xclaimed, "this is a revolution."

"It is. But that is only one part of my conception. The main thing will
be my presentation of what I may call the psychology of Hamlet."

"The psychology!" we said.

"Yes," resumed the Great Actor, "the psychology. To make Hamlet
understood, I want to show him as a man bowed down by a great burden. He
is overwhelmed with Weltschmerz. He carries in him the whole weight of
the Zeitgeist; in fact, everlasting negation lies on him--"

"You mean," we said, trying to speak as cheerfully as we could, "that
things are a little bit too much for him."

"His will," went on the Great Actor, disregarding our interruption, "is
paralysed. He seeks to move in one direction and is hurled in another.
One moment he sinks into the abyss. The next, he rises above the clouds.
His feet seek the ground, but find only the air--"

"Wonderful," we said, "but will you not need a good deal of machinery?"

"Machinery!" exclaimed the Great Actor, with a leonine laugh. "The
machinery of _thought_, the mechanism of power, of magnetism--"

"Ah," we said, "electricity."

"Not at all," said the Great Actor. "You fail to understand. It is all
done by my rendering. Take, for example, the famous soliloquy on death.
You know it?"

"'To be or not to be,'" we began.

"Stop," said the Great Actor. "Now observe. It is a soliloquy.
Precisely. That is the key to it. It is something that Hamlet _says to
himself_. Not a _word of it_, in my interpretation, is actually spoken.
All is done in absolute, unbroken silence."

"How on earth," we began, "can you do that?"

"Entirely and solely _with my face_."

Good heavens! Was it possible? We looked again, this time very closely,
at the Great Actor's face. We realized with a thrill that it might be
done.

"I come before the audience _so_," he went on, "and
soliloquize--thus--follow my face, please--"

As the Great Actor spoke, he threw himself into a characteristic pose
with folded arms, while gust after gust of emotion, of expression, of
alternate hope, doubt and despair, swept--we might say chased themselves
across his features.

"Wonderful!" we gasped.

"Shakespeare's lines," said the Great Actor, as his face subsided to its
habitual calm, "are not necessary; not, at least, with my acting. The
lines, indeed, are mere stage directions, nothing more. I leave them
out. This happens again and again in the play. Take, for instance, the
familiar scene where Hamlet holds