his art is such an austere compact that he would be incapable of humiliating it by any mere advertising devices; and beyond that, those who have seen him play this time (1914) in New York must have been aware that in the very texture of all his performances was woven like a sigh the word “farewell.”  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.

In doing this, along with the inevitable sadness that must accompany such a step, one cannot but think there will be a certain private whimsical satisfaction for him in being able to go about the world in after years with his great gift still his, hidden away, but still his to use at any moment, and to know not only that he has been, but still is, as it were, in secret, the supreme Hamlet of his time.  Something like that, one may imagine, must be the private fun of abdication.  Forbes-Robertson, as he himself has told us, lays down one art only to take up another to which he has long been devoted, and of his early affiliation to which the figure of Love Kissing Beatrice in Rossetti’s “Dante’s Dream” bears illustrious and significant witness.  As, one recalls that he was the model for that figure one realizes that even then he was the young lord Hamlet, born to be par excellence the actor of sorrow and renunciation.

It is not my province to write here of Forbes-Robertson from the point of view of the reminiscent playgoer or of the technical critic of acting.  Others, obviously, are far better qualified to undertake those offices for his fame.  I would merely offer him the tribute of one to whom for many years his acting has been something more than acting, as usually understood, something to class with great poetry, and all the spiritual exaltation which “great poetry” implies.  From first to last, however associated with that whimsical comedy of which, too, he is appropriately a master, he has struck for me that note of almost heartbreaking spiritual intensity which, under all its superficial materialism and cynicism, is the key-note of the modern world.

When I say “first,” I am thinking of the first time I saw him, on the first night of The Profligate by Pinero, in its day one of the plays that blazed the trail for that social, or, rather, I should say, sociological, drama since become even more deadly in earnest, though perhaps less deadly in skill.  Incidentally, I remember that Miss Olga Nethersole, then quite unknown, made a striking impression of evil, though playing only a small part.  It was Forbes-Robertson, however, for me, and I think for all the playgoing London of the time, that gave the play its chief value by making us startlingly