Lecture by David H. Wheeler, LL.D., President of Allegheny College,
delivered in the Amphitheater, Chautauqua, N. Y., August 23d, at 2 p. m.
Let me begin by saying that my subject is not theological, and it will
save us trouble if we remember it. Let me say in the second place that
my subject is not the stage, but a book. I shall not discuss the drama
as it is related to the stage, but the drama as a form of literature.
The theologian may find some comfort in the reflection that if God makes
a book it must be the best book. By the drama we mean simply the best
telling of a story. The gospels as God’s book may therefore be regarded
as necessarily the best told story in the world. But a few things may be
profitably said with regard to the relations of the drama with the stage.
First, this general one, that the stage was a contrivance for ages and
times when men could not read; and that ever since men learned to read,
the stage has been passing into shadow. An illustration of that may be
found in the fact that in the sixteenth century, the age of Shakspere,
there were probably one thousand men who went to the theater to one man
who could read a book; whereas, in our time, there are a hundred thousand
men who read books to one man who frequents the theater. The stage, in
other words, is an effete institution. It is therefore an institution
whose death does not carry with it the death of the drama; for, along
with the death of the stage, there has come an enlargement of the scope
of the drama. No important story was ever put upon the stage, or could
be. The stage is too narrow for a great theme; therefore all the themes
of all the plays are necessarily narrow themes—a few incidents grouped
about a character, or grouped about a single characteristic of human
nature. We have need in the world to tell stories that are larger,
that require an ampler stage for their development; that deal not only
with single principles, and single men, but with many principles and
vast masses of men—that concern not for a moment, or an hour, and a
single epoch of human life, but concern vast reaches of time and vaster
interests of humanity. And so it has come to pass that in our modern
times, our poetry—our epic poetry and our dramatic poetry—the two highest
forms of literary art, have undergone a great transformation. The poem
has become a novel. The epic has passed into this form; and the drama has
become history. Carlyle says that it is the business of the poet to write
history.
We make distinction between prose and poetry, but we ought to remember
that with regard to epic poetry, and dramatic poetry, both are to
be expressed either in verse or prose, and that versification is an
accident. There may be epic poems in prose; and, as the freest form,
prose has become the prevailing form, and poetry is, more and more, as
the world grows older, confined to the lyric jingle. Poetry, in the
old sense, soon will pass, and the drama has passed into unversified
poetry. Milton made a great change by adopting blank verse, and Shakspere
had started us on the same road. In our age the great works of poetic
language may be expected to be produced in what is technically prose. The
epic poem may also be dramatically constructed, so that we may have the
prose epic under form of the drama.
Let me call attention to the fact that we are fortunate in speaking a
tongue, the imperial language, in which Shakspere practically killed the
old Aristotelian unities. He wanted a dramatic form in which to tell the
story of the fall of Julius Cæsar, and the story of English history. He
had to discard the old unities of time and place. The only Aristotelian
unity that remains in our English literature is that of subject. The
subject of a dramatic action, or an epic story, must have unity. There
must be one action having a beginning, a middle, and an end; and there
must be a constant, regular, orderly, striking, impressive advance from
the beginning to the end.
Now we come to consider whether the gospels ought to be regarded as a
drama. In the first place, we are familiar with the custom of commenting
on and praising the literary merits of the gospel. We say how sweet
and fluent and intelligible is the language in which it is written.
We understand that portions of it reach the heights of sublimity,
particularly the seventeenth chapter of John. We are familiar with the
fact that its English is so beautiful that there are men among us to rise
and complain if we interfere with a word in it. We are familiar with the
idea that the gospels have literary merits of a very high order. But we
have been accustomed, as a rule, to regard these things in detail rather
than as a whole. Now, when I say that they may be regarded as dramatic,
I mean the highest literary merit crowns them as a whole. Their story is
told in a dramatic form. No story ever told under the sun was so well
told as is this story of the life, death, resurrection and ascension of
the Lord Jesus Christ. I must treat this topic illustratingly, for my
sole purpose is to get an idea before you. Look, then, at the idea of
dramatizing history. It is said that Lord Marlborough read only Shakspere
for English history. He found that the dramatist had put his conceptions
of the actions and characteristics of leading men in English history in
such an effective way, that, whether he was right or wrong, he had fixed
the national estimate of these characters—had typed them forever. What
Shakspere says a man was, the English people will go on thinking him to
have been. These characters give us, on a small scale, the purpose and
effect of the dramatization of history. When Shakspere did his work,
little historical study had been done. English critical history dates
from after his time. But without the help of critics he conceived and
typed groups of characters, and he had such power of placing himself in
the center of things and working out the characteristics, that he really
constructed English history by the dramatic method. He had pitifully few
materials, but historians who have come after him have found his types
very faithful, and have been content to work out the details, accepting
the pictures Shakspere had hung up before the eyes of the nation.
Shaksperean English characters can not be much changed by ever so much
study. This is only an illustration of the triumph which the dramatic
form may win. Another most important distinction is the one between the
theatrical and the dramatic. We can best understand it by looking at
the common significance of the words. By “theatrical” we mean something
false, fictitious, showy, with no reality behind it.
When a human action is theatrical it is insincere and false to the facts.
On the other hand, when you use the word “dramatic,” you mean something
entirely different. You mean to praise the thing and not condemn it.
When the two Senators from New York suddenly resigned their position in
1881—you remember it—the friends of these men spoke of their action as
dramatic, and their enemies characterized their action as theatrical;
one to praise, the other to blame. An incident like that draws the line
better than a definition. The word “drama” has won a place outside of
the stage—and it more and more separates itself from the stage, and
becomes a word descriptive of the best told story. In such a story there
must be reality. It must be a story so put together that the meaning
leaps out as the story goes on, and the mind takes hold of the meaning
easily and fully—so that the whole meaning flashes on the understanding.
You all know the power of a good story teller. You all know that every
neighborhood has some man who can grasp an incident and tell it so that
it comes strikingly before the mind. This power of narrative is at once
epic and dramatic. This village story teller is a miniature Milton and
Shakspere. The arrangement of a drama is systematic; and moves to a
climax with full force. In order to a dramatic arrangement it is not
necessary that the characters should be combined, as in the form of a
play; it is only necessary that the story should be told in the most
effective way, so that its meaning will flash clear and strong on the
understanding. The gospels are told in this way; and it is the only
possible way in which their story could reach the understanding. If we
consider the gospels from this point of view, there are several things
to attract our attention. One of them is the universality of the human
nature which is brought out in the gospel. If you take up a picture book,
or a fashion book of a hundred years ago, you are interested in a certain
way in studying the characters, and discovering that the people dressed
in a way very different from the present mode. You study the strange
dresses with interest, but at the same time with a kind of feeling that
these people were not just like yourself. Your point of observation in
the fashion-plate presents you with nothing but unlikeness to yourself
and your contemporaries. It is a strange world to you.
Now, what the fashion-plate is, a great part of literature is. It is
something which gets old, out of fashion, outworn, when it is a hundred
years old. People live largely upon a contemporaneous literary diet. The
most of the literature for each generation is produced by itself, and
therefore the human nature of it, like the dresses of the fashion-plate,
is in a little while out of date, and seems old. I am not as old as I
look to be, but I have seen several kinds of literary fashions come and
go. I have known men to be famous, producing a book nearly every month,
whose name would now be strange, and there are few here who have thought
of them for a long time. Other books have taken their places. They were
novels, stories, histories, and even poems, but they have gone out of
date, because the human nature they dealt with was a temporary and
passing human nature—that of a fashion-plate. And the same effect must
attend most of the novels being written in our day, because there is a
passion upon us for this sort of living detail, this sort of temporary
book.
There is so little of permanent universal human nature in an ordinary
novel of the period, that when you are done with it you have learned
but very little about man. The great defect with this class of books is
that they do not deal with universal human nature, and it is the power
of Shakspere that he deals largely with universal human nature. And
here we discover the likeness that reigns there. We recognize ourselves
and our neighbors. We have struck one of the old lines of humanity,
and are acquainted with the people we meet. They wear togas, we wear
trousers; but we know each other for brothers. The defect of Shaksperean
human nature very soon appears when you lay it down along side of the
gospels. You have a little universal human nature in Shakspere, in the
gospels you have almost nothing else but universal human nature. If you
ask yourselves why we are interested in certain incidents that occurred
nearly two thousand years ago, in a foreign land, that occurred in
connection with a people for whom we have nothing but antipathy, what
will be the answer? Why are we interested in this old history lying back
there in a world that had almost nothing like our world except men,
and the eternal rocks, and the ever flowing streams? Why, belting the
green earth, should we find men everywhere singing about this passage
in human history? What is the charm of it that reaches human nature so
widely? Undoubtedly there is much charm in the delightful truth which it
contains; more in the delightful power behind it, but much also in the
fact that when we open these gospels we find ourselves in the presence of
men and women like ourselves, in the presence of human nature, undying,
eternally the same. In any of these passages you find yourself suddenly
reminded of yourself. You feel in every throb of a human heart in the
gospels something which allies the old heart with yourself.
Another proof of the dramatic quality of the gospels lies in the fact
that the details all work out into one picture, and each trait resembles
the whole. What I mean here I shall try to make clear. The Righi is a
mountain made up of pudding stones. It is a great egg-shaped mass that
leaps up out of the plain, rising thousands of feet in the air, and is
composed altogether of these pudding stones. At different points up its
rugged sides, masses have been broken off by the action of the ice,
and if you examine them you will find that the fragments resemble the
whole. Break up one of them into the finest pieces, and each bit will
still resemble the whole. In any fragment of the vast mass you have a
picture of the whole mountain. Now this is true of the highest dramatic
production, that every piece and every incident is a picture of the
whole. This highest dramatic perfection is found only in the gospels.
You find hints of it elsewhere. Many of you have read the story of
“Middlemarch,” the most perfect piece of art produced in the way of a
modern novel. The art lies first in the dramatic conception, for it has
a theme, and the theme runs clear through, and the climax leaps out of
the theme. This theme is worked out through a principal character. In
her history the general lesson is impressively taught. But the art does
not end there, each one of the characters is a picture of the heroine in
little. The same story is repeated over and over again, in the different
characters. It is a story of human failure, of the way in which a great
human purpose, and high aspirations, growing in a youthful mind, may be
dispersed and destroyed as human life goes on to its conclusion. It is a
lesson of failure, and the failure of the principal character is repeated
in the subordinate characters.
Take another illustration from Shakspere: “Julius Cæsar” is his best
drama, not the best play, for it does not act well on the stage, as it
lacks singleness and simplicity; nevertheless it is, I think, Shakspere’s
most complete play, his most dramatic piece, and the reason is this: His
subject is large and is developed on the principle I am laying down. The
play is narrow, both in “Macbeth” and “Othello.” In “Julius Cæsar” it is
large. The subject may be named the weaknesses of great men. The play
is constructed so as to develop the weaknesses of Julius Cæsar, and of
all the rest of the characters grouped about him. The story told in the
death of Julius Cæsar is told also in the death of all the parties in
the terrible failure of them all. But you must mark that in this case
we have an extremely narrow purpose as compared with the gospels. In
the gospels you can begin anywhere, and preach the whole gospel from
any incident. Take the case of the Prodigal Son, and you have the whole
story of the gospel in that short compass. Take up the case of the man
described as the “father of the child,” crying, “I believe,” and you have
it over again. It is over and over again, from the beginning to the end,
the pieces all conspiring to the grand result. It is achieved not by
ordinary art. The story teller has seen or heard or conceived something,
and he goes through a mass of details. The gospels have nothing of that
sort. They tell you in a few words what they have to say of the woman
of Samaria, or the maniac of Gadara, or of her who loved much and was
forgiven much. Names are dispensed with, details, places of residence,
all the tricks by which the ordinary story teller succeeds. This story
succeeds by pure force of an infinite truth behind it.
Another characteristic of drama is a kind of consistency between the
beginning and the end, a kind of logical order in which it moves, and
this is illustrated in the gospels by the fact which must always be
borne in mind, that the task is one of supreme difficulty. The author
of the gospels has to tell the story of the Incarnation of God’s son. A
story in which there are human and divine actors, in which there is both
nature and the supernatural. It requires vast dramatic power. I have
suggested, yet I may more definitely repeat it, that the human earth on
which you tread is not that of old Palestine, or Galilee, or Jerusalem.
It is a real universal, a human earth. There is not a bit of purer
realism than the gospels. Take up this story, walk with these men. Down
by the lake you find the Gadarene crying among the tombs. You see the
stranger landing and healing him. You stand down by the boat and hear the
poor man begging Jesus to allow him to go with him. You see these human
figures. Look into it a little, and there the man stands where he has
stood almost two thousand years, listening to the words of the Master
compelling him to go away. The meaning of it you understand, for the case
is before you. On this solid human earth, this real human nature, this
realistic character which makes you feel the heart beat, and smell the
real earth, all is combined with something else, with the supernatural.
There have been writers who have carried us into wonderland. We were
glad to be there, and we traveled along delighted with the scenery and
with the companions created by the imagination. The gospels do not do
this. This solid earth beneath your feet is not more real than the
heavens that bend over it. Human reality is combined with heavenly, and
you are continually going to and fro between the earth and the sky. The
natural and the supernatural are so run together that you feel no shock
in passing from one to the other. You have men and angels, divine power
and human power, associated together. The warp of earth is woven into the
woof of heaven until it is one piece of cloth of gold. The gold of the
skies is braided into the earthly so perfectly I defy any man to take
them apart with consistency or success. This is the beauty and perfection
of dramatic success. The divine and the human are blended in Christ so
that you are puzzled to tell whether it is a man or a God who speaks and
works. The blending of the human about him, in him, through him, all this
is an effect utterly beyond human art. The story goes straight home to
the human heart. The time will never come when it will not be a dear and
sweet old story to the souls that hear it. Edward Eggleston once told me
that when he was lecturing in some strange corner of the earth, where
culture in the pulpit was comparatively rare, after the lecture one of
the men said, “I wish you would come here and preach for us. Our minister
preaches the funeral of Jesus Christ twice a Sunday, fifty-two Sundays
in the year.” The case seemed to me to be an exceedingly sad one until I
began to ask myself, of what man that ever lived could it be said they
preached his funeral sermon twice a Sabbath for fifty-two Sundays in
the year, and the story still had such freshness that the people would
come out and hear it? What other thing was ever so well done that a fool
might talk about it, and still a certain amount of interest attach to it
despite the poor telling? Here lies one of the uses of the dramatic power
of the gospel. When a man of humble attainments has it to tell, he has
only to follow the book to make it an interesting story. The moment he
strikes a real point of interest, the attentive soul feels that that is
what it came for, and, what is better, that it is said to him. In short,
the enduring power of this story lies in great part in this fact. The
consistency between the beginning and the end and the logical order of
things, comes out in a thousand powerful ways. For instance, the peculiar
truth that reappears in the words which are sculptured on Shakspere’s
tomb.
Take the same thought as it reappears—the same thought slightly turned
over—as it is repeated in “Middlemarch,” or in that best human version of
all, that of Watts:
“Princes, this clay must be your bed,
In spite of all your towers;
The tall, the wise, the reverend head,
Must lie as low as ours.”
You will find the thought, in good and bad versions, everywhere. Do you
wish to take this thought fresh from the fountain? Come to the temple,
where the disciples, accustomed to nothing great in art, fresh from
Galilee, stand gazing in admiration at the glory of the great edifice and
one of them cries out: “Master, behold these stones; and what manner of
a building is this?” And listen to the Master as he says: “There shall
not remain one stone upon another,” and you have the fountain head of all
these streams running down into our poetry.
Mark the wonderful consistency, and the wonderful movement of this
story—consider it as a drama. You may regard the gospels as beginning at
that moment when suddenly there was with the angel a great company of the
heavenly hosts, appearing to the shepherds as they watched their flocks
by night. It practically ends when the disciples, after the ascension,
returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple
singing the song which began in angel mouths and ends in human mouths.
The purpose of the story was to sing that angelic music into the human
heart.
In conclusion: What inferences may be drawn from the statements I have
made? Certainly not that the gospels have attained their success because
they are a drama. They had to have the truth to succeed. They have the
truth, and that has given them success. It behooved that Christ should
suffer and rise from the dead the third day. And this behooving lies in
something very deep in our nature. We believe that these gospels are
inspired; that the authors were moved by the Holy Ghost; and it seems to
me to be a necessary inference that the story should be well told; and
well told means dramatically told. If it be true that the gospels sweep
a larger circle and involve a greater work than was ever attempted by a
human brain, if it be true that you can put a million of Shaksperes into
their compass and still have an abyss of art unfilled, then you have an
inference, an argument, in the line of the evidences of Christianity
that has never been attempted. And that is that the best told, most
dramatically told story, the story of the visit of God’s son to the
earth, of his life, death, resurrection and ascension, must have been
told by God himself. No human pen can be eloquent enough, no heart wide
enough, no intellect could penetrate into the human heart deeply enough,
to produce these gospels. In the literary perfection of the gospel there
lies an evidence of the truth, of the divine authorship of the gospels,
which in time to come, when all men read and think, will weigh perhaps
more than any other kind of argument that has been drawn upon to this
hour.