he same earnest enthusiasm for all the purposes, interests, and
details of productive industry. Diderot, as has been justly said,
himself the son of a cutler, might well bring handiwork into honour;
assuredly he had inherited from his good father's workshop sympathy and
regard for skill and labour.[167] The illustrative plates to which
Diderot gave the most laborious attention for a period of almost thirty
years, are not only remarkable for their copiousness, their clearness,
their finish--and in all these respects they are truly admirable--but
they strike us even more by the semi-poetic feeling that transforms the
mere representation of a process into an animated scene of human life,
stirring the sympathy and touching the imagination of the onlooker as by
something dramatic. The bustle, the dexterity, the alert force of the
iron foundry, the glass furnace, the gunpowder mill, the silk calendry
are as skilfully reproduced as the more tranquil toil of the dairywoman,
the embroiderer, the confectioner, the setter of types, the compounder
of drugs, the chaser of metals. The drawings recall that eager and
personal interest in his work, that nimble complacency, which is so
charming a trait in the best French craftsman. The animation of these
great folios of plates is prodigious. They affect one like looking down
on the world of Paris from the heights of Montmartre. To turn over
volume after volume is like watching a splendid panorama of all the busy
life of the time. Minute care is as striking in them as their
comprehensiveness. The smallest tool, the knot in a thread, the ply in a
cord, the curve of wrist or finger, each has special and proper
delineation. The reader smiles at a complete and elaborate set of
tailor's patterns. He shudders as he comes upon the knives, the probes,
the bandages, the posture, of the wretch about to undergo the most
dangerous operation in surgery. In all the chief departments of industry
there are plates good enough to serve for practical specifications and
working drawings. It has often been told how Diderot himself used to
visit the workshops, to watch the men at work, to put a thousand
questions, to sit down at the loom, to have the machine pulled to pieces
and set together again before his eyes, to slave like any apprentice,
and to do bad work, in order, as he says, to be able to instruct others
how to do good work. That was no movement of empty rhetoric which made
him cry out for the Encyclop