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LIFE OF EDWIN FORREST, THE AMERICAN TRAGEDIAN.

WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER.

"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players."

PHILADELPHIA: J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 1877.

The newspaper in some countries has been a crime and in others a luxury. In all civilized countries it has now become a necessity. With us it is a duty. It is often corrupted and degraded into a nuisance. It ought to be cleansed and exalted into a pure benefaction, a circulating medium of intelligence and good will alone. Certainly it is far from being that at the present time. It is true that our newspapers are an invaluable and indispensable protection against all other tyrannies and social abuses; and their fierce vanity, self-interest, and hostile watchfulness of one another keep their common arrogance and encroachments pretty well in check. If they were of one mind and interest we should be helplessly in their power. From the great evils which so seriously alloy the immense benefits of the press, Forrest suffered much in the latter half of his life. The abuse he met irritated his temper, and left a chronic resentment in his mind. Two specimens of this abuse will show something of the nettling wrongs he encountered.

A Philadelphia newspaper stigmatized him in the most offensive terms as a drunkard. Now it was a moral glory of Forrest that, despite the temptations to which his professional career exposed him, he was never intoxicated in his life. The newspaper in question, threatened with a libel suit, withdrew its words with an abject apology,--a poor satisfaction for the pain and injury it had inflicted.

The other instance was on occasion of the driving of Macready from the stage of the Astor Place Opera House. A New York newspaper, in language of studied insolence, called Forrest the instigator and author of the outrage. "Mr. Forrest succeeded last night in doing what even his bad acting and unmanly conduct never did before: he inflicted a thorough and lasting disgrace upon the American character." "To revenge himself on Mr. Macready he packed the house and paid rowdies for driving decent people away." "With his peculiar tastes he will probably enjoy the infamy and deem it a triumph." Forrest, instead of cowhiding the writer of this atrocious slander,--as some men of his high-spirited nature would have done,--sent a letter, through his legal friend Theodore Sedgwick, demanding immediate retraction and apology. The editor assented to the request, confessing that he had spoken with no knowledge of facts to justify him!

From the time of his first appearance on the stage, Forrest was a careful reader of the criticisms on his performances. He generally read them, too, with a just mind, discriminating the valuable from the worthless, quick to adopt a useful hint, indignant or contemptuous towards unfairness and imbecility. There were three classes of persons whose comments on his performances gave him pleasure and instruction. He paid earnest attention to their remarks, and was always generous in expressing his sense of indebtedness to them.

The first class consisted of those who had a personal friendship for him, combined with a strong taste for the drama, and who studied and criticised his efforts in a sympathetic spirit for the purpose of encouraging him and aiding him to improve. Such men as Duane and Chandler and Swift in Philadelphia, Dawson in Cincinnati, Holley at Louisville, Canonge in New Orleans, Leggett and Lawson in New York, and Oakes in Boston, gave him the full benefit of their varied knowledge of human nature, literary art, and dramatic expression. Their censure was unhesitating, their questionings frank, their praise unstinted. Among these friendly critics the name of James Hunter, of Albany, one of the editors of "The Daily Advertiser," in the important period of young Forrest's engagement there, deserves to be remembered. He was one of the best critics of that day. He used to sit close to the stage and watch the actor with the keenest scrutiny, not allowing the smallest particular to escape his notice. Then at the end of the play he would in a private interview submit to his prot?g? the results of his observation, carefully pointing out every fault and indicating the remedy. He lived to see the favorite, who profited so well from his instructions, reach the proudest pitch of success and fame. When Mr. Hunter died, Forrest interrupted an engagement he was filling in a distant city in order to attend the funeral, and followed the remains of his old benefactor to the tomb as one of the chief mourners.

The second class of commenters on the playing of Forrest from whose judgments he received satisfaction and help was composed of that portion of the writers of dramatic criticism for the press who were comparatively competent to the task they undertook. They were men who were neither his friends nor his foes, but impartial judges, who knew what they were writing about and who recorded their honest thoughts in an honorable spirit and a good style. Among the many thousands of articles written on the acting of Forrest during the fifty years of his career there are hundreds written in excellent style, revealing competent knowledge, insight, and sympathy, and marked by an unexceptionable moral tone. They suggest doubts, administer blame, and express admiration, not from caprice or prejudice, but from principle, and with lights and shades varying in accordance with the facts of the case and the truth of the subject. These articles have an interest and a value in the highest degree creditable to their authors, and they go far to redeem the dramatic criticism of our national press from the severe condemnation justly provoked by the greater portion of it. Did space allow, it would be a pleasure to cite full specimens of this better class of dramatic critiques from the collected portfolios left behind him by the departed actor. Enough that he profoundly appreciated them, and that in various directions they did good service in their day.

The third class whose words concerning his performances Forrest gladly heeded were men who simply gave truthful reports of the impressions made on themselves, not professing to sit in judgment or to dogmatize, but honestly declaring what they felt and what they thought. Free from prejudices and perversities, fair average representatives of human nature in its ordinary degrees of power and culture, their experiences under his impersonations, ingenuously expressed, were always interesting and instructive, throwing light on many secrets of cause and effect, on many points of conventional falsity and of natural sincerity, in histrionic portrayals. Often while the newspaper writer who pretends to know the most about the dramatic art is so full of conceit and biases that his verdict on any particular representation has neither weight nor justice, the instincts of the bright-minded and warm-hearted boy or girl, the native intelligence and sympathy of the unsophisticated man or woman, whose soul is all open to the living truth of things, are almost infallible. Nobody knew this better than our tragedian, or was readier to act on it.

The light and joy he drew from these three sets of critics found a heavy counterpoise in the unjust estimates, perverse, exaggerated, malignant, or absurd, of which he was constantly made the subject by five classes of censors. The first were his personal enemies. Among the meaner fry of men who came in contact with him, a multitude hated him from jealousy and envy, from resentment of his independent and uncompromising ways, his refusal to grant them his intimacy or to serve their purposes. They sought to gratify their animosity by backbiting at his reputation, and especially by trying to destroy his professional rank. Year after year they made the columns of many a newspaper groan and reek under the load of their abuse, ranging from envenomed invective to grotesque ridicule. For example, a jocose foe said, in parody of the great Moslem proclamation, "There is but one Bowery, and Hellitisplit is its profit." And a serious foe said, "Mr. Forrest is an injury to the stage. He is a false leader, an oppression, a bad model, and a corrupter of the popular taste." A great part of the hostile criticism he suffered may be traced to bitter personal enmity, which had but slight regard to truth or fairness in its attacks on him, whether as man or as player.

The next class of assailants of Forrest in his professional repute were not his personal enemies, but were the tools of the various cliques, cabals, or social castes who had an antipathy for him and for the party to which he belonged. The English interest was especially active and bitter against him after his quarrel with Macready. Some of these writers were wilfully corrupt in their attitude and consciously false in their written estimates. They expressed neither their own feelings nor their own convictions, but merely the passion and policy of their employers. For example, at the time of the death of the tragedian a well-known editor confessed to a friend that some twenty years previously, when he was a reporter, his employer sent him to the theatre to see Forrest play, and with explicit directions to write the severest condemnation he could of the actor. He went accordingly, and made notes for a savage satirical article, although at the moment of his making these notes the tears were streaming down his cheeks, so sincere and so powerful was the representation which he was, against his conscience, preparing to abuse. Much dishonorable work of this kind has been done, and still is done, by men disgracefully connected with the press.

Another set of critics who assailed the acting of Forrest were those whose tastes were repelled by his realistic method and robust energy. He was too vehemently genuine, his art not far enough removed from material reality, to suit their fancy. They demanded a style more graceful, delicate, and free. Under the impulse of their resentful prejudices they overlooked his great merits, depreciated everything he did, angrily denied him his just rank, magnified every fault beyond measure, and maliciously caricatured him. A volume might be filled with articles purely of this description, proceeding from writers whose want of native manliness unfitted them for appreciating the magnificent manliness of his impersonations, and whose offended fastidiousness expressed itself in terms which were an offence to justice.

The fourth class of abusers of Forrest were men who had an instinctive repugnance for the imposing grandeur of the types of character he represented, for the self-sufficing, autocratic power and stateliness of his impersonations. Mean and envious spirits dislike to look up to those higher and stronger than themselves. Those who either never had any romance and reverence or have been disenchanted, feel an especial enmity or incompetent contempt for every one whose character and bearing appeal to those qualities. This disinclination to admire, this wish to look on equals or inferiors alone, is the special vice of a democracy. Demagogues, whether in politics or in letters, are men of torpid imaginations and dry hearts,--slow to worship, quick to sneer. The style of man enacted by Forrest, full of an imperial personality, overswaying all who come near, massive in will, ponderous in movement, volcanic in passion, majestic in poise, was hateful to the cynical critic the petty proportions of whose soul were revealed and rebuked in its presence. He seized the weapon of ridicule to revenge himself on the actor whose grander portrayals angered him instead of aweing or shaming or delighting him. There seems to be among us in America a growing dislike for the contemplation on the stage of the grandest heroism and power, and an increasing fondness for seeing specimens of commonplace or inferiority promotive of amusement. Already in his life Forrest was a sufferer by this degradation of popular taste, and were he now to appear in our theatres he would feel it still more.

The fifth and largest class of writers who assumed to criticise the acting of Forrest was made up of persons professionally connected with the press, whose blundering or extravagant estimates arose rather from their ignorance and utter incompetency for the task they undertook than from a spirit of antipathy or partisanship. The censures and laudations in these notices were the cause of an immense amount of varied mortification, amusement, vexation, and anger, as they came under his eyes. No small portion of the criticisms in the American newspapers on actors, singers, lecturers, and other public characters have been written, and still continue to be written, by uneducated and inexperienced young men scarcely out of their teens, serving an apprenticeship in the art and trade of journalism. With low aims and views, slight literary culture, superficial knowledge of life, a vile contempt for sentiment, a cynical estimate of human nature, equally ready to extol and to denounce for pay, these writers are the nuisance and the scandal of their craft. Were their articles accompanied by their names they would be destitute of weight or mischief; but, published with apparent editorial sanction, they often assume a pernicious importance.

The art of a people expresses the character and aspiration of a people and reacts to develop them. To sit in judgment on it is a high and sacred office, for which none but the most intelligent, refined, and honorable are fit. The praise and blame given to artists play on the living sensibilities of that most sensitive class whose careers are a vital index of the moral state of the community. Yet this momentous office is frequently entrusted to beardless youths, whose chief experience is in dissipation, and who unblushingly sell their pens to the highest bidder. A severe article exposing this abuse appeared in the "Round Table" in 1864, written by the editor, and entitled "Dramatic Critics in New York." Forrest put it in one of his scrap-books with the endorsement, "How true this is!" Mr. Sedley said, "What dramatic criticism in New York has been the public well know. Its low, egotistic, unfair, malicious character, its blind partialities and undying hates, its brazen ignorance and insulting familiarity, have given it wide notoriety and brought upon it equally wide contempt."

There is no art which more needs to be criticised than that of criticism itself, because there is none which requires in its votary such varied knowledge and cultivation, and such integrity of mind and purity of motive; because, furthermore, no other art is exposed to such subtle temptations of prejudice and vanity. The critic, in assuming to be a judge, is no exception to other writers. Like them he reveals and betrays himself in what he writes. In dissecting others he lays his own soul bare. In consciously judging them he pronounces unconscious judgment on himself,--in the tenderness or the insensibility, the generosity and candor or the meanness and spite, the knowledge and beauty or the ignorance and foulness, which he expresses. The pen of a base, vindictive critic is a stiletto, a fang, or an anal gland. The pen of a competent and genial critic is the wand of an intellectual Midas turning everything it touches to gold. For such a critic has the true standard of judgment in his knowledge, and, whatever the merit or demerit of the work he estimates, as he points out its conformity with that standard or its departure from it his lucid illustration is always full of instruction and help.

But the great majority of those journalists who presume to print their estimates of histrionic performances are profoundly ignorant of the elements of the dramatic art. Thus, having no knowledge of the real standard of judgment by which all impersonations should be tested, they cannot fairly criticise the artists who appear before them for a verdict. Instead of criticising or even justly describing them they victimize them. They use them as the stalking-horses of their own presumption or caprice, prejudice or interest. Unable to write with intelligent candor on the subject which they profess to treat, they employ it only as a text whereon to append whatever they think they can make effective in displaying their own abilities or amusing their readers. The unfittedness of such critics for their task is sufficiently proved by the chief attributes of their writing, namely, prejudice, absurd extravagance, reckless caprice, ridiculous assumption of superiority, violent efforts to lug in every irrelevant matter which they can in any way associate with the topic to enhance the effect they wish to produce regardless of justice or propriety.

A few specimens of these various kinds of criticism will be found full of curious interest and suggestiveness, while they will illustrate something of what the proud and sensitive nature of Forrest had to undergo at the hands of his admirers and his contemners.

One enthusiastic worshipper, in the year 1826, overflowed in the following style: "In the Iron Chest, on Thursday evening last, Mr. Forrest established a name and a fame which, should he die to-morrow, would give him a niche in the temple of renown to endure uncrumbled in the decay of ages!" Another one wrote thus: "In his Richard, Macbeth, Lear, and Othello, Mr. Forrest displays abilities and accomplishments which, for power and finish, we do not believe have ever been at all approached by any other actor that ever stepped upon the stage. The range of his delicate and varied by-play and the terrific energy of his explosions of naked passion leave the very greatest of his predecessors far in the rear and deep in the shade!" Such slopping eulogy defeats its own purpose. For want of discrimination its exaggerations are unmeaning and powerless. To be thus bedaubed and plastered with praise mortifies the actor, and injures him with the judicious, though springing from a generous sensibility and most kindly meant. This style of praise, however, is quite exceptional. The general run of critics have altogether too much knowingness and vanity for it. Their cue is to depreciate and detract, to satirize and belittle, so as either directly or indirectly to imply the superiority of their own knowledge and taste. Your ordinary critic is nothing if not superior to the artist he assumes to estimate. The publicity and admiration enjoyed by the performer seem to taunt the critic with his own obscurity and neglect, and he seeks an ignoble gratification in denying the merit of what he really envies. This base animus of the baser members of a properly high and useful literary guild betrays itself in many ways. For example, one of this sort, sneering at the idea of applauding the genius of an actor, characterized dramatists as "the class of men who administer in the most humiliating of all forms to the amusement of a large and mixed assembly." It needs no more than his own words to place Pecksniff before us in full life.

Through the whole dramatic life of Forrest one class of his assailants were found accusing him of tameness and dulness, while another class blamed him for extravagant energy and frenzied earnestness. Both classes spoke from personal bias or capricious whim, instead of judging by a fixed standard of truth and discerning where reserve and quietness were appropriate and where explosive vehemence was natural. One critic, in 1831, says, "He wants passion and force. He has no sincerity of feeling, no spontaneous and climacteric force. He often counterfeits well,--for the stage,--but nature is not there." At the same time the critic attached to another journal wrote, "Mr. Forrest's greatest fault is lack of self-control and repose. His feelings are so intense and mighty that they break through all bounds. With added years, no doubt, he will grow more reserved and artistic." Thirty years later the same blunt contradiction, the same blind caprice or prejudice, are found in the two extracts that follow:

"For nearly three months the heavy tragedian has weighed like an incubus on the public, which now, that the oppression of this theatrical nightmare is removed, breathes freely. We part with Mr. Forrest without regret; he has taken his leave, and, as that slight acquaintance of his, William Shakspeare, remarks, he could 'take nothing we would more willingly part withal.' Those only who, like ourselves, have constantly attended his performances, have a true knowledge of their tedium and dulness. The occasional visitor may bear with Mr. Forrest for a night or two, but we are really nauseated. The stupid, solemn, melancholy evenings we have passed in watching his stupid, solemn, and melancholy personations will always be remembered with disgust. Nothing but a sense of duty compelled us to submit to this ineffable bore."

"Mr. Forrest belongs to the robustious school of tragedy,--that class who 'split the ears of the groundlings,'--and his eminent example has ruined the American stage. He is a dramatic tornado, and plucks up the author's words by the roots and hurls them at the heads of the audience. He mistakes rant for earnestness, frenzy for vigor. The modulations of his voice are unnatural, and his pauses painful. A man in a furious passion does not measure his words like a pedagogue declaiming before his school, but speaks rapidly and fiercely, without taking time to hiss like a locomotive blowing off steam. Mr. Forrest was not so in his prime; and he has probably borrowed the habit from some antiquated actor who has been afflicted with asthma."

Third. "We thought to have dropped Mr. Edwin Forrest as a subject of newspaper remark; but several of his friends, or persons who think themselves such, are very anxious that we should do him justice, as an actor, though that is just what they ought to fear for him. We will take his performance as Richard. In this part, in the first place, his gait is very bad, awkward, and ungraceful. Richard may, possibly, have halted a little, but he did not roll like a sailor just ashore from a three years' cruise. A king does not walk so. Then, his features are totally devoid of expression; he can contort, but he can throw neither meaning nor feeling into them. When he attempts to look love, anger, hate, or fear, he resembles one of the ghouls and afrites in Harper's new illustrated edition of the Arabian Nights. He wins Lady Anne with a smile that would frighten a fiend, and that varies not a single line from that with which he evinces his satisfaction at the prospect of gaining the crown, and his contempt for the weakness of his enemies. A more outrageous and hideous contortion still expresses his rage at Buckingham's importunity, and at the reproaches of his mother. When he awakes in the tent-scene, he keeps his jaws at their utmost possible distension for about two minutes, and presents no bad emblem of an anaconda about to engorge a buffalo; one might fling in a pound of butter without greasing a tooth. At the same time, his whole frame writhes and shakes like a frog subjected to the action of a galvanic battery. We have seen folks frightened and convulsed before now, but we never saw one of them retain his senses in a convulsion. We like a deep, manly, powerful voice; but we dislike to hear it strained to the screech of a damned soul in hell-torment, like Mr. Forrest's when he calls on his drums to strike up and his men to charge. Often he displays his tremendous physical energies where there is not the least occasion for them, and as often does he repress them where they are needed. For instance, Richard ought to work himself into a passion before he slays King Henry. Mr. Forrest kills him as coolly and as quietly as a butcher sticks a pig or knocks down a calf, and he repulses Buckingham with the voice and action of a raving maniac. But Mr. Forrest is not to blame for his face, which is as nature moulded it, neither because he has but three notes to his voice, nor because the only inflections he is capable of are their exaltation and depression. But he need not aggravate the slight deformity of Richard more than Shakspeare did, who greatly exaggerated it himself. Nor do we blame him for raving, ranting, roaring, and bellowing to houses who never applaud him but when he commits some gross outrage upon good taste and propriety. He adapts his goods to his market, and he does wisely."

As a contrast and offset to the foregoing specimens of self-display disguised as criticism of another, it is but fair to cite a few extracts from different writers who had really something appropriate to say on the subject they were treating, and who said it with exemplary directness and impartiality:

"As regards Forrest, we are often amused to hear people, who have vainly refused for years to recognize his great histrionic abilities, wonder how it is that he invariably attracts crowded houses whenever he performs. We do not know any actor of his rank who has been so scurrilously abused and to so little purpose. The most elaborate pretences at criticism are always poured out on his devoted head, and if the power of the press could have written a man down he surely would have been long since; for he has few special champions among acknowledged critics, a fact which shows how deep is the feeling against him among particular classes. We must candidly confess to have never been biased by profound admiration of Forrest's acting, and yet we must also admit that after having calmly, patiently, and attentively watched some entire performances of his, we were convinced that he really possessed far greater powers of mind than any of the critics ever had given him credit for. His style is apt to be uneven, and men of his mould of intellect cannot always enact the same parts with the same good taste. But of his superb elocution,--of the noble idea of latent force and suppressed passion which his whole manner embodies,--of the perfection of manly dignity and physical development which have never had a better representative on the stage than in his person,--of the marvellous voice, so musical in its sound, and so happily adjusted in its modulations to increase the expression of a sentence,--there ought, in our judgment, to be no abatement of that admiration so long and so justly accorded to him. If all the critics in the country were with one voice to deny the existence of these things, their fiat would be powerless against the evidence of men's senses. We admit that he has no subtlety of intellect, no finely-drawn perceptions of delicate shades of human character. What he does is the result of the action of a very strong mind, capable of being directed in a particular channel with resistless energy; but this is the very class of minds out of which have arisen some of the greatest men in the world's annals. When Forrest performs an engagement people go to see him who know all his defects, but they go because it is the only acting of the highest class they have the opportunity of seeing, and it is so far above the rivalry of such actors as have been here during the last decade as to admit of no comparison."

"It is said when Canova was finishing a choice marble that his friends were very anxious to see the work on exhibition, but the great artist restrained their impatience, and proposed to gratify their desire at the end of a given term. At the expiration of the time, his friends assembled eagerly, and, in tones of disappointment, exclaimed, 'What have you been doing? You have been idle; you have done nothing to your piece.' To which he replied, 'On the contrary, my chisel has been exceedingly busy; I have subdued this muscle, I have brought out this feature, enlivened this expression, polished my marble.' 'Oh, but,' said they, 'these are mere trifles!' 'They may be,' he said, 'but trifles make up the sum of perfection.' The Virginius of Mr. Forrest revived this anecdote of Canova, as well as remembrances of his early performances. The difference in the two cases, however, is that it is not the artist now, but his friends that see the perfection. Virginius has long been identified with Mr. Forrest's fame; but, great as the lustre may be which his surpassing self-possession, noble and balanced bearing, rich, copious, and manly elocution, and deft, minute, and relative action have heretofore thrown upon this character, it has now been still more varied and beautified by the mellow tints that shadow and relieve the local splendor of salient features. It is indeed a masterpiece of acting and the 'top of admiration.' It is difficult to perceive any point of improvement that could give it more truth, in its lifelike resemblance, as a copy of fiction; and we are sure, after the ribaldry which of late years has degraded the boards, that there is not a single lover of the drama who saw this enactment who does not feel grateful to Mr. Edwin Forrest for his manly reassertion of the dignity of the stage."

'I love thee, Cassio, But never more be officer of mine,'

one of the most perfect bits of natural feeling that has ever been uttered upon the stage? Friendship, anger, pity, and justice are all struggling within him, and shape the sorrow of the words that strip his lieutenant of the office which he considers him no longer worthy to retain. It may be observed that in alluding to these points we have not marked any of those more obvious beauties which have for many years been acknowledged in his representation of this character. These are settled excellencies in the estimation of all who love the tragic stage. Certain lines have been stereotyped to us by the genius of those who have embodied this greatest of Shaksperian characters; but for those who will reverently observe his impersonation, there are hitherto hidden points developed by Forrest which justify us in laughing at those whose resolute hatred of the artist blinds them to his excellence, and to the wonderful finish in the histrionic portraits which he offers them. We have good artists amongst us, but we certainly have none who can for a moment be fairly compared with him; and therefore is it that we say the man who constantly undervalues him simply marks himself as notoriously incapable of balancing the critical scales."

The next extract is taken from a long article by the well-known scholar and author, Dr. R. Shelton Mackenzie:

"We once heard a great author say, 'Scurrility is the shadow of Fame, and as often precedes as follows it.' That author was Bulwer, and his remark has the weight of an aphorism. With respect to Mr. Edwin Forrest, it is singular that he has been assailed in his native town by scurrility at an advanced period of his brilliant career, and at a time when his powers have ripened into something very close to perfection.

"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.

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:

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."

"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."

William Robson, in his "Old Play-Goer," says of Edmund Kean, "His person and carriage are mean and contemptible, his judgment poor, his pathos weak, his passion extravagant and unnatural;" and then sums up his estimate of the immortal histrionist in these remarkable words: "He is nothing but a little vixenish black girl in short petticoats!" On the first appearance of Kean in Philadelphia some critics there, who were great admirers of Cooke, called him "a quack, a mountebank, a vulgar impostor." William B. Wood said of Kean, when he had just finished a rehearsal and gone out, "He is a mere mummer." Joseph Jefferson, great- grandfather of the Joseph Jefferson of Rip Van Winkle fame,--a beautiful and noble old man, afterwards characterized by Forrest in loving memory as "one of the purest men that ever lived, sad, sweet, lofty, thoughtful, generous,"--overheard the remark, and replied, with a quiet indignation in his tone, "Ah, Wood, you would give all the riches you ever dreamed of amassing in this world to be another just such a mummer." The "London Spectator," in 1836, said, "Bunn in his drowning desperation catches at any straw. He has just put forward Booth, the shadow and foil of Kean in bygone days. Booth's Richard seems to have been a wretched failure." At the same time another English journal used the following expressive language, in which the writer evidently does justice to himself whatever he endeavors to do to the actors he names: "Since the retirement of Young and the death of Kean, the very name of tragedy has passed away from us. We have had to submit to the presumptuous and uninspired feelings of Mr. Bell-wether Kemble, or to the melodramatic jerks and pumpings of Mr. Macready."

An American critic wrote thus of the Nancy Sykes of Charlotte Cushman: "Miss Cushman's performance is of the Anatomical Museum style. Her effects are thrilling and vulgar. Her poses are awkward, and her pictures unfinished and coarse in outline. She has an unpleasantly pre- raphaelite death scene, and is dragged off, stiff and stark, when all the characters express their internal satisfaction at the circumstance by smiling, shaking hands, and joining in a feeble chorus. The secret of her attraction is vigor. The masses like vigor. If they can have a little art with it, very well. But vigor they must have." Of late it has been the fashion to extol Miss Cushman as the queenly mistress of all the dignities and refinements of the dramatic profession; but the foregoing notice is exactly of a piece with the treatment visited upon Forrest for many years by the vulgar coteries of criticism, whose aim was not justice and usefulness but effect upon the prejudiced and the careless. Even the quiet and gentlemanly Edwin Booth has been as unsparingly assailed as he has been lavishly praised. An insidious article on him, entitled "The Machine-Actor," called him a "self-acting dramatic machine warranted;" and while admitting, with great generosity, that "he was not wholly destitute of dramatic ability," attributed his success and reputation chiefly to extraneous conditions, in especial the shrewdness of "his managing agent, who judiciously prepared his houses for him, and pecuniarily and personally appreciated the power of the press and conciliated the critics." The two following notices of Mr. Booth's Melnotte--the first obviously by a critic who had, the second by one who had not, been "conciliated"--are quite as absurd in their contradiction as those so often composed on Forrest:

Still later we have seen different representatives of the press, both in America and in England, alternately describing the wonderful Othello of Salvini as "the electrifying impersonation of a demi-god" and as "an exhibition of disgusting brutality."

The class of examples of which these are a few specimens show how little worthy the ordinary newspaper dramatic criticism is to be considered authoritative. No branch of journalism, allowing for notable individual exceptions, is more incompetent or more corrupt, because no other set of writers have so difficult a task or are so beset by vicious influences. Their vanity, prejudice, and interest worked upon, their sympathies appealed to by the artist and his friends, their antipathies by his rivals and foes, harassed and hurried with work, moved by promises of money and patronage, no wonder they often turn from the exactions of conscientious labor and study to something so much easier. The unsophisticated portion of the public, who are too much influenced by what they read in the papers, and who fancy that applause is a good proof of merit and censure a sure evidence of fault, ought to know how full of fraud and injustice the world of histrionic ambition and criticism is, and to learn to give little weight to verdicts not ascertained to come from competent and honest judges. The husband of Madame Linguet, a favorite actress at the Italian Theatre in Paris, hired a party to hiss every other actress, but to applaud her to the echo. A ludicrous mistake let out the secret. Linguet told his men one night to hiss the first actress who appeared and applaud the second. The play was changed, and in the substituted piece Madame Linguet came forward first, and was overpowered with hisses. Sir John Hill asked Peg Woffington if she had seen in the paper his praise of her performance the previous evening in the part of Calista. She thanked him for his kindness, but added that the play was changed and she had acted the character of Lady Townley. In a New York paper, in 1863, this notice appeared: "Mr. Forrest repeated, by special request, his great character of Spartacus last evening, before one of the most brilliant and enthusiastic audiences of the season. His acting was grand throughout, and at the end of the last act he received a perfect ovation from the audience." Appended to this, in his own handwriting, pasted in one of his scrap-books, were found these words: "Mr. Forrest on the night above referred to was in Philadelphia, and did not act at all, having been called home by the death of his sister."

After going over the mass of ignorant, capricious, and contradictory criticism bestowed on Forrest,--criticism destitute of fundamental principles or ultimate insight,--the reader may well feel at a loss to know how he is to regulate his judgment upon the subject and form a just estimate of the actor and his performances. The critics, instead of aiding, bewilder him, because themselves appear to be wildly adrift. To work our way through the chaos it is necessary for us to understand distinctly what the dramatic art is in its nature and object, and what are the materials and methods with which it aims to accomplish its purpose. The answers to these inquiries will clear away confusion, lay bare the elements of the art, and put us in possession of those laws of expression which constitute the only final standard for justly criticising the efforts of the player.

Every man has three types of character, in all of which he must be studied before he can be adequately represented. First he has his inherited constitutional or temperamental character, his fixed native character, in which the collective experience and qualities of his progenitors are consolidated, stamped, and transmitted. Next he has his peculiar fugitive or passional character, which is the modification of his stable average character under the influence of exciting impulses, temporary exaltations of instinct or sentiment. And then he has his acquired habitual character, gradually formed in him by the moulding power of his occupation and associations, as expressed in the familiar proverb, "Habit is a second nature." The first type reveals his ancestral or organic rank, what he is in the fatal line of his parentage. The second shows his moral or personal rank, what he has become through his own experience and discipline, self-indulgence and self-denial. The third betrays his social rank, what he has been made by his employment and caste. The original estimate or value assigned to the man by nature is indicated in his constitutional form, the geometrical proportions and dynamic furnishing of his organs, his physical and mental make-up. The estimate he puts on himself, in himself and in his relations with others, his egotistical value, is seen in the transitive modifications of his form by movements made under the stimulus of passions. The conventional estimate or social value awarded him is suggested through the permanent modifications wrought in his organs and bearing by his customary actions and relations with his fellows. Thus the triple type of character possessed by every man is to be studied by means of an analysis of the forms of his organs in repose and of his movements in passion or habit.

Besides the vernacular classes of character ranged under their leading temperaments, there are almost innumerable dialect varieties arising from these, as modified both by the steady influence of chronic conditions of life, historic, national, local, or clique, and by fitful and eccentric individual combinations of faculty and impulse. For instance, how many types of barbarian character there are,--such as the garrulous, laughing, sensual Negro, the taciturn, solemn, abstinent Indian, the fat and frigid Esquimaux, the Hottentot, the Patagonian, the New Zealander,--all differing widely in stature, feature, gesture, disposition, costume, creed, speech, while agreeing in the fundamentals of a common nature. Among civilized nations the diversity of characters is still greater. It would require an almost endless recital of particulars to describe the differences of the Chinaman, the Japanese, the Egyptian, the Persian, the Arab, the Hindu, the Italian, the Spaniard, the German, the Russian, the Frenchman, the Englishman, the American. And then what a maze of attributes, each one at the same time clear in its sharpness or its profundity, qualify and discriminate the various orders, castes, and groups of society!--the Brahmin, the Sudra, the king, the slave, the soldier, the doctor, the lawyer, the priest, the teacher, the shop-keeper, the porter, the detective, the legislator, the hangman, the scientist, and the philosopher. Every professional pursuit, social position, mechanical employment, physical culture, spiritual belief or aptitude, has its peculiar badge of dress, look, posture, motion, in which it reveals its secrets; and the pettifogger or the jurisconsult, the prophet or the necromancer, the Quaker and the Shaker, the Calvinist and the Catholic, the tailor, the gymnast, the gambler, the bully, the hero, the poet, and the saint, stand unveiled before us. How the habitual life reveals itself in the bearing is clearly seen in the sailor when he leaves his tossing ship for the solid shore. His sensation of the strange firmness of the earth makes him tread in a sort of heavy-light way,--half wagoner, half dancing-master. There is always this appearance of lightness of foot and heavy upper works in a sailor, his shoulders rolling, his feet touching and going.

To know how consistently to construct an ideal character of any one of these kinds, at any given height or depth in the historic gamut of humanity, and to be able to embody and enact it with the harmonious truth of nature, is the task of the consummate actor. And to be qualified to catalogue all these attributes of human being and manifestation with accuracy, recognizing every fitness, detecting every incongruity, is the business of the dramatic critic. Who of our ordinary newspaper writers is competent to the work? Yet the youngest and crudest of them never hesitates to pronounce a snap judgment on the most renowned tragedians as if his magisterial "we" were the very ipse dixit of Pythagoras!

Still further, the task of the actor and of the critic is made yet more complicated and difficult by the varied modifications of all the classes of character indicated above under the influence of specific passion. The great dramatic passions, which may be subdivided into many more, are love, hatred, joy, grief, jealousy, wonder, pity, scorn, anger, and fear. To obtain a fine perception and a ready and exact command of the relations of the apparatus of expression to all these passions in their different degrees as manifesting different styles of character, to know for each phase of excitement or depression the precise adjustment of the limbs, chest, and head, of intense or slackened muscles, of compressed or reposeful lips, of dilated or contracted nostrils, of pensive or glaring or fiery or supplicating eyes, of deprecating or threatening mien, of firm or vacillating posture, is an accomplishment as rare as it is arduous. All this is capable of reduction by study and practice to an exact science, and then of development into a perfect art. For every passion has its natural law of expression, and all these laws are related and consistent in an honest and earnest character, incoherent only in a discordant or hypocritical character. There is an art to find the mind's construction in the face. The spirit shines and speaks in the flesh. And a learned eye looks quite through the seemings of men to their genuine being and states. This is indeed the very business of the dramatic art,--to read the truths of human nature through all its attempted disguises, and expose them for instruction. How minute the detail, how keen the perception, how subtle and alert the power of adaptation requisite for this, may be illustrated by a single example. Suppose a criminal character is to be played. He may be of a timid, suspicious, furtive type, or careless, jovial, and rollicking, or brazen and defiant, or sullen and gloomy, yet be a criminal in all. He may be portrayed in the stage of excitement under the interest of plot and pursuit, or in success and triumph, or in defeat and wrath, or in the shame and terror of detection, or in final remorse and despair. There is scarcely any end to the possibilities of variety, yet verisimilitude must be kept up and nature not violated.

The second language is attitudes. Attitudes are living modifications of shape, or the fluencies of form. There are, for example, nine elementary attitudes of the feet, of the hands, of the toes, of the head, which may be combined in an exhaustless series. Every one of these attitudes has its natural meaning and value. All emotions strong enough to pronounce themselves find expression in appropriate attitudes or significant changes of the form in itself and in its relations to others. He who has the key for interpreting the reactions of human nature on the agencies that affect it, easily reads in the outer signs of attitude the inner states of defiance, doubt, exaltation, prostration, nonchalance, respect, fear, misery, or supplication, and so on.

The third language is automatic movements, which are unconscious escapes of character, unpurposed motions through which the states of the mover are betrayed, sometimes with surprising clearness and force. For instance, how often impatience, vexation, or restrained anger, breaks out in a nervous tapping of the foot or the finger! What can be more legible than the fidgety manner of one in embarrassment? And the degree and kind of the embarrassment, together with the personal grade and social position and culture of the subject, will be revealed in the peculiar nature of the fidgeting. There is a whole class of these automatic movements, such as trembling, nodding, shaking the head, biting the lips, lolling the tongue, the shiver of the flesh, the quiver of the mouth or eyelids, the shudder of the bones, and they compose a rich primordial language of revelation, perfectly intelligible and common to universal humanity.

The fourth language is gestures. This is the language so marvellously flexible, copious, and powerful among many barbarous peoples. It was carried to such a pitch of perfection by the mimes of ancient Rome, that Roscius and Cicero had a contest to decide which could express a given idea in the most clear and varied manner, the actor by gestures, or the orator by words. Gestures are a purposed system of bodily motions, both spontaneous and deliberate, intended as preparatory, auxiliary, or substitutional for the expressions by speech. There is hardly any state of consciousness which cannot be revealed more vividly by pantomime than is possible in mere verbal terms. As fixed attitudes are inflected form, and automatic movements inflected attitude, so pantomimic gestures are systematically inflected motion. The wealth of meaning and power in gesticulation depends on the richness, freedom, and harmony of the character and organism. The beauty or deformity, nobleness or baseness, of its pictures are determined by the zones of the body from which the gestures start, the direction and elevation at which they terminate, their rate of moving, and the nature and proportions of the figures, segments of which their lines and curves describe. Music has no clearer rhythm, melody, and harmony to the ear than inflected gesture has to the eye. The first law of gesture is, that it follows the look or the eye, and precedes the sound or the voice. The second law is, that its velocity is precisely proportional to the mass moved. The third and profoundest law, first formulated by Delsarte, is that efferent or outward lines of movement reveal the sensitive life or vital nature of the man; that afferent or inward lines reveal the percipient and reflective life or mental nature; and that immanent or curved lines, blended of the other two, reveal the affectional life or moral nature.

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