OUTER AND INNER LIFE OF THE MAN.
The external life of Forrest from the close of his first engagement
after the divorce trial to the year 1869—the period stretching from his
forty-sixth to his sixty-third year—was largely but the continual
repetition of his old triumphs, varied now and then with some fresh
professional glory or new personal adventure. To recite the details of
his travels and theatrical experiences would be to make a monotonous
record of popular successes without any important significance or
general interest. A brief sketch of the leading incidents of this period
is all that the reader will care to have.
The immense publicity and circulation given to the sensational reports
of the long-drawn legal warfare between Forrest and his wife in their
suits against each other added to his great fame a still greater
notoriety, which enhanced public curiosity and drew to the theatre
greater crowds than ever whenever he played. From Portland and Boston to
Cincinnati and St. Louis, from Buffalo and Detroit to Charleston and New
Orleans, the announcement of his name invariably brought out an
overwhelming throng. The first sight of his person on the stage was the
signal for wild applause. At the close of the performance he was often
called before the curtain and constrained to address the assembly, and
then on retiring to his hotel was not unfrequently followed by band and
orchestra and complimented with a serenade.
The ranks of his enemies, reinforced with the malevolent critics or
Bohemians whom he would not propitiate by any favor, social or
pecuniary, continued to fling at him and annoy him in every way they
could. But while their pestiferous buzzing and stinging made him sore
and angry, it did not make him unhappy. His enormous professional
success and broad personal following prevented that. One example of his
remarkable public triumphs may stand to represent scores. It was the
last night of a long and most brilliant engagement in New York. The
“Forrest Light Guard,” in full uniform, occupied the front seats of the
parquet. No sooner had the curtain fallen on the performance of
Coriolanus than the air grew wild with the prolonged shouts of “Forrest!
Forrest!” At last he came forth, and the auditory, rising en masse,
greeted him with stormy plaudits. “Speech! speech!” they cried. He
responded thus:
“I need not tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that I am gratified to
see this large assemblage before me; and I have an additional
gratification when I remember that among my troops of friends I have
now a military troop who have done me the honor to grace my name by
associating it with their soldier-like corps. This night, ladies and
gentlemen, ends my labors _inside_ of the theatre for the season. I
call them labors, for no one who has not experienced the toil of
acting such parts as I have been called upon nightly to present to
you, can have any idea of the labor, both mental and physical,
required in the performance of the task. They who suppose the
actor’s life to be one of comparative ease mistake the fact
egregiously. My experience has shown me that it is one of
unremitting toil. In no other profession in the world is high
eminence so difficult to reach as in ours. This proposition becomes
evident when you remember how many of rare talents and
accomplishments essay to mount the histrionic ladder, and how very
few approach its topmost round. My earliest ambition was distinction
upon the stage; and while yet a mere child I shaped my course to
reach the wished-for goal. I soon became aware that distinction in
any vocation was only to be won by hard work and by an unfailing
self-reliance. And I resolved
‘with such jewels as the exploring mind
Brings from the caves of knowledge, to buy my ransom
From those twin jailers of the daring heart,
Low birth and iron fortune.’
I resolved to educate myself; not that education only which belongs
to the schools, and which is often comprised in a knowledge of mere
words, but that other education of the world which makes words
things. I resolved to educate myself as Garrick, and Kemble, and
Cooke, and, last and greatest of all, Edmund Kean, had done. As he
had done before me, I educated myself. The self-same volume from
which the Bard of Avon drew his power of mastery lay open before me
also,—the infallible volume of Nature. And in the pages of that
great book, as in the pages of its epitome, the works of Shakspeare,
I have conned the lessons of my glorious art. The philosopher-poet
had taught me that
‘The proper study of mankind is man;’
and, in pursuit of this study, I sojourned in Europe, in Asia, in
Africa, as well as in the length and in the breadth of our own proud
Republic. To catch the living lineaments of passion, I mixed with
the prince and with the potentate, with the peasant and with the
proletary, with the serf and with the savage. All the glorious works
of Art belonging to the world, in painting and in sculpture, in
architecture and in letters, I endeavored to make subservient to the
studies of my calling. How successful I have been I leave to the
verdict of my fellow-countrymen,—my fellow-countrymen, who, for a
quarter of a century, have never denied to me their suffrages.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have spoken thus much not to indulge in any
feeling of pride, nor to gratify any sentiment of egotism, but I
have done so in the hope that the words which I have uttered here
to-night may be the means, perhaps, of inspiring in the bosom of
some young enthusiast who may hereafter aspire to the stage a
feeling of confidence. Some poor and friendless boy, perchance,
imbued with genius, and with those refined sensibilities which are
inseparably connected with genius, may be encouraged not to falter
in his path for the paltry obstacles flung across it by envy,
hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness. Let him rather, with a
vigorous heart, buckle on the armor of patient industry, with his
own discretion for his tutor, and then, with an unfaltering step,
despising the malice of his foes,
‘climb
The steep where Fame’s proud temple shines afar.’”
A shower of bravos broke out, bouquets were thrown upon the stage, and
the actor slowly withdrew, crowned with the applauses of the people like
a victorious Roman in the Capitol.
As the years passed on, Forrest came to take an ever keener interest in
accumulating wealth. A good deal of his time and thought was devoted to
the nursing of his earnings. He showed great shrewdness in his
investments, which, with scarcely a single exception, turned out
profitably. He was prudent and thrifty in his ways, but not parsimonious
or mean. He lived in a handsome, generous style, without ostentation or
extravagance, keeping plenty of servants, horses, and carriages, and a
table generous in wholesome fare but sparing of luxuries. This love of
money, and pleasure in amassing it, though it became a passion, as, with
his bitter early experience of poverty and constant lessons of the evils
of improvidence, it was natural that it should, did not become a vice or
a disease; for it never prevented his full and ready response to every
claim on his conscience or on his sympathy. And within this limit the
love of accumulation is more to be praised than blamed. In final
refutation of the gross injustice which so often during his life charged
upon him the vice of a grasping penuriousness, a few specimens of his
deeds of public spirit and benevolence—not a list, but a few specimens—
may fitly be recorded here. To the fund in aid of the Democratic
campaign which resulted in the election of Buchanan as President he sent
his check for one thousand dollars. He gave the like sum to the first
great meeting in Philadelphia at the outbreak of the war for the defence
of the Union. In 1867, when the South was in such distress from the
effects of the war, he gave five hundred dollars to the treasurer of a
fund in their behalf, saying, “God only knows the whole suffering of our
Southern brethren. Let us do all we can to relieve them, not stopping to
question what is _constitutional_; for charity itself fulfils the law.”
He subscribed five hundred dollars towards the relief of the sufferers
by the great Chicago fire in 1871. The ship “Edwin Forrest” being in
distress on the coast, the towboat “Ajax,” from New York, went to her
assistance, having on board three pilots. The “Ajax” was never heard of
afterwards. To the widows of the three lost pilots Forrest, unsolicited,
sent one thousand dollars each. On two separate occasions he is known to
have sent contributions of five hundred dollars to the Masonic Charity
Fund of the New York Grand Lodge. These acts, which were not
exceptional, but in keeping with his nature and habit, are not the acts
of an unclean slave of avarice. The jealousy too often felt towards the
rich too often incites groundless fault-finding.
It is true that an absorbing passion for truth, for beauty, for
humanity, for perfection, is more glorious and commanding than even the
most honorable chase of riches. But it is likewise true that reckless
idlers and spendthrifts are a greater curse to society, breed worse
evils, than can be attributed to misers. Self-indulgence, dependence,
distress, contempt, the worst temptations, and untimely death, follow
the steps of thriftlessness. Self-denial, foresight, industry, manifold
power of usefulness, wait on a well-regulated purpose to secure
pecuniary independence. Money represents the means of life,—the command
of the best outer conditions of life,—food, shelter, education, culture
in every direction. In itself it is a good, and the fostering of the
virtues adapted to win it is beneficial alike to the individual and the
community, despite the enormous evils associated with the excessive or
unprincipled pursuit of it. Sharp and exacting as he was, the absolute
honesty and honor of Forrest in all pecuniary dealings were so high
above suspicion that they were never questioned. Although often
wrongfully accused of a miserly and sordid temper, he never was accused
of falsehood or trickery. The large fortune he obtained was honorably
earned, liberally used, and at last nobly bestowed. He had a good right
to the deep, vivid satisfaction and sense of power which it yielded him.
His fortune was to him a huge supplementary background of support, a
wide border of the means of life surrounding and sustaining his
immediate life.
An extract from a letter written by him to his biographer may fitly be
cited to complete what has been said above. Under date of August 28th,
1870, he wrote. “The desire I had for wealth was first fostered only
that I might be abler to contribute to the comforts of those whose veins
bore blood like mine, and to smooth the pathway to the grave of the
gentlest, the truest, the most unselfish friend I ever knew—my mother!—
and so, from this holy source, to widen the boundaries of all good and
charitable deeds,—to relieve the wants of friends less fortunate than
myself, and to succor the distressed wherever found. In early life, from
necessity, I learned to depend solely upon myself for my own sustenance.
This self-reliance soon gave me power in a small way to relieve the
wants of others, and this I never failed to do even to the extent of my
ability. So far did I carry this feeling for the distress of others that
I have frequently been forced to ask an advance of salary from the
theatre to pay the current expenses of my own frugal living. And this I
have done when in the receipt of eight thousand dollars a year. I have
been very, very poor; but in my whole life I have never from need
borrowed more than two hundred dollars in all. I have lent two thousand
times that sum, only an infinitesimal part of which was ever returned.”
In 1851 Forrest moved from New York to Philadelphia, and took his three
sisters to live with him. But he paid frequent visits to his romantic
castle on the Hudson. During one of these visits an incident occurred
which presents him to the imagination in real life in a light as
picturesque and sensational as many of those scenes of fiction on the
stage in which he had so often thrilled the multitude who beheld him.
The steamboat “Henry Clay,” plying on the Hudson between New York and
Albany, when opposite Fonthill was suddenly wrapt in flames by an
explosion of its boiler, and sunk with a crowd of shrieking passengers.
The New York “Mirror” of the next day said, “We are informed that while
the unfortunate wretches were struggling, Edwin Forrest, who was then at
his castle, seeing their condition, rushed down to the river, jumped in,
and succeeded in rescuing many from a watery grave, as well as in
recovering the bodies of several who were drowned.”
In 1856 Forrest sold Fonthill to the Catholic Sisterhood of Mount Saint
Vincent, for one hundred thousand dollars. For the devout and beneficent
lives of the members of this order he had a profound reverence; and
immediately on completing the sale he made to the Mother Superior a
present of the sum of five thousand dollars. And so ended all the dreams
of domestic peace and bliss his fancy had woven on that enchanted spot,
still to be associated with memories of his career and echoes of his
name as long as its gray towers shall peer above the trees and be
descried from afar by the sailers on the lordly river below.
In 1857 Forrest received an unparalleled compliment from the State of
California. The Governor, Lieutenant-Governor, Secretary, Treasurer, and
Comptroller of the State, twenty-seven members of the Senate, with the
Secretary and Sergeant-at-Arms, the Speaker and forty-eight members of
the House of Representatives, sent him a letter of invitation to make a
professional visit to the Golden Coast. It read as follows:
“STATE CAPITOL, SACRAMENTO, April 20th, 1857.
“RESPECTED SIR,—The undersigned, State officers and members of the
Senate and Assembly, a small portion of your many admirers on the
coast of the Pacific, avail themselves of this, the only mode under
their control, of signifying to you the very high estimation, as a
gentleman and an actor, in which you are generally and universally
held by all who have a taste for the legitimate drama. Genuine taste
and rigid criticism have united with the verdict of impartial
history to pronounce you the head and leader of the noble profession
to which you have consecrated abilities that would in any sphere of
life render you eminent. We believe that so long as Shakspeare is
remembered, and his words revered, your name, too, will be
remembered with pride by all who glory in the triumphs of our Saxon
literature.
“In conclusion, permit us to express the hope that your existing
engagements will so far coincide with our wishes as to permit us, at
an early day, to welcome you to the shores of the Pacific, assuring
you of a warm and sincere reception, so far as our efforts can
accomplish the same, and we feel that we but express the feelings of
every good citizen of the State.”
To this he replied:
“PHILADELPHIA, July 10th, 1857.
“GENTLEMEN,—With a grateful pleasure I acknowledge your
communication of April 20th, delivered to me a short time since by
the hands of Mr. Maguire.
“Your flattering invitation, so generously bestowed and so
gracefully expressed, to enter the Golden Gate and visit your
beautiful land, is one of the highest compliments I have ever
received. It is an honor, I venture to say, that was never before
conferred on one of my profession.
“It comes not from the lovers of the drama or men of letters merely,
but from the Executive, the Representatives, and other high
officials of a great State of the American Confederacy; and I shall
ever regard it as one of the proudest compliments in all my
professional career.
“Believe me, I deeply feel this mark of your kindness, not as mere
incense to professional or personal vanity, but as a proud tribute
to that art which I have loved so well and have followed so long:
“‘The youngest of the Sister Arts,
Where all their beauty blends.’
“This art, permit me to add, from my youth I have sought personally
to elevate, and professionally to improve, more from the truths in
nature’s infallible volume than from the pedantic words of the
schools,—a volume open to all, and which needs neither Greek nor
Latin lore to be understood.
“And now, gentlemen, although I greatly regret that it is not in my
power to accept your invitation, I sincerely trust there will be a
time for such a word, when we may yet meet together under the roof
of one of those proud temples consecrated to the drama by the taste
and the munificence of your fellow-citizens.”
During the crisis of his domestic unhappiness—1849–1852—Forrest had
withdrawn from the stage for about two years. In 1856, stricken down
with a severe attack of gout and inflammatory rheumatism, wearied also
of his long round of professional labors, he retired into private life
for a period of nearly five years. He now devoted his time to the care
of his rapidly increasing wealth, and to the cultivation of his mind by
reading, studying works of art, and conversing with a few chosen
friends, leading, on the whole, a still and secluded life. At this time
an enthusiastic religious revival was going on in the city, and it was
reported that the tragedian had been made a convert. An old and dear
friend, the Rev. E. L. Magoon, wrote to him a very cordial letter
expressing the hope that this report was well founded. Here is the reply
of Forrest:
“PHILADELPHIA, March 27, 1858.
“I have much pleasure in the receipt of yours of the 23d instant.
“While I thank you and Mrs. Magoon with all my heart for the kind
hope you have expressed that the recent rumor with regard to my
highest welfare may be true, I am constrained to say the rumor is in
this, as in most matters which pertain to me, most pitifully in
error: there is not one word of truth in it.
“But in answer to your questions, my good friend,—for I know you are
animated only by a sincere regard for my spiritual as well as for my
temporal welfare,—I am happy to assure you that the painful attack
of inflammatory rheumatism with which for the last three months I
have combated is now quite overcome, and I think I may safely say
that with the return of more genial weather I shall be restored once
more to a sound and pristine health.
“Then, for the state of my mind. I do not know the time, since when
a boy I blew sportive bladders in the beamy sun, that it was ever so
tranquil and serene as in the present hour. Having profited by the
leisure given me by my lengthened illness seriously to review the
past and carefully to consider the future, both for time and for
eternity, I have with a chastened spirit beheld with many regrets
that there was much in the past that might have been improved; more,
perhaps, in the acts of omission than in acts of commission, for I
feel sustained that my whole conduct has been actuated solely by an
honest desire to adhere strictly to the rule of right; that the past
has been characterized, as I trust the future will be, to love my
friends, to hate my enemies,—for I cannot be a hypocrite,—and to
live in accordance with the Divine precept: ‘As ye would that men
should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.’
“And now for that ‘higher welfare’ of which you speak, I can only
say that, believing, as I sincerely do, in the justice, the mercy,
the wisdom, and the love of Him who knoweth the secrets of our
hearts, I hope I may with
‘An unfaltering trust approach my grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.’
“Hoping you are in the enjoyment of good health, and that you still
prosper in the ‘good work,’ which to you I know is a labor of love,
“I am your friend,
“EDWIN FORREST.”
At length, rested in mind and body, chastened in taste, sobered and
polished in style, but with no abatement of fire or energy, sought by
the public, solicited by friends, urged by managers, and impelled by his
own feelings, he broke from his long repose, and reappeared in New York
under circumstances as flattering as any that had ever crowned his
ambition. Niblo’s Garden was packed to its remotest corners with an
auditory whose upturned expanse of eager faces lighted with smiles and
burst into cheers as he slowly advanced and received a welcome whose
earnestness and unity might well have thrilled him with pride and joy.
The following lines, strong and eloquent as their theme, written for the
occasion by William Ross Wallace, contain perhaps the most truthful and
characteristic tribute ever paid to his genius, drawing the real contour
and breathing the express spirit of the man and the player.
EDWIN FORREST.
Welcome to his look of grandeur, welcome to his stately mien,
Always shedding native glory o’er the wondrous mimic scene,
Always like a mighty mirror glassing Vice or Virtue’s star,
Giving Time his very pressure, showing Nations as they are!
Once again old Rome—the awful—rears her red imperial crest,
And _Virginius_ speaks her downfall in a father’s tortured breast;
Once again far Albion’s genius from sweet Avon leans to view,
As he was, her thoughtful _Hamlet_, and the very _Lear_ she drew.
Nor alone does Europe glory in the Actor’s perfect art,—
From Columbia’s leafy mountains see the native hero start!
Not in depths of mere romances can you _Nature’s_ Indian find;
See him there, as God hath made him, in the _Metamora_ shrined.
Where hast thou, O noble Artist,—crowned by Fame’s immortal flower,—
Grasped the lightnings of thy genius? caught the magic of thy power?
Not, I know, in foreign regions,—for thou art too true and bold:
’Tis the _New_ alone gives daring thus to paint the shapes of _Old_:
From the deep full wind that sweepeth through thine own wild native
woods,
From the organ-like grand cadence heard in autumn’s solemn floods,
Thou hast tuned the voice that thrills us with its modulated roll,
Echoing through the deepest caverns of the hearer’s startled soul:
From the tender blossoms blooming on our haughty torrents’ side—
Like some angel sent by Pity, preaching gentleness to Pride—
Thou didst learn such tender bearing, hushing every listener’s breath,
When in thee poor _Lear_, the crownless, totters gently down to death:
From the boundless lakes and rivers, from our broad continuous climes,
Over which the bell of Freedom sounds her everlasting chimes,
Thou didst catch that breadth of manner; and to wreath the glorious
whole,
Sacred flames are ever leaping from thy democratic soul.
Welcome then that look of grandeur, welcome then that stately mien,
Always shedding native glory o’er the wondrous mimic scene,
Always like a mighty mirror glassing Vice or Virtue’s star,
Giving Time his very pressure, showing Nations as they are!
After a long absence from Albany, Forrest fulfilled an engagement there
in 1864. It carried his mind back to his early struggles in the same
place, though few of the kind friends who had then cheered him now
remained. There was no vacant spot, however, any more than there was any
loss of fervor. On the last night the audience—so crowded that “they
seemed actually piled on one another in the lobbies”—called him before
the curtain and asked for a speech. He said,—
“I am very glad, ladies and gentlemen, that an opportunity is thus
afforded me to say a few words, to thank you for your generous welcome
here, and also for the kind applause you have lavished on my
performances. In Albany I seem to live a twofold existence,—I live one
in the past, and I live one in the present,—and both alike are filled
with the most agreeable memories. Here, within these very walls, even in
my boyish days, I was cheered on to those inspiring toils
‘Which make man master men.’
Here, within these walls, while yet in my boyish days, one of the
proudest honors of my professional life was achieved; for I here essayed
the part of Iago to the Othello of the greatest actor that ‘ever lived
in the tide of times,’—Edmund Kean. To me there is music in the very
name,—Edmund Kean, a name blended indissolubly with the genius of
Shakspeare; Edmund Kean, who did more by his acting to illustrate the
Bard of all time than all the commentators from Johnson, Warburton, and
Steevens down to the critics of the present day. It was said of Edmund
Kean by a distinguished English poet, that ‘he read Shakspeare by
flashes of lightning.’ It is true; but those flashes of lightning were
the coruscations of his own divine mind, which was in affinity with the
mind of Shakspeare. Now I must beg leave to express my heartfelt thanks
for this demonstration of your favor, hoping at no distant day to meet
you again.”
Thus it is clear that, whatever the sufferings of Forrest may have been,
however many trials and pangs his growing experience of the world may
have brought him, he had great enjoyments still. Besides the proud
delight of his professional successes and the solid satisfaction of his
swelling property, he had an even more keen and substantial complacency
of pleasure in his own physical health and strength. His enormous vital
and muscular power supported a superb personal consciousness of joy and
contentment. He trod the earth like an indigenous monarch, afraid of
nothing. The dynamic charge, or rather surcharge, of his frame was often
so profuse that it would break out in wild feats of power to relieve the
aching muscles. For instance, one night when acting in the old Tremont
Theatre in Boston, under such an exhilarating impulse he struck his
sword against a wooden column at the side of the stage as he was passing
out, and cut into it to the depth of more than three inches. An
Englishman who sat near jumped from his seat in terror, and tremblingly
said, as he hastened out, “He is a damned brute. He is going to cut the
theatre down!” This full vigor of the organic nature, this vivid
relishing edge of unsatiated senses, yielded a constant feeling of
actual or potential happiness, and clothed him with an air of native
pride which was both attractive and authoritative. He had paid the price
for this great prize of an indomitable physique in systematic exercises
and temperance. He wore it most proudly and kept it intact until he was
fifty-nine years old. The lesson of his experience and example in
physical culture is well worth heeding.
The fashion of society in regard to the education and care of the body
has passed through three phases. The most extraordinary phase, in the
glorious results it secured, was the worship of bodily perfection among
the Greeks, a reflex revival of which was shown by the nobles and
knights at the period of the Renaissance. The Greek gymnastic of the age
of Pericles, as described by Plato so often and with such enthusiasm,—a
gymnastic in which music, instead of being an end in itself, a sensuous
luxury of the soul, was made a guide and adjunct to bodily training,
giving rhythm to every motion, or that grace and economy of force which
so much enhances both beauty and power,—lifted men higher in unity of
strength and charm of health and harmony of faculties than has anywhere
else been known. The Grecian games were made an ennobling and joyous
religious service and festival. The eager, emulous, patriotic, and
artistic appreciation of the spectators,—the wondrous strength, beauty,
swiftness, rhythmic motions, imposing attitudes of the athletes,—the
legends of the presence and contentions of the gods themselves on that
very spot in earlier times,—the setting up of the statues of the victors
in the temples as a worship of the Givers of Strength, Joy, and Glory,—
served to carry the interest to a pitch hardly to be understood by us.
The sculptures by Phidias which immortalize the triumph of Greek
physical culture show a harmony of the circulations, a compacted unity
of the organism, a central poise of equilibrium, a profundity of
consciousness and a fulness of self-control, a perfect blending of the
automatic and the volitional sides of human nature, which must have
exalted the Olympic victors at once to the extreme of sensibility and to
the extreme of repose. It is a million pities that this ideal should
ever have been lost. But in Rome, under the military drill and unbridled
license of the emperors, it degenerated into a brutal tyranny and
sensuality, the gigantic superiority of potency it generated being
perverted to the two uses of indulging self and oppressing others.
The next swing of the historic pendulum flung men, by the reaction of
spirituality, over to the fatal opposite,—the ecclesiastic contempt and
neglect of the body. The Christian ideal, or at least the Church ideal,
in its scornful revulsion from gladiators and voluptuaries, glorified
the soul at the expense of the loathed and mortified flesh. At the base
of this cultus was the ascetic superstition that matter is evil, that
the capacity for pleasure is an infernal snare, and that the only way to
heaven is through material maceration and renunciation. Sound philosophy
and religion teach, on the contrary, that the body is the temple of God,
to be developed, cleansed, and adorned to the highest degree possible
for His habitation.
The third phase in the history of bodily training is that neutral
condition, between the two foregoing extremes, which generally
characterizes the present period,—a state of almost universal
indifference, or a fitful alternation of unregulated attention to it and
neglect of it. The pedagogue gives his pupils some crude exercises to
keep them from utterly losing their health and breaking down on his
hands under the barbaric pressure of mental forcing; the drill-sergeant
disciplines his recruits to go through their technical evolutions; the
dancing-master trains the aspirants for the mysteries of the ballet; and
the various other classes of public performers who get their living by
playing on the curiosity, taste, or passion of the public, have their
specialities of bodily education for their particular work. But a
perfected system of æsthetic gymnastics, based on all that is known of
the laws of anatomy, physiology, and hygiene,—a system of exercises
regulated by the exactest rhythm and fitted to liberate every
articulation, to develop every muscle, and to harmonize and exalt every
nerve,—such a system applied from childhood to maturity for the purpose
not of making professional exhibitors of themselves, but of perfecting
men and women for the completest fulfilment and fruition of life itself,
does not yet exist. It is the great educational desideratum of the age.
Co-ordinating all our bodily organs and spiritual faculties, unifying
the outward organism and the inward consciousness, it would remove
disease, crime, and untimely death, open to men and women the highest
conditions of inspiration, and raise them towards the estate of gods and
goddesses. Avoiding equally the classic deification of the body and the
mediæval excommunication of it, emerging from the general indifference
and inattention to it which belong to the modern absorption in mental
work and social ambition, the next phase in the progress of physical
education should be the awakening on the part of the whole people of a
thorough appreciation of its just importance, and the assigning to it of
its proportionate place in their practical discipline. This is a work
worthy to be done now in America. As democratic Athens gave the world
the first splendid gymnastic training with its transcendent models of
manhood, so let democratic America, improving on the old example with
all the new treasures of science and sympathy, make application to its
citizens of a system of motions for the simultaneous education of bodies
and souls to the full possession of their personal sovereignty, making
them all kings and queens of themselves, because strong and beautiful
and free and happy in every limb and in every faculty!
There is a vulgar prejudice among many of the most refined and religious
people against the training of the body to its highest condition, as if
that necessitated an animality fatal to the richest action of mind,
heart, and soul. The fop whose delicacy is so exquisite that the least
shock of vigorous emotion makes him turn pale and sicken, fancies the
superb athlete a vulgar creature whose tissues are as coarse as wire
netting and the globules of his blood as big as peas. But in reality the
presence of fidgeting nerves in place of reposeful muscles gives feebler
reactions, not finer ones, a more irritable consciousness, not a richer
one. Were this squeamish prejudice well founded it would make God seem a
bungler in his work, essential discord inhering in its different parts.
It is not so. The harmonious development of all portions of our being
will raise the whole higher than any fragment can be lifted alone. The
two finest and loftiest and richest flowers of Greek genius, Plato and
Sophocles, were both crowned victors in the Olympic games. But this
strong, lazy prejudice has widely fulfilled itself in fact by limiting
the greatest triumphs of physical culture to the more debased and
profane types,—to professional dancers and pugilists. And even here it
is to be affirmed that, on this low range of brawn and pluck and skill,
physical power and prowess are better than physical weakness and
cowardice. It is better, if men are on that level, to surpass and be
admired there than to fail and be despised there. But since one God is
the Creator of flesh and spirit, both of which when obedient are
recipients of his influx and held in tune by all his laws, the best
material states are not hostile, but most favorable, to the best
spiritual fulfilments. The life of the mind will lift out of, not mire
in, the life of the body. And hitherto unknown revelations of inspired
power, delight, and longevity wait on that future age when the
vindication of a divineness for the body equally sacred with that of the
soul shall cause the choicest persons to be as faithful in physical
culture for the perfection of their experience as prize-fighters are for
winning the victory in the ring. Give us the soul of Channing, purest
lover and hero of God, in the body of Heenan, foremost bruiser and
champion of the world; the soul of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, tender
poetess of humanity, in the body of Fanny Elssler, incomparable queen of
the stage;—and what marvels of intuitive perception, creative genius,
irresistible authority, and redemptive conquest shall we not behold!
Such is one of the prophecies drawn from the supremest examples of
combined mental and physical culture in the dramatic profession. Forrest
fell short of any such mark. His gymnastic was coarse and heavy, based
on bone and muscle rather than brain and nerve. The sense of musical
rhythm was not quick and fine in him. His blood was too densely charged
with amorous heat, and his tissues too much clogged with his weight of
over two hundred pounds, for the most ethereal delicacies of
spirituality and the inspired imagination. But within his limitations he
was a marked type of immense original and cultivated power. And his
sedulous fidelity in taking care of his bodily strength and health is
worthy of general imitation. He practised athletics daily, posturing
with dumb-bells or Indian clubs, taking walks and drives. He was
extremely attentive to ventilation, saying, “The first condition of
health is to breathe pure air plentifully.” He ever sought the sunshine,
worshipping the smile of the divine luminary with the ardor of a true
Parsee. “The weather has been pernicious,” he says in one of his
letters. “Oh for a day of pure sunshine! What a true worshipper of the
Sun I have always been! And how he has rewarded me, in the light of his
omnipotent and kindly eye, with health and joy and sweet content! How
reasonable and how sublime was the worship of Zoroaster! I had rather be
a beggar in a sunny climate than a Crœsus in a cloudy one.” He was
temperate in food and drink, shunning for the most part rich luxuries,
complex and highly-seasoned dishes, falling to with the greatest relish
on the simplest and wholesomest things, especially oatmeal, cracked
wheat, corn-meal mush, brown bread, Scotch bannocks, cream, buttermilk.
When fatigued, he turned from artificial stimulants and sought recovery
in rest and sleep. When hard-worked, he never omitted going regularly to
bed in the daytime to supplement the insufficient repose of the night.
He had great facility in catching a nap, and at such times his deep and
full respiration was as regular as clock-work. But above all the rest he
attributed the greatest importance to keeping his skin in a clean and
vigorous condition. Night and morning he gave himself a thorough
washing, followed by energetic scrubbing with coarse towels and a
percussing of his back and spine with elastic balls fastened to the ends
of two little clubs. His skin was always aglow with life, polished like
marble, a soft and sensitive yet firm and flowing mantle of protection
and avenue of influences between his interior world and the exterior
world. This extreme health and vigor of the skin relieved the tasks put
on the other excretory organs, and was most conducive to vital energy
and longevity.
The one fault in the constitution of Forrest was the gouty diathesis he
inherited from his grandfather on the maternal side. This rheumatic
inflammability—a contracted and congested state of some part of the
capillary circulation and the associated sensory nerves accumulating
force to be discharged in hot explosions of twinging agony—might have
been cured by an æsthetic gymnastic adapted to free and harmonize all
the circulations,—the breath, the blood, the nerve-force. But,
unfortunately, his heavy and violent gymnastic was fitted to produce
rigidity rather than suppleness, and thus to cause breaks in the nervous
flow instead of an equable uniformity. This was the secret of his
painful attacks and of his otherwise unexpectedly early death. There are
three natures in man, the vital nature, the mental nature, the moral
nature. These natures express and reveal themselves in three kinds or
directions of movement. The vital nature betrays or asserts itself in
eccentric movement, movement from a centre; the mental, in acentric
movement, movement towards a centre; the moral, in concentric movement,
movement around a centre. Outward lines of motion express vital
activity, inward lines express mental activity, curved lines, which are
a blending of the two other, express moral or affectional activity. This
physiological philosophy is the basis of all sound and safe gymnastic.
The essential evil and danger of the heavy and violent gymnastic of the
circus and the ring is that it consists so largely of the outward and
inward lines which express the individual will or vital energy and
mental purpose. Each of these tends exclusively to strengthen the nature
which it exercises. Straight hitting, pushing, lifting, jumping, in
their two directions of exertion, tend to expand and to contract. That
is vital, and this is mental. Both are expensive in their drain on the
volition, but one tends to enlarge the physical organism, the other to
shrink it and to produce strictures at every weak point. The former
gives a heavy, obese development; the latter an irritable, irregular, at
once bulgy and constricted development. The vice of the vital nature
dominating unchecked is gluttony, and its end, idiocy. The vice of the
mental nature is avarice, both corporal and spiritual, and its end,
madness. The vice of the moral nature, when it becomes diseased, is
fanaticism; and its subject becomes, if the vital element in it
controls, an ecstatic devotee; if the mental element controls, a
reckless proselyter. Now, a true system of gymnastic will perfect all
the three natures of man by not allowing the vital or the mental to
domineer or its special motions to preponderate, but blending them in
those rotatory elliptical or spiral movements which combine the generous
expansion of the vital organs and the selfish concentration of the
mental faculties in just proportion and thereby constitute the language
of the moral nature. Rigid outward movements enlarge the bulk and
strengthen sensuality. Rigid inward movements cramp the organism and
break the unity and liberty of its circulations, leading to every
variety of disease. But flowing musical movements justly blent of the
other two movements, in which rhythm is observed, and the extensor
muscles are used in preponderance over the contractile so as to
neutralize the modern instinctive tendency to use the contractile more
than the extensor,—movements in which the motor nerves are, for the same
reason, used more than the sensory,—will economize the expenditure of
force, soothe the sensibilities, and secure a balanced and harmonious
development of the whole man in equal strength and grace. Such a system
of exercise will remove every tendency to a monstrous force in one part
and a dwarfed proportion in another. It will secure health and beauty in
a rounded fulness equally removed from shrivelled meagreness and
repulsive corpulence. It will make its practiser far more than a match
for the huge athletes of the coarse school, as the man whose every limb
is a whip is thrice more puissant and terrible than the man whose every
limb is a club. The deepest secret of the final result of this æsthetic
gymnastic is that it gives one the perfect possession of himself in the
perfected unity of his organism, _the connective tissue being so
developed by the practice of a slow and rhythmical extensor action that
it serves as an unbroken bed of solidarity for the whole muscular
coating of the man_. Nothing else can be so conducive as this to
equilibrium, and consequently to longevity. When the unity of the
connective tissue is broken by strictures at the articulations or
elsewhere, the waves of motion or force ever beating through the webs of
nerves are interrupted, stopped, or reflected by devitalized wrinkles
which they cannot pass. Thence result the innumerable mischiefs of
inflammation in the outer membrane and catarrh in the inner.
The æsthetic gymnastic, which will serve as a diacatholicon and panacea
for a perverted and sick generation, is one whose measured and
curvilinear movements will not be wasteful of force but conservative of
it, by keeping the molecular vibrations circulating in the organism in
perpetual translations of their power, instead of shaking them out and
losing them through sharp angles and shocks. This will develop the brain
and nerves, the genius and character, as the old system developed the
muscles and the viscera. It will lead to harmony, virtue, inspiration,
and long life, as the old system led to exaggeration, lust, excess, and
early death. How greatly it is needed one fact shows, namely, the steady
process which has long been going on of lessening beauty and increasing
ugliness in the higher classes of society, lessening roundness and
increasing angularity of facial contour. The proof of this historic
encroachment of anxious, nervous wear and tear displacing the full grace
of curved lines with the sinister sharpness of straight lines is given
in most collections of family portraits, and may be strikingly seen by
glancing from the rosy and generous faces of Fox and Burke or of
Washington and Hamilton to the pinched and wrinkled visages of Gladstone
and D’Israeli or of Lincoln and Seward.
There is probably only one man now living who is fully competent to
construct this system of æsthetic gymnastic,—James Steele Mackaye, the
heir of the traditions and the developer of the philosophy of François
Delsarte. It was he of whom Forrest, two years before his own death,
said, “He has thrown floods of light into my mind: in fifteen minutes he
has given me a deeper insight into the philosophy of my own art than I
had myself learned in fifty years of study.” If he shall die without
producing this work, it will be a calamity to the world greater than the
loss of any battle ever fought or the defeat of any legislative measure
ever advocated. For this style of gymnastic alone recognizes the
infinitely solemn and beautiful truth that every attitude, every motion,
tends to _produce_ the quality of which it is the legitimate expression.
Here is brought to light an education constantly going on in every one,
and far more momentous and fatal than any other. Here is a principle
which makes the body and the laws of mechanics as sacred revelations of
the will of God as the soul and the laws of morality. Here is the basis
of the new religious education destined to perfect the children of men,
abolish deformity, sickness, and crime, and redeem the earth.
Had Forrest practised such a style of exercise, instead of weighing
upwards of two hundred pounds and suffering from those irregularities of
circulation which often disabled, at length paralyzed, and at last
killed him at sixty-seven, he would have weighed a hundred and sixty,
been as free and agile as he was powerful, and lived without an ache or
a shock to ninety or a hundred.
His faithful exercises, defective as they were in the spirit of beauty
and economy, gave him enormous vital potency and tenacity. He felt this
keenly as a priceless luxury, and was justly proud of it. He used to be
extremely fond of the Turkish bath, and once said, “No man who has not
taken a Turkish bath has ever known the moral luxury of being personally
clean.” He was a great frequenter of the celebrated establishment of Dr.
Angell, on Lexington Avenue, in New York. After the bath and the
shampoo, and the inunction and the rest, on one occasion, as he was
striding up and down the room, feeling like an Olympian god who had been
freshly fed through all the pores of his skin with some diviner viands
than ambrosia, he vented his slight grief and his massive satisfaction
in these words: “What a pity it is that a man should have to suffer for
the sins of his ancestors! Were it not for this damned gouty diathesis,
I would not swap constitutions with any man on earth,—damned if I
would!”
It was in 1865, while playing, on a terribly cold February night, in the
Holliday Street Theatre, in Baltimore, that Forrest received the first
dread intimation that his so proudly cherished prerogative of bodily
strength was insecure. He was enacting the part of Damon. The theatre
was so cold that, he said, he felt chilled from the extremities of his
hands and feet to the centre of his heart, and the words he uttered
seemed to freeze on his lips. Suddenly his right leg began twitching and
jerking. He nearly lost control of it; but by a violent effort of will
he succeeded in getting through the play. Reaching his lodgings and
calling a physician, he found, to his great grief and horror, that his
right sciatic nerve was partially paralyzed.
An obvious lameness, a slight hobble in his gait, was the permanent
consequence of this attack. It was sometimes better, sometimes worse;
but not all his earnest and patient attempts to cure it ever availed to
find a remedy. It was a mortifying blow, from which he never fully
recovered, though he grew used to it. His strength of build and movement
had been so complete, such a glory to him, he had so exulted in it as it
drew admiring attention, that to be thus maimed and halted in one of its
most conspicuous centres was indeed a bitter trial to him. Still he kept
up good heart, and fondly hoped yet to outgrow it and be all himself
again. He was just as faithful as ever to his exercises, his diet, his
bathing, his rest and sleep; and he retained, in spite of this shocking
blow, an astonishing quantity of vital and muscular energy. Still a
large and dark blot had been made on his personal splendor, and all
those rôles which required grace and speed of bodily movement sank from
their previous height. Notwithstanding his strenuous endeavors to
neutralize the effects of this paralysis, its stealthy encroachments
spread by imperceptible degrees until his whole right side—shoulder and
chest and leg—shrank to smaller dimensions than the left, and at last he
was obliged when fencing to have the sword fastened to his hand. And yet
he continued to act to the end; acting still with a remarkable physical
power and with a mental vividness not one particle lowered from that of
his palmiest day. But, after the year 1865, for any of his old friends
who remembered the electrifying spontaneity of his terrible
demonstrations of strength in former days, to see him in such casts as
Metamora, Damon, Spartacus, and Cade, was painful.
In the month of January, 1866, Forrest had a most gratifying triumph in
Chicago. The receipts were unprecedentedly large, averaging for the five
nights of his engagement nearly twenty-five hundred dollars a night. He
wrote to his friend Oakes: “Eighteen years since, I acted here in a
small theatre of which the present mayor of Chicago, J. B. Rice, Esq.,
was manager. The population, then about six thousand, is now one hundred
and eighty thousand, with a theatre that would grace Naples, Florence,
or Paris. The applause I have received here has been as enthusiastic as
I have ever known, and the money-return greater. It beats the history of
the stage in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, and
New Orleans. Give me joy, my dear and steadfast friend, that the veteran
does _not_ lag superfluous on the stage.”
Early in the same year he accepted the munificent offer made by the
manager of the San Francisco theatre to induce him to pay a professional
visit to California. He remembered the flattering letter sent him by the
government of the State nine years before. He felt a keen desire, as a
patriotic American, to view the wondrous scenery and products of the
golden coast of the Pacific, and he also was ambitious that the youngest
part of the country should behold those dramatic portrayals which had so
long been applauded by the oldest. Landing in San Francisco on the third
of May, he was serenaded in the evening by the Philharmonic Society, and
on the fourteenth made his débût in the Opera House in the rôle of
Richelieu. The prices of admission were doubled, and the seats for the
opening night were sold at auction. The first ticket brought five
hundred dollars. “At an early hour last night,” said one of the morning
papers, “the tide of people turned with steady current towards the Opera
House. Throng after throng approached the portal and melted into the
vast space. Inside, the scene was one of extraordinary magnificence.
Hundreds of flaming jets poured a flood of shadowless light on the rich
painting and gilding of the amphitheatre, the luxurious draperies of the
boxes, and the galaxy of wealth and beauty smiling beneath its rays.” He
played for thirty-five nights to an aggregate of over sixty thousand
persons, and was paid twenty thousand dollars in gold. His engagement
was suddenly interrupted by a severe attack of his old enemy the gout.
He fled away to the cedar groves, the mineral springs, and the
mountains, to feast his eyes on the marvellous California landscapes and
to nurse his health. His enjoyment of the whole trip, and in particular
of his long tarry at the Mammoth Tree Grove, was profound. He delighted
in recalling and describing to his friends one scene in this grove, a
scene in which he was himself a striking figure. Visible in various
directions were gigantic trees hundreds of feet in height, whose age
could be reckoned by centuries, bearing the memorial names of celebrated
Americans, — Bryant, Lincoln, Seward, Longfellow, Webster, Kane,
Everett, and the darling of so many hearts, sweet Starr King,—whose top,
three hundred and sixty-six feet high, overpeers all the rest. Here the
Father of the Forest, long ago fallen, his trunk four hundred and fifty
feet long and one hundred and twelve feet in circumference at the base,
lies mouldering in gray and stupendous ruin. A hollow chamber, large
enough for one to pass through on horseback, extends for two hundred
feet through the colossal trunk of this prone and dead monarch of the
grove, whose descendants tower around him in their fresh life, and seem
mourning his requiem as the evening breeze sighs in their branches.
Forrest mounted a horse, and, with all the pageant personalities he had
so long made familiar to the American people clustering upon his own,
rode slowly through this incredible hollow just as the level beams of
the setting sun illuminated the columns of the grove and turned it into
a golden cathedral.
In September he wrote to Oakes,—
“Here I am still enjoying the salubrious air of the mountains, on
horseback and afoot, and bathing in waters from the hot and cold springs
which pour their affluent streams on every hand.
“My health is greatly improved, and my lameness is now scarcely
perceptible. In a few weeks more I shall return to San Francisco to
finish my engagement, which was interrupted by my late indisposition. My
present intention is not to return to the East until next spring; for it
would be too great a risk to encounter the rigors of a winter there
which might prove disastrous. You are aware that the winter in San
Francisco is much more agreeable than the summer; and after my
professional engagement there I shall visit Sacramento and some few
other towns, and then go to Los Angelos, where I shall enjoy a climate
quite equal to that of the tropics. I am determined to come back to you
in perfect health. How I should like to take a tramp with you into the
mountains this blessed day! I can give you no reasonable idea of the
beauty of the weather here. The skies are cloudless, save with the rare
and rosiest shadows, not a drop of rain, and yet no drought, no aridity;
the trees are fresh and green, and the air as exhilarating as
champagne.”
The news of the serious illness of his sister Caroline caused him to
abandon the purpose of resuming his interrupted engagement in San
Francisco, and, enriched with a thousand agreeable memories, on the
twentieth of October he set sail for home.
The sentiment of patriotism was a fervid element in the inner life of
Forrest, a source of strength and pleasure. He had a deep faith in the
democratic principles and institutions of his country, a large knowledge
and enjoyment of her scenery, a strong interest in her honor,
industries, and fortunes, and an unshaken confidence and pride in her
sublime destiny. His sympathy in politics, which he studied and voted on
with intelligent conviction, had always been Southern as well as
democratic; but at the first sound of the war he sprang into the most
resolute attitude in defence of the imperilled cause of freedom and
humanity. He wrote the following letter to one of his old friends in the
West in June, 1861:
“The political aspect of our country is ominous indeed, and yet I hope
with you that in the Divine Providence there will be some great good
brought out of this evil state of affairs which will prove at last a
blessing to our country. Oftentimes from that we consider evil comes a
reviving good. I trust it may prove so in this case. I do not, however,
condemn the South for their feelings of just indignation towards the
intermeddling abolitionist of the North,—the abolitionist who for years
by his incendiary acts has made the homestead of the planter a place of
anxiety and unrest instead of peace and tranquillity. But I do condemn
the leaders of this unwarrantable rebellion, those scurvy politicians
who, to serve their own selfish ends, flatter and fool, browbeat and
threaten honest people into an attitude which seems to threaten the
safety of our glorious Union. I still believe in man’s capacity to
govern himself, and I prophesy that by September next all our
difficulties will be adjusted. The South will know that the North has no
hostile, no subversive feelings to gratify, that it is the Union of the
States—that Union cemented by the blood of patriot sires—which is to be
preserved unbroken and inviolate, and that under its fraternal ægis all
discord shall cease, all wounds be healed. To this end we must be ready
for the field; we must gird up our loins and put on our armor; for a
graceful and lasting peace is only won when men are equals in honor and
in courage. And to this end it gives me pleasure to know that my
namesake, your son ——, has decided to take arms in defence of the Union
of the States and the Constitution of our fathers; and, more, that his
good mother, as well as yourself, approves his resolution. Now is the
time to test if our Government be really a shield and a protection
against anarchy and rebellion, or merely a rope of sand, an illusion, a
chimera; and it is this spontaneous uprising of every friend of freedom
rallying around the flag of his country—that sacred symbol of our
individual faith—which will proclaim to the world in tones more potent
than heaven’s thunder-peal that we HAVE a Government stronger and more
enduring than that of kings and potentates, because founded on equal and
exact justice, the offspring of man’s holiest and noblest nature, the
attribute of God himself.”
Two years later, he wrote in a letter to another friend,—
“Great God! in what a melancholy condition is our country now! _An
ineradicable curse begin at the very root of his heart that harbors a
single thought that favors disunion._ May God avert the overwhelming
evil!”
He made himself familiar with the triumphs of American genius in every
department of industry and art, and glowed with pride over the names of
his illustrious countrymen. The following brief letter reveals his
heart. He never had any personal acquaintance with the brilliant man
whose departure he thus mourns.
“NEW YORK, July 15th, 1859.
“MY DEAR OAKES,—It is with the deepest emotions I have just heard of
the death of Rufus Choate. His decease is an irreparable loss to the
whole country. A noble citizen, a peerless advocate, a great
patriot, has gone, and there is no one to supply his place. In the
fall of this great man death has obtained a victory and humanity
suffered a defeat.
“EDWIN FORREST.”
One other letter of his should be preserved in this connection, for its
eloquent expression of blended friendship and patriotism:
“PHILADELPHIA, July 28th, 1862.
“MY DEAR FRIEND,—Where are you, and what are you doing? Are you ill
or well? I have telegraphed to you twice, and one answer is that you
are ill, another that you are much better. I called on Mr.
Chickering during my recent visit to New York, and he assured me you
could not be seriously ill, or he would have been advised of it; and
so I calmed my fears. That you have greatly suffered in mind I have
reason to know. The death of Colonel Wyman assured me of that. You
must have felt it intensely. But he fell nobly, in the discharge of
a most sacred duty which consecrates his name forever among the
defenders of the Union of his country. I too have lost friends in
the same glorious cause,—peace and renown to their ashes! Among them
one, the noblest of God’s manly creatures, Colonel Samuel Black, of
Pennsylvania. Enclosed you have a merited eulogy of him by our
friend Forney, who knew him well. Let us prepare ourselves for more
of the same sad bereavements. This unnatural war, which has already
‘widow’d and unchilded many a one,’ has not yet reached its
fearfullest extent. The Union cemented by the blood of our fathers
must and shall be preserved; this is the unalterable decree of the
people of the Free States. Better that all the slaves should perish
and the blood of all those who uphold the institution of slavery
perish with them, than that this proud Temple, this glorious Union
consecrated to human freedom, should tumble into ruins. Do you
remember what Tom Paine, the great Apostle of Liberty, wrote to
General Washington in 1796? ‘A thousand years hence,’ he writes,
‘perhaps much less, America may be what Britain now is. The
innocence of her character, that won the hearts of all nations in
her favor, may sound like a romance, and her inimitable virtue be as
if it had never been. The ruins of that Liberty thousands bled to
obtain may just furnish materials for a village tale. When we
contemplate the fall of empires and the extinction of the nations of
the Old World we see but little more to excite our regret than
mouldering ruins, pompous palaces, magnificent monuments, lofty
pyramids. But when the Empire of America shall fall the subject for
contemplative sorrow will be infinitely greater than crumbling brass
or marble can inspire. It will not then be said, here stood a temple
of vast antiquity, a Babel of invisible height, or there a palace of
sumptuous extravagance,—but here, oh painful thought! the noblest
work of human wisdom, the greatest scene of human glory, THE FAIR
CAUSE OF FREEDOM ROSE AND FELL!’
“May God in his infinite wisdom avert from us such a moral
desolation! Write to me soon, and tell me all about yourself. I have
been ill of late and confined to my bed. I am now better.
“EDWIN FORREST.
“JAMES OAKES, ESQ.”
The earnestness of the feeling of Forrest as an American exerted a
profound influence in moulding his character and in coloring his
theatrical representations. The satisfactions it yielded, the proud
hopes it inspired, were a great comfort and inspiration to him. And he
said that one of his greatest regrets in dying would be that he should
not see the unparalleled growth, happiness, and glory of his country as
they would be a hundred years hence.
Another source of unfailing consolation and pleasure to him was his love
of nature. He took a real solid joy in the forms and processes of the
material creation, the changing lights and shades of the world, the
solemn and lovely phenomena of morning and evening and summer and
winter, the gorgeous upholstery of the clouds, and the mysterious
marshalling of the stars. His letters abound in expressions which only a
sincere and fervent lover of nature could have used. Writing from
Philadelphia in early October, when recovering from a severe illness, he
says, “It is the true Indian summer. The sunbeams stream through the
golden veil of autumn with a softened radiance. How gratefully I receive
these benedictions from the Universal Cause!” And in a letter dated at
Savannah, November, 1870, he writes to his biographer, “Ah, my friend,
could the fine weather you boast of having in Boston make me feel fresh
and happy, Heaven has sent enough of it here to fill a world with
gladness. The skies are bright and roseate as in summer, the air is
filled with fragrance drawn by the warm sun from the balsamic trees,
while the autumnal wild-flowers waft their incense to the glorious day.
All these things I have enjoyed, and, I trust, with a spirit grateful to
the Giver of all good. Yet all these, though they may meliorate in a
degree the sadness of one’s life, cannot bind up the broken heart, heal
the wounded spirit, nor even, as Falstaff has it, ‘set a leg.’”
This taste for nature, with the inexhaustible enjoyment and the refining
culture it yields, was his in a degree not common except with artists
and poets. While acting in Cleveland once in mid-winter, he persuaded a
friend to walk with him for a few miles early on a very cold morning.
Striding off, exulting in his strength, after an hour and a half he
paused on the edge of the lake, his blood glowing with the exercise, his
eyes sparkling with delight, while his somewhat overfat companion was
nearly frozen and panted with fatigue. Stretching his hand out towards
the magnificent expanse of scenery spread before them, he exclaimed,
“Bring your prating atheists out here, let them look on that, and then
say there is no God—if they can!”
An eminent New York lawyer, an intimate friend of Forrest, who had spent
his whole life in the city absorbed in the social struggle, was utterly
indifferent to the beauties of nature. He had never felt even the
loveliness of a sunset,—something which one would think must fill the
commonest mind with glory. Walking with him in the environs of the city
on a certain occasion when approaching twilight had caused the blue
chamber of the west to blaze with such splendors of architectural clouds
and crimsoned squadrons of war as no scenic art could ever begin to
mock, Forrest called the attention of his comrade to the marvellous
spectacle. “I have no doubt,” said the lawyer, “that I have seen a great
many of these things; but I never cared anything about them.” The
disciple of Shakspeare proceeded to discourse to the disciple of Coke
upon Littleton on the charm of natural scenery, its soothing and
delight-giving ministrations to a man of taste and sensibility, in a
strain that left a permanent impression on his hearer, who from that
time began to watch the phenomena of the outward world with a new
interest.
But even more than in his professional triumphs, his increasing store of
wealth, his animal health and strength, his patriotism, or his love for
the works of God in nature, Forrest found during the last twenty years
of his life a never-failing resource for his mind and heart in the
treasures of literature. He gathered a library of between ten and
fifteen thousand volumes, well selected, carefully arranged and
catalogued, for the accommodation of which he set apart the finest
apartment in his house, a lofty and spacious room running the whole
length of the edifice. In this bright and cheerful room all the
conveniences of use and comfort were collected. Beside his desk, where
from his chair he could lay his hand on it, superbly bound in purple
velvet, on a stand made expressly for it, rested his rare copy of the
original folio edition of Shakspeare, valued at two thousand dollars.
Around him, invitingly disposed, were the standard works of the
historians, the biographers, the poets, and especially the dramatists
and their commentators. Here he added to his shelved treasures many of
the best new works as they appeared, keeping himself somewhat abreast
with the fresh literature of the times in books like Motley’s
Netherlands, Grimm’s Life of Michael Angelo, and Hawkins’s Life of Kean,
which he read with a generous relish. Here, ensconced in an arm-chair by
the window, or lolling on a lounge in the centre of the library, or
seated at his study-table, he passed nearly all the leisure time of his
lonely later years. Here he would occupy himself for many an hour of day
and night,—hours that flew swiftly, laden with stingless enjoyment,—
passing from volume to volume sipping the hived sweetnesses of the
paradisal field of literature. Here, alone and quiet in the peopled
solitude of books, he loved to read aloud by the hour together,
listening to himself as if some one else were reading to him,—the
perfection of his breathing and the ease of his articulation being such
that the labor of utterance took nothing from the interest of the
subject, while the rich music and accurate inflections of his voice
added much. Here his not numerous intimates, with occasional callers
from abroad,—Rees, Forney, and his particular favorite, Daniel
Dougherty,—would often drop in, ever sure of an honest welcome and
genial fellowship, and speed the time with wit and humor, reminiscence,
anecdote, argument, joke, and repartee, vainly seeking to beguile him
into that more general society which would have gladly welcomed what he
could so richly give and take.
An extract from a letter of his written in June, 1870, is of interest in
this connection:
“I will read Forster’s Life of Walter Savage Landor, of which you speak,
at my first leisure; though I consider Forster personally to be a snob.
You will find among my papers in your possession exactly what I think of
him. For Landor, even as a boy, I had a great admiration. I sate with
wonder while I quaffed instruction at the shrine of his genius. There is
a book just published in England which I shall devour with an insatiable
mental appetite. It is called ‘Benedict Spinoza, his Life,
Correspondence, and Ethics.’ It is the first time that his works have
been collected and published in English. So that I shall have a rare
treat. His Ethics I have read in a French translation which I found in
Paris years ago; and its perusal divided my time between the pleasures
of the town and the intellectual culture which the study of his sublime
philosophy gave me. It was called ‘Spinoza’s Ethics; or, Man’s
Revelation to Man of the Dealings of God with the World.’”
Yes, his library was indeed his sure refuge from care and sorrow, a
sweet solace for disappointment and vacancy and heartache. Here, in the
glorious fellowship of the genius and worth of all ages, he fully
gratified that love of reading without whose employment he would hardly
have known how to bear some of the years of his checkered life. An
anecdote will illustrate the strength of this habit in him and afford an
interesting glimpse of the interior of the man. In his library one
summer afternoon, the notes of birds in the trees and the hum of bees in
his garden languidly stealing in at the open window, he sat, with the
precious Shakspeare folio in his lap, conversing with his biographer. He
said, “If I could describe how large a space Shakspeare has filled of my
inward life, and how intense an interest I feel in his personality, no
one would believe me. I would this moment give one hundred thousand
dollars simply to read—even if the instant I had finished its perusal
the manuscript were to be destroyed forever—a full account of the first
eighteen years of the life of Shakspeare,—such an account as he could
himself have written at forty had he been so minded, of his joys and
sorrows, hopes and fears, his aspirations, his disappointments, his
friendships, his enmities, his quarrels, his fights, his day-dreams, his
loves; in short, the whole inward and outward drama of his boyhood.” It
was certainly one of the most striking tributes ever paid to the genius
of the immortal dramatist. A thorough familiarity with the works of
Shakspeare is of itself an education and a fortune for the inner man.
There all the known grades of experience, all the kinds of characters
and styles of life seen in the world, are shown in their most vivid
expressions. There all the varieties of thought and sentiment are
gathered in their most choice and energetic forms of utterance. There
are stimulus and employment for every faculty. There is incitement for
all ambition, solace for all sorrow, beguilement for all care,
provocation and means for every sort and degree of self-culture.
Shakspeare is one of the greatest teachers that ever lived, and those
players who have character, docility, and aspiration are his favorite
pupils. Betterton, who was born in 1635, only twelve years after the
death of Shakspeare, made a journey from London to Warwickshire on
purpose to gather up what traditions and anecdotes remained of him.
Garrick was the author of the remarkable centennial celebration of his
memory. And the voice of Kemble faltered and his tears were visible as
in his farewell speech on the stage he alluded to the divine Shakspeare.
Anecdotes of the conduct and expressions of a man when he is off his
guard and unstudiedly natural give a truer picture of his character than
elaborate general statements. And three or four brief ones may be given
to close this chapter with an impartial view of the inner life of
Forrest in its contrasted aspects of refinement and even sublimity at
one time, and of rude severity and coarseness at another.
One summer evening, when he was paying a visit to his friend Oakes, they
were at Cohasset, sitting on a piazza overhanging the sea. Mr. John F.
Mills, one of the best men that ever lived, whose beautiful spirit gave
pain to his host of friends for the first time only when he died, was
with them. There had been a long storm, and now that it had subsided the
moaning roar of the sea was loud and dismal. Forrest addressed it with
this extemporaneous apostrophe, as reported by Mr. Mills: “Howl on,
cursed old ocean, howl in remorse for the crimes you have committed.
Millions of skeletons lie bleaching on your bed; and if all our race
were swallowed there to-night you would not care any more for them than
for the bursting of a bubble on your breast. There is something dreadful
in this inhumanity of nature. Therefore I love to hear you groan, you
heartless monster! It makes you seem as unhappy as you make your victims
when they empty their stomachs into you or are themselves engulfed.
Gnash your rocky teeth and churn your rage white. Thank God, your cruel
reign will one day end, and there will be no more sea.”
The next evening they sat in the same place, but the moon was up, and
his mood was different, more placid and pensive than before. The swell
and plunge of the billows on the beach made solemn accompaniment to the
guttural music of his voice. There was a mournfulness in the murmur of
his tones as elemental and sad as the tremendous sighing of the sea
itself. “This world,” he said, “seems to me a penal abode. We have all
lived elsewhere and gone astray, and now we expiate our bygone offences.
There is no other explanation that I can think of for the tangled snarl
of human fates. True, since we are ignorant of these sins, our
punishment seems not just. But then we may some time recover memory of
all and so understand everything clearly. It is all mystery now, but if
there is any explanation I am convinced we are convicts working out our
penances, and hell is not hereafter but here. Just hear those breakers
boom, boom, boom. Do they not seem to you to be drumming the funereal
Rogue’s March for this Botany Bay of a world?”
A stranger to Forrest, merely to gratify his vanity by drawing the
attention of a company to his speech, said he had seen the celebrated
actor drunk in the gutter. The friend who reported this to Forrest would
not reveal who the man was. But one day he pointed him out on the
opposite sidewalk. The outraged and angry tragedian went quietly over
and accosted the slanderer; “Do you know Edwin Forrest, and do you say
you once saw him drunk in the gutter?” On receiving an affirmative reply
he broke out in the strong vernacular of which he was a master, “Now,
you sneaking scoundrel and lying calumniator, I am Edwin Forrest. I ache
all over to give you the damnedest thrashing you ever tasted. But it is
against my principles. I should be ashamed of myself if I stooped to
take such advantage of your cowardly weakness. But, while I will not do
it with my body, in my mind I kick and spit on you. Now pass on, and
relish yourself, and be damned, you human skunk.”
Although Forrest used much profane language, his real spirit was not an
irreverential one. His profanity was but an expletive habit, a safety-
valve for wrath. When expostulated with on the custom, he said, “I never
knowingly swear before ladies or clergymen, lest it should shock or
grieve them. But at other times, when it is necessary either for proper
emphasis or as a vent for passion too hot and strong, why I let it rip
as it will.”
In connection with the Broad Street mansion which he occupied at the
time of his death, Forrest built and fitted up a handsome private
theatre. John Wiser, a scenic artist, arranged and painted it. At its
completion Forrest seated himself in a large chair, and, after
expressing his pleasure at the effect, said, “John, do you know what
would be the most delightful sight in the world, eh? If I could only see
this room filled with children, and a company of little boys and girls
playing on that stage.”
One day when Forrest was walking with a friend in Brooklyn a beggar
accosted them. Tears were in his eyes, and he had a ragged exterior as
well as a tottering form and a pale and sunken look. With a plaintive
voice he said, “For the love of heaven, gentlemen, give me a trifle for
the sake of my starving family. You will not feel it, and it will
relieve a half a score of hungry ones. Will you not aid me?” Forrest
looked at the man for a moment as if reading his very soul, and then
said, while placing a golden eagle in his hand, “Yes, my friend, you are
either a true subject for charity or else the best actor I ever saw.”
Forrest always carried his professional humor and docility with him. He
gave a ludicrous description of an amateur grave-digger who lived in
Philadelphia. He was worth fifty thousand dollars, yet whenever a grave
was to be made he liked to have a hand in it. His nose was so turned up
that his brains might have been seen, had he possessed any. And his
voice was a perfect model for the second grave-digger in Hamlet, saying,
“The crowner hath set on her, and finds it Christian burial.”
A strolling exhibitor of snakes came to Louisville when Forrest was
playing there in his youth. Wishing to feel the strongest emotions of
fear, that he might utilize the experience in his acting, Forrest asked
the man to take care of the head of a boa-constrictor some twelve feet
in length and let the hideous reptile crawl about his naked neck. He
never forgot the cold, clammy slip of the coils on his flesh and the
sickening horror it awakened.