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"Ay, and thou shouldst thank the gods that they have suffered thee to see it. What think'st thou of it?"
"Spartacus. That if the Romans had not been fiends, Rome had never been great. Whence came this greatness but from the miseries of subjugated nations? How many myriads of happy people that had not wronged Rome, for they knew not Rome,—how many myriads of these were slain, like the beasts of the field, that Rome might fatten upon their blood, and become great? Look ye, Roman, there is not a palace upon these hills that cost not the lives of a thousand innocent men; there is no deed of greatness ye can boast, but it was achieved by the ruin of a nation; there is no joy ye can feel, but its ingredients are blood and tears."
Lentulus breaks in, "Now, marry, villain, thou wert bought not to prate, but to fight."
"Spartacus. I will not fight. I will contend with mine enemy, when there is strife between us; and if that enemy be one of these same fiends, a Roman, I will give him the advantage of weapon and place; he shall take a helmet and buckler, while I, with my head bare and my breast naked, and nothing in my hand but my shepherd's staff, will beat him to my feet and slay him. But I will not slay a man for the diversion of Romans."
His master threatens to have him lashed if he refuses to contend in the arena. The fearful attitude and fixed look with which Spartacus received this threat, suggesting that he would strike the speaker dead with a glance, were a masterpiece of expressive art not easily forgotten by any one who saw it. Its possessing power seemed to freeze the gazer while he gazed. Still refusing to fight, in moody despair he bewails the destruction of his home by the Romans, and their murder of his wife and young child. The female slaves of Bracchius here pass by, and, to his amazement, among them Spartacus sees his lost Senona and her boy. After a touching interview of contending joy and grief with them, he agrees to enter the arena, on condition that if he is victorious his reward shall be their liberation.
The next act opens with a view of the great Roman amphitheatre, crowded with the people gathered to see those bloody games which were their horrid but favorite amusement. The first adversary brought against Spartacus is a Gaul. He soon slays
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him, though with great reluctance, and only as moved to it by the prospect of freedom for his wife and child. Then they propose as a second champion a renowned Thracian. He flings down his sword and refuses to fight with one of his own countrymen. But at last, on learning that liberty is to be had in no other way, he suddenly yields. The Thracian is introduced. It is Phasarius. A scene of intense pathetic power follows, as little by little the brothers are struck with each other's appearance, suspect, inquire, respond, are satisfied, and rush into a loving embrace. The prætor treats their recognition and their transport of fraternal affection as a trick to escape the combat, and orders them to begin. Spartacus proposes to his brother to die sword in hand rather than obey the unnatural command. In reply, Phasarius rapidly informs him that he has already organized the elements of a revolt among his comrades, and that it awaits but his signal to break out. Crassus angrily calls on his guards to enter the amphitheatre and punish the dilatory combatants. The manner in which Spartacus retorted, "Let them come in,—we are armed!" never failed to stir the deepest excitement in the theatre, causing the whole assembly to join in enthusiastic applause. Port, look, gesture, tone, accent, combined to make it a signal example of the sovereign potency of manner in revealing a master-spirit and swaying subject-spirits.
On the entrance of the guards, Phasarius gives a shout, and the confederate gladiators also plunge in, and a general conflict begins. In this scene the acting of Forrest absorbed his whole heart. He was so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of it that everything he did was perfectly natural, full of that genuine fire which is so much beyond all exertion by rule. It was universally agreed that more spirited and admirable fighting was hardly to be conceived, the varied postures into which he threw his massive form being worthy to be taken as studies for the sculptor.
The rebellion grows apace in success and numbers. Spartacus rescues his wife and child from the Roman camp, and seizes the niece of the prætor. Phasarius falls in love with this young woman, and demands her of his brother. Being refused because she is affianced to a youth in Rome, he insists on his demand. In the altercation occurs one of the finest and loftiest passages in the play, and it was rendered with a sublime eloquence:
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"Spartacus. Come, look me in the face,
And let me see how bad desires have changed thee.
Phasarius. I claim the captive.
Spar. Set thine eye on her:
Lo, you! she weeps, and she is fatherless.
Thou couldst not harm an orphan? What, I say,
Art thou, whom I have carried in my arms
To mountain-tops to worship the great God,
Art thou a man to plot a wrong and sorrow
'Gainst such as have no father left but Him?"
Phasarius revolts, and takes off more than half the army. Disastrously defeated by Crassus, he returns with a broken fragment of his forces, and is generously forgiven and restored to favor by Spartacus, who intrusts him with an important separate command, and confides Senona and her boy to his keeping, with the solemn charge that he shall avoid all collision with the enemy. Phasarius, however, thirsting for Roman blood, seeks an engagement, and is totally routed, his force cut in pieces, and the mother and child both slain. The unhappy man, then, mortally wounded, presents himself before his brother, tells his fearful tale, and expires at his feet. In this interview the emotions of anxiety, deprecation, grief, wrath, and horror, were depicted in all their most forcible language in the person of Spartacus. One action in particular was effective in the highest degree. Phasarius described the crucifixion by the Romans of six thousand of their Thracian captives. The highway on both sides, he said, was lined with crosses, and on each cross was nailed a gladiator.
"I crept
Thro' the trenched army to that road, and saw
The executed multitude uplifted
Upon the horrid engines. Many lived:
Some moaned and writhed in stupid agony;
Some howled and prayed for death, and cursed the gods;
Some turned to lunatics, and laughed at horror;
And some with fierce and hellish strength had torn
Their arms free from the beams, and so had died
Grasping headlong the air."
The agitations of the soul of the listener up to this point had been delineated with fearful distinctness. But when told that his wife and child had been killed, his head suddenly fell forward on his breast and rested there, after vibrating four or five times
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in lessening degrees on the pivot of the neck, as if utterly abandoned to itself. It was marvellously expressive of the exhausted state, the woe-begone despair, of one who had received a shock too great to be borne, a shock which, had it been a little severer, would have prostrated his whole figure, but, as it was, simply prostrated his head.
Deprived of all his kindred and of all hope, alone on the flinty earth, rage and recklessness now seize the desolate Thracian, and he resolves to sacrifice his captive, the niece of the prætor, in retaliation for the slaughter of his own family; but a nobler sentiment restrains him, and he dismisses her to her father. In this passage he displayed the agony of generous grief subduing the desire of vengeance with a power which, as a prominent English critic said, reminded the beholder of the head of Laocoön struggling in the folds of the serpent, or of the head of Hercules writhing under the torture of the poisoned shirt.
The prætor in return for his daughter sends Spartacus an offer of pardon if he will surrender. Disdainfully rejecting the overture, he has the horses in his camp slain, and sets everything on the chance of one more battle, but against such odds as he knows can result only in his defeat. With a frenzied thirst for vengeance he fights his way to the presence of the Roman general, and, in the very act of striking him down, exhausted from the accumulated wounds received in his passage of blood, grows faint, reels, falls in the exact attitude of the immortal statue of the Dying Gladiator, and expires.
A most remarkable proof of the histrionic genius of Forrest was given in the profoundly discriminated manner with which the same mass and fury of revengeful passion, the same rude breadth and tenderness of affection and pathos, were shown by him in the two characters of Metamora and Spartacus. In the Indian there was a stoical compression of the emotions out of their revealing channels, an organic suppression of starts and surprises and lamentations, a profound impassibility of demeanor, an exterior of slow, stubborn, monotonous self-possession, through which the volcanic ferocity of the interior crept in words of slow lava, or flared as fire through a smouldering heap of cinders. In the Thracian there was more variety as well as incomparably more freedom and impulsiveness of expression. The exterior and in
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terior corresponded with each other and mutually reflected instead of contradicting each other. In different exigencies the gladiator exhibited in his whole person, limbs, torso, face, eyes, and voice, the extremes of sullen stolidity, pining sorrow, convulsive grief, ambitious pride, pity, anger, resolution, and despair, each well shaded from the others. He had a wider gamut, as civilization is more comprehensive than barbarism. The movements and expressions of Metamora seemed to be instinctive, and originate in the nervous centres of the physique; those of Spartacus to be volitional, originating in the cerebral centres. In civilized life the body tends to be the reflex of the brain; in savage life the brain to be the reflex of the body. This historic and physiological truth Forrest knew nothing about, but the practical results of the fact he intuitively observed.
The seven characters, now described as fully as the writer can do it with the data at his command, were the favorite ones in which Forrest had gained his greenest laurels at the time of his visit to Europe. Jaffier, Octavian, Sir Edward Mortimer, Sir Giles Overreach, Iago, and other kindred parts, which he often acted with distinguished ability and acceptance, he liked less and less, and gradually dropped them altogether. In Febro, Cade, Melnotte, and Richelieu he had not yet appeared. His Richard, Macbeth, Othello, Lear, Hamlet, and Coriolanus will be more appropriately treated in a later chapter of his life, when he had elaborated his conceptions of them to the highest finish in his power. But his performances at the time now under consideration were, in their spiritual substance, their general treatment and outlines, what they remained to the end. The subsequent changes were merely improvements in details, in gradual climax, in grouping, in symmetry and unity. With his advancing years and experience and study, more and more the parts were made to grow before the audience, so to speak, from their roots upward, gaining strength and expansion as they rose. Gusty irregularity, crudity, misproportion, discord, were carefully struck out, and harmony secured by the just blending of light and shade. But from first to last his style was consistent, and, like his personality, knew no revolutions, only development.
In the practice of his profession it was a noble characteristic of
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Forrest that he disliked to impersonate essentially bad or ignoble characters. He hated to set forth passions, thoughts, or sentiments meant to be regarded as base and repulsive, unless, indeed, it was to make them odious and hold them up to detestation. Into this work he threw himself with a gusto that was extreme. He was but too vehement in the utterance of sarcastic denunciations of every form of meanness or cruelty, his relish of the excoriation being often too keen, his inflection of tone too widely sweeping, and his emphasis too prolonged for the measure of any average sympathy. All was sincere with him in it, but his expression was pitched in the scale of reality, while the appreciation of the listeners was only pitched in the calmer scale of ideality.
He loved to stand out in some commanding form of virtue, heroism, or struggle, battling with trials that would appall common souls, setting a great example, and evoking enthusiasm. This was his glory. The zeal with which he ever regarded this phase of his profession, the delight with which he revelled in the contemplation of ideal strength, fortitude, courage, devotion, was a grand attribute of his soul. Accordingly, all his favorite parts were expressions of a high-souled manhood, reverential towards God, truth, and justice, and fearing nothing; a proud integrity and hardiness competent to every emergency of life and death; an unbending will, based on right and entwined with the central virtues of honor, friendship, domestic love, and patriotic ardor. And surely these are the qualities best deserving universal respect, the democratic ideals most wholesome to be cultivated. This is what he most innately loved and stood on the stage to represent. He did it with immense earnestness and immense individuality. He did it also with a conscientious devotion to his chosen art and profession that never faltered. In none of his performances was there ever anything in the least degree savoring of pruriency or indelicacy. Never, after his boyhood was past, could he be induced to appear in any trivial or unmeaning role, destitute of moral purpose and dignity. With not one of those many innovations which have detracted so much from the rank and purity of the drama was his name ever associated. He was ever strongly averse in his own person to touching in any way any play which was not enriched and elevated by some imaginative romantic or heroic creation. And, with a world
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-wide removal from the so common frivolity and carelessness of his associates on the boards, he approached every one of his performances with a studious sobriety, and went through it with an undeniable dignity and earnestness, which should have lifted him beyond the reach of ridicule, whatever were the faults an honorable criticism might affirm.
The substance of the honest objections made to his acting may be designated as ascribing to it two faults, an excess and a defect. The excess was too much display of physical and spiritual force in the expression of contemptuous or revengeful and destructive passion. There was a basis for this charge, though the accusation was grossly exaggerated. The muscular and passional strength and intensity of Forrest, both by constitution and by culture, were so much beyond those of ordinary men that a manifestation of them which was entirely natural and within the bounds to him often seemed to them a huge extravagance, a wilful overdoing for the sake of making a sensation. In him it was perfectly genuine and not immoderate by the tests of nature, while to them it appeared far to transgress the modest limits of truth. Of course such explosions repelled and pained, sometimes revolted, the sensibilities of the delicate and fastidious, while the more ungirdled and terrific they were, so much the greater was the pleased and wondering approval of those whose sympathies were stormed and self-surrendered. Such was the histrionic fault of excess in Forrest, if it may not rather be called the fault of those whose natures were keyed so much below his that they could not come into tune with him.
