Going the other evening to see "Rip Van Winkle," the old question of
its moral naturally came up, and Portia warmly asserted that it was
shameful to bring young children to see a play in which the exquisite
skill of Jefferson threw a glamour upon the sorriest vice.
"See," she said, "the earnest, tearful interest with which these boys
and girls near us hang upon the story. The charm to them of the scene
and of the acting is indescribable. Do you suppose they can escape the
effect? All their sympathy is kindled for the good-natured and
good-for-nothing reprobate, and when Gretchen turns him out into the
night and the storm, they cannot help feeling that it is she, not he,
who has ruined the home, and that the drunken vagabond, who has just
made his endearments the cover of deception, is really the victim of a
virago. And when he returns, old and decrepit, and, we might hope,
purged of that fatal appetite which has worked all the woe, it is his
old victim, the woman whose youth his evil habits ruined, and who, in
consequence of those habits was driven into the power of the
tormentor, Derrick von Beekman, who hands him 'the cup that shall be
death in tasting,' as if it were she, and not he, who had been
properly chastened and converted from the fatal error of supposing
that drunkenness is not a good thing.
"No, no," said Portia, indignantly and eloquently, raising her voice
to that degree that the Easy Chair feared to hear the appalling "'sh!
'sh!" of the disturbed neighbors; "it is a grossly immoral spectacle,
and the subtler and more fascinating the genius of Mr. Jefferson in
the representation, the more deadly is the effect."
The drop had just fallen, and the scene on the mountains was about to
open. The house had been darkened, and as the clear, quiet, unforced
tone of Rip, yielding, not remonstrating, to the doom that we all knew
and he did not, fell upon the hushed audience, the eyes of men and
women were full of tears; while the orchestra murmured, _mezzo voce_,
during the storm within and without the house, the tenderly pathetic
melody of the "Lorelei:"
"I know not what it presages,
This heart with sadness fraught;
'Tis a tale of the olden ages
That will not from my thought."
It was not easy to find in the emotion of that moment a response to
Portia's accusation of gross immorality. There was but a poetic figure
in the mind--the sweet-natured, weak-willed, simple-hearted vagabond
of the village and the mountain--touching the heart with pity, and, in
the drunken scene, with sorrow. This figure excludes all the rest. Its
symmetry and charm are the triumph of the play as acted. Now the
immorality can not lie in the kindly feeling for the tippling
vagabond, for that is natural and universal. Indeed, the same kind of
weakness that leads to a habit of tippling belongs often to the most
charming and attractive natures, and the representation of the fact
upon the stage is not in itself immoral. The immorality must be found,
if anywhere, as Portia insisted, in the charm with which vice is
invested.
But is it so invested in this play? It used to be urged against
Bulwer's early novels that they made scoundrels fascinating, and that
boys after reading them would prefer rascals to honest men. If that
had been the fact, the novels would have been justly open to that
censure. But, tried by this standard, Rip Van Winkle, as Mr. Jefferson
plays it, is far from an immoral play. The picture as he paints it is
moral in the same sense that nature is moral. No man, shiftless, idle,
and drunken, afraid to go home, ashamed before his children, without
self-respect or the regard of others, however gentle and sweet, and
however much a favorite with the boys and girls and animals he may be,
is a man whose courses those boys will wish to imitate or who will
make vice more tasteful to them. The pathos of the second part of the
play, in which the change of age mingled with mystery is marvellously
portrayed, is largely due to the consciousness that this melancholy
end is all due to that woful beginning. The expulsion of Derrick and
his nephew is nothing, the happiness of Meenie and her lover is
nothing, the release of Gretchen is nothing, there is only a wasted
old man, without companions, the long prime of whose life has been
lost in unconsciousness, and who, suddenly awaking, looks at us
pitifully from the edge of the grave.
By the most prosaic standards this should not seem to adorn vice with
attraction. It is true that the spectator is more interested in Rip
than in his wife, and that she is made a virago. But it is not his
drunkenness that charms, and her virtue is at least severe. Indeed, if
this performance is to be tried by this standard, the play must be
regarded as a temperance mission. For temperance is to be inculcated
upon the youthful spectators who sit near us not so much by stories
and pictures of the furious brute who drives wife and children from a
home made desolate by him, and who fly from him as from a demon, as by
this simple, faithful showing of the kind-hearted loiterer who makes
wretched a wife who yet loves him, and who denounces himself to the
child that he loves. This is the fair view of it as a picture of
ordinary human life.
But, as we look, the low wail of the sad music is in our ears, the
scene changes to a weird world of faery, the story merges in a dream,
and Rip Van Winkle smiles at us from a realm beyond the diocese of
conscience. If conscience, indeed, will obtrude, conscience shall be
satisfied. It is a sermon if you will, but if you will, also, it is a
poem.