There is for man and woman on this earth one supreme happiness, one contenting fulfilment of destiny, whether there are more or not. It is a pure, calm, holy, and impassioned love, joining them in one life, filling both soul and body with a peaceful and rapturous harmony, glorifying the scenery of nature by its reflection, making the current of daily experience a stream of prophetic bliss, revealing to them authentic glimpses of God in each other, and opening eternity to their faith with mystic suggestions of worlds bygone and worlds to come, lives already led and forgotten and lives yet to be welcomed. This is the one absolute blessing, without whose appeasing and sufficing seal the human creature pines for he knows not what, and dies unsatisfied, no matter how much else is granted him. Any one to whom this divine fortune falls, and whose conscience, instead of wearing it proudly as a crown of glory in the sight of God, shrinks with it guiltily before the sight of men, is a contemptible coward, unworthy of the boon, and sure to forfeit it. As the most original thinker, the boldest diver into the mysteries of our nature, America has produced, expresses it,—
“The sense of the world is short,
Long and various the report,
To love and be beloved.
Men and gods have not outlearned it,
And how oft soe’er they’ve turned it,
’Tis not to be improved.”
Thousands, enslaved by the conventional, distracted by the external, absorbed in the trivial, may be ignorant of the incomparable importance of the truth here expressed, care nothing about it, and give themselves up to selfish ambitions and contemptible materialities. This must be so, since the blind cannot see; and even the seeing eye sees in an object only what it brings the means of seeing; and the marvellous heights and depths of experience are fatally locked from the inexperienced. Nevertheless, the truth above affirmed survives its overlooking by the unworthy, and every man and woman gifted with profound insight and sensibility knows it and feels it beyond everything else. The great multitudes of society also have at least dim glimpses of it, strange presentiments of it, blind intuitions awakening a strong and incessant curiosity in that direction. This is the secret cause of the universal interest felt in the subject of love and in every instance of its transcendent experience or exemplification. One of the most central functions of art—whether written romance, painting, sculpture, music, or the drama—is directly or indirectly to celebrate this truth by giving it concentrated and relieved expression, and thus inciting the contemplators to aspire after their own highest bliss. To those whose emotions are rich and quick enough to interpret them, what are the finest songs of the composers but sighings for the fulfilment of affection, or raptures in its fruition, or wailings over its loss? With what unrivalled power Rubens, in his fearful pictures of love and war, has uncovered to the competent spectator the horrible tragedy all through history of the intimate association of lust and murder, libidinous passion and death! And pre-eminently the stage, in all its forms,—tragic, comic, and operatic,—has ever found, and always will find, its most fascinating employment and crowning mission in the open display—published to those who have the keys to read it, veiled from all who have not—of the varied bewitchments, evasions, agonies, and ecstasies of the passion of love between the sexes. That is the most effective actor or actress whose gamut of emotional being and experience, real and ideal, is greatest, and whose training gives completest command of the apparatus of expression, making the organism a living series of revelations, setting before the audience in visible play, in the most precise and intense manner, the working of love, in all its kinds and degrees, through the language of its occult signals. The competent actor shows to the competent gazer the exact rank and quality of the love actuating him by the adjustment of his behavior to it,—every look and tone, every changing rate and quality in the rhythm of his motions, every part of his body which leads or dominates in his bearing, whether head, shoulder, chest, elbow, hand, abdomen, hip, knee, or foot, having its determinate significance. Thus people are taught to discern grades of character through styles of manners, inspired to admire the noble and loathe the base at the same time that they are deepened in their own desires for the divine prizes of beauty and joy.
The most wholesome and triumphant art of the stage has always taught in its personifying revelation that the highest blessedness of human life is the perfect attunement of the natures of man and woman in a perfect love around which nature thrills and over which God smiles. No diviner lesson ever has been or ever will be taught on this earth. All other fruitions here are but preliminaries to this, all sacrifices penances for its failure, all diseases and crimes the fruit of its violation.
In contrast with this glorious proper fulfilment of affection, wherever we look on the history of our race we find six great chronic tragedies which dramatic art has portrayed perhaps even more fully than it has the positive triumph itself.