The "Broker of Bogota" was in many respects the most meritorious of all the prize-plays elicited by Forrest. It was written by Robert Montgomery Bird, but was of a wholly different order from his other tragedies. Brought out first in 1834 with marked success, it had been suffered to lie in neglect for some time, both because of the difficulty of finding satisfactory performers for the secondary parts in it, and because the piece, while especially admired by refined and cultivated judges, lacked those showy scenes and exciting points which attract the crowd. But it was ever a particular favorite with Forrest himself, who always delighted to play it, and always spoke of it with enthusiasm and with deep regret that it was so much too fine for his average audiences that he was obliged largely to lay it aside for noisier and more glaring performances with not one tithe of its merit. Having taken unwearied pains to perfect himself even to the very minutest details in the representation of the title-rôle, he now reproduced this play, and continued occasionally to repeat it, wherever he felt confident of an appreciative audience, up to his last year upon the stage. In the series of plays with which the name of Forrest is identified, this one is of so unique a character that we must try to give some distinctive idea of it; though it is difficult to do so.
The great passions of patriotism, liberty, ambition, revenge, public spirit and enterprise, with their imposing accompaniments of conflict and spectacle, are wholly absent from the piece. And yet it was written expressly for Forrest, and by one who knew him in his inmost peculiarities. And, despite the seeming strangeness of the assertion, he never appeared in a part better fitted to his true being. It is a purely domestic drama, a drama of individual and family affections and trials. Its delineation was a dissection of the human heart in its most common and familiar elements, only carried by circumstances to an extreme intensity.
Baptista Febro is an old man doing a large business in Bogota as a banker, conveyancer, money-lender, and legatee. He is widely known and respected for his ability and his scrupulous integrity; he is honest, frank, and humble to his employers; nevertheless imperative in his family, though just and kind. The two pre-eminent passions which dominate him are his personal honor and his parental affection. His daughter Leonor is devotedly attached to her father; but his son Ramon is a dissipated and ungrateful youth, whose vicious ways cause the old man the keenest anguish. Febro turns his son away and refuses him support, hoping by the consequent distress to lead him to repentance and reformation. His heart torn with anxiety and bleeding with wounded love, he watches for some signal of improvement or some overture for reconciliation from his prodigal boy; but in vain. Ramon meanwhile, who is more weak than wicked, is the helpless tool of an abandoned young noble, Caberero, whom he has taken for a friend. Caberero is a cool, dashing villain, utterly without conscience or fear, a brilliant and hardened scoundrel, who fairly illuminates with his lurid deviltry every scene in which he appears. Febro, learning these facts, sends for Caberero and has a personal interview with him. He first attempts to hire Caberero to give up his intimacy with Ramon and leave the young man in freedom to follow the promptings of his own better nature and the solicitations of his father. The contrast of the invulnerable insolence of the rascal, his shameless betrayal of his own unprincipled character and habits, with the earnest affection and simple sincerity and honorable concern which agitated the old man, was a moral lesson of the strongest kind, set in a dramatic picture of the finest art. Then, finding all efforts at persuasion useless, the scorn and indignation of the righteous man and the injured father gradually mount in his blood till they break out in a paralyzing explosion of gesture and speech. Towering in the grandeur of his own moral passion, and backed by that dynamic atmosphere, of public opinion which invisibly enspheres the good man pitted against the scoundrel, the broker makes the noble cower and flee before the storm of his angry contempt.
Ramon is slowly driven to desperation by his vices and their natural fruits. Caberero, malignantly resenting the denunciation and disdain of Febro, resolves to break into his vaults and rob him of his deposits. With diabolical ingenuity he entangles Ramon in the plot. They succeed, and arrange matters so that it seems as if the robbery were a pretence and a fraud on the part of the broker himself. He is brought before the viceroy, accused, and condemned. Deprived of his property, of his son, and, above all of his honor, the unhappy old man is almost crushed; yet his consciousness of virtue sustains him, and his bearing in the presence of the real culprits and his deceived judges, marked by every sign and attribute of conscious rectitude as he appeals to God for his final vindication, is a most impressive revelation of human nature in a scene of extraordinary trial. Meanwhile, the shame and grief of Febro are topped by a new calamity. Tidings are brought him that his daughter has eloped, and that he is left desolate indeed. But now Juanna, the betrothed of Ramon, who believes Febro incapable of the dishonor charged on him, meets the young man and denounces him for not defending his father. He tells her the facts of the case. Amazed at such baseness, her conscience treads their troth under foot, and she spurns the hideous criminal, and flies to the viceroy to vindicate Febro. There she finds the broker searching for his daughter. Her story is told and verified. The joy and gratitude and noble pride of the old man at the removal of the stigma from his name made an exquisite moral climax. Then it is also announced to him that his daughter is not lost, but is the honorable wife of the son of the viceroy. This delightful surprise breaks on his previous pleasure like a new morn risen on mid-noon. But, alas, his hapless and guilty Ramon,—where is he? What dreadful fate awaits him? At this moment a messenger enters with the statement that Ramon, in a revulsion of remorse and despair, had committed suicide by precipitating himself from a cliff. The sudden reversal of emotion in the already over-tried Febro is too much; it snaps the last chord. As if struck in the brain with an invisible but deadly blow, he gazes first wildly, then vacantly, around, stretches out his hands in a piteous gesture of supplication, staggers, and falls lifeless on the floor.
To those who thought of Forrest as heaving the most ponderous bar and fitted only for the rugged characters of the gymnastic school, his impersonation of the "Broker of Bogota" was a surprise. There were no sensational adjuncts in it, no roll of drum, gaudy procession, or drawing of swords,—nothing but the naked, simple drama of real life in its familiar course. But he never exhibited a more perfect piece of professional workmanship. His portraiture of the business dealings between the upright and courteous old broker and his varied customers,—the torturing struggle of his sense of justice and his parental affection,—the withering curse in which his pent agony burst on the sneering villain in whom he saw the spoiler of his boy,—the heart-rending wail with which he sorrowed over the sinfulness of his darling, "Would to Heaven he had never been born!"—the alternating crisis of suspense and fulfilment as the plot proceeds through gloom and gleam of crime and innocence to the last awful climax, where the mystery is transferred from time and human judgment through despair and death into eternity and to the unknown tribunal there,—all were represented with the almost microscopic fidelity of a pre-Raphaelite picture. Nothing seemed wanting, nothing seemed superfluous. Every tone, every glance, every gesture, every step, contributed towards shaping out the ideal. The performance bore the impress of a study as close and patient as that given to a household scene in the masterpieces of the Dutch school of painting. But to appreciate it as it deserved there was required an audience of psychologists, critically interested in the study of human nature, and curious as to its modes of individual manifestation. The general multitude must feel it to be rather dull and tiresome. It was in this respect like the "La Civile Morte" of Salvini, which, though perhaps his most absolutely perfect piece of acting in its minute truth, was yet felt by many to be tedious,—by the few to be most marvellous in its fascination.
One of the most striking examples of the skill and power of Forrest as an artist is given in the distinction he always made in his rendering of old age as seen respectively in Richelieu, in Lear, and in Febro. How does he translate the wily craft, the pitilessness, the mocking tenderness, of the first of these? He does it in so just and human a manner, with so little of that blunt and electrizing power which he displays in some other parts, that one who had not seen him in Lear would be disposed to believe this his greatest representation of age. The broken yet gigantic power of the old Lear in his fearful malediction of Goneril is overwhelming, and gives a new idea of the possible force of an aged and almost worn-out man. Lear is savagely straightforward and honest. In the first scenes he sweeps the spectators along with him in his passion and his rage. When maddened by the injuries of his unnatural children, he still is artful and clear. His very actions are unmistakable indications of his thoughts, and the last scene of the tragedy deserves to stand alone as a picture of suffering age in which past energy and passion spasmodically assert themselves. Let this be contrasted with the half-simulated decadence of Richelieu's powers. One feels from the very manner of the artist that this is but partially real,—that a moment of success may kindle into new life the man prostrated by bodily weakness. It comes, and for the moment he looms before us, as if recreated by the success of the intrigue which makes him again the genuine king of France. Very different from Richelieu and from Lear is the portrait Forrest gave of Febro. Here we have hale and honorable age, plain, sincere, outspoken. There is nothing of the jocularly-dissembling craft of the cardinal,—nothing of the ferocious passion of the discrowned monarch; but all of the self-respect and candid bearing of an honorable servant, the deep affection and authority of a father, and the impulsiveness of a strong, genuine man. It is a more modest histrionic picture, none the less true because less majestic.
The reader will be pleased to peruse the following genial critique on Forrest as the "Broker of Bogota" from the pen of an unnamed but reflective and tasteful writer, who first saw the play in Washington in 1864:
"We are glad that we have seen Forrest in the 'Broker of Bogota.' His rendering of this conception has given us a nearer and a warmer view of him. In this impersonation he puts off the armor of sternness and inflexibility, and lets us into the world of a heart in which there are green arbors clad with sweet flowers, where lingering sunlight wanders and happy birds sing. Right glad are we that we have seen this picture of Forrest, for it has an eloquent breath for our common humanity. It has given us a glimpse of his nature which long ago we should have rejoiced to see revealed, but whose richness we dreamed not was there. What a volume is a man's life! The heart's story,—always going on, always deepening the great drama of our being as it progresses to the mortal act,—this story, in a strong inveterate nature, writes in the public bearing and in all the features that falsehood as to his sensibilities which the dreadful pen of pride alone engraves. But we do not complain because the proud man in the conflict wears this covering of steel. In a mortal struggle with the world it is often his only safety. Heaven help the weak who falter and fall among the soft valleys of the heart when there are fastnesses of strength to scale! We are told of victims fatally poisoned by the breath of a flower whose fragrance floats at the base of a mountain where it strikes its roots. That lost one, suffocated by perfume, and that mountain, emblem of endurance and strength, are fit types of the thought we would convey. But then we do not love that any man who towers in influence above his fellows shall go thus to the grave!—that, like Byron, for example, he shall live in posterity shamed by a record which is a libel upon the romance of his soul, and written, too, by his own deathless genius. It is for this reason that we are glad to have seen Forrest as the 'Broker of Bogota.' Here he uplifts the veil, tears away the mask, and exhibits the tenderness which, like a deep vein of gold, is intermixed with the iron in the mine where his intellect sinks the shaft. Forrest, all of him, his virtues and his faults, is an American product. He is no common man. His power has a wider range than is given to that of the mere actor. This is evident from the fact that all over the nation he elicits the warmth of the partisan. His friends love him as men love a leader. His enemies, we think, do not understand him. If apology, therefore, be needed, thus we have given it for this somewhat personal criticism. We regard the Broker as Forrest's masterpiece. In it there are vehement power, flexibility, tenderness, sensibility, and all the light and shade which belong to our full humanity. The story of the play is the love of an honest, haughty, avaricious, fond old man for an erring son, whom he seeks to redeem from dissipation and bad friends. It is the love of the father for his boy, compared to which his coffers of gold become as dross in his sight,—always peeping with the eyes of a dove from the ark of the old man's heart, waiting for the deluge of evil passions to subside in his child, that the olive-branch may be wafted to him,—it is this love, sublime in forgiveness, ample for protection, and which at last breaks his heart, that is so painted here by the player as to make a dramatic movement of which Shakspeare might have been the author. And it is this which we have called the poem of Forrest's heart. A man of his intractable mould could not thus simulate. There is a limit to that sort of power which art cannot pass. In every detail this picture is so tenderly toned, so livingly brought from the canvas, that it must be a real revelation."
Another new part which Forrest in 1838 essayed with good success was that of Claude Melnotte, in the brilliant and popular play of "The Lady of Lyons," by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton. Forrest, never having seen the play performed, created his rôle afresh, and was the first actor who ever represented it in America. This drama, as is well known to the theatrical and reading world, is rich in eloquent language and in the varied movement and surprises of its plot, shifting from the still life of the peasant class to the pomp and clang of court and camp. The hero is the son of a poor gardener, who, in his humble garb and lot, has a soul full of poetry and aspiration. He falls in love with the proud Pauline Deschapelles, and writes to her impassioned verses, which she scorns as coming from one so much beneath her in station. Claude, half maddened, assumes the dress and rank of the Prince of Como, and wooes and wins and weds her. Then, revealing his true name and person, he enlists in the army, goes to the wars, fights his way to an illustrious renown and the baton of a marshal, returns, and wooes and wins his bride anew. The whole character and the motives of its situations differ most widely from all the parts in which Forrest had gained his celebrity as an actor; and his friends shook their heads with doubt when he proposed to attempt so novel and foreign a part. But his intelligence and art proved quite competent to the undertaking. The transformation he underwent, as shown by his picture when costumed for the character, is a surprising evidence of his true dramatic faculty. Instead of the weighty tragedian, whose Romanesque stateliness and volcanic fire filled out the ideals of Virginius, Brutus, Spartacus, he became a gay and ardent Frenchman, elastic with ambitious hope and love. The ponderous gave way to the romantic, declamation to conversational ease, monotone to graceful variety. The wooing breathed the music of sincerity, the tones of martial pride rang like a trumpet, and the gorgeous diction of the speeches never had better justice done to it. A judicious critic of that day said, "We were never before so astonished as at the real, genuine triumph of Forrest in Claude Melnotte,—a part we had imagined so utterly unsuited to his genius. He made many points of the most effective excellence; one, for example, was in reading over the letter of Bauseant twice, the first time in a rapid, half-conscious, half-trusting manner, the second time in a slow, careful, and soliloquizing style. Nothing could be more natural than this. But we cannot do justice to the acting, as a whole, in any words at our command. It was in conception thoroughly studied and yet easy, consistently wrought out, beautiful from beginning to end, from the tender enveloping of the form of Pauline in his cloak to the calm and respectful lifting from the table of the marriage settlement. The critic who can harshly ridicule such a sincere and remarkable performance must have in his nature something bitterly hostile to the actor." Yet it must be confessed, however well the art of Forrest overcame the difficulties of the rôle, it was not one really suited to the spontaneities of his nature. The satire of his prejudiced censors stung him more than the average approval gratified him, and the performance was year by year less frequently repeated, and finally was dropped. Still, there were in it many passages exemplifying the high mission of the drama to refresh, to teach, and to uplift those who submit themselves to its influence, when an eloquent interpreter with contagious tones breathes glorious sentiments in charming words. For instance, what a heavenly revelation and longing must be given by this speech to souls of imaginative tenderness chafing under the grim realities of care and hate and neglect!
"Nay, dearest, nay, if thou wouldst have me paint