The defect corresponding to this excess was lack of souplesse, physical and spiritual mobility. He was unquestionably deficient, when tried by a severe standard, in bright, alert, expectant, rich freedom of play in nerves and faculties. His disposition was comparatively obstinate in its pertinacity, and his body adhesive in its heaviness. This gave him the ponderous weight of unity, the antique port of the gods, but it robbed him in a degree of that supreme grace which is the ability to compass the largest effects of impression with the smallest expenditure of energy. It cannot be denied that he needed exactly what Garrick had in such perfection, namely, that detached personality, that quicksilver liberty and rapidity of motion, which made the great English actor such a memorable paragon of variety and charm. Yet, when these abatements are all allowed, enough remains amply to justify his large historic claim in the honest massiveness and glow of his delineations, set off alike by the imposing physique fit to take the club and pose for a Farnesian Hercules, by a studious and manly art unmarred with any insincere trickery, and by a powerful mellow voice of vast compass and flexible intonation, whose declamation, modelled on nature, and without theatrical affectation, ever did full justice to noble thoughts and beautiful words.
Cibber said, in allusion to Betterton, "Pity it is that the momentary beauties from an harmonious elocution cannot be their own record, that the animated graces of the player can live no longer than the instant breath and motion that presents them, or at best but faintly glimmer through the memory or imperfect attestation of a few surviving spectators." Could the author of this biography paint in their true forms and colors and with full completeness the once vivid and vigorous achievements of the buried master, had he with sufficient knowledge and memory command of some notation whereby he could record every light and shade of each great rôle so that they might be revived from the dead symbols in all the lustre of their original reality, even as a musician translates from the dormant score into living music an overture of Mozart or a symphony of Beethoven, then were there a deathless Forrest breathing in these pages who should stir the souls of generations of readers to rise and mutiny against the depreciating estimates of his forgotten foes and the encroachments of literary oblivion. But, alas! to such a task the pen that essays the tribute is unequal, and the writer must be content with the pale presentments he can but imperfectly produce, sighing to think how true is the refrain of regret taken up in every age by those who have mourned a departed actor, and never better worded, perhaps, than in the famous lines by Garrick:
"The painter dead, yet still he charms the eye;
While taste survives, his fame can never die.
But he who struts his hour upon the stage
Can scarce extend his fame for half an age.
Nor pen nor pencil can the actor save,—
The art and artist share one common grave."