The Actor and the Journalist—The Newspaper and the State—Joseph
Jefferson—His Personal and Artistic Career—Modest Character and
Religious Belief
I
The journalist and the player have some things in common. Each turns
night into day. I have known rather intimately all the eminent
English-speaking actors of my time from Henry Irving and Charles
Wyndham to Edwin Booth and Joseph Jefferson, from Charlotte Cushman to
Helena Modjeska. No people are quite so interesting as stage people.
During nearly fifty years my life and the life of Joseph Jefferson ran
close upon parallel lines. He was eleven years my senior; but after the
desultory acquaintance of a man and a boy we came together under
circumstances which obliterated the disparity of age and established
between us a lasting bond of affection. His wife, Margaret, had died,
and he was passing through Washington with the little brood of children
she had left him.
It made the saddest spectacle I had ever seen. As I recall it after
more than sixty years, the scene of silent grief, of unutterable
helplessness, has still a haunting power over me, the oldest lad not
eight years of age, the youngest a girl baby in arms, the young father
aghast before the sudden tragedy which had come upon him. There must
have been something in my sympathy which drew him toward me, for on his
return a few months later he sought me out and we fell into the easy
intercourse of established relations.
I was recovering from an illness, and every day he would come and read
by my bedside. I had not then lost the action of one of my hands,
putting an end to a course of musical study I had hoped to develop into
a career. He was infinitely fond of music and sufficiently familiar
with the old masters to understand and enjoy them. He was an artist
through and through, possessing a sweet nor yet an uncultivated voice—a
blend between a low tenor and a high baritone—I was almost about to
write a “contralto,” it was so soft and liquid. Its tones in speech
retained to the last their charm. Who that heard them shall ever forget
them?
Early in 1861 my friend Jefferson came to me and said: “There is going
to be a war of the sections. I am not a warrior. I am neither a
Northerner nor a Southerner. I cannot bring myself to engage in
bloodshed, or to take sides. I have near and dear ones North and South.
I am going away and I shall stay away until the storm blows over. It
may seem to you unpatriotic, and it is, I know, unheroic. I am not a
hero; I am, I hope, an artist. My world is the world of art, and I must
be true to that; it is my patriotism, my religion. I can do no manner
of good here, and I am going away.”