"I am awaiting with impatience the reflections of _Pantophile Diderot on Tancrede,_" wrote Voltaire: "everything is within the sphere of activity of his genius: he passes from the heights of metaphysics to the weaver's trade, and thence he comes to the stage." The stage, indeed, occupied largely the attention of Diderot, who sought to introduce reforms, the fruit of his own thought as well as of imitation of the Germans, which he had not perhaps sufficiently considered.

For the classic tragedies, the heritage of which Voltaire received from the hands of Racine, Diderot aspired to substitute the natural drama.

His two attempts in that style, _Le Pere de Famille_ and _Le Fils natural,_ had but little success in France, and contributed to develop in Germany the school already founded by Lessing.

An excess of false sensibility and an inflation of expression had caused certain true ideas to fall flat on the French stage.
"You have the inverse of dramatic talent," said Abbe Arnauld to Diderot; "the proper thing is to transform one's self into all the characters, and you transform all the characters into yourself." The criticism did Diderot wrong: he had more wits than his characters, and he was worth more at bottom than those whom he described.

Carried away by the richness as well as the unruliness of his mind, destitute as he was of definite and fixed principles, he recognized no other moral law than the natural impulse of the soul.