he Middle Ages. Yet we cannot but see that Diderot
was feeling for dramatic forms and subjects that would have been as
little classic as romantic. He failed in the search. There is one play
and only one of his epoch that is not classic, and is not romantic, but
speaks independently the truest and best mind of the eighteenth century
itself, in its own form and language. That play is _Nathan the Wise_.

CHAPTER VIII.

RAMEAU'S NEPHEW.

In hypochondriacal moments, it has been said, the world, viewed from the
aesthetic side, appears to many a one a cabinet of caricatures; from the
intellectual side, a madhouse; and from the moral side, a harbouring
place for rascals.[292] We might perhaps extend this saying beyond the
accidents of hypochondriasis, and urge that the few wide, profound, and
real observers of human life have all known, and known often, this
fantastic consciousness of living in a strange distorted universe of
lunatics, knaves, grotesques. It is an inevitable mood to any who dare
to shake the kaleidoscopic fragments out of their conventional and
accepted combination. Who does not remember deep traces of such a mood
in Plato, Shakespeare, Pascal, Goethe? And Diderot, who went near to
having something of the deep quality of those sovereign spirits, did not
escape, any more than they, the visitation of the misanthropic spectre.
The distinction of the greater minds is that they have no temptation to
give the spectre a permanent home with them, as is done by theologians
in order to prove the necessity of grace and another world, or by
cynics in order to prove the wisdom of selfishness in this world. The
greater minds accept the worse facts of character for what they are
worth, and bring them into a right perspective with the better facts.
They have no expectation of escaping all perplexities, nor of hitting on
answers to all the moral riddles of the world. Yet are they ever drawn
by an invincible fascination to the feet of the mighty Sphinx of
society. She bewilders them with questions that are never overheard by
common ears, and torments them with a mockery that is unobserved by
common eyes. The energetic--a Socrates, a Diderot--cannot content
themselves with merely recording her everlasting puzzles; still less
with merely writing over again the already recorded answers. They insist
on scrutinising the moral world afresh; they resolve the magniloquent
vocabulary of abstract ethics into the small realities