wanderings and strange and often sad adventures of that wayward man of
genius, and no doubt the many sorrowful experiences of his youth
deepened the gloom of his inherited temperament. Those who know him well
are aware that he has great tenderness of heart and abundant playful
humour; that his mind is one of extraordinary liveliness, and that he
sympathises keenly and cordially with the joys and sorrows of others;
and yet that he seems saturated with sadness, isolated from
companionship, lonely and alone. It is this temperament, combined with a
sombre and melancholy aspect of countenance, that has helped to make him
so admirable in the character of Hamlet. Of his fitness for that part
his father was the first to speak, when on a night many years ago, in
Sacramento, they had dressed for Pierre and Jaffier, in _Venice
Preserved_. Edwin, as Jaffier, had put on a close-fitting robe of black
velvet. "You look like Hamlet," the father said. The time was destined
to come when Edwin Booth would be accepted all over America as the
greatest Hamlet of the day. In the season of 1864-65, at the Winter
Garden theatre, New York, he acted that part for a hundred nights in
succession, accomplishing a feat then unprecedented in theatrical
annals. Since then Henry Irving, in London, has acted Hamlet two hundred
consecutive times in one season; but this latter achievement, in the
present day and in the capital city of the world, was less difficult
than Edwin Booth's exploit, performed in turbulent New York in the
closing months of the terrible civil war.
The elder Booth was a short, spare, muscular man, with a splendid chest,
a symmetrical Greek head, a pale countenance, a voice of wonderful
compass and thrilling power, dark hair, and blue eyes. His son's
resemblance to him is chiefly obvious in the shape of the head and face,
the arch and curve of the heavy eyebrows, the radiant and constantly
shifting light of expression that animates the countenance, the natural
grace of carriage, and the celerity of movement. Booth's eyes are dark
brown, and seem to turn black in moments of excitement, and they are
capable of conveying, with electrical effect, the most diverse
meanings--the solemnity of lofty thought, the tenderness of affection,
the piteousness of forlorn sorrow, the awful sense of spiritual
surroundings, the woful weariness of despair, the mocking glee of wicked
sarcasm, the vindictive menace of sinister purpose, and the lightning
glare of baleful wrath. In range of facial expressiveness his
countenance is thus fully equal to that of his father. The present
writer saw the elder Booth but once, and then in a comparatively
inferior part--Pescara, in Shiel's ferocious tragedy of _The Apostate_.
He was a terrible presence. He was the incarnation of smooth, specious,
malignant, hellish rapacity. His exultant malice seemed to buoy him
above the ground. He floated rather than walked. His glance was deadly.
His clear, high, cutting, measured tone was the exasperating note of
hideous cruelty. He was acting a fiend then, and making the monster not
only possible but actual. He certainly gave a greater impression of
overwhelming power than is given by Edwin Booth, and seemed a more
formidable and tremendous man. But his face was not more brilliant than
that of his renowned son; and in fact it was, if anything, somewhat less
splendid in power of the eye. There is a book about him, called _The
Tragedian_, written by Thomas R. Gould, who also made a noble bust of
him in marble; and those who never saw him can obtain a good idea of
what sort of an actor he was by reading that book. It conveys the image
of a greater actor, but not a more brilliant one, than Edwin Booth. Only
one man of our time has equalled Edwin Booth in this singular splendour
of countenance--the great New England orator Rufus Choate. Had Choate
been an actor upon the stage--as he was before a jury--with those
terrible eyes of his, and that passionate Arab face, he must have
towered fully to the height of the tradition of George Frederick Cooke.
The lurid flashes of passion and the vehement outbursts in the acting of
Edwin Booth are no doubt the points that most persons who have seen him
will most clearly remember. Through these a spectator naturally discerns
the essential nature of an actor. The image of George Frederick Cooke,
pointing with his long, lean forefinger and uttering Sir Giles's
imprecation upon Marrall, never fades out of theatrical history.
Garrick's awful frenzy in the storm scene of King Lear, Kean's colossal
agony in the farewell speech of Othello, Macready's heartrending yell in
_Werner_, Junius Booth's terrific utterance of Richard's "What do they
i' the north?" Forrest's hyena snarl when, as Jack Cade, he met Lord Say
in the thicket, or his volumed cry of tempestuous fury when, as Lucius
Brutus, he turned upon Tarquin under the black midnight sky--those are
things never to be forgotten. Edwin Booth has provided many such great
moments in acting, and the traditions of the stage will not let them
die. To these no doubt we must look for illuminative manifestations of
hereditary genius. Garrick, Henderson, Cooke, Edmund Kean, Junius Booth,
and Edwin Booth are names that make a natural sequence in one
intellectual family. Could we but see them together, we should
undoubtedly find them, in many particulars, kindred. Henderson
flourished in the school of nature that Garrick had created--to the
discomfiture of Quin and all the classics. Cooke had seen Henderson
act, and was thought to resemble him. Edmund Kean worshipped the memory
of Cooke and repeated many of the elder tragedian's ways. So far,
indeed, did he carry his homage that when he was in New York in 1824 he
caused Cooke's remains to be taken from the vault beneath St. Paul's
church and buried in the church-yard, where a monument, set up by Kean
and restored by his son Charles, by Sothern, and by Edwin Booth, still
marks their place of sepulture. That was the occasion when, as Dr.
Francis records, in his book on old New York, Kean took the index finger
of Cooke's right hand, and he, the doctor, took his skull, as relics. "I
have got Cooke's style in acting," Kean once said, "but the public will
never know it, I am so much smaller." It was not the imitation of a
copyist; it was the spontaneous devotion and direction of a kindred
soul. The elder Booth saw Kean act, and although injured by a rivalry
that Kean did not hesitate to make malicious, admired him with honest
fervour. "I will yield Othello to him," he said, "but neither Richard
nor Sir Giles." Forrest thought Edmund Kean the greatest actor of the
age, and copied him, especially in Othello. Pathos, with all that it
implies, seems to have been Kean's special excellence. Terror was the
elder Booth's. Edwin Booth may be less than either, but he unites
attributes of both.
In the earlier part of his career Edwin Booth was accustomed to act Sir
Giles Overreach, Sir Edward Mortimer, Pescara, and a number of other
parts of the terrific order, that he has since discarded. He was fine in
every one of them. The first sound of his voice when, as Sir Edward
Mortimer, he was heard speaking off the scene, was eloquent of deep
suffering, concentrated will, and a strange, sombre, formidable
character. The sweet, exquisite, icy, infernal joy with which, as
Pescara, he told his rival that there should be "music" was almost
comical in its effect of terror: it drove the listener across the line
of tragical tension and made him hysterical with the grimness of a
deadly humour. His swift defiance to Lord Lovell, as Sir Giles, and
indeed the whole mighty and terrible action with which he carried that
scene--from "What, are you pale?" down to the grisly and horrid viper
pretence and reptile spasm of death--were simply tremendous. This was in
the days when his acting yet retained the exuberance of a youthful
spirit, before "the philosophic mind" had checked the headlong currents
of the blood or curbed imagination in its lawless flight. And those
parts not only admitted of bold colour and extravagant action but
demanded them. Even his Hamlet was touched with that elemental fire. Not
alone in the great junctures of the tragedy--the encounters with the
ghost, the parting with Ophelia, the climax of the play-scene, the
slaughter of poor old Polonius in delirious mistake for the king, and
the avouchment to Laertes in the graveyard--was he brilliant and
impetuous; but in almost everything that quality of temperament showed
itself, and here, of course, it was in excess. He no longer hurls the
pipe into the flies when saying "Though you may fret me, you can not
play upon me"; but he used to do so then, and the rest of the
performance was kindred with that part of it. He needed, in that period
of his development, the more terrible passions to express. Pathos and
spirituality and the mountain air of great thought were yet to be. His
Hamlet was only dazzling--the glorious possibility of what it has since
become. But his Sir Giles was a consummate work of genius--as good then
as it ever afterward became, and better than any other that has been
seen since, not excepting that of E.L. Davenport. And in all kindred
characters he showed himself a man of genius. His success was great. The
admiration that he inspired partook of zeal that almost amounted to
craziness. When he walked in the streets of Boston in 1857 his shining
face, his compact figure, and his elastic step drew every eye, and
people would pause and turn in groups to look at him.
The actor is born but the artist must be made, and the actor who is not
an artist only half fulfils his powers. Edwin Booth had not been long
upon the stage before he showed himself to be an actor. During his first
season he played Cassio in _Othello_, Wilford in _The Iron Chest_, and
Titus in _The Fall of Tarquin_, and he played them all auspiciously
well. But his father, not less wise than kind, knew that the youth must
be left to himself to acquire experience, if he was ever to become an
artist, and so left him in California, "to rough it," and there, and in
the Sandwich Islands and Australia, he had four years of the most severe
training that hardship, discipline, labour, sorrow, and stern reality
can furnish. When he came east again, in the autumn of 1856, he was no
longer a novice but an educated, artistic tragedian, still crude in some
things, though on the right road, and in the fresh, exultant vigour, if
not yet the full maturity, of extraordinary powers. He appeared first at
Baltimore, and after that made a tour of the south, and during the
ensuing four years he was seen in many cities all over the country. In
the summer of 1860 he went to England, and acted in London, Liverpool,
and Manchester, but he was back again in New York in 1862, and from
September 21, 1863 to March 23, 1867 he managed what was known as the
Winter Garden theatre, and incidentally devoted himself to the
accomplishment of some of the stateliest revivals of standard plays that
have ever been made in America. On February 3, 1869 he opened Booth's
Theatre and that he managed for five years. In 1876 he made a tour of
the south, which, so great was the enthusiasm his presence aroused, was
nothing less than a triumphal progress. In San Francisco, where he
filled an engagement of eight weeks, the receipts exceeded $96,000, a
result at that time unprecedented on the dramatic stage.
The circumstances of the stage and of the lives of actors have greatly
changed since the generation went out to which such men as Junius Booth
and Augustus A. Addams belonged. No tragedian would now be so mad as to
put himself in pawn for drink, as Cooke is said to have done, nor be
found scraping the ham from the sandwiches provided for his luncheon, as
Junius Booth was, before going on to play Shylock. Our theatre has no
longer a Richardson to light up a pan of red fire, as that old showman
once did, to signalise the fall of the screen in _The School for
Scandal_. The eccentrics and the taste for them have passed away. It
seems really once to have been thought that the actor who did not often
make a maniac of himself with drink could not be possessed of the divine
fire. That demonstration of genius is not expected now, nor does the
present age exact from its favourite players the performance of all
sorts and varieties of parts. Forrest was the first of the prominent
actors to break away from the old usage in this latter particular.
During the most prosperous years of his life, from 1837 to 1850, he
acted only about a dozen parts, and most of them were old. The only new
parts that he studied were Claude Melnotte, Richelieu, Jack Cade, and
Mordaunt, the latter in the play of _The Patrician's Daughter_, and he
"recovered" Marc Antony, which he particularly liked. Edwin Booth, who
had inherited from his father the insanity of intemperance, conquered
that utterly, many years ago, and nobly and grandly trod it beneath his
feet; and as he matured in his career, through acting every kind of
part, from a dandy negro up to Hamlet, he at last made choice of the
characters that afford scope for his powers and his aspirations, and so
settled upon a definite, restricted repertory. His characters were
Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, Othello, Iago, Richard the Second, Richard the
Third, Shylock, Cardinal Wolsey, Benedick, Petruchio, Richelieu, Lucius
Brutus, Bertuccio, Ruy Blas, and Don Cæsar de Bazan. These he acted in
customary usage, and to these he occasionally added Marcus Brutus,
Antony, Cassius, Claude Melnotte, and the Stranger. The range thus
indicated is extraordinary; but more extraordinary still was the
evenness of the actor's average excellence throughout the breadth of
that range.
Booth's tragedy is better than his elegant comedy. There are other
actors who equal or surpass him in Benedick or Don Cæsar. The comedy in
which he excels is that of silvery speciousness and bitter sarcasm, as
in portions of Iago and Richard the Third and the simulated madness of
Lucius Brutus, and the comedy of grim drollery, as in portions of
Richelieu--his expression of those veins being wonderfully perfect. But
no other actor who has trod the American stage in our day has equalled
him in certain attributes of tragedy that are essentially poetic. He is
not at his best, indeed, in all the tragic parts that he acts; and, like
his father, he is an uneven actor in the parts to which he is best
suited. No person can be said to know Edwin Booth's acting who has not
seen him play the same part several times. His artistic treatment will
generally be found adequate, but his mood or spirit will continually
vary. He cannot at will command it, and when it is absent his
performance seems cold. This characteristic is, perhaps, inseparable
from the poetic temperament. Each ideal that he presents is poetic; and
the suitable and adequate presentation of it, therefore, needs poetic
warmth and glamour. Booth never goes behind his poet's text to find a
prose image in the pages of historic fact. The spectator who takes the
trouble to look into his art will find it, indeed, invariably accurate
as to historic basis, and will find that all essential points and
questions of scholarship have been considered by the actor. But this is
not the secret of its power upon the soul. That power resides in its
charm, and that charm consists in its poetry. Standing on the lonely
ramparts of Elsinore, and with awe-stricken, preoccupied, involuntary
glances questioning the star-lit midnight air, while he talks with his
attendant friends, Edwin Booth's Hamlet is the simple, absolute
realisation of Shakespeare's haunted prince, and raises no question, and
leaves no room for inquiry, whether the Danes in the Middle Ages wore
velvet robes or had long flaxen hair. It is dark, mysterious,
melancholy, beautiful--a vision of dignity and of grace, made sublime by
suffering, made weird and awful by "thoughts beyond the reaches of our
souls." Sorrow never looked more wofully and ineffably lovely than his
sorrow looks in the parting scene with Ophelia, and frenzy never spoke
with a wilder glee of horrid joy and fearful exultation than is heard
in his tempestuous cry of delirium, "Nay, I know not: is it the king?"
An actor who is fine only at points is not, of course, a perfect actor.
The remark of Coleridge about the acting of Edmund Kean, that it was
like "reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning," has misled many
persons as to Kean's art. Macready bears a similar testimony. But the
weight of evidence will satisfy the reader that Kean was, in fact, a
careful student and that he never neglected any detail of his art. This
is certainly true of Edwin Booth. In the level plains that lie between
the mountain-peaks of expression he walks with as sure a footstep and as
firm a tread as on the summit of the loftiest crag or the verge of the
steepest abyss. In 1877-78, in association with the present writer, he
prepared for the press an edition of fifteen of the plays in which he
acts, and these were published for the use of actors. There is not a
line in either of those plays that he has not studiously and thoroughly
considered; not a vexed point that he has not scanned; not a
questionable reading that he has not, for his own purposes in acting,
satisfactorily settled. His Shakespearean scholarship is extensive and
sound, and it is no less minute than ample. His stage business has been
arranged, as stage business ought to be, with scientific precision. If,
as king Richard the Third, he is seen to be abstractedly toying with a
ring upon one of his fingers, or unsheathing and sheathing his dagger,
those apparently capricious actions would be found to be done because
they were illustrative parts of that monarch's personality, warranted by
the text and context. Many years ago an accidental impulse led him, as
Hamlet, to hold out his sword, hilt foremost, toward the receding
spectre, as a protective cross--the symbol of that religion to which
Hamlet so frequently recurs. The expedient was found to justify itself
and he made it a custom. In the graveyard scene of this tragedy he
directs that one of the skulls thrown up by the first clown shall have a
tattered and mouldy fool's-cap adhering to it, so that it may attract
attention, and be singled out from the others, as "Yorick's skull, the
king's jester." These are little things; but it is of a thousand little
things that a dramatic performance is composed, and without this care
for detail--which must be precise, logical, profound, vigilant,
unerring, and at the same time always unobtrusive and seemingly
involuntary--there can be neither cohesion, nor symmetry, nor an
illusory image consistently maintained; and all great effects would
become tricks of mechanism and detached exploits of theatrical force.
The absence of this thoroughness in such acting as that of Edwin Booth
would instantly be felt; its presence is seldom adequately appreciated.
We feel the perfect charm of the illusion in the great fourth act of
_Richelieu_--one of the most thrilling situations, as Booth fills it,
that ever were created upon the stage; but we should not feel this had
not the foreground of character, incident, and experience been prepared
with consummate thoroughness. The character of Richelieu is one that the
elder Booth could never act. He tried it once, upon urgent solicitation,
but he had not proceeded far before he caught Joseph around the waist,
and with that astonished friar in his arms proceeded to dash into a
waltz, over which the curtain was dropped. He had no sympathy with the
moonlight mistiness and lace-like complexity of that weird and
many-fibred nature. It lacked for him the reality of the imagination,
the trumpet blare and tempest rush of active passion. But Edwin Booth,
coming after Forrest, who was its original in America, has made
Richelieu so entirely his own that no actor living can stand a
comparison with him in the character. Macready was the first
representative of the part, as everybody knows, and his performance of
it was deemed magnificent; but when Edwin Booth acted it in London in
1880, old John Ryder, the friend and advocate of Macready, who had
participated with him in all his plays, said to the American tragedian,
with a broken voice and with tears in his eyes, "You have thrown down my
idol." Two at least of those great moments in acting that everybody
remembers were furnished by Booth in this character--the defiance of the
masked assailant, at Rouel, and the threat of excommunication delivered
upon Barradas. No spectator possessed of imagination and sensibility
ever saw, without utter forgetfulness of the stage, the imperial
entrance of that Richelieu into the gardens of the Louvre and into the
sullen presence of hostile majesty. The same spell of genius is felt in
kindred moments of his greater impersonations. His Iago, standing in the
dark street, with sword in hand, above the prostrate bodies of Cassio
and Roderigo, and as the sudden impulse to murder them strikes his
brain, breathing out in a blood-curdling whisper, "How silent is this
town!" his Bertuccio, begging at the door of the banquet-hall, and
breaking down in hysterics of affected glee and maddening agony; his
Lear, at that supreme moment of intolerable torture when he parts away
from Goneril and Regan, with his wild scream of revenges that shall be
the terrors of the earth; his Richard the Third, with the gigantic
effrontery of his "Call him again," and with his whole matchless and
wonderful utterance of the awful remorse speech with which the king
awakens from his last earthly sleep--those, among many others, rank with
the best dramatic images that ever were chronicled, and may well be
cited to illustrate Booth's invincible and splendid adequacy at the
great moments of his art.
Edwin Booth has been tried by some of the most terrible afflictions that
ever tested the fortitude of a human soul. Over his youth, plainly
visible, impended the lowering cloud of insanity. While he was yet a
boy, and when literally struggling for life in the semi-barbarous wilds
of old California, he lost his beloved father, under circumstances of
singular misery. In early manhood he laid in her grave the woman of his
first love--the wife who had died in absence from him, herself scarcely
past the threshold of youth, lovely as an angel and to all that knew her
precious beyond expression. A little later his heart was well-nigh
broken and his life was well-nigh blasted by the crime of a lunatic
brother that for a moment seemed to darken the hope of the world.
Recovering from that blow, he threw all his resources and powers into
the establishment of the grandest theatre in the metropolis of America,
and he saw his fortune of more than a million dollars, together with the
toil of some of the best years of his life, frittered away. Under all
trials he has borne bravely up, and kept the even, steadfast tenor of
his course; strong, patient, gentle, neither elated by public homage nor
imbittered by private grief. Such a use of high powers in the dramatic
art, and the development and maintenance of such a character behind
them, entitle him to the affection of his countrymen, proud equally of
his goodness and his renown.
V.
MARY ANDERSON: HERMIONE: PERDITA.
On November 25, 1875 an audience was assembled in one of the theatres of
Louisville, Kentucky, to see "the first appearance upon any stage" of "a
young lady of Louisville," who was announced to play Shakespeare's
Juliet. That young lady was in fact a girl, in her sixteenth year, who
had never received any practical stage training, whose education had
been comprised in five years of ordinary schooling, whose observation of
life had never extended beyond the narrow limits of a provincial city,
who was undeveloped, unheralded, unknown, and poor, and whose only
qualifications for the task she had set herself to accomplish were the
impulse of genius and the force of commanding character. She dashed at
the work with all the vigour of abounding and enthusiastic youth, and
with all the audacity of complete inexperience. A rougher performance of
Juliet probably was never seen, but through all the disproportion and
turbulence of that effort the authentic charm of a beautiful nature was
distinctly revealed. The sweetness, the sincerity, the force, the
exceptional superiority and singular charm of that nature could not be
mistaken. The uncommon stature and sumptuous physical beauty of the girl
were obvious. Above all, her magnificent voice--copious, melodious,
penetrating, loud and clear, yet soft and gentle--delighted every ear
and touched every heart. The impersonation of Juliet was not highly
esteemed by judicious hearers; but some persons who saw that performance
felt and said that a new actress had risen and that a great career had
begun. Those prophetic voices were right. That "young lady of
Louisville" was Mary Anderson.