and
sports himself in the slime of the age, consisting of obscenity, and
into the beaten track of declamation. In his leading novels he dwells a
long time on salacious equivocation, or on a scene of lewdness. Crudity
with him is not extenuated by malice or glossed over by elegance. He
is neither refined nor pungent; is quite incapable, like the younger
Crebillon, of depicting the scapegrace of ability. He is a new-comer,
a parvenu in standard society; you see in him a commoner, a powerful
reasoner, an indefatigable workman and great artist, introduced, through
the customs of the day, at a supper of fashionable livers. He engrosses
the conversation, directs the orgy, or in the contagion or on a wager,
says more filthy things, more "gueulees," than all the guests put
together[4129]. In like manner, in his dramas, in his "Essays on
Claudius and Nero," in his "Commentary on Seneca," in his additions to
the "Philosophical History" of Raynal, he forces the tone of things.
This tone, which then prevails by virtue of the classic spirit and of
the new fashion, is that of sentimental rhetoric. Diderot carries it to
extremes in the exaggeration of tears or of rage, in exclamations, in
apostrophes, in tenderness of feeling, in violences, indignation, in
enthusiasms, in full-orchestra tirades, in which the fire of his brains
finds employment and an outlet.--On the other hand, among so many
superior writers, he is the only genuine artist, the creator of souls,
within his mind objects, events and personages are born and become
organized of themselves, through their own forces, by virtue of natural
affinities, involuntarily, without foreign intervention, in such a way
as to live for and in themselves, safe from the author's intentions, and
outside of his combinations. The composer of the "Salons," the "Petits
Romans," the "Entretien," the "Paradoxe du Comedien," and especially
the "Reve de d'Alembert" and the "Neveu de Rameau "is a man of an unique
species in his time. However alert and brilliant Voltaire's personages
may be, they are always puppets; their action is derivative; always
behind them you catch a glimpse of the author pulling the strings. With
Diderot, the strings are severed; he is not speaking through the lips of
his characters; they are not his comical loud-speakers or puppets,
but independent and detached persons, with an action of their own,
a personal accent, with their own temperament, passions, ideas,
philosophy, st