492. The Dramatic Element

The Dramatic Element

1Co_7:31 : ’93They that use this world as not abusing it.’94

My reason for preaching this discourse is that I have been kindly invited by two of the leading newspapers of this country to inspect and report on two of the popular plays of the day; to go some weeks ago to Chicago, and see the drama Quo Vadis, and criticise it with respect to its moral effect; and to go to New York, and see the drama Ben Hur, and write my opinion of it for public use. Instead of doing that, I propose in a sermon to discuss what we shall do with the dramatic element which God has implanted in many of our natures; not in ten or a hundred or a thousand, but in the vast majority of the human race. Some people speak of the drama as though it were something built up outside of ourselves by the Congreves and the Goldsmiths and the Shakespeares and the Sheridans of literature, and that then we attune our tastes to correspond with human inventions. Not at all. The drama is an echo from the feeling which God has implanted in our immortal souls. It is seen first in the domestic circle among the children three or four years of age playing with their dolls and their cradles and their carts’97seen ten years after in the playhouses of wood’97ten years after in the parlor charades’97after that, in the elaborate impersonations in the academies of music. Thespis and ‘c6schylus and Sophocles and Euripides merely dramatized what was in the Greek heart. Terence and Plautus and Seneca merely dramatized what was in the Roman heart. Congreve and Farquhar merely dramatized what was in the English heart. Racine, Corneille and Alfieri only dramatized what was in the French and Italian heart. Shakespeare only dramatized what was in the great world’92s heart. The dithyrambic and classic drama, the sentimental drama, the romantic drama, were merely echoes of the human soul.

I do not speak of the drama on the poetic shelf, nor of the drama in the playhouse; but I speak of the dramatic element in your soul and mine. We make men responsible for it. They are not responsible. They are responsible for the perversion of it, but not for the original implantation. God did that work, and I suppose he knew what he was about when he made us. We are nearly all moved by the spectacular. When on Thanksgiving Day we decorate our churches with the cotton and rice and the apples and the wheat and the rye and the oats, our gratitude to God is stirred. When on Easter morning we see written in letters of flowers the inscription, ’93He is risen,’94 our emotions are stirred. Every parent likes to go to the school exhibition with its recitations and its dialogues and its droll costumes. The torchlight procession of the political campaign is merely the dramatization of principles involved. No intelligent man can look in any secular or religious direction without finding this dramatic element revealing, unrolling, demonstrating itself. What shall we do with it?

Shall we suppress it? You can as easily suppress its Creator. You may direct it, you may educate it, you may purify it, you may harness it to multipotent usefulness, and that it is your duty to do. Just as we cultivate the taste for the beautiful and the sublime by bird-haunted glen and roystering stream and cataracts let down in uproar over the mossed rocks, and the day lifting its banner of victory in the East, and then setting everything on fire as it retreats through the gates of the West, and the Austerlitz and Waterloo of an August thunderstorm blazing their batteries, into a sultry afternoon, and the round, glittering tear of a world wet on the cheek of the night’97as in this way we cultivate our taste for the beautiful and sublime, so in every lawful way we are to cultivate the dramatic element in our nature, by every staccato passage in literature, by antithesis and synthesis, by every tragic passage in human life.

The plainest man has in his plainest day something histrionic. This dramatic element in all our natures, or nearly all our natures, is exceptionally strong or weak in some; just as there may be a million men who admire poetry where there was only one poet, one Tennyson to England, or one Longfellow to America; just as there may be a million people who admire music where there was only one Ole Bull to Norway, and one Wagner to Germany. Now I have to tell you not only that God has implanted this dramatic element in our natures, but I have to tell you in the Scriptures he cultivates it, he appeals to it, he develops it. I do not care where you open the Bible, your eye will fall upon a drama. Here it is in the Book of Judges; the fir tree, the vine, the olive tree, the bramble’97they all make speeches. Then at the close of the scene there is a coronation, and the bramble is proclaimed king. That is a political drama. Here it is in the Book of Job: Enter Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, Elihu, and Job. The opening act of the drama, all darkness; the closing act of the drama, all sunshine. Magnificent drama is the Book of Job!

Here it is in Solomon’92s Song: The region, an Oriental region’97vineyards, pomegranates, mountain of myrrh, flock of sheep, garden of spices, a wooing, a bride, a bridegroom, dialogue after dialogue’97intense, gorgeous, all-suggestive drama is the Book of Solomon’92s Song. Here it is in the Book of Luke: Costly mansion in the night. All the windows bright with illumination. The floor a-quake with the dance. Returned son in costly garments, which do not very well fit him, perhaps, for they were not made for him, but he must swiftly leave off his old garb and prepare for this extemporized levee. Pouting son at the back door, too mad to go in, because they are making such a fuss. Tears of sympathy running down the old man’92s cheek at the story of his son’92s wandering and suffering, and tears of joy at his return. When you heard Murdock recite the Prodigal Son in one of his readings, you did not know whether to sob or shout. Revivals of religion have started just under the reading of that soul-revolutionizing drama of the Prodigal Son.

Here it is in the Book of Revelation: Crystalline sea; pearly gate; opaline river; amethystine capstone; showering coronets; one vial poured out incarnadining the waters; cavalrymen of heaven galloping on white horses; nations in doxology’97hallelujahs to the right of them, hallelujahs to the left of them. As the Bible opens with the drama of the first Paradise, so it closes with the drama of the second Paradise.

Mind you, when I say drama, I do not mean myth or fable, for my theology is of the oldest type’97five hundred years old, thousands of years old, as old as the Bible. When I speak of the drama at the beginning and the close of the Bible, I do not mean an allegory, but I mean the truth so stated that in grouping and in startling effect it is a God-given, world-resounding, heaven-echoing drama. Now if God implanted this dramatic element in our natures, and if he has cultivated and developed it in the Scriptures, I demand that you recognize it.

Because the drama has again and again been degraded and employed for destructive purposes is nothing against the drama, any more than music ought to be accursed because it has been taken again and again into the saturnalian wassails of four thousand years. Will you refuse to enthrone music on the church organ because the art has been trampled again and again under the feet of the lascivious dance?

It is nothing against painting and sculpture that in Corinth and Herculaneum they were demonstrative of vulgarity and turpitude. The dreadful museum at Pompeii shall throw no discredit on Powers’92s Greek Slave or Church’92s Heart of the Andes or Rubens’92s Descent from the Cross or Angelo’92s Last Judgment. The very fact that again and again the drama has been dragged through the sewers of iniquity is the reason why we should snatch it up and start it out on a grand and a holy and a magnificent mission. Let me say at this point in my sermon that the drama will never be lifted to its rightful sphere by those people who have not sense enough to distinguish between the drama and the playhouse. The drama is no more the theatre than a hymn book is a church. I am not speaking in regard to the theatre at all. The drama is a literary expression of that feeling which God implanted in the human soul. Neither will the drama ever be lifted to its proper sphere by wholesale denunciation of all dramatists. If you have not known men and women connected with the drama who are pure in heart and pure in speech and pure in life, it is because you have not had very wide acquaintance.

Some one will say to me: ’93Did you not some years ago preach a sermon in wholesale denunciation of all dramatists?’94 I reply that that sermon, which was printed in a secular paper, then copied in many religious papers, was written by a literary wit who had never seen me, who found out what the text was from some one who had been present, and then composed the whole thing on his own desk’97the whole thing a caricature representing me as hostile to zoological gardens, and as considering it a great sin to look at an elephant or crocodile! Mr. Davenport, no wonder, at the close of a play a few nights after that in the Chestnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, stepped before the curtain and denounced that sermon. He could not have hated it more than I did.

Wholesale denunciation of all dramatists will never elevate the drama. Yonder stand a church and a theatre on opposite sides of the street. The church shouts over to the theatre, ’93You are all scoundrels;’94 the theatre shouts back, ’93You are all hypocrites;’94 and they both falsify. Dropping all indiscriminate jeremiads against dramatists, and realizing that the drama is not necessarily connected with this institution or with that, I want to show you how the dramatic element in our natures may be harnessed to the chariot of civilization and Christianity.

Let the Sabbath-school teachers employ more of the dramatic in their work. By graphic Scripture scene, by anecdote, by descriptive gesture, by impersonation, urge your classes to right action. We want in all our schools and colleges and prayer meetings, and in all our attempts at reform, and in all our churches, to have less of the style didactic and more of the style dramatic.

Fifty essays about the sorrows of the poor could not affect me as a little drama of accident and suffering I saw one slippery morning in the streets of Philadelphia. Just ahead of me was a lad, wretched in apparel, his limb amputated at the knee; from the pallor of the boy’92s cheek, the amputation not long before. He had a package of broken food under his arm’97food he had begged, I suppose, at the doors. As he passed on over the slippery pavement, cautiously, and carefully I steadied him until his crutch slipped and he fell. I helped him up as well as I could, gathered up the fragments of the package as well as I could, put them under one arm and the crutch under the other arm; but when I saw the blood run down his pale cheek I burst into tears. Fifty essays about the sufferings of the poor could not touch one like that little drama of accident and suffering.

Oh! we want in all our different departments of usefulness more of the dramatic element and less of the didactic. The tendency in this day is to drone religion, to whine religion, to cant religion, to moan religion, to croak religion, to sepulcharize religion, when we ought to present it in animated and spectacular manner.

Let me say to all young ministers of the Gospel, if you have this dramatic element in your nature use it for God and heaven. If you will go home and look over the history of the Church you will find that those men have brought more souls to Christ who have been dramatic. Rowland Hill, dramatic; Thomas Chalmers, dramatic; Thomas Guthrie, dramatic; John Knox, dramatic; Robert McCheyne, dramatic; Christmas Evans, dramatic; George Whitefield, dramatic; Robert Hall, dramatic; Robert South, dramatic; Bourdaloue, dramatic; Fenelon, dramatic; John Mason, dramatic. When you get into the ministry, if you attempt to cultivate that element, and try to wield it for God, you will meet with mighty rebuff and caricature, and ecclesiastical counsel will take your case in charge, and they will try to put you down; but the God who starts you will help you through, and great will be the eternal rewards for the assiduous and the brave.

What we want, ministers and laymen, is to get our sermons and our exhortations and our prayers out of the old rut. The old hackneyed religious phrases that come snoring down through the centuries will never arrest the masses. What we want to-day, you in your sphere and I in my sphere, is to freshen up. People do not want in their sermons the sham flowers bought at the millinery shop, but the japonicas wet with the morning dew; not the heavy bones of extinct megatherium of past ages, but the living reindeer caught last August at the edge of Schroon Lake. We want to drive out the drowsy and the prosaic and the tedious and the humdrum, and introduce the brightness and the vivacity and the holy sarcasm and the sanctified wit and the epigrammatic power and the blood-red earnestness and the fire of religious zeal, and I do not know of any way of doing it as well as through the dramatic.

But now let us turn to the drama as an amusement and entertainment.

Rev. Dr. Bellows, of New York, many years ago, in a very brilliant but much-criticised sermon, took the position that the theatre might be renovated and made auxiliary to the church. Many Christian people are of the same opinion. I do not agree with them. I have no idea that success is in that direction. What I have said heretofore on this subject, as far as I remember, is my sentiment now. But to-day I take a step in advance of my former theory. Christianity is going to take full possession of this world and control its maxims, its laws, its literature, its science, and its amusements. Shut out from the realm of Christianity anything and you give it up to sin and death.

If Christianity is mighty enough to manage everything but the amusements of the world, then it is a very defective Christianity. Is it capable of keeping account of the tears of the world and incompetent to make record of its smiles? Is it good to follow the funeral but dumb at the world’92s play? Can it control all the other elements of our nature but the dramatic element? My idea of Christianity is that it can and will conquer everything. In the good time coming, which the world calls the golden age, and the poet the Elysian age and the Christian the Millennium, we have positive announcement that the amusements of the world are to be under Christian sway. ’93Holiness shall be upon the bells of the horses,’94 says one prophet. So, you see, it will control even the sleigh-rides. ’93The city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof,’94 says another prophet. So you see it is to control the hoop-rolling and the kite-flying and the ball-playing. Now, what we want is to hasten that time. How will it be done? By the church going over to the theatre? It will not go. By the theatre coming to the church? It will not come. What we want is a Reformed Amusement Association in every city and town of the United States. Once announced and explained and illustrated, the Christian and philanthropic capitalist will come forward to establish it, and there will be public-spirited men everywhere who will do this work for the dramatic element of our natures. We need a new institution to meet and recognize and develop and defend the dramatic element of our nature.

It needs to be distinct from everything that is or has been. In an age which has projected a telephone and an electric pen and the bicycle and the telegraph, surely we are not afraid of a new institution. It would be derided at the start, as all great movements are derided at the start, but it would revolutionize society for good. Wiser men than we are would baptize it with a name, only for the purposes of this sermon I will call it The Spectacular. I would have its board of trustees made up of the most intelligent and most unimpeachable men and women of each community. One-half of them I would have professed and most pronounced Christians, connected with the churches.

I would have this Reformed Amusement Association having in charge this new institution of the Spectacular take possession of some hall or academy. It might take a smaller building at the start, but it would soon need the largest hall, and even that would not hold the people: for he who opens before the dramatic element in human nature an opportunity of gratification without compromise and without danger, does the mightiest thing of this century, and the tides of such an institution would rise as the Atlantic rises at Liverpool Docks.

There are tens of thousands of Christian homes where the sons and daughters are held back from dramatic entertainment for reasons which some of you would say are good reasons and others would say are poor reasons, but still held back. But on the establishment of such an institution they would feel the arrest of their anxieties, and would say on the establishment of this new institution, which I have called the Spectacular, they would say, ’93Thank God, this is what we have all been waiting for.’94

Now, as I believe that I make suggestion of an institution which wiser men will develop, I want to give some characteristics of this new institution, this Spectacular, if it is to be a grand social and moral success. In the first place, its entertainments must be compressed within an hour and three-quarters. What kills sermons, prayers and lectures and entertainments of all sorts is prolixity. At a reasonable hour every night every curtain of public entertainment ought to drop, every church service ought to cease, the instruments of orchestras ought to be unstrung. What comes more than this comes too late.

There are thousands of people now asleep in the cemeteries who would have been alive and well, but they would not go to bed before twelve o’92clock at night. You have your choice, sleep in your beds or sleep in your graves. The reason there are intoxicating bars connected with nearly all places of public entertainment, is because people get exhausted with their amusements, and they have to stimulate in order to stand it. How shall you the next day sell your goods, build your walls, physician your sick, preach your sermons, if the night before at half-past ten or eleven o’92clock, or half-past eleven some public entertainment shall turn you out, you getting home at twelve o’92clock?

The sublimest thing outside of heaven is the oratorio of the Messiah and the oratorio of the Creation; but I never heard one of those performances but I saw, before it was over, the people were overcome with satiety. The first hour we were enchanted, the next half-hour we liked it pretty well, the rest of the time we were looking at our watches and wondering when we could go home. It is prolixity that kills all amusements, or injures all amusements. Now, in this Spectacular, this new institution, the curtain must drop at ten. So you will escape one style of dissipation.

On the platform of this new institution there will be a drama which, before rendering, has been read, expurgated, abbreviated, and passed upon by a board of trustees connected with this Reformed Amusement Association. If there be in a drama a sentence suggesting evil, it will be stricken out. If there be in a Shakespearian play a word with two meanings’97a good meaning and a bad meaning’97another word will be substituted, an honest word looking only one way. The caterers to public taste will have to learn that Shakespearian nastiness is no better than Congrevean nastiness. You say, ’93Who will dare to change by expurgation or abbreviation a Shakespearian play?’94 I dare. The board of trustees of this Reformed Amusement Association will dare. It is no depreciation of a drama, the abbreviation of it. I would like to hear thirty or forty pages of Milton’92s Paradise Lost read at one time, but I should be very sorry to hear the whole book read at one sitting. Abbreviation is not depreciation.

On the platform of this new institution, this Spectacular, under the care of the very best men and women in the community, there shall be nothing witnessed that would be unfit for a parlor. Any attitude, any look, any word that would offend you seated at your own fireside, in your family circle, will be prohibited from that platform. By what law of common sense or of morality does that which is not fit to be seen or heard by five people become fit to be seen or heard by fifteen hundred people? On the platform of that Spectacular all the scenes of the drama will be as chaste as was ever a lecture by Edward Everett, or a sermon by F. W. Robertson. On the platform shall come only such men and women as you would welcome to your homes. I do not make the requisition that they be professors of religion. There are professors of religion that I would not want in my parlor or kitchen or coal-cellar! It is not what we profess, but what we are. All who come on that platform of the Spectacular will be gentlemen and ladies in the ordinary acceptation of those terms’97persons whom you would invite to sit at your table, and whom you would introduce to your children, and with whom you would not be compromised if you were seen passing down Pennsylvania Avenue or Broadway with them.

On that platform there shall be no carouser, no inebriate, no Cyprian, no foe of good morals, masculine or feminine. It is often said we have no right to criticise the private morals of public entertainers. Well, do as you please with other institutions; on the platform of this new institution we shall have only good men and good women, in the ordinary social sense of goodness. Just as soon as the platform of the Spectacular is fully and fairly established, many a genius who hitherto has suppressed the dramatic element in his nature because he could not find the realm in which to exercise it, will step over on the platform, and giants of the drama, their name known the world over, who have been toiling for the elevation of the drama, will step over on that platform’97such women as Charlotte Cushman of the past, such men as Joseph Jefferson of the present.

The platform of that new institution, of that expurgated drama, occupied only by these purest of men and women, will draw to itself millions of people who have never been to see the drama more than once or twice in their lives, or never saw it at all. That institution will combine the best music, the best architecture, the best genius six nights the week on the side of intelligence and good morals.

Do you tell me this plan is chimerical? I answer, it only requires one man somewhere between here and San Francisco, or between Bangor and Galveston, to see it and appreciate it’97one man of large individual means and great heart, and with a hundred thousand dollars he could do more good than all the Lenoxes and the Lawrences and the Peabodys ever accomplished. He would settle for all nations and for all times the stupendous question of amusement which for centuries has been under angry and vituperative discussion, and which is no nearer being settled to-day, by all appearances, than it was at the start. Such an institution would have to be supported at the start by a donation of capital; but very soon, in a year or two, it would become self-supporting, and the board of trustees of the Reformed Amusement Association would find that the idea paid not only in morals and the elevation of the people, but in dividends and hard cash.

I would go to such an institution, such a Spectacular; I should go once a week the rest of my life, and take my family with me, and the majority of the families of the earth would go to such an institution. I expect the time will come when I can, without bringing upon myself criticism, without being an inconsistent Christian’97when I, a minister of the good old Presbyterian Church, will be able to go to some new institution like this, the Spectacular, and see Hamlet and King Lear and the Merchant of Venice and the Hunchback and Joshua Whitcomb. Meanwhile, many of us will have this dramatic element unmet and unregaled.

For my love of pictures I can. go to the art gallery; for my love of music I can go to the concert; for my love of literature I can go to the lyceum lecture; but for this dramatic element in my nature, as strong as any other passion of the soul, there is nothing but injunction and prohibition. Until, sirs, you can establish a Spectacular, or a similar institution, with as much purity and with as much entertainment as this one of which I speak’97until you can establish some such institution, you may thunder away against evil amusements until the last minute of the last hour of the last day of the world’92s existence and without any avail.

This dramatic element will break out, and it will climb over and it will trample under foot every effort at suppression. If you cannot guide it in the right direction, it will plunge in the wrong direction. It will either be angel or satyr.

We want this institution independent of the Church and independent of the theatre. The Church tries to compromise this matter, and in many churches there are dramatic exhibitions. Sometimes they call them charades, sometimes they call them magic-lantern exhibitions’97entertainments for which you pay fifty cents, the fifty cents to go for the support of some charitable institution. An extemporized stage is put up in the church or in the lecture-room, and there you go and see David and the giant, and Joseph sold into Egypt, and little Samuel awoke; the chief difference between the exhibition in the church and the exhibition in the theatre being that the exhibition in the theatre is more skilful. The exhibition in the church generally has amateurs; the exhibition in the theatre, performers who have given their whole life to the study of particular parts. But because the dramatic exhibition in the church is not as good as the dramatic exhibition in the theatre, it is considered to be more pious! The old elders do not say anything against it because they do not want to make trouble in the church; and the minister, to atone for the dramatic exhibition the week before in the house of the Lord, the next Sabbath anathematizes in style more vitriolic and brimstony the playhouse! And so all are cheated except God.

Now let us have a new institution, with expurgated drama and with the surroundings I have spoken of’97an institution which we can, without sophistry and without self-deception, support and patronize’97an institution so uncompromisingly good that we can attend it without any shock to our religious sensibilities, though the Sabbath before we sat at the holy sacrament.

Because the drama is good it need not be dull. There is more fun in virtue than in sin. The best way to scatter darkness is by the clear light; the best way to wash off filth is by clean water; the best way to drown discord is by the drum-beat and the flute warble, and the trumpet blast of grand harmony; and the best way to overcome the polluting and besotting and soul-destroying amusements of the day is by a model Spectacular with expurgated drama, under the control of the purest and the best men and women in the world and church. That man who shall have money enough and brain enough and enterprise enough and heart enough to establish, illustrate and demonstrate the institution that I speak of, will bring the Church of God and all the human race under everlasting obligations. The world waits for it.

Meanwhile, until the Spectacular, this new institution, or something like it, shall be established, I counsel you to beware lest you allow the dramatic element in human nature to lead you into contamination. To gratify that one taste, you cannot afford to sacrifice your purity, your influence, your usefulness, your soul, as many have done. The amusements of life are merely the interstices, the parentheses, the interregnums of hard work, in preparation for other hard work. He who hunts for amusement, and makes that his business, is like a man who hunts for a lost diamond among rocks, not regarding a precipice near by, and in the joy of finding the diamond stumbles five hundred feet off and down, the cormorants and the sea-gulls only knowing where he perished.

The amusements of life are beautiful and they are valuable; but they cannot pay you for the loss of your soul. I could not tell your character, I could not tell your prospects for this world or the next by the particular church you attend; but if you will tell me where you were last night and where you were the night before and where you have been the nights of the last month, I think I could guess where you will spend eternity.

As to the drama of your life and mine, it will soon end. There will be no encore to bring us back. At the beginning of that drama of life stood a cradle; at the end of it will stand a grave. The first act, welcome. The last act, farewell. The intermediate acts, banquet and battle, processions bridal and funeral, songs and tears, laughter and groans.

It was not original with Shakespeare when he said, ’93All the world’92s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.’94 He got it from St. Paul, who, fifteen centuries before that, had written, ’93We are made a spectacle unto the world and to angels and to men.’94 A spectacle in a Colosseum fighting with wild beasts in an amphitheater, the galleries full, looking down. Here we destroy a lion. Here we grapple with a gladiator. When we fall, devils shout. When we rise, angels sing. A spectacle before gallery above gallery, gallery above gallery. Gallery of our departed kindred looking down to see if we are faithful, and worthy of our Christian ancestry, hoping for our victory, wanting to throw us a garland; glorified children and parents, with cheer on cheer urging us on. Gallery of the martyrs looking down’97the Polycarps and the Ridleys and the M’92Kails and the Theban Legion and the Scotch Covenanters and they of the Brussels marketplace and of Piedmont’97crying down from the galleries, ’93God gave us the victory, and he will give it you.’94 Gallery of angels looking down’97cherubic, seraphic, archangelic’97clapping their wings at every advantage we gain. Gallery of the King from which there waves a scarred hand, and from which there comes a sympathetic voice, saying: ’93Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.’94 Oh, the spectacle in which you and I are the actors! Oh, the piled-up galleries looking down!

Scene: The Last Day. Stage: The Rocking Earth. Enter: Dukes, Lords, Kings, Beggars, Clowns. No sword. No tinsel. No crown. For footlights: The kindling flames of a world. For orchestra: The trumpets that wake the dead. For applause: The clapping floods of the sea. For curtain: The heavens rolled together as a scroll. For tragedy: The Doom of the Profligate. For the last scene of the fifth act: The tramp of nations across the stage’97some to the right, others to the left. Then the bell of the last thunder will ring, and the curtain will drop!

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage