His manner now changes. Some great resolution seems to have arisen in him. His words have a tender yet ominous meaning in their inflection as he asks Nahmeokee, "Do you not fear the power of the white man? He might seize thee and bear thee off to his far country, bind those arms that have so often clasped me, and make thee his slave. We cannot fly: our foes are all about us. We cannot fight, for this [drawing his long
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knife] is the only weapon I have saved unbroken from the strife. It has tasted the white man's blood and reached the cold heart of the traitor. It has been our best friend, and it is now our only treasure." Here he drew her still closer, and placed her head on his bosom, and, with the long knife in his hand, pointed upwards, and with an alluring, indescribably sweet and aerial falsetto tone, painted a picture that seemed to take form and color in the very atmosphere. There was a weird dreaminess in his voice and a visionary abstractness in his gaze, as with the words "long path in the thin air," he indicated the heavenward journey of his dead child, that seemed actually to dissolve the whole scene, theatre, actor, spectators, and all, into a passing vapor, an ethereal enchantment.
"I look through the long path in the thin air, and think I see our little one borne to the land of the happy, where the fair hunting-grounds never know snows or storms, and where the immortal brave feast under the eyes of the Giver of Good. Look upward, Nahmeokee! See, thy child looks back to thee, and beckons thee to follow." Drawing her closer with his left arm, and lowering his right, he whispers, "Hark! In the distant wood I faintly hear the tread of the white men. They are upon us! The home of the happy is made ready for thee!" While this picture of fear and hope is vivid before her mind, he strikes the blow, and in an instant she is dead in his arms. He clasps her to his breast, presses his lips on her forehead, and gently places her beside the dead child. He then shudders, and draws forth the knife sheathed in her side, and kisses its blade in a sudden transport, exclaiming, "She knew no bondage to the white men. Pure as the snow she lived, free as the air she died!"
At this moment the hills are covered with the white men, pointing their rifles at his heart. "Hah!" he cries. Their leader shouts, "Metamora is our prisoner!" "No," he proudly responds, dilating with the haughtiest port of defiance. "I live, the last of my race, live to defy you still, though numbers and treachery overpower me. Come to me, come singly, come all, and this knife, which has drunk the foul blood of your nation, and is now red with the purest of mine, will feel a grasp as strong as when it flashed in the glare of your burning dwellings or was lifted terribly over the fallen in battle."
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The order is given to fire upon him; and he replies, "Do so. I am weary of the world; for ye are dwellers in it. I would not turn on my heel to save my life." They shoot, and he staggers, but in his dying agonies launches on them his awful malediction:
"My curses on ye, white men! May the Great Spirit curse ye when he speaks in his war-voice from the clouds! May his words be like the forked lightnings, to blast and desolate! May the loud winds and the fierce red flames be loosed in vengeance upon ye, tigers! May the angry Spirit of the Waters in his wrath sweep over your dwellings! May your graves and the graves of your children be in the path where the red man shall tread, and may the wolf and the panther howl over your fleshless bones! I go. My fathers beckon from the green lakes and the broad hills. The Great Spirit calls me. I go,—but the curses of Metamora stay with the white men!"
He crawls painfully to the bodies of his wife and child, and, in a vain effort to kiss them, expires, with his last gasp mixing the words, "I die—my wife, my queen—my Nahmeokee!"
SPARTACUS.
F. Halpin
EDWIN FORREST AS
THE GLADIATOR.
"The Gladiator," written by Robert Montgomery Bird, was another prize-play, in which Forrest acquired a popularity which, if less general, was more intense, than that secured for his Metamora. If the admiration and applause given to it were drawn less universally from men and women, from old and young, they were more fervent and sustained, being fed by those elementary instincts which are strongest in the robust multitude. The Spartacus of Forrest was more abused and satirized by hostile critics than any of his other parts, because it was the most "physical" and "melodramatic" of them all. Muscular exertion and ferocious passion were carried to their greatest pitch in it, though neither of these was displayed in a degree beyond sincerity and fitness or the demands of the given situations on the given embodiment of the character. There are actual types of men and actual scenes of life which are transcendently "physical" and "melodramatic." No actor can truly represent such specimens of human nature and such conjunctures of human history without being highly "physical" and profoundly "melodramatic." Is it not the office of the player, the very aim of his art, correctly to depict the truth of man
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and life? And, recollecting what sort of a person the veritable Thracian gladiator was, and what sort of a part he played, one may well ask how he can be justly impersonated on the stage if not invested with the attributes of brawny muscularity, terrific indignation, stentorian speech, and merciless revenge. Forrest was blamed and ridiculed by a coterie because he did exactly what, as an artist cast in such a rôle, he ought to do, and any deviation from which would have been a gross violation of propriety. He simply exhibited tremendous mental and physical realities with tremendous mental and physical realism. What else would the demurrer have?
The fact is, the cant words "physical" and "melodramatic," as demeaningly used in dramatic criticism, express a vulgar prejudice too prevalent among the educated and refined,—a prejudice infinitely more harmful than any related prejudice of the ignorant and coarse. They seem to fancy the body something vile, to be ashamed of, to receive as little attention and be kept as much out of sight as possible. But since God created the body as truly as he did the spirit, and decreed its uses as much as he did those of the spirit, the perfecting and glorifying of the former are just as legitimate as the perfecting and glorifying of the latter. The ecclesiastical interpretation of Christianity for these fifteen hundred years is responsible, in common with kindred ascetic superstitions of other and elder religions, for an incalculable amount of disease, deformity, vice, crime, and untimely death. The contempt for bodily power and its material conditions in a superbly-developed and trained physical organism, the foul and dishonoring notion of the superior sanctity of the celibate state, the teaching that chastity is the one thing that allies us to the angels, with which every other sin may be forgiven, without which no other virtue is to be recognized,—these and associated errors—discords, distortions, and inversions of nature—have been prolific sources of evil. They lie at the root of the so common prejudice against a magnificent and glowing condition of the physical organism, a prejudice which feeds the conceit of the votaries of the present mental forcing system, and causes so many dawdling idlers to neglect all use of those vigorous measures of gymnastic hygiene which would raise the power and splendor of body and soul together to their maximum.
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The type of man produced by the Athenians in their best age, its unrivalled combination of health and strength, energy and grace, acumen and sensibility, organic harmony of mental peace and vital joy, was very largely the fruit of their unrivalled system of gymnastics regulated by music. Free America, with this example and so much subsequent experience, with all the conquests of modern science at her command, should inaugurate a system of popular training which will acknowledge the equal sanctity of body and soul and render them worthy of each other, a union of athletic and æsthetic culture making the body the temporary illuminated temple of its indwelling immortal divinity.
The separating of human nature into opposed parts whose respective highest welfare is incompatible must ever be productive of all kinds of morbidity, monstrosity, and horror, through the final reactions of the violated harmony of truth. Leading to the enforced culture of one side, the mental, and the enforced neglect of the other, the material, it is fatal to that rounded wholeness of the entire man which is the synonym of both health and virtue. For the helpless subsidence of the soul in the body is brutality or idiocy; the insurrectionary sway of the body over the soul is insanity; the remorseless subdual of the body by the soul is egotistic asceticism or murderous ferocity; but the parallel development and exaltation of accordant body and soul give us the ideal of health and happiness fulfilled in beauty, or the enthronement of divine order in man. Therefore such a stimulating instance of organic glory, extraordinary outward poise and inward passion, as the people, thrilled in their most instinctive depths of enthusiasm, used to shout at when they saw Forrest in his early assumptions of the rôle of Spartacus, is not to be stigmatized as something offensive, but to be hailed as something admirable.
In those happy and glowing years of his prime and of his fresh celebrity, what a glorious image of unperverted manhood, of personified health and strength and beauty, he presented! What a grand form he had! What a grand face! What a grand voice! And, the living base of all, what a grand blood! the rich flowing seed-bed of his human thunder and lightning. As he stepped upon the stage in his naked fighting-trim, his muscular coating unified all over him and quivering with vital power, his skin polished by exercise and friction to a smooth and marble hardness, conscious
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of his enormous potency, fearless of anything on the earth, proudly aware of the impression he knew his mere appearance, backed by his fame, would make on the audience who impatiently awaited him,—he used to stand and receive the long, tumultuous cheering that greeted him, as immovable as a planted statue of Hercules. In the rank and state of his physical organism and its feelings he had the superiority of a god over common men. The spectacle, let it be repeated, was worthy the admiration it won. And had the personal imitation of the care and training he gave himself been but equal to the admiration lavished on their result, the benefit to the American people would have been beyond estimate. But in this, as in the other lessons of the drama, the example was relatively fruitless, because shown to spectators who applaud without copying, seeking entertainment instead of instruction. This, however, is clearly the fault of the people, and not of the stage.
The play of "The Gladiator" is founded on that dark and frightful episode in the history of Rome, the famous servile war headed by the gladiators under the lead of Spartacus. Our sympathies are skilfully enlisted on the side of the insurgents, who are goaded to their desperate enterprise by insufferable wrongs and cruelties. It abounds in pictures of insolent tyranny on one side, and with eloquent denunciation and fearless resistance on the other, and the chief character is a powerful presentation of a deep and generous manhood, outraged in every fibre, lashed to fury by his injuries, and, after superhuman efforts of revenge, expiring in monumental despair and appeal to the gods. The horrors of oppression, the irrepressible dignity of human nature, the reckless luxury of the rulers, the suffering of the slaves, the revolting arrogance of despotism, and the burning passion of liberty, are set against one another; and all through it the mighty figure of Spartacus is made to fill the central place. It was just the part for a democrat, who, despising what is factitious, gloried in the ineradicable attributes of free manhood; and Forrest made the most of it. For instance, it is easy for those who knew him to imagine the energy and relish with which he would utter the following lines when he came to them in his part:
"I thank the gods, I am barbarian;
For I can better teach the grace-begot
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And heaven-supported masters of the earth,
How a mere dweller of a desert rock
Can bow their crowned heads to his chariot-wheels.
Man is heaven's work, and beggars' brats may herit
A soul to mount them up the steeps of fortune,
With regal necks to be their stepping-blocks."
In the intense sincerity and elaborate as well as spontaneous truth of his performance, it was not a play that the spectators saw, but a history; not a history, but a resurrection. Entering in the garb of a slave, bound and whipped, his mighty frame and terrible aspect made the abuse seem more awful. Tortured with insulting questions, his proud spirit stung by wrong on wrong, he broke forth in desperation, and carried the passions of the audience by storm, as with clenched hands, and half erect from their seats, while the blood ran quicker through their veins, they saw him rush into combat with his enemies and chase them from the stage. They delighted to see the cruel subduer of the world humbled by her own captive, who held her haughty prætors by the heart and called on Thrace, on Africa, on the oppressed of all nations, to pour the flood of their united hates on the detested city. They rejoiced to hear him recite with bitter eloquence the story of her degradation, and heap on her with hot scorn the recollection of the time when Tiber ran blood and Hannibal hung over her like a cloud charged with ruin. Every step, every word, vibrated on their feelings, and when he fell their hearts swelled with a pang. For the actor had been lost in the slave, the insurgent, the conqueror, the victim.
His first appearance as a captive in imperial Rome was deeply affecting. "Is it a thousand leagues to Thrace?" he said, with a whispered agony, the deadly lament of hopeless exile. He has been purchased by Lentulus, an exhibitor of gladiators, on the strength of the report that he was the most desperate, skilful, and unconquerable fighter in the province. Bracchius, another proprietor of gladiators, owns one Phasarius, a Thracian, who has always been victorious in his combats. Phasarius was a younger and favorite brother of Spartacus, supposed to have been killed in battle years before, but really taken captive and brought to Rome. Now Bracchius and Lentulus propose a combat between their two slaves. Spartacus, chained, is ordered in. He asks, "Is not this Rome, the great city?" Bracchius replies,
