The following critical notice of the histrionic type and style of Forrest is from the gifted pen of William Winter, whose dramatic criticisms in the New York “Tribune” for the past ten years have been marked by a knowledge, an eloquence, an assured grasp and a conscientiousness which make them stand out in refreshing contrast to the average theatrical commenting of the newspaper press. Making a little allowance for the obvious antipathy and sympathy of the writer, the article is both just and generous:
“Mr. Forrest has always been remarkable for his iron repose, his perfect precision of method, his immense physical force, his capacity for leonine banter, his fiery ferocity, and his occasional felicity of elocution in passages of monotone and colloquy. These features are still conspicuous in his acting. The spell of physical magnetism that he has wielded so long is yet unbroken. The certainty of purpose that has always distinguished him remains the same. Hence his popular success is as great as ever. Strength and definiteness are always comprehensible, and generally admirable. Mr. Forrest is the union of both. We may liken him to a rugged old castle, conspicuous in a landscape. The architecture may not be admired, but the building is distinctly seen and known. You may not like the actor, but you cannot help seeing that he is the graphic representative of a certain set of ideas in art. That is something. Nay, in a world of loose and wavering motives and conduct, it is much. We have little sympathy with the school of acting which Mr. Forrest heads; but we know that it also serves in the great educational system of the age, and we are glad to see it so thoroughly represented. But, while Mr. Forrest illustrates the value of earnestness and of assured skill, he also illustrates the law of classification in art as well as in humanity. All mankind—artists among the rest—are distinctly classified. We are what we are. Each man develops along his own grade, but never rises into a higher one. Hence the world’s continual wrangling over representative men,—wrangling between persons of different classes, who can never possibly become of one mind. Mr. Forrest has from the first been the theme of this sort of controversy. He represents the physical element in art. He is a landmark on the border-line between physical and spiritual power. Natures kindred with his own admire him, follow him, reverence him as the finest type of artist. That is natural and inevitable. But there is another sort of nature,—with which neither Mr. Forrest nor his admirers can possibly sympathize,—that demands an artist of a very different stamp; that asks continually for some great spiritual hero and leader; that has crowned and uncrowned many false monarchs; and that must for ever and ever hopelessly pursue its ideal. This nature feels what Shelley felt when he wrote of ‘the desire of the moth for the star, of the night for the morrow.’ To persons of this order—and they are sufficiently numerous to constitute a large minority—Mr. Forrest’s peculiar interpretations of character and passion are unsatisfactory. They see and admire his certainty of touch, his profound assurance, his solid symmetry. But they feel that something is wanting to complete the artist. But enough of this. It is pleasanter now to dwell upon whatever is most agreeable in the veteran’s professional attitude. Mr. Forrest is one of the few thorough and indefatigable students remaining to the stage. He has collected the best Shakspearean library in America. He studies acting with an earnest and single-hearted devotion worthy of all honor, worthy also of professional emulation. Every one of his personations bears the marks of elaborate thought. According to the measure of his abilities, Mr. Forrest is a true and faithful artist; and if, as seems to us, the divine spark be wanting to animate and glorify his creations, that lack, unhappily, is one that nearly all artists endure, and one that not all the world can supply.”
And now it is left to show more clearly and fully, while doing justice to what Forrest was in his own noble School of Nature, how he fell short in that other School of Art which is the finest and greatest of all.
The voice of Forrest, naturally deep, rich, and strong, and developed by constant exercise until it became astonishingly full and powerful, ministered largely to the delight of his audiences and was a theme of unfailing wonder and eulogy to his admirers. It may not be said which is the most important weapon of the actor, the chest and neck, the arm and hand, the face and head, or the voice; because they depend on and contribute to one another, and each in its turn may be made the most potent of the agents of expression. But if the primacy be assigned to any organ it must be to the central and royal faculty of voice, since this is the most varied and complex and intellectual of all the channels of thought and emotion. A perfected voice can reveal almost everything which human nature is capable of thinking or feeling or being, and not only reveal it, but also wield it as an instrument of influence to awaken in the auditor correspondent experiences. But for this result not only an uncommon endowment by nature is necessary, but likewise an exquisite artistic training, prolonged with a skill and a patience which finally work a revolution in the vocal apparatus. Only one or two examples of this are seen in a generation. The Italian school of vocalization occasionally gives an instance in a Braham or a Lablache. But such perfection in the speaking voice is even rarer than in the singing. Henry Russell, whose reading and recitative were as consummate as his song, and played as irresistibly on the feelings, had a voice of perhaps the most nearly perfect expressive power known in our times. He could infuse into it every quality of experience, color it with every hue and tint of feeling, every light and shade of sentiment. To speak in illustrative metaphor, he could issue it at will in such a varying texture and quality of sound, such modified degrees of softness or hardness, energy or gentleness, as would suggest bolts of steel, of gold, of silver, or of opal; waves of velvet or of fire; ribbons of satin or of crystal. His organism seemed a mass of electric sensibility, all alive, and, in response to the touches of ideas within, giving out fitted tones and articulations through the whole diapason of humanity, from the very vox angelica down to the gruff basses where lions roar and serpents hiss. This is a result of the complete combination of instinctive sensibility in the mind and developed elocutionary apparatus in the body. The muscular connections of the thoracic and abdominal structures are brought into unity, every part playing into all the parts and propagating every vibration or undulatory impulse. At the slightest volition the entire space sounding becomes a vital whole, all its walls, from the roof of the mouth to the base of the inside, compressing and relaxing with elastic exactitude, or yielding in supple undulation so as to reveal in the sounds emitted precisely the tinge and energy of the dominant thought and emotion. Then the voice appears a pure mental agent, not a physical one. It seems to reside in the centre of the breath, using air alone to articulate its syllables. Commanding, without any bony or meaty quality, both extremes,—the thread-like diminuendo of the nightingale and the stunning crash of the thunderbolt,—it gives forth the whole contents of the man in explicit revelation.
This perfection of the Italian School has been confined to the lyric stage. Perhaps the nearest examples to it on the dramatic stage were Edmund Kean for a short time in his best period, and Forrest and Salvini in our own day. Forrest had it not in its complete finish. He grew up wild, as it were, on a wild continent, where no such consummate training had ever been known. Left to himself and to nature, he did everything and more than everything that could have been expected. But perfection of voice, a detached vocal mentality which uses the column of respiratory air alone as its instrument, sending its vibrations freely into the sonorous surfaces around it, he did not wholly attain. His voice seemed rather by direct will to employ the muscles to seize the breath and shape and throw the words. He could crash it in sheeted thunder better than he could hurl it in fagoted bolts, and he loved too much to do it. In a word, his voice lacked, just as his character did, the qualities of intellectualized spirituality, ethereal brilliancy, aerial abstraction and liberty from its muscular settings and environment. Had these qualities been fully his in body and soul, in addition to what he was, he would have been the unrivalled paragon of the stage. The fibres of the backbone and of the solar plexus were too much intertangled with the fibres of the brain, the individual traits in him were too closely mixed with the universal, for this. But nevertheless, as it was, his voice was an organ of magnificent richness and force for the expression of the elemental experiences of humanity in all their wide ranges of intelligence, instinct, and passion. It could do full justice to love and hate, scorn and admiration, desire, entreaty, expostulation, remorse, wonder, and awe, and was most especially effective in pity, in command, and in irony and sarcasm. His profound visceral vitality and vigor were truly extraordinary. This grew out of an athletic development exceptionally complete and a respiration exceptionally deep and perfect. When Forrest under great passion or mental energy spoke mighty words, his vocal blows, muffled thunder-strokes on the diaphragmatic drum, used to send convulsive shocks of emotion through the audience. The writer well remembers hearing him imitate the peculiar utterance of Edmund Kean in his most concentrated excitement. The sweet, gurgling, half-smothered and half-resonant staccato spasms of articulation betokened the most intense state of organic power, a girded and impassioned condition as terrible and fascinating as the muscular splendor of an infuriated tiger. The voice and elocution of Forrest were all that could be expected of nature and a culture instinctive, observational, and intelligent, but irregular and without fundamental principles. What was wanting was a systematic drill based on ultimate laws and presided over by a consummate ideal, an ideal which is the result of all the traditions of vocal training and triumphs perfected with the latest physiological knowledge. Then he could have done in tragedy what Braham did in song. Braham sang, “But the children of Israel went on dry land.” He paused, and a painful hush filled the vast space. Then, as if carved out of the solid stillness, came the three little words, “through the sea.” The breath of the audience failed, their pulses ceased to beat, as all the wonder of the miracle seemed to pass over them with those accents, awful, radiant, resonant, triumphant. He sat down amid the thunder of the whole house, while people turned to one another wiping their eyes, and said, Braham!
If the voice is the soul of the drama, facial expression is its life. In the latter as in the former Forrest had remarkable power and skill, yet fell short of the perfection of the few supreme masters. He stood at the head of the Natural School whose representatives achieve everything that can be done by a genuine inspiration and laborious study, but not everything that can be done by these conjoined with that learned and disciplined art which is the highest fruit of science applied in a systematic drill. Imitatively and impulsively, with careful study of nature in others, and with sincere excitement of his own faculties of thought and feeling, he practised faithfully to acquire mobility of feature and a facile command of every sort of passional expression. He succeeded in a very uncommon yet clearly limited degree. The familiar states of vernacular humanity when existing in their extremest degrees of intensity and breadth he could express with a fidelity and vigor possible to but few. His organic portraitures of the staple passions of man were exact in detail and stereoscopic in outline,—breathing sculptures, speaking pictures. Pre-eminently was this true in regard to the basic attributes and ground passions of our nature. His Gladiator in his palmiest day of vital strength was something never surpassed in its kind. Every stroke touched the raw of the truth, and it was sublime in its terribleness. At one moment he stood among his enemies like a column of rock among dashing waves; at another moment the storm of passion shook him as an oak is shaken by the hurricane. And when brought to bay his action was a living revelation, never to be forgotten, of a dread historic type of man,—the tense muscles, the distended neck, the obstructed breath, the swollen arteries and veins, the rigid jaws, the orbs now rolling like the dilated and blazing eyes of a leopard, now white and set like the ferocious deathly eyes of a bull, while smothered passion seemed to threaten an actual explosion of the whole frame. It was fearful, but it was great. It was nature at first hand. And he could paint with the same clear accuracy the sweeter and nobler phases of human nature and the higher and grander elements of experience. His expressions of domestic affection, friendship, honesty, honor, patriotism, compassion, valor, fortitude, meditation, wonder, sorrow, resignation, were marked by a delicate finish and a pronounced distinctness of truth seldom equalled. For example, when in Virginius he said to his motherless daughter, “I never saw you look so like your mother in all my life,” the pensive and effusive tenderness of his look and speech irresistibly drew tears. When he said to her, “So, thou art Claudius’s slave!” the combination in his utterance of love for her and ironic scorn for the tyrant was a stroke of art subtile and effective beyond description. And when, in his subsequent madness, he exhibited the phases of insanity from inane listlessness to raving frenzy, when his sinews visibly set as he seized Appius and strangled him to death, when he sat down beside the corpse and his face paled and his eyes glazed and his limbs slowly stiffened and his head dropped in death,—his attitudes and movements were a series of vital sculptures fit to be photographed for immortality.
Still, after every eulogy which can justly be paid him, it must be said that he remained far from the complete mastership of his art in its whole compass. Neither in conception nor execution did he ever grasp the entire range of the possibilities of histrionic expression. Had he done this he would not have stood at the head of the spontaneous and cultivated Natural School, but would have represented that Artistic School which practically still lies in the future, although its boundaries have been mapped and its contents sketched by François Delsarte. For instance, the feat performed by Lablache after a dinner at Gore House, the representation of a thunder-storm simply by facial expression, was something that Forrest would never have dreamed of undertaking. Lablache said he once witnessed, when walking in the Champs Elysées with Signor de Begnis, a distant thunder-storm above the Arc de Triomphe, and the idea occurred to him of picturing it with the play of his own features. He proceeded to do it without a single word. A gloom overspread his countenance appearing to deepen into actual darkness, and a terrific frown indicated the angry lowering of the tempest. The lightnings began by winks of the eyes and twitchings of the muscles of the face, succeeded by rapid sidelong movements of the mouth which wonderfully recalled the forked flashes that seem to rend the sky, while he conveyed the notion of thunder in the shaking of his head. By degrees the lightnings became less vivid, the frown relaxed, the gloom departed, and a broad smile illuminating his expressive face gave assurance that the sun had broken through the clouds and the storm was over.
By a Scientifically Artistic School of acting is not meant, as some perversely understand, a cold-blooded procedure on mechanical calculations, but a systematic application of the exact methods of science to the materials and practice of the dramatic art. It means an art of acting not left to chance, to caprice, to imitation, to individual inspiration, or to a desultory and indigested observation of others and study of self, but based on a comprehensive accurately formulated knowledge of the truths of human nature and experience, and a perfected mastery of the instruments for their expression. To be a worthy representative of this school one must have spontaneous genius, passion, inspiration, and mimetic instinct, and a patient training in the actual exercise of his profession, no less than if he belonged to the Classic, the Romantic, or the Natural School; while in addition he seizes the laws of dramatic revelation by analysis and generalization, and gains a complete possession of the organic apparatus for their display in his own person by a physical and mental drill minute and systematic to the last degree. The Artistic School of acting is the Classic, Romantic, and Natural Schools combined, purified, supplemented and perfected by adequate knowledge and drill methodically applied.
Human nature has its laws of manifestation as well as every other department of being. These laws are incomparably more elusive, obscure, and complicated than those of natural philosophy, and therefore later to gain formulation; but they are not a whit less real and unerring. The business of the dramatic performer is to reveal the secrets of the characters he represents by giving them open manifestation. Acting is the art of commanding the discriminated manifestations of human nature. If not based on the science of the structure and workings of human nature it is not an art, but mere empiricism, as most acting always has been.
Delsarte toiled forty years with unswerving zeal to transform the fumbling empiricism of the stage into a perfect art growing out of a perfect science. He was himself beyond all comparison the most accomplished actor that ever lived, and might, had he pleased, have raised whirlwinds of applause and reaped fortunes. But, with a heroic abnegation of fame and a proud consecration to the lonely pursuit of truth, he refused to cater to a public who craved only amusement and would not accept instruction; and he died comparatively obscure, in poverty and martyrdom. He mastered the whole circle of the sciences and the whole circle of the arts, and synthetized and crowned them all with an art of acting based on a science of man as comprehensive as the world and as minute as experience. It is to be hoped that he has left works which will yet be published in justification of his claim, to glorify his valiant, neglected, and saintly life, and to enrich mankind with an invaluable bequest.