Life of Edwin Forrest, the American Tragedian. Volume 2 (of 2)

Many actors have represented Macbeth as a coward moulded and directed at will by his stronger wife,—a weakling caught like a leaf in an irresistible current and hurried helplessly on to his doom. Such is not the picture painted by Shakspeare. Such was not the interpretation given by Forrest. Macbeth is a broad, rich, powerful nature, with a poetic mind, a loving heart, a courageous will. He is also strongly ambitious, and prone to superstition. To gratify his ambition he is tempted to commit a dreadful crime, and the temptation is urged on him by what he holds to be supernatural agencies. After misgivings and struggles with himself, he yields. The horrid deed being perpetrated, the results disappoint him. The supernatural prophecies that led him on change to supernatural terrors, his soul is filled with remorse, his brain reels, and as the sequel of his guilt thickens darkly around him he rallies his desperate energies and meets his fate with superb defiance. The struggle of temptation in a soul richly furnished with good yet fatally susceptible to evil, the violation of conscience, the overwhelming retribution,—these points, softened with sunny touches of domestic love and poetic moral sentiment, compose the lurid substance and movement of the drama. And these points Forrest embodied in his portraiture with an emotional intensity and an intellectual clearness which enthralled his audience.

As he came over the hills at the back of the stage, accompanied by Banquo, in his Highland tartan, his plumed Scotch cap, his legs bare from the knee to the ankle, his pointed targe on his arm, with his free and commanding air, and his appearance of elastic strength and freshness, he was a picture of vigorous, breezy manhood. His first words were addressed to Banquo in an easy tone, such as one would naturally use in describing the weather:

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

As they concluded, the manner in which, with subdued breathing eagerness, he said,—

showed what a deep and prepared chord in his soul their greeting had struck. And when they made themselves vapor and disappeared, he stood rapt in the wonder of it, and replied to the question of Banquo, “Whither have they vanished?” with a dissolving whispering voice, in an attitude of musing suspense and astonishment,—

When the missives from the king saluted him Glamis and Cawdor, he attributed more than mortal knowledge to the weird sisters; and at once the terrible temptation to gratify his ambition by murder seized his soul, and conscience began to struggle with it. This struggle, in all its dread import, he pictured forth as he delivered the ensuing soliloquy with speaking features and in quick low tones of suppressed questioning eagerness:

In uttering these words he painted to eye and ear how temptation divides the soul into the desiring passion and the forbidding principle and sets them in deadly contention. Then the apologetic sympathy of his reply to the expostulation of Banquo,—

showed the gentle quality of his nature:

Macbeth was one originally full of the milk of human kindness, who would not play false, but would win holily what he wished highly: yet his ambition was so sharp that the sight of the coveted prize made him wild to snatch it the nearest way. This conflict Forrest continually indicated by alternations of geniality towards his comrades and of lowering gloom in himself, while his brain seemed heaving in the throes of a moral earthquake. Thus, when Duncan had indicated Malcolm as successor to the throne, Macbeth betrayed the depths of his soul by saying, with sinister mien, aside,—

The earnest and tender warmth which Forrest made Macbeth put into his greeting of his wife after his absence, his dangers in battle, and his mysterious adventure with the witches, proved how deeply he loved her. And his first words,—

were spoken with an abstracted and concentrated air that fully revealed the awful scheme that loomed darkly far back in his mind. Left alone with himself, the temptation renewed the struggle between his better and his worse self. In the long and wonderful soliloquy, beginning—

he painted the gradual victory of reason, honor, conscience, and affection over the fell ambition that was spurring him to murder, and, as Lady Macbeth entered, he exclaimed, with a clearing and relieved look,—

But the stinging taunts with which she upbraided him, and the frightful energy of her own resolution with which she eloquently infected him, worked so strongly on his susceptible nature that he reinstalled his discarded purpose, and went out saying firmly,—

In this scene he so distinctly exhibited the operation of her influence on him, the slow change of his innocent determination into uncertain wavering, and then the change of the irresolute state into guilty determination, that the spectators could almost see the inspiring temptress pour her spirits into him, as with the valor of her tongue she chastised his hesitation away.

When he next appeared he looked oppressed, bowed, haggard, and pale, as if the fearful crisis had exerted on him the effect of years of misery. In half-undress, with semi-distraught air, his hushed and gliding manner of sinewy stealth, in conjunction with the silence and darkness of the hour, conveyed a mysterious impression of awe and terror to every soul. He said to the servant, with an absent look and tone, as if the words uttered themselves without his heed,—

Then slowly came the appalling climax in the temptation whose influences had been progressively operating in the automatic strata of his being deeper than his free consciousness could reach. Those influences were now ready to produce an illusion, by a reversal of the normal action of the faculties unconscious ideas reporting themselves outwardly as objects. Buried in thought, he stands gazing on the floor. Lifting his head, at last, as if to speak, he sees a dagger floating in the air. He winks rapidly, then rubs his eyes, to clear his sight and dispel his doubt. The fatal vision stays. He reasons with himself, and acts the reasoning out, to decide whether it is a deception of fancy or a supernatural reality. First he thinks it real, but, failing in his attempt to clutch it, he holds it to be a false creation of the brain. Then its persistence drives him insane, and as he sees the blade and dudgeon covered with gouts of blood he shrieks in a frenzy of horror. Passing this crisis, he re-seizes possession of his mind, and, with an air of profound relief, sighs,—

Then, changing his voice from a giant whisper to a full sombre vocality, the next words fell on the ear in their solemn music like thunder rolling mellowed and softened in the distance:

Gathering his faculties and girding up his resolution for the final deed, as the bell rang he grasped his dagger and made his exit, saying,—

These words he spoke, not with the bellowing declamation many players had given them, but in a low, firm tone tinged with sadness, a tone expressive of melancholy mixed with determination. As he came out of the fatal chamber backwards, with his hands recking, he did not see Lady Macbeth standing there in an attitude of intense listening, until he struck against her. They both started and gazed at each other in terror,—an action so true to nature that it always electrified the house.

Then at once began the dread reaction of sorrow, fear, and remorse. Forrest made the regret and lamentation of Macbeth over the crime and its irreparable consequences exquisitely piteous and mournful. The marvellous wail of his description of innocent sleep forfeited thenceforth, the panic surprise of his

the lacerating distress of his

penetrated the heart of every hearer with commiseration.

Forrest gave Macbeth, in the first scene of the play, a cheerful and observant air; after the interview with the witches he was absorbed and abstracted; pending his direful crime he was agitated, moody, troubled,—

after the murder he was restless, suspicious, terrified, at times insane. These alterations of mood and manner were distinctly marked with the evolution of the plot through its salient stages. Of the pervasive remorse with which the moral nature of Macbeth afflicted and shook him, Forrest presented a picture fascinating in its fearful beauty and truth. When he spoke the following passage, the mournfulness of his voice was like the sighing of the November wind as it throws its low moan over the withered leaves:

Then, seeking sympathy and consolation, he turned to the partner of his bosom and his greatness with the agonizing outburst,—

Close on the awful remorse and on the pathetic tenderness, with consummate truth to nature the selfish instincts were shown hardening the man in his crime, making him resolve to strengthen with further ill things bad begun:

So unstably poised was his disposition between his good affections and his wicked desires that the conflict was still repeated, and with each defeat of conscience the dominion of evil grew completer. As his remorseful fears translated themselves into outward spectres, Forrest vividly illustrated the curdling horror human nature experiences when guilt opens the supernatural world to its apprehension. He made Macbeth show a proud and lion-mettled courage in human relations, but seem cowed with abject terror by ghostly visitations. His criminal course collects momentum till it hurries him headlong to wholesale slaughters and to his own inevitable ruin. In his mad infatuation of self-entangling crime he says of his own proposed massacre of the family of Macduff,—

Relying on the promise of the witches that none of woman born should harm him, and that he should never be vanquished till Birnam wood came to Dunsinane, he added crime to crime till the whole land was in arms for his overthrow. Then, despite his forced faith and bravery, a profound melancholy sank on him. His vital spirits failed. He grew sick of life and weary of the sun. To this phase of the character and career Forrest did conspicuous justice. Nothing of the kind could exceed the exquisite beauty of his readings of the three famous passages,—

His voice lingered on the melodious melancholy of the words and every line of his face responded to their mournful and despairing significance.

When told that Birnam wood was moving, the sense of supernatural power turned against him. For a moment he stood, a solid dismay. Then he staggered as if his brain had received a blow from the words which smote to its reeling centre. So, when Macduff exposed to him the paltering of the fiends in a double sense, his boasted charm seemed visibly to melt from him, and he shrank back as though struck by a withering spell. His towering form contracted into itself, his knees shook, and his sword half dropped from his grasp. But the next instant, goaded by the taunts of his adversary, he rallied on his native heroism, braced himself for the struggle as if he resolved to rise superior to fate whether natural or demoniac, and fell at last like a ruined king, with all his blazing regalia on. The performance left on the mind of the appreciative beholder, stamped in terrible impress, the eternal moral of temptation and crime culminating in fatal success and followed by the inevitable swoop of retribution:

Quite early in his histrionic career Forrest wrote to his friend Leggett, “My notions of the character of Richard the Third do not accord with those of the players I have seen personate it. They have not made him gay enough in the earlier scenes, but too sullen, frowning, and obvious a villain. He was an exulting and dashing, not a moody, villain. Success followed his schemes too rapidly and gave him too much elation to make appropriate the haggard and penthouse aspect he is usually made to wear. Contempt for mankind forms a stronger feature of his character than hatred; and he has a sort of reckless jollity, a joyous audacity, which has not been made conspicuous enough.” In general accord with this conception he afterwards elaborated his portraiture of the deformed tyrant, the savage humorist, the murderous and brilliant villain. He set aside the stereotyped idea of Richard as a strutting, ranting, gloomy plotter, forever cynical and sarcastic and parading his crimes. Not excluding these traits, Forrest subordinated them to his cunning hypocrisy, his gleaming intellectuality, his jocose irony, his exulting self-complacence and fiendish sportiveness. He represented him not only as ravenously ambitious, but also full of a subtle pride and vanity which delighted him with the constant display of his mental superiority to those about him. Above all he was shown to be possessed of a laughing devil, a witty and sardonic genius, which amused itself with playing on the faculties of the weaklings he wheedled, scoffing at what they thought holy, and bluntly utilizing the most sacred things for the most selfish ends. There can be no doubt that in removing the conventional stage Richard with this more dashing and versatile one Forrest restored the genuine conception of Shakspeare, who has painted him as rattling not brooding, exuberantly complacent even under his own dispraises, an endlessly inventive and triumphant hypocrite, master of a gorgeous eloquence whose splendid phrases adorn the ugliness of his schemes almost out of sight. His mental nature devours his moral nature, and, swallowing remorse, leaves him free to be gay. The character thus portrayed was hard, cruel, deceitful, mocking,—less melodramatically fiendish and electrical than the Richard of Kean, but more true to nature. The picture was a consistent one. The deformity of the man, reacting on his matchless intellect and courage and sensual passion, had made him a bitter cynic. But his genius was too rich to stagnate into an envenomed gloom of misanthropy. Its exuberance broke out in aspiring schemes and crimes gilded with philosophy, hypocrisy, laughter, and irony. Moving alone in a murky atmosphere of sin and sensuality, he knew himself to the bottom of his soul, and read everybody else through and through. He believed in no one, and scoffed at truth, because he was himself without conscience. But his insight and his solid understanding and glittering wit, making of everything a foil to display his self-satisfied powers, hid the degradation of his wickedness from his own eyes, and sometimes almost excused it in the eyes of others. Yet, so wondrous was the moral genius of Shakspeare, the devilish chuckling with which he hugged the notion of his own superiority in his exemption from the standards that rule other men, instead of infecting, shocked and warned and repelled the auditor:

Thus in the impersonation of him by Forrest Richard lost his perpetual scowl, and took on here and there touches of humor and grim comedy. He burst upon the stage, cloaked and capped, waving his glove in triumph over the downfall of the house of Lancaster. Not in frowning gutturals or with snarling complaint but merrily came the opening words,—

Gradually as he came to descant upon his own defects and unsuitedness for peace and love, the tone passed from glee to sarcasm, and ended with dissembling and vindictive earnestness in the apostrophe,—

The scene with Lady Anne, where he overcomes every conceivable kind and degree of obstacles to her favor by the sheer fascination of his gifted tongue, was a masterpiece of nature and art. He gave his pleading just enough semblance of sincerity to make a plausible pathway to the feminine heart, but not enough to hide the sinister charm of a consummate hypocrisy availing itself of every secret of persuasion. It was a fearful unmasking of the weakness of ordinary woman under the siege of passion. No sermon was ever preached in any pulpit one-half so terrible in power for those prepared to appreciate all that it meant. When Lady Anne withdrew, the delighted vanity of Richard, the self-pampering exultation of the artist in dissimulation, shone out in the soliloquy wherewith he applauded and caressed himself:

In many places in the play his air of searching and sarcastic incredulity, and his rich vindictive chuckle of self-applause, were as artistically fine as they were morally repulsive. As Kean had done before him, he made an effective point in speaking the line,

he looked at the limb for some time with a sort of bitter discontent, and struck it back with angry disgust. When the queenly women widowed by his murderous intervention began to upbraid him with his monstrous deeds, the cool audacity, the immense aplomb, the half-hidden enjoyment of the joke, with which he relieved himself from the situation by calling out,—

were a bit of grotesque satire, a gigantic and serviceable absurdity, worthy of Rabelais.

The acting of Forrest in the tent-scene, where Richard in his broken sleep dreams he sees the successive victims of his murderous hand approach and threaten him, was original and effective in the highest degree. He struggled on his couch with horrible phantoms. Ghosts pursued him. Visions of battle, overthrow, despair, and death convulsed him. Acting his dreams out he dealt his blows around with frightful and aimless energy, and with an intense expression of remorse and vengeance on his face fell apparently cloven to the earth. He then arose like a man coming out of hell, dragging his dream with him, and, struggling fiercely to awake, rushed to the footlights, sank on his knee, and spoke these words, beginning with a shriek and softening down to a shuddering whisper:

The merely selfish individual instincts and passions of unregenerate human nature are kept from breaking out into the crimes which they would spontaneously commit, by an ethical regulation which consists of a set of ideal sympathies representing the rights and feelings of other men, representing the word of God or the collective principles of universal order. The criminal type of character embodied in Richard throws off or suppresses this restraining and retributive apparatus, and enthrones a lawless egotism masked in hypocrisy. Thus, Richard had so obscured, clogged, and deadened the moral action of conscience, that his egotistic passions held rampant supremacy, and success made him gay and exultant, unchecked by any touch of remorse or shame. In his own eyes he clothed himself in the glimmering mail of his triumphant deeds of wickedness, and dilated with pride like Lucifer in hell. He could not weep nor tremble, but he could shake with horrid laughter. In drawing this terrible outline Shakspeare showed that he knew what was in man. In painting the audacious picture Forrest proved himself a profound artist. And the moral for the spectators was complete when the hardened intellectual monster of depravity, in the culmination of the secret forces of destiny and his own organism, was stripped of his self-sufficiency, and, as the supernatural world broke on his vision, he stood aghast, with curdled blood and stiffened hair, shrieking with terror and despair.

Forrest was too large, with too much ingrained justice and heavy grandeur, to be really suited for this part. He needed, especially in its scolding contests of wit and spiteful invective, to be smaller, lighter, swifter, more vixenish. It was just the character for Kean and Booth, who in their way were unapproachable in it. Yet the conception of Forrest was far truer on the whole; and his performance was full of sterling merit.

HAMLET.

The clear good sense, the trained professional skill, and the deep personal experience of Forrest gave him an accurate perception of the general character of Hamlet. There will always be room for critical differences of judgment on the details. But he could not commit the gross blunders illustrated by so many noted actors who have exhibited the enigmatical prince either as a petulant, querulous egotist morbidly brooding over himself and irritable with everybody else, or as a robustious, periwig-pated fellow always in a roaring passion or on the verge of it. Forrest saw in the mind and heart of Hamlet sweet and noble elements of the courtier, the scholar, the philosopher, the poet, and the lover, but joined with a sensitive organization whose nerves were too exquisitely strung not to be a little jangled by the harsh contact of the circumstances into which he was flung. He regarded him as naturally wise, just, modest, and affectionate, but by his experience of wrong and fickleness in others, and of disturbed health in himself, led to an exaggerated self-consciousness profoundly tinged with mournfulness and easily provoked to sarcasm. In the melancholy young Dane was embodied the sad malady of the highest natures, the great spiritual disease of modern life,—an over-excited intellectuality dwelling with too much eagerness and persistence on the mysteries of things; allured, perplexed, baffled, vainly trying to solve the problems of existence, injustice, misery, death, and wearying itself out with the restless effort. Thus there is produced a tendency of blood to the head, which leaves the extremities cold, the centres congested, and the surface anæmic. The fevered and hungry brain devours the juices of the body, the exhausted organic and animal functions complainingly react on the spiritual nature or conscious essence with a wretched depression, everything within is sicklied over with a pale cast of thought, and everything without becomes a sterile and pestilent burden. The strong and gentle nature, finely touched for fine issues, but too delicately poised, is stricken with the disease of introspective inquiry, and, not content to accept things as they are and wholesomely make the best of them, keeps forever probing too curiously into the mysterious cause and import of events, until mental gloom sets in on the lowered physical tone. Then the opening of the supernatural world upon him, revealing the murder of his father and imposing the duty of vengeance, hurries him in his weakened and anxious condition to the edge of lunacy, over which he sometimes purposely affects to pass, and sometimes, in his sleepless care or sudden excitement, is really precipitated. Such was the conception which Forrest strove to represent in his portraiture of Hamlet. And in rendering it he did all he could to neutralize the ill-adaptedness of his stalwart person and abounding vigor for the philosophical and romantic sentimentality of the part by a subdued and pensive manner and a costume which made his figure appear more tall and slender. He laid aside the massive hauteur of his port, and walked the stage and conversed with the interlocutors as a thoughtful scholar would walk the floor of his library and talk with his friends. Even when he broke into passionate indignation or scorn a restraining power of culture and refinement curbed the violence. Still, the incongruity between his form and that of the ideal Hamlet was felt by the audience; and it abated from the admiration and enjoyment due to the sound intelligence, sincere feeling, beautiful elocution, and just acting which he displayed in the performance.

Most players of Hamlet, in the scene where he first appears among the courtiers before the king and queen, have taken a conspicuous position, drawing all eyes. Forrest, with a delicate perception that the deep melancholy and suspicion in which he was plunged would make him averse to ostentation, was seen in the rear, as if avoiding notice, and only came forward when the king called him by name with the title of son. He then betrayed his prophetic mislike of his uncle by the dark look and satirical inflection with which he said, aside,—

His reply to the expostulation of his mother against his grief seeming so particular and persistent,—

was given with a sincerity, naturalness, and beauty irresistible in effect. His grief and gloom appeared to embody themselves in a voice that wailed and quivered the weeping syllables like the tones of a bell swinging above a city stricken with the plague. The impression thus produced was continued, modified with new elements of emotion, and carried to a still higher pitch, when, left alone, he began to commune with himself and to utter his thoughts and feelings aloud. What an all-pervasive disheartenment possessed him, how sick he was of life, how tenderly he loved and mourned his father, how loathingly he shrank from the shameless speed and facility wherewith his widowed mother had transferred herself to a second husband,—these phases of his unhappiness were painted with an earnest truthfulness which seized and held the sympathies as with a spell.

Hamlet had been a deep solitary self-communer, had penetrated the hollow forms and shows of the conventional world, and with his questioning spirit touched the very quick of the mystery of the universe. His soul must have vibrated at least with obscure presentiments of the invisible state and supernal ranges of being in hidden connection with the scenes in which he was playing his part. Forrest revealed this by his manner of listening to Horatio while he described how he and Marcellus and Bernardo had seen the ghost of the buried majesty of Denmark walking by them at midnight. This sense of a providential, retributive, supernatural scheme mysteriously interwoven with our human life was breathed yet more forcibly in his soliloquizing moods after agreeing to watch with them that night in hope that the ghost would walk again:

When Hamlet, with Horatio and Marcellus, came upon the platform at twelve to watch for the ghost, and said,—

he finely indicated by his absent and preoccupied manner that he was not thinking about the cold, but was full of the solemn expectation of something else. He took a position nigh to the entrance of the ghost, and continued his desultory talk about the custom of carousing in Denmark, till the spectral figure stalked in, almost touching him. Then Hamlet turned, with a violent start of amazement and a short cry, and, while the white face looked down into his own, uttered the most affecting invocation ever spoken by man, in a subdued and beseeching tone that seemed freighted with the very soul of bewildered awe and piteous pleading. His voice was in a high key but husky, the vocality half dissolved in mysterious breath. His look was that of startled amazement touched with love and eagerness. The remorseful Macbeth confronted the ghost of Banquo with petrifying terror. The thunder-struck Richard saw the ghosts of his victims with wild horror. But Hamlet was innocent; his spirit was that of truth and filial piety; and when the marble tomb yawned forth its messenger from the invisible world to revisit the glimpses of the moon, although his fleshly nature might tremble at recognizing the manifest supernatural, his soul would indeed be wonder-thrilled but not unhinged, feeling itself as immortal as that on which it looked. His figure perfectly still, leaning forward with intent face, his whole soul concentrated in eye and ear, breathed mute supplication. And when in reply to the pathetic words of the ghost,—

he said,—

his voice was so heart-brokenly expressive of commiseration that the hearers almost anticipated the response,—

The harrowing tale finished, the task of revenge enjoined, the ghost disappears, saying,—

Nothing in dramatic art has ever been conceived more overwhelmingly affecting and appalling than this scene and speech. A withering spell seemed to have fallen on Hamlet and instantly aged him. He looked as pale and shrivelled as the frozen moonlight and the wintry landscape around him. He spoke the soliloquy that followed with a feeble and slow laboriousness expressive of terrible pain and anxiety:

To these words Forrest imparted an expression loaded with the whole darkening and dislocating effect which the vision and injunction of his father had exerted on him and was thenceforth to exert. For he was changed beyond the power of recovery. He now moves through the mysteries of the play, himself the densest mystery of all, at once shedding and absorbing night, his steady purpose drifting through his unstable plans, and his methodical madness hurrying king, queen, Polonius, Ophelia, Laertes, and himself to their tragic doom. The load of his supernatural mission darkens every prospect; yet his royal reason rifts the darkness with its flashes, the splendor of his imagination flings rainbows around him, and the native tenderness of his heart contrasts with his hard and lonely fate like an Alpine rose springing from the crags and pressing its fragrant petals against the very glacier. He was unhappy before, because his faculties transcended his conditions, his boundless soul chafed under the trifles of every-day experience, and his nobleness revolted from the hollow shams and frivolous routine which he saw so clearly. But now that the realm of the dead has opened on him, filling him with distressful doubts and burdening him with distasteful duty, revealing murder on the throne and making love and joy impossible, his miserable dejection becomes supreme. He seeks to escape from the pressure of his doom in thought, conversation, friendship, sportive wit. Embittered by his knowledge, he turns on the shallow and treacherous praters about him with a sarcastic humor which seems not part of his character but elicited from him by accidents and glittering out of his gloom like lamplight reflected on an ebony caryatid, or like a scattered rosary of stars burning in a night of solid black.

Forrest endeavored to represent in their truth the rapid succession of transitory and contradictory moods of Hamlet and yet never to lose the central thread of unity on which they were strung. That unity was imaginative intellectuality, introspective skepticism, profound unhappiness, and a shrinking yet persistent determination to avenge the murder of his father. The great intelligence and skill of the actor were proved by his presenting both the variety and the unity, and never forgetting that his portraiture was of a refined and scholarly prince and a satirical humorist who loved solitude and secrecy and would rather be misunderstood than reveal himself to the crowd. Among the many delicate shadings of character exemplified in the impersonation one of the quietest and best was the contrast of his sharp lawyer-like manner of cross-examining Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and detecting that in the disguise of friends they were really spies, with the thoughtful and gracious kindness of his dealing with the players. Seated part of the time, he spoke to the poor actor like an old friend, and called him back, when he was retiring, to add another thought, and finally dismissed him with a sympathetic touch on his shoulder and a smile.

The closet scene with the queen-mother, as Forrest played it, was a model of justness. He began in a respectful and sorrowing tone. Gradually, as he dwelt on her faithlessness to his father, and her loathsome sensuality, his glowing memory and burning words wrought him up to vehement indignation, and he appeared on the point of offering violence, when the ghost reappeared with warning signal and message. The suddenness of change in his manner—pallor of face, shrunken shoulders, fixed dilatation of eyes—was electrifying. And when in response to the queen’s