PRIZES AND PENALTIES OF FAME.
The next important feature to be studied in order to appreciate the
character and life of Forrest is his experience of the prizes and the
penalties of fame. For he had a great fame; and fame, particularly in a
democratic country, inflicts penalties as well as bestows prizes. Not
one man in a thousand has enough force and tenacity of character to
determine to gain the solid and lasting prizes of life. Average men
willingly put up with cheap and transient substitutes for the real ends,
or with deluding mockeries of them. They seek passing pleasures instead
of the conditions of permanent happiness; applause instead of merit; a
crowd of acquaintances instead of true friends; notoriety or stagnant
indifference instead of fame. There is nothing more worthy of contempt,
although it is so miserably common, than the mean and whining cant which
puts negation and failure above affirmation and success, constantly
asserting the emptiness and deceit of all earthly goods. In opposition
to this morbid depreciation of every natural attractiveness without and
desire within, nothing is more wholesome or grand than a positive grasp
and fruition of all the native worths of the world. A great deal of the
fashionable disparagement and scorn of the prizes of wealth, position,
reputation, is but unconscious envy decrying what it lacks the strength
and courage to seize. The fame which a gifted and faithful man secures
is the reflex signal of the effects he has produced, and a broad, vivid,
healthy enjoyment of it is an intrinsic social good to be desired. It is
one of the greatest forces employed by Providence for the education of
men and the advancement of society. To condemn or despise it is to fling
in the face of God. The fancied pious who do this are dupes of an
impious error.
Fame is a life in the souls of other men added to our own. It is a
feeling of the effect we have taken on the admiration and love of those
who regard us with honoring attention and sympathy. It is a social
atmosphere of respect and praise and curiosity, enveloping its subject,
fostering his self-esteem, keeping his soul in a moral climate of
complacency. The famous man has a secret feeling that the contributors
to his glory are his friends, loyal to him, ready to protect, further,
and bless him. Thus he is fortified and enriched by them, their powers
ideally appropriated to his ideal use. Thus fame is the multiplication
of the life of its subject, reflected in the lives of its givers. This
is the real cause of the powerful fascination of fame for its votaries;
for there is no instinct deeper in man than the instinct which leads him
to desire to intensify, enlarge, and prolong his existence; and fame
makes a man feel that in some sense his existence is multiplied and
continued in all those who think of him admiringly, and that it will
last as long as their successive generations endure. As Conrad makes
Jack Cade say,—
“Fame is the thirst
Of gods and godlike men to make a life
Which nature made not, stealing from heaven
Its imaged immortality.”
And so in its ultimate essence and use fame represents a magnified and
prolonged idealization of direct personal experience. It is ideal means
of life, a deeper foundation and wider range of reflected sympathetic
life embracing and sustaining immediate individual life. This great
prize is evidently a good to be desired, the evils connected with it
belonging not to itself but to unprincipled methods of pursuing it,
vulgar errors in distributing it, and the selfish perversion of its true
offices. It exists and is enjoyed in various degrees, on many different
levels, from the plebeian enthusiasm for the champion boxer to the
aristocratic recognition of a great thinker. As we ascend in rank we
lose in fervor. Fame is seen in its ruddiest intensity at the funeral of
Thomas Sayers celebrated by fifty thousand screaming admirers; in its
palest expansion in the renown of Plato, whose works are read by
scattered philosophers and whose name glitters inaccessibly in the
eternal empyrean. The reason for this greater heat of glory on its lower
ranges plainly is that men feel the sharpest interest in the lowest
bases of life, because these are the most indispensable. Existence can
be maintained without transcendent talents, but not without health,
strength, and courage. Animal perfection goes before spiritual
perfection, and its glory is more popular because more appreciable.
Forrest drank the intoxicating cup of fame on widely separated levels,
from the idolatrous incense of the Bowery Boys who at the sight of his
herculean proportions shied their caps into the air with a wild yell of
delight, to the praise of the refined judges who applauded the
intellectual and imaginative genius of his Lear. It was a genuine luxury
to his soul for many years, and would have been a far deeper one had it
not been for the alloys accompanying it. He enjoyed the prize because he
had honorably won it, not sacrificing to it the more commanding aims of
life; and fame is a mockery only when it shines on the absence of the
goods greater than itself,—honor, health, peace, and love. He suffered
much on account of it, in consequence of the detestable jealousies,
plots, ranklings, and slanders always kindled by it among unhappy rivals
and malignant observers. But one suffering he was always spared, namely,
the bitter mortifications of the charlatan who has snatched the outward
semblance of the prizes of desert without paying their price or
possessing their substance. Striving always to deserve his reputation,
he did not forfeit his own esteem. The satisfaction he received from
applause was the joy of feeling his own power in the fibres of the
audience thrilling under his touch. Fame was the magnifying and
certified abstract of this,—a vast and constant assurance in his
imagination of life and power and pleasure. Dry sticks, leather men, may
sneer at the idea, but the rising moral ranks of souls are indicated by
the intensity with which they can act and react on ideal considerations.
Fame puts a favorable bias on all our relations with the approving
public, and thus enriches our inner life by aiding our sympathies to
appropriate their goods.
The actor lives in an atmosphere electrized with human publicity, and
walks between walls lined with mirrors. Everything in his career is
calculated to develop an acute self-consciousness. And then by what
terrible trials his sensitiveness is beset in his exposure to the
opposite extremes of derision and eulogy! Dr. Johnson, alluding at one
time to the sensibility of Garrick, said, contemptuously, “Punch has no
feelings.” At another time, praising his genius, he said, sublimely,
“His death eclipsed the gayety of nations.” The actor tastes the
sweetness of fame more keenly than any other, because no other lives so
directly on it or draws the expression of it so openly and directly.
Bannister was invited by the royal family at Windsor one evening to read
a new play, and was treated with the utmost regard. The very next night
he was stopped by a footpad, who, dragging him to a lamp to plunder him,
discovered who he was, and said, “I’ll be damned if I can rob Jack
Bannister.” Having thus the esteem of both extremes of society, it is
safe to conclude that he enjoyed the admiration of all between. And this
boon of public honor and love will seem valuable to a performer in
proportion to the quickness and depth of his emotional power. “The awful
consciousness,” said Mrs. Siddons, “that one is the sole object of
attention to that immense space, lined as it were with human intellect
all around from top to bottom, may perhaps be imagined, but can never be
described.” A vulgar performer would rush on as if those heads were so
many turnips. The genius of imaginative sensibility is the raw material
for greatness. Forrest had much of this, although his self-possession
was so strong; and under his composed exterior, even after he had been
thirty years on the stage, he often shrank with temporary trepidation
from the ordeal of facing a fresh audience. His enjoyment of the
tributes paid to him was commensurately deep.
And, stretching through the long fifty years of his professional course,
how varied, how numerous, how interesting and precious, these crowded
tributes were! There was no end to the compliments paid him, echoes of
the impression he had made on the country. Now it was a peerless race-
horse, carrying off prize on prize, that was named after him. Then it
was some beautiful yacht, club-boat, or pilot-boat, of which there were
a dozen or more to whose owners he presented sets of flags. At another
time it was a noble steamer or merchantman, of which there were a good
many named for him, each adorned with a statue of some one of his
characters as a figure-head. Locomotives and fire-engines also were
crowned with his name and his likeness. Military companies, too, took
their titles from him and carried his face copied on their banners. The
following letter indicates another of the results of his fame:
“WALTHAM, February 12th, 1871.
“EDWIN FORREST, ESQ.:
“DEAR SIR,—Being one of the small army of boys called after you, I
should feel happy to receive some token from my illustrious
namesake, if nothing more than his autograph. Hoping to see you
before you leave the stage,
“I am respectfully yours,
“EDWIN FORREST MOORE.”
Seven different dramatic associations, composed of amateurs and
professionals, were formed in the cities of Portland, Boston, New York,
and elsewhere, bearing his name. And the notices of him in the
newspapers were to be reckoned by thousands, ranging all the way from
majestic eulogium to gross vituperation.
Portraits of him, paintings, engravings, photographs, in his own
individuality and in his chief impersonations, were multiplied in many
quarters. Numerous plaster casts of him, four or five busts in marble,
and one full-length statue of surpassing grandeur, were taken. Many
celebrated artists studied him, from Gilbert Stuart, whose Washington
stands supremely immortal in American portraiture, to William Page,
whose lovingly elaborated Shakspeare may become so in creative
portraiture. Page has depicted Forrest in the role of Spartacus. He
shows him at that moment of the scene in the amphitheatre where he
utters the words which he never spoke without moving the audience to
repeated bursts of applause: “Let them come in: we are armed!” The last
portrait ever painted by the dying Stuart was of Forrest, then in his
youth and only just beginning to become famous. Forrest used often to
speak of his sitting to Stuart, whose strong fiery soul was enclosed in
a frame then tottering and tremulous with age. “He was an old white
lion,” said Forrest, “and so blind that I had to tell him the color of
my eyes and of my hair. By sudden efforts of will he _threw_ the lines
and bits of color on the canvas, and every stroke was speech.”
Of the likenesses of Forrest published in this volume, the frontispiece
is engraved from a daguerreotype of him at the age of forty-six; the
succeeding one is from a painting by Samuel Lawrence, and shows him as
he was at twenty-eight; the last one is from a photograph taken when he
was in his sixty-seventh year. The illustrations of him in dramatic
characters are from photographs made after he had passed sixty and had
suffered partial paralysis. They do no justice to him as he appeared in
his perfect meridian.
Of all the expressions of admiration, affection, pleasure, called forth
by a professional artist, of all the forms or signals of fame, perhaps
none is more flattering or more delightful to the recipient than the
tributary verses evoked from souls endowed with the poetic faculty. As
such natures are finer and higher than others, their homage is
proportionally more precious. During his life more than fifty poems
addressed to Forrest were published, and gave him a great deal of pure
pleasure. A few specimens of these offerings may properly find a place
here.
The following lines felicitously copied were thrown upon the stage to
him one evening in a bouquet:
TO EDWIN FORREST.
When Time hath often turned his glass,
And Memory scans the stage,
Foremost shall then thy image pass,
The Roscius of this age.
The succeeding piece was written in 1828:
TO EDWIN FORREST.
Young heir of glory, Nature’s bold and favorite child,
Nurtured ’midst matchless scenes of wild sublimity,
Thou who wert reared with sternest truth in groves of song,
To thy bare arm the grasp is given to hurl the bolts
Of wrathful heaven. ’Tis thine, with thundering voice to shake
Creation to her centre, wakening love or rage,
And show thyself as angels or as demons are.
Yea, thou didst seem, as at the shrine I saw thee kneel,
With that bold brow of thine, like some creation bright
From higher spheres breathing thy inspiration there,
As if the Altar’s flame itself had lit thine eye
With all the dazzling radiance of the Deity.
Go forth. Already round thy brow the wreath of fame
Amidst thy godlike locks with classic grace is curled.
Go forth, and shine, the Sun of the dramatic world!
R. M. WARD.
The next piece, in which he is associated with his friend Halleck, is
dated 1830:
TO EDWIN FORREST.
When genius, with creative fancy fraught,
Moulds some new being for the sphere of thought,
How the soul triumphs as, supremely blest,
She opes her temple to the welcome guest,
And her white pulses feel, with answering glow,
The kindred breath of the young presence flow!
Such moments, bright as hours in heaven that bring
To spirits life, a pure and deathless thing,
Cheer him who, warm with poesy’s true flame,
Rears in his bower of song the birds of fame;
He whose wreathed locks the lyric laurels wear
Green with immortal dew and cloudless air;
Whose harp-chords wildly echoed back the swell
Of glory’s clarion when BOZZARIS fell,—
Thus knew his human fancies grow divine,
And poured their spirit o’er the happy line.
Yet not alone the sons of song can feel
This joy along the grateful senses steal.
To him who, musing, waits at Nature’s throne,
And feels, at last, her wealth become his own,
Then with the priceless gold, thought, passion, heart,
And feeling, tempers to the test of art,
Blends these with poesy’s mysterious spell
Strange as the sigh of ocean’s rosy shell,
No less belong the triumph-throb, the pride
To mind-ennobling sympathies allied,
The deep emotion, and the rapture free;
And these, O Forrest, we behold in thee!
Who e’er has marked thine eye, thy matchless mien,
While, all forgetful of the mimic scene,
Spurning the formal, manner-taught control,
Thou bar’st the fire that lightens in the soul,
Has deemed there moved the form that Shakspeare drew
From visions bright with passion’s warmest hue,
As, wildly garbed in awful tragic guise,
MACBETH, OTHELLO, LEAR, he saw arise.
When the last outrage of oppression falls
On man enthralled by man, and Freedom calls
Some champion to flash her steel where’er,
Bloody and black, death, shrieking, hovers near,
Who can portray like thee the throe of hate
Which warns the tyrant of his dreadful fate?
Who image forth th’ exalted agony
Of strife and maddening hope of victory?
There thrills an echo of the pulse, the tone,
That universal man exults to own,
A voice which teaches craven souls that War
For right than guilty Peace is holier far;
Nor suffers them to breathe and pass away
As dust that ne’er forsook its primal clay.
The lines that follow next were printed in 1852, after the divorce
trial:
TO EDWIN FORREST.
In every soul where Poesy and Beauty find a place,
Thy image, Forrest, sits enshrined in majesty and grace.
Could but the high and mighty bard, whose votary thou art,
Have seen with what a matchless power thou swayest the human heart,
He too had bowed beneath the spell and owned thy wondrous sway,
And bound thy brow with laurel, and with flowers strewn thy way.
The clouds of grief that for a time obscured thy brilliant morn,
Like to the envious shadows that would dim the rising sun,
Meridian’s fame has put to flight. Cast not thy glances back,
But in the light of fearless genius hold thine onward track.
MARGARET BARNETT.
This sonnet was written in the same year:
TO EDWIN FORREST.
King of the tragic art! without compeer!
Thy sway is sovereign in the scenic realm;
And where thy sceptre waves, or nods thy helm,
All crowd to be thy royal presence near.
Thou speakest,—we are stilled; the solemn Past,
Rich with grand thought, and filled with noble men
Over whose lives and deeds time’s veil is cast,
Rises to view, and they do live again!
While thou dost tread life’s stage, thy lofty fame,
Undimmed, shall grow, and be the drama’s pride
Centuries hence, when all shall see thy name
Carved deep and high her noblest names beside;
And, with the noblest placed, will aye be found,
In Thespis’ fane, thy statue, laurel-crowned!
R. H. BACON.
Here is a tribute penned in 1862, in the midst of our civil war:
EDWIN FORREST AS “DAMON.”
Great master of the tragic art,
Whose genius moves the passions’ spring,
To melt the eye and warm the heart
With love of virtue, hate of sin,
Is it our nation’s bleeding fate
That gives thee such heroic fire
Singly to brave the Senate’s hate
And faith for country’s good inspire?
Yes; ’tis not all the mimic scene
We view when now beholding thee;
The heart-strung voice and earnest mien
Of “Damon” breathe pure liberty.
The test of friendship true is there;
But hope for freedom more than life
Starts the usurping tyrant near—
Pleads for the boy—weeps for the wife.
O art divine! when Forrest brings
His matchless eloquence to bear,
Denouncing treason’s poisonous stings,
While for his loved land falls the tear,
The temple of the Muses, filled
With beauty, fashion, youth, and age,
Proves admiration for the skilled
And perfect artist of the stage.
G. C. HOWARD.
And a year later the following eloquent verses were published by their
author in the Philadelphia “Press:”
FORREST.
Pride of the Grecian art,
King of the glorious act,
Whose sceptre-touch can start
From airiest fancy fact!
Sole monarch of the stage!
Thy crowning is the truth
That garners unto age
The laurel-wreaths of youth.
Were massive mien or mould
Of Thespian gods divine
E’er richer in the gold
Of Thespian grace than _thine_?
A voice that thrills the soul
Through all her trembling keys,
From deepening organ-roll
To flute-born symphonies;
An eye that gleams the light
Of Tragedy’s quick fire,
And soul that sweeps aright
Each grandest poet-lyre,—
These into living thought,
FORREST! in thee sublime
The Thespian gods have wrought,
A masterpiece for Time!
Not from the clods of earth
’Mid grovelling toil and strife
Thy GENIUS hailed her birth
To all her peerless life;
Her viewless home hath been
Where Poesy hath flung
Its sweetest words to win
The music of thy tongue!
How Manhood’s honor rose,
How perished Woman’s shame,
When robed in worth and woes
Thine own VIRGINIUS came!
How Freedom claims a peal
And Tyranny a knell
When BRUTUS waves the steel
Where Slave and Tarquin fell!
When SPARTACUS leads on
Each gladiator-blade,
Or feudal tyrants fawn
To lion-hearted CADE,—
How every listening heart
its narrow span,
And, in that glorious art,
Adores the peerless man!
But dearer than the rest
We own thy mystic spell
To lave the lingering breast
Where Avon’s sweetness fell!
To marshal from the page
And summon from the pen
Of SHAKSPEARE, to _thy_ stage,
His living, breathing men!
No longer Shakspeare’s line,
But _studious_ gaze controls;
It girds and gilds from _thine_
The multitude of souls!
While Genius claims a crown,
Or mimic woe a tear,
Paled be the envious frown
And dumb the cynic sneer
That barreth from thy heart
Or veileth from thy name
The loftiest, grandest part
Of histrionic FAME!
C. H. B.
A single sonnet more shall end these examples of the poetic tributes to
the genius and worth of Forrest; tributes which, adding lustre to his
career and shedding comfort and joy into his heart, were and are one of
the most attractive illustrations of the value and sweetness of the
prize of fame:
ON ROOT’S DAGUERREOTYPE OF MR. FORREST.
Light-born, and limned by Heaven! It is no cheat,
No image; but himself, his living shade!
With hurried pulse, the heart leaps forth to greet
The man who merits more than Tully said
Of his own Roscius, that the histrion’s power
Was but a leaf amid his garland wreath.
His swaying spirit ruled the magic hour,
But his vast virtues knew no day, no death.
He seems not now, but is. And I do know,
Or think I do, what meaning from those lips
Would break; and on that bold and manly brow
There hangs a light that knows not an eclipse,
The light of a true soul. If art can give
The bodied soul this life, who doubts the soul will live?
ROBERT T. CONRAD.
Public and private banquets were given in honor of the actor by
distinguished men in all parts of the country, occasions drawing
together brilliant assemblages and yielding the highest enjoyment to
every faculty of sense and soul. To meet around the social table, decked
with everything that wealth and taste can command, the most eminent
members of the learned professions, artists, authors, statesmen, the
leaders of the business world, beautiful and accomplished women, and
pass the hours in friendly converse seasoned with every charm of culture
and wit, is one of the choicest privileges society can bestow in
recognition and reward of worth and celebrity. Among the more notable of
these honors may be mentioned as especially brilliant and locally
conspicuous at the time a dinner given him at Detroit by General Lewis
Cass, one at Cincinnati by his old friend James Taylor, one at New
Orleans by a committee of the leading citizens, including some of his
early admirers, and, later, one at Washington by his intimate and
esteemed friend Colonel Forney, then Clerk of the House of
Representatives. During one of his engagements in Washington he dined
with a distinguished company under the princely auspices of Henry Clay.
The great Kentuckian, in allusion to Pierre Soulé, a Louisiana Senator,
who was a passionate orator but wanting, perhaps, in sobriety of
judgment and steadiness of character, said to one of the guests, “A mere
actor, sir, a mere actor!” At that instant chancing to catch the eye of
Forrest, he promptly added, with the courteous grace of self-possession
and winsome eloquence native to his thoroughbred soul, “I do not allude,
Mr. Forrest, when I use the word actor thus demeaningly, to those men of
genius who impersonate the great characters of Shakspeare and the other
immortal dramatists, holding the very mirror of truth up to nature; I
refer to the man who in real life affects convictions and plays parts
foreign to his soul.”
At a banquet given in honor of John Howard Payne, the first vice-
president, Prosper M. Wetmore, an old and dear friend of Forrest, paid
him a compliment which, received as it was by the brilliant company with
three times three enthusiastic cheers, must have given him a proud
pleasure. Mr. Wetmore said, “Before mentioning the name of the gentleman
whose health I am about to ask you to drink, I take this opportunity to
say a word in relation to the generosity of his heart and the richness
of his mind. He was one of the very first who took an interest in the
festival of Thursday last, and kindly offered his name and services to
add to the attractions of the evening. He has always been the foremost
to do his share in honoring our sons of genius; and his purse has never
been shut against the meritorious who stood in need of his bounty. His
talents as an actor you all know and appreciate. Allow me to give you—
Edwin Forrest:
“His health; and would on earth there stood
Some more of such a frame,
That life might be all poetry,
And weariness a name.”
Such as above described were the satisfactions afforded to Forrest by
his fame. They are what thousands have vainly wished to win, fondly
believing that if they could gain them they should be happy indeed. But
to these advantages there are drawbacks, corresponding to these prizes
there are penalties, which were experienced by Forrest in all their
varieties of bitterness. The evils which dog the goods of public life,
as their shadows, went far to disenchant him, to sour him, to make him
turn sadly and resentfully into himself away from the lures and shams of
society.
To any man of honorable instincts, clear perceptions, and high
principles, the incompetency, corruption, and selfish biases of many of
those who assume to sit in judgment on the claims of the competitors for
public favor and glory, the shallowness and fickleness of the average
public itself, the contemptible means successfully used by ignoble
aspirants for their own advancement and the defeat of their rivals, the
frequent reaction of their own modesty and high-mindedness to obscure
and keep down the most meritorious, have a strong influence to rob
ambition of its power, destroy all the relish of its rewards, and make
fame seem worthless or even odious. Critics write in utter ignorance of
the laws of criticism or standards of judgment, and even without having
seen the performance they presume to approve or to condemn. Claqueurs
are hired to clap one and to hiss another irrespective of merit or
demerit. Wreaths, bouquets, rings, jewelled snuff-boxes, are purchased
by actors or actresses themselves, through confederates, to be then
presented to them in the name of an admiring public. A vase or cup or
watch has been known to go with a popular performer from city to city to
be presented to him over and over with eulogistic addresses of his own
composition. A brazen politician, successful in compassing a nomination
and election by shameless wire-pulling, mendacity, and bribery, then
receives the tribute of an ostentatious testimonial of which he is
himself the secret originator and prime manager. No one who has not had
long experience of the world and been admitted behind the scenes, with
the keys for interpreting appearances, can suspect how common such
things are. They are terribly disheartening and repulsive to a generous
soul. They destroy the splendor and value of the outward prizes of
existence, and thus paralyze the grandest motives of action. When fools,
charlatans, and swindlers carry off honors, then wisdom, genius, and
heroism are tempted to despise honors. When the owl is umpire in a
contest of song between the donkey and the nightingale, and awards the
prize to the brayer, the lark and the mocking-bird may well decline to
enter the lists.
In the fashionable rage for Master Betty, Kemble and Siddons were quite
neglected; as the levee of Tom Thumb drew a throng of the nobility and
fashion of London while poor Haydon, across the street, watched them
with a gnawing heart from the door of his deserted exhibition. Cowper
says in his “Task,”—
“For Betty the boy
Did strut and storm and straddle, stamp and stare,
And show the world how Garrick did not act.”
When, with pompous incompetency, Lord Abercorn told Mrs. Siddons that
“that boy would yet eclipse everything which had been called acting in
England,” she quietly replied, with crushing knowledge, “My lord, he is
a very clever, pretty boy, but nothing more.” Garrick said it was the
lot of actors to be alternately petted and pelted. And Kemble, when
congratulated on the superb honors given him at his final adieu to the
stage, responded, “It was very fine, but then I could not help
remembering that without any cause they were once going to burn my
house.” Genius and nobility naturally love fame, worship the public,
would pour out their very life-blood to gain popular sympathy and
admiration; but after such experiences of baseness and wrong and error
the fascination flies from the prizes they had adored as so sacred, and
never more do their souls leap and burn with the old enthusiasm of their
unsophisticated days. The injustice of the world drives from it the love
and homage of its noblest children.
Parasites and egotists seek association with a famous man merely to
gratify their vanity, though they call it friendship. They fawn on him
to share a reflection of his glory, to reap advantage from his
influence, or to beg loans of his money; and when circumstances unmask
their characters and show how they were preying on his frankness, he is
revolted and his confidence in human nature shaken. Many a man of a
sweet and loving nature, like the noble Timon, has gone out to the world
with throbbing heart and open arms, and, met with selfishness and
treachery, reacted into despair and hate. One of the penalties of a
great reputation with its personal following is to be annoyed by
sycophants, toadies, the impertinent curiosity of a miscellaneous throng
who have neither genuine appreciation for talent nor sincere love for
excellence, but a pestiferous instinct for boring and preying. Mrs.
Siddons, bereaved of her children amidst her great fame, was so annoyed
by worrying interruptions, assailed by envy, slandered by enemies, and
vexed by parasites, that she breathed the deepest wishes of her soul in
these lines:
“Say, what’s the brightest wreath of fame,
But cankered buds that opening close?
Ah, what the world’s most pleasing dream,
But broken fragments of repose?
“Lead me where peace with steady hand
The mingled cup of life shall hold,
Where time shall smoothly pour his sand,
And wisdom turn that sand to gold.
“Then haply at religion’s shrine
This weary heart its load shall lay,
Each wish my fatal love resign,
And passion melt in tears away.”
The falsehood, the injustice, the plots, insincerity and triviality that
gather about the surfaces and course of a showy popular career Forrest
experienced in their full extent. He was not deceived by them, but saw
through them. They repelled and disgusted him, angered and depressed
him. They did not make him a misanthrope, but they chilled his demeanor,
hardened his face, checked the trustfulness of his sympathy, and gave
him an increasing distaste for convivial scenes and an increased liking
for his library and the chosen few in whom he could fully confide. He
was a man who esteemed justice and sincerity above all things else.
Flattery or interested eulogy he detested as much as he did venal
prejudice and blame. He loathed the unmeaning, conventional praises of
the journals, the polite compliments of acquaintances or strangers, but
was glad of all honest estimates. His dignity kept him from mingling
with the audience as they conversed on their way out of the theatre, but
he loved to hear what they said when it was repeated by one whom he
could trust. Nothing more surely proves that deep elements of love and
pride instead of shallow vanity and selfishness formed the basis of his
character than the fact that he hated to mix in great companies, either
public or private, where he was known and noticed, but loved to mingle
with the population of the streets, with festive multitudes, where,
unrecognized, he could look on and enter into their ways and pleasures.
“It is a great feat,” he used to say, “to resist the temptations of our
friends.” He did it when he withdrew from the obstreperous enthusiasm of
those who adulated him while revelling at his expense and shouting, “By
heaven, Forrest, you are an institution!”—forsaking them, and giving
himself exclusively to nature, his art, his books, and his disinterested
friends.
The practice of the arts of purchasing unearned praise, the tricks of
the mean to circumvent the noble, the accredited verdicts of titled
ignorance, and the fickle superficiality of popular favor, lessen the
value of common fame in the eyes of all who understand these things.
They foul its prizes and repel ingenuous spirits from its pursuit. The
same influence is exerted in a yet stronger degree by the experience of
the malignant envy awakened in plebeian natures by the sight of the
success of others contrasted with their own failure. It was long ago
remarked that
“With fame in just proportion envy grows;
The man that makes a character makes foes.”
The selfishness—not to say the innate depravity—of human nature, as
transmitted by historic inheritance, is such that every one who has not
been regenerated by the reception or culture of a better spirit secretly
craves a monopoly of the goods which command his desires. He dislikes
his competitors, and would gladly defeat their designs and appropriate
every waiting laurel to himself. In 1865 Forrest wrote, in a letter to
Oakes, “Yes, my dear friend, there are many in this world who take
pleasure in the misfortunes of their fellow-men and gloat over the
miseries of their neighbors. And their envy, hatred, and malice are
always manifested most towards men of positive natures.”
Souls of a generous type leave this base temper behind, and rejoice in
the glory of a rival as if it were their own. But mean souls, so far
from taking a disinterested delight in the spectacle of triumphant
genius or valor justly crowned with what it has justly won, are filled
with pain at the sight, a pain obscenely mixed up with fear and hate.
Wherever they see an illustrious head they would fain strike it down or
spatter it with mud. Their perverse instincts regard every good of
another as so much kept from them. There was a powerful passage in the
play of Jack Cade which Forrest used to pronounce with tremendous
effect, ingravidating every word with his own bitter experience of its
truth:
“Life’s story still! all would o’ertop their fellows;
And every rank, the lowest, hath its height,
To which hearts flutter with as large a hope
As princes feel for empire! but in each
Ambition struggles with a sea of hate.
He who sweats up the ridgy grades of life
Finds in each station icy scorn above;
Below him, hooting envy!”
The extent to which this dark and malign power operates in the breasts
of men is fearful. The careless see it not, the innocent suspect it not;
carefully disguising itself under all sorts of garbs, it dupes the
superficial observer. But the wise and earnest student of human life who
has had large experience knows that it is almost omnipresent. In every
walk of society, every profession,—even in the Church and among the
clergy,—are men who fear and hate their superiors simply because they
are superior, and the inferiors feel themselves obscured and taunted by
the superiority. A good free man loves to reverence a superior, feels
himself blessed and helped in looking up. But the slave of egotism and
envy feels elevated and enriched only in looking down on those he
fancies less favored than himself. It is a frightful and disheartening
phase of human nature; but it ought to be recognized, that we may be
guarded against it in others and stimulated to outgrow it in ourselves.
No other profession is so beset by the temptations and trials of this
odious spirit as the histrionic, which lives directly in the public
gaze, feeding on popular favor. And among all the actors America has
produced, no other had so varied, so intense and immense an experience
of the results of it as Forrest. He wrote these sad and caustic words in
his old age: “For more than forty years the usual weapons of abuse,
ridicule, and calumny have been unceasingly levelled at me, personally
and professionally, by envious associates, by ungrateful friends turned
traitors, by the hirelings of the press, and by a crowd of causeless
enemies made such by sheer malignity.” In a speech made twenty-two years
previously in the Walnut Street Theatre, in response to a call before
the curtain, he had said, “I thank you with all my heart for this
glorious and generous reception. In the midst of my trials it is
gratifying to be thus sustained. I have been assailed, ladies and
gentlemen, by a fiendish combination of enemies, who, not content with
striking at my professional efforts, have let loose their calumnies upon
my private character and invaded the sacred precincts of my home. Apart
from the support of my ardent and cherished friends is the consciousness
that I possess a reputation far dearer than all the professional honors
that the world could bestow,—a reputation which is dearer to me than
life itself. I will therefore pursue unawed the even tenor of my way. I
will, with God’s blessing, live down the calumnies that would destroy me
with my countrymen; and, turning neither to the right hand nor to the
left hand, will fearlessly toil to preserve to the last the reputation
of an honest and independent American citizen.”
To a man of his keen feeling and proud self-respect it must have been a
torture to read the studiously belittling estimates, the satires, the
insults, the slanderous caricatures continually published in the
newspapers under the name of criticism. No wonder they stirred his rage
and poisoned his repose, as they wounded his heart, offended his
conscience, and made him sometimes shrink from social intercourse and
sicken of the world. One critic says, “He is an injury to the stage. He
has established a bad school for the young actors who are all imitating
him. He has a contempt for genius and a disrelish for literature.”
Against this extract, pasted in one of his scrap-books, Forrest had
written, “Oh! oh!” A second writes, “It is impossible for us to admit
that a man of Mr. Forrest’s intelligence can take pleasure in making of
himself a silly spectacle for the amusement of the ignorant and the
sorrow and pity of the educated. We prefer to believe that it is even a
greater pain for him to play Metamora than it is for us to see him play
it. In that case, how great must be his anguish!” A third philosophizes
thus on his playing: “The best performances of Mr. Forrest are those
tame readings of ordinary authors which offer no opportunity for
enormous blunders. In the flat, dreary regions of the commonplace he
walks firmly. But he climbs painfully up Shakspeare as a blind man would
climb a mountain, continually tumbling over precipices without seeming
to know it. He shocks our sensibilities, astonishes our judgment,
bewilders and offends us; and this is at least excitement, if not
entertainment. But his Brutus is a remarkably stupid performance. The
only way in which he can redeem its stupidity is to make it worse; and
if he wants to do this he must inspire it with the spirit of his Hamlet
or his Othello.” A fourth makes malicious sport at his expense in this
manner: “Mr. Forrest excels every tragedian we remember in one grand
achievement. He can snort better than any man on the stage. It is an
accomplishment which must have cost him much labor, and of which he is
doubtless proud, for he introduces it whenever he gets a chance. His
snort in Hamlet is tremendous; but that dying, swan-like note, which
closes the career of the Gladiator, is unparalleled in the whole history
of his sonorous and tragic nose. It must be heard, not described. We can
only say that when he staggers in, with twenty mortal murders on his
crown, with a face hideous with gore, and falls dying on the stage, he
sounds a long, trumpet-like wail of dissolution, which is the most
supernaturally appalling sound we ever heard from any nose, either of
man or brute.” And a fifth caps the climax by calling him “A herculean
murderer of Shakspeare!” So did a critic say of Garrick, on the eve of
his retirement, “His voice is hoarse and hollow, his dimples are
furrows, his neck hideous, his lips ugly, especially the upper one,
which is raised all at once like a turgid piece of leather.” “He is a
grimace-maker, a haberdasher of wry faces, a hypocrite who laughs and
cries for hire!” Well might Byron exclaim,—
“Hard is his fate on whom the public gaze
Is fixed forever to detract or praise.”
A servile fawning on the press, a cowardly fear of its censures, a
tremulous sensitiveness to its comments, is one of the chief weaknesses
of American society. Its unprincipled meddlesomeness, tyranny, and
cruelty are thus pampered. A quiet ignoring of its impertinence or its
slander is undoubtedly the course most conducive to comfort on the part
of one assailed. But the man who has the independence and the courage
publicly to call his wanton assailant to account and prosecute him, even
though shielded by all the formidable immunities of an editorial chair,
sets a good example and does a real service to the whole community.
Every American who values his personal freedom should crown with his
applause the American who seizes an insolent newspaper by the throat and
brings it to its knees; for unkind and unprincipled criticism is the
bane of the American people. The antidote for this bane is personal
independence supported by personal conscience and honor in calm defiance
of all prying and censorious espionage. This would produce individual
distinction, raciness, and variety, resulting in an endless series of
personal ranks, with perfect freedom of circulation among them all;
whereas the two chief exposures of a democracy are individual envy and
social cowardice, yielding the double evil of universal rivalry and
universal truckling, and threatening to end in a dead level of conceited
mediocrity. The envy towards superiors which De Tocqueville showed to be
the cardinal vice of democracy finds its worst vent in the newspaper
press, which assails almost every official in the country with the
foulest accusations. Are these writers destitute of patriotism and of
faith in humanity? Are they ignorant of the fact that if they convince
the public that their superiors are all corrupt the irresistible reflex
influence of the conviction will itself corrupt the whole public?
That American citizen who has original manhood and lives a fresh, honest
life of his own, regardless of the dictation of King Caucus or Queen
Average,—the most heartless and vulgar despots that ever reigned,—sets
the bravest of examples and teaches the most needed of lessons. Fenimore
Cooper did this, criticising the errors and defects of his fellow-
citizens as an enthusiastic and conscientious patriot should who sets
humanity and truth above even country and fashion, and in consequence he
was misunderstood, lampooned, and insulted by the baser newspapers, and
finally, after one or two hundred libel suits, hounded into his grave.
If they ever come to their senses, his repentant countrymen will one day
build him a monument. Forrest was much this sort of man. He asserted
himself, resented and defied dictation, and wanted others to do the
same. He secured at different times a verdict with damages against the
proprietors of four newspapers, and threatened libel suits against three
others, which he withdrew on receiving ample public apology. The apology
given in one instance, where he had been professionally abused and
personally accused of drunkenness, is of so exemplary a character that
it ought to be preserved. And here it is:
“It will perhaps be remembered by most of our readers that Mr. Edwin
Forrest brought a libel suit against the proprietors of this paper for
articles which appeared in our issues of 10th, 17th, and 24th of
November, 1867. The solicitations and representations of mutual friends
have induced Mr. Forrest generously to consent to the withdrawal of the
case. Under these circumstances it becomes our duty as it is our
pleasure, to express our regret at the publication of the articles in
question.
“The articles complained of were, we frankly admit, beyond the limits of
dramatic criticism; and the present proprietors, who saw them for the
first time when printed, were at the time and still are sincerely sorry
they appeared. Though not personally acquainted with Mr. Forrest, we do
know, what the world knows, that he has always been prompt and faithful
in his professional engagements; and his bitterest enemies, if he have
any, must admit that he is not only eminent in his profession but
especially free from the vice of intemperance.”
The newspaper attack from which he suffered the most was so peculiar in
some of its features as to demand mention. In 1855 a series of elaborate
critiques on his chief rôles appeared in a leading metropolitan journal.
They were so scholarly, careful, and strong in their analysis of the
plays, and so cutting in their strictures on the player, that they
attracted wide attention and did him much damage. Now, two hands were
concerned in these articles. The learning, thought, and eloquence were
furnished by a German of uncommon scholarship and talent, who deeply
felt the power and merit of Forrest as an actor and considered him a man
of accomplished dramatic genius. The articles, as he wrote them, were
then padded with demeaning epithets and scurrilous estimates of Forrest
by one who was filled with prejudices theoretical and personal. Could
Forrest have totally disregarded the articles, fortified in a
magnanimous serenity, it had been well. He could not do it. He took them
home with extreme pain and with extreme wrath, intensely resenting their
injustice and their unkindness. This is a specimen of what is inflicted
and suffered in the battle of public life. It tempts one to say, Blessed
is the man who escapes all publicity, and lives and loves and dies
happily in private! No doubt, however, it is best to say, with the grand
old Faliero,—
“I will be what I should be, or be nothing.”
His long, crowded experience of unfairness and unkindness deposited in
Forrest a burning grudge against the world, a fierce animosity towards
his injurers, an angry recoil of self-esteem, and a morbid exaggeration
of the real vices of society. In one of his letters to a friend he
writes, “This human life is a wretched failure, and the sooner
annihilation comes to it the better.” An old poet makes one of his
characters who had been deeply wronged say,—
“I will instruct my sorrows to be proud,
For grief is proud and makes his owner stout.”
Mrs. Montagu wrote to John Philip Kemble under similar circumstances,
“If you retire, from an opinion that mankind are insincere, ungrateful,
and malignant, you will grow proud by reflecting that you are not like
these Pharisees.” How such an opinion in Forrest marred his peace of
mind and rankled in his general feelings—although much kindliness to men
and much enjoyment of life still remained—was obvious enough in his
later years, and is vividly expressed in many of his letters. “It would
amaze and shock the honest, upright people of this country,” he writes,
“could they but know as I do how these sage judges, these benign law-
peddlers, are manipulated by outsiders to give any decree that malice
and money may demand.” Again he writes, “I have all my life been cheated
and preyed on by harpies, right and left. While they have enjoyed my
money and maligned me I have toiled on for the next batch of swindlers.
I have squandered more than a quarter of a million dollars on friends
who, with a few noble exceptions, have returned my kindness not only
with ingratitude but with obloquy.” And at another time he says still
more at length, “Whatever my enemies may say of me—be it good or bad—
matters but little. I would not buy their mercy at the price of one fair
word. I claim no exemption from the infirmities of my temper, which are
doubtless many. But I would not exchange the honest vices of my blood
for the nefarious hypocrisies and assumed virtues of my malignant
detractors. I am no canting religionist, and I cordially hate those who
have wronged and backbitten me. I have—yes, let me own that I have—a
religion of hate; not of revenge, for while I detest I would not injure.
I have a hatred of oppression in whatever shape it may appear,—a hatred
of hypocrisy, falsehood, and injustice,—a hatred of bad and wicked men
and women,—and a hatred of my enemies, for whom I have no forgiveness
excepting through their own repentance of the injuries they have done
me. I have never flattered the blown-up fool above me nor crushed the
wretch beneath me.
“‘I have not caused the widow’s tear,
Nor dimmed the orphan’s eye;
I have not stained the virgin years,
Nor mocked the mourner’s cry.’”
“As for those who misjudge and mislike me, I hate and defy them, and
appeal for justice to Nature and God, confident that they will one day
grant it.”
These expressions but too plainly reveal the sore places in his heart.
Ah, could he but have attained a sweet and magnanimous self-
sufficingness, frankly forgiven and forgotten his foes, and outgrown all
those chronic contempts and resentments,—could he but have turned his
thoughts away from brooding over the vices of men, and dwelt
prevailingly on the other side of the picture of the world,—how much
more peaceful and dignified and happy his age would have been! But this
is hardly to be expected of one passionately struggling in the emulous
arena, his veins swollen with hot blood in which still runs the barbaric
tradition, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. To expurgate that
old animal tradition and introduce in its place the saintly principle of
forgiveness needs patient suffering and leisurely culture grafted on a
fine spirit. When this result is secured, man rises superior to wrong,
to enmity, to disgrace, is content to do his duty and fulfil his destiny
in the love of truth and humanity, sure that every one will at last be
rewarded after his deserts, and letting the cruel or ridiculous caprices
of fortune and fame pass by him as unregarded as the idle wind.
It would not be fair to the truth of the case if this chapter left the
impression that Forrest found on the whole the penalties of his fame
bitterer to bear than its prizes were sweet to enjoy. The opposite was
the fact. The annoyances attendant on his great reputation alloyed but
destroyed not the comfort it yielded in its varied tributes and in its
vast supporting sense of sympathetic life. Besides, the very vexations
consequent on it were often accompanied by their own outweighing
compensations. Sallying out of the Tremont House in Boston, one
forenoon, arm in arm with his friend Oakes, and passing down Washington
Street, his attention was caught by a hideous caricature of himself in a
shop-window. A group of boys were gazing at it in great merriment. “Good
heavens, Oakes,” he cried, “just look at that infernal thing! It is
enough to make one curse the day he was born.” At that moment one of the
boys recognized him, and exclaimed to the others, “Here he is!” Forrest
whispered to his friend, “Boys are impartial; they have not the
prejudices men have. I am going to ask them their opinion. Look here,
boys, do I look like that?” One of them, a little older than the rest,
answered, promptly, “Well, we knew that it was you; but then you see
there is this difference,—this makes us laugh, and you make us cry.”
“Thank you, my lad, thank you,” responded Forrest, “Come on, Oakes; I
have got better than I bargained for. My enemy when he produced that
beastly monstrosity little dreamed what a pleasure he was going to give
me.” And, as they swung slowly along, he said, half musingly, “I wonder
why they always degrade me by caricature and never exalt me by
idealization.” The solution, which he left unattempted, is this.
Caricature is the exaggeration of bad points, idealization is the
heightening of good points. It is much easier to make the bad appear
worse than it is to make the good appear better. Man intuitively likes
to attempt what he feels he can succeed in, and dislikes to attempt what
he feels he shall fail in. Therefore, when commonplace natures represent
their superiors they lower them by travesty rather than raise them by
improvement. And so in critical art caricature abounds over
idealization.