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had a respite, and hope a prospect. Then came his fearful and startling challenge to Iago, ending,—
'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 almost savage energy with which this passage was delivered produced an indescribable effect. Three long and distinct rounds of applause testified how highly the audience was delighted with this master-effort; and the most prejudiced must have been convinced that they were witnessing the acting of no ordinary man."
The critique in the Albion was a notable one:
"Mr. Forrest made his first appearance on our boards on Monday last, in the part of Othello. Mr. Forrest possesses a fine person, an excellent thing in either man or woman; but, though this has been much dwelt upon by the London critics, it is but a very minor affair when speaking of such a man as Mr. Forrest. He carries himself with exceeding grace and dignity, and his tread is easy and majestic: he dresses with taste and magnificence. The picture which he presented of the Moor was one of the most perfect which we have witnessed. He gave us to see, like Desdemona, 'Othello's visage in his mind,' of which he furnished us with a beautiful and highly-finished portrait. Not content with acting each scene well, he gave us a consistent transcript of the whole matter. Each succeeding scene was in strict keeping with those that had preceded it, showing that the actor had grasped the whole plot from beginning to end, and that, from commencement to catastrophe, he had embodied himself into strict identity with the person represented. His early scenes were distinguished by a quiet and calm dignity of demeanor, which, concomitant with the deepest tenderness of feeling, and a high tone of manliness, he seems to have conceived the basis of the Moor's character. In his address to the Senate, this dignified self-possession, and a sense of what was due to himself, he made particularly conspicuous. As the interest of the tragedy advanced, we saw, with exceeding pleasure, that Mr. Forrest was determined to de
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pend for success upon the precept set forth by Shakspeare, 'To hold the mirror up to nature.' With proper confidence in his own powers, he disdained to overstep the prescribed bound for the sake of producing effects equally at variance with nature and heterodox to good taste. In the scene where he quells the drunken brawl, his acting throughout was strikingly impressive of reality. Some of his ideas were novel, and beautifully accordant with the tone of the character which he wished to develop. Such was his recitation of the passage,—
'Silence that dreadful bell! it frights the isle
From her propriety.'
From the general group he turned to a single attendant who stood at his elbow, and delivered the command in a subdued tone, as though it were not intended for the ear of the multitude. This, though effective, was judicious, and not overstrained. His dismissal of Cassio was equally illustrative of the spirit to which we have alluded. The audience testified their approbation by a loud burst of applause. The final scene with Iago was beautifully played: the gradual workings of his mind from calmness to jealousy were displayed with striking effect. The transitions of emotion in the following splendid passage were finely marked:
'If I do prove her haggard,
Though that her jesses were my dear heartstrings,
I'd whistle her off, and let her down the wind,
To prey at fortune. Haply, for I am black,
And have not those soft parts of conversation
That chamberers have: Or, for I am declined
Into the vale of years; yet that's not much:
She's gone: I am abused: and my relief
Must be to loathe her. O the curse of marriage,
That we can call these delicate creatures ours,
And not their appetites! I'd rather be a toad,
And live upon the vapor of a dungeon,
Than keep a corner in the thing I love,
For other's uses.
Desdemona comes!'
The burst of mixed passions with which he uttered the first of these sentences was terrific. His voice then sank into tones the most touching, expressive of complaining regret. The conclusion seemed to have excited him to the most extreme pitch of
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loathing and disgust, and, as he sees Desdemona advancing, he, for a few moments, gazed upon her with horror. The feeling gave way, and all his former tenderness seemed to return as he exclaimed,—
'If she be false, O then Heaven mocks itself,—
I'll not believe it.'
The subsequent scene with Iago, a trial of physical as well as mental strength, was well sustained. It is here that Iago, by a series of artful manœuvres, screws the Moor up to the sticking-place. To the conclusion of the scene the vehement passions are continually increasing, and the difficulty is for an actor so to manage his powers as to give full effect to the whole, without sinking into apparent tameness in the last imprecation. We will not attempt any description of the bedchamber scene. The reiterated and protracted plaudits of the audience showed how highly it was appreciated. The dying-scene was equally novel and excellent. At the fall of the curtain the audience testified their delight and approbation by the most marked and vehement applause, which continued for several minutes."
The London Journal gave a long account of Forrest's Lear, of which this extract contains the substance:
"We have been much amused by the conflict of opinion respecting this representation. Some describe it as one of the most magnificent triumphs of this or any age. Another denounces the performance as an idle and false imposition, and the actor as an ignorant empiric, who has crossed the Atlantic solely to practise on the gullibility of John Bull. We do not think John quite so gullible; we do not believe that in matters of intellectual recreation he is so apt to take
'Those tenders for true pay
Which are not sterling.'
We consider it may be pretty safely taken as a general rule that the large popularity of any artist is here synonymous only with great talent. We had also seen quite enough of Mr. Forrest to convince us that he is a man of real talent, with very little, if any, mere trickery in his acting, so that to stigmatize him as a quack or an impostor was as great a violation of truth as of good feeling. At
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the same time, it is right we should remark that the estimate we had formed of his genius, from his previous representations, was not sufficiently high to induce a belief in all that his eulogists pronounced on his Lear. We, therefore, came to the conclusion that in this case, as in others where opinions are so remote from each other, the truth would, probably, be found midway between the two extremes; and, on seeing and judging for ourselves on Monday night, found our conclusion fully warranted. The general conception of the 'poor old king' is most accurately taken, and his general execution of it fervid, earnest, and harmonious. He has evidently grappled with the character manfully, and he never lets go his hold. The carefulness of his study is sometimes a little too obvious, giving an injurious hardness and over-precision. The awful malediction of Goneril—that fearful curse, which can scarcely be even read without trembling—was delivered by Mr. Forrest with a power and intensity we never saw surpassed by any actor of Lear. It was an exhibition likely to follow a young play-goer to his pillow and mix itself with his dreams. Shakspeare has here given us a wild burst of uncontrolled and uncontrollable rage, mixed with a deep pathos, which connects the very terms of the curse with the cause of the passion,—an awful prayer for a retribution as just as terrible. All this Mr. Forrest evidently understood and felt; and he therefore made his audience feel it with him. The almost supernatural energy with which Lear seems to be carried on to the very termination of the malediction, when the passion exhausts itself and him, was portrayed by Mr. Forrest with fearful reality and effect. He also greatly excelled in the passage,—
'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.'
His delivery of these lines was marked with the same truth and power as the curse, and very finely displayed the energy of will and impotence of action which form so touching a combination in Lear's character. But perhaps the very best point in Mr. Forrest's Lear, because the most delicate and difficult passage for an actor to realize, was his manner of giving the lines,—
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'My wits begin to turn.—
Come on, my boy: how dost, my boy? Art cold?
I am cold myself....
Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart
That's sorry yet for thee.'
This beautiful passage is extremely touching, and Mr. Forrest fully felt and adequately illustrated its pathos and its beauty."
Another of the authorities in British journalism, whose title the writer cannot recover, wrote thus:
"If Mr. Forrest is great in Othello, we do not hesitate to say he is much greater in Lear. Here the verisimilitude is perfect. From the moment of his entrance to the finely-portrayed death, every passion which rages in that brain—the love, the madness, the ambition, the despair—is given the more forcibly that it flashes through the feebleness of age. In that powerful scene where the bereaved monarch laments over his dead daughter, Mr. Forrest acted pre-eminently well. He bears in her lifeless body and makes such a moan over it as would force tears from a Stoic. None, we think, who heard him put the plaintive but powerful interrogatory,—
'Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all?'—
followed by the bitter and melancholy reflection,—
'O! thou wilt come no more,
Never! never! never! never! never!'
will ever forget the anguish depicted on Mr. Forrest's features, or the heart-piercing melancholy of his tones. Mr. Forrest evinced, throughout, a fine conception of the character. He did not surprise us by a burst of genius now and then. His performance was equable,—it was distinguished in every part by deep and intense feeling. The curse levelled against Goneril (one of the most fearful passages ever penned by man) was given with awful force. The last member of the speech—
'That she may feel
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is
To have a thankless child!'—
was poured forth with an unrestrained but natural energy that acted like an electric shock on the audience; a momentary silence
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succeeded it; but immediately afterwards a simultaneous burst of applause attested the great triumph of the actor. His mad-scenes, when, delighting in a crown and sceptre of straw, Lear proclaims himself 'every inch a king,' were admirably conceived, and no less admirably acted. There was no straining after effect,—there was no grimacery. We saw before us the 'poor, weak, and despised old man,'—the 'more sinned against than sinning,'—reduced to a state of second childhood, and paying the too severe penalty which his folly and his credulity, in listening to the hyperboles of his elder daughters and rejecting the true filial affection of his youngest and once his most beloved child, exacted from him."
It may be well, also, to quote what was said by the "London Times" of November 5th:
"The part of Lear is one which many otherwise eminent actors have found above, or at least unsuited to, their capacities. Mr. Forrest played it decidedly better than anything he has as yet essayed in this country. His conception of the character is accurate, and his execution was uncommonly powerful and effective. If it be, as it cannot be disputed that it is, a test of an actor's skill that he is able to rivet the attention of the audience, and so to engage their thoughts and sympathies that they have not leisure even to applaud on the instant, he may be said to have succeeded most completely last night. From the beginning of the play to the end, it was obvious that he exercised this power over the spectators. While he was speaking, the most profound silence prevailed, and it was not until he had concluded that the delight of the audience vented itself in loud applause. This was particularly remarkable in his delivery of Lear's curse upon his daughters, the effect of which was more powerful than anything that has lately been done on the stage. It is not, however, upon particular passages that the excellence of the performance depended; its great merit was that it was a whole, complete and finished. The spirit in which it began was equally sustained throughout, and, as a delineation of character and passion, it was natural, true, and vigorous, in a very remarkable degree. The mad-scenes were admirably played; and the last painful scene, so painful that it might well be dispensed with, was given with considerable power. The great accuracy and fidelity with which
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the decrepitude of the aged monarch was portrayed was not among the least meritorious parts of the performance. The palsied head and quivering limbs were so correctly given as to prove that the actor's attention has been sedulously devoted to the attempt to make the performance as perfect as possible. A striking proof of his sense of the propriety of keeping up the illusion he had created was manifested in his reappearance, in obedience to the loud and general call of the audience, at the end of the tragedy. He came on, preserving the same tottering gait which he had maintained throughout, and bowed his thanks as much in the guise of Lear as he had acted in the drama. This would have been almost ridiculous in any but a very skilful actor: in him it served to prevent too sudden a dissipation of the dramatic illusion."
The critical notices of the Macbeth of Forrest were of the same average as the foregoing estimates of his other parts, though the faults pointed out were generally of a description the exact opposite of those currently ascribed to his acting. He was considered too subdued and tame in the part:
"Mr. Forrest essayed the difficult character of Macbeth, for the first time in this country, on Wednesday evening. We are inclined to think that this highly-gifted actor has not often attempted this part; because, though his performance displayed many noble traits of genius, yet it could not, as a whole, boast of that equally-sustained excellence by which his personation of Lear and of Othello was distinguished. We were highly gratified by his exertions in that part of the second act which commences with the 'dagger soliloquy,' and ends with Macbeth's exit, overwhelmed with fear, horror, and remorse. There is no man on the stage at present who could, in this scene, produce so terrific an effect. Never did we see the bitterness of remorse, the pangs of guilt-condemning conscience, so powerfully portrayed. The storm of feeling by which the soul of Macbeth is assailed, spoke in the agitated limbs of Mr. Forrest, and in the wild, unearthly glare of his eye, ere he had uttered a word. On his entrance after his bloody mission to Duncan's chamber, Mr. Forrest introduced a new and a very striking point. Absorbed in the recollection of the crime which he has committed, he does not perceive Lady Macbeth till she seizes his arm. Then, acting
