But the mouth has no bones. It is merely flesh under the control of many muscles. Surgeons tell me that if one opens the cheek of a man who has lived an intellectual life, it is surprising how many muscles one finds. On the other hand, the cheek of an ignorant laborer does not contain much more than a muscle for chewing, for opening and shutting the mouth, and for grinning and frowning. The muscles that give irony, humor, and sadness are not there.
One of the prominent men in America, who has a beautiful mouth, has told me that when he was a boy his family objected so to it as an unsightly thing and that for many years he had the habit of covering it with his hand whenever he expressed himself, for fear of comment. The change has been within the man himself and the mouth has echoed it.
One may train a plain mouth to express the beauty of the human mind which controls it. Mr. Emerson had a hole in his face as a boy, not a mouth. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the plainest man that ever lived, had a sweet, tender, one might say almost beautiful mouth, before he died. At any actors’ gathering, one can see a dozen mouths like Booth’s at twenty-five, but you will hunt a long time before finding the mouth Booth died with.
The delicacy shown in a study of Edwin Booth’s face was borne out in his life. He did the most dignified thing in the world, to apologize for an act of his family against the American nation, by retiring for a period from public life after the assassination of Lincoln.
He was a man who felt keenly, both mentally and physically. He hated to be touched by anyone and loathed to be buttonholed. I remember a well-known writer of fiction, who had the extraordinary capacity for doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, eagerly presenting Mr. Booth with a playbill of the performance of the night at Ford’s Theater. He simply arose and went to bed, as he always did on such occasions. Something of the same kind happened quite by accident when Booth was visiting at Nutley, the home of Laurence Hutton, secretary of The Players and an old friend of the actor’s. Booth had retired for the night, when Hutton remembered with horror that at the foot of the bed and in full view upon the wall was one of those same playbills. He knew that if Booth saw it he would pack his bag and silently depart. What to do he did not know. Finally, waiting until he hoped Booth was asleep, he stole upstairs, crept into the room, and carried off the bill.
This sensitiveness about his family was not due entirely to the unfortunate occurrence of Lincoln’s assassination, for it was shown in various ways. One evening a man, who had become a member of The Players by presenting the club with a second folio of Shakespeare, brought a friend in as a guest and presented him to Mr. Booth.
“Why, Mr. Booth,” were the friend’s first words, “I saw your father play. I was in the theater in St. Louis when, as Hamlet, he drove Laertes off the stage and out into the alleyway.”
I saw Booth’s eyes grow dark and ominous, and, rising, he said:
“Sir, I do not doubt that you think you saw that, but of course you did not. That incident never took place. It has been told to me as having happened in four or five different cities in this Union. Good night, sir.” And he was off to bed.
Booth was a superman and showed it in many ways, but there is just one incident which he told me, himself, that proves him one in my eyes. When I see another man’s mind working, I compare it with my own, and when I see that mind doing things that my own could never do, I realize there are grades of mentality that I do not understand and cannot reach; so I bow down and worship. I do not remember how the subject of religion ever arose between us, but he said that the Booths had always been superstitious folk and that he himself had at one time been almost a convinced spiritualist. Having made up his mind on the subject, he was talking to his friend Kellar, the magician. Kellar explained to him how all the wonderful miracles were worked at the seances and then performed before Booth’s very eyes, tricks more wonderful than any he had seen done in the spiritualistic meetings. All of these Kellar explained also.