Player*

Forbes -Robertson among

Princes, Presidents, Pre-Raphaelites

The Autobiography. Some English children are playing Hamlet as a drawing-room entertainment for Christmas, 1867. The melancholy Dane, a likely stripling of 14, wears a velvet tunic between the hem of which and a pair of his mother's black stockings there yawns "a sad hiatus" when he sits. Friends of the family swell the audience, including three painters--Ford Madox Brown, Laurence Alma-Tadema, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A lissom youth with auburn hair and a weak but beautiful countenance stretches on the rug, slightly disconcerting the actors by chanting the lines with them in a melodious undertone. He is called Algernon Swinburne.

In a few years, the stripling Hamlet has followed Rossetti's advice to study painting. Among his comrades at the Royal Academy is a shy, ruddy-faced youth in rough homespun and thick boots. This man's eyes can "snap and sparkle . . . beam with sympathy." His laugh is infectious. He has just written a book and asks the stripling (Johnston Forbes-Robertson) to take it to his journalist-father for criticism. The book is Erewhon; the shy man, Samuel Butler.

There are a dozen Forbes-Robertson mouths to feed and Johnston, the eldest, though speedily mastering his painting, cannot refuse a salaried part in Mary, Queen o' Scots at the Princess Theatre. Other engagements follow and the young actor begins meeting the great stage folk of the day--Charles Calvert, Charles Kean, Samuel Phelps (who trains him), Madame Modjeska, Author Charles Read amid a sea of manuscript in his study, Miss Ellen Terry in her gray-blue drawing-room with ribbons of incense smoke wreathing the Venus of Milo.

The story thins into a string of anecdotes as its author's activities and acquaintance widen. Still painting, he sees much of Whistler, something of Oscar Wilde, of which parasite wit Whistler says: "He picks from our platters the plums for the puddings he peddles in the provinces."

Forbes-Robertson supports Henry Irving in Much Ado About Nothing, also painting for Irving the church scene that hangs today in the Players' Club, N. Y. . . . A brother actor is stabbed by a madman. . . . Gilbert quarrels with Sullivan. . . . John Clayton solves the question of corresponding with inept authors: "My dear Sir, I have read your play. Oh! My very dear Sir! Yours truly, John Clayton." In 1885, Mary Anderson tours the U. S. "J. F.-R.," her leading man, is enchanted by American sunshine. General Sherman wrings his hand in St. Louis; General Lee's daughters charm him in Louisville. At Denver there is a rat-hunt in the dining-room; at Salt Lake City, Brigham Young's brave theatre and stone water-conduits; at Washington, John Hay "and his friend Henry Adams."

The Significance. And so--including a description of the ceremony of the accolade, tales of touring the Continent, and many more intimate memories of princes, presidents and pre-Raphaelites--to the farewell performance of Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson (Hamlet at Harvard in 1916). Cables Herbert Tree: "All our stage is proud of you." After the passing* of one of the great actor-managers in the lofty line of Garrick, Siddons and Macready, his book is a snapshot album copiously illustrating the rich life of his day and a memorial for ex-audiences from Berlin to Vancouver.

*A PLAYER UNDER THREE REIGNS--Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson--Little, Brown ($5.00). *Only from the stage. Sir Johnston still abides, aged 72, in Bedford Square, London.