The second department of the drama among barbarians is their impersonations of animals, their picturesque and terrible representation of the passions and habits of reptiles, birds, and beasts. Morgan, in his History of the Iroquois, gives a list of some forty dances in which they acted out to the life stories based on their own experience and on that of the creatures beneath them. But we owe to Catlin some of the most graphic descriptions of the drama among the North American savages. In the Eagle Dance, the braves dress themselves as eagles, in plumes, feathers, beaks, talons; and they shriek, whistle, sail, swoop, in exact imitation of them. In the Wolf Dance, they go on all-fours, yelp, snarl, bark, and fill up the wolfish programme to the very letter. In the Buffalo Dance, they each wear a buffalo mask, consisting of the face, horns, and skin of a buffalo, and mimic, in ludicrous burlesque, the sounds and motions of that unwieldy creature. And so with bears, foxes, beavers, hawks, and the rest of the fauna most familiar to them. In these performances they reproduce with frenzied truth and force the most ferocious and deadly traits of their prototypes, and often, among the savages of Fiji and South Africa, the drama ends half drowned in blood. In Dahomey, where the Serpent is worshipped, the votary crawls on his belly as a snake and licks the dust before his idol, and sometimes becomes crazy with the permanent possession of his part. The barbaric mind finds intense excitement and enjoyment in these plays, hideous as they seem to us. They break up the weary monotony of his life, and introduce the relish of games and novelty and variety. They give him, what he so greatly craves, mental amusement with physical passion and exertion. They are his almost only antidote for the bane of stagnation.
On the other hand, great evils result from them. They never work upward to reflect higher forms of character and life for redemptive imitation, but downward, in the impersonating of creatures whose inferiority either inflames the boastful and reckless self-complacency of the actors, or else by its reflex influences takes possession of their consciousness and animalizes them, degrading them to the level of the brutes they portray. Secondly, the reception of the idea of the beast, snake or vulture which they represent, their furious mimicry of it, the spasmodic, rhythmical, long-continued movements they make in accordance with it, tend to subject the brain to the automatic spinal and ganglionic centres below, and thus furnish the conditions and initiate the stages of all sorts of insanity. Much of the persistent degradation and ferocity of the barbaric world is to be traced to this cause.
Nor is this the only evil; for, in the third place, when the savage mind, after such a training, affects to penetrate the invisible world and come back to report and portray the supernatural beings who exercise authority there, it naturally takes its impulsive cue, its ideal stamp, from the nervous centres under the inspiration of which it acts. Those centres being possessed by the influences of serpents, wolves, lust, hate, and murder, of course the spirits and gods reflected will be fiends, incongruous mixtures of beast and man, devilish monsters. Then the worship of these reacts to deepen the besotted superstition and terror, the nightmare carnival of the brain, out of which it originally sprang. And so the process goes on, in a doomed circle of hopelessness. The time and faculty devoted by the soothsayers and medicine-men who compose the priestly caste in savagedom to the tricking out of their devil-gods and their mummery of magic,—the time and faculty given by their followers to the enactment of their obsessed ritual,—if directed to the creation and imitative reproduction of superior types of human character and experience, would soon lift them out of the barbaric state in which they have so long grovelled. And it is a very impressive fact that every instance revealed in history of a savage people rising into civilization is accompanied by the tradition of some illustrious stranger from afar, or some divinely-inspired genius emerging among themselves, who has originated the rôle of a new style of man, thrown it out before them for dramatic assimilation, and so impressed it on them as to secure its general copying among them. This has, thus far in history, been the divine plan for lifting the multitude: the appearance of a single inspired superior whose characteristics the inferiors look up to with loving reverence and put on for the transformation of their own personalities into the likeness of his. That is the dynamic essence of Christianity itself.
The next step in this survey of the psychological history of the dramatic art whereby we are essaying to unfold its purport and its final definition, leads us from barbaric life to the private homes of the most cultivated classes of civilized society. The higher we go in the scale of social wealth and rank, the larger provisions we shall find made for gratifying the dramatic instincts of children, till we come to the nursery of the baby prince, who has his miniature parks of cannon and whole regiments of lead soldiers, and the baby princess, who has a constant succession of dolls of all grades, costumes, and ages. The little warrior animates his soldiers and their officers with such ideas and passions as he has in himself or as he can get glimpses of from his elders or from books, creates rôles for them, and puts them through their paces and fortunes with such variety and succession as he can contrive. And so his nursery is a theatre, and he is at once author, manager, actors, supernumeraries, spectators, and all. Likewise the young girl dresses up her dolls, takes them to church, to balls, undresses them, puts them to sleep, weds them, celebrates their funeral, in a word, transfuses all her own life, real and imaginative, into them, and so reactingly multiplies herself and her experience, and peoples the otherwise tedious vacancy of childhood with vital and passionate processions, pathetically prefiguring all the tragedy and comedy that are actually to follow. A Bengal newspaper, giving an account of a curious marriage-procession through the streets of Dacca, says, "In Indian households dolls play a far more important part than they do in England, for all the perfection to which we have attained in the art of making, clothing, and lodging them. Indian dolls are not remarkable for beauty or close resemblance to human models; but in bedecking them no expense is spared. They have a room to themselves, and seem to enjoy as much attention as live children do elsewhere. Feasts and garden-parties are given in their honor. The death of a doll involves a great show of mourning, and the marriage of one is a public event. In the present instance two dolls belonging to the daughters of the wealthiest Hindus in Dacca were led out at the head of a solemn procession, to the delight of the bystanders. After the wedding ceremony the parents of the girls who had thus disposed of their puppets laid out a few thousand rupees in feasting their friends and caste-folk, as well as the neighboring poor."
As children grow older and become school-boys and school-girls, this faculty and impulse do not cease to act, but, developed still further, instead of imparting fancied life and action to inanimate toys, lead them to imitative performances of their own, causing them to group themselves together for the representation of games, and of the historic scenes, social events, or fictitious stories which have most impressed and pleased their imaginations.
The point of interest demanding attention at this stage of our inquiry is how to discriminate clearly between the drama of the savage and the drama of the child. The dramatization of the savage is mimetic, a putting on from without of the disguise, the postures, sounds, motions, of the animal he impersonates. He imitates the outer signs of the animal; and these often in return produce in him the corresponding states of consciousness. But the dramatization of the child is creative, a projection from within of his own thoughts and emotions into the counterfeit toys he personifies, and a consequent heightening of his own sense of life by an imagination of its being imparted and sympathetically taken up and shared. With the barbarian the primary movement of action is from without inward; with the child it is from within outward. There it is the interpretative assumption by the actor of the signs of states in another; here it is the direct transference by sympathetic imagination of the states of the actor to another. That is the raw drama of the senses, this the initial drama of the soul.
We must pause here, before passing to the next head, to make a brief exposition of another department and application of the dramatic power of man, a department intermediate between the examples already given and those which are to come. Its peculiarity is that it combines in one, with certain original features of its own, the barbaric and the childish drama. The creation of Fables is the strongest delight of the dramatizing literary faculty in its first movements. Its workings are to be traced in the ingenuous oral treasures preserved among tribes who have no written language, as well as in the most beloved vernacular writings current among the populace in civilized countries. Fables are short compositions designed to teach moral truths, or to impress moral truisms, by representing beasts, birds, reptiles, insects, trees, flowers, or other objects, as endowed with the faculties of men, retaining their own forms but acting and talking as men, exemplifying the virtues and vices of men in characteristic deeds, followed by their proper consequences. In the degrading barbarian drama the actors admit into themselves the lower creatures whom they represent, putting on the skins, movements, cries, of the crocodiles, hyenas, or boa-constrictors the ideas of whom they take into their brains. In the naïve child drama the little performers project the ideas of themselves into the dolls and toys they personify and move. But in the fable drama these two processes are joined, with a mere inversion of the subjects of the first; for in fables the actors, in place of being, as in the plays of savages, the assumed souls of animals and the disguised bodies of men, are the disguised souls of men in the assumed forms and costumes of animals. The one is an actual representation of animals by men for free sport; the other is an imaginary representation of men by animals for the inculcation of lessons, as, for example, in the well-known instance of the Wolf and the Lamb. The author of a fable puts his own human nature into the humbler creatures whom he dramatizes, with a deliberate conscious thought, a creative exercise of the reflective faculty at the second remove, quite unlike the instinctive and half-believing action of the child who straddles a stick pretending that it is a horse. He has a clear didactic purpose in addition to the sportive impulse of fancy. This picturing of human nature and its experiences in the living framework of the lower world yields the keenest pleasure to all who have not outgrown it; and no one ought ever to outgrow it. He outgrows it only by the gradual hardening of his heart and fancy, the immovable stolidity of his faculties in their fixed ruts and crusts. It is the favorite literature of the childhood of the world. It is filled with quaint wisdom, raciness, and droll burlesque, as is abundantly to be seen in the traditions of the Hottentots, the Esquimaux, the Africans, and other barbaric nations. And in the classic compositions of Pilpai the Persian, Lokman the Arab, Æsop the Greek, Phædrus the Roman, La Fontaine the Frenchman, and other masters, it constitutes, with its innocent gayety, its malicious mischief, its delicious wit and humor, its cutting satire and caricature, one of the most exquisite portions of cosmopolitan literature.
Hardly any other conception has given the people so much pleasure as that Beast-Epic, or picture of human life in the vizards and scenery of animal life, which, under the title of "Reynard the Fox," circulated through Europe for centuries,—a sort of secular and democratic Bible, read in palaces, quoted in universities, thumbed by toilsmen, delighted in by all, old and young, high and low, learned and illiterate. There the society and life of the Middle Age are reflected with grotesque truth and mirth, grim irony, sardonic grins, comic insight, laughter and tragedy, not without many touches of poetry and prophecy. There are Noble the Lion, Isegrim the Wolf, Reynard the Fox, Chanticleer the Cock, Bruin the Bear, Lampe the Hare, Hinze the Cat, and the rest, each one representing enigmatically some class or order in the human life of the romantic but cruel Feudal World. The poet, with a sly joy, unfolds his pictures of wolves tonsured as monks, foxes travelling as pilgrims to shrines and to Rome, cocks pleading as lawyers at the judgment-bar. He asserts the moral standard of the plebeian instincts against the conventional ecclesiastic and civil codes, and rectifies his own wrongs as without rank, power, or wealth, but gifted with genius and spirit, against the kings, barons, priests, and soldiers, by portraying the uniform final success of the reckless, good-for-nothing, but inexhaustibly bright, shifty, and fascinating Reynard. The representative types of the strong, cruel, stupid men of prerogative and routine are made to serve as foils for the scholar and actor, with his spiritual flexibility, elusive swiftness of resource, inner detachment and readiness.
The attractiveness of fables is fourfold. First, the charm of all exercises of the dramatic art, namely, the incessant playing of human nature with its elementary experiences in and out of all sorts of masks and disguises of changing persons and situations. Second, the congruous mixture in them of the most extravagant impossibilities and absurdities with the plainest facts and truths; the union of sober realities of reason and nature with incredible forms, giving fresh shocks of wit and humor. Third, the constant sense of superiority and consequent elated complacency felt by the human auditor or reader over the animal impersonators of his nature, with the ludicrous contrasts and suggestions they awaken at every turn. Fourth, the interest and authority of the moral lessons, truisms though these may be, which they so vividly bring out.
One cannot refrain from adding, in this connection, that there is a further form of the dramatic inhabitation of our humbler brethren the brutes, by kind and generous men, an example newly offered to notice by the officers and friends of our Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. These gentlemen, by a divine extension of their sympathy, quite in the spirit of the blessed Master who in his parables immortalized the hen, the sparrow, the raven, the ox, and the ass, transport themselves into the situation of the poor dumb creatures who are so often abused, feel and speak for them, and try to remedy their wrongs and to secure them their rights. They are spreading abroad a disposition and habit of kindness which will not stop with the first field of its application, but will extend to include in a finer and vaster embrace the whole world of childhood, and all the weak, degraded, and suffering classes of men. This development of sympathy is one of surprising beauty and promise. It tends to do for us what the doctrine of the transmigration of souls has done for the Hindoos,—affiliate us with the entire series of living beings in tender sentiment and mystery, as members of one family, under one law of destiny. It will indeed redeem the whole world of humanity if it shall be applied consistently to all as it was expressed by the famous Rarey in the practical principle he applied to the taming of unruly horses, namely: Free them from the spirit of opposition, and fill them with the spirit of obedient trust, by showing them how groundless is fear and how futile is resistance. The truth of God in the love of men will one day end crime, cruelty, terror, and misery. O blessed vision, how far away art thou?