ntensive exercise, incapable of
further range.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The different case of Diderot.]

Neither of the disabilities which weighed on Voltaire and Rousseau--the
incapacity of the former to construct any complex character, and of the
latter to portray any but his own, or some other brought into intensest
communion, actually or as a matter of wish, with his own--weighed upon
the third of the great trio of _philosophe_ leaders. There is every
probability that Diderot might have been a very great novelist if he had
lived a hundred years later; and not a little evidence that he only
missed being such, even as it was, because of that mysterious curse
which was epigrammatically expressed about him long ago (I really
forget who said it first), "Good pages, no good book." So far from being
self-centred or of limited interests, he could, as hardly any other man
ever could, claim the hackneyed _Homo sum_, etc., as his rightful motto.
He had, when he allowed himself to give it fair play, an admirable gift
of tale-telling; he could create character, and set it to work, almost
after the fashion of the very greatest novelists; his universal interest
and "curiosity" included such vivid appreciation of literature, and of
art, and of other things useful to the novel-writer, that he never could
have been at a loss for various kinds of "seasoning." He had keen
observation, an admittedly marvellous flow of ideas, and a style which
(though, like everything else about him, careless) was of singular
vigour and freshness when, once more, he let it have fair play. But his
time, his nature, and his circumstances combined to throw in his way
traps and snares and nets which he could not, or would not, avoid. His
anti-religiosity, though sometimes greatly exaggerated, was a bad
stumbling-block; although he was free from the snigger of Voltaire and
of Sterne, you could not prevent him, as Horace Walpole complains of his
distinguished sire, from blurting out the most improper remarks and
stories at the most inconvenient times and in the most unsuitable
companies; while his very multiscience, and his fertility of thought and
imagination, kept him in a whirl which hindered his "settling" to
anything. Although in one sense he had the finest and wisest critical
taste of any man then living--I do not bar even Gray or even
Lessing--his taste in some other ways was utterly untrustworthy and
sometimes horribly b