I bent my bow; yet kept he rounding still
His airy circle, as in the delight
Of measuring the ample range beneath
And round about: absorbed, he heeded not
The death that threatened him. I could not shoot—
'Twas liberty! I turned my bow aside,
And let him soar away."
Old Melctal, the father of Tell's wife, is led in by Albert, blind and trembling, his eyes having been plucked from their sockets by order of Gesler. As Tell, horror-struck, listened to the frightful story from the lips of the old man, the revelation of the feelings it stirred in him was one of the most genuine and moving pieces of emotional portraiture ever shown to an audience. It was an unveiled storm of contending pity, amazement, wrath, tenderness, tears, loathing, and revenge. Every muscle worked, his soul seemed wrapt and shaken with thunders and lightnings of passion, which alternately darkened and illumined his features, and he seemed going mad, until at last he seized his weapons and darted away in search of the monster whose presence profaned the earth, crying, as he went, "Father, thou shalt be revenged, thou shalt be revenged!" The power of this effort is shown in the fact that more than one critic compared his struggle with his own feelings under the narrative of Melctal to his subsequent struggle with the guards of Gesler, when, like a lion amidst a pack of curs, he hurled them in every direction, and held them at bay till overpowered by sheer numbers. The mental struggle was quite as visibly defined and terrible as the physical one.
In this play Forrest presented four successive examples of that
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proud assertion of an independent, high-minded man which has been said to be the real type of his character as a tragedian. These specimens were differenced from one another with such clean strokes and bold colors that it was an æsthetic as well as a moral luxury to behold him enact them. The first was a trenchant, sarcastic scorn of baseness, spoken when he sees the servile peasants bow to Gesler's cap, and the hireling soldiery driving them to it:
"They do it, Verner;
They do it! Look! Ne'er call me man again!
Look, look! Have I the outline of that caitiff
Who to the outraged earth doth bend the head
His God did rear for him to heaven? Base pack!
Lay not your loathsome touch upon the thing
God made in his own image. Crouch yourselves;
'Tis your vocation, which you should not call
On free-born men to share with you, who stand
Erect except in presence of their God
Alone."
The second example is the stern stateliness of unshaken heroism with which he confronts insult and threats of torture and death, when, chained and baited by the soldiers, Sarnem bids him down on his knees and beg for mercy. They try to force him to the ground, inciting one another with cowardly ferocity to strike him, put out his eyes, or lop off a limb. His bearing and the soul it revealed were such as corresponded with the descriptive comment wrung from the onlooking Gesler:
"Can I believe my eyes? He smiles. He grasps
His chains as he would make a weapon of them
To lay his smiter dead. What kind of man
Is this, that looks in thraldom more at large
Than they who lay it on him!
A heart accessible as his to trembling
The rock or marble hath. They more do fear
To inflict than he to suffer. Each one calls
Upon the other to accomplish that
Himself hath not the manhood to begin.
He has brought them to a pause, and there they stand
Like things entranced by some magician's spell,
Wondering that they are masters of their organs
And not their faculties."
The third example is fearless defiance of tyrannical power, when, bound and helpless, he confronts the cowering Gesler with
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majestic superiority. The Austrian governor says, "Ha, beware! think on thy chains!" Tell replies, with swelling bosom and flashing eyes,—
"Though they were doubled, and did weigh me down
Prostrate to earth, methinks I could rise up
Erect, with nothing but the honest pride
Of telling thee, usurper, to the teeth,
Thou art a monster! Think upon my chains!
Show me the link of them which, could it speak,
Would give its evidence against my word.
Think on my chains! 'They are my vouchers, which
I show to heaven, as my acquittance from
The impious swerving of abetting thee
In mockery of its Lord!' Think on my chains!
How came they on me?"
The fourth example is that of a grand, positive exultation in the moral beauty and glory of human nature in its undesecrated experiences. In response to the contemptible threat of the despot that his vengeance can kill, and that that is enough, Tell raises his face proudly, stretches out his arm, and says, in rich, strong accents,—
"No: not enough:
It cannot take away the grace of life,—
Its comeliness of look that virtue gives,—
Its port erect with consciousness of truth,—
Its rich attire of honorable deeds,—
Its fair report that's rife on good men's tongues:
It cannot lay its hands on these, no more
Than it can pluck his brightness from the sun,
Or with polluted finger tarnish it."
The capacities of parental and filial affection in tragic pathos are wrought up by Knowles in the last two acts with consummate and unrelenting skill. The varied interest and suspense of the dialogue and action between Tell and Albert are harrowing, as, neither knowing that the other is in the power of Gesler, they are suddenly brought together. Instinct teaches them to appear as strangers. The struggle to suppress their feelings and play their part under the imminent danger is followed with painful excitement as the plot thickens and the dread catastrophe seems hurrying. Tell, ordered to instant execution, seeks to speak a few last words to his son, under the pretext of sending a farewell message to his Albert by the stranger boy. In a voice
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whose condensed and tremulous murmuring betrays all the crucified tenderness it refuses to express, he says,—
"Thou dost not know me, boy; and well for thee
Thou dost not. I'm the father of a son
About thy age; I dare not tell thee where
To find him, lest he should be found of those
'Twere not so safe for him to meet with. Thou,
I see, wast born, like him, upon the hills:
If thou shouldst 'scape thy present thraldom, he
May chance to cross thee; if he should, I pray thee,
Relate to him what has been passing here,
And say I laid my hand upon thy head,
And said to thee—if he were here, as thou art,
Thus would I bless him: Mayst thou live, my boy,
To see thy country free, or die for her
As I do!"
Here he turns away with a slight convulsive movement mightily held down, and Sarnem exclaims, "Mark, he weeps!" The whole audience weep with him, too; as well they may, for the concentration of affecting circumstances in the scene forms one of the masterpieces of dramatic art. And Forrest played it in every minute particular with an intensity of nature and a closeness of truth effective to all, but agonizing to the sympathetic. His last special stroke of art was the natural yet cunningly-prepared contrast between the extreme nervous anxiety and agitation that marked his demeanor through all the preliminary stages of the fearful trial-shot for life and liberty, and his final calmness. Until the apple was on the head of his kneeling boy, and he had taken his position, he was all perturbation and misgiving. Then this spirit seemed to pass out of him with an irresolute shudder, and instantly he confirmed himself into an amazing steadiness. Every limb braced as marble, and as motionless, he stood, like a sculptured archer that looked life yet neither breathed nor stirred. The arrow flies, the boy bounds forward unhurt, with the transfixed apple in his hand. Tell then slays Gesler, and, dilating above the prostrated Austrian banner, amidst universal exultation both on and off the stage, closes the play with the shouted words,—
"To arms! and let no sword be sheathed
Until our land, from cliff to lake, is free!
Free as our torrents are that leap our rocks,
Or as our peaks that wear their caps of snow
In very presence of the regal sun!"
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DAMON.
The Damon of Forrest perhaps surpassed, in popular effect, all his other early performances. The romantic story of the devotion of the ancient Greek pair of friends, as narrated by Valerius Maximus, has had a diffusion in literature and produced an impression on the imaginations of men almost without a parallel. This is because it appeals so penetratingly to a sentiment so deep and universal. Above the mere materialized instincts of life there is hardly a feeling of the human heart so profound and vivid as the craving for a genuine, tender, and inviolable friendship. After all the disappointments of experience, after all the hardening results of custom, strife, and fraud, this desire still remains alive, however thrust back and hidden. Remove the disguises and pretences, even of the aged and worldly-minded, and it is surprising in the souls of how many of them the spring of this baffled yet importunate desire will be found running and murmuring in careful concealment. In the hurry and worry of our practical age, so crowded with toil, rivalry, and distraction, the sentiment is less gratified in real life than ever, a fact which in many cases only makes the ideal still more attractive. Accordingly, when the sacred old tale of the Pythagorean friends was wrought into a play by Banim and Shiel, it struck the taste of the public at once. The play, too, had exceptional rhetorical merit, and was constructed with a simple plot, marked by a constant movement full of moral force and pathos.
Forrest had seen the rôle of Damon filled by Cooper with transcendent dignity and energy, and the remembrance had been burned into his brain. It was one of the most finished and famous impersonations of that celebrated actor, who charged it with honest passion and clothed it with rugged grandeur. The representation by Cooper, though unequal and careless, was so just in its general outlines to the idea of the author, that when Forrest first hesitatingly essayed the character, he had as a disciple of truth, perforce, largely to repeat the example. But he came to the part with a fresher youth, a more concentrated nature, a keener ambition, and a more elaborate study; and, original in many details as well as in the more conscientious working up of the harmony of the different scenes, it was soon conceded that
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in the portrayal as a whole and in the unprecedented excitement it produced he had eclipsed his distinguished English forerunner on the American stage. He entered into the spirit and scenery of the subject with so intelligent and vehement an earnestness that he seemed not to act, but to be, Damon, speaking the words spontaneously created in his soul on the spot, not uttering any memorized lesson. It was like a resurrection of Syracuse, with the despot and his tools plotting the overthrow of its republican government, and the faithful friends seeking to prevent the success of the scheme. The spectators forgot that the Sicilian city had vanished ages since, and Dionysius and Pythias and Procles and Calanthe all gone to dust. The reality was before them, and its living shapes moved and spoke to the spell-bound sense.
The Damon of Forrest was in every respect grandly conceived and grandly embodied. His noble form carried proudly aloft in weighty ease, clad in Grecian garb, with long robe and sandals, corresponded with the justice and dignity of his soul. He was in no sense a sentimentalist or fanatic, but a man with intellect and heart balanced in conscience,—equally a patriot, a philosopher, and a friend,—his sentiments set in the great virtues of human nature loyal to the gods, his convictions and love not mere instincts but embedded in his reason and his honor. Yet, trained as he had been in the lofty ethics of Pythagoras, the austere discipline deadened not, but only curbed, the tremendous elemental passions of his being. Beneath his cultivated stateliness and playfulness the impetuous volume and energy of his natural feelings made them, reposing, grand as mountains clad with verdure, aroused, terrible as volcanoes spouting fire. An inferior actor would be tempted to weaken or slur everything else in order to give the higher relief to the great central topic of friendship. It was the rare excellence of Forrest that he gave as patient an attention and as sustained a treatment to the gravity and zealous devotion of the senator, the thoughtful habit of the scholar, the fondness of the husband and father, as he did to the touching affection of the friend, in his portraiture of Damon.
He makes his appearance in the street, on his way to the Senate, when he encounters a crowd of venal officers and soldiers thronging to the citadel, brandishing their swords and cheering
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for the despot. He says, with a musing air first, then quickly passing through indignant scorn to mournful expostulation,—
"Then Dionysius has o'erswayed it? Well,
It is what I expected: there is now
No public virtue left in Syracuse.
What should be hoped from a degenerate,
Corrupted, and voluptuous populace,
When highly-born and meanly-minded nobles
Would barter freedom for a great man's feast,
And sell their country for a smile? The stream
With a more sure eternal tendency
Seeks not the ocean, than a sensual race
Their own devouring slavery. I am sick
At my inmost heart of everything I see
And hear! O Syracuse, I am at last
Forced to despair of thee! And yet thou art
My land of birth,—thou art my country still;
And, like an unkind mother, thou hast left
The claims of holiest nature in my heart,
And I must sorrow for, not hate thee!"
The soldiery shout,—
"For Dionysius! Ho, for Dionysius!
Damon. Silence, obstreperous traitors!
Your throats offend the quiet of the city;
And thou, who standest foremost of these knaves,
Stand back and answer me, a Senator,
What have you done?"
And then he slowly leans towards them with dilating front, and sways the whole crowd away from him as if by the invisible momentum of some surcharging magnetism.
"Procles. But that I know 'twill gall thee,
Thou poor and talking pedant of the school
Of dull Pythagoras, I'd let thee make
Conjecture from thy senses: But, in hope
'Twill stir your solemn anger, learn from me,
We have ta'en possession of the citadel.
Damon. Patience, ye good gods! a moment's patience,
