For thee I sought to borrow from each Grace,
And every Muse, such attributes as lend
Ideal charms to Love. I thought of thee,
And Passion taught me poesy,—of thee.
And on the painter's canvas grew the life
Of beauty!—Art became the shadow
Of the dear starlight of thy haunting eyes!"
In such examples the speaker behind the footlights becomes a more thrilling preacher in a more genial pulpit, and teaches, for whoever will heed, the most precious lessons in our existence.
The tragedy of "Jack Cade, the Bondman of Kent," was written by Robert T. Conrad, who, in a prefatory note, acknowledges his "indebtedness to the judgment and taste of Mr. Forrest in its preparation for the stage," and ascribes "its flattering success at home and abroad to the eminent genius of that unrivalled tragedian." Conrad took the name of the despised rebel, cleared it of the odium and calumny with which four hundred years of fierce prejudice had encrusted it, and presented the notorious insurrectionary leader not as a vulgar demagogue and a brutal leveller, but as an avenging patriot, who felt the wrongs of the down-trodden masses and animated them to assert their rights. In place of Jack Cade the coarse and contemptible upstart pictured in Shakspeare, Conrad paints the portrait of Jack Cade the great English democrat of the fourteenth century. He held that there were good grounds in historic truth for this view; and, at all events, it was the only view of the character which his sympathies could embrace and shape to his purpose of producing a play at once suited to the personality of Forrest as an actor and constituting an impassioned argument for democracy. The tragedy is all on fire with democratic conviction and passion. It breathes throughout the most intense feeling of the wrongs and claims of the oppressed common people. It is a sort of battle-song of liberty, written in blood and set to music. If a poetic license, it was a generous one, thus to attempt to redeem from infamy the leader of a popular movement against the monstrous kingly, priestly, and baronial outrages under which the laboring classes had suffered so long, and attract the admiration of the people to his memory and his cause. Such was the feeling of Leggett, also, who longed to try his own hand at a drama on this very theme, but could never quite raise his literary courage to the point.
The main motive of the tragedy, then, is the exaltation of the sublimest of mortal aspirations,—the grand idea of popular liberty and equality—against unjust and cruel prerogative. It is a burning oration and poem of democracy. It is full of the horrible wrongs of the feudal system, the dreadful crime and ferocity of the past, but likewise penetrated and glorified with those thrilling sentiments of justice, freedom, and humanity which forecast the better ages yet to be. Thus, while European and retrospective in the revengeful temper that glows in its situations, it is American and prophetic in the moral and social coloring which irradiates its plot. And herein is indicated the secret of its immense popularity. The Jack Cade of Forrest stirred the great passions in the bosom of the people, swept the chords of their elementary sympathies with tempestuous and irresistible power. From the first to the last it secured and maintained a success similar to that which had previously crowned Metamora and Spartacus. The Lear of Forrest was the storm, and his Broker of Bogota the rainbow, of his passion. Othello was his tornado, which, pursuing a level line of desolation, had on either side an atmosphere of light and love that illumined its dark wings. Macbeth was his supernatural dream and entrancement of spasmodic action. Hamlet was his philosophic reverie and rambling in a charmed circle of the intellect. But Jack Cade was his incarnate tribuneship of the people, the blazing harangue of a later Rienzi inflamed by more frightful personal wrongs and inspired with a more desperate love of liberty. In it he was a sort of dramatic Demosthenes, rousing the cowardly and slumberous hosts of mankind to redeem themselves with their own right hands.