In addition, Forrest always showed himself a man of sterling integrity, inflexible truth, whose word was as good as his bond, who toiled in the open ways of self-denial and industry to build his name and position. He bribed no one to write him up, bought no one from writing him down, stooped to no startling eccentricities or tricks to get himself talked about, arranged no conspiracies to push his own claims or hold others back, but by manly resolution, study, and effort paid the fair price for all he won, triumphantly resisting those insidious lures of indolence, dissipation, and improvidence so incident to a theatrical career, and steadily raising himself to the summit of his difficult profession, where he sat in assured mastery for two generations. There was a native grandeur about him which attracted admiring attention wherever he moved.
The life of one who for so long a time and in so great a degree enjoyed the favor of his countrymen may be said to belong to the public. The man who has been watched with such eagerness in the fictitious characters of the stage kindles a desire to see him truly in his own. It is proper that the story should be told for the gratification of the natural curiosity of the people, as well as for the sake of the numerous lessons it must inculcate. The lesson of an adventurous and ascending career surmounting severe hardships and obstacles,—the lesson of a varied, fresh, full, racy, and idiosyncratic experience,—the lesson of an extraordinary knowledge of the world, transmuting into consciousness the moral substance of the sphere of humanity,—the lesson of self-respect and force of character resisting the strongest temptations to fatal indulgence,—the lesson of strong faults and errors, not resisted or concealed, but unhappily yielded to, and the bearing of their unavoidable penalties,—the lesson of resolute devotion to physical training developing a frail and feeble child into a man of herculean frame and endurance,—the lesson of talent and ambition patiently employing the means of artistic mental improvement by independent application to truth and nature,—the lesson of a brilliant fortune and position bravely won and maintained,—these and other lessons, besides all those numerous and highly important ones which the theatrical world and the dramatic art in themselves present for the instruction of mankind, have not often been more effectively taught than they may be from the life of Edwin Forrest.
The subject-matter of the drama, understood in its full dignity, is nothing less than the science of human nature and the art of commanding its manifestations. The exemplification of this in the theatre in our country, it is believed, will hereafter be endowed with a personal instructiveness and a social influence greater than it has ever had anywhere else. For the moral essence and interest of representative playing on the stage ultimately reside in the contrasts between the varieties of reality and ideality in the characters and lives of human beings. All spiritual import centres in the conflict and reconciliation of actuals and ideals. In this point of view the biography of the principal American as yet identified with the histrionic profession assumes a grave importance for Americans. Such a narrative will afford opportunity to show what are the elements of good and bad acting both in earnest and in fiction; to contrast the folly of living to gain applause with the dignity of living to achieve merit; to exhibit the valuable uses of competent criticism, the frequency and ridiculous arrogance of ignorant and prejudiced criticism; to expose the mean and malignant artifices of envy, jealousy, and ignoble rivalry. It will, in a word, give occasion for illustrating the true ideal of life, the harmonious fruition of the full richness of human nature, with instances of approaches to it and of departures from it. To get behind the scenes of the dramatic art is to get behind the scenes of the sources of power, the arts of sway, the workings of vice and virtue, the deepest secrets of the historic world.
In the distinguishing peculiarities of his structure and strain Edwin Forrest was one of those extraordinary men who seem to spring up rarely here and there, as if without ancestors, direct from some original mould of nature, and constitute a breed apart by themselves. Alexander, Cæsar, Demosthenes, Mirabeau, Chatham, Napoleon, draw their volitions from such an unsounded reservoir of power, have such latent resources of intuition, can strike such all-staggering blows, that common men, appalled before their mysteriousness, instinctively revere and obey. In the primeval time such men loomed with the overshadowing port of deities and were worshipped as avatars from a higher world. One of this class of men has, if we may use the figure, a sphere so dense and vast that the lighter and lesser spheres of those around him give way on contact with his firmer and weightier gravitation. Wherever he goes he is treated as a natural king. He carries his royal credentials in the intrinsic rank of his organism. There is in his nervous system, resulting from the free connection and uninterrupted interplay of all its parts, a centralized unity, a slowly swaying equilibrium, which fills him with the sense of a saturating drench of power. His consciousness seems to float on his surcharged ganglia in an intoxicating dreaminess of balanced force, which, by the transcendent fearlessness and endurance it imparts, lifts him out of the category of common men. The dynamic charge in his nervous centres is so deep and intense that it produces a chronic exaltation above fear into complacency, and raises him towards the eternal ether, among the topmost heads of our race. Each of these men in his turn draws from his admiring votaries the frequent sigh of regret that nature made but one such and then broke the die. This high gift, this unimpartable superiority, is a secret safely veiled from vulgar eyes. Fine spirits recognize its occult signals in the pervasive rhythm of the spinal cord, the steadiness of the eye, the enormous potency of function, the willowy massiveness of bearing, and a certain mystic languor whose sleeping surface can with swift and equal ease emit the soft gleams of love to delight or flash the forked bolts of terror to destroy. This gift, as terrible as charming, varies with the temperament and habits of its possessor. In Coleridge its profuse electricity was steeped in metaphysical poppy and mandragora. In our American Samuel Adams it was gathered in a battery that discharged the most formidable shocks of revolutionary eloquence. In Sargent S. Prentiss, one of the most imperial personalities this continent has known, it stood at a great height, but his body was too much for his brain, and, as in a thousand other melancholy examples of splendid genius ruined, the authentic divinity continually gave way to its maudlin counterfeit. Where the spell of this supernal inspiration has been inbreathed, unless it be accompanied by noble employment and gratified affection, either the mind topples into delirium and imbecility, or the temptation to drunkenness is irresistible. It can know none of the intermediate courses of mediocrity, but must still touch some extreme; and one of the five words, ambition, love, saintliness, madness, or idiocy, covers the secret history and close of genius on the earth.
In his basic build, his informing temperament, the habitual sway of his being, Forrest was a marked specimen of this dominating class of men. The circumstances of his life and the training of his mind were unfavorable to the full development of his power, in the highest directions; and it never came in him to a refined and free consciousness. Had it done so, as it did in Daniel Webster, he would have been a man entirely great. Webster was scarcely better known by his proper name than by his popular sobriquet of the godlike. He and Forrest were fashioned and equipped on the same scale, and closely resembled each other in many respects. The atlantean majesty of Webster seemed so self-commanded in its immense stability that the spectator imagined it would require a thousand men planting their levers at the distance of a mile to tip him from his poise. When he drew his hand from his bosom and stretched it forth in emphatic gesture, the movement suggested the weight of a ton. It was so with Forrest. The slowness of his action was sometimes wonderfully impressive, suggesting to the consciousness an imaginative apprehension of immense spaces and magnitudes with a corresponding dilation of passion and power. His attitudes and gestures cast angles whose lines appeared, as the imagination followed them, to reach to elemental distances. And it is the perception or the vague feeling of such things as these that magnetizes a spell-bound auditory as they gaze. The organic foundation for this exceptional power is the unification of the nervous system by the exact correlation and open communication of all its scattered batteries. This heightens the force of each point by its sympathetic reinforcement with all points. The focal equilibrium that results is the condition of an immovable self-possession. This is an attainment much more common once than it is in our day of external absorption and frittering anxieties. Its signs, the pathetic and sublime indications of this transfused unity, are visible in the immortal masterpieces of antique art, in the statues of the gods, kings, sages, heroes, and great men of India, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. It is now excessively rare. Most of us are but as collections of fragments pieced together, so full of strictures and contractions that no vibratory impact or undulation can circulate freely in us. But Forrest had this open and poised unity in such a degree that when at ease he swayed on his centre like a mountain on a pivot, and when volition put rigidity into his muscles the centre was solidaire with the periphery. And he was thus differenced from his average fellow-men just as those two or three matchless thoroughbred stallions who have so startlingly raised the breed of horses in this whole country were differenced from their plebeian brothers in the dray and at the plough.
The truth here indicated is one of surpassing importance. However overlooked by the ignorant multitude, it was blindly felt by them, and it was clearly seen by all who had the key to it, especially by women of rich intuitions. With these Forrest was always an especial favorite. Not only did the magnetizing signs of his power so work upon hundreds of men all over the land that he was imitated by them, his habitudes of bearing and voice copied and transmitted, but they also wrought more deeply still on more sensitive imaginations, producing reactions there to be transmitted thence upon their offspring and perpetuate his traits in future generations. This is one of the historic prerogatives of the potent and brilliant artist, one of the chosen modes by which selective nature or providence improves the strain of our race. No biography can have a stronger claim on public attention than one which promises to throw light on the law for exalting the human organism to its highest perfection,—a secret which belongs to the complete training of a dramatic artist and the fascination with which it invests him in the eyes of sensibility.
Still further, Forrest has a claim for posthumous justice as one who was wronged in important particulars of his life and misjudged in essential elements of his character. Outraged, as he conceived, in the sanctities of his manhood, he bore the obloquy for years with outward silence, but with an inner resentment that rankled to his very soul. Endowed with a tender and expansive heart, cultivated taste, and a scrupulous sense of justice, shrinking sensitively from any stain on his honor, he was in many circles considered a selfish despot addicted to the most unprincipled practices. His enemies, combining with certain sets of critics, incompetent, prejudiced, or unprincipled, caused it to be quite commonly supposed that he was a coarse, low performer, merely capable of splitting the ears of the groundlings; while, in fact, his intellectual vigor, his conversational powers, his literary discernment, and his sensibility to the choicest delicacies of sentiment were as much superior to those of the ordinary run of men as his popular success on the stage was greater than that of the ordinary stock of actors. Betrayed—as he and his intimate friends believed—in his own home, he was, when at length, after long forbearance, moved to seek legal redress, himself accused, and as he always felt, against law, evidence, and equity, loaded with shameful condemnation and damages. Standing by his early friends with faithful devotion and open purse, he was accused of heartlessly deserting them in their misfortunes. A penniless boy, making his money not by easy speculations which bring a fortune in a day, but by hard personal labor, he gave away over a quarter of a million dollars, and then was stigmatized as an avaricious curmudgeon. Cherishing the keenest pride in his profession and in those who were its honor and ornament,—bestowing greater pecuniary benefactions on it than any other man who ever lived, and meditating a nobler moral service to it than any other mere member of it has conferred since Thespis first set up his cart,—he was accused of valuing his art only as a means of personal enrichment and glorification, and of being a haughty despiser of his theatrical brothers and sisters. As a result of these industrious misrepresentations, there is abroad in a large portion of the community a judgment of him which singularly inverts every fair estimate of his deserts after a complete survey. It seems due to justice that the facts be stated, and his character vindicated, so far as the simple light of the realities of the case will vindicate it.
Two definite illustrations may here fitly serve to show that the foregoing statements are to be regarded not as vague generalities, but as strict and literal truth. One is in relation to the frequent estimate of Forrest as a quarrelsome, fighting man. Against this may be set the simple fact that, with all his gigantic strength, pugilistic skill, and volcanic irritability, from his eighteenth year to his death he never laid violent hand in anger on a human being, except in one instance, and that was when provocation had set him beside himself. The other illustration is concerning his alleged pecuniary meanness. When he was past sixty-five, alone in the world with his fast-swelling fortune, under just the circumstances to give avarice its sharpest edge and energy, he set apart the sum of fifty thousand dollars for an annuity to an old friend, to release him from toil and make his last years happy. Even of those called generous, how many in our day are capable of such a deed in answer to a silent claim of friendship?
One more element or feature in this life, of public interest, of attraction and value for biographic use, is its strictly American character. All the outlines and setting of Forrest's career, the quality and smack of his sentiments, the mould and course of his thoughts, the style of his art, were distinctly American. His immediate descent, on both sides, from European immigrants suggests the lesson of the mixture in our nationality, the providential place and purpose of the great world-gathering of nationalities and races in our republic. His personal prejudice against foreigners, with his personal indebtedness to the teachings and examples of foreigners,—Pilmore, Wilson, Cooper, Conway, Kean,—brings up the question of the just feelings which ought to subsist between our native-born and our naturalized citizens; that true spirit of human catholicity which should blend them all in a patriotism identical at last with universal philanthropy and scorning to harbor any schismatic dislikes. And then his intimate relations, at critical periods of his life, with the most marked specimens of our Western and Southern civilization, bring upon the biographic scene many illustrations of those unique American characters, having scarcely prototypes or antitypes, which have passed away forever with the state of society that produced them.