CHAPTER VI. LIFE IN NEW ORLEANS.—CRITICAL PERIOD OF EXPERIENCE.
Forrest made his first appearance in New Orleans, at the American Theatre, as Jaffier in Venice Preserved, February 4th, 1824, Caldwell sustaining the part of Pierre. His individuality and his acting immediately made a strong impression on the general audience, and drew towards him the fervent personal interest of those particular individuals, both men and women, whose qualities of character caused them to feel a vivid curiosity and sympathy for highly-marked and expressive specimens of human nature. Accordingly, he very soon had many intimate friends among both sexes,—friends whose pronounced types of being and impassioned styles of life wrought assimilatingly upon him in that frank, lusty, and plastic period of his experience.
New Orleans at that time was a city of about thirty thousand inhabitants. It was the chief commercial and social capital of the South, and thoroughly conscious of its pre-eminence. On its small but concentrated scale it was the gayest, most Parisian city in the country. The Spanish and French blood of the original settlers of Louisiana and of their early followers was largely represented in its leading families. Then and there the chivalry of the slave-holding South, in all its patrician characteristics both of virtue and of vice, was at the acme of its glory. The types of men were unquestionably the most varied and sharply defined and pushed to the greatest extremes of development, the freedom and beauty of the women the most intoxicating and dangerous, the social life the most voluptuous, passionate, and reckless, of those of any city in the United States. Wealth was great, easily found, carelessly lost, leisure ample, pride intense, living luxurious, manly sports and exercises in physical training assiduously cultivated, gambling common, duelling and every form of desperate personal conflict constant, the code of man
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ners alternately bewitching in courtesy and terrible in ferocity. From every part of the State the gentlemen planters loved to congregate in New Orleans, perfect masters of their limbs, their faculties, their weapons, and their horses, not knowing fear or embarrassment, living their thoughts and passions spontaneously out, their tall forms aflush with bold sensibility, the rich strength and grace of the thoroughbred pointing their elastic motions. And in the parlor, the ball-room, at fashionable resorts, on the promenades, the women were the peers of the men in their intensity of being, their fondness of adventure, their courage, brilliance, and piquancy. The crossing of tropical bloods, the long lineage of aristocratic habitudes of ardent indulgence and leisurely culture, had produced a class of women famed throughout the land for the symmetry of their forms, the visible music of their movements, the dreamy softness of their voices, and the bewildering charm of their eyes, swimming seas of languor and fire. Many an imaginative and burning nature asked no other paradise than the arms of these Creole houris. But, unfortunately, the reverse of being immortal, its dissolving views melted into degradation and vanished in death, too often with accompaniments of frantic jealousy, crime, and horror.
These men and these women, naturally enough, were fascinating to the adolescent actor, whose faculties were all aglow with ambition to excel, whose curiosity was on edge in every direction to know the contents of the living world which it was his profession to portray, and whose passions were just breaking from their fullest bud. Nor was he any less fascinating to them. His bluff courage, his young formative docility and eagerness, his smiling openness of face and bearing, so sadly changed in later years, and the nameless badge of personal distinction and original force he bore on his front and in his accent, drew the men to make much of him. So the outlines of his slender but sinewy and breathing form with the muscles so superbly defined, the deep and mellow tones of his ringing voice in which the clang-tints of the whole organism were audible, his large and dark-brown eyes so clearly set and brilliant, his fresh blood teeming over him in vital revelation at each vehement mood, and the speaking truthfulness of his portrayals of thought and sentiment in character, magnetized the women, secured him many a flattering smile
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and note and flower, and led to no slight experience in amours, which put their permanent stamp upon his inner being, and often rose out of the vistas of memory in pictures when he shut his eyes and mused in his lonely old age. A biography of Forrest which omitted these things would be like a description of the Saint Lawrence without an allusion to Niagara.
In his opening manhood, before repeated experiences of injustice, slander, and treachery had in any degree soured and closed his soul, Forrest had a heart as much formed for friendship as for love. He was full of ingenuous life, sportive, affectionate, every way most companionable. His friendships were fervent and faithfully cherished. The disappointments, the revulsions of feeling, and the results on his final character, we shall see in the later stages of this biography.
Caldwell felt a strong interest in the young actor, and was of service to him outside of the theatre as well as within it. He introduced him to a higher order of society with more aristocratic manners and refined accomplishments than he had been accustomed to, thus affording him an opportunity, had he been so minded, to make his upward way socially not less than professionally. As a keen observer and a quick learner, he did not fail to reap some valuable fruits from the advantages thus afforded him. But his forte lay not in this direction. He had then, and always afterwards, a deep distaste to all that is called fashionable society. He was insuperably democratic in his very bones. For the elaborate forms and conventionalities of the polite world he had a rooted repugnance. He wanted to be free and downright in honest speech and demeanor, making his outer manifestations correspond exactly with his inner states. He could not bear, in accordance with the conventions of the best society, to pretend to be inferior where he felt himself superior, to affect to be interested when he was bored, to express insincere nothings to give pleasure, and carefully hide his most earnest thoughts and feelings lest they should give pain. This art of polished intercourse—quite necessary in our world, and often as artistic and useful as it is artificial and compromising—he vehemently disliked and was never an adept in. Instead of gracefully appropriating it for its gracious uses while spurning its evils, he impatiently rebelled against it, stigmatizing it in blunt phrase as a
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cursed hypocrisy. This defect in him it is needful to recognize as one of the keys to his character and career. His athletic, bluff nature, true and generous, lacked the flexible suavity of the spirituelle qualities, a lack which prevented his universal success, causing him to jar on persons of squeamish disposition or fastidious taste. Until a long series of revulsive experiences had trained him to be silent and reticent, his impulsive frankness and passionate love of freedom made it extremely irksome and chafing to him purposely to adapt himself to others at the expense of his own honest emotions. He never could be in the slightest degree a courtier or a tuft-hunter, but—like Edmund Kean, and many another man of genius whose abounding and impetuous soul loved nature and truth in their spontaneous forms more than any of the gilded substitutes for them—he ever preferred to be with those in whose presence he could act himself out just as he was and just as he felt. His playing in the theatre, instead of fitting, by reaction unfitted him for playing in society. If, on the stage, he consented to seem, all the more, off from it, he desired to be. The basis of this veritable self-assertion was his vigorous manliness; and so far it was creditable to him. But the extravagance to which he carried it partook of pride and wilfulness, and was an error and a fault. The code of fashion, tyrannical and imperfect as it is, has uses without which society could scarcely get on. It cannot be neglected with impunity. Forrest was no exception, but paid the penalty for his independence in the neglect with which Fashion, as such, always treated him.
Among the foibles which especially beset the histrionic profession are vanity, greed of applause, jealousy, invidious rivalry. Manager Caldwell was not free from these weaknesses. His pride as a player was as strong as his prudential regard for the interests of his theatre. No actor in the South had been a greater favorite, and no member of his company had ever rivalled him. He had carefully awakened an interest in advance for his protégé, saying to his friends that he had engaged in Kentucky a young man named Edwin Forrest, who had high talent, was industrious, resolved to rise to the top of the profession, and who, he was sure, would greatly please the New Orleans public. But when the pupil made such rapid progress and gained such loud plaudits that the master felt himself in danger of being
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eclipsed, he had recourse to an artifice not uncommon, though certainly somewhat ungenerous. He reserved the best parts for himself, and cast his rising competitor in inferior or repulsive characters, most often in the part of an old man. Forrest saw the design and inwardly resented it, though he said nothing. He followed the wise course of trying to make the best he could of the part assigned him. He made a careful study of the peculiarities of age, in feature, in gait, in voice. He would often sit in places of public resort and critically watch every old man who came in or went out. Many a time when he had chanced to discover some striking example of power and dignity or of weakness and decrepitude in an old man he would follow him in the street and mentally imitate him, reproducing and fixing what he saw. In this way he soon attained such skill that his representations of these parts won him as much approval as he had ever received for the more congenial and showy rôles to which he had been accustomed.
Caldwell was fond of society, cared little for individuals, and, as some thought, held his theatrical vocation subsidiary to personal ends. The superficialities and insincerities of fashion did not distress him. Forrest had an aversion to society, a passion for individuals, and an intense ambition to excel in his art, which he loved for itself. It was quite natural that the friendship of men so unlike, to say nothing of their great disparity in years, should be streaked with coolnesses and gradually cease. It was not long in dying, though they continued to get along together comfortably, with some trifling exceptions, until their bond was suddenly ruptured by an irritating event which will be narrated on a succeeding page.
But it was outside of the circle of the theatrical company with which he was associated in New Orleans that Forrest found the most rich and decisive influences, at the same time developing his organism, moulding his character, and enhancing his dramatic powers. These influences were exerted on him chiefly through the five closest friends he had in the city, five men intimately grouped, to be the confidant of one of whom was to be the confidant of all, men of the most remarkable force and finish of personality each in his own kind, each of them an intense type of the class he represented. They were all men of great personal
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beauty and strength, tall, supple, lithe, absolutely ignorant of fear, chivalrous in disposition, loose in habits, kind and loving in their native moods, but relentless and terrible in their wrath. Some insight into the sympathetic assimilation of these superb and fearful persons upon Forrest, and some tracing of the effect on his nature and on his art of the cycle of experience which they revealed to him partly by description, partly by personal introduction, are essential to an understanding of his great career.
Those who are often and long together influence one another more than is usually supposed. Their giving and taking of opinions, prejudices, habits, and even organic peculiarities, are far beyond their own conscious purpose or recognition. Not unfrequently intimate associates obviously grow like one another in look, action, voice, passion, type of character, quality of temper, style of manners, and mode of life. This is confessedly matter of observation; but the law of its operation or the importance of the results very few understand. It is the sympathetic impartation and reproduction, between two or more parties, of inner states through outer signs; and, as to noble qualities, it is proportioned in degree to the docility of the persons, combined with their richness of organization. Those who have plastic nervous systems copiously furnished with force, and who are eager to improve, take possession of one another's knowledge and accomplishments with marvellous celerity. By intuition and instinct they seem to reflect their contents and transmit their habitudes with mutual appropriation. In this unpurposed but saturating school of real life what the superior knows and does passes into the sympathetic observer by a sort of contagion. Those whose nerves are capable of the same kinds and rates of vibration play into each other and are attuned together, as the sounding string of one musical instrument propagates its pulses through the air and awakens a harmonic sound in the corresponding string of another instrument. This is the scientific basis of what is loosely called human magnetism, and it is a factor of incomparable import in the problem of human life.
The one of Forrest's New Orleans friends first to be named is James Bowie, inventor and unrivalled wielder of that terrible weapon for hand-to-hand fights named from him the bowie-knife. He was a member of the aristocratic class of the South, planter,
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gentleman, traveller, adventurer, sweet-spoken, soft-mannered, poetic, and chivalrous, and possessed of a strength and a courage, a cool audacity and an untamable will, which seemed, when compared with any ordinary standard, superhuman. These qualities in a hundred conflicts never failed to bring him off conqueror. In heart, when not roused by some sinister influence, he was as open as a child and as loving as a woman. In soul high-strung, rich and free, in physical condition like a racing thoroughbred or a pugilist ready for the ring, an eloquent talker, thoroughly acquainted with the world from his point of view, he was a charming associate for those of such tastes, equally fascinating to friends and formidable to foes. As a personal competitor, taken nakedly front to front, few more ominous and magnificent specimens of man have walked on this continent.
His favorite knife, used by him awfully in many an awful fray, he presented as a token of his love to Forrest, who carefully preserved it among his treasured keepsakes. It was a long and ugly thing, clustering with fearful associations in its very look; plain and cheap for real work, utterly unadorned, but the blade exquisitely tempered so as not to bend or break too easily, and the handle corrugated with braids of steel, that it might not slip when the hand got bloody. Journeying in a stage-coach, in cold weather, after stopping for a change of horses a huge swaggering fellow usurped a seat belonging to an invalid lady, leaving her to ride on the outside. In vain the lady expostulated with him; in vain several others tried to persuade him to give up the place to her. At last a man who sat in front of the offender, so muffled and curled up in a great cloak that he looked very small, dropped the cloak down his shoulders, took his watch in his left hand, lifted a knife in his right, and, straightening himself up slowly till it seemed as if his head was going through the top of the coach, planted his unmoving eyes full on those of the intruder, and said, in a perfectly soft and level tone which gave the words redoubled power, "Sir, if within two minutes you are not out of that seat, by the living God I will cut your ears off!" The man paused a few seconds to take in the situation. He then cried, "Driver, let me out! I won't ride with such a set of damned murderers!" That was Bowie with his knife. Fearful, yet not without something admirable. Another anecdote of him
