At the date of this writing, although there are many good actors in America, there are none who are generally recognized as great. There also appears for the time to be a decline in the popular taste for the serious and lofty drama, and a general preference for sensational, comic, and spectacular plays. In vain does the call-boy summon the sublime characters and parts that entranced the audiences of a bygone generation. They seem to have died with the strong and stately actors who gave them such noble life and motion. The sceptred pall of gorgeous tragedy has vanished from the stage, it may almost be said, and for the poet and the thinker have been substituted the carpenter, the scene-painter, the upholsterer, and the milliner. Nudity, prurience, broad appeals to sensual passion, extravagant glare and movement and noise, have largely thrust aside tragic action, romantic sentiment, and moral grandeur. Even though the depravation be but temporary, marking a transitional crisis, it is a feature unpleasant to contemplate. And it may be of some service, not only in completing the picture of the life of Forrest, but likewise in revealing the higher social uses and lessons of his art, to give a description of the chief of those massive and heroic rôles he loved best to fill in the ripest period of his professional career. The accounts must be brief and fragmentary, and very inadequate at the best. To preserve or re-create the full impression of a great actor in a great part, he should be sculptured in every attitude and movement, with every gesture and look, and painted in every tone, emphasis, and inflection of his voice. Yet, without attempting this impossible feat in the case of Forrest, enough may be rapidly indicated in general sketches to enable intelligent readers to form some approximate conception of his leading impersonations and of the influences they were calculated to exert.
The pictures of the acting of Forrest now to be essayed must be tantalizingly faint and imperfect, in the absence of an art to translate and reproduce all the other eight dramatic languages of human nature in the one language of words. But to appreciate even these poor attempts at their worth one preliminary condition on the part of those who read is pre-eminently necessary. They must remember that Forrest was one of those rare men profusely endowed with that mysterious power to interest and impress which is popularly called personal magnetism. He was signally charged with that secret spell, that loaded and swaying fascination, which all feel though no one understands, which contagiously works on those who come within its reach, seizing curiosity, enlisting sympathy, or evoking repulsion. The distinguishing differences of men in this respect are indescribable and fatal. No art can efface them or neutralize them. For an artist who makes direct personal appeal to an audience the having or the not having this magnetic gift is as the hidden core of destiny. With it obstacles are removed as by magic, friends won, enemies overthrown, and wherever the possessor sails through the community he leaves a wide phosphorescent wake of social interest and gossip. Without it, though flags are waved and trumpets are blown and all pains taken to make an impression and secure a victorious career, yet the efforts prove futile and public attention wanders listlessly away. One seems created to be the victim of perpetual slights, dry, trivial, destitute of charm, nobody caring anything about him; while another, freighted with occult talismans, strangely interests everybody. The recognition of such contrasts is one of the most familiar facts of experience. These phenomena are suggested by the word sphere as applied to the characteristic influence of personality. The spiritual sphere or signalling power of an individual is described as attractive or repulsive, strong or weak, vast or little, harmonious or discordant. The mystery is not so blankly baffling as it has been supposed, but is in a large degree susceptible of rational explication.
Out of a hundred accomplished singers, beautiful in person and marvellous in voice, one prima donna shall surpass all the rest in fascinating the public. There is a nameless distinction in her bearing, there is an indescribable charm in her song, which bewitch and enthrall, are her irresistible passports to public enthusiasm, and make her sure of a long and dazzling career; while one after another of the rest with desperate exertions and fitful plaudits disappear. Here is a tragedian who exercises the same spell and quickly obscures his distanced rivals. He advances on the stage with a quiet step, his mantle negligently crossing his breast, his countenance calm. Without a start, without a gesture, without a word, he simply is and looks. Yet, as he approaches, awe spreads around him. Why this breathless silence all over the theatre, this rooted attention from every one? He seats himself, he leans on the arm of the chair; his voice, quick and deep, seems not to utter common words, but to pronounce supernatural oracles. By what transcendent faculty does he render hate so terrible, irony so frightful, disdain so superhuman, devotion so entrancing, love so inexpressibly sweet, that the whole assembly rivet their eyes and hold their breath while their hearts throb under the mystic influence of his action? The secret is purely a matter of law without anything of chance or whim or caprice in it. It is the profound and universal law which regulates the exercise of sympathetic influence by one person on another. It has two elements, namely, beauty and power. Beauty and power both can be expressed in shapes, features, motions, and tones. Shapes, features, and tones are results and revelations of modes of motion. The face is shaped and modulated by the ideal forces within, the rhythmical vibrations which preside over the processes of nutrition. All those shapes or movements in a person which in their completeness constitute, or in their segments imply, returning curves or undulations, such as circles, ellipses, and spirals, are beautiful. They suggest economy of force, ease of function, sustained vitality, and potency. But abrupt changes of direction, sudden snatches and breaks of movement, sharp angles, are ugly and repellent, because they suggest waste of force, difficulty of function, discord of the individual with the universal, and therefore hint evil and death. The serpent was anciently considered a symbol of immortality on account, no doubt, of all its motions being endless lines or undulations circling in themselves. This is the law of beauty which just in proportion to its pervasive prevalence and exhibition in any one gives its possessor charm. The subtile indication of this in the incessant and innumerable play of the person fascinates and delights all who see it; and those who do not consciously perceive it are still influenced by it in the unconscious depths of their nature.
The element of power is closely allied in its mode of revelation and influence with that of beauty. Every attitude, gesture, or facial expression is composed of contours and lines, static and dynamic, latent and explicit, fragmentary and complete, straight, curved, or angularly crooked. Now, the nature of these lines, the degree in which their curves return or do not return into themselves, the nature and sizes of the figures they describe, or would describe if completed according to their indicative commencements, determine their beauty or ugliness and decide what effect they shall produce on the spectator. The beauty and the pleasure it yields are proportioned to the preponderance of endless lines suggestive of circulation of force without waste, and therefore of perfect grace and immortal life. But that sense of power which breeds awe in the beholder is measured by the proportion of exertion made to effect produced. All force expended passes off on angular lines. The angles of movement may be obtuse or sharp in varying degrees, and consequently subtend lines of different lengths. All attitudes and gestures compose curves and figures, or cast lines and form angles, which constitute their æsthetic and dynamic values, those measuring beauty, these measuring power. For, on the principle of the lever and momentum, the power expended at the end of a line is equal to that exerted at the beginning of the line multiplied by its length. The amounts of exertion and the lengths of lines are unconsciously estimated by the intuitions of the observer, and the unconscious interpretations to which he is led are what yield the impressions he experiences on seeing any given actor. The greatest sense of power is received when the minimum of initial effort is seen with the maximum of terminal result; when the smallest weight at the central extremity balances the largest one at the distal extremity. The law of combined beauty and power of action, then, is contained in the relations of returning lines and lengths of straight lines. The measure of dramatic expression is this: impression of grace is according to the preponderance of perpetuating curves, and impression of strength according to the degrees of the angles formed by the straight lines. That actress or actor in whose organism there is the greatest freedom of the parts and the greatest unity of the whole, the most perfect co-operation of all the nerve-centres in a free dynamic solidarity and the most complete surrender of the individual will to universal principles, will make the deepest sensation,—in other words, will have the largest amount of what has been vaguely called personal magnetism. The divinest character expresses itself in softly-flowing forms and inexpensive movements. The most royal and august majesty of function indicates its rank of power by the slightest exertions implying the vastest effects. Frivolous, false, and vulgar characters are ever full of short lines, incongruous, fussy, and broken motions, curves everywhere subordinated and angles obtrusive. Such persons are, as it is said, destitute of magnetism. They do not interest. They cannot possibly charm or awe. It is a law of inexpressible importance that the quality, grade, and measure of a personality are revealed primarily in the proportions, secondarily in the movements, of the physical organism. These proportions and movements betray alike the permanent features of the indwelling character and all its passing thoughts and emotions. The truth is all there, though the spectator may be incompetent to interpret its signals. The most harmonious and perfect character will show the most exquisite symmetry and grace of repose and action. The irregulated, raw, and reckless type of character expresses itself in awkward, violent, or incongruous movements, wasteful of energy yet not impressive in result. Beauty of motion, the implication of endless lines, is the normal sign of loveliness of soul. Grandeur of soul or dynamic greatness of mind is indicated by implicit extent and ponderous slowness of motion. When the smallest displays of motion at the centres suggest the most sustained and extended lines, the impression given of power is the most mysterious and overwhelming. The most tremendous exertions, in lines and angles whose invisible complements are small, produce a weak impression, because they make no appeal to the imagination. The beauty of the figures implied in the forms of the movements of a man is the analogue of his goodness; the dimensions of the figures, the analogue of his strength. And in the case of every one the spectators are constantly apprehending the forms of these figures and how far they reach, and emotionally reacting in accordance with the results thus attained. It is not a conscious and critical process of the understanding or the senses, but a swift procedure of the intuitions or organic habits, including the sum of ancestral experiences deposited in instinctive faculty. Many who are ignorant of this law of the revelation of human nature, and of the sympathetic influence of man on man involved in it, may feel that the whole conception is merely a fine-spun fancy, with no solid basis in fact. But a perfect parallel to the process here described as taking place through the eye has been both mathematically and visibly demonstrated in the case of the ear. The beauty of form as perceived by the eye depends on implicit perception of geometric law, and is proportioned to the simplicity of the law and the variety of the outline embodying it, just as the harmony of colors or the harmony of sounds depends on the implicit perception of arithmetical ratios, and is proportioned to the harmony of times in which the vibrations of the visible or audible medium occur. We distinguish the beauty and the quality of a tone of the same pitch produced by different instruments or voices, and our feelings are differently affected with pleasure or pain as we listen to them. But the beauty of a tone consists in the equidistance of the pulsations of air composing it, and the quality of a tone consists in the forms of the pulsations. The auditory apparatus reports the symmetry or asymmetry of the pulsations in form and rate, and the soul, intuitively grasping the secret significance, is delighted or disturbed accordingly. The charm of a delicious, musical, powerful voice has these four elements, beautiful forms in its vibrations, perfect rhythm or equidistance in its vibrations, varying breadth in its vibrations, and varying extent of vibratory surface in the sounding mechanism. Without knowing anything about any of these conditions, the sensitive hearer, played on by them through his ear, accurately responds in feeling. It is exactly the same, in the case of the eye, with the geometrical lines and figures involved in the bearing of a person. If these are beautiful in forms, graceful in motions, sublime in implicit dimensions, the impression is delightful and profound; while if they are petty and incoherent, or clumsy and unbalanced, their appeal is superficial and disagreeable. This is the law of personal magnetism, which always exerts the vastest swing of power from the most exactly centred equilibrium. The mysteries of God are revealed in space and time through form and motion. They are concentrated in rhythm, which, as defined by Delsarte, is the simultaneous vibration of number, weight, and measure. We are creatures of space and time; all our experience has been written and is organized in that language. Our whole nature therefore in its inmost depths corresponds and thrills to the mystic symbols of harmony or discord with love and pleasure or with fear and pain. The secret of the delight that waits on the perception or feeling of beauty and power is the recognition of sequent ratios which express symmetry in time or algebraic law, and coexistent ratios which express symmetry in space or geometric law. Spatial symmetry is the law of equilibrium, the adjustment of the individual with the universal, and measures power. Temporal symmetry is the law of health, the pulsating adjustment of function with its norm, and measures the melodious flow of life. Rhythm is the constant dynamic reproduction of symmetry in space and time combined. It is the secret of personal magnetism. Its charm and its power are at their height when the symmetries are most varied in detail and most perfect in unity.
Now, Forrest ever possessed this magnetic temperament, this firmly poised and ingravidated personality, and ever wielded its signals with startling effect. The tones and inflections of his sweet and majestic voice in its wide diapason were felt by his hearers palpitating among the pulses of their hearts. His attitude, look, and gesture in great situations often produced on a whole assembly the electric creep of the flesh and the cold shudder of the marrow. His fearlessness and deliberation were conspicuous and proverbial. A censorious critic said, “Mr. Forrest is the most painfully elaborate actor on the stage. He swings in a great slow orbit, and, though he revolves with dignity and sublimity, the sublimity is often stupid and the dignity a little pompous. He dwells so long on unimportant passages that one might imagine he intended to take up an everlasting rest on a period, to go to sleep over a semicolon, or spend the evening with a comma. His pauses are like the distances from star to star, and if he continues in his course people will have time to stroll in the lobbies between his sentences. His performances might be defined by his enemies as infinite extensions of silence with incidental intervals of speech.” Through this enveloping burlesque one discerns the poise, sang-froid, and grandeur of the man.
Senator Stockton, passing the Broadway Theatre one evening, met a friend coming out, and asked him, “What is going on in there?” The reply was, “Oh, nothing: Forrest is in one of his pauses!” An admiring critic said of him, and if the diction be exaggerated it yet invests the truth, “There is no actor living who takes a stronger hold of the feelings of his audience or grasps the passions of the human heart with such a giant-like clutch. He is as imposing and daring in his action as the mountain condor when he darts on the flock, or the bird of Jove when he wheels from the peaks and burnishes his plumage in the blaze of the sun. It is not one here and there that submits to his sovereignty. The entire audience are swayed and fashioned after the workings of his soul. He permits none to escape the potency of his sceptre, but makes all bow to his terrible and overwhelming mastery.” Of course different persons had different degrees of susceptibility to this elemental power and earnestness of nature and to this trained and skilled display of art, though all must feel it more or less either as attraction or as repulsion. The varying effects of the playing of character through its signs is the genuine drama of life itself. The idiot holds his bauble for a god, as Shakspeare says. The ruffian is hardened against all delicate and noble manifestations of mind. The dilettante, in his dryness, veneer, and varnish, is incapable of any enthusiasm for persons. And there are multitudes so harassed and exhausted in the selfish contests of the day, their hearts and imaginations so perverted or shrivelled, that the brightest signals of heroism, genius, and saintliness shine before them in vain. The play of personal qualities, the study and appreciation of them, are more neglected now than they ever were before. It is one of the greatest of social calamities; for it takes the social stimulus away from spiritual ambition or the passion for excellence. And it is one of the supreme benefactions conferred on society by a great actor that he intensifies and illuminates the revelatory language of character and fixes attention on its import by lifting all its modes of expression to their highest pitch.
In a previous chapter an attempt was made to describe Forrest in those characters of physical and mental realism with which his fame was chiefly identified during the earlier and middle portions of his popular career. It remains now to essay a similar sketch of those characters of imaginative portraiture which he best loved to impersonate in the culminating glory and at the close of his artistic career. In the Rolla, Damon, Spartacus, Metamora of his young manhood he was, rather than played, the men whose parts he assumed, so intensely did he feel them and so completely did he reproduce nature. He wrestled with the genius of his art as Hercules with Antæus, throwing it to the ground continually, but making its vitality more vigorous with every fall. As years passed, and brought the philosophic mind, they tempered and refined the animal fierceness, strained out the crudity and excess, and secured a result marked by greater symmetry in details, fuller harmony of accessories, a purer unity in the whole, and a loftier climax of interest and impression. Then studious intellect and impassioned sentiment, guided by truth and taste, preponderated over mere instinct and observation, and imaginative portraiture took the place which had been held by sensational realism. This is what in dramatic art gives the violence of passion moderating restraint, puts the calm girdle of beauty about the throbbing loins of power. Imagination, it is true, cannot create, but it can idealize, order, and unify, unravel the tangled snarl of details, and wind the intricacies in one unbroken thread, making nature more natural by abstraction of the accidental and arrangement of the essential. This was what the acting of Forrest, always sincere and natural, for a long time needed, but at last, in a great degree, attained, and, in attaining, became genuinely artistic.
The Richelieu of Forrest was a grand conception consummately elaborated and grandly represented. It was a part suited to his nature, and which he always loved to portray. The glorious patriotism which knit his soul to France, the tender affection which bound his heart to his niece, the leonine banter with which he mocked his rivals, the indomitable courage with which he defied his foes, the sublime self-sufficingness with which he trusted in fate and in the deepest emergencies prophesied the dawn while his followers were trembling in the gloom, his immense personal superiority of mind and force swaying all others, as the sun sways its orbs,—these were traits to which Forrest brought congenial qualities and moods, making their representation a delight to his soul.
He dressed for the part in long robes, an iron-gray wig, and the scarlet cap of a cardinal. He stooped a little, coughed, but gave no signs of superannuation. As the conspiracies thickened about him and the end drew on, he seemed visibly to grow older and more excitable. His age and feebleness, though simulated with an exquisite skill, were not obtruded. Though the picture of an old man, it was the picture of a very grand old man, like the ruin of a mighty castle, worn by time and broken by storms, yet towering proudly in its strength, with foundations the earthquake could not uproot and battlements over which the thunder crashed in vain. Forrest made the character not only intensely interesting and exciting by the great variety of sharp contrasts he brought into reconciliation in it, but also admirable and lovable from the honest virtues and august traits it embodied. He represented Richelieu as a patriotic statesman of the loftiest order, and also as a sage deeply read in the lore of the human heart, tenaciously just, a careful weigher of motives, his sometimes rough and repellent manner always covering a deep well of love and a rich vein of satire.
In the opening scene, the cunning slyness of the veteran plotter and detective, the dignity of the great statesman, and the magnetic command of the powerful minister were revealed in rapid alternation in a manner which was a masterpiece of art.
There was in the delivery of these words a mixture of sportiveness and sobriety, complacency and irony, which spoke volumes. Then, speaking of Baradas, the conceited upstart who expected to outwit and overthrow him, the expression of self-conscious greatness in his manner, combined with contempt for the mushroom success of littleness, made the verbal passage and the picture he painted in uttering it equally memorable as he said,—
As his hand imaginatively shook the ladder, his eye blazed, his voice grew solid, and the audience saw everything indicated by the words as distinctly as if it had been presented in material reality. Nothing could be more finely drawn and colored than the variety of moods, the changing qualities of character and temper, called out in Richelieu by the reactions of his soul on the contrasted persons of the play and exigencies of the plot as he came in contact with them. When, alluding to the attachment of the king for his ward as an ivy, he said—
there was a fond caressing sweetness in his tones that fell on the heart like a celestial dew. Into what a wholly different world of human nature we were taken in the absolute transformation of his demeanor with Joseph, the Capuchin monk, his confidant! Here there was a grim humor, an amusing yet sinister banter:
His interview with De Mauprat reminded one of a cat playing with a mouse, or of a royal tiger which had laid its paw on one of the sacred cattle and was watching its quiverings under the velvet-sheathed claws. When De Mauprat expects to be ordered to the block, Richelieu sends him to his darling Julie:
The delightful humor here follows the desperate terror like sunlight streaming on a thunder-cloud. What a contrast was furnished in the allusion to the detested Baradas and his confederates when the aroused cardinal, after the failure of every method to conciliate, towers into his kingliest port, and exclaims, with concentrated and vindictive resolution,—
The central and all-conspicuous merit of Forrest’s rendering of Richelieu was the unfailing felicity of skill with which he kept the unity of the character clear through all the variety of its manifestations. It was a character fixed in its centre but mobile in its exterior, dominated by a magnificent patriotic ambition, open to everything great, tinged with cynicism by bitter experience, if irascible and revengeful yet full of honest human sympathy. He enjoyed circumventing traitors with a finesse keener than their own, and defying enemies with a haughtiness that blasted, while ever and anon gleams of gentle and generous affection lighted up and softened the sombre prominences of a nature formed to mould rugged wills and to rule stormy times.
It is only great actors who are able to make the individuality of a character imperially prominent and absorbing yet at the same time to do equal justice to every universal thought or sentiment occurring in the part. Forrest was remarkable for this supreme excellence. Whenever the author had introduced any idea or passion of especial dignity from the depth of its meaning or the largeness of its scope, he was sure to express it with corresponding emphasis and finish. This makes a dramatic entertainment educational and ennobling no less than pleasurable. When François, starting on an important errand, says, “If I fail?” Richelieu gazes on the boy, while recollections of the marvellous triumphs of his own career flit over his face, and exclaims, with an electric accentuation of surprise and unconquerable assurance,—
When the huge sword of his martial period at Rochelle drops from his grasp, and he is reminded that he has other weapons now, he goes slowly to his desk, the old hand from which the heavy falchion had dropped takes up the light feather, his eyes look into vacancy, the soldier passes into the seer, an indefinable presence of prophecy broods over him, and the meditative exultation of his air and the solemn warmth of his voice make the whole audience thrill as his sculptured syllables fall on their ears:
When Julie, appealing to him for aid which he cannot promise, expostulatingly asks,—
he answers in a manner whose attitude, look, and tone instantly carry the imagination and sympathy of the soul-stricken auditors from the individual instance before them to the solemn pathos and mystery of the destiny of all mankind in this world:
So, when, amidst unveiled treason, hate and fear and sickening ingratitude, left alone in his desolation, his spirit for a moment wavered under the load of suspicion and melancholy, but quickly rallied into its own invincible heroism, he so painted and voiced the successive moods that every bosom palpitated in living response:
Never was transition more powerful than from the minor wail of lamentation with which Forrest here began to the glorious eloquence of the climax, where his vocal thunderbolts drove home to every heart the lesson of conscious greatness and courage. The treachery was depicted with a look and voice expressive of a weary and mournful indignation and scorn touched with loathing; the desertion, with bowed head and drooping arms, in low, lingering, tearful tones; the self-assertion was launched from a mien that swelled with sudden access of inspiration, as if heaving off its weakness and stiffened in its utmost erection.
Another imposing instance in which Forrest so rendered a towering sense of genius and personal superiority as to change it from egotism to revelation, merging the individual peculiarity in a universal attribute, was where the armed De Mauprat comes upon the solitary cardinal and tells him the next step will be his grave. The defiant retort to this threat was so given as to impress the audience with a sense of prophetic power, a feeling that the destiny of man is mysteriously linked with unseen and supernatural ranks of being:
A crowning glory of the impersonation of this great rôle by Forrest was the august grandeur of the method by which he set the intrinsic royalty of Richelieu over against the titular royalty of Louis. In many nameless ways besides by his subtile irony, his air of inherent command masked in studied courtesy of subordination, and the continual contrast of the comprehensive measures and sublime visions of the one with the petty personal spites and schemes of the other, he made it ever clear that the crowned monarch was a sham, the statesman the real one anointed and sealed by heaven itself. This true and democratic idea of superiority, that he is the genuine king, not who chances to hold the throne, but who knows how to govern, received a splendid setting in all the interviews of the king and the cardinal. When the conspirators had won Louis to turn his back on his minister with the words,—
who that saw it could ever forget the dilating mien and burning oratoric burst which instantly made the sovereign seem a menial subject, and the subject a vindicated sovereign?
Again, when Louis, with mere personal passion, had harshly rebuffed him with the words,—
the narrow selfishness of the king makes him seem a pygmy and a plebeian in the light of the universal sentiment and expansive thought with which Richelieu overwhelmingly responds,—
But the grandest exhibition of the superiority of democratic personal royalty of character and inspiration to the conventional royalty of title and place, the supreme dramatic moment of the play, was the protection of Julie from the polluting pursuit of the king. Folding the affrighted girl to his breast with his left arm, he lifted his loaded right hand, and, with visage of smouldering fire and clarion tone, cried,—
Baradas asserts that the king claims her. Then came such a climax of physical, moral, and artistic power as no man could witness without being electrified through and through. Forrest prepared and executed this climax with an exquisite skill that made it seem an unstudied inspiration. His intellect appeared to have the eager fire that burns and flashes along a train of thought, gathering speed and glory as it moves, till at last it strikes with irresistible momentum. At first with noble repression the low deep voice uttered the portentous words,—
Here the surge of passion began to sweep cumulatively on. The eyes grew wild, the outstretched hands quivered, the tones swelled and rang, the expanded and erected figure looked like a transparent mass of fire, and the climax fell as though the sky had burst with a broadside of thunders.
The sudden passage of Richelieu from the extreme of tottering feebleness to the extreme of towering strength, under the stimulus of some impersonal passion, illustrated a deep and marvellous principle of human nature. Forrest never forgot how startlingly he had once seen this exemplified by Andrew Jackson when discussing the expediency of the annexation of Texas to the United States. A disinterested and universal sentiment suddenly admitted to the mind, lifting the man out of egotism, sometimes seems to open the valves of the brain, flood the organism with supernatural power, and transform a shrivelled skeleton into a glowing athlete. Richelieu had fainted, and was thought to be dying. The king repents, and restores his office, saying,—
In one instant the might of his whole idolized country passes into his withered frame.
It was the colossal scale of intellect, imagination, passion, and energy exposed by Forrest in his representation of Richelieu that made the rôle to ordinary minds a new revelation of the capacities of human nature. When, with a tone and inflection whose sweet and long-drawn cadence almost made the audience hear the melody of the spheres clanging in endless space, he said,—
he produced on the stage a religious impression of which Bossuet might have been proud in the pulpit. And to hear him declaim, with a modest pomp and solemn glow of elocution befitting the thoughts and imagery, the following passage, was to receive an influence most ennobling while most pleasurable:
It was no wonder that Charles Kean, after beholding this interpretation of Richelieu by Forrest, said to his wife, “Ellen, this is the greatest acting we have ever seen or ever shall see.” It was but just that Henry Sedley, himself an accomplished actor and owned to be one of the best dramatic critics in the country, should write, “We can imagine a Richelieu more French than that of Mr. Forrest, but we cannot well conceive one more full of dramatic passion, of sustained power, or of the mysterious magnetism that takes captive and sways at will the average human imagination.”
In all the last forty years of his life Forrest was an enthusiastic reader and student of Shakspeare. As his experience deepened and his observation enlarged and his familiarity with the works of this unrivalled genius became more thorough, his love and admiration rose into wondering reverence, and ended in boundless idolatry. His library teemed with books illustrative of the plays and poems of the immortal dramatist. He delighted to pore even over the commentators, and the original pages were his solace, his joy, and his worship. He relished the Comedies as much as he did the Tragedies, and in the Sonnets found inexhaustible beauties entwined with exquisite autobiographic revelations. Thus he came within the esoteric circle of readers. One of the latest schemes with which his heart pleased his fancy was a design to erect in some suitable place in his native city a group of statuary representing Shakspeare with Heminge and Condell, the two editors whose pious care collected and gave to posterity the matchless writings which otherwise might have been lost.
The personal feelings and the professional pride of Forrest were more bound up with his representations of Shakspearean characters than with any others. Of the eight Shakspearean rôles which he played, those of Shylock and Iago were early dropped, on account of his extreme distaste for the parts, and his unwillingness to bear the ideal hate and loathing they awakened in the spectators. But to the remaining six parts—Macbeth, Richard, Hamlet, Coriolanus, Othello, and Lear—he gave the most unwearied study, and in their representation showed the extremest elaboration of his art. He spent an incredible amount of time and pains in striving to grasp the true types and attributes of these characters, and in perfecting his portrayals of them according to the intentions of the author and the realities of nature. And he actually attained conceptions of them far more comprehensive, accurate, and distinct than he received credit for. His playing of them, too, was marked not only by a bold sweep of power and truth, but also by a keenness of insight, a delicate perception of fitness, a just distribution of light and shade, a felicity of transition and contrast, which were lost on the average of an audience. The knowledge that his finest points were not appreciated by many was one of his trials. In spite of this, however, his own conviction of the minute truthfulness and merit of his acting of Shakspearean characters, based on indefatigable study of nature and honest reproduction of what he saw, was the sweetest satisfaction of his professional life. He always wished his fame to stand or fall with a fair estimate of his renderings of these rôles. And one thing is to be affirmed of him, which the carelessness of miscellaneous assemblies superficially seeking amusement generally failed to appreciate, namely, that he felt profoundly the solemn lessons with which those characters were charged, and conscientiously endeavored to emphasize and enforce them, making his performance a panorama of living instruction, an illuminated revelation of human nature and human destiny, and not a mere series of piques of curiosity or traps for sensation.
In the ordinary dramatist or novelist a character is manufactured out of a formula, but in Shakspeare every great character is so deeply true that it suggests many formulas. In the highest ancient art situations vary with characters; in average modern art characters vary with situations; in Shakspeare both these results are shown as they are in real life, where sometimes characters are moulds for shaping situations, and sometimes situations are furnaces for testing characters. Of old, when life was deeper because less complex, the dramatized legend was the channel of a force or fate; there its interest lay. In Shakspeare the interest is not to see the supernatural force reflected blazing on a character, but rather to see it broken up by the faculties of the character, to see it refracted on his idiosyncrasies. This makes the task of the player more difficult, because he must seize the unity of the character in its relations with the plot, and keep it clear, however modulated in variety of manifestations. This Forrest did in all his Shakspearean impersonations. Though few who saw him act appreciated it, the distinctness with which he kept this in view was his crowning merit as an artist.