Here, within these walls, while yet in my boyish days, one of the proudest honors of my professional life was achieved; for I here essayed the part of Iago to the Othello of the greatest actor that ‘ever lived in the tide of times,’—Edmund Kean. To me there is music in the very name,—Edmund Kean, a name blended indissolubly with the genius of Shakspeare; Edmund Kean, who did more by his acting to illustrate the Bard of all time than all the commentators from Johnson, Warburton, and Steevens down to the critics of the present day. It was said of Edmund Kean by a distinguished English poet, that ‘he read Shakspeare by flashes of lightning.’ It is true; but those flashes of lightning were the coruscations of his own divine mind, which was in affinity with the mind of Shakspeare. Now I must beg leave to express my heartfelt thanks for this demonstration of your favor, hoping at no distant day to meet you again.”
Thus it is clear that, whatever the sufferings of Forrest may have been, however many trials and pangs his growing experience of the world may have brought him, he had great enjoyments still. Besides the proud delight of his professional successes and the solid satisfaction of his swelling property, he had an even more keen and substantial complacency of pleasure in his own physical health and strength. His enormous vital and muscular power supported a superb personal consciousness of joy and contentment. He trod the earth like an indigenous monarch, afraid of nothing. The dynamic charge, or rather surcharge, of his frame was often so profuse that it would break out in wild feats of power to relieve the aching muscles. For instance, one night when acting in the old Tremont Theatre in Boston, under such an exhilarating impulse he struck his sword against a wooden column at the side of the stage as he was passing out, and cut into it to the depth of more than three inches. An Englishman who sat near jumped from his seat in terror, and tremblingly said, as he hastened out, “He is a damned brute. He is going to cut the theatre down!” This full vigor of the organic nature, this vivid relishing edge of unsatiated senses, yielded a constant feeling of actual or potential happiness, and clothed him with an air of native pride which was both attractive and authoritative. He had paid the price for this great prize of an indomitable physique in systematic exercises and temperance. He wore it most proudly and kept it intact until he was fifty-nine years old. The lesson of his experience and example in physical culture is well worth heeding.
The fashion of society in regard to the education and care of the body has passed through three phases. The most extraordinary phase, in the glorious results it secured, was the worship of bodily perfection among the Greeks, a reflex revival of which was shown by the nobles and knights at the period of the Renaissance. The Greek gymnastic of the age of Pericles, as described by Plato so often and with such enthusiasm,—a gymnastic in which music, instead of being an end in itself, a sensuous luxury of the soul, was made a guide and adjunct to bodily training, giving rhythm to every motion, or that grace and economy of force which so much enhances both beauty and power,—lifted men higher in unity of strength and charm of health and harmony of faculties than has anywhere else been known. The Grecian games were made an ennobling and joyous religious service and festival. The eager, emulous, patriotic, and artistic appreciation of the spectators,—the wondrous strength, beauty, swiftness, rhythmic motions, imposing attitudes of the athletes,—the legends of the presence and contentions of the gods themselves on that very spot in earlier times,—the setting up of the statues of the victors in the temples as a worship of the Givers of Strength, Joy, and Glory,—served to carry the interest to a pitch hardly to be understood by us. The sculptures by Phidias which immortalize the triumph of Greek physical culture show a harmony of the circulations, a compacted unity of the organism, a central poise of equilibrium, a profundity of consciousness and a fulness of self-control, a perfect blending of the automatic and the volitional sides of human nature, which must have exalted the Olympic victors at once to the extreme of sensibility and to the extreme of repose. It is a million pities that this ideal should ever have been lost. But in Rome, under the military drill and unbridled license of the emperors, it degenerated into a brutal tyranny and sensuality, the gigantic superiority of potency it generated being perverted to the two uses of indulging self and oppressing others.
The next swing of the historic pendulum flung men, by the reaction of spirituality, over to the fatal opposite,—the ecclesiastic contempt and neglect of the body. The Christian ideal, or at least the Church ideal, in its scornful revulsion from gladiators and voluptuaries, glorified the soul at the expense of the loathed and mortified flesh. At the base of this cultus was the ascetic superstition that matter is evil, that the capacity for pleasure is an infernal snare, and that the only way to heaven is through material maceration and renunciation. Sound philosophy and religion teach, on the contrary, that the body is the temple of God, to be developed, cleansed, and adorned to the highest degree possible for His habitation.
The third phase in the history of bodily training is that neutral condition, between the two foregoing extremes, which generally characterizes the present period,—a state of almost universal indifference, or a fitful alternation of unregulated attention to it and neglect of it. The pedagogue gives his pupils some crude exercises to keep them from utterly losing their health and breaking down on his hands under the barbaric pressure of mental forcing; the drill-sergeant disciplines his recruits to go through their technical evolutions; the dancing-master trains the aspirants for the mysteries of the ballet; and the various other classes of public performers who get their living by playing on the curiosity, taste, or passion of the public, have their specialities of bodily education for their particular work. But a perfected system of æsthetic gymnastics, based on all that is known of the laws of anatomy, physiology, and hygiene,—a system of exercises regulated by the exactest rhythm and fitted to liberate every articulation, to develop every muscle, and to harmonize and exalt every nerve,—such a system applied from childhood to maturity for the purpose not of making professional exhibitors of themselves, but of perfecting men and women for the completest fulfilment and fruition of life itself, does not yet exist. It is the great educational desideratum of the age. Co-ordinating all our bodily organs and spiritual faculties, unifying the outward organism and the inward consciousness, it would remove disease, crime, and untimely death, open to men and women the highest conditions of inspiration, and raise them towards the estate of gods and goddesses. Avoiding equally the classic deification of the body and the mediæval excommunication of it, emerging from the general indifference and inattention to it which belong to the modern absorption in mental work and social ambition, the next phase in the progress of physical education should be the awakening on the part of the whole people of a thorough appreciation of its just importance, and the assigning to it of its proportionate place in their practical discipline. This is a work worthy to be done now in America. As democratic Athens gave the world the first splendid gymnastic training with its transcendent models of manhood, so let democratic America, improving on the old example with all the new treasures of science and sympathy, make application to its citizens of a system of motions for the simultaneous education of bodies and souls to the full possession of their personal sovereignty, making them all kings and queens of themselves, because strong and beautiful and free and happy in every limb and in every faculty!
There is a vulgar prejudice among many of the most refined and religious people against the training of the body to its highest condition, as if that necessitated an animality fatal to the richest action of mind, heart, and soul. The fop whose delicacy is so exquisite that the least shock of vigorous emotion makes him turn pale and sicken, fancies the superb athlete a vulgar creature whose tissues are as coarse as wire netting and the globules of his blood as big as peas. But in reality the presence of fidgeting nerves in place of reposeful muscles gives feebler reactions, not finer ones, a more irritable consciousness, not a richer one. Were this squeamish prejudice well founded it would make God seem a bungler in his work, essential discord inhering in its different parts. It is not so. The harmonious development of all portions of our being will raise the whole higher than any fragment can be lifted alone. The two finest and loftiest and richest flowers of Greek genius, Plato and Sophocles, were both crowned victors in the Olympic games. But this strong, lazy prejudice has widely fulfilled itself in fact by limiting the greatest triumphs of physical culture to the more debased and profane types,—to professional dancers and pugilists. And even here it is to be affirmed that, on this low range of brawn and pluck and skill, physical power and prowess are better than physical weakness and cowardice. It is better, if men are on that level, to surpass and be admired there than to fail and be despised there. But since one God is the Creator of flesh and spirit, both of which when obedient are recipients of his influx and held in tune by all his laws, the best material states are not hostile, but most favorable, to the best spiritual fulfilments. The life of the mind will lift out of, not mire in, the life of the body. And hitherto unknown revelations of inspired power, delight, and longevity wait on that future age when the vindication of a divineness for the body equally sacred with that of the soul shall cause the choicest persons to be as faithful in physical culture for the perfection of their experience as prize-fighters are for winning the victory in the ring. Give us the soul of Channing, purest lover and hero of God, in the body of Heenan, foremost bruiser and champion of the world; the soul of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, tender poetess of humanity, in the body of Fanny Elssler, incomparable queen of the stage;—and what marvels of intuitive perception, creative genius, irresistible authority, and redemptive conquest shall we not behold!
Such is one of the prophecies drawn from the supremest examples of combined mental and physical culture in the dramatic profession. Forrest fell short of any such mark. His gymnastic was coarse and heavy, based on bone and muscle rather than brain and nerve. The sense of musical rhythm was not quick and fine in him. His blood was too densely charged with amorous heat, and his tissues too much clogged with his weight of over two hundred pounds, for the most ethereal delicacies of spirituality and the inspired imagination. But within his limitations he was a marked type of immense original and cultivated power. And his sedulous fidelity in taking care of his bodily strength and health is worthy of general imitation. He practised athletics daily, posturing with dumb-bells or Indian clubs, taking walks and drives. He was extremely attentive to ventilation, saying, “The first condition of health is to breathe pure air plentifully.” He ever sought the sunshine, worshipping the smile of the divine luminary with the ardor of a true Parsee. “The weather has been pernicious,” he says in one of his letters. “Oh for a day of pure sunshine! What a true worshipper of the Sun I have always been! And how he has rewarded me, in the light of his omnipotent and kindly eye, with health and joy and sweet content! How reasonable and how sublime was the worship of Zoroaster! I had rather be a beggar in a sunny climate than a Crœsus in a cloudy one.” He was temperate in food and drink, shunning for the most part rich luxuries, complex and highly-seasoned dishes, falling to with the greatest relish on the simplest and wholesomest things, especially oatmeal, cracked wheat, corn-meal mush, brown bread, Scotch bannocks, cream, buttermilk. When fatigued, he turned from artificial stimulants and sought recovery in rest and sleep. When hard-worked, he never omitted going regularly to bed in the daytime to supplement the insufficient repose of the night. He had great facility in catching a nap, and at such times his deep and full respiration was as regular as clock-work. But above all the rest he attributed the greatest importance to keeping his skin in a clean and vigorous condition. Night and morning he gave himself a thorough washing, followed by energetic scrubbing with coarse towels and a percussing of his back and spine with elastic balls fastened to the ends of two little clubs. His skin was always aglow with life, polished like marble, a soft and sensitive yet firm and flowing mantle of protection and avenue of influences between his interior world and the exterior world. This extreme health and vigor of the skin relieved the tasks put on the other excretory organs, and was most conducive to vital energy and longevity.
The one fault in the constitution of Forrest was the gouty diathesis he inherited from his grandfather on the maternal side. This rheumatic inflammability—a contracted and congested state of some part of the capillary circulation and the associated sensory nerves accumulating force to be discharged in hot explosions of twinging agony—might have been cured by an æsthetic gymnastic adapted to free and harmonize all the circulations,—the breath, the blood, the nerve-force. But, unfortunately, his heavy and violent gymnastic was fitted to produce rigidity rather than suppleness, and thus to cause breaks in the nervous flow instead of an equable uniformity. This was the secret of his painful attacks and of his otherwise unexpectedly early death. There are three natures in man, the vital nature, the mental nature, the moral nature. These natures express and reveal themselves in three kinds or directions of movement. The vital nature betrays or asserts itself in eccentric movement, movement from a centre; the mental, in acentric movement, movement towards a centre; the moral, in concentric movement, movement around a centre. Outward lines of motion express vital activity, inward lines express mental activity, curved lines, which are a blending of the two other, express moral or affectional activity. This physiological philosophy is the basis of all sound and safe gymnastic. The essential evil and danger of the heavy and violent gymnastic of the circus and the ring is that it consists so largely of the outward and inward lines which express the individual will or vital energy and mental purpose. Each of these tends exclusively to strengthen the nature which it exercises. Straight hitting, pushing, lifting, jumping, in their two directions of exertion, tend to expand and to contract. That is vital, and this is mental. Both are expensive in their drain on the volition, but one tends to enlarge the physical organism, the other to shrink it and to produce strictures at every weak point. The former gives a heavy, obese development; the latter an irritable, irregular, at once bulgy and constricted development. The vice of the vital nature dominating unchecked is gluttony, and its end, idiocy. The vice of the mental nature is avarice, both corporal and spiritual, and its end, madness. The vice of the moral nature, when it becomes diseased, is fanaticism; and its subject becomes, if the vital element in it controls, an ecstatic devotee; if the mental element controls, a reckless proselyter. Now, a true system of gymnastic will perfect all the three natures of man by not allowing the vital or the mental to domineer or its special motions to preponderate, but blending them in those rotatory elliptical or spiral movements which combine the generous expansion of the vital organs and the selfish concentration of the mental faculties in just proportion and thereby constitute the language of the moral nature. Rigid outward movements enlarge the bulk and strengthen sensuality. Rigid inward movements cramp the organism and break the unity and liberty of its circulations, leading to every variety of disease. But flowing musical movements justly blent of the other two movements, in which rhythm is observed, and the extensor muscles are used in preponderance over the contractile so as to neutralize the modern instinctive tendency to use the contractile more than the extensor,—movements in which the motor nerves are, for the same reason, used more than the sensory,—will economize the expenditure of force, soothe the sensibilities, and secure a balanced and harmonious development of the whole man in equal strength and grace. Such a system of exercise will remove every tendency to a monstrous force in one part and a dwarfed proportion in another. It will secure health and beauty in a rounded fulness equally removed from shrivelled meagreness and repulsive corpulence. It will make its practiser far more than a match for the huge athletes of the coarse school, as the man whose every limb is a whip is thrice more puissant and terrible than the man whose every limb is a club. The deepest secret of the final result of this æsthetic gymnastic is that it gives one the perfect possession of himself in the perfected unity of his organism, the connective tissue being so developed by the practice of a slow and rhythmical extensor action that it serves as an unbroken bed of solidarity for the whole muscular coating of the man. Nothing else can be so conducive as this to equilibrium, and consequently to longevity. When the unity of the connective tissue is broken by strictures at the articulations or elsewhere, the waves of motion or force ever beating through the webs of nerves are interrupted, stopped, or reflected by devitalized wrinkles which they cannot pass. Thence result the innumerable mischiefs of inflammation in the outer membrane and catarrh in the inner.
The æsthetic gymnastic, which will serve as a diacatholicon and panacea for a perverted and sick generation, is one whose measured and curvilinear movements will not be wasteful of force but conservative of it, by keeping the molecular vibrations circulating in the organism in perpetual translations of their power, instead of shaking them out and losing them through sharp angles and shocks. This will develop the brain and nerves, the genius and character, as the old system developed the muscles and the viscera. It will lead to harmony, virtue, inspiration, and long life, as the old system led to exaggeration, lust, excess, and early death. How greatly it is needed one fact shows, namely, the steady process which has long been going on of lessening beauty and increasing ugliness in the higher classes of society, lessening roundness and increasing angularity of facial contour. The proof of this historic encroachment of anxious, nervous wear and tear displacing the full grace of curved lines with the sinister sharpness of straight lines is given in most collections of family portraits, and may be strikingly seen by glancing from the rosy and generous faces of Fox and Burke or of Washington and Hamilton to the pinched and wrinkled visages of Gladstone and D’Israeli or of Lincoln and Seward.
There is probably only one man now living who is fully competent to construct this system of æsthetic gymnastic,—James Steele Mackaye, the heir of the traditions and the developer of the philosophy of François Delsarte. It was he of whom Forrest, two years before his own death, said, “He has thrown floods of light into my mind: in fifteen minutes he has given me a deeper insight into the philosophy of my own art than I had myself learned in fifty years of study.” If he shall die without producing this work, it will be a calamity to the world greater than the loss of any battle ever fought or the defeat of any legislative measure ever advocated. For this style of gymnastic alone recognizes the infinitely solemn and beautiful truth that every attitude, every motion, tends to produce the quality of which it is the legitimate expression. Here is brought to light an education constantly going on in every one, and far more momentous and fatal than any other. Here is a principle which makes the body and the laws of mechanics as sacred revelations of the will of God as the soul and the laws of morality. Here is the basis of the new religious education destined to perfect the children of men, abolish deformity, sickness, and crime, and redeem the earth.