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 circ.u.mstances, 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. a.s.suredly, 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 att.i.tude 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 Lemaitre. 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 d.i.c.kens to a Shakespeare. Sir Henry Irving and Sir Charles Wyndham in England, M. Coquelin in France, his contemporaries--each had his _metier_. 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!
Chapter the Twenty-Fourth
The Writing of Memoirs--Some Characteristics of Carl Shurz--Sam Bowles--Horace White and the Mugwumps
I
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 personae 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 Caesar 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 a.s.surance 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. a.s.suredly 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 mult.i.tude 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 unsurpa.s.sed 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, reenforced 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 apt.i.tude for military employment.
II
A philosopher and an artist, he was drawn by circ.u.mstance 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 pa.s.s--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.
III
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.