The strong, lucid, cutting tones in which these words were spoken went vibrating into the breasts of the listeners, and thrilled them with sympathetic echoes. The perjured witness was summoned by the recreant judge. And the next passage of the play had a moral meaning deep enough, and was represented with a truth and power grand enough, to turn the stage for the time being into a pulpit and make the world tremble at its preaching.
"Virginius. And are you the man
That claims my daughter for his slave?—Look at me,
And I will give her to thee.
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Claudius. She is mine, then:
Do I not look at you?
Virginius. Your eye does, truly,
But not your soul.—I see it, through your eye,
Shifting and shrinking,—turning every way
To shun me. You surprise me, that your eye,
So long the bully of its master, knows not
To put a proper face upon a lie,
But gives the port of impudence to falsehood
When it would pass it off for truth. Your soul
Dares as soon show its face to me!"
Now the interest grows yet intenser and the influence of the actor yet more penetrating in its simplicity and terrible beauty. Virginius finds that nothing can save his daughter from the last profanation of the tyrant except her immediate immolation by himself. For a moment he is lost in a reverie, striving to think what he can do. By chance he perceives a knife lying on the stall of a butcher. At the sight of this providential instrument an electric change passes over his face, revealing all his purpose with a grim joy, like the lightning-flash at night illumining the murky sky and giving an instantaneous outline of the clouds loaded with the coming storm. He moves gradually towards the stall, smiling on Virginia a tender smile, full of the consolation he sees in the prospect of her deliverance even by death. He pats her lovingly on the shoulder while changing her from his left arm, that with it he may reach the knife. He stealthily seizes it and passes it behind him from the left hand to the right. With deep fondness he breathes, "My dear Virginia," and gives her quick and fervent kisses, which he appears striving to press into her very soul. Tears seem to moisten his words,—
"There is one only way to save thine honor,—
'Tis this!"
And, swift as motion of the human arm can make it, the knife pierces her heart. The storm has burst, the lightning has wreathed its folds around the consecrated instrument of the work, and now the thunder-tones of his voice crash through the theatre in the awful exclamation,—
"Lo, Appius! with this innocent blood
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I do devote thee to the infernal gods!
Make way there!
If they dare
To tempt the desperate weapon that is maddened
With drinking my daughter's blood, why, let them.
Thus, thus it rushes in amongst them. Way, there!"
His exit here used to excite the wildest huzzas, the men in the pit standing with their hats in their uplifted hands, and the women in the boxes waving their handkerchiefs.
Virginius heads the revolution, in which the revolted troops and the commons join. The tyranny is hurled to the dust, the people freed, and Appius lodged in prison. But the wronged and wretched father is broken down by the preternatural horror and excitement he has undergone, and loses his reason. He is next seen in his own desolate home, with a pale and haggard face, and a look half wild, half dreamy, talking to himself:
"'Tis ease! 'tis ease! I am content! 'Tis peace,—
'Tis anything that is most soft and quiet.
And after such a dream! I want my daughter.
Send me my daughter! Will she come, or not?
I'll call myself. Virginia!"
His call of Virginia was a call dictated by a dethroned mind. It was a sound that appeared to come from a mysterious vault. There was a kind of semi-wakefulness in it, like the utterance of a thought in a dream. It had a touch of pity. It was an inverted form of sound, that turned back whence it issued and fell dead where it was born, feeling that there was no reply for it to keep it alive. Yet, after a pause, he fancies he hears her answering; and he rapidly asks,—
"Is it a voice, or nothing, answers me?
I hear a sound so fine there's nothing lives
'Twixt it and silence."
And then, with an entranced listening, he follows the illusory voice around to different parts of the room, in the vain attempt to find its source. An apathetic stare, a blank, miserable stupor, succeeds, soon broken by the fancy that he hears her shrieking in the prison for rescue from Appius,—and he darts away. Appius, meanwhile, is planning an escape, and gloatingly counting over in imagination the victims he will pick out to expiate for his
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present shame, when the shattered Virginius, appalling even in his ruins, rushes in upon him, wildly crying, "Give me my daughter!" The affrighted prisoner replies,—
"I know nothing of her, Virginius, nothing.
Virginius. Do you tell me so?
Vile tyrant! Think you, shall I not believe
My own eyes before your tongue? Why, there she is!
There at your back,—her locks dishevelled, and
Her vestment torn,—her cheeks all faded with
Her pouring tears.
Villain! is this a sight to show a father?
And have I not a weapon to requite thee?"
In his distraught fury, feeling over his body for some weapon he discovers his own hands. A wild and eager delight shudders through him as, holding these naked instruments before him, he springs on the terrified Appius and strangles him to death. Lucius, Icilius, and Numitorius enter, bearing the urn of Virginia. The wronged father and sufferer looks up, and sighs, with a bewildered gaze,—
"What a load my heart has heaved off! Where is he?
I thought I had done it."
They call him by name. He makes no response. Icilius places the urn in his right hand, with the single word, "Virginia." He looks at Icilius and the urn, at Numitorius and Lucius, seems struck by their mourning garb, looks again at the urn, breaks into a passion of tears, and falls on the neck of Icilius, exclaiming, "Virginia!"
METAMORA.
Jas Bannister
EDWIN FORREST AS
METAMORA.
The famous prize-play of Metamora, by John Augustus Stone, is not a work of much genius, and if published would have no literary rank; yet it had all that was essential, in the striking merit of furnishing the genius of the enactor of its leading character the conditions for compassing a popular success of the most remarkable description. With his performance of Metamora, Forrest impressed the masses of the American people in a degree rarely precedented, and won a continental celebrity full of idiomatic enthusiasm. Of course there were good reasons for this warm favor from the surrendered many, despite the disdain of the squeamish few, who can generally enjoy nothing, only conceitedly criticise everything.
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In the first place, the subject was indigenous, and thus came home to the American heart and curiosity. In the imagination of our people for more than a century the race of the aborigines of the land were clothed with romantic associations and regretted with a sort of national remorse. The disinterestedness of the fancy and the soul, relieved from all proximity to their squalor, ferocity, and vice, with a beautiful pity lamented their wrongs, their evanescence, and the rapid disappearance of the wigwam and papoose and war-dance and canoe of the painted tribes from hill and glen and wood and lake. In this wide-spread sentimental interest the play took hold of powerful chords. Although prosaic research and experience have so largely divested the character of the Indian of its old romance and made his actual presence a nuisance, nevertheless so long as the memories of our primeval settlements and of our bloody and adventurous frontier traditions shall live, so long will the American Indian be remembered with a sigh as the lost human poetry of the nature wherein he was cradled.
Furthermore, the play was stocked with fresh suggestions and images of nature,—a store-house of those simple metaphors drawn direct from the great objects of the universe, full of a rude pathos and sublimity, and so natural to the genius of Indian chief and orator in their talk. There was a piquance of novelty and a refreshing charm to people—hived in towns and cities, and, stifled with artificial customs, almost oblivious of any direct contact of their senses with the solemn elementary phenomena of the surrounding universe—in hearing Metamora speak, in a voice that echoed and painted them, of the woods, the winds, the sun, the cliffs, the torrents, the lakes, the sea, the stars, the thunder, the meadows and the clouds, the wild animals and the singing birds. The meaning of the words so fitly intoned by the player awoke in the nerves of the audience dim reminiscences of ancestral experiences reverberating out of far ages forgotten long ago, and they were bound by a spell themselves understood not.
And then there was the interest of a style of character and life, of an idealized historic picture of a vanished form of human nature and society, all whose elements stood in strange and fascinating contrast with the personal experience of the beholders. It was the first time the American Indian had ever been dramatized and put on the stage; and this was done in a theme based on
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one of the romantic episodes of his history embodied in a chieftain of tragic greatness.
In a production of art whose subject and materials lie in the domain of unreclaimed nature, genius is not, indeed, permitted to falsify any fundamental principle or fact, but is free to modify and add. Otherwise, the creative function of art is gone, and only imitation left. In this respect of combined truth and originality, the acted Metamora of Forrest was a wonder never surpassed, in its own kind, in the long story of the stage. He appeared the kingly incarnation of the spirit of the scene, both of the outward landscape and of the taciturn tribe that peopled it with their gliding shapes. He appeared the human lord of the dark wood and the rocky shore, and the natural ruler of their untutored tenants; the soul of the eloquent recital, the noble appeal, and the fiery harangue; the embodiment of a rude magnanimity, a deep domestic love, an unquivering courage and fortitude, an instinctive patriotism and sense of justice, and a relentless revenge. He appeared, too, the votary of a superstition of singular attractiveness, blooming with the native wild-flowers of the human mind, a faith so unaffected and open that it seemed to be read by the stars of the Great Spirit as they looked down on the lone Indian kneeling by the mound of his fathers, the hunted patriot lying in ambush for his foes. Through all this physically-realized, wondrous portraiture of the poetic, the tender, the noble, the awful, the reverential, was mingled the glare of the crouching tiger. It was thus that Forrest in his great creation of Metamora rendered all that there was in the naturalistic poem of Indian life, to all that there was justly adding an infusion of that ideal quality by which art appeals to the nobler feelings of admiration and sympathy in preference to the meaner ones of hate and scorn. In this performance he elaborated a picture of the legendary and historic American Indian which to this day stands alone beyond all rivalry.
Never did an actor more thoroughly identify and merge himself with his part than Forrest did in Metamora. He was completely transformed from what he appeared in other characters, and seemed Indian in every particular, all through and all over, from the crown of his scalp to the sole of his foot. The carriage of his body, the inflections of his voice, his facial expressions, the
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very pose of his head and neck on his shoulders, were new. For he had recalled all his observations while on his visit with Push-ma-ta-ha among the Choctaws, when he had adopted their habits, eaten their food, slept in their tents, echoed the crack of his rifle over the surface of their lakes, and left the print of his moccasins on their hunting-grounds. He had also patiently studied their characteristics from all other available sources. Accordingly, when he came to impersonate Metamora, or the Last of the Wampanoags, modelled by the author of the play after that celebrated New England Sachem, the son of Massasoit, known in history as King Philip of Pokanoket, it was the genuine Indian who was brought upon the stage, merely idealized a little in some of his moral features. The attributes unnoticed by careless observers were distinctly shown,—the sudden muscular movements, the repressed emotion, the peculiar mode of breathing, the deep and vigorous gutturals flung out from the muscular base of the abdomen, and the straight or slightly inward-pointing line of the footfall. With a profound truth to fact, the general bearing of Metamora on ordinary occasions was marked by a dull monotony of manner, broken with awkward abruptness, and his grand poses were limited to those times of great excitement when the human organism, if in a state of dynamic surcharge, is spontaneously electrified with heroic lines, and becomes an instrument with which impersonal passions or the laws of nature gesticulate.
With the single and very proper exception of this partially heightened moral refinement, the counterfeit was so cunningly copied that it might have deceived nature herself. Many a time delegations of Indian tribes who chanced to be visiting the cities where he acted this character—Boston, New York, Washington, Baltimore, Cincinnati, New Orleans—attended the performance, adding a most picturesque feature by their presence, and their pleasure and approval were unqualified. A large delegation of Western Indians, seated in the boxes of the old Tremont Theatre on such an occasion, were so excited by the performance that in the closing scene they rose and chanted a dirge in honor of the death of the great chief.
This incident recalls one which happened in the earliest theatre in Philadelphia, when Mrs. Whitelock, the sister of Mrs. Siddons, was playing, and when Washington was present. At the begin
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ning of the performance a group of Indians, who had come from the wilderness to conclude a treaty, made their appearance in the pit in their native costume. The dark, tall, gaunt figures glided in, and, without noticing the audience or seeming to hear the claps of welcome which greeted them, seated themselves, and fixed their eyes on the stage, as unchangingly as if they were petrified. They sat through the chief play like statues, with immovable tranquillity. But in the after-piece an artificial elephant was introduced, which so electrified these sons of the forest that they suddenly sprang up with a cry. They said there had once been a great beast like this in their land. The next day they called on the manager, inspected the mammoth of sticks, pasteboard, and cloth, and asked to see by daylight the heavenly women who had appeared on the stage the previous night.
