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His readers, therefore, are not saddened by any pathetic gleanings from a once-rich harvest-field, or the carefully picked-up shakings of November boughs. Forbes-Robertson is one of those artists who has chosen to bid farewell to his art while he is still indisputably its master.
In "Hamlet" Henry Irving did not go to the audience; he made them come to him. Slowly, but surely, attention gave place to admiration, admiration to enthusiasm, enthusiasm to triumphant acclaim. I have seen many Hamlets, Fechter, Charles Kean, Rossi, Friedrich Haase, Forbes-Robertson, and my own son, Gordon Craig, among them, but they were not in the same hemisphere!
One of our playwrights of whom I always expected a great play was Mrs. A little one-act play of hers, "Journeys End in Lovers' Meeting" in which I first acted with Johnston Forbes-Robertson and Terriss at a special matinée in 1894 brought about a friendship between us which lasted until her death. Of her it could indeed be said with poignant truth, "She should have died hereafter."
No one feature stands out more conspicuously for results than a "tea" she gave for Sir Forbes-Robertson in her palatial home, to which she invited about two hundred guests, most of whom were radical anti-suffragists, but many of them went away converts after hearing the presentation of the subject by the guest of honor. Mrs. Hirsch also brought the Rev. Charles A. Aked of San Francisco. Dr.
Forbes-Robertson put a touch of Leontes into it, a part which some years later he was to play magnificently, and through the subtle indication of consuming and insanely suspicious jealousy made Claudio's offensive conduct explicable at least.
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?"
Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, than whom there can be no greater authority, tells me that this is not so. To my surprise, he declares that electric light is too crude and white, and that it destroys all illusion. He informs me that it is impossible to obtain a convincing moonlight effect with electricity, or to give a sense of atmosphere.
His very art, as I shall have later to emphasize, is an art of farewell; but, apart from that general quality, it seemed to me, though, indeed, it may have been mere sympathetic fancy, that in these last New York performances, as in the performances last spring in London, I heard a personal valedictory note. Forbes-Robertson seemed to be saying good-by at once to his audience and to his art.
Were one asked what aspects of Hamlet does Forbes-Robertson specially embody, I should say, in the first place, his princeliness, his ghostliness, then his cynical and occasionally madcap humour, as where, at the end of the play-scene, he capers behind the throne in a terrible boyish glee.
Gas-light was yellow, and colour-effects were obtained by dropping thin screens of coloured silk over the gas-battens in the flies. This diffused the light, which a crude blue or red electric bulb does not do. Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson astonished me by telling me that Henry Irving always refused to have electric light on the stage at the Lyceum, though he had it in the auditorium.
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