Indeed, the theatre is a better school of moral sentiments than churches
where the feelings of humanity are thus outraged. Poets who have to deal
with an audience not yet graduated in the school of the rights of men,
and who must apply themselves to the moral constitution of the heart,
would not dare to produce such a triumph as a matter of exultation.
There, where men follow their natural impulses, they would not bear the
odious maxims of a Machiavelian policy, whether applied to the
attainment of monarchical or democratic tyranny. They would reject them
on the modern, as they once did on the ancient stage, where they could
not bear even the hypothetical proposition of such wickedness in the
mouth of a personated tyrant, though suitable to the character he
sustained. No theatric audience in Athens would bear what has been borne
in the midst of the real tragedy of this triumphal day: a principal
actor weighing, as it were in scales hung in a shop of horrors, so much
actual crime against so much contingent advantage,--and after putting in
and out weights, declaring that the balance was on the side of the
advantages. They would not bear to see the crimes of new democracy
posted as in a ledger against the crimes of old despotism, and the
book-keepers of politics finding democracy still in debt, but by no
means unable or unwilling to pay the balance.
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