"Catharine Forrest."
Forrest, after playing in Nashville in 1842 or 1843, visited Jackson at the Hermitage, in Tennessee, where the venerable ex-President was passing in peaceful retirement the last days of his stormy life. Jackson, who was himself one of the greatest actors who ever appeared off the stage, had often seen him act, knew him well, and not only made him welcome, but insisted on his staying with him as his guest. Forrest did so, and extremely enjoyed the intercourse with the celebrated man for whom he had always cherished the greatest political and personal admiration. It was in the height of the agitation about the annexation of Texas to the United States. While there, Forrest broached this topic. In an instant the stooped and faltering sage was all alive, for he felt a passionate interest in the subject. In a few minutes, warming with his own action, he rose to his feet, seized a map in his left hand, and entered vehemently into the whole argument in behalf of the project on political, commercial, and social grounds. As his eyes glanced from point to point on the map, they glowed like two gray balls of fire. His right hand followed the direction of his eyes, and the pitch of his voice obeyed the inflections of his hand. His cheeks flushed, his white hair flew back like the mane of an aged lion, his head rose on his lifted and dilated neck, the motions of his limbs and torse were made straight from their joints, and he inveighed with the mien of an angry prophet. Forrest was actually startled by the spectacle of so sudden a change from drooping decrepitude to sublime power. He never forgot it as the best unintentional lesson he had ever received in dramatic expression. He afterwards bore in mind this proof of the electric capacity of feeble old age to be suddenly charged and emit lightnings and thunders, when he modelled the great explosions of his Richelieu.
Year on year now passed by with the fortunes of the player still wearing an aspect nearly all smiles. Though liberal, he was prudent, and the investments of his large income were always marked by shrewd foresight. His strength was enormous, his health and spirits for the most part were unvarying, his popularity was unabated, caps tossed for him in the theatre and eyes turned after him in the street, his home was blessed with love and peace, and his mother and sisters gave him the pleasure of seeing their steady happiness in the honorable repose and comfort he had provided for them. Well might he be an agreeable and cheerful man, genial with his friends, delighting in his profession, proud of his country and his countrymen, unpoisoned and undepressed as yet by misjudgment and abuse. So things were with him when, in 1845, attracted by a handsome managerial offer, moved by the desire of his wife to revisit her early home, and encouraged by the recollection of his flattering success before, with a strong hope of enhancing it in repetition, he resolved to cross the sea once more, and, in a selection of his favorite characters, present himself anew on the British Stage.
There was at this time one ominous element working in him which had been the cause of considerable irritation to him already, and which was to be unexpectedly aggravated in the experience now immediately before him. In his twenty years of professional life with its waxing celebrity he had encountered so many jealousies and slanders, so much envy, meanness, and treachery,—in his intimacy with artists, politicians, and other ambitious men his sharp discernment had seen so much base plotting and backbiting, so much pushing of the unworthy into prominence by dishonorable methods, and so much sacrificing of the meritorious and modest by falsehoods and shameless tricks of superior address,—that his early estimate of the average of human nature had been lowered and some degree of distrust and reserve developed. The change was not conspicuous, but it had begun, and it foreboded further evil. He had an open, truthful nature, especially characterized by love of justice and detestation of all double-faced or underhanded dealings. He was also a man of a deep and sensitive pride. Finding himself assailed continually with incompetent and acrimonious criticism, and in some cases pursued with malignant libels, he was naturally nettled and angered. With a man of his warm and tenacious temper the experience was a dangerous one, which tended to feed itself and to grow by what it fed on. Had he been gifted with that saintly spirit which bears wrong and insult with meek or magnanimous forgiveness, he would have escaped a world of strife and suffering. But in regard to injuries he was an Indian rather than a saint. Accordingly, the interested opposition and coarse abuse he met put him on probation for misanthropy. Fortunately, his reason and sympathy were too strong to yield to the temptation. But in his later career we shall see what was originally his generous outward struggle with adversity and the social conditions of success partially changed into a bitter inward conflict with men.
CHAPTER XIII.
SECOND PROFESSIONAL TOUR IN GREAT BRITAIN, AND ITS
CONSEQUENCES.—THE MACREADY CONTROVERSY AND RIOT.
Few persons have any adequate idea of the prevalence, the force, the subtile windings of envy and jealousy among men, especially among those classes into whose life the principle of rivalry directly enters. The more patiently and profoundly any one studies the workings of these passions in his own soul, the larger will be his estimate of the part they play in society. And then, if his experience be such as to admit him to the secrets behind the scenes of social life, revealing to him the selfish collusions, plots, bribes, and wire-pullings concealed beneath the conventional appearances of openness and fair-play, his allowance for the operation of sinister forms of self-love will receive another important enlargement. No other class is so keenly beset by these malign suspicions and grudges, these base motives to depreciate and supplant one another, as those who are competitors for public admiration and applause. There are obvious reasons for this fact, and the fact itself is notorious and unquestionable. The annals of the stage in all its departments, tragic, comic, operatic, teem and reek with the animosities and cabals of those who have seemed to dislike one another in even proportion as they were favorites of the public. Forrest, with all his faults, was remarkably free from this mean and odious vice of professional envy. He never sought by hidden means or dishonorable arts of any kind either to gain laurels for himself or to tarnish or tear off the laurels of others. He was always ready to applaud merit in another, and always rejoiced generously to have his fellow-actors generously praised when they deserved it. When on the stage, he did not strive to monopolize everything, and add greatness and lustre to his own part by belittling and darkening the parts of others. He was not that kind of man. He had too strong a sense of justice, too much pride and too much sympathy, to be capable of such action. The form his self-love took when excited in hostility was an angry resentment of injustice. The injustice might be fancied sometimes, but it was that which he identified with the offender, and hated accordingly. And his wrath manifested itself not in secret or overt measures of injury, not in a silent malignity circulating poisonously in the heart and brain, but in frank and passionate expression on the spot, in hot gestures, flashes of face, and strokes of voice. He vented his indignation extravagantly, like Boythorn, but elaborated no methods of doing harm, and was incapable, in his haughty self-respect, of purchasing a critic or consciously slandering a rival.
Garrick had such a prurient vanity, so morbid a dread of censure and love of praise, that he not only persuaded hostile critics not to attack him and friendly ones to write him up, but also freely used his own skilful pen for the same purpose. He wrote anonymous feeble condemnations of his own acting, and then replied to them anonymously with convincing force, thus inflaming the public interest. Voltaire is well known to have done the same thing. But these were both men of vanity, not of pride. Vanity hates rivals, and is monopolizing and revengeful, and a mother of all meannesses. Pride furiously resents attacks on itself, but does not spontaneously attack others. It asks but freedom and a fair field. Deny these, and it grows dangerous. When any one assailed or undertook to lower Daniel Webster, he was met with the most imperious repulse and transcendent scorn. The kindling wrath of the haughty giant was terrible. But the mere supposition that he could ever have stooped to offer a bribe to any one, or to curry favor of any one, is absurd. Forrest was a man of the same mould. The anger of such natures at any meddlesome attempt to disparage them has this moral ground, namely, it is their aroused instinct of spiritual self-preservation. The man of vulgar inferiority, in his coarse and complacent stolidity, cares little for the estimates others put on him. But the man conscious of a great superiority—a Webster or a Forrest—is keenly alive to whatever threatens it. His sphere of mental life enormously surpasses his sphere of physical life. The elemental rhythm of his being, which marks the key-note of his constitution and destiny, has a more massive and sensitive swing in him than in average persons, and his feelings are intensely quick to drive back every hostile or demeaning valuation ideally shrivelling and lowering his rank. The consciousness of such a man is so vital and intelligent that it intuitively reports to him every sneer, derogatory judgment, or insulting look, as something intended to compress and hamper his being of its full volume and freedom of function. Thus Forrest could not meekly submit to be undervalued or snubbed; but he had no natural impulse to undervalue or snub others, or to imagine that they stood in his way and must be thrust aside.