a tender soul cannot view the general system of sensible beings without a strong desire that they should be happy.  Dorval, who cuts an extremely sorry figure in such a scene, exclaims, “Ah, but children!  Dorval would have children!  When I think that we are thrown from our very birth into a chaos of prejudices, extravagances, vices, and miseries, the idea makes me shudder!”—­“Dorval, you are beset by phantoms, and no wonder.  The history of life is so little known, while the appearance of evil in the universe is so glaring....  Dorval, your daughters will be modest and good; your sons noble and high-minded; all your children will be charming....  There is no fear that a cruel soul should ever grow in my bosom from stock of yours."[255]

We can hardly wonder that players were disgusted, or critics moved to wicked jests.  The counterpart to the scene in which Constance persuades Dorval that they would be very happy in one case, is the scene in which Dorval persuades Rosalie that they would be very unhappy in another case.  The situations in themselves may command our approval morally, but they certainly do not attract our sympathies dramatically.  That a woman should demonstrate to a man in fine sententious language the expediency of marrying her, is not inconsistent with good sense, but it is displeasing.  When a man tells a woman that, though love draws in one way, duty draws in the other, we may admire his prudence, but we are glad when so delicate a business comes to an end.  In The Natural Son the latter scene, though very long, is the less disagreeable of the two.  And just as in Diderot’s most wordy and tiresome pages we generally find some one phrase, some epithet, some turn of a sentence whose freshness or strength or daring reveals a genius, so in this scene we find a few lines whose energy reminds us that we are not after all in the hands of some obscure playwright, whose works ought long ago to have been eaten by moths or burnt by fire.  Those lines are a warning against the temptation so familiar in every age since Paris was a guest in the halls of Menelaus, to take that fatal resolve, All for love and the world well lost.  “To do wrong,” says Dorval, “is to condemn ourselves to live and to find our pleasure with wrong-doers; it is to pass an uncertain and troubled life in one long and never-ending lie; to have to praise with a blush the virtue that we flung behind us; to hear from the lips of others harsh words for our own action; to seek a little calm in sophistical systems, that the breath of a single good man scatters to the winds; to shut ourselves for ever out from the spring of true joys, the only joys that are virtuous, austere, sublime; and to give ourselves up, simply as a way of escape from ourselves, to the weariness of those frivolous diversions in which the day flows away in self-oblivion, and our life glides slowly from us and loses itself in waste."[256] A very old story, no doubt; but natural, true, and in its place.