The guilty globe should blaze, she will spring up
Through the fire and soar above the crackling pile
With not a downy feather ruffled by
Its fierceness!”
The noble lines of the poet full of great thoughts, scarcely heeded and soon forgotten by the reader, are by the fiery or solemn elocution of the actor sculptured on the memories of his auditors for ineffaceable retention.
The theatre is always in some degree a school of manners, but it ought to be far more distinctly and systematically such. The different personages are foils and contrasts to set one another off. As they act and react in their various styles of being and of behavior, they advertise and illuminate what they are, and tacitly, but with the most penetrative effect, teach the spectator to estimate them by mutual comparisons and by reference to such standards as he knows. Grandeur and meanness, awkwardness and grace, brutal or fiendish cruelty and divine sensibility, selfish arrogance and sweet renunciation, grossness and delicacy,—in a word, every possible sort and grade of inward disposition and of outward bearing are exemplified on the stage. The instructive spectacle is too often gazed at with frivolity and mirth alone. But more profound, more vital, more important lessons are nowhere in the world taught. This art of manners precisely fitted to the character and rank of the person has been particularly studied in the Théâtre Français. The writer saw a play represented there in which there were three distinct sets of characters. The first belonged to the circle of royalty, the second to the gentry, and the third were of the laboring class. The second carefully aped the first, and the third painfully aped the second. The bearing of the first was composed, easy, dignified; that of the second was a lowered copy with curious differences made most instructively perceptible; while the third was a ludicrous travesty. The superior always, as by a secret magic, overswayed and gave the cue to the inferior. The king, disguised, sat down at table with a plebeian. The king ate and drank slowly, quietly, with a silent refinement in every motion; but the plebeian hurried, shuffled, fussed, choked, and sneezed. The actor who is really master of his whole business teaches in a thousand indescribably subtile ways a thousand indescribably valuable lessons for all who have eyes to see and intelligence behind the eyes to interpret what they see and apply its morals to their own edification.
Another service rendered by the theatre is in uncovering the arts of deceit and villainy. In their unsophisticated openness the innocent are often the helpless victims of seductive adepts in dissipation and crime. All the designing ways and tricks of the votaries of vice, the hypocritical wiles of brilliant scoundrels, their insinuating movements, the magnetizing spells they weave around the unsuspicious, are exposed on the stage in such a manner as fully to put every careful observer on guard. This unmasking of dangers, this warning and arming, is a species of moral instruction quite necessary in the present state of society, and nowhere so consummately exhibited as before the footlights. Nor is it to be fancied that the instruction is more demoralizing than guardian; for the instinctive sympathies of a public assembly move towards virtue, not towards vice. They who seem to be corrupted by public plays are inwardly corrupt beforehand.
A further and fairer utility of the stage is the exact opposite of that last mentioned. It is the delightful privilege of dramatic performers to exhibit pleasing and admirable types of character and display their worths and graces so as to kindle the love and worship of those who behold, and awaken in them emulous desires for the noble virtues and the exquisite charms which they see so divinely embodied. If the manifestation of heroism, piety, modesty, tenderness, self-sacrifice, glorious aspiration in the drama is not an educational and redemptive spectacle, it must be because the stolidity and shallowness of the audience neutralize its proper influence. Then it is they who are disgraced, not the play which is discredited.
It is also a signal function of dramatic acting to reveal to ordinary people the extraordinary attributes of their own nature by exemplifying before them the transcendent heights and depths of the human soul. Average persons and their average lives are prosaic and monotonous, often mean and tiresome or repulsive. They have no conception of the august or appalling extremes reached by those of the greatest endowments, the intensities of their experience, the grandeurs and the mysteries of their fate. In contrast with the tame level of vulgar life, the dull plod of the humdrum world, the theatre shows the romantic side of life, the supernal passions and adventures of genius, the entrancements of dreaming ideality, the glimpsing hints and marvels of destiny. An actor like Garrick or Salvini, an actress like Rachel or Ristori, carrying the graduated signals of love to the climax of beatific bliss, or the signals of jealousy to the explosive point of madness, makes common persons feel that they had not dreamed what these passions were. In beholding a great play greatly performed an audience gain a new measure for the richness of experience and the width of its extremes. Thus average people are brought to see the exceptional greatnesses of humanity and initiated into some appreciation of those astonishing passions, feats, and utterances of genius which must otherwise have remained sealed mysteries to them. Rachel used to stand, every nerve seeming an adder, and freeze and thrill the audience with terror, as her fusing gestures, perfectly automatic although guided by will, glided in slow continuity of curves or darted in electric starts. The commanding majesty, intelligence, and passion of Siddons seemed to bring her audience before her and not her before her audience. A great actor enlarges the diapason of man. Our kind is aggrandized in him. He is copy to men of grosser faculty and teaches them how to feel. It was this sort of association in his mind that made Dryden say of the aged Betterton, with such magnifying pomp of phrase,—
“He, like the sun, still shoots a glimmering ray,