Diderot and the Encyclopædists (Vol 1 of 2) eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 344 pages of information about Diderot and the Encyclopædists (Vol 1 of 2).

Diderot and the Encyclopædists (Vol 1 of 2) eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 344 pages of information about Diderot and the Encyclopædists (Vol 1 of 2).

It is needless to remind the neutral reader that Rousseau uses exactly the same kind of language about his heart.  For this is the worst of sentimentalism, that it is so readily bent into a substitution of indulgence to oneself for upright and manly judgment about others.  Still we may willingly grant that in the present rupture of a long friendship, it was not Diderot who was the real offender. Too many honest people would be in the wrong, he most truly said, if Jean Jacques were in the right.

Of Grimm, I have already said elsewhere as much as is needful to be said.[234] His judgment in matters of conduct and character was cool and rather hard, but it was generally sound.  He had a keen eye for what was hollow in the pretensions of the society in which he lived.  Above all, he had the keen eye of his countrymen for his own interest, and for the use which he could make of other people.  The best thing that we know in his favour, is that he should have won the friendship of Diderot.  Diderot’s attachment to Grimm seems like an exaggeration of the excesses of the epoch of sentimentalism in Germany.

He pines for a letter from him, as he pined for letters from Mademoiselle Voland.  If Grimm had been absent for a few months, their meeting was like a scene in a melodrama.  “With what ardour we enclasped one another.  My heart was swimming.  I could not speak a word, nor could he.  We embraced without speaking, and I shed tears.  We were not expecting him.  We were all at dessert when he was announced, ’Here is M. Grimm.’M.  Grimm,’ I exclaimed, with a loud cry; and starting up, I ran to him and fell on his neck.  He sat down, and ate a poor meal, you may be sure.  As for me, I could not open my lips either to eat or to speak.  He was next to me, and I kept pressing his hand and gazing at him."[235] Mademoiselle Voland appears on some occasion to have compared Diderot with his friend.  “No more comparison, I beseech you, my good friend, between Grimm and me.  I console myself for his superiority by frankly recognising it.  I am vain of the victory that I thus gain over my self-love, and you must not deprive me of that little advantage."[236] Grimm, however, knew better than Diderot how to unite German sentimentalism with a steady selfishness.  “I have just received from Grimm,” writes good-natured Diderot, “a note that wounds my too sensitive spirit.  I had promised to write him a few lines on the exhibition of pictures in the Salon; he writes to me that if it is not ready to-morrow, it will be of no use.  I will be revenged for this kind of hardness, and in a way that becomes me.  I worked all day yesterday, and all day to-day.  I shall pass the night at work, and all to-morrow, and at nine o’clock he shall receive a volume of manuscript."[237] We may doubt whether his German friend would feel the force of a rebuke so extremely convenient to himself.

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Diderot and the Encyclopædists (Vol 1 of 2) from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.