hich we may close our chapter. "The relaxation of
morals does not prevent people from being very loud in praise of honour
and virtue; those who have least of them know very well how much they
are concerned in other people having them." Again, "The French," he
said, "are the only people among whom it is possible for morals to be
depraved, without either the heart being corrupted, or their courage
being weakened."

CHAPTER VII.

THE STAGE.

There is at first something incredible in the account given by some
thinkers of Diderot, as the greatest genius of the eighteenth century;
and perhaps an adjustment of such nice degrees of comparison among the
high men of the world is at no time very profitable. What is intended by
these thoroughgoing panegyrists is that Diderot placed himself at the
point of view whence, more comprehensively than was possible from any
other, he discerned the long course and the many bearings, the complex
faces and the large ramifications, of the huge movement of his day. He
seized the great transition at every point, and grasped all the threads
that were to be inwoven into the pattern of the new time.

Diderot is in a thousand respects one of the most unsatisfactory of men
and of writers. Yet it is hard to deny that to whatever quarter he
turned, he caught the rising illumination and was shone upon by the
spirit of the coming day. It was no copious and overflowing radiance,
but they were the beams of the dawn. Hence, what he has to say, and we
shall soon see how much he said, about the two great arts of painting
and the drama, though it is fragmentary, though it is insufficient, yet
points, as all the rest of his thoughts pointed, along the lines that
the best minds of the western world have since traversed. He would, in
the old metaphysical language, have called the direction of it a turning
to Nature, but if we translate this into more positive terms, just as we
have said that the Encyclopaedia was a glorification of pacific industry
and of civil justice, so we may say that his whole theory of the drama
was a glorification of private virtues and domestic life. And the
definite rise of civil justice and industry over feudal privilege and a
life of war, and again the elevation of domestic virtue into the place
formerly held by patriotic devotion, are the two great sides of a single
movement.[248] It is quite true that Diderot and the French of that day
had only a glimpse of the promised la