through the lips of his characters; they are not his comical loud-speakers or puppets, but independent and detached persons, with an action of their own, a personal accent, with their own temperament, passions, ideas, philosophy, style and spirit, and occasionally, as in the “Neveu de Rameau,” a spirit so original, complex and complete, so alive and so deformed that, in the natural history of man, it becomes an incomparable monster and an immortal document.  He has expressed everything concerning nature,[30] art morality and life[31] in two small treatises of which twenty successive readings exhaust neither the charm nor the sense.  Find elsewhere, if you can, a similar stroke of power and a greater masterpiece, “anything more absurd and more profound!"[32] — Such is the advantage of men of genius possessing no control over themselves.  They lack discernment but they have inspiration.  Among twenty works, either soiled, rough or nasty, they produce a creation, and still better, an animated being, able to live by itself, before which others, fabricated by merely intellectual people, resemble simply well-dressed puppets. — Hence it is that Diderot is so great a narrator, a master of dialogue, the equal in this respect of Voltaire, and, through a quite opposite talent, believing all he says at the moment of saying it; forgetful of his very self, carried away by his own recital, listening to inward voices, surprised with the responses which come to him unexpectedly, borne along, as if on an unknown river, by the current of action, by the sinuosities of the conversation inwardly and unconsciously developed, aroused by the flow of ideas and the leap of the moment to the most unexpected imagery, extreme in burlesque or extreme in magnificence, now lyrical even to providing Musset with an entire stanza,[33] now comic and droll with outbursts unheard of since the days of Rabelais, always in good faith, always at the mercy of his subject, of his inventions, of his emotions; the most natural of writers in an age of artificial literature, resembling a foreign tree which, transplanted to a parterre of the epoch, swells out and decays on one side of its stem, but of which five or six branches, thrust out into full light, surpass the neighboring underwood in the freshness of their sap and in the vigor of their growth.

Rousseau also is an artisan, a man of the people, ill-adapted to elegant and refined society, out of his element in a drawing room and, moreover, of low birth, badly brought up, sullied by a vile and precocious experience, highly and offensively sensual, morbid in mind and in body, fretted by superior and discordant faculties, possessing no tact, and carrying the contamination of his imagination, temperament and past life into his austere morality and into his purest idylls;[34] besides this he has no fervor, and in this he is the opposite of Diderot, avowing himself” that his ideas arrange themselves in his head with the utmost