On books and arts

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

JOSEPH JEFFERSON

Joseph Jefferson has been seen again—and with all the enthusiasm of many years ago—in Rip Van Winkle. The playbill which announces his appearance makes no mention of Washington Irving, but claims the play as ‘written by Dion Boucicault.’ It needs, however, no very profound student to detect in that tender and graceful fancy of the story, a quality not to be numbered among the useful talents of the versatile dramatist who can give us anything that lies between London Assurance and the Shaughraun. But I believe that, after all these years, the work of three hands is really to be found in the play; Mr. Jefferson himself having manipulated much of its action and business. He does not act the piece: he lives in it. And he is only to be compared with Got, in Balzac’s Mercadet. Both performances are restrained and reserved, without the appearance of restraint and reserve. Both are quiet. There are no dramatic outbursts, and no surprises. But in each case a character, a career—one might almost say a life itself—is put before the spectator. Greater things have undoubtedly been done upon the stage—greater things have been done on the stage of our day by Irving, and greater remain to be done by him—but nothing quite so complete has been seen: nothing giving one the sense of so easy and unlaboured a mastery. The pathos is very gentle: the humour has something of Charles Lamb in it. Jefferson has a face of the utmost good-humour; very kindly eyes, gentle ways, which win upon the children and the dumb things of his village of Falling Waters. For it is certainly his village, this Falling Waters; we cannot seriously separate the actor from the man. And he has a voice of admirable quality and compass: an enunciation of the utmost distinctness, with no perceptible mannerism, unless, indeed, the studied quietness be itself a mannerism. The voice is capable of what would be called an almost womanly tenderness, by those who have never observed that the tenderness of a man—as here to children—may be even a profounder thing.

In Rip Van Winkle he plays a winning character. We have all of us a weakness for the amiable ne’er-do-well, who begins by ruining himself, and ends—much against his feeble inclination—by ruining his children and his friends. Our sympathy is wholly with him, and not with his irritated wife; and when he has drunk away his fortune, and all that he can of hers, we think that if he sits quietly under her reproaches, or makes but a gentle answer, he has atoned for everything. That is the magnetism of the lovable. And that is the kind of character that Mr. Jefferson embodies, in a manner so entirely natural that you are constantly forgetting that it is a performance. He has learned nothing by rote. He has an easy way of seeking for his words: a half-absorbed repetition of part of a phrase, as in our everyday, unchosen speech. He does not finish his sentence like an actor who has learned his lines and counted the delivery of them, and measured them to the end. The common actor winds up an address as Rossini and his school wind up a finale—‘I have the honour to remain your humble and obedient servant,’ Schumann said of them. But Mr. Jefferson’s sentences die off sometimes, or are changed a little, by a slight thing happening in his presence, or by the swift occurrence of a fresh thought which you may read in his face. It is the perfection of naturalness—the perfection of seeming spontaneity.

And if his humour is as mild as Charles Lamb’s, his pathos is as gentle as Hans Christian Andersen’s. There is the delicate suggestion, for those who can seize it—the suggestion and nothing more. When Rip goes out from the home from which his wife has at last banished him—goes out pointing to the child, in answer to his wife’s reproach that he has no part in this house: ‘You say I have no part in this house’—the pathos is of a simple and suggested kind, comparable only to Hans Andersen’s, in the Story of a Mother. And as there is nothing in Literature like the one, there is little on the Stage like the other.

(Academy, 6th November 1875.)

ZOLA’S ‘THÉRÈSE RAQUIN’

On Saturday I went to Thérèse Raquin at the Royalty Theatre; and while I found the piece itself—as indeed I expected to find it—far less of a melodrama than certain of its critics had said, I discovered that the performance, though good and creditable, was not quite so noteworthy as it had been pronounced. The thing is worth seeing, though—would indeed in any case be worth seeing. It is but the second piece of M. Zola’s which has found hospitality among us: nay, in a certain sense, it is the first, for L’Assommoir was hardly seen in its nakedness and truth, though it was seen with fulness of horror in Charles Reade’s version Drink. The version of Thérèse Raquin—executed mainly, as I suppose, by Mr. De Mattos, but overlooked by Mr. George Moore—does not widely depart from the original. It is not a bad translation, though it might, with advantage, have been a little more colloquial. It suggests nowhere that it has been subjected to the process which I believe to be the only satisfactory one, in translation, to a writer who is ambitious, as he ought to be, to write the English that we talk: the process of wholly discarding the original at a certain point—when the bare but real equivalent of that original has once been secured—of forgetting, from that moment, the existence of the original, and of setting oneself solely to say well and naturally what the translation, which is still beside one, says with awkwardness. The translation of Thérèse Raquin is good enough, it may be, for most people’s requirements on the stage; but it is not good enough to be counted as literature. The thing—that is—has not become Mr. De Mattos’s own: he has remained its somewhat mechanical interpreter.

Thérèse Raquin occupies a middle place in M. Zola’s work. In point of date, it is early; but I mean ‘a middle place’ in that it displays neither the exaggerated and sterile realism of the uglier of the writer’s books nor the abounding poetry of the finer of them. A problem in itself less interesting than the problem of the Page d’Amour is, in Thérèse Raquin, treated with hardly a trace of the poetic tragedy which gives the Page d’Amour so much of its value. Thérèse Raquin contains only one or two sentences—they are those in which the wicked little bourgeoise expresses her desire to live for ever in the sunshine—which permit one to realise that its author is the author of the passionate idyl La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret. But, on the other hand, in Thérèse Raquin we are not face to face with the superfluous and unveracious hideousness of La Terre; and the view of humanity is not so brutal and so gross as that which is taken in Nana. No; in these respects we may rank Thérèse Raquin rather with L’Assommoir itself: in both a sad and ugly and degraded world, but a glimpse of the skies. In both—as in everything, for the matter of that, that M. Zola writes—an austere moral: the assured march of evil-doing to its own punishment.

If Thérèse Raquin were simply the melodrama some of its opponents have pronounced it to be, the murder, which is the cause of the two lovers’ remorse and collapse, would have been done, not in the interval between two acts—the first of which ends and the second of which begins with a quiet game of dominoes in a Parisian parlour—but in sight of the audience, with an abundance of water in the middle of the stage, and at the back a panorama of the Seine by Asnières or Meudon. As it is, with the material circumstances of the murder we are not for one moment invited to be concerned. We are shown in one act the state of mind and feeling in which, to two people who were perhaps not born to be villains, such a solution as murder becomes possible; we are shown in another the state of mind and feeling which, in two such people, may presumably succeed to that deed of violence of which they have been guilty. The interest of these acts—different slightly from the interest of the later ones—is the interest of mental analysis; and, if these acts are melodrama, The Ring and the Book is a ‘shocker.’

The intelligent, unprejudiced person who goes to see Thérèse Raquin, comes away with the knowledge that he has witnessed an exposition of several bitter truths—an exposition made by M. Zola with power and with singleness of aim, but here and there accompanied by a purposeless, or at the least an unsuccessful, diffuseness, which is one of the most characteristic and abiding defects of this important writer’s method. This diffuseness, this fulness of detail which is not actually illustrative and explanatory, Balzac, who was Zola’s master, had in a measure; but he had it far less than Zola. A profuse employment of the commonplace, in order that one may be ‘natural’—this avoidance of selection and rejection, when selection and rejection are of the very essence of Art—commends itself, as I understand, to a little school of criticism, or of dogmatism, which has now found voice among us; and that it does so is an entertaining evidence of the capacity of its professors for critical preachment.