No happy song I leave unsung,
A deeper life within has sprung,
And so my heart forever young,
Still laughs at time defiantly.
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.