CHAPTER XX. PLACE AND RANK OF FORREST AS A PLAYER.--THE CLASSIC, ROMANTIC, NATURAL, AND ARTISTIC SCHOOLS OF ACTING.

Forrest being the most conspicuous and memorable actor America has produced, it is desirable to fix the place and rank which belong to him in the history of his profession. To do this with any clearness or with any authority we must first penetrate to the central characteristics of each of the great schools of acting, illustrate them by some examples, and explain his relation to them.

Omitting the consideration of comedy and confining our attention to tragedy, the most familiar distinction in the styles of dramatic representation is that which divides them into the two schools called Classic and Romantic or Ancient and Modern. But this enumeration is altogether insufficient. It needs to be supplemented by two other schools, namely, the Natural and the Artistic.

The antique theatres of Greece and Rome stood open in the air unroofed to the sky, and were so vast, holding from ten thousand to two hundred thousand spectators, that the players in order not to be belittled and inaudible were raised on the high cothurnus and wore a metallic mask whose huge and reverberating mouth augmented the voice. The word persona is derived from personare, to sound through. Dramatis personÆ originally meant masks, and only later came to denote the persons of the play. The conditions suppressed all the finer inflections of tone and the play of the features. The actor had to depend for his effects on measured declamation, imposing forms and attitudes, slow and appropriate movements, simple pictures distinctly outlined and set in bold relief. The characters principally brought forward were kings, heroes, prophets, demi-gods, deities. It was the stately representation of superhuman or exalted personages, full of exaggerated solemnity and pomp both in bearing and in speech. All this naturally arose from the circumstances under which the serious drama was developed,—the audience a whole population, the player at a distance from them, in the scenery of surrounding sea and mountains and the overhanging heaven. The traditions of the Classic School came directly down to the subsequent ages and gave their mould and spirit to the modern theatre. They have been kept up by the long list of all the great conventional tragedians in their stilted pose and stride and grandiose delivery, until the very word theatrical has come to signify something overdone, unreal, turgid, hollow, bombastic.

But when, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, in Italy, Spain, Germany, France, and England, the drama revived and asserted itself in such an extended and deepened popular interest,—when the theatres were built on a smaller scale adapted for accurate seeing and hearing, and the actors and the stage were brought close to the limited and select audience,—when the plays, instead of dealing mainly with sublime themes of fate and the tragic pomp and grandeur of monarchs and gods, began to depict ordinary mortal characters and reflect the contents of real life,—the scene changed from an enormous amphitheatre where before a city of gazers giants stalked and trumpeted, to a parlor where a group of ladies and gentlemen exhibited to a company of critical observers the workings of human souls and the tangled plots of human life. The buskins were thrown off and the masks laid aside, the true form and moving displayed, living expression given to the features, and the changing tones of passion restored to the voice. Then the mechanical in acting gave way to the passionate; the Classic School, which was statuesque, receded, and the Romantic School, which was picturesque, advanced.

The Classic School modulates from the idea of dignity. Its attributes are unity, calmness, gravity, symmetry, power, harmonic severity. Its symbol is the Greek Parthenon, whose plain spaces marble images people with purity and silence. The Romantic School modulates from the idea of sensational effect. Its attributes are variety, change, excitement, sudden contrasts, alternations of accord and discord, vehement extremes. Its symbol is the Christian Cathedral, whose complicated cells and arches palpitate as the strains of the organ swell and die within them trembling with sensibility and mystery. The ancient tragedian represented man as a plaything of destiny, sublimely helpless in the grasp of his own doings and the will of the gods. The chief interest was in the evolution of the character, which had but one dominant chord raised with a cunning simplicity through ever-converging effects to a single overwhelming climax. The modern tragedian impersonates man as now the toy and now the master of his fate, a creature of a hundred contradictions, his history full of contrasts and explosive crises. The chief interest is in the complications of the character and the situations of the plot so combined as to keep the sympathies and antipathies in varying but constant excitement. The vices of the former school are proud rigidity and frigidity, pompous formality and mechanical bombast. The vices of the latter school, on the other hand, are incongruity, sensational extravagance, and affectation. The Classic virtue is unity set in relief, but a mathematical chill was its fault. The Romantic virtue is variety set in relief, but its bane was inconsistency. The true tone of the heart, however, and the breathing warmth of life which it brings to the stage more than atone for all its defects and excesses.

The Romantic School early began to branch in two directions. In one it degenerated into that Melodramatic Medley which, although it has a nameless herd of followers, does not deserve to be called a school, because it has no system and is but instinct and passion let loose and run wild. In the other direction, joining with the traditional stream of example from its Classic rival, the Romantic issued in what should be named the Natural School. So the Classic School, too, forked in a double tendency, one branch of which led to death in an icy formalism and slavish subserviency to empiric rules, while the other led to the perfecting of vital genius and skill in the rounded fulness of truth; not truth as refracted in crude individualities but as generalized into a scientific art. This higher result of the double issue of the Classic School, joined with the higher result of the double issue of the Romantic School, constitutes the Artistic School. The Natural School is to be defined as having merely an empiric foundation, in it the contents of human nature and their modes of manifestation being grasped by intuition, instinct, observation, and practice, with no commanded insight of ultimate principles. The Artistic School, on the contrary, has a scientific foundation, in it the materials and methods being mastered by a philosophical study which employs all the means of enlightenment and inspiration systematically co-ordinated and applied.

Betterton was a noble representative of the classic style with a large infusion of the romantic and the natural and with a strong determination towards the artistic. Garrick had less of the first two and more of the third and fourth. In the history of the British stage Garrick is an epochal mark in the progressive displacement of theatricality by nature. He ridiculed the noisy mechanical declamation of the stage and introduced a quiet conversational manner. He agreed with the suggestion of his friend Aaron Hill that Shakspeare, judging from his wise directions to the players in Hamlet, must himself have been a fine actor, but in advance of the taste of his time. Quin, Young, Kemble, Conway, and Vandenhoff were examples of the classic type of acting, while Barton Booth, Mossop, and Spranger Barry exemplified the more passionate and impulsive romantic type. Macklin was a bold and intelligent though somewhat coarse and hard representative of the Natural School. Cooper and Cooke, each of whom had a personality of great original power, veered between the three preceding schools, with a large and varying element of each one infused in their impersonations. But the fullest glory of the Romantic School was seen in Edmund Kean, the coruscations of whose meteoric genius blazed out equally in the sensational feats of the melodramatic and in the profound triumphs of the natural. In France, Lekain, Talma, and LemaÎtre moved the stiff traditions of their art many degrees towards the simplicity and the free fire of truth, released the actor from his stilts, and did much to humanize the strutting and mouthing stage-ideal transmitted by tyrannic tradition.

The Classic and the Romantic School each had its separate reign. The Melodramatic offshoot of the latter also had and still has its prevalence, yielding its mushroom crops of empiric sensationalists. But in the historic evolution of the art of acting there must come a complete junction of two great historic schools in one person. The plebeian Lekain, a working goldsmith, was not bred in the laps of queens, as Baron said an actor ought to be; but, as Talma declared of him, Nature, a nobler instructress than any queen, undertook to reveal her secrets to him. And he broke the fetters of pedantry, repudiated the sing-song or monotonous chant so long in vogue, and brought the unaffected accents of the soul on the stage. Living, however, in the very focus of monarchical traditions and habits, subject to every royal and aristocratic influence, he could not establish in the eighteenth-century-theatres of France the true Democratic School of Nature. This was necessarily left for America and the nineteenth century. Edwin Forrest was the man. By his burning depth and quick exuberance of passion, his instinctive and cultivated democracy of conviction and sentiment, his resolute defiance of old rules and customs, and his constant recurrence to original observation of nature, it was easy for him to master the Romantic School, while the spirit and mode of the Classic School could not be difficult for one of his proud mind, imposing physique, and severe self-possession. The intense bias he caught from Kean in the melodramatic direction and the lofty bias imparted to him by Cooper in the stately antique way were supplemented, first, by his wild strolling experiences and training in the West and South, secondly, by his patient self-culture and studies at the prime fountain-heads of nature itself. In addition to this, he rose and flourished in the midst of the latest and ripest development of all the unconventional institutions and influences of the most democratic land and people the world has yet known. And so he came to represent, in the history of the drama, the moment of the fusion of the Classic and Romantic Schools and their passage into the Natural School. As the founder of this school in the United States he has been followed by a whole brood of disciples,—such as Kirby, Neafie, Buchanan, and Proctor,—who have reflected discredit on him by imitating his faultiness instead of reproducing his excellence.

Substantially intellectual, impassioned, profoundly ambitious, with flaming physical energies, with a very imperfect education, and few social advantages, Forrest was early thrown into the company of men who had great natural force of mind, and were frank and generous, but comparatively unpolished in taste and reckless in habits, leading a life of free amusement, conviviality, and passion often exploding in frenzied jealousies, rages, duels, deaths. He resisted the temptations that would have proved fatal to him, as they did to so many of his fellows, kept his self-respect, and faithfully studied and aspired to something better. He was exposed to the widest extremes of praise and abuse,—petted without bounds and assailed without measure. He kept his head unturned by either extravagance, though not uninjured, and swiftly sprang into a vast and intense popularity. But under the circumstances of the case—his burning impulsiveness and exuberant energy and lack of early culture, his tempestuous associates, and the general rawness or sensational eagerness of our population at that time—he would have been a miracle if his acting had not been marred with faults, if he had not been extravagant in displays of muscle and voice, if he had not been in some degree what his hostile critics called a melodramatic actor. Yet even then there were excellences in his playing, virtues of sincerity, truthfulness, intelligence, electric strokes of fine feeling, exquisite touches of beauty, confluences of light and shade, sustained unity of design, which justified the admiration and gave ground for the excessive eulogies he received. In melodrama the action is more physical than mental, the exertions of the actor blows of artifice to produce an effect rather than strokes of art to reveal truth. But in this sense Forrest always, even in his crudest day, was more tragic than melodramatic, his efforts explosions of the soul through the senses rather than convulsions of the muscles,—vents of the mind and glimpses of the spirit rather than contortions of the person, limbs, voice, and face. And he went steadily on, reading the best books, studying himself and other men, scrutinizing the unconscious acting of all kinds of persons in every diversity of situation, sedulously trying to correct errors, outgrow faults, gain deeper insight, and secure a fuller and finer mastery of the resources of his art.

Consequently his career was a progressive one, and in his latest and mentally best days he gave impersonations of the loftiest and most difficult characters known in the drama which have hardly been surpassed. The prejudices against him as a strutting and robustious ranter who shivered the timbers of his hearers and tore everything to tatters were largely unwarranted at the outset, and for every year afterwards were a gross wrong. In the time of his herculean glory with the Bowery Boys it may be true that his fame was bottomed on the great lower classes of society, and made its strongest appeals through the signs he gave of muscle, blood, and fire; yet there must have been wonderful intelligence, pathos, and beauty, as well as naked power, to have commanded, as his playing did at that early day, the glowing tributes paid to him by Irving, Leggett, Bryant, Chandler, Clay, Conrad, Wetmore, Halleck, Ingraham, Lawson, and Oakes. He always had sincerity and earnestness. His audiences always felt his entrance as the appearance of a genuine man among the hollow fictions of the stage. His soul filled with power and passion by nature, without anything else was greater than everything else could be without this. A celebrated English actress generously undertook to train a young beginner, who was yet unknown, to assume higher parts. Tutoring her in the rÔle of a princess neglected by the man she loved, the patroness could not get the pupil to make her concern appear natural. “Heaven and earth!” she exclaimed. “Suppose it real. Suppose yourself slighted by the man you devotedly loved. How would you act then in real life?” The hopeless reply was, “I? I should get another lover as quickly as I could.” The instructress saw the fatal, fatal defect of nature. She shut the book and gave no more lessons. Nature must supply the diamond which art polishes.

The youthful Forrest not only had nature in himself, but he was a careful student of nature in others. He used to walk behind old men, watching every movement, to attain the gait and peculiarities of age. He visited hospitals and asylums, and patiently observed the phases of weakness and death, the features and actions of maniacs. His reading was a model of precision and lucidity in the extrication of the sense of the words. One of his earlier critics said, “He grasps the meaning of a passage more firmly than any actor we know. He discloses the idea with exactness, energy, and fulness, leaving in this respect nothing to be desired. His recitation is as clear as a mathematical demonstration.” He had also an exquisite tenderness of feeling and utterance which penetrated the heart, and a power of intense mournfulness or delicious sadness which could always unseal the eyes of the sensitive. He studied the different forms of actual death with such minute attention that his stage deaths were so painfully true as to excite repugnance while they compelled admiration. The physical accompaniments were too literally exact. He had not yet learned that the highest artistic power lowers and absorbs the minor details in its broad grasp and conspicuous portrayal of the whole. The Natural School, as a rule, does not enough discriminate between the terror that paralyzes the brain and the horror that turns the stomach. In the part of Virginius, Forrest for some years had the hollow blade of the knife filled with a red fluid which, on the pressure of a spring as he struck his daughter, spurted out like blood following a stab. A lady fainted away as he played this scene in Providence, and, feeling that the act was artifice, and not art, he never afterwards repeated it. So it was nature, and not art, when Polus, the Roman tragedian, having to act a part of great pathos secretly brought in the urn the ashes of his own son. In distinction equally from artifice and from nature, art grasps the essential with a noble disregard of the accidental, and finely subordinates what is particular to what is general.

The Classic School modulates from the idea of grandeur or dignity; its aim is to set unity in relief, and its attribute is power in repose. The Romantic School modulates from the idea of effectiveness; its aim is to set the contrasts of variety in relief, and its attribute is power in excitement. The Natural School modulates from the idea of sincerity; its aim is to set reality in relief, exhibiting both unity in variety and variety in unity, and its attribute is alternation of power in repose and power in excitement, according to the exigencies of character and circumstance. The Artistic School modulates from the idea of truth; its attributes are freedom from personal crudity and prejudice, liberation of the faculties of the soul and the functions of the body, and an exact discrimination of the accidental and the individual from the essential and the universal; and its aim is to set in relief in due order and degree every variety of character and experience, every style and grade of spiritual manifestation, not as the workings of nature are made known in any given person however sincere, but as they are generalized into laws by a mastery of all the standards of comparison and classification. Sincerity is individual truth, but truth is universal sincerity. “Why do you enact that part in Macbeth as you do?” asked a friend of Forrest. “Because,” he replied, “that is the way I should have done it had I been Macbeth.” Ah, but the question is not how would a Forrestian Macbeth have done it, but how would a Macbethian Macbeth do it? The sincere Natural School of acting is hampered by the limiting of its vision to the reflections of nature in the refracting individuality of the actor. The true Artistic School purifies, corrects, supplements, and harmonizes individual perceptions by that consensus of averages, or elimination of the personal equation, which dispels illusions and reveals permanent principles.

Forrest stands at the head of the Natural School as its greatest representative, with earnest aspirations and efforts towards that final and perfect School whose threshold he thoroughly crossed but whose central shrine and crown he could not attain. He attained a solitary supremacy in the Natural School, but could not attain it in the Artistic School, because he had not in his mind grasped the philosophically perfected ideal of that School, and did not in his preliminary practices apply to himself its scientifically systematized drill. His ideal and drill were the old traditional ones, based on observation, instinct, and empirical study, modified only by his originality and direct recurrence to nature. But Nature gives her empirical student merely genuine facts without and sincere impulses within. She yields essential universal truths and principles only to the student who is equipped with rectifying tests and a generalizing method. Destitute of this, both theoretically and practically, Forrest wanted that clearness and detachment of the spiritual faculties and the physical articulations, that consummated liberty and swiftness of thought and feeling and muscular play, which are absolutely necessary to the perfect actor. He was so great an artist that he gave his pictures background, foreground, proportion, perspective, light and shade, gradations of tone, and unity; but he fell short of perfection, because carrying into every character too much of his own individuality, and not sufficiently seizing their various individualities and giving their distinctive attributes an adequate setting in the refinements of an intellectualized representation of universal human nature.

The perfect artist—such an one as Delsarte was—will build a form of character in the cold marble of pure intellect and then transfuse it with passion till it blushes and burns. He will also reverse the process, seize the spiritual shape born flaming from intuitive passion, change it into critical perception, and deposit it in memory for subsequent evocation at will. This is more than nature: it is art superimposed on nature. Garrick, Siddons, Talma, Rachel, Salvini, Forrest, were natural actors, and, more, they were artists. But the only supreme master of the Artistic School known as yet, whose theoretic ideal and actual training were perfect, was the great dramatic teacher FranÇois Delsarte.

Nature is truth in itself. But it is the ideal operation of truth that constitutes art. Acting, like all art, is truth seen not in itself, but reflected in man. It should not exhibit unmodified nature directly. It should hold up the mirror of the human soul and reveal nature as reflected there. It is a Claude Lorraine mirror of intellectual sympathy, softening, shading, toning,—just as Shakspeare says, begetting a temperance which gives smoothness to everything seen. The fights of the gladiators and the butcheries of the victims in the Roman amphitheatre were not acting, but reality. The splendor of art was trodden into the mire of fact. The error, the defect, the exaggeration in the acting of Forrest, so far as such existed, was that sometimes excess of nature prevented perfection of art. If certainly a glorious fault, it was no less clearly a fault.

But as he advanced in years this fault diminished, and the polish of art removed the crudeness of nature. Step by step the tricks into which he had been betrayed revealed themselves to him as distasteful tricks, and the sturdy impetuous honesty of his character made him repudiate them. Too often in his earlier Lear he gave the impression that he was buffeting fate and fortune instead of being buffeted by them; but slowly the spiritual element predominated over the physical one, until the embodiment stood alone in its balanced and massive combination of sublimated truth, epic simplicity, exquisite tenderness, and tragic strength. So his young Damon was greatly a performance of captivating points and electrical transitions, stirring the audience to fever-heats of fear and transport. No one who saw his wonderful burst of passion when he learned that his slave had slain the horse that was to carry him to the rescue of his friend and hostage—no one who saw his reappearance before the block, stained and smeared with sweat and dust, crazed and worn, yet sustained by a terrible nervous energy—could say that in any class of passion he ever witnessed a truer or a grander thing. But the conception was rather of a hot-blooded knight of the age of chivalry than of a contemplative, resolute, symmetrical Greek senator. Gradually, however, the maturing mind of the actor lessened the mere tumult of sensational excitement, and increased and co-ordinated the mental and moral qualities into a classical and climacteric harmony. One of the most striking evidences of the progressive artistic improvement of Forrest was the change in his delivery of the celebrated lament of Othello, “Farewell the tranquil mind.” He used, speaking it in a kind of musical recitative, to utter the words “neighing steed” in equine tones, imitate the shrillness of “the shrill trump,” give a deep boom to the phrase “spirit-stirring drum,” and swell and rattle his voice to portray “the engines whose rude throats the immortal Jove’s dread clamors counterfeit.” He learned to see that however effective this might be as elocution it was neither nature nor art, but an artificiality; and then he read the passage with consummate feeling and force, his voice broken with passionate emotion but not moulded to any pedantic cadences or flourishes. And yet it must be owned that after all his sedulous study and great growth in taste, his too strong individuality would still crop out sometimes to mar what else had been very nigh perfect. For instance, there was, even to the last, an occasional touch of vanity that was repulsive in those displays of voice which he would make on a favorite sonorous word. In the line of the Gladiator, “We will make Rome howl for this,” the boys would repeat as they went homeward along the streets his vociferous and exaggerated downward slide and prolongation of the unhappy word howl. And the same fault was conspicuous and painful in the word royal, where Othello says,—

Despite this and other similar flaws, however, he had an intense sincerity and force of nature, a varied truth blent in one consistent whole of grand moral effectiveness, that place him high among the most extraordinary players. His youthful Gladiator and Othello were as impetuous, volcanic, and terrible as any of the delineations of Frederick LemaÎtre. His mature Coriolanus had as imperial a stateliness, as grand a hauteur, as massive a dynamic pomp, as were ever seen in John Philip Kemble. His aged Lear was as boldly drawn and carefully finished, as fearfully powerful in its general truth, and as wonderfully tinted, toned, shaded, and balanced in its details, as any character-portrait ever pictured by David Garrick. In the various parts he played in the successive periods of his career he traversed the several schools of his art,—except the last one, and fairly entered that,—and displayed the leading traits of them all, the lava passion of Kean, the superb pomposity of Vandenhoff, the statuesque kingliness of Talma, the mechanically studied effects of Macready. His great glory was “magnanimous breadth and generosity of manly temperament.” His faults were an occasional slip in delicacy of taste, inability always to free himself from himself, and the grave want of a swift grace and lightness in the one direction equal to his ponderous weight and slowness in the other. Thus, while in some respects he may be called the king of the Natural School, he must be considered only a striking member, and not a model, of the Artistic School. After his death his former wife, Mrs. Sinclair, who was in every way an excellent judge of acting, and could not be thought biased in his favor, was asked her opinion of him professionally. She replied, “He was a very great artist. In some things I do not think he ever had an equal; certainly not in my day. I do not believe his Othello and his Lear were ever surpassed. His great characteristics as an actor were power and naturalness.” In illustration of this judgment the following anecdote, told by James Oakes, may be adduced:

“I was visiting my friend in Philadelphia, and went to the theatre to see his Virginius. He had said to me at sunset, ‘I feel like acting this part to-night better than I ever did it before;’ and accordingly I was full of expectation. Surely enough, never before in his life had I seen him so intensely grand. His touching and sublime pathos made not only women but sturdy men weep audibly. As for myself, I cried like a baby. I observed, sitting in the pit near the stage, a fine-looking old gentleman with hair as white as snow, who seemed entirely absorbed in the play, so much so that the attention of Forrest was drawn to him, and in some of the most moving scenes he appeared acting directly towards him. In the part where the desperate father kills his daughter the acting was so vivid and real that many ladies, sobbing aloud, buried their faces in their handkerchiefs and groaned. The old gentleman above alluded to said, in quite a distinct tone, ‘My God, he has killed her!’ Afterwards, when Virginius, having lost his reason, comes upon the stage and says, with a distraught air, ‘Where is my daughter?’ utterly absorbed and lost in the action, the old man rose from his seat, and, looking the player earnestly in the face, while the tears were streaming from his eyes, said, ‘Good God, sir, don’t you know that you killed her?’ After the play Forrest told me that when he saw how deeply affected the old gentleman was he came very near breaking down himself. He esteemed it one of the greatest tributes ever paid him, one that he valued more than the most boisterous applause of a whole audience.”

The following critical notice of the histrionic type and style of Forrest is from the gifted pen of William Winter, whose dramatic criticisms in the New York “Tribune” for the past ten years have been marked by a knowledge, an eloquence, an assured grasp and a conscientiousness which make them stand out in refreshing contrast to the average theatrical commenting of the newspaper press. Making a little allowance for the obvious antipathy and sympathy of the writer, the article is both just and generous:

“Mr. Forrest has always been remarkable for his iron repose, his perfect precision of method, his immense physical force, his capacity for leonine banter, his fiery ferocity, and his occasional felicity of elocution in passages of monotone and colloquy. These features are still conspicuous in his acting. The spell of physical magnetism that he has wielded so long is yet unbroken. The certainty of purpose that has always distinguished him remains the same. Hence his popular success is as great as ever. Strength and definiteness are always comprehensible, and generally admirable. Mr. Forrest is the union of both. We may liken him to a rugged old castle, conspicuous in a landscape. The architecture may not be admired, but the building is distinctly seen and known. You may not like the actor, but you cannot help seeing that he is the graphic representative of a certain set of ideas in art. That is something. Nay, in a world of loose and wavering motives and conduct, it is much. We have little sympathy with the school of acting which Mr. Forrest heads; but we know that it also serves in the great educational system of the age, and we are glad to see it so thoroughly represented. But, while Mr. Forrest illustrates the value of earnestness and of assured skill, he also illustrates the law of classification in art as well as in humanity. All mankind—artists among the rest—are distinctly classified. We are what we are. Each man develops along his own grade, but never rises into a higher one. Hence the world’s continual wrangling over representative men,—wrangling between persons of different classes, who can never possibly become of one mind. Mr. Forrest has from the first been the theme of this sort of controversy. He represents the physical element in art. He is a landmark on the border-line between physical and spiritual power. Natures kindred with his own admire him, follow him, reverence him as the finest type of artist. That is natural and inevitable. But there is another sort of nature,—with which neither Mr. Forrest nor his admirers can possibly sympathize,—that demands an artist of a very different stamp; that asks continually for some great spiritual hero and leader; that has crowned and uncrowned many false monarchs; and that must for ever and ever hopelessly pursue its ideal. This nature feels what Shelley felt when he wrote of ‘the desire of the moth for the star, of the night for the morrow.’ To persons of this order—and they are sufficiently numerous to constitute a large minority—Mr. Forrest’s peculiar interpretations of character and passion are unsatisfactory. They see and admire his certainty of touch, his profound assurance, his solid symmetry. But they feel that something is wanting to complete the artist. But enough of this. It is pleasanter now to dwell upon whatever is most agreeable in the veteran’s professional attitude. Mr. Forrest is one of the few thorough and indefatigable students remaining to the stage. He has collected the best Shakspearean library in America. He studies acting with an earnest and single-hearted devotion worthy of all honor, worthy also of professional emulation. Every one of his personations bears the marks of elaborate thought. According to the measure of his abilities, Mr. Forrest is a true and faithful artist; and if, as seems to us, the divine spark be wanting to animate and glorify his creations, that lack, unhappily, is one that nearly all artists endure, and one that not all the world can supply.”

And now it is left to show more clearly and fully, while doing justice to what Forrest was in his own noble School of Nature, how he fell short in that other School of Art which is the finest and greatest of all.

The voice of Forrest, naturally deep, rich, and strong, and developed by constant exercise until it became astonishingly full and powerful, ministered largely to the delight of his audiences and was a theme of unfailing wonder and eulogy to his admirers. It may not be said which is the most important weapon of the actor, the chest and neck, the arm and hand, the face and head, or the voice; because they depend on and contribute to one another, and each in its turn may be made the most potent of the agents of expression. But if the primacy be assigned to any organ it must be to the central and royal faculty of voice, since this is the most varied and complex and intellectual of all the channels of thought and emotion. A perfected voice can reveal almost everything which human nature is capable of thinking or feeling or being, and not only reveal it, but also wield it as an instrument of influence to awaken in the auditor correspondent experiences. But for this result not only an uncommon endowment by nature is necessary, but likewise an exquisite artistic training, prolonged with a skill and a patience which finally work a revolution in the vocal apparatus. Only one or two examples of this are seen in a generation. The Italian school of vocalization occasionally gives an instance in a Braham or a Lablache. But such perfection in the speaking voice is even rarer than in the singing. Henry Russell, whose reading and recitative were as consummate as his song, and played as irresistibly on the feelings, had a voice of perhaps the most nearly perfect expressive power known in our times. He could infuse into it every quality of experience, color it with every hue and tint of feeling, every light and shade of sentiment. To speak in illustrative metaphor, he could issue it at will in such a varying texture and quality of sound, such modified degrees of softness or hardness, energy or gentleness, as would suggest bolts of steel, of gold, of silver, or of opal; waves of velvet or of fire; ribbons of satin or of crystal. His organism seemed a mass of electric sensibility, all alive, and, in response to the touches of ideas within, giving out fitted tones and articulations through the whole diapason of humanity, from the very vox angelica down to the gruff basses where lions roar and serpents hiss. This is a result of the complete combination of instinctive sensibility in the mind and developed elocutionary apparatus in the body. The muscular connections of the thoracic and abdominal structures are brought into unity, every part playing into all the parts and propagating every vibration or undulatory impulse. At the slightest volition the entire space sounding becomes a vital whole, all its walls, from the roof of the mouth to the base of the inside, compressing and relaxing with elastic exactitude, or yielding in supple undulation so as to reveal in the sounds emitted precisely the tinge and energy of the dominant thought and emotion. Then the voice appears a pure mental agent, not a physical one. It seems to reside in the centre of the breath, using air alone to articulate its syllables. Commanding, without any bony or meaty quality, both extremes,—the thread-like diminuendo of the nightingale and the stunning crash of the thunderbolt,—it gives forth the whole contents of the man in explicit revelation.

This perfection of the Italian School has been confined to the lyric stage. Perhaps the nearest examples to it on the dramatic stage were Edmund Kean for a short time in his best period, and Forrest and Salvini in our own day. Forrest had it not in its complete finish. He grew up wild, as it were, on a wild continent, where no such consummate training had ever been known. Left to himself and to nature, he did everything and more than everything that could have been expected. But perfection of voice, a detached vocal mentality which uses the column of respiratory air alone as its instrument, sending its vibrations freely into the sonorous surfaces around it, he did not wholly attain. His voice seemed rather by direct will to employ the muscles to seize the breath and shape and throw the words. He could crash it in sheeted thunder better than he could hurl it in fagoted bolts, and he loved too much to do it. In a word, his voice lacked, just as his character did, the qualities of intellectualized spirituality, ethereal brilliancy, aerial abstraction and liberty from its muscular settings and environment. Had these qualities been fully his in body and soul, in addition to what he was, he would have been the unrivalled paragon of the stage. The fibres of the backbone and of the solar plexus were too much intertangled with the fibres of the brain, the individual traits in him were too closely mixed with the universal, for this. But nevertheless, as it was, his voice was an organ of magnificent richness and force for the expression of the elemental experiences of humanity in all their wide ranges of intelligence, instinct, and passion. It could do full justice to love and hate, scorn and admiration, desire, entreaty, expostulation, remorse, wonder, and awe, and was most especially effective in pity, in command, and in irony and sarcasm. His profound visceral vitality and vigor were truly extraordinary. This grew out of an athletic development exceptionally complete and a respiration exceptionally deep and perfect. When Forrest under great passion or mental energy spoke mighty words, his vocal blows, muffled thunder-strokes on the diaphragmatic drum, used to send convulsive shocks of emotion through the audience. The writer well remembers hearing him imitate the peculiar utterance of Edmund Kean in his most concentrated excitement. The sweet, gurgling, half-smothered and half-resonant staccato spasms of articulation betokened the most intense state of organic power, a girded and impassioned condition as terrible and fascinating as the muscular splendor of an infuriated tiger. The voice and elocution of Forrest were all that could be expected of nature and a culture instinctive, observational, and intelligent, but irregular and without fundamental principles. What was wanting was a systematic drill based on ultimate laws and presided over by a consummate ideal, an ideal which is the result of all the traditions of vocal training and triumphs perfected with the latest physiological knowledge. Then he could have done in tragedy what Braham did in song. Braham sang, “But the children of Israel went on dry land.” He paused, and a painful hush filled the vast space. Then, as if carved out of the solid stillness, came the three little words, “through the sea.” The breath of the audience failed, their pulses ceased to beat, as all the wonder of the miracle seemed to pass over them with those accents, awful, radiant, resonant, triumphant. He sat down amid the thunder of the whole house, while people turned to one another wiping their eyes, and said, Braham!

If the voice is the soul of the drama, facial expression is its life. In the latter as in the former Forrest had remarkable power and skill, yet fell short of the perfection of the few supreme masters. He stood at the head of the Natural School whose representatives achieve everything that can be done by a genuine inspiration and laborious study, but not everything that can be done by these conjoined with that learned and disciplined art which is the highest fruit of science applied in a systematic drill. Imitatively and impulsively, with careful study of nature in others, and with sincere excitement of his own faculties of thought and feeling, he practised faithfully to acquire mobility of feature and a facile command of every sort of passional expression. He succeeded in a very uncommon yet clearly limited degree. The familiar states of vernacular humanity when existing in their extremest degrees of intensity and breadth he could express with a fidelity and vigor possible to but few. His organic portraitures of the staple passions of man were exact in detail and stereoscopic in outline,—breathing sculptures, speaking pictures. Pre-eminently was this true in regard to the basic attributes and ground passions of our nature. His Gladiator in his palmiest day of vital strength was something never surpassed in its kind. Every stroke touched the raw of the truth, and it was sublime in its terribleness. At one moment he stood among his enemies like a column of rock among dashing waves; at another moment the storm of passion shook him as an oak is shaken by the hurricane. And when brought to bay his action was a living revelation, never to be forgotten, of a dread historic type of man,—the tense muscles, the distended neck, the obstructed breath, the swollen arteries and veins, the rigid jaws, the orbs now rolling like the dilated and blazing eyes of a leopard, now white and set like the ferocious deathly eyes of a bull, while smothered passion seemed to threaten an actual explosion of the whole frame. It was fearful, but it was great. It was nature at first hand. And he could paint with the same clear accuracy the sweeter and nobler phases of human nature and the higher and grander elements of experience. His expressions of domestic affection, friendship, honesty, honor, patriotism, compassion, valor, fortitude, meditation, wonder, sorrow, resignation, were marked by a delicate finish and a pronounced distinctness of truth seldom equalled. For example, when in Virginius he said to his motherless daughter, “I never saw you look so like your mother in all my life,” the pensive and effusive tenderness of his look and speech irresistibly drew tears. When he said to her, “So, thou art Claudius’s slave!” the combination in his utterance of love for her and ironic scorn for the tyrant was a stroke of art subtile and effective beyond description. And when, in his subsequent madness, he exhibited the phases of insanity from inane listlessness to raving frenzy, when his sinews visibly set as he seized Appius and strangled him to death, when he sat down beside the corpse and his face paled and his eyes glazed and his limbs slowly stiffened and his head dropped in death,—his attitudes and movements were a series of vital sculptures fit to be photographed for immortality.

Still, after every eulogy which can justly be paid him, it must be said that he remained far from the complete mastership of his art in its whole compass. Neither in conception nor execution did he ever grasp the entire range of the possibilities of histrionic expression. Had he done this he would not have stood at the head of the spontaneous and cultivated Natural School, but would have represented that Artistic School which practically still lies in the future, although its boundaries have been mapped and its contents sketched by FranÇois Delsarte. For instance, the feat performed by Lablache after a dinner at Gore House, the representation of a thunder-storm simply by facial expression, was something that Forrest would never have dreamed of undertaking. Lablache said he once witnessed, when walking in the Champs ElysÉes with Signor de Begnis, a distant thunder-storm above the Arc de Triomphe, and the idea occurred to him of picturing it with the play of his own features. He proceeded to do it without a single word. A gloom overspread his countenance appearing to deepen into actual darkness, and a terrific frown indicated the angry lowering of the tempest. The lightnings began by winks of the eyes and twitchings of the muscles of the face, succeeded by rapid sidelong movements of the mouth which wonderfully recalled the forked flashes that seem to rend the sky, while he conveyed the notion of thunder in the shaking of his head. By degrees the lightnings became less vivid, the frown relaxed, the gloom departed, and a broad smile illuminating his expressive face gave assurance that the sun had broken through the clouds and the storm was over.

By a Scientifically Artistic School of acting is not meant, as some perversely understand, a cold-blooded procedure on mechanical calculations, but a systematic application of the exact methods of science to the materials and practice of the dramatic art. It means an art of acting not left to chance, to caprice, to imitation, to individual inspiration, or to a desultory and indigested observation of others and study of self, but based on a comprehensive accurately formulated knowledge of the truths of human nature and experience, and a perfected mastery of the instruments for their expression. To be a worthy representative of this school one must have spontaneous genius, passion, inspiration, and mimetic instinct, and a patient training in the actual exercise of his profession, no less than if he belonged to the Classic, the Romantic, or the Natural School; while in addition he seizes the laws of dramatic revelation by analysis and generalization, and gains a complete possession of the organic apparatus for their display in his own person by a physical and mental drill minute and systematic to the last degree. The Artistic School of acting is the Classic, Romantic, and Natural Schools combined, purified, supplemented and perfected by adequate knowledge and drill methodically applied.

Human nature has its laws of manifestation as well as every other department of being. These laws are incomparably more elusive, obscure, and complicated than those of natural philosophy, and therefore later to gain formulation; but they are not a whit less real and unerring. The business of the dramatic performer is to reveal the secrets of the characters he represents by giving them open manifestation. Acting is the art of commanding the discriminated manifestations of human nature. If not based on the science of the structure and workings of human nature it is not an art, but mere empiricism, as most acting always has been.

Delsarte toiled forty years with unswerving zeal to transform the fumbling empiricism of the stage into a perfect art growing out of a perfect science. He was himself beyond all comparison the most accomplished actor that ever lived, and might, had he pleased, have raised whirlwinds of applause and reaped fortunes. But, with a heroic abnegation of fame and a proud consecration to the lonely pursuit of truth, he refused to cater to a public who craved only amusement and would not accept instruction; and he died comparatively obscure, in poverty and martyrdom. He mastered the whole circle of the sciences and the whole circle of the arts, and synthetized and crowned them all with an art of acting based on a science of man as comprehensive as the world and as minute as experience. It is to be hoped that he has left works which will yet be published in justification of his claim, to glorify his valiant, neglected, and saintly life, and to enrich mankind with an invaluable bequest.

Every form has its meaning. Every attitude has its meaning. Every motion has its meaning. Every sound has its meaning. Every combination of forms, attitudes, motions, or sounds, has its meaning. These meanings are intrinsic or conventional or both. Their purport, value, rank, beauty, merit, may be exactly determined, fixed, defined, portrayed. The knowledge of all this with reference to human nature, methodically arranged, constitutes the scientific foundation for dramatic representation. Then the art consists in setting it all in free living play. The first thing is a complete analysis and synthesis of the actions and reactions of our nature in its three divisions of intelligence, instinct, and passion; mind, heart, and conscience; mentality, vitality, and morality. The second thing is a complete command of the whole apparatus of expression, so that when it is known exactly what the action of each muscle or of each combination of muscles signifies, the actor may have the power to effect the requisite muscular adjustment and excitation. The first requisite, then, is a competent psychological knowledge of the spiritual functions of men, with a sympathetic quickness to summon them into life; and the second, a correspondent knowledge of anatomy and physiology applied in a gymnastic drill to liberate all parts of the organism from stiffness and stricture and unify it into a flexible and elastic whole.

The Æsthetic gymnastic which Delsarte devised, to perfect the dramatic aspirant for the most exalted walks of his profession, was a series of exercises aiming to invigorate the tissues and free the articulations of the body, so as to give every joint and muscle its greatest possible ease and breadth of movement and secure at once the fullest liberty of each part and the exactest co-operation of all the parts. When the pupil had finished this training he was competent to exemplify every physical feat and capacity of man. Furthermore, this teacher arranged certain gamuts of expression for the face, the practice of which would give the brows, eyes, nose, and mouth their utmost vital mobility. He required his pupil to sit before a mirror and cause to pass over his face, from the appropriate ideas and emotions within, a series of revelatory pictures. Beginning, for instance, with death, he ascended through idiocy, drunkenness, despair, interest, curiosity, surprise, wonder, astonishment, fear, and terror, to horror; or from grief, through pity, love, joy, and delight, to ecstasy. Then he would reverse the passional panorama, and descend phase by phase back again all the way from ecstasy to despair and death. When he was able at will instantly to summon the distinct and vivid picture on his face of whatever state of feeling calls for expression, he was so far forth ready for entrance on his professional career.

Such is the training demanded of the consummate actor in that Artistic School which combines the excellences of the three preceding schools, cleansing them of their excesses and supplying all that they lack. The prejudice against this sort of discipline, that it must be fatal to all charm of impulse and fire of genius and reduce everything to a frigid construction by rule, is either a fruit of ignorance or an excuse of sloth. It is absurd to suppose that the perfecting of his mechanism makes a man mechanical. On the contrary it spiritualizes him. It is stiff obstructions or dead contractions in the organism that approximate a man to a marionette. It is a ridiculous prejudice which fancies that the strengthening, purification, and release of the organism from all strictures destroys natural life and replaces it with artifice, or banishes the fresh play of ideas and the surprising loveliness of impulse by reducing the divine spontaneity of passion to a cold set of formulas. The Delsartean drill so far from preventing inspiration invites and enhances it by preparing a fit vehicle and providing the needful conditions. The circulating curves of this Æsthetic gymnastic, whose soft elliptical lines supersede the hard and violent angles of the vulgar style of exercise, redeem discordant man from his fragmentary condition to a harmonious unity. He is raised from the likeness of a puppet towards the likeness of a god. Then, as the influence of thought and feeling breathes through him, the changes of the features and the movement of the limbs and of the different zones of the body are so fused and interfluent that they modulate the flesh as if it were materialized music.

Delsarte could shrink and diminish his stature under the shrivelling contraction of meanness and cowardice or suspicion and crime until it seemed dwarfed, or lift and dilate it under the inspiration of grand ideas and magnanimous passions until it seemed gigantic. Every great emotional impulse that took possession of him seemed to melt all the parts of his organism together into a flexible whole with flowing joints, and then his fused movements awed the spectator like something supernatural. His face was a living canvas on which his soul painted the very proportions and hues of every feeling. His voice in tone and inflection took every color and shadow of thought and emotion, from the sombre cloudiness of breathing awe to the crystalline lucidity of articulating intellect. His inward furnishing even richer than the outward, he would sit down at the piano, in a coarse overcoat, in a room with bare walls, and, as he acted and sang, Œdipus, Agamemnon, Orestes, Augustus, Cinna, Pompey, Robert le Diable, Tartuffe, rose before you and revealed themselves in a truth that appeared almost miraculous and with a power that was actually irresistible. It was no reproduction by painful mimicry of externals, no portrayal by elaborate delineation of details. It was positive identification and resurrection. It was a real recreation of characters in their ensemble of being, and an exhibited reanimation of them by imaginative insight and sympathetic assimilation. Most wonderful of all, and greatest proof of the value of his system of drill, he could catch a part by inspiration and go through it under the automatic direction of nature, and then deliberately repeat the same thing by critical perception and conscious free will; and he could also reverse the process with equal ease, critically elaborate a rÔle by analysis and then fix it in the nerves and perform it with inspired spontaneity. This was the highest possible exemplification of the dramatic art by the founder of its only perfect school. It was Classic, because it had the greatest dignity, repose, power, symmetry, unity. It was Romantic, because it was full of the most startling effects, beautiful combinations, sudden changes, surprising contrasts, and extremes. It was Natural, because exactly conformed to the facts of experience and the laws of truth as disclosed by the profoundest study of nature. And above all it was supremely Artistic, because in it intuition, instinct, inspiration, intelligence, will, and educated discipline were reconciled with one another in co-operative harmony, and everything was freely commanded by conscious knowledge and not left to accident.

True art is never merely an imitation of nature, nor is it ever purely creative; but it is partly both. It arises from the desire to convert conceptions into perceptions, to objectify the subjective in order to enhance and prolong it in order to revive it at will and impart it to others. Art, Delsarte said, with his matchless precision of phrase, is feeling passed through thought and fixed in form. Grace without force is the product of weakness or decay, and can please none save those whose sensibilities are drained. Force without grace is like presenting a figure skinned or flayed, and must shock every one who has taste. But grace in force and force in grace, combined impetuosity and moderation, power revealed hinting a far mightier power reserved,—this is what irresistibly charms all. This is what only the very fewest ever attain to in a superlative degree; for it requires not only richness of soul and spontaneous instinct, and not only analytic study and systematic drill, but all these added to patience and delicacy and energy. The elements of the art of acting are the applied elements of the science of human nature; yet on the stage those elements are different from what they are in life in this respect, that there they are set in relief,—that is, so systematized and pronounced as to give them distinct prominence. That is precisely the difference of art from nature. It heightens effect by the convergence of co-operative agencies. For instance, when the variations of the speech exactly correspond with the changes of the face, how the effect of each is heightened! Aaron Hill said of Barton Booth that the blind might have seen him in his voice and the deaf have heard him in his visage. Of those in whom nature is equal he who has the greater art will carry the day, as of those in whom art is equal he who has more nature must win. A lady said, “Had I been Juliet to Garrick’s Romeo, so ardent and impassioned was he, I should have expected that he would come up to me in the balcony; but had I been Juliet to Barry’s Romeo, so tender, so eloquent and seductive was he, that I should certainly have gone down to him.” In these two great actors nature and art contended which was stronger. Very different was it with Macready and Kean, of whom it used to be said respectively, “We go to see Macready in Othello, but we go to see Othello in Kean.” The latter himself enjoyed, and delighted others by showing, a transcript of the great world of mankind in the little world of his heart. The former,—

Talma said, “In whatever sphere fate may have placed a man, the grand movements of the soul lift him into an ideal nature.” The greatness of every truly great actor shows itself in the general ideal which characterizes his embodiments. If he has any originality it will publish itself in his ideal. Now, while most actors are not only second-rate but also second-hand, Forrest certainly was original alike as man and as player. He was distinctively original in his personality, original and independent in the very make of his mind and heart. This subtle and striking originality of personal mind and genius was thoroughly leavened and animated by a distinctively American spirit, the spirit generated by the historic and material conditions of American society and the social and moral conditions of American life. He was original by inherited idiosyncrasy, original by his natural education, original by his self-moulding culture which resented and shed every authoritative interference with his freedom and every merely traditional dictation. He was original in going directly to the instructions of nature and in drawing directly from the revelations of his own soul. He was original in a homely intensity of feeling and in a broad and unsophisticated intelligence whose honest edges were never blunted by hypocritical conformity and falsehood. And above all, as an actor he exhibited his originality in a bearing or style of manners thoroughly democratic in its prevailing scornful repudiation of tricks or squeamish nicety, and a frank reliance on the simplicity of truth and nature in their naked power.

Now, precisely the crowning originality of Forrest as an actor, that which secures him a distinctive place in the historic evolution of the drama, is that while the ideals which the great actors before him impersonated were monarchical, aristocratic, or purely individual, he embodied the democratic ideal of the intrinsic independence and royalty of man. Give Kemble only the man to play, he was nothing; give him the paraphernalia of rank and station, he was imposing. But Forrest, a born democrat, his bare feet on the earth, his bare breast to his foes, his bare forehead to the sky, asked no foreign aid, no gilded toggery, no superstitious titles, to fill the theatre with his presence and thrill the crowd with his spell. There is an egotism of pride, an egotism of vanity, an egotism of conceit, all of which, based in want of sympathy, are contemptible and detestable. Forrest was remarkable for a tremendous and obstinate pride, but not for vanity or conceit; and his sympathy was as deep and quick as his pride, so that he was not an odious egotist, although he was imperious and resentful. Many distinguished players have trodden the stage as gentlemen, Forrest trod it as man. The ideal of detachment, authority throned in cold-blooded self-regard, has been often set forth. He exhibited the ideal of identification, burning honesty of passion and open fellowship. The former is the ideal of polite society. The latter is the ideal of unsophisticated humanity. Macready asserted himself in his characters; Forrest asserted his characters in himself. Both were self-attached, though in an opposite way, and thus missed the perfect triumph which Delsarte achieved by abolishing self and always resuscitating alive in its pure integrity the very truth of the characters he essayed. Macready as an elaborate and frigid representative of titular kings was a sovereign on the boards, a subject elsewhere. Forrest as an inborn representative of natural kings was a true sovereign in himself everywhere and always. The former by his petulant pride and pomp and his drilled exemption from the sway of the sympathies secured the approval of a sensitive and irritable nil admirari class. The latter by the fulness of his sympathies and his impassioned eloquence as the impersonator of oppressed races awakened the enthusiastic admiration of the people. A line, said an accomplished critic, drawn across the tops of the points of Macready would leave Forrest below in matters of mechanical detail, but would only cut the bases of his pyramids of power and passion. His chief rÔles were all embodiments of the elemental vernacular of man in his natural virtue and glory rather than in the refinements of his choicest dialects. Always asserting the superiority of man to his accidents, he will be remembered in the history of the theatre as the greatest democrat that up to his time had ever stepped before the footlights. He had sincerity, eloquence, power, nobleness, sublimity. His want was beauty, charm. The epithets strong, fearless, heroic, grand, terrible, magnificent, were fully applicable to him; but the epithets bright, bold, brisk, romantic, winsome, graceful, poetic, were inapplicable. In a word, though abounding in the broad substance of sensibility and the warm breath of kindness, he lacked the artificial polish and finesse of etiquette; and consequently the under-current of dissent from his fame, the murmur of detraction, that followed him, was the resentment of the conventional society whose superfine code he neglected and scorned.

For this penalty, however, his sincerity and direct reliance on nature gave ample compensation in making him capable of inspiration. Adherence to mere authority, tradition, usage, or dry technicality, is fatal to inspiration. This carried to an extreme makes the most cultivated player a mere professor of postures and stage mechanics,—what the French called Macready, “L’artiste de poses.” There is an infinite distance from such external elaboration to the surprises of feeling which open the soul directly upon the mysteries of experience, send cold waves of awe through the nerves, and convert the man into a sublime automaton of elemental nature, or a hand with which God himself gesticulates. Then the performing of the actor originates not on the volitional surfaces of the brain, but in the dynamic deeps of the spine and ganglia, and he seems an incarnate fagot of thunderbolts. Then the gesticulating arms, modulated by the profound spinal rhythms, become the instruments of a visible music of passion mysteriously powerful. For all action from the distal extremities of the nerves is feverish, twitching, anxious, with a fidgety and wasteful expensiveness of force, while action from their central extremities is steady, harmonious, commanding, economical of force. The nearer to the central insertions of the muscles the initial impulses take effect, so much the longer the lines they fling, the acuter the angles they subtend, the vaster the segments they cut and the areas they sweep. This suggests to the imagination of the spectator, without his knowing the meaning or ground of it, a godlike dignity and greatness. Forrest was full of this hinted and hinting power. It was the secret of his loaded personality and magnetizing port.

Art, while it is not pure and simple nature, is not anything substituted for nature nor anything opposed to nature. It is something superadded to nature, which gives the artist supreme possession of his theme, supreme possession of himself, and supreme command of his treatment of his theme. It is a grasped generalization of the truths of nature freed from all coarse, crude, and degrading accidents and details. The consummate artist, observing the principle or law, does everything easily; but the empiric, striving at the facts, does everything laboriously. Feeling transmuted into art by being passed through thought and fixed in form is transferred for its exemplification from the volition of the cerebral nerves to the automatic execution of the spinal nerves. This does not exhaust the strength, but leaves one fresh after apparently the most tremendous exertions. Talma, Rachel, Salvini, did not sweat or fatigue themselves, however violent their action seemed. But when feeling, instead of having been passed through thought and fixed in form for automatic exhibition, is livingly radiated into form by the will freshly exerted each time, the exaction on the forces of the organism is great. It is then nature in her expensiveness that is seen, rather than the art which secures the maximum of result at the minimum of cost. It was said of Barry that excessive sensibility conquered his powers. His heart overcame his head; while Garrick never lost possession of himself and of his acting. The one felt everything himself before he made his audience feel it; the other remained cool, and yet by his kingly self-control forced his audience to feel so much the more. In his direct honest feeling and exertion Forrest paid the expensive penalty of the Natural School. After playing one of his great parts he was drenched with perspiration and blew off steam like a locomotive brought to rest. The nerves of his brain and the nerves of his spinal cord were insufficiently detached in their activities, too much mixed. Like Edmund Kean, he was as a fusee, and the points of the play were as matches; at each electric touch his nerve-centres exploded and his muscles struck lightning. But in the Artistic School the actor is like a lens made of ice, through which the sunbeams passing set on fire whatever is placed in their focus. The player who can pour the full fire of passion through his soul while his nerves remain firm and calm has command of every power of nature, and reaches the greatest effects without waste. But, as Garrick said,—

The essence of the dramatic art or the mission of the theatre is the revelation of the different grades of character and culture as exhibited in the different styles of manners, so that the spectator may assign them their respective ranks. The skill or bungling of the actor is shown by the degrees of accuracy and completeness which mark his portraitures. And the predominant ideal illustrated in his impersonations betrays the personal quality and level of the actor himself.

Manners are the index of the soul, silently pointing out its rank. All grades of souls, from the bottom of the moral scale to its top, have their correspondent modes of behavior which are the direct expression of their immediate states and the reflex revelation of their permanent characters. The principle of politeness or good manners is the law of the ideal appropriation of states of feeling on recognition of their signs. Sympathy implies that when we see the sign of any state in another we at once enter into that state ourselves. Interpreting the sign we assimilate the substance signified and thus reflect the experience. Everything injurious, repulsive, or petty, pains, lessens, and lowers us. The signs of such states therefore are to be withheld. But the signs of beautiful, powerful, sublime, and blessed states enrich and exalt those who recognize them and reproduce their meaning. The refinement and benignity of any style of manners are measured by the largeness and purity of the sphere of sympathetic life it implies, the generosity of its motives, and the universality of its objects. The vulgarity and odiousness of manners are measured by the coarseness of sensibility, the narrow egotism, the contracted sphere of consciousness implied by them. Thus the person who fixes our attention on anything spiritual, calming, authoritative, charming, or godlike, confers a favor, ideally exalting us above our average level. But all such acts as biting the nails or lips, taking snuff, smoking a cigar, talking of things destitute of interest save to the vanity of the talker, are bad manners, because they draw attention from dignified and pleasing themes and fasten it to petty details, or inflict a severe nervous waste on the sensibility that refuses to be degraded by obeying their signals.

Now, there are four generic codes of manners in society, each of which has its specific varieties, and all of which are exemplified in the theatre,—that great explicit “mirror of fashion and mould of form.” First there is the code of royal manners, the proper behavior of kings. Kings are all of one family. They are all free, neither commanding one another nor obeying one another, each one complete sovereign in himself and of himself. The sphere of his personality is hedged about by a divinity through which no one ventures to peep for dictation or interference. In his relations with other persons the king is not an individual, but is the focal consensus of the whole people over whom he is placed, the apex of the collective unity of the nation. He therefore represents public universality and no private egotism. He is the symbol of perfect fulfilment, wealth, radiance, joy, peace. By personal will he imposes nothing, exacts nothing, but like the sun sheds impartially on all who approach him the golden largess of his own complete satisfaction. That is the genuine ideal of royal manners. But the actual exemplification is often the exact opposite,—an egotistic selfishness pampered and maddened to its very acme. Then the formula of kingly behavior is the essence of spiritual vulgarity and monopolizing arrogance, namely, I am the highest of all: therefore every one must bow to me and take the cue from me! Then, instead of representing the universal, to enrich all, he degrades the universal into the individual, to impoverish all. Then his insolent selfishness at the upper extreme produces deceit and fawning at the lower extreme. The true king imposes nothing, asks nothing, takes nothing, though all is freely offered him, because he radiates upon all the overflow of his own absolute contentment. Every one who sees him draws a reflected sympathetic happiness from the spectacle of his perfect happiness.

The formula expressed in truly royal manners is, I am so contented with the sense of fulfilment and of universal support that my only want is to see every one enjoying the same happiness! In a perfected state the formula of democratic manners will be identical with this. For then the whole community with its solidarity of wealth and power will be the sustaining environment whereof each individual is a centre. But as yet the private fortune of each man is his selfishly isolated environment; and the totality of individual environments bristles with hostility, while every one tries to break into and absorb the neighboring ones.

The code of aristocratic manners, too, has its sinister or false development as well as its true and benign development. The formula which, in its ungenial phase, it is forever insinuating through all its details of demeanor, when translated into plain words is this: I am superior to you and therefore command you! But the real aristocratic behavior does not say the inferior must obey the superior. On the contrary, it withholds and suppresses the sense of superiority, seems unconscious of it, and only indirectly implies it by the implicit affirmation, I am glad to be able to bless and aid you, to comfort, strengthen, and uplift you! The false aristocrat asserts himself and would force others to follow his lead. The true aristocrat joyously stoops to serve. His motto is not, I command, but Privilege imposes obligation.

The twofold aspect of plebeian manners affords a repetition of the same contrast. The plebeian manner, discontented and insurrectionary, says, You are superior to me, and therefore I distrust, fear, and hate you! The plebeian manner, submissive and humble or cringing, says, I am inferior to you, and therefore beseech your favor, deprecating your scorn! But the plebeian manner, honest, manly, and good, says, You are superior to me, and I am glad of it, because, looking up to you with admiration and love, I shall appropriate your excellence and grow like you myself!

Finally, we come to the democratic code of manners. The spurious formula for democratic behavior is, I am as good as you! This is the interpretation too common in American practice thus far. It is the insolent casting off of despotic usages and authorities, and the replacing them with the defiant protest of a reckless independence. I am as good as you, and therefore neither of us will have any regard or deference for the other! But in wide distinction from this impolite and harsh extreme, the formula implied in the genuine code of democratic manners is, We are all amenable to the same open and universal standard of right and good, and therefore we do not raise the question at all of precedency or privilege, of conscious superiority or inferiority, but we leave all such points to the decision of the facts themselves, and are ready indifferently to lead or to follow according to the fitness of intrinsic ranks!

Spurious democracy would inaugurate a stagnant level of mediocrities, a universal wilderness of social carelessness and self-assertion. Genuine democracy recognizes every man as a monarch, independent and supreme in his interior personal sphere of life, but in his social and public life affiliated with endless grades of superiors, equals, and inferiors, all called on to obey not the self-will of one another, or of any majority, but to follow gladly the dictates of those inherent fitnesses of inspiration from above and aspiration from below which will remain eternally authoritative when every unjust immunity and merely conventional or titular rank has been superseded. This was the style of manners, this was the implied formula of behavior, embodied by Forrest in all his great rÔles. Affirming the indefeasible sovereignty of the individual, he neither wished to command nor brooked to obey other men except so far as the intrinsic credentials of God were displayed in them. Thus, under every accidental or local diversity of garb and bearing, he stood on the American stage, and stands and will stand in front there, as the first sincere, vigorous, and grand theatrical representative of the democratic royalty of man.