dox. It was in literature that this genius of innovation, which
afterwards extended over the whole social structure, showed itself
first of all. Rousseau, not merely in the judgment of a foreigner
like myself, but in that of the very highest of all native
authorities, Sainte Beuve, effected the greatest revolution that the
French tongue had undergone since Pascal. And this revolution was
more remarkable for nothing than for its repudiation of nearly all
the notes of classicism that are enumerated by M. Taine. Diderot,
again, in every page of his work, whether he is discussing painting,
manners, science, the drama, poetry, or philosophy, abounds and
overabounds in those details, particularities, and special marks of
the individual, which are, as M. Taine rightly says, alien to the
classic genius. Both Rousseau and Diderot, considered as men of
letters, were conscious literary revolutionists, before they were
used as half-conscious social revolutionists. They deliberately put
away from them the entire classic tradition as to the dignity of
personage proper to art, and the symmetry and fixed method proper to
artistic style. This was why Voltaire, who was a son of the
seventeenth century before he was the patriarchal sire of the
eighteenth, could never thoroughly understand the author of the New
Heloisa, or the author of the Pere de Famille and Jacques le
Fataliste. Such work was to him for the most part a detestable
compound of vulgarity and rodomontade. 'There is nothing living in
the eighteenth century,' M. Taine says, 'but the little sketches
that are stitched in by the way and as if they were contraband, by
Voltaire, and five or six portraits like Turcaret, Gil Blas,
Marianne, Manon Lescaut, Rameau's Nephew, Figaro, two or three
hasty sketches of Crebillon the younger and Colle' (p. 258). Nothing
living but this! But this is much and very much. We do not pretend
to compare the authors of these admirable delineations with Moliere
and La Bruyere in profundity of insight or in grasp and ethical
mastery, but they are certainly altogether in a new vein even from
those two great writers, when we speak of the familiar, the real,
and the particular, as distinguished from old classic generality.
And, we may add in passing, that the social life of France from the
death of Lewis XIV. downwards was emancipated all round from the
formality and precision of the classic time. As M. Taine himself
shows in many amusing pages, life was