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.

So when he passed on from the theory of dramatic morality to the matter
which he had more at heart, namely, the practical effects of introducing
the drama into Geneva, he keeps out of sight all the qualities in the
Genevese citizen which would protect him against the evil influence of
the stage, though it is his anxiety for the preservation of these very
qualities that gives all its fire to his eloquence. If the citizen
really was what Rousseau insisted that he was, then his virtues would
surely neutralise the evil of the drama; if not, the drama would do him
no harm. We need not examine the considerations in which Rousseau
pointed out the special reasons against introducing a theatre into his
native town. It would draw the artisans away from their work, cause
wasteful expenditure of money in amusements, break up the harmless and
inexpensive little clubs of men and the social gatherings of women