ith the inevitable sadness that must accompany
such a step, one cannot but think there will be a certain private
whimsical satisfaction for him in being able to go about the world in
after years with his great gift still his, hidden away, but still his to
use at any moment, and to know not only that he has been, but still is,
as it were, in secret, the supreme Hamlet of his time. Something
like that, one may imagine, must be the private fun of abdication.
Forbes-Robertson, as he himself has told us, lays down one art only to
take up another to which he has long been devoted, and of his early
affiliation to which the figure of Love Kissing Beatrice in Rossetti's
"Dante's Dream" bears illustrious and significant witness. As, one
recalls that he was the model for that figure one realizes that even
then he was the young lord Hamlet, born to be _par excellence_ the actor
of sorrow and renunciation.

It is not my province to write here of Forbes-Robertson from the point
of view of the reminiscent playgoer or of the technical critic of
acting. Others, obviously, are far better qualified to undertake those
offices for his fame. I would merely offer him the tribute of one to
whom for many years his acting has been something more than acting, as
usually understood, something to class with great poetry, and all the
spiritual exaltation which "great poetry" implies. From first to last,
however associated with that whimsical comedy of which, too, he is
appropriately a master, he has struck for me that note of almost
heartbreaking spiritual intensity which, under all its superficial
materialism and cynicism, is the key-note of the modern world.

When I say "first," I am thinking of the first time I saw him, on the
first night of _The Profligate_ by Pinero, in its day one of the plays
that blazed the trail for that social, or, rather, I should say,
sociological, drama since become even more deadly in earnest, though
perhaps less deadly in skill. Incidentally, I remember that Miss Olga
Nethersole, then quite unknown, made a striking impression of evil,
though playing only a small part. It was Forbes-Robertson, however, for
me, and I think for all the playgoing London of the time, that gave the
play its chief value by making us startlingly aware, through the
poignancy of his personality, of what one might call the voice of the
modern conscience. To associate that thrillingly beautiful and profound
voice of his with anything that sounds