Joseph Jefferson

I

JEFFERSON was not born on the stage, but his family for generations had boon associated with the theatre. His first appearance that he remembered was in 1832, when he was three years old; and he continued to act, in all sorts of parts and with all sorts of experiences, almost till his death in 1905. The theatrical influence and atmosphere seemed to surround him at all times. He grew up with the strange richness of wandering Bohemian vagrancy that attaches to the profession in the dreams of youth, and he met his full share of the hard knocks and bitter struggles that the dreams of youth pass over lightly. Also, he had something of the easy, gracious temper that enjoys the charms of such a life and takes the trials as they come. His father had even more of it. When he was reduced to total bankruptcy, he went fishing, and said to those who found him so occupied, ‘ I have lost everything, and I am so poor now that I really cannot afford to let anything worry me.’ The son inherited from his mother a soul of somewhat more substantial tissue. He did not like bankruptcy, and avoided it. Yet even he thoroughly savored a nomad life and a changing world. He says of such: ‘It had a roving, joyous, gypsy kind of attraction in it that was irresistible.’ It is said that his great-grandmother died laughing. He lived laughing, at any rate, or smiling, with the tenderest sympathy, at all the strange vagaries of existence. To be sure of it, you need only study his portraits—that curiously wrinkled face, which seems as if generations of laughter had kneaded it to the perfect expression of all pathos and all gayety.

The striking thing is that, with this profuse contact with every side of human experience, which must have included the basest, the most sordid, the most vicious, the man should have kept his own nature high and pure to a singular degree. Certainly no one was more in the world, and, in a sense, of the world; yet few have kept themselves more unspotted by it. He often quoted with approval the fine saying, ‘We cannot change the world, but we can keep away from it.’ He kept away from it in spirit. His great friend, President Cleveland, said of him: ‘Many knew how free he was from hatred, malice, and uncharitableness, but fewer knew how harmoniously his qualities of heart, and mind, and conscience blended in the creation of an honest, upright, sincere and God-fearing man.’ And Colonel Watterson, who was intimately acquainted with him, remarks, more specifically, ’I never knew a man whose moral sensibilities were more acute. He loved the respectable. He detested the unclean.'

This moral tone was not merely the sanity of a wholesome, well-adjusted nature: it was a delicacy, an instinctive refinement, which rejected the subtler shades of coarseness as well as mere brutality. Not that Jefferson was the least in the world of a Puritan. The suggestion would be laughable. But he avoided the obscene as he avoided the ugly. He disliked grossness on the stage as he disliked it in the drawing-room, and even deliberately asserted that the latter should be a criterion for the former, which is perhaps going a little far. And he wanted as much decency behind the scenes as before. ‘ Booth’s theatre,’ he said, ‘is conducted as a theatre should be — like a church behind the curtain and like a counting-house in front of it.’

He not only avoided the moral looseness of Bohemianism: he could not tolerate its easy-going indifference to artistic method. He reflected deeply and carefully on the nature of his art, and did not cease to reflect on it as long as he practised it. He had definite views as to its purpose; and though we may not agree with these views, we must at least recognize their validity for one of Jefferson’s temperament. Realism he would have nothing to do with. Art, he urged, was from its very nature selective, suggestive, aimed to give the spiritual essence, not the superficial, material detail. Just so far as these details served the spirit, they were to be used and developed amply; but they were to be disregarded altogether, when they threatened to drag down the spirit and smother it.

He gave careful attention to the audience and its point of view. The strength of his artistic achievement lay in both distinction and human feeling, but with the emphasis rather on human feeling; and he knew it and studied the human hearts to which he addressed himself. All the human hearts, moreover. He was no actor to evening dress and diamonds. How admirable is his appeal to Miss Shaw to remember the second balcony: ‘They are just as much entitled to hear and see and enjoy as arc the persons in the private boxes.’

And he reflected and often spoke on the great critical problem of whether the actor should act from feeling or from intellect. To Jefferson’s keen common sense the problem was hardly a problem at all. Every actor must use feeling and intellect both, the proportion differing according to the temperament. An intense imaginative sympathy with the emotion of the character involved must lie at the bottom of every successful impersonation. But this imaginative sympathy must at all times be controlled by clear and competent analysis. Surely no actor could have had keener sensibilities than had Jefferson himself. Once, at a pathetic moment in a part he had played over and over again, he was observed to falter and lose himself, and the curtain fell abruptly. ‘I broke down,’ he explained afterward, ‘completely broke down. I turned away from the audience to recover myself. But I could not and had the curtain rung.’ Yet he was commonly self-possessed enough in the most intense situations to make comments to his fellow actors; and he summed up the whole question in the often-quoted saying, ‘The actor should have a cool head and a warm heart.’

As Jefferson was thorough in analyzing the theory of his profession, so he was industrious and conscientious in the practice of it. Although, in his later years, he confined himself to a few parts, he had been in his youth an actor of wide range, and he never ceased to study his oft-repeated triumphs for new effects and possibilities, was never the man to lie back upon established reputation and forget the toil necessary to sustain it. ‘ I learn something about my art every night,’ he said, even in old age. And he not only worked, but worked with method and foresight. He speaks in his Autobiography of being careless and unreliable as to facts, and perhaps he was, in indifferent, matters. But when it came to planning a campaign, he knew what he was seeking and got it. For he was a good man of business. So many actors earn great sums and let them slip through their fingers. Not Jefferson. His ideas of financial management were broad and liberal. He put no spite into it and no meanness. See his excellent remarks on competition and opposition. Nor did he desire money for itself. A moderate income was enough for him. ‘Less than this may be inconvenient at times; more than this is a nuisance.’ But hard discipline had taught him to know the value of a dollar when he saw it, the pleasure it would give and the misery it would save; and when the dollars came, he held on to them.

In his relations with his fellow actors he appears to have been delightful. At least, I have looked rather widely for fault-finding and have not discovered it. He enjoyed practical jokes, as in the case of the exquisitely dressed dandy whom he had to embrace upon the stage: ‘I held him tight and rumpled his curls, and then I heard him murmur in a tone of positive agony, “O God!” He was not in the least hurt, but he seemed to feel that his last hour had come.’ No doubt Jefferson was tolerant of such jokes when played upon him. Also, with his charming frankness, he lays bare in himself the weaknesses to which human nature is liable. Jealousy? ‘In this instance my rival was a good actor, but not too good to be jealous of me; and if our positions had been reversed, the chances are that I should have been jealous of him.’ Temper? He had temper and showed it, as he illustrates by various examples, without excusing himself. Quarrels? They occurred in his life, as in most lives, and he admits that his part in them was not always creditable. But the quarrels were relieved and soon healed by a wide comprehension of the human heart and love of it. And, above all, a sane philosophy taught that no quarrel should be perpetuated by talking about it or making any parade of it whatever. ‘ If people could only realize how little the public care for the private quarrels of individuals, — except to laugh at them. — they would hesitate before entering upon a newspaper controversy.’ If Whistler could have learned that lesson, his life would have been pleasanter to read about.

And Jefferson’s good terms with his fellows were by no means confined to the negative. He was always ready for a frolic with them. He was cordially interested in their affairs. He was willing to give both money and time to extricate them from difficulties. He could do what is perhaps even harder, bestow unstinted and discerning praise upon their achievements. And he could stand up for their professional dignity, whether they were alive or dead. When a fashionable minister refused to perform the funeral service for an actor on account of his calling, Jefferson asked in wrath if there was no church where he could get it done. ‘There is a little church around the corner,’ was the reply. ‘Then, if this be so, God bless the little church around the corner!’ The name sticks to this day. No wonder that a friend who knew him intimately could write, ‘He was the most lovable person I ever met, either in or out of my profession.’

A better test even than relations with the profession generally is that of management of the actors in his own company and under his especial charge. It is evident that he preserved discipline. Irregularities in conduct and irregularities in artistic method he would not tolerate. But he was reasonable in discipline, and he was gentle, as gentle, we are told, with his subordinates as with his children and grandchildren. He had the largest patience in meeting unforeseen accidents and difficulties. One night the curtain dropped unexpectedly in the midst of a critical scene. Jefferson accepted the situation with perfect calmness. Afterward he inquired the cause of the trouble, and one of the stage-hands explained that he had leaned against the button that gave the signal. ‘Well,’ said Jefferson, ‘will you kindly find some other place to lean tomorrow night?’

He was helpful to those about him, and gave advice and encouragement when needed; but this was less by constant lecturing than by the force and suggestion of his own example. You could not be with him without learning, if you had one atom of the stuff of success in you. Some great artists daunt and discourage by their very presence. Jefferson soothed. When he saw that you were anxious and troubled, ‘he laid his hand on your shoulder in that gentle way that stilled all tumult in you and made everything easy and possible, saying, “It will be all right.’”

It is true that some urged, and do still, that Jefferson wanted all the stage and all the play to himself. At a certain point in his career he became a star. After that he altered plays to suit his own prominence, and finally centred practically his whole effort on a very inferior piece that happened to be adapted to his temperament and gave him enormous professional success. It may reasonably be argued that this tendency to engross attention to himself kept him out of real masterpieces; and even more subtly, that he had not the genius to make himself unquestioned master of those masterpieces. On the other hand, his admirers insist that, before he became a one-part actor, he appeared in a great variety of parts, over a hundred in all, and in most, competently, if not triumphantly. There is no doubt that he himself felt keenly the charges of repetition and self-assertion, though he could always meet them with his charming humor, as when he tells t he story of his friends’ giving him a Christmas present of The Rivals with all the parts but his own cut out. The cleverest thing he ever said as to the lack of variety was his answer to Matthews, who charged him with making a fortune with one part and a carpet-bag: ‘It, is perhaps better to play one part in different ways than to play many parts all in one way.’

But by far the most interesting light on Jefferson’s view of his own professional methods is to be found in the conversation reported by Miss Mary Shaw as to her performance of Gretchen in Rip Van Winkle. Miss Shaw had been inclined to emphasize the possibilities of tenderness in Gretchen’s character, but Jefferson, in his infinitely gentle way, put a stop to this immediately. ‘You must not once during the play, except in the last act, call the attention of the audience to any ordinary rule of conduct or mode of feeling. You must play everything with the idea of putting forth this central figure, Rip Van Winkle, as more and more lovable, the more and more he outrages the sensibilities, that being the ethical meaning of the play.’ And there are many other words to the same effect, all admirably ingenious and, on the whole, wise. Only I should like to have seen Jefferson smile as he said them.

Whether he smiled, or whether he was serious, there can be no doubt that, with all his gentleness and all his humor, he had an immense ambition that stuck by him till he died. Over and over again he acknowledges this, with his graceful jesting, which covers absolute sincerity: ‘As the curtain descended the first night on that remarkably successful play [Our American Cousin], visions of large type, foreign countries, and increased remuneration floated before me, and I resolved to be a star if I could.’

Those who think of his later glory do not realize the long years of difficulty and struggle. His youth knew the plague of fruitless effort. He met hunger and cold, deception and rejection. His words about failure have the vividness of intimate acquaintance with the subject. ‘If you are unsuccessful as a, poet, a painter, an architect, or even a mechanic, it is only your work that has failed; but with the actor it does not end here: if he be condemned, it is himself that has failed.’ And further: ‘The mortification of a personal and public slight is so hard to bear, that he casts about for any excuse rather than lay the blame upon himself.’ Stage-fright, utter distrust of self and fortune, he knew it, oh, how well he knew it! To the very end he was nervous over the chance of some sudden incapacity or untoward accident. ‘I am always attacked with a nervous fit when I am to meet a new assemblage of actors and actresses.’ And he said to an amateur, who asked him for a cure for such feelings, ‘If you find one, I wish you would let me have it.’

He was as sensitive to applause and appreciation as to failure. When words of approval began to come, they were drunk in with eagerness. ‘How anxious I used to be in the morning to see what the critics said, quickly scanning the article and skipping over the praise of the other actors, so as to get to what they said about me.’ And years did not abate the zest or dull the edge of it. To be sure, he liked discretion in compliments, as did Doctor Johnson, who said to Hannah More, ‘Madam, before you flatter a man so grossly to his face, you should consider whether your flattery is worth his having.’ Jefferson’s method was gentler. To a lady who hailed him as ‘ You dear, great man!’ he answered, ‘Madam, you make me very uncomfortable.’ But when the compliments were deftly managed, he liked them. ‘He was susceptible to honest admiration,’ says Mr. Wilson. ‘I have often heard him declare since, that he would not give the snap of his finger for anybody who was not.’ And when the compliment came, not from an individual, but from a vast audience, he found it uplifting, exhilarating beyond most things on earth. This stimulus was so splendid, so out of normal experience, that, with his mystical views, he was inclined to relate it to some magnetic agency. ‘He claimed,’ says Miss Shaw, ‘that what he gave the audience in nervous force, in artistic effort, in inspiration, he received back in full measure, pressed down and running over. . . . And how well I saw this great truth demonstrated by Mr. Jefferson. Every night this delicate old man, after having been virtually on the stage every moment for hours, in a play he had acted for thirty-seven years, and which therefore of itself afforded him little or no inspiration, would come off absolutely refreshed instead of exhausted.’

Few human beings have had more opportunity to drink the cup of immediate triumph to the bottom. Jefferson himself often enlarged upon the ephemeral quality of the actor’s glory. No doubt the thought of this gave added poignancy to his rendering of the celebrated phrase in Rip Van Winkle, ‘Are we so soon forgot when we are gone?’ And he urged that it was but just that this glory, being so brief, should be immense and fully savored. He savored it, with perfect appreciation of its casual elements, but still he savored it with large and long delight. He recognized fully that his lot had been fortunate, and that, although he had to toil for success, he had achieved it. ‘ I have always been a very contented man, whatever happened,’ he said, ‘and I think I have had good reason to be.’ He recognized also in his triumph that substantial quality which comes from normal growth; as he beautifully phrased it, ‘that sweet and gradual ascent to good fortune that is so humanizing.’ Respect, tenderness, appreciation, from young and old, rich and poor, wise and unwise, hung about his ripe age and mellowed it, and he acknowledged them again and again in most touching words. ‘It has been dear to me — this life of illuminated emotion — and it has been so magnificently repaid. . . . I have been doubly repaid by the sympathetic presence of the people when I was playing, and the affection that seems to follow me, like the sunshine streaming after a man going down the forest trail that leads over the hills to the lands of morning. No, I can’t put it into words.’ Then he added, with the whimsical turn which gave his talk so much of its charm, ‘Perhaps it’s a good thing to quit the stage before. the people have a chance to change their minds about me.’

As is well known, the climax of Jefferson’s fortunate career lay in the discovery of Rip Van Winkle, not., of course, as a new play, but as something perfectly suited to Jefferson himself, His whole account of this discovery — of the first suggestion on a hay-mow in a country barn on a rainy day, of the gradual growth of the piece and its final triumph — is extremely curious. Equally curious is the study of the play itself. As read, it appears to be crude, inept, inadequate, illiterate. It is not that the language is simple. Much of it is not simple, but heavily, commonly pretentious, with that conventionality which is as foreign to life as it is to good writing. Yet Jefferson took this infirm, tottering patch of literary ineptitude, and by sheer dramatic power made it a human masterpiece. When the play was first produced in England, Foueieault, the author, expressed his doubts as to Jefferson’s handling of it. ‘Joe, I think you are making a mistake: you are shooting Over their heads.’ Jefferson answered, ‘ I ’m not even shooting at their heads — I’m shooting at their hearts.’ He did not miss his mark.

II

So much for the actor. In studying him, we have had glimpses of the man, but he deserves to be developed much more fully. First, as to intelligence. His shrewdness, his keenness, his acute insight, into life and human nature appear in every record of him. He understood men and women, read their tempers, their desires, their hopes and fears, no doubt largely by his own, as is the surest way. For he made a constant, careful, and remorseless analysis of himself. Few persons have confided to us their observations in this kind with more engaging candor. That is, when he saw fit. His Autobiography is not a psychological confession, and deals intentionally with the external. But the glimpses of inner life that he does give have a singular clarity. He admitted his merits, if we may accept, the account of Mr. Wilson, whose conversations with him generally bear the strongest mark of spiritual genuineness. ‘You always do the right thing,’ said Mr. Wilson. ‘Well,’ said Jefferson modestly, ‘I believe I make fewer mistakes than most men. I think I am tactful rather than polilic. the difference between which is very great.’

I find this a little hard to swallow. But Jefferson’s ample admission of his faults and weaknesses is apparent everywhere, and is really charming. He agrees to accept a rôle to please a friend. ‘ I did so, partly to help my old partner, and partly to see my name in large letters. This was the first time I had ever enjoyed that felicity, and it had a most soothing influence upon me.’ He sees a rival actor and appreciates his excellence, ‘though I must confess that I had a hard struggle even inwardly to acknowledge it. As I look back and call to mind the slight touch of envy that I felt that night, I am afraid that I had hoped to see something not quite so good, and was a Httle annoyed to find him such a capital actor.’ All actors and all men feel these things; not all have the honesty to say them.

Also, Jefferson’s vivacity and activity of spirit made him widely conversant with many subjects. ‘I never discussed any topic of current interest or moment with him,’ says Colonel Watterson, ‘that he did not throw upon it the side lights of a luminous understanding, and at the same time an impartial and intelligent judgment.’ It must not be supposed, however, that he was a profound or systematic thinker, and his acquaintance with books, though fairly wide, was somewhat superficial. Even Shakespeare, whom he worshiped and introduced constantly into discussion and argument, he had never read through.

The truth is, he was too busy living to read. He relished life, in all its forms and energies. He was fond of sport, and entered into it with boyish ardor. His love of fishing is widely known, because it figured in his relation with President Cleveland. Their hearty comradeship is well illustrated by the pleasant anecdote of Cleveland’s waiting impatiently while Jefferson chatted at his ease with the commander of the Oneida. ‘ Are you going fishing or not?’ called out the President in despair. ‘I do not mean to stir until I have finished my story to the Commodore,’ said the actor.

Jefferson sometimes shot as well as fished. But in later years the gun was too much for his natural tenderness. ‘I don’t shoot any more,’ he said; ‘I can’t bear to see the birds die.’ And it is characteristic that, to an interviewer who had ventured some comment on the subject, he remarked later, ‘You said you did n’t like to kill things! It made such an impression on me that I’ve never been shooting since.’

Jefferson would have been even more absorbed in sport, if he had not had another distraction which fascinated him and took most of the time and strength that he could spare from his regular pursuits. From his childhood he loved to paint. His father did a good deal of scene-painting, and the son, hardly out of infancy, would gel. hold of the father’s colors and busy himself with them for hours. The passion endured and grew, and Jefferson even felt that, if he had not been an actor, he would have been a painter, and a successful one. His work, mostly landscapes, shows the grace, sensibility, and subtle imaginative quality of his temperament, as well as the influence of the great French painters whom he so much admired.

But what interests us about Jefferson’s painting is the hold it had upon him and the zeal with which he threw himself into it at all times. When he was at home, he shut himself into his studio and worked. When he was touring the country, and acting regularly, ‘in the early morning — at half-past six or so — he would be heard calling for his coffee and for his palette and brushes. It was very hard to get any conversation out of him during the day that did not in some way lead up to painting.’ This is one of the curious cases of a man with a genius for one form of art possessed with the desire to excel in another. When asked if it were true that he would rather paint than act, he replied that it most emphatically was. At any rate, there can be no question that painting filled his thoughts quite as much as acting. When he was in Paris, he says, ‘I painted pictures all day and dreamed of them all night.’ He cherished the hope that after his death bis paintings would be prized and sought for, and he fondly instanced Corot, whose work did not begin to sell till he was fifty. A scene of natural beauty always translated itself for him into a picture. One day, when he had been admiring such a scene, a friend said to him, ‘Why don’t you paint it?’ — ‘No, no, no! Not now.’ — ‘And when?’ — ‘Oh, some time in the future — when I have forgotten it.’

But the most charming comment on this pictorial passion is the little dialogue between Cleveland and Jefferson on the morning after Cleveland was nominated for the second time. Jefferson was standing at a window at Gray Gables, looking out over the bay. Cleveland put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Joe,’he said, ‘are n’t you going to congratulate me?’ And Jefferson: ‘Ah, I do! Believe me, I do congratulate you. But, good God, if I could paint like that you could be president of a dozen United States and I would n’t change places with you.’

The drawback to painting, at least in Jefferson’s case, was that it was a solitary pleasure. It was only when alone that artistic ideas would come to him. He commented on this with his usual delicate wit. ‘But if I like to be alone when I paint, I have no objection to a great many people when I act.’ And in general he had no objection to a great many people, liked them, in fact, and was a thoroughly social and human being. He had all the qualities of a peculiarly social temperament. ‘He was full of caprices,’ says Winter, ‘mercurial and fanciful; a creature of moods; exceedingly, almost morbidly sensitive; eagerly desirous to please, because he loved to see people happy.’

He could enter into the happiness of others, and quite as keenly into their distress. He was ‘sensible of the misfortunes and sufferings of the lame, the blind, the deaf, and the wretched.’ He not only felt these things and relieved them with words, with counsel, and with comfort; but he was ready and active with deeds, both in the way of effort and in the way of money. With the shrewdness of a Franklin, he saw the subjective as well as the objective benefit of such action. ‘My boys sometimes get discouraged,’he remarked, ‘and I say to them: “Go out and do something for somebody. Go out and give something to anybody, if it ’s only a pair of woolen stockings to a poor old woman. It will take you away from yourselves and make you happy.'”

He was some! imes spoken of as overcareful in money matters. Certainly he was not careless or wasteful. He knew that common sense applies to giving as to other things, and he was not liable to the reproach suggested in his comment on a fellow actor: ‘It was said of him that he was generous to a fault; and I think he must have been, for he nev - er paid his washerwoman.’ Jefferson paid his own washerwoman before he helped other people’s.

In human traits of a less practical order he was even richer. In company he was cordial, gay, sympathetic, amusing. He was an admirable story-teller, acted his narrative as well as spoke it, apologized for repeat ing himself, as good story-tellers too often do not, but made old anecdotes seem new by the freshness of his invention in detail. He was tolerant, of the talk of others, even of bores, even of impertinent interviewers, and all agree that he was an excellent listener. He knew that in our hurried, ignorant world those who listen are those who learn.

In the more intimate relations of life Jefferson’s tenderness was always evident. He was twice married and had children by both wives, and his family life was full of charm. This is admirably shown in his daughter-in-law’s story of his once enlarging upon the hideousness of the old idea of God as jealous and angry. This, he said, violated all the beauty of the true relation between parent and child. Whereupon one of his sons remarked, ‘You never taught us to be afraid of you, father.’ Jeflerson’s affection for those who were gone seems to have had a peculiar tenacity and loyalty. Of his elder half-brother, Charles, especially, he always spoke with such vivid feeling that you felt that the memory was a clinging presence in his life.

His devotion to the friends who were with him in the flesh was equally sincere and attractive. The relation with the Clevelands naturally commands the most attention, and it is as creditable to one side as to the other. Jefferson understood perfectly his friend’s great position in the world. He was absolutely indifferent to it, so far as the free, intimate commerce of daily intercourse went; yet never for one instant did he presume upon it for any purpose of selfexaltation or self-aggrandizement. I do not know where this is more delightfully illustrated than in the words of Gilder, the close friend of both men, writing to Mrs. Cleveland: ‘I have just spent the night at Joseph Jefferson’s; he was as angelic as ever, and speaks of yourself and the President always with that refinement of praise that honors the praised doubly — with that deep respect mingled with an affect ionate tone, free of familiarity, that makes one feel like taking off one’s hat whenever he says, “the President,”or “Mrs. Cleveland.” ’

The same sensibility t hat marks Jefferson’s human relations shows in all his enjoyment of life. He liked pleasant things, pretty things. He was moderate in his eating, but he appreciated good food in good company. He liked to build houses and fill them with what was beautiful. He was too shrewd to be lavish, too shrewd to think that lavishness makes happiness. But he knew how to select the beautiful with delicacy and grace. He loved music, though here his taste was rather simple and he quoted with relish ‘Rill’ Nye’s remark about Wagner: ‘My friend Wagner’s music is really much better than it sounds.’ He adored painting, st udied it closely, and collected it as assiduously as his means would allow, at times perhaps a little more so. His love for nature has already appeared with his painting. It was inexhaustible, and one of the best things Winter ever said about him was, ‘No other actor has expressed in art,as he did, the spirit of humanity in intimate relat ion with the spirit of physical nature.'

The sensitive and emotional quality that belonged to his æsthetic feeling was very evident in Jefferson’s religious attitude. It does not appear that he had done any elaborate or systematic thinking upon such subjects, and he did not trouble himself greatly with the external formalities of religion. ‘For sectarian creeds he entertained a profound contempt,’says Winter, ‘and upon clergymen, as a class, he looked with distrust and aversion. But he had an instinctive leaning toward a spiritual view of life. Immortality was not only a theory with him, but an actual, vivid fact, so that he seemed constantly to feet about him the presence of those whom he had lost. In this he resembled the Swedenborgians, to whose doctrines he was favorable, without, perhaps knowing much about them. He carried his recept iveness for spiritual phenomena to the verge of credulity, at the same time always tingeing and correcting it with his wholesome humor and irony. Once he came into the company of Cleveland just as some other person present was telling something a little difficult for ordinary minds to swallow. ‘Ah, said Cleveland, tell that to Jefferson: he ’ll believe anything. And Jefferson answered, ‘Of course I will. The world is full of wonders, and another, more or less, does not surprise me.'

What is winning about Jefferson’s religion is its cheerfulness, serenity, and love. To be as happy as possible one’s self, and especially to make others happy, was the cardinal doctrine of it, and I do not know that it can be improved upon. Above all, he was an enemy to fear. He told Miss Shaw ‘that everything that was detrimental either to the physical or the spiritual health of humanity had its origin in fear. And this he believed in casting out entirely. . . , He told me that he had labored for years with this end in view, believing that the conquering of fear would harmonize his character as much as it was possible for him to do.’

Evidently there was some struggle about this, and the interest of Jefferson’s cheerfulness and optimism lies in the fact that they were not wholly a matter of temperament, but a matter of will. His was not the easy-going, Bohemian carelessness, which takes fortune and misfort une with equal indifference. He liked joy and laughter and sought them and cultivated them. But he was sensitive and capable of suffering intensely. There was a strain of melancholy in him, all the more subtle for being repressed. When someone classed him as an optimist, he protested: ‘No — no, he is mistaken, I am not an optimist. I too often let things sadden me.’ Ugliness he hated. Decay he hated. ’I cannot endure destruction of any kind.’ Old age he hated; never would admit that he was old, kept his heart youthful, at any rate. The secret of life, he knew, is looking forward, and he filled his spirit full of the things that look forward, to this life or another. Thus it was that he loved gardens and flowers. ‘The saddest thing in old age,’he said to Mr. Wilson, ‘is the absence of expectation. You no longer look forward to things. Now a garden is all expectation,’ — here his thought took the humorous turn so characteristic of him, — ‘and you often get a lot of things you don’t expect.’ Then he returned to the serious. ‘Therefore, I have become a gardener. My boy, when you are past seventy, don’t forget to cultivate a garden. It is all expectation.’

This exquisite blending of laughter and pathos, of tenderness and irony, coupled with Jefferson’s constant association with the stage, makes one connect him irresistibly with the clowns of Shakespeare. Touchstone and Feste and the Fool of Lear are not fools in the ordinary sense of imbecility. Their keenness, their apprehension, their subtlety , are often, in specific cases, much beyond those of common mortals. But they take seriously matters which the children of this world think trifling, and see as trifles under the haunting aspect of eternity those solemn passions and desires which grave human creatures regard as the important interests of life. With this airy, gracious, fantastic temper Jefferson had always something in common, however practical he might be when a compelling occasion called for it. He loved dolls and toy-shops; would spend hours in them, watching the children and entering into their ecstasy. He would stand before the windows and put chatter into the dolls’ mouths. ’Look at that old fool taking up his time staring and laughing at us. I wonder if he thinks we have no feelings.’ — ’ Is n’t this a sloppy sort of day for dolls ? Not even fit to look out of t he window! ’ ‘Hello, Margery, who tore your skirt?’ Don’t you hear Touchstone? Don’t you hear Rip Van Winkle?

‘At New Orleans,’he said to Mr. Wilson, ‘Eugene Field and I ranged through the curiosity shops, and the man would buy dolls and such things.’ And Wilson told him that ‘Field said he never saw a man like Jefferson — that his eye was caught with all sorts of gew-gaws, and that he simply squandered money on trifles.’ And Jefferson chuckled. ‘That s it: one half the world thinks the other half crazy.’

So the solution and dissolution of all life, with its passion and eflort and despair and hope, in quaint and tender laughter, bring Jefferson fully into the company of the children of dream. Mark Twain, with his vast wandering, his quest of fortune, his touching of all men’s hands and hearts, was a thing of dream, and confessed it. Emily Dickinson, shut oil’ in her white Amherst solitude, daughter of thoughts and flowers, was a thing of dream, and knew it. With Jefferson the very nature of stage-life made the dream even more insistent and pervading. And on the stage, to act one part, over and over, till the identities of actor and acted were mingled inseparably! And to have that part Rip Van Winkle, a creature of dream, if ever human being was!

And Jefferson himself recognized this flavor of dream again and again. He liked the strange, the mysterious, the mystical; preferred to seek the explanation of natural things in supernatural causes. The actor’s glory, so immense, so all-involving for a moment, does it not flit away into oblivion, like a bubble or a dream? Trifles all, toys all, diversions of dolls, and lit for dolls to play with! ‘Is anything worth while?’ he said. ‘What, perhaps, does the best or worst any of us can do amount to in this vast conglomeration of revolving worlds i On the other hand, is n’t everything worth while? Is not the smallest thing of importance?' So he mocked and meditated, as Feste might have done in the gardens of Olivia, while Sir Toby drank, and Viola and Orsino caressed and kissed.

He loved to sum up his own and all life in a phrase of Seneca : ’Life is a play upon the stage; il signifies not how long it. lasts, but how well it is acted. Die when or where you will, think only on making a good exit.’ But I am sure, il he had known them, he would have preferred the magnificent lines with which Fitzgerald ends his translation of the great dream-play of Calderon:—