Part 14

_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.

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.

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.

_Monday, December 19._—I have just returned from seeing Fechter in “Ruy Blas.” The public has just received the news that he is to leave the Globe Theatre and Boston in four weeks. The result was an enormous house, and the most fashionable house I have seen this season. He played with great fire and ease, but he has a wretched cold and his pronunciation was so thick and French (as it is apt to be when he is excited) that I could often hardly catch a word. But his audience was determined to be pleased and they caught and applauded all his good points. I saw but one dissenting spirit, that was a spoiled queen of fashion just returned from Europe, who saw nobody and nothing but herself....

_Saturday, January 7, 1871_.—Dined at Mr. Longfellow’s with Mr. Fechter. The poet welcomed us with a cordiality peculiar to himself and his children, with a simple glad-to-see written over their faces which is worth a world of talk. We had a merry table-talk although Fechter was laboring under the unnatural excitement of his position in having lost his season at the Globe, broken with the proprietor Cheney who was his friend, and finding himself without an engagement for the time. Also, so mischance held the day, Miss Leclercq, his only fit support, injured herself in the afternoon and their superb audience went away disappointed. However, the dinner went off beautifully, as it always must with Longfellow at the helm. There was some talk of poetry and the drama and J. amused them too with anecdotes. Then we adjourned to the room of Charles the East-India man, where we saw many curiosities and had a very pleasant hour before leaving. Passing through the dressing-room of our dear Longfellow, I was struck with seeing how like the house of a German student it was—a Goethean aspect of simplicity and largeness everywhere—books too are put on all the walls. It is surely a most attractive house.

_January 13, 1871._—Today Jamie lunched with Appleton. We passed the evening at Mrs. Quincy’s. It is the great benefit to Fechter, but in consequence of the tickets being sold unjustly at auction, we shall not go. Unhappily there are rumors about town that Fechter is to be insulted in the theatre. I wish I could get word to him. I shall wait until J. gets home and then ask him to drive up to put F. on his guard.

_January 23._—It proved an unnecessary alarm! The evening went off well enough but unenthusiastically, and at last Fechter gave all the money to the poor!

When Mrs. Fields first met that representative of the once alluring art of “elocution,” James E. Murdoch, he was already a veteran who had twice, at an interval of nearly twenty years, retired from the stage. Two notes about him recall his robust personality.

_January 13, 1867._—I never met James E. Murdoch, the actor, to hear any talk until Sunday night. The knowledge of his patriotism, of his son who died in the war, and of the weary miles the father had travelled to comfort the soldiers by reading to them, and afterwards the large sums of money he had given to the country’s cause gathered up laboriously night by night by public “readings”—all this I had known. Of course no introduction could have been better, yet I liked the man even more than I had fancied was possible. He was so modest and talked in such a free generous way, purely for the entertainment of others, I fancied, because we saw he had a severe cold on his chest. The way too in which he recited “Sheridan’s Ride” and anything else for the children which he thought they would like was quite beautiful to see in a man of his years, who must have had quite enough of that kind of thing to do. His hobby is elocution. He is about to establish a school or college or something of that description, whatever its honorable title will be, at the West[30] (the money having been granted in part by legislature, the other half to be made by his own public efforts) for the purpose of educating speakers and teaching men and women how to read. He has known Grant and Sheridan well, lived in camp with them at the same mess-table, and has the highest opinion of the patriotism and probity of both of them. There is no mistake about one thing. Mr. Murdoch made himself a power during the war, and now that is over does not cease to work, nor does he allow himself to presume upon the laurels he has won nor to brag of his own work.

_Saturday morning, November 13, 1875._—After a western journey, left for home. Sunday met James E. Murdoch in the cars at Springfield. It was about six o’clock A.M., but he was bound for Newton. He came in therefore with us, and talked delightfully until we parted. He is an old man but as full of nerve, vigor, and ripened intellect as anyone whom I have seen. His talk of the stage, of his disgust for Macready’s book, his disgust at the manner in which Forrest treated his wife, his account of his own experiences, when he was glad to play for $35 a week, were deeply interesting. The better side of Forrest he understood and appreciated thoroughly.

The hospitalities of Charles Street were by no means confined to the men of the theatrical and kindred professions. In later years Miss Ellen Terry, Lady Gregory, and those other ladies associated with the stage who so surely found their way to Mrs. Fields’s door when they visited Boston, were but carrying on the traditions of the earlier decades. As the visitors came and went, the diary in the sixties and seventies recorded their exits and their entrances. A few passages are typical of many.