The dramatic art, based on the science of human nature in the revelation of its inner states through outer signs, is the exercise of that power whereby man can indefinitely multiply his personality and life, by identifying himself with others, or others with himself, by divesting himself of himself and entering into the characters, situations, and experiences of those whom he beholds or reads of or creatively imagines. This definition elevates the art, in its pure practice, high above the reach of cavil; for its central principle is the essence of that disinterested sympathy and vicarious atonement whose culmination on Calvary have deified the Christ.
Let us trace a little the rise and nature of this power from a point of view somewhat different from the one in which we have already considered it.
The life of a peach-tree, a rose-bush, or a squash-vine is rigidly determined for it in advance by the seed from which it springs and the soil and climate in which it grows. Its life is simply the sum of actions and reactions between the forces in itself and the forces in its environment; and this sum of dynamic relations is fixed fatally by its organic structure. To a degree the same is true of the life of a weasel, a pig, a horse, or an eagle; but this with two modifications, two elements of greatening freedom and variety. First, in connection with the consciousness and the power of locomotion which distinguish the animal from the vegetable, it can change its environment, from cliff to cave, from village to desert, from field to shore, from hill to valley, or from a temperate zone to a tropical, thus securing a large mass of changes in its surrounding conditions, resulting in a correspondent diversity or increase in that sum of actions and reactions which composes its life. Second, the gregarious nature of animals enables them likewise, to some extent, to supplement one another, to exchange states of consciousness and unite their experience. Crows hold consultations and caw with mutual intelligibility. A flock of wild geese understand the honk of their leader, and obey every signal perfectly. Bees converse, build, hunt, wage war, and carry on their little monarchical republic with amazing cunning and consent.
But this associative alteration, enhancement, and interchange of life receive an almost incredible development when we ascend to man. His nature and destiny too, the fact that he is a man, not a tree or a brute or an angel or a god, are determined for him by his parentage. This hereditary descent decides his general character and status, and also many details of special faculty and tendency. But in him all this coexists with an immense freedom and power of foreign assimilation. He can change and modify the conditions of his habitat in a thousand particulars where the lower animals can do so in one. By free education, drill, and habit, he can likewise indefinitely modify his reactions on the same outer conditions. But far above all this in rank and reach is his ability to perfect his character by the characters of others, to make the most direct and copious levying on the experiences of his fellow-men. He has not only the organic inheritance of his ancestry and the traditional treasure of his country and people to work with, but, furthermore, in history, science, and literature he has the keys to the conscious wealth of all men in all lands and times.
The outward universe in which we live is one and the same in common to all men. But the inner representation of this, the sum of all that he has experienced and knows of it, is different with every man. Now, it is with the revelation, the discovery, seizure, and exhibition of this peculiar inner or ideal world of each individual that the dramatic art in its practice in actual life is concerned. The business of most persons seems to be rather to conceal and hold back, to falsify and distort their inner states, than to reveal and impart them. Their arts are disguise, imposture, and deception, rather than sincerity, sympathy, and frankness. But the practical science of the drama puts all the secrets in our power, and enables us to add to our own inner world or conscious personal kosmos the related inner worlds of others, almost without hindrance or limit.
A philosopher like Hegel, a scientist like Humboldt, a poet like Rückert, deeply read in all literatures and trained to the facile reproduction of every mode of thought and action, traverses all races and ages, deciphering their symbols, reading their passions, royally reaping their experimental conquests, thus virtually enlarging his own soul to the dimensions of collective humanity and enriching himself with its accumulated possessions. The first condition of truly profound and vital acting is to have the knowledge, the liberty, the spiritual energy and skill, to solve this inner side of the problem by reconstructing in the mind and heart the modes of character, passion, and conduct which are to be represented. They must be mastered and made one's own before they can be intelligently exhibited. It is the part of a charlatan to content himself with merely detecting and imitating the outer signs. He is potentially the richest and freest man who is most capable of assuming and subsidizing all other men. He is virtually the king and owner of the world, though without crown or sceptre, while many a titular king has nothing but these external insignia. The greatest actor is the one who is the most perfect master of all the signs of the inner states of men, and can in his own person exhibit those signs with the most vivid power. He must have, to be completely equipped for his work, a mind and a body whose parallel faculties and organs are energetic and harmonic, every muscle of the one so liberated and elastic, every power of the other so freed and connected, that they can act either singly or in varied combination with others or with the whole, with easy precision and vigor. The absence of prejudices and strictures, contracting ignorance and hate, and the presence of disinterested wisdom and openness, a trained intuitive sensibility, will put all states of all souls in his possession by spontaneous interpretation of their signals. Such an actor, perfected in his own being and crowned with the trophies of human culture in every department, is fitted to pass through all the grades and ranges of society, reflecting everything, subjected to nothing, the sovereign of mankind, the top of the world.
And now we are prepared to advance to the heart of our theme and show the place of the drama in its full development in adult civilized society, where all sorts of acting are not only diffused through the daily life of the community, but also separated in a distinct profession and supplied with a brilliant home. The drama, in its finished literary and histrionic sense, is seen when a story, instead of being merely described in forms, words, or colors,—as by sculpture, narrative, and painting,—is exhibited by fit personages in living action with all the appropriate accessories of looks, attitudes, tones, articulations, gestures, and deeds. The end of this imitative, reproductive, and creative exhibition is, as has already been said, to enable the spectator to transpose himself out of himself into others, assimilating them to himself or himself to them, thus unlimitedly exchanging his personality and its conscious contents. In this sense the dramatic faculty is universal, and its exercise, in an unsystematic way, incessant. What other people do in a bungling and piecemeal manner, without clear purpose or method, the professional actor does with full consciousness and system, and exhibits for the pleasure and edification of the observers. Everybody, from infancy to old age, with such pliancy of fancy, resources of reason, wealth of sympathy, as he can command, is always observing other people, studying, judging, approving, copying, or condemning and avoiding. All that is wanting to regulate and complete the art is, as Schlegel has said, to draw the mimic elements and fragments clear off from real life, and confront real life with them collectively in one mass. This is the sphere and office of the Theatre, whose very business it is to hold up the mirror to nature and humanity, that all styles of character and conduct may be seen in their proper quality and their true rank, teaching the spectators what to despise, what to admire, what to shun, what to imitate or reproduce for the perfecting of their own characters and conduct.
There are in the exhibited drama three provinces or directions, the lower, the intermediate, and the higher, or Comedy, Melodrama, and Tragedy. In the lower drama, inferior types of men and manners are exhibited for the various purposes of amusement, ridicule, satire, correction. The direction of the moral and social faculties of the spectators towards the persons and actions they contemplate is downward from their own or the social mental standards of virtue, propriety, and grace to the real exemplifications before them, the descending movement which accompanies their perception of the incongruity awakening laughter or tendencies to laughter, scorn or tendencies to scorn, with a reflex of complacency in themselves. Comedy teaches, so far as it ventures to teach at all and does not content itself with mere entertainment, by the principle of opposition and contrast, showing what not to do and how not to do it, suggesting grace by awkwardness, hinting refinement by vulgarity, setting off beauty and dignity by ugliness and triviality. This, as every one must see, is a varied, effective, and fruitful mode of direct instruction as well as of indirect and unpurposed educational moulding. No one can well be thoroughly familiar with the genteel comedy of the theatres and remain a boor. Such a familiarity is of itself a sort of social education.
In the higher drama, or Tragedy, the superior social types, lords, ladies, geniuses, kings, and the nobler styles of character, heroes, martyrs, saints, are represented, to awaken admiration and reverence, to stir emulous and aspiring desires. Pity, love, and awe, the profoundest passions and capacities of the soul, are moved and expanded. The mysteries of fate and providence are shadowed forth, and the most insoluble problems of morality and religion indirectly agitated. Transcendent degrees of power, virtue, success, and glory, or failure and suffering, are indicated; and all our upward-looking faculties are put on the stretch, with the result of assimilating more or less of the forms of being and experience on which they sympathizingly gaze aloft. Here we are taught, sometimes with a distinct aim, oftener by an unpurposed, contagious kindling of suggested thought and feeling, innumerable lessons pertaining to human nature and experience, the varieties of character and conduct, the limits and retributions of virtue and vice, the extremes of hope and despair, the portentous question of death, the omnipresent laws of God. How much one shall be affected and changed, inspired and aided, by all this, depends on his docility and earnestness in front of it, his plasticity under it. But it is plain that it can scarcely be repeated and continued without important effects on all who are not dolts.
The intermediate, or Melodrama, mixed of the other two and presented on the ever-varying level between comic lowness and tragic height, brings forward a medley of characters, greater and lesser, good, bad, and indifferent, portraying life not truly as it is in fact, but exaggeratedly, in heterogeneous combination, so set off in extravagant relief and depression, emphasis of lights and shades, as to give it a more than natural attraction for the senses. Without taxing any faculties in the audience, it piques the curiosity of all by turns, and exercises and refreshes them with its rapid changes and its glaring effects, which provide strong sensations yet with small exaction on the mind. Any explicit instruction it contains is incidental, since its real business is to serve as a spiritual alterative directed to the soul through the senses, to beguile heavy thoughts and cares, to entertain and rest weary faculties with fresh objects, and fill idle hours with pleasurable amusement. All this is certainly legitimate, needed, and useful, although it may be abused by the employment of illegitimate means, and thus perverted into an injury. But every good thing is likewise capable of perversion, and ought to be judged by its true intent, not by its aberrations.