ence shows that nature condemns to misery the man to whom she
has allotted genius, and whom she has endowed with beauty; it is
they who are the figures of poetry. Then within myself I lauded
the mediocrity that shelters one alike from praise and blame; and
yet why, I asked myself, would no one choose to let his sensibility
go, and to become mediocre? O vanity of man!"[59]

[59] x. 124, 125.

Goethe's _Tasso_, a work so full of finished poetry and of charm, is the
idealised and pathetic version of the figure that Diderot has thus
conceived for genius. The dialogues between the hapless poet and
Antonio, the man of the world, are a skilful, lofty, and impressive
statement of the problem that often vexed Diderot. Goethe sympathised
with Antonio's point of view; he had in his nature so much of the spirit
of conduct, of saneness, of the common reason of the world. And in art
he was a lover of calm ideals. In Diderot, as our readers by this time
know, these things were otherwise.

The essay on Beauty in the Encyclopaedia is less fertile than most of
Diderot's contributions to the subject.[60] It contains a careful
account of two or three other theories, especially that of Hutcheson.
The object is to explain the source of Beauty. Diderot's own conclusion
is that this is to be found in "relations." Our words for the different
shades of the beautiful are expressive of notions (acquired by
experience through the senses) of order, proportion, symmetry, unity,
and so forth. But, after all, the real question remains unanswered--what
makes some relations beautiful, and others not so; and the same objects
beautiful to me, and indifferent to you; and the same object beautiful
to me to-day, and indifferent or disgusting to me to-morrow? Diderot
does, it is true, enumerate twelve sources of such diversity of
judgment, in different races, ages, individuals, moods, but their force
depends upon the importation into the conception of beauty of some more
definite element than the bare idea of relation. Some sentences show
that he came very near to the famous theory of Alison, that beauty is
only attributed to sounds and sights, where, and because, they recall
what is pleasing, sublime, pathetic, and set our ideas and emotions
flowing in one of these channels. But he does not get fairly on the
track of either Alison's or any other decisive and marking adjective,
with which to qualify his _rapports_. He wastes some