and Collier’s strictures were not applicable, nor meant to apply, either to the ancients, for he has a good word even for Aristophanes, or to the French drama.  Bossuet’s loftier denunciation, like Rousseau’s, was puritanical, and it extended to the whole body of stage plays.  He objected to the drama as a school of concupiscence, as a subtle or gross debaucher of the gravity and purity of the understanding, as essentially a charmer of the senses, and therefore the most equivocal and untrustworthy of teachers.  He appeals to the fathers, to Scripture, to Plato, and even to Christ, who cried, Woe unto you that laugh.[347] There is a fine austerity about Bossuet’s energetic criticism; it is so free from breathless eagerness, and so severe without being thinly bitter.  The churchmen of a generation or two later had fallen from this height into gloomy peevishness.

Rousseau’s letter on the theatre, it need hardly be said, is meant to be an appeal to the common sense and judgment of his readers, and not conceived in the ecclesiastical tone of unctuous anathema and fulgurant menace.  It is no bishop’s pastoral, replete with solecisms of thought and idiom, but a piece of firm dialectic in real matter.  His position is this:  that the moral effect of the stage can never be salutary in itself, while it may easily be extremely pernicious, and that the habit of frequenting the theatre, the taste for imitating the style of the actors, the cost in money, the waste in time, and all the other accessory conditions, apart from the morality of the matter represented, are bad things in themselves, absolutely and in every circumstance.  Secondly, these effects in all kinds are specially bad in relation to the social condition and habits of Geneva.[348] The first part of the discussion is an ingenious answer to some of the now trite pleas for the morality of the drama, such as that tragedy leads to pity through terror, that comedy corrects men while amusing them, that both make virtue attractive and vice hateful.[349] Rousseau insists with abundance of acutely chosen illustration that the pity that is awaked by tragedy is a fleeting emotion which subsides when the curtain falls; that comedy as often as not amuses men at the expense of old age, uncouth virtue, paternal carefulness, and other objects which we should be taught rather to revere than to ridicule; and that both tragedy and comedy, instead of making vice hateful, constantly win our sympathy for it.  Is not the French stage, he asks, as much the triumph of great villains, like Catilina, Mahomet, Atreus, as of illustrious heroes?