38

John Dennis' Reply to Law.

has its exceptions. Law measured his strength with some of the very ablest men of his day, with men like Hoadly and Warburton and Tindal and Wesley; and it may safely be said that he never came forth from the contest defeated. But, absurd as it may sound, it is perfectly true that what neither Hoadly nor Warburton nor Tindal nor Wesley could do, that was done by-John Dennis! In the controversy between Law and Dennis, the latter assuredly has the advantage. 'Plays,' wrote Law, ' are contrary to Scripture, as the devil is to God, as the worship of images is to the second commandment.' To this Dennis gave the obvious and unanswerable retort that when S. Paul was at Athens, the very source of dramatick poetry, he said a great deal publickly against the idolatry of the Athenians, but not one word against their stage. At Corinth he said as little against theirs. He quoted on one occasion an Athenian dramatick poet, and on others Aratus and Epimenides. He was educated in all the learning of the Grecians, and could not but have read their dramatic poems; and yet so far from speaking a word against them, he makes use of them for the instruction and conversion of mankind.'1

Dennis again convicts Law of something very like disingenuousness in quoting Archbishop Tillotson's strictures against plays as they were then ordered, but omitting to add the Archbishop's qualification that 'plays might be so framed and governed by such rules as not only to be innocent and diverting, but instructive and useful.' It was the whole purport of Law's treatise to show that this was impossible. It is really painful to quote the unmeasured abuse which he pours not only upon the entertainment itself but upon all who took part in it; but it is the duty

The Stage defended from Scripture, reason, experience, and the common sense of mankind for 2000 years, occasioned by Mr. Law's Pamphlet.

By Mr. Dennis, 1726.

Law's Violence against the Stage.

39

of a faithful biographer not to shrink from admitting the weaknesses of his subject. 'Perhaps,' writes Law, 'you had rather see your son chained to a galley, or your daughter driving a plough than getting their bread on the stage, by administering in so scandalous a manner to the vices and corrupt pleasures of the world! The business of the player is not a more christian employment than that of robbers! There is as much justice and tenderness in telling every player that his employment is abominably sinful as in telling the same to a thief!' The playhouse, not only when some very profane play is on the stage, but in its daily common entertainments, is as certainly the house of the devil as the church is the house of God.' 'Can pious persons tell you of any one play for this forty or fifty years that has been free from wild rant, immodest passions, and profane language?' 'To suppose an innocent play is like supposing innocent lust, sober rant, or harmless profaneness.' 'The stage never has one innocent play; not one can be produced that ever you saw acted in either house, but what abounds with thoughts, passions, and language, contrary to religion! This is true of the stage in its best state, when some admired tragedy is upon it.'

When it is remembered that such a play, for example, as Addison's Cato' had, within Law's lifetime been acted with immense success, and that Shakespeare's tragedies, though not so popular as they deserved to be, must have been perfectly well known to him, one can scarcely conceive how he could stigmatise all plays in such a sweeping tone of condemnation.1

His scurrilous abuse of players, too,

1 It is interesting to contrast the views of the master with those of one of his most distinguished disciples on this point. John Wesley, after condemning, as well he might, the barbarous amusements of bear-baiting, cock-fighting, &c., adds, 'It seems a great deal more may be said in defence of seeing a serious tragedy. I could not do it with a clear conscience; at least not in an English theatre, the sink of all profaneness and debauchery, but possibly

40

Corrupt State of the Stage.

was surely as uncharitable as it was unauthorised, and fully justifies Dennis's remark that the pamphlet was written in 'downright anti-Christian language.'

It was a sad pity that Dennis, having so strong a case, should have spoiled it by having recourse to the ad captandum argument that Law wrote in the interests of Jacobitism. Law had no such object in view; he wrote in perfect sincerity and honesty, and if he had followed the example of the Archbishop whom he quoted, he might have written with telling effect. For the state of the stage was deplorably bad. If the efforts of Collier and others had done a little to purify it from the utter degradation into which it had fallen after the Restoration, it still was so corrupt that even a worldly man like John, Lord Hervey, was fain to confess that the law (passed ten years after Law's pamphlet was written) requiring plays to be licensed by the Lord Chamberlain was needed.' But Law spoiled the effect which no one better than he could have produced by his unreasonable violence; and it is to be feared that there is some truth in Dennis's remark that the 'wild enthusiasm of Law's pamphlet would afford matter of scorn and laughter to infidels and freethinkers, and render our most sacred religion still more contemptible among them!' Those who had read none of Law's writings except this

others can.' Law, in point of fact, was far more of a Puritan, High Churchman though he was, than any of the Methodists or Evangelicals were; in some points, indeed, as, for instance, that of clerical celibacy, he recommended and practised an asceticism which the Puritans never did; and, singularly unlike them, he almost absolutely condemned all wars and all oaths. On the point of plays he was thoroughly at one with the 'Histriomastix' of the preceding century.

1 Lord Hervey's Memoirs, ii. 341. David Hume, also, who will hardly be accused of Puritanism, writing a few years later, speaks of the English stage being put to shame by a neighbour which has never been considered a model of purity. The English are become sensible of the scandalous licentiousness of their stage from the example of the French decency and morals.' -Essay on the Rise of the Arts and Sciences,' Essays, iii. 135.

'Christian Perfection.'

4I

pamphlet, might really say of him as one of his antagonists on this question did : 'I never read a more unfair reasoner. He begs the question. He is a madman who rails at theatres till he foams again.' But we shall do Law more justice if we remember that in this pamphlet he was really unworthy of himself; and we may close this painful account of what one cannot but call his escapade, with the judicious remark of Gibbon : His discourse on the absolute unlawfulness of stage entertainments is sometimes quoted for a ridiculous intemperance of sentiment and language; but these sallies must not extinguish the praise which is due to Mr. William Law as a wit and a scholar; '2 and we may add what the historian does not add, 'as a most powerful advocate of the Christian cause and a noble example of the Christian life.'

Law himself thought his remarks upon the stage so important that he transferred them almost word for word to the pages of his 'Christian Perfection,' the first of his great practical treatises, which was published in the same year as the Tract on the Stage (1726).

The merits of this treatise have been somewhat thrown into the shade by the still greater reputation of its immediate successor, 'The Serious Call.' But the 'Serious Call' is, perhaps, the only work of the kind published in the eighteenth century to which the 'Christian Perfection' is inferior.

By Christian perfection' Law did not exactly mean what became soon afterwards the source of such fierce dispute between the Wesley and Whitefield sections of the

Law Outlawed; or, a Short Reply to Mr. Law's Long Declamation against the Stage, wherein the wild rant, blind passion, and false reasoning of that piping hot Pharisee are made apparent to the meanest capacity. By Mrs. S. O., 1726.

Autobiography. Misc. Works, i. 15.

42

'Christian Perfection.'

Methodists. Intending the work to be exclusively what he termed it, 'a practical treatise,' he carefully avoided all nice points of doctrine, and defined 'Christian perfection, at the outset, in a way to which no one who accepted Christianity at all could take exception:1 viz. as 'the right performance of our necessary duties;' it is 'such as men in cloysters and religious retirements cannot add more, and, at the same time, such as Christians in all states of the world must not be content with less.'

In his Christian Perfection' Law takes a very gloomy view of life-far gloomier than he took in his later works. The body we are in is 'a mere sepulchre of the soul;' the world but the remains of a drowned world--a mere wilderness, a vale of misery, where vice and madness, dreams and shadows, variously please, agitate, and torment the short, miserable lives of men.' 'The sole end of Christianity is to separate us from the world, to deliver us from the slavery of our own natures and unite us to God.' This life is a state of darkness, because it clouds and covers all the true appearances of things; and what are called worldly advantages no more constitute the state of human life than rich coffins or beautiful monuments constitute the state of the dead.' 'The vigour of our blood, the gaiety of our spirits, and the enjoyment of sensible pleasures, though the allowed signs of living men, are often undeniable proofs of dead Christians.' 'Christianity buries our bodies, burns the present world, triumphs over death by a general resurrection, and opens all into an eternal state.' 'There is nothing that deserves a serious thought but how to get out of the world and make it a right passage to our eternal state.' 'It is the same vanity to project for happiness on earth as to propose a happiness in the moon. Christianity,

'So far as it went, that is. The Evangelicals would, of course, complain of it, as being very inadequate, as savouring more of the law than the gospel.