The priest not only holds that the dramatic ideal of the natural fulfilment of the offices of being is opposed to the religious ideal of grace, is profane, and tends directly to ruin; he likewise, from all the prejudices of his own rigidity of mould and bigoted routine, believes that the facility and continual practice of the actor in passing from assumption to assumption and from mood to mood must be fatal to moral consistency, must loosen the fibre of character, and produce dissoluteness of soul not less than of life. This is mostly a false prejudice. Those of the greatest dramatic mobility of genius and versatile spiritual physiognomy, like Cervantes, Molière, Goethe, Schiller, Dickens, Voltaire, and the very greatest actors and actresses, like Talma, Garrick, Rachel, Siddons, had the most firm and coherent individuality of their own. Their penetrations and impersonations of others reacted not to weaken and scatter but to define and gird their own personal types of being and behavior. The dramatic type of character is richer and freer than the priestly, but not less distinctly maintained.
Another circumstance stirring a keen resentment in the church against the theatre is that it has often been attacked and satirized by it. When the divines, who had long enjoyed a monopoly of the luxurious privilege of being the censors of morals, the critics of other men, found themselves unceremoniously hauled over the coals by the actors, their vices exposed to the cautery of a merciless ridicule, their personal peculiarities caricatured, it was but human nature that they should be angry and try to put down the new censorship which with its secular vigor and universal principles confronted the ecclesiastical standard. The legal, medical, and clerical professions have often had to run the gauntlet of a scorching criticism on the stage. Herein the drama has been a power of wholesome purification; but it could not hope to escape the penalty of the wrath of those it exposed with its light and laughter. It has done much to make cant and hypocrisy odious and to vindicate true morality and devotion by unmasking false. Louis XIV. said to Condé, “Why do the saints who are scandalized at Tartuffe make no complaint of Scaramouche?” Condé replied, “Because the author of Scaramouche ridicules religion, for which these gentry care nothing; but Molière ridicules themselves, and this they cannot endure.” The censure and satire on the stage, concealed in the quips of fools or launched from the maxims of the noble, have often had marked effect. Jesters like Heywood and Tarleton, who were caressed by kings and statesmen, under their masks of simplicity and merriment have shot many a brave bolt at privileged pretences and wrongs and pompous imposition. The power of satire is often most piercing and most fruitful. The all-wise Shakspeare makes his melancholy Jaques say,—
“Invest me in my motley: give me leave
To speak my mind, and I will through and through
Cleanse the foul body of the infected world,
If they will patiently receive my medicine.”
Furthermore, the priest often has an antipathy for the player because in spite of his arrogated spiritual superiority feeling himself personally inferior to him. The preacher, rigid, hide-bound, of a dogmatic and formal cast, cannot take off the mobile, hundred-featured actor, who, on the contrary, can easily include and transcend him, caricature him, and make him appear in the most ridiculous or the most disagreeable light.
“If comprehension best can power express,
And that’s still greater which includes the less,
No rank’s high claim can make the player’s small,