CHAPTER XIV. NEWSPAPER ESTIMATES.--ELEMENTS OF THE DRAMATIC ART, AND ITS TRUE STANDARD OF CRITICISM.

The newspaper in some countries has been a crime and in others a luxury. In all civilized countries it has now become a necessity. With us it is a duty. It is often corrupted and degraded into a nuisance. It ought to be cleansed and exalted into a pure benefaction, a circulating medium of intelligence and good will alone. Certainly it is far from being that at the present time. It is true that our newspapers are an invaluable and indispensable protection against all other tyrannies and social abuses; and their fierce vanity, self-interest, and hostile watchfulness of one another keep their common arrogance and encroachments pretty well in check. If they were of one mind and interest we should be helplessly in their power. From the great evils which so seriously alloy the immense benefits of the press, Forrest suffered much in the latter half of his life. The abuse he met irritated his temper, and left a chronic resentment in his mind. Two specimens of this abuse will show something of the nettling wrongs he encountered.

A Philadelphia newspaper stigmatized him in the most offensive terms as a drunkard. Now it was a moral glory of Forrest that, despite the temptations to which his professional career exposed him, he was never intoxicated in his life. The newspaper in question, threatened with a libel suit, withdrew its words with an abject apology,—a poor satisfaction for the pain and injury it had inflicted.

The other instance was on occasion of the driving of Macready from the stage of the Astor Place Opera House. A New York newspaper, in language of studied insolence, called Forrest the instigator and author of the outrage. “Mr. Forrest succeeded last night in doing what even his bad acting and unmanly conduct never did before: he inflicted a thorough and lasting disgrace upon the American character.” “To revenge himself on Mr. Macready he packed the house and paid rowdies for driving decent people away.” “With his peculiar tastes he will probably enjoy the infamy and deem it a triumph.” Forrest, instead of cowhiding the writer of this atrocious slander,—as some men of his high-spirited nature would have done,—sent a letter, through his legal friend Theodore Sedgwick, demanding immediate retraction and apology. The editor assented to the request, confessing that he had spoken with no knowledge of facts to justify him!

From the time of his first appearance on the stage, Forrest was a careful reader of the criticisms on his performances. He generally read them, too, with a just mind, discriminating the valuable from the worthless, quick to adopt a useful hint, indignant or contemptuous towards unfairness and imbecility. There were three classes of persons whose comments on his performances gave him pleasure and instruction. He paid earnest attention to their remarks, and was always generous in expressing his sense of indebtedness to them.

The first class consisted of those who had a personal friendship for him, combined with a strong taste for the drama, and who studied and criticised his efforts in a sympathetic spirit for the purpose of encouraging him and aiding him to improve. Such men as Duane and Chandler and Swift in Philadelphia, Dawson in Cincinnati, Holley at Louisville, Canonge in New Orleans, Leggett and Lawson in New York, and Oakes in Boston, gave him the full benefit of their varied knowledge of human nature, literary art, and dramatic expression. Their censure was unhesitating, their questionings frank, their praise unstinted. Among these friendly critics the name of James Hunter, of Albany, one of the editors of “The Daily Advertiser,” in the important period of young Forrest’s engagement there, deserves to be remembered. He was one of the best critics of that day. He used to sit close to the stage and watch the actor with the keenest scrutiny, not allowing the smallest particular to escape his notice. Then at the end of the play he would in a private interview submit to his protÉgÉ the results of his observation, carefully pointing out every fault and indicating the remedy. He lived to see the favorite, who profited so well from his instructions, reach the proudest pitch of success and fame. When Mr. Hunter died, Forrest interrupted an engagement he was filling in a distant city in order to attend the funeral, and followed the remains of his old benefactor to the tomb as one of the chief mourners.

The second class of commenters on the playing of Forrest from whose judgments he received satisfaction and help was composed of that portion of the writers of dramatic criticism for the press who were comparatively competent to the task they undertook. They were men who were neither his friends nor his foes, but impartial judges, who knew what they were writing about and who recorded their honest thoughts in an honorable spirit and a good style. Among the many thousands of articles written on the acting of Forrest during the fifty years of his career there are hundreds written in excellent style, revealing competent knowledge, insight, and sympathy, and marked by an unexceptionable moral tone. They suggest doubts, administer blame, and express admiration, not from caprice or prejudice, but from principle, and with lights and shades varying in accordance with the facts of the case and the truth of the subject. These articles have an interest and a value in the highest degree creditable to their authors, and they go far to redeem the dramatic criticism of our national press from the severe condemnation justly provoked by the greater portion of it. Did space allow, it would be a pleasure to cite full specimens of this better class of dramatic critiques from the collected portfolios left behind him by the departed actor. Enough that he profoundly appreciated them, and that in various directions they did good service in their day.

The third class whose words concerning his performances Forrest gladly heeded were men who simply gave truthful reports of the impressions made on themselves, not professing to sit in judgment or to dogmatize, but honestly declaring what they felt and what they thought. Free from prejudices and perversities, fair average representatives of human nature in its ordinary degrees of power and culture, their experiences under his impersonations, ingenuously expressed, were always interesting and instructive, throwing light on many secrets of cause and effect, on many points of conventional falsity and of natural sincerity, in histrionic portrayals. Often while the newspaper writer who pretends to know the most about the dramatic art is so full of conceit and biases that his verdict on any particular representation has neither weight nor justice, the instincts of the bright-minded and warm-hearted boy or girl, the native intelligence and sympathy of the unsophisticated man or woman, whose soul is all open to the living truth of things, are almost infallible. Nobody knew this better than our tragedian, or was readier to act on it.

The light and joy he drew from these three sets of critics found a heavy counterpoise in the unjust estimates, perverse, exaggerated, malignant, or absurd, of which he was constantly made the subject by five classes of censors. The first were his personal enemies. Among the meaner fry of men who came in contact with him, a multitude hated him from jealousy and envy, from resentment of his independent and uncompromising ways, his refusal to grant them his intimacy or to serve their purposes. They sought to gratify their animosity by backbiting at his reputation, and especially by trying to destroy his professional rank. Year after year they made the columns of many a newspaper groan and reek under the load of their abuse, ranging from envenomed invective to grotesque ridicule. For example, a jocose foe said, in parody of the great Moslem proclamation, “There is but one Bowery, and Hellitisplit is its profit.” And a serious foe said, “Mr. Forrest is an injury to the stage. He is a false leader, an oppression, a bad model, and a corrupter of the popular taste.” A great part of the hostile criticism he suffered may be traced to bitter personal enmity, which had but slight regard to truth or fairness in its attacks on him, whether as man or as player.

The next class of assailants of Forrest in his professional repute were not his personal enemies, but were the tools of the various cliques, cabals, or social castes who had an antipathy for him and for the party to which he belonged. The English interest was especially active and bitter against him after his quarrel with Macready. Some of these writers were wilfully corrupt in their attitude and consciously false in their written estimates. They expressed neither their own feelings nor their own convictions, but merely the passion and policy of their employers. For example, at the time of the death of the tragedian a well-known editor confessed to a friend that some twenty years previously, when he was a reporter, his employer sent him to the theatre to see Forrest play, and with explicit directions to write the severest condemnation he could of the actor. He went accordingly, and made notes for a savage satirical article, although at the moment of his making these notes the tears were streaming down his cheeks, so sincere and so powerful was the representation which he was, against his conscience, preparing to abuse. Much dishonorable work of this kind has been done, and still is done, by men disgracefully connected with the press.

Another set of critics who assailed the acting of Forrest were those whose tastes were repelled by his realistic method and robust energy. He was too vehemently genuine, his art not far enough removed from material reality, to suit their fancy. They demanded a style more graceful, delicate, and free. Under the impulse of their resentful prejudices they overlooked his great merits, depreciated everything he did, angrily denied him his just rank, magnified every fault beyond measure, and maliciously caricatured him. A volume might be filled with articles purely of this description, proceeding from writers whose want of native manliness unfitted them for appreciating the magnificent manliness of his impersonations, and whose offended fastidiousness expressed itself in terms which were an offence to justice.

The fourth class of abusers of Forrest were men who had an instinctive repugnance for the imposing grandeur of the types of character he represented, for the self-sufficing, autocratic power and stateliness of his impersonations. Mean and envious spirits dislike to look up to those higher and stronger than themselves. Those who either never had any romance and reverence or have been disenchanted, feel an especial enmity or incompetent contempt for every one whose character and bearing appeal to those qualities. This disinclination to admire, this wish to look on equals or inferiors alone, is the special vice of a democracy. Demagogues, whether in politics or in letters, are men of torpid imaginations and dry hearts,—slow to worship, quick to sneer. The style of man enacted by Forrest, full of an imperial personality, overswaying all who come near, massive in will, ponderous in movement, volcanic in passion, majestic in poise, was hateful to the cynical critic the petty proportions of whose soul were revealed and rebuked in its presence. He seized the weapon of ridicule to revenge himself on the actor whose grander portrayals angered him instead of aweing or shaming or delighting him. There seems to be among us in America a growing dislike for the contemplation on the stage of the grandest heroism and power, and an increasing fondness for seeing specimens of commonplace or inferiority promotive of amusement. Already in his life Forrest was a sufferer by this degradation of popular taste, and were he now to appear in our theatres he would feel it still more.

The fifth and largest class of writers who assumed to criticise the acting of Forrest was made up of persons professionally connected with the press, whose blundering or extravagant estimates arose rather from their ignorance and utter incompetency for the task they undertook than from a spirit of antipathy or partisanship. The censures and laudations in these notices were the cause of an immense amount of varied mortification, amusement, vexation, and anger, as they came under his eyes. No small portion of the criticisms in the American newspapers on actors, singers, lecturers, and other public characters have been written, and still continue to be written, by uneducated and inexperienced young men scarcely out of their teens, serving an apprenticeship in the art and trade of journalism. With low aims and views, slight literary culture, superficial knowledge of life, a vile contempt for sentiment, a cynical estimate of human nature, equally ready to extol and to denounce for pay, these writers are the nuisance and the scandal of their craft. Were their articles accompanied by their names they would be destitute of weight or mischief; but, published with apparent editorial sanction, they often assume a pernicious importance.

The art of a people expresses the character and aspiration of a people and reacts to develop them. To sit in judgment on it is a high and sacred office, for which none but the most intelligent, refined, and honorable are fit. The praise and blame given to artists play on the living sensibilities of that most sensitive class whose careers are a vital index of the moral state of the community. Yet this momentous office is frequently entrusted to beardless youths, whose chief experience is in dissipation, and who unblushingly sell their pens to the highest bidder. A severe article exposing this abuse appeared in the “Round Table” in 1864, written by the editor, and entitled “Dramatic Critics in New York.” Forrest put it in one of his scrap-books with the endorsement, “How true this is!” Mr. Sedley said, “What dramatic criticism in New York has been the public well know. Its low, egotistic, unfair, malicious character, its blind partialities and undying hates, its brazen ignorance and insulting familiarity, have given it wide notoriety and brought upon it equally wide contempt.”

There is no art which more needs to be criticised than that of criticism itself, because there is none which requires in its votary such varied knowledge and cultivation, and such integrity of mind and purity of motive; because, furthermore, no other art is exposed to such subtle temptations of prejudice and vanity. The critic, in assuming to be a judge, is no exception to other writers. Like them he reveals and betrays himself in what he writes. In dissecting others he lays his own soul bare. In consciously judging them he pronounces unconscious judgment on himself,—in the tenderness or the insensibility, the generosity and candor or the meanness and spite, the knowledge and beauty or the ignorance and foulness, which he expresses. The pen of a base, vindictive critic is a stiletto, a fang, or an anal gland. The pen of a competent and genial critic is the wand of an intellectual Midas turning everything it touches to gold. For such a critic has the true standard of judgment in his knowledge, and, whatever the merit or demerit of the work he estimates, as he points out its conformity with that standard or its departure from it his lucid illustration is always full of instruction and help.

But the great majority of those journalists who presume to print their estimates of histrionic performances are profoundly ignorant of the elements of the dramatic art. Thus, having no knowledge of the real standard of judgment by which all impersonations should be tested, they cannot fairly criticise the artists who appear before them for a verdict. Instead of criticising or even justly describing them they victimize them. They use them as the stalking-horses of their own presumption or caprice, prejudice or interest. Unable to write with intelligent candor on the subject which they profess to treat, they employ it only as a text whereon to append whatever they think they can make effective in displaying their own abilities or amusing their readers. The unfittedness of such critics for their task is sufficiently proved by the chief attributes of their writing, namely, prejudice, absurd extravagance, reckless caprice, ridiculous assumption of superiority, violent efforts to lug in every irrelevant matter which they can in any way associate with the topic to enhance the effect they wish to produce regardless of justice or propriety.

A few specimens of these various kinds of criticism will be found full of curious interest and suggestiveness, while they will illustrate something of what the proud and sensitive nature of Forrest had to undergo at the hands of his admirers and his contemners.

One enthusiastic worshipper, in the year 1826, overflowed in the following style: “In the Iron Chest, on Thursday evening last, Mr. Forrest established a name and a fame which, should he die to-morrow, would give him a niche in the temple of renown to endure uncrumbled in the decay of ages!” Another one wrote thus: “In his Richard, Macbeth, Lear, and Othello, Mr. Forrest displays abilities and accomplishments which, for power and finish, we do not believe have ever been at all approached by any other actor that ever stepped upon the stage. The range of his delicate and varied by-play and the terrific energy of his explosions of naked passion leave the very greatest of his predecessors far in the rear and deep in the shade!” Such slopping eulogy defeats its own purpose. For want of discrimination its exaggerations are unmeaning and powerless. To be thus bedaubed and plastered with praise mortifies the actor, and injures him with the judicious, though springing from a generous sensibility and most kindly meant. This style of praise, however, is quite exceptional. The general run of critics have altogether too much knowingness and vanity for it. Their cue is to depreciate and detract, to satirize and belittle, so as either directly or indirectly to imply the superiority of their own knowledge and taste. Your ordinary critic is nothing if not superior to the artist he assumes to estimate. The publicity and admiration enjoyed by the performer seem to taunt the critic with his own obscurity and neglect, and he seeks an ignoble gratification in denying the merit of what he really envies. This base animus of the baser members of a properly high and useful literary guild betrays itself in many ways. For example, one of this sort, sneering at the idea of applauding the genius of an actor, characterized dramatists as “the class of men who administer in the most humiliating of all forms to the amusement of a large and mixed assembly.” It needs no more than his own words to place Pecksniff before us in full life.

Through the whole dramatic life of Forrest one class of his assailants were found accusing him of tameness and dulness, while another class blamed him for extravagant energy and frenzied earnestness. Both classes spoke from personal bias or capricious whim, instead of judging by a fixed standard of truth and discerning where reserve and quietness were appropriate and where explosive vehemence was natural. One critic, in 1831, says, “He wants passion and force. He has no sincerity of feeling, no spontaneous and climacteric force. He often counterfeits well,—for the stage,—but nature is not there.” At the same time the critic attached to another journal wrote, “Mr. Forrest’s greatest fault is lack of self-control and repose. His feelings are so intense and mighty that they break through all bounds. With added years, no doubt, he will grow more reserved and artistic.” Thirty years later the same blunt contradiction, the same blind caprice or prejudice, are found in the two extracts that follow:

“For nearly three months the heavy tragedian has weighed like an incubus on the public, which now, that the oppression of this theatrical nightmare is removed, breathes freely. We part with Mr. Forrest without regret; he has taken his leave, and, as that slight acquaintance of his, William Shakspeare, remarks, he could ‘take nothing we would more willingly part withal.’ Those only who, like ourselves, have constantly attended his performances, have a true knowledge of their tedium and dulness. The occasional visitor may bear with Mr. Forrest for a night or two, but we are really nauseated. The stupid, solemn, melancholy evenings we have passed in watching his stupid, solemn, and melancholy personations will always be remembered with disgust. Nothing but a sense of duty compelled us to submit to this ineffable bore.”

“Mr. Forrest belongs to the robustious school of tragedy,—that class who ‘split the ears of the groundlings,’—and his eminent example has ruined the American stage. He is a dramatic tornado, and plucks up the author’s words by the roots and hurls them at the heads of the audience. He mistakes rant for earnestness, frenzy for vigor. The modulations of his voice are unnatural, and his pauses painful. A man in a furious passion does not measure his words like a pedagogue declaiming before his school, but speaks rapidly and fiercely, without taking time to hiss like a locomotive blowing off steam. Mr. Forrest was not so in his prime; and he has probably borrowed the habit from some antiquated actor who has been afflicted with asthma.”

There is no candid criticism in such effusions of obvious prepossession and satire. They show no reference to a fixed standard, no sincere devotion to the interests of truth and art; but a desire to awaken laughter, a purpose to make the player appear ridiculous and the writer appear witty. The same may be said of the following examples, wherein amusing or malignant ridicule takes the place of fair and intelligent judgment. Such writers care not what their victims suffer, or what justice suffers, so long as they can succeed in gaining attention and raising a laugh. They feel with the English critic who excoriated Payne for his Macbeth, “No matter if the labor we delight in physics Payne, it pays us.”

First. “Mr. Forrest’s personation of the Broker of Bogota is feeble and uninteresting. Contrasted with his Othello, it has the advantage which the Stupid has over the Outrageous. Febro may be compared to one of those intolerable bores who prose and prose, with sublime contempt of all that is interesting, for hours. Othello is like one of those social torments who destroy your peace of mind with incessant and furious attacks. The bore is the negative of Good; his opposite is the affirmative of Evil.”

Second. “We can account for the popularity which Forrest enjoys as the greatest master of the Epigastric School of Acting on no other hypothesis than that of the innate depravity of human taste. Like the vicious propensity in mankind to chew tobacco and drink whisky, the majority of men have a depraved appetite for this false and outrageous caricature of human nature which Mr. Forrest calls acting. Our strictures apply in a lesser degree to the stage delineations of all tragedians. They are all false, and Forrest is only a little more so. His particular excellence seems to lie in his extraordinary power of pumping up rage from his epigastrium, and expectorating it upon his audience, through the interstices of his set teeth. Other tragedians equal him in their facial contortions, and in the power of converting their chests into an immense bellows violently worked. His great rival, McKean Buchanan, excels Mr. Forrest in this department of high art, but fails in the epigastric power. Mr. Forrest may well claim to stand at the head of the Epigastric School. He does not underestimate the value of epilepsy in delineation, and ‘chaws,’ tears, rends, and foams at the mouth quite as artistically as the best of his rivals; but he especially cultivates his epigastrium. We do not want Mr. Forrest to die soon. But when he does pass away, we have a physiological and anatomical curiosity which we would be pleased to have gratified at the expense of a post mortem on the great tragedian. We have a grave suspicion that, deep down in his stomach, beneath the liver and other less important viscera, he has concealed additional vocal apparatus, by means of which he is enabled to produce those diabolical tremolo sounds which have so often thrilled and chilled his auditors. But in our opinion, with its two great exponents, Edwin Forrest and McKean Buchanan, the Epigastric and Epileptic School of Acting will pass away.”

Third. “We thought to have dropped Mr. Edwin Forrest as a subject of newspaper remark; but several of his friends, or persons who think themselves such, are very anxious that we should do him justice, as an actor, though that is just what they ought to fear for him. We will take his performance as Richard. In this part, in the first place, his gait is very bad, awkward, and ungraceful. Richard may, possibly, have halted a little, but he did not roll like a sailor just ashore from a three years’ cruise. A king does not walk so. Then, his features are totally devoid of expression; he can contort, but he can throw neither meaning nor feeling into them. When he attempts to look love, anger, hate, or fear, he resembles one of the ghouls and afrites in Harper’s new illustrated edition of the Arabian Nights. He wins Lady Anne with a smile that would frighten a fiend, and that varies not a single line from that with which he evinces his satisfaction at the prospect of gaining the crown, and his contempt for the weakness of his enemies. A more outrageous and hideous contortion still expresses his rage at Buckingham’s importunity, and at the reproaches of his mother. When he awakes in the tent-scene, he keeps his jaws at their utmost possible distension for about two minutes, and presents no bad emblem of an anaconda about to engorge a buffalo; one might fling in a pound of butter without greasing a tooth. At the same time, his whole frame writhes and shakes like a frog subjected to the action of a galvanic battery. We have seen folks frightened and convulsed before now, but we never saw one of them retain his senses in a convulsion. We like a deep, manly, powerful voice; but we dislike to hear it strained to the screech of a damned soul in hell-torment, like Mr. Forrest’s when he calls on his drums to strike up and his men to charge. Often he displays his tremendous physical energies where there is not the least occasion for them, and as often does he repress them where they are needed. For instance, Richard ought to work himself into a passion before he slays King Henry. Mr. Forrest kills him as coolly and as quietly as a butcher sticks a pig or knocks down a calf, and he repulses Buckingham with the voice and action of a raving maniac. But Mr. Forrest is not to blame for his face, which is as nature moulded it, neither because he has but three notes to his voice, nor because the only inflections he is capable of are their exaltation and depression. But he need not aggravate the slight deformity of Richard more than Shakspeare did, who greatly exaggerated it himself. Nor do we blame him for raving, ranting, roaring, and bellowing to houses who never applaud him but when he commits some gross outrage upon good taste and propriety. He adapts his goods to his market, and he does wisely.”

As a contrast and offset to the foregoing specimens of self-display disguised as criticism of another, it is but fair to cite a few extracts from different writers who had really something appropriate to say on the subject they were treating, and who said it with exemplary directness and impartiality:

“As a reader Mr. Forrest has, in our opinion, few equals. Believing him to be the most overrated actor on the stage, we are yet not blind to his merit, but are glad to speak of the least of his excellences, and only wish they were more numerous. Let us take his inherent faults for granted, and consider his reading at the best. Does he fail in the first essential,—intelligibility? On the contrary, he enunciates a thought with such clearness that the meaning cannot be mistaken. Does he fail to give the rhythm and the rhetoric of verse? On the contrary, verse in his utterance retains its melody and music, and the high-sounding eloquence of words its majesty. He subtly marks the changes of reflection, and keeps the leading idea emphatic and distinct. There stands the thought at least, no matter if the feeling is a thousand miles away. He has carved the statue correctly, though he wants the power of the ancient sculptor to give the cold marble life. This he cannot do by ‘emphasizing every word,’ in the unnatural way of which our correspondent accuses him. Analyze one of his well-read sentences, and mark how the strong word and the strong sound fall together; then listen to most of the actors that surround him, and notice with what amusing vehemence they shout their ‘ands’ and ‘ifs’ and ‘buts.’ They begin every sentence with a stentorian cry that dwindles into an exhausted whisper.”

“As regards Forrest, we are often amused to hear people, who have vainly refused for years to recognize his great histrionic abilities, wonder how it is that he invariably attracts crowded houses whenever he performs. We do not know any actor of his rank who has been so scurrilously abused and to so little purpose. The most elaborate pretences at criticism are always poured out on his devoted head, and if the power of the press could have written a man down he surely would have been long since; for he has few special champions among acknowledged critics, a fact which shows how deep is the feeling against him among particular classes. We must candidly confess to have never been biased by profound admiration of Forrest’s acting, and yet we must also admit that after having calmly, patiently, and attentively watched some entire performances of his, we were convinced that he really possessed far greater powers of mind than any of the critics ever had given him credit for. His style is apt to be uneven, and men of his mould of intellect cannot always enact the same parts with the same good taste. But of his superb elocution,—of the noble idea of latent force and suppressed passion which his whole manner embodies,—of the perfection of manly dignity and physical development which have never had a better representative on the stage than in his person,—of the marvellous voice, so musical in its sound, and so happily adjusted in its modulations to increase the expression of a sentence,—there ought, in our judgment, to be no abatement of that admiration so long and so justly accorded to him. If all the critics in the country were with one voice to deny the existence of these things, their fiat would be powerless against the evidence of men’s senses. We admit that he has no subtlety of intellect, no finely-drawn perceptions of delicate shades of human character. What he does is the result of the action of a very strong mind, capable of being directed in a particular channel with resistless energy; but this is the very class of minds out of which have arisen some of the greatest men in the world’s annals. When Forrest performs an engagement people go to see him who know all his defects, but they go because it is the only acting of the highest class they have the opportunity of seeing, and it is so far above the rivalry of such actors as have been here during the last decade as to admit of no comparison.”

“It is said when Canova was finishing a choice marble that his friends were very anxious to see the work on exhibition, but the great artist restrained their impatience, and proposed to gratify their desire at the end of a given term. At the expiration of the time, his friends assembled eagerly, and, in tones of disappointment, exclaimed, ‘What have you been doing? You have been idle; you have done nothing to your piece.’ To which he replied, ‘On the contrary, my chisel has been exceedingly busy; I have subdued this muscle, I have brought out this feature, enlivened this expression, polished my marble.’ ‘Oh, but,’ said they, ‘these are mere trifles!’ ‘They may be,’ he said, ‘but trifles make up the sum of perfection.’ The Virginius of Mr. Forrest revived this anecdote of Canova, as well as remembrances of his early performances. The difference in the two cases, however, is that it is not the artist now, but his friends that see the perfection. Virginius has long been identified with Mr. Forrest’s fame; but, great as the lustre may be which his surpassing self-possession, noble and balanced bearing, rich, copious, and manly elocution, and deft, minute, and relative action have heretofore thrown upon this character, it has now been still more varied and beautified by the mellow tints that shadow and relieve the local splendor of salient features. It is indeed a masterpiece of acting and the ‘top of admiration.’ It is difficult to perceive any point of improvement that could give it more truth, in its lifelike resemblance, as a copy of fiction; and we are sure, after the ribaldry which of late years has degraded the boards, that there is not a single lover of the drama who saw this enactment who does not feel grateful to Mr. Edwin Forrest for his manly reassertion of the dignity of the stage.”

“We are disposed to admit the greatest liberty possible to the theatrical critic employed upon the daily press, but we cannot help alluding to the disgracefully savage bitterness of the writer in one of our weekly contemporaries as equally damaging to his employer’s reputation and his own. Mr. Forrest has now passed that period of his life in which he might have been injured by the malevolence of the individual. In the mass, criticism bows before his assured superiority, and it is simply a petty spite which dares persistently to deny his claims to genius of the highest order. He is no longer a man respecting whose position in the history of the American stage there can be any dispute. He stands completely alone. We are induced this week to make this remark from having freshly seen him in ‘Othello’ and ‘Macbeth.’ Can any observer who remembers his interpretation of the first of these characters, some twenty years since, or his rendering of the last one, but four years ago, and is disposed to examine them fairly, with reference to his present reading and acting of either part, deny this? If he does so, we can but feel that he is alike ungifted with the talent to recognize and the honesty to admit the wide difference which exists between them. His ‘Othello’ is now a most coherent and perfect whole. Where is the artist who can infuse a more perfect and thorough spirit of love than he does in that scene where he meets Desdemona again in Cyprus, after having quitted her in Venice? Where is the one who grows under the heat of Iago’s viperous tongue into a more sublimely savage delineation of jealousy than he does in the subsequent acts? Is not his

one of the most perfect bits of natural feeling that has ever been uttered upon the stage? Friendship, anger, pity, and justice are all struggling within him, and shape the sorrow of the words that strip his lieutenant of the office which he considers him no longer worthy to retain. It may be observed that in alluding to these points we have not marked any of those more obvious beauties which have for many years been acknowledged in his representation of this character. These are settled excellencies in the estimation of all who love the tragic stage. Certain lines have been stereotyped to us by the genius of those who have embodied this greatest of Shaksperian characters; but for those who will reverently observe his impersonation, there are hitherto hidden points developed by Forrest which justify us in laughing at those whose resolute hatred of the artist blinds them to his excellence, and to the wonderful finish in the histrionic portraits which he offers them. We have good artists amongst us, but we certainly have none who can for a moment be fairly compared with him; and therefore is it that we say the man who constantly undervalues him simply marks himself as notoriously incapable of balancing the critical scales.”

The next extract is taken from a long article by the well-known scholar and author, Dr. R. Shelton Mackenzie:

“We once heard a great author say, ‘Scurrility is the shadow of Fame, and as often precedes as follows it.’ That author was Bulwer, and his remark has the weight of an aphorism. With respect to Mr. Edwin Forrest, it is singular that he has been assailed in his native town by scurrility at an advanced period of his brilliant career, and at a time when his powers have ripened into something very close to perfection.

“Unless the actuating principle of the writer be a merely malignant dislike of the man, it seems almost impossible to us that any critic, possessed of the ordinary intelligence current among the more respectable members of the fraternity, can refuse or be so morally blind as not to see the wide difference existing between the Forrest of the present time and the Forrest who was admitted by the public to be the greatest American actor some twenty years ago. At that time he was wonderful,—wonderful by his intensity, his dashing power, his superb manhood, his fine voice, and his noble presence. This made him a great artist. He might have many faults, but these were obliterated from the mind of the spectator by his many and dazzling merits, which were even the more striking from the comparative blemishes with which they were mingled.

“The artistic career of Edwin Forrest has now, however, made a great stride in advance. He has polished, refined, and completed his style. It was said of Garrick, who was several years older than Forrest when he retired from the stage, that in his latter seasons he acted better than ever, and the fact that he never, even when a master in the art, ceased to be a student, explained the cause. The same may be said, and even with more truth, of Edwin Forrest. There is no living actor half so studious as himself. His mind, always under thorough self-cultivation, has matured in later years, and the effects are apparent. He is so near perfection as an actor that it is impossible to be so attracted by his excellencies now as we might have been when contrast made them more palpable.

“Fully to appreciate the various power of Mr. Forrest cannot be done by examining him in any single character. We have therefore waited until his engagement is nearly completed, and have carefully studied him in eleven different characters,—Richelieu, Damon, Richard III., Hamlet, Othello, Virginius, Macbeth, Lucius Junius Brutus, Febro, Jack Cade, and Lear. Of these, perhaps, his Lear, his Othello, his Macbeth, his Richelieu, and his Damon are the greatest; but there is comparatively so little difference in excellence between his Hamlet and his Othello, his Virginius and his Damon, that he might reasonably except to us for noting that difference, which, after all, is in some measure the result of a purely physical variation in the bodily means at his disposal for each special embodiment.

“The almost even excellence, in so many of his great parts, to which Edwin Forrest has attained, contains in itself a strong assertion of his right not only to the first place in the histrionic annals of the last few years, but registers a positive claim to the highest position, as an artist, in all histrionic history to which the slightest degree of faith can be attached. To be at the same time a great Hamlet and a great Othello, even granting a difference in the excellence of the two parts, argues that the actor possesses to a larger extent than common that intellectual adaptability without which it would be impossible for him to represent two such widely different men. Slightly deranged, a philosophic dreamer, without the capability of sustained action, energetic only by immediate impulse, the Danish Prince differs widely from the passionate, powerful, one-purposed, and sublimely simple nature of the Moor. In grasping these two opposite characters as completely as Edwin Forrest has done, he has displayed an intellectual strength of the highest order, approaching very nearly to that subtlety of intelligence which is but rarely coupled with genius, but which, when coupled with it, makes it a genius of the highest order.

“This subtlety of intelligence he develops in his wonderful rendering of Richard, as widely opposed a character to both or either of the others as could well be presented to us. For the physical nature of Richard he has preferred Horace Walpole’s ‘Historic Doubts’ to Shakspeare’s delineation of the man, but in portraying him intellectually Edwin Forrest has simply depended on himself. He paints Richard with strong and vigorous execution, as a crafty and cruel hypocrite, with a positively unequalled subtlety of touch, rendering his hypocrisy frank and pleasant to the outside observer and coloring it with a comedy of which he offers no example in Othello and but a vague suspicion in Hamlet. His love-scene with Lady Anne is a marvellous piece of acting, which excerpts from the character as a worthy pendant to the mad scene in Lear. It was probably much more easily, although more recently, perfected by him than the latter, inasmuch as the last named was the result of careful and minute study, while the former is simply an effort of pure cultured genius which is as positively real as stage simulation ever can be. But this difference in character of the three extends even to those points in which Richard touches upon the two others. Richard is a man of strong passion as well as Othello. He is a philosopher as well as Hamlet. But passion is suppressed in Richard under the vest of his craft. It is addressed to other objects than Othello yearns for. It is bold and crafty. Othello is brave and honest. This is wonderfully discriminated by Mr. Forrest. The philosophy of Hamlet is reflective and uncertain, colored by study and lunacy. That of Richard is worldly and practical, subjected by him to his immediate ambition. Here Mr. Forrest, as an artist, is truly admirable. In Hamlet his philosophy is impulsively given to the audience. In Richard it is reasoned out and calculated with.

“Let us look at Macbeth, reaching, as Richard does, at the Crown. Most of our modern actors vary the two but little in their manner, without following the line of difference made between them by the great dramatist. This difference was in the intellectual strength of their natures. Richard is the tool of nobody. Macbeth is but a plaster in the fingers of his wife. How exquisitely does Mr. Forrest mark out the two natures! You trace Macbeth’s indecision of purpose in his very manner. His entrance in the first scene is characterized by it. The breaking off from his friends,—his return to himself when addressed by them,—his interjectional reveries,—his uncertainty of action, are all as they are given to us by Shakspeare, but scarcely such as we might have expected a man of Mr. Forrest’s physical temperament to embody. In Richard the ambition is positive. He does not reason of the acts which he commits. Hence here the artist’s actions are positive. When he commits or orders one of these deeds which tend to secure his desires or objects, it is done at once. The positive decision of the man is translated by the actor, whether it be in the passionate command or the sneering jest, by the calculated impulse of the man.”

Here is a part of an elaborate attack written by a relentless enemy and persecutor, quite remarkable for the untempered way in which it mixes truth and misrepresentation, justice and wrong:

“Mr. Forrest is now an actor who depends almost entirely on his voice as a medium of expression. He throws all his force into his reading; elocution is intended to compensate for everything,—for facial expression, for suitable action, for muscular vigor, and often, indeed, for true feeling and appreciation. By his impressive reading he frequently gains applause when in reality he deserves condemnation. There are whole scenes in his Lear unredeemed by one spark of feeling, the poverty of which he attempts to hide under a superficial gloss of elocutionary charlatanism. His fine voice aids him in this attempt; for that he has a noble voice, of great power,—whose tones are often commanding, and sometimes would be tender if they were inspired by any sincere feeling,—no one who has heard him can doubt. Take away this voice and Mr. Forrest is a nonentity, for he cannot act, and his face has no variety of expression. We know that, instead of using this fine element of success well, he has abused it; for his mannerisms of tone are perpetual, and disfigure every lengthy passage he reads. His voice has too great a burden to bear.

“This is one reason why he is so very monotonous. Another and a deeper reason is that the man himself is nothing but a monotone. No man on the stage has a more strongly marked individuality than Mr. Forrest; once seen, he cannot be easily forgotten, nor can his performances ever be confused in memory with those of others. Yet this individuality is a prison-house to him; he cannot escape from it. He is forced, in spite of himself, to play every character in exactly the same way. He develops Spartacus by the identical methods he employs in Hamlet; his Lear and his Claude Melnotte are made impressive, not by different styles. He has but one style. He is Edwin Forrest in everything; and, worse than this, he seems to care nothing for the best character he plays in comparison with his own success. Egotism is a marked peculiarity of his acting; he seems to say to the audience, not, ‘How fine is this character! how great was the author!’ but ever, ‘How finely I play it! am I not the greatest actor you ever saw?’

“Of course this strong personality is sometimes to Mr. Forrest an advantage. There are rÔles which are adapted to his powers,—such as Virginius, Damon, and Spartacus. These he plays well because they do not require of him the transcendent power of genius,—the imagination which enables a man to penetrate the motives of a being foreign to himself, and to re-create in his own living nature the beauty and the passion of a dream. These he plays well because he finds in them something of himself. And even in Shaksperian characters, which are alien to his nature, he occasionally meets a passage which he can feel, and which he therefore expresses; and these moments of earnestness, occurring suddenly in the midst of long scenes of artificiality and dulness, are like flashes of lightning in a black midnight: while they last they are bright, but when they are gone they make the darkness deeper.”

The two brief notices that succeed appeared at the same time and in the same city in two opposed newspapers. The contrast is amusing, and it is easy to see how little impartial critical judgment went to the composition of either of them, as well as how bewildering they must have been to the reader who was seeking from the judgment of the press to form a dispassionate opinion on the merits of the actor:

“Having within the present year closely criticised Edwin Forrest’s performances during a long engagement, we do not intend to bore our readers with repetitions of what we have said. Mr. Forrest will go through his programme like a machine, and like most machines it may be discovered that his powers have suffered somewhat by wear and tear. He has long since passed the point of improvement. Fully settled in his own conceit that his personations are the most wonderful that the world ever saw, his only care will be to heighten defects which he considers beauties, and to dwell with increased tenderness upon each fault. There are some mothers who give their hearts to their puny, deformed, and bad-tempered children, to the neglect of others who are handsome, gentle, and intelligent. Mr. Forrest is an admirer of this policy. He slights his better qualities in acting, and dandles his absurdities with more than just parental fondness. His faults are inveterate; his beauties daily grow homely. It would be supererogation to expose at length those vices and stage tricks which have already been freely cauterized.”

“During the week Mr. Forrest has been performing the characters of Richelieu, Damon, Richard, and Hamlet. At each representation the invariable compliment of a crowded house has been paid him. With the advance of every year this actor seems to grow greater. The intellectuality of his acting becomes more and more apparent. The experience of years is now devoted to his art; a lifetime is concentrated upon the development of his transcendent genius. Mr. Forrest has shaped the colossal block of crude genius into wonderful statues of natural and lovely proportions. No intelligent praise can be extravagant which extols the exceeding beauty of the conceptions of this wonderful artist. We can scarcely think of Mr. Forrest’s fame as otherwise than increasing. It throws around his name a luminous halo, whose brightness and extent the progress of years will only intensify and enlarge.”

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

“If Forrest is not in a paroxysm, he is a mere wicker idol; huge to the eye, but full of emptiness,—a gigantic vacuum. His distortions of character are monstrous; the athletic, muscular vigor of his Lear is a positive libel upon consistency and truth. Spartacus was made for him, and he for Spartacus; the athlete is everlastingly present in all his personations. His ravings in Othello, in Macbeth, and in Richard the Third are orgasms of vigorous commonplace.

“When Mr. Forrest represents terror, his knees shake, his hands vibrate, his chest heaves, his throat swells, and his muscles project as if he were under the influence of a galvanic battery or his whole frame put in motion by a machine. He always appears anxious to show the toughness of his sinews, the cast-iron capabilities of his body, and the prodigious muscularity of his legs, which really haunt the spectator’s eyes like huge, grim-looking spectres, appearing too monstrous for realities, as they certainly are for the dignified grace of tragedy. He delights to represent physical agony with the most revolting exaggerations. When he dies, he likes that the audience should hear the rattles in his throat, and will, no doubt, some day have a bladder of pig’s blood concealed under his doublet, that, when stabbed, the tragic crimson may stream upon the stage, and thus give him the opportunity of representing death, in the words of his admirers, to the life.

“Perhaps no stronger test of Mr. Forrest’s want of intellectual power as an actor can be given than his slow, drawling, whining mode of delivering the speech to the senate, in the play of Othello. No schoolboy could do it worse, and though in the more energetic scenes there is a certain mechanical skill and seeming reality of passion, yet the charm which this might be calculated to produce is lost by the closeness of resemblance to a well-remembered original. It is almost frightfully vigorous, and though there are some touches of true energy, this is much too boisterous, coarse, and unrelieved by those delicate inflections which so eloquently express true feeling to obtain for it that meed of praise only due to the efforts of original genius. There is much art and much skill in Mr. Forrest’s acting; but its grand defect is the general absence of truth.”

The medley of praise and abuse, the hodge-podge of incongruous opinions, seen in the foregoing illustrations of newspaper criticism, arose far less from any contradiction of excellences and faults in the acting of Forrest than from the prejudices and ignorance of the writers. A large proportion of those writers were obstinately prepossessed or corruptly interested, and few of them had any distinct appreciation of the constituent elements of the dramatic art. Destitute of the true standard of criticism, the final canon of authority, their judgments were at the mercy of impulse and chance influences.

But Forrest was no solitary, though he was an extreme, sufferer in this respect. The greatest of his predecessors, all the most gifted and famous actors and actresses, have had to undergo the same pitiless ordeal. Those concerning whose illustrious pre-eminence there can be no question whatever have borne the same shower of detraction, insult, and ridicule, the same pelting of cynical badinage. The restless vanity, presumptuous conceit, and blasÉ omniscience of the common order of critics have spared none of the conspicuous dramatic artists. And if any one infer from the abuse and depreciation rained on Forrest that he must have been guilty of the worst faults, he may draw the like conclusion from the like premises in relation to every celebrated name in the history of the stage.

The bigoted opposition and belittling estimates met by Talma in his bold and resolute effort to displace the conventional inanity and stilted bombast of the French stage with truth and nature are a matter of notorious record. Some of his sapient critics thought they were administering a caustic censure when they uttered the unwitting compliment, extorted by their surprise at his severe costume and grand attitudes, “Why, he looks exactly like a Roman statue just stepped out of the antique.” The biographers of Garrick give abundant evidence of the misrepresentation, ridicule, and manifold censure with which his enemies and rivals and their venal tools pursued and vexed him. He even stooped to buy them off, and sometimes counteracted their malice with his own anonymous pen. Horace Walpole wrote, “I have seen the acting of Garrick, and can say that I see nothing wonderful in it.” His small stature, his starts and pauses, were, in especial, maliciously animadverted on. Mossop was sneered at as “a distiller of syllables,” Macklin for the prominent “lines, or rather cordage, of his face,” and Quin for the “mechanic regularity and swollen pomp of his declamation.” George Steevens wrote a bitter satire, utterly unjust and unprovoked, on Mrs. Siddons. She and her brother, John Philip Kemble, were stigmatized as icebergs and pompous pretenders, and were repeatedly hissed and insulted on the stage. Before her marriage, while Siddons was playing at the Haymarket, a critic, trying to put her down, wrote to Hayley, the manager, “Miss Kemble, though patronized by a number of clamorous friends, will prove only a piece of beautiful imbecility.” In 1807 a leading London newspaper said of George Frederick Cooke, “His delivery of Lear is just what it is in Richard: in its subdued passages, little and mean; in its more prominent efforts, rugged, rumbling, and staccato, resembling rather a watchman’s rattle than any other object in art or nature.”

William Robson, in his “Old Play-Goer,” says of Edmund Kean, “His person and carriage are mean and contemptible, his judgment poor, his pathos weak, his passion extravagant and unnatural;” and then sums up his estimate of the immortal histrionist in these remarkable words: “He is nothing but a little vixenish black girl in short petticoats!” On the first appearance of Kean in Philadelphia some critics there, who were great admirers of Cooke, called him “a quack, a mountebank, a vulgar impostor.” William B. Wood said of Kean, when he had just finished a rehearsal and gone out, “He is a mere mummer.” Joseph Jefferson, great-grandfather of the Joseph Jefferson of Rip Van Winkle fame,—a beautiful and noble old man, afterwards characterized by Forrest in loving memory as “one of the purest men that ever lived, sad, sweet, lofty, thoughtful, generous,”—overheard the remark, and replied, with a quiet indignation in his tone, “Ah, Wood, you would give all the riches you ever dreamed of amassing in this world to be another just such a mummer.” The “London Spectator,” in 1836, said, “Bunn in his drowning desperation catches at any straw. He has just put forward Booth, the shadow and foil of Kean in bygone days. Booth’s Richard seems to have been a wretched failure.” At the same time another English journal used the following expressive language, in which the writer evidently does justice to himself whatever he endeavors to do to the actors he names: “Since the retirement of Young and the death of Kean, the very name of tragedy has passed away from us. We have had to submit to the presumptuous and uninspired feelings of Mr. Bell-wether Kemble, or to the melodramatic jerks and pumpings of Mr. Macready.”

An American critic wrote thus of the Nancy Sykes of Charlotte Cushman: “Miss Cushman’s performance is of the Anatomical Museum style. Her effects are thrilling and vulgar. Her poses are awkward, and her pictures unfinished and coarse in outline. She has an unpleasantly pre-raphaelite death scene, and is dragged off, stiff and stark, when all the characters express their internal satisfaction at the circumstance by smiling, shaking hands, and joining in a feeble chorus. The secret of her attraction is vigor. The masses like vigor. If they can have a little art with it, very well. But vigor they must have.” Of late it has been the fashion to extol Miss Cushman as the queenly mistress of all the dignities and refinements of the dramatic profession; but the foregoing notice is exactly of a piece with the treatment visited upon Forrest for many years by the vulgar coteries of criticism, whose aim was not justice and usefulness but effect upon the prejudiced and the careless. Even the quiet and gentlemanly Edwin Booth has been as unsparingly assailed as he has been lavishly praised. An insidious article on him, entitled “The Machine-Actor,” called him a “self-acting dramatic machine warranted;” and while admitting, with great generosity, that “he was not wholly destitute of dramatic ability,” attributed his success and reputation chiefly to extraneous conditions, in especial the shrewdness of “his managing agent, who judiciously prepared his houses for him, and pecuniarily and personally appreciated the power of the press and conciliated the critics.” The two following notices of Mr. Booth’s Melnotte—the first obviously by a critic who had, the second by one who had not, been “conciliated”—are quite as absurd in their contradiction as those so often composed on Forrest:

“On Monday evening last we enjoyed the first opportunity of seeing Mr. Edwin Booth in the character of Claude Melnotte, in the ‘Lady of Lyons.’ Our impressions of Mr. Booth in the part may be briefly summed up in saying that he is one of the very best Claudes we have ever seen,—scholarly, sustained, and forcibly reticent at all points,—not so youthful in his make-up as to suggest the enthusiastic boy of Bulwer’s drama, but in all other regards the very ideal of the character. His marvellously melodious voice sounds to peculiar advantage in the rich prose-poetry of the more sentimental passages, and in the passages of sterner interest the latent strength of the tragedian comes nobly into play. Booth’s Claude is an unqualified success, and its first rendering was witnessed by an audience brilliant in number and intelligence and markedly enthusiastic in their reception of the best points.”

“Mr. Booth’s Claude Melnotte was a failure. It was neither serious nor sentimental, comic nor tragic. The best that can be said of it is that it came near being an effective burlesque. When he first came on to the stage, I almost thought it was his intention to make it so. His carriage and general make-up were those of one of Teniers’ Dutch boors, even to the extent of yellow hair combed straight down the forehead and clipped square across from temple to temple. His action consisted mainly in a series of shrugs. I don’t remember a natural movement of body or expression of countenance, from the beginning of the piece to the end; nor a natural tone of voice.”

Still later we have seen different representatives of the press, both in America and in England, alternately describing the wonderful Othello of Salvini as “the electrifying impersonation of a demi-god” and as “an exhibition of disgusting brutality.”

The class of examples of which these are a few specimens show how little worthy the ordinary newspaper dramatic criticism is to be considered authoritative. No branch of journalism, allowing for notable individual exceptions, is more incompetent or more corrupt, because no other set of writers have so difficult a task or are so beset by vicious influences. Their vanity, prejudice, and interest worked upon, their sympathies appealed to by the artist and his friends, their antipathies by his rivals and foes, harassed and hurried with work, moved by promises of money and patronage, no wonder they often turn from the exactions of conscientious labor and study to something so much easier. The unsophisticated portion of the public, who are too much influenced by what they read in the papers, and who fancy that applause is a good proof of merit and censure a sure evidence of fault, ought to know how full of fraud and injustice the world of histrionic ambition and criticism is, and to learn to give little weight to verdicts not ascertained to come from competent and honest judges. The husband of Madame Linguet, a favorite actress at the Italian Theatre in Paris, hired a party to hiss every other actress, but to applaud her to the echo. A ludicrous mistake let out the secret. Linguet told his men one night to hiss the first actress who appeared and applaud the second. The play was changed, and in the substituted piece Madame Linguet came forward first, and was overpowered with hisses. Sir John Hill asked Peg Woffington if she had seen in the paper his praise of her performance the previous evening in the part of Calista. She thanked him for his kindness, but added that the play was changed and she had acted the character of Lady Townley. In a New York paper, in 1863, this notice appeared: “Mr. Forrest repeated, by special request, his great character of Spartacus last evening, before one of the most brilliant and enthusiastic audiences of the season. His acting was grand throughout, and at the end of the last act he received a perfect ovation from the audience.” Appended to this, in his own handwriting, pasted in one of his scrap-books, were found these words: “Mr. Forrest on the night above referred to was in Philadelphia, and did not act at all, having been called home by the death of his sister.”

After going over the mass of ignorant, capricious, and contradictory criticism bestowed on Forrest,—criticism destitute of fundamental principles or ultimate insight,—the reader may well feel at a loss to know how he is to regulate his judgment upon the subject and form a just estimate of the actor and his performances. The critics, instead of aiding, bewilder him, because themselves appear to be wildly adrift. To work our way through the chaos it is necessary for us to understand distinctly what the dramatic art is in its nature and object, and what are the materials and methods with which it aims to accomplish its purpose. The answers to these inquiries will clear away confusion, lay bare the elements of the art, and put us in possession of those laws of expression which constitute the only final standard for justly criticising the efforts of the player.

Considered in its full scope, the drama is the practical science of human nature exemplified in the revelation of its varieties of character and conduct. It aims to uncover and illustrate man in the secret springs of his action and suffering and destiny, by representing the whole range and diversity of his experience in living evolution. The drama is the reflection of human life in the idealizing mirror of art. In what does this reflection consist? In the correct exhibition of the different modes of behavior that belong to the different types of humanity in the various exigencies of their fortunes. The critic, therefore, in order to be able to say whether histrionic performances are true or false, consistent or inconsistent, noble or base, refined or vulgar, artistically elaborated and complete or absurdly exaggerated and defective, must understand the contents of human nature in all its grades of development, and know how the representatives of those grades naturally deport themselves under given conditions of inward consciousness and of exterior situation. That is to say, a man to be thoroughly equipped for the task of dramatic criticism must have mastered these three provinces of knowledge; first, the characters of men in their vast variety; second, the modes of manifestation whereby those characters reveal their inward states through outward signs; third, the manner in which those characters and those modes of manifestation are affected by changes of consciousness or of situation, how they are modified by the reflex play of their own experience.

Every man has three types of character, in all of which he must be studied before he can be adequately represented. First he has his inherited constitutional or temperamental character, his fixed native character, in which the collective experience and qualities of his progenitors are consolidated, stamped, and transmitted. Next he has his peculiar fugitive or passional character, which is the modification of his stable average character under the influence of exciting impulses, temporary exaltations of instinct or sentiment. And then he has his acquired habitual character, gradually formed in him by the moulding power of his occupation and associations, as expressed in the familiar proverb, “Habit is a second nature.” The first type reveals his ancestral or organic rank, what he is in the fatal line of his parentage. The second shows his moral or personal rank, what he has become through his own experience and discipline, self-indulgence and self-denial. The third betrays his social rank, what he has been made by his employment and caste. The original estimate or value assigned to the man by nature is indicated in his constitutional form, the geometrical proportions and dynamic furnishing of his organs, his physical and mental make-up. The estimate he puts on himself, in himself and in his relations with others, his egotistical value, is seen in the transitive modifications of his form by movements made under the stimulus of passions. The conventional estimate or social value awarded him is suggested through the permanent modifications wrought in his organs and bearing by his customary actions and relations with his fellows. Thus the triple type of character possessed by every man is to be studied by means of an analysis of the forms of his organs in repose and of his movements in passion or habit.

The classes of constitutional character are as numerous as the human temperaments which mark the great vernacular distinctions of our nature according to the preponderant development of some portion of the organism. There is the osseous temperament, in which the bones and ligaments are most developed; the lymphatic temperament, in which the adipose and mucous membrane preponderate; the sanguine temperament, in which the heart and arteries give the chief emphasis; the melancholic temperament, in which the liver and the veins oversway; the executive temperament, in which the capillaries and the nerves take the lead; the mental temperament, in which the brain is enthroned; the visceral temperament, in which the vital appetites reign; the spiritual temperament, in which there is a fine harmony of the whole. The enumeration might be greatly varied and extended, but this is enough for our purpose. Each head of the classification denotes a distinct style of character, distinguished by definite modes of manifesting itself, the principal sign of every character, the key-note from which all its expressions are modulated, being the quality and rate of movement or the nervous rhythm of the organism in which it is embodied.

Besides the vernacular classes of character ranged under their leading temperaments, there are almost innumerable dialect varieties arising from these, as modified both by the steady influence of chronic conditions of life, historic, national, local, or clique, and by fitful and eccentric individual combinations of faculty and impulse. For instance, how many types of barbarian character there are,—such as the garrulous, laughing, sensual Negro, the taciturn, solemn, abstinent Indian, the fat and frigid Esquimaux, the Hottentot, the Patagonian, the New Zealander,—all differing widely in stature, feature, gesture, disposition, costume, creed, speech, while agreeing in the fundamentals of a common nature. Among civilized nations the diversity of characters is still greater. It would require an almost endless recital of particulars to describe the differences of the Chinaman, the Japanese, the Egyptian, the Persian, the Arab, the Hindu, the Italian, the Spaniard, the German, the Russian, the Frenchman, the Englishman, the American. And then what a maze of attributes, each one at the same time clear in its sharpness or its profundity, qualify and discriminate the various orders, castes, and groups of society!—the Brahmin, the Sudra, the king, the slave, the soldier, the doctor, the lawyer, the priest, the teacher, the shop-keeper, the porter, the detective, the legislator, the hangman, the scientist, and the philosopher. Every professional pursuit, social position, mechanical employment, physical culture, spiritual belief or aptitude, has its peculiar badge of dress, look, posture, motion, in which it reveals its secrets; and the pettifogger or the jurisconsult, the prophet or the necromancer, the Quaker and the Shaker, the Calvinist and the Catholic, the tailor, the gymnast, the gambler, the bully, the hero, the poet, and the saint, stand unveiled before us. How the habitual life reveals itself in the bearing is clearly seen in the sailor when he leaves his tossing ship for the solid shore. His sensation of the strange firmness of the earth makes him tread in a sort of heavy-light way,—half wagoner, half dancing-master. There is always this appearance of lightness of foot and heavy upper works in a sailor, his shoulders rolling, his feet touching and going.

To know how consistently to construct an ideal character of any one of these kinds, at any given height or depth in the historic gamut of humanity, and to be able to embody and enact it with the harmonious truth of nature, is the task of the consummate actor. And to be qualified to catalogue all these attributes of human being and manifestation with accuracy, recognizing every fitness, detecting every incongruity, is the business of the dramatic critic. Who of our ordinary newspaper writers is competent to the work? Yet the youngest and crudest of them never hesitates to pronounce a snap judgment on the most renowned tragedians as if his magisterial “we” were the very ipse dixit of Pythagoras!

Still further, the task of the actor and of the critic is made yet more complicated and difficult by the varied modifications of all the classes of character indicated above under the influence of specific passion. The great dramatic passions, which may be subdivided into many more, are love, hatred, joy, grief, jealousy, wonder, pity, scorn, anger, and fear. To obtain a fine perception and a ready and exact command of the relations of the apparatus of expression to all these passions in their different degrees as manifesting different styles of character, to know for each phase of excitement or depression the precise adjustment of the limbs, chest, and head, of intense or slackened muscles, of compressed or reposeful lips, of dilated or contracted nostrils, of pensive or glaring or fiery or supplicating eyes, of deprecating or threatening mien, of firm or vacillating posture, is an accomplishment as rare as it is arduous. All this is capable of reduction by study and practice to an exact science, and then of development into a perfect art. For every passion has its natural law of expression, and all these laws are related and consistent in an honest and earnest character, incoherent only in a discordant or hypocritical character. There is an art to find the mind’s construction in the face. The spirit shines and speaks in the flesh. And a learned eye looks quite through the seemings of men to their genuine being and states. This is indeed the very business of the dramatic art,—to read the truths of human nature through all its attempted disguises, and expose them for instruction. How minute the detail, how keen the perception, how subtle and alert the power of adaptation requisite for this, may be illustrated by a single example. Suppose a criminal character is to be played. He may be of a timid, suspicious, furtive type, or careless, jovial, and rollicking, or brazen and defiant, or sullen and gloomy, yet be a criminal in all. He may be portrayed in the stage of excitement under the interest of plot and pursuit, or in success and triumph, or in defeat and wrath, or in the shame and terror of detection, or in final remorse and despair. There is scarcely any end to the possibilities of variety, yet verisimilitude must be kept up and nature not violated.

But we have as yet hardly hinted at the richness of the elements of the dramatic art and the scope of the knowledge and skill necessary for applying them. The aim of the dramatic art being the revelation of the characters and experiences of men, the question arises, By what means is this revelation effected? The inner states of man are revealed through outer signs. Every distinct set of outer signs through which inner states are made known constitutes a dramatic language. Now, there are no less than nine of these sets of signs or dramatic languages of human nature.

The first language is forms. When we look on an eagle, a mouse, a horse, a tiger, a worm, a turtle, an alligator, a rattlesnake, their very forms reveal their natures and dispositions and habits. In their shapes and proportions we read their history. So with man. His generic nature, his specific inheritance, his individual peculiarities are signalized in his form and physiognomy with an accuracy and particularity proportioned to the interpreting power of the spectator. The truth is all there for the competent gazer. The actor modifies his form and features by artifice and will to correspond with what should be the form of the person whose character he impersonates. And costume, with its varieties of outline and color, constitutes a secondary province artificially added to the natural language of form.

The second language is attitudes. Attitudes are living modifications of shape, or the fluencies of form. There are, for example, nine elementary attitudes of the feet, of the hands, of the toes, of the head, which may be combined in an exhaustless series. Every one of these attitudes has its natural meaning and value. All emotions strong enough to pronounce themselves find expression in appropriate attitudes or significant changes of the form in itself and in its relations to others. He who has the key for interpreting the reactions of human nature on the agencies that affect it, easily reads in the outer signs of attitude the inner states of defiance, doubt, exaltation, prostration, nonchalance, respect, fear, misery, or supplication, and so on.

The third language is automatic movements, which are unconscious escapes of character, unpurposed motions through which the states of the mover are betrayed, sometimes with surprising clearness and force. For instance, how often impatience, vexation, or restrained anger, breaks out in a nervous tapping of the foot or the finger! What can be more legible than the fidgety manner of one in embarrassment? And the degree and kind of the embarrassment, together with the personal grade and social position and culture of the subject, will be revealed in the peculiar nature of the fidgeting. There is a whole class of these automatic movements, such as trembling, nodding, shaking the head, biting the lips, lolling the tongue, the shiver of the flesh, the quiver of the mouth or eyelids, the shudder of the bones, and they compose a rich primordial language of revelation, perfectly intelligible and common to universal humanity.

The fourth language is gestures. This is the language so marvellously flexible, copious, and powerful among many barbarous peoples. It was carried to such a pitch of perfection by the mimes of ancient Rome, that Roscius and Cicero had a contest to decide which could express a given idea in the most clear and varied manner, the actor by gestures, or the orator by words. Gestures are a purposed system of bodily motions, both spontaneous and deliberate, intended as preparatory, auxiliary, or substitutional for the expressions by speech. There is hardly any state of consciousness which cannot be revealed more vividly by pantomime than is possible in mere verbal terms. As fixed attitudes are inflected form, and automatic movements inflected attitude, so pantomimic gestures are systematically inflected motion. The wealth of meaning and power in gesticulation depends on the richness, freedom, and harmony of the character and organism. The beauty or deformity, nobleness or baseness, of its pictures are determined by the zones of the body from which the gestures start, the direction and elevation at which they terminate, their rate of moving, and the nature and proportions of the figures, segments of which their lines and curves describe. Music has no clearer rhythm, melody, and harmony to the ear than inflected gesture has to the eye. The first law of gesture is, that it follows the look or the eye, and precedes the sound or the voice. The second law is, that its velocity is precisely proportional to the mass moved. The third and profoundest law, first formulated by Delsarte, is that efferent or outward lines of movement reveal the sensitive life or vital nature of the man; that afferent or inward lines reveal the percipient and reflective life or mental nature; and that immanent or curved lines, blended of the other two, reveal the affectional life or moral nature.

The fifth language is what is called facial expression. It consists of muscular contractions and relaxations, dilatations and diminutions, the fixing or the flitting of nervous lights and shades over the organism. Its changes are not motions of masses of the body, but visible modifications of parts of its periphery, as in smiles, frowns, tears. The girding up or letting down of the sinews, the tightening or loosening or horripilating creep of the skin, changes of color, as in paleness and blushing, and all the innumerable alterations of look and meaning in the brows, the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the chin, come under this head. The delicacy, power, and comprehensiveness of this language are inexhaustible. So numerous and infinitely adjustable, for instance, are the nerves of the mouth, that Swedenborg asserts that no spoken language is necessary for the illuminated, every state of the soul being instantly understood from the modulation of the lips alone.

The sixth language is inarticulate noises, the first undigested rudiments of the voice. All our organic and emotional states, when they are keen enough to seek expression, and we are under no restraint, distinguish and reveal themselves in crude noises, each one the appropriate effect of a corresponding cause. We breathe aloud, whistle, gasp, sigh, choke, whimper, sob, groan, grunt, sneeze, snore, snort, sip, hiss, smack, sniff, gulp, gurgle, gag, wheeze, cough, hawk, spit, hiccup, and give the death-rattle. These and kindred noises take us back to the rawest elemental experiences, and express them to universal apprehension in the most unmistakable manner. The states of the organism in its various sensations, the forms its affected parts assume under different stimuli, are as dies which strike the sounds then made into audible coins or medals revelatory of their faces. This is the broadest and vulgarest language of unrefined vernacular man. The lower the style of acting the larger part this will play in it. From the representation of high characters it is more and more strained out and sublimated away, the other languages quite superseding it.

The seventh language is inflected tones, vocalized and modulated breath. The mere tones of the sounding apparatus of the voice, in the variety of their quality, pitch, and cadence, reveal the emotional nature of man through the whole range of his feelings, both in kind and degree. The moan of pain, the howl of anguish, the yell of rage, the shriek of despair, the wail of sorrow, the ringing laugh of joy, the ecstatic and smothering murmur of love, the penetrative tremor of pathos, the solemn monotone of sublimity, and the dissolving whisper of wonder and adoration,—these are some of the great family of inflected sounds in which the emotions of the human heart are reflected and echoed to the recognition of the sympathetic auditor.

The eighth language is articulated words, the final medium of the intellect. Vocal sounds articulated in verbal forms are the pure vehicle of the thoughts of the head, and the inflected tones with which they are expressed convey the accompanying comments of the heart upon those thoughts. What a man thinks goes out on his articulate words, but what he feels is taught in the purity or harshness of the tones, the pitch, rate, emphasis, direction and length of slide with which the words are enunciated. The word reveals the intellectual state; the tone, the sensitive state; the inflection, the moral state. The character of a man is nowhere so concentratedly revealed as in his voice. In its clang-tints all the colors and shades of his being are mingled and symbolized. But it requires a commensurate wisdom, sensibility, trained skill and impartiality to interpret what it implies. Yet one fact remains sure: give a man a completely developed and freed voice, and there is nothing in his experience which he cannot suggest by it. Nothing can be clearer or more impressive than the revelation of characters by the voice: the stutter and splutter of the frightened dolt, the mincing lisp of the fop, the broad and hearty blast of the strong and good-natured boor, the clarion note of the leader, the syrupy and sickening sweetness of the goody, the nasal and mechanical whine of the pious hypocrite, the muddy and raucous vocality of vice and disease, the crystal clarity and precision of honest health and refinement. Cooke spoke with two voices, one harsh and severe, one mild and caressing. His greatest effects were produced by a rapid transition from one of these to the other. He used the first to convince or to command, the second to soothe or to betray.

Actions speak louder than words; and the ninth language is deeds, the completest single expression of the whole man. The thoughts, affections, designs, expose and execute themselves in rounded revelation and fulfilment in a deed. When a hungry man sits down to a banquet and satisfies his appetite, when one knocks down his angered opponent or opens the window and calls a policeman, when one gives his friend the title-deed of an estate, everything is clear, there is no need of explanatory comment. The sowing of a seed, the building of a house, the painting of a picture, the writing of a book or letter, any intentional act, is in its substance and form the most solid manifestation of its performer. In truth, the deeds of every man, in their material and moral physiognomy, betray what he has been, demonstrate what he is, and prophesy what he will become. They are a language in which his purposes materialize themselves and set up mirrors of his history. Deeds are, above all, the special dramatic language, because the dramatic art seeks to unveil human nature by a representation of it not in description, but in living action.

These nine languages, or sets of outer signs for revealing inner states, are all sustained and pervaded by a system of invisible motions or molecular vibrations in the brain and the other nerve-centres. The consensus of these hidden motions, in connection at the subjective pole with the essence of our personality, at the objective pole with other personalities and all the forces of the kosmos, presides over our bodily and spiritual evolution; and all that outwardly appears of our character and experience is but a partial manifestation of its working. From the differing nature, extent, and combination of these occult vibrations in the secret nerve-centres originate the characteristic peculiarities of individuals. It may not be said that all the substances and forms of life and consciousness consist in modes of motion, but undoubtedly every vital or conscious state of embodied man is accompanied by appropriate kinds and rates of organic undulations or pulses of force, and is revealed through these if revealed at all. The forms and measures of these molecular vibrations in the nerve-centres and fibres,—whether they are rectilinear, spherical, circular, elliptical, or spiral,—the width of their gamut, with the slowness and swiftness of the beats in their extremes,—and the complexity and harmony of their co-operation,—determine the quality and scale of the man. The signals of these concealed things exhibited through the nine languages of his organism mysteriously hint the kinds and degrees of his power, and announce the scope and rank of his being. This is the real secret of what is vulgarly called animal magnetism. One person communicates his vibrations to another, either by direct contact, or through ideal signs intuitively recognized and which discharge their contents in the apprehending soul, just as a musical string takes up the vibrations of another one in tune with it. He whose organism is richest in differentiated centres and most perfect in their co-ordinated action, having the exactest equilibrium in rest and the freest play in exercise, having the amplest supply of force at command and the most consummate grace or economy in expending it, is naturally the king of all other men. He is closest to nature and God, fullest of a reconciled self-possession and surrender to the universal. He is indeed a divine magnetic battery. The beauty and grandeur of his bearing bewitch and dominate those who look on him, because suggestive of the subtlety and power of the modes of motion vibrating within him. The unlimited automatic intelligence associated with these interior motions can impart its messages not only through the confessed languages enumerated above, but also, as it seems, immediately, thus enveloping our whole race with an unbroken mental atmosphere alive and electric with intercommunication.

The variety of human characters, in their secret selfhood and in their social play,—the variety of languages through which they express themselves and their states, all based on that infinitely fine system of molecular motions in the nerve-centres where the individual and the universal meet and blend and react in volitional or reflex manifestation,—the variety of modes and degrees in which characters are modified under the influence of passion within or society and custom without,—the variety of changes in the adaptation of expression to character, perpetually altering with the altering situations,—such are the elements of the dramatic art. What cannot be said can be sung; what cannot be sung can be looked; what cannot be looked can be gesticulated; what cannot be gesticulated can be danced; what cannot be danced can be sat or stood,—and be understood. The knowledge of these elements properly formulated and systematized composes the true standard of dramatic criticism.

It is obvious enough how few of the actors and critics of the day possess this knowledge. Without it the player has to depend on intuition, inspiration, instinct, happy or unhappy luck, laborious guess-work, and servile imitation. He has not the safe guidance of fundamental principles. Without it the critic is at the mercy of every bias and caprice. Now, one of the greatest causes of error and injustice in acting and in the criticism of acting is the difficulty of determining exactly how a given character in given circumstances will deport and deliver himself. With what specific combinations of the nine dramatic languages of human nature, in what relative prominence or subtlety, used with what degrees of reserve or explosiveness, will he reveal his inner states through outer signs? Here the differences and the chances for truthful skill are innumerable; for every particular in expression will be modified by every particular in the character of the person represented. What is perfectly natural and within limits for one would be false or extravagant for another. The taciturnity of an iron pride, the demonstrativeness of a restless vanity, the abundance of unpurposed movements and unvocalized sounds characteristic of boorishness and vulgarity, the careful repression of automatic language by the man of finished culture, are illustrations.

And then the degree of harmony in the different modes of expression by which a given person reveals himself is a point of profound delicacy for actor and critic. In a type of ideal perfection every signal of thought or feeling, of being or purpose, will denote precisely what it is intended to denote and nothing else, and all the simultaneous signals will agree with one another. But real characters, so far as they fall short of perfection, are inconsistent in their expressions, continually indefinite, superfluous or defective, often flatly contradictory. Multitudes of characters are so undeveloped or so ill developed that they fall into attitudes without fitness or direct significance, employ gestures vaguely or unmeaningly, and are so insincere or little in earnest that their postures, looks, motions, and voices carry opposite meanings and thus belie one another. It requires no superficial art to be able instantly to detect every incongruity of this sort, to assign it to its just cause, and to decide whether the fault arises from conscious falsity in the character or from some incompetency of the physical organism to reflect the states of its spiritual occupant. For instance, in sarcastic speech the meaning of the tone contradicts the meaning of the words. The articulation is of the head, but the tone is of the heart. So when the voice is ever so soft and wheedling, if the language of the eyes and the fingers is ferocious, he is a fool who trusts the voice. In like manner the revelations in form and attitude are deeper and more massive than those of gesture. But in order that all the expressions of the soul through the body should be marked by truth and agreement, it is necessary that the soul should be completely sincere and unembarrassed and that the body should be completely free and flexible to reflect its passing states. No character furnishes these conditions perfectly, and therefore every character will betray more or less inconsistency in its manifestations. Still, every pronounced character has a general unity of design and coloring in its type which must be kept prevailingly in view.

The one thing to be demanded of every actor is that he shall conceive his part with distinctness and represent it coherently. No actor can be considered meritorious who has not a full and vivid conception of his rÔle and does not present a consistent living picture of it. But, this essential condition met, there may be much truth and great merit in many different conceptions and renderings of the same rÔle. Then the degree of intellectuality, nobleness, beauty, and charm, or of raw passion and material power, in any stated performance is a fair subject for critical discussion, and will depend on the quality of the actor. But the critic should be as large and generous as God and nature in his standard, and not set up a factitious limit of puling feebleness and refuse to pardon anything that goes beyond it. He must remember that a great deal ought to be pardoned to honest and genuine genius when it electrifyingly exhibits to the crowd of tame and commonplace natures a character whose scale of power is incomparably grander than their own. It is ever one of the most imposing and benign elements in the mission of the stage to show to average men, through magnificent examples of depth of passion, force of will, strength of muscle, compass of voice, and organic play of revelation, how much wider than they had known is the gamut of humanity, how much more intense and exquisite its love, how much more blasting its wrath, more awful its sorrow, more hideous its crime and revenge, more godlike its saintliness and heroism.

It is not to be pretended that Forrest had ever made the systematic analysis of the dramatic art sketched above. But when it was submitted to him he instantly appreciated it with enthusiasm; for he was experimentally familiar with all the rudiments of it. He was all his life an earnest student of human nature, in literature, in social intercourse, in his own consciousness, and in the critical practice of his profession. In fixing his rank as an actor the only question is how far he had the ability to represent in action what he unquestionably had the ability to appreciate in conception. While some of his admirers have eulogized him as the greatest tragedian that ever lived, some of his detractors have denounced him as one of the worst. The truth, of course, lies between these extremes. His excellences were of the most distinguished kind, but the limitations of his excellence were obvious to the judicious and sometimes repulsive to the fastidious.

To be the complete and incomparable actor which the partisans of Forrest claim him to have been requires some conditions plainly wanting in him. The perfect player must have a detached, imaginative, mercurial, yet impassioned mind, free from chronic biases and prejudices, lodged in a rich, symmetrical body as full of elastic grace as of commanding power. The spirit must be freely attuned to the whole range of humanity, and the articulations and muscles of the frame so liberated and co-operative as to furnish an instrument obviously responsive to all the play of thought and emotion. Now, Forrest, after his early manhood, under the rigorous athletic training he gave himself, was a ponderous Hercules, magnificent indeed, but incapable of the more airy and delicate qualities, the fascination of free grace and spontaneous variety. He lacked the lightning-like suppleness of Garrick and of Kean. His rugged and imposing physique, handsome and serviceable as it was, wanted the varying flexibility of the diviner forms of beauty, and so put rigid limitations on him. The same was true mentally; for while his intellect was keen, clear, broad, and vigorous, and his heart warm and faithful, and his passion deep and intense, yet his seated antipathies were as strong as his artistic sympathies, and shut him up in scorn and hostility from whole classes of character. Both physically and spiritually he was moulded in the fixed ways of the general type of characters which his own predominant qualities caused him to affect. These were grand characters, glorious in attributes, sublime in manifestation, but in spite of all his art many of their traits were in common, and there was something of monotony in the histrionic cortÉge, electrifying as their scale of heroism and strength was. Could he but have mastered in tragedy the spirituelle and free as he did the sombre and tenacious, he had been perfect.

The same defect here admitted for his form and mind, it must be confessed applied to his facial expression, gesture, and voice. As in attitude he could express with immense energy everything slow and tremendous in purpose or swift and resistless in execution, while the more subtile and fleeting moods were baffled of a vent, so in look and motion and tone he could give most vivid and sustained revelation to all the great cardinal emotions of the human breast, the elemental characteristics of our nature, but could not so well expose the more elusive sentiments and delicate activities. As in his tone and limbs so in his face and voice, the heavy style of gymnastic culture had fixed itself in certain rigid moulds or lines, which could not break up in endless forms accordant with endless moods, melting into one another, all underlaid by that living unity which it is the end of a true Æsthetic gymnastic to produce. On occasion of his first professional visit to London an English journal well said,—

“Mr. Forrest is in person most remarkable for symmetrical but somewhat Herculean proportions. He might take the Farnese club and stand a perfect model to painter or sculptor. His neck is also as a pillar of strength, and his head is finely set on. His features are marked, but by no means of a classic caste, nor are they well suited for histrionic effect. Abundantly indicative of energy, they have not breadth of character, or beauty, or variety of expression. Under strong excitement they cut or contrast into sharp angularities, which cannot harmonize with the grand in passion.”

Even the marvellous voice of Forrest—celebrated as it was for power, tenderness, and manly sincerity—was prevailingly too dark or too crashing. He articulated a certain range of thoughts and intoned a certain range of feelings with superb correctness and force. Still, his voice wanted a clarity and a bolted solidity corresponding with its sombreness and its smashing violence. That is to say, while it wonderfully expressed the ordinary contents of understanding and passion, it relatively failed in delivering the contents of intellectualized imagination and sentiment. His voice was astonishing in volume of power, tearing fury of articulation, long-drawn cadences of solemnity and affectional sweetness, but it was deficient in light graceful play, brilliancy, concentrated and echoing sonority. For the absolute perfection often claimed in its behalf its crashing gutturality needed supplementing with that Italian quality of transparent, round, elastic, ringing precision which delivers the words on the silent air like crystal balls on black velvet.

The everlasting refrain in the cry of the weak or snarling critics of Forrest was that he overdid everything,—striding, screeching, howling, tearing passions to tatters, disregarding the sacred bounds of propriety. That there was an apparent modicum of justice in this charge must be admitted. And yet when all the truth is seen the admission makes but a very small abatement from his merit. There is a comparatively raw elemental language of human nature, such as is seen in the sneer, the growl, the hiss, the grinding of the teeth, muscular contortion, which is progressively restrained, sifted out and left behind with the advance of polished dignity and refinement. In his impersonations Forrest unquestionably retained more of this than is tolerated by the standard of courtly fashion. His democratic soul despised courtly fashion and paid its homage only at the shrine of native universal manhood. But, on the other hand, it is unquestionable that these vigorous expressions were perfectly in accordance with truth and nature as represented in men of such exceptional strength and intensity as he and the types of character he best loved to portray. He gave extraordinarily vigorous expression to an extraordinarily wide gamut of passion because he sincerely felt it, and thus nature informed his art with it. He did not in cold blood overstep truth for effect, but he earnestly set forth the truth as he conceived and felt it. With the mould and furnishing given by his physique and soul for the great rÔles he essayed, efforts were easy and moderate which pale and feeble spindlings might well find extravagant or shocking. The fault clearly is more theirs than his. Power, sincerity, earnestness, are always respectable except to the envious. His total career is proof enough how profound and conscientious and popularly effective his sincerity, earnestness, and power were. But he must needs run the scathing gauntlet which all bold originality has to run. It is the same in all the arts. Nine-tenths of the current criticism is worthless and contemptible, because ignorant or corrupt. Beethoven was ridiculed as a madman and a bungler, Rossini sneered at as a shallow trickster, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi denounced as impostors, and Wagner systematically scouted as an insufferable charlatan. As Lewes says, “The effort to create a new form is deprecated, and a patient hearing denied. Repeat the old forms, and the critics denounce the want of originality. Present new forms, and the critics, deprived of their standards, denounce the heresy. It remains with the public to discover real genius in the artist, and it does so by its genuine response to his work.”

In reply to the accusation of overdoing a character by excessive force of demonstration, Forrest might fairly have asked his critics, Overdone for whom? For Boythorn or for Skimpole? For Coriolanus or for Launcelot Gobbo? For Spartacus or for a dry-goods clerk? The precision with which he conceived each of his leading characters, the patience with which he elaborated all its elements into a consistent unity, the thoroughness with which he assimilated it into his soul and identified himself with it, and the unfaltering coherency and bold relief with which he enacted it, carefully observing every condition of perspective and light and shade and relative emphasis, placed his chief rÔles among the most complete specimens of the dramatic art in their way. And they forced from his own generation the almost universal acknowledgment of his solitary pre-eminence on the American stage. An anonymous writer justly said of him in 1855, “An actor of the most positive qualities, decisive in discrimination, pronounced in every attitude and phase, his embodiments have sharp and stern definition. Therefore they challenge with double force the most searching criticism, and invite while they defy the sneers of less bold and more artificial schools. His delineations are not mere cartoons, where the faults, like the virtues, are elusive and shadowy. They are pictures finished with unmistakable color, sharp expression of form, and a single, unerring meaning. Their simplicity is such that if not grand they would be shallow commonplace: just as it is but a step from Doric majesty to unrelieved and squat ugliness. A modern school of actors is perplexing itself to get rid of demonstration on the stage, to avoid scrupulously what is called ‘a scene,’ to express passion by silent and gentlemanly bitterness, to reduce all emotion to bloodless and suppressed propriety. Love is to be made a morbid gnawing; anger clipped as close as hypocrisy; jealousy corrode, but never bubble; joy be trim and well behaved; and madness violent only at rare intervals. Not of such stuff as this are made the Virginius, the Lear, the Metamora, and the Hamlet of Forrest. It is not in his nature to polish passion until, like a sentence too much refined, it loses all that is striking and natural. His anger is not conveyed off like electricity by invisible agents. His moods are construed in his audience by instinct, not by analysis. The moment he touches an emotional key a major chord is struck that rings out clear and piercing and brings back an echo equally distinct.”

The “London Times” said of the Metamora of Forrest, “It is a most accurate delineation of Indian character. There is the awkward bluntness that even approaches the comic and raises a laugh when it defies; and there is, rising from behind this, the awful sense of right that makes the Indian respected as a wronged man. The dull deportment which petrifies the figurative language that flows lazily from the lips, and the hurricane of passion that rages beneath it, are the two elements of the character, and the manner in which they are combined by Mr. Forrest renders his Metamora a most remarkable performance.” In contrast with the foregoing fairness of statement the following specimen of base and insolent ridicule is a literary curiosity:

“The Metamora of Mr. Forrest is as much like a gorilla as an Indian, and in fact more like a dignified monkey than a man. It has not the face of a man, nor the voice nor the gait of a man. Du Chaillu’s description of the gorilla would apply equally well to Forrest’s Metamora. We are told by that celebrated traveller that upon the approach of an enemy this ferocious baboon, standing upright on his hind legs, his eyes dilated, his teeth gritting and grinding, gives vent to divers snorts and grunts, and then, beating his breast fiercely with his hands till it sounds like a muffled drum, utters a loud roar. What a singular coincidence! The similarity need scarcely be pointed out. Substitute the words ‘great tragedian’ for ‘ferocious baboon,’ omit the word ‘hind,’ and you have as accurate a description of Mr. Forrest in Metamora as any reasonable man could wish. The snorting, gritting, and especially the beating of the breast and roaring, are so familiar to us, that we could almost imagine that the tragedian and the traveller have met.”

One more example of the kind of “criticism” too common in the American press will suffice:

“Can any man or woman who has paid a dollar to see Mr. Forrest in any of his great characters recall any evidence in real life to substantiate his assertions that such bellowing is natural? Did anybody ever see anybody that looked as Mr. Forrest looks when he pretends to be representing the passions of rage, hate, remorse? If Mr. Forrest ‘holds the mirror up to nature,’ he first carefully scrawls over the face certain hideous etchings, with only a small portion of surface here and there left open for reflection. His Othello is a creature to be kicked, instead of feared or loved, if met with in actual life. Is it credible that any one was ever actually moved or interested in witnessing one of this actor’s tedious and absurd performances?”

Ample reply to these brutal inquiries is afforded by the rapt silence, the copious tears, and the all-shaking plaudits of the unprecedented crowds, drawn for so long a series of years in every part of the country by the magnetic impersonations which have secured him the first illustrious place in the history of his country’s stage. But two or three individual anecdotes possess interest enough to warrant their preservation here.

While he was enacting the part of Iago to the Othello of Edmund Kean in Albany one night, a stalwart canal-boatman was seated in the pit, so near the stage that he rested his elbow on it close to the footlights. Iago, in the scene where he had wrought so fearfully on the jealousy of the Moor, crossed the stage near the boatman, and, as he passed, the man looked savagely at him and hissed through his teeth while grinding them together, “You damned lying scoundrel, I would like to get hold of you after this show is over and wring your infernal neck!” When they met in the dressing-room, Kean generously said to Forrest, “Young man, if my acting to-night had received as high a compliment as that brawny fellow in the pit bestowed on yours I should feel very proud. You made the mimic show real to him, and I will tell you your acting merited the criticism.”

Mr. Rees recalls among his interesting reminiscences an incident of which he was a witness in New Orleans. Forrest was delivering the curse in Lear with his wonted fierce and overwhelming vehemence. Mr. Rees heard a strange sound proceeding from some one beside him, and, turning, found, to his alarm, an elderly gentleman with his eyes fixed, his mouth open, and a deathly paleness overspreading his face. Seizing him by the shoulders and giving him a sudden jerk, he caused a reaction of the blood. The gentleman gasped, heaved a deep sigh, and gazed around like one awaking from a troubled sleep. The awful curse so awfully uttered, which had taken away his breath, seemed still ringing in his ears. “One moment more and I should have been a dead man,” he said. And, looking towards the vacant stage, he asked, “Is that terrible old man gone?”

Hazlitt tells the traditional story that once when Garrick was acting Lear the crown of straw which he wore was discomposed or fell off, which happening to any common actor would have caused a burst of laughter; but with him not the slightest notice was taken of the accident, but the attention of the audience remained riveted. The same thing actually befell Forrest, and gave the most astonishing proof of his absorbed earnestness and magnetizing power. It was in the old Broadway Theatre, near Anthony Street. He was performing Lear, with Barry, Davidge, Conway, Whiting, Madame Ponisi, Mrs. Abbott, and other favorites in the cast. In the last scene of the second act, when depicting the frenzy of the aged monarch, whose brain, maddened by injuries, was reeling on its throne, in the excitement of the moment Forrest tore the wig of whitened hair from his head and hurled it some twenty feet towards the footlights. The wig thus removed, there was revealed to the audience a head of glossy raven locks, forming a singular contrast to the hoary beard still fastened by a white cord to the actor’s chin. Not the least embarrassment resulted either to actor or to spectators. Amidst the vast assembly not a titter was heard, scarce a smile discerned. Enchained, entranced by the power of the player, two thousand breathless spectators gazed with bedimmed eyes on the mimic scene. Nor made he any pause or hesitation. Still did that superb voice, so rich and grand in melody and compass, speak forth in anguish and wrath the indignant denunciation of the outraged king and father, making every heart tremble with his tones. One of the actors on the stage at the time, in describing the event more than twenty years afterwards, said that as he recalled the effect produced by Forrest in that scene on the house, and on the players about him, it seemed something superhuman.

In the tragedy of Cleopatra, by Marmontel, an asp had been made so natural that it seemed alive. As it approached the queen its eyes sparkled like fire, and it began to hiss. At the close of the scene one asked a critic who sat by him how he liked the play. He replied, “I am of the same opinion as the asp.” This is the case with the average sort of critic, whose commonplace inferiority of soul seeks to revenge itself, whose vanity or complacency seeks to exalt itself, by a demeaning estimate of every artist of whom he writes. But, fortunately, there are numerous instances of a nobler style, men equally just and generous, who in all their judgments hold individual prejudices in abeyance, and, actuated solely by public spirit and love of truth and of art, follow the guidance not of whim or interest, but of general principles, as exemplified in the great fixed types of character and modified in their dialect variations. One writer of this kind has admirably said,—

“Every actor has some particular excellence, which stamps his style in everything he does. This in Forrest is the ever visible manliness of spirit, and love of equality and liberty, which place his Damon, Spartacus, Brutus, and all characters of a like nature so far above the reach of other actors. He is always the true man, casting defiance in the face of tyranny; his hand always open to the grasp of a friend, resolute, generous, and faithful. This spirit is something which every true heart, be its owner rich or poor, learned or unlearned, will always acknowledge and worship as the noblest attribute of man; and here is the real secret of Forrest’s success. The unlettered cannot but admire him for this feature, while to those who can appreciate artistic finish and detail, his acting must be an inexhaustible source of pleasure. After he has gone the stage will feel his worth. Who has not wept over the last act of Brutus? Who has not felt his ‘seated heart knock at his ribs’ while listening to the tragedian’s astonishing delivery in the third act of Damon and Pythias? Who that has ever heard him exclaim in the last act of the Gladiator, ‘There are no gods in heaven!’ can accuse him of being coarse or vulgar? Indeed, it may be said of his acting in many characters (as a Shaksperian commentator has said of Lear), ‘The genius of antiquity bows before it, and moderns gaze upon it with awe.’”

The strong proclivity of professional artists to jealousy is as proverbial as the tendency of the critic to attack and belittle. Forrest suffered much from both. His imperious independence, not less than his great success, provoked it, and he was maligned, spattered, and backbitten sufficiently from the stage as well as from the office. If in this respect he was an exception, it was merely in degree. The mortified and envious actors of Drury Lane discussing Kean in the greenroom, one of them sneeringly remarked, “They say he is a good harlequin.” “Yes,” retorted honest Jack Bannister, “an extraordinary one; for he has leaped over all your heads.” But the other side of this view was also true, and Forrest numbered his most enthusiastic admirers in the dramatic profession itself in all its ranks. They paid him many tributes from first to last, on which he justly set the highest value. For when the player is intelligent and candid, his special experience makes him the most competent critic of a player. The extent to which the peculiar style of Forrest took effect in producing imitators, conscious and unconscious,—who often, it is true, unhappily, copied his least praiseworthy points,—was a vast and unquestionable testimonial to his original power. And in here leaving the subject of criticism, it is enough, passing over the recorded praises of his genius by many leading American actors, to set down the deliberate estimate of James E. Murdock, himself a player of uncommon merit, as well as a man of refined scholarly culture. Some one had made a degrading allusion to Forrest, when Murdock replied, “Never had I been able to find a fitting illustration of the massive and powerful acting of Forrest until, on a visit to Rome some years ago, I stood before the mighty works of Michael Angelo,—his Last Judgment, his gigantic Moses. Call it exaggerated if you will. But there it is, beautiful in symmetry, impressive in proportions, sublime in majesty. Such was Edwin Forrest when representing the chosen characters of Shakspeare.” The illustration was as exact as the spirit that prompted it was generous. It indicates precisely the central attribute of the subject. For the powerful and reposeful port, the elemental poise and swing of the colossal figures of Angelo, reveal just what the histrionic pose and bearing of Forrest revealed, namely, the preponderance in him of the universal over the individual, the working of the forces of nature rather than the straining of his will. This is what makes a personality memorable, for it is contagious on others, and so invisibly descends the ages.