Stephen Foster, the Song-Writer--A Friend Comes to the Rescu His Originality--"My Old Kentucky Home" and the "Old Folks at Home"--General Sherman and "Marching Through Georgia"
I have received many letters touching what I said a little while ago of Stephen Collins Foster, the song writer. In that matter I had, and could have had, no unkindly thought or purpose. The story of the musical scrapbook rested not with me, but as I stated, upon the averment of Will S. Hays, a rival song writer. But that the melody of Old Folks at Home may be found in Schubert's posthumous Rosemonde admits not of contradiction for there it is, and this would seem to be in some sort corroborative evidence of the truth of Hays' story.
Among these letters comes one from Young E. Allison which is entitled to serious consideration. Mr. Allison is a gentleman of the first order of character and culture, an editor and a musician, and what he writes cannot fail to carry with it very great weight. I need make no apology for quoting him at length.
"I have long been collecting material about Foster from his birth to his death," says Mr. Allison, "and aside from his weak and fatal love of drink, which developed after he was twenty-five, and had married, his life was one continuous devotion to the study of music, of painting, of poetry and of languages; in point of fact, of all the arts that appeal to one who feels within him the stir of the creative. He was, quite singularly enough, a fine mathematician, which undoubtedly aided him in the study of music as a science, to which time and balance play such an important part. In fact, I believe it was the mathematical devil in his brain that came to hold him within such bare and primitive forms of composition and so, to some extent, to delimit the wider development of his genius.
"Now as to Foster's drinking habits, however unfortunate they proved to him they did not affect the quality of his art as he bequeathed it to us. No one cares to recall the unhappy fortunes of Burns, De Musset, Chopin or--even in our own time--of O. Henry, and others who might be named. In none of their productions does the hectic fever of over-stimulation show itself. No purer, gentler or simpler aspirations were ever expressed in the varying forms of music and verse than flowed from Foster's pen, even as penetrating benevolence came from the pen of O. Henry, embittered and solitary as his life had been. Indeed when we come to regard what the drinkers of history have done for the world in spite of the artificial stimulus they craved, we may say with Lincoln as Lincoln said of Grant, 'Send the other generals some of the same brand.'
"Foster was an aristocrat of aristocrats, both by birth and gifts. He inherited the blood of Richard Steele and of the Kemble family, noted in English letters and dramatic annals. To these artistic strains he added undoubtedly the musical temperament of an Italian grandmother or great-grand-mother. He was a cousin of John Rowan, the distinguished Kentucky lawyer and senator. Of Foster's family, his father, his brothers, his sisters were all notable as patriots, as pioneers in engineering, in commerce and in society. One of his brothers designed and built the early Pennsylvania Railroad system and died executive vice-president of that great corporation. Thus he was born to the arts and to social distinction. But, like many men of the creative temperament, he was born a solitary, destined to live in a land of dreams. The singular beauty and grace of his person and countenance, the charm of his voice, manner and conversation, were for the most part familiar to the limited circle of his immediate family and friends. To others he was reticent, with a certain hauteur of timidity, avoiding society and public appearances to the day of his death.
"Now those are the facts about Foster. They certainly do not describe the 'ne'er-do-well of a good family' who hung round barrooms, colored-minstrel haunts and theater entrances. I can find only one incident to show that Foster ever went to hear his own songs sung in public. He was essentially a solitary, who, while keenly observant of and entering sympathizingly into the facts of life, held himself aloof from immediate contact with its crowded stream. He was solitary from sensitivity, not from bitterness or indifference. He made a large fortune for his day with his songs and was a popular idol.
"Let us come now to the gravamen of my complaint. You charge on the authority of mere gossip from the late Will S. Hays, that Foster did not compose his own music, but that he had obtained a collection of unpublished manuscripts by an unnamed old 'German musician and thus dishonestly, by pilfering and suppression' palmed off upon the public themes and compositions which he could not himself have originated. Something like this has been said about every composer and writer, big and little, whose personality and habits did not impress his immediate neighbors as implying the possession of genius. The world usually expects direct inheritance and a theatric impressiveness of genius in its next-door neighbor before it accepts the proof of his works alone. For that reason Napoleon's paternity in Corsica was ascribed to General Maboeuf, and Henry Clay's in early Kentucky to Patrick Henry. That legend of the 'poor, unknown German musician' who composed in poverty and secrecy the deathless songs that have obsessed the world of music lovers, has been told of numberless young composers on their way to fame, but died out in the blaze of their later work. I have no doubt they told it of Foster, as they did also of Hays. And Colonel Hays doubtless repeated it to you as the intimate gossip about Foster.
"I have an article written by Colonel Hays and published in and cut from The Courier-Journal some twelve years after the composer's death, in which he sketches the life and work of Stephen Collins Foster. In that article he lays especial stress upon the surprising originality of the Foster themes and of their musical setting. He praises their distinct American or rather native inspiration and flavor, and describes from his own knowledge of Foster how they were 'written from his heart.' No mention or suggestion in it of any German or other origin for any of those melodies that the world then and now cherishes as American in costume, but universal in appeal. While you may have heard something in Schubert's compositions that suggested something in Foster's most famous song, still I venture to say it was only a suggestion, such as often arises from the works of composers of the same general type. Schubert and Foster were both young sentimentalists and dreamers who must have had similar dreams that found expression in their similar progressions.
"The German musicians from whom Foster got inspiration to work were Beethoven, Glück, Weber, Mozart. He was a student of all of them and of the Italian school also, as some of his songs show. Foster's first and only music teacher--except in the 'do-re-mi' exercises in his schoolboy life--testifies that Foster's musical apprehension was so quick, his intuitive grasp of its science so complete that after a short time there was nothing he could teach him of the theory of composition; that his pupil went straight to the masters and got illustration and discipline for himself.
"This was to be expected of a precocious genius who had written a concerted piece for flutes at thirteen, who was trying his wings on love songs at sixteen, and before he was twenty-one had composed several of the most famous of his American melodies, among them Oh Susannah, Old Dog Tray and Old Uncle Ned. As in other things he taught himself music, but he studied it ardently at the shrines of the masters. He became a master of the art of song writing. If anybody cares to hunt up the piano scores that Verdi made of songs from his operas in the days of Foster he will find that the great Italian composer's settings were quite as thin as Foster's and exhibited not much greater art. It was the fault of the times on the piano, not of the composers. It was not till long afterward that the color capacities of the piano were developed. As Foster was no pianist, but rather a pure melodist, he could not be expected to surpass his times in the management of the piano, the only 'orchestra' he had. It will not do to regard Foster as a crude musician. His own scores reveal him as the most artful of 'artless' composers.
"It is not even presumption to speak of him in the same breath with Verdi. The breadth and poignancy of Foster's melodies entitle them to the highest critical respect, as they have received worldwide appreciation from great musicians and plain music lovers. Wherever he has gone he has reached the popular heart. Here in the United States he has quickened the pulse beats of four generations. But this master creator of a country's only native songs has invariably here at home been apologized for as a sort of 'cornfield musician,' a mere banjo strummer, a hanger-on at barrooms where minstrel quartets rendered his songs and sent the hat round. The reflection will react upon his country; it will not detract from the real Foster when the constructive critic appears to write his brief and unfortunate life. I am not contending that he was a genius of the highest rank, although he had the distinction that great genius nearly always achieves, of creating a school that produced many imitators and established a place apart for itself in the world's estimation. In ballad writing he did for the United States what Watteau did for painting in France. As Watteau found a Flemish school in France and left a French school stamped forever, so Foster found the United States a home for imitations of English, Irish, German and Italian songs, and left a native ballad form and melodic strain forever impressed upon it as pure American.
"He was like Watteau in more than that. Watteau took the elegancies and fripperies of the corrupt French court and fixed them in art immortal, as if the moment had been arrested and held in actual motion. Foster took the curious and melancholy spectacle of African slavery at its height, superimposed by the most elegant and picturesque social manners this country has known, at the moment the institution was at its zenith. He saw the glamor, the humor, the tragedy, the contrasts, the emotional depths--that lay unplumbed beneath it all. He fixed it there for all time, for all hearts and minds everywhere. His songs are not only the pictorial canvas of that time, they are the emotional history of the times. It was done by a boy who was not prophet enough to foresee the end, or philosopher enough to demonstrate the conditions, but who was born with the intuition to feel it all and set it forth deeply and truly from every aspect.
"While Foster wrote many comic songs there is ever in them something of the melancholy undercurrent that has been detected under the laces and arabesques of Chopin's nominally frivolous dances. Foster's ballad form was extremely attenuated, but the melodic content filled it so completely that it seems to strain at the bounds and must be repeated and repeated to furnish full gratification to the ear. His form when compared with the modern ballad's amplitude seems like a Tanagra figurine beside a Michelangelo statue--but the figurine is as fine in its scope as the statue is in the greater.
"I hope you will think Foster over and revise him 'upward.'"
All of us need to be admonished to speak no evil of the dead. I am trying in Looking Backward to square the adjuration with the truth. Perhaps I should speak only of that which is known directly to myself. It costs me nothing to accept this statement of Mr. Allison and to incorporate it as an essential part of the record as far as it relates to the most famous and in his day the most beloved of American song writers.
Once at a Grand Army encampment General Sherman and I were seated together on the platform when the band began to play Marching Through Georgia, when the general said rather impatiently: "I wish I had a dollar for every time I have had to listen to that blasted tune."
And I answered: "Well, there is another tune about which I might say the same thing," meaning My Old Kentucky Home.
Neither of us was quite sincere. Both were unconsciously pleased to hear the familiar strains. At an open-air fiesta in Barcelona some American friends who made their home there put the bandmaster up to breaking forth with the dear old melody as I came down the aisle, and I was mightily pleased. Again at a concert in Lucerne, the band, playing a potpourri of Swiss songs, interpolated Kentucky's national anthem and the group of us stood up and sang the chorus.
I do not wonder that men march joyously to battle and death to drum and fife squeaking and rattling The Girl I Left Behind Me. It may be a long way to Tipperary, but it is longer to the end of the tether that binds the heart of man to the cradle songs of his nativity. With the cradle songs of America the name of Stephen Collins Foster "is immortal bound," and I would no more dishonor his memory than that of Robert Burns or the author of The Star-Spangled Banner.
Theodore Roosevelt--His Problematic Character--He Offers Me an Appointment--HisBonhomieand Chivalry--Proud of His Rebel Kin
It is not an easy nor yet a wholly congenial task to write--truthfully, intelligently and frankly to write--about Theodore Roosevelt. He belonged to the category of problematical characters. A born aristocrat, he at no time took the trouble to pose as a special friend of the people; a born leader, he led with a rough unsparing hand. He was the soul of controversy. To one who knew him from his childhood as I did, always loving him and rarely agreeing with him, it was plain to see how his most obvious faults commended him to the multitude and made for a popularity that never quite deserted him.
As poorly as I rate the reign of majorities I prefer it to the one-man power, either elective or dynastic. The scheme of a third term in the presidency for General Grant seemed to me a conspiracy though with many of its leaders I was on terms of affectionate intimacy. I fought and helped to kill in 1896 the unborn scheme to give Mr. Cleveland a third term. Inevitably as the movement for the retention of Theodore Roosevelt beyond the time already fixed began to show itself in 1907, my pen was primed against it and I wrote variously and voluminously.
There appeared in one of the periodicals for January, 1908, a sketch of mine which but for a statement issued concurrently from the White House would have attracted more attention than it did. In this I related how at Washington just before the War of Sections I had a musical pal--the niece of a Southern senator--who had studied in Paris, been a protégée of the Empress Eugénie and become an out-and-out imperialist. Louis Napoleon was her ideal statesman. She not only hated the North but accepted as gospel truth all the misleading theories of the South: that cotton was king; that slavery was a divine institution; that in any enterprise one Southern man was a match for six Northern men.
On these points we had many contentions. When the break came she went South with her family. The last I saw of her was crossing Long Bridge in a lumbering family carriage waving a tiny Confederate flag.
Forty-five years intervened. I had heard of her from time to time wandering aimlessly over Europe, but had not met her until the preceding winter in a famous Southern homestead. There she led me into a rose garden, and seated beneath its clustered greeneries she said with an air of triumph, "Now you see, my dear old friend, that I was right and you were wrong all the time."
Startled, and altogether forgetful, I asked in what way.
"Why," she answered, "at last the South is coming to its own."
Still out of rapport with her thought I said something about the obliteration of sectionalism and the arrival of political freedom and general prosperity. She would none of this.
Henry Watterson (Photograph taken in Florida)Henry Watterson (Photograph taken in Florida)
"I mean," she abruptly interposed, "that the son of Martha Bullock has come to his own and he will rescue us from the mudsills of the North."
She spoke as if our former discussions had been but yesterday. Then I gave her the right of way, interjecting a query now and then to give emphasis to her theme, while she unfolded the plan which seemed to her so simple and easy; God's own will; the national destiny, first a third term, and then life tenure à la Louis Napoleone for Theodore Roosevelt, the son of Martha Bullock, the nephew of our great admiral, who was to redress all the wrongs of the South and bring the Yankees to their just deserts at last.
"If," I ended my sketch, "out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, why not out of the brain of this crazed old woman of the South?"
Early in the following April I came from my winter home in Florida to the national capital, and the next day was called by the President to the White House.
"The first thing I want to ask," said he, "is whether that old woman was a real person or a figment of your imagination?"
"She was a figment of my imagination," I answered, "but you put her out of business with a single punch. Why didn't you hold back your statement a bit? If you had done so there was room for lots of sport ahead."
He was in no mood for joking. "Henry Watterson," he said, "I want to talk to you seriously about this third-term business. I will not deny that I have thought of the thing--thought of it a great deal." Then he proceeded to relate from his point of view the state of the country and the immediate situation. He spoke without reserve of his relations to the nearest associated public men, of what were and what were not his personal and party obligations, his attitude toward the political questions of the moment, and ended by saying, "What do you make of all this?"
"Mr. President," I replied, "you know that I am your friend, and as your friend I tell you that if you go out of here the fourth of next March placing your friend Taft in your place you will make a good third to Washington and Lincoln; but if you allow these wild fellows willy-nilly to induce you, in spite of your declaration, to accept the nomination, substantially for a third term, all issues will be merged in that issue, and in my judgment you will not carry a state in the Union."
As if much impressed and with a show of feeling he said: "It may be so. At any rate I will not do it. If the convention nominates me I will promptly send my declination. If it nominates me and adjourns I will call it together again and it will have to name somebody else."
As an illustration of the implacability which pursued him I may mention that among many leading Republicans to whom I related the incident most of them discredited his sincerity, one of them--a man of national importance--expressing the opinion that all along he was artfully playing for the nomination. This I do not believe. Perhaps he was never quite fixed in his mind. The presidency is a wondrous lure. Once out of the White House--what else and what----?
Upon his return from one of his several foreign journeys a party of some hundred or more of his immediate personal friends gave him a private dinner at a famous uptown restaurant. I was placed next him at table. It goes without saying that we had all sorts of a good time--he Cæsar and I Brutus--the prevailing joke the entente between the two.
"I think," he began his very happy speech, "that I am the bravest man that ever lived, for here I have been sitting three hours by the side of Brutus--have repeatedly seen him clutch his knife--without the blink of an eye or the turn of a feature."
To which in response when my turn came I said: "You gentlemen seem to be surprised that there should be so perfect an understanding between our guest and myself. But there is nothing new or strange in that. It goes back, indeed, to his cradle and has never been disturbed throughout the intervening years of political discussion--sometimes acrimonious. At the top of the acclivity of his amazing career--in the very plenitude of his eminence and power--let me tell you that he offered me one of the most honorable and distinguished appointments within his gift."
"Tell them about that, Marse Henry," said he.
"With your permission, Mr. President, I will," I said, and continued: "The centenary of the West Point Military Academy was approaching. I was at dinner with my family at a hotel in Washington when General Corbin joined us. 'Will you,' he abruptly interjected, 'accept the chairmanship of the board of visitors to the academy this coming June?'
"'What do you want of me?' I asked.
"'It is the academy's centenary, which we propose to celebrate, and we want an orator.'
"'General Corbin,' said I, 'you are coming at me in a most enticing way. I know all about West Point. Here at Washington I grew up with it. I have been fighting legislative battles for the Army all my life. That you Yankees should come to a ragged old rebel like me for such a service is a distinction indeed, and I feel immensely honored. But which page of the court calendar made you a plural? Whom do you mean by "we"?'
"'Why,' he replied in serio-comic vein, 'the President, the Secretary of War and Me, myself.'
"I promised him to think it over and give him an answer. Next day I received a letter from the President, making the formal official tender and expressing the hope that I would not decline it. Yet how could I accept it with the work ahead of me? It was certain that if I became a part of the presidential junket and passed a week in the delightful company promised me, I would be unfit for the loyal duty I owed my belongings and my party, and so reluctantly--more reluctantly than I can tell you--I declined, obliging them to send for Gen. Horace Porter and bring him over from across the ocean, where he was ably serving as Ambassador to France. I need not add how well that gifted and versatile gentleman discharged the distinguished and pleasing duty."
The last time I met Theodore Roosevelt was but a little while before his death. A small party of us, Editor Moore, of Pittsburgh, and Mr. Riggs, of the New York Central, at his invitation had a jolly midday breakfast, extending far into the afternoon. I never knew him happier or heartier. His jocund spirit rarely failed him. He enjoyed life and wasted no time on trivial worries, hit-or-miss, the keynote to his thought.
The Dutch blood of Holland and the cavalier blood of England mingled in his veins in fair proportion. He was especially proud of the uncle, his mother's brother, the Southern admiral, head of the Confederate naval organization in Europe, who had fitted out the rebel cruisers and sent them to sea. And well he might be, for a nobler American never lived. At the close of the War of Sections Admiral Bullock had in his possession some half million dollars of Confederate money. Instead of appropriating this to his own use, as without remark or hindrance he might have done, he turned it over to the Government of the United States, and died a poor man.
The inconsistencies and quarrels in which Theodore Roosevelt was now and again involved were largely temperamental. His mind was of that order which is prone to believe what it wants to believe. He did not take much time to think. He leaped at conclusions, and from his premise his conclusion was usually sound. His tastes were domestic, his pastime, when not at his books, field sports.
He was not what might be called convivial, though fond of good company--very little wine affecting him--so that a certain self-control became second nature to him.
To be sure, he had no conscientious or doctrinal scruples about a third term. He had found the White House a congenial abode, had accepted the literal theory that his election in 1908 would not imply a third but a second term, and he wanted to remain. In point of fact I have an impression that, barring Jackson and Polk, most of those who have got there were loath to give it up. We know that Grant was, and I am sure that Cleveland was. We owe a great debt to Washington, because if a third why not a fourth term? And then life tenure after the manner of the Caesars and Cromwells of history, and especially the Latin-Americans--Bolivar, Rosas and Diaz?
Away back in 1873, after a dinner, Mr. Blaine took me into his den and told me that it was no longer a surmise but a fact that the group about General Grant, who had just been reflected by an overwhelming majority, was maneuvering for a third term. To me this was startling, incredible. Returning to my hotel I saw a light still burning in the room of Senator Morton, of Indiana, and rapping at the door I was bidden to enter. Without mentioning how it had reached me, I put the proposition to him. "Certainly," he said, "it is true."
The next day, in a letter to the Courier-Journal, I reduced what I had heard to writing. Reading this over it seemed so sensational that I added a closing paragraph, meant to qualify what I had written and to imply that I had not gone quite daft.
"These things," I wrote, "may sound queer to the ear of the country. They may have visited me in my dreams; they may, indeed, have come to me betwixt the sherry and the champagne, but nevertheless I do aver that they are buzzing about here in the minds of many very serious and not unimportant persons."
Never was a well-intentioned scribe so berated and ridiculed as I, never a simple news gatherer so discredited. Democratic and Republican newspapers vied with one another which could say crossest things and laugh loudest. One sentence especially caught the newspaper risibilities of the time, and it was many a year before the phrase "between the sherry and the champagne" ceased to pursue me. That any patriotic American, twice elevated to the presidency, could want a third term, could have the hardihood to seek one was inconceivable. My letter was an insult to General Grant and proof of my own lack of intelligence and restraint. They lammed me, laughed at me, good and strong. On each successive occasion of recurrence I have encountered the same criticism.
The Actor and the Journalist--The Newspaper and the State--Joseph Jefferson--His Personal and Artistic Career--Modest Character and Religious Belief
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."
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.
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.
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 wasmeine 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.
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 hismétier. 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 herule 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!
The Writing of Memoirs--Some Characteristics of Carl Shurz--Sam Bowles--Horace White and the Mugwumps
Talleyrand was so impressed by the world-compelling character of the memoirs he had prepared for posterity that he fixed an interdict of more than fifty years upon the date set for their publication, and when at last the bulky tomes made their appearance, they excited no especial interest--certainly created no sensation--and lie for the most part dusty upon the shelves of the libraries that contain them. For a different reason, Henry Ward Beecher put a time limit upon the volume, or volumes, which will tell us, among other things, all about one of the greatest scandals of modern times; and yet how few people now recall it or care anything about the dramatis personæ and the actual facts! Metternich, next after Napoleon and Talleyrand, was an important figure in a stirring epoch. He, too, indicted an autobiography, which is equally neglected among the books that are sometimes quoted and extolled, but rarely read. Rousseau, the half insane, and Barras, the wholly vicious, have twenty readers where Talleyrand and Metternich have one.
From this point of view, the writing of memoirs, excepting those of the trivial French School or gossiping letters and diaries of the Pepys-Walpole variety, would seem an unprofitable task for a great man's undertaking. Boswell certainly did for Johnson what the thunderous old doctor could not have done for himself. Nevertheless, from the days of Cæsar to the days of Sherman and Lee, the captains of military and senatorial and literary industry have regaled themselves, if they have not edified the public, by the narration of their own stories; and, I dare say, to the end of time, interest in one's self, and the mortal desire to linger yet a little longer on the scene--now and again, as in the case of General Grant, the assurance of honorable remuneration making needful provision for others--will move those who have cut some figure in the world to follow the wandering Celt in the wistful hope--
Around my fire an evening group to draw,And tell of all I felt and all I saw.
Something like this occurs to me upon a reperusal of the unfinished memoirs of my old and dear friend, Carl Schurz. Assuredly few men had better warrant for writing about themselves or a livelier tale to tell than the famous German-American, who died leaving that tale unfinished. No man in life was more misunderstood and maligned. There was nothing either erratic or conceited about Schurz, nor was he more pragmatic than is common to the possessor of positive opinions along with the power to make their expression effectual.
The actual facts of his public life do not anywhere show that his politics shifted with his own interests. On the contrary, he was singularly regardless of his interests where his convictions interposed. Though an alien, and always an alien, he possessed none of the shifty traits of the soldier of fortune. Never in his career did he crook the pregnant hinges of the knee before any worldly throne of grace or flatter any mob that place might follow fawning. His great talents had only to lend themselves to party uses to get their full requital. He refused them equally to Grant in the White House and the multitude in Missouri, going his own gait, which could be called erratic only by the conventional, to whom regularity is everything and individuality nothing.
Schurz was first of all and above all an orator. His achievements on the platform and in the Senate were undeniable. He was unsurpassed in debate. He had no need to exploit himself. The single chapter in his life on which light was desirable was the military episode. The cruel and false saying, "I fight mit Sigel und runs mit Schurz," obviously the offspring of malignity, did mislead many people, reënforced by the knowledge that Schurz was not an educated soldier. How thoroughly he disposes of this calumny his memoirs attest. Fuller, more convincing vindication could not be asked of any man; albeit by those familiar with the man himself it could not be doubted that he had both courage and aptitude for military employment.
A philosopher and an artist, he was drawn by circumstance into the vortex of affairs. Except for the stirring events of 1848, he might have lived and died a professor at Bonn or Heidelberg. If he had pursued his musical studies at Leipsic he must have become a master of the piano keyboard. As it was, he played Schumann and Chopin creditably. The rescue of Kinkel, the flight from the fatherland, the mild Bohemianizing in Paris and London awakened within him the spirit of action rather than of adventure.
There was nothing of the Dalgetty about him; too reflective and too accomplished. His early marriage attests a domestic trend, from which he never departed; though an idealist in his public aspirations and aims he was a sentimentalist in his home life and affections. Genial in temperament and disposition, his personal habit was moderation itself.
He was a German. Never did a man live so long in a foreign country and take on so few of its thoughts and ways. He threw himself into the anti-slavery movement upon the crest of the wave; the flowing sea carried him quickly from one distinction to another; the ebb tide, which found him in the Senate of the United States, revealed to his startled senses the creeping, crawling things beneath the surface; partyism rampant, tyrannous and corrupt; a self-willed soldier in the White House; a Blaine, a Butler and a Garfield leading the Representatives, a Cameron and a Conkling leading the Senate; single-minded disinterestedness, pure unadulterated conviction, nowhere.
Jobs and jobbing flourished on every side. An impossible scheme of reconstruction was trailing its slow, putrescent length along. The revenue service was thick with thieves, the committees of Congress were packed with mercenaries. Money-making in high places had become the order of the day. Was it for this that oceans of patriotism, of treasure and of blood had been poured out? Was it for this that he had fought with tongue and pen and sword?
There was Sumner--the great Sumner--who had quarreled with Grant and Fish, to keep him company and urge him on. There was the Tribune, the puissant Tribune--two of them, one in New York and the other in Chicago--to give him countenance. There was need of liberalizing and loosening things in Missouri, for which he sat in the Senate--they could not go on forever half the best elements in the State disfranchised.
Thus the Liberal Movement of 1872.
Schurz went to Cincinnati elate with hope. He was an idealist--not quite yet a philosopher. He had his friends about him. Sam Bowles--the first newspaper politician of his day, with none of the handicaps carried by Raymond and Forney--a man keen of insight and foresight, fertile of resources, and not afraid--stood foremost among them. Next came Horace White. Doric in his simplicity like a marble shaft, and to the outer eye as cold as marble, but below a man of feeling, conviction and tenacity, a working journalist and a doughty doctrinaire. A little group of such men formed itself about Schurz--then only forty-three years old--to what end? Why, Greeley, Horace Greeley, the bellwether of abolitionism, the king bee of protectionism, the man of fads and isms and the famous "old white hat."
To some of us it was laughable. To Schurz it was tragical. A bridge had to be constructed for him to pass--for retrace his steps he could not--and, as it were, blindfolded, he had to be backed upon this like a mule aboard a train of cars. I sometimes wonder what might have happened if Schurz had then and there resigned his seat in the Senate, got his brood together and returned to Germany. I dare say he would have been welcomed by Bismarck.
Certainly there was no lodgment for him thenceforward in American politics. The exigencies of 1876-77 made him a provisional place in the Hayes Administration; but, precisely as the Democrats of Missouri could put such a man to no use, the Republicans at large could find no use for him. He seemed a bull in a china shop to the political organization he honored with a preference wholly intellectual, and having no stomach for either extreme, he became a Mugwump.
He was a German. He was an artist. By nature a doctrinaire, he had become a philosopher. He could never wholly adjust himself to his environment. He lectured Lincoln, and Lincoln, perceiving his earnest truthfulness and genuine qualities, forgave him his impertinence, nor ceased to regard him with the enduring affection one might have for an ardent, aspiring and lovable boy. He was repellant to Grant, who could not and perhaps did not desire to understand him.... To him the Southerners were always the red-faced, swashbuckling slave-drivers he had fancied and pictured them in the days of his abolition oratory. More and more he lived in a rut of his own fancies, wise in books and counsels, gentle in his relations with the few who enjoyed his confidence; to the last a most captivating personality.
Though fastidious, Schurz was not intolerant. Yet he was hard to convince--tenacious of his opinions--courteous but insistent in debate. He was a German; a German Herr Doktor of Music, of Letters and of Common Law. During an intimacy of more than thirty years we scarcely ever wholly agreed about any public matter; differing about even the civil service and the tariff. But I admired him hugely and loved him heartily.
I had once a rather amusing encounter with him. There was a dinner at Delmonico's, from whose program of post-prandial oratory I had purposely caused my own name to be omitted. Indeed, I had had with a lady a wager I very much wished to win that I would not speak. General Grant and I went in together, and during the repast he said that the only five human beings in the world whom he detested were actually here at table.
Of course, Schurz was one of these. He was the last on the list of speakers and, curiously enough--the occasion being the consideration of certain ways and means for the development of the South--and many leading Southerners present--he composed his speech out of an editorial tour de force he was making in the Evening Post on The Homicidal Side of Southern Life. Before he had proceeded half through General Grant, who knew of my wager, said, "You'll lose your bet," and, it being one o'clock in the morning, I thought so too, and did not care whether I won or lost it. When he finished, the call on me was spontaneous and universal. "Now give it to him good," said General Grant.
And I did; I declared--the reporters were long since gone--that there had not been a man killed amiss in Kentucky since the war; that where one had been killed two should have been; and, amid roars of laughter which gave me time to frame some fresh absurdity, I delivered a prose paean to murder.
Nobody seemed more pleased than Schurz himself, and as we came away--General Grant having disappeared--he put his arm about me like a schoolboy and said: "Well, well, I had no idea you were so bloody-minded."