ped by any of the formal mannerisms of the spirit. He was wholly
uncorrupted by the affectation of culture with which the great Goethe
infected part of the world a generation later. His own life was never
made the centre of the world. Self-development and self-idealisation as
ends in themselves would have struck Diderot as effeminate drolleries.
The daily and hourly interrogation of experience for the sake of
building up the fabric of his own character in this wise or that, would
have been incomprehensible and a little odious to him in theory, and
impossible as a matter of practice. In the midst of all the hardships of
his younger time, as afterwards in the midst of crushing Herculean
taskwork, he was saved from moral ruin by the inexhaustible geniality
and expansiveness of his affections. Nor did he narrow their play by
looking only to the external forms of human relation. To Diderot it came
easily to act on a principle which most of us only accept in words: he
looked not to what people said, nor even to what they did, but wholly
to what they were.

Those whom he had once found reason to love and esteem might do him many
an ill turn, without any fear of estranging him. Any one can measure
character by conduct. It is a harder thing to be willing, in cases that
touch our own interests, to interpret conduct by previous knowledge of
character. His father, for instance, might easily have spared money
enough to save him from the harassing privations of Bohemian life in
Paris. A less full-blooded and generous person than Diderot would have
resented the stoutness of the old man's persistency. Diderot on the
contrary felt and delighted to feel, that this conflict of wills was a
mere accident which left undisturbed the reality of old love. "The first
few years of my life in Paris," he once told an acquaintance, "had been
rather irregular; my behaviour was enough to irritate my father, without
there being any need to make it worse by exaggeration. Still calumny was
not wanting. People told him--well what did they not tell him? An
opportunity for going to see him presented itself. I did not give it two
thoughts. I set out full of confidence in his goodness. I thought that
he would see me, that I should throw myself into his arms, that we
should both of us shed tears, and that all would be forgotten. I thought
rightly."[7] We may be sure of a stoutness of native stuff in any stock
where so much tenacity united with such fine confide