And then there was the interest of a style of character and life, of an idealized historic picture of a vanished form of human nature and society, all whose elements stood in strange and fascinating contrast with the personal experience of the beholders. It was the first time the American Indian had ever been dramatized and put on the stage; and this was done in a theme based on one of the romantic episodes of his history embodied in a chieftain of tragic greatness. In a production of art whose subject and materials lie in the domain of unreclaimed nature, genius is not, indeed, permitted to falsify any fundamental principle or fact, but is free to modify and add. Otherwise, the creative function of art is gone, and only imitation left. In this respect of combined truth and originality, the acted Metamora of Forrest was a wonder never surpassed, in its own kind, in the long story of the stage. He appeared the kingly incarnation of the spirit of the scene, both of the outward landscape and of the taciturn tribe that peopled it with their gliding shapes. He appeared the human lord of the dark wood and the rocky shore, and the natural ruler of their untutored tenants; the soul of the eloquent recital, the noble appeal, and the fiery harangue; the embodiment of a rude magnanimity, a deep domestic love, an unquivering courage and fortitude, an instinctive patriotism and sense of justice, and a relentless revenge. He appeared, too, the votary of a superstition of singular attractiveness, blooming with the native wild-flowers of the human mind, a faith so unaffected and open that it seemed to be read by the stars of the Great Spirit as they looked down on the lone Indian kneeling by the mound of his fathers, the hunted patriot lying in ambush for his foes. Through all this physically-realized, wondrous portraiture of the poetic, the tender, the noble, the awful, the reverential, was mingled the glare of the crouching tiger. It was thus that Forrest in his great creation of Metamora rendered all that there was in the naturalistic poem of Indian life, to all that there was justly adding an infusion of that ideal quality by which art appeals to the nobler feelings of admiration and sympathy in preference to the meaner ones of hate and scorn. In this performance he elaborated a picture of the legendary and historic American Indian which to this day stands alone beyond all rivalry.