Such works as Colley Cibber’s Apology, the several lives of Garrick, Boaden’s Life of Kemble, Macklin’s Memoirs, Campbell’s Life of Mrs. Siddons, Galt’s Lives of the Players, Proctor’s Life of Kean, Collier’s Annals of the Stage, Doran’s His Majesty’s Servants, were familiar to Forrest. His memory was well stored with their contents. He had reflected carefully and much on the general topics of which they treat, and he conversed on them with eloquence and with wisdom. He cherished an eager interest in everything pertaining to his profession viewed in its most comprehensive aspect. His intelligent and profound enthusiasm for the theatre gave him an entire faith that the drama is destined to flourish as long as human nature shall be embodied in men. Its seeming eclipse by cheaper and coarser attractions he held to be but temporary. Its perversion and degradation in meaningless spectacles and prurient dances will pass by, and its restoration to its own high mission, the exhibition of the grandest elements of the soul in the noblest situations, the teaching of the most beautiful and sublime lessons by direct exemplification in breathing life, will give it, ere many generations pass, a glory and a popular charm it has never yet known. Then we may expect to see a great purification and enrichment of the subject-matter presented on the stage. The mere animal affections will cease to have an exaggerated and morbid attention paid to them. Justice will be done to the generic moral sentiments of man, and to his noblest historic and ideal types. The passions of love of truth and spiritual aspiration will dilate in treatment, those of individual jealousy and social ambition dwindle. Instructive and inspiring plays will be constructed out of the veracious materials furnished by characters and careers like those of Columbus and Galileo.
Certainly the realization of such a vision is a great desideratum; because the theatre is a sort of universal Church of Humanity, where good and evil are shown in their true colors without formalism or cant. Its influence—unlike that of sectarian enclosures—is to draw all its attendants together in common sympathies towards the good and fair, and in common antipathies for the foul and cruel. Men are more open and generous in their pleasures than in their pains. Places of public amusement are the first to vibrate to the notes of public joy or grief, defeat or triumph. Telegrams announcing victories or calamities are read from the stage. Theatres are sure to be decked on great festival or pageant days, the popular pulse beating strongest there.
The taste for dramatic representations is native and ineradicable in man. It is a fixed passion with man to love to see the passions of men exhibited in plot and action, and to watch the mutual workings of characters on one another through their different manners of behavior. Just now, it is true, the great, complex, terribly exciting and exacting drama of real life, revealed to us in the newspaper and the novel and the telegraph, so fastens and drains our sympathies that we lack the ideal freedom and restful leisure to enjoy the stage drama so eagerly as it was enjoyed at an earlier and simpler time. But this will not always be so;—
“The world will grow a less distracting scene,
And life, less busy, wear a gentler mien.”
Forrest looked for a revival, at no remote date, in America and Europe, of the ancient Greek pride and joy in athletic exercises and the development of nude strength and beauty. The reflex influence from such a revival, he imagined, would flood the stage with a new lustre, making it a resplendent and exalted centre for the inspiring exposure to the public of the perfected models of every form of human excellence. Then the gymnasium, the circus, the race-course, dance, music, song, and the intellectual emulations of the academy may all be grouped around the theatre and find their dazzling climax in the scenic drama, made religious once more as it was in the palmiest day of Greece.
CHAPTER XVII.
OUTER AND INNER LIFE OF THE MAN.
The external life of Forrest from the close of his first engagement after the divorce trial to the year 1869—the period stretching from his forty-sixth to his sixty-third year—was largely but the continual repetition of his old triumphs, varied now and then with some fresh professional glory or new personal adventure. To recite the details of his travels and theatrical experiences would be to make a monotonous record of popular successes without any important significance or general interest. A brief sketch of the leading incidents of this period is all that the reader will care to have.
The immense publicity and circulation given to the sensational reports of the long-drawn legal warfare between Forrest and his wife in their suits against each other added to his great fame a still greater notoriety, which enhanced public curiosity and drew to the theatre greater crowds than ever whenever he played. From Portland and Boston to Cincinnati and St. Louis, from Buffalo and Detroit to Charleston and New Orleans, the announcement of his name invariably brought out an overwhelming throng. The first sight of his person on the stage was the signal for wild applause. At the close of the performance he was often called before the curtain and constrained to address the assembly, and then on retiring to his hotel was not unfrequently followed by band and orchestra and complimented with a serenade.
The ranks of his enemies, reinforced with the malevolent critics or Bohemians whom he would not propitiate by any favor, social or pecuniary, continued to fling at him and annoy him in every way they could. But while their pestiferous buzzing and stinging made him sore and angry, it did not make him unhappy. His enormous professional success and broad personal following prevented that. One example of his remarkable public triumphs may stand to represent scores. It was the last night of a long and most brilliant engagement in New York. The “Forrest Light Guard,” in full uniform, occupied the front seats of the parquet. No sooner had the curtain fallen on the performance of Coriolanus than the air grew wild with the prolonged shouts of “Forrest! Forrest!” At last he came forth, and the auditory, rising en masse, greeted him with stormy plaudits. “Speech! speech!” they cried. He responded thus: