This rude handling of accepted commonplace is always one of the most interesting features in Rousseau’s polemic.  It was of course a characteristic of the eighteenth century always to take up the ethical and high prudential view of whatever had to be justified, and Rousseau seems from this point to have been successful in demolishing arguments which might hold of Greek tragedy at its best, but which certainly do not hold of any other dramatic forms.  The childishness of the old criticism which attaches the label of some moral from the copybook to each piece, as its lesson and point of moral aim, is evident.  In repudiating this Rousseau was certainly right.[350] Both the assailants and the defenders of the stage, however, commit the double error, first of supposing that the drama is always the same thing, from the Agamemnon down to the last triviality of a London theatre, and next of pitching the discussion in too high a key, as if the effect or object of a stage play in the modern era, where grave sentiment clothes itself in other forms, were substantially anything more serious than an evening’s amusement.  Apart from this, and in so far as the discussion is confined to the highest dramatic expression, the true answer to Rousseau is now a very plain one.  The drama does not work in the sphere of direct morality, though like everything else in the world it has a moral or immoral aspect.  It is an art of ideal presentation, not concerned with the inculcation of immediate practical lessons, but producing a stir in all our sympathetic emotions, quickening the imagination, and so communicating a wider life to the character of the spectator.  This is what the drama in the hands of a worthy master does; it is just what noble composition in music does, and there is no more directly moralising effect in the one than in the other.  You must trust to the sum of other agencies to guide the interest and sympathy thus quickened into channels of right action.  Rousseau, like most other controversialists, makes an attack of which the force rests on the assumption that the special object of the attack is the single influencing element and the one decisive instrument in making men had or good.  What he says about the drama would only be true if the public went to the play all day long, and were accessible to no other moral force whatever, modifying and counteracting such lessons as they might learn at the theatre.  He failed here as in the wider controversy on the sciences and arts, to consider the particular subject of discussion in relation to the whole of the general medium in which character moves, and by whose manifold action and reaction it is incessantly affected and variously shaped.