SECOND PROFESSIONAL TOUR IN GREAT BRITAIN, AND ITS
CONSEQUENCES.—THE MACREADY CONTROVERSY AND RIOT.
Few persons have any adequate idea of the prevalence, the force, the subtile windings of envy and jealousy among men, especially among those classes into whose life the principle of rivalry directly enters. The more patiently and profoundly any one studies the workings of these passions in his own soul, the larger will be his estimate of the part they play in society. And then, if his experience be such as to admit him to the secrets behind the scenes of social life, revealing to him the selfish collusions, plots, bribes, and wire-pullings concealed beneath the conventional appearances of openness and fair-play, his allowance for the operation of sinister forms of self-love will receive another important enlargement. No other class is so keenly beset by these malign suspicions and grudges, these base motives to depreciate and supplant one another, as those who are competitors for public admiration and applause. There are obvious reasons for this fact, and the fact itself is notorious and unquestionable. The annals of the stage in all its departments, tragic, comic, operatic, teem and reek with the animosities and cabals of those who have seemed to dislike one another in even proportion as they were favorites of the public. Forrest, with all his faults, was remarkably free from this mean and odious vice of professional envy. He never sought by hidden means or dishonorable arts of any kind either to gain laurels for himself or to tarnish or tear off the laurels of others. He was always ready to applaud merit in another, and always rejoiced generously to have his fellow-actors generously praised when they deserved it. When on the stage, he did not strive to monopolize everything, and add greatness and lustre to his own part by belittling and darkening the parts of others. He was not that kind of man. He had too
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 strong a sense of justice, too much pride and too much sympathy, to be capable of such action. The form his self-love took when excited in hostility was an angry resentment of injustice. The injustice might be fancied sometimes, but it was that which he identified with the offender, and hated accordingly. And his wrath manifested itself not in secret or overt measures of injury, not in a silent malignity circulating poisonously in the heart and brain, but in frank and passionate expression on the spot, in hot gestures, flashes of face, and strokes of voice. He vented his indignation extravagantly, like Boythorn, but elaborated no methods of doing harm, and was incapable, in his haughty self-respect, of purchasing a critic or consciously slandering a rival.
Garrick had such a prurient vanity, so morbid a dread of censure and love of praise, that he not only persuaded hostile critics not to attack him and friendly ones to write him up, but also freely used his own skilful pen for the same purpose. He wrote anonymous feeble condemnations of his own acting, and then replied to them anonymously with convincing force, thus inflaming the public interest. Voltaire is well known to have done the same thing. But these were both men of vanity, not of pride. Vanity hates rivals, and is monopolizing and revengeful, and a mother of all meannesses. Pride furiously resents attacks on itself, but does not spontaneously attack others. It asks but freedom and a fair field. Deny these, and it grows dangerous. When any one assailed or undertook to lower Daniel Webster, he was met with the most imperious repulse and transcendent scorn. The kindling wrath of the haughty giant was terrible. But the mere supposition that he could ever have stooped to offer a bribe to any one, or to curry favor of any one, is absurd. Forrest was a man of the same mould. The anger of such natures at any meddlesome attempt to disparage them has this moral ground, namely, it is their aroused instinct of spiritual self-preservation. The man of vulgar inferiority, in his coarse and complacent stolidity, cares little for the estimates others put on him. But the man conscious of a great superiority—a Webster or a Forrest—is keenly alive to whatever threatens it. His sphere of mental life enormously surpasses his sphere of physical life. The elemental rhythm of his being, which marks the key-note of his
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 constitution and destiny, has a more massive and sensitive swing in him than in average persons, and his feelings are intensely quick to drive back every hostile or demeaning valuation ideally shrivelling and lowering his rank. The consciousness of such a man is so vital and intelligent that it intuitively reports to him every sneer, derogatory judgment, or insulting look, as something intended to compress and hamper his being of its full volume and freedom of function. Thus Forrest could not meekly submit to be undervalued or snubbed; but he had no natural impulse to undervalue or snub others, or to imagine that they stood in his way and must be thrust aside.
The distinguished English actor, William Charles Macready, with whom circumstances brought the American into a professional rivalry which deepened into bitter enmity, was a man in every respect of a very different type. All his life he had an extreme distaste and a moral aversion to his profession; yet, by dint of incessant intellectual and mechanical drill, he placed himself for a term of years at its head in Great Britain. He was of vanity and irritability and egotistic exactingness all compact, insanely sensitive to neglect and censure, greedily avid of notice and admiration. He seemed scarcely to live in the direct goals of life for their own sakes, but to be absorbed in their secondary reflections in his own self-consciousness and in his imaginations of the opinions of other people concerning him and his affairs. A man of a morbidly introspective habit, a discontented observer, a spiritual dyspeptic, he coveted social preferment and shrank from the plebeian crowd,—
"And 'twas known
He sickened at all triumphs not his own."
This severe estimate is unwillingly recorded, but it is amply justified by his own memoirs of himself, posthumously published under the editorship of his literary executor. His diary so abounds in confessions and instances of bad temper, vanity, arrogance, angry jealousy, and rankling envy, that it serves as a pillory in which he exhibits himself as a candidate for contempt. In an article on "Macready's Reminiscences," the "Quarterly Review" (English) says, "Actors have an evil reputation for egotism and jealousy. No one ever lay more heavily under this
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 imputation than Mr. Macready while on the stage. We have heard the greatest comedian of his time say of him, 'Macready never could see any merit in any actor in his own line until he was either dead or off the stage.' The indictment was sweeping, but this book almost bears it out. In his own words, the echo of applause, unless given to himself, fills him 'with envious and vindictive feelings.' He abhors and despises his own profession. While still on the stage he says, 'It is an unhappy life. We start at every shadow of an actor, living in constant dread of being ousted from popularity by some new favorite.' After leaving the stage he says, 'I can now look my fellow-men, whatever their station, in the face and assert my equality.' And these things he says in the face of the fact that he owed all his consequence to his success as an actor."
Macready had played a successful series of engagements in the United States in 1843. He was well received, much praised, and carried home a handsome sum, though the profit was mostly his own, since the managers generally made little, and many of them actually lost by him. He was not popular with the multitude, but was favored by the selecter portion of the public. His enjoyment, too, of the eulogies written on his acting was a good deal dashed by the censure and detraction in which some of the writers for the press indulged. His social success, however, was unalloyed. He and Forrest up to this time were on good terms, terms of genuine kindness, though any strong friendship was out of the question between natures so incompatible. Forrest had honorably refused urgent invitations from several managers of theatres in different cities to play for them at the time Macready was acting in rival houses. The two or three weeks of his engagement in New York Macready spent in the house of Forrest, who received a very cordial letter of thanks from Mrs. Macready, in London, in acknowledgment of his generous attentions and hospitality to her absent husband.
There were at that time many Englishmen connected with the leading newspapers in this country. They naturally felt that the cause of Macready was their own, and expatiated on the beauties of his performances, not a little to the disparagement of the American player. On the other hand, the national feeling of other writers affirmed the greater merits of their own tragedian.
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 By natural affinity the English party drew to themselves the dilettante portion of the upper stratum of society, the so-called fashionable and aristocratic, while the general mass of the people were the hearty admirers of Forrest. The cold and measured style of the foreigner, his rigid mannerism and studied artificiality, were frequently spoken of in unfavorable contrast with the free enthusiasm, the breathing sincerity and impassioned power, of the native player. Forrest was called a rough jewel of the first water, who scorned to heighten his apparent value by false accompaniments; Macready a paste gem, polished and set off with every counterfeit gleam art could lend. The fire of the one was said to command honest throbs and tears; the icy glitter of the other, the dainty clappings of kid gloves. Such expressions plainly betray the spirit that was working. These comparisons—though there were enough of an opposite character, painting the Englishman as a king, Forrest as a boor—greatly irked and nettled Macready. And it was known that he went back to England with a good deal of soreness on this point.
When Forrest made his first appearance in London, at Covent Garden Theatre, a few months after the return of Macready from his American trip, the latter, as well as all his compeers, Charles Kemble, Charles Kean, and Vandenhoff, was without any London engagement. This circumstance of itself was calculated to quicken jealousy towards an intruding foreigner who threatened to attract much attention. However, as it is known that Forrest had nothing to do with the depreciating notices of Macready written in America, it is to be supposed that none of the English tragedians had any hand whatever in the scurrilous critiques of Forrest written in their country, or in the attempt made to break him down and drive him from the London stage. But such conspicuous personages always have in their train, among the meaner fry of dramatic critics and their hangers-on, plenty of henchmen who are eager to do anything in the fancied service of their lords, even to the discredit and against the will of those whose cause they affect to sustain.
On the evening of the 17th of February, 1845, as Forrest appeared in the character of Othello, he was saluted with a shower of hisses, proceeding from three solid bodies of claqueurs, packed in three different parts of the house. So often as the legitimate
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 audience attempted any expression of approval, it was overpowered by these organized emissaries. Beyond any doubt it was a systematic plan arranged in advance under the stimulus of national prejudice and personal interest, whoever its responsible authors were or were not. Forrest, though profoundly annoyed, gave no open recognition whatever of the outrage, but went steadily on with his performance to the end. The next evening, when he played Macbeth, the disturbances were more determined than before; but the large majority of the crowded assembly upheld the actor by their applause, and again he gave no heed to the interruptions and insults. The force of the conspiracy was broken, and gave no further overt signal, and the engagement was played through triumphantly. But Forrest left Covent Garden with a bitter and angry mind. He ruminated unforgivingly, as it was his nature to, on the injurious and unprovoked treatment he had received. For the hisses, suborned as they evidently were, did not constitute the worst abuse he had to bear. Three or four of the London newspapers, known as organs of special dramatic interests, most notably the organ of the bosom friend of Macready, noticed him and his performances in a tone of comment shamefully without warrant in truth. A few specimens will suffice to prove the justice of this statement:
"Mr. Forrest's Othello is a burlesque of the elder Kean's mannerisms, his air of depressed solemnity, prolonged pauses, and startling outbursts, with occasional imitations of Vandenhoff's deep-voiced utterance, varied by the Yankee nasal twang. His presence is not commanding, nor his deportment dignified; for the assumption of grandeur is not sustained by an imaginative feeling of nobleness. His passion is a violent effort of physical vehemence. He bullies Iago, and treats Desdemona with brutal ferocity. Even his tenderness is affected, and his smile is like the grin of a wolf showing his fangs. The killing of Desdemona was cold-blooded butchery."
"Our old friend Mr. Forrest afforded great amusement to the public by his performance of Macbeth. Indeed, our best comic actors do not often excite so great a quantity of mirth. The change from an inaudible murmur to a thunder of sound was enormous. But the grand feature was the combat, in which he stood scraping his sword against that of Macduff. We were at a
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 loss to know what this gesture meant, till an enlightened critic in the gallery shouted out, 'That's right! sharpen it!'"
"Of Mr. Edwin Forrest's coarse caricature of Lear we caught a glimpse that more than sufficed to show that the actor had no conception of the part. His Lear is a roaring pantaloon, with a vigorous totter, a head waving as indefatigably as a china image, and lungs of prodigious power. There only wanted the candlewick mustaches to complete the stage idea of a choleric despot in pantomime."
"Mr. Forrest's Richard the Third forms no exception to those murderous attacks upon Shakspeare which this gentleman has so ruthlessly made since his arrival amongst us. Since the time of that elder Forrest, who had such a hand in the murder of the princes in the Tower, we may not inappropriately take this last execution of Richard at Drury Lane to be
'The most arch deed of piteous massacre
That ever yet this land was guilty of.'
"We have tried very hard, since witnessing the performance, to discover the principle or intention of it; but to no effect. We remember some expressions, however, in an old comedy of Greene's, which may possibly suggest something to the purpose. 'How,' says Bubble, on finding himself dressed out very flauntingly indeed,—'how apparel makes a man respected! The very children in the street do adore me!' In almost every scene Mr. Forrest blazed forth in a new and most oppressively-gilded dress, for which he received precisely the kind of adoration that the simple Bubble adverts to."
But while the hostile papers characterized the change in the acting of Forrest from what it was on his earlier visit as an unaccountable deterioration, and censured him without reason, other journals took up his defence, praised his performances warmly, and affirmed that he had made great improvement. What the former stigmatized as a becoming dull, cold, and formal, the latter eulogized as an outgrowing of former extravagance and an acquiring of refinement, measure, and repose. As he went on playing, his opponents diminished in numbers and virulence, while his supporters increased, and at last he had conquered a real triumph. It will be well to quote a few of the notices which appeared in
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 friendly and impartial quarters in contrast to those of an opposite character already cited.
The Athenæum, in speaking of his opening night in Macbeth, said, "Mr. Forrest's former manner has received considerable modification and become mellowed with experience. He has learned that repose is the final grace of art. In the startling crises of the play his voice and action, both without effort, spring forth with crushing effect, not because he is an actor who chooses thus to manifest strength, but because he is a strong man, who simply exerts his excited energies. Macbeth, as he now performs it, is a calm and stately, almost a sculpturesque, piece of acting."
The Sun called his Lear a decisive triumph, and used the following words:
"Those contrasts, in which he delights, all tell well in the character of Lear, and they were used with excellent discrimination and great effect. There was something appalling in the bursts of fury with which that weak-bodied but intensely-impassioned old man was occasionally convulsed. The tottering gait, the palsied head, the feeble footsteps of old age were admirably given; but the deep voice and the manly contour of the figure showed that it was the old age of one who had been, in the heyday of life, 'every inch a king.' It was the old oak tottering to its fall, but the monarch of the forest still. The passion, too, was most artistically worked up to a climax, increasing in intensity from the scene in which he casts off Cordelia, through the scene in which he curses Goneril, until in the scene in which he becomes convinced of the treason of Goneril, when it became the desolating hurricane, destroying even reason itself. The scenes with Edgar were beautifully given. The different phases of the approach of madness were admirably marked. You could see, as it were, reason descending from her throne. The scene with Gloucester, too, was very fine; the biting apothegms which Shakspeare has in this scene put into the mouth of Lear were given with heartless, bitter, scornful, laughing sarcasm, which is perhaps one of the most unfailing characteristics of madness. The recognition of Cordelia was beautifully touching, and the lament over her dead body was given with an expression of heart-rending pathos of which we did not before imagine Mr. Forrest capable."
The praise given by the Times was still more emphatic:
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"Mr. Forrest's Lear is, from beginning to end, a very masterly, intelligent, and powerful performance, giving evidence of the most careful and attentive study of the author's meaning, steering clear, at the same time, of all fine-drawn subtleties and tricky point-making, and affording a well-grasped and evenly-sustained impersonation of that magnificent and soul stirring creation. He is certainly a better Lear than any our own stage has afforded for some time. Although, from Mr. Forrest's personal appearance, one would with difficulty imagine him capable of looking the old man, fourscore and upwards, all the attributes of age and feebleness, the palsied head and tottering walk, are admirably assumed, and are never lost sight of throughout the performance. At his first appearance he was received with considerable applause, which was repeatedly renewed as he continued with the scene,—commencing in a tone of kingly dignity and paternal affection, and, after Cordelia's reply, gradually giving place to the suppressed workings of his rage, which at last burst forth, at Kent's interference, into an ungovernable storm, and lit up his features with the most withering expression of fury. The curse at the end of the second act, which was pronounced by Mr. Forrest in one scream of rage, his body tremulously agitated with the violence of his emotion, brought down burst after burst of applause, which lasted considerably after the fall of the drop; and indeed an attempt was made to introduce that very unusual compliment when the play is still unfinished, a call for the actor. Such displays of physical power, although in this instance perfectly called for and necessary, are not, however, the chief or the best points on which the merits of Mr. Forrest's performance rest. The scene where he discovers Kent in the stocks, and is subsequently confronted with his two daughters, whose insults finally drive him off distracted, was acted with great play and variety of expression,—Mr. Forrest passing from one emotion to the other with childish fitfulness, and displaying a keen and discriminate perception. The mad scenes also in no less degree evinced the higher qualities of the actor. The declamatory bursts of passionate satire on the vices and weaknesses of the world, chaotically mingled with the incoherences of madness, had evidently been a subject of minute study, and were shaded with admirable nicety, the features constantly expressing the alternate
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 return of light and darkness on the old man's brain. In the last act, the touching simplicity and tenderness of his manner, when too exhausted for violent emotion, and the last burst of feverish energy over the body of Cordelia, were equally well conceived. If there be any fault to find, it was with the death, which was, perhaps, too minutely true in its physical details.
"Mr. Forrest was called for at the conclusion, and received enthusiastic marks of approbation."
The following extract is from a notice of his Othello by the John Bull:
"Mr. Forrest's former visit to this country must be fresh in the memory of theatrical amateurs. His talents were then generally admitted; but it was remarked that, though he possessed force, it was more of a physical than a moral kind, and that his action was more akin to melodrama than to tragedy. Since that time Mr. Forrest seems considerably changed, and for the better. His action has become more quiet, chaste, and subdued. It is now, perhaps, too careful and measured, and we rather missed something of his former rough and somewhat extravagant energy. We cannot help thinking that one or two of our contemporaries have relied rather on their remembrance of what Mr. Forrest was than their perception of what he is. On the whole, his representation of Othello well merited the immense applause it received."
Scores of notices like these in the best portion of the English press prove conclusively enough the malignity of writers who could denounce their American visitor as a theatrical impostor, worthy of nothing but contempt. The London Observer, for example, could find nothing better to say of the Metamora of Forrest than this: "His whole dramatic existence is a spasm of rage and hatred, and his whole stage-life one continuous series of murder, arson, and destruction to life and property in its most hideous form. What a pity he could not be let loose upon the drab-colored swindlers of Pennsylvania! Mr. Forrest did not indicate one of the characteristics of the American Indian except that wretched combination of sounds between a whine, a howl, and a gobble, which is designated the war-whoop by those who think more of poetry than of truth. Besides this sin of omission, he has to answer for those sins of commission which so sadly
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 deface his impersonation of every part he has appeared in, namely, that cool, nonchalant manner, that slow motion, and that ridiculous style of elocution, now whispering, now conversational, ever and anon screaming, roaring, bellowing, and raving, but never sustained, truthful, or dignified:
"'List to that voice! Did ever discord hear
Sounds so well fitted to her untuned ear?'"
The Age and Argus spoke of the most extraordinary contrast of the conduct of a part of the press towards Mr. Forrest to the treatment he received when he acted at Drury Lane in 1836, and said, "Many persons intimate that had he been now engaged there instead of appearing at the Princess's, the theatrical reporters would have been unable to discover a single fault in his performances,—managerial tact being competent to guide the honest opinions of most of these gentry. The 'Observer' endeavors to depict Mr. Forrest as a fool, an idiot, whose performance is simply ludicrous; albeit we have reason to believe the writer is the self-same person who seven years ago tried to write him up as a first-rate tragedian."
Forrest thought, from some direct proofs and a mass of circumstantial evidence, he could trace the fierce hostility with which he was met to its chief source in Macready. He may have been mistaken; but such was his belief. Macready, returning from America irritated towards him as a more than formidable rival before the people, was now idle, and had repeatedly failed to draw a remunerative audience in London. In fact, such was the temper of the man that when manager Bunn was nightly losing money by him, and, in order to make him break his engagement, purposely vexed him by casts which he disliked, he one night rushed off the stage in a fury, and, without a word of provocation, fell on Bunn, a much smaller and weaker man, and beat him so dreadfully that the poor manager lay in bed in frightful agony for two weeks. He was prosecuted, convicted, and forced to pay a hundred and fifty pounds damages. Macready was the intimate friend of the theatrical critic who abused Forrest the most unrelentingly. He was the intimate friend of Bulwer Lytton, who refused the request of Forrest to be allowed to appear in his two plays of "Richelieu" and "The Lady of Lyons."
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 He was the intimate friend of Mitchel, the manager of the English theatrical company in Paris, who rudely refused to see Forrest when he applied to him for an interview. This last circumstance was especially mortifying, as he had informed his friends before leaving home that he intended to perform in Paris, and flattering notices of him and of his purposed appearance among them had been published in the French press.[A] Macready himself had failed to make an impression in Paris, and the English company there was not pecuniarily successful. Forrest believed, whether correctly or not, that his rival had interfered to prevent his engagement there. Thus his antagonism was edged with a sharper hate.
[A]
"Forrest a reçu le surnom de Talma de l'Amérique, et ce surnom n'est point immérité. Forrest, de stature plus grande, plus athlétique que Talma, a avec lui une certaine ressemblance de tête. Il a étudié ce grand modèle auquel il a gardé une sorte de culte, et, dans son dernier voyage de Paris, en 1834, sa première visite fut à la tombe du grande artiste, sur laquelle il alla modestement et secrètement déposer une couronne. Il y a quelque choses de touchant et d'éloquent dans cet hommage apporté des rives lointaines du Nouveau-Monde à celui qui fut le roi du théâtre européen. Forrest a dans son répertoire certains rôles qui auront pour le public français un grand attrait de nouveauté. Tel est, par exemple, celui de l'Indien Metamora, qu'il rend avec tant d'énergie et de sauvage vérité. A son talent de premier ordre, Forrest a dû non-seulement une réputation sans rivale en ce pays, mais encore une très-belle fortune. Il est aussi haut placé comme homme que comme artiste. Il est l'un des tribuns les plus éloquents du parti démocrate, et il été un moment question de le nommer représentant du peuple au congrès. Il a donc tout espèce de titres à une réception brillante et digne de lui de la part du peuple parisien, si hospitalier à toutes les gloires. A sa titres nombreux à cette hospitalité, M. Forrest en a ajouté un encore, s'il est possible, par la manière honorable et cordiale dont il a parlé de la France dans le discours d'adieu qu'il a adressé l'autre jour aux habitans de Philadelphie. Voici la fin de ce speech: 'Pendant le voyage que je vais faire à l'étranger, je me propose de donner quelque représentations dans la capitale de la France, où je recevrai, je n'en doute pas, l'accueil le plus bienveillant et le plus cordial. Je crois que je ne hasarde rien en osant tant espérer. Je parle d'après ma connaissance personnelle du peuple français, au sein duquel je sais qu'un Américain est toujours bien venu. Un Américain se souvient avec gratitude que la France a été l'alliée, l'amie de son pays, dans la guerre de son indépendance, et la nation française n'a point oublié que c'est à l'exemple de l'Amérique qu'elle doit son initiation à la grande cause de la liberté humaine.'"
Meanwhile, the respective adherents of the rivals fanned the flames of the quarrel by their constant recriminations in the press, and kept the controversy spreading. Criticisms, accusations, rejoinders, flew to and fro between the assailants and the cham
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pions of each side. An extract from an article by one of the best-informed of the English friends of the American actor, though obviously written with a bias, yet throws light in several directions. He says, "There are half a dozen writers for the press in London who are recipients of constant attentions from the clique with which Macready lives, a clique of wits, artists, authors, and men-about-town, who hover in the outskirts of high life and form a barrier stratum between the lesser aristocracy and the critics. The critics support upward, the clique transmit notice downward, and Macready controls this clique by the consequence he has as favored by the noblemen who play the patron to his profession. Forrest is a true republican, and cannot be a courtier,—
'He would not flatter Neptune for his trident.'
He neglects the finical rules and scorns to observe the demands of the courtly circles which arrogate all superiority to themselves." Under these circumstances a growing dislike and a final collision between the men were inevitable by the logic of human nature.
Thus the quarrel went on, nor was confined to the scene of combat. Its echoes rolled back to America, growing as they went, and adding, somewhat extravagantly, to their individual import a national significance. A long article appeared in the "Democratic Review," entitled "Mr. Forrest's Second Reception in England." A portion of it will be found still to possess interest and suggestiveness:
"It is the fortune of this country to send over the water from time to time men who are palpable and obvious embodiments of its spirit, and who do not fail, therefore, to stir the elements among which they are cast.
"Daniel Webster was one of these; and we all recollect how his motions were watched, his words chronicled, his looks at court, in Parliament, and at agricultural dinners taken down. They felt that he was a genuine piece of the country, and, in presence of his oak-ribbed strength of person and understanding, acknowledged that he belonged to the land he came from. Mr. Forrest is another of these; quite as good in his way; struck out of the very heart of the soil, and vindicating himself too clearly to be misunderstood, as a creature of its institutions, habits, and daily life. His biography is a chapter in the life of the country; and
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 taking him at the start, as he appears on the Bowery stage (a rugged, heady, self-cultured mass of strength and energy thrown down in the most characteristic spot in the American metropolis), and running on with him through all his career, in the course of which it became necessary for him more than once to take society by the collar, down to the day when, in his brass-buttoned coat, he set out for this second expedition to Europe, we shall find him American every inch, the growth of the place, and well entitled to make a stir among the smooth proprieties of the Princess's Theatre. And he has done so. When, after an absence of something like seven years, he heaves up his sturdy bulk against the foot-lights on the English house, the audience know him at once to be genuine: but lurking in the edges of the place are certain sharp-eyed gentlemen, who in the very teeth of the unquestionable force before them, massive, irregular it may be, discover that Mr. Forrest has lapsed from his early manner, and has subsided into tameness and effeminacy!
"Mr. Forrest's English position at this moment is, in our view, just what his true friends would desire. He is carrying his audiences with him; and has from the press just the amount of resistance required to rouse him to new efforts, and to bring out the whole depth and force of New-Worldism in him, to play an engagement such as he has never played before, and to measure himself in assured strength by the side of the head of the English school.
"Mr. Macready, an admirable performer, succeeds by subduing all of the man within him; because he ceases, in the fulfilment of his function as an actor, to have any fellowship with the beatings and turmoils and agitations of the heart. He is classical in spirit, in look, and action.
"It is because he is a man of large heart, and does not forget it in all the mazes of the stage, that Mr. Forrest has sway with the house. He never loses sight of the belief that it is he, a man, with men before him, who treads the boards, and asks for tears, and sobs, and answers of troubled hearts. It is no painted shadow you see in Forrest; no piece of costume; no sword or buckler moving along the line of light as in a procession; but a man, there to do his four hours' work; it may be sturdily, and with great outlay of muscular power, but with a big heart;
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 and if you fail to be moved, you may reasonably doubt whether sophistication has not taken the soul out of you, and left you free to offer yourself for a show-case or a clothier's dummy.
"We take an interest in Mr. Forrest because we see in him elemental qualities characteristic of the country, and we feel therefore any slight put upon him as, in its essence, a wound directed at the country itself. He carries with him into action, upon the stage, qualities that are true to the time and place of his origin. Whether rugged or refined, he is upon a large scale, expansive, bold, gothic in his style; and it is not, therefore, matter of wonder that he should have encountered, both at home and abroad, the hostility of simpering elegance and dainty imbecility."
Concluding his London engagement, Forrest proceeded to the principal cities of the United Kingdom and appeared in his leading rôles, and was uniformly greeted with full houses and unstinted applause. The tone of the press towards him was everywhere highly flattering. At Sheffield in particular his success was great. The dramatic company were as much pleased with him as the audiences were, and took occasion on his closing night to express their sentiment in a manner which gratified him deeply. After the tragedy of Othello, Mr. G. V. Brooke, who had sustained the part of Iago, invited Forrest to meet the theatrical company in the green-room, and, entirely to his surprise, addressed him thus:
"Sir,—A most pleasing duty has devolved upon me, in being deputed by my brother actors to express the gratification and delight we have experienced in witnessing your powerful talent as an actor, and your courteous and gentlemanly bearing to your brother professors of the sock and buskin. I am obliged to be very brief in my remarks, as some of the gentlemen around me will have, in a very short time, to be on duty at the post of honor. Allow me, then, sir, before you return to the land of your birth, of which you are a brilliant ornament, to present you, in the name of myself and brother actors, with this small testimonial of our esteem, and to wish that health and prosperity may attend you and Mrs. Forrest, whatever part of the globe it may be your lot to visit."
The following was the inscription on the testimonial, which was a very elegant silver snuff-box: "Presented to Edwin For
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rest, Esq., by the members of the Sheffield Theatrical Company, as a mark of their esteem for him as an Actor and a Man. January 30, 1846."
Forrest replied in the following words:
"I accept this gratifying token of the kind feeling entertained towards me by the members of this company with mingled sentiments of pride and satisfaction. Believe me, there is no praise that could be awarded to my professional exertions so dear to me as that which is offered by my brother actors; for they who, through years of toil, have labored up the steep and thorny pathway which leads to eminence in our laborious art, can alone appreciate the difficulties that must be encountered and overcome. I shall ever look back with sincerest pleasure to my intercourse with the Sheffield dramatic corps, to whose uniform kindness I am greatly indebted for their prompt and cordial co-operation in all the professional duties which we have been called upon to perform together. Both here and at Manchester I have found you always ready and willing to second my views, and any request made to you at rehearsal in the morning you have never failed to perform with alacrity and promptitude at night.
"You have in the kindest terms alluded to the courtesy which you have been pleased to say has characterized my conduct towards all the members of the company. In reply, I can only say, you have, each and all, met me with an entirely correspondent feeling, and I thank you from my heart. These same courtesies shown to one another are productive of a vast amount of good. I cannot but remember that I, too, have gone through the 'rough brake,' that I, too, began the profession in its humblest walks; and I have not forgotten the pleasing and inspiring emotions that were awakened in my youthful breast when I have received a kind word, or an approving smile, from those who were 'older and better soldiers' than myself. And at the same time my experience has taught me that there is no one engaged in the art, be he ever so humble, but some advantage may be gleaned from his observations. As I knew not until this moment of your kind intention to present me with this flattering testimonial, I am wholly unprepared to thank you as I ought. There are feelings too deep to be expressed in words; and such are my feelings now.
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"Once more, I thank you: and permit me to add that, should any here, by life's changing scene, be 'discovered' in my country, I shall take sincerest pleasure in promoting his views to the best of my ability."
While at Sheffield, Forrest attended a banquet given in honor of the birthday of Robert Burns. In response to a toast proposed by the chairman, "The health of Mr. Edwin Forrest, and Success to the Drama in America," he said some of his earliest human and literary memories were linked together with the story of Scotland and the genius of Burns. His own father had left the Scottish hills to seek his fortune in an American city. His earliest tutor, who had taken a generous interest in him in his opening boyhood, and taught him to recite some of the finest of the poems of Burns, was another Scottish emigrant,—Wilson the ornithologist. After a few other words, he closed by reciting the eloquent poem of his friend Fitz-Greene Halleck in memory of Burns, which was received with vociferous cheering:
"Praise to the Bard! His words are driven,
Like flower-seeds by the far winds sown,
Where'er beneath the arch of heaven
The birds of fame have flown.
"Such graves as his are pilgrim-shrines,
Shrines to no code or creed confined,—
The Delphian vales, the Palestines,
The Meccas of the mind."
The Manchester Guardian published a critique on the Spartacus of Forrest quite remarkable for its intelligent discrimination and choice diction. As a description it is very just, but utterly mistaken in its apparent implication that the spiritual should be made more distinctly superior to the physical in this part. The writer seems not to have remembered that Forrest was impersonating a semi-barbaric gladiator, in whom, when under supreme excitement, the animal must predominate over the intellectual. It would be false to nature to depict in such a man under such circumstances ideality governing sense, reason calmly curbing passion. It would be as absurd as to give a pugilist the mental splendor and majesty of a Pericles. The way in which the critic paints Forrest as representing Spartacus is exactly the way in
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 which alone the character could be represented without a gross violation of truth:
"This is, perhaps, of all others, the character in which Mr. Forrest most excels; nay, stands alone. It implies and demands great physical strength, a man of herculean mould, and we doubt if ever we shall again look upon so fine a model of the lionhearted Thracian. That he is a barbarian, too, is in favor of the actor; for what would be blemishes in the polished Greek or haughty Roman are in keeping with the rude, untutored nature of the Thracian mountaineer. Since his former visit, Mr. Forrest has certainly improved, especially in the less showy passages of the play; and we admire him most in the quiet asides, the quick and clear directions as to the disposition of his troops, and any other portions of the dialogue that do not demand great emotion. In these he is natural and truthful. As before, when he comes to the delineation of the deeper passions of our nature, it is by energetic muscular action, and by the fierce shoutings or hoarse raving of his voice, that he conveys the idea,—not by any of the nicer touches of mental discrimination and expression. This course—an original one, in which perhaps he stands supreme—is most effective, or rather least defective, in this play, for the reason already given: in it his acting is of a high, but certainly not of the highest, order. It is the material seeking to usurp the throne of the ideal; physical force clutching at the sceptre of the intellectual; with what success the immutable laws of matter and mind will now, as ever, pronounce, in their irreversible decrees. Still, it is an extraordinary histrionic picture, which all lovers of the drama should contemplate. It is not a thing to be laughed at or sneered down. Power there is; at times great mental, as well as physical, power; but in the thrilling situations of the piece, that which should be the slave becomes the master; and energy of body reigns supreme over subordinated intellectual expression and mental dignity. He is the Hercules, or the Polyphemus, not the high-souled hero; and, in his fury, the raging animal rather than the goaded and distracted man."
In Ireland, the acting of Forrest, the magnetic power of his personality, the patriotic sentiments and stirring invectives against tyranny with which his Spartacus and Cade abounded, conspired
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 to arouse a wild enthusiasm in his passionate and imaginative audiences, and his appearances at Cork, Belfast, Dublin, were so many ovations. The effect of his Jack Cade may be seen in this notice from the Cork Examiner:
"The object of the writer seems to be to rescue Cade from the defamation of courtly chroniclers and historians, who, either imbued with an aristocratic indifference to the wrongs of an oppressed people, or writing for their oppressors, misrepresented the motives and ridiculed the power of the Kentish rebel. In this the author has succeeded; for he flings round the shoulders of the rustic the garb of the patriot, and fills his soul not only with a deep and thorough hatred of the oppressors who ground the people to the earth and held them down in bondage, but breathes into his every thought a passionate and beautiful longing after liberty. The powerful representation of such a play must produce a corresponding impression upon any audience; how strong its appeal to the sympathies of an Irish audience, may be better imagined than described. It abounds with passionate appeals to liberty, withering denunciations of oppression, and stinging sarcasms, unveiling at a glance the narrow foundation upon which class-tyranny bases its power and usurpation. In fact, from beginning to end, it is an animated appeal to the best sympathies of MAN, stirring him to the depths of his nature, as with a trumpet's blast.
"An objection might be made to some passages, that they are too declamatory; but this is rather praise to the discrimination and fidelity of the author to nature, than a reproach. When a leader has to stir men's blood, to make their strong hearts throb, he uses not the 'set phrase of peace,'—he does not ratiocinate like a philosopher, insinuate like a pleader; he talks like a trumpet, with tongue of fire and with words of impassioned eloquence. Sufferings, wrongs, indignities, dishonor to gray hairs and outrage to tender virginhood, are not to be tamely told of, but painted with vivid imagination until the heart again feels its anguish and the brow burns at the wrong. This is the direct avenue to men's hearts,—the only way to rouse them to desperate action; and hence the justice of Cade's declamation, when addressing the crushed bondmen of Kent.
"Mr. Forrest's Aylmere had nothing in it of the actor's trick,—it
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 was not acting. He seemed thoroughly and entirely to identify himself with the struggles of an enslaved people; and as every spirit-stirring sentence was dashed off with the energy of a man in earnest it seemed as if it had its birthplace in the heart rather than in the conceiving brain. One passage, in which he calls down fierce imprecations on the head of Lord Say, the torturer of his aged father and the coward murderer of his widowed mother, was magnificently pronounced by Mr. Forrest, amidst thunders of applause, as if the sympathy of the audience ratified and sanctified the curse of the avenging son. Such is the power of true genius!—such the force of passion, when legitimate and earnest!"
At Cork he received the compliments of a poet in the happy lines that follow:
"O'er the rough mass the Grecian sculptor bent,
And, as his chisel shaped the yielding stone,
Rising, the world-enchanting Venus shone,
And stood in youth and grace and beauty blent.
Thus o'er each noble speaking lineament
Of thy fine face, thy genius, Forrest, shines,
And paints the picture in perfection's lines.
With plastic skill Prometheus formed the clay;
Yet soul was wanting in the image cold
Till through its frame was shed life's glorious ray
And fire immortal lit the mindless mould.
Thus, while thy lips the poet's words unfold,
With the rough ore of thought thy fancies play,
And, with a Midas power, turn all they touch to gold!"
On his farewell night he acted Macbeth to a brilliant house. As the drop-scene fell at the close of the last act, deafening shouts re-echoed through the house, with calls for Forrest, which, on his coming in front of the curtain to acknowledge them, were renewed and kept up for a considerable time, the people rising en masse, and paying the most marked tribute of their estimation. On silence being restored, he said,—
"Ladies and Gentlemen,—Exhausted as I must necessarily feel, owing to the character I have sustained, I cannot find language adequate to express the sentiments that fill my bosom, neither am I able to return suitable acknowledgments for the kindness which you are pleased to evince towards me. I beg
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 to thank you sincerely for the cordiality and courtesy which I have experienced from the hospitable citizens of Cork during my short sojourn in this 'beautiful city.' Long shall I remember it, and in returning to my native country I shall bear with me the grateful recollection of that courtesy and hospitality; and, when there, I shall often think with pleasure and pride on the flattering reception you were pleased to honor me with. I wish you all adieu, and hope that the dark cloud that overhangs this fair country will soon pass away; that a happier and brighter day will beam on her, and that Ireland and her people will long enjoy the prosperity and happiness they are so eminently entitled to, and which are so much to be desired."
He was quite as triumphant in Dublin as in Cork. The notice of his opening in Othello shows this:
"Mr. Forrest, the American tragedian, made his first appearance on Monday night, as Othello. The selection of the character was, for an actor of great power, most judicious; for in all the glorious range of Shakspeare's immortal plays there is not one so powerful in its appeal to the sympathies of our nature, so masterly in its anatomy of the human heart, or so highly-wrought and yet so beautiful a picture of passion,—nor, for the actor, is there any character requiring more delicacy of perception and personation in its details, nor so much of terrible energy of the wrung heart and stormy soul in its bursts of frenzied passion. An actor without a heart to feel and an energy to express the fearful passion of the gallant Moor, whose free and open nature was craftily abused to madness, could give no idea of the character, and must needs leave the audience as cold and unmoved as himself.
"But, to one glowing with the divine fire of genius, that wonderful electricity by which the inmost nature of man is moved, and masses are swayed as if by the wand of an enchanter, Othello is a noble character for the display of his power,—a resistless spell, by which the eye and ear and soul of the audience are held and moved and swayed. We must admit that such an actor is Mr. Forrest, and that such is the effect which his personation of the loving, tender, gentle, duped, abused, maddened Moor produced upon us, and seemed to produce upon his audience. From the rising to the falling of the curtain the house was hushed in
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 stilled, almost breathless, attention; and it was not until stirred by some electrifying burst of passion that the pent-up feeling of his listeners vented itself in such applause, such recognition of the justness and naturalness of the passion, as man gives to man in real life, and when, as it were, the interests of the actor and the spectators are one. This species of involuntary homage to the genius of his personation arose not only from the power which a consummate actor acquires over the feelings of others, but from the entire absence of all those contemptible tricks of the stage, those affectations of originality, of individuality,—that is, stamping the counterfeit manner of the actor upon the sterling ore of the author,—those false readings and exaggerated declamations, which call down injudicious but degrading approbation. Mr. Forrest is free from all these defects. And yet his 'reading' is singularly telling. Not one passage—nay, not one word—of the vivid, picturesque, nervous, wondrous eloquence of the poet is lost upon the audience. What might puzzle in the closet is transparent on the stage. The quaint form in which the divine philosophy of Shakspeare clothes itself seems, by his reading, its fit and apposite garb,—as if none other could so well indicate its keen and subtile meaning. And all this is done without aiming at 'points,' or striving after 'effects.' Then his tenderness is tenderness—his passion, passion. Possessing a noble voice, running from the richest base to the sweetest tenor,—if we might so describe it,—full of flexibility, and capable of every modulation, from the hurricane of savage fury to the melting tenderness of love, Mr. Forrest can express all those varied and oftentimes opposite emotions which agitate our nature, and which Shakspeare, as its most masterly delineator, represents in all its phases in his immortal creations, and not least in Othello. We were much struck with the beautiful fidelity with which Mr. Forrest's look, gesture, tone, and manner painted the gradual growth of jealousy, from the first faint, vague doubt, to its full and terrible confirmation, and the change of Othello's nature, from the frank soldier and th............