This playing 'possum is a dramatic artifice very prevalent even in the lower regions of the animal kingdom. If it be thought that a bug cannot possibly know so much, the reply is, Perhaps the bug itself does not, but the presence of God, the creative and guardian Spirit of nature, the collective experience of the total ancestry of the bug organized in its nervous system, does know it; and it is this automatic reason that plays the cunning game. A bear has been known to frequent the bank of a stream where fishes were wont to come to the surface and feed on the falling fruit of an overhanging tree, to splash the water with his paw in imitation of the dropping fruit, and when the fish appeared, seize and devour it! This neat little drama implies on the part of the bear an imaginative conception of the different personages and scenes in the situation, in advance, and then a deliberate representation of his ideas in action. It would be the same thing as human art if the bear could of its own impulse repeat the whole serial action under other circumstances, as, for example, before a group of bears off in the woods. This he cannot do; and thus is the animal drama differenced from the human drama, instinct separated from art.
A great many animals are known to imitate the cries or motions of the creatures they prey on, in order to allure them within seizing-distance. For the sake of gaining some end they pretend to be what they are not, and to entertain feelings and designs quite different from their real ones. Certainly this is to be a hypocrite, an actor, in the deepest sense of guile. The mocking-bird has the faculty of mimicking the notes of all kinds of birds with marvellous accuracy and ease. It takes great pleasure in practising the gift, calling various kinds of timid songsters around it, and then with a malicious delight pouring on their ears the screams of their enemies and scattering them in the wildest terror. By this exercise of the dramatic art the mocking-bird refreshes, varies, magnifies, the play of its own life. In like manner, and with the same result, kittens, dogs, lions, play games with one another, represent mimic battles, pretend to be angry, to strike and bite, doing it all in a gentle manner, softened down from the deadly earnestness of reality.
[Pg 80]
The aim and use of those crude elements or germs of the drama which appear in the lower animal world would seem, therefore, to be the enabling them to escape their pursuers, to seize their prey, to vary and enlarge their lives by that gregarious interchange and consolidation which is a mutual giving and taking of inner states through outer signs. It is transmitted instinct, fitted to its ends and acting within fixed limits, dependent for the most part on outward stimuli.
Mounting from animals to men, we discover the earliest developments of the dramatic art among the rudest tribes of savages. The prevalence and exercise of the faculty of dramatization among the principal tribes of barbarians in all parts of the world are equally striking and extensive. It is one of the most prized and powerful portions of their experience, and one of the first to impress the travellers who visit them. It has three distinct provinces. The first is their own actual lives, whose most exciting incidents, most salient features, they repeat in mimic representation. Dressed in appropriate costumes, they celebrate with counterfeit performances the Planting Festival, the Harvest Festival, and other important events connected with the phenomena of the year. They also dramatize with intense vividness and vigor the experience of war,—the following of the trail of the enemy, the ambush, the surprise, the struggle, the scalping of the slain, the burning of the village, the gathering of the booty, the return home, and the triumphant reception. This is not confined to the North American Indians. The Dyaks of Borneo, the New Zealanders, the Patagonians, the Khonds of Asia, the Negroes of Africa, and scores of other peoples, have similar rites, besides numerous additional ones less distinctively dramatic, covering the ceremonies of hunting, fishing, marriage, birth, and death.
The second department of the drama among barbarians is their impersonations of animals, their picturesque and terrible representation of the passions and habits of reptiles, birds, and beasts. Morgan, in his History of the Iroquois, gives a list of some forty dances in which they acted out to the life stories based on their own experience and on that of the creatures beneath them. But we owe to Catlin some of the most graphic descriptions of the drama among the North American savages.
[Pg 81]
In the Eagle Dance, the braves dress themselves as eagles, in plumes, feathers, beaks, talons; and they shriek, whistle, sail, swoop, in exact imitation of them. In the Wolf Dance, they go on all-fours, yelp, snarl, bark, and fill up the wolfish programme to the very letter. In the Buffalo Dance, they each wear a buffalo mask, consisting of the face, horns, and skin of a buffalo, and mimic, in ludicrous burlesque, the sounds and motions of that unwieldy creature. And so with bears, foxes, beavers, hawks, and the rest of the fauna most familiar to them. In these performances they reproduce with frenzied truth and force the most ferocious and deadly traits of their prototypes, and often, among the savages of Fiji and South Africa, the drama ends half drowned in blood. In Dahomey, where the Serpent is worshipped, the votary crawls on his belly as a snake and licks the dust before his idol, and sometimes becomes crazy with the permanent possession of his part. The barbaric mind finds intense excitement and enjoyment in these plays, hideous as they seem to us. They break up the weary monotony of his life, and introduce the relish of games and novelty and variety. They give him, what he so greatly craves, mental amusement with physical passion and exertion. They are his almost only antidote for the bane of stagnation.
On the other hand, great evils result from them. They never work upward to reflect higher forms of character and life for redemptive imitation, but downward, in the impersonating of creatures whose inferiority either inflames the boastful and reckless self-complacency of the actors, or else by its reflex influences takes possession of their consciousness and animalizes them, degrading them to the level of the brutes they portray. Secondly, the reception of the idea of the beast, snake or vulture which they represent, their furious mimicry of it, the spasmodic, rhythmical, long-continued movements they make in accordance with it, tend to subject the brain to the automatic spinal and ganglionic centres below, and thus furnish the conditions and initiate the stages of all sorts of insanity. Much of the persistent degradation and ferocity of the barbaric world is to be traced to this cause.
Nor is this the only evil; for, in the third place, when the savage mind, after such a training, affects to penetrate the invisible
[Pg 82]
world and come back to report and portray the supernatural beings who exercise authority there, it naturally takes its impulsive cue, its ideal stamp, from the nervous centres under the inspiration of which it acts. Those centres being possessed by the influences of serpents, wolves, lust, hate, and murder, of course the spirits and gods reflected will be fiends, incongruous mixtures of beast and man, devilish monsters. Then the worship of these reacts to deepen the besotted superstition and terror, the nightmare carnival of the brain, out of which it originally sprang. And so the process goes on, in a doomed circle of hopelessness. The time and faculty devoted by the soothsayers and medicine-men who compose the priestly caste in savagedom to the tricking out of their devil-gods and their mummery of magic,—the time and faculty given by their followers to the enactment of their obsessed ritual,—if directed to the creation and imitative reproduction of superior types of human character and experience, would soon lift them out of the barbaric state in which they have so long grovelled. And it is a very impressive fact that every instance revealed in history of a savage people rising into civilization is accompanied by the tradition of some illustrious stranger from afar, or some divinely-inspired genius emerging among themselves, who has originated the rôle of a new style of man, thrown it out before them for dramatic assimilation, and so impressed it on them as to secure its general copying among them. This has, thus far in history, been the divine plan for lifting the multitude: the appearance of a single inspired superior whose characteristics the inferiors look up to with loving reverence and put on for the transformation of their own personalities into the likeness of his. That is the dynamic essence of Christianity itself.
The next step in this survey of the psychological history of the dramatic art whereby we are essaying to unfold its purport and its final definition, leads us from barbaric life to the private homes of the most cultivated classes of civilized society. The higher we go in the scale of social wealth and rank, the larger provisions we shall find made for gratifying the dramatic instincts of children, till we come to the nursery of the baby prince, who has his miniature parks of cannon and whole regiments of lead soldiers, and the baby princess, who has a constant succession of dolls of
[Pg 83]
all grades, costumes, and ages. The little warrior animates his soldiers and their officers with such ideas and passions as he has in himself or as he can get glimpses of from his elders or from books, creates rôles for them, and puts them through their paces and fortunes with such variety and succession as he can contrive. And so his nursery is a theatre, and he is at once author, manager, actors, supernumeraries, spectators, and all. Likewise the young girl dresses up her dolls, takes them to church, to balls, undresses them, puts them to sleep, weds them, celebrates their funeral, in a word, transfuses all her own life, real and imaginative, into them, and so reactingly multiplies herself and her experience, and peoples the otherwise tedious vacancy of childhood with vital and passionate processions, pathetically prefiguring all the tragedy and comedy that are actually to follow. A Bengal newspaper, giving an account of a curious marriage-procession through the streets of Dacca, says, "In Indian households dolls play a far more important part than they do in England, for all the perfection to which we have attained in the art of making, clothing, and lodging them. Indian dolls are not remarkable for beauty or close resemblance to human models; but in bedecking them no expense is spared. They have a room to themselves, and seem to enjoy as much attention as live children do elsewhere. Feasts and garden-parties are given in their honor. The death of a doll involves a great show of mourning, and the marriage of one is a public event. In the present instance two dolls belonging to the daughters of the wealthiest Hindus in Dacca were led out at the head of a solemn procession, to the delight of the bystanders. After the wedding ceremony the parents of the girls who had thus disposed of their puppets laid out a few thousand rupees in feasting their friends and caste-folk, as well as the neighboring poor."
As children grow older and become school-boys and school-girls, this faculty and impulse do not cease to act, but, developed still further, instead of imparting fancied life and action to inanimate toys, lead them to imitative performances of their own, causing them to group themselves together for the representation of games, and of the historic scenes, social events, or fictitious stories which have most impressed and pleased their imaginations.
The point of interest demanding attention at this stage of our
[Pg 84]
inquiry is how to discriminate clearly between the drama of the savage and the drama of the child. The dramatization of the savage is mimetic, a putting on from without of the disguise, the postures, sounds, motions, of the animal he impersonates. He imitates the outer signs of the animal; and these often in return produce in him the corresponding states of consciousness. But the dramatization of the child is creative, a projection from within of his own thoughts and emotions into the counterfeit toys he personifies, and a consequent heightening of his own sense of life by an imagination of its being imparted and sympathetically taken up and shared. With the barbarian the primary movement of action is from without inward; with the child it is from within outward. There it is the interpretative assumption by the actor of the signs of states in another; here it is the direct transference by sympathetic imagination of the states of the actor to another. That is the raw drama of the senses, this the initial drama of the soul.
We must pause here, before passing to the next head, to make a brief exposition of another department and application of the dramatic power of man, a department intermediate between the examples already given and those which are to come. Its peculiarity is that it combines in one, with certain original features of its own, the barbaric and the childish drama. The creation of Fables is the strongest delight of the dramatizing literary faculty in its first movements. Its workings are to be traced in the ingenuous oral treasures preserved among tribes who have no written language, as well as in the most beloved vernacular writings current among the populace in civilized countries. Fables are short compositions designed to teach moral truths, or to impress moral truisms, by representing beasts, birds, reptiles, insects, trees, flowers, or other objects, as endowed with the faculties of men, retaining their own forms but acting and talking as men, exemplifying the virtues and vices of men in characteristic deeds, followed by their proper consequences. In the degrading barbarian drama the actors admit into themselves the lower creatures whom they represent, putting on the skins, movements, cries, of the crocodiles, hyenas, or boa-constrictors the ideas of whom they take into their brains. In the naïve child drama the little performers project the ideas of themselves into the dolls
[Pg 85]
and toys they personify and move. But in the fable drama these two processes are joined, with a mere inversion of the subjects of the first; for in fables the actors, in place of being, as in the plays of savages, the assumed souls of animals and the disguised bodies of men, are the disguised souls of men in the assumed forms and costumes of animals. The one is an actual representation of animals by men for free sport; the other is an imaginary representation of men by animals for the inculcation of lessons, as, for example, in the well-known instance of the Wolf and the Lamb. The author of a fable puts his own human nature into the humbler creatures whom he dramatizes, with a deliberate conscious thought, a creative exercise of the reflective faculty at the second remove, quite unlike the instinctive and half-believing action of the child who straddles a stick pretending that it is a horse. He has a clear didactic purpose in addition to the sportive impulse of fancy. This picturing of human nature and its experiences in the living framework of the lower world yields the keenest pleasure to all who have not outgrown it; and no one ought ever to outgrow it. He outgrows it only by the gradual hardening of his heart and fancy, the immovable stolidity of his faculties in their fixed ruts and crusts. It is the favorite literature of the childhood of the world. It is filled with quaint wisdom, raciness, and droll burlesque, as is abundantly to be seen in the traditions of the Hottentots, the Esquimaux, the Africans, and other barbaric nations. And in the classic compositions of Pilpai the Persian, Lokman the Arab, Æsop the Greek, Phædrus the Roman, La Fontaine the Frenchman, and other masters, it constitutes, with its innocent gayety, its malicious mischief, its delicious wit and humor, its cutting satire and caricature, one of the most exquisite portions of cosmopolitan literature.
