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!