manners will gain.  Can we believe that the action of two old blind people, man and wife, as they sought one another in their aged days, and with tears of tenderness clasped one another’s hands and exchanged caresses on the brink of the grave, so to say—­that this would not demand the same talent, and would not interest me far more than the spectacle of the violent pleasures with which their senses in all the first freshness of youth were once made drunk?"[264]

The emphasising moralists of Diderot’s school never understood that virtue may be made attractive, without pulling the reader or the spectator by the sleeve, and urgently shouting in his ear how attractive virtue is.  When The Heart of Midlothian appeared (1818), a lady wrote about it as follows:  “Of late days, especially since it has been the fashion to write moral and even religious novels, one might almost say of the wise good heroines what a lively girl once said of her well-meaning aunt—­’On my word she is enough to make anybody wicked.’  Had this very story been conducted by a common hand, Effie would have attracted all our concern and sympathy, Jeanie only cold approbation.  Whereas Jeanie, without youth, beauty, genius, warm passions, or any other novel perfection, is here our object from beginning to end.  This is ‘enlisting the affections in the cause of virtue’ ten times more than ever Richardson did; for whose male and female pedants, all excelling as they are, I never could care half as much as I found myself inclined to do for Jeanie before I finished the first volume."[265]

In other words, you must win us by kindling our sympathy, not by formally commanding our moral approval.  To kindle sympathy your personage must be interesting; must touch our pity or wonder or energetic fellow-feeling or sense of moral loveliness, which is a very different thing from touching our mere sense of the distinctions between right and wrong.  Direct homily excites no sympathy with the homilist.  Deep pensive meditations on the moral puzzles of the world are not at all like didactic discourse.  But the Father of the Family was exactly fulfilling Diderot’s notion of dramatic purpose and utility when he talked to his daughter in such a strain as this:  “Marriage, my daughter, is a vocation imposed by nature....  He who counts on bliss without alloy knows neither the life of man nor the designs of heaven.  If marriage exposes us to cruel pain, it is also the source of the sweetest pleasures.  Where are the examples of pure and heartfelt interest, of real tenderness, of inmost confidence, of daily help of griefs divided, of tears mingled, if they be not in marriage?  What is there in the world that the good man prefers to his wife?  What is there in the world that a father loves more dearly than his children?  O sacred bond, if I think of thee, my whole soul is warmed and elevated!"[266]