Marse Henry Part 34

The Dutch blood of Holland and the cavalier blood of England mingled in his veins in fair proportion. He was especially proud of the uncle, his mother's brother, the Southern admiral, head of the Confederate naval organization in Europe, who had fitted out the rebel cruisers and sent them to sea. And well he might be, for a n.o.bler American never lived. At the close of the War of Sections Admiral Bullock had in his possession some half million dollars of Confederate money. Instead of appropriating this to his own use, as without remark or hindrance he might have done, he turned it over to the Government of the United States, and died a poor man.

The inconsistencies and quarrels in which Theodore Roosevelt was now and again involved were largely temperamental. His mind was of that order which is p.r.o.ne to believe what it wants to believe. He did not take much time to think. He leaped at conclusions, and from his premise his conclusion was usually sound. His tastes were domestic, his pastime, when not at his books, field sports.

He was not what might be called convivial, though fond of good company--very little wine affecting him--so that a certain self-control became second nature to him.

To be sure, he had no conscientious or doctrinal scruples about a third term. He had found the White House a congenial abode, had accepted the literal theory that his election in 1908 would not imply a third but a second term, and he wanted to remain. In point of fact I have an impression that, barring Jackson and Polk, most of those who have got there were loath to give it up. We know that Grant was, and I am sure that Cleveland was. We owe a great debt to Washington, because if a third why not a fourth term? And then life tenure after the manner of the Caesars and Cromwells of history, and especially the Latin-Americans--Bolivar, Rosas and Diaz?

Away back in 1873, after a dinner, Mr. Blaine took me into his den and told me that it was no longer a surmise but a fact that the group about General Grant, who had just been reflected by an overwhelming majority, was maneuvering for a third term. To me this was startling, incredible.

Returning to my hotel I saw a light still burning in the room of Senator Morton, of Indiana, and rapping at the door I was bidden to enter.

Without mentioning how it had reached me, I put the proposition to him.

"Certainly," he said, "it is true."

The next day, in a letter to the Courier-Journal, I reduced what I had heard to writing. Reading this over it seemed so sensational that I added a closing paragraph, meant to qualify what I had written and to imply that I had not gone quite daft.

"These things," I wrote, "may sound queer to the ear of the country.

They may have visited me in my dreams; they may, indeed, have come to me betwixt the sherry and the champagne, but nevertheless I do aver that they are buzzing about here in the minds of many very serious and not unimportant persons."

Never was a well-intentioned scribe so berated and ridiculed as I, never a simple news gatherer so discredited. Democratic and Republican newspapers vied with one another which could say crossest things and laugh loudest. One sentence especially caught the newspaper risibilities of the time, and it was many a year before the phrase "between the sherry and the champagne" ceased to pursue me. That any patriotic American, twice elevated to the presidency, could want a third term, could have the hardihood to seek one was inconceivable. My letter was an insult to General Grant and proof of my own lack of intelligence and restraint. They lammed me, laughed at me, good and strong. On each successive occasion of recurrence I have encountered the same criticism.

Chapter the Twenty-Third

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

I

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

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

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

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

Early in 1861 my friend Jefferson came to me and said: "There is going to be a war of the sections. I am not a warrior. I am neither a Northerner nor a Southerner. I cannot bring myself to engage in bloodshed, or to take sides. I have near and dear ones North and South.

I am going away and I shall stay away until the storm blows over. It may seem to you unpatriotic, and it is, I know, unheroic. I am not a hero; I am, I hope, an artist. My world is the world of art, and I must be true to that; it is my patriotism, my religion. I can do no manner of good here, and I am going away."

II

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

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

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

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

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

"No," said I, following him. "What was it?"

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

Joseph Jefferson was a Swedenborgian in his religious belief. At one time too extreme a belief in spiritualism threatened to cloud his sound, wholesome understanding. As he grew older and happier and pa.s.sed out from the shadow of his early tragedy he fell away from the more sinister influence the supernatural had attained over his imagination. One time in Washington I had him to breakfast to meet the Chief Justice and Mr.

Justice Matthews and Mr. Carlisle, the newly-elected Speaker of the House. It was a rainy Sunday, and it was in my mind to warn him that our company was made up of hard-headed lawyers not apt to be impressed by fairy tales and ghost stories, and to suggest that he cut the spiritualism in case the conversation fell, as was likely, into the speculative. I forgot, or something hindered, and, sure enough, the question of second sight and mind reading came up, and I said to myself: "Lord, now we'll have it." But it was my kinsman, Stanley Matthews, who led off with a clairvoyant experience in his law practice. I began to be rea.s.sured. Mr. Carlisle followed with a most mathematical account of some hobgoblins he had encountered in his law practice. Finally the Chief Justice, Mr. Waite, related a series of incidents so fantastic and incredible, yet detailed with the precision and lucidity of a master of plain statement, as fairly to stagger the most believing ghostseer. Then I said to myself again: "Let her go, Joe, no matter what you tell now you will fall below the standard set by these professional perfecters of pure reason, and are safe to do your best, or your worst." I think he held his own, however.

IV

Joseph Jefferson came to his artistic spurs slowly but surely, being nearly thirty years of age when he got his chance, and therefore wholly equal to it and prepared for it.

William E. Burton stood and had stood for twenty-five years the recognized, the reigning king of comedy in America. He was a master of his craft as well as a leader in society and letters. To look at him when he came upon the stage was to laugh; yet he commanded tears almost as readily as laughter. In New York City particularly he ruled the roost, and could and did do that which had cost another his place. He began to take too many liberties with the public favor and, truth to say, was beginning to be both coa.r.s.e and careless. People were growing restive under ministrations which were at times little less than impositions upon their forbearance. They wanted something if possible as strong, but more refined, and in the person of the leading comedy man of Laura Keene's company, a young actor by the name of Jefferson, they got it.

Both Mr. Sothern and Mr. Jefferson have told the story of Tom Taylor's extravaganza, "Our American Cousin," in which the one as Dundreary, the other as Asa Trenchard, rose to almost instant popularity and fame. I shall not repeat it except to say that Jefferson's Asa Trenchard was unlike any other the English or American stage has known. He played the raw Yankee boy, not in low comedy at all, but made him innocent and ignorant as a well-born Green Mountain lad might be, never a b.u.mpkin; and in the scene when Asa tells his sweetheart the bear story and whilst pretending to light his cigar burns the will, he left not a dry eye in the house.

New York had never witnessed, never divined anything in pathos and humor so exquisite. Burton and his friends struggled for a season, but Jefferson completely knocked them out. Even had Burton lived, and had there been no diverting war of sections to drown all else, Jefferson would have come to his growth and taken his place as the first serio-comic actor of his time.

Rip Van Winkle was an evolution. Jefferson's half-brother, Charles Burke, had put together a sketchy melodrama in two acts and had played in it, was playing in it when he died. After his Trenchard, Jefferson turned himself loose in all sorts of parts, from Diggory to Mazeppa, a famous burlesque, which he did to a turn, imitating the mock heroics of the feminine horse marines, so popular in the equestrian drama of the period, Adah Isaacs Menken, the beautiful and ill-fated, at their head.

Then he produced a version of Nicholas Nickleby, in which his Newman Noggs took a more ambitious flight. These, however, were but the avant-couriers of the immortal Rip.

Charles Burke's piece held close to the lines of Irving's legend. When the vagabond returns from the mountains after the twenty years' sleep Gretchen is dead. The apex is reached when the old man, sitting dazed at a table in front of the tavern in the village of Falling Water, asks after Derrick Van Beekman and Nick Vedder and other of his cronies. At last, half twinkle of humor and half glimmer of dread, he gets himself to the point of asking after Dame Van Winkle, and is told that she has been dead these ten years. Then like a flash came that wonderful Jeffersonian change of facial expression, and as the white head drops upon the arms stretched before him on the table he says: "Well, she led me a hard life, a hard life, but she was the wife of my bosom, she was _meine frau!_"