that is to say, with any one of
our sixteen greatest actors
it was within the privacy of his own library that we obtained—need we say with infinite difficulty—our interview with the great actor. he was sitting in a deep arm-chair, so buried in his own thoughts that he was oblivious of our approach. on his knee before him lay a cabinet photograph of himself. his eyes seemed to be peering into it, as if seeking to fathom its unfathomable mystery. we had time to note that a beautiful carbon photogravure of himself stood on a table at his elbow, while a magnificent half-tone pastel of himself was suspended on a string from the ceiling. it was only when we had seated ourself in a chair and taken out our notebook that the great actor looked up.
“an interview?” he said, and we noted with pain the weariness in his tone. “another interview!”
we bowed.
“publicity!” he murmured rather to himself than to us. “publicity! why must one always be forced into publicity?”
it was not our intention, we explained apologetically, to publish or to print a single word—
“eh, what?” exclaimed the great actor. “not print it? not publish it? then what in—”
not, we explained, without his consent.
“ah,” he murmured wearily, “my consent. yes, yes, i must give it. the world demands it. print, publish anything you like. i am indifferent to praise, careless of fame. posterity will judge me. but,” he added more briskly, “let me see a proof of it in time to make any changes i might care to.”
we bowed our assent.
“and now,” we began, “may we be permitted to ask a few questions about your art? and first, in which branch of the drama do you consider that your genius chiefly lies, in tragedy or in comedy?”
“in both,” said the great actor.
“you excel then,” we continued, “in neither the one nor the other?”
“not at all,” he answered, “i excel in each of them.”
“excuse us,” we said, “we haven’t made our meaning quite clear. what we meant to say is, stated very simply, that you do not consider yourself better in either of them than in the other?”
“not at all,” said the actor, as he put out his arm with that splendid gesture that we have known and admired for years, at the same time throwing back his leonine head so that his leonine hair fell back from his leonine forehead. “not at all. i do better in both of them. my genius demands both tragedy and comedy at the same time.”
“ah,” we said, as a light broke in upon us, “then that, we presume, is the reason why you are about to appear in shakespeare?”
the great actor frowned.
“i would rather put it,” he said, “that shakespeare is about to appear in me.”
“of course, of course,” we murmured, ashamed of our own stupidity.
“i appear,” went on the great actor, “in hamlet. i expect to present, i may say, an entirely new hamlet.”
“a new hamlet!” we exclaimed, fascinated. “a new hamlet! is such a thing possible?”
“entirely,” said the great actor, throwing his leonine head forward again. “i have devoted years of study to the part. the whole conception of the part of hamlet has been wrong.”
we sat stunned.
“all actors hitherto,” continued the great actor, “or rather, i should say, all so-called actors—i mean all those who tried to act before me—have been entirely mistaken in their presentation. they have presented hamlet as dressed in black velvet.”
“yes, yes,” we interjected, “in black velvet, yes!”
“very good. the thing is absurd,” continued the great actor, as he reached down two or three heavy volumes from the shelf beside him. “have you ever studied the elizabethan era?”
“the which?” we asked modestly.
“the elizabethan era?”
we were silent.
“or the pre-shakespearean tragedy?”
we hung our head.
“if you had, you would know that a hamlet in black velvet is perfectly ridiculous. in shakespeare’s day—as i could prove in a moment if you had the intelligence to understand it—there was no such thing as black velvet. it didn’t exist.”
“and how then,” we asked, intrigued, puzzled and yet delighted, “do you present hamlet?”
“in brown velvet,” said the great actor.
“great heavens,” we exclaimed, “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 the skull in his hand: shakespeare here suggests the words ‘alas, poor yorick! i knew him well—‘”
“yes, yes!” we interrupted, in spite of ourself, “‘a fellow of infinite jest—‘”
“your intonation is awful,” said the actor. “but listen. in my interpretation i use no words at all. i merely carry the skull quietly in my hand, very slowly, across the stage. there i lean against a pillar at the side, with the skull in the palm of my hand, and look at it in silence.”
“wonderful!” we said.
“i then cross over to the right of the stage, very impressively, and seat myself on a plain wooden bench, and remain for some time, looking at the skull.”
“marvellous!”
“i then pass to the back of the stage and lie down on my stomach, still holding the skull before my eyes. after holding this posture for some time, i crawl slowly forward, portraying by the movement of my legs and stomach the whole sad history of yorick. finally i turn my back on the audience, still holding the skull, and convey through the spasmodic movements of my back hamlet’s passionate grief at the loss of his friend.”
“why!” we exclaimed, beside ourself with excitement, “this is not merely a revolution, it is a revelation.”
“call it both,” said the great actor.
“the meaning of it is,” we went on, “that you practically don’t need shakespeare at all.”
“exactly, i do not. i could do better without him. shakespeare cramps me. what i really mean to convey is not shakespeare, but something greater, larger—how shall i express it—bigger.” the great actor paused and we waited, our pencil poised in the air. then he murmured, as his eyes lifted in an expression of something like rapture. “in fact—me.”
he remained thus, motionless, without moving. we slipped gently to our hands and knees and crawled quietly to the door, and so down the stairs, our notebook in our teeth.
