Part 15

“Is it not the duty of any man,” he answered, “especially of one in a responsible position, carefully to consider the arguments and doctrines of all who are sincere and earnest in their convictions, and, however averse they may be from our preconceived opinions, to weigh them, as far as possible, calmly, and without prejudice, and see what they really are and what truth there may be in them? and was not this peculiarly incumbent on me in the case of so noble and spiritual a teacher as Christ? Was it not my duty to endeavor, as far as in me lay, first to recognize the great principles of his teaching, and then in their light to examine and weigh his very words as far as they are authentically reported to us by his followers? It is this fixed notion, from which we cannot easily free ourselves, that we in our own views alone can be right, that shuts up the mind and encrusts our faith with superstitions. We at our best are merely men, subject to errors, short-sighted, fixed in prejudices, and seeing but a part of anything. No system of religion ever embraced all truth; no system is without gleams of it; all recognize a higher power above us and beyond our comprehension; and nothing is more unbecoming than to scorn what we have not even striven to understand, or to shut our ears and our minds to any doctrine or faith which is earnestly, seriously propounded and accepted by others. Unfortunately, it is this narrow-mindedness and arrogance of opinion which has always impeded the growth and development of truth. There is nothing so bitter as religious controversy,—nothing which has so petrified our intelligence or has begotten such crimes and such persecutions. Therefore it was that I deemed it my duty to study and endeavor to understand the doctrine and belief of all sincere minds, whether of those who worshiped Jehovah or Zeus, Mithras or Christ, and not to reject them as wicked or erroneous simply because they were averse from the faith in which I had been educated. Will you excuse me if I say that what amazes me in regard to the Christian faith is, that while it is claimed that Christ is God, and therefore to be implicitly obeyed in all his commands, so little intelligence is shown in studying those commands, and such willful perversion in avoiding them even when they are plainly enunciated; and again, that while claiming that love and forgiveness are the very corner-stone of your faith, you Christians none the less not only accept war and battle as arbitraments of right, but in the name of your great founder,—nay, of your very God,—have endeavored at times to enforce those doctrines by the most hideous of crimes, and by wholesale slaughter of those who differed from you in minor particulars of faith; and still more, do constantly even now exhibit such narrow-minded adherence to mere words and texts, without consideration of the great principles which underlie them and in the light of which surely they are to be interpreted. You are all Christians now, in Rome. You profess absolute faith in the teaching of Christ. You profess to consider his life as the great exemplar for all men. Do you follow it? Do you, for instance, think it in accordance with his teaching or his example to devote your lives selfishly to the laying up of riches for your own individual luxuries, to clothe yourselves in purple and fine linen, to make broad your phylacteries, or to use vain repetitions in your prayers as the heathen do, standing in the synagogues and at the corners of the streets, and to play the part of Dives while Lazarus is starving at your gates? Are you any better than we heathens, as you call us, in all this? Do you think Christ would have done thus, or smiled approval on all you do in his name? Ah! you say, it would be impossible for us strictly to carry out this system of Christ. It is beautiful, but ideal, and for us, in the present state of the world, absolutely impracticable. But have you ever tried it? Have you ever even sought to try it, and to hold a common purse for the interest of all?”

I had to bow my head, and admit that in that high sense we are not Christians. “But,” I said, “to follow exactly all these commands, to carry out all these doctrines, even to imitate his example as set before us in his life, would be to revolutionize the world.”

“But does not the world need revolutionizing,” he said, “according to your own principles?”

“We do what we can, at least we endeavor to do so, as far as we are able.”

“Are you sure even of that?” he replied. “Are you sure it is not mammon that you really worship, and not Christ? But I will say no more. You are but mortal men as we were; and man is fallible and weak, and our knowledge is but half-knowledge at best, and our love and faith have but feeble wings to lift us above the earth on which we dwell. Look upon us, therefore, as you would be looked upon yourselves, and be not too stern on our shortcomings. We had our vices and faults and deficiencies as you have yours, but we had also our virtues, and were on the whole as high of purpose, as self-sacrificing, as pure even as you; but man neither then nor now has led an ideal life.

“But to return to what we were saying about our treatment of Christians. Let me add in my own justification that I for myself never had any hand in persecutions, either of Christians or of others, nor was I ever aware that they were persecuted. I knew that persons who happened to be Christians were punished for political offenses; and that was all, I think, that happened. Believe me, my soul was averse from all such things, nor would I ever allow even my enemies to be persecuted, much less those who merely differed from me on moral and philosophical theses. Nay, I may say they differed little from me even on these points, as you may well see if you read my letters on the subject of the proper treatment of one’s enemies, written to Lucius Verus, or if you will refer to that little diary of mine in Pannonia, wherein I was not so base as to lie to myself.”

“Indeed,” I cried; “that book is a precious record of the purest and highest morality.”

“’Tis a poor thing,” he answered, “but sincere. I strove to act up to my best principles; but life is difficult, and man is not wise, and our opinions are often incorrect. Still, I strove to act according to my nature; to do the things which were fit for me, and not to be diverted from them by fear of any blame; to keep the divine part in me tranquil and content; and to look upon death and life, honor and dishonor, pain and pleasure, as neither good nor evil in themselves, but only in the way in which we receive them. For fame I sought not; for what is fame but a smoke that vanishes, a river that runs dry, a lamp that soon is extinguished—a tale of a day, and scarcely even so much? Therefore, it benefits us not deeply to consider it, but to pass on through the little space assigned to us conformably to nature, and in content, and to leave it at last grateful for what we have received, just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, blessing nature which produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew. So, also, it is our duty not to defile the divinity in our breast, but to follow it tranquilly and obediently as a god, saying nothing contrary to truth, and doing nothing contrary to justice. For our opinions are but running streams, flowing in various ways; but truth and justice are ever the same, and permanent, and our opinions break about them as the waves round a rock, while they stand firm forever. For every accident of life there is a corresponding virtue to exercise; and if we consult the divine within us, we know what it is. As we cannot avoid the inevitable, we should accept it without murmuring; for we cannot struggle against the gods without injuring ourselves. For the good we do to others, we have our immediate reward; for the evil that others do to us, if we cease to think of it, there is no evil to us. It is by accepting an offense, and entertaining it in our thoughts, that we increase it, and render ourselves unhappy, and veil our reason, and disturb our senses. As for our life, it should be given to proper objects, or it will not be decent in itself; for a man is the same in quality as the object that engages his thoughts. Our whole nature takes the color of our thoughts and actions. We should also be careful to keep ourselves from rash and premature judgments about men and things; for often a seeming wrong done to us is a wrong only through our misapprehension, and arising from our fault. And so, making life as honest as possible and calmly doing our duty in the present, as the hour and the act require, and not too curiously considering the future beyond us, standing ever erect, and believing that the gods are just, we may make our passage through this life no dishonor to the Power that placed us here. Throughout the early portion of my life, my father, Antoninus Pius,—I call him my father, for he was ever dear to me, and was like a father,—taught me to be laborious and assiduous, to be serene and just, to be sober and kind, to be brave and without envy or vanity; and on his death-bed, when he felt the shadow coming over him, he ordered the captain of the guard to transfer to me the golden statuette of Fortune, and gave him his last watchword of ‘Equanimity.’ From that day to the day when, in my turn, I left the cares of empire and of life, I ever kept that watchword in my heart—equanimity; nor do I know a better one for any man.”

“Oh, tell me, for you know,” I cried, “what is there behind this dark veil which we call death? You have told me of your opinions and thoughts and principles of life, here; but of that life hereafter you have not said a word. What is it?”

There was a blank silence. I looked up—the chair was empty! That noble figure was no longer there.

“Fool that I was!” I cried; “why did I discuss with him these narrow questions belonging to life and history, and leave that stupendous question unasked which torments us all, and of which he could have given the solution?”

I rose from my chair, and after walking up and down the room several minutes, with the influence of him who had left me still filling my being as a refined and delicate odor, I went to the window, pushed wide the curtains, and looked out upon the night. The clouds were broken, and through a rift of deep, intense blue, the moon was looking out on the earth. Far away, the heavy and ragged storm was hovering over the mountains, sullen and black, and I recalled the words of St. Paul to the Romans:—

“When the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves;” and “the doers of the law shall be justified.”

DISTORTIONS OF THE ENGLISH STAGE AS INSTANCED IN “MACBETH.”

Art is art because it is not nature, is the motto of the Idealisti; Art is but the imitation of nature, say the Naturalisti. The truth lies between the two. Art is neither nature alone, nor can it do without nature. No imitation, however accurate, for imitation’s sake makes a good work of art in any other than a mechanical sense. And every work of art in which the objects represented are inaccurately or imperfectly imitated is in so far deficient. But art works by suggestion as well as by imitation. Whatever is untrue to the imagination fails to produce its proper effect, however true it be to the fact. The most absolute realism will not answer the higher demand of the imagination for ideal truth. Art is not simply the reproduction of nature, but nature as modified and colored by the spirit of the artist. It is a crystallization out of nature of all elements and facts related by affinity to the idea intended to be embodied. These solely it should eliminate and draw to itself, leaving the rest as unessential. A literal adherence to all the accidents of nature is not only not necessary in art, but may even be fatal. The enumeration of all the leaves in a tree does not reproduce a tree to the imagination, while a whole landscape may be compressed into a single verse.

Between the ideal and the natural school there is a perpetual struggle. Under the purely ideal treatment art becomes vague and insipid; under the purely natural treatment it becomes literal and prosaic. The Pre-Raphaelites, in protesting against weak sentimentalism and vague generalization, and demanding an honest study of nature, have fallen into the error of exaggerating the importance of minute detail, and, by insisting too strongly on literal truth, have sometimes lost sight of that ideal truth which is of higher worth. But their work was needed, and it has been bravely done. They have roused the age out of that dull conventionalism in which it had fallen asleep. They have stimulated thought, revivified sentiment, and reasserted with word and deed the necessity of nature as a true basis of art.

As in the arts of painting and sculpture, so in the drama and on the stage a strong reaction is taking place against the stilted conventionalism and elaborate artifice of the last generation. Such plays as the “Nina Sforza” of Mr. Troughton, the “Legend of Florence” of Mr. Leigh Hunt, and the “Blot in the ‘Scutcheon” and “Colombe’s Birthday” of Mr. Browning, are vigorous protests against the feeble pretensions and artificial tragedies of the previous century. The poems and plays of Mr. Browning breathe a new life; and if as yet they have only found “fit audience though few,” they are stimulating the best thought of this age, and slowly infusing a new life and spirit into it.

But the traditions of the stage are very strong in England, and are not easily to be rooted out. The English public has become accustomed to certain traditional and conventional modes of acting, which interfere with the freedom of the actor, and cramp his genius within artificial forms. There is almost no attempt on the English stage to represent life as it really is. Tradition and convention stand in the stead of nature. From the moment an actor puts his foot on the stage he is taught to mouth and declaim. He studies rather to make telling points than to give a consistent whole to the character he represents. His utterance and action are false and “stagey.” In quiet scenes he is pompous and stilted; in tragic scenes, ranting and violent. He never forgets his audience, but, standing before the footlights, constantly addresses himself to them as if they were personages in the play. Habit at last becomes a second nature; his taste becomes corrupted, and he ceases to strive to be simple and natural. There is, in a word, no defect against which Hamlet warns the actor which is not a characteristic feature of English acting. It never “holds the mirror up to nature,” but is always “overdone,” without “temperance,” full of mouthing, strutting, bellowing, and noise. It “tears a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings.” And “there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that, having neither the accent of Christians nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor Turk, have so strutted and bellowed, that I have thought some of Nature’s journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably;” and this needs to be reformed altogether.

These words of Shakespeare show that even in his time the inflated, pompous, and artificial style still in vogue on the English stage was a national characteristic. We have scarcely improved, since old traditions cling and hold the stage in mortmain. Reform moves slowly everywhere in England; but the two institutions which oppose to it the most obstinate resistance are the church and the theatre. In both of these tradition stands for nearly as much as revelation. Each adheres to its old forms, as if they contained its true essence; each believes that those forms once broken, the whole spirit would be lost; just as if they were phials which contained a precious liquid, and must be therefore preserved at all costs. The idea that the liquid can be quite as well, and perhaps better, kept in different phials has never occurred to them. They will die for the phial.

Still it is plain that a strong reaction against this bigoted admiration of traditional and conventional forms is now perceptible. The facilities of travel and intercourse with other nations have engendered new notions and modified old ones. It is impossible to compare the French and Italian stage with the English, and not perceive the vast inferiority of the latter. In the one we see nature, simplicity, and life; in the other, the galvanism of artificial convention. It cannot be denied that the recent acting of Hamlet by Fechter was to the English mind a daring and doubtful innovation. It was something so utterly different in spirit and style from that to which we have been accustomed that it created a sensation; and while it found many ardent admirers, it found quite as many vehement opposers. The public ranged themselves in two parties; the one insisting that the traditional and artificial school, as represented by Garrick, the elder Kean, and Cooke, was the only safe guide for the tragic actor; and the other arguing that as the true function of the stage was to hold up the mirror to nature, acting should be as much like life and as little like acting as possible. The former, at the head of which were the friends of Mr. Charles Kean, made a public demonstration in his behalf, and scouted these newfangled French notions of acting. Was it to be supposed that any school of acting could be superior to that created and established in England by the genius of such actors as Garrick, the elder Kean, and Cooke? Should foreigners presume to teach us how to interpret and represent plays which had been the study of the English people for centuries? To this it was opposed that, however mortifying to us, it was a fact that the Germans had led the way to a profounder and more metaphysical study of Shakespeare, and had taught us in many ways how to understand his plays, and that therefore there was no reason why foreigners might not teach us how to act them. The very fact that their eyes were not blinded, nor their tongues tied by traditional conventions, enabled them to study Shakespeare with more freedom and directness. There was no deep rut of ancient usage out of which they were forced to wrench themselves. And, besides, it was affirmed, and with truth, that the English stage is the jeer of the world, and needs thorough reform.

We have indeed made little progress in reforming the stage. Mr. Charles Kean has devoted his talents to improving the wardrobe and scenery, and has so far done good service; but in the essential matter of acting we are nearly where we were in the past century. While the background and dresses are reformed, and the bag-wig in which Garrick played Hamlet is thrown aside, we have carefully preserved all the old points, all the stage-tricks, and all the stilted intonations of the artificial school; and the consequence is, that the sole reality is in that which is the least essential. The attention is thus withdrawn from the actor to the scenery, and we have a spectacle instead of a tragedy. The background is real, but the actor is conventional; the blanket has usurped the prominent place, and Shakespeare has retired behind it. The bursts of genius with which Garrick startled the house, and made the audience forget his bag-wig, are wanting, but all his tricks are preserved; the corpse is still there, but the spirit he put into it is gone.

In comedy there is as little resemblance to real life as in tragedy; humor and wit are travestied by buffoonery and grimace. Instead of pictures of life as it is, we have grotesque daubs and caricatures, so exaggerated and farcical in their character as to “make the judicious grieve.” The actor and the audience react upon each other. The audience are generally uneducated, and for the most part agree with Partridge in his comment on “Hamlet:” “Give me the king for my money,” says he. The actors must bow to this low taste,—

“For they who live to please must please to live.”

But tradition has worse sins to answer for. It has not only ruined our national acting, but in some cases has overshadowed the drama itself, and perverted the meaning of some of the greatest plays of Shakespeare. Hamlet is not Hamlet on the English stage; he is the tall, imposing figure of John Kemble; dark, melodramatic, and dressed in black velvet. Strive as we will, we cannot imagine him as the light-haired Dane, easy and dreamy of temperament, “fat and scant of breath,” essentially metaphysical, hating physical action, and wanting energy to put his thoughts into deeds. The whole spirit of the acted Hamlet is southern; that of the real Hamlet is purely northern. We have indeed broken through an old tradition, according to which, incredible as it may seem, Shylock used to be acted as a comic character, though we are still far from a real understanding of his character. But of all the plays of Shakespeare none is so grossly misunderstood as “Macbeth.” Nor is this misapprehension confined to the stage; it prevails even among those who have zealously studied and admired Shakespeare. As John Kemble stands for Hamlet in our imaginations, so does Mrs. Siddons for Lady Macbeth. She has completely transformed this wonderful creation of Shakespeare’s, distorted its true features, and so stamped upon it her own individuality, that when we think of one we have the figure of the other in our minds. The Lady Macbeth of Mrs. Siddons is the only Lady Macbeth we know and believe in. She is the imperious, wicked, cruel wife of Macbeth, urging on her weak and kindhearted husband to abominable crimes solely to gratify her own ambitious and evil nature. She is without heart, tenderness, or remorse. Devilish in character, violent in purpose, she is the soul of the whole play; the plotter and instigator of all its horrors; a fiend-like creature, who, having a complete mastery over Macbeth, works him to madness by her taunts, and relentlessly drives him on against his will to the commission of his terrible crimes. We hate her, as we pity Macbeth. He is weak of purpose, amiable of disposition, “full of the milk of human kindness,” an unwilling instrument of all her evil designs, who, wanting force of will and strength of character, yields reluctantly to her infernal temptations.

Nothing could more clearly prove the great genius of Mrs. Siddons, than that she has been able so to stamp upon the public mind this amazing misconception, that, despite all the careful study which of late years has been given to Shakespeare, this notion of the character of Lady Macbeth and Macbeth should still prevail. Yet so deeply is it rooted, and so universal, that whoever attempts to eradicate it will find his task most difficult. But, believing it to be an utter distortion of the characters as Shakespeare drew them, and so at variance with the interior thought, conduct, and development of the play as not only entirely to obscure its real meaning, but to obliterate all its finest and most delicate features, we venture to enter upon this difficult task.