CHAPTER XXIII.

CLOSING YEARS AND THE EARTHLY FINALE.

When in the fullest glory of his strength and his fame Forrest bought a

farm and quite made up his mind to retire from the stage forever. While

under this impulse he played a parting engagement in New Orleans. Called

out after the play, he said, among other things, “The bell which tolled

the fall of the curtain also announced my final departure from among

you. I have chosen a pursuit congenial to my feelings,—that pursuit

which the immortal Washington pronounced one of the most noble and

useful ever followed by man,—the tilling of the soil. And now, ladies

and gentlemen, I have to say that little word which must so often be

said in this sad, bright world,—farewell.” The purpose, however, passed

away with its now forgotten cause. Again he seriously thought for a

little time, when a nomination to Congress was pressed on him, of

exchanging his dramatic career for a political one. This idea, too, on

careful reflection he rejected. And once more, when depressed and

embittered by his domestic trouble, and sick of appearing before the

public, he was for a season strongly tempted to say he would never again

enter the theatre as a player. With these three brief and fitful

exceptions he never entertained any design of abandoning the practice of

his profession, until a shattering illness in the spring of 1872

compelled him to take the step. Then he took the step quietly, with no

public announcement.

Thus the dramatic seasons of the five years preceding his death found

the veteran still in harness, working vigorously as of old in the art of

which he had ever been so fond and so proud. His earnings during each of

these seasons were between twenty-five and forty thousand dollars, and

the applause given to his performances and the friendly and flattering

personal attentions paid him were almost everywhere very marked. He had

no reason to feel that he was lingering superfluous on the stage. Many,

it is true, asked why, with his great wealth, his satiation of fame, his

literary taste, his growing infirmity of lameness, he did not give up

this drudgery and enjoy the luxury of his home in leisure and dignity.

There were two chief reasons why he persisted in his vocation. No doubt

the large sum of ready money he earned by it was welcome to him, because

while his fortune was great it was mostly unproductive and a burden of

taxes. No doubt, also, he well relished the admiration and applause he

drew; for the habit of enjoying this had become a second nature with

him. Neither of these considerations, however, was it which caused him

to undergo the toil and hardship of his profession to the last. His real

motives were stronger. The first was the sincere conviction that it was

better for the preservation of his health and faculties, his interest

and zest in life and the world, to keep at his wonted task. He feared

that a withdrawal of this spur and stimulus would the sooner dull his

powers, stagnate him, and break him down. He often asserted this. For

example, in 1871 he wrote thus, after speaking of what he had suffered

from severe journeyings, extreme cold, poor food, many vexations, and a

fall over a balustrade so terrible that it would have killed him had it

not been for his professional practice in falling: “This is very hard

work; but it is best to do it, as it prevents both physical and mental

rust, which is a sore decayer of body and soul.”

But the most effectual motive in keeping him on the stage was a real

professional enthusiasm, an intense love of his art for its own sake. He

felt that he was still improving in his best parts, in everything except

mere material power, giving expression to his refining conceptions with

a greater delicacy and subtilty, a more minute truthfulness and finish.

He keenly enjoyed his own applause of his own best performances. This

was a satisfaction to him beyond anything which the critics or the

public could bestow or withhold. It was a luxury he was not willing to

forego. He was a great artist still delighting himself with touching and

tinting his favorite pictures, still loyal to truth and nature, and

feeling the joy of a devotee as he placed now a more delicate shade here

or a more ethereal light there, producing a higher harmony of tone, a

greater convergence of effects in a finer unity of the whole. Even had

this been an illusion with him, it would have been touching and noble.

But it was a reality. His Richelieu and Lear were never rendered by him

with such entire artistic beauty and grandeur as the last times he

played them. In the thoughts of those who knew that as he went over the

country in his later years the plaudits of the audiences and the

approvals of critics were insignificant to him in comparison with his

own judgment and feeling, and that he deeply relished the minutely

earnest and natural truth and power and rounded skill of his own chosen

portrayals of human nature, the fact lent an extreme interest and

dignity to his character. This unaffected enthusiasm of the old artist,

this intrinsic delight in his work, was a sublime reward for his long-

continued conscientious devotion, and an example which his professional

followers in future time should thoughtfully heed. He wrote to a friend

from Washington near the close of his career, “Last night I played Lear

in a cold house, with a wretched support, and to a sparse and

undemonstrative audience. But I think I never in my life more thoroughly

enjoyed any performance of mine, because I really believed, and do

believe so now, that I never before in my life played the part so well.

For forty years I have studied and acted Lear. I have studied the part

in the closet, in the street, on the stage, in lunatic asylums all over

the world, and I hold that next to God, Shakspeare comprehended the mind

of man. Now I would like to have had my representation of the character

last night photographed to the minutest particular. Then next to the

creation of the part I would not barter the fame of its representation.”

This, written to a bosom friend from whom he kept back nothing, when the

shadow of the grave was approaching, was not egotism or vanity. It was

truth and sincerity, and its meaning is glorious. What a man works for

with downright and persevering honesty, that, and the satisfaction or

the retribution of it, he shall at last have. And there is only one

thing of which no artist can ever tire,—merit. The passion for mere fame

grows weak and cold, and, under its prostituted accompaniments, dies out

in disgust; but the zeal and the joy of a passion for excellence keep

fresh and increase to the end.

Aside from that self-rewarding love of his art and delight in exercising

it and improving in it, of which no invidious influence could rob him,

Forrest continued still to be followed by the same extremes of praise

and abuse to which he had ever been accustomed. But one grateful form of

compliment and eulogy became more frequent towards the close. He was in

the frequent receipt of letters, drawn up and signed by large numbers of

the leading citizens of important towns, urging him to pay them a visit

and gratify them with another, perhaps a final, opportunity of

witnessing some of his most celebrated impersonations. Among his papers

were found, carefully labelled, autograph letters of this description

from New Orleans, Savannah, Cincinnati, Louisville, Detroit, Troy, and

other cities,—flattering testimonials to his celebrity and the interest

felt in him. These dignified and disinterested demonstrations were

fitted to offset and soothe the wounds continually inflicted on his

proud sensibility by many vulgar persons who chanced to have access to

newspapers for the expression of their frivolity, malignity, or envy.

For detraction is the shadow flung before and behind as the sun of fame

journeys through the empyrean. To illustrate the scurrilous treatment

Forrest had to bear, even in his old age, from heartless ribalds, it is

needful only to set a few characteristic examples in contrast with his

real character. His professional and personal character, in the spirit

and aim of his public life, is justly indicated in this brief newspaper

editorial:

“In the line of heroic characters—such as Brutus, Virginius, Tell—Mr.

Forrest has had no rival in this country. He is himself rich in the

generous, manly qualities fitted for such grand ideal parts. The old-

time favorite plays of the heroic and romantic school, like Damon and

Pythias, are well-nigh banished from the stage. The materialistic

tendencies and aspirations of this intensely practical age disqualify

most audiences for seeing with the zest of their fathers a play so

purely poetic and imaginative as the immortal tale of the Pythagorean

friends. That Mr. Forrest, almost alone among his contemporaries, should

cling to this style of plays with such true enthusiasm is evidence of

the fidelity with which he seeks purity rather than attractiveness in

the models of his art. His name has never been identified with a single

one of the meretricious innovations which have within the past two

decades so lowered the dignity of the drama. Every play associated with

his person has some noble hero as its central figure, and some sublime

moral quality and lesson in the unravelling of its plot. And his

unwavering seriousness of purpose in everything he plays cannot be

questioned, whatever else may be questioned.”

The above estimate is sustained by the unconscious betrayal, the latent

implications, in the following speech made by Forrest himself when

called out after a performance:

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,—For this and for the many tokens of your kind

approbation, I return you my sincere and heartfelt acknowledgments. It

is a source of peculiar gratification to me to perceive that the drama

is yet, with you, a subject of consideration. Permit me to express my

conviction that it is, in one form or another, whether for good or for

evil, intimately blended with our social institutions. It is for you,

then, to give it the necessary and appropriate direction. If it be left

in charge of the bad and the dissolute, the consequences will be

deplorable; but if the fostering protection of the wise and the good be

extended to it, the result cannot but tend to the advancement of morals

and the intellectual improvement of the community. It is indeed the true

province of the drama

‘To wake the soul by tender strokes of art,

To raise the genius, and to mend the heart;

To make mankind in conscious virtue bold,

Live o’er each scene, and be what they behold;

For this, the tragic muse first trod the stage,

Commanding tears to stream through every age;

Tyrants no more their savage nature kept,

And foes to virtue wondered how they wept.’”

What a descent from the above level to the ridicule, insult, and

misrepresentation in notices like the succeeding:

“Forrest reminded us of the Butcher of Chandos, and his rendition of the

fifth act was reminiscent of the wild madness, the ungovernable

bellowings and fierce snortings of a short-horned bull chased by a score

of terriers. He raved, and rumbled, and snorted, and paused, gathering

wind for a fresh start, as if the ghost of Shakspeare were whispering in

his ear,

‘Now crack thy lungs, and split thy brazen pipe;

Blow, actor, till thy sphered bias cheek

Outswell the colic of puffed Aquilon;

Come, stretch thy chest, and let thy eyes spout blood;

Thou blow’st for Hector.’

We are fearful that the more he studies and improves his part the worse

it will be.”

“Last night we went with great expectations to the Academy of Music to

see Forrest. We were never so astonished as to witness there the most

successful practical imposition ever played on the public. Manager Leake

has got Old Brown the hatter there, with his white head blacked, playing

leading parts under the assumed name of Edwin Forrest.”

“Mr. Forrest dragged his weary performances out to empty boxes last

week. Save in his voice, which still soars, crackles, rumbles, grumbles,

growls and hisses, as in his younger days, this great actor is but a

dreary echo of his former self. Appropriately may he exclaim,—

‘Othello’s occupation’s gone!’

and it would be well if, like the heroic Moor, he would bid farewell to

the bustling world by an abrupt retirement from the stage, instead of

inflicting nightly stabs upon his high reputation and wounding his old-

time friends by his attempts to soar into the sublime regions of

tragedy.”

“The interest that still crowds the theatre whenever Mr. Forrest appears

is less admiration of his present power than curiosity to see a gigantic

ruin.”

“The intellectual portion of the community never thoroughly appreciated

the style of histrionic gymnastics which our great tragedian has

introduced; the ponderous tenderness and gladiatorial grace of his

conceptions, though excellent in their way, had never any charm for

people of delicate nerves, who delight not in viewing experiments in

spasmodic contortion, or delineations of violent death, evidently after

studies from nature in the slaughterhouse! But lately the faithful

themselves are tiring of it.”

The man with a thin and acid nature who aspires to be an author or an

artist, and cannot succeed, sometimes becomes a spiteful critic. The

only pity is that he should usually find it so easy to get an organ for

his spites. Would-be genius hates and criticises, actual genius loves

and creates. The former enviously despises those who succeed where he

has failed, the latter generously admires all true merit.

And now it will be a relief to turn from such criticisms to facts. The

season of 1871 was marked by an experience altogether memorable in the

professional history of Forrest, his last engagement in New York, where

he played for twenty nights in February at the Fourteenth Street

Theatre, sustaining only the two roles of Lear and Richelieu. These were

his two best parts, and being characters of old men his cruel sciatica

scarcely interfered with his rendering of them. One or two newspaper

writers complained, as if it were a crime in the actor and a personal

offence to them, that “when Forrest came this season to New York he

neglected, and apparently with a purpose, the usual precautions of

metropolitan managers, and seemed to avoid all the modern appliances of

success, either from a contempt for the appliances or from indifference

as to the result.” They did not seem once to suspect that his scorn for

every species of bribery or meretricious advertising, his frank and

careless trust in simple truth, was, considering the corrupt custom of

the times, in the highest degree honorable to him and exemplary for

others. It was always his way to make a plain announcement of his

appearance, and then let the verdict be what it might, with no

interference of his.

There was no popular rush to see him now. In the crowd of new

excitements and the quick forgetfulness belonging to our day, the

curiosity about him and the interest in him had largely passed away. But

the old friends who rallied at his name, and the respectable numbers of

cultivated people who were glad of a chance to see the most historic

celebrity of the American stage before it should be too late, were

unanimous in their enthusiastic admiration. They declared with one voice

that his playing was filled with wonderful power in general and with

wonderful felicities in detail. That metropolitan press, too, from which

he had so long received not only unjust depreciation, but wrong and

contumely, spoke of him and his performances now in a very different

tone. Its voice appeared a kindly response to what he had privately

written to his friend Oakes: “Well, I am here, here in New York once

more, and on Monday next begin again my professional labor,—labors begun

more than forty years ago in the same city. What changes since then in

men and things! Will any one of that great and enthusiastic audience

which greeted my efforts as a boy, be here on Monday evening next to

witness the matured performance of the man? If so, how I should like to

hear from his own lips if the promises of spring-time have been entirely

fulfilled by the fruits of the autumn of life!” Without any notable

exception, extreme praise was lavished on his acting, and his name was

treated with a tenderness and a respect akin to reverence. It seemed as

though the writers felt some premonition of the near farewell and the

endless exit, and were moved to be just and kind. The late amends

touched the heart of the old player deeply. It was a comfort to him to

be thus appreciated in the city of his greatest pride ere he ceased

acting, and to have the estimates of his friends endorsed in elaborate

critiques from the pens of the best dramatic censors, William Winter,

Henry Sedley, John S. Moray, and others. It is due to him and to them

that some specimens of these notices be preserved here. Space will allow

but a few extracts from the leading articles:

“Edwin Forrest, the actor, who is identified with much that is

intellectual, picturesque, and magnificently energetic in the history of

the American stage, is again before the New York public. His

reappearance is deeply interesting upon several accounts. His

reputation, far from being confined to the United States, extends

wherever the language of Shakspeare is spoken, and to a great many

countries where translations have rendered that poet’s meanings known.

His name has grown with the name of the American people, and has

greatened with the increasing greatness of the country. At home and

abroad he is recognized as the superbly unique representative of several

characters whose creators owe their inspiration to the genius of

American history. No other actor has presented Americans with such

powerful and original conceptions of King Lear, Coriolanus, and Macbeth.

No other unites such grand physical forces with such intellectual vigor

and delicacy. His hand has an infinity of tints at its command, and his

tenderest touches are never weak. He is, therefore, deservedly and

almost universally considered as the fair representative of what

Americans have most reason to be proud of in the history of their stage.

He is not a weak copyist of foreign originalities and of schools of the

past. His virtues and his vices, dramatically speaking, are his own. His

genius is thoroughly self-responsible, and his strong, conscious, and

magnificent repose is resplendently suggestive of the degree in which

the great actor rates, and has a right to rate himself.”

“Mr. Forrest can indeed be now admired more than he ever was before; for

his magnificent and picturesque energies are now chastened and

restrained by great intellectual culture, and softened by the presence

of that tender glow which varied experience is pretty sure to ultimately

lend. One strives in vain to recall the name of any other actor, either

in this country or in England, who possesses such immense physical

energies under such perfect subservience to the intellect. We insist

more particularly upon this point, because it is one upon which even the

admirers of Mr. Forrest are not apt to dwell. There is a very large

class of people who are so absorbed in the generous breadth, the

brilliant coloring, and the large treatment of Mr. Forrest’s favorite

themes, that they neglect to give him credit for intellectual niceties

and delicate emotional distinctions. They vulgarly admire merely the

large style and heroic presence of the man, and the rich reverberations

of a voice that all the demands of the entire gamut of passion have not

yet perceptibly worn, and they omit to give him that intellectual

appreciation which is very decidedly his due. In no other character

which he is fond of playing are all these qualifications so harmoniously

united as in Lear. In no other character are the distinctive qualities

of Mr. Forrest’s genius so beautifully blended and played. Those who

have been familiar with his rendering of this character in the days that

are past will take a curious pleasure in accompanying him from scene to

scene, and from act to act, and in remarking how true he remains to the

ideal of his younger years, and how powerful he is in expressing that

ideal. It is a rare thing for an actor to awaken in a later generation

the same quality and degree of delight that he awoke in his own. It is a

rare thing for him to be as youthful in his maturity as he was mature in

his youth, and to thus succeed in delighting those who measure by a

standard more exacting and severe than the standard was which the

public, in an earlier age of American dramatic art, was fond of

applying. Mr. Forrest has passed these tests. We do not care for the

ignorant sarcasm of those who claim that the ‘school’ he represents is a

‘physical’ school. It is a school wherein Mr. Forrest is supreme master,

and where an unrivalled voice and physique are made absolutely

subservient to intellectual expression.”

“Never were plaudits better deserved by any actor in any age than those

which have been showered down upon Forrest during the past week. His

conception and his rendering of King Lear were alike magnificent. In his

prime, when theatres were crowded by the brightest and fairest of

America, who listened spell-bound to the favorite of the hour, he never

played this character half so well. The idiosyncrasy of his nature

forbade it. The fierce ungovernable fire within him could not be

restrained within the limits of the rôle. Forrest could never modulate

the transport of his feelings. He leaped at once from a calm and even

tenor to the full violence of frenzied anger. There was no _crescendo_,

no gradation. He was so fully possessed of his rôle that he threw aside

every consideration of different circumstances which the case suggested.

He was for the moment Lear, but not Shakspeare’s old man: he was

Forrest’s Lear. Hence the fire of furious anger and the decrepitude of

age were alike exaggerated. But these things have passed away. Age has

tamed the lion-like excesses of the royal Forrest, and his impersonation

of King Lear is now absolutely faultless. Seeing and hearing him under

the disadvantages of a mangled text, a poor company, a miserable _mise

en scène_, and a thin house, the visitor must still be impressed by the

one grand central figure, so eloquent, so strong, so sweet in gentlest

pathos. There is an unconscious reproach in the manner in which he bows

his head to the shouts of applause. He is the King Lear of the American

stage; he gave to his children, the public, all that he had, and now

they have deserted him. They have crowned a new king before whom they

bow, and the old man eloquent is cheered by few voices. The

consciousness of his royal nature supports him. He knows that while he

lives there can be no other head of the American stage; but still he is

deserted and alone. That some such feeling overpowered him when the

flats parted, and the audience, seeing the king on his throne, cheered

him, there can be little doubt. He bowed his head slightly in response

to the acclamations of those scantily-filled seats. But throughout the

play there was an added dignity of sorrow, which showed that the neglect

of the public had wounded him. He knew his fate. He recognized that he

was a discrowned king, and that the fickle public had crowned another

not worthy of sovereignty and having no sceptre of true genius. The play

went on and he became absorbed in his rôle, forgetting in the delirium

of his art that his house was nearly empty. Had there been but five

there, he would have played it. For to him acting is existence, and the

histrionic fire in his bosom can never be quenched save with life.

Actors may come and actors may go, but it will be centuries before a

Lear arises like unto this man Forrest, whom the public seems to have so

nearly forgotten.”

“The curtain rose a few minutes after eight, and the cold air issuing

from the stage threw a chill over the audience. But when at last the

scene opened and revealed Lear on his throne, the old form in its Jove-

like grandeur, the quiet eye that spoke of worlds of reserved power,

brought back the memories of old, and round after round of applause

stopped the utterance of the opening words. There was such a heartiness

of admiring welcome about the thing, so much of the old feeling of

theatrical enthusiasm, that Forrest felt for once compelled to stand up,

and, with a bend of his leonine head, acknowledge the welcome. He tested

the love of his daughters; he gave away his kingdom, taking, as he gave

it, the sympathies of the audience. He called on the eldest, and was

taunted; he lost his ill-controlled temper, and finally, goaded till his

whole frame seemed about to shatter, he invoked the curse of heaven. As

he spoke, you could hear all over the house that hissing of breath drawn

through the teeth which sudden pain causes, and when the curtain fell

people looked into each other’s eyes in silence. Then you would hear,

‘That is acting.’ ‘It is awful!’ Then suddenly rose bravos, not your

petty clapping of hands, but shouts from boxes and orchestra, and they

came in volleys. The old king tottered calmly out before the curtain,

looked around slowly, and bowed back. But there was now in that quiet

eye a suppressed gleam in which those nearest the stage could read as in

a book the pride and gratification of genius enjoying the effect of its

power.”

“With the drawbacks of ordinary scenery and a wretched support, Forrest

gives us a Richelieu which at the close of the fourth act nightly draws

forth a perfect whirlwind of applause, and brings the veteran before the

curtain amidst a wild cry of enthusiasm which must stir old memories in

his bosom. His genius spreads an electric glow through the house and

carries the sympathies by storm.”

“Mr. Forrest’s reading of Richelieu is remarkable for its firmness and

intelligibility of purpose, for its singular pathos, for its often

unaffected melody of elocution, and—in this point approaching his Lear—

for its revelation, at intervals, of unmistakable subtlety of thought.

Like his Lear, too, the part is embroidered over with those swift

touches of electricity that gild and enrich the underlying fabric which

might otherwise appear too weighty and sombre.”

“The actor who would vitalize this part has no common work to perform.

It is incumbent upon him to make martial heroism visible through a veil

of intellectual finesse, and to indicate the natural soldier-like

qualities of the man projecting through that smoothness and

dissimulation which the ambition of the statesman rendered expedient. It

is necessary for him to develop so that they may be perceived by the

audience those characteristics which Bulwer has unfolded in the play

through the instrumentality of long soliloquies that are necessarily

omitted upon the stage, and unless this is done by the actor the

character is deprived of that subtlety and force and that human

complexity of motive which Bulwer, in spite of his artificiality and

conceits, contrives to make apparent.”

“This, however, is the task which Mr. Forrest performs to perfection.

Not being a purely intellectual character, Richelieu demands in the

delineation all those aids which are desirable from Mr. Forrest’s august

physique and wonderfully rich voice. A just discrimination compels us to

own that beside this representation that of Mr. Booth appears faint and

pale. A film seems to cover it; whereas the representation of Mr.

Forrest gathers color and strength from the contrast. As a piece of mere

elocution Mr. Forrest’s reading is exquisitely beautiful, the ear

floating upon the profound and varied music of its cadences. But,

flawlessly exquisite as are these graces of enunciation, they are, after

all, merely channels in which the spirit of the entire interpretation

runs. The most cultured man in the audience which last night filled the

Fourteenth Street Theatre might have closely followed every line which

the actor enunciated, without being able to perceive wherein it could be

more heavily freighted with significance.”

But perhaps the most gratifying testimony borne at this time to the

natural power and artistic genius and skill of Forrest was the following

eloquent article by Mr. Winter, whose repeated previous notices of the

actor had been unfavorable and severe, but who, irresistibly moved, now

showed himself as magnanimous as he was conscientious:

“Probably the public does not quite yet appreciate either the value of

its opportunity or the importance of improving it. Two facts, therefore,

ought to be strongly stated: one, that Mr. Forrest’s personation of Lear

is an extraordinary work of art; the other, that, in the natural order

of things, it must soon pass forever away from the stage. Those who see

it now will enjoy a luxury and a benefit. Those who miss seeing it now

will sow the seed of a possible future regret. We have not in times past

been accustomed to extol, without considerable qualification, the acting

of Mr. Forrest. This was natural, and it was right. An unpleasant

physical element—the substitution of muscle for brain and of force for

feeling—has usually tainted his performances. That element has been

substantially discarded from his Lear. We have seen him play the part

when he was no more than a strong, resolute, robustious man in a state

of inconsequent delirium. The form of the work, of course, was always

definite. Strength of purpose in Mr. Forrest’s acting always went hand

in hand with strength of person. He was never vague. He knew his intent,

and he was absolutely master of the means that were needful to fulfil

it. Precision, directness, culminating movement, and physical magnetism

were his weapons; and he used them with a firm hand. Self-distrust never

depressed him. Vacillation never defeated his purpose. It was the

triumph of enormous and overwhelming individuality. Lear could not be

seen, because Mr. Forrest stood before him and eclipsed him.

“All that is greatly modified. Time and suffering seem to have done

their work. It is no secret that Mr. Forrest has passed through a great

deal of trouble. It is no secret that he is an old man. We do not touch

upon these facts in a spirit of heartlessness or flippancy. But what we

wish to indicate is that natural causes have wrought a remarkable change

in Mr. Forrest’s acting, judged, as we now have the opportunity of

judging it, by his thrilling delineation of the tremendous agonies and

the ineffably pathetic madness of Shakspeare’s Lear. In form his

performance is neither more nor less distinct than it was of old. Almost

every condition of symmetry is satisfied in this respect. The port is

kingly; the movement is grand; the transitions are natural; the delivery

is resonant; the intellect is potential; the manifestations of madness

are accurate; the method is precise. But, beyond all this, there is now

a spiritual quality such as we have not seen before in this extremely

familiar work. Here and there, indeed, the actor uses his ancient snort,

or mouths a line for the sake of certain words that intoxicate his

imagination by their sound and movement. Here and there, also, he

becomes suddenly and inexplicably prosaic in his rendering of meanings.

But these defects are slight in contrast with the numberless beauties

that surround and overshadow them. We have paid to this personation the

involuntary and sincere tribute of tears. We cannot, and would not

desire to, withhold from it the merited recognition of critical praise.

Description it can scarcely be said to require. Were we to describe it

in detail, however, we should dwell, with some prolixity of remark, upon

the altitude of imaginative abstraction which Mr. Forrest attains in the

mad scenes. Shakspeare’s Lear is a person with the most tremulously

tender heart and the most delicately sensitive and poetical mind

possible to mortal man, and his true grandeur appears in his overthrow,

which is pathetic for that reason. The shattered fragments of the column

reveal its past magnificence. No man can play Lear in these scenes so as

to satisfy, even approximately, the ideal inspired by Shakspeare’s text

unless he knows, whether by intuition or by experience, the vanity, the

mutability, the hollowness of this world. The deepest deep of philosophy

is sounded here, and the loftiest height of pathos is attained. It is

high praise to say that Mr. Forrest, whether consciously or

unconsciously, interprets these portions of the tragedy in such a manner

as frequently to enthrall the imagination and melt the heart. The

miserable desolation of a noble and tender nature scathed and blasted by

physical decay and by unnatural cruelty looks out of his eyes and speaks

in his voice. This may be only the successful simulation of practised

art; but, whatever it be, its power and beauty and emotional influence

are signal and irresistible.”

The New York “Courier” said, in a striking editorial, “The engagement of

Edwin Forrest at the Fourteenth Street Theatre, and the praises lavished

on him by the whole press of this city, afford us an opportunity to make

a little contribution to the truth of history.” The “Courier,” after

maintaining that Forrest had always been a great actor, and that the

total change of tone in the press was not so much owing to his

improvement as to the fact that time had softened and removed the

prejudices of his judges, continues,—

“When Edwin Forrest, who might have been called at the time the American

boy tragedian, was playing at the Old Bowery, and Edmund Kean at the Old

Park, there was a little society of gentlemen in this city, who were

passionate admirers of the drama. Young in years, they were already ripe

in scholarship and profound as well as independent critics. Amongst

them, and constantly associating together, were Anthony L. Robertson,

afterwards Vice-Chancellor; John Nathan, afterwards law partner with

Secretary Fish; John Lawrence; John K. Keese, better known as ‘Kinney

Keese,’ the wittiest and most learned of book auctioneers, whose mind

was a Bodleian Library and whose tongue a telegraph battery of joke and

repartee, and a dozen others,—all since eminent at the bar, in

literature, or in national politics. Their little semi-social, semi-

literary society was known as ‘The Column,’ and subsisted for many

years. During the rival engagements of Kean and Forrest these gentlemen

went backwards and forwards between the ‘Park’ and the ‘Bowery,’ and

after witnessing the ‘Lear’ of the greatest of English actors since

Garrick, and the Lear of Forrest, unanimously decided, upon the most

careful and critical discussion, that, great as Kean was, Forrest was

THE Lear. Unhappily he was only an American boy, and American actors

were not then the fashion. It was in the days of Anglomania, and the

fashion was to pooh-pooh everything that had not graduated at Covent

Garden or Drury Lane and lacked the full diploma of cockney approbation.

Forrest, both as man and actor, was a full-blooded American and a sturdy

Democrat,—two fearful crimes at a time when art was measured wholly by

an English standard and politics reduced criticism to almost as

despicable servility as they do now. Happily for the impartiality of

discussion in art we have outlived the period of Anglomania, and are

rather virtuously proud than otherwise of anything genuinely American.

And this Edwin Forrest is. His career, too, is a fine example at once of

personal devotion to art, and of ‘the sober second thought of the

people,’ which all the critics failed to alter. For, even when the

latter were most mad against him, he always drew crowds, and we may say

safely, by the power of native genius, supported only by an iron will,

he has shone for fifty years, with increasing lustre, as a star in the

dramatic firmament. William Leggett of the Evening _Post_, who was a

power in New York politics and loved Forrest as a brother, tried to draw

him, in his early manhood, into politics. Had the latter consented to

abandon his profession, he might have commanded, at that time, any

nomination in the gift of the New York Democracy, and risen to the

highest political employments in the State. But he had chosen art as a

mistress, and refused to abandon her for the colder but equally exacting

idol of the mind,—political ambition. It is to this refusal we owe the

fact that our stage is still graced by the greatest actor America has

ever produced.”

The dramatic season of 1871–72 gave an astonishing proof of the vital

endurance and popular attractiveness of the veteran player, then in his

sixty-sixth year. Between October 1st and April 4th he travelled over

seven thousand miles, acted in fifty-two different places, one hundred

and twenty-eight nights, and received the sum of $39,675.47. He began at

the Walnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, proceeded to Columbus and

Cincinnati, and then appeared in regular succession at New Orleans,

Galveston, Houston, Nashville, Omaha, and Kansas City. At Kansas City

excursionists were brought by railroad from the distance of a hundred

and fifty miles, at three dollars each the round trip. From this place

his series of engagements took him to Saint Louis, Quincy, Pittsburg,

Cleveland, Buffalo, Detroit, Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, Troy, and

Albany. From Albany he journeyed to Boston, where he opened an

engagement at the Globe Theatre with Lear, before an audience of great

brilliancy completely crowding the house. He had a triumph in every way

flattering, although the herculean toils of the season behind him had

most severely taxed his strength. How he played may be imagined from the

following report, made by a distinguished author in a private letter. “I

went last night to see Forrest. I saw Lear himself; and never can I

forget him, the poor, discrowned, wandering king, whose every look and

tone went to the heart. Though mimic sorrows latterly have little power

over me, I could not suppress my tears in the last scene. The tones of

the heart-broken father linger in my ear like the echo of a distant

strain of sad sweet music, inexpressibly mournful, yet sublime. The

whole picture will stay in my memory so long as soul and body hang

together.”

On the Monday and Tuesday evenings of the second week, he appeared as

Richelieu. He had taken a severe cold, and was suffering so badly from

congestion and hoarseness that Oakes tried to persuade him not to act.

He could not be induced, he said, to disappoint the audience by failing

to keep his appointment. Oakes accompanied him to his dressing-room,

helped him on with his costume, and, when the bell rang, led his

tottering steps to the stage entrance. The instant the foot of the

veteran touched the stage and his eye caught the footlights and the

circling expanse of expectant faces, he straightened up as if from an

electric shock and was all himself. At the end of each scene Oakes was

waiting at the wing to receive him and almost carry him to a chair.

Besought to take some stimulant, he replied, “No: if I die to-night,

they shall find no liquor in me. My mind shall be clear.” And so he

struggled on, playing by sheer dint of will, with fully his wonted

spirit and energy, but the moment he left the eyes of the audience

seeming almost in a state of collapse. The play was drawing near its

end. And this, though no one thought of it, this was to be the last

appearance of Edwin Forrest on the stage. Débût, Rosalia de Borgia,—

interval of fifty-five years with slow illumination of the continent by

his fame,—exit, Richelieu! Oakes stood at the wing, all anxiety, peering

in and listening intently. The characters were grouped in the final

tableau. He stood central, resting on his left foot, his right slightly

advanced and at ease, his right arm lifted and his venerable face

upturned. Then his massive and solemn voice, breaking clear from any

impediment, was heard articulating with a mournful beauty the last words

of the play:

“There is ONE above

Sways the harmonious mystery of the world

Even better than prime ministers. Alas!

Our glories float between the earth and heaven

Like clouds that seem pavilions of the sun

And are the playthings of the casual wind.

Still, like the cloud which drops on unseen crags

The dews the wild-flower feeds on, our ambition

May from its airy height drop gladness down

On unsuspected virtue; and the flower

May bless the cloud when it hath passed away.”

Then, instead of inclining for the rise of the audience and the fall of

the curtain, he gazed for an instant musingly into vacancy, and, as if

some strange intuition or prophetic spirit had raised the veil of fate,

uttered from his own mind the significant words, “_And so it ends_.”

He slept little that night, and, the next day, was clearly so much worse

that Oakes insisted resolutely that he should not act at any rate. He

was announced for Virginius, and was so set on going that his friend had

almost to use force to restrain him. Dr. S. W. Langmaid, so justly

eminent for his faithful skill, was called. He said, positively, “If you

undertake to act to-night, Mr. Forrest, you will in all likelihood die

upon the stage.” He replied, pointing to Oakes, “Then I owe my life to

that dear old fellow yonder; for if he had not obstinately resisted I

should certainly have gone.” Pneumonia set in, and for more than a week

a fatal result was feared. During all this time Oakes was his constant

nurse, catching a few moments of sleep when he could, but for the whole

period of danger never taking off his clothes except for a daily bath.

Unwearied and incessant in attentions, he left not his station until his

friend was so far recovered as to be able to start for Philadelphia. The

day after the convalescent reached home he wrote a letter of

affectionate acknowledgment to Oakes for all the services rendered with

such a loving fidelity. Here is an extract from it: “The air is sunny,

warm, and delicious, and I am pervaded by a feeling of rest which

belongs only to home. How marvellously I was spared from death’s

effacing fingers, and permitted for a little longer time to worship God

in the glad sunshine of his eternal temple. To your tender care and

solicitude during my illness I owe everything.” And thus the old tie of

friendship between the pair received another degree of depth and was

cemented with a new seal.

Here it is fit to pause awhile in the narrative, go back a little to

gather up a few interesting things not yet mentioned, and supplement the

account previously given of his inner life by some further description

of the kind of man he was in social intercourse and in the privacy of

his home during his last years.

His home was always a charmed and happy place to him, although

sorrowfully vacant of wife and children. He took great delight in the

works of art he had collected. In his picture-gallery he had paintings

of which he really made friends; and often of a night when he was

restless he would rise, go to them, light the gas, and gaze on them as

if they had a living sympathy to soothe and bless his spirit. But his

library was the favorite haunt where he felt himself indeed at ease and

supplied with just the ministration and companionship he craved. It

opened in the rear upon a spacious garden. Mr. Rees once asked him why

he did not clear up this garden and beautify it with more flower-beds.

He answered, “I prefer the trees. When I sit here alone the whistling of

the wind through their branches sounds like a voice from another world.”

He always went away with regret and came back with pleasure. Nor was his

satisfaction altogether solitary. Writing to Oakes once he says, “Yes,

my friend, I am indeed happy once more to reach this sweet haven of

rest, my own dear home. My sisters received me with the greatest joy,

the servants with unaffected gladness, and the two dogs actually went

into ecstasies over me. It was a welcome fit for an emperor.”

The loss of his three sisters one by one struck heavy blows on his

heart, and left his house darker each time than it had been before. In

1863 he writes,—

“DEAR FRIEND OAKES,—I cannot sufficiently thank you for the kind

words of sympathy you have expressed for me in my late unhappy

bereavement—the loss of my dear sister Henrietta, who on the death

of my beloved mother devoted her whole life to me. Her wisdom was

indeed a lamp to my feet, and her love a joy to my heart. Ah, my

friend, we cannot but remember such things were that were most dear

to us. Do we love our friends more as we advance in life, that our

loss of them is so poignant, while in youth we see them fall around

us like leaves in winter weather as though the next spring would

once more restore them? I read your letter to my remaining sisters,

and they thanked you with their tears. You may remember that once

under a severe affliction of your own—the death of a loved friend—I

endeavored to console you with the hope of immortality. That fails

me now.”

In 1869 he wrote again, “My sister Caroline died last night. We have a

sad house. Why under such bereavements has God not given us some

comforting reasonable hope in the future, where these severed ties of

friendship and love may be again united? Man’s vanity and self-love have

betrayed him into such a belief; but who knows that the fact

substantiates it?” And in 1871 once more he wrote, “My sister Eleanora

is dead, and there is now no one on earth whose veins bear blood like

mine. My heart is desolate.” This obituary notice appeared at the time:

“The death of Eleanora Forrest, sister of Mr. Edwin Forrest the

tragedian, has cast a gloom over the large circle of her acquaintances,

which time alone can dispel; but the gloom which rests over the

household in which her gentle sway and influence brought peace and

happiness no change of time or season can ever remove. To one, at least,

the light of home went out with her life. To one, now the last of his

race, his splendid mansion will be as some stately hall deserted. Its

light has gone out; the garlands which her hands twined are dead; ‘the

eyes that shone, now dimmed and gone,’ will only appear again to him in

memory. Memory, however,

“‘Is but a gift

Within a ruined temple left,

Recalling what its beauties were

And then painting what they are.’

“There was something so mild, so pure, so Christian-like, in this lady,

that her passing away from us is but a translation from earth to Heaven,

like a flower blooming here for awhile to find eternal blossom there.

“Kind, gentle, with a hand open to charity, she did not remain at home

awaiting the call of the destitute and suffering, but when the storms

and the tempests of winter came and the poor were suffering, bearing

their poverty and wretchedness in silence, she came forth unsolicited to

aid them. We could name many instances of this; but she, who while

living did not wish her charities known, receives her reward from One

who reads the human heart and sways the destinies of mankind. The writer

of this speaks feelingly of one whom it was a pleasure and a happiness

to know. If ever a pure spirit left its earthly tenement to follow

father, mother, brothers, and sisters to the home ‘eternal in the

skies,’ it was that of Eleanora Forrest. There are many left to mourn

her loss, but only one of kindred remains to grieve. To him the

knowledge of her many virtues, sisterly affection, and the bright

hereafter, must bring that peace no friendly aid can effect. Let us

remember, in our hours of affliction, that

“‘Life’s a debtor to the grave,

Dark lattice, letting in eternal day.’”

The revolutions of his tempestuous blood, the resentful memory of

wrongs, the keen perception of insincerity, shallowness, and

evanescence, and the want of any grounded faith in a future life gave

Forrest many hours of melancholy, of bitterness, and almost of despair.

But he never, not even in the darkest hour, became a misanthrope or an

atheist. In one of his commonplace books he had copied these lines which

he was often heard to quote:

“The weariness, the wildness, the unrest,

Like an awakened tempest, would not cease;

And I said in my sorrow, Who is blessed?

What is good? What is truth? Where is peace?”

A few of his characteristic expressions in his depressed moods may have

interest for the reader:

“Is there then no rest but in the grave? Rest without the consciousness

of rest? The rest of annihilation?”

“I am very sad and disheartened at the iniquitous decisions of these

juries and judges. I could willingly die now with an utter contempt for

this world and a perfect indifference to my fate in the next.”

“I wish the great Day of Doom were not a chimera. What a solace it would

be to all those whom man has so deeply wronged!”

“This human life is a wretched failure, and the sooner annihilation

comes to it the better.”

While these impulsive phrases reveal his intense and unstable

sensibility, they must be taken with great allowance, or they will do

injustice to his better nature. They are transitory phases of experience

betraying his weakness. In his deeper and clearer moods he felt a

strange and profound presentiment of immortality, and surmised that this

life was neither the first nor the last of us. But living as he did

mostly for this material world and its prizes, he could not hold his

mind steadily to the sublime height of belief in the eternal life of the

soul. And so all sorts of doubts came in and were recklessly

entertained. Had his spirituality equalled his sensibility and

intelligence, and had he aimed at personal perfection as zealously as he

aimed at professional excellence, his faith in immortality would have

been as unshakable as was his faith in God. Also could he have filled

his soul with the spirit of forgiveness and charity instead of harboring

tenacious instincts of hate and disgust, he would have been a serene and

benignant man. His complaining irritability would have vanished in a

devout contentment; for he would have seen a plan of exact compensations

everywhere threading the maze of human life.

But then he would not have been Edwin Forrest. Inconsistent extremes,

unregulated impulsiveness, unsubdued passion, some moral incongruity of

character and conduct, of intuition and thought, belonged to his type of

being. It is only required that those who assume to judge him shall be

just, and not be misled by any superficial or partial appearance of good

or evil to give an unfair verdict. His defects were twofold, and he had

to pay the full penalty for them. First, no man can lead a really happy

and noble life, in the high and true sense of the words, who is infested

with feelings of hate and loathing towards persons who have injured him

or shown themselves detestable. He must refuse to entertain such

emotions, and with a magnanimous and loving heart contemplate the fairer

side of society. For almost all our experience, whether we know it or

not, is strained through and tested and measured by our emotional

estimates of our fellow-men. It is chiefly in them, or in ourselves as

affected by our thoughts of them, that God reveals himself to us or

hides himself from us. Second, Forrest not only dwelt too much on mean

or hostile persons and on real or fancied wrongs, but he did not live

chiefly for the only ends which are worthy to be the supreme aim of man.

The genuine ends of a man in this world are to glorify God, to serve

humanity, and to perfect himself. And these three are inseparably

conjoined, a triune unity. The man who faithfully lives for these

religious ends will surely attain peace of mind and unwavering faith in

a Providence which orders everything and cannot err. The highest

conscious ends of Forrest were not religious, but were to glorify his

art, to perfect his strength and skill, and to win the ordinary prizes

of society,—wealth, fame, and pleasure. Elements of the superior aims

indeed entered largely into his spirit and conduct, but were not his

proposed and consecrating aim. This, as now frankly set forth, was his

failure, and the lesson it has for other men.

But, on the other hand, he had his praiseworthy success. If he was

inferior to the best men, he was greatly superior to most men. For he

was no hypocrite, parasite, profligate, squanderer of his own resources,

or usurper of the rights of others. After every abatement it will be

said of him, by all who knew the man through and through, that he was

great and original in personality, honest in every fibre, truthful and

upright according to the standard of his own conscience, tender and

sweet and generous in the inmost impulses of his soul. On the other

hand, it must be admitted that he was often the obstinate victim of

injurious and unworthy prejudices, and abundantly capable of a profanity

that was vulgar and of animosities that were ferocious. This is written

in the very spirit which he himself inculcated on his biographer, to

whom he addressed these words with his own hand in 1870: “Having

revealed myself and my history to you without disguise or affectation, I

say, Tell the blunt truth in every particular you touch, no matter where

it hits or what effect it may have. To make it easier for you, I could

well wish that my whole life, moral and mental, professional and social,

could have been photographed for your use in this biographical

undertaking. And then, ‘though all occasions should inform against me,’

though I might have too much cause to sigh over my many weaknesses and

follies, no single act of mine, I am sure, should ever make me blush

with shame. I always admired the spirit of Cromwell, who said sternly,

when an artist in taking his portrait would have omitted the disfiguring

wart on his face, ‘Paint me as I am!’”

Forrest was one of those elemental men who want always to live in direct

contact with great realities, and cannot endure to accept petty

substitutes for them, or pale phantoms of them at several removes. He

craved to taste the substantial goods of the earth in their own

freshness, and refused to be put off with mere social symbols of them.

He loved the grass, the wind, the sun, the rain, the sky, the mountains,

the thunder, the democracy. He loved his country earnestly, truth

sincerely, his art profoundly, men and women passionately and made them

love him passionately,—the last too often and too much. For these

reasons he is an interesting and contagious character, and, as his

figure is destined to loom in history, it is important that his best

traits be appreciated at their full worth.

It is but justice, as an offset to his occasional fits of the blues and

to the lugubrious sentiments he then expressed, some of which were

quoted a page or two back, to affirm the truth that if he suffered more

than most people he likewise enjoyed much more. Prevailingly he loved

the world, and set a high value on life and took uncommon pains to

secure longevity. As a general thing his spirit of enjoyment was sharp

and strong. One illustration of this was the pronounced activity of the

element of humor in him. This humor was sometimes grim, almost sardonic,

and bordering on irony and satire, but often breathed itself out in a

sunny playfulness. This lubricated the joints and sockets of the soul,

so to speak, and made the mechanism of experience move smoothly when

otherwise it would have gritted harshly with great frictional waste in

unhappy resistances. It is difficult to give in words due illustration

of this quality, of its genial manifestations in his manner, and of its

happy influence on his inner life. But all his intimate friends know

that the trait was prominent in him and of great importance. When on

board the steamer bound for California, sick and wretched, he sent for

the captain, and with great earnestness demanded, “For how much will you

sell this ship and cargo?” After giving a rough estimate of the value,

the captain asked, “But why do you wish to know this?” Forrest answered,

“I want to scuttle her and end this detestable business by sinking the

whole concern to the bottom of the sea!” A soft-spoken clergyman, who

occupied the next state-room, overheard him giving energetic expression

to his discontent, and called on him to expostulate on the duty of

forbearance and patience, saying, “Our Saviour, you know, was always

patient.” “Yes,” retorted the actor, grimly, “but our Saviour went to

sea only once, and then he disliked it so much that he got out and

walked. Unfortunately, we cannot do that.”

At another time a Calvinistic divine had been trying to convince him of

the punitive character of death, arguing that death was not the original

destiny of man, but a penalty imposed for sin. “What,” said Forrest, “do

you mean to say that if it had not been for that unlucky apple we should

have seen old Adam hobbling around here still?”

Even to the end of his life he had the heart of a boy, and when with

trusted friends it was ever and anon breaking forth in a playfulness and

a jocosity which would have astonished those who deemed him so stern and

lugubrious a recluse. One day he went into a druggist’s shop where he

was familiar, for some little article. The druggist chanced to be alone

and stooping very low behind his counter pouring something from a jug.

Forrest slipped up and leaning over him thundered in his ear with full

pomp of declamation, “An ounce of civet, good apothecary!” The poor

trader revealed his comic fright by a bound from the floor which would

not have disgraced a gymnast.

On arriving at the places where he was to act he was often annoyed by

strangers who pressed about him with pestering importunity merely from a

vulgar curiosity. On these occasions he would sometimes, as he reached

the hotel and saw the crowd, leap out of the carriage, say with a low

bow to his agent, “Please keep your seat, Mr. Forrest, and I will

inquire about a room,” and then vanish, laughing in his sleeve, and

leaving the embarrassed McArdle to sustain the situation as best he

might.

His just and complacent pride in his work, too, kept him from being

chronically any such disappointed and grouty complainer as he might

sometimes appear. It is a sublime joy for a man of genius, a great

artist, to feel, as the reward of heroic labor engrafted on great

endowment, that his rank is at the top of the world; that in some

particulars he is superior to all the twelve hundred millions of men

that are alive. There were passages in the acting of Forrest, besides

the terrific burst of passion in the curse of Lear, which he might well

believe no other man on earth could equal.

The knowledge and culture of Forrest were in no sense limited to the

range of his profession. He was uncommonly well educated, not only by a

wide acquaintance with books, but also by a remarkably varied

observation and experience of the world. Whenever he spoke or wrote,

some proof appeared of his reading and reflection. Speaking of Humboldt,

he said, “Humboldt was a man open to truth without a prejudice. He was

to the tangible and physical world what Shakspeare was to the mind and

heart of man.” Characterizing a religious discourse which much pleased

him, he said, “Its logic is incontrovertible, its philosophy

unexceptionable, and its humanity most admirable,—quite different from

those homilies which people earth with demons, heaven with slaves, and

hell with men.” On one occasion, alluding to the facts that Shakspeare

when over forty attended the funeral of his mother, and that his boy

Hamnet died at the age of twelve, he regretted that the peerless poet

had not written out what he must then have felt, and given it to the

world. His genius under such an inspiration might have produced

something which would have made thenceforth to the end of time all

parents who read it treat their children more tenderly, all children

love and honor their parents more religiously. But, he added, it seemed

contrary to the genius of Shakspeare to utilize his own experience for

any didactic purpose. At another time he said, “Shakspeare is the most

eloquent preacher that ever taught humanity to man. The sermons he

uttered will be repeated again and again with renewed and unceasing

interest not only in his own immortal pages, but from the inspired lips

of great tragedians through all the coming ages of the world.”

A touching thing in Forrest in his last years was the unpurposed organic

revelation in his voice of what he had suffered in the battle of life.

What he had experienced of injustice and harshness, of selfishness and

treachery, of beautiful things relentlessly snatched away by time and

death, had left a permanent memorial in the unstudied tones and cadences

of his speech. As he narrated or quoted or read, his utterance was

varied in close keeping with what was to be expressed. But the moment he

fell back on himself, and gave spontaneous utterance from within, there

was a perpetual recurrence of a minor cadence, a half-veiled sigh, a

strangely plaintive tone, sweet and mournful as the wail of a dying wind

in a hemlock grove.

A trait of Forrest, to which all his friends will testify, was the

perfect freedom of his usual manner in private life from all

theatricality or affectation. His bearing was natural and honest,

varying truthfully with his impulses. With an actor so powerfully marked

as he this is not common. Most great actors carry from their

professional into their daily life some fixed strut of attitude or

chronic stilt of elocution or pompous trick of quotation. It was not so

with Forrest, and his detachment from all such habits, his straight-on

simplicity, were an honor to him and a charm to those who could

appreciate the suppression of the shop in the manly assertion of dignity

and rectitude. He had no swagger, though he had a swing which belonged

to his heavy equilibrium. His speech attracted attention only from its

uncommon ease and finish, not from any ostentation. The actor, it has

been justly said, is so far contemptible who keeps his mock grandeur on

when his buskins are off, and orders a coffee-boy with the air of a

Roman general commanding an army. He seems ever to say by his manner, It

is easier to be a hero than to act one. Charles Lamb relates that a

friend one day said to Elliston, “I like Wrench because he is the same

natural easy creature on the stage that he is off.” Elliston replied,

with charming unconsciousness, “My case exactly. I am the same person

off the stage that I am on.” The inference instead of being identical

was opposite. The one was never acting, the other always. Mrs. Siddons,

it is said, used to stab the potatoes, and call for a teaspoon in a tone

that curdled the blood of the waiter. Once when she was buying a piece

of calico at a shop in Bath, she interrupted the voluble trader by

inquiring, Will it wash? with an accent that made him start back from

the counter. John Philip Kemble, dissatisfied with Sheridan’s management

and resolved to free himself from all engagements with him, rose in the

greenroom like a slow pillar of state, and said to that astonished

individual, “I am an eagle whose wings have long been bound down by

frosts and snows; but now I shake my pinions and cleave into the general

air unto which I am born.” Sheridan looked into the heart of the eagle,

and with a few wheedling words smoothed his ruffled plumage and made him

coo like a dove in response to new proposals. Greatness of soul is

necessary for a great actor, quick detachableness, and facility of

transitions, with full understanding, sensibility, and fire; but cold

counterfeits of these, empty forms of them swollen out with mechanic

pomp, are as odious as they are frequent. Some are great only when

inspired and set off by grand adjuncts; others are great by the native

build of their being. Forrest was of this latter class. He knew how to

act in the theatre, and to be simple and sincere in the parlor.

But, when all is said, the greatest quality and charm of Forrest, the

deepest hiding of his magnetism, was his softness and truth of heart,

the quickness, strength, and beauty of his affection. Bitter experience

had taught him, before he was an old man, not to wear his heart on his

sleeve for the heartless to peck at it. But how shallow the observation

which, not seeing his heart on his sleeve, incontinently concluded that

he had none! The reverential gratitude with which he delighted to dwell

on the memory of his mother, the yearning fondness with which he was

wont to recall the names of his early benefactors and dwell on the

thought of the few living friends who had been ever kind and true to

him, amply demonstrated the strong grasp of his affection. “My mother,”

he one day said to him who now copies his words, “was weeping on a

certain occasion in my early childhood when she was hard pressed by

poverty and care. My father, in his grave, almost awful way, said to

her, ‘Do not weep, Rebecca. It will do no good. I know it is very dark

here. But it is all right. Above the clouds the sun is still shining.’ I

remember it made a great impression on my young mind; and many a time in

afterlife it came up and was a comfort to me. Ah, what, what would I not

give if I could really believe that when that dear good soul left the

earth my father met her ‘on a happier shore,’ and said, ‘Rebecca, you

will weep no more now. Did I not tell you it was all right?’” After the

death of Forrest, nigh a quarter of a century after it was written, was

found among his papers a faded and tear-stained letter, enclosing two

withered leaves, which read thus:

“EDWIN FORREST, ESQ., FONTHILL:

“These leaves were taken from your mother’s grave, on Sunday, August

5th, 1849, and are presented as a humble but sacred memorial by your

friend,

“W. H. M.”

There is no surer proof of plentifulness of love within than is shown by

its finding vent in endearments lavished on lower creatures and on

inanimate things,—flowers, books, pictures, birds, dogs, horses. All

these were copiously loved by Forrest. All his life he had some dog for

a friend, and for the last twenty years he kept two or more. In the

summer of 1870 a little turkey in his garden, only a week old, by some

accident got its leg broken. He saw it, and commiserately picked up the

poor thing, carefully set its leg, laid it in a basket of wool, hung it

in a tree in the sunshine, and tenderly nursed and fed it till it was

whole. This and the succeeding incidents occurred under the observation

of his biographer, who was then paying him a visit.

He used to go into his stable and pat and fondle his horses and talk

with them, looking in their eyes and smoothing their necks, as if they

had full intelligence and sympathy with him. “Why, Brownie, poor

Brownie, handsome Brownie, are you not happy to come out to-day?” he

said, as we rode along the Wissahickon, in a tone so tender and sad that

it moistened the eyes of his human hearer. It was his custom to go up

the river-side to a secluded place, and there get out and feed the horse

with apples. One day he had forgotten his supply, and, as he dismounted

and walked along in front of Brownie, he was touched to find the

intelligent creature following him, smelling at his pockets and nudging

him for her apples.

In one aspect it was beautiful, in another it was mournful, to see him

going about his house, lonely, lonely, solacing himself for what was

absent with humble substitutes. He had a mocking-bird wonderfully gifted

and a great favorite with him and his sister. It bore the nickname of

Bob. In moulting it fell sick, lost both voice and sight, and seemed to

be dying. The great soft-hearted tragedian, thought by many to be so

gruff and savage, was overheard, as he stood before the cage, talking to

the sick bird, “Ah, poor Bob, poor Bob! Your myriad-voiced throat has

filled my house with wondrous melodies these years past. Why must this

cruel affliction come to you? You are a sinless creature. You cannot do

any harm. It perplexes my philosophy to know why you should have to

suffer in this way. Ah, little Bob, where now are all your sweet

mockeries? Blind? Dumb? It cuts me to the very soul to think of it. Ah,

well, well!” And he tottered slowly away, musing, quite as his Lear used

to do on the stage when unkindness had broken the old royal heart.

Another characteristic incident is worth relating. He had a chamber at

the Metropolitan Hotel fronting on Broadway. Oakes and the present

writer were in a rear room. He sent for us to come to him and see the

funeral-procession of Farragut pass. He sank on his knees at the open

window as the sacred corse went by, and we saw the tears streaming down

his cheeks. The bands played a dirge, and the soldiers and marines

marched on, visible masses of music in blue and gold, as the sailors

proudly carried their dead admiral through the central artery of the

nation, and every heart seemed vibrating with reverence and grief. “The

grandest thing about this,” said Forrest, “is that he was a good man,

worthy of all the honor he receives. He whose modesty kept his bosom

from ever swelling with complacency while he was alive may now well

exult in death, as the sailors, unwilling to confide their commander to

any catafalque, lovingly bear him on their shoulders to his grave.”

The love which Forrest had for children was one of the deepest traits of

his disposition. This tenderness was the same all through his career,

except that it seemed to grow more profound and pensive in his age. Two

anecdotes selected from among many will set this quality in an

interesting light. When he was in the fullest strength of his manhood

and was acting in Boston at the old National Theatre, there was at his

hotel a very sick child whose mother was quite worn out with nursing it.

Forrest begged permission to take care of the little sufferer through

the succeeding night, that the mother might sleep. The mother, fearing

that the terrible Metamora would prove rather a repulsive nurse for her

darling, hesitated, but at length gave consent. At the close of the play

he hurried back with so much haste that half the paint was left on one

of his cheeks. Through the whole night, hour after hour, he paced up and

down the room, tenderly soothing the fevered babe, which lay on his

great chest with nothing but a silk shirt between its face and his skin.

The mother slept, and so did the child. And when the doctor came in the

morning, he said that the care of Forrest and the vitality the infant

drew from his body during the long hours had saved its life.

All night long the baby-voice

Wailed pitiful and low;

All night long the mother paced

Wearily to and fro,

Striving to woo to those dim eyes

Health-giving slumbers deep;

Striving to stay the fluttering life

With heavenly balm of sleep.

Three nights have passed—the fourth has come;

O weary, weary feet!

That still must wander to and fro—

Relief and rest were sweet.

But still the pain-wrung, ceaseless moan

Breaks from the baby-breast,

And still the mother strives to soothe

The suffering child to rest.

Lo, at the door a giant form

Stands sullen, grand, and vast!

Over that broad brow every storm

Life’s clouds can send has passed.

Those features of heroic mould

Can waken awe or fear;

Those eyes have known Othello’s scowl,

The maniac glare of Lear.

The deep, full voice, whose tones can sweep

In thunder to the ear,

Has learned such softness that the babe

Can only smile to hear.

The strong arms fold the little form

Upon the massive breast.

“Go, mother, _I_ will watch your child,”

He whispers; “go and rest!”

All night long the giant form

Treads gently to and fro;

All night long the deep voice speaks

In murmured soothings low,

Until the rose-light of the morn

Flushes the far-off skies:

In slumber sweet on Forrest’s breast

At last the baby lies.

O Saviour, Thou didst bid one day

The children come to Thee!

He who has served Thy little ones,

Hath he not, too, served Thee?

Low lies the actor now at rest

Beneath the summer light;

Sweet be his sleep as that he gave

The suffering child that night!

LUCY H. HOOPER.

The other anecdote, though less dramatic, is of still deeper

significance as a revelation of his soul. During the last ten or twelve

years of his life, when he was fulfilling his engagements in the

different cities, he used so to time and direct his walks that he might

be near some great public school at the hour when the children were

dismissed. There he would stand—the grim-looking, lonely old man, whose

surface might be hard, but whose heart was very soft—and gaze with a

thoughtful and loving regard on the throng of boys and girls as they

rushed out bubbling over with delight, variously sorting and grouping

themselves on their way home. This was a great enjoyment to him, though

not unmixed with an attractive pain. It soothed his childless soul with

ideal parentage, gave him a bright glad life in reflected sympathy with

the dancing shouters he saw, and stirred in his imagination a thousand

dreams, now of the irrevocable past, now of the mysterious future.

Resuming the narrative with the opening of June, 1872, Forrest is lying

in his bed in a woeful state, brought on him by a nostrum called

“Jenkins’s cure for gout.” A doctor Jenkins of New Orleans told him if

he would take it, it would produce an excruciating attack of the

disease, but would then eradicate it from the system and effect a

permanent cure. He took it. He experienced the excruciating attack. The

permanent cure did not follow. As soon as Oakes learned of his

situation, body racked with torture, limbs palsied, mind at times

unhinged and wandering, he started for the scene. His own words will

best describe their meeting. “When I entered his chamber he was in a

doze, and I stood at his bedside until he awoke. Opening his eyes, he

gazed steadily into my face for about a minute. He knew me then, and

said, in the most touching manner, ‘My friend, I am always glad to see

you, but never in my life so much so as now.’ Again looking steadily at

me for about a minute, he said, ‘Oakes, put my hand in yours: it is

paralyzed but true.’ I took his hand tenderly from the bed and placed it

in mine. He could not move the fingers, but I felt his noble heart throb

through them. At once I began organizing my hospital. I had him washed,

his flannel and the bed-linen changed, the doors and windows flung wide

open, and gave him all he could take of the best of nourishment,—

strawberries, fresh buttermilk, and beef tea strong enough to draw four

hundred pounds the whole length of the house. Already he is greatly

improved. I keep him perfectly quiet, allowing no one on any excuse

whatever to see him.” Under this style of doctoring and nursing, all

impregnated with the magnetism of friendship, it was natural that in

three weeks he should be comfortably about his house, as he was.

One morning in the midst of his illness, but when he had passed a night

free from pain, and his mind was in a most serene state yet marked by

great exaltation of thought and language, he began relating to Oakes, in

the most eloquent manner, his recollections of old Joseph Jefferson, the

great comedian. He told how when a boy he had visited that beautiful and

gifted old man; what poverty and what purity and high morality were in

his household; how he had educated his children; and how at last he had

died among strangers, heart-broken by ingratitude. He told how he had

seen him act Dogberry in a way that out-topped all comparison; how at a

later time he had again seen him play the part of the Fool in Lear so as

to set up an idol in the memory of the beholders, for he insinuated into

the words such wonderful contrasts of the greatness and misery and

mystery of life with the seeming ignorant and innocent simplicity of the

comments on them, that comedy became wiser and stronger than tragedy.

His listener afterwards said, “We two were alone. Never had I seen him

so deeply and so loftily stirred in his very soul as he was then about

Jefferson. His eulogy had more moral dignity and intense religious

feeling than any sermon I ever heard from the pulpit. It was as grand

and fine as anything said by Cicero. This was especially true of his

closing words. When he seemed to have emptied his heart in admiring

praises on the old player, he ended thus, querying with himself as if

soliloquizing: ‘Is it possible that all of such a man can go into the

ground and rot, and nothing of him at all be left forever? If he is not

immortal, he ought to be. It must be that he is, though our philosophy

cannot find it out.’”

It is a curious proof of how his moods shaped and colored his beliefs to

read in connection with the above the following extract from a letter he

wrote in 1866. “There is great consolation in the sincere belief of the

immortality of the soul. If I could honestly and reasonably entertain

such a faith, that the love and friendship of to-day will extend through

all time with renewed devotion, death would have no sting and the grave

no victory. I quite envied the closing hours of Senator Foote the other

day. He was so serenely confident of seeing all his friends again, that

by the perishing light of his fervid brain he seemed for a moment to

realize the illusion of his earth-taught faith.”

It was now September. The semi-paralyzed condition of his limbs forbade

every thought of returning to the stage that season; though, with a

self-flattery singular in one of so experienced and clear a head, he

fondly hoped to recover in time, and to act for years yet. His interest

in everything connected with his profession knew no abatement, and he

always took the most cheerful view of the future of the drama. He did

not yield to that common fallacy which glorifies the past at the expense

of the present and holds that everything glorious is always in decline

and sure ere long to perish. Sheridan said, while surrounded by Johnson,

Burke, Hume, Robertson, Gibbon, Pitt, and Fox, “The days of little men

have arrived.” The trouble is that we see the foibles and feel the

faults of our contemporaries, but not those of our predecessors who sit,

afar and still, aggrandized into Olympians in historic memory. Mrs.

Siddons often saw before her, sitting together in the orchestra, all in

tears, Burke, Reynolds, Fox, Gibbon, Windham, and Sheridan. Yet in her

day as now the constant talk was of the failing glory of the theatre.

Also in the time of Talma, in 1807, Cailhava presented a memoir to the

Institute of France, “Sur les Causes de la Décadence du Théâtre.” The

fact is, the theatres of the world were never so numerous, so splendid,

so largely attended, as now; the playing as a whole was never so good,

the morality of the pieces never so high, and the behavior of the

audiences never so orderly and refined. In spite of everything that can

be said on the other side, this is the truth. The former advantage of

the drama was simply that it stood out in more solitary and conspicuous

relief, occupied a larger relative space, and made therefore a greater

and more talked-of sensation. Its rule is now divided with a swarm of

other claimants. Still, intrinsically its worth and rank must increase

in the future, and not diminish. Forrest always clearly held to this

faith, and was much cheered by it. His conviction that the drama was

charged with a sacred and indestructible mission, and his enthusiastic

love for the personal practice of its art,—these were thoughts and

feelings

“In him which though all others should decay,

Would be the last that time could bear away.”

Accordingly, he would withdraw from the worship of his life, if withdraw

he must, only piecemeal and as compelled. His voice was unimpaired, and

he had for years been solicited to give readings. And so he resolved,

since he could not play Hamlet and Othello on the stage, he would read

them in the lecture-room.

Therefore he read these two plays in Philadelphia, Wilmington, Brooklyn,

New York, and Boston. Although the rich mellow fulness, ease, and force

of his elocution were highly enjoyable, and there were many beauties of

characterization in his readings, his physique was so deeply shattered,

and his vital forces so depressed, that the vivacity, the magnetism, the

spirited variety of power necessary to draw and to hold a miscellaneous

crowd were wanting. The experiment was comparatively a failure. The

large halls were so thinly seated that, though the marks of approval

were strong, the result was not inspiring. He felt somewhat

disheartened, much wearied, and sighed for a good long period of rest in

his own quiet home. And so on Saturday afternoon, December 7, 1872, in

Tremont Temple, Boston, he read Othello, and made unconsciously his last

bow on earth to a public assembly, with the apt words of the unhappy

Moor, whose character much resembled his own:

“I kissed thee ere I killed thee: no way but this,—

Killing myself, to die upon a kiss.”

Oakes went with him to the train, saw him comfortably installed in the

car, and bade him an affectionate good-bye. “Another parting, my

friend!” said Forrest: “the last one must come some time. I shall

probably be the first to die.” Arriving at the hotel in New York, he

ordered a room and a fire, and went to bed, “and lay there thinking,” as

he said, “what a pleasant time he was indebted to his friend for in

Boston.” He reached home safely on the 9th. Two days he passed in rest,

lounging about his library, reading a little, and attending only to a

few necessary matters of business. “The time glided away like an

ecstatic dream, without any let or hindrance,” he wrote on the 11th to

Oakes,—the last letter he ever penned,—closing with the words, “God

bless you ever, my dear and much valued friend.”

The earthly finale was at hand. Twenty years before this, in 1852, he

wrote to one of his early friends:

“I thank you for your kindness in drinking my health in company with

my sisters to-day, the anniversary of my birth. The weather here is

gloomy and wears an aspect in accordance with the color of my fate.

There is a destiny in this strange world which often decrees an

undeserved doom. The ways of Providence are truly mysterious. From

boyhood to the present time I have endeavored to walk the paths of

honor and honesty with a kindly and benevolent spirit towards all

men. And I am not unwilling that my whole course of life should be

scrutinized with justice and impartiality. When it shall be so all

weighed together I have no fear of the result. And yet I have been

fearfully wronged, maligned, and persecuted. I do not, however, lose

my faith and trust in that God who will one day hold all men to a

strict and sure account. Kind regards to all, and believe me,

“Ever yours,

“EDWIN FORREST.”

On the eighth recurrence of the same anniversary after the date of the

above sombre epistle—that is, in 1860—he wrote these words: “Friendship

is as much prostituted as love. My heart is sick, and I grow aweary of

life.” And once more, on the 9th of March, 1871, he set down his feeling

in the melancholy sentence, “This is my birthday, another funeral

procession in my sad life, and the end not far off.” These expressions

reveal the gloomier side of a soul which had its sunny side as well, and

the more painful aspect of a life which was also abundantly blessed with

wealth, triumphs, and pleasures. But be the outward lot of any man what

it may, unless he has communion with God, a love for his fellows that

swallows up every hatred, and a firm faith in immortality, the burden of

the song of his unsatisfied soul will ever be, “Vanity of vanities, all

is vanity.”

But sooner or later there is an hour for every earthly vanity to cease.

Nothing mortal can escape or be denied the universal fate and boon of

death. Its meaning is the same for all, however diverse its disguises or

varied its forms. A slave and prisoner, starved and festered in his

chains, groaned, as the sweet and strange release came, “How welcome is

this deliverance! Farewell, painful world and cruel men!” A Sultan,

stricken and sinking on his throne, cried, “O God, I am passing away in

the hand of the wind!” A fool, in his painted costume, with his grinning

bauble in his hand, said, as he too vanished into the hospitable

Unknown, “Alackaday, poor Tom is a dying, and nobody cares. O me! was

there ever such a pitiful to-do?” And a Pope, the crucifix lifted before

his eyes and the tiara trembling from his brow, breathed his life out in

the words, “Now I surrender my soul to Him who gave it!”

The death of a player is particularly suggestive and impressive from the

sharp contrast of its perfect reality and sincerity with all the

fictitious assumptions and scenery of his professional life. The last

drop-scene is the lowering of the eyelid on that emptied ocular stage

which in its time has held so many acts and actors. The deaths of many

players have been marked by mysterious coincidences. Powell, starting

from the bed on which he lay ill, cried, “Is this a dagger which I see

before me? O God!”—and instantly expired. Peterson, playing the Duke in

Measure for Measure, said,—

“Reason thus with life:

If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing

That none but fools would keep; a breath thou art”—

and fell into the arms of the Friar to whom he was speaking; and these

were his last words. Cummings had just spoken the words of Dumont in

Jane Shore—

“Be witness for me, ye celestial hosts,

Such mercy and such pardon as my soul

Accords to thee and begs of heaven to show thee,

May such befall me at my latest hour”—

when he suddenly gasped, and was dead. Palmer, while enacting the part

of the Stranger, having uttered the sentence in his rôle, “There is

another and a better world,” dropped lifeless on the stage. In such

instances Fate interpolates in the stereotyped performance a dread

impromptu which must make us all feel what mysteries we are and by what

mysteries enshrouded.

The morning of the 12th came, and the death of Edwin Forrest was at

hand. In the early light, solitary in the privacy of his chamber, he who

had no blood relative on earth, the last of his race, was summoned to

give up his soul and take the unreturning road into the voiceless

mystery. He who in the mimic scene had so often acted death was now to

perform it in reality. Now he who in all his theatrical impersonations

had been so democratic, was to be, in his closing and unwitnessed human

impersonation, supremely democratic, both in the substance and in the

manner of his performing. For this severing of the spirit from the

flesh, this shrouded and mystic farewell of the soul to the world, is a

part cast inevitably for every member of the family of man, and enacted

under conditions essentially identical by all, from the emperor to the

pauper. Perform or omit whatever else he may, every one must go through

with this. Furthermore, in the enactment of it all artificial dialects

of expression, all caste peculiarities of behavior, fall away; the

profoundest vernacular language of universal nature alone comes to the

surface, and the pallor of the face, the tremor of the limbs, the

glazing of the eye, the gasp, the rattle, the long sigh, and the

unbreakable silence,—are the same for all. Death knows neither

politeness nor impoliteness, only truth. Now the hour was at hand whose

coming and method had been foresignalled years ago, when, at Washington,

an apoplectic clot hung the warning of its black flag in his brain. No

visible spectators gathered to the sight, whatever invisible ones may

have come. No lights were kindled, no music played, no bell rang, no

curtain rose, no prompter spoke. But the august theatre of nature,

crowded with the circulating ranks of existence, stood open for the

performance of the most critical and solemn portion of a mortal destiny.

And suddenly the startling command came. With a shudder of all the

terrified instincts of the organism he sprang to the action. There was a

sanguinary rush through the proscenium of the senses. The cerebral stage

deluged in blood, the will instantly surrendered its private functions,

all fleshly consciousness vanished, and that automatic procedure of

nature, which, when not meddled with by individual volition, is

infallible, took up the task. Then, step by step, point for point, phase

on phase, he went through the enactment of his own death, in the

minutest particulars from beginning to end, with a precision that was

absolutely perfect, and a completeness that could never admit of a

repetition. It was the greatest part, filled with the most boundless

meaning, of all that he had ever sustained; and no critic could detect

the slightest flaw in its representation.

The appalling performance was done, the actor disrobed, transformed, and

vanished, when the servants, concerned at his delay to appear, and

alarmed at obtaining no answer to their knocking, entered the chamber.

The body, dressed excepting as to the outer coat, lay facing upwards on

the bed, with the hands grasping a pair of light dumb-bells, and a livid

streak across the right temple. A near friend and a physician were

immediately called. But it was vain. The fatal acting was finished, and

the player gone beyond recall.

The curtain falls. The drama of a life

Is ended. One who trod the mimic stage

As if the crown, the sceptre, and the robe

Were his by birthright—worn from youth to age—

“Ay, every inch a king,” with voiceless lips,

Lies in the shadow of Death’s cold eclipse.

_Valete et plaudite!_ Well might he

Have used the Roman’s language of farewell

Who was “the noblest Roman of them all;”

For Brutus spoke, and Coriolanus fell,

And Spartacus defied the she-wolf’s power,

In the great actor’s high meridian hour.

How as the noble Moor he wooed and wed

His bride of Venice; how his o’erwrought soul,

Tortured and racked and wildly passion-tossed,

Was whirled, resisting, to the fatal goal,

Doting, yet dooming! Every trait was true;

He lived the being that the poet drew.

Room for the aged Cardinal! Once more

The greatest statesman France has ever known

Waked from the grave and wove his subtle spells;

A power behind, but greater than, the throne.

Is Richelieu gone? It seems but yesterday

We heard his voice and watched his features’ play.

Greatest of all in high creative skill

Was Lear, poor discrowned king and hapless sire.

What varied music in the actor’s voice!

The sigh of grief, the trumpet-tone of ire.

Now both are hushed; we ne’er shall hear that strain

Of well-remembered melody again.

No fading laurels did his genius reap;

With Shakspeare’s best interpreters full high

His name is graven on Fame’s temple-front,

With Kean’s and Kemble’s, names that will not die

While memory venerates the poet’s shrine

And holds his music more than half divine.

FRANCIS A. DURIVAGE.

Before noon Oakes received the shock of this portentous telegram from

Dougherty: “Forrest died this morning; nothing will be done until you

arrive.” He started at once, and reached Philadelphia in the bitter cold

of the next morning at four o’clock. Describing the scene, at a later

period, he writes, “I went directly into his bedchamber. There he lay,

white and pulseless as a man of marble. For a few minutes it seemed to

me that my body was as cold as his and my heart as still. The little

while I stood at his side, speechless, almost lifeless, seemed an age.

No language can express the agony of that hour, and even now I cannot

bear to turn my mind back to it.”

Arrangements were made for a simple and unostentatious funeral; a modest

card of invitation being sent to only about sixty of his nearest friends

or associates in private and professional life. But it was found

necessary to forego the design of a reserved and quiet burial on account

of the multitudes who felt so deep an interest in the occasion, and

expressed so strong a desire to be present at the last services that

they could not be refused admission. When the hour arrived, on that dark

and rainy December day, the heavens muffled in black and weeping as if

they felt with the human gloom below, the streets were blocked with the

crowd, all anxious to see once more, ere it was borne forever from

sight, the memorable form and face. The doors were thrown open to them,

and it was estimated that nearly two thousand people in steady stream

flowed in and out, each one in turn taking his final gaze. The house was

draped in mourning and profusely filled with flowers. In a casket

covered with a black cloth, silver mounted, and with six silver handles,

clothed in a black dress suit, reposed the dead actor. Every trace of

passion and of pain was gone from the firm and fair countenance, looking

startlingly like life, whose placid repose nothing could ever disturb

again. All over the body and the casket and around it were heaped floral

tributes in every form, sent from far and near,—crosses, wreaths,

crowns, and careless clusters. From four actresses in four different

cities came a cross of red and white roses, a basket of evergreens, a

wreath of japonicas, and a crown of white camelias. Delegations from

various dramatic associations were present. A large deputation of the

Lotus Club came from New York with the mayor of that city at their head.

All classes were there, from the most distinguished to the most humble.

Many of the old steadfast friends of other days passed the coffin, and

looked their last on its occupant, with dripping eyes. One, a life-long

professional coadjutor, stooped and kissed the clay-cold brow. Several

poor men and women who had been blessed by his silent charities touched

every heart by the deep grief they showed. And the household servants

wept aloud at parting from the old master who had made himself earnestly

loved by them.

The only inscription on the coffin-lid was the words,

EDWIN FORREST.

_Born March 9, 1806. Died December 12, 1872._

The pall-bearers were James Oakes, James Lawson, Daniel Dougherty, John

W. Forney, Jesse R. Burden, Samuel D. Gross, George W. Childs, and James

Page. The funeral cortége, consisting of some sixty carriages, moved

through throngs of people lining the sidewalk along the way to Saint

Paul’s Church, where the crowd was so great, notwithstanding the rain,

as to cause some delay. It seemed as though the very reserve and

retiracy of the man in his last years had increased the latent popular

curiosity about him, investing him with a kind of mystery. A simple

prayer was read; and then, in the family vault, with the coffined and

mouldering forms of his father and mother and brother and sisters around

him, loving hands placed all that was mortal of the greatest tragedian

that ever lived in America.

The announcement of the sudden and solitary death of Forrest produced a

marked sensation throughout the country. In the chief cities meetings of

the members of the dramatic profession were called, and resolutions

passed in honor and lamentation for the great man and player, “whose

remarkable originality, indomitable will, and unswerving fidelity,” they

asserted, “made him an honor to the walk of life he had chosen,” and

“whose lasting monument will be the memory of his sublime delineations

of the highest types of character on the modern stage.”

For a long time the newspapers abounded with biographic and obituary

notices of him, with criticisms, anecdotes, personal reminiscences. In a

very few instances the bitterness of ancient grudges still pursued him

and spoke in unkindness and detraction. There are men in whose meanness

so much malignity mixes that they cannot forgive or forget even the

dead. But in nearly every case the tone of remark on him was highly

honorable, appreciative, and even generous. Two brief examples of this

style may be cited.

“One thing must be said of Edwin Forrest, now that he lies cold in the

tomb—he never courted popularity; he never flattered power. Importuned a

thousand times to enter society, he rather avoided it. The few

friendships he had were sincere. He never boasted of his charities; and

yet we think, when the secrets of his life are unsealed, this solitary

man, who dies without leaving a single known person of his own blood,

will prove that he had a heart that could throb for all humanity. Having

known him and loved him through his tribulations and his triumphs for

more than a generation, we feel that in what we say we speak the truth

of one who was a sincere friend, an honest citizen, and a benevolent

man.”

“In our view Edwin Forrest was a great man; the one genius, perhaps,

that the American stage has given to history. The conditions of his

youth, the rough-and-tumble struggle of a life fired by a grand purpose,

the loves, hates, triumphs, and failures that preceded the placing of

the bays upon his brow, and the long reign that no new-comer ventured to

disturb, all point to a nature that could do nothing by halves and bore

the ineffaceable imprint of positive greatness. He was, essentially, a

self-made man. All the angularities that result from a culture confined

by the very conditions of its existence to a few of the many directions

in which men need to grow were his. His genius developed itself

irresistibly,—even as a spire of corn will shoot up despite encumbering

stones,—gnarled, rugged, and perhaps disproportioned. His art was

acquired not in the scholar’s closet or under the careful eye of learned

tradition, but from demonstrative American audiences. Therefore such

errors of performance as jumped with the easily excited emotions of an

unskilled auditory were made a part of his education and his creed by a

law which not even genius can surmount. So Forrest grew to giant

stature, a one-sided man. Experience and a liberal culture in later life

worked for him all that opportunity can do for greatness. That these did

not wholly remove the faults of his early training was inevitable, but

they so broadened his life and power that men of wisest censure saw in

him the greatest actor of his time, and a man who under favorable early

conditions would have stood, perhaps, peerless in the history of his

art. Such a man, bearing a life flooded with the sunshine of glory, but

often clouded with storm and almost wrecked by the pain that is born of

passion, needs from the nation that produced and honored him, not

fulsome adulation or biased praise, but dispassionate analysis and

intelligent appreciation.”

One elaborate sketch of his life and character was published—by far the

ablest and boldest that appeared—whose most condemnatory portion and

moral gist ought to be quoted here, for two reasons. First, on account

of its incisive power, honesty, and splendid eloquence. Second, that

what is unjust in it may be seen and qualified:

“The death of this remarkable man is an incident which seems to prompt

more of indefinite emotion than of definite thought. The sense that is

uppermost is the sense that a great vitality, an enormous individuality

of character, a boundless ambition, a tempestuous spirit, a life of rude

warfare and often of harsh injustice, an embittered mind, and an age

laden with disappointment and pain, are all at rest. Mr. Forrest, partly

from natural bias to the wrong and partly from the force of

circumstances and the inexorable action of time, had made shipwreck of

his happiness; had cast away many golden opportunities; had outlived his

fame; had outlived many of his friends and alienated others; had seen

the fabric of his popularity begin to crumble; had seen the growth of

new tastes and the rise of new idols; had found his claims as an actor,

if accepted by many among the multitude, rejected by many among the

judicious; and, in wintry age, broken in health, dejected in spirit, and

thwarted in ambition, had come to the ‘last scene of all’ with great

wealth, indeed, but with very little of either love or peace or hope.

Death, at almost all times a blessing, must, in ending such an

experience as this, be viewed as a tender mercy. His nature—which should

have been noble, for it contained elements of greatness and beauty—was

diseased with arrogance, passion, and cruelty. It warred with itself,

and it made him desolate. He has long been a wreck. There was nothing

before him here but an arid waste of suffering; and, since we understand

him thus, we cannot but think with a tender gratitude that at last he is

beyond the reach of all trouble, and where neither care, sorrow, self-

rebuke, unreasoning passion, resentment against the world, nor physical

pain can any more torment him. His intellect was not broad enough to

afford him consolation under the wounds that his vanity so often

received. All his resource was to shut himself up in a kind of feudal

retreat and grim seclusion, where he brooded upon himself as a great

genius misunderstood and upon the rest of the world as a sort of

animated scum. This was an unlovely nature; but, mingled in it, were the

comprehension and the incipient love of goodness, sweetness, beauty,

great imaginings, and beneficent ideas. He knew what he had missed,

whether of intellectual grandeur, moral excellence, or the happiness of

the affections, and in the solitude of his spirit he brooded upon his

misery. The sense of this commended him to our sympathy when he was

living, and it commends his memory to our respect in death.”

The writer of the powerful article from which the above extract is

taken, in another part of it, said of Forrest, “He was utterly selfish.

He did not love dramatic art for itself, but because it was tributary to

him.”

Now, although the brave and sincere spirit of the article is as clear as

its masterly ability, something is to be said in protest against the

sweeping verdict it gives and in vindication of the man so terribly

censured. That there is some truth in the charges made is not denied.

All of them—except the two last, which are wholly baseless—have been

illustrated and commented on in this biography, but, as is hoped, in a

tone and with a proportion and emphasis more accordant with the facts of

the whole case. The charges, as above made, of sourness, ferocity,

arrogance, cynicism, wretchedness, wreck, and despair, are greatly

unjust in their overcharged statement of the sinister and sad,

profoundly unfair in their omission of the sunny and smiling, features

and qualities in the life and character with which they deal. The writer

must have taken his cue either from inadequate and unfortunate personal

knowledge of the man or from representations made by prejudiced parties.

Ample data certainly are afforded in preceding pages of this volume to

neutralize the extravagance in the accusations while leaving the truth

that is also in them with its proper weight.

One fact alone scatters the entire theory that the social and moral

condition of the tragedian was so fearfully dismal, forlorn, and

execrable,—the fact that he had high and precious friendships with

women, tenderly cherished and sacredly maintained. These were the

foremost joy and solace of his life. They were kept up by unfailing

attentions, epistolary and personal, to the last of his days. Into these

relations he carried a fervor of affection, a poetry of sentiment, a

considerate delicacy and refinement of speech and manner, which secured

the amplest return for all he gave, and drew from the survivors, when he

was gone, tributes which if they were published would cover him with the

lustre of a romantic interest. But it is forbidden to spread such

matters before the common gaze. They have a sacred right of privacy

which must be no further violated than is needed to refute the absurd

belief that the experience of Edwin Forrest was one of such unfathomable

desolation and unhappiness.

No, a portrait in which he is shown as a man whose all-ruling motives

were cruel egotism, pride, vanity, and avarice, a man “whose nature

fulfilled itself,” and for that reason made his life a half-ignominious

and half-pathetic “failure,” will be repudiated by his countrymen. At

the same time his genuine portrait will reveal the truth that while he

loved the good in this world well, he hated the evil too much,—the truth

that while he sought success by honorable means, he too rancorously

loathed those who opposed him with dishonorable means,—and the truth

that while he won many of the solid prizes of existence and enjoyed them

with a more than average measure of happiness, he missed the very

highest and best prizes from lack of spirituality, serene equilibrium of

soul, and religious consecration.

His literary agent for three years and intimate theatrical confrère for

a much longer period, Mr. C. G. Rosenberg, moved by the injurious things

said of him, published an article admitting his explosive irritability,

but affirming his justice and kindness and fund of genial humor and

denying the charges of an oppressive temper and arrogant selfishness.

His business manager and constant companion for a great many years loved

him as a brother, and always testified to his high rectitude of soul and

his many endearing qualities. In one of his latest years, when this

faithful servant lost a pocket-book containing over three thousand

dollars of his money, and was in excessive distress about it, Forrest,

without one sign of anger or peevishness or regret, simply said, in a

gentle tone, “Do not blame yourself, McArdle. Accidents will happen. We

can make it all up in a few nights. So let it go and never mind.” John

McCullough, who for six years had every condition requisite for reading

his character to the very bottom, bore witness to his rare nobility and

social charm, saying, “In heart he was a prince, and would do anything

for a friend. A thorough student of human nature, gifted with intensity,

he applied himself to the heart, and ever reached it. He was essentially

an autocrat. His personal magnetism was great, and he could draw

everything to him. Wherever he might be, men recognized him as king, and

he reigned without resistance, also without imposition.” For six years,

after the close of the War, he gave a one-armed soldier, as a vegetable

garden, the free use of a piece of land worth twenty-five thousand

dollars. This is an extract from one of his letters: “Notice has been

sent me that the price of the picture by Tom Gaylord is one hundred and

fifty dollars, but that if I think this too much I may fix my own price.

No doubt it is more than the painting is worth, but as the young man is

just beginning, and needs to be cheered on, I shall gladly give it to

encourage him for his long career of art.” When a certain poor man of

his acquaintance had died, and his widow knew not where to bury him, he

gave her a space for this purpose in his own lot in the cemetery. And

every winter he gave private orders to his grocer to supply such

suffering, worthy families as he knew, with what they needed, and charge

the bills to him. Surely these are not the kind of deeds done by, these

not the kind of tributes paid to, a misanthropic old tyrant,

discontented with himself, sick of the world, and breathing scorn and

wrath against everybody who approached him.

The following letter, addressed by one of the oldest and choicest

friends of Forrest to another one, speaks for itself:

“NEWPORT, KY., December 30, 1872.

“S. S. SMITH, ESQ.,—