Why do I feel so differently from the Reverend Dr. Price, and those of
his lay flock, who will choose to adopt the sentiments of his discourse?
For this plain reason--because it is NATURAL I should; because we are
so made, as to be affected at such spectacles with melancholy sentiments
upon the unstable condition of mortal prosperity and the tremendous
uncertainty of human greatness; because in those natural feelings we
learn great lessons; because in events like these our passions instruct
our reason; because when kings are hurled from their thrones by the
Supreme Director of this great drama, and become the objects of insult
to the base, and of pity to the good, we behold such disasters in the
moral, as we should behold a miracle in the physical, order of things.
We are alarmed into reflection; our minds (as it has long since been
observed) are purified by terror and pity; our weak, unthinking pride is
humbled under the dispensations of a mysterious wisdom. Some tears might
be drawn from me, if such a spectacle were exhibited on the stage. I
should be truly ashamed of finding in myself that superficial, theatric
sense of painted distress, whilst I could exult over it in real life.
With such a perverted mind, I could never venture to show my face at
a tragedy. People would think the tears that Garrick formerly, or
that Siddons not long since, have extorted from me, were the tears of
hypocrisy; I should know them to be the tears of folly.
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. In the theatre, the first
intuitive glance, without any elaborate process of reasoning, will show,
that this method of political computation would justify every extent
of crime. They would see, that on these principles, even where the very
worst acts were not perpetrated, it was owing rather to the fortune
of the conspirators, than to their parsimony in the expenditure of
treachery and blood. They would soon see, that criminal means once
tolerated are soon preferred. They present a shorter cut to the object
than through the highway of the moral virtues. Justifying perfidy and
murder for public benefit, public benefit would soon become the pretext,
and perfidy and murder the end; until rapacity, malice, revenge,
and fear more dreadful than revenge, could satiate their insatiable
appetites. Such must be the consequences of losing, in the splendour
of these triumphs of the rights of men, all natural sense of wrong and
right.