diency
of marrying her, is not inconsistent with good sense, but it is
displeasing. When a man tells a woman that, though love draws in one
way, duty draws in the other, we may admire his prudence, but we are
glad when so delicate a business comes to an end. In _The Natural Son_
the latter scene, though very long, is the less disagreeable of the
two. And just as in Diderot's most wordy and tiresome pages we generally
find some one phrase, some epithet, some turn of a sentence whose
freshness or strength or daring reveals a genius, so in this scene we
find a few lines whose energy reminds us that we are not after all in
the hands of some obscure playwright, whose works ought long ago to have
been eaten by moths or burnt by fire. Those lines are a warning against
the temptation so familiar in every age since Paris was a guest in the
halls of Menelaus, to take that fatal resolve, All for love and the
world well lost. "To do wrong," says Dorval, "is to condemn ourselves to
live and to find our pleasure with wrong-doers; it is to pass an
uncertain and troubled life in one long and never-ending lie; to have to
praise with a blush the virtue that we flung behind us; to hear from the
lips of others harsh words for our own action; to seek a little calm in
sophistical systems, that the breath of a single good man scatters to
the winds; to shut ourselves for ever out from the spring of true joys,
the only joys that are virtuous, austere, sublime; and to give ourselves
up, simply as a way of escape from ourselves, to the weariness of those
frivolous diversions in which the day flows away in self-oblivion, and
our life glides slowly from us and loses itself in waste."[256] A very
old story, no doubt; but natural, true, and in its place.

What adds to the flatness of the play is a device which Diderot
introduced on a deliberately adopted principle; we mean the elaborate
setting out of the acting directions. Every movement, every gesture,
every silent pause is written down, and we have the impression less of a
play than of some strangely bald romance. In the versified declamation
which then reigned on the French stage, nothing was left to natural
action, nothing was told by change of position, by movement without
speech, or in short by any means other than discourse. Diderot,
repudiating the conventions of dramatic art, and consulting nature or
reality, saw that there are many scenes in life in which it is more
natural to the personag