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or masked in several ways. First, the peculiarities of the two lines of transmitted ancestry, from father and from mother, may in their union neutralize each other, or supplement each other, or exaggerate each other, or combine to form new traits. Secondly, they may be modified by the reaction of the original personality of the new being, and also by the reaction of the new conditions in which he is placed. Still, the law is there, and works. It is at once the fixed fatality of nature and the free voice of God.
Edwin Forrest was fortunate in the national bequests of brain and blood or structural fitnesses and tendencies which he received from his fatherland and from his motherland. The distinctive national traits of the Scottish and of the German character, regarded on the favorable side, were signally exemplified in him. The traits of the former are courage, acuteness, thrift, tenacity, clannishness, and patriotism; of the latter, reasoning intelligence, poetic sentiment, honesty, personal freedom, capacity for systematic drill, and open sense of humanity. These two lines of prudential virtue and expansive sympathy were marked in his career. The attributes of weakness or vice that belonged to him were rather human than national. So the Caledonian and Teutonic currents that met in his American veins were an inheritance of goodness and strength.
Nor was he less fortunate in the bequeathal of strictly personal qualities from his individual parents. Those conditions of bodily and mental life, the offshoot of the conjoined being of father and mother, imprinted and inwoven and ever operative in all the globules of his blood and all the sources of his volition, were far above the average both in the physical power and in the moral rank they gave. His father was a tall, straight, sinewy man, who lived to his sixty-second year a life of hardship and care, without the aid of any particular knowledge of the laws of health. His mother was of an uncommonly strong, well-balanced, and healthy constitution, who bore seven children, worked hard, saw much trouble, but lived in equanimity to her seventy-fifth year. From the paternal side no special tendency to any disease is traceable; on the maternal side, only, through the grandfather, who was an inveterate imbiber of claret, that germ of the gout which ripened to such terrible mischief for him. In intellectual, moral, and religious endowments and habits, both parents were
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of a superior order, remarked by all who knew them for sound sense, sterling virtue, unwearied industry, devout spirit and carriage. The good, strong, consecrated stock, both national and personal, they gave their boy, alike by generative transmission, by example, and by precept, was of inexpressible service to him. He never forgot it or lost it. It stood him in good stead in a thousand trying hours. Amidst the constant and intense temptations of his exposed professional life, it gave him superb victories over the worst of those vices to which hundreds of his fellows succumbed in disgraceful discomfiture and untimely death. It is true he yielded to follies and sins,—as, under such exposures, who would not?—but his sense of honor and his memory of his mother kept him from doing anything which would destroy his self-respect and give him a bad conscience. This inestimable boon he owed to the moral fibre of his birth and early training.
The thoughtful reader will not deem that the writer is making too much of these preliminary matters. Besides their intrinsic interest and value, they are vitally necessary for the full understanding of much that is to follow. In the formation of the character and the shaping of the career of any man the circumstance of supremest power is the ancestral spirits which report themselves in him from the past, and the organific influences of blood and nerve brought to bear on him in the mystic world of the womb previous to his entrance into this breathing theatre of humanity. The ignorance and the squeamishness prevalent in regard to the subject of the best raising of children are the causes of indescribable evils ramifying in all directions. It has been tabooed from the province of public study and teaching, although no other matter presents such pressing and sacred claims on universal attention. It cannot always continue to be so neglected or forced into the dark. The young giant, Social Science, so rapidly growing, will soon insist on the thorough investigation of it, and on the accordant organization in practice of the truths which shall be elicited. When by analysis, generalization, experiment, and all sorts of methods and tests, men shall have ransacked every other subject, it may be hoped, they will begin to apply a little study to the one subject of really paramount importance,—the breeding of their own species. When the same scientific care and skill, based on accumulated and sifted knowl
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edge, shall be devoted to this province as has already been exemplified with such surprising results in the improvement of the breeds of sheep, cows, horses, hens, and pigeons, still more amazing achievements may be confidently expected. The ranks of hopeless cripples, invalids, imbeciles, idlers, and criminals will cease to be recruited. The rate of births may perhaps be reduced to one-fourth of what it now is, with a commensurate elevation of the condition of society by the weeding out of the perishing and dangerous classes. And the rate of infant mortality may be reduced to one per cent. of its present murderous average. The regeneration of the world will be secured by the perfecting of its generation.
These ideas were familiar to Forrest. He often spoke of them, and wondered they were so slow to win the notice they deserved. For the hypocrisy or prudery which affected to regard them as indelicate and to be shunned in polite speech, he expressed contempt. In his soul the chord of ancestral lineage which bound his being with a vital line running through all foregone generations of men up to the Author of men, was, as he felt it, exceptionally intense and sacred. And surely the whole subject of our consanguinity in time and space is, to every right thinker, as full of poetic attraction and religious awe on one side as it is of scientific interest and social importance on the other.
Each of us has two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents. In every receding generation the number doubles, from thirty-two to sixty-four, then to one hundred and twenty-eight, and so on; so that at the twentieth remove, omitting the factor of intermarriages, one has over a million ancestors! So many threads of nerve thrilling into him out of the dark past! So many invisible rivulets of blood tributary to the ocean of his heart, the collective experiences of all of them latently reported in his structure! His physiological mould and type, his mental biases and passional drifts, his longevity, and other prospective experiences and fate, are the resultant of these combined contributions modified by his own choice and new circumstances. What can be conceived more solemnly impressive, or to us morally more sublime and momentous, than this picture of an immortal personality, isolated in his own responsible thought amidst the universe, but surrounded by the mys
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terious ranks of his ancestry, all connected with him by spiritual ligaments which lengthen and multiply, but never break, as he tracks them, further and further, through the annals of time, through prehistoric ages, incapable of solution or pause till his faith apprehends the beginning of their tremulous lines in the creative fiat of God!
Indulge in whatever theories we may, whether of continuous development or of sudden creation, it is through our parents that we receive our being. It is through our ancestry, spreading ultimately back to the limits of the human race, that each of us descends from God. By them it is that the Creator creates us. Well may the great Asiatic races, the soft and contemplative Brahmins, the child-like Chinese, the pure and thoughtful Parsees, worship their unknown Maker in forms of reverential remembrance and adoration paid to their known ancestors, gathering their relics in dedicated tombs or temples, cherishing their names and examples and precepts with fond devotion, celebrating pensive and glad festivals in their honor, preparing, around their pious offerings of fruits and flowers, little seats of grass, in a circle, for the pleased guardian spirits of their recalled fathers and mothers invisibly to occupy. Let not the reckless spirit of Young America, absorbed in the chase of material gain, and irreverent of everything but sensuous good, call it all a superstition and a folly. There is truth in it, too, and a hallowing touch of the universal natural religion of humanity.
America, in her hasty and incompetent contempt for the dotage, fails to appropriate the wisdom of the Orient. More of their humility, leisure, meditation, reverence, aspiration, mystic depth of intuition, will do us as much good as more of our science, ingenuity, independence, and enterprise will do them. The American people, in their deliverance from the entrammelling conditions of the over-governed Old World, and their exciting naturalization on the virgin continent of the West, have, to some extent, erred in affixing their scorn and their respect to the wrong objects. In repudiating excessive or blind loyalty to titular superiors and false authority, they have lost too much of the proper loyalty to real superiors and just authority. They are too much inclined to be contented with respectability and the average standard, instead of aspiring to perfection by the divine standard.
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They show too much deference to public opinion, and are too eagerly drawn after the vulgar prizes of public pursuit,—money and social position,—to the comparative neglect of personal reflection and culture, personal honor, and detachment in a self-sustaining insight of principles. They think too subserviently of what is established, powerful, fashionable,—the very vice from which the founders of the country fled hither. They think too meanly and haltingly of the truth and good which are not yet established and fashionable, but ought to be so,—thus turning their backs on the very virtue which heaven and earth command them in especial to cultivate, namely, the virtue of an unflinching spirit of progress in obedience to whatever is right and desirable as against whatever wrongfully continues to govern. The best critics from abroad, and the wisest observers at home, agree that the most distinctive vice in the American character is described by the terms complacent rashness and assumption, crude impertinence, disrespect to age, irreverence towards parents, contempt for whatever does not belong to itself. This rampant democratic royalty in everybody has proved sadly detrimental to that spirit of modesty and docility which, however set against oppression and falsehood, is profoundly appreciative of everything sacred or useful and sits with veneration at the feet of the past to garner up its treasures with gratitude. The American who improves instead of abusing his national privileges will maintain his private convictions and not bend his knee slavishly to public opinion, but he will treat the feelings of others with tenderness, bow to all just authority, and reverently uncover his heart before everything that he sees to be really sacred.
On these points, it will be seen in the subsequent pages, the subject of the present biography, as a boldly-pronounced American citizen, was in most respects a good example. If occasionally, in some things, he practised the American vice,—self-will, unconscious bigotry intrenched in a shedding conceit,—he prevailingly exemplified the American virtue,—tolerance, frankness, generosity, a sympathetic forbearance in the presence of what was venerable and dear to others, although it was not so to him. While withholding his homage from merely conventional sanctities, he never scoffed at them; and he always instinctively worshipped those intrinsic sanctities which carry their divine
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credentials in their own nature. The filial and fraternal spirit in particular was very strong in him, and bore rich fruits in his life and conduct.
The conspicuous relative decay of the filial and fraternal virtues, or weakening of the family tie, among the American people, the precocious development and self-assertion of their children, wear an evil aspect, and certainly are not charming. Yet they may be inevitable phases in the evolution of the final state of society. They may distinguish a transitional stage through which all countries will have to pass, America being merely in the front. In ancient life the political and social unit was the family. The whole family was held strictly responsible for the deeds of each member of it. The drift marked by democracy is to make the individual the ultimate unit in place of the family, legally clearing each person from his consanguineous entanglements, and holding him responsible solely for his own deeds in relation to entire society. The movement towards individuality is disintegrating; but, when completed, it may, by a terminal conversion of opposites, play into a more intimate fellowship and harmony of the whole than has ever yet been realized on earth. Thus it is not impossible that the narrower and intenser domestic bonds may be giving way simply before the extruding growth of wider and grander bonds, the particular yielding merely as the universal advances. If the destiny of the future be some form of social unity, some public solidarity of sympathies and interests in which all shall mutually identify themselves with one another, then the temporary irreverences and insurgences of a democratic régime may have their providential purpose and their abundant compensation in that final harmony of co-operative freedom and obedience to which they are preparing the way out of priestly and monarchical régimes.
Either this is the truth, that the youthful insubordination and premature complacency, the rarity of generous friendships and the commonness of sinister rivalries, which mark our time and land are necessary accompaniments of the passage from individual loyalties to collective loyalties, from an antagonistic to a communistic civilization, or else our republicanism is but the repetition of a stale experiment, doomed to renewed failure. There are political horoscopists who predict the subversion of
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the American Republic and its replacement by a monarchy. Thickening corruption and strife between two hostile parties over a vast intermediate stratum of indifference prompt the observer to such a conclusion. But a more auspicious faith is that these ills are to be overruled for good. It is more likely that both republicanism and monarchy, in their purest forms, are to vanish in behalf of a third, as yet scarcely known, form of government, which will give the final solution to the long-vexed problem, namely, government by scientific commissions which will know no prejudice, but represent all in the spirit of justice.
