The common mass of the community may not be able to judge of the supreme niceties of merit in the different provinces of art, to appreciate the finest qualities and strokes of genius, and award their plaudits and laurels with that exact justice which will stand as the impartial verdict of posterity. In these respects their decisions are often as erroneous as they are careless and fickle; and competent judges, trained in critical knowledge, skilled by long experience to detect the minutest shades of truth and falsehood, beauty and ugliness, desert and blameworthiness, will not hesitate to overrule the passing partialities of the contemporary crowd, and rectify their errors for the record of history. But the multitude are abundantly able—none more so—to respond with admiring interest to the impression of original power, recognize the broad outlines of a sublime and fiery soul, thrill under the general signs of genius, and pay deserved tribute to popular exhibitions of skill. And when this great coveted democratic tribute has been given to a public servant, in an unprecedented degree, for half a century, throughout the whole extent of a nation covering eight millions of square miles and including more than thirty millions of inhabitants, securing him a professional income of from twenty to forty thousand dollars a season, and filling three dozen folio volumes with newspaper and magazine cuttings composed of biographic sketches of him and critical notices of his performances,—to undertake to set aside the overwhelming verdict, as deceived and vulgar, is both idle and presumptuous. To account for a career like that of Edwin Forrest it is necessary to admit that he must have embodied force, intellect, passion, culture, and perseverance in a very uncommon degree. And in perceiving and honoring the general evidences of this the great average of the people are better judges, fairer critics, than any special classes or cliques can be; because the former are free from the finical likes and dislikes, the local whims
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and biases, the envy and squeamishness which prejudice the feelings and corrupt the judgments of the latter.
The historic place and power of Forrest are of themselves one good reason why his life should be fully and fairly written while all the data are within reach. For it can hardly be a matter of doubt that the theatre is destined in future ages to have in this country a rank and a space assigned to it in the education and entertainment of the public such as it has not yet known. The interest in types of human nature, in modes of human life, in all the marvels of the inner world of the soul, will increase with that popular leisure and culture which the multiplication of labor-saving machinery promises to carry to an unknown pitch; and as fast as this interest grows, the estimate of the drama will ascend as the best school for the living illustration of the experience of man. It is not improbable that the scholars and critics of America a hundred or two hundred years hence will be looking back and laboring with a zeal we little dream of now to recover the beginnings of our national stage as seen in its first representatives. For then the theatre, in its splendid public examples and in its innumerable domestic reduplications, will be regarded as the unrivalled educational mirror of humanity.
Of no American actor has there yet been written a biography worthy of the name; though scarcely any other sphere of life is so crowded with adventure, with romance, with every kind of affecting incident, and with striking moral lessons. The theatre is a concentrated nation in itself. It is a moving and illuminated epitome of mankind. It is a condensed and living picture of the ideal world within the real world. It has its old man, its old woman, its king and queen, its fop, buffoon, and drudge, its youth, its chambermaid, its child, its fine lady, its hero, its walking gentleman, its villain,—in short, its possible patterns of every style of character and life. On the surface of that little mimic world play in miniature reflection all the jealousies and ambitions, hopes and fears, joys and sorrows, plots and counterplots, of the huge actual world roaring without. A clear portrayal of this from the interior, or even a constant suggestion of it in connection with the history of one of its representatives, must be full of interest and edification.
It is very singular, and lamentable too, that while there are
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hundreds of admirable and celebrated biographies of kings, generals, statesmen, artists, inventors, merchants, authors, there is said not to exist a single life of an actor which is a recognized classic, a work combining standard value and popular charm. This is especially strange when we recollect that the genius of the player has an incomparable claim for literary preservation, because the glorious monuments of the deeds of the others remain for the contemplation of posterity, but the achievements of the actor pass away with himself in a fading tradition. Architect, sculptor, painter, poet, composer, legislator, bequeath their works as a posthumous life. The tragedian has no chance of this sort unless the features and accents of the great characters he created are photographed in breathing description on the pages that record his triumphs and make him live forever, who otherwise would soon become a bodiless and inaudible echo.
The highest value and service of histrionic genius consist herein; that the magical power of its performances evokes in the souls of those who throng to gaze on them the noblest thoughts and sentiments in a degree superior to that in which they experience them in ordinary life. They thus feel themselves exalted to a grander pitch than their native one. If the great impersonations of Forrest can in a permanent biography be pictured adequately in the colors of reality, each copy of the book will perpetuate a reflex Forrest to repeat in literature on succeeding generations what he did so effectively in life on his contemporaries; namely, strike the elemental chords of human nature till they vibrate with intense sympathy to sublimer degrees than their own of the great virtues of manly sincerity, heroism, honor, domestic love, friendship, patriotism, and liberty, which he illustrated in his chief parts.
Furthermore, every actor who excelling in his art maintains a high character and bearing, and wins a proud social position and fortune, exerts an effective influence in removing the traditional odium or suspicion from his class, and thus confers a benefit on all who are hereafter to be members of it. His example deserves to be lifted into general notice. In the case of Forrest this consideration received an unprecedented emphasis from the fact of his devoting the vast sum of money amassed in his laborious lifetime to the endowment of a home for aged and dependent
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members of his profession, and of a school for the public teaching of the dramatic art.
Besides, he was a man of extraordinary strength and originality of character, an imperious, self-defending personality, living steadfastly at first hand from his own impulses, perceptions, and purposes, not shiftily in faded reflections of the opinions and wishes of other people at the second or third remove. He was a standing refutation of the common prejudice against actors, that simulating so many fictitious traits they gradually cease to have genuine ones of their own, and become mere lay figures ready for every chance dress. If any man ever was true to his own fixed type, Forrest was. The study of such a character is always attractive and strengthening, a valuable tonic for more dependent and aimless natures.
He lived a varied, wide, and profound life. He travelled extensively, mingled with all sorts of people, the noble and the base, the high and the low, observed keenly, reflected much, was exposed to almost every sort of trial, and assimilated into his experience the principal secrets of human nature. The moral substance of the world passed into his soul, and the great lessons of human destiny were epitomized there. He knew the inebriating sweetness of popular applause, and the bitter revulsions consequent on its change into public disfavor and censure. He wore the honors, suffered the penalties, and proved both the solidity and the hollowness of fame on its various levels, from the wild idolatry of ignorant throngs to the admiring friendship of gifted and refined spirits. There are swarms of men of dry and contracted souls, and of a poor, wearisome monotony of conventional habits, with no spiritual saliency or relish, no free appropriation of the treasures of the world, whose lives if written would have about as much dignity and interest as the life of a dorbug or a bat. But when a man's faculties are expansive, and have embraced, in a fresh, impulsive way, a great range of experiences, the story is worth telling, and, if truly told, will not fail to yield matter for profitable meditation.
In addition, Forrest always showed himself a man of sterling integrity, inflexible truth, whose word was as good as his bond, who toiled in the open ways of self-denial and industry to build his name and position. He bribed no one to write him up,
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bought no one from writing him down, stooped to no startling eccentricities or tricks to get himself talked about, arranged no conspiracies to push his own claims or hold others back, but by manly resolution, study, and effort paid the fair price for all he won, triumphantly resisting those insidious lures of indolence, dissipation, and improvidence so incident to a theatrical career, and steadily raising himself to the summit of his difficult profession, where he sat in assured mastery for two generations. There was a native grandeur about him which attracted admiring attention wherever he moved.
The life of one who for so long a time and in so great a degree enjoyed the favor of his countrymen may be said to belong to the public. The man who has been watched with such eagerness in the fictitious characters of the stage kindles a desire to see him truly in his own. It is proper that the story should be told for the gratification of the natural curiosity of the people, as well as for the sake of the numerous lessons it must inculcate. The lesson of an adventurous and ascending career surmounting severe hardships and obstacles,—the lesson of a varied, fresh, full, racy, and idiosyncratic experience,—the lesson of an extraordinary knowledge of the world, transmuting into consciousness the moral substance of the sphere of humanity,—the lesson of self-respect and force of character resisting the strongest temptations to fatal indulgence,—the lesson of strong faults and errors, not resisted or concealed, but unhappily yielded to, and the bearing of their unavoidable penalties,—the lesson of resolute devotion to physical training developing a frail and feeble child into a man of herculean frame and endurance,—the lesson of talent and ambition patiently employing the means of artistic mental improvement by independent application to truth and nature,—the lesson of a brilliant fortune and position bravely won and maintained,—these and other lessons, besides all those numerous and highly important ones which the theatrical world and the dramatic art in themselves present for the instruction of mankind, have not often been more effectively taught than they may be from the life of Edwin Forrest.
The subject-matter of the drama, understood in its full dignity, is nothing less than the science of human nature and the art of commanding its manifestations. The exemplification of this in the
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theatre in our country, it is believed, will hereafter be endowed with a personal instructiveness and a social influence greater than it has ever had anywhere else. For the moral essence and interest of representative playing on the stage ultimately reside in the contrasts between the varieties of reality and ideality in the characters and lives of human beings. All spiritual import centres in the conflict and reconciliation of actuals and ideals. In this point of view the biography of the principal American as yet identified with the histrionic profession assumes a grave importance for Americans. Such a narrative will afford opportunity to show what are the elements of good and bad acting both in earnest and in fiction; to contrast the folly of living to gain applause with the dignity of living to achieve merit; to exhibit the valuable uses of competent criticism, the frequency and ridiculous arrogance of ignorant and prejudiced criticism; to expose the mean and malignant artifices of envy, jealousy, and ignoble rivalry. It will, in a word, give occasion for illustrating the true ideal of life, the harmonious fruition of the full richness of human nature, with instances of approaches to it and of departures from it. To get behind the scenes of the dramatic art is to get behind the scenes of the sources of power, the arts of sway, the workings of vice and virtue, the deepest secrets of the historic world.
In the distinguishing peculiarities of his structure and strain Edwin Forrest was one of those extraordinary men who seem to spring up rarely here and there, as if without ancestors, direct from some original mould of nature, and constitute a breed apart by themselves. Alexander, Cæsar, Demosthenes, Mirabeau, Chatham, Napoleon, draw their volitions from such an unsounded reservoir of power, have such latent resources of intuition, can strike such all-staggering blows, that common men, appalled before their mysteriousness, instinctively revere and obey. In the primeval time such men loomed with the overshadowing port of deities and were worshipped as avatars from a higher world. One of this class of men has, if we may use the figure, a sphere so dense and vast that the lighter and lesser spheres of those around him give way on contact with his firmer and weightier gravitation. Wherever he goes he is treated as a natural king. He carries his royal credentials in the intrinsic rank of his organism. There is in his nervous system, resulting from the free
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connection and uninterrupted interplay of all its parts, a centralized unity, a slowly swaying equilibrium, which fills him with the sense of a saturating drench of power. His consciousness seems to float on his surcharged ganglia in an intoxicating dreaminess of balanced force, which, by the transcendent fearlessness and endurance it imparts, lifts him out of the category of common men. The dynamic charge in his nervous centres is so deep and intense that it produces a chronic exaltation above fear into complacency, and raises him towards the eternal ether, among the topmost heads of our race. Each of these men in his turn draws from his admiring votaries the frequent sigh of regret that nature made but one such and then broke the die. This high gift, this unimpartable superiority, is a secret safely veiled from vulgar eyes. Fine spirits recognize its occult signals in the pervasive rhythm of the spinal cord, the steadiness of the eye, the enormous potency of function, the willowy massiveness of bearing, and a certain mystic languor whose sleeping surface can with swift and equal ease emit the soft gleams of love to delight or flash the forked bolts of terror to destroy. This gift, as terrible as charming, varies with the temperament and habits of its possessor. In Coleridge its profuse electricity was steeped in metaphysical poppy and mandragora. In our American Samuel Adams it was gathered in a battery that discharged the most formidable shocks of revolutionary eloquence. In Sargent S. Prentiss, one of the most imperial personalities this continent has known, it stood at a great height, but his body was too much for his brain, and, as in a thousand other melancholy examples of splendid genius ruined, the authentic divinity continually gave way to its maudlin counterfeit. Where the spell of this supernal inspiration has been inbreathed, unless it be accompanied by noble employment and gratified affection, either the mind topples into delirium and imbecility, or the temptation to drunkenness is irresistible. It can know none of the intermediate courses of mediocrity, but must still touch some extreme; and one of the five words, ambition, love, saintliness, madness, or idiocy, covers the secret history and close of genius on the earth.
