The Actor and the Journalist—The Newspaper and the State—Joseph Jefferson—His Personal and Artistic Career—Modest Character and Religious Belief

I

The journalist and the player have some things in common. Each turns night into day. I have known rather intimately all the eminent English-speaking actors of my time from Henry Irving and Charles Wyndham to Edwin Booth and Joseph Jefferson, from Charlotte Cushman to Helena Modjeska. No people are quite so interesting as stage people.

During nearly fifty years my life and the life of Joseph Jefferson ran close upon parallel lines. He was eleven years my senior; but after the desultory acquaintance of a man and a boy we came together under circumstances which obliterated the disparity of age and established between us a lasting bond of affection. His wife, Margaret, had died, and he was passing through Washington with the little brood of children she had left him.

It made the saddest spectacle I had ever seen. As I recall it after more than sixty years, the scene of silent grief, of unutterable helplessness, has still a haunting power over me, the oldest lad not eight years of age, the youngest a girl baby in arms, the young father aghast before the sudden tragedy which had come upon him. There must have been something in my sympathy which drew him toward me, for on his return a few months later he sought me out and we fell into the easy intercourse of established relations.

I was recovering from an illness, and every day he would come and read by my bedside. I had not then lost the action of one of my hands, putting an end to a course of musical study I had hoped to develop into a career. He was infinitely fond of music and sufficiently familiar with the old masters to understand and enjoy them. He was an artist through and through, possessing a sweet nor yet an uncultivated voice—a blend between a low tenor and a high baritone—I was almost about to write a “contralto,” it was so soft and liquid. Its tones in speech retained to the last their charm. Who that heard them shall ever forget them?

Early in 1861 my friend Jefferson came to me and said: “There is going to be a war of the sections. I am not a warrior. I am neither a Northerner nor a Southerner. I cannot bring myself to engage in bloodshed, or to take sides. I have near and dear ones North and South. I am going away and I shall stay away until the storm blows over. It may seem to you unpatriotic, and it is, I know, unheroic. I am not a hero; I am, I hope, an artist. My world is the world of art, and I must be true to that; it is my patriotism, my religion. I can do no manner of good here, and I am going away.”

II

At that moment statesmen were hopefully estimating the chances of a peaceful adjustment and solution of the sectional controversy. With the prophet instinct of the artist he knew better. Though at no time taking an active interest in politics or giving expression to party bias of any kind, his personal associations led him into a familiar knowledge of the trend of political opinion and the portent of public affairs, and I can truly say that during the fifty years that passed thereafter I never discussed any topic of current interest or moment with him that he did not throw upon it the side lights of a luminous understanding, and at the same time an impartial and intelligent judgment.

His mind was both reflective and radiating. His humor though perennial was subdued; his wit keen and spontaneous, never acrid or wounding. His speech abounded with unconscious epigram. He had his beliefs and stood by them; but he was never aggressive. Cleaner speech never fell from the lips of man. I never heard him use a profanity. We once agreed between ourselves to draw a line across the salacious stories so much in vogue during our day; the wit must exceed the dirt; where the dirt exceeded the wit we would none of it.

He was a singularly self-respecting man; genuinely a modest man. The actor is supposed to be so familiar with the pubic as to be proof against surprises. Before his audience he must be master of himself, holding the situation and his art by the firmest grip. He must simulate, not experience emotion, the effect referable to the seeming, never to the actuality involving the realization.

Mr. Jefferson held to this doctrine and applied it rigorously. On a certain occasion he was playing Caleb Plummer. In the scene between the old toy-maker and his blind daughter, when the father discovers the dreadful result of his dissimulation—an awkward hitch; and, the climax quite thwarted, the curtain came down. I was standing at the wings.

“Did you see that?” he said as he brushed by me, going to his dressing-room.

“No,” said I, following him. “What was it?”

He turned, his eyes still wet and his voice choked. “I broke down,” said he; “completely broke down. I turned away from the audience to recover myself. But I failed and had the curtain rung.”

The scene had been spoiled because the actor had been overcome by a sudden flood of real feeling, whereas he was to render by his art the feeling of a fictitious character and so to communicate this to his audience. Caleb’s cue was tears, but not Jefferson’s.

On another occasion I saw his self-possession tried in a different way. We were dining with a gentleman who had overpartaken of his own hospitality. Mr. Murat Halstead was of the company. There was also a German of distinction, whose knowledge of English was limited. The Rip Van Winkle craze was at its height. After sufficiently impressing the German with the rare opportunity he was having in meeting a man so famous as Mr. Jefferson, our host, encouraged by Mr. Halstead, and I am afraid not discouraged by me, began to urge Mr. Jefferson to give us, as he said, “a touch of his mettle,” and failing to draw the great comedian out he undertook himself to give a few descriptive passages from the drama which was carrying the town by storm. Poor Jefferson! He sat like an awkward boy, helpless and blushing, the German wholly unconscious of the fun or even comprehending just what was happening—Halstead and I maliciously, mercilessly enjoying it.

III

I never heard Mr. Jefferson make a recitation or, except in the singing of a song before his voice began to break, make himself a part of any private entertainment other than that of a spectator and guest.

He shrank from personal displays of every sort. Even in his younger days he rarely “gagged,” or interpolated, upon the stage. Yet he did not lack for a ready wit. One time during the final act of Rip Van Winkle, a young countryman in the gallery was so carried away that he quite lost his bearings and seemed to be about to climb over the outer railing. The audience, spellbound by the actor, nevertheless saw the rustic, and its attention was being divided between the two when Jefferson reached that point in the action of the piece where Rip is amazed by the docility of his wife under the ill usage of her second husband. He took in the situation at a glance.

Casting his eye directly upon the youth in the gallery, he uttered the lines as if addressing them directly to him, “Well, I would never have believed it if I had not seen it.”

The poor fellow, startled, drew back from his perilous position, and the audience broke into a storm of applause.

Joseph Jefferson was a Swedenborgian in his religious belief. At one time too extreme a belief in spiritualism threatened to cloud his sound, wholesome understanding. As he grew older and happier and passed out from the shadow of his early tragedy he fell away from the more sinister influence the supernatural had attained over his imagination. One time in Washington I had him to breakfast to meet the Chief Justice and Mr. Justice Matthews and Mr. Carlisle, the newly-elected Speaker of the House. It was a rainy Sunday, and it was in my mind to warn him that our company was made up of hard-headed lawyers not apt to be impressed by fairy tales and ghost stories, and to suggest that he cut the spiritualism in case the conversation fell, as was likely, into the speculative. I forgot, or something hindered, and, sure enough, the question of second sight and mind reading came up, and I said to myself: “Lord, now we’ll have it.” But it was my kinsman, Stanley Matthews, who led off with a clairvoyant experience in his law practice. I began to be reassured. Mr. Carlisle followed with a most mathematical account of some hobgoblins he had encountered in his law practice. Finally the Chief Justice, Mr. Waite, related a series of incidents so fantastic and incredible, yet detailed with the precision and lucidity of a master of plain statement, as fairly to stagger the most believing ghostseer. Then I said to myself again: “Let her go, Joe, no matter what you tell now you will fall below the standard set by these professional perfecters of pure reason, and are safe to do your best, or your worst.” I think he held his own, however.

IV

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!