"Ladies and Gentlemen,—Exhausted as I must necessarily feel, owing to the character I have sustained, I cannot find language adequate to express the sentiments that fill my bosom, neither am I able to return suitable acknowledgments for the kindness which you are pleased to evince towards me. I beg to thank you sincerely for the cordiality and courtesy which I have experienced from the hospitable citizens of Cork during my short sojourn in this 'beautiful city.' Long shall I remember it, and in returning to my native country I shall bear with me the grateful recollection of that courtesy and hospitality; and, when there, I shall often think with pleasure and pride on the flattering reception you were pleased to honor me with. I wish you all adieu, and hope that the dark cloud that overhangs this fair country will soon pass away; that a happier and brighter day will beam on her, and that Ireland and her people will long enjoy the prosperity and happiness they are so eminently entitled to, and which are so much to be desired."
He was quite as triumphant in Dublin as in Cork. The notice of his opening in Othello shows this:
"Mr. Forrest, the American tragedian, made his first appearance on Monday night, as Othello. The selection of the character was, for an actor of great power, most judicious; for in all the glorious range of Shakspeare's immortal plays there is not one so powerful in its appeal to the sympathies of our nature, so masterly in its anatomy of the human heart, or so highly-wrought and yet so beautiful a picture of passion,—nor, for the actor, is there any character requiring more delicacy of perception and personation in its details, nor so much of terrible energy of the wrung heart and stormy soul in its bursts of frenzied passion. An actor without a heart to feel and an energy to express the fearful passion of the gallant Moor, whose free and open nature was craftily abused to madness, could give no idea of the character, and must needs leave the audience as cold and unmoved as himself.
"But, to one glowing with the divine fire of genius, that wonderful electricity by which the inmost nature of man is moved, and masses are swayed as if by the wand of an enchanter, Othello is a noble character for the display of his power,—a resistless spell, by which the eye and ear and soul of the audience are held and moved and swayed. We must admit that such an actor is Mr. Forrest, and that such is the effect which his personation of the loving, tender, gentle, duped, abused, maddened Moor produced upon us, and seemed to produce upon his audience. From the rising to the falling of the curtain the house was hushed in stilled, almost breathless, attention; and it was not until stirred by some electrifying burst of passion that the pent-up feeling of his listeners vented itself in such applause, such recognition of the justness and naturalness of the passion, as man gives to man in real life, and when, as it were, the interests of the actor and the spectators are one. This species of involuntary homage to the genius of his personation arose not only from the power which a consummate actor acquires over the feelings of others, but from the entire absence of all those contemptible tricks of the stage, those affectations of originality, of individuality,—that is, stamping the counterfeit manner of the actor upon the sterling ore of the author,—those false readings and exaggerated declamations, which call down injudicious but degrading approbation. Mr. Forrest is free from all these defects. And yet his 'reading' is singularly telling. Not one passage—nay, not one word—of the vivid, picturesque, nervous, wondrous eloquence of the poet is lost upon the audience. What might puzzle in the closet is transparent on the stage. The quaint form in which the divine philosophy of Shakspeare clothes itself seems, by his reading, its fit and apposite garb,—as if none other could so well indicate its keen and subtile meaning. And all this is done without aiming at 'points,' or striving after 'effects.' Then his tenderness is tenderness—his passion, passion. Possessing a noble voice, running from the richest base to the sweetest tenor,—if we might so describe it,—full of flexibility, and capable of every modulation, from the hurricane of savage fury to the melting tenderness of love, Mr. Forrest can express all those varied and oftentimes opposite emotions which agitate our nature, and which Shakspeare, as its most masterly delineator, represents in all its phases in his immortal creations, and not least in Othello. We were much struck with the beautiful fidelity with which Mr. Forrest's look, gesture, tone, and manner painted the gradual growth of jealousy, from the first faint, vague doubt, to its full and terrible confirmation, and the change of Othello's nature, from the frank soldier and the doting husband to the relentless fury of the avenger. To our mind it was a noble picture,—bold, beautiful, and delicate."
An event illustrative of the spirit of Forrest occurred on his last evening in Dublin. The play was "Damon and Pythias." The Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland entered the theatre with a noble party, escorted by a military company with martial music. The audience rose with the curtain, and joined the whole dramatic corps in singing "God save the Queen." Forrest never once during the play looked towards the vice-regal box; and in the bows with which he acknowledged an honorary call from the audience at the close, he studiously avoided seeing the group of titularly-illustrious visitors. He was a democrat; he liked the Irish and disliked their English rulers, and he would not in his own eyes appear a snob. His taste and delicacy in the act were questionable,—his sturdy honesty unquestionable. It reminds one of Goethe and Beethoven standing together when the victorious Napoleon passed in his pomp on the way to Berlin. Both were men of genius and of nobleness; but the one was socially freed by cosmopolitan culture and health, the other socially enslaved by natural inheritance and morbidity. They acted with equal honesty, but in a very different way, as Napoleon went by. Goethe made a low bow, and stood with inclined front; Beethoven crushed his hat over his brows, and thrust himself more stiffly up. Neither he nor Forrest could play the courtier. They could not in social relations abnegate self and react impersonally on others. They must assert that they were themselves, and were democratically willing to allow everybody else the same privilege.
The reception of Forrest in Scotland, notably at Glasgow and Edinburgh, was all that he could have asked. The first literary organ of Edinburgh pronounced its judgment thus: "The three leading characteristics of Mr. Forrest's acting appear to us to be, a bold intellectual grasp of the written soul of his author; a remarkably vigorous and striking execution, accompanied by an apparent contempt for mere conventional rules or customs; and a rare faculty of expressing by the face what neither pen can write nor tongue tell."
It was at Edinburgh that the actor performed what may perhaps be called the most unfortunate and ill-omened deed in his life. Attending the theatre to see Macready play Hamlet, he had applauded several good points made by his rival. But in the scene where the court are about assembling to witness the play within the play, and Hamlet says to Horatio,—
"They are coming to the play; I must be idle.
Get you to a place,"