But he had sufficient force and height of character not to yield himself up to selfish indulgence. Notwithstanding the flattery bestowed on him, he felt the defects in his education, and determined to remedy them as well as he could. He knew that he needed the polish of literary and social culture and the training of critical studies alike to supplement the advantages and to neutralize the disadvantages of the coarse and boisterous scenes—the bold and lawless styles of men—amidst which much of his life in the West and South had been passed. Accordingly, when the opportunity was given him for a choice of associates, he took for his intimate friends in New York a very different class from those he had affiliated with in New Orleans. Without at all losing his taste for manly sports or shunning the company of their votaries, his preferred friends were men of literary and artistic tastes, of the highest refinement and the best social rank. A large number of accomplished persons, like Leggett, Bryant, Wetmore, Halleck, Inman, Ingraham, Dunlap, Lawson, were in those years on affectionate terms with him as his avowed admirers. From their example, their conversation, their criticism, he profited much. He became a liberal buyer of books, and soon had an excellent library, which he used faithfully, devoting a large portion of his leisure to reading. Nor did he read idly. He read as a student, reflecting on what he read, striving to improve his mind and taste by knowledge in general, as well as to pierce more deeply into the philosophy of the dramatic art in particular. He made himself familiar with the history of plastic and pictorial art, with engravings of celebrated statues and paintings, carefully noting their most impressive attitudes and groupings. He also explored the history of costume in the principal countries, classic, mediæval, and modern. The habit of reading and meditating which he formed at this time was fostered by many influences, grew stronger with his years, spread over wide provinces of biography, poetry, philosophy, and science, and was to the very last the chief solace and ornament of his existence.
While thus devoting himself with new zeal to mental culture, he did not forego one whit of his old assiduity in exercises for the furtherance of his bodily development. During his second year in New York he took a series of lessons in boxing. He felt a great interest in this art, became a redoubtable proficient in its practice, and was ever an earnest and open admirer of its prominent heroes. Those who feel this to be discreditable to him will find on reflection, if they think fairly, that it was, on the contrary, a credit to him. Multitudes of refined people have an intense admiration for superlative developments of physical beauty, force, and courage, though they conceal their taste because by the standards of a squeamish politeness it is considered something low and coarse. But Forrest always scorned that style of public opinion, defied it, and frankly lived out what he thought and felt. At the time of the famous fight between Heenan and Sayers for the belt of world-championship, it was clear that scholars, poets, statesmen, divines, and even fashionable women, felt the keenest interest in the contest. They read the details with avidity, and talked of them with the liveliest eagerness. The fascination is nothing to be ashamed of, but rather to be cultivated with pride. To a just perception, the fighting is not attractive, but repulsive and dreadful. It is the strength, grace, discipline, smiling fearlessness, superb hardihood, connected with the struggle, the rare exaltation of the most fundamental qualities of a kingly nature, that evoke admiration. Surely it is better to be a perfect animal than an imperfect one. When all things are in harmony, the finest corporeal condition is the basis for the highest spiritual power. A champion in finished training, with his perfected form, his marble skin, clear unflinching eyes, corky tread, and indomitable pluck, is a thrilling sight. When the crowd see him, their enthusiasm vents itself in a shout of delight. His mauling his adversary into a disfigured mass of jelly is indeed frightful and loathsome; but that is a base perversion, not the proper fruition, of his high estate. The functional power of his bearing is magnificent. He is in a condition of godlike potency. It is a higher thing to admire this glorious wealth of force, ease, and courage than to despise it. Personal gifts of strength, skill, fearlessness, are certainly desirable on any level in preference to the corresponding defects. To turn away from them with disgust is a morbid weakness, not a proof of fine superiority. While in this world we cannot escape the physical level of our constitution, however much we may build above it. Is it not plainly best as far as possible to perfect ourselves on every level of our nature? An Admirable Crichton, able to surpass everybody on all the successive heights of human accomplishments, from fencing with swords to fencing with wits, from dancing to dialectics, cannot be held, except by a mawkish judgment, as inferior to a Kirke White writing verses of pale piety while dying of consumption brought on by over-stimulus of literary ambition.
Forrest had pretty thoroughly practised gymnastics, the exercises of the military drill, horsemanship, and fencing, each of which has a particular efficacy in developing and economizing power, by harmonizing the nervous system, if the will does not interpose too much resistance to the flow of the rhythmical vibrations through the muscles. He now felt that there was a special virtue in the mastery of boxing; and to avail himself of it he secured the services of George Hernizer, a distinguished professor of the manly art, a man of immense strength, great experience, and not a little moral dignity. Supreme mastership, in whatever province it be achieved, even though it be in the mere ranges of physical force and prowess, gives its possessor an assured feeling of competency and superiority, which has an intrinsic moral value and reflects itself through him in some quiet lustre of repose and security. It is those whose equilibrium is most unstable who are the most irritable and resentful. It is weakness and insecurity that make one fretful and quarrelsome. Shakspeare says it is good to have a giant's strength, but tyrannous to use it like a giant. We know that the more gigantic the resources of a man the less tempted he is to put them forth. It is ever your weakling who is naturally waspish.
Before putting on the gloves with his pupil for the first time, Hernizer sat down with him and talked with him for half an hour in a wise and kindly manner on the morality of the art, or the true spirit in which it should be approached. He summed up in terse maxims the principles which ought to govern all who practise it, and enforced them with apt illustrations. He warned him especially never to lose his temper, and never to presume on the advantages of his skill to strike any man unnecessarily. He said that every boxer who had the instincts of a gentleman was made more generous and forbearing by his safeguard of reserved power. Forrest, eager to be at the work, and scarcely appreciating the propriety or value of the lecture, listened to it impatiently at the time, but remembered it with profit and gratitude all his life. As he recalled the circumstances and lingered over the narrative forty years later, a light of retrospective fondness played in his eyes, and his tongue seemed laved and lambent with love.
When he had taken lessons for about six months, one day when his nervous centres were aching with fulness of power, as he was sparring with his teacher, a sort of good-natured berserker rage came over him. The ancestral instincts of love of battle burned in his muscles, and he longed to pitch into the strife in right down sincerity. "Come, now, Hernizer," he cried, "let us try it for once in real earnest." "Pshaw! no, no!" replied the master, parrying him off. But waxing warmer and warmer in the play he pressed hard on him, putting in the licks so hot and heavy that at last Hernizer, rallying on his resources, fetched him a blow fair between the eyes that made him see stars and sent him reeling against the wall. "I have got enough!" exclaimed Forrest, with a laugh, as soon as he could collect himself, and went and threw his arms around his teacher; and the two athletes stood in a smiling embrace, their naked breasts clasped together, and the great waves of warm blood mantling through them. Such a passage would have made untrained and nervous men angry or sullen, but it only made these giants laugh with pleasure and sharpened their fellowship. However, Forrest said, he never again asked Hernizer to buckle to it in earnest.
Forrest did not inherit that herculean poise of power which for half a century made him such a massive mark of popular admiration. He attained it by training. And herein he is a splendid example to his countrymen, thousands on thousands of whom, in their whining debility, dyspeptic pallor, and fidgety activity, need nothing else so much as a thorough physical regimen to replenish their blood, soothe their exasperated nerves, and give a solid equilibrium to their energies. The Greeks and Romans, the nobles and knights of the Middle Age, were wiser than we in securing a superb physical basis for human perfection. Men like Plato, Pericles, Æschylus, Sophocles, were foremost in the palæstra as well as in the lists of mind. There never was another time or land in which the excited suspicions and emulations of society tended so terribly as in our own to fret and haggardize men and prematurely break them down and wear them out. Our incessant reading, our excessive brain-work, cloys the memory, impoverishes the heart, wearies the soul, and destroys the capacity for relishing simple natural enjoyments. This is one of the morals which the biography of Forrest ought to emphasize by the brilliant contrast it exhibits. For he at thirty, the period when laborious Americans begin to give out, had developed an organism of extraordinary power, with cleanly-freed joints and firmly-knit fibres and a copiously-stocked reservoir of vitality. With an unfailing digestion which quickly assimilated the nutriment from what he ate, effort slowly tired, rest rapidly restored him. As he himself once expressed it, the engine was strong and there was always plenty of fire under the boiler. He therefore felt no need of stimulation; and this, no doubt, was one of his safeguards against that insidious temptation to intemperance to which so many members of his profession, from the exhausting nature of its irregular exertions, are fatally exposed. A full force of vitality transfuses the elastic frame with an electric consciousness of pleasure and wealth. It is the ready power to do anything we like within the limits of our nature, just as a rich man feels that he can buy this, that, or the other thing at any moment if he wishes. In contrast with the drooping, tremulous man, overtasked and drained, startled at each sound, shrinking from the thought of effort, crossing the street to avoid the trial of accosting an acquaintance, afflicted with lingering pains by the slightest injury, there is nothing so inexhaustibly fascinating as an exuberant vigor of life in the senses, easily shedding annoyances, quickly healing hurts, ready at every turn for transmutation into any form of the universal good.
The effect of an artistic drill resolutely applied is something which very few persons appreciate. Faithfully practised, its power is surprising. Most observers, instead of recognizing its steady accumulation of gains, attribute the startling result to exceptional genius. Artistic drill for super-eminent excellence in any personal accomplishment has a moral value no less than a physical service but little understood. It lifts one above the multitude in that particular and gives him distinction. It thus fosters self-respect and puts him at work with greater zeal and assurance. It is thus a moral basis of inspiration and contentment. The drill of the horseman, the sportsman, the boxer, the soldier, the dancer, the singer, the orator, has an effect quite distinct from and superior to that of labor or exercise. Labor or exercise is straggling, broken, fitful; but drill is regular, symmetric, rhythmical, and has an influence to refine and exalt by economizing and directing the forces of the organism while enhancing them. It is a discipline of art. In its final completeness, corporeal and mental, it gives one an easy confidence, a feeling of competency, which is a great luxury. It enables one to stand up before his fellow-men with free chest and alert spirit and look straight in their eyes without blenching and perform his tasks without flurry. This was Forrest. He attained this deliberate self-possession, this mastery of his resources, in a degree which cannot be ascribed to one actor out of ten thousand, to one man out of a million.
A brief account of his first appearance in Boston will give an idea of the experience which he enjoyed in those years, in constant repetition, as his fresh engagements led him over the land from city to city.
"Boston, February 7th, 1827.
"My dear Mother,—Sunday evening I arrived, after a tedious and wearisome journey, at the place which is called the literary emporium of the Western hemisphere, and on Monday evening, for the first time in my life, made my bow to the good people of Massachusetts. I was received with acclamations of delight, and the curtain fell amidst repeated and enthusiastic testimonials of gratification and approval.