and the Philosophical Dictionary.  D’Alembert was Voltaire’s staunchest henchman.  He only wrote his article on Geneva for the Encyclopaedia to gratify the master.  Fresh from a visit to him when he composed it, he took occasion to regret that the austerity of the tradition of the city deprived it of the manifold advantages of a theatre.  This suggestion had its origin partly in a desire to promote something that would please the eager vanity of the dramatist whom Geneva now had for so close a neighbour, and who had just set her the example by setting up a theatre of his own; and partly, also, because it gave the writer an opportunity of denouncing the intolerant rigour with which the church nearer home treated the stage and all who appeared on it.  Geneva was to set an example that could not be resisted, and France would no longer see actors on the one hand pensioned by the government, and on the other an object of anathema, excommunicated by priests and regarded with contempt by citizens.[345]

The inveterate hostility of the church to the theatre was manifested by the French ecclesiastics in the full eighteenth century as bitterly as ever.  The circumstance that Voltaire was the great play-writer of the time would not tend to soften their traditional prejudice, and the persecution of players by priests was in some sense an episode of the war between the priest and the philosophers.  The latter took up the cause of the stage partly because they hoped to make the drama an effective rival to the teaching of pulpit and confessional, partly from their natural sympathy with an elevated form of intellectual manifestation, and partly from their abhorrence of the practical inhumanity with which the officers of the church treated stage performers.  While people of quality eagerly sought the society of those who furnished them as much diversion in private as in public, the church refused to all players the marriage blessing; when an actor or actress wished to marry, they were obliged to renounce the stage, and the Archbishop of Paris diligently resisted evasion or subterfuge.[346] The atrocities connected with the refusal of burial, as well in the case of players as of philosophers, are known to all readers in a dozen illustrious instances, from Moliere and Adrienne Lecouvreur downwards.

Here, as along the whole line of the battle between new light and old prejudice, Rousseau took part, if not with the church, at least against its adversaries.  His point of view was at bottom truly puritanical.  Jeremy Collier in his Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage (1698) takes up quite a different position.  This once famous piece was not a treatment of the general question, but an attack on certain specific qualities of the plays of his time—­their indecency of phrase, their oaths, their abuse of the clergy, the gross libertinism of the characters.  One can hardly deny that this was richly deserved by the English drama of the Restoration,