m wrote news-letters to various high
personages in Germany, reporting what was going on in the world of art
and literature in Paris, then without a rival as the capital of the
intellectual activity of Europe. Diderot helped his friend at one time
and another between 1759 and 1779, by writing for him an account of the
annual exhibitions of paintings. These _Salons_ are among the most
readable of all pieces of art criticism. They have a freshness, a
reality, a life, which take their readers into a different world from
the dry and conceited pedantries of the ordinary virtuoso. As has been
said by Sainte-Beuve, they initiated the French into a new sentiment,
and introduced people to the mystery and purport of colour by ideas.
"Before Diderot," Madame Necker said, "I had never seen anything in
pictures except dull and lifeless colours; it was his imagination that
gave them relief and life, and it is almost a new sense for which I am
indebted to his genius."

Greuze was Diderot's favourite among contemporary artists, and it is
easy to see why. Greuze's most characteristic pictures were the
rendering in colour of the same sentiment of domestic virtue and the
pathos of common life, which Diderot attempted with inferior success to
represent upon the stage. For Diderot was above all things interested in
the life of men,--not the abstract life of the race, but the incidents
of individual character, the fortunes of a particular family, the
relations of real and concrete motives in this or that special case. He
delighted with the enthusiasm of a born casuist in curious puzzles of
right and wrong, and in devising a conflict between the generalities of
ethics and the conditions of an ingeniously contrived practical dilemma.
Mostly his interest expressed itself in didactic and sympathetic form;
in two, however, of the most remarkable of all his pieces, it is not
sympathetic, but ironical. _Jacques le fataliste_ (written in 1773, but
not published until 1796) is in manner an imitation of _Tristram Shandy_
and _The Sentimental Journey_. Few modern readers will find in it any
true diversion. In spite of some excellent criticisms dispersed here and
there, and in spite of one or two stories that are not without a certain
effective realism, it must as a whole be pronounced savourless, forced,
and as leaving unmoved those springs of laughter and of tears which are
the common fountain of humour. _Le Neveu de Rameau_ is a far superior
performan