and
carrying the contamination of his imagination, temperament and past life
into his austere morality and into his purest idylls;[4134] besides this
he has no fervor, and in this he is the opposite of Diderot, avowing
himself" that his ideas arrange themselves in his head with the utmost
difficulty, that certain sentences are turned over and over again in his
brain for five or six nights before putting them on paper, and that a
letter on the most trifling subject costs him hours of fatigue," that he
cannot fall into an easy and agreeable tone, nor succeed otherwise than
"in works which demand application."[4135] As an offset to this,
style, in this ardent brain, under the influence of intense, prolonged
meditation, incessantly hammered and rehammered, becomes more concise
and of higher temper than is elsewhere found. Since La Bruyere we
have seen no more ample, virile phrases, in which anger, admiration,
indignation, studied and concentrated passion, appear with more rigorous
precision and more powerful relief. He is almost the equal of La Bruyere
in the arrangement of skillful effects, in the aptness and ingenuity
of developments, in the terseness of impressive summaries, in the
overpowering directness of unexpected arguments, in the multiplicity of
literary achievements, in the execution of those passages of bravura,
portraits, descriptions, comparisons, creations, wherein, as in a
musical crescendo, the same idea, varied by a series of yet more
animated expressions, attains to or surpasses, at the last note, all
that is possible of energy and of brilliancy. Finally, he has that which
is wanting in La Bruyere; his passages are linked together; he is not
a writer of pages but of books; no logician is more condensed. His
demonstration is knitted together, mesh by mesh, for one, two and three
volumes like a great net without an opening in which, willingly or not,
we remain caught. He is a systematizer who, absorbed with himself; and
with his eyes stubbornly fixed on his own reverie or his own principle,
buries himself deeper in it every day, weaving its consequences off one
by one, and always holding fast to the various ends. Do not go near him.
Like a solitary, enraged spider he weaves this out of his own substance,
out of the most cherished convictions of his brain and the deepest
emotions of his heart. He trembles at the slightest touch; ever on the
defensive, he is terrible,[4136] beside himself;[4137] even venomous