Chapter XXII (3)

In the first speech of Othello, referring to the purpose of Brabantio to injure him with the Duke, Forrest won all hearts by the impression he gave of the noble self-possession of a free and generous nature full of honest affection and manly potency. He alluded to Brabantio without any touch of anger or scorn, to himself with an air of quiet pride bottomed on conscious worth and not on any vanity or egotism, and to Desdemona with a softened tone of effusive warmth which betrayed the precious freight and direction of his heart:

“Let him do his spite;
My services, which I have done the seignory,
Shall out-tongue his complaints. My demerits
May speak, unbonneted, to as proud a fortune
As this that I have reached. For know, Iago,
But that I love the gentle Desdemona,
I would not my unhoused, free condition
Put into circumscription and confine
For the sea’s worth.”

The easy frankness of his look and the rich flowing elocution of his delivery of these words indicated a nature so ingenuous and honorable that already the sympathies of every man and woman before him were won to the Moor. This impression was continued and enhanced when, in response to the abusive epithet of Brabantio and the threats of his armed followers, he said, in a tone of unruffled self-command, touched with a humorous playfulness and with a deprecating respect,—

“Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.—
Good seignior, you shall more command with years,
Than with your weapons.”

There was an exquisite moral beauty in the whole attitude and carriage which Forrest gave Othello in the scene in the council-chamber, where he replied to the accusations of using spells and medicines to draw Desdemona to his arms. There was a combination of modest assurance and picturesque dignity in his bearing, and a simple eloquence in his pronouncing of the narrative of all his wooing, so artistic in its seeming artlessness, so full of breathing honesty straight from the heart of nature, that not a word could be doubted, nor could any hearer resist the conviction expressed by the Duke,—

“I think this tale would win my daughter too,
Good Brabantio.”

To the bewitching power of simple sincerity and glowing truth he put into this marvellous speech hundreds of testimonies were given like that of the refined and lovely young lady who was heard saying to her companion, “If that is the way Moors look and talk and love, give me a Moor for my husband.”

When Desdemona entered, while she stayed, as she spoke, as she departed, all the action of Othello towards her, his motions, looks, words, inflections, clearly betokened the nature and supremacy of his affection for her. Through the high and pure character of these signals it was made obvious that his love was an entrancing possession; not an animal love bred in the senses alone, but a love born in the soul and flooding the senses with its divineness. On the keen fires of his high-blooded organism and the poetic enchantments of his ardent imagination the exquisite sweetness of this surrendered and gentle Desdemona played a delicious intoxication, and the enthrallment of his passion made the very movement of existence a rapture. Everything else faded before the happiness he felt. Life was too short, the earth too dull, the stars too dim, for the blissful height of his consciousness. In contrast with this enchanted possession, day, night, joy, laughter, air, sea, the thrilling notes of war, victory, fame, and power, were but passing illusions. The voice of duty could rouse him from his dream, but the moment his task was done he sank again into its ecstatic depths. All this still saturation of delight and fulness of expanded being the Othello of Forrest revealed by his acting and speech on meeting Desdemona in Cyprus after their separation by his sudden departure to the wars. As, all eager loveliness, she came in sight, exclaiming, “My dear Othello!” the sudden brightness of his eyes, the rapturous smile that clothed his face, his parted lips, his heaving breast and outstretched arms, were so significant that they worked on the spectators like an incantation. And when he drew her passionately to his bosom, kissed her on the forehead and lips, and gazed into her face with unfathomable fondness, it was a picture not to be surpassed of the exquisite doting of the new-made husband while the honeymoon yet hung over them full-orbed in the silent and dewy heaven, its inundation undimmed by the breath of custom. Then he spoke:

“O, my soul’s joy!
If after every tempest come such calms,
May the winds blow till they have wakened death;
And let the laboring bark climb hills of seas
Olympus-high, and duck again as low
As hell’s from heaven! If it were now to die,
’Twere now to be most happy; for, I fear,
My soul hath her content so absolute,
That not another comfort like to this
Succeeds in unknown fate.”

The last lines he uttered with a restrained, prolonged, murmuring music, a tremulous mellowness, as if the burden of emotion broke the vocal breath into quivers. It suggested a tenderness whose very excess made it timid and mystic with a pathetic presentiment of its own evanescence. The yearning, aching deliciousness of love filled his breast so more than full that even while he seemed to strive to hold back all verbal expression for fear of losing the emotional substance, it broke forth itself with melodious softness in the syllabled beats of the lingering words:

“I cannot speak enough of this content:
It stops me here: it is too much of joy.
Come, let us to the castle. O, my sweet,
I prattle out of fashion, and I dote
In mine own comforts.”

In the scene of the drunken brawl in Cyprus most actors had made Othello rush in with drawn sword, crying, with extravagant pose and emphasis, “Hold, for your lives!” Forrest entered without sword, in haste, his night-mantle thrown over his shoulders as if just from his bed. He went through the scene, rebuking the brawlers and restoring order, with an admirable moderation combined with commanding moral authority. Only once, when answer to his inquiry was delayed, his volcanic heat burst out. He spoke rapidly, with surprise rather than anger, and bore down all with a personal weight that had neither pomp nor offence, yet was not to be resisted. Throughout the first and second acts Forrest played Othello as a man of beautiful human nature, noble in honor, rich in affection, gentle in manners, though, when justly roused, capable of a terrific headlong wrath:

“Now, by Heaven,
My blood begins my safer guides to rule;
And passion, having my best judgment collied,
Assays to lead the way. If I once stir
Or do but lift this arm, the best of you
Shall sink in my rebuke.”

In the third act the diabolical malignity and cunning of Iago begin to take effect, more and more insinuating poisonous suspicions and doubts into the naturally open and truthful mind of Othello. The process and advancement of the horrid struggle found in Forrest a man and an artist to whose experience of human nature and life no item in the whole dread catalogue of the courses, symptoms, and consequences of love encroached on and subdued by jealousy was foreign, and whose skill in expression was abundantly able to set every feature of the tragedy in distinct relief. As now the guileless Desdemona shone on him, and anon the devilish Iago distilled his venom, he was torn between his loving confidence in his wife and his confiding trust in his tempter:

“As if two hearts did in one body reign
And urge conflicting streams from vein to vein.”

When he saw or thought of her a blessed reassurance tranquillized him; when he heeded the hideous suggestions of his treacherous servant a frozen shudder ran through him. The waves of tenderness and violence chased one another over the mimic scene. At one moment he said,—

“If she be false, O, then heaven mocks itself.
I’ll not believe it.”

At another moment he writhed in excruciating anguish under the fearful innuendoes which Iago wound about him. The spectacle was like that of an anaconda winding her tightening coils around a tiger until one can hear the cracking of the bones in his lordly back.

When the fiendish suggestions of Iago first took thorough effect the result startled even him, and he gazed on the awful convulsions in the face of his victim as one might look into the crater of Vesuvius. That which had seemed granite proved to be gunpowder. As with the prairie fire: the traveller lets a spark fall, and the whole earth seems to be one rushing flame. Then swiftly followed those lacerating alternations of contradictory excitements which are the essence of jealousy,—the mixture of intense opposites into an experience of infernal discord. His love lingers on her and gloats over her, and will not believe any evil of her. His suspicion makes him shrink into himself with horror:

“O curse of marriage,
That we can call these delicate creatures ours,
And not their appetites.”

Now he seeks relief in loathing and hating her, trying to tear her dear image out from among his heart-strings. From the crazing agony of this effort he springs wildly into wrath against her traducer. Forrest expressed these sudden and violent transitions from extreme to extreme with exact truth to nature, by that constant interchanging of intense muscles and languid eyes with intense eyes and languid muscles which corresponds with the successive apprehension of a blessing to be embraced and an evil to be abhorred. The change in his appearance and moving too was commensurate with what he had undergone. As he advanced to meet his wife on her arrival in Cyprus, he walked like one inspired, weightless and illumined with joy:

“Treading on air each step the soul displays,
The looks all lighten and the limbs all blaze.”

But after the dreadful doubt had ruined his peace, he grew so pale and haggard, wore so startled and dismal a look, was so self-absorbed in misery, that he appeared an incarnate comment on the descriptive words,—

“Look where he comes! Not poppy nor mandragora,
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou ow’dst yesterday.”

There was an imaginative vastness and unity in the soul of Othello which aggrandized his experiences and allowed him to do nothing by halves. Forrest so perceived and exemplified this as to make his performance come before the audience as a new revelation to them of the colossal and blazing extremes, the entrancing, maddening, and fatal extremes, to which human passions can mount. His love, his conflict with doubt, his melancholy, his wrath, his hate, his revenge, his remorse, his despair, each in turn absorbingly possesses him and floods the earth with heaven or hell.

The unrivalled speech of lamentation over his lost happiness he gave not, as many a famous actor has, partly in a tone of complaining vexation and partly with a noisy pomp of declamation. He began with an exquisite quality of tearful regret and sorrow which was a breathing requiem over the ruins of his past delights. The mournfulness of it was so sweet and chill that it seemed perfumed with the roses and moss growing over the tomb of all his love.

“I had been happy if the general camp,
Pioneers and all, had tasted her sweet body,
So I had nothing known.”

Then the voice, still low and plaintive, swelled and quivered with the glorious words that followed:

“O, now, forever,
Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars,
That make ambition virtue! O, farewell!”

And as he ended with the line,

“Farewell! Othello’s occupation’s gone!”

his form and limbs drooping, his lips sunken and tremulous, his very life seemed going out with each word, as if everything had been taken from him and he was all gone. Suddenly, with one electrifying bound, he leaped the whole gamut from mortal exhaustion to gigantic rage, his eyeballs rolling and flashing and his muscles strung, seized the cowering Iago by the throat, and, with a startling transition of voice from mellow and mournfully lingering notes to crackling thunderbolts of articulation, shrieked,—

“If thou dost slander her, and torture me,
Never pray more; abandon all remorse;
On horror’s head horrors accumulate;
Do deeds to make heaven weep, all earth amazed;—
For nothing canst thou to damnation add
Greater than that.”

The wild inspiration subsided as swiftly as it had risen, and left him gazing in blank amazement at what he had done. Again his struggling emotions were carried to a kindred climax when Iago told him the pretended dream of Cassio. He uttered the sentence, “I will tear her all to pieces,” in a manner whose force of pathos surprised every heart. His revenge began furiously, “I will tear her”—when his love came over it, and he suddenly ended with pitying softness—“all to pieces.” It was as if an avalanche, sweeping along earth and rocks and trees, were met by a breath which turned it into a feather. In the next act he gave an instance just the reverse of this: first he says, with doting fondness, “O, the world hath not a sweeter creature;” then, the imaginative associations changing the picture, he screams ferociously, “I will chop her into messes!”

Thence onward Othello was painted in a more and more piteous plight. The great soul was conquered by the remorseless intellect of Iago, leagued with its own weakness and excess. He grew less massive and more petulant. He stooped to spies and plots, and compassed the assassination of Cassio. His misery sapped his mind and toppled down his chivalrous sentiments until he could unpack his sore and wretched heart in abusive words and treat Desdemona with unrelenting cruelty.

Finally his tossing convulsions passed away, and a fixed resolution to kill the woman who had been false to him settled down in gloomy calmness. The curtain rose and showed him seated at an open window looking out on the night sky. Desdemona was asleep in her bed. He sighed heavily, and in slow tones, loaded with thoughtful and resigned melancholy, soliloquized,—

“It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,—
Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars!—
It is the cause. Yet I’ll not shed her blood,
Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,
And smooth as monumental alabaster.
Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men.
Put out the light, and then put out the light.
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me. But once put out thy light,
Thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume.”

He permitted the audience to see the vast dimension and intensity of his love, doubt, agony, sorrow, despair, vengeance,—and the revelation was appalling in its solemnity. Henceforth even his invective was moderated and quiet. He seemed to fancy himself not so much revenging his personal wrong as vindicating himself and executing justice. He did not make a horror of the killing, as Kean did. He drew the curtains apart,—a slight struggle,—a choking murmur,—and as Emilia knocked at the door, and he turned, with the pillow in his hand, his listening attitude and his bronze face and glistening eyes formed a dramatic picture not to be forgotten. Then came the final revulsion of his agonizing sorrow:

“O, insupportable! O, heavy hour!
Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse
Of sun and moon; and that the affrighted globe
Should yawn at alteration.”

His deadly distress and paralyzing bewilderment now illustrated what he had before said, that he loved her so with the entirety of his being that the loss of her, even in thought, brought back chaos:

“Had she been true,
If heaven would make me such another world
Of one entire and perfect chrysolite,
I’d not have sold her for it.”

When Emilia revealed the plot by which he had been deceived, and convinced him of the innocence of his wife, an absolute desolation and horror of remorse, as if a thunderbolt had burst within his brain, smote him to the floor. Staggering to the fatal couch, his gaze was riveted on the marble face there, and a broken heart and a distracted conscience moaned and sobbed in the syllables,—

“Now, how dost thou look now? O, ill-starred wench!
Pale as thy smock! when we shall meet at compt,
This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven,
And fiends will snatch at it. Cold, cold, my girl?
Even like thy chastity.
O, cursed, cursed slave! Whip me, ye devils,
From the possession of this heavenly sight!
Blow’ me about in winds! roast me in sulphur!
Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!
O Desdemona! Desdemona! dead?”

The strain had been too great to be borne, and he was himself nearly dead. He wore the aspect of one who felt that to live was calamity, and to die the sole happiness left. Collecting himself, he spoke the calm words of appeal that justice might be done to his memory, nothing extenuated nor aught set down in malice. He turned towards the breathless form, once so dear, with a look of tenderness slowly dissolving and freezing into despair. Then, with one stroke of his dagger, he fell dead without a groan or a shudder.

“This did I fear, but thought he had no weapon;
For he was great of heart.”

Some actors have made Othello feared and disliked; others have caused him to be regarded with moral curiosity or poetic interest. As Forrest impersonated him he was first warmly admired, then profoundly pitied. Of the tragedians most celebrated in the past, according to the best descriptions which have been given of their representations, it may be said that the Othello of Quin was a jealous plebeian; the Othello of Kean, in parts a jealous king, in parts a jealous savage; the Othello of Vandenhoff, a jealous general; the Othello of Macready, a jealous theatrical player; the Othello of Brooke, a jealous knight; the Othello of Salvini, a jealous lover transformed into a jealous tiger; but the Othello of Forrest was a jealous man carried truthfully through all the degrees of his passion. One of his predecessors in the rôle had veiled the woes of the man beneath the dignities of his rank and station as a martial commander; another had theatricized the part, with wondrous study and toil, elaborating posture, look, and emphasis, presenting a correctness of drawing which might secure admiring criticism but could never move feeling; yet another, fascinated with the romantic accessories and vicissitudes of the character, made a gorgeous picture of a gorgeous hero in a gorgeous time. Forrest analyzed away from his Othello all adventitious circumstances; took him from the picturesque scenes of Venice, stripped off his official robes, and placed him on the stage in the glories and tortures of his naked humanity, a living mirror to every one of the struggles of a master-passion tearing a great heart asunder, driving a powerful mind into the awful abyss of insanity, making a generous man a coward, an eavesdropper, a murderer, and a suicide.

The explicit contents and teaching of the part as Shakspeare wrote it and as Forrest acted it are the unspeakable privilege and preciousness of a supreme human love crowned with fulfilment, and the fearful nature and results of an ill-grounded jealousy. The deeper implicit meaning and lesson it bears is the animal degradation, the frightful ugliness and danger, the intrinsically immoral and murderous character of the passion of jealousy. This all-important revelation latent in the tragedy of Othello has not been illumined, emphasized, or brought into relief on the stage as yet. It ought to be done. The historical traditions of tyrannical selfishness, almost universally organized in the interests of the world, which make men feel that in sexual love the lover possesses the object of his love as an appanage and personal property, all whose free wishes are merged in his will and whose disloyalty is justly visited with merciless cruelty and even death itself, have blinded most persons to the inherent unworthiness and vulgarity, the inherent ferocity and peril, of the passion of jealousy. It is common among brutes, and belongs to the brutish stage in man. It cannot be imagined in heaven among the cherubim and seraphim. Freedom, the self-possession of each one in equilibrium with all others and in harmony with universal order, belongs to the divine stage of developed humanity. There can be no certainty against madness, crime, and self-immolation so long as an automatic passion in the lower regions of the organism enslaves the royal reason meant to reign by right from God. Happen what may, self- poise and the steady aim at progress towards perfection should be kept. This cannot be when love is degraded to physical pleasure sought as an end, instead of being consecrated to the fruitful purposes for which it was ordained. The only absolute pledge of blessedness and peace between those who love and would hope to love always is an adjustment of conduct based not on mere feeling, whether low or high, but on feeling as itself subdued and disciplined by reason, justice, and truth, first developed in the thinking mind and constituted as it were into the science of the subject, then appropriated by the sentiments and made habitual in the individual character. What details of conduct will result, what innovations on the present social state will be made, when a scientific morality shall have mastered the subject and formulated its principles into practical rules, it is premature to say. But it is certain that the leading of one life in the light and another one in the dark will be forbidden. It is certain that the discords, the diseases, the distresses, the crimes, which are now so profuse in this region of experience will be no longer tolerated. And it is safe to prophesy that such delirious expressions of hate and revenge as have hitherto usually been thought tragic and terrible will come to be thought bombastic and ludicrous:

“O that the slave had forty thousand lives;
One is too poor, too weak for my revenge!
Now do I see ’tis true. Look here, Iago;
All my fond love thus do I blow to heaven. ’Tis gone.—
Arise, black vengeance, from thy hollow cell!
Yield up, O love, thy crown, and hearted throne,
To tyrannous hate! swell, bosom, with thy fraught;
For ’tis of aspics’ tongues! O blood, blood, blood!”

Othello, like most of the characters of Shakspeare, illustrates the historic actual, not the prophetic ideal. The present state of society is so ill adjusted, so full of painful evils, that things cannot always remain as temporary and local habits and mere empirical authority have seemingly settled them. To think they can is the sure mark of a narrow mind, a petty character, and a selfish heart. Nothing is more certain than continuous change. Nothing is, therefore, more characteristic of the genuine thinker than his ability to contemplate other modes of thought, other varieties of sentiment, than those to which he was bred. With the progress of social evolution the hitherto prevalent ideas of love and jealousy may undergo changes amounting in some instances, perhaps, to a reversal. Meanwhile, those who are not prepared to adopt any new opinions in detail should, with hospitable readiness impartially to investigate, consider within themselves which is better, an imperial delicacy and magnanimity in those who love causing them to refuse to know anything that occurs in absence so long as each preserves self- respecting personal fidelity to the ideal of progressive perfection? or, as at present, spiritual mutilation and misery, treacherous concealment, espionage, detection, disgrace, frenzy, and death?

One thing at all events is sure, namely, that of him alone whose love for God, or the universal in himself and others, is superior to his love for the individual, or the egotistic in himself and others, can it ever be safely said, as it was once so mistakenly said of the unhappy Moor,—

“This is a man
Whom passion cannot shake; whose solid virtue
The shock of accident nor dart of chance
Can neither graze nor pierce.”

LEAR.

Nearly every season for more than forty years Forrest played the part of Lear many times. He never ceased to study it and to improve his representation, adding new touches here and there, until at last it became, if not the most elaborately finished and perfect of all his performances, certainly the sublimest in spiritual power and tragic pathos. As he grew old, as his experience of the desolating miseries of the world deepened, as his perception was sharpened of the hollowness and irony of the pomps and pleasures of human power contrasted with the solemn drifting of destiny and death, as the massiveness of his physique was expanded in its mould and loosened in its fibre by the shocks of time and fate, he seemed ever better fitted, both in faculty and appearance, to meet the ideal demands of the rôle. He formed his conception of it directly from the pages of Shakspeare and the dictates of nature. His elaboration and acting of it were original, the result of his own inspiration and study. Heeding no traditional authority, copying no predecessor, but testing each particular by the standard of truth, he might have proudly protested, like the veritable Lear,—

G H Cushman

EDWIN FORREST AS

KING LEAR.
]

“No, they cannot touch me for coining,—
I am the king himself.”

No person of common sensibility could witness his impersonation of the character during his latter years without paying it the tribute of tears and awe.

Lear appears in a shape of imposing majesty, but with the authentic signals of breaking sorrow and ruin already obvious. He is a king in the native build and furniture of his being, not merely by outward rank. His scale of passion is gigantic, and always exerted at the extremes. When deferred to and pleased, his magnanimity is boundless and his love most tender. But, once crossed, nothing can restrain his petulance, and his outbursts of anger are terrible to others and dangerously expensive to himself. His identity is always marked by greatness, like some huge landmark dwarfing everything near. There is a royal scope and altitude belonging to the structure of his soul which is never lost. It is seen, whether he be ruler, outcast, or madman, in the grandeur of his mien, in the majestic eloquence of his thought and expression, in the towering swell of his ambition. He is ever insistingly conscious of his kingliness, and must be bowed to and have his way, as much when with the poor fool he hides his nakedness from the pelting blast as when in august plenitude of power he divides his realm among his children. This central point of unity Forrest firmly seized, and made it everywhere in his representation abundantly prominent and impressive.

At the opening of the play Lear is a very old man. Moved by some secret premonition of failing reason or decay, he is about to abdicate his crown. He is seen to be an imperial spirit throned in an enfeebled nature, a power girdled with weakness. An exacting and unbridled spirit of authority, a splenetic assertion of his kingly will, with the incessant worries and frictions to which such a habit always gives rise, have undermined his poise and lowered his strength, and brought his mind into that state of unstable equilibrium which is the condition of an explosive irritability fated to issue in madness. He himself, in the organic strata below his free intelligence, has obscure premonitions of his crumbling state; but every intimation of it which reaches his consciousness fills him with an angry resentment that seeks some instant vent.

The task to indicate all this, so clearly, with such moving force, with such combination of overtopping power and piteous weakness, as to fix it all in the apprehending sympathies of the audience, was marvellously accomplished by Forrest in the opening scene. The vast frame whose motions were alternately ponderous and fretful, the pale massive face, the restless wild eyes, the rich deep voice magnificent in oratoric phrase and breaking in querulous anger,—these, skilfully managed, revealed at once the ruining greatness of the royal nature, dowered with imposing and gracious qualities but fatally cored with irritable self- love.

“Know that we have divided
In three our kingdom; and ’tis our fast intent
To shake all cares and business from our age;
Conferring them on younger strengths, while we,
Unburthened, crawl toward death. Tell me, my daughters,
(Since now we will divest us, both of rule,
Interest of territory, cares of state,)
Which of you, shall we say, doth love us most?
That we our largest bounty may extend
Where nature doth with merit challenge.”

The treacherous Goneril and Regan, whose heartless natures their younger sister so well knew, made such fulsome protestations as shocked her into a dumb reliance on her own true affection; and when the yearning and testy monarch fondly asks what she can say, her whole being of love and sincerity is behind her words:

“Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave
My heart into my mouth. I love your majesty
According to my bond.”

Then broke forth the insane pride and self-will, which, brooking no appearance of opposition or evasion, were stricken with judicial blindness and left to prefer evil to good, to embrace the selfishness which was as false and cruel as hell, and to reject the love which was as gentle and true as heaven. With a terrible look, and a deep intensely girded voice, whose rapid accents made his whole chest shake with muffled reverberations, like a throbbing drum, he cried,—

“Let it be so: thy truth then be thy dower;
For, by the sacred radiance of the sun,
The mysteries of Hecate, and the night;
By all the operations of the orbs,
From whom we do exist, and cease to be;
Here I disclaim all my paternal care,
Propinquity, and property of blood,
And as a stranger to my heart and me
Hold thee, from this, forever. The barbarous Scythian,
Or he that makes his generation messes
To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom
Be as well neighbored, pitied, and relieved,
As thou, my sometime daughter.”

And when the noble Kent would have interceded, his frenzied wrong- headedness peremptorily destroyed the last hope of remedy:

“Peace, Kent!
Come not between the dragon and his wrath.”

Then, with the piteous side-revelation,—

“I loved her most, and thought to set my rest
On her kind nursery,”—

he subscribed and sealed his hideous fault by harshly driving the poor, sweet Cordelia from his presence, and banishing from his dominions the best friend he ever had, honest Kent.

The disease in the nature of Lear, a morbid self-consciousness that prevented alike self-rule and self-knowledge, did not let his passion expire like flaming tinder, but kept it long smouldering. Forrest pictured to perfection its recurring swells and tardy subsidence. Each advancing step showed more completely the vice that had cloyed the kingly nobility and gradually prepared the retributive tempest about to burst. His injured vanity feeding itself with its own inflaming deception now made his fancy ascribe to the angelic Cordelia, dismantled from the folds of his old favor, such foul and ugly features of character that he called her

“A wretch whom nature is ashamed
Almost to acknowledge hers,”—

while, perversely investing the tiger-breasted Goneril and Regan with imaginary goodness and charm, he said to them,—

“Ourself, by monthly course
With reservation of an hundred knights,
By you to be sustained, shall our abode
Make with you by due turns. Only we will retain
The name and all the additions to a king.”

So to combine in the representation of Lear the power and the weakness, the mental and physical grandeur and irritability, as to compose a consistent picture true to nature, and to make their manifestations accurate both in the whirlwinds of passion and in the periods of calm,— this is what few even of the greatest actors have been able to do. Forrest did it in a degree which made the most competent judges the most enthusiastic applauders. The nervous and tottering walk, with its sudden changes, the quick transitions of his voice from thundering fulness to querulous shrillness, the illuminated and commanding aspect passing into sunken pallor and recovering, the straightenings up of the figure into firm equilibrium, the palsying collapses,—all these he gave with a precision and entireness which were the transcript and epitome of a thousand original studies of himself and of grand old men whom he had watched in different lands, in the streets, in lunatic asylums.

But the deepest merit of this representation was not its exactness in mimetic simulation or reproduction of the visible peculiarities of shattered and irascible age. Its chief merit was the luminous revelation it gave of the inner history of the character impersonated. He made it a living exhibition of the justifying causes and the profound moral lessons of the tragedy of the aged monarch, who, self-hurled both from his outer and his inner kingdom, was left to gibber with the gales and the lightnings on the rain-swept and desolate moor. In every fibre of his frame and every crevice of his soul Forrest felt the tremendous teachings intrusted by Shakspeare to the tragedy of Lear. It is true the feeling did not lead him morally to master these teachings for a redemptive application to himself; and his own experience paid the bitter penalty of a personal pride too exacting in its ideal estimate of self and others. But the feeling did enable him dramatically to portray these lessons, with matchless vividness and power, and a rugged realism softened and tinted with art. Shakspeare’s own notion of Lear is remarkably expressed by one of the characters in the play: “He hath ever but slenderly known himself. Then we must look from his age to receive not alone the imperfections of long-engrafted condition, but, therewithal, the unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them.”

The whole history of the world in every part of society abounds with correspondences to the cruel error, the awful wrong, committed by Lear in accepting Goneril and Regan and rejecting Cordelia. But there is a cause for everything that happens. These dread and lamentable injustices arise from vices in the characters that perpetrate them. Their blindness is the punishment for their sin. The most inherent and obstinate sin in every unregenerate soul is excess of egotistic self-love. The strongest and richest natures are most exposed to this evil disguised in shapes so subtile as to deceive the very elect, making them unconsciously desire to subdue the wills of others to their will. This is a proud and fearful historic inheritance in the automatic depth of man below his free consciousness. Overcoming it, he is divinely free and peaceful. Yielding to it, he wears his force away in unhappy repinings and resentments. Aggravated by indulgence, it blinds his instincts and perverts his perceptions, makes him praise and clasp the bad who yield and flatter, denounce and shun the good who faithfully resist and try to bless. This profound moral truth Shakspeare makes the dim background of the tragedy, whose foreground blazes with a dreadful example of the penalties visited on those who violate its commands. He teaches that those who, bound and blinded by wilful self-love, embrace the designing and corrupt instead of the honest and pure, are left to the natural consequences of their choice. These consequences are the avenging Nemesis of divine providence. The actor who, as Forrest did, worthily illustrates this conception, becomes for the time the sublimest of preachers; for his appalling sermon is not an exhortation verbally articulated, it is a demonstration vitally incarnated.

The monstrous mistake of Lear soon brought its results to sight. The poor old monarch, fast weakening, even-paced, in his wits and muscles, but not abating one jot of his arrogant self-estimate and royal requiring, was so scolded, thwarted, and badgered by Goneril that he was quite beside himself with indignation. Then, most pitiably in his distress, relenting memory turned his regards towards the faithful gentleness he had spurned:

“O, most small fault!
How ugly didst thou in Cordelia show,
Which, like an engine, wrenched my frame of nature
From the fixed place, drew from my heart all love,
And added to the gall. O Lear, Lear, Lear!
Beat at this gate, that let thy folly in,
And thy dear judgment out.”

Uttering these remorseful words, striking his forehead, Forrest stood, for a moment, a picture of uncertainty, regret, self-deprecation, and woe. Then a sense of the insulting disrespect and ingratitude of Goneril seemed to break on him afresh, and let loose the whole volcanic flood of his injured selfhood. Anguish, wrath, and helplessness drove him mad. The blood made path from his heart to his brow, and hung there, a red cloud, beneath his crown. His eyes flashed and faded and reflashed. He beat his breast as if not knowing what he did. His hands clutched wildly at the air as though struggling with something invisible. Then, sinking on his knees, with upturned look and hands straight outstretched towards his unnatural daughter, he poured out, in frenzied tones of mingled shriek and sob, his withering curse, half adjuration, half malediction. It was a terrible thing, almost too fearful to be gazed at as a work of art, yet true to the character, the words, and the situation furnished by Shakspeare. Drawing for the moral world comparisons from the material world, it was a maelstrom of the conscience, an earthquake of the mind, a hurricane of the soul, and an avalanche of the heart. By a perfect gradation his protruded and bloodshot eyeballs, his crimsoned and swollen features, and his trembling frame subsided from their convulsive exertion. And with a confidence touching in its groundlessness, he bethought him,—

“I have another daughter,
Who, I am sure, is kind and comfortable.”

He went to her, and said, with a distraught air of sorrowful anger, more pathetic than mere words can describe,—

“Thy sister’s naught: O Regan! She hath tied
Sharp-toothed unkindness, like a vulture, here:
I can scarce speak to thee; thou’lt not believe
With how depraved a quality,—O Regan!”

Told by her that he was old, that in him nature stood on the verge of her confine, that he needed guidance, and had best return to Goneril and ask her forgiveness, he stood an instant in blank amazement, as if not trusting his ears; a tremor of agony and rage shot through him, fixed itself in a scornful smile, and, throwing himself on his knees, he vented his heart with superhuman irony:

“Dear daughter, I confess that I am old:
Age is unnecessary; on my knees I beg
That you’ll vouchsafe me raiment, bed, and food.”

Goneril entered. Shrinking from her partly with loathing, partly with fear, he exclaimed, in a tone of mournful and pleading pain befitting the transcendent pathos of the imagery,—

“O Heavens!
If you do love old men, if your sweet sway
Allow obedience, if yourselves are old,
Make it your cause: send down, and take my part!”

As Regan and Goneril chaffered and haggled to reduce the cost of his entertainment, he revealed in his face and by-play the effect their conduct had on him. The rising thoughts and emotions suffused his features in advance of their expression. He stood before the audience like a stained window that burns with the light of the landscape it hides. He then began in a low tone of supplicating feebleness and gradually mounted to a climax of frenzy, where the voice, raised to screaming shrillness, broke in helplessness, exemplifying that degree of passion which is impotent from its very intensity. Those critics who blamed him for this excess as a fault were wrong, not he; for it belongs to a rage which unseats the reason to have no power of repression, and so to recoil on itself in exhaustion:

“You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age; wretched in both.
If it be you that stir these daughters’ hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely: touch me with noble anger.
O, let not women’s weapons, water-drops,
Stain my man’s cheeks. No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall—I will do such things—
What they are yet I know not—but they shall be
The terrors of the earth.”

The elemental storm at that moment heard rumbling in the distance actually seemed an echo of the more terrible spiritual storm raging in him.

The scene by night on the heath, where Lear, discrowned of his reason, wanders in the tempest,—the earth his floor, the sky his roof, the elements his comrades,—was sustained by Forrest with a broad strength and intensity which left nothing wanting. Even the imagination was satisfied with the scale of acting when the old king was seen, colossal in his broken decay, exulting as the monarch of a new realm, pelted by tempests, shrilling with curses, and peopled with wicked daughters! His eyes aflame, his breast distended, his arms flying, his white hair all astream in the wind, his voice rolling and crashing like another thunder below, he seemed some wild spirit in command of the scene; and he called, as if to his conscious subjects,—

“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout,
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters.
I tax not you, ye elements, with unkindness:
I never gave you kingdom, called you children;
You owe me no subscription. Then let fall
Your horrible pleasure: here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man.
But yet I call you servile ministers
That will with two pernicious daughters join
Your high-engendered battles ’gainst a head
So old and white as this. O, O, ’tis foul.”

These last words, beginning with “_high_-engendered battles,” he delivered with a down-sweeping cadence as mighty in its swell as one of the great symphonic swings of Beethoven. The auditor seemed to hear the peal strike on the mountain-top and its slow reverberations roll through the valleys. The next speech, commencing with,—

“Let the great gods,
That keep this dreadful pother o’er our heads,
Find out their enemies now,”—

and ending with,—

“I am a man
More sinned against than sinning,”—

he pronounced in a way that emphasized the vast ethical meaning involved in it, and illustrated the strong humanity of Lear. He seemed to be saying, “These woes are just; I have been proud, rash, and cruel; but others have treated me worse than I have treated them.” This unconscious effort at a halting justification, this disguised appeal for kindly judgment, was profoundly natural and affecting. Then his brain reeled under its load of woe, and he sighed, with a piteous bewilderment, “My wits begin to turn,” bringing back with awful fulfilment his prophetic prayer long before, “O, let me not be mad, sweet heaven! keep me in temper: I would not be mad!”

There was something in the immense outspread of the sorrows of Lear and the enlacement of their gigantic portrayal with the elemental scenery of nature, the desolate heath, the blackness of night, the howling gale, the stabbing flashes of lightning, overwhelmingly pathetic and sublime. The passion of Othello pours along like a vast river turbulent and raging, yet with placid eddies. The passion of Lear is like the continual swell and moan of the ocean, whose limitless expanse, with no beacon of hope to meet the eye, baffles our comprehension and bewilders us with its awful mystery. This part of the play, as Forrest represented it in person and voice, gave one a new measure of the greatness of man in his glory and in his ruin. And in the subsequent scenes, where the disease of Lear had progressed and his faculties become more wrecked, he was so interpreted from the splendid might over which he had exulted to the mournful decay into which he had sunk, that when he said, in reply to a request to be allowed to kiss his hand, “Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality,” the whole audience felt like exclaiming, with Gloster,—

“O ruined piece of nature! This great world
Shall so wear out to naught.”

The acting of all the closing scenes with Cordelia was something to be treasured apart in the memories of all who saw it and who were capable of appreciating its exquisite beauty and its unfathomable pathos. When he was awakened out of the merciful sleep which had fallen on the soreness of his soul, and heard her whose voice was ever soft, gentle, and low, addressing him as she had been wont in happier days, his look of wondering weariness, his mistaking her for a spirit in bliss, his kneeling to her, his gradual recognition of her,—all these were executed with a unity of purpose, a simplicity of means, and an ineffable tenderness of affection, to which it is impossible for any verbal description to do justice. Who, that did not carry a stone in his breast in place of a heart, could refrain from tears when he heard the exhausted sufferer—his gaze fixed on hers, his hands moving in unpurposed benediction, a solemn calm wrapping him after the long tempest, passing from the old arrogance of self-assertion into a supreme sympathy—murmur,—

“Where have I been? Where am I?—Fair daylight?
I am mightily abused.—I should even die with pity
To see another thus.”

Who that saw his instinctive action and heard his broken utterance when she was dead, and he stood trying with insane perseverance to restore her, fondling her with his paralyzed hands, can ever forget? With insistent eagerness he asked,—

“Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all?”

With complaining resignation he said,—

“Thou’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!—”

With wild surprise he exclaimed, while his lips parted and a weird and shrivelling smile stole through his wearied face,—

“Do you see this?—Look on her,—look,—her lips,—
Look there, look there!”

He stood erect and still, gazing into vacancy. Not a rustle, not a breath, could be heard in the house. Slowly the head nodded, the muscles of the face relaxed, the hands opened, the eyes closed, one long hollow gasp through the nostrils, then on the worn-out king of grief and pain fell the last sleep, and his form sank upon the stage, while the parting salvos of the storm rolled afar.

Such were the principal characters represented by Edwin Forrest. So, as far as an incompetent pen can describe their portraiture, did he represent them. The work was a dignified and useful one, moralizing the scene not less than entertaining the crowd. It was full of noble lessons openly taught. It was still richer, as all acting is, in yet deeper latent lessons to be gathered and self-applied by the spectators who were wise enough to pierce to them and earnest enough to profit from them.

For every dramatic impersonation of a character in the unravelling of a plot and the fulfilment of a fate is charged with implicit morals. This is inevitable because every type of man, every grade of life, every kind of conduct, every style of manners, embodies those laws of cause and effect between the soul and its circumstances which constitute the movement of human destiny, and illustrates the varying standards of truth and beauty, or of error and sin, in charming examples to be assimilated, or in repulsive ones to serve as warnings. Thus the stage is potentially as much more instructive than the pulpit, as life is more inclusive and contagious than words. The trouble is that its teaching is so largely disguised and latent. It sorely needs an infusion of the religious and academic spirit to explicate and drive home its morals. For instance, when Coriolanus says, with action of immovable haughtiness,—

“Let them pull all about mine ears; present me
Death on the wheel, or at wild horses’ heels;
Or pile ten hills on the Tarpeian rock,
That the precipitation might down stretch
Below the beam of sight, yet will I still
Be thus to them,—”

it is a huge and grand personality, filled to bursting with arrogant pride and indirect vanity, asserting itself obstinately against the mass of the people. As a piece of power it is imposing; but morally it is vulgar and odious. The single superior should not assert his egotistic will defiantly against the wills of the multitude of inferiors and hate them for their natural resistance. He should modestly modulate his self- will with the real claims of the collective many, or blend and assert it through universal right and good, thus representing God with the strength of truth and the suavity of love. That is the lesson of Coriolanus,—a great lesson if taught and learned. And, to take an exactly opposite example, what is it that so pleases and holds everybody who sees the exquisite Rip Van Winkle of Joseph Jefferson? Analyze the performance to the bottom, and it is clear that the charm consists in the absence of self-assertion, the abeyance of all egotistic will. Against the foil of his wife’s tartar temper, who with arms akimbo and frowning brow and scolding acidity of voice opposes everything, and asserts her authority, and, despite her faithful virtues, is as disagreeable as an incarnated broomstick, Rip, lazy and worthless as he is, steals into every heart with his yielding movement, soft tones, and winsome look of unsuspicious innocence. He resists not evil or good, neither his appetite for drink nor his inclinations to reform. The spontaneity, the perfect surrender of the man, the unresisted sway of nature in him, plays on the unconscious sympathies of the spectators with a charm whose divine sweetness not all the vices of the vagabond can injure. It is, in this homely and almost unclean disguise, a moral music strangely wafted out of an unlost paradise of innocence into which drunkenness has strayed. But the real secret of the fascination is hidden from most of those who intuitively feel its delicious fascination. Did the audience but appreciate the graceful spirit of its spell, and for themselves catch from its influence the same unresisted spontaneousness of soul in unconscious abnegation of self-will, they would go home regenerated.