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One singular story of Diderot's heedlessness about himself has often been told before, but we shall be none the worse in an egoistic world for hearing it told again. There came to him one morning a young man, bringing a manuscript in his hand. He begged Diderot to do him the favour of reading it, and to make any remarks he might think useful on the margin.
We have thus the extraordinary circumstance that for a great number of years, down almost to the present decade, the text of the one masterpiece of a famous man who died so recently as 1784 rested on a single manuscript, and that a manuscript of disputed authenticity. Critics differ extremely in their answers to the question of the subject or object of Diderot's singular "farce-tragedy."
It is quite true that his reputation may have been ill-founded, that d'Alembert, and Turgot, and Hume may have been deluded, or may have been bribed, into admitting him to their friendship; but is it not clear that we ought not to believe any such hypotheses as these until we have before us such convincing proof of Diderot's guilt that we must believe them? Mrs.
The examples which I have given of the way in which such an occurrence would have been treated in classic times may not suit the ideas of honorable people; so let me recommend to their notice, as a kind of antidote, the story of Monsieur Desglands in Diderot's masterpiece, Jacques le fataliste.
Turn and turn and turn again; there is ever a crumpled rose-leaf to vex you." It is not often that we find such active benevolence as Diderot's, in conjunction with such a vein of philosophy as follows:
Diderot's 'Father of the Family' enjoyed a short vogue in France and Italy and met with considerable favor in Germany. Most noteworthy among minor German plays that were influenced by it is Gemmingen's 'Head of the House'. Gemmingen was himself an aristocrat, a baron by title, who was born in 1755.
Lenten food for the pious bishop's table to furnish, By my Creator I'm poured over the famishing land. Pray be silent, ye rivers! One sees ye have no more discretion Than, in a case we could name, Diderot's favorites had. Wheresoever thou wanderest in space, thy Zenith and Nadir Unto the heavens knit thee, unto the axis of earth.
The emphasising moralists of Diderot's school never understood that virtue may be made attractive, without pulling the reader or the spectator by the sleeve, and urgently shouting in his ear how attractive virtue is.
Far more modern, both in its general conception and in the absolute realism of its treatment, was Diderot's La Religieuse; but this masterpiece was not published till some years after the Revolution; and the real honour of having originated the later developments in French fiction as in so many other branches of literature belongs undoubtedly to Rousseau.
Diderot's mind was constantly feeling for explanations; it was never a passive recipient. The drama excited this alert interest just as everything else excited it. He thought about that, as about everything else, originally, that is to say, sincerely and in the spirit of reality.
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