Valerius enters. Brutus cautiously probes his soul, and is rejoiced to

find him worthy of confidence. As they commune on the degradation of

their country, the crimes of the royal family, and the hopes of speedy

redemption, we seem to feel the sultry smother and to hear the muffled

rumble of the rising storm of an outraged people. As Valerius departs,

Tarquin himself advances, and gives a new momentum to the movement for

his own destruction. Still supposing Brutus to be an imbecile, with

shameless garrulity he boasts of the fiendish violence he has done to

Lucretia, the wife of Collatinus, and the near kinswoman of Brutus

himself. This woman was of such transcendent loveliness and nobility of

person and soul as to have become a poetic ideal of her sex throughout

the civilized world in all the ages since. While Tarquin boastfully

described his deed, the effect on his auditor was terrific to see. The

inward struggle was fully pictured without, in the hands convulsively

clutched, the eyes starting from their sockets, the blood threatening

to burst through the swollen veins of the neck and temples. Finally,

the quivering earthquake of passion broke in an explosion of maniacal

abandonment.

"The fiends curse you, then! Lash you with snakes!

When forth you walk, may the red flaming sun

Strike you with livid plagues!

Vipers, that die not, slowly gnaw your heart!

May earth be to you but one wilderness!

May you hate yourself,--

For death pray hourly, yet be in tortures,

Millions of years expiring!"

He shrieked this fearful curse upon the shrinking criminal with

a frenzied energy which so amazed and stirred the audience that

sometimes they gave vent to their excitement in a simultaneous shout of

applause, sometimes by looking at one another in silence or whispering,

"Wonderful!"

Lucretia, unwilling to survive the purity of her name, has stabbed

herself. Collatinus rushes wildly in with the bloody steel in his hand,

and tells the tale of horror:

"She's dead! Lucretia's dead! This is her blood!

Howl, howl, ye men of Rome.

Ye mighty gods, where are your thunders now?"

Brutus, the full gale of oratoric fire and splendor swelling his frame

and lighting his features, seizes the dagger, lifts it aloft, and

exclaims:

"Heroic matron!

Now, now, the hour is come! By this one blow

Her name's immortal, and her country saved!

Hail, dawn of glory! Hail, thou sacred weapon!

Virtue's deliverer, hail! This fatal steel,

Empurpled with the purest blood on earth,

Shall cut your chains of slavery asunder.

Hear, Romans, hear! did not the Sibyl tell you

A fool should set Rome free? I am that fool:

Brutus bids Rome be free!

_Valerius._ What can this mean?

_Brutus._ It means that Lucius Junius has thrown off

The mask of madness, and his soul rides forth

On the destroying whirlwind, to avenge

The wrongs of that bright excellence and Rome.

[_Sinks on his knees._]

Hear me, great Jove! and thou, paternal Mars,

And spotless Vesta! To the death, I swear,

My burning vengeance shall pursue these Tarquins!

Ne'er shall my limbs know rest till they are swept

From off the earth which groans beneath their infamy!

Valerius, Collatine, Lucretius, all,

Be partners in my oath."

The above apostrophe to the dagger was marvellously delivered. As he

held it up with utmost stretch of arm and addressed it, it seemed to

become a living thing, an avenging divinity.

The next scene was given with a contrast that came like enchantment.

A multitude of relatives and friends are celebrating the obsequies

of Lucretia. Brutus, with solemn and gentle mien, and a delivery of

funereal gloom in which admiring love and pride gild the sorrow,

pronounces her eulogy. He paints her with a bright and sweet fondness,

and bewails her fate with a closing cadence indescribably plaintive.

"Such perfections

Might have called back the torpid breast of age

To long-forgotten rapture: such a mind

Might have abashed the boldest libertine,

And turned desire to reverential love

And holiest affection. Oh, my countrymen!

You all can witness when that she went forth

It was a holiday in Rome; old age

Forgot its crutch, labor its task,--all ran;

And mothers, turning to their daughters, cried,

'There, there's Lucretia!' Now, look ye, where she lies,

That beauteous flower by ruthless violence torn!

Gone! gone! gone!

_All._ Sextus shall die! But what for the king, his father?

_Brutus._ Seek you instruction? Ask yon conscious walls,

Which saw his poisoned brother, saw the incest

Committed there, and they will cry. Revenge!

Ask yon deserted street, where Tullia drove

O'er her dead father's corse, 'twill cry, Revenge!

Ask yonder senate-house, whose stones are purple

With human blood, and it will cry, Revenge!

Go to the tomb where lies his murdered wife,

And the poor queen, who loved him as her son,

Their unappeaséd ghosts will shriek, Revenge!

The temples of the gods, the all-viewing heavens,

The gods themselves, shall justify the cry,

And swell the general sound, Revenge! Revenge!"

The instant change, in that presence of death, from the subdued,

mournful manner to this tremendous burst of blazing eloquence was a

consummate marvel of oratoric effect, in which art and nature were at

odds which was the greater element. It might be said of Forrest in this

scene,--as Corunna in the play itself described to Horatius the action

of Brutus,--

"He waved aloft the bloody dagger,

And spoke as if he held the souls of men

In his own hand and moulded them at pleasure.

They looked on him as they would view a god.

Who, from a darkness which invested him,

Sprang forth, and, knitting his stern brow in frowns,

Proclaimed the vengeful will of angry Jove."

The throng are so possessed with him that they propose to make him king

in place of Tarquin; but the patriot, his unselfish soul breathing

from his countenance and audible in his accent, convinces them of his

personal purity:

"No, fellow-citizens!

If mad ambition in this guilty frame

Had strung one kingly fibre,--yea, but one,--

By all the gods, this dagger which I hold

Should rip it out, though it entwined my heart.

Now take the body up. Bear it before us

To Tarquin's palace; there we'll light our torches,

And, in the blazing conflagration, rear

A pile for these chaste relics, that shall send

Her soul amongst the stars. On!"

They sweep away to their victims, deliver the State, and seal an ample

vengeance.

The primary climax of the play has thus been reached. Brutus has

emerged from his idiot concealment and vindicated himself as the

successful champion of liberty and his country. He is next to appear

in a second climax, of still greater intensity and height, by the

personal sacrifice of himself as the martyr of duty. The first action

has the superior national significance, but the second action has the

superior human significance, and therefore properly succeeds. Titus,

the only son of the liberator, corrupted by his love of power and

pleasure, has, in a measure, joined the party of the Tarquins. He is

therefore regarded by the victor patriots as a traitor to Rome. Brutus,

torn between his parental affection and his public duty, is profoundly

agitated, yet resolute. He spares the life of Tarquinia, the betrothed

of Titus, at the same time warning him,--

"This I concede; but more if thou attemptest,--

By all the gods!--Nay, if thou dost not take

Her image, though with smiling Cupids decked,

And pluck it from thy heart, there to receive

Rome and her glories in without a rival,

Thou art no son of mine, thou art no Roman!"

For the defective treatment of the theme of the love of Brutus for his

son by the author the actor made the very best amends in his power by

improving every opportunity to suggest the depth and fervor of the tie,

in look and gesture and tone, in order to exalt the coming catastrophe.

Seated calmly in the curule chair as Consul, robed with purple, the

lictors with their uplifted axes before him, a messenger announces

the seizure of a young man at the head of an insurgent band. Valerius

whispers to Brutus,--

"Oh, my friend, horror invades my heart.

I know thy soul, and pray the gods to put

Thee to no trial beyond a mortal bearing."

Mastering his agitation by a mighty effort, Brutus responds,--

"No, they will not,--they cannot."

The unhappy Titus is brought in guarded. The father, all his convulsed

soul visible in his countenance and motions, turns from him, rises,

walks to his colleague, and says, with tremulous, sobbing voice,--

"That youth, my Titus, was my age's hope,--

I loved him more than language can express,--

I thought him born to dignify the world."

The culprit kneels to him, and begs for clemency:

"A word for pity's sake. Before thy feet,

Humbled in soul, thy son and prisoner kneels.

Love is my plea: a father is my judge;

Nature my advocate!--I can no more:

If these will not appease a parent's heart,

Strike through them all, and lodge thy vengeance here!"

Almost overpowered, Brutus hesitates a moment, rallies, straightens

himself up, and exclaims, with lofty dignity,--

"Break off! I will not, cannot hear thee further!

The affliction nature hath imposed on Brutus,

Brutus will suffer as he may.--Enough!

Lictors, secure your prisoner. Point your axes.

To the Senate--On!"

The last scene shows the Senate in the temple of Mars, Brutus in the

Consular seat. He speaks, beginning with solemn air and tones of

ringing firmness:

"Romans the blood which hath been shed this day

Hath been shed wisely. Traitors, who conspire

Against mature societies, may urge

Their acts as bold and daring; and though villains,

Yet they are manly villains. But to stab

The cradled innocent, as these have done,--

To strike their country in the mother-pangs

Of struggling childbirth, and direct the dagger

To freedom's infant throat,--is a deed so black

That my foiled tongue refuses it a name."

Here he pauses, falters a little, then slowly adds,--

"There is one criminal still left for judgment:

Let him approach."

Titus is led in by the lictors, with the edges of their axes turned

towards him. He kneels.

"Oh, Brutus! Brutus! must I call you father,

Yet have no token of your tenderness?

_Brutus._ Think that I love thee by my present passion,

By these unmanly tears, these earthquakes here,

Let these convince you that no other cause

Could force a father thus to wrong his nature.

Romans, forgive this agony of grief,--

My heart is bursting,--Nature must have way.

I will perform all that a Roman should,--

I cannot feel less than a father ought!"

The piteous look and choking accents with which he said to his son,

"Think that I love thee by my present passion," were irresistible. They

seemed to betoken that his heart was breaking. The sound of weeping was

usually audible in the audience, and hundreds might be seen wiping the

tears from their cheeks.

Justice holds its course, and the Consul sentences the guilty citizen

to the block:

"_Brutus._ The sovereign magistrate of injured Rome

Condemns

A crime, thy father's bleeding heart forgives.

Go,--meet thy death with a more manly courage

Than grief now suffers me to show in parting;

And, while she punishes, let Rome admire thee!

Farewell!

_Titus._ Farewell forever!

_Brutus._ Forever! Lictors, lead your prisoner forth.

My hand shall wave the signal for the axe;

Then let the trumpet's sound proclaim its fall.

Poor youth! Thy pilgrimage is at an end!

A few sad steps have brought thee to the brink

Of that tremendous precipice, whose depth

No thought of man can fathom. Justice now

Demands her victim! A little moment,

And I am childless.--One effort, and 'tis past!--

Justice is satisfied, and Rome is free!"

Forrest made the finale an artistic climax of superlative originality,

finish, and power. He climbs the steps of the tribune to wave his

hand, as agreed, in signal for the execution. His face grows pale. He

struggles to lift his arm. Then, when the trumpet announces that the

deed is done, he absently wraps his head up in his toga, as if it were

something separate from his body which must not know what has taken

place. Suddenly his whole form relaxes and sinks heavily on the stage.

VIRGINIUS.

The rôle of Virginius, as filled by Forrest, had, with many

resemblances to that of Brutus, also many important differences. In

the domestic pictures of the first part, the sacred innocence and

artless ways of the motherless daughter and the overflowing fondness

of the widowed father, an element of more varied and tender beauty is

introduced. The play has a wider range of interest than that of Brutus,

and, while more attractive in some portions, is quite as terrible in

others. To the perfecting of his performance of it Forrest devoted

as much study and labor as to any part he ever acted. It obtained a

commensurate recognition and approval from the general public. In its

outlines as a piece of physical realism his rendering of Virginius

was as pronounced as that of his Brutus, and in its artistic finish

as an example of imaginative portraiture it was unquestionably far

superior. In addition to the exceptional power with which the central

motives were presented, there were incidental features of extreme

felicity. For instance, the vein of sarcasm which Virginius displays

towards the Decemvirs and their party was worked with a master-hand,

and the friendship for the crabbed but brave and good old Dentatus was

exhibited with a careless and bluff cordiality direct from nature. As

a complete picture of the antique passion and sublime strength of

the Roman character, the whole performance stood forth in pre-eminent

distinctness and vitality.

[Illustration: W. G. Jackman EDWIN FORREST AS VIRGINIUS.]

Sometimes, as an artist is lifting the curtain to expose his picture to

view, with the removal of the first corner of drapery the connoisseur

catches a glimpse of an exquisite bit of drawing and color which

convinces him that the entire work is a great and beautiful one. When

Forrest made his entrance in Virginius, with an irritated and impetuous

air, the earliest sound of his voice, so deep and resonant, coining and

propelling its words in air with such easy and percussive precision,

seized the attention of the auditory and gave assurance that something

uncommon was to come. With a quick articulation and an expostulating

tone he said, "Why did you make him Decemvir, and first Decemvir, too?"

He refers to the shameless Appius Claudius, and the key-note of the

play is struck by his inflection of the words.

He is not displeased on seeing reason for suspecting that his

daughter--an only and idolized child left him by his dead wife--is in

love with the noble young Lucius Icilius, for whom he has an excellent

liking. He sends for Virginia, who is still a schoolgirl, that he may

question her. She comes in, and sits upon his knee, saying, "Well,

father, what is your will?" At the sight of her his face lights as if

a sunbeam had suddenly fallen on it, and his voice has a sweet, low,

half-smothered tone, as if the words were spoken in his heart, and only

their softened echoes came forth:

"_Virginius._ I wished to see you,

To ask you of your tasks,--how they go on,--

And what your masters say of you,--what last

You did. I hope you never play

The truant?

_Virginia._ The truant! No, indeed, Virginius.

_Virginius._ I am sure you do not. Kiss me!

_Virginia._ Oh! my father,

I am so happy when you are kind to me!

_Virginius._ You are so happy when I'm kind to you!

Am I not always kind? I never spoke

An angry word to you in all my life,

Virginia! You are happy when I'm kind!

That's strange; and makes me think you have some reason

To fear I may be otherwise than kind."

The parental tenderness of his manner, his speech, his kiss, seemed to

combine the love of a father and a mother in one. His hand meanwhile

was playing with her tresses in a way suggestive of unpurposed

instinctive fondness, exquisitely touching.

The transition was perfect when, meeting Icilius, after scrutinizing

him earnestly, as though to read his very soul, the rough soldier and

honest man succeeds to the adoring father:

"Icilius!

Thou seest this hand? It is a Roman's, boy;

'Tis sworn to liberty,--it is the friend,

Of honor. Dost thou think so?

_Icilius._ Do I think

Virginius owns that hand?

_Virginius._ Then you'll believe

It has an oath deadly to tyranny,

And is the foe of falsehood! By the gods,

Knew it the lurking-place of treason, though

It were a brother's heart, 'twould drag the caitiff

Forth. Dar'st thou take this hand?"

And when, a little later, he led his daughter to her lover and formally

betrothed them in these eloquent words, his whole frame betraying the

struggle at composure, it was a consummate moral painting of humanity

in one of its most sacred aspects:

"Didst thou but know, young man,

How fondly I have watched her, since the day

Her mother died, and left me to a charge

Of double duty bound,--how she hath been

My pondered thought by day, my dream by night,

My prayer, my vow, my offering, my praise,

My sweet companion, pupil, tutor, child!--

Thou wouldst not wonder that my drowning eye

And choking utterance upbraid my tongue

That tells thee she is thine!"

The plot progresses, and the air is thick with the clamor and strife

of Rome, the hates of parties and the reverberation of war. Virginius

is called to a distance with the army. His daughter is left under the

guardianship of her uncle. One day the lustful Appius has a sight of

her passing in the street.

"Her young beauty,

Trembling and blushing 'twixt the striving kisses

Of parting spring and meeting summer,"

inflames him. He charges one of his minions to seize her, under the

pretext that she is the child of one of his slaves, sold to Virginius

and falsely proclaimed his daughter. With details of cruel atrocity

the deed is accomplished, in spite of the desperate interference of

Icilius. Lucius is sent as a messenger to the camp to inform Virginius.

Lucius tells him he is wanted immediately at Rome. With a start and

a look of dread anxiety he demands to know wherefore. The messenger

prevaricates and delays, but, on being chided and commanded to speak

out, says, "Hear me, then, with patience." Virginius replies, while his

restless fingers and the working of his toes, seen through the openings

of his sandals, most effectually contradict the words, "Well, I am

patient."

"_Lucius._ Your Virginia--

_Virginius._ Stop, my Lucius!

I am cold in every member of my frame!

If 'tis prophetic, Lucius, of thy news,

Give me such token as her tomb would,--silence.

I'll bear it better.

_Lucius._ You are still--

_Virginius._ I thank thee, Jupiter, I am still a father!"

The change of his countenance while uttering the word "father," from

the expression it wore on the word "silence," was like an unexpected

sunburst through a gloomy cloud. As Lucius went on in his narration,

the breathing of the listener thickened with intensity of suspense, his

heart beat with remittent throb, and he started at each point in the

outrage like one receiving electric shocks.

He departed for Rome, where his poor daughter was guarded in the house

of her uncle, Numitorius, in the deepest distress and terror. He

entered; and such was his expression as he cried, "My child! my child!"

and she rushed into his arms, that there were scarcely ever many dry

eyes in the theatre at that moment. Then it was something divine to

be seen, and never to be forgotten, to behold how he turned from his

blistering and disdainful apostrophe to the villain who had dared set

his panders after her, and, taking her precious head in his hands,

gazed in her face, saying,--

"I never saw you look so like your mother

In all my life!

_Virginia._ You'll be advised, dear father?

_Virginius._ It was her soul,--her soul, that played just then

About the features of her child, and lit them

Into the likeness of her own. When first

She placed thee in my arms,--I recollect it

As a thing of yesterday!--she wished, she said,

That it had been a man. I answered her,

It was the mother of a race of men.

And paid her for thee with a kiss. Her lips

Are cold now,--could they but be warmed again,

How they would clamor for thee!

_Virginia._ My dear father,

You do not answer me! Will you not be advised?

_Virginius._ I will not take him by the throat and strangle him!

But I COULD do it! I could DO IT!"

They go to the Forum, where Appius is seated on the tribunal, supported

by the lictors and an armed troop. The acting of Forrest in the

trial-scene that followed was as genuine and moving, set in as bold

relief, as anything the American theatre has known. Who that saw him

can ever forget the imperial front with which, bearing Virginia on

his arm, he advanced before the judgment-seat,--the firm step, the

indomitable face, the parental love that seemed to throw a thousand

invisible tendrils around his child to hold her up! The tableau caused

a silence that was absolute, and was maintained so long that the

suspense had begun to be painful, when the kingly voice of Virginius

broke the spell:

"Does no one speak? I am defendant here!

Is silence my opponent? Fit opponent

To plead a cause too foul for speech! What brow

Shameless, gives front to this most valiant cause,

That tries its prowess 'gainst the honor of

A girl, yet lacks the wit to know that they

Who cast off shame should likewise cast off fear!"

The strong, lucid, cutting tones in which these words were spoken

went vibrating into the breasts of the listeners, and thrilled them

with sympathetic echoes. The perjured witness was summoned by the

recreant judge. And the next passage of the play had a moral meaning

deep enough, and was represented with a truth and power grand enough,

to turn the stage for the time being into a pulpit and make the world

tremble at its preaching.

"_Virginius._ And are you the man

That claims my daughter for his slave?--Look at me,

And I will give her to thee.

_Claudius._ She is mine, then:

Do I not look at you?

_Virginius._ Your eye does, truly,

But not your soul.--I see it, through your eye,

Shifting and shrinking,--turning every way

To shun me. You surprise me, that your eye,

So long the bully of its master, knows not

To put a proper face upon a lie,

But gives the port of impudence to falsehood

When it would pass it off for truth. Your soul

Dares as soon show its face to me!"

Now the interest grows yet intenser and the influence of the actor

yet more penetrating in its simplicity and terrible beauty. Virginius

finds that nothing can save his daughter from the last profanation of

the tyrant except her immediate immolation by himself. For a moment

he is lost in a reverie, striving to think what he can do. By chance

he perceives a knife lying on the stall of a butcher. At the sight of

this providential instrument an electric change passes over his face,

revealing all his purpose with a grim joy, like the lightning-flash at

night illumining the murky sky and giving an instantaneous outline of

the clouds loaded with the coming storm. He moves gradually towards

the stall, smiling on Virginia a tender smile, full of the consolation

he sees in the prospect of her deliverance even by death. He pats her

lovingly on the shoulder while changing her from his left arm, that

with it he may reach the knife. He stealthily seizes it and passes

it behind him from the left hand to the right. With deep fondness he

breathes, "My dear Virginia," and gives her quick and fervent kisses,

which he appears striving to press into her very soul. Tears seem to

moisten his words,--

"There is one only way to save thine honor,--

'Tis this!"

And, swift as motion of the human arm can make it, the knife pierces

her heart. The storm has burst, the lightning has wreathed its

folds around the consecrated instrument of the work, and now the

thunder-tones of his voice crash through the theatre in the awful

exclamation,--

"Lo, Appius! with this innocent blood

I do devote thee to the infernal gods!

Make way there!

If they dare

To tempt the desperate weapon that is maddened

With drinking my daughter's blood, why, let them.

Thus, thus it rushes in amongst them. Way, there!"

His exit here used to excite the wildest huzzas, the men in the pit

standing with their hats in their uplifted hands, and the women in the

boxes waving their handkerchiefs.

Virginius heads the revolution, in which the revolted troops and the

commons join. The tyranny is hurled to the dust, the people freed, and

Appius lodged in prison. But the wronged and wretched father is broken

down by the preternatural horror and excitement he has undergone, and

loses his reason. He is next seen in his own desolate home, with a pale

and haggard face, and a look half wild, half dreamy, talking to himself:

"'Tis ease! 'tis ease! I am content! 'Tis peace,--

'Tis anything that is most soft and quiet.

And after such a dream! I want my daughter.

Send me my daughter! Will she come, or not?

I'll call myself. Virginia!"

His call of Virginia was a call dictated by a dethroned mind. It was a

sound that appeared to come from a mysterious vault. There was a kind

of semi-wakefulness in it, like the utterance of a thought in a dream.

It had a touch of pity. It was an inverted form of sound, that turned

back whence it issued and fell dead where it was born, feeling that

there was no reply for it to keep it alive. Yet, after a pause, he

fancies he hears her answering; and he rapidly asks,--

"Is it a voice, or nothing, answers me?

I hear a sound so fine there's nothing lives

'Twixt it and silence."

And then, with an entranced listening, he follows the illusory voice

around to different parts of the room, in the vain attempt to find

its source. An apathetic stare, a blank, miserable stupor, succeeds,

soon broken by the fancy that he hears her shrieking in the prison for

rescue from Appius,--and he darts away. Appius, meanwhile, is planning

an escape, and gloatingly counting over in imagination the victims he

will pick out to expiate for his present shame, when the shattered

Virginius, appalling even in his ruins, rushes in upon him, wildly

crying, "Give me my daughter!" The affrighted prisoner replies,--

"I know nothing of her, Virginius, nothing.

_Virginius._ Do you tell me so?

Vile tyrant! Think you, shall I not believe

My own eyes before your tongue? Why, there she is!

There at your back,--her locks dishevelled, and

Her vestment torn,--her cheeks all faded with

Her pouring tears.

Villain! is this a sight to show a father?

And have I not a weapon to requite thee?"

In his distraught fury, feeling over his body for some weapon he

_discovers_ his own hands. A wild and eager delight shudders through

him as, holding these naked instruments before him, he springs on the

terrified Appius and strangles him to death. Lucius, Icilius, and

Numitorius enter, bearing the urn of Virginia. The wronged father and

sufferer looks up, and sighs, with a bewildered gaze,--

"What a load my heart has heaved off! Where is he?

I thought I had done it."

They call him by name. He makes no response. Icilius places the urn in

his right hand, with the single word, "Virginia." He looks at Icilius

and the urn, at Numitorius and Lucius, seems struck by their mourning

garb, looks again at the urn, breaks into a passion of tears, and falls

on the neck of Icilius, exclaiming, "Virginia!"

METAMORA.

[Illustration: Jas Bannister EDWIN FORREST AS METAMORA.]

The famous prize-play of Metamora, by John Augustus Stone, is not a

work of much genius, and if published would have no literary rank; yet

it had all that was essential, in the striking merit of furnishing

the genius of the enactor of its leading character the conditions

for compassing a popular success of the most remarkable description.

With his performance of Metamora, Forrest impressed the masses of the

American people in a degree rarely precedented, and won a continental

celebrity full of idiomatic enthusiasm. Of course there were good

reasons for this warm favor from the surrendered many, despite the

disdain of the squeamish few, who can generally enjoy nothing, only

conceitedly criticise everything.

In the first place, the subject was indigenous, and thus came home to

the American heart and curiosity. In the imagination of our people

for more than a century the race of the aborigines of the land were

clothed with romantic associations and regretted with a sort of

national remorse. The disinterestedness of the fancy and the soul,

relieved from all proximity to their squalor, ferocity, and vice, with

a beautiful pity lamented their wrongs, their evanescence, and the

rapid disappearance of the wigwam and papoose and war-dance and canoe

of the painted tribes from hill and glen and wood and lake. In this

wide-spread sentimental interest the play took hold of powerful chords.

Although prosaic research and experience have so largely divested the

character of the Indian of its old romance and made his actual presence

a nuisance, nevertheless so long as the memories of our primeval

settlements and of our bloody and adventurous frontier traditions shall

live, so long will the American Indian be remembered with a sigh as the

_lost human poetry_ of the nature wherein he was cradled.

Furthermore, the play was stocked with fresh suggestions and images

of nature,--a store-house of those simple metaphors drawn direct

from the great objects of the universe, full of a rude pathos and

sublimity, and so natural to the genius of Indian chief and orator in

their talk. There was a piquance of novelty and a refreshing charm

to people--hived in towns and cities, and, stifled with artificial

customs, almost oblivious of any direct contact of their senses with

the solemn elementary phenomena of the surrounding universe--in hearing

Metamora speak, in a voice that echoed and painted them, of the woods,

the winds, the sun, the cliffs, the torrents, the lakes, the sea,

the stars, the thunder, the meadows and the clouds, the wild animals

and the singing birds. The meaning of the words so fitly intoned by

the player awoke in the nerves of the audience dim reminiscences of

ancestral experiences reverberating out of far ages forgotten long ago,

and they were bound by a spell themselves understood not.

And then there was the interest of a style of character and life, of

an idealized historic picture of a vanished form of human nature and

society, all whose elements stood in strange and fascinating contrast

with the personal experience of the beholders. It was the first time

the American Indian had ever been dramatized and put on the stage; and

this was done in a theme based on one of the romantic episodes of his

history embodied in a chieftain of tragic greatness.

In a production of art whose subject and materials lie in the domain

of unreclaimed nature, genius is not, indeed, permitted to falsify

any fundamental principle or fact, but is free to modify and add.

Otherwise, the creative function of art is gone, and only imitation

left. In this respect of combined truth and originality, the acted

Metamora of Forrest was a wonder never surpassed, in its own kind,

in the long story of the stage. He appeared the kingly incarnation

of the spirit of the scene, both of the outward landscape and of

the taciturn tribe that peopled it with their gliding shapes. He

appeared the human lord of the dark wood and the rocky shore, and the

natural ruler of their untutored tenants; the soul of the eloquent

recital, the noble appeal, and the fiery harangue; the embodiment

of a rude magnanimity, a deep domestic love, an unquivering courage

and fortitude, an instinctive patriotism and sense of justice, and a

relentless revenge. He appeared, too, the votary of a superstition

of singular attractiveness, blooming with the native wild-flowers of

the human mind, a faith so unaffected and open that it seemed to be

read by the stars of the Great Spirit as they looked down on the lone

Indian kneeling by the mound of his fathers, the hunted patriot lying

in ambush for his foes. Through all this physically-realized, wondrous

portraiture of the poetic, the tender, the noble, the awful, the

reverential, was mingled the glare of the crouching tiger. It was thus

that Forrest in his great creation of Metamora rendered all that there

was in the naturalistic poem of Indian life, to all that there was

justly adding an infusion of that ideal quality by which art appeals

to the nobler feelings of admiration and sympathy in preference to the

meaner ones of hate and scorn. In this performance he elaborated a

picture of the legendary and historic American Indian which to this day

stands alone beyond all rivalry.

Never did an actor more thoroughly identify and merge himself with

his part than Forrest did in Metamora. He was completely transformed

from what he appeared in other characters, and seemed Indian in every

particular, all through and all over, from the crown of his scalp to

the sole of his foot. The carriage of his body, the inflections of his

voice, his facial expressions, the very pose of his head and neck

on his shoulders, were new. For he had recalled all his observations

while on his visit with Push-ma-ta-ha among the Choctaws, when he had

adopted their habits, eaten their food, slept in their tents, echoed

the crack of his rifle over the surface of their lakes, and left the

print of his moccasins on their hunting-grounds. He had also patiently

studied their characteristics from all other available sources.

Accordingly, when he came to impersonate Metamora, or the Last of the

Wampanoags, modelled by the author of the play after that celebrated

New England Sachem, the son of Massasoit, known in history as King

Philip of Pokanoket, it was the genuine Indian who was brought upon the

stage, merely idealized a little in some of his moral features. The

attributes unnoticed by careless observers were distinctly shown,--the

sudden muscular movements, the repressed emotion, the peculiar mode of

breathing, the deep and vigorous gutturals flung out from the muscular

base of the abdomen, and the straight or slightly inward-pointing line

of the footfall. With a profound truth to fact, the general bearing of

Metamora on ordinary occasions was marked by a dull monotony of manner,

broken with awkward abruptness, and his grand poses were limited to

those times of great excitement when the human organism, if in a state

of dynamic surcharge, is spontaneously electrified with heroic lines,

and becomes an instrument with which impersonal passions or the laws of

nature gesticulate.

With the single and very proper exception of this partially heightened

moral refinement, the counterfeit was so cunningly copied that it

might have deceived nature herself. Many a time delegations of Indian

tribes who chanced to be visiting the cities where he acted this

character--Boston, New York, Washington, Baltimore, Cincinnati, New

Orleans--attended the performance, adding a most picturesque feature

by their presence, and their pleasure and approval were unqualified.

A large delegation of Western Indians, seated in the boxes of the old

Tremont Theatre on such an occasion, were so excited by the performance

that in the closing scene they rose and chanted a dirge in honor of the

death of the great chief.

This incident recalls one which happened in the earliest theatre in

Philadelphia, when Mrs. Whitelock, the sister of Mrs. Siddons, was

playing, and when Washington was present. At the beginning of the

performance a group of Indians, who had come from the wilderness to

conclude a treaty, made their appearance in the pit in their native

costume. The dark, tall, gaunt figures glided in, and, without

noticing the audience or seeming to hear the claps of welcome which

greeted them, seated themselves, and fixed their eyes on the stage,

as unchangingly as if they were petrified. They sat through the chief

play like statues, with immovable tranquillity. But in the after-piece

an artificial elephant was introduced, which so electrified these sons

of the forest that they suddenly sprang up with a cry. They said there

had once been a great beast like this in their land. The next day they

called on the manager, inspected the mammoth of sticks, pasteboard, and

cloth, and asked to see by daylight the heavenly women who had appeared

on the stage the previous night.

The opening scene of Metamora was a glen, with ledges of stone, trees,

bushes, running vines, and flowers, the leading character seen, in his

picturesque, aboriginal costume, standing on the highest rock in an

attitude that charmed the eye. Leaning forward on his firmly-planted

right foot, the left foot thrown easily back on its tip, he had a bow

in his hands, with the arrow sprung to its head. As the arrow sped

from the twanging string he raised his eyes with eager gaze after

it, gave a deep interjection, "Hah!" bounded upon a rock below, and

vanished. In a few moments he re-entered, with his left arm bleeding,

as if it had been bitten in a struggle with a wild beast. Oceana, a

white maiden, passing, sees his wound and offers him her scarf to bind

it up. The mother of Oceana had once befriended Massasoit when he was

sick. Metamora, in his gratitude, had visited her grave with offerings

for the dead, and, on such an occasion, had rescued Oceana from a

panther. He hesitates before accepting, and fills the delay with a

by-play of pantomime so true to Indian nature, so new and strange to

the spectators, that it was invested with an absorbing interest. At

length he says, "Metamora will take the white maiden's gift." He then

gives her an eagle's feather, bids her wear it in her hair, and if she

is ever in danger he will fly to her rescue at the sight of this pledge

of his friendship.

As the play moves on, the audience are gradually borne back to the

early days of their fathers, and their dread struggle to establish

themselves on these Western shores. We see the thin and thriving

settlements constantly augmenting with reinforcements, and pushing the

natives before them. We are taken within the homes of the Indians,

shown their better qualities, their hopeless efforts, their mixed

resolution and misgiving before their coming fate. Our sympathies are

enlisted, before we know it, with the defeated party against ourselves;

and thus the author and actor won their just victory. For the

English are made to represent power and fraud, the Indians truth and

patriotism; and when their fugitive king pauses on a lofty cliff in the

light of the setting sun, gazes mournfully on the lost hunting-grounds

and desecrated graves of his forefathers, and launches his curse on

their destroyers, every heart beats with sorrow for him.

The class of speeches in which the instinctive love of nature that

unconsciously saturated the Indian soul is expressed, and the closeness

of their daily life to the elements of the landscape and the phenomena

of the seasons is revealed, were delivered with matchless effect.

Metamora, poised like the bronze statue of some god of the antique,

says, "I have been upon the high mountain-top when the gray mists were

beneath my feet, and the Great Spirit passed by me in wrath. He spoke

in anger, and the rocks crumbled beneath the flash of his spear. Then

I felt proud and smiled. The white man trembles, but Metamora is not

afraid."

And again: "The war and the chase are the red man's brother and sister.

The storm-cloud in its fury frights him not; and when the stream is

wild and broken his canoe is like a feather, that cannot drown."

Another class of speeches, equally unique in character, and breathing

with compressed passion, were those in which the relative positions of

the intruding race and the native lords of the soil were described.

The style with which these were pronounced made the form of the actor

seem a new tenement in which the departed Sachem of the Pequots lived

and spoke again. "_Your_ lands?" he exclaims, with sarcastic disdain.

"They are mine. Climb upon the rock and look to the sunrise and to the

sunset,--all that you see is the land of the Wampanoags, the land of

Metamora. I am the white man's friend; but when my friendship is over I

will not ask the white man if I have the right to be his foe. Metamora

will love and hate, smoke the pipe of peace or draw the hatchet of

battle, as seems good to him. He will not wrong his white brother, but

he owns no master save Manito, Master of Heaven."

And at another time: "The pale-faces are around me thicker than the

leaves of summer. I chase the hart in the hunting-grounds; he leads me

to the white man's village. I drive my canoe into the rivers; they are

full of the white man's ships. I visit the graves of my fathers; they

are lost in the white man's corn-fields. They come like the waves of

the ocean forever rolling upon the shores. Surge after surge, they dash

upon the beach, and every foam-drop is a white man. They swarm over

the land like the doves of winter, and the red men are dropping like

withered leaves."

In these passages his declamation seemed to make the whole tragedy of

the story of the American Indians breathe and swell and tremble.

A wonderful interest, too, was concentrated in the personal traits of

Metamora himself as an individual; so true to his word, so faithful to

his friend, so devoted to his wife and child, so proud of his land and

his fathers, so fearless of his foe, so reverential before his God. "To

his friend Metamora is like the willow,--he bends ever at the breath of

those that love him. To others he is an oak. Until with your single arm

you can rive the strongest tree of the forest from its earth, think not

to stir Metamora when his heart says No."

In the earliest scene with his wife, when ready to start on a hunt,

he lingered, and directed her to take her child from its couch on the

earth. He then lifted it in his hands, and stood for several seconds

in an attitude so superbly defined in its outlines of strength and

grace that several pictures of it were published at the time. He asked,

with a look of fondness, suppressing his stern reserve, "Dost thou

not love this little one, Nahmeokee?" "Ah, yes!" she replied. He then

continued, in a caressing murmur like the runneling music of a brook,

"When first his little eyes unclosed, thou saidst that they were like

to mine." The expression of human love was so simple and complete, and

so exquisitely set in the wild seclusion of nature, suggestive of the

self-sufficingness of this little nest of affection embosomed in the

wood and forgetful of all else in the world, that it made many a soft

heart beat fast with an aching wish that stayed long after the scene

was gone.

In a later scene he describes to his wife a vision he has had in the

night. He relates it in a rich, subdued undertone, waxing intenser, and

giving the hearer a mixed feeling of mysterious reverie and prophetic

inspiration. "Nahmeokee, the power of dreams has been on me, and the

shadows of things to be have passed before me. My heart is big with

great thoughts. When I sleep, I think the knife is red in my hand and

the scalp of the white man is streaming." Here he gave an additional

height to his figure, a slight downward inclination to his head and

eyes, dropped his left arm listlessly, and, while the two halves of

his whole form were seen finely distinguished along the median line,

with his right hand, extended to its fullest distance straight from

the shoulder, grasped his bow, which stood perfectly erect from the

ground. It was a posture of beautiful artistic precision and meaning,

expressive of reflection with a quality of earnest listening in it, as

if waiting for a reply. The words of Nahmeokee, not fitting his mood,

slightly ruffled his temper, and then, with a crisp tone of voice which

in its change of quality and accent was so unexpected that it was like

a sudden sweep of the wind that rustles the dry leaves and hums through

the wood, he said, "Yes, when our fires are no longer red in the high

places of our fathers,--when the bones of our kindred make fruitful the

fields the stranger has planted amid the ashes of our wigwams,--when

we are hunted back like the wounded elk far towards the going down of

the sun,--our hatchets broken, our bows unstrung, and our war-whoops

hushed,--then will the stranger spare; for we shall be too small for

his eye to see!"

The controversy between the natives and the new settlers having reached

a perilous height, the latter dispatch a messenger asking Metamora to

meet them in council. Very angry, and deeming all talk useless, he

yet concludes to go. Unannounced, abruptly, he makes his peremptory

appearance amidst them. Settling strongly back on his right leg, his

left advanced at ease with bent knee, his right side half presented,

his face turned squarely towards them, he says, with Spartan curtness,

and in a manner not insolent, and yet indescribably defiant, "You sent

for me, and I have come." His action was so wonderfully expressive in

speaking these few words that they became a popular phrase, circulating

in the mouths of men in all parts of the country.

The same result also followed in another and simpler scene. He had

promised to meet the English at a certain time and place. They demanded

of him, "Will you come?" By mere force of manner he gave an immense

impressiveness to the simple reply, "Metamora cannot lie." The very

boys in the streets were seen trying to imitate his posture and look,

swelling their little throats to make the words sound big, as they

repeated, "Metamora cannot lie."

In an interview with the English, after deadly hostilities have begun

to rage, Aganemo, a subject of Metamora, who, for some supposed wrong,

has turned against him, is called in, and bears testimony against his

chief and his tribe. Metamora cries, "Let me see his eyes;" and, going

close in front of him, addresses the cowering recreant: "Look me in

the face, Aganemo. Thou turnest away. The spirit of a dog has entered

thee, and thou crouchest. Dost thou come here with a lie in thy heart

to witness against me? Thine eye cannot rest on thy chieftain. White

men, can he speak words of truth who has been false to his nation and

false to his friends?" Fitz Arnold says, "Send him hence." Metamora

interposes with an imperial mien full of dread import, "I will do

that," and strikes him dead on the spot, exclaiming, "Slave of the

whites, follow Sassamon,"--Sassamon being the name of another traitor

whom he had previously slain in the midst of his own braves.

Fitz Arnold orders his men to seize the high-handed executioner of

their witness. Towering alone in solitary and solid grandeur, with

accents and gestures whose impassioned sincerity painted every thought

as a visible reality and made the excited audience lean out of their

seats, Metamora hurled back his electric defiance:

"Come! my knife has drunk the blood of the traitor, but it is not

satisfied. Men of the pale race, beware! The mighty spirits of the

Wampanoags are hovering over your heads. They stretch their shadowy

arms and call for vengeance. They shall have it. Tremble! From East to

West, from the South to the North, the tribes have roused from their

slumbers. They grasp the hatchet. The pale-faces shall wither under

their power. White men. Metamora is your foe!"

The soldiers level their guns at him. He suddenly seizes a white man

and places him before himself. The living shield thus extemporized

falls, perforated with bullets. Metamora hurls his tomahawk to the

floor, where it sticks quivering, while he cries, "Thus do I defy your

power!" and darts away, leaving them dumb with astonishment.

The pathos with which Forrest rendered portions of the play of Metamora

was one of its most remarkable excellences and one of his most

distinctive trophies as a dramatic artist. No theory of the passions

or mere mechanical drill in their expression can ever teach a man to

be pathetic. Only a disagreeable mockery of it can thus come. Pathos

is the one particular affection that knows no deceit, but comes in

truth direct from the soul and goes direct to the soul. It may lie

dormant in us, as music lies in the strings of a silent harp, till a

touch gives it life. Speaking more or less in all, it speaks most in

those who cherish it most; and when it speaks it is felt by all,--red

man and white man, barbarian and philosopher. The pathos of Metamora

was not like that of Damon when he parted with his family to go to his

execution, not like that of Brutus when he sentenced his son to death,

not like that of Virginius when he slew his daughter. It was a pathos

without tears or gesture. The Indian warrior never weeps. It was almost

solely a pathos of the voice, and was as broad and primitive as the

unperverted faith and affection of man. The supreme example of this

quality in the play was finely set off by the contrast that immediately

foreran it, its soft, sad shades following a scene of lurid fury and

grandeur.

A peace-runner brings Metamora the news that Nahmeokee is a captive in

the power of his enemies. Leaving fifty white men bound as hostages to

secure his own safety, he starts alone to deliver her. As he approaches

the English camp, he hears Nahmeokee shriek. With one bound he bursts

in upon them, levels his gun, and thunders,--

"Which of you has lived too long? Dogs of white men, do you lift your

hands against a woman?" "Seize him!" they cry, but shrink from his

movement. "Hah!" he scornfully exclaims, "it is now a warrior who

stands before you, the fire-weapon in his hands. Who, then, shall

seize him? Go, Nahmeokee; I will follow thee." Then, reminding them of

his hostages, he turns on his heel and departs.

He is next discovered, with a slow and heavy step, approaching his

wigwam, where his rescued wife waits to receive him. He has seen that

the too unequal struggle of his countrymen is hopeless, and he appears

sad and gloomy. Telling Nahmeokee, who looks broken with grief, that he

is weary with the strife of blood, he says, "Bring me thy little one,

that I may press him to my burning heart to quiet its tumult." Without

his knowledge, the child had been killed by the white men a few hours

previous. The mother goes where the child is lying upon the ground,

lifts the skin that covers him, points at him, and drops her head in

tears. Metamora looks at the child, at the mother, stoops, and, with

rapid motions, feels the little face, arms, and legs. Suppressing the

start of horror and the cry of grief a white man would have given,

he sinks his chin slowly upon his breast and heaves a deep sigh, and

then utters the simple words, "Dead! cold!" in a tone low as if to

be heard by himself alone, and sounding like the wail of a sorrow in

some far-away world. Having lifted the dead child and fondled it in

his bosom and laid it tenderly back, he walks slowly to the weeping

Nahmeokee, places his hand on her shoulder, and says, in a soft voice

quivering with the tears not suffered to mount in the eyes, "Well, is

he not happy? Better that he should die by the stranger's hand than

live to be his slave. Do not bow down thy head. Thou wilt see him

again in the happy land of the spirits; and he will look smilingly

as--as--as I do now." Here the quality of smilingness was in the tones

of the voice only, while his face wore the impress of intense grief.

The voice and face thus contradicting each other presented a pathos so

overwhelming that it seemed as if nothing human could surpass it or

resist it.

His manner now changes. Some great resolution seems to have arisen in

him. His words have a tender yet ominous meaning in their inflection

as he asks Nahmeokee, "Do you not fear the power of the white man?

He might seize thee and bear thee off to his far country, bind those

arms that have so often clasped me, and make thee his slave. We cannot

fly: our foes are all about us. We cannot fight, for this [drawing his

long knife] is the only weapon I have saved unbroken from the strife.

It has tasted the white man's blood and reached the cold heart of the

traitor. It has been our best friend, and it is now our only treasure."

Here he drew her still closer, and placed her head on his bosom, and,

with the long knife in his hand, pointed upwards, and with an alluring,

indescribably sweet and aerial falsetto tone, painted a picture that

seemed to take form and color in the very atmosphere. There was a weird

dreaminess in his voice and a visionary abstractness in his gaze, as

with the words "long path in the thin air," he indicated the heavenward

journey of his dead child, that seemed actually to dissolve the whole

scene, theatre, actor, spectators, and all, into a passing vapor, an

ethereal enchantment.

"I look through the long path in the thin air, and think I see

our little one borne to the land of the happy, where the fair

hunting-grounds never know snows or storms, and where the immortal

brave feast under the eyes of the Giver of Good. Look upward,

Nahmeokee! See, thy child looks back to thee, and beckons thee to

follow." Drawing her closer with his left arm, and lowering his right,

he whispers, "Hark! In the distant wood I faintly hear the tread of the

white men. They are upon us! The home of the happy is made ready for

thee!" While this picture of fear and hope is vivid before her mind,

he strikes the blow, and in an instant she is dead in his arms. He

clasps her to his breast, presses his lips on her forehead, and gently

places her beside the dead child. He then shudders, and draws forth the

knife sheathed in her side, and kisses its blade in a sudden transport,

exclaiming, "She knew no bondage to the white men. Pure as the snow she

lived, free as the air she died!"

At this moment the hills are covered with the white men, pointing their

rifles at his heart. "Hah!" he cries. Their leader shouts, "Metamora is

our prisoner!" "No," he proudly responds, dilating with the haughtiest

port of defiance. "I live, the last of my race, live to defy you still,

though numbers and treachery overpower me. Come to me, come singly,

come all, and this knife, which has drunk the foul blood of your

nation, and is now red with the purest of mine, will feel a grasp as

strong as when it flashed in the glare of your burning dwellings or was

lifted terribly over the fallen in battle."

The order is given to fire upon him; and he replies, "Do so. I am weary

of the world; for ye are dwellers in it. I would not turn on my heel to

save my life." They shoot, and he staggers, but in his dying agonies

launches on them his awful malediction:

"My curses on ye, white men! May the Great Spirit curse ye when he

speaks in his war-voice from the clouds! May his words be like the

forked lightnings, to blast and desolate! May the loud winds and the

fierce red flames be loosed in vengeance upon ye, tigers! May the angry

Spirit of the Waters in his wrath sweep over your dwellings! May your

graves and the graves of your children be in the path where the red man

shall tread, and may the wolf and the panther howl over your fleshless

bones! I go. My fathers beckon from the green lakes and the broad

hills. The Great Spirit calls me. I go,--but the curses of Metamora

stay with the white men!"

He crawls painfully to the bodies of his wife and child, and, in a vain

effort to kiss them, expires, with his last gasp mixing the words, "I

die--my wife, my queen--my Nahmeokee!"

SPARTACUS.

[Illustration: F. Halpin EDWIN FORREST AS THE GLADIATOR.]

"The Gladiator," written by Robert Montgomery Bird, was another

prize-play, in which Forrest acquired a popularity which, if less

general, was more intense, than that secured for his Metamora. If

the admiration and applause given to it were drawn less universally

from men and women, from old and young, they were more fervent and

sustained, being fed by those elementary instincts which are strongest

in the robust multitude. The Spartacus of Forrest was more abused and

satirized by hostile critics than any of his other parts, because

it was the most "physical" and "melodramatic" of them all. Muscular

exertion and ferocious passion were carried to their greatest pitch in

it, though neither of these was displayed in a degree beyond sincerity

and fitness or the demands of the given situations on the given

embodiment of the character. There are actual types of men and actual

scenes of life which are transcendently "physical" and "melodramatic."

No actor can truly represent such specimens of human nature and such

conjunctures of human history _without_ being highly "physical" and

profoundly "melodramatic." Is it not the office of the player, the very

aim of his art, correctly to depict the truth of man and life? And,

recollecting what sort of a person the veritable Thracian gladiator

was, and what sort of a part he played, one may well ask how he can be

justly impersonated on the stage if _not_ invested with the attributes

of brawny muscularity, terrific indignation, stentorian speech, and

merciless revenge. Forrest was blamed and ridiculed by a coterie

because he did exactly what, as an artist cast in such a rôle, he ought

to do, and any deviation from which would have been a gross violation

of propriety. He simply exhibited tremendous mental and physical

realities with tremendous mental and physical realism. What else would

the demurrer have?

The fact is, the cant words "physical" and "melodramatic," as

demeaningly used in dramatic criticism, express a vulgar prejudice too

prevalent among the educated and refined,--a prejudice infinitely more

harmful than any related prejudice of the ignorant and coarse. They

seem to fancy the body something vile, to be ashamed of, to receive

as little attention and be kept as much out of sight as possible. But

since God created the body as truly as he did the spirit, and decreed

its uses as much as he did those of the spirit, the perfecting and

glorifying of the former are just as legitimate as the perfecting

and glorifying of the latter. The ecclesiastical interpretation of

Christianity for these fifteen hundred years is responsible, in common

with kindred ascetic superstitions of other and elder religions, for an

incalculable amount of disease, deformity, vice, crime, and untimely

death. The contempt for bodily power and its material conditions in

a superbly-developed and trained physical organism, the foul and

dishonoring notion of the superior sanctity of the celibate state, the

teaching that chastity is the one thing that allies us to the angels,

_with_ which every other sin may be forgiven, _without_ which no other

virtue is to be recognized,--these and associated errors--discords,

distortions, and inversions of nature--have been prolific sources

of evil. They lie at the root of the so common prejudice against a

magnificent and glowing condition of the physical organism, a prejudice

which feeds the conceit of the votaries of the present mental forcing

system, and causes so many dawdling idlers to neglect all use of those

vigorous measures of gymnastic hygiene which would raise the power and

splendor of body and soul together to their maximum.

The type of man produced by the Athenians in their best age, its

unrivalled combination of health and strength, energy and grace,

acumen and sensibility, organic harmony of mental peace and vital joy,

was very largely the fruit of their unrivalled system of gymnastics

regulated by music. Free America, with this example and so much

subsequent experience, with all the conquests of modern science at her

command, should inaugurate a system of popular training which will

acknowledge the equal sanctity of body and soul and render them worthy

of each other, a union of athletic and æsthetic culture making the body

the temporary illuminated temple of its indwelling immortal divinity.

The separating of human nature into opposed parts whose respective

highest welfare is incompatible must ever be productive of all kinds of

morbidity, monstrosity, and horror, through the final reactions of the

violated harmony of truth. Leading to the enforced culture of one side,

the mental, and the enforced neglect of the other, the material, it is

fatal to that rounded wholeness of the entire man which is the synonym

of both health and virtue. For the helpless subsidence of the soul in

the body is brutality or idiocy; the insurrectionary sway of the body

over the soul is insanity; the remorseless subdual of the body by the

soul is egotistic asceticism or murderous ferocity; but the parallel

development and exaltation of accordant body and soul give us the ideal

of health and happiness fulfilled in beauty, or the enthronement of

divine order in man. Therefore such a stimulating instance of organic

glory, extraordinary outward poise and inward passion, as the people,

thrilled in their most instinctive depths of enthusiasm, used to shout

at when they saw Forrest in his early assumptions of the rôle of

Spartacus, is not to be stigmatized as something offensive, but to be

hailed as something admirable.

In those happy and glowing years of his prime and of his fresh

celebrity, what a glorious image of unperverted manhood, of personified

health and strength and beauty, he presented! What a grand form he had!

What a grand face! What a grand voice! And, the living base of all,

what a grand blood! the rich flowing seed-bed of his human thunder and

lightning. As he stepped upon the stage in his naked fighting-trim, his

muscular coating unified all over him and quivering with vital power,

his skin polished by exercise and friction to a smooth and marble

hardness, conscious of his enormous potency, fearless of anything on

the earth, proudly aware of the impression he knew his mere appearance,

backed by his fame, would make on the audience who impatiently awaited

him,--he used to stand and receive the long, tumultuous cheering

that greeted him, as immovable as a planted statue of Hercules. In

the rank and state of his physical organism and its feelings he had

the superiority of a god over common men. The spectacle, let it be

repeated, was worthy the admiration it won. And had the personal

imitation of the care and training he gave himself been but equal to

the admiration lavished on their result, the benefit to the American

people would have been beyond estimate. But in this, as in the other

lessons of the drama, the example was relatively fruitless, because

shown to spectators who applaud without copying, seeking entertainment

instead of instruction. This, however, is clearly the fault of the

people, and not of the stage.

The play of "The Gladiator" is founded on that dark and frightful

episode in the history of Rome, the famous servile war headed by

the gladiators under the lead of Spartacus. Our sympathies are

skilfully enlisted on the side of the insurgents, who are goaded to

their desperate enterprise by insufferable wrongs and cruelties. It

abounds in pictures of insolent tyranny on one side, and with eloquent

denunciation and fearless resistance on the other, and the chief

character is a powerful presentation of a deep and generous manhood,

outraged in every fibre, lashed to fury by his injuries, and, after

superhuman efforts of revenge, expiring in monumental despair and

appeal to the gods. The horrors of oppression, the irrepressible

dignity of human nature, the reckless luxury of the rulers, the

suffering of the slaves, the revolting arrogance of despotism, and

the burning passion of liberty, are set against one another; and all

through it the mighty figure of Spartacus is made to fill the central

place. It was just the part for a democrat, who, despising what is

factitious, gloried in the ineradicable attributes of free manhood; and

Forrest made the most of it. For instance, it is easy for those who

knew him to imagine the energy and relish with which he would utter the

following lines when he came to them in his part:

"I thank the gods, I am barbarian;

For I can better teach the grace-begot

And heaven-supported masters of the earth,

How a mere dweller of a desert rock

Can bow their crowned heads to his chariot-wheels.

Man is heaven's work, and beggars' brats may herit

A soul to mount them up the steeps of fortune,

With regal necks to be their stepping-blocks."

In the intense sincerity and elaborate as well as spontaneous truth

of his performance, it was not a play that the spectators saw, but a

history; not a history, but a resurrection. Entering in the garb of a

slave, bound and whipped, his mighty frame and terrible aspect made

the abuse seem more awful. Tortured with insulting questions, his

proud spirit stung by wrong on wrong, he broke forth in desperation,

and carried the passions of the audience by storm, as with clenched

hands, and half erect from their seats, while the blood ran quicker

through their veins, they saw him rush into combat with his enemies

and chase them from the stage. They delighted to see the cruel subduer

of the world humbled by her own captive, who held her haughty prætors

by the heart and called on Thrace, on Africa, on the oppressed of all

nations, to pour the flood of their united hates on the detested city.

They rejoiced to hear him recite with bitter eloquence the story of

her degradation, and heap on her with hot scorn the recollection of

the time when Tiber ran blood and Hannibal hung over her like a cloud

charged with ruin. Every step, every word, vibrated on their feelings,

and when he fell their hearts swelled with a pang. For the actor had

been lost in the slave, the insurgent, the conqueror, the victim.

His first appearance as a captive in imperial Rome was deeply

affecting. "Is it a thousand leagues to Thrace?" he said, with a

whispered agony, the deadly lament of hopeless exile. He has been

purchased by Lentulus, an exhibitor of gladiators, on the strength of

the report that he was the most desperate, skilful, and unconquerable

fighter in the province. Bracchius, another proprietor of gladiators,

owns one Phasarius, a Thracian, who has always been victorious in his

combats. Phasarius was a younger and favorite brother of Spartacus,

supposed to have been killed in battle years before, but really taken

captive and brought to Rome. Now Bracchius and Lentulus propose a

combat between their two slaves. Spartacus, chained, is ordered in. He

asks, "Is not this Rome, the great city?" Bracchius replies, "Ay, and

thou shouldst thank the gods that they have suffered thee to see it.

What think'st thou of it?"

"_Spartacus._ That if the Romans had not been fiends, Rome had never

been great. Whence came this greatness but from the miseries of

subjugated nations? How many myriads of happy people that had not

wronged Rome, for they knew not Rome,--how many myriads of these were

slain, like the beasts of the field, that Rome might fatten upon their

blood, and become great? Look ye, Roman, there is not a palace upon

these hills that cost not the lives of a thousand innocent men; there

is no deed of greatness ye can boast, but it was achieved by the ruin

of a nation; there is no joy ye can feel, but its ingredients are blood

and tears."

Lentulus breaks in, "Now, marry, villain, thou wert bought not to

prate, but to fight."

"_Spartacus._ I will not fight. I will contend with mine enemy, when

there is strife between us; and if that enemy be one of these same

fiends, a Roman, I will give him the advantage of weapon and place;

he shall take a helmet and buckler, while I, with my head bare and my

breast naked, and nothing in my hand but my shepherd's staff, will

beat him to my feet and slay him. But I will not slay a man for the

diversion of Romans."

His master threatens to have him lashed if he refuses to contend in

the arena. The fearful attitude and fixed look with which Spartacus

received this threat, suggesting that he would strike the speaker

dead with a glance, were a masterpiece of expressive art not easily

forgotten by any one who saw it. Its possessing power seemed to freeze

the gazer while he gazed. Still refusing to fight, in moody despair he

bewails the destruction of his home by the Romans, and their murder

of his wife and young child. The female slaves of Bracchius here pass

by, and, to his amazement, among them Spartacus sees his lost Senona

and her boy. After a touching interview of contending joy and grief

with them, he agrees to enter the arena, on condition that if he is

victorious his reward shall be their liberation.

The next act opens with a view of the great Roman amphitheatre, crowded

with the people gathered to see those bloody games which were their

horrid but favorite amusement. The first adversary brought against

Spartacus is a Gaul. He soon slays him, though with great reluctance,

and only as moved to it by the prospect of freedom for his wife and

child. Then they propose as a second champion a renowned Thracian.

He flings down his sword and refuses to fight with one of his own

countrymen. But at last, on learning that liberty is to be had in

no other way, he suddenly yields. The Thracian is introduced. It is

Phasarius. A scene of intense pathetic power follows, as little by

little the brothers are struck with each other's appearance, suspect,

inquire, respond, are satisfied, and rush into a loving embrace. The

prætor treats their recognition and their transport of fraternal

affection as a trick to escape the combat, and orders them to begin.

Spartacus proposes to his brother to die sword in hand rather than obey

the unnatural command. In reply, Phasarius rapidly informs him that

he has already organized the elements of a revolt among his comrades,

and that it awaits but his signal to break out. Crassus angrily calls

on his guards to enter the amphitheatre and punish the dilatory

combatants. The manner in which Spartacus retorted, "Let them come

in,--we are armed!" never failed to stir the deepest excitement in the

theatre, causing the whole assembly to join in enthusiastic applause.

Port, look, gesture, tone, accent, combined to make it a signal example

of the sovereign potency of manner in revealing a master-spirit and

swaying subject-spirits.

On the entrance of the guards, Phasarius gives a shout, and the

confederate gladiators also plunge in, and a general conflict begins.

In this scene the acting of Forrest absorbed his whole heart. He was

so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of it that everything he did was

perfectly natural, full of that genuine fire which is so much beyond

all exertion by rule. It was universally agreed that more spirited and

admirable fighting was hardly to be conceived, the varied postures into

which he threw his massive form being worthy to be taken as studies for

the sculptor.

The rebellion grows apace in success and numbers. Spartacus rescues his

wife and child from the Roman camp, and seizes the niece of the prætor.

Phasarius falls in love with this young woman, and demands her of his

brother. Being refused because she is affianced to a youth in Rome,

he insists on his demand. In the altercation occurs one of the finest

and loftiest passages in the play, and it was rendered with a sublime

eloquence:

"_Spartacus._ Come, look me in the face,

And let me see how bad desires have changed thee.

_Phasarius._ I claim the captive.

_Spar._ Set thine eye on her:

Lo, you! she weeps, and she is fatherless.

Thou couldst not harm an orphan? What, I say,

Art thou, whom I have carried in my arms

To mountain-tops to worship the great God,

Art thou a man to plot a wrong and sorrow

'Gainst such as have no father left but Him?"

Phasarius revolts, and takes off more than half the army. Disastrously

defeated by Crassus, he returns with a broken fragment of his forces,

and is generously forgiven and restored to favor by Spartacus, who

intrusts him with an important separate command, and confides Senona

and her boy to his keeping, with the solemn charge that he shall avoid

all collision with the enemy. Phasarius, however, thirsting for Roman

blood, seeks an engagement, and is totally routed, his force cut in

pieces, and the mother and child both slain. The unhappy man, then,

mortally wounded, presents himself before his brother, tells his

fearful tale, and expires at his feet. In this interview the emotions

of anxiety, deprecation, grief, wrath, and horror, were depicted in all

their most forcible language in the person of Spartacus. One action in

particular was effective in the highest degree. Phasarius described the

crucifixion by the Romans of six thousand of their Thracian captives.

The highway on both sides, he said, was lined with crosses, and on each

cross was nailed a gladiator.

"I crept

Thro' the trenched army to that road, and saw

The executed multitude uplifted

Upon the horrid engines. Many lived:

Some moaned and writhed in stupid agony;

Some howled and prayed for death, and cursed the gods;

Some turned to lunatics, and laughed at horror;

And some with fierce and hellish strength had torn

Their arms free from the beams, and so had died

Grasping headlong the air."

The agitations of the soul of the listener up to this point had been

delineated with fearful distinctness. But when told that his wife and

child had been killed, his head suddenly fell forward on his breast and

rested there, after vibrating four or five times in lessening degrees

on the pivot of the neck, as if utterly abandoned to itself. It was

marvellously expressive of the exhausted state, the woe-begone despair,

of one who had received a shock too great to be borne, a shock which,

had it been a little severer, would have prostrated his whole figure,

but, as it was, simply prostrated his head.

Deprived of all his kindred and of all hope, alone on the flinty earth,

rage and recklessness now seize the desolate Thracian, and he resolves

to sacrifice his captive, the niece of the prætor, in retaliation for

the slaughter of his own family; but a nobler sentiment restrains him,

and he dismisses her to her father. In this passage he displayed the

agony of generous grief subduing the desire of vengeance with a power

which, as a prominent English critic said, reminded the beholder of the

head of Laocoön struggling in the folds of the serpent, or of the head

of Hercules writhing under the torture of the poisoned shirt.

The prætor in return for his daughter sends Spartacus an offer of

pardon if he will surrender. Disdainfully rejecting the overture, he

has the horses in his camp slain, and sets everything on the chance of

one more battle, but against such odds as he knows can result only in

his defeat. With a frenzied thirst for vengeance he fights his way to

the presence of the Roman general, and, in the very act of striking him

down, exhausted from the accumulated wounds received in his passage of

blood, grows faint, reels, falls in the exact attitude of the immortal

statue of the Dying Gladiator, and expires.

A most remarkable proof of the histrionic genius of Forrest was given

in the profoundly discriminated manner with which the same mass and

fury of revengeful passion, the same rude breadth and tenderness of

affection and pathos, were shown by him in the two characters of

Metamora and Spartacus. In the Indian there was a stoical compression

of the emotions out of their revealing channels, an organic suppression

of starts and surprises and lamentations, a profound impassibility of

demeanor, an exterior of slow, stubborn, monotonous self-possession,

through which the volcanic ferocity of the interior crept in words of

slow lava, or flared as fire through a smouldering heap of cinders.

In the Thracian there was more variety as well as incomparably more

freedom and impulsiveness of expression. The exterior and interior

corresponded with each other and mutually reflected instead of

contradicting each other. In different exigencies the gladiator

exhibited in his whole person, limbs, torso, face, eyes, and voice,

the extremes of sullen stolidity, pining sorrow, convulsive grief,

ambitious pride, pity, anger, resolution, and despair, each well

shaded from the others. He had a wider gamut, as civilization is more

comprehensive than barbarism. The movements and expressions of Metamora

seemed to be instinctive, and originate in the nervous centres of the

physique; those of Spartacus to be volitional, originating in the

cerebral centres. In civilized life the body tends to be the reflex of

the brain; in savage life the brain to be the reflex of the body. This

historic and physiological truth Forrest knew nothing about, but the

practical results of the fact he intuitively observed.

* * * * *

The seven characters, now described as fully as the writer can do it

with the data at his command, were the favorite ones in which Forrest

had gained his greenest laurels at the time of his visit to Europe.

Jaffier, Octavian, Sir Edward Mortimer, Sir Giles Overreach, Iago, and

other kindred parts, which he often acted with distinguished ability

and acceptance, he liked less and less, and gradually dropped them

altogether. In Febro, Cade, Melnotte, and Richelieu he had not yet

appeared. His Richard, Macbeth, Othello, Lear, Hamlet, and Coriolanus

will be more appropriately treated in a later chapter of his life, when

he had elaborated his conceptions of them to the highest finish in his

power. But his performances at the time now under consideration were,

in their spiritual substance, their general treatment and outlines,

what they remained to the end. The subsequent changes were merely

improvements in details, in gradual climax, in grouping, in symmetry

and unity. With his advancing years and experience and study, more and

more the parts were made to grow before the audience, so to speak, from

their roots upward, gaining strength and expansion as they rose. Gusty

irregularity, crudity, misproportion, discord, were carefully struck

out, and harmony secured by the just blending of light and shade. But

from first to last his style was consistent, and, like his personality,

knew no revolutions, only development.

In the practice of his profession it was a noble characteristic of

Forrest that he disliked to impersonate essentially bad or ignoble

characters. He hated to set forth passions, thoughts, or sentiments

meant to be regarded as base and repulsive, unless, indeed, it was to

make them odious and hold them up to detestation. Into this work he

threw himself with a gusto that was extreme. He was but too vehement

in the utterance of sarcastic denunciations of every form of meanness

or cruelty, his relish of the excoriation being often too keen, his

inflection of tone too widely sweeping, and his emphasis too prolonged

for the measure of any average sympathy. All was sincere with him in

it, but his expression was pitched in the scale of reality, while the

appreciation of the listeners was only pitched in the calmer scale of

ideality.

He loved to stand out in some commanding form of virtue, heroism,

or struggle, battling with trials that would appall common souls,

setting a great example, and evoking enthusiasm. This was his glory.

The zeal with which he ever regarded this phase of his profession, the

delight with which he revelled in the contemplation of ideal strength,

fortitude, courage, devotion, was a grand attribute of his soul.

Accordingly, all his favorite parts were expressions of a high-souled

manhood, reverential towards God, truth, and justice, and fearing

nothing; a proud integrity and hardiness competent to every emergency

of life and death; an unbending will, based on right and entwined with

the central virtues of honor, friendship, domestic love, and patriotic

ardor. And surely these are the qualities best deserving universal

respect, the democratic ideals most wholesome to be cultivated. This is

what he most innately loved and stood on the stage to represent. He did

it with immense earnestness and immense individuality. He did it also

with a conscientious devotion to his chosen art and profession that

never faltered. In none of his performances was there ever anything

in the least degree savoring of pruriency or indelicacy. Never, after

his boyhood was past, could he be induced to appear in any trivial or

unmeaning role, destitute of moral purpose and dignity. With not one

of those many innovations which have detracted so much from the rank

and purity of the drama was his name ever associated. He was ever

strongly averse in his own person to touching in any way any play which

was not enriched and elevated by some imaginative romantic or heroic

creation. And, with a world-wide removal from the so common frivolity

and carelessness of his associates on the boards, he approached every

one of his performances with a studious sobriety, and went through it

with an undeniable dignity and earnestness, which should have lifted

him beyond the reach of ridicule, whatever were the faults an honorable

criticism might affirm.

The substance of the honest objections made to his acting may be

designated as ascribing to it two faults, an excess and a defect. The

excess was too much display of physical and spiritual force in the

expression of contemptuous or revengeful and destructive passion.

There was a basis for this charge, though the accusation was grossly

exaggerated. The muscular and passional strength and intensity of

Forrest, both by constitution and by culture, were so much beyond those

of ordinary men that a manifestation of them which was entirely natural

and within the bounds to him often seemed to them a huge extravagance,

a wilful overdoing for the sake of making a sensation. In him it was

perfectly genuine and not immoderate by the tests of nature, while

to them it appeared far to transgress the modest limits of truth.

Of course such explosions repelled and pained, sometimes revolted,

the sensibilities of the delicate and fastidious, while the more

ungirdled and terrific they were, so much the greater was the pleased

and wondering approval of those whose sympathies were stormed and

self-surrendered. Such was the histrionic fault of excess in Forrest,

if it may not rather be called the fault of those whose natures were

keyed so much below his that they could not come into tune with him.

The defect corresponding to this excess was lack of _souplesse_,

physical and spiritual mobility. He was unquestionably deficient, when

tried by a severe standard, in bright, alert, expectant, rich freedom

of play in nerves and faculties. His disposition was comparatively

obstinate in its pertinacity, and his body adhesive in its heaviness.

This gave him the ponderous weight of unity, the antique port of the

gods, but it robbed him in a degree of that supreme grace which is the

ability to compass the largest effects of impression with the smallest

expenditure of energy. It cannot be denied that he needed exactly what

Garrick had in such perfection, namely, that detached personality,

that quicksilver liberty and rapidity of motion, which made the great

English actor such a memorable paragon of variety and charm. Yet,

when these abatements are all allowed, enough remains amply to justify

his large historic claim in the honest massiveness and glow of his

delineations, set off alike by the imposing physique fit to take the

club and pose for a Farnesian Hercules, by a studious and manly art

unmarred with any insincere trickery, and by a powerful mellow voice of

vast compass and flexible intonation, whose declamation, modelled on

nature, and without theatrical affectation, ever did full justice to

noble thoughts and beautiful words.

Cibber said, in allusion to Betterton, "Pity it is that the momentary

beauties from an harmonious elocution cannot be their own record,

that the animated graces of the player can live no longer than the

instant breath and motion that presents them, or at best but faintly

glimmer through the memory or imperfect attestation of a few surviving

spectators." Could the author of this biography paint in their true

forms and colors and with full completeness the once vivid and vigorous

achievements of the buried master, had he with sufficient knowledge and

memory command of some notation whereby he could record every light and

shade of each great rôle so that they might be revived from the dead

symbols in all the lustre of their original reality, even as a musician

translates from the dormant score into living music an overture of

Mozart or a symphony of Beethoven, then were there a deathless Forrest

breathing in these pages who should stir the souls of generations

of readers to rise and mutiny against the depreciating estimates of

his forgotten foes and the encroachments of literary oblivion. But,

alas! to such a task the pen that essays the tribute is unequal, and

the writer must be content with the pale presentments he can but

imperfectly produce, sighing to think how true is the refrain of regret

taken up in every age by those who have mourned a departed actor, and

never better worded, perhaps, than in the famous lines by Garrick:

"The painter dead, yet still he charms the eye;

While taste survives, his fame can never die.

But he who _struts his hour upon the stage_

Can scarce extend his fame for half an age.

Nor pen nor pencil can the _actor_ save,--

The art and artist share one common grave."

CHAPTER X.

TWO YEARS OF RECREATION AND STUDY IN THE OLD WORLD.

The parting cheers died into silence, the ship began to speed through

the spray, the forms of his friends receded and vanished, the roofs and

spires of the city lowered and faded, the sun sank in the west, the

hills of Neversink subsided below the horizon, and only the gliding

vessel and her foamy wake broke the expanse of ocean and sky, when the

outward-bound Forrest for the first night sought his berth, relieving

the sadness of his farewell to America with thoughts of what awaited

him in Europe and Asia.

Life spread before him an alluring prospect, and nothing which he could

ask to encourage and stimulate his aspirations seemed to be wanting.

When he looked back, he could not fail to be grateful. Beginning the

struggle under such depressing circumstances,--poor, friendless,

uneducated,--he had won a handsome fortune, a national fame, a host

of admiring friends, and no inconsiderable amount of cultivation and

miscellaneous knowledge. And now, at twenty-eight, with two long years

of freedom from all responsibility and care before him, blessed with

superabundant health and strength and hope, he was on his way to the

enchanted scenes of the Old World,--the famous cities, battle-fields,

monuments, art-galleries, and pleasure-gardens,--of which he had read

and dreamed so much. He was going with an earnest purpose to improve

himself as well as to enjoy himself. This spirit, with a well-filled

purse, and the fluent knowledge of the French language which he had

acquired in New Orleans, were important conditions for the realization

of his aim. And thus, with alternate recollections of those left

behind, observations of the scenery and experiences of marine life,

mapping out the series of places he meant to visit, and thinking over

what he would do, the days wore by. He spread his cloak sometimes on

the deck in the very prow of the vessel, and lying on it upon his

back, so that he could see nothing but the sky and clouds, continued

there for hours, allowing the scene and the strong sensations it

awoke to sink into his soul, feeling himself a little speck floating

on a larger speck between two infinities. He said he often, years

afterwards, associated the remembrance of this experience with speeches

of Lear and Hamlet when representing those characters on the stage.

[Illustration: EDWIN FORREST. ÆT 21]

A fortnight of monotony and nausea, sprinkled with a few excitements,

passed, and the transatlantic shore hove in view, as welcome a vision

as his eyes had ever seen. Landing at Havre, he bade adieu to Captain

Forbes and the good ship Sully, made his way at once to Paris, and,

taking apartments, settled down to that delightful course of mingled

recreation and study to which he had long been looking forward.

A voyage across the ocean and a two years' residence in Europe for a

young American full of eager curiosity and ambition, cut loose from

the routine and precedents of home and friends, cannot but constitute

an epoch of extreme importance in his life. This must be true in its

effects on the development of his personal character, detaching him

and bringing out his manhood; and, if he is the votary of any liberal

art, true also in its influence on his professional culture. In 1834

such an enterprise was a greater event than it is now. The number of

American travellers in Europe was nothing like what it has grown to

be since. Furthermore, the multiplication of books and descriptive

letters, giving the most minute and vivid accounts of all that is most

interesting in a journey or residence in the different countries then

visited by Forrest, has been so great, that any prolonged presentation

of his adventures and observations there would now seem so out of date

and out of place as to be an impertinence. It will suffice for all the

legitimate ends of a biography if a few characteristic specimens of

what befell him and what he saw and did are furnished from his letters,

his diary, and his subsequent conversation. These will indicate the

spirit of the man at that time, and show something of the advantages,

personal and professional, which he gained from the social and artistic

sources of instruction opened to him while abroad. It will be seen

that, however strong the attractions of pleasure were to him, he did

not neglect the opportunities for substantial profit, but, keeping

his faculties alert to observe new phases of human nature and fresh

varieties of social life, he was especially careful to drink in the

beauties of natural scenery and to study the expressive possibilities

of the human form, as illustrated in the works of the greatest artists

of ancient and modern time.

The following letter was written shortly after his arrival in Paris:

"To say that I am pleased with what I have thus far seen of Paris

would be a phrase of very inadequate meaning: I am surprised and

delighted. I have been to the Louvre, the Tuileries, Place Vendôme,

St. Cloud,--here, there, and everywhere,--and I have not yet seen a

twentieth part of the objects which claim a stranger's attention. One

cannot go into the streets for a moment, indeed, but something new

attracts his curiosity; and it seems to me that my senses, which I

have heretofore considered adequate to the usual purposes of life,

ought now to be enlarged and quickened for the full enjoyment of the

objects which surround me. I have, of course, visited some of the

theatres, of which there are upwards of twenty now open. A number

of the best actors, however, are absent from the city, fulfilling

provincial engagements, and may not be expected back for a month or

more. I went to the Théâtre Porte St. Martin the other night, to see

Mademoiselle Georges, now, on the French stage, the queen of tragedy.

I saw her perform the part of Lucrece Borgia, in Victor Hugo's drama

of that name. Her personation was truly beautiful,--nay, that is too

cold a word; it was grand, and even terrible! Though a woman more

than fifty years old, never can I forget the dignity of her manner,

the flexible and expressive character of her yet fine face, and the

rich, full, stirring, and well-modulated tones of her voice. How

different is her and nature's style from the sickly abortions of

the present English school of acting, lately introduced upon the

American stage!--the snakelike writhing and contortion of body, the

rolling and straining of the eyeballs till they squint, the shuffling

gait, and the whining monotone,--how different, I say, from all this

is the natural and easy style of Mademoiselle Georges! In her you

trace no servile imitations of a bad model; but you behold that sort

of excellence which makes you forget you are in a theatre,--that

perfection of art by which art is wholly concealed,--the lofty and

the thrilling, the subdued and the graceful, harmoniously mingling,

the spirit being caught from living nature. I had been led to believe

that, in France, the highest order of tragic excellence had died

with Talma. It is not so. I consider Mademoiselle Georges the very

incarnation of the tragic muse.

"The French, it must be allowed, understand and practise the art of

living independently. They find you furnished apartments according

to your own taste and means--comfortable, handsome, or gorgeous--in

any part of the city or its environs. In your rooms you may either

breakfast, dine, and sup, or take only your coffee there, and dine at

a restaurant. This is to me, a bird of passage, and desirous of taking

a bird's-eye view of things, a delightful mode of living. Paris is

filled with restaurants and cafés of all sorts and sizes, where you

may obtain your 'provant,' as Captain Dalgetty would style it, at what

price you please, from the humble sum of a few sous up to the emptying

of a well-lined purse. Ladies, gentlemen, and whole families may be

seen at these places, enjoying their repast, and the utmost order and

decorum prevail. Some of these cafés are magnificently furnished. I

breakfasted in one yesterday the furniture and decorations of the

salon of which cost eighty thousand francs. Another agreeable thing

in Paris is, that you may one moment be in the midst of fashion,

pomp, and all the hollowness of the flattering crowd, and the next

buried in the sincere quiet of your own chamber, your very existence

blotted from the memories of those with whom, the unsophisticated

might have imagined, your society was of the utmost consequence. I say

this is pleasant when properly understood and appreciated. All that

is required of you is the superficial courtesy of life, which costs

a well-bred man nothing; and in return you have a well-dissembled

friendship, looking like truth, but which they would not have you to

cherish as a reality for the world. The sentiments of the heart are

quite too dull and too troublesome for their mercurial temperament;

and hence you seldom hear of a Frenchman's having a false friend."

The professional bias which so strongly dominated among the

associations in the mind of Forrest led him very early after his

arrival in the French metropolis, to visit the tomb of Talma. Carrying

a fresh laurel crown under his cloak, he sought out the consecrated

place among the crowd of undistinguished graves, reverently laid

his tribute there, and lingered long in meditation on the career,

the genius, the renown of the greatest stage-actor of France, and

the lessons to be learned from his life and character by ambitious

successors in his art. Thus, like Byron at the grave of Churchill, did

the player draw his profitable homily from "the glory," though, unlike

the morbid bard, he did not think of "the nothing, of a name."

One incident occurred in the experience of Forrest in Paris which has

much significance on several accounts. He had formed a very pleasant

acquaintance with the manager of one of the theatres. This manager

had a protégé of whose nascent talent as an actor he cherished a high

estimate. The youth was to make his début, and the manager asked the

American tragedian to attend the performance and give his opinion of

the promise it indicated. At the close of the play, asked to state his

candid impression without reserve, Forrest said to the manager, "He

will never rise beyond a respectable mediocrity. It is a perfectly

hopeless case. There are no deeps of latent passion in him, no

lava-reservoirs. His sensibility is quick, but all superficial. But

that Jewish-looking girl, that little bag of bones with the marble face

and flaming eyes,--there is demoniacal power in her. If she lives, and

does not burn out too soon, she will become something wonderful." That

little bag of bones was the then unknown Rachel!

The next selection presented from his correspondence was written to

Leggett several months later, and soon after Jackson's recommendation

of reprisals if the American claims on France were not paid:

"You see I still date from the gay metropolis of France. The

fascinations of Paris have held me longer than I intended; but I mean

to break from them by the first of next month, and cross into Italy.

I have read the President's admirable message: it breathes a spirit

worthy of himself, worthy of the occasion, worthy of my country. I

refer particularly, of course, to his views relative to France. His

energetic and manly sentiments have had the effect here of once more

_Americanizing_ Americans, and revived within them that love of country

which the pageantry and frivolity, the dreamy and debasing luxury of

this metropolis serve materially to enervate. The Chamber of Deputies

has not yet recovered from the shock occasioned by the unanticipated

recommendations of the message. Opinion is divided as to the course

which will be pursued; but from all I hear, and all I observe, I am

strongly inclined to believe that when they have recovered from their

bewilderment they will come to the conclusion that, in this instance at

least, honesty is the best policy; and perhaps they may consider also

that discretion is the better part of valor.

"By the way, I was presented to Louis Philippe on the third and last

evening of the usual presentations. I was accompanied by Mr. ----,

of Boston. We crossed over to the palace of the Tuileries (which is

nearly opposite to our hotel) about nine o'clock in the evening,

passed unquestioned by the numerous guards who throng the avenues of

the great court-yard, and entered the vestibule of the palace, filled

with an army of servants in rich liveries, standing in form, with all

the stiffness of militia officers on drill. We next ascended to an

elevated mosaic pavement, where we encountered two secretaries prepared

to receive the names of visitors. On entering the palace, we ascended

a grand staircase, the stone balustrade of which is beautifully

ornamented with lyres and snakes, under suns,--the crests of Colbert

and Louis XIV. On the first landing is the Salon of the Hundred Swiss,

which has four Ionic columns, and is ornamented with four statues of

Silence, two sitting and two erect. We next passed into the state

apartments. The first is the Salon of the Marshals, occupying the

whole of the centre pavilion, and having a graceful balcony on each

side. The walls are hung with portraits of the marshals of France

by the most eminent artists, and it also contains busts of several

distinguished French generals. In the next room, which is called the

Salon of the Nobles, we found a concourse of ladies and gentlemen,

comprising the orders of nobility, and all richly and appropriately

attired. This apartment is set off with gold, representing battles,

marches, triumphs, surrounded with ornaments and allegorical figures.

The Salon of Peace, which is the next room, contains also many costly

decorations; but I had less opportunity to observe these, as the crowd

became each moment denser and denser, and to make our way through it

demanded all our attention. This human current at last débouched

in the Salle du Trône, and, diffusing itself quickly around it, its

waves subsided like those of an impetuous torrent when it pauses in

the valley and spreads itself out, as if in homage, at the mountain's

foot. I need not tell you of the beauty of the throne, the richness

of its carved work, the profusion of gold ornaments with which it is

sprinkled, the gorgeousness of the crimson canopy which overhangs it,

or the pride-kindling trophies which are dispersed in picturesque

clusters at its sides. These things, and numerous like accessories,

your fancy will present to you with sufficient accuracy.

"The king had not yet entered, but was expected every moment; and the

interval afforded me an opportunity of studying the brilliant scene.

The effect at first was absolutely dazzling. The plumed and jewelled

company constantly moving and intermingling, so that the light played

in a thousand trembling and shifting beams, which flashed in arrowy

showers not only at every motion, but almost every respiration, of the

diamond-covered groups, and these groups multiplied to infinity by

the reflections of magnificent mirrors surrounded by chandeliers that

diffused excessive lustre through the room, presented a scene to me

which, as I eagerly gazed on it, almost pained me with its surpassing

splendor.

"In the anxious hush of expectation, the old ladies, as if in

melancholy consciousness of the decay of their natural charms, busied

themselves in arranging their diamonds to the most dazzling effect

of brilliancy, while the young demoiselles threw hurried glances at

each other, scrutinizing their relative pretensions in the way of

decorations and personal beauty. The varieties of human character

found time to display themselves even in the brief and anxious period

of suspense while waiting for the entrance of royalty. Pride, envy,

jealousy, ambition, coquetry, were all at work. Here an antique and

embroidered dandy twisted his long and grizzly mustachios with an

air of perfect satisfaction, whilst his bump of self-esteem seemed

demanding immediate release from his tightened peruke. There an old

Spanish general talked loudly of the wars, and 'fought his battles

o'er again.' From a pair of melting eyes a fair one on one hand threw

languishing glances on the favored youth at her side, while the ruby

lip of another curled with contempt as a lighter figure or a fairer

face swept by.

"But a general movement of the crowd soon gave a new direction to

my thoughts; and my eyes, from studying the various features of the

splendid crowd, were now attracted to those of the king, who had just

entered the apartment. For a moment all was bustle. The ladies arranged

themselves along the sides of the spacious salon, and Louis Philippe,

with his queen, the two princesses, and the two dukes, Orleans and

Nemours, together with the officers and dames of honor, passed along

the line, politely and familiarly conversing with the ladies. After

satisfying our curiosity by gazing on the royal family, and having

followed them to the Salon of Peace, we returned again to the Salle

du Trône, where we took seats in front of the royal chair. Here I

sat meditating on the gaudy and empty show for some time, when an

officer suddenly entered and exclaimed, '_Messieurs, la Reine!_' and

immediately the queen entered. I rose and bowed, which she graciously

acknowledged, and passed into the apartment beyond, called the Hall

of Council. The king, with the rest of the family, attended by the

courtiers, followed the queen. The ladies had now all been presented,

and most of them had retired. About a hundred gentlemen were assembled

at the door of the Council-chamber, and myself and friend had scarcely

joined the group when the doors opened, and one by one those before us

passed in. A gentleman usher at the door demanded the names of those

who passed, and announced them to the court. After hearing those of

sundry marquises, counts, and others announced, it at last came to

my turn. My name was audibly repeated, I entered, and made my début

before the King of France with not half the trepidation I experienced

on presenting myself for the first time before a _sovereign_ in New

York--I mean the sovereign people--on an occasion you will recollect.

The king addressed a question to me in French, and after exchanging a

few sentences I bade him farewell, bowed to the queen and others of the

royal family, and withdrew.

"Our plain republicans often laugh at the mimic monarchs of the stage

for their want of grace and dignity. A trip to court would satisfy them

that real monarchs are not always overstocked with those qualities.

"I some time ago had the pleasure of an introduction to the celebrated

Mademoiselle Mars. She received me very cordially, and through her

polite offices the freedom of the Théâtre Français was presented to

me. Of all the actresses I have ever seen, M'lle Mars stands first in

comedy. In her you perceive the natural ease and grace which should

characterize the most finished lady of the drawing-room; and her quiet

yet effective style of acting is the most enchanting and delicate

triumph of the mimic art. You cannot witness one of her performances

without thinking that the genius of comedy belongs exclusively to

the French stage. Do not suppose that my opinion is influenced by

personal attentions: it was formed before I had had the pleasure of

being presented to her. Though possessing a splendid fortune, she still

exerts, fortunately for the lovers of the drama, her unrivalled talents

in her laborious and difficult profession. She lives in a palace, and

even her _salle du billard_ is an apartment which would well serve for

a corporation dinner.

"The great and almost the only topic of conversation in all circles

just now is the President's message, the recall of the French minister,

and the intimation to Mr. Livingston that his passports were at his

service. Allow a little time for the effervescence of public feeling

to subside, for the excitable temper of this mercurial nation to

grow calm, and I think the propriety of paying our claims will be

acknowledged.

"While I scribble this desultory letter to you, I am with you in fancy,

and almost wish I were so in reality. I am tired of the glare and

frivolities of Paris, and long to tread again

'The piled leaves of the West,--

My own green forest land.'

"France is refined and polite; America is solid and sincere. France is

the land for pleasure; America the land for happiness. Adieu. I shall

go into Italy in a fortnight, from whence I will write you again."

The following letter, addressed to another friend, was written about

three weeks after the foregoing one:

"I am about bidding adieu to Paris, having been detained here by its

various fascinations much longer than I anticipated. I shall set out on

Tuesday next, with three young Americans, to travel by post through

Italy, so as to be in Rome before the termination of the Carnival. I

can at least claim the merit of not having been idle during my sojourn

in Paris, and the time has passed both agreeably and profitably.

Though the _dulce_ has been the chief object of my search, the _utile_

has been found with it, and has not been altogether neglected,

neither, as a separate aim. New sources of various information have

opened themselves to my mind at every turn in this great and gay and

ever-changing metropolis; and whether I hereafter resume the buskin,

or play a more real part in the drama of life, I think I shall find

my gleanings here of service to me. I have mingled with all ranks

of people, from the monarch who wears 'the golden round and top of

sovereignty,' down to the lowest of his subjects,

'In smoky cribs,

Upon uneasy pallets stretching them.'

"I have visited alike the perfumed chambers of the great and the poor

abodes of the lowly, the institutions of science, literature, and the

arts, the resorts of fashion, of folly, and of vice, and in all I

have found something which not merely served to fill up the passing

hour, but that furnished either substantial additions of knowledge or

agreeable subjects of future meditation and discourse. Human nature,

as modified by the different circumstances of life and fortune,

presents an ample and diversified volume to her student in Paris: and

in this bustling and glittering panorama, where everything seems most

artificial, one who looks beneath the surface may learn much of the

secret feelings, motives, passions, and genius of man.

"The President's message still continues to be the theme of much

conversation. In the saloons of the theatres, in the cafés and

restaurants, and on the public promenades I frequently hear the name of

General Jackson uttered by tongues that never before were troubled to

syllable it, and which do not pronounce it 'trippingly,' according to

Hamlet's advice, but twist it into various grotesque sounds. Passing

through Ste. Pélagie the other day (a prison for debtors), I overheard

one of the inmates of that abode discussing with great vehemence the

question of indemnity. He held a newspaper in his hand, and, as I

passed, exclaimed, '_La France ne devrait pas payer les vingt-cinq

millions!_' A fellow-feeling, thought I, makes us wondrous kind. The

anecdote of the porter, the soldier, and the debtor, in the 'Citizen of

the World,' occurred to my mind.

"By the way, the prison of Ste. Pélagie is a curious establishment. It

derives its name from an actress of the city of Antioch, who became a

penitent in the fifth century. No other prison in Paris presents so

diversified a picture, such a motley group of inmates, so singular an

association of rank, country, profession, and age. Barons, marquises,

and princes are among the cooped-up denizens of Ste. Pélagie. An

Austrian prince, one of these, is shut up here to answer the claims

of creditors to the amount of several millions. A café and restaurant

are maintained within the prison; and one entering these, were he not

reminded of his whereabouts by the gratings of the windows, might

easily imagine himself in the Café des Trois Frères of the Palais Royal.

"I regret that I was not in America to welcome James Sheridan

Knowles to our shores. I should have been glad to take the author of

'Virginius' and 'The Hunchback' by the hand,--ay, and by the heart

too; for, from all I hear, any man might be proud of his friendship.

But New York had this reception in her own hands, and it, no doubt,

was such a one as 'gave him wonder great as his content.' I remember,

very vividly, what sort of a reception she gave to a youth 'unknown to

fame,' in whom you are kind enough to take an interest,--a youth whose

highest ambition was only to strut his hour in those parts which the

genius of Knowles has created. Can I, then, doubt that to the dramatist

himself her greeting was most cordial?

"Adieu! I shall probably meet with Bryant in Rome; and, in conversing

with him of past scenes and distant friends, shall almost feel myself,

for a time, restored to their society."

The description of the first portion of his tour in Italy, in a long

letter to Leggett, also seems worthy of preservation, and will have a

various interest for the reader even now:

"I left Paris on the 11th instant on my projected ramble through Italy.

It was not without regret that I at last quitted the gay and brilliant

metropolis of France, which I had entered a total stranger but a

few months before, but in which I had experienced the most grateful

courtesies, and formed friendships with persons whose talents and

worth have secured them an abiding place in my esteem. As the towers

of Notre Dame and the dome of the Pantheon faded from my sight, I

sighed an adieu to the past, and turned with somewhat of apathy, if not

reluctance, to the future.

"At this season of the year the country of France presents to the

American traveller a cheerless appearance. Without forests to variegate

the scene with their many-colored garniture, and with rarely even a

hedge to define the boundaries of individual property, the country

looks somewhat like a wide, uncultivated common or storm-beaten

prairie; and in this state of 'naked, unfenced desolation,' even one of

those unsightly and zigzag structures which in America mark the limits

of contiguous farms would have been an agreeable interruption of the

monotony. The neat farm-houses of America, with all their accessories

bespeaking prosperity and thrift, are not met with here; but, instead,

a bleak, untidy hovel obtrudes itself on your sight, or your eyes,

turning from it, rest on a ruined tower or once proud château tumbling

into decay.

"I reached Lyons at midnight on the 13th, and spent the following day

in visiting the chief objects of interest in the city, among which were

the Museum of Antiquities and the Cathedral. My curiosity led me to

inspect the silk manufactories of this place; but the pleasure which I

should have derived from witnessing the beautiful creations of the loom

was wholly counteracted by the squalid and miserable appearance of the

poor creatures by whom the glossy fabrics are made,--attenuated, sickly

wretches, who waste their being in ineffectual toil, since the scanty

pittance which they earn is not enough to sustain life. My thoughts

reverted from these oppressed creatures to the slaves of America. The

condition of the latter is one of luxury in comparison. Yet they are

slaves,--how much is in a name!

"I crossed the Alps by Mont Cenis. The toil of this achievement is a

different thing now from what it was in the time of Pompey, who has

the honor of being set down as the first that made the passage. From

his time till 1811 the journey must have had its difficulties, since

it could only be performed on foot, or with a mule or donkey. Napoleon

then came upon the scene, and--_presto, change_--in five months a

carriage-road wound by an easy ascent from the base to the cloud-capped

summit, and thence down into the sunny lap of Italy. Napoleon! wherever

he passed he has left traces of his greatness stamped in indelible

characters. A thousand imperishable monuments attest the magnificence

of his genius. Here, now, at all seasons, a practicable road traverses

Mont Cenis, running six thousand feet above the level of the sea, and

uniting the valley of the Arck in Savoy to that of Doria Ripuaria in

Piedmont. What a bugbear the passage of the Alps is to the uninitiated!

and all travellers seem disposed to encourage the deception. For my

own part, the tales I had heard prepared me to anticipate an encounter

with all sorts of difficulties, and that I should avoid them only by

'hair-breadth 'scapes.' When I first mentioned my intention of crossing

Mont Cenis in the month of February, a laugh of incredulity was the

only answer I received from certain 'holiday and silken fools.' And

yet, when I came to test the nature of those perils which seemed so

formidable viewed from Paris, judge my surprise at finding one of the

best roads I was ever wheeled over, stealing up into mid-heaven by

such a gentle ascent, that, were not one continually reminded of his

whereabout by the roar of foaming waters, as they leap from fragment

to fragment of the huge, dissevered rocks, and tumble into 'steep-down

gulfs,' he might almost fancy himself gliding smoothly over one of

those modern contrivances which have realized, in some measure, the

wish of Nat Lee's hero, and 'annihilated time and space.'

"A Kentuckian once riding with me on the Albany and Troy turnpike,

after an interval of silence, in which he was probably comparing that

smooth road with the rough-hewn ways of his own State, suddenly broke

out, 'Well, this road has the leetlest tilt from a level I ever did

see!' The odd expression occurred to my mind more than once in crossing

the Alps. It may do to talk of the terrors of the Alps to certain

lap-nursed Europeans, who have never surmounted any but mole-hill

difficulties; but to Americans--or such Americans, at least, as have

seen something of their own magnificent country before hastening to

examine the miniature features of Europe--the Alps have no terror in

their threats. Land-Admiral Reeside or honest Joe Webster of Albany

would enjoy a hearty laugh to see for himself what Alpine dangers are,

and with one of his fast teams would contract to take you over the

mountains in no time at any season of the year.