But when, in later years, the bloom had been somewhat brushed from life, and the freshness worn from experience, and the meaner phases of human nature abundantly brought home to him,—then the war of incompetent and unprincipled criticism, the storm of virulent personal animosities, raging ever worse and worse, was a very different thing. Then the stings of ridicule and falsehood were bitterly felt and resented. Their poison sank deeply into his soul, and, rankling there, made him a changed man. In a subsequent chapter there will be an occasion to do justice to this subject and to its morals by a full treatment. It is appropriate here merely to explain the causes of the unfair depreciation and the venomous hostility with which he was pursued from the time he first appeared suddenly in the theatrical firmament as a star of the first magnitude.
The first cause of the endless flings, aspersions, and belittling valuations of which Forrest was the subject is to be found in the mere fact of his success itself. Every one familiar with the workings of unregenerate human nature must confess the truth of this assertion, dark and sad as it is. In this world of baffled aspirants and jealous rivals the man who surpasses his competitors finds himself amidst a host of foes, who, soured and angry at their own failure, are mortified by his success and strive by malignant detractions to blacken his laurels and drag him down to themselves. Envy is a frightful power among men, and it is said by De Tocqueville to be the characteristic vice of a democracy. Like a diseased eye, it is offended by everything bright. Nobody assails the nobodies who never undertake anything. Few assail the incompetents who fail in what they undertake. But let a strong man conspicuously cover himself with coveted prizes, and hundreds will be snarling at his heels, barking at his glory, eagerly declaring that he does not deserve his success, but that it properly belongs to them. A vast quantity of acrimonious criticism originates in envy. The ancient Roman victors when they rode in a Triumph wore amulets as a protection against the evil eyes of envy.
Another cause in Forrest of offence and numerous dislike was the pronounced distinctiveness of his character, his marked and independent manhood. Most people are of the conventional type in personality and manners, each one as the rest are. And their likings are confined to those of their own stamp. A man of fresh and decisive originality, who is and appears just what God and nature have made him, who thinks for himself, speaks for himself, acts himself out with freedom and power, disturbs and repels them. He irritates their prejudices by violating their standards. His frank and flexible spontaneity, his uncovered impulsive revelation of his feelings, and fearless choice of what he will do or will not do, imply a tacit contempt for their meek conformities and spirit of routine. Thus their self-esteem is hurt and they are made angry. Forrest was a man of this kind, not addicted to swear in the polished phrase of the magistrate, but in his own honest vernacular. The true theory of republican America is that the people should not be cast in the monotonous moulds of certain classes or types, the national character a fixed repetition, but that every citizen should be in himself a priest and a king before God, with his own form and color and relish of individuality unrepressed by any foreign dictation. This democratic idea was well realized in Edwin Forrest. It made him all his life a touchstone of hostility to those whose social subserviency it rebuked or whose aristocratic prejudices it set bristling.
He drew forth the animosity and injurious influence of a third set of opponents from among the least noble and successful members of his own profession, with whom, from dissimilarities of tastes and habits and preference for the opportunities of higher intercourse opened to him, he did not intimately associate as an equal. He had an ample supply of friends and comrades endowed with distinguished talents and proud aspirations, scholars, poets, jurists, statesmen, whose fellowship strengthened his ambition, nourished his mind, refined his fancy, gratified his affections, and led him into the ideal world of books and art. Courted by such gentlemen, with his rising fame and fortune he naturally chose their society, to the neglect of that of his fellow-actors whose haunts were low, whose habits loose, and whose professional status a dull and hopeless mediocrity. It is not customary for the distinguished leaders and masters in any profession to associate in close intimacy with the rank and file of workmen in their departments. It is customary, however, for the rank and file to resent the neglect and take their revenge in flouting. Giotto, Lionardo, Raphael, Titian, did not hob-nob and lounge with the ordinary painters of their day. The friends of artists are not artisans, but other artists, their peers, noble patrons, celebrated persons, and inspiring coadjutors. The blame so bitterly and often cast on Forrest in this respect was unjust. The vindictive personal censures which his sometimes absorbed and distant bearing elicited from injured self-love were ignoble. The stock is no doubt often provoked to sneer at the Star; but the action is not beautiful or worthy of deferential attention. If the ordinary members of a profession, instead of looking askance at the extraordinary ones and indulging in detraction, would cultivate admiring sympathy, aspiring intelligence, and nobleness, they would soon bridge the chasm that separates them. It is the absence of generous sensibility and self-respecting application that at once keeps them inferiors and prevents their superiors from becoming their intimates. In the last twenty-five years of his life Forrest had, as a consequence of what he had been through, an explosive irritability of temperament, and not infrequently in moving among theatrical companies betrayed an imperious sense of power. But he was profoundly just, ready instantly to make princely amends when convinced of an error or wrong; and under his harsh and volcanic exterior there always, even to the very last, slept a deep spring of tenderness pure enough to reflect the eyes of angels. It was perfectly natural that he should be misjudged. Not one in a thousand could be expected to have the generous insight, the detachment and gentleness, needed to read him aright. Consequently, a swarm of false accusations and angry remarks pursued him like a buzz of wasps enveloping his head.
Still further, he incurred the special resentment of that class of newspaper critics who expected to receive tribute from those whom they condescended to praise. Many of these writers for the press have been so accustomed to be courted, flattered, compensated, that they have come to regard a failure on the part of a public performer to propitiate their good graces in advance by suppliant attentions, and to acknowledge them afterwards by thanks if not by rewards, as just cause for turning their pens against the delinquent. Forrest was always too honest and too proud to stoop to anything of this kind. He strove to do the best justice in his power to the characters he impersonated, and would then leave the verdict to the instincts of the public and the unbiassed judgments of competent critics. The utter falsity, unfairness, shallowness, and absurdity which so often marked the dramatic critiques of the press, a large proportion of which were written by persons not only notoriously prejudiced and unprincipled but also ignorant of the elementary principles of criticism, early disgusted and angered him to such a degree that he would have nothing whatever to do with this class of writers, but turned from them with disdain. They knew his feeling, and they sought their revenge by every sort of exaggeration and caricature. With artifices of misrepresentation, burlesque, elaborate assault, and incidental jeer, they racked their ingenuity to lessen his reputation and make him wince. They succeeded better in the latter than in the former.
At that time, as has been said, the influence of English literature and talent held almost exclusive possession of the field in this country, most especially in theatrical matters. All the great travelling stars of the stage, until Forrest rose, had been drawn from the English galaxy. The chief dramatic critics were Englishmen. There was a strong banded interest to keep these things so. But the rising spirit of nationality was beginning to assert itself. In the conflict that ensued, Forrest was made a central figure around whom the struggle raged most fiercely. The English clique were pledged to maintain the supremacy of their own school and its representatives, while the Americans stood up distinctively in support and praise of whatever was native. A majority of the worst critiques against Forrest were written by foreigners under the instigation of the English clique. The extent and power of this passionate bias on both sides are now so nearly a mere matter of the past that it is not easy for the present generation to realize them. The manager of a prominent New York journal enlisted on the English side, who had a strong antipathy to Forrest on personal grounds, resolved to write him down, cost what it might. A friend of the actor said to the editor, "You cannot do it; he is too popular." The editor replied, "The continual dropping of water wears away the stone," and made his columns pour an incessant rain of satire and abuse. Many a damaging estimate was levelled against him simply as the first American tragedian who had by his original power acquired a national reputation and promised through his increasing imitators to found a school.
Besides all these sets of hostile regarders, he was misliked as a man and maligned or disesteemed as an actor by another class, whose representatives are very numerous, namely, those persons of a feeble and squeamish constitution and sickly delicacy who could not stand the powerful shocks he administered to their nerves. The robust and towering specimens of impassioned manhood which he exhibited, teeming with fearless energies, constantly breaking into colossal attitudes and gestures, lightnings of expression and thunderbolts of speech, were too much for them. Their quivering sensitiveness cowered before his terrible fire and stride, and shrank from him with fear; and fear is the parent of hate. Faint ladies, spruce clerks, spindling fops, and perfumed dandies were horrified and wellnigh thrown into convulsions by his Gladiator and Jack Cade. Then they vented their own weakness and ignorance of virile truth in querulous complaints of his measureless coarseness and ferocity. It is obvious that weaklings will shudder before such heroic volcanoes of men as Hotspur and Coriolanus and resent their own terror on its cause. Forrest produced the same effect when he personated such overwhelming characters on the stage. Made on that pattern and stocked with ammunition on that scale, he lived as it were in reality the parts he played in fiction, and was ever, in his own way and in his own measure, true to nature and life. The lion and the tiger are not to be toned down to the style of the antelope or the mouse because timid spectators may desire it for the sparing of their nerves.
Finally, one more class of play-goers were continually censuring Forrest, casting blame even on his best portrayals. They had better grounds for their fault-finding than the others, and were partly justified in their verdicts, only unjust in their wilful exaggeration of his defects and ungenerous in their prejudiced denial of his conspicuous and imposing merits. Reference is now made to the select class of refined and scholarly minds, exquisitely cultivated in all directions, who insist that art is distinct from nature, being the purified and heightened reflection of nature through the mind at one remove from reality. Exuberance of power and sincerity was the primary greatness of Forrest as a tragedian. A small but most commanding portion of the public maintained that this too was the chief foible and limitation of his excellence, leading him to attempt on the stage a living resurrection of the crude truth of nature in place of that idealized softening and tempered reflex which is the genuine province of art. Shakspeare himself said that the end of playing was and is not to bring nature herself upon the stage, but to hold the mirror up to nature. The perfected artistic actor does not bring before his audience the reality itself of life with all its interclinging entanglements of passion and muscle, but he drops the repulsive details, all unessential vulgarities, refines and combines the chief features, harmonizing and heightening them in the process, and shows the result as a free picture, like the original in form and color and moving, but without its tearing ruggedness or expense of volition. This view is a true one, though not the adequate truth in its completeness. And this criticism is proper, though they who brought it against Forrest, in their intolerance, urged it beyond its fair application to him. It never was claimed that he was a perfect artist; it cannot be honestly denied that he was a great one. As a rule he did, no doubt, lack that last and most irresistible charm of genius, the easy curbing of expenditure which is the divine girdle of art. The bewitchment of the fairest of the goddesses lay in her cestus. The enchanting cestus of art is continence around strength. Human nature flung back on its elemental experiences in their extremest energy breaks loose from the finished forms and manners of polite society, and the conventional members of polite society are naturally displeased with the player who presents a specimen of this kind in its tempestuous truth not refined and tamed to their code. The great characters of Forrest were statues of their originals, recast in their native moulds in his imagination and heart, and placed directly on the stage in living action. The excrescences unremoved by the chisel and file did not lessen their truth or affect their sublimity. But in the eyes of dilettante critics who had no free intellect behind their glasses and no generous passions beneath their gloves, a perception of the marks of the moulds caused all the heroic grandeur of the images to go for nothing.
It is necessary to bear in mind these six classes of critics in order justly to understand the career of Forrest as an actor with the extraordinary amount of depreciation, invective, and ridicule he encountered as an offset to his surpassing popular success. For before the cliques of critics spoke, while they were speaking, and after they had spoken, unaffected by anything they said, the general average of theatre-goers were played upon in their manliest sympathies by him as by no other actor of his time, and the great mass of the people followed him with their loving admiration and praise like a flood. And in such matters as this, we may be well assured, the permanent judgment of the multitude is never grandly wrong, however pettily right the opinion of the opposing few may be.
January 8th, 1834, Forrest wrote to Henry Hart, officer of a literary society in Albany, the following eminently characteristic letter. The period of critical transition from youth to manhood which he spent in Albany had left lingering recollections of interest and gratitude in him which he gladly availed himself of this opportunity to express in an act of public spirit.