168. Hissed Off the Stage

Hissed Off the Stage

Job_27:23 : ’93Men shall clap their hands at him, and shall hiss him out of his place.’94

This allusion seems to be dramatic. The Bible more than once makes such allusion. Paul says: ’93We are made a theater (or spectacle) to angels and to men.’94 The theater is so old that no one can fix the date of its birth. Archilochus, Simonides and Solon, who wrote for it dithyrambics, lived about six or seven hundred years before Christ. It is evident from the text that some of the present habits of the theatergoers were known in Job’92s time, because in the text he describes an actor hissed off the stage. The impersonator comes on the boards, and either through lack of study of the part he is to take or inaptness or other incapacity, the spectators are offended, and express their disapprobation and disgust first by over-applause, attempting by great clapping of hands to drown out what he says, and that failing to stop the performer they put their tongue against their teeth, and make terrific sibilation until he disappears behind the curtain. ’93Men shall clap their hands at him, and shall hiss him out of his place.’94

My text suggests that each one of us is put on the stage of this world to take some part. Each one is assigned a place, no supernumeraries hanging around the drama of life to take this or that or the other part, as he may be called upon. No one can take our place. We can take no other place. Ay, it is not the impersonation of another; we ourselves are the real ’93Merchant of Venice,’94 or the real Shylock; the real filial Cordelia, or the real cruel Regan; the real Portia or the real Lady Macbeth. The tragedian of the playhouse, at the close of the third scene of the fifth act, takes off the attire of Gonzalo or Edward Mortimer or Henry V, and resigns the character in which for three hours he appeared; but we never put off our character, and no change of apparel can make us any one else than that which we eternally are. The late Mr. McCullough, the actor, was no more certainly appointed on any occasion to appear as Spartacus or Edwin Forrest as King Lear or Charlotte Cushman as Meg Merrilies or John Kemble as Macbeth or Cooke as Richard III or Kean as Othello than you and I are expected to take some especial and particular part in the great drama of human and immortal life. Through what hardship and suffering and discipline these artists went year after year that they might be perfected in their parts, you have often read. But we, put on the stage of this life to represent charity and faith and humility and helpfulness’97what little preparation we have made, although we have three galleries of spectators’97earth and heaven and hell! Have we not been more attentive to the part taken by others than to the part taken by ourselves, and while we needed to be looking at home and concentring our thoughts on our own duty, we have been criticising the other performers, and saying, ’93That was too high,’94 or ’93too low,’94 or ’93too feeble,’94 or ’93too extravagant,’94 or ’93too tame,’94 or ’93too demonstrative,’94 while we were making ourselves a dead failure and preparing to be ignominiously hissed off the stage?

Many make a failure of their part in the drama of life through dissipation. They have enough intellectual equipment and good address and geniality unbounded. But they have a wine-closet that contains all the forces for their social and business and moral overthrow. So far back as 959 King Edgar of England made a law that the drink-cup should have pins fastened at a certain point in the side, so that the indulger might be reminded to stop before he got to the bottom. But there are no pins projecting from the sides of the modern wine-cup or beer-mug, and the first point at which millions stop is at the gravelly bottom of their own grave.

Dr. Sax, of France, discovered something which all drinkers ought to know. He found out that alcohol in every shape, whether of wine or brandy or beer, contains parasitic life called bacillus potumani’e6. By a powerful microscope these living things are discovered, and when you take strong drink you take them into the stomach, and then into your blood, and getting into the crimson canals of life they go into every tissue of your body, and your entire organism is taken possession of by these destructive infinitesimals. When in delirium tremens a man sees every form of reptilian life, it is only these parasites of the brain in exaggerated size. It is not a hallucination that the victim is suffering from. He only sees in the room what is actually crawling and rioting in his own brain. Every time you take strong drink you swallow these maggots, and every time the imbiber of alcohol in any shape feels vertigo or rheumatism or nausea, it is only the jubilee of these maggots. Efforts are being made for the discovery of some germicide that can kill the parasites of alcoholism, but the only thing that will ever extirpate them is abstinence from alcohol and teetotal abstinence to which I would, before God, swear all young men and old.

America is a fruitful country, and we raise large crops of wheat and corn and oats, but the largest crop we raise in this country is the crop of drunkards. With sickle made out of the sharp edges of the broken glass of bottle and demijohn they are cut down, and there are whole swaths of them, whole windrows of them, and it takes all the hospitals and penitentiaries and graveyards and cemeteries to hold this harvest of hell. Some of you are going down under this evil, and the never-dying worm of alcoholism has wound around you one of its coils, and by next New Year’92s Day it will have another coil around you, and it will after a while put a coil around your tongue and a coil around your brain and a coil around your lung and a coil around your foot and a coil around your heart; and some day this never-dying worm will with one spring tighten all the coils at once, and in the last twist of that awful convolution you will cry out, ’93Oh, my God!’94 and be gone.

The greatest of dramatists, in the tragedy of ’93The Tempest,’94 sends staggering across the stage Stephano, the drunken butler; but across the stage of human life strong drink sends kingly and queenly and princely natures staggering forward against the footlights of conspicuity, and then staggering back into failure, till the world is impatient for their disappearance, and human and diabolic voices join in hissing them off the stage.

Many also make a failure in the drama of life through indolence. They are always making calculation how little they can do for the compensation they get. There are more lazy ministers, lawyers, doctors, merchants, artists and farmers than have ever been counted upon. Community is full of laggards and shirkers. I can tell it from the way they crawl along the street, from their tardiness in meeting engagements, from the lethargies that seem to hang to the foot when they lift it, to the hand when they put it out, to the words when they speak. Compare two young men in a store. In the morning the one goes to his post the last minute or one minute behind. The other is ten minutes before the time, and has his hat and coat hung up, and is at his post waiting for duty. The one is ever and anon in the afternoon looking at his watch to see if it is not almost time to shut up. The other stays half an hour after he might go, and when asked why, says he wanted to look over some entries he had made, to be sure he was right, or to put up some goods that had been left out of place. The one is very punctilious about doing work not exactly belonging to him. The other is glad to help the other clerks in their work. The first will be a prolonged nothing, and he will be poorer at sixty than at twenty. The other will be a merchant prince.

Indolence is the cause of more failures in all occupations than you have ever suspected. People are too lazy to do what they can do, and want to undertake that which they cannot do. In the drama of life they do not want to be a common soldier carrying a halberd across the stage or a falconer or a mere attendant, and so lounge about the scenes till they shall be called to be a Macready or a Junius Brutus Booth. They say, ’93Give me the part of Timon of Athens rather than that of Flavius, his steward.’94 ’93Let me be Cymbeline, the king, rather than Pisano, the servant.’94 After a while they, by some accident of prosperity or circumstances, get in the place for which they have no qualification. And very soon, if the man be a merchant, he is going around asking his creditors to compromise for ten cents on the dollar. Or, if a clergyman, he is making tirades against the ingratitude of churches. Or, if an attorney, by unskilful management he loses a case in which widows and orphans are robbed of their portion. Or, if a physician, he by malpractice gives his patient rapid transit from this world to the next, as the clumsy surgeon of Charles II, King of Navarre, having sewed up the feeble limbs of the king in a sheet saturated with inflammable material, and having no knife to cut the thread, tood a candle to burn off the thread, and the bandages took fire and consumed the king. One incompetent friend would have made a splendid horse-doctor, but he wanted to be professor of anatomy in a university. He could have sold enough confectionery to have supported his family, but he wanted to have a sugar refinery like the Havemeyers. He could have mended shoes, but he wanted to mend the Constitution of the United States. Toward the end of life these people are out of patience, out of money, out of friends, out of everything. They go to the poorhouse or keep out of it by running in debt to all the grocery and drygoods stores that will trust them. People begin to wonder when the curtain will drop on the scene. After a while, leaving nothing but their compliments to pay their doctor, undertaker and Gabriel Grubb, the grave-digger, they disappear. Exeunt! Hissed off the stage!

Others fail in the drama of life through demonstrated selfishness. They make all the rivers empty into their sea, all the roads of emolument end at their door, and they gather all the plumes of honor for their brow. They help no one, encourage no one, rescue no one. ’93How big a pile of money can I get?’94 ’93How much of the world can I absorb?’94 are the chief questions. They feel about the common people as the Turks felt toward the Asapi or common soldiers, considering them of no use except to fill up the ditches with their dead bodies, while the other troops walked over them to take the fort. After a while, this prince of worldly success is sick. The only interest society has in his illness is the effect that his possible decease may have on the money markets. After a while he dies. Great newspaper capitals announce how he started with nothing and ended with everything. Although for sake of appearance some people put handkerchief to the eye, there is not one genuine tear shed at their obsequies. The heirs sit up all night while he lies in state, discussing what the old fellow has probably done with his money. It takes all the livery stables within two miles to furnish funeral equipage, and all the mourning stores are kept busy in selling weeds of grief. The stonecutters send in proposals for a monument. The minister at the obsequies reads of the Resurrection, which makes the hearers fear that if the unscrupulous financier does come up in the general rising he will try to get a corner on tombstones and graveyard fences. All good men are glad that the moral nuisance has been removed. The Wall street speculators are glad, because there is more room for themselves. The heirs are glad, because they get possession of the long-delayed inheritance. Dropping every feather of all his plumes, every certificate of all his stock, every bond of all his investments, every dollar of all his fortune, he departs, and all the rolling of Dead March in Saul, and all the pageantry of his interment, and all the exquisiteness of sarcophagus, and all the extravagance of epitaphiology cannot hide the fact that my text has come again to tremendous fulfilment: ’93Men shall clap their hands at him, and shall hiss him out of his place.’94

You see the clapping comes before the hiss. The world cheers before it damns. So, it is said, the deadly asp tickles before it stings. Going up in the world is he? Hurrah! Stand back and let his galloping horses dash by, a whirlwind of plated harness and tinkling headgear and arched neck. Drink deep of his Madeira and cognac. Boast of how well you know him. All hats off as he passes. Bask for days and years in the sunlight of his prosperity. Going down in the world is he? Pretend to be nearsighted, so that you cannot see him as he walks past. When men ask you if you know him, halt and hesitate, as though you were trying to call up a dim memory, and say: ’93Well, y-e-e-s; yes, I believe I once did know him, but have not seen him for a long while.’94 Cross a different ferry from the one where you used to meet him, lest he ask for financial help. When you started life he spoke a good word for you at the bank. Talk down his credit, now that his fortunes are collapsing. He put his name on two of your notes; tell him that you have changed your mind about such things, and that you never indorse. After a while his matters come to a dead halt, and an assignment or suspension or sheriff’92s sale takes place. You say, ’93He ought to have stopped sooner. Just as I expected. He made too big a splash in the world. Glad the balloon has burst.’94 Ha! ha! Applause when he went up, sibilant derision when he came down. ’93Men shall clap their hands at him, and hiss him out of his place.’94 So, high up amid the crags, the eagle flutters dust into the eyes of the roebuck, until with eyes blinded it goes tumbling over the precipice, the great antlers crashing on the rocks.

Now, compare some of these goings out of life with the departure of men and women who in the drama of life took the part that God assigned them, and then went away honored of men and crowned of the Lord Almighty. It is about fifty years ago since in a comparatively small apartment, a newly-married pair set up a home. The first guest that was invited into that residence was the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Bible given the bride on the day of her espousal was the guide of that household. Days of sunshine were followed by days of shadow. Did you ever know a home that for fifty years had no vicissitude? Years passed on, and there were in that home hilarities, but they were good and healthful; and sorrows, but they were comforted. Marriages as bright as orange blossoms could make them, and burials in which all hearts were riven. They have a family lot in the cemetery, but all the place is illuminated with hopes of resurrection and reunion. The children of the household that lived have grown up, and they are all Christians, the father and mother leading the way, and the children following. What care the mother took of wardrobe and education and character and manners! How hard she sometimes worked! When the head of the household was unfortunate in business, she sewed until her fingers were numb and bleeding at the tips. And what close calculation of economies, and what ingenuity in refitting the garments of the elder children for the younger! And only God kept account of that mother’92s sideaches and headaches and heartaches and the prayers by the side of the sick child’92s cradle, and by the couch of this one fully grown. The neighbors often noticed how tired she looked, and old acquaintances hardly knew her in the street; but without complaint she waited and toiled and endured and accomplished all these years. The children are out in the world, an honor to themselves and their parents. After a while the mother’92s last sickness comes. Children and grandchildren, summoned from afar, come softly into the room one by one, for she is too weak to see more than one at a time. She runs her dying fingers lovingly through their hair, and tells them not to cry, and that she is going now, but they will all meet again in a little while, in a better world, and then kisses them good-by and ’93God bless and keep you, my dear child!’94 The day of the obsequies comes, and the officiating clergyman tells the story of wifely and motherly fidelity, and many hearts on earth and in heaven echo the sentiment; and as she is earned off the stage of this mortal life there are cries of ’93Faithful unto death; she hath done what she could,’94 while overpowering all the voices of earth and heaven is the plaudit of the God who watched her from first to last, saying: ’93Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things. Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.’94

But what became of the father of that household? He started out as a young man in business and had small income, and having got a little ahead, sickness in the family swept it all away. He went through all the business panics of forty years, met many losses, and suffered many betrayals; but kept right on trusting in God, whether business was good or poor, setting his children a good example, giving them the best of counsel; and never a prayer did he offer for all those years but they were mentioned in it. He is old now, and realizes it cannot be long before he must quit all these scenes; but he is going to leave his children an inheritance of prayer and Christian principles which the defalcations of earth can never touch; and as he goes out of the world the Church of God blesses him, and the poor ring his doorbell to see if he is any better, and his grave is surrounded by a multitude who went on foot and stood there before the procession of carriages came up, and some say there will be no one to take his place, and others say, ’93Who will pity me now that he is gone?’94 and others remark, ’93He shall be held in everlasting remembrance.’94 And as the drama of his life closes all the vociferations and bravos and encores that ever shook the amphitheaters and the Drury Lanes and the Covent Gardens and the Hay-markets and the Coliseums of earthly spectacle were tame and feeble compared with the long, loud thunders of approval that shall break from the cloud of witnesses in the piled-up gallery of the heavens. Choose ye between the life that shall close by being hissed off the stage and the life that shall close amid the acclamations supernal and archangelic.

O men and women on the stage of life, many of you in the first act of the drama, and others in the second, and some of you in the third, and a few in the fourth, and here and there one in the fifth, but all of you between entrance and exit, I quote to you as the peroration of this sermon the most suggestive passage that Shakespeare ever wrote, although you never heard it recited. The author has often been claimed as infidel and atheistic, so the quotation shall be not only religiously helpful to ourselves, but grandly vindicatory of the great dramatist. I quote from his last will and testament: ’93In the name of God, Amen. I, William Shakespeare, of Stratford-upon-Avon, in the county of Warwick, gentleman, in perfect health and memory (God be praised!), do make this my last will and testament in manner and form following. First, I commend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing through the only merits of Jesus Christ, my Saviour, to be made partaker of life everlasting.’94 Then follow the bequests and the signature: ’93By me, William Shakespeare.’94 ’93Witnesses to the publishing hereof, F. Collyns, Jesse Shaw, John Robinson, Hamnet Sadler, Robert Whattcott.’94

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage