scoundrel.... In what consists then the honor of that nobility of
which you are so proud? How does it affect the glory of one's
country or the good of mankind? A mortal enemy to liberty and the
laws, what did it ever produce, in the most of those countries where
it has flourished, but the power of tyranny and the oppression of
the people? Will you presume to boast, in a republic, of a rank that
Is destructive to virtue and humanity? Of a rank that makes its
boast of slavery and wherein men blush to be men?[51]

This is of course the language of passion and prejudice (it would not
else be Rousseau), but there was enough of truth in it, as in the case
of Rousseau's other fervors, to rouse the revolutionary spirit. German
literature began to teem with novels and plays which exhibit the
sufferings of some untitled hero or heroine at the hands of a vicious
aristocracy. The theme is touched upon in 'Werther', but without
becoming an Important issue. It appears in Wagner's 'Infanticide',
wherein a butcher's daughter, Evchen Humbrecht, is violated by a titled
officer, runs away from home in her shame, kills her child and is
finally found by the repentant author of her disgrace. We meet it again
in Lenz's 'Private Tutor', the tragedy of a German St. Preux who falls
in love with his titled pupil and dishonors her, with the result that
she too runs away from home and tries to commit suicide, while her lover
in his chagrin emasculates himself. These are grotesque tragedies, not
devoid of literary power, but devoid of high sentiment and saturated
with a woeful vulgarity. We cannot wonder that the high-minded Schiller
should have condemned Wagner's malodorous play as a mediocre
performance. His incentive came rather from Gemmingen's 'Head of the
House', which in turn carries us back to Diderot.

In the hands of Diderot, democrat, moralist and apostle of the _genre