Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/168

ONCE A CLOWN, ALWAYS A CLOWN This reception of Booth, born of sympathy, love, idolatry and hot partisanship, continued for seventeen minutes, Bell said, rising and falling, but never stopping, and stimulated by the muffled roar of a mob rioting outside and the hoots and catcalls of a bitter minority in the theater. The majority wished the actor to know that they held him blameless for the insane act of his brother. Booth repeatedly tried to stem the demonstration and continue with his lines. Failing, he finally sank to a bench and wept with bowed head, the hysterical spectators sobbing with him.

Edwin Forrest, his contemporary, was touched with genius, but he was physical, while Booth was intellectual and spiritual, and Forrest, too, was of the declamatory school, his acting marred with mannerisms and elaborate artifice. While Booth was essentially a tragedian, Hamlet his greatest role, he was a comedian of the first rank. No one ever played Petruchio in "The Taming of the Shrew" with a finer, defter comic touch.

For that matter, no man ever was a truly great tragedian who lacked the comic sense. I doubt that a man ever reached the full measure of greatness in any vocation without that saving