UCSB LIBRAR
 
 THE TRAGEDIAN; 
 
 AN ESSAY ON 
 
 THE HISTRIONIC GENIUS 
 
 THOMAS R. GOULD. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 PUBLISHED BY HURD AND HOUGHTOX. 
 3&fbersflie 33vess. 
 1868.
 
 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by 
 
 THOMAS R. GOULD, 
 
 in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the District of Massa- 
 chusetts. 
 
 RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE: 
 
 STEREOTYPED AND FEINTED BT 
 
 H. 0. HOUQHTON AND COMPANY.
 
 To 
 
 EDWIN BOOTH, 
 
 WHOSE RARE GOOD GIFTS HAVE ALREADY WOJT FOR HIM 
 THE UNDIVIDED ADMIRATION AND RESPECT OF 
 HIS COUNTRYMEN, 
 
 rijrs'c iHrmnrtals 
 
 OF HIS ILLUSTRIOUS FATHER, ARE AFFECTIONATELY 
 INSCRIBED, 
 
 BY THE AUTHOR.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 RICHARD III 37 
 
 HAMLET 49 
 
 SHYLOCK 73 
 
 IAGO 81 
 
 OTHELLO 92 
 
 MACBETH H8 
 
 LEAR 134 
 
 CASSIUS 151 
 
 SIR GILES OVERREACH 153 
 
 LUKE 158 
 
 SIR EDWARD MORTIMER 160 
 
 BRUTUS I 66 
 
 PESCARA 172 
 
 REUBEN- GLENROY 175 
 
 OCTAVIAN 176 
 
 BERTRAM 177 
 
 PIERRE 179 
 
 THE STRANGER 180 
 
 THE TRAGEDIAN 181 
 
 AN INCIDENT 182 
 
 A DIALOGUE 184 
 
 THE TRAGEDIAN 188
 
 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 DECEMBER, 1852. 
 
 TEN days ago a private letter from New 
 Orleans assured us, that the great actor of 
 the age had arrived from the " Golden 
 Land," was then playing an engagement in 
 that city, and appeared in remarkably good 
 health. 
 
 Swiftly following this intelligence which 
 gave us hope soon again to " have sight " 
 of the Proteus of Shakespearean character 
 " coming from the sea," and hear once more 
 the strange inward music of his voice 
 came last week, with " spleen of speed," the 
 telegram that he had ' died on the passage to 
 Cincinnati. 
 
 Our first feeling was the pang of a per- 
 sonal friendship, suddenly parted. Then 
 came the thought that a great artist, the 
 greatest in his sphere in our day, had passed
 
 6 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 away; and finally, vivid images and emo- 
 tions, won from that wide range of tragic 
 character in which he so truthfully lived, 
 came crowding into our memory. 
 
 JUNIUS BRUTTTS BOOTH was born in Lon- 
 don, May 1, 1796. He appeared on the Lon- 
 don stage at the age of twenty, but has run 
 the greater part of his dramatic career in 
 this country. He was of short stature, but 
 his presence and action were types of manli- 
 ness and power. His face was cast originally 
 in the antique Roman mould ; and even many 
 years after the untoward accident which 
 spoiled its classic outline, it presented, on one 
 occasion, when we were sitting by his side, 
 a singular resemblance to the portraits of 
 Michael Angelo. 
 
 No language can do more than recall, to 
 those who have seen him in his most vital 
 moods, the terrible and beautiful meaning of 
 his look and gesture ; or the charm of his 
 massive and resonant voice. For voice, 
 gesture, and every fibre of his wonderful 
 organization, were subordinated to a genius, 
 which laid hold of and expressed, with 
 absolute sincerity, the radical elements of 
 character ; and gave play to its minor mani-
 
 THE TRAGEDIAN. 7 
 
 festations, with the spontaneous freedom and 
 variety of nature. 
 
 We well remember how, in former times, 
 we hungered and thirsted, in the intervals of 
 his absence, after the intellectual beauty of 
 his personations. 
 
 His great popularity, which time, accident, 
 and eccentric habits seldom availed to di- 
 minish, seemed owing mainly to those fire 
 blasts of a volcanic energy, that power of 
 instant and tremendous concentration of pas- 
 sion, which was one constituent of his genius. 
 Yet it was curious to observe a crowded and 
 tumultuous pit, with its new comers strug- 
 gling for some " coigne of vantage " in the 
 doorways, noisily careless of the sorrows of 
 King Henry, but hushed in a moment, 
 
 " Still as night, 
 Or summer's noontide air," 
 
 as the grand, but subdued and self-commun- 
 ing intonations of Richard's opening soliloquy 
 fell upon their ears. 
 
 In the cumulative and energetic evolution 
 of character, which forms the basis of his 
 fame, the subtler traits of Mr. Booth's delin- 
 eations were often overlooked ; but, to our 
 thinking, it was this marvelous delicacy
 
 8 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 especially which made his acting " the feast 
 it was." It was this rare power which ena- 
 bled him to follow the lead of Shakespeare's 
 imagination, in its most secret windings and 
 its airiest flights v and found him the sole 
 artist of our time, worthy to present in living 
 form the characters of Hamlet, lago, Othello, 
 and Lear. 
 
 Thus much have we felt impelled to say, 
 in the hurry of the hour, in grateful memory 
 of one from whom we have drawn deep de- 
 light and instruction ; while we reserve, to 
 some future day, an ampler notice, worthy, 
 we trust, in some measure, of his exalted 
 representative genius.
 
 1868. 
 
 AN actor's posthumous fame is, by the 
 nature of his art, visionary and traditional. 
 The sculptor's thought lives after him, in 
 lines and masses of imperishable marble ; the 
 painter's in simulated forms and " sorcery of 
 color " on his canvas ; and from the impish 
 figures of the composer's score, a cunning 
 hand may at any time evoke 
 
 " The hidden soul of harmony." 
 
 But when a great actor passes away, nothing 
 remains excepting grand and delicate images, 
 which in silent hours crowd the memory of 
 those who have seen him, and the report of 
 which finds a fainter and still receding echo 
 in the minds of those who have not. 
 
 In this view, in grateful testimony to the 
 rare delight his personations have afforded ; 
 and in the hope of giving body to the vision, 
 and language to the common sentiment of his 
 appreciators, we proceed to record our im- 
 pressions of Mr. Booth's genius for dramatic 
 impersonation.
 
 10 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 And here we feel we cannot advance one 
 steady step without first considering, and 
 haply disposing of, Charles Lamb's thought- 
 ful essay " On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, 
 considered in their fitness for stage repre- 
 sentation " ; in which he evinces the most 
 penetrating sentiment of the quality of 
 Shakespeare's genius, and denies with equal 
 emphasis, but less discretion, the power of the 
 stage to reproduce it. The sophistry of his 
 argument, as we apprehend it, lies in his ap- 
 plying to Shakespeare's dramas the most 
 subtle imaginative tests, and thereupon as- 
 suming the entire absence of the imaginative 
 faculty in the representation of those dramas 
 on the stage. Let us review his theory ; for if 
 Shakespeare cannot be represented, it is idle 
 to assign the quality of genius to any actor. 
 
 Lamb tells us that, as he was taking a 
 turn in Westminster Abbey, he was struck 
 by an affected figure of Garrick, the player, 
 under writ by some fustian lines about the 
 equality of genius between Garrick and 
 Shakespeare ! Scarcely need we affirm our 
 sympathy with Lamb's condemnation of their 
 "false thoughts and nonsense." They con- 
 tain sufficient provocation to set off the ec-
 
 THE TRAGEDIAN. 11 
 
 centric genius of Elia at a smart pace in the 
 opposite direction. 
 
 We can follow him in his lucid exposition 
 of the inadequacy of the stage to represent 
 supernatural scenery ; and the consequent 
 failure of all attempts to reproduce the fairy 
 creations of " A Midsummer Night's Dream," 
 and " The Tempest." These require for 
 their due appreciation, an imagination sub- 
 tilized by quiet, and airily abstracted from 
 the presence of material objects. 
 
 But when he proceeds to distinguish the 
 stage as equally incapable of embodying 
 single human characters, in which the imagi- 
 nation plays a conspicuous part ; or who are 
 possessed by supernatural emotions, as Ham- 
 let, Macbeth, Lear, then we part company 
 with the ingenious essayist. The possibility 
 of their adequate representation by living 
 man is involved in the fact of their creation 
 within the sphere of humanity. 
 
 No doubt, Lamb's sensitive spirit, devel- 
 oped and nourished in the morning light and 
 dew and fragrance of the English classics, 
 was often shocked by pretenders to the 
 much-abused and misjudged fine art of acting 
 that swarmed the London theatres. Even
 
 12 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 Edmund Kean, no pretender, but an original 
 and genuine artist, may have swelled the 
 current of this feeling. 
 
 Hazlitt cherished a passionate admiration 
 for Kean ; but he was a jealous lover, and 
 frequently chastised his favorite. Kean dis- 
 appointed him in Lear. The critic quotes 
 the passage, 
 
 " heavens, 
 
 If you do love old men, if your sweet sway 
 Hallow obedience, if yourselves are old, 
 Make it your cause; send down, and take my part! 
 Art not ashamed to look upon this beard? 
 Regan, wilt thou take her by the hand?" 
 
 and adds, " One would think there are tones 
 and looks and gestures answerable to these 
 words, to thrill and harrow up the thoughts, 
 to ' appall the guilty and make mad the free ' : 
 or that might create a soul under the ribs of 
 death ! But we did not see or hear them. 
 It is not enough that Lear's crosses and per- 
 plexities are expressed by single strokes." 
 
 Lamb retorts, " What have looks and 
 tones to do with that sublime identification of 
 his age with that of the heavens themselves, 
 when, in his reproaches to them, for conniving 
 at the injustice of his children, he reminds 
 them that ' they themselves are old '
 
 THE TRAGEDIAN. 13 
 
 Lamb enforces his abstract point by italicizing 
 the word " heavens." But the attentive 
 reader of the play will see that Lear, the 
 grand old pagan king, uses this word inter- 
 changeably with "gods" the gods w r ere 
 persons if the heavens are not. 
 
 The respective printed articles in which 
 these opposing views occur, are the evident 
 outcome of a foregone conversation. We 
 can fancy Hazlitt coming, on a Wednesday 
 evening, hot from the theatre, into that con- 
 gress of wits and good fellows then assembled 
 at Lamb's lodgings ; uttering and controvert- 
 ing opinion, with fierce and fitful eloquence ; 
 then disappearing, in order to write one of 
 those papers on Kean's performances, which 
 was to lighten from his firefly page, on the 
 dull world of London, in the " Chronicle " 
 of the following day. 
 
 Lamb might have added, and with equal 
 pertinency, to his question about looks and 
 tones, what have words to do with that 
 sublime identification ? Words are arbitrary 
 signs. Tone is 1 their living spirit. Tone is 
 the direct utterance of the heart and the 
 imagination. We hold with Hazlitt. We 
 have heard tones equal to the expression of
 
 14 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 the grandest words of Shakespeare. They 
 ring in the chambers of memory. We have 
 seen faces, one face, at least, capable of pre- 
 senting the very look of Lear, as he stood 
 with his lifted face, blanched and wasted by 
 accumulated and unutterable grief, his soul 
 looking through blue eyes, beyond the storm, 
 towards the blue heavens, the abode of those 
 " kind gods " into whose awful likeness he 
 was for the moment transfigured. 
 
 We judge of the capability of an art, had 
 we no better guide, by its best examples, not 
 its average product : as in painting we take, 
 not a tavern sign, being a portrait of the pro- 
 prietor ; but rather Raphael's picture in the 
 Dresden Gallery of that Divine Child whose 
 name is Wonderful. 
 
 Lamb supposes that an actor must be 
 thinking only and always of his own appear- 
 ance. " On what compulsion must he ? tell 
 us that." A genuine actor, it is true, delights 
 in his own product as an artist ; but why 
 may he not feel, at the same time, the inspi- 
 ration of his author, even to the point of self- 
 forgetfulness ? Brooding study, and a mas- 
 tery over the business of his profession, may 
 be the very means of his emancipation, and
 
 THE TRAGEDIAN. 15 
 
 contribute to give free play to his genius ; 
 even as the habit of virtue deepens the foun- 
 tains of spontaneous goodness. 
 
 Compare for a moment the histrionic with 
 a sister art, and see what delight of liberty 
 the former may command. If the dull and 
 silent clay can be so manipulated by the hand 
 of genius as to insphere and express the rar- 
 est beauty of woman, as in that Neapolitan 
 Psyche, pure, proud, visionary ; or rise to the 
 colossal grandeur of the Phidian Jupiter, 
 (" how big imagination glows in that lip ! ") 
 why may not the actor, whose clay is a living 
 organism of fearful and wonderful forces, 
 make it an instant vehicle of the most glow- 
 ing inspiration. He is statue, and picture, 
 and poem, and music, and informs them all 
 with life and motion, through the charm of 
 his magnetic presence. 
 
 Lamb's article is a special literary plea. 
 Let the closet student exalt, if he will, the 
 pleasure of abstract reverie. We hold it to 
 be " womanish and weak," compared with 
 that robust and intellectual delight, which 
 comes with the " sense of distinctness " a 
 great actor is capable of imparting to creations 
 of human character whose form is genuine,
 
 16 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 and which can bear light and sound and mo- 
 tion. The charm of Shakespeare's dramas is 
 not a witch's spell, that an uttered word may 
 break. 
 
 Certain purists of to-day are following a 
 like line of argument with Lamb, in their 
 graduation of the relative dignity of the arts. 
 Their formula might be stated thus : that is 
 the finest art which employs the most imma- 
 terial vehicle. But so long as the beauty of 
 the world depends on the law of gravitation, 
 we dare maintain, that the finest art is that 
 in which the solidest material is permeated 
 by the most spiritual thought. This is the 
 
 true 
 
 " Bridal of the earth and sky." 
 
 Not with his usual vision of the germs and 
 processes of genius did Lamb write, that an 
 actor is an imitator of the signs and turns of 
 passion. An actor of the understanding, a 
 sensible actor, indeed, always takes this 
 method ; an imaginative actor, never. One 
 takes the words of the text (always premis- 
 ing that he is not a poor copy of some 
 empirical precedent), reasons upon, and 
 infers the meaning, and so extracts the 
 character. The result of this method, how-
 
 THE TRAGEDIAN. 17 
 
 ever carefully and comprehensively employed, 
 is at best but an abstract induction, having 
 something of the aspect of reality, biit auto- 
 matic, and without the breath of life. 
 
 The other looks, for example, into one of 
 Shakespeare's great creations, as if passing 
 into a real presence ; is filled and atmosphered 
 by its spirit ; listens to its language as to a 
 living voice ; is brought into intimate rela- 
 tions with the springs of its being ; and 
 conceives it in unity by the power of a 
 brooding and recreative imagination. 
 
 And unto this power, because " it cometh 
 not with observation," but transcends the 
 understanding ; because it is vital and life- 
 giving, and elevates acting from a mimetic 
 into an imaginative art, subordinating the 
 comparative intellect to its higher and self- 
 justified laws, we feel bound to give, with 
 a considerate and responsible decision, the 
 sacred name of genius. 
 
 This word is too often profaned. We do 
 not intend either to cumber or distract the 
 reader's mind with a new definition. But it 
 will be found equally true of the representa- 
 tive, as of the originating arts, that they find 
 their highest expression with swiftness, ease, 
 2
 
 18 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 and joy. With swiftness ; for repose itself, 
 a live quiet, a quality so profound in art and 
 so misappreciated, sits at the farthest remove 
 from dullness, and necessitates a quick con- 
 tinuity of harmonious conditions. " Living" 
 and " quick " are English synonyms. With 
 ease ; for, when the high powers of the mind 
 come by invitation or spontaneous consent, 
 and combine and converge towards one com- 
 mon end, the beautiful in art, their grandest 
 and their gravest work is play. The glow of 
 this play is the very element of joy. 
 
 If in addition to the power we have indi- 
 cated, but dare not define, an actor be gifted 
 with an organization instantly responsive to 
 its monitions, the conduit of its influence, and 
 the varying form of its strong possession, or 
 its subtle and shifting inspiration, we call him 
 by the noble name of artist. 
 
 That Mr. Booth was a man of genius in 
 the vital conception, and a consummate artist 
 in the varied expression of dramatic, and es- 
 pecially of Shakespearean character, we hope 
 amply to illustrate, by a review of his more 
 important personations, defined and refreshed 
 by memoranda made at the time of their 
 occurrence, during many years, for private 
 reference and delight.
 
 THE TRAGEDIAN. 19 
 
 In person Mr. Booth was short, spare and 
 muscular ; with a head and face of antique 
 beauty ; dark hair ; blue eyes ; a neck and 
 chest of ample but symmetrical mould ; a step 
 and movement elastic, assured, kingly. His 
 face was pale, with that healthy pallor which 
 is one sign of a magnetic brain. Throughout 
 this brief, close-knit, imperial figure, Nature 
 had planted or diffused her most vital organic 
 forces ; and made it the capable servant of 
 the commanding mind that descended into 
 and possessed it in every fibre. 
 
 The airy condensation of his tempfi'ament 
 found fullest expression in his voice. Sound 
 and capacious lungs, a vascular and fibrous 
 throat, clearness and amplitude in the inte- 
 rior mouth and nasal passages, formed its 
 physical basis. Words are weak, but the 
 truth of those we shall employ, in an en- 
 deavor to suggest that voice, will be felt by 
 multitudes who have been thrilled by its 
 living tones. Deep, massive, resonant, many- 
 stringed, changeful, vast in volume, of mar- 
 velous flexibility and range ; delivering with 
 ease, and power of instant and total inter- 
 change, trumpet-tones, bell-tones, tones like 
 the " sound of many waters," like the muffled 
 and confluent " roar of bleak-grown pines."
 
 20 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 But no analogies in art or nature, and espe- 
 cially no indication of its organic structure 
 and physical conditions, could reveal the inner 
 secret of its charm. This charm lay in the 
 mind, of which his voice was the organ: a 
 " most miraculous organ," under the sway of 
 a thoroughly informing mind. The chest 
 voice became a fountain of passion and emo- 
 tion. The head register gave the " clear, 
 silver, icy, keen, awakening tones " of the 
 pure intellect. And as the imagination stands, 
 with its beautiful and comforting face, between 
 heart tti^.d brain, and marries them with a 
 benediction, giving glow to the thoughts, and 
 form to the emotions, so there arose in this 
 intuitive actor a third element of voice, hard 
 to define, but of a fusing, blending, kindling 
 quality, which we may name the imaginative, 
 which appeared now in some single word, 
 now with the full diapason of tones in some 
 memorable sentence, and which distinguished 
 him as an incomparable speaker of the Eng- 
 lish tongue. That voice was guided by a 
 method which defied the set rules of elocution. 
 It transcended music. It " brought airs from 
 heaven and blasts from hell." It struggled 
 and smothered in the pent fires of passion, or
 
 THE TRAGEDIAN. 21 
 
 darted from them as in tongues of flame. 
 It was " the earthquake voice of victory." 
 It was, on occasion, full of tears and heart- 
 break. Free as a fountain, it took the form 
 and pressure of the conduit thought ; and 
 expressive beyond known parallel in voice of 
 man, it suggested more than it expressed. 
 
 But his voice was marked by one signifi- 
 cant limitation. It had no mirth. There 
 were tones of light, but none of levity. No 
 laughter, but that terrific laughter in Shylock, 
 which seemed torn from his malignant heart 
 at the announcement of Antonio's losses. It 
 is true Mr. Booth played in farce. We have 
 seen him repeatedly as Jerry Sneak, in 
 Foote's farce of the " Mayor of Garratt ; " 
 and as Geoffry Muffincap, in " Amateurs and 
 Actors." But his acting in this kind was 
 never to our taste. It was not fun alive. 
 His farce was simply the negation of his 
 tragedy. In it he took the one step from the 
 sublime. The sunny blue eye, the genial 
 smile, the pleasantry we found so winning in 
 social intercourse, never appeared upon the 
 stage. His genius, and the voice it swayed, 
 were dedicated to tragedy. Child of nature 
 as he was, though consummated by art, he
 
 22 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 
 disdained no resource which might minister 
 
 to the legitimate effects of tragedy. And it 
 may be said that, as Phidias blended the lion 
 into the god, in the face of his Jupiter, so 
 Booth lifted the lion's voice, " the prowling 
 lion's 'Here I am,'" into the human scale, 
 and with judicious reserve and translated 
 meaning bade it "roar and thunder in the 
 index " of the stormier passions. 
 
 Such a man, so minded and so organized, 
 we will not say justifies, he necessitates the 
 stage. The moral argument is absorbed in 
 the inevitable fact. If the theatre had not 
 existed, he would have created it, according 
 to the Divine order, in which the soul invents 
 the circumstance. Without it, there would 
 have been no field for the exercise of his 
 peculiar powers. In him grand passions found 
 play through the imagination, not only harm- 
 less, but fruitful and beautiful as art. Nay, it 
 would seem as if the nature of this man lay, 
 a distinct personality, embryonic in the very 
 mind of Shakespeare, whose grander charac- 
 ters awaited, as the centuries rolled by, their 
 destined and completed representative. And 
 he came, in the fullness of time, to give them 
 living form, and vital motion, and transcend-
 
 THE TRAGEDIAN. 23 
 
 ant speech, and personal unity, and ever- 
 endeared remembrance. 
 
 We must regard him as the greatest of all 
 actors. Two names alone in the history of 
 the stage, might dispute his supremacy 
 David Garrick and Edmund Kean. Garrick 
 is a tradition. The record of his histrionic 
 power is meagre. He seems to have been 
 hampered by conventionalism, enacting Mac- 
 beth in a tie-wig and knee-breeches. His 
 look is praised ; and the power of his voice is 
 illustrated by declamatory passages. No sat- 
 isfactory analysis of his method has reached 
 us. The anecdote that Dr. Johnson was 
 overwhelmed by the pathos of his perform- 
 ance in Lear, is the most noteworthy cir- 
 cumstance of his life upon the stage. But 
 Garrick played Tate's perversion, not Shake- 
 speare's drama ; and Johnson's morbid sensi- 
 bility is well known. 
 
 Garrick was of French descent, and he 
 seems to have inherited the vivacity, the point, 
 the versatility, of the Gallic branch of the 
 Celtic race. He was playwright, player, 
 dancer, and a facile writer of epilogues and 
 epigrams. He adapted, that is, altered for 
 the stage, Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, Kath-
 
 24 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 erine and Petruchio. Dr. Johnson said that 
 "'his death eclipsed the gayety of nations." 
 He was best in comedy, and his comic parts 
 far outnumber the tragic. From all sources 
 of knowledge on the subject, not omitting 
 Fitzgerald's fascinating "Life of Garrick," 
 recently published in London, we must con- 
 clude that his tragic acting, although a rare 
 entertainment, did not touch the deepest 
 springs of feeling ; that it was rather a skill 
 than an inspiration. 
 
 The inadequacy of Johnsofi's commenta- 
 ries, stamps him, with all his vigorous English 
 sense, as singularly deficient in the very 
 quality which made Shakespeare the great- 
 est of all dramatists, and which, whether in 
 'actor or critic, must be employed in interpret- 
 ing his pages we mean the quality of im- 
 agination. And we are without all evidence 
 that the player went beyond the critic. That 
 Garrick did not play up to the height of 
 Shakespeare, is finally evident from the fact 
 that Shakespeare himself was not truly known 
 till a later day. Coleridge discovered him. 
 Then Schlegel and other German thinkers 
 (if indeed they did not precede Coleridge), 
 caught his light,
 
 THE TRAGEDIAN. 25 
 
 " The light that never was on sea or lana, 
 The consecration and the poet's dream," 
 
 and reflected it back upon the English mind. 
 
 About this time Booth appeared, at the age 
 of twenty, at Covent Garden Theatre, Lon- 
 don. At another theatre, another actor of 
 original force and fiery temperament, in the 
 full maturity of his power and fame, the des- 
 pot of the stage, jealous of all rivalry, was 
 enacting Shakespeare to the wonder and 
 admiration of the city; while such men as 
 Coleridge, and Hazlitt, and Lamb, and God- 
 win, sat attentive in the pit. This actor was 
 Edmund Kean. 
 
 " Two stars keep not their motion in one 
 sphere." It is from the purpose of this essay 
 to detail the circumstances of the war which 
 followed, between the rival players. The 
 curiosity of the reader may find satisfaction 
 by looking into any authentic record of the 
 English stage. What we have to do, is, 
 briefly to note the respective forms of histri- 
 onic power in Kean and Booth ; to trace 
 these forms to their true sources in bodily 
 and mental constitution, and to assign the 
 superiority to whom it rightfully belongs. 
 
 There was a striking resemblance between
 
 26 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 these two actors, in height and figure. In 
 temperament, also, there was a partial sim- 
 ilarity both being distinguished by passion- 
 ate energy, and by daring to displace the 
 prescriptive habits of the stage, by the action 
 and the tones of nature. To the English 
 mind, observant of externals, and thrice-sod- 
 den in its regard for precedent, this super- 
 ficial likeness, coupled with the mere fact 
 that Booth was the younger and later prod- 
 uct, seems to have suggested that he formed 
 his style upon the acting of Kean. Nothing 
 could be farther from the truth. We pro- 
 pose to state the points of difference between 
 them, condensed from the widest range of 
 the most unimpeachable testimony. 
 
 In Booth, the passionate energy, common 
 to both, was sustained and expanded by a 
 certain ethereal quality, wanting in Kean. 
 Kean was alert ; Booth, airy. Kean was 
 black-eyed, like the children of Southern 
 Europe. Booth had the blue eyes of the 
 North, 
 
 " Whence those arts and races sprung 
 Which light, and lift, and sway the world." 
 
 The confined intensity of temperament in 
 Kean, limited the range of his voice. Haz-
 
 THE TRAGEDIAN. 27 
 
 litt speaks of him as having " the eye of an 
 eagle, and the voice of a raven ; " and else- 
 where, while justly lauding the fire, the na- 
 ture, the genius of his favorite, confesses to 
 his " inharmonious voice." The voice obeys 
 the emotion which dominates and employs it, 
 and the pathos of Kean's utterance, partic- 
 ularly in certain passages of Othello, has 
 probably never been surpassed. 
 
 In that admirable paper on the "Acting 
 of Kean," written by Mr. Dana (himself a 
 poet and imaginative critic of a high and del- 
 icate order of genius ; and which brief record 
 has gone far to continue the visionary and 
 vanishing fame of the actor), he says, the 
 pronunciation of the single word "Ha! " in 
 Othello, when the feeling of jealousy is 
 first awakened in his heart, seemed to carry 
 away the listener " on its wild swell." 
 Kean's throat was a cave of magical whis- 
 pers. But, whether owing or not to the 
 national catarrh, which afflicts the majority 
 of Englishmen, and the influence of which 
 upon the pronunciation of their native tongue 
 is imitated by some absurd Americans, his 
 voice was equally deficient in the ringing 
 head tones, and in that resonant bass, not
 
 28 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 guttural, but far deeper, which Booth used 
 with such masculine and memorable effect. 
 We find accordingly in Kean's voice a pe- 
 culiarity, a mannerism, in which the liquids 
 m and n had no place, but which consisted 
 in a prolongation of the liquids I and r. 
 
 " Farewell-l-l the pl-1-lumdd trrroop." 
 
 The most cordial tribute to Kean's excel- 
 lence, was given us by one who, by the law 
 of retaliation, was under the least obligation 
 to render it, namely, by Mr. Booth himself. 
 Similar magnanimity Kean never would 
 have shown. But Mr. Booth, throughout a 
 changeful career, marked by human infirm- 
 ity, and running sometimes on the giddy 
 verge of madness, was always a gentleman 
 as well as a scholar ; while it must be owned 
 that Kean, great as were his histrionic claims, 
 was neither the one nor the other. 
 
 There existed however a distinction, more 
 radical than temperament, or education, or 
 manners, which separated these two actors, 
 and lay in the very core of the mental life 
 of each. Look at the portraits of Kean. All 
 concur (even that one with the Kemble eye- 
 brow, which Kean had not) in giving him a 
 brain wide at the base, pinched at the tern-
 
 THE TRAGEDIAN. 29 
 
 pies ; in marked contrast with the winged 
 and balanced brain of Booth. Correspond- 
 ingly, all records and all reports agree, in 
 representing Kean's performances as fearfully 
 intense, inevitable, aiming to express char- 
 acter by single strokes of overwhelming en- 
 ergy, or heart-broken pathos ; and leaving 
 between the strokes wide intervals of dull- 
 ness. 
 
 Coleridge said that to see him act, " was 
 like reading Shakespeare by flashes of light- 
 ning." John Kemble said, " the little fellow 
 is 'terribly in earnest." All records agree 
 all but one. Macaulay, in his " History of 
 England," in one of those brief and brilliant 
 episodes which beguile the progress of the 
 story, traces the pedigree of Kean to the 
 Marquis of Halifax through how many 
 escapades of illegitimacy he does not confess. 
 He says, the Marquis was the progenitor 
 of " that Edmund Kean, who, in our own 
 time, transformed himself so marvelously into 
 Shylock, lago, and Othello." If this be 
 true, no higher praise could be awarded to 
 any actor. If this be true, then the por- 
 traits, and Kemble, and Hazlitt, and Coler- 
 idge, and a multitude of contemporary ob- 
 servers now living, are all at fault.
 
 30 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 We think it will require something more 
 than the dazzling dogmatism of the English 
 historian, to sustain his position. We think, 
 not that Kean transformed himself into Shy- 
 lock, lago, and Othello ; but that the actor 
 transformed those characters respectively 
 into Edmund Kean : that is, that he took 
 just those words, and lines, and points, and 
 passages, in the character he was to repre- 
 sent, which he found suited to his genius, 
 and gave them with electric force. His 
 method was limitary. It was analytic and 
 passionate ; not, in the highest sense, intel- 
 lectual and imaginative. 
 
 Our final authority is Hazlitt, who has 
 given, in his work on the " English Stage," 
 by far the most thorough exposition of 
 Kean's powers. Hazlitt learnt him by heart. 
 He delved him to the root, and let in on his 
 merits and defects the irradiating and the 
 " insolent light" of a searching criticism. He 
 says, with fine hyperbole, that to see Kean 
 at his best, in Othello, " was one of the con- 
 solations of the human mind ; " yet is con- 
 strained to admit, even in his notice of this 
 play, that " Kean lacked imagination." 
 
 Now this power Booth possessed of a sub-
 
 THE TRAGEDIAN. 31 
 
 tile kind, and in magnificent measure. It 
 lent a weird expressiveness to his voice. 
 It atmosphered his most terrific performances 
 with beauty. Booth took up Kean at his 
 best, and carried him further. Booth was 
 Kean, plus the higher imagination. Kean 
 was the intense individual ; Booth, the type 
 in the intense individual. To see Booth in 
 his best mood was not " like reading Shake- 
 speare by flashes of lightning," in which a 
 blinding glare alternates with the fearful sus- 
 pense of darkness ; but rather like reading 
 him by the sunlight of a summer's day, a 
 light which casts deep shadows, gives play to 
 glorious harmonies of color, and shows all 
 objects in vivid life and true relation. 
 
 The recorded impression left by Kean on 
 the minds of his reporters and biographers, 
 is of a mighty grasp and overwhelming ener- 
 gy in partial scenes ; while Booth is remem- 
 bered for his sustained and all-related con- 
 ception of character, intensely realized, it is 
 true, but chiefly marked by those ideal traits, 
 which not only charmed the listener, but ac- 
 companied the scholar to his study, and shed 
 a light on the subtlest and the profoundest 
 page of Shakespeare. The imaginative power
 
 32 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 was so opulent in Booth, that- he multiplied 
 himself into the scene, and abolished the 
 dullness of the other players. Filled with 
 the conception of the supernatural himself, he 
 " shook the superflux to them." In Hamlet, 
 he made the tread and exit of the heaviest 
 " ghost," airier ; and in Macbeth, transformed 
 by his presence and action, the three fantastic 
 old women into ministers of fate. 
 
 In according to Booth the gift of supreme 
 histrionic power, we do not imply that his 
 performances were faultless ; for the faultless 
 performer is simply the correct. We wil- 
 lingly admit that he may have been matched 
 by others, and haply surpassed in all second- 
 ary qualities, excepting voice, which illumi- 
 nate the stage ; he holding, beyond rivalry, 
 the single controlling quality of a penetrating, 
 kindling, shaping imagination. Genius can 
 light its own fire ; and it is the peculiar prop- 
 erty of histrionic genius to cherish, manipu- 
 late, and apply the flame. Yet in the finest 
 results of all art there is something indepen- 
 dent of the will. Mr. Booth was perhaps the 
 most unequal of all great actors. And this 
 inequality was more sadly manifest towards 
 the latter part of his career. His excellence
 
 THE TRAGEDIAN. 33 
 
 was, however, throughout his life, so incal- 
 culable and surprising, that one of his very 
 greatest Shakespearean performances took 
 place in the year 1850, during his last en- 
 gagement in Boston. 
 
 Health, animal spirits, that vigor which 
 comes from just intervals of repose, clearness 
 of voice in our trying climate, and general 
 freshness of the physical man, may all con- 
 spire to serve the exacting hour, and yet the 
 spontaneous actor not find himself " i' the 
 vein." The transforming imaginative power 
 on which he relies to identify himself with 
 the dramatic character, may be either slug- 
 gish or asleep. The whence and whither of 
 that wind of the spirit, who knoweth ? So 
 Mr. Booth, to the casual attendant on his 
 performances, often failed to sustain his great 
 reputation. Only to those who, like our- 
 selves, had waited on them through remuner- 
 ating years, did the full depth and refinement, 
 the glow and sway of mind he showed, 
 entirely appear. Many a time, when passion 
 and imagination were comparatively wanting, 
 have we admired the subtle intellect of his 
 interpretations ; and were, on such occasions, 
 content to follow his lifted and guiding torch,
 
 34 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 along the spar-gemmed labyrinths of Shake- 
 speare's more intricate meanings. 
 
 Our course of remark has drifted us into 
 that cloud which hung over and partially 
 obscured his fame, and which, in good men's 
 minds, affixed a blot on his personal character. 
 We mean what has been called, with needless 
 exaggeration, his habit of intoxication. We 
 would gladly avoid this subject, but " omit- 
 tance is no quittance,'' and we proceed to 
 set the charge in its true light. During the 
 forty years, save one, which bounded his 
 dramatic career, Mr. Booth's habit of life, 
 both on his farm and on the stage, was exem- 
 plarily temperate. His reverence for the 
 sacredness of all life amounted to a super- 
 stition. He abstained for many years on 
 principle from the use of animal food. An 
 " extravagant and erring spirit," allied to 
 madness, would sometimes take possession of 
 him, and hurry him away from the theatre at 
 the moment the performance was to begin ; 
 and to this cause, and not to intoxication, 
 should be attributed the not infrequent dis- 
 appointment of the audience. Still it must 
 be confessed, with grief and pity, that the 
 baser charge was often true. A resort to
 
 THE TRAGEDIAN. 35 
 
 stimulants is the actor's special bane and 
 ever-present temptation : to an actor of Mr. 
 Booth's spontaneous method, sometimes an 
 irresistible temptation. The histrionic art 
 was to him a cultus, a religion. Not to speak 
 it profanely, he offered himself a perpetual 
 sacrifice to the god of terror and of beauty ; 
 he staked " soul and body on the action both," 
 and the exhaustion sometimes attendant upon 
 his performance of the fiery rite, was relieved 
 by means questionable, pitiful, pardonable. 
 
 The accident by which his nose was broken, 
 spoiling forever his noble profile, threatened 
 for a time the more serious disaster of a per- 
 manent injury to his voice. Immediately on 
 his recovery he began to play. To those 
 who, during these first performances, recalled 
 the perfect features and the resonant tones 
 of former years, the sight and sound were 
 indeed pitiful. The head tones were scarce- 
 ly perceptible. But instead of humoring this 
 vocal infirmity, he spoke with all the old 
 mastery of motive, and let the result take 
 care of itself. By this persistent method, in 
 less than two years after the accident, his 
 voice had completely recovered its original 
 scope, variety, and power ; as we can attest
 
 36 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 by close, solicitous, and comparative observa- 
 tion. To this restoration, added to the 
 autumnal ripeness of his physical and mental 
 powers, we owe the undiminished zest and 
 life of his impersonations. 
 
 We pass on to examples, in the hope that 
 the reader will bring to our record that 
 " productive imagination " which alone can 
 render fruitful the endeavor to rekindle the 
 fire of eye and action, to give form to air, to 
 bring a voice out of the silent past, and to 
 conjure up before him a kingly and inspiring 
 presence.
 
 EICHARD HL 
 
 WE do not quarrel with Colley Gibber, 
 player and playwright of the time of Gar- 
 rick, because he saw fit, for the convenience 
 of the stage, to compose, out of several his- 
 torical plays of Shakespeare, in which the 
 same characters occur, one entitled " Rich- 
 ard the Third." But we do blame him for 
 his audacious excision of the living limbs, 
 his more audacious interpolations in the text, 
 and his senseless changes in the character 
 of that Richard, third of the name, whom 
 Shakespeare delineated. He has obliterated 
 those lights of human feeling, which the 
 great master touched in, and which alone 
 redeem Richard from the condition of vulgar 
 villainy, into which Gibber plunges him. 
 The buoyant, aspiring soul of the usurper, 
 finding expression in such language as this 
 
 " But I was born so high, 
 Our aiery buildeth in the cedar's top 
 And dallies with the wind, and scorns the sun," 
 
 does nowhere appear.
 
 38 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 In Shakespeare, the villainy is incidental 
 to the ambition ; and is besides relieved by 
 genius, energy, and vast and ready variety 
 of intellectual resources. In Gibber's ver- 
 sion, villainy i the substance of the char- 
 acter ; the very element in which it sits and 
 revels. In Shakespeare, when multiplying 
 dangers and ghostly visitation have com- 
 bined to open in Richard's soul " the access 
 and passage to remorse," occurs this remark- 
 able utterance : 
 
 " There is no creature loves me, 
 And if I die no soul will pity me ! " 
 
 Gibber wantonly hardens the depravity of 
 the character, below its all-sufficient wicked- 
 ness. The interpolated scene with Lady 
 Anne, whom Richard had widowed, cajoled, 
 married, and resolved to slay, is simply atro- 
 cious and inhuman. 
 
 But the play, such as it is, shining with 
 Shakespeare's genius, blotted by Gibber's 
 folly, has always held the stage ; and it is 
 less our purpose to complain of its defects, 
 than to show Mr. Booth's masterly imper- 
 sonation of the leading part. He is identi- 
 fied with it in the public mind. His per- 
 formance of it was certain, at any period of
 
 RICHARD III. 39 
 
 *. 
 
 his life, to crowd the theatre. And in truth, 
 although it excluded all opportunity for the 
 display of the finer traits of his genius, yet 
 the energy, subtlety, variety, he brought to 
 its representation the sustained vigor of 
 voice, and look, and action, to the last. 
 justified the popular approval. 
 
 In Mr. Booth's conception the main im- 
 pulse was most apparent ; the ambition, and 
 not the crimes it caused. There was a certain 
 slow movement at the opening ; a sombre 
 settled purpose, underlying and surrounding 
 his most brilliant action ; and giving place at 
 last to a preternatural energy, and fiery ex- 
 pedition, only when the object, the crown, 
 was attained, and all the resources of his 
 fertile brain were drawn on and combined, 
 in the effort to retain the regal power he 
 had usurped. 
 
 With head bent in thought, arms folded, 
 and slow long step, longer it would seem 
 than the height of his figure might warrant, 
 yet perfectly natural to him, and so that his 
 lifted foot emerged first into view, Booth 
 appeared upon the scene, enveloped and ab- 
 sorbed in the character of Richard. 
 
 If tumultuous plaudits extorted from him
 
 40 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 a momentary recognition of the audience, it 
 was done with no suspension of the look and 
 action of the character. That look and ac- 
 tion were profoundly self-involved. He de- 
 livered the soliloquy beginning 
 
 " Now is the winter of our discontent," 
 
 in an inward many-stringed resonance of 
 tone, varied by outbursts of passionate vehe- 
 mence, when " descanting on his own de- 
 formity," and reaching through murderous 
 intent after the glorious diadem. He spoke 
 like a man thinking aloud, not as if reciting 
 from memory. Indeed, to speak with strict- 
 ness, he never re-cited at all. He possessed 
 himself of the character, and its language, 
 and then uttered it from inspiration, and 
 according to the emergency of the scene and 
 the situation. Memory, the prime need of 
 an actor, speedily becomes his greatest dan- 
 ger ; a danger lurking always in repetitions 
 of performance, but one into which our actor 
 seldom if ever fell. He carried distinctness 
 of articulation to an extreme, pronouncing 
 " ocean," in this soliloquy, as a word of three 
 syllables. 
 
 In the sequent scene where Gloster hav- 
 ing killed King Henry, exclaims with bitter 
 scorn
 
 RICHARD 111. 41 
 
 " What! Will the aspiring blood of Lancaster 
 Sink in the ground? I thought it would have mounted ! " 
 
 he lifts his sword, and his eye following, 
 catches sight of blood upon the blade, in a 
 manner like the very truth of nature. He 
 adds 
 
 " See ! How my sword weeps for the poor king's death ! 
 ! may such purple tears be always shed, 
 By those who wish the downfall of our house." 
 
 What grim humor was in that cold, self- 
 poised recollection, contained in the words 
 
 " Indeed, 'tis true, that Henry told me of," 
 
 Henry lying then warm but dead by his 
 hand, and alone with him in the kingly bed- 
 chamber ! 
 
 Originality in Mr. Booth's performances 
 was a necessity of his genius. His acting 
 was a congeries of causes, coordinated with 
 the main cause, the conception of the char- 
 acter. Kean's manner of acting, on the con- 
 trary, was a series of disconnected brilliant 
 effects. Gloster's wooing scene with Lady 
 Anne is a case in point. 
 
 The best character portrait of Kean, repre- 
 sents him on one knee, smiling, and saying 
 
 " Take up the sword again, or take up me." 
 
 Hazlitt says, " The whole scene was an ad-
 
 42 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 mirable exhibition of smooth and smiling vil- 
 lainy." Booth made no such exhibition. 
 He did not kneel gracefully. The question 
 with him was not, how is courtship done ; 
 but how would Gloster do it. Nothing 
 would be more likely to charm so weak a 
 woman as Lady Anne, than the repentance 
 and humility of so powerful a nature as that 
 of Richard. " You may relish him more in 
 the soldier than in the lover." Personal 
 flattery was thrown in as a spice, and not 
 as the substance of the dish he offered her. 
 Surprise was blent with joy at his hoped-for 
 victory, in the glance he darted up from his 
 abasement at her feet, when Lady Anne 
 drops the sword. Surprise which finds vent 
 in words, as soon as he finds himself alone. 
 
 " Was ever woman in this humor wooed? 
 Was ever woman in this humor won f 
 I'll have her but I will not keep her long." 
 
 The whole soliloquy was given with that 
 massive, vivid, and varied intonation, which 
 might express the tumult of feelings awak- 
 ened by his almost incredible success. How 
 fine the sudden halt, in that repeated descant 
 on his own deformity, and airy change of 
 tone, in the passage beginning
 
 RICHARD 111. 48 
 
 " My dukedom to a beggarly denier 
 I do mistake my person all this while." 
 
 Nothing could exceed the picturesque beauty 
 of his action, as he delivered the closing 
 lines 
 
 " Shin e out fair sun, till I salute my glass, 
 That I may see my shadow as I pass." 
 
 He looked down at his supposed shadow 
 (we seem to see the shadow as we write) ; 
 he looked with lingering step, and, with 
 pauses between the words, annihilated the 
 sing-song of the double ending 
 
 " That I may see my shadow as I pass." 
 
 The flexible grasp with which Mr. Booth 
 laid hold of and personated the elements of 
 a character, permitted certain minor varia- 
 tions, both in by-play and intonation, in dif- 
 ferent performances of the same part, with- 
 out injuring, but rather heightening, the 
 general effect. This freshened the interest 
 in successive exhibitions, and gave scope 
 oftentimes to rare and vanishing delicacies of 
 thought and feeling. An instance occurred 
 in the scene between Gloster and the young 
 prince Edward, sometimes given thus : 
 
 Gloster (aside). " So wise, so young (they say), do ne'er 
 live long,"
 
 44 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 as if musing complacently on the proverb, 
 yet scarcely harboring the purpose of making 
 it true. And again thus : 
 
 " So wise, so young, they say, do ne'er live long." 
 
 as if the proverb was but the cloak of his full- 
 blown intent to ** remove " the prince. 
 
 From this point he developed the character 
 with ever-increasing animation and momen- 
 tum. His change of manner when seated 
 on the throne was marked and majestic, and 
 in fine contrast with the wily, plotting ap- 
 proaches to it. Buckingham, the agent of 
 his elevation, stands at once and forever in 
 the shadow of his kingly will. Booth's tone 
 and action acquired a combined solidity and 
 celerity, which continued, with brief but fear- 
 ful interruptions in the latter scenes, to the 
 end of the play. 
 
 We may here note an apparent error in 
 his manner of replying to Buckingham's 
 urgent and reiterated demand for the prom- 
 ised earldom. He says : 
 
 " Thou troublest me. I'm not i' the vein," 
 
 in a tone of fretful anger. The passage 
 would seem rather to require a tone of cool 
 and kingly slight. Shakespeare amplifies 
 the retort, and has this line, left out in Gib- 
 ber's version :
 
 RICHARD HI. 45 
 
 " I ain not in the giving vein to-day." 
 
 In the scene where Richard pleads with 
 Queen Elizabeth for her daughter's hand, and 
 says 
 
 " When this warlike arm shall have chastised 
 The audacious rebel, hot-brained Buckingham, 
 Bound with triumphant garlands will I come, 
 And lead your daughter to a conqueror's bed," 
 
 we cannot express the splendor of his man- 
 ner better than by saying, that it suggested 
 the majestic march, the mighty music, and 
 the flower-like play of color of a Roman tri- 
 umph. Lord Stanley enters with these 
 words : 
 
 ' Richmond is on the seas." 
 
 Richard. " There let him sink " (plummet), " and be the 
 seas on him " ( like the lift, advance, and fall of one huge 
 whelming wave), " white-livered runagate " (between set 
 teeth, like hissing foam). 
 
 In this dialogue with Stanley, Booth re- 
 stored a passage from Shakespeare, not in 
 Gibber's play, but essential to the character 
 of Richard, who, fighting to maintain his 
 throne, seems really to feel himself "the 
 Lord's anointed." In reply to Stanley's 
 suggestion that Richmond came to claim the 
 crown, Richard bursts forth 
 
 " Is the chair empty ? Is the sword unswayed ? Is the 
 king dead? "
 
 46 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 The solid, smiting questions, the momen- 
 tary pause between, as rendered . by Booth, 
 can never be forgotten by those who heard 
 them. The questions continue and culminate 
 in that memorable passage 
 
 " What do they i' the North, 
 When they should serve their sovereign i' the West? " 
 
 The last line was delivered in one continuous 
 tone of commanding resonance, in which the 
 words were dropped like stones in the current 
 of his speech. 
 
 In the concluding scenes of this play he 
 seemed, when in his best mood, to be filled 
 with " strange fire." He showed infinite 
 vigilance of mind, relentless mastery of will. 
 The tent scene, in which Richard starts out 
 of his remorseful dream, was one of terrific 
 grandeur, and never failed of producing an 
 electrical effect. After he had mastered the 
 harrowing thoughts born of his dream, his 
 utterance of the words 
 
 " Richard's himself again," 
 
 constituted a brief but pointed study of char- 
 acter. A distinguished tragedian, now living 
 and performing, and therefore here unnamed, 
 could find no better gesture for Richard's 
 self-recovery than to strike a fencing attitude.
 
 RICHARD III. 47 
 
 But Booth stood still, and with one inclusive, 
 unanalyzable motion of the hand, took limbs, 
 body, heart, and brain, in its subtle and com- 
 manding sweep, while he delivered the pas- 
 sage expressing his inward victory with 
 inward voice 
 
 "As if a man were author of himself 
 And knew no other kin ! " 
 
 In the following scene, when Stanley's 
 defection is announced, Richard exclaims 
 
 " Off with his son George's head." 
 At that moment his ear catches the sound of 
 distant music, and his whole manner instantly 
 changes. He listens, leaning on the air with 
 keen looks and parted lips, and an expression 
 of eager and confident expectation. 
 
 Norfolk. " My lord, the foe's already past the marsh ; 
 
 After the battle let young Stanley die." 
 Richard. " Why, after be it then." 
 
 He said this in a tone of the lightest and 
 most careless readiness, still listening ; then 
 resumed his energy of manner in the brief 
 and stirring appeal to his soldiers, as he led 
 them into the fight. 
 
 In the last scene he fought with Richmond 
 desperately ; when wounded and overthrown, 
 fought on the ground. Finally, gathering
 
 48 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 himself up with one mighty effort, he plunged 
 headlong at his cool antagonist, wa& disarmed, 
 and felled to the earth. Gibber has put in- 
 to the mouth of the dying Richard, some 
 wretched and inhuman stuff, which, to the 
 credit of Mr. Booth be it said, we could never 
 distinctly hear from his lips. It sounded 
 only like 
 
 " The cloudy groan 
 Of dying thunder on the distant wind."
 
 HAMLET. 
 
 THE character of Hamlet has been, ever 
 since the time of Shakespeare, the delight and 
 the puzzle of scholars. The portrayal of it 
 has been equally the ambition and the failure 
 of actors. The scholar finds the drama emi- 
 nently a tragedy of thought, and is apt to 
 refine into abstraction the personality of the 
 hero. The actor, depending in his art on 
 presence and speech, usually fails to sound 
 the depth of the character, to pluck out the 
 heart of its mystery, and so gives its varied 
 incident, action, dialogue, soliloquy, in a 
 succession of incoherent, perhaps brilliant, 
 effects. 
 
 In Mr. Booth's conception, Hamlet was a 
 character, not of melancholy, but of a pre- 
 dominant sensibility, which included melan- 
 choly. Not of madness, but of one who, 
 bound by strange ties to the invisible world, 
 found his large discourse of reason and his 
 mastery of will distracted between opposing 
 
 4
 
 50 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 duties. In Hamlet, filial love amounted to a 
 passion. And his father's spirit, in arms, 
 appeared visibly to him, and audibly com- 
 manded him, in terms of solemn adjuration, 
 to commit a deed abhorrent to his feelings as 
 a man. Booth's Hamlet was intensely per- 
 sonal. His brain was 
 
 " The quick forge and working-house of thought.' 1 
 
 His heart was full of purpose, as of affection. 
 His indecision was the result of circumstances, 
 not a defect of will. But this positive and 
 personal life was so atmosphered by beauty, 
 so steeped in melancholy, so spiritualized by 
 supernatural emotion, that it seemed to us, 
 in all essential qualities, the very Hamlet of 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 That phase of this many-sided creation to 
 which he gave least effect, was the princeli- 
 ness. That pensive grace and high breeding 
 which many regard as Hamlet's permanent 
 condition, ruffled only by passing gusts of 
 passion, illuminated by fitful lights of philoso- 
 phy and fancy, and crazed by ghostly visita- 
 tion, found in him an indifferent interpre- 
 ter. He seemed too severely exercised by 
 " thoughts beyond the reaches of his soul " to
 
 HAMLET. 51 
 
 mind the graces of the court ; and his manner 
 was seldom gentle, but rather " swift as medi- 
 tation." Hamlet was Booth's favorite part. 
 Among unnumbered representations, we 
 select for special comment one which took 
 place at the Howard Athena3um, in Boston, 
 on that very winter's night when the steamer 
 Atlantic was lost upon Long Island Sound, in 
 a furious snow-storm 
 
 " A brave vessel 
 
 Which had no doubt some noble creatures in her, 
 Dashed all to pieces." 
 
 Owing to the weather the attendance was 
 small. This circumstance aided the illusion 
 of the opening scene, as if the scattered spec- 
 tators were accidentally present, and looking 
 at the chilled and lonely sentinels, pacing the 
 ramparts of Elsinore castle. But the audi- 
 ence was fit though few. An eminent Shake- 
 spearean scholar sat with us, and a knot of 
 literary friends. It was a noteworthy fact, 
 however it might be accounted for, that Mr. 
 Booth seemed to play better to a thin house. 
 He appeared on the stage with his features 
 marred, with his natural hair turned iron- 
 gray, and with no special help from costume, 
 or scenery, or the other actors. But never
 
 52 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 did the soul of Hamlet shine forth more 
 clearly with its own peculiar, fitful, far-reach- 
 ing, saddened, and supernatural light. 
 
 He was not merely sad, but stricken in 
 grief, at the sudden and mysterious death of 
 his father. He is stung by instinctive sus- 
 picion of his uncle. He is shamed and 'out- 
 raged by his mother's hasty and incestuous 
 marriage. He sobs audibly. When his 
 " uncle father " addresses him 
 
 " But now my cousin Hamlet, and my son," 
 
 he answers aside, in bitter murmur 
 
 " A little more than kin, and less than kind." 
 
 To his mother's vague generalization about 
 the commonness of death, he answers with 
 restrained respect 
 
 " Ay, madam, it is common." 
 
 But when she urges a question of cold com- 
 plaint, he vindicates the profound sincerity 
 of his grief, in that fine speech beginning 
 
 " Seems, madam ! nay, it is." 
 
 We pause upon this passage, for in the search- 
 ing and thoughtful emphasis he gave to its 
 delivery, Mr. Booth struck the key-note of 
 Hamlet's character, the depth of which
 
 HAMLET. 53 
 
 neither action nor language, however elo- 
 quent or effective, could ever fully reveal. 
 " He had that within which passeth show." 
 
 Hamlet is left alone, and instantly unbur- 
 dens his heart in the soliloquy beginning 
 
 " 0, that this too, too solid flesh would melt." 
 
 Did Shakespeare intend the speech to be 
 uttered aloud, or only mused upon ? The 
 question becomes pertinent, in view of Lamb's 
 objection to the stage representation of the 
 play, where he speaks of Hamlet's "light- 
 and-noise-abhorring ruminations." We think 
 the terse vigor of the language would find a 
 tongue. It did find an eloquent tongue in 
 our actor. The jostle of thoughts, the im- 
 patient leaps of emotion, all crowding for 
 utterance, found meet expression in his rapid 
 and changeful delivery. 
 
 " Frailty, thy name is woman," 
 
 as if no other name were needed. 
 
 " Married with mine uncle (paust,), 
 My father's brother " (in low and slighting tones), 
 
 then without pause 
 
 " But no more like my father 
 Than I to Hercules." 
 
 The following scene is chiefly remarkable
 
 54 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 for the report to Hamlet of the appearance 
 of the ghost. How fit that this disclosure 
 should be made by Horatio, whose gracious, 
 limited, and firm-seated nature becomes, 
 from this moment, coolness to the fever, 
 and counterpoise to the perturbation of his 
 princely friend, even to the closing scene of 
 the play, when Hamlet lies dead in his arms ! 
 The spiritual tone Booth imparted to this 
 scene, weighted as it is by specific questions 
 and answers, as to the time and aspect of 
 the apparition, raised the listener at once into 
 the rare atmosphere of Hamlet's being, and 
 culminated in this remarkable soliloquy : 
 
 " My father's spirit in arms ! All is not well ; 
 I doubt some foul play : would the night were come ! 
 Till then sit still, my soul : foul deeds will rise, 
 Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes." 
 
 Booth uttered the words, " Foul deeds will 
 rise," as with the voice of Fate. Then came 
 the mighty parenthesis, " Though all the 
 earth o'erwhelm them," which he gave with 
 a sweeping gesture, as if taking the solid 
 earth, and lifting it as a wave of the sea is 
 lifted, and letting it fall. He then raised a 
 warning hand, with significant motion, before 
 his face, and with changed voice, couching
 
 HAMLET. 55 
 
 strength of emphasis on a lower range of 
 tones, resumed the suspended meaning 
 " to men's eyes." 
 
 In the platform scene, his adjuration of 
 the Spirit reached a climax of feeling in the 
 word "father," into which he threw the 
 agony of his grief, and the contending hope 
 and fear born of this strange visitation. 
 After a momentary pause, the figure remain- 
 ing silent, Hamlet recommences, and delivers 
 without pause the following : 
 
 " Royal Dane, 0, answer me." 
 
 In all editions of the play, there is a colon 
 after " Royal Dane." Booth overruled this 
 pause, with a more subtle perception of the 
 meaning of the passage than has been shown 
 by any commentator. 
 
 The first effect of the sudden apparition 
 passes rapidly off; and Hamlet soon finds 
 himself in strange and calm accord with the 
 silent but beckoning visitor. To the dissua- 
 sion of his friends he says : 
 
 " Why. what should be the fear? 
 I do not set my life at a pin's fee, 
 And for my soul, what can it do to that, 
 Being a thing immortal as itself ? " 
 
 Booth's manner here is hard to analyze. It
 
 56 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 may suffice to say, that both tone and action 
 scaled the heights of spiritual thought. He 
 seemed to have digested in his soul the very 
 bitterness of death, to have passed beyond, 
 and to speak as one conscious of his immor- 
 tality. In fine contrast came the passionate 
 outbreak 
 
 " My fate cries out 
 
 And makes each petty artery in this body 
 As hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve." 
 
 We know not whether the action origi- 
 nated with Mr. Booth or not : but in the 
 scene following the terrible revelation of the 
 Spirit, when his friends find him, and he 
 swears them to secrecy, Hamlet holds up 
 the hilt of his sword, the cross, and not the 
 blade, for the imposition of their hands. 
 We have seen, both in picture and on the 
 stage, the hands of Horatio and Marcellus 
 laid along the blade. In this scene, the 
 "antic disposition," which has so puzzled 
 critic and actor, begins to play. In Booth's 
 conception, this was partly a reaction from 
 the pressure of supernatural emotion ; and 
 partly assumed as a disguise. Its fitful light 
 seemed native to the genius of our actor. It 
 gave variety and unexpectedness in look, and
 
 HAMLET. 57 
 
 tone, and action, throughout the play. It 
 shone above the melancholy, like phospho- 
 rescence on a midnight sea, with most inten- 
 sifying effect. The scenes with Polonius, 
 where Hamlet plays upon him ; the scenes 
 with his school-fellows, in which he shows he 
 cannot be played upon ; and the scenes with 
 the players, are instances in point. 
 
 Ghost (beneath). Swear. 
 
 Hamlet. There are more things in heaven and earth, 
 
 Horatio, 
 Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." 
 
 A light scorn in the last word : and his hand 
 passed his forehead, with a gesture equally 
 light and evanescent. 
 
 Perhaps the most brilliant example of that 
 unexpectedness which is genius in an actor, 
 as if he indeed were the character assumed ; 
 as if the thoughts were developed from 
 within, and the language occurred to him, 
 might be found in the passage beginning 
 
 " I have of late (but wherefore I know not) lost all my 
 mirth." 
 
 At the words, " This most excellent canopy, 
 the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging " 
 (he omitted the word " firmament," as in the 
 folio), " this majestical roof fretted with golden
 
 58 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 fire," his voice, sombre and husky in the 
 preceding lines, suddenly darted upward like 
 light ; seemed to penetrate the sky ; to run 
 all over the firmament; to search out and 
 give back the remotest echoes of heaven. 
 The speaker was for the moment forgot, 
 
 " Hidden 
 In the light of thought" 
 
 " He that plays the king shall be wel- 
 come," was uttered with eager emphasis, a 
 momentary betrayal by Hamlet of his inner 
 thought ; which however he masks immedi- 
 ately, by a running and cheery commentary 
 on the other players. Hamlet has received, 
 seen through, talked with, and dismissed his 
 school-mates ; puzzled Polonius by subtle 
 reaches of wit ; welcomed the players with a 
 volatile and princely grace ; shown a com- 
 bined freedom and aptitude in all this sur- 
 face-play of mind, this " whiff and wind " 
 of thought, over the deep sea of his sad 
 spirit, most wonderful in Shakespeare, and 
 reproduced by Booth as in a mirror ; until 
 he finds himself alone, when he reveals his 
 latent purpose in that soliloquy in which the 
 lines occur :
 
 HAMLET. 59 
 
 " I'll have these players 
 Play something like the murder of my father 
 Before mine uncle." 
 
 and closing with 
 
 " The play 's the thing 
 Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king." 
 
 Our Shakespearean scholar found fault 
 with an emphasis, after the act was done. 
 " Booth emphasized * catch,' " said he ; " he 
 should have emphasized ' conscience.' " Not 
 so. The actor's spontaneous method gave 
 life to the whole passage. He really empha- 
 sized both words, and all in due relation. 
 The Third Act opened. The play went 
 on. The atmosphere of Hamlet, with whose 
 very being Booth was for the time con- 
 substantiated, enveloped also the listening 
 scholar, and gradually nourished him out of 
 his meagre mood of verbal criticism. And 
 
 O 
 
 to that degree did the influence work, that 
 we heard him uttering unconscious groans 
 for sympathy, as the catastrophe drew near 
 and that foreboding illness, "here about 
 the heart," found expression in tones of 
 mournful, tender trust : 
 
 " If it be now, 'tis not to come. If it be not now, yet it 
 will come: the readiness is all. Let be."
 
 60 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 Hamlet repeatedly revolves the problem of 
 suicide. We have seen that he does not 
 " set his life at a pin's fee ; " but his con- 
 science, the very strength of his moral na- 
 ture, which withholds his hand from attempt- 
 ing his own life, also makes him fear to take 
 that of the king. The beginning of the 
 meditation " To be, or not to be " was ut- 
 tered in a voice like the mystic murmur of a 
 river running under ground, and required an 
 attentive ear : " That undiscovered country " 
 (in a manner unimaginably remote) " from 
 whose bourn no traveller returns " given 
 with accelerated and vibrating intensity, the 
 stroke of emphasis coming suprisingly on the 
 last word. It shocked the elocutionist, but 
 delighted the Shakespearean scholar. 
 
 The soliloquy was marked by a curious 
 reading, thus : 
 
 " For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, 
 
 When he himself might his quietus make." 
 
 Here he made a full stop. Then, as if be- 
 ginning a new sentence, and without pause 
 in the delivery of it, he went on 
 
 " With a bare bodkin who would fardels bear, etc. 
 
 On being called to account for this odd read-
 
 HAMLET. 61 
 
 ing, he affirmed, that " bodkin " was a local 
 term, in some parts of England, for a padded 
 yoke, worn over the shoulders for the sup- 
 port of burdens on either side ; and that a 
 " bare bodkin " was a yoke without the pad, 
 and therefore galling. The meaning as- 
 signed, has, we believe, escaped the notice of 
 all lexicographers. 
 
 On suddenly discovering Ophelia his 
 meditation done with what tremulous ten- 
 derness did he say 
 
 " Nymph, in thy orisons 
 Be all my sins remembered." 
 
 In the acting play, Hamlet is made to catch 
 a glimpse of the king and his minister at 
 espial : the discovery being intended to ac- 
 count for his harshness towards Ophelia. 
 We find no warrant for this in Shakespeare. 
 The intuitive Hamlet knows, it is true, by 
 Ophelia's manner, that she is acting a part 
 under instructions. But we think every one 
 of his speeches to her is justified by his own 
 nature ; by his assumed madness ; or by his 
 endeavor to wipe away both from his own 
 mind and hers, " all trivial fond records," so 
 that the commandment of the Spirit "all 
 alone may live "
 
 62 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 " Within the book and volume of his brain " 
 
 and all without supposing him to be aware of 
 other listeners. 
 
 In spite of the set purpose, his deep love 
 bursts forth in jets of passionate tenderness. 
 It did so in Mr. Booth's rendering. He 
 spoke with wildness rather than severity. 
 He was in constant action ; striding across 
 the stage ; passing out, still speaking, and 
 beginning the next speech before he reen- 
 tered. We seem now to hear his voice ring- 
 ing, out of view, the phrase 
 
 " I have heard of your paintings too, well enough." 
 
 Only when imploring her to go to a nunnery 
 did he pause in action ; then, approaching 
 her tenderly, he threw into those oft-repeated 
 words " to a nunnery, go," the whole force 
 of his fervent affection. 
 
 Mr. Macready played Hamlet in Boston, 
 and Cambridge crowded the boxes yes, 
 and applauded too, as that sensible but unim- 
 aginative actor gave his studied version of 
 Hamlet's idleness. 
 
 Hamlet (to Horatio). " They are coming to the play ; I 
 
 must be idle : 
 (Jet you a place." 
 
 Macready seemed unaccountably to have
 
 HAMLET. 63 
 
 changed natures with Osric the " waterfly ; " 
 for he danced before the foot-lights, flirting a 
 white handkerchief above his head ! This 
 was that " famed performer" to whom Em- 
 erson refers, when he says : " All I then 
 heard, and all I now remember, of the tra- 
 gedian, was that in which the tragedian had 
 no part; simply, Hamlet's question to the 
 ghost 
 
 ' What may this mean, 
 
 That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel 
 Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon? ' " 
 
 Booth's idleness was Hamlet's. He re- 
 tires up the stage, passes from view, and re- 
 appears like a shadow ; is lost in the company 
 that enters to witness the play. We find 
 him next at Ophelia's feet, at once Mercury 
 and Nemesis, the lover's wit playing airily 
 above the avenging purpose. 
 
 (We may here mention that in the year 
 1831, Mr. Booth became the temporary 
 manager of a theatre in Baltimore. Mr. 
 Charles Kean enacted Hamlet. Mr. Booth, 
 on this occasion, assumed the part of Lu- 
 cianus, called in the play-bills, " the second 
 actor," whose whole office it is to say 
 
 " Thoughts black, hands apt, drugs fit, and time agreeing; 
 Confederate season, else no creature seeing;
 
 64 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 Thou mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected, 
 With Hecate's ban thrice blasted, thrice infected 
 Thy natural magic and dire property, 
 On wholesome life usurp immediately." 
 
 In Booth's delivery of these fearful lines, 
 each word dropped poison. The weird 
 music of his voice and the stealthy yet de- 
 cisive action, made this brief scene the mem- 
 orable event of the night.) 
 
 The king does blench " Upon the talk of 
 the poisoning ; " he rises " frighted with false 
 fire." The play within the play abruptly 
 ends. Hamlet is left alone. To him come, 
 first his traitor school-fellows; then the 
 meddling Polonius, envoys of the king and 
 queen. 
 
 In two lines of the short soliloquy which 
 follows, the tragedian indicated, by a master- 
 stroke of intonation and expression, the span 
 and sweep of Hamlet's nature : the restrain- 
 ing force of will, acting as counterpoise to 
 the momentum of his feelings. 
 
 " Soft; now to my mother. 
 heart, lose not thy nature ; let not ever 
 The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom." 
 
 The thought of Nero's crime seemed sud- 
 denly to occur to him, to fill him with hor-
 
 HAMLET. 65 
 
 ror, and to lend to the word " Nero " a stir- 
 prising repulsion of gesture and emphasis. 
 
 These lines were a fit prologue to the 
 great scene of the play, in the Third Act, 
 the interview with his mother. The strong 
 current, the earnest pleading, the impas- 
 sioned conscience, the noble purpose, the 
 intense personal life, made manifest by Mr. 
 Booth in this scene, might serve as a study 
 for those, who, impressed by a single trait in 
 this " abstract and brief chronicle " of civ- 
 ilized man this Hamlet weakly conclude 
 him to be full of weakness, and of a melan- 
 choly .born of weakness. His melancholy 
 was born of his strength. 
 
 " Mother, you have my father much offended." 
 
 " Come, come, and sit you down ; you shall not budge ; 
 You go not, till I set you up a glass 
 Where you shall see the iw-most part of you! " 
 
 He had already said 
 
 " I will speak daggers to her." 
 
 That word " inmost " touched the core of 
 the matter. The sound of it, greatly pro- 
 longed on the first syllable, was like a search- 
 ing probe of steel. After he had killed Po- 
 lonius, mistaking him for the king, he gave 
 separately each word of the line
 
 66 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 " Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell ! " 
 
 and all with ascending emphasis, in tones of 
 mingled grief and anger, and as if dashed 
 with tears. 
 
 What exalted passion is in the continuing 
 portion of this scene ! In the comparison of 
 the portraits, what dramatic action, thought, 
 imagery, language ! We know this tribute 
 belongs to Shakespeare. We make it, look- 
 ing towards him, where he sits, in the glory 
 and beatitude of his own peculiar heaven. 
 All we claim for Mr. Booth, all that can be 
 claimed for any actor, is, that he shall, by 
 the power of imaginative sympathy, pass 
 himself, and draw us after, into the strong 
 current of Shakespeare's thought ; shall re- 
 mould and rekindle to our attentive senses, 
 the individuality of his unmatched char- 
 acters. 
 
 Looking on tfce picture of his father he 
 says 
 
 " Where every god, did seem to set his seal." 
 
 "This was your husband" (kissing the picture and in 
 a voice that sheathed affection for his father, in reprobation for 
 his mother). "Look you now what follows" (with startling 
 change of manner)
 
 HAMLET. 67 
 
 " Here is-s-s your husband, like a mildewed ear 
 Blasting his wholesome brother! " 
 
 The words of this phrase were shaken and 
 eddied over by one continuing flood of tone ; 
 in obedience to a passionate method, most 
 expressive and quite peculiar to our actor. 
 
 At the opportune moment, when the heat 
 of his indignation finds expression thus 
 " A murderer and a villain ; 
 
 A cutpurse of the empire and the rule," 
 
 the ghost appears. There seemed to pass 
 over Booth's features an instant baptism of 
 devotion. All anger vanished. The out- 
 reaching and imploring look in his full blue 
 eyes, arching the inner angles of the brows, 
 gave the face a tender exaltation, as he be- 
 gan that strange colloquy between Hamlet, 
 his guilty mother, and his father's spirit, 
 with the words 
 
 " What would your gracious figure? " 
 During the presence of the ghost, until 
 just before its exit at the opposite door, 
 Booth stood rooted to the spot from which 
 he first saw it ; stood with steady gaze, out- 
 stretched hands, and such pathetic reverence 
 of voice and action, that, though we looked
 
 68 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 and listened then in a mood above weeping, 
 yet the memory of it surprises us, as we 
 write, *' unto the brink of tears." 
 
 Ghost. " Speak to her, Hamlet." 
 
 Ham. (Still looking at the ghost.) " How is it with you, 
 
 lady?" 
 
 Queen. " Whereon do you look ?" 
 
 Ham. " On him, on him" (aa if the question were idle; 
 as if she must see the figure also). 
 
 In the oft-quoted passage 
 
 " Assume a virtue if you have it not," 
 
 Booth paused after " virtue," then uttered 
 the words, " if you have it not," as if a 
 spring of love gushed in his heart, and he 
 caught at a hope, that she might have re- 
 pented already. 
 
 In the grave-yard scene, after he has 
 matched wit with the clown, and given 
 another example of that blended airiness and 
 melancholy which seemed the very form of 
 Shakespeare's thought, the funeral proces- 
 sion of Ophelia enters. 
 
 Hamlet (to Horatio). " That is Laertes, 
 A very noble youth: mark " 
 
 uttered with perfect simplicity and generous 
 high breeding. Perhaps in qualification of an 
 opinion heretofore expressed, the princeliness
 
 BAM LET. 69 
 
 came out more strongly in Mr. Booth's de- 
 lineation of these later scenes. When Laer- 
 tes says 
 
 "A ministering angel shall my sister be," 
 
 Hamlet, according to the text, utters the 
 exclamation 
 
 " What! the fair Ophelia! " 
 
 No syllable of this phrase could be heard. 
 Only a wild, inarticulate cry escaped him ; 
 and he muffled his face in his cloak. He 
 seemed to have gone behind Shakespeare's 
 language, into Shakespeare's thought. 
 
 Following this fine touch of feeling and 
 character, came what seems to us a wholly 
 unauthorized reading : 
 
 " What is he whose grief 
 
 Bears such an emphasis ? whose phrase of sorrow 
 Conjures the wandering stars, and bids them stand 
 Like wonder-wounded hearers ? This is I, 
 Hamlet the Dane." 
 
 So Shakespeare ; but Booth made a full stop 
 after the word " stand ; " then said 
 
 " Look ! wonder-wounded hearers, this is I," etc. 
 
 The scene, however, was grandly carried to 
 completion. The storm of mingled grief and 
 love for the dead Ophelia ; of anger breaking 
 through respect, for Laertes, could never
 
 70 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 have had a more characteristic representa- 
 tion. 
 
 Hamlet consents to play the wager with 
 Laertes, but is possessed by a presentiment 
 of evil. We had heard Mr. Booth give the 
 passage thus : 
 
 " It is but foolery, but it is such a kind of gain-giving as 
 would, perhaps (slight pause, then in lower tone), trouble a 
 woman," 
 
 meaning, " it ought not to trouble me, a 
 man, yet I feel it does." On this occasion he 
 said 
 
 " As would, perhaps, trouble (slight pause) a woman," 
 
 meaning, " but shall not trouble me." How 
 fine the sentiment, how delicate the appre- 
 hension, that could dictate these distinctions. 
 The wavering balance inclines toward the 
 latter reading ; for to Horatio's friendly dis- 
 suasion, Hamlet immediately rejoins "Not 
 a whit ; we defy augury ; there is a special 
 providence in the fall of a sparrow." Rufus 
 Choate said, " I have seen him act Hamlet 
 exquisitely : " and again, in comparing Kean 
 and Booth, he said, " This man (Booth) has 
 finer touches." 
 
 The last scene was full of grace and dra- 
 matic truth, in the fencing match with Laer-
 
 HAMLET. 71 
 
 tes, and in its accumulation of tragical results. 
 Well might Fortinbras, coming in peaceful 
 march from recent victory, exclaim 
 
 " O, proud Death ! 
 
 What feast is toward in thine eternal cell, 
 That thou so many princes, at a shot, 
 So bloodily hast struck? " 
 
 Dullness no doubt in us, in early readings 
 of the play, but we confess our indebtedness 
 to Mr. Booth, for the true meaning of a line 
 in Hamlet's last speech. After he has wrested 
 the poisoned cup from Horatio's hand, he 
 says 
 
 " If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, 
 Absent thee from felicity awhile, 
 A.nd in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, 
 To tell my story." 
 
 Striving against the poison at work in his 
 own frame, he begs Horatio to live, and lifts 
 his hand toward that heaven whither he felt 
 his noble friend would go, saying 
 
 " Absent thee from felicity awhile." 
 
 We have taken more copious notes of 
 Booth's Hamlet than of any other character 
 assumed by him. But in reviewing the mis- 
 cellany, something of Antony's impatience 
 at the prolixity of his messenger from Rome, 
 prompts us to exclaim: " Grates me: the
 
 72 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 sum ! " What is the sum of Hamlet ; what 
 the personal unity of that marvelous and 
 various life ? We venture no opinion. But 
 the total impression left by Mr. Booth's per- 
 sonation, at the time of its occurrence, and 
 which still abides, was that of a spiritual 
 melancholy, at once acute and profound. 
 This quality colored his tenderest feeling 
 and his airiest fancy as well as his graver 
 purpose. You felt its presence even when 
 he was off the stage. As the Claude mirror 
 defines, refines, and tones the landscape, so 
 Booth's impersonation lent a saddened and 
 mysterious charm to the vast world of Ham- 
 let's thought and observation.
 
 SHYLOCK. 
 
 THE Hebrew blood, which, from some re- 
 mote ancestor, mingled in the current of his 
 life ; and was evidently traceable in his 
 features ; and haply determined the family 
 name (Booth from Beth, Hebrew for house, 
 or nest for birds), did also undoubtedly in- 
 fluence Mr. Booth's conception of the char- 
 acter of Shylock. 
 
 He made it the representative Hebrew : 
 the type of a race, old as the world. He 
 drew the character in lines of simple grand- 
 eur, and filled it with fiery energy. In his 
 hands, it was marked by pride of intellect ; 
 by intense pride of race ; by a reserved force, 
 as if there centered in him the might of a 
 people whom neither time, nor scorn, nor 
 political oppression could subdue ; and which 
 has at successive periods, even down to our 
 own day, drawn the attention of mankind 
 towards its frequent examples of intellectual 
 power. His pronunciation of the words
 
 74 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 " This Jacob from our holy Abraham was," 
 
 carried the mind back into the remotest an- 
 tiquity, and begat an involuntary respect for 
 the speaker. 
 
 The intense realism of Edmund Kean 
 made Shylock merely a malignant usurer ; 
 and so represented, to our thinking, rather 
 Gratiano's idea of the Jew, than Shakes- 
 peare's. But Kean, after making the audi- 
 ance hate him, did, by one of his sudden 
 turns of power, and by the pathos of his 
 voice, in the passage beginning 
 
 " Nay, take my life and all," 
 
 produce an entire revulsion of feeling in the 
 listener, so that pity took the place of ex- 
 ecration. 
 
 Booth, on the contrary, whether for better 
 or worse, made usury the Jew's accidental 
 or enforced employment ; and avarice, which 
 is the natural ally of such employment, 
 rather a graft on his nature than a part of 
 the original stock. He disdained all appeal 
 to the compassion of his judges. He gave 
 the passage quoted only as a softened ex- 
 pression of that inexorable logic, which in 
 other scenes, yields a certain dignity to the 
 character, and wins our reluctant regard.
 
 KEYLOCK. 75 
 
 Geo. Frederick Cooke, in the passage be- 
 ginning " Hath not a Jew eyes ? " when he 
 came to the word " affections," so informed 
 it with human feeling, so contrasted it Avith 
 the context, that it remains as the marked 
 point of his performance. But if Kean's 
 abject appeal for the means of living, when 
 Shylock was utterly ruined, be doubtful ; 
 Cooke's turning the Jew out of the current 
 of his reasoning wrath, when he had wealth 
 and power, and was rejoicing in the pros- 
 pect of revenge, in order to complain of 
 his wounded affections, seems at best but a 
 tempting error of conception. Booth, on the 
 contrary, gave no prominence to his affec- 
 tions ; but did, as we believe Shakespeare 
 intended, evenly include them in that in- 
 ventory of the qualities and conditions of 
 man, on which Shylock based his claim to be 
 respected as a man. 
 
 Shylock develops the strongest traits of 
 his character in the very first scene. Ob- 
 serve the cautious self-satisfaction with which 
 he Ijolds and plies the reins of monetary 
 power, in his interview with Bassanio and 
 Antonio. Yet the Hebrew stands back of 
 and above the usurer. He says, musing on 
 Antonio
 
 7t> THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 " If I can catch him once upon the hip, 
 I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him. 
 He hates our sacred nation." 
 
 Again 
 
 " What! are there masques? Hear you me, Jessica: 
 Lock up my doors .... 
 
 Let not the sound of shallow foppery, enter 
 My sober house." 
 
 Perhaps the grandest performance of Shy- 
 lock ever given by Mr. Booth, or any other, 
 was on the third of September, 1850, during 
 his last engagement before going to Califor- 
 nia. He was in perfect physical condition. 
 His voice was still capable of that unfath- 
 omed resonance, which told in the settled 
 revengeful purpose of the part. The gen- 
 eral conception was as we have indicated. 
 
 The Third Act opened. Salanio and 
 Salarino are conversing of Antonio's losses. 
 Shylock enters, having just found out Jes- 
 sica's theft, and heard of her elopement. 
 He should say, " You knew, none so well as 
 you, of my daughter's flight." But no word 
 could we distinguish. His voice see.med 
 molten by passion, before it could be shaped 
 into words, and so leaped from his lips, a 
 volcanic eruption of inarticulate speech.
 
 SHYLOCK. 77 
 
 This as he was coming in. When fairly on 
 the scene, the fire retreats inward. He im- 
 mediately proves himself an overmatch for 
 the lighter wit of the two Venetian gallants. 
 One of them makes a feeble rally, then they 
 stand silent, and receive without further par- 
 ley his tremendous questioning. 
 
 The fiery scorn he threw into the words 
 
 ..." A bankrupt a prodigal . . . that used to 
 come so smug upon the mart. . . . He was wont to call 
 me usurer. Let him look to his bond." 
 
 And he strode down the stage to the farthest 
 corner, the white fire of his anger writhing 
 in his face, animating his tread, and flying 
 out in his wild but determinate gesture. 
 
 Salarino. " Why I am sure if he forfeit, thou wilt not take 
 his flesh : what's that good for ? " 
 
 Shylock (turning suddenly). " To bait fish withal." 
 
 We have heard Mr. Booth, in one of his 
 tamer moods, say this with a gesture as if 
 holding a fishing-rod. But on this occasion, 
 with a gesture inexpressibly violent and 
 rapid, he seemed to be tearing the flesh, and 
 throwing it into the sea. 
 
 The whole of the next speech rode on a 
 mighty tide of passion, gathering, acceler- 
 ating, rushing due on, but broken sometimes
 
 78 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 by fearful pauses of thought, followed by 
 smiting blows of logic, like the hush before 
 the thunder-stroke. How those questions 
 came, winged and edged with scorn, solid as 
 the substance of thought, fiery and irresisti- 
 ble as the motion of passion ! 
 
 Nor can we tell from what depth of vigor 
 arose the grand and various expression of 
 the next scene, directly after, on the en- 
 trance of Tubal. Let the reader review the 
 text. 
 
 " No ill luck stirring but what lights o' my shoulders. 
 . . . . No tears but o' my shedding." 
 
 ' I thank God, I thank God." 
 
 Good news. Ha ! ha ! ha ! " 
 
 ' Thou slickest a dagger in me ! " 
 
 ' I am glad of it. I'll torture him. I am glad of it." 
 
 ' I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys." 
 
 ' I will have the heart of him if he forfeit." 
 
 ' Go, Tubal, and meet me at our Synagogue, at our Syna- 
 gogue, Tubal." 
 
 All given with glowing passion, and fine 
 artistic changes. 
 
 In the fourth act, Booth enters the court- 
 room, calm, his tumult of passion condensed 
 into a settled purpose ; and with a kind of 
 dignity, if unrelenting hate like his can bear 
 that quality. From the audience, he listens 
 to the Duke, then quietly begins :
 
 SRYLOCK. 79 
 
 " 1 have possessed your Grace of what I purpose ; 
 And by our holy Sabbath have I sioorn 
 To have the due and forfeit of my bond: 
 If you deny it, let the danger light 
 Upon your charter, and your city's freedom." 
 
 The last two lines were given with an 
 outreaching and arching motion of the arm 
 and hand, palm downward, like the stoop of 
 a bird of prey. 
 
 We feel the pressure of the intense pas- 
 sionate purpose, below the logic, in his short 
 colloquies with Bassanio and-Gratanio, and in 
 his longer speeches to the court till Portia, 
 as the Doctor, enters, and speaks of mercy 
 and the law. Against her plea for mercy, 
 as against the twice-blessed quality itself, 
 Shylock sets his face like a flint ; but as his 
 religion moved him, at the mention of the 
 name of God, Booth folded his arms upon 
 his breast, and bowed his head in reverence. 
 " My deeds upon my head! " 
 
 exclaims Shylock. As Christ was mercy, 
 there may have been floating in Shakespeare's 
 mind that other fearful imprecation, " His 
 blood be on us and on our children." The 
 dark effluence of the same spirit appears in 
 the language of the Jew. Booth gave the 
 words with solid force, as after, in saying :
 
 80 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 " An oath, an oath, I have an oath in heaven : 
 Shall I lay perjury upon my soul? 
 No, not for Venice," 
 
 he stood a type of the religion of the law. 
 
 The crisis of the play arrives. Shylock 
 finds his "justice " a two-edged sword, and 
 is suffering from the unexpected stroke of it. 
 Foiled of the penalty he craves, he says : 
 
 "I take this offer then: pay the bond thrice, 
 And let the Christian go," 
 
 uttered between set teeth, and with repeated 
 gesture of repulsion : still holding to the last, 
 his pride of faith as the dominant element of 
 his cruel mind.
 
 IAGO. 
 
 AN actor is the only innocent hypocrite. 
 That a man of Mr. Booth's probity and gen- 
 erosity of soul, should have so insphered the 
 character of lago as to make it one of his 
 most admirable and popular representations, 
 is a case in point. lago seems not so much 
 a debauched intelligence as an intelligence 
 which had been the devil's own from the 
 beginning. Yet his diabolism was not of 
 that kind which delights primarily in others' 
 pain. It consisted rather in an unresting 
 intellectual activity, without moral principle 
 or human feeling. 
 
 He is a constitutional liar. He brags of it. 
 In audacious contrast to Him who said, " I 
 am that I am," lago says, " I am not what I 
 am." Danger and crime are necessary to 
 give scope to the action of his fertile brain. 
 He is the embodiment of spiritual wickedness 
 in human character. And we must resort 
 to this paradox, in order to make him human ; 
 that he seeks for motives, which are in them- 
 
 6
 
 82 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 selves criminal, in order to justify the pro- 
 ceeding of his spontaneous malignity. He is 
 the parent of many a villain in more recent 
 literary art. The Mephistopheles of Goethe 
 is of his family, at the least a cousin-german. 
 But Goethe slights his fiend into heaven, and 
 gives him preternatural power to work mis- 
 chief on the earth: while lago's successes 
 (which are only postponed failures) are the 
 mere product of his busy brain, and his 
 plumed-up will. He " works by wit, and 
 not by witchcraft." 
 
 Hazlitt says that Kean made lago " a gay 
 light-hearted monster; a careless, cordial, 
 comfortable villain." Booth gave quite 
 another version. His conception was satur- 
 nine ; but the expression of it was strangely 
 swift and brilliant. He showed the dense 
 force, the stealth, the velvet-footed grace of 
 the panther ; the subtlety, the fascination, 
 the rapid stroke of the fanged serpent. There 
 was less variation in his performances, one 
 from the other, of this part, than he exhibited 
 in the portrayal of any other Shakespearean 
 character. Whatever difference did exist, 
 lay in the greater or less intensity of the rep- 
 resentation.
 
 I A GO. 83 
 
 On the 15th of September, 1847, as we 
 most vividly remember, he was possessed by 
 his most splendid devil. He came on the 
 stage, clear as spirit, and the voice he used 
 was that most sweet and audible, deep-re- 
 volving bass. He " talked far above sing- 
 ing." His delivery of the text was a master- 
 piece of colloquial style. It had all the 
 abrupt turns, the tones of nature, the unex- 
 pectedness, and the occasional persuasive 
 force, which belong to the best conversation. 
 
 In the first scene, having quieted Rod- 
 erigo's complaints, he breaks out with 
 
 " Call up her father; 
 Rouse him (that it, Othello), make after him, poison his 
 
 delight, 
 
 Proclaim him in the streets ; incense her kinsmen, 
 And though he in a fertile climate dwell, 
 Plague him with flies: though that his joy be joy, 
 Yet throw such changes of vexation on 't, 
 As it may lose some color." 
 
 Observe the rapid alternation of subject 
 in these lines, and the chasing up of mis- 
 chievous suggestion they contain. 
 
 Roderigo. Here is her father's house : I'll call aloud. 
 Jago. Do with like timorous accent and dire yell, 
 
 As when (by night and negligence) the fire 
 
 Is spied in populous cities. 
 
 There was no heat in this passage. Booth
 
 84 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 uttered it with a devilish unconcern, as if 
 pleased with the fancy of terror and dismay, 
 and playing meanwhile with his sword-hilt, 
 or pulling at his gauntlets. He then strikes 
 on the door of Brabantio's house, and speak- 
 ing through the key-hole, sounds the reso- 
 nant alarm, " What, ho, Brabantio ! " Yet in 
 saying this, we felt that his mind was " play- 
 ing with some inward bait." The duplicity, 
 the double nature, the devil in him, was 
 subtly manifest. 
 
 After Roderigo has made himself known 
 in the darkness, and while Brabantio, from 
 the window, is uttering his peevish personal- 
 ities, why cannot some actor who represents 
 the " silly gentleman," make him interrupt 
 the old man at intervals, in order to get a 
 hearing, instead of repeating " Sir, sir, sir," 
 all at once, as is invariably done upon the 
 stage? and which indeed is in the text so 
 set down. 
 
 While we are in the mood of complaint, 
 let us note the ludicrous error, usually com- 
 mitted by actors, in lago's next speech : 
 
 " Zounds, sir, you are one of those that will not serve God, 
 if the devil bid you." 
 
 In which they bring down the emphasis
 
 I AGO. 85 
 
 plump on " devil," as if the highest motive 
 for serving God, were the devil's bidding ! 
 Booth said : " that will not serve Grod, if the 
 devil bid you," giving the plain meaning, 
 that the devil's bidding was no argument 
 against serving God. 
 
 In the first scene, lago enters, lying to 
 Roderigo. In the second he enters, lying to 
 Othello about Roderigo. In the third, he is 
 a silent attendant during the trial of Othello's 
 marriage. But no one who saw Mr. Booth 
 in any of these scenes, either speaking or 
 silent, could escape the impression of the 
 presence of a malign and potent intellect. 
 
 The second act opens in Cyprus. Desde- 
 mona is waiting and anxious for the arrival 
 
 O 
 
 of Othello. She says : 
 
 " I am not merry ; but I do beguile 
 The thing I am by seeming otherwise. 
 Come, how would' st thou praise me? " 
 
 In lago's reply, with his invented rhymes, 
 Booth showed that nature in art, which 
 was one felicity of his genius. He was a 
 poet caught in the very act of invention ; 
 with just those pauses, abstractions, flashes, 
 and occasional career of speech, when a line 
 or two came out entire which befit the 
 passage.
 
 86 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 The ambition of many actors is to make 
 the sound an echo to the sense. Booth used 
 his grand voice, not as echo, but as inter- 
 preter. His imagination was so penetrative, 
 that he did not stop at the imagery, but 
 voiced the thought or emotion imaged. In 
 simple passages, however, where the ring, or 
 hum, or buzz, or plunge, or clang, or sus- 
 piration, of the words, is identical with their 
 meaning, as was the case in the early days 
 of human speech, nothing could exceed the 
 sphered beauty of that tongue's utterance. 
 An example occurred in lago, on the night 
 in question. He exclaims : " The Moor ! I 
 know his trumpet." He gave the word, 
 with the very sound of the instrument ; and 
 tossed it from his lips with the careless 
 grace of an accomplished musician. The 
 sound startled from his dull mood one critic 
 in the audience, and kept him an alert lis- 
 tener for the remainder of the play. In the 
 self-betraying soliloquy that concludes this 
 scene, occur the lines 
 
 " Now I do love her too : 
 Not out of absolute lust (though perad venture 
 I stand accountant for as great a sin "). 
 
 The gratuitous fiendishness contained in this
 
 I A GO. 87 
 
 parenthesis, Booth illustrated, by looking up 
 to heaven with defiant forehead and gesture, 
 and with a cold and mocking smile. 
 
 lago has fooled Roderigo to the top of his 
 bent ; made Cassio drunk too drunk, and 
 vulgarly so, most actors make him a quar- 
 rel follows, the town rises, and Othello ap- 
 pears, lago is called on for explanation, 
 and finds himself in just those circumstances 
 which give a stinging relish to the motion 
 of his mind. How he stood, still, but with 
 a quick spirit in every fibre, between the 
 roused Othello and the drunken Cassio, vig- 
 ilant, vital, ready for the unknown emer- 
 gency, and with an invention whose play 
 was " easy as lying ! " 
 
 He reached the acme of hypocrisy in the 
 passage beginning 
 
 " Touch me not so near: 
 
 I had rather have this tongue cut from my mouth 
 Than it should do offense to Michael Cassio ! " 
 
 When left alone with Cassio, lago says : 
 
 " As I am an honest man I thought you had received some 
 bodily wound." 
 
 The simpler meaning is conveyed, by the 
 usual emphasis on " bodily." But this em- 
 phasis would oppose bodily to spiritual
 
 88 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 wounds, and lago has no faith in the latter. 
 Booth, with fine penetration, said, " I thought 
 you had received some bodily wound" em- 
 phasizing both words, as if there were no 
 other wounds to suffer from. And we find 
 him directly after blowing " reputation," the 
 loss of which Cassio so deplores, like a bub- 
 ble, into thin air. 
 
 With what amazing fertility of evil re- 
 source has Shakespeare invested lago : and 
 what subtlety of adaptation did Booth ex- 
 hibit in those soliloquies, wherein he " plumes 
 up his will ; " and in the varied play of fac- 
 ulty he brings to bear on the other charac- 
 ters of the drama ! We dare not attempt 
 to analyze his look, tone, manner, the unde- 
 finable efflux of wickedness, under the guise 
 of friendship, by which, in the Third Act, 
 he obtains the mastery over Othello's mind. 
 One or two points may bear specific mention. 
 Finding the suspicion he has awakened in 
 the Moor, applies alone to Cassio, leaving 
 Desdemona yet clear of it, lago says : 
 
 " Good name in man and woman dear my lord 
 Is the immediate jewel of their souls." 
 
 Isolating the words "and woman" by a 
 pause before and after, and completing the
 
 IAGO. 89 
 
 isolation by uttering them in an altered, 
 clear, low tone, he aims directly at Othello's 
 heart, and plants in it the first surmise of 
 his wife's infidelity. 
 
 His addresses to Othello had a fearful 
 symmetry of falsehood. He lied so like 
 truth, that had we been in Othello's place, 
 we felt he would have deceived us too. 
 His soliloquies, and those looks and slight 
 gestures aside, alone revealed his true char- 
 acter. Between his assumed friendship, and 
 these tokens of self-betrayal, he passed with 
 incredible rapidity of transition ; and did it 
 with a keen relish, an intense gust of iniquity. 
 Yet was the odiousness of lago's nature 
 lightened and carried off by the grace and 
 force of Booth's representation. For, dis- 
 guise it as we may, the love of power is so 
 natural to man, that we take an unmeasured 
 delight in the exhibition of power, whether 
 for good or evil in a play. The eyeballs 
 of a just-imported leopard, that we saw in our 
 youth, dilating and glancing with a green 
 malignant light, shine still with all the old 
 fascination; and glow in memory by some 
 occult association, as we write of Booth's 
 lago. He chastened Shakespeare by deliv- 
 ering, as in one continuous line,
 
 90 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 " It is a common thing to have a foolish wife." 
 
 He gave 
 
 " Dangerous conceits . . 
 Burn like the mines of sulphur," 
 
 with a voice like a writhing inward flame. 
 
 Wherever Shakespeare raised one of his 
 characters above its habitual level, by plum- 
 ing it with the splendor of his own imagi- 
 nation, Booth instinctively took wing with 
 him ; and the manner in which he gave 
 
 " Not poppy nor mandragora 
 Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world 
 Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep 
 Which thou ow'dst yesterday," 
 
 was, as if a boding angel, in tones of pro- 
 foundest music, banished all the agents of 
 repose, and created the doom he pronounced. 
 In the night scene, where Roderigo en- 
 counters Cassio, on the very night when the 
 deeper tragedy of the play is consummated, 
 lago appears with a light and a drawn sword. 
 The light shone on Booth's pale and fiendish 
 face, as, with a sword-stroke into Roderigo's 
 wounded body, he delivers himself of this 
 stroke of devilish wit : 
 
 " Kill men i' the dark!"
 
 1A GO. 91 
 
 It will be remembered that he had instigated 
 Roderigo to the murder of Cassio. 
 
 In the last scene, as lago stands a defeated 
 culprit, his hideous crimes exposed, Othello 
 saying, 
 
 " If that thou be'st a devil I cannot kill thee," 
 runs at and stabs him. Booth replied, 
 staunching the wound, and mastering the 
 anguish of it, and with a look of steady 
 hatred and defiance, 
 
 " I bleed, sir, but not killed." 
 
 As if he would say, " You are right, you 
 cannot kill me. I am & devil."
 
 OTHELLO. 
 
 DURING a certain week in the autumn of 
 1847, there came to us a special revelation of 
 the scope of the histrionic art. On Tuesday, 
 September 14th, Mr. Booth enacted Othello. 
 On Wednesday, 15th, lago that lago we 
 have just briefly noticed and on Thursday, 
 16th, Othello again. The entireness of 
 transition in so short a span ; the complete- 
 ness of identification in characters so essen- 
 tially diverse, filled us with a wonder that 
 still abides. But a great actor is the only 
 human being who is voluntarily and happily 
 beside himself, with power of complete self- 
 recovery, and readiness for a fresh transfor- 
 mation. 
 
 Booth's lago was so well known to us ; his 
 figure rose so surely in our imagination as we 
 read the play, that we heard, not without 
 some misgiving, the announcement of Mr. 
 Booth as Othello, " the first time for many 
 years." We confess to a fear, lest, in his 
 performance, some look, or trait, or tone of
 
 OTHELLO. 93 
 
 the deep-revolving subtle villainy of his more 
 familiar part might appear, to despoil the 
 frank and noble presence of the Moor. But 
 it is scarcely too much to say, that the two 
 characters did not lie more clearly asunder 
 in the mind of Shakespeare, than in Mr. 
 Booth's representation. 
 
 Othello was a Christian graft upon a wild 
 Arabian stock. He was a Mauritanian 
 prince. The Eastern origin of his race ; his 
 birth in Africa ; his military life ; his Venetian 
 culture ; all had part in building up a charac- 
 ter, compact of strength, fervency, simplicity, 
 and honor. Accordingly, Booth's persona- 
 tion was marked, especially in the earlier 
 portion of the play, by an oriental largeness 
 and calm. Even when his frame of nature 
 is wrenched from its fixed place, by lago's 
 preternatural enginery, there is a continual 
 recoil and reinstatement of the Moor's solid 
 virtue ; so that he never loses our respect, at 
 the same time that he moves our sympathies 
 beyond any other male character in Shake- 
 speare. We might sum up Mr. Booth's 
 characterization in one word magnanimity. 
 
 In this mood of mind he enters on the 
 scene, lago following. If the reader could
 
 94 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 imagine Booth's lago played against his own 
 Othello, how would the illusion we hope to 
 create in him be heightened ! lago tries to 
 incense Othello against Roderigo, the Moor's 
 soi-disant rival. Othello answers 
 " 'Tis better as it is." 
 
 Booth gave this with a gravity, a weighty 
 distinctness on the last three words, which 
 conveyed a reproof, and was intended to dis- 
 miss the subject. lago returns to the charge : 
 
 " Nay, but he prated, 
 
 And spoke such scurvy and provoking terms 
 Against your honor ; " 
 
 a home thrust, but finding it without effect, 
 his speech veers upon Brabantio, his place 
 and power for injury. Then comes from 
 Othello the noble reply, beginning 
 
 " Let him do his spite. 
 
 I fetch my life and being 
 From men of royal siege; and my demerits 
 May speak unbonneted to as proud a fortune 
 As this that I have reached," 
 
 given with peculiar intonation, and rising em- 
 phasis, imparting a fine accent to the meaning, 
 that it did not add to the dignity of a Moorish 
 prince to become the son-in-law of a Vene- 
 tian senator.
 
 OTHELLO. 95 
 
 " For know, lago, 
 But that I love the gentle Desdemona," 
 
 with wealth of tenderness, and sad, as all 
 high feeling is, and in tones that seemed the 
 vibration of his " dear heart-strings." In 
 that speech Mr. Booth struck the key note 
 of the character. 
 
 How picturesque and effective are the 
 night scenes of this great play ! The whole 
 of the First Act, with its large variety of 
 place and persons, and the whole of the 
 Fifth, with much of the Second and Fourth 
 Acts, pass in the night. Night is the season 
 for peace and love; It is the house of grief. 
 It is the cloak of crime. 
 
 Brabantio (entering with followers, 
 torches, and weapons) exclaims 
 
 " Down with him, thief ! " 
 
 (They draw on both sides.) lago strikes in 
 with 
 
 " You, Roderigo, come sir, I am for you." , 
 
 Perhaps he intended to pick off that gentle- 
 man, whose purse he had already drained, 
 even as he does later in the play. Perhaps 
 in encountering him he only meant to pre- 
 serve him, in order to pluck him cleaner.
 
 96 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 We speculate on the motives and conduct of 
 Shakespeare's characters, as if they were 
 living persons. And with reason ; for they 
 are not only living, but immortal. lago 
 plainly expects a fight. He has no sympathy 
 with that romance of honor, which governs 
 Othello's conduct. He can have no knowl- 
 edge of it. But so disengaged from all pur- 
 pose or permission of quarrel is the Moor, 
 that he playfully and nobly says 
 
 " Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them." 
 
 Then turning to Desdemona's father, who 
 has just called him " thie.f," he adds, in a 
 manner of mingled reproof and deference 
 
 " Good signior, you shall more command with years 
 Than with your weapon." 
 
 But into the utterance of the last line, there 
 crept a keen, low-toned, cool disdain. The 
 old father insists on Othello's arrest, and 
 heaps gross accusations on him. Then came 
 from Booth 
 
 " The flash and outbreak of a fiery mind," 
 
 in the words 
 
 " Hold your hands ! 
 Both you of my inclining and the rest; 
 Were it my cue to fight, I should have known it 
 Without a prompter "
 
 OTHELLO. 97 
 
 the concluding words quietly addressed to 
 the disappointed lago. 
 
 Charles Lamb said that he was quite un- 
 able to measure the value of Hamlet's so- 
 liloquy, " To be or not to be," because he 
 had heard it so often recited. Othello's ad- 
 dress to the Senate is almost equally hack- 
 neyed. But Mr. Booth so cleansed it from 
 the scurf of custom ; gave it with such dig- 
 nity, directness, delicacy, fervor, that we 
 seemed to hear it then for the first time. 
 To genius all doors fly open. He took us 
 into old Brabantio's house, and made us see 
 the very progress of his courtship ; and the 
 gentle lady, the house affairs dispatched, sit- 
 ting a charmed listener to his recital. 
 
 " Her father loved me (gesture of dissent from the father) ; 
 Oft invited me : 
 
 Still questioned me the story of my life, 
 From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes, 
 That I have passed. 
 
 I ran it through, even from my boyish days, 
 To the very moment that he bade me tell it." 
 
 These circumstances were proof of love, in 
 the estimate of the frank-minded Moor. In 
 the dramatic truth of Booth's delivery we 
 felt the presence of the "insolent foe," by 
 whom he was " sold to slavery," and the joy 
 7
 
 98 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 of his " redemption thence." Desdemona 
 listens with " greedy ear " 
 
 " Which I observing, 
 Took once a pliant hour, and found good means " 
 
 glancing at the father 
 
 "To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart, 
 That I would all my pilgrimage dilate, 
 Whereof by parcels she had something heard, 
 But not intentively." 
 
 In these words and in the following lines, 
 where he quotes Desdemona, we seem to 
 hear her speaking through him, with all her 
 innocent finesse, and full-hearted tenderness. 
 " 'Twas pitiful," as if concluding : then with 
 fresh access of feeling, and with rising in- 
 flection, "'Twas wondrous pitiful." The 
 address was made to the Senate, and not to 
 the audience. We can only add, in the lan- 
 guage of the Duke 
 
 " I think this tale would win my daughter too." 
 
 The reader has undoubtedly remarked, 
 that in making the comparison of excellence 
 in actors, we excluded all literatures beside 
 the English, and all nations who did not 
 speak the English tongue. And simply be- 
 cause of the unquestioned supremacy of 
 Shakespeare. The French and Italian trans- 
 lations, and the actors who perform in them,
 
 OTHELLO. 99 
 
 may be passed by without comment. The 
 Germans, by affinity of language and race, 
 may put in a better claim. The name of 
 Devrient, has a vague high fame, in the Ger- 
 man Shakespeare, as well as in the drama of 
 his native land. Travelled scholars have 
 also, for many years, brought back report of 
 the unmatched excellence of Mr. Bogumil 
 Dawison, as a representative of Shakespear- 
 ean character ; and the cultivated audiences 
 of New York and Boston have recently en- 
 joyed the rare pleasure of seeing him play 
 Othello in German, to Mr. Edwin Booth's 
 lago in English. 
 
 We watched his performance with eager 
 interest. It was full of beauties, and strik- 
 ingly original and natural, in action and by- 
 play. He dismissed Cassio as if he loved 
 him. He lay on a couch in his own chamber, 
 as if no one were looking at him. He hung 
 over his dead wife, in the last scene, uttering 
 cries whose simple pathos touched the heart. 
 His voice is sweet and flute-like, but of little 
 compass, or variety of tone. His facial ex- 
 pression was intense and vivid, though with 
 sameness ; and his gestures were indetermi- 
 nate and heaving. Yet he made one exit, in
 
 100 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 the great Third Act, in which, by abrupt 
 pauses, and repeated looking back, and by 
 glances, and play of feature, he expressed 
 the contending emotions of Othello's mind, 
 in a manner that Roscius might have envied, 
 and which aimed well at the height of Shake- 
 speare. He introduced the long first scene of 
 the Fourth Act, always omitted on the Eng- 
 lish and American stage ; but which is so 
 necessary to that continuity and accumulation 
 of evidence, which overbears Othello's mind, 
 and hurries on the catastrophe and for this 
 we thank him heartily. He carried natural- 
 ness to an excess. His affection for Desde- 
 mona was very manifest perhaps a little 
 fulsome. It lacked dignity, and that reti- 
 cence which belongs to calm, firm natures, 
 whose flame of love is contained, intense, 
 and steady. He translated the character, 
 as well as the language, into German. 
 
 These remarks will apply to his expression, 
 in that scene we have reached, in our pres- 
 ent consideration of the play the scene of 
 Othello and Desdemona meeting at Cyprus. 
 The words " content," " calm," " comfort," 
 and " content " again, appear in the Moor's 
 first speeches. He calls her his
 
 OTHELLO. 101 
 
 joy." So chaste, so deep-hearted is his love, 
 that he feels a willingness to die, an ex- 
 perience only possible to the most serene 
 and imaginative mood. We return to Mr. 
 Booth. 
 
 " If it were now to die 
 'Twere now to be most happy ; for I fear 
 My soul hath her content so absolute, 
 That not another comfort like to this, 
 Succeeds in unknown fate." 
 
 The calm intensity, the purified and exalted 
 passion, the sad, prophetic, far-off music he 
 infused into this passage, can never be for- 
 gotten. We shall recall it, once, in the 
 course of this analysis. 
 
 On that scene of confusion so skillfully 
 engineered by lago, with Cassio drunk, 
 Montano wounded, and the town alarmed, 
 Othello appears, roused with indignation. 
 The tropic blood, till now sleeping in his 
 veins, begins to stir. He dismissed Cassio, 
 not as if he loved him ; or rather as if, loving 
 him, he loved discipline and honor more. 
 
 We have had the initial touches of this 
 man's vast capacity for imaginative emotion. 
 We are prepared for the grand Third Act, 
 exhibiting the second distinct phase of Othel- 
 lo's nature, yet without losing his noble in-
 
 102 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 dividuality. We have hitherto seen him as 
 the Christian soldier. He now appears as 
 the barbaric prince. Africa supplants Ven- 
 ice. The mighty passions, nourished by the 
 sun, where he was born, and which lay slum- 
 bering within, imparting, so long as they 
 were kept subdued, a lion-like strength to 
 his character, are here set loose, and lashed 
 into a fearful storm, by the devil-agency of 
 lago. 
 
 In order to save a repetition of names, 
 we shall speak, for the time, of Othello and 
 Booth as one person. They were one, to 
 our apprehension. We note the noble con- 
 fidence of Othello towards Cassio, whom he 
 sees parting from his wife. " I do believe 
 'twas he." So opposite was Othello by na- 
 ture, to the selfish and self-generated passion 
 of jealousy, that it required the repeated 
 subtle probe of lago's wit before even Cassio 
 could be brought under suspicion. 
 
 Othello. " yes, and went between us very oft," 
 
 given with a hearty and happy remembrance 
 of Cassio's friendship. And not till lago 
 has, by covert and halting insinuations, 
 brought Othello, who lived by truth, to the 
 agonized question, " What dost thou mean ? "
 
 OTHELLO. 103 
 
 does he dare to implicate Desdemona. He 
 does it then only by suggestion, and in the 
 general words "and woman," pushing that 
 card like an ingenious juggler. Othello takes 
 it, and finds it inscribed with characters of 
 dismay. The fiend follows up his advantage, 
 and wrings from the heart of his victim, in 
 the words " O, misery ! " tones that for ex- 
 pression of inward desolation we have never 
 heard equaled. 
 
 Yet in the next long speech, we find his 
 shaken manhood partially recovering its 
 poise : 
 
 " Thinkest thou I'd make a life of jealousy? " 
 
 The blended modesty and self-respect of man- 
 ner, in the phrase 
 
 " Nor from mine own weak merits will I draw 
 The smallest fear or doubt of her revolt: 
 For she had eyes and chose me." 
 
 The word " revolt " was one of those strokes 
 of genius in tone, of which he furnished such 
 numberless examples. It came with access 
 of emphasis, as if he felt, for an instant, how 
 dreadful a thing her revolt might be, then 
 dismisses the thought at once. It was that 
 subtle touch of lago's, in the phrase 
 " She did deceive her father marrying you,"
 
 104 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 put forth as a "basis for those " proofs " 
 Othello calls for, which took the ground 
 from under him. 
 
 logo. " I see, this hath a little dashed your spirits." 
 Othello. " Not a jot. Not a jot," 
 
 in a tone, playing on the surface of a mind, 
 filled with suppressed agony. And again, 
 soon after : 
 
 " No, not much moved," 
 
 till his o'erfraught heart burst into the words : 
 " I do not think but Desdemona's honest ! " 
 
 *' Fear not my government," meaning, of 
 course, my self-control, and given with a ges- 
 ture strangely original and fine the fore- 
 finger of the lifted hand pointed vertically to 
 the top of the head. 
 
 " If I do prove her haggard, etc.," 
 
 in a voice that matched the any sweep of the 
 imagery ; the words, " to prey at fortune," 
 accompanied by a darting and dispersed ges- 
 ture. 
 
 " Desdemona comes : 
 
 If she be false, 0, then heaven mocks itself! 
 I'll not believe it." 
 
 The sight of his wife dispels suspicion, as 
 daybreak a hideous dream. But the weari- 
 ness remains.
 
 OTHELLO. 105 
 
 " Your napkin is too little." 
 
 The handkerchief drops. He goes with 
 Desdemona to the dinner, to which he has 
 invited the " generous islanders." The scene 
 is occupied by Emilia in finding the fatal nap- 
 kin, and lago, in snatching it, and plotting 
 mischief with it. 
 Othello has said 
 
 " 'Tis not to make me jealous, 
 To say my wife is fair, feeds well, loves company, 
 Is free of speech ; sings, plays, and dances well ; 
 Where virtue is these are more virtuous." 
 
 But already, to Othello's mind, lago has 
 begun to turn that virtue into pitch. And 
 we may imagine the guileless hospitality of 
 the gentle lady to her guests, maddening 
 her husband, so that he abruptly leaves them, 
 and reenters on the scene to lago, with the 
 exclamation 
 
 " Ha, ha! false to me? to me? " 
 
 He seeks a wretched refuge in the surmise 
 of ignorance : 
 
 " I had been happy, if the general camp, 
 Pioneers and all " 
 
 the voice of desperation as he heaps up the 
 hyperbole ! 
 
 " Had tasted her sweet body, 
 So I had nothing known."
 
 106 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 But the self-wounding, scorpion mood is of 
 brief duration. With entire change of man- 
 ner, in a style large, oriental, he came down 
 the stage ; and looking towards the listeners, 
 but never at them, he poured the full volume 
 of his voice, not loud but deep, into the " fare- 
 well." The melancholy grandeur of the lines, 
 however uttered, finds its way into every 
 soul. In the mere word " farewell," his 
 great heart seemed to burst as in one vast 
 continuing sigh. The phrase, " the tranquil 
 mind," immediately succeeding, came in 
 clear brain-tones, with a certain involved 
 suggestiveness of meaning almost impossible 
 to define, but as if the tranquil mind had 
 flown. The whole passage, with its succes- 
 sive images of glorious war, filing and dis- 
 appearing before his mind's eye, employed 
 some of the grandest elements of voice, sub- 
 dued to retrospective and mournful cadences. 
 
 " Othello's occupation's gone." 
 
 And he stood with a look in his large blue 
 eyes the bronzed face lending them a 
 strange sadness as if all happiness had 
 gone after. Kean's manner, in this scene, 
 was very diiferent. At the close of the 
 "farewell," he raised both hands, clasped
 
 OTHELLO. 107 
 
 them, and so brought them down upon his 
 head, with a most effective gesture of des- 
 pair. But the action seems to us like trans- 
 formino- Othello into Edmund Kean. 
 
 O 
 
 It is the setting of the "farewell," the 
 grand pause in the passion of the play like 
 the ominous pause of the maelstrom, at the 
 turning of the tide which gives it such 
 sway over the mind. The passion returns 
 with redoubled power, to the evident sur- 
 prise, and almost to the discomfiture of lago, 
 whom Othello seizes by the throat, demand- 
 ing ocular proof of his wife's infidelity. The 
 villain can make only short protests. Words 
 can but faintly indicate the terrific and cum- 
 ulative energy of the passage, beginning 
 
 " If thou dost slander her, and torture me, 
 Never pray more; " 
 
 marked as it was equally by intellectual 
 clearness, heat of passion, and imaginatire 
 realization. The fit passes, and leaves him 
 in a whirl of doubt ; but of doubt pressing 
 towards resolution, demanding proof, and 
 lago is ready with his master stroke, the 
 
 " Strong circumstance 
 Which leads directly to the door of truth " 
 
 the handkerchief.
 
 108 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 " Such a handkerchief 
 (I am sure it was your wife's) did I to-day 
 See Cassio wipe his beard with." 
 
 When Mr. Booth played lago, he did, in 
 saying this, while pretending to lay his hand 
 on his heart, to enforce asseveration, tuck 
 away more securely in his doubtlet, the very 
 handkerchief, which, with fiendish purpose, 
 he intended Cassio should wipe his beard 
 with. 
 
 Now appears the third distinct phase of 
 Othello's nature, the oriental. The history 
 of that handkerchief arises in the mind of 
 the Moor, and with it the dim and dominat- 
 ing superstitions of the East, the birthplace 
 of his race. He exclaims 
 
 " Now do I see 'tis true ! " 
 
 The passion of the Third Act is so intense 
 and varying, the drain on the physical power 
 of the actor, especially his voice, is so enor- 
 mous that eight lines, beginning 
 
 " Like to the Pontic sea," 
 
 have been cut out of the representation. 
 Edmund Kean never gave them. Mr. Booth 
 omitted them on his first performance ; but 
 at the urgent solicitation of personal friends,
 
 OTHELLO. 109 
 
 restored them on the second. Their utter- 
 ance overpaid expectation. They came with 
 headlong speed and vast momentum. The 
 images and names of those eastern seas, he 
 endowed with a peculiar freshness and sur- 
 prise. " Hellespont " sounded like a torrent 
 dashed on rocks. 
 
 " Till that a capable and wide revenge 
 Swallow them up," 
 
 gave the sound, and figured the very action 
 of engulfing waves. 
 
 The waters of the river Rhone, as they 
 leave the lake of Geneva, are singularly pure. 
 The turbid Arve empties into the Rhone ; 
 and, side by side, without mingling, flow the 
 two distinct currents in the same channel. 
 Even so was it with Othello's mind. The 
 current of his pure and inextinguishable love, 
 runs side by side, without mingling, with the 
 flow of foul and bloody thoughts poured into 
 his heart by lago. He blows his love to 
 heaven in one pathetic breath. He invokes 
 his love to yield up its crown and hearted 
 throne to tyrannous hate. His bosom swells 
 with its fraught of " aspic's tongues." He 
 passes from the scene, in order to provide 
 
 " Some swift means of death, 
 For the fair devil."
 
 110 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 But when he comes, in the very next 
 scene, into the angel presence of his wife, all 
 is changed. He takes Desdemona's hand 
 with a grave tenderness. His paternal, mon- 
 itory tones, ring clear and sad in our memory. 
 
 " This hand is moist, my lady." 
 
 Desdemona, " It yet has felt no age, nor known no sorrow." 
 Othello. " This argues fruitfulness, and liberal heart: 
 
 Hot, hot, and moist. This hand of yours requires 
 
 A sequester from liberty, fasting and prayer." 
 
 This line and the following, remind one of 
 the Hebrew poetry, which consisted of a 
 varied repetition of the thought, in mated 
 lines, but without rhyme. He goes on 
 
 " Much castigation, exercise devout; " 
 
 and he held up the innocent hand between 
 his two, in momentary but fervent attitude 
 of prayer. Then, still holding her hand in 
 one of his, and pointing with the other, and 
 looking keenly but without unkindness into 
 her palm, he adds, with heightening and ring- 
 ing accent : 
 
 " For here 's a young and sweating devil here, 
 That commonly rebels." 
 
 These three words in changed tone, and with 
 the voice sustained at the close, and given in 
 such a manner that the attentive listener 
 supplemented the meaning " and I fear
 
 OTHELLO. Ill 
 
 must do so in your case." So, at the first 
 performance. On the second, a fine varia- 
 tion 
 
 " For here 'a a young and sweating devil here," 
 
 with the same searching intensity ; then a 
 kindly doubt seems to rise in his mind, and 
 he gives her the benefit of it in saying 
 
 " That commonly (slight pause) rebels." 
 
 The history of the handkerchief, contain- 
 ing the only touch of the supernatural in this 
 domestic tragedy, was told with a fine orien- 
 tal fanaticism. 
 
 * 
 
 " She was a charmer, and could almost read 
 The thoughts of people." 
 
 Eye, gesture, voice, conspired to give the 
 very impress of divination. 
 
 " And bid me, when my fate would have me wive." 
 
 His look reached upward, as a Chaldean's 
 might, towards those stars which influence 
 human destiny. 
 
 " Make it a darling, like your precious eye." 
 
 The priceless, unreplaceable preciousness of 
 the handkerchief, was condensed in the word 
 "darling," with a keen, fond, defended in- 
 tonation.
 
 112 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 Detdemona. " Is it possible ? " 
 
 Othello (irutantly). " 'Tig true. There 's magic in the 
 
 web of it. 
 
 A sibyl, that had numbered in the world 
 The sun to make two hundred compasses, 
 In her prophetic fury sewed the work." 
 
 The whole passage came with a frenzy of 
 spontaneous narration ; and with gesture full 
 of subtle intimations, not mimicries, for 
 example, turning, swift as a swallow in flight, 
 from the inspiration of the sibyl, to the sew- 
 ing of the work. 
 
 " Fetch it; let me see it," 
 
 as with a desperate certainty that it could 
 not be found or brought. 
 
 It argued a certain badness of nature in 
 Emilia, for which only her wakened con- 
 science and her willing death at the end of 
 the play might fully atone, that she could 
 bear to stand by and hear this relation, wit- 
 ness her mistress's astonished grief, and 
 Othello's angry exit, and yet withhold the 
 little word that would have set all right. 
 
 The omission of the first scene of the 
 Fourth Act, was a serious fault. It should 
 always be presented. In it the simulated 
 proofs thicken. The wild alternation of love 
 with jealous madness in Othello that pa-
 
 OTHELLO. 113 
 
 renthesis of contemplation, where he refers 
 his " shadowing passion " to " instructed na- 
 ture," and not to lago's report ; and so 
 makes the very emotion he suffers under 
 an occult proof of his wife's guilt the 
 bloody thoughts which clot into single, ter- 
 rible words his trance are all of the 
 closest texture of dramatic situation and ex- 
 pression, and can employ the very highest 
 genius of any actor. Moreover, that scene 
 prepares the auditor for the following, and 
 accounts for Othello's direct and cruel ac- 
 cusations. The turbid current has mingled 
 with the pure. 
 
 We come now to the last scene the 
 bed-chamber. It was full of fate. Mr. 
 Booth entered with an eastern lamp lighted 
 in one hand, and a drawn scimitar in the 
 other. The oriental subjective mood had 
 obtained full possession of him. The sup- 
 posed " proofs " had sunk into his mind, and 
 resolved themselves into a fearful unity of 
 thought and purpose. This is fully shown 
 in a later speech : 
 
 " For to deny each article with oath, 
 
 Cannot remove or choke the strong conception 
 That I do groan withal. Thou art to die."
 
 114 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 And again : " Being done (i. e., resolved on) 
 there is no pause " (in deed). 
 
 The expression of contained energy in his 
 movement, the large, low-toned, vibrant ru- 
 mination of his voice, sounding like thought 
 overheard, filled the scene with an atmos- 
 phere at once oppressive and fascinating. 
 
 " I know not where is that Promethean heat," 
 
 as if the adjective had just occurred to him ; 
 and accompanied by a wandering and ques- 
 tioning gesture. 
 
 We feel a certain shame in picking out 
 items for comment from scenes of profound 
 or exalted passion, like this one we have in 
 view ; and especially as the excellence of 
 Mr. Booth's acting could not be measured 
 by the number of good points he made, but 
 by the entireness of identification. Yet we 
 find no help for it. Observe the eastern 
 imagery employed throughout this scene. 
 The " chaste stars ; " the " error of the 
 moon ; " " the Arabian trees ; " " the base 
 Indian ; " the " huge eclipse of sun and 
 moon ; " and that big imagination of the 
 world as 
 
 " One entire and perfect chrysolite."
 
 OTHELLO. 115 
 
 The deed is done. Emilia enters : 
 
 " good my lord, yonder 's foul murder done." 
 Othello. "What, now?" 
 Emilia. " But now, my lord." 
 Othello. " It is the very error of the moon ; 
 
 She comes more new the earth than she was wont, 
 
 And makes men mad." 
 
 His gesture seemed to figure the faith of the 
 Chaldean, and to bring the moon more near. 
 "Roderigo killed! " (with wonder). " And 
 Cassio killed ! " (glutting the words in his 
 throat). * 
 
 " 0, 1 were damned beneath all depth in hell, 
 But that I did proceed, upon just grounds, 
 To this extremity." 
 
 He uttered that first tremendous line with 
 burning intensity. Milton has borrowed the 
 thought, and put it into the mouth of Satan : 
 
 " And in the lowest depth, a lower deep," etc. 
 After the truth is out, and under the spell 
 of his grand presence, and in the tragic con- 
 tinuity of the scene, his speech over his dead 
 wife seemed the ultimate reach of blended 
 grief and love and wild remorseful passion 
 of which the human voice is capable. 
 
 " Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire! " 
 
 Othello has wounded lago, but not killed 
 him. He says :
 
 116 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 " I am not sorry neither: I'd have thee live ; 
 For in my sense, 'tis happiness to die." 
 
 We now recall that passage in the Second 
 Act 
 
 " If it were now to die 
 'Twere now to be most happy." 
 
 Then, the expression came from the absolute 
 fullness of his joy ; now, the same word tells 
 of the last bitterness of his grief and self-con- 
 demnation : 
 
 " The wheel has come full circle." 
 
 From this moment his own death is assured. 
 At the summons, " Bring him away," and 
 as he is beginning his final speech 
 
 " Soft you; a word or two before you go," 
 
 he takes a silken robe, and carelessly throws 
 it over his shoulder ; then reaches for his tur- 
 ban, possessing himself of a dagger he had 
 concealed therein. 
 
 " Then must you speak 
 Of one that loved, not wisely, but too well, 
 
 Of one whose hand, 
 
 Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away 
 Richer than all his tribe." 
 
 He uttered the word " pearl " as if it were 
 indeed " the immediate jewel of his soul," 
 his wife, with a lingering fullness and tender- 
 ness of emphasis, and with a gesture as if, in
 
 OTEELLO. 117 
 
 the act of throwing it away, he cast his own 
 life from him. 
 
 If .the excellence of a performance may be 
 judged by its effect on the audience, this one 
 had transcendant merit. Let the hushed 
 attention of a company unusually numerous 
 and refined let the silent tears of strong; 
 
 O 
 
 men, carried by the imaginative stress of the 
 scene beyond the reaches of their critical 
 culture bear witness. For ourself, we 
 went no more to the play during that engage- 
 ment ; but walked about as in a voluntary 
 dream, not caring to dispel by attendance on 
 even his other performances, the pathetic 
 illusion he had created.
 
 MACBETH. 
 
 AMONG those undefined influences which 
 stream from the greater dramas of Shake- 
 speare may be numbered the climate of the 
 play; and this, while dften eluding the ob- 
 servation, tells surely upon the feeling of the 
 reader. From tropical heat, we pass to the 
 chill mists of Scotland. From the alternate 
 languor and fierceness of passion from im- 
 agination which rides upon the current of the 
 blood, and revels in gorgeous color and in 
 rich and sensuous forms, we pass to that 
 higher imagination, which allies itself to the 
 intellectual and spiritual nature ; in a word, 
 from the atmosphere of Othello to the at- 
 mosphere of Macbeth. 
 
 The ductile flame of Mr. Booth's histrionic 
 genius passed into this northern form with 
 even greater readiness and radiance than into 
 Othello. The supernatural element in Mac- 
 beth is more pervading and various in its 
 working than in Hamlet. The character is 
 more closely knit ; the action more peremp-
 
 MACBETH. 119 
 
 tory and progressive. In his ambition, and 
 in the ways of satisfying it, there are points 
 of likeness to Richard. But Richard moved 
 toward his design " without remorse or 
 dread," while Macbeth is a victim to both 
 these conditions ; not from a lack of courage, 
 but by virtue of a morbid excess of imagina- 
 tion, which projects his thoughts into objects. 
 So dominant is this quality, that the weird 
 sisters themselves seem like the outward 
 shapes of his guilty purposes. They appear 
 first upon the scene, then vanish, then reap- 
 pear, as if they were the influences of his 
 mind as well as the heralds of his approach. 
 Mr. Booth filled this part. We had seen 
 gracious performances, and heard musical 
 readings of the text by other actors. They 
 reported the character. Booth was possessed 
 by it. A captain in the service of his king, 
 and returning from successful fight, in com- 
 pany with Banquo, he is met upon a blasted 
 heath by the three witches. The preternat- 
 ural grandeur, and significant brevity, of 
 their greeting, are usually lost upon the stage. 
 And this, we contend, is owing quite as much 
 to the incapacity of imagination on the part 
 of the performer of Macbeth, as to the fan-
 
 120 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 tastical, half-comic aspect of the three old 
 women. While they were speaking, Mr. 
 Booth betrayed his strong inward agitation 5 
 and when they vanished (that is, clattered 
 off the stage), he looked at them, then into 
 the air, with a quick and wonder-struck tran- 
 sition, which volatilized their substance, and 
 abolished their defect. 
 
 We must illustrate this scene by a com- 
 parison. 
 
 Banquo, " The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, 
 And these are of them. Whither are they vanished? " 
 
 Macbeth. " Into the air ; and what seemed corporal melted 
 AB breath into the wind." 
 
 Mr. Vandenhoff, the elder, a gentleman 
 whose readings from Shakespeare and other 
 poets delighted large audiences in this coun- 
 try some twenty years since, had a voice sin- 
 gularly sweet and sonorous. We saw him 
 act Macbeth, or rather heard him read the 
 part ; for his action was always secondary. 
 His delivery of the passage quoted, was a 
 marvel of descriptive intonation. He gave 
 body and form to the impalpable air. You 
 could almost see his breath in it. But he did 
 not give the vanishing. Booth did. With 
 a sudden upward look, and with a sudden
 
 MACBETH. 121 
 
 springing tone, not musical, but like the whiz 
 of a shaft from a cross-bow, he gave " into 
 the air." Could he dally with the image ? 
 No. Voice, look, action, conveyed the instant 
 thought, the vanishing. And the conclusion 
 of the sentence came in the same style : 
 
 " And what seemed corporal " (looking at his own body), 
 " Melted as bi-eath into the wind" (short i), 
 
 with a succession of emphasis, swift, and filled 
 with wonder. To assign the method of vari- 
 ous actors, we might say : Vandenhoff played 
 the imagery ; Macready, the analysis ; Kean, 
 the passion of the scene ; Booth, the charac- 
 ter, which not only includes the other methods, 
 but supplies an element wanting in them. 
 The speech beginning 
 
 " Two truths are told," 
 
 drew upon that well-spring of imaginative ex- 
 pression, which lay deep in Booth's nature, 
 and which Macbeth gave scope for, in a more 
 condensed and terrific way, than any other 
 character. The effect of the " supernatural 
 soliciting " was to kindle this quality into its 
 highest life. No voice that we have ever 
 heard or read of, could convey like his, the 
 unbodied beauty or terror of supernatural
 
 122 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 emotions. The music of the " imperial 
 theme " was in his ears. He saw the throne 
 in vision, but between him and it were dark- 
 ness, fearful guilt, and " horrible imaginings." 
 
 "My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical (with 
 tone and gesture that figured a hovering and vanishing 
 shape), 
 
 Shakes so my single state of man (with vibrant intensity), 
 that function 
 
 Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is 
 
 But what is not." 
 
 This phrase was uttered in one continuous 
 tone of involved resonance, and in such a 
 manner as to make the listener feel that the 
 thronging shapes of Macbeth's roused and 
 guilty imagination had displaced the world of 
 objective realities. 
 
 In that terrific invocation by Lady Macbeth 
 to the 
 
 " Spirits 
 That tend on mortal thoughts," 
 
 she says, 
 
 " Stop up the access and passage to remorse ; 
 That no compunctious visitings of nature 
 Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace ( ? ) between 
 The effect and it." 
 
 All the editions, including Hudson's, which 
 for the profound value of its commentary, is, 
 in our judgment, by far the best preserve 
 this reading. But it would seem that Shake-
 
 MACBETH. 123 
 
 speare wrote " pace," not " peace." He 
 personifies " nature," whose " visitings " are 
 imagined to " keep pace" like a sentinel on 
 guard, between the " effect," the murder, 
 and " it," the fell purpose ; sundering them, 
 the very thing Lady Macbeth deprecated. 
 
 She welcomes her returning husband 
 with 
 
 " Great Glamis, worthy Cawdor ! 
 Greater than both by the all-hail hereafter! " 
 
 But his mind is bewildered, and his will 
 weakened, by images of terror his ambition 
 has conjured up. His uncertain and post- 
 poning mood, found fit interpretation in the 
 manner of Mr. Booth's delivery of the few 
 words that conclude this scene ; and in the 
 soliloquy, beginning 
 
 " If 'twere done when 'tis done," 
 
 that mood found full utterance. Note the 
 crowd and jostle of inconsequent thoughts, in 
 words that defy punctuation. His mind flies 
 at a tangent, from the need of despatch in 
 the horrid deed he contemplates, to the hope 
 of success ; then to fears of the life to come, 
 followed by fears of retribution in the life 
 that now is. Mr. Booth did not play the 
 trumpet stop of his voice, in the phrase 
 " Will plead like angels, trumpet- tongued,"
 
 124 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 but gave us rather to feel the gracious nature 
 of Duncan, and 
 
 " The deep damnation of his taking off." 
 
 But at length, through the agency of his 
 wife, he is resolved, and strained up to the 
 purpose of regicide. In the dark chamber 
 from which he goes to kill the king, appears 
 before him, the dagger of the mind. The 
 pause, the look, the evasion of the object, 
 which still haunted his vision, and would not 
 pass, as expressed by Booth, bettered nature. 
 At length came the words 
 
 " 1$ this a dagger that I see before me," 
 
 low-toned, scarce audible, with a prolonged 
 emphasis on the first word, and in that man- 
 ner as if thinking aloud without auditors, 
 which marked all his soliloquies. The whole 
 speech was given in volumed whispers. It 
 was filled with fearful shadows. It made one 
 hold his breath in dreadful expectation, as the 
 actor passed silently 
 
 " With Tarquin's ravishing strides," 
 
 towards the king's chamber. 
 
 What an awful grandeur is in this play ; 
 with its dense thought, rapid action, sub- 
 stantive imagination, and mystery of iniq-
 
 MACBETH. 125 
 
 uity ! Even Lady Macbeth, ambitious realist 
 as she was, sometimes thinks in images ; as 
 when, in the appalling scene now opening, 
 and which we are disposed to describe by 
 indirection, she speaks of the " surfeited 
 grooms." 
 
 " I have drugged their possets 
 That Death and Nature do contend about them, 
 Whether they live or die." 
 
 In the progress of the scene, her cruel hard- 
 ness returns, and stands out strong against 
 the overwhelming imaginative remorse of 
 her husband. He not only " peoples the 
 void air with his own phantoms," but fills it 
 with strange voices. 
 
 " Methought I heard a voice cry, ' Sleep no more ! 
 Macbeth does murder sleep ; the innocent sleep, 
 
 Balm of hurt minds.' " 
 
 What wealth of meaning in these words ! 
 And what assuaging fullness of comfort, 
 Booth infused into that little word, " balm ! " 
 " Hurt minds," given in anguished brain- 
 tones. 
 
 Goethe pregnantly said, " The power of 
 art lies, not in reporting, but in conveying 
 your impressions." We invoke the aid of 
 that power, in our endeavor to convey the
 
 126 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 actor's manner, in the culminating speech 
 of this scene. Lady Macbeth has gone to 
 gild the faces of the grooms with Duncan's 
 blood. Left alone, Macbeth hears a knock- 
 ing at the gate. 
 
 " Whence is that knocking? 
 How is't with me, when every noise appals me '? 
 What hands are here ? Ha ! they pluck out mine eyes ! 
 Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood 
 Clean from my hand? " 
 
 Looking on his hands with starting eyes, 
 and a knotted horror in his features ; and 
 wiping one hand with the other from him, 
 with intensest loathing. The words came, 
 like the weary dash on reef rocks, and as 
 over sunken wrecks and drowned men, of 
 the despairing sea. 
 
 " No : this my hand will rather 
 The multitudinous seas incarnardine, 
 Making the green one red." 
 
 He launched the mysterious power of his 
 voice, like the sudden rising of a mighty 
 wind from some unknown source, over those 
 " multitudinous seas," and they swelled and 
 congregated dim and vast before the eye of 
 the mind. Then came the amazing word, 
 " incarnardine," each syllable ringing like 
 the stroke of a sword, and, as it were, " mak-
 
 MACBETH. 127 
 
 ing the green one red." The whole pas- 
 sage was of unparalleled grandeur ; and in 
 tone, look, action, conveyed the impression 
 of an infinite and unavailing remorse. 
 
 During the alarm at the discovery of the 
 murder of the king, Macbeth goes to Dun- 
 can's chamber and returns, saying 
 
 " Had I but died an hoar before this chance 
 I had lived a blessed time," etc. 
 
 While delivering this speech, and the follow- 
 ing one, wherein he justifies himself for the 
 added murder of the grooms, an intelligent 
 reporter for the press happened to enter the 
 theatre. " That 's not good ! " he exclaimed. 
 " What 's the matter with Booth to-night ? " 
 Nothing was the matter, except that the 
 actor had reached the height of the histri- 
 onic art, and was speaking Macbeth's false 
 sentiments with pretended feeling. He de- 
 livered the forced imagery, in the affected 
 manner of a hired mourner, hired by " the 
 common enemy of man," and paid a 
 crown. 
 
 Hazlitt says of Kean's Macbeth, that " he 
 was deficient in the poetry of the character;" 
 and that " he did not look like a man who 
 had encountered the Weird Sisters." How
 
 128 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 then, we may ask, could he play the part at 
 all? For, unless we are made to feel that 
 the actor is possessed by visions of the mind, 
 startled by voices in. the air, waylaid, and 
 drawn on to his confusion, by those 
 
 " Secret, black, and midnight hags," 
 
 it becomes of little account that he gives, as 
 Kean did, one heart-rending picture of re- 
 morse, after the commission of a murder. 
 This might be done, without representing 
 Macbeth. 
 
 Booth's performance, on the contrary, 
 was constituted by imagination, kindled and 
 swayed by supernatural agencies. Mac- 
 beth's action is a succession of crimes, but 
 the intervals are filled with thoughtful 
 speech. The truth and beauty that slide 
 into these musings, show the native affinity 
 of the imaginative faculty with what is best 
 in man. A fine example occurs in these 
 lines : 
 
 " Duncan is in his grave ; 
 After life's fitful fever, he sleeps well. 
 Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison, 
 Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing, 
 Can touch him further." 
 
 The mood was profoundly retrospective, but 
 the thoughts it generates were uttered with
 
 MACBETH. 129 
 
 spontaneous life. The " fitful fever," " trea- 
 son," " steel," " poison," and the other ene- 
 mies of life, came as fresh thoughts, not as 
 remembered words. The passage was be- 
 gun, and closed, and rounded in with tones 
 of mournful music. 
 
 In the banquet scene, Banquo personated 
 his own ghost, by appearing in bodily form, 
 and pointing to his wounds. This rank ex- 
 pedient might have been toned into art, by 
 means of costume, obscured lights, and espe- 
 cially by a judicious wonder in the faces and 
 manner of the guests, at the outbreak of Mac- 
 beth's supernatural fear of an object they do 
 not see. We prefer, however, the visionary 
 Banquo, the pure creation of the usurper's 
 wicked conscience 
 
 " That coineth goblins swift as frenzy thoughts." 
 
 Mr. Booth had to do with the bodily pres- 
 ence, and it must be confessed he spirit- 
 ualized it strangely. His passion of blended 
 terror and fury, made the object a " horrible 
 shadow," and left it so, as it disappeared. 
 
 " Can such things be 
 And overcome us, like a summer's cloud, 
 Without our special wonder? " 
 
 What is the meaning of these lines ? The
 
 130 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 cool commentator says nothing, or replies 
 " Pass over us without wonder, as a casual 
 summer's cloud passes unregarded." But 
 the actor, aglow or chilled with the pas- 
 sion of the scene, gave quite another ver- 
 sion. The " summer's cloud " was to him a 
 huge shadow, suddenly scaling the heavens, 
 charged with lightning, and filling the specta- 
 tor with fear. He used " overcome " in the 
 sense proximate to " overwhelm," or " stoop 
 upon." The speech is made in answer to 
 his wife, who has left the feast and come to 
 his rescue. The vanished ghost still has him 
 in possession, and he turns to his guests, 
 with 
 
 " You make me strange, 
 Even to the disposition that I owe, 
 When now I think you, can behold such sights, 
 And keep the natural ruby of your cheeks, 
 When mine are blanched with fear," 
 
 and filling the speech with an intense and 
 varied fury of wonder. 
 
 The same power of imagination that con- 
 jured up the " unreal mockery," played also 
 in the subtile shades of meaning he infused 
 into the passage, beginning 
 " It will have blood." 
 
 This was uttered as soliloquy, his wife sitting
 
 MACBETH. 131 
 
 silent by. The first phrase came in a reso- 
 nant murmur, like an assent to a decree of 
 fate. Then, in livelier tone 
 
 " They say blood will have blood ; 
 Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak; " 
 
 given as vivid conceptions, not as recalled 
 impressions. In the concluding phrase of 
 this speech 
 
 " The secret'st man of blood," 
 
 the word " secret'st " came with so profound 
 and quiet an intonation, that we feared the 
 emphasis it manifestly requires, must be lost. 
 But beneath the lowest depth of his voice, 
 there might at any time open a lower deep ; 
 and here, after a momentary pause, the close 
 listener caught distinctly from some un- 
 fathomed source the syllabled rumination 
 
 " Man of blood." 
 
 Among those passages of solemn beauty, 
 which find or make their place side by side 
 with the warlike speech of the later scenes, 
 that one following the death of the queen was 
 the most significant. Macbeth is left alone 
 in the world. Life, which had seemed to 
 him before that event of little value, becomes 
 a " walking shadow." The sense of vague
 
 132 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 desolation which the actor conveyed in this 
 phrase, and in the whole speech to which it 
 belongs, can bear no closer comment : 
 
 " What 's he, 
 
 That was not born of woman ? such a one 
 Am I to fear, or none." 
 
 The word " fear" was uttered in an upward 
 flight of sound, and carried with it a scorn of 
 fear. A similar example occurred in Lear. : 
 
 " Through tattered clothes small vices do appear." 
 
 His voice flashed the appearance. Yet no 
 one could on such examples found a rule of 
 elocution. There is no rule for sympathy ; 
 none for imaginative art. 
 
 " I bear a charmed life which must not yield 
 To one of woman born." 
 
 The word " charmed " was not broken in 
 two, as it is usually pronounced, but uttered 
 in one prolonged, resonant, confident syllable. 
 So close was Mr. Booth's identification of 
 character that its transpirations were mani- 
 fest, in minor and unconsidered ways. We 
 may instance as contrasted examples the dif- 
 ferent modes of fighting and dying, in Rich- 
 ard and in Macbeth. The circumstances are 
 externally similar. In each play a brave and 
 guilty king dies in single combat, either with
 
 MACBETH. 133 
 
 the rightful heir to the throne, or his repre- 
 sentative, after suffering a supernatural and 
 prophetic visitation. But how different is 
 the soul of the respective scenes. In Rich- 
 ard, the vision of the night has passed like a 
 forgotten dream. In the battle 
 
 o 
 
 " A thousand hearts are swelling in his bosom." 
 
 His kingdom is still at stake. The hope of 
 victory lives in the fast embrace of his enor- 
 mous and tenacious will, and never leaves 
 him till the last blow is struck. Accordingly, 
 Booth as Richard, seemed 
 
 " Treble sinewed, hearted, breathed, 
 And fought maliciously," 
 
 while in Macbeth, he flung out voice and 
 action, with the desperate abandonment of a 
 brave soldier, consciously meeting a preter- 
 natural doom.
 
 LEAR. 
 
 WHAT audacity of genius, or what igno- 
 rance of the greatness of the task could have 
 induced Mr. Booth, at the age of twenty- 
 three, to study and represent the character 
 of Lear, we need not now inquire. His suc- 
 cess in the personation is a fact of dramatic 
 history. Hazlitt says, under date of April, 
 1820 : " We have seen Mr. Booth's Lear 
 with great pleasure. Mr. Kean's is a greater 
 pleasure to come (so we anticipate)." But 
 the critic has left it on record, that these 
 " expectations were very considerably disap- 
 pointed ; " and he goes on in his brilliant 
 way, through several pages, descanting on 
 the grandeur of the character, and marking 
 in scene after scene, " the deficiency and 
 desultoriness of the interest excited " by Mr. 
 Kean's performance of it. This sounds like 
 implicit testimony from an unwilling witness 
 to the superiority of Booth's Lear. At any 
 rate, it sets the absurd question of imitation 
 a question first put by prejudice, and since
 
 LEAR. 135 
 
 repeated by dullness entirely at rest ; as 
 Booth's performance came first in order of 
 time, took place when he was very young, 
 and when Kean was in the full maturity of 
 his powers. 
 
 Indeed, as the public mind was preoccupied 
 by Booth's admired personation, there was 
 danger that Kean himself, when he came to 
 play the part, might be regarded as the imi- 
 tator. And this consideration led him into 
 perverse readings, which are duly scored by 
 Hazlitt's caustic pen. The critic, however, 
 could not dismiss his favorite without giving 
 Booth one disparaging touch, in the follow- 
 ing sentence : " In a subsequent part Mr. 
 Kean did not give to the reply of Lear 
 
 ' Ay, every inch a king ! ' 
 
 the same vehemence and emphasis that Mr. 
 Booth did, and in this he was justified ; for, 
 in the text, it is an exclamation of indignant 
 irony, not of conscious superiority ; and he 
 immediately adds with deep disdain, to prove 
 the nothingness of his pretensions 
 
 ' When I do stare, see how the subject quakes.' " 
 
 From this sentence, judicially pronounced, 
 we appeal to the judgment of the thoughtful
 
 136 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 reader. Lear has just entered on the scene, 
 fantastically dressed with flowers ; and with 
 the exclamation 
 
 " No, they cannot touch me for coming : 
 I am the king himself." 
 
 No irony here, but downright mad earnest. 
 Directly after, in reply to Gloster's question 
 
 ' Is 't not the king ? " 
 
 the sense of outraged majesty, which, com- 
 plicated with filial ingratitude, was the very 
 occasion of his madness, comes back on him 
 in a full tide of consciousness, as he ex- 
 claims 
 
 " Ay, every inch a king ! " 
 
 Hazlitt infers the irony from the line which 
 follows 
 
 " When I do stare, see how the subject quakes." 
 
 To sustain his view there should be some 
 " subject " present who pays the king no re- 
 spect. There is none. The only other oc- 
 cupants of the scene are Edgar and his blind 
 father, who stand by filled with grief and 
 reverence. 
 
 Edgar. " 0, thou side-piercing sight ! " 
 Gloster. " 0, let me kiss that hand ! " 
 
 Lear is talking to the shadows of his distem-
 
 LEAR. 137 
 
 pered fancy, which become realities to him. 
 He goes on 
 
 " I pardon that man's life," etc. 
 
 In the year 1835, fifteen years after these 
 first performances in London, it was our 
 privilege, in early youth, to see Mr. Booth 
 enact Lear, at the National Theatre in Bos- 
 ton. We saw him then for the first time. 
 The blue eye ; the white beard ; the nose in 
 profile, keen as the curve of a falchion ; the 
 ringing utterance of the names, " Regan," 
 " Goneril ; " the close-pent-up passion, striv- 
 ing for expression ; the kingly energy ; the 
 affecting recognition of Cordelia in the last 
 act made a deep impression on our boyish 
 mind. We saw and heard all this, but we 
 did not see Lear. We were not old enough. 
 
 A closet study of the great poet, coupled 
 with the reading of Charles Lamb's refined 
 and ingenious strictures on the capacity of 
 the stage, conspired to prevent our attend- 
 ance on a representation of either Hamlet or 
 Lear, during the lapse of many years. The 
 grandeur and subtlety of Mr. Booth's per- 
 formance in other characters, however, led 
 us one night to dare his Hamlet. We found 
 the atmosphere of the play-house not stifling
 
 138 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 to the imagination, provided there was genius 
 on the stage. Lamb's fantastic theory van- 
 ished. The illumination which accompanied 
 Booth's Hamlet, filled us with eagerness to 
 witness his Lear. 
 
 We hold the just representation of this 
 character to be the sublime of the actor's art. 
 " There be players that we have seen play, 
 and heard others praise, and that highly," 
 who, whether developed among us, or arriv- 
 ing from over sea with their budget of literary 
 credentials, did little else in Lear, but show 
 us the choler or the querulousness of an old 
 king, abused and abandoned of his children. 
 They yielded to the temptation of rendering 
 the stormier passages with melodramatic fury, 
 and the milder ones with the peevish feeble- 
 ness of age. Mr. Kean seems to have over- 
 done the part in both these respects. But 
 overdoing, on the stage, is usually the result 
 of under-thinking. And if there be one char- 
 acter in Shakespeare which requires in an 
 actor fullness of thought, delicacy and subtlety 
 of apprehension, and beyond these, the im- 
 aginative and identifying power, it is the 
 character of Lear. 
 
 Mi*. Macready gave us a scholastic per-
 
 LEAR. 139 
 
 formance, which we witnessed with a certain 
 pleasure. It was marred by the cold pre- 
 meditation which marked all the efforts of 
 that educated gentleman. It did not move 
 us. Marvelous as was the imitation of the 
 signs of passion, we felt the absence of the 
 pulse of life. He was the intellectual show- 
 man of the character, not the character itself. 
 He never got inside. Conception is a bless- 
 ing-not vouchsafed to actors of his school. 
 
 With Mr. Booth the case was different. 
 We expected that he would retouch and re- 
 vivify the dim old pagan figure, and we were 
 not disappointed. He filled the hitherto 
 empty niche. The grandeur of mind, rising 
 colossal and unexpected out of age and desti- 
 tution ; the frenzy of outraged feeling in this 
 child-changed father, passing upward from a 
 poignant sense of his own suffering, and en- 
 larging to a sublime contemplation of the 
 abuses of the world ; the gradual untying of 
 that k ' knot intrinsicate " which bound up his 
 faculties in strength and sanity ; the anguish ; 
 the pathos ; and, through all, the essential 
 kingliness in a word, the interior life of 
 Lear, came forth and shone in the focal light 
 of Mr. Booth's representation.
 
 140 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 In the first scene we note the choleric and 
 impatient majesty of the old king ; who yet, 
 out of his deeper love, parleys with Cordelia ; 
 hears her cool answers ; controls his rising 
 passion, till at length it bursts all bounds, and 
 he casts her off in the speech beginning 
 
 " Thy truth then be thy dower." 
 
 This, and the banishment of Kent, who takes 
 her part, employed the most sonorous ele- 
 ments of Mr. Booth's voice, shaken and 
 weighted as with age, yet betraying latent 
 physical vigor, and choked in passages by the 
 force of contending emotions. We hold the 
 show of vigor to be necessary to the identity 
 of this character, enabling Lear to bear the 
 stress and strain on both body and mind, to 
 which he is afterwards destined ; and respond- 
 ing to the wonder expressed in a later scene, 
 when he is turned out in the storm, that 
 his 
 
 " Life and wits at once 
 Had not concluded all." 
 
 When Goneril, putting aside the mask of 
 filial piety, first assumes the governess, Mr. 
 Booth seemed stunned as with a blow. Then 
 partially recovering, he put those fearful ques- 
 tions " Are you our daughter ? " " Does
 
 LEAR. 141 
 
 any here know me ? " " Who is it that can 
 tell me who I am? " and the rest in a manner 
 as if freighted with the possibility of madness. 
 The agony of mind, the terrible suspicion 
 just waking in him that he has dispossessed 
 himself irrevocably, the bursts of anger 
 
 " Degenerate bastard ! I'll not trouble thee; " 
 
 the selfish regret 
 
 " Woe that toq late repents ! " 
 
 the affectionate regret 
 
 " 0, most small fault, 
 How ugly didst thou in Cordelia show; " 
 
 the imperious impatience towards Albany; 
 the desperation, as he strikes his head 
 
 " 0, Lear, Lear, Lear, 
 Beat at this gate, that let thy folly in, 
 And thy dear judgment out; " 
 
 those manifold flaws and starts, all crowded 
 into a few lines, and a few moments, were ren- 
 dered as they were conceived, with wonder- 
 ful variety and truth. Even in this whirl- 
 wind of his passion, how fine and kingly the 
 courtesy of his reply to Albany, who dis- 
 claims all knowledge of what had moved him, 
 in the words 
 
 " It may be so, my lord."
 
 142 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 (So again at the end of the play, in a scene 
 unhappily omitted by Mr. Booth, Lear speaks 
 to Albany 
 
 " Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, sir; " 
 
 the phrase receiving an exquisite accent of 
 courtesy, from the infinite pathos of the sit- 
 uation.) 
 
 Then comes the imprecation on Goneril. 
 It is customary to call it " the curse." This 
 word roughens the sense of it unnecessarily. 
 It is in substance a pagan prayer, that she 
 may be childless ; but " if she must teem," 
 that her child may be a 
 
 " Thwart disnatured torment to her; " 
 
 that she may suffer the same kind and quality 
 of anguish which she is now inflicting on her 
 father. The principle of the prayer is "an 
 eye for an eye." Putting " Jehovah " in- 
 stead of " Nature," a Jew might have uttered 
 it. Mr. Booth began it as a solemn adjuration 
 to the unseen power of Nature. The indig- 
 nant bitterness in the terms of imprecation, 
 seemed as if it was converted out of sweetest 
 images of what a child should be, that lay in 
 the core of his fatherly heart. This double 
 action of his mind, in the agony which it in-
 
 LEAR. 143 
 
 volved, swayed and shook his kneeling figure 
 and lent his voice a wild vibration that drew 
 involuntary sympathy and awe. The heart 
 followed him as he arose and ran out with 
 extended arms. Lear reenters, and in the 
 course of his speech to Goneril, in a similar 
 vein of feeling, but with that change sug- 
 gested by the lines 
 
 " That these hot tears which break from me perforce, 
 Should make thee worth them " 
 
 Mr. Booth produced one of those large effects 
 which distinguished his personations. 
 
 " Thou shall find 
 
 That I'll resume the shape which thou dost think 
 I have cast off forever." 
 
 Into the word " resume," he cast the whole 
 energy of his royal will, with a volumed, 
 prolonged, and ringing intonation. His very 
 figure seemed to dilate with majesty. 
 
 There is a scene, omitted on the stage, at 
 the end of this First Act, which rivals in 
 pathos that omitted scene in Othello, which 
 we commented on in our notice of that part. 
 It consists of a brief dialogue between Lear 
 and the Fool. The Fool's talk, " matter and 
 impertinency mixed," is partly responded to 
 by Lear, whose few musing " asides," and
 
 144 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 broken exclamations, touch the core of the 
 plot, and point to the tragic consummation. 
 Let the reader ponder this scene, if he would 
 pass into the presence of the character. 
 
 In the opening scene with Regan, in the 
 Second Act, all the unexpressed tenderness 
 which the old king had felt for his best-loved 
 child Cordelia, seemed to pass by a kind of 
 vicarious deflection upon Regan, now his only 
 fatherly hope. 
 
 Regan. " I am glad to see your highness." 
 Lear. " Regan, I think you are ! I know what reason 
 I have to think so ; if thou should not be glad, 
 I would divorce me from thy mother's tomb, 
 Sepulchring an adultress. Beloved Regan, 
 Thy sister 's naught. 0, Regan, she hath tied 
 Sharp-toothed unkindness like a vulture, here ; 
 I can scarce speak to thee." 
 
 When coldly advised to return to Goneril he 
 says 
 
 " Ask her forgiveness ? " 
 
 Then, with mock humility 
 
 " Dear daughter, I confess that I am old," etc. 
 
 And, when still pressed to -return, he rises 
 from his knees with the tremendous exclama- 
 tion 
 
 " Never, Regan : 
 
 She hath abated me of half my train ; 
 Looked black upon me ; struck me with her tongue,
 
 LEAR. 145 
 
 Most serpent-like, upon the very heart: 
 All the stored vengeances of heaven fall 
 On her ingrateful top." 
 
 In these passages, and in the recurrence to 
 his desperate hope in Regan 
 
 " Thy tender hefted nature shall not give 
 Thee o'er to harshness .... 
 
 Thou better know'st 
 The offices of nature, bond of childhood," etc. 
 
 Mr. Booth sounded the various stops of grief, 
 of parental love, of irony, of indignation, of 
 baffled but clinging hope, which filled inter- 
 changeably, or inhabited together in discord, 
 the heart of Lear, until Goneril enters. 
 
 The transcendant art of Shakespeare, in 
 bringing her upon the scene, that the two 
 unnatural daughters may vie with each other 
 in impious speech, so that Lear, heart-struck, 
 if not heart-broken, is torn and cast loose at 
 last from all ties of earth, and stands appeal- 
 ing to the heavens : 
 
 " You see me here, you gods, a poor old man, 
 As full of grief as age." 
 
 The responsive art of our actor, who, touched 
 with noble anger, filled with grief and un- 
 shed tears, crowned with majesty yet with- 
 out its lendings abjured all roofs, after 
 visiting upon those " unnatural hags " the 
 10
 
 146 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 overwhelming energy of his wrath, as he 
 rushes out into the storm ! 
 
 The final test of an actor's worthiness to 
 delineate this sublime figure, is his power to 
 catch and reproduce the insanity of Lear. 
 Hazlitt says : " Mr. Kean's performance, 
 when the king's intellects begin to fail him, 
 and are at last quite disordered, was curious 
 and quaint, rather than impressive or natural. 
 He driveled and looked vacant, and moved 
 his lips so as not to be heard, and did nothing, 
 and appeared at times as if he would quite 
 forget himself. The spectator was big with 
 expectation of seeing some extraordinary 
 means employed ; but the general result did 
 not correspond to the waste of preparation." 
 Dana takes a directly opposite view. He 
 says : "It has been said that Lear is a study 
 for one who would make himself acquainted 
 with the workings of an insane mind. And 
 it is hardly less true that the acting of Kean 
 was an embodying of these workings. There 
 was a childish feeble gladness in the eye, and 
 a half-piteous smile about the mouth, at times, 
 which one could scarce look upon without 
 tears." If this be true, the question still 
 remains, did Kean represent the insanity of
 
 LEAS. 147 
 
 Lear ? The phases and modes of mental 
 derangement differ as widely in different per- 
 sons, as do the operations of the healthful 
 mind. A generalized expression of insanity- 
 would hardly suffice for the character we are 
 considering ; but this, it would seem, was the 
 sum of Kean's achievement. 
 
 The madness of Lear was not a chaos of 
 mind ; neither was it a declension towards 
 imbecility. It was an aberration. The im- 
 agination was exalted, although diverted from 
 the truth of things ; and presented, at times, 
 a grandeur of thought and speech, which has 
 no parallel in dramatic literature. The rea- 
 soning power was left intact, even when con- 
 fusion reigned among the subjects of its ex- 
 ercise. We think the text of Shakespeare, 
 deeply mused upon, will bear out this inter- 
 pretation. It is certain that the view might 
 have been deduced from Mr. Booth's charac- 
 terization. In the storm scenes, where Lear, 
 with a Greek vigor of imagination, personifies 
 the elements, addressing them as substantial 
 beings, and with a majesty of self-exaltation, 
 yet dashed with madness, calls them 
 
 " Servile ministers 
 That have with two pernicious daughters "
 
 148 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 leagued against him, the acting of Booth was 
 indescribably grand. What Lamb calls " the 
 contemptible machinery of the storm," was 
 forgotten. It was the tempest in Lear's 
 mind, that Mr. Booth made us conscious of, 
 and this range of his personation reached the 
 topmost height of the actor's art. 
 
 His mind played over the minor crazed 
 passages, with the " nimble stroke of quick 
 cross lightning." There was no weakness or 
 vacancy in any word or act. Instead of " a 
 childish feeble gladness in the eye," we saw 
 only the blue light of a speculative madness 
 shifting and shining in his eyes. His sharp- 
 ened looks, and his keen crazy questioning of 
 Edgar, whom yet he treated with a kind of 
 fraternal tenderness ; the visioning eye and 
 airy manner, when dealing with the creations 
 of his brain, 
 
 " Arraign her first, 'tis Goneril," 
 
 and 
 
 " Then let them anatomize Regan ; see what breeds about 
 her heart " 
 
 if these things did not make us weep, it was 
 because they touched a depth below the 
 source of tears. 
 
 In order to avoid a vain repetition of terms,
 
 LEAK. 149 
 
 we touch lightly the pathos of the chamber 
 scene which follows the arrival of Cordelia. 
 His return to soundness of mind, in the ap- 
 peasing presence of his one true daughter, 
 was as subtle, tender, and graduated, as the 
 departure had been violent and willful. Never, 
 even from his mouth, have we heard a more 
 pathetic utterance, than lie gave to the line 
 
 " If you have poison for me I will drink it." 
 
 Not only was it filled with music, but with 
 the remorseful humility of a bruised heroic 
 heart. 
 
 Our notes on Booth's Lear must here close 
 abruptly. The last scene, the great scene for 
 sounding the inmost depths of human feeling, 
 not only in this play, but in all dramatic 
 literature, was left out. Booth played Tate's 
 Lear. It does not lessen our chagrin to add 
 that Garrick played at an earlier date, and 
 Kean at a later, in that diversion on Shake- 
 speare's grandest drama, which leaves out the 
 indispensable Fool, and puts in the superflu- 
 ous folly. 
 
 We have no fault to find with Booth's 
 Lear so far as he followed Shakespeare. We 
 sat at his feet. But his performance was a
 
 150 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 magnificent fragment. It might be compared 
 to that torso of Hercules, which Angelo so 
 
 7 O 
 
 reverently studied, and which conveyed 
 through its knotted and swayed outlines, the 
 suggestion of a grief we may guess at, but 
 which, in its fullness, must remain forever 
 unexpressed.
 
 CASSIUS. 
 
 IN earlier years Mr. Booth assumed many 
 minor characters of Shakespeare, which he 
 afterwards surrendered, as Richard II., Hot- 
 spur, King John, Posthumous. There may 
 still be found in London a print of him in the 
 latter character. Cassius was the last part 
 so surrendered. He played it in Boston, 
 with Mr. Forrest as Brutus, about the year 
 1837. 
 
 Cassius was a Roman, whose subtle mind, 
 restless spirit, and splenetic humor, allied him 
 to the modern Italian, and showed some 
 points of likeness to lago. But when we 
 name this " Italian fiend," the generous and 
 constant friendship between Brutus and 
 Cassius must of course be put from view. 
 The noble head, the mobile features, the 
 spare figure of Booth gave him a singular 
 external fitness for the part. Perhaps no 
 passage in any performance of his, tran- 
 scended in colloquial style the well-known 
 street scene with Brutus. His description of
 
 152 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 himself and Caesar swimming in the Tiber 
 on that " raw and gusty day ; " and of Caesar's 
 sickness " when he was in Spain," were 
 especially noteworthy. Booth's vivid por- 
 traiture recreated the event. He touched 
 the arm of Brutus ; leaned, but without un- 
 due familiarity, upon his shoulder. In the 
 line 
 
 " His coward lips did from their color fly," 
 
 Cassius, by a subtle reversion of the common 
 phrase, " the color fled from his lips," implies 
 a sarcasm on Caesar's quality as a soldier. 
 Booth illustrated the meaning by a momen- 
 tary gesture, as if carrying a standard. The 
 movement was fine, as giving edge to the 
 sarcasm, but pointed to a redundancy of 
 action, which sometimes appeared in this 
 great actor's personations ; marking the ex- 
 cess in him, however, of those high histrionic 
 powers, keen feeling and shaping imagination. 
 His Cassius was signalized by one action 
 of characteristic excellence and originality. 
 After Caesar had been encompassed and 
 stabbed by the conspirators, and lay extended 
 on the floor of the Senate-house, Booth 
 strode right across the dead body, and out of 
 the scene, in silent and disdainful triumph.
 
 SIR GILES OVERREACH. 
 
 OUT of Shakespeare, through Massinger, 
 down to the lowest quarry to which his 
 genius deigned to stoop to Payne, Col- 
 man, Otway, even to Sheil and Maturin, the 
 path of our actor was a track of light ; and, 
 against the mass of dramatic dullness it some- 
 times met, 
 
 " Stuck fiery off indeed." 
 
 His " Sir Giles Overreach," in Massinger's 
 play, "A New Way to pay Old Debts," 
 stands in our memory as a representation of 
 singular solid force. We propose to relimn 
 some of the bolder strokes, and hold a can- 
 dle towards some of the finer touches of this 
 artist's work. When he speaks of having, 
 as servants to his daughter Margaret 
 
 " The ladies of errant knights decayed," 
 
 he adds, 
 
 " There having ever been 
 More than a feud, a strange antipathy 
 Between us and true gentry," 
 
 Booth infused into those two italicized words
 
 154 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 the aspiring and implacable hatred of the 
 rich and overbearing commoner. His ges- 
 ture, like his speech, escaped the confinement 
 of rules. It ^was the natural language of 
 imaginative passion ; or the " complement 
 extern " of fine perceptions. In the scene 
 where Sir Giles urges Marrall to work the 
 ruin of Wellborn, and says 
 
 " Persuade him that 'tis better steal than beg," 
 
 he gave the word " steal " with the fingers 
 of his right hand downward, and as in act of 
 taking : " than beg," palm up, as in act of 
 solicitation and both movements with rapid 
 ease. 
 
 The scene with Margaret, where he tries 
 to induce her to receive, or if need be, catch, 
 the attentions of Lord Lovel, was a master- 
 piece. 
 
 " If you are my true daughter, 
 You'll venture alone with one man, though he came 
 Like Jupiter to Semele." 
 
 Margaret protests 
 
 " If to obey you I forget my honor, 
 He must and will forsake me." 
 
 Sir Giles. " How ! Forsake thee ! 
 Do 1 wear a sword for fashion; or is this arm 
 Shrunk up or withered? Does there live a man, 
 Of that large list I have encountered with, 
 Can truly say, I e'er gave inch of ground, 
 Not purchased by his blood, that did oppose me? "
 
 SIB GILES OVERREACH. 155 
 
 These lines were so full and bristling with 
 shining points of the actor's art, that we shall 
 attempt an analysis of Mr. Booth's victori- 
 ous method of rendering them. He uttered 
 " forsake thee ! " with a shriek of astonish- 
 ment. 
 
 " Do I wear a sword for fashion ? " 
 
 beginning low, and as on a rising wave of 
 passion, the last word blown disdainful, like 
 the foam from its crest. In saying it, he 
 clutched the scabbard with his left hand, and 
 struck the sword-hilt with his right. 
 
 " Or is this arm 
 Shrunk up or withered'? " 
 
 He grasped his outstretched right arm with 
 the fingers of the left hand, and gave the 
 phrase in throated and roughened tones of 
 scorn. The words of the continuing lines 
 were " rammed with life," and full of the 
 soh'd temper of Sir Giles, down to the word 
 " blood ; " when his voice dropped suddenly 
 to its subterranean chamber, and he uttered 
 the phrase " that did oppose me," in a cool 
 depth of tone, which seemed to assure the 
 doom of all antagonists. 
 
 "Wellborn, cheated and hated of Sir Giles, 
 is presented to him by Lady Allworth, with
 
 156 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 the remark, " If I am welcome, bid him so." 
 The manner in which Booth stood, with his 
 back turned, betraying an inward strife by 
 subtle motions of head, hands, and features, 
 until, mastering repugnance by policy, he 
 turned suddenly with affected heartiness, 
 and grasped the youth's hand, saying, " My 
 nephew!" was a most felicitous touch. 
 To Lord Lovel's question if he is not moved 
 by the imprecations of those he has wronged, 
 Sir Giles replies 
 
 " Yes, as rocks are 
 
 When foaming billows split themselves against 
 Their flinty ribs ; or as the moon is moved 
 When wolves, with hunger pined, howl at her brightness." 
 
 The change of voice from the howling pack 
 to the silver clearness of the moon, in the 
 words " at her brightness," made the listener 
 feel the assumption of unapproachable seren- 
 ity. The whole speech was a magnificent 
 example of self-assertion, and suggested how 
 grandly Mr. Booth could have enacted Co- 
 riolanus. We do not know that he ever did 
 personate this character ; but one night in 
 Cincinnati, when the mood was on, he took 
 down a volume of Shakespeare, and read the 
 whole play aloud to his son Edwin. 
 
 Lamb's argument that the sight of objects
 
 SIH GILES OVERREACH. 157 
 
 dispels the imagination of them, is disproved 
 by notable examples. Does not the imagina- 
 tion rather deal with sensible objects, accord- 
 ing to its own exalting laws ? Fuseli, the 
 painter, said that after reading Chapman's 
 most characteristic translation of Homer, he 
 went out into the street, and the men he 
 met, seemed to him to be ten feet high ! 
 Father Hennepin, the first white man who 
 ever looked upon the Falls of Niagara, 
 makes, in his quaint and simple record, the 
 wild surmise, " that they are at least six 
 hundred feet high ! " And he bore truer 
 testimony to the spirit of the scene, than does 
 the scientific tourist, who takes the altitude 
 of the cliff in English feet. When Booth, 
 on a certain occasion, as Sir Giles, chal- 
 lenged Lord Lovel, and ran (not shuffled) 
 out, but finding he was not followed, came 
 directly back, stood just within the scene, 
 and uttered these words in his deepest voice, 
 
 " Are you pale? " 
 
 he took his stature from the mind : his figure 
 seemed to dilate with the vast expansion of 
 his will, and actually to overstate in physical 
 dimension, the bulky and brawny Scotchman 
 who played Lord Lovel.
 
 LUKE. 
 
 IN Massinger's play entitled the " City 
 Madam," adapted for the modern stage under 
 the name of " Riches," Mr. Booth played the 
 part of Luke. The plot is simple. Luke, a 
 ruined prodigal, is obliged to accept, in order 
 to "keep base life afoot," the situation of 
 servant to his brother's wife, the City Madam. 
 His conduct in this capacity is so exemplary 
 that his brother, believing in the prodigal's 
 reformation, yet willing to test its reality, 
 feigns death, leaving Luke all his immense 
 wealth. The servant turns tyrant, maltreats 
 his former mistress, and is reveling at a feast 
 in solitary luxury, when Sir John appears, as 
 from the dead. Luke, though struck at first 
 with terror, soon comprehends the situation, 
 and dashes from the scene in a rage. 
 
 The sight of our actor, a short man in ser- 
 vant's livery, carrying a number of band-boxes 
 and bundles, and scolded by madam for his 
 tardiness, at first provoked a smile. But the 
 manner of gentle reverence, and the intellec-
 
 LUKE. 159 
 
 tual intonation with which he delivered the 
 following speech, soon changed the feeling of 
 the auditor : 
 
 " I am your creature, madam, 
 And if I have in aught offended, 
 I humbly ask your pardon. 
 But as I was obliged to bring 
 
 These from the Tower, these from the old Exchange, 
 And these from Westminster, I could not come 
 Mvck sooner." 
 
 Coming from the room filled with riches 
 
 O 
 
 whicli he has unexpectedly inherited, he 
 
 says 
 
 " I am sublimed, I walk on air! " 
 
 not with that epicurism of elocution which 
 the words invite, but with the roughened 
 voice of a man who could not contain his 
 selfish joy. 
 
 He presided at his solitary banquet with a 
 kind of Satanic grace. When, in the midst 
 of it, terror at the appearance of his brother 
 gives way to rage, and he dashes past him 
 with the words 
 
 " Bar not my way ! The world is wide enough 
 For thee and me," 
 
 i 
 
 he sounded the grand organ stop of his voice, 
 with that easy power, which at once startled 
 and charmed the audience.
 
 SIR EDWARD MORTIMER. 
 
 WILLIAM GODWIN, on seeing Booth, at the 
 age of twenty, play lago, was so struck with 
 his excellence that he wrote the young tra- 
 gedian a letter, filled with discriminating 
 praise. From Godwin's novel called " Caleb 
 Williams," Colman dramatized the play called 
 the " Iron Chest ; " and Mr. Booth's por- 
 trayal of the principal character, we have 
 always regarded as one of his most effective 
 personations. We use the adjective with 
 deliberate intent. Effective it was beyond 
 measure, and above praise. Indeed, if it had 
 been our actor's purpose to combine in one 
 representation all the daring, and difficult, 
 and terrific feats, in look, voice, action, of 
 which his supple frame was capable, he could 
 not have selected a better field for the ex- 
 hibition than this play affords. 
 
 Who that ever saw Mr. Booth as Sir Ed- 
 ward Mortimer, can forget his utterance of 
 the name "Adam, Adam Winterton," just 
 before the scene draws, and discloses him
 
 SIR EDWARD MORTIMER. 161 
 
 seated at his library table ? It carried from 
 the invisible speaker the whole tragedy, in 
 its muffled, yet resonant and boding cry. 
 The opening soliloquy of Sir 'Edward, a sen- 
 sitive, generous, honorable man, but stained 
 with the guilt of a secret murder, was filled 
 with melancholy beauty. He invokes 
 
 " That mind of man 
 
 Which lifts us to the stars, which carries us 
 O'er the swollen waters of the angry deep, 
 As swallows skim the air." 
 
 Booth gave, with his picturing voice, the 
 very look of the chafed and billowy sea 
 then, by a fine ethereal transition, the motion 
 of a bird in air. 
 
 The passion of this play is, as the actor 
 once quaintly expressed it, " on the tight 
 jump all the time." Every scene in which 
 Sir Edward appears has a pyrotechnic bril- 
 liancy. The interest centres, not in the 
 evolution of character, but in the presenta- 
 tion of special scenes and situations. These 
 were given with wonderful resource of voice 
 and look, and equal vividness and variety of 
 action. Witness for instance the first scene 
 with the secretary, Wilford, who seeks to 
 penetrate his master's secret. 
 11
 
 162 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 " Sirrah ! What am I about? 
 Oh, Honor! Honor! 
 Thy pile should be so uniform, displace 
 One atom of thee, and the slightest breath 
 Of a rude peasant makes thine owner tremble 
 For his whole building ! " 
 
 The rapid changes in voice and manner, in 
 this speech, and the original intonation of the 
 concluding phrase, at once reckless and sus- 
 tained, and as if the building were about 
 tumbling into ruin, were marked by Mr. 
 Booth's unique and inimitable method. 
 
 No actor we have ever seen seemed to 
 have such control over the vital and invol- 
 untary functions. He would tremble from 
 head to foot, or tremble in one outstretched 
 arm to the finger tips, while holding it in the 
 firm grasp of the other hand as in the last 
 scene of this play, where he says 
 
 " Curse on my flesh to tremble so." 
 The veins of his corded and magnificent neck 
 would swell, and the whole throat and face 
 become suffused with crimson in a moment, 
 in the crisis of passion, to be succeeded on 
 the ebb of feeling by an ashy paleness. To 
 throw the blood into the face is a compara- 
 tively easy feat for a sanguine man by sim- 
 ply holding the breath ; but for a man of pale
 
 SIR EDWARD MORTIMER. 163 
 
 complexion to speak passionate and thrilling 
 words pending the suffusion, is quite another 
 thing. On the other hand it must be ob- 
 served that no amount of merely physical 
 exertion, or exercise of voice, could bring 
 color into that pale, proud, intellectual face. 
 This was abundantly shown in Shylock, in 
 Lear, in Hamlet, where the passion was in- 
 tense, but where the face continued clear and 
 pale. 
 
 To return to Sir Edward. In the terrible 
 scene in the library, when he proposes the 
 oath of secrecy to Wilford, and 
 
 " Waxing desperate with imagination," 
 
 reenacts the murder he has confessed ; in the 
 threat to Wilford 
 
 " Dare to make 
 
 The slightest movement to awake my fears, 
 And the gaunt criminal naked and stake-tied, 
 Left on the heath to blister in the sun 
 Till lingering death shall end his agony, 
 Compared to thee, shall seem more enviable 
 Than cherubs to the damned ! " 
 
 the accents of which, even to the last rever- 
 berant word, ring startlingly clear in our 
 memory in all this scene no color mantled 
 his face, or mingled in the manifest working 
 of his features. But when old Winterton
 
 164 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 comes in, and Sir Edward turns to Wilford, 
 fixing him with magnetic glance, and utters 
 the parting admonition 
 
 " I shall be angry, 
 Be very angry if I find you careless," 
 
 the reiterated word, given in prolonged and 
 kindling tones, carried also a flush of feeling 
 visibly into his face. In a former scene, 
 where he seizes Wilford, and cries out 
 
 " Slave ! I will crush thee ! pulverize thy frame, 
 That no vile particle of prying nature 
 
 May ha ! ha ! ha ! I will not harm thee, boy, 
 
 O, agony ! " 
 
 and rushes from the scene, the gust of anger 
 gathers and spends itself without change of 
 color; but the sudden revulsion of feeling 
 that takes place with the words 
 
 " I will not harm thee, boy," 
 
 crimsons his face and neck with burning 
 shame. His ghastly pallor in the death 
 scene shall conclude this episode on color. 
 In a word, he commanded his own pulses, as 
 well as the pulses of his auditors, with des- 
 potic ease. 
 
 John Howard Payne, in a published criti- 
 cism on Booth's Mortimer, speaks happily of 
 the " manual eloquence " he exhibited. The
 
 SJR EDWARD MORTIMER. 165 
 
 beauty of this hand-play, shone throughout 
 the drama, above the terror of the represen- 
 tation. The indescribable motion of both 
 hands towards those heart- wounds 
 
 " Too tender e'en for tenderness to touch; " 
 
 the creeping, trembling play of his pale, thin 
 fingers over his maddening brain ; and his 
 action when describing the assassination, may 
 serve as examples. 
 
 A melancholy interest attaches to this part, 
 in view of the fact that it was the last char- 
 acter in which Mr. Booth ever appeared.
 
 BRUTUS. 
 
 MR. BOOTH was never the literary fashion. 
 He came unheralded, and without letters. 
 He was obliged to introduce himself to the 
 manager of the Richmond theatre, on the 
 occasion of his first performance in this coun- 
 try. He came to Boston and appeared in 
 Colman's play called the "Mountaineers," 
 " Octavian by Mr. Booth " to a moderate 
 house. But the fire took, and the next day 
 the town was ablaze with interest in the new 
 tragedian an interest that scarcely flagged 
 during the following thirty years. 
 
 It was the native whim of this monarch of 
 tragedy, to go about incognito ; to mix with 
 the people ; to play at second-rate theatres. 
 The reward he got, beside that richest and 
 ever sure reward which the artist enjoys in 
 the excellence of his work, was a fullness and 
 heartiness of popular appreciation which our 
 actor felt was infinitely better than the cool 
 approval of scholars. He avoided the listless 
 and fashionable audiences, with the blue blood
 
 BRUTUS. 167 
 
 sleeping in their veins, and who go to the 
 theatre for idle pastime. He turned with joy 
 to crowded audiences of the people with the 
 red blood leaping in their arteries, who went 
 to the theatre to see the play, and him in it ; 
 and whom he melted by the pathos, or raised 
 by the grandeur, or charmed by the beauty 
 of his impersonations. If the exclusive, of 
 nice culture, excluded himself from these im- 
 personations, on account of the place in which 
 they shone, or the company who enjoyed 
 their light, then the loss was irreparably his. 
 The current of our remark brings us to the 
 little " Eagle," a theatre in Boston, about as 
 large as the " Globe " theatre in London in 
 which Shakespeare had a share, and in which 
 Shakespeare played. Good society shunned 
 the " Globe." There is no evidence that 
 Lord Bacon 
 
 " Large-browed Verulam," 
 
 ever set foot in it. When Shakespeare's 
 company played before the Queen, it was at 
 the palace, and not at the play-house. The 
 " Globe " was not fashionable. Neither was 
 the " Eagle." A few gray heads, whose 
 hearts continued warm ; a few critical brains ;
 
 168 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 a few enthusiastic youths ; and the remainder 
 of the little cockpit was filled up by that 
 crowd which the seething city spills after 
 nightfall into its places of amusement. 
 Bounded in that nutshell, Hamlet became 
 king of the infinite spaces of thought ; Rich- 
 ard found " ample room and verge enough " 
 for his vast ambition ; and there took place 
 the most intense and memorable representa- 
 tion of John Howard Payne's tragedy of 
 Brutus, or the Roman Father. 
 
 The playwright found rich material for his 
 work in history and in literature. Junius 
 Brutus, a supposed fool, but hiding his wit 
 through policy, hears from Sextus Tarquin 
 his confession of the ravishment of Lucretia ; 
 and breaks out upon him in a speech of fiery 
 indignation. Throwing aside the mask of 
 folly, Brutus incites his countrymen to re- 
 venge, and to the extirpation of the Tarquins. 
 He is clothed with civil and military power, 
 and vanquishes the enemy. But his own 
 son, fighting on the side of Tarquin, is taken 
 prisoner. Here centres the chief and closing 
 interest of the play, in the struggle between 
 the duty of the magistrate, and the feelings 
 of the father. In this struggle the Roman
 
 BRUTUS. 169 
 
 triumphs, and Brutus condemns his son to 
 death. The play has supernatural scenes, 
 which are failures ; but those scenes which 
 turn on the domestic affections, display un- 
 usual power. We believe the tragedy was 
 written expressly for Mr. Booth. It is cer- 
 tain that the author was an intimate and ad- 
 miring personal friend of the actor. 
 
 Booth enters running, and is called by 
 some other character on the scene to minister 
 to his amusement. The rounded back, the 
 blank face, the restless, aimless motion of the 
 hands, enacted folly to the life. Moved by 
 his evil genius, Tarquin reports for pastime 
 to Brutus, the details of his crime, beginning 
 with the remark that he will fill the fool with 
 wonder. Brutus replies 
 
 " You can say nothing that would make me wonder." 
 
 Before the last word he made a slight pause, 
 his looks grew keen, he uttered the word 
 " wonder " with an ominous and penetrating 
 accent, then leaned to listen. 
 
 During Tarquin's recital, Booth's eyes 
 kindled with a strange blue light. His back 
 straightened. He stood, crowned with rea- 
 son, and on fire with indignation ; and thus
 
 170 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 transformed as into a strong avenging angel 
 (Tarquin's story done), he hurled upon him 
 an anathema, the agony of which should last 
 " millions of years." 
 
 Never shall we forget that speech. Every 
 fibre of his frame seemed to contribute to 
 swell the energy of his voice. And all the 
 elements of his voice 
 
 " Constringed in mass," 
 
 burst upon the astonished and terrified offen- 
 der. Nor can we forget Booth's pale and 
 terrible face, nor the lightning of his glance, 
 nor the unexpected, but most dramatic move- 
 ment which supplemented the speech. While 
 speaking he stood still, towering above his 
 victim ; but after the words " millions of 
 years," he began to stride down the stage. 
 The power which had animated his voice was 
 transferred to his action ; and he literally 
 occupied the little stage, treading it trans- 
 versely to the extreme corner, as if he would 
 pass over among the audience ; then turning 
 abruptly, he strode up again to the other ex- 
 treme, a fearful play of look and feature, 
 betraying meanwhile a silent, inward, grow- 
 ing, and tremendous resolution.
 
 BRUTUS. 171 
 
 We next find him in the public square, 
 addressing the citizens, over the body of 
 Lucretia. There was no elocution in this 
 speech. It was rough in voice, half choked 
 with feelino;. The manner was at the farthest 
 
 O 
 
 remove from that of an opera singer, listening 
 to his own musical grief. But his tones 
 seemed the outcry of a torn and bleeding 
 heart, and in them a noble anger strove 
 with and finally overmastered the softer emo- 
 tions. 
 
 It is safe to affirm that no passage in any 
 performance of his, either in or out of Shake- 
 speare, exhibited a greater intensity of dra- 
 matic conception, or a more thorough accord 
 of utterance and action than did the closing 
 scene of this play. The Roman costume left 
 head, neck, and arms bare. There might be 
 seen swift changes of color ; swifter and sub- 
 tler movements of head and feature, now 
 quivering and writhing with emotion, now 
 fixed in immovable resolve. To watch this 
 varied movement would have satisfied the 
 deaf. To listen to the accompanying tones, 
 often inarticulate heart-cries, wrung thence 
 by the passion of the hour, would have given 
 mental vision to the blind.
 
 PESCARA. 
 
 SHIEL, in his play of the " Apostate," 
 wrote the part of Pescai*a for Booth. Booth 
 responded, by creating the character for 
 Shiel: that is, he poured into its ugly and 
 defective mould his own splendid faculty and 
 abounding life. To speak the interior truth, 
 we think both parties might have been bet- 
 ter employed, Shiel in writing, Booth in de- 
 lineating; for a more desperate example of 
 inhuman depravity than this Pescara, could 
 scarcely be hunted out of literature. 
 
 If it be said lago is more fiendish ; we 
 answer, let him be so. The difference of the 
 two characters is a difference of kind. lago 
 is an intellectual experiment on the part of 
 a capable young man of twenty-eight, to see 
 how successfully he can play the game of 
 life, leaving God entirely out. He is full 
 of subtlety, and many parts of his speeches, 
 as set forth by the unmatched art of Shake- 
 speare, might, when viewed apart from his 
 character, shine in ethical discourse. Pes-
 
 PESCARA. 173 
 
 cara, on the contrary, is an uninteresting 
 villain, ventilating bad passions in turgid 
 rhetoric ; and holding the attention only by 
 a cruel force of will, exercised in his office 
 as governor of Granada. 
 
 Probably, there worked through the dull 
 brain of the author, and out into his dark 
 and cruel Spaniard, some dim reminiscence 
 of Shakespeare's " super-subtle Venetian." 
 Certainly, in the personation of Pescara, 
 Booth drew off some of that spirit which 
 filled his lago, adulterated it with Shiel, and 
 offered it with great acceptance to the rank 
 palate of a popular audience 
 
 " Darkening his power to lend base subjects light." 
 
 Yet the flashing and magnetic eye ; the crisp, 
 resonant, and changeful tones ; the natural 
 attitudes of easy power ; the lithe strength 
 in action, always characteristic of Booth, 
 lent their wonted charm to this performance 
 also, and made even Pescara yield a transi- 
 tory delight. 
 
 Two sets of characters figure in the play ; 
 Moors and Christians. Pescara is one of the 
 Christians. His first entrance is highly dra- 
 matic. Hemeya, a Moor, and his successful 
 rival, is saying to Florinda
 
 174 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 " Who now shall part us? " 
 
 "I," replies Pescara, entering. Booth's 
 action, as he stepped upon the scene, had 
 something of the measured force of his first 
 entrance in Richard, and something of the 
 stealthy tread of his lago ; while the word he 
 uttered, gave voice in one little syllable to 
 the whole malign personality of the char- 
 acter. 
 
 In a later scene, he was accustomed to 
 recount a dream or vision, in a manner des- 
 perately vivid. A lady of much histrionic 
 excellence, told in our hearing, how, as 
 Florinda, in this scene, she involuntarily 
 shrank from his touch, possessed by his fero- 
 cious aspect and resounding voice. But he, 
 with that conscious and tactile delicacy, 
 which never left him, even when most filled 
 with the inspiration of his art, in a few low- 
 toned words reassured her, and proceeded 
 without a moment's pause, to possess with 
 his vision the imagination of his auditors. 
 The calm directing mind sat at the centre 
 of his wildest passion, like 
 
 " The whirlwind's heart of peace."
 
 REUBEN GLENROY. 
 
 LET us touch a few other characters with 
 a slight pencil. In Colman's play, " Town 
 and Country," Reuben, accompanied by 
 Cosey, is seeking his lost love in the labyrinths 
 of London. The kind old man makes some 
 casual remark, at which the lover winces. 
 
 Cosey. " I beg pardon for bringing her to your mind." 
 Reuben. " Bringing her to my mind ? " 
 
 Booth gave the first word with a pathetic 
 ringing clearness, paused slightly before and 
 after " her," and closed the sentence, in a 
 manner very low, clear, and quick ; most ex- 
 quisitely conveying the plain meaning, that 
 she was always in his mind.
 
 OCTAVIAN. 
 
 OCTAVIAN, in the " Mountaineers," is a rag- 
 ged and melancholy Spaniard, of high birth 
 and breeding, who finds his love, Floranthe, 
 after long and wretched separation, and under 
 extraordinary circumstances. 
 
 The deep joy of this discovery was de- 
 picted by Mr. Booth with a tender fullness 
 of expression most winning to the popular 
 heart. We also recall one unique gesture. 
 He locked the fingers of his raised hand 
 within the fingers of Floranthe, while speak- 
 ing, a subtle and beautiful diversion on 
 
 o* 
 
 that dangerous thing, the stage embrace. 
 
 Booth rarely yielded even to the most 
 vociferous call to appear before the curtain. 
 On one occasion, however, in Octavian, at 
 the close of the play, he came towards the 
 footlights as the curtain was descending, let 
 it fall behind him, was still atmosphered by 
 the melancholy beauty of the character, 
 bowed to the audience, and silently with- 
 drew.
 
 BERTRAM. 
 
 CLERGYMEN are seldom good playwrights : 
 witness the " Zanga " of Dr. Young, the " Cat- 
 aline " of Mr. Croly. The old feud between 
 the pulpit and the stage makes it difficult for 
 any combatant to fight, either for love, or 
 fame, or hire, successfully on both sides. 
 The didactic and the dramatic methods of 
 presenting truth, lie respectively at opposite 
 poles : and an author is determined by 
 native temperament or mental constitution 
 towards either one or the other method, but 
 never towards both. 
 
 Let this view furnish what excuse it may 
 for the Reverend J. Maturin, who wrote the 
 wretched tragedy of " Bertram." The play is 
 a little worse than the " Apostate," and that is 
 highly unnecessary. Morbid passion, adul- 
 tery, murder, suicide, mark its criminal prog- 
 ress ; and it is choked by a throng of incon- 
 gruous and unnatural incidents. 
 
 Bad as the play is, Booth descended occa- 
 sionally to its level, and by the touch of his 
 
 12
 
 178 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 histrionic genius, stirred its corruption into 
 a transient phosphorescent brilliancy. To 
 Bertram, as to Pescara, he contributed him- 
 self; and in the enjoyment of his consum- 
 mate art, we sometimes happily lost sight of 
 the author. 
 
 Bertram is picked up from a wreck and 
 borne in on men's shoulders, as one drowned. 
 In his slow recovery of consciousness, Mr. 
 Booth took the spectator with him. One 
 could almost feel the partial flow and quick 
 ebb of the vital current ; and the intermit- 
 tent thrill of life to his extremities. He de- 
 livered such passages as 
 
 " No dews from Heaven fall on this blighted soil," 
 
 and 
 
 " I have offended Heaven, I will not mock it," 
 
 with a melancholy, undeserved, Byronic 
 grace. We find nothing else in this play 
 worthy to illustrate our subject.
 
 PIERRE. 
 
 MR. BOOTH'S Pierre, in Otway's tragedy 
 of " Venice Preserved," was distinguished by- 
 one salient passage of extraordinary energy 
 and clearness. He is urging his fellow con- 
 spirators to fire the city of Venice. He 
 stood with his back to the audience, appeal- 
 ing with fierce eloquence to each one of his 
 companions in turn. Well do we remember 
 his transport at the vision of 
 
 " The Adriatic in her robes of flame." 
 
 The last performance of this part that we 
 recall, took place at the Howard Atheneum 
 in Boston, about the year 1847. After the 
 play, we met a gentleman, ripe in years and 
 culture, who had known Mr. Booth through- 
 out his career, and who said he had never 
 seen him exhibit more beauty or clearness 
 of voice and gesture, than on this occasion. 
 The remark acquires value, in view of the 
 " blown surmise," that the actor's voice, if 
 not his general histrionic power, had become 
 impaired by the accident to his face.
 
 THE STRANGER. 
 
 OF Kotzebue's play, entitled " The Stran- 
 ger, or Misanthropy and Repentance," only 
 this remains : the piquant tone and gesture 
 with which he said 
 
 "Whea they see me with my runaway wife upon my arm." 
 
 In considering this play, so weak and so un- 
 worthy of representation, the question natu- 
 rally arises, why did not Mr. Booth enact 
 Timon? We suppose the managers might 
 have answered. We can only regret that he 
 did not add this mighty figure to his Shake- 
 spearean gallery. We can only fancy the 
 large and hospitable style he might have lent 
 to the beginning of the play ; his impetuous 
 scorn when the tide of prosperity is turning, 
 and the isolated majesty of mien and voice, 
 becoming the sullen grandeur of the closing 
 scenes.
 
 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 IN the exercise of the most effective and 
 inclusive, if not the most exalted of the fine 
 arts, the art of acting, Mr. Booth's method 
 was 
 
 " Unremovably coupled to nature." 
 
 The term " theatrical," invidiously used, 
 could never be justly applied to him. Nature 
 was the deep source of his power ; and she 
 imparted her own perpetual freshness to his 
 personations. We could not tire of him, any 
 more than we tire of her. His art was, in a 
 high sense, as natural as the bend of Niagara ; 
 as the poise and drift of summer clouds ; the 
 play of lightning ; the play of children ; or 
 as the sea, storm-tossed, sunlit, moonlit, or 
 brooded in mysterious calm and his art 
 awakened in the observer corresponding 
 emotions.
 
 AN INCIDENT. 
 
 GARRICK, in addition to his other gifts, was 
 an admirable dancer. Kean danced ; he also 
 sang exquisitely, employing a faculty not un- 
 common with rough-speaking men. Booth 
 could neither dance nor sing. The single 
 comic song with which he enlivened his per- 
 formance in farce, was simply a grotesque 
 jingle, scorning melody, and depending for 
 its success on odd turns of expression, verbal 
 and vocal. We recall a true incident, show- 
 ing his characteristic admiration of a talent 
 he did not possess. 
 
 After a splendid success in tragedy, he 
 stood at the wing (as at other times, on going 
 behind the scenes, we have seen him stand), 
 with folded arms, in the dress of the charac- 
 ter he had just personated, and listening in- 
 tently to an excellent singer, then before the 
 audience. Unable to congratulate him at the 
 time, Booth sought and found the singer, 
 later in the night, at a refreshment room in 
 company with other actors. Booth entered
 
 AN INCIDENT. 183 
 
 the room, silently stretched himself at full 
 length upon the sanded floor, took one of the 
 singer's feet, placed it upon his own neck, 
 held it so a few moments, then rose and de- 
 parted without word.
 
 A DIALOGUE. 
 
 SCENE. A hotel chamber, dimly lighted. Time 
 summer evening. Mr. Booth discovered sitting at an 
 open window, smoking. A glazed cap, and a round- 
 about formed a part of his dress, giving him the appear- 
 ance of a " Middy Ashore" Enter Guest. Inter- 
 change of salutations and courtesies. 
 
 Cruest. I saw your " Sir Giles " last eve- 
 ning. How do you manage to carry the 
 scene so smoothly, with such weak support ? 
 
 Actor. By close attention to the business 
 of the stage. 
 
 Gruest. But you seemed to lose yourself in 
 your impersonation. 
 
 Actor. Else how could I identify charac- 
 ter? 
 
 Cruest. And can you keep up these two 
 diverse processes of thought at the same 
 time? 
 
 Actor. Nothing easier after the machin- 
 ery is oiled. In one view, that is a strange 
 play, "A New Way to pay Old Debts," 
 not one honest person in it. They are all
 
 A DIALOGUE. 185 
 
 rogues from beginning to end ; rogues for 
 virtue, rogues in vice. Shakespeare drew the 
 foibles of the good ; but he never blurred the 
 lines, by making the good counterplot against 
 the villains. Did you see how near they came 
 to letting Shakespeare's birthplace slip into 
 the hands of a Yankee speculator ? I once 
 saw, on the 23d of April, the whole way from 
 London to Stratford lined with flowers, in 
 honor of the poet. They should preserve 
 every vestige of him. 
 
 G-uest (Murmurs the title of a book then 
 popular). " Vestiges of Creation." 
 
 Actor (Catching the allusion, instantly re- 
 joins). Yes, he was the god of the histrionic 
 art in England. Can you tell me whether 
 Howard Payne be still living ? 
 
 Cruest. I cannot. But I recall a Ion mot 
 upon him, made by some London critics, who 
 " cut up " his tragedy of Brutus. The author 
 was indiscreet enough to retort through the 
 press. Whereupon the critics rejoined, 
 
 " The labor we delight in, physics Payne." 
 and turned the laugh on him. Mr. Booth, 
 did you ever read in public ? 
 
 Actor. Reading is emasculate acting. The 
 drama should never be so treated. (Then
 
 186 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 added, smiling) I did attempt it once. I 
 read the " Ancient Mariner " at the Chatham 
 Street Theatre in New York. But the read- 
 ing was a failure. The boys were cracking 
 nuts and calling out to each other, " Hi ! 
 hi I " all over the house. 
 
 Cruest. I fear your audience was of similar 
 quality to those sailors, who are said to have 
 bought up the first edition of the poem, out of 
 regard to the name. But they soon became 
 disgusted with the purchase. They couldn't 
 fathom the meaning. " I would I had been 
 there," and heard your reading, even with 
 the " Hi ! hi ! " accompaniment. 
 
 Actor (whiff, whiff, in silence). 
 
 Cruest. How vivid the imagery, how allur- 
 ing the measure of that remarkable poem. 
 
 " The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew; 
 The furrow followed free." 
 
 Actor (continuing the verse). 
 
 " We were the first that ever burst, 
 Into that silent sea ! " 
 
 Cruest (Listens patiently, but hears no 
 more of the " Ancient Mariner " that night. 
 The actor was "not i' the vein "). 
 
 Actor. The reports about Rachel interest 
 me greatly. She has become famous since
 
 A DIALOGUE. 187 
 
 my last visit to Europe. The French style, 
 even in the antiquated tragedy of Racine, is 
 closer to nature than ours. 
 
 Guest. Is she a Jewess ? 
 
 Actor. Juive Francaise (with exquisite 
 purity of accent). By the way, this is the 
 first Jewish month (September). 
 
 Guest takes leave. 
 
 Actor. Come down with me to supper; 
 come, take a bit. I'm going in (on the 
 stairs). Come now, you'd better take a bit. 
 
 Guest declines, bids good-night, and sees 
 the actor pass across the hall, and out of 
 sight, with his natural and kingly stride.
 
 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 His knowledge and accent of the French 
 tongue were simply perfect. He played 
 Oreste* in Racine's tragedy, " Andromaque," 
 at the French Theatre in New Orleans, 
 repeatedly, and in a manner to rouse the 
 wildest enthusiasm. Frenchmen of that city 
 speak of him to this day, as a second Talma. 
 
 MEETING on one occasion, at the house of 
 the late Governor Andrew, a select company 
 of gentlemen and ladies, the talk turned on 
 the stage and the drama, and was varied by 
 imitations running up into the region of 
 Shakespearean criticism. The Reverend Mr. 
 Clarke, who was present, related an adven- 
 ture he had with Mr. Booth in Louisville. 
 His recital was the germ of an excellent 
 paper, which has since appeared in the At- 
 lantic Monthly. At the close of the inter- 
 view therein described, and which appears so
 
 THE TRAGEDIAN. 189 
 
 full of histrionic, eccentric, and psychological 
 interest, the player told the preacher that he 
 had called on him as a Unitarian, a mono- 
 theist, himself being a Jew. Whether the 
 latter statement referred to race or religion, 
 is left a little uncertain. 
 
 Nothing can be surer, however, than that 
 Mr. Booth's mind was deeply exercised by 
 religious problems ; by " obstinate question- 
 ings " of futurity and human destiny. The 
 chance companions of his convivial hours, or 
 even the thrilled auditor and spectator of his 
 matchless impersonations, could have had 
 little conception of this, his private and ha- 
 bitual mood. 
 
 He passed into all religions with a certain 
 humility and humanity, and, we may add, 
 with a certain Shakespearean impartiality. 
 Among Jews, he was counted a Jew. He 
 was as familiar with the Koran as with the 
 Hebrew Scriptures, and would name a child 
 of his after a wife of Mahomet. At other 
 times, and in sympathy with his favorite poet, 
 Shelley, he delighted to lose himself in the 
 mysticism of the faiths of India.
 
 THE TRAGEDIAN. 
 
 p 
 
 IN recording our impressions of him, who, 
 if power of identification be the actor's su- 
 preme gift, was perhaps the greatest of all 
 actors, we have lived over again hours of rare 
 aesthetic delight. We indulge the hope that 
 this happiness has been in some measure 
 communicated to the reader. 
 
 But the play is over. The curtain has fal- 
 len ; the actor vanished. His voice is hushed. 
 Its wild bell has died upon the air. His eye 
 is quenched. No more shall the quick im- 
 agination of Shakespeare, 
 
 " Fill its blue urn with fire." 
 
 That organization, so elastic, firm, dense, 
 fibrous, delicate, has become a pinch of dust. 
 Yet remains the indestructible hope, that, 
 out of the 
 
 " Abysmal deeps of personality," 
 
 how, when, or under what aspect, who can 
 tell ? himself shall arise immortal and 
 sacred still to the beneficent ministry of 
 beauty.
 
 UCSB LIBRARY 
 
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 Ql JAN 21 199?