--from
that delirium of scrofula, palsy, entrails, the winding-sheet, and the
grave-worm. Diderot's method was to improve men, not by making their
blood curdle, but by warming and softening the domestic affections.

[35] x. 208.

Diderot, as a critic, seems always to have remembered a pleasant
remonstrance once addressed at the Salon by the worthy Chardin to
himself and Grimm: "Gently, good sirs, gently! Out of all the pictures
that are here seek the very worst; and know that two thousand unhappy
wretches have bitten their brushes in two with their teeth, in despair
of ever doing even as badly. Parrocel, whom you call a dauber, and who
for that matter is a dauber, if you compare him to Vernet, is still a
man of rare talent relatively to the multitude of those who have flung
up the career in which they started with him." And then the artist
recounts the immense labours, the exhausting years, the boundless
patience, attention, tenacity, that are the conditions even of a
mediocre degree of mastery. We are reminded of the scene in a famous
work of art in our own day, where Herr Klesmer begs Miss Gwendolen
Harleth to reflect, how merely to stand or to move on the stage is an
art that requires long practice. "_O le triste et plat metier que celui
de critique!_" Diderot cries on one occasion: "_Il est si difficile de
produire une chose meme mediocre; il est si facile de sentir la
mediocrite._"[36] No doubt, as experience and responsibility gather upon
us, we learn how hard in every line is even moderate skill. The wise
are perhaps content to find what a man can do, without making it a
reproach to him that there is something else which he cannot do.

[36] x. 177.

But Diderot knew well enough that Chardin's kindly principle might
easily be carried too far. In general, he said, criticism displeases me;
it supposes so little talent. "What a foolish occupation, that of
incessantly hindering ourselves from taking pleasure, or else making
ourselves blush for the pleasure that we have taken! And that is the
occupation of criticism!"[37] Yet in one case he writes a score of pages
of critical dialogue, in which the chief interlocutor is a painter who
avenges his own failure by stringent attacks on the work of happier
rivals of the year. And speaking in his own proper person, Diderot knows
how to dismiss incompetence with the right word, sometimes of scorn,
more often of good-natured remonstrance. Bad painters, a Parrocel, a