MR. JEFFERSON IN RIP VAN WINKLE.
UR: JEFFERSON is a great gain to the English stage. There Iare few qualities in which our English actors, and even Mr. Fechter, our greatest foreign actor, are so deficient as the soft, pliant acting of gradual transitions of mood and of playful glim- mering humour. The characters in which the nerves are lax and the shades of feeling, instead of changing abruptly, pass impercep- tibly into each other,—joyousness into sadness, tenderness into levity, irritation into gay and capricious banter,—are seldom acted well amongst us. Mr. Fechter gives us all the French sharp- ness of contrast, the sudden turns of social feeling, the keen con- trolling force of princely pride, the dramatic exchange of pride for the opposite extreme of tenderness, with admirable effect, but he is sadly wanting in the play of the less voluntary and more finely shaded ripple of character. There is a French precision about his face and its changes ; the latter are far readier and livelier than our rigid English habits of thought and feeling, but they show a still sharper boundary between the sunshine and shadow. Mr. Jefferson is an actor of quite a different school, and he has a part to act at the Adelphi which brings out his powers admir- ably. The old legend of " Rip Van Winkle " or " Sleepy Hollow," which Washington Irving has told so well, is half- parable, half-sarcasm. In one of the old Dutch colonies on the Hudson River there lived a Dutchman—with Mr. Jefferson he is a German—to whom time is valueless. He has spare time for everything but his own affairs. With one of those genial tempers which enters into every one's little wishes and pleasures almost with gratitude for their supplying the deficiency of any dis- tinct wishes in himself, —for sympathy with others is with him a stronger feeling than any original desire of his own,—he becomes at once the mast popular and the most thriftless man in the village, both characteristics being helped by the violent temper of his wife, who in her anger at the gralual disappearance of Rip's acres and stock, does all in her power to render everything else he does pleasanter to him than his own proper work, for which he never gets either thanks or lova. Yet Rip, like all men of such easy, flexible temper, is somewhat meditative. Naturally clear- sighted, he is not eager enough about anything to be blind to the real motives at work among his fellow-villagers. He is to some extent like Adam Smith's " impartial spectator" in the bosom of every man, having sympathy enough for in- sight and not eagerness enough to be misled by his sympathy. His only passion is drink, which soothes his self-reproaches for his thoughtlessness, and is, moreover, the natural passion of an over- social man. Such is the man chosen by the legend as the fittest to lose his consciousness of the flight of time for twenty years among the haunted Catskill Mountains, and then wake up and become aware of the immense changes which had taken place during that period,—the change of a revolution both politically and socially, the Government altered, a village grown into a busy town, un- known men become famous, old men dead, babies themselves parents; yet all of these changes scarcely less affected by his own co-operation than if he had awakened every day as usual during its lapse ; for a man who only helps his neighbours and lightens their work without doing his own does little which would not equally be done without him, though it might be done at greater cost. Living, too, in others, and not in himself, he is just the man to appreciate most vividly the pain of being utterly for- gotten by those in whom he had as it were merged his own proper personality. Being naturally reflective and clearsighted, the anxiety and amazement of the gulf between his to-day and yester- day is greater than it would be with a more common-place and confused intelligence. Without any hardness of will, he makes little strenuous effort to meet the shock, but is half borne down before it. With much social humour, he feels the full force of the contradiction between the popularity of yesterday and the loneli- ness of to-day ; with much tenderness of feeling, he feels. the utter friendlessness still more. And all this, though due to a twenty years' sleep, is not properly preternatural. The really curious thing is that when people do once in sleep become unconscious of what is going on, they should feel so much confidence as they do that a whole host of important events may not have happened during the temporary loss of personality. Why should we always feel confi- dent that only twelve hours at most have elapsed during a trance that might have lasted for eighteen centuries? Why should not one man, after dipping into that oblivion, take up his life again at quite a different point from every other man who passed into it with him ? The true mystery is our confidence in the measure's of duration applied to such a mystery as sleep, and so far Rip Van Winkle's trance, instead of being a preternatural invasion of the laws of life, may be said to be the illustration of a doubt which sometimes haunts us all.
Such are the dramatic conditions of the piece which Mr. Jeffer- son has to realize for us by his acting, and he does so with wonder- ful power and ease. When he first enters, with a crowd of children at his heels, and one on his back, the villagers laughing with him, you seem to see humour, gentleness, good-nature, pliancy, and yet a clear, indolent sense, in every movement of his mobile and handsome face. His broken English, half German, some- how adds to the effect by giving the air of a stranger, a half spec- tator, who enters warmly into the village life without being quite a part of it. There is often a slight absence of mind in his brief assenting ja, which indicates that he can reflect on the nature and drift of the purposes to which he generally gives in so lightly. In his half-tender, half-humorous, half self- reproachful conversation with the two children, his own little daughter and her small lover, on the future of which they were dreaming, how Hendrick should go and kill whales, and bring back all the money for Meenie, but give it to Rip to keep mean- time till they were old enough to get married, Mr. Jefferson makes you feel how little personal influence Rip really has, and knows that he has, over the future even of those nearest to him, and yet how much concern he feels about it! He acquiesces in the children's little plans as one who is sensible he shall never have power to mould them in the least, inquiring playfully if it was all settled without his consent, and when he hears it is, saying with a smile half of tenderness, half of self-ridicule, " Ja! I tought maybe you might have jus ask my leaf." And with a quizzical air of self-indulgence he drinks off a glass to the poor
little things with his regular toast, " To your health, and your families, and may you live long and happy !" Nothing can express more perfectly the relaxed nerves of action, than the tenderness and self-reproach, dissolving into fun and amusement at his own aptness in finding excuses for more drink, with which he acts this little scene. He gives, too, admirably, in other scenes of this first
part of the play, the manner of a man who has absolutely no end in living and few strong desires beyond the warmest social impulses, whose tendrils climb easily from circumstance to circumstance,
and who yet for that very reason is more utterly annihilated than another man would be, when he is torn from all surrounding cir- cumstances at once, and thrust, in the profound solitude of name- lessness, into a new world. The art with which Mr. Jefferson obliges us by his light humour, his mobile feeling, his purpose- less good-nature, to feel and see how idly he floats on the sur- face of his time, is appreciated in a moment when, after the great sleep has passed, his aged face, unconscious of the change, though clothed in a long white beard, prepares itself once more for its old expression of comic alarm at his wife's anger and of indolence trying to be gay, though without feeling the old effervescence. The sense of complete and terrible solitude produced is most pathetic,—far more than we could have felt in the C.132. of any one with more personal energy of his own, or with a less delicate social instinct. The old man is deprived of his gay spirit and of all in which it had revelled at a stroke. He has suddenly become—himself, and nothing but himself, and as that self scarcely existed except in relation to his own volatile spirits and his sympathies, as he was scarcely more in himself than a looking-glass is with nothing to reflect in it, as we know that he can carve out no future, can scarcely enter even with any vivacity now into new society, that to transfer him to a new world is almost like moving an air-bub- ble from the surface of one stream to another, the pathos of the moment when he drifts into the new current, still expectant of the old floating straws which he used to chase, is profound. When he hobbles into what was his village, looking eagerly out for the old universal smile of welcome, and finds nothing but ridicule, amazement, and strange looks, the wonder first, then the pale glimmering of his old humour as he hopes for a moment that all is yet right, the anxiety which is all but terror as he fears that he is mad and realizes that he is forgotten, —most of all the wonderful expression of absolute nothingness he puts on as he fails to regain one after another of the lost threads, show Mr. Jefferson to be a really fine actor. Then his wife comes in, and he regains some courage, as feeling assured that his mind has not wholly played him false. While he listens to her—she has married again, and is now the persecuted instead of the perseeutrix —conversing with his successor, and anticipates her replies from his knowledge of her former character, he has all the air of a man who sees and comments on that curious distortion of ones own circumstances of which one is sometimes conscious in a dream. But the finest piece of acting in the play is Rip Van Winkle's interview with his daughter after he is persuaded that it is his daughter he sees though now a young woman. The helpless quiver of his failing voice as he passionately pleads with Meenie to recognize him and convince him that he is not the madman he fears, is as fine a piece of acting as any the English stage has seen for years. His voice and his passion seem to have floated over twenty years in their way to this moment ; it is the last point at which he hopes to recover his fading personality, and he knows there is no strength or life in him for anything if he fail. Succeeding in convincing her that he is her father, flickers of the old humour return, and when imitating the words and manner of the old despot (who has married his wife and made her miserable) in dismissing the pre- sumed beggar from the house, he quivers out, " Give him a cold potato, and send him away," we see that the old Rip is kindling up again feebly in him. We have not often seen a finer, and never a less artificial or more easy piece of acting, than Mr. Jefferson's picture of the genial, quick, indolent, at once helpful and helpless loiterer, suddenly insulated from all the trifles in which he had lived, and made to realize at once that the busy world had not wanted hint, but that he had no life except in it.
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