Such were the principal characters represented by Edwin Forrest. So, as far as an incompetent pen can describe their portraiture, did he represent them. The work was a dignified and useful one, moralizing the scene not less than entertaining the crowd. It was full of noble lessons openly taught. It was still richer, as all acting is, in yet deeper latent lessons to be gathered and self-applied by the spectators who were wise enough to pierce to them and earnest enough to profit from them.
For every dramatic impersonation of a character in the unravelling of a plot and the fulfilment of a fate is charged with implicit morals. This is inevitable because every type of man, every grade of life, every kind of conduct, every style of manners, embodies those laws of cause and effect between the soul and its circumstances which constitute the movement of human destiny, and illustrates the varying standards of truth and beauty, or of error and sin, in charming examples to be assimilated, or in repulsive ones to serve as warnings. Thus the stage is potentially as much more instructive than the pulpit, as life is more inclusive and contagious than words. The trouble is that its teaching is so largely disguised and latent. It sorely needs an infusion of the religious and academic spirit to explicate and drive home its morals. For instance, when Coriolanus says, with action of immovable haughtiness,—
“Let them pull all about mine ears; present me
Death on the wheel, or at wild horses’ heels;
Or pile ten hills on the Tarpeian rock,
That the precipitation might down stretch
Below the beam of sight, yet will I still
Be thus to them,—”
it is a huge and grand personality, filled to bursting with arrogant pride and indirect vanity, asserting itself obstinately against the mass of the people. As a piece of power it is imposing; but morally it is vulgar and odious. The single superior should not assert his egotistic will defiantly against the wills of the multitude of inferiors and hate them for their natural resistance. He should modestly modulate his self-will with the real claims of the collective many, or blend and assert it through universal right and good, thus representing God with the strength of truth and the suavity of love. That is the lesson of Coriolanus,—a great lesson if taught and learned. And, to take an exactly opposite example, what is it that so pleases and holds everybody who sees the exquisite Rip Van Winkle of Joseph Jefferson? Analyze the performance to the bottom, and it is clear that the charm consists in the absence of self-assertion, the abeyance of all egotistic will. Against the foil of his wife’s tartar temper, who with arms akimbo and frowning brow and scolding acidity of voice opposes everything, and asserts her authority, and, despite her faithful virtues, is as disagreeable as an incarnated broomstick, Rip, lazy and worthless as he is, steals into every heart with his yielding movement, soft tones, and winsome look of unsuspicious innocence. He resists not evil or good, neither his appetite for drink nor his inclinations to reform. The spontaneity, the perfect surrender of the man, the unresisted sway of nature in him, plays on the unconscious sympathies of the spectators with a charm whose divine sweetness not all the vices of the vagabond can injure. It is, in this homely and almost unclean disguise, a moral music strangely wafted out of an unlost paradise of innocence into which drunkenness has strayed. But the real secret of the fascination is hidden from most of those who intuitively feel its delicious fascination. Did the audience but appreciate the graceful spirit of its spell, and for themselves catch from its influence the same unresisted spontaneousness of soul in unconscious abnegation of self-will, they would go home regenerated.
But beyond the special lessons in the parts played by Forrest, he was, through his whole professional course, constantly teaching the great lesson of the beauty and value of the practice of the dramatic art for the purposes of social life itself. Should the stage decline and disappear, the art so long practised on it will not cease, but will be transferred to the ordinary walks of social life. Nothing is so charming as a just and vivid play of the spiritual faculties through all the languages of their outer signs, in the friendly intercourse of real life. But in our day the tendency is to confine expression to the one language of articulate words. This suppression of the free play of the organism stiffens and sterilizes human nature, impoverishes the interchanges of souls makes existence formal and barren. The most precious relish of conversation and the divinest charm of manners is the living play of the spirit in the features, and the spontaneous modulation of the form by the passing experience. A man grooved in bigotry and glued in awkwardness, with no alert intelligence and sympathy, is a painful object and a repulsive companion. He moves like a puppet and talks like a galvanized corpse. But it is delightful and refreshing to associate with one thoroughly possessed by the dramatic spirit, who, his articulations all freed and his faculties all earnest, speaks like an angel and moves like a god. The theatre all the time offers society this inspiring lesson. For there are seen free and developed souls lightening and darkening through free and sensitive faces. If bodies did not answer to spirits nor faces reveal minds, nature would be a huge charnelhouse and society a brotherhood of the dead. And if things go on unchecked as they have been going on, we bid fair to come to that. It is to be hoped, however, that the examples of universal, liberated expression given on the stage will more and more take effect in the daily intercourse of all classes. As a guiding hint and stimulus in that direction, the central law of dramatic expression may here be explicitly formulated. All emotions that betoken the exaltation of life, or the recognition of influences that tend to heighten life, confirm the face, but expand and brighten it. All emotions that indicate the sinking of life, or the recognition of influences that threaten to lower life, relax and vacate the face if these emotions are negative, contract and darken it if they are positive. In answer to the exalting influences the face either grasps what it has or opens and smiles to hail and receive what is offered; in answer to the depressing influences, it either droops under its load or shuts and frowns to oppose and exclude what is threatened. The eyes reveal the mental states; the muscles reveal the effects of those states in the body. In genial states active, the eyes and the muscles are both intense, but the eyes are smiling. In genial states passive, the eyes are intense, the muscles languid. In hostile states active, both eyes and muscles are intense, but the eyes are frowning. In hostile states passive, the eyes are languid, the muscles intense. In simple or harmonious states, the eyes and the muscles agree in their excitement or relaxation. In complex and inconsistent states, the eyes and the muscles are opposed in their expression. To expound the whole philosophy of these rules would take a volume. But they formulate with comprehensive brevity the central law of dramatic expression as a guide for observation in daily life.