These opposed and balancing truths found a magnificent impersonation on the stage in Edwin Forrest, and made him pre-eminently the representative American actor. All his great parts set in emphatic relief the intrinsic sovereignty of the individual man, the ideal of a free manhood superior to all artificial distinctions or circumstances. He showed man as inherent king of himself, and also relative king over others in proportion to his true superiority in worth and weight. When Tell confronted Gessler, or Rolla appeared with the Inca, or Spartacus stood before the Emperor, or Cade defied the King, or Metamora scorned the Englishman, the titular monarch was nothing in the tremendous presence of the authentic hero. Genuine virtue, power, and nobleness took the crown and sceptre away from empty prescription. This was grand, and is the lesson the American people need to learn. It enthrones the truth, while repudiating the error, of vulgar democracy. That error would interpret the doctrine of equal rights into a flat and dead uniformity, a stagnant level of similarities; but that truth affirms an endless variety of degrees with a boundless liberty around all, each free to fit himself for all the privileges of human nature according to his ability, and entitled to enjoy those privileges in proportion to the fitness he attains. The principle of order, rank, authority, hierarchy, is as omnipotent and sacred in genuine democracy as it is in nature or the government of God. The American idea, as against the Asiatic and European, would not destroy the principle of precedence, but would make that principle the intrinsic force and merit of the individual, instead of any historic or artificial prerogative. It asserts that there must be no horizontal caste or stratum in society to prevent the vertical any more than the level circulation of the political units. It declares that there shall be no despotic fixtures reserving the most desirable and authoritative places for any arbitrary sets of persons, but that there shall be divine liberty for the ablest and best to gravitate by divine right to the highest places. That is the American idea purified and completed. That, also, is the central lesson of the dramatic art in its crowning triumphs on the popular stage. And in the half-inspired, half-conscious representation of it lay the commanding originality of Edwin Forrest, our first national tragedian.
The foregoing thoughts put us in possession of the data and place us at the point of view for an intelligent and interested survey of the field before us. And we will now proceed to the proper narrative of the biographic details, and to the critical delineation of the professional features suggested by the title of our work.
CHAPTER III.
BOYHOOD AND YOUTH.
When Edwin was born, his father, encumbered and oppressed by the debts which his failure some years before had entailed on him, was serving in a bank, at a small salary. The family, consisting then of the parents and five children, were forced to live in a very humble style, and to practise a stern economy. For many years they endured the trials and hardships of poverty almost in its extremities. Yet, by dint of industry, character, and tidiness, they managed to maintain respectable appearances and a fair position. Both the father and mother were exemplary members of the Episcopal Church, under the pastoral charge of the Rev. Doctor Pilmore, on whose Sunday services they, with their children, were regular attendants.
What they most lamented was their inability to give their boys and girls the education and accomplishments whose absence in themselves their strong judgment and refined sensibility caused them deeply to regret. But they sought to make such compensation as they could by example, by precept, by directing in the formation of their habits and the choice of their associates, and by keeping them at the public schools as long as possible.
Lorman, the eldest son, when of the proper age to earn his living, was apprenticed to a tanner and currier. William, at a later period, was set at work in a printing-office. Henrietta, the eldest daughter,—as could not be avoided,—was early taken from under the rule of the school-mistress to the side of her mother, to help in the increasing labors of the household. Edwin went constantly to the public school nearest his home, from the age of five to thirteen, together with his eldest sister, Caroline, and also, for the last six years, with his youngest sister, Eleanora.