1. It is not the function of the drama to teach moral lessons.
2. A moral lesson neither makes nor mars either a drama or a novel.
3. The moral quality of a play does not depend upon the result.
4. The real function of the drama is like that of the novel—not to amuse, not to excite; but to portray life, and so minister to it. And as virtue and vice, goodness and evil, are the great fundamental facts of life, they must, in either serious story or serious play, be portrayed. If they are so portrayed that the vice is alluring and the virtue repugnant, the play or story is immoral; if so portrayed that the vice is repellant and the virtue alluring, they play or story is moral.
5. The church has no occasion to ask the theatre to preach; though if it does preach we have a right to demand that its ethical doctrines be pure and high. But we have a right to demand that in its pictures of life it so portrays vice as to make it abhorrent, and so portrays virtue as to make it attractive.
Answer. I agree in most of what you have read, though I must confess that to find a minister agreeing with me, or to find myself agreeing with a minister, makes me a little uncertain. All art, in my judgment, is for the sake of expression—equally true of the drama as of painting and sculpture. No poem touches the human heart unless it touches the universal. It must, at some point, move in unison with the great ebb and flow of things. The same is true of the play, of a piece of music or a statue. I think that all real artists, in all departments, touch the universal and when they do the result is good; but the result need not have been a consideration. There is an old story that at first there was a temple erected upon the earth by God himself; that afterward this temple was shivered into countless pieces and distributed over the whole earth, and that all the rubies and diamonds and precious stones since found are parts of that temple. Now, if we could conceive of a building, or of anything involving all Art, and that it had been scattered abroad, then I would say that whoever find and portrays truthfully a thought, an emotion, a truth, has found and restored one of the jewels.
—Dramatic Mirror, New York, April 21, 1888.