Chapter XXI (2)

Molière can show up Tartuffe, Tartuffe cannot show up Molière. Therefore Tartuffe fears and hates Molière, excommunicates him, denies his body consecrated burial, and, with a sharp relish, consigns his soul to the brimstone gulf. The prevailing temper of the clerical guild towards the histrionic guild, from the first till now, has been uncharitable and unjust, intellectually unappreciative and morally repulsive. This is shown all the way from the frenzied De Spectaculis of Tertullian and the vituperative Histrio-Mastix of Prynne to the sweeping denunciation of the drama by Henry Ward Beecher, who, never having seen a play, condemns it from inherited prejudice, although himself every Sunday carrying a whole theatre into his pulpit in his own person. An English clergyman in 1792 uttered these words in a sermon on the drama: “No player or any of his children ought to be entitled to Christian burial or even to lie in a church-yard. Not one of them can be saved. And those who enter a play- house are equally certain with the players of eternal damnation. No player can be an honest man.” Richard Robinson, who played Wittipol in “The Devil is an Ass” so as to win warm praise from Ben Jonson, was, at the siege of Bassinge-House, shot through the head after he had laid down his arms. A puritan named Harrison shot him, crying, “Cursed be he that doeth the work of the Lord deceitfully!” The body of the favorite Parisian actor Philippe in 1824 was refused religious rites by the priests, and his friends were so incensed that the military had to be called out to quell the riot. A kindred disturbance was narrowly escaped at the death of Talma. When the wife of Nokes, a dancing-master, had rescued Edmund Kean and his wife and children from actual starvation and lent them a room, the landlord, a Christian clergyman named Flower, said that “no theatrical people should have the room.” And it is matter of fresh remembrance how the same spirit of bigotry was manifested by a Boston bishop in refusing confirmation to the universally respected and beloved Thomas Comer because he led the orchestra in a theatre, and by a New York pastor who declined to read the funeral-service over the estimable George Holland because he had been an actor.

It must be affirmed that the chief animus of the clerical profession has been the desire to be obeyed, and that this is less Christian and less amiable than the ruling spirit of the dramatic profession, which is the desire to be loved. But the real spirit which ought to reign supreme in every one is neither the desire to be obeyed nor the desire to be loved, but the desire to be harmonized with the principles of universal order, giving and taking accordingly without egotistic exactions of any kind whether dictatorial or sympathetic. And this result can only be attained by means of the dramatic art of mutual sympathetic interpretation universally applied under the guidance of moral and religious principles.

The church of Christ, in opposition to the example of its divine Founder, has been made an exclusive enclosure for a privileged class of believers. In it their prejudices are cherished and their ascetic ideal glorified and urged on all. The Saviour himself was a miracle of tolerance and inclusiveness, mingling freely with the common people, not spurning the publican, the sinner, or the harlot, but regarding all ranks in the great brotherhood of humanity with a sweet and inexhaustible kindness. There was one exception alone. Towards the bigot, the pharisee, the hypocrite, the tyrant, his scorn and indignation burned. But all other forms of man moved only his impartial love or his healing compassion. This was the divinely democratic genius of Christ, but has not been the genius of the priesthood who with arrogance and persecution have claimed to represent him. The theatre has been far more expansive in the range of its sympathies than the church. The highest dramatic genius that has ever appeared in the world, Shakspeare, shows in his works a serene charity, a boundless toleration, a genial appreciation of the widest extremes, kindred to that of God in nature and grace. His loving imagination, like the all-holding sky, embraces Trinculo, Bardolph, Poins, Falstaff, and Malvolio, as well as Bassanio, Prospero, Hamlet, Cæsar, and Lear; Audrey and Quickly, as well as Portia and Cordelia.

The first glory of the theatre is its freedom from sectarianism; and its first use is to radiate abroad this generous spirit of universality, not bigotedly limiting attention to any one province of life or any single ideal, but revealing the whole world of man in its heights and breadths and depths, exhibiting in turn every variety of ideal and doing justice to them all. “The drama,” Macklin said, “should be a perfect reproduction of general nature as it passes through human life in every character, age, rank, and station.” Taught this by genius, experience, and learning, it teaches the common observer how wondrously large and rich is the world of mankind. Emperors and clowns pass, saints and villains jostle, heroes and murderers meet, the divine lady and the foul virago appear and vanish,—and all the meanings and values of their traits and fortunes are laid bare to those who see and can understand. There is indeed no other revelation of the complex contents and destinies of humanity in this world so competent as that afforded in dramatic literature and the theatre. For here all is concentrated, heightened, set off, and revealed by aid of the most exquisite contrivances of art of every sort.

One of the most penetrative and wonderful but least generally appreciated of these contrivances is the explication of the good and evil or beauty and ugliness of souls and deeds, the moral worth and significance of dispositions and situations, by means of music. Rubinstein has depicted in his symphony of Ivan the Terrible the character of that frightful monster of the Russian throne. In this musical character-picture he has painted his hero in the blackest colors, revealing his hideous traits and moods by violent and spasmodic tones repulsively combined. But Mozart is the most dramatic of the composers,—the very Shakspeare of the musicians. The personages of his operas are distinctive creations, true to life. They appear to think, feel, and act in tones and combinations of tones. Each of the musical characters keeps his individuality, however the passions and scenes and events change. The features and outlines of the characters are defined or determined by the style, the phrases, the time, rhythm, range, inflections, and accompaniment. In place of this, Wagner marks his chief personages by the mannerism of repeating the same phrase with the same instruments whenever one of them reappears. In the Tannhäuser, as often as Venus enters the high chromatic violin tremolo and rhythmical whisper of the wind instruments are repeated. The artifice is profound, and its effect mysteriously impressive. The meaning of the mystery lies in the facts that the sounds of the music correspond with vibrations in our nerves, and that every quality of passion has its peculiar forms and rates of vibration. The ratios in the physical sound are parallel with other ratios in the spiritual consciousness. And so Giovanni and Leporello, Elvira and Anna, are distinguished. And so the Benediction of the Poignards and the Mass for the Dead are contrasted.

Characters are interpreted on the stage by means of their visible motions also. For the upper classes, the most dignified personages in the stately tragedy, there is a solemn pomp of bearing, and the employment of marches and processions. Everything partakes more of slowness and formality. The most heavenly human characters, or angelic visitants from another world, are indicated by floating contours and melodious lines of motion. Perfected equilibrium in the body is the sign of perfected harmony in the soul. Devils or demoniac men are suggested by dances full of excessive energy, hideous and sudden contortions, convulsive jumps and climaxes.

The central characteristic of the genuine melodrama, now nearly or quite obsolete, was its combination of musical tone and muscular movement as a method of dramatic revelation and impression. Its theme and scene lay in the middle or lower class and in a limited sphere. Thus, while the assassination of a monarch suggested a tragedy, a village murder would form the subject of a melodrama. But all the gestures and pantomime of the performers were regulated or accompanied by instrumental music played forte or fortissimo, piano or pianissimo, as the situation required. The villain was marked by an orchestral discord or crash, while lovers billed and cooed to the mellifluous breathings of the German flute. Villagers always came over a bridge at the rise of the curtain to lively music. The heroine entered to eight bars of plaintive melody. Four harsh and strongly accented bars heralded the approach of the villain. The characters struggled to hurried music, recognized one another and were surprised to chords, and crept about in caves and dark apartments to mysterious pizzicato strains. All this correspondence of sound, color, and motion works on the souls of the audience in the profoundest manner, obscurely suggestive of innumerable things beyond the reach of any clear memory and below the depths of any distinct apprehension. It stirs up that automatic region of our nature compacted of prehistoric experiences.

Few persons have any idea how closely the theatre even in its romantic extravaganzas and fairy spectacles reflects the truths of human life. It merely intensifies the effect and produces a magical impression by expanding and shrinking the measures of space and time. But all its seeming miracles are in the outer world slowly brought about in prosaic reality. The suddenness of the changes in the mimic scenes ought to open our eyes to the equal marvellousness of them in the gradual substance of history. Harlequin in his spangled vestment, with his sword of enchantment, pursuing the lovely Columbine, and always outwitting and baffling the clumsy attempts of the Clown and Pantaloon to circumvent him, is the type of how the aristocracy of genius has always snatched the sweet prizes of the world from blundering plebeianism amidst the astonishment, laughter, and rage of the bewildered bystanders, who so imperfectly comprehend the game. The relations of coexistence and sequence, the working of laws of cause and effect that preside over events in the actual world, are not altered in the theatre. It is only their measures or rates of action that are trifled with so to the amazement of the senses. Appreciating this, it is obvious that no transformation scenes on the stage can possibly equal the real ones in life itself. Mohammed, the poor factor of Kadijah, receives an inspiration, preaches a new faith, is hunted by his foes, conquers nation after nation, till a quarter of the earth exults under his crescent flag and hails him infallible prophet of Allah. Columbus conceives a thought, his frail pinnaces pierce their perilous way over the ocean, and a new world is discovered. Louis Napoleon is taken from teaching French for a livelihood in New York to be throned in the palace of the Tuileries and to inaugurate the _Exposition Universelle_ surrounded by the leading monarchs of the earth. The young Rachel, haggard and ill clad, begged an influential person to obtain leave for her to appear on the stage of the Théâtre Français. He told her to get a basket and sell flowers. When she did appear, and heaps of bouquets were thrown at her feet, after the curtain fell she flung them all into a basket, slung it from her shoulders, and, kneeling to the man who had advised her to go and sell flowers, asked him, half in smiles and half in tears, if he would not buy a nosegay. Nothing that befalls the glittering Harlequin or Columbine amidst the swift enchantments of the theatre is fuller of astounding contrasts than these realities, if our thought but escapes the tyranny of space and time.

An artifice of vast power by which the theatre intensifies its revelations of character and experience, conduct and destiny, so as to make them more effective and apparently more significant than the original realities themselves are in actual life, is by increasing the range and vividness of the standards and foils by which they are judged, carrying them lower and raising them higher and making their contrasts sharper than they are seen elsewhere. The fool used to have the head of his stick or mock sceptre painted with human features, and talk and play with it as if it were an intelligent comrade. This was his bauble, in allusion to which Shakspeare says, “The fool holds his bauble for a god.” Scoggan, the famous mummer, used to dress up his fists and make them act for the amusement of a dinner company. This is the secret of the vulgar delight in the clown, with his ridiculous dress made up of absurdities, his face whitened with chalk and flour and blotched with red patches and black and yellow streaks, his lips painted in elongations so that when he laughs his mouth seems to open from ear to ear. The mental disparity of his standard of intelligence and manners with that in the minds of the spectators elicits roars of coarse joy from them. It was said of Mazurier, the great Punchinello, that he was in deformities what Apollo was in perfections. Humped equally before and behind, perched on the legs of a heron, equipped with the arms of an ape, he moved with that stiffness without force, that suppleness devoid of reaction, characterizing the play of a body which has not in itself the principle of its movement, and whose members, set in action by a wire, are not attached to the trunk by articulations, but by rags. He imitated mechanism with as close a fidelity as in another rôle mechanism is made to imitate man. He seemed to be human and yet to have nothing human. His motions and falls were such that one believed him made not of flesh and bone but of cotton and thread. His face was wooden, and he carried illusion to such a pitch that the children took him for a gigantic puppet which had grown.

Even below this there is a lower dramatic depth still, and filled with yet keener sport for a large class. The reflection of human life in the marionette or puppet-show makes a revelation of a phase of human nature as profound and fearful as it is unexpected. The revelation is not consciously made, but springs from an intuitive perception of truth and sense of fitness as marvellous as anything in the history of the drama. It has long been known that there is an intimate likeness between the insane class and the criminal class. They both show the effect of removing the restraints exerted on the ego by its sympathetic connections with the general public. The restraint exercised on the indulgence of egotistic feelings and interests by a consideration of the feelings and interests of others being lifted off, these selfish instincts, which are the deepest organic heritage from ancestral history, break recklessly out. Now, the puppet has no sympathy. Moved not by his brain and heart but by wires attached to his limbs, his character shows the result. He is personified selfishness and whim. His individual will is absolutely reckless of other wills or of consequences. His ferocity is murderous, his jollity fiendish, his conduct a jumble of animal passions, cunning impulses, and chaotic impressions. This is unregenerate man released from social order and given over to himself. And there is a deep, sinister, raw pleasure for an uncultivated soul in the sight of a being freed from every law but that of self-indulgence. This is the secret of the fascination of the plebeian puppet-show.

Sometimes there has been in it a strange and terrible element of social satire. The lower class vent through it their hatred for their oppressors. One type of the Italian Polichinelle was a representative of the populace angered and made vindictive by their wrongs. He lays the stick lustily on the shoulders of his master and on the necks of the police, and takes summary vengeance for the iniquities of official justice. He is also a frightful cynic. He says, “I despise men so much that I care not what they think or say of me. I have suffered as much as others, but I have turned my back and my heart into leather. I am laughter personified, triumphant laughter, wicked laughter. Pshaw for the poor creatures knocked over by a breath! I am of iron and wood, old also as the world.” “In thus speaking,” says his French historian, “he is truthful; for his heart is as dry as his baton, and he is a thorough egotist. Ferocious under his seeming good humor, he does evil for the love of it. Valuing the life of a man no more than that of a flea, he delights in quarrels and massacres.” He has no sincere affection, no reverence, no fear either of God or devil, is always eager for coarse and low enjoyment, and laughs most loudly when he has done the cruellest deeds. He is the very type of the strong, vital, abandoned criminal; and he opens a huge vista into the most horrible experience of the human race.

And now it will be a relief to turn attention aloft in the opposite direction. The upward action of the dramatic art is its benign aspect. The egotist looks down to learn how great he is, and up to learn how little. The generous man looks up to feel how rich he is, and down to feel how poor. The former sees himself in contrast with others, the latter sees himself in unison with them. This may be exemplified in comedy as well as in tragedy. The portraiture of reality on the stage hitherto has perhaps chiefly aimed to amuse by exhibiting the follies and absurdities of people and making the spectators laugh at them in reaction from standards in their own minds. It will one day aim to correct the follies and absurdities of the spectators by setting before them models of superiority and ideals of perfection.

To enter into and appropriate the states and prerogatives of those happier, greater, and better than we, either for an admiring estimate of them, for the enrichment of ourselves, or for the free play of desirable spiritual qualities, is at once recreation, luxury, redemption, and education. This is the highest application of the dramatic principle, the mending of the characters of men with the characters of superior men. And it tends to the reconciliation and attuning of all the world. This is the principle which Paul illustrates in his doctrine that true circumcision is not of the flesh but of the soul, and that the genuine children of Abraham are the new race of spiritual characters which, reproducing his type of faith and conduct, will supersede his mere material descendants. He also says that those who measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves among themselves are not wise. The complement of this statement would be that we should compare ourselves with all sorts of people, that we may put off every imperfection of our own and put on every perfection of theirs. And the same apostle gives this principle its supremest application in his immortal text, “Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ.” The Pauline formula for the salvation of the world embodies the regenerating essence of the dramatic art, which is the assimilation by less divine characters of a more divine one, raising them into fellowship with the Divinest. It calls on all men to “behold with open face, as in a mirror, the glory of the Lord,” and gaze on it until “they are changed into the same image, from glory to glory, by the Spirit of the Lord.”

In distinction from this high use of the dramatic life and spirit, the fault of the ordinary range of coarse and careless men is the utter absence of all vital sympathetic insight. Fixed in the grooves of habit, shut up in their own hard and narrow type, they move stolidly among other men, insensible to the treasures they contain, giving and taking no more than so many sticks would.

And in some who have a fair share of the dramatic instinct it suffers a direct inversion of its purest office. For the weak and reckless allow themselves to be degraded to the level of the worst characters they behold, adopt their customs, assume their traits, copy their vices, and repeat their retributive ruin. The man of moral earnestness is warned and armed by a dramatic knowledge of the profligate and criminal. Only the impure or heedless idler will be led astray by it.

Yet there is another abuse of this art of dramatic penetration, which, if less fearful, is more frequent and almost as much to be reprehended, namely, a fruitless toying with it in a spirit of mere frivolity. A great many persons enter imaginatively into the states of other people, neither to honor and imitate nor to disapprove and avoid, but in empty sport and as an ostentatious luxury of vanity and pride. There is nothing which vulgar natures are so fond of as, in vulgar phrase, feeling their oats, pampering their fancied superiority to those they contemplate. They hate to be rebuked and commanded by excellences beyond their own attainment. They love to look down on something beneath their own arrogated estimate of self. And so they come to interpret almost everything they see as being inferior, and to draw from it a reflex complacency. Their noisy laughter is but an indirect self-applause consisting of what Emerson has called “contemptible squeals of joy.” For whatever a man can laugh at he deems he is superior to. Nothing did the audiences at the old miracle-plays enjoy half so keenly as laughing at the devil when he was driven through a trap-door in a sulphurous shower of fire and squibs. The reason why a superficial exhibition of wit or humor is so popular is that it affords, at so low a price of effort, the luxury of the feeling of detachment and mastery. The insincere or unconsecrated nature always prefers a cheap seeming superiority to a costly real one. However much Harlequin and Punch and Judy may relieve and amuse, and thus find justification, they do not purify nor lift nor inspire nor educate the ordinary spectator. The genuine drama does all these in addition to bestowing the richest entertainment. Still, it must be remembered that the influence of a performance depends ultimately on the character and spirit of the spectator. Some persons seeing Washington would think nothing of his character, but be absorbed in admiration of his regimentals. One, at a given exhibition, will be simply entertained. Another will be debauched. A third will be lastingly impressed, stimulatingly edified. A fourth may enjoy the delusive luxury of a criticising superiority, persuading himself that he includes and transcends the characters whose enactments he so clearly understands and sees around. Those who laugh at those who weep fancy they are above them while really grovelling below in vulgar insensibility. One may easily lift armor he cannot wear.

The next use of the theatre, the most obvious of its serious uses, lies in the force with which it carries the great practical truths of morality home to the heart and the soul. The power of the stage in enforcing moral lessons, the rewards of virtue, the beauty of nobleness, the penalties of vice and crime, the horrors of remorse and disgrace, the peace and comfort of a self-approving conscience, is greater than that of any other mode of teaching. Its living exemplification of the workings of good and evil in the secret soul and in the social sphere has an effectiveness of incitement and of warning far beyond that of the mere didactic precept or exhortation of the pulpit. It is said that many a dissipated and felonious apprentice who saw Ross play George Barnwell was turned from his evil courses by the terrible force of the representation. One who was thus saved used every year anonymously to send Ross on his benefit-night the sum of ten guineas as a token of his gratitude. And Dr. Barrowby assured the player that he had done more good by his acting than many a parson had by his preaching. This educational function or moral edification in uncovering the secrets of experience and showing how every style of character and conduct entails its own compensatory consequences is even now a high and fruitful office of the theatre, frivolous and corrupt as it often is. And when the drama shall be made in all respects what it ought to be, fulfilling its own proper ideal, it will be beyond comparison the most effective agency in the world for imparting moral instruction and influence. The teaching of the stage is indeed all the more insinuating and powerful because it is indirect and not perfunctory or interested. The audience are not on their guard against it. It works with the force of nature and sincerity themselves.

“I have heard
That guilty creatures, sitting at a play,
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaimed their malefactions.”

No thoughtful and earnest person could possibly see the wickedness of Iago, the torture of Othello, the struggle and remorse of Macbeth, depicted by a great actor and not be profoundly instructed, moved, and morally fortified.

Not only does the drama array its teachings of morality in living forms so much more contagious and powerful than abstract precepts, but it also gives the highest examples of didactic eloquence. It abounds in the most beautiful expressions of poetry and philosophy, the wisest and most charming instances of insight and moralizing experience, verbal descriptions of character and of nature set off with every adjunct of oratoric art and heightening scenery. The preaching on the stage is often richer and sounder as well as more splendid than that heard from the pulpit. Besides, the pleasing excitement of the scene, the persuasive interest of the play, the surrendered and receptive spirits of the crowd blending in quickest sympathy and applause always over the most disinterested and exalted sentiments, predispose every hearer to the most favorable mood for being impressed by what is lovely, good, and great. The actor, inspired by his theme and his audience, makes thousands thrill and weep as he gives burning utterance to burning thoughts or infuses his own high spirit into beautiful and heroic examples of eloquence and virtue. When in Macbeth Forrest said,—

“I dare do all that may become a man,
Who dares do more is none;”—

when in the Peruvian hero he replied to the accusation from Pizarro of having spoken falsely, “Rolla utter falsehood! I would I had thee in a desert with thy troop around thee, and I but with my sword in this unshackled hand!” when in Damon he said, in rebuke of the corrupt and sycophantic office-seeker,—

“I told you, boy, I favored not this stealing
And winding into place: what he deserves,
An honest man dares challenge ’gainst the world,”—

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

“Ha! behold in air
Where a majestic eagle floats above
The northern turrets of the citadel,
And as the sun breaks through yon rifted cloud
His plumage shines, embathed in burning gold,
And sets off his regality in heaven!”

To have such a picture painted in speech and action so vividly that the hearers are transported out of themselves and tremble with pleasure is an educational influence of a pure and lofty order. The victorious Spartacus soliloquizes,—

“A cloud is on my path, but my ambition
Sees glory in it. As travellers, who stand
On mountains, view upon some neighboring peak
Among the mists a figure of themselves
Traced in sublimer characters; so I
Here see the vapory image of myself
Distant and dim, but giant-like.”

All who take the impression of the actor and his imagery in this passage must receive some sense of the greatness of man and the mystery of his destiny, and feel themselves magnified beyond their wonted state. And when Forrest spoke these words of Virginius whole audiences were electrified by their power and inspirited with their sublime faith:

“Whoever says Justice will be defeated—
He lies in the face of the gods. She is immutable,
Immaculate, and immortal. And though all
The guilty globe should blaze, she will spring up
Through the fire and soar above the crackling pile
With not a downy feather ruffled by
Its fierceness!”

The noble lines of the poet full of great thoughts, scarcely heeded and soon forgotten by the reader, are by the fiery or solemn elocution of the actor sculptured on the memories of his auditors for ineffaceable retention.

The theatre is always in some degree a school of manners, but it ought to be far more distinctly and systematically such. The different personages are foils and contrasts to set one another off. As they act and react in their various styles of being and of behavior, they advertise and illuminate what they are, and tacitly, but with the most penetrative effect, teach the spectator to estimate them by mutual comparisons and by reference to such standards as he knows. Grandeur and meanness, awkwardness and grace, brutal or fiendish cruelty and divine sensibility, selfish arrogance and sweet renunciation, grossness and delicacy,—in a word, every possible sort and grade of inward disposition and of outward bearing are exemplified on the stage. The instructive spectacle is too often gazed at with frivolity and mirth alone. But more profound, more vital, more important lessons are nowhere in the world taught. This art of manners precisely fitted to the character and rank of the person has been particularly studied in the Théâtre Français. The writer saw a play represented there in which there were three distinct sets of characters. The first belonged to the circle of royalty, the second to the gentry, and the third were of the laboring class. The second carefully aped the first, and the third painfully aped the second. The bearing of the first was composed, easy, dignified; that of the second was a lowered copy with curious differences made most instructively perceptible; while the third was a ludicrous travesty. The superior always, as by a secret magic, overswayed and gave the cue to the inferior. The king, disguised, sat down at table with a plebeian. The king ate and drank slowly, quietly, with a silent refinement in every motion; but the plebeian hurried, shuffled, fussed, choked, and sneezed. The actor who is really master of his whole business teaches in a thousand indescribably subtile ways a thousand indescribably valuable lessons for all who have eyes to see and intelligence behind the eyes to interpret what they see and apply its morals to their own edification.

Another service rendered by the theatre is in uncovering the arts of deceit and villainy. In their unsophisticated openness the innocent are often the helpless victims of seductive adepts in dissipation and crime. All the designing ways and tricks of the votaries of vice, the hypocritical wiles of brilliant scoundrels, their insinuating movements, the magnetizing spells they weave around the unsuspicious, are exposed on the stage in such a manner as fully to put every careful observer on guard. This unmasking of dangers, this warning and arming, is a species of moral instruction quite necessary in the present state of society, and nowhere so consummately exhibited as before the footlights. Nor is it to be fancied that the instruction is more demoralizing than guardian; for the instinctive sympathies of a public assembly move towards virtue, not towards vice. They who seem to be corrupted by public plays are inwardly corrupt beforehand.

A further and fairer utility of the stage is the exact opposite of that last mentioned. It is the delightful privilege of dramatic performers to exhibit pleasing and admirable types of character and display their worths and graces so as to kindle the love and worship of those who behold, and awaken in them emulous desires for the noble virtues and the exquisite charms which they see so divinely embodied. If the manifestation of heroism, piety, modesty, tenderness, self-sacrifice, glorious aspiration in the drama is not an educational and redemptive spectacle, it must be because the stolidity and shallowness of the audience neutralize its proper influence. Then it is they who are disgraced, not the play which is discredited.

It is also a signal function of dramatic acting to reveal to ordinary people the extraordinary attributes of their own nature by exemplifying before them the transcendent heights and depths of the human soul. Average persons and their average lives are prosaic and monotonous, often mean and tiresome or repulsive. They have no conception of the august or appalling extremes reached by those of the greatest endowments, the intensities of their experience, the grandeurs and the mysteries of their fate. In contrast with the tame level of vulgar life, the dull plod of the humdrum world, the theatre shows the romantic side of life, the supernal passions and adventures of genius, the entrancements of dreaming ideality, the glimpsing hints and marvels of destiny. An actor like Garrick or Salvini, an actress like Rachel or Ristori, carrying the graduated signals of love to the climax of beatific bliss, or the signals of jealousy to the explosive point of madness, makes common persons feel that they had not dreamed what these passions were. In beholding a great play greatly performed an audience gain a new measure for the richness of experience and the width of its extremes. Thus average people are brought to see the exceptional greatnesses of humanity and initiated into some appreciation of those astonishing passions, feats, and utterances of genius which must otherwise have remained sealed mysteries to them. Rachel used to stand, every nerve seeming an adder, and freeze and thrill the audience with terror, as her fusing gestures, perfectly automatic although guided by will, glided in slow continuity of curves or darted in electric starts. The commanding majesty, intelligence, and passion of Siddons seemed to bring her audience before her and not her before her audience. A great actor enlarges the diapason of man. Our kind is aggrandized in him. He is copy to men of grosser faculty and teaches them how to feel. It was this sort of association in his mind that made Dryden say of the aged Betterton, with such magnifying pomp of phrase,—

“He, like the sun, still shoots a glimmering ray,
Like ancient Rome majestic in decay.”

But the central and essential office of the drama is to serve as a means of spiritual purification, freedom, and enrichment. It is a most powerful alterative for those wearied, sickened, and soured with egotism. It takes them out of themselves, transfers their thoughts from their own affairs, and trains them in disinterested sympathy. They are made to hate the tyrants, loathe the sycophants, admire the heroes, pity the sufferers, love the lovers, grieve with the unhappy, and rejoice with the glad. Redeemed from the dismal treadmill of the ego, they enter into the fortunes of others and put on their feelings, and, exulting to be out of the purgatory of self-consciousness, they roam at large in the romantic paradise of sympathetic human kind. As we sit in the theatre and follow the course of the play, a torrent of ideal life is poured through the soul, free from the sticky attachments of personal prejudices, slavish likes and dislikes, viscous and disturbing morbidities. It therefore cleanses and emancipates. This is what Aristotle meant in saying that the soul should be purged by the passions of pity and terror. The impure mixture of broken interests and distracted feelings known in daily life is washed away by the overwhelming rush of the emotions and lessons of a great tragedy. One may recognize in another the signs of states—a glow of muscle, a vigor of thought, a height of sentiment—which he could not create in himself, but which he easily enters into by sympathy. An actor of splendid genius and tone, in the focus of a breathless audience, is for the hour a millionaire of soul. Two thousand spectators sitting before him divest themselves of themselves and put him on, and are for the hour millionaires of soul too. And so the stage illustrates a cheap way to wealth of consciousness, or every man his own spiritual Crœsus.

The histrionic art is likewise the best illustration of history. No narrative of events or biographic description can vie with a good play properly set on the stage in giving a vivid conception of an ancient period or a great personage. It steals the keys of time, enters the chambers of the past, and summons the sleeping dead to life again in their very forms, costumes, and motions.

“Time rushes o’er us: thick as evening clouds
Ages roll back. What calls them from their shrouds?
What in full vision brings their good and great,
The men whose virtues make a nation’s fate,
The far forgotten stars of human kind?
_The Stage, that mighty telescope of mind!_”

What are the words of Tacitus or Livy in their impression on the common mind compared with the visible resurrection of the people and life of Rome in “Virginius,” “Brutus,” “Julius Cæsar,” or “Antony and Cleopatra”? Colley Cibber said, with felicitous phrase, “The most a Vandyke can arrive at is to make his portraits of great persons seem to think. A Shakspeare goes further, and tells you what his pictures thought. A Betterton steps beyond both, and calls them from the grave to breathe and be themselves again in feature, speech, and motion.” The theatrical art puts in our hands a telescope wherewith we pierce distant ages and nations and see them as they were.

And as it revives the truths and wonders of antiquity, so it reflects the present world, depicting in its successive scenes all forms of society and experience, from the luxuries of the palace to the wretchedness of the hovel. Moreover, in addition to thus lifting the curtain from the past and the present, it gives prophetic glimpses of the future, in its representations of ideal types of men and women and in its poetic pictures of happier times yet to bless the world. While most buildings are devoted to the mere interests and comforts of the private individual or family, or to mechanical business and selfish scheming, well is it that there should be one fair and open edifice dedicated to the revelation of human nature in its whole extent, of human experience in all its seriousness and mirth, of human love and hope in all their beautiful glory.

But, after all the uses of the theatre enumerated above, there remains to be stated what is perhaps its most constant, most valuable and universal benefit; namely, its delightful ministry of recreation and amusement. In its charmed enclosure there is a blessed escape from the jading cares and toils and hates and griefs and fears that so harass and corrode heart and mind in the emulous strifes of the world. Here pictures of beauty and bravery are exhibited, adventures of romantic interest set forth, the most sublime deeds and engaging traits of men lifted into relief, a tide of pride and joy and love sent warm to the hearts of the crowd, and all factitious distinctions swept away, as thousands of eyes gaze on the same scenes and thousands of bosoms beat together with one emotion. In the drama all the arts are concentrated, and made accessible to those of the most moderate means, with a splendor which elsewhere, if found at all, can be commanded only by the favored few. There is the rich and imposing architecture of the theatre itself, with its stately proportions and fair ornaments. There is the audience with its brilliant toilets and its array of celebrity, beauty, and fashion. There are colors in every direction, and painting in the elaborate scenery heightened by the gorgeous illumination poured over all. There is sculpture in the most exquisite forms and motions, the living statuary of the trained performers. There are poetry and oratory in the skilled elocution of the speakers. There are the interest of the story, the interplay of the characters, and the evolution and climax of the plot. There is the profound magnetic charm of the sympathetic assembly, all swayed and breathing as one. And then there is the penetrative incantation, the omnipotent spell of rhythm, in the music of the orchestra, the chant of the singers, the dancing of the ballet.

Here indeed is an art equally fitted to amuse the weary, to instruct the docile, and to express the inspired. The prejudiced deprecators of the drama have delighted to depict the kings and queens of the stage descending from their scenic pedestals, casting off their tinsel robes, and slinking away in slovenly attire into cellar and garret. How much worthier of note is the reverse aspect, the noble metamorphosis actors undergo when the prosaic belittlement of their daily life of poverty and care slips off and they enter the scene in the greatest characters of history to enact the grandest conceptions of passion and poetry! And there is an influence in great impersonations to purify and ennoble their performers. The law of congruity necessitates it. “If,” said Clairon, “I am only an ordinary woman for twenty of the twenty-four hours of the day, no effort I can make will render me more than an ordinary woman when I appear as Agrippina or Semiramis.” The actor, to make heroic, sublime, or tender manifestations of the mysterious power and pity and doom of human nature, must have these qualities in his soul. No petty or vulgar nature could be competent to such strokes of wonder and pathos as the “Prithee, undo this button!” of Garrick; the “Fool, fool, fool!” of Kean; the “Vous pleurez, Zaïre!” of Lekain; the “After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well!” of Forrest.

The theatre offers us an unrivalled opportunity for the economical activity of all our faculties, especially of our finer sentiments, which there play freely, disconnected from the exacting action of the studious intellect. The whole concentrated mass of life shown in action on the stage is ideally radiated into the bosoms of the beholders without cost to them. They despise, they admire, they laugh, they weep, they feel complacent in their contempt or in their reverence. Many who are too poor and outcast, or too busy and worn, or too proud and irascible, or too grieved and unfortunately circumstanced, for the indulgence of these feelings in real life, find the luxuries copiously and cheaply supplied in the scene. This is one reason why so many play-goers retain such grateful recollections of their favorites. Steele said, “From the acting of Mr. Betterton I have received more strong impressions of what is great and noble in human nature than from the arguments of the most solid philosophers or the descriptions of the most charming poets.” Robson declared, “I never came away from seeing Bannister without feeling ten years younger, and that if I had not, with Christian, got rid of my sins, I had got rid of what was pretty nearly as heavy to carry, my cares.” A noble lady of Edinburgh who in her youth had seen Siddons, when blind and nearly speechless in the torpor of extreme age, on being reminded of the great actress, broke into enthusiastic expressions, while smiles lighted up the features pale and wrinkled with nearly a hundred years.

An old English writer asking how he shall seclude and refresh himself from fretting care and hardship puts aside every form of vicious dissipation, and says,—

“My faculties truly to recreate
With modest mirth and myself to please,
Give me a PLAY that no distaste can breed.
Prove thou a spider and from flowers suck gall;
I will, bee-like, take honey from a weed,
For I was never puritanical.”

Collective history looked at from the human point of view may sometimes appear a chaos, but seen from the divine auditorium above it is a perfect drama, the earth its stage, the generations its actors. Thus the argument of Thomas Heywood was sound, No Theatre, No World!

“If then the world a theatre present,
As by the roundnesse it appears most fit,
Built with starre-galleries of high ascent
In which Jehove doth as spectator sit
And chief determines to applaud the best,
But by their evil actions doome the rest,
He who denies that theatres should be
He may as well deny the world to me!”

For as the world is a stage, so the stage is a world. It is an artistic world in which not only the natural but also the supernatural world is revealed. This is shown with overwhelming abundance of power in William Winter’s description of the Saul of Alfieri as rendered by Salvini:

“It depicts the condition of an imaginative mind, a stately and robust character, an arrogant, fiery spirit, an affectionate heart, and, altogether, a royal and regally-poised nature, that have first been undermined by sin and the consciousness of sin, and then crazed by contact with the spirit-world and by a nameless dread of the impending anger of an offended God. It would be difficult to conceive of a more distracting and piteous state. Awe and terror surround this august sufferer, and make him both holy and dreadful. In his person and his condition, as these are visible to the imaginative mind, he combines all the elements that impress and thrill. He is of vast physical stature, which time has not bent, and of great beauty of face, which griefs have ravaged but not destroyed. He is a valiant and bloody warrior, and danger seems to radiate from his presence. He is a magnanimous king and a loving father, and he softens by generosity and wins by gentleness. He is a maniac, haunted by spectres and scourged with a whip of scorpions, and his red-eyed fury makes all space a hell and shatters silence with the shrieks of the damned. He is a human soul, burdened with the frightful consciousness of the Almighty’s wrath, and poised in torment on the precipice that overhangs the dark and storm-beaten ocean of eternity. His human weakness is affrighted by ghastly visions and by all manner of indefinite horrors, against which his vain struggles do but make more piteous his awful condition. The gleams of calm that fall upon his tortured heart only light up an abyss of misery,—a vault of darkness peopled by demons. He is already cut off from among the living by the doom of inevitable fate, and while we pity him we fear him. His coming seems attended with monstrous shapes; he diffuses dissonance; his voice is a cry of anguish or a wail of desolation; his existence is a tempest; there can be no relief for him save death, and the death that ends him comes like the blessing of tears to the scorched eyelids of consuming misery. That is the Saul of the Bible and of Alfieri’s tragedy; and that is the Saul whom Salvini embodies. It is a colossal monument of human suffering that the actor presents, and no man can look upon it without being awed and chastened and lifted above the common level of this world.”

But the culminating utility and glory and eulogy of the art of the theatre are not that it furnishes common people an opportunity for learning what are the exceptional greatness, beauty, and wonder of human nature by the sight of its most colossal faculties unveiled and its most marvellous terrors, splendors, sorrows, and ecstasies exposed for study, but that _its inherent genius tends to produce expansive sympathy, sincerity of soul, generous deeds, and an open catholicity of temper_. No other class is so true and liberal to its own members in distress or so prompt in response to public calamity as that of the actors. Their constant familiarity with the sentiments of nobleness and pity imbues them with the qualities. In trying exigencies, personal or national, their conduct has often illustrated the truth of the compliment paid them by the poet:

“These men will act the passions they inspire,
And wave the sabre as they sweep the lyre.”

Macklin said, “I have always loved the conscious worth of a good action more than the profit that would arise from a bad one.” A famous singer was passing through the market-place of Lyons one day, when a woman with a sick child asked alms of him. He had left his purse behind, but, wishing to aid the woman, he took off his hat, sang his best, and hastily gave her the money he collected.

“The singer, pleased, passed on, and softly thought,
Men will not know by whom this deed was wrought;
But when at night he came upon the stage,
Cheer after cheer went up from that wide throng,
And flowers rained on him. Nothing could assuage
The tumult of the welcome save the song
That for the beggars he had sung that day
While standing in the city’s busy way.”

So when in his old age the great tenor, Duprez, reappeared to sing some stanzas he had composed in behalf of the sufferers by an inundation, as he said he could no longer utter the sensational cry of Arnold in William Tell, _Suivez-moi_, but that he still had strength to sing _Secourons le malheur_, the house rang with plaudits.

The flexibility of the actor, his sympathetic art, the affecting poetic situations in which he is seen set off by aggrandizing and romantic adjuncts, clothe him with fascinating associations, make him gazed after and courted. This is one secret of the keen interest felt in him. He who gives the most powerful signs of soul is naturally thought to have the greatest soul. The great have always been drawn to make favorites of actors. Demosthenes was the friend of Satyrus; Cicero, of Roscius; Louis the Fourteenth, of Molière; Bolingbroke, of Barton Booth; Napoleon, of Talma; Byron, of Kean. The Duke of Northumberland gave Kemble ten thousand pounds sterling. Lord Loughborough settled a handsome annuity on Macklin in his destitute age; and when the old actor in his one hundred and eighth year was about to die he besought the friend who had agreed to write his life to make grateful mention of this.

Players have given kings and nobles greater benefits than they have received from them, often teaching them character as well as manners. When the Earl of Essex told Edmund Kean that by continuing to associate with Incledon, the decayed singer, he would endanger his own further welcome in the upper class, the actor replied, “My lord, Incledon was my friend, in the strictest sense of the word, when I had scarcely another friend in the world; and if I should now desert him in the decline of his popularity and the fall of his fortunes I should little deserve the friendship of any man, and be quite unworthy of the favorable opinion your lordship has done me the honor to entertain for me.” Thus speaking, he rose, and, with a profound bow to the earl, left the room.

The greatest social characters have not only always affected the society of gifted players, but have themselves had a profound passion for the personal practice of the art. This is because the art deals with all the most subtile secrets of human nature and experience, out of which grow those arts of power which they feel to be their peculiar province. It is also because in this practice they escape from the empty round of the merely conventional and titular which soon becomes so wearying to the soul and so nauseous to the heart, and come into the realm of reality. The effect produced by the king, the deference paid to him, may be hollow. The power of the actor depends on genuine gifts, on his own real being and skill and charm. And he sees through all cold forms and shallow pretences. His very art, in its bedizenments and factitious accessories, sickens him of all shams in private life. There he wants sincerity and the unaffected substantial goods of nature, a friendly fellowship springing straight from the heart. When the wife of Kean asked him what Lord Essex had said of his Shylock, the actor replied, “Damn Lord Essex. The pit rose at me!” A common soldier with whom Cooke had quarrelled refused to fight him because he was rich and the persons present would favor him. Cooke said, “Look here, sir. This is all I possess in the world,” showing three hundred and fifty pounds in bank- notes, which he immediately thrust into the fire, holding the poker on them till they were consumed. Then he added, “Now I am a beggar, sir. Will you fight me now?”