He asked Mr. Warren why a Mr. Inglis was selling his fine library and pictures—a question nobody had been able to solve. Mr. Inglis is, however, in some way connected with the stage, and Warren told us it was because he had been arrested with Mr. Harvey Parker and others and condemned to be thrown in the House of Correction, for selling liquor. His money protected him from the rigor of the law, but the disgrace remained. His children felt it much and he was going to Europe at least for a season. We could not help feeling the injustice of this when we remembered the myriad liquor shops for the poor all over the town, with which no one interferes.
Mr. Jefferson was deeply interested in our pictures of the players by Zanaçois. Dr. Holmes came in, talked a little at my suggestion about Anne Whitney’s bust of Keats, which he appears to know nothing about artistically (I observed the same lack of knowledge in Emerson), but he criticised the hair. He said he supposed nothing was known about Keats’s hair, so it might as well be one way as another. I told him on the contrary I owned some of it; whereat I got it out, and he went off in a little episode about an essay which he had sometimes thought of writing about hair. He has a machine by which the size of a hair can be measured and recorded. This he would like to use, and make a note of comparison between the hairs of “G. W.” (as he laughingly called Washington), Jefferson, Milton, and other celebrities of the earth. He thought it might be very curious to discover the difference in quality.
We were soon seated at the table (only six all told) where the conversation never flagged. Longfellow properly began it by saying he thought Mr. Charles Mathews was entirely unjust to Mr. Forrest as King Lear. He considered Mr. Forrest’s rendering of the part, and he sat through the whole, as fine and close to nature. He could not understand Mr. Mathews’s underrating it as he did. Of course the other two gentlemen could say nothing more than the difficulty Mr. Mathews from his nature would have in estimating at its proper worth anything Mr. Forrest might do, their idea of Art being so dissimilar. Here arose the question if one actor was a good judge of another. Jefferson said he sometimes thought actors very bad judges—indeed he preferred to be judged by an audience inspired by feeling rather than by one intellectually critical.
Jefferson has a clear blue eye, very fine and bright and sweet. Longfellow thinks his mouth a very weak one, and certainly his face is not impressive. Warren appears a man of finer intellect and more wit. He had many witty things to say and his little tales were always dramatically given. Dr. Holmes could not seem to recover from the idea that Jefferson had made a fortune out of one play and that he never played but one. “I hear, Mr. Jefferson,” he said, when he first came in, “that you have been playing the same play ever since you came here.” (He has been playing the same for a dozen years, I believe, nearly—and has been here three weeks!) Jefferson could hardly help laughing as he assured him that for the space of three weeks he had given the same every night. Dr. Holmes had a way at the table of talking of “you actors,” “you gentlemen of the stage,” until I saw Longfellow was quite disturbed at the unsympathetic unmannerliness of it, in appearance, and tried to talk more than ever in a different strain.
After I left the table, which I did because I thought they might like to smoke, Jamie sent for Parsons’s poems and read them some of the finest. Of course the talk was wittier and quicker as the time came to separate, but I cannot report upon it. The impression the two actors left upon me, however, was rather that of men who enjoyed coming up to the surface to breathe a natural air seldom vouchsafed to them than of men sparring with their wits—they are affectionate, gentle, subdued gentlemen and a noble contrast to the self-opinionated ignorance which we often meet in society. Dr. Holmes was, however, the wit of the occasion, as he always is, and everybody richly enjoyed his sallies. They stayed until the last moment—indeed I do not see how they got to their two theatres in time to dress. It must have been, as they say of eggs, a “hard scrabble.” We went afterward—we four—to see a new actor, Raymond, play “Colleen Bawn” at the Globe—pretty play, though very touching and melodramatic, by Boucicault. I must confess to dislike such plays where your feelings are wrought to the highest pitch for nothing.
JEFFERSON IN THE BETROTHAL SCENE OF “RIP VAN WINKLE”
The name of Fechter is familiar to the middle-aged through the memory of fathers, to the young through that of grandfathers. Readers of these pages will recall that Dickens, soon after reaching America in 1867, spoke of him in terms which caused Mrs. Fields to look forward with confidence to a new friendship. His coming to America was specifically heralded by an article, “On Mr. Fechter’s Acting,” contributed by Dickens to the “Atlantic” for August, 1869. When Fechter was in Boston, warmly received as Dickens’s friend, he often appears in the journals of Mrs. Fields, in conjunction with others.
Friday, February 25, 1870.—Mr. Fechter came to lunch with Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Appleton, Mr. and Mrs. Dorr. He talked freely about his Hamlet, so different from all other impersonations. His audience here he finds wonderfully good, better than any other; fine points which have never been applauded before bring out a round of applause. On the whole he appears to enjoy new hearers—does not understand the constant comparison between himself and Booth. They are already great friends. Booth was in the house the last night of his performance there; afterward he did not come to speak to him, and Fechter felt it; but a letter came yesterday saying he was so observed that he slipped away as soon as possible, and could not come on Sunday because visitors prevented him. Better late than never; it was pleasant to Fechter to hear from Booth—with one exception: he enclosed a notice from some newspaper, cutting up himself horribly and praising Fechter. “Ah! that won’t do; I shall send it back to him and tell him why. We are totally unlike in our Hamlets, and neither should be praised at the other’s expense.”
Mr. Fechter described minutely Mr. Dickens’s attack of paralysis last year, and, the year before, his prompt appearance in the box of the theatre at the last performance of “No Thoroughfare,” which he said he should do; but as Fechter had not heard of his return from America, it was a great shock. “If it had been ‘Hamlet,’ or any difficult play, I could not have gone on! He should not have done such a thing.” He told us a strange touching story of M’lle Mars, during her last years. She came upon the stage one night to give one of the youthful parts in which she had once been so famous. When she appeared, some heartless wretch threw her a wreath of immortelles, as if for her grave. She was so shocked that the drops stood on her brow, the rouge fell from her cheeks, and she stood motionless before the audience, a picture of age and misery. She could not continue her part.