CORIOLANUS.
Not many dramatic contrasts are wider than that between the complex imaginative character of the melancholy Hamlet, spontaneously betaking himself to speculation, and the simple passionate character of the proud Coriolanus, instinctively rushing to action. There was much in the build and soul of Forrest that closely resembled the haughty patrician, and he was drawn to the part by a liking for it accordant with his inherent fitness for it. For several years he played it a great deal and produced a strong sensation in it. So thoroughly suited were he and the part for each other, so pervasive and genuine was the identification of his personal quality with the ideal picture, that his most intimate friend, and the gifted artist chosen for the work, selected this as the most appropriate representative character for his portrait-statue in marble.
The features and contour of the honest, imperious, fiery, scornful, and heroic Coriolanus, as impersonated by Forrest with immense solidity and distinctness, were simple but grand in their colossal and unwavering relief. Kemble had been celebrated in this rôle. He played it as if he were a symmetrical statue cut out of cold steel and set in motion by some precise mechanical action. Forrest added to this a blood that seemed to flame through him and a voice whose ponderous syllables pulsated with fire. Stern virtue, ambition, deep tenderness, magnanimity, transcendent daring and pride and scorn,—the man as soldier and hero in uncorrupt sincerity and haughty defiance of everything wrong or mean,—these were the favorite attributes which Forrest met in Coriolanus, and absorbed as by an electric affinity, and made the people recognize with applauding enthusiasm. He might well utter as his own the words of his part to Volumnia,—
“Would you have me
False to my nature? Rather say, I play
The man I am.”
What unconsciously delighted Forrest in Coriolanus, and what he represented with consummate felicity and force of nature, was that his aristocracy was of the true democratic type; that is, it rested on a consciousness of intrinsic personal worth and superiority, not on conventional privilege and prescription. He loathed and launched his scorching invectives against the commonalty not because they were plebeians and he was a patrician, but because of the revolting opposition of their baseness to his loftiness, of their sycophancy to his pride, of their treacherous fickleness to his adamantine steadfastness. As an antique Roman, he had the resentful haughtiness of his social caste, but morally as an individual his disdain and sarcasm were based on the contrast of intrinsically noble qualities in himself to the contemptible qualities he saw predominating in those beneath him. And although this is far removed from the beautiful bearing of a spiritually purified and perfected manhood, yet there is in it a certain relative historical justification, utility, and even glory, entirely congenial to the honest vernacular fervor of Forrest.
Coriolanus, in his utter loathing for the arts of the demagogue, goes to the other extreme, and makes the people hate him because, as they say, “For the services he has done he pays himself with being proud.” At his first appearance in the play he cries to the citizens, with scathing contempt,—
“What’s the matter, you dissentient rogues,
That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion,
Make yourselves scabs?
He that trusts to you,
Where he should find you lions, finds you hares;
Where foxes, geese. You are no surer, no,
Than is the coal of fire upon the ice,
Or hailstone in the sun. Hang ye! Trust ye?
With every minute you do change a mind;
And call him noble that was now your hate;
Him vile, that was your garland.”
As his constancy despises their unstableness, so his audacious courage detests their cowardice:
“Now put your shields before your hearts, and fight
With hearts more proof than shields.”
Seeing them driven back by the Volsces, he exclaims,—
“You souls of geese
That bear the shapes of men, how have you run
From slaves that apes would beat? Pluto and hell!
All hurt behind; backs red, and faces pale
With flight and agued fear! Mend, and charge home,
Or, by the fires of heaven, I’ll leave the foe
And make my wars on you.”
In all these speeches the measureless contempt, the blasting irony, the huge moral chasm separating the haughty speaker from the cowering rabble, were deeply relished by Forrest, and received an expression in his bearing, look, and tone, everyway befitting their intensity and their dimensions. Particularly in the reply to Sicinius,—
“Shall remain!
Hear you this Triton of the minnows? Mark you
His absolute ‘shall’?”—
the width of the gamut of the ironical circumflexes gave one an enlarged idea of the capacity of the human voice to express contempt. And when his disdain to beg the votes of the people and his mocking gibes at them had aggravated them to pronounce his banishment, his superhuman expression of scornful wrath no witness could ever forget:
“You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o’ the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you.”
His eyes flashed, his form lifted to its loftiest altitude, and the words were driven home concentrated into hissing bolts. As the enraged mob pressed yelping at his heels, he turned, and with marvellous simplicity of purpose calmly looked them reeling backwards, his single sphere swallowing all theirs and swaying them helplessly at his magnetic will.
His farewell, when “the beast with many heads had butted him away,” was a noble example of manly tenderness and dignity, all the more pathetic from the self-control which masked his pain in a smiling aspect:
“Thou old and true Menenius,
Thy tears are salter than a younger man’s,
And venomous to thine eyes. I’ll do well yet.
Come, my sweet wife, my dearest mother, and
My friends of noble touch, when I am forth,
Bid me farewell, and smile. I pray you, come.
While I remain above the ground, you shall
Hear from me still.”
But his most charming and delightful piece of acting in the whole play was the interview with his family on his return with Aufidius and the conquering Volscians before the gates of Rome. The swift-recurring struggle and alternation of feeling between the opposite extremes of intense natural affection and revengeful tenacity of pride were painted in all the vivid lineaments of truth. Fixed in the frozen pomp of his power and his purpose, he soliloquizes,—
“My wife comes foremost, then the honored mould
Wherein this trunk was framed, and in her hand
The grandchild to her blood. But out, affection!
All bond and privilege of nature, break!
Let it be virtuous to be obstinate.
What is that curt’sy worth, or those doves’ eyes,
Which can make gods forsworn? I melt and am not
Of stronger earth than others. My mother bows;
As if Olympus to a molehill should
In supplication nod; and my young boy
Hath an aspect of intercession, which
Great nature cries, ‘Deny not.’ Let the Volsces
Plough Rome and harrow Italy; I’ll never
Be such a gosling to obey instinct; but stand
As if a man were author of himself
And knew no other kin.”
But when Virgilia fixed her eyes on him and said, “My lord and husband!” his ice flowed quite away, and the exquisite thoughts which followed were vibrated on the vocal chords as if not his lungs but his heart supplied the voice:
“Like a dull actor now,
I have forgot my part, and I am out,
Even to a full disgrace. Best of my flesh,
Forgive my tyranny; but do not say,
For that, ‘Forgive our Romans.’ O, a kiss
Long as my exile, sweet as my revenge!
Now, by the jealous queen of heaven, that kiss
I carried from thee, dear; and my true lip
Hath virgined it e’er since. You gods! I prate,
And the most noble mother of the world
Leave unsaluted. Sink, my knee, i’ the earth;
Of thy deep duty more impression show
Than that of common sons.”
Yielding to the prayers of Volumnia, he took her hand with tender reverence, and said, with upturned look and deprecating tone,—
“O, mother, mother!
What have you done? Behold, the heavens do ope,
The gods look down, and this unnatural scene
They laugh at.”
From the solemn reverence of this scene the change was wonderful to the frenzied violence of untamable anger and scorn with which he broke on Aufidius, who had called him “a boy of tears:”
“Measureless liar, thou hast made my heart
Too great for what contains it. Boy! O slave!
Cut me to pieces, Volsces; men and lads,
Stain all your edges on me. Boy! False hound!
If you have writ your annals true, ’tis there,
That, like an eagle in a dovecote, I
Fluttered your Volsces in Corioli:
Alone I did it. Boy!”
The signalizing memorable mark of the Coriolanus impersonated by Forrest was the gigantic grandeur of his scale of being and consciousness. He revealed this in his stand and port and moving and look and voice. The manner in which he did it was no result of critical analysis, but was intuitive with him, given to him by nature and inspiration. He exhibited a gravitating solidity of person, a length of lines, a slowness of curves, an immensity of orbit, a reverberating sonority of tone, which illustrated the man who, as Menenius said, “wanted nothing of a god but eternity, and a heaven to throne in.” They went far to justify the amazing descriptions given in the play itself of the impressions produced by him on those who approached him.
“Being moved, he will not spare to gird the gods.
Marked you his lip, and eyes?”
“Who is yonder?
O gods! he has the stand of Marcius.”
“The shepherd knows not thunder from a tabor
More than I know the sound of Marcius’ tongue
From every meaner man.”
“Marcius,
A carbuncle entire, as big as thou art,
Were not so rich a jewel. Thou art a soldier
Even to Cato’s wish, not fierce and terrible
Only in strokes; but, with thy grim looks, and
The thunder-like percussion of thy sounds,
Thou mak’st thine enemies shake, as if the world
Were feverous and did tremble.”
“The man I speak of cannot in the world
Be singly counterpoised.”
When, after his peerless feats in battle, the army and its leaders would idolize him with praises, crown him with garlands, and load him with spoils, he felt his deeds to be their own sufficient pay, and waved all the rewards peremptorily aside with a mien as imposing as if some god
“Were slily crept into his human powers
And gave him noble posture.”
Entering the capital in triumph, the vast and steady imperiality of his attitude, the tremendous weight of his slightest inclination, as though the whole earth were the pedestal-slab on which he stood, drew and fascinated all gaze.
“Matrons flung gloves,
Ladies and maids their scarfs and handkerchiefs,
Upon him as he passed; the nobles bended
As to Jove’s statue; and the commons made
A shower and thunder with their caps and shouts.”
The rare and exalted use of such acting as this is that it invites the audience to lift their eyes above the vulgar pettinesses to which they are accustomed and extend their souls with a superior conception of the dignity of human nature and of the mysterious meanings latent in it.
The Coriolanus of Forrest was a marble apotheosis of heroic strength, pride, and scorn. His moral glory was that he asserted himself on the solid grounds of conscious truth, justice, and merit, and not, as popular demagogues and the selfish members of the patrician class do, on hollow grounds of assumption, trickery, and spoliating fraud. There was great beauty, too, in his reverential love for his mother, his tender love for his wife, his hearty love for his friend, and his magnanimous incapacity for any recognized littleness of soul or of deed. The weight and might of his spirit could give away victories and confer favors, but could not steal a laurel or endure flattery. His fatal defect was that he did not know the spirit of forgiveness, and was utterly incompetent to self-renunciation. He had the repulsive and fatal fault of a crude, harsh, revengeful temper, that clothed his gigantic indirect egotism in the glorifying disguise of justice and sacrificed even his country to his personal passion. Just and true at the roots, his virtues grew insane from pride. Wrath destroyed his equilibrium, and belched his grandeur and his life away in incontinent insolence of expression. Like all the favorite characters of Forrest, however, he was no starveling fed on verbality and ceremony, no pygmy imitator or empty conformist, but one who lived in rich power from his own original centres and let his qualities honestly out with democratic sincerity of self-assertion. There is indeed a royal lesson in what he says:
“Should we in all things do what custom wills,
The dust on antique time would lie unswept,
And mountainous error be too highly heaped
For truth to o’er-peer.”
Still, self-will ought abnegatingly to give way in docile and disinterested devotion to the public good. The great, strong, fearless man should conquer himself, render his pride impersonal, renounce revenge for individual slights or wrongs, and, instead of despising and insulting the plebeian multitude, labor to abate their vices, remove their errors, guide their efforts, and build their virtues into a fabric of popular freedom and happiness. Then the selfish, passional ideal of the past would give way to the rational, social ideal which is to redeem the future. For, as a general rule thus far in the history of the world, power, both private and public, in the proportion of its degree, has been complacent instead of sympathetic, despotic instead of helpful, indulging its own passions, despising the needs of others, filling civilization itself with the spirit of moral murder. The chief characters of Shakspeare embody this pagan ideal. Is there not a Christian ideal, long since divinely born, but still waiting to be nurtured to full growth, to be illustrated by dramatic genius, and to be glorified in universal realization?