Perth Amboy evening news., 1905-12-13
WOMAN SPOKE
AT HARVARD.
Mrs. Fishes Address TO Students
on the Theatre Art Her
Principal Them3.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass, Dec. 13.-Ur-
der the auspices Of the Harvard j '-
ical society Mrs. Minnie Madur. i
Fiske, the actress, delivered an adj
dress on "The Theater'' in Sanders
Opera House here. The auditorium
was crowded with Harvard and Rad
cliffe students. Charles T. Copeland,
lecturer on English literature at Har-
ward, introduced Mrs. Fiske, who is
the second ever asked to adj
dress the students of Harvard as a lee
turer. She spoke in part as follows:
There can be little doubt that the
idea at times comes to the worker in
any field of art that possibly after all
one might better be giving life and
thought and action to something other
thar any Of the arts. That is to say,
when one contemplutes he facts of
life about one there must sometimes
arise a confusion of impulse rs to
which Of the many ways is the right
road OF thought and relative effort to
follow.
I'VE see dreamers gazing for hours
Mt the ceiling of the Sistine chapel,
oblivious t~oeverything but the thoughts
and dreams inspired by that contem-
plation. But ideal as these thoughts
and beautiful as these dreams may be
we wonder if the dreamers might not
better spend their time even under the
humble discipline of the Salvation
,.. n4 n.tt,nI x.rn.Ir with on i'm
mediate human purpose.
Oscar Wilde said that all art is I'M
necessary Ruskin proves what any
philosophy must admit, that life with
out art is brutal. Art has Il function
beyond that Of affording pleasure for
the moment. 1t should be an inspira-
ton and it should be potent-indirectly
of course, and by degrees-in mitiga-
ton of the terrors whose contempla-
ton may induce a question as to its
utility.
1T is not enough to say ever that
art is worth while 1t is of greater
worth. In some forms its influence
works toward the alienation of the
worlds misery. The sweeping terrors
and horrors of war may gradually
grow less until they disappear through
the education that the arts assist.
Verestchagin, the great Russian paint
er whose work was so largely devoted
to picturing wars inhumanity and ter
rors and who lost his life in the midst
of a carnage that his brush would have
revealed to assist in a reformation of
humanity, did not live in vain.
sin mankind there survives Il savage,
brutal instinct. 1t is Il relic of the ages
marked by the murder of all creatures.
Those were the ages when the stron-
gest among all classes of brutes en-
joyed the longer lives. The world
has not vet learned that the greatest
coward is he who treats with cruelty a
helpless living thing, nor has it yet
quite learned that the vulgarest soul is
that soul which finds pleasure in in
f1icting pain.
speaking to an audience like this
which / now have the honor to address,
1t would be an impertlnence to outline
the history Of the theater. much less to
try to point the ethical facts that relate
to the stage. We see everywhere, in the
little towns us well as in the cities, Il
few persons of discrimination among
the mass which is indiscriminate in
taste us well as in habit and impulse.
In the great cities, it is true, there are
found audiences for plays which shame
the stage as well as those who patro
nige them, but the discriminating class,
made up of persons who's taste sets
standards after the chaos of a crazy
dramatic miscellany has been resolved
into constituents, is the class that the
theateA must rely upon at all times to
keep i\ within the bounds of sanity
One great play, like the leaven of Hol!
Writ, may serve to save the theater fo
any reason that may appear to be
given over to the world, the flesh an(
the devil"