vidual a
sense of responsibility for his own character than to do anything,
either by magnificent dithyrambs or penetrating satire, to dispose him
to lay the blame on Society. Society is after all only a name for other
people. An instructive contrast might be drawn between the method of
French writers of genius, from Diderot down to that mighty master of our
own day, Victor Hugo, in pouring fulminant denunciations upon Society,
and the other method of our best English writers, from Milton down to
Mill, in impressing new ideas on the Individual, and exacting a
vigorous personal answer to the moral or spiritual call.

One other remark may be worth making. It is characteristic of the
immense sociability of the eighteenth century, that when he saw
Desroches sitting alone in the public room, receiving no answers to his
questions, never addressed by any of those around him, avoided, coldly
eyed, and morally proscribed, Diderot never thought of applying the
artificial consolation of the Stoic. He never dreamed of urging that
expulsion from the society of friends was not a hardship, a true
punishment, and a genuine evil. No one knew better than Diderot that a
man should train himself to face the disapprobation of the world with
steadfast brow and unflinching gaze; but he knew also that this is only
done at great cost, and is only worth doing for clear and far-reaching
objects. Life was real to Diderot, not in the modern canting sense of
earnestness and making a hundred thousand pounds; but in the sense of
being an agitated scene of living passion, interest, sympathy, struggle,
delight, and woe, in which the graceful ascetic commonplaces of the
writer and the preacher barely touch the actual conditions of human
experience, or go near to softening the smart of chagrin, failure,
mistake, and sense of wrong, any more than the sweet music of the birds
poised in air over a field of battle can still the rage and horror of
the plain beneath. As was said by a good man, who certainly did not fail
to try the experiment,--"Speciosa quidem ista sunt, oblitaque rhetoricae
et musicae melle dulcedinis; tum tantum cum audiuntur oblectant. Sed
miseris malorum altior sensus est. Itaque quum haec auribus insonare
desierint, insitus animum moeror praegravat."[4]

[4] Boethius.

* * * * *

III. We may close this chapter with a short account of the _Supplement
to Bougainville's Travels_, which was composed in 17