Diderot and the Encyclopædists (Vol. 2 of 2)
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Title: Diderot and the Encyclopædists (Vol. 2 of 2)
Author: John Morley
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Language: English
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DIDEROT AND THE ENCYCLOPAEDISTS
BY
JOHN MORLEY
VOL. II.
London
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1905
_First published elsewhere_
_New Edition 1886. Reprinted 1891, 1897, 1905_
CONTENTS OF VOL. II.
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
OTHER DIALOGUES.
(1) _The Conversations of a Father with his Children_ 1
Remarks upon it.
(2) _The Inconsistency of Public Judgment on Private Actions_ 8
Observations.
(3) _Supplement to Bougainville's Travels_ 14
Philosophical qualities of the discussion not satisfactory 19
Nothing gained by his criticism on marriage 21
CHAPTER II.
ROMANCE.
Digression inevitable in dealing with Diderot 24
Richardson's influence in Europe 26
Diderot's _Eloge_ upon him 28
Rousseau and Richardson 29
Diderot writes _The Nun_ (1796) 31
Circumstances of its composition 32
Its intention 33
And characteristics 35
Sterne 36
Diderot writes _Jacques le Fataliste_ 37
Its history 38
Goethe's criticism on it 38
Nature of Diderot's imitation of Richardson and Sterne 40
No true creation in _Jacques le Fataliste_ 41
Its unredeemed grossness 43
Its lack of poetry and of flavour 44
CHAPTER III.
ART.
The _Salons_ 45
Qualities of their criticism 45
Deep foundation of Diderot's critical quality 46
French art-criticism 48
Dufresnoy, Dubos, Webb, Andre, Batteux 48, 49
Travellers in Italy 50
Diderot never in Italy 52
Spirit of French art in his day 52
Greuze, Diderot's favourite 56
Greuze's _Accordee de Village_ 57
Hogarth would have displeased Diderot 59
Diderot's considerateness in criticism 60
Boucher 62
Fragonard 62
Diderot adds literary charm to scientific criticism 63
His readiness for moral asides 65
His suggestions of pictorial subjects 68
His improved versions 69
Illustration of his variety of approach 72
Diderot's Essay on Painting 73
Goethe's commentary 73
Difference of type between Goethe and Diderot 76
Diderot's Essay on Beauty 78
His anticipation of Lessing 82
Music 83
CHAPTER IV.
ST. PETERSBURG AND THE HAGUE.
Diderot's resolution to visit the Empress of Russia 84
The Princess Dashkow 84
Prince Galitzin 85
Diderot in Holland (1773) 86
St. Petersburg and Russian civilisation 89
The Empress 91
Accounts of her by men of affairs 92
Her pursuit of French culture 94
Her interest in the French philosophic party 96
Partly the result of political calculation 98
The philosophers and the Partition of Poland 101
Rulhiere's narrative of Catherine's accession 102
Falconet, the first Frenchman welcomed by her 104
Diderot arrives at St. Petersburg (1773) 106
His conversations with the Empress 107
Not successful as a politician 108
General impression of him 109
Grimm outstrips him in court favour 110
Diderot's return to the Hague 112
Bjoernstaehl's report of him 114
Contemporary literature in Holland 117
Hemsterhuys 118
The Princess Galitzin 119
Diderot's return to Paris 121
CHAPTER V.
HELVETIUS.
Three works of which Diderot was regarded as the inspirer 123
Helvetius's _L'Esprit_ 123
Contemporary protests against it 123
Turgot's weighty criticism 124
Real drift of the book 127
Account of Helvetius 127
The style of his book 134
The momentous principle contained in it 135
Adopted from Helvetius by Bentham 136
Helvetius's statement of doctrine of Utility 137
Miscarriage of the doctrine in his hands 139
His fallacy 140
True side of his objectionable position 140
Helvetius's reckless presentation of a true theory 141
Confusion of beneficence with self-love 142
Imitation from Mandeville 143
Mean anecdotes 144
Nature of Helvetius's errors 144
Explanation of them 146
Positive side of his speculation 147
Its true significance 149
Second great paradox of _L'Esprit_ 149
Benjamin Constant's _Adolphe_ 152
CHAPTER VI.
HOLBACH'S SYSTEM OF NATURE.
Publication of the _System of Nature_ (1770) 155
Its startling effect 156
Voltaire's alarm 158
He never understood Holbach's position 159
Account of Holbach 160
Disregard of historic opinion in his book 163
Its remarkable violence against the government 165
The sting of this violence 166
The doctrine from which Holbach's book arose 167
Account of Holbach's Naturalism 168
His proposition concerning Man 173
He uses the orthodox language about the pride of man 177
His treatment of Morals 178
Onslaught upon the theory of Free Will 178
Connection of necessarianism with humanity in punishment 181
His answer to some objections against necessarianism 181
Chapter on the Immortality of the Soul 183
His enthusiasm for reforms 185
The literature of a political revolution 187
Misrepresentation of Holbach's ethical theory 188
The _System of Nature_, a protest against ascetic ideals 191
The subject of the second half of the book 193
Repudiation of the _a priori_ method 194
Replies to the common charges against atheism 197
The chapter on the superiority of Naturalism 198
Political side of the indictment against religion 199
Holbach's propagandism 202
CHAPTER VII.
RAYNAL'S HISTORY OF THE INDIES.
Contemporary estimate of _The History of the Indies_ 204
Account of Raynal 205
Composition of the book 207
Its varied popularity 209
Frederick the Great dislikes it 210
Signal merit of the History 213
Its shortcomings 214
Its idyllic inventions 215
Its animation and variety 218
Superficial causes of its popularity 220
Its deeper source 221
Catholicism in contact with the lower races 222
The other side of this 223
Raynal's book a plea for justice and humanity 224
Morality towards subject races 226
Slavery 227
Raynal's conduct in the Revolution 229
His end 231
CHAPTER VIII.
DIDEROT'S CLOSING YEARS.
Diderot's meditation on life and death 232
Age overtakes him on his return from Russia 233
Writes his life of Seneca 235
Its quality 236
Interest to Diderot of Seneca's career 237
Strange digression in the Essay 239
Reason for Diderot's anger against Rousseau 240
His usual magnanimity 241
Diderot's relations with Voltaire 244
Naigeon 246
Romilly's account of Diderot 247
Palissot and the conservative writers 249
The ecclesiastical champions of the old system 251
The precursors gradually disappearing 253
Galiani 254
Beaumarchais's _Mariage de Figaro_ 255
Diderot's famous couplet 256
His fellow-townsmen at Langres 257
Last days 258
CHAPTER IX.
CONCLUSION.
The variety of Diderot's topics 261
(1) _Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature_ 262
Maupertuis's _Loi d'Epargne_ 262
General scope of Diderot's aphorisms 263
Prophecy about geometry 264
Utility made to prescribe limits to speculation 267
The other side of this principle 267
On Final Causes 268
Adaptation of the Leibnitzian law of economy 269
(2) _D'Alembert's Dream_ 271
Diderot not the originator of French materialism 272
Materialism of the three dialogues 273
Mdlle. Lespinasse's moral objections 274
(3) _Plan of a University for Russia_ 275
Religious instruction 276
Latin and Greek 277
Letter to the Countess of Forbach 278
(4) _Conversation with the Marechale de ----_ 278
Parable of the young Mexican 279
(5) _Letters to Falconet_ 281
Diderot defends the feeling for posterity 283
APPENDIX.
_Rameau's Nephew: a Translation_ 285
DIDEROT.
CHAPTER I.
OTHER DIALOGUES.
We may now pass to performances that are nearer to the accepted surface
of things. A short but charming example of Diderot's taste for putting
questions of morals in an interesting way, is found in the _Conversation
of a Father with his Children_ (published in 1773). This little dialogue
is perfect in the simple realism of its form. Its subject is the peril
of setting one's own judgment of some special set of circumstances above
the law of the land. Diderot's venerable and well-loved father is
sitting in his arm-chair before the fire. He begins the discussion by
telling his two sons and his daughter, who are tending him with pious
care, how very near he had once been to destroying their inheritance. An
old priest had died leaving a considerable fortune. There was believed
to be no will, and the next of kin were a number of poor people whom the
inheritance would have rescued from indigence for the rest of their
days. They appointed the elder Diderot to guard their interests and
divide the property. He finds at the bottom of a disused box of ancient
letters, receipts, and other waste-paper, a will made long years ago,
and bequeathing all the fortune to a very rich bookseller in Paris.
There was every reason to suppose that the old priest had forgotten the
existence of the will, and it involved a revolting injustice. Would not
Diderot be fulfilling the dead man's real wishes by throwing the
unwelcome document into the flames?
At this point in the dialogue the doctor enters the room and interrupts
the tale. It appears that he is fresh from the bedside of a criminal who
is destined to the gallows. Diderot the younger reproaches him for
labouring to keep in the world an offender whom it were best to send out
of it with all despatch. The duty of the physician is to say to so
execrable a patient--"I will not busy myself in restoring to life a
creature whom it is enjoined upon me by natural equity, the good of
society, the well-being of my fellow-creatures, to give up. Die, and let
it never be said that through my skill there exists a monster the more
on earth!" The doctor parries these energetic declamations with
sufficient skill. "My business is to cure, not to judge; I shall cure
him, because that is my trade; then the judge will have him hung,
because that is his trade." This episodic discussion ended, the story of
the will is resumed. The father, when on the point of destroying it, was
seized with a scruple of conscience, and hastened to a cure well versed
in casuistry. As in England the agents of the law itself not seldom play
the part of arbitrary benevolence, which the old Diderot would fain have
played against the law, the scene may perhaps be worth transcribing:
"'Nothing is more praiseworthy, sir, than the sentiment of
compassion that touches you for these unfortunate people. Suppress
the testament and succour them--good; but on condition of restoring
to the rightful legatee the exact sum of which you deprive him,
neither more nor less. Who authorised you to give a sanction to
documents, or to take it away? Who authorised you to interpret the
intentions of the dead?'
'But then, father Bouin, the old box?'
'Who authorised you to decide whether the will was thrown away on
purpose, or mislaid by accident? Has it never happened to you to do
such a thing, and to find at the bottom of a chest some valuable
paper that you had tossed there inadvertently?'
'But, father Bouin, the far-off date of the paper, and its
injustice?'
'Who authorised you to pronounce on the justice or injustice of the
document, and to regard the bequest as an unlawful gift, rather
than as a restitution or any other lawful act which you may choose
to imagine?'
'But, these poor kinsfolk here on the spot, and that mere
collateral, distant and wealthy?'
'Who authorised you to weigh in your balance what the dead man owed
to his distant relations, whom you don't know?'
'But, father Bouin, that pile of letters from the legatee, which
the departed never even took the trouble to open?'
'There is neither old box, nor date, nor letters, nor father Bouin,
nor if, nor but, in the case. No one has any right to infringe the
laws, to enter into the intention of the dead, or to dispose of
other people's property. If providence has resolved to chastise
either the heir or the legatee or the testator--we cannot tell
which--by the accidental preservation of the will, the will must
remain.'"[1]
[1] _Oeuv._, v. 289.
Diderot the younger declaims against all this with his usual vehemence,
while his brother, the abbe, defends the supremacy of the law on the
proper ground, that to evade or defy it in any given case is to open the
door to the sophistries of all the knaves in the universe. At this point
a journeyman of the neighbourhood comes in with a new case of
conscience. His wife has died after twenty years of sickness; in these
twenty years the cost of her illness has consumed all that he would
otherwise have saved for the end of his days. But, as it happens, the
marriage portion that she brought him has lain untouched. By law this
ought to go to her family. Equity, however, seems to justify him in
keeping what he might have spent if he had chosen. He consults the party
round the fire. One bids him keep the money; another forbids him; a
third thinks it fair for him to repay himself the cost of his wife's
illness. Diderot's father cries out, that since on his own confession
the detention of the inheritance has brought him no comfort, he had
better surrender it as speedily as possible, and eat, drink, sleep,
work, and make himself happy so.
"'Not I,' cried the journeyman abruptly, 'I shall be off to
Geneva.'
'And dost thou think to leave remorse behind?'
'I can't tell, but to Geneva I go.'
'Go where thou wilt, there wilt thou find thy conscience.'
The hatter went away; his odd answer became the subject of our
talk. We agreed that perhaps distance of place and time had the
effect of weakening all the feelings more or less, and stifling the
voice of conscience even in cases of downright crime. The assassin
transported to the shores of China is too far off to perceive the
corpse that he has left bleeding on the banks of the Seine.
Remorse springs perhaps less from horror of self than from fear of
others; less from shame for the deed, than from the blame and
punishment that would attend its discovery. And what clandestine
criminal is tranquil enough in his obscurity not to dread the
treachery of some unforeseen circumstance, or the indiscretion of
some thoughtless word? What certainty can he have that he will not
disclose his secret in the delirium of fever, or in dreams? People
will understand him if they are on the scene of the action, but
those about him in China will have no key to his words."[2]
[2] v. 295, 296.
Two other cases come up. Does the husband or wife who is the first to
break the marriage vow, restore liberty to the other? Diderot answered
affirmatively. The second case arose from a story that the abbe had been
reading. A certain honest cobbler of Messina saw his country overrun by
lawlessness. Each day was marked by a crime. Notorious assassins braved
the public exasperation. Parents saw their daughters violated; the
industrious saw the fruits of their toil ravished from them by the
monopolist or the fraudulent tax-gatherer. The judges were bribed, the
innocent were afflicted, the guilty escaped unharmed. The cobbler
meditating on these enormities devised a plan of vengeance. He
established a secret court of justice in his shop; he heard the
evidence, gave a verdict, pronounced sentence, and went out into the
street with his gun under his cloak to execute it. Justice done, he
regained his stall, rejoicing as though he had slain a rabid dog. When
some fifty criminals had thus met their doom, the viceroy offered a
reward of two thousand crowns for information of the slayer, and swore
on the altar that he should have full pardon if he gave himself up. The
cobbler presented himself, and spoke thus: "I have done what was your
duty. 'Tis I who condemned and put to death the miscreants that you
ought to have punished. Behold the proofs of their crimes. There you
will see the judicial process which I observed. I was tempted to begin
with yourself; but I respected in your person the august master whom you
represent. My life is in your hands: dispose of it as you think right."
Well, cried the abbe, the cobbler, in spite of all his fine zeal for
justice, was simply a murderer. Diderot protested. His father decided
that the abbe was right, and that the cobbler was an assassin.
Nothing short of a transcript of the whole would convey a right idea of
the dramatic ease of this delightful dialogue--its variety of
illustration with unity of topic, the naturalness of movement, the
pleasant lightness of touch. At its close the old man calls for his
nightcap; Diderot embraces him, and in bidding him good-night whispers
in his ear, "Strictly speaking, father, there are no laws for the sage.
All being open to exception, 'tis for him to judge the cases in which we
ought to submit to them, or to throw them over." "I should not be
sorry," his father answers, "if there were in the town one or two
citizens like thee; but nothing would induce me to live there, if they
all thought in that way." The conclusion is just, and Diderot might have
verified it by the state of the higher society of his country at that
very moment. One cause of the moral corruption of France in the closing
years of the old _regime_ was undoubtedly the lax and shifting
interpretations, by which the Jesuit directors had softened the rigour
of general moral principles. Many generations must necessarily elapse
before a habit of loosely superseding principles in individual cases
produces widespread demoralisation, but the result is inevitable, sooner
or later; and this, just in proportion as the principles are sound. The
casuists practically constructed a system for making the observance
alike of the positive law, and of the accepted ethical maxims, flexible
and conditional. The Diderot of the present dialogue takes the same
attitude, but has the grace to leave the demonstration of its
impropriety to his wise and benevolent sire.
* * * * *
II. We shall presently see that Diderot did not shrink from applying a
vigorous doubt to some of the most solidly established principles of
modern society. Let us meanwhile in passing notice that short piece of
plangent irony, which did not appear until many years after his death
(1798), and which he or some one else entitled, _On the inconsistency of
the Public Judgment on our Private Actions_. This too is in the form of
dialogue, but the argument of the story is in its pith as follows.
Desroches, first an abbe, then a lawyer, lastly a soldier, persuades a
rich and handsome widow to marry him. She is aware of his previous
gallantries, and warns him in very dramatic style before a solemn
gathering of friends, that if he once wounds her by an infidelity, she
will shut herself up and speedily die of grief. He makes such vows as
most men would make under such circumstances; he presses her hands
ardently to his lips, bedews them with his tears, and moves the whole
company to sympathy with his own agitation. The scene is absurd enough,
or seems so to us dull people of phlegmatic habit. Yet Diderot, even for
us, redeems it by the fine remark: "'Tis the effect of what is good and
virtuous to leave a large assembly with only one thought and one soul.
How all respect one another, love one another in such moments! For
instance, how beautiful humanity is at the play! Ah, why must we part so
quickly? Men are so good, so happy, when what is worthy unites all their
suffrages, melts them, makes them one."[3] For some time all went well,
and our pair were the happiest of men and women. Then various assaults
were made on the faithfulness of Desroches. He resisted them, until in
endeavouring to serve a friend he was forced to sue for the goodwill of
a lady with whom in his unregenerate days he had had passages of
gallantry. The old intrigue was renewed. Letters of damning proof fell
by ill hazard into his wife's hands. She reassembled her friends,
denounced the culprit, and forthwith carried away her child to seek
shelter with her aged mother. Desroches's fervent remorse was unheeded,
his letters were sent back unopened, he was denied the door. Presently,
the aged mother died. Then the infant. Lastly, the wife herself. Now,
says Diderot to his interlocutor, I pray you to turn your eyes to the
public--that imbecile crowd that pronounces judgment on us, that
disposes of our honour, that lifts us to the clouds or trails us through
the mud. Opinion passed through every phase about Desroches. The
shifting event is ever their one measure of praise and blame. A fault
which nobody thought more than venial became gradually aggravated in
their eyes by a succession of incidents which it was impossible for
Desroches either to foresee or to prevent. At first opinion was on his
side, and his wife was thought to have carried things with too high a
hand. Then, after she had fallen ill, and her child had died, and her
aged mother had passed away in the fulness of years, he began to be held
answerable for all this sea of troubles. Why had not Desroches written
to his wife, beset her doors, waylaid her as she went to church? He
had, as matter of fact, done all these things, but the public did not
know it. The important thing is, not to know, but to talk. Then, as it
befell, his wife's brother took Desroches's place in his regiment; there
he was killed. More exclamations as to the misfortune of being connected
with such a man. How was Desroches responsible for the death of his
mother-in-law, already well stricken in years? How could he foresee that
a hostile ball would pierce his brother-in-law in his first campaign?
But his wife? He must be a barbarian, a monster, who had gradually
pressed a poniard into the bosom of a divine woman, his wife, his
benefactress, and then left her to die, without showing the least sign
of interest or feeling. And all this, cries Diderot, for not knowing
what was concealed from him, and what was unknown and unsuspected even
by those who were daily about her? What presumption, what bad logic,
what incoherence, what unjustified veering and vacillation in all these
public verdicts from beginning to end!
[3] _Oeuv._, v. 342.
Yet we feel that Diderot's impetuous taunts fail to press to the root of
the matter. Diderot excels in opening a subject; he places it in a new
light; he furnishes telling concrete illustrations; he thoroughly
disturbs and unsettles the medium of conventional association in which
it has become fixed. But he does not leave the question readjusted. His
mind was not of that quality which is slow to complain where it cannot
explain; which does not quit a discussion without a calm and orderly
review of the conditions that underlie the latest exhibition of human
folly, shortsightedness, or injustice. The public condemnation of
Desroches for consequences that were entirely strange to his one
offence, was indefensible on grounds of strict logic. But then men have
imagination as well as reason. Imagination is stronger than reason with
most of them. Their imagination was touched by the series of disasters
that followed Madame Desroches's abandonment of her husband. They admit
no plea of remoteness of damage, such as law courts allow. In a way that
was loose and unreasonable, but still easily intelligible, the husband
became associated with a sequel for which he was not really answerable.
If the world's conduct in such cases were accurately expressed, it would
perhaps be found that people have really no intention to pronounce a
judicial sentence; they only mean that an individual's associations have
become disagreeable and doubtful to them. They may think proper to
justify the grievously meagre definition of _homo_ as _animal
rationale_, by varnishing their distaste with reasons; the true reason
is that the presence of a Desroches disturbs their comfort, by recalling
questionable and disorderly circumstances. That this selfish and rough
method many a time inflicts horrible cruelty is too certain, and those
to whom the idea of conduct is serious and deep-reaching will not fall
into it. A sensible man is aware of the difficulty of pronouncing wisely
upon the conduct of others, especially where it turns upon the
intricate and unknowable relations between a man and a woman. He will
not, however, on that account break down the permanent safeguards, for
the sake of leniency in a given case. _A great enemy to indifference, a
great friend to indulgence_, said Turgot of himself; and perhaps it is
what we should all do well to be able to say of ourselves.
Again, though these ironical exposures of the fatuity and recklessness
and inconsistency of popular verdicts are wholesome enough in their
degree in all societies, yet it has been, and still remains, a defect of
some of the greatest French writers to expect a fruit from such
performances which they can never bear. In the long run a great body of
men and women is improved less by general outcry against its collective
characteristics than by the inculcation of broader views, higher
motives, and sounder habits of judgment, in such a form as touches each
man and woman individually. It is better to awaken in the individual a
sense of responsibility for his own character than to do anything,
either by magnificent dithyrambs or penetrating satire, to dispose him
to lay the blame on Society. Society is after all only a name for other
people. An instructive contrast might be drawn between the method of
French writers of genius, from Diderot down to that mighty master of our
own day, Victor Hugo, in pouring fulminant denunciations upon Society,
and the other method of our best English writers, from Milton down to
Mill, in impressing new ideas on the Individual, and exacting a
vigorous personal answer to the moral or spiritual call.
One other remark may be worth making. It is characteristic of the
immense sociability of the eighteenth century, that when he saw
Desroches sitting alone in the public room, receiving no answers to his
questions, never addressed by any of those around him, avoided, coldly
eyed, and morally proscribed, Diderot never thought of applying the
artificial consolation of the Stoic. He never dreamed of urging that
expulsion from the society of friends was not a hardship, a true
punishment, and a genuine evil. No one knew better than Diderot that a
man should train himself to face the disapprobation of the world with
steadfast brow and unflinching gaze; but he knew also that this is only
done at great cost, and is only worth doing for clear and far-reaching
objects. Life was real to Diderot, not in the modern canting sense of
earnestness and making a hundred thousand pounds; but in the sense of
being an agitated scene of living passion, interest, sympathy, struggle,
delight, and woe, in which the graceful ascetic commonplaces of the
writer and the preacher barely touch the actual conditions of human
experience, or go near to softening the smart of chagrin, failure,
mistake, and sense of wrong, any more than the sweet music of the birds
poised in air over a field of battle can still the rage and horror of
the plain beneath. As was said by a good man, who certainly did not fail
to try the experiment,--"Speciosa quidem ista sunt, oblitaque rhetoricae
et musicae melle dulcedinis; tum tantum cum audiuntur oblectant. Sed
miseris malorum altior sensus est. Itaque quum haec auribus insonare
desierint, insitus animum moeror praegravat."[4]
[4] Boethius.
* * * * *
III. We may close this chapter with a short account of the _Supplement
to Bougainville's Travels_, which was composed in 1772, and published
twenty-four years later. The second title is, _A dialogue on the
disadvantage of attaching moral ideas to certain physical actions which
do not really comport with them_. Those who believe that the ruling
system of notions about marriage represents the last word that is to be
said as to the relations between men and women, will turn away from
Diderot's dialogue with some impatience. Those, on the contrary, who
hold that the present system is no more immovably fixed in ultimate laws
of human nature, no more final, no more unimprovable, no more sacred,
and no more indisputably successful, than any other set of social
arrangements and the corresponding moral ideas, will find something to
interest them, though, as it seems to the present writer, very little to
instruct. Bougainville was the first Frenchman who sailed round the
world. He did in 1766-69 what Captain Cook did about the same time. The
narrative of his expedition appeared in 1771, and the picture of life
among the primitive people of the Southern Seas touched Diderot almost
as deeply as if he had been Rousseau. As one says so often in this
history of the intellectual preparation for the Revolution, the
corruption and artificiality of Parisian society had the effect of
colouring the world of primitive society with the very hues of paradise.
Diderot was more free from this besetting weakness than any of his
contemporaries. He never fell into Voltaire's fancy that China is a land
of philosophers.[5] But he did not look very critically into the real
conditions of life in the more rudimentary stages of development, and
for the moment he committed the sociological anachronism of making the
poor people of Otaheite into wise and benevolent patriots and sound
reasoners. The literary merit of the dialogue is at least as striking as
in any of the pieces of which we have already spoken. The realism of the
scenes between the ship-chaplain and his friendly savage, with too
kindly wife, and daughters as kindly as either, is full of sweetness,
simplicity, and a sort of pathos. A subject which easily takes on an air
of grossness, and which Diderot sometimes handled very grossly indeed,
is introduced with an idyllic grace that to the pure will hardly be
other than pure. We have of course always to remember that Diderot is an
author for grown-up people, as are the authors of the Bible or any other
book that deals with more than the surface of human experience. Our
English practice of excluding from literature subjects and references
that are unfit for boys and girls, has something to recommend it, but it
undeniably leads to a certain narrowness and thinness, and to some most
nauseous hypocrisy. All subjects are evidently not to be discussed by
all; and one result in our case is that some of the most important
subjects in the world receive no discussion whatever.
[5] See, however, above, vol. i. p. 274.
The position which Diderot takes up in the present dialogue may be
inferred from the following extract. The ship-chaplain has been
explaining to the astonished Otaheitan the European usage of strict
monogamy, as the arrangement enjoined upon man by the Creator of the
universe, and vigilantly guarded by the priest and the magistrate. To
which, Orou thus:
"These singular precepts I find opposed to nature and contrary to
reason. They are contrary to nature because they suppose that a
being who thinks, feels, and is free, can be the property of a
creature like itself. Dost thou not see that in thy land they have
confounded the thing that has neither sensibility, nor thought, nor
desire, nor will; that one leaves, one takes, one keeps, one
exchanges, without its suffering or complaining--with a thing that
is neither exchanged nor acquired, that has freedom, will, desire,
that may give or may refuse itself for the moment; that complains
and suffers; and that cannot become a mere article of commerce,
unless you forget its character and do violence to nature? And they
are contrary to the general law of things. Can anything seem more
senseless to thee than a precept which proscribes the law of change
that is within us, and which commands a constancy that is
impossible, and that violates the liberty of the male and the
female, by chaining them together in perpetuity;--anything more
senseless than are oaths of immutability, taken by two creatures of
flesh, in the face of a sky that is not an instant the same, under
vaults that threaten ruin, at the base of a rock crumbling to
dust, at the foot of a tree that is splitting asunder?... You may
command what is opposed to nature, but you will not be obeyed. You
will multiply evil-doers and the unhappy by fear, by punishment,
and by remorse; you will deprave men's consciences; you will
corrupt their minds; they will have lost the polar star of their
pathway." (225.)
After this declamation he proceeds to put some practical questions to
the embarrassed chaplain. Are young men in France always continent, and
wives always true, and husbands never libertines? The chaplain's answers
disclose the truth to the keen-eyed Orou:
"What a monstrous tissue is this that thou art unfolding to me! And
even now thou dost not tell me all; for as soon as men allow
themselves to dispose at their own will of the ideas of what is
just and unjust, to take away, or to impose an arbitrary character
on things; to unite to actions or to separate from them the good
and the evil, with no counsellor save caprice--then come blame,
accusation, suspicion, tyranny, envy, jealousy, deception, chagrin,
concealment, dissimulation, espionage, surprise, lies; daughters
deceive their parents, wives their husbands, husbands their wives;
young women, I don't doubt, will smother their children; suspicious
fathers will despise and neglect their children; mothers will leave
them to the mercy of accident; and crime and debauchery will show
themselves in every guise. I know all that, as if I had lived among
you. It is so, because it must be so; and that society of thine, in
spite of thy chief who vaunts its fine order, is nothing but a
collection of hypocrites who secretly trample the laws under foot;
or of unfortunate wretches who make themselves the instrument of
their own punishment, by submitting to these laws; or of imbeciles,
in whom prejudice has absolutely stifled the voice of nature."
(227.)
The chaplain has the presence of mind to fall back upon the radical
difficulty of all such solutions of the problem of family union as were
practised in Otaheite, or were urged by philosophers in Paris, or are
timidly suggested in our own times in the droll-sounding form of
marriages for terms of years with option of renewal. That difficulty is
the disposal of the children which are the fruit of such unions. Orou
rejoins to this argument by a very eloquent account how valuable, how
sought after, how prized, is the woman who has her quiver full of them.
His contempt for the condition of Europe grows more intense, as he
learns that the birth of a child among the bulk of the people of the
west is rather a sorrow, a perplexity, a hardship, than a delight and
ground of congratulation.
The reader sees by this time that in the present dialogue Diderot is
really criticising the most fundamental and complex arrangement of our
actual western society, from the point of view of an arbitrary and
entirely fanciful naturalism. Rousseau never wrote anything more
picturesque, nor anything more dangerous, nor more anarchic and
superficially considered. It is true that Diderot at the close of the
discussion is careful to assert that while we denounce senseless laws,
it is our duty to obey them until we have procured their reform. "He who
of his own private authority infringes a bad law, authorises every one
else to infringe good laws. There are fewer inconveniences in being mad
with the mad, than in being wise by oneself. Let us say to ourselves,
let us never cease to cry aloud, that people attach shame, chastisement,
and infamy to acts that in themselves are innocent; but let us abstain
from committing them, because shame, punishment, and infamy are the
greatest of evils." And we hear Diderot's sincerest accents when he
says, "Above all, one must be honest, and true to a scruple, with the
fragile beings who cannot yield to our pleasures without renouncing the
most precious advantages of society."[6]
[6] _Oeuv._, ii. 249.
This, however, does not make the philosophical quality of the discussion
any more satisfactory. Whatever changes may ultimately come about in the
relations between men and women, we may at least be sure that such
changes will be in a direction even still further away than the present
conditions of marriage, from anything like the naturalism of Diderot and
the eighteenth-century school. Even if--what does not at present seem at
all likely to happen--the idea of the family and the associated idea of
private property should eventually be replaced by that form of communism
which is to be seen at Oneida Creek, still the discipline of the
appetites and affections of sex will necessarily on such a system be not
less, but far more rigorous to nature than it is under prevailing
western institutions.[7] Orou would have been a thousand times more
unhappy among the Perfectionists under Mr. Noyes than in Paris or
London. We cannot pretend here to discuss the large group of momentous
questions involved, but we may make a short remark or two. One reason
why the movement, if progressive, must be in the direction of greater
subordination of appetite, is that all experience proves the position
and moral worth of women, taking society as a whole, to be in proportion
to the self-control of their male companions. Nobody doubts that man is
instinctively polygamous. But the dignity and self-respect, and
consequently the whole moral cultivation of women, depends on the
suppression of this vagrant instinct. And there is no more important
chapter in the history of civilisation than the record of the steps by
which its violence has been gradually reduced.
[7] See Nordhoff's _Communistic Societies of the United States_
(London: Murray, 1875), pp. 259-293. This grave and most instructive
book shows how modifiable are some of those facts of existing human
character which are vulgarly deemed to be ultimate and ineradicable.
There is another side, we admit. The home, of which sentimental
philosophers love to talk, is too often a ghastly failure. The conjugal
union, so tender and elevating in its ideal, is in more cases than we
usually care to recognise, the cruellest of bonds to the woman, the most
harassing, deadening, spirit-breaking of all possible influences to the
man. The purity of the family, so lovely and dear as it is, has still
only been secured hitherto by retaining a vast and dolorous host of
female outcasts. When Catholicism is praised for the additions which it
has made to the dignity of womanhood and the family, we have to set
against that gain the frightful growth of this caste of poor creatures,
upon whose heads, as upon the scapegoat of the Hebrew ordinance, we put
all the iniquities of the children of the house, and all their
transgressions in all their sins, and then banish them with maledictions
into the foul outer wilderness and the land not inhabited.
On this side there is much wholesome truth to be told, in the midst of
the complacent social cant with which we are flooded. But Diderot does
not help us. Nothing can possibly be gained by reducing the attraction
of the sexes to its purely physical elements, and stripping it of all
the moral associations which have gradually clustered round it, and
acquired such force as in many cases among the highest types of mankind
to reduce the physical factor to a secondary place. Such a return to the
nakedness of the brute must be retrograde. And Diderot, as it happened,
was the writer who, before all others, habitually exalted the delightful
and consolatory sentiment of the family. Nobody felt more strongly the
worth of domestic ties, when faithfully cherished. It can only have been
in a moment of elated paradox that he made one of the interlocutors in
the dialogue on Bougainville pronounce Constancy, "The poor vanity of
two children who do not know themselves, and who are blinded by the
intoxication of a moment to the instability of all that surrounds them:"
and Fidelity, "The obstinacy and the punishment of a good man and a
good woman:" and Jealousy, "The passion of a miser; the unjust sentiment
of man; the consequence of our false manners, and of a right of property
extending over a feeling, willing, thinking, free creature."[8]
[8] _Oeuv._, ii. 243.
It is a curious example of the blindness which reaction against excess
of ascetic doctrine bred in the eighteenth century, that Diderot should
have failed to see that such sophisms as these are wholly destructive of
that order and domestic piety, to whose beauty he was always so keenly
alive. It is curious, too, that he should have failed to recognise that
the erection of constancy into a virtue would have been impossible, if
it had not answered first, to some inner want of human character at its
best, and second, to some condition of fitness in society at its best.
How is it, says one of the interlocutors, that the strongest, the
sweetest, the most innocent of pleasures is become the most fruitful
source of depravation and misfortune? This is indeed a question well
worth asking. And it is comforting after the anarchy of the earlier part
of the dialogue to find so comparatively sensible a line of argument
taken in answer as the following. This evil result has been brought
about, he says, by the tyranny of man, who has converted the possession
of woman into a property; by manners and usages that have overburdened
the conjugal union with superfluous conditions; by the civil laws that
have subjected marriage to an infinity of formalities; by religious
institutions that have attached the name of vices and virtues to actions
that are not susceptible of morality. If this means that human happiness
will be increased by making the condition of the wife more independent
in respect of property; by treating in public opinion separation between
husband and wife as a transaction in itself perfectly natural and
blameless, and often not only laudable, but a duty; and by abolishing
that barbarous iniquity and abomination called restitution of conjugal
rights, then the speaker points to what has been justly described as the
next great step in the improvement of society. If it means that we do
wrong to invest with the most marked, serious, and unmistakable
formality an act that brings human beings into existence, with uncounted
results both to such beings themselves and to others who are equally
irresponsible for their appearance in the world, then the position is
recklessly immoral, and it is, moreover, wholly repugnant to Diderot's
own better mind.
CHAPTER II
ROMANCE.
The President de Brosses on a visit to Paris, in 1754, was anxious to
make the acquaintance of that "furious metaphysical head," as he styled
Diderot. Buffon introduced him. "He is a good fellow," said the
President, "very pleasant, very amiable, a great philosopher, a strong
reasoner, but given to perpetual digressions. He made twenty-five
digressions yesterday in my room, between nine o'clock and one o'clock."
And so it is that a critic who has undertaken to give an account of
Diderot, finds himself advancing from digression to digression, through
a chain of all the subjects that are under the sun. The same Diderot,
however, is present amid them all, and behind each of them; the same
fresh enthusiasm, the same expansive sympathy, the same large
hospitality of spirit. Always, too, the same habitual reference of
ideas, systems, artistic forms, to the complex realities of life, and to
these realities as they figured to sympathetic emotions.
It was inevitable that Diderot should make an idol of the author of
_Clarissa Harlowe_. The spirit of reaction against the artificiality of
the pseudo-classic drama, which drove him to feel the way to a drama of
real life in the middle class, made him exult in the romance of ordinary
private life which was invented by Richardson. It was no mere accident
that the modern novel had its origin in England, but the result of
general social causes. The modern novel essentially depends on the
interest of the private life of ordinary men and women. But this
interest was only possible on condition that the feudal and aristocratic
spirit had received its deathblow, and it was only in England that such
a revolution had taken place even partially. It was only in England as
yet that the middle class had conquered a position of consideration,
equality, and independence. Only in England, as has been said, had every
man the power of making the best of his own personality, and arranging
his own destiny according to his private goodwill and pleasure.[9] The
greatest of Richardson's successors in the history of English fiction
adds to this explanation. "Those," says Sir Walter Scott, "who with
patience had studied rant and bombast in the folios of Scuderi, could
not readily tire of nature, sense, and genius in the octavos of
Richardson." The old French romances in which Europe had found a dreary
amusement, were stories of princes and princesses. It was to be expected
that the first country where princes and princesses were shorn of
divinity and made creatures of an Act of Parliament, would also be the
country where imagination would be most likely to seek for serious
passion, realistic interest, and all the material for pathos and tragedy
in the private lives of common individuals. It is true that Marivaux,
the author of _Marianne_, was of the school of Richardson before
Richardson wrote a word. But this was an almost isolated appearance, and
not the beginning of a movement. Richardson's popularity stamped the
opening of a new epoch. It was the landmark of a great social, no less
than a great literary transition, when all England went mad with
enthusiasm over the trials, the virtue, the triumph of a rustic
ladies'-maid.
[9] Hettner's _Literaturgeschichte_, i. 462.
In the literary circles of France the enthusiasm for Richardson was
quite as great as it was in England. There it was one of the signs of
the certain approach of that transformation which had already taken
place in England; the transformation from feudalism to industrial
democracy. It may sound a paradox to say that a passion for Richardson
was a symbol that a man was truly possessed by the spirit of political
revolution. Yet it is true. Voltaire was a revolter against superstition
and the tyranny of the church, but he never threw off the monarchic
traditions of his younger days; he was always a friend of great nobles;
he had no eye and no inclination for social overthrow. And this is what
Voltaire said of _Clarissa Harlowe_: "It is cruel for a man like me to
read nine whole volumes in which you find nothing at all. I said--Even
if all these people were my relations and friends, I could take no
interest in them. I can see nothing in the writer but a clever man who
knows the curiosity of the human race, and is always promising something
from volume to volume, in order to go on selling them." In the same way,
and for exactly the same reasons, he could never understand the
enthusiasm for the _New Heloisa_, the greatest of the romances that were
directly modelled on Richardson. He had no vision for the strange social
aspirations that were silently haunting the inner mind of his
contemporaries. Of these aspirations, in all their depth and
significance, Diderot was the half-conscious oracle and unaccepted
prophet. It was not deliberate philosophical calculation that made him
so, but the spontaneous impulse of his own genius and temperament. He
was no conscious political destroyer, but his soul was open to all those
voices of sentiment, to all those ideals of domestic life, to those
primary forces of natural affection, which were so urgently pressing
asunder the old feudal bonds, and so swiftly ripening a vast social
crisis. Thus his enthusiasm for Richardson was, at its root, another
side of that love of the life of peaceful industry, which gave one of
its noblest characteristics to the Encyclopaedia.
To this enthusiasm Diderot gave voice in half a dozen pages which are
counted among his masterpieces. Richardson died in 1761, and Diderot
flung off a commemorative piece, which is without any order and
connection; but this makes it more an echo, as he called it, of the
tumult of his own heart. Here, indeed, he merits Gautier's laudatory
phrase, and is as "flamboyant" as one could desire. To understand the
march of feeling in French literature, and to measure the growth and
expansion in criticism, we need only compare Diderot's _eloge_ on
Richardson with Fontenelle's _eloge_ on Dangeau or Leibnitz. The
exaggerations of phrase, the violences of feeling, the broken
apostrophes, give to Diderot's _eloge_ an unpleasant tone of
declamation. Some of us may still prefer the moderation, the subtlety,
the nice discrimination, of the critics of another school. Still it
would be a sign of narrowness and short-sight not to discern the
sincerity, the movement, the real meaning underneath all that profusion
of glaring colour.
"O Richardson, Richardson, unique among men in my eyes, thou shalt
be my favourite all my life long! If I am hard driven by pressing
need, if my friend is overtaken by want, if the mediocrity of my
fortune is not enough to give my children what is necessary for
their education, I will sell my books; but thou shalt remain to me,
thou shalt remain on the same shelf with Moses, Homer, Euripides,
Sophocles!
"O Richardson, I make bold to say that the truest history is full
of falsehoods, and that your romance is full of truths. History
paints a few individuals; you paint the human race. History sets
down to its few individuals what they have neither said nor done;
whatever you set down to man, he has both said and done.... No; I
say that history is often a bad novel; and the novel, as you have
handled it, is good history. O painter of nature, 'tis you who are
never false!
"You accuse Richardson of being long! You must have forgotten how
much trouble, pains, busy movement, it costs to bring the smallest
undertaking to a good issue,--to end a suit, to settle a marriage,
to bring about a reconciliation. Think of these details what you
please, but for me they will be full of interest if they are only
true, if they bring out the passions, if they display character.
They are common, you say; it is all what one sees every day. You
are mistaken; 'tis what passes every day before your eyes, and what
you never see."
In Richardson's work, he says, as in the world, men are divided into two
classes, those who enjoy and those who suffer, and it is always to the
latter that he draws the mind of the reader. It is due to Richardson, he
cries, "if I have loved my fellow-creatures better, and loved my duties
better; if I have never felt anything but pity for the bad; if I have
conceived a deeper compassion for the unfortunate, more veneration for
the good, more circumspection in the use of present things, more
indifference about future things, more contempt for life, more love for
virtue." The works of Richardson are his touch-stone; those who do not
love them, stand judged and condemned in his eyes. Yet in the midst of
this tumult of admiration Diderot admits that the number of readers who
will feel all their value can never be great; it requires too severe a
taste, and then the variety of events is such, relations are so
multiplied, the management of them is so complicated, there are so many
things arranged, so many personages! "O Richardson; if thou hast not
enjoyed in thy lifetime all the reputation of thy deserts, how great
wilt thou be to our grandchildren when they see thee from the distance
at which we now view Homer! Then who will there be with daring enough to
strike out a line of thy sublime work?"[10] Yet of the very moderate
number of living persons who have ever read _Clarissa Harlowe_, it would
be safe to say that the large majority have read it in a certain
abridgment in three volumes which appeared some years ago.
[10] The _Eloge de Richardson_ is in Diderot's Works, v. 212-227.
Doctor Johnson made the answer of true criticism to some one who
complained to him that Richardson is tedious. "Why, sir," he said, "if
you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so
much frighted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for
the sentiment, and consider the story only as giving occasion to the
sentiment." And this is just what Diderot and the Paris of the middle of
the eighteenth century were eager to do. It was the sentiment that
touched and delighted them in _Clarissa_, just as it was the sentiment
that made the fortune of the great romance in their own tongue, which
was inspired by _Clarissa_, and yet was so different from _Clarissa_.
Rousseau threw into the _New Heloisa_ a glow of passion of which the
London printer was incapable, and he added a beauty of external
landscape and a strong feeling for the objects and movement of wild
natural scenery that are very different indeed from the atmosphere of
the cedar-parlour and the Flask Walk at Hampstead. But the sentiment,
the adoration of the _belle ame_, is the same, and it was the _belle
ame_ that fascinated that curious society, where rude logic and a stern
anti-religious dialectic went hand-in-hand with the most tender and
exalted sensibility.[11] It is singular that Diderot says nothing about
Rousseau's famous romance, and we can only suppose that his silence
arose from his contempt for the private perversity and seeming
insincerity of the author.
[11] The _belle ame_ was the origin of the _schoene Seele_ that has
played such a part in German literature and life. The reader will
find a history of the expression in an appendix to Dr. Erich
Schmidt's study. _Richardson, Rousseau, und Goethe_ (Jena, 1875).
Diderot made one attempt of his own, in which we may notice the
influence of the minute realism and the tearful pathos of Richardson.
_The Nun_ was not given to the world until 1796, when its author had
been twelve years in his grave. Since then it has been reproduced in
countless editions in France and Belgium, and has been translated into
English, Spanish, and German. It fell in with certain passionate
movements of the popular mind against some anti-social practices of the
Catholic Church. Perhaps it is not unjust to suppose that the horrible
picture of the depraved abbess has had some share in attracting a
public.
It is thoroughly characteristic of Diderot's dreamy, heedless humour,
and of the sincerity both of his interest in his work for its own sake,
and of his indifference to the popular voice, that he should have
allowed this, like so many other pieces, to lie in his drawer, or at
most to circulate clandestinely among three or four of his more
intimate friends. It was written about 1760, and ingenious historians
have made of it a signal for the great crusade against the Church. In
truth, as we have seen, it was a strictly private performance, and could
be no signal for a public movement. _La Religieuse_ was undoubtedly an
expression of the strong feeling of the Encyclopaedic school about
celibacy, renunciation of the world, and the burial of men and women
alive in the cloister.
The circumstances under which the story was written are worthy of a word
or two. Among the friends of Madame d'Epinay, Grimm, and Diderot was a
certain Marquis de Croismare. He had deserted the circle, and retired to
his estates in Normandy. It occurred to one of them that it would be a
pleasant stratagem for recalling him to Paris, to invent a personage who
should be shut up in a convent against her will, and then to make this
personage appeal to the well-known courage and generosity of the Marquis
de Croismare to rescue her. A previous adventure of the Marquis
suggested the fiction, and made its success the more probable. Diderot
composed the letters of the imaginary nun, and the conspirators had the
satisfaction of making merry at supper over the letters which the loyal
and unsuspecting Marquis sent in reply. At length the Marquis's interest
became so eager that they resolved that the best way of ending his
torment was to make the nun die. When the Marquis de Croismare returned
to Paris, the plot was confessed, the victim of the mystification
laughed at the joke, and the friendship of the party seemed to be
strengthened by their common sorrow for the woes of the dead sister. But
Diderot had been taken in his own trap. His imagination, which he had
set to work in jest, was caught by the figure and the situation. One day
while he was busy about the tale, a friend paid him a visit, and found
him plunged in grief and his face bathed in tears. "What in the world
can be the matter with you?" cried the friend. "What the matter?"
answered Diderot in a broken voice; "I am filled with misery by a story
that I am writing!" This capacity of thinking of imaginary personages as
if they were friends living in the next street, had been stirred by
Richardson. His acquaintances would sometimes notice anxiety and
consternation on his countenance, and would ask him if anything had
befallen his health, his friends, his family, his fortune. "O my
friends," he would reply, "Pamela, Clarissa, Grandison ...!" It was in
their world, not in the Rue Taranne, that he really lived when these
brooding moods overtook him. And while he was writing _The Nun_, Sister
Susan and Sister Theresa, the lady superior of Longchamp, and the
libertine superior of Saint Eutropius, were as alive to him as Clarissa
was alive to the score of correspondents who begged Richardson to spare
her honour, not to let her die, to make Lovelace marry her, or by no
means to allow Lovelace to marry her.
_The Nun_ professes to be the story of a young lady whose family have
thrust her into a convent, and her narrative, with an energy and
reality that Diderot hardly ever surpassed, presents the odious sides of
monastic life, and the various types of superstition, tyranny, and
corruption that monastic life engenders. Yet Diderot had far too much
genius to be tempted into the exaggerations of more vulgar assailants of
monkeries and nunneries. He may have begun his work with the purpose of
attacking a mischievous and superstitious system that mutilates human
life, but he certainly continued it because he became interested in his
creations. Diderot was a social destroyer by accident, but in intention
he was a truly scientific moralist, penetrated by the spirit of
observation and experiment; he shrunk from no excess in dissection, and
found nothing in human pathology too repulsive for examination. Yet _The
Nun_ has none of the artificial violences of the modern French school,
which loves moral disease for its own sake. The action is all very
possible, and the types are all sufficiently human and probable. The
close realistic touches which flowed from the intensity of the writer's
illusion, naturally convey a certain degree of the same illusion to the
mind of the reader.
Existence as it goes on in these strange hives is caught with what one
knows to be true fidelity; its dulness, its littleness, its goings and
comings, its spite, its reduction of the spiritual to the most purely
mechanical.
"The first moments passed in mutual praises, in questions about the
house that I had quitted, in experiments as to my character, my
inclinations, my tastes, my understanding. They feel you all over;
there is a number of little snares that they set for you, and from
which they draw the most just conclusions. For example, they throw
out some word of scandal, and then they look at you; they begin a
story, and then wait to see whether you will ask for the end or
will leave it there; if you make the most ordinary remark, they
declare that it is charming, though they know well enough that it
is nothing; they praise or they blame you with a purpose; they try
to worm out your most hidden thoughts; they question you as to what
you read; they offer you religious books and profane, and carefully
notice your choice; they invite you to some slight infractions of
the rule; they tell you little confidences, and throw out hints
about the foibles of the Lady Superior. All is carefully gathered
up and told over again. They leave you, they take you up again;
they try to sound your sentiments about manners, about piety, about
the world, about religion, about the monastic life, about
everything. The result of all these repeated experiments is an
epithet that stamps your character, and is always added by way of
surname to the name that you already bear. I was called Sister
Susan the Reserved."[12]
[12] _La Religieuse._ _Oeuv._, v. 110.
The portraits we feel to be to the life. The strongest of them all is
undoubtedly the most disagreeable, the most atrocious; it is, if you
will, the most infamous. We can only endure it as we endure to traverse
the ward for epileptics in an hospital for the insane. It is appalling,
it fills you with horror, it haunts you for days and nights, it leaves a
kind of stain on the memory. It is a possibility of character of which
the healthy, the pure, the unthinking have never dreamed. Such a
portrait is not art, that is true; but it is science, and that delivers
the critic from the necessity of searching his vocabulary for the cheap
superlatives of moral censure. Whether it be art or science, however,
men cannot but ask themselves how Diderot came to think it worth while
to execute so painful a study. The only answer is that the
irregularities of human nature--those more shameful parts of it, which
in some characters survive the generations of social pressure that have
crushed them down in civilised communities--had an irresistible
attraction for the curiosity of his genius. The whole story is full of
power; it abounds in phrases that have the stamp of genius; and
suppressed vehemence lends to it strength. But it is fatally wanting in
the elements of tenderness, beauty, and sympathy. If we chance to take
it up for a second or for a tenth time, it infallibly holds us; but
nobody seeks to return to it of his own will, and it holds us under
protest.
If Richardson created one school in France, Sterne created another. The
author of _Tristram Shandy_ was himself only a follower of one of the
greatest of French originals, and a follower at a long distance. Even
those who have the keenest relish for our "good-humoured, civil,
nonsensical, Shandean kind of a book," ought to admit how far it falls
behind Rabelais in exuberance, force, richness of extravagance, breadth
of colour, fulness of blood. They may claim, however, for Sterne what,
in comparison with these great elements, are the minor qualities of
simplicity, tenderness, precision, and finesse. These are the qualities
that delighted the French taste. In 1762 Sterne visited Paris, and found
_Tristram Shandy_ almost as well known there as in London, and he
instantly had dinners and suppers for a fortnight on his hands. Among
them were dinners and suppers at Holbach's, where he made the
acquaintance of Diderot, and where perhaps he made the discovery that
"notwithstanding the French make such a pother about the word
_sentiment_, they have no precise idea attached to it."[13] The
_Sentimental Journey_ appeared in 1768, and was instantly pronounced by
the critics in both countries to be inimitable. It is no wonder that a
performance of such delicacy of literary expression, united with so much
good-nature, such easy, humane, amiable feeling, went to the hearts of
the French of the eighteenth century. "My design in it," said Sterne,
"was to teach us to love the world and our fellow-creatures better than
we do, so it runs most upon those gentle passions and affections which
aid so much to it."[14] This exactly fell in with the reigning Parisian
modes, and with such sentiment as that of Diderot most of all. There
were several French imitations of the _Sentimental Journey_,[15] but the
only one that has survived in popular esteem, if indeed this can be said
to have survived, is Diderot's _Jacques le Fataliste_.
[13] Sterne's Letters, May 23, 1765.
[14] Nov. 12, 1767.
[15] E.g. _Le Voyageur Sentimental_ of Vernes (Grimm, _Corr. Lit._,
xiii. 227).
It seems to have been composed about the time (1773) of Diderot's
journey to Holland and St. Petersburg, of which we shall have more to
say in a later chapter. Its history is almost as singular as the history
of _Rameau's Nephew_. A contemporary speaks of a score of copies as
existing in different parts of Germany, and we may conjecture that they
found their way there from friends whom Diderot made in Holland, and
some of them were no doubt sent by Grimm to his subscribers. The first
fragment of it that saw the light in print was in a translation that
Schiller made of its most striking episode, in the year 1785. This is
another illustration of the eagerness of the best minds of Germany to
possess and diffuse the most original products of French intelligence
and hardihood. Diderot, as we have said, stands in the front rank along
with Rousseau, along also with Richardson, Sterne, and Goldsmith, among
those who in Germany kindled the glow of sentimentalism, both in its
good and its bad forms. It was in Germany that the first complete
version of the whole of _Jacques le Fataliste_ appeared, in 1792. Not
until four years later did the French obtain an original transcript.
This they owed to the generosity of Prince Henri of Prussia, the brother
of Frederick the Great; he presented it to the Institute.
"There is going about here," wrote Goethe in 1780, while Diderot was
still alive, "a manuscript of Diderot's called _Jacques le Fataliste et
son Maitre_, and it is really first-rate--a very fine and exquisite
meal, prepared and dished up with great skill, as if for the palate of
some singular idol. I set myself in the place of this Bel, and in six
uninterrupted hours swallowed all the courses in the order, and
according to the intentions, of this excellent cook and _maitre
d'hotel_."[16] He goes on to say that when other people came to read it,
some preferred one story, and some another. On the whole, one is
strongly inclined to judge that few modern readers will equal Goethe's
unsparing appetite. The reader sighs in thinking of the brilliant and
unflagging wit, the verve, the wicked graces of _Candide_, and we long
for the ease and simplicity and light stroke of the _Sentimental
Journey_. Diderot has the German heaviness. Perhaps this is because he
had too much conscience, and laboured too deeply under the burdensome
problems of the world. He could not emancipate himself sufficiently from
the tumult of his own sympathies. At many a page both of _Jacques le
Fataliste_, and of others of his pieces, we involuntarily recall the
writer's own contention that excess of sensibility makes a mediocre
actor. The same law is emphatically true of the artist. Diderot never
writes as if his spirit were quite free--and perhaps it never was free.
If we are to enjoy these reckless outbursts of all that is bizarre and
grotesque, these defiances of all that is sane, coherent, and rational,
we must never feel conscious of a limitation, or a possibility of stint
or check. The draught must seem to come from an exhaustless fountain of
boisterous laughter, irony, and caprice. Perfect fooling is so rare an
art, that not half a dozen men in literature have really possessed it;
perhaps only Aristophanes, Rabelais, Shakespeare. _Candide_, wonderful
as it is, has many a stroke of malice, and _Tristram Shandy_, wonderful
as that is too, is not without tinges of self-consciousness; and neither
malice nor self-consciousness belongs to the greater gods of buffoonery.
Cervantes and Moliere, those great geniuses of finest temper, still have
none of the reckless buffoonery of such scenes as that between Prince
Henry and the drawer, or the mad extravagances of the _Merry Wives_;
still less of the wild topsy-turvy of the _Birds_ or the _Peace_. They
have not the note of true Pantagruelism. Most critics, again, would find
in Swift a truculence, sometimes latent and sometimes flagrant, that
would deprive him, too, of his place among these great masters of free
and exuberant farce. Diderot, at any rate, must rank in the second class
among those who have attempted to tread a measure among the whimsical
zigzags of unreason. The sincere sentimentalist makes a poor reveller.
[16] Quoted in Rosenkranz, ii. 326.
We have spoken, as many others have done before us, of Diderot as
imitating our two English celebrities, and in one sense that is a
perfectly true description. In _Jacques le Fataliste_ whole sentences
are transcribed in letter and word from _Tristram Shandy_. Yet imitation
is hardly the right word for the process by which Diderot showed that an
author had seized and affected him. _La Religieuse_ would not have been
written if there had been no Richardson, nor _Jacques le Fataliste_ if
there had been no Sterne; yet Diderot's work is not really like the work
of either of his celebrated contemporaries. They gave him the suggestion
of a method and a sentiment to start from, and he mused and brooded over
it until, from among the clouds of his imagination, there began to loom
figures of his own, moving along a path which was also his own. This was
the history of his adaptation of _The Natural Son_ from Goldoni. We can
only be sure that nothing became blithe in its passage through his mind.
He was too much of a preacher to be an effective humorist.
There is in _Jacques le Fataliste_ none of that gift of true creation
which produced such figures as Trim, and my Uncle Toby, and Mr. Shandy.
Jacques's master is a mere lay figure, and Jacques himself, with his
monotonous catchword, "_Il etait ecrit la-haut_," has no real
personality; he has none of the naturalness that wins us to Corporal
Trim, still less has he any touch of the profound humour of the immortal
Sancho. The book is a series of stories, rather than Sterne's subtle
amalgam of pathos, gentle irony, and frank buffoonery; and the stories
themselves are for the most part either insipid or obscene. There is
perhaps one exception. The longest and the most elaborate of them, that
which Schiller translated, is more like one of the modern French novels
of a certain kind, than any other production of the eighteenth century.
The adventure of Madame de Pommeraye and the Marquis d'Arcis is a crude
foreshadowing of a style that has been perfected by M. Feydeau and M.
Flaubert. The Marquis has been the lover of Madame de Pommeraye; he
grows weary of her, and in time the lady discovers the bitter truth.
Resignation is not among her virtues, and in her rage and anguish she
devises an elaborate plan of revenge, which she carries out with the
utmost tenacity and resolution. It consists in leading him on, by
skilful incitements, to marry a woman whom he supposes to be an angel of
purity, but whom Madame de Pommeraye triumphantly reveals to him on the
morning after his marriage as a creature whose past history has been one
of notorious depravity. This disagreeable story, of which Balzac would
have made a masterpiece, is told in an interesting way, and the
humoristic machinery by which the narrative is managed is less tiresome
than usual. It is at least a story with meaning, purpose, and character.
It is neither a jumble without savour or point, nor is it rank and gross
like half the pages in the book. "Your _Jacques_," Diderot supposes some
one to say to him, "is only a tasteless rhapsody of facts, some real,
others imaginary, written without grace, and distributed without order.
How can a man of sense and conduct, who prides himself on his
philosophy, find amusement in spinning out tales so obscene as
these?"[17] And this is exactly what the modern critic is bound to ask.
In Rabelais there is at least puissant laughter; in Montaigne, when he
dwells on such matters, there is _naivete_. In Diderot we do not even
feel that he is having any enjoyment in his grossnesses; they have not
even the bad excuse of seeming spontaneous and coming from the fulness
of his heart. "Reader," he says, "I amuse myself in writing the follies
that you commit; your follies make me laugh; and my book puts you out of
humour. To speak frankly to you, I find that the more wicked of us two
is not myself." Unhappily, he does not convey the impression of
amusement to his readers; it has no infection in it, and if his book
puts us out of humour, it is not by its satire on mankind, but by its
essential want of point and want of meaning, either moral or aesthetic.
The few masters of this style have known how to bind the heterogeneous
elements together, if not by some deep-lying purpose, at least by some
pervading mood of rich and mellow feeling. In _Jacques le Fataliste_ is
neither.
[17] vi. 221, 222.
That men of the stamp of Goethe and Schiller should have found such a
book of delicious feast, naturally makes the disparaging critic pause.
In truth, we can easily see how it was. Like all the rest of Diderot's
work, it breaks roughly in upon that starved formalism which had for
long lain so heavily both on art and life. Its hardihood, its very
license, its contempt of conventions, its presentation of common people
and coarse passions and rough lives, all made it a dissolvent of the
thin, dry, and frigid rules which tyrannised over the world, and
interposed between the artist or the thinker and the real existence of
man on the earth. When we think of what European literature was, it
ceases to be wonderful that Goethe should have been unable for six whole
hours to tear himself away from a book that so few men to-day, save
under some compulsion, could persuade themselves to read through. On
great wholesome minds the grossness left no stain, and the interest of
Diderot's singularities worked as a stimulus to a happier originality in
men of more disciplined endowments. And let us add, of more poetic
endowments. It is the lack of poetry in _Jacques_ that makes its irony
so heavy to us. We only willingly suffer those to take us down into the
depths who can also raise us on the wings of a beautiful fancy. Even
Rabelais has his poetic moments, as in the picture of Cupid
self-disarmed before the industrious serenity of the Muses. A single
lovely image, like Sterne's figure of the recording angel, reconciles us
to many a miry page. But in _Jacques le Fataliste_, Diderot never raises
his eye for an instant to the blue aether, his ear catches no harmony of
awe, of hope, nor even of a noble despair. With a kind of clumsy
jubilancy he holds us fast in the ways and language of thick and clogged
sense. The _fatrasie_ of old France has its place in literature, but it
can never be restored in ages when a host of moral anxieties have laid
siege to men's souls. The uncommon is always welcome to the lover of
art, but it must justify itself. _Jacques_ has the quality of the
uncommon; it is a curiously prepared dish, as Goethe said; but it lacks
the pinch of salt and the handful of herbs with sharp diffusive
flavour.
CHAPTER III.
ART.
In 1759 Diderot wrote for Grimm the first of his criticisms on the
exhibition of paintings in the Salon. At the beginning of the reign of
Lewis XV. these exhibitions took place every year, as they take place
now. But from 1751 onwards, they were only held once in two years.
Diderot has left his notes on every salon from 1759 to 1781, with the
exception of that of 1773, when he was travelling in Holland and Russia.
We have already seen how Grimm made Diderot work for him. The nine
_Salons_ are one of the results of this willing bondage, and they are
perhaps the only part of Diderot's works that has enjoyed a certain
measure of general popularity. Mr. Carlyle describes them with emphatic
enthusiasm: "What with their unrivalled clearness, painting the picture
over again for us, so that we too _see_ it, and can judge it; what with
their sunny fervour, inventiveness, real artistic genius, which wants
nothing but a _hand_, they are with some few exceptions in the German
tongue, the only Pictorial Criticisms we know of worth reading."[18] I
only love painting in poetry, Madame Necker said to Diderot, and it is
into poetry that you have found out the secret of rendering the works of
our modern painters, even the commonest of them. It would be a truly
imperial luxury, wrote A. W. Schlegel, to get a collection of pictures
described for oneself by Diderot.
[18] _Essays_, iv. 303. (Ed. 1869.)
There is a freshness, a vivacity, a zeal, a sincerity, a brightness of
interest in his subject, which are perhaps unique in the whole history
of criticism. He flings himself into the task with the perfection of
natural abandonment to a joyous and delightful subject. His whole
personality is engaged in a work that has all the air of being
overflowing pleasure, and his pleasure is contagious. His criticism
awakens the imagination of the reader. Not only do we see the picture;
we hear Diderot's own voice in ecstasies of praise and storms of
boisterous wrath. There is such mass in his criticism; so little of the
mincing and niggling of the small virtuoso. In facility of expression,
in animation, in fecundity of mood, in fine improvisation, these pieces
are truly incomparable. There is such an _impetus animi et quaedam artis
libido_. Some of the charm and freedom may be due to the important
circumstance that he was not writing for the public. He was not exposed
to the reaction of a large unknown audience upon style; hence the
absence of all the stiffness of literary pose. But the positive
conditions of such success lay in the resources of Diderot's own
character.
The sceptic, the dogmatist, the dialectician, and the other personages
of a heterogeneous philosophy who existed in Diderot's head, all
disappear or fall back into a secondary place, and he surrenders himself
with a curious freedom to such imaginative beauty as contemporary art
provided for him. Diderot was perhaps the one writer of the time who was
capable on occasion of rising above the strong prevailing spirit of the
time; capable of forgetting for a season the passion of the great
philosophical and ecclesiastical battle. No one save Diderot could have
been moved by sight of a picture to such an avowal as this:
"Absurd rigorists do not know the effect of external ceremonies on
the people; they can never have seen the enthusiasm of the
multitude at the procession of the _Fete Dieu_, an enthusiasm that
sometimes gains even me. I have never seen that long file of
priests in their vestments; those young acolytes clad in their
white robes, with broad blue sashes engirdling their waists, and
casting flowers on the ground before the Holy Sacrament; the crowd
as it goes before and follows after them hushed in religious
silence, and so many with their faces bent reverently to the
ground; I have never heard that grave and pathetic chant, as it is
led by the priests and fervently responded to by an infinity of
voices of men, of women, of girls, of little children, without my
inmost heart being stirred, and tears coming into my eyes. There is
in it something, I know not what, that is grand, solemn, sombre,
and mournful."
Thus to find the material of religious reaction in the author of
_Jacques le Fataliste_ and the centre of the atheistic group, completes
the circle of Diderot's immense and deep-lying versatility. And in his
account of such a mood, we see how he came to be so great and poetical a
critic; we see the sincerity, the alertness, the profound mobility, with
which he was open to impressions of colour, of sound, of the pathos of
human aspiration, of the solemn concourses of men.
France has long been sovereign in criticism in its literary sense. In
that department she has simply never had, and has not now, any serious
rival. In the profounder historic criticism, Germany exhibits her one
great, peculiar, and original gift. In the criticism of art Germany has
at least three memorable names; but save where history is concerned most
modern German aesthetics are so clouded with metaphysical speculation as
to leave the obscurity of a very difficult subject as thick as it was
before. In France the beginnings of art-criticism were literary rather
than philosophic, and with the exception of Cousin's worthless
eloquence, and of the writers whose philosophy Cousin dictated, and of
M. Taine's ingenious paradoxes, Diderot is the only writer who has
deliberately brought a vivid spirit and a philosophic judgment to the
discussion of the forms of Beauty, as things worthy of real elucidation.
As far back as the time of the English Restoration, Dufresnoy had
written in bad Latin a poem on the art of Painting, which had the signal
honour of being translated into good English by no less illustrious a
master of English than Dryden, and it was again translated by Mason, the
friend of Reynolds and of Gray. Imitations, applied to the pictorial
art, of the immortal Epistle to the Pisos, came thick in France in the
eighteenth century.[19] But these effusions are merely literary, and
they are very bad literature indeed. The abbe Dubos published in 1719 a
volume of Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting, including
observations also on the relations of those arts to Music. Lessing is
known to have made use of this work in his _Laocoeon_, and Diderot gave
it a place among the books which he recommended in his Plan of a
University.[20] This, as it is the earliest, seems to have been the best
contribution to aesthetic thought before Lessing and Diderot. Daniel
Webb, the English friend of Raphael Mengs, published an Enquiry into the
Beauties of Painting (1760), and Diderot wrote a notice of it,[21] but
it appears to have made no mark on his mind. Andre, a Jesuit father,
wrote an Essay on the Beautiful (1741), which distributed the kinds of
art with precision, but omitted to say in what the Beautiful consists.
The abbe Batteux wrote a volume reducing the fine arts to a single
principle, and another volume attempting a systematic classification of
them. The first of these was the occasion of Diderot's Letter on Deaf
Mutes, and Diderot described their author as a good man of letters, but
without taste, without criticism, and without philosophy; _a ces
bagatelles pres, le plus joli garcon du monde_.[22]
[19] _E.g._ Watelet's poem, _Sur l'Art de Peindre_, 1760; Le
Mierre's _Sur la Peinture_, 1769; Marsy's _Pictura Carmen_, 1736.
See Diderot's works, xiii. 17, etc.
[20] _Oeuv._, iii. 486. Guhrauer, ii. 15. Also Bluemner's admirable
edition of the _Laocoeon_, p. 173.
[21] xiii. 33.
[22] Grimm, _Corr. Lit._, iv. 136. In another place in the same work
either Grimm or Diderot makes a remark about Batteux, which is worth
remembering in our own age of official vindications of orthodoxy.
The abbe had written a book about first causes. "I venture to
observe moreover to M. l'abbe Batteux that when in this world a man
has put on the dress of any sort of harlequin, red or black, with a
pair of bands or a frill, he ought to give up once for all every
kind of philosophic discussion, because it is impossible for him to
speak according to his faith and his conscience; and a writer of bad
faith is all the more odious, as nothing compelled him to break
silence." _Ib._ vi. 120.
Travellers to the land where criticism of art has been so slight, and
where production has been so noble, so bounteous, so superb, published
the story of what Italy had shown to them. Madame de Pompadour designed
to make her brother the Superintendent of fine arts, and she despatched
Cochin, the great engraver of the day, to accompany him in a studious
tour through the holy land of the arts. Cochin was away nearly two
years, and on his return produced three little volumes (1758), in which
he deals such blows to some vaunted immortalities as made the idolators
by convention not a little angry. The abbe Richard (1766) published six
very stupid volumes on Italy, and such criticism on art as they contain
is not worthy of serious remark. The President de Brosses spent a year
in Italy (1739-40), and wrote letters to his friends at home, which may
be read to-day with interest and pleasure for their graphic picture of
Italian society; but the criticisms which they contain on the great
works of art are those of a well-informed man of the world, taking many
things for granted, rather than of a philosophical critic industriously
using his own mind. His book recalls to us how true the eighteenth
century was to itself in its hatred of Gothic architecture, that symbol
and associate of mysticism, and of the age which the eighteenth century
blindly abhorred as the source of all the tyrannical laws and cruel
superstitions that still weighed so heavily on mankind. "You know the
Palace of Saint Mark at Venice," says De Brosses: "_c'est un vilain
monsieur, s'il eu fut jamais, massif, sombre, et gothique, du plus
mechant gout_!"[23]
[23] _Lettres Familieres_, i. 174. (Ed. 1869.)
Dupaty, like De Brosses, an eminent lawyer, an acquaintance of Diderot
and an early friend of a conspicuous figure of a later time, the
ill-starred Vergniaud, travelled in Italy almost immediately before the
Revolution (1785), and his letters, when read with those of De Brosses,
are a curious illustration of the change that had come over the spirit
of men in the interval. He leaves the pictures of the Pitti collection
at Florence, and plunges into meditation in the famous gardens behind
the palace, rejoicing with much expansion in the glories of light and
air, in greenery and the notes of birds, and finally sums all up in one
rapturous exclamation of the vast superiority of nature over art.[24]
[24] Dupaty's _Lettres sur l'Italie_, No. 40. In talking of Rome, he
complains in a very Diderotian spirit of the want of _le beau
moral_. "On ne trouve ici dans les moeurs ni des hommes prives ni
des hommes publics, cette moralite, cette bienseance, dont les
moeurs francoises sont pleines. _Le beau moral est absolument
inconnu._ Or, c'est pour atteindre a ce beau moral dans tous les
genres que la sensibilite est la plus tourmentee; qu'elle est en
proie aux contentions de l'esprit, aux emulations de l'ame ...
qu'elle pare avec tant de raffinement et de peine, les ecrits, les
discours, les passions, enfin toute la vie publique et privee.'
It is impossible, in reading how deeply Diderot was affected by
fifth-rate paintings and sculpture, not to count it among the great
losses of literature that he saw few masterpieces. He never made the
great pilgrimage. He was never at Venice, Florence, Parma, Rome. A
journey to Italy was once planned, in which Grimm and Rousseau were to
have been his travelling companions;[25] the project was not realised,
and the strongest critic of art that his country produced never saw the
greatest glories of art. If Diderot had visited Florence and Rome, even
the mighty painter of the Last Judgment and the creator of those sublime
figures in the New Sacristy at San Lorenzo, would have found an
interpreter worthy of him. But it was not to be. "It is rare," he once
wrote, "for an artist to excel without having seen Italy, just as a man
seldom becomes a great writer or a man of great taste without having
given severe study to the ancients."[26] Diderot at least knew what he
lost.
[25] x. 514, _n._
[26] xi. 241.
French art was then, as art usually is, the mirror of its time,
reproducing such imaginative feeling as society could muster. When the
Republic and the Empire came, and twenty years of battle and siege, then
the art of the previous generation fell into a degree of contempt for
which there is hardly a parallel. Pictures that had been the delight of
the town and had brought fortunes to their painters, rotted on the quays
or were sold for a few pence at low auctions. Fragonard, who had been
the darling of his age, died in neglect and beggary. David and his
hideous art of the Empire utterly effaced what had thrown the
contemporaries of Diderot into rapture.[27] Every one knows all that can
be said against the French paintings of Diderot's time. They are
executed hastily and at random; they abound in technical defects of
colour, of drawing, of composition; their feeling is light and shallow.
Watteau died in 1721--at the same premature age as Raphael,--but he
remained as the dominating spirit of French art through the eighteenth
century. Of course the artists went to Rome, but they changed sky and
not spirit. The pupils of the academy came back with their portfolios
filled with sketches in which we see nothing of the "lone mother of dead
empires," nothing of the vast ruins and the great sombre desolate
Campagna, but only Rome turned into a decoration for the scenes of a
theatre or the panels of a boudoir. The Olympus of Homer and of Virgil,
as has been well said, becomes the Olympus of Ovid. Strength, sublimity,
even stateliness disappeared, unless we admit some of the first two
qualities in the landscapes of Vernet. Not only is beauty replaced by
prettiness, but by prettiness in season and out of season. The common
incongruity of introducing a spirit of elegance and literature into the
simplicities of the true pastoral, was condemned by Diderot as a mixture
of Fontenelle with Theocritus. We do not know what name he would have
given to that still more curious incongruity of taste, which made a
publisher adorn a treatise on Differential and Integral Calculus with
amusing plates by Cochin, and introduce dainty little vignettes into a
Demonstration of the Properties of the Cycloid.
[27] Goncourt's _L'Art au 18ieme Siecle_, i.
There is one true story that curiously illustrates the spirit of French
art in those equivocal days. When Madame de Pompadour made up her mind
to play pander to the jaded appetites of the king, she had a famous
female model of the day introduced into a _Holy Family_, which was
destined for the private chapel of the queen. The portrait answered its
purpose; it provoked the curiosity and desire of the king, and the model
was invited to the Parc-aux-Cerfs.[28] This was typical of the service
that painting was expected to render to the society that adored it and
paid for it. "All is daintiness, delicate caressing for delicate senses,
even down to the external decoration of life, down to the sinuous lines,
the wanton apparel, the refined commodity of rooms and furniture. In
such a place and in such company, it is enough to be together to feel
at ease. Their idleness does not weigh upon them; life is their
plaything."[29]
[28] Goncourt's _Art au 18ieme Siecle_, i. 213.
[29] Taine's _Ancien Regime_, p. 186.
Only let us not, while reserving our serious admiration for Titian,
Rembrandt, Raphael, and the rest of the gods and demigods, refuse at
least a measure of historic tolerance to these light and graceful
creations. Boucher, whose dreams of rose and blue were the delight of
his age, came away from Rome saying: "Raphael is a woman, Michael Angelo
is a monster; one is paradise, the other is hell; they are painters of
another world; it is a dead language that nobody speaks in our day. We
others are the painters of our own age: we have not common sense, but we
are charming." This account of them was not untrue. They filled up the
space between the grandiose pomp of Le Brun and the sombre
pseudo-antique of David, just as the incomparable grace and sparkle of
Voltaire's lighter verse filled up the space in literature between
Racine and Chenier. They have a poetry of their own; they are cheerful,
sportive, full of fancy, and like everything else of that day, intensely
sociable. They are, at any rate, even the most sportive of them, far
less unwholesome and degrading than the acres of martyrdoms,
emaciations, bad crucifixions, bad pietas, that make some galleries more
disgusting than a lazar-house.[30]
[30] "Si tous les tableaux de martyrs que nos grands peintres ont si
sublimement peints, passaient a une posterite reculee, pour qui nous
prendrait-elle? Pour des betes feroces ou des
anthropophages."--Diderot's _Pensees sur la Peinture_.
For Watteau himself, the deity of the century, Diderot cared very
little. "I would give ten Watteaus," he said, "for one Teniers." This
was as much to be expected, as it was characteristic in Lewis XIV., when
some of Teniers's pictures were submitted to him, imperiously to command
"_ces magots la_" to be taken out of his sight.
Greuze (_b. 1725, d. 1805_) of all the painters of the time was
Diderot's chief favourite. Diderot was not at all blind to Greuze's
faults, to his repetitions, his frequent want of size and amplitude, the
excess of gray and of violet in his colouring. But all these were
forgotten in transports of sympathy for the sentiment. As we glance at a
list of Greuze's subjects, we perceive that we are in the very heart of
the region of the domestic, the moral, "_l'honnete_," the homely pathos
of the common people. The Death of a father of a family, regretted by
his children; The Death of an unnatural father, abandoned by his
children; The beloved mother caressed by her little ones; A child
weeping over its dead bird; A Paralytic tended by his family, or the
Fruit of a Good Education:--Diderot was ravished by such themes. The
last picture he describes as a proof that compositions of that kind are
capable of doing honour to the gifts and the sentiments of the
artist.[31] The _Girl bewailing her dead bird_ throws him into raptures.
"O, the pretty elegy!" he begins, "the charming poem! the lovely idyll!"
and so forth, until at length he breaks into a burst of lyric
condolence addressed to the weeping child, that would fill four or five
of these pages.[32]
[31] x. 143.
[32] x. 343.
No picture of the eighteenth century was greeted with more enthusiasm
than Greuze's _Accordee de Village_, which was exhibited in 1761. It
seems to tell a story, and therefore even to-day, in spite of its dulled
pink and lustreless blue, it arrests the visitor to one of the less
frequented halls of the Louvre.[33] Paris, weary of mythology and sated
with pretty indecencies, was fascinated by the simplicity of Greuze's
village tale. "_On se sent gagner d'une emotion douce en le regardant_,"
said Diderot, and this gentle emotion was dear to the cultivated classes
in France at that moment of the century. It was the year of the _New
Heloisa_.
[33] No. 260 of the French School.
The subject is of the simplest: a peasant paying the dower-money of his
daughter. "The father"--it is prudent of us to borrow Diderot's
description--"is seated in the great chair of the house. Before him his
son-in-law standing, and holding in his left hand the bag that contains
the money. The betrothed, standing also, with one arm gently passed
under the arm of her lover, the other grasped by her mother, who is
seated. Between the mother and the bride, a younger sister standing,
leaning on the bride and with an arm thrown round her shoulders. Behind
this group, a child standing on tiptoes to see what is going on. To the
extreme left in the background, and at a distance from the scene, two
women-servants who are looking on. To the right a cupboard with its
usual contents--all scrupulously clean.... A wooden staircase leading to
the upper floor. In the foreground near the feet of the mother, a hen
leading her young ones, to whom a little girl throws crumbs of bread; a
basin full of water, and on the edge of it, one of the small chickens
with its beak up in the air so as to let the water go down." Diderot
then proceeds to criticise the details, telling us the very words that
he hears the father addressing to the bridegroom, and as a touch of
observation of nature, that while one of the old man's hands, of which
we see the back, is tanned and brown, the other, of which we see the
palm, is white. "To the bride the painter has given a face full of
charm, of seemliness, of reserve. She is dressed to perfection. That
apron of white stuff could not be better; there is a trifle of luxury in
her ornament; but then it is a wedding-day. You should note how true are
the folds and creases in her dress, and in those of the rest. The
charming girl is not quite straight; but there is a light and gentle
inflexion in all her figure and her limbs that fills her with grace and
truth. Indeed she is pretty and very pretty. If she had leaned more
towards her lover, it would have been unbecoming; more to her mother and
her father, and she would have been false. She has her arm half passed
under that of her future husband, and the tips of her fingers rest
softly on his hand; that is the only mark of tenderness that she gives
him, and perhaps without knowing it herself: it is a delicate idea in
the painter."[34]
[34] x. 151-156. Dr. Waagen pronounces this picture to be as truly
an expression of _das Nationalfranzoesiche_ as Wilkie's paintings are
of _das Englische_. See his _Kunstwerke und Kuenstler in Paris_, p.
675.
"Courage, my good Greuze," he cries, "_fais de la morale en peinture_.
What, has not the pencil been long enough and too long consecrated to
debauchery and vice? Ought we not to be delighted at seeing it at last
unite with dramatic poetry in instructing us, correcting us, inviting us
to virtue?"[35] It has been sometimes said that Diderot would have
exulted in the paintings of Hogarth, and we may admit that he would have
sympathised with the spirit of such moralities as the Idle and the
Industrious Apprentice, the Rake's Progress, and Mariage a la Mode. The
intensity and power of that terrible genius would have had their
attraction, but the minute ferocities of Hogarth's ruthless irony would
certainly have revolted him. Such a scene as Lord Squanderfield's visit
to the quack doctor, or as the Rake's debauch, would have filled him
with inextinguishable horror. He could never have forgiven an artist
who, in the ghastly pathos of a little child straining from the arms of
its nurse towards the mother, as she lies in the very article of death,
could still find in his heart to paint on it the dark patches of foul
disease. He would have fled with shrieks from those appalling scenes of
murder, torture, madness, bestial drunkenness, rapacity, fury--from
that delirium of scrofula, palsy, entrails, the winding-sheet, and the
grave-worm. Diderot's method was to improve men, not by making their
blood curdle, but by warming and softening the domestic affections.
[35] x. 208.
Diderot, as a critic, seems always to have remembered a pleasant
remonstrance once addressed at the Salon by the worthy Chardin to
himself and Grimm: "Gently, good sirs, gently! Out of all the pictures
that are here seek the very worst; and know that two thousand unhappy
wretches have bitten their brushes in two with their teeth, in despair
of ever doing even as badly. Parrocel, whom you call a dauber, and who
for that matter is a dauber, if you compare him to Vernet, is still a
man of rare talent relatively to the multitude of those who have flung
up the career in which they started with him." And then the artist
recounts the immense labours, the exhausting years, the boundless
patience, attention, tenacity, that are the conditions even of a
mediocre degree of mastery. We are reminded of the scene in a famous
work of art in our own day, where Herr Klesmer begs Miss Gwendolen
Harleth to reflect, how merely to stand or to move on the stage is an
art that requires long practice. "_O le triste et plat metier que celui
de critique!_" Diderot cries on one occasion: "_Il est si difficile de
produire une chose meme mediocre; il est si facile de sentir la
mediocrite._"[36] No doubt, as experience and responsibility gather upon
us, we learn how hard in every line is even moderate skill. The wise
are perhaps content to find what a man can do, without making it a
reproach to him that there is something else which he cannot do.
[36] x. 177.
But Diderot knew well enough that Chardin's kindly principle might
easily be carried too far. In general, he said, criticism displeases me;
it supposes so little talent. "What a foolish occupation, that of
incessantly hindering ourselves from taking pleasure, or else making
ourselves blush for the pleasure that we have taken! And that is the
occupation of criticism!"[37] Yet in one case he writes a score of pages
of critical dialogue, in which the chief interlocutor is a painter who
avenges his own failure by stringent attacks on the work of happier
rivals of the year. And speaking in his own proper person, Diderot knows
how to dismiss incompetence with the right word, sometimes of scorn,
more often of good-natured remonstrance. Bad painters, a Parrocel, a
Brenet, fare as ill at his hands as they deserved to do. He remarks
incidentally that the condition of the bad painter and the bad actor is
worse than that of the bad man of letters: the painter hears with his
own ears the expressions of contempt for his talent, and the hisses of
the audience go straight to the ears of the actor, whereas the author
has the comfort of going to his grave without a suspicion that you have
cried out at every page: "_The fool, the animal, the jackass!_" and have
at length flung his book into a corner. There is nothing to prevent the
worst author, as he sits alone in his library, and reads himself over
and over again, from congratulating himself on being the originator of a
host of rare and felicitous ideas.[38]
[37] xii. 8, 79.
[38] xi. 149.
The one painter whom Diderot never spares is Boucher, who was an idol of
the time, and made an income of fifty thousand livres a year out of his
popularity. He laughs at him as a mere painter of fans, an artist with
no colours on his palette save white and red. He admits the fecundity,
the _fougue_, the ease of Boucher, just as Sir Joshua Reynolds admits
his grace and beauty and good skill in composition.[39] Boucher, says
Diderot, is in painting what Ariosto is in poetry, and he who admires
the one is inconsistent if he is not mad for the other. What is wanting
is disciplined taste, more variety, more severity. Yet he cannot refuse
to concede about one of Boucher's pictures that after all he would be
glad to possess it. Every time you saw it, he says, you would find fault
with it, yet you would go on looking at it.[40] This is perhaps what the
severest modern amateur, as he strolls carelessly through the French
school at his leisure, would not in his heart care to deny.
[39] See Reynolds's Twelfth Discourse, p. 106.
[40] x. 102.
Fragonard, whose picture of Coresus and Callirrhoe made a great
sensation in its day, and still attracts some small share of attention
in the French school, was not a favourite with Diderot. The Callirrhoe
inspired an elaborate but not very felicitous criticism. Then the
painter changed his style in the direction of Boucher, and as far away
as possible from _l'honnete_ and _le beau moral_, and Diderot turned
away from him; at last describing an oval picture representing groups of
children in heaven as "_une belle et grande omelette d'enfants_," heads,
legs, thighs, arms, bodies, all interlaced together among yellowish
clouds--"_bien omelette, bein douillette, bein jaune, et bien
brulee_."[41]
[41] xi. 296. For the Callirrhoe, see x. 397.
On the whole, we cannot wonder either that painters hold literary talk
about their difficult and complex art so cheap, or that the lay public
prizes it so much above its intrinsic worth. It helps the sluggish
imagination and dull sight of the one, while it is apt to pass
ignorantly over both the true difficulties and the true successes of the
other. Diderot, unlike most of those who have come after him, had
carefully studied the conditions prescribed to the painter by the
material in which he works. Although he was a master of the literary
criticism of art, he had artists among his intimate companions, and was
too eager for knowledge not to wring from them the secrets of technique,
just as he extorted from weavers and dyers the secrets of their
processes and instruments. He makes no ostentatious display of this
special knowledge, yet it is present, giving a firmness and accuracy to
what would otherwise be too like mere arbitrary lyrics suggested by a
painting, and not really dealing with it. His special gift was the
transformation of scientific criticism into something with the charm of
literature. Take, for instance, a picture by Vien:
"_Psyche approaching with her lamp to surprise Love in his
sleep._--The two figures are of flesh and blood, but they have
neither the elegance, nor the grace, nor the delicacy that the
subject required. Love seems to me to be making a grimace. Psyche
is not like a woman who comes trembling on tiptoe. I do not see on
her face that mixture of surprise, fear, love, desire, and
admiration, which ought all to be there. It is not enough to show
in Psyche a curiosity to see Love; I must also perceive in her the
fear of awakening him. She ought to have her mouth half open, and
to be afraid of drawing her breath. 'Tis her lover that she
sees--that she sees for the first time, at the risk of losing him
for ever. What joy to look upon him, and to find him so fair! Oh,
what little intelligence in our painters, how little they
understand nature! The head of Psyche ought to be inclined towards
Love; the rest of her body drawn back, as it is when you advance
towards a spot where you fear to enter, and from which you are
ready to flee back; one foot planted on the ground and the other
barely touching it. And the lamp; ought she to let the light fall
on the eyes of Love? Ought she not to hold it apart, and to shield
it with her hand to deaden its brightness? Moreover, that would
have lighted the picture in a striking way. These good people do
not know that the eyelids have a kind of transparency; they have
never seen a mother coming in the night to look at her child in the
cradle, with a lamp in her hand, and fearful of awakening it."[42]
[42] x. 121.
There have been many attempts to imitate this manner since Diderot. No
less a person than M. Thiers tried it, when it fell to him as a young
writer for the newspapers to describe the Salon of 1822. One brilliant
poet, novelist, traveller, critic, has succeeded, and Diderot's
art-criticism is at least equalled in Theophile Gautier's pages on
Titian's Assunta and Bellini's Madonna at Venice, or Murillo's Saint
Anthony of Padua at Seville.[43]
[43] _Voyage en Italie_, 230. _Voyage en Espagne_, 330. See the same
critic's _Abecedaire du Salon de 1861_.
Just as in his articles in the Encyclopaedia, here too Diderot is always
ready to turn from his subject for a moral aside. Even the modern reader
will forgive the discursive apostrophe addressed to the judges of the
unfortunate Calas, the almost lyric denunciation of an atrocity that
struck such deep dismay into the hearts of all the brethren of the
Encyclopaedia.[44] But Diderot's asides are usually in less tragic
matter. A picture of Michael Van Loo's reminds him that Van Loo had once
a friend in Spain. This friend took it into his head to equip a vessel
for a trading expedition, and Van Loo invested all his fortune in his
friend's vessel. The vessel was wrecked, the fortune was lost, and the
master was drowned. When Van Loo heard of the disaster, the first word
that came to his mouth was--_I have lost a good friend_. And on this
Diderot sails off into a digression on the grounds of praise and blame.
[44] xi. 309.
Here are one or two illustrations of the same moralising:
"The effect of our sadness on others is very singular. Have you not
sometimes noticed in the country the sudden stillness of the
birds, if it happens that on a fine day a cloud comes and lingers
over the spot that was resounding with their music? A suit of deep
mourning in company is the cloud that, as it passes, causes the
momentary silence of the birds. It goes, and the song is resumed."
"We should divide a nation into three classes: the bulk of the
nation, which forms the national taste and manners; those who rise
above these are called madmen, originals, oddities; those who fall
below are noodles. The progress of the human mind causes the level
to shift, and a man often lives too long for his reputation.... He
who is too far in front of his generation, who rises above the
general level of the common manners, must expect few votes; he
ought to be thankful for the oblivion that rescues him from
persecution. Those who raise themselves to a great distance above
the common level are not perceived; they die forgotten and
tranquil, either like everybody else, or far away from everybody
else. That is my motto."[45]
"But Vernet will never be more than Vernet, a mere man. No, and for
that very reason all the more astonishing, and his work all the
more worthy of admiration. It is, no doubt, a great thing, is this
universe; but when I compare it with the energy of the productive
cause, if I had to wonder at aught, it would be that its work is
not still finer and still more perfect. It is just the reverse when
I think of the weakness of man, of his poor means, of the
embarrassments and of the short duration of his life, and then of
certain things that he has undertaken and carried out."[46]
[45] xi. 294.
[46] xi. 102.
These digressions are one source of the charm of Diderot's criticism.
They impart ease and naturalness to it, because they evidently reproduce
the free movement of his mind as it really was, and not as the supposed
dignity of authorship might require him to pretend. There is no
stiffness nor sense, as we have said, of literary strain, and yet there
is no disturbing excess of what is random, broken, _decousu_. The
digression flows with lively continuity from the main stream and back
again into it, leaving some cheerful impression or curious suggestion
behind it. Something, we cannot tell what, draws him off to wonder
whether there is not as much verve in the first scene of Terence and in
the Antinoues as in any scene of Moliere or any work of Michael Angelo?
"I once answered this question, but rather too lightly. Every moment I
am apt to make a mistake, because language does not furnish me with the
right expression for the truth at the moment. I abandon a thesis for
lack of words that shall supply my reasons. I have one thing in the
bottom of my heart, and I find myself saying another. There is the
advantage of living in retirement and solitude. There a man speaks, asks
himself questions, listens to himself, and listens in silence. His
secret sensation develops itself little by little." Then when he is
about to speak of one of Greuze's pictures, he bethinks himself of
Greuze's vanity, and this leads him to a vein of reflection which it is
good for all critics, whether public or private, to hold fast in their
minds. "If you take away Greuze's vanity, you will take away his verve,
you will extinguish his fire, his genius will undergo an eclipse. _Nos
qualites tiennent de pres a nos defauts._" And of this important truth,
the base of wise tolerance, there follow a dozen graphic examples.[47]
[47] x. 342. He says elsewhere of Greuze (xviii. 247) that he is _un
excellent artiste, mais une bien mauvaise tete_.
Gretry, the composer, more than once consulted Diderot in moments of
perplexity. It was not always safe, he says, to listen to the glowing
man when he allowed his imagination to run away with him, but the first
burst was of inspiration divine.[48] Painters found his suggestions as
potent and as hopeful as the musician found them. He delighted in being
able to tell an artist how he might change his bad picture into a good
one.[49] "Chardin, La Grenee, Greuze, and others," says Diderot, "have
assured me (and artists are not given to flattering men of letters) that
I was about the only one whose images could pass at once to canvas,
almost exactly as they came into my head." And he gives illustrations,
how he instantly furnished to La Grenee a subject for a picture of
Peace; to Greuze, a design introducing a nude figure without wounding
the modesty of the spectator; to a third, a historical subject.[50] The
first of the three is a curious example of the difficulty which even a
strong genius like Diderot had in freeing himself from artificial
traditions. For Peace, he cried to La Grenee, show me Mars with his
breastplate, his sword girded on, his head noble and firm. Place
standing by his side a Venus, full, divine, voluptuous, smiling on him
with an enchanting smile; let her point to his casque, in which her
doves have made their nest. Is it not singular that even Diderot
sometimes failed to remember that Mars and Venus are dead, that they can
never be the source of a fresh and natural inspiration, and that neither
artist nor spectator can be moved by cold and vapid allegories in an
extinct dialect? If Diderot could have seen such a treatment of La
Grenee's subject as Landseer's _Peace_, with its children playing at the
mouth of the slumbering gun, he would have been the first to cry out how
much nearer this came to the spirit of his own aesthetic methods, than
all the pride of Mars and all the beauty of Venus. He is truer to
himself in the subject with which he met Greuze's perplexity in the
second of his two illustrations. He bade Greuze paint the Honest Model;
a girl sitting to an artist for the first time, her poor garments on the
ground beside her; her head resting on one of her hands, and a tear
rolling down each cheek. The mother, whose dress betrays the extremity
of indigence, is by her side, and with her own hands and one of the
hands of her daughter covers her face. The painter, witness of the
scene, softened and touched, lets his palette or his brush fall from his
hand. Greuze at once exclaimed that he saw his subject; and we may at
least admit that this pretty bit of commonplace sentimentalism is more
in Diderot's vein than pagan gods and goddesses.
[48] Quoted in Diderot's _Oeuv._, v. 460, _n._
[49] E.g. _Oeuv._, xi. 258.
[50] xi. 74.
Diderot is never more truly himself than when he takes the subject of a
picture that is before him, and shows how it might have been more
effectively handled. Thus:
"The Flight into Egypt is treated in a fresh and piquant manner.
But the painter has not known how to make the best of his idea. The
Virgin passes in the background of the picture, bearing the infant
Jesus in her arms. She is followed by Joseph and the ass carrying
the baggage. In the foreground are the shepherds prostrating
themselves, their hands upturned towards her, and wishing her a
happy journey. Ah, what a fine painting, if the artist had known
how to make mountains at the foot of which the Virgin had passed;
if he had known how to make the mountains very steep, escarped,
majestic; if he had covered them with moss and wild shrubs; if he
had given to the Virgin simplicity, beauty, grandeur, nobleness; if
the road that she follows had led into the paths of some forest,
lonely and remote; if he had taken his moment at the rise of day,
or at its fall!"[51]
[51] x. 115.
The picture of Saint Benedict by Deshays--whom at one moment Diderot
pronounces to be the first painter in the nation--stirs the same spirit
of emendation. Diderot thinks that in spite of the pallor of the dying
saint's visage, one would be inclined to give him some years yet to
live.
"I ask whether it would not have been better that his legs should
have sunk under him; that he should have been supported by two or
three monks; that he should have had the arms extended, the head
thrown back, with death on his lips and ecstasy on his brow. If the
painter had given this strong expression to his Saint Benedict,
consider, my friend, how it would have reflected itself on all the
rest of the picture. That slight change in the principal figure
would have influenced all the others. The celebrant, instead of
being upright, would in his compassion have leaned more forward;
distress and anguish would have been more strongly depicted in all
the bystanders. There is a piece from which you could teach young
students that, by altering one single circumstance, you alter all
others, or else the truth disappears. You could make out of it an
excellent chapter on the _force of unity_: you would have to
preserve the same arrangement, the same figures, and to invite them
to execute the picture according to the different changes that were
made in the figure of the communicant."[52]
[52] x. 125.
The admirable Salons were not Diderot's only contributions to aesthetic
criticism. He could not content himself with reproductions, in eloquent
language upon paper, of the combinations of colour and form upon canvas.
No one was further removed from vague or indolent expansion. He returns
again and again to examine with keenness and severity the principles,
the methods, the distinctions of the fine arts, and though he is often a
sentimentalist and a declaimer, he can also, when the time comes,
transform himself into an accurate scrutiniser of ideas and phrases, a
seeker after causes and differences, a discoverer of kinds and classes
in art, and of the conditions proper to success in each of them. In
short, the fact of being an eloquent and enthusiastic critic of
pictures, did not prevent him from being a truly philosophical thinker
about the abstract laws of art, with the thinker's genius for analysis,
comparison, classification. Who that has read them can ever forget the
dialogues that are set among the landscapes of Vernet in the Salons of
1767?[53] The critic supposes himself unable to visit the Salon of the
year, and to be staying in a gay country-house amid some fine landscapes
on the sea-coast. He describes his walks among these admirable scenes,
and the strange and varying effects of light and colour, and all the
movements of the sky and ocean; and into the descriptions he weaves a
series of dialogues with an abbe, a tutor of the children of the house,
upon art and landscape and the processes of the universe. Nothing can be
more excellent and lifelike: it is not until the end that he lets the
secret slip that the whole fabric has been a flight of fancy, inspired
by no real landscape, but by the sea-pieces sent to the exhibition by
Vernet.
[53] xi. 98-149.
This is an illustration of the variety of approach which makes Diderot
so interesting, so refreshing a critic. He never sinks into what is
mechanical, and the evidence of this is that his mind, while intent on
the qualities of a given picture, yet moves freely to the outside of the
picture, and is ever cordially open to the most general thoughts and
moods, while attending with workmanlike fidelity to what is particular
in the object before him.[54]
[54] _E.g._ xi. 223.
In the light of modern speculation upon the philosophy of the fine arts,
Diderot makes no commanding figure, because he is so egregiously
unsystematic. But as Goethe said, in a piece where he was withstanding
Diderot to the face, _die hoechste Wirkung des Geistes ist, den Geist
hervorzurufen_--the highest influence of mind is to call out mind. This
stimulating provocation of the intelligence was the master faculty in
Diderot. For the sake of that men are ready to pardon all excesses, and
to overlook many offences against the law of Measure. From such a point
of view, Goethe's treatment of Diderot's Essay on Painting (written in
1765, but not given to the world until 1796) is an instructive lesson.
"Diderot's essay," he wrote to Schiller, "is a magnificent work, and it
speaks even more usefully to the poet than to the painter, though for
the painter, too, it is a torch of powerful illumination." Yet Diderot's
critical principle in the essay was exactly opposite to Goethe's; and
when Goethe translated some portions of it, he was forced to add a
commentary of stringent protest. Diderot, as usual, energetically extols
nature, as the one source and fountain of true artistic inspiration.
Even in what looks to us like defect and monstrosity, she is never
incorrect. If she inflicts on the individual some unusual feature, she
never fails to draw other parts of the system into co-ordination and a
sort of harmony with the abnormal element. We say of a man who passes in
the street that he is ill-shapen. Yes, according to our poor rules; but
according to nature, it is another matter. We say of a statue that it is
of fine proportions. Yes, according to our poor rules; but according to
nature?[55]
[55] x. 481, 462.
In the same vein, he breaks out against the practice of drawing from
the academic model. All these academic positions, affected, constrained,
artificial, as they are; all these actions coldly and awkwardly
expressed by some poor devil, and always the same poor devil, hired to
come three times a week, to undress himself, and to play the puppet in
the hands of the professor--what have these in common with the positions
and actions of nature? What is there in common between the man who draws
water from the well in your courtyard, and the man who pretends to
imitate him on the platform of the drawing-school? If Diderot thought
the seven years passed in drawing the model no better than wasted, he
was not any more indulgent to the practice of studying the minutiae of
the anatomy of the human frame. He saw the risk of the artist becoming
vain of his scientific acquirement, of his eye being corrupted, of his
seeking to represent what is under the surface, of his forgetting that
he has only the exterior to show. A practice that is intended to make
the student look at nature most commonly tends to make him see nature
other than she really is. To sum up, mannerism would disappear from
drawing and from colour, if people would only scrupulously imitate
nature. Mannerism comes from the masters, from the academy, from the
school, and even from the antique.[56]
[56] x. 467. For a more respectful view of the antique, and of
Winckelmann's position, see _Salon de 1765_, x. 418.
We may easily believe how many fallacies were discerned in such lessons
as these by the author of _Iphigenie_, and the passionate admirer of
the ancient marbles. Diderot's fundamental error, said Goethe, is to
confound nature and art, completely to amalgamate nature with art. "Now
Nature organises a living, an indifferent being, the Artist something
dead, but full of significance; Nature something real, the Artist
something apparent. In the works of Nature the spectator must import
significance, thought, effect, reality; in a work of Art he will and
must find this already there. A perfect imitation of Nature is in no
sense possible; the Artist is only called to the representation of the
surface of an appearance. The outside of the vessel, the living whole
that speaks to all our faculties of mind and sense, that stirs our
desire, elevates our intelligence--that whose possession makes us happy,
the vivid, potent, finished Beautiful--for all this is the Artist
appointed." In other words, art has its own laws, as it has its own
aims, and these are not the laws and aims of nature. To mock at rules is
to overthrow the conditions that make a painting or a statue possible.
To send the pupil away from the model to the life of the street, the
gaol, the church, is to send him forth without teaching him for what to
look. To make light of the study of anatomy in art, is like allowing the
composer to forget thorough bass in his enthusiasm, or the poet in his
enthusiasm to forget the number of syllables in his verse. Again, though
art may profit by a free and broad method, yet all artistic significance
depends on the More and the Less. Beauty is a narrow circle in which
one may only move in modest measure. And of this modest measure the
academy, the school, the master, above all the antique, are the
guardians and the teachers.[57]
[57] Diderot's _Versuch ueber die Malerei_. Goethe's _Werke_, xxv.
309, etc.
It is unnecessary to labour the opposition between the two great masters
of criticism. Goethe, as usual, must be pronounced to have the last word
of reason and wisdom, the word which comprehends most of the truth of
the matter. And it is delivered in that generous and loyal spirit which
nobody would have appreciated more than the free-hearted Diderot
himself. The drift of Goethe's contention is, in fact, the thesis of
Diderot's Paradox on the Comedian. But the state of painting in
France--and Goethe admits it--may have called for a line of criticism
which was an exaggeration of what Diderot, if he had been in Goethe's
neutral position, would have found in his better mind.[58]
[58] And of course on occasion did actually find. See xi. 101. Sir
Joshua Reynolds, who was too sincere a lover of his art not to be
above mere patriotic prejudice, describes the condition of things.
"I have heard painters acknowledge that they could do better without
nature than with her, or, as they expressed themselves, it only put
them out. Our neighbours, the French, are much in this practice of
extempore invention, and their dexterity is such as even to excite
admiration, if not envy; but how rarely can this praise be given to
their finished pictures!" Twelfth Discourse, p. 105.
There is a passage in one of the Salons which sheds a striking
side-light on the difference between these two great types of genius.
The difference between the mere virtuoso and the deep critic is that, in
the latter, behind views on art we discern far-reaching thoughts on
life. And in Diderot, no less than in Goethe, art is ever seen in its
associations with character, aspiration, happiness, and conduct.
"The sun, which was on the edge of the horizon, disappeared; over
the sea there came all at once an aspect more sombre and solemn.
Twilight, which is at first neither day nor night--an image of our
feeble thoughts, and an image that warns the philosopher to stay in
his speculations--warns the traveller too to turn his steps towards
home. So I turned back, and as I continued the thread of my
thoughts, I began to reflect that if there is a particular morality
belonging to each species, so perhaps in the same species there is
a different morality for different individuals, or at least for
different kinds and collections of individuals. And in order not to
scandalise you by too serious an example, it came into my head that
there is perhaps a morality peculiar to artists or to art, and that
this morality might well be the very reverse of the common
morality. Yes, my friend, I am much afraid that man marches
straight to misery by the very path that leads the imitator of
nature to the sublime. To plunge into extremes--that is the rule
for poets. To keep in all things the just mean--there is the rule
for happiness. One must not make poetry in real life. The heroes,
the romantic lovers, the great patriots, the inflexible
magistrates, the apostles of religion, the philosophers _a toute
outrance_--all these rare and divine insensates make poetry in
their life, and that is their bane. It is they who after death
provide material for great pictures. They are excellent to paint.
Experience shows that nature condemns to misery the man to whom she
has allotted genius, and whom she has endowed with beauty; it is
they who are the figures of poetry. Then within myself I lauded
the mediocrity that shelters one alike from praise and blame; and
yet why, I asked myself, would no one choose to let his sensibility
go, and to become mediocre? O vanity of man!"[59]
[59] x. 124, 125.
Goethe's _Tasso_, a work so full of finished poetry and of charm, is the
idealised and pathetic version of the figure that Diderot has thus
conceived for genius. The dialogues between the hapless poet and
Antonio, the man of the world, are a skilful, lofty, and impressive
statement of the problem that often vexed Diderot. Goethe sympathised
with Antonio's point of view; he had in his nature so much of the spirit
of conduct, of saneness, of the common reason of the world. And in art
he was a lover of calm ideals. In Diderot, as our readers by this time
know, these things were otherwise.
The essay on Beauty in the Encyclopaedia is less fertile than most of
Diderot's contributions to the subject.[60] It contains a careful
account of two or three other theories, especially that of Hutcheson.
The object is to explain the source of Beauty. Diderot's own conclusion
is that this is to be found in "relations." Our words for the different
shades of the beautiful are expressive of notions (acquired by
experience through the senses) of order, proportion, symmetry, unity,
and so forth. But, after all, the real question remains unanswered--what
makes some relations beautiful, and others not so; and the same objects
beautiful to me, and indifferent to you; and the same object beautiful
to me to-day, and indifferent or disgusting to me to-morrow? Diderot
does, it is true, enumerate twelve sources of such diversity of
judgment, in different races, ages, individuals, moods, but their force
depends upon the importation into the conception of beauty of some more
definite element than the bare idea of relation. Some sentences show
that he came very near to the famous theory of Alison, that beauty is
only attributed to sounds and sights, where, and because, they recall
what is pleasing, sublime, pathetic, and set our ideas and emotions
flowing in one of these channels. But he does not get fairly on the
track of either Alison's or any other decisive and marking adjective,
with which to qualify his _rapports_. He wastes some time, moreover, in
trying to bring within the four corners of his definition some uses of
the terms of beauty, which are really only applied to objects by way of
analogy, and are not meant to predicate the beautiful in any literal or
scientific sense.
[60] _Oeuv._, x.
There is no more interesting department of aesthetic inquiry than the
relations of the arts to one another, and the nature of the
delimitations of the provinces of poetry, painting, sculpture, music.
Diderot, from the very beginning of his career, had turned his thoughts
to this intricate subject. In his letter on Deaf Mutes (1751) he had
stated the problem--to collect the common beauties of poetry, painting,
and music; to show their analogies; to explain how the poet, the
painter, and the musician render the same image; to seize the fugitive
emblems of their expression. Why should a situation that is admirable in
a poem become ridiculous in a painting?[61] For instance, what is it
that prevents a painter from reproducing the moment when Neptune raises
his head above the tossing waters, as he is represented in Virgil:
Interea magno misceri murmure pontum.
Emissamque hiemem sensit Neptunus, et imis
Stagna refusa vadis; graviter commotus, et alto
Prospiciens, summa placidum caput extulit unda.
[61] It is to be observed also that he shows true perspicacity in
connecting the difficulty of transforming a poetic into a pictorial
description, with the kindred difficulty of translating a finished
poem in one language into another language. See also xi. 107.
Diderot's answer to the question is an anticipation of the main position
of the famous little book which appeared fifteen years afterwards, and
which has been well described as the Organum of aesthetic cultivation. In
_Laocooen_ Lessing contends against Spence, the author of _Polymetis_
against Caylus, and others of his contemporaries, that poetry and
painting are divided from one another in aim, in effects, in reach, by
the limits set upon each by the nature of its own material.[62] So
Diderot says that the painter could not seize the Virgilian moment,
because a body that is partially immersed in water is disfigured by an
effect of refraction, which a faithful painter would be bound to
reproduce; because the image of the body could not be seen
transparently through the stormy waters, and therefore the god would
have the appearance of being decapitated; because it is indispensable,
if you would avoid the impression of a surgical amputation, that some
visible portion of hidden limbs should be there to inform us of the
existence of the rest.[63] He takes another instance, where a
description that is admirable in poetry would be insupportable in
painting. Who, he asks, could bear upon canvas the sight of Polyphemus
grinding between his teeth the bones of one of the companions of
Ulysses? Who could see without horror a giant holding a man in his
enormous mouth, with blood dripping over his head and breast?
[62] Lessing appears to have been directly led to this by Aristotle.
See Gotschlich's _Lessing's Aristotelische Studien_, p. 120.
[63] _Oeuv._, i. 382, 403.
Among the many passages in which Diderot touches on the differences
between poetry and painting, none is more just and true than that in
which he implores the poet not to attempt description of details: "True
taste fastens on one or two characteristics, and leaves the rest to
imagination. 'Tis when Armida advances with noble mien in the midst of
the ranks of the army of Godfrey, and when the generals begin to look at
one another with jealous eyes, that Armida is beautiful to us. It is
when Helen passes before the old men of Troy, and they all cry out--it
is then that Helen is beautiful. And it is when Ariosto describes Alcina
from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet, that
notwithstanding the grace, the facility, the soft elegance of his verse,
Alcina is not beautiful. He shows me everything; he leaves me nothing to
do; he makes me wearied and impatient. If a figure walks, describe to
me its carriage and its lightness; I will undertake the rest. If it is
stooping, speak to me only of arms and shoulders; I will take all else
on myself. If you do more, you confuse the kinds of work; you cease to
be a poet, and become a painter or sculptor. One single trait, a great
trait; leave the rest to my imagination. That is true taste, great
taste."[64] And then he quotes with admiration Ovid's line of the
goddess of the seas:
Nec brachia longo
Margine terrarum porrexerat Amphitrite.
[64] _Oeuv._, xi. 328.
Quel image! Quels bras! Quel prodigieux mouvement! Quelle figure! and so
forth, after Diderot's manner.
Nobody will compare these detached and fragmentary deliverances with the
full and easy mastery which Lessing, in _Laocoeon_ and its unfinished
supplements, exhibits over the many ramifications of his central idea.
We can only notice that Diderot had a foot on the track along which
Lessing afterwards made such signal progress. The reader who cares to
measure the advantage of Lessing's more serious and concentrated
attention to his subject, may compare the twelfth chapter of _Laocoeon_
with Diderot's criticism on Doyen's painting of the Battle between
Diomede and Aeneas.[65] As we see how near Diderot came to the real and
decisive truths of all these matters, and yet how far he remains from
the full perception of what a little consecutive study must have
revealed to his superior genius, we can only think painfully of his
avowal--"I have not the consciousness of having employed the half of my
strength: _jusqu'a present je n'ai que baguenaude_."
[65] _Salon de 1761_; _Oeuv._, v. 140.
On the great art of music Diderot has said little that is worth
attending to. Bemetzrieder, a German musician, who taught Diderot's
daughter to play on the clavecin, wrote an elementary book called
Lessons on the Clavecin and Principles of Harmony. This is pronounced by
the modern teachers to be not less than contemptible. Diderot, however,
with his usual boundless good nature, took the trouble to set the book
in a series of dialogues, in which teacher, pupil, and a philosopher
deal in all kinds of elaborate amenities, and pay one another many
compliments. It reminds one of the old Hebrew grammar which is couched
in the form of Conversations with a Duchess--"Your Grace having kindly
condescended to approve of the plan that I have sketched. All this your
Grace probably knows already, but your Grace has probably never
attempted," and so forth.
The unwise things that men of letters have written from a good-natured
wish to help their friends, are not so numerous that we need be afraid
of extending to them a good-natured pardon. The beauty of Diderot's
Salons is remarkable enough to cover a multitude of sins in other arts.
There are few other compositions in European literature which show so
well how criticism of art itself may become a fine art.
CHAPTER IV.
ST. PETERSBURG AND THE HAGUE.
"What would you say of the owner of an immense palace, who should spend
all his life in going up from the cellars to the attics, and going down
from attics to cellar, instead of sitting quietly in the midst of his
family? That is the image of the traveller." Yet Diderot, whose words
these are, resolved at the age of sixty to undertake no less formidable
a journey than to the remote capital on the shores of the Neva. It had
come into his head, or perhaps others had put it into his head, that he
owed a visit to his imperial benefactress whose bounty had rendered life
easier to him. He had recently made the acquaintance of two Russian
personages of consideration. One of them was the Princess Dashkow, who
was believed to have taken a prominent part in that confused conspiracy
of 1762, which ended in the murder of Peter III. by Alexis Orloff, and
the elevation of Catherine II. to the throne. Her services at that
critical moment had not prevented her disgrace, if indeed they were not
its cause, and in 1770 the Princess set out on her travels. Horace
Walpole has described the curiosity of the London world to see the
Muscovite Alecto, the accomplice of the northern Athaliah, the amazon
who had taken part in a revolution when she was only nineteen. In
England she made a pleasant impression, in spite of eyes of "a very
Catiline fierceness." She was equally delighted with England, and when
she went on from London to Paris, she took very little trouble to make
friends in the capital of the rival nation. Diderot seems to have been
her only intimate. The Princess (1770) called nearly every afternoon at
his door, carried him off to dinner, and kept him talking and declaiming
until the early hours of the next morning. The "hurricanes of his
enthusiastic nature" delighted her, and she remembered for years
afterwards how on one occasion she excited him to such a pitch that he
sprang from his chair as if by machinery, strode rapidly up and down the
room, and spat upon the floor with passion.[66]
[66] _Memoirs of Princess Dashkoff_ (vol. ii.). By Mrs. Bradford, an
English companion and friend of the Princess. (London, 1840.) See
Diderot's account of her, _Oeuv._, xvii. 487. Compare Horace
Walpole's _Letters_, v. 266.
The Prince Galitzin was a Russian friend of greater importance. Prince
Galitzin was one of those foreigners, like Holbach, Grimm, Galiani, who
found themselves more at home in Paris than anywhere else in the world.
Living mostly among artists and men of letters, he became an established
favourite. With Diderot's assistance (1767) he acquired for the Empress
many of the pictures that adorn the great gallery at St. Petersburg,
and Diderot praises his knowledge of the fine arts, the reason being
that he has that great principle of true taste, the _belle ame_.[67] He
wrote eclogues in French, and he attempted the more useful but more
difficult task of writing in the half-formed tongue of his own country
an account of the great painters of Italy and Holland.[68] Diderot makes
the pointed remark about him, that he believed in equality of ranks by
instinct, which is better than believing in it by reflection.[69] It was
through the medium of this friendly and intelligent man that the Empress
had acted in the purchase of Diderot's library. In 1769 he was appointed
Russian minister at the Hague, and his chief ground for delight at the
appointment was that it brought him within reach of his friends in
Paris.
[67] _Oeuv._, xviii. 239.
[68] Grimm, _Cor. Lit._, xv. 18. Diderot, xviii. 251.
[69] _Oeuv._, xix. 250.
Diderot set out on his expedition some time in the summer of 1773--the
date also of Johnson's memorable tour to the Hebrides--and his first
halt was at the Dutch capital, then at the distance of a four days'
journey from Paris. Here he remained for many weeks, in some doubt
whether or not to persist in the project of a more immense journey. He
passed most of his time with the Prince and Princess Galitzin, as
between a good brother and a good sister. Their house, he notices, had
once been the residence of Barneveldt. Men like Diderot are the last
persons to think of their own historic position, else we might have
expected to find him musing on the saving shelter which this land of
freedom and tolerance had given to more than one of his great precursors
in the literature of emancipation. Descartes had found twenty years of
priceless freedom (1629-1649) among the Dutch burghers. The ruling ideas
of the Encyclopaedia came in direct line from Bayle (_d. 1706_) and Locke
(_d. 1704_), and both Bayle and Locke, though in different measures,
owed their security to the stout valour with which the Dutch defended
their own land, and taught the English how to defend theirs, against the
destructive pretensions of Catholic absolutism. Of these memories
Diderot probably thought no more than Descartes thought about the
learning of Grotius or the art of Rembrandt. It was not the age, nor was
his the mind, for historic sentimentalism. "The more I see of this
country," he wrote to his good friends in Paris, "the more I feel at
home in it. The soles, fresh herrings, turbot, perch, are all the best
people in the world. The walks are charming; I do not know whether the
women are all very sage, but with their great straw hats, their eyes
fixed on the ground, and the enormous fichus spread over their bosoms,
they have the air of coming back from prayers or going to confession."
Diderot did not fail to notice more serious things than this. His
remarks on the means of travelling with most profit are full of sense,
and the account which he wrote of Holland shows him to have been as
widely reflective and observant as we should have expected him to
be.[70] It will be more convenient to say something on this in
connection with the stay which he again made at the Hague on his return
from his pilgrimage to Russia.
[70] _Oeuv._, xviii. 365, 471.
After many hesitations the die was cast. Nariskin, a court chamberlain,
took charge of the philosopher, and escorted him in an excellent
carriage along the dreary road that ended in the capital reared by Peter
the Great among the northern floods. It is worth while to digress for a
few moments, to mark shortly the difference in social and intellectual
conditions between the philosopher's own city and the city for which he
was bound, and to touch on the significance of his journey. We can only
in this way understand the position of the Encyclopaedists in Europe, and
see why it is interesting to the student of the history of Western
civilisation to know something about them. It is impossible to have a
clear idea of the scope of the revolutionary philosophy, as well as of
the singular pre-eminence of Paris over the western world, until we have
placed ourselves, not only at Ferney and Grandval, and in the parlours
of Madame Geoffrin and Mademoiselle Lespinasse, but also in palaces at
Florence, Berlin, Vienna, and St. Petersburg.
From Holland with its free institutions, its peaceful industry, its
husbanded wealth, its rich and original art, its great political and
literary tradition, to go to Russia was to measure an arc of Western
progress, and to retrace the steps of the genius of civilisation. The
political capital of Russia represented a forced and artificial union
between old and new conditions. In St. Petersburg, says an onlooker,
were united the age of barbarism and the age of civilisation, the tenth
century and the eighteenth, the manners of Asia and the manners of
Europe, the rudest Scythians and the most polished Europeans, a
brilliant and proud aristocracy and a people sunk in servitude. On one
side were elegant fashions, magnificent dresses, sumptuous repasts,
splendid feasts, theatres like those which gave grace and animation to
the select circles of London or Paris: on the other side, shopkeepers in
Asiatic dress, coachmen, servants, and peasants clad in sheepskins,
wearing long beards, fur caps, and long fingerless gloves of skin, with
short axes hanging from their leathern girdles. The thick woollen bands
round their feet and legs resembled a rude cothurnus, and the sight of
these uncouth figures reminded one who had seen the bas-reliefs on
Trajan's column at Rome, of the Scythians, the Dacians, the Goths, the
Roxolani, who had been the terror of the Empire.[71] Literary
cultivation was confined to almost the smallest possible area. Oriental
as Russia was in many respects, it was the opposite of oriental in one:
women were then, as they are still sometimes said to be in Russia, more
cultivated and advanced than men. Many of them could speak half a dozen
languages, could play on several instruments, and were familiar with
the works of the famous poets of France, Italy, and England. Among the
men, on the contrary, outside of a few exceptional families about the
court, the vast majority were strangers to all that was passing beyond
the limits of their own country. The few who had travelled and were on
an intellectual level with their century, were as far removed from the
rest of their countrymen as Englishmen are removed from Iroquois.
[71] Segur's _Mem._, ii. 230.
To paint the court of Catherine in its true colours it has been said
that one ought to have the pen of Procopius. It was a hot-bed of
corruption, intrigue, jealousy, violence, hatred. One day, surrounded by
twenty-seven of her courtiers, Catherine said: "If I were to believe
what you all say about one another, there is not one of you who does not
richly deserve to have his head cut off." A certain princess was
notorious for her inhuman barbarity. One day she discovered that one of
her attendants was with child; in a frenzy she pursued the hapless
Callisto from chamber to chamber, came up with her, dashed in her skull
with a heavy weapon, and finally in a delirium of passion ripped up her
body. When two nobles had a quarrel, they fell upon one another then and
there like drunken navvies, and Potemkin had an eye gouged out in a
court brawl. Such horrors give us a measure of the superior humanity of
Versailles, and enable us also in passing to see how duelling could be a
sign of a higher civilisation. The reigning passions were love of money
and the gratification of a coarse vanity. Friendship, virtue, manners,
delicacy, probity, said one witness, are here merely words, void of all
meaning. The tone in public affairs was as low as in those of private
conduct. I might as well, says Sir G. Macartney, quote Clarke and
Tillotson at the divan of Constantinople, as invoke the authority of
Puffendorf and Grotius here.
The character of the Empress herself has been more disputed than that of
the society in which she was the one imposing personage. She stands in
history with Elizabeth of England, with Catherine de' Medici, with Maria
Theresa, among the women who have been like great men. Of her place in
the record of the creation of that vast empire which begins with Prussia
and ends with China, we have not here to speak. The materials for
knowing her and judging her are only in our own time becoming
accessible.[72] As usual, the mythic elements that surrounded her like
a white fog from the northern seas out of which she loomed like a
portent, are rapidly disappearing, and are replaced by the outlines of
ordinary humanity, with more than the ordinary human measure of
firmness, resolution, and energetic grasp of the facts of her position
in the world.
[72] The Imperial Historical Society are publishing a _Recueil
General_ of documents, many of which shed an interesting light on
Catherine's intercourse with the men of letters. In the Archives of
the House of Woronzow (especially vol. xii.), amid much of what for
our purpose is chaff, are a few grains of what is interesting. M.
Rambaud, the author of the learned work on the Greek Empire in the
Tenth Century, gave interesting selections from these sources in two
articles in the _Revue des deux Mondes_ for February and April,
1877. Besides what is to be gathered from such well-known
authorities as William Tooke, Segur, Dashkoff, there are many
interesting pages in the memoirs of that attractive and interesting
person, the Prince de Ligne. The passages from English and French
despatches I have taken from an anonymous but authentic work
published at Berlin in 1858, _La Cour de la Russie il y a cent ans:
1725-83: extraits des depeches des Ambassadeurs anglais et
francais_. Catherine's own Memoirs, published in London in 1859 by
Alexander Herzen, are perhaps too doubtful.
We must go from the philosophers to the men of affairs for a true
picture. These tell us that she offered an unprecedented mixture of
courage and weakness, of knowledge and incompetence, of firmness and
irresolution; passing in turn from the most opposite extremes, she
presented a thousand diverse surfaces, until at last the observer had to
content himself with putting her down as a consummate comedian. She had
no ready apprehension. Too refined a pleasantry was thrown away upon
her, and there was always a chance of her reversing its drift. No
playful reference to the finances, or the military force, or even to the
climate of her empire, was ever taken in good part.[73] The political
part was the serious part of her nature. Catherine had the literary
tastes, but not the literary skill, of Frederick. She is believed, on
good evidence, to have written for the use of her grandsons not only an
Abridgment of Russian History, but a volume of Moral Tales.[74] The
composition of moral tales was entirely independent of morality. Just
as Lewis XV. had a long series of Chateauroux, Pompadours, Dubarrys, so
Catherine had her Orloffs and Potemkins, and a countless host of obscure
and miscellaneous Wassiltchikows, Zavadowskys, Zoriczes, Korsaks. On the
serious side, Lewis XIV. was her great pattern and idol. She resented
criticism on that renowned memory, as something personal to herself. To
her business as sovereign--_mon petit menage_, as she called the control
of her huge formless empire--she devoted as much indefatigable industry
as Lewis himself had done in his best days. Notwithstanding all her
efforts to improve her country, she was not popular, and never won the
affection of her subjects; but she probably cared less for the opinion
and sentiment of Russia than for the applause of Europe. Tragedy
displeases her, writes the French Minister, and comedy wearies her; she
does not like music; her table is without any sort of exquisiteness; in
a garden she cares only for roses; her only taste is to build and to
drill her court, for the taste that she has for reigning, and for making
a great figure in the universe, is really not so much taste as a
downright absorbing passion.
[73] _Mem. du Prince de Ligne_, p. 101.
[74] Segur, 219.
Gunning, the English charge d'affaires, insists that the motive of all
her patriotic labours was not benevolence, but an insatiable and
unbounded thirst for fame. "If it were not so, we must charge her with
an inconsistency amounting to madness, for undertaking so many immense
works of public utility, such as the foundation of colleges and
academies on a most extensive plan and at an enormous outlay, and then
leaving them incomplete, not even finishing the buildings for them."
They had served the purpose of making foreigners laud the glory of the
Semiramis of the north, and that was enough. The arts and sciences, said
the French Minister, have plenty of academies here, but the academies
have few subjects and fewer pupils. How could there be pupils in a
country where there is nobody who is not either a courtier, a soldier,
or a slave? The Princess Sophie of Anhalt, long before she dreamed of
becoming the Czarina Catherine II., had been brought up by a French
governess, and the tastes that her governess had implanted grew into a
passion for French literature, which can only be compared to the same
passion in Frederick the Great. Catherine only continued a movement that
had already in the reign of her predecessor gone to a considerable
length. The social reaction against German political predominance had
been accompanied by a leaning to France. French professors in art and
literature had been tempted to Moscow, the nobles sent to Paris for
their clothes and their furniture, and a French theatre was set up in
St. Petersburg, where the nobles were forced to attend the performances
under pain of a fine. Absentees and loiterers were hurried to their
boxes by horse-patrols.
Catherine was more serious and intelligent than this in her pursuit of
French culture. She had begun with the books in which most of the salt
of old France was to be found, with Rabelais, Scarron, Montaigne; she
cherished Moliere and Corneille; and of the writers of the eighteenth
century, apart from Voltaire, the author of Gil Blas was her favourite.
Such a list tells its own tale of a mind turned to what is masculine,
racy, pungent, and thoroughly sapid. "I am a Gauloise of the north," she
said, "I only understand the old French; I do not understand the new. I
made up my mind to get something out of your gentry, the learned men in
_ist_: I have tried them; I made some of them come here; I occasionally
wrote to them; they wearied me to death, and never understood me; there
was only my good protector, Voltaire. Do you know it was Voltaire who
made me the fashion?"[75] This was a confidential revelation, made long
after most of the philosophers were dead. We might have penetrated the
secret of her friendship for such a man as Diderot, even with less
direct evidence than this. It was the vogue of the philosophers, and not
their philosophy that made Catherine their friend. They were the great
interest of Europe at this time, just as Greek scholars had been its
interest in one century, painters in another, great masters of religious
controversy in a third. "What makes the great merit of France," said
Voltaire, "what makes its unique superiority, is a small number of
sublime or delightful men of genius, who cause French to be spoken at
Vienna, at Stockholm, and at Moscow. Your ministers, your intendants,
your chief secretaries have no part in all this glory." This vogue of
the philosophers brought the whole literature of their country into
universal repute. In the depths of the Crimea a khan of the Tartars took
a delight in having Tartufe and the Bourgeois Gentilhomme read aloud to
him.[76]
[75] To the Prince de Ligne.
[76] Rambaud, p. 573.
As soon as Catherine came into power (1762), she at once applied herself
to make friends in this powerful region. It was a matter of course that
she should begin with the omnipotent pontiff at Ferney. Graceful verses
from Voltaire were as indispensable an ornament to a crowned head as a
diadem, and Catherine answered with compliments that were perhaps more
sincere than his verses. She wonders how she can repay him for a bundle
of books that he had sent to her, and at last bethinks herself that
nothing will please the lover of mankind so much as the introduction of
inoculation into the great empire; so she sends for Dr. Dimsdale from
England, and submits to the unfamiliar rite in her own sacred person.
Presents of furs are sent to the hermit of the Alps, and he is told how
fortunate the imperial messenger counts himself in being despatched to
Ferney. What flattered Voltaire more than furs was Catherine's
promptitude and exactness in keeping him informed of her military and
political movements against Turkey. It made him a centre of European
intelligence in more senses than one, and helped him in his lifelong
battle to pose, in his letters at least, as the equal of his friend, the
King of Prussia. For D'Alembert the Empress professed an admiration only
less than she felt for Voltaire. She was eager that he should come to
Russia to superintend the instruction of the young Grand Duke. But
D'Alembert was too prudent to go to St. Petersburg, as he was too
prudent to go to Berlin. Montesquieu had died five years before her
accession, but his influence remained. She habitually called the Spirit
of Laws the breviary of kings, and when she drew up her Instruction for
a new code, she acknowledged how much she had pillaged from Montesquieu.
"I hope," she said, "that if from the other world he sees me at work, he
will forgive my plagiarism for the sake of the twenty millions of men
who will benefit by it." In truth the twenty millions of men got very
little benefit indeed by the code. Montesquieu's own method might have
taught her that not even absolute power can force the civil system of
free labour into a society resting on serfdom. But it is not surprising
that Catherine was no wiser than more democratic reformers who had drunk
from the French springs. Or probably she had a lower estimate in her own
heart of the value of her code for practical purposes than it suited her
to disclose to a Parisian philosopher.
Catherine did not forget that, though the French at this time were
pre-eminent in the literature of new ideas, yet there were meritorious
and useful men in other countries. One of her correspondents was
Zimmermann of Hanover, whose essay on Solitude the shelves of no
second-hand bookseller's shop is ever without. She had tried hard to
bribe Beccaria to leave Florence for St. Petersburg. She succeeded in
persuading Euler to return to a capital whither he had been invited many
years before by the first Catherine, and where he now remained.
Both Catherine's position and her temperament made the society of her
own sex of little use or interest to her. "I don't know whether it is
custom or inclination," she wrote, "but somehow I can never carry on
conversation except with men. There are only two women in the world with
whom I can talk for half an hour at once." Yet among her most intimate
correspondents was one woman well known in the Encyclopaedic circle. She
kept up an active exchange of letters with Madame Geoffrin--that
interesting personage, who though belonging to the bourgeoisie, and
possessing not a trace of literary genius, yet was respectfully courted
not only by Catherine, but by Stanislas, Gustavus, and Joseph II.[77]
[77] See M. Mouy's Introduction to her Correspondence with
Stanislas.
On the whole then we must regard Catherine's European correspondence as
at least in some measure the result of political calculation. Its
purposes, as has been said, were partly those to which in our own times
some governments devote a Reptile-fund. There is a letter from the
Duchesse de Choiseul to Madame du Deffand, her intimate friend, and the
friend of so many of the literary circle, in which the secret of the
relations between Catherine and the men of letters is very plainly told.
"All that," she writes--protection of arts and sciences--"is mere luxury
and a caprice of fashion in our age. All such pompous jargon is the
product of vanity, not of principles or of reflection.... The Empress of
Russia has another object in protecting literature; she has had sense
enough to feel that she had need of the protection of the men of
letters. She has flattered herself that their base praises would cover
with an impenetrable veil in the eyes of her contemporaries and of
posterity, the crimes with which she has astonished the universe and
revolted humanity.... The men of letters, on the other hand, flattered,
cajoled, caressed by her, are vain of the protection that they are able
to throw over her, and dupes of the coquetries that she lavishes on
them. These people who say and believe that they are the instructors of
the masters of the world, sink so low as actually to take a pride in the
protection that this monster seems in her turn to accord to them, simply
because she sits on a throne."[78]
[78] _Corresp. Complete de Mdme. du Deffand_, i. 115. (Ed. 1877.)
June, 1767.
In short, the monarchs of the north understood and used the new forces
of the men of letters, whom their own sovereign only recognised to
oppress. The contrast between the liberalism of the northern sovereigns,
and the obscurantism of the court of France, was never lost from sight.
Marmontel's _Belisarius_ was condemned by the Sorbonne, and burnt at
the foot of the great staircase of the Palace of Justice; in Russia a
group of courtiers hastened to translate it, and the Empress herself
undertook one chapter of the work. Diderot, who was not allowed to enter
the French Academy, was an honoured guest at the Russian palace. For all
this Catherine was handsomely repaid. When Diderot visited St.
Petersburg, Voltaire congratulated the Empress on seeing that unique
man; but Diderot is not, he added, "the only Frenchman who is an
enthusiast for your glory. We are lay missionaries who preach the
religion of Saint Catherine, and we can boast that our church is
tolerably universal."[79] We have already seen Catherine's generosity in
buying Diderot's books, and paying him for guarding them as her
librarian. "I should never have expected," she says, "that the purchase
of a library would bring me so many fine compliments; all the world is
bepraising me about M. Diderot's library. But now confess, you to whom
humanity is indebted for the strong support that you have given to
innocence and virtue in the person of Calas, that it would have been
cruel and unjust to separate a student from his books."[80] "Ah, madam,"
replies the most graceful of all courtiers, "let your imperial majesty
forgive me; no, you are not the aurora borealis; you are assuredly the
most brilliant star of the north, and never was there one so beneficent
as you. Andromeda, Perseus, Callisto are not your equals. All these
stars would have left Diderot to die of starvation. He was persecuted in
his own country, and your benefactions came thither to seek him! Lewis
XIV. was less munificent than your majesty: he rewarded merit in foreign
countries, but other people pointed it out to him, whereas you, madame,
go in search of it and find it for yourself. Your generous pains to
establish freedom of conscience in Poland are a piece of beneficence
that the human race must ever celebrate."[81]
[79] November 1, 1773.
[80] November 1766.
[81] December 22, 1766.
When the first Partition of Poland took place seven years later,
Catherine found that she had not cultivated the friendship of the French
philosophers to no purpose. The action of the dominant party in Poland
enabled Catherine to take up a line which touched the French
philosophers in their tenderest part. The Polish oligarchy was Catholic,
and imposed crushing disabilities on the non-Catholic part of the
population. "At the slightest attempt in favour of the non-Catholics,"
King Stanislas writes to Madame Geoffrin, of the Diet of 1764, "there
arose such a cry of fanaticism! The difficulty as to the naturalisation
of foreigners, the contempt for _roturiers_ and the oppression of them,
and Catholic intolerance, are the three strongest national prejudices
that I have to fight against in my countrymen; they are at bottom good
folk, but their education and ignorance render them excessively stubborn
on these three heads."[82] Poland in short reproduced in an aggravated
and more barbaric form those evils of Catholic feudalism, in which the
philosophers saw the arch-curse of their own country. Catherine took the
side of the Dissidents, and figured as the champion of religious
toleration. Toleration was chief among the philosophic watchwords, and
seeing that great device on her banners, the Encyclopaedic party asked no
further questions. So, with the significant exception of Rousseau, they
all abstained from the cant about the Partition which has so often been
heard from European liberals in later days. And so with reference to
more questionable transactions of an earlier date, no one could guess
from the writings of the philosophers that Catherine had ever been
suspected of uniting with her husband in a plot to poison the Empress
Elizabeth, and then uniting with her lover in a plot to strangle her
husband. "I am quite aware," said Voltaire, "that she is reproached with
some bagatelles in the matter of her husband, but these are family
affairs with which I cannot possibly think of meddling."
[82] _Corresp._, pp. 135, 144, etc.
One curious instance of Catherine's sensibility to European opinion is
connected with her relations to Diderot. Rulhiere, afterwards well known
in literature as a historian, began life as secretary to Breteuil, in
the French embassy at St. Petersburg. An eyewitness of the tragedy which
seated Catherine on the throne, he wrote an account of the events of the
revolution of 1762. This piquant narrative, composed by a young man who
had read Tacitus and Sallust was circulated in manuscript among the
salons of Paris (1768). Diderot had warned Rulhiere that it was
infinitely dangerous to speak about princes, that not everything that is
true is fit to be told, that he could not be too careful of the feelings
of a great sovereign who was the admiration and delight of her people.
Catherine pretended that a mere secretary of an embassy could know very
little about the real springs and motives of the conspiracy. Diderot had
described the manuscript as painting her in a commanding and imperious
attitude. "There was nothing of that sort," she said; "it was only a
question of perishing with a madman, or saving oneself with the
multitude who insisted on coming to the rescue." What she saw was that
the manuscript must be bought, and she did her best first to buy the
author and then, when this failed, to have him locked up in the
Bastille. She succeeded in neither. The French government were not sorry
to have a scourge to their hands. All that Diderot could procure from
Rulhiere was a promise that the work should not be published during the
Empress's lifetime. It was actually given to the world in 1797. When
Diderot was at St. Petersburg, the Empress was importunate to know the
contents of the manuscript, which he had seen, but of which she was
unable to procure a copy. "As far as you are concerned," he said, "if
you attach great importance, Madame, to the decencies and virtues, the
worn-out rags of your sex, this work is a satire against you; but if
large views and masculine and patriotic designs concern you more, the
author depicts you as a great princess." The Empress answered that this
only increased her desire to read the book. Diderot himself truly enough
described it as a historic romance, containing a mixed tissue of lies
and truths that posterity would compare to a chapter of Tacitus.[83]
Perhaps the only piece of it that posterity will really value is the
page in which the writer describes Catherine's personal appearance; her
broad and open brow, her large and slightly double chin, her hair of
resplendent chestnut, her eyes of a brilliant brown into which the
reflections of the light brought shades of blue. "Pride," he says, "is
the true characteristic of her physiognomy. The amiability and grace
which are there too only seem to penetrating eyes to be the effect of an
extreme desire to please, and these seductive expressions somehow let
the design of seducing be rather too clearly seen."
[83] _Satire I. sur les caracteres, etc. Oeuv._, vi. 313.
The first Frenchman whom Catherine welcomed in person to her court was
Falconet, of whose controversy with the philosopher we shall have a few
words to say in a later chapter. This introduction to her was due to
Diderot. She had entreated him to find for her a sculptor who would
undertake a colossal statue of Peter the Great. Falconet was at the
height of his reputation in his own country; in leaving it he seems to
have been actuated by no other motive than the desire of an opportunity
of erecting an immense monument of his art, though Diderot's eloquence
was not wanting. Falconet had the proverbial temperament of artistic
genius. Diderot called him the Jean Jacques of sculpture. He had none of
the rapacity for money which has distinguished so many artists in their
dealings with foreign princes, but he was irritable, turbulent,
restless, intractable. He was a chivalrous defender of poorer brethren
in art, and he was never a respecter of persons. His feuds with Betzki,
the Empress's faithful factotum, were as acrid as the feuds between
Voltaire and Maupertuis. Betzki had his own ideas about the statue that
was to do honour to the founder of the Empire, and he insisted that the
famous equestrian figure of Marcus Aurelius should be the model.
Falconet was a man of genius, and he retorted that what might be good
for Marcus Aurelius would not be good for Peter the Great. The courtly
battle does not concern us, though some of its episodes offer tempting
illustrations of biting French malice. Falconet had his own way, and
after the labour of many years, a colossus of bronze bestrode a charger
rearing on a monstrous mass of unhewn granite. Catherine took the
liveliest interest in her artist's work, frequently visiting his studio,
and keeping up a busy correspondence. With him, as with the others, she
insisted that he should stand on no ceremony, and should not spin out
his lines with epithets on which she set not the smallest value. She may
be said to have encouraged him to pester her with a host of his obscure
countrymen in search of a living, and a little colony of Frenchmen whose
names tell us nothing, hung about the Russian capital. Diderot's
account of this group of his countrymen at St. Petersburg recalls the
picture of a corresponding group at Berlin. "Most of the French who are
here rend and hate one another, and bring contempt both on themselves
and their nation: 'tis the most unworthy set of rascals that you can
imagine."[84]
[84] _Oeuv._, xx. 58.
Diderot reached St. Petersburg towards the end of 1773, and he remained
some five months, until the beginning of March, 1774. His impulsive
nature was shocked by a chilly welcome from Falconet, but at the palace
his reception was most cordial, as his arrival had been eagerly
anticipated. The Empress always professed to detest ceremony and state.
In a letter to Madame Geoffrin she insists, as we have already seen her
doing with Falconet, on being treated to no oriental prostrations, as if
she were at the court of Persia. "There is nothing in the world so ugly
and detestable as greatness. When I go into a room, you would say that I
am the head of Medusa: everybody turns to stone. I constantly scream
like an eagle against such ways; yet the more I scream, the less are
they at their ease.... If you came into my room, I should say to
you,--Madame, be seated; let us chatter at our ease. You would have a
chair in front of me; there would be a table between us. _Et puis des
batons rompus, tant et plus, c'est mon fort._"
This is an exact description of her real behaviour to Diderot. On most
days he was in her society from three in the afternoon until five or
six. Etiquette was banished. Diderot's simplicity and vehemence were as
conspicuous and as unrestrained at Tsarskoe-selo as at Grandval or the
Rue Taranne. If for a moment the torrent of his improvisation was
checked by the thought that he was talking to a great lady, Catherine
encouraged him to go on. "_Allons_," she cried, "_entre hommes tout est
permis_." The philosopher in the heat of exposition brought his hands
down upon the imperial knees with such force and iteration, that
Catherine complained that he made them black and blue. She was sometimes
glad to seek shelter from such zealous enforcement of truth, behind a
strong table. Watchful diplomatists could not doubt that such interviews
must have reference to politics. Cathcart, the English ambassador,
writes to his government that M. Diderot is still with the Empress at
Tsarskoe-selo, "pursuing his political intrigues." And, amazing as it
may seem, the French minister and the French ambassador both of them
believed that they had found in this dreaming rhapsodical genius a
useful diplomatic instrument. "The interviews between Catherine and
Diderot follow one another incessantly, and go on from day to day. He
told me, and I have reasons for believing that he is speaking the truth,
that he has painted the danger of the alliance of Russia with the King
of Prussia, and the advantage of an alliance with us. The Empress, far
from blaming this freedom, encouraged him by word and gesture. 'You are
not fond of that prince,' she said to Diderot. 'No,' he replied, 'he is
a great man, but a bad king, and a dealer in counterfeit coin.' 'Oh,'
said she laughing, 'I have had my share of his coin.'"
The first Partition of Poland had been finally consummated in the Polish
Diet in the autumn of 1773, a few weeks before Diderot's arrival at St.
Petersburg. Lewis XV., now drawing very near to his end, and
D'Aiguillon, his minister, had some uneasiness at this opening of the
great era of territorial revolution, and looked about in a shiftless way
for an ally against Russia and Prussia. England sensibly refused to
stir. Then France, as we see, was only anxious to detach Catherine from
Frederick. All was shiftless and feeble, and the French government can
have known little of the Empress, if they thought that Diderot was the
man to affect her strong and positive mind. She told Segur in later
years what success Diderot had with her as a politician.
"I talked much and frequently with him," said Catherine, "but with more
curiosity than profit. If I had believed him, everything would have been
turned upside down in my kingdom; legislation, administration,
finances--all to be turned topsy-turvy to make room for impracticable
theories. Yet as I listened more than I talked, any witness who happened
to be present, would have taken him for a severe pedagogue, and me for
his humble scholar. Probably he thought so himself, for after some time,
seeing that none of these great innovations were made which he had
recommended, he showed surprise and a haughty kind of dissatisfaction.
Then speaking openly, I said to him: _Mr. Diderot, I have listened with
the greatest pleasure to all that your brilliant intelligence has
inspired; and with all your great principles, which I understand very
well, one would make fine books, but very bad business. You forget in
all your plans of reform the difference in our positions; you only work
on paper, which endures all things; it opposes no obstacle either to
your imagination or to your pen. But I, poor Empress as I am, work on
the human skin, which is irritable and ticklish to a very different
degree._ I am persuaded that from this moment he pitied me as a narrow
and vulgar spirit. For the future he only talked about literature, and
politics vanished from our conversation."[85]
[85] Segur, iii. 34.
Catherine was mistaken, as we shall see, in supposing that Diderot ever
thought her less than the greatest of men. Cathcart, the English
ambassador, writes in a sour strain: "All his letters are filled with
panegyrics of the Empress, whom he depicts as above humanity. His
flatteries of the Grand Duke have been no less gross, but be it said to
the young prince's honour, he has shown as much contempt for such
flatteries as for the mischievous principles of this pretended
philosopher."
Frederick tells D'Alembert that though the Empress overwhelms Diderot
with favours, people at St. Petersburg find him tiresome and
disputatious, and "talking the same rigmarole over and over again." In
her letters to Voltaire, Catherine lets nothing of this be seen. She
finds Diderot's imagination inexhaustible, and ranks him among the most
extraordinary men that have ever lived; she delights in his
conversation, and his visits have given her the most uncommon pleasure.
All this was perhaps true enough. Catherine probably rated the
philosopher at his true worth as a great talker and a singular and
original genius, but this did not prevent her, any more than it need
prevent us, from seeing the limits and measure. She was not one of the
weaker heads who can never be content without either wholesale
enthusiasm or wholesale disparagement.
Diderot had a companion who pleased her better than Diderot himself.
Grimm came to St. Petersburg at this time to pay his first visit, and
had a great success. "The Empress," wrote Madame Geoffrin to King
Stanislas, "lavished all her graces on Grimm. And he has everything that
is needed to make him worthy of them. Diderot has neither the fineness
of perception, nor the delicate tact that Grimm has, and so he has not
had the success of Grimm. Diderot is always in himself, and sees nothing
in other people that has not some reference to himself. He is a man of a
great deal of understanding, but his nature and turn of mind make him
good for nothing, and, more than that, would make him a very dangerous
person in any employment. Grimm is quite the contrary."[86]
[86] Mouy's _Corresp. du roi Stanislas_, p. 501.
In truth, as we have said before, Grimm was one of the shrewdest heads
in the Encyclopaedic party; he had much knowledge, a judgment both solid
and acute, and a certain easy fashion of social commerce, free from
raptures and full of good sense. Yet he was as devoted and ecstatic in
his feelings about the Empress as his more impetuous friend. "Here," he
says, "was no conversation of leaps and bounds, in which idleness
traverses a whole gallery of ideas that have no connection with one
another, and weariness draws you away from one object to skim a dozen
others. They were talks in which all was bound together, often by
imperceptible threads, but all the more naturally, as not a word of what
was to be said had been led up to or prepared beforehand." Grimm cannot
find words to describe her verve, her stream of brilliant sallies, her
dashing traits, her eagle's _coup d'oeil_. No wonder that he used to
quit her presence so electrified as to pass half the night in marching
up and down his room, beset and pursued by all the fine and marvellous
things that had been said. How much of all this is true, and how much of
it is the voice of the bewildered courtier, it might be hard to decide.
But the rays of the imperial sun did not so far blind his prudence, as
to make him accept a pressing invitation to remain permanently in
Catherine's service. When Diderot quitted St. Petersburg, Grimm went to
Italy. After an interlude there, he returned to Russia and was at once
restored to high favour. When the time came for him to leave her, the
Empress gave him a yearly pension of two thousand roubles, or about ten
thousand livres, and with a minute considerateness that is said not to
be common among the great, she presently ordered that it should be paid
in such a form that he should not lose on the exchange between France
and Russia. Whether she had a special object in keeping Grimm in good
humour, we hardly know. What is certain is that from 1776 until the fall
of the French monarchy she kept up a voluminous correspondence with him,
and that he acted as an unofficial intermediary between her and the
ministers at Versailles. Every day she wrote down what she wished to say
to Grimm, and at the end of every three months these daily sheets were
made into a bulky packet and despatched to Paris by a special courier,
who returned with a similar packet from Grimm. This intercourse went on
until the very height of the Revolution, when Grimm at last, in
February, 1792, fled from Paris. The Empress's helpful friendship
continued to the end of her life (1796).[87]
[87] _Memoire Historique_, printed in vol. i. of the new edition
(1877) of the Correspondence of Grimm and Diderot, by M. Maurice
Tourneux.
Diderot arrived at the Hague on his return from Russia in the first week
of April (1774), after making a rapid journey of seven hundred leagues
in three weeks and a day. D'Alembert had been anxious that Frederick of
Prussia should invite Diderot to visit him at Berlin. Frederick had told
him that, intrepid reader as he was, he could not endure to read
Diderot's books. "There reigns in them a tone of self-sufficiency and
an arrogance which revolt the instinct of my freedom. It was not in such
a style that Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Gassendi, Bayle, and
Newton wrote." D'Alembert replied that the king would judge more
favourably of the philosopher's person than of his works; that he would
find in Diderot, along with much fecundity, imagination, and knowledge,
a gentle heat and a great deal of amenity.[88] Frederick, however, did
not send the invitation, and Diderot willingly enough went homeward by
the northern route by which he had come. He passed Koenigsberg, where, if
he had known it, Kant was then meditating the Critic of Pure Reason. It
is hardly probable that Diderot met the famous worthy who was destined
to deal so heavy a blow to the Encyclopaedic way of thinking, and to
leave a name not less illustrious than Frederick or Catherine. A court
official was sent in charge of the philosopher. The troubles of posting
by the sea-road between Koenigsberg and Memel had moved him to the
composition of some very bad verses on his first journey; and the horror
of crossing the Dwina inspired others that were no better on his return.
The weather was hard; four carriages were broken in the journey. He
expected to be drowned as the ice creaked under his horses' feet at
Riga, and he thought that he had broken an arm and a shoulder as he
crossed the ferry at Mittau. But all ended well, and he found himself
once more under the roof of Prince Galitzin at the Hague. Hence he
wrote to his wife and his other friends in Paris, that it must be a
great consolation to them to know that he was only separated from them
by a journey of four days. That journey was not taken, however, for
nearly four months. Diderot had promised the Empress that he would
publish a set of the regulations for the various institutions which she
had founded for the improvement of her realm. This could only be done,
or could best be done, in Holland. His life there was spent as usual in
the slavery of proof-sheets, tempered by daily bursts of conversation,
rhapsody, discussion, and dreamy contemplation. He made the acquaintance
of a certain Bjoernstaehl, a professor of oriental languages at the
university of Lund in Sweden, and a few pages in this obscure writer's
obscure book contain the only glimpse that we have of the philosopher on
his travels.[89] Diderot was as ecstatic in conversation, as we know him
to have been in his correspondence, in praise of the august friend whom
he had left. The least of his compliments was that she united the charms
of Cleopatra to the soul of Caesar, or sometimes it was, to the soul of
Brutus.
[88] D'Alembert au Roi de Prusse. Feb. 14, 1774.
[89] _Briefe aus seinen auslaendischen Reisen_, iii. 217-233.
(Leipsic, 1780--a German translation from the Swedish.)
"At the Hague," says Bjoernstaehl, "we go about every day with M. Diderot.
He has views extending over an incredibly wide field, possesses a
vivacity that I cannot describe, is pleasant and friendly in
intercourse, and has new and unusual observations to make on every
subject.... Who could fail to prize him? He is so bright, so full of
instruction, has so many new thoughts and suggestions, that nobody can
help admiring him. But willingly as he talks when one goes to him, he
shows to little advantage in large companies, and that is why he did not
please everybody at St. Petersburg. You will easily see the reason why
this incomparable man in such companies, where people talk of fashion,
of clothes, of frippery, and all other sorts of triviality, neither
gives pleasure to others nor finds pleasure himself." And the friendly
Swede rises to the height of generalisation in the quaint maxim, Where
an empty head shines, there a thoroughly cultivated man comes too short.
Bjoernstaehl quotes a saying of Voltaire, that Diderot would have been a
poet if he had not wished to be a philosopher--a remark that was rather
due perhaps to Voltaire's habitual complaisance than to any serious
consideration of Diderot's qualities. But if he could not be a poet
himself, at least he knew Pindar and Homer by heart, and at the Hague he
never stirred out without a Horace in his pocket. And though no poet, he
was full of poetic sentiment. Scheveningen, the little bathing-place a
short distance from the Hague, was Diderot's favourite spot. "It was
there," he writes, "that I used to see the horizon dark, the sea covered
with white haze, the waves rolling and tumbling, and far out the poor
fishermen in their great clumsy boats; on the shore a multitude of women
frozen with cold or apprehension, trying to warm themselves in the sun.
When the work was at an end and the boats had landed, the beach was
covered with fish of every kind. These good people have the simplicity,
the openness, the filial and fraternal piety of old time. As the men
come down from their boats, their wives throw themselves into their
arms, they embrace their fathers and their little ones; each loads
himself with fish; the son tosses his father a codfish or a salmon,
which the old man carries off in triumph to his cottage, thanking heaven
that it has given him so industrious and worthy a son. When he has gone
indoors, the sight of the fish rejoices the old man's mate; it is
quickly cut in pieces, the less lucky neighbours invited, it is speedily
eaten, and the room resounds with thanks to God, and cheerful
songs."[90]
[90] xvii. 449.
These scenes, with their sea-background, their animation, their broad
strokes of the simple, tender, and real in life, may well have been
after Diderot's own heart. He often told me, says Bjoernstaehl, that he
never found the hours pass slowly in the company of a peasant, or a
cobbler, or any handicraftsman, but that he had many a time found them
pass slowly enough in the society of a courtier. "For of the one," he
said, "one can always ask about useful and necessary things, but the
other is mostly, so far as anything useful is concerned, empty and
void."
The characteristics of the European capitals a century ago were believed
to be hit off in the saying, that each of them would furnish the proper
cure for a given defect of character. The over-elegant were to go to
London, savages to Paris, bigots to Berlin, rebels to St. Petersburg,
people who were too sincere to Rome, the over-learned to Brussels, and
people who were too lively to the Hague. Yet the dulness thus charged
against the Hague was not universally admitted. Impartial travellers
assigned to the talk of cultivated circles there a rank not below that
of similar circles in France and England. Some went even farther, and
declared Holland to have a distinct advantage, because people were never
embarrassed either by the levity and sparkling wit of France on the one
hand, nor by the depressing reserve and taciturnity of England on the
other.[91] Yet Holland was fully within the sphere of the great
intellectual commonwealth of the west, and was as directly accessible to
the literary influences of the time as it had ever been. If Diderot had
inquired into the vernacular productions of the country, he would have
found that here also the wave of reaction against French conventions,
the tide of English simplicity and domestic sentimentalism, had passed
into literature. The _Spectator_ and _Clarissa Harlowe_ inspired the
writers of Holland, as they had inspired Diderot himself.[92]
[91] George Forster's _Ansichten vom Niederrhein_, etc. ii. 396
(1790).
[92] Jonckbloet's _Gesch. d. Niederland. Lit._ (German trans.) ii.
502, etc.
In erudition, it was still what, even after the death of Scaliger, it
had remained through the seventeenth century, the most learned state of
Europe; and the elder Hemsterhuys, with such pupils as Ruhnken and
Valckenaer, kept up as well as he could the scholarly tradition of
Gronovius and Graevius. But the eighteenth century was not the century of
erudition. Scholarship had given way to speculation.
Among the interesting persons whom Diderot saw at the Hague, the most
interesting is the amiable and learned son of the elder Hemsterhuys,
himself by the way not Dutch, but the son of a Frenchman. Hemsterhuys
had been greatly interested in what he had heard of Diderot's
character,[93] though we have no record of the impression that was made
by personal acquaintance. If Diderot was playfully styled the French
Socrates, the younger Hemsterhuys won from his friends the name of the
Dutch Plato. The Hollanders pointed to this meditative figure, to his
great attainments in the knowledge of ancient literature and art, to his
mellowed philosophising, to his gracious and well-bred style, as a proof
that their country was capable of developing both the strength and the
sensibility of human nature to their highest point.[94] And he has a
place in the history of modern speculation. As we think of him and
Diderot discussing, we feel ourselves to be placed at a point that seems
to command the diverging streams and eddying currents of the time. In
this pair two great tides of thought meet for a moment, and then flow
on in their deep appointed courses. For Hemsterhuys, born a Platonist to
the core, became a leader of the reaction against the French philosophy
of illumination--of sensation, of experience, of the verifiable. He
contributed a marked current to the mysticism and pietism which crept
over Germany before the French revolution, and to that religious
philosophy which became a point of patriotic honour both in Germany and
at the Russian Court, after the revolutionary war had seemed to identify
the rival philosophy of the Encyclopaedists with the victorious fury of
the national enemy. Jacobi, a chief of the mystic tribe, had begun the
attack on the French with weapons avowedly borrowed from the
sentimentalism of Rousseau, but by and by he found in Hemsterhuys more
genuinely intellectual arguments for his vindication of feeling and the
heart against the Encyclopaedist claim for the supremacy of the
understanding.
[93] _Oeuv. Phil. de Fr. Hemsterhuys_, iii. 141. (Ed. Meyboom.)
[94] Forster, ii. 398. Galiani, _Corresp._ ii. 189.
Diderot's hostess at the Hague is a conspicuous figure in the history of
this movement. Prince Galitzin had married the daughter of Frederick's
field-marshal, Schmettau. Goethe, who saw her (1797) many years after
Diderot was dead, describes her as one of those whom one cannot
understand without seeing; as a person not rightly judged unless
considered not only in connection, but in conflict, with her time. If
she was remarkable to Goethe when fifty years had set their mark upon
her, she was even more so to the impetuous Diderot in all the flush and
intellectual excitement of her youth. It was to the
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