After lunch I called on Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. The “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” is now over eighty, but he is as young as ever, and will die with a kind smile on his face and a merry twinkle in his eyes. I know no more delightful talker than this delightful man. You may say of him that every time he talks he says something. When he asked me what it was I had found most interesting in America, I wished I could have answered: “Why, my dear doctor, to see and to hear such a man as you, to be sure!” But the doctor is so simple, so unaffected, that I felt an answer of that kind, though perfectly sincere, would not have been one calculated to please him. The articles “Over the Tea Cups,” which he writes every month for the Atlantic Monthly, and which will soon appear in book form, are as bright, witty, humorous, and philosophic as anything he ever wrote. Long may he live to delight his native land!
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In the evening I went to see Mr. Edwin Booth and Madame Modjeska in “Hamlet.” By far the two greatest tragedians of America in Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy. I expected great things. I had seen Mounet-Sully in the part, Henry Irving, Wilson Barrett; and I remembered the witty French quatrain, published on the occasion of Mounet-Sully attempting the part:
| Sans Fechter ni Rivière Le cas était hasardeux; Jamais, non jamais sur terre, On n’a fait d’Hamlet sans eux. |
I had seen Mr. Booth three times before. As Brutus, I thought he was excellent. As Richelieu he was certainly magnificent; as Iago ideally superb.
His Hamlet was a revelation to me. After seeing the raving Hamlet of Mounet-Sully, the somber Hamlet of Irving, and the dreamy Hamlet of Wilson Barrett, I saw this evening Hamlet the philosopher, the rhetorician.
Mr. Booth is too old to play Hamlet as he does, that is to say, without any attempt at making-up. He puts on a black wig, and that is all, absolutely all. It is, however, a most remarkable, subtle piece of acting in his hands.
Madame Modjeska was beautiful as Ophelia. No tragédienne that I have ever seen weeps more naturally. In all sad situations she makes the chords of one’s heart vibrate, and that without any trick or artifice, but simply by the modulations of her singularly sympathetic voice and such like natural means.
It is very seldom that you can see in America, outside of New York, more than one very good actor or actress playing together. So you may imagine the success of such a combination as Booth-Modjeska.
Every night the theater is packed from floor to ceiling, although the prices of admission are doubled.