SPARTACUS.
F. Halpin
EDWIN FORREST AS
THE GLADIATOR.
"The Gladiator," written by Robert Montgomery Bird, was another prize-play, in which Forrest acquired a popularity which, if less general, was more intense, than that secured for his Metamora. If the admiration and applause given to it were drawn less universally from men and women, from old and young, they were more fervent and sustained, being fed by those elementary instincts which are strongest in the robust multitude. The Spartacus of Forrest was more abused and satirized by hostile critics than any of his other parts, because it was the most "physical" and "melodramatic" of them all. Muscular exertion and ferocious passion were carried to their greatest pitch in it, though neither of these was displayed in a degree beyond sincerity and fitness or the demands of the given situations on the given embodiment of the character. There are actual types of men and actual scenes of life which are transcendently "physical" and "melodramatic." No actor can truly represent such specimens of human nature and such conjunctures of human history without being highly "physical" and profoundly "melodramatic." Is it not the office of the player, the very aim of his art, correctly to depict the truth of man and life? And, recollecting what sort of a person the veritable Thracian gladiator was, and what sort of a part he played, one may well ask how he can be justly impersonated on the stage if not invested with the attributes of brawny muscularity, terrific indignation, stentorian speech, and merciless revenge. Forrest was blamed and ridiculed by a coterie because he did exactly what, as an artist cast in such a rôle, he ought to do, and any deviation from which would have been a gross violation of propriety. He simply exhibited tremendous mental and physical realities with tremendous mental and physical realism. What else would the demurrer have?
The fact is, the cant words "physical" and "melodramatic," as demeaningly used in dramatic criticism, express a vulgar prejudice too prevalent among the educated and refined,—a prejudice infinitely more harmful than any related prejudice of the ignorant and coarse. They seem to fancy the body something vile, to be ashamed of, to receive as little attention and be kept as much out of sight as possible. But since God created the body as truly as he did the spirit, and decreed its uses as much as he did those of the spirit, the perfecting and glorifying of the former are just as legitimate as the perfecting and glorifying of the latter. The ecclesiastical interpretation of Christianity for these fifteen hundred years is responsible, in common with kindred ascetic superstitions of other and elder religions, for an incalculable amount of disease, deformity, vice, crime, and untimely death. The contempt for bodily power and its material conditions in a superbly-developed and trained physical organism, the foul and dishonoring notion of the superior sanctity of the celibate state, the teaching that chastity is the one thing that allies us to the angels, with which every other sin may be forgiven, without which no other virtue is to be recognized,—these and associated errors—discords, distortions, and inversions of nature—have been prolific sources of evil. They lie at the root of the so common prejudice against a magnificent and glowing condition of the physical organism, a prejudice which feeds the conceit of the votaries of the present mental forcing system, and causes so many dawdling idlers to neglect all use of those vigorous measures of gymnastic hygiene which would raise the power and splendor of body and soul together to their maximum.
The type of man produced by the Athenians in their best age, its unrivalled combination of health and strength, energy and grace, acumen and sensibility, organic harmony of mental peace and vital joy, was very largely the fruit of their unrivalled system of gymnastics regulated by music. Free America, with this example and so much subsequent experience, with all the conquests of modern science at her command, should inaugurate a system of popular training which will acknowledge the equal sanctity of body and soul and render them worthy of each other, a union of athletic and æsthetic culture making the body the temporary illuminated temple of its indwelling immortal divinity.
The separating of human nature into opposed parts whose respective highest welfare is incompatible must ever be productive of all kinds of morbidity, monstrosity, and horror, through the final reactions of the violated harmony of truth. Leading to the enforced culture of one side, the mental, and the enforced neglect of the other, the material, it is fatal to that rounded wholeness of the entire man which is the synonym of both health and virtue. For the helpless subsidence of the soul in the body is brutality or idiocy; the insurrectionary sway of the body over the soul is insanity; the remorseless subdual of the body by the soul is egotistic asceticism or murderous ferocity; but the parallel development and exaltation of accordant body and soul give us the ideal of health and happiness fulfilled in beauty, or the enthronement of divine order in man. Therefore such a stimulating instance of organic glory, extraordinary outward poise and inward passion, as the people, thrilled in their most instinctive depths of enthusiasm, used to shout at when they saw Forrest in his early assumptions of the rôle of Spartacus, is not to be stigmatized as something offensive, but to be hailed as something admirable.