The corruption which has been imputed
to the drama as an effect, begins when the poetry employed in its
constitution ends: I appeal to the history of manners whether the
periods of the growth of the one and the decline of the other have not
corresponded with an exactness equal to any example of moral cause and
effect.
The drama at Athens, or wheresoever else it may have approached to its
perfection, ever coexisted with the moral and intellectual greatness
of the age. The tragedies of the Athenian poets are as mirrors in which
the spectator beholds himself, under a thin disguise of circumstance,
stript of all but that ideal perfection and energy which every one
feels to be the internal type of all that he loves, admires, and would
become. The imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with pains and
passions so mighty that they distend in their conception the capacity
of that by which they are conceived; the good affections are
strengthened by pity, indignation, terror, and sorrow; and an exalted
calm is prolonged from the satiety of this high exercise of them into
the tumult of familiar life: even crime is disarmed of half its horror
and all its contagion by being represented as the fatal consequence
of the unfathomable agencies of nature; error is thus divested of its
willfulness; men can no longer cherish it as the creation of their
choice.
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