yle and spirit, and occasionally, as in the "Neveu de
Rameau," a spirit so original, complex and complete, so alive and so
deformed that, in the natural history of man, it becomes an incomparable
monster and an immortal document. He has expressed everything concerning
nature,[4130] art morality and life[4131] in two small treatises of
which twenty successive readings exhaust neither the charm nor the
sense. Find elsewhere, if you can, a similar stroke of power
and a greater masterpiece, "anything more absurd and more
profound!"[4132]--Such is the advantage of men of genius possessing
no control over themselves. They lack discernment but they have
inspiration. Among twenty works, either soiled, rough or nasty, they
produce a creation, and still better, an animated being, able to live by
itself, before which others, fabricated by merely intellectual people,
resemble simply well-dressed puppets.--Hence it is that Diderot is so
great a narrator, a master of dialogue, the equal in this respect of
Voltaire, and, through a quite opposite talent, believing all he says at
the moment of saying it; forgetful of his very self, carried away by his
own recital, listening to inward voices, surprised with the responses
which come to him unexpectedly, borne along, as if on an unknown
river, by the current of action, by the sinuosities of the conversation
inwardly and unconsciously developed, aroused by the flow of ideas
and the leap of the moment to the most unexpected imagery, extreme in
burlesque or extreme in magnificence, now lyrical even to providing
Musset with an entire stanza,[4133] now comic and droll with outbursts
unheard of since the days of Rabelais, always in good faith, always at
the mercy of his subject, of his inventions, of his emotions; the most
natural of writers in an age of artificial literature, resembling a
foreign tree which, transplanted to a parterre of the epoch, swells out
and decays on one side of its stem, but of which five or six branches,
thrust out into full light, surpass the neighboring underwood in the
freshness of their sap and in the vigor of their growth.

Rousseau also is an artisan, a man of the people, ill-adapted to elegant
and refined society, out of his element in a drawing room and, moreover,
of low birth, badly brought up, sullied by a vile and precocious
experience, highly and offensively sensual, morbid in mind and in body,
fretted by superior and discordant faculties, possessing no tact,