Upon the stage, as well as elsewhere, an aristocratic audience will only meet personages of quality, and share the emotions of kings.

The same thing applies to style: an aristocracy is apt to impose upon dramatic authors certain modes of expression which give the key in which everything is to be delivered.

By these means the stage frequently comes to delineate only one side of man, or sometimes even to represent what is not to be met with in human nature at all--to rise above nature and to go beyond it.
In democratic communities the spectators have no such partialities, and they rarely display any such antipathies: they like to see upon the stage that medley of conditions, of feelings, and of opinions, which occurs before their eyes.

The drama becomes more striking, more common, and more true.

Sometimes, however, those who write for the stage in democracies also transgress the bounds of human nature--but it is on a different side from their predecessors.