SEEN ON THE STAGE I LIFE AND THE THEATRE The quickest answer to the question, "What is the purpose of art?" would come with the retort courteous, "What is the purpose of life?" for both aims are indeed identical, since art is nothing else than the quintessence of life. The purpose of life has been discussed ever since the human race became articulate; and an adequate review of this discussion would require a résumé of all the great religions of the world. Without attempting to cover so colossal a subject in an unpretentious essay, the present writer asks permission to offer an opinion concerning what appear to him to be the noblest and the meanest answers to this all-important question. The most ignoble definition of the purpose of life was formulated, in fairly recent times, by the Puritans of England and the Calvinists of Scotland. According to the concept of these dour, sour, glowering religionists, this world is nothing but a vale of tears, through which a man should slink whining, like a beaten dog with his tail between his legs, in the hope of being caught up subsequently into a nobler and a better life which shall offer to him a renewal of those opportunities for positive appreciation which, on principle, he had neglected throughout the pitiful and wasted period of his sojourn upon earth. The Puritans and Calvinists warned their devotees against the lure of beauty, and branded it as an ensnarement of the devil; and, by this token, they are damned, if there is such a sentence as damnation in the supreme court of everlasting law. The noblest answer to the basic question, “What is the purpose of life?," was asseverated by the noblest men who ever lived,- those great Athenians who crowned this earth with their Acropolis, two thousand and four hundred years ago. These men asserted that our world should be regarded as a valley of soul-making, a sort of training-camp for infinite futurity, in which the individual should find an opportunity to indicate his worthiness to live, by accepting every offered chance to prove himself alive. That lovely and lasting phrase, "the valley of soulmaking," was not invented by the ancient Greeks: it was formulated by John Keats, who is their true apostle to all modern nations, and, because of that, the greatest poet of recent centuries. It was Keats, also, who was destined to remind a forgetful world that “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty," and that both of these ideals are identical with the ideal of Righteousness. There is one God, in three aspects: - Beauty, which appeals to the emotions; Truth, which appeals to the intellect; Righteousness, which appeals to the conscience. This is the Gospel according to John Keats: this is the Law and the Prophets. If this world according to the ancient Greeks is to be regarded as a valley of soul-making, and if according to the apostolic vision of John Keats — there is no basic difference between Beauty, Truth, and Righteousness, it becomes the duty of every transient visitor to this valley to develop, in the little time allotted to him, what Rudyard Kipling has described "the makin's of a bloomin' soul," by keeping his spirit at all moments responsive and awake to every drifting evidence of what is True or Beautiful or Right. as If the purpose of life is to prove ourselves alive, in order to indicate our fitness for continuing to live in some hypothetical domain where second chances are accorded in the future, it behooves us to live as intensely and convincingly as possible throughout that fleeting period of three score years and ten which is allotted to us, on the average, in this immediate valley of soul-making. It is only at infrequent intervals throughout our period of living that the best of us is able to feel himself to be alive. Sir Thomas Browne has penned an eloquent comment on this fact, in the concluding section of his famous Letter to a Friend, in which he says, -"And surely if we deduct all those days of our life which we might wish unlived, and which abate the comfort of those we now live; if we reckon up only those days which God hath accepted of our lives, a life of good years will hardly be a span long." There is also, in the record of eternal literature, a tively recent poem by John Masefield, called Biography, compara |