“Unless the actuating principle of the writer be a merely malignant dislike of the man, it seems almost impossible to us that any critic, possessed of the ordinary intelligence current among the more respectable members of the fraternity, can refuse or be so morally blind as not to see the wide difference existing between the Forrest of the present time and the Forrest who was admitted by the public to be the greatest American actor some twenty years ago. At that time he was wonderful,—wonderful by his intensity, his dashing power, his superb manhood, his fine voice, and his noble presence. This made him a great artist. He might have many faults, but these were obliterated from the mind of the spectator by his many and dazzling merits, which were even the more striking from the comparative blemishes with which they were mingled.
“The artistic career of Edwin Forrest has now, however, made a great stride in advance. He has polished, refined, and completed his style. It was said of Garrick, who was several years older than Forrest when he retired from the stage, that in his latter seasons he acted better than ever, and the fact that he never, even when a master in the art, ceased to be a student, explained the cause. The same may be said, and even with more truth, of Edwin Forrest. There is no living actor half so studious as himself. His mind, always under thorough self-cultivation, has matured in later years, and the effects are apparent. He is so near perfection as an actor that it is impossible to be so attracted by his excellencies now as we might have been when contrast made them more palpable.
“Fully to appreciate the various power of Mr. Forrest cannot be done by examining him in any single character. We have therefore waited until his engagement is nearly completed, and have carefully studied him in eleven different characters,—Richelieu, Damon, Richard III., Hamlet, Othello, Virginius, Macbeth, Lucius Junius Brutus, Febro, Jack Cade, and Lear. Of these, perhaps, his Lear, his Othello, his Macbeth, his Richelieu, and his Damon are the greatest; but there is comparatively so little difference in excellence between his Hamlet and his Othello, his Virginius and his Damon, that he might reasonably except to us for noting that difference, which, after all, is in some measure the result of a purely physical variation in the bodily means at his disposal for each special embodiment.
“The almost even excellence, in so many of his great parts, to which Edwin Forrest has attained, contains in itself a strong assertion of his right not only to the first place in the histrionic annals of the last few years, but registers a positive claim to the highest position, as an artist, in all histrionic history to which the slightest degree of faith can be attached. To be at the same time a great Hamlet and a great Othello, even granting a difference in the excellence of the two parts, argues that the actor possesses to a larger extent than common that intellectual adaptability without which it would be impossible for him to represent two such widely different men. Slightly deranged, a philosophic dreamer, without the capability of sustained action, energetic only by immediate impulse, the Danish Prince differs widely from the passionate, powerful, one-purposed, and sublimely simple nature of the Moor. In grasping these two opposite characters as completely as Edwin Forrest has done, he has displayed an intellectual strength of the highest order, approaching very nearly to that subtlety of intelligence which is but rarely coupled with genius, but which, when coupled with it, makes it a genius of the highest order.
“This subtlety of intelligence he develops in his wonderful rendering of Richard, as widely opposed a character to both or either of the others as could well be presented to us. For the physical nature of Richard he has preferred Horace Walpole’s ‘Historic Doubts’ to Shakspeare’s delineation of the man, but in portraying him intellectually Edwin Forrest has simply depended on himself. He paints Richard with strong and vigorous execution, as a crafty and cruel hypocrite, with a positively unequalled subtlety of touch, rendering his hypocrisy frank and pleasant to the outside observer and coloring it with a comedy of which he offers no example in Othello and but a vague suspicion in Hamlet. His love-scene with Lady Anne is a marvellous piece of acting, which excerpts from the character as a worthy pendant to the mad scene in Lear. It was probably much more easily, although more recently, perfected by him than the latter, inasmuch as the last named was the result of careful and minute study, while the former is simply an effort of pure cultured genius which is as positively real as stage simulation ever can be. But this difference in character of the three extends even to those points in which Richard touches upon the two others. Richard is a man of strong passion as well as Othello. He is a philosopher as well as Hamlet. But passion is suppressed in Richard under the vest of his craft. It is addressed to other objects than Othello yearns for. It is bold and crafty. Othello is brave and honest. This is wonderfully discriminated by Mr. Forrest. The philosophy of Hamlet is reflective and uncertain, colored by study and lunacy. That of Richard is worldly and practical, subjected by him to his immediate ambition. Here Mr. Forrest, as an artist, is truly admirable. In Hamlet his philosophy is impulsively given to the audience. In Richard it is reasoned out and calculated with.
“Let us look at Macbeth, reaching, as Richard does, at the Crown. Most of our modern actors vary the two but little in their manner, without following the line of difference made between them by the great dramatist. This difference was in the intellectual strength of their natures. Richard is the tool of nobody. Macbeth is but a plaster in the fingers of his wife. How exquisitely does Mr. Forrest mark out the two natures! You trace Macbeth’s indecision of purpose in his very manner. His entrance in the first scene is characterized by it. The breaking off from his friends,—his return to himself when addressed by them,—his interjectional reveries,—his uncertainty of action, are all as they are given to us by Shakspeare, but scarcely such as we might have expected a man of Mr. Forrest’s physical temperament to embody. In Richard the ambition is positive. He does not reason of the acts which he commits. Hence here the artist’s actions are positive. When he commits or orders one of these deeds which tend to secure his desires or objects, it is done at once. The positive decision of the man is translated by the actor, whether it be in the passionate command or the sneering jest, by the calculated impulse of the man.”
Here is a part of an elaborate attack written by a relentless enemy and persecutor, quite remarkable for the untempered way in which it mixes truth and misrepresentation, justice and wrong:
“Mr. Forrest is now an actor who depends almost entirely on his voice as a medium of expression. He throws all his force into his reading; elocution is intended to compensate for everything,—for facial expression, for suitable action, for muscular vigor, and often, indeed, for true feeling and appreciation. By his impressive reading he frequently gains applause when in reality he deserves condemnation. There are whole scenes in his Lear unredeemed by one spark of feeling, the poverty of which he attempts to hide under a superficial gloss of elocutionary charlatanism. His fine voice aids him in this attempt; for that he has a noble voice, of great power,—whose tones are often commanding, and sometimes would be tender if they were inspired by any sincere feeling,—no one who has heard him can doubt. Take away this voice and Mr. Forrest is a nonentity, for he cannot act, and his face has no variety of expression. We know that, instead of using this fine element of success well, he has abused it; for his mannerisms of tone are perpetual, and disfigure every lengthy passage he reads. His voice has too great a burden to bear.
“This is one reason why he is so very monotonous. Another and a deeper reason is that the man himself is nothing but a monotone. No man on the stage has a more strongly marked individuality than Mr. Forrest; once seen, he cannot be easily forgotten, nor can his performances ever be confused in memory with those of others. Yet this individuality is a prison-house to him; he cannot escape from it. He is forced, in spite of himself, to play every character in exactly the same way. He develops Spartacus by the identical methods he employs in Hamlet; his Lear and his Claude Melnotte are made impressive, not by different styles. He has but one style. He is Edwin Forrest in everything; and, worse than this, he seems to care nothing for the best character he plays in comparison with his own success. Egotism is a marked peculiarity of his acting; he seems to say to the audience, not, ‘How fine is this character! how great was the author!’ but ever, ‘How finely I play it! am I not the greatest actor you ever saw?’
“Of course this strong personality is sometimes to Mr. Forrest an advantage. There are rôles which are adapted to his powers,—such as Virginius, Damon, and Spartacus. These he plays well because they do not require of him the transcendent power of genius,—the imagination which enables a man to penetrate the motives of a being foreign to himself, and to re-create in his own living nature the beauty and the passion of a dream. These he plays well because he finds in them something of himself. And even in Shaksperian characters, which are alien to his nature, he occasionally meets a passage which he can feel, and which he therefore expresses; and these moments of earnestness, occurring suddenly in the midst of long scenes of artificiality and dulness, are like flashes of lightning in a black midnight: while they last they are bright, but when they are gone they make the darkness deeper.”