alone showed any feeling
for a doctrine, and for large organic and constructive conceptions. He
had the rare faculty of true philosophic meditation. Though immeasurably
inferior both to Voltaire and Rousseau in gifts of literary expression,
he was as far their superior in breadth and reality of artistic
principle. He was the originator of a natural, realistic, and
sympathetic school of literary criticism. He aspired to impose new forms
upon the drama. Both in imaginative creation and in criticism, his work
was a constant appeal from the artificial conventions of the classic
schools to the actualities of common life. The same spirit united with
the tendency of his philosophy to place him among the very few men who
have been great and genuine observers of human nature and human
existence. So singular and widely active a genius may well interest us,
even apart from the important place that he holds in the history of
literature and opinion.

CHAPTER II.

YOUTH.

Denis Diderot was born at Langres in 1713, being thus a few months
younger than Rousseau (1712), nearly twenty years younger than Voltaire
(1694), nearly two years younger than Hume (1711), and eleven years
older than Kant (1724). His stock was ancient and of good repute. The
family had been engaged in the great local industry, the manufacture of
cutlery, for no less than two centuries in direct line. Diderot liked to
dwell on the historic prowess of his town, from the days of Julius
Caesar and the old Lingones and Sabinus, down to the time of the Great
Monarch. With the taste of his generation for tracing moral qualities to
a climatic source, he explained a certain vivacity and mobility in the
people of his district by the great frequency and violence of its
atmospheric changes from hot to cold, from calm to storm, from rain to
sunshine. "Thus they learn from earliest infancy to turn to every wind.
The man of Langres has a head on his shoulders like the weathercock at
the top of the church spire. It is never fixed at one point; if it
returns to the point it has left, it is not to stop there. With an
amazing rapidity in their movements, their desires, their plans, their
fancies, their ideas, they are cumbrous in speech. For myself, I belong
to my country side." This was thoroughly true. He inherited all the
versatility of his compatriots, all their swift impetuosity, and
something of their want of dexterity in expression.

His father was one of the brav