. The
town was not populous enough to support a theatre, therefore the
government would have to provide one, and this would mean increased
taxation. All this was the secondary and merely colourable support by
argumentation, of a position that had been reached and was really held
by sentiment. Rousseau hated the introduction of French plays in the
same way that Cato hated the introduction of fine talkers from Greece.
It was an innovation, and so habitual was it with Rousseau to look on
all movement in the direction of what the French writers called taste
and cultivation as depraving, that he cannot help taking for granted
that any change in manners associated with taste must necessarily be a
change for the worse. Thus the Letter to D'Alembert was essentially a
supplement to the first Discourse; it was an application of its
principles to a practical case. It was part of his general reactionary
protest against philosophers, poets, men of letters, and all their
works, without particular apprehension on the side of the drama. Hence
its reasoning is much less interesting than its panegyric on the
simplicity, robust courage, and manliness of the Genevese, and its
invective against the effeminacy and frivolity of the Parisian. One of
the most significant episodes in the discussion is the lengthy criticism
on the immortal Misanthrope of Moliere. Rousseau admits it for the
masterpiece of the comic muse, though with characteristic perversity he
insists that the hero is not misanthropic enough, nor truly misanthropic
at all, because he flies into rage at small things affecting himself,
instead of at the large follies of the race. Again, he says that Moliere
makes Alceste ridiculous, virtuous as he is, in order to win the
applause of the pit. It is for the character of Philinte, however, that
Rousseau reserves all his spleen. He takes care to describe him in terms
which exactly hit Rousseau's own conception of his philosophic enemies,
who find all going well because they have no interest in anything going
better; who are content with everybody, because they do not care for
anybody; who round a full table maintain that it is not true that the
people are hungry. As criticism, one cannot value this kind of analysis.
D'Alembert replied with a much more rational interpretation of the great
comedy, but finding himself seized with the critic's besetting
impertinence of improving masterpieces, he suddenly stopped with the
becoming reflection