as it goes before and follows after them hushed in religious
silence, and so many with their faces bent reverently to the
ground; I have never heard that grave and pathetic chant, as it is
led by the priests and fervently responded to by an infinity of
voices of men, of women, of girls, of little children, without my
inmost heart being stirred, and tears coming into my eyes. There is
in it something, I know not what, that is grand, solemn, sombre,
and mournful."

Thus to find the material of religious reaction in the author of
_Jacques le Fataliste_ and the centre of the atheistic group, completes
the circle of Diderot's immense and deep-lying versatility. And in his
account of such a mood, we see how he came to be so great and poetical a
critic; we see the sincerity, the alertness, the profound mobility, with
which he was open to impressions of colour, of sound, of the pathos of
human aspiration, of the solemn concourses of men.

France has long been sovereign in criticism in its literary sense. In
that department she has simply never had, and has not now, any serious
rival. In the profounder historic criticism, Germany exhibits her one
great, peculiar, and original gift. In the criticism of art Germany has
at least three memorable names; but save where history is concerned most
modern German aesthetics are so clouded with metaphysical speculation as
to leave the obscurity of a very difficult subject as thick as it was
before. In France the beginnings of art-criticism were literary rather
than philosophic, and with the exception of Cousin's worthless
eloquence, and of the writers whose philosophy Cousin dictated, and of
M. Taine's ingenious paradoxes, Diderot is the only writer who has
deliberately brought a vivid spirit and a philosophic judgment to the
discussion of the forms of Beauty, as things worthy of real elucidation.
As far back as the time of the English Restoration, Dufresnoy had
written in bad Latin a poem on the art of Painting, which had the signal
honour of being translated into good English by no less illustrious a
master of English than Dryden, and it was again translated by Mason, the
friend of Reynolds and of Gray. Imitations, applied to the pictorial
art, of the immortal Epistle to the Pisos, came thick in France in the
eighteenth century.[19] But these effusions are merely literary, and
they are very bad literature indeed. The abbe Dubos published in 1719 a