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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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