Forrest stands at the head of the Natural School as its greatest representative, with earnest aspirations and efforts towards that final and perfect School whose threshold he thoroughly crossed but whose central shrine and crown he could not attain. He attained a solitary supremacy in the Natural School, but could not attain it in the Artistic School, because he had not in his mind grasped the philosophically perfected ideal of that School, and did not in his preliminary practices apply to himself its scientifically systematized drill. His ideal and drill were the old traditional ones, based on observation, instinct, and empirical study, modified only by his originality and direct recurrence to nature. But Nature gives her empirical student merely genuine facts without and sincere impulses within. She yields essential universal truths and principles only to the student who is equipped with rectifying tests and a generalizing method. Destitute of this, both theoretically and practically, Forrest wanted that clearness and detachment of the spiritual faculties and the physical articulations, that consummated liberty and swiftness of thought and feeling and muscular play, which are absolutely necessary to the perfect actor. He was so great an artist that he gave his pictures background, foreground, proportion, perspective, light and shade, gradations of tone, and unity; but he fell short of perfection, because carrying into every character too much of his own individuality, and not sufficiently seizing their various individualities and giving their distinctive attributes an adequate setting in the refinements of an intellectualized representation of universal human nature.
The perfect artist—such an one as Delsarte was—will build a form of character in the cold marble of pure intellect and then transfuse it with passion till it blushes and burns. He will also reverse the process, seize the spiritual shape born flaming from intuitive passion, change it into critical perception, and deposit it in memory for subsequent evocation at will. This is more than nature: it is art superimposed on nature. Garrick, Siddons, Talma, Rachel, Salvini, Forrest, were natural actors, and, more, they were artists. But the only supreme master of the Artistic School known as yet, whose theoretic ideal and actual training were perfect, was the great dramatic teacher François Delsarte.
Nature is truth in itself. But it is the ideal operation of truth that constitutes art. Acting, like all art, is truth seen not in itself, but reflected in man. It should not exhibit unmodified nature directly. It should hold up the mirror of the human soul and reveal nature as reflected there. It is a Claude Lorraine mirror of intellectual sympathy, softening, shading, toning,—just as Shakspeare says, begetting a temperance which gives smoothness to everything seen. The fights of the gladiators and the butcheries of the victims in the Roman amphitheatre were not acting, but reality. The splendor of art was trodden into the mire of fact. The error, the defect, the exaggeration in the acting of Forrest, so far as such existed, was that sometimes excess of nature prevented perfection of art. If certainly a glorious fault, it was no less clearly a fault.
But as he advanced in years this fault diminished, and the polish of art removed the crudeness of nature. Step by step the tricks into which he had been betrayed revealed themselves to him as distasteful tricks, and the sturdy impetuous honesty of his character made him repudiate them. Too often in his earlier Lear he gave the impression that he was buffeting fate and fortune instead of being buffeted by them; but slowly the spiritual element predominated over the physical one, until the embodiment stood alone in its balanced and massive combination of sublimated truth, epic simplicity, exquisite tenderness, and tragic strength. So his young Damon was greatly a performance of captivating points and electrical transitions, stirring the audience to fever-heats of fear and transport. No one who saw his wonderful burst of passion when he learned that his slave had slain the horse that was to carry him to the rescue of his friend and hostage—no one who saw his reappearance before the block, stained and smeared with sweat and dust, crazed and worn, yet sustained by a terrible nervous energy—could say that in any class of passion he ever witnessed a truer or a grander thing. But the conception was rather of a hot-blooded knight of the age of chivalry than of a contemplative, resolute, symmetrical Greek senator. Gradually, however, the maturing mind of the actor lessened the mere tumult of sensational excitement, and increased and co-ordinated the mental and moral qualities into a classical and climacteric harmony. One of the most striking evidences of the progressive artistic improvement of Forrest was the change in his delivery of the celebrated lament of Othello, “Farewell the tranquil mind.” He used, speaking it in a kind of musical recitative, to utter the words “neighing steed” in equine tones, imitate the shrillness of “the shrill trump,” give a deep boom to the phrase “spirit-stirring drum,” and swell and rattle his voice to portray “the engines whose rude throats the immortal Jove’s dread clamors counterfeit.” He learned to see that however effective this might be as elocution it was neither nature nor art, but an artificiality; and then he read the passage with consummate feeling and force, his voice broken with passionate emotion but not moulded to any pedantic cadences or flourishes. And yet it must be owned that after all his sedulous study and great growth in taste, his too strong individuality would still crop out sometimes to mar what else had been very nigh perfect. For instance, there was, even to the last, an occasional touch of vanity that was repulsive in those displays of voice which he would make on a favorite sonorous word. In the line of the Gladiator, “We will make Rome howl for this,” the boys would repeat as they went homeward along the streets his vociferous and exaggerated downward slide and prolongation of the unhappy word howl. And the same fault was conspicuous and painful in the word royal, where Othello says,—
“’Tis yet to know,
(Which, when I know that boasting is an honour,
I shall promulgate,) I fetch my life and being
From men of royal siege.”
Despite this and other similar flaws, however, he had an intense sincerity and force of nature, a varied truth blent in one consistent whole of grand moral effectiveness, that place him high among the most extraordinary players. His youthful Gladiator and Othello were as impetuous, volcanic, and terrible as any of the delineations of Frederick Lemaître. His mature Coriolanus had as imperial a stateliness, as grand a hauteur, as massive a dynamic pomp, as were ever seen in John Philip Kemble. His aged Lear was as boldly drawn and carefully finished, as fearfully powerful in its general truth, and as wonderfully tinted, toned, shaded, and balanced in its details, as any character-portrait ever pictured by David Garrick. In the various parts he played in the successive periods of his career he traversed the several schools of his art,—except the last one, and fairly entered that,—and displayed the leading traits of them all, the lava passion of Kean, the superb pomposity of Vandenhoff, the statuesque kingliness of Talma, the mechanically studied effects of Macready. His great glory was “magnanimous breadth and generosity of manly temperament.” His faults were an occasional slip in delicacy of taste, inability always to free himself from himself, and the grave want of a swift grace and lightness in the one direction equal to his ponderous weight and slowness in the other. Thus, while in some respects he may be called the king of the Natural School, he must be considered only a striking member, and not a model, of the Artistic School. After his death his former wife, Mrs. Sinclair, who was in every way an excellent judge of acting, and could not be thought biased in his favor, was asked her opinion of him professionally. She replied, “He was a very great artist. In some things I do not think he ever had an equal; certainly not in my day. I do not believe his Othello and his Lear were ever surpassed. His great characteristics as an actor were power and naturalness.” In illustration of this judgment the following anecdote, told by James Oakes, may be adduced:
“I was visiting my friend in Philadelphia, and went to the theatre to see his Virginius. He had said to me at sunset, ‘I feel like acting this part to-night better than I ever did it before;’ and accordingly I was full of expectation. Surely enough, never before in his life had I seen him so intensely grand. His touching and sublime pathos made not only women but sturdy men weep audibly. As for myself, I cried like a baby. I observed, sitting in the pit near the stage, a fine-looking old gentleman with hair as white as snow, who seemed entirely absorbed in the play, so much so that the attention of Forrest was drawn to him, and in some of the most moving scenes he appeared acting directly towards him. In the part where the desperate father kills his daughter the acting was so vivid and real that many ladies, sobbing aloud, buried their faces in their handkerchiefs and groaned. The old gentleman above alluded to said, in quite a distinct tone, ‘My God, he has killed her!’ Afterwards, when Virginius, having lost his reason, comes upon the stage and says, with a distraught air, ‘Where is my daughter?’ utterly absorbed and lost in the action, the old man rose from his seat, and, looking the player earnestly in the face, while the tears were streaming from his eyes, said, ‘Good God, sir, don’t you know that you killed her?’ After the play Forrest told me that when he saw how deeply affected the old gentleman was he came very near breaking down himself. He esteemed it one of the greatest tributes ever paid him, one that he valued more than the most boisterous applause of a whole audience.”