Yet he himself was, as we have seen, a debtor: and to the old creditor, France. The critical history, during this period, of France herself is the most curious of the three divisions which here suffice. In Germany, Neo-classicism, which had taken no deep root, was easily uprooted. In England, though various causes, and especially the immense influence of the “dead hand” of Addison and Pope, and the living one of Johnson, kept back the Romantic growth in a salutary fashion, that growth itself was as steady as it was slow. In the very year after Gray died, Coleridge was born: and the lives and work of these two men mark one unhasting, unresting line of Romantic progress. But in France (as the two parallel views given in the second chapter of the last book, and the fourth chapter of this, will have shown), although there is no real confusion, the strands are most puzzlingly twisted during the whole of this selfsame period, till those of the classical colour break and ravel away into almost nothing just before the close. This is due, no doubt, in part to the extreme strength of what we may call the Neo-classic _establishment_ in France—to the fact that the strong places of literature are held by classical garrisons, who take good care to let no unorthodox recruit set foot in them if it can possibly be helped. But it is due also to that essential classicality which has been noticed, and fully acknowledged, in the French literary temper. It certainly exists: and it accounts not merely for the stubborn resistance, until its sudden _débâcle_, of Classicism itself, but also for the peculiarities of the various greater critics whom we have noticed. Of the three greatest of these (for Madame de Staël cannot, I think, really make out her right to cut in) Joubert excels in aphoristic and perennial quality, somewhat (not wholly) independent of time, and Chateaubriand expresses more fully than any one the tendencies (even in him much chequered by others) which he was to live to see triumphant without being quite glad thereat. But Diderot is, in principle and motive force, however eccentrically working, if not in actual expressed example, the most considerable of the three, and perhaps the most considerable single figure included in this Book. For in him, as was said above, we first see as a pervading and guiding, if not explicitly asserted, principle that Impressionism which (though the word has been variously used[347]) is, in its simplest and most natural meaning, perhaps more