"Threescore years and two have now elapsed since our fathers ventured on the grand experiment of freedom. The nations of the earth heard with wonder the startling principle they asserted, and watched the progress of their enterprise with doubt and apprehension. The heart of the political philanthropist throbbed with anxiety for the result; the down-trodden victims of oppression scarce dared to lift their eyes in hope of a successful termination, while they knew that failure would more strongly rivet their chains; and the despots of the Old World, from their 'bad eminences,' gloomily looked on, aghast with rage and terror, and felt that a blow had been struck which loosened the foundation of their thrones.
"The event illustrates what ample cause there was for the prophetic tremors which thrilled to the soul of arbitrary power. Time has stamped the attestation of its signet on the success of the experiment, and the fabric then erected now stands on the strong basis of established truth, the mark and model of the world. The vicissitudes of threescore years, while they have shaken to the centre the artificial foundations of other governments, have but demonstrated the solidity of the simple and natural structure of democratic freedom. The lapse of time, while it dims the light of false systems, has continually aug
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mented the brightness of that which glows with the inherent and eternal lustre of reason and justice. New stars, from year to year, emerging with perfect radiance in the western horizon, have increased the benignant splendor of that constellation which now shines the political guiding light of the world.
"How grand in their simplicity are the elementary propositions on which our edifice of freedom is erected! A few brief, self-evident axioms furnish the enduring basis of political institutions which harmoniously accomplish all the legitimate purposes of government to fifteen millions of people. The natural equality of man; the right of a majority to govern; their duty so to govern as to preserve inviolate the sacred obligations of equal justice, with no end in view but the protection of life, property, and social order, leaving opinion free as the wind which bloweth where it listeth: these are the plain, eternal principles on which our fathers reared that temple of true liberty beneath whose dome their children congregate this day to pour out their hearts in gratitude for the precious legacy. Yes! on the everlasting rock of truth the shrine is founded where we worship freedom; and
'When the sweeping storm of time
Has sung its death-dirge o'er the ruined fanes
And broken altars of the mighty fiend
Whose name usurps her honors, and the blood,
Through centuries clotted there, has floated down
The tainted flood of ages,'—
that shrine shall stand, unshaken by the beating surge of change, and only washed to purer whiteness by the deluge that overwhelms all other political fabrics.
"To the genius of Bacon the world is indebted for emancipating philosophy from the subtleties of the schoolmen, and placing her securely on the firm basis of ascertained elementary truth, thence to soar the loftiest flights on the unfailing pinions of induction and analogy. To the genius of Jefferson—to the comprehensive reach and fervid patriotism of his mind—we owe a more momentous obligation. What Bacon did for natural science, Jefferson did for political morals, that important branch of ethics which most directly affects the happiness of all mankind. He snatched the art of government from the hands that had enveloped it in sophisms and mysteries that it might be made an instrument to
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oppress the many for the advantage of the few. He stripped it of the jargon by which the human mind had been deluded into blind veneration for kings as the immediate vicegerents of God on earth; and proclaimed in words of eloquent truth, which thrilled conviction to every heart, those eternal self-evident first principles of justice and reason on which alone the fabric of government should be reared. He taught those 'truths of power in words immortal' you have this day heard; words which bear the spirit of great deeds; words which have sounded the death-dirge of tyranny to the remotest corners of the earth; which have roused a sense of right, a hatred of oppression, an intense yearning for democratic liberty, in myriads of myriads of human hearts; and which, reverberating through time like thunder through the sky, will,
'in the distance far away,
Wake the slumbering ages.'
"To Jefferson belongs exclusively and forever the high renown of having framed the glorious charter of American liberty. This was the grandest experiment ever undertaken in the history of man. But they that entered upon it were not afraid of new experiments, if founded on the immutable principles of right and approved by the sober convictions of reason. There were not wanting then, indeed, as there are not wanting now, pale counsellors to fear, who would have withheld them from the course they were pursuing, because it tended in a direction hitherto untrod. But they were not to be deterred by the shadowy doubts and timid suggestions of craven spirits, content to be lashed forever round the same circle of miserable expedients, perpetually trying anew the exploded shifts which had always proved lamentably inadequate before. To such men the very name of experiment is a sound of horror. It is a spell which conjures up gorgons, hydras, and chimeras dire. They seem not to know that all that is valuable in life—that the acquisitions of learning, the discoveries of science, and the refinements of art—are the result of experiment. It was experiment that bestowed on Cadmus those keys of knowledge with which we unlock the treasure-houses of immortal mind. It was experiment that taught Bacon the futility of the Grecian philosophy, and led him to that heaven-scaling method of investigation and analysis on which science
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has safely climbed to the proud eminence where now she sits, dispensing her blessings on mankind. It was experiment that lifted Newton above the clouds and darkness of this visible diurnal sphere, enabling him to explore the sublime mechanism of the stars and weigh the planets in their eternal rounds. It was experiment that nerved the hand of Franklin to snatch the thunder from the armory of heaven. It was experiment that gave this hemisphere to the world. It was experiment that gave this continent to freedom.
CHAPTER XIII.
SECOND PROFESSIONAL TOUR IN GREAT BRITAIN, AND ITS
CONSEQUENCES.—THE MACREADY CONTROVERSY AND RIOT.
Few persons have any adequate idea of the prevalence, the force, the subtile windings of envy and jealousy among men, especially among those classes into whose life the principle of rivalry directly enters. The more patiently and profoundly any one studies the workings of these passions in his own soul, the larger will be his estimate of the part they play in society. And then, if his experience be such as to admit him to the secrets behind the scenes of social life, revealing to him the selfish collusions, plots, bribes, and wire-pullings concealed beneath the conventional appearances of openness and fair-play, his allowance for the operation of sinister forms of self-love will receive another important enlargement. No other class is so keenly beset by these malign suspicions and grudges, these base motives to depreciate and supplant one another, as those who are competitors for public admiration and applause. There are obvious reasons for this fact, and the fact itself is notorious and unquestionable. The annals of the stage in all its departments, tragic, comic, operatic, teem and reek with the animosities and cabals of those who have seemed to dislike one another in even proportion as they were favorites of the public. Forrest, with all his faults, was remarkably free from this mean and odious vice of professional envy. He never sought by hidden means or dishonorable arts of any kind either to gain laurels for himself or to tarnish or tear off the laurels of others. He was always ready to applaud merit in another, and always rejoiced generously to have his fellow-actors generously praised when they deserved it. When on the stage, he did not strive to monopolize everything, and add greatness and lustre to his own part by belittling and darkening the parts of others. He was not that kind of man. He had too
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strong a sense of justice, too much pride and too much sympathy, to be capable of such action. The form his self-love took when excited in hostility was an angry resentment of injustice. The injustice might be fancied sometimes, but it was that which he identified with the offender, and hated accordingly. And his wrath manifested itself not in secret or overt measures of injury, not in a silent malignity circulating poisonously in the heart and brain, but in frank and passionate expression on the spot, in hot gestures, flashes of face, and strokes of voice. He vented his indignation extravagantly, like Boythorn, but elaborated no methods of doing harm, and was incapable, in his haughty self-respect, of purchasing a critic or consciously slandering a rival.
Garrick had such a prurient vanity, so morbid a dread of censure and love of praise, that he not only persuaded hostile critics not to attack him and friendly ones to write him up, but also freely used his own skilful pen for the same purpose. He wrote anonymous feeble condemnations of his own acting, and then replied to them anonymously with convincing force, thus inflaming the public interest. Voltaire is well known to have done the same thing. But these were both men of vanity, not of pride. Vanity hates rivals, and is monopolizing and revengeful, and a mother of all meannesses. Pride furiously resents attacks on itself, but does not spontaneously attack others. It asks but freedom and a fair field. Deny these, and it grows dangerous. When any one assailed or undertook to lower Daniel Webster, he was met with the most imperious repulse and transcendent scorn. The kindling wrath of the haughty giant was terrible. But the mere supposition that he could ever have stooped to offer a bribe to any one, or to curry favor of any one, is absurd. Forrest was a man of the same mould. The anger of such natures at any meddlesome attempt to disparage them has this moral ground, namely, it is their aroused instinct of spiritual self-preservation. The man of vulgar inferiority, in his coarse and complacent stolidity, cares little for the estimates others put on him. But the man conscious of a great superiority—a Webster or a Forrest—is keenly alive to whatever threatens it. His sphere of mental life enormously surpasses his sphere of physical life. The elemental rhythm of his being, which marks the key-note of his
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constitution and destiny, has a more massive and sensitive swing in him than in average persons, and his feelings are intensely quick to drive back every hostile or demeaning valuation ideally shrivelling and lowering his rank. The consciousness of such a man is so vital and intelligent that it intuitively reports to him every sneer, derogatory judgment, or insulting look, as something intended to compress and hamper his being of its full volume and freedom of function. Thus Forrest could not meekly submit to be undervalued or snubbed; but he had no natural impulse to undervalue or snub others, or to imagine that they stood in his way and must be thrust aside.
The distinguished English actor, William Charles Macready, with whom circumstances brought the American into a professional rivalry which deepened into bitter enmity, was a man in every respect of a very different type. All his life he had an extreme distaste and a moral aversion to his profession; yet, by dint of incessant intellectual and mechanical drill, he placed himself for a term of years at its head in Great Britain. He was of vanity and irritability and egotistic exactingness all compact, insanely sensitive to neglect and censure, greedily avid of notice and admiration. He seemed scarcely to live in the direct goals of life for their own sakes, but to be absorbed in their secondary reflections in his own self-consciousness and in his imaginations of the opinions of other people concerning him and his affairs. A man of a morbidly introspective habit, a discontented observer, a spiritual dyspeptic, he coveted social preferment and shrank from the plebeian crowd,—
"And 'twas known
He sickened at all triumphs not his own."
This severe estimate is unwillingly recorded, but it is amply justified by his own memoirs of himself, posthumously published under the editorship of his literary executor. His diary so abounds in confessions and instances of bad temper, vanity, arrogance, angry jealousy, and rankling envy, that it serves as a pillory in which he exhibits himself as a candidate for contempt. In an article on "Macready's Reminiscences," the "Quarterly Review" (English) says, "Actors have an evil reputation for egotism and jealousy. No one ever lay more heavily under this
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imputation than Mr. Macready while on the stage. We have heard the greatest comedian of his time say of him, 'Macready never could see any merit in any actor in his own line until he was either dead or off the stage.' The indictment was sweeping, but this book almost bears it out. In his own words, the echo of applause, unless given to himself, fills him 'with envious and vindictive feelings.' He abhors and despises his own profession. While still on the stage he says, 'It is an unhappy life. We start at every shadow of an actor, living in constant dread of being ousted from popularity by some new favorite.' After leaving the stage he says, 'I can now look my fellow-men, whatever their station, in the face and assert my equality.' And these things he says in the face of the fact that he owed all his consequence to his success as an actor."
Macready had played a successful series of engagements in the United States in 1843. He was well received, much praised, and carried home a handsome sum, though the profit was mostly his own, since the managers generally made little, and many of them actually lost by him. He was not popular with the multitude, but was favored by the selecter portion of the public. His enjoyment, too, of the eulogies written on his acting was a good deal dashed by the censure and detraction in which some of the writers for the press indulged. His social success, however, was unalloyed. He and Forrest up to this time were on good terms, terms of genuine kindness, though any strong friendship was out of the question between natures so incompatible. Forrest had honorably refused urgent invitations from several managers of theatres in different cities to play for them at the time Macready was acting in rival houses. The two or three weeks of his engagement in New York Macready spent in the house of Forrest, who received a very cordial letter of thanks from Mrs. Macready, in London, in acknowledgment of his generous attentions and hospitality to her absent husband.
