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.

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,—

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.

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.

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,—

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,—

it must have been a brutish breast in which his words did not start generous and ennobling echoes. Tell says,—

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,—

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:

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,—

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 Croesus.

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.

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,—

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!

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:

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.

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.