Forrest thoroughly understood from the combined lessons of experience

and study the irremediable unhappiness and skepticism of the great,

dark, tender, melancholy soul of Hamlet,—how sick he was at heart, how

nauseated with the faithless shallowness of the hangers-on at court, how

weary of life. He comprehended the misery of the affectionate nature

that had lost all its illusions and was unable to reconcile itself to

the loss,—the unrest of the ardent imagination that could not forego the

search for happiness though constantly finding but emptiness and

desolation. And he made all this so clear that he actually startled and

spell-bound the audience by his interpretation of the wonderful

soliloquy wherein Hamlet debates whether he had not better with his own

hand seize that consummation of death so devoutly to be wished, and

escape

“The whips and scorns of time,

The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurns

That patient merit of the unworthy takes.”

The deep intuition that felt there were more things in heaven and earth

than philosophy had ever dreamed, the sore resentment at the unjust

discriminations of the world, the over-inquisitive intellect of the fool

of nature, horridly shaking his disposition with thoughts beyond the

reaches of his soul, the instinctive shrinking from the undiscovered

country after death, the broken will forever hankering after action but

forever baffled from it, the unfathomable desire for rest, the intense

ennui raising sighs so piteous and profound that they seemed to shatter

all the bulk,—all these were so brought out as to constitute a

revelation of the history of genius diseased by excessive exercise

within itself with no external outlets of wholesome activity. This

lesson has the greatest significance for the present time, when so many

gifted men allow their faculties to spin barrenly in their sockets,

incessantly struggling with abstract desires and doubts, wasting the

health and strength all away because the spiritual mechanism is not

lubricated by outward fruition of its functions, till normal religious

faith is made impossible, and at last, in their sterilized and irritable

exhaustion, they apotheosize despair, like Schopenhauer, and perpetually

toss between the two poles of pessimism and nihilism,—Everything is bad,

Everything is nothing! The true moral of the revelation is, Shut off the

wastes of an ambitious intellect and a rebellious will by humility and

resignation, do the clear duties next your hand, enjoy the simple

pleasures of the day with an innocent heart, trusting in the benignant

order of the universe, and you shall at last find peace in such an

optimistic faith as that illustrated by Leibnitz,—Everything is good,

Everything in the infinite degrees of being from vacuity to plenum is

centred in God!

It has always been felt that in Hamlet Shakspeare has embodied more of

his own inner life than in any other of his characters. Certainly Hamlet

is the literary father of the prolific modern brood of men of genius who

fail of all satisfactory outward activity because wasting their

spiritual peace and force in the friction of an inane cerebral strife

and worry. Few appreciate the true teaching or importance of this

portrayal. Hamlet said he lacked advancement, and that there was nothing

good or bad but thinking made it so, and that were it not that he had

bad dreams he could be bounded in a nutshell and count himself king of

infinite space. His comments on others were usually contemptuous and

satirical. He despised and mocked Polonius, and treated Osric,

Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern with scorn and sarcasm. And yet, although

he vilifies the general crowd and the drossy age, he is clearly

sensitive to public opinion and really most anxious to appear well, and

unwilling to bear a wounded name. In a word, he represents that class of

select and unhappy spirits whose great imaginative sympathy is

constantly showing to them themselves reflected in others and others

reflected in themselves, the result of the comparisons being personal

complacence and social irritability. For they form an estimate of their

own superiority which they cannot by action justify to others and get

them to ratify. The disparity of their inward power and their outward

production annoys them, fixes itself in chronic consciousness, and in

the consequent spiritual resistance and fret expends all the energy

which if economized and fruitfully directed would remove the evil they

resent and bless them with the good they desire. Then they react from

the world into cynical bitterness and painful solitude. The empty

struggle and misanthropic buzz within exhaust brain and nerves, and

initiate a resentful, desponding, suicidal state made up of discordant

aspiration and despair. Unable to fulfil themselves happily they madly

seek to destroy themselves in order to end their misery. The remedy lies

in a secret at once so deep and so transparent that hardly any of the

victims ever see it. It is simply to think less pamperingly of

themselves and more lovingly of others; cease from resistance, purify

their ambition with humble faith, and in a quiet surrender to the

Universal allow their drained and exasperated individuality leisure to

be replenished and harmonized. Corresponding with a religious attunement

of the soul, nervous tissues divinely filled with equalizing vitality

and power are the physical ground of contentment with self, nature,

mankind, destiny, and God. And the man of genius who has once lost it

can gain this combined moral and physical condition only by a modest

self-conquest, lowering his excessive exactions, and giving him a fair

outlet for his inward desires in productive activity.

Forrest distinguished the wavering of his Hamlet from the indecision of

his Macbeth and the promptitude of his Richard, and contrasted their

deaths with a luminous marking both fine and bold. Richard, whose

selfish intellect and stony heart had no conscience mediating between

them, with solid equilibrium and ruthless decision swept directly to his

object without pause or question. His death was characterized by

convulsions of impotent rage that closed in paralyzing horror. The

conscience of Macbeth made him hesitate, weigh, and vacillate until

rising passion or foreign influence turned the scale. His death was one

of climacteric bravery and frenzied exertion embraced in reckless

despair. The intellect of Hamlet set his heart and his conscience at

odds, and kept him ever balancing between opposed thoughts and

solicitations. He had lost his stable poise, and was continually tipping

from central sanity now towards dramatic madness, now towards

substantial madness. He died with philosophic resignation and

undemonstrative quietude. While all the mutes and audience to the act

looked pale and trembled at the tragic chance, he bequeathed the

justification of his memory to his dear Horatio, gave his dying voice

for the election of Fortinbras, and slowly, as the potent poison quite

o’ercrowed his spirit, let his head sink on the bosom of his one friend,

and with a long breath faintly whispered,—

“The rest is silence;”—

and then all was done.

“Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet prince,

And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

In the few pages of this tragedy Shakspeare gives perhaps the supremest

existing example of the richness and power of the dramatic art. It sums

up the story of life,—the joy of lovers, the anguish of bereavement, the

trial of friendship, hope and fear, plot and counterplot, lust, hatred,

crime and the remorse that follows, hearty mirth contrasted with sublime

despair, death, and the dark ignorance of what it all means which shuts

around the horizon with impenetrable clouds. Here are expressed an

intensity of passion, a bitter irony, a helpless doubt, a vain struggle,

a saturating melancholy and a bewildered end which would be too

repulsive for endurance were it not for the celestial poetry which plays

over it and permeates it all and makes it appear like a strange and

beautiful dream.

As to the interpretation by Forrest of the part of Hamlet in the play it

is but fair to quote in close what was said by a severe and unfriendly

anonymous critic who admitted that the intelligence shown was uncommon,

the elocution perfect, the manner discreet, the light and shade

impressive. “Mr. Forrest struggles continually with Mr. Forrest. Mind

wrestles with muscle; and although intellect is manifest, it is plain

that the body with great obstinacy refuses to fulfil the demands of

thought. To conceive bright images is a different thing from portraying

them on the canvas. And when Mr. Forrest, attempting with high ambition

to do that which nature forbids him to do, makes of philosophy a

physical exhibition and reduces mental supremacy to the dominion of

corporeal authority, he must blame that fate which cast him in no common

mould and gave to the body a preponderance which neither study nor

inspiration can overcome.” The critic here indicates the defect of the

actor, unquestionably, but so exaggerated as to dwarf and obscure his

greater merits.

CORIOLANUS.

Not many dramatic contrasts are wider than that between the complex

imaginative character of the melancholy Hamlet, spontaneously betaking

himself to speculation, and the simple passionate character of the proud

Coriolanus, instinctively rushing to action. There was much in the build

and soul of Forrest that closely resembled the haughty patrician, and he

was drawn to the part by a liking for it accordant with his inherent

fitness for it. For several years he played it a great deal and produced

a strong sensation in it. So thoroughly suited were he and the part for

each other, so pervasive and genuine was the identification of his

personal quality with the ideal picture, that his most intimate friend,

and the gifted artist chosen for the work, selected this as the most

appropriate representative character for his portrait-statue in marble.

The features and contour of the honest, imperious, fiery, scornful, and

heroic Coriolanus, as impersonated by Forrest with immense solidity and

distinctness, were simple but grand in their colossal and unwavering

relief. Kemble had been celebrated in this rôle. He played it as if he

were a symmetrical statue cut out of cold steel and set in motion by

some precise mechanical action. Forrest added to this a blood that

seemed to flame through him and a voice whose ponderous syllables

pulsated with fire. Stern virtue, ambition, deep tenderness,

magnanimity, transcendent daring and pride and scorn,—the man as soldier

and hero in uncorrupt sincerity and haughty defiance of everything wrong

or mean,—these were the favorite attributes which Forrest met in

Coriolanus, and absorbed as by an electric affinity, and made the people

recognize with applauding enthusiasm. He might well utter as his own the

words of his part to Volumnia,—

“Would you have me

False to my nature? Rather say, I play

The man I am.”

What unconsciously delighted Forrest in Coriolanus, and what he

represented with consummate felicity and force of nature, was that his

aristocracy was of the true democratic type; that is, it rested on a

consciousness of intrinsic personal worth and superiority, not on

conventional privilege and prescription. He loathed and launched his

scorching invectives against the commonalty not because they were

plebeians and he was a patrician, but because of the revolting

opposition of their baseness to his loftiness, of their sycophancy to

his pride, of their treacherous fickleness to his adamantine

steadfastness. As an antique Roman, he had the resentful haughtiness of

his social caste, but morally as an individual his disdain and sarcasm

were based on the contrast of intrinsically noble qualities in himself

to the contemptible qualities he saw predominating in those beneath him.

And although this is far removed from the beautiful bearing of a

spiritually purified and perfected manhood, yet there is in it a certain

relative historical justification, utility, and even glory, entirely

congenial to the honest vernacular fervor of Forrest.

Coriolanus, in his utter loathing for the arts of the demagogue, goes to

the other extreme, and makes the people hate him because, as they say,

“For the services he has done he pays himself with being proud.” At his

first appearance in the play he cries to the citizens, with scathing

contempt,—

“What’s the matter, you dissentient rogues,

That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion,

Make yourselves scabs?

He that trusts to you,

Where he should find you lions, finds you hares;

Where foxes, geese. You are no surer, no,

Than is the coal of fire upon the ice,

Or hailstone in the sun. Hang ye! Trust ye?

With every minute you do change a mind;

And call him noble that was now your hate;

Him vile, that was your garland.”

As his constancy despises their unstableness, so his audacious courage

detests their cowardice:

“Now put your shields before your hearts, and fight

With hearts more proof than shields.”

Seeing them driven back by the Volsces, he exclaims,—

“You souls of geese

That bear the shapes of men, how have you run

From slaves that apes would beat? Pluto and hell!

All hurt behind; backs red, and faces pale

With flight and agued fear! Mend, and charge home,

Or, by the fires of heaven, I’ll leave the foe

And make my wars on you.”

In all these speeches the measureless contempt, the blasting irony, the

huge moral chasm separating the haughty speaker from the cowering

rabble, were deeply relished by Forrest, and received an expression in

his bearing, look, and tone, everyway befitting their intensity and

their dimensions. Particularly in the reply to Sicinius,—

“Shall remain!

Hear you this Triton of the minnows? Mark you

His absolute ‘shall’?”—

the width of the gamut of the ironical circumflexes gave one an enlarged

idea of the capacity of the human voice to express contempt. And when

his disdain to beg the votes of the people and his mocking gibes at them

had aggravated them to pronounce his banishment, his superhuman

expression of scornful wrath no witness could ever forget:

“You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate

As reek o’ the rotten fens, whose loves I prize

As the dead carcasses of unburied men

That do corrupt my air, I banish you.”

His eyes flashed, his form lifted to its loftiest altitude, and the

words were driven home concentrated into hissing bolts. As the enraged

mob pressed yelping at his heels, he turned, and with marvellous

simplicity of purpose calmly looked them reeling backwards, his single

sphere swallowing all theirs and swaying them helplessly at his magnetic

will.

His farewell, when “the beast with many heads had butted him away,” was

a noble example of manly tenderness and dignity, all the more pathetic

from the self-control which masked his pain in a smiling aspect:

“Thou old and true Menenius,

Thy tears are salter than a younger man’s,

And venomous to thine eyes. I’ll do well yet.

Come, my sweet wife, my dearest mother, and

My friends of noble touch, when I am forth,

Bid me farewell, and smile. I pray you, come.

While I remain above the ground, you shall

Hear from me still.”

But his most charming and delightful piece of acting in the whole play

was the interview with his family on his return with Aufidius and the

conquering Volscians before the gates of Rome. The swift-recurring

struggle and alternation of feeling between the opposite extremes of

intense natural affection and revengeful tenacity of pride were painted

in all the vivid lineaments of truth. Fixed in the frozen pomp of his

power and his purpose, he soliloquizes,—

“My wife comes foremost, then the honored mould

Wherein this trunk was framed, and in her hand

The grandchild to her blood. But out, affection!

All bond and privilege of nature, break!

Let it be virtuous to be obstinate.

What is that curt’sy worth, or those doves’ eyes,

Which can make gods forsworn? I melt and am not

Of stronger earth than others. My mother bows;

As if Olympus to a molehill should

In supplication nod; and my young boy

Hath an aspect of intercession, which

Great nature cries, ‘Deny not.’ Let the Volsces

Plough Rome and harrow Italy; I’ll never

Be such a gosling to obey instinct; but stand

As if a man were author of himself

And knew no other kin.”

But when Virgilia fixed her eyes on him and said, “My lord and husband!”

his ice flowed quite away, and the exquisite thoughts which followed

were vibrated on the vocal chords as if not his lungs but his heart

supplied the voice:

“Like a dull actor now,

I have forgot my part, and I am out,

Even to a full disgrace. Best of my flesh,

Forgive my tyranny; but do not say,

For that, ‘Forgive our Romans.’ O, a kiss

Long as my exile, sweet as my revenge!

Now, by the jealous queen of heaven, that kiss

I carried from thee, dear; and my true lip

Hath virgined it e’er since. You gods! I prate,

And the most noble mother of the world

Leave unsaluted. Sink, my knee, i’ the earth;

Of thy deep duty more impression show

Than that of common sons.”

Yielding to the prayers of Volumnia, he took her hand with tender

reverence, and said, with upturned look and deprecating tone,—

“O, mother, mother!

What have you done? Behold, the heavens do ope,

The gods look down, and this unnatural scene

They laugh at.”

From the solemn reverence of this scene the change was wonderful to the

frenzied violence of untamable anger and scorn with which he broke on

Aufidius, who had called him “a boy of tears:”

“Measureless liar, thou hast made my heart

Too great for what contains it. Boy! O slave!

Cut me to pieces, Volsces; men and lads,

Stain all your edges on me. Boy! False hound!

If you have writ your annals true, ’tis there,

That, like an eagle in a dovecote, I

Fluttered your Volsces in Corioli:

Alone I did it. Boy!”

The signalizing memorable mark of the Coriolanus impersonated by Forrest

was the gigantic grandeur of his scale of being and consciousness. He

revealed this in his stand and port and moving and look and voice. The

manner in which he did it was no result of critical analysis, but was

intuitive with him, given to him by nature and inspiration. He exhibited

a gravitating solidity of person, a length of lines, a slowness of

curves, an immensity of orbit, a reverberating sonority of tone, which

illustrated the man who, as Menenius said, “wanted nothing of a god but

eternity, and a heaven to throne in.” They went far to justify the

amazing descriptions given in the play itself of the impressions

produced by him on those who approached him.

“Being moved, he will not spare to gird the gods.

Marked you his lip, and eyes?”

“Who is yonder?

O gods! he has the stand of Marcius.”

“The shepherd knows not thunder from a tabor

More than I know the sound of Marcius’ tongue

From every meaner man.”

“Marcius,

A carbuncle entire, as big as thou art,

Were not so rich a jewel. Thou art a soldier

Even to Cato’s wish, not fierce and terrible

Only in strokes; but, with thy grim looks, and

The thunder-like percussion of thy sounds,

Thou mak’st thine enemies shake, as if the world

Were feverous and did tremble.”

“The man I speak of cannot in the world

Be singly counterpoised.”

When, after his peerless feats in battle, the army and its leaders would

idolize him with praises, crown him with garlands, and load him with

spoils, he felt his deeds to be their own sufficient pay, and waved all

the rewards peremptorily aside with a mien as imposing as if some god

“Were slily crept into his human powers

And gave him noble posture.”

Entering the capital in triumph, the vast and steady imperiality of his

attitude, the tremendous weight of his slightest inclination, as though

the whole earth were the pedestal-slab on which he stood, drew and

fascinated all gaze.

“Matrons flung gloves,

Ladies and maids their scarfs and handkerchiefs,

Upon him as he passed; the nobles bended

As to Jove’s statue; and the commons made

A shower and thunder with their caps and shouts.”

The rare and exalted use of such acting as this is that it invites the

audience to lift their eyes above the vulgar pettinesses to which they

are accustomed and extend their souls with a superior conception of the

dignity of human nature and of the mysterious meanings latent in it.

The Coriolanus of Forrest was a marble apotheosis of heroic strength,

pride, and scorn. His moral glory was that he asserted himself on the

solid grounds of conscious truth, justice, and merit, and not, as

popular demagogues and the selfish members of the patrician class do, on

hollow grounds of assumption, trickery, and spoliating fraud. There was

great beauty, too, in his reverential love for his mother, his tender

love for his wife, his hearty love for his friend, and his magnanimous

incapacity for any recognized littleness of soul or of deed. The weight

and might of his spirit could give away victories and confer favors, but

could not steal a laurel or endure flattery. His fatal defect was that

he did not know the spirit of forgiveness, and was utterly incompetent

to self-renunciation. He had the repulsive and fatal fault of a crude,

harsh, revengeful temper, that clothed his gigantic indirect egotism in

the glorifying disguise of justice and sacrificed even his country to

his personal passion. Just and true at the roots, his virtues grew

insane from pride. Wrath destroyed his equilibrium, and belched his

grandeur and his life away in incontinent insolence of expression. Like

all the favorite characters of Forrest, however, he was no starveling

fed on verbality and ceremony, no pygmy imitator or empty conformist,

but one who lived in rich power from his own original centres and let

his qualities honestly out with democratic sincerity of self-assertion.

There is indeed a royal lesson in what he says:

“Should we in all things do what custom wills,

The dust on antique time would lie unswept,

And mountainous error be too highly heaped

For truth to o’er-peer.”

Still, self-will ought abnegatingly to give way in docile and

disinterested devotion to the public good. The great, strong, fearless

man should conquer himself, render his pride impersonal, renounce

revenge for individual slights or wrongs, and, instead of despising and

insulting the plebeian multitude, labor to abate their vices, remove

their errors, guide their efforts, and build their virtues into a fabric

of popular freedom and happiness. Then the selfish, passional ideal of

the past would give way to the rational, social ideal which is to redeem

the future. For, as a general rule thus far in the history of the world,

power, both private and public, in the proportion of its degree, has

been complacent instead of sympathetic, despotic instead of helpful,

indulging its own passions, despising the needs of others, filling

civilization itself with the spirit of moral murder. The chief

characters of Shakspeare embody this pagan ideal. Is there not a

Christian ideal, long since divinely born, but still waiting to be

nurtured to full growth, to be illustrated by dramatic genius, and to be

glorified in universal realization?

OTHELLO.

There was no character in which Forrest appeared more frequently or with

more effect on those who saw him than in that of Othello. He was pre-

eminently suited to the part by his own nature and experience, as well

as by unwearied observation and study. The play turns on the most vital

and popular of all the passions, love, and its revulsion into the most

cruel and terrible one, jealousy. He devoted incredible pains to the

perfecting of his representation of it; and undoubtedly it was, on the

whole, the most true and powerful of all his performances, though in

single particulars some others equalled and his Lear surpassed it.

Unprejudiced and competent judges agreed that he portrayed Othello in

the great phases of his character,—as a man dignified, clear, generous,

and calm,—as a man ecstatically happy in an all-absorbing love,—as a man

slowly wrought up through the successive degrees of jealousy,—as a man

actually converted into a maniac by the frightful conflict and agony of

his soul,—and, finally, as a man who in the frenzy of despair closes the

scene with murder and suicide;—that he acted all this with an intensity,

an accuracy, a varied naturalness and sweeping power very rarely

paralleled in the history of the stage. The reason why the portraiture

received so much censorious criticism amidst the abundant admiration it

excited was because the scale and fervor of the passions bodied forth in

it were so much beyond the experience of average natures. They were not

exaggerated or false, but seemed so to the cold or petty souls who knew

nothing of the lava-floods of bliss and avalanches of woe that ravage

the sensibilities of the impassioned souls that find complete fulfilment

and lose it. It is a most significant and interesting fact that when the

matchless Salvini played Othello in the principal American cities to

such enthusiastic applause, his conception and performance of the part

were so identical with those of Forrest, and he himself so closely

resembled his deceased compeer, that hundreds of witnesses in different

portions of the country spontaneously exclaimed that it seemed as if

Forrest had risen from the dead and reappeared in his favorite rôle. The

old obstinate prejudices did not interfere; and although Salvini made

the passion more raw and the force more shuddering and carried the

climax one degree farther than the American tragedian had done, actually

sinking the human maniac in the infuriated tiger, he was greeted with

wondering acclaim. If his portraiture of the Moor was a true one,—as it

unquestionably was,—then that of Forrest was equally true and better

moderated.

[Illustration:

G R Hall

EDWIN FORREST AS

OTHELLO.

]

In the first speech of Othello, referring to the purpose of Brabantio to

injure him with the Duke, Forrest won all hearts by the impression he

gave of the noble self-possession of a free and generous nature full of

honest affection and manly potency. He alluded to Brabantio without any

touch of anger or scorn, to himself with an air of quiet pride bottomed

on conscious worth and not on any vanity or egotism, and to Desdemona

with a softened tone of effusive warmth which betrayed the precious

freight and direction of his heart:

“Let him do his spite;

My services, which I have done the seignory,

Shall out-tongue his complaints. My demerits

May speak, unbonneted, to as proud a fortune

As this that I have reached. For know, Iago,

But that I love the gentle Desdemona,

I would not my unhoused, free condition

Put into circumscription and confine

For the sea’s worth.”

The easy frankness of his look and the rich flowing elocution of his

delivery of these words indicated a nature so ingenuous and honorable

that already the sympathies of every man and woman before him were won

to the Moor. This impression was continued and enhanced when, in

response to the abusive epithet of Brabantio and the threats of his

armed followers, he said, in a tone of unruffled self-command, touched

with a humorous playfulness and with a deprecating respect,—

“Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.—

Good seignior, you shall more command with years,

Than with your weapons.”

There was an exquisite moral beauty in the whole attitude and carriage

which Forrest gave Othello in the scene in the council-chamber, where he

replied to the accusations of using spells and medicines to draw

Desdemona to his arms. There was a combination of modest assurance and

picturesque dignity in his bearing, and a simple eloquence in his

pronouncing of the narrative of all his wooing, so artistic in its

seeming artlessness, so full of breathing honesty straight from the

heart of nature, that not a word could be doubted, nor could any hearer

resist the conviction expressed by the Duke,—

“I think this tale would win my daughter too,

Good Brabantio.”

To the bewitching power of simple sincerity and glowing truth he put

into this marvellous speech hundreds of testimonies were given like that

of the refined and lovely young lady who was heard saying to her

companion, “If that is the way Moors look and talk and love, give me a

Moor for my husband.”

When Desdemona entered, while she stayed, as she spoke, as she departed,

all the action of Othello towards her, his motions, looks, words,

inflections, clearly betokened the nature and supremacy of his affection

for her. Through the high and pure character of these signals it was

made obvious that his love was an entrancing possession; not an animal

love bred in the senses alone, but a love born in the soul and flooding

the senses with its divineness. On the keen fires of his high-blooded

organism and the poetic enchantments of his ardent imagination the

exquisite sweetness of this surrendered and gentle Desdemona played a

delicious intoxication, and the enthrallment of his passion made the

very movement of existence a rapture. Everything else faded before the

happiness he felt. Life was too short, the earth too dull, the stars too

dim, for the blissful height of his consciousness. In contrast with this

enchanted possession, day, night, joy, laughter, air, sea, the thrilling

notes of war, victory, fame, and power, were but passing illusions. The

voice of duty could rouse him from his dream, but the moment his task

was done he sank again into its ecstatic depths. All this still

saturation of delight and fulness of expanded being the Othello of

Forrest revealed by his acting and speech on meeting Desdemona in Cyprus

after their separation by his sudden departure to the wars. As, all

eager loveliness, she came in sight, exclaiming, “My dear Othello!” the

sudden brightness of his eyes, the rapturous smile that clothed his

face, his parted lips, his heaving breast and outstretched arms, were so

significant that they worked on the spectators like an incantation. And

when he drew her passionately to his bosom, kissed her on the forehead

and lips, and gazed into her face with unfathomable fondness, it was a

picture not to be surpassed of the exquisite doting of the new-made

husband while the honeymoon yet hung over them full-orbed in the silent

and dewy heaven, its inundation undimmed by the breath of custom. Then

he spoke:

“O, my soul’s joy!

If after every tempest come such calms,

May the winds blow till they have wakened death;

And let the laboring bark climb hills of seas

Olympus-high, and duck again as low

As hell’s from heaven! If it were now to die,

’Twere now to be most happy; for, I fear,

My soul hath her content so absolute,

That not another comfort like to this

Succeeds in unknown fate.”

The last lines he uttered with a restrained, prolonged, murmuring music,

a tremulous mellowness, as if the burden of emotion broke the vocal

breath into quivers. It suggested a tenderness whose very excess made it

timid and mystic with a pathetic presentiment of its own evanescence.

The yearning, aching deliciousness of love filled his breast so more

than full that even while he seemed to strive to hold back all verbal

expression for fear of losing the emotional substance, it broke forth

itself with melodious softness in the syllabled beats of the lingering

words:

“I cannot speak enough of this content:

It stops me here: it is too much of joy.

Come, let us to the castle. O, my sweet,

I prattle out of fashion, and I dote

In mine own comforts.”

In the scene of the drunken brawl in Cyprus most actors had made Othello

rush in with drawn sword, crying, with extravagant pose and emphasis,

“Hold, for your lives!” Forrest entered without sword, in haste, his

night-mantle thrown over his shoulders as if just from his bed. He went

through the scene, rebuking the brawlers and restoring order, with an

admirable moderation combined with commanding moral authority. Only

once, when answer to his inquiry was delayed, his volcanic heat burst

out. He spoke rapidly, with surprise rather than anger, and bore down

all with a personal weight that had neither pomp nor offence, yet was

not to be resisted. Throughout the first and second acts Forrest played

Othello as a man of beautiful human nature, noble in honor, rich in

affection, gentle in manners, though, when justly roused, capable of a

terrific headlong wrath:

“Now, by Heaven,

My blood begins my safer guides to rule;

And passion, having my best judgment collied,

Assays to lead the way. If I once stir

Or do but lift this arm, the best of you

Shall sink in my rebuke.”

In the third act the diabolical malignity and cunning of Iago begin to

take effect, more and more insinuating poisonous suspicions and doubts

into the naturally open and truthful mind of Othello. The process and

advancement of the horrid struggle found in Forrest a man and an artist

to whose experience of human nature and life no item in the whole dread

catalogue of the courses, symptoms, and consequences of love encroached

on and subdued by jealousy was foreign, and whose skill in expression

was abundantly able to set every feature of the tragedy in distinct

relief. As now the guileless Desdemona shone on him, and anon the

devilish Iago distilled his venom, he was torn between his loving

confidence in his wife and his confiding trust in his tempter:

“As if two hearts did in one body reign

And urge conflicting streams from vein to vein.”

When he saw or thought of her a blessed reassurance tranquillized him;

when he heeded the hideous suggestions of his treacherous servant a

frozen shudder ran through him. The waves of tenderness and violence

chased one another over the mimic scene. At one moment he said,—

“If she be false, O, then heaven mocks itself.

I’ll not believe it.”

At another moment he writhed in excruciating anguish under the fearful

innuendoes which Iago wound about him. The spectacle was like that of an

anaconda winding her tightening coils around a tiger until one can hear

the cracking of the bones in his lordly back.

When the fiendish suggestions of Iago first took thorough effect the

result startled even him, and he gazed on the awful convulsions in the

face of his victim as one might look into the crater of Vesuvius. That

which had seemed granite proved to be gunpowder. As with the prairie

fire: the traveller lets a spark fall, and the whole earth seems to be

one rushing flame. Then swiftly followed those lacerating alternations

of contradictory excitements which are the essence of jealousy,—the

mixture of intense opposites into an experience of infernal discord. His

love lingers on her and gloats over her, and will not believe any evil

of her. His suspicion makes him shrink into himself with horror:

“O curse of marriage,

That we can call these delicate creatures ours,

And not their appetites.”

Now he seeks relief in loathing and hating her, trying to tear her dear

image out from among his heart-strings. From the crazing agony of this

effort he springs wildly into wrath against her traducer. Forrest

expressed these sudden and violent transitions from extreme to extreme

with exact truth to nature, by that constant interchanging of intense

muscles and languid eyes with intense eyes and languid muscles which

corresponds with the successive apprehension of a blessing to be

embraced and an evil to be abhorred. The change in his appearance and

moving too was commensurate with what he had undergone. As he advanced

to meet his wife on her arrival in Cyprus, he walked like one inspired,

weightless and illumined with joy:

“Treading on air each step the soul displays,

The looks all lighten and the limbs all blaze.”

But after the dreadful doubt had ruined his peace, he grew so pale and

haggard, wore so startled and dismal a look, was so self-absorbed in

misery, that he appeared an incarnate comment on the descriptive words,—

“Look where he comes! Not poppy nor mandragora,

Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,

Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep

Which thou ow’dst yesterday.”

There was an imaginative vastness and unity in the soul of Othello which

aggrandized his experiences and allowed him to do nothing by halves.

Forrest so perceived and exemplified this as to make his performance

come before the audience as a new revelation to them of the colossal and

blazing extremes, the entrancing, maddening, and fatal extremes, to

which human passions can mount. His love, his conflict with doubt, his

melancholy, his wrath, his hate, his revenge, his remorse, his despair,

each in turn absorbingly possesses him and floods the earth with heaven

or hell.

The unrivalled speech of lamentation over his lost happiness he gave

not, as many a famous actor has, partly in a tone of complaining

vexation and partly with a noisy pomp of declamation. He began with an

exquisite quality of tearful regret and sorrow which was a breathing

requiem over the ruins of his past delights. The mournfulness of it was

so sweet and chill that it seemed perfumed with the roses and moss

growing over the tomb of all his love.

“I had been happy if the general camp,

Pioneers and all, had tasted her sweet body,

So I had nothing known.”

Then the voice, still low and plaintive, swelled and quivered with the

glorious words that followed:

“O, now, forever,

Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content!

Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars,

That make ambition virtue! O, farewell!”

And as he ended with the line,

“Farewell! Othello’s occupation’s gone!”

his form and limbs drooping, his lips sunken and tremulous, his very

life seemed going out with each word, as if everything had been taken

from him and he was all gone. Suddenly, with one electrifying bound, he

leaped the whole gamut from mortal exhaustion to gigantic rage, his

eyeballs rolling and flashing and his muscles strung, seized the

cowering Iago by the throat, and, with a startling transition of voice

from mellow and mournfully lingering notes to crackling thunderbolts of

articulation, shrieked,—

“If thou dost slander her, and torture me,

Never pray more; abandon all remorse;

On horror’s head horrors accumulate;

Do deeds to make heaven weep, all earth amazed;—

For nothing canst thou to damnation add

Greater than that.”

The wild inspiration subsided as swiftly as it had risen, and left him

gazing in blank amazement at what he had done. Again his struggling

emotions were carried to a kindred climax when Iago told him the

pretended dream of Cassio. He uttered the sentence, “I will tear her all

to pieces,” in a manner whose force of pathos surprised every heart. His

revenge began furiously, “I will tear her”—when his love came over it,

and he suddenly ended with pitying softness—“all to pieces.” It was as

if an avalanche, sweeping along earth and rocks and trees, were met by a

breath which turned it into a feather. In the next act he gave an

instance just the reverse of this: first he says, with doting fondness,

“O, the world hath not a sweeter creature;” then, the imaginative

associations changing the picture, he screams ferociously, “I will chop

her into messes!”

Thence onward Othello was painted in a more and more piteous plight. The

great soul was conquered by the remorseless intellect of Iago, leagued

with its own weakness and excess. He grew less massive and more

petulant. He stooped to spies and plots, and compassed the assassination

of Cassio. His misery sapped his mind and toppled down his chivalrous

sentiments until he could unpack his sore and wretched heart in abusive

words and treat Desdemona with unrelenting cruelty.

Finally his tossing convulsions passed away, and a fixed resolution to

kill the woman who had been false to him settled down in gloomy

calmness. The curtain rose and showed him seated at an open window

looking out on the night sky. Desdemona was asleep in her bed. He sighed

heavily, and in slow tones, loaded with thoughtful and resigned

melancholy, soliloquized,—

“It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,—

Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars!—

It is the cause. Yet I’ll not shed her blood,

Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,

And smooth as monumental alabaster.

Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men.

Put out the light, and then put out the light.

If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,

I can again thy former light restore,

Should I repent me. But once put out thy light,

Thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature,

I know not where is that Promethean heat

That can thy light relume.”

He permitted the audience to see the vast dimension and intensity of his

love, doubt, agony, sorrow, despair, vengeance,—and the revelation was

appalling in its solemnity. Henceforth even his invective was moderated

and quiet. He seemed to fancy himself not so much revenging his personal

wrong as vindicating himself and executing justice. He did not make a

horror of the killing, as Kean did. He drew the curtains apart,—a slight

struggle,—a choking murmur,—and as Emilia knocked at the door, and he

turned, with the pillow in his hand, his listening attitude and his

bronze face and glistening eyes formed a dramatic picture not to be

forgotten. Then came the final revulsion of his agonizing sorrow:

“O, insupportable! O, heavy hour!

Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse

Of sun and moon; and that the affrighted globe

Should yawn at alteration.”

His deadly distress and paralyzing bewilderment now illustrated what he

had before said, that he loved her so with the entirety of his being

that the loss of her, even in thought, brought back chaos:

“Had she been true,

If heaven would make me such another world

Of one entire and perfect chrysolite,

I’d not have sold her for it.”

When Emilia revealed the plot by which he had been deceived, and

convinced him of the innocence of his wife, an absolute desolation and

horror of remorse, as if a thunderbolt had burst within his brain, smote

him to the floor. Staggering to the fatal couch, his gaze was riveted on

the marble face there, and a broken heart and a distracted conscience

moaned and sobbed in the syllables,—

“Now, how dost thou look now? O, ill-starred wench!

Pale as thy smock! when we shall meet at compt,

This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven,

And fiends will snatch at it. Cold, cold, my girl?

Even like thy chastity.

O, cursed, cursed slave! Whip me, ye devils,

From the possession of this heavenly sight!

Blow’ me about in winds! roast me in sulphur!

Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!

O Desdemona! Desdemona! dead?”

The strain had been too great to be borne, and he was himself nearly

dead. He wore the aspect of one who felt that to live was calamity, and

to die the sole happiness left. Collecting himself, he spoke the calm

words of appeal that justice might be done to his memory, nothing

extenuated nor aught set down in malice. He turned towards the

breathless form, once so dear, with a look of tenderness slowly

dissolving and freezing into despair. Then, with one stroke of his

dagger, he fell dead without a groan or a shudder.

“This did I fear, but thought he had no weapon;

For he was great of heart.”

Some actors have made Othello feared and disliked; others have caused

him to be regarded with moral curiosity or poetic interest. As Forrest

impersonated him he was first warmly admired, then profoundly pitied. Of

the tragedians most celebrated in the past, according to the best

descriptions which have been given of their representations, it may be

said that the Othello of Quin was a jealous plebeian; the Othello of

Kean, in parts a jealous king, in parts a jealous savage; the Othello of

Vandenhoff, a jealous general; the Othello of Macready, a jealous

theatrical player; the Othello of Brooke, a jealous knight; the Othello

of Salvini, a jealous lover transformed into a jealous tiger; but the

Othello of Forrest was a jealous man carried truthfully through all the

degrees of his passion. One of his predecessors in the rôle had veiled

the woes of the man beneath the dignities of his rank and station as a

martial commander; another had theatricized the part, with wondrous

study and toil, elaborating posture, look, and emphasis, presenting a

correctness of drawing which might secure admiring criticism but could

never move feeling; yet another, fascinated with the romantic

accessories and vicissitudes of the character, made a gorgeous picture

of a gorgeous hero in a gorgeous time. Forrest analyzed away from his

Othello all adventitious circumstances; took him from the picturesque

scenes of Venice, stripped off his official robes, and placed him on the

stage in the glories and tortures of his naked humanity, a living mirror

to every one of the struggles of a master-passion tearing a great heart

asunder, driving a powerful mind into the awful abyss of insanity,

making a generous man a coward, an eavesdropper, a murderer, and a

suicide.

The explicit contents and teaching of the part as Shakspeare wrote it

and as Forrest acted it are the unspeakable privilege and preciousness

of a supreme human love crowned with fulfilment, and the fearful nature

and results of an ill-grounded jealousy. The deeper implicit meaning and

lesson it bears is the animal degradation, the frightful ugliness and

danger, the intrinsically immoral and murderous character of the passion

of jealousy. This all-important revelation latent in the tragedy of

Othello has not been illumined, emphasized, or brought into relief on

the stage as yet. It ought to be done. The historical traditions of

tyrannical selfishness, almost universally organized in the interests of

the world, which make men feel that in sexual love the lover possesses

the object of his love as an appanage and personal property, all whose

free wishes are merged in his will and whose disloyalty is justly

visited with merciless cruelty and even death itself, have blinded most

persons to the inherent unworthiness and vulgarity, the inherent

ferocity and peril, of the passion of jealousy. It is common among

brutes, and belongs to the brutish stage in man. It cannot be imagined

in heaven among the cherubim and seraphim. Freedom, the self-possession

of each one in equilibrium with all others and in harmony with universal

order, belongs to the divine stage of developed humanity. There can be

no certainty against madness, crime, and self-immolation so long as an

automatic passion in the lower regions of the organism enslaves the

royal reason meant to reign by right from God. Happen what may, self-

poise and the steady aim at progress towards perfection should be kept.

This cannot be when love is degraded to physical pleasure sought as an

end, instead of being consecrated to the fruitful purposes for which it

was ordained. The only absolute pledge of blessedness and peace between

those who love and would hope to love always is an adjustment of conduct

based not on mere feeling, whether low or high, but on feeling as itself

subdued and disciplined by reason, justice, and truth, first developed

in the thinking mind and constituted as it were into the science of the

subject, then appropriated by the sentiments and made habitual in the

individual character. What details of conduct will result, what

innovations on the present social state will be made, when a scientific

morality shall have mastered the subject and formulated its principles

into practical rules, it is premature to say. But it is certain that the

leading of one life in the light and another one in the dark will be

forbidden. It is certain that the discords, the diseases, the

distresses, the crimes, which are now so profuse in this region of

experience will be no longer tolerated. And it is safe to prophesy that

such delirious expressions of hate and revenge as have hitherto usually

been thought tragic and terrible will come to be thought bombastic and

ludicrous:

“O that the slave had forty thousand lives;

One is too poor, too weak for my revenge!

Now do I see ’tis true. Look here, Iago;

All my fond love thus do I blow to heaven. ’Tis gone.—

Arise, black vengeance, from thy hollow cell!

Yield up, O love, thy crown, and hearted throne,

To tyrannous hate! swell, bosom, with thy fraught;

For ’tis of aspics’ tongues! O blood, blood, blood!”

Othello, like most of the characters of Shakspeare, illustrates the

historic actual, not the prophetic ideal. The present state of society

is so ill adjusted, so full of painful evils, that things cannot always

remain as temporary and local habits and mere empirical authority have

seemingly settled them. To think they can is the sure mark of a narrow

mind, a petty character, and a selfish heart. Nothing is more certain

than continuous change. Nothing is, therefore, more characteristic of

the genuine thinker than his ability to contemplate other modes of

thought, other varieties of sentiment, than those to which he was bred.

With the progress of social evolution the hitherto prevalent ideas of

love and jealousy may undergo changes amounting in some instances,

perhaps, to a reversal. Meanwhile, those who are not prepared to adopt

any new opinions in detail should, with hospitable readiness impartially

to investigate, consider within themselves which is better, an imperial

delicacy and magnanimity in those who love causing them to refuse to

know anything that occurs in absence so long as each preserves self-

respecting personal fidelity to the ideal of progressive perfection? or,

as at present, spiritual mutilation and misery, treacherous concealment,

espionage, detection, disgrace, frenzy, and death?

One thing at all events is sure, namely, that of him alone whose love

for God, or the universal in himself and others, is superior to his love

for the individual, or the egotistic in himself and others, can it ever

be safely said, as it was once so mistakenly said of the unhappy Moor,—

“This is a man

Whom passion cannot shake; whose solid virtue

The shock of accident nor dart of chance

Can neither graze nor pierce.”

LEAR.

Nearly every season for more than forty years Forrest played the part of

Lear many times. He never ceased to study it and to improve his

representation, adding new touches here and there, until at last it

became, if not the most elaborately finished and perfect of all his

performances, certainly the sublimest in spiritual power and tragic

pathos. As he grew old, as his experience of the desolating miseries of

the world deepened, as his perception was sharpened of the hollowness

and irony of the pomps and pleasures of human power contrasted with the

solemn drifting of destiny and death, as the massiveness of his physique

was expanded in its mould and loosened in its fibre by the shocks of

time and fate, he seemed ever better fitted, both in faculty and

appearance, to meet the ideal demands of the rôle. He formed his

conception of it directly from the pages of Shakspeare and the dictates

of nature. His elaboration and acting of it were original, the result of

his own inspiration and study. Heeding no traditional authority, copying

no predecessor, but testing each particular by the standard of truth, he

might have proudly protested, like the veritable Lear,—

[Illustration:

G H Cushman

EDWIN FORREST AS

KING LEAR.

]

“No, they cannot touch me for coining,—

I am the king himself.”

No person of common sensibility could witness his impersonation of the

character during his latter years without paying it the tribute of tears

and awe.

Lear appears in a shape of imposing majesty, but with the authentic

signals of breaking sorrow and ruin already obvious. He is a king in the

native build and furniture of his being, not merely by outward rank. His

scale of passion is gigantic, and always exerted at the extremes. When

deferred to and pleased, his magnanimity is boundless and his love most

tender. But, once crossed, nothing can restrain his petulance, and his

outbursts of anger are terrible to others and dangerously expensive to

himself. His identity is always marked by greatness, like some huge

landmark dwarfing everything near. There is a royal scope and altitude

belonging to the structure of his soul which is never lost. It is seen,

whether he be ruler, outcast, or madman, in the grandeur of his mien, in

the majestic eloquence of his thought and expression, in the towering

swell of his ambition. He is ever insistingly conscious of his

kingliness, and must be bowed to and have his way, as much when with the

poor fool he hides his nakedness from the pelting blast as when in

august plenitude of power he divides his realm among his children. This

central point of unity Forrest firmly seized, and made it everywhere in

his representation abundantly prominent and impressive.

At the opening of the play Lear is a very old man. Moved by some secret

premonition of failing reason or decay, he is about to abdicate his

crown. He is seen to be an imperial spirit throned in an enfeebled

nature, a power girdled with weakness. An exacting and unbridled spirit

of authority, a splenetic assertion of his kingly will, with the

incessant worries and frictions to which such a habit always gives rise,

have undermined his poise and lowered his strength, and brought his mind

into that state of unstable equilibrium which is the condition of an

explosive irritability fated to issue in madness. He himself, in the

organic strata below his free intelligence, has obscure premonitions of

his crumbling state; but every intimation of it which reaches his

consciousness fills him with an angry resentment that seeks some instant

vent.

The task to indicate all this, so clearly, with such moving force, with

such combination of overtopping power and piteous weakness, as to fix it

all in the apprehending sympathies of the audience, was marvellously

accomplished by Forrest in the opening scene. The vast frame whose

motions were alternately ponderous and fretful, the pale massive face,

the restless wild eyes, the rich deep voice magnificent in oratoric

phrase and breaking in querulous anger,—these, skilfully managed,

revealed at once the ruining greatness of the royal nature, dowered with

imposing and gracious qualities but fatally cored with irritable self-

love.

“Know that we have divided

In three our kingdom; and ’tis our fast intent

To shake all cares and business from our age;

Conferring them on younger strengths, while we,

Unburthened, crawl toward death. Tell me, my daughters,

(Since now we will divest us, both of rule,

Interest of territory, cares of state,)

Which of you, shall we say, doth love us most?

That we our largest bounty may extend

Where nature doth with merit challenge.”

The treacherous Goneril and Regan, whose heartless natures their younger

sister so well knew, made such fulsome protestations as shocked her into

a dumb reliance on her own true affection; and when the yearning and

testy monarch fondly asks what she can say, her whole being of love and

sincerity is behind her words:

“Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave

My heart into my mouth. I love your majesty

According to my bond.”

Then broke forth the insane pride and self-will, which, brooking no

appearance of opposition or evasion, were stricken with judicial

blindness and left to prefer evil to good, to embrace the selfishness

which was as false and cruel as hell, and to reject the love which was

as gentle and true as heaven. With a terrible look, and a deep intensely

girded voice, whose rapid accents made his whole chest shake with

muffled reverberations, like a throbbing drum, he cried,—

“Let it be so: thy truth then be thy dower;

For, by the sacred radiance of the sun,

The mysteries of Hecate, and the night;

By all the operations of the orbs,

From whom we do exist, and cease to be;

Here I disclaim all my paternal care,

Propinquity, and property of blood,

And as a stranger to my heart and me

Hold thee, from this, forever. The barbarous Scythian,

Or he that makes his generation messes

To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom

Be as well neighbored, pitied, and relieved,

As thou, my sometime daughter.”

And when the noble Kent would have interceded, his frenzied wrong-

headedness peremptorily destroyed the last hope of remedy:

“Peace, Kent!

Come not between the dragon and his wrath.”

Then, with the piteous side-revelation,—

“I loved her most, and thought to set my rest

On her kind nursery,”—

he subscribed and sealed his hideous fault by harshly driving the poor,

sweet Cordelia from his presence, and banishing from his dominions the

best friend he ever had, honest Kent.

The disease in the nature of Lear, a morbid self-consciousness that

prevented alike self-rule and self-knowledge, did not let his passion

expire like flaming tinder, but kept it long smouldering. Forrest

pictured to perfection its recurring swells and tardy subsidence. Each

advancing step showed more completely the vice that had cloyed the

kingly nobility and gradually prepared the retributive tempest about to

burst. His injured vanity feeding itself with its own inflaming

deception now made his fancy ascribe to the angelic Cordelia, dismantled

from the folds of his old favor, such foul and ugly features of

character that he called her

“A wretch whom nature is ashamed

Almost to acknowledge hers,”—

while, perversely investing the tiger-breasted Goneril and Regan with

imaginary goodness and charm, he said to them,—

“Ourself, by monthly course

With reservation of an hundred knights,

By you to be sustained, shall our abode

Make with you by due turns. Only we will retain

The name and all the additions to a king.”

So to combine in the representation of Lear the power and the weakness,

the mental and physical grandeur and irritability, as to compose a

consistent picture true to nature, and to make their manifestations

accurate both in the whirlwinds of passion and in the periods of calm,—

this is what few even of the greatest actors have been able to do.

Forrest did it in a degree which made the most competent judges the most

enthusiastic applauders. The nervous and tottering walk, with its sudden

changes, the quick transitions of his voice from thundering fulness to

querulous shrillness, the illuminated and commanding aspect passing into

sunken pallor and recovering, the straightenings up of the figure into

firm equilibrium, the palsying collapses,—all these he gave with a

precision and entireness which were the transcript and epitome of a

thousand original studies of himself and of grand old men whom he had

watched in different lands, in the streets, in lunatic asylums.

But the deepest merit of this representation was not its exactness in

mimetic simulation or reproduction of the visible peculiarities of

shattered and irascible age. Its chief merit was the luminous revelation

it gave of the inner history of the character impersonated. He made it a

living exhibition of the justifying causes and the profound moral

lessons of the tragedy of the aged monarch, who, self-hurled both from

his outer and his inner kingdom, was left to gibber with the gales and

the lightnings on the rain-swept and desolate moor. In every fibre of

his frame and every crevice of his soul Forrest felt the tremendous

teachings intrusted by Shakspeare to the tragedy of Lear. It is true the

feeling did not lead him morally to master these teachings for a

redemptive application to himself; and his own experience paid the

bitter penalty of a personal pride too exacting in its ideal estimate of

self and others. But the feeling did enable him dramatically to portray

these lessons, with matchless vividness and power, and a rugged realism

softened and tinted with art. Shakspeare’s own notion of Lear is

remarkably expressed by one of the characters in the play: “He hath ever

but slenderly known himself. Then we must look from his age to receive

not alone the imperfections of long-engrafted condition, but,

therewithal, the unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring

with them.”

The whole history of the world in every part of society abounds with

correspondences to the cruel error, the awful wrong, committed by Lear

in accepting Goneril and Regan and rejecting Cordelia. But there is a

cause for everything that happens. These dread and lamentable injustices

arise from vices in the characters that perpetrate them. Their blindness

is the punishment for their sin. The most inherent and obstinate sin in

every unregenerate soul is excess of egotistic self-love. The strongest

and richest natures are most exposed to this evil disguised in shapes so

subtile as to deceive the very elect, making them unconsciously desire

to subdue the wills of others to their will. This is a proud and fearful

historic inheritance in the automatic depth of man below his free

consciousness. Overcoming it, he is divinely free and peaceful. Yielding

to it, he wears his force away in unhappy repinings and resentments.

Aggravated by indulgence, it blinds his instincts and perverts his

perceptions, makes him praise and clasp the bad who yield and flatter,

denounce and shun the good who faithfully resist and try to bless. This

profound moral truth Shakspeare makes the dim background of the tragedy,

whose foreground blazes with a dreadful example of the penalties visited

on those who violate its commands. He teaches that those who, bound and

blinded by wilful self-love, embrace the designing and corrupt instead

of the honest and pure, are left to the natural consequences of their

choice. These consequences are the avenging Nemesis of divine

providence. The actor who, as Forrest did, worthily illustrates this

conception, becomes for the time the sublimest of preachers; for his

appalling sermon is not an exhortation verbally articulated, it is a

demonstration vitally incarnated.

The monstrous mistake of Lear soon brought its results to sight. The

poor old monarch, fast weakening, even-paced, in his wits and muscles,

but not abating one jot of his arrogant self-estimate and royal

requiring, was so scolded, thwarted, and badgered by Goneril that he was

quite beside himself with indignation. Then, most pitiably in his

distress, relenting memory turned his regards towards the faithful

gentleness he had spurned:

“O, most small fault!

How ugly didst thou in Cordelia show,

Which, like an engine, wrenched my frame of nature

From the fixed place, drew from my heart all love,

And added to the gall. O Lear, Lear, Lear!

Beat at this gate, that let thy folly in,

And thy dear judgment out.”

Uttering these remorseful words, striking his forehead, Forrest stood,

for a moment, a picture of uncertainty, regret, self-deprecation, and

woe. Then a sense of the insulting disrespect and ingratitude of Goneril

seemed to break on him afresh, and let loose the whole volcanic flood of

his injured selfhood. Anguish, wrath, and helplessness drove him mad.

The blood made path from his heart to his brow, and hung there, a red

cloud, beneath his crown. His eyes flashed and faded and reflashed. He

beat his breast as if not knowing what he did. His hands clutched wildly

at the air as though struggling with something invisible. Then, sinking

on his knees, with upturned look and hands straight outstretched towards

his unnatural daughter, he poured out, in frenzied tones of mingled

shriek and sob, his withering curse, half adjuration, half malediction.

It was a terrible thing, almost too fearful to be gazed at as a work of

art, yet true to the character, the words, and the situation furnished

by Shakspeare. Drawing for the moral world comparisons from the material

world, it was a maelstrom of the conscience, an earthquake of the mind,

a hurricane of the soul, and an avalanche of the heart. By a perfect

gradation his protruded and bloodshot eyeballs, his crimsoned and

swollen features, and his trembling frame subsided from their convulsive

exertion. And with a confidence touching in its groundlessness, he

bethought him,—

“I have another daughter,

Who, I am sure, is kind and comfortable.”

He went to her, and said, with a distraught air of sorrowful anger, more

pathetic than mere words can describe,—

“Thy sister’s naught: O Regan! She hath tied

Sharp-toothed unkindness, like a vulture, here:

I can scarce speak to thee; thou’lt not believe

With how depraved a quality,—O Regan!”

Told by her that he was old, that in him nature stood on the verge of

her confine, that he needed guidance, and had best return to Goneril and

ask her forgiveness, he stood an instant in blank amazement, as if not

trusting his ears; a tremor of agony and rage shot through him, fixed

itself in a scornful smile, and, throwing himself on his knees, he

vented his heart with superhuman irony:

“Dear daughter, I confess that I am old:

Age is unnecessary; on my knees I beg

That you’ll vouchsafe me raiment, bed, and food.”

Goneril entered. Shrinking from her partly with loathing, partly with

fear, he exclaimed, in a tone of mournful and pleading pain befitting

the transcendent pathos of the imagery,—

“O Heavens!

If you do love old men, if your sweet sway

Allow obedience, if yourselves are old,

Make it your cause: send down, and take my part!”

As Regan and Goneril chaffered and haggled to reduce the cost of his

entertainment, he revealed in his face and by-play the effect their

conduct had on him. The rising thoughts and emotions suffused his

features in advance of their expression. He stood before the audience

like a stained window that burns with the light of the landscape it

hides. He then began in a low tone of supplicating feebleness and

gradually mounted to a climax of frenzy, where the voice, raised to

screaming shrillness, broke in helplessness, exemplifying that degree of

passion which is impotent from its very intensity. Those critics who

blamed him for this excess as a fault were wrong, not he; for it belongs

to a rage which unseats the reason to have no power of repression, and

so to recoil on itself in exhaustion:

“You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,

As full of grief as age; wretched in both.

If it be you that stir these daughters’ hearts

Against their father, fool me not so much

To bear it tamely: touch me with noble anger.

O, let not women’s weapons, water-drops,

Stain my man’s cheeks. No, you unnatural hags,

I will have such revenges on you both

That all the world shall—I will do such things—

What they are yet I know not—but they shall be

The terrors of the earth.”

The elemental storm at that moment heard rumbling in the distance

actually seemed an echo of the more terrible spiritual storm raging in

him.

The scene by night on the heath, where Lear, discrowned of his reason,

wanders in the tempest,—the earth his floor, the sky his roof, the

elements his comrades,—was sustained by Forrest with a broad strength

and intensity which left nothing wanting. Even the imagination was

satisfied with the scale of acting when the old king was seen, colossal

in his broken decay, exulting as the monarch of a new realm, pelted by

tempests, shrilling with curses, and peopled with wicked daughters! His

eyes aflame, his breast distended, his arms flying, his white hair all

astream in the wind, his voice rolling and crashing like another thunder

below, he seemed some wild spirit in command of the scene; and he

called, as if to his conscious subjects,—

“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout,

Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!

You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,

Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,

Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,

Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!

Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters.

I tax not you, ye elements, with unkindness:

I never gave you kingdom, called you children;

You owe me no subscription. Then let fall

Your horrible pleasure: here I stand, your slave,

A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man.

But yet I call you servile ministers

That will with two pernicious daughters join

Your high-engendered battles ’gainst a head

So old and white as this. O, O, ’tis foul.”

These last words, beginning with “_high_-engendered battles,” he

delivered with a down-sweeping cadence as mighty in its swell as one of

the great symphonic swings of Beethoven. The auditor seemed to hear the

peal strike on the mountain-top and its slow reverberations roll through

the valleys. The next speech, commencing with,—

“Let the great gods,

That keep this dreadful pother o’er our heads,

Find out their enemies now,”—

and ending with,—

“I am a man

More sinned against than sinning,”—

he pronounced in a way that emphasized the vast ethical meaning involved

in it, and illustrated the strong humanity of Lear. He seemed to be

saying, “These woes are just; I have been proud, rash, and cruel; but

others have treated me worse than I have treated them.” This unconscious

effort at a halting justification, this disguised appeal for kindly

judgment, was profoundly natural and affecting. Then his brain reeled

under its load of woe, and he sighed, with a piteous bewilderment, “My

wits begin to turn,” bringing back with awful fulfilment his prophetic

prayer long before, “O, let me not be mad, sweet heaven! keep me in

temper: I would not be mad!”

There was something in the immense outspread of the sorrows of Lear and

the enlacement of their gigantic portrayal with the elemental scenery of

nature, the desolate heath, the blackness of night, the howling gale,

the stabbing flashes of lightning, overwhelmingly pathetic and sublime.

The passion of Othello pours along like a vast river turbulent and

raging, yet with placid eddies. The passion of Lear is like the

continual swell and moan of the ocean, whose limitless expanse, with no

beacon of hope to meet the eye, baffles our comprehension and bewilders

us with its awful mystery. This part of the play, as Forrest represented

it in person and voice, gave one a new measure of the greatness of man

in his glory and in his ruin. And in the subsequent scenes, where the

disease of Lear had progressed and his faculties become more wrecked, he

was so interpreted from the splendid might over which he had exulted to

the mournful decay into which he had sunk, that when he said, in reply

to a request to be allowed to kiss his hand, “Let me wipe it first; it

smells of mortality,” the whole audience felt like exclaiming, with

Gloster,—

“O ruined piece of nature! This great world

Shall so wear out to naught.”

The acting of all the closing scenes with Cordelia was something to be

treasured apart in the memories of all who saw it and who were capable

of appreciating its exquisite beauty and its unfathomable pathos. When

he was awakened out of the merciful sleep which had fallen on the

soreness of his soul, and heard her whose voice was ever soft, gentle,

and low, addressing him as she had been wont in happier days, his look

of wondering weariness, his mistaking her for a spirit in bliss, his

kneeling to her, his gradual recognition of her,—all these were executed

with a unity of purpose, a simplicity of means, and an ineffable

tenderness of affection, to which it is impossible for any verbal

description to do justice. Who, that did not carry a stone in his breast

in place of a heart, could refrain from tears when he heard the

exhausted sufferer—his gaze fixed on hers, his hands moving in

unpurposed benediction, a solemn calm wrapping him after the long

tempest, passing from the old arrogance of self-assertion into a supreme

sympathy—murmur,—

“Where have I been? Where am I?—Fair daylight?

I am mightily abused.—I should even die with pity

To see another thus.”

Who that saw his instinctive action and heard his broken utterance when

she was dead, and he stood trying with insane perseverance to restore

her, fondling her with his paralyzed hands, can ever forget? With

insistent eagerness he asked,—

“Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,

And thou no breath at all?”

With complaining resignation he said,—

“Thou’lt come no more,

Never, never, never, never, never!—”

With wild surprise he exclaimed, while his lips parted and a weird and

shrivelling smile stole through his wearied face,—

“Do you see this?—Look on her,—look,—her lips,—

Look there, look there!”

He stood erect and still, gazing into vacancy. Not a rustle, not a

breath, could be heard in the house. Slowly the head nodded, the muscles

of the face relaxed, the hands opened, the eyes closed, one long hollow

gasp through the nostrils, then on the worn-out king of grief and pain

fell the last sleep, and his form sank upon the stage, while the parting

salvos of the storm rolled afar.

Such were the principal characters represented by Edwin Forrest. So, as

far as an incompetent pen can describe their portraiture, did he

represent them. The work was a dignified and useful one, moralizing the

scene not less than entertaining the crowd. It was full of noble lessons

openly taught. It was still richer, as all acting is, in yet deeper

latent lessons to be gathered and self-applied by the spectators who

were wise enough to pierce to them and earnest enough to profit from

them.

For every dramatic impersonation of a character in the unravelling of a

plot and the fulfilment of a fate is charged with implicit morals. This

is inevitable because every type of man, every grade of life, every kind

of conduct, every style of manners, embodies those laws of cause and

effect between the soul and its circumstances which constitute the

movement of human destiny, and illustrates the varying standards of

truth and beauty, or of error and sin, in charming examples to be

assimilated, or in repulsive ones to serve as warnings. Thus the stage

is potentially as much more instructive than the pulpit, as life is more

inclusive and contagious than words. The trouble is that its teaching is

so largely disguised and latent. It sorely needs an infusion of the

religious and academic spirit to explicate and drive home its morals.

For instance, when Coriolanus says, with action of immovable

haughtiness,—

“Let them pull all about mine ears; present me

Death on the wheel, or at wild horses’ heels;

Or pile ten hills on the Tarpeian rock,

That the precipitation might down stretch

Below the beam of sight, yet will I still

Be thus to them,—”

it is a huge and grand personality, filled to bursting with arrogant

pride and indirect vanity, asserting itself obstinately against the mass

of the people. As a piece of power it is imposing; but morally it is

vulgar and odious. The single superior should not assert his egotistic

will defiantly against the wills of the multitude of inferiors and hate

them for their natural resistance. He should modestly modulate his self-

will with the real claims of the collective many, or blend and assert it

through universal right and good, thus representing God with the

strength of truth and the suavity of love. That is the lesson of

Coriolanus,—a great lesson if taught and learned. And, to take an

exactly opposite example, what is it that so pleases and holds everybody

who sees the exquisite Rip Van Winkle of Joseph Jefferson? Analyze the

performance to the bottom, and it is clear that the charm consists in

the absence of self-assertion, the abeyance of all egotistic will.

Against the foil of his wife’s tartar temper, who with arms akimbo and

frowning brow and scolding acidity of voice opposes everything, and

asserts her authority, and, despite her faithful virtues, is as

disagreeable as an incarnated broomstick, Rip, lazy and worthless as he

is, steals into every heart with his yielding movement, soft tones, and

winsome look of unsuspicious innocence. He resists not evil or good,

neither his appetite for drink nor his inclinations to reform. The

spontaneity, the perfect surrender of the man, the unresisted sway of

nature in him, plays on the unconscious sympathies of the spectators

with a charm whose divine sweetness not all the vices of the vagabond

can injure. It is, in this homely and almost unclean disguise, a moral

music strangely wafted out of an unlost paradise of innocence into which

drunkenness has strayed. But the real secret of the fascination is

hidden from most of those who intuitively feel its delicious

fascination. Did the audience but appreciate the graceful spirit of its

spell, and for themselves catch from its influence the same unresisted

spontaneousness of soul in unconscious abnegation of self-will, they

would go home regenerated.

But beyond the special lessons in the parts played by Forrest, he was,

through his whole professional course, constantly teaching the great

lesson of the beauty and value of the practice of the dramatic art for

the purposes of social life itself. Should the stage decline and

disappear, the art so long practised on it will not cease, but will be

transferred to the ordinary walks of social life. Nothing is so charming

as a just and vivid play of the spiritual faculties through all the

languages of their outer signs, in the friendly intercourse of real

life. But in our day the tendency is to confine expression to the one

language of articulate words. This suppression of the free play of the

organism stiffens and sterilizes human nature, impoverishes the

interchanges of souls makes existence formal and barren. The most

precious relish of conversation and the divinest charm of manners is the

living play of the spirit in the features, and the spontaneous

modulation of the form by the passing experience. A man grooved in

bigotry and glued in awkwardness, with no alert intelligence and

sympathy, is a painful object and a repulsive companion. He moves like a

puppet and talks like a galvanized corpse. But it is delightful and

refreshing to associate with one thoroughly possessed by the dramatic

spirit, who, his articulations all freed and his faculties all earnest,

speaks like an angel and moves like a god. The theatre all the time

offers society this inspiring lesson. For there are seen free and

developed souls lightening and darkening through free and sensitive

faces. If bodies did not answer to spirits nor faces reveal minds,

nature would be a huge charnelhouse and society a brotherhood of the

dead. And if things go on unchecked as they have been going on, we bid

fair to come to that. It is to be hoped, however, that the examples of

universal, liberated expression given on the stage will more and more

take effect in the daily intercourse of all classes. As a guiding hint

and stimulus in that direction, the central law of dramatic expression

may here be explicitly formulated. All emotions that betoken the

exaltation of life, or the recognition of influences that tend to

heighten life, confirm the face, but expand and brighten it. All

emotions that indicate the sinking of life, or the recognition of

influences that threaten to lower life, relax and vacate the face if

these emotions are negative, contract and darken it if they are

positive. In answer to the exalting influences the face either grasps

what it has or opens and smiles to hail and receive what is offered; in

answer to the depressing influences, it either droops under its load or

shuts and frowns to oppose and exclude what is threatened. The eyes

reveal the mental states; the muscles reveal the effects of those states

in the body. In genial states active, the eyes and the muscles are both

intense, but the eyes are smiling. In genial states passive, the eyes

are intense, the muscles languid. In hostile states active, both eyes

and muscles are intense, but the eyes are frowning. In hostile states

passive, the eyes are languid, the muscles intense. In simple or

harmonious states, the eyes and the muscles agree in their excitement or

relaxation. In complex and inconsistent states, the eyes and the muscles

are opposed in their expression. To expound the whole philosophy of

these rules would take a volume. But they formulate with comprehensive

brevity the central law of dramatic expression as a guide for

observation in daily life.

In filling up the outlines of the majestic characters imperfectly limned

in the preceding pages, exhibiting them in feature and proportion and

color and tone as they were, setting in relief the full dimensions and

quality of their intellect and their passion, living over again their

experiences and laying bare for public appreciation the lessons of their

fate, Forrest found the high and noble joy of his existence, the most

satisfying employment for his faculties, and a deep, unselfish solace

for his afflictions. He reposed on the grand moments of each drama, as

if they were thrones which he was loath to abdicate. He dilated and

glowed in the exciting situations, as if they were no mimic reflections

of the crises of other souls, but original and thrilling incarnations of

his own. He lingered over the nobler utterances, as if he would have

paused to repeat their music, and would willingly let the action wait

that the thought might receive worthy emphasis. Every inspired

conception of eloquence, every delicate beauty of sentiment, every

aggrandizing attitude of man contained in the plays he lifted into a

relief of light and warmth that gave it new attraction and more power.

And to trace the thoughts and feelings that gained heightened expression

through him, echoed and working with contagious sympathy in the hearts

of the crowds who hung on his lips, was a divine pleasure which he would

fain have indefinitely prolonged. But the movement on the stage, that

affecting mirror of life, hurries forward, the business of the world

breaks in upon philosophy, and the dreams of the poet and the player

burst like painted bubbles.

Meanwhile, not only do the parts played and the scenes amidst which they

are shown vanish and become the prey of oblivion, but those who played

them disappear also, leaving the providential and prophetic Spirit of

Humanity, a sublimer Prospero, to say,—

“These, our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air.”