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His best scenes interest us more for their good sense than for any more stirring qualities. His nearest approach to a strong character is the paterfamilias himself, who is certainly much less "woolly and mawkish" than his pendant in Diderot. Next one may place the artist Wehrmann.
At an after-period only, when he had definitely entered upon his maturer literary career, was he to take up the latter and use them, together with Rabelais, La Bruyere, Moliere, and Diderot, as his best, if not his constant, sources of inspiration.
Two days afterwards, about nine o'clock in the evening, as I was going to sup with Madam D'Epinay, I perceived a hackney-coach pass by the door. Somebody within made a sign to me to approach. I did so, and got into it, and found the person to be Diderot. He spoke of the pension with more warmth than, upon such a subject, I should have expected from a philosopher.
The Royal Society of London, however, took the jest of fathering atheism on one of its members in bad part, and Diderot was systematically excluded from the honour of admission to that learned body, as he was excluded all his life from the French Academy.
"She does not hear for fifteen years," says Diderot, "anything else but 'my daughter, your fig leaf is on badly; my daughter, your fig leaf is on well; my daughter, would it not look better so?" Keep your wife then within this fine and noble circle of knowledge.
Of all the writers who enjoyed such fame in the eighteenth century, the only one who will bear reading today is Voltaire the Voltaire of the Dictionnaire Philosophique and of the novels. Diderot, whom the French consider a great man, is of no interest whatsoever to the modern mind, at least to the mind which is not French. He is almost as dull as Rousseau.
We do not see that he is aware as yet of there being as valid objections on his own sceptical principles to the alleged data of naturalistic deism, as to the pretensions of a supernatural religion. He was content with Shaftesbury's position. Shaftesbury's influence on Diderot was permanent.
His fortune was considerable, and he used it nobly, receiving at his house men of letters and merit: and, by the knowledge he himself had acquired, was very worthy of holding a place amongst them. Having been long attached to Diderot, he endeavored to become acquainted with me by his means, even before my name was known to the world.
What, cries Diderot, you do not conceive the effect that would be produced on you by a real scene, with real dresses, with speech in true proportion to the action, with the actions themselves simple, with the very dangers that have made you tremble for your parents, for your friends, for yourselves?
Diderot begins by contrasting him with the crowd of people, and clever people, who insist on passing judgment all day long. "They ignore the scope and limits of the human mind; they think it capable of knowing everything; hence they think it a disgrace not to pronounce judgment, and imagine that intelligence consists in that and nothing else.
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