Part 14

_September 23, 1866._—Edwin Booth and the Aldriches came to tea; also Tom Beal and Professor Sterry Hunt of Montreal, the latter late. Booth came in the twilight while a magnificent red and purple and gold sunset was staining the bay. The schooners anchored just off shore had already lighted their lanterns and swung them in the rigging, and the full moon cast a silver sheen over the scene. I hear he passes every Sunday morning while here at the grave of his wife in Mt. Auburn. He seems deeply saddened. He was very pleasant, however, and ready to talk, and gave amusing imitations—in particular of his black boy, Jan, who possesses, he says, the one accomplishment of forgetting everything he ought to remember. One day a man with a deep tragic voice, “Forrestian,” he said, came to him with letters of introduction asking Mr. Booth to assist him as he was about to go to England. Mr. B. told him he knew no one in England and could do nothing for him, he was sorry. If he ever found it possible to do him a service he would with pleasure. With that Mr. B. turned,—they were in the vestibule of the theatre—and entered the box-office to speak to someone there; immediately he heard the deep voice addressing Jan with “You are with Mr. Booth.” “Yes,” responded Jan with real negro accent, “I’m wid Mr. Booth.” “In what capacity—are you studying?” “Yaas,” returned Jan, unblushingly, “I’se studyin’.” “What are you upon now?” “Oh, Richelieu, Hamlet, an’ a few of dese yer.” “Ah, I should be pleased to enter into correspondence with you while I am abroad. Would you have any objections?” “Oh, no, no objection, no objection at all.” “Thank you, sir; good-day, sir.” With that they parted and Jan came with his mouth stretched wide with laughter. “Massa, what is ‘correspond’? I told him I’d correspond, what’d he mean, correspond?” Then Jan, convulsed with his joke, roared and roared again. They are surely a merry race, but provoking enough sometimes. They are capable of real attachments, however; this man has been several times dismissed but will not go. Booth told everything very dramatically, but I was especially struck with his description of a man travelling with two shaggy terrier pups in the cars. He had them in a basket and hung them up over his head and then composed himself to sleep. Waking up half an hour later, he observed a man on the opposite side of the car, his eyes starting from his head and the very picture of dismay, as if a demon were looking at him. The owner of the pups, following the direction of the man’s eyes, looked up and saw the two pups had their heads out of the basket. He quietly made a sign for them to go back and they disappeared. The man’s gaze did not apparently slacken, however, but in a moment became still more horrified when the pups again looked out. “What’s the matter?” said the owner. “What are those?” said the man, pointing with trembling finger; “pray excuse me, but I have been on a spree and I thought they were demons.” He introduced the subject of the stage and talked of points in “Hamlet,” which he had made for the first time, but occasionally through accident had omitted. The next day he will be sure to be asked by letter or newspaper why he omits certain points which would be so excellent to make, _the writer thinks_. He has had a life of strange vicissitudes, as almost all actors. He referred last night to his frequent travels during childhood over the Alleghanies with his father, of long nights spent in this kind of travel; and once in Nevada he walked fifty miles chiefly through snow. “Why?” said Lilian. “Because I was hard up, Lily,” he continued; “I walked it too in stage boots which were too tight—it was misery.” ...

They had all gone by half-past ten, but we lay long awake thinking over poor Booth and his strange sad fortune. Hamlet, indeed!—although Forceythe Willson says, “I have been to see Mr. Hamlet play Booth.” Yes, perhaps when he is playing it for the 400th time with a bad cold, it may seem so; indeed I found it dullish myself, or his part, I mean, the other night; but he _did_ play it once—the night of his reappearance in New York.

[Illustration: BOOTH AS HAMLET]

_May 18, 1869._—Last Sunday evening Booth, Aldrich and his wife and sister, Dr. Holmes and Amelia and Launt Thompson, Leslie and ourselves took tea here together. In the evening came Mr. and Mrs. Emerson. We did have a rare and delightful symposium. Booth talked little as usual, and the next night went round to Aldrich’s and took himself off as he behaves in company!! Nevertheless he was glad to see Holmes, though every time Dr. H. addressed him across the table he seemed to receive an electric shock.

A chance meeting between William Warren and Fields in a lane at the seaside Manchester is recorded, with their talk, in the diary as early as 1865. Two entries in 1872 have to do with Jefferson, first alone and then with Warren. The friendship with Jefferson, begun so long ago, was continued until his death.

_Tuesday, March 18, 1872._—Left Boston for a short trip to New York. Jefferson the actor, famous throughout the world for his impersonation of “Rip Van Winkle,” was on the train and finding us out (or J. him), came to our compartment car to pass the day. He talked without cessation and without effort. He described his sudden disease of the eyes quite bravely and simply, from the use of too much whiskey. He said the newspapers had said it was the gas, and many other reasons had been assigned first and last; but he firmly believed there was no other reason than too much whiskey. He had taken the habit—when he was somewhat below his ordinary physical and mental condition in the evening and wished to rise to the proper point and “carry the audience”—of taking a small glass of whiskey. This glass was after a time made two, and even three or four. Finally he was stricken down by a trouble of the eyes which threatened the entire extinction of sight. His physician at once suggested that unnatural use of stimulants was the cause, of which he himself is now entirely convinced and no longer touches anything stronger than claret. He has played to a larger variety of audiences probably than almost any other great actor. The immense applause he received in England, where he played 170 consecutive nights at the Adelphi in London, always as “Rip,” has only served to make him more modest, it would seem, more desirous to uphold himself artistically. He gave us a hint of his taste for fishing and described his trout-raising establishment in Jersey; very curious and wonderful it was. Nature preserves only one in a hundred of the eggs of trout to come to maturity. Mr. Jefferson in his pond is able to raise 85 out of 100. There seems no delight to him so great as that of sitting beside a stream on a sunny day, line in hand.

Talking of the everlasting repetition of “Rip,” he says he should be thankful to rest himself with another play, but this has been a growth and it would be a daring thing for him to attempt anything new with a public who would always compare him with himself in this play which is the result of years of his best thought and strength. I think myself, if he were quite well he would be almost sure to attempt something else. He told us several stories very dramatically. He is an odd, carelessly dressed little mortal, a cross between Charles Lamb and Grimaldi, but we have seldom passed a more delightful day of talk than with him. The hours absolutely fled away.

_Wednesday, May 22, 1872._—Mr. Longfellow, Dr. Holmes, and Jefferson and Warren, the two first comedians of our time, dined here. The hour was three o’clock, to accommodate the two professional gentlemen. The hours until three, with the exception of two visits (Miss Sara Clarke and Miss Wainwright in spite of saying “engaged”), were occupied in making preparations for the little feast. I mean the hours after breakfast until time to dress. (Of hours before breakfast I have now-a-days nothing to say. I am not strong enough to do anything early, but country life this summer is to change all that.) Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Warren arrived first. Finding much to interest them in the pictures of our lower room, they lingered there a few moments before coming to the library, when we talked of Marney’s pictures (Mr. J. owns some of his water-colors) and looked about at others. Soon Longfellow came with Jamie. He said he felt like one on a journey. He left home early in the morning, had been sight-seeing in Boston all day, was to dine and go to the theatre with us afterward.

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.

[Illustration: 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.

[Illustration: A NAST CARTOON OF DICKENS AND FECHTER]

He spoke with intense enthusiasm of Frédérick Lemaître, much as I have heard Mr. Dickens do. “The second-class actors were always arguing with him (only second-class people argue) and saying, ‘Why do you wish me to stand here, Frédérick?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he would say, ‘only do it.’”

Mr. Appleton was deeply interested in the fact that Shakespeare proved himself such a believer in ghosts, as “Hamlet” shows, and would like to push the subject farther, Mr. Fechter evidently finding much to say on this topic also. Mr. Longfellow was interested to ask about the Dumas, _père et fils_. Mr. Fechter has known them well and has many queer stories to tell of their relation to each other. _Le fils_ calls _mon père_, “my youngest child born many years ago,” and the father usually introduces the son as M. Dumas, _mon père_. The motto on Fechter’s note paper is very curious and a type of the man—“_Faiblesse vaut vice_.” Mr. Longfellow spoke again of Mr. Dickens’s restlessness, of his terrible sadness. “Yes, yes,” said Fechter, “all his fame goes for nothing.” ...

Jamie is so weak that he went to sleep almost as soon as they were gone. God knows what it all means; I do not.

It is odd that Fechter’s eyes should be brown after all. They look so light in the play. He is a round little man, naturally friendly, spontaneous. We do not know what his life has been, and we will not ask; that does not rest with us; but he is a very fine artist. His imitation of Mr. Dickens, as he sat on the lawn watching him at work, or as he joined him coming from his desk at lunchtime with tears on his cheek and a smile on his mouth, was very close to the life and delightful.

Mr. Longfellow did not talk much, not as much as the last time he was here, but he was lovely and kind.[29] He brought a coin of the French Republic which had been touched by French wit, _Liberté_ x (point), _Egalité_ x (point), _Fraternité_ x (point). And more to the same effect, without altering the coin.

Appleton has just bought a new Troyon, which he says he shall lend me for a week.

At the end of the following August there is a record of a talk with Fechter on the boat from Boston to Nahant, where he and the Fieldses dined with Longfellow. Dickens had died in the June just past, and Fechter had much to say of him and his family life. “Day by day,” wrote Mrs. Fields, “I am grateful to think of him at rest.” The little party at Nahant is described.

We found dear Longfellow looking through a glass to espy our approach, and all his dear little girls and Ernest and his wife and Appleton, who whisked me away from the dinner-table to his studio where he had some really good sketches. The conversation at table was half French, Longfellow and Appleton both finding it agreeable to recall the foreign scenes by the foreign tongue. But except a queer imitation of John Forster, by Fechter, I do not remember any quotable talk. F. said Forster always looked at everybody as if regarding their qualifications for a lunatic asylum (he is commissioner of lunacy), saying to himself, “Well, I’ll let you off _today_, but tomorrow you must certainly go and be shut up.” He describes Forster’s present state of health as something very precarious and wretched.

_November 14, 1870._—Monday night went to see Fechter in “Claude Melnotte.” Longfellow and his daughter Edith sat in the box adjoining ours. It was the stage box where they were sheltered from observation; ours was the box next it, to be sure, but accessible to all eyes. During the curtain Longfellow came into our box; Mrs. Holmes and Mrs. Andrew were with me, both plain ladies dressed in mourning. His advent caused a little rustle of curiosity to ripple over the house. Longfellow was never looking finer than he is today. His white hair and deep blue eyes and kind face make his presence a benediction wherever he goes—of such men one cannot help feeling what Dr. Putnam so well expressed last Sunday in speaking of the presence of our Lord at a feast. “He rewarded the hospitality of his friends by his presence.”

Longfellow brought an illegible scrawl in his hand which Parsons had written from London to Lunt. He told me also of having lately received a photograph from Virginia of a young woman, and written under it were the words, “What fault can be found with this?” He said he thought of replying, “The fault of too great youth.” It certainly could not be agreeable to him to sit in the eye of the audience as he did; but he was very talkative and pleasant, expressed his disappointment at not having us at his Nilsson dinner, but his family were too many for him; said how he liked her for her frankness; told me of the old impressario Garrett, the Jew, coming without invitation and certainly without being wanted (as it sent “his children upstairs to dine”); and then, as the play was about to begin, he withdrew. He was much amused and disgusted by the platitudes of the play. Returned to his own box, Jamie said he laughed immoderately over the absurdities of it as it continued. He tooted as the instruments tooted and spouted as the second-rate actors spouted, all of which was highly amusing to Edith, who was weeping over the unhappy lovers, utterly absorbed in the play. Mrs. Holmes and Mrs. Andrew, too, were full of tears, and I found it no use attempting to say anything more during the evening.

Fechter was indeed marvellous. He raised the play into something human, something exquisite whenever he was upon the stage. His terrible earnestness sweeps the audience utterly away. But he is not the player for the million.

_Sunday evening, December 11, 1870._—Went to Mr. Bartol’s and met Mr. Collyer. He was pleased to hear what Fechter said of him Saturday night (by the by we met Fechter at Mrs. Dorr’s dinner on Saturday), that he singled him out, found him a capital audience, and played to him. It was a fine house on Saturday and Fechter played “Don Cæsar.” It was never played better. Curtis was there, and fine company. Fechter was graceful and saucy too in talk at dinner—just right for the occasion.