Who that has read them can ever forget the
dialogues that are set among the landscapes of Vernet in the Salons of
1767?[53] The critic supposes himself unable to visit the Salon of the
year, and to be staying in a gay country-house amid some fine landscapes
on the sea-coast. He describes his walks among these admirable scenes,
and the strange and varying effects of light and colour, and all the
movements of the sky and ocean; and into the descriptions he weaves a
series of dialogues with an abbe, a tutor of the children of the house,
upon art and landscape and the processes of the universe. Nothing can be
more excellent and lifelike: it is not until the end that he lets the
secret slip that the whole fabric has been a flight of fancy, inspired
by no real landscape, but by the sea-pieces sent to the exhibition by
Vernet.

[53] xi. 98-149.

This is an illustration of the variety of approach which makes Diderot
so interesting, so refreshing a critic. He never sinks into what is
mechanical, and the evidence of this is that his mind, while intent on
the qualities of a given picture, yet moves freely to the outside of the
picture, and is ever cordially open to the most general thoughts and
moods, while attending with workmanlike fidelity to what is particular
in the object before him.[54]

[54] _E.g._ xi. 223.

In the light of modern speculation upon the philosophy of the fine arts,
Diderot makes no commanding figure, because he is so egregiously
unsystematic. But as Goethe said, in a piece where he was withstanding
Diderot to the face, _die hoechste Wirkung des Geistes ist, den Geist
hervorzurufen_--the highest influence of mind is to call out mind. This
stimulating provocation of the intelligence was the master faculty in
Diderot. For the sake of that men are ready to pardon all excesses, and
to overlook many offences against the law of Measure. From such a point
of view, Goethe's treatment of Diderot's Essay on Painting (written in
1765, but not given to the world until 1796) is an instructive lesson.
"Diderot's essay," he wrote to Schiller, "is a magnificent work, and it
speaks even more usefully to the poet than to the painter, though for
the painter, too, it is a torch of powerful illumination." Yet Diderot's
critical principle in the essay was exactly opposite to Goethe's; and
when Goethe translated some portions of it, he was forced to add a
commentary of stringent protest. Diderot, as usual, energetically