[Mr. William Winter's "Life and Art of Edwin Booth" is indispensable
to a student of the American stage. Here are two paragraphs chosen
from many as illuminating:
"The salient attributes of Booth's art were imagination, insight,
grace, intense emotion, and melancholy refinement. In Hamlet,
Richelieu, Othello, Iago, Lear, Bertuccio, and Lucius Brutus they were
conspicuously manifest. But the controlling attribute,--that which
imparted individual character, colour and fascination to his
acting,--was the thoughtful introspective habit of a stately mind,
abstracted from passion and suffused with mournful dreaminess of
temperament. The moment that charm began to work, his victory was
complete. It was that which made him the true image of Shakespeare's
thought, in the glittering halls of Elsinore, on its midnight
battlements, and in its lonely, wind-beaten place of graves.
"Under the discipline of sorrow, and through years that bring the
philosophic mind, Booth drifted further and further away from things
dark and terrible, whether in the possibilities of human life or in
the world of imagination. That is the direction of true growth. In
all characters that evoked his essential spirit--in characters which
rested on spiritualised intellect, or on sensibility to fragile
loveliness, the joy that is unattainable, the glory that fades, and
the beauty that perishes--he was peerless. Hamlet, Richelieu, Faust,
Manfred, Jacques, Esmond, Sydney Carton, and Sir Edward Mortimer are
all, in different ways, suggestive of the personality that Booth was
fitted to illustrate. It is the loftiest type that human nature
affords, because it is the embodied supremacy of the soul, and because
therein it denotes the only possible escape from the cares and
vanities of a transitory world."
The letters which follow are from "Edwin Booth: Recollections by his
daughter, Edwina Booth Grossman, and Letters to Her and to His
Friends." Copyright, 1894, Century Company, New York.--ED.]