4. The real function of the drama is like that of the novel--not
to amuse, not to excite; but to portray life, and so minister to
it. And as virtue and vice, goodness and evil, are the great
fundamental facts of life, they must, in either serious story or
serious play, be portrayed. If they are so portrayed that the vice
is alluring and the virtue repugnant, the play or story is immoral;
if so portrayed that the vice is repellant and the virtue alluring,
they play or story is moral.
5. The church has no occasion to ask the theatre to preach; though
if it does preach we have a right to demand that its ethical
doctrines be pure and high. But we have a right to demand that in
its pictures of life it so portrays vice as to make it abhorrent,
and so portrays virtue as to make it attractive.
_Answer_. I agree in most of what you have read, though I must
confess that to find a minister agreeing with me, or to find myself
agreeing with a minister, makes me a little uncertain. All art,
in my judgment, is for the sake of expression--equally true of the
drama as of painting and sculpture. No poem touches the human
heart unless it touches the universal. It must, at some point,
move in unison with the great ebb and flow of things. The same is
true of the play, of a piece of music or a statue. I think that
all real artists, in all departments, touch the universal and when
they do the result is good; but the result need not have been a
consideration. There is an old story that at first there was a
temple erected upon the earth by God himself; that afterward this
temple was shivered into countless pieces and distributed over the
whole earth, and that all the rubies and diamonds and precious
stones since found are parts of that temple. Now, if we could
conceive of a building, or of anything involving all Art, and that
it had been scattered abroad, then I would say that whoever find
and portrays truthfully a thought, an emotion, a truth, has found
and restored one of the jewels.
--_Dramatic Mirror_, New York, April 21, 1888.