ne work.

No man that ever wrote was more wholly free from that unquiet
self-consciousness which too often makes literary genius pitiful or
odious in the flesh. He put on no airs of pretended resignation to
inferior production, with bursting hints of the vast superiorities that
unfriendly circumstance locked up within him. Yet on one occasion, and
only on one, so far as evidence remains, he indulged a natural regret.
"And so," he wrote when revising the last sheets of the Encyclopaedia
(July 25, 1765), "in eight or ten days I shall see the end of an
undertaking that has occupied me for twenty years; that has not made my
fortune by a long way; that has exposed me many a time to the risk of
having to quit my country or lose my freedom; and that has consumed a
life that I might have made both more useful and more glorious. The
sacrifice of talent to need would be less common, if it were only a
question of self. One could easily resolve rather to drink water and eat
dry crusts and follow the bidding of one's genius in a garret. But for a
woman and for children, what can one not resolve? If I sought to make
myself of some account in their eyes, I would not say--I have worked
thirty years for you: I would say--I have for you renounced for thirty
years the vocation of my nature; I have preferred to renounce my tastes
in doing what was useful for you, instead of what was agreeable to
myself. That is your real obligation to me, and of that you never
think."[19]

It is a question, nevertheless, whether Diderot would have achieved
masterpieces, even if the pressure of housekeeping had never driven him
to seek bread where he could find it. Indeed it is hardly a question.
His genius was spacious and original, but it was too dispersive, too
facile of diversion, too little disciplined, for the prolonged effort of
combination which is indispensable to the greater constructions whether
of philosophy or art. The excellent talent of economy and administration
had been denied him; that thrift of faculty, which accumulates store and
force for concentrated occasions. He was not encyclopaedic by accident,
nor merely from external necessity. The quality of rapid movement,
impetuous fancy, versatile idea, which he traced to the climate of his
birthplace, marked him from the first for an encyclopaedic or some such
task. His interest was nearly as promptly and vehemently kindled in one
subject as in another; he was always boldly tentative, alway