The only inscription on the coffin-lid was the words,
Edwin Forrest.
Born March 9, 1806. Died December 12, 1872.
The pall-bearers were James Oakes, James Lawson, Daniel Dougherty, John W. Forney, Jesse R. Burden, Samuel D. Gross, George W. Childs, and James Page. The funeral cortége, consisting of some sixty carriages, moved through throngs of people lining the sidewalk along the way to Saint Paul’s Church, where the crowd was so great, notwithstanding the rain, as to cause some delay. It seemed as though the very reserve and retiracy of the man in his last years had increased the latent popular curiosity about him, investing him with a kind of mystery. A simple prayer was read; and then, in the family vault, with the coffined and mouldering forms of his father and mother and brother and sisters around him, loving hands placed all that was mortal of the greatest tragedian that ever lived in America.
The announcement of the sudden and solitary death of Forrest produced a marked sensation throughout the country. In the chief cities meetings of the members of the dramatic profession were called, and resolutions passed in honor and lamentation for the great man and player, “whose remarkable originality, indomitable will, and unswerving fidelity,” they asserted, “made him an honor to the walk of life he had chosen,” and “whose lasting monument will be the memory of his sublime delineations of the highest types of character on the modern stage.”
For a long time the newspapers abounded with biographic and obituary notices of him, with criticisms, anecdotes, personal reminiscences. In a very few instances the bitterness of ancient grudges still pursued him and spoke in unkindness and detraction. There are men in whose meanness so much malignity mixes that they cannot forgive or forget even the dead. But in nearly every case the tone of remark on him was highly honorable, appreciative, and even generous. Two brief examples of this style may be cited.
“One thing must be said of Edwin Forrest, now that he lies cold in the tomb—he never courted popularity; he never flattered power. Importuned a thousand times to enter society, he rather avoided it. The few friendships he had were sincere. He never boasted of his charities; and yet we think, when the secrets of his life are unsealed, this solitary man, who dies without leaving a single known person of his own blood, will prove that he had a heart that could throb for all humanity. Having known him and loved him through his tribulations and his triumphs for more than a generation, we feel that in what we say we speak the truth of one who was a sincere friend, an honest citizen, and a benevolent man.”
“In our view Edwin Forrest was a great man; the one genius, perhaps, that the American stage has given to history. The conditions of his youth, the rough-and-tumble struggle of a life fired by a grand purpose, the loves, hates, triumphs, and failures that preceded the placing of the bays upon his brow, and the long reign that no new-comer ventured to disturb, all point to a nature that could do nothing by halves and bore the ineffaceable imprint of positive greatness. He was, essentially, a self-made man. All the angularities that result from a culture confined by the very conditions of its existence to a few of the many directions in which men need to grow were his. His genius developed itself irresistibly,—even as a spire of corn will shoot up despite encumbering stones,—gnarled, rugged, and perhaps disproportioned. His art was acquired not in the scholar’s closet or under the careful eye of learned tradition, but from demonstrative American audiences. Therefore such errors of performance as jumped with the easily excited emotions of an unskilled auditory were made a part of his education and his creed by a law which not even genius can surmount. So Forrest grew to giant stature, a one-sided man. Experience and a liberal culture in later life worked for him all that opportunity can do for greatness. That these did not wholly remove the faults of his early training was inevitable, but they so broadened his life and power that men of wisest censure saw in him the greatest actor of his time, and a man who under favorable early conditions would have stood, perhaps, peerless in the history of his art. Such a man, bearing a life flooded with the sunshine of glory, but often clouded with storm and almost wrecked by the pain that is born of passion, needs from the nation that produced and honored him, not fulsome adulation or biased praise, but dispassionate analysis and intelligent appreciation.”
One elaborate sketch of his life and character was published—by far the ablest and boldest that appeared—whose most condemnatory portion and moral gist ought to be quoted here, for two reasons. First, on account of its incisive power, honesty, and splendid eloquence. Second, that what is unjust in it may be seen and qualified:
“The death of this remarkable man is an incident which seems to prompt more of indefinite emotion than of definite thought. The sense that is uppermost is the sense that a great vitality, an enormous individuality of character, a boundless ambition, a tempestuous spirit, a life of rude warfare and often of harsh injustice, an embittered mind, and an age laden with disappointment and pain, are all at rest. Mr. Forrest, partly from natural bias to the wrong and partly from the force of circumstances and the inexorable action of time, had made shipwreck of his happiness; had cast away many golden opportunities; had outlived his fame; had outlived many of his friends and alienated others; had seen the fabric of his popularity begin to crumble; had seen the growth of new tastes and the rise of new idols; had found his claims as an actor, if accepted by many among the multitude, rejected by many among the judicious; and, in wintry age, broken in health, dejected in spirit, and thwarted in ambition, had come to the ‘last scene of all’ with great wealth, indeed, but with very little of either love or peace or hope. Death, at almost all times a blessing, must, in ending such an experience as this, be viewed as a tender mercy. His nature—which should have been noble, for it contained elements of greatness and beauty—was diseased with arrogance, passion, and cruelty. It warred with itself, and it made him desolate. He has long been a wreck. There was nothing before him here but an arid waste of suffering; and, since we understand him thus, we cannot but think with a tender gratitude that at last he is beyond the reach of all trouble, and where neither care, sorrow, self-rebuke, unreasoning passion, resentment against the world, nor physical pain can any more torment him. His intellect was not broad enough to afford him consolation under the wounds that his vanity so often received. All his resource was to shut himself up in a kind of feudal retreat and grim seclusion, where he brooded upon himself as a great genius misunderstood and upon the rest of the world as a sort of animated scum. This was an unlovely nature; but, mingled in it, were the comprehension and the incipient love of goodness, sweetness, beauty, great imaginings, and beneficent ideas. He knew what he had missed, whether of intellectual grandeur, moral excellence, or the happiness of the affections, and in the solitude of his spirit he brooded upon his misery. The sense of this commended him to our sympathy when he was living, and it commends his memory to our respect in death.”