men, their
callings and situations, the types of classes, in short, must be
substituted for mere individual characters. Third, a real tragedy must
be introduced upon the lyric theatre. Finally, the dance must be brought
within the forms of a true poem.

The only remark to be made upon this scheme touches the second article
of it. To urge the substitution of types of classes for individual
character was the very surest means that could have been devised for
bringing back the conventional forms of the pseudo-classic drama. The
very mark of that drama was that it introduced types instead of
vigorously stamped personalities. What would be gained by driving the
typical king off the stage, only to make room for the generalisation of
a shopkeeper? This was not the path that led to romanticism, to Andre
Chenier, to De Vigny, to Lamartine, to Victor Hugo. Theophile Gautier
has told us that the fiery chiefs of the romantic school who suddenly
conquered France at the close of the Restoration, divided the whole
world into _flamboyant_ and _drab_. In the literature of the past they
counted Voltaire one of the Drab, and Diderot a Flamboyant.[290] If it
be not too presumptuous in a foreigner to dissent, we cannot but think
that they were mistaken. Nothing could be farther removed at every part
from Diderot's dramatic scheme, than _Faust_ or _Goetz von Berlichingen_
or _Hernani_.

The truth is that it was impossible for an effective antagonism to the
classic school to rise in the mind of an Encyclopaedist, for the reason
that the Encyclopaedists hated and ignored what they called the Dark
Ages. Yet it was exactly the Dark Ages from which the great romantic
revival drew its very life-breath. "In the eighteenth century," it has
been said, "it was really the reminiscence of the classic spirit which
was awakened in the newer life of Europe, and made prominent."[291] This
is true in a certain historic sense of Rousseau's politics, and perhaps
of Voltaire's rationalism. In spite of the vein of mysticism which
occasionally shows in him, it is true in some degree of Diderot himself,
if by classicism we mean the tendency to make man the centre of the
universe. Classicism treats man as worthy and great, living his life
among cold and neutral forces. This is the very opposite of the
sinfulness, imperfection, and nothingness habitually imputed to man, and
the hourly presence of a whole hierarchy of busy supernatural agents
placed about man by t