When Forrest had accepted the proposal from Caldwell, the thought of the long, long journey and the time that must elapse before he should see his mother again gave him a homesick feeling. He shrank from his engagement. Learning that his acquaintance Sol Smith was then in Lexington collecting a troupe to play in Cincinnati, he called on him and urgently begged to be employed. He said he had rather serve under him for ten dollars a week than under a stranger for eighteen. He was steadily refused. He went over to a circus which then chanced to be there, and hired himself out for a year. Smith says he heard of this with great mortification, and immediately called at the circus. There, he adds, sure enough, was Ned in all his glory, surrounded by riders, tumblers, and grooms. He was slightly abashed at first, but, putting a good face on the affair, said, as he had been refused an engagement at ten dollars a week by his old friend, he had agreed with these boys for twelve. To convince Smith of his ability to sustain his new line of business, he turned a couple of flip-flaps on the spot. Smith took Edwin to his lodgings, and by dint of argument and persuasion succeeding in getting him to abandon the profession of clown and fulfil his promise to Caldwell.
He accordingly went to Louisville and took passage on a steamboat down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans. On the trip he made the acquaintance of Winfield Scott and of John Howard Payne. The celebrated general and the gifted author of Sweet Home seem both to have been strongly attracted to the young actor. They held many long conversations with him, and brought out, from their ample stores of experience in the field and on the boards, anecdotes, principles, criticism, and advice, which were not only highly entertaining to him at the time but lastingly instructive and useful. He always accounted his meeting with these two men as a particular piece of good fortune. It betokens that he was at that period of his life an ingenuous and docile spirit, however impulsive and wild still attracting the sympathy and appropriating from the experience of his elders.
CHAPTER VI.
LIFE IN NEW ORLEANS.—CRITICAL PERIOD OF EXPERIENCE.
Forrest made his first appearance in New Orleans, at the American Theatre, as Jaffier in Venice Preserved, February 4th, 1824, Caldwell sustaining the part of Pierre. His individuality and his acting immediately made a strong impression on the general audience, and drew towards him the fervent personal interest of those particular individuals, both men and women, whose qualities of character caused them to feel a vivid curiosity and sympathy for highly-marked and expressive specimens of human nature. Accordingly, he very soon had many intimate friends among both sexes,—friends whose pronounced types of being and impassioned styles of life wrought assimilatingly upon him in that frank, lusty, and plastic period of his experience.
New Orleans at that time was a city of about thirty thousand inhabitants. It was the chief commercial and social capital of the South, and thoroughly conscious of its pre-eminence. On its small but concentrated scale it was the gayest, most Parisian city in the country. The Spanish and French blood of the original settlers of Louisiana and of their early followers was largely represented in its leading families. Then and there the chivalry of the slave-holding South, in all its patrician characteristics both of virtue and of vice, was at the acme of its glory. The types of men were unquestionably the most varied and sharply defined and pushed to the greatest extremes of development, the freedom and beauty of the women the most intoxicating and dangerous, the social life the most voluptuous, passionate, and reckless, of those of any city in the United States. Wealth was great, easily found, carelessly lost, leisure ample, pride intense, living luxurious, manly sports and exercises in physical training assiduously cultivated, gambling common, duelling and every form of desperate personal conflict constant, the code of manners alternately bewitching in courtesy and terrible in ferocity. From every part of the State the gentlemen planters loved to congregate in New Orleans, perfect masters of their limbs, their faculties, their weapons, and their horses, not knowing fear or embarrassment, living their thoughts and passions spontaneously out, their tall forms aflush with bold sensibility, the rich strength and grace of the thoroughbred pointing their elastic motions. And in the parlor, the ball-room, at fashionable resorts, on the promenades, the women were the peers of the men in their intensity of being, their fondness of adventure, their courage, brilliance, and piquancy. The crossing of tropical bloods, the long lineage of aristocratic habitudes of ardent indulgence and leisurely culture, had produced a class of women famed throughout the land for the symmetry of their forms, the visible music of their movements, the dreamy softness of their voices, and the bewildering charm of their eyes, swimming seas of languor and fire. Many an imaginative and burning nature asked no other paradise than the arms of these Creole houris. But, unfortunately, the reverse of being immortal, its dissolving views melted into degradation and vanished in death, too often with accompaniments of frantic jealousy, crime, and horror.
These men and these women, naturally enough, were fascinating to the adolescent actor, whose faculties were all aglow with ambition to excel, whose curiosity was on edge in every direction to know the contents of the living world which it was his profession to portray, and whose passions were just breaking from their fullest bud. Nor was he any less fascinating to them. His bluff courage, his young formative docility and eagerness, his smiling openness of face and bearing, so sadly changed in later years, and the nameless badge of personal distinction and original force he bore on his front and in his accent, drew the men to make much of him. So the outlines of his slender but sinewy and breathing form with the muscles so superbly defined, the deep and mellow tones of his ringing voice in which the clang-tints of the whole organism were audible, his large and dark-brown eyes so clearly set and brilliant, his fresh blood teeming over him in vital revelation at each vehement mood, and the speaking truthfulness of his portrayals of thought and sentiment in character, magnetized the women, secured him many a flattering smile and note and flower, and led to no slight experience in amours, which put their permanent stamp upon his inner being, and often rose out of the vistas of memory in pictures when he shut his eyes and mused in his lonely old age. A biography of Forrest which omitted these things would be like a description of the Saint Lawrence without an allusion to Niagara.
In his opening manhood, before repeated experiences of injustice, slander, and treachery had in any degree soured and closed his soul, Forrest had a heart as much formed for friendship as for love. He was full of ingenuous life, sportive, affectionate, every way most companionable. His friendships were fervent and faithfully cherished. The disappointments, the revulsions of feeling, and the results on his final character, we shall see in the later stages of this biography.