tragic stage, what would become, round her dishevelled figure, of all
those powdered, curled, frizzled, tricked-out creatures? Sooner or later
they must put themselves in unison. O nature, nature! We can never
resist her."[285]

From all this we turn, for a few moments only, and not too cheerfully,
to the Serbonian bog of dramatic rules and the metaphysics of the
theatre. There is no subject in literature, not even the interpretation
of the Apocalypse, which has given birth to such pedantic, dismal, and
futile discussion. The immense controversy, carried on in books,
pamphlets, sheets and flying articles, mostly German, as to what it was
that Aristotle really meant by the famous words in the sixth chapter of
the _Poetics_, about tragedy accomplishing the purification of our moods
of pity and sympathetic fear, is one of the disgraces of human
intelligence, a grotesque monument of sterility. The great tap-root of
fallacy has been and remains the incessant imputation of ethical or
social purpose to the dramatist, and the demand of direct and combined
ethical or social effect from the drama. There is no critic, from the
great Aristotle downwards, who has steered quite clear of these evil
shallows; Diderot, as we have seen, least of all. But Diderot disarms
the impatience which narrower critics kindle, by this magnificent
concession, coming at the close of all: "Especially remember that _there
is no general principle;_ I do not know a single one of those that I
have indicated which a man of genius cannot infringe with success."[286]
Here we listen to the voice of the genuine Diderot; and if this be
granted, we need not give more than a passing attention to the rules
that have gone before--about the danger of borrowing in the same
composition the shades both of the comic and of the tragic styles; about
movement being injurious to dignity, and of the importance therefore of
not making the principal personage the _machinist_ of the piece; about
the inexpediency of episodic personages--and so forth. The only remark
worth making on these propositions is that, whatever their value may be,
Diderot at any rate, like a true philosopher, generalised from the facts
of nature and art. He did not follow the too common critical method of
reading one's own ideas into a work of art, and then taking them back
again in the more imposing form of inevitable deductions from the work
itself.

What Diderot conceived himself really to have done,