in imbecility, in the midst of
anguish and cries; to be the toy of ignorance, of error, of necessity,
of sickness, of malice, of all passions; to return step by step to that
imbecility whence one sprang; from the moment when we lisp our first
words, down to the moment when we mumble the words of our dotage, to
live among rascals and charlatans of every kind; to lie expiring between
a man who feels your pulse, and another man who frets and wearies your
head; not to know whence one comes, nor why one has come, nor whither
one is going--that is what we call the greatest gift of our parents and
of nature--human life."[206]

These sombre meditations hardly represent Diderot's habitual vein; they
are rather a reaction and a relief from the busy intensity with which he
watches the scene, and is constantly putting interrogatories to human
life, as day by day its motley circumstance passes before his eyes. We
should scarcely suspect from his frequent repetitions of the mournful
eternal chorus of the nullity of man and the vanity of all the things
that are under the sun, how alert a watch he kept on incident and
character, with what keen and open ear he listened for any curious note
of pain, or voice of fine emotion, or odd perversity of fate. All this
he does, not in the hard temper of a Balzac, not with the calm or pride
of a Goethe, but with an overflowing fulness of spontaneous and
uncontrollable sympathy. He is a sentimentalist in the rationalistic
century, not with the sentimentalism of misanthropy, such as fired or
soured Rousseau, but social, large-hearted, many-sided, careless of the
wise rigours of morality. He is never callous nor neutral; on the
contrary, he is always approving or disapproving, but not from the
standards of the ethical text-books. The casuistry of feeling is of
everlasting interest to him, and he is never tired of inventing
imaginary cases, or pondering real ones, in which pliant feeling is
invoked against the narrowness of duty. These are mostly in a kind of
matter which modern taste hardly allows us to reproduce; nor, after all,
is there much to be gained by turning the sanctities of human
relationship, with all their immeasurable bliss, their immeasurable woe,
into the playthings of an idle dialectic. It is pleasanter, and for us
English not less instructive than pleasant, to see this dreaming,
restless, thrice ingenious spirit, half Titan of the skies, half gnome
of the lower earth, entering joyou