JOSEPH JEFFERSON
Joseph Jeffersonhas been seen again—and with all the enthusiasm of many years ago—inRip 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 betweenLondon Assuranceand theShaughraun. 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’sMercadet. Both performances are restrained and reserved, without the appearance of restraint and reserve. Both are quiet. There are no dramaticoutbursts, 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.
InRip Van Winklehe 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 theStory 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.)