eines. _Le beau moral est absolument
inconnu._ Or, c'est pour atteindre a ce beau moral dans tous les
genres que la sensibilite est la plus tourmentee; qu'elle est en
proie aux contentions de l'esprit, aux emulations de l'ame ...
qu'elle pare avec tant de raffinement et de peine, les ecrits, les
discours, les passions, enfin toute la vie publique et privee.'

It is impossible, in reading how deeply Diderot was affected by
fifth-rate paintings and sculpture, not to count it among the great
losses of literature that he saw few masterpieces. He never made the
great pilgrimage. He was never at Venice, Florence, Parma, Rome. A
journey to Italy was once planned, in which Grimm and Rousseau were to
have been his travelling companions;[25] the project was not realised,
and the strongest critic of art that his country produced never saw the
greatest glories of art. If Diderot had visited Florence and Rome, even
the mighty painter of the Last Judgment and the creator of those sublime
figures in the New Sacristy at San Lorenzo, would have found an
interpreter worthy of him. But it was not to be. "It is rare," he once
wrote, "for an artist to excel without having seen Italy, just as a man
seldom becomes a great writer or a man of great taste without having
given severe study to the ancients."[26] Diderot at least knew what he
lost.

[25] x. 514, _n._

[26] xi. 241.

French art was then, as art usually is, the mirror of its time,
reproducing such imaginative feeling as society could muster. When the
Republic and the Empire came, and twenty years of battle and siege, then
the art of the previous generation fell into a degree of contempt for
which there is hardly a parallel. Pictures that had been the delight of
the town and had brought fortunes to their painters, rotted on the quays
or were sold for a few pence at low auctions. Fragonard, who had been
the darling of his age, died in neglect and beggary. David and his
hideous art of the Empire utterly effaced what had thrown the
contemporaries of Diderot into rapture.[27] Every one knows all that can
be said against the French paintings of Diderot's time. They are
executed hastily and at random; they abound in technical defects of
colour, of drawing, of composition; their feeling is light and shallow.
Watteau died in 1721--at the same premature age as Raphael,--but he
remained as the dominating spirit of French art through the eighteenth
century. Of co