I have written you sundry letters by the last two steamers. If the company in New York should come up to the scratch and we should go on, I don’t know but my conjectures and questionings and hypothetical projects for the future will seem absurd, if they do, just consider that there is a raging lion up there at Mariposa and I am getting letters every mail which it is very hard to answer & meeting men every time I go into the street whom it is very hard to meet, and that I have been under this now for three weeks nearly, have telegraphed five times to New York for advice what to expect and have got nothing in reply but two Bunsbyish impertinences. I am no better informed of the conditions & intentions of the Trustees and have no more light upon the future than when I came down.

If they will give me money enough to pay the men, I can take care of the rest—winding up or creeping on as may be best, but the longer the decision is delayed the harder it will be to do either.

Jan. 30th We got today newspaper correspondence which shows what took place in New York up to the 3d, though the effort to be flippant leaves little to be clearly seen except that there had been a sudden fall in the stock and an excited meeting of the stockholders.

Matters remain here absolutely in statu quo. I have heard nothing of affairs on the Estate for more than a week—nothing since my last letter to you left here. That morning a message sent by Express to Stockton & thence telegraphed, reached me saying that the men made certain demands and threatened riots. I judge they were mollified or quelled by the Sheriff, or I should certainly have been informed. Mrs Olmsted wrote me that she had had to send twelve miles over the mountain for something to eat, as all the butchers on the Estate had given out. She has good servants, horses and plenty of gold coin and I don’t think will suffer much inconvenience. But I don’t know when I have been as homesick.

Was it you who wrote the criticism in the Post on Booth? If so, I am inclined to think you ask too much. I have learned in the first place to put up with a good deal of what I used to detest as rant and mouthing and at last to approve of a certain degree of it. This is the theory I think: All men who are in the least degree self-conscious do in all things act more or less, with consent of the will (if conscious of what they are doing) if not with deliberate purpose and study. Some men consciously and studiously restrain themselves not only from impassioned acting but from even a natural degree of vehemence. How much gesture and mouthing and gasping and guttural any man shall command of himself or allow himself on any particular occasion is partly a matter of taste and partly a [311]question of what sort of an audience he has and what will most effect his purpose with it. You yourself will in giving thanks to a Frenchman for having saved you from a fall in the streets use a very different manner from what you would to an Englishman. Otherwise you would seem to him very frigid and ungrateful. It is a matter of custom and fashion a great deal—custom & fashion forming our habits. But custom and habit are changeable, and in the next generation of Englishmen we may have men wearing slashed sleeves and feathers, or powdered wigs and golden knee-buckles, and to make an impression of simple sincerity and a natural degree of feeling in anything a man has to say which is in the least out of common it may be necessary to speak in a manner which we should now think abominably affected, egotistical, impertinent and over strained.

But suppose we could free ourselves from the influence of custom & mere fashion of the time and consider the question of a man in a particular situation, how would we have him express himself? How far should he vary each way from the monotone? It seems to me that theoretically we would have had him cultivate all his faculties to the utmost to give the widest range to his faculties of expression and use lower notes & higher notes, speak at times more staccato, at others more smoothly than men generally do. Well then, is it not a good thing for actors to do this under the artificial circumstances of the theatre? We don’t want to see a professional dancer confine himself to the steps of the fashionable ball-room. An actor ought to talk better & walk better than a dry goods’ clerk can be expected to be able to. It would be an impertinence in him to appear before a large audience at a theatre unless he had cultivated his walking powers, and his vocal expressional powers also. The question then is not simply, what would a king’s son do, but what would a king’s son do, if he were constrained by no mere fashion of the day, and if his vocal expressional powers had been royaly cultivated? Nobody supposes that Hamlet in real life was in the habit of putting his sentences into feet and rhymes much less that he habitually talked in the highest poetical strain. The language which Shakespeare puts into his mouth is Shakespeare’s idealization of Hamlet the prince’s common or uncommon conversation. And Booth or Forrest is justifiable in poeticising, so to speak, both the Prince’s common & uncommon tones, gestures and glances. That in fact is his business, and he should be hissed if he got nothing more from his lungs than a book-keeper would;—if he could play with his voice no better than Mr Bancroft.

I know that is only the beginning of the question but it is an important thing to begin at the beginning. Because the question moves from that to this: If we free ourselves from the influence of present custom, and measure by an ideal, poetic standard, what should we like? How then does Booth stand &c. And it is not easy to so free ourselves, I am convinced.

[312]

I don’t write all this, of course upon the letter signed G. in the Post but I remember we used to talk of it and I agreed with you very heartily. And here in San Francisco I have had an extraordinary experience which has humbled my criticism and opened my eyes a little. I used to hear Charles Kean in London, and never could like him or comprehend how he was ranked so high as an actor. I thought him a terrible mouther. I liked Mrs Kean much better, thinking her simpler and more natural. The last time I was here the Keans were here, and I of course found a great treat to hear them, here on the Pacific and coming from Bear Valley. Still I intellectually judged them much as I did before, while I enjoyed them, as I supposed, because of the general dearth of good things—tolerably good—in my life lately. So I saw them several times & with increasing interest. They have been off to Victoria & returned and now I have found them here again, and finally I confess I never enjoyed an intellectual treat that compares with that I have in Kean’s acting. I am taken by surprise as if a new sense were suddenly given me. I do not lose myself. I am not nearly as much affected in my sympathies as I often have been before & by worse acting, but I watch it & listen to it closely, minutely & critically with the most profound intellectual satisfaction as to a work of art, and I have never seen a statue or painting or building or heard music that seemed to me such high art as Kean’s acting. And I suppose I write this from a sense of former injustice to the theatre. I think that I have been educated to Kean’s point of view and appreciate his purpose—what it is he has to do and what he has to do it with. I saw him off the stage at a great ball given here by Genl McDowell a few nights since and was surprised to see what an insignificant figure and face he had and thus appreciate the more the hard study, laborious drilling, true devotion and back of all the real genius which is evinced in his many parts. His most elaborate and wonderful piece of acting is not in Shakespeare but in Louis the Eleventh.

As for the difference between my present & my former impressions of him, it amazes me. I think something like it, however, is a common experience. Did you ever hear a notable clergyman for the first time without being disappointed by some individual mannerisms? I remember that when I first heard Dr Bellows there was something in his tones that annoyed me very much, but after I had become familiar with him I completely lost sight of it. It must be the same with all who hear Osgood else he would have no congregation, for I feel almost as if he were insulting me by his unnatural tone & manner. But I suppose that if I were condemned to listen to him two hours a week, it would not be noticeable to me after a month or two. No lawyer addresses a court, no man addresses any large audience in a tone & manner at all resembling that of his ordinary conversation, and the difference is not accounted for by the effort to be audible, nor the effort to emphacize. I don’t think it is [313]deliberately willed. It would seem to be an involuntary nervous action, a slight and exceedingly imperfect musical improvisation. There are sounds in every impassioned oration, which you would think insulting if you heard them in private conversation in your own parlor; even though the words and the purpose in view should be identical. Custom justifies the actor in taking the same liberty that is allowed the orator.

I know that Shakespeare’s own testimony of what he would have seems to be against this, but suppose we had never had the theatrically acted drama, and had from time immemorial had the opera—a musical dramatic institution—might not much the same precepts as those given by Shakespeare to the actors, be appropriately offered the singers? You would not say that holding the mirror up to nature meant that they must not sing. Of course they must sing, but not sing in an exaggerated way as if they were crazy; not shriek like a kettled dog nor bellow like a baited bull, but make the highest possible healthy use of their human organs in the expression of natural human emotions & sentiments. There seems to be an intermediate plane between conversational expression and musical expression, which the orator and the actor are and always have been expected to use. It must have been so in Shakespeare’s time and he assumed this as a matter of course in addressing actors.

Feby 2d News from Estate this evening to 29th ulto—about half the men at work and no violence yet. Lawyer tells me there is no way possible for me to get salary from Estate in advance of services by law. He says the attachment for wages in advance was tomfoolery.

I can see some business here in Landscape gardening.

I find the Alta is not for sale. To start a new morning paper would require a capital of at least $180,000 gold. One of the most successful business men here spoke of it today as being the best business enterprise which could be undertaken on the Pacific.