The next important feature to be studied in order to appreciate the character and life of Forrest is his experience of the prizes and the penalties of fame. For he had a great fame; and fame, particularly in a democratic country, inflicts penalties as well as bestows prizes. Not one man in a thousand has enough force and tenacity of character to determine to gain the solid and lasting prizes of life. Average men willingly put up with cheap and transient substitutes for the real ends, or with deluding mockeries of them. They seek passing pleasures instead of the conditions of permanent happiness; applause instead of merit; a crowd of acquaintances instead of true friends; notoriety or stagnant indifference instead of fame. There is nothing more worthy of contempt, although it is so miserably common, than the mean and whining cant which puts negation and failure above affirmation and success, constantly asserting the emptiness and deceit of all earthly goods. In opposition to this morbid depreciation of every natural attractiveness without and desire within, nothing is more wholesome or grand than a positive grasp and fruition of all the native worths of the world. A great deal of the fashionable disparagement and scorn of the prizes of wealth, position, reputation, is but unconscious envy decrying what it lacks the strength and courage to seize. The fame which a gifted and faithful man secures is the reflex signal of the effects he has produced, and a broad, vivid, healthy enjoyment of it is an intrinsic social good to be desired. It is one of the greatest forces employed by Providence for the education of men and the advancement of society. To condemn or despise it is to fling in the face of God. The fancied pious who do this are dupes of an impious error. Fame is a life in the souls of other men added to our own. “Fame is the thirst Of gods and godlike men to make a life Which nature made not, stealing from heaven Its imaged immortality.” And so in its ultimate essence and use fame represents a magnified and prolonged idealization of direct personal experience. It is ideal means of life, a deeper foundation and wider range of reflected sympathetic life embracing and sustaining immediate individual life. This great prize is evidently a good to be desired, the evils connected with it belonging not to itself but to unprincipled methods of pursuing it, vulgar errors in distributing it, and the selfish perversion of its true offices. It exists and is enjoyed in various degrees, on many different levels, from the plebeian enthusiasm for the champion boxer to the aristocratic recognition of a great thinker. As we ascend in rank we lose in fervor. Fame is seen in its ruddiest intensity at the funeral of Thomas Sayers celebrated by fifty thousand screaming admirers; in its palest expansion in the renown of Plato, whose works are read by scattered philosophers and whose name glitters inaccessibly in the eternal empyrean. The reason for this greater heat of glory on its lower ranges plainly is that men Forrest drank the intoxicating cup of fame on widely separated levels, from the idolatrous incense of the Bowery Boys who at the sight of his herculean proportions shied their caps into the air with a wild yell of delight, to the praise of the refined judges who applauded the intellectual and imaginative genius of his Lear. It was a genuine luxury to his soul for many years, and would have been a far deeper one had it not been for the alloys accompanying it. He enjoyed the prize because he had honorably won it, not sacrificing to it the more commanding aims of life; and fame is a mockery only when it shines on the absence of the goods greater than itself,—honor, health, peace, and love. He suffered much on account of it, in consequence of the detestable jealousies, plots, ranklings, and slanders always kindled by it among unhappy rivals and malignant observers. But one suffering he was always spared, namely, the bitter mortifications of the charlatan who has snatched the outward semblance of the prizes of desert without paying their price or possessing their substance. Striving always to deserve his reputation, he did not forfeit his own esteem. The satisfaction he received from applause was the joy of feeling his own power in the fibres of the audience thrilling under his touch. Fame was the magnifying and certified abstract of this,—a vast and constant assurance in his imagination of life and power and pleasure. Dry sticks, leather men, may sneer at the idea, but the rising moral ranks of souls are indicated by the intensity with which they can act and react on ideal considerations. Fame puts a favorable bias on all our relations with the approving public, and thus enriches our inner life by aiding our sympathies to appropriate their goods. The actor lives in an atmosphere electrized with human publicity, and walks between walls lined with mirrors. Everything in his career is calculated to develop an acute self-consciousness. And then by what terrible trials his sensitiveness is beset in his exposure to the opposite extremes of derision and eulogy! And, stretching through the long fifty years of his professional course, how varied, how numerous, how interesting and precious, these crowded tributes were! There was no end to the compliments paid him, echoes of the impression he had made on the country. Now it was a peerless race-horse, carrying off prize on prize, that was named after him. Then it was some beautiful yacht, club-boat, or pilot-boat, of which there were a dozen or more to whose owners he presented sets of flags. At another time it was a noble steamer or merchantman, of which there were a good many named for him, each adorned with a statue of some one of his characters as a figure-head. Locomotives and fire-engines also were crowned with his name and his likeness. Military companies, too, took their titles from him and carried his face “Waltham, February 12th, 1871. “Edwin Forrest, Esq.: “Dear Sir,—Being one of the small army of boys called after you, I should feel happy to receive some token from my illustrious namesake, if nothing more than his autograph. Hoping to see you before you leave the stage, “I am respectfully yours, “Edwin Forrest Moore.” Seven different dramatic associations, composed of amateurs and professionals, were formed in the cities of Portland, Boston, New York, and elsewhere, bearing his name. And the notices of him in the newspapers were to be reckoned by thousands, ranging all the way from majestic eulogium to gross vituperation. Portraits of him, paintings, engravings, photographs, in his own individuality and in his chief impersonations, were multiplied in many quarters. Numerous plaster casts of him, four or five busts in marble, and one full-length statue of surpassing grandeur, were taken. Many celebrated artists studied him, from Gilbert Stuart, whose Washington stands supremely immortal in American portraiture, to William Page, whose lovingly elaborated Shakspeare may become so in creative portraiture. Page has depicted Forrest in the role of Spartacus. He shows him at that moment of the scene in the amphitheatre where he utters the words which he never spoke without moving the audience to repeated bursts of applause: “Let them come in: we are armed!” The last portrait ever painted by the dying Stuart was of Forrest, then in his youth and only just beginning to become famous. Forrest used often to speak of his sitting to Stuart, whose strong fiery soul was enclosed in a frame then tottering and tremulous with age. “He was an old white lion,” said Forrest, “and so blind that I had to tell him the color of my eyes and of my hair. By sudden efforts of will he threw the lines and bits of color on the canvas, and every stroke was speech.” Of the likenesses of Forrest published in this volume, the frontispiece is engraved from a daguerreotype of him at the age of forty-six; the succeeding one is from a painting by Samuel Of all the expressions of admiration, affection, pleasure, called forth by a professional artist, of all the forms or signals of fame, perhaps none is more flattering or more delightful to the recipient than the tributary verses evoked from souls endowed with the poetic faculty. As such natures are finer and higher than others, their homage is proportionally more precious. During his life more than fifty poems addressed to Forrest were published, and gave him a great deal of pure pleasure. A few specimens of these offerings may properly find a place here. The following lines felicitously copied were thrown upon the stage to him one evening in a bouquet: TO EDWIN FORREST. When Time hath often turned his glass, And Memory scans the stage, Foremost shall then thy image pass, The Roscius of this age. The succeeding piece was written in 1828: TO EDWIN FORREST. Young heir of glory, Nature’s bold and favorite child, Nurtured ’midst matchless scenes of wild sublimity, Thou who wert reared with sternest truth in groves of song, To thy bare arm the grasp is given to hurl the bolts Of wrathful heaven. ’Tis thine, with thundering voice to shake Creation to her centre, wakening love or rage, And show thyself as angels or as demons are. Yea, thou didst seem, as at the shrine I saw thee kneel, With that bold brow of thine, like some creation bright From higher spheres breathing thy inspiration there, As if the Altar’s flame itself had lit thine eye With all the dazzling radiance of the Deity. Go forth. Already round thy brow the wreath of fame Amidst thy godlike locks with classic grace is curled. Go forth, and shine, the Sun of the dramatic world! R. M. Ward. TO EDWIN FORREST. When genius, with creative fancy fraught, Moulds some new being for the sphere of thought, How the soul triumphs as, supremely blest, She opes her temple to the welcome guest, And her white pulses feel, with answering glow, The kindred breath of the young presence flow! Such moments, bright as hours in heaven that bring To spirits life, a pure and deathless thing, Cheer him who, warm with poesy’s true flame, Rears in his bower of song the birds of fame; He whose wreathed locks the lyric laurels wear Green with immortal dew and cloudless air; Whose harp-chords wildly echoed back the swell Of glory’s clarion when Bozzaris fell,— Thus knew his human fancies grow divine, And poured their spirit o’er the happy line. Yet not alone the sons of song can feel This joy along the grateful senses steal. To him who, musing, waits at Nature’s throne, And feels, at last, her wealth become his own, Then with the priceless gold, thought, passion, heart, And feeling, tempers to the test of art, Blends these with poesy’s mysterious spell Strange as the sigh of ocean’s rosy shell, No less belong the triumph-throb, the pride To mind-ennobling sympathies allied, The deep emotion, and the rapture free; And these, O Forrest, we behold in thee! Who e’er has marked thine eye, thy matchless mien, While, all forgetful of the mimic scene, Spurning the formal, manner-taught control, Thou bar’st the fire that lightens in the soul, Has deemed there moved the form that Shakspeare drew From visions bright with passion’s warmest hue, As, wildly garbed in awful tragic guise, Macbeth, Othello, Lear, he saw arise. When the last outrage of oppression falls On man enthralled by man, and Freedom calls Some champion to flash her steel where’er, Bloody and black, death, shrieking, hovers near, Which warns the tyrant of his dreadful fate? Who image forth th’ exalted agony Of strife and maddening hope of victory? There thrills an echo of the pulse, the tone, That universal man exults to own, A voice which teaches craven souls that War For right than guilty Peace is holier far; Nor suffers them to breathe and pass away As dust that ne’er forsook its primal clay. The lines that follow next were printed in 1852, after the divorce trial: TO EDWIN FORREST. In every soul where Poesy and Beauty find a place, Thy image, Forrest, sits enshrined in majesty and grace. Could but the high and mighty bard, whose votary thou art, Have seen with what a matchless power thou swayest the human heart, He too had bowed beneath the spell and owned thy wondrous sway, And bound thy brow with laurel, and with flowers strewn thy way. The clouds of grief that for a time obscured thy brilliant morn, Like to the envious shadows that would dim the rising sun, Meridian’s fame has put to flight. Cast not thy glances back, But in the light of fearless genius hold thine onward track. Margaret Barnett. This sonnet was written in the same year: TO EDWIN FORREST. King of the tragic art! without compeer! Thy sway is sovereign in the scenic realm; And where thy sceptre waves, or nods thy helm, All crowd to be thy royal presence near. Thou speakest,—we are stilled; the solemn Past, Rich with grand thought, and filled with noble men Over whose lives and deeds time’s veil is cast, Rises to view, and they do live again! While thou dost tread life’s stage, thy lofty fame, Undimmed, shall grow, and be the drama’s pride Centuries hence, when all shall see thy name Carved deep and high her noblest names beside; And, with the noblest placed, will aye be found, In Thespis’ fane, thy statue, laurel-crowned! R. H. Bacon. Here is a tribute penned in 1862, in the midst of our civil war: Great master of the tragic art, Whose genius moves the passions’ spring, To melt the eye and warm the heart With love of virtue, hate of sin, Is it our nation’s bleeding fate That gives thee such heroic fire Singly to brave the Senate’s hate And faith for country’s good inspire? Yes; ’tis not all the mimic scene We view when now beholding thee; The heart-strung voice and earnest mien Of “Damon” breathe pure liberty. The test of friendship true is there; But hope for freedom more than life Starts the usurping tyrant near— Pleads for the boy—weeps for the wife. O art divine! when Forrest brings His matchless eloquence to bear, Denouncing treason’s poisonous stings, While for his loved land falls the tear, The temple of the Muses, filled With beauty, fashion, youth, and age, Proves admiration for the skilled And perfect artist of the stage. G. C. Howard. And a year later the following eloquent verses were published by their author in the Philadelphia “Press:” FORREST. Pride of the Grecian art, King of the glorious act, Whose sceptre-touch can start From airiest fancy fact! Sole monarch of the stage! Thy crowning is the truth That garners unto age The laurel-wreaths of youth. Were massive mien or mould Of Thespian gods divine E’er richer in the gold Of Thespian grace than thine? A voice that thrills the soul Through all her trembling keys, From deepening organ-roll To flute-born symphonies; Of Tragedy’s quick fire, And soul that sweeps aright Each grandest poet-lyre,— These into living thought, Forrest! in thee sublime The Thespian gods have wrought, A masterpiece for Time! Not from the clods of earth ’Mid grovelling toil and strife Thy Genius hailed her birth To all her peerless life; Her viewless home hath been Where Poesy hath flung Its sweetest words to win The music of thy tongue! How Manhood’s honor rose, How perished Woman’s shame, When robed in worth and woes Thine own Virginius came! How Freedom claims a peal And Tyranny a knell When Brutus waves the steel Where Slave and Tarquin fell! When Spartacus leads on Each gladiator-blade, Or feudal tyrants fawn To lion-hearted Cade,— How every listening heart its narrow span, And, in that glorious art, Adores the peerless man! But dearer than the rest We own thy mystic spell To lave the lingering breast Where Avon’s sweetness fell! To marshal from the page And summon from the pen Of Shakspeare, to thy stage, His living, breathing men! No longer Shakspeare’s line, But studious gaze controls; It girds and gilds from thine The multitude of souls! While Genius claims a crown, Or mimic woe a tear, And dumb the cynic sneer That barreth from thy heart Or veileth from thy name The loftiest, grandest part Of histrionic Fame! C. H. B. A single sonnet more shall end these examples of the poetic tributes to the genius and worth of Forrest; tributes which, adding lustre to his career and shedding comfort and joy into his heart, were and are one of the most attractive illustrations of the value and sweetness of the prize of fame: ON ROOT’S DAGUERREOTYPE OF MR. FORREST. Light-born, and limned by Heaven! It is no cheat, No image; but himself, his living shade! With hurried pulse, the heart leaps forth to greet The man who merits more than Tully said Of his own Roscius, that the histrion’s power Was but a leaf amid his garland wreath. His swaying spirit ruled the magic hour, But his vast virtues knew no day, no death. He seems not now, but is. And I do know, Or think I do, what meaning from those lips Would break; and on that bold and manly brow There hangs a light that knows not an eclipse, The light of a true soul. If art can give The bodied soul this life, who doubts the soul will live? Robert T. Conrad. Public and private banquets were given in honor of the actor by distinguished men in all parts of the country, occasions drawing together brilliant assemblages and yielding the highest enjoyment to every faculty of sense and soul. To meet around the social table, decked with everything that wealth and taste can command, the most eminent members of the learned professions, artists, authors, statesmen, the leaders of the business world, beautiful and accomplished women, and pass the hours in friendly converse seasoned with every charm of culture and wit, is one of the choicest privileges society can bestow in recognition and reward of worth and celebrity. Among the more notable of these honors may be mentioned as especially brilliant and locally conspicuous at the time a dinner given him at Detroit by General At a banquet given in honor of John Howard Payne, the first vice-president, Prosper M. Wetmore, an old and dear friend of Forrest, paid him a compliment which, received as it was by the brilliant company with three times three enthusiastic cheers, must have given him a proud pleasure. Mr. Wetmore said, “Before mentioning the name of the gentleman whose health I am about to ask you to drink, I take this opportunity to say a word in relation to the generosity of his heart and the richness of his mind. He was one of the very first who took an interest in the festival of Thursday last, and kindly offered his name and services to add to the attractions of the evening. He has always been the foremost to do his share in honoring our sons of genius; and his purse has never been shut against the meritorious who stood in need of his bounty. His talents as an actor you all know and appreciate. Allow me to give you—Edwin Forrest: “His health; and would on earth there stood Some more of such a frame, That life might be all poetry, And weariness a name.” Such as above described were the satisfactions afforded to To any man of honorable instincts, clear perceptions, and high principles, the incompetency, corruption, and selfish biases of many of those who assume to sit in judgment on the claims of the competitors for public favor and glory, the shallowness and fickleness of the average public itself, the contemptible means successfully used by ignoble aspirants for their own advancement and the defeat of their rivals, the frequent reaction of their own modesty and high-mindedness to obscure and keep down the most meritorious, have a strong influence to rob ambition of its power, destroy all the relish of its rewards, and make fame seem worthless or even odious. Critics write in utter ignorance of the laws of criticism or standards of judgment, and even without having seen the performance they presume to approve or to condemn. Claqueurs are hired to clap one and to hiss another irrespective of merit or demerit. Wreaths, bouquets, rings, jewelled snuff-boxes, are purchased by actors or actresses themselves, through confederates, to be then presented to them in the name of an admiring public. A vase or cup or watch has been known to go with a popular performer from city to city to be presented to him over and over with eulogistic addresses of his own composition. A brazen politician, successful in compassing a nomination and election by shameless wire-pulling, mendacity, and bribery, then receives the tribute of an ostentatious testimonial of which he is himself the secret originator and prime manager. No one who has not had long experience of the world and been admitted behind the scenes, with the keys for interpreting appearances, can suspect how common such things are. They are terribly disheartening and repulsive to a generous soul. They destroy the splendor and value of the outward prizes of existence, and thus paralyze the grandest motives of action. When fools, In the fashionable rage for Master Betty, Kemble and Siddons were quite neglected; as the levee of Tom Thumb drew a throng of the nobility and fashion of London while poor Haydon, across the street, watched them with a gnawing heart from the door of his deserted exhibition. Cowper says in his “Task,”— “For Betty the boy Did strut and storm and straddle, stamp and stare, And show the world how Garrick did not act.” When, with pompous incompetency, Lord Abercorn told Mrs. Siddons that “that boy would yet eclipse everything which had been called acting in England,” she quietly replied, with crushing knowledge, “My lord, he is a very clever, pretty boy, but nothing more.” Garrick said it was the lot of actors to be alternately petted and pelted. And Kemble, when congratulated on the superb honors given him at his final adieu to the stage, responded, “It was very fine, but then I could not help remembering that without any cause they were once going to burn my house.” Genius and nobility naturally love fame, worship the public, would pour out their very life-blood to gain popular sympathy and admiration; but after such experiences of baseness and wrong and error the fascination flies from the prizes they had adored as so sacred, and never more do their souls leap and burn with the old enthusiasm of their unsophisticated days. The injustice of the world drives from it the love and homage of its noblest children. Parasites and egotists seek association with a famous man merely to gratify their vanity, though they call it friendship. They fawn on him to share a reflection of his glory, to reap advantage from his influence, or to beg loans of his money; and when circumstances unmask their characters and show how they were preying on his frankness, he is revolted and his confidence in human nature shaken. Many a man of a sweet and loving nature, like the noble Timon, has gone out to the world with “Say, what’s the brightest wreath of fame, But cankered buds that opening close? Ah, what the world’s most pleasing dream, But broken fragments of repose? “Lead me where peace with steady hand The mingled cup of life shall hold, Where time shall smoothly pour his sand, And wisdom turn that sand to gold. “Then haply at religion’s shrine This weary heart its load shall lay, Each wish my fatal love resign, And passion melt in tears away.” The falsehood, the injustice, the plots, insincerity and triviality that gather about the surfaces and course of a showy popular career Forrest experienced in their full extent. He was not deceived by them, but saw through them. They repelled and disgusted him, angered and depressed him. They did not make him a misanthrope, but they chilled his demeanor, hardened his face, checked the trustfulness of his sympathy, and gave him an increasing distaste for convivial scenes and an increased liking for his library and the chosen few in whom he could fully confide. He was a man who esteemed justice and sincerity above all things else. Flattery or interested eulogy he detested as much as he did venal prejudice and blame. He loathed the unmeaning, conventional praises of the journals, the polite compliments of acquaintances or strangers, but was glad of all honest estimates. His dignity kept him from mingling with the audience as they conversed on their way out of the theatre, but he loved to hear what they said when it was repeated by one whom The practice of the arts of purchasing unearned praise, the tricks of the mean to circumvent the noble, the accredited verdicts of titled ignorance, and the fickle superficiality of popular favor, lessen the value of common fame in the eyes of all who understand these things. They foul its prizes and repel ingenuous spirits from its pursuit. The same influence is exerted in a yet stronger degree by the experience of the malignant envy awakened in plebeian natures by the sight of the success of others contrasted with their own failure. It was long ago remarked that “With fame in just proportion envy grows; The man that makes a character makes foes.” The selfishness—not to say the innate depravity—of human nature, as transmitted by historic inheritance, is such that every one who has not been regenerated by the reception or culture of a better spirit secretly craves a monopoly of the goods which command his desires. He dislikes his competitors, and would gladly defeat their designs and appropriate every waiting laurel to himself. In 1865 Forrest wrote, in a letter to Oakes, “Yes, my dear friend, there are many in this world who take pleasure in the misfortunes of their fellow-men and gloat over the miseries of their neighbors. And their envy, hatred, and malice are always manifested most towards men of positive natures.” Souls of a generous type leave this base temper behind, and rejoice in the glory of a rival as if it were their own. But mean souls, so far from taking a disinterested delight in the spectacle “Life’s story still! all would o’ertop their fellows; And every rank, the lowest, hath its height, To which hearts flutter with as large a hope As princes feel for empire! but in each Ambition struggles with a sea of hate. He who sweats up the ridgy grades of life Finds in each station icy scorn above; Below him, hooting envy!” The extent to which this dark and malign power operates in the breasts of men is fearful. The careless see it not, the innocent suspect it not; carefully disguising itself under all sorts of garbs, it dupes the superficial observer. But the wise and earnest student of human life who has had large experience knows that it is almost omnipresent. In every walk of society, every profession,—even in the Church and among the clergy,—are men who fear and hate their superiors simply because they are superior, and the inferiors feel themselves obscured and taunted by the superiority. A good free man loves to reverence a superior, feels himself blessed and helped in looking up. But the slave of egotism and envy feels elevated and enriched only in looking down on those he fancies less favored than himself. It is a frightful and disheartening phase of human nature; but it ought to be recognized, that we may be guarded against it in others and stimulated to outgrow it in ourselves. No other profession is so beset by the temptations and trials of this odious spirit as the histrionic, which lives directly in the public gaze, feeding on popular favor. And among all the actors America has produced, no other had so varied, so intense and immense an experience of the results of it as Forrest. He wrote these sad and caustic words in his old age: “For more than forty To a man of his keen feeling and proud self-respect it must have been a torture to read the studiously belittling estimates, the satires, the insults, the slanderous caricatures continually published in the newspapers under the name of criticism. No wonder they stirred his rage and poisoned his repose, as they wounded his heart, offended his conscience, and made him sometimes shrink from social intercourse and sicken of the world. One critic says, “He is an injury to the stage. He has established a bad school for the young actors who are all imitating him. He has a contempt for genius and a disrelish for literature.” Against this extract, pasted in one of his scrap-books, Forrest had written, “Oh! oh!” A second writes, “It is impossible for us to admit that a man of Mr. Forrest’s intelligence can take pleasure in making of himself a silly spectacle for the amusement of the ignorant and the sorrow and pity of the educated. We prefer to believe that it is even a greater pain for him to play Metamora than it is for us to see him play it. In that case, how great must A servile fawning on the press, a cowardly fear of its censures, a tremulous sensitiveness to its comments, is one of the chief weaknesses of American society. Its unprincipled meddlesomeness, That American citizen who has original manhood and lives a fresh, honest life of his own, regardless of the dictation of King Caucus or Queen Average,—the most heartless and vulgar despots that ever reigned,—sets the bravest of examples and teaches the most needed of lessons. Fenimore Cooper did this, criticising the errors and defects of his fellow-citizens as an enthusiastic and conscientious patriot should who sets humanity and truth above even country and fashion, and in consequence he was misunderstood, lampooned, and insulted by the baser newspapers, and finally, after one or two hundred libel suits, hounded into his grave. If they ever come to their senses, his repentant countrymen “It will perhaps be remembered by most of our readers that Mr. Edwin Forrest brought a libel suit against the proprietors of this paper for articles which appeared in our issues of 10th, 17th, and 24th of November, 1867. The solicitations and representations of mutual friends have induced Mr. Forrest generously to consent to the withdrawal of the case. Under these circumstances it becomes our duty as it is our pleasure, to express our regret at the publication of the articles in question. “The articles complained of were, we frankly admit, beyond the limits of dramatic criticism; and the present proprietors, who saw them for the first time when printed, were at the time and still are sincerely sorry they appeared. Though not personally acquainted with Mr. Forrest, we do know, what the world knows, that he has always been prompt and faithful in his professional engagements; and his bitterest enemies, if he have any, must admit that he is not only eminent in his profession but especially free from the vice of intemperance.” The newspaper attack from which he suffered the most was so peculiar in some of its features as to demand mention. In 1855 a series of elaborate critiques on his chief rÔles appeared in a leading metropolitan journal. They were so scholarly, careful, and strong in their analysis of the plays, and so cutting in their strictures on the player, that they attracted wide attention and did him much damage. Now, two hands were concerned in these articles. The learning, thought, and eloquence were furnished by a German of uncommon scholarship and talent, who deeply felt the power and merit of Forrest as an actor and considered him a man of accomplished dramatic genius. The articles, as he wrote them, were then padded with demeaning epithets and scurrilous estimates of Forrest by one who was filled with prejudices theoretical “I will be what I should be, or be nothing.” His long, crowded experience of unfairness and unkindness deposited in Forrest a burning grudge against the world, a fierce animosity towards his injurers, an angry recoil of self-esteem, and a morbid exaggeration of the real vices of society. In one of his letters to a friend he writes, “This human life is a wretched failure, and the sooner annihilation comes to it the better.” An old poet makes one of his characters who had been deeply wronged say,— “I will instruct my sorrows to be proud, For grief is proud and makes his owner stout.” Mrs. Montagu wrote to John Philip Kemble under similar circumstances, “If you retire, from an opinion that mankind are insincere, ungrateful, and malignant, you will grow proud by reflecting that you are not like these Pharisees.” How such an opinion in Forrest marred his peace of mind and rankled in his general feelings—although much kindliness to men and much enjoyment of life still remained—was obvious enough in his later years, and is vividly expressed in many of his letters. “It would amaze and shock the honest, upright people of this country,” he writes, “could they but know as I do how these sage judges, these benign law-peddlers, are manipulated by outsiders to give any decree that malice and money may demand.” Again he writes, “I have all my life been cheated and preyed on by harpies, right and left. While they have enjoyed my money and maligned me I have toiled on for the next batch of swindlers. I have squandered more than a quarter of a million dollars on friends who, with a few noble exceptions, have returned my kindness not only with ingratitude but with obloquy.” And at “‘I have not caused the widow’s tear, Nor dimmed the orphan’s eye; I have not stained the virgin years, Nor mocked the mourner’s cry.’” “As for those who misjudge and mislike me, I hate and defy them, and appeal for justice to Nature and God, confident that they will one day grant it.” These expressions but too plainly reveal the sore places in his heart. Ah, could he but have attained a sweet and magnanimous self-sufficingness, frankly forgiven and forgotten his foes, and outgrown all those chronic contempts and resentments,—could he but have turned his thoughts away from brooding over the vices of men, and dwelt prevailingly on the other side of the picture of the world,—how much more peaceful and dignified and happy his age would have been! But this is hardly to be expected of one passionately struggling in the emulous arena, his veins swollen with hot blood in which still runs the barbaric tradition, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. To expurgate that old animal tradition and introduce in its place the saintly principle of forgiveness needs patient suffering and leisurely culture grafted on a fine spirit. When this result is secured, man rises superior to wrong, to enmity, to disgrace, is content to do his duty and fulfil his destiny in the love of It would not be fair to the truth of the case if this chapter left the impression that Forrest found on the whole the penalties of his fame bitterer to bear than its prizes were sweet to enjoy. The opposite was the fact. The annoyances attendant on his great reputation alloyed but destroyed not the comfort it yielded in its varied tributes and in its vast supporting sense of sympathetic life. Besides, the very vexations consequent on it were often accompanied by their own outweighing compensations. Sallying out of the Tremont House in Boston, one forenoon, arm in arm with his friend Oakes, and passing down Washington Street, his attention was caught by a hideous caricature of himself in a shop-window. A group of boys were gazing at it in great merriment. “Good heavens, Oakes,” he cried, “just look at that infernal thing! It is enough to make one curse the day he was born.” At that moment one of the boys recognized him, and exclaimed to the others, “Here he is!” Forrest whispered to his friend, “Boys are impartial; they have not the prejudices men have. I am going to ask them their opinion. Look here, boys, do I look like that?” One of them, a little older than the rest, answered, promptly, “Well, we knew that it was you; but then you see there is this difference,—this makes us laugh, and you make us cry.” “Thank you, my lad, thank you,” responded Forrest, “Come on, Oakes; I have got better than I bargained for. My enemy when he produced that beastly monstrosity little dreamed what a pleasure he was going to give me.” And, as they swung slowly along, he said, half musingly, “I wonder why they always degrade me by caricature and never exalt me by idealization.” The solution, which he left unattempted, is this. Caricature is the exaggeration of bad points, idealization is the heightening of good points. It is much easier to make the bad appear worse than it is to make the good appear better. Man intuitively likes to attempt what he feels he can succeed in, and dislikes to attempt what he feels he shall fail in. Therefore, when commonplace natures represent their superiors they lower them by travesty rather than raise them by improvement. And so in critical art caricature abounds over idealization. |