e to-day. Neither of these
compliments can fairly be paid to _The Natural Son_ and _The Father of
the Family_. Diderot's plays ought to be looked upon merely as sketchy
illustrations of a favourite theory; as the rough drawings on the black
board with which a professor of the fine arts may accompany a lecture on
oil painting.

One radical part of Diderot's dramatic doctrine is wholly condemned by
modern criticism; and it is the part which his plays were especially
designed to enforce. "It is always," he says, "virtue and virtuous
people that a man ought to have in view when he writes. Oh, what good
would men gain, if all the arts of imitation proposed one common object,
and were one day to unite with the laws in making us love virtue and
hate vice. It is for the philosopher to address himself to the poet, the
painter, the musician, and to cry to them with all his might: _O men of
genius, to what end has heaven endowed you with gifts_? If they listen
to him, speedily will the images of debauch cease to cover the walls of
our palaces; our vices will cease to be the organs of crime; and taste
and manners will gain. Can we believe that the action of two old blind
people, man and wife, as they sought one another in their aged days, and
with tears of tenderness clasped one another's hands and exchanged
caresses on the brink of the grave, so to say--that this would not
demand the same talent, and would not interest me far more than the
spectacle of the violent pleasures with which their senses in all the
first freshness of youth were once made drunk?"[264]

The emphasising moralists of Diderot's school never understood that
virtue may be made attractive, without pulling the reader or the
spectator by the sleeve, and urgently shouting in his ear how attractive
virtue is. When _The Heart of Midlothian_ appeared (1818), a lady wrote
about it as follows: "Of late days, especially since it has been the
fashion to write moral and even religious novels, one might almost say
of the wise good heroines what a lively girl once said of her
well-meaning aunt--'On my word she is enough to make anybody wicked.'
Had this very story been conducted by a common hand, Effie would have
attracted all our concern and sympathy, Jeanie only cold approbation.
Whereas Jeanie, without youth, beauty, genius, warm passions, or any
other novel perfection, is here our object from beginning to end. This
is 'enlisting the affections in the cause of virtue' te