American Men of Mind

by Burton Egbert Stevenson

Of his art no words can give an adequate idea. It was essentially poetic, full of a strange and compelling charm. His great moments laid upon his audience the spell of his genius, and rank with the highest achievements of any actor who ever lived. His countenance—

"That face which no man ever saw
And from his memory banished quite,
The eyes in which are Hamlet's awe
And Cardinal Richelieu's subtle light"—

as Thomas Bailey Aldrich wrote of Sargent's portrait, which heads this chapter—was a strange and moving one, and in range of expression unsurpassed. His eyes were especially wonderful, dark brown, but seeming to turn black in moments of passion, and conveying, with electrical effect, the actor's thought. He was unique. He stood apart. The American stage has never produced another like him.

Second only to Edwin Booth in sheer glory of achievement stands Edwin Forrest. He fell far below Booth in grace, in charm, and in poetic insight, but he surpassed him in physical equipment for the great parts of tragedy, particularly in his voice, magnificent, vibrating, with an extraordinary depth and purity of tone.

Unlike Booth, Forrest came from no family of actors, nor inherited a name famous in the annals of the stage. He was born in Philadelphia in 1806, his father being a Scotchman, employed in Stephen Girard's bank, and making just enough money to keep his family of six children from actual want. He died when Edwin was thirteen years old, and his widow, by opening a little store, managed to support the children. She was a serious and devout woman and decided that Edwin should enter the ministry. But meantime, he must earn a living, so he was apprenticed to a cooper.

How long he stayed with the cooper nobody knows; but it could not have been long, for already he was fired with an ambition to be an actor, and after some experience as an amateur, astonished and grieved his mother by announcing that he was going on the stage. He made his first appearance on the 27th of November, 1820, as Young Norval, in Home's tragedy of "Douglas," and was an immediate success. His youth—remember, he was but fourteen—his handsome face and manly bearing, and, above all, that wonderful and resonant voice, won the audience at once, and his career was begun.

But many hardships awaited him. The theatres of New York and Philadelphia had their companies of well-known and well-trained actors. There was no hope for him in either of those cities; but at last he secured an engagement to play juvenile parts at Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Lexington, and other towns of the middle west, at a salary of eight dollars a week. This, of course, was scarcely enough to keep body and soul together, but all Forrest wanted was a chance, and he did not murmur at the suffering and hardship which followed.

For business was poor, and Forrest did not always receive even that eight dollars. The end came at Dayton, Ohio, where the company went to pieces. Forrest, without money and almost without clothes, walked the forty miles to Cincinnati, where, after a time, he found another position. Such was the beginning of his career, and this hard novitiate lasted for four years, until, in 1826, at the age of twenty, he was able to return to New York and secure an engagement at the old Bowery Theatre. He was an instant success, and from year to year his wonderful powers seemed to increase, until he became easily the most famous actor of the day.

But his fame was soon to be dulled by unfortunate personalities. Conceiving a jealousy of Macready, the famous English actor, he hissed him at a performance in Edinburgh, and when Macready came to America in 1849, Forrest's followers broke in upon a performance at the Astor Place opera house, and a riot followed in which twenty-two men were killed. A quarrel with his wife led to the divorce court, and the suit was decided against him.

The end was pathetic. He had been troubled with gout for a long time, and in 1865, it took a malignant turn, paralyzing the sciatic nerve, so that he lost the use of one hand, and could not walk steadily. His power had left him, and in the five years that followed, he played to empty houses and an indifferent public, not content to retire, but hoping against hope that he might in some way regain his lost prestige. A stroke of paralysis finally ended the hopeless struggle.