THE GOSPELS CONSIDERED AS A DRAMA.
Lecture by David H. Wheeler, LL.D., President of Allegheny College, delivered in the Amphitheater, Chautauqua, N. Y., August 23d, at 2 p. m.
Let me begin by saying that my subject is not theological, and it will save us trouble if we remember it. Let me say in the second place that my subject is not the stage, but a book. I shall not discuss the drama as it is related to the stage, but the drama as a form of literature. The theologian may find some comfort in the reflection that if God makes a book it must be the best book. By the drama we mean simply the best telling of a story. The gospels as God’s book may therefore be regarded as necessarily the best told story in the world. But a few things may be profitably said with regard to the relations of the drama with the stage. First, this general one, that the stage was a contrivance for ages and times when men could not read; and that ever since men learned to read, the stage has been passing into shadow. An illustration of that may be found in the fact that in the sixteenth century, the age of Shakspere, there were probably one thousand men who went to the theater to one man who could read a book; whereas, in our time, there are a hundred thousand men who read books to one man who frequents the theater. The stage, in other words, is an effete institution. It is therefore an institution whose death does not carry with it the death of the drama; for, along with the death of the stage, there has come an enlargement of the scope of the drama. No important story was ever put upon the stage, or could be. The stage is too narrow for a great theme; therefore all the themes of all the plays are necessarily narrow themes—a few incidents grouped about a character, or grouped about a single characteristic of human nature. We have need in the world to tell stories that are larger, that require an ampler stage for their development; that deal not only with single principles, and single men, but with many principles and vast masses of men—that concern not for a moment, or an hour, and a single epoch of human life, but concern vast reaches of time and vaster interests of humanity. And so it has come to pass that in our modern times, our poetry—our epic poetry and our dramatic poetry—the two highest forms of literary art, have undergone a great transformation. The poem has become a novel. The epic has passed into this form; and the drama has become history. Carlyle says that it is the business of the poet to write history.
We make distinction between prose and poetry, but we ought to remember that with regard to epic poetry, and dramatic poetry, both are to be expressed either in verse or prose, and that versification is an accident. There may be epic poems in prose; and, as the freest form, prose has become the prevailing form, and poetry is, more and more, as the world grows older, confined to the lyric jingle. Poetry, in the old sense, soon will pass, and the drama has passed into unversified poetry. Milton made a great change by adopting blank verse, and Shakspere had started us on the same road. In our age the great works of poetic language may be expected to be produced in what is technically prose. The epic poem may also be dramatically constructed, so that we may have the prose epic under form of the drama.
Let me call attention to the fact that we are fortunate in speaking a tongue, the imperial language, in which Shakspere practically killed the old Aristotelian unities. He wanted a dramatic form in which to tell the story of the fall of Julius Cæsar, and the story of English history. He had to discard the old unities of time and place. The only Aristotelian unity that remains in our English literature is that of subject. The subject of a dramatic action, or an epic story, must have unity. There must be one action having a beginning, a middle, and an end; and there must be a constant, regular, orderly, striking, impressive advance from the beginning to the end.
Now we come to consider whether the gospels ought to be regarded as a drama. In the first place, we are familiar with the custom of commenting on and praising the literary merits of the gospel. We say how sweet and fluent and intelligible is the language in which it is written. We understand that portions of it reach the heights of sublimity, particularly the seventeenth chapter of John. We are familiar with the fact that its English is so beautiful that there are men among us to rise and complain if we interfere with a word in it. We are familiar with the idea that the gospels have literary merits of a very high order. But we have been accustomed, as a rule, to regard these things in detail rather than as a whole. Now, when I say that they may be regarded as dramatic, I mean the highest literary merit crowns them as a whole. Their story is told in a dramatic form. No story ever told under the sun was so well told as is this story of the life, death, resurrection and ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ. I must treat this topic illustratingly, for my sole purpose is to get an idea before you. Look, then, at the idea of dramatizing history. It is said that Lord Marlborough read only Shakspere for English history. He found that the dramatist had put his conceptions of the actions and characteristics of leading men in English history in such an effective way, that, whether he was right or wrong, he had fixed the national estimate of these characters—had typed them forever. What Shakspere says a man was, the English people will go on thinking him to have been. These characters give us, on a small scale, the purpose and effect of the dramatization of history. When Shakspere did his work, little historical study had been done. English critical history dates from after his time. But without the help of critics he conceived and typed groups of characters, and he had such power of placing himself in the center of things and working out the characteristics, that he really constructed English history by the dramatic method. He had pitifully few materials, but historians who have come after him have found his types very faithful, and have been content to work out the details, accepting the pictures Shakspere had hung up before the eyes of the nation. Shaksperean English characters can not be much changed by ever so much study. This is only an illustration of the triumph which the dramatic form may win. Another most important distinction is the one between the theatrical and the dramatic. We can best understand it by looking at the common significance of the words. By “theatrical” we mean something false, fictitious, showy, with no reality behind it.
When a human action is theatrical it is insincere and false to the facts. On the other hand, when you use the word “dramatic,” you mean something entirely different. You mean to praise the thing and not condemn it. When the two Senators from New York suddenly resigned their position in 1881—you remember it—the friends of these men spoke of their action as dramatic, and their enemies characterized their action as theatrical; one to praise, the other to blame. An incident like that draws the line better than a definition. The word “drama” has won a place outside of the stage—and it more and more separates itself from the stage, and becomes a word descriptive of the best told story. In such a story there must be reality. It must be a story so put together that the meaning leaps out as the story goes on, and the mind takes hold of the meaning easily and fully—so that the whole meaning flashes on the understanding. You all know the power of a good story teller. You all know that every neighborhood has some man who can grasp an incident and tell it so that it comes strikingly before the mind. This power of narrative is at once epic and dramatic. This village story teller is a miniature Milton and Shakspere. The arrangement of a drama is systematic; and moves to a climax with full force. In order to a dramatic arrangement it is not necessary that the characters should be combined, as in the form of a play; it is only necessary that the story should be told in the most effective way, so that its meaning will flash clear and strong on the understanding. The gospels are told in this way; and it is the only possible way in which their story could reach the understanding. If we consider the gospels from this point of view, there are several things to attract our attention. One of them is the universality of the human nature which is brought out in the gospel. If you take up a picture book, or a fashion book of a hundred years ago, you are interested in a certain way in studying the characters, and discovering that the people dressed in a way very different from the present mode. You study the strange dresses with interest, but at the same time with a kind of feeling that these people were not just like yourself. Your point of observation in the fashion-plate presents you with nothing but unlikeness to yourself and your contemporaries. It is a strange world to you.
Now, what the fashion-plate is, a great part of literature is. It is something which gets old, out of fashion, outworn, when it is a hundred years old. People live largely upon a contemporaneous literary diet. The most of the literature for each generation is produced by itself, and therefore the human nature of it, like the dresses of the fashion-plate, is in a little while out of date, and seems old. I am not as old as I look to be, but I have seen several kinds of literary fashions come and go. I have known men to be famous, producing a book nearly every month, whose name would now be strange, and there are few here who have thought of them for a long time. Other books have taken their places. They were novels, stories, histories, and even poems, but they have gone out of date, because the human nature they dealt with was a temporary and passing human nature—that of a fashion-plate. And the same effect must attend most of the novels being written in our day, because there is a passion upon us for this sort of living detail, this sort of temporary book.
There is so little of permanent universal human nature in an ordinary novel of the period, that when you are done with it you have learned but very little about man. The great defect with this class of books is that they do not deal with universal human nature, and it is the power of Shakspere that he deals largely with universal human nature. And here we discover the likeness that reigns there. We recognize ourselves and our neighbors. We have struck one of the old lines of humanity, and are acquainted with the people we meet. They wear togas, we wear trousers; but we know each other for brothers. The defect of Shaksperean human nature very soon appears when you lay it down along side of the gospels. You have a little universal human nature in Shakspere, in the gospels you have almost nothing else but universal human nature. If you ask yourselves why we are interested in certain incidents that occurred nearly two thousand years ago, in a foreign land, that occurred in connection with a people for whom we have nothing but antipathy, what will be the answer? Why are we interested in this old history lying back there in a world that had almost nothing like our world except men, and the eternal rocks, and the ever flowing streams? Why, belting the green earth, should we find men everywhere singing about this passage in human history? What is the charm of it that reaches human nature so widely? Undoubtedly there is much charm in the delightful truth which it contains; more in the delightful power behind it, but much also in the fact that when we open these gospels we find ourselves in the presence of men and women like ourselves, in the presence of human nature, undying, eternally the same. In any of these passages you find yourself suddenly reminded of yourself. You feel in every throb of a human heart in the gospels something which allies the old heart with yourself.
Another proof of the dramatic quality of the gospels lies in the fact that the details all work out into one picture, and each trait resembles the whole. What I mean here I shall try to make clear. The Righi is a mountain made up of pudding stones. It is a great egg-shaped mass that leaps up out of the plain, rising thousands of feet in the air, and is composed altogether of these pudding stones. At different points up its rugged sides, masses have been broken off by the action of the ice, and if you examine them you will find that the fragments resemble the whole. Break up one of them into the finest pieces, and each bit will still resemble the whole. In any fragment of the vast mass you have a picture of the whole mountain. Now this is true of the highest dramatic production, that every piece and every incident is a picture of the whole. This highest dramatic perfection is found only in the gospels. You find hints of it elsewhere. Many of you have read the story of “Middlemarch,” the most perfect piece of art produced in the way of a modern novel. The art lies first in the dramatic conception, for it has a theme, and the theme runs clear through, and the climax leaps out of the theme. This theme is worked out through a principal character. In her history the general lesson is impressively taught. But the art does not end there, each one of the characters is a picture of the heroine in little. The same story is repeated over and over again, in the different characters. It is a story of human failure, of the way in which a great human purpose, and high aspirations, growing in a youthful mind, may be dispersed and destroyed as human life goes on to its conclusion. It is a lesson of failure, and the failure of the principal character is repeated in the subordinate characters.
Take another illustration from Shakspere: “Julius Cæsar” is his best drama, not the best play, for it does not act well on the stage, as it lacks singleness and simplicity; nevertheless it is, I think, Shakspere’s most complete play, his most dramatic piece, and the reason is this: His subject is large and is developed on the principle I am laying down. The play is narrow, both in “Macbeth” and “Othello.” In “Julius Cæsar” it is large. The subject may be named the weaknesses of great men. The play is constructed so as to develop the weaknesses of Julius Cæsar, and of all the rest of the characters grouped about him. The story told in the death of Julius Cæsar is told also in the death of all the parties in the terrible failure of them all. But you must mark that in this case we have an extremely narrow purpose as compared with the gospels. In the gospels you can begin anywhere, and preach the whole gospel from any incident. Take the case of the Prodigal Son, and you have the whole story of the gospel in that short compass. Take up the case of the man described as the “father of the child,” crying, “I believe,” and you have it over again. It is over and over again, from the beginning to the end, the pieces all conspiring to the grand result. It is achieved not by ordinary art. The story teller has seen or heard or conceived something, and he goes through a mass of details. The gospels have nothing of that sort. They tell you in a few words what they have to say of the woman of Samaria, or the maniac of Gadara, or of her who loved much and was forgiven much. Names are dispensed with, details, places of residence, all the tricks by which the ordinary story teller succeeds. This story succeeds by pure force of an infinite truth behind it.
Another characteristic of drama is a kind of consistency between the beginning and the end, a kind of logical order in which it moves, and this is illustrated in the gospels by the fact which must always be borne in mind, that the task is one of supreme difficulty. The author of the gospels has to tell the story of the Incarnation of God’s son. A story in which there are human and divine actors, in which there is both nature and the supernatural. It requires vast dramatic power. I have suggested, yet I may more definitely repeat it, that the human earth on which you tread is not that of old Palestine, or Galilee, or Jerusalem. It is a real universal, a human earth. There is not a bit of purer realism than the gospels. Take up this story, walk with these men. Down by the lake you find the Gadarene crying among the tombs. You see the stranger landing and healing him. You stand down by the boat and hear the poor man begging Jesus to allow him to go with him. You see these human figures. Look into it a little, and there the man stands where he has stood almost two thousand years, listening to the words of the Master compelling him to go away. The meaning of it you understand, for the case is before you. On this solid human earth, this real human nature, this realistic character which makes you feel the heart beat, and smell the real earth, all is combined with something else, with the supernatural. There have been writers who have carried us into wonderland. We were glad to be there, and we traveled along delighted with the scenery and with the companions created by the imagination. The gospels do not do this. This solid earth beneath your feet is not more real than the heavens that bend over it. Human reality is combined with heavenly, and you are continually going to and fro between the earth and the sky. The natural and the supernatural are so run together that you feel no shock in passing from one to the other. You have men and angels, divine power and human power, associated together. The warp of earth is woven into the woof of heaven until it is one piece of cloth of gold. The gold of the skies is braided into the earthly so perfectly I defy any man to take them apart with consistency or success. This is the beauty and perfection of dramatic success. The divine and the human are blended in Christ so that you are puzzled to tell whether it is a man or a God who speaks and works. The blending of the human about him, in him, through him, all this is an effect utterly beyond human art. The story goes straight home to the human heart. The time will never come when it will not be a dear and sweet old story to the souls that hear it. Edward Eggleston once told me that when he was lecturing in some strange corner of the earth, where culture in the pulpit was comparatively rare, after the lecture one of the men said, “I wish you would come here and preach for us. Our minister preaches the funeral of Jesus Christ twice a Sunday, fifty-two Sundays in the year.” The case seemed to me to be an exceedingly sad one until I began to ask myself, of what man that ever lived could it be said they preached his funeral sermon twice a Sabbath for fifty-two Sundays in the year, and the story still had such freshness that the people would come out and hear it? What other thing was ever so well done that a fool might talk about it, and still a certain amount of interest attach to it despite the poor telling? Here lies one of the uses of the dramatic power of the gospel. When a man of humble attainments has it to tell, he has only to follow the book to make it an interesting story. The moment he strikes a real point of interest, the attentive soul feels that that is what it came for, and, what is better, that it is said to him. In short, the enduring power of this story lies in great part in this fact. The consistency between the beginning and the end and the logical order of things, comes out in a thousand powerful ways. For instance, the peculiar truth that reappears in the words which are sculptured on Shakspere’s tomb.
Take the same thought as it reappears—the same thought slightly turned over—as it is repeated in “Middlemarch,” or in that best human version of all, that of Watts:
“Princes, this clay must be your bed,
In spite of all your towers;
The tall, the wise, the reverend head,
Must lie as low as ours.”
You will find the thought, in good and bad versions, everywhere. Do you wish to take this thought fresh from the fountain? Come to the temple, where the disciples, accustomed to nothing great in art, fresh from Galilee, stand gazing in admiration at the glory of the great edifice and one of them cries out: “Master, behold these stones; and what manner of a building is this?” And listen to the Master as he says: “There shall not remain one stone upon another,” and you have the fountain head of all these streams running down into our poetry.
Mark the wonderful consistency, and the wonderful movement of this story—consider it as a drama. You may regard the gospels as beginning at that moment when suddenly there was with the angel a great company of the heavenly hosts, appearing to the shepherds as they watched their flocks by night. It practically ends when the disciples, after the ascension, returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple singing the song which began in angel mouths and ends in human mouths. The purpose of the story was to sing that angelic music into the human heart.
In conclusion: What inferences may be drawn from the statements I have made? Certainly not that the gospels have attained their success because they are a drama. They had to have the truth to succeed. They have the truth, and that has given them success. It behooved that Christ should suffer and rise from the dead the third day. And this behooving lies in something very deep in our nature. We believe that these gospels are inspired; that the authors were moved by the Holy Ghost; and it seems to me to be a necessary inference that the story should be well told; and well told means dramatically told. If it be true that the gospels sweep a larger circle and involve a greater work than was ever attempted by a human brain, if it be true that you can put a million of Shaksperes into their compass and still have an abyss of art unfilled, then you have an inference, an argument, in the line of the evidences of Christianity that has never been attempted. And that is that the best told, most dramatically told story, the story of the visit of God’s son to the earth, of his life, death, resurrection and ascension, must have been told by God himself. No human pen can be eloquent enough, no heart wide enough, no intellect could penetrate into the human heart deeply enough, to produce these gospels. In the literary perfection of the gospel there lies an evidence of the truth, of the divine authorship of the gospels, which in time to come, when all men read and think, will weigh perhaps more than any other kind of argument that has been drawn upon to this hour.
