Chapter 4

Mrs. Asia Booth Clarke, wife of the distinguished and excellent comedian John S. Clarke, wrote a life of her father, Junius Brutus Booth, in which she has recounted interesting passages in his career, and chronicled significant and amusing anecdotes of his peculiarities. He was on the stage from 1813 to 1852, in which latter year he died, aged fifty-six. In his youth he served for a while in the British navy, showed some talent for painting, learned the printer's trade, wrote a little, and dabbled in sculpture--all before he turned actor. The powerful hostility of Edmund Kean and his adherents drove him from the London stage, though not till after he had gained honours there, and he came to America in 1821, and bought a farm near Baltimore, where he settled, and where his son Edwin (the seventh of ten children) was born. That farm remained in the family till 1880, when for the first time it changed hands. There is a certain old cherry-tree growing upon it--remarkable among cherry-trees for being large, tall, straight, clean, and handsome--amid the boughs of which the youthful Edwin might often have been found in his juvenile days. It is a coincidence that Edwin L. Davenport and John McCullough, also honoured names in American stage history, were born on the same day in the same month with Edwin Booth, though in different years.

From an early age Edwin Booth was associated with his father in all the 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.