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APPENDIX i
tion indulges in this kind of amusement with the greatest reserve. This is attributable to peculiar causes which the reader is already acquainted with, and of which a few words will suffice to remind him.
The Puritans who founded the American Republics were not only enemies to amusements, but they professed an especial abhorrence for the stage. They considered it as an abominable pastime; and, as long as their principles prevailed with undivided sway, scenic performances were wholly unknown among them. These opinions of the first fathers of the colony have left very deep marks on the minds of their descendants.
The extreme regularity of habits and the great strictness of manners which are observable in the United States have as yet opposed additional obstacles to the growth of dramatic art. There are no dramatic subjects in a country which has witnessed no great political catastrophes and in which love invariably leads by a straight and easy road to matrimony. People who spend every day in the week in making money, and the Sunday in going to church, have nothing to invite the Muse of Comedy.
A single fact proves that the stage is not very popular in the United States. The Americans, whose laws allow of the utmost freedom and even licence of language in all other respects, have nevertheless subjected their dramatic authors to a sort of censorship. Theatrical performances can only take place by permission of the municipal authorities. This may serve to show how much communities are like individuals; they surrender themselves unscrupulously to their ruling passions, and afterward take the greatest care not to yield too much to the vehemence of tastes which they do not possess.
No portion of literature is connected by closer or more numerous ties with the present condition of society than the drama. The drama of one period can never be suited to the following age, if in the interval an important revolution has changed the manners and the laws of the nation.
The great authors of a preceding age may be read; but pieces written for a different public will not attract an audience. The dramatic authors of the past live only in books. The traditional taste of certain individuals, vanity, fashion, or the genius of an actor, may sustain or resuscitate for a time the aristocratic drama among a democracy; but it will speedily fall away of itself — not overthrown, but abandoned.
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