The Father of the Family, written in 1758, and first acted in 1761, is very superior to The Natural Son; it even enjoyed a certain popularity.  In Germany it became an established favourite, and in Italy it was only less popular than a piece of Goldoni’s.  The French were not quite so easy to please.  In 1761 its reception was undoubtedly favourable, and it ran for more than a week.  In 1769 it was reproduced, and, according to Diderot’s own account, with enthusiasm.  “There was a frightful crowd,” he says, “and people hardly remember such a success.  I was surprised at it myself.  My friends are at the height of exultation.  My daughter came home intoxicated with wonder and delight.”  Even Madame Diderot at length grew ashamed at having to confess that she had not seen her husband’s triumph, and throwing aside her horror of the stage, was as deeply moved as every one else.[262]

Notwithstanding this satisfactory degree of success, and though it was performed as late as 1835, the play never struck root in France.  It is indeed a play without any real quality or distinction.  “Diderot, in his plays,” said Madame de Stael, “put the affectation of nature in the place of the affectation of convention."[263] The effect is still more disagreeable in the first kind of affectation than the second. The Father of the Family is made more endurable than The Natural Son by a certain rapidity and fire in the action, and a certain vigour in the characters of the impetuous son (Saint Albin) and the malignant brother-in-law (the Commander).  But the dialogue is poor, and the Father of the Family himself is as woolly and mawkish a figure as is usually made out of benevolent intentions and weak purpose combined.  The woes of the heavy father of the stage, where there is no true pathos, but only a sentimental version of it, find us very callous.  The language has none of that exquisite grace and flexibility which makes a good French comedy of own day, a piece by Augier, Sandeau, Feuillet, Sardou, so delightful.  Diderot was right in urging that there is no reason why a play should be in verse; but then the prose of a play ought to have a point, elegance, and highly-wrought perfection, which shall fill us with a sense of art, though not the art of the poet.  Diderot not only did not write comedy in such a style; but he does not even so much as show consciousness that any difference exists between one kind of prose and another.  The blurred phrases and clipped sentences of what Diderot would have called Nature, that is to say of real life, are intolerable on the stage.  Even he felt this, for his characters, though their dialogue is without wit or finish, are still dull and tame of speech, in a different way from that in which the people whom we may meet are dull and tame.  There is an art of a kind, though of an extremely vapid kind.