Book, Diderot works 5 the natural son[LS]

If you are convinced, he told me, that it is a tragedy, and that there is an intermediate genre between tragedy and comedy, then we are between two branches of the dramatic genre that are still uncultivated and that are just waiting for their authors. Make comedies in a serious genre; perform domestic tragedies and be sure that applause and immortality are reserved for you. Above all, leave aside the theatrical coups. Look for paintings; get closer to real life and, first of all, have a space that allows the exercise of pantomime in all its scope. […] What makes a play comic, serious or tragic is less the theme and more the tone, the passions, the characters and the interest. The effects of love, jealousy, gambling, unruly living, ambition, hatred, envy can make us laugh, reflect or tremble - argues Diderot in this Natural Son of the 18th century Enlightenment and its pre-romantic sentimentalism, which they anticipate, with the vision of their genius, not only the novelistic deliveries of bourgeois drama and melodrama or the poetic experiences of Romanticism, but also an entire trend that will take theater to the stage of modernity.