"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 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.

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 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:

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, "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 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:

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.

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 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 interior 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 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-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.

The defect corresponding to this excess was lack of souplesse, physical and spiritual mobility. He was unquestionably deficient, when tried by a severe standard, in bright, alert, expectant, rich freedom of play in nerves and faculties. His disposition was comparatively obstinate in its pertinacity, and his body adhesive in its heaviness. This gave him the ponderous weight of unity, the antique port of the gods, but it robbed him in a degree of that supreme grace which is the ability to compass the largest effects of impression with the smallest expenditure of energy. It cannot be denied that he needed exactly what Garrick had in such perfection, namely, that detached personality, that quicksilver liberty and rapidity of motion, which made the great English actor such a memorable paragon of variety and charm. Yet, when these abatements are all allowed, enough remains amply to justify his large historic claim in the honest massiveness and glow of his delineations, set off alike by the imposing physique fit to take the club and pose for a Farnesian Hercules, by a studious and manly art unmarred with any insincere trickery, and by a powerful mellow voice of vast compass and flexible intonation, whose declamation, modelled on nature, and without theatrical affectation, ever did full justice to noble thoughts and beautiful words.

Cibber said, in allusion to Betterton, "Pity it is that the momentary beauties from an harmonious elocution cannot be their own record, that the animated graces of the player can live no longer than the instant breath and motion that presents them, or at best but faintly glimmer through the memory or imperfect attestation of a few surviving spectators." Could the author of this biography paint in their true forms and colors and with full completeness the once vivid and vigorous achievements of the buried master, had he with sufficient knowledge and memory command of some notation whereby he could record every light and shade of each great rôle so that they might be revived from the dead symbols in all the lustre of their original reality, even as a musician translates from the dormant score into living music an overture of Mozart or a symphony of Beethoven, then were there a deathless Forrest breathing in these pages who should stir the souls of generations of readers to rise and mutiny against the depreciating estimates of his forgotten foes and the encroachments of literary oblivion. But, alas! to such a task the pen that essays the tribute is unequal, and the writer must be content with the pale presentments he can but imperfectly produce, sighing to think how true is the refrain of regret taken up in every age by those who have mourned a departed actor, and never better worded, perhaps, than in the famous lines by Garrick: