The other anecdote, though less dramatic, is of still deeper significance as a revelation of his soul. During the last ten or twelve years of his life, when he was fulfilling his engagements in the different cities, he used so to time and direct his walks that he might be near some great public school at the hour when the children were dismissed. There he would stand—the grim-looking, lonely old man, whose surface might be hard, but whose heart was very soft—and gaze with a thoughtful and loving regard on the throng of boys and girls as they rushed out bubbling over with delight, variously sorting and grouping themselves on their way home. This was a great enjoyment to him, though not unmixed with an attractive pain. It soothed his childless soul with ideal parentage, gave him a bright glad life in reflected sympathy with the dancing shouters he saw, and stirred in his imagination a thousand dreams, now of the irrevocable past, now of the mysterious future.
Resuming the narrative with the opening of June, 1872, Forrest is lying in his bed in a woeful state, brought on him by a nostrum called “Jenkins’s cure for gout.” A doctor Jenkins of New Orleans told him if he would take it, it would produce an excruciating attack of the disease, but would then eradicate it from the system and effect a permanent cure. He took it. He experienced the excruciating attack. The permanent cure did not follow. As soon as Oakes learned of his situation, body racked with torture, limbs palsied, mind at times unhinged and wandering, he started for the scene. His own words will best describe their meeting. “When I entered his chamber he was in a doze, and I stood at his bedside until he awoke. Opening his eyes, he gazed steadily into my face for about a minute. He knew me then, and said, in the most touching manner, ‘My friend, I am always glad to see you, but never in my life so much so as now.’ Again looking steadily at me for about a minute, he said, ‘Oakes, put my hand in yours: it is paralyzed but true.’ I took his hand tenderly from the bed and placed it in mine. He could not move the fingers, but I felt his noble heart throb through them. At once I began organizing my hospital. I had him washed, his flannel and the bed-linen changed, the doors and windows flung wide open, and gave him all he could take of the best of nourishment,—strawberries, fresh buttermilk, and beef tea strong enough to draw four hundred pounds the whole length of the house. Already he is greatly improved. I keep him perfectly quiet, allowing no one on any excuse whatever to see him.” Under this style of doctoring and nursing, all impregnated with the magnetism of friendship, it was natural that in three weeks he should be comfortably about his house, as he was.
One morning in the midst of his illness, but when he had passed a night free from pain, and his mind was in a most serene state yet marked by great exaltation of thought and language, he began relating to Oakes, in the most eloquent manner, his recollections of old Joseph Jefferson, the great comedian. He told how when a boy he had visited that beautiful and gifted old man; what poverty and what purity and high morality were in his household; how he had educated his children; and how at last he had died among strangers, heart-broken by ingratitude. He told how he had seen him act Dogberry in a way that out-topped all comparison; how at a later time he had again seen him play the part of the Fool in Lear so as to set up an idol in the memory of the beholders, for he insinuated into the words such wonderful contrasts of the greatness and misery and mystery of life with the seeming ignorant and innocent simplicity of the comments on them, that comedy became wiser and stronger than tragedy.
His listener afterwards said, “We two were alone. Never had I seen him so deeply and so loftily stirred in his very soul as he was then about Jefferson. His eulogy had more moral dignity and intense religious feeling than any sermon I ever heard from the pulpit. It was as grand and fine as anything said by Cicero. This was especially true of his closing words. When he seemed to have emptied his heart in admiring praises on the old player, he ended thus, querying with himself as if soliloquizing: ‘Is it possible that all of such a man can go into the ground and rot, and nothing of him at all be left forever? If he is not immortal, he ought to be. It must be that he is, though our philosophy cannot find it out.’”
It is a curious proof of how his moods shaped and colored his beliefs to read in connection with the above the following extract from a letter he wrote in 1866. “There is great consolation in the sincere belief of the immortality of the soul. If I could honestly and reasonably entertain such a faith, that the love and friendship of to-day will extend through all time with renewed devotion, death would have no sting and the grave no victory. I quite envied the closing hours of Senator Foote the other day. He was so serenely confident of seeing all his friends again, that by the perishing light of his fervid brain he seemed for a moment to realize the illusion of his earth-taught faith.”
It was now September. The semi-paralyzed condition of his limbs forbade every thought of returning to the stage that season; though, with a self-flattery singular in one of so experienced and clear a head, he fondly hoped to recover in time, and to act for years yet. His interest in everything connected with his profession knew no abatement, and he always took the most cheerful view of the future of the drama. He did not yield to that common fallacy which glorifies the past at the expense of the present and holds that everything glorious is always in decline and sure ere long to perish. Sheridan said, while surrounded by Johnson, Burke, Hume, Robertson, Gibbon, Pitt, and Fox, “The days of little men have arrived.” The trouble is that we see the foibles and feel the faults of our contemporaries, but not those of our predecessors who sit, afar and still, aggrandized into Olympians in historic memory. Mrs. Siddons often saw before her, sitting together in the orchestra, all in tears, Burke, Reynolds, Fox, Gibbon, Windham, and Sheridan. Yet in her day as now the constant talk was of the failing glory of the theatre. Also in the time of Talma, in 1807, Cailhava presented a memoir to the Institute of France, “Sur les Causes de la Décadence du Théâtre.” The fact is, the theatres of the world were never so numerous, so splendid, so largely attended, as now; the playing as a whole was never so good, the morality of the pieces never so high, and the behavior of the audiences never so orderly and refined. In spite of everything that can be said on the other side, this is the truth. The former advantage of the drama was simply that it stood out in more solitary and conspicuous relief, occupied a larger relative space, and made therefore a greater and more talked-of sensation. Its rule is now divided with a swarm of other claimants. Still, intrinsically its worth and rank must increase in the future, and not diminish. Forrest always clearly held to this faith, and was much cheered by it. His conviction that the drama was charged with a sacred and indestructible mission, and his enthusiastic love for the personal practice of its art,—these were thoughts and feelings
“In him which though all others should decay,
Would be the last that time could bear away.”
Accordingly, he would withdraw from the worship of his life, if withdraw he must, only piecemeal and as compelled. His voice was unimpaired, and he had for years been solicited to give readings. And so he resolved, since he could not play Hamlet and Othello on the stage, he would read them in the lecture-room.
Therefore he read these two plays in Philadelphia, Wilmington, Brooklyn, New York, and Boston. Although the rich mellow fulness, ease, and force of his elocution were highly enjoyable, and there were many beauties of characterization in his readings, his physique was so deeply shattered, and his vital forces so depressed, that the vivacity, the magnetism, the spirited variety of power necessary to draw and to hold a miscellaneous crowd were wanting. The experiment was comparatively a failure. The large halls were so thinly seated that, though the marks of approval were strong, the result was not inspiring. He felt somewhat disheartened, much wearied, and sighed for a good long period of rest in his own quiet home. And so on Saturday afternoon, December 7, 1872, in Tremont Temple, Boston, he read Othello, and made unconsciously his last bow on earth to a public assembly, with the apt words of the unhappy Moor, whose character much resembled his own: