them; he has not that firm foundation of common practical sense which controls their impetuosity and ravages, that inner dyke of social caution which, with Montesquieu and Voltaire, bars the way to outbursts.  Everything with him rushes out of the surcharged crater, never picking its way, through the first fissure or crevice it finds, according to his haphazard reading, a letter, a conversation, an improvisation, and not in frequent small jets as with Voltaire, but in broad currents tumbling blindly down the most precipitous declivities of the century.  Not only does he descend thus to the very depths of anti-religious and anti-social doctrines, with logical and paradoxical rigidity, more impetuously and more obstreperously than d’Holbach himself; but again he falls into and sports himself in the slime of the age, consisting of obscenity, and into the beaten track of declamation.  In his leading novels he dwells a long time on salacious equivocation, or on a scene of lewdness.  Crudity with him is not extenuated by malice or glossed over by elegance.  He is neither refined nor pungent; is quite incapable, like the younger Crébillon, of depicting the scapegrace of ability.  He is a new-comer, a parvenu in standard society; you see in him a commoner, a powerful reasoner, an indefatigable workman and great artist, introduced, through the customs of the day, at a supper of fashionable livers.  He engrosses the conversation, directs the orgy, or in the contagion or on a wager, says more filthy things, more “gueulées,” than all the guests put together[29].  In like manner, in his dramas, in his “Essays on Claudius and Nero,” in his “Commentary on Seneca,” in his additions to the “Philosophical History” of Raynal, he forces the tone of things.  This tone, which then prevails by virtue of the classic spirit and of the new fashion, is that of sentimental rhetoric.  Diderot carries it to extremes in the exaggeration of tears or of rage, in exclamations, in apostrophes, in tenderness of feeling, in violences, indignation, in enthusiasms, in full-orchestra tirades, in which the fire of his brains finds employment and an outlet. — On the other hand, among so many superior writers, he is the only genuine artist, the creator of souls, within his mind objects, events and personages are born and become organized of themselves, through their own forces, by virtue of natural affinities, involuntarily, without foreign intervention, in such a way as to live for and in themselves, safe from the author’s intentions, and outside of his combinations.  The composer of the “Salons,” the “Petits Romans,” the “Entretien,” the “Paradoxe du Comédien,” and especially the “Rêve de d’Alembert” and the” Neveu de Rameau “is a man of an unique species in his time.  However alert and brilliant Voltaire’s personages may be, they are always puppets; their action is derivative; always behind them you catch a glimpse of the author pulling the strings.  With Diderot, the strings are severed; he is not speaking