Had Forrest practised such a style of exercise, instead of weighing upwards of two hundred pounds and suffering from those irregularities of circulation which often disabled, at length paralyzed, and at last killed him at sixty-seven, he would have weighed a hundred and sixty, been as free and agile as he was powerful, and lived without an ache or a shock to ninety or a hundred.
His faithful exercises, defective as they were in the spirit of beauty and economy, gave him enormous vital potency and tenacity. He felt this keenly as a priceless luxury, and was justly proud of it. He used to be extremely fond of the Turkish bath, and once said, “No man who has not taken a Turkish bath has ever known the moral luxury of being personally clean.” He was a great frequenter of the celebrated establishment of Dr. Angell, on Lexington Avenue, in New York. After the bath and the shampoo, and the inunction and the rest, on one occasion, as he was striding up and down the room, feeling like an Olympian god who had been freshly fed through all the pores of his skin with some diviner viands than ambrosia, he vented his slight grief and his massive satisfaction in these words: “What a pity it is that a man should have to suffer for the sins of his ancestors! Were it not for this damned gouty diathesis, I would not swap constitutions with any man on earth,—damned if I would!”
It was in 1865, while playing, on a terribly cold February night, in the Holliday Street Theatre, in Baltimore, that Forrest received the first dread intimation that his so proudly cherished prerogative of bodily strength was insecure. He was enacting the part of Damon. The theatre was so cold that, he said, he felt chilled from the extremities of his hands and feet to the centre of his heart, and the words he uttered seemed to freeze on his lips. Suddenly his right leg began twitching and jerking. He nearly lost control of it; but by a violent effort of will he succeeded in getting through the play. Reaching his lodgings and calling a physician, he found, to his great grief and horror, that his right sciatic nerve was partially paralyzed.
An obvious lameness, a slight hobble in his gait, was the permanent consequence of this attack. It was sometimes better, sometimes worse; but not all his earnest and patient attempts to cure it ever availed to find a remedy. It was a mortifying blow, from which he never fully recovered, though he grew used to it. His strength of build and movement had been so complete, such a glory to him, he had so exulted in it as it drew admiring attention, that to be thus maimed and halted in one of its most conspicuous centres was indeed a bitter trial to him. Still he kept up good heart, and fondly hoped yet to outgrow it and be all himself again. He was just as faithful as ever to his exercises, his diet, his bathing, his rest and sleep; and he retained, in spite of this shocking blow, an astonishing quantity of vital and muscular energy. Still a large and dark blot had been made on his personal splendor, and all those rôles which required grace and speed of bodily movement sank from their previous height. Notwithstanding his strenuous endeavors to neutralize the effects of this paralysis, its stealthy encroachments spread by imperceptible degrees until his whole right side—shoulder and chest and leg—shrank to smaller dimensions than the left, and at last he was obliged when fencing to have the sword fastened to his hand. And yet he continued to act to the end; acting still with a remarkable physical power and with a mental vividness not one particle lowered from that of his palmiest day. But, after the year 1865, for any of his old friends who remembered the electrifying spontaneity of his terrible demonstrations of strength in former days, to see him in such casts as Metamora, Damon, Spartacus, and Cade, was painful.
In the month of January, 1866, Forrest had a most gratifying triumph in Chicago. The receipts were unprecedentedly large, averaging for the five nights of his engagement nearly twenty-five hundred dollars a night. He wrote to his friend Oakes: “Eighteen years since, I acted here in a small theatre of which the present mayor of Chicago, J. B. Rice, Esq., was manager. The population, then about six thousand, is now one hundred and eighty thousand, with a theatre that would grace Naples, Florence, or Paris. The applause I have received here has been as enthusiastic as I have ever known, and the money-return greater. It beats the history of the stage in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, and New Orleans. Give me joy, my dear and steadfast friend, that the veteran does not lag superfluous on the stage.”
Early in the same year he accepted the munificent offer made by the manager of the San Francisco theatre to induce him to pay a professional visit to California. He remembered the flattering letter sent him by the government of the State nine years before. He felt a keen desire, as a patriotic American, to view the wondrous scenery and products of the golden coast of the Pacific, and he also was ambitious that the youngest part of the country should behold those dramatic portrayals which had so long been applauded by the oldest. Landing in San Francisco on the third of May, he was serenaded in the evening by the Philharmonic Society, and on the fourteenth made his débût in the Opera House in the rôle of Richelieu. The prices of admission were doubled, and the seats for the opening night were sold at auction. The first ticket brought five hundred dollars. “At an early hour last night,” said one of the morning papers, “the tide of people turned with steady current towards the Opera House. Throng after throng approached the portal and melted into the vast space. Inside, the scene was one of extraordinary magnificence. Hundreds of flaming jets poured a flood of shadowless light on the rich painting and gilding of the amphitheatre, the luxurious draperies of the boxes, and the galaxy of wealth and beauty smiling beneath its rays.” He played for thirty-five nights to an aggregate of over sixty thousand persons, and was paid twenty thousand dollars in gold. His engagement was suddenly interrupted by a severe attack of his old enemy the gout. He fled away to the cedar groves, the mineral springs, and the mountains, to feast his eyes on the marvellous California landscapes and to nurse his health. His enjoyment of the whole trip, and in particular of his long tarry at the Mammoth Tree Grove, was profound. He delighted in recalling and describing to his friends one scene in this grove, a scene in which he was himself a striking figure. Visible in various directions were gigantic trees hundreds of feet in height, whose age could be reckoned by centuries, bearing the memorial names of celebrated Americans, — Bryant, Lincoln, Seward, Longfellow, Webster, Kane, Everett, and the darling of so many hearts, sweet Starr King,—whose top, three hundred and sixty-six feet high, overpeers all the rest. Here the Father of the Forest, long ago fallen, his trunk four hundred and fifty feet long and one hundred and twelve feet in circumference at the base, lies mouldering in gray and stupendous ruin. A hollow chamber, large enough for one to pass through on horseback, extends for two hundred feet through the colossal trunk of this prone and dead monarch of the grove, whose descendants tower around him in their fresh life, and seem mourning his requiem as the evening breeze sighs in their branches. Forrest mounted a horse, and, with all the pageant personalities he had so long made familiar to the American people clustering upon his own, rode slowly through this incredible hollow just as the level beams of the setting sun illuminated the columns of the grove and turned it into a golden cathedral.
In September he wrote to Oakes,—
“Here I am still enjoying the salubrious air of the mountains, on horseback and afoot, and bathing in waters from the hot and cold springs which pour their affluent streams on every hand.
“My health is greatly improved, and my lameness is now scarcely perceptible. In a few weeks more I shall return to San Francisco to finish my engagement, which was interrupted by my late indisposition. My present intention is not to return to the East until next spring; for it would be too great a risk to encounter the rigors of a winter there which might prove disastrous. You are aware that the winter in San Francisco is much more agreeable than the summer; and after my professional engagement there I shall visit Sacramento and some few other towns, and then go to Los Angelos, where I shall enjoy a climate quite equal to that of the tropics. I am determined to come back to you in perfect health. How I should like to take a tramp with you into the mountains this blessed day! I can give you no reasonable idea of the beauty of the weather here. The skies are cloudless, save with the rare and rosiest shadows, not a drop of rain, and yet no drought, no aridity; the trees are fresh and green, and the air as exhilarating as champagne.”
The news of the serious illness of his sister Caroline caused him to abandon the purpose of resuming his interrupted engagement in San Francisco, and, enriched with a thousand agreeable memories, on the twentieth of October he set sail for home.