Then the voice, still low and plaintive, swelled and quivered with the glorious words that followed:
And as he ended with the line,
his form and limbs drooping, his lips sunken and tremulous, his very life seemed going out with each word, as if everything had been taken from him and he was all gone. Suddenly, with one electrifying bound, he leaped the whole gamut from mortal exhaustion to gigantic rage, his eyeballs rolling and flashing and his muscles strung, seized the cowering Iago by the throat, and, with a startling transition of voice from mellow and mournfully lingering notes to crackling thunderbolts of articulation, shrieked,—
The wild inspiration subsided as swiftly as it had risen, and left him gazing in blank amazement at what he had done. Again his struggling emotions were carried to a kindred climax when Iago told him the pretended dream of Cassio. He uttered the sentence, “I will tear her all to pieces,” in a manner whose force of pathos surprised every heart. His revenge began furiously, “I will tear her”—when his love came over it, and he suddenly ended with pitying softness—“all to pieces.” It was as if an avalanche, sweeping along earth and rocks and trees, were met by a breath which turned it into a feather. In the next act he gave an instance just the reverse of this: first he says, with doting fondness, “O, the world hath not a sweeter creature;” then, the imaginative associations changing the picture, he screams ferociously, “I will chop her into messes!”
Thence onward Othello was painted in a more and more piteous plight. The great soul was conquered by the remorseless intellect of Iago, leagued with its own weakness and excess. He grew less massive and more petulant. He stooped to spies and plots, and compassed the assassination of Cassio. His misery sapped his mind and toppled down his chivalrous sentiments until he could unpack his sore and wretched heart in abusive words and treat Desdemona with unrelenting cruelty.
Finally his tossing convulsions passed away, and a fixed resolution to kill the woman who had been false to him settled down in gloomy calmness. The curtain rose and showed him seated at an open window looking out on the night sky. Desdemona was asleep in her bed. He sighed heavily, and in slow tones, loaded with thoughtful and resigned melancholy, soliloquized,—
He permitted the audience to see the vast dimension and intensity of his love, doubt, agony, sorrow, despair, vengeance,—and the revelation was appalling in its solemnity. Henceforth even his invective was moderated and quiet. He seemed to fancy himself not so much revenging his personal wrong as vindicating himself and executing justice. He did not make a horror of the killing, as Kean did. He drew the curtains apart,—a slight struggle,—a choking murmur,—and as Emilia knocked at the door, and he turned, with the pillow in his hand, his listening attitude and his bronze face and glistening eyes formed a dramatic picture not to be forgotten. Then came the final revulsion of his agonizing sorrow:
His deadly distress and paralyzing bewilderment now illustrated what he had before said, that he loved her so with the entirety of his being that the loss of her, even in thought, brought back chaos:
When Emilia revealed the plot by which he had been deceived, and convinced him of the innocence of his wife, an absolute desolation and horror of remorse, as if a thunderbolt had burst within his brain, smote him to the floor. Staggering to the fatal couch, his gaze was riveted on the marble face there, and a broken heart and a distracted conscience moaned and sobbed in the syllables,—
The strain had been too great to be borne, and he was himself nearly dead. He wore the aspect of one who felt that to live was calamity, and to die the sole happiness left. Collecting himself, he spoke the calm words of appeal that justice might be done to his memory, nothing extenuated nor aught set down in malice. He turned towards the breathless form, once so dear, with a look of tenderness slowly dissolving and freezing into despair. Then, with one stroke of his dagger, he fell dead without a groan or a shudder.
Some actors have made Othello feared and disliked; others have caused him to be regarded with moral curiosity or poetic interest. As Forrest impersonated him he was first warmly admired, then profoundly pitied. Of the tragedians most celebrated in the past, according to the best descriptions which have been given of their representations, it may be said that the Othello of Quin was a jealous plebeian; the Othello of Kean, in parts a jealous king, in parts a jealous savage; the Othello of Vandenhoff, a jealous general; the Othello of Macready, a jealous theatrical player; the Othello of Brooke, a jealous knight; the Othello of Salvini, a jealous lover transformed into a jealous tiger; but the Othello of Forrest was a jealous man carried truthfully through all the degrees of his passion. One of his predecessors in the rôle had veiled the woes of the man beneath the dignities of his rank and station as a martial commander; another had theatricized the part, with wondrous study and toil, elaborating posture, look, and emphasis, presenting a correctness of drawing which might secure admiring criticism but could never move feeling; yet another, fascinated with the romantic accessories and vicissitudes of the character, made a gorgeous picture of a gorgeous hero in a gorgeous time. Forrest analyzed away from his Othello all adventitious circumstances; took him from the picturesque scenes of Venice, stripped off his official robes, and placed him on the stage in the glories and tortures of his naked humanity, a living mirror to every one of the struggles of a master-passion tearing a great heart asunder, driving a powerful mind into the awful abyss of insanity, making a generous man a coward, an eavesdropper, a murderer, and a suicide.
The explicit contents and teaching of the part as Shakspeare wrote it and as Forrest acted it are the unspeakable privilege and preciousness of a supreme human love crowned with fulfilment, and the fearful nature and results of an ill-grounded jealousy. The deeper implicit meaning and lesson it bears is the animal degradation, the frightful ugliness and danger, the intrinsically immoral and murderous character of the passion of jealousy. This all-important revelation latent in the tragedy of Othello has not been illumined, emphasized, or brought into relief on the stage as yet. It ought to be done. The historical traditions of tyrannical selfishness, almost universally organized in the interests of the world, which make men feel that in sexual love the lover possesses the object of his love as an appanage and personal property, all whose free wishes are merged in his will and whose disloyalty is justly visited with merciless cruelty and even death itself, have blinded most persons to the inherent unworthiness and vulgarity, the inherent ferocity and peril, of the passion of jealousy. It is common among brutes, and belongs to the brutish stage in man. It cannot be imagined in heaven among the cherubim and seraphim. Freedom, the self-possession of each one in equilibrium with all others and in harmony with universal order, belongs to the divine stage of developed humanity. There can be no certainty against madness, crime, and self-immolation so long as an automatic passion in the lower regions of the organism enslaves the royal reason meant to reign by right from God. Happen what may, self-poise and the steady aim at progress towards perfection should be kept. This cannot be when love is degraded to physical pleasure sought as an end, instead of being consecrated to the fruitful purposes for which it was ordained. The only absolute pledge of blessedness and peace between those who love and would hope to love always is an adjustment of conduct based not on mere feeling, whether low or high, but on feeling as itself subdued and disciplined by reason, justice, and truth, first developed in the thinking mind and constituted as it were into the science of the subject, then appropriated by the sentiments and made habitual in the individual character. What details of conduct will result, what innovations on the present social state will be made, when a scientific morality shall have mastered the subject and formulated its principles into practical rules, it is premature to say. But it is certain that the leading of one life in the light and another one in the dark will be forbidden. It is certain that the discords, the diseases, the distresses, the crimes, which are now so profuse in this region of experience will be no longer tolerated. And it is safe to prophesy that such delirious expressions of hate and revenge as have hitherto usually been thought tragic and terrible will come to be thought bombastic and ludicrous:
Othello, like most of the characters of Shakspeare, illustrates the historic actual, not the prophetic ideal. The present state of society is so ill adjusted, so full of painful evils, that things cannot always remain as temporary and local habits and mere empirical authority have seemingly settled them. To think they can is the sure mark of a narrow mind, a petty character, and a selfish heart. Nothing is more certain than continuous change. Nothing is, therefore, more characteristic of the genuine thinker than his ability to contemplate other modes of thought, other varieties of sentiment, than those to which he was bred. With the progress of social evolution the hitherto prevalent ideas of love and jealousy may undergo changes amounting in some instances, perhaps, to a reversal. Meanwhile, those who are not prepared to adopt any new opinions in detail should, with hospitable readiness impartially to investigate, consider within themselves which is better, an imperial delicacy and magnanimity in those who love causing them to refuse to know anything that occurs in absence so long as each preserves self-respecting personal fidelity to the ideal of progressive perfection? or, as at present, spiritual mutilation and misery, treacherous concealment, espionage, detection, disgrace, frenzy, and death?
One thing at all events is sure, namely, that of him alone whose love for God, or the universal in himself and others, is superior to his love for the individual, or the egotistic in himself and others, can it ever be safely said, as it was once so mistakenly said of the unhappy Moor,—
LEAR.
Nearly every season for more than forty years Forrest played the part of Lear many times. He never ceased to study it and to improve his representation, adding new touches here and there, until at last it became, if not the most elaborately finished and perfect of all his performances, certainly the sublimest in spiritual power and tragic pathos. As he grew old, as his experience of the desolating miseries of the world deepened, as his perception was sharpened of the hollowness and irony of the pomps and pleasures of human power contrasted with the solemn drifting of destiny and death, as the massiveness of his physique was expanded in its mould and loosened in its fibre by the shocks of time and fate, he seemed ever better fitted, both in faculty and appearance, to meet the ideal demands of the rôle. He formed his conception of it directly from the pages of Shakspeare and the dictates of nature. His elaboration and acting of it were original, the result of his own inspiration and study. Heeding no traditional authority, copying no predecessor, but testing each particular by the standard of truth, he might have proudly protested, like the veritable Lear,—
G H Cushman
EDWIN FORREST AS
KING LEAR.
No person of common sensibility could witness his impersonation of the character during his latter years without paying it the tribute of tears and awe.
Lear appears in a shape of imposing majesty, but with the authentic signals of breaking sorrow and ruin already obvious. He is a king in the native build and furniture of his being, not merely by outward rank. His scale of passion is gigantic, and always exerted at the extremes. When deferred to and pleased, his magnanimity is boundless and his love most tender. But, once crossed, nothing can restrain his petulance, and his outbursts of anger are terrible to others and dangerously expensive to himself. His identity is always marked by greatness, like some huge landmark dwarfing everything near. There is a royal scope and altitude belonging to the structure of his soul which is never lost. It is seen, whether he be ruler, outcast, or madman, in the grandeur of his mien, in the majestic eloquence of his thought and expression, in the towering swell of his ambition. He is ever insistingly conscious of his kingliness, and must be bowed to and have his way, as much when with the poor fool he hides his nakedness from the pelting blast as when in august plenitude of power he divides his realm among his children. This central point of unity Forrest firmly seized, and made it everywhere in his representation abundantly prominent and impressive.
At the opening of the play Lear is a very old man. Moved by some secret premonition of failing reason or decay, he is about to abdicate his crown. He is seen to be an imperial spirit throned in an enfeebled nature, a power girdled with weakness. An exacting and unbridled spirit of authority, a splenetic assertion of his kingly will, with the incessant worries and frictions to which such a habit always gives rise, have undermined his poise and lowered his strength, and brought his mind into that state of unstable equilibrium which is the condition of an explosive irritability fated to issue in madness. He himself, in the organic strata below his free intelligence, has obscure premonitions of his crumbling state; but every intimation of it which reaches his consciousness fills him with an angry resentment that seeks some instant vent.
The task to indicate all this, so clearly, with such moving force, with such combination of overtopping power and piteous weakness, as to fix it all in the apprehending sympathies of the audience, was marvellously accomplished by Forrest in the opening scene. The vast frame whose motions were alternately ponderous and fretful, the pale massive face, the restless wild eyes, the rich deep voice magnificent in oratoric phrase and breaking in querulous anger,—these, skilfully managed, revealed at once the ruining greatness of the royal nature, dowered with imposing and gracious qualities but fatally cored with irritable self-love.
The treacherous Goneril and Regan, whose heartless natures their younger sister so well knew, made such fulsome protestations as shocked her into a dumb reliance on her own true affection; and when the yearning and testy monarch fondly asks what she can say, her whole being of love and sincerity is behind her words:
Then broke forth the insane pride and self-will, which, brooking no appearance of opposition or evasion, were stricken with judicial blindness and left to prefer evil to good, to embrace the selfishness which was as false and cruel as hell, and to reject the love which was as gentle and true as heaven. With a terrible look, and a deep intensely girded voice, whose rapid accents made his whole chest shake with muffled reverberations, like a throbbing drum, he cried,—
And when the noble Kent would have interceded, his frenzied wrong-headedness peremptorily destroyed the last hope of remedy:
Then, with the piteous side-revelation,—
he subscribed and sealed his hideous fault by harshly driving the poor, sweet Cordelia from his presence, and banishing from his dominions the best friend he ever had, honest Kent.
The disease in the nature of Lear, a morbid self-consciousness that prevented alike self-rule and self-knowledge, did not let his passion expire like flaming tinder, but kept it long smouldering. Forrest pictured to perfection its recurring swells and tardy subsidence. Each advancing step showed more completely the vice that had cloyed the kingly nobility and gradually prepared the retributive tempest about to burst. His injured vanity feeding itself with its own inflaming deception now made his fancy ascribe to the angelic Cordelia, dismantled from the folds of his old favor, such foul and ugly features of character that he called her
while, perversely investing the tiger-breasted Goneril and Regan with imaginary goodness and charm, he said to them,—
So to combine in the representation of Lear the power and the weakness, the mental and physical grandeur and irritability, as to compose a consistent picture true to nature, and to make their manifestations accurate both in the whirlwinds of passion and in the periods of calm,—this is what few even of the greatest actors have been able to do. Forrest did it in a degree which made the most competent judges the most enthusiastic applauders. The nervous and tottering walk, with its sudden changes, the quick transitions of his voice from thundering fulness to querulous shrillness, the illuminated and commanding aspect passing into sunken pallor and recovering, the straightenings up of the figure into firm equilibrium, the palsying collapses,—all these he gave with a precision and entireness which were the transcript and epitome of a thousand original studies of himself and of grand old men whom he had watched in different lands, in the streets, in lunatic asylums.
But the deepest merit of this representation was not its exactness in mimetic simulation or reproduction of the visible peculiarities of shattered and irascible age. Its chief merit was the luminous revelation it gave of the inner history of the character impersonated. He made it a living exhibition of the justifying causes and the profound moral lessons of the tragedy of the aged monarch, who, self-hurled both from his outer and his inner kingdom, was left to gibber with the gales and the lightnings on the rain-swept and desolate moor. In every fibre of his frame and every crevice of his soul Forrest felt the tremendous teachings intrusted by Shakspeare to the tragedy of Lear. It is true the feeling did not lead him morally to master these teachings for a redemptive application to himself; and his own experience paid the bitter penalty of a personal pride too exacting in its ideal estimate of self and others. But the feeling did enable him dramatically to portray these lessons, with matchless vividness and power, and a rugged realism softened and tinted with art. Shakspeare’s own notion of Lear is remarkably expressed by one of the characters in the play: “He hath ever but slenderly known himself. Then we must look from his age to receive not alone the imperfections of long-engrafted condition, but, therewithal, the unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them.”
The whole history of the world in every part of society abounds with correspondences to the cruel error, the awful wrong, committed by Lear in accepting Goneril and Regan and rejecting Cordelia. But there is a cause for everything that happens. These dread and lamentable injustices arise from vices in the characters that perpetrate them. Their blindness is the punishment for their sin. The most inherent and obstinate sin in every unregenerate soul is excess of egotistic self-love. The strongest and richest natures are most exposed to this evil disguised in shapes so subtile as to deceive the very elect, making them unconsciously desire to subdue the wills of others to their will. This is a proud and fearful historic inheritance in the automatic depth of man below his free consciousness. Overcoming it, he is divinely free and peaceful. Yielding to it, he wears his force away in unhappy repinings and resentments. Aggravated by indulgence, it blinds his instincts and perverts his perceptions, makes him praise and clasp the bad who yield and flatter, denounce and shun the good who faithfully resist and try to bless. This profound moral truth Shakspeare makes the dim background of the tragedy, whose foreground blazes with a dreadful example of the penalties visited on those who violate its commands. He teaches that those who, bound and blinded by wilful self-love, embrace the designing and corrupt instead of the honest and pure, are left to the natural consequences of their choice. These consequences are the avenging Nemesis of divine providence. The actor who, as Forrest did, worthily illustrates this conception, becomes for the time the sublimest of preachers; for his appalling sermon is not an exhortation verbally articulated, it is a demonstration vitally incarnated.
The monstrous mistake of Lear soon brought its results to sight. The poor old monarch, fast weakening, even-paced, in his wits and muscles, but not abating one jot of his arrogant self-estimate and royal requiring, was so scolded, thwarted, and badgered by Goneril that he was quite beside himself with indignation. Then, most pitiably in his distress, relenting memory turned his regards towards the faithful gentleness he had spurned:
Uttering these remorseful words, striking his forehead, Forrest stood, for a moment, a picture of uncertainty, regret, self-deprecation, and woe. Then a sense of the insulting disrespect and ingratitude of Goneril seemed to break on him afresh, and let loose the whole volcanic flood of his injured selfhood. Anguish, wrath, and helplessness drove him mad. The blood made path from his heart to his brow, and hung there, a red cloud, beneath his crown. His eyes flashed and faded and reflashed. He beat his breast as if not knowing what he did. His hands clutched wildly at the air as though struggling with something invisible. Then, sinking on his knees, with upturned look and hands straight outstretched towards his unnatural daughter, he poured out, in frenzied tones of mingled shriek and sob, his withering curse, half adjuration, half malediction. It was a terrible thing, almost too fearful to be gazed at as a work of art, yet true to the character, the words, and the situation furnished by Shakspeare. Drawing for the moral world comparisons from the material world, it was a maelstrom of the conscience, an earthquake of the mind, a hurricane of the soul, and an avalanche of the heart. By a perfect gradation his protruded and bloodshot eyeballs, his crimsoned and swollen features, and his trembling frame subsided from their convulsive exertion. And with a confidence touching in its groundlessness, he bethought him,—
He went to her, and said, with a distraught air of sorrowful anger, more pathetic than mere words can describe,—
Told by her that he was old, that in him nature stood on the verge of her confine, that he needed guidance, and had best return to Goneril and ask her forgiveness, he stood an instant in blank amazement, as if not trusting his ears; a tremor of agony and rage shot through him, fixed itself in a scornful smile, and, throwing himself on his knees, he vented his heart with superhuman irony:
Goneril entered. Shrinking from her partly with loathing, partly with fear, he exclaimed, in a tone of mournful and pleading pain befitting the transcendent pathos of the imagery,—
As Regan and Goneril chaffered and haggled to reduce the cost of his entertainment, he revealed in his face and by-play the effect their conduct had on him. The rising thoughts and emotions suffused his features in advance of their expression. He stood before the audience like a stained window that burns with the light of the landscape it hides. He then began in a low tone of supplicating feebleness and gradually mounted to a climax of frenzy, where the voice, raised to screaming shrillness, broke in helplessness, exemplifying that degree of passion which is impotent from its very intensity. Those critics who blamed him for this excess as a fault were wrong, not he; for it belongs to a rage which unseats the reason to have no power of repression, and so to recoil on itself in exhaustion:
The elemental storm at that moment heard rumbling in the distance actually seemed an echo of the more terrible spiritual storm raging in him.
The scene by night on the heath, where Lear, discrowned of his reason, wanders in the tempest,—the earth his floor, the sky his roof, the elements his comrades,—was sustained by Forrest with a broad strength and intensity which left nothing wanting. Even the imagination was satisfied with the scale of acting when the old king was seen, colossal in his broken decay, exulting as the monarch of a new realm, pelted by tempests, shrilling with curses, and peopled with wicked daughters! His eyes aflame, his breast distended, his arms flying, his white hair all astream in the wind, his voice rolling and crashing like another thunder below, he seemed some wild spirit in command of the scene; and he called, as if to his conscious subjects,—
These last words, beginning with “high-engendered battles,” he delivered with a down-sweeping cadence as mighty in its swell as one of the great symphonic swings of Beethoven. The auditor seemed to hear the peal strike on the mountain-top and its slow reverberations roll through the valleys. The next speech, commencing with,—
and ending with,—
he pronounced in a way that emphasized the vast ethical meaning involved in it, and illustrated the strong humanity of Lear. He seemed to be saying, “These woes are just; I have been proud, rash, and cruel; but others have treated me worse than I have treated them.” This unconscious effort at a halting justification, this disguised appeal for kindly judgment, was profoundly natural and affecting. Then his brain reeled under its load of woe, and he sighed, with a piteous bewilderment, “My wits begin to turn,” bringing back with awful fulfilment his prophetic prayer long before, “O, let me not be mad, sweet heaven! keep me in temper: I would not be mad!”
There was something in the immense outspread of the sorrows of Lear and the enlacement of their gigantic portrayal with the elemental scenery of nature, the desolate heath, the blackness of night, the howling gale, the stabbing flashes of lightning, overwhelmingly pathetic and sublime. The passion of Othello pours along like a vast river turbulent and raging, yet with placid eddies. The passion of Lear is like the continual swell and moan of the ocean, whose limitless expanse, with no beacon of hope to meet the eye, baffles our comprehension and bewilders us with its awful mystery. This part of the play, as Forrest represented it in person and voice, gave one a new measure of the greatness of man in his glory and in his ruin. And in the subsequent scenes, where the disease of Lear had progressed and his faculties become more wrecked, he was so interpreted from the splendid might over which he had exulted to the mournful decay into which he had sunk, that when he said, in reply to a request to be allowed to kiss his hand, “Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality,” the whole audience felt like exclaiming, with Gloster,—
The acting of all the closing scenes with Cordelia was something to be treasured apart in the memories of all who saw it and who were capable of appreciating its exquisite beauty and its unfathomable pathos. When he was awakened out of the merciful sleep which had fallen on the soreness of his soul, and heard her whose voice was ever soft, gentle, and low, addressing him as she had been wont in happier days, his look of wondering weariness, his mistaking her for a spirit in bliss, his kneeling to her, his gradual recognition of her,—all these were executed with a unity of purpose, a simplicity of means, and an ineffable tenderness of affection, to which it is impossible for any verbal description to do justice. Who, that did not carry a stone in his breast in place of a heart, could refrain from tears when he heard the exhausted sufferer—his gaze fixed on hers, his hands moving in unpurposed benediction, a solemn calm wrapping him after the long tempest, passing from the old arrogance of self-assertion into a supreme sympathy—murmur,—
Who that saw his instinctive action and heard his broken utterance when she was dead, and he stood trying with insane perseverance to restore her, fondling her with his paralyzed hands, can ever forget? With insistent eagerness he asked,—
With complaining resignation he said,—
With wild surprise he exclaimed, while his lips parted and a weird and shrivelling smile stole through his wearied face,—
He stood erect and still, gazing into vacancy. Not a rustle, not a breath, could be heard in the house. Slowly the head nodded, the muscles of the face relaxed, the hands opened, the eyes closed, one long hollow gasp through the nostrils, then on the worn-out king of grief and pain fell the last sleep, and his form sank upon the stage, while the parting salvos of the storm rolled afar.
Such were the principal characters represented by Edwin Forrest. So, as far as an incompetent pen can describe their portraiture, did he represent them. The work was a dignified and useful one, moralizing the scene not less than entertaining the crowd. It was full of noble lessons openly taught. It was still richer, as all acting is, in yet deeper latent lessons to be gathered and self-applied by the spectators who were wise enough to pierce to them and earnest enough to profit from them.
For every dramatic impersonation of a character in the unravelling of a plot and the fulfilment of a fate is charged with implicit morals. This is inevitable because every type of man, every grade of life, every kind of conduct, every style of manners, embodies those laws of cause and effect between the soul and its circumstances which constitute the movement of human destiny, and illustrates the varying standards of truth and beauty, or of error and sin, in charming examples to be assimilated, or in repulsive ones to serve as warnings. Thus the stage is potentially as much more instructive than the pulpit, as life is more inclusive and contagious than words. The trouble is that its teaching is so largely disguised and latent. It sorely needs an infusion of the religious and academic spirit to explicate and drive home its morals. For instance, when Coriolanus says, with action of immovable haughtiness,—
it is a huge and grand personality, filled to bursting with arrogant pride and indirect vanity, asserting itself obstinately against the mass of the people. As a piece of power it is imposing; but morally it is vulgar and odious. The single superior should not assert his egotistic will defiantly against the wills of the multitude of inferiors and hate them for their natural resistance. He should modestly modulate his self-will with the real claims of the collective many, or blend and assert it through universal right and good, thus representing God with the strength of truth and the suavity of love. That is the lesson of Coriolanus,—a great lesson if taught and learned. And, to take an exactly opposite example, what is it that so pleases and holds everybody who sees the exquisite Rip Van Winkle of Joseph Jefferson? Analyze the performance to the bottom, and it is clear that the charm consists in the absence of self-assertion, the abeyance of all egotistic will. Against the foil of his wife’s tartar temper, who with arms akimbo and frowning brow and scolding acidity of voice opposes everything, and asserts her authority, and, despite her faithful virtues, is as disagreeable as an incarnated broomstick, Rip, lazy and worthless as he is, steals into every heart with his yielding movement, soft tones, and winsome look of unsuspicious innocence. He resists not evil or good, neither his appetite for drink nor his inclinations to reform. The spontaneity, the perfect surrender of the man, the unresisted sway of nature in him, plays on the unconscious sympathies of the spectators with a charm whose divine sweetness not all the vices of the vagabond can injure. It is, in this homely and almost unclean disguise, a moral music strangely wafted out of an unlost paradise of innocence into which drunkenness has strayed. But the real secret of the fascination is hidden from most of those who intuitively feel its delicious fascination. Did the audience but appreciate the graceful spirit of its spell, and for themselves catch from its influence the same unresisted spontaneousness of soul in unconscious abnegation of self-will, they would go home regenerated.
But beyond the special lessons in the parts played by Forrest, he was, through his whole professional course, constantly teaching the great lesson of the beauty and value of the practice of the dramatic art for the purposes of social life itself. Should the stage decline and disappear, the art so long practised on it will not cease, but will be transferred to the ordinary walks of social life. Nothing is so charming as a just and vivid play of the spiritual faculties through all the languages of their outer signs, in the friendly intercourse of real life. But in our day the tendency is to confine expression to the one language of articulate words. This suppression of the free play of the organism stiffens and sterilizes human nature, impoverishes the interchanges of souls makes existence formal and barren. The most precious relish of conversation and the divinest charm of manners is the living play of the spirit in the features, and the spontaneous modulation of the form by the passing experience. A man grooved in bigotry and glued in awkwardness, with no alert intelligence and sympathy, is a painful object and a repulsive companion. He moves like a puppet and talks like a galvanized corpse. But it is delightful and refreshing to associate with one thoroughly possessed by the dramatic spirit, who, his articulations all freed and his faculties all earnest, speaks like an angel and moves like a god. The theatre all the time offers society this inspiring lesson. For there are seen free and developed souls lightening and darkening through free and sensitive faces. If bodies did not answer to spirits nor faces reveal minds, nature would be a huge charnelhouse and society a brotherhood of the dead. And if things go on unchecked as they have been going on, we bid fair to come to that. It is to be hoped, however, that the examples of universal, liberated expression given on the stage will more and more take effect in the daily intercourse of all classes. As a guiding hint and stimulus in that direction, the central law of dramatic expression may here be explicitly formulated. All emotions that betoken the exaltation of life, or the recognition of influences that tend to heighten life, confirm the face, but expand and brighten it. All emotions that indicate the sinking of life, or the recognition of influences that threaten to lower life, relax and vacate the face if these emotions are negative, contract and darken it if they are positive. In answer to the exalting influences the face either grasps what it has or opens and smiles to hail and receive what is offered; in answer to the depressing influences, it either droops under its load or shuts and frowns to oppose and exclude what is threatened. The eyes reveal the mental states; the muscles reveal the effects of those states in the body. In genial states active, the eyes and the muscles are both intense, but the eyes are smiling. In genial states passive, the eyes are intense, the muscles languid. In hostile states active, both eyes and muscles are intense, but the eyes are frowning. In hostile states passive, the eyes are languid, the muscles intense. In simple or harmonious states, the eyes and the muscles agree in their excitement or relaxation. In complex and inconsistent states, the eyes and the muscles are opposed in their expression. To expound the whole philosophy of these rules would take a volume. But they formulate with comprehensive brevity the central law of dramatic expression as a guide for observation in daily life.
In filling up the outlines of the majestic characters imperfectly limned in the preceding pages, exhibiting them in feature and proportion and color and tone as they were, setting in relief the full dimensions and quality of their intellect and their passion, living over again their experiences and laying bare for public appreciation the lessons of their fate, Forrest found the high and noble joy of his existence, the most satisfying employment for his faculties, and a deep, unselfish solace for his afflictions. He reposed on the grand moments of each drama, as if they were thrones which he was loath to abdicate. He dilated and glowed in the exciting situations, as if they were no mimic reflections of the crises of other souls, but original and thrilling incarnations of his own. He lingered over the nobler utterances, as if he would have paused to repeat their music, and would willingly let the action wait that the thought might receive worthy emphasis. Every inspired conception of eloquence, every delicate beauty of sentiment, every aggrandizing attitude of man contained in the plays he lifted into a relief of light and warmth that gave it new attraction and more power. And to trace the thoughts and feelings that gained heightened expression through him, echoed and working with contagious sympathy in the hearts of the crowds who hung on his lips, was a divine pleasure which he would fain have indefinitely prolonged. But the movement on the stage, that affecting mirror of life, hurries forward, the business of the world breaks in upon philosophy, and the dreams of the poet and the player burst like painted bubbles.
Meanwhile, not only do the parts played and the scenes amidst which they are shown vanish and become the prey of oblivion, but those who played them disappear also, leaving the providential and prophetic Spirit of Humanity, a sublimer Prospero, to say,—