Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 8.djvu/261

 JOSEPH JEFFERSON 377 himself remembered and written of by such a man, he lay musing on the compli- ment, when the " Sketch Book " and the story of Rip van Winkle came suddenly into his mind. 'There was to me," he writes, " magic in the sound of the name as I repeated it. Why was not this the very character I wanted ? An American story by an American author was surely just the thing suited to an American actor." There had been three or four plays founded on this story, but Jefferson says that none of them were good. His father and his half-brother had acted the part before him, but nothing that he remembered gave him any hope that he could make a good play out of existing material. He therefore went to work to con- struct a play for himself, and his story of how he did it, told in two pages of his book, and with the most unconscious air in the world, reveals the whole secret of Jefferson's acting : its humor and pathos subtly mingled, its deep humanity, its pure poetry — the assemblage of qualities, in fine, that make it the most perfect as well as the most original product of the American stage. Yet the play, even in the form he gave it, did not satisfy him, nor did it make the impression in America that he desired. It was not until five years later that Dion Boucicault, in London, remade it for Jefferson ; and it was in that city it first saw the light in its new form, September 5, 1865. It was at once successful, and had a run of one hundred and seventy-five nights. With his Asa Trenchard and his Rip van Winkle will ever be associated in the loving memory of play-goers his Bob Acres in Sheridan's " Rivals," thought by many to be his capital part — a personification where all the foibles of the would-be man-of-the-world : his self-conceit, his brag, his cowardice, are trans- formed into virtues and captivate our hearts, dissolved in the brimming humor which yet never overflows the just measure, so degenerating into farce. Between the two productions of Rip van Winkle in New York and in London, Jefferson had had many strange experiences. His wife died in 1861, and he broke up his household in New York, and leaving three of his children at school in that city, he left home with his eldest son and went to California. After acting in San Francisco, he sailed for Australia, where he was warmly received ; thence went to the other British colonies in that region, touched on his return at Lima and Callao and Panama, at which place he took a sailing- packet for London, and after his great success in that city returned to America in 1866. In 1867 he married, in Chicago, Miss Sarah Warren, and since that time his life has flowed on in an even stream, happy in all its relations, private and public, crowned with honors, not of a gaudy or brilliant kind, but solid and enduring. His art is henceforth part and parcel of the rich treasure of the American stage. <^7-u-7<.
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