Part I, Chapter IV. The Objections from Authority Answered.
While I am pleading in defense of the stage I am defending and supporting poetry, the best and the noblest kind of writing. For all other writers are made by precept and are formed by art; but a poet prevails by the force of nature; is excited by all that's powerful in humanity, and is, sometimes, by a spirit not his own exalted to divinity.
For if poetry in other countries has flourished with the stage and been with that neglected, what must become of it here in England if the stage is ruined; For foreign poets have found their public and their private patrons. They who excelled in Greece were encouraged by the Athenian state, nay and by all Greece, assembled at their Olympian, Istmean, Nemean, Pythian games. Rome had its Scipios, its Caesars, and its Maecenases. France had its magnanimous Richelieu, and its greater Lewis; but the protection that poetry has found in England has been from the stage alone. Some few indeed of our private men have had souls that have been large enough, and wanted only power. But of our princes how few have had any taste of arts! Nay, and of them who had some, have had their heads too full, and some their souls too narrow!
As then in maintaining the cause of the stage, I am defending poetry in general; so in defending that I am pleading for eloquence, for history, and philosophy. I am pleading for the reasonable pleasures of mankind, the only harmless, the only cheap, the only universal pleasures; the nourishments of youth and the delights of age; the ornaments of prosperity and the surest sanctuaries of adversity; now insolently attempted by furious zeal, too wretchedly blind tosee their beauties or discern their innocence. For unless the stage be encouraged in England, poetry cannot subsist; for never was any man a great poet who did not make it his business as well as pleasure and solely abandon himself to that. And as poetry would be crushed by the ruins of the stage, so eloquence would be miserably maimed by them; for which, if action be confessed the life of it, the theater is certainly the best of schools; and if action be not the life of it, Demosthenes was much mistaken.
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