CHAPTER XIV.

[Illustration:

ÆT 65

]

LIFE

OF

EDWIN FORREST,

THE AMERICAN TRAGEDIAN.

BY

WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER.

“All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players.”

VOLUME II.

PHILADELPHIA:

J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.

1877.

Copyright, 1877, by J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER XIV.

NEWSPAPER ESTIMATES.—ELEMENTS OF THE DRAMATIC ART, AND ITS TRUE STANDARD

OF CRITICISM.

The newspaper in some countries has been a crime and in others a luxury.

In all civilized countries it has now become a necessity. With us it is

a duty. It is often corrupted and degraded into a nuisance. It ought to

be cleansed and exalted into a pure benefaction, a circulating medium of

intelligence and good will alone. Certainly it is far from being that at

the present time. It is true that our newspapers are an invaluable and

indispensable protection against all other tyrannies and social abuses;

and their fierce vanity, self-interest, and hostile watchfulness of one

another keep their common arrogance and encroachments pretty well in

check. If they were of one mind and interest we should be helplessly in

their power. From the great evils which so seriously alloy the immense

benefits of the press, Forrest suffered much in the latter half of his

life. The abuse he met irritated his temper, and left a chronic

resentment in his mind. Two specimens of this abuse will show something

of the nettling wrongs he encountered.

A Philadelphia newspaper stigmatized him in the most offensive terms as

a drunkard. Now it was a moral glory of Forrest that, despite the

temptations to which his professional career exposed him, he was never

intoxicated in his life. The newspaper in question, threatened with a

libel suit, withdrew its words with an abject apology,—a poor

satisfaction for the pain and injury it had inflicted.

The other instance was on occasion of the driving of Macready from the

stage of the Astor Place Opera House. A New York newspaper, in language

of studied insolence, called Forrest the instigator and author of the

outrage. “Mr. Forrest succeeded last night in doing what even his bad

acting and unmanly conduct never did before: he inflicted a thorough and

lasting disgrace upon the American character.” “To revenge himself on

Mr. Macready he packed the house and paid rowdies for driving decent

people away.” “With his peculiar tastes he will probably enjoy the

infamy and deem it a triumph.” Forrest, instead of cowhiding the writer

of this atrocious slander,—as some men of his high-spirited nature would

have done,—sent a letter, through his legal friend Theodore Sedgwick,

demanding immediate retraction and apology. The editor assented to the

request, confessing that he had spoken with no knowledge of facts to

justify him!

From the time of his first appearance on the stage, Forrest was a

careful reader of the criticisms on his performances. He generally read

them, too, with a just mind, discriminating the valuable from the

worthless, quick to adopt a useful hint, indignant or contemptuous

towards unfairness and imbecility. There were three classes of persons

whose comments on his performances gave him pleasure and instruction. He

paid earnest attention to their remarks, and was always generous in

expressing his sense of indebtedness to them.

The first class consisted of those who had a personal friendship for

him, combined with a strong taste for the drama, and who studied and

criticised his efforts in a sympathetic spirit for the purpose of

encouraging him and aiding him to improve. Such men as Duane and

Chandler and Swift in Philadelphia, Dawson in Cincinnati, Holley at

Louisville, Canonge in New Orleans, Leggett and Lawson in New York, and

Oakes in Boston, gave him the full benefit of their varied knowledge of

human nature, literary art, and dramatic expression. Their censure was

unhesitating, their questionings frank, their praise unstinted. Among

these friendly critics the name of James Hunter, of Albany, one of the

editors of “The Daily Advertiser,” in the important period of young

Forrest’s engagement there, deserves to be remembered. He was one of the

best critics of that day. He used to sit close to the stage and watch

the actor with the keenest scrutiny, not allowing the smallest

particular to escape his notice. Then at the end of the play he would in

a private interview submit to his protégé the results of his

observation, carefully pointing out every fault and indicating the

remedy. He lived to see the favorite, who profited so well from his

instructions, reach the proudest pitch of success and fame. When Mr.

Hunter died, Forrest interrupted an engagement he was filling in a

distant city in order to attend the funeral, and followed the remains of

his old benefactor to the tomb as one of the chief mourners.

The second class of commenters on the playing of Forrest from whose

judgments he received satisfaction and help was composed of that portion

of the writers of dramatic criticism for the press who were

comparatively competent to the task they undertook. They were men who

were neither his friends nor his foes, but impartial judges, who knew

what they were writing about and who recorded their honest thoughts in

an honorable spirit and a good style. Among the many thousands of

articles written on the acting of Forrest during the fifty years of his

career there are hundreds written in excellent style, revealing

competent knowledge, insight, and sympathy, and marked by an

unexceptionable moral tone. They suggest doubts, administer blame, and

express admiration, not from caprice or prejudice, but from principle,

and with lights and shades varying in accordance with the facts of the

case and the truth of the subject. These articles have an interest and a

value in the highest degree creditable to their authors, and they go far

to redeem the dramatic criticism of our national press from the severe

condemnation justly provoked by the greater portion of it. Did space

allow, it would be a pleasure to cite full specimens of this better

class of dramatic critiques from the collected portfolios left behind

him by the departed actor. Enough that he profoundly appreciated them,

and that in various directions they did good service in their day.

The third class whose words concerning his performances Forrest gladly

heeded were men who simply gave truthful reports of the impressions made

on themselves, not professing to sit in judgment or to dogmatize, but

honestly declaring what they felt and what they thought. Free from

prejudices and perversities, fair average representatives of human

nature in its ordinary degrees of power and culture, their experiences

under his impersonations, ingenuously expressed, were always interesting

and instructive, throwing light on many secrets of cause and effect, on

many points of conventional falsity and of natural sincerity, in

histrionic portrayals. Often while the newspaper writer who pretends to

know the most about the dramatic art is so full of conceit and biases

that his verdict on any particular representation has neither weight nor

justice, the instincts of the bright-minded and warm-hearted boy or

girl, the native intelligence and sympathy of the unsophisticated man or

woman, whose soul is all open to the living truth of things, are almost

infallible. Nobody knew this better than our tragedian, or was readier

to act on it.

The light and joy he drew from these three sets of critics found a heavy

counterpoise in the unjust estimates, perverse, exaggerated, malignant,

or absurd, of which he was constantly made the subject by five classes

of censors. The first were his personal enemies. Among the meaner fry of

men who came in contact with him, a multitude hated him from jealousy

and envy, from resentment of his independent and uncompromising ways,

his refusal to grant them his intimacy or to serve their purposes. They

sought to gratify their animosity by backbiting at his reputation, and

especially by trying to destroy his professional rank. Year after year

they made the columns of many a newspaper groan and reek under the load

of their abuse, ranging from envenomed invective to grotesque ridicule.

For example, a jocose foe said, in parody of the great Moslem

proclamation, “There is but one Bowery, and Hellitisplit is its profit.”

And a serious foe said, “Mr. Forrest is an injury to the stage. He is a

false leader, an oppression, a bad model, and a corrupter of the popular

taste.” A great part of the hostile criticism he suffered may be traced

to bitter personal enmity, which had but slight regard to truth or

fairness in its attacks on him, whether as man or as player.

The next class of assailants of Forrest in his professional repute were

not his personal enemies, but were the tools of the various cliques,

cabals, or social castes who had an antipathy for him and for the party

to which he belonged. The English interest was especially active and

bitter against him after his quarrel with Macready. Some of these

writers were wilfully corrupt in their attitude and consciously false in

their written estimates. They expressed neither their own feelings nor

their own convictions, but merely the passion and policy of their

employers. For example, at the time of the death of the tragedian a

well-known editor confessed to a friend that some twenty years

previously, when he was a reporter, his employer sent him to the theatre

to see Forrest play, and with explicit directions to write the severest

condemnation he could of the actor. He went accordingly, and made notes

for a savage satirical article, although at the moment of his making

these notes the tears were streaming down his cheeks, so sincere and so

powerful was the representation which he was, against his conscience,

preparing to abuse. Much dishonorable work of this kind has been done,

and still is done, by men disgracefully connected with the press.

Another set of critics who assailed the acting of Forrest were those

whose tastes were repelled by his realistic method and robust energy. He

was too vehemently genuine, his art not far enough removed from material

reality, to suit their fancy. They demanded a style more graceful,

delicate, and free. Under the impulse of their resentful prejudices they

overlooked his great merits, depreciated everything he did, angrily

denied him his just rank, magnified every fault beyond measure, and

maliciously caricatured him. A volume might be filled with articles

purely of this description, proceeding from writers whose want of native

manliness unfitted them for appreciating the magnificent manliness of

his impersonations, and whose offended fastidiousness expressed itself

in terms which were an offence to justice.

The fourth class of abusers of Forrest were men who had an instinctive

repugnance for the imposing grandeur of the types of character he

represented, for the self-sufficing, autocratic power and stateliness of

his impersonations. Mean and envious spirits dislike to look up to those

higher and stronger than themselves. Those who either never had any

romance and reverence or have been disenchanted, feel an especial enmity

or incompetent contempt for every one whose character and bearing appeal

to those qualities. This disinclination to admire, this wish to look on

equals or inferiors alone, is the special vice of a democracy.

Demagogues, whether in politics or in letters, are men of torpid

imaginations and dry hearts,—slow to worship, quick to sneer. The style

of man enacted by Forrest, full of an imperial personality, overswaying

all who come near, massive in will, ponderous in movement, volcanic in

passion, majestic in poise, was hateful to the cynical critic the petty

proportions of whose soul were revealed and rebuked in its presence. He

seized the weapon of ridicule to revenge himself on the actor whose

grander portrayals angered him instead of aweing or shaming or

delighting him. There seems to be among us in America a growing dislike

for the contemplation on the stage of the grandest heroism and power,

and an increasing fondness for seeing specimens of commonplace or

inferiority promotive of amusement. Already in his life Forrest was a

sufferer by this degradation of popular taste, and were he now to appear

in our theatres he would feel it still more.

The fifth and largest class of writers who assumed to criticise the

acting of Forrest was made up of persons professionally connected with

the press, whose blundering or extravagant estimates arose rather from

their ignorance and utter incompetency for the task they undertook than

from a spirit of antipathy or partisanship. The censures and laudations

in these notices were the cause of an immense amount of varied

mortification, amusement, vexation, and anger, as they came under his

eyes. No small portion of the criticisms in the American newspapers on

actors, singers, lecturers, and other public characters have been

written, and still continue to be written, by uneducated and

inexperienced young men scarcely out of their teens, serving an

apprenticeship in the art and trade of journalism. With low aims and

views, slight literary culture, superficial knowledge of life, a vile

contempt for sentiment, a cynical estimate of human nature, equally

ready to extol and to denounce for pay, these writers are the nuisance

and the scandal of their craft. Were their articles accompanied by their

names they would be destitute of weight or mischief; but, published with

apparent editorial sanction, they often assume a pernicious importance.

The art of a people expresses the character and aspiration of a people

and reacts to develop them. To sit in judgment on it is a high and

sacred office, for which none but the most intelligent, refined, and

honorable are fit. The praise and blame given to artists play on the

living sensibilities of that most sensitive class whose careers are a

vital index of the moral state of the community. Yet this momentous

office is frequently entrusted to beardless youths, whose chief

experience is in dissipation, and who unblushingly sell their pens to

the highest bidder. A severe article exposing this abuse appeared in the

“Round Table” in 1864, written by the editor, and entitled “Dramatic

Critics in New York.” Forrest put it in one of his scrap-books with the

endorsement, “How true this is!” Mr. Sedley said, “What dramatic

criticism in New York has been the public well know. Its low, egotistic,

unfair, malicious character, its blind partialities and undying hates,

its brazen ignorance and insulting familiarity, have given it wide

notoriety and brought upon it equally wide contempt.”

There is no art which more needs to be criticised than that of criticism

itself, because there is none which requires in its votary such varied

knowledge and cultivation, and such integrity of mind and purity of

motive; because, furthermore, no other art is exposed to such subtle

temptations of prejudice and vanity. The critic, in assuming to be a

judge, is no exception to other writers. Like them he reveals and

betrays himself in what he writes. In dissecting others he lays his own

soul bare. In consciously judging them he pronounces unconscious

judgment on himself,—in the tenderness or the insensibility, the

generosity and candor or the meanness and spite, the knowledge and

beauty or the ignorance and foulness, which he expresses. The pen of a

base, vindictive critic is a stiletto, a fang, or an anal gland. The pen

of a competent and genial critic is the wand of an intellectual Midas

turning everything it touches to gold. For such a critic has the true

standard of judgment in his knowledge, and, whatever the merit or

demerit of the work he estimates, as he points out its conformity with

that standard or its departure from it his lucid illustration is always

full of instruction and help.

But the great majority of those journalists who presume to print their

estimates of histrionic performances are profoundly ignorant of the

elements of the dramatic art. Thus, having no knowledge of the real

standard of judgment by which all impersonations should be tested, they

cannot fairly criticise the artists who appear before them for a

verdict. Instead of criticising or even justly describing them they

victimize them. They use them as the stalking-horses of their own

presumption or caprice, prejudice or interest. Unable to write with

intelligent candor on the subject which they profess to treat, they

employ it only as a text whereon to append whatever they think they can

make effective in displaying their own abilities or amusing their

readers. The unfittedness of such critics for their task is sufficiently

proved by the chief attributes of their writing, namely, prejudice,

absurd extravagance, reckless caprice, ridiculous assumption of

superiority, violent efforts to lug in every irrelevant matter which

they can in any way associate with the topic to enhance the effect they

wish to produce regardless of justice or propriety.

A few specimens of these various kinds of criticism will be found full

of curious interest and suggestiveness, while they will illustrate

something of what the proud and sensitive nature of Forrest had to

undergo at the hands of his admirers and his contemners.

One enthusiastic worshipper, in the year 1826, overflowed in the

following style: “In the Iron Chest, on Thursday evening last, Mr.

Forrest established a name and a fame which, should he die to-morrow,

would give him a niche in the temple of renown to endure uncrumbled in

the decay of ages!” Another one wrote thus: “In his Richard, Macbeth,

Lear, and Othello, Mr. Forrest displays abilities and accomplishments

which, for power and finish, we do not believe have ever been at all

approached by any other actor that ever stepped upon the stage. The

range of his delicate and varied by-play and the terrific energy of his

explosions of naked passion leave the very greatest of his predecessors

far in the rear and deep in the shade!” Such slopping eulogy defeats its

own purpose. For want of discrimination its exaggerations are unmeaning

and powerless. To be thus bedaubed and plastered with praise mortifies

the actor, and injures him with the judicious, though springing from a

generous sensibility and most kindly meant. This style of praise,

however, is quite exceptional. The general run of critics have

altogether too much knowingness and vanity for it. Their cue is to

depreciate and detract, to satirize and belittle, so as either directly

or indirectly to imply the superiority of their own knowledge and taste.

Your ordinary critic is nothing if not superior to the artist he assumes

to estimate. The publicity and admiration enjoyed by the performer seem

to taunt the critic with his own obscurity and neglect, and he seeks an

ignoble gratification in denying the merit of what he really envies.

This base animus of the baser members of a properly high and useful

literary guild betrays itself in many ways. For example, one of this

sort, sneering at the idea of applauding the genius of an actor,

characterized dramatists as “the class of men who administer in the most

humiliating of all forms to the amusement of a large and mixed

assembly.” It needs no more than his own words to place Pecksniff before

us in full life.

Through the whole dramatic life of Forrest one class of his assailants

were found accusing him of tameness and dulness, while another class

blamed him for extravagant energy and frenzied earnestness. Both classes

spoke from personal bias or capricious whim, instead of judging by a

fixed standard of truth and discerning where reserve and quietness were

appropriate and where explosive vehemence was natural. One critic, in

1831, says, “He wants passion and force. He has no sincerity of feeling,

no spontaneous and climacteric force. He often counterfeits well,—for

the stage,—but nature is not there.” At the same time the critic

attached to another journal wrote, “Mr. Forrest’s greatest fault is lack

of self-control and repose. His feelings are so intense and mighty that

they break through all bounds. With added years, no doubt, he will grow

more reserved and artistic.” Thirty years later the same blunt

contradiction, the same blind caprice or prejudice, are found in the two

extracts that follow:

“For nearly three months the heavy tragedian has weighed like an incubus

on the public, which now, that the oppression of this theatrical

nightmare is removed, breathes freely. We part with Mr. Forrest without

regret; he has taken his leave, and, as that slight acquaintance of his,

William Shakspeare, remarks, he could ‘take nothing we would more

willingly part withal.’ Those only who, like ourselves, have constantly

attended his performances, have a true knowledge of their tedium and

dulness. The occasional visitor may bear with Mr. Forrest for a night or

two, but we are really nauseated. The stupid, solemn, melancholy

evenings we have passed in watching his stupid, solemn, and melancholy

personations will always be remembered with disgust. Nothing but a sense

of duty compelled us to submit to this ineffable bore.”

“Mr. Forrest belongs to the robustious school of tragedy,—that class who

‘split the ears of the groundlings,’—and his eminent example has ruined

the American stage. He is a dramatic tornado, and plucks up the author’s

words by the roots and hurls them at the heads of the audience. He

mistakes rant for earnestness, frenzy for vigor. The modulations of his

voice are unnatural, and his pauses painful. A man in a furious passion

does not measure his words like a pedagogue declaiming before his

school, but speaks rapidly and fiercely, without taking time to hiss

like a locomotive blowing off steam. Mr. Forrest was not so in his

prime; and he has probably borrowed the habit from some antiquated actor

who has been afflicted with asthma.”

There is no candid criticism in such effusions of obvious prepossession

and satire. They show no reference to a fixed standard, no sincere

devotion to the interests of truth and art; but a desire to awaken

laughter, a purpose to make the player appear ridiculous and the writer

appear witty. The same may be said of the following examples, wherein

amusing or malignant ridicule takes the place of fair and intelligent

judgment. Such writers care not what their victims suffer, or what

justice suffers, so long as they can succeed in gaining attention and

raising a laugh. They feel with the English critic who excoriated Payne

for his Macbeth, “No matter if the labor we delight in physics Payne, it

_pays_ us.”

First. “Mr. Forrest’s personation of the Broker of Bogota is feeble and

uninteresting. Contrasted with his _Othello_, it has the advantage which

the Stupid has over the Outrageous. _Febro_ may be compared to one of

those intolerable bores who prose and prose, with sublime contempt of

all that is interesting, for hours. _Othello_ is like one of those

social torments who destroy your peace of mind with incessant and

furious attacks. The bore is the negative of Good; his opposite is the

affirmative of Evil.”

Second. “We can account for the popularity which Forrest enjoys as the

greatest master of the Epigastric School of Acting on no other

hypothesis than that of the innate depravity of human taste. Like the

vicious propensity in mankind to chew tobacco and drink whisky, the

majority of men have a depraved appetite for this false and outrageous

caricature of human nature which Mr. Forrest calls acting. Our

strictures apply in a lesser degree to the stage delineations of all

tragedians. They are all false, and Forrest is only a little more so.

His particular excellence seems to lie in his extraordinary power of

pumping up rage from his epigastrium, and expectorating it upon his

audience, through the interstices of his set teeth. Other tragedians

equal him in their facial contortions, and in the power of converting

their chests into an immense bellows violently worked. His great rival,

McKean Buchanan, excels Mr. Forrest in this department of high art, but

fails in the epigastric power. Mr. Forrest may well claim to stand at

the head of the Epigastric School. He does not underestimate the value

of epilepsy in delineation, and ‘chaws,’ tears, rends, and foams at the

mouth quite as artistically as the best of his rivals; but he especially

cultivates his epigastrium. We do not want Mr. Forrest to die soon. But

when he _does_ pass away, we have a physiological and anatomical

curiosity which we would be pleased to have gratified at the expense of

a _post mortem_ on the great tragedian. We have a grave suspicion that,

deep down in his stomach, beneath the liver and other less important

viscera, he has concealed additional vocal apparatus, by means of which

he is enabled to produce those diabolical _tremolo_ sounds which have so

often thrilled and chilled his auditors. But in our opinion, with its

two great exponents, Edwin Forrest and McKean Buchanan, the Epigastric

and Epileptic School of Acting will pass away.”

Third. “We thought to have dropped Mr. Edwin Forrest as a subject of

newspaper remark; but several of his friends, or persons who think

themselves such, are very anxious that we should do him justice, as an

actor, though that is just what they ought to fear for him. We will take

his performance as Richard. In this part, in the first place, his gait

is very bad, awkward, and ungraceful. Richard may, possibly, have halted

a little, but he did not roll like a sailor just ashore from a three

years’ cruise. A king does not walk so. Then, his features are totally

devoid of expression; he can contort, but he can throw neither meaning

nor feeling into them. When he attempts to look love, anger, hate, or

fear, he resembles one of the ghouls and afrites in Harper’s new

illustrated edition of the Arabian Nights. He wins Lady Anne with a

smile that would frighten a fiend, and that varies not a single line

from that with which he evinces his satisfaction at the prospect of

gaining the crown, and his contempt for the weakness of his enemies. A

more outrageous and hideous contortion still expresses his rage at

Buckingham’s importunity, and at the reproaches of his mother. When he

awakes in the tent-scene, he keeps his jaws at their utmost possible

distension for about two minutes, and presents no bad emblem of an

anaconda about to engorge a buffalo; one might fling in a pound of

butter without greasing a tooth. At the same time, his whole frame

writhes and shakes like a frog subjected to the action of a galvanic

battery. We have seen folks frightened and convulsed before now, but we

never saw one of them retain his senses in a convulsion. We like a deep,

manly, powerful voice; but we dislike to hear it strained to the screech

of a damned soul in hell-torment, like Mr. Forrest’s when he calls on

his drums to strike up and his men to charge. Often he displays his

tremendous physical energies where there is not the least occasion for

them, and as often does he repress them where they are needed. For

instance, Richard ought to work himself into a passion before he slays

King Henry. Mr. Forrest kills him as coolly and as quietly as a butcher

sticks a pig or knocks down a calf, and he repulses Buckingham with the

voice and action of a raving maniac. But Mr. Forrest is not to blame for

his face, which is as nature moulded it, neither because he has but

three notes to his voice, nor because the only inflections he is capable

of are their exaltation and depression. But he need not aggravate the

slight deformity of Richard more than Shakspeare did, who greatly

exaggerated it himself. Nor do we blame him for raving, ranting,

roaring, and bellowing to houses who never applaud him but when he

commits some gross outrage upon good taste and propriety. He adapts his

goods to his market, and he does wisely.”

As a contrast and offset to the foregoing specimens of self-display

disguised as criticism of another, it is but fair to cite a few extracts

from different writers who had really something appropriate to say on

the subject they were treating, and who said it with exemplary

directness and impartiality:

“As a reader Mr. Forrest has, in our opinion, few equals. Believing him

to be the most overrated actor on the stage, we are yet not blind to his

merit, but are glad to speak of the least of his excellences, and only

wish they were more numerous. Let us take his inherent faults for

granted, and consider his reading at the best. Does he fail in the first

essential,—intelligibility? On the contrary, he enunciates a thought

with such clearness that the meaning cannot be mistaken. Does he fail to

give the rhythm and the rhetoric of verse? On the contrary, verse in his

utterance retains its melody and music, and the high-sounding eloquence

of words its majesty. He subtly marks the changes of reflection, and

keeps the leading idea emphatic and distinct. There stands the _thought_

at least, no matter if the _feeling_ is a thousand miles away. He has

carved the statue correctly, though he wants the power of the ancient

sculptor to give the cold marble life. This he cannot do by ‘emphasizing

every word,’ in the unnatural way of which our correspondent accuses

him. Analyze one of his well-read sentences, and mark how the strong

word and the strong sound fall together; then listen to most of the

actors that surround him, and notice with what amusing vehemence they

shout their ‘ands’ and ‘ifs’ and ‘buts.’ They begin every sentence with

a stentorian cry that dwindles into an exhausted whisper.”

“As regards Forrest, we are often amused to hear people, who have vainly

refused for years to recognize his great histrionic abilities, wonder

how it is that he invariably attracts crowded houses whenever he

performs. We do not know any actor of his rank who has been so

scurrilously abused and to so little purpose. The most elaborate

pretences at criticism are always poured out on his devoted head, and if

the power of the press could have written a man down he surely would

have been long since; for he has few special champions among

acknowledged critics, a fact which shows how deep is the feeling against

him among particular classes. We must candidly confess to have never

been biased by profound admiration of Forrest’s acting, and yet we must

also admit that after having calmly, patiently, and attentively watched

some entire performances of his, we were convinced that he really

possessed far greater powers of mind than any of the critics ever had

given him credit for. His style is apt to be uneven, and men of his

mould of intellect cannot always enact the same parts with the same good

taste. But of his superb elocution,—of the noble idea of latent force

and suppressed passion which his whole manner embodies,—of the

perfection of manly dignity and physical development which have never

had a better representative on the stage than in his person,—of the

marvellous voice, so musical in its sound, and so happily adjusted in

its modulations to increase the expression of a sentence,—there ought,

in our judgment, to be no abatement of that admiration so long and so

justly accorded to him. If all the critics in the country were with one

voice to deny the existence of these things, their fiat would be

powerless against the evidence of men’s senses. We admit that he has no

subtlety of intellect, no finely-drawn perceptions of delicate shades of

human character. What he does is the result of the action of a very

strong mind, capable of being directed in a particular channel with

resistless energy; but this is the very class of minds out of which have

arisen some of the greatest men in the world’s annals. When Forrest

performs an engagement people go to see him who know all his defects,

but they go because it is the only acting of the highest class they have

the opportunity of seeing, and it is so far above the rivalry of such

actors as have been here during the last decade as to admit of no

comparison.”

“It is said when Canova was finishing a choice marble that his friends

were very anxious to see the work on exhibition, but the great artist

restrained their impatience, and proposed to gratify their desire at the

end of a given term. At the expiration of the time, his friends

assembled eagerly, and, in tones of disappointment, exclaimed, ‘What

have you been doing? You have been idle; you have done nothing to your

piece.’ To which he replied, ‘On the contrary, my chisel has been

exceedingly busy; I have subdued this muscle, I have brought out this

feature, enlivened this expression, polished my marble.’ ‘Oh, but,’ said

they, ‘these are mere trifles!’ ‘They may be,’ he said, ‘but trifles

make up the sum of perfection.’ The Virginius of Mr. Forrest revived

this anecdote of Canova, as well as remembrances of his early

performances. The difference in the two cases, however, is that it is

not the artist now, but his friends that see the perfection. Virginius

has long been identified with Mr. Forrest’s fame; but, great as the

lustre may be which his surpassing self-possession, noble and balanced

bearing, rich, copious, and manly elocution, and deft, minute, and

relative action have heretofore thrown upon this character, it has now

been still more varied and beautified by the mellow tints that shadow

and relieve the local splendor of salient features. It is indeed a

masterpiece of acting and the ‘top of admiration.’ It is difficult to

perceive any point of improvement that could give it more truth, in its

lifelike resemblance, as a copy of fiction; and we are sure, after the

ribaldry which of late years has degraded the boards, that there is not

a single lover of the drama who saw this enactment who does not feel

grateful to Mr. Edwin Forrest for his manly reassertion of the dignity

of the stage.”

“We are disposed to admit the greatest liberty possible to the

theatrical critic employed upon the daily press, but we cannot help

alluding to the disgracefully savage bitterness of the writer in one of

our weekly contemporaries as equally damaging to his employer’s

reputation and his own. Mr. Forrest has now passed that period of his

life in which he might have been injured by the malevolence of the

individual. In the mass, criticism bows before his assured superiority,

and it is simply a petty spite which dares persistently to deny his

claims to genius of the highest order. He is no longer a man respecting

whose position in the history of the American stage there can be any

dispute. He stands completely alone. We are induced this week to make

this remark from having freshly seen him in ‘_Othello_’ and ‘_Macbeth_.’

Can any observer who remembers his interpretation of the first of these

characters, some twenty years since, or his rendering of the last one,

but four years ago, and is disposed to examine them fairly, with

reference to his present reading and acting of either part, deny this?

If he does so, we can but feel that he is alike ungifted with the talent

to recognize and the honesty to admit the wide difference which exists

between them. His ‘_Othello_’ is now a most coherent and perfect whole.

Where is the artist who can infuse a more perfect and thorough spirit of

love than he does in that scene where he meets _Desdemona_ again in

Cyprus, after having quitted her in Venice? Where is the one who grows

under the heat of _Iago’s_ viperous tongue into a more sublimely savage

delineation of jealousy than he does in the subsequent acts? Is not his

‘I love thee, Cassio,

But never more be officer of mine,’

one of the most perfect bits of natural feeling that has ever been

uttered upon the stage? Friendship, anger, pity, and justice are all

struggling within him, and shape the sorrow of the words that strip his

lieutenant of the office which he considers him no longer worthy to

retain. It may be observed that in alluding to these points we have not

marked any of those more obvious beauties which have for many years been

acknowledged in his representation of this character. These are settled

excellencies in the estimation of all who love the tragic stage. Certain

lines have been stereotyped to us by the genius of those who have

embodied this greatest of Shaksperian characters; but for those who will

reverently observe his impersonation, there are hitherto hidden points

developed by Forrest which justify us in laughing at those whose

resolute hatred of the artist blinds them to his excellence, and to the

wonderful finish in the histrionic portraits which he offers them. We

have good artists amongst us, but we certainly have none who can for a

moment be fairly compared with him; and therefore is it that we say the

man who constantly undervalues him simply marks himself as notoriously

incapable of balancing the critical scales.”

The next extract is taken from a long article by the well-known scholar

and author, Dr. R. Shelton Mackenzie:

“We once heard a great author say, ‘Scurrility is the shadow of Fame,

and as often precedes as follows it.’ That author was Bulwer, and his

remark has the weight of an aphorism. With respect to Mr. Edwin Forrest,

it is singular that he has been assailed in his native town by

scurrility at an advanced period of his brilliant career, and at a time

when his powers have ripened into something very close to perfection.

“Unless the actuating principle of the writer be a merely malignant

dislike of the man, it seems almost impossible to us that any critic,

possessed of the ordinary intelligence current among the more

respectable members of the fraternity, can refuse or be so morally blind

as not to see the wide difference existing between the Forrest of the

present time and the Forrest who was admitted by the public to be the

greatest American actor some twenty years ago. At that time he was

wonderful,—wonderful by his intensity, his dashing power, his superb

manhood, his fine voice, and his noble presence. This made him a great

artist. He might have many faults, but these were obliterated from the

mind of the spectator by his many and dazzling merits, which were even

the more striking from the comparative blemishes with which they were

mingled.

“The artistic career of Edwin Forrest has now, however, made a great

stride in advance. He has polished, refined, and completed his style. It

was said of Garrick, who was several years older than Forrest when he

retired from the stage, that in his latter seasons he acted better than

ever, and the fact that he never, even when a master in the art, ceased

to be a student, explained the cause. The same may be said, and even

with more truth, of Edwin Forrest. There is no living actor half so

studious as himself. His mind, always under thorough self-cultivation,

has matured in later years, and the effects are apparent. He is so near

perfection as an actor that it is impossible to be so attracted by his

excellencies now as we might have been when contrast made them more

palpable.

“Fully to appreciate the various power of Mr. Forrest cannot be done by

examining him in any single character. We have therefore waited until

his engagement is nearly completed, and have carefully studied him in

eleven different characters,—_Richelieu_, _Damon_, _Richard III._,

_Hamlet_, _Othello_, _Virginius_, _Macbeth_, _Lucius Junius Brutus_,

_Febro_, _Jack Cade_, and _Lear_. Of these, perhaps, his _Lear_, his

_Othello_, his _Macbeth_, his _Richelieu_, and his _Damon_ are the

greatest; but there is comparatively so little difference in excellence

between his _Hamlet_ and his _Othello_, his _Virginius_ and his _Damon_,

that he might reasonably except to us for noting that difference, which,

after all, is in some measure the result of a purely physical variation

in the bodily means at his disposal for each special embodiment.

“The almost even excellence, in so many of his great parts, to which

Edwin Forrest has attained, contains in itself a strong assertion of his

right not only to the first place in the histrionic annals of the last

few years, but registers a positive claim to the highest position, as an

artist, in all histrionic history to which the slightest degree of faith

can be attached. To be at the same time a great _Hamlet_ and a great

_Othello_, even granting a difference in the excellence of the two

parts, argues that the actor possesses to a larger extent than common

that intellectual adaptability without which it would be impossible for

him to represent two such widely different men. Slightly deranged, a

philosophic dreamer, without the capability of sustained action,

energetic only by immediate impulse, the Danish Prince differs widely

from the passionate, powerful, one-purposed, and sublimely simple nature

of the Moor. In grasping these two opposite characters as completely as

Edwin Forrest has done, he has displayed an intellectual strength of the

highest order, approaching very nearly to that subtlety of intelligence

which is but rarely coupled with genius, but which, when coupled with

it, makes it a genius of the highest order.

“This subtlety of intelligence he develops in his wonderful rendering of

_Richard_, as widely opposed a character to both or either of the others

as could well be presented to us. For the physical nature of _Richard_

he has preferred Horace Walpole’s ‘Historic Doubts’ to Shakspeare’s

delineation of the man, but in portraying him intellectually Edwin

Forrest has simply depended on himself. He paints _Richard_ with strong

and vigorous execution, as a crafty and cruel hypocrite, with a

positively unequalled subtlety of touch, rendering his hypocrisy frank

and pleasant to the outside observer and coloring it with a comedy of

which he offers no example in _Othello_ and but a vague suspicion in

_Hamlet_. His love-scene with _Lady Anne_ is a marvellous piece of

acting, which excerpts from the character as a worthy pendant to the mad

scene in _Lear_. It was probably much more easily, although more

recently, perfected by him than the latter, inasmuch as the last named

was the result of careful and minute study, while the former is simply

an effort of pure cultured genius which is as positively real as stage

simulation ever can be. But this difference in character of the three

extends even to those points in which _Richard_ touches upon the two

others. _Richard_ is a man of strong passion as well as _Othello_. He is

a philosopher as well as _Hamlet_. But passion is suppressed in

_Richard_ under the vest of his craft. It is addressed to other objects

than _Othello_ yearns for. It is bold and crafty. _Othello_ is brave and

honest. This is wonderfully discriminated by Mr. Forrest. The philosophy

of _Hamlet_ is reflective and uncertain, colored by study and lunacy.

That of _Richard_ is worldly and practical, subjected by him to his

immediate ambition. Here Mr. Forrest, as an artist, is truly admirable.

In _Hamlet_ his philosophy is impulsively given to the audience. In

_Richard_ it is reasoned out and calculated with.

“Let us look at _Macbeth_, reaching, as _Richard_ does, at the Crown.

Most of our modern actors vary the two but little in their manner,

without following the line of difference made between them by the great

dramatist. This difference was in the intellectual strength of their

natures. _Richard_ is the tool of nobody. _Macbeth_ is but a plaster in

the fingers of his wife. How exquisitely does Mr. Forrest mark out the

two natures! You trace _Macbeth’s_ indecision of purpose in his very

manner. His entrance in the first scene is characterized by it. The

breaking off from his friends,—his return to himself when addressed by

them,—his interjectional reveries,—his uncertainty of action, are all as

they are given to us by Shakspeare, but scarcely such as we might have

expected a man of Mr. Forrest’s physical temperament to embody. In

_Richard_ the ambition is positive. He does not reason of the acts which

he commits. Hence here the artist’s actions are positive. When he

commits or orders one of these deeds which tend to secure his desires or

objects, it is done at once. The positive decision of the man is

translated by the actor, whether it be in the passionate command or the

sneering jest, by the calculated impulse of the man.”

Here is a part of an elaborate attack written by a relentless enemy and

persecutor, quite remarkable for the untempered way in which it mixes

truth and misrepresentation, justice and wrong:

“Mr. Forrest is now an actor who depends almost entirely on his voice as

a medium of expression. He throws all his force into his reading;

elocution is intended to compensate for everything,—for facial

expression, for suitable action, for muscular vigor, and often, indeed,

for true feeling and appreciation. By his impressive reading he

frequently gains applause when in reality he deserves condemnation.

There are whole scenes in his _Lear_ unredeemed by one spark of feeling,

the poverty of which he attempts to hide under a superficial gloss of

elocutionary charlatanism. His fine voice aids him in this attempt; for

that he has a noble voice, of great power,—whose tones are often

commanding, and sometimes would be tender if they were inspired by any

sincere feeling,—no one who has heard him can doubt. Take away this

voice and Mr. Forrest is a nonentity, for _he cannot act_, and his face

has no variety of expression. We know that, instead of using this fine

element of success well, he has abused it; for his mannerisms of tone

are perpetual, and disfigure every lengthy passage he reads. His voice

has too great a burden to bear.

“This is one reason why he is so very monotonous. Another and a deeper

reason is that the man himself is nothing but a monotone. No man on the

stage has a more strongly marked individuality than Mr. Forrest; once

seen, he cannot be easily forgotten, nor can his performances ever be

confused in memory with those of others. Yet this individuality is a

prison-house to him; he cannot escape from it. He is forced, in spite of

himself, to play every character in exactly the same way. He develops

_Spartacus_ by the identical methods he employs in _Hamlet_; his _Lear_

and his _Claude Melnotte_ are made impressive, not by different styles.

He has but one style. He is Edwin Forrest in everything; and, worse than

this, he seems to care nothing for the best character he plays in

comparison with his own success. Egotism is a marked peculiarity of his

acting; he seems to say to the audience, not, ‘How fine is this

character! how great was the author!’ but ever, ‘How finely _I_ play it!

am I not the greatest actor you ever saw?’

“Of course this strong personality is sometimes to Mr. Forrest an

advantage. There are _rôles_ which are adapted to his powers,—such as

_Virginius_, _Damon_, and _Spartacus_. These he plays well because they

do not require of him the transcendent power of genius,—the imagination

which enables a man to penetrate the motives of a being foreign to

himself, and to re-create in his own living nature the beauty and the

passion of a dream. These he plays well because he finds in them

something of himself. And even in Shaksperian characters, which are

alien to his nature, he occasionally meets a passage which he _can_

feel, and which he therefore expresses; and these moments of

earnestness, occurring suddenly in the midst of long scenes of

artificiality and dulness, are like flashes of lightning in a black

midnight: while they last they are bright, but when they are gone they

make the darkness deeper.”

The two brief notices that succeed appeared at the same time and in the

same city in two opposed newspapers. The contrast is amusing, and it is

easy to see how little impartial critical judgment went to the

composition of either of them, as well as how bewildering they must have

been to the reader who was seeking from the judgment of the press to

form a dispassionate opinion on the merits of the actor:

“Having within the present year closely criticised Edwin Forrest’s

performances during a long engagement, we do not intend to bore our

readers with repetitions of what we have said. Mr. Forrest will go

through his programme like a machine, and like most machines it may be

discovered that his powers have suffered somewhat by wear and tear. He

has long since passed the point of improvement. Fully settled in his own

conceit that his personations are the most wonderful that the world ever

saw, his only care will be to heighten defects which he considers

beauties, and to dwell with increased tenderness upon each fault. There

are some mothers who give their hearts to their puny, deformed, and bad-

tempered children, to the neglect of others who are handsome, gentle,

and intelligent. Mr. Forrest is an admirer of this policy. He slights

his better qualities in acting, and dandles his absurdities with more

than just parental fondness. His faults are inveterate; his beauties

daily grow homely. It would be supererogation to expose at length those

vices and stage tricks which have already been freely cauterized.”

“During the week Mr. Forrest has been performing the characters of

_Richelieu_, _Damon_, _Richard_, and _Hamlet_. At each representation

the invariable compliment of a crowded house has been paid him. With the

advance of every year this actor seems to grow greater. The

intellectuality of his acting becomes more and more apparent. The

experience of years is now devoted to his art; a lifetime is

concentrated upon the development of his transcendent genius. Mr.

Forrest has shaped the colossal block of crude genius into wonderful

statues of natural and lovely proportions. No intelligent praise can be

extravagant which extols the exceeding beauty of the conceptions of this

wonderful artist. We can scarcely think of Mr. Forrest’s fame as

otherwise than increasing. It throws around his name a luminous halo,

whose brightness and extent the progress of years will only intensify

and enlarge.”

One more specimen will suffice. It is from the pen of an anonymous

English critic:

“If Forrest is not in a paroxysm, he is a mere wicker idol; huge to the

eye, but _full of emptiness_,—a gigantic vacuum. His distortions of

character are monstrous; the athletic, muscular vigor of his Lear is a

positive libel upon consistency and truth. Spartacus was made for him,

and he for Spartacus; the athlete is everlastingly present in all his

personations. His ravings in Othello, in Macbeth, and in Richard the

Third are orgasms of vigorous commonplace.

“When Mr. Forrest represents terror, his knees shake, his hands vibrate,

his chest heaves, his throat swells, and his muscles project as if he

were under the influence of a galvanic battery or his whole frame put in

motion by a machine. He always appears anxious to show the toughness of

his sinews, the cast-iron capabilities of his body, and the prodigious

muscularity of his legs, which really haunt the spectator’s eyes like

huge, grim-looking spectres, appearing too monstrous for realities, as

they certainly are for the dignified grace of tragedy. He delights to

represent physical agony with the most revolting exaggerations. When he

dies, he likes that the audience should hear the rattles in his throat,

and will, no doubt, some day have a bladder of pig’s blood concealed

under his doublet, that, when stabbed, the tragic crimson may stream

upon the stage, and thus give him the opportunity of representing death,

in the words of his admirers, _to the life_.

“Perhaps no stronger test of Mr. Forrest’s want of intellectual power as

an actor can be given than his slow, drawling, whining mode of

delivering the speech to the senate, in the play of Othello. No

schoolboy could do it worse, and though in the more energetic scenes

there is a certain mechanical skill and seeming reality of passion, yet

the charm which this might be calculated to produce is lost by the

closeness of resemblance to a well-remembered original. It is almost

frightfully vigorous, and though there are some touches of true energy,

this is much too boisterous, coarse, and unrelieved by those delicate

inflections which so eloquently express true feeling to obtain for it

that meed of praise only due to the efforts of original genius. There is

much art and much skill in Mr. Forrest’s acting; but its grand defect is

the general absence of truth.”

The medley of praise and abuse, the hodge-podge of incongruous opinions,

seen in the foregoing illustrations of newspaper criticism, arose far

less from any contradiction of excellences and faults in the acting of

Forrest than from the prejudices and ignorance of the writers. A large

proportion of those writers were obstinately prepossessed or corruptly

interested, and few of them had any distinct appreciation of the

constituent elements of the dramatic art. Destitute of the true standard

of criticism, the final canon of authority, their judgments were at the

mercy of impulse and chance influences.

But Forrest was no solitary, though he was an extreme, sufferer in this

respect. The greatest of his predecessors, all the most gifted and

famous actors and actresses, have had to undergo the same pitiless

ordeal. Those concerning whose illustrious pre-eminence there can be no

question whatever have borne the same shower of detraction, insult, and

ridicule, the same pelting of cynical badinage. The restless vanity,

presumptuous conceit, and _blasé_ omniscience of the common order of

critics have spared none of the conspicuous dramatic artists. And if any

one infer from the abuse and depreciation rained on Forrest that he must

have been guilty of the worst faults, he may draw the like conclusion

from the like premises in relation to every celebrated name in the

history of the stage.

The bigoted opposition and belittling estimates met by Talma in his bold

and resolute effort to displace the conventional inanity and stilted

bombast of the French stage with truth and nature are a matter of

notorious record. Some of his sapient critics thought they were

administering a caustic censure when they uttered the unwitting

compliment, extorted by their surprise at his severe costume and grand

attitudes, “Why, he looks exactly like a Roman statue just stepped out

of the antique.” The biographers of Garrick give abundant evidence of

the misrepresentation, ridicule, and manifold censure with which his

enemies and rivals and their venal tools pursued and vexed him. He even

stooped to buy them off, and sometimes counteracted their malice with

his own anonymous pen. Horace Walpole wrote, “I have seen the acting of

Garrick, and can say that I see nothing wonderful in it.” His small

stature, his starts and pauses, were, in especial, maliciously

animadverted on. Mossop was sneered at as “a distiller of syllables,”

Macklin for the prominent “lines, or rather cordage, of his face,” and

Quin for the “mechanic regularity and swollen pomp of his declamation.”

George Steevens wrote a bitter satire, utterly unjust and unprovoked, on

Mrs. Siddons. She and her brother, John Philip Kemble, were stigmatized

as icebergs and pompous pretenders, and were repeatedly hissed and

insulted on the stage. Before her marriage, while Siddons was playing at

the Haymarket, a critic, trying to put her down, wrote to Hayley, the

manager, “Miss Kemble, though patronized by a number of clamorous

friends, will prove only a piece of beautiful imbecility.” In 1807 a

leading London newspaper said of George Frederick Cooke, “His delivery

of Lear is just what it is in Richard: in its subdued passages, little

and mean; in its more prominent efforts, rugged, rumbling, and staccato,

resembling rather a watchman’s rattle than any other object in art or

nature.”

William Robson, in his “Old Play-Goer,” says of Edmund Kean, “His person

and carriage are mean and contemptible, his judgment poor, his pathos

weak, his passion extravagant and unnatural;” and then sums up his

estimate of the immortal histrionist in these remarkable words: “He is

nothing but a little vixenish black girl in short petticoats!” On the

first appearance of Kean in Philadelphia some critics there, who were

great admirers of Cooke, called him “a quack, a mountebank, a vulgar

impostor.” William B. Wood said of Kean, when he had just finished a

rehearsal and gone out, “He is a mere mummer.” Joseph Jefferson, great-

grandfather of the Joseph Jefferson of Rip Van Winkle fame,—a beautiful

and noble old man, afterwards characterized by Forrest in loving memory

as “one of the purest men that ever lived, sad, sweet, lofty,

thoughtful, generous,”—overheard the remark, and replied, with a quiet

indignation in his tone, “Ah, Wood, you would give all the riches you

ever dreamed of amassing in this world to be another just such a

mummer.” The “London Spectator,” in 1836, said, “Bunn in his drowning

desperation catches at any straw. He has just put forward Booth, the

shadow and foil of Kean in bygone days. Booth’s Richard seems to have

been a wretched failure.” At the same time another English journal used

the following expressive language, in which the writer evidently does

justice to himself whatever he endeavors to do to the actors he names:

“Since the retirement of Young and the death of Kean, the very name of

tragedy has passed away from us. We have had to submit to the

presumptuous and uninspired feelings of Mr. Bell-wether Kemble, or to

the melodramatic jerks and pumpings of Mr. Macready.”

An American critic wrote thus of the Nancy Sykes of Charlotte Cushman:

“Miss Cushman’s performance is of the Anatomical Museum style. Her

effects are thrilling and vulgar. Her poses are awkward, and her

pictures unfinished and coarse in outline. She has an unpleasantly pre-

raphaelite death scene, and is dragged off, stiff and stark, when all

the characters express their internal satisfaction at the circumstance

by smiling, shaking hands, and joining in a feeble chorus. The secret of

her attraction is vigor. The masses like vigor. If they can have a

little art with it, very well. But vigor they must have.” Of late it has

been the fashion to extol Miss Cushman as the queenly mistress of all

the dignities and refinements of the dramatic profession; but the

foregoing notice is exactly of a piece with the treatment visited upon

Forrest for many years by the vulgar coteries of criticism, whose aim

was not justice and usefulness but effect upon the prejudiced and the

careless. Even the quiet and gentlemanly Edwin Booth has been as

unsparingly assailed as he has been lavishly praised. An insidious

article on him, entitled “The Machine-Actor,” called him a “self-acting

dramatic machine warranted;” and while admitting, with great generosity,

that “he was not wholly destitute of dramatic ability,” attributed his

success and reputation chiefly to extraneous conditions, in especial the

shrewdness of “his managing agent, who judiciously prepared his houses

for him, and pecuniarily and personally appreciated the power of the

press and conciliated the critics.” The two following notices of Mr.

Booth’s Melnotte—the first obviously by a critic who had, the second by

one who had not, been “conciliated”—are quite as absurd in their

contradiction as those so often composed on Forrest:

“On Monday evening last we enjoyed the first opportunity of seeing Mr.

Edwin Booth in the character of _Claude Melnotte_, in the ‘Lady of

Lyons.’ Our impressions of Mr. Booth in the part may be briefly summed

up in saying that he is one of the very best _Claudes_ we have ever

seen,—scholarly, sustained, and forcibly reticent at all points,—not so

youthful in his make-up as to suggest the enthusiastic boy of Bulwer’s

drama, but in all other regards the very ideal of the character. His

marvellously melodious voice sounds to peculiar advantage in the rich

prose-poetry of the more sentimental passages, and in the passages of

sterner interest the latent strength of the tragedian comes nobly into

play. Booth’s _Claude_ is an unqualified success, and its first

rendering was witnessed by an audience brilliant in number and

intelligence and markedly enthusiastic in their reception of the best

points.”

“Mr. Booth’s _Claude Melnotte_ was a failure. It was neither serious nor

sentimental, comic nor tragic. The best that can be said of it is that

it came near being an effective burlesque. When he first came on to the

stage, I almost thought it was his intention to make it so. His carriage

and general make-up were those of one of Teniers’ Dutch boors, even to

the extent of yellow hair combed straight down the forehead and clipped

square across from temple to temple. His action consisted mainly in a

series of shrugs. I don’t remember a natural movement of body or

expression of countenance, from the beginning of the piece to the end;

nor a natural tone of voice.”

Still later we have seen different representatives of the press, both in

America and in England, alternately describing the wonderful Othello of

Salvini as “the electrifying impersonation of a demi-god” and as “an

exhibition of disgusting brutality.”

The class of examples of which these are a few specimens show how little

worthy the ordinary newspaper dramatic criticism is to be considered

authoritative. No branch of journalism, allowing for notable individual

exceptions, is more incompetent or more corrupt, because no other set of

writers have so difficult a task or are so beset by vicious influences.

Their vanity, prejudice, and interest worked upon, their sympathies

appealed to by the artist and his friends, their antipathies by his

rivals and foes, harassed and hurried with work, moved by promises of

money and patronage, no wonder they often turn from the exactions of

conscientious labor and study to something so much easier. The

unsophisticated portion of the public, who are too much influenced by

what they read in the papers, and who fancy that applause is a good

proof of merit and censure a sure evidence of fault, ought to know how

full of fraud and injustice the world of histrionic ambition and

criticism is, and to learn to give little weight to verdicts not

ascertained to come from competent and honest judges. The husband of

Madame Linguet, a favorite actress at the Italian Theatre in Paris,

hired a party to hiss every other actress, but to applaud her to the

echo. A ludicrous mistake let out the secret. Linguet told his men one

night to hiss the first actress who appeared and applaud the second. The

play was changed, and in the substituted piece Madame Linguet came

forward first, and was overpowered with hisses. Sir John Hill asked Peg

Woffington if she had seen in the paper his praise of her performance

the previous evening in the part of Calista. She thanked him for his

kindness, but added that the play was changed and she had acted the

character of Lady Townley. In a New York paper, in 1863, this notice

appeared: “Mr. Forrest repeated, by special request, his great character

of Spartacus last evening, before one of the most brilliant and

enthusiastic audiences of the season. His acting was grand throughout,

and at the end of the last act he received a perfect ovation from the

audience.” Appended to this, in his own handwriting, pasted in one of

his scrap-books, were found these words: “Mr. Forrest on the night above

referred to was in Philadelphia, and did not act at all, having been

called home by the death of his sister.”

After going over the mass of ignorant, capricious, and contradictory

criticism bestowed on Forrest,—criticism destitute of fundamental

principles or ultimate insight,—the reader may well feel at a loss to

know how he is to regulate his judgment upon the subject and form a just

estimate of the actor and his performances. The critics, instead of

aiding, bewilder him, because themselves appear to be wildly adrift. To

work our way through the chaos it is necessary for us to understand

distinctly what the dramatic art is in its nature and object, and what

are the materials and methods with which it aims to accomplish its

purpose. The answers to these inquiries will clear away confusion, lay

bare the elements of the art, and put us in possession of those laws of

expression which constitute the only final standard for justly

criticising the efforts of the player.

Considered in its full scope, the drama is _the practical science of

human nature exemplified in the revelation of its varieties of character

and conduct_. It aims to uncover and illustrate man in the secret

springs of his action and suffering and destiny, by representing the

whole range and diversity of his experience in living evolution. The

drama is the reflection of human life in the idealizing mirror of art.

In what does this reflection consist? In the correct exhibition of the

different modes of behavior that belong to the different types of

humanity in the various exigencies of their fortunes. The critic,

therefore, in order to be able to say whether histrionic performances

are true or false, consistent or inconsistent, noble or base, refined or

vulgar, artistically elaborated and complete or absurdly exaggerated and

defective, must understand the contents of human nature in all its

grades of development, and know how the representatives of those grades

naturally deport themselves under given conditions of inward

consciousness and of exterior situation. That is to say, a man to be

thoroughly equipped for the task of dramatic criticism must have

mastered these three provinces of knowledge; first, the characters of

men in their vast variety; second, the modes of manifestation whereby

those characters reveal their inward states through outward signs;

third, the manner in which those characters and those modes of

manifestation are affected by changes of consciousness or of situation,

how they are modified by the reflex play of their own experience.

Every man has three types of character, in all of which he must be

studied before he can be adequately represented. First he has his

inherited constitutional or temperamental character, his fixed native

character, in which the collective experience and qualities of his

progenitors are consolidated, stamped, and transmitted. Next he has his

peculiar fugitive or passional character, which is the modification of

his stable average character under the influence of exciting impulses,

temporary exaltations of instinct or sentiment. And then he has his

acquired habitual character, gradually formed in him by the moulding

power of his occupation and associations, as expressed in the familiar

proverb, “Habit is a second nature.” The first type reveals his

ancestral or organic rank, what he is in the fatal line of his

parentage. The second shows his moral or personal rank, what he has

become through his own experience and discipline, self-indulgence and

self-denial. The third betrays his social rank, what he has been made by

his employment and caste. The original estimate or value assigned to the

man by nature is indicated in his constitutional form, the geometrical

proportions and dynamic furnishing of his organs, his physical and

mental make-up. The estimate he puts on himself, in himself and in his

relations with others, his egotistical value, is seen in the transitive

modifications of his form by movements made under the stimulus of

passions. The conventional estimate or social value awarded him is

suggested through the permanent modifications wrought in his organs and

bearing by his customary actions and relations with his fellows. Thus

the triple type of character possessed by every man is to be studied by

means of an analysis of the forms of his organs in repose and of his

movements in passion or habit.

The classes of constitutional character are as numerous as the human

temperaments which mark the great vernacular distinctions of our nature

according to the preponderant development of some portion of the

organism. There is the osseous temperament, in which the bones and

ligaments are most developed; the lymphatic temperament, in which the

adipose and mucous membrane preponderate; the sanguine temperament, in

which the heart and arteries give the chief emphasis; the melancholic

temperament, in which the liver and the veins oversway; the executive

temperament, in which the capillaries and the nerves take the lead; the

mental temperament, in which the brain is enthroned; the visceral

temperament, in which the vital appetites reign; the spiritual

temperament, in which there is a fine harmony of the whole. The

enumeration might be greatly varied and extended, but this is enough for

our purpose. Each head of the classification denotes a distinct style of

character, distinguished by definite modes of manifesting itself, the

principal sign of every character, the key-note from which all its

expressions are modulated, being the quality and rate of movement or the

_nervous rhythm_ of the organism in which it is embodied.

Besides the vernacular classes of character ranged under their leading

temperaments, there are almost innumerable dialect varieties arising

from these, as modified both by the steady influence of chronic

conditions of life, historic, national, local, or clique, and by fitful

and eccentric individual combinations of faculty and impulse. For

instance, how many types of barbarian character there are,—such as the

garrulous, laughing, sensual Negro, the taciturn, solemn, abstinent

Indian, the fat and frigid Esquimaux, the Hottentot, the Patagonian, the

New Zealander,—all differing widely in stature, feature, gesture,

disposition, costume, creed, speech, while agreeing in the fundamentals

of a common nature. Among civilized nations the diversity of characters

is still greater. It would require an almost endless recital of

particulars to describe the differences of the Chinaman, the Japanese,

the Egyptian, the Persian, the Arab, the Hindu, the Italian, the

Spaniard, the German, the Russian, the Frenchman, the Englishman, the

American. And then what a maze of attributes, each one at the same time

clear in its sharpness or its profundity, qualify and discriminate the

various orders, castes, and groups of society!—the Brahmin, the Sudra,

the king, the slave, the soldier, the doctor, the lawyer, the priest,

the teacher, the shop-keeper, the porter, the detective, the legislator,

the hangman, the scientist, and the philosopher. Every professional

pursuit, social position, mechanical employment, physical culture,

spiritual belief or aptitude, has its peculiar badge of dress, look,

posture, motion, in which it reveals its secrets; and the pettifogger or

the jurisconsult, the prophet or the necromancer, the Quaker and the

Shaker, the Calvinist and the Catholic, the tailor, the gymnast, the

gambler, the bully, the hero, the poet, and the saint, stand unveiled

before us. How the habitual life reveals itself in the bearing is

clearly seen in the sailor when he leaves his tossing ship for the solid

shore. His sensation of the strange firmness of the earth makes him

tread in a sort of heavy-light way,—half wagoner, half dancing-master.

There is always this appearance of lightness of foot and heavy upper

works in a sailor, his shoulders rolling, his feet touching and going.

To know how consistently to construct an ideal character of any one of

these kinds, at any given height or depth in the historic gamut of

humanity, and to be able to embody and enact it with the harmonious

truth of nature, is the task of the consummate actor. And to be

qualified to catalogue all these attributes of human being and

manifestation with accuracy, recognizing every fitness, detecting every

incongruity, is the business of the dramatic critic. Who of our ordinary

newspaper writers is competent to the work? Yet the youngest and crudest

of them never hesitates to pronounce a snap judgment on the most

renowned tragedians as if his magisterial “we” were the very ipse dixit

of Pythagoras!

Still further, the task of the actor and of the critic is made yet more

complicated and difficult by the varied modifications of all the classes

of character indicated above under the influence of specific passion.

The great dramatic passions, which may be subdivided into many more, are

love, hatred, joy, grief, jealousy, wonder, pity, scorn, anger, and

fear. To obtain a fine perception and a ready and exact command of the

relations of the apparatus of expression to all these passions in their

different degrees as manifesting different styles of character, to know

for each phase of excitement or depression the precise adjustment of the

limbs, chest, and head, of intense or slackened muscles, of compressed

or reposeful lips, of dilated or contracted nostrils, of pensive or

glaring or fiery or supplicating eyes, of deprecating or threatening

mien, of firm or vacillating posture, is an accomplishment as rare as it

is arduous. All this is capable of reduction by study and practice to an

exact science, and then of development into a perfect art. For every

passion has its natural law of expression, and all these laws are

related and consistent in an honest and earnest character, incoherent

only in a discordant or hypocritical character. There is an art to find

the mind’s construction in the face. The spirit shines and speaks in the

flesh. And a learned eye looks quite through the seemings of men to

their genuine being and states. This is indeed the very business of the

dramatic art,—to read the truths of human nature through all its

attempted disguises, and expose them for instruction. How minute the

detail, how keen the perception, how subtle and alert the power of

adaptation requisite for this, may be illustrated by a single example.

Suppose a criminal character is to be played. He may be of a timid,

suspicious, furtive type, or careless, jovial, and rollicking, or brazen

and defiant, or sullen and gloomy, yet be a criminal in all. He may be

portrayed in the stage of excitement under the interest of plot and

pursuit, or in success and triumph, or in defeat and wrath, or in the

shame and terror of detection, or in final remorse and despair. There is

scarcely any end to the possibilities of variety, yet verisimilitude

must be kept up and nature not violated.

But we have as yet hardly hinted at the richness of the elements of the

dramatic art and the scope of the knowledge and skill necessary for

applying them. The aim of the dramatic art being the revelation of the

characters and experiences of men, the question arises, By what means is

this revelation effected? The inner states of man are revealed through

outer signs. Every distinct set of outer signs through which inner

states are made known constitutes a dramatic language. Now, there are no

less than nine of these sets of signs or dramatic languages of human

nature.

The first language is forms. When we look on an eagle, a mouse, a horse,

a tiger, a worm, a turtle, an alligator, a rattlesnake, their very forms

reveal their natures and dispositions and habits. In their shapes and

proportions we read their history. So with man. His generic nature, his

specific inheritance, his individual peculiarities are signalized in his

form and physiognomy with an accuracy and particularity proportioned to

the interpreting power of the spectator. The truth is all there for the

competent gazer. The actor modifies his form and features by artifice

and will to correspond with what should be the form of the person whose

character he impersonates. And _costume_, with its varieties of outline

and color, constitutes a secondary province artificially added to the

natural language of form.

The second language is attitudes. Attitudes are living modifications of

shape, or the fluencies of form. There are, for example, nine elementary

attitudes of the feet, of the hands, of the toes, of the head, which may

be combined in an exhaustless series. Every one of these attitudes has

its natural meaning and value. All emotions strong enough to pronounce

themselves find expression in appropriate attitudes or significant

changes of the form in itself and in its relations to others. He who has

the key for interpreting the reactions of human nature on the agencies

that affect it, easily reads in the outer signs of attitude the inner

states of defiance, doubt, exaltation, prostration, nonchalance,

respect, fear, misery, or supplication, and so on.

The third language is automatic movements, which are unconscious escapes

of character, unpurposed motions through which the states of the mover

are betrayed, sometimes with surprising clearness and force. For

instance, how often impatience, vexation, or restrained anger, breaks

out in a nervous tapping of the foot or the finger! What can be more

legible than the fidgety manner of one in embarrassment? And the degree

and kind of the embarrassment, together with the personal grade and

social position and culture of the subject, will be revealed in the

peculiar nature of the fidgeting. There is a whole class of these

automatic movements, such as trembling, nodding, shaking the head,

biting the lips, lolling the tongue, the shiver of the flesh, the quiver

of the mouth or eyelids, the shudder of the bones, and they compose a

rich primordial language of revelation, perfectly intelligible and

common to universal humanity.

The fourth language is gestures. This is the language so marvellously

flexible, copious, and powerful among many barbarous peoples. It was

carried to such a pitch of perfection by the mimes of ancient Rome, that

Roscius and Cicero had a contest to decide which could express a given

idea in the most clear and varied manner, the actor by gestures, or the

orator by words. Gestures are a purposed system of bodily motions, both

spontaneous and deliberate, intended as preparatory, auxiliary, or

substitutional for the expressions by speech. There is hardly any state

of consciousness which cannot be revealed more vividly by pantomime than

is possible in mere verbal terms. As fixed attitudes are inflected form,

and automatic movements inflected attitude, so pantomimic gestures are

systematically inflected motion. The wealth of meaning and power in

gesticulation depends on the richness, freedom, and harmony of the

character and organism. The beauty or deformity, nobleness or baseness,

of its pictures are determined by the zones of the body from which the

gestures start, the direction and elevation at which they terminate,

their rate of moving, and the nature and proportions of the figures,

segments of which their lines and curves describe. Music has no clearer

rhythm, melody, and harmony to the ear than inflected gesture has to the

eye. The first law of gesture is, that it follows the look or the eye,

and precedes the sound or the voice. The second law is, that its

velocity is precisely proportional to the mass moved. The third and

profoundest law, first formulated by Delsarte, is that efferent or

outward lines of movement reveal the sensitive life or vital nature of

the man; that afferent or inward lines reveal the percipient and

reflective life or mental nature; and that immanent or curved lines,

blended of the other two, reveal the affectional life or moral nature.

The fifth language is what is called facial expression. It consists of

muscular contractions and relaxations, dilatations and diminutions, the

fixing or the flitting of nervous lights and shades over the organism.

Its changes are not motions of masses of the body, but visible

modifications of parts of its periphery, as in smiles, frowns, tears.

The girding up or letting down of the sinews, the tightening or

loosening or horripilating creep of the skin, changes of color, as in

paleness and blushing, and all the innumerable alterations of look and

meaning in the brows, the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the chin, come

under this head. The delicacy, power, and comprehensiveness of this

language are inexhaustible. So numerous and infinitely adjustable, for

instance, are the nerves of the mouth, that Swedenborg asserts that no

spoken language is necessary for the illuminated, every state of the

soul being instantly understood from the modulation of the lips alone.

The sixth language is inarticulate noises, the first undigested

rudiments of the voice. All our organic and emotional states, when they

are keen enough to seek expression, and we are under no restraint,

distinguish and reveal themselves in crude noises, each one the

appropriate effect of a corresponding cause. We breathe aloud, whistle,

gasp, sigh, choke, whimper, sob, groan, grunt, sneeze, snore, snort,

sip, hiss, smack, sniff, gulp, gurgle, gag, wheeze, cough, hawk, spit,

hiccup, and give the death-rattle. These and kindred noises take us back

to the rawest elemental experiences, and express them to universal

apprehension in the most unmistakable manner. The states of the organism

in its various sensations, the forms its affected parts assume under

different stimuli, are as dies which strike the sounds then made into

audible coins or medals revelatory of their faces. This is the broadest

and vulgarest language of unrefined vernacular man. The lower the style

of acting the larger part this will play in it. From the representation

of high characters it is more and more strained out and sublimated away,

the other languages quite superseding it.

The seventh language is inflected tones, vocalized and modulated breath.

The mere tones of the sounding apparatus of the voice, in the variety of

their quality, pitch, and cadence, reveal the emotional nature of man

through the whole range of his feelings, both in kind and degree. The

moan of pain, the howl of anguish, the yell of rage, the shriek of

despair, the wail of sorrow, the ringing laugh of joy, the ecstatic and

smothering murmur of love, the penetrative tremor of pathos, the solemn

monotone of sublimity, and the dissolving whisper of wonder and

adoration,—these are some of the great family of inflected sounds in

which the emotions of the human heart are reflected and echoed to the

recognition of the sympathetic auditor.

The eighth language is articulated words, the final medium of the

intellect. Vocal sounds articulated in verbal forms are the pure vehicle

of the thoughts of the head, and the inflected tones with which they are

expressed convey the accompanying comments of the heart upon those

thoughts. What a man thinks goes out on his articulate words, but what

he feels is taught in the purity or harshness of the tones, the pitch,

rate, emphasis, direction and length of slide with which the words are

enunciated. The word reveals the intellectual state; the tone, the

sensitive state; the inflection, the moral state. The character of a man

is nowhere so concentratedly revealed as in his voice. In its clang-

tints all the colors and shades of his being are mingled and symbolized.

But it requires a commensurate wisdom, sensibility, trained skill and

impartiality to interpret what it implies. Yet one fact remains sure:

give a man a completely developed and freed voice, and there is nothing

in his experience which he cannot suggest by it. Nothing can be clearer

or more impressive than the revelation of characters by the voice: the

stutter and splutter of the frightened dolt, the mincing lisp of the

fop, the broad and hearty blast of the strong and good-natured boor, the

clarion note of the leader, the syrupy and sickening sweetness of the

goody, the nasal and mechanical whine of the pious hypocrite, the muddy

and raucous vocality of vice and disease, the crystal clarity and

precision of honest health and refinement. Cooke spoke with two voices,

one harsh and severe, one mild and caressing. His greatest effects were

produced by a rapid transition from one of these to the other. He used

the first to convince or to command, the second to soothe or to betray.

Actions speak louder than words; and the ninth language is deeds, the

completest single expression of the whole man. The thoughts, affections,

designs, expose and execute themselves in rounded revelation and

fulfilment in a deed. When a hungry man sits down to a banquet and

satisfies his appetite, when one knocks down his angered opponent or

opens the window and calls a policeman, when one gives his friend the

title-deed of an estate, everything is clear, there is no need of

explanatory comment. The sowing of a seed, the building of a house, the

painting of a picture, the writing of a book or letter, any intentional

act, is in its substance and form the most solid manifestation of its

performer. In truth, the deeds of every man, in their material and moral

physiognomy, betray what he has been, demonstrate what he is, and

prophesy what he will become. They are a language in which his purposes

materialize themselves and set up mirrors of his history. Deeds are,

above all, the special dramatic language, because the dramatic art seeks

to unveil human nature by a representation of it not in description, but

in living action.

These nine languages, or sets of outer signs for revealing inner states,

are all sustained and pervaded by a system of invisible motions or

molecular vibrations in the brain and the other nerve-centres. The

consensus of these hidden motions, in connection at the subjective pole

with the essence of our personality, at the objective pole with other

personalities and all the forces of the kosmos, presides over our bodily

and spiritual evolution; and all that outwardly appears of our character

and experience is but a partial manifestation of its working. From the

differing nature, extent, and combination of these occult vibrations in

the secret nerve-centres originate the characteristic peculiarities of

individuals. It may not be said that all the substances and forms of

life and consciousness _consist in_ modes of motion, but undoubtedly

every vital or conscious state of embodied man is _accompanied by_

appropriate kinds and rates of organic undulations or pulses of force,

and is revealed through these if revealed at all. The forms and measures

of these molecular vibrations in the nerve-centres and fibres,—whether

they are rectilinear, spherical, circular, elliptical, or spiral,—the

width of their gamut, with the slowness and swiftness of the beats in

their extremes,—and the complexity and harmony of their co-operation,—

determine the quality and scale of the man. The signals of these

concealed things exhibited through the nine languages of his organism

mysteriously hint the kinds and degrees of his power, and announce the

scope and rank of his being. This is the real secret of what is vulgarly

called animal magnetism. One person communicates his vibrations to

another, either by direct contact, or through ideal signs intuitively

recognized and which discharge their contents in the apprehending soul,

just as a musical string takes up the vibrations of another one in tune

with it. He whose organism is richest in differentiated centres and most

perfect in their co-ordinated action, having the exactest equilibrium in

rest and the freest play in exercise, having the amplest supply of force

at command and the most consummate grace or economy in expending it, is

naturally the king of all other men. He is closest to nature and God,

fullest of a reconciled self-possession and surrender to the universal.

He is indeed a divine magnetic battery. The beauty and grandeur of his

bearing bewitch and dominate those who look on him, because suggestive

of the subtlety and power of the modes of motion vibrating within him.

The unlimited automatic intelligence associated with these interior

motions can impart its messages not only through the confessed languages

enumerated above, but also, as it seems, immediately, thus enveloping

our whole race with an unbroken mental atmosphere alive and electric

with intercommunication.

The variety of human characters, in their secret selfhood and in their

social play,—the variety of languages through which they express

themselves and their states, all based on that infinitely fine system of

molecular motions in the nerve-centres where the individual and the

universal meet and blend and react in volitional or reflex

manifestation,—the variety of modes and degrees in which characters are

modified under the influence of passion within or society and custom

without,—the variety of changes in the adaptation of expression to

character, perpetually altering with the altering situations,—such are

the elements of the dramatic art. What cannot be said can be sung; what

cannot be sung can be looked; what cannot be looked can be gesticulated;

what cannot be gesticulated can be danced; what cannot be danced can be

sat or stood,—and be understood. The knowledge of these elements

properly formulated and systematized composes the true standard of

dramatic criticism.

It is obvious enough how few of the actors and critics of the day

possess this knowledge. Without it the player has to depend on

intuition, inspiration, instinct, happy or unhappy luck, laborious

guess-work, and servile imitation. He has not the safe guidance of

fundamental principles. Without it the critic is at the mercy of every

bias and caprice. Now, one of the greatest causes of error and injustice

in acting and in the criticism of acting is the difficulty of

determining exactly how a given character in given circumstances will

deport and deliver himself. With what specific combinations of the nine

dramatic languages of human nature, in what relative prominence or

subtlety, used with what degrees of reserve or explosiveness, will he

reveal his inner states through outer signs? Here the differences and

the chances for truthful skill are innumerable; for every particular in

expression will be modified by every particular in the character of the

person represented. What is perfectly natural and within limits for one

would be false or extravagant for another. The taciturnity of an iron

pride, the demonstrativeness of a restless vanity, the abundance of

unpurposed movements and unvocalized sounds characteristic of

boorishness and vulgarity, the careful repression of automatic language

by the man of finished culture, are illustrations.

And then the degree of harmony in the different modes of expression by

which a given person reveals himself is a point of profound delicacy for

actor and critic. In a type of ideal perfection every signal of thought

or feeling, of being or purpose, will denote precisely what it is

intended to denote and nothing else, and all the simultaneous signals

will agree with one another. But real characters, so far as they fall

short of perfection, are inconsistent in their expressions, continually

indefinite, superfluous or defective, often flatly contradictory.

Multitudes of characters are so undeveloped or so ill developed that

they fall into attitudes without fitness or direct significance, employ

gestures vaguely or unmeaningly, and are so insincere or little in

earnest that their postures, looks, motions, and voices carry opposite

meanings and thus belie one another. It requires no superficial art to

be able instantly to detect every incongruity of this sort, to assign it

to its just cause, and to decide whether the fault arises from conscious

falsity in the character or from some incompetency of the physical

organism to reflect the states of its spiritual occupant. For instance,

in sarcastic speech the meaning of the tone contradicts the meaning of

the words. The articulation is of the head, but the tone is of the

heart. So when the voice is ever so soft and wheedling, if the language

of the eyes and the fingers is ferocious, he is a fool who trusts the

voice. In like manner the revelations in form and attitude are deeper

and more massive than those of gesture. But in order that all the

expressions of the soul through the body should be marked by truth and

agreement, it is necessary that the soul should be completely sincere

and unembarrassed and that the body should be completely free and

flexible to reflect its passing states. No character furnishes these

conditions perfectly, and therefore every character will betray more or

less inconsistency in its manifestations. Still, every pronounced

character has a general unity of design and coloring in its type which

must be kept prevailingly in view.

The one thing to be demanded of every actor is that he shall conceive

his part with distinctness and represent it coherently. No actor can be

considered meritorious who has not a full and vivid conception of his

rôle and does not present a consistent living picture of it. But, this

essential condition met, there may be much truth and great merit in many

different conceptions and renderings of the same rôle. Then the degree

of intellectuality, nobleness, beauty, and charm, or of raw passion and

material power, in any stated performance is a fair subject for critical

discussion, and will depend on the quality of the actor. But the critic

should be as large and generous as God and nature in his standard, and

not set up a factitious limit of puling feebleness and refuse to pardon

anything that goes beyond it. He must remember that a great deal ought

to be pardoned to honest and genuine genius when it electrifyingly

exhibits to the crowd of tame and commonplace natures a character whose

scale of power is incomparably grander than their own. It is ever one of

the most imposing and benign elements in the mission of the stage to

show to average men, through magnificent examples of depth of passion,

force of will, strength of muscle, compass of voice, and organic play of

revelation, how much wider than they had known is the gamut of humanity,

how much more intense and exquisite its love, how much more blasting its

wrath, more awful its sorrow, more hideous its crime and revenge, more

godlike its saintliness and heroism.

It is not to be pretended that Forrest had ever made the systematic

analysis of the dramatic art sketched above. But when it was submitted

to him he instantly appreciated it with enthusiasm; for he was

experimentally familiar with all the rudiments of it. He was all his

life an earnest student of human nature, in literature, in social

intercourse, in his own consciousness, and in the critical practice of

his profession. In fixing his rank as an actor the only question is how

far he had the ability to represent in action what he unquestionably had

the ability to appreciate in conception. While some of his admirers have

eulogized him as the greatest tragedian that ever lived, some of his

detractors have denounced him as one of the worst. The truth, of course,

lies between these extremes. His excellences were of the most

distinguished kind, but the limitations of his excellence were obvious

to the judicious and sometimes repulsive to the fastidious.

To be the complete and incomparable actor which the partisans of Forrest

claim him to have been requires some conditions plainly wanting in him.

The perfect player must have a detached, imaginative, mercurial, yet

impassioned mind, free from chronic biases and prejudices, lodged in a

rich, symmetrical body as full of elastic grace as of commanding power.

The spirit must be freely attuned to the whole range of humanity, and

the articulations and muscles of the frame so liberated and co-operative

as to furnish an instrument obviously responsive to all the play of

thought and emotion. Now, Forrest, after his early manhood, under the

rigorous athletic training he gave himself, was a ponderous Hercules,

magnificent indeed, but incapable of the more airy and delicate

qualities, the fascination of free grace and spontaneous variety. He

lacked the lightning-like suppleness of Garrick and of Kean. His rugged

and imposing physique, handsome and serviceable as it was, wanted the

varying flexibility of the diviner forms of beauty, and so put rigid

limitations on him. The same was true mentally; for while his intellect

was keen, clear, broad, and vigorous, and his heart warm and faithful,

and his passion deep and intense, yet his seated antipathies were as

strong as his artistic sympathies, and shut him up in scorn and

hostility from whole classes of character. Both physically and

spiritually he was moulded in the fixed ways of the general type of

characters which his own predominant qualities caused him to affect.

These were grand characters, glorious in attributes, sublime in

manifestation, but in spite of all his art many of their traits were in

common, and there was something of monotony in the histrionic cortége,

electrifying as their scale of heroism and strength was. Could he but

have mastered in tragedy the spirituelle and free as he did the sombre

and tenacious, he had been perfect.

The same defect here admitted for his form and mind, it must be

confessed applied to his facial expression, gesture, and voice. As in

attitude he could express with immense energy everything slow and

tremendous in purpose or swift and resistless in execution, while the

more subtile and fleeting moods were baffled of a vent, so in look and

motion and tone he could give most vivid and sustained revelation to all

the great cardinal emotions of the human breast, the elemental

characteristics of our nature, but could not so well expose the more

elusive sentiments and delicate activities. As in his tone and limbs so

in his face and voice, the heavy style of gymnastic culture had fixed

itself in certain rigid moulds or lines, which could not break up in

endless forms accordant with endless moods, melting into one another,

all underlaid by that living unity which it is the end of a true

æsthetic gymnastic to produce. On occasion of his first professional

visit to London an English journal well said,—

“Mr. Forrest is in person most remarkable for symmetrical but somewhat

Herculean proportions. He might take the Farnese club and stand a

perfect model to painter or sculptor. His neck is also as a pillar of

strength, and his head is finely set on. His features are marked, but by

no means of a classic caste, nor are they well suited for histrionic

effect. Abundantly indicative of energy, they have not breadth of

character, or beauty, or variety of expression. Under strong excitement

they cut or contrast into sharp angularities, which cannot harmonize

with the grand in passion.”

Even the marvellous voice of Forrest—celebrated as it was for power,

tenderness, and manly sincerity—was prevailingly too dark or too

crashing. He articulated a certain range of thoughts and intoned a

certain range of feelings with superb correctness and force. Still, his

voice wanted a clarity and a bolted solidity corresponding with its

sombreness and its smashing violence. That is to say, while it

wonderfully expressed the ordinary contents of understanding and

passion, it relatively failed in delivering the contents of

intellectualized imagination and sentiment. His voice was astonishing in

volume of power, tearing fury of articulation, long-drawn cadences of

solemnity and affectional sweetness, but it was deficient in light

graceful play, brilliancy, concentrated and echoing sonority. For the

absolute perfection often claimed in its behalf its crashing gutturality

needed supplementing with that Italian quality of transparent, round,

elastic, ringing precision which delivers the words on the silent air

like crystal balls on black velvet.

The everlasting refrain in the cry of the weak or snarling critics of

Forrest was that he overdid everything,—striding, screeching, howling,

tearing passions to tatters, disregarding the sacred bounds of

propriety. That there was an apparent modicum of justice in this charge

must be admitted. And yet when all the truth is seen the admission makes

but a very small abatement from his merit. There is a comparatively raw

elemental language of human nature, such as is seen in the sneer, the

growl, the hiss, the grinding of the teeth, muscular contortion, which

is progressively restrained, sifted out and left behind with the advance

of polished dignity and refinement. In his impersonations Forrest

unquestionably retained more of this than is tolerated by the standard

of courtly fashion. His democratic soul despised courtly fashion and

paid its homage only at the shrine of native universal manhood. But, on

the other hand, it is unquestionable that these vigorous expressions

were perfectly in accordance with truth and nature as represented in men

of such exceptional strength and intensity as he and the types of

character he best loved to portray. He gave extraordinarily vigorous

expression to an extraordinarily wide gamut of passion because he

sincerely felt it, and thus nature informed his art with it. He did not

in cold blood overstep truth for effect, but he earnestly set forth the

truth as he conceived and felt it. With the mould and furnishing given

by his physique and soul for the great rôles he essayed, efforts were

easy and moderate which pale and feeble spindlings might well find

extravagant or shocking. The fault clearly is more theirs than his.

Power, sincerity, earnestness, are always respectable except to the

envious. His total career is proof enough how profound and conscientious

and popularly effective his sincerity, earnestness, and power were. But

he must needs run the scathing gauntlet which all bold originality has

to run. It is the same in all the arts. Nine-tenths of the current

criticism is worthless and contemptible, because ignorant or corrupt.

Beethoven was ridiculed as a madman and a bungler, Rossini sneered at as

a shallow trickster, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi denounced as

impostors, and Wagner systematically scouted as an insufferable

charlatan. As Lewes says, “The effort to create a new form is

deprecated, and a patient hearing denied. Repeat the old forms, and the

critics denounce the want of originality. Present new forms, and the

critics, deprived of their standards, denounce the heresy. It remains

with the public to discover real genius in the artist, and it does so by

its genuine response to his work.”

In reply to the accusation of overdoing a character by excessive force

of demonstration, Forrest might fairly have asked his critics, Overdone

for whom? For Boythorn or for Skimpole? For Coriolanus or for Launcelot

Gobbo? For Spartacus or for a dry-goods clerk? The precision with which

he conceived each of his leading characters, the patience with which he

elaborated all its elements into a consistent unity, the thoroughness

with which he assimilated it into his soul and identified himself with

it, and the unfaltering coherency and bold relief with which he enacted

it, carefully observing every condition of perspective and light and

shade and relative emphasis, placed his chief rôles among the most

complete specimens of the dramatic art in their way. And they forced

from his own generation the almost universal acknowledgment of his

solitary pre-eminence on the American stage. An anonymous writer justly

said of him in 1855, “An actor of the most positive qualities, decisive

in discrimination, pronounced in every attitude and phase, his

embodiments have sharp and stern definition. Therefore they challenge

with double force the most searching criticism, and invite while they

defy the sneers of less bold and more artificial schools. His

delineations are not mere cartoons, where the faults, like the virtues,

are elusive and shadowy. They are pictures finished with unmistakable

color, sharp expression of form, and a single, unerring meaning. Their

simplicity is such that if not grand they would be shallow commonplace:

just as it is but a step from Doric majesty to unrelieved and squat

ugliness. A modern school of actors is perplexing itself to get rid of

demonstration on the stage, to avoid scrupulously what is called ‘a

scene,’ to express passion by silent and gentlemanly bitterness, to

reduce all emotion to bloodless and suppressed propriety. Love is to be

made a morbid gnawing; anger clipped as close as hypocrisy; jealousy

corrode, but never bubble; joy be trim and well behaved; and madness

violent only at rare intervals. Not of such stuff as this are made the

Virginius, the Lear, the Metamora, and the Hamlet of Forrest. It is not

in his nature to polish passion until, like a sentence too much refined,

it loses all that is striking and natural. His anger is not conveyed off

like electricity by invisible agents. His moods are construed in his

audience by instinct, not by analysis. The moment he touches an

emotional key a major chord is struck that rings out clear and piercing

and brings back an echo equally distinct.”

The “London Times” said of the Metamora of Forrest, “It is a most

accurate delineation of Indian character. There is the awkward bluntness

that even approaches the comic and raises a laugh when it defies; and

there is, rising from behind this, the awful sense of right that makes

the Indian respected as a wronged man. The dull deportment which

petrifies the figurative language that flows lazily from the lips, and

the hurricane of passion that rages beneath it, are the two elements of

the character, and the manner in which they are combined by Mr. Forrest

renders his Metamora a most remarkable performance.” In contrast with

the foregoing fairness of statement the following specimen of base and

insolent ridicule is a literary curiosity:

“The _Metamora_ of Mr. Forrest is as much like a gorilla as an Indian,

and in fact more like a dignified monkey than a man. It has not the face

of a man, nor the voice nor the gait of a man. Du Chaillu’s description

of the gorilla would apply equally well to Forrest’s _Metamora_. We are

told by that celebrated traveller that upon the approach of an enemy

this ferocious baboon, standing upright on his hind legs, his eyes

dilated, his teeth gritting and grinding, gives vent to divers snorts

and grunts, and then, beating his breast fiercely with his hands till it

sounds like a muffled drum, utters a loud roar. What a singular

coincidence! The similarity need scarcely be pointed out. Substitute the

words ‘great tragedian’ for ‘ferocious baboon,’ omit the word ‘hind,’

and you have as accurate a description of Mr. Forrest in _Metamora_ as

any reasonable man could wish. The snorting, gritting, and especially

the beating of the breast and roaring, are so familiar to us, that we

could almost imagine that the tragedian and the traveller have met.”

One more example of the kind of “criticism” too common in the American

press will suffice:

“Can any man or woman who has paid a dollar to see Mr. Forrest in any of

his great characters recall any evidence in real life to substantiate

his assertions that such bellowing is natural? Did anybody ever see

anybody that looked as Mr. Forrest looks when he pretends to be

representing the passions of rage, hate, remorse? If Mr. Forrest ‘holds

the mirror up to nature,’ he first carefully scrawls over the face

certain hideous etchings, with only a small portion of surface here and

there left open for reflection. His Othello is a creature to be kicked,

instead of feared or loved, if met with in actual life. Is it credible

that any one was ever actually moved or interested in witnessing one of

this actor’s tedious and absurd performances?”

Ample reply to these brutal inquiries is afforded by the rapt silence,

the copious tears, and the all-shaking plaudits of the unprecedented

crowds, drawn for so long a series of years in every part of the country

by the magnetic impersonations which have secured him the first

illustrious place in the history of his country’s stage. But two or

three individual anecdotes possess interest enough to warrant their

preservation here.

While he was enacting the part of Iago to the Othello of Edmund Kean in

Albany one night, a stalwart canal-boatman was seated in the pit, so

near the stage that he rested his elbow on it close to the footlights.

Iago, in the scene where he had wrought so fearfully on the jealousy of

the Moor, crossed the stage near the boatman, and, as he passed, the man

looked savagely at him and hissed through his teeth while grinding them

together, “You damned lying scoundrel, I would like to get hold of you

after this show is over and wring your infernal neck!” When they met in

the dressing-room, Kean generously said to Forrest, “Young man, if my

acting to-night had received as high a compliment as that brawny fellow

in the pit bestowed on yours I should feel very proud. You made the

mimic show real to him, and I will tell you your acting merited the

criticism.”

Mr. Rees recalls among his interesting reminiscences an incident of

which he was a witness in New Orleans. Forrest was delivering the curse

in Lear with his wonted fierce and overwhelming vehemence. Mr. Rees

heard a strange sound proceeding from some one beside him, and, turning,

found, to his alarm, an elderly gentleman with his eyes fixed, his mouth

open, and a deathly paleness overspreading his face. Seizing him by the

shoulders and giving him a sudden jerk, he caused a reaction of the

blood. The gentleman gasped, heaved a deep sigh, and gazed around like

one awaking from a troubled sleep. The awful curse so awfully uttered,

which had taken away his breath, seemed still ringing in his ears. “One

moment more and I should have been a dead man,” he said. And, looking

towards the vacant stage, he asked, “Is that terrible old man gone?”

Hazlitt tells the traditional story that once when Garrick was acting

Lear the crown of straw which he wore was discomposed or fell off, which

happening to any common actor would have caused a burst of laughter; but

with him not the slightest notice was taken of the accident, but the

attention of the audience remained riveted. The same thing actually

befell Forrest, and gave the most astonishing proof of his absorbed

earnestness and magnetizing power. It was in the old Broadway Theatre,

near Anthony Street. He was performing Lear, with Barry, Davidge,

Conway, Whiting, Madame Ponisi, Mrs. Abbott, and other favorites in the

cast. In the last scene of the second act, when depicting the frenzy of

the aged monarch, whose brain, maddened by injuries, was reeling on its

throne, in the excitement of the moment Forrest tore the wig of whitened

hair from his head and hurled it some twenty feet towards the

footlights. The wig thus removed, there was revealed to the audience a

head of glossy raven locks, forming a singular contrast to the hoary

beard still fastened by a white cord to the actor’s chin. Not the least

embarrassment resulted either to actor or to spectators. Amidst the vast

assembly not a titter was heard, scarce a smile discerned. Enchained,

entranced by the power of the player, two thousand breathless spectators

gazed with bedimmed eyes on the mimic scene. Nor made he any pause or

hesitation. Still did that superb voice, so rich and grand in melody and

compass, speak forth in anguish and wrath the indignant denunciation of

the outraged king and father, making every heart tremble with his tones.

One of the actors on the stage at the time, in describing the event more

than twenty years afterwards, said that as he recalled the effect

produced by Forrest in that scene on the house, and on the players about

him, it seemed something superhuman.

In the tragedy of Cleopatra, by Marmontel, an asp had been made so

natural that it seemed alive. As it approached the queen its eyes

sparkled like fire, and it began to hiss. At the close of the scene one

asked a critic who sat by him how he liked the play. He replied, “I am

of the same opinion as the asp.” This is the case with the average sort

of critic, whose commonplace inferiority of soul seeks to revenge

itself, whose vanity or complacency seeks to exalt itself, by a

demeaning estimate of every artist of whom he writes. But, fortunately,

there are numerous instances of a nobler style, men equally just and

generous, who in all their judgments hold individual prejudices in

abeyance, and, actuated solely by public spirit and love of truth and of

art, follow the guidance not of whim or interest, but of general

principles, as exemplified in the great fixed types of character and

modified in their dialect variations. One writer of this kind has

admirably said,—

“Every actor has some particular excellence, which stamps his style in

everything he does. This in Forrest is the ever visible manliness of

spirit, and love of equality and liberty, which place his Damon,

Spartacus, Brutus, and all characters of a like nature so far above the

reach of other actors. He is always the _true man_, casting defiance in

the face of tyranny; his hand always open to the grasp of a friend,

resolute, generous, and faithful. This spirit is something which every

true heart, be its owner rich or poor, learned or unlearned, will always

acknowledge and worship as the noblest attribute of man; and here is the

real secret of Forrest’s success. The unlettered cannot but admire him

for this feature, while to those who can appreciate artistic finish and

detail, his acting must be an inexhaustible source of pleasure. After he

has gone the stage will feel his worth. Who has not wept over the last

act of Brutus? Who has not felt his ‘seated heart knock at his ribs’

while listening to the tragedian’s astonishing delivery in the third act

of Damon and Pythias? Who that has ever heard him exclaim in the last

act of the Gladiator, ‘There are no gods in heaven!’ can accuse him of

being coarse or vulgar? Indeed, it may be said of his acting in many

characters (as a Shaksperian commentator has said of Lear), ‘The genius

of antiquity bows before it, and moderns gaze upon it with awe.’”

The strong proclivity of professional artists to jealousy is as

proverbial as the tendency of the critic to attack and belittle. Forrest

suffered much from both. His imperious independence, not less than his

great success, provoked it, and he was maligned, spattered, and

backbitten sufficiently from the stage as well as from the office. If in

this respect he was an exception, it was merely in degree. The mortified

and envious actors of Drury Lane discussing Kean in the greenroom, one

of them sneeringly remarked, “They say he is a good harlequin.” “Yes,”

retorted honest Jack Bannister, “an extraordinary one; for he has leaped

over all your heads.” But the other side of this view was also true, and

Forrest numbered his most enthusiastic admirers in the dramatic

profession itself in all its ranks. They paid him many tributes from

first to last, on which he justly set the highest value. For when the

player is intelligent and candid, his special experience makes him the

most competent critic of a player. The extent to which the peculiar

style of Forrest took effect in producing imitators, conscious and

unconscious,—who often, it is true, unhappily, copied his least

praiseworthy points,—was a vast and unquestionable testimonial to his

original power. And in here leaving the subject of criticism, it is

enough, passing over the recorded praises of his genius by many leading

American actors, to set down the deliberate estimate of James E.

Murdock, himself a player of uncommon merit, as well as a man of refined

scholarly culture. Some one had made a degrading allusion to Forrest,

when Murdock replied, “Never had I been able to find a fitting

illustration of the massive and powerful acting of Forrest until, on a

visit to Rome some years ago, I stood before the mighty works of Michael

Angelo,—his Last Judgment, his gigantic Moses. Call it exaggerated if

you will. But there it is, beautiful in symmetry, impressive in

proportions, sublime in majesty. Such was Edwin Forrest when

representing the chosen characters of Shakspeare.” The illustration was

as exact as the spirit that prompted it was generous. It indicates

precisely the central attribute of the subject. For the powerful and

reposeful port, the elemental poise and swing of the colossal figures of

Angelo, reveal just what the histrionic pose and bearing of Forrest

revealed, namely, the preponderance in him of the universal over the

individual, the working of the forces of nature rather than the

straining of his will. This is what makes a personality memorable, for

it is contagious on others, and so invisibly descends the ages.