Diderot and the Encyclopædists (Vol 1 of 2) | Page 7

old prudence. His father, who was a man of
substance, gave him his choice between medicine and law. Law he
refused because he did not choose to spend his days in doing other
people's business; and medicine, because he had no turn for killing. His
father resolutely declined to let him have more money on these terms,

and Diderot was thrown on his wits.
The man of letters shortly before the middle of the century was as much
an outcast and a beggar in Paris as he was in London. Voltaire, Gray,
and Richardson were perhaps the only three conspicuous writers of the
time, who had never known what it was to want a meal or to go without
a shirt. But then none of the three depended on his pen for his
livelihood. Every other man of that day whose writings have delighted
and instructed the world since, had begun his career, and more than one
of them continued and ended it, as a drudge and a vagabond. Fielding
and Collins, Goldsmith and Johnson, in England; Goldoni in Italy;
Vauvenargues, Marmontel, Rousseau, in France; Winckelmann and
Lessing in Germany, had all alike been doubtful of dinner, and
trembled about a night's lodging. They all knew the life of mean hazard,
sorry shift, and petty expedient again and again renewed. It is sorrowful
to think how many of the compositions of that time that do most to
soothe and elevate some of the best hours of our lives, were written by
men with aching hearts, in the midst of haggard perplexities. The man
of letters, as distinguished alike from the old-fashioned scholar and the
systematic thinker, now first became a distinctly marked type.
Macaulay has contrasted the misery of the Grub Street hack of
Johnson's time, with the honours accorded to men like Prior and
Addison at an earlier date, and the solid sums paid by booksellers to the
authors of our own day. But these brilliant passages hardly go lower
than the surface of the great change. Its significance lay quite apart
from the prices paid for books. The all-important fact about the men of
letters in France was that they constituted a new order, that their rise
signified the transfer of the spiritual power from ecclesiastical hands,
and that, while they were the organs of a new function, they associated
it with a new substitute for doctrine. These men were not only the
pupils of the Jesuits; they were also their immediate successors as the
teachers, the guides, and the directors of society. For two hundred years
the followers of Ignatius had taken the intellectual and moral control of
Catholic communities out of the failing hands of the Popes and the
secular clergy. Their own hour had now struck. The rationalistic
historian has seldom done justice to the services which this great Order
rendered to European civilisation. The immorality of many of their

maxims, their too frequent connivance at political wrong for the sake of
power, their inflexible malice against opponents, and the cupidity and
obstructiveness of the years of their decrepitude, have blinded us to the
many meritorious pages of the Jesuit chronicle. Even men like Diderot
and Voltaire, whose lives were for years made bitter by Jesuit
machinations, gave many signs that they recognised the aid which had
been rendered by their old masters to the cultivation and enlightenment
of Europe. It was from the Jesuit fathers that the men of letters whom
they trained, acquired that practical and social habit of mind which
made the world and its daily interests so real to them. It was perhaps
also his Jesuit preceptors whom the man of letters had to blame for a
certain want of rigour and exactitude on the side of morality.
What was this new order which thus struggled into existence, which so
speedily made itself felt, and at length so completely succeeded in
seizing the lapsed inheritance of the old spiritual organisation? Who is
this man of letters? A satirist may easily describe him in epigrams of
cheap irony; the pedant of the colleges may see in him a frivolous and
shallow profaner of the mysteries of learning; the intellectual coxcomb
who nurses his own dainty wits in critical sterility, despises him as Sir
Piercie Shafton would have despised Lord Lindsay of the Byres. This
notwithstanding, the man of letters has his work to do in the critical
period of social transition. He is to be distinguished from the great
systematic thinker, as well as from the great imaginative creator. He is
borne on the wings neither of a broad philosophic conception nor of a
lofty poetic conception. He is only the propagator of portions of such a
conception, and of the minor ideas which they suggest. Unlike the
Jesuit father whom he replaced, he