The kind friend and patron young Forrest had won by his exhibition

at the Tivoli Garden did not forget him, but continued to give him

good advice and encouragement. About a year afterwards he introduced

him to the managers of the Walnut Street Theatre, Messrs. Wood and

Warren. In consequence of this friendly intercession, and of his own

promise, he was enabled to make his formal début, on the stage of the

Walnut Street Theatre, on the evening of November 27th, 1820, in the

character of Norval. His success was decisive. The leading Philadelphia

newspaper said, "Of the part of Norval, we must say that it was as

uncommon in the performance as it was extraordinary in just conception

and exemption from the idea of artifice. We mean that the _sentiment_

of the character obtained such full possession of the youth as to take

away in appearance every consideration of an audience or a drama, and

to give, as it were, the natural speaking of the shepherd boy suddenly

revealed by instinct to be the son of Douglas. We were much surprised

at the excellence of his elocution, his self-possession in speech and

gesture, and a voice that, without straining, was of such volume and

fine tenor as to carry every tone and articulation to the remotest

corner of the theatre. We trust that this young gentleman will find the

patronage to which his extraordinary ripeness of faculty and his modest

deportment entitle him."

It is certainly interesting to find in this, the first criticism of the

first regular appearance of Forrest, in the fifteenth year of his age,

a distinct indication of his most prominent characteristics throughout

his whole histrionic career, namely, his earnest realism, his noble

voice, his accurate elocution, and his steady poise. The notice was

from the pen of William Duane, of the "Aurora," then one of the ablest

and most experienced editors in the country, and afterwards Secretary

of the Treasury under General Jackson.

The play was repeated December 2d. December 29th he sustained the part

of Frederick, in Lovers' Vows; and January 6th, 1821, he assumed the

rôle of Octavian, in The Mountaineers. On the last occasion, which was

his benefit, the following notice was published in one of the morning

papers: "The very promising youth, Master Forrest, who has appeared

twice as Young Norval, and once as Frederick, is to perform Octavian

this evening, and the profits of the house are for his benefit. We

trust that this modest and promising youth will obtain the notice to

which he is certainly well entitled from the lovers of the drama and of

native genius."

Though the receipts from these his first four performances were not

unusually large, the popular applause and the critical verdict were

flattering. The results of the experiment confirmed his bent and fixed

his resolution for life.

During this year, that is, before he was fifteen years old, he made

another appearance on the stage, under circumstances which show the

native boldness and resolution of his character. Without advice or

assistance of any kind, he went alone to the proprietors of the Prune

Street Theatre and asked them to let it to him on his own account for

a single night. The proposition surprised them, but they admired the

pluck of the boy so much that they granted his request. He engaged the

company to support him, got his brother William to print the bills

announcing him in the character of Richard the Third, drew a good

house, and came off with a liberal quantity of applause and a small

pecuniary gain.

It was at this date, when Forrest was in his fifteenth year, that he,

who was destined to inspire so many poems, drew from the prophetic muse

of an admirer the first verses ever composed on him. They were written

by the Hon. Joseph R. Chandler, one of the most distinguished citizens

of Philadelphia, and then editor of the "United States Gazette."

"Turn we from State to view the mimic Stage,

Which gives the form and pressure of the age.

Each season brings its wonders, and each year

Some unfledged buskins on our boards appear;

And Covent Garden sends us stage-sick trash

To gather laurels or to pocket cash.

A Phillipps comes to sing us Braham's airs,

And Wallack, Finn, and Maywood strut with theirs.

These sickly meteors dim our hemisphere,

While rare as comets Cookes and Keans appear:

These fopling twinklers, with their borrowed glare,

Will meet our censure when we cease to stare.

But the bright sun that gives our stage its rays

Still lights and warms us by its innate blaze.

We have a power to gild our drama's age,--

COOPER'S our Sun, his orbit is our stage.

Long may he shine, by sense and taste approved,

By fancy reverenced, and by genius loved!

And when retiring, mourned by every grace,

May FORREST rise to fill his envied place!

Dear child of genius! round thy youthful brow

Taste, wit, and beauty bind thy laurel now.

No foreign praise thy native worth need claim;

No aid extrinsic heralds forth thy name;

No titled patron's power thy merit decked:--

The blood of Douglas will itself protect!"

The insight and the foresight indicated in the application of the last

line to the yet undeveloped boy are remarkable, and will thrill every

one who is familiar with the bearing and poise of the mature actor

and man. For in him the massive majesty of pose, the slow weight of

gesture, the fixedness of look, the ponderous gutturality and sweetness

of articulative energy, all revealed an intensity and equilibrium of

selfhood, a deep and vast power of personality, not often equalled. He

was nothing if not independent and competent to his own protection.

The eminent English tragedian Cooper was at that time living in

Philadelphia, in the intervals between his starring engagements. He was

an actor of pronounced and signal merits, and of great professional

authority, from his varied and long experience. Edwin had seen him in

several of his chief parts, with docile quickness had caught important

impressions from his performances, and was full of admiration for him.

When, after his early successes, he had determined to become an actor

himself, he longed for the sympathy and counsel of the illustrious

veteran. Accordingly, armed with an introduction, he went to see the

old king in his private state. He was received kindly, but with some

loftiness. Cooper told him he must not trust to his raw triumphs as

an amateur, but must be willing to serve a regular apprenticeship to

the art, and climb the ladder round by round, not trying to mount by

great skips. The best men in every profession, he said, were those

who had gone through all its experiences. The greatest lawyers he had

known in England, he declared, had begun their career by sweeping

out the law-office. Edwin, thinking his adviser meant him to stoop

to the position of a supernumerary or call-boy, rather petulantly,

but tellingly, answered, "When one knows how to read, he needs not to

learn his letters." The old man was nettled by the pert reply, and the

interview closed with coolness, though not, as has been reported, with

anger or alienation. They were ever afterwards good friends, frequently

meeting, and the veteran not only gave him much useful instruction,

but also used his influence to secure for the novice an engagement

in Boston. That there was no quarrel, no ingratitude, but, on the

contrary, both a thankful appreciation and a generous return from

the boyish aspirant and pupil, we shall, on a future page, cite the

testimony of the old actor himself, amidst the decay and want of his

last days.

The advice of Cooper was based on his own experience, and was sound.

He himself, at fourteen, had engaged under Stephen Kemble. Kemble kept

him a whole season without a single appearance. When he did appear,

it was as a substitute for another, in the character of Malcolm, in

Macbeth. He forgot his part, and was actually hissed off the stage.

But he persevered, and slowly worked his way to the very summit of the

profession. His advice to Edwin did not contemplate so low a descent as

the boy inferred, but only that he should be modest and studious, begin

in relatively humble parts, and grow by degrees. Forrest of his own

accord, or perhaps in consequence of Cooper's words, really followed

exactly this course a little later.

Although retaining his place in the store, his heart was given to

the theatre, and the dearest exercises of his soul were devoted to

the cultivation of the powers which, he hoped, would enable him at

some future time to shine as he had seen others shine. Not only had

Cooper presented a model to his admiring fancy, Edmund Kean also had

electrified his senses and indelibly stamped his imagination. It was

only two nights after his own benefit as Octavian that Kean began an

engagement of twelve nights in the same theatre. And of all in the

crowds who waited on this peerless meteor of the stage, melted at the

pathos of his genius, or trembled before the irresistible bursts of his

power, in not one did the exhibition kindle such imperishable wonder

and such idolatrous admiration as in the fond proud boy who was himself

aspiring to become a great actor, and who drew from what he then saw a

large share of the inspiration which afterwards urged him so high.

The nature of Edwin Forrest in his fifteenth year was remarkably

developed and mature, especially when we consider the small advantages

he had enjoyed. He was distinguished from most youths of his age by the

intensity and tenacity of his passion and purpose, and by the vividness

with which the objects of his thought were pictured in his mind. A

consequence of these attributes was a strong personal magnetism, a

power of attracting and deeply interesting susceptible natures with

whom he came in contact.

He was not without touches of a poetic and sentimental vein, leading

him sometimes to indulge in melancholy reveries. The following lines

were composed by him at this time,--that is, in 1820. They were found

among his posthumous papers, inscribed in his own hand, "Verses, or

Doggerel, written in my Boyhood":

"Scenes of my childhood, hail!

All hail, beloved years

When Hope first spread life's sail,

Ere sorrow came, or tears.

Hail to the blissful hours

Of life's resplendent morn,

When all around was flowers,

And flowers without a thorn!

"Hail, guardians of my youth!

Hail their instructions given,

Showing the path of Truth,

The flowery way to heaven!

All hail the reverend place

Where first I lisped His name,

Where first my infant lips

God's praises did proclaim!

Inestimable precious scenes,

Now faded and all past,

Can you not fling one ray serene

To cheer me on at last?

Ah, no! Life's winter has set in,

And storms and tempests rise;

A chaos infinite of sin

Sweeps full before my eyes.

"This frail habiliment of soul

Must shortly cease to be,--

Some planet then my goal,--

Home for eternity.

Another document from his pen at about the same time will certainly

interest readers who recall the circumstances of his situation then,

and the facts of his subsequent career. It is the earliest application

he ever made--and it was in vain--to the manager of a theatre for an

engagement.

"PHILADA., Dec. 6, 1820.

"To Mr. JAMES H. CALDWELL, New Orleans.

"SIR,--Having understood you intend to open your theatre in the city

of New Orleans some time during this month, I, by the advice of a

number of friends, have taken the liberty of addressing you relative

to an engagement. I am desirous of performing in your company for six

or eight nights, in such parts as I shall name at the foot of this

letter.

"I acted last season in Messrs. Warren and Wood's theatre for a

few nights, and drew respectable and profitable houses, which is a

difficult matter to do at this season in Philadelphia. For my capacity

I refer you to the managers above named, or to Col. John Swift, of

this city. Should you think it troublesome to write to these gentlemen

on the subject, I will procure the necessary papers and forward them

to you. If you conclude to receive me, I should like to hear on what

terms, and so forth. Address care of John R. Baker and Son, 61 Race

St., Philada.

"Yours truly,

"EDWIN FORREST.

"Characters:

Douglas,

Octavian,

Chamont,

Zanga,

Zaphna,

Tancred."

Among the first letters ever written by Edwin were three addressed

to his brother William, who had given up working as a printer and

become an actor, and was then absent on a professional engagement at

Harrisburg, Reading, and York. When we remember that these letters were

by a boy of sixteen, we shall not think them discreditable to him.

They throw light on his character at that time, and show what he was

doing. They also draw aside the veil of privacy a little, and give us

some glimpses of the domestic drama of his home, the bereaved family

industriously struggling to maintain itself, watched over perhaps from

the other side by the still-conscious spirit of its departed head.

"PHILADELPHIA, 4th Feb'y, 1822.

"Mr. WM. FORREST, Harrisburg.

"DEAR BROTHER,--On Saturday evening last I performed Zaphna, in

Mahomet, at Walnut Street Theatre, to a pretty good house, which

would have been better had not Phillipps, the celebrated vocalist,

been announced to appear on the Monday following. I played on the

above evening better than ever I did before. After the murder of my

father, repeated bravos rose from all quarters. Last scene, bravos

again,--curtain fell amidst bravos kept up till the farce began and

was forced to be suspended. Mr. Wood called me to his apartment, and

told me to go on, they were calling for me. I informed him that I had

never appeared before an audience in that manner, and begged him to go

on for me. He did so, and asked the audience what was their pleasure.

Engagement! engagement! from every side. Mr. Wood said he had heard

nothing to the contrary; he was happy that Master Forrest had pleased

the audience, and if they wished it he should appear again. The people

testified their approbation, and the farce was suffered to proceed in

peace.

"I expect to appear with Mr. Phillipps this or next week. I anticipate

that they will hiss him when he appears to-night. More of this

by-and-by. Please write as early as possible, and let me know how you

make out. We are well, with the exception of myself. I have a severe

cold. I remain

"Your affectionate brother,

"EDWIN FORREST.

"P.S.--Heavy snow falling."

"PHILADELPHIA, 15th April, 1822.

"Mr. WILLIAM FORREST, Reading.

"DEAR BROTHER,--I received your esteemed favor of the 13th instant,

and carefully noticed its contents. My brother, you complain of my not

writing to you since your arrival in Reading. The reason is this. A

gentleman called at the house and informed me that you would return to

the city on Saturday last. Lorman and I were on the point of coming up

to you, but affairs interfered.

"Lorman called on Johnson, according to your request. He informs him

that you can get work at the printing business without any difficulty,

the printers being very busy at present in this city. Therefore I

would advise you to quit the unfair Williams as early as possible. If

you fail in getting a situation at your trade, Stanislas will engage

you on your arrival to act in a good line of business. Therefore you

have a double advantage. The Walnut Street Theatre closes for the

season on Friday next with the new comedy of the Spy, written by a

young gentleman of New York. To-morrow evening I perform Richard Third

for my own benefit. Joel Barr called here a week or ten days after he

had been in town, to tell us you were well. Leave that pander of a

manager directly; do not stay another moment with him, is the advice

of your affectionate brother,

"EDWIN.

"P.S.--Henrietta says she is sorry you have two and a half shirts, but

that is better than she expected.

"Billy McCorkle says $12 ought to have been an object to you. Ah, he

says, it was a bad day's work when you left him!

"We expect you by the return stage. So pack up your tatters and follow

the drum.

"E. F."

"PHILADELPHIA, 1st June, 1822.

"Mr. WILLIAM FORREST, York, Pa.

"DEAR BROTHER,--I take this opportunity of addressing myself to you

and asking your pardon for my ungrounded belief that you had been

guilty of misusing my letters. I have every reason now to believe that

Mrs. Allen must have invented some lie and told it to Stanislas.

"I have the pleasure of informing you that your friend Sam Barr is

married. Therefore wish him joy; for you know a man entering into such

a state stands in need of the good wishes of his friends. I am sorry

to relate that Sinclair is dead.

"'There would have been a time for such a word.'

"The actors are not undoing themselves at Tivoli. A young gentleman

by the name of Ondes makes his appearance there this evening in the

character of Octavian. Mrs. Riddle has left the company.

"I leave the firm in Race Street this day. When you can spare from

your salary the sum of $5, I wish you would send it to me, as I at

present stand in much need, and ere long I will transmit it to you

again. We are all well, and hope that this will find you so. Write as

early as possible; in expectation whereof I remain

"Yours, affectionately,

"EDWIN F.

"P.S.--Mother is longing for your return, and I hope it will not be

long ere our wishes are fulfilled."

For the next two months he was in earnest training, developing the

muscles of his body and the faculties of his mind, practising athletics

and studying rôles, looking out meanwhile for some regular engagement

The following letter speaks for itself:

"PHILADELPHIA, 7th Sept., 1822.

"JAMES HEWITT, Esq., Boston.

"SIR,--Having understood from Mr. Utt that you were about to form a

company of actors to go to Charleston, I have, by the advice of the

above-named gentleman, written to know whether you would afford me

an engagement in your concern or not, I having a desire to visit the

aforesaid city. As you must already be acquainted with the line of

business I have supported in Messrs. Wood and Warren's Theatre, it

is useless to say anything farther on that head, referring you to

Mr. Utt, Messrs. Wood and Warren, John Swift, Esq., of Philadelphia,

or to Mr. Thomas A. Cooper: the latter gentleman having procured me

an engagement in Mr. Dickson's theatre, Boston, which I declined,

thinking it better to be more remote, for some years at least, from

the principal cities.

"If, therefore, you have any idea of giving me a situation in a

respectable line, juvenile business, you will hear farther from me by

addressing a line to 77 Cedar Street, Philadelphia.

"Your most obedient servant,

"(In haste.) EDWIN FORREST.

"P.S.--I should be pleased to learn your resolve as early as possible,

so that in case you decline my services I may be enabled elsewhere to

make arrangements."

This letter, like the one he had two years before addressed to

Caldwell, was fruitless. But his mind was firmly made up that he would

persevere until his efforts were successful. And, a few days later, the

opportunity he sought presented itself, and he left home to enter in

earnest on a regular apprenticeship to the vocation he had chosen.

Here, for a little space, we drop the thread of personal narrative for

the purpose of introducing a sketch of the origin and significance of

the dramatic art. As the subject of this biography is to be an actor,

his character to be shaped by the peculiar influences of the theatrical

profession, his career and fame to be permanently associated with the

history of that profession in America, an exposition of the origin and

nature of the drama, of its different forms and applications, and of

its personal uses, will bring the reader to the succeeding chapters

with a fuller appreciation of their various topics, and give him some

data for estimating the place which the art of acting has held, now

holds, and is destined hereafter to hold, in the experience of mankind.

CHAPTER IV.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ORIGIN, VARIETY, AND PERSONAL USES OF THE DRAMATIC

ART.

ANY one who so analyzes the Dramatic Art as to see what its basis,

contents, and uses are, will be astonished to find what a deep and

wide feature it is in human nature, and how extensive and important

a part it plays in human life. The study of the great spectacle of

human existence as a whole, from the point of view of the Stage, in

the light of dramatic usages and imagery, imparts to it a keener, more

diversified, more comprehensive interest and instructiveness than it

can receive in any other way. The habit of thus seeing people and

things group themselves in pictures, of looking on scenes and acts in

their relationship as a whole, of reading character and getting at

states of mind and plucking out personal secrets by an intuitive and

cultivated art of interpreting the signs consciously or unconsciously

given, is spontaneous in men of the highest artistic genius, like

Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, and Goethe. And it lends a marvellous charm

and piquancy to their experience of the world, enchanting every object

with active significance, color, and mystery.

Thus the Theatre, technically so called, is but one of the lesser

spheres of the dramatic art. The tragedies and comedies coldly

elaborated there are often tame and poor to those enacted with the

flaming passions of life itself in parlors and kitchens, in palace and

hut and street. Every one of us is essentially an actor, the setting of

his performance furnished independently of his will wherever he goes,

all his schemes included and borne on in a divine plan deeper than he

dreams. Our own organism is the primary theatre, the proscenia of brain

and heart teeming with dramas which link our being and destiny with

those of all other actors from the beginning to the end of the world.

Every spot in which man meets his fellow-men is a secondary theatre,

arrayed with its scenery of circumstances, where each has his rôle and

all the characters and parts interplay upon one another with mixtures

of truth and deceit, skill and awkwardness, aspiration and despair.

One of the chief differences is that some get behind the scenes and

sharply understand a little of what is going on, while most take

their parts blindly, ignorant of what either themselves or others are

about, alternately before the foot-lights and back of the drop. And,

meanwhile, what is the blue, glittering wilderness of infinitude itself

but the theatre fitted up by God, with its doors of birth and death and

its curtains of day and night, for the training of the total company

of living creatures with which He has stocked it, from animalcule

to archangel? The Manager has assigned in the evolution of the

universal plot their just rôles to all the performers, with incessant

transmigrations of drudge and star, lackey and hero, sultan and beggar,

while the years move on and the generations pass and return, the whole

space of the stage being crowded as thickly with shifting masks and

disguises as a sunbeam is with motes.

All place being thus theatrical, and all conscious existence thus

having something dramatic, it is quite obvious how inadequate must be

their appreciation of the art of acting who recognize its offices only

in the play-house. The play-house is merely the scene of its purposed

and deliberate _exhibition_ as a professional art. In its different

kinds, with its different degrees of consciousness and complexity, as

a matter of instinct and culture it is _practised_ everywhere. Freeing

our minds from prejudices on the one side, and from indifference on the

other, let us, then, approach the subject with an earnest effort to

learn the truth and to see what its lessons are.

The history of the drama, in the usual accounts given of it, is

traced back to Thespis, Susarion, and others, in Greece, about six

centuries before Christ. But this has reference only to the most

detached and consummate form of the art. In order really to understand

its derivative basis, its ingredients, its numerous applications

and the moral rank and value of its several uses, we must go much

farther back, and study its gradual ascent. We must, indeed, not only

go beyond the polished states of civilization, but even beyond the

first appearance of man himself on the scene of this world. For the

rudiments of the dramatic art, the simple germs afterwards combined

and developed in human nature with higher additions, are manifested

in the lower animals. The naked foundations, the raw materials, of

the art of acting are shown in all gregarious creatures, and portions

of them even in solitary creatures. They are the crude instincts

of intelligence, imagination, and sympathy. Creatures who are made

alike have the same inner states of consciousness when they are under

the same outer conditions. They also reveal these inner states by

the same outer signs, namely, attitudes, movements, colors, cries,

nervous relaxations or contractions. Seeing in another creature the

signals of a certain state which has always in their own experience

been the accompaniment and cause of these same signals, they interpret

the signals accordingly, and enter into the same state themselves

by sympathy, the signals by a reversal of impulse reacting to cause

the state which they primarily denoted. Thus panics spread through a

swarm of birds, an army of wild horses, or a flock of sheep. Thus the

leader of a herd of buffaloes coming on the track of hunters or in

sight of a grizzly bear is terrified by the danger and starts off on

a run in another direction. The stiffened tail, erected ears, glaring

eyes, expanded nostrils, impetuous plunge, communicate the instinctive

intelligence and feeling through these signs from the nearest members

of the herd to those farther off, with extreme rapidity, and soon the

entire multitude is in one sympathetic state of alarm and flight. The

perception of danger by the leader awakened the feeling of fear and led

to the movement of escape. Those who had not these states of themselves

caught their signs and assumed their substance from the one who had.

Thus all are reinforced and saved by one.

There are animals and insects which on being touched, or being

approached by a superior enemy, instantly assume the attitude and

appearance of death. They recognize their peril, and seek to elude

notice by a motionless condition which simulates death. They thus

pretend to be other than they are, for the purpose of preserving the

power to remain what they are. The ruby-throated humming-bird of

Canada, if captured, feigns death by shutting its eyes and keeping

quite still, then making a vigorous effort to escape. Some birds

by false pretences of agitation lure the trapper away from the

neighborhood of their nest. Cats constantly feign sleep to further

their design of catching birds or mice. This shows not only a dramatic

gift, but also a clear purpose in the use of it.

This _playing 'possum_ is a dramatic artifice very prevalent even in

the lower regions of the animal kingdom. If it be thought that a bug

cannot possibly know so much, the reply is, Perhaps the bug itself

does not, but the presence of God, the creative and guardian Spirit

of nature, the collective experience of the total ancestry of the bug

organized in its nervous system, does know it; and it is this automatic

reason that plays the cunning game. A bear has been known to frequent

the bank of a stream where fishes were wont to come to the surface and

feed on the falling fruit of an overhanging tree, to splash the water

with his paw in imitation of the dropping fruit, and when the fish

appeared, seize and devour it! This neat little drama implies on the

part of the bear an imaginative conception of the different personages

and scenes in the situation, in advance, and then a deliberate

representation of his ideas in action. It would be the same thing as

human art if the bear could of its own impulse repeat the whole serial

action under other circumstances, as, for example, before a group of

bears off in the woods. This he cannot do; and thus is the animal drama

differenced from the human drama, instinct separated from art.

A great many animals are known to imitate the cries or motions

of the creatures they prey on, in order to allure them within

seizing-distance. For the sake of gaining some end they pretend to

be what they are not, and to entertain feelings and designs quite

different from their real ones. Certainly this is to be a hypocrite,

an actor, in the deepest sense of guile. The mocking-bird has the

faculty of mimicking the notes of all kinds of birds with marvellous

accuracy and ease. It takes great pleasure in practising the gift,

calling various kinds of timid songsters around it, and then with a

malicious delight pouring on their ears the screams of their enemies

and scattering them in the wildest terror. By this exercise of the

dramatic art the mocking-bird refreshes, varies, magnifies, the play of

its own life. In like manner, and with the same result, kittens, dogs,

lions, play games with one another, represent mimic battles, pretend to

be angry, to strike and bite, doing it all in a gentle manner, softened

down from the deadly earnestness of reality.

The aim and use of those crude elements or germs of the drama which

appear in the lower animal world would seem, therefore, to be the

enabling them to escape their pursuers, to seize their prey, to

vary and enlarge their lives by that gregarious interchange and

consolidation which is a mutual giving and taking of inner states

through outer signs. It is transmitted instinct, fitted to its ends

and acting within fixed limits, dependent for the most part on outward

stimuli.

Mounting from animals to men, we discover the earliest developments of

the dramatic art among the rudest tribes of savages. The prevalence

and exercise of the faculty of dramatization among the principal

tribes of barbarians in all parts of the world are equally striking

and extensive. It is one of the most prized and powerful portions of

their experience, and one of the first to impress the travellers who

visit them. It has three distinct provinces. The first is their own

actual lives, whose most exciting incidents, most salient features,

they repeat in mimic representation. Dressed in appropriate costumes,

they celebrate with counterfeit performances the Planting Festival,

the Harvest Festival, and other important events connected with the

phenomena of the year. They also dramatize with intense vividness

and vigor the experience of war,--the following of the trail of the

enemy, the ambush, the surprise, the struggle, the scalping of the

slain, the burning of the village, the gathering of the booty, the

return home, and the triumphant reception. This is not confined to the

North American Indians. The Dyaks of Borneo, the New Zealanders, the

Patagonians, the Khonds of Asia, the Negroes of Africa, and scores

of other peoples, have similar rites, besides numerous additional

ones less distinctively dramatic, covering the ceremonies of hunting,

fishing, marriage, birth, and death.

The second department of the drama among barbarians is their

impersonations of animals, their picturesque and terrible

representation of the passions and habits of reptiles, birds, and

beasts. Morgan, in his History of the Iroquois, gives a list of some

forty dances in which they acted out to the life stories based on

their own experience and on that of the creatures beneath them. But

we owe to Catlin some of the most graphic descriptions of the drama

among the North American savages. In the Eagle Dance, the braves dress

themselves as eagles, in plumes, feathers, beaks, talons; and they

shriek, whistle, sail, swoop, in exact imitation of them. In the Wolf

Dance, they go on all-fours, yelp, snarl, bark, and fill up the wolfish

programme to the very letter. In the Buffalo Dance, they each wear a

buffalo mask, consisting of the face, horns, and skin of a buffalo, and

mimic, in ludicrous burlesque, the sounds and motions of that unwieldy

creature. And so with bears, foxes, beavers, hawks, and the rest of the

fauna most familiar to them. In these performances they reproduce with

frenzied truth and force the most ferocious and deadly traits of their

prototypes, and often, among the savages of Fiji and South Africa, the

drama ends half drowned in blood. In Dahomey, where the Serpent is

worshipped, the votary crawls on his belly as a snake and licks the

dust before his idol, and sometimes becomes crazy with the permanent

possession of his part. The barbaric mind finds intense excitement and

enjoyment in these plays, hideous as they seem to us. They break up

the weary monotony of his life, and introduce the relish of games and

novelty and variety. They give him, what he so greatly craves, mental

amusement with physical passion and exertion. They are his almost only

antidote for the bane of stagnation.

On the other hand, great evils result from them. They never work upward

to reflect higher forms of character and life for redemptive imitation,

but downward, in the impersonating of creatures whose inferiority

either inflames the boastful and reckless self-complacency of the

actors, or else by its reflex influences takes possession of their

consciousness and animalizes them, degrading them to the level of the

brutes they portray. Secondly, the reception of the idea of the beast,

snake or vulture which they represent, their furious mimicry of it, the

spasmodic, rhythmical, long-continued movements they make in accordance

with it, tend to subject the brain to the automatic spinal and

ganglionic centres below, and thus furnish the conditions and initiate

the stages of all sorts of insanity. Much of the persistent degradation

and ferocity of the barbaric world is to be traced to this cause.

Nor is this the only evil; for, in the third place, when the savage

mind, after such a training, affects to penetrate the invisible

world and come back to report and portray the supernatural beings

who exercise authority there, it naturally takes its impulsive cue,

its ideal stamp, from the nervous centres under the inspiration of

which it acts. Those centres being possessed by the influences of

serpents, wolves, lust, hate, and murder, of course the spirits and

gods reflected will be fiends, incongruous mixtures of beast and

man, devilish monsters. Then the worship of these reacts to deepen

the besotted superstition and terror, the nightmare carnival of the

brain, out of which it originally sprang. And so the process goes on,

in a doomed circle of hopelessness. The time and faculty devoted by

the soothsayers and medicine-men who compose the priestly caste in

savagedom to the tricking out of their devil-gods and their mummery of

magic,--the time and faculty given by their followers to the enactment

of their obsessed ritual,--if directed to the creation and imitative

reproduction of superior types of human character and experience,

would soon lift them out of the barbaric state in which they have so

long grovelled. And it is a very impressive fact that every instance

revealed in history of a savage people rising into civilization is

accompanied by the tradition of some illustrious stranger from afar,

or some divinely-inspired genius emerging among themselves, who has

originated the rôle of a new style of man, thrown it out before them

for dramatic assimilation, and so impressed it on them as to secure

its general copying among them. This has, thus far in history, been

the divine plan for lifting the multitude: the appearance of a single

inspired superior whose characteristics the inferiors look up to

with loving reverence and put on for the transformation of their own

personalities into the likeness of his. That is the dynamic essence of

Christianity itself.

The next step in this survey of the psychological history of the

dramatic art whereby we are essaying to unfold its purport and its

final definition, leads us from barbaric life to the private homes of

the most cultivated classes of civilized society. The higher we go in

the scale of social wealth and rank, the larger provisions we shall

find made for gratifying the dramatic instincts of children, till we

come to the nursery of the baby prince, who has his miniature parks of

cannon and whole regiments of lead soldiers, and the baby princess,

who has a constant succession of dolls of all grades, costumes, and

ages. The little warrior animates his soldiers and their officers with

such ideas and passions as he has in himself or as he can get glimpses

of from his elders or from books, creates rôles for them, and puts

them through their paces and fortunes with such variety and succession

as he can contrive. And so his nursery is a theatre, and he is at

once author, manager, actors, supernumeraries, spectators, and all.

Likewise the young girl dresses up her dolls, takes them to church, to

balls, undresses them, puts them to sleep, weds them, celebrates their

funeral, in a word, transfuses all her own life, real and imaginative,

into them, and so reactingly multiplies herself and her experience,

and peoples the otherwise tedious vacancy of childhood with vital and

passionate processions, pathetically prefiguring all the tragedy and

comedy that are actually to follow. A Bengal newspaper, giving an

account of a curious marriage-procession through the streets of Dacca,

says, "In Indian households dolls play a far more important part than

they do in England, for all the perfection to which we have attained

in the art of making, clothing, and lodging them. Indian dolls are not

remarkable for beauty or close resemblance to human models; but in

bedecking them no expense is spared. They have a room to themselves,

and seem to enjoy as much attention as live children do elsewhere.

Feasts and garden-parties are given in their honor. The death of a

doll involves a great show of mourning, and the marriage of one is

a public event. In the present instance two dolls belonging to the

daughters of the wealthiest Hindus in Dacca were led out at the head

of a solemn procession, to the delight of the bystanders. After the

wedding ceremony the parents of the girls who had thus disposed of

their puppets laid out a few thousand rupees in feasting their friends

and caste-folk, as well as the neighboring poor."

As children grow older and become school-boys and school-girls, this

faculty and impulse do not cease to act, but, developed still further,

instead of imparting fancied life and action to inanimate toys, lead

them to imitative performances of their own, causing them to group

themselves together for the representation of games, and of the

historic scenes, social events, or fictitious stories which have most

impressed and pleased their imaginations.

The point of interest demanding attention at this stage of our inquiry

is how to discriminate clearly between the drama of the savage and

the drama of the child. The dramatization of the savage is mimetic, a

putting on from without of the disguise, the postures, sounds, motions,

of the animal he impersonates. He imitates the outer signs of the

animal; and these often in return produce in him the corresponding

states of consciousness. But the dramatization of the child is

creative, a projection from within of his own thoughts and emotions

into the counterfeit toys he personifies, and a consequent heightening

of his own sense of life by an imagination of its being imparted and

sympathetically taken up and shared. With the barbarian the primary

movement of action is from without inward; with the child it is from

within outward. There it is the interpretative assumption by the actor

of the signs of states in another; here it is the direct transference

by sympathetic imagination of the states of the actor to another. That

is the raw drama of the senses, this the initial drama of the soul.

We must pause here, before passing to the next head, to make a brief

exposition of another department and application of the dramatic power

of man, a department intermediate between the examples already given

and those which are to come. Its peculiarity is that it combines in

one, with certain original features of its own, the barbaric and the

childish drama. The creation of Fables is the strongest delight of the

dramatizing literary faculty in its first movements. Its workings are

to be traced in the ingenuous oral treasures preserved among tribes who

have no written language, as well as in the most beloved vernacular

writings current among the populace in civilized countries. Fables

are short compositions designed to teach moral truths, or to impress

moral truisms, by representing beasts, birds, reptiles, insects, trees,

flowers, or other objects, as endowed with the faculties of men,

retaining their own forms but acting and talking as men, exemplifying

the virtues and vices of men in characteristic deeds, followed by their

proper consequences. In the degrading barbarian drama the actors admit

into themselves the lower creatures whom they represent, putting on the

skins, movements, cries, of the crocodiles, hyenas, or boa-constrictors

the ideas of whom they take into their brains. In the naïve child

drama the little performers project the ideas of themselves into the

dolls and toys they personify and move. But in the fable drama these

two processes are joined, with a mere inversion of the subjects of the

first; for in fables the actors, in place of being, as in the plays of

savages, the assumed souls of animals and the disguised bodies of men,

are the disguised souls of men in the assumed forms and costumes of

animals. The one is an actual representation of animals by men for free

sport; the other is an imaginary representation of men by animals for

the inculcation of lessons, as, for example, in the well-known instance

of the Wolf and the Lamb. The author of a fable puts his own human

nature into the humbler creatures whom he dramatizes, with a deliberate

conscious thought, a creative exercise of the reflective faculty at the

second remove, quite unlike the instinctive and half-believing action

of the child who straddles a stick pretending that it is a horse. He

has a clear didactic purpose in addition to the sportive impulse of

fancy. This picturing of human nature and its experiences in the living

framework of the lower world yields the keenest pleasure to all who

have not outgrown it; and no one ought ever to outgrow it. He outgrows

it only by the gradual hardening of his heart and fancy, the immovable

stolidity of his faculties in their fixed ruts and crusts. It is the

favorite literature of the childhood of the world. It is filled with

quaint wisdom, raciness, and droll burlesque, as is abundantly to be

seen in the traditions of the Hottentots, the Esquimaux, the Africans,

and other barbaric nations. And in the classic compositions of Pilpai

the Persian, Lokman the Arab, Æsop the Greek, Phædrus the Roman, La

Fontaine the Frenchman, and other masters, it constitutes, with its

innocent gayety, its malicious mischief, its delicious wit and humor,

its cutting satire and caricature, one of the most exquisite portions

of cosmopolitan literature.

Hardly any other conception has given the people so much pleasure as

that Beast-Epic, or picture of human life in the vizards and scenery of

animal life, which, under the title of "Reynard the Fox," circulated

through Europe for centuries,--a sort of secular and democratic Bible,

read in palaces, quoted in universities, thumbed by toilsmen, delighted

in by all, old and young, high and low, learned and illiterate. There

the society and life of the Middle Age are reflected with grotesque

truth and mirth, grim irony, sardonic grins, comic insight, laughter

and tragedy, not without many touches of poetry and prophecy. There

are Noble the Lion, Isegrim the Wolf, Reynard the Fox, Chanticleer the

Cock, Bruin the Bear, Lampe the Hare, Hinze the Cat, and the rest,

each one representing enigmatically some class or order in the human

life of the romantic but cruel Feudal World. The poet, with a sly joy,

unfolds his pictures of wolves tonsured as monks, foxes travelling

as pilgrims to shrines and to Rome, cocks pleading as lawyers at the

judgment-bar. He asserts the moral standard of the plebeian instincts

against the conventional ecclesiastic and civil codes, and rectifies

his own wrongs as without rank, power, or wealth, but gifted with

genius and spirit, against the kings, barons, priests, and soldiers, by

portraying the uniform final success of the reckless, good-for-nothing,

but inexhaustibly bright, shifty, and fascinating Reynard. The

representative types of the strong, cruel, stupid men of prerogative

and routine are made to serve as foils for the scholar and actor,

with his spiritual flexibility, elusive swiftness of resource, inner

detachment and readiness.

The attractiveness of fables is fourfold. First, the charm of all

exercises of the dramatic art, namely, the incessant playing of human

nature with its elementary experiences in and out of all sorts of

masks and disguises of changing persons and situations. Second, the

congruous mixture in them of the most extravagant impossibilities and

absurdities with the plainest facts and truths; the union of sober

realities of reason and nature with incredible forms, giving fresh

shocks of wit and humor. Third, the constant sense of superiority and

consequent elated complacency felt by the human auditor or reader over

the animal impersonators of his nature, with the ludicrous contrasts

and suggestions they awaken at every turn. Fourth, the interest and

authority of the moral lessons, truisms though these may be, which they

so vividly bring out.

One cannot refrain from adding, in this connection, that there is a

further form of the dramatic inhabitation of our humbler brethren the

brutes, by kind and generous men, an example newly offered to notice

by the officers and friends of our Societies for the Prevention of

Cruelty to Animals. These gentlemen, by a divine extension of their

sympathy, quite in the spirit of the blessed Master who in his parables

immortalized the hen, the sparrow, the raven, the ox, and the ass,

transport themselves into the situation of the poor dumb creatures

who are so often abused, feel and speak for them, and try to remedy

their wrongs and to secure them their rights. They are spreading

abroad a disposition and habit of kindness which will not stop with

the first field of its application, but will extend to include in a

finer and vaster embrace the whole world of childhood, and all the

weak, degraded, and suffering classes of men. This development of

sympathy is one of surprising beauty and promise. It tends to do for

us what the doctrine of the transmigration of souls has done for the

Hindoos,--affiliate us with the entire series of living beings in

tender sentiment and mystery, as members of one family, under one law

of destiny. It will indeed redeem the whole world of humanity if it

shall be applied consistently to all as it was expressed by the famous

Rarey in the practical principle he applied to the taming of unruly

horses, namely: Free them from the spirit of opposition, and fill them

with the spirit of obedient trust, by showing them how groundless is

fear and how futile is resistance. The truth of God in the love of men

will one day end crime, cruelty, terror, and misery. O blessed vision,

how far away art thou?

The dramatic art, based on the science of human nature in the

revelation of its inner states through outer signs, is the exercise

of that power whereby man can indefinitely multiply his personality

and life, by identifying himself with others, or others with himself,

by divesting himself of himself and entering into the characters,

situations, and experiences of those whom he beholds or reads of or

creatively imagines. This definition elevates the art, in its pure

practice, high above the reach of cavil; for its central principle is

the essence of that disinterested sympathy and vicarious atonement

whose culmination on Calvary have deified the Christ.

Let us trace a little the rise and nature of this power from a point

of view somewhat different from the one in which we have already

considered it.

The life of a peach-tree, a rose-bush, or a squash-vine is rigidly

determined for it in advance by the seed from which it springs and

the soil and climate in which it grows. Its life is simply the sum of

actions and reactions between the forces in itself and the forces

in its environment; and this sum of dynamic relations is fixed

fatally by its organic structure. To a degree the same is true of

the life of a weasel, a pig, a horse, or an eagle; but this with two

modifications, two elements of greatening freedom and variety. First,

in connection with the consciousness and the power of locomotion

which distinguish the animal from the vegetable, it can change

its environment, from cliff to cave, from village to desert, from

field to shore, from hill to valley, or from a temperate zone to a

tropical, thus securing a large mass of changes in its surrounding

conditions, resulting in a correspondent diversity or increase in that

sum of actions and reactions which composes its life. Second, the

gregarious nature of animals enables them likewise, to some extent,

to supplement one another, to exchange states of consciousness and

unite their experience. Crows hold consultations and caw with mutual

intelligibility. A flock of wild geese understand the honk of their

leader, and obey every signal perfectly. Bees converse, build, hunt,

wage war, and carry on their little monarchical republic with amazing

cunning and consent.

But this associative alteration, enhancement, and interchange of life

receive an almost incredible development when we ascend to man. His

nature and destiny too, the fact that he is a man, not a tree or a

brute or an angel or a god, are determined for him by his parentage.

This hereditary descent decides his general character and status, and

also many details of special faculty and tendency. But in him all this

coexists with an immense freedom and power of foreign assimilation.

He can change and modify the conditions of his habitat in a thousand

particulars where the lower animals can do so in one. By free

education, drill, and habit, he can likewise indefinitely modify his

reactions on the same outer conditions. But far above all this in rank

and reach is his ability to _perfect his character by the characters of

others_, to make the most direct and copious levying on the experiences

of his fellow-men. He has not only the organic inheritance of his

ancestry and the traditional treasure of his country and people to work

with, but, furthermore, in history, science, and literature he has the

keys to the conscious wealth of all men in all lands and times.

The outward universe in which we live is one and the same in common

to all men. But the inner representation of this, the sum of all that

he has experienced and knows of it, is different with every man. Now,

it is with the revelation, the discovery, seizure, and exhibition of

this peculiar inner or ideal world of each individual that the dramatic

art in its practice in actual life is concerned. The business of most

persons seems to be rather to conceal and hold back, to falsify and

distort their inner states, than to reveal and impart them. Their

arts are disguise, imposture, and deception, rather than sincerity,

sympathy, and frankness. But the practical science of the drama puts

all the secrets in our power, and enables us to add to our own inner

world or conscious personal kosmos the related inner worlds of others,

almost without hindrance or limit.

A philosopher like Hegel, a scientist like Humboldt, a poet like

Rückert, deeply read in all literatures and trained to the facile

reproduction of every mode of thought and action, traverses all races

and ages, deciphering their symbols, reading their passions, royally

reaping their experimental conquests, thus virtually enlarging his

own soul to the dimensions of collective humanity and enriching

himself with its accumulated possessions. The first condition of truly

profound and vital acting is to have the knowledge, the liberty, the

spiritual energy and skill, to solve this inner side of the problem by

reconstructing in the mind and heart the modes of character, passion,

and conduct which are to be represented. They must be mastered and made

one's own before they can be intelligently exhibited. It is the part

of a charlatan to content himself with merely detecting and imitating

the outer signs. He is potentially the richest and freest man who is

most capable of assuming and subsidizing all other men. He is virtually

the king and owner of the world, though without crown or sceptre,

while many a titular king has nothing but these external insignia. The

greatest actor is the one who is the most perfect master of all the

signs of the inner states of men, and can in his own person exhibit

those signs with the most vivid power. He must have, to be completely

equipped for his work, a mind and a body whose parallel faculties and

organs are energetic and harmonic, every muscle of the one so liberated

and elastic, every power of the other so freed and connected, that they

can act either singly or in varied combination with others or with

the whole, with easy precision and vigor. The absence of prejudices

and strictures, contracting ignorance and hate, and the presence of

disinterested wisdom and openness, a trained intuitive sensibility,

will put all states of all souls in his possession by spontaneous

interpretation of their signals. Such an actor, perfected in his

own being and crowned with the trophies of human culture in every

department, is fitted to pass through all the grades and ranges of

society, reflecting everything, subjected to nothing, the sovereign of

mankind, the top of the world.

And now we are prepared to advance to the heart of our theme and show

the place of the drama in its full development in adult civilized

society, where all sorts of acting are not only diffused through

the daily life of the community, but also separated in a distinct

profession and supplied with a brilliant home. The drama, in its

finished literary and histrionic sense, is seen when a story, instead

of being merely described in forms, words, or colors,--as by sculpture,

narrative, and painting,--is exhibited by fit personages in living

action with all the appropriate accessories of looks, attitudes,

tones, articulations, gestures, and deeds. The end of this imitative,

reproductive, and creative exhibition is, as has already been said, to

enable the spectator to transpose himself out of himself into others,

assimilating them to himself or himself to them, thus unlimitedly

exchanging his personality and its conscious contents. In this sense

the dramatic faculty is universal, and its exercise, in an unsystematic

way, incessant. What other people do in a bungling and piecemeal

manner, without clear purpose or method, the professional actor does

with full consciousness and system, and exhibits for the pleasure and

edification of the observers. Everybody, from infancy to old age, with

such pliancy of fancy, resources of reason, wealth of sympathy, as

he can command, is always observing other people, studying, judging,

approving, copying, or condemning and avoiding. All that is wanting to

regulate and complete the art is, as Schlegel has said, to draw the

mimic elements and fragments clear off from real life, and confront

real life with them collectively in one mass. This is the sphere and

office of the Theatre, whose very business it is to hold up the mirror

to nature and humanity, that all styles of character and conduct may

be seen in their proper quality and their true rank, teaching the

spectators what to despise, what to admire, what to shun, what to

imitate or reproduce for the perfecting of their own characters and

conduct.

There are in the exhibited drama three provinces or directions, the

lower, the intermediate, and the higher, or Comedy, Melodrama, and

Tragedy. In the lower drama, inferior types of men and manners are

exhibited for the various purposes of amusement, ridicule, satire,

correction. The direction of the moral and social faculties of the

spectators towards the persons and actions they contemplate is downward

from their own or the social mental standards of virtue, propriety,

and grace to the real exemplifications before them, the descending

movement which accompanies their perception of the incongruity

awakening laughter or tendencies to laughter, scorn or tendencies to

scorn, with a reflex of complacency in themselves. Comedy teaches,

so far as it ventures to teach at all and does not content itself

with mere entertainment, by the principle of opposition and contrast,

showing what _not_ to do and how _not_ to do it, suggesting grace by

awkwardness, hinting refinement by vulgarity, setting off beauty and

dignity by ugliness and triviality. This, as every one must see, is a

varied, effective, and fruitful mode of direct instruction as well as

of indirect and unpurposed educational moulding. No one can well be

thoroughly familiar with the genteel comedy of the theatres and remain

a boor. Such a familiarity is of itself a sort of social education.

In the higher drama, or Tragedy, the superior social types, lords,

ladies, geniuses, kings, and the nobler styles of character,

heroes, martyrs, saints, are represented, to awaken admiration and

reverence, to stir emulous and aspiring desires. Pity, love, and

awe, the profoundest passions and capacities of the soul, are moved

and expanded. The mysteries of fate and providence are shadowed

forth, and the most insoluble problems of morality and religion

indirectly agitated. Transcendent degrees of power, virtue, success,

and glory, or failure and suffering, are indicated; and all our

upward-looking faculties are put on the stretch, with the result of

assimilating more or less of the forms of being and experience on

which they sympathizingly gaze aloft. Here we are taught, sometimes

with a distinct aim, oftener by an unpurposed, contagious kindling

of suggested thought and feeling, innumerable lessons pertaining to

human nature and experience, the varieties of character and conduct,

the limits and retributions of virtue and vice, the extremes of hope

and despair, the portentous question of death, the omnipresent laws of

God. How much one shall be affected and changed, inspired and aided, by

all this, depends on his docility and earnestness in front of it, his

plasticity under it. But it is plain that it can scarcely be repeated

and continued without important effects on all who are not dolts.

The intermediate, or Melodrama, mixed of the other two and presented

on the ever-varying level between comic lowness and tragic height,

brings forward a medley of characters, greater and lesser, good, bad,

and indifferent, portraying life not truly as it is in fact, but

exaggeratedly, in heterogeneous combination, so set off in extravagant

relief and depression, emphasis of lights and shades, as to give it

a more than natural attraction for the senses. Without taxing any

faculties in the audience, it piques the curiosity of all by turns, and

exercises and refreshes them with its rapid changes and its glaring

effects, which provide strong sensations yet with small exaction on

the mind. Any explicit instruction it contains is incidental, since

its real business is to serve as a spiritual alterative directed to

the soul through the senses, to beguile heavy thoughts and cares, to

entertain and rest weary faculties with fresh objects, and fill idle

hours with pleasurable amusement. All this is certainly legitimate,

needed, and useful, although it may be abused by the employment of

illegitimate means, and thus perverted into an injury. But every good

thing is likewise capable of perversion, and ought to be judged by its

true intent, not by its aberrations.

Furthermore, it is to be said--and it is an important truth which

should in no wise be overlooked--that even when the play is petty and

worthless in plot, full of absurdities as many of our gaudy modern

pantomimes and spectacles are, and pernicious in its exhibitions of

nudity, impure postures, and prurient accessories,--even then a twofold

good may be derived from the show, in addition to the mere recreative

diversion and pleasure yielded. First, the sight of the superb power,

grace, and skill of the trained performers, disciplined and perfected

to the highest point of energy, self-possession, and easy and joyous

readiness for the execution of their functions, is a charming and

edifying sight. It is the display of models of human nature developed

to an extreme degree of strength, beauty, and flexibility,--a display

which tends to mould the eyes of the spectators, and through their eyes

to affect their souls and to exert educational influence on future

generations. Every spectator should be kindled by the sight to secure

for himself, for the highest fulfilment of life under the eyes of God,

the exemplary development which these performers have so laboriously

won for the mere purpose of exhibition and pay. The sacrifice and toil

they have devoted for the sake of applause, should we not be willing to

devote for the sake of entering on our full heritage in the universe?

Second, the melodrama, by its artistic groupings, colors, and

movements, its scenic processions, its magic pictures, its orderly

evolution of romantic adventures, the multiform interplaying of

the characters and fortunes of its actors upon one another, draws

our attention from ourselves, enlists our feelings in the fates of

others, and thus exercising our faculties, disciplines, purifies, and

emancipates them, making them readier and more competent for whatever

exigencies we may be called on to meet. This great good and use of

the dramatic art, its moral essence, is afforded to the profiting

beholder by almost every theatrical representation, namely, that, in

showing life concentrated and intensified, it holds up for imitation

the instructive spectacle, in its trained actors, of men passing from

themselves into the personalities and situations of others, mutually

appropriating one another's traits and experiences, supplementing

themselves with one another. This varied practice of reason,

imagination, and sympathy in assuming inner states and their outer

signs is the most effective culture and drill there is for freeing

human nature from the slavery of routine, and perfecting its entrance

on that heritage of unlimited sympathetic fellowships which will at

last realize the hydrostatic paradox in morals, and make one man

commensurate with all humanity. A drop balances an ocean by its dynamic

translation and interplay with all the drops!

Whatever dissent or qualification may be made by some to the foregoing

view, there will scarcely be any hesitation or difference of opinion

when we turn from the representation of bad characters or neutral

characters, the vile and the insignificant, to the grandest forms

of the drama, where we encounter the most pathetic and brilliant

impersonations of ideal excellence,--those patterns of loveliness and

heroism with which the Stage abounds in its pictures of stainless

and queenly women, fearless and kingly men. The natural influence of

weeping over the misfortunes and wrongs or worshipping the virtues

of a saintly sufferer, who resists not, complains not, resents not,

but bears all with angelic patience, sweetness, and fortitude, is to

soften and expand the heart and cultivate the tenderest graces of human

nature. The natural influence of tracing the indomitable enterprise,

valor, disinterestedness, and perseverance of a great genius, an

illustrious patriot or martyr, thrilling with the deepest admiration at

his virtues, is to foster in the susceptible breast burning aspirations

after kindred worth and distinction. This tendency may be neutralized

or prevented, but it is the natural influence, by which alone it is

fair to judge the best specimens of the drama. And he who should

undertake to estimate the total influence of the Stage in the model

characters it has held up as ideals for honor and imitation, would have

a task not less difficult than genial.

While War and Work, with the rehearsing discipline they exact, occupy

and ravage the fairest fields and promises of Human Life, and create

Weariness, Crime, Lust, and Death, as the horrid Reapers who tread

close in their steps, the Theatre--one bright home of Freedom, Art, and

Beauty, planted in a paradisal place--is prophetic of the time to come

when Love and Leisure shall have room to people the redeemed world with

their fair and sweet offspring, Play and Joy.

In the mean time, while the spirit of doubt, banter, and insincerity

is so rife,--while we meet on every hand that arid, cynical, and

contemptuous temper which thrives on mockery and badinage, fosters

an insolent complacency and laughter by degrading superior persons

and subjects in parodies and lampoons,--while our young men and women

are infested with a boastful conceit of superiority to all sentiment

and enthusiasm, and even our rising authors are so disenchanted, so

knowing, that persiflage and the ridicule of illusion and devotion are

their highest tests of experience and power,--under such conditions,

surely we shall all agree that the ideal revelations, the impassioned

music and eloquence, the free elevation above commonplace, the

portrayals of ingenuous faith and energy, that still linger on the

Stage, are to be held precious. Amidst so much formality and hypocrisy,

it is a boon to have a great actor break into us through the crust of

custom and startle our noblest powers into life.

The actor, in laboring to fit himself for the highest walk in his

profession, studies all forms of human nature and experience,

discriminates their ranks and worth, sees what is congruous and

becoming, or the contrary, and reproduces their powers in himself by

the practice of putting on their states and showing their signals.

This done disinterestedly, with a sovereign eye to duty and the Divine

Will, is the way for every one to educate himself towards that personal

perfection the pursuit of which is his supreme business on earth. He

thus learns to assume and absorb the ascending ideals that brighten

the pathway to heaven. Herein the dramatic art becomes glorified into

identity with religion.

The lowest range of the histrionic inhabitations of the soul is

_obsession_, where the man is insanely held by some inferior or evil

spirit, as when Nebuchadnezzar went out and ate grass, like an ox.

The next grade is _sympathetic domination_, where the idea of another

being is so vividly seated in the imagination of a person that for

the time it makes him its involuntary agent. The intermediate or

neutral level, half-way from the lowest to the highest, is the region

of _voluntary assumption_, or acting properly so called, where the

player by his own free intelligence and will reproduces or imitates

foreign characters. Then there is the ascent into _inspiration_, where

loftier influences or spirits than are native to the impersonator take

possession of him, enhancing his powers, animating and guiding him

beyond his own knowledge or volition. And lastly, there is the supreme

height of _divine incarnation_, where some deity stoops into the cloud

of mortality, or the infinite God in varying degrees deigns to inflesh

and enshrine himself in man. Christendom owns one unapproachable and

incomparable example in its august Founder. But in India, Egypt,

Greece, were mystic men, who, too wise and grand to be thought

lunatics, have claimed to be of a lineage divine and dateless. This is

a realm for silence. But every unique, whether Gautama or Jesus, is

only the transcending culmination of a rule that rises through levels

below. Either great men have played the rôles of incarnate gods or

descending gods have assumed the rôles of men on earth.

CHAPTER V.

THE DRAMATIC APPRENTICE AND STROLLING PLAYER.

WHEN Edwin was nine years old, he was thin, pale, and had a slight

forward stoop of the chest and shoulders. He was full of fire, courage,

impulsive force, but had a quick pulse, a nervous habit, a sensitive

brain and skin. The tears came easily to his eyes, and under severe

exertion his endurance quickly gave out. At that time he seemed a fair

candidate for consumption and an early grave. His father is known, on

several occasions, to have expressed fears that he should not be able

to raise him.

A fortunate occurrence set the boy at work just at the right time and

in the right direction. Wherever a Circus travels through the country,

its performances take powerful effect on the impressible sympathies

of energetic and ambitious youths. As it departs, it often leaves

behind it a line of emulous lads, in mimic repetition of its scenes,

climbing ropes, leaping bars, walking on their hands, standing on their

heads, throwing somersaults, or posturing, balancing, and wrestling.

Such an experience befell Edwin, and his physical improvement under

it was rapid. It deepened his breathing, invigorated the circulation

of his blood, and straightened him up, bringing out his breast and

throwing back his shoulders. And in his seventeenth year, the period

which we have now reached, he was as fine a specimen of a manly

youth as one might wish to see. He had a free, open bearing, with

steadily-confronting eyes, and a clear, deep voice. He had never been

bashful; neither was he ever impudent or shameless. He was at once

self-possessed and modest, combining an air of sincerity and justice

with an expression of democratic independence. Such was the result, in

his outward appearance, of his character, his parental inheritance and

training, his dramatic practice, and his gymnastic exercises.

Accordingly, when, early in the September of 1822, it was announced

that the proprietors of the three theatres at Pittsburg, Lexington,

and Cincinnati had come to Philadelphia for the purpose of engaging

a company to perform alternately in those cities, and young Forrest,

depressed and impatient from the failure of his previous attempts to

secure a regular engagement, made personal application to manager

Jones, that gentleman was so much pleased with his words and his

bearing that he at once struck a bargain with him. The agreement was

that for a compensation of eight dollars a week he should play, without

a question, whatever parts he was cast in, no matter how high or how

low the parts were. He was willing now, despite his precocious starring

experiences, to take this humble position and hold himself ready for

anything at the beck and call of his superior, because he had come

keenly to feel how little he knew and how much he had to learn. And

his sound sense, with the good advice he had received, taught him that

there offered no other way so thoroughly and rapidly to master his

profession as by submitting to a regular drill in the miscellaneous

parts of the working stage, from top to bottom. He saw his path

to the dramatic throne through the steps of a docile and patient

apprenticeship.

It was always a characteristic of him that he was unwilling to utter

words while ignorant of their meaning. He studied what he was to speak,

that he might speak it with intelligence and propriety. Whether right

or wrong, he would, as a rule, always know what he meant to do, and

why and how. In illustration of this teachable spirit an incident may

be adduced which he ever gratefully remembered as one of the most

influential in his life.

When he was but fourteen, he was one evening in front of one of the

Philadelphia theatres, when his attention was fixed on two large

statues, or mythological figures, each carved from a single block of

wood, pedestal and all, placed in niches at each side of the entrance.

Under them were inscribed the names Thalia and Melpomene. "Who are

Thallea and Melpomeen?" he asked of an elder comrade with whom he was

wont to practise histrionics in the Thespian Club. "Oh, I don't know;

a couple of Grecian queens, I guess," was the reply. A gentleman,

handsomely dressed, with a benignant face and graceful mien, who had

overheard the question and the answer, stepped forward, took Edwin

by the hand, and said, "My lad, these figures, whose names you have

not pronounced correctly, represent two characters in the old Greek

mythology. This one, with the mask and the mirror, is Thalia, the

Muse of Comedy. That one, with the dagger and the bowl, is Melpomene,

the Muse of Tragedy. They are appropriately painted here, because the

theatre is the home of the drama, where both comedies and tragedies are

performed. Now, my boy, if you like to learn, there is a book, which

you can get at any book-store, called Walker's Classical Pronouncing

Dictionary, to which on all such occasions you can refer and find just

what you want to know." It was a beautiful action. And it fell on good

soil. Edwin bought the volume, and he never ceased to practise the

lesson or to be thankful to him who gave it, and on whose unknown head,

even to the end of life, his grateful heart showered benedictions.

When, many years later, that theatre was taken down, Forrest, in memory

of the incident above related, had the two statues purchased for him,

intending to set them up in his own private theatre.

Edwin was an affectionate boy, who won affection from others

notwithstanding his somewhat reckless spirit of adventure, frequent

coarseness of speech, and violence of temper. He was sympathetic, as

dramatic genius perforce must be, quick in intelligence, keen and eager

in observation, and of an honest manner and make throughout. He was

throbbing with hope and aspiration before the new prospect opened to

him as he went around to say farewell to those he loved, his favorite

companions among the amateur Thespians, and his benefactors. As he took

the hand of one after another and said good-bye, the cuff of his sleeve

repeatedly went to his eyes, and he felt those bitter twinges of pain

familiar to boyish bosoms on such partings in all generations and all

over the world. He went to the tannery, where, on the old stone table,

his declamations as a proud and happy child had been applauded by

Lorman and his fellow-workmen. He visited the tomb of his father, and

the house of his kind old pastor. Then came the last and severest trial

of his fortitude, the taking leave of his sisters, and, above all, of

his mother, who was always enshrined in his inmost soul as an object of

the most tender and sacred love. He girded himself up and got through

with it, he hardly knew how.

One small and humble trunk held all his effects,--a very scant

wardrobe, a few trifling keepsakes, a Bible the gift of his mother,

an edition of Shakspeare in one cheap volume, Walker's Classical

Pronouncing Dictionary, and a little collection of plays in pamphlet

form. Joining the company which Collins and Jones had gathered,

consisting of about a dozen persons, male and female, they regarded

one another with mutual interest; and, with that intuitive reading of

character which their professional art bestows, they in an amazingly

short time were intimately acquainted, and quite prepared to share

adventures, confidences, and lives. Besides Collins and Jones,

there were Groshorn, Scott, Eberle, leader of the orchestra, Lucas,

scene-painter, Henderson, stage manager, Davis, Mrs. Pelby, Mrs.

Riddle, Miss Fenton, Miss Sallie Riddle, and Miss Eliza Riddle. Several

of these not only had varied and ripe experience of the stage, but were

also highly distinguished for their talents and accomplishments. This

was especially the case with Mrs. Pelby and Mrs. Riddle.

The magnetic personality, the inexperienced youth, the attractive

ingenuousness, and the enthusiastic ambition of Forrest made him at

once a prominent object of attention in the company, all of whom were

ready to give him such instructions and aids as were in their power.

But, above all the rest, to the constant generous kindness and teaching

of Mrs. Riddle he always expressed himself as deeply indebted for

services rendered at the most critical period of his life, and whose

record remained as fresh in his latest memory as their results were

indelible in his being.

About the middle of October they began playing in Pittsburg, in a

building so ruinous and dilapidated that on rainy nights the audience

in the pit held up their umbrellas to screen themselves from the

leakings through the roof. The first performance was Douglas, Forrest

sustaining the part of Young Norval with much applause. In the course

of the season here he played many characters, in tragedy, comedy,

farce, and ballet. In grappling with these subordinate parts he

afterwards said he could distinctly remember that he often felt ashamed

to find how ignorant he was, and was almost appalled at the immense

task before him in becoming the actor he wished to be. But the progress

he felt he was making, combined with the unstinted praise he received,

kept his spirits at a high point.

The following letter, dated Pittsburg, October 10th, 1822, is the

earliest letter from him to his mother found among his papers after his

death:

"DEAR MOTHER,--I arrived here yesterday at about eleven o'clock, and

am much pleased with the place and its inhabitants. I was quite out of

patience riding so long in the stage over such tremendous mountains,

but was greatly delighted, on reaching the summit of them, to view the

surrounding country,--so vast and varied a landscape.

"Pittsburg is three hundred miles from Philadelphia. It is a sort of

London in miniature, very black and smoky. The Alleghany River and

Mountains surround it. The theatre is very old.

"This, you know, is the first time I have ever been away from you.

I have felt many qualms of homesickness, and I miss you, dear, dear

mother, more than words can give out. Has William gone to Petersburg?

Furnish me with every particular, especially how our Tid is, and

whether she reads with the yard-stick. Give me an account, too, of my

Grandma, and of my _beautiful_ Sister. The long ride in the stage has

made my hurdies so callous that they would ward off a cannon-ball.

"Give my respects to all my friends, particularly to Philip. Inform

me also, if you can, how the Tivoli Garden gets on. Write as early as

possible, and pray pay the postage, as I am out of funds. I expect the

managers by the next stage. Mr. Hughes, formerly of the Walnut Street

Theatre, is here. I find him a perfect gentleman.

"Your affectionate son,

"EDWIN FORREST."

In a short time the company collected their properties and took passage

on the Ohio River in a flat-boat for Maysville, Kentucky. They floated

lazily along for five days and nights, in delightful weather, through

lovely scenery new to the most of them, filling the time with stories,

games, and jokes,--a happy set, careless, healthy, and as gay and free

as the ripples of the stream that glanced around them. They played at

Maysville a few evenings with excellent success, greatly delighting the

rude Kentuckians, who thronged in from miles around.

Departing thence, they journeyed to Lexington, then the most important

town in the State, where they were encouraged to make a considerable

tarry, as they found a nice theatre, good patronage, and an uncommonly

intelligent auditory. The Transylvania University was here, under the

presidency of the celebrated Horace Holley. Many of the teachers and

pupils of the University attended the performances night after night.

Forrest was looked on as a lad of extreme promise. He made many friends

among the students. One of these friendships in particular, that formed

with young James Taylor, son of a wealthy planter of Newport, was kept

unbroken to the end of his life.

In 1870, Mr. William D. Gallagher, an old and dear friend of Mr.

Forrest, visited Col. Taylor at his estate in Newport. Taylor gave

him many pleasing reminiscences of his early days and his romantic

friendship with the young actor, then so world-famous. He said that

while at Lexington he one night invited Forrest to his hotel. He

acceded, without waiting to change his costume as Young Norval. He

spent the night with him, sharing his bed, and breakfasted with him

the next morning. After breakfast, as he went to his own quarters in

another street, the boys, attracted by his theatrical dress, followed

him with shouts and cheers.

President Holley was a man of very extraordinary oratorical power. He

was really a man of genius, his freedom of thought and his æsthetic

culture far in advance of his time. He had a great fame in his day,

but, leaving no visible work behind him, his name is now but a faded

tradition. He was so much struck by the performances of Forrest that he

generously sought him out and held several long interviews with him, in

which, with a masterly power which profoundly impressed his youthful

listener, he unfolded his views of art and of life and urged him to

cherish noble aspirations in the profession he had chosen. This contact

with the veteran preacher was one of the moulding points in the career

of the player. Such acts of condescension and disinterestedness--or

perhaps it is juster to call them acts of love and duty--are charming

and are divinely encouraging. There are more of them in the world

than we think, though certainly there are far fewer of them than there

ought to be. The record of each, while delightful to contemplate, is a

stimulus to produce others.

Holley urged Forrest to curb his taste for comic and farcical parts and

as soon as possible to cease appearing in such characters. He strove to

impress on him a deeper sense of his fitness for the highest walks of

tragedy, and explained to him most eloquently the noble qualities the

enactment of such parts both required and cultivated in the performer,

as well as the valuable lessons they taught to the spectator. He also

dwelt at length on the true principle of the dramatic art, which he

maintained to be not merely to hold the mirror up to crude nature, but

to give a choice and refined presentation of the truth. Nature, he

said, is reality, but art is ideality. The actor is not to reflect all

the direct and unrelieved facts of nature, but to present a selective

and softened or intensified reflection of them. Art plays the tune

of nature, he held, but with variations. He uttered these and other

thoughts with such remarkable grace and precision that Forrest said

the conversation made an epoch in his mind, although he differed from

him in opinion, then and always holding that the purpose of acting was

to show the exact truth of nature. Holley was right; and it is notable

that his youthful auditor in rejecting the view he advocated accurately

marked his own central defect not less than his most conspicuous merit

as an actor.

Closing their season at Lexington, February 22d, 1823, the company

started across the country for Cincinnati, the women with the

theatrical paraphernalia in covered wagons, the men on horseback.

Their good humor and abundant faculty for finding or making enjoyment

in everything stood them in hand during the journey, which their

rude accommodations and the wintry weather would otherwise have made

cheerless enough. They opened in Cincinnati, in the old Columbia Street

Theatre, on the evening of March 6th, 1823. The play was The Soldier's

Daughter. Forrest, who lacked just three days of being seventeen

years old, was assigned the humble part of Malfort, a serious walking

gentleman. His range of casts during this season was extremely varied,

reaching from the heights of dire tragedy to the level of ridiculous

pantomime. He danced in the then popular ballet of Little Red

Riding-Hood. He often sang comic songs between the plays. Eberle, who

was a good violinist, on one occasion appeared as an old broken soldier

with a wooden leg and a fiddle, accompanied by Forrest as his daughter

in a ragged female dress. The father fiddled, the daughter sang with

laughable pathos,--

"Oh, cruel was my parients, as tored my love from me;

And cruel was the great big ship as tooked him off to sea;

And cruel was the capitaine and the boswain and the men,

As didn't care a fardin if we never met agen."

(Tears.)

The performance was encored so warmly that it was repeated many

successive nights. He also played Corinthian Tom in the extravaganza of

Tom and Jerry, Lubin in the Wandering Boys of Switzerland, and Blaize

in the Forest of Bondy, or the Dog of Montargis. In the last character

he sang this song:

"Bondy's forest,--full of leaves;

Bondy's forest,--full of thieves;

They hold your bridle, take your cash,

And then they give your throat a gash.

Sing la, la, la, la, la."

At this time he had a trained dog, who knew as much as a great many

men. He was strongly attached to this dog, who appeared on the stage

with him in the Forest of Bondy and acted his part with striking

effect. He was a frisky and mischievous creature. He occupied the same

room with Edwin; and one morning he took advantage of the leisure his

habits as an early riser gave him to gnaw and tear in pieces one of his

master's only pair of boots. The poor actor was in a dilemma. He had

no money and no credit. In his wrath he thought of whipping the dog.

But that would boot nothing. The innocent creature knew no better. So

he pretended to have a sore foot, put a bandage on it, borrowed an old

slipper, and hobbled about until his wages fell due and enabled him to

buy a pair of shoes.

In contrast with the above-named comic casts, Forrest took the second

parts to the Damon, Brutus, and Virginius of the stars Pelby and

Pemberton, and at his own benefit played Richard the Third.

Without making a great sensation or achieving any brilliant success,

he was decidedly popular. Sol Smith and Moses Dawson, editors of the

two Cincinnati newspapers at that time, both praised him highly and

prophesied his future eminence. Moses Dawson--a leading Democrat of

the West, the first to raise the political banner inscribed with the

name of Andrew Jackson, and who is said to have died of joy at the

triumph of his party in the Presidential election of 1844--wrote the

earliest earnest and studious criticisms ever composed on the acting

of Forrest. He carefully noted all the points and peculiarities of the

youthful performer, honestly stated his defects and faults, generously

signalized his excellences, and made judicious suggestions for his

profit. His candid and thoughtful words were of great service to the

boy, and were never forgotten by the man.

A specimen from one of these articles will be of interest: "Mr.

Forrest has a finely-formed and expressive countenance, expressing

all the passions with marvellous exactness and power, and he looks

the character of Richard much better than could be expected from a

person of his years. He assumes a stately majesty of demeanor, passes

suddenly to wheedling hypocrisy, and then returns to the haughty strut

of towering ambition, with a facility which sufficiently evidence that

he has not only deeply studied but also well understood the immortal

bard. The scene with Lady Ann appeared to us unique, and superior to

everything we have ever seen, not excepting Kemble or Cooke. In the

soliloquies he uttered the sentiments as if they had arisen in his mind

in that regular succession, and we never once caught his eye wandering

towards the audience. Of the tent scene we do not hesitate to say that

it was a very superior piece of acting. Horror and despair were never

more forcibly represented. We consider Mr. Forrest's natural talents

of the highest grade, and we hope his good sense will prevent him from

being so intoxicated with success as to neglect study and industry. We

are willing to render to youthful talent a full meed of praise; but

while we applaud, we would caution. Applause should not be received as

a reward, but as an incentive to still further exertion to deserve it."

During his first engagement in Cincinnati, Forrest boarded with widow

Bryson, on Main Street. Almost half a century afterwards, William D.

Gallagher sought this excellent woman out, and obtained from her some

very interesting reminiscences. It seems that General Harrison, who was

subsequently President of the United States, came to Mrs. Bryson one

day and asked her to do him the favor to take as a boarder a young man

named Edwin Forrest, who was then playing at one of the theatres. The

General said he feared, if the youth boarded with the other players,

he would form bad habits. He wished to guard him from this, as he

considered him a young man of extraordinary ability, and destined to

excel in his profession. She assented. She said he was at that time

a beautiful boy, with deep and very dark brown eyes, a complexion of

marble clearness mantling with blood, and a graceful, sinewy form. He

once made her very angry by an insulting remark concerning one of the

female boarders, whose conduct did not suit his ideas of propriety.

Mrs. Bryson declared that she would not have such language used at

her table. He replied that of course he did not apply it to her. But

she could not forget, and sent for General Harrison, and related the

matter to him. He brought Edwin before her. The youth hung down his

head. "Poor fellow!" added the old lady, "it has been a long time since

then. Forty-six or seven years. Yet I can plainly see him standing

there now!" Eying him sternly, the General said, "Sir, the father of

this lady was a Revolutionary soldier; her husband was one of my trusty

officers in the late war; and she is a lady whom I highly esteem. When

I introduced you into her family, I did not suppose you would treat

her with disrespect; and I now ask you to make her a humble apology."

Edwin raised his head and said, "General, I did make a severe remark

concerning a particular person whom Mrs. Bryson thinks she knows, but

does not. It was an unguarded act. I am very sorry for it, and ask

her a thousand pardons. I assure you, madam, I would not, under any

circumstances, use words to hurt your feelings." He then turned and

made a humble excuse to Harrison, who reprimanded him with severity.

It did him good; it was a lesson he never forgot. But Mrs. Bryson

confessed that she learned soon after that he was right in what he had

said about the woman.

One Sunday evening there came up a dreadful thunder-storm. As the

thunders crashed and rattled, the frightened women, with Mrs. Bryson at

their head, rushed into Edwin's room. He went to the window, raised it,

took his sword and waved it out. When the electric flashes broke, it

looked as if the lightnings were dancing on the point of his sword. The

women fled out of his room with even greater terror than they had come

into it, and he laughed heartily to see them scamper.

Gallagher was present at an interview of Mrs. Bryson and her daughter

with Mr. Forrest in 1869, the first time they had met for forty-six

years. Although the daughter, Mrs. Kemp, was but a little girl when

they parted, he recognized her at the first glance. They spent a

long time in unrestrained enjoyment, talking over the events of the

old times as if they were things that had occurred but a few days

previously. Mrs. Bryson exclaimed, "Oh, Edwin Forrest, I can scarcely

realize it when I look at you and think what a beautiful boy you were

when we last met, and now see you such a great, heavy man, and getting

into age, too!"

At the end of the winter, Collins and Jones found their enterprise a

pecuniary failure. They incontinently shut up the theatre and turned

the whole company out to shift for themselves as best they could. These

poor children of Thespis were in a pitiful plight. Without money,

without employment or prospects, what could they do? About a dozen of

them, including Forrest, Mrs. Riddle, and her two daughters, determined

to extemporize a vagrant company, travel into the country, and try

their fortune from town to town. Their action was as prompt as their

pluck was good and their means small. With a couple of rickety wagons

and two dreadfully thin old horses, they started off for Hamilton, most

of them on foot. It is interesting to contemplate the little band of

strolling players as they thus set out on their adventures. On their

journey they scrutinized many a passing itinerant unlike themselves,

laughed and sang in jovial liberty, while the birds sang around them

by day and the stars twinkled over their heads by night. If there were

hardships in it, tough and scanty fare, rude conditions, weary trudges,

harsh treatment, wretched patronage, there were also in it rich

experiences of life at first hand, a rough relish, a free existence in

the open air, and all the traditional associations linking them to

the strollers of other times and lands, wandering minstrels, beggars,

apprentices, gypsies, and those travelling groups of actors who used to

perform in the yards of inns or the halls of baronial castles, and a

specimen of whom found a so much better than lenten entertainment from

the hands of Hamlet at Elsinore.

After performing at Hamilton for eight or ten nights, in the second

story of a venerable barn, with more applause than profit, they went

to Lebanon. An interesting reminiscence of this time is given by the

following fac-simile of a note afterwards redeemed by its signer, and

found carefully preserved among his papers at his death:

[Illustration

Hamilton August 6th 1823

Due Wm Cooper or order one

dollar & fifty cents for Value Recd

August 6th 1823----

Edwin Forrest]

They met little encouragement at Lebanon, and proceeded to Dayton,

where they had still poorer success. In fact, their funds and their

hopes gave out together, and they agreed to disperse. Forrest had not

one cent in his pocket. He started on foot for Cincinnati, a distance

of about forty miles. Journeying along on the bank of the Big Miami

River, he spied a canoe on the other shore. How much easier it would

be to float than to walk! He stripped, plunged, and swam. As soon

as he was near enough to see that the boat was chained and locked,

the owner of it appeared and pointed a gun at him. He made backward

strokes to his clothes, and resumed his plod. It was evening when he

reached Cincinnati, pretty well fagged out. Some of his acquaintances

met him in the street, said an amateur club were that night to play

the farce of Miss in her Teens across the river at Newport, that one

of the fellows was drunk, and asked him if he would fill the vacancy.

He consented to do it for five dollars. They agreed to give that

price, and he went and did it. The excessive fatigue probably made it

the hardest-earned, as it was the sorest-needed, five dollars he ever

received. It nearly exhausted the proceeds of the performance.

In a short time the scattered strollers rejoined their forces at

Louisville to try one more experiment. They succeeded moderately

well. But Archibald Woodruff, keeper of the Globe Inn in Cincinnati,

had fitted up a hasty and cheap structure adjoining his tavern, and

christened it the Globe Theatre. He invited the Louisville company to

come and open it. They did so on the evening of June 2d, 1823, with

Douglas, Forrest as Norval. June 4th they gave the play of The Iron

Chest, Forrest as Sir Edward Mortimer, Mrs. Riddle as Lady Helen. On

subsequent nights he sustained among other characters those of George

Barnwell, Octavian in The Mountaineers, Jaffier in Venice Preserved,

and Richard the Third, besides several parts in low comedy.

But perhaps the most surprising fact connected with this portion of

his career is that he was the first actor who ever represented on

the stage the Southern plantation negro with all his peculiarities

of dress, gait, accent, dialect, and manners. This he did ten years

before T. D. Rice, usually denominated the originator of the Ethiopian

drama, made his début at the Bowery in the character of Jim Crow. Rice

deserves his fame, for, though preceded first by Forrest, and then in a

more systematic fashion by George W. Dixon, he was the man who really

popularized the burnt-cork and burlesque minstrelsy and made it the

institution it became.

The fortunes of the Globe were in such a state that the establishment

was on the point of breaking up, when Sol Smith hired it for one night.

He brought out three pieces, the comedy of Modern Fashions, a farce

entitled The Tailor in Distress, and the pantomime of Don Quixote. He

agreed to pay each performer two dollars. For this sum Forrest acted

a dandy in the first play, a negro in the second, and Sancho Panza

in the third. The Tailor in Distress was a light affair, composed by

Sol Smith, turning on local matters well known and very ludicrous.

The part of Ruban, the negro, assigned to Forrest, was full of songs,

dances, and fun. He was a servant, and his wife, who had nothing to

say, was to appear with him as a help to set off his performance. He

blacked himself up and rigged his costume quite to his content, when

it occurred to his thought that no one had been got for the part of

his black wife. He applied to the women of the theatre, but not one of

them was willing to black herself for the occasion. He recollected his

old African washerwoman, who lived in a shanty close by. He hurried

thither and knocked and went in. Dinah cried, "Wha, bress me! who am

dis? Gosh-a-massy, who be you? Whose chile am you?" He answered, in a

negro voice, "Wha, Dinah, duzzent you know Sambo?" "What Sambo?" she

answered. "No, I duzzent know nothin' about you. Who is you?" "Heaw!

heaw! You duzzent know me! Now, don't you petend you am ign'rant ob

dis chile." "Well, I say I be, and want to know who you am!" Time was

pressing, and he said, in simple earnest, "Dinah, I am Mr. Forrest,

from the theatre. I am all blacked and dressed to play the part of a

negro, and I must have a black wife to go on the stage with me. I want

you to do it." The astonished and incredulous washerwoman responded,

"De debbil you does!" Sharply examining her visitor, she recognized

him. "Reely, now, it be de fac'. You am Mass' Forrest. But what a funny

nigger you am! You nigger all ober!" "Yes, Dinah, but hurry along, or

we shall be late." "Well, I duzzent care; I goes along wid you anyhow."

So they hastened arm-in-arm to the theatre, and got there just in time.

The appearance of the darkies was greeted with loud applause, and when

Ruban began to let out the regular cuffy, as he always could in the

most irresistible way, with wide and suddenly breaking inflections of

voice, breathing guffaw, and convulsive double-shuffle, the enthusiasm

of the audience reached the highest pitch. The play was repeated

several nights to crowds.

The Distressed Tailor referred to a well-known representative of that

profession, named Platt Evans, who was a very curious and original

character. He was interviewed by Mr. Gallagher in 1869, who found

him a hale, active man of over eighty, and still fond of his joke.

Old Platt said, "The farce was a da-da-da-dam good thing; on-on-only

the character of me wa-was not true, as he stu-stu-stu-stuttered,

and I do-don't stu-stu-stutter!" He said he made a suit of clothes

for Forrest in 1823, and that once when he was in the store a fellow

accused him of being stuffed. Forrest took off his coat and vest, and,

striking his breast, exclaimed, "No, there is no padding here. It is

all honest, and I mean it always shall be!"

It was now the end of July. The theatre was shut, the actors adrift

and penniless. It was a hard time for them. Mrs. Riddle and her two

daughters lived for awhile in Newport in a little dilapidated cottage,

and Forrest spent part of his time with them. Invited to a party on one

occasion, he was in want of a clean shirt and collar. Mrs. Riddle took

a collar and a handkerchief of her own, washed and ironed them, pinned

the collar on, tied a piece of ribbon around his neck, fastened the

handkerchief over the bosom of his dingy shirt, and sent him smilingly

off to the festivity, where his disguise was probably little suspected.

Young, full of healthy blood, with a fiery imagination, it took but

little to make him happy in those days. And yet, poor, ill clad,

unemployed, with only a few chance friends, at a distance from mother

and home, it took but little to make him very unhappy.

For several weeks he obtained almost his sole food from the corn-fields

of General Taylor across the river in Newport. He used to break off an

armful of ears, take them to his old negro washerwoman, and get her to

boil them for him. Sometimes he made a fire under some stones out in

the field, roasted the corn and ate it without salt. It was a Spartan

dinner; but, fortunately, he had a Spartan appetite.

During this period he one day rowed over the river to Covington and

climbed a sightly eminence there wooded with a growth of oaks. He sat

down under a huge tree, pulled from his pocket his well-worn copy of

Shakspeare, and began to read. He had on a somewhat ragged coat and

a dilapidated pair of stage-boots whose gilding contrasted with the

rusty remainder of his costume. He was no little depressed that day

with loneliness and thinking of his destitute condition and precarious

outlook. He fell upon this passage in King Henry IV.:

"O God! that one might read the book of Fate,

And see the revolution of the times

Make mountains level, and the continent,

Weary of solid firmness, melt itself

Into the sea! and, other times, to see

The beachy girdle of the ocean

Too wide for Neptune's hips; how chances mock,

And changes fill the cup of alteration

With divers liquors! O, if this were seen,

The happiest youth--viewing his progress through,

What perils past, what crosses to ensue--

Would shut the book, and sit him down and die."

Edwin felt melancholy enough as he laid the volume on his knee, and his

head sank on his bosom in painful musing. After a long time, breaking

from his reverie, he looked up. There stood, erect before him, a stout

grape-vine. Apparently its tendrils had been torn from the oak by whose

side it grew, and finding itself cast off, alone, deprived of its

sustaining protection, it had rallied upon its own roots, spread and

deepened them, and now held itself bravely up in solitary independence,

as if it were not a vine but a tree. The moral lesson electrified him.

He took new heart, with the feeling that it would be shameful for him

to succumb when even a poor plant could thus conquer. Twenty years

afterwards, with a grateful memory of the incident, he bought that

whole woodland region, of some sixty acres, and named it Forrest Hill.

He owned it at the day of his death.

After another brief trial of the theatre at Lexington, late in the

autumn, Collins and Jones grew discouraged, gave up their business,

and released Forrest from his contract with them. James H. Caldwell,

an extremely good light comedian, and for many years proprietor and

manager of the theatre in New Orleans, wrote to him opportunely,

offering him an engagement for the ensuing season at a salary of

eighteen dollars a week. It is said that Caldwell was led to make this

proposition from his remembrance of having once seen the youth make an

original point of great power in the part of Richard the Third. It was

in the tent scene. All previous actors had been wont to awake from the

dream in a state of extreme affright, and either sit on the side of

the couch or stand near it. Forrest sprang from his reclining posture,

rushed forward to the foot-lights, and there fell upon his knees, with

his whole frame trembling, his face blanched with terror, his sword

grasped by the hilt in one hand and with the point in the floor, the

sword itself so shaking that it could be heard all over the house. The

intense realism with which this was done made it sensational in an

extraordinary degree.

When Forrest had accepted the proposal from Caldwell, the thought of

the long, long journey and the time that must elapse before he should

see his mother again gave him a homesick feeling. He shrank from his

engagement. Learning that his acquaintance Sol Smith was then in

Lexington collecting a troupe to play in Cincinnati, he called on him

and urgently begged to be employed. He said he had rather serve under

him for ten dollars a week than under a stranger for eighteen. He was

steadily refused. He went over to a circus which then chanced to be

there, and hired himself out for a year. Smith says he heard of this

with great mortification, and immediately called at the circus. There,

he adds, sure enough, was Ned in all his glory, surrounded by riders,

tumblers, and grooms. He was slightly abashed at first, but, putting

a good face on the affair, said, as he had been refused an engagement

at ten dollars a week by his old friend, he had agreed with these

boys for twelve. To convince Smith of his ability to sustain his new

line of business, he turned a couple of flip-flaps on the spot. Smith

took Edwin to his lodgings, and by dint of argument and persuasion

succeeding in getting him to abandon the profession of clown and fulfil

his promise to Caldwell.

He accordingly went to Louisville and took passage on a steamboat

down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans. On the trip he

made the acquaintance of Winfield Scott and of John Howard Payne. The

celebrated general and the gifted author of Sweet Home seem both to

have been strongly attracted to the young actor. They held many long

conversations with him, and brought out, from their ample stores of

experience in the field and on the boards, anecdotes, principles,

criticism, and advice, which were not only highly entertaining to him

at the time but lastingly instructive and useful. He always accounted

his meeting with these two men as a particular piece of good fortune.

It betokens that he was at that period of his life an ingenuous and

docile spirit, however impulsive and wild still attracting the sympathy

and appropriating from the experience of his elders.

CHAPTER VI.

LIFE IN NEW ORLEANS.--CRITICAL PERIOD OF EXPERIENCE.

FORREST made his first appearance in New Orleans, at the American

Theatre, as Jaffier in Venice Preserved, February 4th, 1824, Caldwell

sustaining the part of Pierre. His individuality and his acting

immediately made a strong impression on the general audience, and

drew towards him the fervent personal interest of those particular

individuals, both men and women, whose qualities of character caused

them to feel a vivid curiosity and sympathy for highly-marked and

expressive specimens of human nature. Accordingly, he very soon had

many intimate friends among both sexes,--friends whose pronounced types

of being and impassioned styles of life wrought assimilatingly upon him

in that frank, lusty, and plastic period of his experience.

New Orleans at that time was a city of about thirty thousand

inhabitants. It was the chief commercial and social capital of the

South, and thoroughly conscious of its pre-eminence. On its small

but concentrated scale it was the gayest, most Parisian city in the

country. The Spanish and French blood of the original settlers of

Louisiana and of their early followers was largely represented in its

leading families. Then and there the chivalry of the slave-holding

South, in all its patrician characteristics both of virtue and of vice,

was at the acme of its glory. The types of men were unquestionably the

most varied and sharply defined and pushed to the greatest extremes of

development, the freedom and beauty of the women the most intoxicating

and dangerous, the social life the most voluptuous, passionate, and

reckless, of those of any city in the United States. Wealth was great,

easily found, carelessly lost, leisure ample, pride intense, living

luxurious, manly sports and exercises in physical training assiduously

cultivated, gambling common, duelling and every form of desperate

personal conflict constant, the code of manners alternately bewitching

in courtesy and terrible in ferocity. From every part of the State the

gentlemen planters loved to congregate in New Orleans, perfect masters

of their limbs, their faculties, their weapons, and their horses, not

knowing fear or embarrassment, living their thoughts and passions

spontaneously out, their tall forms aflush with bold sensibility, the

rich strength and grace of the thoroughbred pointing their elastic

motions. And in the parlor, the ball-room, at fashionable resorts, on

the promenades, the women were the peers of the men in their intensity

of being, their fondness of adventure, their courage, brilliance,

and piquancy. The crossing of tropical bloods, the long lineage of

aristocratic habitudes of ardent indulgence and leisurely culture, had

produced a class of women famed throughout the land for the symmetry

of their forms, the visible music of their movements, the dreamy

softness of their voices, and the bewildering charm of their eyes,

swimming seas of languor and fire. Many an imaginative and burning

nature asked no other paradise than the arms of these Creole houris.

But, unfortunately, the reverse of being immortal, its dissolving

views melted into degradation and vanished in death, too often with

accompaniments of frantic jealousy, crime, and horror.

These men and these women, naturally enough, were fascinating to the

adolescent actor, whose faculties were all aglow with ambition to

excel, whose curiosity was on edge in every direction to know the

contents of the living world which it was his profession to portray,

and whose passions were just breaking from their fullest bud. Nor was

he any less fascinating to them. His bluff courage, his young formative

docility and eagerness, his smiling openness of face and bearing,

so sadly changed in later years, and the nameless badge of personal

distinction and original force he bore on his front and in his accent,

drew the men to make much of him. So the outlines of his slender but

sinewy and breathing form with the muscles so superbly defined, the

deep and mellow tones of his ringing voice in which the clang-tints

of the whole organism were audible, his large and dark-brown eyes so

clearly set and brilliant, his fresh blood teeming over him in vital

revelation at each vehement mood, and the speaking truthfulness of his

portrayals of thought and sentiment in character, magnetized the women,

secured him many a flattering smile and note and flower, and led to

no slight experience in amours, which put their permanent stamp upon

his inner being, and often rose out of the vistas of memory in pictures

when he shut his eyes and mused in his lonely old age. A biography of

Forrest which omitted these things would be like a description of the

Saint Lawrence without an allusion to Niagara.

In his opening manhood, before repeated experiences of injustice,

slander, and treachery had in any degree soured and closed his soul,

Forrest had a heart as much formed for friendship as for love. He

was full of ingenuous life, sportive, affectionate, every way most

companionable. His friendships were fervent and faithfully cherished.

The disappointments, the revulsions of feeling, and the results on his

final character, we shall see in the later stages of this biography.

Caldwell felt a strong interest in the young actor, and was of service

to him outside of the theatre as well as within it. He introduced him

to a higher order of society with more aristocratic manners and refined

accomplishments than he had been accustomed to, thus affording him an

opportunity, had he been so minded, to make his upward way socially

not less than professionally. As a keen observer and a quick learner,

he did not fail to reap some valuable fruits from the advantages

thus afforded him. But his forte lay not in this direction. He had

then, and always afterwards, a deep distaste to all that is called

fashionable society. He was insuperably democratic in his very bones.

For the elaborate forms and conventionalities of the polite world he

had a rooted repugnance. He wanted to be free and downright in honest

speech and demeanor, making his outer manifestations correspond exactly

with his inner states. He could not bear, in accordance with the

conventions of the best society, to pretend to be inferior where he

felt himself superior, to affect to be interested when he was bored,

to express insincere nothings to give pleasure, and carefully hide

his most earnest thoughts and feelings lest they should give pain.

This art of polished intercourse--quite necessary in our world, and

often as artistic and useful as it is artificial and compromising--he

vehemently disliked and was never an adept in. Instead of gracefully

appropriating it for its gracious uses while spurning its evils, he

impatiently rebelled against it, stigmatizing it in blunt phrase as a

cursed hypocrisy. This defect in him it is needful to recognize as one

of the keys to his character and career. His athletic, bluff nature,

true and generous, lacked the flexible suavity of the spirituelle

qualities, a lack which prevented his universal success, causing him to

jar on persons of squeamish disposition or fastidious taste. Until a

long series of revulsive experiences had trained him to be silent and

reticent, his impulsive frankness and passionate love of freedom made

it extremely irksome and chafing to him purposely to adapt himself to

others at the expense of his own honest emotions. He never could be

in the slightest degree a courtier or a tuft-hunter, but--like Edmund

Kean, and many another man of genius whose abounding and impetuous

soul loved nature and truth in their spontaneous forms more than any

of the gilded substitutes for them--he ever preferred to be with those

in whose presence he could act himself out just as he was and just as

he felt. His playing in the theatre, instead of fitting, by reaction

unfitted him for playing in society. If, on the stage, he consented

to seem, all the more, off from it, he desired to be. The basis of

this veritable self-assertion was his vigorous manliness; and so far

it was creditable to him. But the extravagance to which he carried it

partook of pride and wilfulness, and was an error and a fault. The code

of fashion, tyrannical and imperfect as it is, has uses without which

society could scarcely get on. It cannot be neglected with impunity.

Forrest was no exception, but paid the penalty for his independence in

the neglect with which Fashion, as such, always treated him.

Among the foibles which especially beset the histrionic profession

are vanity, greed of applause, jealousy, invidious rivalry. Manager

Caldwell was not free from these weaknesses. His pride as a player was

as strong as his prudential regard for the interests of his theatre. No

actor in the South had been a greater favorite, and no member of his

company had ever rivalled him. He had carefully awakened an interest

in advance for his protégé, saying to his friends that he had engaged

in Kentucky a young man named Edwin Forrest, who had high talent, was

industrious, resolved to rise to the top of the profession, and who,

he was sure, would greatly please the New Orleans public. But when

the pupil made such rapid progress and gained such loud plaudits that

the master felt himself in danger of being eclipsed, he had recourse

to an artifice not uncommon, though certainly somewhat ungenerous. He

reserved the best parts for himself, and cast his rising competitor

in inferior or repulsive characters, most often in the part of an

old man. Forrest saw the design and inwardly resented it, though he

said nothing. He followed the wise course of trying to make the best

he could of the part assigned him. He made a careful study of the

peculiarities of age, in feature, in gait, in voice. He would often

sit in places of public resort and critically watch every old man who

came in or went out. Many a time when he had chanced to discover some

striking example of power and dignity or of weakness and decrepitude in

an old man he would follow him in the street and mentally imitate him,

reproducing and fixing what he saw. In this way he soon attained such

skill that his representations of these parts won him as much approval

as he had ever received for the more congenial and showy rôles to which

he had been accustomed.

Caldwell was fond of society, cared little for individuals, and, as

some thought, held his theatrical vocation subsidiary to personal ends.

The superficialities and insincerities of fashion did not distress him.

Forrest had an aversion to society, a passion for individuals, and an

intense ambition to excel in his art, which he loved for itself. It was

quite natural that the friendship of men so unlike, to say nothing of

their great disparity in years, should be streaked with coolnesses and

gradually cease. It was not long in dying, though they continued to

get along together comfortably, with some trifling exceptions, until

their bond was suddenly ruptured by an irritating event which will be

narrated on a succeeding page.

But it was outside of the circle of the theatrical company with which

he was associated in New Orleans that Forrest found the most rich and

decisive influences, at the same time developing his organism, moulding

his character, and enhancing his dramatic powers. These influences were

exerted on him chiefly through the five closest friends he had in the

city, five men intimately grouped, to be the confidant of one of whom

was to be the confidant of all, men of the most remarkable force and

finish of personality each in his own kind, each of them an intense

type of the class he represented. They were all men of great personal

beauty and strength, tall, supple, lithe, absolutely ignorant of fear,

chivalrous in disposition, loose in habits, kind and loving in their

native moods, but relentless and terrible in their wrath. Some insight

into the sympathetic assimilation of these superb and fearful persons

upon Forrest, and some tracing of the effect on his nature and on

his art of the cycle of experience which they revealed to him partly

by description, partly by personal introduction, are essential to an

understanding of his great career.

Those who are often and long together influence one another more than

is usually supposed. Their giving and taking of opinions, prejudices,

habits, and even organic peculiarities, are far beyond their own

conscious purpose or recognition. Not unfrequently intimate associates

obviously grow like one another in look, action, voice, passion, type

of character, quality of temper, style of manners, and mode of life.

This is confessedly matter of observation; but the law of its operation

or the importance of the results very few understand. It is the

sympathetic impartation and reproduction, between two or more parties,

of inner states through outer signs; and, as to noble qualities, it

is proportioned in degree to the docility of the persons, combined

with their richness of organization. Those who have plastic nervous

systems copiously furnished with force, and who are eager to improve,

take possession of one another's knowledge and accomplishments with

marvellous celerity. By intuition and instinct they seem to reflect

their contents and transmit their habitudes with mutual appropriation.

In this unpurposed but saturating school of real life what the superior

knows and does passes into the sympathetic observer by a sort of

contagion. Those whose nerves are capable of the same kinds and rates

of vibration play into each other and are attuned together, as the

sounding string of one musical instrument propagates its pulses through

the air and awakens a harmonic sound in the corresponding string of

another instrument. This is the scientific basis of what is loosely

called _human magnetism_, and it is a factor of incomparable import in

the problem of human life.

The one of Forrest's New Orleans friends first to be named is James

Bowie, inventor and unrivalled wielder of that terrible weapon for

hand-to-hand fights named from him the bowie-knife. He was a member of

the aristocratic class of the South, planter, gentleman, traveller,

adventurer, sweet-spoken, soft-mannered, poetic, and chivalrous,

and possessed of a strength and a courage, a cool audacity and an

untamable will, which seemed, when compared with any ordinary standard,

superhuman. These qualities in a hundred conflicts never failed to

bring him off conqueror. In heart, when not roused by some sinister

influence, he was as open as a child and as loving as a woman. In

soul high-strung, rich and free, in physical condition like a racing

thoroughbred or a pugilist ready for the ring, an eloquent talker,

thoroughly acquainted with the world from his point of view, he was a

charming associate for those of such tastes, equally fascinating to

friends and formidable to foes. As a personal competitor, taken nakedly

front to front, few more ominous and magnificent specimens of man have

walked on this continent.

His favorite knife, used by him awfully in many an awful fray, he

presented as a token of his love to Forrest, who carefully preserved it

among his treasured keepsakes. It was a long and ugly thing, clustering

with fearful associations in its very look; plain and cheap for real

work, utterly unadorned, but the blade exquisitely tempered so as not

to bend or break too easily, and the handle corrugated with braids of

steel, that it might not slip when the hand got bloody. Journeying in

a stage-coach, in cold weather, after stopping for a change of horses

a huge swaggering fellow usurped a seat belonging to an invalid lady,

leaving her to ride on the outside. In vain the lady expostulated with

him; in vain several others tried to persuade him to give up the place

to her. At last a man who sat in front of the offender, so muffled and

curled up in a great cloak that he looked very small, dropped the cloak

down his shoulders, took his watch in his left hand, lifted a knife in

his right, and, straightening himself up slowly till it seemed as if

his head was going through the top of the coach, planted his unmoving

eyes full on those of the intruder, and said, in a perfectly soft and

level tone which gave the words redoubled power, "Sir, if within two

minutes you are not out of that seat, by the living God I will cut

your ears off!" The man paused a few seconds to take in the situation.

He then cried, "Driver, let me out! I won't ride with such a set of

damned murderers!" That was Bowie with his knife. Fearful, yet not

without something admirable. Another anecdote of him will illustrate

still better the atmosphere of the class of men under whose patronizing

influence Forrest came in the company of his friend Bowie.

The plantations of Bowie and a very quarrelsome Spaniard joined each

other. The proprietors naturally fell out. The Spaniard swore he would

shoot Bowie on the first chance. The latter, not liking to live with

such an account on his hands, challenged his neighbor, who was a very

powerful and skilful fighter with all sorts of weapons and had in his

time killed a good many men. The Spaniard accepted the challenge, and

fixed the following conditions for the combat. An oak bench six feet

long, two feet high, and one foot wide should be firmly fastened in

the earth. The combatants, stark naked, each with a knife in his right

hand, its blade twelve inches in length, should be securely strapped to

the bench, face to face, their knees touching. Then, at a signal, they

should go at it, and no one should interfere till the fight was done.

The murderous temper of the arrangements was not more evident than the

horrible death of one of the men or of both was sure. But Bowie did not

shrink. He said to himself, "If the Spaniard's hate is so fiendish,

why, he shall have his bellyful before we end." All was ready, and a

crowd stood by. Bowie may tell the rest himself, as he related it a

dozen years after to Forrest, whose blood curdled while he listened: