Actorviews (1923)

The Gravest Fault of Sir Herbert Tree CTING,” said Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who had just completed a distinguished pattern of it with the role of Cardinal Wolsey in “Henry VIII” at the Illinois Theater, “is a matter of hypnotism.” He qualified with the lighter touch that is characteristic of the man who talks as wittily as he writes : “No matter what the faults of the actor, no matter how enormous, he can with hypnotism induce at least a part of his audience to believe that he is what the dramatis personae proclaims him.” England’s wittiest actor laughed at his way of putting it. Finding him in this mood, I pressed the subject and asked him to tell me what he regarded as his gravest defects as an actor. But his answer was deferred; Sir Herbert has a delicious sense of the dramatic, and who knows but he deliberately saved it for the “tag” of our dressing-room drama? He told me rapidly, in spare words and with much more of gesture than he permits himself on the stage, that he could measure the quality of an actor by his handshake. In the air he moved a hand flabbily and heavily. The actor with that handshake was a fish. But the one whose grip wras light and nervously alive! He was — Sir Herbert touched his brow — an intelligence, a somebody, an actor. He said actor with a fine