pages in the book. "Your _Jacques_," Diderot supposes some
one to say to him, "is only a tasteless rhapsody of facts, some real,
others imaginary, written without grace, and distributed without order.
How can a man of sense and conduct, who prides himself on his
philosophy, find amusement in spinning out tales so obscene as
these?"[17] And this is exactly what the modern critic is bound to ask.
In Rabelais there is at least puissant laughter; in Montaigne, when he
dwells on such matters, there is _naivete_. In Diderot we do not even
feel that he is having any enjoyment in his grossnesses; they have not
even the bad excuse of seeming spontaneous and coming from the fulness
of his heart. "Reader," he says, "I amuse myself in writing the follies
that you commit; your follies make me laugh; and my book puts you out of
humour. To speak frankly to you, I find that the more wicked of us two
is not myself." Unhappily, he does not convey the impression of
amusement to his readers; it has no infection in it, and if his book
puts us out of humour, it is not by its satire on mankind, but by its
essential want of point and want of meaning, either moral or aesthetic.
The few masters of this style have known how to bind the heterogeneous
elements together, if not by some deep-lying purpose, at least by some
pervading mood of rich and mellow feeling. In _Jacques le Fataliste_ is
neither.

[17] vi. 221, 222.

That men of the stamp of Goethe and Schiller should have found such a
book of delicious feast, naturally makes the disparaging critic pause.
In truth, we can easily see how it was. Like all the rest of Diderot's
work, it breaks roughly in upon that starved formalism which had for
long lain so heavily both on art and life. Its hardihood, its very
license, its contempt of conventions, its presentation of common people
and coarse passions and rough lives, all made it a dissolvent of the
thin, dry, and frigid rules which tyrannised over the world, and
interposed between the artist or the thinker and the real existence of
man on the earth. When we think of what European literature was, it
ceases to be wonderful that Goethe should have been unable for six whole
hours to tear himself away from a book that so few men to-day, save
under some compulsion, could persuade themselves to read through. On
great wholesome minds the grossness left no stain, and the interest of
Diderot's singularities worked as a stimulus to a happier originalit