Chapter XXIII: Closing Years and the Earthly Finale (3)

One fact alone scatters the entire theory that the social and moral condition of the tragedian was so fearfully dismal, forlorn, and execrable,—the fact that he had high and precious friendships with women, tenderly cherished and sacredly maintained. These were the foremost joy and solace of his life. They were kept up by unfailing attentions, epistolary and personal, to the last of his days. Into these relations he carried a fervor of affection, a poetry of sentiment, a considerate delicacy and refinement of speech and manner, which secured the amplest return for all he gave, and drew from the survivors, when he was gone, tributes which if they were published would cover him with the lustre of a romantic interest. But it is forbidden to spread such matters before the common gaze. They have a sacred right of privacy which must be no further violated than is needed to refute the absurd belief that the experience of Edwin Forrest was one of such unfathomable desolation and unhappiness.

No, a portrait in which he is shown as a man whose all-ruling motives were cruel egotism, pride, vanity, and avarice, a man “whose nature fulfilled itself,” and for that reason made his life a half-ignominious and half-pathetic “failure,” will be repudiated by his countrymen. At the same time his genuine portrait will reveal the truth that while he loved the good in this world well, he hated the evil too much,—the truth that while he sought success by honorable means, he too rancorously loathed those who opposed him with dishonorable means,—and the truth that while he won many of the solid prizes of existence and enjoyed them with a more than average measure of happiness, he missed the very highest and best prizes from lack of spirituality, serene equilibrium of soul, and religious consecration.

His literary agent for three years and intimate theatrical confrère for a much longer period, Mr. C. G. Rosenberg, moved by the injurious things said of him, published an article admitting his explosive irritability, but affirming his justice and kindness and fund of genial humor and denying the charges of an oppressive temper and arrogant selfishness. His business manager and constant companion for a great many years loved him as a brother, and always testified to his high rectitude of soul and his many endearing qualities. In one of his latest years, when this faithful servant lost a pocket-book containing over three thousand dollars of his money, and was in excessive distress about it, Forrest, without one sign of anger or peevishness or regret, simply said, in a gentle tone, “Do not blame yourself, McArdle. Accidents will happen. We can make it all up in a few nights. So let it go and never mind.” John McCullough, who for six years had every condition requisite for reading his character to the very bottom, bore witness to his rare nobility and social charm, saying, “In heart he was a prince, and would do anything for a friend. A thorough student of human nature, gifted with intensity, he applied himself to the heart, and ever reached it. He was essentially an autocrat. His personal magnetism was great, and he could draw everything to him. Wherever he might be, men recognized him as king, and he reigned without resistance, also without imposition.” For six years, after the close of the War, he gave a one-armed soldier, as a vegetable garden, the free use of a piece of land worth twenty-five thousand dollars. This is an extract from one of his letters: “Notice has been sent me that the price of the picture by Tom Gaylord is one hundred and fifty dollars, but that if I think this too much I may fix my own price. No doubt it is more than the painting is worth, but as the young man is just beginning, and needs to be cheered on, I shall gladly give it to encourage him for his long career of art.” When a certain poor man of his acquaintance had died, and his widow knew not where to bury him, he gave her a space for this purpose in his own lot in the cemetery. And every winter he gave private orders to his grocer to supply such suffering, worthy families as he knew, with what they needed, and charge the bills to him. Surely these are not the kind of deeds done by, these not the kind of tributes paid to, a misanthropic old tyrant, discontented with himself, sick of the world, and breathing scorn and wrath against everybody who approached him.

The following letter, addressed by one of the oldest and choicest friends of Forrest to another one, speaks for itself:

“NEWPORT, KY., December 30, 1872.

“S. S. SMITH, ESQ.,—

“MY DEAR FRIEND,—Our old and distinguished friend is no more. It is
a great sorrow to us and to his country. The papers show that all
mourn his loss, for he and his fame belonged to the public. I knew
Forrest well; except yourself, no man knew him better than I did. He
was a man of genius, of great will and energy, and, without much
education, by his own untiring efforts raised himself to the very
highest pinnacle of fame in his profession. There was a grandeur in
the man, in every thing he did and said, and hence the great
admiration his friends had for him. He was a truly noble and
generous man, one who loved his friends with devotion, and despised
his enemies. I first made his acquaintance at Lexington, Kentucky,
in the fall of 1822. He came there with Collins & Jones as one of
their theatrical corps. He was then between sixteen and seventeen,
and was the pet of us college boys. He made his first appearance as
Young Norval, and the boys were so much taken with him that after
the play was over we went to the greenroom, and took him, dressed as
he was in character, to a supper. That night he slept with me in my
boarding-house. We had breakfast in my room, and it was late before
he left. I wanted to lend him a suit to go home in; but no, he would
go in his Highland costume, a feather in his hat, straight down Main
Street, with a crowd of boys following him to his hotel. He played
all that winter in Lexington, and when the Medical and Law Colleges
broke up in the spring he went to Cincinnati. That was in March or
April, and he boarded at Mrs. Bryson’s, on Main Street. In the
summer of 1823 he came to Newport with Mrs. Riddle and her daughter
and two or three actors, and rented a house on the bank of the
river. I assisted him in fixing up a small theatre in the old frame
buildings of the United States barracks at the Point of Licking, and
we had plays there until October. My brother-in-law, Major Harris,
played Iago to his Othello. I was to have played Damon to his
Pythias, but some difficulty occurred which prevented it. Forrest
was then very poor, but kept up his spirits, and spent many nights
with me in my father’s old office. His great delight was to get in a
boat and sail for hours on the river when the wind was high. In the
fall of 1823 he returned with Collins & Jones to Lexington, the
Drakes, I think, uniting, and played the winter of 1823-24. He
played with Pelby and his wife, and Pemberton, an actor from
Nashville. He improved rapidly in his profession, and had always one
of the most prominent characters cast to him. In fact, he would play
second to no man. I was very intimate with him that whole winter,
and on the first day of January, 1824, Tom Clay and several of us
gave a fine dinner at Ayers’s Hotel, and he was the _distinguished
guest_. We all made speeches and recitations, and before we had
finished the entertainment we had an extensive audience. Forrest had
many intimate friends among the students, and he often attended the
college declamations. He had a great admiration for the eloquence of
Doctor Holley, our President, and has often told me of the benefit
he derived from the style of this remarkable orator. In March of
1824 I returned home, after the breaking up of the Law School, and
played Zanga, in Young’s Revenge, at the Columbia Street Theatre,
for the benefit of old Colonel John Cleve Symmes. We had a crowded
house. Sallie Riddle played in the same piece. It was to enable Mr.
Symmes to get to his Hole at the North Pole; but, poor man, he never
got further than New York. I think Mr. Forrest went that spring to
New Orleans. I am very certain he was not in Cincinnati when I
played in the Revenge, otherwise he would have performed in the same
play. It has been published in the papers that Forrest was once a
circus rider and tumbler. No such thing. The only time he was ever
connected with a circus was when with the circus company in
Lexington he played Timour the Tartar. Mrs. Pelby and others were in
the same piece. He looked Grandeur itself when mounted on Pepin’s
famous cream-colored horse. After March, 1824, I did not meet Mr.
Forrest again until the spring of 1828. He was then playing in New
York, and I saw him in his great character of Othello. His star had
then begun to rise, and it continued to rise until it reached its
zenith, and there it continued to shine until the last hour of his
life. His place cannot be filled in this country. Great actors are
born, and not made. To be a great tragedian a man must possess the
soul, the passion, and the eloquence to delineate the character he
represents. Forrest had that beyond most men.

“I thank you for the paper containing his will and other
reminiscences of him. My wife has been since his death clipping from
the newspapers all that has been written about him, and has put the
notices in her scrap-book. Some of the journals have done him
justice, others have not; but posterity will cherish his memory and
feel proud of the man. In 1870 I had a copy made of my portrait of
George Frederick Cooke by Sully, and sent it to him. I think you saw
it. He wrote me at Fire Island, New York, a long and affectionate
letter acknowledging the receipt of the portrait and pressing me to
spend a week with him at his house. My daughter, Mrs. Jones, has the
letter, and has copied it in her book of original letters written to
my father by Henry Clay and many other distinguished men of our
country. The last time Mr. Forrest was in Cincinnati he walked over
one morning to see me and the family. We took him back in my
carriage to his hotel, and as he parted from my daughter Martha and
myself his eyes were filled with tears, and he exclaimed, ‘God bless
you!’ and left us. This was the last time I ever saw our
distinguished and much beloved friend. My daughter, only last night,
was speaking of this event of our parting, and how much affected Mr.
Forrest seemed to be.

“Forrest was a great favorite with my wife. She knew him in 1823 and
1824, and, before our marriage, had often witnessed his performances
at Lexington when a girl. She well knew the great friendship that
united us: hence in referring to our boy and girl days in Lexington,
Kentucky, she often speaks of Forrest, and how much he was respected
and his company sought by the college boys at Old Transylvania. I
have a very fine daguerreotype picture of our friend, and two quite
large photographs he sent me through you several years ago. They
will be faithfully preserved and handed down to my children and to
their children as the picture of a man concerning whom it may well
be said, ‘Take him for all in all, we shall not look upon his like
again.’

“All we have left to us, my friend, is to meet and talk over the
pleasure we once enjoyed in the company of our friend. He was so
full of wit and humor! And how well he told a story! I remember the
day, some years back, he and you spent at my house. All my family
were present, together with several friends, and he fascinated us
all at dinner by his eloquence, and his incidents of foreign travel.
How heartily we laughed at the anecdotes which he told with such
fine effect! Then we had music at night, and he recited the ‘Idiot
Boy,’ to the delight of every one, and it was the ‘witching time of
night’ when the company broke up.

“I am very truly your friend and obedient servant,
“JAMES TAYLOR.”

Alas, how easy it is, and how congenial it seems to be to many, to let down and tarnish the memory of a great man by an estimate in which his vices are magnified and his virtues omitted! So did old Macklin say of David Garrick, “He had a narrow mind, bounded on one side by suspicion, by envy on the other, by avarice in front, by fear in the rear, and with self in the centre.” But against every unkind or demeaning word spoken of the departed Forrest a multitude of facts protest. Two of these may be cited to show the genius he had to make himself loved and admired and remembered.

On receiving intelligence of the death of his benefactor, a literary gentleman who had been tried by severe misfortunes of poverty and blindness and paralysis, and had experienced extreme kindness as well as generous aid at the hands of Forrest, wrote to Oakes a long letter, eloquent with gratitude and admiration, and closing with the poetic acrostic which follows. The writer thoroughly knew and loved the actor both personally and professionally,—a fact that adds value to his eulogistic appreciation:

Ever foremost in histrionic fame,
Death cannot dim the lustre of thy name.
Wondrously bright the record of thy life,
In spite of wrongs that drove thee into strife.
Nobler by far than titled lord or peer!

Friend of thy race, philanthropist sincere,
On earth esteemed for charms of intellect,
Renowned as well for manhood most erect;
Reserved, but kind, from ostentation free,
Envying no one of high or low degree,
Scorning all tricks of meretricious kind,
Thy course is run, thy glory left behind!

LOUIS F. TASISTRO.

On the first anniversary of his death a company of gentlemen, actuated by purely disinterested motives, met in New York and organized the Edwin Forrest Club, with a president, vice-president, and seven directors. “The primary object of the club shall be to foster the memory of the great actor, to erect a statue of him in the Central Park, and to collect criticisms, pictures, and all things relating to him, for the purpose of forming a Forrest Museum.” After the memory of Forrest had been drunk standing, Mr. G. W. Metlar, a friend from his earliest boyhood, paid an affectionate eulogy to his worth. Others offered similar tributes. And the corresponding secretary of the club, Mr. Harrison, said, “Gentlemen, however well the world may know Mr. Forrest as an actor, it knows comparatively nothing of him as a man. A kinder heart never beat in the bosom of a human being. In the finer sympathies of our nature he was more like a child than one who had felt an undue share of the rude buffets of ingratitude. When speaking with him of the troubles of others I have often seen his eyes suffused with tears. The beggar never knocked at his door and went away unladen. And many is the charity that fell from his manly hand and the relieved knew not whence it came; but

‘Like the song of the lone nightingale,
Which answereth with her most soothing song
Out of the ivy bower, it came and blessed.’

And I may say with conscientious pride that however much any of the great actors may have done for their national stage, Mr. Forrest, equal to any of them, has done as much for the theatre of his country, and will remain a recognized peer in the everlasting group.

‘He stands serene amid the actors old,
Like Chimborazo when the setting sun
Has left his hundred mountains dark and dun,
Sole object visible, the imperial one
In purple robe and diadem of gold.
Immortal Forrest, who can hope to tell,
With tongue less gifted, of the pleasing sadness
Wrought in your deepest scenes of woe and madness?
Who hope by words to paint your Damon and your Lear?
Their noble forms before me pass,
Like breathing things of a living class.’

The longer I allude to the tragedian the stronger becomes the sadness that tinctures my feelings to think that he is no more, and that the existence of the gifts Nature had so liberally bestowed on him had to cease with the cessation of his pulse.”

Everything set down by the biographer in this volume has been stated in the simple spirit of truth. And if the pen that writes has distilled along the pages such a spirit of love for their subject as makes the reader suspect the writer possessed with a fond partiality, he asks, Why is it so? His love is but a response to the love he received, and to the grand and beautiful qualities he saw. A dried-up and malignant heart does not breathe such effusive words in such a sincere tone as those which, in 1869, Forrest wrote to Oakes: “The good news you send of the restored health of our dear friend Alger gives me inexpressible relief. Now I go into the country with abounding joy.”

The fortune Forrest had laboriously amassed would amount, it was thought, when it should all be made available, to upwards of a million dollars. It was found that in his will he had left the whole of it— excepting a few personal bequests—to found, on his beautiful estate of “Spring Brook,” about eight miles from the heart of Philadelphia, the EDWIN FORREST HOME, for the support of actors and actresses decayed by age or disabled by infirmity.

The trustees and executors have arranged the grounds and prepared the buildings, removed thither all the relics of the testator, his books, pictures, and statues, and made public announcement that the home is ready for occupation. Thus the greatest charity ever bequeathed in the sole interest of his own profession by any actor since the world began is already in active operation, and promises to carry the name it wears through unlimited ages. It pleasantly allies its American founder with the old tragedian Edward Alleyn, the friend of Shakspeare, who two hundred and fifty years ago established munificent institutions of knowledge and mercy, which have been growing ever since and are now one of the princeliest endowments in England.

Those who loved Forrest best had hoped for him that, reposing on his laurels, pointed out in the streets as the veteran of a hundred battles, the vexations and resentments of earlier years outgrown and forgotten, enjoying the calls of his friends, luxuriating in bookish leisure, overseeing with paternal fondness the progress of the home he had planned for the aged and needy of his profession, taking a proud joy in the prosperity and glory of his country and in the belief that his idolized art has before it here amidst the democratic institutions of America a destiny whose splendor and usefulness shall surpass everything it has yet known,—the days of his mellow and vigorous old age should glide pleasantly towards the end where waits the strange Shadow with the key and the seal. Then, they trusted, nothing in his life should have become him better than the leaving of it would. For, receding step by step from the stage and the struggle, he should fade out in a broadening illumination from behind the scenes, the murmur of applause reaching him until his ear closed to every sound of earth.

It would have been so had he been all that he should have been. It was ordained not to be so. Shattered and bowed, he was snatched untimely from his not properly perfected career. But all that he was and did will not be forgotten in consequence of what he was not and did not do.

He will live as a great tradition in the history of the stage. He will live as a personal image in the magnificent Coriolanus statue. He will live as a learned and versatile histrionist in the exact photographic embodiments of his costumed and breathing characters. He will live as a diffused presence in the retreat he has founded for his less fortunate brethren. Perhaps he will live, in some degree, as a friend in the hearts of those who perusing these pages shall appreciate the story of his toils, his trials, his triumphs, and his disappearance from the eyes of men. He will certainly live in the innumerable and untraceable but momentous influences of his deeds and effluences of his powerful personality and exhibitions caught up by sensitive organisms and transmitted in their posterity to the end of our race. And, still further, if, as Swedenborg teaches, there are theatres in heaven, and all sorts of plays represented there, those who in succeeding ages shall recall his memory amidst the shades of time may think of him still as acting some better part before angelic spectators within the unknown scenery of eternity.

Here the pen of the writer drops from his hand in the conclusion of its task, and, with the same words with which it began, ends the story of EDWIN FORREST.