so as not to weep, and yet behind this
laughter there are tears; he ends sneeringly, subsiding into a tone
of profound sadness, of mournful pity. In this degree, and with such
subjects, it is only an effect of habit, or as an expedient, a mania of
inspiration, a fixed condition of the nervous machinery rushing headlong
over everything, without a break and in full speed. Gaiety, let it not
be forgotten, is still a incentive of action, the last that keeps man
erect in France, the best in maintaining the tone of his spirit, his
strength and his powers of resistance, the most intact in an age when
men, and women too, believed it incumbent on them to die people of good
society, with a smile and a jest on their lips[4128].

When the talent of a writer thus accords with public inclinations it
is a matter of little import whether he deviates or fails since he is
following the universal tendency. He may wander off or besmirch himself
in vain, for his audience is only the more pleased, his defects serving
him as advantageously as his good qualities. After the first generation
of healthy minds the second one comes on, the intellectual balance here
being equally inexact. "Diderot," says Voltaire, "is too hot an oven,
everything that is baked in it getting burnt." Or rather, he is an
eruptive volcano which, for forty years, discharges ideas of every order
and species, boiling and fused together, precious metals, coarse scorioe
and fetid mud; the steady stream overflows at will according to the
roughness of the ground, but always displaying the ruddy light and acrid
fumes of glowing lava. He is not master of his ideas, but his ideas
master him; he is under submission to them; he has not that firm
foundation of common practical sense which controls their impetuosity
and ravages, that inner dyke of social caution which, with Montesquieu
and Voltaire, bars the way to outbursts. Everything with him rushes
out of the surcharged crater, never picking its way, through the first
fissure or crevice it finds, according to his haphazard reading, a
letter, a conversation, an improvisation, and not in frequent small jets
as with Voltaire, but in broad currents tumbling blindly down the most
precipitous declivities of the century. Not only does he descend thus
to the very depths of anti-religious and anti-social doctrines,
with logical and paradoxical rigidity, more impetuously and more
obstreperously than d'Holbach himself; but again he falls into