THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ORIGIN, VARIETY, AND PERSONAL USES OF Any one who so analyzes the Dramatic Art as to see what its basis, contents, and uses are, will be astonished to find what a deep and wide feature it is in human nature, and how extensive and important a part it plays in human life. The study of the great spectacle of human existence as a whole, from the point of view of the Stage, in the light of dramatic usages and imagery, imparts to it a keener, more diversified, more comprehensive interest and instructiveness than it can receive in any other way. The habit of thus seeing people and things group themselves in pictures, of looking on scenes and acts in their relationship as a whole, of reading character and getting at states of mind and plucking out personal secrets by an intuitive and cultivated art of interpreting the signs consciously or unconsciously given, is spontaneous in men of the highest artistic genius, like Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, and Goethe. And it lends a marvellous charm and piquancy to their experience of the world, enchanting every object with active significance, color, and mystery. Thus the Theatre, technically so called, is but one of the lesser spheres of the dramatic art. The tragedies and comedies coldly elaborated there are often tame and poor to those enacted with the flaming passions of life itself in parlors and kitchens, in palace and hut and street. Every one of us is essentially an actor, the setting of his performance furnished independently of his will wherever he goes, all his schemes included and borne on in a divine plan deeper than he dreams. Our own organism is the primary theatre, the proscenia of brain and heart teeming with dramas which link our being and destiny with those of all other actors from the beginning to the end of the world. Every spot in which man meets his fellow-men is a secondary theatre, arrayed with its scenery of circumstances, where each has his All place being thus theatrical, and all conscious existence thus having something dramatic, it is quite obvious how inadequate must be their appreciation of the art of acting who recognize its offices only in the play-house. The play-house is merely the scene of its purposed and deliberate exhibition as a professional art. In its different kinds, with its different degrees of consciousness and complexity, as a matter of instinct and culture it is practised everywhere. Freeing our minds from prejudices on the one side, and from indifference on the other, let us, then, approach the subject with an earnest effort to learn the truth and to see what its lessons are. The history of the drama, in the usual accounts given of it, is traced back to Thespis, Susarion, and others, in Greece, about six centuries before Christ. But this has reference only to the most detached and consummate form of the art. In order really to understand its derivative basis, its ingredients, its numerous applications and the moral rank and value of its several uses, we must go much farther back, and study its gradual ascent. We must, indeed, not only go beyond the polished states of civilization, but even beyond the first appearance of man himself on the scene of this world. For the rudiments of the dramatic art, the simple germs afterwards combined and developed in human There are animals and insects which on being touched, or being approached by a superior enemy, instantly assume the attitude and appearance of death. They recognize their peril, and seek to elude notice by a motionless condition which simulates death. They thus pretend to be other than they are, for the purpose of preserving the power to remain what they are. The ruby-throated humming-bird of Canada, if captured, feigns death by shutting its eyes and keeping quite still, then making a vigorous effort to escape. Some birds by false pretences of agitation lure the trapper away from the neighborhood of their nest. Cats constantly feign sleep to further their design of catching birds or This playing 'possum is a dramatic artifice very prevalent even in the lower regions of the animal kingdom. If it be thought that a bug cannot possibly know so much, the reply is, Perhaps the bug itself does not, but the presence of God, the creative and guardian Spirit of nature, the collective experience of the total ancestry of the bug organized in its nervous system, does know it; and it is this automatic reason that plays the cunning game. A bear has been known to frequent the bank of a stream where fishes were wont to come to the surface and feed on the falling fruit of an overhanging tree, to splash the water with his paw in imitation of the dropping fruit, and when the fish appeared, seize and devour it! This neat little drama implies on the part of the bear an imaginative conception of the different personages and scenes in the situation, in advance, and then a deliberate representation of his ideas in action. It would be the same thing as human art if the bear could of its own impulse repeat the whole serial action under other circumstances, as, for example, before a group of bears off in the woods. This he cannot do; and thus is the animal drama differenced from the human drama, instinct separated from art. A great many animals are known to imitate the cries or motions of the creatures they prey on, in order to allure them within seizing-distance. For the sake of gaining some end they pretend to be what they are not, and to entertain feelings and designs quite different from their real ones. Certainly this is to be a hypocrite, an actor, in the deepest sense of guile. The mocking-bird has the faculty of mimicking the notes of all kinds of birds with marvellous accuracy and ease. It takes great pleasure in practising the gift, calling various kinds of timid songsters around it, and then with a malicious delight pouring on their ears the screams of their enemies and scattering them in the wildest terror. By this exercise of the dramatic art the mocking-bird refreshes, varies, magnifies, the play of its own life. In like manner, and with the same result, kittens, dogs, lions, play games with one another, represent mimic battles, pretend to be angry, to strike and bite, doing it all in a gentle manner, softened down from the deadly earnestness of reality. The aim and use of those crude elements or germs of the drama which appear in the lower animal world would seem, therefore, to be the enabling them to escape their pursuers, to seize their prey, to vary and enlarge their lives by that gregarious interchange and consolidation which is a mutual giving and taking of inner states through outer signs. It is transmitted instinct, fitted to its ends and acting within fixed limits, dependent for the most part on outward stimuli. Mounting from animals to men, we discover the earliest developments of the dramatic art among the rudest tribes of savages. The prevalence and exercise of the faculty of dramatization among the principal tribes of barbarians in all parts of the world are equally striking and extensive. It is one of the most prized and powerful portions of their experience, and one of the first to impress the travellers who visit them. It has three distinct provinces. The first is their own actual lives, whose most exciting incidents, most salient features, they repeat in mimic representation. Dressed in appropriate costumes, they celebrate with counterfeit performances the Planting Festival, the Harvest Festival, and other important events connected with the phenomena of the year. They also dramatize with intense vividness and vigor the experience of war,—the following of the trail of the enemy, the ambush, the surprise, the struggle, the scalping of the slain, the burning of the village, the gathering of the booty, the return home, and the triumphant reception. This is not confined to the North American Indians. The Dyaks of Borneo, the New Zealanders, the Patagonians, the Khonds of Asia, the Negroes of Africa, and scores of other peoples, have similar rites, besides numerous additional ones less distinctively dramatic, covering the ceremonies of hunting, fishing, marriage, birth, and death. The second department of the drama among barbarians is their impersonations of animals, their picturesque and terrible representation of the passions and habits of reptiles, birds, and beasts. Morgan, in his History of the Iroquois, gives a list of some forty dances in which they acted out to the life stories based on their own experience and on that of the creatures beneath them. But we owe to Catlin some of the most graphic descriptions of the drama among the North American savages. On the other hand, great evils result from them. They never work upward to reflect higher forms of character and life for redemptive imitation, but downward, in the impersonating of creatures whose inferiority either inflames the boastful and reckless self-complacency of the actors, or else by its reflex influences takes possession of their consciousness and animalizes them, degrading them to the level of the brutes they portray. Secondly, the reception of the idea of the beast, snake or vulture which they represent, their furious mimicry of it, the spasmodic, rhythmical, long-continued movements they make in accordance with it, tend to subject the brain to the automatic spinal and ganglionic centres below, and thus furnish the conditions and initiate the stages of all sorts of insanity. Much of the persistent degradation and ferocity of the barbaric world is to be traced to this cause. Nor is this the only evil; for, in the third place, when the savage mind, after such a training, affects to penetrate the invisible The next step in this survey of the psychological history of the dramatic art whereby we are essaying to unfold its purport and its final definition, leads us from barbaric life to the private homes of the most cultivated classes of civilized society. The higher we go in the scale of social wealth and rank, the larger provisions we shall find made for gratifying the dramatic instincts of children, till we come to the nursery of the baby prince, who has his miniature parks of cannon and whole regiments of lead soldiers, and the baby princess, who has a constant succession of dolls of As children grow older and become school-boys and school-girls, this faculty and impulse do not cease to act, but, developed still further, instead of imparting fancied life and action to inanimate toys, lead them to imitative performances of their own, causing them to group themselves together for the representation of games, and of the historic scenes, social events, or fictitious stories which have most impressed and pleased their imaginations. The point of interest demanding attention at this stage of our We must pause here, before passing to the next head, to make a brief exposition of another department and application of the dramatic power of man, a department intermediate between the examples already given and those which are to come. Its peculiarity is that it combines in one, with certain original features of its own, the barbaric and the childish drama. The creation of Fables is the strongest delight of the dramatizing literary faculty in its first movements. Its workings are to be traced in the ingenuous oral treasures preserved among tribes who have no written language, as well as in the most beloved vernacular writings current among the populace in civilized countries. Fables are short compositions designed to teach moral truths, or to impress moral truisms, by representing beasts, birds, reptiles, insects, trees, flowers, or other objects, as endowed with the faculties of men, retaining their own forms but acting and talking as men, exemplifying the virtues and vices of men in characteristic deeds, followed by their proper consequences. In the degrading barbarian drama the actors admit into themselves the lower creatures whom they represent, putting on the skins, movements, cries, of the crocodiles, hyenas, or boa-constrictors the ideas of whom they take into their brains. In the naÏve child drama the little performers project the ideas of themselves into the dolls Hardly any other conception has given the people so much pleasure as that Beast-Epic, or picture of human life in the vizards and scenery of animal life, which, under the title of "Reynard the Fox," circulated through Europe for centuries,—a sort of secular and democratic Bible, read in palaces, quoted in universities, thumbed by toilsmen, delighted in by all, old and young, high and low, learned and illiterate. There the society and life of the Middle Age are reflected with grotesque truth and mirth, grim irony, sardonic grins, comic insight, laughter The attractiveness of fables is fourfold. First, the charm of all exercises of the dramatic art, namely, the incessant playing of human nature with its elementary experiences in and out of all sorts of masks and disguises of changing persons and situations. Second, the congruous mixture in them of the most extravagant impossibilities and absurdities with the plainest facts and truths; the union of sober realities of reason and nature with incredible forms, giving fresh shocks of wit and humor. Third, the constant sense of superiority and consequent elated complacency felt by the human auditor or reader over the animal impersonators of his nature, with the ludicrous contrasts and suggestions they awaken at every turn. Fourth, the interest and authority of the moral lessons, truisms though these may be, which they so vividly bring out. One cannot refrain from adding, in this connection, that there is a further form of the dramatic inhabitation of our humbler brethren the brutes, by kind and generous men, an example newly offered to notice by the officers and friends of our Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. These gentlemen, by a divine extension of their sympathy, quite in the spirit of the blessed Master who in his parables immortalized the hen, the sparrow, The dramatic art, based on the science of human nature in the revelation of its inner states through outer signs, is the exercise of that power whereby man can indefinitely multiply his personality and life, by identifying himself with others, or others with himself, by divesting himself of himself and entering into the characters, situations, and experiences of those whom he beholds or reads of or creatively imagines. This definition elevates the art, in its pure practice, high above the reach of cavil; for its central principle is the essence of that disinterested sympathy and vicarious atonement whose culmination on Calvary have deified the Christ. Let us trace a little the rise and nature of this power from a point of view somewhat different from the one in which we have already considered it. The life of a peach-tree, a rose-bush, or a squash-vine is rigidly determined for it in advance by the seed from which it springs and the soil and climate in which it grows. Its life is simply the sum of actions and reactions between the forces in But this associative alteration, enhancement, and interchange of life receive an almost incredible development when we ascend to man. His nature and destiny too, the fact that he is a man, not a tree or a brute or an angel or a god, are determined for him by his parentage. This hereditary descent decides his general character and status, and also many details of special faculty and tendency. But in him all this coexists with an immense freedom and power of foreign assimilation. He can change and modify the conditions of his habitat in a thousand particulars where the lower animals can do so in one. By free education, drill, and habit, he can likewise indefinitely modify his reactions on the same outer conditions. But far above all this in rank and reach is his ability to perfect his character by the characters of others, to make the most direct and copious levying on the experiences of his fellow-men. He has not only the organic inheritance of his ancestry and the traditional treasure of his country and people to work with, but, furthermore, in history, science, and literature he has the keys to the conscious wealth of all men in all lands and times. The outward universe in which we live is one and the same in A philosopher like Hegel, a scientist like Humboldt, a poet like RÜckert, deeply read in all literatures and trained to the facile reproduction of every mode of thought and action, traverses all races and ages, deciphering their symbols, reading their passions, royally reaping their experimental conquests, thus virtually enlarging his own soul to the dimensions of collective humanity and enriching himself with its accumulated possessions. The first condition of truly profound and vital acting is to have the knowledge, the liberty, the spiritual energy and skill, to solve this inner side of the problem by reconstructing in the mind and heart the modes of character, passion, and conduct which are to be represented. They must be mastered and made one's own before they can be intelligently exhibited. It is the part of a charlatan to content himself with merely detecting and imitating the outer signs. He is potentially the richest and freest man who is most capable of assuming and subsidizing all other men. He is virtually the king and owner of the world, though without crown or sceptre, while many a titular king has nothing but these external insignia. The greatest actor is the one who is the most perfect master of all the signs of the inner states of men, and can in his own person exhibit those signs with the most vivid power. He must have, to be completely equipped for his work, a mind and a body whose parallel faculties and organs are energetic and harmonic, every muscle of the one so liberated and elastic, every power of the other so freed and connected, that they can act either singly or in varied combination with others And now we are prepared to advance to the heart of our theme and show the place of the drama in its full development in adult civilized society, where all sorts of acting are not only diffused through the daily life of the community, but also separated in a distinct profession and supplied with a brilliant home. The drama, in its finished literary and histrionic sense, is seen when a story, instead of being merely described in forms, words, or colors,—as by sculpture, narrative, and painting,—is exhibited by fit personages in living action with all the appropriate accessories of looks, attitudes, tones, articulations, gestures, and deeds. The end of this imitative, reproductive, and creative exhibition is, as has already been said, to enable the spectator to transpose himself out of himself into others, assimilating them to himself or himself to them, thus unlimitedly exchanging his personality and its conscious contents. In this sense the dramatic faculty is universal, and its exercise, in an unsystematic way, incessant. What other people do in a bungling and piecemeal manner, without clear purpose or method, the professional actor does with full consciousness and system, and exhibits for the pleasure and edification of the observers. Everybody, from infancy to old age, with such pliancy of fancy, resources of reason, wealth of sympathy, as he can command, is always observing other people, studying, judging, approving, copying, or condemning and avoiding. All that is wanting to regulate and complete the art is, as Schlegel has said, to draw the mimic elements and fragments clear off from real life, and confront real life with them collectively in one mass. This is the sphere and office of the Theatre, whose very business it is to hold up the mirror to nature and humanity, that all styles of character and conduct may be seen in their proper quality and their true rank, teaching the spectators There are in the exhibited drama three provinces or directions, the lower, the intermediate, and the higher, or Comedy, Melodrama, and Tragedy. In the lower drama, inferior types of men and manners are exhibited for the various purposes of amusement, ridicule, satire, correction. The direction of the moral and social faculties of the spectators towards the persons and actions they contemplate is downward from their own or the social mental standards of virtue, propriety, and grace to the real exemplifications before them, the descending movement which accompanies their perception of the incongruity awakening laughter or tendencies to laughter, scorn or tendencies to scorn, with a reflex of complacency in themselves. Comedy teaches, so far as it ventures to teach at all and does not content itself with mere entertainment, by the principle of opposition and contrast, showing what not to do and how not to do it, suggesting grace by awkwardness, hinting refinement by vulgarity, setting off beauty and dignity by ugliness and triviality. This, as every one must see, is a varied, effective, and fruitful mode of direct instruction as well as of indirect and unpurposed educational moulding. No one can well be thoroughly familiar with the genteel comedy of the theatres and remain a boor. Such a familiarity is of itself a sort of social education. In the higher drama, or Tragedy, the superior social types, lords, ladies, geniuses, kings, and the nobler styles of character, heroes, martyrs, saints, are represented, to awaken admiration and reverence, to stir emulous and aspiring desires. Pity, love, and awe, the profoundest passions and capacities of the soul, are moved and expanded. The mysteries of fate and providence are shadowed forth, and the most insoluble problems of morality and religion indirectly agitated. Transcendent degrees of power, virtue, success, and glory, or failure and suffering, are indicated; and all our upward-looking faculties are put on the stretch, with the result of assimilating more or less of the forms of being and experience on which they sympathizingly gaze aloft. Here we are taught, sometimes with a distinct aim, oftener by an unpurposed, contagious kindling of suggested thought and feeling, The intermediate, or Melodrama, mixed of the other two and presented on the ever-varying level between comic lowness and tragic height, brings forward a medley of characters, greater and lesser, good, bad, and indifferent, portraying life not truly as it is in fact, but exaggeratedly, in heterogeneous combination, so set off in extravagant relief and depression, emphasis of lights and shades, as to give it a more than natural attraction for the senses. Without taxing any faculties in the audience, it piques the curiosity of all by turns, and exercises and refreshes them with its rapid changes and its glaring effects, which provide strong sensations yet with small exaction on the mind. Any explicit instruction it contains is incidental, since its real business is to serve as a spiritual alterative directed to the soul through the senses, to beguile heavy thoughts and cares, to entertain and rest weary faculties with fresh objects, and fill idle hours with pleasurable amusement. All this is certainly legitimate, needed, and useful, although it may be abused by the employment of illegitimate means, and thus perverted into an injury. But every good thing is likewise capable of perversion, and ought to be judged by its true intent, not by its aberrations. Furthermore, it is to be said—and it is an important truth which should in no wise be overlooked—that even when the play is petty and worthless in plot, full of absurdities as many of our gaudy modern pantomimes and spectacles are, and pernicious in its exhibitions of nudity, impure postures, and prurient accessories,—even then a twofold good may be derived from the show, in addition to the mere recreative diversion and pleasure yielded. First, the sight of the superb power, grace, and skill of the trained performers, disciplined and perfected to the highest point of energy, self-possession, and easy and joyous readiness for the execution of their functions, is a charming and edifying Second, the melodrama, by its artistic groupings, colors, and movements, its scenic processions, its magic pictures, its orderly evolution of romantic adventures, the multiform interplaying of the characters and fortunes of its actors upon one another, draws our attention from ourselves, enlists our feelings in the fates of others, and thus exercising our faculties, disciplines, purifies, and emancipates them, making them readier and more competent for whatever exigencies we may be called on to meet. This great good and use of the dramatic art, its moral essence, is afforded to the profiting beholder by almost every theatrical representation, namely, that, in showing life concentrated and intensified, it holds up for imitation the instructive spectacle, in its trained actors, of men passing from themselves into the personalities and situations of others, mutually appropriating one another's traits and experiences, supplementing themselves with one another. This varied practice of reason, imagination, and sympathy in assuming inner states and their outer signs is the most effective culture and drill there is for freeing human nature from the slavery of routine, and perfecting its entrance on that heritage of unlimited sympathetic fellowships which will at last realize the hydrostatic paradox in morals, and make one man commensurate with all humanity. A drop balances an ocean by its dynamic translation and interplay with all the drops! Whatever dissent or qualification may be made by some to the foregoing view, there will scarcely be any hesitation or difference of opinion when we turn from the representation of bad characters or neutral characters, the vile and the insignificant, to the grandest forms of the drama, where we encounter the most While War and Work, with the rehearsing discipline they exact, occupy and ravage the fairest fields and promises of Human Life, and create Weariness, Crime, Lust, and Death, as the horrid Reapers who tread close in their steps, the Theatre—one bright home of Freedom, Art, and Beauty, planted in a paradisal place—is prophetic of the time to come when Love and Leisure shall have room to people the redeemed world with their fair and sweet offspring, Play and Joy. In the mean time, while the spirit of doubt, banter, and insincerity is so rife,—while we meet on every hand that arid, cynical, and contemptuous temper which thrives on mockery and badinage, fosters an insolent complacency and laughter by degrading superior persons and subjects in parodies and lampoons,—while our young men and women are infested with a boastful conceit of superiority to all sentiment and enthusiasm, and even our rising authors are so disenchanted, so knowing, that persiflage and the ridicule of illusion and devotion are their highest tests of experience and power,—under such conditions, surely we shall all agree that the ideal revelations, the impassioned music and eloquence, the free elevation above commonplace, the por The actor, in laboring to fit himself for the highest walk in his profession, studies all forms of human nature and experience, discriminates their ranks and worth, sees what is congruous and becoming, or the contrary, and reproduces their powers in himself by the practice of putting on their states and showing their signals. This done disinterestedly, with a sovereign eye to duty and the Divine Will, is the way for every one to educate himself towards that personal perfection the pursuit of which is his supreme business on earth. He thus learns to assume and absorb the ascending ideals that brighten the pathway to heaven. Herein the dramatic art becomes glorified into identity with religion. The lowest range of the histrionic inhabitations of the soul is obsession, where the man is insanely held by some inferior or evil spirit, as when Nebuchadnezzar went out and ate grass, like an ox. The next grade is sympathetic domination, where the idea of another being is so vividly seated in the imagination of a person that for the time it makes him its involuntary agent. The intermediate or neutral level, half-way from the lowest to the highest, is the region of voluntary assumption, or acting properly so called, where the player by his own free intelligence and will reproduces or imitates foreign characters. Then there is the ascent into inspiration, where loftier influences or spirits than are native to the impersonator take possession of him, enhancing his powers, animating and guiding him beyond his own knowledge or volition. And lastly, there is the supreme height of divine incarnation, where some deity stoops into the cloud of mortality, or the infinite God in varying degrees deigns to inflesh and enshrine himself in man. Christendom owns one unapproachable and incomparable example in its august Founder. But in India, Egypt, Greece, were mystic men, who, too wise and grand to be thought lunatics, have claimed to be of a lineage divine and dateless. This is a realm for silence. But every unique, whether Gautama or Jesus, is only the transcending culmination of a rule that rises through levels below. Either great men have played the rÔles of incarnate gods or descending gods have assumed the rÔles of men on earth. |