factory to Diderot's love of realistic moralising as the
conventional tragedy of the court of Lewis XIV. The Fable of most of
them turns on adultery, and this is not within the method of the _genre
serieux_ as expounded by Diderot. Perhaps half a dozen comedies, such,
for instance, as _The Ideas of Madame Aubray,_ by M. Dumas, are of the
_genre serieux_, but certainly there are not enough of such comedies to
constitute a genuine Diderotian school in France. There is no need
therefore to say more about the theory than this, namely, that though
the drama is an imitative art, yet besides imitation its effects demand
illusion. What, cries Diderot, you do not conceive the effect that would
be produced on you by a real scene, with real dresses, with speech in
true proportion to the action, with the actions themselves simple, with
the very dangers that have made you tremble for your parents, for your
friends, for yourselves? No, we answer: reproduction of reality does not
move us as a powerful work of imagination moves us. "We may as well
urge," said Burke, "that stones, sand, clay, and metals lie in a certain
manner in the earth, as a reason for building with these materials and
in that manner, as for writing according to the accidental disposition
of characters in Nature."[289] Common dangers do not excite us; it is
the presentation of danger in some uncommon form, in some new
combination, in some fresh play of motive and passion, that quickens
that sympathetic fear and pity which it is the end of a play to produce.
And if this be so, there is another thing to be said. If we are to be
deliberately steeped in the atmosphere of Duty, illusion is out of
place. The constant presence of that severe and overpowering figure,
"Stern Daughter of the Voice of God," checks the native wildness of
imagination, restricts the exuberance of fancy, and sets a rigorous
limit to invention. Diderot used to admit that the _genre serieux_ could
never take its right place until it had been handled by a man of high
dramatic genius. The cause why this condition has never come to pass is
simply that its whole structure and its regulations repel the faculties
of dramatic genius.

Besides the perfection of the _genre serieux_, Diderot insisted that the
following tasks were also to be achieved before the stage could be said
to have attained the full glory of the other arts. First, a domestic or
bourgeois tragedy must be created. Second, the conditions of