Senator Stockton, passing the Broadway Theatre one evening, met a friend coming out, and asked him, “What is going on in there?” The reply was, “Oh, nothing: Forrest is in one of his pauses!” An admiring critic said of him, and if the diction be exaggerated it yet invests the truth, “There is no actor living who takes a stronger hold of the feelings of his audience or grasps the passions of the human heart with such a giant-like clutch. He is as imposing and daring in his action as the mountain condor when he darts on the flock, or the bird of Jove when he wheels from the peaks and burnishes his plumage in the blaze of the sun. It is not one here and there that submits to his sovereignty. The entire audience are swayed and fashioned after the workings of his soul. He permits none to escape the potency of his sceptre, but makes all bow to his terrible and overwhelming mastery.” Of course different persons had different degrees of susceptibility to this elemental power and earnestness of nature and to this trained and skilled display of art, though all must feel it more or less either as attraction or as repulsion. The varying effects of the playing of character through its signs is the genuine drama of life itself. The idiot holds his bauble for a god, as Shakspeare says. The ruffian is hardened against all delicate and noble manifestations of mind. The dilettante, in his dryness, veneer, and varnish, is incapable of any enthusiasm for persons. And there are multitudes so harassed and exhausted in the selfish contests of the day, their hearts and imaginations so perverted or shrivelled, that the brightest signals of heroism, genius, and saintliness shine before them in vain. The play of personal qualities, the study and appreciation of them, are more neglected now than they ever were before. It is one of the greatest of social calamities; for it takes the social stimulus away from spiritual ambition or the passion for excellence. And it is one of the supreme benefactions conferred on society by a great actor that he intensifies and illuminates the revelatory language of character and fixes attention on its import by lifting all its modes of expression to their highest pitch.
RICHELIEU.
In a previous chapter an attempt was made to describe Forrest in those characters of physical and mental realism with which his fame was chiefly identified during the earlier and middle portions of his popular career. It remains now to essay a similar sketch of those characters of imaginative portraiture which he best loved to impersonate in the culminating glory and at the close of his artistic career. In the Rolla, Damon, Spartacus, Metamora of his young manhood he was, rather than played, the men whose parts he assumed, so intensely did he feel them and so completely did he reproduce nature. He wrestled with the genius of his art as Hercules with Antæus, throwing it to the ground continually, but making its vitality more vigorous with every fall. As years passed, and brought the philosophic mind, they tempered and refined the animal fierceness, strained out the crudity and excess, and secured a result marked by greater symmetry in details, fuller harmony of accessories, a purer unity in the whole, and a loftier climax of interest and impression. Then studious intellect and impassioned sentiment, guided by truth and taste, preponderated over mere instinct and observation, and imaginative portraiture took the place which had been held by sensational realism. This is what in dramatic art gives the violence of passion moderating restraint, puts the calm girdle of beauty about the throbbing loins of power. Imagination, it is true, cannot create, but it can idealize, order, and unify, unravel the tangled snarl of details, and wind the intricacies in one unbroken thread, making nature more natural by abstraction of the accidental and arrangement of the essential. This was what the acting of Forrest, always sincere and natural, for a long time needed, but at last, in a great degree, attained, and, in attaining, became genuinely artistic.
The Richelieu of Forrest was a grand conception consummately elaborated and grandly represented. It was a part suited to his nature, and which he always loved to portray. The glorious patriotism which knit his soul to France, the tender affection which bound his heart to his niece, the leonine banter with which he mocked his rivals, the indomitable courage with which he defied his foes, the sublime self-sufficingness with which he trusted in fate and in the deepest emergencies prophesied the dawn while his followers were trembling in the gloom, his immense personal superiority of mind and force swaying all others, as the sun sways its orbs,—these were traits to which Forrest brought congenial qualities and moods, making their representation a delight to his soul.
He dressed for the part in long robes, an iron-gray wig, and the scarlet cap of a cardinal. He stooped a little, coughed, but gave no signs of superannuation. As the conspiracies thickened about him and the end drew on, he seemed visibly to grow older and more excitable. His age and feebleness, though simulated with an exquisite skill, were not obtruded. Though the picture of an old man, it was the picture of a very grand old man, like the ruin of a mighty castle, worn by time and broken by storms, yet towering proudly in its strength, with foundations the earthquake could not uproot and battlements over which the thunder crashed in vain. Forrest made the character not only intensely interesting and exciting by the great variety of sharp contrasts he brought into reconciliation in it, but also admirable and lovable from the honest virtues and august traits it embodied. He represented Richelieu as a patriotic statesman of the loftiest order, and also as a sage deeply read in the lore of the human heart, tenaciously just, a careful weigher of motives, his sometimes rough and repellent manner always covering a deep well of love and a rich vein of satire.
In the opening scene, the cunning slyness of the veteran plotter and detective, the dignity of the great statesman, and the magnetic command of the powerful minister were revealed in rapid alternation in a manner which was a masterpiece of art.
“And so you think this new conspiracy
The craftiest trap yet laid for the old fox?
Fox? Well, I like the nickname. What did Plutarch
Say of the Greek Lysander?