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 men, their callings and situations, the types of classes, in short, must be substituted for mere individual characters.  Third, a real tragedy must be introduced upon the lyric theatre.  Finally, the dance must be brought within the forms of a true poem.

The only remark to be made upon this scheme touches the second article of it.  To urge the substitution of types of classes for individual character was the very surest means that could have been devised for bringing back the conventional forms of the pseudo-classic drama.  The very mark of that drama was that it introduced types instead of vigorously stamped personalities.  What would be gained by driving the typical king off the stage, only to make room for the generalisation of a shopkeeper?  This was not the path that led to romanticism, to Andre Chenier, to De Vigny, to Lamartine, to Victor Hugo.  Theophile Gautier has told us that the fiery chiefs of the romantic school