ensure or
applause--of rejection or adoption. In the common operations of human
life, every man is compelled by the necessity of his nature to take
succedaneous aid from others. The mechanic in erecting the poorest
building, or forming the most simple machine, is indebted for his means
to the practical geometrician, and instrument maker, and the latter
again, to the master of the science of mathematics. The practical
surveyor or navigator finds it his interest to be governed by rules
supplied by those whom study has furnished with the great elementary
principles of science, and is contented to stand indebted to them for
his means of determining, the area of his land, or the latitude and
longitude at sea, without impugning the rights of those studious men who
have given him the compendious rules and the tables by which he works.
It is so with dramatic criticism. The legitimate source of judgment lies
with those who have by deep study made themselves masters of the first
principles of the science; and from them the people at large, who are
too much otherwise and certainly better employed, to learn those
principles, must be content to take the rules and laws by which they
judge. The most infatuated self-devotee would be ashamed to contest this
point, if he were at all apprised of the various acquirements requisite
for forming an accurate judgment of the business of the theatre,
interwoven, as the dramatic art is, with some of the highest departments
of literature, and the multifarious operations of the human heart. The
vainest being who cajoles himself into the notion that a man either
unlettered or inexperienced can form a just judgment of a play and
actors, must at once be convinced of his error by reflecting that "the
drama is an exhibition of the real state of sublunary nature;" and that
"to instruct life, and for that purpose to copy what passes in it, is
the business of the stage."[6] To understand this well, demands not only
some book-learning, but that experience which, though books improve,
they cannot impart, and which never can be attained by seclusion or
solitary study, but must be derived from intercourse with men in all
their forms of conduct, from converse with society, and from an
attentive and accurate examination of that complex miscellany, the
living world. To know the drama we must know men; and "if we would know
men (says Rousseau) it is necessary that we should see them act." It is
equally necessary to