In this way I got closer to the marvellous lines of the actor's face, and was enabled to read and record the subtler, fleeter shadows of his expression. I have never looked upon a face with such transcendent power of externalizing and differentiating emotions, and I have never heard a voice of equal beauty and majesty.
Booth taught millions of Americans the dignity, the power and the music of the English tongue. He set a high mark in grace and precision of gesture, and the mysterious force of his essentially tragic spirit made so deep an impression upon those who heard him that they confused him with the characters he portrayed. As for me—I could not sleep for hours after leaving the theater.
Line by line I made mental note of the actor's gestures, accents, and cadences and afterward wrote them carefully down. As I closed my eyes for sleep I could hear that solemn chant "Duncan is in his grave. After life's fitful fever he sleeps well." With horror and admiration I recalled him, when as Sir Giles, with palsied hand helpless by his side, his face distorted, he muttered as if to himself, "Some undone widow sits upon my sword," or when as Petruchio in making a playful snatch at Kate's hand with the blaze of a lion's anger in his eye his voice rang out, "Were it the paw of an angry bear, I'd smite it off—but as it's Kate's I kiss it."
To the boy from the cabin on the Dakota plain these stage pictures were of almost incommunicable beauty and significance. They justified me in all my daring. They made any suffering past, present, or future, worth while, and the knowledge that these glories were evanescent and that I must soon return to the Dakota plain only deepened their power and added to the grandeur of every scene.
Booth's home at this time was on Beacon Hill, and I used to walk reverently by just to see where the great man housed. Once, the door being open, I caught a momentary glimpse of a curiously ornate umbrella stand, and the soft glow of a distant lamp, and the vision greatly enriched me. This singularly endowed artist presented to me the radiant summit of human happiness and glory, and to see him walk in or out of his door was my silent hope, but alas, this felicity was denied me!
Under the spell of these performers, I wrote a series of studies of the tragedian in his greatest rôles. "Edwin Booth as Lear," "Edwin Booth as Hamlet," and so on, recording with minutest fidelity every gesture, every accent, till four of these impersonations were preserved on the page as if in amber. I re-read my Shakespeare in the light of Booth's eyes, in the sound of his magic voice, and when the season ended, the city grew dark, doubly dark for me. Thereafter I lived in the fading glory of that month.
These were growing days! I had moments of tremendous expansion, hours when my mind went out over the earth like a freed eagle, but these flights were always succeeded by fits of depression as I realized my weakness and my poverty. Nevertheless I persisted in my studies.
Under the influence of Spencer I traced a parallel development of the Arts and found a measure of scientific peace. Under the inspiration of Whitman I pondered the significance of democracy and caught some part of its spiritual import. With Henry George as guide, I discovered the main cause of poverty and suffering in the world, and so in my little room, living on forty cents a day, I was in a sense profoundly happy. So long as I had a dollar and a half with which to pay my rent and two dollars for the keepers of the various dives in which I secured my food, I was imaginatively the equal of Booth and brother to the kings of song.
And yet one stern persistent fact remained, my money was passing and I was growing weaker and paler every day. The cockroaches no longer amused me. Coming as I did from a land where the sky made up half the world I resented being thus condemned to a nook from which I could see only a gray rag of mist hanging above a neighboring chimney.
In the moments when I closely confronted my situation the glory of the western sky came back to me, and it must have been during one of these dreary storms that I began to write a poor faltering little story which told of the adventures of a cattleman in the city. No doubt it was the expression of the homesickness at my own heart but only one or two of the chapters ever took shape, for I was tortured by the feeling that no matter how great the intellectual advancement caused by hearing Edwin Booth in Hamlet might be, it would avail me nothing when confronted by the school committee of Blankville, Illinois.