Tell where the bolt will strike, and how.”
Delsarte could shrink and diminish his stature under the shrivelling contraction of meanness and cowardice or suspicion and crime until it seemed dwarfed, or lift and dilate it under the inspiration of grand ideas and magnanimous passions until it seemed gigantic. Every great emotional impulse that took possession of him seemed to melt all the parts of his organism together into a flexible whole with flowing joints, and then his fused movements awed the spectator like something supernatural. His face was a living canvas on which his soul painted the very proportions and hues of every feeling. His voice in tone and inflection took every color and shadow of thought and emotion, from the sombre cloudiness of breathing awe to the crystalline lucidity of articulating intellect. His inward furnishing even richer than the outward, he would sit down at the piano, in a coarse overcoat, in a room with bare walls, and, as he acted and sang, Œdipus, Agamemnon, Orestes, Augustus, Cinna, Pompey, Robert le Diable, Tartuffe, rose before you and revealed themselves in a truth that appeared almost miraculous and with a power that was actually irresistible. It was no reproduction by painful mimicry of externals, no portrayal by elaborate delineation of details. It was positive identification and resurrection. It was a real recreation of characters in their ensemble of being, and an exhibited reanimation of them by imaginative insight and sympathetic assimilation. Most wonderful of all, and greatest proof of the value of his system of drill, he could catch a part by inspiration and go through it under the automatic direction of nature, and then deliberately repeat the same thing by critical perception and conscious free will; and he could also reverse the process with equal ease, critically elaborate a rôle by analysis and then fix it in the nerves and perform it with inspired spontaneity. This was the highest possible exemplification of the dramatic art by the founder of its only perfect school. It was Classic, because it had the greatest dignity, repose, power, symmetry, unity. It was Romantic, because it was full of the most startling effects, beautiful combinations, sudden changes, surprising contrasts, and extremes. It was Natural, because exactly conformed to the facts of experience and the laws of truth as disclosed by the profoundest study of nature. And above all it was supremely Artistic, because in it intuition, instinct, inspiration, intelligence, will, and educated discipline were reconciled with one another in co-operative harmony, and everything was freely commanded by conscious knowledge and not left to accident.
True art is never merely an imitation of nature, nor is it ever purely creative; but it is partly both. It arises from the desire to convert conceptions into perceptions, to objectify the subjective in order to enhance and prolong it in order to revive it at will and impart it to others. Art, Delsarte said, with his matchless precision of phrase, is feeling passed through thought and fixed in form. Grace without force is the product of weakness or decay, and can please none save those whose sensibilities are drained. Force without grace is like presenting a figure skinned or flayed, and must shock every one who has taste. But grace in force and force in grace, combined impetuosity and moderation, power revealed hinting a far mightier power reserved,—this is what irresistibly charms all. This is what only the very fewest ever attain to in a superlative degree; for it requires not only richness of soul and spontaneous instinct, and not only analytic study and systematic drill, but all these added to patience and delicacy and energy. The elements of the art of acting are the applied elements of the science of human nature; yet on the stage those elements are different from what they are in life in this respect, that there they are set in relief,—that is, so systematized and pronounced as to give them distinct prominence. That is precisely the difference of art from nature. It heightens effect by the convergence of co-operative agencies. For instance, when the variations of the speech exactly correspond with the changes of the face, how the effect of each is heightened! Aaron Hill said of Barton Booth that the blind might have seen him in his voice and the deaf have heard him in his visage. Of those in whom nature is equal he who has the greater art will carry the day, as of those in whom art is equal he who has more nature must win. A lady said, “Had I been Juliet to Garrick’s Romeo, so ardent and impassioned was he, I should have expected that he would come up to me in the balcony; but had I been Juliet to Barry’s Romeo, so tender, so eloquent and seductive was he, that I should certainly have gone down to him.” In these two great actors nature and art contended which was stronger. Very different was it with Macready and Kean, of whom it used to be said respectively, “We go to see Macready in Othello, but we go to see Othello in Kean.” The latter himself enjoyed, and delighted others by showing, a transcript of the great world of mankind in the little world of his heart. The former,—
“Whate’er the part in which his cast was laid,
Self still, like oil, upon the surface played.”
Talma said, “In whatever sphere fate may have placed a man, the grand movements of the soul lift him into an ideal nature.” The greatness of every truly great actor shows itself in the general ideal which characterizes his embodiments. If he has any originality it will publish itself in his ideal. Now, while most actors are not only second-rate but also second-hand, Forrest certainly was original alike as man and as player. He was distinctively original in his personality, original and independent in the very make of his mind and heart. This subtle and striking originality of personal mind and genius was thoroughly leavened and animated by a distinctively American spirit, the spirit generated by the historic and material conditions of American society and the social and moral conditions of American life. He was original by inherited idiosyncrasy, original by his natural education, original by his self-moulding culture which resented and shed every authoritative interference with his freedom and every merely traditional dictation. He was original in going directly to the instructions of nature and in drawing directly from the revelations of his own soul. He was original in a homely intensity of feeling and in a broad and unsophisticated intelligence whose honest edges were never blunted by hypocritical conformity and falsehood. And above all, as an actor he exhibited his originality in a bearing or style of manners thoroughly democratic in its prevailing scornful repudiation of tricks or squeamish nicety, and a frank reliance on the simplicity of truth and nature in their naked power.
Now, precisely the crowning originality of Forrest as an actor, that which secures him a distinctive place in the historic evolution of the drama, is that while the ideals which the great actors before him impersonated were monarchical, aristocratic, or purely individual, he embodied the democratic ideal of the intrinsic independence and royalty of man. Give Kemble only the man to play, he was nothing; give him the paraphernalia of rank and station, he was imposing. But Forrest, a born democrat, his bare feet on the earth, his bare breast to his foes, his bare forehead to the sky, asked no foreign aid, no gilded toggery, no superstitious titles, to fill the theatre with his presence and thrill the crowd with his spell. There is an egotism of pride, an egotism of vanity, an egotism of conceit, all of which, based in want of sympathy, are contemptible and detestable. Forrest was remarkable for a tremendous and obstinate pride, but not for vanity or conceit; and his sympathy was as deep and quick as his pride, so that he was not an odious egotist, although he was imperious and resentful. Many distinguished players have trodden the stage as gentlemen, Forrest trod it as man. The ideal of detachment, authority throned in cold-blooded self-regard, has been often set forth. He exhibited the ideal of identification, burning honesty of passion and open fellowship. The former is the ideal of polite society. The latter is the ideal of unsophisticated humanity. Macready asserted himself in his characters; Forrest asserted his characters in himself. Both were self-attached, though in an opposite way, and thus missed the perfect triumph which Delsarte achieved by abolishing self and always resuscitating alive in its pure integrity the very truth of the characters he essayed. Macready as an elaborate and frigid representative of titular kings was a sovereign on the boards, a subject elsewhere. Forrest as an inborn representative of natural kings was a true sovereign in himself everywhere and always. The former by his petulant pride and pomp and his drilled exemption from the sway of the sympathies secured the approval of a sensitive and irritable nil admirari class. The latter by the fulness of his sympathies and his impassioned eloquence as the impersonator of oppressed races awakened the enthusiastic admiration of the people. A line, said an accomplished critic, drawn across the tops of the points of Macready would leave Forrest below in matters of mechanical detail, but would only cut the bases of his pyramids of power and passion. His chief rôles were all embodiments of the elemental vernacular of man in his natural virtue and glory rather than in the refinements of his choicest dialects. Always asserting the superiority of man to his accidents, he will be remembered in the history of the theatre as the greatest democrat that up to his time had ever stepped before the footlights. He had sincerity, eloquence, power, nobleness, sublimity. His want was beauty, charm. The epithets strong, fearless, heroic, grand, terrible, magnificent, were fully applicable to him; but the epithets bright, bold, brisk, romantic, winsome, graceful, poetic, were inapplicable. In a word, though abounding in the broad substance of sensibility and the warm breath of kindness, he lacked the artificial polish and finesse of etiquette; and consequently the under-current of dissent from his fame, the murmur of detraction, that followed him, was the resentment of the conventional society whose superfine code he neglected and scorned.
For this penalty, however, his sincerity and direct reliance on nature gave ample compensation in making him capable of inspiration. Adherence to mere authority, tradition, usage, or dry technicality, is fatal to inspiration. This carried to an extreme makes the most cultivated player a mere professor of postures and stage mechanics,—what the French called Macready, “L’artiste de poses.” There is an infinite distance from such external elaboration to the surprises of feeling which open the soul directly upon the mysteries of experience, send cold waves of awe through the nerves, and convert the man into a sublime automaton of elemental nature, or a hand with which God himself gesticulates. Then the performing of the actor originates not on the volitional surfaces of the brain, but in the dynamic deeps of the spine and ganglia, and he seems an incarnate fagot of thunderbolts. Then the gesticulating arms, modulated by the profound spinal rhythms, become the instruments of a visible music of passion mysteriously powerful. For all action from the distal extremities of the nerves is feverish, twitching, anxious, with a fidgety and wasteful expensiveness of force, while action from their central extremities is steady, harmonious, commanding, economical of force. The nearer to the central insertions of the muscles the initial impulses take effect, so much the longer the lines they fling, the acuter the angles they subtend, the vaster the segments they cut and the areas they sweep. This suggests to the imagination of the spectator, without his knowing the meaning or ground of it, a godlike dignity and greatness. Forrest was full of this hinted and hinting power. It was the secret of his loaded personality and magnetizing port.
Art, while it is not pure and simple nature, is not anything substituted for nature nor anything opposed to nature. It is something superadded to nature, which gives the artist supreme possession of his theme, supreme possession of himself, and supreme command of his treatment of his theme. It is a grasped generalization of the truths of nature freed from all coarse, crude, and degrading accidents and details. The consummate artist, observing the principle or law, does everything easily; but the empiric, striving at the facts, does everything laboriously. Feeling transmuted into art by being passed through thought and fixed in form is transferred for its exemplification from the volition of the cerebral nerves to the automatic execution of the spinal nerves. This does not exhaust the strength, but leaves one fresh after apparently the most tremendous exertions. Talma, Rachel, Salvini, did not sweat or fatigue themselves, however violent their action seemed. But when feeling, instead of having been passed through thought and fixed in form for automatic exhibition, is livingly radiated into form by the will freshly exerted each time, the exaction on the forces of the organism is great. It is then nature in her expensiveness that is seen, rather than the art which secures the maximum of result at the minimum of cost. It was said of Barry that excessive sensibility conquered his powers. His heart overcame his head; while Garrick never lost possession of himself and of his acting. The one felt everything himself before he made his audience feel it; the other remained cool, and yet by his kingly self-control forced his audience to feel so much the more. In his direct honest feeling and exertion Forrest paid the expensive penalty of the Natural School. After playing one of his great parts he was drenched with perspiration and blew off steam like a locomotive brought to rest. The nerves of his brain and the nerves of his spinal cord were insufficiently detached in their activities, too much mixed. Like Edmund Kean, he was as a fusee, and the points of the play were as matches; at each electric touch his nerve-centres exploded and his muscles struck lightning. But in the Artistic School the actor is like a lens made of ice, through which the sunbeams passing set on fire whatever is placed in their focus. The player who can pour the full fire of passion through his soul while his nerves remain firm and calm has command of every power of nature, and reaches the greatest effects without waste. But, as Garrick said,—
“In vain will Art from Nature help implore