I should be prepared to multiply the citation and discussion of the critical “places” in Diderot to almost any extent, if such multiplication were reconcilable with my plan; but, as has been said, to do so would be as superfluous logically as it is methodically impossible.[170] Diderot’s commanding position, in criticism as well as in aesthetics, is due not more to the number and variety of his individual utterances than to the fact that he certainly obtrudes, and in all probability conceals, no general æsthetic “preventions” (as the French would say, and as Dryden very wisely does say) whatsoever. One of the great resources and one of the great charms of his criticism is the way in which he draws it from, and returns it to, all the arts without letting any of them interfere with the other. The pedants of art-criticism have of course said that his is too literary; but the pedant is always pedantic, and always negligible, whether he draws his principles from French classrooms in the seventeenth century or from French studios in the nineteenth and twentieth. No matter whether he is talking of writing or of acting, of painting or of sculpture, the work of art is for Diderot something which ought to give the human sense and the human soul pleasure, which, if it does so, is to be welcomed and extolled, not without (if anybody feels thereto disposed) inquiry into the manner and the causes, rather mediate and immediate than ultimate, of that pleasure. He can everywhere display a really encyclopædic “curiosity,” in the good sense. He can be extremely inventive and subtle, as in the famous _Paradoxe_;[171] he can enter into infinite detail and yet never lose grasp of principle, as in the essay _De la Poésie Dramatique_;[172] he can glance and digress in lightning fashion as he does everywhere, but especially in the _Salons_. As good an instance of this as any is the admirable excursus on Mannerism in the _Salon_ of 1767,[173] which is applicable to literature quite as much as to painting.