st 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

Thou trumpet set for Shakespeare's lips to blow,

and we may be sure that Irving appreciated the honour thus paid him, he
who so wonderfully interpreted so many of Shakespeare's moods, so well
understood the irony of his intellect, even the breadth of his humanity,
yet in _Hamlet_, at all events, so strangely missed his soul.

Most of us have seen many Hamlets die. We have watched them squirming
through those scientific contortions of dissolution, to copy which they
had very evidently walked the hospitals in a businesslike quest of
death-a