In his acting also there was something of the same inevitable change that time brings to all things and all men; but to me he always remained the most powerful and consummate tragedian I have ever seen. Some of the old force may have faded, but it flashed out at intervals in every performance with all its ancient brilliancy.
The last time that I saw him on the stage,
“Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,”
was also the last night that Barrett ever played. The piece was “Richelieu,” and it seemed to me that Booth excelled himself in the finish of the earlier scenes and in the tempest of passion at the climax. During this engagement I went behind the scenes as I had used to go a quarter of a century before, and found all the old fascination still, subdued and softened by his more chastened dignity. But he played only a few times after his friend Barrett was stricken, and then his own ailings increased.
After this I never met him out of his own rooms but once. I called just as he was about to try to walk, and he asked me to go with him. He had to be assisted to the door, and when he reached the street I offered him my arm. He took it and leaned heavily. He stumbled as he walked, and it took us half an hour to move around the block of buildings in which the club-house stands. Then he was tired, and wanted to go in, and I knew that my friend would not recover.
In his rooms at the Players’ Club I saw my last of him. For a year or two he seldom left them except to visit his daughter in town or country, or perhaps to accompany her to a play. But he spent many hours in her society and that of her husband and children—his greatest solace. I fortunately was near him during this period, and we often passed a morning talking of our early manhood or his later career.
But there was something inexpressibly painful in the spectacle of him, whose physical faculties had been so inextricably bound up with the intellectual, whose bodily gifts had been the incarnation of passion and romance and poetry, his corporal charm the fit 267 embodiment of a noble soul—to see him decay, his powers crumble and waste away; to see him decrepit, weary, worn, who had been alive with expression, captivating in bearing, majestic, terrible, tender, by turns. Only his eyes retained their marvellous beauty, like a lamp burning in a deserted temple, or the soul looking out through the windows of that body it was soon to leave.
