them." Or, as another writer says: "Empire in this world belongs not so
much to wits, to talents, and to industry, as to a certain skilful
economy and to the continual management that a man has the art of
applying to all his other gifts."[18] Notwithstanding the peril that
haunts superlative propositions, we are inclined to say that Diderot is
the most striking illustration of this that the history of letters or
speculation has to furnish. If there are many who have missed the mark
which they or kindly intimates thought them certain of attaining, this
is mostly not for want of economy, but for want of the great qualities
which were imputed to them by mistake. To be mediocre, to be sterile, to
be futile, are the three fatal endings of many superbly announced
potentialities. Such an end nearly always comes of exaggerated faculty,
rather than of bad administration of natural gifts. In Diderot were
splendid talents. It was the art of prudent stewardship that lay beyond
his reach. Hence this singular fact, that he perhaps alone in literature
has left a name of almost the first eminence, and impressed his
greatness upon men of the strongest and most different intelligence, and
yet never produced a masterpiece; many a fine page, as Marmontel said,
but no one fine 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 Encyclopædia
(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