ic performance is composed, and without this care
for detail--which must be precise, logical, profound, vigilant,
unerring, and at the same time always unobtrusive and seemingly
involuntary--there can be neither cohesion, nor symmetry, nor an
illusory image consistently maintained; and all great effects would
become tricks of mechanism and detached exploits of theatrical force.

The absence of this thoroughness in such acting as that of Edwin Booth
would instantly be felt; its presence is seldom adequately appreciated.
We feel the perfect charm of the illusion in the great fourth act of
_Richelieu_--one of the most thrilling situations, as Booth fills it,
that ever were created upon the stage; but we should not feel this had
not the foreground of character, incident, and experience been prepared
with consummate thoroughness. The character of Richelieu is one that the
elder Booth could never act. He tried it once, upon urgent solicitation,
but he had not proceeded far before he caught Joseph around the waist,
and with that astonished friar in his arms proceeded to dash into a
waltz, over which the curtain was dropped. He had no sympathy with the
moonlight mistiness and lace-like complexity of that weird and
many-fibred nature. It lacked for him the reality of the imagination,
the trumpet blare and tempest rush of active passion. But Edwin Booth,
coming after Forrest, who was its original in America, has made
Richelieu so entirely his own that no actor living can stand a
comparison with him in the character. Macready was the first
representative of the part, as everybody knows, and his performance of
it was deemed magnificent; but when Edwin Booth acted it in London in
1880, old John Ryder, the friend and advocate of Macready, who had
participated with him in all his plays, said to the American tragedian,
with a broken voice and with tears in his eyes, "You have thrown down my
idol." Two at least of those great moments in acting that everybody
remembers were furnished by Booth in this character--the defiance of the
masked assailant, at Rouel, and the threat of excommunication delivered
upon Barradas. No spectator possessed of imagination and sensibility
ever saw, without utter forgetfulness of the stage, the imperial
entrance of that Richelieu into the gardens of the Louvre and into the
sullen presence of hostile majesty. The same spell of genius is felt in
kindred moments of his greater impersonations. His Iago, standing