CHAPTER XXII.

FORREST IN SEVEN OF HIS CHIEF ROLES.—CHARACTERS OF IMAGINATIVE

PORTRAITURE.—RICHELIEU.—MACBETH.—RICHARD.—HAMLET.—CORIOLANUS.—OTHELLO.—

LEAR.

At the date of this writing, although there are many good actors in

America, there are none who are generally recognized as great. There

also appears for the time to be a decline in the popular taste for the

serious and lofty drama, and a general preference for sensational,

comic, and spectacular plays. In vain does the call-boy summon the

sublime characters and parts that entranced the audiences of a bygone

generation. They seem to have died with the strong and stately actors

who gave them such noble life and motion. The sceptred pall of gorgeous

tragedy has vanished from the stage, it may almost be said, and for the

poet and the thinker have been substituted the carpenter, the scene-

painter, the upholsterer, and the milliner. Nudity, prurience, broad

appeals to sensual passion, extravagant glare and movement and noise,

have largely thrust aside tragic action, romantic sentiment, and moral

grandeur. Even though the depravation be but temporary, marking a

transitional crisis, it is a feature unpleasant to contemplate. And it

may be of some service, not only in completing the picture of the life

of Forrest, but likewise in revealing the higher social uses and lessons

of his art, to give a description of the chief of those massive and

heroic rôles he loved best to fill in the ripest period of his

professional career. The accounts must be brief and fragmentary, and

very inadequate at the best. To preserve or re-create the full

impression of a great actor in a great part, he should be sculptured in

every attitude and movement, with every gesture and look, and painted in

every tone, emphasis, and inflection of his voice. Yet, without

attempting this impossible feat in the case of Forrest, enough may be

rapidly indicated in general sketches to enable intelligent readers to

form some approximate conception of his leading impersonations and of

the influences they were calculated to exert.

The pictures of the acting of Forrest now to be essayed must be

tantalizingly faint and imperfect, in the absence of an art to translate

and reproduce all the other eight dramatic languages of human nature in

the one language of words. But to appreciate even these poor attempts at

their worth one preliminary condition on the part of those who read is

pre-eminently necessary. They must remember that Forrest was one of

those rare men profusely endowed with that mysterious power to interest

and impress which is popularly called personal magnetism. He was

signally charged with that secret spell, that loaded and swaying

fascination, which all feel though no one understands, which

contagiously works on those who come within its reach, seizing

curiosity, enlisting sympathy, or evoking repulsion. The distinguishing

differences of men in this respect are indescribable and fatal. No art

can efface them or neutralize them. For an artist who makes direct

personal appeal to an audience the having or the not having this

magnetic gift is as the hidden core of destiny. With it obstacles are

removed as by magic, friends won, enemies overthrown, and wherever the

possessor sails through the community he leaves a wide phosphorescent

wake of social interest and gossip. Without it, though flags are waved

and trumpets are blown and all pains taken to make an impression and

secure a victorious career, yet the efforts prove futile and public

attention wanders listlessly away. One seems created to be the victim of

perpetual slights, dry, trivial, destitute of charm, nobody caring

anything about him; while another, freighted with occult talismans,

strangely interests everybody. The recognition of such contrasts is one

of the most familiar facts of experience. These phenomena are suggested

by the word sphere as applied to the characteristic influence of

personality. The spiritual sphere or signalling power of an individual

is described as attractive or repulsive, strong or weak, vast or little,

harmonious or discordant. The mystery is not so blankly baffling as it

has been supposed, but is in a large degree susceptible of rational

explication.

Out of a hundred accomplished singers, beautiful in person and

marvellous in voice, one prima donna shall surpass all the rest in

fascinating the public. There is a nameless distinction in her bearing,

there is an indescribable charm in her song, which bewitch and enthrall,

are her irresistible passports to public enthusiasm, and make her sure

of a long and dazzling career; while one after another of the rest with

desperate exertions and fitful plaudits disappear. Here is a tragedian

who exercises the same spell and quickly obscures his distanced rivals.

He advances on the stage with a quiet step, his mantle negligently

crossing his breast, his countenance calm. Without a start, without a

gesture, without a word, he simply is and looks. Yet, as he approaches,

awe spreads around him. Why this breathless silence all over the

theatre, this rooted attention from every one? He seats himself, he

leans on the arm of the chair; his voice, quick and deep, seems not to

utter common words, but to pronounce supernatural oracles. By what

transcendent faculty does he render hate so terrible, irony so

frightful, disdain so superhuman, devotion so entrancing, love so

inexpressibly sweet, that the whole assembly rivet their eyes and hold

their breath while their hearts throb under the mystic influence of his

action? The secret is purely a matter of law without anything of chance

or whim or caprice in it. It is the profound and universal law which

regulates the exercise of sympathetic influence by one person on

another. It has two elements, namely, beauty and power. Beauty and power

both can be expressed in shapes, features, motions, and tones. Shapes,

features, and tones are results and revelations of modes of motion. The

face is shaped and modulated by the ideal forces within, the rhythmical

vibrations which preside over the processes of nutrition. All those

shapes or movements in a person which in their completeness constitute,

or in their segments imply, returning curves or undulations, such as

circles, ellipses, and spirals, are beautiful. They suggest economy of

force, ease of function, sustained vitality, and potency. But abrupt

changes of direction, sudden snatches and breaks of movement, sharp

angles, are ugly and repellent, because they suggest waste of force,

difficulty of function, discord of the individual with the universal,

and therefore hint evil and death. The serpent was anciently considered

a symbol of immortality on account, no doubt, of all its motions being

endless lines or undulations circling in themselves. This is the law of

beauty which just in proportion to its pervasive prevalence and

exhibition in any one gives its possessor charm. The subtile indication

of this in the incessant and innumerable play of the person fascinates

and delights all who see it; and those who do not consciously perceive

it are still influenced by it in the unconscious depths of their nature.

The element of power is closely allied in its mode of revelation and

influence with that of beauty. Every attitude, gesture, or facial

expression is composed of contours and lines, static and dynamic, latent

and explicit, fragmentary and complete, straight, curved, or angularly

crooked. Now, the nature of these lines, the degree in which their

curves return or do not return into themselves, the nature and sizes of

the figures they describe, or would describe if completed according to

their indicative commencements, determine their beauty or ugliness and

decide what effect they shall produce on the spectator. The beauty and

the pleasure it yields are proportioned to the preponderance of endless

lines suggestive of circulation of force without waste, and therefore of

perfect grace and immortal life. But that sense of power which breeds

awe in the beholder is measured by the proportion of exertion made to

effect produced. All force expended passes off on angular lines. The

angles of movement may be obtuse or sharp in varying degrees, and

consequently subtend lines of different lengths. All attitudes and

gestures compose curves and figures, or cast lines and form angles,

which constitute their æsthetic and dynamic values, those measuring

beauty, these measuring power. For, on the principle of the lever and

momentum, the power expended at the end of a line is equal to that

exerted at the beginning of the line multiplied by its length. The

amounts of exertion and the lengths of lines are unconsciously estimated

by the intuitions of the observer, and the unconscious interpretations

to which he is led are what yield the impressions he experiences on

seeing any given actor. The greatest sense of power is received when the

minimum of initial effort is seen with the maximum of terminal result;

when the smallest weight at the central extremity balances the largest

one at the distal extremity. The law of combined beauty and power of

action, then, is contained in the relations of returning lines and

lengths of straight lines. The measure of dramatic expression is this:

impression of grace is according to the preponderance of perpetuating

curves, and impression of strength according to the degrees of the

angles formed by the straight lines. That actress or actor in whose

organism there is the greatest freedom of the parts and the greatest

unity of the whole, the most perfect co-operation of all the nerve-

centres in a free dynamic solidarity and the most complete surrender of

the individual will to universal principles, will make the deepest

sensation,—in other words, will have the largest amount of what has been

vaguely called personal magnetism. The divinest character expresses

itself in softly-flowing forms and inexpensive movements. The most royal

and august majesty of function indicates its rank of power by the

slightest exertions implying the vastest effects. Frivolous, false, and

vulgar characters are ever full of short lines, incongruous, fussy, and

broken motions, curves everywhere subordinated and angles obtrusive.

Such persons are, as it is said, destitute of magnetism. They do not

interest. They cannot possibly charm or awe. It is a law of

inexpressible importance that _the quality, grade, and measure of a

personality are revealed primarily in the proportions, secondarily in

the movements, of the physical organism_. These proportions and

movements betray alike the permanent features of the indwelling

character and all its passing thoughts and emotions. The truth is all

there, though the spectator may be incompetent to interpret its signals.

The most harmonious and perfect character will show the most exquisite

symmetry and grace of repose and action. The irregulated, raw, and

reckless type of character expresses itself in awkward, violent, or

incongruous movements, wasteful of energy yet not impressive in result.

Beauty of motion, the implication of endless lines, is the normal sign

of loveliness of soul. Grandeur of soul or dynamic greatness of mind is

indicated by implicit extent and ponderous slowness of motion. When the

smallest displays of motion at the centres suggest the most sustained

and extended lines, the impression given of power is the most mysterious

and overwhelming. The most tremendous exertions, in lines and angles

whose invisible complements are small, produce a weak impression,

because they make no appeal to the imagination. The beauty of the

figures implied in the forms of the movements of a man is the analogue

of his goodness; the dimensions of the figures, the analogue of his

strength. And in the case of every one the spectators are constantly

apprehending the forms of these figures and how far they reach, and

emotionally reacting in accordance with the results thus attained. It is

not a conscious and critical process of the understanding or the senses,

but a swift procedure of the intuitions or organic habits, including the

sum of ancestral experiences deposited in instinctive faculty. Many who

are ignorant of this law of the revelation of human nature, and of the

sympathetic influence of man on man involved in it, may feel that the

whole conception is merely a fine-spun fancy, with no solid basis in

fact. But a perfect parallel to the process here described as taking

place through the eye has been both mathematically and visibly

demonstrated in the case of the ear. The beauty of form as perceived by

the eye depends on implicit perception of geometric law, and is

proportioned to the simplicity of the law and the variety of the outline

embodying it, just as the harmony of colors or the harmony of sounds

depends on the implicit perception of arithmetical ratios, and is

proportioned to the harmony of times in which the vibrations of the

visible or audible medium occur. We distinguish the beauty and the

quality of a tone of the same pitch produced by different instruments or

voices, and our feelings are differently affected with pleasure or pain

as we listen to them. But the beauty of a tone consists in the

equidistance of the pulsations of air composing it, and the quality of a

tone consists in the forms of the pulsations. The auditory apparatus

reports the symmetry or asymmetry of the pulsations in form and rate,

and the soul, intuitively grasping the secret significance, is delighted

or disturbed accordingly. The charm of a delicious, musical, powerful

voice has these four elements, beautiful forms in its vibrations,

perfect rhythm or equidistance in its vibrations, varying breadth in its

vibrations, and varying extent of vibratory surface in the sounding

mechanism. Without knowing anything about any of these conditions, the

sensitive hearer, played on by them through his ear, accurately responds

in feeling. It is exactly the same, in the case of the eye, with the

geometrical lines and figures involved in the bearing of a person. If

these are beautiful in forms, graceful in motions, sublime in implicit

dimensions, the impression is delightful and profound; while if they are

petty and incoherent, or clumsy and unbalanced, their appeal is

superficial and disagreeable. This is the law of personal magnetism,

which always exerts the vastest swing of power from the most exactly

centred equilibrium. The mysteries of God are revealed in space and time

through form and motion. They are concentrated in rhythm, which, as

defined by Delsarte, is the simultaneous vibration of number, weight,

and measure. We are creatures of space and time; all our experience has

been written and is organized in that language. Our whole nature

therefore in its inmost depths corresponds and thrills to the mystic

symbols of harmony or discord with love and pleasure or with fear and

pain. The secret of the delight that waits on the perception or feeling

of beauty and power is the recognition of sequent ratios which express

symmetry in time or algebraic law, and coexistent ratios which express

symmetry in space or geometric law. Spatial symmetry is the law of

equilibrium, the adjustment of the individual with the universal, and

measures power. Temporal symmetry is the law of health, the pulsating

adjustment of function with its norm, and measures the melodious flow of

life. Rhythm is the constant dynamic reproduction of symmetry in space

and time combined. It is the secret of personal magnetism. Its charm and

its power are at their height when the symmetries are most varied in

detail and most perfect in unity.

Now, Forrest ever possessed this magnetic temperament, this firmly

poised and ingravidated personality, and ever wielded its signals with

startling effect. The tones and inflections of his sweet and majestic

voice in its wide diapason were felt by his hearers palpitating among

the pulses of their hearts. His attitude, look, and gesture in great

situations often produced on a whole assembly the electric creep of the

flesh and the cold shudder of the marrow. His fearlessness and

deliberation were conspicuous and proverbial. A censorious critic said,

“Mr. Forrest is the most painfully elaborate actor on the stage. He

swings in a great slow orbit, and, though he revolves with dignity and

sublimity, the sublimity is often stupid and the dignity a little

pompous. He dwells so long on unimportant passages that one might

imagine he intended to take up an everlasting rest on a period, to go to

sleep over a semicolon, or spend the evening with a comma. His pauses

are like the distances from star to star, and if he continues in his

course people will have time to stroll in the lobbies between his

sentences. His performances might be defined by his enemies as infinite

extensions of silence with incidental intervals of speech.” Through this

enveloping burlesque one discerns the poise, sang-froid, and grandeur of

the man.

Senator Stockton, passing the Broadway Theatre one evening, met a friend

coming out, and asked him, “What is going on in there?” The reply was,

“Oh, nothing: Forrest is in one of his pauses!” An admiring critic said

of him, and if the diction be exaggerated it yet invests the truth,

“There is no actor living who takes a stronger hold of the feelings of

his audience or grasps the passions of the human heart with such a

giant-like clutch. He is as imposing and daring in his action as the

mountain condor when he darts on the flock, or the bird of Jove when he

wheels from the peaks and burnishes his plumage in the blaze of the sun.

It is not one here and there that submits to his sovereignty. The entire

audience are swayed and fashioned after the workings of his soul. He

permits none to escape the potency of his sceptre, but makes all bow to

his terrible and overwhelming mastery.” Of course different persons had

different degrees of susceptibility to this elemental power and

earnestness of nature and to this trained and skilled display of art,

though all must feel it more or less either as attraction or as

repulsion. The varying effects of the playing of character through its

signs is the genuine drama of life itself. The idiot holds his bauble

for a god, as Shakspeare says. The ruffian is hardened against all

delicate and noble manifestations of mind. The dilettante, in his

dryness, veneer, and varnish, is incapable of any enthusiasm for

persons. And there are multitudes so harassed and exhausted in the

selfish contests of the day, their hearts and imaginations so perverted

or shrivelled, that the brightest signals of heroism, genius, and

saintliness shine before them in vain. The play of personal qualities,

the study and appreciation of them, are more neglected now than they

ever were before. It is one of the greatest of social calamities; for it

takes the social stimulus away from spiritual ambition or the passion

for excellence. And it is one of the supreme benefactions conferred on

society by a great actor that he intensifies and illuminates the

revelatory language of character and fixes attention on its import by

lifting all its modes of expression to their highest pitch.

RICHELIEU.

In a previous chapter an attempt was made to describe Forrest in those

characters of physical and mental realism with which his fame was

chiefly identified during the earlier and middle portions of his popular

career. It remains now to essay a similar sketch of those characters of

imaginative portraiture which he best loved to impersonate in the

culminating glory and at the close of his artistic career. In the Rolla,

Damon, Spartacus, Metamora of his young manhood he was, rather than

played, the men whose parts he assumed, so intensely did he feel them

and so completely did he reproduce nature. He wrestled with the genius

of his art as Hercules with Antæus, throwing it to the ground

continually, but making its vitality more vigorous with every fall. As

years passed, and brought the philosophic mind, they tempered and

refined the animal fierceness, strained out the crudity and excess, and

secured a result marked by greater symmetry in details, fuller harmony

of accessories, a purer unity in the whole, and a loftier climax of

interest and impression. Then studious intellect and impassioned

sentiment, guided by truth and taste, preponderated over mere instinct

and observation, and imaginative portraiture took the place which had

been held by sensational realism. This is what in dramatic art gives the

violence of passion moderating restraint, puts the calm girdle of beauty

about the throbbing loins of power. Imagination, it is true, cannot

create, but it can idealize, order, and unify, unravel the tangled snarl

of details, and wind the intricacies in one unbroken thread, making

nature more natural by abstraction of the accidental and arrangement of

the essential. This was what the acting of Forrest, always sincere and

natural, for a long time needed, but at last, in a great degree,

attained, and, in attaining, became genuinely artistic.

The Richelieu of Forrest was a grand conception consummately elaborated

and grandly represented. It was a part suited to his nature, and which

he always loved to portray. The glorious patriotism which knit his soul

to France, the tender affection which bound his heart to his niece, the

leonine banter with which he mocked his rivals, the indomitable courage

with which he defied his foes, the sublime self-sufficingness with which

he trusted in fate and in the deepest emergencies prophesied the dawn

while his followers were trembling in the gloom, his immense personal

superiority of mind and force swaying all others, as the sun sways its

orbs,—these were traits to which Forrest brought congenial qualities and

moods, making their representation a delight to his soul.

He dressed for the part in long robes, an iron-gray wig, and the scarlet

cap of a cardinal. He stooped a little, coughed, but gave no signs of

superannuation. As the conspiracies thickened about him and the end drew

on, he seemed visibly to grow older and more excitable. His age and

feebleness, though simulated with an exquisite skill, were not obtruded.

Though the picture of an old man, it was the picture of a very grand old

man, like the ruin of a mighty castle, worn by time and broken by

storms, yet towering proudly in its strength, with foundations the

earthquake could not uproot and battlements over which the thunder

crashed in vain. Forrest made the character not only intensely

interesting and exciting by the great variety of sharp contrasts he

brought into reconciliation in it, but also admirable and lovable from

the honest virtues and august traits it embodied. He represented

Richelieu as a patriotic statesman of the loftiest order, and also as a

sage deeply read in the lore of the human heart, tenaciously just, a

careful weigher of motives, his sometimes rough and repellent manner

always covering a deep well of love and a rich vein of satire.

In the opening scene, the cunning slyness of the veteran plotter and

detective, the dignity of the great statesman, and the magnetic command

of the powerful minister were revealed in rapid alternation in a manner

which was a masterpiece of art.

“And so you think this new conspiracy

The craftiest trap yet laid for the old fox?

Fox? Well, I like the nickname. What did Plutarch

Say of the Greek Lysander?

That where the lion’s skin fell short, he eked it

Out with the fox’s! A great statesman, Joseph,

That same Lysander!”

There was in the delivery of these words a mixture of sportiveness and

sobriety, complacency and irony, which spoke volumes. Then, speaking of

Baradas, the conceited upstart who expected to outwit and overthrow him,

the expression of self-conscious greatness in his manner, combined with

contempt for the mushroom success of littleness, made the verbal passage

and the picture he painted in uttering it equally memorable as he said,—

“It cost me six long winters

To mount as high as in six little moons

This painted lizard. But I hold the ladder,

And when I shake—he falls!”

As his hand imaginatively shook the ladder, his eye blazed, his voice

grew solid, and the audience saw everything indicated by the words as

distinctly as if it had been presented in material reality. Nothing

could be more finely drawn and colored than the variety of moods, the

changing qualities of character and temper, called out in Richelieu by

the reactions of his soul on the contrasted persons of the play and

exigencies of the plot as he came in contact with them. When, alluding

to the attachment of the king for his ward as an ivy, he said—

“Insidious ivy,

And shall it creep around my blossoming tree,

Where innocent thoughts, like happy birds, make music

That spirits in heaven might hear?”—

there was a fond caressing sweetness in his tones that fell on the heart

like a celestial dew. Into what a wholly different world of human nature

we were taken in the absolute transformation of his demeanor with

Joseph, the Capuchin monk, his confidant! Here there was a grim humor,

an amusing yet sinister banter:

“In my closet

You’ll find a rosary, Joseph: ere you tell

Three hundred beads I’ll summon you. Stay, Joseph.

I did omit an Ave in my matins,—

A grievous fault. Atone it for me, Joseph.

There is a scourge within; I am weak, you strong.

It were but charity to take my sin

On such broad shoulders. Exercise is healthful.”

His interview with De Mauprat reminded one of a cat playing with a

mouse, or of a royal tiger which had laid its paw on one of the sacred

cattle and was watching its quiverings under the velvet-sheathed claws.

When De Mauprat expects to be ordered to the block, Richelieu sends him

to his darling Julie:

“To the tapestry chamber. You will there behold

The executioner: your doom be private,

And heaven have mercy on you!”

The delightful humor here follows the desperate terror like sunlight

streaming on a thunder-cloud. What a contrast was furnished in the

allusion to the detested Baradas and his confederates when the aroused

cardinal, after the failure of every method to conciliate, towers into

his kingliest port, and exclaims, with concentrated and vindictive

resolution,—

“All means to crush. As with the opening and

The clenching of this little hand, I will

Crush the small vermin of the stinging courtiers!”

The central and all-conspicuous merit of Forrest’s rendering of

Richelieu was the unfailing felicity of skill with which he kept the

unity of the character clear through all the variety of its

manifestations. It was a character fixed in its centre but mobile in its

exterior, dominated by a magnificent patriotic ambition, open to

everything great, tinged with cynicism by bitter experience, if

irascible and revengeful yet full of honest human sympathy. He enjoyed

circumventing traitors with a finesse keener than their own, and defying

enemies with a haughtiness that blasted, while ever and anon gleams of

gentle and generous affection lighted up and softened the sombre

prominences of a nature formed to mould rugged wills and to rule stormy

times.

It is only great actors who are able to make the individuality of a

character imperially prominent and absorbing yet at the same time to do

equal justice to every universal thought or sentiment occurring in the

part. Forrest was remarkable for this supreme excellence. Whenever the

author had introduced any idea or passion of especial dignity from the

depth of its meaning or the largeness of its scope, he was sure to

express it with corresponding emphasis and finish. This makes a dramatic

entertainment educational and ennobling no less than pleasurable. When

François, starting on an important errand, says, “If I fail?” Richelieu

gazes on the boy, while recollections of the marvellous triumphs of his

own career flit over his face, and exclaims, with an electric

accentuation of surprise and unconquerable assurance,—

“Fail?

In the lexicon of youth, which fate reserves

For a bright manhood, there is no such word

As fail!”

When the huge sword of his martial period at Rochelle drops from his

grasp, and he is reminded that he has other weapons now, he goes slowly

to his desk, the old hand from which the heavy falchion had dropped

takes up the light feather, his eyes look into vacancy, the soldier

passes into the seer, an indefinable presence of prophecy broods over

him, and the meditative exultation of his air and the solemn warmth of

his voice make the whole audience thrill as his sculptured syllables

fall on their ears:

“True,—_this_!

Beneath the rule of men entirely great

The pen is mightier than the sword. Behold

The arch-enchanted wand! Itself a nothing,

But taking sorcery from the master hand

To paralyze the Cæsars and to strike

The loud earth breathless. Take away the sword:

States _can_ be saved without it.”

When Julie, appealing to him for aid which he cannot promise,

expostulatingly asks,—

“Art thou not Richelieu?”—

he answers in a manner whose attitude, look, and tone instantly carry

the imagination and sympathy of the soul-stricken auditors from the

individual instance before them to the solemn pathos and mystery of the

destiny of all mankind in this world:

“Yesterday I was:

To-day, a very weak old man: to-morrow,

I know not what!”

So, when, amidst unveiled treason, hate and fear and sickening

ingratitude, left alone in his desolation, his spirit for a moment

wavered under the load of suspicion and melancholy, but quickly rallied

into its own invincible heroism, he so painted and voiced the successive

moods that every bosom palpitated in living response:

“My leeches bribed to poisoners; pages

To strangle me in sleep; my very king—

This brain the unresting loom from which was woven

The purple of his greatness—leagued against me!

Old, childless, friendless, broken—all forsake,

All, all, but the indomitable heart

Of Armand Richelieu!”

Never was transition more powerful than from the minor wail of

lamentation with which Forrest here began to the glorious eloquence of

the climax, where his vocal thunderbolts drove home to every heart the

lesson of conscious greatness and courage. The treachery was depicted

with a look and voice expressive of a weary and mournful indignation and

scorn touched with loathing; the desertion, with bowed head and drooping

arms, in low, lingering, tearful tones; the self-assertion was launched

from a mien that swelled with sudden access of inspiration, as if

heaving off its weakness and stiffened in its utmost erection.

Another imposing instance in which Forrest so rendered a towering sense

of genius and personal superiority as to change it from egotism to

revelation, merging the individual peculiarity in a universal attribute,

was where the armed De Mauprat comes upon the solitary cardinal and

tells him the next step will be his grave. The defiant retort to this

threat was so given as to impress the audience with a sense of prophetic

power, a feeling that the destiny of man is mysteriously linked with

unseen and supernatural ranks of being:

“Thou liest, knave!

I am old, infirm, most feeble—but thou liest.

Armand de Richelieu dies not by the hand

Of man. The stars have said it, and the voice

Of my own prophetic and oracular soul

Confirms the shining sibyls!”

A crowning glory of the impersonation of this great rôle by Forrest was

the august grandeur of the method by which he set the intrinsic royalty

of Richelieu over against the titular royalty of Louis. In many nameless

ways besides by his subtile irony, his air of inherent command masked in

studied courtesy of subordination, and the continual contrast of the

comprehensive measures and sublime visions of the one with the petty

personal spites and schemes of the other, he made it ever clear that the

crowned monarch was a sham, the statesman the real one anointed and

sealed by heaven itself. This true and democratic idea of superiority,

that he is the genuine king, not who chances to hold the throne, but who

knows how to govern, received a splendid setting in all the interviews

of the king and the cardinal. When the conspirators had won Louis to

turn his back on his minister with the words,—

“Remember, he who made can unmake,”—

who that saw it could ever forget the dilating mien and burning oratoric

burst which instantly made the sovereign seem a menial subject, and the

subject a vindicated sovereign?

“Never! Your anger can recall your trust,

Annul my office, spoil me of my lands,

Rifle my coffers: but my name, my deeds,

Are royal in a land beyond your sceptre.

Pass sentence on me if you will. From kings,

Lo, I appeal to Time!”

Again, when Louis, with mere personal passion, had harshly rebuffed him

with the words,—

“For our conference

This is no place nor season,”—

the narrow selfishness of the king makes him seem a pygmy and a plebeian

in the light of the universal sentiment and expansive thought with which

Richelieu overwhelmingly responds,—

“Good my liege, for justice

All place is a temple and all season summer.

Do you deny me justice?”

But the grandest exhibition of the superiority of democratic personal

royalty of character and inspiration to the conventional royalty of

title and place, the supreme dramatic moment of the play, was the

protection of Julie from the polluting pursuit of the king. Folding the

affrighted girl to his breast with his left arm, he lifted his loaded

right hand, and, with visage of smouldering fire and clarion tone,

cried,—

“To those who sent you!

And say you found the virtue they would slay,

Here, couched upon this heart, as at an altar,

And sheltered by the wings of sacred Rome.

Begone!”

Baradas asserts that the king claims her. Then came such a climax of

physical, moral, and artistic power as no man could witness without

being electrified through and through. Forrest prepared and executed

this climax with an exquisite skill that made it seem an unstudied

inspiration. His intellect appeared to have the eager fire that burns

and flashes along a train of thought, gathering speed and glory as it

moves, till at last it strikes with irresistible momentum. At first with

noble repression the low deep voice uttered the portentous words,—

“Ay, is it so?

Then wakes the power which in the age of iron

Burst forth to curb the great and raise the low.”

Here the surge of passion began to sweep cumulatively on. The eyes grew

wild, the outstretched hands quivered, the tones swelled and rang, the

expanded and erected figure looked like a transparent mass of fire, and

the climax fell as though the sky had burst with a broadside of

thunders.

“Mark where she stands! Around her form I draw

The awful circle of our solemn Church.

Set but a foot within that holy ground,

And on thy head, yea, though it wore a crown,

I launch the curse of Rome!”

The sudden passage of Richelieu from the extreme of tottering feebleness

to the extreme of towering strength, under the stimulus of some

impersonal passion, illustrated a deep and marvellous principle of human

nature. Forrest never forgot how startlingly he had once seen this

exemplified by Andrew Jackson when discussing the expediency of the

annexation of Texas to the United States. A disinterested and universal

sentiment suddenly admitted to the mind, lifting the man out of egotism,

sometimes seems to open the valves of the brain, flood the organism with

supernatural power, and transform a shrivelled skeleton into a glowing

athlete. Richelieu had fainted, and was thought to be dying. The king

repents, and restores his office, saying,—

“Live, Richelieu, if not for me, for France!”

In one instant the might of his whole idolized country passes into his

withered frame.

“My own dear France, I have thee yet, I have saved thee.

All earth shall never pluck thee from my heart,

My mistress France, my wedded wife, sweet France!”

It was the colossal scale of intellect, imagination, passion, and energy

exposed by Forrest in his representation of Richelieu that made the rôle

to ordinary minds a new revelation of the capacities of human nature.

When, with a tone and inflection whose sweet and long-drawn cadence

almost made the audience hear the melody of the spheres clanging in

endless space, he said,—

“No, let us own it, there is One above

Sways the harmonious mystery of the world

Even better than prime ministers,”—

he produced on the stage a religious impression of which Bossuet might

have been proud in the pulpit. And to hear him declaim, with a modest

pomp and solemn glow of elocution befitting the thoughts and imagery,

the following passage, was to receive an influence most ennobling while

most pleasurable:

“I found France rent asunder;

The rich men despots, and the poor, banditti;

Sloth in the mart, and schism in the temple;

Brawls festering to rebellion, and weak laws

Rotting away with rust in antique sheaths.

I have re-created France, and from the ashes

Of the old feudal and decrepit carcass

Civilization, on her luminous wings,

Soars, phœnix-like, to Jove. What was my art?

Genius, some say; some, fortune; witchcraft, some.

Not so: my art was JUSTICE!”

It was no wonder that Charles Kean, after beholding this interpretation

of Richelieu by Forrest, said to his wife, “Ellen, this is the greatest

acting we have ever seen or ever shall see.” It was but just that Henry

Sedley, himself an accomplished actor and owned to be one of the best

dramatic critics in the country, should write, “We can imagine a

Richelieu more French than that of Mr. Forrest, but we cannot well

conceive one more full of dramatic passion, of sustained power, or of

the mysterious magnetism that takes captive and sways at will the

average human imagination.”

SHAKSPEAREAN CHARACTERS.

In all the last forty years of his life Forrest was an enthusiastic

reader and student of Shakspeare. As his experience deepened and his

observation enlarged and his familiarity with the works of this

unrivalled genius became more thorough, his love and admiration rose

into wondering reverence, and ended in boundless idolatry. His library

teemed with books illustrative of the plays and poems of the immortal

dramatist. He delighted to pore even over the commentators, and the

original pages were his solace, his joy, and his worship. He relished

the Comedies as much as he did the Tragedies, and in the Sonnets found

inexhaustible beauties entwined with exquisite autobiographic

revelations. Thus he came within the esoteric circle of readers. One of

the latest schemes with which his heart pleased his fancy was a design

to erect in some suitable place in his native city a group of statuary

representing Shakspeare with Heminge and Condell, the two editors whose

pious care collected and gave to posterity the matchless writings which

otherwise might have been lost.

The personal feelings and the professional pride of Forrest were more

bound up with his representations of Shakspearean characters than with

any others. Of the eight Shakspearean rôles which he played, those of

Shylock and Iago were early dropped, on account of his extreme distaste

for the parts, and his unwillingness to bear the ideal hate and loathing

they awakened in the spectators. But to the remaining six parts—Macbeth,

Richard, Hamlet, Coriolanus, Othello, and Lear—he gave the most

unwearied study, and in their representation showed the extremest

elaboration of his art. He spent an incredible amount of time and pains

in striving to grasp the true types and attributes of these characters,

and in perfecting his portrayals of them according to the intentions of

the author and the realities of nature. And he actually attained

conceptions of them far more comprehensive, accurate, and distinct than

he received credit for. His playing of them, too, was marked not only by

a bold sweep of power and truth, but also by a keenness of insight, a

delicate perception of fitness, a just distribution of light and shade,

a felicity of transition and contrast, which were lost on the average of

an audience. The knowledge that his finest points were not appreciated

by many was one of his trials. In spite of this, however, his own

conviction of the minute truthfulness and merit of his acting of

Shakspearean characters, based on indefatigable study of nature and

honest reproduction of what he saw, was the sweetest satisfaction of his

professional life. He always wished his fame to stand or fall with a

fair estimate of his renderings of these rôles. And one thing is to be

affirmed of him, which the carelessness of miscellaneous assemblies

superficially seeking amusement generally failed to appreciate, namely,

that he felt profoundly the solemn lessons with which those characters

were charged, and conscientiously endeavored to emphasize and enforce

them, making his performance a panorama of living instruction, an

illuminated revelation of human nature and human destiny, and not a mere

series of piques of curiosity or traps for sensation.

In the ordinary dramatist or novelist a character is manufactured out of

a formula, but in Shakspeare every great character is so deeply true

that it suggests many formulas. In the highest ancient art situations

vary with characters; in average modern art characters vary with

situations; in Shakspeare both these results are shown as they are in

real life, where sometimes characters are moulds for shaping situations,

and sometimes situations are furnaces for testing characters. Of old,

when life was deeper because less complex, the dramatized legend was the

channel of a force or fate; there its interest lay. In Shakspeare the

interest is not to see the supernatural force reflected blazing on a

character, but rather to see it broken up by the faculties of the

character, to see it refracted on his idiosyncrasies. This makes the

task of the player more difficult, because he must seize the unity of

the character in its relations with the plot, and keep it clear, however

modulated in variety of manifestations. This Forrest did in all his

Shakspearean impersonations. Though few who saw him act appreciated it,

the distinctness with which he kept this in view was his crowning merit

as an artist.

[Illustration:

D G Thompson

EDWIN FORREST AS

SHYLOCK.

]

MACBETH.

Many actors have represented Macbeth as a coward moulded and directed at

will by his stronger wife,—a weakling caught like a leaf in an

irresistible current and hurried helplessly on to his doom. Such is not

the picture painted by Shakspeare. Such was not the interpretation given

by Forrest. Macbeth is a broad, rich, powerful nature, with a poetic

mind, a loving heart, a courageous will. He is also strongly ambitious,

and prone to superstition. To gratify his ambition he is tempted to

commit a dreadful crime, and the temptation is urged on him by what he

holds to be supernatural agencies. After misgivings and struggles with

himself, he yields. The horrid deed being perpetrated, the results

disappoint him. The supernatural prophecies that led him on change to

supernatural terrors, his soul is filled with remorse, his brain reels,

and as the sequel of his guilt thickens darkly around him he rallies his

desperate energies and meets his fate with superb defiance. The struggle

of temptation in a soul richly furnished with good yet fatally

susceptible to evil, the violation of conscience, the overwhelming

retribution,—these points, softened with sunny touches of domestic love

and poetic moral sentiment, compose the lurid substance and movement of

the drama. And these points Forrest embodied in his portraiture with an

emotional intensity and an intellectual clearness which enthralled his

audience.

As he came over the hills at the back of the stage, accompanied by

Banquo, in his Highland tartan, his plumed Scotch cap, his legs bare

from the knee to the ankle, his pointed targe on his arm, with his free

and commanding air, and his appearance of elastic strength and

freshness, he was a picture of vigorous, breezy manhood. His first words

were addressed to Banquo in an easy tone, such as one would naturally

use in describing the weather:

“So foul and fair a day I have not seen.”

The witches hailing him with new titles and a royal prophecy, he

starts,—

“And seems to fear

Things that do sound so fair.”

As they concluded, the manner in which, with subdued breathing

eagerness, he said,—

“Stay, you imperfect speakers; tell me more,”—

showed what a deep and prepared chord in his soul their greeting had

struck. And when they made themselves vapor and disappeared, he stood

rapt in the wonder of it, and replied to the question of Banquo,

“Whither have they vanished?” with a dissolving whispering voice, in an

attitude of musing suspense and astonishment,—

“Into the air; and what seemed corporal melted

As breath into the wind. Would they had stayed!”

When the missives from the king saluted him Glamis and Cawdor, he

attributed more than mortal knowledge to the weird sisters; and at once

the terrible temptation to gratify his ambition by murder seized his

soul, and conscience began to struggle with it. This struggle, in all

its dread import, he pictured forth as he delivered the ensuing

soliloquy with speaking features and in quick low tones of suppressed

questioning eagerness:

“This supernatural soliciting

Cannot be ill; cannot be good. If ill,

Why hath it given me earnest of success,

Commencing in a truth? I am thane of Cawdor.

If good, why do I yield to that suggestion

Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair,

And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,

Against the use of nature?

My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,

Shakes so my single state of man that function

Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is,

But what is not.”

In uttering these words he painted to eye and ear how temptation divides

the soul into the desiring passion and the forbidding principle and sets

them in deadly contention. Then the apologetic sympathy of his reply to

the expostulation of Banquo,—

“Worthy Macbeth, we stay upon your leisure,”—

showed the gentle quality of his nature:

“Give me your favor: my dull brain was wrought

With things forgotten. Kind gentlemen, your pains

Are registered where every day I turn

The leaf to read them. Let us toward the king.”

[Illustration:

A. Robin.

EDWIN FORREST AS

MACBETH.

]

Macbeth was one originally full of the milk of human kindness, who would

not play false, but would win holily what he wished highly: yet his

ambition was so sharp that the sight of the coveted prize made him wild

to snatch it the nearest way. This conflict Forrest continually

indicated by alternations of geniality towards his comrades and of

lowering gloom in himself, while his brain seemed heaving in the throes

of a moral earthquake. Thus, when Duncan had indicated Malcolm as

successor to the throne, Macbeth betrayed the depths of his soul by

saying, with sinister mien, aside,—

“The Prince of Cumberland! That is a step

On which I must fall down, or else o’erleap,

For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires!

Let not light see my black and deep desires.”

The earnest and tender warmth which Forrest made Macbeth put into his

greeting of his wife after his absence, his dangers in battle, and his

mysterious adventure with the witches, proved how deeply he loved her.

And his first words,—

“My dearest love,

Duncan comes here to-night,”—

were spoken with an abstracted and concentrated air that fully revealed

the awful scheme that loomed darkly far back in his mind. Left alone

with himself, the temptation renewed the struggle between his better and

his worse self. In the long and wonderful soliloquy, beginning—

“If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well,”—

he painted the gradual victory of reason, honor, conscience, and

affection over the fell ambition that was spurring him to murder, and,

as Lady Macbeth entered, he exclaimed, with a clearing and relieved

look,—

“We will proceed no further in this business.”

But the stinging taunts with which she upbraided him, and the frightful

energy of her own resolution with which she eloquently infected him,

worked so strongly on his susceptible nature that he reinstalled his

discarded purpose, and went out saying firmly,—

“I am settled, and bend up

Each corporal agent to this terrible feat.”

In this scene he so distinctly exhibited the operation of her influence

on him, the slow change of his innocent determination into uncertain

wavering, and then the change of the irresolute state into guilty

determination, that the spectators could almost see the inspiring

temptress pour her spirits into him, as with the valor of her tongue she

chastised his hesitation away.

When he next appeared he looked oppressed, bowed, haggard, and pale, as

if the fearful crisis had exerted on him the effect of years of misery.

In half-undress, with semi-distraught air, his hushed and gliding manner

of sinewy stealth, in conjunction with the silence and darkness of the

hour, conveyed a mysterious impression of awe and terror to every soul.

He said to the servant, with an absent look and tone, as if the words

uttered themselves without his heed,—

“Go; bid thy mistress, when my drink is ready,

She strike upon the bell. Get thee to bed.”

Then slowly came the appalling climax in the temptation whose influences

had been progressively operating in the automatic strata of his being

deeper than his free consciousness could reach. Those influences were

now ready to produce an illusion, by a reversal of the normal action of

the faculties unconscious ideas reporting themselves outwardly as

objects. Buried in thought, he stands gazing on the floor. Lifting his

head, at last, as if to speak, he sees a dagger floating in the air. He

winks rapidly, then rubs his eyes, to clear his sight and dispel his

doubt. The fatal vision stays. He reasons with himself, and acts the

reasoning out, to decide whether it is a deception of fancy or a

supernatural reality. First he thinks it real, but, failing in his

attempt to clutch it, he holds it to be a false creation of the brain.

Then its persistence drives him insane, and as he sees the blade and

dudgeon covered with gouts of blood he shrieks in a frenzy of horror.

Passing this crisis, he re-seizes possession of his mind, and, with an

air of profound relief, sighs,—

“There’s no such thing:

It is the bloody business which informs

Thus to mine eyes.”

Then, changing his voice from a giant whisper to a full sombre vocality,

the next words fell on the ear in their solemn music like thunder

rolling mellowed and softened in the distance:

“Now o’er the one half world

Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse

The curtained sleep.”

Gathering his faculties and girding up his resolution for the final

deed, as the bell rang he grasped his dagger and made his exit, saying,—

“Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell

That summons thee to heaven or to hell.”

These words he spoke, not with the bellowing declamation many players

had given them, but in a low, firm tone tinged with sadness, a tone

expressive of melancholy mixed with determination. As he came out of the

fatal chamber backwards, with his hands recking, he did not see Lady

Macbeth standing there in an attitude of intense listening, until he

struck against her. They both started and gazed at each other in

terror,—an action so true to nature that it always electrified the

house.

Then at once began the dread reaction of sorrow, fear, and remorse.

Forrest made the regret and lamentation of Macbeth over the crime and

its irreparable consequences exquisitely piteous and mournful. The

marvellous wail of his description of innocent sleep forfeited

thenceforth, the panic surprise of his

“How is it with me when every noise appals me?”

the lacerating distress of his

“Wake Duncan with thy knocking: I would thou couldst!”

penetrated the heart of every hearer with commiseration.

Forrest gave Macbeth, in the first scene of the play, a cheerful and

observant air; after the interview with the witches he was absorbed and

abstracted; pending his direful crime he was agitated, moody, troubled,—

“Dark thoughts rolling to and fro in his mind

Like thunder-clouds darkening the lucid sky;”

after the murder he was restless, suspicious, terrified, at times

insane. These alterations of mood and manner were distinctly marked with

the evolution of the plot through its salient stages. Of the pervasive

remorse with which the moral nature of Macbeth afflicted and shook him,

Forrest presented a picture fascinating in its fearful beauty and truth.

When he spoke the following passage, the mournfulness of his voice was

like the sighing of the November wind as it throws its low moan over the

withered leaves:

“Better be with the dead,

Whom we to gain our peace have sent to peace,

Than on the torture of the mind to lie

In restless ecstasy. Duncan is in his grave:

After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well:

Treason has done his worst; nor steel, nor poison,

Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing

Can touch him farther.”

Then, seeking sympathy and consolation, he turned to the partner of his

bosom and his greatness with the agonizing outburst,—

“O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife.”

Close on the awful remorse and on the pathetic tenderness, with

consummate truth to nature the selfish instincts were shown hardening

the man in his crime, making him resolve to strengthen with further ill

things bad begun:

“I am in blood

Stept in so far, that, should I wade no more,

Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

So unstably poised was his disposition between his good affections and

his wicked desires that the conflict was still repeated, and with each

defeat of conscience the dominion of evil grew completer. As his

remorseful fears translated themselves into outward spectres, Forrest

vividly illustrated the curdling horror human nature experiences when

guilt opens the supernatural world to its apprehension. He made Macbeth

show a proud and lion-mettled courage in human relations, but seem cowed

with abject terror by ghostly visitations. His criminal course collects

momentum till it hurries him headlong to wholesale slaughters and to his

own inevitable ruin. In his mad infatuation of self-entangling crime he

says of his own proposed massacre of the family of Macduff,—

“No boasting like a fool:

This deed I’ll do before this purpose cool.”

Relying on the promise of the witches that none of woman born should

harm him, and that he should never be vanquished till Birnam wood came

to Dunsinane, he added crime to crime till the whole land was in arms

for his overthrow. Then, despite his forced faith and bravery, a

profound melancholy sank on him. His vital spirits failed. He grew sick

of life and weary of the sun. To this phase of the character and career

Forrest did conspicuous justice. Nothing of the kind could exceed the

exquisite beauty of his readings of the three famous passages,—

“I have lived long enough; my way of life

Has fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf:”

· · · · ·

“Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow?”

· · · · ·

She should have died hereafter:

“There would have been a time for such a word.”

His voice lingered on the melodious melancholy of the words and every

line of his face responded to their mournful and despairing

significance.

When told that Birnam wood was moving, the sense of supernatural power

turned against him. For a moment he stood, a solid dismay. Then he

staggered as if his brain had received a blow from the words which smote

to its reeling centre. So, when Macduff exposed to him the paltering of

the fiends in a double sense, his boasted charm seemed visibly to melt

from him, and he shrank back as though struck by a withering spell. His

towering form contracted into itself, his knees shook, and his sword

half dropped from his grasp. But the next instant, goaded by the taunts

of his adversary, he rallied on his native heroism, braced himself for

the struggle as if he resolved to rise superior to fate whether natural

or demoniac, and fell at last like a ruined king, with all his blazing

regalia on. The performance left on the mind of the appreciative

beholder, stamped in terrible impress, the eternal moral of temptation

and crime culminating in fatal success and followed by the inevitable

swoop of retribution:

“Naught’s had, all’s spent,

Where our desire is got without content.”

RICHARD.

Quite early in his histrionic career Forrest wrote to his friend

Leggett, “My notions of the character of Richard the Third do not accord

with those of the players I have seen personate it. They have not made

him gay enough in the earlier scenes, but too sullen, frowning, and

obvious a villain. He was an exulting and dashing, not a moody, villain.

Success followed his schemes too rapidly and gave him too much elation

to make appropriate the haggard and penthouse aspect he is usually made

to wear. Contempt for mankind forms a stronger feature of his character

than hatred; and he has a sort of reckless jollity, a joyous audacity,

which has not been made conspicuous enough.” In general accord with this

conception he afterwards elaborated his portraiture of the deformed

tyrant, the savage humorist, the murderous and brilliant villain. He set

aside the stereotyped idea of Richard as a strutting, ranting, gloomy

plotter, forever cynical and sarcastic and parading his crimes. Not

excluding these traits, Forrest subordinated them to his cunning

hypocrisy, his gleaming intellectuality, his jocose irony, his exulting

self-complacence and fiendish sportiveness. He represented him not only

as ravenously ambitious, but also full of a subtle pride and vanity

which delighted him with the constant display of his mental superiority

to those about him. Above all he was shown to be possessed of a laughing

devil, a witty and sardonic genius, which amused itself with playing on

the faculties of the weaklings he wheedled, scoffing at what they

thought holy, and bluntly utilizing the most sacred things for the most

selfish ends. There can be no doubt that in removing the conventional

stage Richard with this more dashing and versatile one Forrest restored

the genuine conception of Shakspeare, who has painted him as rattling

not brooding, exuberantly complacent even under his own dispraises, an

endlessly inventive and triumphant hypocrite, master of a gorgeous

eloquence whose splendid phrases adorn the ugliness of his schemes

almost out of sight. His mental nature devours his moral nature, and,

swallowing remorse, leaves him free to be gay. The character thus

portrayed was hard, cruel, deceitful, mocking,—less melodramatically

fiendish and electrical than the Richard of Kean, but more true to

nature. The picture was a consistent one. The deformity of the man,

reacting on his matchless intellect and courage and sensual passion, had

made him a bitter cynic. But his genius was too rich to stagnate into an

envenomed gloom of misanthropy. Its exuberance broke out in aspiring

schemes and crimes gilded with philosophy, hypocrisy, laughter, and

irony. Moving alone in a murky atmosphere of sin and sensuality, he knew

himself to the bottom of his soul, and read everybody else through and

through. He believed in no one, and scoffed at truth, because he was

himself without conscience. But his insight and his solid understanding

and glittering wit, making of everything a foil to display his self-

satisfied powers, hid the degradation of his wickedness from his own

eyes, and sometimes almost excused it in the eyes of others. Yet, so

wondrous was the moral genius of Shakspeare, the devilish chuckling with

which he hugged the notion of his own superiority in his exemption from

the standards that rule other men, instead of infecting, shocked and

warned and repelled the auditor:

[Illustration:

H B Hall & Sons

EDWIN FORREST AS

RICHARD III.

]

“Come, this conscience is a convenient scarecrow;

It guards the fruit which priests and wise men taste,

Who never set it up to fright themselves.”

Thus in the impersonation of him by Forrest Richard lost his perpetual

scowl, and took on here and there touches of humor and grim comedy. He

burst upon the stage, cloaked and capped, waving his glove in triumph

over the downfall of the house of Lancaster. Not in frowning gutturals

or with snarling complaint but merrily came the opening words,—

“Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York.”

Gradually as he came to descant upon his own defects and unsuitedness

for peace and love, the tone passed from glee to sarcasm, and ended with

dissembling and vindictive earnestness in the apostrophe,—

“Dive, thoughts, down to my soul. Here Clarence comes.”

The scene with Lady Anne, where he overcomes every conceivable kind and

degree of obstacles to her favor by the sheer fascination of his gifted

tongue, was a masterpiece of nature and art. He gave his pleading just

enough semblance of sincerity to make a plausible pathway to the

feminine heart, but not enough to hide the sinister charm of a

consummate hypocrisy availing itself of every secret of persuasion. It

was a fearful unmasking of the weakness of ordinary woman under the

siege of passion. No sermon was ever preached in any pulpit one-half so

terrible in power for those prepared to appreciate all that it meant.

When Lady Anne withdrew, the delighted vanity of Richard, the self-

pampering exultation of the artist in dissimulation, shone out in the

soliloquy wherewith he applauded and caressed himself:

“Was ever woman in this humor wooed?

Was ever woman in this humor won?

I’ll have her,—but I will not keep her long

To take her in her heart’s extremest hate,

With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,

The bleeding witness of my hatred by;

Having heaven, her conscience, and these bars against me!

And I no friends to back my suit withal,

But the plain devil, and dissembling looks!

And yet to win her,—all the world to nothing!”

In many places in the play his air of searching and sarcastic

incredulity, and his rich vindictive chuckle of self-applause, were as

artistically fine as they were morally repulsive. As Kean had done

before him, he made an effective point in speaking the line,

“To shrink my arm up like a withered shrub:”

he looked at the limb for some time with a sort of bitter discontent,

and struck it back with angry disgust. When the queenly women widowed by

his murderous intervention began to upbraid him with his monstrous

deeds, the cool audacity, the immense aplomb, the half-hidden enjoyment

of the joke, with which he relieved himself from the situation by

calling out,—

“A flourish, trumpets! strike alarums, drums!

Let not the heavens hear these tell-tale women

Rail on the Lord’s Anointed!”—

were a bit of grotesque satire, a gigantic and serviceable absurdity,

worthy of Rabelais.

The acting of Forrest in the tent-scene, where Richard in his broken

sleep dreams he sees the successive victims of his murderous hand

approach and threaten him, was original and effective in the highest

degree. He struggled on his couch with horrible phantoms. Ghosts pursued

him. Visions of battle, overthrow, despair, and death convulsed him.

Acting his dreams out he dealt his blows around with frightful and

aimless energy, and with an intense expression of remorse and vengeance

on his face fell apparently cloven to the earth. He then arose like a

man coming out of hell, dragging his dream with him, and, struggling

fiercely to awake, rushed to the footlights, sank on his knee, and spoke

these words, beginning with a shriek and softening down to a shuddering

whisper:

“Give me another horse! Bind up my wounds!

Have mercy, Jesu! Soft; I did but dream.

O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!

The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight.

Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.”

The merely selfish individual instincts and passions of unregenerate

human nature are kept from breaking out into the crimes which they would

spontaneously commit, by an ethical regulation which consists of a set

of ideal sympathies representing the rights and feelings of other men,

representing the word of God or the collective principles of universal

order. The criminal type of character embodied in Richard throws off or

suppresses this restraining and retributive apparatus, and enthrones a

lawless egotism masked in hypocrisy. Thus, Richard had so obscured,

clogged, and deadened the moral action of conscience, that his egotistic

passions held rampant supremacy, and success made him gay and exultant,

unchecked by any touch of remorse or shame. In his own eyes he clothed

himself in the glimmering mail of his triumphant deeds of wickedness,

and dilated with pride like Lucifer in hell. He could not weep nor

tremble, but he could shake with horrid laughter. In drawing this

terrible outline Shakspeare showed that he knew what was in man. In

painting the audacious picture Forrest proved himself a profound artist.

And the moral for the spectators was complete when the hardened

intellectual monster of depravity, in the culmination of the secret

forces of destiny and his own organism, was stripped of his self-

sufficiency, and, as the supernatural world broke on his vision, he

stood aghast, with curdled blood and stiffened hair, shrieking with

terror and despair.

Forrest was too large, with too much ingrained justice and heavy

grandeur, to be really suited for this part. He needed, especially in

its scolding contests of wit and spiteful invective, to be smaller,

lighter, swifter, more vixenish. It was just the character for Kean and

Booth, who in their way were unapproachable in it. Yet the conception of

Forrest was far truer on the whole; and his performance was full of

sterling merit.

HAMLET.

The clear good sense, the trained professional skill, and the deep

personal experience of Forrest gave him an accurate perception of the

general character of Hamlet. There will always be room for critical

differences of judgment on the details. But he could not commit the

gross blunders illustrated by so many noted actors who have exhibited

the enigmatical prince either as a petulant, querulous egotist morbidly

brooding over himself and irritable with everybody else, or as a

robustious, periwig-pated fellow always in a roaring passion or on the

verge of it. Forrest saw in the mind and heart of Hamlet sweet and noble

elements of the courtier, the scholar, the philosopher, the poet, and

the lover, but joined with a sensitive organization whose nerves were

too exquisitely strung not to be a little jangled by the harsh contact

of the circumstances into which he was flung. He regarded him as

naturally wise, just, modest, and affectionate, but by his experience of

wrong and fickleness in others, and of disturbed health in himself, led

to an exaggerated self-consciousness profoundly tinged with mournfulness

and easily provoked to sarcasm. In the melancholy young Dane was

embodied the sad malady of the highest natures, the great spiritual

disease of modern life,—an over-excited intellectuality dwelling with

too much eagerness and persistence on the mysteries of things; allured,

perplexed, baffled, vainly trying to solve the problems of existence,

injustice, misery, death, and wearying itself out with the restless

effort. Thus there is produced a tendency of blood to the head, which

leaves the extremities cold, the centres congested, and the surface

anæmic. The fevered and hungry brain devours the juices of the body, the

exhausted organic and animal functions complainingly react on the

spiritual nature or conscious essence with a wretched depression,

everything within is sicklied over with a pale cast of thought, and

everything without becomes a sterile and pestilent burden. The strong

and gentle nature, finely touched for fine issues, but too delicately

poised, is stricken with the disease of introspective inquiry, and, not

content to accept things as they are and wholesomely make the best of

them, keeps forever probing too curiously into the mysterious cause and

import of events, until mental gloom sets in on the lowered physical

tone. Then the opening of the supernatural world upon him, revealing the

murder of his father and imposing the duty of vengeance, hurries him in

his weakened and anxious condition to the edge of lunacy, over which he

sometimes purposely affects to pass, and sometimes, in his sleepless

care or sudden excitement, is really precipitated. Such was the

conception which Forrest strove to represent in his portraiture of

Hamlet. And in rendering it he did all he could to neutralize the ill-

adaptedness of his stalwart person and abounding vigor for the

philosophical and romantic sentimentality of the part by a subdued and

pensive manner and a costume which made his figure appear more tall and

slender. He laid aside the massive hauteur of his port, and walked the

stage and conversed with the interlocutors as a thoughtful scholar would

walk the floor of his library and talk with his friends. Even when he

broke into passionate indignation or scorn a restraining power of

culture and refinement curbed the violence. Still, the incongruity

between his form and that of the ideal Hamlet was felt by the audience;

and it abated from the admiration and enjoyment due to the sound

intelligence, sincere feeling, beautiful elocution, and just acting

which he displayed in the performance.

[Illustration:

G H Cushman

EDWIN FORREST AS

HAMLET.

]

Most players of Hamlet, in the scene where he first appears among the

courtiers before the king and queen, have taken a conspicuous position,

drawing all eyes. Forrest, with a delicate perception that the deep

melancholy and suspicion in which he was plunged would make him averse

to ostentation, was seen in the rear, as if avoiding notice, and only

came forward when the king called him by name with the title of son. He

then betrayed his prophetic mislike of his uncle by the dark look and

satirical inflection with which he said, aside,—

“A little more than kin and less than kind.”

His reply to the expostulation of his mother against his grief seeming

so particular and persistent,—

“Seems, madam: nay, it is: I know not seems.

’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,

Nor customary suits of solemn black,”—

was given with a sincerity, naturalness, and beauty irresistible in

effect. His grief and gloom appeared to embody themselves in a voice

that wailed and quivered the weeping syllables like the tones of a bell

swinging above a city stricken with the plague. The impression thus

produced was continued, modified with new elements of emotion, and

carried to a still higher pitch, when, left alone, he began to commune

with himself and to utter his thoughts and feelings aloud. What an all-

pervasive disheartenment possessed him, how sick he was of life, how

tenderly he loved and mourned his father, how loathingly he shrank from

the shameless speed and facility wherewith his widowed mother had

transferred herself to a second husband,—these phases of his unhappiness

were painted with an earnest truthfulness which seized and held the

sympathies as with a spell.

“O that this too, too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew:

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed

His canon ’gainst self-slaughter. O God! O God!

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!”

Hamlet had been a deep solitary self-communer, had penetrated the hollow

forms and shows of the conventional world, and with his questioning

spirit touched the very quick of the mystery of the universe. His soul

must have vibrated at least with obscure presentiments of the invisible

state and supernal ranges of being in hidden connection with the scenes

in which he was playing his part. Forrest revealed this by his manner of

listening to Horatio while he described how he and Marcellus and

Bernardo had seen the ghost of the buried majesty of Denmark walking by

them at midnight. This sense of a providential, retributive,

supernatural scheme mysteriously interwoven with our human life was

breathed yet more forcibly in his soliloquizing moods after agreeing to

watch with them that night in hope that the ghost would walk again:

“My father’s spirit in arms! All is not well;

I doubt some foul play: would the night were come!

Till then sit still, my soul. Foul deeds will rise,

Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes.”

When Hamlet, with Horatio and Marcellus, came upon the platform at

twelve to watch for the ghost, and said,—

“The air bites shrewdly: it is very cold,”—

he finely indicated by his absent and preoccupied manner that he was not

thinking about the cold, but was full of the solemn expectation of

something else. He took a position nigh to the entrance of the ghost,

and continued his desultory talk about the custom of carousing in

Denmark, till the spectral figure stalked in, almost touching him. Then

Hamlet turned, with a violent start of amazement and a short cry, and,

while the white face looked down into his own, uttered the most

affecting invocation ever spoken by man, in a subdued and beseeching

tone that seemed freighted with the very soul of bewildered awe and

piteous pleading. His voice was in a high key but husky, the vocality

half dissolved in mysterious breath. His look was that of startled

amazement touched with love and eagerness. The remorseful Macbeth

confronted the ghost of Banquo with petrifying terror. The thunder-

struck Richard saw the ghosts of his victims with wild horror. But

Hamlet was innocent; his spirit was that of truth and filial piety; and

when the marble tomb yawned forth its messenger from the invisible world

to revisit the glimpses of the moon, although his fleshly nature might

tremble at recognizing the manifest supernatural, his soul would indeed

be wonder-thrilled but not unhinged, feeling itself as immortal as that

on which it looked. His figure perfectly still, leaning forward with

intent face, his whole soul concentrated in eye and ear, breathed mute

supplication. And when in reply to the pathetic words of the ghost,—

“My hour is almost come

When I to sulphurous and tormenting flames

Must render up myself,”—

he said,—

“Alas, poor ghost!”—

his voice was so heart-brokenly expressive of commiseration that the

hearers almost anticipated the response,—

“Pity me not: but lend thy serious hearing

To what I shall unfold.”

The harrowing tale finished, the task of revenge enjoined, the ghost

disappears, saying,—

“Adieu! adieu! Hamlet, remember me.”

Nothing in dramatic art has ever been conceived more overwhelmingly

affecting and appalling than this scene and speech. A withering spell

seemed to have fallen on Hamlet and instantly aged him. He looked as

pale and shrivelled as the frozen moonlight and the wintry landscape

around him. He spoke the soliloquy that followed with a feeble and slow

laboriousness expressive of terrible pain and anxiety:

“Hold, hold, my heart;

And you, my sinews, grow not instant old,

But bear me stiffly up! Remember thee?

Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat

In this distracted globe. Remember thee?

Yea, from the table of my memory

I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,

All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,

That youth and observation copied there,

And thy commandment all alone shall live

Within the book and volume of my brain.”

To these words Forrest imparted an expression loaded with the whole

darkening and dislocating effect which the vision and injunction of his

father had exerted on him and was thenceforth to exert. For he was

changed beyond the power of recovery. He now moves through the mysteries

of the play, himself the densest mystery of all, at once shedding and

absorbing night, his steady purpose drifting through his unstable plans,

and his methodical madness hurrying king, queen, Polonius, Ophelia,

Laertes, and himself to their tragic doom. The load of his supernatural

mission darkens every prospect; yet his royal reason rifts the darkness

with its flashes, the splendor of his imagination flings rainbows around

him, and the native tenderness of his heart contrasts with his hard and

lonely fate like an Alpine rose springing from the crags and pressing

its fragrant petals against the very glacier. He was unhappy before,

because his faculties transcended his conditions, his boundless soul

chafed under the trifles of every-day experience, and his nobleness

revolted from the hollow shams and frivolous routine which he saw so

clearly. But now that the realm of the dead has opened on him, filling

him with distressful doubts and burdening him with distasteful duty,

revealing murder on the throne and making love and joy impossible, his

miserable dejection becomes supreme. He seeks to escape from the

pressure of his doom in thought, conversation, friendship, sportive wit.

Embittered by his knowledge, he turns on the shallow and treacherous

praters about him with a sarcastic humor which seems not part of his

character but elicited from him by accidents and glittering out of his

gloom like lamplight reflected on an ebony caryatid, or like a scattered

rosary of stars burning in a night of solid black.

Forrest endeavored to represent in their truth the rapid succession of

transitory and contradictory moods of Hamlet and yet never to lose the

central thread of unity on which they were strung. That unity was

imaginative intellectuality, introspective skepticism, profound

unhappiness, and a shrinking yet persistent determination to avenge the

murder of his father. The great intelligence and skill of the actor were

proved by his presenting both the variety and the unity, and never

forgetting that his portraiture was of a refined and scholarly prince

and a satirical humorist who loved solitude and secrecy and would rather

be misunderstood than reveal himself to the crowd. Among the many

delicate shadings of character exemplified in the impersonation one of

the quietest and best was the contrast of his sharp lawyer-like manner

of cross-examining Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and detecting that in

the disguise of friends they were really spies, with the thoughtful and

gracious kindness of his dealing with the players. Seated part of the

time, he spoke to the poor actor like an old friend, and called him

back, when he was retiring, to add another thought, and finally

dismissed him with a sympathetic touch on his shoulder and a smile.

The closet scene with the queen-mother, as Forrest played it, was a

model of justness. He began in a respectful and sorrowing tone.

Gradually, as he dwelt on her faithlessness to his father, and her

loathsome sensuality, his glowing memory and burning words wrought him

up to vehement indignation, and he appeared on the point of offering

violence, when the ghost reappeared with warning signal and message. The

suddenness of change in his manner—pallor of face, shrunken shoulders,

fixed dilatation of eyes—was electrifying. And when in response to the

queen’s

“O Hamlet, thou hast rent my heart in twain!”

he said,—

“O throw away the worser part of it,

And live the purer with the other half.

Good-night: but go not to my uncle’s bed:

Assume a virtue if you have it not,”—

he compressed into his utterance, in one indescribable mixture, a world

of entreaty, command, disgust, grief, deference, love, and mournfulness.

The scene in the church-yard was one full of felicitous design and

execution. Entering slowly with Horatio, he seemed, as he looked about,

invested with a religious reverence. Then he sat down on a tombstone,

and entered easily into conversation in a humorous vein with the clown

who was digging a grave. At the same time he kept up an even flow of

understanding with Horatio. He so bore himself that the audience could

reach no foregone conclusion to withdraw their absorbed attention from

the strange funereal phantasmagoria on which the curtain was soon to

sink like a pall. Over the skull of Yorick, in quick transition from the

bantering with the clown, his reminiscences, not far from mirth, his

profound yet simple moralizing, so heartfelt and natural, were naïve and

solemn and pathetic to the verge of smiles and awe and tears. When he

learned that Ophelia was dead, and that this grave was for her, he

staggered, and bent his head for a moment on the shoulder of his friend

Horatio. Though so quickly done, it told the whole story of his love for

her and his enforced renunciation.

Of all who have acted the part no one perhaps has ever done such

complete justice to the genius of Hamlet as Forrest did in his noble

delivery of the great speeches and soliloquies, with full observance of

every requirement of measure, accent, inflection, and relative

importance of thought. Some admired actors rattle the words off with no

sense whatever of the fathomless depths of meaning in them. In the

famous description by Hamlet of the disenchanting effect of his heavy-

heartedness the voice of Forrest brought the very objects spoken of

before the hearer,—the goodly frame, the earth; the most excellent

canopy, the air; the brave overhanging firmament; the majestical roof

fretted with golden fire. And when, turning from the beauty of the

material universe to the greater glory and mystery of the divine foster-

child and sovereign of the earth, man, he altered the tone of admiration

to a tone of awe, his speech stirred the soul like the grandest chords

in the Requiem of Mozart, thrilling it with sublime premonitions of its

own infinity.