ly shown.

It is not the least remarkable thing about this remarkable book, and not
the least characteristic of its most remarkable author, that its very
survival has something extraordinary about it. Grimm, who was more
likely than any one else to know, apparently thought it was destroyed or
lost; it never appeared at all during Diderot's life, nor for a dozen
years after his death, nor till seven after the outbreak of the
Revolution, and six after the suppression of the religious orders in
France. That it might have brought its author into difficulties is more
than probable; but the undisguised editor of the _Encyclopedie_, the
author, earlier, of the actually disgraceful _Bijoux Indiscrets_, and
the much more than suspected principal begetter of the _Systeme de la
Nature_, could not have been much influenced by this. The true cause of
its abscondence, as in so much else of his work, was undoubtedly that
ultra-Bohemian quality of indifference which distinguished Diderot--the
first in a way, probably for ever the greatest, and, above all, the most
altruistic of literary Bohemians. Ask him to do something definite,
especially for somebody else's profit, to be done off-hand, and it was
done. Ask him to bear the brunt of a dangerous, laborious, by no means
lucrative, but rather exciting adventure, and he would, one cannot quite
say consecrate, but devote (which has two senses) his life to it. But
set him to elaborate artistic creation, confine him to it, and expect
him to finish it, and you were certain to be disappointed. At another
time, even at this time, if his surroundings and his society, his
education and his breeding had been less unfortunate, he might, as it
seems to me, have become a very great novelist indeed. As it is, he is a
great possibility of novel and of much other writing, with occasional
outbursts of actuality. The _Encyclopedie_ itself, for aught I care,
might have gone in all its copies, and with all possibility of
recovering or remembering it on earth, to the place where so many people
at the time would have liked to send it. But in the rest of him, and
even in some of his own Encyclopaedia articles,[384] there is much of
quite different stuff. And among the various gifts, critical and
creative, which this stuff shows, not the least, I think, was the
half-used and mostly ill-used gift of novel-writing.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The successors--Marmontel.]

What has be