conviction of his riper years; and if his life had been prolonged the
autumn of his professional career would have been gentle, serene, and
full of tranquil loveliness.
The achievement of Lawrence Barrett as an actor was great, but his
influence upon the stage was greater than his achievement. Among the
Shakespearian parts that he played were Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear,
Othello, Iago, Shylock, Leontes, Cassius, Wolsey, Richard III., Romeo,
and Benedick. Outside of Shakespeare (to mention only a few of his
impersonations) he acted Richelieu, Evelyn, Aranza, Garrick, Claude
Melnotte, Rienzi, Dan'l Druce, Lanciotto, Hernani, King Arthur, and
Ganelon. The parts in which he was superlatively fine,--and in some
respects incomparable,--are Cassius, Harebell, Yorick, Gringoire, King
Arthur, Ganelon, and James V., King of the Commons. In his time he had
played hundreds of parts, ranging over the whole field of the drama, but
as the years passed and the liberty of choice came more and more within
his reach, he concentrated his powers upon a few works and upon a
specific line of expression. The aspect of human nature and human
experience that especially aroused his sympathy was the loneliness of
beneficent intellectual grandeur, isolated by its supremacy and pathetic
in its isolation. He loved the character of Richelieu, and if he had
acted Becket, as he purposed to do, in Tennyson's tragedy, he would have
presented another and a different type of that same ideal--lonely,
austere, passionate age, defiant of profane authority and protective of
innocent weakness against wicked and cruel strength. His embodiment of
Cassius, with all its intensity of repressed spleen and caustic
malevolence, was softly touched and sweetly ennobled with the majesty of
venerable loneliness,--the bleak light of pathetic sequestration from
human ties, without the forfeiture of human love,--that is the natural
adjunct of intellectual greatness. He loved also the character of
Harebell, because in that he could express his devotion to the
beautiful, the honest impulses of his affectionate heart, and his ideal
of a friendship that is too pure and simple even to dream that such a
thing as guile can exist anywhere in the world. Toward the expression,
under dramatic conditions, of natures such as those, the development of
his acting was steadily directed; and, even if he fell short, in any
degree, of accomplishing all that he purposed, it is certain that his
spirit and his conduct dignified the theatrical profession, strengthened
the stage in the esteem of good men, and cheered the heart and fired the
energy of every sincere artist that came within the reach of his
example. For his own best personal success he required a part in which,
after long repression, the torrent of passion can break loose in a
tumult of frenzy and a wild strain of eloquent words. The terrible
exultation of Cassius, after the fall of Caesar, the ecstasy of Lanciotto
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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