Booth's tragedy is better than his elegant comedy. There are other actors who equal or surpass him in Benedick or Don Caesar. The comedy in which he excels is that of silvery speciousness and bitter sarcasm, as in portions of Iago and Richard the Third and the simulated madness of Lucius Brutus, and the comedy of grim drollery, as in portions of Richelieu—his expression of those veins being wonderfully perfect. But no other actor who has trod the American stage in our day has equalled him in certain attributes of tragedy that are essentially poetic. He is not at his best, indeed, in all the tragic parts that he acts; and, like his father, he is an uneven actor in the parts to which he is best suited. No person can be said to know Edwin Booth's acting who has not seen him play the same part several times. His artistic treatment will generally be found adequate, but his mood or spirit will continually vary. He cannot at will command it, and when it is absent his performance seems cold. This characteristic is, perhaps, inseparable from the poetic temperament. Each ideal that he presents is poetic; and the suitable and adequate presentation of it, therefore, needs poetic warmth and glamour. Booth never goes behind his poet's text to find a prose image in the pages of historic fact. The spectator who takes the trouble to look into his art will find it, indeed, invariably accurate as to historic basis, and will find that all essential points and questions of scholarship have been considered by the actor. But this is not the secret of its power upon the soul. That power resides in its charm, and that charm consists in its poetry. Standing on the lonely ramparts of Elsinore, and with awe-stricken, preoccupied, involuntary glances questioning the star-lit midnight air, while he talks with his attendant friends, Edwin Booth's Hamlet is the simple, absolute realisation of Shakespeare's haunted prince, and raises no question, and leaves no room for inquiry, whether the Danes in the Middle Ages wore velvet robes or had long flaxen hair. It is dark, mysterious, melancholy, beautiful—a vision of dignity and of grace, made sublime by suffering, made weird and awful by "thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls." Sorrow never looked more wofully and ineffably lovely than his sorrow looks in the parting scene with Ophelia, and frenzy never spoke with a wilder glee of horrid joy and fearful exultation than is heard in his tempestuous cry of delirium, "Nay, I know not: is it the king?"

An actor who is fine only at points is not, of course, a perfect actor. The remark of Coleridge about the acting of Edmund Kean, that it was like "reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning," has misled many persons as to Kean's art. Macready bears a similar testimony. But the weight of evidence will satisfy the reader that Kean was, in fact, a careful student and that he never neglected any detail of his art. This is certainly true of Edwin Booth. In the level plains that lie between the mountain-peaks of expression he walks with as sure a footstep and as firm a tread as on the summit of the loftiest crag or the verge of the steepest abyss. In 1877-78, in association with the present writer, he prepared for the press an edition of fifteen of the plays in which he acts, and these were published for the use of actors. There is not a line in either of those plays that he has not studiously and thoroughly considered; not a vexed point that he has not scanned; not a questionable reading that he has not, for his own purposes in acting, satisfactorily settled. His Shakespearean scholarship is extensive and sound, and it is no less minute than ample. His stage business has been arranged, as stage business ought to be, with scientific precision. If, as king Richard the Third, he is seen to be abstractedly toying with a ring upon one of his fingers, or unsheathing and sheathing his dagger, those apparently capricious actions would be found to be done because they were illustrative parts of that monarch's personality, warranted by the text and context. Many years ago an accidental impulse led him, as Hamlet, to hold out his sword, hilt foremost, toward the receding spectre, as a protective cross—the symbol of that religion to which Hamlet so frequently recurs. The expedient was found to justify itself and he made it a custom. In the graveyard scene of this tragedy he directs that one of the skulls thrown up by the first clown shall have a tattered and mouldy fool's-cap adhering to it, so that it may attract attention, and be singled out from the others, as "Yorick's skull, the king's jester." These are little things; but it is of a thousand little things that a dramatic performance is composed, and without this care for detail—which must be precise, logical, profound, vigilant, unerring, and at the same time always unobtrusive and seemingly involuntary—there can be neither cohesion, nor symmetry, nor an illusory image consistently maintained; and all great effects would become tricks of mechanism and detached exploits of theatrical force.

The absence of this thoroughness in such acting as that of Edwin Booth would instantly be felt; its presence is seldom adequately appreciated. We feel the perfect charm of the illusion in the great fourth act of Richelieu—one of the most thrilling situations, as Booth fills it, that ever were created upon the stage; but we should not feel this had not the foreground of character, incident, and experience been prepared with consummate thoroughness. The character of Richelieu is one that the elder Booth could never act. He tried it once, upon urgent solicitation, but he had not proceeded far before he caught Joseph around the waist, and with that astonished friar in his arms proceeded to dash into a waltz, over which the curtain was dropped. He had no sympathy with the moonlight mistiness and lace-like complexity of that weird and many-fibred nature. It lacked for him the reality of the imagination, the trumpet blare and tempest rush of active passion. But Edwin Booth, coming after Forrest, who was its original in America, has made Richelieu so entirely his own that no actor living can stand a comparison with him in the character. Macready was the first representative of the part, as everybody knows, and his performance of it was deemed magnificent; but when Edwin Booth acted it in London in 1880, old John Ryder, the friend and advocate of Macready, who had participated with him in all his plays, said to the American tragedian, with a broken voice and with tears in his eyes, "You have thrown down my idol." Two at least of those great moments in acting that everybody remembers were furnished by Booth in this character—the defiance of the masked assailant, at Rouel, and the threat of excommunication delivered upon Barradas. No spectator possessed of imagination and sensibility ever saw, without utter forgetfulness of the stage, the imperial entrance of that Richelieu into the gardens of the Louvre and into the sullen presence of hostile majesty. The same spell of genius is felt in kindred moments of his greater impersonations. His Iago, standing in the dark street, with sword in hand, above the prostrate bodies of Cassio and Roderigo, and as the sudden impulse to murder them strikes his brain, breathing out in a blood-curdling whisper, "How silent is this town!" his Bertuccio, begging at the door of the banquet-hall, and breaking down in hysterics of affected glee and maddening agony; his Lear, at that supreme moment of intolerable torture when he parts away from Goneril and Regan, with his wild scream of revenges that shall be the terrors of the earth; his Richard the Third, with the gigantic effrontery of his "Call him again," and with his whole matchless and wonderful utterance of the awful remorse speech with which the king awakens from his last earthly sleep—those, among many others, rank with the best dramatic images that ever were chronicled, and may well be cited to illustrate Booth's invincible and splendid adequacy at the great moments of his art.

Edwin Booth has been tried by some of the most terrible afflictions that ever tested the fortitude of a human soul. Over his youth, plainly visible, impended the lowering cloud of insanity. While he was yet a boy, and when literally struggling for life in the semi-barbarous wilds of old California, he lost his beloved father, under circumstances of singular misery. In early manhood he laid in her grave the woman of his first love—the wife who had died in absence from him, herself scarcely past the threshold of youth, lovely as an angel and to all that knew her precious beyond expression. A little later his heart was well-nigh broken and his life was well-nigh blasted by the crime of a lunatic brother that for a moment seemed to darken the hope of the world. Recovering from that blow, he threw all his resources and powers into the establishment of the grandest theatre in the metropolis of America, and he saw his fortune of more than a million dollars, together with the toil of some of the best years of his life, frittered away. Under all trials he has borne bravely up, and kept the even, steadfast tenor of his course; strong, patient, gentle, neither elated by public homage nor imbittered by private grief. Such a use of high powers in the dramatic art, and the development and maintenance of such a character behind them, entitle him to the affection of his countrymen, proud equally of his goodness and his renown.



V.

MARY ANDERSON: HERMIONE: PERDITA.

On November 25, 1875 an audience was assembled in one of the theatres of Louisville, Kentucky, to see "the first appearance upon any stage" of "a young lady of Louisville," who was announced to play Shakespeare's Juliet. That young lady was in fact a girl, in her sixteenth year, who had never received any practical stage training, whose education had been comprised in five years of ordinary schooling, whose observation of life had never extended beyond the narrow limits of a provincial city, who was undeveloped, unheralded, unknown, and poor, and whose only qualifications for the task she had set herself to accomplish were the impulse of genius and the force of commanding character. She dashed at the work with all the vigour of abounding and enthusiastic youth, and with all the audacity of complete inexperience. A rougher performance of Juliet probably was never seen, but through all the disproportion and turbulence of that effort the authentic charm of a beautiful nature was distinctly revealed. The sweetness, the sincerity, the force, the exceptional superiority and singular charm of that nature could not be mistaken. The uncommon stature and sumptuous physical beauty of the girl were obvious. Above all, her magnificent voice—copious, melodious, penetrating, loud and clear, yet soft and gentle—delighted every ear and touched every heart. The impersonation of Juliet was not highly esteemed by judicious hearers; but some persons who saw that performance felt and said that a new actress had risen and that a great career had begun. Those prophetic voices were right. That "young lady of Louisville" was Mary Anderson.

It is seldom in stage history that the biographer comes upon such a character as that of Mary Anderson, or is privileged to muse over the story of such a career as she has had. In many cases the narrative of the life of an actress is a narrative of talents perverted, of opportunity misused, of failure, misfortune, and suffering. For one story like that of Mrs. Siddons there are many like that of Mrs. Robinson. For one name like that of Charlotte Cushman or that of Helen Faucit there are many like that of Lucille Western or that of Matilda Heron—daughters of sorrow and victims of trouble. The mind lingers, accordingly, impressed and pleased with a sense of sweet personal worth as well as of genius and beauty upon the record of a representative American actress, as noble as she was brilliant, and as lovely in her domestic life as she was beautiful, fortunate, and renowned in her public pursuits. The exposition of her nature, as apprehended through her acting, constitutes the principal part of her biography.

Mary Anderson, a native of California, was born at Sacramento, July 28, 1859. Her father, Charles Joseph Anderson, who died in 1863, aged twenty-nine, and was buried in Magnolia cemetery, Mobile, Alabama, was an officer in the service of the Southern Confederacy at the time of his death, and he is said to have been a handsome and dashing young man. Her mother, Marie Antoinette Leugers, was a native of Philadelphia. Her earlier years were passed in Louisville, whither she was taken in 1860, and she was there taught in a Roman Catholic school and reared in the Roman Catholic faith under the guidance of a Franciscan priest, Anthony Miller, her mother's uncle. She left school before she was fourteen years old and she went upon the stage before she was sixteen. She had while a child seen various theatrical performances, notably those given by Edwin Booth, and her mind had been strongly drawn toward the stage under the influence of those sights. The dramatic characters that she first studied were male characters—those of Hamlet, Wolsey, Richelieu, and Richard III.—and to those she added Schiller's Joan of Arc. She studied those parts privately, and she knew them all and knew them well. Professor Noble Butler, of Louisville, gave her instruction in English literature and elocution, and in 1874, at Cincinnati, Charlotte Cushman said a few encouraging words to her, and told her to persevere in following the stage, and to "begin at the top." George Vandenhoff gave her a few lessons before she came out, and then followed her debut as Juliet, leading to her first regular engagement, which began at Barney Macaulay's Theatre, Louisville, January 20, 1876. From that time onward for thirteen years she was an actress,—never in a stock company but always as a star,—and her name became famous in Great Britain as well as America. She had eight seasons of steadily increasing prosperity on the American stage before she went abroad to act, and she became a favourite all over the United States. She filled three seasons at the Lyceum Theatre, London (from September 1, 1883, to April 5, 1884; from November 1, 1884, to April 25, 1885; and from September 10, 1887, to March 24, 1888), and her success there surpassed, in profit, that of any American actor who had appeared in England. She revived Romeo and Juliet with much splendour at the London Lyceum on November 1, 1884, and she restored A Winter's Tale to the stage, bringing forward that comedy on September 10, 1887, and carrying it through the season. She made several prosperous tours of the English provincial theatres, and established herself as a favourite actress in fastidious Edinburgh, critical Manchester, and impulsive but exacting Dublin. The repertory with which she gained fame and fortune included Juliet, Hermione, Perdita, Rosalind, Lady Macbeth, Julia, Bianca, Evadne, Parthenia, Pauline, The Countess, Galatea, Clarice, Ion, Meg Merrilies, Berthe, and the Duchess de Torrenueva. She incidentally acted a few other parts, Desdemona being one of them. Her distinctive achievements were in Shakespearean drama. She adopted into her repertory two plays by Tennyson, The Cup and The Falcon, but never produced them. This record signifies the resources of mind, the personal charm, the exalted spirit, and the patient, wisely directed and strenuous zeal that sustained her achievements and justified her success.

Aspirants in the field of art are continually coming to the surface. In poetry, painting, sculpture, music, and in acting—which involves and utilises those other arts—the line of beginners is endless. Constantly, as the seasons roll by, these essayists emerge, and as constantly, after a little time, they disappear. The process is sequent upon an obvious law of spiritual life,—that all minds which are conscious of the art impulse must at least make an effort toward expression, but that no mind can succeed in the effort unless, in addition to the art impulse, it possesses also the art faculty. For expression is the predominant necessity of human nature. Out of this proceed forms and influences of beauty. These react upon mankind, pleasing an instinct for the beautiful, and developing the faculty of taste. Other and finer forms and influences of beauty ensue, civilisation is advanced, and thus finally the way is opened toward that condition of immortal spiritual happiness which this process of experience prefigures and prophesies. But the art faculty is of rare occurrence. At long intervals there is a break in the usual experience of stage failure, and some person hitherto unknown not only takes the field but keeps it. When Garrick came out, as the Duke of Gloster, in the autumn of 1741, in London, he had never been heard of, but within a brief time he was famous. "He at once decided the public taste," said Macklin; and Pope summed up the victory in the well-known sentence, "That young man never had an equal, and will never have a rival." Tennyson's line furnishes the apt and comprehensive comment—"The many fail, the one succeeds." Mary Anderson in her day furnished the most conspicuous and striking example, aside from that of Adelaide Neilson, to which it is possible to refer of this exceptional experience. And yet, even after years of trial and test, it is doubtful whether the excellence of that remarkable actress was entirely comprehended in her own country. The provincial custom of waiting for foreign authorities to discover our royal minds is one from which many inhabitants of America have not yet escaped. As an actress, indeed, Mary Anderson was, probably, more popular than any player on the American stage excepting Edwin Booth or Joseph Jefferson; but there is a difference between popularity and just and comprehensive intellectual recognition. Many actors get the one; few get the other.

Much of the contemporary criticism that is lavished upon actors in this exigent period—so bountifully supplied with critical observations, so poorly furnished with creative art—touches only upon the surface. Acting is measured with a tape and the chief demand seems to be for form. This is right, and indeed is imperative, whenever it is certain that the actor at his best is one who never can rise above the high-water mark of correct mechanism. There are cases that need a deeper method of inquiry and a more searching glance. A wise critic, when this emergency comes, is something more than an expert who gives an opinion upon a professional exploit. The special piece of work may contain technical flaws, and yet there may be within it a soul worth all the "icily regular and splendidly null" achievements that ever were possible to proficient mediocrity. That soul is visible only to the observer who can look through the art into the interior spirit of the artist, and thus can estimate a piece of acting according to its inspirational drift and the enthralling and ennobling personality out of which it springs. The acting of Mary Anderson, from the first moment of her career, was of the kind that needs that deep insight and broad judgment,—aiming to recognise and rightly estimate its worth. Yet few performers of the day were so liberally favoured with the monitions of dullness and the ponderous patronage of self-complacent folly.

Conventional judgment as to Mary Anderson's acting expressed itself in one statement—"she is cold." There could not be a greater error. That quality in Mary Anderson's acting—a reflex from her spiritual nature—which produced upon the conventional mind the effect of coldness was in fact distinction, the attribute of being exceptional. The judgment that she was cold was a resentful judgment, and was given in a spirit of detraction. It proceeded from an order of mind that can never be content with the existence of anything above its own level. "He hath," said Iago, speaking of Cassio, "a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly." Those detractors did not understand themselves as well as the wily Italian understood himself, and they did not state their attitude with such precision; in fact, they did not state it at all, for it was unconscious with them and involuntary. They saw a being unlike themselves, they vaguely apprehended the presence of a superior nature, and that they resented. The favourite popular notion is that all men are born free and equal; which is false. Free and equal they all are, undoubtedly, in the eye of the law. But every man is born subject to heredity and circumstance, and whoever will investigate his life will perceive that he never has been able to stray beyond the compelling and constraining force of his character—which is his fate. All men, moreover, are unequal. To one human being is given genius; to another, beauty; to another, strength; to another, exceptional judgment; to another, exceptional memory; to another, grace and charm; to still another, physical ugliness and spiritual obliquity, moral taint, and every sort of disabling weakness. To the majority of persons Nature imparts mediocrity, and it is from mediocrity that the derogatory denial emanates as to the superior men and women of our race. A woman of the average kind is not difficult to comprehend. There is nothing distinctive about her. She is fond of admiration; rather readily censorious of other women; charitable toward male rakes; and partial to fine attire. The poet Wordsworth's formula, "Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles," comprises all that is essential for her existence, and that bard has himself precisely described her, in a grandfatherly and excruciating couplet, as

"A creature not too bright and good For human nature's daily food."

Women of that sort are not called "cold." The standard is ordinary and it is understood. But when a woman appears in art whose life is not ruled by the love of admiration, whose nature is devoid of vanity, who looks with indifference upon adulation, whose head is not turned by renown, whose composure is not disturbed by flattery, whose simplicity is not marred by wealth, who does not go into theatrical hysterics and offer that condition of artificial delirium as the mood of genius in acting, who above all makes it apparent in her personality and her achievements that the soul can be sufficient to itself and can exist without taking on a burden of the fever or dulness of other lives, there is a flutter of vague discontent among the mystified and bothered rank and file, and we are apprised that she is "cold." That is what happened in the case of Mary Anderson.

What are the faculties and attributes essential to great success in acting? A sumptuous and supple figure that can realise the ideals of statuary; a mobile countenance that can strongly and unerringly express the feelings of the heart and the workings of the mind; eyes that can awe with the majesty or startle with the terror or thrill with the tenderness of their soul-subduing gaze; a voice, deep, clear, resonant, flexible, that can range over the wide compass of emotion and carry its meaning in varying music to every ear and every heart; intellect to shape the purposes and control the means of mimetic art; deep knowledge of human nature; delicate intuitions; the skill to listen as well as the art to speak; imagination to grasp the ideal of a character in all its conditions of experience; the instinct of the sculptor to give it form, of the painter to give it colour, and of the poet to give it movement; and, back of all, the temperament of genius—the genialised nervous system—to impart to the whole artistic structure the thrill of spiritual vitality. Mary Anderson's acting revealed those faculties and attributes, and those observers who realised the poetic spirit, the moral majesty, and the isolation of mind that she continually suggested felt that she was an extraordinary woman. Such moments in her acting as that of Galatea's mute supplication at the last of earthly life, that of Juliet's desolation after the final midnight parting with the last human creature whom she may ever behold, and that of Hermione's despair when she covers her face and falls as if stricken dead, were the eloquent denotements of power, and in those and such as those—with which her art abounded—was the fulfilment of every hope that her acting inspired and the vindication of every encomium that it received.

Early in her professional career, when considering her acting, the present essayist quoted as applicable to her those lovely lines by Wordsworth:—

"The stars of midnight shall be dear To her, and she shall lean her ear In many a secret place Where rivulets dance their wayward round, And beauty born of murmuring sound Shall pass into her face."

In the direction of development thus indicated she steadily advanced. Her affiliations were with grandeur, purity, and loveliness. An inherent and passionate tendency toward classic stateliness increased in her more and more. Characters of the statuesque order attracted her imagination—Ion, Galatea, Hermione—but she did not leave them soulless. In the interpretation of passion and the presentation of its results she revealed the striking truth that her perceptions could discern those consequences that are recorded in the soul and in comparison with which the dramatic entanglements of visible life are puny and evanescent. Though living in the rapid stream of the social world she dwelt aloof from it. She thought deeply, and in mental direction she took the pathway of intellectual power. It is not surprising that the true worth of such a nature was not accurately apprehended. Minds that are self-poised, stately, irresponsive to human weakness, unconventional and self-liberated from allegiance to the commonplace are not fully and instantly discernible, and may well perplex the smiling glance of frivolity; but they are permanent forces in the education of the human race. Mary Anderson retired from the stage, under the pressure of extreme fatigue, in the beginning of 1889 and entered upon a matrimonial life on June 17, 1890. It is believed that her retirement is permanent. The historical interest attaching to her dramatic career justifies the preservation of this commemorative essay.

There is so much beauty in the comedy of A Winter's Tale—so much thought, character, humour, philosophy, sweetly serene feeling and loveliness of poetic language—that the public ought to feel obliged to any one who successfully restores it to the stage, from which it usually is banished. The piece was written in the maturity of Shakespeare's marvellous powers, and indeed some of the Shakespearean scholars believe it to be the last work that fell from his hand. Human life, as depicted in A Winter's Tale, shows itself like what it always seems to be in the eyes of patient, tolerant, magnanimous experience—the eyes "that have kept watch o'er man's mortality"—for it is a scene of inexplicable contrasts and vicissitudes, seemingly the chaos of caprice and chance, yet always, in fact, beneficently overruled and guided to good ends. Human beings are shown in it as full of weakness; often as the puppets of laws that they do not understand and of universal propensities and impulses into which they never pause to inquire; almost always as objects of benignant pity. The woful tangle of human existence is here viewed with half-cheerful, half-sad tolerance, yet with the hope and belief that all will come right at last. The mood of the comedy is pensive but radically sweet. The poet is like the forest in Emerson's subtle vision of the inherent exultation of nature:—

"Sober, on a fund of joy, The woods at heart are glad."

Mary Anderson doubled the characters of Hermione and Perdita. This had not been conspicuously done until it was done by her, and her innovation, in that respect, was met with grave disapproval. The moment the subject is examined, however, objection to that method of procedure is dispelled. Hermione, as a dramatic person, disappears in the middle of the third act of Shakespeare's comedy and comes no more until the end of the piece, when she emerges as a statue. Her character has been entirely expressed and her part in the action of the drama has been substantially fulfilled before she disappears. There is no intermediate passion to be wrought to a climax, nor is there any intermediate mood, dramatically speaking, to be sustained. The dramatic environment, the dramatic necessities, are vastly unlike, for example, those of Lady Macbeth—one of the hardest of all parts to play well, because exhibited intermittently, at long intervals, yet steadily constrained by the necessity of cumulative excitement. The representative of Lady Macbeth must be identified with that character, whether on the stage or off, from the beginning of it to the end. Hermione, on the contrary, is at rest from the moment when she faints upon receiving information of the death of her boy. A lapse of sixteen years is assumed, and then, standing forth as a statue, she personifies majestic virtue and victorious fortitude. When she descends from the pedestal she silently embraces Leontes, speaks a few pious, maternal and tranquil lines (there are precisely seven of them in the original, but Mary Anderson added two, from "All's Well"), and embraces Perdita, whom she has not seen since the girl's earliest infancy. This is their only meeting, and little is sacrificed by the use of a substitute for the daughter in that scene. Perdita's brief apostrophe to the statue has to be cut, but it is not missed in the representation. The resemblance between mother and daughter heightens the effect of illusion, in its impress equally upon fancy and vision; and a more thorough elucidation is given than could be provided in any other way of the spirit of the comedy. It was a judicious and felicitous choice that the actress made when she selected those two characters, and the fact that her impersonation of them carried a practically disused Shakespearean comedy through a season of one hundred and fifty nights at the Lyceum Theatre in London furnishes an indorsement alike of her wisdom and her ability. She played in a stage version of the piece, in five acts, containing thirteen scenes, arranged by herself.

While Mary Anderson was acting those two parts in London the sum of critical opinion seemed to be that her performance of Perdita was better than her performance of Hermione; but beneath that judgment there was, apparently, the impression that Hermione is a character fraught with superlatively great passions, powers, and qualities, such as are only to be apprehended by gigantic sagacity and conveyed by herculean talents and skill. Those vast attributes were not specified, but there was a mysterious intimation of their existence—as of something vague, formidable, and mostly elusive. But in truth Hermione, although a stronger part than Perdita, is neither complex, dubious, nor inaccessible; and Mary Anderson, although more fascinating in Perdita, could and did rise, in Hermione, to a noble height of tragic power—an excellence not possible for her, nor for anybody, in the more juvenile and slender character.

Hermione has usually been represented as an elderly woman and by such an actress as is technically called "heavy." She ought to be represented as about thirty years of age at the beginning of the piece, and forty-six at the end of it. Leontes is not more than thirty-four at the opening, and he would be fifty at the close. He speaks, in his first scene, of his boyhood as only twenty-three years gone, when his dagger was worn "muzzled, lest it should bite its master"—at which time he may have been ten years old; certainly not more, probably less. His words, toward the end of act third, "so sure as this beard's gray," refer to the beard of Antigonus, not to his own. He is a young man when the play begins, and Polixenes is about the same age, and Hermione is a young woman. Antigonus and Paulina are middle-aged persons in the earlier scenes and Paulina is an elderly woman in the statue scene—almost an old woman, though not too old to be given in marriage to old Camillo, the ever-faithful friend. In Mary Anderson's presentation of A Winter's Tale those details received thoughtful consideration and correct treatment.

In Hermione is seen a type of the celestial nature in woman—infinite love, infinite charity, infinite patience. Such a nature is rare; but it is possible, it exists, and Shakespeare, who depicted everything, did not omit to portray that. To comprehend Hermione the observer must separate her, absolutely and finally, from association with the passions. Mrs. Jameson acutely and justly describes her character as exhibiting "dignity without pride, love without passion, and tenderness without weakness." That is exactly true. Hermione was not easily won, and the best thing known about Leontes is that at last she came to love him and that her love for him survived his cruel and wicked treatment, chastened him, reinstated him, and ultimately blessed him. Hermione suffers the utmost affliction that a good woman can suffer. Her boy dies, heart-broken, at the news of his mother's alleged disgrace. Her infant daughter is torn from her breast and cast forth to perish. Her husband becomes her enemy and persecutor. Her chastity is assailed and vilified. She is subjected to the bitter indignity of a public trial. It is no wonder that at last her brain reels and she falls as if stricken dead. The apparent anomaly is her survival for sixteen years, in lonely seclusion, and her emergence, after that, as anything but a forlorn shadow of her former self. The poet Shelley has recorded the truth that all great emotions either kill themselves or kill those who feel them. It is here, however, that the exceptional temperament of Hermione supplies an explanatory and needed qualification. Her emotions are never of a passionate kind. Her mind predominates. Her life is in the affections and therefore it is one of thought. She sees clearly the facts of her experience and condition, and she knows exactly how those facts look in the eyes of others. She is one of those persons who possess a keen and just prescience of events, who can look far into the future and discern those resultant consequences of the present which, under the operation of inexorable moral law, must inevitably ensue. Self-poised in the right and free from the disturbing force of impulse and desire, she can await the justice of time, she can live, and she can live in the tranquil patience of resignation. True majesty of the person is dependent on repose of the soul, and there can be no repose of the soul without moral rectitude and a far-reaching, comprehensive, wise vision of events. Mary Anderson embodied Hermione in accordance with that ideal. By the expression of her face and the tones of her voice, in a single speech, the actress placed beyond question her grasp of the character:—

"Good my lords, I am not prone to weeping, as our sex Commonly are—the want of which vain dew Perchance shall dry your pities—but I have That honourable grief lodged here, which burns Worse than tears drown."

The conspicuous, predominant, convincing artistic beauty in Mary Anderson's impersonation of Hermione was her realisation of the part, in figure, face, presence, demeanour, and temperament. She did not afflict her auditor with the painful sense of a person struggling upward toward an unattainable identity. She made you conscious of the presence of a queen. This, obviously, is the main thing—that the individuality shall be imperial, not merely wearing royal attire but being invested with the royal authenticity of divine endowment and consecration. Much emphasis has been placed by Shakespeare upon that attribute of innate grandeur. Leontes, at the opening of the trial scene, describes his accused wife as "the daughter of a king," and in the same scene her father is mentioned as the Emperor of Russia. The gentleman who, in act fifth, recounts to Autolycus the meeting between Leontes and his daughter Perdita especially notes "the majesty of the creature, in resemblance of the mother." Hermione herself, in the course of her vindication—expressed in one of the most noble and pathetic strains of poetical eloquence in our language—names herself "a great king's daughter," therein recalling those august and piteous words of Shakespeare's Katharine:—

"We are a Queen, or long have thought so, certain The daughter of a king."

Poor old Antigonus, in his final soliloquy, recounting the vision of Hermione that had come upon him in the night, declares her to be a woman royal and grand not by descent only but by nature:—

"I never saw a vessel of like sorrow, So filled and so becoming. In pure white robes, Like very sanctity, she did approach."

That image Mary Anderson embodied, and therefore the ideal of Shakespeare was made a living thing—that glorious ideal, in shaping which the great poet "from all that are took something good, to make a perfect woman." Toward Polixenes, in the first scene, her manner was wholly gracious, delicately playful, innocently kind, and purely frail. Her quiet archness at the question, "Will you go yet?" struck exactly the right key of Hermione's mood. With the baby prince Mamillius her frolic and banter, affectionate, free, and gay, were in a happy vein of feeling and humour. Her simple dignity, restraining both resentment and grief, in face of the injurious reproaches of Leontes, was entirely noble and right, and the pathetic words, "I never wished to see you sorry, now I trust I shall," could not have been spoken with more depth and intensity of grieved affection than were felt in her composed yet tremulous voice. The entrance, at the trial scene, was made with the stateliness natural to a queenly woman, and yet with a touch of pathos—the cold patience of despair. The delivery of Hermione's defensive speeches was profoundly earnest and touching. The simple cry of the mother's breaking heart, and the action of veiling her face and falling like one dead, upon the announcement of the prince's death, were perfect denotements of the collapse of a grief-stricken woman. The skill with which the actress, in the monument scene—which is all repose and no movement—contrived nevertheless to invest Hermione with steady vitality of action, and to imbue the crisis with a feverish air of suspense, was in a high degree significant of the personality of genius. For such a performance of Hermione Shakespeare himself has provided the sufficient summary and encomium:—

"Women will love her, that she is a woman More worth than any man; men that she is The rarest of all women."

It is one thing to say that Mary Anderson was better in Perdita than in Hermione, and another thing to say that the performance of Perdita was preferred. Everybody preferred it—even those who knew that it was not the better of the two; for everybody loves the sunshine more than the shade. Hermione means grief and endurance. Perdita means beautiful youth and happy love. It does not take long for an observer to choose between them. Suffering is not companionable. By her impersonation of Hermione the actress revealed her knowledge of the stern truth of life, its trials, its calamities, and the possible heroism of character under its sorrowful discipline. Into that identity she passed by the force of her imagination. The embodiment was majestic, tender, pitiable, transcendent, but its colour was the sombre colour of pensive melancholy and sad experience. That performance was the higher and more significant of the two. But the higher form of art is not always the most alluring—never the most alluring when youthful beauty smiles and rosy pleasure beckons another way. All hearts respond to happiness. By her presentment of Perdita the actress became the glittering image and incarnation of glorious youthful womanhood and fascinating joy. No exercise of the imagination was needful to her in that. There was an instantaneous correspondence between the part and the player. The embodiment was as natural as a sunbeam. Shakespeare has left no doubt about his meaning in Perdita. The speeches of all around her continually depict her fresh and piquant loveliness, her innate superiority, her superlative charm; while her behaviour and language as constantly show forth her nobility of soul. One of the subtlest side lights thrown upon the character is in the description of the manner in which Perdita heard the story of her mother's death—when "attentiveness wounded" her "till, from one sign of dolour to another, she did bleed tears." And of the fibre of her nature there is perhaps no finer indication than may be felt in her comment on old Camillo's worldly view of prosperity as a vital essential to the permanence of love:—

"I think affliction may subdue the cheek, But not take in the mind."

In the thirty-seven plays of Shakespeare there is no strain of the poetry of sentiment and grace essentially sweeter than that which he has put into the mouth of Perdita; and poetry could not be more sweetly spoken than it was by Mary Anderson in that delicious scene of the distribution of the flowers. The actress evinced comprehension of the character in every fibre of its being, and she embodied it with the affluent vitality of splendid health and buoyant temperament—presenting a creature radiant with goodness and happiness, exquisite in natural refinement, piquant with archness, soft, innocent, and tender in confiding artlessness, and, while gleeful and triumphant in beautiful youth, gently touched with an intuitive pitying sense of the thorny aspects of this troubled world. The giving of the flowers completely bewitched her auditors. The startled yet proud endurance of the king's anger was in an equal degree captivating. Seldom has the stage displayed that rarest of all combinations, the passionate heart of a woman with the lovely simplicity of a child. Nothing could be more beautiful than she was to the eyes that followed her lithe figure through the merry mazes of her rustic dance—an achievement sharply in contrast with her usually statuesque manner. It "makes old hearts fresh" to see a spectacle of grace and joy, and that spectacle they saw then and will not forget. The value of those impersonations of Hermione and Perdita, viewing them as embodied interpretations of poetry was great, but they possessed a greater value and a higher significance as denotements of the guiding light, the cheering strength, the elevating loveliness of a noble human soul. They embodied the conception of the poet, but at the same time they illumined an actual incarnation of the divine spirit. They were like windows to a sacred temple, and through them you could look into the soul of a true woman—always a realm where thoughts are gliding angels, and feelings are the faces of seraphs, and sounds are the music of the harps of heaven.



VI.

HENRY IRVING AND ELLEN TERRY IN OLIVIA.

It has sometimes been thought that the acting of Henry Irving is seen at its best in those impersonations of his that derive their vitality from the grim, ghastly, and morbid attributes of human nature. That he is a unique actor, and distinctively a great actor, in Hamlet, Mathias, Eugene Aram, Louis XI., Lesurque, and Dubosc, few judges will deny. His performances of those parts have shown him to be a man of weird imagination, and they have shown that his characteristics, mental and spiritual, are sombre. Accordingly, when it was announced that he would play Dr. Primrose—Goldsmith's simple, virtuous, homely, undramatic village-preacher, the Vicar of Wakefield,—a doubt was felt as to his suitability for the part and as to the success of his endeavour. He played Dr. Primrose, and he gained in that character some of the brightest laurels of his professional career. The doubt proved unwarranted. More than one competent observer of that remarkable performance has granted it an equal rank with the best of Henry Irving's achievements; and now, more clearly than before, it is perceived that the current of his inspiration flows as freely from the silver spring of goodness as from the dark and troubled fountain of human misery.

On the first night of Olivia, at the Lyceum Theatre (it was May 27, 1885, when the present writer happened to be in London), Henry Irving's performance of Dr. Primrose was fettered by a curb of constraint. The actor's nerves had been strained to a high pitch of excitement and he was obviously anxious. His spirit, accordingly, was not fully liberated into the character. He advanced with cautious care and he executed each detail of his design with precise accuracy. To various auditors, for that reason, the work seemed a little Methodistical; and drab is a colour at which the voice of the scoffer is apt to scoff. But the impersonation of Dr. Primrose soon became equally a triumph of expression and of ideal; not only flowing out of goodness, but flowing smoothly and producing the effect of nature. It was not absolutely and identically the Vicar that Goldsmith has drawn, for its personality was unmarked by either rusticity or strong humour; but it was a kindred and higher type of the simple truth, the pastoral sweetness, the benignity, and the human tenderness of that delightful original. To invest goodness with charm, to make virtue piquant, and to turn common events of domestic life to exquisite pathos and noble exaltation was the actor's purpose. It was accomplished; and Dr. Primrose, thitherto an idyllic figure, existent only in the chambers of fancy, is henceforth as much a denizen of the stage as Luke Fielding or Jesse Rural; a man not merely to be read of, as one reads of Uncle Toby and Parson Adams, but to be known, remembered, and loved.

Wills's drama of Olivia, based upon an episode in Goldsmith's story, is one of extreme simplicity. It may be described as a series of pictures displaying the consequences of action rather than action itself. It contains an abundance of incident, but the incident is mostly devoid of inherent dramatic force and therefore is such as must derive its chief effect from the manner in which it is treated by the actors who represent the piece. Nevertheless, the piece was found to be, during its first three acts, an expressive, coherent, interesting play. It tells its story clearly and entirely, not by narrative but by the display of characters in their relations to each other. Its language, flavoured here and there with the phraseology of the novel, is consistently appropriate. The fourth and last act is feeble. Nobody can sympathise with "the late remorse of love" in a nature so trivial as that of Thornhill, and the incident of the reconciliation between Olivia and her husband, therefore, goes for nothing. It is the beautiful relation between the father and his daughter that animates the play. It is paternal love that thrills its structure with light, warmth, colour, sincerity, moral force, and human significance. Opinion may differ as to the degree of skill with which Wills selected and employed the materials of Goldsmith's story; but nobody can justly deny that he wrought for the stage a practical dramatic exposition of the beauty and sanctity of the holiest relation that is possible in human life; and to have done that is to have done a noble thing.

Many persons appear to think that criticism falls short of its duty unless it wounds and hurts. Goldsmith himself observed that fact. It was in the story of The Vicar of Wakefield that he made his playful suggestion that a critic should always take care to say that the picture would have been better if the painter had taken more pains. Wills probably heard more than enough for his spiritual welfare about the faults of his piece; yet there is really nothing weak in the play except the conclusion. It is not easy to suggest, however, in what way the fourth act could be strengthened, unless it were by a recasting and renovation of the character of Squire Thornhill. But the victory was gained, in spite of a feeble climax. Many persons also appear to think that it is a sort of sacrilege to lay hands upon the sacred ark of a classic creation. Dion Boucicault, perceiving this when he made a play about Clarissa Harlowe, felt moved to deprecate anticipated public resentment of the liberties that he had taken with Richardson's novel. Yet it is difficult to see why the abundant details of that excellent though protracted narrative should not be curtailed, in order to circumscribe its substance within the limits of a practical drama. Jefferson was blamed for condensing and slightly changing the comedy of The Rivals. Yet the author, who probably knew something about his work, deemed it a wretchedly defective piece, and expressed the liveliest regret for having written it. Wills did not reproduce Goldsmith's Vicar upon the stage: in some particulars he widely diverged from it—and his work, accordingly, may be censured. Yet The Vicar of Wakefield is far from being a faultless production, such as a divinity should be supposed to hedge. Critical students are aware of this. It is not worth while to traverse the old ground. The reader who will take the trouble—and pleasure—to refer to that excellent chapter on Goldsmith in Dr. Craik's History of English Literature will find the structural defects of the novel specifically enumerated. If the dramatist has ignored many details he has at least extracted from the narrative the salient points of a consistent, harmonious story. The spectator can enjoy the play, whether he has read the original or not. At the end of its first act he knows the Vicar and his family, their home, their way of life, their neighbours, the two suitors for the two girls, the motives of each and every character, and the relations of each to all; and he sees, what is always touching in the spectacle of actual human life, the contrasted states of circumstance and experience surrounding and enmeshing all. After this preparation the story is developed with few and rapid strokes. Two of the pictures were poems. At the end of act first the Vicar, who has been apprised of the loss of his property, imparts this sad news to his family. The time is the gloaming. The chimes are sounding in the church-tower. It is the hour of evening prayer. The gray-haired pastor calls his loved ones around him, in his garden, and simply and reverently tells them of their misfortune, which is to be accepted submissively, as Heaven's will. The deep religious feeling of that scene, the grouping, the use of sunset lights and shadows, the melody of the chimes, the stricken look in the faces of the women and children, the sweet gravity of the Vicar—instinct with the nobleness of a sorrow not yet become corrosive and lachrymose, as is the tendency of settled grief—and, over all, the sense of blighted happiness and an uncertain future, made up a dramatic as well as a pictorial effect of impressive poetic significance. In act second—which is pictorial almost without intermission—there was a companion picture, when the Vicar reads, at his fireside, a letter announcing the restitution of his estate; while his wife and children and Mr. Burchell are assembled around the spinet singing an old song. The repose with which Henry Irving made that scene tremulous, almost painful, in its suspense, was observed as one of the happiest strokes of his art. The face and demeanour of Dr. Primrose, changing from the composure of resignation to a startled surprise, and then to almost an hysterical gladness, presented a study not less instructive than affecting of the resources of acting. Only two contemporary actors have presented anything kindred with Mr. Irving's acting in that situation and throughout the scene that is sequent on the discovery of Olivia's flight—Jefferson in America and Got in France.

Evil is restless and irresistibly prone to action. Goodness is usually negative and inert. Dr. Primrose is a type of goodness. In order to invest him with piquancy and dramatic vigour Henry Irving gave him passion, and therewithal various attributes of charming eccentricity. The clergyman thus presented is the fruition of a long life of virtue. He has the complete repose of innocence, the sweet candour of absolute purity, the mild demeanour of spontaneous, habitual benevolence, the supreme grace of unconscious simplicity. But he is human and passionate; he shows—in his surroundings, in his quick sympathy with natural beauty, and in his indicated rather than directly stated ideals of conduct—that he has lived an imaginative and not a prosaic life; he is vaguely and pathetically superstitious; and while essentially grand in his religious magnanimity he is both fascinating and morally formidable as a man. Those denotements point at Henry Irving's ideal. For his method it is less easy to find the right description. His mechanical reiteration of the words that are said to him by Sophia, in the moment when the fond father knows that his idolised Olivia has fled with her lover; his collapse, when the harmless pistols are taken from his nerveless hands; his despairing cry, "If she had but died!"; his abortive effort to rebuke his darling child in the hour of her abandonment and misery, and the sudden tempest of passionate affection with which the great tender heart sweeps away that inadequate and paltry though eminently appropriate morality, and takes its idol to itself as only true love can do—those were instances of high dramatic achievement for which epithets are inadequate, but which the memory of the heart will always treasure.

It was said by the poet Aaron Hill, in allusion to Barton Booth, that the blind might have seen him in his voice and the deaf might have heard him in his visage. Such a statement made concerning an actor now would be deemed extravagant. But, turning from the Vicar to his cherished daughter, that felicitous image comes naturally into the mind. To think of Ellen Terry as Olivia will always be to recall one especial and remarkable moment of beauty and tenderness. It is not her distribution of the farewell gifts, on the eve of Olivia's flight—full although that was of the emotion of a good heart torn and tortured by the conflict between love and duty—and it is not the desperate resentment with which Olivia beats back her treacherous betrayer, when, at the climax of his baseness, he adds insult to heartless perfidy. Those, indeed, were made great situations by the profound sincerity and the rich, woman-like passion of the actress. But there was one instant, in the second act of the play, when the woman's heart has at length yielded to her lover's will, and he himself, momentarily dismayed by his own conquest, strives to turn back, that Ellen Terry made pathetic beyond description. The words she spoke are simply these, "But I said I would come!" What language could do justice to the voice, to the manner, to the sweet, confiding, absolute abandonment of the whole nature to the human love by which it had been conquered? The whole of that performance was astonishing, was thrilling, with knowledge of the passion of love. That especial moment was the supreme beauty of it. At such times human nature is irradiated with a divine fire, and art fulfils its purpose.



VII.

ON JEFFERSON'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

Joseph Jefferson has led a life of noble endeavour and has had a career of ample prosperity, culminating in honourable renown and abundant happiness. He was born in Philadelphia, February 20, 1829. He went on the stage when he was four years old and he has been on the stage ever since. His achievements as an actor have been recognised and accepted with admiration in various parts of the world; in Australia and New Zealand and in England, Scotland, and Ireland, as well as in the United States. Among English-speaking actors he is the foremost living representative of the art of eccentric comedy. He has not, of late years, played a wide range of parts, but, restricting himself to a few characters, and those of a representative kind, the manner in which he has acted them is a perfect manner—and it is this that has gained for him his distinctive eminence. Jefferson, however, is not simply and exclusively an actor. His mind is many sided. He has painted landscape pictures of a high order of merit,—pictures in which elusive moods and subtle sentiments of nature are grasped with imaginative insight and denoted and interpreted with a free, delicate, and luminous touch. He has also addressed the public as an author. He has written an easy, colloquial account of his own life, and that breezy, off-hand, expeditious work,—after passing it as a serial through their Century Magazine,—the Century Company has published in a beautiful volume. It is a work that, for the sake of the writer, will be welcomed everywhere, and, for its own sake as well as his, will everywhere be preserved.

Beginning a theatrical career nearly sixty years ago (1833), roving up and down the earth ever since, and seldom continuing in one place, Jefferson has had uncommon opportunities of noting the development of the United States and of observing, in both hemispheres, the changeful aspect of one of the most eventful periods in the history of the world. Actors, as a class, know nothing but the stage and see nothing but the pursuit in which they are occupied. Whoever has lived much among them knows that fact, from personal observation. Whoever has read the various and numerous memoirs that have from time to time been published by elderly members of that profession must have been amused to perceive that, while they conventionally agree that "all the world's a stage," they are enthusiastically convinced that the stage is all the world. Jefferson's book, although it contains much about the theatre, shows him to be an exception in this respect, even as he is in many others. He has seen many countries and many kinds of men and things, and he has long looked upon life with the thoughtful gaze of a philosopher as well as the wise smile of a humourist. He can, if he likes, talk of something besides the shop. His account of his life "lacks form a little," and his indifference to "accurate statistics"—which he declares to be "somewhat tedious"—is now and then felt to be an embarrassment. One would like to know, for instance, while reading about the primitive theatrical times, when actors sailed the western rivers in flatboats, and shot beasts and birds on the bank, precisely the extent and limits of that period. Nor is this the only queer aspect of the dramatic past that might be illumined. The total environment of a man's life is almost equally important with the life itself—being, indeed, the scenery amid which the action passes—and a good method for the writing of a biography is that which sharply defines the successive periods of childhood, youth, manhood, and age, and, while depicting the development of the individual from point to point, depicts also the entire field through which he moves, and the mutations, affecting his life, that occur in the historic and social fabric around him. Jefferson, while he has painted vigorously and often happily, on a large canvas, has left many spaces empty and others but thinly filled. The reader who accompanies him may, nevertheless, with a little care, piece out the story so as to perceive it as a sequent, distinct, harmonious, and rounded narrative. Meanwhile the companionship of this heedless historian is delightful—for whether as actor, painter, or writer, Jefferson steadily exerts the charm of a genial personality. You are as one walking along a country road, on a golden autumn day, with a kind, merry companion, who knows all about the trees that fringe your track and the birds that flit through their branches, and who beguiles the way with many a humorous tale and many a pleasant remembrance, now impressing your mind by the sagacity of his reflections, now touching your heart by some sudden trait of sentiment or pathos, and always pleasing and satisfying you with the consciousness of a sweet, human, broad, charitable, piquant nature. Although an autobiographer Jefferson is not egotistical, and although a moralist he is not a bore. There is a tinge of the Horatian mood in him—for his reader often becomes aware of that composed, sagacious, half-droll, quizzical mind that indicates, with grave gentleness, the folly of ambition, the vanity of riches, the value of the present hour, the idleness of borrowing trouble, the blessing of the golden medium in fortune, the absurdity of flatterers, and the comfort of keeping a steadfast spirit amid the inevitable vicissitudes of this mortal state.

Jefferson has memories of a boyhood that was passed in Washington, Baltimore, and New York. He went to Chicago in 1838, when that place was scarcely more than a village—making the journey from New York to Buffalo in a canal-boat, and sailing thence, aboard a steamer, through the lakes of Erie, Huron, and Michigan. He travelled with his parents, and they gave dramatic performances, in which he assisted, in western towns. It was a time of poverty and hardship, but those ills were borne cheerfully—the brighter side of a hard life being kept steadily in view, and every comic incident of it being seen and appreciated. His father was a gentleman of the Mark Tapley temperament, who came out strong amid adverse circumstances, and the early disappearance from the book of that delightful person (who died in 1842, of yellow fever, at Mobile), is a positive sorrow. His mother, a refined and gentle lady, of steadfast character and of uncommon musical and dramatic talents and accomplishments, survived till 1849, and her ashes rest in Ronaldson's cemetery, in Philadelphia. Jefferson might have said much more about his parents, and especially about his famous grandfather, without risk of becoming tedious—for they were remarkably interesting people; but he was writing his own life and not theirs, and he has explained that he likes not to dwell much upon domestic matters. The story of his long ancestry of actors, which reaches back to the days of Garrick (for there have been five generations of the Jeffersons upon the stage), he has not mentioned; and the story of his own young days is hurried rapidly to a conclusion. He was brought on the stage, when a child, at the theatre in Washington, D.C., by the negro comedian Thomas D. Rice, who emptied him out of a bag; and thereupon, being dressed as "a nigger dancer," in imitation of Rice, he performed the antics of Jim Crow. He adverts to his first appearance in New York and remembers his stage combat with Master Titus; and he thinks that Master Titus must remember it also,—since one of that boy's big toes was nearly cut off in the fray. That combat occurred at the Franklin theatre, September 30, 1837—a useful fact that the autobiographer cares not to mention. He speedily becomes a young man, as the reader follows him through the first three chapters of his narrative,—of which there are seventeen,—and he is found to be acting, as a stock player, in support of James W. Wallack, Junius Brutus Booth, W.C. Macready, and Mr. and Mrs. J.W. Wallack, Jr. Upon the powers and peculiarities of those actors, and upon the traits of many others who, like them, are dead and gone (for there is scarcely a word in the book about any of his living contemporaries), he comments freely and instructively. He was "barn-storming" in Texas when the Mexican war began, and he followed in the track of the American army, and acted in the old Spanish theatre in Matamoras, in the spring of 1846; and, subsequently, finding that this did no good, he opened a stall there for the sale of coffee and other refreshments, in the corner of a gambling hell. He calls to mind the way of domestic life and the every-day aspect of houses, gardens, people, and manners in Matamoras, and those he describes with especial skill—deftly introducing the portraiture of a dusky, black-eyed, volatile Mexican girl, to whom he lost, temporarily, the light heart of youth, and whom he thinks that he might have married had he not deemed it prudent to journey northward toward a cooler clime. In New Orleans, at about that time, he first saw the then young comedian John E. Owens: and he records the fact that his ambition to excel as an actor was awakened by the spectacle of that rival's success. Owens has had his career since then,—and a brilliant one it was,—and now he sleeps in peace.

After that experience Jefferson repaired to Philadelphia, and during the next ten years, from 1846 to 1856, he wrought in that city and in New York, Baltimore, Richmond, and other places, sometimes as a stock actor, sometimes as a star, and sometimes as a manager. He encountered various difficulties. He took a few serious steps and many comic ones. He was brought into contact with some individuals that were eminent and with some that were ludicrous. He crossed the Allegheny mountains in mid-winter, from Wheeling to Cumberland, in a cold stage-coach, and almost perished. He was a member of Burton's company at the Arch Street theatre, Philadelphia, and was one of the chorus in that great actor's revival of Antigone—which there is little doubt that the chorus extinguished. He was the low comedian in Joseph Foster's amphitheatre, where he sang Captain Kidd to fill up the "carpenter scenes," and where he sported amid the turbulent rhetorical billows of Timour the Tartar and The Terror of the Road. He acted in New York at the Franklin theatre and also at the Chatham. He managed theatres in Macon and Savannah, where he brought out the blithe Sir William Don; and one of the sprightliest episodes of his memoir is the chapter in which he describes that tall, elegant, nonchalant adventurer. Don was a Scotchman, born in 1826, who made his first appearance in America in November 1850 at the Broadway theatre, New York, and afterward drifted aimlessly through the provincial theatres. Don was married in 1857 to Miss Emily Sanders, and he died at Tasmania, March 19, 1862, and was buried at Hobartstown. Jefferson saw the dawn of promise in the career of Julia Dean,—when that beautiful girl was acting with him, in the stock—and afterwards he saw the noonday splendour of her prosperity; and he might have recalled, but that sad touches are excluded from his biography, her mournful decline. In 1853 he was stage manager of the Baltimore museum, for Henry C. Jarrett, and in 1854 he was manager of the Richmond theatre, for John T. Ford. Among the players whom he met, and who deeply influenced him, were James E. Murdoch, Henry Placide, Edwin Forrest, Edwin Adams, and Agnes Robertson. But the actor who most affected the youth of Joseph Jefferson, whose influence sank deepest into his heart and has remained longest in his memory and upon his style, was his half-brother, Charles Burke: and certainly, as a serio-comic actor, it may be doubted whether Charles Burke ever was surpassed. That comedian was born March 27, 1822, in Philadelphia, and he died in New York, November 10, 1854. Jefferson's mother, Cornelia Frances Thomas, born in New York, October 1, 1796, the daughter of French parents, was married in her girlhood to the Irish comedian Thomas Burke, who died in 1824; and she contracted her second marriage, with Jefferson's father, in 1826. Jefferson writes at his best in the description of scenery, in the analysis of character, and in the statement of artistic principles. His portraiture of Murdoch, as a comedian, is particularly clear and fine. His account of Julia Dean's hit, as Lady Priory, is excellent and will often be cited. His portrayal of the reciprocal action of Burton and Charles Burke, when they were associated in the same piece, conveys a valuable lesson. His anecdotes of Edwin Forrest present that grim figure as yet again the involuntary cause of mirth. It often was so. Jefferson, however, draws a veil of gentle charity over those misused powers, that perverse will, that wasted life. The most striking dramatic portraiture in the book is that bestowed on Charles Burke, William Warren, George Holland, Tom Glessing, and Edwin Adams. Those were men who lived in Jefferson's affections, and when he wrote about them he wrote from the heart. The sketch of Glessing, whom everybody loved that ever knew him, is in a touching strain of tender remembrance.

Jefferson visited England and France in 1856, but not to act. At that time he saw the famous English comedians Compton, Buckstone, Robson, and Wright, and that extraordinary actor, fine alike in tragedy and comedy, the versatile Samuel Phelps. In 1857 he was associated with Laura Keene at her theatre in New York; and from that date onward his career has been upon a high and sunlit path, visible to the world. His first part at Laura Keene's theatre was Dr. Pangloss. Then came Our American Cousin, in which he gained a memorable success as Asa Trenchard, and in which Edward A. Sothern laid the basis of that fantastic structure of whim and grotesque humour that afterward became famous as Lord Dundreary. Sothern, Laura Keene, and William Rufus Blake, of course, gained much of Jefferson's attention at that time, and he has not omitted to describe them. His account of Blake, however, does not impart an adequate idea of the excellence of that comedian. In 1858 he went to the Winter Garden theatre, and was associated with the late Dion Boucicault. His characters then were Newman Hoggs, Caleb Plummer, and Salem Scudder—in Nicholas Nickleby, The Cricket on the Hearth, and The Octoroon. Mr. Boucicault told him not to make Caleb Plummer a solemn character at the beginning—a deliverance that Jefferson seems to have cherished as one of colossal wisdom. He made a brilliant hit in Salem Scudder, and it was then that he determined finally to assume the position of a star. "Art has always been my sweetheart," exclaims Jefferson, "and I have loved her for herself alone." No observer can doubt that who has followed his career. It was in 1859 that he reverted to the subject of Rip Van Winkle, as the right theme for his dramatic purpose. He had seen Charles Burke as Rip, and he knew the several versions of Washington Irving's story that had been made for the theatre by Burke, Hackett, and Yates. The first Rip Van Winkle upon the stage, of whom there is any record in theatrical annals, was Thomas Flynn (1804-1849). That comedian, the friend of the elder Booth, acted the part for the first time on May 24, 1828, at Albany. Charles B. Parsons, who afterward acted in many theatres as Rip, and ultimately became a preacher, was, on that night, the performer of Derrick. Jefferson's predecessors as Rip Van Winkle were remarkably clever men—Flynn, Parsons, Burke, Chapman, Hackett, Yates, and William Isherwood. But it remained for Jefferson to do with that character what no one else had ever thought of doing—to lift it above the level of the tipsy rustic and make it the poetical type of the drifting and dreaming vagrant—half-haunted, half-inspired, a child of the trees and the clouds. Jefferson records that he was lying on the hay in a barn in Paradise Valley, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1859, taking advantage of a rainy day to read Washington Irving's Life and Letters, when that plan came to him. It proved an inspiration of happiness to thousands of people all over the world. The comedian made a play for himself, on the basis of Charles Burke's play, but with one vital improvement—he arranged the text and business of the supernatural scene so that Rip only should speak, while the ghosts should remain silent. That stroke of genius accomplished his object. The man capable of that exploit in dramatic art could not fail to win the world, because he would at once fascinate its imagination while touching its heart.

In 1861 Jefferson went to California and thence to Australia, and in the latter country he remained four years. He has written a fine description of the entrance to the harbour at Sydney. His accounts of "the skeleton dance," as he saw it performed by the black natives of that land; of his meeting with the haunted hermit in the woods; of the convict audience at Tasmania, for whom he acted in The Ticket-of-Leave Man; and of the entertainment furnished in a Chinese theatre, are compositions that would impart to any book the interest of adventure and the zest of novelty. Such pictures as those have a broad background; they are not circumscribed within the proscenium frame. The man is seen in those passages as well as the actor; and he plays his part well, amid picturesque surroundings of evil and peril, of tragedy and of pathos. In Australia Jefferson met Charles Kean and his wife (Ellen Tree), of whom his sketches are boldly drawn and his memories are pleasant. Mr. and Mrs. Kean afterward made their farewell visit to the United States, beginning, when they reached New York (from San Francisco, in April 1865), with Henry VIII., and closing with The Jealous Wife. In 1865 Jefferson went from Australia to South America and passed some time in Lima, where he saw much tropical luxury and many beautiful ladies—an inspiriting spectacle, fittingly described by him in some of the most felicitous of his fervent words. In June 1865 he reached London, and presently he came forth, at the Adelphi, as Rip Van Winkle,—having caused the piece to be rewritten by Mr. Boucicault, who introduced the colloquy of the children, paraphrased for it the recognition scene between King Lear and Cordelia, and kept Gretchen alive to be married to Derrick. Mr. Boucicault, however, had no faith in the piece or the actor's plan, and down to the last moment prophesied failure. Jefferson's success was unequivocal. Friends surrounded him and in the gentle and genial record that he has made of those auspicious days some of the brightest names of modern English literature sparkle on his page. Benjamin Webster, Paul Bedford, John Billington, John Brougham, and Marie Wilton were among the actors who were glad to be his associates. Robertson, the dramatist, was his constant companion—one of the most intellectual and one of the wittiest of men. Planche, aged yet hearty and genial (and no man had more in his nature of the sweet spirit of the comrade), speedily sought him. Charles Reade and Anthony Trollope became his cronies; and poor Artemas Ward arrived and joined the party just as Jefferson was leaving it—as bright a spirit, as kind a heart, and as fine and quaint a humourist as ever cheered this age—from which he vanished too soon for the happiness of his friends and for the fruition of his fame. "I was much impressed," says the comedian, "with Ward's genial manner; he was not in good health, and I advised him to be careful lest the kindness of London should kill him." That advice was not heeded, and the kindness of London speedily ended Ward's days.

Jefferson came home in 1866 and passed ten years in America—years of fame and fortune, whereof the record is smooth prosperity. Its most important personal incident was his second marriage, on December 20, 1867, at Chicago, to Miss Sarah Warren. In July 1873 he made a voyage to Europe, with his wife and William Warren, the comedian, and remained there till autumn. From November 1, 1875 to April 29, 1876 and from Easter 1877 until midsummer he was again acting in London, where he redoubled his former success. In October 1877 he returned home, and since then he has remained in America. The chronicle that he has written glides lightly over these latter years, only now and then touching on their golden summits. The manifest wish of the writer has been to people his pages as much as possible with the men and women of his artistic circle and knowledge who would be likely to interest the reader. Robert Browning, Charles Kingsley, and George Augustus Sala come into the picture, and there is a pleasing story of Browning and Longfellow walking arm in arm in London streets till driven into a cab by a summer shower, when Longfellow insisted on passing his umbrella through the hole in the roof, for the protection of the cab-driver. Jefferson lived for one summer in an old mansion at Morningside, Edinburgh, and he dwells with natural delight on his recollections of that majestic city. He had many a talk, at odd times, with the glittering farceur Charles Mathews, about dramatic art, and some of this is recorded in piquant anecdotes. "By many," says the amiable annalist, "he was thought to be cold and selfish; I do not think he was so." There is a kind word for Charles Fechter, whose imitations of Frederick Lemaitre, in Belphegor, the Mountebank, live in Jefferson's remembrance as wonderfully graphic. There are glimpses of James Wallack, Walter Montgomery, Peter Richings, E.A. Sothern, Laura Keene, James G. Burnett, John Gilbert, Tyrone Power, Lester Wallack, John McCullough, John T. Raymond, Mr. and Mrs. Barney Williams, John Drew (the elder), F.S. Chanfrau, Charlotte Cushman, Mrs. Drake, and many others; and the record incorporates two letters, not before published, from John Howard Payne, the author of Home, Sweet Home—a melody that is the natural accompaniment of Jefferson's life. There is a pretty picture of that ancient supper-room at No. 2 Bulfinch Place, Boston—Miss Fisher's kitchen—as it appeared when William Warren sat behind the mound of lobsters, at the head of the table, while the polished pewters reflected the cheerful light, and wit and raillery enlivened the happy throng, and many a face was wreathed with smiles that now is dark and still forever. In one chapter Jefferson sets forth his views upon the art of acting; and seldom within so brief a compass will so many sensible reflections be found so simply and tersely expressed. The book closes with words of gratitude for many blessings, and with an emblematic picture of a spirit resigned to whatever vicissitudes of fortune may yet be decreed.

Jefferson's memoir is a simple message to simple minds. It will find its way to thousands of readers to whom a paper by Addison or an essay by Hume would have no meaning. It will point for them the moral of a good life. It will impress them with the spectacle of a noble actor, profoundly and passionately true to the high art by which he lives, bearing eloquent testimony to its beauty and its worth, and to the fine powers and sterling virtues of the good men and women with whom he has been associated in its pursuit. It will display to them—and to all others who may chance to read it—a type of that absolute humility of spirit which yet is perfectly compatible with a just pride of intellect. It will help to preserve interesting traits of famous actors of an earlier time, together with bright stories that illumine the dry chronicle of our theatrical history. And, in its simple record of the motives by which he has been impelled, and the artistic purposes that he has sought to accomplish, it will remain an eloquent, vital, indestructible memorial to the art and the character of a great comedian, when the present reality of his exquisite acting shall have changed to a dim tradition and a fading memory of the past.



VIII.

ON JEFFERSON'S ACTING.

Fifty years from now the historian of the American stage, if he should be asked to name the actor of this period who was most beloved by the people of this generation, will answer that it was Joseph Jefferson. Other actors of our time are famous, and they possess in various degrees the affection of the public. Jefferson is not only renowned but universally beloved. To state the cause of this effect is at once to explain his acting and to do it the honour to which it is entitled. That cause can be stated in a single sentence. Jefferson is at once a poetic and a human actor, and he is thus able to charm all minds and to win all hearts. His success, therefore, is especially important not to himself alone but to the people.

Public taste is twofold. It has a surface liking, and it has a deep, instinctive, natural preference. The former is alert, capricious, incessant, and continually passes from fancy to fancy. It scarcely knows what it wants, except that it wants excitement and change. Those persons in the dramatic world who make a point to address it are experimental speculators, whose one and only object is personal gain, and who are willing and ready to furnish any sort of entertainment that they think will please a passing caprice, and thereby will turn a penny for themselves. To judge the public entirely by this surface liking is to find the public what Tennyson once called it—a many-headed beast. With that animal every paltry and noxious thing can be made, for a time, to flourish; and that fact leads observers who do not carefully look beneath the surface to conclude that the public is always wrong. But the deep preference of the public comes into the question, and observers who are able to see and to consider that fact presently perceive that the artist, whether actor or otherwise, who gives to the public, not what it says it wants but what it ought to have, is in the long run the victor. The deep preference is for the good thing, the real thing, the right. It is not intelligent. It does not go with thinking and reasoning. It does not pretend to have grounds of belief. It simply responds. But upon the stage the actor who is able to reach it is omnipotent. Jefferson conspicuously is an actor who appeals to the deep, instinctive, natural preference of humanity, and who reaches it, arouses it, and satisfies it. Throughout the whole of his mature career he has addressed the nobler soul of humanity and given to the people what they ought to have; and the actor who is really able to do that naturally conquers everything. It is not a matter of artifice and simulation; it is a matter of being genuine and not a sham.

Still further, Jefferson has aroused and touched and satisfied the feelings of the people, not by attempting to interpret literature but by being an actor. An actor is a man who acts. He may be an uneducated man, deficient in learning and in mental discipline, and yet a fine actor. The people care not at all for literature. They do not read it, and they know nothing about it until it is brought home to their hearts by some great interpreter of it. What they do know is action. They can see and they can feel, and the actor who makes them see and feel can do anything with them that he pleases. It is his privilege and his responsibility. Jefferson is one of those artists (and they are few) who depend for their effects not upon what authors have written but upon impersonation. He takes liberties with the text. It would not perhaps be saying too much to say that he does not primarily heed the text at all. He is an actor; and speaking with reference to him and to others like him it would perhaps be well if those persons who write criticisms upon the stage would come to a definite conclusion upon this point and finally understand that an actor must produce his effects on the instant by something that he does and is, and not by rhetoric and elocution, and therefore that he should not be expected to repeat every word of every part, or to be a translator of somebody else, but that he must be himself. If we want the full, literal text of Shakespeare we can stop at home and read it. What we want of the actor is that he should give himself; and the true actor does give himself. The play is the medium. A man who acts Romeo must embody, impersonate, express, convey, and make evident what he knows and feels about love. He need not trouble himself about Shakespeare. That great poet will survive; while if Romeo, being ever so correct, bores the house, Romeo will be damned. Jefferson is an actor who invariably produces effect, and he produces it by impersonation, and by impersonation that is poetic and human.

Jefferson's performance of Acres conspicuously exemplifies the principles that have been stated here. He has not hesitated to alter the comedy of The Rivals, and in his alteration of it he has improved it. Acres has been made a better part for an actor, and a more significant and sympathetic part for an audience. You could not care particularly for Acres if he were played exactly as he is written. You might laugh at him, and probably would, but he would not touch your feelings. Jefferson embodies him in such a way that he often makes you feel like laughing and crying at the same moment, and you end with loving the character, and storing it in your memory with such cherished comrades of the fancy as Mark Tapley and Uncle Toby. There is but little human nature in Acres as Sheridan has drawn him, and what there is of human nature is coarse; but as embodied by Jefferson, while he never ceases to be comically absurd, he becomes fine and sweet, and wins sympathy and inspires affection, and every spectator is glad to have seen him and to remember him. It is not possible to take that sort of liberty with every author. You can do it but seldom with Shakespeare; never in any but his juvenile plays. But there are authors who can be improved by that process, and Sheridan—in The Rivals, not in The School for Scandal—is one of them. And anyway, since it ought to be felt, known, understood, and practically admitted that an actor is something more than a telegraph wire, that his personal faculty and testimony enter into the matter of embodiment and expression, Jefferson's rare excellence and great success as Acres should teach a valuable lesson, correcting that pernicious habit of the critical mind which measures an actor by the printed text of a play-book and by the hide-bound traditions of custom on the stage. Jefferson has had a royal plenitude of success as an actor, chiefly with the part of Rip Van Winkle, but also with the characters of Caleb Plummer, Bob Brierly, Dr. Pangloss, Dr. Ollapod, Mr. Golightly, and Hugh de Brass. The reason of that success cannot be found in conventional adherence to stage customs and critical standards.

Jefferson has gained his great power over the people—of which his great fame is the shadow—- by giving himself in his art—his own rich and splendid nature and the crystallised conclusions of his experience. As an artist, when it comes to execution, he leaves nothing to chance. The most seemingly artless of his proceedings is absolutely defined in advance, and never is what heedless observers call impulsive and spontaneous. But his temperament is free, fluent, opulent, and infinitely tender; and when the whole man is aroused, this flows into the moulds of literary and dramatic art and glorifies them. When you are looking at Jefferson as Acres in the duel scene in The Rivals, you laugh at him, but almost you laugh through your tears. When you see Jefferson as Rip Van Winkle confronting the ghosts on the lonely mountain-top at midnight, you see a display of imaginative personality quite as high as that of Hamlet in tremulous sensibility to supernatural influence, although wholly apart from Hamlet in altitude of intellect and in anguish of experience. The poetry of the impersonation, though, is entirely consonant with Hamlet, and that is the secret of Jefferson's exceptional hold upon the heart and the imagination of his time. The public taste does not ask Jefferson to trifle with his art. Its deep, spontaneous, natural preference feels that he is a true actor, and so yields to his power, and enjoys his charm, and is all the time improved and made fitter to enjoy it. He has reached as great a height as it is possible to reach in his profession. He could if he chose play greater parts than he has ever attempted; he could not give a better exemplification than he gives, in his chose and customary achievement, of all that is distinctive, beautiful, and beneficent in the art of the actor.



IX.

JEFFERSON AND FLORENCE IN OLD COMEDY.

A revival of The Heir at Law was accomplished in the New York season of 1890, with Joseph Jefferson in the character of Dr. Pangloss and William James Florence in that of Zekiel Homespun. That play dates back to 1797, a period in which a sedulous deference to conventionality prevailed in the British theatre, as to the treatment of domestic subjects; and, although the younger Colman wrote in a more flexible style than was possessed by any other dramatist of the time, excepting Sheridan, he was influenced to this extent by contemporary usage, that often when he became serious he also became artificial and stilted. The sentimental part of The Heir at Law is trite in plan and hard in expression. Furthermore that portion of it which, in the character of Dr. Pangloss, satirises the indigent, mercenary, disreputable private tutors who constituted a distinct and pernicious class of social humbugs in Colman's day, has lost its direct point for the present age, through the disappearance of the peculiar type of imposture against which its irony was directed. Dr. Pangloss, nevertheless, remains abstractly a humorous personage; and when he is embodied by an actor like Jefferson, who can elucidate his buoyant animal spirits, his gay audacity, his inveterate good-nature, his nimble craft, his jocular sportiveness, his shrewd knowledge of character and of society, and his scholar-like quaintness, he becomes a delightful presence; for his mendacity disappears in the sunshine of his humour; his faults seem venial; and we entertain him much as we do the infinitely greater and more disreputable character of Falstaff,—knowing him to be a vagabond, but finding him a charming companion, for all that. This is one great relief to the hollow and metallic sentimentality of the piece. Persons like Henry Moreland, Caroline Dormer, and Mr. Steadfast would be tiresome in actual life; they belong, with Julia and Falkland and Peregrine and Glenroy, to the noble army of the bores, and they are insipid on the stage; but the association of the sprightly and jocose Pangloss with those drab-tinted and preachy people irradiates even their constitutional platitude with a sparkle of mirth. They shine, in spite of themselves.

Colman's humour is infectious and penetrating. In that quality he was original and affluent. As we look along the line of the British dramatists for the last hundred years we shall find no parallel to his felicity in the use of comic inversion and equivoke, till we come to Gilbert. Though he was tedious while he deferred to that theatrical sentimentality which was the fashion of his day (and against which Goldsmith, in She Stoops to Conquer, was the first to strike), he could sometimes escape from it; and when he did escape he was brilliant. In The Heir at Law he has not only illumined it by the contrast of Dr. Pangloss but by the unctuous humour and irresistible comic force of the character of Daniel Dowlas, Lord Duberly. Situations in a play, in order to be invested with the enduring quality of humour, must result from such conduct as is the natural and spontaneous expression of comic character. The idea of the comic parvenue is ancient. It did not originate with Colman. His application of it, however, was novel and his treatment of it—taking fast hold of the elemental springs of mirth—is as fresh to-day as it was a hundred years ago. French minds, indeed, and such as subscribe to French notions, would object that the means employed to elicit character and awaken mirth are not scientifically and photographically correct, and that they are violent. Circumstances, they would say, do not so fall out that a tallow-chandler is made a lord. The Christopher Sly expedient, they would add, is a forced expedient. Perhaps it is. But English art sees with the eyes of the imagination and in dramatic matters it likes to use colour and emphasis. Daniel Dowlas, as Lord Duberly, is all the droller for being a retired tallow-chandler, ignorant, greasy, conventional, blunt, a sturdy, honest, ridiculous person, who thinks he has observed how lords act and who intends to put his gained knowledge into practical use. We shall never again see him acted as he was acted by Burton, or by that fine actor William Rufus Blake, or even by John Gilbert—who was of rather too choleric a temperament and too fine a texture for such an oily and stupidly complacent personage. But whenever and however he is acted he will be recognised as an elemental type of absurd human nature made ludicrous by comic circumstances; and he will give rich and deep amusement.

It is to be observed, in the analysis of this comedy, that according to Colman's intention the essential persons in it are all, at heart, human. The pervasive spirit of the piece is kindly. Old Dowlas, restricted to his proper place in life, is a worthy man. Dick Dowlas, intoxicated by vanity and prosperity, has no harm in him, and he turns out well at last. Even Dr. Pangloss—although of the species of rogue that subsists by artfully playing upon the weakness of human vanity—is genial and amiable; he is a laughing philosopher; he gives good counsel; he hurts nobody; he is but a mild type of sinner—and the satirical censure that is bestowed upon him is neither merciless nor bitter. Pangloss, in Milk Alley, spinning his brains for a subsistence, might be expected to prove unscrupulous; but the moraliser can imagine Pangloss, if he were only made secure by permanent good fortune, leading a life of blameless indolence and piquant eccentricity. From that point of view Jefferson formed his ideal of the character; and, indeed, his treatment of the whole piece denoted an active practical sympathy with that gentle view of the subject. He placed before his audience a truthful picture of old English manners; telling them, in rapid and cheery action, Colman's quaint story—in which there is no malice and no bitterness, but in which simple virtue proves superior to temptation, and integrity is strong amid vicissitudes—and leaving in their minds, at the last, an amused conviction that indeed "Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time." His own performance was full of nervous vitality and mental sparkle, and of a humour deliciously quaint and droll. Dr. Panglass, as embodied by Jefferson, is a man who always sees the comical aspect of things and can make you see it with him, and all the while can be completely self-possessed and grave without ever once becoming slow or heavy. There was an air of candour, of ingenuous simplicity, of demure propriety, about the embodiment, that made it inexpressibly funny. There was no effort and no distortion. The structure of the impersonation tingled with life, and the expression of it—in demeanour, movement, facial play, intonation and business—was clear and crisp, with that absolute precision and beautiful finish for which the acting of Jefferson has always been distinguished. He is probably the only American comedian now left, excepting John S. Clarke, who knows all the traditional embellishments that have gone to the making of this part upon the stage—embellishments fitly typified by the bank-note business with Zekiel Homespun; a device, however, that perhaps suggests a greater degree of moral obliquity in Dr. Pangloss than was intended by the author. It was exceedingly comical, though, and it served its purpose. Jefferson has had the character of Pangloss in his repertory for almost forty years. He first acted it in New York as long ago as 1857, at Laura Keene's theatre, when that beautiful woman played Cicely and when Duberly was represented by the lamented James G. Burnett. It takes the playgoer a long way back, to be thinking about this old piece and the casts that it has had upon the American stage. The Heir at Law was a great favourite in Boston thirty years ago and more, when William Warren was in his prime and could play Dr. Pangloss with the best of them, and when Julia Bennett Barrow was living and acting, who could play Cicely in a way that no later actress has excelled. John E. Owens as Pangloss will never be forgotten. It was a favourite part with John Brougham. And the grotesque fun of John S. Clarke in that droll character has been recognised on both sides of the Atlantic.

In Jefferson's impersonation of Dr. Pangloss the predominant beauty was spontaneous and perfectly graceful identification with the part. The felicity of the apt quotations seemed to be accidental. The manner was buoyant, but the alacrity of the mind was more nimble than the celerity of the body, and those wise and witty comments that Pangloss makes upon life, character, and manners flowed naturally from a brain that was in the vigour and repose of intense animation. The actor was completely merged in the character, which nevertheless his judgment dominated and his will directed. No other representative of Pangloss has quite equalled Jefferson in the element of authoritative and convincing sincerity. His demure sapience was of the most intense order and it arose out of great mental excitement. No other actor of the part has equalled him in softness and winning charm of humour. His embodiment of Dr. Pangloss has left in the memory of his time an image of eccentric character not less lovable than ludicrous.