The next important feature to be studied in order to appreciate the character and life of Forrest is his experience of the prizes and the penalties of fame. For he had a great fame; and fame, particularly in a democratic country, inflicts penalties as well as bestows prizes. Not one man in a thousand has enough force and tenacity of character to determine to gain the solid and lasting prizes of life. Average men willingly put up with cheap and transient substitutes for the real ends, or with deluding mockeries of them. They seek passing pleasures instead of the conditions of permanent happiness; applause instead of merit; a crowd of acquaintances instead of true friends; notoriety or stagnant indifference instead of fame. There is nothing more worthy of contempt, although it is so miserably common, than the mean and whining cant which puts negation and failure above affirmation and success, constantly asserting the emptiness and deceit of all earthly goods. In opposition to this morbid depreciation of every natural attractiveness without and desire within, nothing is more wholesome or grand than a positive grasp and fruition of all the native worths of the world. A great deal of the fashionable disparagement and scorn of the prizes of wealth, position, reputation, is but unconscious envy decrying what it lacks the strength and courage to seize. The fame which a gifted and faithful man secures is the reflex signal of the effects he has produced, and a broad, vivid, healthy enjoyment of it is an intrinsic social good to be desired. It is one of the greatest forces employed by Providence for the education of men and the advancement of society. To condemn or despise it is to fling in the face of God. The fancied pious who do this are dupes of an impious error.

Fame is a life in the souls of other men added to our own. It is a feeling of the effect we have taken on the admiration and love of those who regard us with honoring attention and sympathy. It is a social atmosphere of respect and praise and curiosity, enveloping its subject, fostering his self-esteem, keeping his soul in a moral climate of complacency. The famous man has a secret feeling that the contributors to his glory are his friends, loyal to him, ready to protect, further, and bless him. Thus he is fortified and enriched by them, their powers ideally appropriated to his ideal use. Thus fame is the multiplication of the life of its subject, reflected in the lives of its givers. This is the real cause of the powerful fascination of fame for its votaries; for there is no instinct deeper in man than the instinct which leads him to desire to intensify, enlarge, and prolong his existence; and fame makes a man feel that in some sense his existence is multiplied and continued in all those who think of him admiringly, and that it will last as long as their successive generations endure. As Conrad makes Jack Cade say,—

And so in its ultimate essence and use fame represents a magnified and prolonged idealization of direct personal experience. It is ideal means of life, a deeper foundation and wider range of reflected sympathetic life embracing and sustaining immediate individual life. This great prize is evidently a good to be desired, the evils connected with it belonging not to itself but to unprincipled methods of pursuing it, vulgar errors in distributing it, and the selfish perversion of its true offices. It exists and is enjoyed in various degrees, on many different levels, from the plebeian enthusiasm for the champion boxer to the aristocratic recognition of a great thinker. As we ascend in rank we lose in fervor. Fame is seen in its ruddiest intensity at the funeral of Thomas Sayers celebrated by fifty thousand screaming admirers; in its palest expansion in the renown of Plato, whose works are read by scattered philosophers and whose name glitters inaccessibly in the eternal empyrean. The reason for this greater heat of glory on its lower ranges plainly is that men feel the sharpest interest in the lowest bases of life, because these are the most indispensable. Existence can be maintained without transcendent talents, but not without health, strength, and courage. Animal perfection goes before spiritual perfection, and its glory is more popular because more appreciable.

Forrest drank the intoxicating cup of fame on widely separated levels, from the idolatrous incense of the Bowery Boys who at the sight of his herculean proportions shied their caps into the air with a wild yell of delight, to the praise of the refined judges who applauded the intellectual and imaginative genius of his Lear. It was a genuine luxury to his soul for many years, and would have been a far deeper one had it not been for the alloys accompanying it. He enjoyed the prize because he had honorably won it, not sacrificing to it the more commanding aims of life; and fame is a mockery only when it shines on the absence of the goods greater than itself,—honor, health, peace, and love. He suffered much on account of it, in consequence of the detestable jealousies, plots, ranklings, and slanders always kindled by it among unhappy rivals and malignant observers. But one suffering he was always spared, namely, the bitter mortifications of the charlatan who has snatched the outward semblance of the prizes of desert without paying their price or possessing their substance. Striving always to deserve his reputation, he did not forfeit his own esteem. The satisfaction he received from applause was the joy of feeling his own power in the fibres of the audience thrilling under his touch. Fame was the magnifying and certified abstract of this,—a vast and constant assurance in his imagination of life and power and pleasure. Dry sticks, leather men, may sneer at the idea, but the rising moral ranks of souls are indicated by the intensity with which they can act and react on ideal considerations. Fame puts a favorable bias on all our relations with the approving public, and thus enriches our inner life by aiding our sympathies to appropriate their goods.

The actor lives in an atmosphere electrized with human publicity, and walks between walls lined with mirrors. Everything in his career is calculated to develop an acute self-consciousness. And then by what terrible trials his sensitiveness is beset in his exposure to the opposite extremes of derision and eulogy! Dr. Johnson, alluding at one time to the sensibility of Garrick, said, contemptuously, “Punch has no feelings.” At another time, praising his genius, he said, sublimely, “His death eclipsed the gayety of nations.” The actor tastes the sweetness of fame more keenly than any other, because no other lives so directly on it or draws the expression of it so openly and directly. Bannister was invited by the royal family at Windsor one evening to read a new play, and was treated with the utmost regard. The very next night he was stopped by a footpad, who, dragging him to a lamp to plunder him, discovered who he was, and said, “I’ll be damned if I can rob Jack Bannister.” Having thus the esteem of both extremes of society, it is safe to conclude that he enjoyed the admiration of all between. And this boon of public honor and love will seem valuable to a performer in proportion to the quickness and depth of his emotional power. “The awful consciousness,” said Mrs. Siddons, “that one is the sole object of attention to that immense space, lined as it were with human intellect all around from top to bottom, may perhaps be imagined, but can never be described.” A vulgar performer would rush on as if those heads were so many turnips. The genius of imaginative sensibility is the raw material for greatness. Forrest had much of this, although his self-possession was so strong; and under his composed exterior, even after he had been thirty years on the stage, he often shrank with temporary trepidation from the ordeal of facing a fresh audience. His enjoyment of the tributes paid to him was commensurately deep.

And, stretching through the long fifty years of his professional course, how varied, how numerous, how interesting and precious, these crowded tributes were! There was no end to the compliments paid him, echoes of the impression he had made on the country. Now it was a peerless race-horse, carrying off prize on prize, that was named after him. Then it was some beautiful yacht, club-boat, or pilot-boat, of which there were a dozen or more to whose owners he presented sets of flags. At another time it was a noble steamer or merchantman, of which there were a good many named for him, each adorned with a statue of some one of his characters as a figure-head. Locomotives and fire-engines also were crowned with his name and his likeness. Military companies, too, took their titles from him and carried his face copied on their banners. The following letter indicates another of the results of his fame:

“Dear Sir,—Being one of the small army of boys called after you, I should feel happy to receive some token from my illustrious namesake, if nothing more than his autograph. Hoping to see you before you leave the stage,

Seven different dramatic associations, composed of amateurs and professionals, were formed in the cities of Portland, Boston, New York, and elsewhere, bearing his name. And the notices of him in the newspapers were to be reckoned by thousands, ranging all the way from majestic eulogium to gross vituperation.

Portraits of him, paintings, engravings, photographs, in his own individuality and in his chief impersonations, were multiplied in many quarters. Numerous plaster casts of him, four or five busts in marble, and one full-length statue of surpassing grandeur, were taken. Many celebrated artists studied him, from Gilbert Stuart, whose Washington stands supremely immortal in American portraiture, to William Page, whose lovingly elaborated Shakspeare may become so in creative portraiture. Page has depicted Forrest in the role of Spartacus. He shows him at that moment of the scene in the amphitheatre where he utters the words which he never spoke without moving the audience to repeated bursts of applause: “Let them come in: we are armed!” The last portrait ever painted by the dying Stuart was of Forrest, then in his youth and only just beginning to become famous. Forrest used often to speak of his sitting to Stuart, whose strong fiery soul was enclosed in a frame then tottering and tremulous with age. “He was an old white lion,” said Forrest, “and so blind that I had to tell him the color of my eyes and of my hair. By sudden efforts of will he threw the lines and bits of color on the canvas, and every stroke was speech.”

Of the likenesses of Forrest published in this volume, the frontispiece is engraved from a daguerreotype of him at the age of forty-six; the succeeding one is from a painting by Samuel Lawrence, and shows him as he was at twenty-eight; the last one is from a photograph taken when he was in his sixty-seventh year. The illustrations of him in dramatic characters are from photographs made after he had passed sixty and had suffered partial paralysis. They do no justice to him as he appeared in his perfect meridian.

Of all the expressions of admiration, affection, pleasure, called forth by a professional artist, of all the forms or signals of fame, perhaps none is more flattering or more delightful to the recipient than the tributary verses evoked from souls endowed with the poetic faculty. As such natures are finer and higher than others, their homage is proportionally more precious. During his life more than fifty poems addressed to Forrest were published, and gave him a great deal of pure pleasure. A few specimens of these offerings may properly find a place here.

The following lines felicitously copied were thrown upon the stage to him one evening in a bouquet:

The succeeding piece was written in 1828:

The next piece, in which he is associated with his friend Halleck, is dated 1830:

The lines that follow next were printed in 1852, after the divorce trial:

This sonnet was written in the same year:

Here is a tribute penned in 1862, in the midst of our civil war:

And a year later the following eloquent verses were published by their author in the Philadelphia “Press:”

A single sonnet more shall end these examples of the poetic tributes to the genius and worth of Forrest; tributes which, adding lustre to his career and shedding comfort and joy into his heart, were and are one of the most attractive illustrations of the value and sweetness of the prize of fame:

Public and private banquets were given in honor of the actor by distinguished men in all parts of the country, occasions drawing together brilliant assemblages and yielding the highest enjoyment to every faculty of sense and soul. To meet around the social table, decked with everything that wealth and taste can command, the most eminent members of the learned professions, artists, authors, statesmen, the leaders of the business world, beautiful and accomplished women, and pass the hours in friendly converse seasoned with every charm of culture and wit, is one of the choicest privileges society can bestow in recognition and reward of worth and celebrity. Among the more notable of these honors may be mentioned as especially brilliant and locally conspicuous at the time a dinner given him at Detroit by General Lewis Cass, one at Cincinnati by his old friend James Taylor, one at New Orleans by a committee of the leading citizens, including some of his early admirers, and, later, one at Washington by his intimate and esteemed friend Colonel Forney, then Clerk of the House of Representatives. During one of his engagements in Washington he dined with a distinguished company under the princely auspices of Henry Clay. The great Kentuckian, in allusion to Pierre Soulé, a Louisiana Senator, who was a passionate orator but wanting, perhaps, in sobriety of judgment and steadiness of character, said to one of the guests, “A mere actor, sir, a mere actor!” At that instant chancing to catch the eye of Forrest, he promptly added, with the courteous grace of self-possession and winsome eloquence native to his thoroughbred soul, “I do not allude, Mr. Forrest, when I use the word actor thus demeaningly, to those men of genius who impersonate the great characters of Shakspeare and the other immortal dramatists, holding the very mirror of truth up to nature; I refer to the man who in real life affects convictions and plays parts foreign to his soul.”

At a banquet given in honor of John Howard Payne, the first vice-president, Prosper M. Wetmore, an old and dear friend of Forrest, paid him a compliment which, received as it was by the brilliant company with three times three enthusiastic cheers, must have given him a proud pleasure. Mr. Wetmore said, “Before mentioning the name of the gentleman whose health I am about to ask you to drink, I take this opportunity to say a word in relation to the generosity of his heart and the richness of his mind. He was one of the very first who took an interest in the festival of Thursday last, and kindly offered his name and services to add to the attractions of the evening. He has always been the foremost to do his share in honoring our sons of genius; and his purse has never been shut against the meritorious who stood in need of his bounty. His talents as an actor you all know and appreciate. Allow me to give you—Edwin Forrest:

Such as above described were the satisfactions afforded to Forrest by his fame. They are what thousands have vainly wished to win, fondly believing that if they could gain them they should be happy indeed. But to these advantages there are drawbacks, corresponding to these prizes there are penalties, which were experienced by Forrest in all their varieties of bitterness. The evils which dog the goods of public life, as their shadows, went far to disenchant him, to sour him, to make him turn sadly and resentfully into himself away from the lures and shams of society.

To any man of honorable instincts, clear perceptions, and high principles, the incompetency, corruption, and selfish biases of many of those who assume to sit in judgment on the claims of the competitors for public favor and glory, the shallowness and fickleness of the average public itself, the contemptible means successfully used by ignoble aspirants for their own advancement and the defeat of their rivals, the frequent reaction of their own modesty and high-mindedness to obscure and keep down the most meritorious, have a strong influence to rob ambition of its power, destroy all the relish of its rewards, and make fame seem worthless or even odious. Critics write in utter ignorance of the laws of criticism or standards of judgment, and even without having seen the performance they presume to approve or to condemn. Claqueurs are hired to clap one and to hiss another irrespective of merit or demerit. Wreaths, bouquets, rings, jewelled snuff-boxes, are purchased by actors or actresses themselves, through confederates, to be then presented to them in the name of an admiring public. A vase or cup or watch has been known to go with a popular performer from city to city to be presented to him over and over with eulogistic addresses of his own composition. A brazen politician, successful in compassing a nomination and election by shameless wire-pulling, mendacity, and bribery, then receives the tribute of an ostentatious testimonial of which he is himself the secret originator and prime manager. No one who has not had long experience of the world and been admitted behind the scenes, with the keys for interpreting appearances, can suspect how common such things are. They are terribly disheartening and repulsive to a generous soul. They destroy the splendor and value of the outward prizes of existence, and thus paralyze the grandest motives of action. When fools, charlatans, and swindlers carry off honors, then wisdom, genius, and heroism are tempted to despise honors. When the owl is umpire in a contest of song between the donkey and the nightingale, and awards the prize to the brayer, the lark and the mocking-bird may well decline to enter the lists.

In the fashionable rage for Master Betty, Kemble and Siddons were quite neglected; as the levee of Tom Thumb drew a throng of the nobility and fashion of London while poor Haydon, across the street, watched them with a gnawing heart from the door of his deserted exhibition. Cowper says in his “Task,”—

When, with pompous incompetency, Lord Abercorn told Mrs. Siddons that “that boy would yet eclipse everything which had been called acting in England,” she quietly replied, with crushing knowledge, “My lord, he is a very clever, pretty boy, but nothing more.” Garrick said it was the lot of actors to be alternately petted and pelted. And Kemble, when congratulated on the superb honors given him at his final adieu to the stage, responded, “It was very fine, but then I could not help remembering that without any cause they were once going to burn my house.” Genius and nobility naturally love fame, worship the public, would pour out their very life-blood to gain popular sympathy and admiration; but after such experiences of baseness and wrong and error the fascination flies from the prizes they had adored as so sacred, and never more do their souls leap and burn with the old enthusiasm of their unsophisticated days. The injustice of the world drives from it the love and homage of its noblest children.

Parasites and egotists seek association with a famous man merely to gratify their vanity, though they call it friendship. They fawn on him to share a reflection of his glory, to reap advantage from his influence, or to beg loans of his money; and when circumstances unmask their characters and show how they were preying on his frankness, he is revolted and his confidence in human nature shaken. Many a man of a sweet and loving nature, like the noble Timon, has gone out to the world with throbbing heart and open arms, and, met with selfishness and treachery, reacted into despair and hate. One of the penalties of a great reputation with its personal following is to be annoyed by sycophants, toadies, the impertinent curiosity of a miscellaneous throng who have neither genuine appreciation for talent nor sincere love for excellence, but a pestiferous instinct for boring and preying. Mrs. Siddons, bereaved of her children amidst her great fame, was so annoyed by worrying interruptions, assailed by envy, slandered by enemies, and vexed by parasites, that she breathed the deepest wishes of her soul in these lines:

The falsehood, the injustice, the plots, insincerity and triviality that gather about the surfaces and course of a showy popular career Forrest experienced in their full extent. He was not deceived by them, but saw through them. They repelled and disgusted him, angered and depressed him. They did not make him a misanthrope, but they chilled his demeanor, hardened his face, checked the trustfulness of his sympathy, and gave him an increasing distaste for convivial scenes and an increased liking for his library and the chosen few in whom he could fully confide. He was a man who esteemed justice and sincerity above all things else. Flattery or interested eulogy he detested as much as he did venal prejudice and blame. He loathed the unmeaning, conventional praises of the journals, the polite compliments of acquaintances or strangers, but was glad of all honest estimates. His dignity kept him from mingling with the audience as they conversed on their way out of the theatre, but he loved to hear what they said when it was repeated by one whom he could trust. Nothing more surely proves that deep elements of love and pride instead of shallow vanity and selfishness formed the basis of his character than the fact that he hated to mix in great companies, either public or private, where he was known and noticed, but loved to mingle with the population of the streets, with festive multitudes, where, unrecognized, he could look on and enter into their ways and pleasures. “It is a great feat,” he used to say, “to resist the temptations of our friends.” He did it when he withdrew from the obstreperous enthusiasm of those who adulated him while revelling at his expense and shouting, “By heaven, Forrest, you are an institution!”—forsaking them, and giving himself exclusively to nature, his art, his books, and his disinterested friends.

The practice of the arts of purchasing unearned praise, the tricks of the mean to circumvent the noble, the accredited verdicts of titled ignorance, and the fickle superficiality of popular favor, lessen the value of common fame in the eyes of all who understand these things. They foul its prizes and repel ingenuous spirits from its pursuit. The same influence is exerted in a yet stronger degree by the experience of the malignant envy awakened in plebeian natures by the sight of the success of others contrasted with their own failure. It was long ago remarked that

The selfishness—not to say the innate depravity—of human nature, as transmitted by historic inheritance, is such that every one who has not been regenerated by the reception or culture of a better spirit secretly craves a monopoly of the goods which command his desires. He dislikes his competitors, and would gladly defeat their designs and appropriate every waiting laurel to himself. In 1865 Forrest wrote, in a letter to Oakes, “Yes, my dear friend, there are many in this world who take pleasure in the misfortunes of their fellow-men and gloat over the miseries of their neighbors. And their envy, hatred, and malice are always manifested most towards men of positive natures.”

Souls of a generous type leave this base temper behind, and rejoice in the glory of a rival as if it were their own. But mean souls, so far from taking a disinterested delight in the spectacle of triumphant genius or valor justly crowned with what it has justly won, are filled with pain at the sight, a pain obscenely mixed up with fear and hate. Wherever they see an illustrious head they would fain strike it down or spatter it with mud. Their perverse instincts regard every good of another as so much kept from them. There was a powerful passage in the play of Jack Cade which Forrest used to pronounce with tremendous effect, ingravidating every word with his own bitter experience of its truth:

The extent to which this dark and malign power operates in the breasts of men is fearful. The careless see it not, the innocent suspect it not; carefully disguising itself under all sorts of garbs, it dupes the superficial observer. But the wise and earnest student of human life who has had large experience knows that it is almost omnipresent. In every walk of society, every profession,—even in the Church and among the clergy,—are men who fear and hate their superiors simply because they are superior, and the inferiors feel themselves obscured and taunted by the superiority. A good free man loves to reverence a superior, feels himself blessed and helped in looking up. But the slave of egotism and envy feels elevated and enriched only in looking down on those he fancies less favored than himself. It is a frightful and disheartening phase of human nature; but it ought to be recognized, that we may be guarded against it in others and stimulated to outgrow it in ourselves.

No other profession is so beset by the temptations and trials of this odious spirit as the histrionic, which lives directly in the public gaze, feeding on popular favor. And among all the actors America has produced, no other had so varied, so intense and immense an experience of the results of it as Forrest. He wrote these sad and caustic words in his old age: “For more than forty years the usual weapons of abuse, ridicule, and calumny have been unceasingly levelled at me, personally and professionally, by envious associates, by ungrateful friends turned traitors, by the hirelings of the press, and by a crowd of causeless enemies made such by sheer malignity.” In a speech made twenty-two years previously in the Walnut Street Theatre, in response to a call before the curtain, he had said, “I thank you with all my heart for this glorious and generous reception. In the midst of my trials it is gratifying to be thus sustained. I have been assailed, ladies and gentlemen, by a fiendish combination of enemies, who, not content with striking at my professional efforts, have let loose their calumnies upon my private character and invaded the sacred precincts of my home. Apart from the support of my ardent and cherished friends is the consciousness that I possess a reputation far dearer than all the professional honors that the world could bestow,—a reputation which is dearer to me than life itself. I will therefore pursue unawed the even tenor of my way. I will, with God’s blessing, live down the calumnies that would destroy me with my countrymen; and, turning neither to the right hand nor to the left hand, will fearlessly toil to preserve to the last the reputation of an honest and independent American citizen.”

To a man of his keen feeling and proud self-respect it must have been a torture to read the studiously belittling estimates, the satires, the insults, the slanderous caricatures continually published in the newspapers under the name of criticism. No wonder they stirred his rage and poisoned his repose, as they wounded his heart, offended his conscience, and made him sometimes shrink from social intercourse and sicken of the world. One critic says, “He is an injury to the stage. He has established a bad school for the young actors who are all imitating him. He has a contempt for genius and a disrelish for literature.” Against this extract, pasted in one of his scrap-books, Forrest had written, “Oh! oh!” A second writes, “It is impossible for us to admit that a man of Mr. Forrest’s intelligence can take pleasure in making of himself a silly spectacle for the amusement of the ignorant and the sorrow and pity of the educated. We prefer to believe that it is even a greater pain for him to play Metamora than it is for us to see him play it. In that case, how great must be his anguish!” A third philosophizes thus on his playing: “The best performances of Mr. Forrest are those tame readings of ordinary authors which offer no opportunity for enormous blunders. In the flat, dreary regions of the commonplace he walks firmly. But he climbs painfully up Shakspeare as a blind man would climb a mountain, continually tumbling over precipices without seeming to know it. He shocks our sensibilities, astonishes our judgment, bewilders and offends us; and this is at least excitement, if not entertainment. But his Brutus is a remarkably stupid performance. The only way in which he can redeem its stupidity is to make it worse; and if he wants to do this he must inspire it with the spirit of his Hamlet or his Othello.” A fourth makes malicious sport at his expense in this manner: “Mr. Forrest excels every tragedian we remember in one grand achievement. He can snort better than any man on the stage. It is an accomplishment which must have cost him much labor, and of which he is doubtless proud, for he introduces it whenever he gets a chance. His snort in Hamlet is tremendous; but that dying, swan-like note, which closes the career of the Gladiator, is unparalleled in the whole history of his sonorous and tragic nose. It must be heard, not described. We can only say that when he staggers in, with twenty mortal murders on his crown, with a face hideous with gore, and falls dying on the stage, he sounds a long, trumpet-like wail of dissolution, which is the most supernaturally appalling sound we ever heard from any nose, either of man or brute.” And a fifth caps the climax by calling him “A herculean murderer of Shakspeare!” So did a critic say of Garrick, on the eve of his retirement, “His voice is hoarse and hollow, his dimples are furrows, his neck hideous, his lips ugly, especially the upper one, which is raised all at once like a turgid piece of leather.” “He is a grimace-maker, a haberdasher of wry faces, a hypocrite who laughs and cries for hire!” Well might Byron exclaim,—