Joseph Jefferson came to his artistic spurs slowly but surely, being
nearly thirty years of age when he got his chance, and therefore wholly
equal to it and prepared for it.
William E. Burton stood and had stood for twenty-five years the
recognized, the reigning king of comedy in America. He was a master of
his craft as well as a leader in society and letters. To look at him
when he came upon the stage was to laugh; yet he commanded tears almost
as readily as laughter. In New York City particularly he ruled the
roost, and could and did do that which had cost another his place. He
began to take too many liberties with the public favor and, truth to
say, was beginning to be both coarse and careless. People were growing
restive under ministrations which were at times little less than
impositions upon their forbearance. They wanted something if possible
as strong, but more refined, and in the person of the leading comedy
man of Laura Keene’s company, a young actor by the name of Jefferson,
they got it.
Both Mr. Sothern and Mr. Jefferson have told the story of Tom Taylor’s
extravaganza, “Our American Cousin,” in which the one as Dundreary, the
other as Asa Trenchard, rose to almost instant popularity and fame. I
shall not repeat it except to say that Jefferson’s Asa Trenchard was
unlike any other the English or American stage has known. He played the
raw Yankee boy, not in low comedy at all, but made him innocent and
ignorant as a well-born Green Mountain lad might be, never a bumpkin;
and in the scene when Asa tells his sweetheart the bear story and
whilst pretending to light his cigar burns the will, he left not a dry
eye in the house.
New York had never witnessed, never divined anything in pathos and
humor so exquisite. Burton and his friends struggled for a season, but
Jefferson completely knocked them out. Even had Burton lived, and had
there been no diverting war of sections to drown all else, Jefferson
would have come to his growth and taken his place as the first
serio-comic actor of his time.
Rip Van Winkle was an evolution. Jefferson’s half-brother, Charles
Burke, had put together a sketchy melodrama in two acts and had played
in it, was playing in it when he died. After his Trenchard, Jefferson
turned himself loose in all sorts of parts, from Diggory to Mazeppa, a
famous burlesque, which he did to a turn, imitating the mock heroics of
the feminine horse marines, so popular in the equestrian drama of the
period, Adah Isaacs Menken, the beautiful and ill-fated, at their head.
Then he produced a version of Nicholas Nickleby, in which his Newman
Noggs took a more ambitious flight. These, however, were but the
avant-couriers of the immortal Rip.
Charles Burke’s piece held close to the lines of Irving’s legend. When
the vagabond returns from the mountains after the twenty years’ sleep
Gretchen is dead. The apex is reached when the old man, sitting dazed
at a table in front of the tavern in the village of Falling Water, asks
after Derrick Van Beekman and Nick Vedder and other of his cronies. At
last, half twinkle of humor and half glimmer of dread, he gets himself
to the point of asking after Dame Van Winkle, and is told that she has
been dead these ten years. Then like a flash came that wonderful
Jeffersonian change of facial expression, and as the white head drops
upon the arms stretched before him on the table he says: “Well, she led
me a hard life, a hard life, but she was the wife of my bosom, she was
_meine frau!_”
I did not see the revised, or rather the newly-created and written, Rip
Van Winkle until Mr. Jefferson brought it to America and was playing it
at Niblo’s Garden in New York. Between himself and Dion Boucicault a
drama carrying all the possibilities, all the lights and shadows of his
genius had been constructed. In the first act he sang a drinking song
to a wing accompaniment delightfully, adding much to the tone and color
of the situation. The exact reversal of the Lear suggestion in the last
act was an inspiration, his own and not Boucicault’s. The weird scene
in the mountains fell in admirably with a certain weird note in the
Jefferson genius, and supplied the needed element of variety.
I always thought it a good acting play under any circumstances, but, in
his hands, matchless. He thought himself that the piece, as a piece,
and regardless of his own acting, deserved better of the critics than
they were always willing to give it. Assuredly, no drama that ever was
written, as he played it, ever took such a hold upon the public. He
rendered it to three generations, and to a rising, not a falling,
popularity, drawing to the very last undiminished audiences.
Because of this unexampled run he was sometimes described by unthinking
people as a one-part actor. Nothing could be farther from the truth. He
possessed uncommon versatility. That after twenty years of the new Rip
Van Winkle, when he was past fifty years of age, he could come back to
such parts as Caleb Plummer and Acres is proof of this. He need not
have done so at all. Carrying a pension roll of dependents aggregating
fifteen or twenty thousand a year for more than a quarter of a century,
Rip would still have sufficed his requirements. It was his love for his
art that took him to The Cricket and The Rivals, and at no
inconsiderable cost to himself.
I have heard ill-natured persons, some of them envious actors, say that
he did nothing for the stage.
He certainly did not make many contributions to its upholstery. He was
in no position to emulate Sir Henry Irving in forcing and directing the
public taste. But he did in America quite as much as Sir Charles
Wyndham and Sir Henry Irving in England to elevate the personality, the
social and intellectual standing of the actor and the stage, effecting
in a lifetime a revolution in the attitude of the people and the clergy
of both countries to the theater and all things in it. This was surely
enough for one man in any craft or country.
He was always a good stage speaker. Late in life he began to speak
elsewhere, and finally to lecture. His success pleased him immensely.
The night of the Sunday afternoon charity for the Newsboys’ Home in
Louisville, when the promise of a talk from him had filled the house to
overflowing, he was like a boy who had come off from a college occasion
with all the honors. Indeed, the degrees of Harvard and Yale, which had
reached him both unexpectedly and unsolicited, gave him a pleasure
quite apart from the vanity they might have gratified in another; he
regarded them, and justly, as the recognition at once of his profession
and of his personal character.
I never knew a man whose moral sensibilities were more acute. He loved
the respectable. He detested the unclean. He was just as attractive off
the stage as upon it, because he was as unaffected and real in his
personality as he was sincere and conscientious in his public
representations, his lovely nature showing through his art in spite of
him. His purpose was to fill the scene and forget himself.
V
The English newspapers accompanied the tidings of Mr. Jefferson’s death
with rather sparing estimates of his eminence and his genius, though
his success in London, where he was well known, had been unequivocal.
Indeed, himself, alone with Edwin Booth and Mary Anderson, may be said
to complete the list of those Americans who have attained any real
recognition in the British metropolis. The Times spoke of him as “an
able if not a great actor.” If Joseph Jefferson was not a great actor I
should like some competent person to tell me what actor of our time
could be so described.
Two or three of the journals of Paris referred to him as “the American
Coquelin.” It had been apter to describe Coquelin as the French
Jefferson. I never saw Frederic Lemaître. But, him apart, I have seen
all the eccentric comedians, the character actors of the last fifty
years, and, in spell power, in precision and deftness of touch, in
acute, penetrating, all-embracing and all-embodying intelligence and
grasp, I should place Joseph Jefferson easily at their head.
Shakespeare was his Bible. The stage had been his cradle. He continued
all his days a student. In him met the meditative and the observing
faculties. In his love of fishing, his love of painting, his love of
music we see the brooding, contemplative spirit joined to the alert in
mental force and foresight when he addressed himself to the activities
and the objectives of the theater. He was a thorough stage manager,
skillful, patient and upright. His company was his family. He was not
gentler with the children and grandchildren he ultimately drew about
him than he had been with the young men and young women who had
preceded them in his employment and instruction.
He was nowise ashamed of his calling. On the contrary, he was proud of
it. His mother had lived and died an actress. He preferred that his
progeny should follow in the footsteps of their forebears even as he
had done. It is beside the purpose to inquire, as was often done, what
might have happened had he undertaken the highest flights of tragedy;
one might as well discuss the relation of a Dickens to a Shakespeare.
Sir Henry Irving and Sir Charles Wyndham in England, M. Coquelin in
France, his contemporaries—each had his _métier_. They were perfect in
their art and unalike in their art. No comparison between them can be
justly drawn. I was witness to the rise of all three of them, and have
followed them in their greatest parts throughout their most brilliant
and eminent and successful careers, and can say of each as of Mr.
Jefferson:
_More than King can no man be—Whether he rule in Cyprus or in Dreams._
There shall be Kings of Thule after kings are gone. The actor dies and
leaves no copy; his deeds are writ in water, only his name survives
upon tradition’s tongue, and yet, from Betterton and Garrick to Irving,
from Macklin and Quin to Wyndham and Jefferson, how few!