y in
men of more disciplined endowments. And let us add, of more poetic
endowments. It is the lack of poetry in _Jacques_ that makes its irony
so heavy to us. We only willingly suffer those to take us down into the
depths who can also raise us on the wings of a beautiful fancy. Even
Rabelais has his poetic moments, as in the picture of Cupid
self-disarmed before the industrious serenity of the Muses. A single
lovely image, like Sterne's figure of the recording angel, reconciles us
to many a miry page. But in _Jacques le Fataliste_, Diderot never raises
his eye for an instant to the blue aether, his ear catches no harmony of
awe, of hope, nor even of a noble despair. With a kind of clumsy
jubilancy he holds us fast in the ways and language of thick and clogged
sense. The _fatrasie_ of old France has its place in literature, but it
can never be restored in ages when a host of moral anxieties have laid
siege to men's souls. The uncommon is always welcome to the lover of
art, but it must justify itself. _Jacques_ has the quality of the
uncommon; it is a curiously prepared dish, as Goethe said; but it lacks
the pinch of salt and the handful of herbs with sharp diffusive
flavour.

CHAPTER III.

ART.

In 1759 Diderot wrote for Grimm the first of his criticisms on the
exhibition of paintings in the Salon. At the beginning of the reign of
Lewis XV. these exhibitions took place every year, as they take place
now. But from 1751 onwards, they were only held once in two years.
Diderot has left his notes on every salon from 1759 to 1781, with the
exception of that of 1773, when he was travelling in Holland and Russia.

We have already seen how Grimm made Diderot work for him. The nine
_Salons_ are one of the results of this willing bondage, and they are
perhaps the only part of Diderot's works that has enjoyed a certain
measure of general popularity. Mr. Carlyle describes them with emphatic
enthusiasm: "What with their unrivalled clearness, painting the picture
over again for us, so that we too _see_ it, and can judge it; what with
their sunny fervour, inventiveness, real artistic genius, which wants
nothing but a _hand_, they are with some few exceptions in the German
tongue, the only Pictorial Criticisms we know of worth reading."[18] I
only love painting in poetry, Madame Necker said to Diderot, and it is
into poetry that you have found out the secret of rendering the works of
our modern painters, even the commonest o