The two brief notices that succeed appeared at the same time and in the same city in two opposed newspapers. The contrast is amusing, and it is easy to see how little impartial critical judgment went to the composition of either of them, as well as how bewildering they must have been to the reader who was seeking from the judgment of the press to form a dispassionate opinion on the merits of the actor:
“Having within the present year closely criticised Edwin Forrest’s performances during a long engagement, we do not intend to bore our readers with repetitions of what we have said. Mr. Forrest will go through his programme like a machine, and like most machines it may be discovered that his powers have suffered somewhat by wear and tear. He has long since passed the point of improvement. Fully settled in his own conceit that his personations are the most wonderful that the world ever saw, his only care will be to heighten defects which he considers beauties, and to dwell with increased tenderness upon each fault. There are some mothers who give their hearts to their puny, deformed, and bad-tempered children, to the neglect of others who are handsome, gentle, and intelligent. Mr. Forrest is an admirer of this policy. He slights his better qualities in acting, and dandles his absurdities with more than just parental fondness. His faults are inveterate; his beauties daily grow homely. It would be supererogation to expose at length those vices and stage tricks which have already been freely cauterized.”
“During the week Mr. Forrest has been performing the characters of Richelieu, Damon, Richard, and Hamlet. At each representation the invariable compliment of a crowded house has been paid him. With the advance of every year this actor seems to grow greater. The intellectuality of his acting becomes more and more apparent. The experience of years is now devoted to his art; a lifetime is concentrated upon the development of his transcendent genius. Mr. Forrest has shaped the colossal block of crude genius into wonderful statues of natural and lovely proportions. No intelligent praise can be extravagant which extols the exceeding beauty of the conceptions of this wonderful artist. We can scarcely think of Mr. Forrest’s fame as otherwise than increasing. It throws around his name a luminous halo, whose brightness and extent the progress of years will only intensify and enlarge.”
One more specimen will suffice. It is from the pen of an anonymous English critic:
“If Forrest is not in a paroxysm, he is a mere wicker idol; huge to the eye, but full of emptiness,—a gigantic vacuum. His distortions of character are monstrous; the athletic, muscular vigor of his Lear is a positive libel upon consistency and truth. Spartacus was made for him, and he for Spartacus; the athlete is everlastingly present in all his personations. His ravings in Othello, in Macbeth, and in Richard the Third are orgasms of vigorous commonplace.
“When Mr. Forrest represents terror, his knees shake, his hands vibrate, his chest heaves, his throat swells, and his muscles project as if he were under the influence of a galvanic battery or his whole frame put in motion by a machine. He always appears anxious to show the toughness of his sinews, the cast-iron capabilities of his body, and the prodigious muscularity of his legs, which really haunt the spectator’s eyes like huge, grim-looking spectres, appearing too monstrous for realities, as they certainly are for the dignified grace of tragedy. He delights to represent physical agony with the most revolting exaggerations. When he dies, he likes that the audience should hear the rattles in his throat, and will, no doubt, some day have a bladder of pig’s blood concealed under his doublet, that, when stabbed, the tragic crimson may stream upon the stage, and thus give him the opportunity of representing death, in the words of his admirers, to the life.
“Perhaps no stronger test of Mr. Forrest’s want of intellectual power as an actor can be given than his slow, drawling, whining mode of delivering the speech to the senate, in the play of Othello. No schoolboy could do it worse, and though in the more energetic scenes there is a certain mechanical skill and seeming reality of passion, yet the charm which this might be calculated to produce is lost by the closeness of resemblance to a well-remembered original. It is almost frightfully vigorous, and though there are some touches of true energy, this is much too boisterous, coarse, and unrelieved by those delicate inflections which so eloquently express true feeling to obtain for it that meed of praise only due to the efforts of original genius. There is much art and much skill in Mr. Forrest’s acting; but its grand defect is the general absence of truth.”
The medley of praise and abuse, the hodge-podge of incongruous opinions, seen in the foregoing illustrations of newspaper criticism, arose far less from any contradiction of excellences and faults in the acting of Forrest than from the prejudices and ignorance of the writers. A large proportion of those writers were obstinately prepossessed or corruptly interested, and few of them had any distinct appreciation of the constituent elements of the dramatic art. Destitute of the true standard of criticism, the final canon of authority, their judgments were at the mercy of impulse and chance influences.
But Forrest was no solitary, though he was an extreme, sufferer in this respect. The greatest of his predecessors, all the most gifted and famous actors and actresses, have had to undergo the same pitiless ordeal. Those concerning whose illustrious pre-eminence there can be no question whatever have borne the same shower of detraction, insult, and ridicule, the same pelting of cynical badinage. The restless vanity, presumptuous conceit, and blasé omniscience of the common order of critics have spared none of the conspicuous dramatic artists. And if any one infer from the abuse and depreciation rained on Forrest that he must have been guilty of the worst faults, he may draw the like conclusion from the like premises in relation to every celebrated name in the history of the stage.
The bigoted opposition and belittling estimates met by Talma in his bold and resolute effort to displace the conventional inanity and stilted bombast of the French stage with truth and nature are a matter of notorious record. Some of his sapient critics thought they were administering a caustic censure when they uttered the unwitting compliment, extorted by their surprise at his severe costume and grand attitudes, “Why, he looks exactly like a Roman statue just stepped out of the antique.” The biographers of Garrick give abundant evidence of the misrepresentation, ridicule, and manifold censure with which his enemies and rivals and their venal tools pursued and vexed him. He even stooped to buy them off, and sometimes counteracted their malice with his own anonymous pen. Horace Walpole wrote, “I have seen the acting of Garrick, and can say that I see nothing wonderful in it.” His small stature, his starts and pauses, were, in especial, maliciously animadverted on. Mossop was sneered at as “a distiller of syllables,” Macklin for the prominent “lines, or rather cordage, of his face,” and Quin for the “mechanic regularity and swollen pomp of his declamation.” George Steevens wrote a bitter satire, utterly unjust and unprovoked, on Mrs. Siddons. She and her brother, John Philip Kemble, were stigmatized as icebergs and pompous pretenders, and were repeatedly hissed and insulted on the stage. Before her marriage, while Siddons was playing at the Haymarket, a critic, trying to put her down, wrote to Hayley, the manager, “Miss Kemble, though patronized by a number of clamorous friends, will prove only a piece of beautiful imbecility.” In 1807 a leading London newspaper said of George Frederick Cooke, “His delivery of Lear is just what it is in Richard: in its subdued passages, little and mean; in its more prominent efforts, rugged, rumbling, and staccato, resembling rather a watchman’s rattle than any other object in art or nature.”