Jas Bannister
EDWIN FORREST AS
METAMORA.
The famous prize-play of Metamora, by John Augustus Stone, is not a work of much genius, and if published would have no literary rank; yet it had all that was essential, in the striking merit of furnishing the genius of the enactor of its leading character the conditions for compassing a popular success of the most remarkable description. With his performance of Metamora, Forrest impressed the masses of the American people in a degree rarely precedented, and won a continental celebrity full of idiomatic enthusiasm. Of course there were good reasons for this warm favor from the surrendered many, despite the disdain of the squeamish few, who can generally enjoy nothing, only conceitedly criticise everything.
In the first place, the subject was indigenous, and thus came home to the American heart and curiosity. In the imagination of our people for more than a century the race of the aborigines of the land were clothed with romantic associations and regretted with a sort of national remorse. The disinterestedness of the fancy and the soul, relieved from all proximity to their squalor, ferocity, and vice, with a beautiful pity lamented their wrongs, their evanescence, and the rapid disappearance of the wigwam and papoose and war-dance and canoe of the painted tribes from hill and glen and wood and lake. In this wide-spread sentimental interest the play took hold of powerful chords. Although prosaic research and experience have so largely divested the character of the Indian of its old romance and made his actual presence a nuisance, nevertheless so long as the memories of our primeval settlements and of our bloody and adventurous frontier traditions shall live, so long will the American Indian be remembered with a sigh as the lost human poetry of the nature wherein he was cradled.
Furthermore, the play was stocked with fresh suggestions and images of nature,—a store-house of those simple metaphors drawn direct from the great objects of the universe, full of a rude pathos and sublimity, and so natural to the genius of Indian chief and orator in their talk. There was a piquance of novelty and a refreshing charm to people—hived in towns and cities, and, stifled with artificial customs, almost oblivious of any direct contact of their senses with the solemn elementary phenomena of the surrounding universe—in hearing Metamora speak, in a voice that echoed and painted them, of the woods, the winds, the sun, the cliffs, the torrents, the lakes, the sea, the stars, the thunder, the meadows and the clouds, the wild animals and the singing birds. The meaning of the words so fitly intoned by the player awoke in the nerves of the audience dim reminiscences of ancestral experiences reverberating out of far ages forgotten long ago, and they were bound by a spell themselves understood not.
And then there was the interest of a style of character and life, of an idealized historic picture of a vanished form of human nature and society, all whose elements stood in strange and fascinating contrast with the personal experience of the beholders. It was the first time the American Indian had ever been dramatized and put on the stage; and this was done in a theme based on one of the romantic episodes of his history embodied in a chieftain of tragic greatness.
In a production of art whose subject and materials lie in the domain of unreclaimed nature, genius is not, indeed, permitted to falsify any fundamental principle or fact, but is free to modify and add. Otherwise, the creative function of art is gone, and only imitation left. In this respect of combined truth and originality, the acted Metamora of Forrest was a wonder never surpassed, in its own kind, in the long story of the stage. He appeared the kingly incarnation of the spirit of the scene, both of the outward landscape and of the taciturn tribe that peopled it with their gliding shapes. He appeared the human lord of the dark wood and the rocky shore, and the natural ruler of their untutored tenants; the soul of the eloquent recital, the noble appeal, and the fiery harangue; the embodiment of a rude magnanimity, a deep domestic love, an unquivering courage and fortitude, an instinctive patriotism and sense of justice, and a relentless revenge. He appeared, too, the votary of a superstition of singular attractiveness, blooming with the native wild-flowers of the human mind, a faith so unaffected and open that it seemed to be read by the stars of the Great Spirit as they looked down on the lone Indian kneeling by the mound of his fathers, the hunted patriot lying in ambush for his foes. Through all this physically-realized, wondrous portraiture of the poetic, the tender, the noble, the awful, the reverential, was mingled the glare of the crouching tiger. It was thus that Forrest in his great creation of Metamora rendered all that there was in the naturalistic poem of Indian life, to all that there was justly adding an infusion of that ideal quality by which art appeals to the nobler feelings of admiration and sympathy in preference to the meaner ones of hate and scorn. In this performance he elaborated a picture of the legendary and historic American Indian which to this day stands alone beyond all rivalry.