The journalist and the player have some things in common. Each turns night into day. I have known rather intimately all the eminent English-speaking actors of my time from Henry Irving and Charles Wyndham to Edwin Booth and Joseph Jefferson, from Charlotte Cushman to Helena Modjeska. No people are quite so interesting as stage people.
During nearly fifty years my life and the life of Joseph Jefferson ran close upon parallel lines. He was eleven years my senior; but after the desultory acquaintance of a man and a boy we came together under circumstances which obliterated the disparity of age and established between us a lasting bond of affection. His wife, Margaret, had died, and he was passing through Washington with the little brood of children she had left him.
It made the saddest spectacle I had ever seen. As I recall it after more than sixty years, the scene of silent grief, of unutterable helplessness, has still a haunting power over me, the oldest lad not eight years of age, the youngest a girl baby in arms, the young father aghast before the sudden tragedy which had come upon him. There must have been something in my sympathy which drew him toward me, for on his return a few months later he sought me out and we fell into the easy intercourse of established relations.
I was recovering from an illness, and every day he would come and read by my bedside. I had not then lost the action of one of my hands, putting an end to a course of musical study I had hoped to develop into a career. He was infinitely fond of music and sufficiently familiar with the old masters to understand and enjoy them. He was an artist through and through, possessing a sweet nor yet an uncultivated voice—a blend between a low tenor and a high baritone—I was almost about to write a “contralto,” it was so soft and liquid. Its tones in speech retained to the last their charm. Who that heard them shall ever forget them?
Early in 1861 my friend Jefferson came to me and said: “There is going to be a war of the sections. I am not a warrior. I am neither a Northerner nor a Southerner. I cannot bring myself to engage in bloodshed, or to take sides. I have near and dear ones North and South. I am going away and I shall stay away until the storm blows over. It may seem to you unpatriotic, and it is, I know, unheroic. I am not a hero; I am, I hope, an artist. My world is the world of art, and I must be true to that; it is my patriotism, my religion. I can do no manner of good here, and I am going away.”
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 associations led him into a familiar knowledge of the trend of political opinion and the portent of public affairs, and I can truly say that during the fifty years that passed thereafter I never discussed any topic of current interest or moment with him that he did not throw upon it the side lights of a luminous understanding, and at the same time an impartial and intelligent judgment.
His mind was both reflective and radiating. His humor though perennial was subdued; his wit keen and spontaneous, never acrid or wounding. His speech abounded with unconscious epigram. He had his beliefs and stood by them; but he was never aggressive. Cleaner speech never fell from the lips of man. I never heard him use a profanity. We once agreed between ourselves to draw a line across the salacious stories so much in vogue during our day; the wit must exceed the dirt; where the dirt exceeded the wit we would none of it.
He was a singularly self-respecting man; genuinely a modest man. The actor is supposed to be so familiar with the pubic as to be proof against surprises. Before his audience he must be master of himself, holding the situation and his art by the firmest grip. He must simulate, not experience emotion, the effect referable to the seeming, never to the actuality involving the realization.
Mr. Jefferson held to this doctrine and applied it rigorously. On a certain occasion he was playing Caleb Plummer. In the scene between the old toy-maker and his blind daughter, when the father discovers the dreadful result of his dissimulation—an awkward hitch; and, the climax quite thwarted, the curtain came down. I was standing at the wings.