THE STAGE AMERICAN IN THE CHARACTER PLAY.
"What hempen homespuns have we swaggering here?"
_A Midsummer-Night's Dream_, Act iii. Sc. 1.
The typical and accepted American of the stage, the most familiar figure
in our dramatic literature, is a Jonathan, an Asa Trenchard, a Rip Van
Winkle, a Solon Shingle, a Bardwell Slote, a Mulberry Sellers, and a
Joshua Whitcomb; and even he does not always figure in the American play
as it is here defined.
[Illustration: WILLIAM J. FLORENCE AS BARDWELL SLOTE.]
Jonathan, of whom something has already been said, is now extinct and
defunct. Asa Trenchard is the creation of an Englishman (Tom Taylor),
brought to perfection by the genius of Mr. Jefferson. Rip Van Winkle, as
has been said before, is a Dutchman taken from the pages of Irving's
familiar tale, and so accentuated by the genius of this same Jefferson in
the present generation, that the fact that he had distinguished
predecessors in the same character, but in other dramatizations of the
story, is almost forgotten now. Hackett was the original Rip in 1830.
Of his performance Sol Smith wrote then: "I should despair of finding a
man or a woman in an audience of five hundred who could hear Hackett's
utterance of five words in the second act, 'But she vas mine vrow,'
without experiencing some moisture in the eyes." The second Rip Van Winkle
was Charles Burke, a half-brother of Mr. Jefferson who considers Burke's
the best Rip Van Winkle of the trio. He was the author of his own version
of the play. Concerning his "_Are we so soon forgot?_" L. Clarke Davis
quotes John S. Clarke as saying: "It fell upon the senses like the
culmination of all mortal despair, and the actor's figure, as the low
sweet tones died away, symbolized more the ruin of a representative of a
race than the sufferings of an individual. His awful loss and loneliness
seemed to clothe him with a supernatural dignity and grandeur which
commanded the sympathy and awe of his audience." Mr. Clarke adds that in
supporting Mr. Burke in this part night after night, and while perfectly
aware of what was coming, and even watching for it, when these lines were
spoken his heart seemed to rise in his throat, and his eyes were wet with
tears. The _Rip Van Winkle_ which Mr. Jefferson has played so often on
both sides of the Atlantic is his own version of the story, somewhat
elaborated by Mr. Boucicault; and Mr. Jefferson's Rip Van Winkle is Rip
Van Winkle himself.
It was Charles Burke who first discovered the possibilities lying dormant
in the character of Solon Shingle, a sort of Yankee juvenile Paul Pry, in
a two-act drama called _The People's Lawyer_, by Dr. J. S. Jones. "Yankee"
Hill and Joshua Silsbee--both admirable representatives of Yankee
character parts--played Solon Shingle as a young man, with all of the
"Down-East" characteristics which distinguish stage Down-Easters; and it
was not until he fell into the hands of Burke that he became the
simple-minded, phenomenally shrewd old man from New England, with a soul
which soared no higher than the financial value of a bar'l of apple-sass.
Until Mr. Owens, the last of the Solon Shingles, died and took Solon
Shingle with him, the drivelling old farmer from Massachusetts was as
perfect a specimen of his peculiar species as our stage has ever seen.
Judge Bardwell Slote may be called with justice "a humorous satire," which
is the subtitle given by Benjamin Woolf to the play of _The Mighty
Dollar_, in which he is found. He is a politician of the worst stamp, with
many amiable and commendable qualities. He is vulgar to an almost
impossible degree, personally offensive, and yet entirely delightful to
meet--on the stage, where Mr. Florence kept him for many hundreds of
successive nights. If he never existed in real life--and it is to be hoped
for the sake of our national credit that he did not--Mr. Florence made him
not only possible but probable.
[Illustration: JOHN T. RAYMOND.]
_The Senator_, written by David Lloyd, and retouched by Sydney Rosenfeld
for Wm. H. Crane, is a native legislator of a somewhat different type. He
is an honest politician, who may perhaps be found in the Senate of one of
the States of the nation, and even in the Upper House of the nation
itself. He is a man of energy and of what is called "snap"; he is full of
engagements which he has no time to keep; he is loquacious, of course, for
loquacity is part of his business capital; he is loud, self-made,
self-educated, self-reliant, and not always refined. His humor is
peculiarly American, and in Mr. Crane's hands he is very human.
Mr. Warner and Mr. Clemens, jointly with John T. Raymond, are responsible
for the character of Colonel Mulberry Sellers, a stage American from the
Southern States. He is quite as much exaggerated as Slote, and quite as
amusing. He can be found in part in all sections of the country, perhaps,
but as a whole, happily for the country, he does not exist at all, except
upon the stage.
The great charm of Joshua Whitcomb is that he is a real man of real New
England flesh and blood, so true to the life that when Mr. Thompson took
him to Keene, New Hampshire, not very far from Swanzey, his audiences
wanted their money back, on the ground that they got nothing for it but
what they saw, free of charge, all about them every day. "It warn't no
actin'; it was jest a lot of fellers goin' around and doin' things." The
manner in which Mr. Thompson goes about in _The Old Homestead_, and does
things, is the perfection of art; and if he is not the best of his class,
it is not because he is the least natural and the least lovable.
It is a curious commentary upon the rarity of typical stage Americans of
the gentler sex that only two of any prominence have appeared of late
years, and that these are everything but gentle, and are both played by a
man. Mrs. Barney Williams and Mrs. Florence were very popular as "Yankee
gals" with a previous generation; but to Neil Burgess must we turn now for
the only correct picture of the women who are fit to mate (upon the stage)
with those heroes of the stage who fill our rural homesteads and our
legislative lobbies. The Widow Bedott, and her friend of _The County
Fair_, most assuredly are worthy of equal rights with Joshua Whitcomb and
Bardwell Slote.
[Illustration: NEIL BURGESS AS THE WIDOW BEDOTT.
Drawn by Arthur Jule Goodman, after a photograph by Falk.--From the
collection of Evert Jansen Wendell.]