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 the 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