II. THE ART OF EDWIN BOOTH. HAMLET. OOTH'S impersonation of Hamlet was one of the best known works of the dramatic age. In many minds the actor and the character had become identical, and it is not to be doubted that Booth's performance of Hamlet will live, in commemorative dramatic history, with great representative embodiments of the stagewith Garrick's Lear, Kemble's Coriolanus, Edmund Kean's Richard, Macready's Macbeth, Forrest's Othello, and Irving's Mathias, and Becket. That it deserved historic permanence is the conviction of a great body of thoughtful students of Shakespeare and of the art of acting, in Great Britain and Germany as well as in America. In the elements of intellect, imagination, sublimity, mystery, tenderness, incipient delirium, and morbid passion, it was exactly consonant with what the best analysis has determined as to the conception of Shakespeare; while in sustained vigour, picturesque variety, and beautiful grace of execution, it was a model of executive art, of demeanour, as the atmosphere of the soul, - facial play, gesticulation, and fluent and spontaneous delivery of the text; a delivery that made the blank verse as natural in its effect as 161 blank verse ought to be, or can be, without ever dropping it to the level of colloquialism and commonplace. In each of Booth's performances a distinguishing attribute was simplicity of treatment, and that was significantly prominent in his portrayal of Hamlet. The rejection of all singularity and the avoidance of all meretricious ornament resulted in a sturdy artistic honesty, which could not be too much admired. The figure stood forth, distinct and stately, in a clear light. The attitudes, movements, gestures, and facial play combined in a fabric of symmetry and of always adequate expression. The text was spoken with ample vocal power and fine flexibility. The illustrative "business" was strictly accordant with the wonderful dignity and high intellectual worth of Shakespeare's creation. The illusion of the part was created with an almost magical sincerity, and was perfectly preserved.Booth's Hamlet was as Hamlet on the stage should always be an imaginative and poetic figure; and yet it was natural. To walk upon the stage with the blank verse stored in memory, with every particle of the business prearranged, with every emotion aroused yet controlled, and every effect considered, known, and pre-ordained, and yet to make the execution of a design seem involuntary and spontaneous, that is the task set for the actor, and that task was accomplished by Booth. Much is heard about "nature" in acting, and about the necessity of "feeling," on the part of an actor. The point has been too often obscured by ignorant or careless reasoning. An actor who abdicates intellectual supremacy ceases to be an actor, for he never can present a consistent and harmonious work. To yield to unchecked feeling is to go to pieces. The actor who makes his audience weep is not he who himself weeps, but he who seems to weep. He will have the feeling, but he will control it and use it, and he will not show it in the manner of actual life. Mrs. Siddons said of herself that she had got credit for the truth and feeling of her acting, when she was only relieving her own heart of its grief; but Mrs. Siddons knew how to act, whatever were her personal emotions, for it was she who admonished a young actor, saying, “You feel too much." Besides, every artist has a characteristic, individual way. If the representative of Hamlet will express the feelings of Hamlet, will convey them to his audience, and will make the poetic ideal an actual person, it makes no difference whether he is excited or quiescent. Feeling did not usually run away with Dion Boucicault: yet he could act Daddy O'Dowd so as to convulse an audience with sympathy and grief. Jefferson, the quintessence of tenderness, has often accomplished the same result with Rip Van Winkle. In one case the feeling was assumed and controlled; in the other, it is experienced and controlled. Acting is an art, and not a spasm; and when you saw Booth as Hamlet you saw a noble exemplification of that art, - the ideal of a poet, supplied with a physical investiture and made actual and natural, yet not lowered to the level of common life. The tenderness of Hamlet toward Ophelia — or, rather, toward his ideal of Ophelia was always set in a strong light, in Booth's acting of the part. He likewise gave felicitous expression to a deeper view of that subject to Hamlet's pathetic realisation that Ophelia is but a fragile nature, upon which his love has been wasted, and that, in such a world as this, love can find no anchor and no security. The forlorn desolation of the prince was thus made emphatic. One of the saddest things in Hamlet's experience is his baffled impulse to find rest in love - the crushing lesson, not only that Ophelia is incompetent to understand him, but that the stronger and finer a nature is, whether man or woman, the more inevitably it must stand alone. That hope by which so many fine spirits have been lured and baffled, of finding another heart upon which to repose when the burden of life becomes too heavy to be borne alone, is, of all hopes, the most delusive. Loneliness is the penalty of greatness. Booth was definite, also, as to the "madness" of Hamlet.1 He was not absolutely mad, but substantially sane, guarding himself, his secrets, and his purposes by assumed wildness; yet the awful loneliness of existence to which Hamlet has been se 1 In reply to a question on this subject, Booth wrote the following letter, which was printed by its recipient, in the Nashville (Tenn.) Banner: DEAR SIR: The subject to which you refer is, as you well know, one of endless controversy among the learned heads, and I dare say they will over it "till time fades into eternity." I think I am asked the same question nearly three hundred and sixty-five times a year, and I usually find it safest to side with both parties in dispute, being one of those, perhaps, referred to in the last line of the following verse:— "war "Genius, the Pythian of the beautiful, Leaves her large truths a riddle to the dull; And fools on fools still ask what Hamlet means.' Yet, I will confess that I do not consider Hamlet mad, - except in "craft." My opinion may be of little value, but 'tis the result of many weary walks with him, "for hours together, here in the lobby." questered by his vast, profound, all-embracing, contemplative intellect, and by the mental shock and wrench that he has sustained, was allowed to colour his temperament. That idea might, in its practical application, be advantageously carried much further than it ever was by any actor; for, after the ghost-scene, the spiritual disease of the Dane would augment its ravages, and his figure should then appear in blight, disorder, dishevelment, and hopeless misery. Poetic gain, however, may sometimes be dramatic loss. To Hamlet the dreamer, Booth usually gave more emphasis than to Hamlet the sufferer-wisely remembering therein the value of stage effect for an audience. His Hamlet was a man to whom thoughts are things and actions are shadows, and who is defeated and overwhelmed by spiritual perceptions too vast for his haunted spirit, by griefs and shocks too great for his endurance, by wicked and compelling environments too strong for his nerveless opposition, and by duties too practical and onerous for his diseased and irresolute will. That was as near to the truth of Shakespeare as acting can reach, and it made Hamlet as intelligible as Hamlet can ever be. To a man possessing the great intellect and the infinitely tender sensibility of Hamlet, grief does not come in the form of dejection, but in the form of a restless, turbulent, incessant agonising fever of vital agitation. He is never at rest. The grip that misery has fastened upon his soul is inexorable. Contemplation of the action and reaction of his spirit and his anguish is, to a thoughtful observer, kindred with observance of the hopeless suffering of a noble and beloved friend who is striving in vain against the slow, insidious, |