was to have sketched
and constituted a new species in the great dramatic kingdom. Every one
knows, he said, that there is tragedy and that there is comedy, but we
have to learn that there is room in nature and the art of the stage for
a third division, namely, the _genre serieux_, a kind of comedy that has
for its object virtue and the duties of man. Why should the writer of
comedy confine his work to what is vicious or ridiculous in men? Why
should not the duties of men furnish the dramatist with as ample
material as their vices? Surely in the _genre honnete et serieux_ the
subject is as important as in gay comedy. The characters are as varied
and as original. The passions are all the more energetic as the interest
will be greater. The style will be graver, loftier, more forcible, more
susceptible of what we call sentiment, a quality without which no style
ever yet spoke to the heart. The ridiculous will not be absent, for the
madness of actions and speeches, when they are suggested by the
misunderstanding of interests or by the transport of passion, is the
truly ridiculous thing in men and in life.[287]

Besides his own two pieces, Diderot would probably have pointed to
Terence as the author coming nearest to the _genre serieux_. If Goethe's
bad play of _Stella_ had retained the close as he originally wrote it,
with the bigamous Fernando in the last scene rejoicing over the devoted
agreement of the two ladies and his daughter to live with him in happy
unity, that would perhaps have been a comedy of the _genre serieux_,
with the duties of man gracefully adapted to circumstances.

The theory of the _genre serieux_ has not led to the formation of any
school of writers adopting it and working it out, or to the production
of any masterpiece that has held its ground, as has happened in tragedy,
comedy, and farce. Beaumarchais, who at last achieved such a dazzling
and portentous success by one dramatic masterpiece, began his career as
a playwright by following the vein of _The Father of the Family;_ but
_The Marriage of Figaro_, though not without strong traces of Diderotian
sentiment in pungent application, yet is in its structure and
composition less French than Spanish. It is quite true, as Rosenkranz
says, that the prevailing taste on the French stage in our own times
favours above all else bourgeois romantic comedy, written in prose.[288]
But the strength of the romantic element in them would have been as
little satis