re to expose
the traitor; but Cleon, who loves mischief in the spirit of sport,
though unmasked, is little disconcerted. Brilliant in lines and
speeches, _Le Mechant_ is defective in its composition as a whole.

The decline in a feeling for composition, for art, for the severity
of outline, was accompanied by a development of the emotional or
sentimental element in drama. As sensibility was quickened, and
wealth and ease increased, little things came to be felt as important.
The middle class advanced in prosperity and power. Why should emperors
and kings, queens and princesses occupy the stage? Why neglect the
joys and griefs of every-day domestic life? If "nature" and "virtue"
were to be honoured, why not seek them here? Man, the new philosophy
taught, is essentially good; human nature is of itself inclined to
virtue; if it strays through force of circumstance into vice or folly,
should not its errors be viewed with sympathy, with tenderness? Thus
comedy grew serious, and tragedy put off its exalted airs; the genius
of tragedy and the genius of comedy were wedded, and the _comedie
larmoyante_, which might be named more correctly the bourgeois drama,
was born of this union.

In the plays of NIVELLE DE LA CHAUSEE (1692-1754) the new type is
already formed. The relations of wife and husband, of father and child,
form the theme of all his plays. In _Melanide_, father and son,
unrecognised, are rivals in love; the wife and mother, supposed to
be dead, is discovered; the husband returns to her arms, and is
reconciled to his son. It is the victory of nature and of innate
goodness; comic intention and comic power are wholly absent. La
Chausee's morals are those of an optimist; but those modern domestic
tragedies, the ethics of which do not err by over-sanguine views of
human nature, may trace their ancestry to _Melanide_.

For such serious comedy or bourgeois drama the appropriate vehicle,
so Diderot maintained, is prose. Diderot, among his many gifts, did
not possess a talent for dramatic writing. But as a critic his
influence was considerable. Midway between tragedy and comedy he
perceived a place for the serious drama; to right and left, on either
side of the centre, were spaces for forms approximating, the one to
tragedy, the other to comedy. The hybrid species of tragi-comedy he
wholly condemned; each genre, as he conceived it, is a unity
containing its own principle of life. The function of the theatre
is less to rep