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Meanwhile Diderot wrote on his behalf an energetic and dignified reply to the aggressive pastoral. This apology is not such a masterpiece of eloquence as the magnificent letter addressed by Rousseau ten years later to the archbishop of Paris, after the pastoral against Emilius. But Diderot's vindication of De Prades is firm, moderate, and closely argumentative.
We have to remember then that Diderot was in this respect of the Socratic type, though he was unlike Socrates, in being the disseminator of positive and constructive ideas. His personality exerted a decisive force and influence.
His interest was nearly as promptly and vehemently kindled in one subject as in another; he was always boldly tentative, always fresh and vigorous in suggestion, always instant in search. But this multiplicity of active excitements and with Diderot every interest rose to the warmth of excitement was even more hostile to masterpieces than were the exigencies of a livelihood.
Rousseau, Diderot, Helvétius, Duclos, Suard, the Abbés Galiani, Raynal, the Florentine physician Gatti, Comte de Schomberg, Chevalier de Chastellux, Saint-Lambert, Marquis de Croixmare, the different ambassadors, counts and princes, were frequent visitors In this brilliant circle her letters from Voltaire, read aloud, were always eagerly awaited.
But in the library of the old mansion on the Appomattox, in which he passed his forming years, there was a "wagon-load" of what he terms "French infidelity," though it appears there were almost as many volumes of Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Collins, Hume, and Gibbon, as there were of Diderot, D'Alembert, Helvetius, and Voltaire.
After its success I did not remark, either in Grimm, Diderot, or any of the men of letters, with whom I was acquainted, the same cordiality and frankness, nor that pleasure in seeing me, I had previously experienced.
It has been well said that Diderot, like Socrates, had about him a something dæmonic. He was possessed, and so had the first secret of possessing others. But then to reach excellence in literature, one must also have self-possession; a double current of impulse and deliberation; a free stream of ideas spontaneously obeying a sense or order, harmony, and form.
The illustrative plates to which Diderot gave the most laborious attention for a period of almost thirty years, are not only remarkable for their copiousness, their clearness, their finish and in all these respects they are truly admirable but they strike us even more by the semi-poetic feeling that transforms the mere representation of a process into an animated scene of human life, stirring the sympathy and touching the imagination of the onlooker as by something dramatic.
If not, then you have nothing to say against them. If the public were called upon to judge between you and them, my friend, you would be covered with shame." "What, can it be you, Diderot, who thus take the side of the booksellers?" "My grievances against them do not prevent me from seeing their grievances against you.
Here we listen to the voice of the genuine Diderot; and if this be granted, we need not give more than a passing attention to the rules that have gone before about the danger of borrowing in the same composition the shades both of the comic and of the tragic styles; about movement being injurious to dignity, and of the importance therefore of not making the principal personage the machinist of the piece; about the inexpediency of episodic personages and so forth.
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