reatise on Dramatic Poetry, and three dialogues
appended to _The Natural Son_. On the plays a very few words will
suffice. _The Natural Son_ must, by me at least, be pronounced one of
the most vapid performances in dramatic history. Even Lessing, unwilling
as he was to say a word against a writer who had taught him so much, is
too good a critic not to recognise monotony in the characters, stiffness
and affectation in the dialogue, and a pedantic ring in the sentences of
new-fangled philosophy.[251] Even in the three critical dialogues that
Diderot added to the play, Lessing cannot help discerning the mixture of
superficiality with an almost pompous pretension. Rosenkranz, it is
true, finds the play rich in fine sentences, in scenes full of effect,
in which Diderot's moral enthusiasm expresses itself with impetuous
eloquence. But even he admits that the hero's servant is not so far
wrong when he cries, "_Il semble que le bon sens se soit enfui de cette
maison_," and adds that the whole atmosphere of the piece is sickly with
conscious virtue.[252] For ourselves we are ready for once even to
sympathise with Palissot, the hack-writer of the reactionary parties,
when he says that _The Natural Son_ had neither invention, nor style,
nor characters, nor any other single unit of a truly dramatic work. The
reader who seeks to realise the nullity of the _genre serieux_ in
Diderot's hands, should turn from _The Natural Son_ to Goldoni's play of
_The True Friend_, from which Diderot borrowed the structure of his
play, following it as narrowly as possible to the end of the third act.
Seldom has transfusion turned a sparkling draught into anything so flat
and vapid. In spite of the applause of the philosophic _claque_, led by
Grimm,[253] posterity has ratified the coldness with which it was
received by contemporaries. _The Natural Son_ was written in 1757, but
it was not until 1771 that the directors of the French Comedy could be
induced to place it on the stage. The actors detested their task, and as
we can very well believe, went sulkily through parts which they had not
even taken the trouble to master.[254] The public felt as little
interest in the piece as the actors had done, and after a single
representation, the play was put aside.

Ill-natured critics compared Diderot's play with Rousseau's opera; they
insisted that _The Natural Son_ and _The Village Conjuror_ were a
couple of monuments of the presumptuous incompetence of the e