Caldwell felt a strong interest in the young actor, and was of service to him outside of the theatre as well as within it. He introduced him to a higher order of society with more aristocratic manners and refined accomplishments than he had been accustomed to, thus affording him an opportunity, had he been so minded, to make his upward way socially not less than professionally. As a keen observer and a quick learner, he did not fail to reap some valuable fruits from the advantages thus afforded him. But his forte lay not in this direction. He had then, and always afterwards, a deep distaste to all that is called fashionable society. He was insuperably democratic in his very bones. For the elaborate forms and conventionalities of the polite world he had a rooted repugnance. He wanted to be free and downright in honest speech and demeanor, making his outer manifestations correspond exactly with his inner states. He could not bear, in accordance with the conventions of the best society, to pretend to be inferior where he felt himself superior, to affect to be interested when he was bored, to express insincere nothings to give pleasure, and carefully hide his most earnest thoughts and feelings lest they should give pain. This art of polished intercourse—quite necessary in our world, and often as artistic and useful as it is artificial and compromising—he vehemently disliked and was never an adept in. Instead of gracefully appropriating it for its gracious uses while spurning its evils, he impatiently rebelled against it, stigmatizing it in blunt phrase as a cursed hypocrisy. This defect in him it is needful to recognize as one of the keys to his character and career. His athletic, bluff nature, true and generous, lacked the flexible suavity of the spirituelle qualities, a lack which prevented his universal success, causing him to jar on persons of squeamish disposition or fastidious taste. Until a long series of revulsive experiences had trained him to be silent and reticent, his impulsive frankness and passionate love of freedom made it extremely irksome and chafing to him purposely to adapt himself to others at the expense of his own honest emotions. He never could be in the slightest degree a courtier or a tuft-hunter, but—like Edmund Kean, and many another man of genius whose abounding and impetuous soul loved nature and truth in their spontaneous forms more than any of the gilded substitutes for them—he ever preferred to be with those in whose presence he could act himself out just as he was and just as he felt. His playing in the theatre, instead of fitting, by reaction unfitted him for playing in society. If, on the stage, he consented to seem, all the more, off from it, he desired to be. The basis of this veritable self-assertion was his vigorous manliness; and so far it was creditable to him. But the extravagance to which he carried it partook of pride and wilfulness, and was an error and a fault. The code of fashion, tyrannical and imperfect as it is, has uses without which society could scarcely get on. It cannot be neglected with impunity. Forrest was no exception, but paid the penalty for his independence in the neglect with which Fashion, as such, always treated him.
Among the foibles which especially beset the histrionic profession are vanity, greed of applause, jealousy, invidious rivalry. Manager Caldwell was not free from these weaknesses. His pride as a player was as strong as his prudential regard for the interests of his theatre. No actor in the South had been a greater favorite, and no member of his company had ever rivalled him. He had carefully awakened an interest in advance for his protégé, saying to his friends that he had engaged in Kentucky a young man named Edwin Forrest, who had high talent, was industrious, resolved to rise to the top of the profession, and who, he was sure, would greatly please the New Orleans public. But when the pupil made such rapid progress and gained such loud plaudits that the master felt himself in danger of being eclipsed, he had recourse to an artifice not uncommon, though certainly somewhat ungenerous. He reserved the best parts for himself, and cast his rising competitor in inferior or repulsive characters, most often in the part of an old man. Forrest saw the design and inwardly resented it, though he said nothing. He followed the wise course of trying to make the best he could of the part assigned him. He made a careful study of the peculiarities of age, in feature, in gait, in voice. He would often sit in places of public resort and critically watch every old man who came in or went out. Many a time when he had chanced to discover some striking example of power and dignity or of weakness and decrepitude in an old man he would follow him in the street and mentally imitate him, reproducing and fixing what he saw. In this way he soon attained such skill that his representations of these parts won him as much approval as he had ever received for the more congenial and showy rôles to which he had been accustomed.
Caldwell was fond of society, cared little for individuals, and, as some thought, held his theatrical vocation subsidiary to personal ends. The superficialities and insincerities of fashion did not distress him. Forrest had an aversion to society, a passion for individuals, and an intense ambition to excel in his art, which he loved for itself. It was quite natural that the friendship of men so unlike, to say nothing of their great disparity in years, should be streaked with coolnesses and gradually cease. It was not long in dying, though they continued to get along together comfortably, with some trifling exceptions, until their bond was suddenly ruptured by an irritating event which will be narrated on a succeeding page.
But it was outside of the circle of the theatrical company with which he was associated in New Orleans that Forrest found the most rich and decisive influences, at the same time developing his organism, moulding his character, and enhancing his dramatic powers. These influences were exerted on him chiefly through the five closest friends he had in the city, five men intimately grouped, to be the confidant of one of whom was to be the confidant of all, men of the most remarkable force and finish of personality each in his own kind, each of them an intense type of the class he represented. They were all men of great personal beauty and strength, tall, supple, lithe, absolutely ignorant of fear, chivalrous in disposition, loose in habits, kind and loving in their native moods, but relentless and terrible in their wrath. Some insight into the sympathetic assimilation of these superb and fearful persons upon Forrest, and some tracing of the effect on his nature and on his art of the cycle of experience which they revealed to him partly by description, partly by personal introduction, are essential to an understanding of his great career.
Those who are often and long together influence one another more than is usually supposed. Their giving and taking of opinions, prejudices, habits, and even organic peculiarities, are far beyond their own conscious purpose or recognition. Not unfrequently intimate associates obviously grow like one another in look, action, voice, passion, type of character, quality of temper, style of manners, and mode of life. This is confessedly matter of observation; but the law of its operation or the importance of the results very few understand. It is the sympathetic impartation and reproduction, between two or more parties, of inner states through outer signs; and, as to noble qualities, it is proportioned in degree to the docility of the persons, combined with their richness of organization. Those who have plastic nervous systems copiously furnished with force, and who are eager to improve, take possession of one another's knowledge and accomplishments with marvellous celerity. By intuition and instinct they seem to reflect their contents and transmit their habitudes with mutual appropriation. In this unpurposed but saturating school of real life what the superior knows and does passes into the sympathetic observer by a sort of contagion. Those whose nerves are capable of the same kinds and rates of vibration play into each other and are attuned together, as the sounding string of one musical instrument propagates its pulses through the air and awakens a harmonic sound in the corresponding string of another instrument. This is the scientific basis of what is loosely called human magnetism, and it is a factor of incomparable import in the problem of human life.
The one of Forrest's New Orleans friends first to be named is James Bowie, inventor and unrivalled wielder of that terrible weapon for hand-to-hand fights named from him the bowie-knife. He was a member of the aristocratic class of the South, planter, gentleman, traveller, adventurer, sweet-spoken, soft-mannered, poetic, and chivalrous, and possessed of a strength and a courage, a cool audacity and an untamable will, which seemed, when compared with any ordinary standard, superhuman. These qualities in a hundred conflicts never failed to bring him off conqueror. In heart, when not roused by some sinister influence, he was as open as a child and as loving as a woman. In soul high-strung, rich and free, in physical condition like a racing thoroughbred or a pugilist ready for the ring, an eloquent talker, thoroughly acquainted with the world from his point of view, he was a charming associate for those of such tastes, equally fascinating to friends and formidable to foes. As a personal competitor, taken nakedly front to front, few more ominous and magnificent specimens of man have walked on this continent.
His favorite knife, used by him awfully in many an awful fray, he presented as a token of his love to Forrest, who carefully preserved it among his treasured keepsakes. It was a long and ugly thing, clustering with fearful associations in its very look; plain and cheap for real work, utterly unadorned, but the blade exquisitely tempered so as not to bend or break too easily, and the handle corrugated with braids of steel, that it might not slip when the hand got bloody. Journeying in a stage-coach, in cold weather, after stopping for a change of horses a huge swaggering fellow usurped a seat belonging to an invalid lady, leaving her to ride on the outside. In vain the lady expostulated with him; in vain several others tried to persuade him to give up the place to her. At last a man who sat in front of the offender, so muffled and curled up in a great cloak that he looked very small, dropped the cloak down his shoulders, took his watch in his left hand, lifted a knife in his right, and, straightening himself up slowly till it seemed as if his head was going through the top of the coach, planted his unmoving eyes full on those of the intruder, and said, in a perfectly soft and level tone which gave the words redoubled power, "Sir, if within two minutes you are not out of that seat, by the living God I will cut your ears off!" The man paused a few seconds to take in the situation. He then cried, "Driver, let me out! I won't ride with such a set of damned murderers!" That was Bowie with his knife. Fearful, yet not without something admirable. Another anecdote of him will illustrate still better the atmosphere of the class of men under whose patronizing influence Forrest came in the company of his friend Bowie.
The plantations of Bowie and a very quarrelsome Spaniard joined each other. The proprietors naturally fell out. The Spaniard swore he would shoot Bowie on the first chance. The latter, not liking to live with such an account on his hands, challenged his neighbor, who was a very powerful and skilful fighter with all sorts of weapons and had in his time killed a good many men. The Spaniard accepted the challenge, and fixed the following conditions for the combat. An oak bench six feet long, two feet high, and one foot wide should be firmly fastened in the earth. The combatants, stark naked, each with a knife in his right hand, its blade twelve inches in length, should be securely strapped to the bench, face to face, their knees touching. Then, at a signal, they should go at it, and no one should interfere till the fight was done. The murderous temper of the arrangements was not more evident than the horrible death of one of the men or of both was sure. But Bowie did not shrink. He said to himself, "If the Spaniard's hate is so fiendish, why, he shall have his bellyful before we end." All was ready, and a crowd stood by. Bowie may tell the rest himself, as he related it a dozen years after to Forrest, whose blood curdled while he listened:
"We confronted each other with mutual watch, motionless, for a minute or two. I felt that it was all over with me, and a slight chill went through my breast, but my heart was hot and my brain was steady, and I resolved that at all events he should die too. Every fight is won in the eye first. Well, as I held my look rooted in his eye, I suddenly saw in it a slight quiver, an almost imperceptible sign of giving way. A thrill of joy shot through my heart, and I knew that he was mine. At that instant he stabbed at me. I took his blade right through my left arm, and at the same time, by an upward stroke, as swift as lightning and reaching to his very spine, I ripped him open from the abdomen to the chin. He gave a hoarse grunt, the whole of his insides gushed out, and he tumbled into my lap, dead."
An intimate of Bowie, and a firm patron and friend of Forrest, teaching him much by precept in answer to his inquiries, and contagiously imparting to him yet more by personal contact and example, was Colonel Macaire. The real name of this man, and also those of the two succeeding members of the group, are replaced here by fictitious ones on account of their relatives who are still living. The two most prominent traits of Macaire in social life were his enthusiasm for the military art and his extreme fondness for horses. He was a finished soldier and officer. The martial discipline had left its results plainly all through his mind and his person, in a sensitive loyalty to the code of honor, an easy precision of movement, and an authoritative suavity of demeanor. The military art, on the whole, regarded in its influences on individuals and nations, is perhaps the richest in its power and the most exact in its methods of all the disciplines thus far developed in history. Its drill, faithfully applied to a fair subject, nourishes the habit of obedience and the faculty of command, regulates and refines the behavior, lifts the head, throws back the shoulders, brings out the chest, deepens the breathing, frees the circulation, and through its marching time-beat exalts the rank of the organism by co-ordinating its functions in a spirit of rhythm. It changes the contracted and fixed action of the muscles for an action flowing over the shoulders and hips and drawing on the spinal column instead of the brain. And every work which can be shifted from the brain to the spine is a mental economy especially needed in these days of excessive mental action and deficient vital action.