"Après je reviens rapidement en cab ("hansom") à mon hôtel, et je me demande en chemin pourquoi les cabs vont si vite? C'est tout simple; les cabs vont très vite parce que les cochers les poussent derrière."
No less an authority than David Garrick once said to an ambitious stage aspirant who sought his advice, that he might humbug the public in tragedy, but warned him not to try to do so in comedy, for that was a serious thing. This opinion was borne out by Voltaire, who, in his anxiety not to imperil the success he had achieved in tragedy, when he wrote his first comedy did so anonymously.
Joseph Jefferson
Having pleasant memories of two distinguished American actors—one a comedian, the other a tragedian—I will follow the high opinion held by the great Englishman of Thalia's children, and write first of Joseph Jefferson, incomparably the finest actor who has come to us from America, and who in his day made a powerful impression and won enduring fame by his performance of Rip Van Winkle and his new rendering of Bob Acres in The Rivals, which he admitted was not free from liberties with Sheridan. I can think of no actor who has been more beloved by audiences in his native land. I must, of course, use that expression, although his grandfather, or perhaps great-grandfather, was British, and an actor under David Garrick. He was, as it were, cradled on the stage.
Jefferson might also have made fame and money by his brush. His work was worthily hung upon the walls of the Royal Academy. I cherish two of his paintings: one, a gift to my wife in remembrance of a happy day we all spent together on the Thames, a charming example of one of its many backwaters near Cookham; the other—a purchase—of Shakespeare's church at Stratford-on-Avon—both reminiscent of Corot. The former always suggests to me the misty Hebrides and an appropriate background for the "Island that liked to be visited," in Barrie's Mary Rose.
Gazing, I remember, at the old Maidenhead bridge at sunset, Jefferson murmured: "What a lovely place is this England of yours! How I should just like to lift it in my arms and carry it right away."
When Edwin Booth, the American tragedian, came over to play in London, Millais gave him a dinner, and invited the leading players of the day to make his acquaintance. He was a fine actor; especially so, I thought, in The Fool's Revenge and Richelieu. When he drew the "awful circle" round the shrinking form of the young heroine and said to the villain of the play: "Set but a foot within that holy ground and on thy head—yea, though it wore a crown—I launch the curse of Rome!" you felt you were in the presence of high dramatic art. The performance at the Lyceum Theatre, in which he and Irving alternated the parts of Othello and Iago, created great interest. Booth was the better Othello; Irving the more attractive and less conventional Iago.
Booth would now and then dine with us on a Sunday evening—to help him bear a sorrow which is, at such times, the actor's lot, and which an extract from a letter to a close friend will best explain: