There were at that time many Englishmen connected with the leading newspapers in this country. They naturally felt that the cause of Macready was their own, and expatiated on the beauties of his performances, not a little to the disparagement of the American player. On the other hand, the national feeling of other writers affirmed the greater merits of their own tragedian.
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By natural affinity the English party drew to themselves the dilettante portion of the upper stratum of society, the so-called fashionable and aristocratic, while the general mass of the people were the hearty admirers of Forrest. The cold and measured style of the foreigner, his rigid mannerism and studied artificiality, were frequently spoken of in unfavorable contrast with the free enthusiasm, the breathing sincerity and impassioned power, of the native player. Forrest was called a rough jewel of the first water, who scorned to heighten his apparent value by false accompaniments; Macready a paste gem, polished and set off with every counterfeit gleam art could lend. The fire of the one was said to command honest throbs and tears; the icy glitter of the other, the dainty clappings of kid gloves. Such expressions plainly betray the spirit that was working. These comparisons—though there were enough of an opposite character, painting the Englishman as a king, Forrest as a boor—greatly irked and nettled Macready. And it was known that he went back to England with a good deal of soreness on this point.
When Forrest made his first appearance in London, at Covent Garden Theatre, a few months after the return of Macready from his American trip, the latter, as well as all his compeers, Charles Kemble, Charles Kean, and Vandenhoff, was without any London engagement. This circumstance of itself was calculated to quicken jealousy towards an intruding foreigner who threatened to attract much attention. However, as it is known that Forrest had nothing to do with the depreciating notices of Macready written in America, it is to be supposed that none of the English tragedians had any hand whatever in the scurrilous critiques of Forrest written in their country, or in the attempt made to break him down and drive him from the London stage. But such conspicuous personages always have in their train, among the meaner fry of dramatic critics and their hangers-on, plenty of henchmen who are eager to do anything in the fancied service of their lords, even to the discredit and against the will of those whose cause they affect to sustain.
On the evening of the 17th of February, 1845, as Forrest appeared in the character of Othello, he was saluted with a shower of hisses, proceeding from three solid bodies of claqueurs, packed in three different parts of the house. So often as the legitimate
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audience attempted any expression of approval, it was overpowered by these organized emissaries. Beyond any doubt it was a systematic plan arranged in advance under the stimulus of national prejudice and personal interest, whoever its responsible authors were or were not. Forrest, though profoundly annoyed, gave no open recognition whatever of the outrage, but went steadily on with his performance to the end. The next evening, when he played Macbeth, the disturbances were more determined than before; but the large majority of the crowded assembly upheld the actor by their applause, and again he gave no heed to the interruptions and insults. The force of the conspiracy was broken, and gave no further overt signal, and the engagement was played through triumphantly. But Forrest left Covent Garden with a bitter and angry mind. He ruminated unforgivingly, as it was his nature to, on the injurious and unprovoked treatment he had received. For the hisses, suborned as they evidently were, did not constitute the worst abuse he had to bear. Three or four of the London newspapers, known as organs of special dramatic interests, most notably the organ of the bosom friend of Macready, noticed him and his performances in a tone of comment shamefully without warrant in truth. A few specimens will suffice to prove the justice of this statement:
"Mr. Forrest's Othello is a burlesque of the elder Kean's mannerisms, his air of depressed solemnity, prolonged pauses, and startling outbursts, with occasional imitations of Vandenhoff's deep-voiced utterance, varied by the Yankee nasal twang. His presence is not commanding, nor his deportment dignified; for the assumption of grandeur is not sustained by an imaginative feeling of nobleness. His passion is a violent effort of physical vehemence. He bullies Iago, and treats Desdemona with brutal ferocity. Even his tenderness is affected, and his smile is like the grin of a wolf showing his fangs. The killing of Desdemona was cold-blooded butchery."
"Our old friend Mr. Forrest afforded great amusement to the public by his performance of Macbeth. Indeed, our best comic actors do not often excite so great a quantity of mirth. The change from an inaudible murmur to a thunder of sound was enormous. But the grand feature was the combat, in which he stood scraping his sword against that of Macduff. We were at a
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loss to know what this gesture meant, till an enlightened critic in the gallery shouted out, 'That's right! sharpen it!'"
"Of Mr. Edwin Forrest's coarse caricature of Lear we caught a glimpse that more than sufficed to show that the actor had no conception of the part. His Lear is a roaring pantaloon, with a vigorous totter, a head waving as indefatigably as a china image, and lungs of prodigious power. There only wanted the candlewick mustaches to complete the stage idea of a choleric despot in pantomime."
"Mr. Forrest's Richard the Third forms no exception to those murderous attacks upon Shakspeare which this gentleman has so ruthlessly made since his arrival amongst us. Since the time of that elder Forrest, who had such a hand in the murder of the princes in the Tower, we may not inappropriately take this last execution of Richard at Drury Lane to be
'The most arch deed of piteous massacre
That ever yet this land was guilty of.'
"We have tried very hard, since witnessing the performance, to discover the principle or intention of it; but to no effect. We remember some expressions, however, in an old comedy of Greene's, which may possibly suggest something to the purpose. 'How,' says Bubble, on finding himself dressed out very flauntingly indeed,—'how apparel makes a man respected! The very children in the street do adore me!' In almost every scene Mr. Forrest blazed forth in a new and most oppressively-gilded dress, for which he received precisely the kind of adoration that the simple Bubble adverts to."
But while the hostile papers characterized the change in the acting of Forrest from what it was on his earlier visit as an unaccountable deterioration, and censured him without reason, other journals took up his defence, praised his performances warmly, and affirmed that he had made great improvement. What the former stigmatized as a becoming dull, cold, and formal, the latter eulogized as an outgrowing of former extravagance and an acquiring of refinement, measure, and repose. As he went on playing, his opponents diminished in numbers and virulence, while his supporters increased, and at last he had conquered a real triumph. It will be well to quote a few of the notices which appeared in
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friendly and impartial quarters in contrast to those of an opposite character already cited.
The Athenæum, in speaking of his opening night in Macbeth, said, "Mr. Forrest's former manner has received considerable modification and become mellowed with experience. He has learned that repose is the final grace of art. In the startling crises of the play his voice and action, both without effort, spring forth with crushing effect, not because he is an actor who chooses thus to manifest strength, but because he is a strong man, who simply exerts his excited energies. Macbeth, as he now performs it, is a calm and stately, almost a sculpturesque, piece of acting."
The Sun called his Lear a decisive triumph, and used the following words:
"Those contrasts, in which he delights, all tell well in the character of Lear, and they were used with excellent discrimination and great effect. There was something appalling in the bursts of fury with which that weak-bodied but intensely-impassioned old man was occasionally convulsed. The tottering gait, the palsied head, the feeble footsteps of old age were admirably given; but the deep voice and the manly contour of the figure showed that it was the old age of one who had been, in the heyday of life, 'every inch a king.' It was the old oak tottering to its fall, but the monarch of the forest still. The passion, too, was most artistically worked up to a climax, increasing in intensity from the scene in which he casts off Cordelia, through the scene in which he curses Goneril, until in the scene in which he becomes convinced of the treason of Goneril, when it became the desolating hurricane, destroying even reason itself. The scenes with Edgar were beautifully given. The different phases of the approach of madness were admirably marked. You could see, as it were, reason descending from her throne. The scene with Gloucester, too, was very fine; the biting apothegms which Shakspeare has in this scene put into the mouth of Lear were given with heartless, bitter, scornful, laughing sarcasm, which is perhaps one of the most unfailing characteristics of madness. The recognition of Cordelia was beautifully touching, and the lament over her dead body was given with an expression of heart-rending pathos of which we did not before imagine Mr. Forrest capable."
The praise given by the Times was still more emphatic:
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"Mr. Forrest's Lear is, from beginning to end, a very masterly, intelligent, and powerful performance, giving evidence of the most careful and attentive study of the author's meaning, steering clear, at the same time, of all fine-drawn subtleties and tricky point-making, and affording a well-grasped and evenly-sustained impersonation of that magnificent and soul stirring creation. He is certainly a better Lear than any our own stage has afforded for some time. Although, from Mr. Forrest's personal appearance, one would with difficulty imagine him capable of looking the old man, fourscore and upwards, all the attributes of age and feebleness, the palsied head and tottering walk, are admirably assumed, and are never lost sight of throughout the performance. At his first appearance he was received with considerable applause, which was repeatedly renewed as he continued with the scene,—commencing in a tone of kingly dignity and paternal affection, and, after Cordelia's reply, gradually giving place to the suppressed workings of his rage, which at last burst forth, at Kent's interference, into an ungovernable storm, and lit up his features with the most withering expression of fury. The curse at the end of the second act, which was pronounced by Mr. Forrest in one scream of rage, his body tremulously agitated with the violence of his emotion, brought down burst after burst of applause, which lasted considerably after the fall of the drop; and indeed an attempt was made to introduce that very unusual compliment when the play is still unfinished, a call for the actor. Such displays of physical power, although in this instance perfectly called for and necessary, are not, however, the chief or the best points on which the merits of Mr. Forrest's performance rest. The scene where he discovers Kent in the stocks, and is subsequently confronted with his two daughters, whose insults finally drive him off distracted, was acted with great play and variety of expression,—Mr. Forrest passing from one emotion to the other with childish fitfulness, and displaying a keen and discriminate perception. The mad scenes also in no less degree evinced the higher qualities of the actor. The declamatory bursts of passionate satire on the vices and weaknesses of the world, chaotically mingled with the incoherences of madness, had evidently been a subject of minute study, and were shaded with admirable nicety, the features constantly expressing the alternate
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return of light and darkness on the old man's brain. In the last act, the touching simplicity and tenderness of his manner, when too exhausted for violent emotion, and the last burst of feverish energy over the body of Cordelia, were equally well conceived. If there be any fault to find, it was with the death, which was, perhaps, too minutely true in its physical details.
"Mr. Forrest was called for at the conclusion, and received enthusiastic marks of approbation."
The following extract is from a notice of his Othello by the John Bull:
"Mr. Forrest's former visit to this country must be fresh in the memory of theatrical amateurs. His talents were then generally admitted; but it was remarked that, though he possessed force, it was more of a physical than a moral kind, and that his action was more akin to melodrama than to tragedy. Since that time Mr. Forrest seems considerably changed, and for the better. His action has become more quiet, chaste, and subdued. It is now, perhaps, too careful and measured, and we rather missed something of his former rough and somewhat extravagant energy. We cannot help thinking that one or two of our contemporaries have relied rather on their remembrance of what Mr. Forrest was than their perception of what he is. On the whole, his representation of Othello well merited the immense applause it received."
Scores of notices like these in the best portion of the English press prove conclusively enough the malignity of writers who could denounce their American visitor as a theatrical impostor, worthy of nothing but contempt. The London Observer, for example, could find nothing better to say of the Metamora of Forrest than this: "His whole dramatic existence is a spasm of rage and hatred, and his whole stage-life one continuous series of murder, arson, and destruction to life and property in its most hideous form. What a pity he could not be let loose upon the drab-colored swindlers of Pennsylvania! Mr. Forrest did not indicate one of the characteristics of the American Indian except that wretched combination of sounds between a whine, a howl, and a gobble, which is designated the war-whoop by those who think more of poetry than of truth. Besides this sin of omission, he has to answer for those sins of commission which so sadly
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deface his impersonation of every part he has appeared in, namely, that cool, nonchalant manner, that slow motion, and that ridiculous style of elocution, now whispering, now conversational, ever and anon screaming, roaring, bellowing, and raving, but never sustained, truthful, or dignified:
"'List to that voice! Did ever discord hear
