CHAPTER XV.

PERSONAL AND DOMESTIC LIFE.—FONTHILL CASTLE.—JEALOUSY.—DIVORCE.—

LAWSUITS.—TRAGEDIES OF LOVE IN HUMAN LIFE AND IN THE DRAMATIC ART.

Forrest was now in his forty-fourth year, as magnificent a specimen of

manhood perhaps as there was on the continent. His strength, vitality,

fulness of functional power, and confronting fearlessness of soul before

the course of nature and the faces of men, were so complete as to give

him a chronic sense of complacency and luxury in the mere feeling of

existence endowed with so much ability to do whatever he wished to do.

Despite a few annoying drawbacks his cup of outward prosperity too was

full. It is true his fancy had been somewhat disenchanted and his temper

embittered by experiences of meanness, ingratitude, and worthlessness,

the envy and rancor of rivals, the shallowness and malignity of the

multitude, and especially by a lasting soreness created in his heart

from his late English trip and its unhappy sequel. It is also true that

this evil influence had been negatively increased by the loss of the

wise and benign restraint and inspiration given him during their lives

by the devoted friendship of Leggett and the guardian love of his

mother. Still, he had an earnest, democratic sympathy with the masses of

men and a deep pride in their admiration. His popularity was unbounded.

His rank in his art was acknowledged on the part of his professional

brethren by his election as the first President of the Dramatic Fund

Association, a society to whose exchequer he contributed the proceeds of

an annual benefit for many years. He had fought his way with strenuous

vigor through many hardships of orphanage, poverty, defective education,

and a fearful furnace of temptations. And his reputation in every

respect was without stain or shadow. This was certified by all sorts of

public testimonials, the offers of political office and honor, the

studied eulogies of the most cultivated and eloquent civilians, the

smiling favors of the loveliest women in the land, the shouts of the

crowd, and the golden filling of his coffers. His large earnings were

invested with rare sagacity, his sound financial judgment and skill

always enabling him to reap a good harvest wherever he tilled his

fortune. He was at this time already worth two or three hundred thousand

dollars. And this, in an age of Mammon, is a pledge to society of high

deserts and a hostage for good behavior.

But above all he was signally blessed in his married life, the point in

a character like his by far the most central and vital of all. The first

ten years of his state of wedlock had indeed been happy beyond the

ordinary portion of mortals. It was a well-mated match, he a noble

statue of strength, she a melting picture of beauty, mutually proud and

fond of each other, his native honesty and imperious will met by her

polished refinement and conciliatory sweetness. Beyond all doubt he

deeply and passionately loved her. And well he might, for his nature was

one greatly endowed in all points for impassioned love, and she was in

person, disposition, and accomplishments equally adapted to awaken it.

“She was perfection,” said one, in allusion to her bridal landing in

America; “the most beautiful vision I ever saw.” After the death of

Forrest she herself said, “The first ten years of our married life were

a season of contentment and happiness, scarcely ruffled by so much as a

summer flaw; then bickering began, followed by deeper misunderstanding,

and the fatal result drew on, which I have always deplored.” Yet even in

these halcyon years, too short and too few, there was one thing wanting

to finished household felicity. This one want was children, the eternal

charm of the passing ages of humanity. Of the four pathetic creatures

born to them, but one lived, and that only for a few months. Abandoning

the hope of heirs to his name and fortune, and foreseeing that his

estate was destined to be a large one, Forrest, with the long

anticipation characteristic of a reflective mind, bethought him what

disposal he had best make of his acquisitions when he should be forced

to relinquish them in death. He settled upon a purpose combining

elements of romance, beneficence, and imposing permanence, which showed

him possessed of qualities above the vulgar average of men.

He bought an extensive tract of land on the banks of the Hudson, about

sixteen miles from New York, on a site commanding one of the most

enchanting prospects in the world. Here he proposed to erect a building

to be called Fonthill Castle, somewhat after the fashion of the old

ruined structures on the banks of the Rhine, whose beauty should gratify

his taste, whose conveniences should secure his household comfort, whose

historic and poetic suggestiveness should please his countrymen passing

up and down the river, and whose final object should be an enduring

memorial of his love for his profession and of his compassion for its

less fortunate members. The building of a house is an epoch of great

interest in the lives of many men. This was especially so in the life of

Forrest. In a chiselled orifice of the corner-stone of Fonthill Castle

he placed specimens of the American coinage, a copy of Shakspeare, and

the following paper,—marred only by its betrayal of that prejudice

against foreigners which was so unworthy of his own nature and of his

nationality:

“In building this house, I am impelled by no vain desire to occupy a

grand mansion for the gratification of self-love; but my object is

to build a desirable, spacious, and comfortable abode for myself and

my wife, to serve us during our natural lives, and at our death to

endow the building with a sufficient yearly income, so that a

certain number of decayed or superannuated actors and actresses of

American birth (_all foreigners to be strictly excluded_) may

inhabit the mansion and enjoy the grounds thereunto belonging, so

long as they live; and at the death of any one of the actors or

actresses inhabiting the premises, his or her place to be supplied

by another from the theatrical profession, who, from age or

infirmity, may be found unable to obtain a livelihood upon the

stage. The rules and regulations by which this institution is to be

governed will, at some future day, be framed by

“EDWIN FORREST.”

To this charity he meant to devote his whole property forever. As the

estate grew in value an American Dramatic School was to be added to it,

lectures delivered, practical training imparted, and native histrionic

authors encouraged. It was estimated that in fifty years the rich acres

surrounding the Castle would be a part of New York, and that the rise of

value would make the bequest at last one of the noblest known in any

age.

Fonthill Castle was built of gray silicious granite of extraordinary

hardness and fine grain, hammer-dressed and pointed with gray cement.

The building consists of six octagon towers clumped together, the

battlements of some notched with embrasures, the others capped with

corniced coping. The highest tower rises about seventy feet from the

base, the centre tower, the main tower, the library tower, the drawing-

room tower, and the dining-room tower being of proportioned heights. The

basement contains the kitchen, cellar, and store-rooms. On the next

floor are the parlor, banquet-hall, study, boudoir, and library. The

centre tower comprises a hall or rotunda, and above this a picture-

gallery lighted from the dome. The upper rooms are divided into chambers

for guests and apartments for servants. The staircase tower has a spiral

staircase of granite inserted in a solid brick column, rising from the

basement to the top of the tower, with landings on each floor leading to

the chief apartments. The architectural design was understood to be

chiefly the work of Mrs. Forrest, with modifications by him. It combined

the Norman and Gothic styles, softened in detail so as to embrace some

of the luxuries of modern improvements. For instance, the drawing-room

and banqueting-room are lighted with deep, square, bay-windows, while

those of the upper chambers and of the boudoir are of the Gothic order.

In other portions of the edifice are to be seen the rounded windows of

the Norman period, with their solid stone mullions dividing the

compartments again into pointed Gothic. Loop-holes and buttresses give

the structure the military air of a fortified castle. There are two

entrances, one on the water side, one on the land side. From the summit

of the staircase tower one sees up the river as far as Sing Sing and

down to Staten Island. On the opposite shore frowns the wall of the

Palisades. On the north lie Yonkers, Hastings, Nyack, the lovely inlet

of Tappan Zee, and the cottages of Piermont, glistening like white

shells on the distant beach.

During the progress of the building Forrest had improvised a rude

residence on the grounds, which he constantly visited, growing ever more

deeply attached to the place and to his enterprise. In this romantic

spot, one Fourth of July, he gathered his neighbors and friends, to the

number of some two or three hundreds, and held a celebration,—reading

the Declaration of Independence and delivering an oration, followed by

the distributing of refreshments under waving flags and amidst booming

guns. It was a brilliant and joyous affair,—a sort of initial, and, as

it proved, farewell, dedication of the scene with commingled friendly

and patriotic associations. For in its opening stages of suspicion and

distress the domestic tragedy had already begun which was destined to

make the enchantments of Fonthill so painful to him that he would

withdraw from it forever, sell it to a Catholic sisterhood for a

conventual school, and take up his final abode in the city of his birth.

In the spring of 1848 Forrest was fulfilling a professional engagement

in Cincinnati, and his wife was with him. One day, on entering his room

at the hotel unexpectedly, he saw Mrs. Forrest standing between the

knees of George W. Jamieson, an actor of low moral character, whose

hands were upon her person. Jamieson at once left the room. Forrest was

greatly excited, but the protestations of his wife soothed his angry

suspicion, and he overlooked the affair as a mere matter of

indiscreetness of manners. Still, the incident was not wholly forgotten.

And some months later, after their return home, certain trifling

circumstances came under his observation which again made him feel

uneasy. On opening a drawer in which his wife kept her papers, he found,

addressed to her, the following letter, worn and rumpled, and in the

handwriting of this Jamieson:

“And now, sweetest Consuelo, our brief dream is over; and such a dream!

Have we not known real bliss? Have we not realized what poets love to

set up as an ideal state, giving full license to their imagination,

scarcely believing in its reality? Have we not experienced the truth

that ecstasy is not a fiction? I have; and, as I will not permit myself

to doubt you, am certain you have. And oh! what an additional delight to

think,—no, to know, that I have made some hours happy to you! Yes, and

that remembrance of me may lighten the heavy time of many an hour to

come. Yes, our little dream of great account is over; reality stares us

in the face. Let us peruse its features. Look with me and read as I do,

and you will find our dream is ‘not all a dream.’ Can reality take from

us, when she separates and exiles us from each other,—can she divide our

souls, our spirits? Can slander’s tongue or rumor’s trumpet summon us to

a parley with ourselves, where, to doubt each other, we should hold a

council? _No! no!_ a doubt of thee can no more find harbor in my brain

than the opened rose shall cease to be the hum-bird’s harbor. And as my

heart and soul are in your possession, examine them, and you will find

no text from which to discourse a doubt of _me_. But you have told me

(and oh! what music did your words create upon my grateful ear) that you

would _not doubt me_. With these considerations, dearest, our

separation, though painful, will not be unendurable; and if a sombre

hour should intrude itself upon you, banish it by knowing there is one

who is whispering to himself, Consuelo.

“There is another potent reason why you should be happy,—that is, having

been the means of another’s happiness; for I _am_ happy, and, with you

to remember and the blissful anticipation of seeing you again, shall

remain so. I wish I could tell you my happiness. I cannot. No words have

been yet invented that could convey an idea of the depth of that

passion, composed of pride, admiration, awe, gratitude, veneration, and

love, without being earthy, that I feel for you.

“Be happy, dearest; write to me and tell me you are happy. Think of the

time when we shall meet again; believe that I shall do my utmost to be

worthy of your love; and now God bless you a thousand times, my own, my

heart’s altar.

“I would say more, but must stow away my shreds and tinsel patches. Ugh!

how hideous they look after thinking of you!

“Adieu! adieu! and when thou’rt gone,

My joy shall be made up alone

Of calling back, with fancy’s charm,

Those halcyon hours when in my arm

Clasped Consuelo.

“Adieu! adieu! be thine each joy

That earth can yield without alloy,

Shall be the earnest constant prayer

Of him who in his heart shall wear

But Consuelo.

“Adieu! adieu! when next we meet,

Will not all sadness then retreat,

And yield the conquered time to bliss,

And seal the triumph with a kiss?

Say, Consuelo.”

On reading this missive, as might well be supposed, Forrest was struck

to the heart with surprise, grief, and rage. To one of his ample

experience of the world it seemed to leave no doubt of an utter lapse

from the marriage-vow on the part of its recipient. He was heard rapidly

pacing the floor of his library until long after midnight, when his wife

arrived from a party and a violent scene of accusation and denial

occurred. He wrote an oath, couched in the most stringent and solemn

terms, which she signed, swearing that she was innocent of any criminal

infringement of her marital obligations. He was quieted, but not

satisfied. On questioning the servants as to the scenes and course of

conduct in his house during his absences, and employing such other

methods of inquiry as did not involve publicity, he learned a variety of

facts which confirmed his fear and resulted in a fixed belief that his

wife had been unfaithful to him. Many a jealous husband has entertained

a similar belief on insufficient and on erroneous grounds. He, too, may

have done so. All that justice requires to be affirmed here is the

assertion that he was himself firmly convinced, whether on adequate or

inadequate evidence, that he had been grossly wronged, and he acted on

that conviction in good faith. The pretence that he had tired of his

marriage, longed to be free, and devised false charges in order to

compass his purpose, is a pure slander, without truth or reason. And as

to the theory of the distinguished counsel against him, namely, that he

found himself by the building of Fonthill Castle involved in a financial

ruin that would disgrace him and change its name to Forrest’s Folly, and

so, as the easiest way out, he deliberately “determined to have a

quarrel with his wife for some private cause not to be explained, and

then to assign the breaking up of his family as the reason for

relinquishing his rural residence,”—it is not only the flimsiest of

fancies, but a perfect absurdity in face of the facts, and an infamous

outrage on the helpless memory of the dead. Could a woman of the mind,

spirit, position, and with the friends of Mrs. Forrest be expected

meekly to submit to such a fiendish sacrifice? How does such a thought

seem in the light of the first letters of the parties in the

controversy? The supposition, too, is inconceivably contradictory to the

character of Forrest, who, however rough, violent, or furious he may

sometimes have been, was not a man of cruel injustice or selfish

malignity, was never a sneaking liar and hypocrite. Furthermore, no

financial difficulty existed; since the fortune of Forrest at that time

was about three hundred thousand dollars, and his direct earnings from

his professional labor some thirty thousand a year. Fonthiil cost him

all told less than a hundred thousand, and on separating from his wife,

in addition to carrying the load of Fonthiil for six years longer, the

residence which he purchased and occupied in Philadelphia was worth

nearly as much more, and, besides paying out over two hundred thousand

dollars in his divorce lawsuits, his wealth was steadily swelling all

the time.

After the intense personal hostility and indomitable professional zeal

and persistency with which Charles O’Conor pushed the cause of his fair

client, in eight years securing five repetitions of judgment, heaping up

the expenses for the defendant, as he says, “with the peculiar effect of

compound interest,” he should not have penned so unfounded and terrible

an accusation. The man who could sacrifice the honor and happiness of

his wife with the motive and in the manner O’Conor attributes to Forrest

must be the most loathsome of scoundrels. But in the very paper in which

the great illustrious lawyer presents this theory he says, “Mr. Forrest

possessed great talents, and, unless his conduct in that controversy be

made a subject of censure, he has no blemish on his name.” The innocence

of Mrs. Forrest is publicly accredited, and is not here impugned. But

history abundantly shows that her husband’s affirmation of her guilt

does not prove him to have been a wilful monster. His suspicion was

naturally aroused, and, though it may have been mistaken, naturally

culminated, under the circumstances accompanying its course, in an

assured conviction of its justice.

In his proud, sensitive, and tenacious mind, recoiling with all its

fibres from the fancied wrong and shame, the poison of the Consuelo

letter worked like a deadly drug, burning and mining all within. By day

or by night he could not forget it. The full experience of jealousy, as

so many poor wretches in every age have felt it, gnawed and tore him. He

who had so often enacted the passion now had to suffer it in its dire

reality. For more than a year he kept his dark secret in silence, not

saying a word even to his dearest friends, secluding himself much of the

time, brooding morbidly over his pent-up misery. Now he learned to probe

in their deepest significance the words of his great Master,—

“But oh, what damned minutes tells he o’er

Who dotes yet doubts, suspects yet strongly loves!”

The evidence of the love he had for his wife and of the agony his

jealousy caused him is abundant. His letters to her are tender and

effusive. Such extracts as these are a specimen of them: “I am quite

tired of this wandering, and every hour I wish myself again with you.

God bless you, my dearest Kate, and believe me wholly yours.” “This is a

warm, bright, beautiful day, and I am sitting at an open window in the

Eutaw House; and while I write there is above me a clear, blue,

cloudless sky,—just such a day as I yearn to have with you at Fonthill.”

“I saw Mr. Mackay to-day. He spoke of you in terms of unmitigated

praise, and said you were every way worthy of my most devoted affection.

Of course he made conquest of my whole heart. I do love to hear you

praised, and value it most highly when, as in the present instance, it

is the spontaneous offering of the candid and the good.” “Your two

letters have been received, and I thank you, my dearest Kate, for your

kind attentions in writing to me so often. Indeed, your messages are

always welcome.” “I seem quite lonely without you, and even in this

short absence have often wished you were here. But the three weeks

_will_ pass away, and then we shall see each other again.” Many

witnesses in the trial testified to the happy domestic life of the

couple, their devoted attentions and confiding tenderness up to the time

of their dissension. And that the change which then occurred was as

secretly painful as it was publicly marked is beyond doubt. He appeared

no longer on the stage, but shunned society, even shrank from his

friends, wore a gloomy and absorbed air, and brooded in solitude. The

following verses—as unjust as they are severe, for jealousy is always

more or less insane, a morbid fixture displacing the freedom of the

mind—reflecting his feelings were found after his death, in his

handwriting, copied into one of his scrap-books at the date of the

divorce trial:

Away from my heart, for thy spirit is vain

As the meanest of insects that flutter in air;

I have broken the bonds of our union in twain,

For the spots of deceit and of falsehood are there.

The woman who still in the day-dawn of youth

Can hold out her hand to the kisses of all,

Whose tongue is polluted by guile and untruth,

Doth justify man when he breaks from her thrall.

But think not I hate thee; my heart is too high

To prey on the spoil of so abject a foe;

I deem thee unworthy a curse or a sigh,

For pity too base, and for vengeance too low.

Then away, unregretted, unhonored thy name,

In my moments of scorn recollected alone,—

Soon others shall wake to behold thee the same

As I have beheld thee, and thou shalt be known.

When at last he spoke reservedly on the subject to his confidential

friend, he said he had begun life a very poor boy, had struggled hard to

reach a pinnacle, and it now seemed severe to be struck down from all

his happiness by one individual, and that one the woman whom he had

loved the most of all on earth. And when the listener to whom he spoke

replied with praises of the physical and spiritual beauty of Mrs.

Forrest, he exclaimed, “She now looks ugly to me: her face is black and

hideous.” This friend, Lawson, wrote these words at the time: “I am

persuaded that both parties are still warmly attached to one another.

He, judging by his looks, has suffered deeply, and has grown ten years

older during the last few months. She is not less affected.”

At length a natural but unfortunate incident carried their alienation to

the point of a violent and final rupture. In indignant reply to some

cutting remarks on her sister, Mrs. Forrest inconsiderately said to her

husband, “It is a lie!” If there was one point on which he had always

been proudly scrupulous, as every friend would testify, it was that of

being a man of the uttermost straightforward veracity, whatever might

betide. The words, “It is a lie!” fell into his irascible blood like

drops of molten iron. He restrained himself, and said, “If a man had

said that to me he should die. I cannot live with a woman who says it.”

From that moment separation was inevitable and irrevocable.

A little later they agreed to part, mutually pledging themselves not to

allow the cause to be made known. Before leaving his house she asked him

to give her a copy of the works of Shakspeare as a memento of him. He

did so, writing in it, “Mrs. Edwin Forrest, from Edwin Forrest,” a sad

alteration from the inscription uniformly made in the books he had

before presented to her, “From her lover and husband, Edwin Forrest.”

Taking her in a carriage, with a large portrait of himself at the most

glorious height of his physical life, he accompanied her to the house of

her generous friends, Parke and Fanny Godwin, whose steadfast fidelity

had caused them to offer her an asylum in this trying hour. Parting from

each other silently at that hospitable door, the gulf of pain between

them was henceforth without a bridge. Slow months passed on, various

causes of irritation still at work, when the following letter, which

explains itself, was written:

“I am compelled to address you, by reports and rumors that reach me

from every side, and which a due respect for my own character

compels me not to disregard. You cannot forget that before we parted

you obtained from me a solemn pledge that I would say nothing of the

guilty cause; the guilt alone on your part, not on mine, which led

to our separation; you cannot forget that, at the same time, you

also pledged yourself to a like silence, a silence that I supposed

you would be glad to have preserved; but I understand from various

sources, and in ways that cannot deceive me, that you have

repeatedly disregarded that promise, and are constantly assigning

false reasons for our separation, and making statements in regard to

it intended and calculated to exonerate yourself and to throw the

whole blame on me, and necessarily to alienate from me the respect

and attachment of the friends I have left to me. Is this a fitting

return for the kindness I have ever shown you? Is this your

gratitude to one who, though aware of your guilt and most deeply

wronged, has endeavored to shield you from the scorn and contempt of

the world? The evidence of your guilt, you know, is in my

possession; I took that evidence from among your papers, and I have

your own acknowledgment by whom it was written, and that the

infamous letter was addressed to you. You know, as well as I do,

that the cause of my leaving you was the conviction of your

infidelity. I have said enough to make the object of this letter

apparent; I am content that the past shall remain in silence, but I

do not intend, nor will I permit, that either you, or any one

connected with you, shall ascribe our separation to my misconduct.

“I desire you, therefore, to let me know at once, whether you have

by your own assertions, or by sanctioning those of others,

endeavored to throw the blame of our miserable position on me. My

future conduct will depend on your reply.

“Once yours,

“EDWIN FORREST.”

To this the writer received immediate response:

“I hasten to answer the letter Mr. Stevens has just left with me,

with the utmost alacrity, as it affords me, at least, the melancholy

satisfaction of correcting misstatements, and of assuring you that

the various rumors and reports which have reached you are false.

“You say that you have been told that I am ‘constantly assigning

false reasons for our separation, and making statements in regard to

it intended and calculated to exonerate myself and throw the whole

blame on you;’ this I beg most distinctly to state is utterly

untrue.

“I have, when asked the cause of our sad differences, invariably

replied that was a matter only known to ourselves, and which would

never be explained, and I neither acknowledge the right of the

world, nor our most intimate friends, to question our conduct in

this affair.

“You say, ‘I desire you, therefore, to let me know at once, whether

you have by your own assertions, or by sanctioning those of others,

endeavored to throw the blame of our miserable position on me.’ I

most solemnly assert that I have never done so, directly or

indirectly, nor has any one connected with me ever made such

assertions with my knowledge, nor have I ever permitted any one to

speak of you in my presence with censure or disrespect. I am glad

you have enabled me to reply directly to yourself concerning this,

as it must be evident to you that we are both in a position to be

misrepresented to each other; but I cannot help adding that the tone

of your letter wounds me deeply: a few months ago you would not have

written thus. But in this neither do I blame you, but those who have

for their own motives poisoned your mind against me; this is surely

an unnecessary addition to my sufferings, but while I suffer I feel

the strong conviction that some day, perhaps one so distant that it

may no longer be possible for us to meet on this earth, your own

naturally noble and just mind will do me justice, and that you will

believe in the affection which, for twelve years, has never swerved

from you. I cannot, nor would I, subscribe myself other than,

“Yours now and ever,

“CATHARINE N. FORREST.”

The above letter was succeeded five days later by another:

“In replying to the letter I received from you on Monday last, I

confined myself to an answer to the questions you therein ask me;

for inasmuch as you said you were content that the past should

remain in silence, and as I was myself unwilling to revive any

subject of dispute between us, I passed over the harsh and new

accusations contained in your letter; but on reading and weighing it

carefully, as I have done since, I fear that my silence would be

construed into an implied assent to those accusations. After your

repeated assurances to me prior to our separation, and to others

since then, of your conviction that there had been nothing criminal

on my part, I am pained that you should have been persuaded to use

such language to me. You know as well as I do that there has been

nothing in my conduct to justify those gross and unexpected charges,

and I cannot think why you should now seem to consider a foolish and

anonymous letter as an evidence of guilt, never before having

thought so, unless you have ulterior views, and seek to found some

grounds on this for divorce. If this be your object, it could be

more easily, not to say more generously, obtained. I repeatedly told

you that if a divorce would make you happy, I was willing to go out

of this State with you to obtain it, and that at any future time my

promise to this effect would hold good. You said such was not your

wish, and that we needed no court of law to decide our future

position for us. From the time you proposed our separation, I used

no remonstrance, save to implore you to weigh the matter seriously,

and be sure, before you decided, that such a step would make you

happy; you said it would, and to conduce as much as lay in my power

to that happiness, was my only aim and employment until the day you

took me from my home. Of my own desolate and prospectless future I

scarcely dared to think or speak to you, but once you said that if

any one dared to cast an imputation on me, not consistent with

honor, I should call on you to defend me. That you should,

therefore, now write and speak as you do, I can only impute to your

yielding to the suggestions of those who, under the garb of

friendship, are daring to interfere between us; but it is not in

their power to know whether your happiness will be insured by

endeavoring to work my utter ruin. I cannot believe it, and implore

you, Edwin, for God’s sake, to trust to your own better judgment;

and, as I am certain that your heart will tell you I could not seek

to injure you, so likewise I am sure your future will not be

brighter if you succeed in crushing me more completely, in casting

disgrace upon one who has known no higher pride than the right of

calling herself your wife.

“CATHARINE N. FORREST.”

To this Forrest replied thus:

“I answer your letter dated the 29th and received by me on the 31st

ult., solely to prevent my silence being misunderstood. Mr. Godwin

has told me that the tardy reply to the most material part of mine

of the 24th was sent by his advice. I should indeed think from its

whole tone and character that it was written under instructions. I

do not desire to use harsh epithets or severe language to you; it

can do no good. But you compel me to say that all the important

parts of yours are utterly untrue. It is utterly untrue that the

accusations I now bring against you are ‘new.’ It is utterly untrue

that since the discovery of that infamous letter, which you

callously call ‘foolish,’ I have ever, in any way, expressed my

belief of your freedom from guilt. I could not have done so, and you

know that I have not done it. But I cannot carry on a correspondence

of this kind; I have no desire to injure or to crush you; the fatal

wrong has been done to me, and I only wish to put a final

termination to a state of things which has destroyed my peace of

mind, and which is wearing out my life.

“EDWIN FORREST.”

The next step in the tragedy was the filing of an application for

divorce by Forrest in Philadelphia, instantly counterchecked by a

similar application on the part of Mrs. Forrest in New York. He was led

to his suit because, in his own words, “unwilling to submit to calumnies

industriously circulated by my enemies that I had unmanfully wronged an

innocent woman, the only choice open to me was either to assert my

rectitude before the tribunals of my country or endure throughout life a

weight of reproach which I trust my entire life proves undeserved.” Her

obvious motive in the counter-suit was the instinctive impulse and the

deliberate determination to protect herself from remediless disgrace and

utter social ostracism. No woman with her spirit, and with the host of

friends which she had in the most honored walk of the community, could

willingly accept the fearful penalty of letting such a case go by

default, whether she were innocent or guilty. To those who held her

innocent, as the best people did, her attitude appealed to every

chivalrous sentiment of admiration and sympathy; but to him who believed

her guilty, as her husband did, it presented every motive to aggravate

anger and resentment. The inevitable consequences resulted, and a

prolonged struggle ensued, which was a desperate fight for moral

existence. The miserable details need not be specified. As the combat

thickened, the deeper grew the passions on each side, and the more

damaging the charges and alleged disclosures. The hostile championship

likewise became intenser and wider. The trial, with the incrimination of

adultery and the recrimination of the same offence, began in December,

1851, and reached through six weeks. No trial of the kind in this

country had ever awakened so eager and extended an interest. The

evidence and arguments were minutely reproduced in the press, sold by

wholesale in every corner of the land, and devoured by unnumbered

thousands with every sort of scandalous gossip and comment. The

completed report of the trial fills two enormous volumes of more than

twelve hundred pages each. The lady gained much for her cause by her

strict propriety of language, her elegant deportment, the unequalled

ability and passionate zeal of her counsel, and the exalted character of

her large circle of influential and unfaltering friends. The man lost as

much for his cause by the partisan prejudices against him, by the

imprudences of his more reckless friends, and especially by the

repelling violence and coarseness of expression and demeanor to which in

his exasperated state he was too often tempted. Abundant examples have

already been furnished in these pages of his scholarly taste,

intellectual dignity, moral refinement and strength. Justice to the

truth requires the frank admission that there was also in him a rude and

harsh element, a streak of uncivilized bluntness or barbaric honesty of

impulse, shocking to people of conventional politeness. These people did

him injustice by chiefly seeing this cruder feature in his character,

for it was quite a subordinate part of his genuine nature. But it is

only fair to give specimens of the level to which it not unfrequently

sank him in social appearance. In his eyes observance of external

seemings was nothing in comparison with sincerity to internal realities.

After his separation, but before his divorce, meeting his wife in the

street, she said he kept her there walking up and down for over two

hours in a pouring rain, hearing and replying to him, neither of them

having an umbrella. At this same period watching one night to see who

entered or left his house, in which his wife was still residing, though

alone, a man named Raymond came out. The following intelligible dialogue

immediately took place, as sworn to in court by Raymond himself. “Why

are you sneaking away like a guilty man?” “Edwin Forrest, you have

waylaid me by night with a bludgeon. You want a pretence for attacking

me, and I shall not give it you.” “Bludgeon! I don’t want a bludgeon to

kill you. Damn you, I can choke you to death with my hands. But you are

not the man I am after now. If I catch that damned villain I’ll rip his

liver out. I’ll cut his damned throat at the door. You may go this time,

damn you. But I have marked you, all of you, and I’ll have vengeance.”

This style of speech, as laughable as it is repulsive, and which really

marked not at all the extent but merely the limitation of his culture,

greatly injured him, alloying alike his worth, his peace, and his

success. In one instance alone, however, did his violence of temper

carry him beyond discourteous and furious speech to illegal action.

Meeting in Central Park Mr. N. P. Willis, whom he regarded as one of the

chief fomenters of his domestic trouble, he inflicted severe personal

chastisement on him. The sufferer prosecuted his assailant, and secured

a verdict with damages of one dollar. Forrest brought a suit against

Willis for libel, and gained a verdict with five hundred dollars

damages.

In the divorce case a somewhat unexpected judgment was decreed against

Forrest, acquitting his wife and condemning him to pay costs and three

thousand dollars a year for alimony. He appealed, and was defeated, with

an added thousand dollars a year alimony. Five times he appealed,

carrying his case from court to court, and every time was baffled and

thrown. And it actually was not until 1868, after eighteen years of

unrelenting litigation,—years filled with irritation, acrimony, and

every species of annoyance, settling in many instances into a lodged

hatred,—that he finally abandoned further resistance and paid over the

full award. Sixty-four thousand dollars came to Mrs. Forrest, of which

sum the various expenses swallowed fifty-nine thousand, leaving the

pittance of five thousand,—an edifying example of the beauty of legal

controversies.

The writer is unwilling in any way to enter between the now long and

forever separated disputants or to go behind the rendering of the court.

The defendant is dead, and only requires for justice’s sake the

assertion that he believed himself to have been wronged, and that he

acted on that belief with the unforgivingness belonging to him. The

plaintiff has suffered fearfully enough for any imprudence or error, was

believed by her intimate and most honored friends to be innocent, was

vindicated by a jury after a most searching trial, and is now living in

modest and blameless retirement. She has a right to the benefit of her

acquittal, and shall be left unassailed to that unseen Tribunal which

alone is as just and merciful as it is infallible.

The verdict of the jury was hailed with acclamations by one party, with

amazement and derision by the other. Rumors and charges of perjury,

fraud, and corruption were rife, and many a character suffered badly,

while the end left the contestants pretty much where the beginning found

them, with the exception of the bad passion, costs, and anguish that lay

between. They had been hoisted into a public pillory in the face of the

whole country, subjected to all kinds of odious remarks, the very

sanctities of their being defiled and profaned by the miscellaneous

gawking and commenting of the prurient crowd. Besides all this long

strain on his feelings and huge drain on his purse, Forrest had the

angry grief of seeing large numbers of his most cherished friends fall

away from him to the side of his antagonist, never to be spoken to

again. And then he had the mortification of defeat amidst the cheers and

jeers of his foes, who combined to honor the victorious lawyer to whom

at every step he owed his repulses with a brilliant banquet and a

service of plate, including a massive silver pitcher bearing the

inscription, “From God the conquering champion cometh!” He was just the

kind of man to feel these things most keenly. No wonder the unsuccessful

warfare and its shameful close stung his pride, envenomed his

resentment, darkened his life, and left on him rather a permanent wound

than a scar. But, sure of the rightfulness of his cause, his self-

respect and his faith in ultimate justice for the iniquity he felt had

been done him enabled him to bear up with defiant fortitude. And he was

far from being unsustained without, numerous as were the familiar

associates who deserted him. Whenever he appeared in public the same

enthusiastic multitudes as of old greeted him with an even wilder

admiration. Many a voice and pen were lifted to defend and applaud him,

while many attacked him. The tributes in the newspapers more than

equalled the denunciations. Two examples in verse will show the estimate

of him and his cause formed by close acquaintances:

TO EDWIN FORREST.

Thou noble and unflinching one,

Who stoodst the test so firm and true;

Doubt not, though clouds may hide the sun,

The eye of truth shall pierce them through.

Heed not the sneer and heartless mirth

Of those whose black hearts cannot know

The sterling honesty and worth

Of him at whom they aim the blow.

Thy peace is wrecked—thy heart is riven—

By her so late thy joy and pride,

And thou a homeless wanderer driven

Upon the world’s tumultuous tide.

Yet doubt not, for amid the throng

There’s many a heart beats warm and high

For him who cannot brook a wrong,

Whose noble soul disdains a lie.

Then hail, Columbia’s gifted son,

Pride of our glorious Drama, hail!

Thou deeply wronged and injured one,

Let not thy hope or courage fail.

Though perjury seek thy name to blight,

And venomed tongues with envy rail,

The truth, in all its lustre bright,

’Gainst heartless fops shall yet prevail.

M. C.

TO EDWIN FORREST.

May I, in this gay masquerade of thought,

When crowds will seek thee,

With gay devices curiously wrought,

And love-words greet thee,

Bestow the offering of an earnest soul,

Though it be vain

As to Niagara’s eternal roll

The drops of summer rain!

A thought of thee dwells ever in my heart

And haunts my brain,

And tears unbidden to mine eyelids start

Whene’er I hear thy name.

Yet ’tis no love-thought,—no impassioned dream

Of wild unrest

Quickening my pulses when with earnest beam

Thine eyes upon me rest.

But something deeper, holier far than this,—

A mournful thought

Of all the sorrow and the loneliness

With which thy life is fraught,—

Of thy great, noble heart, so rudely torn

From the deep trust of years,—

Of the proud laurels which thy brow has worn,

Dim with the rust of tears;

Of wrongs and treachery in the princely home

Thy genius earned;

Thy hearth made desolate, thy pathway lone,

Thy heart’s deep worship spurned;

Thy manly prayer for justice coldly met

With mocking jeers,

The seal of exile on thy forehead set

For all thy coming years.

Most deeply injured! yet unshaken still

Amid the storm,

Thy soul leans calmly on its own high will

And waits the coming morn.

And all pure hearts are with thee, and beat high

To know at last

The world will scan thee with unbiassed eye,

Revoking all the past.

CELIA.

A fortnight after the close of the trial, Forrest began a new engagement

at the Broadway Theatre.

One of the leading journals of the day said, “The return of Mr. Forrest

to the stage, from which he has been so long self-exiled, will form the

most interesting feature in the dramatic season. There have been many,

though we have not been of the number, who have thought he would never

reappear on the boards after the unwarrantable treatment he received at

the hands of the maliciously and ignorantly prejudiced. Mr. Forrest,

however, has justly relied upon the spirit of fair play which

characterizes the American people. Let all men be fairly judged before

they are condemned, and especially those who, like him, have long and

manfully withstood such a ‘downright violence and storm of fortune’ as

would have overwhelmed most men, and whose careers have added to the

lustre of their country’s history. We believe that he will never have

cause to say, like Wolsey,—

‘I shall fall

Like a bright exhalation in the evening,

And no man see me more!’

but that he who has so long

‘Trod the ways of glory,

And sounded all the depths and shoals of honor,

Will find a way, out of his wreck, to rise in.’

“All men have their faults, and envy makes those of the great as

prominent as possible.

‘Men’s evil manners live in brass; their virtues

We write in water.’

“Much to their ignominy, the assailants of Forrest have never given him

credit for those high-minded and disinterested acts of generosity which

those who know him best can never recall without admiration, and which,

when his history is written, will leave little comfort to his maligners,

professional or otherwise. We wish for him a delighted welcome back to

the stage, and a complete deliverance from the toils in which his

enemies have sought to destroy him.”

The house was packed to its extremest capacity, and hundreds clamored in

the streets. An inscription was hung across the parquet, “This is the

people’s verdict!” As he entered on his ever favorite roll of Damon, the

audience rose en masse, and greeted him with waving hats, handkerchiefs,

and scarfs, and long, deafening plaudits, which shook the building from

dome to foundation. In matchless solidity of port he stood before the

frenzied tempest of humanity, and bowed his acknowledgments slowly, as

when Zeus nods and all Olympus shakes. A shower of bouquets entwined

with small American flags fell at his feet. He addressed the assembly

thus, constantly interrupted with cheers:

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,—After the unparalleled verdict which you have

rendered me here to-night, you will not doubt that I consider this the

proudest moment of my life. And yet it is a moment not unmingled with

sadness. Instinctively I ask myself the question, Why is this vast

assemblage here to-night, composed as it is of the intelligent, the

high-minded, the right-minded, and last, though not least, the beautiful

of the Empire City? Is it because a favorite actor appears in a favorite

character? No, the actor and the performances are as familiar to you as

household words. Why, then, this unusual ferment? It is because you have

come to express your irrepressible sympathy for one whom you know to be

a deeply-injured man. Nay, more, you are here with a higher and a holier

purpose,—to vindicate the principle of even-handed justice. I do not

propose to examine the proceedings of the late unhappy trial; those

proceedings are now before you, and before the world, and you can judge

as rightly of them as I can. I have no desire to instruct you in the

verdict you shall render. The issue of that trial will yet be before the

court, and I shall patiently await the judgment of that court, be it

what it may. In the mean while I submit my cause to you; my cause, did I

say?—no, not ‘my’ cause alone, but yours, the cause of every man in this

community, the cause of every human being, the cause of every honest

wife, the cause of every virtuous woman, the cause of every one who

cherishes a home and the pure spirit which should abide there. Ladies

and gentlemen, I submit my cause to a tribunal uncorrupt and

incorruptible; I submit it to the sober second-thought of the people. A

little while since, and I thought my pathway of life was filled with

thorns; you have this night strewed it with roses (looking at the

bouquets at his feet). Their perfume is gratifying to the senses, and I

am grateful for your beautiful and fragrant offering.”

The success of the entire engagement was unprecedentedly brilliant.

Called before the curtain at the close of the final performance, he

said,—

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,—This is the sixty-ninth night of an engagement

which, take it all in all, has, I believe, no parallel in the history of

the stage. It is without parallel in its duration, it is without

parallel in the amount of its labors, and it is without parallel in its

success. For sixty-nine almost successive nights, in despite of a season

more inclement than any I ever remember, the tide of popular favor has

flowed, like the Pontic Sea, without feeling a retiring ebb. For sixty-

nine nights I have been called, by your acclamations, to the spot where

I now stand to receive the generous plaudits of your hands, and I may

say hands with hearts in them. No popular assembly, in my opinion,

utters the public voice with more freedom and with more truth than the

assembly usually convened within the walls of a theatre. If this be so,

I have reason to be greatly proud of the demonstration which for twelve

successive weeks has greeted me here. Such a demonstration any man ought

to be proud of. Such a demonstration eloquently vindicates the thought

of the great poet:

‘Sweet are the uses of adversity,

Which, like the toad, though ugly and venomous,

Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.’

Such a demonstration speaks more eloquently to the heart than any words.

Such a demonstration contains in it an unmistakable moral. Such a

demonstration vindicates me more than a thousand verdicts, for it

springs from those who make and unmake judges.”

But despite the flattering applause of the multitude, added to the

support of his own conscience, and notwithstanding his abounding health

and strength and enhancing riches, from the date of his separation and

desire for divorce the dominant tone of the life of Forrest was changed.

His demeanor had a more forbidding aspect, his disposition a sterner

tinge, his faith in human nature less genial expansion, his joy in

existence less spontaneous exuberance. The circle of his friends was

greatly contracted, a certain irritable soreness was fixed in his

sensibility, he shrank more strongly than ever from miscellaneous

society, and seemed to be more asserting or protecting himself cloaked

in an appearance of reserve and gloom. In fact, the excitement and

suffering he had gone through in connection with his domestic

unhappiness gave his whole nature a fearful wrench, and deposited some

permanent settlings of acridity and suspicion. The world of human life

never again wore to him the smiling aspect it had so often worn before.

His sense of justice had been wounded, his heart cut, his confidence

thrown back, and his rebelling will was constrained to resist and to

defy.

And why all this strife and pain? Why all this bitter unyielding

opposition and writhing agony under what was and is and will be?

Wherefore not quietly accept the inevitable with magnanimous gentleness

and wisdom, and, without anger or fuss or regret, conform his conduct to

the best conditions for serenity of soul and wholesomeness of heart, in

contentment with self and charity for all? Why not rather have

suppressed wrath, avoided dispute, foregone retaliation, parted in peace

if part they must, and, each uncomplained of and uninterfered with by

the other, passed freely on in the strangely-checkered pathways of the

world, to test the good of life and the mystery of death and the

everlasting divineness of Providence? How much more auspicious such a

course would have been than to be so convulsed with tormenting passions

and strike to and fro in furious contention! Yes, why did they not

either forgive and forget and renew their loving covenant, or else

silently divide in kindness and liberty without one hostile deed or

thought? Thus they would have consulted their truest dignity and

interest. But, alas! in these infinitely delicate, inflammable, and

explosive affairs of sentiment, dignity and interest are usually

trampled contemptuously under foot by passion.

Every one acts and reacts in accordance with his style and grade of

character, his degrees of loyalty or enslavement to the different

standards of action prevailing around him. A man held fast in a certain

low or mediocre stage of spiritual evolution will naturally conduct

himself in any trying emergency in a very different manner from one who

has reached a transcendent height of emancipation, spontaneity, and

nobleness. And there were two clear reasons why Forrest, in this most

critical passage of his life, did not behave purely in the best and

grandest way, but with a mixture of the vulgar method and the better

one. First, he had not attained that degree of self-detachment which

would make it possible for him to act under exciting circumstances

calmly in the light of universal principles. He could not disentangle

the prejudiced fibres of his consciousness from the personality long and

closely associated with his own so as to treat her with impartiality and

wisdom, regarding her as an independent personality rather than as a

merged part of his own. He must still continue related to her by

personal passion of some kind, when one passion died an opposite one

springing up in its place. And, secondly, he could not in this matter

free himself, although in many other matters he did remarkably free

himself, from the tyranny of what is called public opinion. He had in

this instance an extreme sensitiveness as to what would be thought of

him and said of him in case his conduct openly deviated much from the

average social usage. Thus his personal passions, mixed up in his

imagination with every reference to the woman he had adored but now

abominated, incapacitated him from acting consistently throughout with

disinterested delicacy and forbearance, though these qualities were not

wanting in the earlier stages of the difficulty before he had become so

far inflamed and committed.

Speculation is often easy and practice hard. One may lightly hold as a

theory that which when brought home in private experience gives a

terrible shock and is repelled with horror and loathing. Both Forrest

and his wife had reflected much on what is now attracting so much

attention under the title of the Social question. They both entertained

bold, enlightened views on the subject, as clearly appears from a

remarkable letter written from Chicago, in 1848, by Mrs. Forrest in

reply to one from James Lawson. A comprehensive extract, followed by a

few suggestions on the general lessons of the subject, particularly as

connected with the dramatic art, shall close this unwelcome yet

indispensable chapter of the biography.

“It is impossible, my dear friend, that the wonderful change which has

taken place in men’s minds within the last ten years can have escaped

the notice of so acute an observer as you are; and if you have read the

works which the great men of Europe have given us within that time, you

have found they all tend to illustrate the great principle of progress,

and to show at the same time that for man to attain the high position

for which he is by nature fitted, woman must keep pace with him. Man

cannot be free if woman be a slave. You say, ‘The rights of woman,

whether as maid or wife, and all those notions, I utterly abhor.’ I do

not quite understand what you here mean by the rights of woman. You

cannot mean that she has none. The poorest and most abject thing of

earth has some rights. But if you mean the right to outrage the laws of

nature, by running out of her own sphere and seeking to place herself in

a position for which she is unfitted, then I perfectly agree with you.

At the same time, woman has as high a mission to perform in this world

as man has; and he never can hold his place in the ranks of progression

and improvement who seeks to degrade woman to a mere domestic animal.

Nature intended her for his companion, and him for hers; and without the

respect which places her socially and intellectually on the same

platform, his love for her personally is an insult.

“Again, you say, ‘A man loves her as much for her very dependence on him

as for her beauty or loveliness.’ (Intellect snugly put out of the

question.) This remark from you astonished me so much that I submitted

the question at once to Forrest, who instantly agreed with me that for

once our good friend was decidedly wrong. (Pardon the heresy, I only say

for once.) What! do you value the love of a woman who only clings to you

because she cannot do without your support? Why, this is what in nursery

days we used to call ‘cupboard love,’ and value accordingly. Depend upon

it, as a general rule, there would be fewer family jars if each were

pecuniarily independent of the other. With regard to mutual confidence,

I perfectly agree with you that it should exist; but for this there must

be mutual sympathy; the relative position of man and wife must be that

of companions,—not mastery on one side and dependence on the other.

Again, you say, ‘A wife, if she blame her husband for seeking after new

fancies, should examine her own heart, and see if she find not in some

measure justification for him.’ Truly, my dear friend, I think so too

(when we do agree, our unanimity is wonderful); and if after that self-

examination she finds the fault is hers, she should amend it; but if she

finds on reflection that her whole course has been one of devotion and

affection for him, she must even let matters take their course, and rest

assured, if he be a man of appreciative mind, his affection for her will

return. This is rather a degrading position; but a true woman has pride

in self-sacrifice. In any case, I do not think a woman should blame a

man for indulging in fancies. I think we discussed this once before, and

that I then said, as I do now, that he is to blame when these fancies

are degrading, or for an unworthy object; the last words I mean not to

apply morally, but intellectually. A sensible woman, who loves her

husband in the true spirit of love, without selfishness, desires to see

him happy, and rejoices in his elevation. She would grieve that he

should give the world cause to talk, or in any way risk the loss of that

respect due to both himself and her; but she would infinitely rather

that he should indulge ‘new fancies’ (I quote you) than lead an unhappy

life of self-denial and unrest, feeling each day the weight of his

chains become more irksome, making him in fact a living lie. This is

what society demands of us. In our present state we cannot openly brave

its laws; but it is a despotism which cannot exist forever; and in the

mean time those whose minds soar above common prejudice can, if such be

united, do much to make their present state endurable. It is a fearful

thing to think of the numbers who, after a brief acquaintance, during

which they can form no estimate of each other’s characters, swear

solemnly to love each other while they ‘on this earth do dwell.’ Men and

women boldly make this vow, as though they could by the magic of these

few words enchain forever every feeling and passion of their nature. It

is absurd. No man can do so; and society, as though it had made a

compact with the devil to make man commit more sins than his nature

would otherwise prompt, says, ‘Now you are fairly in the trap, seek to

get out, and we cast you off forever,—you and your helpless children.’

Man never was made to endure even such a yoke as unwise governments have

sought to lay on him; how much more galling, then, must be that which

seeks to bind the noblest feelings and affections of his nature, and

makes him—

‘So, with one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,

The dreariest and the longest journey go.’

“That there is any necessity to insure, by any means, a woman’s

happiness, is a proposition you do not seem to have entertained while

writing your letter of May 24th; but perhaps we are supposed to be happy

under all circumstances.”

There is for man and woman on this earth one supreme happiness, one

contenting fulfilment of destiny, whether there are more or not. It is a

pure, calm, holy, and impassioned love, joining them in one life,

filling both soul and body with a peaceful and rapturous harmony,

glorifying the scenery of nature by its reflection, making the current

of daily experience a stream of prophetic bliss, revealing to them

authentic glimpses of God in each other, and opening eternity to their

faith with mystic suggestions of worlds bygone and worlds to come, lives

already led and forgotten and lives yet to be welcomed. This is the one

absolute blessing, without whose appeasing and sufficing seal the human

creature pines for he knows not what, and dies unsatisfied, no matter

how much else is granted him. Any one to whom this divine fortune falls,

and whose conscience, instead of wearing it proudly as a crown of glory

in the sight of God, shrinks with it guiltily before the sight of men,

is a contemptible coward, unworthy of the boon, and sure to forfeit it.

As the most original thinker, the boldest diver into the mysteries of

our nature, America has produced, expresses it,—

“The sense of the world is short,

Long and various the report,

To love and be beloved.

Men and gods have not outlearned it,

And how oft soe’er they’ve turned it,

’Tis not to be improved.”

Thousands, enslaved by the conventional, distracted by the external,

absorbed in the trivial, may be ignorant of the incomparable importance

of the truth here expressed, care nothing about it, and give themselves

up to selfish ambitions and contemptible materialities. This must be so,

since the blind cannot see; and even the seeing eye sees in an object

only what it brings the means of seeing; and the marvellous heights and

depths of experience are fatally locked from the inexperienced.

Nevertheless, the truth above affirmed survives its overlooking by the

unworthy, and every man and woman gifted with profound insight and

sensibility knows it and feels it beyond everything else. The great

multitudes of society also have at least dim glimpses of it, strange

presentiments of it, blind intuitions awakening a strong and incessant

curiosity in that direction. This is the secret cause of the universal

interest felt in the subject of love and in every instance of its

transcendent experience or exemplification. One of the most central

functions of art—whether written romance, painting, sculpture, music, or

the drama—is directly or indirectly to celebrate this truth by giving it

concentrated and relieved expression, and thus inciting the

contemplators to aspire after their own highest bliss. To those whose

emotions are rich and quick enough to interpret them, what are the

finest songs of the composers but sighings for the fulfilment of

affection, or raptures in its fruition, or wailings over its loss? With

what unrivalled power Rubens, in his fearful pictures of love and war,

has uncovered to the competent spectator the horrible tragedy all

through history of the intimate association of lust and murder,

libidinous passion and death! And pre-eminently the stage, in all its

forms,—tragic, comic, and operatic,—has ever found, and always will

find, its most fascinating employment and crowning mission in the open

display—published to those who have the keys to read it, veiled from all

who have not—of the varied bewitchments, evasions, agonies, and

ecstasies of the passion of love between the sexes. That is the most

effective actor or actress whose gamut of emotional being and

experience, real and ideal, is greatest, and whose training gives

completest command of the apparatus of expression, making the organism a

living series of revelations, setting before the audience in visible

play, in the most precise and intense manner, the working of love, in

all its kinds and degrees, through the language of its occult signals.

The competent actor shows to the competent gazer the exact rank and

quality of the love actuating him by the adjustment of his behavior to

it,—every look and tone, every changing rate and quality in the rhythm

of his motions, every part of his body which leads or dominates in his

bearing, whether head, shoulder, chest, elbow, hand, abdomen, hip, knee,

or foot, having its determinate significance. Thus people are taught to

discern grades of character through styles of manners, inspired to

admire the noble and loathe the base at the same time that they are

deepened in their own desires for the divine prizes of beauty and joy.

The most wholesome and triumphant art of the stage has always taught in

its personifying revelation that the highest blessedness of human life

is the perfect attunement of the natures of man and woman in a perfect

love around which nature thrills and over which God smiles. No diviner

lesson ever has been or ever will be taught on this earth. All other

fruitions here are but preliminaries to this, all sacrifices penances

for its failure, all diseases and crimes the fruit of its violation.

In contrast with this glorious proper fulfilment of affection, wherever

we look on the history of our race we find six great chronic tragedies

which dramatic art has portrayed perhaps even more fully than it has the

positive triumph itself.

First, is the tragedy of the indifferent heart which neither receives

nor gives nor possesses love. Thin and sour natures, frivolous, dry,

cynical, or hard and arrogant,—the enchanted charms and mysteries of

nature and humanity have no existence for them. They sit aloof and

sneer, or plot and struggle and get money and win office, or eat and

drink and joke and sleep and perish,—the amazing horrors and the

entrancing delights of experience equally sealed books to them. They may

attain incidental trifles, but, with their poor, shrivelled, loveless

hearts, not attaining that for which man most was made, to the sorrowing

gaze of nobler natures their earthly lot is a tragedy.

Secondly, is the pathetic tragedy of being loved without the power to

return it. Coquetry, which has strewn its way everywhere with ravaged

and trampled prizes, reverses this, and without sympathy or principle

seeks to elicit and attract affection merely to pamper vanity and

gratify an obscene love of power; and this too is a tragedy, but one of

a fiendish import. The other is a sad and painful experience, yet with

something of an angelic touch in it. It seems to hint at a great

dislocation somewhere in the past of our race, causing this plaintive

discord of conjoined but jarring souls, whose incongruous rhythms can

never blend though in juxtaposition, like an ill-matched span whose

paces will not coincide but still hobble and interfere. To be the

recipient of a great absorbing love which one is absolutely unable to

reciprocate is to any one of generous sympathies a keen sorrow.

Sometimes too it is a sharp and wearing annoyance. And yet it is not

infrequent, both out of wedlock and in it. There are limits alike of

adaptation and of misadaptation to awaken love; and we can never have

any more love than we awaken or give any more than is awakened in us.

There are fatalities in these relations wholly beyond the reach of the

will. When two persons are married whose characters, culture, and

fitnesses place them on such different levels that they can meet only by

a laborious ascent on one side or a distasteful descent on the other,

where the ideal life of one is constantly hurt and baffled and flung in

on itself from every attempt at genial fellowship, any high degree of

love is hopeless. The conjunction is a yoke, not a partnership. Respect,

gratitude, pity, service, almost every quality except love, may be

earned. But love comes, if it come at all, spontaneously, in answer to

the native signals which evoke it. In vain do we strive to love one not

suited to us nor fitted for us; and a sensitive spirit forced to receive

the affectionate manifestations of such a one is often sorely tried when

seemingly bound to appear blessed.

The same considerations apply with double weight and poignancy to the

third and larger class of tragedies of affection, namely, those who love

where they are not acceptable and cannot win a return. Piteous indeed is

the lot, touching the sight, of one humbly offering his worship,

patiently continuing every tender care and service at a shrine which,

despite every effort to change or disguise its insuperable repugnance,

must still feel repugnant. And then, furthermore, there is the anguish

of the homage welcomed at first and toyed with, but soon betrayed and

cast away. The pangs of jilted love are proverbial, and the experience

is one of the commonest as it is one of the cruellest in the world.

Broken hearts, blasted lives, early deaths, terrible struggles of

injured pride and sacred sentiment to conceal themselves and hold

bravely up, caused by failures to secure the hand of the one devotedly

beloved but idly entreated, are much more numerous than is imagined by

the superficial humdrum world. They are in reality so numerous that if

they were all known everybody not familiar with the poetic side and

shyer recesses of human nature would be astonished. This forms a heavy

item in the big statistics of human woe.

The examples contained under the head of the fourth tragedy are the

experiences of those who are full of rich affections but find no

congenial person on whom to bestow them or from whom to obtain a return.

Accordingly, their real passions find only ideal vents in fervent

longings and dreams, in music, prayer, and faith, or embodiment in

industry and beneficence. Their unfulfilled affection thus either

fortifies their being with the culture and good works it prompts, or

opens an imaginative world into which they exhale away in romantic

desires. A noble woman whose rare wealth and effusiveness of soul had

not been happily bestowed, once said, with a sigh, to Thackeray, when

they had been conversing of the extremes in the character of the great

Swift, “I would gladly have suffered his brutality to have had his

tenderness.” The remark pierces us with a keen and wide pain expanding

to brood in pity over the vast tragedy of humanity pining unsatisfied in

every age. Yes, exhalations of sinless and ardent desire, yearnings of

beautiful and baffled passion, are wasted in the air, sufficient, if

they were legitimately appropriated, to make the whole world a heaven.

Ah, let us trust that they are not wasted after all, but that they enter

into the air to make it warmer and sweeter for the breathing of the

happier generations to come, when the earth shall be purely peopled with

children begotten by pairs all whose rhythms correspond, and who love

the individuality of self in one another not less because they love the

universality of God in one another more.

The fifth tragedy in the history of human affection consists of the

instances of those who have been blessed with an adequate love rounded

and fulfilled on both sides, but who have ceased to possess it longer,

except in its results. They have in some cases outgrown and wearied of

their objects, in others been outgrown and wearied of, in others still

been parted by death. These examples likewise are tragic each in its

way, but less melancholy on the whole than the others. These have had

fruition, have, once at least, lived. The memory is divine. If they are

worthy, it enriches and sanctifies their characters, and, in its

treasures of influence, remains to be transferred from its exclusive

concentration on one and freely poured forth on humanity, nature, and

God. It then prepares its possessor for that immortal future of which it

is itself an upholding prophecy. And so every deep and tender nature

must feel with the poet that it is better to have loved and lost than

never to have loved at all.

But the sixth tragedy of love is the most lacerating and merciless of

the whole, and that is the tragedy of jealousy. This dire passion played

the most ravaging part in the domestic life of Forrest, and his

enactment of it in the rôle of Othello held the highest rank in his

professional career. It has also exercised a most extensive and awful

sway in the entire history of the human race up to this moment. The

relative place and function of the dramatic and lyric stage cannot be

appreciated without a full appreciation of this hydra passion, the

green-eyed monster that makes the meat it feeds on.

Even of its victims few clearly understand the ingredients and essence

of jealousy. In the catalogue of the passions it is the impurest, the

insanest, and the most murderous. Every composition whose elements blend

in harmony is pure. Earth is pure and honey is pure, but a mixture of

earth and honey is impure. So in moral subjects. Loyalty is pure, being

consonantly composed of reverence and obedience; conscious disloyalty is

impure, being inconsonantly composed of a perception of rightful

authority and rebellious resistance to it. Now, no other passion is

composed of such an intense and incongruous combination of intense

opposites as jealousy. In it love and hate, esteem and scorn, trust and

suspicion, hope and fear, joy and pain, swiftly alternate or

discordantly mix and conflict. It is these meeting shocks of

contradictory polarities repulsing or penetrating one another in the

soul, rending and exploding in every direction in the consciousness of

its victim, that make jealousy the maddest and most slaughterous because

it is the most violently impure passion known to man. In every one of

its forms, when strong enough, it is a begetter of murders, has been

ever since the devil first peered on Adam and Eve embracing in Paradise,

and will be until it is abolished by slowly-advancing disinterestedness.

It is an appalling fact that the murders of wives by jealous husbands

are tenfold greater in number than any other single class of murders.

When we add to these the husbands murdered by their wives, and the

despatched paramours on both sides, the wild and deadly raging of

jealousy may be recognized in something of its frightful fury.

The cause of the greater prevalence of murder between the married is not

far to seek. It is the weariness of an over-close and continual

intimacy, with the wearing and goading irritations it engenders. It is

the tyrannical assertion of the possession of one by the other as

something owned and to be governed. This provokes the rebellious and

revengeful instincts of a personality aching to be free; and the

aggravated and ruminating desire is finally so nourished and stung as to

burst into frenzied performance. And those ill-starred couples one of

whose members violently destroys the life of the other are insignificant

in number when compared with those who are slowly and stealthily

murdered without the explicit consciousness of either party, by the

gnawing shock and fret of discordant nerves, the steady grinding out of

the very springs and sockets of the faculties by repressive contempt and

hate and fear. A proud, sensitive woman may go into the presence of her

husband an angel, and leave it a fiend, her _amour-propre_ having been

wounded in its sacredest part and filled with irrepressible resentment.

Persons of genius, of absorbing devotion to an aim, are either more

unhappy in wedlock or else more exquisitely blessed and blessing than

others. They live largely in an ideal realm, on a ticklish level of

self-respect, a height of consciousness vital to them. Socrates, Cicero,

Dante, Milton, Chateaubriand, Byron, Bulwer, Kean, Talma, Thackeray,

Dickens, are examples. A collision jars the statue off its pedestal. A

tone of contempt or a look of indifference cuts like a dagger, tears the

spiritual tissues of selfhood,—and the invisible blood of the soul

follows, draining faith, love, life itself, away. The one vast secret of

pleasing and living happily with high sensitive natures is sympathetic

and deferential attention. Where this is not given, and there is sorrow

and chafing, an intercourse which is ever a slow moral murder, and often

inflamed into a swift physical murder, that liberty of divorce should be

granted for which the chaste and noble Milton so long ago made his plea.

Society should cease to say, Whom man has joined together let not God

put asunder!

Having seen what the constituent elements of jealousy are, it now

remains to probe its essence. What is jealousy in its substance and

action? It is the appropriation of one person by another as a piece of

property, and a spontaneous resentment and resistance to any assertion

of its personality on its own part. The jealous man virtually says, “She

belongs to me and not to herself. If she dares to alienate herself from

me or give anything to anybody besides me, I will kill her.” The jealous

woman says, “He is mine, and if he leaves me or smiles on another I will

stab him and poison her.” This is the fell passion in its fiercest

extreme of selfishness.

Viewed in another light it is less dreadful, though just as narrow and

selfish. The lover has assimilated the beloved as a portion of his own

being. His life seems bound up in her and dependent on her. Her

withdrawal is a loss so impoverishing to his imagination that it

threatens death. He feels that the dissolution of their unity will tear

him asunder. Then jealousy is his instinct of self-preservation, rising

in grief, pain and anger to repel or revenge an attack on the dearest

part of his life. Still, in this form as in the previous it implies the

subdual and suppression of one personality by another, and is the sure

signal of a crude character and an imperfect development. The rich,

generous nature, detached from himself, full of free affection, living

directly on objects according to their worth, ready to react on every

action according to its intrinsic claim, is not jealous. Liberty and

magnanimity at home and abroad are the marks of the fully-ripened man.

He knows his own personal sovereignty and abundant resources as a child

of God and an heir of the universe, and frankly allows the equal

personal sovereignty of each of his fellow-creatures. He claims and

grants no imposition of will or slavish subserviency, but seeks only

spontaneous companionship in affection. Mechanical conformity and

hypocrisy can be compelled. Love, veiled in its divinity, comes and goes

as it lists, and is everywhere the most authentic envoy of the Creator.

Jealousy is mental slavery, spiritual poverty, the ravenous cry of

affectional starvation, the blind, fallacious, desperate, murderous

struggle of a frightened and famishing selfhood.

The conduct dictated by such a passion must be of the worst kind. It

begins with a mean espionage and ends with a maniacal violence. Its

relentless cruelty compels its objects to have recourse to the most

unprincipled methods to avert its suspicion and avoid its wrath, sinking

self-respect and honorable frankness in hypocrisy and fraud. Why is the

word or even the oath of any man or woman in regard to a question of

chastity or fidelity to the marriage vow almost universally considered

perfectly worthless? It is because the penalties of dereliction on the

part of woman are so intolerable, so much worse than death, that to

secure escape from them the social conscience justifies means which the

social code condemns. Accordingly, we see the highest personages, the

greatest dignitaries and popular favorites, go into court and openly

perjure themselves, while society cries bravo! The woman is so fearfully

imperilled that for her rescue the fashionable standard of honor

sustains deliberate perjury, the debauching of religious conscience on

the very shrine of public authority.

This wicked social exculpation of the male and immolation of the female

is a lingering accompaniment of the historic evolution of man, the

survival in human civilization of the selfish instincts which in the

lower ranks of the animal kingdom cause the stronger to drive away the

weaker and monopolize the weakest. Among the most potent and fearless

beasts the male, seeing any other male sportively inclined, is seized

with a frenzy to kill him and appropriate the object. Animal man has the

same instinct, and it has smeared the entire course of history with

broad trails of blood and victimized womanhood by the double weapons of

force and fear. The spectacle of the harem of one man with a thousand

imprisoned women guarded by eunuchs tells the whole story. But surely

when human beings, no longer remaining mere instinctive animals, become

free personalities, lords of thought and sentiment, each with a separate

individual responsibility distinctly conscious and immortal, they should

govern themselves by spontaneous choice from within and not be coerced

by an artificial terror applied from without.

The method in history of giving the strongest males possession of the

females is no doubt the mode in which nature selects and exalts her

breeds. But as society refines it will be seen that the strength of

brute instinct, the strength of position, the strength of money, the

strength of every artificial advantage, should be put aside in favor of

the diviner strength of genius, goodness, beauty, moral and physical

completeness of harmony. Freedom would secure this as compulsion

prevents it. Man is destined to outgrow the destructive monopolizing

passion of jealousy native to his animality. This is shown by his

capacity for chivalry, which is a self-abnegating identification of his

personality with the personalities of others, not merely freeing them

from his will, but aiding them to secure their own happiness in their

own way.

The effort to suppress free choice by the use of terror has been tried

terribly enough and long enough. It has always proved an utter failure,

viewed on any large scale. Has the awful penalty affixed to any

deviation from the prescribed legal method of sexual relations wholly

prevented such deviation? It has often led to concealment and

duplicity,—two lives carried on at once, a life of demure conformity in

public, a life of passionate fulfilment in secret. The well-understood

sacrifice of truth to appearance has ever served to inflame the mistrust

and swell the vengeance of the jealous. The only real remedy will be

found in perfect truth, frankness, and justice. In regard to the

personal autonomy of the affections, woman should be raised to the same

status and be tried by the same code as man. That code should not be as

now the legacy of the brutish and despotic past, but the achievement of

a scientific morality, those laws of universal order which express the

will of the Creator, the collective harmony of Nature. Since the unions

of the sexes are of all grades and qualities, all degrees of impurity

and beastliness or of purity and sacredness, the parties to them cannot

be justly judged by a single rigid rule of external technicality, and

ought not to be sealed with one unvarying approval of respectable or

branded with one monotonous stigma of illicit. They should be judged by

the varying facts in the case as they are in the sight of God; and when

those facts are not known in their true merits there is no competency or

right to judge the man or the woman at all. The present judgments of

society unquestionably ought in many cases to be reversed. For example,

it is to be said that the women who consort with men they loathe, and

against their will breed children infected with ferocious passions and

diseased tendencies, no matter how regularly they are married or how

proud their social position, should be condemned or rescued. Also it is

to be said that persons filled with a true and divine love, whether

sanctioned or unsanctioned by conventional usages, claim to be left to

the inherent moral reactions of their acts, and to the unprejudiced

judgments of the competent. This central truth, compromise whom it may,

and encompassed with delicacies and with difficulties as it may be, is

to be firmly maintained, although Pecksniff and Grundy shriek at it

until the whole continent quivers.

The distinction of love and freedom from lust and license is obvious,

and the unleashing of the latter in the disguise of the former cannot be

too vehemently deprecated. But that a man or a woman may cherish in the

wedded state an impure and detestable passion, or outside of it know a

heavenly one, is a truth which can be denied only by a character of

odious vulgarity. The rank and worth of a love are to be estimated by

its moral and religious quality in the sight of God and its natural

influence on character. To estimate it otherwise, as is usually done, is

to violate morality and religion with conventionality, and in place of

nature, sincerity and truth install arbitrary artifice, hypocrisy and

falsehood. The grand desiderata in all relationships of affection are,

first, the observance of open truth and honor, second, the recognition

of their varying grades of intrinsic nobleness and charm or intrinsic

foulness and criminality, and the treatment of the parties to them

accordingly. Meanwhile, the frank and clear discussion of the subject is

imperatively needed. The double system hitherto in vogue of at once

enforcing ignorance and stimulating prurience by banishing the subject

from confessed attention and study into the two regions of

shamefacedness and obscenity has wrought immeasurable evil. For the

sexual passion, morbidly excited by nearly all the influences of

society, and then mercilessly repressed by public opinion, has a morbid

development which breaks out in those monstrous forms of vice which are

the open sores of civilization. Take away the inflaming lures of mystery

and denial—shed the clear, cold light of scientific knowledge on the

facts of the case and the principles properly regulative of conduct—and

the passion will gradually become moderate and wholesome. Science has

brought region after region of human life under the light and guidance

of its benign methods. The region of the personal affections in society

and the procreation of posterity, being most obstinately held by

passions and prejudices, longest resists the application of impartial,

fearless study to the usages imposed by traditional authority. The

consistent doing of this will be one of the greatest steps ever taken.

It will break the historic superstition that the conjunction of a pair

married in seeming by a priest is necessarily holier than that of a pair

married in reality by God, destroy the stupid prejudice which makes in

the affectional relations of the sexes only the one discrimination that

they are in or out of wedlock, and remove the cruel social ban which

renders it impossible for straightforward sincerity of affection and

honesty of speech to escape the dishonor which double-facedness of

passion and duplicity of word and deed so easily shoulder aside. And

when this is done, much will have been done to inaugurate the better era

for which the expectation of mankind waits.

The principal reason why the married so frequently experience satiety

and weariness, and the consequent sting of a foreign hunger provocative

of the wandering which gives occasion for jealousy, is that in their

long and close familiarity the partners come to feel that they have seen

all through and all around each other, have exhausted each other of all

fresh charm, piquancy, and interest. The genuine remedy for this, the

only really adequate and enduring remedy, is the recognition in each

other of the infinite mystery of all conscious being, a free personality

on endless probation and destined for immortal adventures. Then each

will be to the other—what every human being intrinsically is—a

concentrated epitome of the Kosmos and an explicit revelation of God.

There is no revelation of the free conscious God except in the free

conscious creature, and in every such being there is one. Let a pair be

worthy to see and feel this truth, and there can be no exhaustion of

their mutual interest, because before their reverential observation

there can be no end to the surprises of the infinite in the finite. Then

the sweetness, the wonder, the varying lure of love will never wither

and die into indifference, nor roil and perturb into jealousy and

madness.

No doubt to many these views will seem a transcendental romance, a

delusive dream. Not every one has the nature finely touched to fine

issues capable of living in the ether of these ideal heights. But there

_are_ on the earth holy and entranced souls who live there. It is

obvious enough how absurdly inapplicable all this class of

considerations must be to the basest kinds of persons, those who, like

brutes, wallow in styes of sensuality, or, like devils, surrender

themselves to the tyranny of the lowest passions. Such must needs be

relegated to an inferior standard. Those whose consciences are coarser

and lower than the code of society may most properly be held in

subjection by its laws. But those whose consciences are purer and higher

than the current social code, the nobler natures who sincerely aspire to

the fulfilment of their destiny as children of God, should be a law unto

themselves. They will not be tyrants over or spies upon one another.

Full of self-respect and mutual respect, owning the indefeasible

sovereignty of each personality in the offices of its individual being,

they will pass and repass shrouded in transparent royalty, exacting no

subjection, making no inquiries.

And now this long and central chapter in the life of Forrest, with the

essential lessons it has for others, may be ended by a brief statement

of the moral scale of degrees in the conduct of different men under the

provoking conditions of jealousy.

One man detects the woman to whom he is legally united, but whom he

hates and loathes, in criminal relations with another. He takes an axe,

chops them in pieces, then sets the house on fire, and, cutting his own

throat, falls into the flames. In other cases his insane fury satiates

itself with a single victim, the man or the woman, as caprice dictates.

This is crazy ferocity, making its subject first a maniac, then a tiger,

then a devil. Has not humanity by its smothered approval too long kept

the diabolical horror of this style of behavior recrudescent?

Another mournful and shocking form of this tragedy there is. And it is a

form repeated far more frequently in its essential features than ever

comes to the open light of day. A man of a sombre, vivid, and proud

nature, possessed with a passion so absorbing that it sways his being

with tidal power, awakens to the fact that the love he thought all his

own has wandered elsewhere. His heart stands still and his brain reels.

His love is too true and deep to change. To injure her is as impossible

as to restrain himself. He says not a word, makes not a sign, but his

sad, dark purpose is fixed. He leaves directions that no questions be

asked, no public notice taken of him or of his fate further than the

most modest funeral, and that a plain stone be reared over him with the

single word, _Infelicissimus_. Then a pistol-ball in his heart closes

the throbbing of an agony too great to be borne. The suicide is the

pathetic slave of his passion. Surely for such there must be a sequel in

some choicer world, where the tangled plot will be cleared up and the

soul not be thus helplessly self-entangled.

In the third case, a husband, receiving proof of the infidelity of his

honored and trusted wife, in a furious revulsion of scorn and

detestation thrusts her into the street, proclaims her offence

everywhere, and seeks release and redress in a public court. This is one

form of the average of social feeling and conduct in such a case. It is

the common spirit of revenge cloaked in justice. It may not be thought

base, but it cannot be called noble.

In still another example the jealous man is now enraged and now

distressed with conflicting impulses to revenge and to pardon. First he

storms and threatens, then he weeps and entreats; now, he strides up and

down, tearing his hair, crying and sobbing; and now he rushes out and

confides his misery, begging for sympathy and counsel. And whether he

condones or dismisses the offender depends on her own policy. This

course, ruled by no principle, is a mess of incoherent impulse, raw and

childish, a manner of proceeding of which, although it is so common, any

grown-up and well-conditioned man should be ashamed.

In the next instance we see the man, on learning his misfortune in

losing the exclusive affection of her whom alone he has loved, staggered

by the blow, smitten to the heart with grief, flung upon himself in

recoiling anguish. But, to shield her from disgrace, and to avoid shame

to himself and scandal to the public, he keeps the secret sacredly;

ending, however, all marriage intimacy, their lives henceforth a mere

contiguity of ice and gloom until death. This is another expression of

the average level of men and style of social feeling, not lower, not

much higher, than might be expected.

A greatly superior example, finer and braver, comparatively rare,

perhaps, yet with a larger list of performers than many would suppose,

is where the fault is frankly confessed and freely forgiven, just as

other faults are, or the deed justified and accepted on the ground of an

integral affection and an approving conscience willing with courageous

openness to take every consequence. There is valor, dignity,

consistency, force of character in this. It is impossible for persons of

low animal instincts or where there is treachery and lying.

But the highest degree of chivalry under such circumstances is that

exemplified by the man who, cleansed from the foul and cruel usages of

the past, freed from the taints of the tyrannical masculine selfhood,

does what man has so rarely done, but what multitudes of women have

often done. He shows a love so pure and exalted that it subordinates his

selfhood and blends his happiness in that of the beloved object. For her

well-being he is willing to stand aside and yield up every claim. Is

such generosity beyond the limit of human nature? It may be beyond the

limit of _historic_ human nature, trailing the penalties of the past. It

is not beyond the limit of _prophetic_ human nature, carrying the

purposes of God.

No doubt some barrier at present is necessary; and society has a right

to give the law, from insight, but not from despotism. Monogamic union

is the true relation, and its vow should not be broken by either party.

But if it _is_ broken the social penalty should be the same for man as

for woman. In such case the parties should either condone or separate

without furious controversy or personal revenge. Truth and fitness

should be set above conventionality and prejudice, and frankness remove

hypocrisy. Such alone is the teaching of this chapter, which invokes the

pure, steady light of science to shine on the facts of sex, cleanse

foulness out, and bring the code of society into unison with the code of

God.