CHAPTER XXI.

HISTORIC EVOLUTION AND SOCIAL USES OF THE DRAMATIC ART.—GENIUS AND

RELATIONSHIP OF THE LIBERAL PROFESSIONS.—HOSTILITY OF THE CHURCH AND THE

THEATRE.

In an early chapter of this biography an analysis was given of the

dramatic art considered in its psychological origin and in its personal

uses for those who practise it. This was done that the reader might have

in his mind the data requisite for forming an intelligent judgment on

the life which was to be recorded and criticised in the succeeding

chapters. But in order to appreciate the just moral rank and worth or

the legitimate influences of such a life in its public sphere and

aspects, it is necessary to understand something of the historic

development and the social uses of the dramatic art,—its distinctive

genius in contrast with the other liberal professions, and the natural

effects on those who witness its exhibitions. The subject teems with

matters of unsuspected importance, and its discussion will yield

surprising revelations.

Before attempting to trace the rise of the Theatre and its struggle with

its rivals, we must get an adequate idea of the essential substance of

the art practised in the Theatre. For this purpose it will be necessary

to approach the subject from a point of view different from those

generally taken hitherto.

The practice of the dramatic art rests on the differences of men amidst

their similarities. The whole intercourse of life really consists at

bottom in a complex and subtile game of superiorities and inferiorities,

full of tests and tricks, surprises, pains, and pleasures. Every one who

has not been regenerated from the selfish heritage of history into a

saintly disinterestedness is constantly impelled by a desire far deeper

than his consciousness to wish to see others inferior to himself, to

feel himself superior to others, and to get this relative estimate

accepted in the imaginations of the bystanders. Human experience in

society is a half-open and half-disguised battle for advantage and

precedence, inward and outward, private and public, filled with attacks

and defences, feints and traps, overtures and defiances, every

conceivable sort of coarse or exquisite artifices for winning victories

and inflicting defeats in the occult and endless game of personal

comparisons.

All comparisons imply standards of judgment. There are eight of these

standards,—four primary, and four secondary. The first of the primary

standards of excellence by which we try ourselves and one another is

bodily health, strength, grace, and beauty. The second is moral

character, goodness of disposition, purity and nobility of motives. The

third is genius and talent, brilliant powers of creative or beneficent

action. The fourth is technical acquisitions, artificial learning and

accomplishments, charm of manners, skill in doing attractive or

important things. The first of the secondary standards by which men are

estimated in society is hereditary rank or caste, birth, blood, and

title. The second is official place and power, social position and

influence. The third is reputation and fame. The fourth is wealth. All

these standards, it will be observed, find their ultimate meaning and

justification in the idea of adaptedness for the fulfilment of the ends

of life. Good is the fruition of function. The highest personal beauty

and genius imply the greatest fitness for the fulfilment of function.

Wealth is a material means, fame an ideal means, for the fruition of

life.

But obviously there are distinctions of grade and of authority among

these standards, and he who ranks high when judged by one of them may

rank low according to another. It is the continual subterfuge of self-

love at the inner tribunal to evade the tests of the standards that are

unfavorable to it, and to court comparison by those whose verdicts are

surest to be flattering. On the contrary, in testing other people, the

egotistic and ungenerous person instinctively applies the tests most

likely to insure condemnation. This is the first vice of introspection

and of mutual criticism.

The second evil is setting lower standards above higher ones,

attributing more importance to apparent or conventional claims than to

real and intrinsic merits. In all ignoble circles, among all men and

women of low sensibility or of shallow routine, there is a steady

tendency to estimate self and associates by factitious and hollow

standards of good instead of the inherent and substantial standards.

More deference is paid to dress and title than to form and bearing.

Privileged descent and station are put before genius and worth. Deeds

and deserts go to the wall in favor of shows and professions. Riches are

esteemed above character. What others think of us is deemed of greater

account than what God knows of us. This turning topsy-turvy of the

standards for the judging of men is what fills the world with the

confusion, wickedness, and misery of a rivalry that is as detestable as

it is pernicious and sad.

No two men can be exactly alike. Inequality is the universal law of

existence. Without it there would be an unbroken monotony and stagnation

equivalent to death. It is the play of greater and lesser, fairer and

homelier, wiser and foolisher, higher and lower, better and worse,

richer and poorer, older and younger, that intersperses the spectacle of

being and the drama of experience with the glimpsing bewitchments of

surprise, the ravishing zest of pursuit and success, the everlasting

freshness and variety of desire, change, suspense, risk, and adventure.

The essential moral struggle for superiority, in which all men are

forever engaged whether they know it or not, is the divine method of

enchanting them with life and luring them forward. It would be an

unmixed good, covering all intercourse with the charm of a theatrical

beauty and spicing every day with the relish of a religious game, were

it not for the predominant vices of fraud, envy, and tyranny

surreptitiously introduced into the contest. Did all men regard their

superiors with joyous reverence and aspiration, their equals with co-

operative friendship, and their inferiors with respectful kindness and

help, never of their own will raising the question as to who shall

command or lead and who obey or follow, but leaving these points to be

decided by the laws in the manifest fitness of things, the unlikenesses

and inequalities which now set them at wretched odds would be the very

conditions of their orchestral harmony and the chief elements of their

converging delight. The general genius of the dramatic art, purified and

perfected, tends directly to bring this about, while the special genius

of each of the other liberal professions stands obstructively in the

way. For the spirit of each of the other professional classes segregates

it from general humanity into a privileged order whose members maintain

its prerogatives by means of a necessary _peculium_ for which their

special interest makes them desire that the rest of the world shall

depend exclusively on them. But the dramatic spirit freely enters the

soul and lot of every condition of men for the sympathetic

interpretation and intuitive feeling of their contents. The genuine

temper of this art, separate from the depraved usages of society, would

teach men to honor and copy those above, to love and blend with those

around, and to example and help those beneath. Then the strong and

cunning would no longer take selfish advantage of their power and hold

the masses of mankind in subjection by the triple bond of interest,

fraud, and fear. According to the principles of universal order, life

would everywhere become a mutual partnership of teaching and blessing

from above and learning and following from below, a spontaneous giving

and taking of all good things in justice and love without violence and

without money. Every one rendering his share of service in the co-

operation of the whole, no portion would be victimized by the rest, but

in the perfected equity and good will there would be abundant wealth for

all and plenty of leisure for each.

There are certain select places or focal buildings in which all the

secrets of human nature are revealed and the arts of power grasped. Each

of these has become the centre of a profession which has employed the

knowledge and skill given by its social position to secure certain

advantages to its members and make the rest of mankind pay tribute to

them in return for the benefits they claim to bestow or in

acknowledgment of the authority they claim to possess. These are the

ruling or leading classes of the world, in whose hands the keys of power

are lodged. The advantages of their situation where all the secrets of

experience are uncovered and all the arts of influence developed, their

exemption from the hardships of physical drudgery, their varied training

in mental accomplishments and cumulative inheritance of superiority,

place the rest of mankind in subjection to them. Had they

disinterestedly used their power to enlighten and free other men, to

educate and enrich other men, the world would long since have been

redeemed. They have used it to secure special advantages for themselves,

making others their servants on whose uncompensated blood and sweat they

live. Therefore the strife and crime and poverty and misery of the world

continue.

All forms of experience are laid bare in the palace of the king. Every

variety of character and of fortune is stripped of its disguises there;

every mode of behavior, every rank of motives, exposed in its true

signals. The lynx-eyed and selfish scrutiny which has its seat there

utilizes this knowledge, and the rules and methods in which ages have

generalized it, to endow the imperial profession with the peculiar

attributes and treasures by which they govern. The true function of the

king or other ruler is to represent the whole people with his

superiority of position and endowment, to warn, guide, enlighten, and

bless them, using all his privileges faithfully for their service. But

the reverse of this has been his prevailing vice in all times. He has

used his power for his own selfish luxury and the emoluments of his

favorites, making government less a means of universal welfare and more

a means of exalting the few at the cost of the many. The game of

comparisons, instead of being made a divine play of variety and surprise

in service and love, has been made a cruel engine for the oppression of

the weak by the strong. The individual interest of the governing class

has perverted its universal function into a personal privilege. The

genius of the palace is selfish luxury in irresponsible power.

In the tent of the general the same revelation of the secrets of human

nature is made as in the royal palace, and the skill in assuming

authority and in controlling men thereby acquired is embodied in the

military profession, which is always the right arm of the imperial

profession. The genuine office of the martial profession is to raise the

protecting and executive energy of a nation to its maximum by scientific

precision of movement and unquestioning obedience to command. Its

twofold vice has been the fostering of a love of war or reckless spirit

of conquest, and the making of the officer a martinet and of the soldier

a puppet utterly mindless of right or wrong in their blind obedience to

orders. An army is a machine of destruction wielded by the most

consummate art the world has yet known. When that absolute obedience and

that perfect discipline and that matchless devotion become intelligent

and free, and are directed to beneficent ends, they will redeem the

world. But thus far the genius of the military headquarters is arbitrary

power in automatic drill to avenge and to destroy.

By the sick-bed, in the hospital and the asylum, all the treasures of

memory are yielded up, all the mysteries of passion exposed, all the

operations of the soul unshrouded before the eyes of the physician. In

this knowledge, and in the ability which the accumulated experience of

so many centuries has gained to assuage pain, to heal disease, and to

give alleviating guidance, an immense deposit of power is placed in the

hands of the medical profession. The blessed function of the profession,

in its universal aspect, is to instruct the people in the laws of health

and to rescue them from suffering and danger. Its interest, in its class

aspect, thrives on the ills of other men. The more sickness there is,

the more completely dependent on them it is for remedy, the better for

their interest. The great vices of the craft have been charlatanism and

quackery, the owlish wisdom of the gold-headed cane and the spectacled

nose, and a helpless addictedness to routine and prescription. All the

defects of the profession, however, are fast vanishing, all its virtues

fast increasing, as under the infiltrating inspirations of science it is

shedding its bigotry and pride, subordinating pathology to hygiene,

repudiating its besotted faith in drugging, and freely throwing open to

the whole world the special discoveries and insights it used so

carefully to keep to itself as sacred secrets. This is its disinterested

phase. In its selfish phase its genius is a jealous guarding of its

knowledge and repute as a means of power and gain.

The arts of rule are learned, the mechanism of human nature is unveiled

in all the agencies of influence that work it, perhaps even more fully

in the police-office, the court-house, and the prison, than in either of

the places previously named. Brought before the bar of the judge,

surrounded by the imposing and terrible array of the law with its dread

apparatus of inquisition and punishment, every secret of the human heart

is extorted. The culprit, the hero, the high and the low, the weak and

the strong, all kinds and states of men, there betray their several

characteristics in their demeanor, and uncover the springs of the world

in its deepest interests, passions, and plots. Thus the legal

profession, manipulating the laws, sitting as umpires for the decision

of the complex conflicts of men in the endless collisions of their

universal struggle of hostile interests, consummate masters of every

method and artifice of power, have a place nearest to the seat of

government. Their hands are on the very index and regulator of public

authority. Their omnipresent instinct, ever since the rise of the black-

gowned confraternity, has chiefly inspired and shaped as well as

administered the judicial code of society. Now, their profound knowledge

of the arts of sway, their matchless skill in victory and evasion, their

vast professional prerogative, have been chiefly used not to bless

mankind, but to win offices, honors, and fees from them. The universal

function of the lawyer is justice, the prevention or reconciliation of

disputes, the teaching of men to live in harmonious equity. But his

private individual and class interest is litigation, the putting of the

cause of a client above the public right, the retention of his light

that other men in their darkness may be forced to look to him for

guidance. The genius of the law is the nursing of its own authority by

preserving occult technicalities, blind submission to precedents, and

the pursuit of victory regardless of right or wrong.

But the priestly profession, in the temple of religion, has penetrated

more profoundly into the soul than any of the other ruling castes to

seize the secrets of character and elaborate the arts of sway. Through

the lattice-work of the confessional breathes the dismal murmur of the

sins and miseries of men and sighs the glorious music of their

aspirations. The whole reach of experience in its degradations of vice

and its heights of virtue, from apathy to ecstasy, is a familiar thing

to the contemplation of the priest. Confided in or feared, set apart

from other men that he may study them and manage their faiths, nothing

is hidden from him. Suppressing or concealing his own passions, he

learns to play on those of others and mould them to his will. So

Jesuitism, entrenched in the superiority of its detaching and despotic

drill, holds obedience by that cold eyeball which has read human nature

so deeply and so long, plucking from it the tale of its weaknesses and

thus the secrets of rule. Every mystery of man and his life is revealed

to him who presides in the temple, at the altar, the confessional, and

the grave, and who is called in to pronounce the will of God at every

crisis of experience. His style and tenure of power are more ominous,

pervasive, and fatal than any other, because claiming a sanction

supernatural and absolute. It plants in heaven and hell the endless

lever of its hopes and fears to pry up the primitive instincts of

humanity and wrench apart the natural interests of the world. The

sublime office of the priesthood, in its generous and universal aspect,

is to teach men the truths of morality and religion and to administer

their consolations to human sorrow and doom. But, perverting this benign

office, it seeks to subdue all men to itself by claiming the exclusive

deposit of a supernatural revelation. Then it seeks its class interest

at the cost of the interests of the whole, puts authority in the place

of demonstrated truth, and persecutes dissent as the unpardonable sin.

The virtues of the clerical profession are studiousness, personal

purity, philanthropic works, self-sacrifice, and conscientious piety.

Its vices are the hideous brood of fanaticism, intolerance, cruelty,

love of power, vanity, a remorseless greed for subjecting the real

interests of the present world to the fancied interests of a future one.

The historic animus of priesthoods has been dictatorial superstition and

bigotry, setting their own favorite dogmas above the open truths of the

universe, and either superciliously pitying or ferociously hating all

outside of their own narrow folds.

The next place for the revelation of the contents of human nature in all

the ranges of its experience is the studio of the artist. The open and

impassioned sensibility of the great artist gives him free admission to

the interiors of all whom he sees, and his genius enables him to

translate what is there and record it in his works. All experiences are

registered in the organism, and their signals, however invisible or

mystic to ordinary observers, are obvious and full of meanings to the

insight of genius. Sir Godfrey Kneller declared that the eyebrow of

Addison seemed to say, “You are a much greater fool than you think

yourself to be, but I would die sooner than tell you so!” The magic

attraction of the greatest works of art resides really in their occult

revelation of the inherent ranks of the persons depicted. Their

clearness or foulness, their beauty or deformity, their grace or

awkwardness, their radiant joy or their squalid and obscene

wretchedness, are so many hints of the degrees of good and evil in men

and women,—explicit symbols of their potencies of function, their

harmony or discord of powers. In their forms, proportions, attitudes,

gestures, lights and shades of expression, their respective capacities

for woe or bliss are ranged along the scale of human possibility. Thus,

in the paintings of Rubens the whole history of voluptuousness is made

transparent from the first musical breath of desire to the last lurid

madness of murder. In the sculptures of Phidias the most exquisite

living development into unity of all the organs and faculties of man is

petrified for posterity to behold and be stimulated to the same

achievement. In the statues of Buddha is clearly seen by the initiated

eye the intoxicating sense of godhead in the soul, the infinite dream

and entrancement of nirvana,—the molecular equilibrium of the cells of

the body and the dynamic equilibrium of the atoms of consciousness. This

is the charm and mystery with which art fascinates even its unwitting

beholders. But its great lessons of organic ranks and potencies, of

higher and lower characters and experiences, are not distinctly taught.

They are only suggested for those who have the keys to interpret them.

Thus they often give an idle pleasure or provoke a piquant curiosity,

but yield no moral fruit, no lasting benefit. The function of the artist

is revelation by inspired genius, and through this revelation to exalt

the ideals, purify and expand the sensibilities, and kindle the

aspirations of men while giving them a refined pleasure. His vice is the

luxurious enjoyment of his gifts as a subtile ministration to self-

indulgence. His class interest is not to communicate his gifts, but to

secure admiration and patronage for them. It is questionable whether as

yet art has not on the whole done more to unnerve and mislead than to

consecrate and uplift. Its genius is sympathetic insight catering to

complacence and luxury rather than prompting to edification.

All other artists, however, must yield to the dramatic performer of

genius and experience as to the completeness with which he pierces the

secrecy of human nature and commands its manifestations. The actor gains

his knowledge of men not indirectly by ruling and making use of them,

but directly by intuitive perception and mimetic intelligence and

sympathy entering into all their conditions and experiences, reproducing

in himself their inner states of being and the outer signs of them.

Then, on the stage, he gives systematic exhibitions of the varieties of

character and life for the amusement and the instruction of the public.

The ideal of his art is the exemplification in living action of the

grades of personalities, the contrasts of conduct, the styles of

manners, so set off with appropriate foils and true standards as to

cause the spectators to discriminate the rank and worth of each, be

warned from the unworthy with fear and loathing, and drawn to the

excellent with admiration and love. This is contagious education

disguised in beguiling entertainment. Thus the genius of the drama is

earnest improvement concealed in free play, edification masked in

recreation.

The vice that besets the player is not selfishness, despotism, avarice,

indifference, or the subserving of a class interest opposed to the

general interest. He is characteristically free from such faults. His

great error is using his art for ostentation and vanity merely to win

applause and profit. He is tempted to sacrifice the spirit of

earnestness and teaching for the spirit of sport and pleasure, playing a

part simply for people to enjoy, instead of adding to this lessons for

them to learn. As the church, in order to escape from its barren routine

of preceptive and ceremonial repetitions, needs the dramatic spirit of

reflective sympathy and living action, so the theatre, in order to

escape from its too frequent emptiness and tawdry frivolity, needs the

academic spirit of earnest instruction. When the dramatic spirit whose

home and throne are in the theatre shall add to what it already

possesses moral and religious earnestness, making the scene of its art a

school for training aspirants to perfection, it will be seen to be the

purest and richest spirit in the world. It will teach all to enter into

the soul and fortune of each, and each to feel himself bound up in one

bundle of life and destiny with all,—even as he, the Christ, who was the

divinest creature that ever wore this humanized and tearful mask of

clay, played the role of no individual ego, but impersonated collective

humanity, dramatically identifying himself to the end of time with all

the broken and suffering members of our race, saying, “Inasmuch as ye

have done it unto one of the least of these, ye have done it unto me.”

The universal prevalence of that same moralized and religious dramatic

spirit in all men is all that is needed for the immediate and perfect

redemption of the world. Dogmatic theology, ecclesiastical polity, and

sectarian mechanism do more to delay than to expedite the time.

Thus it is plain that the professions that radiate from the palace, the

tent, the hospital, the tribunal, the temple, the studio, and the

theatre all have vices which largely neutralize their good offices and

prevent the fulfilment of their true mission, namely, the spreading of

the kingdom of heaven over the whole earth in the redemption of men from

ignorance, oppression, strife, and want.

There is another building, the seat of another profession, quite exempt

from the evils which alloy and burden the foregoing. The academy takes

all knowledge, scientifically considered, for its province; and the

teaching profession administer their possession as no _peculium_ of

their own, but as an open and free inheritance for all. They have no

class interest to foster as against the welfare of the whole. They have

no dogma of authority to impose, aside from the inherent authority of

truth and right. They do not wish to rule, only to teach every one self-

rule. The academic spirit would break open the enclosures bristling with

technical secrets, the strongholds of partial power, and dispense

freedom to all instead of despotic sway to the ruler, justice to all

instead of victory for the client, health to all instead of a fee to the

doctor, the grace of God to all instead of a salary for the priest. The

vice of the teaching class is the pedagogic dryness of routine and

verbal iteration. Academic education needs to add to itself everywhere

the dramatic spirit of life, that creative action of free sympathy which

will supplement the preceptive word with the exemplifying deed and

change the prosaic aridity for poetic freshness and bloom. It also needs

the military principle of drill, or organic habits of rhythm, wherever

applicable; but not to displace spontaneous intelligence and choice. It

likewise needs to proclaim the religiousness of scientific truth, that

every truth of morals or things is a demonstrable revelation of the will

of God, and the same for all men of all lands and faiths. Then the

academic profession will in itself reject the excesses and supply the

defects of all the other professions, and be the one guiding class in a

condition of mankind which has thrown off obsolete leading-strings. For,

while the ideal state of mankind will have no despotic or selfish ruler,

soldier, lawyer, doctor, or priest, it will always have a class of

teaching artists and artistic teachers, men of original genius and

inspiration, to refresh, enlighten, and guide their less gifted

brethren. To such a class the final government of the world will be

intrusted, not governing by the force of authority but by the persuasion

of light. Then partisan politics, ruling by human will declared in a

majority of votes, will be transmuted into social science, guiding by

the will of God revealed in demonstration. Those who desire to lift

themselves at the expense of others, and to live without labor by

appropriating the toil of others, will dislike such a conception, and

scout it as visionary. But their spirit is bad and must pass away;

because Christ, or God incarnate in man, is surely one day to reign,

putting every enemy under his feet and being All in all.

This millennial state might soon be ushered in if the ruling

professions, instead of guarding their class privileges and keeping the

rest of the world under them, sought disinterestedly to fulfil their

universal functions, securing order, justice, freedom, health, virtue,

piety, and education to all. But in reality the chief desire which

actuates them and shapes their policy and efforts is the instinctive

desire to avoid hardships and secure luxuries by governing other men and

appropriating the fruits of their labor without any equitable return.

This is seen now concentrated in the universal struggle for money,

because the superstition of money enables its possessor to command the

products of others without producing anything himself. How can this

fatal spell be broken, and that condition of society be inaugurated

wherein all things shall be exchanged for love alone, except labor and

its products, and these be exchanged on the principle of equivalences of

cost, abjuring the tyrannical fraud of profit? It can only be brought

about through an increased spirit of sympathy animating an improved

social science. And this is primarily the office of the dramatic

principle of imaginative identification, which is to make every one feel

for all others as if he were in their place.

Thus it is clear that the genuine moral work of the drama is essentially

the same as that of the gospel,—to redeem men from self-love by sympathy

for their kind. And yet the theatre and the church have stood askance,

and the priests and the players generally been enemies. What is the

origin, what the significance, what the remedy, of this quarrel between

those who should be friends and co-workers? A brief historic sketch and

a little human analysis will answer these questions, perhaps with some

profit as well as light.

The dramatic instinct and faculty are native in man in all times and

conditions. When David was afraid of his life in the house of Achish,

king of Gath, “he played the madman, scrabbling on the posts of the gate

and letting his spittle fall down on his beard.” But a theatre is a

fruit only of a high civilization, and it always reflects that

civilization. In India it seems to have been at first an appanage of the

palace, designed to give amusement to the king and his nobles and

favorites. It presented poetic descriptions of nature, romantic pictures

of life, songs, dances, and satires. In the Hindoo temples also were

sometimes enacted mythological religious and mystical dramas by the

priests and their assistants, less with theatrical machinery than in

words and movements, representing avatars of the gods, notably the

avatars of Vishnu as Rama and Krishna, supernatural adventures,

transmigrations, and scenes in other worlds. In China and Japan the

drama was in ancient times, as it still is, largely confined to the

illustration of history, presenting in long-drawn performances minute

pictures of legendary or historic personages, events, costumes, manners,

and customs. But it was in Egypt, where the priesthood was so distinct a

caste, so powerful an order, possessed of so much secret knowledge and

mechanism, that the doctrines and ritual of religion itself were first

wrought into a drama of the most sensational and appalling kind. In the

depths of the temple, with pomp of numbers and dresses, with music,

gorgeous and terrible scenery, artificial thunders and lightnings,

heavens and hells were unveiled, the dead shown in their immortal state,

celestial spirits and demons and deities were revealed, and such lessons

were enforced as suited the purposes of the managers of the spectacle.

It was a tool in the hands of the priests to play on the fears and hopes

of the people, who were taught to regard what they saw not as anything

artificial but as a vision of the supernatural. This was the drama of

the cryptic church, the theatre of the priestly conclave.

In Greece, as in Egypt,—possibly derived thence,—the earliest theatre

and drama were religious and secret. In the Bacchic and Eleusinian and

other mysteries, the incarnation, penance, death, and resurrection of

some god were represented, and in connection with the spectacle various

religious and philosophical doctrines were taught in symbolic shows.

Every art of influencing the imagination and the senses was here

employed,—the imposing forms and gestures of the hierophant and his

helpers impersonating the demiurgus and his train,—light and darkness,

colors, strange noises, music, incantations, rhythmic processions,

enchanting and maddening dances. But, as there was in Greece no distinct

priesthood separate from the rulers and leaders of the state, the

intense interest and power of this mode of impression could not remain

sequestered from the people and confined to a few sacred legends. The

great freedom and restless intelligence and critical personal emulation

of the Greeks soon brought forth from its seclusion this fascinating and

peerless method of teaching, planted it on an open stage, applied it to

sacred and political subjects, to character and experience, and gave the

world the first public theatre of the people. Still retaining in its

best examples its original religious dignity and solemnity, it added

many other qualities, developed comedy alongside of tragedy, and in its

combination of ideal and satirical types and manners rendered the stage

a mirror for the mimic reflection of the real scenes of human life. Thus

it escaped from privacy and priestly management into publicity under the

direction of a literary and political class. It was wielded for the

threefold purpose of moral and religious impression, of social or party

influence, and of displaying various styles of character and behavior

for popular amusement and edification.

In Rome the drama was modified and varied in some particulars from its

Greek model, but no new feature was added. It nearly lost its religious

quality, became more exclusively social and sensational, extended its

range only to profane and degrade it into the barbarity of the circus

and the arena. The Greek poet dealing with the simulated woes of the

soul was displaced by the Roman gladiator dealing in the real agonies of

the body, and the supernal beauty of classic tragedy expired in the

applauded horrors of butchery.

As the drama and the theatre in the Oriental and in the Classic world

had a priestly and religious origin and character, so was it with their

revival and first development in Christendom. The early Christian Church

regarded the games, spectacles, and plays of the moribund civilization

amidst which it arose in regenerating energy, with intense abomination,

as intimately associated with and characteristic of the idolatrous pagan

faith, the persecuting pagan power, and the corrupt pagan morals,

against whose insidious influence and threatening array the new type of

belief and life had to maintain itself. Tertullian and other

distinguished Christian fathers fulminated against the actors and their

associates excommunication in this world and damnation in the next. But

after a while, as the young religion got established, spread among

millions of adherents, and had itself a vast popular sway to uphold and

extend, the love of power and the spirit of politic conformity entered

into it. Seeing what a strong attraction for the public was inherent in

the spectacular drama, with its costume, scenery, dialogue, and action,

and what a power it possessed for insinuating persuasion and

instruction, the church began to adopt its methods, modified to suit the

new ideas and situation. First the bait of amusement, sport, and

burlesque was thrown out to draw in and please the rabble by licensing

to be held in the church the Feast of Asses, the Feast of Fools, and

other like riotous and farcical mummeries borrowed with certain

alterations from the pagan Saturnalia. Then, to add a serious element of

edification, the priests dramatically constructed and enacted in

Miracle-Plays, Mysteries, and Moralities the chief events in Scriptural

history, the outlines of dogmatic theology, the lessons of practical

duty, and the claims of ecclesiastical authority, seeking thus to draw

the crowd and teach and drill them to obedience. The virtues and vices

of men, temptation, death, judgment, were allegorized, personified, and

brought on the stage to impress the rude audience. The Creation, the

Flood, the Crucifixion, the Day of Judgment, were represented. God,

Christ, the Virgin, angels, the devil and his imps, were shown. John

Rastale, brother-in-law of Sir Thomas More, composed a Merry Interlude

to serve as a vehicle of science and philosophy, explaining the four

elements and describing various strange lands, especially the recently

discovered America. The characters were Nature, Humanity, Studious

Desire, Sensual Appetite, a Taverner, Experience, Ignorance, and a

Messenger who spoke the prologue. These plays, simple, crude, fantastic,

grotesque, as they were, suited the tastes of the time, administered fun

and terror to the spectators, who alternately laughed and shuddered

while the meaning of the creed and the hold of its power sank deeper

into their souls. There was a mixture in it of good and evil, recreation

and fear, truth and superstition, fitted to the age and furnishing a

transition to something better.

“When friars, monks, and priests of former days

Apocrypha and Scripture turned to plays,

The Festivals of Fools and Asses kept,

Obeyed boy-bishops and to crosses crept,

They made the mumming Church the people’s rod,

And held the grinning bauble for a God.”

But quite aside from all these dramatic excrescences of the church,

these artifices for catering to and influencing the public, there has

been always imbedded in the very substance of Christianity, ever since

the great ecclesiastical system of dogmatic theology was evolved, a

profound and awful tragedy, the incomparable Drama of Redemption, whose

subject is the birth, life, teachings, sufferings, death, and

resurrection of Christ, whose action sweeps from the creation of the

world to the day of doom, whose characters are the whole human race, God

and his angels, Satan and his demons, and whose explicating close opens

the perfect bliss of heaven for the elect and seals the hopeless agony

of hell for the damned. This is the unrivalled ecclesiastical drama

whose meaning the Protestant Church makes implicit in its creed but the

Catholic Church makes explicit not only in the colossal pathos and

overpowering _miserere_ of Passion Week, but also in every celebration

of the mass, at whose infinite dénouement of a dying God the whole

universe might well stand aghast.

In the course of time the companies of actors who, in connection with

the priests or under their permission and oversight, had played in the

Mysteries and Moralities, gradually detached themselves from

ecclesiastical localities and management, and, with licenses obtained

from sacred and secular authority, set up on their own account, strolled

from place to place, giving entertainments in public squares, at fairs,

in the court-yards of inns, in the mansions of nobles, and in the

palaces of royalty. Then kings and great dukes came to have their own

select companies of players, who wore their livery, obeyed their orders,

and ministered to their amusement and ostentation. Herein the drama was

degraded from its proper dignity to be a vassal of vanity and luxury. In

a masque performed at the marriage of an Italian duke in the sixteenth

century, Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, Diana, Venus, and Mars appeared bringing

in dishes of dainties and waiting on the guests. The immortal gods

represented as servants to honor and ornament a human festival!

At length the dramatic profession, forsaking courts and inns, secured a

separate home of its own, and became a guild by itself, independently

established in the distinct theatre and appealing directly to the

general public for support. In the secret theatre of the priests the

substance of the drama, based on such legends as those of the Hindoo

Krishna, the Egyptian Osiris, and the Greek Dionysus, was fiction

exhibited as fact or poetry disguised as revelation. In the open theatre

of the state the substance of the drama, in such examples as the

Prometheus of Æschylus, was mythology, moral philosophy, or poetry

represented as history. In the plays foisted on the mediæval Christian

church the dramatic substance was tradition, ceremonial, and dogma

taught as religion. But now, with the rise of the educated histrionic

profession, all this passed away, and in the freed theatre of the people

the substance of the drama became coincident with the realities of human

life, a living reflex of the experience of society. In Portugal and

Spain, Lope de Vega and Calderon developed the highest flower and finish

of the Mysteries and Miracle-Plays in their transition from the

ecclesiastical to the social type of the drama, while in England,

France, Italy, and Germany the stage became a rounded mirror of the

world, reflecting human nature and conduct in their actual form, color,

and motion. Then the theatrical art was rapidly developed in all its

varieties,—the drama of character and fate, or tragedy; the drama of

plot and intrigue, or romance; and the drama of manners, or comedy and

farce. Then the theatre instinctively assumed for its whole business

what its comprehensive function now is and must ever remain, yet what it

has never grasped and wielded with distinct consciousness, but only

blindly groped after and fumbled about,—namely, the exhibition of the

entire range of the types of human character and behavior so set off

with the contrasts of their foils and in the light of their standards as

to make the spectators feel what is admirable and lovely and what is

contemptible and odious, as the operation of the laws of destiny is made

visible before them. But all who penetrate beneath mere appearances must

perceive that just in the degree in which the theatre does this work it

is trenching on the immediate province of the church, and the players

fulfilling a function identical in moral substance with that of the

priests.

The church aims directly to teach and to impress, to persuade and to

command. The theatre aims directly to entertain, indirectly to teach,

persuade, and impress. It often accomplishes the last three aims so much

the better because of the surrendered, genial, and pleased condition of

soul induced by the success of the first one. Another advantage the

theatre has had over the church, in attempting to educate or exert

influence, is that it does it without the perfunctory air or the

dogmatic animus or repulsive severity of those who claim the tasks of

moral guidance and authority as their supernatural professional office.

The teachings of the theatre have also a freshness and attraction in

their inexhaustible range of natural variety which are wanting to the

monotonous verbal and ritualistic routine of the set themes and

unchanging forms in the ecclesiastical scheme of Sunday drill. And then,

finally, all natural competition of the dry, bleak pulpit with the stage

becomes hopeless when the priest sees the intense sensational pleasure

and impression secured for the lessons of the player by the convergent

action of the fourteen-fold charm of the theatre,—namely, the charm of a

happy and sympathetic crowd; the charm of ornate architectural

spaciousness and brilliancy; the charm of artistic views of natural

scenery; the charm of music; the charm of light and shade and color in

costumes and jewelry and on figures and landscapes now illuminated and

now darkened; the charm of rhythmic motion in marches and processions

and dances; the charm of poetry; the charm of eloquence in word and tone

and look and gesture; the charm of receiving beautiful lessons

exquisitely taught; the charm of following an intricate and thickening

plot to its satisfactory explication; the charm of beholding in varied

exercise human forms which are trained models of strength, beauty, and

grace; the charm of seeing the varieties of human characters act and

react on one another; the charm of sympathy with the fortunes and

feelings of others under exciting conditions rising to a climax; the

charm of a temporary release from the grinding mill of business and

habit to disport the faculties of the soul freely in an ideal world.

Is it not obvious that such a power as this should be utilized by the

most cultivated minds in the community for the highest ends?

When in the independent theatre such a power as this arose, no longer

asking favors or paying tribute, bidding with such a fearful

preponderance of fascinations for that docile attention of the populace

whereof the clergy had previously held a monopoly, it was no wonder that

the church looked on its rival with deadly jealousy. And there was good

ground for this jealousy separate from any personal interests or

animosities. For _the respective ideals of life held up by the priest

and the player_ are diametrically opposed to each other. This is the

real ultimate basis of the chronic hostility of the church and the

theatre. The deepest genius of the one contradicts that of the other.

The ecclesiastical ideal of life is abnegation, ascetic self-repression

and denial; while the dramatic ideal of life is fulfilment, harmonic

exaltation and completeness of being and function. Which of these ideals

is the more just and adequate? If God made us, it would appear that the

fulfilment of all the normal offices of our nature in their co-ordinated

plenitude of power is his will. It is only on the theory that the Devil

made us in opposition to the wisdom and wish of God, that intrinsic and

sheer denial can be our duty. Lower abnegation as a means for higher

fruition, partial denial for the sake of total fulfilment, are clear and

rational obligations. But the idea that ascetic self-sacrifice as an end

pure and simple in itself is a virtue or a means of salvation is a

morbid superstition with which the church has always been diseased, but

from which the theatre has always been free. Accordingly, the two

institutions in their very genius, as interpreted from the narrow

professional point of view, are hostile. The vices of the church have

been sour asceticism, fanatical ferocity, sentimental melancholy, dismal

gloom, narrow mechanical formalism and cant, and a deep hypocrisy

resulting from the reaction of excessive public strictness into secret

indulgence. The vices of the theatre, on the other hand, have been

frivolity, reckless gayety, conviviality, and voluptuousness. But these

vices have been envisaged with the virtues of quick sympathy, liberal

sentiment, an ingenuous spirit of enjoyment, open docility, universal

tolerance and kindliness.

Purified from its accidental corruptions and redeemed from its shallow

carelessness, the theatre would have greater power to teach and mould

than the church. Aside from historic authority and social prestige, its

intrinsic impressiveness is greater. The deed must go for more than the

word. The dogma must yield to the life. And while in the pulpit the

dogmatic word is preached in its hortatory dryness, on the stage the

living deed is shown in its contagious persuasion or its electric

warning. Character is much more plastic to manners than to opinions.

Manners descend from the top of society; opinions ascend from the

bottom. This is because opinions indirectly govern the world while

manners directly govern it. And the ruling class desire to maintain

things as they are, that they may keep their prerogatives. Therefore

they are opposed to new doctrines. But the ground masses of the people,

who are ruled, desire to change the _status quo_ for their own

betterment. Now the church, representing the vested interests of

traditional authority and the present condition of things, has become a

school of opinions, not for the free testing and teaching of the True,

but for the drill of the Established; while the theatre, in its genuine

ideal, is what the church ought to be,—a school of manners, or

manufactory of character.

Another superiority of the genius of the drama to the genius of theology

is the freedom and largeness of the application of its method. The moral

principle of the dramatic art is _disinterested sympathy animating

plastic intelligence for the interpretation and free circulation of

souls and lives_. It is the redemptive or enriching supplementation of

the individual with society. For in order to put on a superior we must

first put off self. And there is nothing nobler in the attributes of man

than his ability to subdue the tyranny of old egotistic custom with new

perception and impulse, and thus start on a fresh moral career endlessly

varied and progressive. The theatre gives this principle a natural and

universal application through the whole moral range of human life. The

ecclesiastical dogmatist restricts it to a single supernatural

application to the disciple of Christ, and would monopolize its

influence to that one channel. Notoriously every bigot would drill the

whole world in his own fixed mould, to his own set pattern, stiff,

harsh, ascetic, exclusive. But the cosmopolite would see exemplified in

mankind the same generous liberty and variety which prevail in nature.

He would, instead of directing attention only to the sectarian type of

saint, hold up all sorts of worthy ideals that each may be admired and

copied according to its fitness and beauty.

The church paints the world as a sad and fearful place of probation,

where redemption is to be fought for while the violent and speedy end of

the entire scene is implored. The theatre regards it as a gift of beauty

and joy to be graciously perfected and perpetuated. The ideal of the

priest and the ideal of the actor contrast as Dominic and Pericles, or

as Simeon Stylites and Haroun-al-Raschid. All the words denoting the

church and its party—ecclesia, église, kirche, congregation—signify a

portion selected or elected and called aside by themselves for special

salvation, apart from the great whole who are to be left to the general

doom. But the word theatre in its etymology implies that the world of

life is something worthy of contemplation, beautiful to be gazed at and

enjoyed.

The priest naturally disliked the player because he was more attractive

to the public than himself. He also disliked him because disapproving

his art. The very object of the drama is by its spectacle of action to

rouse the faculties and excite the feelings of the assembly who regard

it. But the priest would not have the passions vivified; he would have

them mortified. The contemplation of the dread passion and sacrifice of

Christ, the fear of sin and of death and judgment, should exclude or

suppress all other passions. On the contrary, the dramatist holds to the

great moral canon of all art, that perfected life is the continuous end

of life, and that the setting of intelligence and emotion into ideal

play, a spiritual gymnastic of the passions in mental space disentangled

from their muscular connections, purifies and frees them.

The priest not only holds that the dramatic ideal of the natural

fulfilment of the offices of being is opposed to the religious ideal of

grace, is profane, and tends directly to ruin; he likewise, from all the

prejudices of his own rigidity of mould and bigoted routine, believes

that the facility and continual practice of the actor in passing from

assumption to assumption and from mood to mood must be fatal to moral

consistency, must loosen the fibre of character, and produce

dissoluteness of soul not less than of life. This is mostly a false

prejudice. Those of the greatest dramatic mobility of genius and

versatile spiritual physiognomy, like Cervantes, Molière, Goethe,

Schiller, Dickens, Voltaire, and the very greatest actors and actresses,

like Talma, Garrick, Rachel, Siddons, had the most firm and coherent

individuality of their own. Their penetrations and impersonations of

others reacted not to weaken and scatter but to define and gird their

own personal types of being and behavior. The dramatic type of character

is richer and freer than the priestly, but not less distinctly

maintained.

Another circumstance stirring a keen resentment in the church against

the theatre is that it has often been attacked and satirized by it. When

the divines, who had long enjoyed a monopoly of the luxurious privilege

of being the censors of morals, the critics of other men, found

themselves unceremoniously hauled over the coals by the actors, their

vices exposed to the cautery of a merciless ridicule, their personal

peculiarities caricatured, it was but human nature that they should be

angry and try to put down the new censorship which with its secular

vigor and universal principles confronted the ecclesiastical standard.

The legal, medical, and clerical professions have often had to run the

gauntlet of a scorching criticism on the stage. Herein the drama has

been a power of wholesome purification; but it could not hope to escape

the penalty of the wrath of those it exposed with its light and

laughter. It has done much to make cant and hypocrisy odious and to

vindicate true morality and devotion by unmasking false. Louis XIV. said

to Condé, “Why do the saints who are scandalized at Tartuffe make no

complaint of Scaramouche?” Condé replied, “Because the author of

Scaramouche ridicules religion, for which these gentry care nothing; but

Molière ridicules themselves, and this they cannot endure.” The censure

and satire on the stage, concealed in the quips of fools or launched

from the maxims of the noble, have often had marked effect. Jesters like

Heywood and Tarleton, who were caressed by kings and statesmen, under

their masks of simplicity and merriment have shot many a brave bolt at

privileged pretences and wrongs and pompous imposition. The power of

satire is often most piercing and most fruitful. The all-wise Shakspeare

makes his melancholy Jaques say,—

“Invest me in my motley: give me leave

To speak my mind, and I will through and through

Cleanse the foul body of the infected world,

If they will patiently receive my medicine.”

Furthermore, the priest often has an antipathy for the player because in

spite of his arrogated spiritual superiority feeling himself personally

inferior to him. The preacher, rigid, hide-bound, of a dogmatic and

formal cast, cannot take off the mobile, hundred-featured actor, who, on

the contrary, can easily include and transcend him, caricature him, and

make him appear in the most ridiculous or the most disagreeable light.

“If comprehension best can power express,

And that’s still greater which includes the less,

No rank’s high claim can make the player’s small,

Since acting each he comprehends them all.”

Molière can show up Tartuffe, Tartuffe cannot show up Molière. Therefore

Tartuffe fears and hates Molière, excommunicates him, denies his body

consecrated burial, and, with a sharp relish, consigns his soul to the

brimstone gulf. The prevailing temper of the clerical guild towards the

histrionic guild, from the first till now, has been uncharitable and

unjust, intellectually unappreciative and morally repulsive. This is

shown all the way from the frenzied De Spectaculis of Tertullian and the

vituperative Histrio-Mastix of Prynne to the sweeping denunciation of

the drama by Henry Ward Beecher, who, never having seen a play, condemns

it from inherited prejudice, although himself every Sunday carrying a

whole theatre into his pulpit in his own person. An English clergyman in

1792 uttered these words in a sermon on the drama: “No player or any of

his children ought to be entitled to Christian burial or even to lie in

a church-yard. Not one of them can be saved. And those who enter a play-

house are equally certain with the players of eternal damnation. No

player can be an honest man.” Richard Robinson, who played Wittipol in

“The Devil is an Ass” so as to win warm praise from Ben Jonson, was, at

the siege of Bassinge-House, shot through the head after he had laid

down his arms. A puritan named Harrison shot him, crying, “Cursed be he

that doeth the work of the Lord deceitfully!” The body of the favorite

Parisian actor Philippe in 1824 was refused religious rites by the

priests, and his friends were so incensed that the military had to be

called out to quell the riot. A kindred disturbance was narrowly escaped

at the death of Talma. When the wife of Nokes, a dancing-master, had

rescued Edmund Kean and his wife and children from actual starvation and

lent them a room, the landlord, a Christian clergyman named Flower, said

that “no theatrical people should have the room.” And it is matter of

fresh remembrance how the same spirit of bigotry was manifested by a

Boston bishop in refusing confirmation to the universally respected and

beloved Thomas Comer because he led the orchestra in a theatre, and by a

New York pastor who declined to read the funeral-service over the

estimable George Holland because he had been an actor.

It must be affirmed that the chief animus of the clerical profession has

been the desire to be obeyed, and that this is less Christian and less

amiable than the ruling spirit of the dramatic profession, which is the

desire to be loved. But the real spirit which ought to reign supreme in

every one is neither the desire to be obeyed nor the desire to be loved,

but the desire to be harmonized with the principles of universal order,

giving and taking accordingly without egotistic exactions of any kind

whether dictatorial or sympathetic. And this result can only be attained

by means of the dramatic art of mutual sympathetic interpretation

universally applied under the guidance of moral and religious

principles.

The church of Christ, in opposition to the example of its divine

Founder, has been made an exclusive enclosure for a privileged class of

believers. In it their prejudices are cherished and their ascetic ideal

glorified and urged on all. The Saviour himself was a miracle of

tolerance and inclusiveness, mingling freely with the common people, not

spurning the publican, the sinner, or the harlot, but regarding all

ranks in the great brotherhood of humanity with a sweet and

inexhaustible kindness. There was one exception alone. Towards the

bigot, the pharisee, the hypocrite, the tyrant, his scorn and

indignation burned. But all other forms of man moved only his impartial

love or his healing compassion. This was the divinely democratic genius

of Christ, but has not been the genius of the priesthood who with

arrogance and persecution have claimed to represent him. The theatre has

been far more expansive in the range of its sympathies than the church.

The highest dramatic genius that has ever appeared in the world,

Shakspeare, shows in his works a serene charity, a boundless toleration,

a genial appreciation of the widest extremes, kindred to that of God in

nature and grace. His loving imagination, like the all-holding sky,

embraces Trinculo, Bardolph, Poins, Falstaff, and Malvolio, as well as

Bassanio, Prospero, Hamlet, Cæsar, and Lear; Audrey and Quickly, as well

as Portia and Cordelia.

The first glory of the theatre is its freedom from sectarianism; and its

first use is to radiate abroad this generous spirit of universality, not

bigotedly limiting attention to any one province of life or any single

ideal, but revealing the whole world of man in its heights and breadths

and depths, exhibiting in turn every variety of ideal and doing justice

to them all. “The drama,” Macklin said, “should be a perfect

reproduction of general nature as it passes through human life in every

character, age, rank, and station.” Taught this by genius, experience,

and learning, it teaches the common observer how wondrously large and

rich is the world of mankind. Emperors and clowns pass, saints and

villains jostle, heroes and murderers meet, the divine lady and the foul

virago appear and vanish,—and all the meanings and values of their

traits and fortunes are laid bare to those who see and can understand.

There is indeed no other revelation of the complex contents and

destinies of humanity in this world so competent as that afforded in

dramatic literature and the theatre. For here all is concentrated,

heightened, set off, and revealed by aid of the most exquisite

contrivances of art of every sort.

One of the most penetrative and wonderful but least generally

appreciated of these contrivances is the explication of the good and

evil or beauty and ugliness of souls and deeds, the moral worth and

significance of dispositions and situations, by means of music.

Rubinstein has depicted in his symphony of Ivan the Terrible the

character of that frightful monster of the Russian throne. In this

musical character-picture he has painted his hero in the blackest

colors, revealing his hideous traits and moods by violent and spasmodic

tones repulsively combined. But Mozart is the most dramatic of the

composers,—the very Shakspeare of the musicians. The personages of his

operas are distinctive creations, true to life. They appear to think,

feel, and act in tones and combinations of tones. Each of the musical

characters keeps his individuality, however the passions and scenes and

events change. The features and outlines of the characters are defined

or determined by the style, the phrases, the time, rhythm, range,

inflections, and accompaniment. In place of this, Wagner marks his chief

personages by the mannerism of repeating the same phrase with the same

instruments whenever one of them reappears. In the Tannhäuser, as often

as Venus enters the high chromatic violin tremolo and rhythmical whisper

of the wind instruments are repeated. The artifice is profound, and its

effect mysteriously impressive. The meaning of the mystery lies in the

facts that the sounds of the music correspond with vibrations in our

nerves, and that every quality of passion has its peculiar forms and

rates of vibration. The ratios in the physical sound are parallel with

other ratios in the spiritual consciousness. And so Giovanni and

Leporello, Elvira and Anna, are distinguished. And so the Benediction of

the Poignards and the Mass for the Dead are contrasted.

Characters are interpreted on the stage by means of their visible

motions also. For the upper classes, the most dignified personages in

the stately tragedy, there is a solemn pomp of bearing, and the

employment of marches and processions. Everything partakes more of

slowness and formality. The most heavenly human characters, or angelic

visitants from another world, are indicated by floating contours and

melodious lines of motion. Perfected equilibrium in the body is the sign

of perfected harmony in the soul. Devils or demoniac men are suggested

by dances full of excessive energy, hideous and sudden contortions,

convulsive jumps and climaxes.

The central characteristic of the genuine melodrama, now nearly or quite

obsolete, was its combination of musical tone and muscular movement as a

method of dramatic revelation and impression. Its theme and scene lay in

the middle or lower class and in a limited sphere. Thus, while the

assassination of a monarch suggested a tragedy, a village murder would

form the subject of a melodrama. But all the gestures and pantomime of

the performers were regulated or accompanied by instrumental music

played forte or fortissimo, piano or pianissimo, as the situation

required. The villain was marked by an orchestral discord or crash,

while lovers billed and cooed to the mellifluous breathings of the

German flute. Villagers always came over a bridge at the rise of the

curtain to lively music. The heroine entered to eight bars of plaintive

melody. Four harsh and strongly accented bars heralded the approach of

the villain. The characters struggled to hurried music, recognized one

another and were surprised to chords, and crept about in caves and dark

apartments to mysterious pizzicato strains. All this correspondence of

sound, color, and motion works on the souls of the audience in the

profoundest manner, obscurely suggestive of innumerable things beyond

the reach of any clear memory and below the depths of any distinct

apprehension. It stirs up that automatic region of our nature compacted

of prehistoric experiences.

Few persons have any idea how closely the theatre even in its romantic

extravaganzas and fairy spectacles reflects the truths of human life. It

merely intensifies the effect and produces a magical impression by

expanding and shrinking the measures of space and time. But all its

seeming miracles are in the outer world slowly brought about in prosaic

reality. The suddenness of the changes in the mimic scenes ought to open

our eyes to the equal marvellousness of them in the gradual substance of

history. Harlequin in his spangled vestment, with his sword of

enchantment, pursuing the lovely Columbine, and always outwitting and

baffling the clumsy attempts of the Clown and Pantaloon to circumvent

him, is the type of how the aristocracy of genius has always snatched

the sweet prizes of the world from blundering plebeianism amidst the

astonishment, laughter, and rage of the bewildered bystanders, who so

imperfectly comprehend the game. The relations of coexistence and

sequence, the working of laws of cause and effect that preside over

events in the actual world, are not altered in the theatre. It is only

their measures or rates of action that are trifled with so to the

amazement of the senses. Appreciating this, it is obvious that no

transformation scenes on the stage can possibly equal the real ones in

life itself. Mohammed, the poor factor of Kadijah, receives an

inspiration, preaches a new faith, is hunted by his foes, conquers

nation after nation, till a quarter of the earth exults under his

crescent flag and hails him infallible prophet of Allah. Columbus

conceives a thought, his frail pinnaces pierce their perilous way over

the ocean, and a new world is discovered. Louis Napoleon is taken from

teaching French for a livelihood in New York to be throned in the palace

of the Tuileries and to inaugurate the _Exposition Universelle_

surrounded by the leading monarchs of the earth. The young Rachel,

haggard and ill clad, begged an influential person to obtain leave for

her to appear on the stage of the Théâtre Français. He told her to get a

basket and sell flowers. When she did appear, and heaps of bouquets were

thrown at her feet, after the curtain fell she flung them all into a

basket, slung it from her shoulders, and, kneeling to the man who had

advised her to go and sell flowers, asked him, half in smiles and half

in tears, if he would not buy a nosegay. Nothing that befalls the

glittering Harlequin or Columbine amidst the swift enchantments of the

theatre is fuller of astounding contrasts than these realities, if our

thought but escapes the tyranny of space and time.

An artifice of vast power by which the theatre intensifies its

revelations of character and experience, conduct and destiny, so as to

make them more effective and apparently more significant than the

original realities themselves are in actual life, is by increasing the

range and vividness of the standards and foils by which they are judged,

carrying them lower and raising them higher and making their contrasts

sharper than they are seen elsewhere. The fool used to have the head of

his stick or mock sceptre painted with human features, and talk and play

with it as if it were an intelligent comrade. This was his bauble, in

allusion to which Shakspeare says, “The fool holds his bauble for a

god.” Scoggan, the famous mummer, used to dress up his fists and make

them act for the amusement of a dinner company. This is the secret of

the vulgar delight in the clown, with his ridiculous dress made up of

absurdities, his face whitened with chalk and flour and blotched with

red patches and black and yellow streaks, his lips painted in

elongations so that when he laughs his mouth seems to open from ear to

ear. The mental disparity of his standard of intelligence and manners

with that in the minds of the spectators elicits roars of coarse joy

from them. It was said of Mazurier, the great Punchinello, that he was

in deformities what Apollo was in perfections. Humped equally before and

behind, perched on the legs of a heron, equipped with the arms of an

ape, he moved with that stiffness without force, that suppleness devoid

of reaction, characterizing the play of a body which has not in itself

the principle of its movement, and whose members, set in action by a

wire, are not attached to the trunk by articulations, but by rags. He

imitated mechanism with as close a fidelity as in another rôle mechanism

is made to imitate man. He seemed to be human and yet to have nothing

human. His motions and falls were such that one believed him made not of

flesh and bone but of cotton and thread. His face was wooden, and he

carried illusion to such a pitch that the children took him for a

gigantic puppet which had grown.

Even below this there is a lower dramatic depth still, and filled with

yet keener sport for a large class. The reflection of human life in the

marionette or puppet-show makes a revelation of a phase of human nature

as profound and fearful as it is unexpected. The revelation is not

consciously made, but springs from an intuitive perception of truth and

sense of fitness as marvellous as anything in the history of the drama.

It has long been known that there is an intimate likeness between the

insane class and the criminal class. They both show the effect of

removing the restraints exerted on the ego by its sympathetic

connections with the general public. The restraint exercised on the

indulgence of egotistic feelings and interests by a consideration of the

feelings and interests of others being lifted off, these selfish

instincts, which are the deepest organic heritage from ancestral

history, break recklessly out. Now, the puppet has no sympathy. Moved

not by his brain and heart but by wires attached to his limbs, his

character shows the result. He is personified selfishness and whim. His

individual will is absolutely reckless of other wills or of

consequences. His ferocity is murderous, his jollity fiendish, his

conduct a jumble of animal passions, cunning impulses, and chaotic

impressions. This is unregenerate man released from social order and

given over to himself. And there is a deep, sinister, raw pleasure for

an uncultivated soul in the sight of a being freed from every law but

that of self-indulgence. This is the secret of the fascination of the

plebeian puppet-show.

Sometimes there has been in it a strange and terrible element of social

satire. The lower class vent through it their hatred for their

oppressors. One type of the Italian Polichinelle was a representative of

the populace angered and made vindictive by their wrongs. He lays the

stick lustily on the shoulders of his master and on the necks of the

police, and takes summary vengeance for the iniquities of official

justice. He is also a frightful cynic. He says, “I despise men so much

that I care not what they think or say of me. I have suffered as much as

others, but I have turned my back and my heart into leather. I am

laughter personified, triumphant laughter, wicked laughter. Pshaw for

the poor creatures knocked over by a breath! I am of iron and wood, old

also as the world.” “In thus speaking,” says his French historian, “he

is truthful; for his heart is as dry as his baton, and he is a thorough

egotist. Ferocious under his seeming good humor, he does evil for the

love of it. Valuing the life of a man no more than that of a flea, he

delights in quarrels and massacres.” He has no sincere affection, no

reverence, no fear either of God or devil, is always eager for coarse

and low enjoyment, and laughs most loudly when he has done the cruellest

deeds. He is the very type of the strong, vital, abandoned criminal; and

he opens a huge vista into the most horrible experience of the human

race.

And now it will be a relief to turn attention aloft in the opposite

direction. The upward action of the dramatic art is its benign aspect.

The egotist looks down to learn how great he is, and up to learn how

little. The generous man looks up to feel how rich he is, and down to

feel how poor. The former sees himself in contrast with others, the

latter sees himself in unison with them. This may be exemplified in

comedy as well as in tragedy. The portraiture of reality on the stage

hitherto has perhaps chiefly aimed to amuse by exhibiting the follies

and absurdities of people and making the spectators laugh at them in

reaction from standards in their own minds. It will one day aim to

correct the follies and absurdities of the spectators by setting before

them models of superiority and ideals of perfection.

To enter into and appropriate the states and prerogatives of those

happier, greater, and better than we, either for an admiring estimate of

them, for the enrichment of ourselves, or for the free play of desirable

spiritual qualities, is at once recreation, luxury, redemption, and

education. This is the highest application of the dramatic principle,

the mending of the characters of men with the characters of superior

men. And it tends to the reconciliation and attuning of all the world.

This is the principle which Paul illustrates in his doctrine that true

circumcision is not of the flesh but of the soul, and that the genuine

children of Abraham are the new race of spiritual characters which,

reproducing his type of faith and conduct, will supersede his mere

material descendants. He also says that those who measure themselves by

themselves and compare themselves among themselves are not wise. The

complement of this statement would be that we should compare ourselves

with all sorts of people, that we may put off every imperfection of our

own and put on every perfection of theirs. And the same apostle gives

this principle its supremest application in his immortal text, “Put ye

on the Lord Jesus Christ.” The Pauline formula for the salvation of the

world embodies the regenerating essence of the dramatic art, which is

the assimilation by less divine characters of a more divine one, raising

them into fellowship with the Divinest. It calls on all men to “behold

with open face, as in a mirror, the glory of the Lord,” and gaze on it

until “they are changed into the same image, from glory to glory, by the

Spirit of the Lord.”

In distinction from this high use of the dramatic life and spirit, the

fault of the ordinary range of coarse and careless men is the utter

absence of all vital sympathetic insight. Fixed in the grooves of habit,

shut up in their own hard and narrow type, they move stolidly among

other men, insensible to the treasures they contain, giving and taking

no more than so many sticks would.

And in some who have a fair share of the dramatic instinct it suffers a

direct inversion of its purest office. For the weak and reckless allow

themselves to be degraded to the level of the worst characters they

behold, adopt their customs, assume their traits, copy their vices, and

repeat their retributive ruin. The man of moral earnestness is warned

and armed by a dramatic knowledge of the profligate and criminal. Only

the impure or heedless idler will be led astray by it.

Yet there is another abuse of this art of dramatic penetration, which,

if less fearful, is more frequent and almost as much to be reprehended,

namely, a fruitless toying with it in a spirit of mere frivolity. A

great many persons enter imaginatively into the states of other people,

neither to honor and imitate nor to disapprove and avoid, but in empty

sport and as an ostentatious luxury of vanity and pride. There is

nothing which vulgar natures are so fond of as, in vulgar phrase,

feeling their oats, pampering their fancied superiority to those they

contemplate. They hate to be rebuked and commanded by excellences beyond

their own attainment. They love to look down on something beneath their

own arrogated estimate of self. And so they come to interpret almost

everything they see as being inferior, and to draw from it a reflex

complacency. Their noisy laughter is but an indirect self-applause

consisting of what Emerson has called “contemptible squeals of joy.” For

whatever a man can laugh at he deems he is superior to. Nothing did the

audiences at the old miracle-plays enjoy half so keenly as laughing at

the devil when he was driven through a trap-door in a sulphurous shower

of fire and squibs. The reason why a superficial exhibition of wit or

humor is so popular is that it affords, at so low a price of effort, the

luxury of the feeling of detachment and mastery. The insincere or

unconsecrated nature always prefers a cheap seeming superiority to a

costly real one. However much Harlequin and Punch and Judy may relieve

and amuse, and thus find justification, they do not purify nor lift nor

inspire nor educate the ordinary spectator. The genuine drama does all

these in addition to bestowing the richest entertainment. Still, it must

be remembered that the influence of a performance depends ultimately on

the character and spirit of the spectator. Some persons seeing

Washington would think nothing of his character, but be absorbed in

admiration of his regimentals. One, at a given exhibition, will be

simply entertained. Another will be debauched. A third will be lastingly

impressed, stimulatingly edified. A fourth may enjoy the delusive luxury

of a criticising superiority, persuading himself that he includes and

transcends the characters whose enactments he so clearly understands and

sees around. Those who laugh at those who weep fancy they are above them

while really grovelling below in vulgar insensibility. One may easily

lift armor he cannot wear.

The next use of the theatre, the most obvious of its serious uses, lies

in the force with which it carries the great practical truths of

morality home to the heart and the soul. The power of the stage in

enforcing moral lessons, the rewards of virtue, the beauty of nobleness,

the penalties of vice and crime, the horrors of remorse and disgrace,

the peace and comfort of a self-approving conscience, is greater than

that of any other mode of teaching. Its living exemplification of the

workings of good and evil in the secret soul and in the social sphere

has an effectiveness of incitement and of warning far beyond that of the

mere didactic precept or exhortation of the pulpit. It is said that many

a dissipated and felonious apprentice who saw Ross play George Barnwell

was turned from his evil courses by the terrible force of the

representation. One who was thus saved used every year anonymously to

send Ross on his benefit-night the sum of ten guineas as a token of his

gratitude. And Dr. Barrowby assured the player that he had done more

good by his acting than many a parson had by his preaching. This

educational function or moral edification in uncovering the secrets of

experience and showing how every style of character and conduct entails

its own compensatory consequences is even now a high and fruitful office

of the theatre, frivolous and corrupt as it often is. And when the drama

shall be made in all respects what it ought to be, fulfilling its own

proper ideal, it will be beyond comparison the most effective agency in

the world for imparting moral instruction and influence. The teaching of

the stage is indeed all the more insinuating and powerful because it is

indirect and not perfunctory or interested. The audience are not on

their guard against it. It works with the force of nature and sincerity

themselves.

“I have heard

That guilty creatures, sitting at a play,

Have by the very cunning of the scene

Been struck so to the soul that presently

They have proclaimed their malefactions.”

No thoughtful and earnest person could possibly see the wickedness of

Iago, the torture of Othello, the struggle and remorse of Macbeth,

depicted by a great actor and not be profoundly instructed, moved, and

morally fortified.

Not only does the drama array its teachings of morality in living forms

so much more contagious and powerful than abstract precepts, but it also

gives the highest examples of didactic eloquence. It abounds in the most

beautiful expressions of poetry and philosophy, the wisest and most

charming instances of insight and moralizing experience, verbal

descriptions of character and of nature set off with every adjunct of

oratoric art and heightening scenery. The preaching on the stage is

often richer and sounder as well as more splendid than that heard from

the pulpit. Besides, the pleasing excitement of the scene, the

persuasive interest of the play, the surrendered and receptive spirits

of the crowd blending in quickest sympathy and applause always over the

most disinterested and exalted sentiments, predispose every hearer to

the most favorable mood for being impressed by what is lovely, good, and

great. The actor, inspired by his theme and his audience, makes

thousands thrill and weep as he gives burning utterance to burning

thoughts or infuses his own high spirit into beautiful and heroic

examples of eloquence and virtue. When in Macbeth Forrest said,—

“I dare do all that may become a man,

Who dares do more is none;”—

when in the Peruvian hero he replied to the accusation from Pizarro of

having spoken falsely, “Rolla utter falsehood! I would I had thee in a

desert with thy troop around thee, and I but with my sword in this

unshackled hand!” when in Damon he said, in rebuke of the corrupt and

sycophantic office-seeker,—

“I told you, boy, I favored not this stealing

And winding into place: what he deserves,

An honest man dares challenge ’gainst the world,”—

it must have been a brutish breast in which his words did not start

generous and ennobling echoes. Tell says,—

“Ha! behold in air

Where a majestic eagle floats above

The northern turrets of the citadel,

And as the sun breaks through yon rifted cloud

His plumage shines, embathed in burning gold,

And sets off his regality in heaven!”

To have such a picture painted in speech and action so vividly that the

hearers are transported out of themselves and tremble with pleasure is

an educational influence of a pure and lofty order. The victorious

Spartacus soliloquizes,—

“A cloud is on my path, but my ambition

Sees glory in it. As travellers, who stand

On mountains, view upon some neighboring peak

Among the mists a figure of themselves

Traced in sublimer characters; so I

Here see the vapory image of myself

Distant and dim, but giant-like.”

All who take the impression of the actor and his imagery in this passage

must receive some sense of the greatness of man and the mystery of his

destiny, and feel themselves magnified beyond their wonted state. And

when Forrest spoke these words of Virginius whole audiences were

electrified by their power and inspirited with their sublime faith:

“Whoever says Justice will be defeated—

He lies in the face of the gods. She is immutable,

Immaculate, and immortal. And though all

The guilty globe should blaze, she will spring up

Through the fire and soar above the crackling pile

With not a downy feather ruffled by

Its fierceness!”

The noble lines of the poet full of great thoughts, scarcely heeded and

soon forgotten by the reader, are by the fiery or solemn elocution of

the actor sculptured on the memories of his auditors for ineffaceable

retention.

The theatre is always in some degree a school of manners, but it ought

to be far more distinctly and systematically such. The different

personages are foils and contrasts to set one another off. As they act

and react in their various styles of being and of behavior, they

advertise and illuminate what they are, and tacitly, but with the most

penetrative effect, teach the spectator to estimate them by mutual

comparisons and by reference to such standards as he knows. Grandeur and

meanness, awkwardness and grace, brutal or fiendish cruelty and divine

sensibility, selfish arrogance and sweet renunciation, grossness and

delicacy,—in a word, every possible sort and grade of inward disposition

and of outward bearing are exemplified on the stage. The instructive

spectacle is too often gazed at with frivolity and mirth alone. But more

profound, more vital, more important lessons are nowhere in the world

taught. This art of manners precisely fitted to the character and rank

of the person has been particularly studied in the Théâtre Français. The

writer saw a play represented there in which there were three distinct

sets of characters. The first belonged to the circle of royalty, the

second to the gentry, and the third were of the laboring class. The

second carefully aped the first, and the third painfully aped the

second. The bearing of the first was composed, easy, dignified; that of

the second was a lowered copy with curious differences made most

instructively perceptible; while the third was a ludicrous travesty. The

superior always, as by a secret magic, overswayed and gave the cue to

the inferior. The king, disguised, sat down at table with a plebeian.

The king ate and drank slowly, quietly, with a silent refinement in

every motion; but the plebeian hurried, shuffled, fussed, choked, and

sneezed. The actor who is really master of his whole business teaches in

a thousand indescribably subtile ways a thousand indescribably valuable

lessons for all who have eyes to see and intelligence behind the eyes to

interpret what they see and apply its morals to their own edification.

Another service rendered by the theatre is in uncovering the arts of

deceit and villainy. In their unsophisticated openness the innocent are

often the helpless victims of seductive adepts in dissipation and crime.

All the designing ways and tricks of the votaries of vice, the

hypocritical wiles of brilliant scoundrels, their insinuating movements,

the magnetizing spells they weave around the unsuspicious, are exposed

on the stage in such a manner as fully to put every careful observer on

guard. This unmasking of dangers, this warning and arming, is a species

of moral instruction quite necessary in the present state of society,

and nowhere so consummately exhibited as before the footlights. Nor is

it to be fancied that the instruction is more demoralizing than

guardian; for the instinctive sympathies of a public assembly move

towards virtue, not towards vice. They who seem to be corrupted by

public plays are inwardly corrupt beforehand.

A further and fairer utility of the stage is the exact opposite of that

last mentioned. It is the delightful privilege of dramatic performers to

exhibit pleasing and admirable types of character and display their

worths and graces so as to kindle the love and worship of those who

behold, and awaken in them emulous desires for the noble virtues and the

exquisite charms which they see so divinely embodied. If the

manifestation of heroism, piety, modesty, tenderness, self-sacrifice,

glorious aspiration in the drama is not an educational and redemptive

spectacle, it must be because the stolidity and shallowness of the

audience neutralize its proper influence. Then it is they who are

disgraced, not the play which is discredited.

It is also a signal function of dramatic acting to reveal to ordinary

people the extraordinary attributes of their own nature by exemplifying

before them the transcendent heights and depths of the human soul.

Average persons and their average lives are prosaic and monotonous,

often mean and tiresome or repulsive. They have no conception of the

august or appalling extremes reached by those of the greatest

endowments, the intensities of their experience, the grandeurs and the

mysteries of their fate. In contrast with the tame level of vulgar life,

the dull plod of the humdrum world, the theatre shows the romantic side

of life, the supernal passions and adventures of genius, the

entrancements of dreaming ideality, the glimpsing hints and marvels of

destiny. An actor like Garrick or Salvini, an actress like Rachel or

Ristori, carrying the graduated signals of love to the climax of

beatific bliss, or the signals of jealousy to the explosive point of

madness, makes common persons feel that they had not dreamed what these

passions were. In beholding a great play greatly performed an audience

gain a new measure for the richness of experience and the width of its

extremes. Thus average people are brought to see the exceptional

greatnesses of humanity and initiated into some appreciation of those

astonishing passions, feats, and utterances of genius which must

otherwise have remained sealed mysteries to them. Rachel used to stand,

every nerve seeming an adder, and freeze and thrill the audience with

terror, as her fusing gestures, perfectly automatic although guided by

will, glided in slow continuity of curves or darted in electric starts.

The commanding majesty, intelligence, and passion of Siddons seemed to

bring her audience before her and not her before her audience. A great

actor enlarges the diapason of man. Our kind is aggrandized in him. He

is copy to men of grosser faculty and teaches them how to feel. It was

this sort of association in his mind that made Dryden say of the aged

Betterton, with such magnifying pomp of phrase,—

“He, like the sun, still shoots a glimmering ray,

Like ancient Rome majestic in decay.”

But the central and essential office of the drama is to serve as a means

of spiritual purification, freedom, and enrichment. It is a most

powerful alterative for those wearied, sickened, and soured with

egotism. It takes them out of themselves, transfers their thoughts from

their own affairs, and trains them in disinterested sympathy. They are

made to hate the tyrants, loathe the sycophants, admire the heroes, pity

the sufferers, love the lovers, grieve with the unhappy, and rejoice

with the glad. Redeemed from the dismal treadmill of the ego, they enter

into the fortunes of others and put on their feelings, and, exulting to

be out of the purgatory of self-consciousness, they roam at large in the

romantic paradise of sympathetic human kind. As we sit in the theatre

and follow the course of the play, a torrent of ideal life is poured

through the soul, free from the sticky attachments of personal

prejudices, slavish likes and dislikes, viscous and disturbing

morbidities. It therefore cleanses and emancipates. This is what

Aristotle meant in saying that the soul should be purged by the passions

of pity and terror. The impure mixture of broken interests and

distracted feelings known in daily life is washed away by the

overwhelming rush of the emotions and lessons of a great tragedy. One

may recognize in another the signs of states—a glow of muscle, a vigor

of thought, a height of sentiment—which he could not create in himself,

but which he easily enters into by sympathy. An actor of splendid genius

and tone, in the focus of a breathless audience, is for the hour a

millionaire of soul. Two thousand spectators sitting before him divest

themselves of themselves and put him on, and are for the hour

millionaires of soul too. And so the stage illustrates a cheap way to

wealth of consciousness, or every man his own spiritual Crœsus.

The histrionic art is likewise the best illustration of history. No

narrative of events or biographic description can vie with a good play

properly set on the stage in giving a vivid conception of an ancient

period or a great personage. It steals the keys of time, enters the

chambers of the past, and summons the sleeping dead to life again in

their very forms, costumes, and motions.

“Time rushes o’er us: thick as evening clouds

Ages roll back. What calls them from their shrouds?

What in full vision brings their good and great,

The men whose virtues make a nation’s fate,

The far forgotten stars of human kind?

_The Stage, that mighty telescope of mind!_”

What are the words of Tacitus or Livy in their impression on the common

mind compared with the visible resurrection of the people and life of

Rome in “Virginius,” “Brutus,” “Julius Cæsar,” or “Antony and

Cleopatra”? Colley Cibber said, with felicitous phrase, “The most a

Vandyke can arrive at is to make his portraits of great persons seem to

think. A Shakspeare goes further, and tells you what his pictures

thought. A Betterton steps beyond both, and calls them from the grave to

breathe and be themselves again in feature, speech, and motion.” The

theatrical art puts in our hands a telescope wherewith we pierce distant

ages and nations and see them as they were.

And as it revives the truths and wonders of antiquity, so it reflects

the present world, depicting in its successive scenes all forms of

society and experience, from the luxuries of the palace to the

wretchedness of the hovel. Moreover, in addition to thus lifting the

curtain from the past and the present, it gives prophetic glimpses of

the future, in its representations of ideal types of men and women and

in its poetic pictures of happier times yet to bless the world. While

most buildings are devoted to the mere interests and comforts of the

private individual or family, or to mechanical business and selfish

scheming, well is it that there should be one fair and open edifice

dedicated to the revelation of human nature in its whole extent, of

human experience in all its seriousness and mirth, of human love and

hope in all their beautiful glory.

But, after all the uses of the theatre enumerated above, there remains

to be stated what is perhaps its most constant, most valuable and

universal benefit; namely, its delightful ministry of recreation and

amusement. In its charmed enclosure there is a blessed escape from the

jading cares and toils and hates and griefs and fears that so harass and

corrode heart and mind in the emulous strifes of the world. Here

pictures of beauty and bravery are exhibited, adventures of romantic

interest set forth, the most sublime deeds and engaging traits of men

lifted into relief, a tide of pride and joy and love sent warm to the

hearts of the crowd, and all factitious distinctions swept away, as

thousands of eyes gaze on the same scenes and thousands of bosoms beat

together with one emotion. In the drama all the arts are concentrated,

and made accessible to those of the most moderate means, with a splendor

which elsewhere, if found at all, can be commanded only by the favored

few. There is the rich and imposing architecture of the theatre itself,

with its stately proportions and fair ornaments. There is the audience

with its brilliant toilets and its array of celebrity, beauty, and

fashion. There are colors in every direction, and painting in the

elaborate scenery heightened by the gorgeous illumination poured over

all. There is sculpture in the most exquisite forms and motions, the

living statuary of the trained performers. There are poetry and oratory

in the skilled elocution of the speakers. There are the interest of the

story, the interplay of the characters, and the evolution and climax of

the plot. There is the profound magnetic charm of the sympathetic

assembly, all swayed and breathing as one. And then there is the

penetrative incantation, the omnipotent spell of rhythm, in the music of

the orchestra, the chant of the singers, the dancing of the ballet.

Here indeed is an art equally fitted to amuse the weary, to instruct the

docile, and to express the inspired. The prejudiced deprecators of the

drama have delighted to depict the kings and queens of the stage

descending from their scenic pedestals, casting off their tinsel robes,

and slinking away in slovenly attire into cellar and garret. How much

worthier of note is the reverse aspect, the noble metamorphosis actors

undergo when the prosaic belittlement of their daily life of poverty and

care slips off and they enter the scene in the greatest characters of

history to enact the grandest conceptions of passion and poetry! And

there is an influence in great impersonations to purify and ennoble

their performers. The law of congruity necessitates it. “If,” said

Clairon, “I am only an ordinary woman for twenty of the twenty-four

hours of the day, no effort I can make will render me more than an

ordinary woman when I appear as Agrippina or Semiramis.” The actor, to

make heroic, sublime, or tender manifestations of the mysterious power

and pity and doom of human nature, must have these qualities in his

soul. No petty or vulgar nature could be competent to such strokes of

wonder and pathos as the “Prithee, undo this button!” of Garrick; the

“Fool, fool, fool!” of Kean; the “Vous pleurez, Zaïre!” of Lekain; the

“After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well!” of Forrest.

The theatre offers us an unrivalled opportunity for the economical

activity of all our faculties, especially of our finer sentiments, which

there play freely, disconnected from the exacting action of the studious

intellect. The whole concentrated mass of life shown in action on the

stage is ideally radiated into the bosoms of the beholders without cost

to them. They despise, they admire, they laugh, they weep, they feel

complacent in their contempt or in their reverence. Many who are too

poor and outcast, or too busy and worn, or too proud and irascible, or

too grieved and unfortunately circumstanced, for the indulgence of these

feelings in real life, find the luxuries copiously and cheaply supplied

in the scene. This is one reason why so many play-goers retain such

grateful recollections of their favorites. Steele said, “From the acting

of Mr. Betterton I have received more strong impressions of what is

great and noble in human nature than from the arguments of the most

solid philosophers or the descriptions of the most charming poets.”

Robson declared, “I never came away from seeing Bannister without

feeling ten years younger, and that if I had not, with Christian, got

rid of my sins, I had got rid of what was pretty nearly as heavy to

carry, my cares.” A noble lady of Edinburgh who in her youth had seen

Siddons, when blind and nearly speechless in the torpor of extreme age,

on being reminded of the great actress, broke into enthusiastic

expressions, while smiles lighted up the features pale and wrinkled with

nearly a hundred years.

An old English writer asking how he shall seclude and refresh himself

from fretting care and hardship puts aside every form of vicious

dissipation, and says,—

“My faculties truly to recreate

With modest mirth and myself to please,

Give me a PLAY that no distaste can breed.

Prove thou a spider and from flowers suck gall;

I will, bee-like, take honey from a weed,

For I was never puritanical.”

Collective history looked at from the human point of view may sometimes

appear a chaos, but seen from the divine auditorium above it is a

perfect drama, the earth its stage, the generations its actors. Thus the

argument of Thomas Heywood was sound, No Theatre, No World!

“If then the world a theatre present,

As by the roundnesse it appears most fit,

Built with starre-galleries of high ascent

In which Jehove doth as spectator sit

And chief determines to applaud the best,

But by their evil actions doome the rest,

He who denies that theatres should be

He may as well deny the world to me!”

For as the world is a stage, so the stage is a world. It is an artistic

world in which not only the natural but also the supernatural world is

revealed. This is shown with overwhelming abundance of power in William

Winter’s description of the Saul of Alfieri as rendered by Salvini:

“It depicts the condition of an imaginative mind, a stately and robust

character, an arrogant, fiery spirit, an affectionate heart, and,

altogether, a royal and regally-poised nature, that have first been

undermined by sin and the consciousness of sin, and then crazed by

contact with the spirit-world and by a nameless dread of the impending

anger of an offended God. It would be difficult to conceive of a more

distracting and piteous state. Awe and terror surround this august

sufferer, and make him both holy and dreadful. In his person and his

condition, as these are visible to the imaginative mind, he combines all

the elements that impress and thrill. He is of vast physical stature,

which time has not bent, and of great beauty of face, which griefs have

ravaged but not destroyed. He is a valiant and bloody warrior, and

danger seems to radiate from his presence. He is a magnanimous king and

a loving father, and he softens by generosity and wins by gentleness. He

is a maniac, haunted by spectres and scourged with a whip of scorpions,

and his red-eyed fury makes all space a hell and shatters silence with

the shrieks of the damned. He is a human soul, burdened with the

frightful consciousness of the Almighty’s wrath, and poised in torment

on the precipice that overhangs the dark and storm-beaten ocean of

eternity. His human weakness is affrighted by ghastly visions and by all

manner of indefinite horrors, against which his vain struggles do but

make more piteous his awful condition. The gleams of calm that fall upon

his tortured heart only light up an abyss of misery,—a vault of darkness

peopled by demons. He is already cut off from among the living by the

doom of inevitable fate, and while we pity him we fear him. His coming

seems attended with monstrous shapes; he diffuses dissonance; his voice

is a cry of anguish or a wail of desolation; his existence is a tempest;

there can be no relief for him save death, and the death that ends him

comes like the blessing of tears to the scorched eyelids of consuming

misery. That is the Saul of the Bible and of Alfieri’s tragedy; and that

is the Saul whom Salvini embodies. It is a colossal monument of human

suffering that the actor presents, and no man can look upon it without

being awed and chastened and lifted above the common level of this

world.”

But the culminating utility and glory and eulogy of the art of the

theatre are not that it furnishes common people an opportunity for

learning what are the exceptional greatness, beauty, and wonder of human

nature by the sight of its most colossal faculties unveiled and its most

marvellous terrors, splendors, sorrows, and ecstasies exposed for study,

but that _its inherent genius tends to produce expansive sympathy,

sincerity of soul, generous deeds, and an open catholicity of temper_.

No other class is so true and liberal to its own members in distress or

so prompt in response to public calamity as that of the actors. Their

constant familiarity with the sentiments of nobleness and pity imbues

them with the qualities. In trying exigencies, personal or national,

their conduct has often illustrated the truth of the compliment paid

them by the poet:

“These men will act the passions they inspire,

And wave the sabre as they sweep the lyre.”

Macklin said, “I have always loved the conscious worth of a good action

more than the profit that would arise from a bad one.” A famous singer

was passing through the market-place of Lyons one day, when a woman with

a sick child asked alms of him. He had left his purse behind, but,

wishing to aid the woman, he took off his hat, sang his best, and

hastily gave her the money he collected.

“The singer, pleased, passed on, and softly thought,

Men will not know by whom this deed was wrought;

But when at night he came upon the stage,

Cheer after cheer went up from that wide throng,

And flowers rained on him. Nothing could assuage

The tumult of the welcome save the song

That for the beggars he had sung that day

While standing in the city’s busy way.”

So when in his old age the great tenor, Duprez, reappeared to sing some

stanzas he had composed in behalf of the sufferers by an inundation, as

he said he could no longer utter the sensational cry of Arnold in

William Tell, _Suivez-moi_, but that he still had strength to sing

_Secourons le malheur_, the house rang with plaudits.

The flexibility of the actor, his sympathetic art, the affecting poetic

situations in which he is seen set off by aggrandizing and romantic

adjuncts, clothe him with fascinating associations, make him gazed after

and courted. This is one secret of the keen interest felt in him. He who

gives the most powerful signs of soul is naturally thought to have the

greatest soul. The great have always been drawn to make favorites of

actors. Demosthenes was the friend of Satyrus; Cicero, of Roscius; Louis

the Fourteenth, of Molière; Bolingbroke, of Barton Booth; Napoleon, of

Talma; Byron, of Kean. The Duke of Northumberland gave Kemble ten

thousand pounds sterling. Lord Loughborough settled a handsome annuity

on Macklin in his destitute age; and when the old actor in his one

hundred and eighth year was about to die he besought the friend who had

agreed to write his life to make grateful mention of this.

Players have given kings and nobles greater benefits than they have

received from them, often teaching them character as well as manners.

When the Earl of Essex told Edmund Kean that by continuing to associate

with Incledon, the decayed singer, he would endanger his own further

welcome in the upper class, the actor replied, “My lord, Incledon was my

friend, in the strictest sense of the word, when I had scarcely another

friend in the world; and if I should now desert him in the decline of

his popularity and the fall of his fortunes I should little deserve the

friendship of any man, and be quite unworthy of the favorable opinion

your lordship has done me the honor to entertain for me.” Thus speaking,

he rose, and, with a profound bow to the earl, left the room.

The greatest social characters have not only always affected the society

of gifted players, but have themselves had a profound passion for the

personal practice of the art. This is because the art deals with all the

most subtile secrets of human nature and experience, out of which grow

those arts of power which they feel to be their peculiar province. It is

also because in this practice they escape from the empty round of the

merely conventional and titular which soon becomes so wearying to the

soul and so nauseous to the heart, and come into the realm of reality.

The effect produced by the king, the deference paid to him, may be

hollow. The power of the actor depends on genuine gifts, on his own real

being and skill and charm. And he sees through all cold forms and

shallow pretences. His very art, in its bedizenments and factitious

accessories, sickens him of all shams in private life. There he wants

sincerity and the unaffected substantial goods of nature, a friendly

fellowship springing straight from the heart. When the wife of Kean

asked him what Lord Essex had said of his Shylock, the actor replied,

“Damn Lord Essex. The pit rose at me!” A common soldier with whom Cooke

had quarrelled refused to fight him because he was rich and the persons

present would favor him. Cooke said, “Look here, sir. This is all I

possess in the world,” showing three hundred and fifty pounds in bank-

notes, which he immediately thrust into the fire, holding the poker on

them till they were consumed. Then he added, “Now I am a beggar, sir.

Will you fight me now?”

This democratic spirit which spurns social affectations and tramples

unreal claims, keenly recognizing distinctions but insisting that they

shall be genuine and not merely supposititious, is the very genius of

the drama as felt in its inmost essence. Rulers have ever delighted to

evade their imprisonment in etiquette, put on an incognito, and disport

themselves in the original relishes of human intercourse on the basis of

facts. Nothing in literature is more charming than the adventures in

this kind of Haroun-al-Raschid and his Vizier in the Arabian Nights’

Entertainments. Nero and Commodus were proudest of all to strip off

their imperial insignia and win plaudits by their performances in the

amphitheatre. Julius Cæsar acted in his own theatre the part of Hercules

Furens. He was so carried away by the spirit of the rôle that he

actually killed the youth who played Lycus and swung the body two or

three times round his head. Louis the Fourteenth appeared in the

Magnificent Lovers, by Molière, and pantomimed, danced, sang, and played

on the flute and the guitar. He especially loved in gorgeous ballets to

perform the rôle of the Sun; and in the ballet of the Seasons he

repeatedly filled the rôle of the blonde Ceres surrounded by harvesters.

Even Oliver Cromwell once acted the part of Tactus in the play of

“Lingua, or the Combat of the Five Senses for Superiority.”

But the life of the dramatic profession is not all a brilliant round of

power, gayety, and indulgence. It too has sacrifices, toils, tears,

strenuous duty and virtue, tragedy, mystery, and triumph. The strange

picture of human life and death is nowhere more vividly reflected than

in the theatrical career. The little prodigy James Speaight, whose

performances on the violin had for three years been applauded by crowds,

when he was not yet seven years old, was one evening slightly ill as he

left the stage. About midnight his father heard him say, “Gracious God,

make room for another little child in heaven.” The father spoke,

received no answer, and on going to him found him dead. In 1819, a Mlle.

Charton made her débût at the Odéon. Her enchanting loveliness and

talent captivated all. Intoxicated Paris rang with her praises. Suddenly

she ceased to act. A jealous lover had flung into that beautiful and

happy face a cup of vitriol, destroying beauty, happiness, and eyesight

forever. She refused to prosecute the ruffian, but sat at home,

suffering and helpless, and was soon absorbed in the population and

forgotten. What could be more dreadful than such a doom, or more

pathetic than such submission! In fact, many of those who lived by

acting on the stage have given as noble specimens of acting off of it as

are to be found in history. Mrs. Porter, a famous actress of the

generation preceding Garrick, riding home after the play, in a one-horse

chaise, was accosted by a highwayman with a demand for her money. “She

levelled a pistol at him, when he changed his tone to supplication, told

her his name and the abode of his starving family, and appealed to her

compassion so strongly that she gave him ten guineas. He left her, and,

as she lashed her horse, the animal started aside, upset the chaise, and

in the fall her hip-joint was dislocated. Notwithstanding all the pain

and loss the man had thus occasioned her, she inquired into his

circumstances, and, finding that he had told her the truth, raised sixty

pounds among her acquaintances and sent it to his family.” Her lameness

forced her to leave the stage, and she had herself to subsist upon

charity.

The dread shrinking and anxiety felt by Mrs. Siddons on the night of her

first successful appearance in London, after her earlier failure, were

such as common natures cannot imagine, and such as nothing but a holy

love for her young dependent children could have nerved even her heroic

nature to bear. The dying away of the frenzied shouts and plaudits left

her half dead, as she wrote to a friend. “My joy and thankfulness were

of too solemn and overpowering a nature to admit of words or even tears.

My father, my husband, and myself sat down to a frugal supper in a

silence uninterrupted except by exclamations of gladness from Mr.

Siddons. My father enjoyed his refreshments, but occasionally stopped

short, and, laying down his knife and fork, and lifting up his venerable

face, and throwing back his silver hair, gave way to tears of

happiness.”

The essence of the ecclesiastical and theatrical quarrel lies in the

relation of the natural passions to duty. It is especially concentrated

and prominent in regard to the passion of love, concerning which the

opposed views are seen on the one side in the prurient plays constantly

produced on the boards, and on the other side in the repressive

injunctions as constantly iterated from the pulpit. The latter loudly

commands denial, the former silently insinuates indulgence. The one is

inflamed with the love of power, the other is infected with the love of

pleasure. The battle can never be ended by the victory of either party.

The strife is hopeless so long as the ascetic ideal is proclaimed alone,

kindling the bigoted mental passions, and the voluptuous ideal is

exhibited alone, inflaming the loose sensual passions. Each will have

its party, and they will keep on fighting. The only solution lies in the

appearance and triumph of that juster and broader ideal which shows that

the genuine aim and end of life are not the gratification of any

despotic separate passions, whether spiritual or physical, but the

perfection of individual being in social unity. The two combatants,

therefore, must be reconciled by a mediator diviner than either of them,

armed with a truer authority than the one and animated by a purer mind

than the other. That mediator is Science, unfolding the psychological

and physiological laws of the subject, and bringing denial and

indulgence into reconciliation by giving wholesomeness and normality to

every passion, which shall then seek fulfilment only in accordance with

the conditions of universal order, securing a pure harmony at once of

all the functions of the individual and of all the interests of society.

The incomplete and vain formula of the church is, Deny thyself. The

equally defective and dangerous formula of the theatre is, Indulge

thyself. But the perfect and bridging formula of science is, So deny or

rule in the parts of thy being and life as to fulfil thyself in the

whole.

Virtue is not confined to the votaries of the pulpit, but is often

glorified in the votaries of the stage. Vice, if sometimes openly

flaunted in the theatre, is sometimes secretly cherished in the church.

Neither should scorn the other, but they should mutually teach and aid

each other, and combine their methods as friends, to purify, enlighten,

and free the world. Each has much to give the other, and as much to

receive from it. For, while the mischief of the ascetic ecclesiastic

ideal of repression and denial is the breeding of a spirit of sour and

fanatical gloom, its glory is the earnest conscience, the trimmed lamp,

and the girt loins. Add this sacred self-restraint, which allows no

indulgence not in accordance with the conditions of universal order, to

the genial dramatic ideal of man and life,—a perfect organism and

perfect faculties in perfect conditions of fulfilment and liberty, or

the greatest amount of harmonious experience rooted in the physical

nature and flowering in the spiritual,—and it is the just ideal.

The true business of the church is to inculcate morality and religion.

Its perversions are traditional routine, creed authority, and ceremony.

The true business of the theatre is to exhibit characters and manners in

their contrasts so as to secure appropriating approval for the best,

condemnation and avoidance for the worst. Its perversions are

carelessness, frivolity, and license. When the church purifies itself

for its two genuine functions,—truth and consolation,—and the theatre

cleanly administers its two genuine functions,—wholesome recreation and

earnest teaching,—their offices will coincide and the strife of priest

and player cease.