Lord of himself, though not of lands;
And having nothing yet hath all.
EDWIN BOOTH.
ON AND OFF THE STAGE.
Personal Recollections.
By Adam Badeau.
The Friday before Booth was taken ill, I spent two or three hours with him in his rooms at the Players’ Club, and while there it occurred to me that a picture, not of the actor merely, but of the man whom I had known for more than thirty years, in the glow of youth and the prime of manhood, down to the weary invalid, stricken before his time, in the characters that were not assumed—of husband, father, brother, son, and friend—would have an interest far beyond any critical analysis of his performances or historical account of his engagements. He did not object to my painting him as I had known him in the most intimate relations of his life—an actor is always used to being described and criticised—and he gave me incidents and information, all that I sought. Thus in what I have to say there will be nothing second-hand, nothing that he has not himself told me at one time or another, or that I have not observed in the friendship of a lifetime.
I first met him when he was twenty-three, and I only twenty-five years old, and from that time till his marriage and my own entrance into the army we were as intimate as it is possible for two young men to be. I have the right, therefore, to tell what I shall unfold, for he gave it to me, and I have a further right in the certainty that nothing I can tell will depreciate his fame. If I portray all that I know, no one who reads will fail to think more highly and tenderly of the nature that was cloaked under Richard and Iago, suggested perhaps by points in Othello and Lear, but only really indicated in Hamlet, the melancholy, moody, dreamy, filial, tender Dane.
He was born in 1833, in the night of the historical meteoric display—the “star-shower,” he always called it. His father was a famous actor in the parts which the son so often played. I never saw the elder, but others assured me he possessed a tragic genius perhaps at times even more tremendous than that of the Booth I knew. He was an Englishman, and the rival of Edmund Kean. The family tradition is that he was driven from London by a cabal of Kean’s admirers, and came to America in 1821, almost immediately after his marriage.
Junius Brutus Booth must have been an extraordinary person off the stage; erratic almost to insanity, gloomy, given to fits of passion, but full of warm affections; a man with a temper almost uncontrollable, yet more often morose than violent, who refused to play, even when announced, unless he was in the vein, and walked the streets for hours after acting, and sometimes before. His wife for years accompanied him to the theatre, acting as dresser, and Edwin was taken with them. He thus received his first impressions of the stage when he was three or four years old. The wife remained in the dressing-room during the play, and when the child grew sleepy he was put to bed in a chest of drawers that held his father’s wardrobe. If he wakened he had the theatrical wigs and paint-pots for his toys. A few years later he took his mother’s place and dressed his father for the stage.
