Even below this there is a lower dramatic depth still, and filled with yet keener sport for a large class. The reflection of human life in the marionette or puppet-show makes a revelation of a phase of human nature as profound and fearful as it is unexpected. The revelation is not consciously made, but springs from an intuitive perception of truth and sense of fitness as marvellous as anything in the history of the drama. It has long been known that there is an intimate likeness between the insane class and the criminal class. They both show the effect of removing the restraints exerted on the ego by its sympathetic connections with the general public. The restraint exercised on the indulgence of egotistic feelings and interests by a consideration of the feelings and interests of others being lifted off, these selfish instincts, which are the deepest organic heritage from ancestral history, break recklessly out. Now, the puppet has no sympathy. Moved not by his brain and heart but by wires attached to his limbs, his character shows the result. He is personified selfishness and whim. His individual will is absolutely reckless of other wills or of consequences. His ferocity is murderous, his jollity fiendish, his conduct a jumble of animal passions, cunning impulses, and chaotic impressions. This is unregenerate man released from social order and given over to himself. And there is a deep, sinister, raw pleasure for an uncultivated soul in the sight of a being freed from every law but that of self-indulgence. This is the secret of the fascination of the plebeian puppet-show.
Sometimes there has been in it a strange and terrible element of social satire. The lower class vent through it their hatred for their oppressors. One type of the Italian Polichinelle was a representative of the populace angered and made vindictive by their wrongs. He lays the stick lustily on the shoulders of his master and on the necks of the police, and takes summary vengeance for the iniquities of official justice. He is also a frightful cynic. He says, “I despise men so much that I care not what they think or say of me. I have suffered as much as others, but I have turned my back and my heart into leather. I am laughter personified, triumphant laughter, wicked laughter. Pshaw for the poor creatures knocked over by a breath! I am of iron and wood, old also as the world.” “In thus speaking,” says his French historian, “he is truthful; for his heart is as dry as his baton, and he is a thorough egotist. Ferocious under his seeming good humor, he does evil for the love of it. Valuing the life of a man no more than that of a flea, he delights in quarrels and massacres.” He has no sincere affection, no reverence, no fear either of God or devil, is always eager for coarse and low enjoyment, and laughs most loudly when he has done the cruellest deeds. He is the very type of the strong, vital, abandoned criminal; and he opens a huge vista into the most horrible experience of the human race.
And now it will be a relief to turn attention aloft in the opposite direction. The upward action of the dramatic art is its benign aspect. The egotist looks down to learn how great he is, and up to learn how little. The generous man looks up to feel how rich he is, and down to feel how poor. The former sees himself in contrast with others, the latter sees himself in unison with them. This may be exemplified in comedy as well as in tragedy. The portraiture of reality on the stage hitherto has perhaps chiefly aimed to amuse by exhibiting the follies and absurdities of people and making the spectators laugh at them in reaction from standards in their own minds. It will one day aim to correct the follies and absurdities of the spectators by setting before them models of superiority and ideals of perfection.
To enter into and appropriate the states and prerogatives of those happier, greater, and better than we, either for an admiring estimate of them, for the enrichment of ourselves, or for the free play of desirable spiritual qualities, is at once recreation, luxury, redemption, and education. This is the highest application of the dramatic principle, the mending of the characters of men with the characters of superior men. And it tends to the reconciliation and attuning of all the world. This is the principle which Paul illustrates in his doctrine that true circumcision is not of the flesh but of the soul, and that the genuine children of Abraham are the new race of spiritual characters which, reproducing his type of faith and conduct, will supersede his mere material descendants. He also says that those who measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves among themselves are not wise. The complement of this statement would be that we should compare ourselves with all sorts of people, that we may put off every imperfection of our own and put on every perfection of theirs. And the same apostle gives this principle its supremest application in his immortal text, “Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ.” The Pauline formula for the salvation of the world embodies the regenerating essence of the dramatic art, which is the assimilation by less divine characters of a more divine one, raising them into fellowship with the Divinest. It calls on all men to “behold with open face, as in a mirror, the glory of the Lord,” and gaze on it until “they are changed into the same image, from glory to glory, by the Spirit of the Lord.”
In distinction from this high use of the dramatic life and spirit, the fault of the ordinary range of coarse and careless men is the utter absence of all vital sympathetic insight. Fixed in the grooves of habit, shut up in their own hard and narrow type, they move stolidly among other men, insensible to the treasures they contain, giving and taking no more than so many sticks would.
And in some who have a fair share of the dramatic instinct it suffers a direct inversion of its purest office. For the weak and reckless allow themselves to be degraded to the level of the worst characters they behold, adopt their customs, assume their traits, copy their vices, and repeat their retributive ruin. The man of moral earnestness is warned and armed by a dramatic knowledge of the profligate and criminal. Only the impure or heedless idler will be led astray by it.
Yet there is another abuse of this art of dramatic penetration, which, if less fearful, is more frequent and almost as much to be reprehended, namely, a fruitless toying with it in a spirit of mere frivolity. A great many persons enter imaginatively into the states of other people, neither to honor and imitate nor to disapprove and avoid, but in empty sport and as an ostentatious luxury of vanity and pride. There is nothing which vulgar natures are so fond of as, in vulgar phrase, feeling their oats, pampering their fancied superiority to those they contemplate. They hate to be rebuked and commanded by excellences beyond their own attainment. They love to look down on something beneath their own arrogated estimate of self. And so they come to interpret almost everything they see as being inferior, and to draw from it a reflex complacency. Their noisy laughter is but an indirect self-applause consisting of what Emerson has called “contemptible squeals of joy.” For whatever a man can laugh at he deems he is superior to. Nothing did the audiences at the old miracle-plays enjoy half so keenly as laughing at the devil when he was driven through a trap-door in a sulphurous shower of fire and squibs. The reason why a superficial exhibition of wit or humor is so popular is that it affords, at so low a price of effort, the luxury of the feeling of detachment and mastery. The insincere or unconsecrated nature always prefers a cheap seeming superiority to a costly real one. However much Harlequin and Punch and Judy may relieve and amuse, and thus find justification, they do not purify nor lift nor inspire nor educate the ordinary spectator. The genuine drama does all these in addition to bestowing the richest entertainment. Still, it must be remembered that the influence of a performance depends ultimately on the character and spirit of the spectator. Some persons seeing Washington would think nothing of his character, but be absorbed in admiration of his regimentals. One, at a given exhibition, will be simply entertained. Another will be debauched. A third will be lastingly impressed, stimulatingly edified. A fourth may enjoy the delusive luxury of a criticising superiority, persuading himself that he includes and transcends the characters whose enactments he so clearly understands and sees around. Those who laugh at those who weep fancy they are above them while really grovelling below in vulgar insensibility. One may easily lift armor he cannot wear.
The next use of the theatre, the most obvious of its serious uses, lies in the force with which it carries the great practical truths of morality home to the heart and the soul. The power of the stage in enforcing moral lessons, the rewards of virtue, the beauty of nobleness, the penalties of vice and crime, the horrors of remorse and disgrace, the peace and comfort of a self-approving conscience, is greater than that of any other mode of teaching. Its living exemplification of the workings of good and evil in the secret soul and in the social sphere has an effectiveness of incitement and of warning far beyond that of the mere didactic precept or exhortation of the pulpit. It is said that many a dissipated and felonious apprentice who saw Ross play George Barnwell was turned from his evil courses by the terrible force of the representation. One who was thus saved used every year anonymously to send Ross on his benefit-night the sum of ten guineas as a token of his gratitude. And Dr. Barrowby assured the player that he had done more good by his acting than many a parson had by his preaching. This educational function or moral edification in uncovering the secrets of experience and showing how every style of character and conduct entails its own compensatory consequences is even now a high and fruitful office of the theatre, frivolous and corrupt as it often is. And when the drama shall be made in all respects what it ought to be, fulfilling its own proper ideal, it will be beyond comparison the most effective agency in the world for imparting moral instruction and influence. The teaching of the stage is indeed all the more insinuating and powerful because it is indirect and not perfunctory or interested. The audience are not on their guard against it. It works with the force of nature and sincerity themselves.
“I have heard
That guilty creatures, sitting at a play,