Diderot and the Encyclopædists (Vol 1 of 2) | Page 9

living creature, nor ever condemn him to the misery of such
a day as that."[6] And the real interest of the story lies in the fact that
no oath was ever more faithfully kept. There is no greater test of the
essential richness of a man's nature than that this squalid adversity, not
of the sentimental introspective kind but hard and grinding, and not
even kept in countenance by respectability, fails to make him a savage
or a miser or a misanthrope.
Diderot had his bitter moments. He knew the gloom and despondency
that have their inevitable hour in every solitary and unordered life. But
the fits did not last. They left no sour sediment, and this is the sign of
health in temperament, provided it be not due to mere callousness.
From that horrible quality Diderot assuredly was the furthest removed
of any one of his time. Now and always he walked with a certain large
carelessness of spirit. He measured life with a roving and liberal eye.
Circumstance and conventions, the words under which men hide things,

the oracles of common acceptance, the infinitely diversified properties
of human character, the many complexities of our conduct and
destiny--all these he watched playing freely around him, and he felt no
haste to compress his experience into maxims and system. He was
absolutely uncramped by any of the formal mannerisms of the spirit.
He was wholly uncorrupted by the affectation of culture with which the
great Goethe infected part of the world a generation later. His own life
was never made the centre of the world. Self-development and
self-idealisation as ends in themselves would have struck Diderot as
effeminate drolleries. The daily and hourly interrogation of experience
for the sake of building up the fabric of his own character in this wise
or that, would have been incomprehensible and a little odious to him in
theory, and impossible as a matter of practice. In the midst of all the
hardships of his younger time, as afterwards in the midst of crushing
Herculean taskwork, he was saved from moral ruin by the inexhaustible
geniality and expansiveness of his affections. Nor did he narrow their
play by looking only to the external forms of human relation. To
Diderot it came easily to act on a principle which most of us only
accept in words: he looked not to what people said, nor even to what
they did, but wholly to what they were.
Those whom he had once found reason to love and esteem might do
him many an ill turn, without any fear of estranging him. Any one can
measure character by conduct. It is a harder thing to be willing, in cases
that touch our own interests, to interpret conduct by previous
knowledge of character. His father, for instance, might easily have
spared money enough to save him from the harassing privations of
Bohemian life in Paris. A less full-blooded and generous person than
Diderot would have resented the stoutness of the old man's persistency.
Diderot on the contrary felt and delighted to feel, that this conflict of
wills was a mere accident which left undisturbed the reality of old love.
"The first few years of my life in Paris," he once told an acquaintance,
"had been rather irregular; my behaviour was enough to irritate my
father, without there being any need to make it worse by exaggeration.
Still calumny was not wanting. People told him--well what did they not
tell him? An opportunity for going to see him presented itself. I did not
give it two thoughts. I set out full of confidence in his goodness. I

thought that he would see me, that I should throw myself into his arms,
that we should both of us shed tears, and that all would be forgotten. I
thought rightly."[7] We may be sure of a stoutness of native stuff in any
stock where so much tenacity united with such fine confidence on one
side, and such generous love on the other. It is a commonplace how
much waste would be avoided in human life if men would more freely
allow their vision to pierce in this way through the distorting veils of
egoism, to the reality of sentiment and motive and relationship.
Throughout his life Diderot was blessed with that divine gift of pity,
which one that has it could hardly be willing to barter for the
understanding of an Aristotle. Nor was it of the sentimental type proper
for fine ladies. One of his friends had an aversion for women with child.
"What monstrous sentiment!" Diderot wrote; "for my part, that
condition has always touched me. I cannot see a woman of the common
people so, without a tender commiseration."[8] And Diderot had
delicacy and respect in his pity. He tells a