To give knowledge was his work and his aim; to make knowledge easier for others he left to some lesser man. His style had seldom the grace and clearness which can make, and which in many of his fellow-workers did make, the abstrusest reasoning charm like romance. D’Alembert left Diderot to put his thought into irresistible words, and Voltaire and Turgot to translate it into immortal deeds.
When he was two-and-twenty, in 1739, d’Alembert began his connection with the Academy of Sciences. In 1743 he published his ‘Treatise on Dynamics.’ Now little read and long superseded, it placed him at one bound, and at six-and-twenty years old, among the first geometricians of Europe. Modest, frugal, retiring as he was and remained, he was no more only the loving and patient disciple of science. He was its master and teacher. In 1746 his ‘Treatise on the Theory of Winds’ gained him a prize in the Academy of Berlin, and first brought him into relationship with Frederick the Great.
Two years later, when her son was of daily growing renown, Madame de Tencin died. The story that, when he had become famous and she would fain have acknowledged him, he had repudiated her, saying he had no mother but the glazier’s wife, d’Alembert, declares Madame Suard, always denied. ‘I should never have refused her endearments—it would have been too sweet to me to recover her.’ That answer is more in keeping with a temperament but too gentle and forgiving, than the spirited repulse. It was in keeping also with the life of Madame de Tencin that even death should leave her indifferent to her child. She thought no more of him, he said, in the one than in the other. Her money she left to her doctor.
If the studious poverty of the life in the glazier’s attic spared d’Alembert acquaintances, it did not deprive him of friends.
Then living in Paris, some six-and-thirty years old, the author of the ‘Philosophical Thoughts,’ and the most fascinating scoundrel in France, was Denis Diderot. With the quiet d’Alembert, of morals almost austere and of hidden, frugal life, what could a Diderot have in common? Something more than the attraction of opposites drew them together. The vehement and all-embracing imagination of the one fired the calm reason of the other. The hot head and the cool one were laid together, and the result was the great Encyclopædia.
The first idea of the pair was modest enough—to translate into French the English Encyclopædia of Chambers. But had not brother Voltaire said that no man who could make an adequate translation ever wasted his time in translating? They soon out-ran so timid an ambition. The thing must not only be spontaneous work; it must wholly surpass all its patterns and prototypes. It must be not an Encyclopædia, but the Encyclopædia. Every man of talent in France must bring a stone towards the building of the great Temple. From Switzerland, old Voltaire shall pour forth inspiration, encouragement, incentive. Rousseau shall lend it the glow of his passion, and Grimm his journalistic versatility. Helvétius shall contribute—d’Holbach, Turgot, Morellet, Marmontel, Raynal, La Harpe, de Jaucourt, Duclos.
And the Preliminary Discourse shall be the work of d’Alembert.
An envious enemy once dismissed him scornfully as
—— Chancelier de Parnasse,
Qui se croit un grand homme et fit une préface.
Yet if he had written nothing but that Preface he would still have had noble titles to fame. It contained, as he himself said, the quintessence of twenty years’ study. If his style was usually cold and formal, it was not so now. With warmest eloquence and boldest brush he painted the picture of the progress of the human mind since the invention of printing. From the lofty heights man’s intellect had scaled there stood out yet mightier heights for him to dare! Advance! advance! If ever preface said anything, the Preface to the great Encyclopædia says this. Clothed with light and fire, that dearest son of d’Alembert’s genius went forth to illuminate and to astound the world.