“We all know when we do our best,” said Henry once. “We are the only people who know.” Yet he thought he did better in “Macbeth” than in “Hamlet!”
Was he right, after all?
ELLEN TERRY AS KNIERTJE IN “THE GOOD HOPE”
TAKEN ON THE BEACH AT SWANSEA, WALES, IN 1906, BY EDWARD CRAIG
“WE HAVE TO PAY DEAR FOR THE FISH”
From the collection of H. McM. Painter
His view of Macbeth, though attacked and derided and put to shame in many quarters, is as clear to me as the sunlight itself. To me it seems as stupid to quarrel with the conception as to deny the nose on one’s face. But the carrying out of the conception was unequal. Henry’s imagination was sometimes his worst enemy. When I think of his Macbeth, I remember him most distinctly in the last act, after the battle, when he looked like a great famished wolf, weak with the weakness of a giant exhausted, spent as one whose exertions have been ten times as great as those of commoner men of rougher fibre and coarser strength.
“Of all men else I have avoided thee.”
Once more he suggested, as he only could suggest, 388 the power of fate. Destiny seemed to hang over him, and he knew that there was no hope, no mercy.