Voltaire intended to constitute the French drama into an independent form.

He expected to be told that he was not like Sophocles, and he did not abstain from some singularly free railing against Euripides.

The Greek pieces often smacked too much of the tone of the fair to satisfy him; they were too familiar and colloquial for a taste that had been made fastidious by the court-pieces of Lewis XIV.

Diderot was kept free from such deplorable criticism as this by feeling that the Greek drama was true to the sentiment of the age that gave it birth, and that the French drama, if not in the hands of Racine, still even in the hands of Voltaire, and much more in the hands of such men as Lagrange-Chancel and the elder Crebillon, was true to no sentiment save one purely literary, artificial, and barren.

He insists on the hopelessness of the stage, unless men prepared themselves at every part for a grand return to nature.