PLACE AND RANK OF FORREST AS A PLAYER.—THE CLASSIC, ROMANTIC, NATURAL,
AND ARTISTIC SCHOOLS OF ACTING.
Forrest being the most conspicuous and memorable actor America has
produced, it is desirable to fix the place and rank which belong to him
in the history of his profession. To do this with any clearness or with
any authority we must first penetrate to the central characteristics of
each of the great schools of acting, illustrate them by some examples,
and explain his relation to them.
Omitting the consideration of comedy and confining our attention to
tragedy, the most familiar distinction in the styles of dramatic
representation is that which divides them into the two schools called
Classic and Romantic or Ancient and Modern. But this enumeration is
altogether insufficient. It needs to be supplemented by two other
schools, namely, the Natural and the Artistic.
The antique theatres of Greece and Rome stood open in the air unroofed
to the sky, and were so vast, holding from ten thousand to two hundred
thousand spectators, that the players in order not to be belittled and
inaudible were raised on the high cothurnus and wore a metallic mask
whose huge and reverberating mouth augmented the voice. The word persona
is derived from _personare_, to sound through. Dramatis personæ
originally meant masks, and only later came to denote the persons of the
play. The conditions suppressed all the finer inflections of tone and
the play of the features. The actor had to depend for his effects on
measured declamation, imposing forms and attitudes, slow and appropriate
movements, simple pictures distinctly outlined and set in bold relief.
The characters principally brought forward were kings, heroes, prophets,
demi-gods, deities. It was the stately representation of superhuman or
exalted personages, full of exaggerated solemnity and pomp both in
bearing and in speech. All this naturally arose from the circumstances
under which the serious drama was developed,—the audience a whole
population, the player at a distance from them, in the scenery of
surrounding sea and mountains and the overhanging heaven. The traditions
of the Classic School came directly down to the subsequent ages and gave
their mould and spirit to the modern theatre. They have been kept up by
the long list of all the great conventional tragedians in their stilted
pose and stride and grandiose delivery, until the very word theatrical
has come to signify something overdone, unreal, turgid, hollow,
bombastic.
But when, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, in Italy, Spain,
Germany, France, and England, the drama revived and asserted itself in
such an extended and deepened popular interest,—when the theatres were
built on a smaller scale adapted for accurate seeing and hearing, and
the actors and the stage were brought close to the limited and select
audience,—when the plays, instead of dealing mainly with sublime themes
of fate and the tragic pomp and grandeur of monarchs and gods, began to
depict ordinary mortal characters and reflect the contents of real
life,—the scene changed from an enormous amphitheatre where before a
city of gazers giants stalked and trumpeted, to a parlor where a group
of ladies and gentlemen exhibited to a company of critical observers the
workings of human souls and the tangled plots of human life. The buskins
were thrown off and the masks laid aside, the true form and moving
displayed, living expression given to the features, and the changing
tones of passion restored to the voice. Then the mechanical in acting
gave way to the passionate; the Classic School, which was statuesque,
receded, and the Romantic School, which was picturesque, advanced.
The Classic School modulates from the idea of dignity. Its attributes
are unity, calmness, gravity, symmetry, power, harmonic severity. Its
symbol is the Greek Parthenon, whose plain spaces marble images people
with purity and silence. The Romantic School modulates from the idea of
sensational effect. Its attributes are variety, change, excitement,
sudden contrasts, alternations of accord and discord, vehement extremes.
Its symbol is the Christian Cathedral, whose complicated cells and
arches palpitate as the strains of the organ swell and die within them
trembling with sensibility and mystery. The ancient tragedian
represented man as a plaything of destiny, sublimely helpless in the
grasp of his own doings and the will of the gods. The chief interest was
in the evolution of the character, which had but one dominant chord
raised with a cunning simplicity through ever-converging effects to a
single overwhelming climax. The modern tragedian impersonates man as now
the toy and now the master of his fate, a creature of a hundred
contradictions, his history full of contrasts and explosive crises. The
chief interest is in the complications of the character and the
situations of the plot so combined as to keep the sympathies and
antipathies in varying but constant excitement. The vices of the former
school are proud rigidity and frigidity, pompous formality and
mechanical bombast. The vices of the latter school, on the other hand,
are incongruity, sensational extravagance, and affectation. The Classic
virtue is unity set in relief, but a mathematical chill was its fault.
The Romantic virtue is variety set in relief, but its bane was
inconsistency. The true tone of the heart, however, and the breathing
warmth of life which it brings to the stage more than atone for all its
defects and excesses.
The Romantic School early began to branch in two directions. In one it
degenerated into that Melodramatic Medley which, although it has a
nameless herd of followers, does not deserve to be called a school,
because it has no system and is but instinct and passion let loose and
run wild. In the other direction, joining with the traditional stream of
example from its Classic rival, the Romantic issued in what should be
named the Natural School. So the Classic School, too, forked in a double
tendency, one branch of which led to death in an icy formalism and
slavish subserviency to empiric rules, while the other led to the
perfecting of vital genius and skill in the rounded fulness of truth;
not truth as refracted in crude individualities but as generalized into
a scientific art. This higher result of the double issue of the Classic
School, joined with the higher result of the double issue of the
Romantic School, constitutes the Artistic School. The Natural School is
to be defined as having merely an empiric foundation, in it the contents
of human nature and their modes of manifestation being grasped by
intuition, instinct, observation, and practice, with no commanded
insight of ultimate principles. The Artistic School, on the contrary,
has a scientific foundation, in it the materials and methods being
mastered by a philosophical study which employs all the means of
enlightenment and inspiration systematically co-ordinated and applied.
Betterton was a noble representative of the classic style with a large
infusion of the romantic and the natural and with a strong determination
towards the artistic. Garrick had less of the first two and more of the
third and fourth. In the history of the British stage Garrick is an
epochal mark in the progressive displacement of theatricality by nature.
He ridiculed the noisy mechanical declamation of the stage and
introduced a quiet conversational manner. He agreed with the suggestion
of his friend Aaron Hill that Shakspeare, judging from his wise
directions to the players in Hamlet, must himself have been a fine
actor, but in advance of the taste of his time. Quin, Young, Kemble,
Conway, and Vandenhoff were examples of the classic type of acting,
while Barton Booth, Mossop, and Spranger Barry exemplified the more
passionate and impulsive romantic type. Macklin was a bold and
intelligent though somewhat coarse and hard representative of the
Natural School. Cooper and Cooke, each of whom had a personality of
great original power, veered between the three preceding schools, with a
large and varying element of each one infused in their impersonations.
But the fullest glory of the Romantic School was seen in Edmund Kean,
the coruscations of whose meteoric genius blazed out equally in the
sensational feats of the melodramatic and in the profound triumphs of
the natural. In France, Lekain, Talma, and Lemaître moved the stiff
traditions of their art many degrees towards the simplicity and the free
fire of truth, released the actor from his stilts, and did much to
humanize the strutting and mouthing stage-ideal transmitted by tyrannic
tradition.
The Classic and the Romantic School each had its separate reign. The
Melodramatic offshoot of the latter also had and still has its
prevalence, yielding its mushroom crops of empiric sensationalists. But
in the historic evolution of the art of acting there must come a
complete junction of two great historic schools in one person. The
plebeian Lekain, a working goldsmith, was not bred in the laps of
queens, as Baron said an actor ought to be; but, as Talma declared of
him, Nature, a nobler instructress than any queen, undertook to reveal
her secrets to him. And he broke the fetters of pedantry, repudiated the
sing-song or monotonous chant so long in vogue, and brought the
unaffected accents of the soul on the stage. Living, however, in the
very focus of monarchical traditions and habits, subject to every royal
and aristocratic influence, he could not establish in the eighteenth-
century-theatres of France the true Democratic School of Nature. This
was necessarily left for America and the nineteenth century. Edwin
Forrest was the man. By his burning depth and quick exuberance of
passion, his instinctive and cultivated democracy of conviction and
sentiment, his resolute defiance of old rules and customs, and his
constant recurrence to original observation of nature, it was easy for
him to master the Romantic School, while the spirit and mode of the
Classic School could not be difficult for one of his proud mind,
imposing physique, and severe self-possession. The intense bias he
caught from Kean in the melodramatic direction and the lofty bias
imparted to him by Cooper in the stately antique way were supplemented,
first, by his wild strolling experiences and training in the West and
South, secondly, by his patient self-culture and studies at the prime
fountain-heads of nature itself. In addition to this, he rose and
flourished in the midst of the latest and ripest development of all the
unconventional institutions and influences of the most democratic land
and people the world has yet known. And so he came to represent, in the
history of the drama, the moment of the fusion of the Classic and
Romantic Schools and their passage into the Natural School. As the
founder of this school in the United States he has been followed by a
whole brood of disciples,—such as Kirby, Neafie, Buchanan, and Proctor,—
who have reflected discredit on him by imitating his faultiness instead
of reproducing his excellence.
Substantially intellectual, impassioned, profoundly ambitious, with
flaming physical energies, with a very imperfect education, and few
social advantages, Forrest was early thrown into the company of men who
had great natural force of mind, and were frank and generous, but
comparatively unpolished in taste and reckless in habits, leading a life
of free amusement, conviviality, and passion often exploding in frenzied
jealousies, rages, duels, deaths. He resisted the temptations that would
have proved fatal to him, as they did to so many of his fellows, kept
his self-respect, and faithfully studied and aspired to something
better. He was exposed to the widest extremes of praise and abuse,—
petted without bounds and assailed without measure. He kept his head
unturned by either extravagance, though not uninjured, and swiftly
sprang into a vast and intense popularity. But under the circumstances
of the case—his burning impulsiveness and exuberant energy and lack of
early culture, his tempestuous associates, and the general rawness or
sensational eagerness of our population at that time—he would have been
a miracle if his acting had not been marred with faults, if he had not
been extravagant in displays of muscle and voice, if he had not been in
some degree what his hostile critics called a melodramatic actor. Yet
even then there were excellences in his playing, virtues of sincerity,
truthfulness, intelligence, electric strokes of fine feeling, exquisite
touches of beauty, confluences of light and shade, sustained unity of
design, which justified the admiration and gave ground for the excessive
eulogies he received. In melodrama the action is more physical than
mental, the exertions of the actor blows of artifice to produce an
effect rather than strokes of art to reveal truth. But in this sense
Forrest always, even in his crudest day, was more tragic than
melodramatic, his efforts explosions of the soul through the senses
rather than convulsions of the muscles,—vents of the mind and glimpses
of the spirit rather than contortions of the person, limbs, voice, and
face. And he went steadily on, reading the best books, studying himself
and other men, scrutinizing the unconscious acting of all kinds of
persons in every diversity of situation, sedulously trying to correct
errors, outgrow faults, gain deeper insight, and secure a fuller and
finer mastery of the resources of his art.
Consequently his career was a progressive one, and in his latest and
mentally best days he gave impersonations of the loftiest and most
difficult characters known in the drama which have hardly been
surpassed. The prejudices against him as a strutting and robustious
ranter who shivered the timbers of his hearers and tore everything to
tatters were largely unwarranted at the outset, and for every year
afterwards were a gross wrong. In the time of his herculean glory with
the Bowery Boys it may be true that his fame was bottomed on the great
lower classes of society, and made its strongest appeals through the
signs he gave of muscle, blood, and fire; yet there must have been
wonderful intelligence, pathos, and beauty, as well as naked power, to
have commanded, as his playing did at that early day, the glowing
tributes paid to him by Irving, Leggett, Bryant, Chandler, Clay, Conrad,
Wetmore, Halleck, Ingraham, Lawson, and Oakes. He always had sincerity
and earnestness. His audiences always felt his entrance as the
appearance of a genuine man among the hollow fictions of the stage. His
soul filled with power and passion by nature, without anything else was
greater than everything else could be without this. A celebrated English
actress generously undertook to train a young beginner, who was yet
unknown, to assume higher parts. Tutoring her in the rôle of a princess
neglected by the man she loved, the patroness could not get the pupil to
make her concern appear natural. “Heaven and earth!” she exclaimed.
“Suppose it real. Suppose yourself slighted by the man you devotedly
loved. How would you act then in real life?” The hopeless reply was, “I?
I should get another lover as quickly as I could.” The instructress saw
the fatal, fatal defect of nature. She shut the book and gave no more
lessons. Nature must supply the diamond which art polishes.
The youthful Forrest not only had nature in himself, but he was a
careful student of nature in others. He used to walk behind old men,
watching every movement, to attain the gait and peculiarities of age. He
visited hospitals and asylums, and patiently observed the phases of
weakness and death, the features and actions of maniacs. His reading was
a model of precision and lucidity in the extrication of the sense of the
words. One of his earlier critics said, “He grasps the meaning of a
passage more firmly than any actor we know. He discloses the idea with
exactness, energy, and fulness, leaving in this respect nothing to be
desired. His recitation is as clear as a mathematical demonstration.” He
had also an exquisite tenderness of feeling and utterance which
penetrated the heart, and a power of intense mournfulness or delicious
sadness which could always unseal the eyes of the sensitive. He studied
the different forms of actual death with such minute attention that his
stage deaths were so painfully true as to excite repugnance while they
compelled admiration. The physical accompaniments were too literally
exact. He had not yet learned that the highest artistic power lowers and
absorbs the minor details in its broad grasp and conspicuous portrayal
of the whole. The Natural School, as a rule, does not enough
discriminate between the terror that paralyzes the brain and the horror
that turns the stomach. In the part of Virginius, Forrest for some years
had the hollow blade of the knife filled with a red fluid which, on the
pressure of a spring as he struck his daughter, spurted out like blood
following a stab. A lady fainted away as he played this scene in
Providence, and, feeling that the act was artifice, and not art, he
never afterwards repeated it. So it was nature, and not art, when Polus,
the Roman tragedian, having to act a part of great pathos secretly
brought in the urn the ashes of his own son. In distinction equally from
artifice and from nature, art grasps the essential with a noble
disregard of the accidental, and finely subordinates what is particular
to what is general.
The Classic School modulates from the idea of grandeur or dignity; its
aim is to set unity in relief, and its attribute is power in repose. The
Romantic School modulates from the idea of effectiveness; its aim is to
set the contrasts of variety in relief, and its attribute is power in
excitement. The Natural School modulates from the idea of sincerity; its
aim is to set reality in relief, exhibiting both unity in variety and
variety in unity, and its attribute is alternation of power in repose
and power in excitement, according to the exigencies of character and
circumstance. The Artistic School modulates from the idea of truth; its
attributes are freedom from personal crudity and prejudice, liberation
of the faculties of the soul and the functions of the body, and an exact
discrimination of the accidental and the individual from the essential
and the universal; and its aim is to set in relief in due order and
degree every variety of character and experience, every style and grade
of spiritual manifestation, not as the workings of nature are made known
in any given person however sincere, but as they are generalized into
laws by a mastery of all the standards of comparison and classification.
Sincerity is individual truth, but truth is universal sincerity. “Why do
you enact that part in Macbeth as you do?” asked a friend of Forrest.
“Because,” he replied, “that is the way I should have done it had I been
Macbeth.” Ah, but the question is not how would a Forrestian Macbeth
have done it, but how would a Macbethian Macbeth do it? The sincere
Natural School of acting is hampered by the limiting of its vision to
the reflections of nature in the refracting individuality of the actor.
The true Artistic School purifies, corrects, supplements, and harmonizes
individual perceptions by that consensus of averages, or elimination of
the personal equation, which dispels illusions and reveals permanent
principles.
Forrest stands at the head of the Natural School as its greatest
representative, with earnest aspirations and efforts towards that final
and perfect School whose threshold he thoroughly crossed but whose
central shrine and crown he could not attain. He attained a solitary
supremacy in the Natural School, but could not attain it in the Artistic
School, because he had not in his mind grasped the philosophically
perfected ideal of that School, and did not in his preliminary practices
apply to himself its scientifically systematized drill. His ideal and
drill were the old traditional ones, based on observation, instinct, and
empirical study, modified only by his originality and direct recurrence
to nature. But Nature gives her empirical student merely genuine facts
without and sincere impulses within. She yields essential universal
truths and principles only to the student who is equipped with
rectifying tests and a generalizing method. Destitute of this, both
theoretically and practically, Forrest wanted that clearness and
detachment of the spiritual faculties and the physical articulations,
that consummated liberty and swiftness of thought and feeling and
muscular play, which are absolutely necessary to the perfect actor. He
was so great an artist that he gave his pictures background, foreground,
proportion, perspective, light and shade, gradations of tone, and unity;
but he fell short of perfection, because carrying into every character
too much of his own individuality, and not sufficiently seizing their
various individualities and giving their distinctive attributes an
adequate setting in the refinements of an intellectualized
representation of universal human nature.
The perfect artist—such an one as Delsarte was—will build a form of
character in the cold marble of pure intellect and then transfuse it
with passion till it blushes and burns. He will also reverse the
process, seize the spiritual shape born flaming from intuitive passion,
change it into critical perception, and deposit it in memory for
subsequent evocation at will. This is more than nature: it is art
superimposed on nature. Garrick, Siddons, Talma, Rachel, Salvini,
Forrest, were natural actors, and, more, they were artists. But the only
supreme master of the Artistic School known as yet, whose theoretic
ideal and actual training were perfect, was the great dramatic teacher
François Delsarte.
Nature is truth in itself. But it is the ideal operation of truth that
constitutes art. Acting, like all art, is truth seen not in itself, but
reflected in man. It should not exhibit unmodified nature directly. It
should hold up the mirror of the human soul and reveal nature as
reflected there. It is a Claude Lorraine mirror of intellectual
sympathy, softening, shading, toning,—just as Shakspeare says, begetting
a temperance which gives smoothness to everything seen. The fights of
the gladiators and the butcheries of the victims in the Roman
amphitheatre were not acting, but reality. The splendor of art was
trodden into the mire of fact. The error, the defect, the exaggeration
in the acting of Forrest, so far as such existed, was that sometimes
excess of nature prevented perfection of art. If certainly a glorious
fault, it was no less clearly a fault.
But as he advanced in years this fault diminished, and the polish of art
removed the crudeness of nature. Step by step the tricks into which he
had been betrayed revealed themselves to him as distasteful tricks, and
the sturdy impetuous honesty of his character made him repudiate them.
Too often in his earlier Lear he gave the impression that he was
buffeting fate and fortune instead of being buffeted by them; but slowly
the spiritual element predominated over the physical one, until the
embodiment stood alone in its balanced and massive combination of
sublimated truth, epic simplicity, exquisite tenderness, and tragic
strength. So his young Damon was greatly a performance of captivating
points and electrical transitions, stirring the audience to fever-heats
of fear and transport. No one who saw his wonderful burst of passion
when he learned that his slave had slain the horse that was to carry him
to the rescue of his friend and hostage—no one who saw his reappearance
before the block, stained and smeared with sweat and dust, crazed and
worn, yet sustained by a terrible nervous energy—could say that in any
class of passion he ever witnessed a truer or a grander thing. But the
conception was rather of a hot-blooded knight of the age of chivalry
than of a contemplative, resolute, symmetrical Greek senator. Gradually,
however, the maturing mind of the actor lessened the mere tumult of
sensational excitement, and increased and co-ordinated the mental and
moral qualities into a classical and climacteric harmony. One of the
most striking evidences of the progressive artistic improvement of
Forrest was the change in his delivery of the celebrated lament of
Othello, “Farewell the tranquil mind.” He used, speaking it in a kind of
musical recitative, to utter the words “neighing steed” in equine tones,
imitate the shrillness of “the shrill trump,” give a deep boom to the
phrase “spirit-stirring drum,” and swell and rattle his voice to portray
“the engines whose rude throats the immortal Jove’s dread clamors
counterfeit.” He learned to see that however effective this might be as
elocution it was neither nature nor art, but an artificiality; and then
he read the passage with consummate feeling and force, his voice broken
with passionate emotion but not moulded to any pedantic cadences or
flourishes. And yet it must be owned that after all his sedulous study
and great growth in taste, his too strong individuality would still crop
out sometimes to mar what else had been very nigh perfect. For instance,
there was, even to the last, an occasional touch of vanity that was
repulsive in those displays of voice which he would make on a favorite
sonorous word. In the line of the Gladiator, “We will make Rome howl for
this,” the boys would repeat as they went homeward along the streets his
vociferous and exaggerated downward slide and prolongation of the
unhappy word _howl_. And the same fault was conspicuous and painful in
the word _royal_, where Othello says,—
“’Tis yet to know,
(Which, when I know that boasting is an honour,
I shall promulgate,) I fetch my life and being
From men of royal siege.”
Despite this and other similar flaws, however, he had an intense
sincerity and force of nature, a varied truth blent in one consistent
whole of grand moral effectiveness, that place him high among the most
extraordinary players. His youthful Gladiator and Othello were as
impetuous, volcanic, and terrible as any of the delineations of
Frederick Lemaître. His mature Coriolanus had as imperial a stateliness,
as grand a hauteur, as massive a dynamic pomp, as were ever seen in John
Philip Kemble. His aged Lear was as boldly drawn and carefully finished,
as fearfully powerful in its general truth, and as wonderfully tinted,
toned, shaded, and balanced in its details, as any character-portrait
ever pictured by David Garrick. In the various parts he played in the
successive periods of his career he traversed the several schools of his
art,—except the last one, and fairly entered that,—and displayed the
leading traits of them all, the lava passion of Kean, the superb
pomposity of Vandenhoff, the statuesque kingliness of Talma, the
mechanically studied effects of Macready. His great glory was
“magnanimous breadth and generosity of manly temperament.” His faults
were an occasional slip in delicacy of taste, inability always to free
himself from himself, and the grave want of a swift grace and lightness
in the one direction equal to his ponderous weight and slowness in the
other. Thus, while in some respects he may be called the king of the
Natural School, he must be considered only a striking member, and not a
model, of the Artistic School. After his death his former wife, Mrs.
Sinclair, who was in every way an excellent judge of acting, and could
not be thought biased in his favor, was asked her opinion of him
professionally. She replied, “He was a very great artist. In some things
I do not think he ever had an equal; certainly not in my day. I do not
believe his Othello and his Lear were ever surpassed. His great
characteristics as an actor were power and naturalness.” In illustration
of this judgment the following anecdote, told by James Oakes, may be
adduced:
“I was visiting my friend in Philadelphia, and went to the theatre to
see his Virginius. He had said to me at sunset, ‘I feel like acting this
part to-night better than I ever did it before;’ and accordingly I was
full of expectation. Surely enough, never before in his life had I seen
him so intensely grand. His touching and sublime pathos made not only
women but sturdy men weep audibly. As for myself, I cried like a baby. I
observed, sitting in the pit near the stage, a fine-looking old
gentleman with hair as white as snow, who seemed entirely absorbed in
the play, so much so that the attention of Forrest was drawn to him, and
in some of the most moving scenes he appeared acting directly towards
him. In the part where the desperate father kills his daughter the
acting was so vivid and real that many ladies, sobbing aloud, buried
their faces in their handkerchiefs and groaned. The old gentleman above
alluded to said, in quite a distinct tone, ‘My God, he has killed her!’
Afterwards, when Virginius, having lost his reason, comes upon the stage
and says, with a distraught air, ‘Where is my daughter?’ utterly
absorbed and lost in the action, the old man rose from his seat, and,
looking the player earnestly in the face, while the tears were streaming
from his eyes, said, ‘Good God, sir, don’t you know that you killed
her?’ After the play Forrest told me that when he saw how deeply
affected the old gentleman was he came very near breaking down himself.
He esteemed it one of the greatest tributes ever paid him, one that he
valued more than the most boisterous applause of a whole audience.”
The following critical notice of the histrionic type and style of
Forrest is from the gifted pen of William Winter, whose dramatic
criticisms in the New York “Tribune” for the past ten years have been
marked by a knowledge, an eloquence, an assured grasp and a
conscientiousness which make them stand out in refreshing contrast to
the average theatrical commenting of the newspaper press. Making a
little allowance for the obvious antipathy and sympathy of the writer,
the article is both just and generous:
“Mr. Forrest has always been remarkable for his iron repose, his perfect
precision of method, his immense physical force, his capacity for
leonine banter, his fiery ferocity, and his occasional felicity of
elocution in passages of monotone and colloquy. These features are still
conspicuous in his acting. The spell of physical magnetism that he has
wielded so long is yet unbroken. The certainty of purpose that has
always distinguished him remains the same. Hence his popular success is
as great as ever. Strength and definiteness are always comprehensible,
and generally admirable. Mr. Forrest is the union of both. We may liken
him to a rugged old castle, conspicuous in a landscape. The architecture
may not be admired, but the building is distinctly seen and known. You
may not like the actor, but you cannot help seeing that he is the
graphic representative of a certain set of ideas in art. That is
something. Nay, in a world of loose and wavering motives and conduct, it
is much. We have little sympathy with the school of acting which Mr.
Forrest heads; but we know that it also serves in the great educational
system of the age, and we are glad to see it so thoroughly represented.
But, while Mr. Forrest illustrates the value of earnestness and of
assured skill, he also illustrates the law of classification in art as
well as in humanity. All mankind—artists among the rest—are distinctly
classified. We are what we are. Each man develops along his own grade,
but never rises into a higher one. Hence the world’s continual wrangling
over representative men,—wrangling between persons of different classes,
who can never possibly become of one mind. Mr. Forrest has from the
first been the theme of this sort of controversy. He represents the
physical element in art. He is a landmark on the border-line between
physical and spiritual power. Natures kindred with his own admire him,
follow him, reverence him as the finest type of artist. That is natural
and inevitable. But there is another sort of nature,—with which neither
Mr. Forrest nor his admirers can possibly sympathize,—that demands an
artist of a very different stamp; that asks continually for some great
spiritual hero and leader; that has crowned and uncrowned many false
monarchs; and that must for ever and ever hopelessly pursue its ideal.
This nature feels what Shelley felt when he wrote of ‘the desire of the
moth for the star, of the night for the morrow.’ To persons of this
order—and they are sufficiently numerous to constitute a large minority—
Mr. Forrest’s peculiar interpretations of character and passion are
unsatisfactory. They see and admire his certainty of touch, his profound
assurance, his solid symmetry. But they feel that something is wanting
to complete the artist. But enough of this. It is pleasanter now to
dwell upon whatever is most agreeable in the veteran’s professional
attitude. Mr. Forrest is one of the few thorough and indefatigable
students remaining to the stage. He has collected the best Shakspearean
library in America. He studies acting with an earnest and single-hearted
devotion worthy of all honor, worthy also of professional emulation.
Every one of his personations bears the marks of elaborate thought.
According to the measure of his abilities, Mr. Forrest is a true and
faithful artist; and if, as seems to us, the divine spark be wanting to
animate and glorify his creations, that lack, unhappily, is one that
nearly all artists endure, and one that not all the world can supply.”
And now it is left to show more clearly and fully, while doing justice
to what Forrest was in his own noble School of Nature, how he fell short
in that other School of Art which is the finest and greatest of all.
The voice of Forrest, naturally deep, rich, and strong, and developed by
constant exercise until it became astonishingly full and powerful,
ministered largely to the delight of his audiences and was a theme of
unfailing wonder and eulogy to his admirers. It may not be said which is
the most important weapon of the actor, the chest and neck, the arm and
hand, the face and head, or the voice; because they depend on and
contribute to one another, and each in its turn may be made the most
potent of the agents of expression. But if the primacy be assigned to
any organ it must be to the central and royal faculty of voice, since
this is the most varied and complex and intellectual of all the channels
of thought and emotion. A perfected voice can reveal almost everything
which human nature is capable of thinking or feeling or being, and not
only reveal it, but also wield it as an instrument of influence to
awaken in the auditor correspondent experiences. But for this result not
only an uncommon endowment by nature is necessary, but likewise an
exquisite artistic training, prolonged with a skill and a patience which
finally work a revolution in the vocal apparatus. Only one or two
examples of this are seen in a generation. The Italian school of
vocalization occasionally gives an instance in a Braham or a Lablache.
But such perfection in the speaking voice is even rarer than in the
singing. Henry Russell, whose reading and recitative were as consummate
as his song, and played as irresistibly on the feelings, had a voice of
perhaps the most nearly perfect expressive power known in our times. He
could infuse into it every quality of experience, color it with every
hue and tint of feeling, every light and shade of sentiment. To speak in
illustrative metaphor, he could issue it at will in such a varying
texture and quality of sound, such modified degrees of softness or
hardness, energy or gentleness, as would suggest bolts of steel, of
gold, of silver, or of opal; waves of velvet or of fire; ribbons of
satin or of crystal. His organism seemed a mass of electric sensibility,
all alive, and, in response to the touches of ideas within, giving out
fitted tones and articulations through the whole diapason of humanity,
from the very _vox angelica_ down to the gruff basses where lions roar
and serpents hiss. This is a result of the complete combination of
instinctive sensibility in the mind and developed elocutionary apparatus
in the body. The muscular connections of the thoracic and abdominal
structures are brought into unity, every part playing into all the parts
and propagating every vibration or undulatory impulse. At the slightest
volition the entire space sounding becomes a vital whole, all its walls,
from the roof of the mouth to the base of the inside, compressing and
relaxing with elastic exactitude, or yielding in supple undulation so as
to reveal in the sounds emitted precisely the tinge and energy of the
dominant thought and emotion. Then the voice appears a pure mental
agent, not a physical one. It seems to reside in the centre of the
breath, using air alone to articulate its syllables. Commanding, without
any bony or meaty quality, both extremes,—the thread-like diminuendo of
the nightingale and the stunning crash of the thunderbolt,—it gives
forth the whole contents of the man in explicit revelation.
This perfection of the Italian School has been confined to the lyric
stage. Perhaps the nearest examples to it on the dramatic stage were
Edmund Kean for a short time in his best period, and Forrest and Salvini
in our own day. Forrest had it not in its complete finish. He grew up
wild, as it were, on a wild continent, where no such consummate training
had ever been known. Left to himself and to nature, he did everything
and more than everything that could have been expected. But _perfection_
of voice, a detached vocal mentality which uses the column of
respiratory air alone as its instrument, sending its vibrations freely
into the sonorous surfaces around it, he did not wholly attain. His
voice seemed rather by direct will to employ the muscles to seize the
breath and shape and throw the words. He could crash it in sheeted
thunder better than he could hurl it in fagoted bolts, and he loved too
much to do it. In a word, his voice lacked, just as his character did,
the qualities of intellectualized spirituality, ethereal brilliancy,
aerial abstraction and liberty from its muscular settings and
environment. Had these qualities been fully his in body and soul, in
addition to what he was, he would have been the unrivalled paragon of
the stage. The fibres of the backbone and of the solar plexus were too
much intertangled with the fibres of the brain, the individual traits in
him were too closely mixed with the universal, for this. But
nevertheless, as it was, his voice was an organ of magnificent richness
and force for the expression of the elemental experiences of humanity in
all their wide ranges of intelligence, instinct, and passion. It could
do full justice to love and hate, scorn and admiration, desire,
entreaty, expostulation, remorse, wonder, and awe, and was most
especially effective in pity, in command, and in irony and sarcasm. His
profound visceral vitality and vigor were truly extraordinary. This grew
out of an athletic development exceptionally complete and a respiration
exceptionally deep and perfect. When Forrest under great passion or
mental energy spoke mighty words, his vocal blows, muffled thunder-
strokes on the diaphragmatic drum, used to send convulsive shocks of
emotion through the audience. The writer well remembers hearing him
imitate the peculiar utterance of Edmund Kean in his most concentrated
excitement. The sweet, gurgling, half-smothered and half-resonant
staccato spasms of articulation betokened the most intense state of
organic power, a girded and impassioned condition as terrible and
fascinating as the muscular splendor of an infuriated tiger. The voice
and elocution of Forrest were all that could be expected of nature and a
culture instinctive, observational, and intelligent, but irregular and
without fundamental principles. What was wanting was a systematic drill
based on ultimate laws and presided over by a consummate ideal, an ideal
which is the result of all the traditions of vocal training and triumphs
perfected with the latest physiological knowledge. Then he could have
done in tragedy what Braham did in song. Braham sang, “But the children
of Israel went on dry land.” He paused, and a painful hush filled the
vast space. Then, as if carved out of the solid stillness, came the
three little words, “through the sea.” The breath of the audience
failed, their pulses ceased to beat, as all the wonder of the miracle
seemed to pass over them with those accents, awful, radiant, resonant,
triumphant. He sat down amid the thunder of the whole house, while
people turned to one another wiping their eyes, and said, Braham!
If the voice is the soul of the drama, facial expression is its life. In
the latter as in the former Forrest had remarkable power and skill, yet
fell short of the perfection of the few supreme masters. He stood at the
head of the Natural School whose representatives achieve everything that
can be done by a genuine inspiration and laborious study, but not
everything that can be done by these conjoined with that learned and
disciplined art which is the highest fruit of science applied in a
systematic drill. Imitatively and impulsively, with careful study of
nature in others, and with sincere excitement of his own faculties of
thought and feeling, he practised faithfully to acquire mobility of
feature and a facile command of every sort of passional expression. He
succeeded in a very uncommon yet clearly limited degree. The familiar
states of vernacular humanity when existing in their extremest degrees
of intensity and breadth he could express with a fidelity and vigor
possible to but few. His organic portraitures of the staple passions of
man were exact in detail and stereoscopic in outline,—breathing
sculptures, speaking pictures. Pre-eminently was this true in regard to
the basic attributes and ground passions of our nature. His Gladiator in
his palmiest day of vital strength was something never surpassed in its
kind. Every stroke touched the raw of the truth, and it was sublime in
its terribleness. At one moment he stood among his enemies like a column
of rock among dashing waves; at another moment the storm of passion
shook him as an oak is shaken by the hurricane. And when brought to bay
his action was a living revelation, never to be forgotten, of a dread
historic type of man,—the tense muscles, the distended neck, the
obstructed breath, the swollen arteries and veins, the rigid jaws, the
orbs now rolling like the dilated and blazing eyes of a leopard, now
white and set like the ferocious deathly eyes of a bull, while smothered
passion seemed to threaten an actual explosion of the whole frame. It
was fearful, but it was great. It was nature at first hand. And he could
paint with the same clear accuracy the sweeter and nobler phases of
human nature and the higher and grander elements of experience. His
expressions of domestic affection, friendship, honesty, honor,
patriotism, compassion, valor, fortitude, meditation, wonder, sorrow,
resignation, were marked by a delicate finish and a pronounced
distinctness of truth seldom equalled. For example, when in Virginius he
said to his motherless daughter, “I never saw you look so like your
mother in all my life,” the pensive and effusive tenderness of his look
and speech irresistibly drew tears. When he said to her, “So, thou art
Claudius’s slave!” the combination in his utterance of love for her and
ironic scorn for the tyrant was a stroke of art subtile and effective
beyond description. And when, in his subsequent madness, he exhibited
the phases of insanity from inane listlessness to raving frenzy, when
his sinews visibly set as he seized Appius and strangled him to death,
when he sat down beside the corpse and his face paled and his eyes
glazed and his limbs slowly stiffened and his head dropped in death,—his
attitudes and movements were a series of vital sculptures fit to be
photographed for immortality.
Still, after every eulogy which can justly be paid him, it must be said
that he remained far from the complete mastership of his art in its
whole compass. Neither in conception nor execution did he ever grasp the
entire range of the possibilities of histrionic expression. Had he done
this he would not have stood at the head of the spontaneous and
cultivated Natural School, but would have represented that Artistic
School which practically still lies in the future, although its
boundaries have been mapped and its contents sketched by François
Delsarte. For instance, the feat performed by Lablache after a dinner at
Gore House, the representation of a thunder-storm simply by facial
expression, was something that Forrest would never have dreamed of
undertaking. Lablache said he once witnessed, when walking in the Champs
Elysées with Signor de Begnis, a distant thunder-storm above the Arc de
Triomphe, and the idea occurred to him of picturing it with the play of
his own features. He proceeded to do it without a single word. A gloom
overspread his countenance appearing to deepen into actual darkness, and
a terrific frown indicated the angry lowering of the tempest. The
lightnings began by winks of the eyes and twitchings of the muscles of
the face, succeeded by rapid sidelong movements of the mouth which
wonderfully recalled the forked flashes that seem to rend the sky, while
he conveyed the notion of thunder in the shaking of his head. By degrees
the lightnings became less vivid, the frown relaxed, the gloom departed,
and a broad smile illuminating his expressive face gave assurance that
the sun had broken through the clouds and the storm was over.
By a Scientifically Artistic School of acting is not meant, as some
perversely understand, a cold-blooded procedure on mechanical
calculations, but a systematic application of the exact methods of
science to the materials and practice of the dramatic art. It means an
art of acting not left to chance, to caprice, to imitation, to
individual inspiration, or to a desultory and indigested observation of
others and study of self, but based on a comprehensive accurately
formulated knowledge of the truths of human nature and experience, and a
perfected mastery of the instruments for their expression. To be a
worthy representative of this school one must have spontaneous genius,
passion, inspiration, and mimetic instinct, and a patient training in
the actual exercise of his profession, no less than if he belonged to
the Classic, the Romantic, or the Natural School; while in addition he
seizes the laws of dramatic revelation by analysis and generalization,
and gains a complete possession of the organic apparatus for their
display in his own person by a physical and mental drill minute and
systematic to the last degree. The Artistic School of acting is the
Classic, Romantic, and Natural Schools combined, purified, supplemented
and perfected by adequate knowledge and drill methodically applied.
Human nature has its laws of manifestation as well as every other
department of being. These laws are incomparably more elusive, obscure,
and complicated than those of natural philosophy, and therefore later to
gain formulation; but they are not a whit less real and unerring. The
business of the dramatic performer is to reveal the secrets of the
characters he represents by giving them open manifestation. Acting is
the art of commanding the discriminated manifestations of human nature.
If not based on the science of the structure and workings of human
nature it is not an art, but mere empiricism, as most acting always has
been.
Delsarte toiled forty years with unswerving zeal to transform the
fumbling empiricism of the stage into a perfect art growing out of a
perfect science. He was himself beyond all comparison the most
accomplished actor that ever lived, and might, had he pleased, have
raised whirlwinds of applause and reaped fortunes. But, with a heroic
abnegation of fame and a proud consecration to the lonely pursuit of
truth, he refused to cater to a public who craved only amusement and
would not accept instruction; and he died comparatively obscure, in
poverty and martyrdom. He mastered the whole circle of the sciences and
the whole circle of the arts, and synthetized and crowned them all with
an art of acting based on a science of man as comprehensive as the world
and as minute as experience. It is to be hoped that he has left works
which will yet be published in justification of his claim, to glorify
his valiant, neglected, and saintly life, and to enrich mankind with an
invaluable bequest.
Every form has its meaning. Every attitude has its meaning. Every motion
has its meaning. Every sound has its meaning. Every combination of
forms, attitudes, motions, or sounds, has its meaning. These meanings
are intrinsic or conventional or both. Their purport, value, rank,
beauty, merit, may be exactly determined, fixed, defined, portrayed. The
knowledge of all this with reference to human nature, methodically
arranged, constitutes the scientific foundation for dramatic
representation. Then the art consists in setting it all in free living
play. The first thing is a complete analysis and synthesis of the
actions and reactions of our nature in its three divisions of
intelligence, instinct, and passion; mind, heart, and conscience;
mentality, vitality, and morality. The second thing is a complete
command of the whole apparatus of expression, so that when it is known
exactly what the action of each muscle or of each combination of muscles
signifies, the actor may have the power to effect the requisite muscular
adjustment and excitation. The first requisite, then, is a competent
psychological knowledge of the spiritual functions of men, with a
sympathetic quickness to summon them into life; and the second, a
correspondent knowledge of anatomy and physiology applied in a gymnastic
drill to liberate all parts of the organism from stiffness and stricture
and unify it into a flexible and elastic whole.
The æsthetic gymnastic which Delsarte devised, to perfect the dramatic
aspirant for the most exalted walks of his profession, was a series of
exercises aiming to invigorate the tissues and free the articulations of
the body, so as to give every joint and muscle its greatest possible
ease and breadth of movement and secure at once the fullest liberty of
each part and the exactest co-operation of all the parts. When the pupil
had finished this training he was competent to exemplify every physical
feat and capacity of man. Furthermore, this teacher arranged certain
gamuts of expression for the face, the practice of which would give the
brows, eyes, nose, and mouth their utmost vital mobility. He required
his pupil to sit before a mirror and cause to pass over his face, from
the appropriate ideas and emotions within, a series of revelatory
pictures. Beginning, for instance, with death, he ascended through
idiocy, drunkenness, despair, interest, curiosity, surprise, wonder,
astonishment, fear, and terror, to horror; or from grief, through pity,
love, joy, and delight, to ecstasy. Then he would reverse the passional
panorama, and descend phase by phase back again all the way from ecstasy
to despair and death. When he was able at will instantly to summon the
distinct and vivid picture on his face of whatever state of feeling
calls for expression, he was so far forth ready for entrance on his
professional career.
Such is the training demanded of the consummate actor in that Artistic
School which combines the excellences of the three preceding schools,
cleansing them of their excesses and supplying all that they lack. The
prejudice against this sort of discipline, that it must be fatal to all
charm of impulse and fire of genius and reduce everything to a frigid
construction by rule, is either a fruit of ignorance or an excuse of
sloth. It is absurd to suppose that the perfecting of his mechanism
makes a man mechanical. On the contrary it spiritualizes him. It is
stiff obstructions or dead contractions in the organism that approximate
a man to a marionette. It is a ridiculous prejudice which fancies that
the strengthening, purification, and release of the organism from all
strictures destroys natural life and replaces it with artifice, or
banishes the fresh play of ideas and the surprising loveliness of
impulse by reducing the divine spontaneity of passion to a cold set of
formulas. The Delsartean drill so far from preventing inspiration
invites and enhances it by preparing a fit vehicle and providing the
needful conditions. The circulating curves of this æsthetic gymnastic,
whose soft elliptical lines supersede the hard and violent angles of the
vulgar style of exercise, redeem discordant man from his fragmentary
condition to a harmonious unity. He is raised from the likeness of a
puppet towards the likeness of a god. Then, as the influence of thought
and feeling breathes through him, the changes of the features and the
movement of the limbs and of the different zones of the body are so
fused and interfluent that they modulate the flesh as if it were
materialized music.
“Unmarked he stands amid the throng,
In rumination deep and long,
Till you may see, with sudden grace,
The very thought come o’er his face,
And by the motion of his form
Anticipate the bursting of the storm,
And by the uplifting of his brow
Tell where the bolt will strike, and how.”
Delsarte could shrink and diminish his stature under the shrivelling
contraction of meanness and cowardice or suspicion and crime until it
seemed dwarfed, or lift and dilate it under the inspiration of grand
ideas and magnanimous passions until it seemed gigantic. Every great
emotional impulse that took possession of him seemed to melt all the
parts of his organism together into a flexible whole with flowing
joints, and then his fused movements awed the spectator like something
supernatural. His face was a living canvas on which his soul painted the
very proportions and hues of every feeling. His voice in tone and
inflection took every color and shadow of thought and emotion, from the
sombre cloudiness of breathing awe to the crystalline lucidity of
articulating intellect. His inward furnishing even richer than the
outward, he would sit down at the piano, in a coarse overcoat, in a room
with bare walls, and, as he acted and sang, Œdipus, Agamemnon, Orestes,
Augustus, Cinna, Pompey, Robert le Diable, Tartuffe, rose before you and
revealed themselves in a truth that appeared almost miraculous and with
a power that was actually irresistible. It was no reproduction by
painful mimicry of externals, no portrayal by elaborate delineation of
details. It was positive identification and resurrection. It was a real
recreation of characters in their ensemble of being, and an exhibited
reanimation of them by imaginative insight and sympathetic assimilation.
Most wonderful of all, and greatest proof of the value of his system of
drill, he could catch a part by inspiration and go through it under the
automatic direction of nature, and then deliberately repeat the same
thing by critical perception and conscious free will; and he could also
reverse the process with equal ease, critically elaborate a rôle by
analysis and then fix it in the nerves and perform it with inspired
spontaneity. This was the highest possible exemplification of the
dramatic art by the founder of its only perfect school. It was Classic,
because it had the greatest dignity, repose, power, symmetry, unity. It
was Romantic, because it was full of the most startling effects,
beautiful combinations, sudden changes, surprising contrasts, and
extremes. It was Natural, because exactly conformed to the facts of
experience and the laws of truth as disclosed by the profoundest study
of nature. And above all it was supremely Artistic, because in it
intuition, instinct, inspiration, intelligence, will, and educated
discipline were reconciled with one another in co-operative harmony, and
everything was freely commanded by conscious knowledge and not left to
accident.
True art is never merely an imitation of nature, nor is it ever purely
creative; but it is partly both. It arises from the desire to convert
conceptions into perceptions, to objectify the subjective in order to
enhance and prolong it in order to revive it at will and impart it to
others. Art, Delsarte said, with his matchless precision of phrase, is
feeling passed through thought and fixed in form. Grace without force is
the product of weakness or decay, and can please none save those whose
sensibilities are drained. Force without grace is like presenting a
figure skinned or flayed, and must shock every one who has taste. But
grace in force and force in grace, combined impetuosity and moderation,
power revealed hinting a far mightier power reserved,—this is what
irresistibly charms all. This is what only the very fewest ever attain
to in a superlative degree; for it requires not only richness of soul
and spontaneous instinct, and not only analytic study and systematic
drill, but all these added to patience and delicacy and energy. The
elements of the art of acting are the applied elements of the science of
human nature; yet on the stage those elements are different from what
they are in life in this respect, that there they are set in relief,—
that is, so systematized and pronounced as to give them distinct
prominence. That is precisely the difference of art from nature. It
heightens effect by the convergence of co-operative agencies. For
instance, when the variations of the speech exactly correspond with the
changes of the face, how the effect of each is heightened! Aaron Hill
said of Barton Booth that the blind might have seen him in his voice and
the deaf have heard him in his visage. Of those in whom nature is equal
he who has the greater art will carry the day, as of those in whom art
is equal he who has more nature must win. A lady said, “Had I been
Juliet to Garrick’s Romeo, so ardent and impassioned was he, I should
have expected that he would come up to me in the balcony; but had I been
Juliet to Barry’s Romeo, so tender, so eloquent and seductive was he,
that I should certainly have gone down to him.” In these two great
actors nature and art contended which was stronger. Very different was
it with Macready and Kean, of whom it used to be said respectively, “We
go to see Macready in Othello, but we go to see Othello in Kean.” The
latter himself enjoyed, and delighted others by showing, a transcript of
the great world of mankind in the little world of his heart. The
former,—
“Whate’er the part in which his cast was laid,
Self still, like oil, upon the surface played.”
Talma said, “In whatever sphere fate may have placed a man, the grand
movements of the soul lift him into an ideal nature.” The greatness of
every truly great actor shows itself in the general ideal which
characterizes his embodiments. If he has any originality it will publish
itself in his ideal. Now, while most actors are not only second-rate but
also second-hand, Forrest certainly was original alike as man and as
player. He was distinctively original in his personality, original and
independent in the very make of his mind and heart. This subtle and
striking originality of personal mind and genius was thoroughly leavened
and animated by a distinctively American spirit, the spirit generated by
the historic and material conditions of American society and the social
and moral conditions of American life. He was original by inherited
idiosyncrasy, original by his natural education, original by his self-
moulding culture which resented and shed every authoritative
interference with his freedom and every merely traditional dictation. He
was original in going directly to the instructions of nature and in
drawing directly from the revelations of his own soul. He was original
in a homely intensity of feeling and in a broad and unsophisticated
intelligence whose honest edges were never blunted by hypocritical
conformity and falsehood. And above all, as an actor he exhibited his
originality in a bearing or style of manners thoroughly democratic in
its prevailing scornful repudiation of tricks or squeamish nicety, and a
frank reliance on the simplicity of truth and nature in their naked
power.
Now, precisely the crowning originality of Forrest as an actor, that
which secures him a distinctive place in the historic evolution of the
drama, is that while the ideals which the great actors before him
impersonated were monarchical, aristocratic, or purely individual, he
embodied the democratic ideal of the intrinsic independence and royalty
of man. Give Kemble only the man to play, he was nothing; give him the
paraphernalia of rank and station, he was imposing. But Forrest, a born
democrat, his bare feet on the earth, his bare breast to his foes, his
bare forehead to the sky, asked no foreign aid, no gilded toggery, no
superstitious titles, to fill the theatre with his presence and thrill
the crowd with his spell. There is an egotism of pride, an egotism of
vanity, an egotism of conceit, all of which, based in want of sympathy,
are contemptible and detestable. Forrest was remarkable for a tremendous
and obstinate pride, but not for vanity or conceit; and his sympathy was
as deep and quick as his pride, so that he was not an odious egotist,
although he was imperious and resentful. Many distinguished players have
trodden the stage as gentlemen, Forrest trod it as man. The ideal of
detachment, authority throned in cold-blooded self-regard, has been
often set forth. He exhibited the ideal of identification, burning
honesty of passion and open fellowship. The former is the ideal of
polite society. The latter is the ideal of unsophisticated humanity.
Macready asserted himself in his characters; Forrest asserted his
characters in himself. Both were self-attached, though in an opposite
way, and thus missed the perfect triumph which Delsarte achieved by
abolishing self and always resuscitating alive in its pure integrity the
very truth of the characters he essayed. Macready as an elaborate and
frigid representative of titular kings was a sovereign on the boards, a
subject elsewhere. Forrest as an inborn representative of natural kings
was a true sovereign in himself everywhere and always. The former by his
petulant pride and pomp and his drilled exemption from the sway of the
sympathies secured the approval of a sensitive and irritable _nil
admirari_ class. The latter by the fulness of his sympathies and his
impassioned eloquence as the impersonator of oppressed races awakened
the enthusiastic admiration of the people. A line, said an accomplished
critic, drawn across the tops of the points of Macready would leave
Forrest below in matters of mechanical detail, but would only cut the
bases of his pyramids of power and passion. His chief rôles were all
embodiments of the elemental vernacular of man in his natural virtue and
glory rather than in the refinements of his choicest dialects. Always
asserting the superiority of man to his accidents, he will be remembered
in the history of the theatre as the greatest democrat that up to his
time had ever stepped before the footlights. He had sincerity,
eloquence, power, nobleness, sublimity. His want was beauty, charm. The
epithets strong, fearless, heroic, grand, terrible, magnificent, were
fully applicable to him; but the epithets bright, bold, brisk, romantic,
winsome, graceful, poetic, were inapplicable. In a word, though
abounding in the broad substance of sensibility and the warm breath of
kindness, he lacked the artificial polish and finesse of etiquette; and
consequently the under-current of dissent from his fame, the murmur of
detraction, that followed him, was the resentment of the conventional
society whose superfine code he neglected and scorned.
For this penalty, however, his sincerity and direct reliance on nature
gave ample compensation in making him capable of inspiration. Adherence
to mere authority, tradition, usage, or dry technicality, is fatal to
inspiration. This carried to an extreme makes the most cultivated player
a mere professor of postures and stage mechanics,—what the French called
Macready, “_L’artiste de poses_.” There is an infinite distance from
such external elaboration to the surprises of feeling which open the
soul directly upon the mysteries of experience, send cold waves of awe
through the nerves, and convert the man into a sublime automaton of
elemental nature, or a hand with which God himself gesticulates. Then
the performing of the actor originates not on the volitional surfaces of
the brain, but in the dynamic deeps of the spine and ganglia, and he
seems an incarnate fagot of thunderbolts. Then the gesticulating arms,
modulated by the profound spinal rhythms, become the instruments of a
visible music of passion mysteriously powerful. For all action from the
distal extremities of the nerves is feverish, twitching, anxious, with a
fidgety and wasteful expensiveness of force, while action from their
central extremities is steady, harmonious, commanding, economical of
force. The nearer to the central insertions of the muscles the initial
impulses take effect, so much the longer the lines they fling, the
acuter the angles they subtend, the vaster the segments they cut and the
areas they sweep. This suggests to the imagination of the spectator,
without his knowing the meaning or ground of it, a godlike dignity and
greatness. Forrest was full of this hinted and hinting power. It was the
secret of his loaded personality and magnetizing port.
Art, while it is not pure and simple nature, is not anything substituted
for nature nor anything opposed to nature. It is something superadded to
nature, which gives the artist supreme possession of his theme, supreme
possession of himself, and supreme command of his treatment of his
theme. It is a grasped generalization of the truths of nature freed from
all coarse, crude, and degrading accidents and details. The consummate
artist, observing the principle or law, does everything easily; but the
empiric, striving at the facts, does everything laboriously. Feeling
transmuted into art by being passed through thought and fixed in form is
transferred for its exemplification from the volition of the cerebral
nerves to the automatic execution of the spinal nerves. This does not
exhaust the strength, but leaves one fresh after apparently the most
tremendous exertions. Talma, Rachel, Salvini, did not sweat or fatigue
themselves, however violent their action seemed. But when feeling,
instead of having been passed through thought and fixed in form for
automatic exhibition, is livingly radiated into form by the will freshly
exerted each time, the exaction on the forces of the organism is great.
It is then nature in her expensiveness that is seen, rather than the art
which secures the maximum of result at the minimum of cost. It was said
of Barry that excessive sensibility conquered his powers. His heart
overcame his head; while Garrick never lost possession of himself and of
his acting. The one felt everything himself before he made his audience
feel it; the other remained cool, and yet by his kingly self-control
forced his audience to feel so much the more. In his direct honest
feeling and exertion Forrest paid the expensive penalty of the Natural
School. After playing one of his great parts he was drenched with
perspiration and blew off steam like a locomotive brought to rest. The
nerves of his brain and the nerves of his spinal cord were
insufficiently detached in their activities, too much mixed. Like Edmund
Kean, he was as a fusee, and the points of the play were as matches; at
each electric touch his nerve-centres exploded and his muscles struck
lightning. But in the Artistic School the actor is like a lens made of
ice, through which the sunbeams passing set on fire whatever is placed
in their focus. The player who can pour the full fire of passion through
his soul while his nerves remain firm and calm has command of every
power of nature, and reaches the greatest effects without waste. But, as
Garrick said,—
“In vain will Art from Nature help implore
When Nature for herself exhausts her store.”
The essence of the dramatic art or the mission of the theatre is the
revelation of the different grades of character and culture as exhibited
in the different styles of manners, so that the spectator may assign
them their respective ranks. The skill or bungling of the actor is shown
by the degrees of accuracy and completeness which mark his portraitures.
And the predominant ideal illustrated in his impersonations betrays the
personal quality and level of the actor himself.
Manners are the index of the soul, silently pointing out its rank. All
grades of souls, from the bottom of the moral scale to its top, have
their correspondent modes of behavior which are the direct expression of
their immediate states and the reflex revelation of their permanent
characters. The principle of politeness or good manners is the law of
the ideal appropriation of states of feeling on recognition of their
signs. Sympathy implies that when we see the sign of any state in
another we at once enter into that state ourselves. Interpreting the
sign we assimilate the substance signified and thus reflect the
experience. Everything injurious, repulsive, or petty, pains, lessens,
and lowers us. The signs of such states therefore are to be withheld.
But the signs of beautiful, powerful, sublime, and blessed states enrich
and exalt those who recognize them and reproduce their meaning. The
refinement and benignity of any style of manners are measured by the
largeness and purity of the sphere of sympathetic life it implies, the
generosity of its motives, and the universality of its objects. The
vulgarity and odiousness of manners are measured by the coarseness of
sensibility, the narrow egotism, the contracted sphere of consciousness
implied by them. Thus the person who fixes our attention on anything
spiritual, calming, authoritative, charming, or godlike, confers a
favor, ideally exalting us above our average level. But all such acts as
biting the nails or lips, taking snuff, smoking a cigar, talking of
things destitute of interest save to the vanity of the talker, are bad
manners, because they draw attention from dignified and pleasing themes
and fasten it to petty details, or inflict a severe nervous waste on the
sensibility that refuses to be degraded by obeying their signals.
Now, there are four generic codes of manners in society, each of which
has its specific varieties, and all of which are exemplified in the
theatre,—that great explicit “mirror of fashion and mould of form.”
First there is the code of royal manners, the proper behavior of kings.
Kings are all of one family. They are all free, neither commanding one
another nor obeying one another, each one complete sovereign in himself
and of himself. The sphere of his personality is hedged about by a
divinity through which no one ventures to peep for dictation or
interference. In his relations with other persons the king is not an
individual, but is the focal consensus of the whole people over whom he
is placed, the apex of the collective unity of the nation. He therefore
represents public universality and no private egotism. He is the symbol
of perfect fulfilment, wealth, radiance, joy, peace. By personal will he
imposes nothing, exacts nothing, but like the sun sheds impartially on
all who approach him the golden largess of his own complete
satisfaction. That is the genuine ideal of royal manners. But the actual
exemplification is often the exact opposite,—an egotistic selfishness
pampered and maddened to its very acme. Then the formula of kingly
behavior is the essence of spiritual vulgarity and monopolizing
arrogance, namely, I am the highest of all: therefore every one must bow
to me and take the cue from me! Then, instead of representing the
universal, to enrich all, he degrades the universal into the individual,
to impoverish all. Then his insolent selfishness at the upper extreme
produces deceit and fawning at the lower extreme. The true king imposes
nothing, asks nothing, takes nothing, though all is freely offered him,
because he radiates upon all the overflow of his own absolute
contentment. Every one who sees him draws a reflected sympathetic
happiness from the spectacle of his perfect happiness.
The formula expressed in truly royal manners is, I am so contented with
the sense of fulfilment and of universal support that my only want is to
see every one enjoying the same happiness! In a perfected state the
formula of democratic manners will be identical with this. For then the
whole community with its solidarity of wealth and power will be the
sustaining environment whereof each individual is a centre. But as yet
the private fortune of each man is his selfishly isolated environment;
and the totality of individual environments bristles with hostility,
while every one tries to break into and absorb the neighboring ones.
The code of aristocratic manners, too, has its sinister or false
development as well as its true and benign development. The formula
which, in its ungenial phase, it is forever insinuating through all its
details of demeanor, when translated into plain words is this: I am
superior to you and therefore command you! But the real aristocratic
behavior does not say the inferior must obey the superior. On the
contrary, it withholds and suppresses the sense of superiority, seems
unconscious of it, and only indirectly implies it by the implicit
affirmation, I am glad to be able to bless and aid you, to comfort,
strengthen, and uplift you! The false aristocrat asserts himself and
would force others to follow his lead. The true aristocrat joyously
stoops to serve. His motto is not, I command, but Privilege imposes
obligation.
The twofold aspect of plebeian manners affords a repetition of the same
contrast. The plebeian manner, discontented and insurrectionary, says,
You are superior to me, and therefore I distrust, fear, and hate you!
The plebeian manner, submissive and humble or cringing, says, I am
inferior to you, and therefore beseech your favor, deprecating your
scorn! But the plebeian manner, honest, manly, and good, says, You are
superior to me, and I am glad of it, because, looking up to you with
admiration and love, I shall appropriate your excellence and grow like
you myself!
Finally, we come to the democratic code of manners. The spurious formula
for democratic behavior is, I am as good as you! This is the
interpretation too common in American practice thus far. It is the
insolent casting off of despotic usages and authorities, and the
replacing them with the defiant protest of a reckless independence. I am
as good as you, and therefore neither of us will have any regard or
deference for the other! But in wide distinction from this impolite and
harsh extreme, the formula implied in the genuine code of democratic
manners is, We are all amenable to the same open and universal standard
of right and good, and therefore we do not raise the question at all of
precedency or privilege, of conscious superiority or inferiority, but we
leave all such points to the decision of the facts themselves, and are
ready indifferently to lead or to follow according to the fitness of
intrinsic ranks!
Spurious democracy would inaugurate a stagnant level of mediocrities, a
universal wilderness of social carelessness and self-assertion. Genuine
democracy recognizes every man as a monarch, independent and supreme in
his interior personal sphere of life, but in his social and public life
affiliated with endless grades of superiors, equals, and inferiors, all
called on to obey not the self-will of one another, or of any majority,
but to follow gladly the dictates of those inherent fitnesses of
inspiration from above and aspiration from below which will remain
eternally authoritative when every unjust immunity and merely
conventional or titular rank has been superseded. This was the style of
manners, this was the implied formula of behavior, embodied by Forrest
in all his great rôles. Affirming the indefeasible sovereignty of the
individual, he neither wished to command nor brooked to obey other men
except so far as the intrinsic credentials of God were displayed in
them. Thus, under every accidental or local diversity of garb and
bearing, he stood on the American stage, and stands and will stand in
front there, as the first sincere, vigorous, and grand theatrical
representative of the democratic royalty of man.