nd in art and poetry. The whole
moral energy of the generation after Diderot was drawn inevitably into
the strong current of social action. The freshly kindled torch of
dramatic art passed for nearly half a century to the country of Lessing
and Goethe.

There is in the use of a certain kind of abstract language this
inconvenience, that the reader may suppose us to be imputing to Diderot
a deliberate and systematic survey of the whole movement of his time,
and a calculated resolution to further it, now in this way and now in
that. It is not necessary to suppose that the movement as a whole was
always present to him. Diderot's mind was constantly feeling for
explanations; it was never a passive recipient. The drama excited this
alert interest just as everything else excited it. He thought about
that, as about everything else, originally, that is to say, sincerely
and in the spirit of reality.[249] Whoever turns with a clear eye and
proper intellectual capacity in search of the real bearings of what he
is about, is sure to find out the strong currents of the time, even
though he may never consciously throw them into their most general and
abstract expression.

Since Aristotle, said Lessing, no more philosophical mind than Diderot's
has treated of the theatre. Lessing himself translated Diderot's two
plays, and the Essay on Dramatic Poetry, and repeatedly said that
without the impulse of Diderot's principles and illustrations his own
taste would have taken a different direction. As a dramatist, the author
of _Miss Sara Sampson_, of _Emilia Galotti_, and above all that noble
dramatic poem, _Nathan the Wise_, could hardly have owed much to the
author of such poor stuff as _The Natural Son_ and _The Father of the
Family_. Lessing had some dramatic fire, invention, spontaneous
elevation; he had a certain measure, though not a very large one, of
poetic impulse. Diderot had nothing of all these, but he had the eye of
the philosophic critic.

Any one who reads Lessing's dramatic criticisms will see that he did
not at all overrate his obligations to his French contemporary.[250] It
has been replied to the absurd taunt about the French inventing nothing,
that at least Descartes invented German philosophy. Still more true is
it that Diderot invented German criticism.

Diderot's thoughts on the stage, besides his completed plays, and a
number of fragmentary scenes, are contained principally in the Paradox
on the Player, a short t