"By William Leggett—Shakspeare: a conqueror greater than Alexander. The warrior's victories were bounded by the earth, and he vainly wept for other worlds to conquer. The poet 'exhausted worlds, and then imagined new.'"
The festivities were maintained with the greatest zest till early morning, when the company broke up in unalloyed pleasure, leaving with their guest the recollection of an occasion of the most flattering nature. And shortly afterwards, when he embarked, sixty or seventy of his closest friends went several miles down the harbor in a yacht. Among them were Leggett and Halleck. Leggett, between whom and Forrest had grown a love as ardent and heroic as that of the famed antique examples, threw his arms around him with a tearful "God bless and keep you!" Halleck said, "May you have hundreds of beautiful hours in beautiful places, and come back to us the same as you go away, only enriched!" Forrest replied, pressing his hand, "That is indeed the wish of a poet for his friend. You may be sure when I am at Marathon, at Athens, at Constantinople, I shall often recall your lines on Marco Bozzaris, and be delighted to link with them the memory of this your parting benediction."
His friends did not say good-bye until they had through their spokesman commended him to the special graces of the captain. Then, wishing him a happy voyage, they joined hands, gave him twenty-four cheers, and sailed reluctantly apart, they to their wonted ways, he to a foreign continent.
Leaving him on the deck, with folded arms, his chin on his breast, gazing sadly at the receding West, we will now endeavor to form a just estimate of his acting in his favorite characters at that time. We will try to paint him livingly, just as he was in that fresh period of his popularity and glory, the proud young giant and democrat of the American Stage.
CHAPTER IX.
SENSATIONAL AND ARTISTIC ACTING.—CHARACTERS OF PHYSICAL
AND MENTAL REALISM.—ROLLA.—TELL.—DAMON.—BRUTUS.—
VIRGINIUS.—SPARTACUS.—METAMORA.
A nation beginning its career as a colony is naturally dependent on the parent country for its earliest examples in culture. Some time must elapse; wealth, leisure, and other conditions favorable to spiritual enrichment and free aspiration must be developed, before it can create ideals of its own and achieve æsthetic triumphs in accordance with them. Such was the case with America. Its mental dependence on England continued long after its civil allegiance had ceased. Little by little, however, the colonial temper and servile habit were repudiated in one province after another of the national activity. Jefferson was our first audacious and fruitful original thinker in politics. In painting, Stuart arose as a bold and profound master, with no teacher but nature. In fiction, Cooper opened a rich field, and reaped a harvest of imperishable renown. In religion, the inspired genius of Channing appeared with a leavening impulse which still works. And in poetry, Bryant was the earliest who treated indigenous themes with a distinction which has made his name ineffaceable.
In no other region of the national life was the colonial dependence so complete and so prolonged as in the drama. The chief plays and actors alike were imported. Scarcely did anything else dare to lift its head on the theatrical boards. All was servile imitation or lifeless reproduction, until Forrest fought his way to the front, burst into fame, and by the conspicuous brilliance of his success heralded a new day for his profession in this country. Forrest, as an eloquent writer said a quarter of a century ago, was the first great native actor who brought to the illustration of Shakspeare and other poets a genius essentially American and at the same time individual,—a genius distinguished by its freedom from all trammels and subservience to schools, by its force in a self-reliance which seemed loyalty to nature, and by its freshness in an ideal which gave to all his efforts a certain moral elevation,—a genius which, after every deduction, still remained as a something peculiarly noble and enkindling, highly original in itself, and distinctively American. This is certainly his historic place; and it was perhaps more fortunate than calamitous that he was left in his early years so largely without teachers and without models, to develop his own resources in his early wanderings as a strolling player in the West by direct experience of the soul within him and direct observation of the impassioned unconventional life about him. He was thus forced to shape out of the mint of his own nature the form and stamp and coloring of his conceptions. There was fitness and significance in such a genius as his maturing and pouring itself out under the shade of the Western woods, rising up amid their grandeur clear and simple as a spring, till, fed and strengthened, it leaped forth fresh and thundering as a torrent.