When Nature for herself exhausts her store.”
The essence of the dramatic art or the mission of the theatre is the revelation of the different grades of character and culture as exhibited in the different styles of manners, so that the spectator may assign them their respective ranks. The skill or bungling of the actor is shown by the degrees of accuracy and completeness which mark his portraitures. And the predominant ideal illustrated in his impersonations betrays the personal quality and level of the actor himself.
Manners are the index of the soul, silently pointing out its rank. All grades of souls, from the bottom of the moral scale to its top, have their correspondent modes of behavior which are the direct expression of their immediate states and the reflex revelation of their permanent characters. The principle of politeness or good manners is the law of the ideal appropriation of states of feeling on recognition of their signs. Sympathy implies that when we see the sign of any state in another we at once enter into that state ourselves. Interpreting the sign we assimilate the substance signified and thus reflect the experience. Everything injurious, repulsive, or petty, pains, lessens, and lowers us. The signs of such states therefore are to be withheld. But the signs of beautiful, powerful, sublime, and blessed states enrich and exalt those who recognize them and reproduce their meaning. The refinement and benignity of any style of manners are measured by the largeness and purity of the sphere of sympathetic life it implies, the generosity of its motives, and the universality of its objects. The vulgarity and odiousness of manners are measured by the coarseness of sensibility, the narrow egotism, the contracted sphere of consciousness implied by them. Thus the person who fixes our attention on anything spiritual, calming, authoritative, charming, or godlike, confers a favor, ideally exalting us above our average level. But all such acts as biting the nails or lips, taking snuff, smoking a cigar, talking of things destitute of interest save to the vanity of the talker, are bad manners, because they draw attention from dignified and pleasing themes and fasten it to petty details, or inflict a severe nervous waste on the sensibility that refuses to be degraded by obeying their signals.
Now, there are four generic codes of manners in society, each of which has its specific varieties, and all of which are exemplified in the theatre,—that great explicit “mirror of fashion and mould of form.” First there is the code of royal manners, the proper behavior of kings. Kings are all of one family. They are all free, neither commanding one another nor obeying one another, each one complete sovereign in himself and of himself. The sphere of his personality is hedged about by a divinity through which no one ventures to peep for dictation or interference. In his relations with other persons the king is not an individual, but is the focal consensus of the whole people over whom he is placed, the apex of the collective unity of the nation. He therefore represents public universality and no private egotism. He is the symbol of perfect fulfilment, wealth, radiance, joy, peace. By personal will he imposes nothing, exacts nothing, but like the sun sheds impartially on all who approach him the golden largess of his own complete satisfaction. That is the genuine ideal of royal manners. But the actual exemplification is often the exact opposite,—an egotistic selfishness pampered and maddened to its very acme. Then the formula of kingly behavior is the essence of spiritual vulgarity and monopolizing arrogance, namely, I am the highest of all: therefore every one must bow to me and take the cue from me! Then, instead of representing the universal, to enrich all, he degrades the universal into the individual, to impoverish all. Then his insolent selfishness at the upper extreme produces deceit and fawning at the lower extreme. The true king imposes nothing, asks nothing, takes nothing, though all is freely offered him, because he radiates upon all the overflow of his own absolute contentment. Every one who sees him draws a reflected sympathetic happiness from the spectacle of his perfect happiness.
The formula expressed in truly royal manners is, I am so contented with the sense of fulfilment and of universal support that my only want is to see every one enjoying the same happiness! In a perfected state the formula of democratic manners will be identical with this. For then the whole community with its solidarity of wealth and power will be the sustaining environment whereof each individual is a centre. But as yet the private fortune of each man is his selfishly isolated environment; and the totality of individual environments bristles with hostility, while every one tries to break into and absorb the neighboring ones.
The code of aristocratic manners, too, has its sinister or false development as well as its true and benign development. The formula which, in its ungenial phase, it is forever insinuating through all its details of demeanor, when translated into plain words is this: I am superior to you and therefore command you! But the real aristocratic behavior does not say the inferior must obey the superior. On the contrary, it withholds and suppresses the sense of superiority, seems unconscious of it, and only indirectly implies it by the implicit affirmation, I am glad to be able to bless and aid you, to comfort, strengthen, and uplift you! The false aristocrat asserts himself and would force others to follow his lead. The true aristocrat joyously stoops to serve. His motto is not, I command, but Privilege imposes obligation.
The twofold aspect of plebeian manners affords a repetition of the same contrast. The plebeian manner, discontented and insurrectionary, says, You are superior to me, and therefore I distrust, fear, and hate you! The plebeian manner, submissive and humble or cringing, says, I am inferior to you, and therefore beseech your favor, deprecating your scorn! But the plebeian manner, honest, manly, and good, says, You are superior to me, and I am glad of it, because, looking up to you with admiration and love, I shall appropriate your excellence and grow like you myself!
Finally, we come to the democratic code of manners. The spurious formula for democratic behavior is, I am as good as you! This is the interpretation too common in American practice thus far. It is the insolent casting off of despotic usages and authorities, and the replacing them with the defiant protest of a reckless independence. I am as good as you, and therefore neither of us will have any regard or deference for the other! But in wide distinction from this impolite and harsh extreme, the formula implied in the genuine code of democratic manners is, We are all amenable to the same open and universal standard of right and good, and therefore we do not raise the question at all of precedency or privilege, of conscious superiority or inferiority, but we leave all such points to the decision of the facts themselves, and are ready indifferently to lead or to follow according to the fitness of intrinsic ranks!
Spurious democracy would inaugurate a stagnant level of mediocrities, a universal wilderness of social carelessness and self-assertion. Genuine democracy recognizes every man as a monarch, independent and supreme in his interior personal sphere of life, but in his social and public life affiliated with endless grades of superiors, equals, and inferiors, all called on to obey not the self-will of one another, or of any majority, but to follow gladly the dictates of those inherent fitnesses of inspiration from above and aspiration from below which will remain eternally authoritative when every unjust immunity and merely conventional or titular rank has been superseded. This was the style of manners, this was the implied formula of behavior, embodied by Forrest in all his great rôles. Affirming the indefeasible sovereignty of the individual, he neither wished to command nor brooked to obey other men except so far as the intrinsic credentials of God were displayed in them. Thus, under every accidental or local diversity of garb and bearing, he stood on the American stage, and stands and will stand in front there, as the first sincere, vigorous, and grand theatrical representative of the democratic royalty of man.