A touching thing in Forrest in his last years was the unpurposed organic revelation in his voice of what he had suffered in the battle of life. What he had experienced of injustice and harshness, of selfishness and treachery, of beautiful things relentlessly snatched away by time and death, had left a permanent memorial in the unstudied tones and cadences of his speech. As he narrated or quoted or read, his utterance was varied in close keeping with what was to be expressed. But the moment he fell back on himself, and gave spontaneous utterance from within, there was a perpetual recurrence of a minor cadence, a half-veiled sigh, a strangely plaintive tone, sweet and mournful as the wail of a dying wind in a hemlock grove.
A trait of Forrest, to which all his friends will testify, was the perfect freedom of his usual manner in private life from all theatricality or affectation. His bearing was natural and honest, varying truthfully with his impulses. With an actor so powerfully marked as he this is not common. Most great actors carry from their professional into their daily life some fixed strut of attitude or chronic stilt of elocution or pompous trick of quotation. It was not so with Forrest, and his detachment from all such habits, his straight-on simplicity, were an honor to him and a charm to those who could appreciate the suppression of the shop in the manly assertion of dignity and rectitude. He had no swagger, though he had a swing which belonged to his heavy equilibrium. His speech attracted attention only from its uncommon ease and finish, not from any ostentation. The actor, it has been justly said, is so far contemptible who keeps his mock grandeur on when his buskins are off, and orders a coffee-boy with the air of a Roman general commanding an army. He seems ever to say by his manner, It is easier to be a hero than to act one. Charles Lamb relates that a friend one day said to Elliston, “I like Wrench because he is the same natural easy creature on the stage that he is off.” Elliston replied, with charming unconsciousness, “My case exactly. I am the same person off the stage that I am on.” The inference instead of being identical was opposite. The one was never acting, the other always. Mrs. Siddons, it is said, used to stab the potatoes, and call for a teaspoon in a tone that curdled the blood of the waiter. Once when she was buying a piece of calico at a shop in Bath, she interrupted the voluble trader by inquiring, Will it wash? with an accent that made him start back from the counter. John Philip Kemble, dissatisfied with Sheridan’s management and resolved to free himself from all engagements with him, rose in the greenroom like a slow pillar of state, and said to that astonished individual, “I am an eagle whose wings have long been bound down by frosts and snows; but now I shake my pinions and cleave into the general air unto which I am born.” Sheridan looked into the heart of the eagle, and with a few wheedling words smoothed his ruffled plumage and made him coo like a dove in response to new proposals. Greatness of soul is necessary for a great actor, quick detachableness, and facility of transitions, with full understanding, sensibility, and fire; but cold counterfeits of these, empty forms of them swollen out with mechanic pomp, are as odious as they are frequent. Some are great only when inspired and set off by grand adjuncts; others are great by the native build of their being. Forrest was of this latter class. He knew how to act in the theatre, and to be simple and sincere in the parlor.
But, when all is said, the greatest quality and charm of Forrest, the deepest hiding of his magnetism, was his softness and truth of heart, the quickness, strength, and beauty of his affection. Bitter experience had taught him, before he was an old man, not to wear his heart on his sleeve for the heartless to peck at it. But how shallow the observation which, not seeing his heart on his sleeve, incontinently concluded that he had none! The reverential gratitude with which he delighted to dwell on the memory of his mother, the yearning fondness with which he was wont to recall the names of his early benefactors and dwell on the thought of the few living friends who had been ever kind and true to him, amply demonstrated the strong grasp of his affection. “My mother,” he one day said to him who now copies his words, “was weeping on a certain occasion in my early childhood when she was hard pressed by poverty and care. My father, in his grave, almost awful way, said to her, ‘Do not weep, Rebecca. It will do no good. I know it is very dark here. But it is all right. Above the clouds the sun is still shining.’ I remember it made a great impression on my young mind; and many a time in afterlife it came up and was a comfort to me. Ah, what, what would I not give if I could really believe that when that dear good soul left the earth my father met her ‘on a happier shore,’ and said, ‘Rebecca, you will weep no more now. Did I not tell you it was all right?’” After the death of Forrest, nigh a quarter of a century after it was written, was found among his papers a faded and tear-stained letter, enclosing two withered leaves, which read thus:
“Edwin Forrest, Esq., Fonthill:
“These leaves were taken from your mother’s grave, on Sunday, August 5th, 1849, and are presented as a humble but sacred memorial by your friend,
“W. H. M.”
There is no surer proof of plentifulness of love within than is shown by its finding vent in endearments lavished on lower creatures and on inanimate things,—flowers, books, pictures, birds, dogs, horses. All these were copiously loved by Forrest. All his life he had some dog for a friend, and for the last twenty years he kept two or more. In the summer of 1870 a little turkey in his garden, only a week old, by some accident got its leg broken. He saw it, and commiserately picked up the poor thing, carefully set its leg, laid it in a basket of wool, hung it in a tree in the sunshine, and tenderly nursed and fed it till it was whole. This and the succeeding incidents occurred under the observation of his biographer, who was then paying him a visit.
He used to go into his stable and pat and fondle his horses and talk with them, looking in their eyes and smoothing their necks, as if they had full intelligence and sympathy with him. “Why, Brownie, poor Brownie, handsome Brownie, are you not happy to come out to-day?” he said, as we rode along the Wissahickon, in a tone so tender and sad that it moistened the eyes of his human hearer. It was his custom to go up the river-side to a secluded place, and there get out and feed the horse with apples. One day he had forgotten his supply, and, as he dismounted and walked along in front of Brownie, he was touched to find the intelligent creature following him, smelling at his pockets and nudging him for her apples.
In one aspect it was beautiful, in another it was mournful, to see him going about his house, lonely, lonely, solacing himself for what was absent with humble substitutes. He had a mocking-bird wonderfully gifted and a great favorite with him and his sister. It bore the nickname of Bob. In moulting it fell sick, lost both voice and sight, and seemed to be dying. The great soft-hearted tragedian, thought by many to be so gruff and savage, was overheard, as he stood before the cage, talking to the sick bird, “Ah, poor Bob, poor Bob! Your myriad-voiced throat has filled my house with wondrous melodies these years past. Why must this cruel affliction come to you? You are a sinless creature. You cannot do any harm. It perplexes my philosophy to know why you should have to suffer in this way. Ah, little Bob, where now are all your sweet mockeries? Blind? Dumb? It cuts me to the very soul to think of it. Ah, well, well!” And he tottered slowly away, musing, quite as his Lear used to do on the stage when unkindness had broken the old royal heart.
Another characteristic incident is worth relating. He had a chamber at the Metropolitan Hotel fronting on Broadway. Oakes and the present writer were in a rear room. He sent for us to come to him and see the funeral-procession of Farragut pass. He sank on his knees at the open window as the sacred corse went by, and we saw the tears streaming down his cheeks. The bands played a dirge, and the soldiers and marines marched on, visible masses of music in blue and gold, as the sailors proudly carried their dead admiral through the central artery of the nation, and every heart seemed vibrating with reverence and grief. “The grandest thing about this,” said Forrest, “is that he was a good man, worthy of all the honor he receives. He whose modesty kept his bosom from ever swelling with complacency while he was alive may now well exult in death, as the sailors, unwilling to confide their commander to any catafalque, lovingly bear him on their shoulders to his grave.”