Never did an actor more thoroughly identify and merge himself with his part than Forrest did in Metamora. He was completely transformed from what he appeared in other characters, and seemed Indian in every particular, all through and all over, from the crown of his scalp to the sole of his foot. The carriage of his body, the inflections of his voice, his facial expressions, the very pose of his head and neck on his shoulders, were new. For he had recalled all his observations while on his visit with Push-ma-ta-ha among the Choctaws, when he had adopted their habits, eaten their food, slept in their tents, echoed the crack of his rifle over the surface of their lakes, and left the print of his moccasins on their hunting-grounds. He had also patiently studied their characteristics from all other available sources. Accordingly, when he came to impersonate Metamora, or the Last of the Wampanoags, modelled by the author of the play after that celebrated New England Sachem, the son of Massasoit, known in history as King Philip of Pokanoket, it was the genuine Indian who was brought upon the stage, merely idealized a little in some of his moral features. The attributes unnoticed by careless observers were distinctly shown,—the sudden muscular movements, the repressed emotion, the peculiar mode of breathing, the deep and vigorous gutturals flung out from the muscular base of the abdomen, and the straight or slightly inward-pointing line of the footfall. With a profound truth to fact, the general bearing of Metamora on ordinary occasions was marked by a dull monotony of manner, broken with awkward abruptness, and his grand poses were limited to those times of great excitement when the human organism, if in a state of dynamic surcharge, is spontaneously electrified with heroic lines, and becomes an instrument with which impersonal passions or the laws of nature gesticulate.
With the single and very proper exception of this partially heightened moral refinement, the counterfeit was so cunningly copied that it might have deceived nature herself. Many a time delegations of Indian tribes who chanced to be visiting the cities where he acted this character—Boston, New York, Washington, Baltimore, Cincinnati, New Orleans—attended the performance, adding a most picturesque feature by their presence, and their pleasure and approval were unqualified. A large delegation of Western Indians, seated in the boxes of the old Tremont Theatre on such an occasion, were so excited by the performance that in the closing scene they rose and chanted a dirge in honor of the death of the great chief.
This incident recalls one which happened in the earliest theatre in Philadelphia, when Mrs. Whitelock, the sister of Mrs. Siddons, was playing, and when Washington was present. At the beginning of the performance a group of Indians, who had come from the wilderness to conclude a treaty, made their appearance in the pit in their native costume. The dark, tall, gaunt figures glided in, and, without noticing the audience or seeming to hear the claps of welcome which greeted them, seated themselves, and fixed their eyes on the stage, as unchangingly as if they were petrified. They sat through the chief play like statues, with immovable tranquillity. But in the after-piece an artificial elephant was introduced, which so electrified these sons of the forest that they suddenly sprang up with a cry. They said there had once been a great beast like this in their land. The next day they called on the manager, inspected the mammoth of sticks, pasteboard, and cloth, and asked to see by daylight the heavenly women who had appeared on the stage the previous night.
The opening scene of Metamora was a glen, with ledges of stone, trees, bushes, running vines, and flowers, the leading character seen, in his picturesque, aboriginal costume, standing on the highest rock in an attitude that charmed the eye. Leaning forward on his firmly-planted right foot, the left foot thrown easily back on its tip, he had a bow in his hands, with the arrow sprung to its head. As the arrow sped from the twanging string he raised his eyes with eager gaze after it, gave a deep interjection, "Hah!" bounded upon a rock below, and vanished. In a few moments he re-entered, with his left arm bleeding, as if it had been bitten in a struggle with a wild beast. Oceana, a white maiden, passing, sees his wound and offers him her scarf to bind it up. The mother of Oceana had once befriended Massasoit when he was sick. Metamora, in his gratitude, had visited her grave with offerings for the dead, and, on such an occasion, had rescued Oceana from a panther. He hesitates before accepting, and fills the delay with a by-play of pantomime so true to Indian nature, so new and strange to the spectators, that it was invested with an absorbing interest. At length he says, "Metamora will take the white maiden's gift." He then gives her an eagle's feather, bids her wear it in her hair, and if she is ever in danger he will fly to her rescue at the sight of this pledge of his friendship.
As the play moves on, the audience are gradually borne back to the early days of their fathers, and their dread struggle to establish themselves on these Western shores. We see the thin and thriving settlements constantly augmenting with reinforcements, and pushing the natives before them. We are taken within the homes of the Indians, shown their better qualities, their hopeless efforts, their mixed resolution and misgiving before their coming fate. Our sympathies are enlisted, before we know it, with the defeated party against ourselves; and thus the author and actor won their just victory. For the English are made to represent power and fraud, the Indians truth and patriotism; and when their fugitive king pauses on a lofty cliff in the light of the setting sun, gazes mournfully on the lost hunting-grounds and desecrated graves of his forefathers, and launches his curse on their destroyers, every heart beats with sorrow for him.
The class of speeches in which the instinctive love of nature that unconsciously saturated the Indian soul is expressed, and the closeness of their daily life to the elements of the landscape and the phenomena of the seasons is revealed, were delivered with matchless effect. Metamora, poised like the bronze statue of some god of the antique, says, "I have been upon the high mountain-top when the gray mists were beneath my feet, and the Great Spirit passed by me in wrath. He spoke in anger, and the rocks crumbled beneath the flash of his spear. Then I felt proud and smiled. The white man trembles, but Metamora is not afraid."
And again: "The war and the chase are the red man's brother and sister. The storm-cloud in its fury frights him not; and when the stream is wild and broken his canoe is like a feather, that cannot drown."
Another class of speeches, equally unique in character, and breathing with compressed passion, were those in which the relative positions of the intruding race and the native lords of the soil were described. The style with which these were pronounced made the form of the actor seem a new tenement in which the departed Sachem of the Pequots lived and spoke again. "Your lands?" he exclaims, with sarcastic disdain. "They are mine. Climb upon the rock and look to the sunrise and to the sunset,—all that you see is the land of the Wampanoags, the land of Metamora. I am the white man's friend; but when my friendship is over I will not ask the white man if I have the right to be his foe. Metamora will love and hate, smoke the pipe of peace or draw the hatchet of battle, as seems good to him. He will not wrong his white brother, but he owns no master save Manito, Master of Heaven."
And at another time: "The pale-faces are around me thicker than the leaves of summer. I chase the hart in the hunting-grounds; he leads me to the white man's village. I drive my canoe into the rivers; they are full of the white man's ships. I visit the graves of my fathers; they are lost in the white man's corn-fields. They come like the waves of the ocean forever rolling upon the shores. Surge after surge, they dash upon the beach, and every foam-drop is a white man. They swarm over the land like the doves of winter, and the red men are dropping like withered leaves."
In these passages his declamation seemed to make the whole tragedy of the story of the American Indians breathe and swell and tremble.