Joseph Jefferson by Frederick Wedmore — Read

Joseph Jefferson has been seen again -- and with all the enthusiasm of many years ago -- in _Rip Van Winkle_. The playbill which announces his appearance makes no mention of Washington Irving, but claims the play as ‘written by Dion Boucicault. ' It needs, however, no very profound student to detect in that tender and graceful fancy of the story, a quality not to be numbered among the useful talents of the versatile dramatist who can give us anything that lies between _London Assurance_ and the _Shaughraun_. But I believe that, after all these years, the work of three hands is really to be found in the play; Mr. Jefferson himself having manipulated much of its action and business. He does not act the piece: he lives in it. And he is only to be compared with Got, in Balzac's _Mercadet_. Both performances are restrained and reserved, without the appearance of restraint and reserve. Both are quiet. There are no dramatic outbursts, and no surprises. But in each case a character, a career -- one might almost say a life itself -- is put before the spectator. Greater things have undoubtedly been done upon the stage -- greater things have been done on the stage of our day by Irving, and greater remain to be done by him -- but nothing quite so complete has been seen: nothing giving one the sense of so easy and unlaboured a mastery.

The pathos is very gentle: the humour has something of Charles Lamb in it. Jefferson has a face of the utmost good-humour; very kindly eyes, gentle ways, which win upon the children and the dumb things of his village of Falling Waters. For it is certainly his village, this Falling Waters; we cannot seriously separate the actor from the man. And he has a voice of admirable quality and compass: an enunciation of the utmost distinctness, with no perceptible mannerism, unless, indeed, the studied quietness be itself a mannerism. The voice is capable of what would be called an almost womanly tenderness, by those who have never observed that the tenderness of a man -- as here to children -- may be even a profounder thing.