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,—