's soul unseized by the Germans
yet." Yet what a Hamlet! How majestical, how simple, how much a poet
and a gentleman! To what depth he suffers! How magnificently he
interprets, in the crucifixion of his own soul, the main riddles of the
universe! In "Hamlet," too, I saw deeper meanings than I had ever seen
in the play when it was acted. Mr. Sothern was the only quite sane
Hamlet; his madness is all the outer coverings of wisdom; there was
nothing fantastic in his grave, subdued, powerful, and piteous
representation, in which no symbol, no metaphysical Faust, no figment of
a German brain, loomed before us, but a man, more to be pitied and not
less to be honoured than any man in Elsinore. I have seen romantic,
tragic, exceptional Hamlets, the very bells on the cap of "Fortune's
fool." But at last I have seen the man himself, as Shakespeare saw him
living, a gentleman, as well as a philosopher, a nature of fundamental
sincerity; no melancholy clown, but the greatest of all critics of life.
And the play, with its melodrama and its lyrical ecstasy, moved before
one's eyes like a religious service. How is it that we get from the
acting and management of these two actors a result which no one in
England has ever been able to get? Well, in the first place, as I have
said, they have the odd caprice of preferring Shakespeare to themselves;
the odd conviction that fidelity to Shakespeare will give them the best
chance of doing great things themselves. Nothing is accidental,
everything obeys a single intention; and what, above all, obeys that
intention is the quality of inspiration, which is never absent and never
uncontrolled. Intention without the power of achievement is almost as
lamentable a thing as achievement not directed by intention. Now here
are two players in whom technique has been carried to a supreme point.
There is no actor on our stage who can speak either English or verse as
these two American actors can. It is on this preliminary technique, this
power of using speech as one uses the notes of a musical instrument,
that all possibility of great acting depends. Who is there that can give
us, not the external gesture, but the inner meaning, of some beautiful
and subtle passage in Shakespeare? One of our actors will give it
sonorously, as rhetoric, and another eagerly, as passionate speech, but
no one with the precise accent of a man who is speaking his thoughts,
which is what Shakespeare makes his characters do when he