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THE
personality of American actor Edwin Booth was greater than his
achievement. By birth and heredity he possessed faculties and
qualities that most actors pass laborious lives in the fruitless
effort to emulate -- the faculties and qualities, namely, of
genius and personal charm, that constitute distinction and lead
directly to conquest. His face, his voice, his person, his demeanour,
and his brilliant, indomitable spirit -- those were his authentic
preordination to empire and renown. As a young man his beauty
was extraordinary. His dark eyes flashed with superb fire, not
alone of physical vitality, but of imagination, emotion, and
exaltation of the soul. In mature years the same nobility of
presence continued to subsist, but it was softened and hallowed
by experience and grief. Alike in youth and age, in bloom and
in decline, he was exceptional and rare, a striking product of
nature, and as such a puissant and predominant force. He needed
not to seek after novelties; he was himself a novelty. The old
plays were adequate for his purpose, because, in his inspired
expression of their thought and feeling, character and action,
he made them ever new. His success was that of a great personality,
-- specially shown in the equilibrium of his intellectual life
and its freedom from fret and fume. All his mistakes and most
of his troubles resulted from the amiable weakness with which
he sometimes permitted himself to become entangled with paltry,
scheming, unworthy people. By himself, -- isolated, introspective,
strange, wayward, variable, moody, yet noble, gentle, affectionate,
generous, -- he was incarnate victory.
The salient attributes of Booth's art were
imagination, insight, grace, intense emotion, and melancholy
refinement. In Hamlet, Richelieu, Othello, Iago, King Lear, Bertuccio,
and Lucius Brutus they were conspicuously manifest. But the controlling
attribute, -- that which imparted individual character, colour,
and fascination to his acting, -- was the thoughtful, introspective
habit of a stately mind, abstracted from passion and suffused
with mournful dreaminess of temperament. The moment that charm
began to work, his victory was complete. It was that which made
him the true image of Shakespeare's
thought, in the glittering halls of Elsinore, on its midnight
battlements, and in its lonely, wind-beaten place of graves.
Under the discipline of sorrow, and through
"years that bring the philosophic mind," Booth drifted
further and further away from things dark and terrible, whether
in the possibilities of human life or in the world of imagination.
That is the direction of true growth. In all characters that
evoked his essential spirit -- in characters which rest on spiritualised
intellect, or on sensibility to fragile loveliness, the joy that
is unattainable, the glory that fades, and the beauty that perishes
-- he was peerless. Hamlet, Richelieu, Faust, Manfred, Jacques,
Esmond, Sydney Carton, and Sir Edward Mortimer are all, in different
ways, suggestive of the personality that Booth was fitted to
illustrate. It is the loftiest type that human nature affords,
because it is the embodied supremacy of the soul, and because
therein it denotes the only possible escape from the cares and
vanities of a transitory world.
This article was originally
published in The Life and Art of Edwin Booth. William
Winter. New York: Macmillon Co., 1893. pp. 151-153.
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