WILLIAM J. FLORENCE AS BARDWELL SLOTE.
Jonathan, of whom something has already been said, is now extinct and defunct. Asa Trenchard is the creation of an Englishman (Tom Taylor), brought to perfection by the genius of Mr. Jefferson. Rip Van Winkle, as has been said before, is a Dutchman taken from the pages of Irving’s familiar tale, and so accentuated by the genius of this same Jefferson in the present generation, that the fact that he had distinguished predecessors in the same character, but in other dramatizations of the story, is almost forgotten now. Hackett was the original Rip in 1830. Of his performance Sol Smith wrote then: “I should despair of finding a man or a woman in an audience of five hundred who could hear Hackett’s utterance of five words in the second act, ‘But she vas mine vrow,’ without experiencing some moisture in the eyes.” The second Rip Van Winkle was Charles Burke, a half-brother of Mr. Jefferson who considers Burke’s the best Rip Van Winkle of the trio. He was the author of his own version of the play. Concerning his “Are we so soon forgot?” L. Clarke Davis quotes John S. Clarke as saying: “It fell upon the senses like the culmination of all mortal despair, and the actor’s figure, as the low sweet tones died away, symbolized more the ruin of a representative of a race than the sufferings of an individual. His awful loss and loneliness seemed to clothe him with a supernatural dignity and grandeur which commanded the sympathy and awe of his audience.” Mr. Clarke adds that in supporting Mr. Burke in this part night after night, and while perfectly aware of what was coming, and even watching for it, when these lines were spoken his heart seemed to rise in his throat, and his eyes were wet with tears. The Rip Van Winkle which Mr. Jefferson has played so often on both sides of the Atlantic is his own version of the story, somewhat elaborated by Mr. Boucicault; and Mr. Jefferson’s Rip Van Winkle is Rip Van Winkle himself.
It was Charles Burke who first discovered the possibilities lying dormant in the character of Solon Shingle, a sort of Yankee juvenile Paul Pry, in a two-act drama called The People’s Lawyer, by Dr. J. S. Jones. “Yankee” Hill and Joshua Silsbee—both admirable representatives of Yankee character parts—played Solon Shingle as a young man, with all of the “Down-East” characteristics which distinguish stage Down-Easters; and it was not until he fell into the hands of Burke that he became the simple-minded, phenomenally shrewd old man from New England, with a soul which soared no higher than the financial value of a bar’l of apple-sass. Until Mr. Owens, the last of the Solon Shingles, died and took Solon Shingle with him, the drivelling old farmer from Massachusetts was as perfect a specimen of his peculiar species as our stage has ever seen.
Judge Bardwell Slote may be called with justice “a humorous satire,” which is the subtitle given by Benjamin Woolf to the play of The Mighty Dollar, in which he is found. He is a politician of the worst stamp, with many amiable and commendable qualities. He is vulgar to an almost impossible degree, personally offensive, and yet entirely delightful to meet—on the stage, where Mr. Florence kept him for many hundreds of successive nights. If he never existed in real life—and it is to be hoped for the sake of our national credit that he did not—Mr. Florence made him not only possible but probable.
JOHN T. RAYMOND.
The Senator, written by David Lloyd, and retouched by Sydney Rosenfeld for Wm. H. Crane, is a native legislator of a somewhat different type. He is an honest politician, who may perhaps be found in the Senate of one of the States of the nation, and even in the Upper House of the nation itself. He is a man of energy and of what is called “snap”; he is full of engagements which he has no time to keep; he is loquacious, of course, for loquacity is part of his business capital; he is loud, self-made, self-educated, self-reliant, and not always refined. His humor is peculiarly American, and in Mr. Crane’s hands he is very human.