American Men of Mind

by Burton Egbert Stevenson

To the student of American acting, one name stands out before all the rest, the name of Booth. No other actors in this country have ever equalled the achievements of Junius Brutus Booth and of his son, Edwin Booth. They possessed the genius of tragedy, if any men ever did, and no one who saw them in their great moments can forget the impression of absolute reality which they conveyed.

Junius Brutus Booth was the son of an eccentric silversmith of London, and was born there in 1796. Let us pause here to remark that, just as the greatest Frenchman who ever lived was an Italian, and the greatest Russian woman a German, so most of the early American actors were either English or Irish. This sounds rather Irish itself; but it is true. Certainly, in the end Napoleon Bonaparte became as French as any Frenchman and the Empress Catherine II Russian to the core; and the English and Irish actors who came to these shores in search of fame and fortune, and who found them and spent the remainder of their lives here, have every right to be considered in any account of the American stage which they did so much to adorn.

Junius Brutus Booth, then, was born in London in 1796. Twenty years before, his father had been so carried away by Republican principles that he had sailed for America to join the ranks of the army of independence, but he was captured and sent back to England. So it will be seen that he was something more than a mere silversmith; but he was very successful at his trade, and was able to give his son a careful classical education, to fit him for the bar. Imagine his chagrin when the boy, after a short experience in amateur theatricals, announced his intention of becoming an actor.

He secured some small parts, made a tour of the provinces, and finally, in London, engaged in a remarkable war with the great tragedian, Edmund Kean, which divided the town into two factions. But Booth tired of the struggle, in which the odds were all against him, and in 1821 sailed for America. He won an instant success, and was a great popular favorite until the day of his death. He was a short, spare, muscular man, with a pale countenance, set off by dark hair and lighted by a pair of piercing blue eyes, and he possessed a voice of wonderful compass and thrilling power. Upon the stage he was formidable and tremendous, giving an impression of overwhelming power, in which his son, perhaps, never quite equalled him.

Shortly after his arrival in America, Booth bought a farm near Baltimore, and there, on November 13, 1833, Edwin Booth was born. There was a great shower of meteors that night, which, if they portended nothing else, may be taken as symbolical of the career of America's greatest tragedian. He was the seventh of ten children, all of whom inherited, in some degree, their father's genius. It was not without a trace of madness, and reached a fearful culmination in John Wilkes Booth, when he shot down Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington.

From the first, Edwin Booth felt himself destined for the stage. His father did not encourage him, but finally, in 1849, consented to his appearance with him in the unimportant part of Tressel, in "King Richard the Third." From that time on, he accompanied his father in all his wanderings, and partook of the strange and sad adventures of that wayward man of genius. In 1852, he went with his father to California, and was left there by the elder Booth, who no doubt thought it the best school for the boy's budding talent. There, in the Sandwich Islands, and in Australia, among the rough crowds of the mining camps, he had four years of the most severe training that hardship, discipline, and stern reality can furnish. Amid it all his genius grew and deepened, and when he returned again to the east in 1856 he was no longer a novice, but an accomplished actor.

His last years in California had been shadowed by a great sorrow—the sudden and pitiful death of his father. The elder Booth had for years been subject to attacks of insanity, brought on, or at least intensified, by extreme intemperance. On one occasion he had attempted to commit suicide. On another, he had had his nose broken, an accident which so interfered with his voice that he did not regain complete control of it for nearly two years. On his return from California, where he had left his son, he stopped at New Orleans, and remained there a week, performing to crowded houses. He then started north by way of the Mississippi, and was found dying in his stateroom a few days later. He had been caught in a severe rain as he left New Orleans, a cold developed, complications followed, and for forty-eight hours he lay unattended in his stateroom, without that medical attention which he was unable or unwilling to summon. He died November 30, 1852, and his body was interred at Greenmount Cemetery, Baltimore, in a grave afterwards marked by a monument erected by his son Edwin.

This was only one of many tragedies which darkened the life of Edwin Booth, for, to use the words of William Winter, he was "tried by some of the most terrible afflictions that ever tested the fortitude of a human soul. Over his youth, plainly visible, impended the lowering cloud of insanity. While he was yet a boy, and while literally struggling for life in the semi-barbarous wilds of old California, he lost his beloved father, under circumstances of singular misery. In early manhood he laid in her grave the woman of his first love, the wife who had died in absence from him, herself scarcely past the threshold of youth, lovely as an angel and to all who knew her precious beyond expression. A little later his heart was well nigh broken and his life was well nigh blasted by the crime of a lunatic brother that for a moment seemed to darken the hope of the world. Recovering from that blow, he threw all his resources and powers into the establishment of the grandest theatre in the metropolis of America, and he saw his fortune of more than a million dollars, together with the toil of some of the best years of his life frittered away. Under all trials he bore bravely up, and kept the even, steadfast tenor of his course; strong, patient, gentle, neither elated by public homage nor embittered by private grief."

It has been said that Booth returned from California a finished actor. He had, besides, the prestige of a great name, and he was welcomed with open arms. He had not yet reached the summit of his skill, but he showed an extraordinary grace and "a spirit ardent with the fire of genius." From that time forward, his career was one of lofty endeavor and of high achievement. In the great characters of Shakespeare, especially in those of Hamlet, Richard the Third, and Iago, he had no rivals, and no one who witnessed him in any of these parts ever outlived the deep impression the performance made. During the last two or three years of his life his health failed gradually, and he was finally compelled to leave the stage. On April 19, 1893, he suffered a stroke of paralysis from which he never rallied, lingering in a semi-conscious state until June 7th, when he sank rapidly and died.