Shortly after, M. Diderot brought out his Père de famille. The genius of this writer, his powerful manner, the vigorous and masculine style of his play, ought to have caused me to throw down my pen; instead, the path he had opened up held forth such charms to me that I listened to the dictates of my personal inclination rather than to the voice of my own weakness and inability. I went to work on my play with renewed ardor. As soon as I had finished it, I gave the manuscript to the Comedie Française.…
Now that it has been produced, I shall proceed to inquire into all the uproarious clamor and adverse criticism which it has aroused; but I shall not linger long over those points which do not immediately concern the dramatic form which it pleased me to choose, because that is the only point which can interest the public at this time. I shall indulge in no personalities. Jam dolor in morem venit meus (Ovid). I shall even pass over in silence everything that has been said against the play, firmly convinced that the greatest honor that could be paid it—after the actual interest taken in it on the stage—is that it is not unworthy of critical discussion.…
I have seen people actually and sincerely bemoan the fact that the Serious Drama was gaining partisans. "An equivocal form!" they declare. "You cannot tell what it is. What sort of play is that in which there is not a single line that makes you laugh? Five mortal acts of long-drawn-out prose, with no comic relief, no moral reflections, no characters—during which we are held suspended by the thread of some romantic circumstance which has neither versimilitude nor reality! Does not the sufferance of such works rather open the gate to license, and encourage laziness? The facility of prose will tend to turn our young authors from the arduous task of writing verse, and our stage will soon fall into a state of barbarism, out of which our poets have so painfully managed to develop it. I do not mean to infer that some of these pieces have not affected me, I do not know just how; but how terrible it would be if such plays obtained a foothold! And besides, their popularity would be most unseemly in our land: everyone knows what our celebrated authors have thought, and they are authorities! They have proscribed this dramatic form as belonging neither to Melpomene nor to Thalia. Must we create a new Muse to preside over this trivial cothurnus, this stilted comic form? Tragi-comedy, Bourgeois Tragedy, Tearful Comedy—I can find no term to designate this hybrid. And let no wretched author pride himself upon the momentary approval of the public, which is vouchsafed rather to the assiduity and talent of the actors! The public! What is this public? The moment that collective entity dissolves, and each member of it goes his own way, what remains of the general opinion, unless it becomes that of each individual, among whom the most enlightened exercise a natural influence over the others, who are brought sooner or later to think with the former? Whence it will be seen that the author must look to the few and not to the many for his "general opinion."
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