By the sick-bed, in the hospital and the asylum, all the treasures of memory are yielded up, all the mysteries of passion exposed, all the operations of the soul unshrouded before the eyes of the physician. In this knowledge, and in the ability which the accumulated experience of so many centuries has gained to assuage pain, to heal disease, and to give alleviating guidance, an immense deposit of power is placed in the hands of the medical profession. The blessed function of the profession, in its universal aspect, is to instruct the people in the laws of health and to rescue them from suffering and danger. Its interest, in its class aspect, thrives on the ills of other men. The more sickness there is, the more completely dependent on them it is for remedy, the better for their interest. The great vices of the craft have been charlatanism and quackery, the owlish wisdom of the gold-headed cane and the spectacled nose, and a helpless addictedness to routine and prescription. All the defects of the profession, however, are fast vanishing, all its virtues fast increasing, as under the infiltrating inspirations of science it is shedding its bigotry and pride, subordinating pathology to hygiene, repudiating its besotted faith in drugging, and freely throwing open to the whole world the special discoveries and insights it used so carefully to keep to itself as sacred secrets. This is its disinterested phase. In its selfish phase its genius is a jealous guarding of its knowledge and repute as a means of power and gain.
The arts of rule are learned, the mechanism of human nature is unveiled in all the agencies of influence that work it, perhaps even more fully in the police-office, the court-house, and the prison, than in either of the places previously named. Brought before the bar of the judge, surrounded by the imposing and terrible array of the law with its dread apparatus of inquisition and punishment, every secret of the human heart is extorted. The culprit, the hero, the high and the low, the weak and the strong, all kinds and states of men, there betray their several characteristics in their demeanor, and uncover the springs of the world in its deepest interests, passions, and plots. Thus the legal profession, manipulating the laws, sitting as umpires for the decision of the complex conflicts of men in the endless collisions of their universal struggle of hostile interests, consummate masters of every method and artifice of power, have a place nearest to the seat of government. Their hands are on the very index and regulator of public authority. Their omnipresent instinct, ever since the rise of the black-gowned confraternity, has chiefly inspired and shaped as well as administered the judicial code of society. Now, their profound knowledge of the arts of sway, their matchless skill in victory and evasion, their vast professional prerogative, have been chiefly used not to bless mankind, but to win offices, honors, and fees from them. The universal function of the lawyer is justice, the prevention or reconciliation of disputes, the teaching of men to live in harmonious equity. But his private individual and class interest is litigation, the putting of the cause of a client above the public right, the retention of his light that other men in their darkness may be forced to look to him for guidance. The genius of the law is the nursing of its own authority by preserving occult technicalities, blind submission to precedents, and the pursuit of victory regardless of right or wrong.
But the priestly profession, in the temple of religion, has penetrated more profoundly into the soul than any of the other ruling castes to seize the secrets of character and elaborate the arts of sway. Through the lattice-work of the confessional breathes the dismal murmur of the sins and miseries of men and sighs the glorious music of their aspirations. The whole reach of experience in its degradations of vice and its heights of virtue, from apathy to ecstasy, is a familiar thing to the contemplation of the priest. Confided in or feared, set apart from other men that he may study them and manage their faiths, nothing is hidden from him. Suppressing or concealing his own passions, he learns to play on those of others and mould them to his will. So Jesuitism, entrenched in the superiority of its detaching and despotic drill, holds obedience by that cold eyeball which has read human nature so deeply and so long, plucking from it the tale of its weaknesses and thus the secrets of rule. Every mystery of man and his life is revealed to him who presides in the temple, at the altar, the confessional, and the grave, and who is called in to pronounce the will of God at every crisis of experience. His style and tenure of power are more ominous, pervasive, and fatal than any other, because claiming a sanction supernatural and absolute. It plants in heaven and hell the endless lever of its hopes and fears to pry up the primitive instincts of humanity and wrench apart the natural interests of the world. The sublime office of the priesthood, in its generous and universal aspect, is to teach men the truths of morality and religion and to administer their consolations to human sorrow and doom. But, perverting this benign office, it seeks to subdue all men to itself by claiming the exclusive deposit of a supernatural revelation. Then it seeks its class interest at the cost of the interests of the whole, puts authority in the place of demonstrated truth, and persecutes dissent as the unpardonable sin. The virtues of the clerical profession are studiousness, personal purity, philanthropic works, self-sacrifice, and conscientious piety. Its vices are the hideous brood of fanaticism, intolerance, cruelty, love of power, vanity, a remorseless greed for subjecting the real interests of the present world to the fancied interests of a future one. The historic animus of priesthoods has been dictatorial superstition and bigotry, setting their own favorite dogmas above the open truths of the universe, and either superciliously pitying or ferociously hating all outside of their own narrow folds.
The next place for the revelation of the contents of human nature in all the ranges of its experience is the studio of the artist. The open and impassioned sensibility of the great artist gives him free admission to the interiors of all whom he sees, and his genius enables him to translate what is there and record it in his works. All experiences are registered in the organism, and their signals, however invisible or mystic to ordinary observers, are obvious and full of meanings to the insight of genius. Sir Godfrey Kneller declared that the eyebrow of Addison seemed to say, “You are a much greater fool than you think yourself to be, but I would die sooner than tell you so!” The magic attraction of the greatest works of art resides really in their occult revelation of the inherent ranks of the persons depicted. Their clearness or foulness, their beauty or deformity, their grace or awkwardness, their radiant joy or their squalid and obscene wretchedness, are so many hints of the degrees of good and evil in men and women,—explicit symbols of their potencies of function, their harmony or discord of powers. In their forms, proportions, attitudes, gestures, lights and shades of expression, their respective capacities for woe or bliss are ranged along the scale of human possibility. Thus, in the paintings of Rubens the whole history of voluptuousness is made transparent from the first musical breath of desire to the last lurid madness of murder. In the sculptures of Phidias the most exquisite living development into unity of all the organs and faculties of man is petrified for posterity to behold and be stimulated to the same achievement. In the statues of Buddha is clearly seen by the initiated eye the intoxicating sense of godhead in the soul, the infinite dream and entrancement of nirvana,—the molecular equilibrium of the cells of the body and the dynamic equilibrium of the atoms of consciousness. This is the charm and mystery with which art fascinates even its unwitting beholders. But its great lessons of organic ranks and potencies, of higher and lower characters and experiences, are not distinctly taught. They are only suggested for those who have the keys to interpret them. Thus they often give an idle pleasure or provoke a piquant curiosity, but yield no moral fruit, no lasting benefit. The function of the artist is revelation by inspired genius, and through this revelation to exalt the ideals, purify and expand the sensibilities, and kindle the aspirations of men while giving them a refined pleasure. His vice is the luxurious enjoyment of his gifts as a subtile ministration to self-indulgence. His class interest is not to communicate his gifts, but to secure admiration and patronage for them. It is questionable whether as yet art has not on the whole done more to unnerve and mislead than to consecrate and uplift. Its genius is sympathetic insight catering to complacence and luxury rather than prompting to edification.
All other artists, however, must yield to the dramatic performer of genius and experience as to the completeness with which he pierces the secrecy of human nature and commands its manifestations. The actor gains his knowledge of men not indirectly by ruling and making use of them, but directly by intuitive perception and mimetic intelligence and sympathy entering into all their conditions and experiences, reproducing in himself their inner states of being and the outer signs of them. Then, on the stage, he gives systematic exhibitions of the varieties of character and life for the amusement and the instruction of the public. The ideal of his art is the exemplification in living action of the grades of personalities, the contrasts of conduct, the styles of manners, so set off with appropriate foils and true standards as to cause the spectators to discriminate the rank and worth of each, be warned from the unworthy with fear and loathing, and drawn to the excellent with admiration and love. This is contagious education disguised in beguiling entertainment. Thus the genius of the drama is earnest improvement concealed in free play, edification masked in recreation.
The vice that besets the player is not selfishness, despotism, avarice, indifference, or the subserving of a class interest opposed to the general interest. He is characteristically free from such faults. His great error is using his art for ostentation and vanity merely to win applause and profit. He is tempted to sacrifice the spirit of earnestness and teaching for the spirit of sport and pleasure, playing a part simply for people to enjoy, instead of adding to this lessons for them to learn. As the church, in order to escape from its barren routine of preceptive and ceremonial repetitions, needs the dramatic spirit of reflective sympathy and living action, so the theatre, in order to escape from its too frequent emptiness and tawdry frivolity, needs the academic spirit of earnest instruction. When the dramatic spirit whose home and throne are in the theatre shall add to what it already possesses moral and religious earnestness, making the scene of its art a school for training aspirants to perfection, it will be seen to be the purest and richest spirit in the world. It will teach all to enter into the soul and fortune of each, and each to feel himself bound up in one bundle of life and destiny with all,—even as he, the Christ, who was the divinest creature that ever wore this humanized and tearful mask of clay, played the role of no individual ego, but impersonated collective humanity, dramatically identifying himself to the end of time with all the broken and suffering members of our race, saying, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, ye have done it unto me.” The universal prevalence of that same moralized and religious dramatic spirit in all men is all that is needed for the immediate and perfect redemption of the world. Dogmatic theology, ecclesiastical polity, and sectarian mechanism do more to delay than to expedite the time.
Thus it is plain that the professions that radiate from the palace, the tent, the hospital, the tribunal, the temple, the studio, and the theatre all have vices which largely neutralize their good offices and prevent the fulfilment of their true mission, namely, the spreading of the kingdom of heaven over the whole earth in the redemption of men from ignorance, oppression, strife, and want.
There is another building, the seat of another profession, quite exempt from the evils which alloy and burden the foregoing. The academy takes all knowledge, scientifically considered, for its province; and the teaching profession administer their possession as no peculium of their own, but as an open and free inheritance for all. They have no class interest to foster as against the welfare of the whole. They have no dogma of authority to impose, aside from the inherent authority of truth and right. They do not wish to rule, only to teach every one self-rule. The academic spirit would break open the enclosures bristling with technical secrets, the strongholds of partial power, and dispense freedom to all instead of despotic sway to the ruler, justice to all instead of victory for the client, health to all instead of a fee to the doctor, the grace of God to all instead of a salary for the priest. The vice of the teaching class is the pedagogic dryness of routine and verbal iteration. Academic education needs to add to itself everywhere the dramatic spirit of life, that creative action of free sympathy which will supplement the preceptive word with the exemplifying deed and change the prosaic aridity for poetic freshness and bloom. It also needs the military principle of drill, or organic habits of rhythm, wherever applicable; but not to displace spontaneous intelligence and choice. It likewise needs to proclaim the religiousness of scientific truth, that every truth of morals or things is a demonstrable revelation of the will of God, and the same for all men of all lands and faiths. Then the academic profession will in itself reject the excesses and supply the defects of all the other professions, and be the one guiding class in a condition of mankind which has thrown off obsolete leading-strings. For, while the ideal state of mankind will have no despotic or selfish ruler, soldier, lawyer, doctor, or priest, it will always have a class of teaching artists and artistic teachers, men of original genius and inspiration, to refresh, enlighten, and guide their less gifted brethren. To such a class the final government of the world will be intrusted, not governing by the force of authority but by the persuasion of light. Then partisan politics, ruling by human will declared in a majority of votes, will be transmuted into social science, guiding by the will of God revealed in demonstration. Those who desire to lift themselves at the expense of others, and to live without labor by appropriating the toil of others, will dislike such a conception, and scout it as visionary. But their spirit is bad and must pass away; because Christ, or God incarnate in man, is surely one day to reign, putting every enemy under his feet and being All in all.
This millennial state might soon be ushered in if the ruling professions, instead of guarding their class privileges and keeping the rest of the world under them, sought disinterestedly to fulfil their universal functions, securing order, justice, freedom, health, virtue, piety, and education to all. But in reality the chief desire which actuates them and shapes their policy and efforts is the instinctive desire to avoid hardships and secure luxuries by governing other men and appropriating the fruits of their labor without any equitable return. This is seen now concentrated in the universal struggle for money, because the superstition of money enables its possessor to command the products of others without producing anything himself. How can this fatal spell be broken, and that condition of society be inaugurated wherein all things shall be exchanged for love alone, except labor and its products, and these be exchanged on the principle of equivalences of cost, abjuring the tyrannical fraud of profit? It can only be brought about through an increased spirit of sympathy animating an improved social science. And this is primarily the office of the dramatic principle of imaginative identification, which is to make every one feel for all others as if he were in their place.
Thus it is clear that the genuine moral work of the drama is essentially the same as that of the gospel,—to redeem men from self-love by sympathy for their kind. And yet the theatre and the church have stood askance, and the priests and the players generally been enemies. What is the origin, what the significance, what the remedy, of this quarrel between those who should be friends and co-workers? A brief historic sketch and a little human analysis will answer these questions, perhaps with some profit as well as light.