"RIP VAN WINKLE."
AVE we, too, been sleeping through half the spell of rest
which the dear, droll Dutchman took in the Kaatskills, and is it only to-morrow? This is what we ask when, after ten years, we see Rip, with his escort of children, and only just miss seeing Schneider, that invisible, but quite real, dog, who has a double in Tatters, the ally of "the Shaugluaun." Can it possibly be ten years since we heard that incomparable voice, which combines in some inexplicable way the music of Munster with the accent of Holland, and the subtlest intonation of American enunciation, —that peculiar tone which gives such point to a question—ten years since we saw that face, over which countless expressions flit like shadows, leaving always its humorous sweetness underneath, irradiated by the inimitable smile which parts the lips with a flash that glitters up in the eyes, and seems to come out like a halo round the shining brow? Ten years since that delightful, pro- voking, good-for-nothing vagabond went all wrong in his irresistibly charming way before our eyes, and we followed him with them ruefully, as a friend who is hopelessly running down-hill, but carrying our hearts with him ; and coming away from the theatre, found it impossible to think about Mr. Jefferson at all, to realise that he ever was or ever could be any one but Rip Van Winkle ? It is ten years ; and in all that time not only have we never seen an actor who could be compared with this one, in degree, but we have never seen one like him in kind. In Mr. Jefferson's Rip, we have the highest finish of the best school of French acting, applied to a character which is thought out with entire originality, and in- vested with beautiful simplicity. We do not mean to imply that there is a touch of French sentiment or handling about Mr. Jefferson's masterpiece. The humour of Rip, which "one feels in one's bones "—as Dickens said of the violoncello—is entirely different from, even opposite to, French esprit ; and is so various and perfect that we fancy it must have astonished the writer of the piece, clever as it is, when he first saw what Mr. Jefferson made of it. The finish of details, the careful fidelity to nature, the perfection, in short, which enables the audience to forget that they are looking at acting, because the actor is seemingly uncon- scious of them ; the quiet, talking tone, the indescribable ease, which makes everybody feel easy ; these are the things in which we find the resemblance to the highest kind of French art ; beyond these, Mr. Jefferson's Rip Van Winkle is unlike any other performance, and belongs to no school.
That Mr. Jefferson should have relinquished the acting of every other role is not surprising. He makes us feel Rip to be so real, that he extends that fascinating vagabond's delightful perplexity to our- selves, and makes it difficult to dissever the idea of Mr. Jefferson from Rip. If he played any other part, we should feel that the Dutchman was masquerading, and we were losing time which might have been enjoyed in his company. To have acted this part for many years, and while bringing it to absolute perfection, never to have lost an atom of its freshness, or dulled the edge of the easy drollery which must be, one would suppose, the most difficult of all characteristics to preserve entirely untouched, is a triumph of art which, so far as our knowledge on the subject ex- tends, is unprecedented. To those who on the present occasion see it for the first time, Mr. Jefferson's Rip Van Winkle is a reve- lation; to those who remember it ten years ago, it is a pleasure invested with the charms of memory and comparison.
It has been said, and with truth, that the author, Mr. Boucicault, has made the legendary Rip Van Winkle more Irish than Dutch, but what does it matter? Acted by any other artist, Rip might easily become absurd, for his story of Gretchen's escape from drown- ing, on her wedding-day, by the upsetting of the boat that she was not in, and the answer to the question, "Who did you call a wild cat ?"—a difficulty which Rip meets by protesting that he had bestowed that appellation upon his dog Schneider—are very Irish, and not in the least Dutch or American ; but this Rip Van Winkle is the man himself, and we no more trouble ourselves about his nationality than about his costume, which could never have been Dutch, even when it was new. What if there be a touch of "the Shaughraun "—married and done for—about him, Moya having turned into a frugal and industrious vixen, and Conn, being deprived of a "young masther," having unlimited leisure to devote himself to the tailor's thimble,—does the resem- blance between the older and the newer play detract from the excellence of either, or do anything except make us recognise with delight the unexhausted vein of true, vital humour which runs lavishly through both ? The old and the new have in contmon that peculiar charm which is found in all Mr. Boucicault's Irish plays, the mingling of fun and pathos by a process of slyness quite indefinable, in which look, tone, and gesture co-operate ; fun of the drollest kind, pathos of the most natural and the simplest, the laughter and the sentiment equally pure and wholesome. Irish humour is a thing of the past, except in this instance, and we are well content that the one Irish humourist in existence should have lighted up the Knickerbocker legend with that wonderful lamp, especially when he found such a hand to put it in as Mr. Jefferson's.
It is a little trying to have to wait for Rip's appearance so long after the curtain rises, but the delay has the merit of being filled with instruction. The play is remarkably well constructed in this respect ; there is no confusion about it, the relative positions of everybody are clearly defined from the first, and we may contemplate Rip from the moment at which his face shows itself—beaming with the sweet, careless drollery, which instantly overthrows our compassionate and indignant sense of Gretchen's wrongs, and adds us to the party of the dogs and the children— without having any by-paths of attention to tread. There's not a word to be said for the morality of the piece ; we give that up ; and are glad to be provided with a bigly villainous person like Derrick, a regular stage out-and-outer, to absorb all our virtuous reprobation of evil, for we have not any for Rip. He is everything that Gretchen calls him, and more—for Gretchen does not know of his unjustifiable talk about her to Derrick and Vetter—but we love him ; his smile goes straight to our hearts ; his laugh—can there ever have been such a laugh among the great actors who are the traditions of our time? —makes us laugh unconsciously with the oddest sense of unreason- able glee, and his first words make us understand what the Irish people mean by a voice that "would wh istle the birds off the bushes." No truer words were ever spoken on the stage than Gretchen's definition of "a jolly dog," and of the results to the wife and children of that tragic personage ; but what becomes of their weighty effect when we see Rip and the children, and when Rip drinks his famous toast, with a serious, calm, and fascinating grace, as if he fulfilled a duty none the less agreeable for its sacredness? We don't defend ourselves, we only protest absurdly : "He isn't a jolly dog--a jolly dog is a vulgar beast—he is Rip." Yes, that is just it,—he is Rip, and everybody loves him, except Derrick, the big villain, who is sober and thrifty. And Rip is always tipsy, but infinitely charming ; he is just a hopeless vagabond, without the faintest sense of duty, but full of the most enchanting humour ; a ragamuffin, who is simply beautiful to look upon ; a sot, with a world of gentleness and not a particle of principle in him, irradiated all through by such an exquisite light of drollery and shrewdness that our moral sense is blinded by it. Can any one imagine a constable "taking up" Rip Van Winkle, or a magistrate committing him ? Grummer would be incapable of the one, and Mr. Nupkins, who fined Mr. Pickwick freely, of the other. We can hear a remonstrance, in the accents of Mr. Toole, "Now, that ain't right, you know," but so it is. We are by no means certain of Rip's reformation, even at the end, when Gretchen seems inclined to allow him unlimited schnapps, and the big villain is hunted out ; but he has our warmest sympathy from first to last, and we cannot be even decently sorry for Gretchen's fifteen years of Derrick.
Though humour is the stronger characteristic of the first part of the play, and pathos of the second, they are never far apart all through, and the two mingle wonderfully in the scene, which might easily have been made merely farcical, between Rip and the children, Meenie and Hendrik. The little brother and sister who play these parts at the Princess's Theatre are very clever, amazingly self-possessed, and likely to do remarkable things in their early-adopted profession. The gentle, droll gravity with which Rip listens to the boy's plans for his marriage with Meenie; the suggestion that he thought perhaps they might have liked to say something to him (Rip) about it, but that it is very kind of Hendrik ; the mixed sense of the man's amusement and its con- tention with something like shame, something not strong enough for remorse, which breaks down under his irresistible sense of the humorousness of the child's proposal that they should give him all their money to keep, and evaporates in the delightful, infectious laugh, form one of the most perfect points of the performance.
The notion of Dickens's Tom Pinch winking to himself in appreciation of his own slyness has always seemed to us a pecu- liarly happy one, but its full drollery is revealed by Rip Van Winkle. He winks with infinite humour always,—when he winks at Derrick a propos of Vetter, and at Vetter a propos of Derrick— but his wink attains perfection when it is addressed to himself ; when he picks Gretchen's pocket ; on some of the occasions on. which he "swears off," when he tells the story of how he shot the bull, and explains that the fatter a rabbit is the whiter its tail (apropos of the rabbit which he did not shoot), and many other times. That wink—we feel he communicates with Schneider by the same means—is the concentrated essence of supreme fun ; it even beats his laugh sometimes, in its expression of sudden, keen, unsurpassable enjoyment of his own vagabond humour. We miss the wink in the second part of the play, where pathos reigns, with humour in waiting.
It is presumptuous to pass an off-hand judgment upon such a performance, so matured by such an artist, and we may be en- tirely wrong in our supposition ; but it appears to us that the- most trying and difficult part of it is the ghostly scene in the mountain, and that if one follows that with close attention, it reveals the full power and skill of the artist, though it is by no means so touching or so interesting as a situation as those which have preceded and are to follow it. We find in it the homely simplicity, the contented ignorance, the cheery reck- lessness, the unimpressionableneas, the gentleness of Rip, together with his besetting weakness, and an unexpected flash of courage, which forms a capital point of contrast with the humorous cowardice, in -which there is more fun than meanness, which, at the end of the first act, makes him lay the blame on the girl who danced " mit " him, when Gretchen catches them at the festivities for which he has paid in Derrick's money. The queer perplexity of Rip as he meets the stony gaze of face after face among the rocks on the mountain-side, the rising fear, the half- querulous protest that he does not like "these kind of people," the timid patience of his efforts to make the apparitions speak ; the half-conscious relief with which he learns that they are dumb, and dismisses, with a revival of his old drol- lery, the gathering dread of the supernatural ; the drink which acts so strangely on him, the rush forward under its influence (for a moment like Bulwer's description of Glaucus, in "The Last Days of Pompeii," when he swallows the supposed love- philtre), the swift drowning of his senses in the enchanted sleep, and his faint appeal to the exultant phantoms not to leave him alone,—all these seem to us to be immensely difficult, as well as singularly perfect. It always must tax an actor's powers to the utmost to be alone with supernatural surroundings which can never evade the verge of the ridiculous, and we thought it a great test of the consummate ability which Mr. Jefferson dis- plays at this point, that the audience, among whom there was some misplaced laughter during the second part of the perform- ance, watched this scene with silent attention.
The defect of the second part of the play, which mars its pathos and makes it buy its humour too dear, is that Rip is too hard on Gretchen in his reviving memory. It is all right so long as he retains the delusion that it is only the to-morrow of the yesterday which found him with the "queer kind of people,' but it is all wrong when he discovers the truth, and that Gretchen has been Derrick's wife for years. There is a discord between the humour of his remarks then and the exquisite feeling in his questions about Meenie—" There was a—a child—she's not —not dead !"—a passage which we have never seen surpassed on any stage, that jars on us, all the more perceptibly that it is the only discord in the piece. All but that is beautiful,—the repetition of Rip's entrance, Rip as in the first act, but this time with an escort of hooting boors ;—the dogs which used to wag their tails barking at him, and the children who used to run to him running away ;— the old man's patient, seeking, dazed bewilderment, his wonderful face, with the lost look in the black eyes, the strained ear, the painful, imploring attention ; his stiffened limbs, his trembling, timid hands, the indescribable dignity of the aged form, for all that, with its mouldering rags upon it ; the confusion of ideas even when he has perceived the truth, the amused scorn of his—" Why, she's a little child ! Do you take me for a fool ?"—when they talk of his daughter as a woman ; his quaint inquiry for Schneider- " He was a dog, I thought you might have know'd him "—the shifting glance, the words murmured to himself, the mechanical repetition of the old formula, "Here's your good health, tke., the unsurpassed pathos of his gentle "This was my home— I was born in this village," the innumerable touches of exquisite art, like pearls upon a string, which one watches with greedy anxiety lest one should lose any_ But most beautiful of all is the scene in which he recalls him- self to the memory of his child. He is led as a stranger and a
beggar over the threshold of her wretched home by the wife who turned him out twenty years before,—the scene of that dismissal is all revived by one glance, as he steps inside the door, upheld by her hand. That one glance is a thing to remember always. In a few moments he is alone with the grown-up woman who has known plenty of sorrow since be left her, a little child crying for her father, when he "wiped the disgrace" from his wife's door. To hear him call the half-frightened, half-curious girl to him in a tone of mingled hope and anguish—which must be heard, no one could imagine the sound—to see him fall to per- using of her features, half rise, sink into his chair again, pluck nervously at his finger-ends, look at her with a yearning prayer coming all over his face, just as the incomparable smile used to come over it twenty years before ; talk to her in the voice which has a different but equally irresistible charm, persuade, rise when she moves away, plead that she "could not forget her father's face, no, no ;," and when she runs into his arms, fall upon her neck with the terrible relief and triumph of the cry, "There's somebody that knows me now ! there's somebody that knows me now !" is to experience a pleasure than which nothing we have ever seen on any stage has been greater.
It could not be, of course ; virtue (Rip's included?) must triumph to the full, and vice be punished with the requisite rigour. Derrick and his nephew must be kicked out, and the young couple united ; Gretchen has to rejoice over her prodigal, and gently press the liquid equivalent of the fatted calf on his acceptance. Rip must speak his tag, and drink to the audience in the comprehensive formula which comes naturally to him under all circumstances. It could not be, but we wish it could ; we wish the green curtain might fall upon those heart-piercing words, "There's somebody that knows me now !"
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