Life of Edwin Forrest, the American Tragedian (Complete)
9781465639370
100 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Edwin Forrest has good claims for a biography. The world, it has been said, is annually inundated with an intolerable flood of lives of nobodies. So much the stronger motive, then, for presenting the life of one who was an emphatic somebody. There is no more wholesome or more fascinating exercise for our faculties than in a wise and liberal spirit to contemplate the career of a gifted and conspicuous person who has lived largely and deeply and shown bold and exalted qualities. To analyze his experience, study the pictures of his deeds, and estimate his character by a free and universal standard, is one of the fittest and finest tasks to which we can be summoned. To do this with assimilating sympathy and impartial temper, stooping to no meaner considerations than the good and evil, the baseness and grandeur of man as man, requires a degree of freedom from narrow distastes, class and local biases, but rarely attained. Every effort pointing in this direction, every biographic essay characterized by a full human tone or true catholicity, promises to be of service, and thus carries its own justification. The habit of esteeming and censuring men in this generous human fashion, uninfluenced by any sectarian or partisan motive, unswayed by any clique or caste, is one of the ripest results of intellectual and moral culture. It implies that fusion of wisdom and charity which alone issues in a grand justice. One of the commonest evils among men is an undue sympathy for the styles of character and modes of life most familiar to them or like their own, with an undue antipathy for those unfamiliar to them or unlike their own. It is a duty and a privilege to outgrow this low and poor limitation by cultivating a more liberal range of appreciation. There is still lingering in many minds, especially in the so-called religious world, a strong prejudice against the dramatic profession. Analyzed down to its origin, the long warfare of church and theatre, the instinctive aversion of priest and player, will be found to be rooted in the essential opposition of their respective ideals of life. The ecclesiastical ideal is ascetic, its method painful obedience and prayer, its chief virtues self-restraint and denial; the dramatic ideal is free, its method self-development and culture, its ruling aims gratification and fulfilment The votaries of these distinctive sets of convictions and sentiments have from an early age formed two hostile camps. Accordingly, when one known as a clergyman was said to be writing the life of an actor, the announcement created surprise and curiosity and elicited censorious comment. The question was often asked, how can this strange conjunction be explained? It is therefore, perhaps, not inappropriate for the author of the present work to state the circumstances and motives which caused him to undertake it. The narrative will be brief, and may, with several advantages, take the place of a formal preface. Conventional prefaces are rarely read; but the writer trusts that the statement he proposes to make will be not only interesting to the reader but likewise helpful, by furnishing him with the proper key and cue to the succeeding chapters. It may serve as a sort of preparatory lighting up of the field to be traversed; a kind of prelusive sketch of the provinces of experience to be surveyed, of the lessons to be taught, and of the credentials of the author in the materials and other conditions secured to him for the completion of his task. This statement is to be taken as an explanation, not as an apology.
