“Mr. Forrest dragged his weary performances out to empty boxes last week. Save in his voice, which still soars, crackles, rumbles, grumbles, growls and hisses, as in his younger days, this great actor is but a dreary echo of his former self. Appropriately may he exclaim,—
‘Othello’s occupation’s gone!’
and it would be well if, like the heroic Moor, he would bid farewell to the bustling world by an abrupt retirement from the stage, instead of inflicting nightly stabs upon his high reputation and wounding his old-time friends by his attempts to soar into the sublime regions of tragedy.”
“The interest that still crowds the theatre whenever Mr. Forrest appears is less admiration of his present power than curiosity to see a gigantic ruin.”
“The intellectual portion of the community never thoroughly appreciated the style of histrionic gymnastics which our great tragedian has introduced; the ponderous tenderness and gladiatorial grace of his conceptions, though excellent in their way, had never any charm for people of delicate nerves, who delight not in viewing experiments in spasmodic contortion, or delineations of violent death, evidently after studies from nature in the slaughterhouse! But lately the faithful themselves are tiring of it.”
The man with a thin and acid nature who aspires to be an author or an artist, and cannot succeed, sometimes becomes a spiteful critic. The only pity is that he should usually find it so easy to get an organ for his spites. Would-be genius hates and criticises, actual genius loves and creates. The former enviously despises those who succeed where he has failed, the latter generously admires all true merit.
And now it will be a relief to turn from such criticisms to facts. The season of 1871 was marked by an experience altogether memorable in the professional history of Forrest, his last engagement in New York, where he played for twenty nights in February at the Fourteenth Street Theatre, sustaining only the two roles of Lear and Richelieu. These were his two best parts, and being characters of old men his cruel sciatica scarcely interfered with his rendering of them. One or two newspaper writers complained, as if it were a crime in the actor and a personal offence to them, that “when Forrest came this season to New York he neglected, and apparently with a purpose, the usual precautions of metropolitan managers, and seemed to avoid all the modern appliances of success, either from a contempt for the appliances or from indifference as to the result.” They did not seem once to suspect that his scorn for every species of bribery or meretricious advertising, his frank and careless trust in simple truth, was, considering the corrupt custom of the times, in the highest degree honorable to him and exemplary for others. It was always his way to make a plain announcement of his appearance, and then let the verdict be what it might, with no interference of his.
There was no popular rush to see him now. In the crowd of new excitements and the quick forgetfulness belonging to our day, the curiosity about him and the interest in him had largely passed away. But the old friends who rallied at his name, and the respectable numbers of cultivated people who were glad of a chance to see the most historic celebrity of the American stage before it should be too late, were unanimous in their enthusiastic admiration. They declared with one voice that his playing was filled with wonderful power in general and with wonderful felicities in detail. That metropolitan press, too, from which he had so long received not only unjust depreciation, but wrong and contumely, spoke of him and his performances now in a very different tone. Its voice appeared a kindly response to what he had privately written to his friend Oakes: “Well, I am here, here in New York once more, and on Monday next begin again my professional labor,—labors begun more than forty years ago in the same city. What changes since then in men and things! Will any one of that great and enthusiastic audience which greeted my efforts as a boy, be here on Monday evening next to witness the matured performance of the man? If so, how I should like to hear from his own lips if the promises of spring-time have been entirely fulfilled by the fruits of the autumn of life!” Without any notable exception, extreme praise was lavished on his acting, and his name was treated with a tenderness and a respect akin to reverence. It seemed as though the writers felt some premonition of the near farewell and the endless exit, and were moved to be just and kind. The late amends touched the heart of the old player deeply. It was a comfort to him to be thus appreciated in the city of his greatest pride ere he ceased acting, and to have the estimates of his friends endorsed in elaborate critiques from the pens of the best dramatic censors, William Winter, Henry Sedley, John S. Moray, and others. It is due to him and to them that some specimens of these notices be preserved here. Space will allow but a few extracts from the leading articles:
“Edwin Forrest, the actor, who is identified with much that is intellectual, picturesque, and magnificently energetic in the history of the American stage, is again before the New York public. His reappearance is deeply interesting upon several accounts. His reputation, far from being confined to the United States, extends wherever the language of Shakspeare is spoken, and to a great many countries where translations have rendered that poet’s meanings known. His name has grown with the name of the American people, and has greatened with the increasing greatness of the country. At home and abroad he is recognized as the superbly unique representative of several characters whose creators owe their inspiration to the genius of American history. No other actor has presented Americans with such powerful and original conceptions of King Lear, Coriolanus, and Macbeth. No other unites such grand physical forces with such intellectual vigor and delicacy. His hand has an infinity of tints at its command, and his tenderest touches are never weak. He is, therefore, deservedly and almost universally considered as the fair representative of what Americans have most reason to be proud of in the history of their stage. He is not a weak copyist of foreign originalities and of schools of the past. His virtues and his vices, dramatically speaking, are his own. His genius is thoroughly self-responsible, and his strong, conscious, and magnificent repose is resplendently suggestive of the degree in which the great actor rates, and has a right to rate himself.”
“Mr. Forrest can indeed be now admired more than he ever was before; for his magnificent and picturesque energies are now chastened and restrained by great intellectual culture, and softened by the presence of that tender glow which varied experience is pretty sure to ultimately lend. One strives in vain to recall the name of any other actor, either in this country or in England, who possesses such immense physical energies under such perfect subservience to the intellect. We insist more particularly upon this point, because it is one upon which even the admirers of Mr. Forrest are not apt to dwell. There is a very large class of people who are so absorbed in the generous breadth, the brilliant coloring, and the large treatment of Mr. Forrest’s favorite themes, that they neglect to give him credit for intellectual niceties and delicate emotional distinctions. They vulgarly admire merely the large style and heroic presence of the man, and the rich reverberations of a voice that all the demands of the entire gamut of passion have not yet perceptibly worn, and they omit to give him that intellectual appreciation which is very decidedly his due. In no other character which he is fond of playing are all these qualifications so harmoniously united as in Lear. In no other character are the distinctive qualities of Mr. Forrest’s genius so beautifully blended and played. Those who have been familiar with his rendering of this character in the days that are past will take a curious pleasure in accompanying him from scene to scene, and from act to act, and in remarking how true he remains to the ideal of his younger years, and how powerful he is in expressing that ideal. It is a rare thing for an actor to awaken in a later generation the same quality and degree of delight that he awoke in his own. It is a rare thing for him to be as youthful in his maturity as he was mature in his youth, and to thus succeed in delighting those who measure by a standard more exacting and severe than the standard was which the public, in an earlier age of American dramatic art, was fond of applying. Mr. Forrest has passed these tests. We do not care for the ignorant sarcasm of those who claim that the ‘school’ he represents is a ‘physical’ school. It is a school wherein Mr. Forrest is supreme master, and where an unrivalled voice and physique are made absolutely subservient to intellectual expression.”