The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor | Page 8

that, with few exceptions, they stand highly respectable for private

worth and pure moral character. In England, Scotland and still more in
Ireland, an unblemished reputation is necessary to a lady's success on
the stage. In some instances, the greatest favourites of the public have
been driven for a time from the stage, for trespasses upon virtue, and
when permitted to return were never after much more than endured. To
these instances we shall have occasion to advert in the course of this
work.
While we assert, on the best grounds, that the theatre may be made, by
proper established regulations, a school of virtue and manners, we do
not wish to conceal our persuasion that there is nothing more potent to
debase and corrupt the minds of a people than a licentious stage. But it
may be averred with equal truth, that the abuses of every other
institution are fraught with no less mischief to the public. At this very
moment the abuse of the pulpit is the parent of more public mischief in
Great Britain and America than the stage ever produced in its most
prolific days of vice; and it is deplorable to reflect that the former is
rapidly increasing, while the vitiation of the latter has been for a
century on the decline. The licentiousness of the stage in the reign of
Charles II was enormous: but it was a licentiousness which the theatre
in common with the whole nation derived from the court, and from a
most flagitious monarch whose example made vice fashionable. In
servile compliance with the reigning taste, the greatest poets of the day
abandoned true fame, and discarded much of their literary merit: Otway
and Dryden sunk into the most mean and criminal slavery to it--the
former with the greatest powers for the pathetic ever possessed by any
man, Shakspeare excepted, has left behind him plays which in an
almost equal degree excite our admiration and contempt, our
indignation and our pity. It is charitable to suppose that "his poverty
and not his will consented." But Dryden had no such excuse to plead
for his base subserviency to pecuniary advantage, or for the detestable
licentiousness of his comedies. He who will take the pains to turn to
that admirable tragedy, Venice Preserved, by Otway, will find in the
scenes between Aquileia and the old senator Antonio enough to disgust
the taste of any one not callous to all sense of delicacy. But had Juvenal
lived at that period, he would have scourged Dryden out of society. To
those we might add Wycherly. Congreve and other cotemporary

authors succeeded: but the offences committed by those men can no
more be alleged as a ground of general condemnation of the stage, than
the works of lord Rochester can be set up as a reason for condemning
Milton, Pope, Thomson, Goldsmith, and all our other poets, or the
innumerable murders committed by unprincipled quacks, be alleged as
a cause for abolishing the whole practice of medicine.
Exasperated by the outrages of the dramatic poets, on virtue and
decency, Jeremy Collier, a non-juring clergyman, attacked the stage.
His charge against the authors was unquestionably right; but his attack
upon the stage itself, exhibited a disposition splenetic almost to
misanthropy, and an austerity of principle urged to unsocial ferocity. In
his fury he renounced the idea of reforming the stage; he was for
abolishing it entirely. He attacked the poets with "unconquerable
pertinacity, with wit in the highest degree keen and sarcastic, and with
all those powers exalted and invigorated by just confidence in his
cause."[3] Thus arose a controversy which lasted ten years, during
which time authors found it necessary to become more discreet.
"Comedy (says Dr. Johnson) grew more modest; and Collier lived to
see the reformation of the stage." Colley Cibber, who was one of those
whose plays Collier attacked, candidly says, "It must be granted that his
calling our dramatic writers to this account had a very wholesome
effect upon those who writ after his time. Indecencies were no longer
wit; and by degrees the fair sex came again to fill the boxes on the first
day of a new comedy, without fear or censure."
[Footnote 3: Dr. Johnson.]
Such a licentious stage as is here described well deserved the severest
attacks: but what is there to justify severity now? at this day not only
the success of every new play so much depends upon its purity, but so
scrupulously correct in that particular is the public taste, and so
abstinent from every the slightest indelicacy are the authors of plays
and even farces, that not a word is uttered upon the stage from which
the most timid real modesty would shrink. In conformity to this happy
state of the general taste and morals,