CHAPTER XV. PERSONAL AND DOMESTIC LIFE.--FONTHILL CASTLE.--JEALOUSY.--DIVORCE.--LAWSUITS.--TRAGEDIES OF LOVE IN HUMAN LIFE AND IN THE DRAMATIC ART.

Forrest was now in his forty-fourth year, as magnificent a specimen of manhood perhaps as there was on the continent. His strength, vitality, fulness of functional power, and confronting fearlessness of soul before the course of nature and the faces of men, were so complete as to give him a chronic sense of complacency and luxury in the mere feeling of existence endowed with so much ability to do whatever he wished to do.

Despite a few annoying drawbacks his cup of outward prosperity too was full. It is true his fancy had been somewhat disenchanted and his temper embittered by experiences of meanness, ingratitude, and worthlessness, the envy and rancor of rivals, the shallowness and malignity of the multitude, and especially by a lasting soreness created in his heart from his late English trip and its unhappy sequel. It is also true that this evil influence had been negatively increased by the loss of the wise and benign restraint and inspiration given him during their lives by the devoted friendship of Leggett and the guardian love of his mother. Still, he had an earnest, democratic sympathy with the masses of men and a deep pride in their admiration. His popularity was unbounded. His rank in his art was acknowledged on the part of his professional brethren by his election as the first President of the Dramatic Fund Association, a society to whose exchequer he contributed the proceeds of an annual benefit for many years. He had fought his way with strenuous vigor through many hardships of orphanage, poverty, defective education, and a fearful furnace of temptations. And his reputation in every respect was without stain or shadow. This was certified by all sorts of public testimonials, the offers of political office and honor, the studied eulogies of the most cultivated and eloquent civilians, the smiling favors of the loveliest women in the land, the shouts of the crowd, and the golden filling of his coffers. His large earnings were invested with rare sagacity, his sound financial judgment and skill always enabling him to reap a good harvest wherever he tilled his fortune. He was at this time already worth two or three hundred thousand dollars. And this, in an age of Mammon, is a pledge to society of high deserts and a hostage for good behavior.

But above all he was signally blessed in his married life, the point in a character like his by far the most central and vital of all. The first ten years of his state of wedlock had indeed been happy beyond the ordinary portion of mortals. It was a well-mated match, he a noble statue of strength, she a melting picture of beauty, mutually proud and fond of each other, his native honesty and imperious will met by her polished refinement and conciliatory sweetness. Beyond all doubt he deeply and passionately loved her. And well he might, for his nature was one greatly endowed in all points for impassioned love, and she was in person, disposition, and accomplishments equally adapted to awaken it. “She was perfection,” said one, in allusion to her bridal landing in America; “the most beautiful vision I ever saw.” After the death of Forrest she herself said, “The first ten years of our married life were a season of contentment and happiness, scarcely ruffled by so much as a summer flaw; then bickering began, followed by deeper misunderstanding, and the fatal result drew on, which I have always deplored.” Yet even in these halcyon years, too short and too few, there was one thing wanting to finished household felicity. This one want was children, the eternal charm of the passing ages of humanity. Of the four pathetic creatures born to them, but one lived, and that only for a few months. Abandoning the hope of heirs to his name and fortune, and foreseeing that his estate was destined to be a large one, Forrest, with the long anticipation characteristic of a reflective mind, bethought him what disposal he had best make of his acquisitions when he should be forced to relinquish them in death. He settled upon a purpose combining elements of romance, beneficence, and imposing permanence, which showed him possessed of qualities above the vulgar average of men.

He bought an extensive tract of land on the banks of the Hudson, about sixteen miles from New York, on a site commanding one of the most enchanting prospects in the world. Here he proposed to erect a building to be called Fonthill Castle, somewhat after the fashion of the old ruined structures on the banks of the Rhine, whose beauty should gratify his taste, whose conveniences should secure his household comfort, whose historic and poetic suggestiveness should please his countrymen passing up and down the river, and whose final object should be an enduring memorial of his love for his profession and of his compassion for its less fortunate members. The building of a house is an epoch of great interest in the lives of many men. This was especially so in the life of Forrest. In a chiselled orifice of the corner-stone of Fonthill Castle he placed specimens of the American coinage, a copy of Shakspeare, and the following paper,—marred only by its betrayal of that prejudice against foreigners which was so unworthy of his own nature and of his nationality:

“In building this house, I am impelled by no vain desire to occupy a grand mansion for the gratification of self-love; but my object is to build a desirable, spacious, and comfortable abode for myself and my wife, to serve us during our natural lives, and at our death to endow the building with a sufficient yearly income, so that a certain number of decayed or superannuated actors and actresses of American birth (all foreigners to be strictly excluded) may inhabit the mansion and enjoy the grounds thereunto belonging, so long as they live; and at the death of any one of the actors or actresses inhabiting the premises, his or her place to be supplied by another from the theatrical profession, who, from age or infirmity, may be found unable to obtain a livelihood upon the stage. The rules and regulations by which this institution is to be governed will, at some future day, be framed by

To this charity he meant to devote his whole property forever. As the estate grew in value an American Dramatic School was to be added to it, lectures delivered, practical training imparted, and native histrionic authors encouraged. It was estimated that in fifty years the rich acres surrounding the Castle would be a part of New York, and that the rise of value would make the bequest at last one of the noblest known in any age.

Fonthill Castle was built of gray silicious granite of extraordinary hardness and fine grain, hammer-dressed and pointed with gray cement. The building consists of six octagon towers clumped together, the battlements of some notched with embrasures, the others capped with corniced coping. The highest tower rises about seventy feet from the base, the centre tower, the main tower, the library tower, the drawing-room tower, and the dining-room tower being of proportioned heights. The basement contains the kitchen, cellar, and store-rooms. On the next floor are the parlor, banquet-hall, study, boudoir, and library. The centre tower comprises a hall or rotunda, and above this a picture-gallery lighted from the dome. The upper rooms are divided into chambers for guests and apartments for servants. The staircase tower has a spiral staircase of granite inserted in a solid brick column, rising from the basement to the top of the tower, with landings on each floor leading to the chief apartments. The architectural design was understood to be chiefly the work of Mrs. Forrest, with modifications by him. It combined the Norman and Gothic styles, softened in detail so as to embrace some of the luxuries of modern improvements. For instance, the drawing-room and banqueting-room are lighted with deep, square, bay-windows, while those of the upper chambers and of the boudoir are of the Gothic order. In other portions of the edifice are to be seen the rounded windows of the Norman period, with their solid stone mullions dividing the compartments again into pointed Gothic. Loop-holes and buttresses give the structure the military air of a fortified castle. There are two entrances, one on the water side, one on the land side. From the summit of the staircase tower one sees up the river as far as Sing Sing and down to Staten Island. On the opposite shore frowns the wall of the Palisades. On the north lie Yonkers, Hastings, Nyack, the lovely inlet of Tappan Zee, and the cottages of Piermont, glistening like white shells on the distant beach.

During the progress of the building Forrest had improvised a rude residence on the grounds, which he constantly visited, growing ever more deeply attached to the place and to his enterprise. In this romantic spot, one Fourth of July, he gathered his neighbors and friends, to the number of some two or three hundreds, and held a celebration,—reading the Declaration of Independence and delivering an oration, followed by the distributing of refreshments under waving flags and amidst booming guns. It was a brilliant and joyous affair,—a sort of initial, and, as it proved, farewell, dedication of the scene with commingled friendly and patriotic associations. For in its opening stages of suspicion and distress the domestic tragedy had already begun which was destined to make the enchantments of Fonthill so painful to him that he would withdraw from it forever, sell it to a Catholic sisterhood for a conventual school, and take up his final abode in the city of his birth.

In the spring of 1848 Forrest was fulfilling a professional engagement in Cincinnati, and his wife was with him. One day, on entering his room at the hotel unexpectedly, he saw Mrs. Forrest standing between the knees of George W. Jamieson, an actor of low moral character, whose hands were upon her person. Jamieson at once left the room. Forrest was greatly excited, but the protestations of his wife soothed his angry suspicion, and he overlooked the affair as a mere matter of indiscreetness of manners. Still, the incident was not wholly forgotten. And some months later, after their return home, certain trifling circumstances came under his observation which again made him feel uneasy. On opening a drawer in which his wife kept her papers, he found, addressed to her, the following letter, worn and rumpled, and in the handwriting of this Jamieson:

“And now, sweetest Consuelo, our brief dream is over; and such a dream! Have we not known real bliss? Have we not realized what poets love to set up as an ideal state, giving full license to their imagination, scarcely believing in its reality? Have we not experienced the truth that ecstasy is not a fiction? I have; and, as I will not permit myself to doubt you, am certain you have. And oh! what an additional delight to think,—no, to know, that I have made some hours happy to you! Yes, and that remembrance of me may lighten the heavy time of many an hour to come. Yes, our little dream of great account is over; reality stares us in the face. Let us peruse its features. Look with me and read as I do, and you will find our dream is ‘not all a dream.’ Can reality take from us, when she separates and exiles us from each other,—can she divide our souls, our spirits? Can slander’s tongue or rumor’s trumpet summon us to a parley with ourselves, where, to doubt each other, we should hold a council? No! no! a doubt of thee can no more find harbor in my brain than the opened rose shall cease to be the hum-bird’s harbor. And as my heart and soul are in your possession, examine them, and you will find no text from which to discourse a doubt of me. But you have told me (and oh! what music did your words create upon my grateful ear) that you would not doubt me. With these considerations, dearest, our separation, though painful, will not be unendurable; and if a sombre hour should intrude itself upon you, banish it by knowing there is one who is whispering to himself, Consuelo.

“There is another potent reason why you should be happy,—that is, having been the means of another’s happiness; for I am happy, and, with you to remember and the blissful anticipation of seeing you again, shall remain so. I wish I could tell you my happiness. I cannot. No words have been yet invented that could convey an idea of the depth of that passion, composed of pride, admiration, awe, gratitude, veneration, and love, without being earthy, that I feel for you.

“Be happy, dearest; write to me and tell me you are happy. Think of the time when we shall meet again; believe that I shall do my utmost to be worthy of your love; and now God bless you a thousand times, my own, my heart’s altar.

“I would say more, but must stow away my shreds and tinsel patches. Ugh! how hideous they look after thinking of you!

On reading this missive, as might well be supposed, Forrest was struck to the heart with surprise, grief, and rage. To one of his ample experience of the world it seemed to leave no doubt of an utter lapse from the marriage-vow on the part of its recipient. He was heard rapidly pacing the floor of his library until long after midnight, when his wife arrived from a party and a violent scene of accusation and denial occurred. He wrote an oath, couched in the most stringent and solemn terms, which she signed, swearing that she was innocent of any criminal infringement of her marital obligations. He was quieted, but not satisfied. On questioning the servants as to the scenes and course of conduct in his house during his absences, and employing such other methods of inquiry as did not involve publicity, he learned a variety of facts which confirmed his fear and resulted in a fixed belief that his wife had been unfaithful to him. Many a jealous husband has entertained a similar belief on insufficient and on erroneous grounds. He, too, may have done so. All that justice requires to be affirmed here is the assertion that he was himself firmly convinced, whether on adequate or inadequate evidence, that he had been grossly wronged, and he acted on that conviction in good faith. The pretence that he had tired of his marriage, longed to be free, and devised false charges in order to compass his purpose, is a pure slander, without truth or reason. And as to the theory of the distinguished counsel against him, namely, that he found himself by the building of Fonthill Castle involved in a financial ruin that would disgrace him and change its name to Forrest’s Folly, and so, as the easiest way out, he deliberately “determined to have a quarrel with his wife for some private cause not to be explained, and then to assign the breaking up of his family as the reason for relinquishing his rural residence,”—it is not only the flimsiest of fancies, but a perfect absurdity in face of the facts, and an infamous outrage on the helpless memory of the dead. Could a woman of the mind, spirit, position, and with the friends of Mrs. Forrest be expected meekly to submit to such a fiendish sacrifice? How does such a thought seem in the light of the first letters of the parties in the controversy? The supposition, too, is inconceivably contradictory to the character of Forrest, who, however rough, violent, or furious he may sometimes have been, was not a man of cruel injustice or selfish malignity, was never a sneaking liar and hypocrite. Furthermore, no financial difficulty existed; since the fortune of Forrest at that time was about three hundred thousand dollars, and his direct earnings from his professional labor some thirty thousand a year. Fonthiil cost him all told less than a hundred thousand, and on separating from his wife, in addition to carrying the load of Fonthiil for six years longer, the residence which he purchased and occupied in Philadelphia was worth nearly as much more, and, besides paying out over two hundred thousand dollars in his divorce lawsuits, his wealth was steadily swelling all the time.

After the intense personal hostility and indomitable professional zeal and persistency with which Charles O’Conor pushed the cause of his fair client, in eight years securing five repetitions of judgment, heaping up the expenses for the defendant, as he says, “with the peculiar effect of compound interest,” he should not have penned so unfounded and terrible an accusation. The man who could sacrifice the honor and happiness of his wife with the motive and in the manner O’Conor attributes to Forrest must be the most loathsome of scoundrels. But in the very paper in which the great illustrious lawyer presents this theory he says, “Mr. Forrest possessed great talents, and, unless his conduct in that controversy be made a subject of censure, he has no blemish on his name.” The innocence of Mrs. Forrest is publicly accredited, and is not here impugned. But history abundantly shows that her husband’s affirmation of her guilt does not prove him to have been a wilful monster. His suspicion was naturally aroused, and, though it may have been mistaken, naturally culminated, under the circumstances accompanying its course, in an assured conviction of its justice.

In his proud, sensitive, and tenacious mind, recoiling with all its fibres from the fancied wrong and shame, the poison of the Consuelo letter worked like a deadly drug, burning and mining all within. By day or by night he could not forget it. The full experience of jealousy, as so many poor wretches in every age have felt it, gnawed and tore him. He who had so often enacted the passion now had to suffer it in its dire reality. For more than a year he kept his dark secret in silence, not saying a word even to his dearest friends, secluding himself much of the time, brooding morbidly over his pent-up misery. Now he learned to probe in their deepest significance the words of his great Master,—

The evidence of the love he had for his wife and of the agony his jealousy caused him is abundant. His letters to her are tender and effusive. Such extracts as these are a specimen of them: “I am quite tired of this wandering, and every hour I wish myself again with you. God bless you, my dearest Kate, and believe me wholly yours.” “This is a warm, bright, beautiful day, and I am sitting at an open window in the Eutaw House; and while I write there is above me a clear, blue, cloudless sky,—just such a day as I yearn to have with you at Fonthill.” “I saw Mr. Mackay to-day. He spoke of you in terms of unmitigated praise, and said you were every way worthy of my most devoted affection. Of course he made conquest of my whole heart. I do love to hear you praised, and value it most highly when, as in the present instance, it is the spontaneous offering of the candid and the good.” “Your two letters have been received, and I thank you, my dearest Kate, for your kind attentions in writing to me so often. Indeed, your messages are always welcome.” “I seem quite lonely without you, and even in this short absence have often wished you were here. But the three weeks will pass away, and then we shall see each other again.” Many witnesses in the trial testified to the happy domestic life of the couple, their devoted attentions and confiding tenderness up to the time of their dissension. And that the change which then occurred was as secretly painful as it was publicly marked is beyond doubt. He appeared no longer on the stage, but shunned society, even shrank from his friends, wore a gloomy and absorbed air, and brooded in solitude. The following verses—as unjust as they are severe, for jealousy is always more or less insane, a morbid fixture displacing the freedom of the mind—reflecting his feelings were found after his death, in his handwriting, copied into one of his scrap-books at the date of the divorce trial:

When at last he spoke reservedly on the subject to his confidential friend, he said he had begun life a very poor boy, had struggled hard to reach a pinnacle, and it now seemed severe to be struck down from all his happiness by one individual, and that one the woman whom he had loved the most of all on earth. And when the listener to whom he spoke replied with praises of the physical and spiritual beauty of Mrs. Forrest, he exclaimed, “She now looks ugly to me: her face is black and hideous.” This friend, Lawson, wrote these words at the time: “I am persuaded that both parties are still warmly attached to one another. He, judging by his looks, has suffered deeply, and has grown ten years older during the last few months. She is not less affected.”

At length a natural but unfortunate incident carried their alienation to the point of a violent and final rupture. In indignant reply to some cutting remarks on her sister, Mrs. Forrest inconsiderately said to her husband, “It is a lie!” If there was one point on which he had always been proudly scrupulous, as every friend would testify, it was that of being a man of the uttermost straightforward veracity, whatever might betide. The words, “It is a lie!” fell into his irascible blood like drops of molten iron. He restrained himself, and said, “If a man had said that to me he should die. I cannot live with a woman who says it.” From that moment separation was inevitable and irrevocable.

A little later they agreed to part, mutually pledging themselves not to allow the cause to be made known. Before leaving his house she asked him to give her a copy of the works of Shakspeare as a memento of him. He did so, writing in it, “Mrs. Edwin Forrest, from Edwin Forrest,” a sad alteration from the inscription uniformly made in the books he had before presented to her, “From her lover and husband, Edwin Forrest.” Taking her in a carriage, with a large portrait of himself at the most glorious height of his physical life, he accompanied her to the house of her generous friends, Parke and Fanny Godwin, whose steadfast fidelity had caused them to offer her an asylum in this trying hour. Parting from each other silently at that hospitable door, the gulf of pain between them was henceforth without a bridge. Slow months passed on, various causes of irritation still at work, when the following letter, which explains itself, was written:

“I am compelled to address you, by reports and rumors that reach me from every side, and which a due respect for my own character compels me not to disregard. You cannot forget that before we parted you obtained from me a solemn pledge that I would say nothing of the guilty cause; the guilt alone on your part, not on mine, which led to our separation; you cannot forget that, at the same time, you also pledged yourself to a like silence, a silence that I supposed you would be glad to have preserved; but I understand from various sources, and in ways that cannot deceive me, that you have repeatedly disregarded that promise, and are constantly assigning false reasons for our separation, and making statements in regard to it intended and calculated to exonerate yourself and to throw the whole blame on me, and necessarily to alienate from me the respect and attachment of the friends I have left to me. Is this a fitting return for the kindness I have ever shown you? Is this your gratitude to one who, though aware of your guilt and most deeply wronged, has endeavored to shield you from the scorn and contempt of the world? The evidence of your guilt, you know, is in my possession; I took that evidence from among your papers, and I have your own acknowledgment by whom it was written, and that the infamous letter was addressed to you. You know, as well as I do, that the cause of my leaving you was the conviction of your infidelity. I have said enough to make the object of this letter apparent; I am content that the past shall remain in silence, but I do not intend, nor will I permit, that either you, or any one connected with you, shall ascribe our separation to my misconduct.

“I desire you, therefore, to let me know at once, whether you have by your own assertions, or by sanctioning those of others, endeavored to throw the blame of our miserable position on me. My future conduct will depend on your reply.

To this the writer received immediate response:

“I hasten to answer the letter Mr. Stevens has just left with me, with the utmost alacrity, as it affords me, at least, the melancholy satisfaction of correcting misstatements, and of assuring you that the various rumors and reports which have reached you are false.

“You say that you have been told that I am ‘constantly assigning false reasons for our separation, and making statements in regard to it intended and calculated to exonerate myself and throw the whole blame on you;’ this I beg most distinctly to state is utterly untrue.

“I have, when asked the cause of our sad differences, invariably replied that was a matter only known to ourselves, and which would never be explained, and I neither acknowledge the right of the world, nor our most intimate friends, to question our conduct in this affair.

“You say, ‘I desire you, therefore, to let me know at once, whether you have by your own assertions, or by sanctioning those of others, endeavored to throw the blame of our miserable position on me.’ I most solemnly assert that I have never done so, directly or indirectly, nor has any one connected with me ever made such assertions with my knowledge, nor have I ever permitted any one to speak of you in my presence with censure or disrespect. I am glad you have enabled me to reply directly to yourself concerning this, as it must be evident to you that we are both in a position to be misrepresented to each other; but I cannot help adding that the tone of your letter wounds me deeply: a few months ago you would not have written thus. But in this neither do I blame you, but those who have for their own motives poisoned your mind against me; this is surely an unnecessary addition to my sufferings, but while I suffer I feel the strong conviction that some day, perhaps one so distant that it may no longer be possible for us to meet on this earth, your own naturally noble and just mind will do me justice, and that you will believe in the affection which, for twelve years, has never swerved from you. I cannot, nor would I, subscribe myself other than,

The above letter was succeeded five days later by another:

“In replying to the letter I received from you on Monday last, I confined myself to an answer to the questions you therein ask me; for inasmuch as you said you were content that the past should remain in silence, and as I was myself unwilling to revive any subject of dispute between us, I passed over the harsh and new accusations contained in your letter; but on reading and weighing it carefully, as I have done since, I fear that my silence would be construed into an implied assent to those accusations. After your repeated assurances to me prior to our separation, and to others since then, of your conviction that there had been nothing criminal on my part, I am pained that you should have been persuaded to use such language to me. You know as well as I do that there has been nothing in my conduct to justify those gross and unexpected charges, and I cannot think why you should now seem to consider a foolish and anonymous letter as an evidence of guilt, never before having thought so, unless you have ulterior views, and seek to found some grounds on this for divorce. If this be your object, it could be more easily, not to say more generously, obtained. I repeatedly told you that if a divorce would make you happy, I was willing to go out of this State with you to obtain it, and that at any future time my promise to this effect would hold good. You said such was not your wish, and that we needed no court of law to decide our future position for us. From the time you proposed our separation, I used no remonstrance, save to implore you to weigh the matter seriously, and be sure, before you decided, that such a step would make you happy; you said it would, and to conduce as much as lay in my power to that happiness, was my only aim and employment until the day you took me from my home. Of my own desolate and prospectless future I scarcely dared to think or speak to you, but once you said that if any one dared to cast an imputation on me, not consistent with honor, I should call on you to defend me. That you should, therefore, now write and speak as you do, I can only impute to your yielding to the suggestions of those who, under the garb of friendship, are daring to interfere between us; but it is not in their power to know whether your happiness will be insured by endeavoring to work my utter ruin. I cannot believe it, and implore you, Edwin, for God’s sake, to trust to your own better judgment; and, as I am certain that your heart will tell you I could not seek to injure you, so likewise I am sure your future will not be brighter if you succeed in crushing me more completely, in casting disgrace upon one who has known no higher pride than the right of calling herself your wife.

To this Forrest replied thus:

“I answer your letter dated the 29th and received by me on the 31st ult., solely to prevent my silence being misunderstood. Mr. Godwin has told me that the tardy reply to the most material part of mine of the 24th was sent by his advice. I should indeed think from its whole tone and character that it was written under instructions. I do not desire to use harsh epithets or severe language to you; it can do no good. But you compel me to say that all the important parts of yours are utterly untrue. It is utterly untrue that the accusations I now bring against you are ‘new.’ It is utterly untrue that since the discovery of that infamous letter, which you callously call ‘foolish,’ I have ever, in any way, expressed my belief of your freedom from guilt. I could not have done so, and you know that I have not done it. But I cannot carry on a correspondence of this kind; I have no desire to injure or to crush you; the fatal wrong has been done to me, and I only wish to put a final termination to a state of things which has destroyed my peace of mind, and which is wearing out my life.

The next step in the tragedy was the filing of an application for divorce by Forrest in Philadelphia, instantly counterchecked by a similar application on the part of Mrs. Forrest in New York. He was led to his suit because, in his own words, “unwilling to submit to calumnies industriously circulated by my enemies that I had unmanfully wronged an innocent woman, the only choice open to me was either to assert my rectitude before the tribunals of my country or endure throughout life a weight of reproach which I trust my entire life proves undeserved.” Her obvious motive in the counter-suit was the instinctive impulse and the deliberate determination to protect herself from remediless disgrace and utter social ostracism. No woman with her spirit, and with the host of friends which she had in the most honored walk of the community, could willingly accept the fearful penalty of letting such a case go by default, whether she were innocent or guilty. To those who held her innocent, as the best people did, her attitude appealed to every chivalrous sentiment of admiration and sympathy; but to him who believed her guilty, as her husband did, it presented every motive to aggravate anger and resentment. The inevitable consequences resulted, and a prolonged struggle ensued, which was a desperate fight for moral existence. The miserable details need not be specified. As the combat thickened, the deeper grew the passions on each side, and the more damaging the charges and alleged disclosures. The hostile championship likewise became intenser and wider. The trial, with the incrimination of adultery and the recrimination of the same offence, began in December, 1851, and reached through six weeks. No trial of the kind in this country had ever awakened so eager and extended an interest. The evidence and arguments were minutely reproduced in the press, sold by wholesale in every corner of the land, and devoured by unnumbered thousands with every sort of scandalous gossip and comment. The completed report of the trial fills two enormous volumes of more than twelve hundred pages each. The lady gained much for her cause by her strict propriety of language, her elegant deportment, the unequalled ability and passionate zeal of her counsel, and the exalted character of her large circle of influential and unfaltering friends. The man lost as much for his cause by the partisan prejudices against him, by the imprudences of his more reckless friends, and especially by the repelling violence and coarseness of expression and demeanor to which in his exasperated state he was too often tempted. Abundant examples have already been furnished in these pages of his scholarly taste, intellectual dignity, moral refinement and strength. Justice to the truth requires the frank admission that there was also in him a rude and harsh element, a streak of uncivilized bluntness or barbaric honesty of impulse, shocking to people of conventional politeness. These people did him injustice by chiefly seeing this cruder feature in his character, for it was quite a subordinate part of his genuine nature. But it is only fair to give specimens of the level to which it not unfrequently sank him in social appearance. In his eyes observance of external seemings was nothing in comparison with sincerity to internal realities. After his separation, but before his divorce, meeting his wife in the street, she said he kept her there walking up and down for over two hours in a pouring rain, hearing and replying to him, neither of them having an umbrella. At this same period watching one night to see who entered or left his house, in which his wife was still residing, though alone, a man named Raymond came out. The following intelligible dialogue immediately took place, as sworn to in court by Raymond himself. “Why are you sneaking away like a guilty man?” “Edwin Forrest, you have waylaid me by night with a bludgeon. You want a pretence for attacking me, and I shall not give it you.” “Bludgeon! I don’t want a bludgeon to kill you. Damn you, I can choke you to death with my hands. But you are not the man I am after now. If I catch that damned villain I’ll rip his liver out. I’ll cut his damned throat at the door. You may go this time, damn you. But I have marked you, all of you, and I’ll have vengeance.” This style of speech, as laughable as it is repulsive, and which really marked not at all the extent but merely the limitation of his culture, greatly injured him, alloying alike his worth, his peace, and his success. In one instance alone, however, did his violence of temper carry him beyond discourteous and furious speech to illegal action. Meeting in Central Park Mr. N. P. Willis, whom he regarded as one of the chief fomenters of his domestic trouble, he inflicted severe personal chastisement on him. The sufferer prosecuted his assailant, and secured a verdict with damages of one dollar. Forrest brought a suit against Willis for libel, and gained a verdict with five hundred dollars damages.

In the divorce case a somewhat unexpected judgment was decreed against Forrest, acquitting his wife and condemning him to pay costs and three thousand dollars a year for alimony. He appealed, and was defeated, with an added thousand dollars a year alimony. Five times he appealed, carrying his case from court to court, and every time was baffled and thrown. And it actually was not until 1868, after eighteen years of unrelenting litigation,—years filled with irritation, acrimony, and every species of annoyance, settling in many instances into a lodged hatred,—that he finally abandoned further resistance and paid over the full award. Sixty-four thousand dollars came to Mrs. Forrest, of which sum the various expenses swallowed fifty-nine thousand, leaving the pittance of five thousand,—an edifying example of the beauty of legal controversies.

The writer is unwilling in any way to enter between the now long and forever separated disputants or to go behind the rendering of the court. The defendant is dead, and only requires for justice’s sake the assertion that he believed himself to have been wronged, and that he acted on that belief with the unforgivingness belonging to him. The plaintiff has suffered fearfully enough for any imprudence or error, was believed by her intimate and most honored friends to be innocent, was vindicated by a jury after a most searching trial, and is now living in modest and blameless retirement. She has a right to the benefit of her acquittal, and shall be left unassailed to that unseen Tribunal which alone is as just and merciful as it is infallible.

The verdict of the jury was hailed with acclamations by one party, with amazement and derision by the other. Rumors and charges of perjury, fraud, and corruption were rife, and many a character suffered badly, while the end left the contestants pretty much where the beginning found them, with the exception of the bad passion, costs, and anguish that lay between. They had been hoisted into a public pillory in the face of the whole country, subjected to all kinds of odious remarks, the very sanctities of their being defiled and profaned by the miscellaneous gawking and commenting of the prurient crowd. Besides all this long strain on his feelings and huge drain on his purse, Forrest had the angry grief of seeing large numbers of his most cherished friends fall away from him to the side of his antagonist, never to be spoken to again. And then he had the mortification of defeat amidst the cheers and jeers of his foes, who combined to honor the victorious lawyer to whom at every step he owed his repulses with a brilliant banquet and a service of plate, including a massive silver pitcher bearing the inscription, “From God the conquering champion cometh!” He was just the kind of man to feel these things most keenly. No wonder the unsuccessful warfare and its shameful close stung his pride, envenomed his resentment, darkened his life, and left on him rather a permanent wound than a scar. But, sure of the rightfulness of his cause, his self-respect and his faith in ultimate justice for the iniquity he felt had been done him enabled him to bear up with defiant fortitude. And he was far from being unsustained without, numerous as were the familiar associates who deserted him. Whenever he appeared in public the same enthusiastic multitudes as of old greeted him with an even wilder admiration. Many a voice and pen were lifted to defend and applaud him, while many attacked him. The tributes in the newspapers more than equalled the denunciations. Two examples in verse will show the estimate of him and his cause formed by close acquaintances:

A fortnight after the close of the trial, Forrest began a new engagement at the Broadway Theatre.

One of the leading journals of the day said, “The return of Mr. Forrest to the stage, from which he has been so long self-exiled, will form the most interesting feature in the dramatic season. There have been many, though we have not been of the number, who have thought he would never reappear on the boards after the unwarrantable treatment he received at the hands of the maliciously and ignorantly prejudiced. Mr. Forrest, however, has justly relied upon the spirit of fair play which characterizes the American people. Let all men be fairly judged before they are condemned, and especially those who, like him, have long and manfully withstood such a ‘downright violence and storm of fortune’ as would have overwhelmed most men, and whose careers have added to the lustre of their country’s history. We believe that he will never have cause to say, like Wolsey,—

but that he who has so long

“All men have their faults, and envy makes those of the great as prominent as possible.

“Much to their ignominy, the assailants of Forrest have never given him credit for those high-minded and disinterested acts of generosity which those who know him best can never recall without admiration, and which, when his history is written, will leave little comfort to his maligners, professional or otherwise. We wish for him a delighted welcome back to the stage, and a complete deliverance from the toils in which his enemies have sought to destroy him.”

The house was packed to its extremest capacity, and hundreds clamored in the streets. An inscription was hung across the parquet, “This is the people’s verdict!” As he entered on his ever favorite roll of Damon, the audience rose en masse, and greeted him with waving hats, handkerchiefs, and scarfs, and long, deafening plaudits, which shook the building from dome to foundation. In matchless solidity of port he stood before the frenzied tempest of humanity, and bowed his acknowledgments slowly, as when Zeus nods and all Olympus shakes. A shower of bouquets entwined with small American flags fell at his feet. He addressed the assembly thus, constantly interrupted with cheers:

“Ladies and Gentlemen,—After the unparalleled verdict which you have rendered me here to-night, you will not doubt that I consider this the proudest moment of my life. And yet it is a moment not unmingled with sadness. Instinctively I ask myself the question, Why is this vast assemblage here to-night, composed as it is of the intelligent, the high-minded, the right-minded, and last, though not least, the beautiful of the Empire City? Is it because a favorite actor appears in a favorite character? No, the actor and the performances are as familiar to you as household words. Why, then, this unusual ferment? It is because you have come to express your irrepressible sympathy for one whom you know to be a deeply-injured man. Nay, more, you are here with a higher and a holier purpose,—to vindicate the principle of even-handed justice. I do not propose to examine the proceedings of the late unhappy trial; those proceedings are now before you, and before the world, and you can judge as rightly of them as I can. I have no desire to instruct you in the verdict you shall render. The issue of that trial will yet be before the court, and I shall patiently await the judgment of that court, be it what it may. In the mean while I submit my cause to you; my cause, did I say?—no, not ‘my’ cause alone, but yours, the cause of every man in this community, the cause of every human being, the cause of every honest wife, the cause of every virtuous woman, the cause of every one who cherishes a home and the pure spirit which should abide there. Ladies and gentlemen, I submit my cause to a tribunal uncorrupt and incorruptible; I submit it to the sober second-thought of the people. A little while since, and I thought my pathway of life was filled with thorns; you have this night strewed it with roses (looking at the bouquets at his feet). Their perfume is gratifying to the senses, and I am grateful for your beautiful and fragrant offering.”

The success of the entire engagement was unprecedentedly brilliant. Called before the curtain at the close of the final performance, he said,—

“Ladies and Gentlemen,—This is the sixty-ninth night of an engagement which, take it all in all, has, I believe, no parallel in the history of the stage. It is without parallel in its duration, it is without parallel in the amount of its labors, and it is without parallel in its success. For sixty-nine almost successive nights, in despite of a season more inclement than any I ever remember, the tide of popular favor has flowed, like the Pontic Sea, without feeling a retiring ebb. For sixty-nine nights I have been called, by your acclamations, to the spot where I now stand to receive the generous plaudits of your hands, and I may say hands with hearts in them. No popular assembly, in my opinion, utters the public voice with more freedom and with more truth than the assembly usually convened within the walls of a theatre. If this be so, I have reason to be greatly proud of the demonstration which for twelve successive weeks has greeted me here. Such a demonstration any man ought to be proud of. Such a demonstration eloquently vindicates the thought of the great poet:

Such a demonstration speaks more eloquently to the heart than any words. Such a demonstration contains in it an unmistakable moral. Such a demonstration vindicates me more than a thousand verdicts, for it springs from those who make and unmake judges.”

But despite the flattering applause of the multitude, added to the support of his own conscience, and notwithstanding his abounding health and strength and enhancing riches, from the date of his separation and desire for divorce the dominant tone of the life of Forrest was changed. His demeanor had a more forbidding aspect, his disposition a sterner tinge, his faith in human nature less genial expansion, his joy in existence less spontaneous exuberance. The circle of his friends was greatly contracted, a certain irritable soreness was fixed in his sensibility, he shrank more strongly than ever from miscellaneous society, and seemed to be more asserting or protecting himself cloaked in an appearance of reserve and gloom. In fact, the excitement and suffering he had gone through in connection with his domestic unhappiness gave his whole nature a fearful wrench, and deposited some permanent settlings of acridity and suspicion. The world of human life never again wore to him the smiling aspect it had so often worn before. His sense of justice had been wounded, his heart cut, his confidence thrown back, and his rebelling will was constrained to resist and to defy.

And why all this strife and pain? Why all this bitter unyielding opposition and writhing agony under what was and is and will be? Wherefore not quietly accept the inevitable with magnanimous gentleness and wisdom, and, without anger or fuss or regret, conform his conduct to the best conditions for serenity of soul and wholesomeness of heart, in contentment with self and charity for all? Why not rather have suppressed wrath, avoided dispute, foregone retaliation, parted in peace if part they must, and, each uncomplained of and uninterfered with by the other, passed freely on in the strangely-checkered pathways of the world, to test the good of life and the mystery of death and the everlasting divineness of Providence? How much more auspicious such a course would have been than to be so convulsed with tormenting passions and strike to and fro in furious contention! Yes, why did they not either forgive and forget and renew their loving covenant, or else silently divide in kindness and liberty without one hostile deed or thought? Thus they would have consulted their truest dignity and interest. But, alas! in these infinitely delicate, inflammable, and explosive affairs of sentiment, dignity and interest are usually trampled contemptuously under foot by passion.

Every one acts and reacts in accordance with his style and grade of character, his degrees of loyalty or enslavement to the different standards of action prevailing around him. A man held fast in a certain low or mediocre stage of spiritual evolution will naturally conduct himself in any trying emergency in a very different manner from one who has reached a transcendent height of emancipation, spontaneity, and nobleness. And there were two clear reasons why Forrest, in this most critical passage of his life, did not behave purely in the best and grandest way, but with a mixture of the vulgar method and the better one. First, he had not attained that degree of self-detachment which would make it possible for him to act under exciting circumstances calmly in the light of universal principles. He could not disentangle the prejudiced fibres of his consciousness from the personality long and closely associated with his own so as to treat her with impartiality and wisdom, regarding her as an independent personality rather than as a merged part of his own. He must still continue related to her by personal passion of some kind, when one passion died an opposite one springing up in its place. And, secondly, he could not in this matter free himself, although in many other matters he did remarkably free himself, from the tyranny of what is called public opinion. He had in this instance an extreme sensitiveness as to what would be thought of him and said of him in case his conduct openly deviated much from the average social usage. Thus his personal passions, mixed up in his imagination with every reference to the woman he had adored but now abominated, incapacitated him from acting consistently throughout with disinterested delicacy and forbearance, though these qualities were not wanting in the earlier stages of the difficulty before he had become so far inflamed and committed.

Speculation is often easy and practice hard. One may lightly hold as a theory that which when brought home in private experience gives a terrible shock and is repelled with horror and loathing. Both Forrest and his wife had reflected much on what is now attracting so much attention under the title of the Social question. They both entertained bold, enlightened views on the subject, as clearly appears from a remarkable letter written from Chicago, in 1848, by Mrs. Forrest in reply to one from James Lawson. A comprehensive extract, followed by a few suggestions on the general lessons of the subject, particularly as connected with the dramatic art, shall close this unwelcome yet indispensable chapter of the biography.

“It is impossible, my dear friend, that the wonderful change which has taken place in men’s minds within the last ten years can have escaped the notice of so acute an observer as you are; and if you have read the works which the great men of Europe have given us within that time, you have found they all tend to illustrate the great principle of progress, and to show at the same time that for man to attain the high position for which he is by nature fitted, woman must keep pace with him. Man cannot be free if woman be a slave. You say, ‘The rights of woman, whether as maid or wife, and all those notions, I utterly abhor.’ I do not quite understand what you here mean by the rights of woman. You cannot mean that she has none. The poorest and most abject thing of earth has some rights. But if you mean the right to outrage the laws of nature, by running out of her own sphere and seeking to place herself in a position for which she is unfitted, then I perfectly agree with you. At the same time, woman has as high a mission to perform in this world as man has; and he never can hold his place in the ranks of progression and improvement who seeks to degrade woman to a mere domestic animal. Nature intended her for his companion, and him for hers; and without the respect which places her socially and intellectually on the same platform, his love for her personally is an insult.

“Again, you say, ‘A man loves her as much for her very dependence on him as for her beauty or loveliness.’ (Intellect snugly put out of the question.) This remark from you astonished me so much that I submitted the question at once to Forrest, who instantly agreed with me that for once our good friend was decidedly wrong. (Pardon the heresy, I only say for once.) What! do you value the love of a woman who only clings to you because she cannot do without your support? Why, this is what in nursery days we used to call ‘cupboard love,’ and value accordingly. Depend upon it, as a general rule, there would be fewer family jars if each were pecuniarily independent of the other. With regard to mutual confidence, I perfectly agree with you that it should exist; but for this there must be mutual sympathy; the relative position of man and wife must be that of companions,—not mastery on one side and dependence on the other. Again, you say, ‘A wife, if she blame her husband for seeking after new fancies, should examine her own heart, and see if she find not in some measure justification for him.’ Truly, my dear friend, I think so too (when we do agree, our unanimity is wonderful); and if after that self-examination she finds the fault is hers, she should amend it; but if she finds on reflection that her whole course has been one of devotion and affection for him, she must even let matters take their course, and rest assured, if he be a man of appreciative mind, his affection for her will return. This is rather a degrading position; but a true woman has pride in self-sacrifice. In any case, I do not think a woman should blame a man for indulging in fancies. I think we discussed this once before, and that I then said, as I do now, that he is to blame when these fancies are degrading, or for an unworthy object; the last words I mean not to apply morally, but intellectually. A sensible woman, who loves her husband in the true spirit of love, without selfishness, desires to see him happy, and rejoices in his elevation. She would grieve that he should give the world cause to talk, or in any way risk the loss of that respect due to both himself and her; but she would infinitely rather that he should indulge ‘new fancies’ (I quote you) than lead an unhappy life of self-denial and unrest, feeling each day the weight of his chains become more irksome, making him in fact a living lie. This is what society demands of us. In our present state we cannot openly brave its laws; but it is a despotism which cannot exist forever; and in the mean time those whose minds soar above common prejudice can, if such be united, do much to make their present state endurable. It is a fearful thing to think of the numbers who, after a brief acquaintance, during which they can form no estimate of each other’s characters, swear solemnly to love each other while they ‘on this earth do dwell.’ Men and women boldly make this vow, as though they could by the magic of these few words enchain forever every feeling and passion of their nature. It is absurd. No man can do so; and society, as though it had made a compact with the devil to make man commit more sins than his nature would otherwise prompt, says, ‘Now you are fairly in the trap, seek to get out, and we cast you off forever,—you and your helpless children.’ Man never was made to endure even such a yoke as unwise governments have sought to lay on him; how much more galling, then, must be that which seeks to bind the noblest feelings and affections of his nature, and makes him—

“That there is any necessity to insure, by any means, a woman’s happiness, is a proposition you do not seem to have entertained while writing your letter of May 24th; but perhaps we are supposed to be happy under all circumstances.”

There is for man and woman on this earth one supreme happiness, one contenting fulfilment of destiny, whether there are more or not. It is a pure, calm, holy, and impassioned love, joining them in one life, filling both soul and body with a peaceful and rapturous harmony, glorifying the scenery of nature by its reflection, making the current of daily experience a stream of prophetic bliss, revealing to them authentic glimpses of God in each other, and opening eternity to their faith with mystic suggestions of worlds bygone and worlds to come, lives already led and forgotten and lives yet to be welcomed. This is the one absolute blessing, without whose appeasing and sufficing seal the human creature pines for he knows not what, and dies unsatisfied, no matter how much else is granted him. Any one to whom this divine fortune falls, and whose conscience, instead of wearing it proudly as a crown of glory in the sight of God, shrinks with it guiltily before the sight of men, is a contemptible coward, unworthy of the boon, and sure to forfeit it. As the most original thinker, the boldest diver into the mysteries of our nature, America has produced, expresses it,—

Thousands, enslaved by the conventional, distracted by the external, absorbed in the trivial, may be ignorant of the incomparable importance of the truth here expressed, care nothing about it, and give themselves up to selfish ambitions and contemptible materialities. This must be so, since the blind cannot see; and even the seeing eye sees in an object only what it brings the means of seeing; and the marvellous heights and depths of experience are fatally locked from the inexperienced. Nevertheless, the truth above affirmed survives its overlooking by the unworthy, and every man and woman gifted with profound insight and sensibility knows it and feels it beyond everything else. The great multitudes of society also have at least dim glimpses of it, strange presentiments of it, blind intuitions awakening a strong and incessant curiosity in that direction. This is the secret cause of the universal interest felt in the subject of love and in every instance of its transcendent experience or exemplification. One of the most central functions of art—whether written romance, painting, sculpture, music, or the drama—is directly or indirectly to celebrate this truth by giving it concentrated and relieved expression, and thus inciting the contemplators to aspire after their own highest bliss. To those whose emotions are rich and quick enough to interpret them, what are the finest songs of the composers but sighings for the fulfilment of affection, or raptures in its fruition, or wailings over its loss? With what unrivalled power Rubens, in his fearful pictures of love and war, has uncovered to the competent spectator the horrible tragedy all through history of the intimate association of lust and murder, libidinous passion and death! And pre-eminently the stage, in all its forms,—tragic, comic, and operatic,—has ever found, and always will find, its most fascinating employment and crowning mission in the open display—published to those who have the keys to read it, veiled from all who have not—of the varied bewitchments, evasions, agonies, and ecstasies of the passion of love between the sexes. That is the most effective actor or actress whose gamut of emotional being and experience, real and ideal, is greatest, and whose training gives completest command of the apparatus of expression, making the organism a living series of revelations, setting before the audience in visible play, in the most precise and intense manner, the working of love, in all its kinds and degrees, through the language of its occult signals. The competent actor shows to the competent gazer the exact rank and quality of the love actuating him by the adjustment of his behavior to it,—every look and tone, every changing rate and quality in the rhythm of his motions, every part of his body which leads or dominates in his bearing, whether head, shoulder, chest, elbow, hand, abdomen, hip, knee, or foot, having its determinate significance. Thus people are taught to discern grades of character through styles of manners, inspired to admire the noble and loathe the base at the same time that they are deepened in their own desires for the divine prizes of beauty and joy.

The most wholesome and triumphant art of the stage has always taught in its personifying revelation that the highest blessedness of human life is the perfect attunement of the natures of man and woman in a perfect love around which nature thrills and over which God smiles. No diviner lesson ever has been or ever will be taught on this earth. All other fruitions here are but preliminaries to this, all sacrifices penances for its failure, all diseases and crimes the fruit of its violation.

In contrast with this glorious proper fulfilment of affection, wherever we look on the history of our race we find six great chronic tragedies which dramatic art has portrayed perhaps even more fully than it has the positive triumph itself.

First, is the tragedy of the indifferent heart which neither receives nor gives nor possesses love. Thin and sour natures, frivolous, dry, cynical, or hard and arrogant,—the enchanted charms and mysteries of nature and humanity have no existence for them. They sit aloof and sneer, or plot and struggle and get money and win office, or eat and drink and joke and sleep and perish,—the amazing horrors and the entrancing delights of experience equally sealed books to them. They may attain incidental trifles, but, with their poor, shrivelled, loveless hearts, not attaining that for which man most was made, to the sorrowing gaze of nobler natures their earthly lot is a tragedy.

Secondly, is the pathetic tragedy of being loved without the power to return it. Coquetry, which has strewn its way everywhere with ravaged and trampled prizes, reverses this, and without sympathy or principle seeks to elicit and attract affection merely to pamper vanity and gratify an obscene love of power; and this too is a tragedy, but one of a fiendish import. The other is a sad and painful experience, yet with something of an angelic touch in it. It seems to hint at a great dislocation somewhere in the past of our race, causing this plaintive discord of conjoined but jarring souls, whose incongruous rhythms can never blend though in juxtaposition, like an ill-matched span whose paces will not coincide but still hobble and interfere. To be the recipient of a great absorbing love which one is absolutely unable to reciprocate is to any one of generous sympathies a keen sorrow. Sometimes too it is a sharp and wearing annoyance. And yet it is not infrequent, both out of wedlock and in it. There are limits alike of adaptation and of misadaptation to awaken love; and we can never have any more love than we awaken or give any more than is awakened in us. There are fatalities in these relations wholly beyond the reach of the will. When two persons are married whose characters, culture, and fitnesses place them on such different levels that they can meet only by a laborious ascent on one side or a distasteful descent on the other, where the ideal life of one is constantly hurt and baffled and flung in on itself from every attempt at genial fellowship, any high degree of love is hopeless. The conjunction is a yoke, not a partnership. Respect, gratitude, pity, service, almost every quality except love, may be earned. But love comes, if it come at all, spontaneously, in answer to the native signals which evoke it. In vain do we strive to love one not suited to us nor fitted for us; and a sensitive spirit forced to receive the affectionate manifestations of such a one is often sorely tried when seemingly bound to appear blessed.

The same considerations apply with double weight and poignancy to the third and larger class of tragedies of affection, namely, those who love where they are not acceptable and cannot win a return. Piteous indeed is the lot, touching the sight, of one humbly offering his worship, patiently continuing every tender care and service at a shrine which, despite every effort to change or disguise its insuperable repugnance, must still feel repugnant. And then, furthermore, there is the anguish of the homage welcomed at first and toyed with, but soon betrayed and cast away. The pangs of jilted love are proverbial, and the experience is one of the commonest as it is one of the cruellest in the world. Broken hearts, blasted lives, early deaths, terrible struggles of injured pride and sacred sentiment to conceal themselves and hold bravely up, caused by failures to secure the hand of the one devotedly beloved but idly entreated, are much more numerous than is imagined by the superficial humdrum world. They are in reality so numerous that if they were all known everybody not familiar with the poetic side and shyer recesses of human nature would be astonished. This forms a heavy item in the big statistics of human woe.

The examples contained under the head of the fourth tragedy are the experiences of those who are full of rich affections but find no congenial person on whom to bestow them or from whom to obtain a return. Accordingly, their real passions find only ideal vents in fervent longings and dreams, in music, prayer, and faith, or embodiment in industry and beneficence. Their unfulfilled affection thus either fortifies their being with the culture and good works it prompts, or opens an imaginative world into which they exhale away in romantic desires. A noble woman whose rare wealth and effusiveness of soul had not been happily bestowed, once said, with a sigh, to Thackeray, when they had been conversing of the extremes in the character of the great Swift, “I would gladly have suffered his brutality to have had his tenderness.” The remark pierces us with a keen and wide pain expanding to brood in pity over the vast tragedy of humanity pining unsatisfied in every age. Yes, exhalations of sinless and ardent desire, yearnings of beautiful and baffled passion, are wasted in the air, sufficient, if they were legitimately appropriated, to make the whole world a heaven. Ah, let us trust that they are not wasted after all, but that they enter into the air to make it warmer and sweeter for the breathing of the happier generations to come, when the earth shall be purely peopled with children begotten by pairs all whose rhythms correspond, and who love the individuality of self in one another not less because they love the universality of God in one another more.

The fifth tragedy in the history of human affection consists of the instances of those who have been blessed with an adequate love rounded and fulfilled on both sides, but who have ceased to possess it longer, except in its results. They have in some cases outgrown and wearied of their objects, in others been outgrown and wearied of, in others still been parted by death. These examples likewise are tragic each in its way, but less melancholy on the whole than the others. These have had fruition, have, once at least, lived. The memory is divine. If they are worthy, it enriches and sanctifies their characters, and, in its treasures of influence, remains to be transferred from its exclusive concentration on one and freely poured forth on humanity, nature, and God. It then prepares its possessor for that immortal future of which it is itself an upholding prophecy. And so every deep and tender nature must feel with the poet that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

But the sixth tragedy of love is the most lacerating and merciless of the whole, and that is the tragedy of jealousy. This dire passion played the most ravaging part in the domestic life of Forrest, and his enactment of it in the rÔle of Othello held the highest rank in his professional career. It has also exercised a most extensive and awful sway in the entire history of the human race up to this moment. The relative place and function of the dramatic and lyric stage cannot be appreciated without a full appreciation of this hydra passion, the green-eyed monster that makes the meat it feeds on.

Even of its victims few clearly understand the ingredients and essence of jealousy. In the catalogue of the passions it is the impurest, the insanest, and the most murderous. Every composition whose elements blend in harmony is pure. Earth is pure and honey is pure, but a mixture of earth and honey is impure. So in moral subjects. Loyalty is pure, being consonantly composed of reverence and obedience; conscious disloyalty is impure, being inconsonantly composed of a perception of rightful authority and rebellious resistance to it. Now, no other passion is composed of such an intense and incongruous combination of intense opposites as jealousy. In it love and hate, esteem and scorn, trust and suspicion, hope and fear, joy and pain, swiftly alternate or discordantly mix and conflict. It is these meeting shocks of contradictory polarities repulsing or penetrating one another in the soul, rending and exploding in every direction in the consciousness of its victim, that make jealousy the maddest and most slaughterous because it is the most violently impure passion known to man. In every one of its forms, when strong enough, it is a begetter of murders, has been ever since the devil first peered on Adam and Eve embracing in Paradise, and will be until it is abolished by slowly-advancing disinterestedness. It is an appalling fact that the murders of wives by jealous husbands are tenfold greater in number than any other single class of murders. When we add to these the husbands murdered by their wives, and the despatched paramours on both sides, the wild and deadly raging of jealousy may be recognized in something of its frightful fury.

The cause of the greater prevalence of murder between the married is not far to seek. It is the weariness of an over-close and continual intimacy, with the wearing and goading irritations it engenders. It is the tyrannical assertion of the possession of one by the other as something owned and to be governed. This provokes the rebellious and revengeful instincts of a personality aching to be free; and the aggravated and ruminating desire is finally so nourished and stung as to burst into frenzied performance. And those ill-starred couples one of whose members violently destroys the life of the other are insignificant in number when compared with those who are slowly and stealthily murdered without the explicit consciousness of either party, by the gnawing shock and fret of discordant nerves, the steady grinding out of the very springs and sockets of the faculties by repressive contempt and hate and fear. A proud, sensitive woman may go into the presence of her husband an angel, and leave it a fiend, her amour-propre having been wounded in its sacredest part and filled with irrepressible resentment. Persons of genius, of absorbing devotion to an aim, are either more unhappy in wedlock or else more exquisitely blessed and blessing than others. They live largely in an ideal realm, on a ticklish level of self-respect, a height of consciousness vital to them. Socrates, Cicero, Dante, Milton, Chateaubriand, Byron, Bulwer, Kean, Talma, Thackeray, Dickens, are examples. A collision jars the statue off its pedestal. A tone of contempt or a look of indifference cuts like a dagger, tears the spiritual tissues of selfhood,—and the invisible blood of the soul follows, draining faith, love, life itself, away. The one vast secret of pleasing and living happily with high sensitive natures is sympathetic and deferential attention. Where this is not given, and there is sorrow and chafing, an intercourse which is ever a slow moral murder, and often inflamed into a swift physical murder, that liberty of divorce should be granted for which the chaste and noble Milton so long ago made his plea. Society should cease to say, Whom man has joined together let not God put asunder!

Having seen what the constituent elements of jealousy are, it now remains to probe its essence. What is jealousy in its substance and action? It is the appropriation of one person by another as a piece of property, and a spontaneous resentment and resistance to any assertion of its personality on its own part. The jealous man virtually says, “She belongs to me and not to herself. If she dares to alienate herself from me or give anything to anybody besides me, I will kill her.” The jealous woman says, “He is mine, and if he leaves me or smiles on another I will stab him and poison her.” This is the fell passion in its fiercest extreme of selfishness.

Viewed in another light it is less dreadful, though just as narrow and selfish. The lover has assimilated the beloved as a portion of his own being. His life seems bound up in her and dependent on her. Her withdrawal is a loss so impoverishing to his imagination that it threatens death. He feels that the dissolution of their unity will tear him asunder. Then jealousy is his instinct of self-preservation, rising in grief, pain and anger to repel or revenge an attack on the dearest part of his life. Still, in this form as in the previous it implies the subdual and suppression of one personality by another, and is the sure signal of a crude character and an imperfect development. The rich, generous nature, detached from himself, full of free affection, living directly on objects according to their worth, ready to react on every action according to its intrinsic claim, is not jealous. Liberty and magnanimity at home and abroad are the marks of the fully-ripened man. He knows his own personal sovereignty and abundant resources as a child of God and an heir of the universe, and frankly allows the equal personal sovereignty of each of his fellow-creatures. He claims and grants no imposition of will or slavish subserviency, but seeks only spontaneous companionship in affection. Mechanical conformity and hypocrisy can be compelled. Love, veiled in its divinity, comes and goes as it lists, and is everywhere the most authentic envoy of the Creator. Jealousy is mental slavery, spiritual poverty, the ravenous cry of affectional starvation, the blind, fallacious, desperate, murderous struggle of a frightened and famishing selfhood.

The conduct dictated by such a passion must be of the worst kind. It begins with a mean espionage and ends with a maniacal violence. Its relentless cruelty compels its objects to have recourse to the most unprincipled methods to avert its suspicion and avoid its wrath, sinking self-respect and honorable frankness in hypocrisy and fraud. Why is the word or even the oath of any man or woman in regard to a question of chastity or fidelity to the marriage vow almost universally considered perfectly worthless? It is because the penalties of dereliction on the part of woman are so intolerable, so much worse than death, that to secure escape from them the social conscience justifies means which the social code condemns. Accordingly, we see the highest personages, the greatest dignitaries and popular favorites, go into court and openly perjure themselves, while society cries bravo! The woman is so fearfully imperilled that for her rescue the fashionable standard of honor sustains deliberate perjury, the debauching of religious conscience on the very shrine of public authority.

This wicked social exculpation of the male and immolation of the female is a lingering accompaniment of the historic evolution of man, the survival in human civilization of the selfish instincts which in the lower ranks of the animal kingdom cause the stronger to drive away the weaker and monopolize the weakest. Among the most potent and fearless beasts the male, seeing any other male sportively inclined, is seized with a frenzy to kill him and appropriate the object. Animal man has the same instinct, and it has smeared the entire course of history with broad trails of blood and victimized womanhood by the double weapons of force and fear. The spectacle of the harem of one man with a thousand imprisoned women guarded by eunuchs tells the whole story. But surely when human beings, no longer remaining mere instinctive animals, become free personalities, lords of thought and sentiment, each with a separate individual responsibility distinctly conscious and immortal, they should govern themselves by spontaneous choice from within and not be coerced by an artificial terror applied from without.

The method in history of giving the strongest males possession of the females is no doubt the mode in which nature selects and exalts her breeds. But as society refines it will be seen that the strength of brute instinct, the strength of position, the strength of money, the strength of every artificial advantage, should be put aside in favor of the diviner strength of genius, goodness, beauty, moral and physical completeness of harmony. Freedom would secure this as compulsion prevents it. Man is destined to outgrow the destructive monopolizing passion of jealousy native to his animality. This is shown by his capacity for chivalry, which is a self-abnegating identification of his personality with the personalities of others, not merely freeing them from his will, but aiding them to secure their own happiness in their own way.

The effort to suppress free choice by the use of terror has been tried terribly enough and long enough. It has always proved an utter failure, viewed on any large scale. Has the awful penalty affixed to any deviation from the prescribed legal method of sexual relations wholly prevented such deviation? It has often led to concealment and duplicity,—two lives carried on at once, a life of demure conformity in public, a life of passionate fulfilment in secret. The well-understood sacrifice of truth to appearance has ever served to inflame the mistrust and swell the vengeance of the jealous. The only real remedy will be found in perfect truth, frankness, and justice. In regard to the personal autonomy of the affections, woman should be raised to the same status and be tried by the same code as man. That code should not be as now the legacy of the brutish and despotic past, but the achievement of a scientific morality, those laws of universal order which express the will of the Creator, the collective harmony of Nature. Since the unions of the sexes are of all grades and qualities, all degrees of impurity and beastliness or of purity and sacredness, the parties to them cannot be justly judged by a single rigid rule of external technicality, and ought not to be sealed with one unvarying approval of respectable or branded with one monotonous stigma of illicit. They should be judged by the varying facts in the case as they are in the sight of God; and when those facts are not known in their true merits there is no competency or right to judge the man or the woman at all. The present judgments of society unquestionably ought in many cases to be reversed. For example, it is to be said that the women who consort with men they loathe, and against their will breed children infected with ferocious passions and diseased tendencies, no matter how regularly they are married or how proud their social position, should be condemned or rescued. Also it is to be said that persons filled with a true and divine love, whether sanctioned or unsanctioned by conventional usages, claim to be left to the inherent moral reactions of their acts, and to the unprejudiced judgments of the competent. This central truth, compromise whom it may, and encompassed with delicacies and with difficulties as it may be, is to be firmly maintained, although Pecksniff and Grundy shriek at it until the whole continent quivers.

The distinction of love and freedom from lust and license is obvious, and the unleashing of the latter in the disguise of the former cannot be too vehemently deprecated. But that a man or a woman may cherish in the wedded state an impure and detestable passion, or outside of it know a heavenly one, is a truth which can be denied only by a character of odious vulgarity. The rank and worth of a love are to be estimated by its moral and religious quality in the sight of God and its natural influence on character. To estimate it otherwise, as is usually done, is to violate morality and religion with conventionality, and in place of nature, sincerity and truth install arbitrary artifice, hypocrisy and falsehood. The grand desiderata in all relationships of affection are, first, the observance of open truth and honor, second, the recognition of their varying grades of intrinsic nobleness and charm or intrinsic foulness and criminality, and the treatment of the parties to them accordingly. Meanwhile, the frank and clear discussion of the subject is imperatively needed. The double system hitherto in vogue of at once enforcing ignorance and stimulating prurience by banishing the subject from confessed attention and study into the two regions of shamefacedness and obscenity has wrought immeasurable evil. For the sexual passion, morbidly excited by nearly all the influences of society, and then mercilessly repressed by public opinion, has a morbid development which breaks out in those monstrous forms of vice which are the open sores of civilization. Take away the inflaming lures of mystery and denial—shed the clear, cold light of scientific knowledge on the facts of the case and the principles properly regulative of conduct—and the passion will gradually become moderate and wholesome. Science has brought region after region of human life under the light and guidance of its benign methods. The region of the personal affections in society and the procreation of posterity, being most obstinately held by passions and prejudices, longest resists the application of impartial, fearless study to the usages imposed by traditional authority. The consistent doing of this will be one of the greatest steps ever taken. It will break the historic superstition that the conjunction of a pair married in seeming by a priest is necessarily holier than that of a pair married in reality by God, destroy the stupid prejudice which makes in the affectional relations of the sexes only the one discrimination that they are in or out of wedlock, and remove the cruel social ban which renders it impossible for straightforward sincerity of affection and honesty of speech to escape the dishonor which double-facedness of passion and duplicity of word and deed so easily shoulder aside. And when this is done, much will have been done to inaugurate the better era for which the expectation of mankind waits.

The principal reason why the married so frequently experience satiety and weariness, and the consequent sting of a foreign hunger provocative of the wandering which gives occasion for jealousy, is that in their long and close familiarity the partners come to feel that they have seen all through and all around each other, have exhausted each other of all fresh charm, piquancy, and interest. The genuine remedy for this, the only really adequate and enduring remedy, is the recognition in each other of the infinite mystery of all conscious being, a free personality on endless probation and destined for immortal adventures. Then each will be to the other—what every human being intrinsically is—a concentrated epitome of the Kosmos and an explicit revelation of God. There is no revelation of the free conscious God except in the free conscious creature, and in every such being there is one. Let a pair be worthy to see and feel this truth, and there can be no exhaustion of their mutual interest, because before their reverential observation there can be no end to the surprises of the infinite in the finite. Then the sweetness, the wonder, the varying lure of love will never wither and die into indifference, nor roil and perturb into jealousy and madness.

No doubt to many these views will seem a transcendental romance, a delusive dream. Not every one has the nature finely touched to fine issues capable of living in the ether of these ideal heights. But there are on the earth holy and entranced souls who live there. It is obvious enough how absurdly inapplicable all this class of considerations must be to the basest kinds of persons, those who, like brutes, wallow in styes of sensuality, or, like devils, surrender themselves to the tyranny of the lowest passions. Such must needs be relegated to an inferior standard. Those whose consciences are coarser and lower than the code of society may most properly be held in subjection by its laws. But those whose consciences are purer and higher than the current social code, the nobler natures who sincerely aspire to the fulfilment of their destiny as children of God, should be a law unto themselves. They will not be tyrants over or spies upon one another. Full of self-respect and mutual respect, owning the indefeasible sovereignty of each personality in the offices of its individual being, they will pass and repass shrouded in transparent royalty, exacting no subjection, making no inquiries.

And now this long and central chapter in the life of Forrest, with the essential lessons it has for others, may be ended by a brief statement of the moral scale of degrees in the conduct of different men under the provoking conditions of jealousy.

One man detects the woman to whom he is legally united, but whom he hates and loathes, in criminal relations with another. He takes an axe, chops them in pieces, then sets the house on fire, and, cutting his own throat, falls into the flames. In other cases his insane fury satiates itself with a single victim, the man or the woman, as caprice dictates. This is crazy ferocity, making its subject first a maniac, then a tiger, then a devil. Has not humanity by its smothered approval too long kept the diabolical horror of this style of behavior recrudescent?

Another mournful and shocking form of this tragedy there is. And it is a form repeated far more frequently in its essential features than ever comes to the open light of day. A man of a sombre, vivid, and proud nature, possessed with a passion so absorbing that it sways his being with tidal power, awakens to the fact that the love he thought all his own has wandered elsewhere. His heart stands still and his brain reels. His love is too true and deep to change. To injure her is as impossible as to restrain himself. He says not a word, makes not a sign, but his sad, dark purpose is fixed. He leaves directions that no questions be asked, no public notice taken of him or of his fate further than the most modest funeral, and that a plain stone be reared over him with the single word, Infelicissimus. Then a pistol-ball in his heart closes the throbbing of an agony too great to be borne. The suicide is the pathetic slave of his passion. Surely for such there must be a sequel in some choicer world, where the tangled plot will be cleared up and the soul not be thus helplessly self-entangled.

In the third case, a husband, receiving proof of the infidelity of his honored and trusted wife, in a furious revulsion of scorn and detestation thrusts her into the street, proclaims her offence everywhere, and seeks release and redress in a public court. This is one form of the average of social feeling and conduct in such a case. It is the common spirit of revenge cloaked in justice. It may not be thought base, but it cannot be called noble.

In still another example the jealous man is now enraged and now distressed with conflicting impulses to revenge and to pardon. First he storms and threatens, then he weeps and entreats; now, he strides up and down, tearing his hair, crying and sobbing; and now he rushes out and confides his misery, begging for sympathy and counsel. And whether he condones or dismisses the offender depends on her own policy. This course, ruled by no principle, is a mess of incoherent impulse, raw and childish, a manner of proceeding of which, although it is so common, any grown-up and well-conditioned man should be ashamed.

In the next instance we see the man, on learning his misfortune in losing the exclusive affection of her whom alone he has loved, staggered by the blow, smitten to the heart with grief, flung upon himself in recoiling anguish. But, to shield her from disgrace, and to avoid shame to himself and scandal to the public, he keeps the secret sacredly; ending, however, all marriage intimacy, their lives henceforth a mere contiguity of ice and gloom until death. This is another expression of the average level of men and style of social feeling, not lower, not much higher, than might be expected.

A greatly superior example, finer and braver, comparatively rare, perhaps, yet with a larger list of performers than many would suppose, is where the fault is frankly confessed and freely forgiven, just as other faults are, or the deed justified and accepted on the ground of an integral affection and an approving conscience willing with courageous openness to take every consequence. There is valor, dignity, consistency, force of character in this. It is impossible for persons of low animal instincts or where there is treachery and lying.

But the highest degree of chivalry under such circumstances is that exemplified by the man who, cleansed from the foul and cruel usages of the past, freed from the taints of the tyrannical masculine selfhood, does what man has so rarely done, but what multitudes of women have often done. He shows a love so pure and exalted that it subordinates his selfhood and blends his happiness in that of the beloved object. For her well-being he is willing to stand aside and yield up every claim. Is such generosity beyond the limit of human nature? It may be beyond the limit of historic human nature, trailing the penalties of the past. It is not beyond the limit of prophetic human nature, carrying the purposes of God.

No doubt some barrier at present is necessary; and society has a right to give the law, from insight, but not from despotism. Monogamic union is the true relation, and its vow should not be broken by either party. But if it is broken the social penalty should be the same for man as for woman. In such case the parties should either condone or separate without furious controversy or personal revenge. Truth and fitness should be set above conventionality and prejudice, and frankness remove hypocrisy. Such alone is the teaching of this chapter, which invokes the pure, steady light of science to shine on the facts of sex, cleanse foulness out, and bring the code of society into unison with the code of God.