too much conscience, and laboured too deeply under the burdensome
problems of the world. He could not emancipate himself sufficiently from
the tumult of his own sympathies. At many a page both of _Jacques le
Fataliste_, and of others of his pieces, we involuntarily recall the
writer's own contention that excess of sensibility makes a mediocre
actor. The same law is emphatically true of the artist. Diderot never
writes as if his spirit were quite free--and perhaps it never was free.
If we are to enjoy these reckless outbursts of all that is bizarre and
grotesque, these defiances of all that is sane, coherent, and rational,
we must never feel conscious of a limitation, or a possibility of stint
or check. The draught must seem to come from an exhaustless fountain of
boisterous laughter, irony, and caprice. Perfect fooling is so rare an
art, that not half a dozen men in literature have really possessed it;
perhaps only Aristophanes, Rabelais, Shakespeare. _Candide_, wonderful
as it is, has many a stroke of malice, and _Tristram Shandy_, wonderful
as that is too, is not without tinges of self-consciousness; and neither
malice nor self-consciousness belongs to the greater gods of buffoonery.
Cervantes and Moliere, those great geniuses of finest temper, still have
none of the reckless buffoonery of such scenes as that between Prince
Henry and the drawer, or the mad extravagances of the _Merry Wives_;
still less of the wild topsy-turvy of the _Birds_ or the _Peace_. They
have not the note of true Pantagruelism. Most critics, again, would find
in Swift a truculence, sometimes latent and sometimes flagrant, that
would deprive him, too, of his place among these great masters of free
and exuberant farce. Diderot, at any rate, must rank in the second class
among those who have attempted to tread a measure among the whimsical
zigzags of unreason. The sincere sentimentalist makes a poor reveller.

[16] Quoted in Rosenkranz, ii. 326.

We have spoken, as many others have done before us, of Diderot as
imitating our two English celebrities, and in one sense that is a
perfectly true description. In _Jacques le Fataliste_ whole sentences
are transcribed in letter and word from _Tristram Shandy_. Yet imitation
is hardly the right word for the process by which Diderot showed that an
author had seized and affected him. _La Religieuse_ would not have been
written if there had been no Richardson, nor _Jacques le Fataliste_ if
there had been