censure. But, tried by this standard, Rip Van Winkle, as Mr. Jefferson
plays it, is far from an immoral play. The picture as he paints it is
moral in the same sense that nature is moral. No man, shiftless, idle,
and drunken, afraid to go home, ashamed before his children, without
self-respect or the regard of others, however gentle and sweet, and
however much a favorite with the boys and girls and animals he may be,
is a man whose courses those boys will wish to imitate or who will
make vice more tasteful to them. The pathos of the second part of the
play, in which the change of age mingled with mystery is marvellously
portrayed, is largely due to the consciousness that this melancholy
end is all due to that woful beginning. The expulsion of Derrick and
his nephew is nothing, the happiness of Meenie and her lover is
nothing, the release of Gretchen is nothing, there is only a wasted
old man, without companions, the long prime of whose life has been
lost in unconsciousness, and who, suddenly awaking, looks at us
pitifully from the edge of the grave.

By the most prosaic standards this should not seem to adorn vice with
attraction. It is true that the spectator is more interested in Rip
than in his wife, and that she is made a virago. But it is not his
drunkenness that charms, and her virtue is at least severe. Indeed, if
this performance is to be tried by this standard, the play must be
regarded as a temperance mission. For temperance is to be inculcated
upon the youthful spectators who sit near us not so much by stories
and pictures of the furious brute who drives wife and children from a
home made desolate by him, and who fly from him as from a demon, as by
this simple, faithful showing of the kind-hearted loiterer who makes
wretched a wife who yet loves him, and who denounces himself to the
child that he loves. This is the fair view of it as a picture of
ordinary human life.