The antique theatres of Greece and Rome stood open in the air unroofed to the sky, and were so vast, holding from ten thousand to two hundred thousand spectators, that the players in order not to be belittled and inaudible were raised on the high cothurnus and wore a metallic mask whose huge and reverberating mouth augmented the voice. The word persona is derived from personare, to sound through. Dramatis personæ originally meant masks, and only later came to denote the persons of the play. The conditions suppressed all the finer inflections of tone and the play of the features. The actor had to depend for his effects on measured declamation, imposing forms and attitudes, slow and appropriate movements, simple pictures distinctly outlined and set in bold relief. The characters principally brought forward were kings, heroes, prophets, demi-gods, deities. It was the stately representation of superhuman or exalted personages, full of exaggerated solemnity and pomp both in bearing and in speech. All this naturally arose from the circumstances under which the serious drama was developed,—the audience a whole population, the player at a distance from them, in the scenery of surrounding sea and mountains and the overhanging heaven. The traditions of the Classic School came directly down to the subsequent ages and gave their mould and spirit to the modern theatre. They have been kept up by the long list of all the great conventional tragedians in their stilted pose and stride and grandiose delivery, until the very word theatrical has come to signify something overdone, unreal, turgid, hollow, bombastic.
But when, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, in Italy, Spain, Germany, France, and England, the drama revived and asserted itself in such an extended and deepened popular interest,—when the theatres were built on a smaller scale adapted for accurate seeing and hearing, and the actors and the stage were brought close to the limited and select audience,—when the plays, instead of dealing mainly with sublime themes of fate and the tragic pomp and grandeur of monarchs and gods, began to depict ordinary mortal characters and reflect the contents of real life,—the scene changed from an enormous amphitheatre where before a city of gazers giants stalked and trumpeted, to a parlor where a group of ladies and gentlemen exhibited to a company of critical observers the workings of human souls and the tangled plots of human life. The buskins were thrown off and the masks laid aside, the true form and moving displayed, living expression given to the features, and the changing tones of passion restored to the voice. Then the mechanical in acting gave way to the passionate; the Classic School, which was statuesque, receded, and the Romantic School, which was picturesque, advanced.
The Classic School modulates from the idea of dignity. Its attributes are unity, calmness, gravity, symmetry, power, harmonic severity. Its symbol is the Greek Parthenon, whose plain spaces marble images people with purity and silence. The Romantic School modulates from the idea of sensational effect. Its attributes are variety, change, excitement, sudden contrasts, alternations of accord and discord, vehement extremes. Its symbol is the Christian Cathedral, whose complicated cells and arches palpitate as the strains of the organ swell and die within them trembling with sensibility and mystery. The ancient tragedian represented man as a plaything of destiny, sublimely helpless in the grasp of his own doings and the will of the gods. The chief interest was in the evolution of the character, which had but one dominant chord raised with a cunning simplicity through ever-converging effects to a single overwhelming climax. The modern tragedian impersonates man as now the toy and now the master of his fate, a creature of a hundred contradictions, his history full of contrasts and explosive crises. The chief interest is in the complications of the character and the situations of the plot so combined as to keep the sympathies and antipathies in varying but constant excitement. The vices of the former school are proud rigidity and frigidity, pompous formality and mechanical bombast. The vices of the latter school, on the other hand, are incongruity, sensational extravagance, and affectation. The Classic virtue is unity set in relief, but a mathematical chill was its fault. The Romantic virtue is variety set in relief, but its bane was inconsistency. The true tone of the heart, however, and the breathing warmth of life which it brings to the stage more than atone for all its defects and excesses.
The Romantic School early began to branch in two directions. In one it degenerated into that Melodramatic Medley which, although it has a nameless herd of followers, does not deserve to be called a school, because it has no system and is but instinct and passion let loose and run wild. In the other direction, joining with the traditional stream of example from its Classic rival, the Romantic issued in what should be named the Natural School. So the Classic School, too, forked in a double tendency, one branch of which led to death in an icy formalism and slavish subserviency to empiric rules, while the other led to the perfecting of vital genius and skill in the rounded fulness of truth; not truth as refracted in crude individualities but as generalized into a scientific art. This higher result of the double issue of the Classic School, joined with the higher result of the double issue of the Romantic School, constitutes the Artistic School. The Natural School is to be defined as having merely an empiric foundation, in it the contents of human nature and their modes of manifestation being grasped by intuition, instinct, observation, and practice, with no commanded insight of ultimate principles. The Artistic School, on the contrary, has a scientific foundation, in it the materials and methods being mastered by a philosophical study which employs all the means of enlightenment and inspiration systematically co-ordinated and applied.
Betterton was a noble representative of the classic style with a large infusion of the romantic and the natural and with a strong determination towards the artistic. Garrick had less of the first two and more of the third and fourth. In the history of the British stage Garrick is an epochal mark in the progressive displacement of theatricality by nature. He ridiculed the noisy mechanical declamation of the stage and introduced a quiet conversational manner. He agreed with the suggestion of his friend Aaron Hill that Shakspeare, judging from his wise directions to the players in Hamlet, must himself have been a fine actor, but in advance of the taste of his time. Quin, Young, Kemble, Conway, and Vandenhoff were examples of the classic type of acting, while Barton Booth, Mossop, and Spranger Barry exemplified the more passionate and impulsive romantic type. Macklin was a bold and intelligent though somewhat coarse and hard representative of the Natural School. Cooper and Cooke, each of whom had a personality of great original power, veered between the three preceding schools, with a large and varying element of each one infused in their impersonations. But the fullest glory of the Romantic School was seen in Edmund Kean, the coruscations of whose meteoric genius blazed out equally in the sensational feats of the melodramatic and in the profound triumphs of the natural. In France, Lekain, Talma, and Lemaître moved the stiff traditions of their art many degrees towards the simplicity and the free fire of truth, released the actor from his stilts, and did much to humanize the strutting and mouthing stage-ideal transmitted by tyrannic tradition.
The Classic and the Romantic School each had its separate reign. The Melodramatic offshoot of the latter also had and still has its prevalence, yielding its mushroom crops of empiric sensationalists. But in the historic evolution of the art of acting there must come a complete junction of two great historic schools in one person. The plebeian Lekain, a working goldsmith, was not bred in the laps of queens, as Baron said an actor ought to be; but, as Talma declared of him, Nature, a nobler instructress than any queen, undertook to reveal her secrets to him. And he broke the fetters of pedantry, repudiated the sing-song or monotonous chant so long in vogue, and brought the unaffected accents of the soul on the stage. Living, however, in the very focus of monarchical traditions and habits, subject to every royal and aristocratic influence, he could not establish in the eighteenth-century-theatres of France the true Democratic School of Nature. This was necessarily left for America and the nineteenth century. Edwin Forrest was the man. By his burning depth and quick exuberance of passion, his instinctive and cultivated democracy of conviction and sentiment, his resolute defiance of old rules and customs, and his constant recurrence to original observation of nature, it was easy for him to master the Romantic School, while the spirit and mode of the Classic School could not be difficult for one of his proud mind, imposing physique, and severe self-possession. The intense bias he caught from Kean in the melodramatic direction and the lofty bias imparted to him by Cooper in the stately antique way were supplemented, first, by his wild strolling experiences and training in the West and South, secondly, by his patient self-culture and studies at the prime fountain-heads of nature itself. In addition to this, he rose and flourished in the midst of the latest and ripest development of all the unconventional institutions and influences of the most democratic land and people the world has yet known. And so he came to represent, in the history of the drama, the moment of the fusion of the Classic and Romantic Schools and their passage into the Natural School. As the founder of this school in the United States he has been followed by a whole brood of disciples,—such as Kirby, Neafie, Buchanan, and Proctor,—who have reflected discredit on him by imitating his faultiness instead of reproducing his excellence.
Substantially intellectual, impassioned, profoundly ambitious, with flaming physical energies, with a very imperfect education, and few social advantages, Forrest was early thrown into the company of men who had great natural force of mind, and were frank and generous, but comparatively unpolished in taste and reckless in habits, leading a life of free amusement, conviviality, and passion often exploding in frenzied jealousies, rages, duels, deaths. He resisted the temptations that would have proved fatal to him, as they did to so many of his fellows, kept his self-respect, and faithfully studied and aspired to something better. He was exposed to the widest extremes of praise and abuse,—petted without bounds and assailed without measure. He kept his head unturned by either extravagance, though not uninjured, and swiftly sprang into a vast and intense popularity. But under the circumstances of the case—his burning impulsiveness and exuberant energy and lack of early culture, his tempestuous associates, and the general rawness or sensational eagerness of our population at that time—he would have been a miracle if his acting had not been marred with faults, if he had not been extravagant in displays of muscle and voice, if he had not been in some degree what his hostile critics called a melodramatic actor. Yet even then there were excellences in his playing, virtues of sincerity, truthfulness, intelligence, electric strokes of fine feeling, exquisite touches of beauty, confluences of light and shade, sustained unity of design, which justified the admiration and gave ground for the excessive eulogies he received. In melodrama the action is more physical than mental, the exertions of the actor blows of artifice to produce an effect rather than strokes of art to reveal truth. But in this sense Forrest always, even in his crudest day, was more tragic than melodramatic, his efforts explosions of the soul through the senses rather than convulsions of the muscles,—vents of the mind and glimpses of the spirit rather than contortions of the person, limbs, voice, and face. And he went steadily on, reading the best books, studying himself and other men, scrutinizing the unconscious acting of all kinds of persons in every diversity of situation, sedulously trying to correct errors, outgrow faults, gain deeper insight, and secure a fuller and finer mastery of the resources of his art.
Consequently his career was a progressive one, and in his latest and mentally best days he gave impersonations of the loftiest and most difficult characters known in the drama which have hardly been surpassed. The prejudices against him as a strutting and robustious ranter who shivered the timbers of his hearers and tore everything to tatters were largely unwarranted at the outset, and for every year afterwards were a gross wrong. In the time of his herculean glory with the Bowery Boys it may be true that his fame was bottomed on the great lower classes of society, and made its strongest appeals through the signs he gave of muscle, blood, and fire; yet there must have been wonderful intelligence, pathos, and beauty, as well as naked power, to have commanded, as his playing did at that early day, the glowing tributes paid to him by Irving, Leggett, Bryant, Chandler, Clay, Conrad, Wetmore, Halleck, Ingraham, Lawson, and Oakes. He always had sincerity and earnestness. His audiences always felt his entrance as the appearance of a genuine man among the hollow fictions of the stage. His soul filled with power and passion by nature, without anything else was greater than everything else could be without this. A celebrated English actress generously undertook to train a young beginner, who was yet unknown, to assume higher parts. Tutoring her in the rôle of a princess neglected by the man she loved, the patroness could not get the pupil to make her concern appear natural. “Heaven and earth!” she exclaimed. “Suppose it real. Suppose yourself slighted by the man you devotedly loved. How would you act then in real life?” The hopeless reply was, “I? I should get another lover as quickly as I could.” The instructress saw the fatal, fatal defect of nature. She shut the book and gave no more lessons. Nature must supply the diamond which art polishes.
The youthful Forrest not only had nature in himself, but he was a careful student of nature in others. He used to walk behind old men, watching every movement, to attain the gait and peculiarities of age. He visited hospitals and asylums, and patiently observed the phases of weakness and death, the features and actions of maniacs. His reading was a model of precision and lucidity in the extrication of the sense of the words. One of his earlier critics said, “He grasps the meaning of a passage more firmly than any actor we know. He discloses the idea with exactness, energy, and fulness, leaving in this respect nothing to be desired. His recitation is as clear as a mathematical demonstration.” He had also an exquisite tenderness of feeling and utterance which penetrated the heart, and a power of intense mournfulness or delicious sadness which could always unseal the eyes of the sensitive. He studied the different forms of actual death with such minute attention that his stage deaths were so painfully true as to excite repugnance while they compelled admiration. The physical accompaniments were too literally exact. He had not yet learned that the highest artistic power lowers and absorbs the minor details in its broad grasp and conspicuous portrayal of the whole. The Natural School, as a rule, does not enough discriminate between the terror that paralyzes the brain and the horror that turns the stomach. In the part of Virginius, Forrest for some years had the hollow blade of the knife filled with a red fluid which, on the pressure of a spring as he struck his daughter, spurted out like blood following a stab. A lady fainted away as he played this scene in Providence, and, feeling that the act was artifice, and not art, he never afterwards repeated it. So it was nature, and not art, when Polus, the Roman tragedian, having to act a part of great pathos secretly brought in the urn the ashes of his own son. In distinction equally from artifice and from nature, art grasps the essential with a noble disregard of the accidental, and finely subordinates what is particular to what is general.
The Classic School modulates from the idea of grandeur or dignity; its aim is to set unity in relief, and its attribute is power in repose. The Romantic School modulates from the idea of effectiveness; its aim is to set the contrasts of variety in relief, and its attribute is power in excitement. The Natural School modulates from the idea of sincerity; its aim is to set reality in relief, exhibiting both unity in variety and variety in unity, and its attribute is alternation of power in repose and power in excitement, according to the exigencies of character and circumstance. The Artistic School modulates from the idea of truth; its attributes are freedom from personal crudity and prejudice, liberation of the faculties of the soul and the functions of the body, and an exact discrimination of the accidental and the individual from the essential and the universal; and its aim is to set in relief in due order and degree every variety of character and experience, every style and grade of spiritual manifestation, not as the workings of nature are made known in any given person however sincere, but as they are generalized into laws by a mastery of all the standards of comparison and classification. Sincerity is individual truth, but truth is universal sincerity. “Why do you enact that part in Macbeth as you do?” asked a friend of Forrest. “Because,” he replied, “that is the way I should have done it had I been Macbeth.” Ah, but the question is not how would a Forrestian Macbeth have done it, but how would a Macbethian Macbeth do it? The sincere Natural School of acting is hampered by the limiting of its vision to the reflections of nature in the refracting individuality of the actor. The true Artistic School purifies, corrects, supplements, and harmonizes individual perceptions by that consensus of averages, or elimination of the personal equation, which dispels illusions and reveals permanent principles.