The pall-bearers were James Oakes, James Lawson, Daniel Dougherty, John W. Forney, Jesse R. Burden, Samuel D. Gross, George W. Childs, and James Page. The funeral cortége, consisting of some sixty carriages, moved through throngs of people lining the sidewalk along the way to Saint Paul’s Church, where the crowd was so great, notwithstanding the rain, as to cause some delay. It seemed as though the very reserve and retiracy of the man in his last years had increased the latent popular curiosity about him, investing him with a kind of mystery. A simple prayer was read; and then, in the family vault, with the coffined and mouldering forms of his father and mother and brother and sisters around him, loving hands placed all that was mortal of the greatest tragedian that ever lived in America.

The announcement of the sudden and solitary death of Forrest produced a marked sensation throughout the country. In the chief cities meetings of the members of the dramatic profession were called, and resolutions passed in honor and lamentation for the great man and player, “whose remarkable originality, indomitable will, and unswerving fidelity,” they asserted, “made him an honor to the walk of life he had chosen,” and “whose lasting monument will be the memory of his sublime delineations of the highest types of character on the modern stage.”

For a long time the newspapers abounded with biographic and obituary notices of him, with criticisms, anecdotes, personal reminiscences. In a very few instances the bitterness of ancient grudges still pursued him and spoke in unkindness and detraction. There are men in whose meanness so much malignity mixes that they cannot forgive or forget even the dead. But in nearly every case the tone of remark on him was highly honorable, appreciative, and even generous. Two brief examples of this style may be cited.

“One thing must be said of Edwin Forrest, now that he lies cold in the tomb—he never courted popularity; he never flattered power. Importuned a thousand times to enter society, he rather avoided it. The few friendships he had were sincere. He never boasted of his charities; and yet we think, when the secrets of his life are unsealed, this solitary man, who dies without leaving a single known person of his own blood, will prove that he had a heart that could throb for all humanity. Having known him and loved him through his tribulations and his triumphs for more than a generation, we feel that in what we say we speak the truth of one who was a sincere friend, an honest citizen, and a benevolent man.”

“In our view Edwin Forrest was a great man; the one genius, perhaps, that the American stage has given to history. The conditions of his youth, the rough-and-tumble struggle of a life fired by a grand purpose, the loves, hates, triumphs, and failures that preceded the placing of the bays upon his brow, and the long reign that no new-comer ventured to disturb, all point to a nature that could do nothing by halves and bore the ineffaceable imprint of positive greatness. He was, essentially, a self-made man. All the angularities that result from a culture confined by the very conditions of its existence to a few of the many directions in which men need to grow were his. His genius developed itself irresistibly,—even as a spire of corn will shoot up despite encumbering stones,—gnarled, rugged, and perhaps disproportioned. His art was acquired not in the scholar’s closet or under the careful eye of learned tradition, but from demonstrative American audiences. Therefore such errors of performance as jumped with the easily excited emotions of an unskilled auditory were made a part of his education and his creed by a law which not even genius can surmount. So Forrest grew to giant stature, a one-sided man. Experience and a liberal culture in later life worked for him all that opportunity can do for greatness. That these did not wholly remove the faults of his early training was inevitable, but they so broadened his life and power that men of wisest censure saw in him the greatest actor of his time, and a man who under favorable early conditions would have stood, perhaps, peerless in the history of his art. Such a man, bearing a life flooded with the sunshine of glory, but often clouded with storm and almost wrecked by the pain that is born of passion, needs from the nation that produced and honored him, not fulsome adulation or biased praise, but dispassionate analysis and intelligent appreciation.”

One elaborate sketch of his life and character was published—by far the ablest and boldest that appeared—whose most condemnatory portion and moral gist ought to be quoted here, for two reasons. First, on account of its incisive power, honesty, and splendid eloquence. Second, that what is unjust in it may be seen and qualified:

“The death of this remarkable man is an incident which seems to prompt more of indefinite emotion than of definite thought. The sense that is uppermost is the sense that a great vitality, an enormous individuality of character, a boundless ambition, a tempestuous spirit, a life of rude warfare and often of harsh injustice, an embittered mind, and an age laden with disappointment and pain, are all at rest. Mr. Forrest, partly from natural bias to the wrong and partly from the force of circumstances and the inexorable action of time, had made shipwreck of his happiness; had cast away many golden opportunities; had outlived his fame; had outlived many of his friends and alienated others; had seen the fabric of his popularity begin to crumble; had seen the growth of new tastes and the rise of new idols; had found his claims as an actor, if accepted by many among the multitude, rejected by many among the judicious; and, in wintry age, broken in health, dejected in spirit, and thwarted in ambition, had come to the ‘last scene of all’ with great wealth, indeed, but with very little of either love or peace or hope. Death, at almost all times a blessing, must, in ending such an experience as this, be viewed as a tender mercy. His nature—which should have been noble, for it contained elements of greatness and beauty—was diseased with arrogance, passion, and cruelty. It warred with itself, and it made him desolate. He has long been a wreck. There was nothing before him here but an arid waste of suffering; and, since we understand him thus, we cannot but think with a tender gratitude that at last he is beyond the reach of all trouble, and where neither care, sorrow, self-rebuke, unreasoning passion, resentment against the world, nor physical pain can any more torment him. His intellect was not broad enough to afford him consolation under the wounds that his vanity so often received. All his resource was to shut himself up in a kind of feudal retreat and grim seclusion, where he brooded upon himself as a great genius misunderstood and upon the rest of the world as a sort of animated scum. This was an unlovely nature; but, mingled in it, were the comprehension and the incipient love of goodness, sweetness, beauty, great imaginings, and beneficent ideas. He knew what he had missed, whether of intellectual grandeur, moral excellence, or the happiness of the affections, and in the solitude of his spirit he brooded upon his misery. The sense of this commended him to our sympathy when he was living, and it commends his memory to our respect in death.”

The writer of the powerful article from which the above extract is taken, in another part of it, said of Forrest, “He was utterly selfish. He did not love dramatic art for itself, but because it was tributary to him.”

Now, although the brave and sincere spirit of the article is as clear as its masterly ability, something is to be said in protest against the sweeping verdict it gives and in vindication of the man so terribly censured. That there is some truth in the charges made is not denied. All of them—except the two last, which are wholly baseless—have been illustrated and commented on in this biography, but, as is hoped, in a tone and with a proportion and emphasis more accordant with the facts of the whole case. The charges, as above made, of sourness, ferocity, arrogance, cynicism, wretchedness, wreck, and despair, are greatly unjust in their overcharged statement of the sinister and sad, profoundly unfair in their omission of the sunny and smiling, features and qualities in the life and character with which they deal. The writer must have taken his cue either from inadequate and unfortunate personal knowledge of the man or from representations made by prejudiced parties. Ample data certainly are afforded in preceding pages of this volume to neutralize the extravagance in the accusations while leaving the truth that is also in them with its proper weight.

One fact alone scatters the entire theory that the social and moral condition of the tragedian was so fearfully dismal, forlorn, and execrable,—the fact that he had high and precious friendships with women, tenderly cherished and sacredly maintained. These were the foremost joy and solace of his life. They were kept up by unfailing attentions, epistolary and personal, to the last of his days. Into these relations he carried a fervor of affection, a poetry of sentiment, a considerate delicacy and refinement of speech and manner, which secured the amplest return for all he gave, and drew from the survivors, when he was gone, tributes which if they were published would cover him with the lustre of a romantic interest. But it is forbidden to spread such matters before the common gaze. They have a sacred right of privacy which must be no further violated than is needed to refute the absurd belief that the experience of Edwin Forrest was one of such unfathomable desolation and unhappiness.

No, a portrait in which he is shown as a man whose all-ruling motives were cruel egotism, pride, vanity, and avarice, a man “whose nature fulfilled itself,” and for that reason made his life a half-ignominious and half-pathetic “failure,” will be repudiated by his countrymen. At the same time his genuine portrait will reveal the truth that while he loved the good in this world well, he hated the evil too much,—the truth that while he sought success by honorable means, he too rancorously loathed those who opposed him with dishonorable means,—and the truth that while he won many of the solid prizes of existence and enjoyed them with a more than average measure of happiness, he missed the very highest and best prizes from lack of spirituality, serene equilibrium of soul, and religious consecration.

His literary agent for three years and intimate theatrical confrère for a much longer period, Mr. C. G. Rosenberg, moved by the injurious things said of him, published an article admitting his explosive irritability, but affirming his justice and kindness and fund of genial humor and denying the charges of an oppressive temper and arrogant selfishness. His business manager and constant companion for a great many years loved him as a brother, and always testified to his high rectitude of soul and his many endearing qualities. In one of his latest years, when this faithful servant lost a pocket-book containing over three thousand dollars of his money, and was in excessive distress about it, Forrest, without one sign of anger or peevishness or regret, simply said, in a gentle tone, “Do not blame yourself, McArdle. Accidents will happen. We can make it all up in a few nights. So let it go and never mind.” John McCullough, who for six years had every condition requisite for reading his character to the very bottom, bore witness to his rare nobility and social charm, saying, “In heart he was a prince, and would do anything for a friend. A thorough student of human nature, gifted with intensity, he applied himself to the heart, and ever reached it. He was essentially an autocrat. His personal magnetism was great, and he could draw everything to him. Wherever he might be, men recognized him as king, and he reigned without resistance, also without imposition.” For six years, after the close of the War, he gave a one-armed soldier, as a vegetable garden, the free use of a piece of land worth twenty-five thousand dollars. This is an extract from one of his letters: “Notice has been sent me that the price of the picture by Tom Gaylord is one hundred and fifty dollars, but that if I think this too much I may fix my own price. No doubt it is more than the painting is worth, but as the young man is just beginning, and needs to be cheered on, I shall gladly give it to encourage him for his long career of art.” When a certain poor man of his acquaintance had died, and his widow knew not where to bury him, he gave her a space for this purpose in his own lot in the cemetery. And every winter he gave private orders to his grocer to supply such suffering, worthy families as he knew, with what they needed, and charge the bills to him. Surely these are not the kind of deeds done by, these not the kind of tributes paid to, a misanthropic old tyrant, discontented with himself, sick of the world, and breathing scorn and wrath against everybody who approached him.

The following letter, addressed by one of the oldest and choicest friends of Forrest to another one, speaks for itself:

“My dear Friend,—Our old and distinguished friend is no more. It is a great sorrow to us and to his country. The papers show that all mourn his loss, for he and his fame belonged to the public. I knew Forrest well; except yourself, no man knew him better than I did. He was a man of genius, of great will and energy, and, without much education, by his own untiring efforts raised himself to the very highest pinnacle of fame in his profession. There was a grandeur in the man, in every thing he did and said, and hence the great admiration his friends had for him. He was a truly noble and generous man, one who loved his friends with devotion, and despised his enemies. I first made his acquaintance at Lexington, Kentucky, in the fall of 1822. He came there with Collins & Jones as one of their theatrical corps. He was then between sixteen and seventeen, and was the pet of us college boys. He made his first appearance as Young Norval, and the boys were so much taken with him that after the play was over we went to the greenroom, and took him, dressed as he was in character, to a supper. That night he slept with me in my boarding-house. We had breakfast in my room, and it was late before he left. I wanted to lend him a suit to go home in; but no, he would go in his Highland costume, a feather in his hat, straight down Main Street, with a crowd of boys following him to his hotel. He played all that winter in Lexington, and when the Medical and Law Colleges broke up in the spring he went to Cincinnati. That was in March or April, and he boarded at Mrs. Bryson’s, on Main Street. In the summer of 1823 he came to Newport with Mrs. Riddle and her daughter and two or three actors, and rented a house on the bank of the river. I assisted him in fixing up a small theatre in the old frame buildings of the United States barracks at the Point of Licking, and we had plays there until October. My brother-in-law, Major Harris, played Iago to his Othello. I was to have played Damon to his Pythias, but some difficulty occurred which prevented it. Forrest was then very poor, but kept up his spirits, and spent many nights with me in my father’s old office. His great delight was to get in a boat and sail for hours on the river when the wind was high. In the fall of 1823 he returned with Collins & Jones to Lexington, the Drakes, I think, uniting, and played the winter of 1823-24. He played with Pelby and his wife, and Pemberton, an actor from Nashville. He improved rapidly in his profession, and had always one of the most prominent characters cast to him. In fact, he would play second to no man. I was very intimate with him that whole winter, and on the first day of January, 1824, Tom Clay and several of us gave a fine dinner at Ayers’s Hotel, and he was the distinguished guest. We all made speeches and recitations, and before we had finished the entertainment we had an extensive audience. Forrest had many intimate friends among the students, and he often attended the college declamations. He had a great admiration for the eloquence of Doctor Holley, our President, and has often told me of the benefit he derived from the style of this remarkable orator. In March of 1824 I returned home, after the breaking up of the Law School, and played Zanga, in Young’s Revenge, at the Columbia Street Theatre, for the benefit of old Colonel John Cleve Symmes. We had a crowded house. Sallie Riddle played in the same piece. It was to enable Mr. Symmes to get to his Hole at the North Pole; but, poor man, he never got further than New York. I think Mr. Forrest went that spring to New Orleans. I am very certain he was not in Cincinnati when I played in the Revenge, otherwise he would have performed in the same play. It has been published in the papers that Forrest was once a circus rider and tumbler. No such thing. The only time he was ever connected with a circus was when with the circus company in Lexington he played Timour the Tartar. Mrs. Pelby and others were in the same piece. He looked Grandeur itself when mounted on Pepin’s famous cream-colored horse. After March, 1824, I did not meet Mr. Forrest again until the spring of 1828. He was then playing in New York, and I saw him in his great character of Othello. His star had then begun to rise, and it continued to rise until it reached its zenith, and there it continued to shine until the last hour of his life. His place cannot be filled in this country. Great actors are born, and not made. To be a great tragedian a man must possess the soul, the passion, and the eloquence to delineate the character he represents. Forrest had that beyond most men.

“I thank you for the paper containing his will and other reminiscences of him. My wife has been since his death clipping from the newspapers all that has been written about him, and has put the notices in her scrap-book. Some of the journals have done him justice, others have not; but posterity will cherish his memory and feel proud of the man. In 1870 I had a copy made of my portrait of George Frederick Cooke by Sully, and sent it to him. I think you saw it. He wrote me at Fire Island, New York, a long and affectionate letter acknowledging the receipt of the portrait and pressing me to spend a week with him at his house. My daughter, Mrs. Jones, has the letter, and has copied it in her book of original letters written to my father by Henry Clay and many other distinguished men of our country. The last time Mr. Forrest was in Cincinnati he walked over one morning to see me and the family. We took him back in my carriage to his hotel, and as he parted from my daughter Martha and myself his eyes were filled with tears, and he exclaimed, ‘God bless you!’ and left us. This was the last time I ever saw our distinguished and much beloved friend. My daughter, only last night, was speaking of this event of our parting, and how much affected Mr. Forrest seemed to be.

“Forrest was a great favorite with my wife. She knew him in 1823 and 1824, and, before our marriage, had often witnessed his performances at Lexington when a girl. She well knew the great friendship that united us: hence in referring to our boy and girl days in Lexington, Kentucky, she often speaks of Forrest, and how much he was respected and his company sought by the college boys at Old Transylvania. I have a very fine daguerreotype picture of our friend, and two quite large photographs he sent me through you several years ago. They will be faithfully preserved and handed down to my children and to their children as the picture of a man concerning whom it may well be said, ‘Take him for all in all, we shall not look upon his like again.’

“All we have left to us, my friend, is to meet and talk over the pleasure we once enjoyed in the company of our friend. He was so full of wit and humor! And how well he told a story! I remember the day, some years back, he and you spent at my house. All my family were present, together with several friends, and he fascinated us all at dinner by his eloquence, and his incidents of foreign travel. How heartily we laughed at the anecdotes which he told with such fine effect! Then we had music at night, and he recited the ‘Idiot Boy,’ to the delight of every one, and it was the ‘witching time of night’ when the company broke up.

Alas, how easy it is, and how congenial it seems to be to many, to let down and tarnish the memory of a great man by an estimate in which his vices are magnified and his virtues omitted! So did old Macklin say of David Garrick, “He had a narrow mind, bounded on one side by suspicion, by envy on the other, by avarice in front, by fear in the rear, and with self in the centre.” But against every unkind or demeaning word spoken of the departed Forrest a multitude of facts protest. Two of these may be cited to show the genius he had to make himself loved and admired and remembered.

On receiving intelligence of the death of his benefactor, a literary gentleman who had been tried by severe misfortunes of poverty and blindness and paralysis, and had experienced extreme kindness as well as generous aid at the hands of Forrest, wrote to Oakes a long letter, eloquent with gratitude and admiration, and closing with the poetic acrostic which follows. The writer thoroughly knew and loved the actor both personally and professionally,—a fact that adds value to his eulogistic appreciation:

On the first anniversary of his death a company of gentlemen, actuated by purely disinterested motives, met in New York and organized the Edwin Forrest Club, with a president, vice-president, and seven directors. “The primary object of the club shall be to foster the memory of the great actor, to erect a statue of him in the Central Park, and to collect criticisms, pictures, and all things relating to him, for the purpose of forming a Forrest Museum.” After the memory of Forrest had been drunk standing, Mr. G. W. Metlar, a friend from his earliest boyhood, paid an affectionate eulogy to his worth. Others offered similar tributes. And the corresponding secretary of the club, Mr. Harrison, said, “Gentlemen, however well the world may know Mr. Forrest as an actor, it knows comparatively nothing of him as a man. A kinder heart never beat in the bosom of a human being. In the finer sympathies of our nature he was more like a child than one who had felt an undue share of the rude buffets of ingratitude. When speaking with him of the troubles of others I have often seen his eyes suffused with tears. The beggar never knocked at his door and went away unladen. And many is the charity that fell from his manly hand and the relieved knew not whence it came; but

And I may say with conscientious pride that however much any of the great actors may have done for their national stage, Mr. Forrest, equal to any of them, has done as much for the theatre of his country, and will remain a recognized peer in the everlasting group.

The longer I allude to the tragedian the stronger becomes the sadness that tinctures my feelings to think that he is no more, and that the existence of the gifts Nature had so liberally bestowed on him had to cease with the cessation of his pulse.”

Everything set down by the biographer in this volume has been stated in the simple spirit of truth. And if the pen that writes has distilled along the pages such a spirit of love for their subject as makes the reader suspect the writer possessed with a fond partiality, he asks, Why is it so? His love is but a response to the love he received, and to the grand and beautiful qualities he saw. A dried-up and malignant heart does not breathe such effusive words in such a sincere tone as those which, in 1869, Forrest wrote to Oakes: “The good news you send of the restored health of our dear friend Alger gives me inexpressible relief. Now I go into the country with abounding joy.”

The fortune Forrest had laboriously amassed would amount, it was thought, when it should all be made available, to upwards of a million dollars. It was found that in his will he had left the whole of it—excepting a few personal bequests—to found, on his beautiful estate of “Spring Brook,” about eight miles from the heart of Philadelphia, the Edwin Forrest Home, for the support of actors and actresses decayed by age or disabled by infirmity.

The trustees and executors have arranged the grounds and prepared the buildings, removed thither all the relics of the testator, his books, pictures, and statues, and made public announcement that the home is ready for occupation. Thus the greatest charity ever bequeathed in the sole interest of his own profession by any actor since the world began is already in active operation, and promises to carry the name it wears through unlimited ages. It pleasantly allies its American founder with the old tragedian Edward Alleyn, the friend of Shakspeare, who two hundred and fifty years ago established munificent institutions of knowledge and mercy, which have been growing ever since and are now one of the princeliest endowments in England.

Those who loved Forrest best had hoped for him that, reposing on his laurels, pointed out in the streets as the veteran of a hundred battles, the vexations and resentments of earlier years outgrown and forgotten, enjoying the calls of his friends, luxuriating in bookish leisure, overseeing with paternal fondness the progress of the home he had planned for the aged and needy of his profession, taking a proud joy in the prosperity and glory of his country and in the belief that his idolized art has before it here amidst the democratic institutions of America a destiny whose splendor and usefulness shall surpass everything it has yet known,—the days of his mellow and vigorous old age should glide pleasantly towards the end where waits the strange Shadow with the key and the seal. Then, they trusted, nothing in his life should have become him better than the leaving of it would. For, receding step by step from the stage and the struggle, he should fade out in a broadening illumination from behind the scenes, the murmur of applause reaching him until his ear closed to every sound of earth.

It would have been so had he been all that he should have been. It was ordained not to be so. Shattered and bowed, he was snatched untimely from his not properly perfected career. But all that he was and did will not be forgotten in consequence of what he was not and did not do.

He will live as a great tradition in the history of the stage. He will live as a personal image in the magnificent Coriolanus statue. He will live as a learned and versatile histrionist in the exact photographic embodiments of his costumed and breathing characters. He will live as a diffused presence in the retreat he has founded for his less fortunate brethren. Perhaps he will live, in some degree, as a friend in the hearts of those who perusing these pages shall appreciate the story of his toils, his trials, his triumphs, and his disappearance from the eyes of men. He will certainly live in the innumerable and untraceable but momentous influences of his deeds and effluences of his powerful personality and exhibitions caught up by sensitive organisms and transmitted in their posterity to the end of our race. And, still further, if, as Swedenborg teaches, there are theatres in heaven, and all sorts of plays represented there, those who in succeeding ages shall recall his memory amidst the shades of time may think of him still as acting some better part before angelic spectators within the unknown scenery of eternity.

Here the pen of the writer drops from his hand in the conclusion of its task, and, with the same words with which it began, ends the story of Edwin Forrest.