Publisher's Synopsis
THIS book has three different and almost independent attractions -- leaving its print, paper, and wrapper out of the question -- that of Mr. Pollock's excellent translation and annotations, which may be said to belong to the department of scholarship; that of Mr. Irving's preface, the interest of which is chiefly personal; and that of the intrinsic merit of the original Paradoxe as 'a contribution to French literature and to the aesthetics of the drama. It will be perhaps most convenient to take these in reverse order. Diderot has hitherto been very badly represented by English translations; indeed, until the version of the Neveu de Rameau which Mr. John Morley subjoined to his book on the Encyclopædist and his company, there was hardly any such worth ranking as literature. Yet there are not many French authors who, from the excess of material over formal excellence, deserve better to be known in England by translations; and it so happens that this Paradoxe sur le Comédien is a peculiarly favorable example of the author. Perhaps, with the exception of the already mentioned Neveu de Rameau and a few minor pieces, it is the most favorable. No competent authority denies the importance of Diderot in the history of aesthetic criticism; it is hardly an exaggeration to say that he is the father of all such as have done good criticism in art and letters for the last century. Although nothing can be further from his desultory and irregular fashion of comment than a definite critical creed or formulary, he more than any other may be regarded as the discoverer of the legitimate critique as against the illegitimate which for fully two thousand years had based itself (for the most part without any just title) on the authority of Aristotle. Glimmerings may of course be found in the Latin writers; glimmerings in the critics of the seventeenth century, especially in Dryden and Corneille. But, as regards literature first of all (which was long almost the only recognized subject of criticism), and other arts in the second place, Diderot, more than anyone else, deserves the credit of having thrown aside the idea of an archetypal model of each particular kind to which every example of that kind was bound to conform, and of having introduced the plan of treating individual excellence as if it were individual.--Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, Volume 73
