“Matrons flung gloves,
Ladies and maids their scarfs and handkerchiefs,
Upon him as he passed; the nobles bended
As to Jove’s statue; and the commons made
A shower and thunder with their caps and shouts.”
The rare and exalted use of such acting as this is that it invites the audience to lift their eyes above the vulgar pettinesses to which they are accustomed and extend their souls with a superior conception of the dignity of human nature and of the mysterious meanings latent in it.
The Coriolanus of Forrest was a marble apotheosis of heroic strength, pride, and scorn. His moral glory was that he asserted himself on the solid grounds of conscious truth, justice, and merit, and not, as popular demagogues and the selfish members of the patrician class do, on hollow grounds of assumption, trickery, and spoliating fraud. There was great beauty, too, in his reverential love for his mother, his tender love for his wife, his hearty love for his friend, and his magnanimous incapacity for any recognized littleness of soul or of deed. The weight and might of his spirit could give away victories and confer favors, but could not steal a laurel or endure flattery. His fatal defect was that he did not know the spirit of forgiveness, and was utterly incompetent to self-renunciation. He had the repulsive and fatal fault of a crude, harsh, revengeful temper, that clothed his gigantic indirect egotism in the glorifying disguise of justice and sacrificed even his country to his personal passion. Just and true at the roots, his virtues grew insane from pride. Wrath destroyed his equilibrium, and belched his grandeur and his life away in incontinent insolence of expression. Like all the favorite characters of Forrest, however, he was no starveling fed on verbality and ceremony, no pygmy imitator or empty conformist, but one who lived in rich power from his own original centres and let his qualities honestly out with democratic sincerity of self-assertion. There is indeed a royal lesson in what he says:
“Should we in all things do what custom wills,
The dust on antique time would lie unswept,
And mountainous error be too highly heaped