POPULAR SPORTS, EXHIBITIONS, AND DRAMA
Limits of the study, Introduction.--Literature and drama in
ethology.--Public amusements of the uncivilized; reversion to
archaic, "natural" ways.--Chaldean and Mexican myths of
reproduction dramatically represented.--Limit of toleration for
propriety in exhibitions.--Origin of the Athenian drama.--Drama
and worship; customs derived from the mysteries.--The word
"God."--Kinship yields to religion as social tie.--Religion and
drama; syncretism.--Beginnings of the theater at Rome.--
Gladiatorial exhibitions.--Spread of gladiatorial exhibitions.--
The folk drama.--The popular taste; realism; conventionality;
satire.--Popular exhibitions.--Ancient popular festivals.--The
_mimus_.--Modern analogies.--Biologs and ethologs.--Dickens as
a biolog.--Early Jewish plays.--The Roman _mimus_.--_The
Suffering Christ_; _Pseudo-querolus_.--The _mimus_ and
Christianity.--Popular phantasms.--Effects of vicious
amusements.--Gladiatorial games.--Compromise between the church
and popular customs.--The _cantica_.--Passion for the games.--
German sports.--The _mimus_ from the third to the eighth
century.--The drama in the Orient.--Marionettes.--The drama in
India.--Punch in the West.--Resistance of the church to the
drama.--Hrotsvitha.--The jongleurs; processions.--Adam de la
Halle.--The flagellants.--Use of churches for dramatic
exhibitions.--Protest against misuse of churches.--Toleration
of jests by the ecclesiastics.--Fictitious literature.--
Romances of roguery.--Picaresque novels.--Books of beggars.--
At the beginning of the sixteenth century.--The theater at
Venice.--Dancing; public sports.--Women in the theater and on
the stage.--The _commedia del arte_.--Jest books; Italian
comedy at Paris.--_Commedia del arte_ in Italy.--Summary and
review.--Amusements need the control of educated judgment and
will.--Amusements do not satisfy the current notions of
progress.
+Limits.+ The cases of public amusement and entertainment which shall
here be mentioned are such as were within the limits of usage and
accepted propriety at the time. They are not cases of vice or of
disputed propriety at the time. Drunkenness, gambling, bull baiting,
cockfighting, and prize fighting are amusements which have entered into
the mores of groups and subgroups, as bullfighting still does in Spain,
but they were limited to classes or groups, or they were important on
account of the excess, or they were disapproved by great numbers or by
the ecclesiastical authorities. They would, therefore, lie outside the
mores, to which the cases to be noticed belonged. The theater in England
in Charles II's time testified to a depraved taste and a low standard of
morals, but it was temporary and indeed limited in time. In different
groups also the moral standards are unequal at the same time, and the
mores are on different levels. There is a wider limit now for romances
and dramas in France than in English-speaking countries. The cases which
now interest us are those of long and wide currency, which the mores
have firmly established according to current standards, even though
moralists may have inveighed against them sometimes, as the same class
now sometimes denounces all dancing.
The cases here to be noticed are further illustrations of the fact that
the mores can make anything right, and can protect anything from
condemnation, in addition to those in the last two chapters.
+614. Literature and drama in ethology.+ Poetry, drama, and literary
fiction are useful to ethology in one or the other of two ways: (1) they
reveal facts of the mores; (2) they show the longings and ideals of the
group,--in short, what the people like and wish for. The second division
includes mythology, fairy tales, and extravaganzas. The taste for them,
if it exists, is a feature of the mores, but in fact such a taste is
hardly ever popular. It is a product of culture. Myths, legends,
proverbs, fables, riddles, etc., are popular products.
+615. Public amusements of the uncivilized. Reversion to archaic,
"natural" ways.+ We find in savage life, almost universally unless the
group has been crushed by conquest or misfortune, festivals, games,
dances, and orgies, which are often celebrated with masks and dramatic
action. The motives are fidelity to the traditions of ancestors,
entertainment, sex excitement, war enthusiasm, and occult influence in
aid of the food quest. The dramatic representation of sex attraction and
of the ways of animals is often intensely graphic, and it gives great
pleasure to the spectators. An occult effect, to bring about what is
desired in war or the chase by enacting it in a dance or play, involves
demonism, the existing form of religion. Therefore religion, dramatic
dances, music, songs, emotional suggestion, and sex stimulation are
intertwined from low barbarism or savagery. Experience of the perils and
pains of sexual excess and overpopulation force the development of
folkways of restraint, which are customary and conventional regulations
of primary natural impulses. At the recurring points of time at which
the festivals are held there is often a reversion from the moral status
created by the later mores to the ancient "natural" ways, because the
later ways are a reflection on the ancestors who were "uncultivated."
Their ghosts will be displeased at the new ways and will inflict ill
fortune on the group. The festival is not a time at which to emphasize
the novelty, but to set it aside and revert to old ways. How far back
shall the reversion go? What is "natural"? As no one ever has known from
what depths of beastliness, rendered more acute by some intelligence,
man came, no one has ever known what "nature" would be. Men reverted
actually to some ancient custom of their ancestors beyond which they
knew nothing, and which therefore to them seemed primitive and original.
The festivals were always outside of the routine of regular life. We,
for a holiday frolic, relax, for ourselves and our children, the
discipline of ordinary life; for instance, on the Fourth of July. In the
theater we make allowances for what we would not tolerate in the street
or parlor. That a thing is in jest is, and always has been, an excuse
for what is a little beyond the limit otherwise observed. It was a
favorite Arab jest to fasten the train of a woman's dress, while she was
sitting, to the waist of it, so that when she arose her dress would be
disordered.[1987] She must learn to guard herself.
+616. Chaldean and Mexican myths of reproduction dramatically
represented.+ In the mythical period of Chaldea the worship of the Great
Mother Ishtar (the patroness of sex attraction, but a goddess whose love
was a calamity to all her husbands,[1988] perhaps a mythical
representation of the perils and pains of sex) was a setting loose of
sex passion from the later societal ("moral") regulations, in favor of
the original passionate impulse of sex and reproduction. The festival
was, therefore, a period of license. The seat of the licentious rites,
and of sacral prostitution, was Uruk, the city of the dead (i.e. of
ancestors), where men liked to be buried (in order to join their
ancestors).[1989] The Tammuz (Adonis) worship was connected with the
worship of Ishtar, the relation between the god and the goddess being
different in different myths. The Tammuz worship was a dramatic
enactment of the death and resurrection of the god (connected with the
decay and renewal of the world of vegetation), with corresponding
lamentations and rejoicings of the worshipers.[1990] In Mexico we find a
parallel pantomime of the nature process at a religious harvest
festival, the pantomime being used for occult magic, in order to get
good crops in the next season. Obscene figures and rites were used.
There is a maize goddess who is the "Mother of the Gods." The union of
the sun god with the earth gives fertility, so that the food supply is
at stake in these rites and notions.[1991] This most absorbing interest
of mankind drove men's minds along the same lines of world philosophy.
The "Mother of the Gods," by her sex activity, brought about growth on
earth and became goddess of lewdness and filth, just as the German
Corn-mother became a harlot. So the goddess by whose activity the earth
bears flowers was honored at a festival at which boys and girls nine or
ten years old became senselessly drunk and perpetrated sex vice. This
was at a _religious_ festival.[1992] Here then we find reversion to more
primitive sex mores, and dramatic representation of a myth, conjoined in
religion, on the very threshold of the higher civilization. The
reversion to primitive sex mores to satisfy notions of duty to religion
and ancestors comes to us as an incomprehensible violation of "primary
instincts," which we have inferred from ideas that we can trace back
beyond any known origin, which we suppose to be universally accepted,
and which seem to us axiomatic as to social welfare. The only way to
understand the case is to take the standpoint of the mores of that time.
The mores contained the answer to the questions: How far back shall we
go? What shall be the degree of license at the festival? At the limit
fixed by custom the mores extend their sanction over the function and
make it "right." Another source of barbaric festivals may be noticed.
Men won victories over the elements and over beasts before they won
victories over each other. This is true of remote antiquity and of
primitive society. It is also true of the Middle Ages. The destruction
of great beasts, demons, and other monsters led to dramatic and
religious festivals. Magnin[1993] thinks that he could make a cycle of
beasts, of which Reineke Fuchs would be the last link, anterior to the
cycles of Arthur and Charlemagne.
+617. Limit of toleration for propriety in exhibitions.+ Therefore: What
shall be the limit of toleration in theatrical and other exhibitions
with respect to dress, language, gesture, etc., in order to define
propriety, is altogether a matter of the mores. It is not conceivable
that the _Lysistrata_ of Aristophanes could be presented on any public
stage in Christendom. The whole play is beyond the toleration of modern
mores. We meet with jugglers in Homer,[1994] also mountebanks and
tumblers.[1995] The _kubisteteres_ spun around on the perpendicular axis
of the body, and are compared to the wheel of the potter. Then they
pitched down head-foremost, like plungers or tumblers turning
somersaults. Some archæologs have thought that the play of these persons
had some analogy with that of the cubic stones which were so prominent
in the cult of the Phrygian Cybele. If that analogy is accepted, then
the pyramidal dance must be regarded as originally hieratic and
consecrated to Cybele. That dance was at first aristocratic, but
speedily became popular and descended to the mountebanks.[1996]
+618. Origin of Athenian drama.+ The theater originated in the Dionysiac
mysteries of the Greeks, in which dramatic action and responsive
choruses were employed. Sex symbols were used without reserve.
Intoxication and ecstasy belonged to due performance. In later mysteries
dramatic action was employed to present myths and legends, or religious
doctrines, in order to get the powerful effects in suggestion which
dramatic action exerts. Many myths presented acts such as later mores
could not tolerate. Allowance had to be made for the representations, as
we now make allowances for Bible stories and Shakespeare. We know that
the mysteries were often in bad repute for their indecency and realism,
even in an age of low standards. Anybody who is not in the convention
can scoff at it, however low his own code may be. The Greeks described
the Phrygian mysteries as abominable and immoral, while they praised and
admired the Eleusinian. "The former were introduced by slaves and
foreigners, and participated in by the superstitious and ignorant. They
were celebrated for money by strolling priests, and any one who paid a
fee was initiated without preparation, except some ritual acts. There
was no solemnity in the surroundings, and no dignity in the ceremonial,
but all was vulgar and sordid."[1997] The Athenian drama, in the fifth
century B.C., went through an amazing development and reached high
perfection. The art of the theater was especially cultivated. As to the
effect of the dramas on the character of the spectators, it is to be
noticed that they were presented only once in the year, at the greater
festival of Dionysus in the spring, and that then a large number of
plays were represented. The spectators, at Athens, were a very mixed
assemblage and included the populace, "who remained populace in spite of
any beautiful verses which they might chance to hear." They cared only
to be amused, "just like modern audiences."[1998]
+619. Dramatic taste and usage in worship. Customs derived from the
mysteries.+ About the time of Christ, by syncretism all the religions
took on a dramatic form in their ritual, with liturgies and responses,
on account of the attractiveness of that form for worshipers. The
Christian year was built up as a drama of the life of Christ. The
ceremony of the mass was produced by an application of modes of worship
which, so far as we can learn, were devised and used in the mysteries.
"There is unmistakable evidence that a marriage ceremony of a religious
nature existed, and that this ceremony stood in close relation to a
part of the ritual of the mysteries. In fact, the marriage was, as it
were, a reproduction by the bride and bridegroom of a scene from the
divine life, i.e. from the mystic drama. The formula, 'I escaped evil: I
found better,' was repeated by the celebrant who was initiated in the
Phrygian mysteries; and the same formula was pronounced as part of the
Athenian marriage ceremony. Another formula, 'I have drunk from the
_kymbalon_,' was pronounced by the initiated; and drinking from the same
cup has been proved to have formed part of a ceremony performed in the
temple by the betrothed pair." "It is an extremely important fact that
the human marriage ceremony was thus celebrated by forms taken from the
mysteries; and the conclusion must be that the human pair repeat the
action in the way in which the god and goddess first performed and
consecrated it, and that, in fact, they play the parts of the god and
goddess in the sacred drama. This single example is, as we may be sure,
typical of a whole series of actions."[1999]
+620. The word "god."+ "That man when he dies becomes a god was
considered already in the fourth century B.C. to be part of the teaching
conveyed in the mysteries."[2000] This meant no more than the earlier
notion that when a man died he became a ghost. The word "god" was used
in senses very strange to our ears,[2001] and to quote an expression of
any writer of the beginning of the Christian era in which he uses the
word "god," and to give to that word our sense of it, is to be led into
great error. The age was one which put all its religion in dramatic form
and acted it out. It was an age with a gift for manufacturing rites and
liturgies.
+621. Kin yields to religion as social tie.+ This was due to a great
ethnological change which was then coming to its culmination. The kin
tie, which had been the primitive mode of association and coherence of
groups, began to break down in the sixth century B.C. in Greece. It was
superseded by the social tie of a common religious faith and ritual. The
Pythagorean and Orphic sects developed this tie. They had a revelation
of the other world, a system of mystic and cathartic rites, which
cleared men of ritual uncleanness, purified them, and "saved" them. The
cathartic rites were a means of warding off evil spirits and did the
work of the old shamans.[2002] The sectarian brotherhood of the
initiated, the "church," the faith, the contrast of ordinary life with
the ecstatic emotions of the mysteries, the consequent antagonism of the
"flesh" or the "world," and the "spirit," were easy deductions from the
teaching and ritual of the sects.[2003] It was all concentrated in the
godlikeness, divinity, or immortality of the human soul, with the mystic
notions of union between the soul and God. "Mysticism, as doctrine and
theory, grew up from the soil of a more ancient practice in worship."
"The worship of Dionysus must have furnished the first germ of the
belief in the immortality of the soul."[2004] The idea of the Orphic
mysteries was that humanity is suffering and sinful, and must be
initiated in order to wash away its stains and be redeemed from its
sins. Initiation puts a man in communication with the divinity. The soul
is raised by ecstasy to feel its own divinity, which is the deepest
element in all mystic religion. In all this compound of rites and
notions the great antecedent philosophy was not the same as ours. It was
demonism, superstitious anxiety about the world of demons, who floated
around men and stretched their hands out of the surrounding darkness to
seize them. It was from these that men wanted to be "saved." Atonement
was to be made to the chthonic gods, for they were displeased at ritual
uncleanness, and the chthonic cults had the other world in view.[2005]
The uncleanness was ritual, and hence it came from anything far out of
the regular order, either by abomination or holiness. The rabbis held
that the handling of the Scriptures defiled the hands and called for
ceremonial washing (Num. xix. 8, 10).[2006]
+622. Combination of religion and drama. Syncretism.+ The interest of
all this for our present purpose is the combination of religious ideas
with dramatic representation. Processions of all kinds easily turn into
such representations. Rites and ceremonies are but a form of drama.
Symbols and emblems have the same character. The old religions were
subjected to criticism, which means that they had lost their authority.
They did not verify when the attempt was made to use them for societal
needs. Slaves, merchants, soldiers, etc., afloat in the world,
associated from choice and contributed traditions from the whole known
world. Then syncretism began, and a body of sectarian notions was
formed. There was a new totemism, a breaking down of national religion,
a spirit of propaganda, and a setting forth of the whole in all dramatic
forms.[2007] In the sects women were admitted, a fact of double
significance. It was an emancipation for the women and a peril for the
sect. The doubt with which the mysteries are now regarded is due to the
uncertainty as to the relations of the sexes in them. The word "orgy"
originally meant worship, or rites, then secret rites, that is,
mysteries. The sense in which the word has come down to us shows the
notion about secret meetings which became commonly accepted.
The customs which had grown out of religious interest had reached the
desire for entertainment and pleasure. They satisfied it and stimulated
it, and the religious element might be forgotten.
+623. Beginnings of the theater at Rome.+ The Floralia were instituted
at Rome in 240 B.C. They were celebrated by courtesans with processions,
lascivious pantomimes, etc. They are said to have come from
Greece.[2008] In the same year Livius Andronicus presented at Rome the
first play translated from the Greek. In 154 the first permanent theater
was established there against great opposition. In 146 the first theater
outside the circus, with seats, was provided.[2009] All mimic actions
were foreign to the austere mores of the early Romans, but in the second
century B.C. the mores changed through the growth of wealth and contact
with other nations. Young Romans learned from actors to sing and dance,
acts which their ancestors thought unworthy of free persons. The
earliest plays were called _saturae_, because they were mixed
dialogues, music, and dances. The sense of the word was closely that of
"farce" in the Middle Ages,[2010] i.e. an episode or intermezzo of a
comic character interjected into a drama. The _saturae_ contained an
Etruscan element, but atellans were entirely Etruscan. They were comic
and grotesque, and got their name from Atella (i.e. Aversa or Santo
Arpino) in Campania. They could be played by persons who did not on that
account lose their places in their tribes or their right to serve in the
legion. No personalities at all were allowed on the Roman stage.
Cynicism and obscenity characterized the Oscan style.[2011] In 55 B.C.
the younger Cato was present at the Floralia. The populace hesitated to
call, in his presence, for the stripping of the _mimae_. He left in
order not to hinder the celebration from taking its usual course.[2012]
Valerius Maximus[2013] says that the pantomime was brought to Rome from
Etruria, the Etruscans having brought it from their old home in Lydia.
We see from the epigrams in the first book of Martial that at the Roman
theater in the first century of the Christian era incidents of the Roman
mythology were made into dramas and represented in pantomime.
+624. Gladiatorial exhibitions.+ The gladiatorial exhibitions are
supposed to have been of Etruscan origin in the form of funeral games.
Games to rejoice the ghosts, sacrifices of prisoners, a chance given to
a prisoner to fight for his life, are steps of a development of which we
find many examples. The Romans showed the pitilessness and inhumanity of
their mores in the development they gave to the gladiatorial
exhibitions. "Campanian hosts used to entertain their guests at dinner
with them in the days before the Second Punic War. It was in Campanian
towns that in the first century was displayed most glaringly the not
unusual combination of cruelty and voluptuousness."[2014] Some murmurs
of dissent arose from the philosophers of the first and second centuries
of the Christian era,--Plutarch, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius,[2015]--but at
that time the popular sentiment had not faltered at all in its love and
zeal for the gladiatorial shows and beast contests on account of any
doubt whether the exhibitions were "right." Tertullian, at the end of
the second century, wrote a tract, _Ad Nationes_, in which he criticised
the theater, and also another, _De Spectaculis_, against the public
entertainments. Although the latter is chiefly controversial against
heathen and heathenism, it contains direct and noble arguments against
the games of the arena on account of their inhumanity. He says that the
games were at first connected with funerals, and that the theater was a
temple of Venus, under cover of which the games won a footing. That
would mean, then, that they were at first under a convention of time,
place, occasion, and religion. Correctly understood, therefore, what
happened at Rome was that the convention was broken over and the
exceptional rite was made the everyday usage, the religious sentiment
being disregarded and the sensual entertainment alone being valued. When
we have reached this point we can understand the original place of the
games within the intellectual horizon of the nation, and also the deep
demoralization which they caused in later times. They were consonant
with early Roman mores which were warlike. Cicero thought them an
excellent school to teach contempt for pain and death. He cited
gladiators as examples of bodily exercise, courage, and discipline. He
seems to have known that some disapproved of the exhibitions, and he was
disposed to agree with them if the gladiators were others than criminals
condemned to death.[2016] A usage which is consonant with the tastes,
mores, and world philosophy of a people need work no corruption on them,
for it is under taboos and conventions; but if all the restraints are
taken away it enters into their life for just what it is in its
character,--sensual, cruel, bloody, obscene, etc. What had been savage
and bloodthirsty when the Romans were warriors became base and cowardly
when they never risked their own blood in any way. Condemned criminals
were compelled to take rôles in which they suffered torture and a
frightful death, in order to entertain the Roman crowd. Such rôles were
Prometheus, Dædalus, Orpheus, Hercules, and Attys; Pasiphae and the
bull, and Leda and the swan were also enacted. In Martial's _Epigrams_,
Book I, the cases are mentioned where a woman fought with a lion;
Laureolus, a robber, was crucified and torn, as he hung on the cross, by
a bear; Dædalus, when his wing broke, was precipitated amongst bears who
tore him to pieces; and Orpheus was torn by a bear. These exhibitions
were recognized as indecencies.[2017] Later the exhibitions had no
limit.[2018] "From father to son, for nearly seven centuries, the Roman
character became more and more indurated under the influence of licensed
cruelty. The spectacle was also surrounded by the emperors, even the
greatest and best, for politic reasons, with ever growing
splendor."[2019] "It is a grave deduction from the admiring judgment of
the glory of the Antonine age, that its most splendid remains are the
stately buildings within whose enclosure for centuries the populace were
regaled with the sufferings and the blood of the noblest creatures of
the wild animal world and of gallant men. The deserts and forests of
Africa and the remotest East contributed their elephants and panthers
and lions to these scenes."[2020]
+625. Spread of gladiatorial exhibitions.+ The Romans carried
gladiatorial exhibitions wherever their conquests extended. "The
Teutonic regions of the North and Greece were almost the only provinces
in which the bloody games were not popular. The one Greek town where the
taste for them was fully developed was the mongrel city of Corinth,
which was a Roman colony. In the novel of Apuleius we meet a high
Corinthian magistrate traveling through Thessaly to collect the most
famous gladiators for his shows. Plutarch urges public men to banish or
to restrain these exhibitions in their cities. When the Athenians, from
an ambition to rival the splendor of Corinth, were meditating the
establishment of a gladiatorial show, the gentle Demonax bade them first
to overturn their altar of Pity. The apostles of Hellenism,--Dion,
Plutarch, and Lucian,--were unanimous in condemning an institution which
sacrificed the bravest men to the brutal passions of the mob."[2021] At
Byzantium the lack of any standard of decency and propriety in the
exhibitions was even more complete, and they lasted indefinitely.[2022]
Constantine in 325 A.D. absolutely forbade gladiatorial exhibitions,
because bloody shows were unfit for a time of peace. He forbade the
condemnation of criminals to be gladiators. His laws, however, failed of
effect.[2023] At the end of the fourth century Symmachus, "who was
regarded as one of the most estimable pagans of his age," collected some
prisoners to fight in honor of his son. They committed suicide to escape
the destiny for which he designed them. He lamented the misfortune which
had befallen him from their "impious hands," but endeavored to calm his
feelings by recalling the patience of Socrates and the precepts of
philosophy. He will not, he says, use such people any more, but Libyan
lions, more docile than men.[2024] He serves to point a moral on the
mores of his age.
+626. The folk drama.+ The culture classes pass by the sports of the
"vulgar" with contempt; but the student of the mores cannot do so. The
tastes of the crowd are manifested in them. We read the great dramas
which have become a part of the world literature, and we form from them
our ideas of the current intellectual interest of the time of their
origin and of the society in which they were produced. Such inferences
need to be corrected. They are certainly erroneous. The Greeks were not
all of them, nor any of them all the time, on a plane of classical
severity and correctness. Far from it. They were realistic, egoistic,
cold, cruel, and fond of sensual pleasure.[2025] The great dramas,
epics, etc., were enjoyed only by the real upper strata of the society,
just as is the case in regard to Shakespeare amongst us. The great
populace of no society has ever found its amusement in purely
intellectual suggestions. With us popular amusement is found in the
circus, negro minstrels, the variety show, opera bouffe, the spectacle,
and ballet, and it attaches to parody and burlesque, "knock-down
business," buffoonery, and broad allusion. Stupidity is always funny.
Everything which breaks over the social taboo is funny. A violation of
propriety, accidental disorder of the dress, grotesque postures, vulgar
gestures of derision or defiance, blows, painful accidents and
mishaps,--if not too serious,--deformations of the body (humpbacks),
epithets and nicknames, slang and other abuses of language (like
mispronunciation by foreigners), vituperation, caricature and burlesque
of respectable types like the pedant, dandy, Puritan, imbecile, or the
rich and great, always raise a laugh in the crowd and are relished by
the crowd. They are constant elements of farce and fun. They have been
so for three thousand years. Jugglery and feats of strength and skill
excite wonder until they become familiar. They are proofs of individual
capacity. They do not give amusement like the points which have just
been mentioned and which have been repeated to generation after
generation. The crowd always delights in any degradation of the things
which the selected classes prefer and try to impose on all. They rejoice
to see the restrictions trampled upon which they hear preached as the
rules of life. In opera bouffe classical heroes, gods of the classical
mythology, royalty, nobles of the mediæval type, feudalism, dominies,
are turned to ridicule. The crowd worships its heroes fanatically while
they are in fashion, but it likes to turn about and roll them in the mud
of satire, in order to teach them who made them and how easily it can
unmake them. Aristophanes derided all which was serious in the Athenian
social system. Long before Don Quixote was written chivalry was treated
with derision. Satire is a reversal of respect and admiration.
+627. The popular taste. Realism. Conventionality. Satire.+ That which
is realistic and graphic appeals to the popular and uneducated taste,
not that which is conventional, regulated, and refined according to rule
and standard. That which is realistic reproduces all the facts of life.
If the mirror is held up to nature it will show some nasty things. The
social taboos began in superstitious fear, but they formed a series of
conventional folkways under which some acts and facts of life were
veiled from sight, knowledge, speech, and publicity. Other lesser
conventions were grafted on these, and produced the great mass of usages
within which our lives are passed. That which is artistic is the highest
form of conventional refinement. Realism antagonizes and breaks through
all these conventions and taboos, which are always a strain upon those
who are not brought up in them from infancy. Therefore we hear demands
for realism and naturalness from those who weary of the strain and do
not want to submit to it. The conventionalities define respectability,
and respectability has always been sneered at. In all comedy it is made
ridiculous. The husband was possessed of conventional rights in which he
was protected by society so that he had a secured and uneventful status.
In comedy his rights have been violated and his security has been
broken. The crowd has always enjoyed this. It rejoiced to see the wife
deceive the husband, and the adulterer fool him. The latter represented
freedom and cleverness at war with philistinism. On the other hand, all
the taboos and conventions which have penetrated the masses and become
familiar to them from infancy are fiercely defended by them (e.g. female
dress and the taboo on man's dress for females). The popular magazines
and the "great moral shows" religiously respect the standards of the
crowd. That which is broad is funny, but there is always a limit of
toleration. What is prudish, puritanical, fastidious, affected,
pharisaical, etc.? These adjectives are in use, and they apply to things
which are beyond a line which is undefined and indefinable. It depends
on the codes and standards of the group. Realism presents everyday
experience, no humbug, the world as it is. It must, therefore, be
cynical and ruthless to all conventions. It shows the meanness of
greatness, the other side of virtue, the weakness of heroes. No doubt it
is great fun to pour scorn and ridicule on all who assume to be better
than we are, and to look down on us. The easiest way to do it is to show
up their weaknesses, follies, and sins. Here is another task for the
satirists. Satire in comedy may be a gratification of envy. The rôle of
Pierrot is dangerous to him who exercises it. In fact no man is fit for
it. Where does any one get a charter to be censor of all the rest? He
will certainly become proud, arrogant, self-seeking, and tyrannical.
Each one satirizes follies which are not to his taste, or sins to which
he is not tempted. Satire to be artistic and permanently effective must
be marked by light and shade. It always exaggerates what it wants to
impress on the attention, but to do this artistically it must subdue
other elements. This is very difficult to accomplish when for popular
effect it must use big brushes and glaring colors.
+628. Popular exhibitions.+ From the time of Homer we can trace popular
exhibitions which accompanied the theatrical forms above described as an
inferior class of the same species. The popular exhibitions were marked
by the features which have been described (sec. 626), to which we may
add bloodshed and cruel rites.
+629. Ancient popular festivals.+ The _thargelia_ were ancient
sanguinary festivals celebrated in Greece in honor of Apollo and Diana.
Two men, or a man and a woman, were immolated in Attica, to expiate the
sins of the people. "The circular dances of the Greeks around the
victims, or later around the altar, can only be compared with the songs
and furious dances of the Iroquois and Brazilians around their
prisoners."[2026] At Athens also the _kronia_ were festivals of Saturn.
The notion that there was a period of original liberty and equality "at
the beginning" was entertained at that time, and this festival was held
to represent it. Also on Crete there were festivals of Mercury. In
Thessaly the _peloria_ were a festival, the name of which was derived
from Pelor, the man that brought news that an earthquake had drained the
valley of Tempe. The _sacea_ were a festival at Babylon similar to the
_saturnalia_. A slave in each house, including the palace of the king,
ruled as a house sovereign for five days. The leading idea was to
reverse or invert everything in ordinary life. The _kordax_ was an
ancient dance of the old comedy, with indecent gestures, in which the
human figure was caricatured according to all the deformations which it
underwent by vice or sensuality. All the effects of gluttony and Bacchic
excess were caricatured in the figure of Silenus. The old woman fond of
wine lost all modesty under the influence of wine.[2027] The leaders of
the choruses, in a later time at Athens, offered reminders of primitive
barbarism and of the immolation of human beings, and a representation of
savage nudity, but they presented no image which was ridiculous or base.
Tragedy had a long struggle to become separate from lyric forms, but
Æschylus at last accomplished the separation. This was really the
separation of the high literary drama from the popular _mimus_. After
ten centuries of glory in Greece tragedy was lost again under the lyric
form.[2028] The popular drama, however, lasted on until to-day, and it
has never changed its characteristic elements.
+630. The _mimus_.+ The essence of the _mimus_ is in pantomime as the
name denotes. It imitates facts of life and behavior and is, therefore,
essentially realistic. It may well be derived from the mimetic dances of
nature peoples, in which beasts, warriors, and lovers are imitated, with
jest and satirical exaggeration of characteristic traits. In the folk
drama in its simplest forms nothing has ever been written. The actor,
assumed a rôle and improvised all which he had to say in trying to act
it out. His responsibility for the rôle was far greater than that of an
actor in a culture drama. The actor, by repeating a rôle, produced a
representation of it which was personal to himself and which he
perfected. The most interesting and marked characters became fixed. A
large number of them are now established in literature and have become
known all over the world. The latest instance of such a type is,
perhaps, Lord Dundreary. The word _mimus_ appears in Greece in the fifth
century B.C. The _mimus_ was a picture of life or, more exactly, an
unwritten parody of life. It was divided into grades and the actors into
castes. Women had previously appeared as jugglers and mountebanks. They
now appeared amongst the actors of the popular drama. This made the
exhibitions questionable according to Greek standards. The exhibitions
were given by wandering companies. While actors of the culture drama
always wore masks, those of the _mimus_ were the first to appear
unmasked;[2029] later others imitated them. At the present day the
theatrical exhibitions which may be seen on the outskirts of a fair in
central Europe well represent the ancient _mimus_. The marionettes were
an early offshoot of the _mimus_, and the modern Punch-and-Judy show is
a descendant in part of both. For the mores the _mimus_ and the
marionette theater are a thousandfold more important than the great
tragedies, but the former have left no mark on history. They never were
written down; the actors are dead; their reputation is forgotten. The
mores contain the effect as a fact but no explanation of it. From the
time of Alexander the Great that which is common, popular, realistic
prevailed in politics and literature. The heroic and ideal-poetic
declined and was made an object of satire in the _mimus_. "The trivial,
prosaic, and libertine taste of the Macedonian princes of Egypt and
Syria at last reigned alone in enslaved Greece." Then, under different
forms and names, nothing remained but mimes, realistic representation of
common life.[2030] The Olympian gods and Homeric heroes were burlesqued
for fun. The _mimus_ won acceptance at courts and in higher circles. It
was developed into the so-called "hypothesis" and won a place on the
stage. The most distinguished maker of hypotheses was Philistion,[2031]
who lived at the beginning of the Christian era. They became popular
throughout the Greco-Roman world in the first centuries of the Christian
era.[2032] The emperor Tiberius caused actors to be expelled from Italy
as disturbers of the peace, and because the old Oscan farce, once
amusement for the common people, had become indecent.[2033] Out of the
common origin of all dramatic exhibitions (sec. 616) the _mimus_ kept
the corn demons, or growth demons, which always commanded the interest
of husbandmen. The actors of this rôle wore masks in which the features
of a low and sensual countenance were greatly exaggerated. An artificial
phallus (sec. 473) was worn outside of the dress, and the entire region
of the hips was enlarged so as to produce a conventional, extravagant,
and stereotyped figure, like the modern clown, punch, or Mephisto,
being, in fact, in some measure, their ancestor.[2034] Greek vases
represent these figures. The same set of ideas and course of thought has
been traced in Mexico in connection with crop interests and growth
demons.[2035] There also the public rites at festivals passed by
imperceptible steps into dramatic representations with dogmatic meaning
or magical significance.
+631. Modern analogies.+ The end man of the negro minstrel troupe is a
modern creation like the Greek _phlyax_, for he is a buffoon of the
plantation-negro type, with every feature exaggerated to the utmost, so
that he is unreal and a caricature; but the exaggerations direct
attention to familiar facts and display characteristic features which
are a cause of merriment. The rise, development, and decline of negro
ministrelsy illustrate, within our observation, many features in the
history of popular comedy. It originated in fun making by the imitation
of a foreign group, whose peculiar ways appeared to be ridiculous
antics. Then the negro was used to burlesque and satirize the
weaknesses, follies, and affectations of whites. The negro plantation
hand is a type which is disappearing and interest in him is declining.
He is no longer available for direct study or derived satire.
+632. Biologs and ethologs.+ The Greek _phlyax_ (the play) passed to
southern Italy in the fourth century B.C., whence it was transmitted to
Rome and confused with the atellan. It became very popular, and lasted
until the fifth century A.D.[2036] Reich divides the mimes into two
classes: (1) biologs, i.e. those who represent individual types, e.g. an
unfaithful wife, an imbecile husband, a fatuous nobleman, a physician,
etc.; (2) ethologs, i.e. those who impersonate some feature in the mores
of the time and satirize it, e.g. faith in miracles, fondness for drink
or gambling, sycophancy to the rich, or "getting on in the world." This
is a very important distinction and one which illuminates the connection
between the drama and the mores. Socrates was an etholog, although not
an actor. He spent sarcasm, irony, and humor on the ways of the
Athenians of his time.[2037] Aristophanes was another, Rabelais was
another, Erasmus was an inferior one. In his _Colloquies_ and _Praise of
Folly_ he is more of a preacher, but his aim is to influence by graphic
satirical description. In our day the comic papers attempt the task of
the etholog. They try to satirize manners and men. A comic paper owned
or subsidized by a political party is the sorriest representative of
Pierrot that the world has yet seen. The biolog personates an individual
type, like an aberration of human nature, which may be found anywhere
and at any time. The etholog personates a specimen of a class which
helps to characterize a period. Dandies exist at all times, but vary in
detail. The fatuity and vanity of all dandies are features for the
etholog; the follies of the dandy of a period belong to the biolog. Beau
Brummel would be a model for a biolog. The etholog is apt to overlook
his best subjects. He cannot himself escape from his own times enough to
recognize them. He never satirizes the reigning features. The American
etholog never satirizes democracy, or the politician, or the newspaper.
The etholog wants a big party or a strong sentiment behind him. It is
not until after skepticism about a ruling "way" has formed in the minds
of a large section of the masses that the etholog makes himself the
mouthpiece of it. We have no satire yet on militarism, or imperialism,
or the Monroe doctrine. A protective tariff is a grand object for
satire, but so long as the masses believe in it satire is powerless. The
same is true of any folkway so long as it is not yet doubted. Satire is
then blasphemy. While a way is prevalent there is pathos about it (sec.
178), as there is now amongst us about democracy, but there never can be
satire, and pathos at the same time, in the same society, about the same
thing. One might have believed that nothing need be sacred to the
theaters of Paris, but a few years ago a play was written which set the
French Revolution in a different light from the now consecrated
commonplace in regard to it. It was found impossible to produce it. A
marionette player and his wife made fun of Père Duchesne on the
boulevard during the Revolution. Both were guillotined.[2038] These
facts limit very much the high moral function sometimes ascribed to
satire. It never gets into action until the mischief is done. It never
squelches a folly at its commencement. That function belongs to educated
reason, but educated reason is not in the masses.
+633. Dickens as a biolog.+ Charles Dickens was a biolog. His novels
contain very little evidence of the manners and customs of his time, and
what they do contain is forced and untrue. He invented characters whose
names have become common nouns and adjectives for individual types which
are found in all societies at all times (Pecksniff, Micawber,
Turveydrop, Uriah Heep, etc.), but which may, at a time, be especially
common and produce fine specimens.
+634. Early Jewish plays.+ Ezekiel (an Alexandrian Jew, fl. c. 200 B.C.)
is said to have written a play on the exodus from Egypt, with the same
motive as the mystery plays,--the edification of the faithful. Herod
Atticus ([Symbol: cross] c. 180 A.D.), having caused the death of his
wife, Regilla, was not satisfied with the expiations in the usual
funeral rites. He built, as a monument to her, a theater with a
roof.[2039] Ezekiel's play on the exodus was presented in Herod's
theater. Nicholas of Damascus (b. 74 B.C.) is said to have written a
play on the story of Susanna.[2040]
+635. Roman _mimus_.+ The _mimus_, in the Greco-Roman empire,
stereotyped its figures for a period, since of course they did not
change suddenly or greatly. In the Roman _mimus_ the recurring features
were the pursuit of legacies, the impotency of men, the stupidity of the
clown, blows and other physical violence. The fixed types were: old
women as drunkards, sorceresses, go-betweens, peddlers, and panders; men
as _scholasticus_ (the pedant and learned imbecile), Ardalio (a
character introduced by Philistion), the fatuous, fussy old man, and
then the Christian, a type which was kept up for several
centuries.[2041] These personages, remaining unchanged in character,
were put in various assumed positions and conjunctures. The actors had
to invent the dialogue and work out the situation. The characters have
come down to us as Punch, Harlequin, Pantaloon, etc.[2042] Punch
(=Pulcino, Pulcinella) is only a Neapolitan rendering of Maccus, a
character in the atellans. "Maccus," in Etruscan, meant a little
cock.[2043] Christian antiphonal singing, like the Greek mystery acts of
Dionysus, helped to develop the drama.[2044] In the first centuries of
the Christian era "obscenity dominated the theater." "It was no longer a
school of patriotism, recalling the heroes of the early ages or
criticising the misdoings of contemporaries. It was a scene of vice and
corruption for actors and spectators. There was nothing represented but
the adventures of deceived husbands, adulteries, intrigues of
libertines, incidents in lupanars. The only characters represented were
shameless women and effeminate men. The most shameful things were
exhibited. Everything which ought to be respected was there degraded.
Virtue was mocked and the gods were derided. The actor caused the taste
for evil things to penetrate the mind of the spectator; he stimulated
ignoble and criminal passions, and, familiar as he was with vice, he
blushed sometimes at the shameful rôle which he was forced to play
before the crowd."[2045]
+636. "The Suffering Christ." "Pseudo-Querolus."+ In the fourth century
the Christians tried to use the theater for their purposes. The drama
_The Suffering Christ_ is attributed to Gregory of Nazianz. It
represents the passion of Jesus as understood by the Nicene theologians.
It consists of twelve hundred and seventy-three verses taken more or
less exactly from the tragedies of Euripides and patched together.
Lintilhac[2046] says it is now the accepted opinion that it cannot be of
remoter origin than the eleventh century, so that the most noteworthy
fact about it would be that it is a Greek liturgical play of even date
with the earliest western plays of that class. In it the Virgin Mary is
a pagan woman, who uses verses of Hecuba and Medea, and thinks of
suicide.[2047] Another play of the fourth century, which is mentioned as
important in the history of the drama, is the _Pseudo-Querolus_. It is
an imitation of Plautus. Querolus is the forerunner of Molière's
Misanthrope and so a biolog,--a permanent type of person.[2048] Dramas
representing martyrdom and other Christian incidents were presented with
very great realism.[2049]
+637. The _mimus_ and Christianity.+ The _mimus_ opened war on
Christianity. The religion was unpopular and hated. It set itself
against the mores of the society at the time. It was scoffed at just as
Puritans, Quakers, Mormons, and Christian Scientists have been scoffed
at since and for the same reasons. It shared the unpopularity of the
Jews, who came before the heathen world claiming the isolation of
superiority, exclusive favor of God, ascendancy by rights over all the
world. To the pagans the Christians seemed to make a great fuss about
nothing. The _mimus_ seized the popular sentiment and gave it
expression. The Christian became the clown and simpleton. Christian
rites were parodied and ridiculed. Martyrdoms were represented on the
stage, the martyr being the buffoon. The heathen gods were taken under
the protection of the _mimus_, instead of being burlesqued as they had
been for several centuries. This mockery ran through the Roman empire
until the end of the fourth century, when the church got the protection
of the state against public insult, but Christianity fell under the
dominion of heathen mores. The great ecclesiastics of the fifth century
preached fiercely against the theater, not because of the insults of the
theater against the church, for they were silenced, but on account of
the action of the theater upon Christian mores. Chrysostom denounced the
theater on account of the manners of actresses in the _mimus_, on
account of false hair, paint, exposed bodies, uncovered heads, melodies,
gross language, gestures, strife, representations of adultery and other
sex vice, and because it was the school of intrigue and seduction. This
became the attitude of the church towards the theater.[2050]
+638. Popular phantasms.+ Although the crowd likes to see realistic
representations of life, and also likes to see in the drama that
ridicule of the cultured classes which seems like a victory over them,
yet it also loves fantastic scenes, and acts in which the limitations of
reality are left behind and imaginary luck and joy are represented,--such
as magical transformations, fairy tales, and realms of bliss. Extremes
of realism and phantasm meet in the folk drama. After the fifth century
the sense of societal decline and loss was strong in the popular mind.
It was felt that the world was failing. There was a contempt for
life.[2051] Pagan society was ennuyé. "It wanted to laugh. It wanted
games and dances to make gay the last hours which separated it from its
fall."[2052] Salvianus says that the Roman world died laughing.[2053]
+639. Effects of vicious amusements.+ Vicious amusements provoke all
kinds of vicious passions. Excitement, sensuality, frivolity, and
meanness go together. Lecky[2054] points out the contrast between the
conduct of the Romans of the time of Marius, who refused to plunder the
houses of the opposing faction when Marius threw them open, and that of
the Romans of the time of Vespasian, who enjoyed the fun and plunder of
his war with Vitellius in the streets of Rome. "The moral condition of
the empire is, indeed, in some respects one of the most appalling
pictures on record."
+640. Gladiatorial games.+ The mores of the Romans of the third century
B.C. (sec. 624) seized upon the gladiatorial contests as something
suited to the genius of the Roman people, and, as the Romans gained
wealth and power by conquest and plunder, with numerous war captives,
they developed the sport of the arena to a very high point. Then the
sport reacted on the mores and made them more cruel, licentious, and
cowardly. It required more and more extravagant inventions to produce
the former degree of pleasure. The Romans were fond of all torture and
showed great invention in connection with it, both for beasts and men.
Children amused themselves by torturing beasts and insects, making them
draw loads, and making fowls and birds fight. They loved the sight of
pain and bloodshed and found their greatest pleasure in it.[2055] Under
Nero women fought in the arena. This was forbidden under Severus. A law,
probably of the time of Nero, forbade masters to give their slaves to
fight beasts. Hadrian forbade the sale of slaves to be gladiators.
Marcus Aurelius forbade the condemnation of criminals to be gladiators,
and he tried to limit the gladiatorial exhibitions. They were far too
popular.[2056] It is thus that amusements and mores react on each other
to produce social degeneration. The whole social standard of "right"
moves down with the moral degeneracy, and at no stage is there a sense
of shame or wrongdoing in the public mind in connection with what is
customary and traditional at the time. There is no contrast between
facts and standards. The great Christian ecclesiastics of the fourth and
fifth centuries denounced the public amusements and tried to keep the
Christians away from them. They tried to convert actors. They pointed
out the subtle corruption of character produced by feigning vice.
Gladiators were not admitted to baptism unless they repented and
renounced their profession.[2057] In 325 Constantine forbade
gladiatorial combats as unfit for a time of peace. He forbade the use of
condemned criminals in the arena. These laws were powerless.[2058]
+641. Compromise between church and customs.+ The _maiuma_ (mock sea
fight on the Tiber in May) was forbidden, probably under Constance, a
prohibition which was repeated by Theodosius. Arcadius tried to allow it
again, under conditions that propriety be observed, but it was
impossible, and he forbade all immodest exhibitions. Theodosius forbade
magistrates to be present at exhibitions after midday, when the most
obscene and bloody were presented, except on the anniversaries of his
own birth and accession. He also forbade actresses to use fine clothes
and jewels, and forbade Christians to be actors. Leo I ([symbol: cross]
461) forbade that any Christian woman, free or slave, should be
compelled to be an actress or meretrix.[2059] Salvianus describes,[2060]
in very emphatic but general terms, the public exhibitions in Gaul and
Africa in the second half of the fifth century. There was, he says,
scarcely a crime or outrage which was not represented on the stage, and
the spectators enjoyed seeing a man killed or cruelly lacerated. All the
earth was ransacked for beasts. All the senses were outraged by
indecencies. Nevertheless, on any day on which performances occurred the
churches were empty. The Christians, as we see, lived in the mores of
their age, and all these things had centuries of tradition behind them.
Salvianus and other ecclesiastics were not heeded because they derived
their standards from Christian dogmas, and those standards were far
removed from the current mores. The church was forced to compromise. It
allowed feasts, fairs, and games near the churches. It converted heathen
festivals, with processions, lights, and garlands, into Christian
festivals and usages. It borrowed the attractions of the worship of
Isis, Mithra, and Cybele, and adopted all the means of suggestion
employed in their rites. The great ecclesiastics were divided as to this
policy. Augustine put an end, so far as his jurisdiction went, to the
feasts in the churches in honor of martyrs, with singing, dancing, and
drinking, although they were very popular.[2061] He complained earnestly
of the indecency of the exhibitions of his time.[2062] "Especially at
the festivals in honor of the heathen gods, and in civil celebrations,
the ancient religious practices were renewed, not infrequently
degenerating into shameless immorality, yet protecting civil usages. The
patriot, the philosopher, the skeptic, and the pious man had to make a
capitulation with those ancient religious practices, for they were not,
in truth, emancipated from them at heart, and they did not know of
anything better to replace what those practices did for society."[2063]
So the philosopher, patriot, skeptic, and pious man always have to
compromise with the ancient and existing mores. Salvianus[2064] says
that poverty caused the great exhibitions to cease. It was advancing
poverty and misery which put an end to all the old forms of amusement.
It was not the church or Christianity. The Christian rites and
festivals alone remained. Modern Spanish bullfights appear to be a
survival of the old sports of the arena. Bullfights were introduced into
Italy in the fourteenth century. They were general in the fifteenth
century. The Aragonese brought them to Naples and the Borgias to
Rome.[2065] We hear of a kind of gladiatorial exhibition at some
festivals in India early in the nineteenth century.[2066] There were
gladiators also in Japan[2067] and in Mexico.[2068]
+642. The _cantica_.+ Roman drama ran down to pantomime with explanatory
recitation, that is, _cantica_. From the seventh to the tenth century
few dramas were produced with dialogue. Some biblical narratives,
legends of saints, and profane compositions from that time exist, which
are probably _cantica_, to be accompanied by pantomime at fairs or in
church porches.
+643. Passion for the games.+ It certainly was not on account of any
decline in the taste for amusement that the games declined. In the fifth
century, when the Vandals were besieging Carthage, "the church of
Carthage was crazy for the games," and the cries of those dying in
battle were confused with those of the applauding spectators at the
games. The leading men of Treves were gratifying their love of feasting
when the barbarians entered their city.[2069] The people of Antioch were
in the theater when the Persians surprised them, about 265 A.D.[2070]
+644. German sports.+ Amongst the Germanic nations, from a very early
period, popular amusements consisted in pantomimes, mummery with animal
masks, horseplay by clowns, etc. The feast of Holda, or Berchta, during
the first twelve days of January, was an especial period for those
sports. From the sixth century there was also a pantomime of the strife
of winter and spring.[2071]
+645. The _mimus_ from the third to the eighth century.+ As the culture
drama fell into neglect the _mimus_ was left in possession of the field.
The culture drama, as we have seen, was built upon and above the
_mimus_, and has the character of a high product which could be
maintained only in a peaceful and prosperous society whose other
literary and artistic products were of a high grade. With a failure of
societal power the highest products disappeared first, but the low and
vulgar _mimus_, which had been disregarded but had amused the crowd
during prosperity, continued to exist. In the third, fourth, and fifth
centuries the _mimus_ existed throughout the Roman world and was very
popular. In the fifth century it flourished at Ravenna, and perhaps it
continued later in the same form as in the East. It can be traced in
Italy in the sixth century, after which its existence is doubtful. In
the seventh century the theater was a thing of the past, but the _mimus_
still existed. The ascetics of Charlemagne's time disapproved of it and
got legislation against it, but the laws were of no avail. The
ecclesiastics were fond of the _mimus_. It was in the hands of strolling
players of the humblest kind. It coarsened with the general decay. All
court festivals needed the _mimus_ for the festivities.[2072]
+646. Drama in the Orient.+ There is no drama in Mohammedan literature
and it appears that there is no original drama in the Orient.[2073] The
_mimus_ declined in the West in the disaster of the fifth century, but
in the Byzantine empire it lasted until the Turkish conquest, so that it
appears that if there is any historical connection between modern and
ancient drama it must be through Byzantium.[2074] The actors at
Byzantium kept a certain traditional license in the face of the emperor
and court which was not without social and political value.[2075]
+647. Marionettes.+ Marionettes are mentioned in Xenophon's _Symposium_.
They were of more ancient origin. The puppet play was used as a means of
burlesquing the legitimate theater and drama. It passed to the Turks as
the puppet shadow play, in which the hero Karagöz is the same as Punch
in figure, character, and acts. This puppet play spread all over the
Eastern world. Lane[2076] says of it in Egypt, in the first half of the
nineteenth century, that it was very indecent. Reich[2077] describes an
indecent shadow play. A special form of it was developed in Java, the
_wajang-poerva_, with figures of the _pantin_ type, operated by strings
and levers. This amusement is very popular in Java and very
representative of the mores. Whether these oriental forms of the _mimus_
were derived from the Greco-Roman world is uncertain. The _mimus_ is so
original and of such spontaneous growth that it does not need to be
borrowed.
+648. The drama in India.+ In India, at the beginning of the Christian
era, there was a development of drama of a high character. The one
called the _Clay-waggon_ (a child's toy) is described as of very great
literary merit,--realistic, graphic, and Shakespearean in its artistic
representation of life.[2078] Every drama which has that character must
be in and of the mores. In the _Clay-waggon_ the story is that of a
Brahmin of the noblest character, who marries a courtesan, she having
great love for him. The courtesan gives to the Brahmin's son a toy wagon
of gold for his own made of clay. The name of the play comes from this
trivial incident in it. A wicked, vain, and shallow-pated prince
intervenes and is taken as a biolog, or standing type of person. Modern
Hindoo dramas require a whole night for the representation. They
represent the loves and quarrels of the gods and other mythological
stories. "The actors are dressed and painted in imitation of the deities
they represent, and frequently the conversations are rendered attractive
by sensual and obscene allusions, whilst in the interludes boys dressed
in women's clothes dance with the most indecent gestures. The worst
dances that I have ever seen have been in front of an image and as a
part of the rejoicings of a religious festival. Crowds of men, women,
and children sit to watch them the whole night through."[2079] The
history of Ram is also enacted in pantomime in northern India. The text
of the _Ramayana_ is read and days are spent in acting it, by a great
crowd, which moves from place to place, and naïvely plans to act city
incidents in cities, forest incidents in forests, boat episodes on
ponds, and war episodes or battles on great fields.[2080]
+649. Punch in the West.+ Punch was brought to Italy in the fifteenth
century.[2081] Polichinelle, as developed in France, is distinctly
French. The model is Henri IV. The hump is an immemorial sign of the
French _badin-ès-farces_. "Polichinelle seems to me to be a purely
national (French) type, and one of the most spontaneous and vivacious
creations of French fantasy."[2082] The puppet play of Punch and Judy
has enjoyed immense popularity in western Europe. The Faust legend has
been developed by the puppets.[2083] With the improvements in the arts
people became more sophisticated. The puppets were left to children and
to the simplest rural population, not because the mores improved, but
because people were treated to more elaborate entertainments and the
puppets became trivial. Punch is now a blackguard and criminal, who is
conventionally tolerated on account of his antiquity. He is not in
modern mores and is almost unknown in the United States. He is generally
popular in southern Europe. To the Sicilians "a puppet play is a book, a
picture, a poem, and a theater all in one. It teaches and amuses at the
same time."[2084] Then it still is what it has been for three thousand
years.
+650. Resistance of the church to the drama.+ The council in the palace
of Trullo, at Constantinople in 692,[2085] adopted canons forbidding
clerics to attend horse races or theatrical exhibitions, or to stay at
weddings after play began, also pantomimes, beast combats, and
theatrical dances, also heathen festivals, vows to Pan, bacchanal rites,
public dances by women, the appearance of men dressed as women, or of
women dressed as men, and the use of comic, tragic, or satyric masks.
All the Dionysiac rites had been forbidden long before. These canons
prove that those rites were still observed. These clerical rules and
canons do not represent the mores and they never overruled the mores at
Constantinople. They only bear witness to what existed in the mores late
in the seventh century, and they were an attempt to purify the usages
which had been taken over by compromise from heathenism. In the sixth
century in the West dances in church were often forbidden. The only
stock of ideas in the eighth and ninth centuries were fantastic notions
of nature, heaven and hell, history, supernatural agents, etc., which
notions the ecclesiastics had an interest to teach. Dramatic
representation was a means of teaching. The external action corresponded
closely with the mental concept or story. From the time of Charlemagne
pantomimes, tableaux, etc., set forth incidents of biblical stories and
the resurrection, ascension, etc. The mores of the age seized on these
modes of representation and gave method and color to them. All the
grossness, superstition, and bad taste of the age were put into them.
Satan and his demons were realistically represented, and the mass was
travestied by ecclesiastics in a manner which we should think would be
deeply offensive to them.[2086] It was another case of conventionality
for a limited time and place. Some of the clergy no doubt enjoyed the
fun; others had to tolerate what was old and traditional. The folk drama
reawakened as burlesque, parody, satire. The evil characters in the
Scripture stories (Pharaoh, Judas, Caiaphas, the Jews) all fed this
interest. All persons and institutions which pretended to be great and
good and were not such provoked satire (clergy, nobles, warriors,
women). The drama, introduced to show forth religious notions, served
also to set forth others (social, political, city rivalry, class
antagonisms). The "mass of fools" was a complete parody of the mass,
with mock music and vestments and burlesque ceremony. In the "mass of
innocents" children took the place of adults and carried out the
ceremony as a parody. At the "feast of the ass" an ass was led into
church and treated with mock respect. This last degenerated into
obscenity, indecency, and disorder. Bulls and edicts against it were
long vain. It was popular as a relief from restraint.[2087] It continued
the function of the Saturnalia, which had been a grand frolic and
relaxation. The ecclesiastics tolerated these outbursts, perhaps because
they saw that the lines could not be drawn very tightly without such
relaxation. From the eleventh century the ecclesiastics opposed any
automatic figure. They construed the making of such a figure as an
attempt to call the saints, etc., to life again. The skill employed also
seemed to them like sorcery.[2088] "There was not an ecumenic, national,
or diocesan council in whose canons may not be found severe and
peremptory reproofs of all sorts and qualities of drama, of actors, and
of those who run to see plays."[2089] This became the orthodox attitude
of the church to the theater. There were complaints of the attendance of
clerics and people at theatrical exhibitions until the tenth century.
Then they cease because the church ceremonies were more interesting and
better done.[2090] The Christian drama reached the height of its
hieratic development between the ninth and twelfth centuries.[2091]
+651. Hrotsvitha.+ Klein[2092] puts as the next important literary work
of dramatic composition after the _Pseudo-Querolus_ the works of the nun
Hrotsvitha. In the tenth century she wrote six comedies in Latin, in
imitation of Terence, her purpose being to show the superiority of the
conventual conception of love to the worldly theory, and of religious
passion to erotic passion. In the introduction she apologizes for her
realistic descriptions of erotic passion, which she says was necessary
for the argument implicit in her plays. She introduces God as a
character, and miracles as a means of bringing about the dénouement at
which she wants to arrive. It became the custom in mediæval drama to
reach, by introducing a miracle, the moral result which current dogma
required.[2093] The situations and intrigue are generally very
unedifying. To our taste the plays seem very unfit to be acted by nuns
before nuns.
+652. Jongleurs. Processions.+ In the eleventh century abbeys and
cathedrals were built. At the beginning of the century the basilicas of
the churches were repaired throughout Latin Christendom.[2094] The
Jongleurs of the twelfth century were the popular minstrels. "Poet,
mountebank, musician, physician, beast showman, and to some extent
diviner and sorcerer, the jongleur is also the orator of the public
market place, the man adored by the crowd to whom he offers his songs
and his couplets. Questions of morals and politics, toothache, pious
legends, scandalous tales about priests, noble ladies, and cavaliers,
gossip of grog shops, and news from the Holy Land were all in his
domain."[2095] In the second third of the twelfth century the vulgar
language began to displace the Latin in church, especially in
dramas.[2096] Processions were in the taste and usage of the Middle Ages
and Renaissance for both civil and religious pomp and display. The
dresses, banners, arches, etc., contributed to the spectacle, and all
took on a dramatic character for, on a saint's day or other occasion,
the exhibition had a second sense of reference to the story of the
saint, or the success in war of the king or potentate. The latter sense
might be dramatically set forth, and generally was at least suggested.
Tableaux and dramatic pantomime in the streets were combined with the
processions. Mythological subjects as well as incidents of Christian
history were so represented. All classes coöperated in these functions.
Poets and artists of the first rank assisted. The contribution of these
functions to the development of the drama is obvious. In modern times
the taste for processions is lost, and the cultivated classes refuse to
participate, but when the whole population of a city took part in
setting forth something they all cared for, the social effect was great,
and the whole proceeding nourished dramatic taste and power. In Italy
the pantomime with song and dance, or ballet, had its origin in the
procession.[2097] In the churches arrangements were made, with elaborate
machinery, for exhibiting representations of Scripture incidents.
Godfrey, Abbot of St. Albans ([Symbol: cross] 1146) wrote a play on the
life of St. Catharine "such as was afterwards called a miracle." The
Annunciation was represented in St. Mark's, Venice, in 1267. In Germany
the mysteries were partly in German from the end of the thirteenth
century.[2098]
+653. Adam de la Halle.+ De Julleville[2099] puts Adam de la Halle as
the first comic writer in France, in point of time. He wrote the _Jeu de
la Feuillée_ about 1262. It is described as a "scenic satire rather than
a comedy." It is local, personal, and satirical, and includes miracles
and capricious inventions without much regard to probability. It stands
by itself and is not the first of a series. The notion of a connection
between comedy and bodily deformity was now so firmly established that
Adam was called the "Humpback of Arras," although he was not humpbacked
at all.[2100] Association of acts and ideas is always very important in
all folkways and popular mores. At Florence, in 1304, on boats on the
Arno, devils were represented at work. The bridge on which the
spectators stood broke down under the crowd, and it was said that "many
went to the real hell to find out about it."[2101] At Paris, in 1313, at
the celebration of the knighting of the sons of Philippe le Bel, devils
were represented tormenting souls.[2102]
+654. Flagellants.+ The flagellants exerted some of the suggestions of
the processions, and they used dramatic devices to set forth their
ideas, to say nothing of the dramatic element in the self-scourging.
They were outside of the church system, and acted on their own
conception of sin and discipline, like modern revivalists. They
reappeared from time to time through the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. They meant to declare that the asserted correlation between
goodness and blessing did not verify, and they were at a loss for a
doctrine to replace it. Their antiphonal singing turned into dialogue,
and then became drama at the end of the thirteenth century.[2103]
+655. Use of churches for dramatic exhibitions.+ The mediæval plays were
presented in churches or on the open spaces on the streets in front of
them, at Florence. Later this became customary in all cities.[2104] The
old idea had been that churches were common public property, a universal
rendezvous for every common interest. Dedications of churches and feasts
of martyrs had been general merrymakings. D'Ancona collects dicta of
councils and popes condemning dramatic actions in churches, and the
singing of lewd songs and dancing by women.[2105] The language used
implies that the songs, gestures, acts, and suggestions connected with
the performances in the churches were lewd and indecent. The populace,
while using the license, well perceived its incongruity and impropriety,
and this stimulated the satire, which was so strong a feature of the
late Middle Ages and which produced the farce. The mysteries and
moralities for a time gave entertainment, but they became tedious. The
farce was at first "stuffing," put in to break up the dullness by fun
making of some kind and to give spice to the entertainment, just as
meats were _farcies_ to give them more savor. It grew until it surpassed
and superseded the sober drama. The populace did not want more preaching
and instruction, but fun and frolic, relief from labor, thought, and
care. The take-off, caricature, burlesque, parody, discerns and sets
forth the truth against current humbug, and the pretenses of the
successful classes. The fool comes into prominence again, not by
inheritance but by rational utility. The fifteenth century offered him
plenty of material. As a fool he escaped responsibility. This
rôle,--that of the _badin_ in France, the _gracioso_ in Spain,
_arlequino_ in Italy, _Hanswurst_ in Germany,--becomes fixed like the
buffoon (_maccus_) in the classical comedy. In France, from the
beginning of the fourteenth century, the _basochiens_ were young clerks
and advocates who were studying law and who made fun of law proceedings.
They met with only limited toleration. Their satire was not relished by
the legal great men. In the fourteenth century they took up moralities
overweighted with allegory but broken up by farces. In the fifteenth
century the _Enfans sans Souci_ were another variety of _comédiens_.
Their emblem was the cap with two horns or ass's ears.[2106] The life of
St. Louis was represented in tableaux at Marseilles in 1517.[2107] The
Passion was represented in the Coliseum until 1539, when Paul III
forbade it. Riots against the Jews had been provoked by the
exhibition.[2108]
+656. Protest against misuse of churches.+ It may be said that there was
never wanting a dissenting opinion and protest amongst the ecclesiastics
about the folk drama in the churches. In 1210 Innocent III forbade such
exhibitions by ecclesiastics. Then the fraternities began to represent
them on public market places. The "festival of fools" at Christmas time
was originally invented to turn the heathen festivals into ridicule.
When there were no more heathen it degenerated into extreme popular
farce. Thomas Aquinas consented to the _mimus_, if it was not
indecent.[2109] The synod of Worms, in 1316, forbade plays in churches.
Such plays seem to have reached their highest perfection in the
fourteenth century.[2110] Plays of this type gave way in the fifteenth
century to "moralities," with allegorical characters, which prevailed
for a long time, the taste for allegory marking the mental fashion of
the time. The council of Basle forbade plays in churches (1440).[2111]
+657. Toleration of jests by the ecclesiastics.+ The ecclesiastical
authorities were very patient with the folk theater for its satires on
the clergy, the church, and religion. They heeded only attacks on "the
faith." "We are astonished to meet, in a time which we always think of
as crushed under authority, with such incredibly bold expressions
against the papacy, the episcopate, chivalry, and the most revered
doctrines of religion such as paradise, hell, etc."[2112] Lenient
suggests as reasons the divisions and factions in church and state and
the current contempt for popular poetry. In the fifteenth century, in
France, the popular drama expressed the class envy of the poor against
the rich. In the mystery play _Job_ (1478) the "Pasteur" says: "The
great lords have all the goods. The poor people have nothing but pain
and adversity. Who would not be irritated [at such a state of things]?"
The passion plays of the Rhine valley followed those of France. Those
of the fourteenth century lacked the rude jests and ghoulish interest of
those of France in the fifteenth. The street public never tired of the
horrors of executions, or of the low gaiety of funerals, etc. The "sot"
first appeared in the _Passion de Troyes_ at the end of the fifteenth
century. He was long popular.[2113]
+658. Fictitious literature.+ Fictitious literature, after printing
became common, was greatly increased, especially in Italy and Spain.
Through the dialogued story it led up to the drama. At the end of the
fifteenth century F. de Rojas wrote a dialogued story, _Calisto e
Meliboea_, about two distressed lovers. The heroine is Celestina, a
bawd who helped them out of their troubles. The book is generally named
after her, and she became a fixed character in drama and fiction. The
noble bawd, however, is an artificial creation of literature and never
could be a biolog. It is not true enough. The Spaniards also developed a
new form of the mystery play,--the _autos sacramentales_. These plays
represented some Scriptural incident, but the rôles were taken by
allegorical figures. They were regularly represented on the festival of
Corpus Christi, in the afternoon, on the public square. They satisfied
the taste of the people for religiosity, if not religion. Machiavelli
(1469-1527) wrote a story, _Mandragore_, which in its day enjoyed great
popularity. A man in Paris heard of the beauty of a lady at Florence. He
went to the latter place to see her and fell in love with her. Her
husband was an imbecile who greatly desired a child. He persuaded his
wife to receive the stranger. She and the lover contracted an enduring
relation. Cardinal Bibbiena wrote a comedy at the beginning of the
sixteenth century, _Calandra_, which was esteemed as a great work. The
intrigue consists of _quiproquos_ produced by twins, a male and a
female, who exchange dress. Many classical stories are introduced. Lope
de Vega (1562-1635) wrote autos and comedies. He wrote eighteen hundred
comedies, four hundred autos, and a great number of other pieces,--in
all, it is said, twenty-one million verses.[2114] Calderon (1600-1681)
continued on the same lines. The servant-buffoon was the time form of
the buffoon. All these productions furnished models and material for the
poets and dramatists of other countries. The comedies are always long
and wordy and generally tedious. They run in fixed molds, and have
unyielding conventions to obey. Rarely have they ethological value.
+659. Romances of roguery.+ The "romances of roguery" were closely akin
to the popular drama as exponents of popular tastes and standards. It is
very possible that the romances were derived from the tastes.[2115] The
clever hero has been a very popular type in all ages and countries. He
easily degenerates into the clever rogue. The rogue is an anti-hero to
offset the epic hero. There was in France, in the thirteenth century, "a
bold rogue, Eustache le Moine, who became the central hero of a _roman_,
which set forth his life and deeds as thief and pirate."[2116] In
Germany Till Eulenspiegel was a rascal who lived in the first part of
the fourteenth century and around whose name anecdotes clustered until
he became an anti-hero. There were in Germany popular tales which were
picaresque novels in embryo. Those about Eulenspiegel were first reduced
to a coherent narrative in 1519. Hemmerlein was an ugly and sarcastic
buffoon of the fourteenth century. Hanswurst was a fat glutton of the
fifteenth century who aimed to be clever but made blunders.
Pickelhering, in Holland, was of the same type.[2117] In England, in the
sixteenth century, Punch began to degenerate. He took away the rôle of
"Old Vice," and became more and more depraved,--a popular Don Juan, a
type of physical and moral deformity.[2118] The play was popular. The
marionettes, being only dolls and sexless, escaped the onslaught of the
Puritans.[2119]
+660. Picaresque novels.+ The picaresque novels do not deal with love,
but with intrigues for material gain in the widest sense. _Lazarillo de
Tormes_ is counted as the first of these. It is attributed to Diego
Hurtado de Mendoza and is thought to have been produced about 1500. The
best known of the class is _Gil Blas_. The hero lives by his wits, has
many vicissitudes, and plays and suffers many cruel practical jokes.
The Spanish stories of Quevedo and Perez are coarse but never obscene.
The view of women, however, is low. They are fickle, shallow, vain, and
cunning. The church is "gingerly handled," but the clergy are derided
for immorality, hypocrisy, and trickiness.
+661. Books of beggars.+ A variety of the picaresque species was the
"books of beggars." An English specimen of this variety is Audley's
_Fraternity of Vagabonds_ (1561). Mediæval social ways produced armies
of vagabonds, beggars, and outcasts, who practiced vice and evil ways
and cultivated criminal cleverness. The picaresque stories illustrate
their ways.
+662. At the beginning of the sixteenth century.+ Isabella d'Este
describes a play at Ferrara, in 1503, in which the Annunciation was
represented, angels descending from heaven by concealed machinery, etc.
There was also a _moresca_, a ballet or pantomime dance, with clowns and
beasts, and blows and other clown tricks. Another very noteworthy
incident is the enactment, at Urbino in 1504, of a "comedy," in which
the recent history of that city was represented, including the marriage
of Lucrezia Borgia, the conquest of Urbino by Cesar Borgia, the death of
Alexander VI, and the return of the Duke of Urbino. This application of
the dramatic method to their own recent history, which had been indeed
dramatic, shows the high development of graphic and artistic power,
which is also shown by the other arts of the time. Ladies did not then
abdicate their prerogative to judge and condemn the propriety of
artistic products offered to them. Isabella declared the _Cassaria_
"lascivious and immoral beyond words," and forbade her ladies to attend
the performance of it at the marriage of Lucrezia Borgia to her
(Isabella's) brother.[2120] In France, in the sixteenth century,
imitations of classical dramas held the stage. The Protestants sought to
use the drama for effect on the populace.[2121] St. Charles Borromeo
(1538-1584), as Archbishop of Milan, carried on a war against
exhibitions of all kinds. He maintained that they were indecent.[2122]
+663. The theater at Venice.+ The first tragedy produced in Italy was
written by Albertino Mussato, a Paduan, early in the fourteenth century
in imitation of Latin dramas. The subject was the conflicts of Padua
with Ezzelino da Romano. Albertino's work was not imitated, for the
mysteries held the stage until the end of the fifteenth century. They
were represented on stages erected in public places of the cities. At
Venice were invented _momaria_, in which there was no theatrical
illusion, but _brio_, joviality, and irony. They began at weddings,
where after the wedding feast some one, impersonating an heroic
personage, narrated the great deeds of the ancestors of the spouses,
with numberless exaggerations and jest, from which the name _momaria_,
or _bombaria_, was derived. The companies of the _calza_ figured in all
gay assemblies at Venice from 1400 to the end of the sixteenth century.
They renewed the Latin comedies and "carried festivity and good taste
even into the churches." Theatrical exhibitions became the favorite
amusement of the Venetians, and were presented not only in private
houses but also in monasteries, although secular persons were not
present.[2123]
+664. Dancing. Public sports.+ From the early Middle Ages the
ecclesiastical authorities disapproved of dancing, but the people were
very fond of it and never gave it up. The poems and romances are full of
it.[2124] Some usages of dancing in Germany were very gross. The man
swung his partner off the floor as far as he could. If any woman refused
to dance with any man, it occurred sometimes that he slapped her face,
but it was disputed whether this was not beyond the limit.[2125] The
usages at the carnival were very gross and obscene.[2126] All popular
sports were coarse and cruel. It seemed to be considered good fun to
torment the weak and to watch their helpless struggles. Birds were shot,
and beasts baited, in a way to give pain and prolong it. At Nuremberg
the "cat knight" fought with a cat hung about his own neck, which he
must bite to death in order to be knighted by the _bürgermeister_.
Blind people were shut in an inclosed space in the market place with a
pig as a prize, which they were to beat with sticks. The fun was
greatest when they struck each other. This amusement is reported from
many places in central Europe.[2127] "Nothing amused our ancestors more
than these blind encounters. Even kings took part at these burlesque
representations." At Paris they were presented every year at
mid-lent.[2128]
+665. Women in the theater and on the stage.+ No young women were
allowed to be present at the _commedia del arte_ in the first times of
the principate at Florence. Masi[2129] says that this was true in
general of all Italy. Later they were addressed in the prologue, which
became customary, and so they must have been present. Popular opinion
still held that they ought to stay at home, as of old. They were never
on the stage. De Julleville says[2130] that women in France in the
Middle Ages were present at the freest farces. In the middle of the
sixteenth century, in Italy, wandering players began to employ women for
female parts. The Italian comedians, when they went to Paris, continued
this custom there.[2131] Philip II of Spain forbade women on the
stage.[2132] French actresses appeared at London in 1629; they were
allowed in 1659.[2133] Innocent XI, in 1676, forbade the employment of
women on the stage.[2134]
+666. The "commedia del arte."+ In Italy the _commedia del arte_ was the
continuation or revival of the _mimus_. The speeches were impromptu; the
characters and rôles were stereotyped. The action and speeches must have
grown by the contributions of talented men who played the parts from
generation to generation. The characters have become traditional and
universal.[2135] Such were Maccus (later Polichinella) of Naples,
Manducus or the French Croquemitaine, Bucco, a half-stupid,
half-sarcastic buffoon, Pappus (the later Venetian Pantalon) the fussy
old man, and Casnar, the French Cassandre. Scaramucca or Fracassa was
added to satirize the Spanish soldier. He was recognized as the Miles
Gloriosus of Plautus.[2136] The Spanish trooper was a boastful coward.
He called himself the son of the earthquake and lightning, cousin of
death, or friend of Beelzebub.[2137] At the marriage of Alphonso d'Este
comedies of Plautus were acted for effect and conventional pretense, but
they were considered tiresome, and interludes of pantomime, ballet,
clown tricks, peasant farce, mythology, and fireworks were introduced to
furnish entertainment.[2138]
+667. Jest books. Italian comedy at Paris.+ In the sixteenth century the
theater became entirely secular, and amusement and religion were
separated as a consequence of the general movement of the Renaissance.
In the Middle Ages serious men collected jests and published jest books,
which were collections of the jokes made by the _mimus_, just as modern
jests have been made by negro minstrels, circus clowns, and variety
actors.[2139] At the end of the sixteenth century the Italians,
"suffocated by Spanish etiquette, and poisoned by Jesuitical hypocrisy,
sought to expand healthy lungs in free spaces of open air, indulging in
dialectical niceties, and immortalizing street jokes by the genius of
masked comedy."[2140] The _commedia del arte_ took this course. It was
open to every chance of political and social influence. It became the
recognized Italian comedy and was transported to the north as such. In
each province of Italy the fixed characters were independently
developed, so that variations were produced. The type of play reached a
climax in the middle of the seventeenth century. Then it declined for
lack of competent actors. It was the realism of everyday life. It tended
always back again to the mountebanks, jugglers, rope dancers, etc.[2141]
The _lazzi_ were "business" which gave the actors time to improvise. In
the sixteenth century Italian comedians began to play at Paris in
Italian. The Italian actresses undressed on the stage much and often, so
that "Italian comedy" came to mean vulgar and licentious comedy. The
Parlement of Paris held that the plays were immoral. Many of them are
said to have been obscene.[2142] Madame de Maintenon having heard that
they were immoral, they were forbidden in 1697.[2143] The Italian comedy
struggled on, however. For a long time no women visited it, but in the
eighteenth century a comedy called _Arlequin, Empereur dans la Lune_
became celebrated. It was a satire on the France of the time. Women
ignored the grossness for the sake of the satire.[2144] The plays of the
Italians were all either farces for pure fun or satires on the mores of
the time. "Many were satires on women." In one of these last, the saying
was ascribed to Aristotle, upon seeing a tree from the limbs of which
four women were hanging, "How happy men would be, if all trees bore that
fruit." Women were currently represented as empty-headed, vain, fond of
pleasure, frivolous, and fickle. Lawyers were also a favorite object of
satire.[2145] In the Italian theater écriteaux were hung up, on which
the speeches were written and the audience joined in singing the
couplets.[2146]
+668. "Commedia del arte" in Italy.+ In Italy the _commedia del arte_
went through many vicissitudes. At Venice, late in the eighteenth
century, Gozzi undertook to revive it by composing what he called
"fables." They were fairy extravaganzas, based on Mother Goose stories
or fairy tales. They were in part improvised, but in part written,
either in prose or verse, in order to make sure of the essential points
of the action. The older custom had been to prepare only a _scenario_,
in which the story was told in brief outline, with the allotment of
parts in the production.[2147] Pantaleone, in the _commedia del arte_,
is sad,--an imbecile, dissolute old man. Gozzi gave him _brio_ and
_bonarietà_, with cordiality and humor. Goldoni, who got into a war with
Gozzi, made Pantaleone a philistine, who used good sense against the
follies of fashion. No women were present at these comedies at Venice at
this time.[2148]
Scherillo[2149] quotes Perucci, that at the end of the seventeenth
century the folk theater was obscene in word and act beyond the ancient
comedies. If that is true, it is only a detail of the degeneracy of
Italy from the middle of the sixteenth century.
+669. Summary and review.+ It is evident that amusement and relaxation
are needs of men. The fondness for exhibitions and theatrical
representations can be traced through history. The suggestion is direct
and forcible. It can be made to play upon harmful tastes as well as upon
good ones. There is nothing to guide it or decide its form and direction
except the mores,--the consenting opinion of the masses as to what is
beneficial or harmful. The leading classes try to mold this opinion. The
history shows that the mores can make anything right, and protect any
violation of the sex taboo or of ordinary propriety. There is no subject
in regard to which the mores need more careful criticism than in regard
to amusements. The standard and the usage degenerate together unless
there is control by an active and well-trained taste and sense. The
popular taste and sense are products of inherited mores. It is this
reflex action of habitual acts and experiences which makes the subject
difficult. All the primary facts and the secondary or remoter
reflections are intertwined as in an organic growth, and all go
together. The facts exert constant education, and every positive effort
to interfere with the course of things by primitive education must be
content to exert slight effects for a long time. Wealth and luxury exert
their evil effects through amusement. Poverty cuts down these products
of wealth and brings societies back to simplicity and virtue. Men
renounce when they cannot get. The periods of economic and social decay
have cut off the development of forms of amusement, arrested vice, and
forced new beginnings.
+670. Amusements need the control of educated judgment and will.+ The
history shows that amusements are a pitfall in which good mores may be
lost and evil ones produced. They require conventional control and good
judgment to guide them. This requirement cannot be set aside. Amusements
always present a necessity for moral education and moral will. This fact
has impressed itself on men in all ages, and all religions have produced
Puritan and ascetic sects who sought welfare, not in satisfying but in
counteracting the desire for amusement and pleasure. Their efforts have
proved that there is no solution in that direction. There must be an
educated judgment at work all the time, and it must form correct
judgments to be made real by a cultivated will, or the whole societal
interest may be lost without the evil tendency being perceived.
+671. Amusements do not satisfy the current notions of progress.+ It is
clear from the history that amusements have gone through waves upward
and downward, but that the amplitude of the waves is very small. It is
true that the shows of the late Roman empire were very base, and that
the great drama has gone very high by comparison, but the oscillation
between the two entirely destroys anything like a steady advance in
dramatic composition or dramatic art. This is a very instructive fact.
It entirely negatives the current notion of progress as a sort of
function of time which is to be expected to realize itself in a steady
improvement and advance to better and better. The useful arts do show an
advance. The fine arts do not. They return to the starting point, or
near it, again and again. The dramatic art is partly literary and partly
practical handicraft. Theater buildings improve; the machinery, lights,
scenery, and manipulation improve. The literary products are like other
artistic products: they have periods of glory and periods of decay. It
is the literary products which are nearest to the mores. They lack all
progress, or advance only temporarily from worse to better literary
forms.
[1987] Wellhausen, _Skizzen und Vorarbeiten_, III, 85.
[1988] Maspero, _Peuples de l'Orient_, I, 580.
[1989] Tiele-Gehrich, _Relig. im Altert._, I, 160.
[1990] Barton, _Semitic Origins_, 85.
[1991] _Archiv für Anthrop._, XXIX, 129.
[1992] _Ibid._, 138, 150.
[1993] _Origines du Théâtre Moderne_, 60.
[1994] _Il._, XVI, 750; XVIII, 604.
[1995] _Il._, XVIII, 601.
[1996] Magnin, _Origines du Théâtre Moderne_, 178.
[1997] Ramsay, _Relig. of Greece and Asia Minor_, Hastings's
Dict., Addit. vol., 120.
[1998] Beloch, _Griech. Gesch._, I, 579, 592.
[1999] Ramsay in Hastings's Dict., Addit. vol., 129-130.
[2000] _Ibid._, 125.
[2001] Boissier, _Religion Romaine_, I, 132.
[2002] Rohde, _Psyche_, II, 70.
[2003] _Ibid._, 34.
[2004] _Ibid._, 3.
[2005] Wobbermin, _Beeinflussung des Urchristenthums durch das
Mysterienwesen_, 21
[2006] W. R. Smith, _Relig. of the Semites_, 426. See sec. 565.
[2007] W. R. Smith, _Relig. of the Semites_, 357-359.
[2008] Wissowa, _Relig. of the Romans_, 163.
[2009] Magnin, _Origines du Théâtre Moderne_, 324, 463.
[2010] Magnin, _Origines_, 304.
[2011] _Ibid._, 304-317.
[2012] Val. Max., II, x, 8.
[2013] II, IV, 7.
[2014] Dill, _Nero to M. Aurel._, 236.
[2015] Cf. Lecky, _Eur. Morals_, I, 285; Dill, _Nero to M.
Aurel._, 235.
[2016] _Tusc. Disp._, II, 17.
[2017] Martial, II, Introd.
[2018] Scherr, _Kult. Gesch._, 181.
[2019] Dill, _Nero to M. Aurel._, 235.
[2020] _Ibid._, 238.
[2021] _Ibid._, 240.
[2022] Gibbon, Chap. XL, i.
[2023] Schmidt, _La Société Civile dans le Monde Romain et sa
Transformation par le Christianisme_, 469.
[2024] _Ep._, II, 46; Migne, _Patrol. Latina_, XVIII, 190.
[2025] Reich, _Der Mimus_, 32.
[2026] Magnin, _Origines, du Théâtre Moderne_, 30.
[2027] _Ibid._, 51.
[2028] Magnin, _Origines_, 33, 38-40.
[2029] Reich, _Der Mimus_, 527.
[2030] Magnin, _Origines_, 161.
[2031] Reich, _Der Mimus_, 12.
[2032] _Ibid._, 27-29.
[2033] Tacitus, _Annales_, IV, 14.
[2034] Preuss (_Archiv für Anthrop._, XXIX, 182) suggests that
Falstaff's fatness may be a survival of one of the physical
features of the stereotyped buffoon.
[2035] _Archiv für Anthrop._, XXIX, 133.
[2036] Reich, _Der Mimus_, 679, 682.
[2037] _Ibid._, 360.
[2038] Magnin, _Marionettes_, 188.
[2039] Lucian, _Demonax_, 33.
[2040] D'Ancona, _Origine del Teatro in Italia_, I, 15.
[2041] Reich, _Der Mimus_, 58, 436, 470, 505.
[2042] Magnin, _Origines du Théâtre Moderne_, 321.
[2043] Magnin, _Origines_, 47.
[2044] D'Ancona, I, 45.
[2045] Schmidt, _La Société Civile dans le Monde Romain_, 98.
[2046] _Théâtre Serieux du M. A._, 13 note.
[2047] D'Ancona, I, 372.
[2048] Klein, _Gesch. des Dramas_, III, 599, 638.
[2049] D'Ancona, I, 372.
[2050] Reich, 80, 93, 95, 107, 117.
[2051] Schmidt, _La Société Civile dans le Monde Romain_, 113.
[2052] _Ibid._, 101.
[2053] _De Gubernat. Dei._, VII.
[2054] _Eur. Morals_, I, 264.
[2055] Grupp, _Kulturgesch. der röm. Kaiserzeit_, I, 200.
[2056] Magnin, _Origines_, 435.
[2057] Schmidt, 251-253.
[2058] _Ibid._, 469.
[2059] _Ibid._, 451, 466, 477.
[2060] _De Gubernat. Dei_, VI, 10, 15, 38, 44-55.
[2061] McCabe, _St. Aug._, 238.
[2062] _De Civit. Dei_, II, 27.
[2063] Harnack, _Dogmengesch._, I, 116.
[2064] _De Gubernat. Dei_, VI, 42.
[2065] Gregorovius, _Lucret. Borgia_, 220.
[2066] Dubois, _Moeurs de l'Inde_, II, 331.
[2067] JAI, XII, 222.
[2068] Bancroft, _Native Races of the Pacific Coast_, II, 305.
[2069] Salvianus, _De Gubernat. Dei_, VI, 69, 71, 77.
[2070] Ammianus Marcel., XXIII, v, 3.
[2071] Grimm, _Deutsche Mythol._, 166, 440.
[2072] Reich, _Der Mimus_, 785-810.
[2073] _Ibid._, 622.
[2074] _Ibid._, 48, 133.
[2075] _Ibid._, 191.
[2076] _Mod. Egypt_, II, 125.
[2077] _Der Mimus_, 656.
[2078] Klein, _Gesch. des Dramas_, III, 84.
[2079] Wilkins, _Modern Hinduism_, 225.
[2080] _Globus_, LXXXVII, 60.
[2081] Reich, _Der Mimus_, 669, 673, 676.
[2082] Magnin, _Marionettes_, 121-122.
[2083] _Ibid._, 343.
[2084] Alec-Tweedie, _Sunny Sicily_, 173, and Chap. XI.
[2085] Hefele, _Conciliengesch._, III, 304.
[2086] Scherr, _D. F. W._, I, 245.
[2087] Lenient, _La Satire en France au M. A._, 422; Du Cange, s.
v. "Festum Asinorum."
[2088] Magnin, _Marionettes_, 58.
[2089] D'Ancona, _Origini del teatro in Italia_, I, 12.
[2090] _Ibid._, I, 49.
[2091] Magnin, _Origines du Théâtre Moderne_, XXV.
[2092] _Gesch. des Dramas_, III, 646.
[2093] Magnin, _Théâtre de Hrotsvitha_.
[2094] Lintilhac, _Théâtre Sérieux du M. A._, 18.
[2095] Lenient, _La Satire_, 23.
[2096] Lintilhac, _Théâtre Sérieux du M. A._, 34.
[2097] Burckhardt, _Renaissance_, 401.
[2098] D'Ancona, I, 62, 78, 86.
[2099] _La Comédie en France au M. A._, 19.
[2100] Magnin, _Marionettes_, 121.
[2101] D'Ancona, I, 88.
[2102] _Ibid._, 89.
[2103] _Ibid._, 98-107.
[2104] D'Ancona, _Origini del Teatro in Italia_, I, 344.
[2105] _Ibid._, I, 47.
[2106] Lenient, _La Satire en France au M. A._, 324-340.
[2107] Scherr, _D. F. W._, II, 124.
[2108] D'Ancona, I, 282.
[2109] Summa, II, 2, qu. 168, art. 3.
[2110] von Schack, _Gesch. der Dramat. Lit._, I, 35.
[2111] Session XXI, sec. 11.
[2112] Lenient, _La Satire en France au M. A._, 29.
[2113] Lintilhac, _Théâtre Serieux du Moyen Age_, 106, 123, 133,
167.
[2114] Zarate, _Liter. Españ._, II, 308, 423, 451.
[2115] Chandler, _Romances of Roguery_, 191.
[2116] _Ibid._, 9.
[2117] Magnin, _Marionettes_, 298.
[2118] _Ibid._, 255-265.
[2119] _Ibid._, 233.
[2120] Gregorovius, _Isabella d'Este_, 212, 251, 255, 264;
Burckhardt, _Renaissance_, 316.
[2121] De Julleville, _La Comédie en France au M. A._, 183, 331.
[2122] Scherillo, _La Commedia del Arte_, Chap. VI.
[2123] Molmenti, _Venezia nella Vita Privata_, 297-299.
[2124] Lacroix, _Manners, Customs, and Dress of M. A._, 241.
[2125] Angerstein, _Volkstänze_, 30.
[2126] Schultz, _D. L._, 414.
[2127] Barthold, _Hansa_, III, 177.
[2128] Lacroix, _Manners, Customs, and Dress of M. A._, 220;
Schultz, _D. L._, 409; Scherr, _Kult. Gesch._, 623.
[2129] _Teatro Ital. nel Sec. XVIII_, 232.
[2130] _Comédie en France au M. A._, 23.
[2131] Scherillo, _La Commedia del Arte_, 72.
[2132] Chandler, _Romances of Roguery_, 159.
[2133] Magnin, _Marionettes_, 233.
[2134] D'Ancona, _Origine del Teatro in Italia_, I, 341.
[2135] Burckhardt, _Die Renaissance_, 318. In Gozzi's _Memoirs_
(ed. Symonds) may be seen good colored plates representing these
fixed characters of the _commedia del arte_.
[2136] Scherillo, _La Commedia del Arte_, 90, 114.
[2137] _Ibid._, 95.
[2138] Burckhardt, 316.
[2139] Reich, _Der Mimus_, 473.
[2140] Symonds, _Catholic Reaction_, I, 55.
[2141] Masi, _Teatro Ital. nel Sec._, XVIII, 229.
[2142] Bernardin, _Comédie Ital. en France_, 9, 12, 13.
[2143] _Ibid._, 52.
[2144] Bernardin, _Com. Ital. en France_, 27.
[2145] _Ibid._, 42.
[2146] _Ibid._, 90.
[2147] Gozzi's _Memoirs_ (_Symond's trans._).
[2148] Masi, _Teatro Ital._, 89, 232, 264.
[2149] _La Commedia del Arte_, 50.
CHAPTER XVIII
ASCETICISM
The exaggeration of opposite policies.--Failure of the mores and
revolt against expediency.--Luck and welfare; self-discipline to
influence the superior powers.--Asceticism in Japan.--
Development of the arts; luxury; sensuality.--The ascetic
philosophy.--Asceticism is an aberration.--The definitions
depend on the limits.--Asceticism in India and Greece; Orphic
doctrines.--Ascetic features in the philosophic sects.--Hebrew
asceticism.--Nazarites, Rechabites, Essenes.--Roman
asceticism.--Christian asceticism.--Three traditions united in
Christianity.--Asceticism in the early church.--Asceticism in
Islam.--Virginity.--Mediæval asceticism.--Asceticism in
Christian mores.--Renunciation of property; beggary.--Ascetic
standards.--The Mendicant Friars.--The Franciscans.--Whether
poverty is a good.--Clerical celibacy.--How Christian
asceticism ended.
+672. The exaggeration of opposite policies.+ It is not to be expected
that all the men in a society will react in the same way against the
same experiences and observations. If they draw unanimously the same
conclusions from the same facts, that is such an unusual occurrence that
their unanimity gives great weight to their opinion. In almost all cases
they are thrown into parties by their different inferences from the same
experiences and observations. There is nothing about which they differ
more than about amusement, pleasure, and happiness, and as to the degree
in which pleasure is worth pursuing. Those who feel deceived by pleasure
and duped by the pursuit of happiness revolt from it and denounce it.
Inasmuch as others not yet disillusioned still pursue pleasure as the
most obviously desirable good, there are two great parties who divide on
fundamental notions of life policy. Two such parties, face to face, tend
to exaggerate their distinctive doctrines and practices. Each party
goes to extremes and excess. We have seen in the last chapter (secs. 624
ff.) that at the beginning of the Christian era moral restraints were
thrown aside and that all living men seemed to plunge into vice, luxury,
and pleasure, so far as their means would allow. There were, however, a
number of sects and religions in the Greco-Roman world that held
extremely pessimistic views as to the worth of human life and of those
things which men care for most. They renounced the ordinary standards of
welfare and happiness, and sought welfare and happiness in merely
denying the popular standards. The old world philosophies no longer
commanded faith, and they seemed to be rejected with active hatred, not
with mere indifferent unbelief. The poor and those who were forced to
live by self-denial joined these sects of philosophy or religion. The
age which saw extremes of luxury and vicious excess was also the age
which saw great phenomena of ascetic philosophy and practice. Each
school or tendency developed its own mores to treat the problems of life
in its own way. An ascetic policy never is a primary product of the
"ways" in which unreflecting men meet the facts of life. It is
reflective and derived. It is a secondary stage of faith built on
experience and reflection. It is, therefore, dogmatic. It must be
sustained by faith in the fundamental pessimistic conviction. It never
can be verified by experience. It purposely runs counter to all the
sanctions which are possible in experience. If any one declares evil
good and pain pleasure, he cannot find proof of it in any experiment.
The mores produced out of asceticism are therefore peculiar and in many
ways instructive.
+673. Failure of the mores and revolt against expediency.+ We have seen
that the mores are the results of the efforts of men to find out how to
live under the conditions of human life so as to satisfy interests and
secure welfare. The efforts have been only very imperfectly successful.
The task, in fact, never can be finished, for the conditions change and
the problem contains different elements from time to time. Moreover,
dogmas interfere. They dictate "duty" and "right" by authority and as
virtue, quite independently of any verification by experience and
expediency. All the primitive taboos express the convictions of men that
there are things which must not be done, or must not be done beyond some
limited degree, if the men would live well. Such convictions came either
from experience or from dogma. The former class of cases were those
things which were connected with food and the sex relation. The latter
class of cases were those things which were connected with the doctrine
of ghosts. There are also a great many primitive customs for coercing or
conciliating superior powers,--either men or spirits,--which consist in
renunciation, self-torture, obscenity, bloodshedding, filthiness, and
the performance of repugnant acts or even suicide. These customs all
imply that the superior powers are indifferent, or angry and malevolent,
or justly displeased, and that the pain of men pleases, or appeases and
conciliates, or coerces them, or wins their attention. Thus we meet with
a fundamental philosophy of life in which it is not the satisfaction of
needs, appetites, and desires, but the opposite theory which is thought
to lead to welfare. Renounce what you want; do what you do not want to
do; pursue what is repugnant; in short, invert the relations of pleasure
and pain, and act by your will against their sanctions, so as to seek
pain and flee pleasure. A doctrine of due measure and limit upon the
rational satisfaction of needs and desires is turned into an absolute
rule of well-being. Within narrower limits the same philosophy
inculcates acts of labor, pain, and renunciation, which produce no
results in the satisfaction of wants but are regarded as beneficial or
meritorious in themselves, as a kind of gymnastic in self-control and
self-denial. It is not to be denied that such a gymnastic has value in
education, especially in the midst of luxury and self-indulgence, if it
is controlled by common sense and limited within reason. Nearly all men,
however, are sure to meet with as much necessity for self-control and
self-denial as is necessary to their training, without arbitrarily
subjecting themselves to artificial discipline of that kind.
+674. Luck and welfare. Self-discipline to influence the superior
powers.+ The notion of welfare through acts which upon their face are
against welfare is directly referable to experience of the
impossibility of establishing sure relations between positive efforts
and satisfactions. The lowest civilization is full of sacrifices,
renunciation, self-discipline, etc. It is the effect of the aleatory
element and of the explanation of the same by goblinism (secs. 6, 9).
The acts of renunciation or self-discipline have no rational connection
with the interests which they aim to serve. Those acts can affect
interests only by influencing the ghosts or demons who always interfere
between efforts and results and make luck. Soldiers, fishermen, hunters,
traders, agriculturists, etc., are bidden to practice continence before
undertaking any of their enterprises. Hence arises the notion of a
"state of grace," not the state produced by work in the workday world,
but a state produced by abstinence from work, from enjoyment, and from
the experience of good and ill. Abstention from wine, meat, other
luxuries of food and drink, and from women gives power which is magical,
because it has no real causal connection with desired results in war or
industry. Uncivilized people almost always have some such notion of
reaching a higher plane of power, or more especially of luck, by
self-discipline. Acts of self-discipline, e.g. fasting, gashing,
mutilating one's self, also enter into mourning. In some tribes parents
who expect a child engage in acts of the same kind.[2150] Asceticism in
higher civilization is a survival of the life philosophy of an earlier
stage, in which the pain of men was believed to be pleasant to the
superior powers. The same sentiment revives now in times of decline or
calamity, when the wrath of God is recognized or apprehended. We appoint
a fast when we are face to face with calamity. The same sentiment is at
work in sects and individuals when they desire "holiness," or a "higher
life," or mystic communion with higher powers, or "purity" (in the
ritual sense), or relief from "sin," or escape from the terror of ghosts
and demons, or power to arise to some high moral standard by crushing
out the natural appetites which according to that standard are base and
wicked.
+675. Asceticism in Japan.+ The Shinto religion of the Japanese "is not
an essentially ascetic religion; it offers flesh and wine to its gods;
and it prescribes only such forms of self-denial as ancient custom and
decency require. Nevertheless, some of its votaries perform
extraordinary austerities on special occasions,--austerities which
always include much cold-water bathing. But the most curious phase of
this Shinto ascetism is represented by a custom still prevalent in
remote districts. According to this custom a community yearly appoints
one of its citizens to devote himself wholly to the gods on behalf of
the rest. During the term of his consecration this communal
representative must separate from his family, must not approach women,
must avoid all places of amusement, must eat only food cooked with
sacred fire, must abstain from wine, must bathe in fresh cold water
several times a day, must repeat particular prayers at certain hours,
and must keep vigil upon certain nights. When he has performed these
duties of abstinence and purification for the specified time he becomes
religiously free, and another man is then elected to take his place. The
prosperity of the settlement is supposed to depend upon the exact
observance by its representative of the duties prescribed; should any
public misfortune occur, he would be suspected of having broken his
vows. Anciently, in the case of a common misfortune, the representative
was put to death."[2151]
+676. Development of the arts. Luxury. Sensuality.+ In the development
of the arts there has been an increase of luxury in the ways of living.
This has seemed to be a good. It has seemed like successful
accomplishment of what man must do to win and enjoy power over nature.
Luxury, however, has brought vice and ill, and has wrought decay and
ruin. It is the twin sister of sensuality, which is corruption. Is
luxury a good or not? Men have lost faith in it, and have declared that
the triumphs of the arts were delusions, "snares to the soul,"
corruption of the individual and society. They have turned back to the
"old simple ways," and have renounced the enjoyments which were within
their reach by the power of the arts. Such renunciation has always been
popular. The crowd has always admired it. It is certainly a noteworthy
feature in the history of civilization that there has always been
present in it a reaction, a movement of fear and doubt about the
innovations of every kind by which it is attended, which has caused
sects of philosophers and religious persons to refuse to go on, to
renounce luxurious novelties, and to prefer the older and inferior ways.
+677. The ascetic philosophy.+ Here then we have a life philosophy, or a
life standpoint, from which the things to be done are presented
inverted. It is ill luck, loss, calamity, etc., which have inverted
human nature. The element of luck crossed and cut off the relations
between effort and satisfaction, and disturbed all the lessons of
industry. All effort would be vain if the ghosts who control luck were
not propitiated. If they were friendly, labor was of no importance.
Self-discipline, therefore, entered into everything. This is asceticism.
It is always irrational or magical, addressed directly or remotely to
the superior powers, as an appeal to their will and favor, their
mystical friendship, and a prayer for the transcendental communications
which they give. Pater[2152] says that asceticism is a sacrifice of one
part of human nature to another, that the latter may survive; or a
harmonious development of all parts to realize an ideal of culture. If
the first sentence of this statement could be accepted as a fair
definition, the second cannot. Asceticism does not aim at a harmonious
development and never could produce it. It selects purposes and pushes
towards their accomplishment. The selection has often been made with the
purpose to attain to holiness, or a higher realization of religious
ideals. The ideals are necessarily arbitrary and are very sure to be
extravagant. They do not have good effect on character, and they produce
moral distortion. They are, however, an outflow of honest religious
emotion.
+678. Asceticism is only an aberration.+ The great viewpoints and the
great world philosophies are found logically at the end of a long study
of life, if anywhere. If one is found or adopted, it furnishes leading
for the notions of ways to be employed in all details of life. This is
equally true if it is reached on a slight, superficial, or superstitious
view of life. The ascetic philosophy produces contradiction and
confusion in the acts of men, because some of them work for expediency
and others for inexpediency at the same time. Therefore also the mores,
if they are affected by asceticism, are inconsistent and contradictory.
Nevertheless asceticism is only an aberration which starts from a highly
virtuous motive. We must do what is right and virtuous because it is so.
It is right and virtuous to fight sensuality in personal character and
social action. The fight will often consist in acts which have no
further relation to interests. By zeal the work of this fight absorbs
more and more of life, and it may engage a large number associatively.
It becomes the great purpose by which mores are built. Then the notion
of pleasing superior powers by self-inflicted pain is thrown out, and
all the primitive superstition is eliminated. We find a vast network of
mores, which may characterize a generation or a society, which are due
to the revolt against sensuality, either in the original purity of the
revolt (which is very rare) or in some of its thousands of variations
and combinations.
+679. The definitions depend on the limit.+ Especially in connection
with food, drink, and sex the asceticism of one age becomes the virtue
of another. The ideas of temperance and moderation of one age are often
clearly produced by previous ascetic usages. The definitions are all
made by the limit. A stricter observance than the current custom is
ascetic, but it may become the custom and set the limit. Then it is only
temperance. It is often impossible to distinguish sharply between taboos
which only impose respect for gods, temples, etc. (cleanliness, quiet,
good clothing), and those which are ascetic. When the ascetic temper and
philosophy assumes control it easily degenerates into a mania. Acts are
regarded as meritorious in proportion as they are painful, and they are
pushed to greater and greater extravagances because what becomes
familiar loses the subjective force from which the ascetic person wins
self-satisfaction. Asceticism then becomes a mental aberration and a
practical negation of the instinct of self-preservation. It leads to
insanity.[2153] If it takes a course against other persons, it explains
the conduct of great inquisitors like Conrad of Marburg.[2154]
+680. Asceticism in India and Greece. Orphic doctrines.+ In India
ascetic acts were supposed to produce not only holiness but also power,
which might arise to superhuman degrees or even avail to overcome gods.
Rohde[2155] finds that the theological ascetic morality of the later
history of Greece, which was not a determination of the will in a given
direction but a mode of defending the soul from an external evil
influence which threatened to soil it, had its first impulse in the
notion of the antagonism between soul and body, because that notion
would cause the body to be regarded as a base constraint from which the
soul would need to be "purified." The notion of the pure soul imprisoned
in a material sensual body, and stained by the base appetites of the
latter, was current amongst the Greeks for five centuries before Christ.
Hence the antagonism between the soul and the "body," the "flesh," or
the "world." The soul passed from one body to another, according to the
Orphic sects, with intervals in which it underwent purification. In each
incarnation it underwent punishment for the misdeeds of the last
previous existence. The soul is immortal. The soul of the bad man goes
on forever in reincarnations from which it cannot escape. The soul which
is purified by the Orphic rites and Orphic mode of life is redeemed from
this eternal round and returns to God. Orpheus gives salvation by his
rites, but it is a work of grace by the redeeming gods. Orpheus provides
by his revelations and intercessions the way to salvation, and he who
would walk in this way must carefully obey his ordinances. This is a
life which must be lived. It is not ritual only. Here asceticism comes
in, for the thing to be renounced is not the errors and faults of
earthly life, but earthly life itself (worldliness). The man must turn
away from everything which would entangle him in the interests of mortal
life and the appetites of the body. Renunciation of meat food was one of
the leading forms of this asceticism; sex restraint was another. The
rites do not free men from the touch of demons. They purify the soul
from the unclean contact with the body and from the dominion of death.
Mysticism is conjoined with this doctrine of purification. The soul came
from God and seeks to return to him. It is released by the rites and
practices from everything on earth, including morals, which are only
petty attempts to deal with details, and therefore are of no interest to
a soul which is released. The dead are led to the place of the dead. The
Orphic priests described this "intermediate state" with graphic
distinctness, surpassing that of the Eleusinian mysteries. Probably this
was the most popular, although not the most original, part of their
teaching. The doctrine was not a folk notion; it was "holy doctrine"
that there would be in Hades a judgment and a retribution. Then woe to
him who had not been purified in the Orphic orgies! The Orphic sects
also had a doctrine that the living, by the rites, could act upon the
fate of deceased relatives in the other world.[2156] These sects began
in the second half of the sixth century before Christ. We do not know
the course or mode by which they spread. They formed close associations
or conventicles to practice the cult of Dionysus.[2157]
+681. Ascetic features in the philosophic sects.+ The Pythagoreans also
formed, in the sixth century, at Crotona, an association to practice
moderation and simplicity. The use of meat food was limited, and by some
it was renounced entirely.[2158] Our knowledge of this sect is very
slight and vague, although the tradition of its doctrines was certainly
very strong in later times. It is believed that there was included in
its teachings disapproval of prenuptial unchastity by men.[2159] This
would not be considered ascetic by us, but it appeared so to ancient
Greeks. The Cynics were ascetics. They renounced the elegances and
luxuries of life, and their asceticism became more and more the essence
of their sectarianism. Some Greek priests were married, but others were
bound to be chaste for life or while engaged in priestly duties.
Sometimes some foods were forbidden to them, and this taboo might be
extended to all who entered the temple. All must be clean in body and
dress.[2160] In the tragedies we find mention of the ascetic notion of
virginity.[2161] In the _Elektra_ (250-270) the heroine lays great
stress on the fact that her peasant husband has never taken conjugal
rights. Orestes asks whether the husband has taken a vow of chastity, so
that a vow of chastity was not an unknown thing. The notion of virginity
was very foreign to the mores of the Greeks, but it existed amongst
them. It gained ground in the later centuries. At the time of Christ it
is certain that a wave of asceticism was running through the Hellenistic
world.[2162] It may have been due to the sense of decline and loss in
comparison with the earlier times. It seems to bear witness to a feeling
that the world was on a wrong path, in spite of Roman glory and luxury.
If they could not correct the course of things, they could at least
renounce the luxury. That seemed like an effort to stem the tide. More
commonly the sentiment was less defined and less morally vigorous. It
was only world sickness. Cases occurred of individuals who renounced
marriage, or lived in it without conjugal intimacy.[2163] The Stoics,
Cynics, Neopythagoreans, and Neoplatonists all had ascetic elements in
their doctrines. The wandering preachers of these sects were rarely men
of any earnest purpose, and their speeches were empty rhetorical
exercises, but they popularized the doctrines of the sects. Simon
Stylites only continued a pagan custom. There were in front of the
temple at Hierapolis two columns one hundred and eighty feet high. Twice
a year a man climbed one of these and remained on top of it for seven
days to pray and commune with the gods, or in memory of Deukalion and
the flood. He drew up supplies with a rope. People brought him gifts of
money and he prayed for them, swinging a brazen instrument which made a
screaming sound.[2164]
+682. Hebrew asceticism.+ The Jewish tradition was that at Sinai all the
people were ordered to refrain from women for the time, but that for
Moses this injunction was unlimited (Exod. xix. 15). In the rabbinical
period it was established doctrine that any one who desired to receive a
revelation from God must refrain from women.[2165] Other cases in the
Old Testament show that persons who were under a renunciation of this
kind were in a state of grace. The ritual of uncleanness was ascetic
and it enforced ascetic views of sex and marriage.[2166]
+683. Nazarites, Rechabites, Essenes.+ The Nazarites were Hebrew
ascetics by temporary vow (Num. vi.). They did not cut their hair or
drink wine, and never touched a corpse.[2167] The Rechabites were a
Jewish ascetic association of the ninth century B.C. They renounced the
civilized life of the nation at that time and reverted to the
pre-Canaanite life. They adopted wild dress and coarse food, and
renounced wine. They lived in tents and cultivated Bedouin mores. The
Essenes of the last century before Christ were an ascetic community with
puritan and rigoristic tenets and practices. The laws of Antiochus
Epiphanes that unclean animals might be brought to Jerusalem opened a
chance that faithful Jews might eat of such. The attempt to guard one's
self was made easier if a number had meals in common. This may be the
origin of the custom of the Essenes to have common meals.[2168] The
company cultivated holiness by set rules of life, ritual, washings, etc.
Their philosophy was that fate controls all which affects man.[2169]
They performed no sacrifices in the temple, but had rites of their own
which seemed to connect them with the Pythagoreans. They were "the best
of men," and "employed themselves in agriculture." They thought evil of
all women, and educated children whom they adopted. All who joined the
society gave their property to it and all property was held in
common.[2170] They used rites of worship to the sun. Their asceticism
was derived from their doctrine of the soul's preëxistence and its
warfare with the body.[2171] They were stricter than the Pharisees. They
rejected wealth, oaths, sensual enjoyment, and slavery.[2172] They
renounced all occupations which excite greed and injustice, such as inn
keeping, commerce, weapon making.[2173] Sex intercourse was so
restricted that they could not fulfill the primary duties which the law
laid on every man to beget children. Often they were persons who
entered the society after having fulfilled this duty.[2174] They had
extreme rules of Sabbath keeping, food taboo, purification, and extreme
doctrines of renunciation of luxury and pleasure. They either died out
or coalesced with Christians.[2175]
+684. Roman asceticism.+ The primitive Roman mores were very austere,
not ascetic, and the institutions of the family and sex were strictly
controlled by the mores. The Vestal Virgins might be cited as a proof
that virginity was considered a qualification for high religious
functions, so that it seemed meritorious and pure and a nobler estate
than marriage.
+685. Christian asceticism.+ Christianity is ascetic in its attitude
towards wealth, luxury, and pleasure. It inherited from Judaism
hostility to sensuality, which was thought by the Jews to be a mark of
heathenism and an especial concomitant of idolatry. We distinguish
between luxury and pleasure on the one side and sensuality on the other,
and repress the last for rational, not ascetic, reasons.
+686. Three traditions united in Christianity.+ The three streams of
tradition which entered into Christianity brought down ascetic notions
and temper. The antagonism of flesh and spirit is expressed, Galat. v.
16, and the evil of the flesh, Romans vii. 18, 25; Eph. v. 29. Yet
ascetics are denounced, 1 Tim. iv. 3, "forbidding to marry, and
commanding to abstain from meats, which God created to be received with
thanksgiving by them that believe and know the truth." In 1 Tim. iii. 2
and Titus i. 6 it is expressly stated that a priest or bishop is to be
the husband of one wife. In Revelation xiv. 4 a group are described as
"they who were not defiled with women, for they are virgins." The notion
that procreation is "impure" and that renunciation of it is "purity" is
present here. Cf. Levit. xv. 16-18. In 1 Cor. vii the doctrine is that
renunciation of marriage is best; that marriage is a concession to human
frailty; that all sex relation outside of marriage is sin. If there is a
technical definition of sin, virtue, purity, etc., it can only be
satisfied by arbitrary acts which are ascetic in character. The
definitions also produce grades of goodness and merit beyond duty and
right. The "religious" become a technical class, who cultivate holiness
beyond what is required of simple Christians. Saints are heroes of the
same development. In general, the methods of attaining to holiness and
saintliness must be arbitrary and ascetic,--fasting, self-torture,
loathsome acts, excessive ritual, etc.
+687. Asceticism in the early church.+ It has been sufficiently shown
that the Greco-Roman world, at the birth of Christ, was penetrated by
ascetic ideas and streams of ascetic usage. In the postapostolic period
there was a specific class of ecclesiastical ascetics. There were many
different fields of origin for such a class in the different
provinces.[2176] Epictetus (b. 60 A.D.) had a spirit and temper which
have always been recognized as closely Christian. He thought the aim
should not be to endure pain and calamity with fortitude, but to
suppress evil desires and to cultivate discipline. There were
congregations in the earliest days of Christianity which were composed
of persons who wanted to lead a purer life than was common amongst
Christians. They adopted rules, as "counsels of perfection," such as
renunciation of marriage and of eating meat.[2177] The ascetic tendency
got strong sway in the church in the second half of the second century,
but the practices were voluntary, suggested by the religious impulses of
the individual, and the leaders tried to hold the ruling tendency in
reason. They held it to be absurd that self-inflicted pain could please
God.[2178] The tendency, however, could not be arrested. It was in the
age. All the philosophies except Epicureanism, and all the sects in the
mysteries, had encouraged it. The Christians had doctrines which were
not hostile to it. It therefore flourished amongst them. In the second
century there was a deep desire for a moral reformation, and to further
it moral discipline was formulated in rules and made a system. The
individual was taught to endure hardships, to drink water rather than
wine, to sleep on the ground oftener than on a bed. In some cases they
submitted to corporal cruelty, being scourged and loaded with chains.
The converse error here appeared, for they made a display of their
powers of endurance.[2179] The moral gymnastics could be best practiced
in solitary life. Many philosophers urged their disciples to leave home
and to practice elsewhere,--in another town or in loneliness.[2180] At
the end of the third century the ascetic party, in spite of the
withdrawal of the puritans, was very powerful. The ascetic sentiment was
stimulated and was spreading on account of the ideas of neoplatonism,
the increasing confusion in the Christian body, the excitement and
anxiety of a period of social decline, and finally on account of the
need to provide other means of expending the passionate love of God
which had formerly driven Christians to martyrdom. When the church
became a religion recognized by the state there was no more martyrdom. A
similar tendency marked the sects of philosophy at the same time. The
author of the _Letters on Virginity_ ascribed to Clement (about 300
A.D.) is a strong admirer of celibacy. He has heard of shameless
Christian men and women who consort, eat, drink, gossip, slander, and
visit each other, although unmarried persons. The ascetics were forced
to separate themselves entirely from the rest. They wandered, praying
and preaching and casting out devils, having no means. The motives of
asceticism were the apprehension of the end of the world, enthusiasm,
dualistic philosophy, fear of sensuality, and gnostic doctrines. In 300
A.D. the ascetics were corrupt and venal and needed more complete
isolation (monasticism).[2181] In the fourth century an ascetic life,
instead of a form of life for Christians inside the church, came to be
thought of as an independent form of life. It was thought of as a
"philosophy," most closely related to Cynicism. In externals Cynics and
Christian ascetics were alike. The coarse garments and uncut hair gave
them the same appearance.[2182] In the fourth century the ethics of Paul
were abandoned by Christians. The average Christians were average
citizens. They held the current ethical ideas of the society. The
intellectual scaffolding built by current culture was stronger than the
new ideas which were accepted. The mores held sway against the new
influences. In place of the notions of justice and holiness the old
notion of "virtue" prevailed. Instead of the law "Love thy neighbour as
thyself," the old enumeration of virtues constituted ethical reflection.
At the end of the fourth century this transformation was recognized by
the leaders of the church.[2183] The Manichæan sects practiced
asceticism even more zealously than the orthodox. Renunciation of "the
world" was selfish. The period was one of turmoil. The burdens of the
state were excessive. It was an evil that the best men renounced the
duties of the state and civil society. Virginity was praised as
Christlike and taught in opposition to society and the family. Marriage
was not forbidden, but a special mystery attached to it, to explain how
it might be honored, although it was so depreciated. The body of that
soul which desired to be the bride of Christ must be virgin.[2184] If
any one turned to a home and family he must understand that he descended
to something inferior and doubtful. The Roman state had been trying for
three hundred years to stimulate marriage and increase population.
Constantine repealed all the laws against celibacy. Later emperors
liberated ecclesiastics from the "municipal burdens which were eating
out the heart of the empire." All were eager to become clerics, and as
the number of settled priests was limited, they became monks. The wealth
of the church also attracted them.[2185] The situation produced
hypocrites, false ascetics, and vicious clerics. After the middle of the
fourth century the church began to legislate that those who took vows
must keep them. The penalty of death was to be inflicted on any man who
should marry a sacred virgin. Pope Siricius, in 384, described the
shameless license of both sexes in violation of vows.[2186] In part this
was due to another logical product of the conception of purity as
negation, especially of sex. Men and women exposed themselves to
temptation and risk by sensual excitement, holding themselves innocent
if they were not criminal.[2187] These tricks of the human mind upon
itself are familiar now in the history of scores of sects, and in the
phenomena of revivalism. Ritual asceticism is consistent with sensual
indulgence. The sophistry necessary to reconcile the two is easily spun.
+688. Asceticism in Islam.+ Islam, at the beginning, had an ascetic
tendency, which it soon lost. Mohammed and his comrades practiced night
watches with prayer.[2188] Jackson found in the modern Yezidi community
a "sort of ascetic order of women," _fakiriah_, corresponding to fakirs
amongst men.[2189] The dervishes are the technically religious Moslems,
and in the history of Islam there have been frequent temporary
appearances of sects and groups which regarded pain as meritorious.
+689. Virginity.+ Virginity is negative and may be a renunciation. It
then falls in with the ascetic way of thinking, and the notion that
virginity, as renunciation, is meritorious is a prompt deduction.
Christian ecclesiastics made this deduction and pushed it to great
extremes. The renunciation was thought to be more meritorious if
practiced in the face of opportunity and temptation. The ascetics
therefore created opportunity in order to put themselves in the midst of
the war of sense and duty.[2190]
+690. Mediæval asceticism.+ In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the
ascetic temper underwent a revival which was like an intellectual storm.
It was nourished by reading the church fathers of the fourth and fifth
centuries. It entered into mediæval mores. It was in the popular taste,
and the church encouraged and developed it. It was connected with
demonism and fetichism which had taken possession of the Christian
church in the ninth and tenth centuries. Relics were fetiches. The Holy
Sepulcher and the Holy Land were fetiches; that is, they were thought
to have magical power on account of the spirits of the great dead in
them. Transubstantiation was the application of magic and fetich ideas
to the ceremony of the mass. All the mediæval religiosity ran to forms
of which asceticism and magic were the core. Cathedral building was a
popular mania of ascetic religion. Pilgrimages had the same character.
We may now regard it as ascertained fact that asceticism, cruelty to
dissenters, fanaticism, and sex frenzy are so interlaced in the depths
of human nature that they produce joint or interdependent phenomena.
That an ascetic who despises pain, or even thinks it a good, should
torture others is not hard to understand. That the same age should
produce a wild outburst of sex passion and a mania of sex renunciation
is only another case of contradictory products of the same cause of
which human society offers many. That the same age should produce
sensual worldlings and fanatical ecclesiastics is no paradox.
+691. Asceticism in Christian mores.+ The ascetic standards and
doctrines passed into the mores of Christianity and so into the mores of
Christendom, both religious and civil. In the popular notion it was the
taboos which constituted Christianity, and those were the best
Christians who construed the taboos on wealth, luxury, pleasure, and sex
most extremely, and observed them most strictly. Such persons were
supposed to be able to perform miracles. In the Middle Ages the casuists
and theologians seemed never to tire of multiplying distinctions and
antitheses about sex.[2191] In fact their constant preoccupation with it
was the worst departure from the reserve and dignity which are the first
requirements in respect to it. A document of the extremest doctrine is
_Hali Meidenhad_,[2192] of the thirteenth century. The aim of the book
is to persuade women to renounce marriage. Marriage is servitude. God
did not institute it. Adam and Eve introduced it by sin. Our flesh is
our foe. Virginity is heaven on earth. Happy wedlock is rare. Motherhood
is painful. Family life is full of trials and quarrels. Virginity is not
God's command but his counsel. Marriage is only a concession (1 Cor.
vii.). This was the orthodox doctrine of the time. Among the religious
heroes of the age not a few were irresponsible from lack of food, lack
of sleep, and the nervous exaltation which they forced upon themselves
by ascetic practices.[2193]
+692. Renunciation of property. Beggary.+ Those who did not practice
asceticism accepted its standards and applied them. A special case and
one of the most important was the admiration which was rendered in the
thirteenth century to the renunciation of property and the consequent
high merit attributed to beggary for the two following centuries. The
social consequences were so great that this view of poverty and beggary
is perhaps the most important consequence in the history of the mores
which go with the ascetic philosophy of life.
+693. Ascetic standards.+ All who were indifferent or hostile to the
church and religion maintained the ascetic standards for ecclesiastics
in their extremest form. All the literature of the Middle Ages contains
scoffing at priests, monks, and friars. In part, they were scoffed at
because they did not fulfill that measure of asceticism which the
scoffers chose to require, and which the clerics taught and seemed bound
to practice.
+694. The mendicant friars.+ The notion that poverty is meritorious and
a good in itself was widely entertained but unformulated at the
beginning of the thirteenth century. Jacques de Vitry, who was in Italy
in 1216, and who left a journal of his journey,[2194] met with an
association in Lombardy, the Umiliati, who held the doctrines of the
later Franciscans. The ideas which were current at that time about the
primitive church were entirely fantastic. They had no foundation in
fact. They were in fact deductions from ascetic ideals. The church of
the thirteenth century was the opposite in all respects of what the
primitive church was supposed to have been. Francis of Assisi and a few
friends determined (1208) to live by the principles of the primitive
church as they supposed that it had been. It is certain that they were
only one group, which found favorable conditions of growth, but that
there were many such groups at the time. De Vitry was filled with
sadness by what he saw at the papal court. All were busy with secular
affairs, kings and kingdoms, quarrels and lawsuits, so that it was
almost impossible to speak about spiritual matters. He greatly admired
the Franciscans, who were trying to live like the early Christians and
to save souls, and who shamed the prelates, who were "dogs who do not
bark." The strongest contrasts between the gospel ideals and the church
of that time were presented by wealth and the hierarchy. Francis
renounced all property. Poverty was idealized and allegorized. Since he
would not produce or own things, he had to beg or borrow them from
others who were therefore obliged to sin for him. The first corollary
from the admiration of poverty was the glorification of beggary and its
exaltation above productive labor.[2195] There is a rhapsody on poverty
in the _Roman de la Rose_. If it is base and corrupting to admire
wealth, it is insane to admire poverty. It never can be anything more
than a pose or affectation. The count of Chiusi gave to Francis the
mountain La Verna as a place of retirement and meditation. Armed men
were necessary to take possession of this place on account of beasts and
robbers.[2196] Here, then, we have all the crime, selfishness, and
violence of "property." The legendary story of Francis is fabulous. It
is a product of the popular notions of the time. He was said to perform
miracles. Crowds flocked to him. His order spread with great rapidity
and without much effort on his part. Evidently it just met the temper,
longings, and ideals of the time. Its strength was that it suited the
current mores. Unlimited money and property were given to it. Francis
died in 1226 and was canonized in 1228. Dominic (1170-1221) aimed to
found an order of preachers in order to oppose the Albigenses and other
heretics. He wanted to found a learned and scholarly order which should
be able to preach and teach. He made it a mendicant order in order to
preserve it from the corruptions to which the conventual life was
exposed. The two orders of friars became fierce enemies to each other
and fought upon all occasions.[2197] In their theory and doctrines they
exactly satisfied the notions of the time as to what the church ought to
be, and "they restored to the church much of the popular veneration
which had become almost hopelessly alienated from it."[2198] The age
cherished ideals and phantasms on which it dwelt in thought, developing
them. Suffering was esteemed as a good, and self-denial with suffering
made saintliness. Francis and his comrades cherished all these ideals
and had all these ways of thinking. Francis became the ideal man of his
time.[2199]
+695. The Franciscans.+ Other mendicant orders prove the dominant ideas
of the time. These were the Augustinian hermits (1256), the Carmelites
(1245), and the Servites, or Servants of Mary (c. 1275). The mendicants
did not live up to their doctrine for a single generation. In the middle
of the century Bonaventura had to reprove the Franciscans for their
greed of property, their litigation and efforts to grasp legacies, and
for the splendor and luxury of their buildings.[2200] The two great
orders of friars became an available power by virtue of their hold on
the tastes and faiths of the people. They became the militia of the pope
and helped to establish papal absolutism. They "were perfectly adapted
to the world conditions of the time."[2201] The doctrines of poverty
were at war with the character, aims, and ambitions of the church. The
Franciscans, in order to establish the primitive character of their
system, asserted that Christ and his disciples lived by beggary in
absolute renunciation of property. This was a Scriptural and historical
doctrine and question of fact, on which fierce controversy arose. It
divided the order into two schools, the conventuals and the spirituals.
In 1275 the spirituals, who clung to the original ideals and rules of
Francis, were treated as heretics and persecuted. They rated Francis as
another Christ, and the rule as a new revelation. They always were
liable to fall into sympathy with enthusiastic sects which were rated as
heretical.[2202] The Franciscans also, in their origin, were somewhat
independent of hierarchical authority and of established discipline. It
was necessary that the order should be brought into the existing
ecclesiastical system. The popes of the thirteenth century until
Boniface VIII accepted the standards of the age and approved of the
mendicant friars. In 1279, in the bull _Exiit qui seminat_, the
Franciscan rule was ascribed to revelation by the Holy Ghost, and the
renunciation of property was approved. The use of property was right,
but the ownership was wrong.[2203] Boniface was of another school. He
was a practical man who meant to increase the power of the hierarchy.
Absurd as was the notion of non-property, it was at least germane to the
doctrine of Christianity that Christians ought to renounce the pomps and
vanities of wealth and the struggle for power, and to live in frugality,
simplicity, and mutual service. The papal hierarchy was in pursuit of
pomp and luxury and, above all, of power and dominion. Boniface ordered
the spiritual Franciscans to conform to the rule of the conventuals.
Some would not obey and became heretics and martyrs. Their zeal for the
ideas and rule of Francis was so great that they welcomed martyrdom for
their adherence.[2204] The most distinguished of the martyrs of the
spirituals was Bernard Delicieux, who found himself at war with the
Inquisition and the pope, and who, after a trial in which all the arts
of browbeating and torture were exhausted, died a prisoner, in chains,
on bread and water.[2205] The other party also had its martyrs, who were
willing to die for the doctrine that Christ and his apostles did not
live by beggary.[2206] Any doctrine that the apostles lived in poverty,
by begging, was a criticism of the hierarchy as it then was. John XXII,
another non-sentimental pope, declared that the doctrine that Christ and
his apostles lived in negation of property was a heresy. Then Francis of
Assisi and all who had held the same opinions as he became
heretics.[2207] In 1368 the strict Franciscans split off and formed the
order of the Observantines, and in 1487 the Recollects, another order of
strict observers of the rule, was founded in Spain, with the
authorization of Innocent VIII. The stricter orders were always more
enthusiastically devoted to the service of the papacy.[2208]
+696. Whether poverty is a good.+ The history of the mendicant orders is
an almost incomprehensible story of wrongheadedness. That poverty is a
good is an inversion of common sense. That men do not want what they
must have to live is a denial of all philosophy. The mendicants did not
invent these dogmas. They were in the mores, and they made the
mendicants. That the mendicants at once became greedy, avaricious, and
luxurious, emissaries of tyranny and executioners of cruelty, was only
an instance of the extravagances of human nature.
+697. Clerical celibacy.+ If according to Christian standards virginity
was the sole right rule and marriage was only a concession, it might
justly be argued that the clergy ought to live up to the real standard,
not the conventional concession. This was the best argument for
sacerdotal celibacy. It was well understood, and not disputed, that
celibacy was a rule of the church, and not an ordinance of Christ or the
Gospel. It was an ascetic practice which was enjoined and enforced on
the clergy. They never obeyed it. The rule produced sin and vice, and
introduced moral discord and turpitude into the lives of thousands of
the best men of the Middle Ages. In the baser days of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries the current practice was a recognized violation of
professed duty and virtue, under money penalties or penances. Yet the
notion of celibacy for the clergy had been so established by discipline
in the usage of priests and the mores of Christendom that a married
priest was a disgusting and intolerable idea. At the same time usage had
familiarized everybody with the concubinage of priests and prelates, and
all Christendom knew that popes had their bastards living with them in
the Vatican, where they were married and dowered by their fathers as
openly as might be done by princes in their palaces. The falsehood and
hypocrisy caused deep moral corruption, aside from any judgment as to
what constituted the error or its remedy. Pope Pius II was convinced
that there were better reasons for revoking the celibacy of the clergy
than there ever had been for imposing it,[2209] but he was not a man to
put his convictions into effect. The effect on character of violation of
an ascetic rule, acknowledged and professed, was the same as that of the
violation of one of the Ten Commandments.
+698. How Christian asceticism ended.+ By the beginning of the sixteenth
century the ascetic views and tastes were all gone, overwhelmed by the
ideas and tastes of a period of commerce, wealth, productive power,
materialism, and enjoyment. In the new age the pagan joy in living was
revived. Objects of desire were wealth, luxury, beauty, pleasure,--all
of which the ascetics scorned and cursed. The reaction was favorable to
a development of sensuality and materialism; also of art. Modern times
have been made what they are by industry on rational lines of effort,
with faith in the direct relation of effort to result. The aleatory
element still remains, and it is still irrational, but the attitude of
men towards it is changed. All the ground for asceticism is taken away.
We work for what we want with courage, hope, and faith, and we enjoy the
product as a right. If the luck goes against us, we try again. We are
very much disinclined to any increase of pain or of fruitless labor.
There is a great change in the mores of the entire modern society about
the aleatory element. That change accounts for a great deal of the
modern change of feeling about religion.
[2150] Spix and Martius, _Brasil_, 1318.
[2151] Hearn, _Japan_, 165.
[2152] _Marius the Epicurean_, 357.
[2153] Galton, _Hered. Genius_, 239.
[2154] Lea, _Inquisition_, II, 330.
[2155] _Psyche_, II, 101.
[2156] Rohde, _Psyche_, II, 121-130.
[2157] _Ibid._, 104.
[2158] Ueberweg, _Hist. Philos._, I, 45.
[2159] Lecky, _Eur. Morals_, II, 314.
[2160] Stengel, _Griech. Kultusalterthümer_, 35.
[2161] Euripides, _Hippolytus_, 1300; _Trojan Women_, 38, 975.
[2162] Mahaffy, _The Grecian World under Roman Sway_, 180.
[2163] Lecky, _Eur. Morals_, II, 315.
[2164] Lucian, _De Syria Dea_, sec. 28.
[2165] _Jewish Encyc._, V, 226.
[2166] Levit. xv. 16, 18; Deut. xxiii. 11; Josephus, _Cont. Ap._,
II, 24.
[2167] Judges xiii. 4-14; Amos ii. 11.
[2168] Lucius, _Essenismus_, 102.
[2169] Josephus, _Antiq._, XIII, 5, 9.
[2170] Cook, _Fathers of Jesus_, II, 30, 38.
[2171] Hastings, Dict. Bib., _Devel. of Doct. in Apoc. Period_;
Supp. Vol. 292, a.
[2172] Lucius, _Essenismus_, 54, 59, 68.
[2173] _Ibid._, 52.
[2174] _Jewish Encyc._, V, s. v. "Essenes."
[2175] Cook, _Fathers of Jesus_, II, 48; Lucius, _Essenismus_,
131; Graetz, _Gesch. der Juden_, III, 92 ff.
[2176] Harnack, _Pseudoclement. Briefe de Virg._, 3.
[2177] Hatch, _Griechenthum und Christenthum_, 121.
[2178] Lea, _Sacer. Celib._, 29.
[2179] Hatch, _Griechenthum und Christenthum_, 108.
[2180] _Ibid._, 109.
[2181] Harnack, _Pseudo-Clement. Briefe de Virg._, 19, 21, 22.
[2182] Hatch, 122.
[2183] Hatch, 123.
[2184] Harnack, _Dogmengesch._, I, 747.
[2185] _Ibid._, 59.
[2186] _Ibid._, 60.
[2187] Such perversions have been very frequent. See Todd, _Life
of St. Patrick_, 91, for a case; also, Lea, _Inquisition_, III,
109. Sometimes the test was to show that the temptation was
powerless. Lea, _Inquis._, II, 357; _Sacerd. Celib._, 167.
[2188] Wellhausen, _Skizzen und Vorarbeiten_, III, 210.
[2189] _Hist. of Religions_, section of the _Amer. Orient. Soc._,
VII, 22.
[2190] Achelis, _Virgines Subintroductae_. The author thinks that
the relationship was one of Platonic comradeship.
[2191] See Peter Lombard, _Sentent._, IV, 31.
[2192] _Early Eng. Text Soc._, 1866.
[2193] Cf. Lea, _Inquis._, II, 214, about Peter Martyr.
[2194] _Nouveaux Mem. de l'Acad. des Sciences, lettres et beaux
arts de Belgique_, XXIII, 30.
[2195] The ideas of Francis had been promulgated by the
Timotheists in the fifth century. They were then declared
heretical (Lea, _Sacerd. Celib._, 377).
[2196] Carmichael, _In Tuscany_, 224.
[2197] Lea, _Inquis._, I, 302.
[2198] Lea, _Sacerd. Celib._, 377.
[2199] Little, _St. Francis of Assisi_, 138. Carmichael (_In
Tuscany_, 228) is satisfied that Francis received the stigmata.
He says: "No serious person any longer seeks to dispute the
fact." The stigmata were imparted by an angel and consisted in
"long nails of a black, hard, fleshy substance. The round heads
of the nails showed close against the palms, and from out the
backs of the hands came the points of the nails, bent back as if
they had pierced through wood and then been clinched." The wounds
caused pain so great that Francis could not walk. Little does not
reject all the fabulous details in the life of the saint as the
legends have brought it down.
[2200] Lea, _Inquis._, III, 29.
[2201] Michael, _Gesch. des Deutschen Volkes_, II, 78.
[2202] Lea, _Inquis._, III, 33.
[2203] _Ibid._, 30.
[2204] _Ibid._, 51.
[2205] _Ibid._, II, 75, 99.
[2206] _Ibid._, 59.
[2207] Lea, _Inquis._, I, 541.
[2208] _Ibid._, III, 172, 179.
[2209] Burckhardt, _Renaissance in Italien_, 465.
CHAPTER XIX
EDUCATION, HISTORY
The superstition of education.--The loss from education;
"missionary-made men."--Schools make persons all on one pattern;
orthodoxy.--Criticism.--Reactions of the mores and education on
each other.--The limitations of the historian.--Overvaluation
of history.--Success and the favor of God.--Philosophic faiths
and the study of history.--Democracy and history.--The study of
history and the study of the mores.--The most essential element
of education.--The history of the mores is needed.
+Introduction.+ The one thing which justifies popular education for all
children is the immense value of men of genius to the society. We have
no means of discerning and recognizing, in their early childhood, the
ones who have genius. If we could do so it would be a good bargain to
pay great sums for them, and to educate them at public expense. Our
popular education may be justly regarded as a system of selecting them.
The pupils retire from the schools when they think that "they do not
want any more schooling." Of course thousands withdraw for one who keeps
on. It is a very expensive system, and the expense all falls on the
taxpayers. The beneficiaries are left entirely free to spend their lives
wherever they please. If the system is sound and just it must be so by
virtue of some common interest of all the people of the United States in
the social services of men of talent and genius in any part of the
United States.
+699. The superstition of education.+ Popular education and certain
faiths about popular education are in the mores of our time. We regard
illiteracy as an abomination. We ascribe to elementary book learning
power to form character, make good citizens, keep family mores pure,
elevate morals, establish individual character, civilize barbarians,
and cure social vice and disease. We apply schooling as a remedy for
every social phenomenon which we do not like. The information given by
schools and colleges, the attendant drill in manners, the ritual of the
mores practiced in schools, and the mental dexterity produced by school
exercises fit individuals to carry on the struggle for existence better.
A literate man can produce wealth better than an illiterate man. Avenues
are also opened by school work through which influences may be brought
to bear on the reason and conscience which will mold character. Not even
the increased production of wealth, much less the improvement of
character, are assured results. Our faith in the power of book learning
is excessive and unfounded. It is a superstition of the age. The
education which forms character and produces faith in sound principles
of life comes through personal influence and example. It is borne on the
mores. It is taken in from the habits and atmosphere of a school, not
from the school text-books. School work opens an opportunity that a
thing may be, but the probability that it will be depends on the
persons, and it may be _nil_ or contrary to what is desired. High
attainments in school enhance the power obtained, but the ethical value
of it all depends on how it is used. These facts are often misused or
exaggerated in modern educational controversies, but their reality
cannot be denied. Book learning is addressed to the intellect, not to
the feelings, but the feelings are the spring of action.
+700. The loss from education. Missionary-made men.+ Education has
always been recognized as a means of individual success and group
strength. In barbarism the children are educated by their elders,
especially the little boys by the big ones, but the whole mental outfit
possessed by the group is transmitted to the children, and all the mores
pass by this tradition. It is to be noticed, therefore, that in our
modern education the sense of the term has been much narrowed, since we
mean by it book learning or schooling. Teachers are not wanting who
teach manners and mores out of zeal and ambition, and families and
churches can be found which duly supplement the work of schools, but
the institutions follow no set plan of coöperation, and one or another
of them fails in its part. The modern superstition of education contains
a great error. It is forgotten that there is always a loss and offset
from education in its narrow sense. Petrie, speaking from observation
and experience of Egyptian peasants, says: "The harm is that you
manufacture idiots. Some of the peasantry are taught to read and write,
and the result of this burden, which their fathers bore not, is that
they become fools. I cannot say this too plainly: An Egyptian who has
had reading and writing thrust on him is, in every case that I have met
with, half-witted, silly, or incapable of taking care of himself. His
intellect and his health have been undermined by the forcing of
education."[2210] Petrie's doctrine is that each generation of men of
low civilization can be advanced beyond the preceding one only by a very
small percentage. He does not lay stress on the stimulation of vanity
and false pride. If he is right, his doctrine explains the complaints of
"missionary-made men" which we hear from Miss Kingsley and others, and
such social results as are described by Becke.[2211] Amongst ourselves
also the increase of insanity, nervous diseases, crime, and suicide must
be ascribed in part to the constant and more intense brain strain,
especially in youth. Women also, as they participate more in the
competition of life, have to get more education, and they fall under the
diseases also. The cases of child suicide are the most startling product
of our ways of education. These personal and social diseases are a part
of the price we pay for "higher civilization." They are an offset to
education and they go with it. It would be great ignorance of the course
of effort in societal matters not to know that such diseased reactions
must always be expected.
+701. Schools make persons all on one pattern. Orthodoxy.+ School
education, unless it is regulated by the best knowledge and good sense,
will produce men and women who are all of one pattern, as if turned in a
lathe. When priests managed schools it was their intention to reach just
this result. They carried in their heads ideals of the Christian man and
woman, and they wanted to educate all to this model. Public schools in a
democracy may work in the same way. Any institution which runs for years
in the same hands will produce a type. The examination papers show the
pet ideas of the examiners. It must not be forgotten that the scholars
set about the making of folkways for themselves, just as members of a
grown society do. In time they adopt codes, standards, preferred types,
and fashions. They select their own leaders, whom they follow with
enthusiasm. They have their pet heroes and fashion themselves upon the
same. Their traditions become stereotyped and authoritative. The type of
product becomes fixed. It makes some kind of compromise with the set
purposes of the teachers and administrators, and the persons who issue
from the schools become recognizable by the characteristics of the type.
It is said that the graduates of Jesuit colleges on the continent of
Europe are thus recognizable. In England the graduates of Oxford and
Cambridge are easily to be distinguished from other Englishmen. In the
continental schools and barracks, in newspapers, books, etc., what is
developed by education is dynastic sentiment, national sentiment,
soldierly sentiment; still again, under the same and other
opportunities, religious and ecclesiastical sentiments, and by other
influences, also class and rank sentiments.[2212] In a democracy there
is always a tendency towards big results on a pattern. An orthodoxy is
produced in regard to all the great doctrines of life. It consists of
the most worn and commonplace opinions which are current in the masses.
It may be found in newspapers and popular literature. It is intensely
provincial and philistine. It does not extend to those things on which
the masses have not pronounced, and by its freedom and elasticity in
regard to these it often produces erroneous judgments as to its general
character. The popular opinions always contain broad fallacies,
half-truths, and glib generalizations of fifty years before. If a
teacher is to be displaced by a board of trustees because he is a
free-trader, or a gold man, or a silver man, or disapproves of a war in
which the ruling clique has involved the country, or because he thinks
that Hamilton was a great statesman and Jefferson an insignificant one,
or because he says that he has found some proof that alcohol is not
always bad for the system, we might as well go back to the dominion in
education of the theologians. They were strenuous about theology, but
they let other things alone. The boards of trustees are almost always
made up of "practical men," and if their faiths, ideas, and prejudices
are to make the norm of education, the schools will turn out boys and
girls compressed to that pattern. There is no wickedness in any
disinterested and sincere opinion. That is what we all pretend to admit,
but there are very few of us who really act by it. We seem likely to
have orthodox history (especially of our own country), political
science, political economy, and sociology before long.[2213] It will be
defined by school boards who are party politicians. As fast as physics,
chemistry, geology, biology, bookkeeping, and the rest come into
conflict with interests, and put forth results which have a pecuniary
effect (which is sure to happen in the not remote future), then the
popular orthodoxy will be extended to them, and it will be enforced as
"democratic." The reason is because there will be a desire that children
shall be taught just that one thing which is "right" in the view and
interest of those in control, and nothing else. That is exactly the view
which the ecclesiastics formerly took when they had control. Mathematics
is the only discipline which could be taught under that rule. As to
other subjects we do not know the "right answers," speaking universally
and for all time. We only know how things look now on our best study,
and that is all we can teach. In fact, this is the reason why the
orthodox answers of the school boards and trustees are mischievous. They
teach that there are absolute and universal facts of knowledge, whereas
we ought to teach that all our knowledge is subject to unlimited
verification and revision. The men turned out under the former system,
and the latter, will be very different agents in the face of all
questions of philosophy, citizenship, finance, and industry.