Edwin Forrest

I

ON South Third Street, Philadelphia, opposite the two houses where iron griffins crouch on the balcony railings, mute guardians of a vanished aristocracy, old St. Paul’s Church still stands. One November Sunday in 1S13 a parishioner named William Forrest, with his wife Rebecca, brought for a mass christening at its altar all six of his children. William was a Scotsman, poor and humble, and his wife was Pennsylvania ‘Dutch’ (née Lauman). The aristocrats across the street were not excited. They little knew — and perhaps in their selfsufficiency they would have little cared if they had known — that the blackhaired boy nearing his eighth birthday, christened Edwin, was destined to become the first great American actor, the first Yankee tragedian to storm the artistic citadel of London, the most admired, the most hated, the stormiest player on our continent, the cause of riots and bloodshed, of scandal and tragedy, destined to be at last an old and broken man whose life, spent in the glare of theatrical publicity, was colorful as that of any character he played and whose end was sad as Lear’s.

Early in his teens the boy Edwin was stage-struck, not surprising in those days when juvenile actors were the rage. His persistence won him a chance to appear in Philadelphia when he was fourteen, as Young Norval, of course, in Douglas. He was applauded, and that sweet sound sealed his fate. But the way was not easy. Headstrong and determined, he pushed westward, looking for opportunities nearer the frontier. In 1823 he was in Cincinnati, where Sol Smith, later noted as a frontier manager and comedian, was editing a newspaper. In one farce there young Forrest played in blackface — one of the earliest Negro impersonations on our stage. Again, he played Richard III. Sol Smith recognized the handsome boy’s potential talent, and when presently Edwin secured a contract to play with Caldwell’s company in New Orleans, but balked at the prospect of the long trip and joined a circus in Kentucky, Smith hunted him out of the sawdust and drove him on his way.

He made his first appearance in New Orleans as Jaffier in Venice Preserved, on February 4, 1824 — when he was a month short of eighteen! His salary was eighteen dollars a week. He was dark, powerful of build, handsome, headstrong, unquestionably talented — and knew it. For such a youth there could hardly have been a worse environment than the New Orleans of 1824. There at the mouth of the great river were Frenchmen, Spaniards, and American frontiersmen; traders and gamblers, pirates and planters; creoles and slaves and a half-world of glamorous quadroons. Life was reckless, passionate, voluptuous, heady. What young Forrest needed most was discipline of character — and one of his warmest friends in New Orleans was James Bowie!

Has America forgotten Bowie? He invented, or adapted, a peculiar form of duel, and the knife to fight if with. The duelists, stripped naked, were bound side by side on a bench, with right arms raised. Into each right hand was put a bowie knife, and at the given signal they went to it. The inventor himself seems to have been highly successful at this pastime, and to have indulged in it at the slightest offense to his ‘honor.’ His favorite knife he gave to Forrest as a token of affection. He and his kind lived under a code which exalted impulse and ignored law, and which especially fostered that form of egotism which causes a man to regard any derogatory remark about himself as a deadly offense which Heaven has ordained he should punish. It makes a quick temper quicker, and it makes conceit a menace.

That such social customs of old New Orleans as the Quadroon Ball were not exactly ideal training for a handsome boy of eighteen goes without saying. But they seem to have had far less effect upon Edwin Forrest than the reckless, touchy egotism of such companions as Bowie. In that extraordinary mingling of fact and moralizing, Alger’s Life of Edwin Forrest, the author says quaintly of Bowie, ’In heart, when not roused by some sinister influence, he was as open as a child and as loving as a woman.’ At any rate, he and his cronies exerted a great charm over young Forrest, and roused his admiration. For a year and a half he was under their spell. Perhaps we might add that one of them was a river captain, who, though possessed of a ‘kind heart’ (Alger again), once took revenge on a bank-side bawdyhouse by tying a cable around it and pulling it into the Mississippi, drowning all the inmates. These men, and their followers, would come to the theatre when Edwin performed, and applaud the more vociferously the more vociferously he let out his already powerful voice and tore into the emotions. Not a good school for either personal or artistic restraint.

In 1825, Forrest challenged Caldwell to a duel, over Jane Placide, the leading lady, but the manager merely laughed, and the young actor rode off with a Choctaw Indian friend, to spend a month with the tribe. Perhaps to that episode he owed his future interest in plays about Indians. At any rate, it terminated his New Orleans life, and forced him back to the effete East.

In the autumn of 1825, aged nineteen, he found a place with the company in Albany, where he worked hard in the theatre and also sought by doing a ‘daily dozen’ (which included ‘walking two or three times about the room on his hands ’) to increase his already muscular stature. That winter in Albany, however, was most important for him because of the visit of Edmund Kean. Young Forrest acted Iago to his Othello, Titus to his Brutus, and Richmond to his Richard, coming thus into intimate touch with his methods. It was inevitable that the boy should be affected by the man — the first great artist he had ever supported. But it was the more inevitable because of the similarity of forces behind the two men.

Edmund Kean was assuredly one of the answers to the question, ‘Why did n’t the British theatre respond, as literature responded, to the romantic movement?’ It did respond, not by great plays, but by great performances in romantic plays already written by William Shakespeare. The cold correctness of a Kemble was a relic of the eighteenth century of Pope, and of Addison’s Cato. When Coleridge said to see Kean act Macbeth was like reading the play by flashes of lightning, he was testifying to the electrification of poetic drama by an actor who let in fire and passion and the unrestrained outbursts of natural emotion. And when nineteen-year-old Forrest played Iago not traditionally, but as a gay young blade, and suddenly astounded Kean by letting his voice ‘slide down from a high pitch’ on the words ‘nor secure,’

(Wear your eye thus, not jealous — nor secure) ending ‘in a whispered horror,’ the great actor demanded later in the dressing room, ‘In the name of God, boy, where did you get that?’ ‘It is something of my own,’ said the delighted youth. And Kean immediately took an added interest in him, publicly praised him, and of course stirred Forrest to emulation. To let nature have its way in the expression of emotion, to electrify by startling or magnificent climaxes, to be realistic in representation when an effect can thus be gained (it is a paradox of romanticism that, in the theatre at least, it foreshadowed realism) — these things Forrest absorbed from the example of Kean, absorbed and adapted to his own personality and powers.

Kean had struggled up to fame from the humblest origins. His private life was dissolute and unrestrained. His genius lay in his sensitivity to emotion and his command of its expression. Forrest was untutored and unrestrained, and the emotional and romantic approach was his natural and easiest way. Further, Forrest was a young American actor at a time when most of our actors were English-born (all the best ones), yet when the ordinary American was passionately aware of his democracy as he has perhaps never been since. Combative self-assertion was in the air, which chimed with Forrest’s temperament, and caused him then, and all his life, to favor parts in which heroes led revolts of the people against tyrants or the individual went down magnificently assertive and unchained. He, too, in the fumbling art of our young Republic, was a phase of the romantic movement, colored always by the passions of democracy, and always predominantly emotional.

II

The new Bowery Theatre in New York was to open in the autumn of 1826, and Forrest’s success in Albany led to his engagement there at twenty-eight dollars a week. But he reached New York penniless, his Albany salary unpaid, and was despondently waiting his new chance, when an opportunity came to give one performance at the fashionable Park, for a fellow player’s benefit. Forrest, just turned twenty, elected to appear as Othello. The audience was small, but the applause was large. He was, accordingly, permitted to make his bow at the crowded new Bowery, November 6, as Othello, challenging our theatrical stronghold in one of the greatest of roles. Certainly he did not lack self-confidence, nor was it unewarded. The next day the stockholders raised his salary from twenty-eight dollars a week to forty!

From that night, his popular success and his financial rewards increased unbrokenly year after year. Very soon the forty dollars a week had multiplied twentyfold. He went up and down the land, playing to packed houses and shrewdly investing what he earned (his father was a Scotsman). He was a boy in his twenties, who to-day would be a college senior or a law student; and he was playing Richard III, Othello, William Tell, Damon, even Lear, to admiring thousands who poured gold into his purse. It is not, perhaps, surprising that he had what his biographer calls ‘a gigantic complacency in himself, which was equally pleasurable to him and attractive to others so long as he intuitively experienced rather than consciously asserted it.’

But during these happy years he for the most part ‘intuitively experienced it.’ He paid his father’s debts, he bought a home in Philadelphia for his mother and sisters, he enjoyed a wide acquaintanceship, and there should have been no canker in his life. But George Odell, compiler of that monumental work, The Annals of the New York Stage, suspects, and probably with reason, that the beginnings of the jealousy which was to wreck Forrest’s life may be found as early as the autumn of 1826, when he was enjoying his first triumphs at the Bowery. During that autumn, William Macready was acting at the fashionable Park (on Park Row, just below the City Hall), and a consultation of the newspapers of the day shows that the English star received by far the bulk of critical attention. No matter how vociferously the Bowery audiences responded to the vocal climaxes of the young American, there were a critical circle and an audience group who either found him crude by comparison with the visitor or for some months ignored him. There is no record left of Forrest’s conscious reaction at this time; nor in immediately subsequent years did he display any open hostility to Macready. But the first impulses may have come to salve the wound to vanity caused by a certain condescension in what we now call the highbrows by an ever more vociferous appeal to his sure, responsive public, the democratic galleries.

In the autumn of 1829, when he was but twenty-three, and some while before Emerson’s declaration of independence for the American Scholar, Forrest made a practical move to Americanize our stage literature. He offered a prize of $500, plus the receipts of the third performance, for a tragedy by a native author, ‘of which the principal character shall be an aboriginal of this country.’ It was the first prize-play competition in our history, and the beginning of a twenty-year vogue for ‘Indian plays,’ since the winning drama, Metamora, by John Augustus Stone, was an immediate and huge success in Forrest’s repertoire.

This drama of a noble Indian chief, who defies the white men in a reverberant prose which made Daniel Webster’s seem restrained, continued a popular item in Forrest’s repertoire almost to the end of his days. He must have thundered its defiances more than a thousand times — but to Stone he paid only the stipulated $500, plus the thirdnight receipts. There was no Dramatists’ Guild in those days; nor was Forrest behaving differently from others in his treatment of the author.

This competition (in which William Cullen Bryant was one of the judges) was followed in succeeding years by others, and in all two hundred plays were submitted, nine received prizes, five were failures in performance, and four — Metamora by Stone, The Gladiator and The Broker of Bogota by Robert Montgomery Bird, and Jack Cade by Robert T. Conrad — were permanent additions to Forrest’s repertoire. They also inspired the American comedian, James H. Hackett, to offer a prize for a native comedy, resulting in The Lion of the West, by James K. Paulding.

That a young actor in our early Republic, himself unschooled except in the practical theatre, still almost alone among companies of players Englishborn and devoted to an English repertoire, should have stirred up so many native dramatists, and secured from them at least three plays which enabled him to show with passionate vividness his ideal of rugged individualism, whether in the American forests or the Roman arena, is truly amazing. It is a testimony both to the impact of his acting and personality on the American imagination of the times and to a sturdy emotional force in his boasted Americanism. Full justice has never been done to him for this accomplishment.

III

In 1834, Forrest ceased acting to make a two-year tour of Europe, seeking a belated education through travel. Before he sailed, the leading citizens of New York gave him a public banquet, celebrated by a medal. He returned in 1836, made the necessary preparations, and once more sailed for London, to challenge that stronghold. On October 17, 1836, at Drury Lane he appeared not in Shakespeare, but as Spartacus, in one of his American prize plays, which gave him ample scope for displaying his tremendous physique, for enunciating in sonorous periods his opinions about tyranny, and for the astonishing physical realism which he employed in melodrama. London was a bit surprised, but undoubtedly impressed, and, after he had added Othello and Macbeth to his repertoire, made him welcome in the Garrick Club. Macready at this time befriended him.

Before he returned to his native land he had married Catherine Sinclair, daughter of a Scotch singer. On meeting him, she confessed, she had said to herself, ‘This is the handsomest man on whom my eyes have ever fallen.’ They were married in St. Paul’s Cathedral, in June 1837, and in the autumn they were in America, where Mrs. Forrest at once made a host of friends, and where her husband resumed his triumphant career. His tours took him to every part of America where theatres were available, and his fortune continued to mount.

In 1843-1844 Macready made another visit to America, which was financially successful for him (if not always for the theatres), and during which he spent some time as a guest at Forrest’s home in New York. More than on his previous visit, however, both the social and the critical acclaim he received was from what to-day would be the orchestra level. The masses preferred Forrest, and those who spoke for them called Macready cold, measured, mannered, and said Forrest’s acting commanded ‘honest throbs and tears’ while the ‘icy glitter’ of the other won ‘ the dainty clapping of kid gloves.’ Macready no more liked this sort of criticism than Forrest enjoyed being called a boor by comparison with the Englishman. Macready, too, was an egotist, with a sometimes ungovernable temper. Once he debated with himself whether a new play could succeed, as it contained two good parts in addition to his own! He went back to England not too happy, and left behind a division among critics and theatregoers which contained the seeds of mischief.

The next year Forrest elected to go again to England. The theatre there was in transition. The Royal Patent had been withdrawn from Covent Garden and Drury Lane, the field was wide open, and Macready, Charles Kean, and other ‘legitimate’ actors were unable to draw houses. When Forrest appeared at Covent Garden in February 1845 as Othello, he was hissed by three separate claques. This was repeated the next night, though the audience finally drowned the objectors. Forrest was stung to the quick. His fingers must have itched for a bowie knife! Certain London reviews, in organs controlled by Macready’s friends (such as Forster), called his performance ‘a burlesque of the elder Kean’s mannerisms . . . varied by the Yankee nasal twang.’ They called his Macbeth ‘comic,’ his Lear ‘a roaring pantaloon.’

Forrest believed — largely from circumstantial evidence, of course — that Macready was behind all this. He had wanted to play Richelieu and The Lady of Lyons in London, and the author, Macready’s friend Bulwer-Lytton, had refused him permission. He had planned, also, to play in Paris, and Macready (who had failed in Paris) was a friend of the manager of the English company there. But this man refused even to see him. It was quite too much for Forrest’s stricken pride. He went on tour of the provinces, brooding.

It was in Edinburgh that he performed the most ill-starred deed of his life. Macready was playing Hamlet in that city, and Forrest, never an inconspicuous person anywhere, elected to witness the performance from a box. After the words ‘They are coming to the play; I must be idle. Get you a place,’ ‘Macready gallopaded two or three times across the stage, swinging his handkerchief in rapid flourishes above his head.’¹

This was his way of affecting madness. It was also Forrest’s opportunity to affect criticism — which he did by giving vent to a loud hiss. It was probably the loudest hiss in theatrical annals, for it resounded over the British Isles and the Continent of North America.

The Scotsman noted the event in an article headed ‘Professional Jealousy.’ The London Times elaborated this article. Forrest wrote a letter to the Times (which he had to expurgate before the editor would print it), in which he dismissed the jealousy charge ‘with the contempt it merits’ and endeavored to justify his act as legitimate criticism; and the fat was in the fire. Forrest reappeared in New York as Lear, at the Park Theatre, early the following autumn; and a crowded house rose and gave him nine cheers, not so much, evidently, for his art as for his sibilant assertion of free-born Americanism. On his benefit night he made a speech, affirming that he was ‘animated by no ungenerous motives toward the really deserving of any other country,’ and a few days later William Cullen Bryant, Parke Godwin, Theodore Sedgwick, Samuel Ward, and other distinguished citizens invited him to a public banquet. Naturally he accepted, and naturally Bryant presided. No wonder Forrest supposed at this time his conduct was approved at home, and had been laudable.

In September 1848, Macready began another tour of the States, with some idea in mind of retiring from the stage at its conclusion and settling in Cambridge or Boston, where he had been always most warmly welcome, and there founding a dramatic school. Almost at the start of his tour, however, trouble began to occur. He was hissed in Philadelphia, and in a public statement said of Forrest, ‘He did toward me what I am sure no English actor would have done toward him — he openly hissed me.’ The next day Forrest replied in a letter to the press, describing Macready’s imagined conduct toward him in angry and rude terms. This brought a reply from the Englishman, and disgusted many Americans. And so it went, with stormy scenes in many theatres, and the press taking the quarrel up, pro and con.

In Macready’s diary you will find such entries as these: ‘November 10, ’48, Rehearsed with care, but I have brutes to deal with, not intelligences — “ignorance made drunk” will well describe American actors from Mr. Forrest downwards! Acted Cardinal Wolsey and Oakley with a Catherine and a Mrs. Oakley to make a dog vomit! ’ Or again: ‘The Baltimore papers characterize the performances of Forrest as equal, if not superior, to mine, and speak of him as an artist and a gentleman. And I am to dwell in this country!’

On May 7, 1849, Macready attempted to end his tour with a performance of Macbeth at the Astor Place Opera House in New York. Forrest was also playing in the city. The theatre was filled largely with a mob bent ‘on putting down the favorite of what they called the kidgloved and silk-stockinged gentry.’ They yelled, hissed, booed, and finally began hurling the theatre chairs upon the stage. The curtain was rung down to save both the actors and the building, and Macready prepared to leave town. The press, however, was outraged at such treatment, as were the better citizens, and he was urged to make another appearance, to enable the city to vindicate itself.

Forrest was openly charged with fomenting the disturbance, but this he denied, though refusing to take any steps to prevent its recurrence. The mob, inflamed by the tone of the press toward them, placarded the city with inflammatory handbills, and the city authorities detailed three hundred police to the scene and ordered the 7th Regiment to be under arms. The friends of Macready saw to it that they themselves occupied most of the seats, and on May 10 the second attempt to play Macbeth was made. Unable to get in, the mob stormed the exterior of the theatre, breaking the windows, crashing at the doors, and howling blue murder.

The 7th Regiment was called out. As it marched up, it was greeted with a shower of stones. The officers expostulated with the mob, but the answer was more stones. Several soldiers were wounded. An order to fire brought a few scattered shots over the heads of the mob, which merely intensified the attack. At last the order to fire in earnest was given, and when the smoke cleared there were thirty dead and as many wounded, and the mob was fleeing toward Broadway or the Bowery. Macready was hustled to Boston, and sailed as speedily as he could for England.

In this disgraceful episode of course the Bowery gangs, then so disturbing an element in New York life, played a considerable part. But the cause went far deeper than that, to an inherent weakness in Forrest’s character. Not only had his wounded egotism provided the first spark, but his relentless spleen had done nothing to allay the mob passions anywhere, his ideals of ‘ democracy ’ had contributed nothing of magnanimity and sportsmanship to justify themselves. And from that tragic night, though he did not cease to draw huge houses, he began to lose the respect of many who had hitherto stood by him.

IV

Worse was yet to come. That spring he had entered his wife’s room and found her standing ' between the knees ’ of an actor named George W. Jamieson, who had ‘his hands upon her person’ (to quote Forrest’s later testimony). Among most people of the theatre this would have required no great explanation. But in Forrest’s mind it rankled sore, and when a few months later he found among his wife’s possessions a silly letter from Jamieson, beginning, ‘And now, sweetest Consuelo, our brief dream is over,’ he was approaching the condition of Othello. The letter, to be sure, so both writer and recipient always declared, had been written to show that others beside George Sand could indulge this strain; but to Forrest it meant that his wife had been unfaithful.

For some months, till the tension grew too great, the matter was kept secret; then he took her to the home of Parke and Fanny Godwin and there deposited her. Even this was not enough. He wrought himself to the point of fancying that she was betraying his ‘shame’ to the public, and sued for divorce on the grounds of adultery. Her defense was a counter suit, on the same grounds. Her past life, the respect in which she was held in the community, the bitterness of Forrest’s attack, combined to put much sympathy on her side. Again the public were lined up behind Forrest or his antagonist, again he was a storm centre.

The trial began in December 1851, lasted six weeks, and was reported at great length in almost every paper in the land. Mrs. Forrest’s counsel was Charles O’Conor, and he saw to it (if she needed any prompting, which is doubtful) that his witness was always a lady, and that her witnesses were among the irreproachable citizens of the land. Forrest’s language and conduct at and during the trial still further alienated the sympathy of many of his remaining friends. He lost the case, and was ordered to pay his wife $3000 a year alimony. He thrashed Nathaniel P. Willis in Central Park on the suspicion that Willis was a party to his domestic ills. Still unable to believe that he, Edwin Forrest, could be wrong, he appealed over and over, and not till many years later did he give up. By then he owed his wife $64,000, $59,000 of which she had to pay out in lawyers’ fees!

Jamieson, whose professional career Forrest succeeded in blighting, was killed in 1868, and Forrest’s reaction was thus expressed: ’I see by the telegraphic news in the paper that George W. Jamieson was killed last night by a railroad train, at Yonkers. God is great; and justice, though slow, is sure. Another scoundrel has gone to hell — I trust forever.’

Incredible as it may seem, Forrest began an engagement in New York two weeks after the first verdict. The audience cheered vociferously, and across the parquet was hung a streamer reading, ‘This is the people’s verdict.’ He made a speech, in which he thanked them for coming to ‘express your irresistible sympathy for one whom you know to be a deeply injured man.’ This was repeated night after night, while the theatre remained packed.

But although the trial, with its display of dirty linen and its provocation to prurient public discussion, increased rather than diminished Forrest’s boxoffice appeal, the effect was to embitter the remainder of his life. During his happy married years he had begun to erect a huge stone dwelling on the banks of the Hudson, south of Yonkers, known as Fonthill Castle. It was to have something the aspect of a Rhine castle. Furthermore, it was to become, on Forrest’s death, a home for indigent actors and actresses — of American birth. But the building was never completed. His break with his wife came before it was ready for occupancy, and thus no American actor lived in a Rhine castle above a great river until William Gillette built himself one on the banks of the Connecticut.

Forrest retreated to his native Philadelphia and bought a mansion in spacious grounds, on North Broad Street — with, however, the same shrewd idea that some day the city would grow out to it and enhance its value. He sold Fonthill in 1856 for $100,000, to a Catholic sisterhood, and the same year withdrew from the stage for several seasons, devoting his time to his grounds, his library, the nursing of his very considerable fortune, and the nursing of his even more considerable grievances against life. He had been too haughty and domineering to make many friends among his fellow actors, and his conduct had alienated many in the outside world who might have stood by him.

One friend he had, a Pythias to his Damon, James Oakes of Boston, who not only urged his retirement, but visited him in winter, took him up to the Massachusetts shore in summer, advised, consoled, and guided him. Forrest was so deeply attached to Oakes that he would not permit a third person to be present when they met, and that lifelong friendship remains the most warmly human record of his career. Next to Oakes, he seems most to have cherished a first folio of Shakespeare. But neither the one nor the other could remove from his mind the idea that he had suffered injustice, that he, who could not be wrong, had been deeply wronged, that a giant was stung by malicious pygmies. He had cast off his wife; he had no children; he was for the most part alone in a great house, brooding.

In 1861 he emerged on the stage again, and resumed his old roles, with, however, an added emphasis on Coriolanus and Lear. Not only was this natural, but it was natural that his emotional experiences, his profound sense of grievance, should have intensified his artistry in these parts. All testimony is that this was the case, especially in Lear. Someone in the latter years once complimented him on his playing of Lear. ‘By God, sir, I don’t play Lear!’ he cried. ‘I play Cade and Macbeth and Damon, but by God, sir, I am Lear!’ He himself once told how he had asked Sheridan Knowles to describe the acting of Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth, and Knowles had replied, ‘with a sort of shudder,’ ‘Well, sir, I smelt blood! I swear I smelt blood!’ I have thought of that incident often, especially of Knowles’s shudder, because I used to endeavor to get from my mother some description of Forrest, whom she saw act Coriolanus in Boston in the ’60’s, and all she could ever reply was, ‘I can’t tell you anything — except that he made me shiver.’ And always, at the memory, she shivered again.

Forrest’s tours, at least outside of New York, remained highly profitable, in spite of the changing tastes of theatregoers, for several years. But in 1865, in Baltimore, while playing Damon in a cold theatre, he suffered a partial paralysis of his right sciatic nerve. For one who had taken an enormous pride in his massive muscularity and whose very style had depended often on bodily agility, it was a terrible blow. Thereafter the regal gait, the swift spring, the massive assurance of poise, were gone, and before long it became necessary to strap the sword to his right hand so that he could fight Macduff or lead his gladiators in revolt. Yet in 1866 he played in the golden San Francisco for thirty-five nights, to sixty thousand people, and brought away $20,000 as his share of the profits.

There is something saddening, always, in the spectacle of a fine actor, past his peak, playing in a style (and often in plays) somewhat outmoded, who refuses to surrender to time and change but must go on repeating what he has always done. The young sometimes sneer; their elders know that it is the indomitable ego refusing to give up. Forrest has never seemed to me so appealing a figure on the New York stage, either when a youth bursting upon the astonished Bowery as Othello or in his massive maturity in the combats of Spartacus, as on that night in 1871 when he made his last appearances in our theatrical capital, playing Lear to half houses in the 14th Street Theatre, neglected by the young, ignored by fashion, but wringing from the reluctant William Winter a tribute to the haunting pathos of his mad King.

Outside of New York, it should be added, even this last tour was still fairly profitable, and the old gladiator reached Boston in the spring of ’72 after traveling 7000 miles, playing 128 nights, and accumulating nearly $40,000. In Boston he played Lear and Richelieu, and the second week, while acting the Cardinal, developed pneumonia and had to cancel all further performances. He recovered, however, and in the following autumn resorted to that last stand of the classic actor, public readings of Shakespeare. They were a disappointment, and he retired to his Philadelphia house, and on the night of December 12, 1872, alone in his chamber, died of a stroke. His will left his estate in trust, to establish and maintain the Forrest Home for aged actors. Ultimately the city did grow to the North Broad Street house, which was sold for a profit, and the Home moved to a suburb, where it still functions and perpetuates the name of the first great American tragedian.

V

What, as artist, was Forrest like? What description of any actor has ever conveyed to later generations the peculiar quality of his appeal? Physically Forrest resembled the Farnese Hercules, with the addition of a black moustache and a small goatee under his lip. His voice, in both range and power, equaled his physique. He was totally without humor or lightness. His Hamlet must have been absurd. Yet in portions of Othello he must have been electrifying. Always he was bound to be massive, dominant, and unsatisfying unless the rôle gave him an opportunity to overwhelm the emotions. The roaring sea surges of his voice in sustained passages of wrath, invective, or grief are constantly mentioned by critics. But as constantly, almost, are his physical actions in his melodramas, such as the death scene in The Gladiator.

In one of those merry burlesques which enlivened our stage before the Civil War (and had so much to do with bringing about a more natural style of play and playing in both England and America), an actor used to ‘take off’ Forrest’s Spartacus, wearing enormously padded calves. Another character stuck a butcher’s knife into one calf and left it there, while Spartacus paid no attention. After many attempts, a fellow gladiator at last succeeded in persuading him to look down at the knife in his leg, whereupon he emitted a terrible roar of pain, fell to the stage writhing with horrible agony, and expired all over the place. That tells us better than any critic can what were some of the excesses of Forrest’s style.

In 1855, John Brougham’s burlesque, Pocahontas, laughed most of the Indian plays off the stage, including Metamora in its merry attack. When Boucicault put an Indian into The Octoroon in 1859, he did not spout the now incredibly turgid rhetoric of Metamora — he just grunted. And the Negroes talked like real Negroes. In 1865 the delicate, natural art of Jefferson captivated us in Rip Van Winkle. Booth was playing Shakespeare neither like his father nor like Forrest, but with a new poetic naturalism. Forrest had many imitators in his prime, though none possessed the physical and vocal prowess to match him; but in the end he left no follower but John McCullough. His plays, except those by Shakespeare, were outmoded, including that bombastic balloon of Sheridan’s, Pizzaro. He passed from the scene leaving Boston ladies to remember that he had made them shiver, and New York to remember (so far as New York ever remembers its past) that his colossal and unbridled egotism, in conflict with another somewhat meaner and more restrained, had caused thirty citizens to be shot dead in its streets.

William Winter often referred to him as a magnificent animal, ‘ bewildered by a spark of genius.’ ‘He struck with a sledge hammer. Not even nerves of gutta-percha could remain unshaken by his blow. In manifestations of terror he lolled out his tongue, contorted his visage, made his frame quiver. In scenes of fury he panted, snorted, and snarled like a wild beast, . . . The snarling yell of ferocity that burst from him when, as Jack Cade, he recognized and sprang upon Lord Say in the forest, fairly frightened his hearers. His utterance of Lear’s delirious prayer to Nature was like a thunderstorm.’

It seems evident that Forrest’s art was crude, as his training had been, and made cruder by the crudities of the audiences which cheered him most, and by the excesses of his own undisciplined character. He lacked intellect, he lacked spiritual fineness, and he confused, hopelessly for his happiness, individual freedom and egoism. Yet in his robustious style he was outlet for the robustious emotions of the unexpressive American masses of his day, and their tumultuous applause when, as Spartacus, he hurled tumultuous defiance at the Lords of Rome was rather good to think about, and not unessential to an understanding of our ancestors.

It is a full century since he took Spartacus to London, the first defiant gesture of the New World theatre toward its elders, and woke the echoes of Old Drury with his mighty voice. Today, instead, we send Shirley Temple on a strip of celluloid. We write peephole drama now, or crank a candid camera, and call it realism. We have no actors who could sustain even the mere physical demands of playing Spartacus or Lear. But do we not sometimes wish that we could see a play where a powerful player could let himself go? Do we not long for a clash and mingling of mighty words and high emotions and electrifying action, a theatrical Ein Heldenleben?

In such a mood Forrest does not seem so far away from us, because his style, even in its excesses, was an outlet for the emotions of the young Republic and a stirring reminder to his audiences of human capacities. Such outlet and such reminder every age needs, and we — or so it seems to-day — are insufficiently finding them in realism. We dream a new and more finely tempered Forrest, and the plays for him to act.