In the scene with Ophelia, Forbes-Robertson’s tenderness was almost terrible.  It came from such a height of pity upon that little uncomprehending flower!

“I never gave you aught,” as Forbes-Robertson said it, seemed to mean:  “I gave you all—­all that you could not understand.”  “Yet are not you and I in the toils of that destiny there that moves the arras. Is it your father?”

Along with Forbes-Robertson’s spiritual interpretation of Shakespeare goes pre-eminently, and doubtless as a contributive part of it, his imaginative revitalization of the great old lines—­lines worn like a highway with the passage of the generations.  As a friend of mine graphically phrased it, “How he revives for us the splendour of the text!”

The splendour of the text!  It is a good phrase, and how splendid the text is we, of course, all know—­know so well that we take it for granted, and so fall into forgetfulness of its significance; forgetting what central fires of soul and intellect must have gone to the creation of such a world of transcendent words.

Yet how living the lines still are, though the generations have almost quoted the life out of them, no man who has spoken them on the stage in our day, except Forbes-Robertson, has had the gift to show.

It is more than elocution, masterly elocution as it is, more than the superbly modulated voice:  the power comes of spiritual springs welling up beneath the voice—­springs fed from those infinite sources which “lie beyond the reaches of our souls.”

Merely to take the phrase I have just quoted, how few actors—­or readers of Shakespeare, or members of any Shakespearian audience, for that matter—­have any personal conception of what it means!  They may make a fine crescendo with it, but that is all.  They have never stood, shrinking and appalled, yet drawn with a divine temptation, upon the brink of that vastness along the margin of which, it is evident, that Hamlet often wandered.  It is in vain they tell their audiences and Horatio: 

          There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
          Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

We are quite sure that they know nothing of what they are saying; and that, as a matter of fact, there are few things for them in heaven or earth except the theatre they are playing in, their actors’ club, and, generally, their genial mundane lives; and, of course, one rather congratulates them on the simplicity of their lives, congratulates them on their ignorance of such haunted regions of the mind.  Yet, all the same, that simplicity seems to disqualify them from playing Hamlet.

Few Shakespearian actors seem to remember what they are playing—­Shakespeare.  One would think that to be held a worthy interpreter of so great a dramatist, so mysterious a mind, and so golden a poet, were enough distinction.  Oscar Wilde, in a fine sonnet, addressed Henry Irving as