ile 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?

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