Joseph Jefferson has been seen again--and with all the enthusiasm of
many years ago--in _Rip Van Winkle_. The playbill which announces his
appearance makes no mention of Washington Irving, but claims the play
as ‘written by Dion Boucicault.’ It needs, however, no very profound
student to detect in that tender and graceful fancy of the story, a
quality not to be numbered among the useful talents of the versatile
dramatist who can give us anything that lies between _London Assurance_
and the _Shaughraun_. But I believe that, after all these years, the
work of three hands is really to be found in the play; Mr. Jefferson
himself having manipulated much of its action and business. He does not
act the piece: he lives in it. And he is only to be compared with Got,
in Balzac’s _Mercadet_. Both performances are restrained and reserved,
without the appearance of restraint and reserve. Both are quiet. There
are no dramatic outbursts, and no surprises. But in each case a
character, a career--one might almost say a life itself--is put before
the spectator. Greater things have undoubtedly been done upon the
stage--greater things have been done on the stage of our day by Irving,
and greater remain to be done by him--but nothing quite so complete has
been seen: nothing giving one the sense of so easy and unlaboured a
mastery. The pathos is very gentle: the humour has something of Charles
Lamb in it. Jefferson has a face of the utmost good-humour; very kindly
eyes, gentle ways, which win upon the children and the dumb things of
his village of Falling Waters. For it is certainly his village, this
Falling Waters; we cannot seriously separate the actor from the man.
And he has a voice of admirable quality and compass: an enunciation of
the utmost distinctness, with no perceptible mannerism, unless, indeed,
the studied quietness be itself a mannerism. The voice is capable of
what would be called an almost womanly tenderness, by those who have
never observed that the tenderness of a man--as here to children--may
be even a profounder thing.
In _Rip Van Winkle_ he plays a winning character. We have all of us a
weakness for the amiable ne’er-do-well, who begins by ruining himself,
and ends--much against his feeble inclination--by ruining his children
and his friends. Our sympathy is wholly with him, and not with his
irritated wife; and when he has drunk away his fortune, and all that
he can of hers, we think that if he sits quietly under her reproaches,
or makes but a gentle answer, he has atoned for everything. That is
the magnetism of the lovable. And that is the kind of character that
Mr. Jefferson embodies, in a manner so entirely natural that you are
constantly forgetting that it is a performance. He has learned nothing
by rote. He has an easy way of seeking for his words: a half-absorbed
repetition of part of a phrase, as in our everyday, unchosen speech. He
does not finish his sentence like an actor who has learned his lines
and counted the delivery of them, and measured them to the end. The
common actor winds up an address as Rossini and his school wind up a
finale--‘I have the honour to remain your humble and obedient servant,’
Schumann said of them. But Mr. Jefferson’s sentences die off sometimes,
or are changed a little, by a slight thing happening in his presence,
or by the swift occurrence of a fresh thought which you may read in his
face. It is the perfection of naturalness--the perfection of seeming
spontaneity.
And if his humour is as mild as Charles Lamb’s, his pathos is as gentle
as Hans Christian Andersen’s. There is the delicate suggestion, for
those who can seize it--the suggestion and nothing more. When Rip goes
out from the home from which his wife has at last banished him--goes
out pointing to the child, in answer to his wife’s reproach that he
has no part in this house: ‘You say I have no part in this house’--the
pathos is of a simple and suggested kind, comparable only to Hans
Andersen’s, in the _Story of a Mother_. And as there is nothing in
Literature like the one, there is little on the Stage like the other.
(_Academy_, 6th November 1875.)