resent character fully formed than to study the natural
history of character, to exhibit the environments which determine
character. Its purpose is to moralise life, and the chief means of
moralisation is that effusive sensibility which is the outflow of
the inherent goodness of human nature.

Diderot attempted to justify his theory by examples, and only proved
his own incapacity as a writer for the stage. His friend SEDAINE
(1719-97) was more fortunate. Of the bourgeois drama of the eighteenth
century, _Le Philosophe sans le savoir_ alone survives. It is little
more than a domestic anecdote rendered dramatic, but it has life and
reality. The merchant Vanderk's daughter is to be married; but on
the same day his son, resenting an insult to his father, must expose
his life in a duel. Old Antoine, the intendant, would take his young
master's place of danger; Antoine's daughter, Victorine,
half-unawares has given her heart to the gallant duellist. Hopes and
fears, joy and grief contend in the Vanderk habitation. Sedaine made
a true capture of a little province of nature. When Mercier
(1740-1814) tried to write in the same vein, his "nature" was that
of declamatory sentiment imposed upon trivial incidents.
Beaumarchais, in his earlier pieces, was tearful and romantic;
happily he repented him of his lugubrious sentiment, and restored
to France its old gaiety in the _Barbier de Seville_ and the inimitable
_Mariage de Figaro_; but amid the mirth of _Figaro_ can be heard the
detonation of approaching revolutionary conflict.

IV

The history of the novel in the eighteenth century corresponds with
the general movement of ideas; the novel begins as art, and proceeds
to propagandism. ALAIN-RENE LESAGE, born at Sarzeau, near Vannes,
in 1668, belongs as much to the seventeenth as to the eighteenth
century. His life of nearly eighty years (died 1747) was the
honourable life of a bourgeois, who was also a man of genius, and
who maintained his own independence and that of his wife and children
by the steadfast diligence of his pen. He was no passionate reformer,
no preacher of ideas; he observed life and human nature with shrewd
common-sense, seeing men in general as creatures in whom good and
evil are mixed; his imagination combined and vivified all he had
observed; and he recorded the results of his study of the world in
a style admirable for naturalness and ease, though these were not
attained without the careful practice of lit