《Life of Edwin Forrest》
作者：Rees, James
内容简介:
The Author of the following work apologizes for the delay of its publication on the ground of long-continued ill health which unfitted him for mental labor. He has tried to make amends by sparing no pains in his effort to do justice to the subjects treated. The plan of the ensuing biography is that of a philosophical history, which adds to the simple narrative of events a discussion of the causes and teachings of the events. The writer has interspersed the mere recital of personal facts and incidents with studies of the principal topics of a more general nature intimately associated with these, and has sought to enforce the lessons they yield. His aim in this has been to add to the descriptive interest of the work more important moral values. The thoughtful reader, who seeks improvement and is interested in the fortunes of his kind, will, it is believed, find these episodes attractive; and the frivolous reader, who seeks amusement alone, need not complain of disquisitions which he can easily skip.
PREFATORY NOTE.
The Author of the following work apologizes for the delay of its publication on the ground of long-continued ill health which unfitted him for mental labor. He has tried to make amends by sparing no pains in his effort to do justice to the subjects treated. The plan of the ensuing biography is that of a philosophical history, which adds to the simple narrative of events a discussion of the causes and teachings of the events. The writer has interspersed the mere recital of personal facts and incidents with studies of the principal topics of a more general nature intimately associated with these, and has sought to enforce the lessons they yield. His aim in this has been to add to the descriptive interest of the work more important moral values. The thoughtful reader, who seeks improvement and is interested in the fortunes of his kind, will, it is believed, find these episodes attractive; and the frivolous reader, who seeks amusement alone, need not complain of disquisitions which he can easily skip.
The author foresees that some opinions advanced will be met with prejudice and disfavor, perhaps with angry abuse. But as he has written in disinterested loyalty to truth and humanity, attacking no entrenched notion and advocating no revolutionary one except from a sense of duty and in the hope of doing a service, he will calmly accept whatever odium the firm statement of his honest convictions may bring. Society in the present phase of civilization is full of tyrannical errors and wrongs against which most persons are afraid even so much as to whisper. To remove these obstructive evils, and exert
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an influence to hasten the period of universal justice and good will for which the world sighs, men of a free and enlightened spirit must fearlessly express their thoughts and breathe their philanthropic desires into the atmosphere. If their motives are pure and their views correct, however much a prejudiced public opinion may be offended and stung to assail them, after a little while their valor will be applauded and their names shine out untarnished by the passing breath of obloquy. It is, Goethe said, with true opinions courageously uttered as with pawns first advanced on the chess-board: they may be beaten, but they have inaugurated a game which must be won.
CHAPTER I. PRELUDE.
Edwin Forrest has good claims for a biography. The world, it has been said, is annually inundated with an intolerable flood of lives of nobodies. So much the stronger motive, then, for presenting the life of one who was an emphatic somebody. There is no more wholesome or more fascinating exercise for our faculties than in a wise and liberal spirit to contemplate the career of a gifted and conspicuous person who has lived largely and deeply and shown bold and exalted qualities. To analyze his experience, study the pictures of his deeds, and estimate his character by a free and universal standard, is one of the fittest and finest tasks to which we can be summoned. To do this with assimilating sympathy and impartial temper, stooping to no meaner considerations than the good and evil, the baseness and grandeur of man as man, requires a degree of freedom from narrow distastes, class and local biases, but rarely attained. Every effort pointing in this direction, every biographic essay characterized by a full human tone or true catholicity, promises to be of service, and thus carries its own justification. The habit of esteeming and censuring men in this generous human fashion, uninfluenced by any sectarian or partisan motive, unswayed by any clique or caste, is one of the ripest results of intellectual and moral culture. It implies that fusion of wisdom and charity which alone issues in a grand justice. One of the commonest evils among men is an undue sympathy for the styles of character and modes of life most familiar to them or like their own, with an undue antipathy for those unfamiliar to them or unlike their own. It is a duty and a privilege to outgrow this low and poor limitation by cultivating a more liberal range of appreciation.
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There is still lingering in many minds, especially in the so-called religious world, a strong prejudice against the dramatic profession. Analyzed down to its origin, the long warfare of church and theatre, the instinctive aversion of priest and player, will be found to be rooted in the essential opposition of their respective ideals of life. The ecclesiastical ideal is ascetic, its method painful obedience and prayer, its chief virtues self-restraint and denial; the dramatic ideal is free, its method self-development and culture, its ruling aims gratification and fulfilment The votaries of these distinctive sets of convictions and sentiments have from an early age formed two hostile camps. Accordingly, when one known as a clergyman was said to be writing the life of an actor, the announcement created surprise and curiosity and elicited censorious comment. The question was often asked, how can this strange conjunction be explained? It is therefore, perhaps, not inappropriate for the author of the present work to state the circumstances and motives which caused him to undertake it. The narrative will be brief, and may, with several advantages, take the place of a formal preface. Conventional prefaces are rarely read; but the writer trusts that the statement he proposes to make will be not only interesting to the reader but likewise helpful, by furnishing him with the proper key and cue to the succeeding chapters. It may serve as a sort of preparatory lighting up of the field to be traversed; a kind of prelusive sketch of the provinces of experience to be surveyed, of the lessons to be taught, and of the credentials of the author in the materials and other conditions secured to him for the completion of his task. This statement is to be taken as an explanation, not as an apology. The only justification needed lies in the belief that the theatrical life may be as pure and noble as the ecclesiastical; that the theatre has as sound a claim to support as the church; that the great actor, properly equipped for his work, is the most flexible and comprehensive style of man in the world, master of all types of human nature and all grades of human experience; and that the priestly profession in our day has as much to learn from the histrionic as it has to teach it.
In the winter of 1867, a man of genius, a friend in common between us, having been struck by paralysis and left without support for his family, I encountered James Oakes engaged in the benevolent business of raising funds for the relief of the
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sufferers from this calamity. Propitious conditions were thus supplied for the beginning of our acquaintance in respect and sympathy. There were characteristic cardinal chords in our breasts which vibrated in unison, and, in consequence, a strong liking sprang up between us.
For forty years James Oakes had been the sworn bosom friend of Edwin Forrest. He regarded him with an admiration and love romantic if not idolatrous. He had, as he said, known him as youth, as man, in all hours, all fortunes; had summered him and wintered him, and for nigh half a century held him locked in the core of his heart, which he opened every day to look in on him there. He resembled him in physical development, in bearing, in unconscious tricks of manner, in tastes and habits. Indeed, so marked were the likeness and assimilation, despite many important differences, that scores of times the sturdy merchant was taken for the tragedian, and their photographs were as often identified with each other.
No one could long be in cordial relations with Oakes and not frequently hear him allude to his distinguished friend and relate anecdotes of him. Besides, I had myself recollections of Forrest warmly attracting me to him. He was one of the first actors I had ever seen on the stage; the very first who had ever electrified and spell-bound me. When a boy of ten years I had seen him in the old National Theatre in Boston in the characters of Rolla, Metamora, and Macbeth. The heroic traits and pomp of the parts, the impassioned energy and vividness of his delineations, the bell, drum, and trumpet qualities of his amazing voice, had thrilled me with emotions never afterwards forgotten. I had also, in later years, often seen him in his best casts. Accordingly, when, on occasion of a visit of Forrest to his friend in Boston in the early autumn of 1868, the offer of a personal interview was given me, I accepted it with alacrity.
There were three of us, and we sat together for hours that flew unmarked. It was a charmed occasion. There was no jar or hindrance, and he without restraint unpacked his soul of its treasures of a lifetime. The great range of experience from which he drew pictures and narratives with a skill so dramatic, the rare ease and force of his conversation, the deep vein of sadness obviously left by his trials, the bright humor with which he so
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naturally relieved this gloom and vented his heart, the winning confidence and gentleness with which he treated me, no touch or glimpse of anything coarse or imperious perceptible in that genial season,—all drew me to him with unresisted attraction. I seemed to recognize in him the unquestionable signals of an honest and powerful nature, magnanimous, proud, tender, equally intellectual and impassioned, harshly tried by the world yet reaping richly from it, capable of eloquent thoughts and great acts, not less fond and true in friendship than tenacious in enmity, always self-reliant, living from impulses within, and not, like so many persons, on tradition and conventionality.
Such was the beginning of my private acquaintance with Forrest. Between that date and his death I had many meetings and spent considerable time with him. He took me into his confidence, unbosomed himself to me without reserve, recounted the chief incidents of his life, and freely revealed, even as to a father confessor, his inmost opinions, feelings, and secret deeds. The more I learned of the internal facts of his career, and the more thoroughly I mastered his character, constantly reminding one—as his friend Daniel Dougherty suggested—of the character of Guy Darrell in the great novel of Bulwer, the more I saw to respect and love. It is true he had undeniable faults,—defects and excesses which perversely deformed his noble nature,—such as frequent outbreaks of harshness and fierceness, occasional superficial profanity, a vein of unforgiving bitterness, sudden alternations of repulsive stiffness with one and too unrestrained familiarity with another. Still, in his own proper soul, from centre to circumference, undisturbed by collisions, he was grand and sweet. When truly himself, not chafed or crossed, a more interesting man, or a pleasanter, no one need wish to meet.
Oakes had long felt that the life of his friend, so prominent and varied and comprehensive, eminently deserved to be recorded in some full and dignified form. He was seeking for a suitable person to whom to intrust the work. With the assent of Forrest he urged me to assume it. I did not at first accede to the proposal, but took it into consideration, making, meanwhile, a careful study of the subject, and arriving finally at the conclusions which follow.
I found in Edwin Forrest a man who must always live in the
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history of the stage as the first great original American actor. This place is secured to him by his nativity, the variety, independence, vigor, and impressiveness of his impersonations, the important parts with which he was so long exclusively identified, the extent and duration of his popularity, and the imposing results of his success. Other distinguished actors who have had a brilliant reputation in this country have been immigrants or visitors here, as Cooke, Cooper, Conway, Kean, Booth; or have been eminent only in some special part, as Marble, Hackett, Setchell, Jefferson; or have enjoyed but a local celebrity, as Burton, Warren, and others. But Forrest, home-born on our soil, intensely national in every nerve, is indissolubly connected with the early history of the American drama by a career of conspicuous eminence, illustrated in a score of the greatest characters, and reaching through fifty years. During this prolonged period his massive physique, his powerful personality, his electrifying energy, his uncompromising honesty and frankness, his wealth, the controversies that raged around him, the unhappy publicity of his domestic misfortune, and other circumstances of various kinds, combined, by means of the newspapers, pamphlets, pictures, statuettes, caricatures, to make him a familiar presence in every part of the country. Therefore, whatever differences there may have been in the critical estimates of the rank of his particular presentments or of his general style of acting, it is impossible to deny him his historic place as the first great representative American actor. He likewise deserves this place, as will hereafter be recognized, by his pronounced originality as the founder of a school of acting—the American School—which combined, in a manner without any prominent precedent, the romantic and the classic style, the physical fire and energy of the melodramatic school with the repose and elaborate painting of the artistic school.
It cannot be fairly thought that the great place and fame of Forrest are accidental. Such achievements as he compassed are not adventitious products of luck or caprice, but are the general measure of worth and fitness. Otherwise, why did they not happen as well to others among the hundreds of competitors who contended with him at every step for the same prizes, but were all left behind in the open race? If mere brawniness, strut
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ting, rant, purchased favor, and clap-trap could command such an immense and sustained triumph, why did they not yield it in other cases, since there were not at any time wanting numerous and accomplished professors of these arts? A wide, solid, and permanent reputation, such as crowned the career of Forrest, is obtained only by substantial merit of some kind. The price paid is commensurate with the value received.
