CHAPTER VI.

SOCIAL LIFE (1759-1770).

Any one must be ignorant of the facts who supposes that the men of the

eighteenth century who did not believe in God, and were as little

continent as King David, were therefore no better than the reckless

vagabonds of Grub Street. Diderot, after he had once settled down to his

huge task, became a very orderly person. It is true that he had an

attachment to a lady who was not his wife. Marriage was in those days,

among the courtiers and the encyclopædic circle, too habitually regarded

as merely an official relation. Provided that there was no official

desertion, and no scandal, the world had nothing to say. Diderot was no

worse than his neighbours, though we may well be sorry that a man of his

generous sympathies and fine impulse was no better than his neighbours.

Mademoiselle Voland, after proper deduction made for the manners of the

time, was of a respectable and sentimental type. Her family were of good

position; she lived with her mother and sisters, and Diderot was on good

terms with them all. We have a glimpse of the characteristics of the

three ladies in a little dialogue between Diderot and some one whom he

met, and who happened to have made their acquaintance. "He informed me

that he had passed three months in the country where you are.--_Three

months_, said he, _is more than one needs to go mad about Madame Le

Gendre_.[192]--True, but then she is so reserved.--_I scarcely know any

woman with such an amount of self-respect_.--She is quite

right.--_Madame Voland is a woman of rare merit_.--Yes, and her eldest

daughter?--_She has the cleverness of a very devil_.--She is very

clever, no doubt; but what I especially like is her frankness. I would

lay a wager that she has never told a voluntary lie since she came to

years of discretion."[193] The relations between Diderot and Sophie

Voland were therefore not at all on the common footing of a low amour

with a coarse or frivolous woman of the world. All the proprieties of

appearance were scrupulously observed. Their mutual passion, though once

not wholly without its gallantries, soon took on that worthy and

decorous quality into which the ardour of valiant youth is reluctantly

softened by middle age, when we gravely comfort it with names of

philosophical compliment.

One of the most interesting of all the documentary memorials of the

century is to be found in the letters which Diderot wrote to

Mademoiselle Voland. No doubt has ever been thrown on the authenticity

of these letters, and they bear ample evidence of genuineness, so far as

the substance of them is concerned, in their characteristic style. They

were first published in 1830, from manuscripts sold to the bookseller

the year before by a certain French man of letters, Jeudy-Dugour by

name. He became a naturalised Russian, changed his name to Gouroff, and

died in the position of councillor of state and director of the

university of St. Petersburg. How he came by any papers of Diderot it is

impossible to guess. It is assumed that when Mademoiselle Voland died

her family gave his letters and other papers back to Diderot. These,

along with other documents, are supposed to have been given by Diderot

to Grimm. Thence they went to the Library of the Hermitage at St.

Petersburg. Whether Jeudy-Dugour sold copies or originals, and whether

he made the copies, if copies they were, from the Library, which was,

however, rigorously closed during the reign of Nicholas I., are literary

secrets which it is impossible to fathom. So far as Diderot is

concerned, some of the spirit of mystification that haunted literature

in the eighteenth century still hovers about it in the nineteenth. This

we shall presently find in a still more interesting monument of Diderot

than even his letters to Mademoiselle Voland.[194]

They are not a continuous series. It was only when either Diderot was

absent from Paris, or his correspondent was away at her mother's house

in the country, that letter-writing was necessary. Diderot appears to

have written to her openly and without disguise. The letters of

Mademoiselle Voland in reply were for obvious reasons not sent to

Diderot's house, but under cover to the office of Damilaville, so well

known to the reader of Voltaire's correspondence. Damilaville was a

commissioner in one of the revenue departments, and it is one among many

instances of the connivance between authority and its foes, that most of

the letters and packets of Voltaire, Diderot, and the rest of the group,

should have been taken in, sent out, guarded, and franked by the head of

a government office. The trouble that Damilaville willingly took in

order to serve his friends is another example of what we have already

remarked as the singular amiability and affectionate solicitude of those

times. "Think of Damilaville's attention," says Diderot on one occasion:

"to-day is Sunday, and he was obliged to leave his office. He was sure

that I should come this evening, for I never fail when I hope for a

letter from you. He left the key with two candles on a table, and

between the two candles your little letter, and a pleasant note of his

own." And by the light of the candles Diderot at once wrote a long

answer.[195]

We need not wonder if much is said in these letters of tardy couriers,

missing answers, intolerable absences, dreary partings, delicious

anticipations. All these are the old eternal talk of men and women, ever

since the world began; without them we should hardly know that we are

reading the words of man to woman. They are in our present case only

the setting of a curiously frank and open picture of a man's life.

It is held by some that one of the best means of giving the sense of a

little fixity to lives that are but as the evanescent fabric of a dream

and the shadow of smoke, is to secure stability of topographical centre

by abiding in the same house. Diderot is one of the few who complied

with this condition. For thirty years he occupied the fourth and fifth

floors of a house which was still standing not long ago, at the corner

of the Rue Saint Benoit by the Rue Taranne, in that Paris which our

tourists leave unexplored, but which is nevertheless the true Paris of

the eighteenth century. Of the equipment of his room we have a charming

picture by the hand of its occupant. It occurs in his playful Regrets on

My Old Dressing-gown, so rich in happy and delightful touches.

"What induced me to part with it? It was made for me; I was made for it.

It moulded itself to all the turns and outlines of my body without

fretting me. I was picturesque and beautiful; its successor, so stiff,

so heavy, makes a mere mannikin of me. There was no want to which, its

complaisance did not lend itself, for indigence is ever obsequious. Was

a book covered with dust, one of the lappets offered itself to wipe the

dust away. Did the thick ink refuse to flow from the pen, it offered a

fold. You saw traced in the long black lines upon it how many a service

it had rendered me. Those long lines announced the man of letters, the

writer, the workman. And now I have all the mien of a rich idler; you

know not who I may be. I was the absolute master of my old robe; I am

the slave of my new one. The dragon that guarded the golden fleece was

not more restless than I. Care wraps me about.

"The old man who has delivered himself up bound hand and foot to the

caprices of a young giddypate, says from morning to night: Ah, where is

my old, my kind housekeeper? What demon possessed me the day that I

dismissed her for this creature? Then he sighs, he weeps. I do not weep

nor sigh; but at every moment I say: Cursed be the man who invented the

art of making common stuff precious by dyeing it scarlet! Cursed be the

costly robe that I stand in awe of! Where is my old, my humble, my

obliging piece of homespun?

"That is not all, my friend. Hearken to the ravages of luxury--of a

luxury that must needs be consistent with itself. My old gown was at one

with the things about me. A straw-bottomed chair, a wooden table, a deal

shelf that held a few books, and three or four engravings, dimmed by

smoke, without a frame, nailed at the four corners to the wall. Among

the engravings three or four casts in plaster were hung up; they formed,

with my old dressing-gown, the most harmonious indigence. All has become

discord. No more _ensemble_, no more unity, no more beauty.

"The woman who comes into the house of a widower, the minister who steps

into the place of a statesman in disgrace, the molinist bishop who gets

hold of the diocese of a jansenist bishop--none of these people cause

more trouble than the intruding scarlet has caused to me.

"I can bear without disgust the sight of a peasant-woman. The bit of

coarse canvas that covers her head, the hair falling about her cheeks,

the rags that only half cover her, the poor short skirt that goes no

more than half-way down her legs, the naked feet covered with mud--all

these things do not wound me; 'tis the image of a condition that I

respect, 'tis the sign and summary of a state that is inevitable, that

is woful, and that I pity with all my heart. But my gorge rises, and in

spite of the scented air that follows her, I turn my eyes from the

courtesan, whose fine lace head-gear and torn cuffs, white stockings and

worn-out shoes, show me the misery of the day in company with the

opulence of last night. Such would my house have been, if the imperious

scarlet had not forced all into harmony with itself. I had two

engravings that were not without merit, Poussin's Manna in the

Wilderness, and the same painter's Esther before Ahasuerus; the one is

driven out in shame by some old man of Rubens's, the Fall of the Manna

is scattered to the winds by a Storm of Vernet's. The old straw chair is

banished to the ante-room by a luxurious thing of morocco. Homer,

Virgil, Horace, Cicero, have been taken from their shelf and shut up in

a case of grand marqueterie work, an asylum worthier of them than of me.

The wooden table still held its ground, protected by a vast pile of

pamphlets and papers heaped pell-mell upon it; they seemed as if they

would long protect it from its doom. Yet one day that too was mastered

by fate, and in spite of my idleness pamphlets and papers went to

arrange themselves in the shelves of a costly bureau.... It was thus that

the edifying retreat of the philosopher became transformed into the

scandalous cabinet of the farmer-general. Thus I too am insulting the

national misery.

"Of my early mediocrity there remained only a list carpet. The shabby

carpet hardly matches with my luxury. I feel it. But I have sworn and I

swear that I will keep this carpet, as the peasant, who was raised from

the hut to the palace of his sovereign, still kept his wooden shoes.

When in a morning, clad in the sumptuous scarlet, I enter my room, if I

lower my eyes I perceive my old list carpet; it recalls to me my early

state, and rising pride stands checked. No, my friend, I am not

corrupted. My door is open as ever to want; it finds me affable as ever;

I listen to its tale, I counsel, I pity, I succour it." ...

Yet the interior of Socrates-Diderot was as little blessed by domestic

sympathy as the interior of the older and greater Socrates. Of course

Diderot was far enough from being faultless. His wife is described by

Rousseau as a shrew and a scold. It is too plain that she was so; sullen

to her husband, impatient with her children, and exacting and

unreasonable with her servants.[196] We cannot pretend accurately to

divide the blame. The companionship was very dreary, and the picture

grievous and most afflicting to our thoughts. Diderot returns in the

evening from Holbach's, throws his carpet-bag in at the door, flies off

to seek a letter from Mademoiselle Voland, writes one to her, gets back

to his house at midnight, finds his daughter ill, puts cheerful and

cordial questions to his wife, she replies with a tartness that drives

him back into silence.[197] Another time the scene is violent. A torrent

of injustice and unreasonableness flows over him for two long hours, and

he wonders what the woman will profit, after she has made him burst a

blood-vessel; he groans in anguish, "Ah, how hard life seems to me to

bear! How many a time would I accept the end of it with joy!"[198] So

sharp are the goads in a divided house; so sorely, with ache and smart

and deep-welling tears, do men and women rend into shreds the fine web

of one another's lives. But the pity of it, O the pity of it!

There are many brighter intervals which make one willing to suppose

that if the wife had been a little more patient, more tolerant, more

cheerful, less severely addicted to her sterile superstition, there

might have been somewhat more happiness in the house. One misery of the

present social ideal of women is that, while it keeps them so

systematically ignorant, superstitious, and narrow, it leaves them

without humility. "Be content," said the great John Wesley to his

froward wife, "be content to be a private insignificant person, known

and loved by God and me. Of what importance is your character to

mankind? If you was buried just now, or if you had never lived, what

loss would it be to the cause of God?" This energetic remonstrance can

hardly be said to exhaust the matter. Still it puts a wholesome side of

the case which Madame Diderot missed, and which better persons are

likely to miss, so long as the exclusion of women, by common opinion or

by law, from an active participation in the settlement of great issues,

makes them indifferent to all interests outside domestic egoism, and

egoistic and personal religion. Brighter intervals shone in the

household. "I announced my departure," writes Diderot, "for next

Tuesday. At the first word I saw the faces both of mother and daughter

fall. The child had a compliment for my fête-day all ready, and it would

not do to let her waste the trouble of having learnt it. The mother had

projected a grand dinner for Sunday. Well, we arranged everything

perfectly. I made my journey, and came back to be harangued and

feasted. The poor child made her little speech in the most bewitching

way. In the middle there came some hard words, so she stopped and said

to me, 'My papa, 'tis because my two front teeth have come out'--as was

true. Then she went on. At the end, as she had a posy to give me, and it

could not be found, she stopped a second time to say to me--'Here's the

worst of the tale; my pinks have got lost.' Then she started off in

search of her flowers. We dined in great style. My wife had got all her

friends together. I was very gay, eating, drinking, and doing the

honours of my table to perfection. On rising from table I stayed among

them and played cards instead of going out. I saw them all off between

eleven and twelve: I was charming, and if you only knew with whom; what

physiognomies, what folk, what talk!"

Another time the child, whispering in his ear, asks why her mother bade

her not remind him that the morrow was the mother's fête-day. The

presence of the blithe all-hoping young, looking on with innocent

unconscious eyes at the veiled tragedy of love turned to bitter discord,

gives to such scenes their last touch of piteousness. Diderot, however,

observed the day, and presented a bouquet which was neither well or ill

received. At the birthday dinner the master of the house presided. "If

you had been behind the curtains, you would have said to yourself, how

can all this gossip and twaddle find a place in the same head with

certain ideas! And in truth I was charming, and played the fool to a

marvel."[199]

In the midst of distractions great and small, was an indomitable

industry. "I tell you," he wrote, "and I tell all men, when you are ill

at ease with yourself, instantly set about some good work. In busying

myself to soothe the trouble of another, I forget my own." He was

assiduous in teaching his daughter, though he complained that her mother

crushed out in a day what it had taken him a month to implant. The

booksellers found him the most cheerful and strenuous bondsman that ever

booksellers had. He would pass a whole month without a day's break,

working ten hours every day at the revision of proof-sheets. Sometimes

he remains a whole week without leaving his workroom. He wears out his

eyes over plates and diagrams, bristling with figures and letters, and

with no more refreshing thought in the midst of this sore toil than that

insult, persecution, torment, trickery, will be the fruit of it. He not

only spent whole days bent over his desk, until he had a feeling as of

burning flame within him; he also worked through the hours of the night.

On one of these occasions, worn out with fatigue and weariness, he fell

asleep with his head on his desk; the light fell down among his papers,

and he awoke to find half the books and papers on the desk burnt to

ashes. "I kept my own counsel about it," he writes, "because a single

hint of such an accident would have robbed my wife of sleep for the

rest of her life."[200]

His favourite form of holiday was a visit to Holbach's country house at

Grandval. Here he spent some six weeks or more nearly every autumn after

1759. The manner of life there was delightful to him. There was perfect

freedom, the mistress of the house neither rendering strict duties of

ceremony nor exacting them. Diderot used to rise at six or at eight, and

remain in his own room until one, reading, writing, meditating. Nobody

was more exquisitely sensible than Diderot to the charm of loitering

over books, "over those authors," as he said, "who ravish us from

ourselves, in whose hands nature has placed a fairy wand, with which

they no sooner touch us, than straightway we forget the evils of life,

the darkness lifts from our souls, and we are reconciled to

existence."[201] The musing suggestiveness of reading when we read only

for reading's sake, and not for reproduction nor direct use, was as

delightful to our laborious drudge as to others, but he could indulge

himself with little of this sweet idleness. It was in harder labour that

he passed most of his mornings. These hours of work achieved, he dressed

and went down among his friends. Then came the mid-day dinner, which was

sumptuous; host and guests both ate and drank more than was good for

their health. After a short siesta, towards four o'clock they took their

sticks and went forth to walk, among woods, over ploughed fields, up

hills, through quagmires, delighting in nature. As they went, they

talked of history, or politics, or chemistry, of literature, or physics,

or morality. At sundown they returned, to find lights and cards on the

tables, and they made parties of piquet, interrupted by supper. At

half-past ten the game ends, they chat until eleven, and in half an hour

more they are all fast asleep.[202] Each day was like the next;

industry, gaiety, bodily comfort, mental activity, diversifying the

hours. Grimm was often there, "the most French of all the Germans," and

Galiani, the most nimble-witted of men, inexhaustible in story,

inimitable in pantomimic narration, and yet with the keenest

intellectual penetration shining through all his Neapolitan prank and

buffoonery. Holbach cared most for the physical sciences. Marmontel

brought a vein of sentimentalism, and Helvétius a vein of cynical

formalism. Diderot played Socrates, Panurge, Pantophile; questioning,

instructing, combining; pouring out knowledge and suggestion, full of

interest in every subject, sympathetic with every vein, relishing alike

the newest philosophic hardihood, the last too merry mood of Holbach's

mother-in-law, the freshest piece of news brought by a traveller. It was

not at Grandval that he found life hard to bear, or would have accepted

its close with joy. And indeed if one could by miracle be transported

back into the sixth decade of that dead century for a single day,

perhaps one might choose that such a day should be passed among the

energetic and vivid men who walked of an afternoon among the fields and

woods of Grandval.

The unblushing grossness of speech which even the ladies of the party

permitted themselves cannot be reproduced in the decorous print of our

age. It is nothing less than inconceivable to us how Diderot can have

brought himself to write down, in letters addressed to a woman of good

education and decent manners, some of the talk that went on at Grandval.

The coarsest schoolboy of these days would wince at such shameless

freedoms. But it would be wrong to forget the allowance that must be

made for differences in point of fashion. Diderot, for instance, in

these very letters is wonderfully frank in his exposure of the details

of his health. He describes his indigestions, and other more

indescribable obstructions to happiness, as freely as Cicero wrote about

the dysentery which punished him, when, after he had resisted oysters

and lampreys at supper, he yielded to a dish of beet and mallow so

dressed with pot-herbs, _ut nil posset esse suavius_. Whatever men could

say to one another or to their surgeons they saw no harm in saying to

women. We have to remember how Sir Walter Scott's great-aunt, about the

very time when Diderot was writing to Mademoiselle Voland, had heard

Mrs. Aphra Behn's books read aloud for the amusement of large circles,

consisting of the first and most creditable society in London. We think

of Swift, in an earlier period of the century, enclosing to Stella some

recklessly gross verses of his own upon Bolingbroke, and habitually

writing to fine ladies in a way that Falstaff might have thought too bad

for Doll Tearsheet. In saying that these coarse impurities are only

points of manners, we are as far as possible from meaning that they are

on that account unimportant. But it is childish to waste our time in

censorious judgment on the individual who does no worse than represent a

ruling type. We can only note the difference and pass on.

A characteristic trait in this rural life is Diderot's passion for high

winds. They gave him a transport, and to hear the storm at night,

tossing the trees, drenching the ground with rain, and filling the air

with the bass of its hoarse ground-tones, was one of his keenest

delights.[203] Yet Diderot was not of those in whom the feeling for the

great effects of nature has something of savagery. He was above all

things human, and the human lot was the central source of his innermost

meditations. In the midst of gossip is constantly interpolated some

passage of fine reflection on life--reflection as sincere, as real,

coming as spontaneously from the writer's inmost mood and genuine

sentiment, as little tainted either by affectation or by commonness, as

ever passed through the mind of a man. Some of these are too

characteristic to be omitted, and there is so little of what is

exquisite in the flavour of Diderot's style, that he perhaps suffers

less from the clumsiness of translation than writers of finer colour or

more stirring melody. One of these passages is as follows:--

"The last news from Paris has made the Baron anxious, as he has

considerable sums in royal securities. He said to his wife: 'Listen, my

friend; if this is going on, I put down the carriage, I buy you a good

cloak and a good parasol, and for the rest of our days we will bless the

minister for ridding us of horses, lackeys, coachmen, ladies'-maids,

cooks, great dinner-parties, false friends, tiresome bores, and all the

other privileges of opulence.' And for my part I began to think, that

for a man without a wife or child, or any of those connections that make

us long for money, and never leave any superfluity, it would be almost

indifferent whether he were poor or rich. This paradox comes of the

equality that I discover among various conditions of life, and in the

little difference that I allow, in point of happiness, between the

master of the house and the hall-porter. If I am sound in mind and body,

if I have worth and a pure conscience, if I know the true from the

false, if I avoid evil and do good, if I feel the dignity of my being,

if nothing lowers me in my own eyes, then people may call me what they

will, _My Lord,_ or _Sirrah_. To do what is good, to know what is

true--that is what distinguishes one man from another; the rest is

nothing. The duration of life is so short, its true needs are so narrow,

and when we go away, it all matters so little whether we have been

somebody or nobody. When the end comes, all that you want is a sorry

piece of canvas and four deal boards. In the morning I hear the

labourers under my window. Scarce has the day dawned before they are at

work with spade and barrow, delving and wheeling. They munch a crust of

black bread; they quench their thirst at the flowing stream; at noon

they snatch an hour of sleep on the hard ground. They are cheerful; they

sing as they work; they exchange their good broad pleasantries with one

another; they shout with laughter. At sundown they go home to find

their children naked round a smoke-blackened hearth, a woman hideous and

dirty, and their lot is neither worse nor better than mine. I came down

from my room in bad spirits; I heard talk about the public misery; I sat

down to a table full of good cheer without an appetite; I had a stomach

overloaded with the dainties of the day before; I grasped a stick and

set out for a walk to find relief; I returned to play cards, and cheat

the heavy-weighing hours. I had a friend of whom I could not hear; I was

far from a woman whom I sighed for. Troubles in the country, troubles in

the town, troubles everywhere. He who knows not trouble is not to be

counted among the children of men. All gets paid off in time; the good

by the evil, evil by good, and life is naught. Perhaps to-morrow night

or Monday morning we may go to pass a day in town; so I shall see the

woman for whom I sighed, and recover the man of whom I could not hear.

But I shall lose them the next day; and the more I feel the happiness of

being with them, the worse I shall suffer at parting. That is the way

that all things go. Turn and turn and turn again; there is ever a

crumpled rose-leaf to vex you."[204]

It is not often that we find such active benevolence as Diderot's, in

conjunction with such a vein of philosophy as follows:--

"Ah, what a fine comedy this world would be, if only one had not to play

a part in it; if one existed, for instance, in some point of space, in

that interval of the celestial orbs where the gods of Epicurus slumber,

far, far away, whence one could see this globe, on which we strut so

big, about the size of a pumpkin, and whence one could watch all the

airs and tricks of that two-footed mite who calls itself man. I would

fain only look at the scenes of life in reduced size, so that those

which are stamped with atrocity may be brought down to an inch in space,

and to actors half a line high. But how bizarre, that our sense of

revolt against injustice is in the ratio of the space and the mass. I am

furious if a large animal unjustly attacks another. I feel nothing at

all if it is two atoms that tear and rend. How our senses affect our

morality. There is a fine text for philosophising!"[205]

"What I see every day of physic and physicians does not much heighten my

opinion of them. To come into the world in imbecility, in the midst of

anguish and cries; to be the toy of ignorance, of error, of necessity,

of sickness, of malice, of all passions; to return step by step to that

imbecility whence one sprang; from the moment when we lisp our first

words, down to the moment when we mumble the words of our dotage, to

live among rascals and charlatans of every kind; to lie expiring between

a man who feels your pulse, and another man who frets and wearies your

head; not to know whence one comes, nor why one has come, nor whither

one is going--that is what we call the greatest gift of our parents and

of nature--human life."[206]

These sombre meditations hardly represent Diderot's habitual vein; they

are rather a reaction and a relief from the busy intensity with which he

watches the scene, and is constantly putting interrogatories to human

life, as day by day its motley circumstance passes before his eyes. We

should scarcely suspect from his frequent repetitions of the mournful

eternal chorus of the nullity of man and the vanity of all the things

that are under the sun, how alert a watch he kept on incident and

character, with what keen and open ear he listened for any curious note

of pain, or voice of fine emotion, or odd perversity of fate. All this

he does, not in the hard temper of a Balzac, not with the calm or pride

of a Goethe, but with an overflowing fulness of spontaneous and

uncontrollable sympathy. He is a sentimentalist in the rationalistic

century, not with the sentimentalism of misanthropy, such as fired or

soured Rousseau, but social, large-hearted, many-sided, careless of the

wise rigours of morality. He is never callous nor neutral; on the

contrary, he is always approving or disapproving, but not from the

standards of the ethical text-books. The casuistry of feeling is of

everlasting interest to him, and he is never tired of inventing

imaginary cases, or pondering real ones, in which pliant feeling is

invoked against the narrowness of duty. These are mostly in a kind of

matter which modern taste hardly allows us to reproduce; nor, after all,

is there much to be gained by turning the sanctities of human

relationship, with all their immeasurable bliss, their immeasurable woe,

into the playthings of an idle dialectic. It is pleasanter, and for us

English not less instructive than pleasant, to see this dreaming,

restless, thrice ingenious spirit, half Titan of the skies, half gnome

of the lower earth, entering joyously or pitifully into the simple charm

and natural tenderness of life as it comes and passes. Nothing delights

him more than to hear or to tell such a story as this of Madame

D'Epinay. She had given a small lad eighteen sous for a day's work. At

night he went home without a farthing. When his mother asked him

whether they had given him nothing for his work, he said No. The mother

found out that this was untrue, and insisted on knowing what had become

of the eighteen sous. The poor little creature had given them to an

alehouse-keeper, where his father had been drinking all day; and so he

had spared the worthy man a rough scene with his wife when he got

home.[207]

From the pathos of kindly youth to the grace of lovable age the step is

not far. "To-day I have dined with a charming woman, who is only eighty

years old. She is full of health and cheerfulness; her soul is still

all gentleness and tenderness. She talks of love and friendship with

the fire and sensibility of a girl of twenty. There were three men of

us at table with her; she said to us, 'My friends, a delicate

conversation, a true and passionate look, a tear, a touched expression,

those are the good things of the world; as for all besides, it is

hardly worth talking of. There are certain things that were said to me

when I was young, and that I remember to this day, and any one of those

words is to be preferred before ten glorious deeds: by my faith, I

believe if I heard them even now, my old heart would beat the quicker.'

'Madame, the reason is that your heart has grown no older.' 'No, my

son, you are right; it is as young as ever. It is not for having kept

me alive so long that I thank God, but for having kept me kind-hearted,

gentle, and full of feeling.'"[208] All this was after Diderot's own

heart, and he declares such a conversation to be worth more than all

the hours of talk on politics and philosophy that he had been having a

few days before with some English friends. We may understand how, as we

shall presently see, a member of a society that could relish the beauty

of such a scene, would be likely to think Englishmen hard, surly, and

cheerless.

His letters constantly offer us sensible and imaginative reflection. He

amused himself in some country village by talking to an old man of

eighty. "I love children and old men; the latter seem to me like some

singular creatures that have been spared by caprice of fate." He meets

some old schoolfellows at Langres, nearly all the rest having gone:

"Well, there are two things that warn us of our end, and set us

musing--old ruins, and the short duration of those who began life with

us." He is taken by a host over-devoted to such joys, to walk among

dung-heaps. "After all," he says, "it ought not to offend one's sense.

To an honest nose that has preserved its natural innocence, 'tis not a

goat, but a bemusked and ambre-scented woman, who smelleth ill."

"When I compare our friendships to our antipathies, I find that the

first are thin, small, pinched; we know how to hate, but we do not know

how to love."

"A poet who becomes idle, does excellently well to be idle; he ought to

be sure that it is not industry that fails, but that his gift is

departing from him."

"Comfort the miserable; that is the true way to console yourself for my

absence. I recollect saying to the Baron, when he lost his first wife,

and was sure that there was not another day's happiness left for him in

this world, 'Hasten out of doors, seek out the wretched, console them,

and then you will pity yourself, if you dare.'"[209]

"An infinitude of tyrannical things interpose between us and the duties

of love and friendship; and we do nothing aright. A man is neither free

for his ambition, nor free for his taste, nor free for his passion. And

so we all live discontented with ourselves. One of the great

inconveniences of the state of society is the multitude of our

occupations and, above all, the levity with which we make engagements to

dispose of all our future happiness. We marry, we go into business, we

have children, all before we have common sense."[210]

After some equivocal speculations as to the conduct of a woman who, by

the surrender of herself for a quarter of an hour to the desires of a

powerful minister, wins an appointment for her husband and bread for her

six children, he exclaims: "In truth, I think Nature heeds neither good

nor evil; she is wholly wrapped up in two objects, the preservation of

the individual and the propagation of the species."[211] True; but the

moral distinction between right and wrong is so much wrung from the

forces that Diderot here calls Nature.

The intellectual excitement in which he lived and the energy with which

he promoted it, sought relief either in calm or else in the play of

sensibility. "A delicious repose," he writes in one of his most harassed

moments, "a sweet book to read, a walk in some open and solitary spot, a

conversation in which one discloses all one's heart, a strong emotion

that brings the tears to one's eyes and makes the heart beat faster,

whether it comes of some tale of generous action, or of a sentiment of

tenderness, of health, of gaiety, of liberty, of indolence--there is the

true happiness, nor shall I ever know any other."

_A Point in Rhetoric._--"Towards six in the evening the party broke up.

I remained alone with D., and as we were talking about the Eloges on

Descartes that had been sent in to the Academy, I made two remarks that

pleased him upon eloquence. One, that it is a mistake to try to stir the

passions before convincing the reason, and that the pathetic remains

without effect, when it is not prepared by the syllogism. Second, that

after the orator had touched me keenly, I could not endure that he

should break in upon this melting of the soul with some violent stroke:

that the pathetic insists on being followed by something moderate, weak,

vague, that should leave room for no contention on my part."[212]

_Holbach's Impressions of England._--"The Baron has returned from

England. He started with the pleasantest anticipations, he had a most

agreeable reception, he had excellent health, and yet he has returned

out of humour and discontented; discontented with the country, which he

found neither as populous nor as well cultivated as people say;

discontented with the buildings, that are nearly all bizarre and Gothic;

with the gardens, where the affectation of imitating nature is worse

than the monotonous symmetry of art; with the taste that heaps up in the

palaces what is first-rate, what is good, what is bad, what is

detestable, all pell-mell. He is disgusted at the amusements, which have

the air of religious ceremonies; with the men, on whose countenances you

never see confidence, friendship, gaiety, sociability, but on every face

the inscription, _'What is there in common between me and you?'_;

disgusted with the great people, who are gloomy, cold, proud, haughty,

and vain; and with the small people, who are hard, insolent, and

barbarous. The only thing that I have heard him praise is the facility

of travel: he says there is not a village, even on a cross-road, where

you do not find four or five post-chaises and a score of horses ready to

start.... There is no public education. The colleges--sumptuous

buildings--palaces to be compared to the Tuileries, are occupied by rich

idlers, who sleep and get drunk one part of the day, and the rest they

spend in training, clumsily enough, a parcel of uncouth lads to be

clergymen.... In the fine places that have been built for public

amusements, you could hear a mouse run. A hundred stiff and silent women

walk round and round an orchestra that is set up in the middle. The

Baron compares these circuits to the seven processions of the Egyptians

round the tomb of Osiris. A charming _mot_ of my good friend Garrick, is

that London is good for the English, but Paris is good for all the

world.... There is a great mania for conversions and missionaries. Mr.

Hume told me a story which will let you know what to think of these

pretended conversions of cannibals and Hurons. A minister thought he had

done a great stroke in this line; he had the vanity to wish to show his

proselyte, and brought him to London. They question his little Huron,

and he answers to perfection. They take him to church, and administer

the sacrament, where, as you know, the communion is in both kinds.

Afterwards, the minister says to him, 'Well, my son, do you not feel

yourself more animated with the love of God? Does not the grace of the

sacrament work within you? Is not all your soul warmed?' 'Yes,' says the

Huron: 'the wine does one good, but I think it would have done still

better if it had been brandy.'"[213]

_Two Cases of Conscience_.--"The curé said that unhappy lovers always

talked about dying, but that it was very rare to find one who kept his

word; still he had seen one case. It was that of a young man of family,

called Soulpse. He fell in love with a young lady of beauty and of good

character, but without money, and belonging to a dishonoured family. Her

father was in the galleys for forgery. The young man, who foresaw all

the opposition, and all the good grounds for opposition, that he would

have to encounter among his family, did all that he could to cure

himself of his passion; but when he was assured of the uselessness of

his efforts, he plucked up courage to open the matter to his parents,

who wearied themselves with remonstrances. Our lover suddenly stopped

them short, saying, 'I know all that you have to say against me; I

cannot disapprove of your reasons, which I should be the first to urge

against my own son, if I had one. But consider whether you would rather

have me dead or badly married; for it is certain that if I do not marry

the woman that I love, I shall die of it.' They treated this speech as

it deserved; the result does not affect that. The young man fell sick,

faded from day to day, and died. 'But, Curé,' said I, 'in the place of

the father, what would you have done?' 'I would have called my son; I

would have said: Soulpse has been your name hitherto; never forget that

it is yours no more; and call yourself by what other name you please.

Here is your lawful share of our property; marry the woman you love, so

far from here that I may never hear speak of you again, and God bless

you. 'For my part,' said old Madame D'Esclavelles, 'if I had been the

mother of the young madman, I would have done exactly as his father did,

and let him die.' And upon this there was a tremendous division of

opinion, and an uproar that made the room ring again.

"The dispute lasted a long time, and would be going on now if the cure

had not broken it off by putting to us another case. A young priest,

discontented with his profession, flees to England, apostatises, marries

according to the law, and has children. After a certain time he longs

for his native country; he comes back to France with his children and

his wife. After that, again, he is stricken by remorse; he returns to

his religion, has scruples about his marriage, and thinks of separating

from his wife. He opens his heart to our curé, who finds the case very

embarrassing, and not venturing to decide it, refers him to casuists and

lawyers. They all decide that he cannot, with a sure conscience, remain

with his wife. When the separation, which the wife opposed with all her

might, was about to be legally effected--rather against the wishes of

our curé--the husband fell dangerously ill. When he knew that he could

not recover, he said to the curé: 'My friend, I wish to make public

amends for my backsliding, to receive the sacraments, and to die in the

hospital; be kind enough to have me taken there.' 'I will take care to

do no such thing,' the curé replied to him. 'This woman is innocent; she

married you according to law; she knew nothing of the obstacles that

existed. And these children, what share have they in your sin? You are

the only wrongdoer, and it is they who are to be punished! Your wife

will be disgraced, your children will be declared illegitimate, and what

is the gain of it all?' And the good curé stuck to his text. He

confessed his man, the illness grew worse, he administered the last

sacraments. The man died, and his wife and children remained in

possession of the titles they had. We all approved the curé's wisdom,

and Grimm insisted on having his portrait taken."[214]

_Chinese Superiority_.---"Apropos of the Chinese, do you know that with

them nobility ascends, and descends never? It is the children who

ennoble their ancestors, and not the ancestors the children. And upon my

word that is most sensible. We are greater poets, greater philosophers,

greater orators, greater architects, greater astronomers, greater

geometers, than these good people; but they understand better than we

the science of good sense and virtue; and if peradventure that science

should happen to be the first of all sciences, they would be right in

saying that they have two eyes and we have only one, and all the rest of

the world is blind."[215]

_Why Women write good Letters_.--"She writes admirably, really

admirably. That is because good style is in the heart; and that is why

so many women talk and write like angels without ever having learnt

either to talk or to write, and why so many pedants will both talk and

write ill all the days of their life, though they were never weary of

studying,--only without learning."[216]

"A little adventure has just happened here that proves that all our fine

sermons on intolerance have as yet produced but poor fruit. A young man

of respectable birth, some say apprentice to an apothecary, others to a

grocer, took it into his head to go through a course of chemistry; his

master consented, on condition that he should pay for board; the lad

agreed. At the end of the quarter the master demanded the money, and it

was paid. Soon after, another demand from the master; the apprentice

replied that he barely owed a single quarter. The master denied that the

first quarter had been paid. The affair was taken into court. The master

is put on his oath, and swears. He had no sooner perjured himself than

the apprentice produced his receipt, and the master was straightway

fined and disgraced. He was a scoundrel who deserved it, but the

apprentice was a rash fellow, whose victory was bought at a price dearer

than life. He had received, in payment or otherwise, from some

colporteur, two copies of _Christianity Unveiled_, and one of them he

had sold to his master. The master informs against him. The colporteur,

his wife, and his apprentice, are all three arrested, and they have just

been pilloried, whipped, and branded, and the apprentice condemned to

nine years of the galleys, the colporteur to five years, and the woman

to the hospital for life.... Do you see the meaning of this judgment? A

colporteur brings me a prohibited book. If I buy more than one copy, I

am declared to be encouraging unlawful trading, and exposed to a

frightful prosecution. You have read the _Man with Forty Crowns_,[217]

and will hardly be able to guess why it is placed under the ban in the

judgment I am telling you of. It is in consequence of the profound

resentment that our lords and masters feel about a certain article,

_Tyrant_, in the _Philosophical Dictionary_. They will never forgive

Voltaire for saying that it was better to have to do with a single wild

beast, which one could avoid, than with a band of little subaltern

tigers who are incessantly getting between your legs.... To return to

those two unfortunate wretches whom they have condemned to the galleys.

When they come out, what will become of them? There will be nothing left

for them to do, save to turn highway robbers. The ignominious

penalties, which take away all resource from a man, are worse than the

capital punishment that takes away his life."[218]

_Method and Genius: an Apologue._--"There was a question between Grimm

and M. Le Roy of creative genius and co-ordinating method. Grimm detests

method; according to him, it is the pedantry of letters. Those who can

only arrange, would do as well to remain idle; those who can only get

instruction from what has been arranged, would do as well to remain

ignorant. What necessity is there for so many people knowing anything

else besides their trade? They said a great many things that I don't

report to you, and they would be saying things still, if the Abbé

Galiani had not interrupted them:

'My friends, I remember a fable: pray listen to it. One day, in the

depths of a forest, a dispute arose between a Nightingale and a Cuckoo.

Each prizes its own gift. What bird, said the Cuckoo, has a song so

easy, so simple, so natural, so measured, as mine?

What bird, said the Nightingale, has a song sweeter, more varied, more

brilliant, more touching, than mine?

_The Cuckoo:_ I say few things, but they are things of weight, of order,

and people retain them.

_The Nightingale:_ I love to use my voice, but I am always fresh, and I

never weary. I enchant the woods; the Cuckoo makes them dismal. He is so

attached to the lessons of his mother, that he would not dare to venture

a single note that he had not taken from her. Now for me, I recognise no

master. I laugh at rules. What comparison between his pedantic method

and my glorious bursts?

The Cuckoo tried several times to interrupt the Nightingale. But

nightingales always go on singing, and never listen; that is rather

their weakness. Ours, carried away by his ideas, followed them with

rapidity, without paying the least attention to the answers of his

rival.

So after some talk and counter-talk, they agreed to refer their quarrel

to the judgment of a third animal. But where were they to find this

third, equally competent and impartial? It is not so easy to find a good

judge. They sought on every side. As they crossed a meadow, they spied

an Ass, one of the gravest and most solemn that ever was seen. Since the

creation of the world, no ass had ever had such long ears. 'Ah,' said

the Cuckoo, 'our luck is excellent; our quarrel is a matter of ears:

here is our judge. God Almighty made him for the very purpose!'

The Ass went on browsing. He little thought that one day he would have

to decide a question of music. But Providence amuses itself with this

and many another thing. Our two birds bow very low, compliment him upon

his gravity and his judgment, explain the subject of their dispute, and

beseech him, with all deference, to listen to their case and decide.

But the Ass, hardly turning his heavy head and without losing a single

toothsome blade, makes them a sign with his ears that he is hungry, and

that he does not hold his court to-day. The birds persist; the Ass goes

on browsing. At last his hunger was appeased. There were some trees

planted by the edge of the meadow. 'Now, if you like,' said he, 'you go

there, I will follow; you shall sing, I will digest; I will listen, and

I'll give you my opinion.'

The birds instantly fly away, and perch on branches. The Ass follows

them with the air and the step of a chief justice crossing Westminster

Hall: he stretches himself flat on the ground, and says, 'Begin, the

court listens.'

Says the Cuckoo: 'My lord, there is not a word to lose. I beg of you to

seize carefully the character of my singing; above all things, deign, my

lord, to mark its artifice and its method.' Then filling its throat, and

flapping its wings at each note, it sang out, 'Coucou, coucou, coucou,

coucou, coucou, coucou.' And after having combined this in every

possible way, it fell silent.

The Nightingale, without any prelude, pours forth his voice at once,

launches into the most daring modulations, pursues the freshest and most

delicate melodies, cadences, pauses, and trills; now you heard the notes

murmuring at the bottom of its throat, like the ripple of the brook as

it loses itself among the pebbles; now you heard them rising and

gradually swelling and filling the air, and lingering long-drawn in the

skies. It was tender, glad, brilliant, pathetic; but his music was not

made for everybody.

Carried away by enthusiasm, he would be singing still; but the Ass, who

had already yawned more than once, stopped him, and said, 'I suspect

that all you have been singing there is uncommonly fine, but I don't

understand a word of it: it strikes me as bizarre, incoherent, and

confused. It may be you are more scientific than your rival; but he is

more methodic than you, and for my part, I'm for method.'

"And then the abbé, addressing M. Le Roy, and pointing to Grimm with his

finger: 'There,' he said, 'is the nightingale, and you the cuckoo; and I

am the ass, who decide in your favour. Good-night.'

"The abbés stories are capital, but he acts in a way that makes them

better still. You would have died with laughing to see him stretch his

neck into the air, and imitate the fine note of the nightingale, then

fill his throat, and take up the hoarse tone for the cuckoo; and all

that naturally, and without effort. He is pantomime from head to

foot."[219]

_Conversation._--"'Tis a singular thing, conversation, especially when

the company is tolerably large. Look at the roundabout circuits we took;

the dreams of a patient in delirium are not more incongruous. Still,

just as there is nothing absolutely unconnected in the head either of a

man who dreams, or of a lunatic, so all hangs together in conversation;

but it would often be extremely hard to find the imperceptible links

that have brought so many disparate ideas together. A man lets fall a

word which he detaches from what has gone before, and what has followed

in his head; another does the same, and then let him catch the thread

who can. A single physical quality may lead the mind that is engaged

upon it to an infinity of different things. Take a colour--yellow, for

instance; gold is yellow, silk is yellow, care is yellow, bile is

yellow, straw is yellow; to how many other threads does not this thread

answer? Madness, dreaming, the rambling of conversation, all consist in

passing from one object to another, through the medium of some common

quality."[220]

_Annihilation._--"The conversation took a serious turn. They spoke of

the horror that we all feel for annihilation.

"'Ah,' cried Father Hoop, 'be good enough to leave me out, if you

please. I have been too uncomfortable the first time to have any wish to

come back. If they would give me an immortality of bliss for a single

day of purgatory, I would not take it. The best that can befall us is to

cease to be.'

"This set me musing, and it seemed to me that so long as I was in good

health I should agree with Father Hoop; but that, at the last instant, I

should perhaps purchase the happiness of living again by a thousand,

nay, ten thousand, years of hell. Ah, my dear, if I thought that I

should see you again, I should soon persuade myself of what a daughter

once succeeded in persuading her father on his deathbed. He was an old

usurer; a priest had sworn to him that he would be damned unless he made

restitution. He resolved to comply, and calling his daughter to his

bedside, said to her: 'My child, you thought I should leave you very

rich, and so I should; but the man there insists that I shall burn in

hell-fire for ever, if I die without making restitution.' 'You are

talking nonsense, father, with your restitution and your damnation,' the

daughter answered; 'with your character I you will not have been damned

ten years, before you will be perfectly used to it.'

"This struck him as true, and he died without making restitution.

"And so behold us launched into a discussion on life and death, on the

world and its alleged Creator.

"Some one remarked that whether there be a God or no, it is impossible

to introduce that device either into nature or into a discussion without

darkening it.

"Another said that if a single supposition explained all the phenomena,

it would not follow from this that it is true; for who knows whether the

general order only allows of one reason? What, then, must we think of a

supposition which, so far from resolving the one difficulty for the sake

of which people imagined it, only makes an infinity of others spring up

from it?

"I believe, my dear, that our chat by the fireside still amuses you; so

I go on.

"Among these difficulties is one that has been proposed ever since the

world has been a world; 'tis that men suffer without having deserved

suffering. There has been no answer to it yet. 'Tis the incompatibility

of physical and moral evil with the nature of the Eternal Being. This is

how the dilemma is put: it is either impotence or bad will; impotence,

if he wished to hinder evil and could not; bad will, if he could have

hindered it and did not will it. A child would understand that. It is

this that has led people to imagine the fault of the first father of us

all, original sin, future rewards and punishments, the incarnation,

immortality, the two principles of the Manicheans, the Ormuzd and

Ahriman of the Persians, the doctrine of emanations, the empire of light

and darkness, metempsychosis, optimism, and other absurdities that have

found credit among the different nations of the earth, where there is

always to be found some hollow vision of a dream, by way of answer to a

clear, precise, and definite fact.

"On such occasions what is the part of good sense? Why, the part that we

took: whatever the optimists may say, we will reply to them that if the

universe could not exist without sensible creatures, nor sensible

creatures without pain, there was nothing to do but to leave chaos at

peace. They had got on very well for a whole eternity without any such

piece of folly.

"The world a piece of folly! Ah, my dear, a glorious folly for all that!

'Tis, according to some of the inhabitants of Malabar, one of the

seventy-four comedies with which the Eternal amuses himself.

"Leibnitz, the founder of optimism, tells somewhere how there was in the

Temple of Memphis a high pyramid of globes placed one above the others;

how a priest, being asked by a traveller about this pyramid and its

globes, made answer that these were all the possible worlds, and that

the most perfect of them all was at the summit; how the traveller,

curious to see this most perfect of all possible worlds, mounted to the

top of the pyramid, and the first thing that caught his eyes, as they

turned towards the globe at the summit, was Tarquin outraging

Lucretia."[221]

Almost every letter reminds us that we are in the very height of the

disputing, arguing, rationalistic century. Diderot delighted in this

kind of argument, as Socrates or Dr. Johnson delighted in it. He was

above all others the archetype and representative of the passion for

moralising, analysing, and philosophising which made the epoch what it

was; but the rest of the world was all in the same vein. If he came to

Paris in a coach from the country, he found a young lady in it, eager to

demonstrate that serious passions are nowadays merely ridiculous; that

people only promise themselves pleasure, which they find or not, as the

case may be; that thus they spare themselves all the broken oaths of old

days. "I took the liberty of saying that I was still a man of those old

days. '_So much the worse for you_,' she said, '_you either deceive or

are deceived, and one is as bad as the other_.'"[222] If Grimm and

Madame d'Epinay and he were together, they discussed ethics from morning

to night; Diderot always on the side of the view that made most for the

dignity and worth of human nature. Grimm is described on one of these

occasions as having rather displeased Madame d'Epinay: "He was not

sufficiently ready to disapprove the remark of a man of our

acquaintance, who said that it was right to observe the most scrupulous

probity with one's friends, but that it was mere dupery to treat other

people better than they would treat us. We maintained, she and I, that

it was right and necessary to be honest and good with all the world

without distinction."[223]

Here is another picture of discussion, with an introduction that is

thoroughly characteristic of Diderot's temper:

"This man looks at the human race only on its dark side. He does not

believe in virtuous actions; he disparages them, and denies them. If he

tells a story, it is always about something scandalous and abominable.

I have just told you of the two women of my acquaintance, of whom he

took occasion to speak as ill as he could to Madame Le Gendre. They have

their defects, no doubt; but they have also their good qualities. Why be

silent about the good qualities, and only pick out the defects? There is

in all that a kind of envy that wounds me--me who read men as I read

authors, and who never burden my memory except with things that are good

to know and good to imitate. The conversation between Suard and Madame

Le Gendre had been very vivacious. They sought the reasons why persons

of sensibility were so readily, so strongly, so deliciously moved at the

story of a good action. Suard maintained that it was due to a sixth

sense that nature had endowed us with, to judge the good and the

beautiful. They pressed to know what I thought of it. I answered that

this sixth sense was a chimæra; that all was the result of experience in

us; that we learnt from our earliest infancy what it was in our instinct

to hide or to show. When the motives of our actions, our judgments, our

demonstrations, are present to us, we have what is called science; when

they are not present to our memory, we have only what is called taste,

instinct, and tact. The reasons for showing ourselves sensible to the

recital of good actions are numberless: we reveal a quality that is

worthy of infinite esteem; we promise to others our esteem, if ever they

deserve it by any uncommon or worthy piece of conduct.... Independently

of all these views of interest, we have a notion of order, and a taste

for order, which we cannot resist, and which drags us along in spite of

ourselves. Every fine action implies sacrifice; and it is impossible for

us not to pay our homage to self-sacrifice"--and so forth.[224]

Alas, all these endless debates and dialogues lacked the inspiration and

the charm with which the genius of a Plato could adorn the narrowest

quibble between Socrates and a Sophist. "Diderot," said Mademoiselle de

Lespinasse, "is an extraordinary man; he is out of his place in society;

he was meant for the chief of a sect, a Greek philosopher, instructing

youth. He pleases me greatly, but his manner does not touch my

soul."[225] And we understand this. People disputed what virtue is, but

the dispute failed in that undefined spirit which makes men love and

adore virtue. Goodness is surrounded with no spacious beauty, it is

clothed with none of the high associations of spontaneous piety. The

discussion seems close, stifling, and airless. Yet ages of loftier

speech and greater spirituality have not always been so favourable to

the affections or to the attachments of life. In amiability that society

has never been surpassed; in sincerity of mutual sympathy and kindliness

of mutual regard. The common irregularity of morals was seen to be

perfectly compatible not merely with a desire to please, but with an

honest anxiety to serve.

Of the thorough excellence of Diderot's heart, of his friendliness and

unwearied helpfulness, time would fail us to tell. Men's conceptions of

friendship differ as widely as their conceptions of other things. Some

look to friendship for absolute exemption from all criticism, and for a

mutual admiration without limit or conditions. Others mistake it for the

right of excessive criticism, in season and out of season.

Diderot was content to take friendship as the right, the duty, or the

privilege of rendering services, without thought of requiring either

them, or gratitude for them, back in return. This we must confess to be

rare. No man that ever lived showed more sterling interest in furthering

the affairs of others around him. He seemed to admit every claim on his

time, his purse, and his talents. A stranger called upon him one day,

and begged Diderot to write for him a puffing advertisement of a new

pomatum. Diderot with a laugh sat down and wrote what was wanted. The

graver occasions of life found him no less ready. Damilaville lost one

of his children, and his wife was inconsolable. It was Diderot who was

summoned, and who cheerfully went for days together to soothe and divert

her mind. For his correspondent and for us he makes the tedium of his

story beautiful by recalling the fine saying of a grief-stricken woman

in Metastasio, when they tried to console her by the example of Abraham,

who was ready even to slay his son at the command of God: _Ah, God would

never have given such an order to his mother!_

The abbé Le Monnier wrote the worst verses that ever were read, a play

that was instantly damned, and a translation of Terence that came into

the world dead. But bad writers are always the most shameless intruders

on the time of good critics, and we find Diderot willingly spending

hours over the abbé's handwriting, which was as wretched as what he

wrote, and then spending hours more in offering critical observations

on verses that were only fit to be thrown into the fire. The abbé, being

absent from Paris and falling short of money, requested Diderot to sell

for him his copy of the Encyclopædia. "I have sold your Encyclopædia,"

said Diderot, "but did not get so much as I expected, for the rumour

spread abroad by those scoundrels of Swiss booksellers, that they were

going to issue a revised edition, has done us some harm. Send for the

nine hundred and fifty livres (about £40) that belong to you, and if

that is not enough for your expenses, besides the drawer that holds your

money is another that holds mine. I don't know how much there is, but I

will count it all at your disposal."[226]

One Jodin, again, was a literary hack who had been employed on the

Encyclopædia. He died, leaving a foolish and extravagant widow, and a

perverse and violent daughter. The latter went on to the stage, and

Diderot took as much trouble in advising her, in seeking appointments

for her, in executing her commissions, in investing her earnings, in

dealing with her relatives, as if he had been her own father. If his

counsels on her art are admirable, there is something that moves us with

more than admiration in the good sense, the right feeling, the

worthiness of his counsels on conduct. And Diderot did not merely

moralise at large. All that he says is real, pointed, and apt for

circumstance and person. The petulant damsel to whom they were addressed

would not be likely to yawn over the sharp remonstrances, the vigorous

plain speaking, the downright honesty and visible sincerity of his

friendliness. It appears that she had sense enough not to be offended

with the frankness of her father's old employer, for after he has

plainly told her that she is violent, rude, vain, and not always too

truthful, she still writes to him from Warsaw, from Dresden, from

Bordeaux, praying him to procure a certain bracelet for her, to arrange

her mother's affairs, to find a good investment for twelve thousand

francs. When the mother was in the depths of indigence, Diderot insisted

that she should take her meals at his own table. And all this for no

other reason than that the troublesome pair had been thrown in his way

by the chance of human circumstance, and needed help which he was able,

not without sacrifice, to give. Mademoiselle Jodin was hardly worthy of

so good a friend. Her parents were Protestants, and as she was a

convert, she enjoyed a pension of some eight pounds a year. That did not

prevent her from one day indulging in some too sprightly sallies, as the

host was carried along the street. For this she was put into prison, and

that is our last glimpse of the light creature.[227]

Men knew how to be as wrong-headed and as graceless as women. We have

already mentioned the name of Landois in connection with Diderot's

article on Liberty. Landois seems to have been a marvel of

unreasonableness, but he was a needy man of letters, and that was

enough to make Diderot ready to bear with him and to succour him. He

wound up an epistle abounding, after the manner of the worthless

failures of the world, in reproaches and grievances against his

benefactor, with a cool request about a manuscript that was full of

dangerous matter. "Why, that," replied Diderot, "is a work that might

well be the ruin of me! And it is after you have on two separate

occasions charged me with the most atrocious and deliberate offences

towards you, that you now propose that I should revise and print your

work! You know that I have a wife and child, that I am a marked man,

that you are putting me into the class of hardened offenders; never

mind, you don't think of one of these things. You take me for an

imbecile, or else you are one. But you are no imbecile.... I see through

men's designs, and often enough I lend myself to them, without deigning

to disabuse them as to the stupidity which they impute to me. It is

enough if I perceive in their design some great service for them, and

not an excess of inconvenience for myself. It is not I who am the fool,

so often as people take me for one." Diderot then seems half to forget

to whom he is writing and pours out what reads like a long soliloquy on

morals, conduct, and the philosophy of life. He insists that man, with

all his high-flying freedom of will, is but a little link in a great

chain of events. He is a creature to be modified from without; hence the

good effects of example, discourse, education, pleasures, pains,

greatness, misery. Hence a sort of philosophy of commiseration, which

attaches us strongly to the good, and irritates us no more against the

bad than against a wind-storm that fills our eyes with dust. If you

adopt such principles as these, they will reconcile you with others and

yourself; you will neither praise nor blame yourself for what you are.

To reproach others with nothing, to repent yourself of nothing--these

are the two first steps towards wisdom; this is the philosophy that

reconciles us with the human race and with life.[228]

When he was in the very midst of all the toil and strife that the

Encyclopædia brought upon him, he could not refuse to spend three whole

days in working like a galley-slave at an account of an important

discovery that had been made by some worthy people with whom he was

acquainted slightly. "But while I was busy about their affairs, my own

are at a standstill. I write to you from Le Breton's, with a mass of

uncorrected proofs before me, and the printers crying out for them.

Still Grimm must be right, when he says that time is not a thing of

which we are free to dispose at our own fancy; that we owe it first and

foremost to our friends, our relations, our daily duties; and that in

the lavish profusion of our time on people who are indifferent, there is

nothing less than vice."[229] Yet in spite of Grimm's most just

remonstrance, the lavish profusion always went on as before.

There was one man, and only one man, for whose perverse and intractable

spirit Diderot's most friendly patience, helpfulness, and devotion,

were no match. I have already, in dealing with Rousseau,[230] said as

much of the quarrel which he picked with Diderot as the matter

requires, and it would be superfluous to go over the ground again from

another side. Whether we listen to Rousseau's story or to Diderot's

story, our judgment on what happened remains unchanged. We have already

seen how warm and close an intimacy subsisted between them in the days

when Diderot was a prisoner at Vincennes (1749). When Rousseau made up

his mind to leave Paris and turn hermit (1756), there was a loud outcry

from the social group at Holbach's. They said to him, in the least

theological dialect of their day, what Sir Walter Scott had said to

Ballantyne when Ballantyne thought of leaving Edinburgh, that, "when

our Saviour himself was to be led into temptation, the first thing the

Devil thought of was to get him into the wilderness." Diderot

remonstrated rather more loudly than Rousseau's other friends, but

there was no breach, and even no coolness. What sort of humours were

bred by solitude in Rousseau's wayward mind we know, and the

Confessions tell us how for a year and a half he was silently brooding

over fancied slights and perhaps real pieces of heedlessness. Grimm,

who was Diderot's closest friend next to Mademoiselle Voland, despised

Rousseau, and Rousseau detested Grimm. "Grimm," he one day said to a

disciple, "is the only man whom I have ever been able to hate." Madame

d'Epinay was compelled to go to Geneva for her health, and Grimm easily

persuaded Diderot that Rousseau was bound by all the ties of gratitude

to accompany his benefactress on the expedition. Diderot wrote to the

hermit a very strong letter to this effect: it made Rousseau furious.

He declined the urgent counsel, he quarrelled outright and violently

with Grimm, and after an angry and confusing interview with Diderot,

all intercourse ceased with him also. "That man," wrote Diderot, on the

evening of this, their last interview, "intrudes into my work; he fills

me with trouble, and I feel as if I were haunted by a damned soul at my

side. May I never see him more; he would make me believe in devils and

hell."[231] And writing afterwards to some friend at Geneva, he recalls

the days when he used to pour out the talk of intimacy "with the man

who has buried himself at the bottom of a wood, where his soul has been

soured and his moral nature has been corrupted. Yet how I pity him!

Imagine that I used to love him, that I remember those old days of

friendship, and that I see him now with crime on one side and remorse

on the other, with deep waters in front of him. He will many a time be

the torment of my thought; our common friends have judged between him

and me; I have kept them all, and to him there remains not one."[232]

It was not in Diderot's nature to bear malice, and when eight years

later Rousseau passed through Paris on his ill-starred way to England

and the Derbyshire hills, Diderot described the great pleasure that a

visit from Rousseau would give to him. "Ah, I do well," he says, "not

to let the access to my heart be too easy; when anybody has once found

a place in it, he does not leave it without making a grievous rent;

'tis a wound that can never be thoroughly cauterised."[233]

It is needless to remind the neutral reader that Rousseau uses exactly

the same kind of language about his heart. For this is the worst of

sentimentalism, that it is so readily bent into a substitution of

indulgence to oneself for upright and manly judgment about others. Still

we may willingly grant that in the present rupture of a long friendship,

it was not Diderot who was the real offender. _Too many honest people

would be in the wrong_, he most truly said, _if Jean Jacques were in the

right_.

Of Grimm, I have already said elsewhere as much as is needful to be

said.[234] His judgment in matters of conduct and character was cool and

rather hard, but it was generally sound. He had a keen eye for what was

hollow in the pretensions of the society in which he lived. Above all,

he had the keen eye of his countrymen for his own interest, and for the

use which he could make of other people. The best thing that we know in

his favour, is that he should have won the friendship of Diderot.

Diderot's attachment to Grimm seems like an exaggeration of the excesses

of the epoch of sentimentalism in Germany.

He pines for a letter from him, as he pined for letters from

Mademoiselle Voland. If Grimm had been absent for a few months, their

meeting was like a scene in a melodrama. "With what ardour we enclasped

one another. My heart was swimming. I could not speak a word, nor could

he. We embraced without speaking, and I shed tears. We were not

expecting him. We were all at dessert when he was announced, _'Here is

M. Grimm.'_ '_M. Grimm_,' I exclaimed, with a loud cry; and starting up,

I ran to him and fell on his neck. He sat down, and ate a poor meal, you

may be sure. As for me, I could not open my lips either to eat or to

speak. He was next to me, and I kept pressing his hand and gazing at

him."[235] Mademoiselle Voland appears on some occasion to have compared

Diderot with his friend. "No more comparison, I beseech you, my good

friend, between Grimm and me. I console myself for his superiority by

frankly recognising it. I am vain of the victory that I thus gain over

my self-love, and you must not deprive me of that little

advantage."[236] Grimm, however, knew better than Diderot how to unite

German sentimentalism with a steady selfishness. "I have just received

from Grimm," writes good-natured Diderot, "a note that wounds my too

sensitive spirit. I had promised to write him a few lines on the

exhibition of pictures in the Salon; he writes to me that if it is not

ready to-morrow, it will be of no use. I will be revenged for this kind

of hardness, and in a way that becomes me. I worked all day yesterday,

and all day to-day. I shall pass the night at work, and all to-morrow,

and at nine o'clock he shall receive a volume of manuscript."[237] We

may doubt whether his German friend would feel the force of a rebuke so

extremely convenient to himself.

While Grimm was amusing himself at Madame d'Epinay's country house,

Diderot was working at the literary correspondence which Grimm was

accustomed to send to St. Petersburg and the courts of Germany. While

Grimm was hunting pensions and honorary titles at Saxe-Gotha, or

currying favour with Frederick and waiting for gold boxes at Potsdam,

Diderot was labouring like any journeyman in writing on his behalf

accounts and reviews of the books, good, bad, and indifferent, with

which the Paris market teemed. When there were no new books to talk

about, the ingenious man, with the resource of the born journalist, gave

extracts from books that did not exist.[238] When we hear of Paris being

the centre of European intelligence and literary activity, we may

understand that these circular letters of Grimm and Diderot were the

machinery by which the light of Paris was diffused among darker lands.

It is not too much to say that no contemporary record so intelligent, so

independent, so vigorous, so complete, exists of any other remarkable

literary epoch.

The abbé Raynal, of whom we shall have more to say in a later chapter,

had founded this counterpart of a modern review in 1747, and he sent a

copy of it in manuscript once a month to anybody who cared to pay three

hundred francs a year. In 1753 Raynal had handed the business over to

Grimm, and by him it was continued until 1790, twelve years beyond the

life of Voltaire and of Rousseau, and six years after the death of the

ablest, most original, and most ungrudging of all those who gave him

their help.

An interesting episode in Diderot's life brought him into direct

relations with one of the two crowned patrons of the revolutionary

literature, who were philosophers in profession and the most arbitrary

of despots in their practice. Frederick the Great, whose literary taste

was wholly in the vein of the conventional French classic, was never

much interested by Diderot's writing, and felt little curiosity about

him. Catherine of Russia was sufficiently an admirer of the Encyclopædia

to be willing to serve its much-enduring builder. In 1765, when the

enterprise was in full course, Diderot was moved by a provident anxiety

about the future of his daughter. He had no dower for her in case a

suitor should present himself, and he had but a scanty substance to

leave her in case of his own death. The income of the property which he

inherited from his father was regularly handed to his wife for the

maintenance of the household. His own earnings, as we have seen, were of

no considerable amount. There are men of letters, he wrote in 1767, to

whom their industry has brought as much as twenty, thirty, eighty, or

even a hundred thousand francs. As for himself, he thought that perhaps

the fruit of his literary occupations would come to about forty thousand

crowns, or some five thousand pounds sterling. "One could not amass

wealth," he said pensively, and his words are of grievous generality for

the literary tribe, "but one could acquire ease and comfort, if only

these sums were not spread over so many years, did not vanish away as

they were gathered in, and had not all been scattered and spent by the

time that years had multiplied, wants, grown more numerous, eyes grown

dim, and mind become blunted and worn."[239] This was his own case. His

earnings were never thriftily husbanded. Diderot could not deny himself

a book or an engraving that struck his fancy, though he was quite

willing to make a present of it to any appreciative admirer the day

after he had bought it. He was extravagant in hiring a hackney-coach

where another person would have gone on foot, and not seldom the

coachman stood for half a day at the door, while the heedless passenger

was expatiating within upon truth, virtue, and the fine arts,

unconscious of the passing hours and the swollen reckoning. Hence, when

the time came, there were no savings. We have to take a man with the

defects of his qualities, and as Diderot would not have been Diderot if

he had taken time to save money, there is no more to be said.

When it became his duty to provide for his daughter, between 1763 and

1765, he resolved to sell his library. Through Grimm, Diderot's position

reached the ears of the Empress of Russia. Her agent was instructed to

buy the library at the price fixed by its possessor, and Diderot

received sixteen thousand livres, a sum equal to something more than

seven hundred pounds sterling of that day. The Empress added a handsome

bounty to the bargain. She requested Diderot to consider himself the

custodian of the new purchase on her behalf, and to receive a thousand

livres a year for his pains. The salary was paid for fifty years in

advance, and so Diderot drew at once what must have seemed to him the

royal sum of between two and three thousand pounds sterling--a figure

that would have to be trebled, or perhaps quadrupled, to convey its

value in the money of our own day. We may wish for the honour of letters

that Diderot had been able to preserve his independence. But pensions

were the custom of the time. Voltaire, though a man of solid wealth, did

not disdain an allowance from Frederick the Great, and complained

shrilly because it was irregularly paid at the very time when he knew

that Frederick was so short of money that he was driven to melt his

plate. D'Alembert also had his pension from Berlin, and Grimm, as we

have seen, picked up unconsidered trifles in half of the northern

courts. Frederick offered an allowance to Rousseau, but that strange

man, in whom so much that was simple, touching, and lofty, mingled with

all that was wayward and perverse, declined to tax the king's strained

finances.[240]

It would shed an instructive light upon authorship and the characters of

famous men, if we could always know the relations between a writer and

his booksellers. Diderot's point of view in considering the great modern

enginery and processes of producing and selling books, was invariably,

like his practice, that of a man of sound common sense and sterling

integrity. We have seen in the previous chapter something of the

difficulties of the trade in those days. The booksellers were a close

guild of three hundred and sixty members, and the printers were limited

to thirty-six. Their privileges brought them little fortune. They were

of the lowest credit and repute, and most of them were hardly better

than beggars. It was said that not a dozen out of the three hundred and

sixty could afford to have more than one coat for his back. They were

bound hand and foot by vexatious rules, and their market was gradually

spoiled by a band of men whom they hated as interlopers, but whom the

public had some reason to bless. No bookseller nor printer could open an

establishment outside of the quarter of the University, or on the north

side of the bridges. The restriction, which was as old as the

introduction of printing into France, had its origin in the days when

the visits of the royal inspectors to the presses and bookshops were

constant and rigorous, and it saved the time of the officials to have

all their business close to their hand. Inasmuch, however, as people

insisted on having books, and as they did not always choose to be at the

pains of making a long journey to the region of the booksellers' shops,

hawkers sprang into existence. Men bought books or got them on credit

from the booksellers, and carried them in a bag over their shoulders to

the houses of likely customers, just as a peddler now carries laces and

calico, cheap silks and trumpory jewellery, round the country villages.

Even poor women filled their aprons with a few books, took them across

the bridges, and knocked at people's doors. This would have been well

enough in the eyes of the guild, if the hawkers had been content to buy

from the legally patented booksellers. But they began secretly to turn

publishers in a small way on their own account. Contraband was here, as

always, the natural substitute for free trade. They both issued pirated

editions of their own, and they became the great purchasers and

distributors of the pirated editions that came in vast bales from

Switzerland, from Holland, from the Pope's country of Avignon. To their

craft or courage the public owed its copies of works whose circulation

was forbidden by the government. The Persian Letters of Montesquieu was

a prohibited book, but, for all that, there were a hundred editions of

it before it had been published twenty years, and every schoolboy could

find a copy on the quays for a dozen halfpence. Bayle's Thoughts on the

Comet, Rousseau's Emilius and Heloïsa, Helvétius's L'Esprit, and a

thousand other forbidden pieces were in every library, both public and

private. The Social Contract, printed over and over again in endless

editions, was sold for a shilling under the vestibule of the king's own

palace. When the police were in earnest, the hawker ran horrible risks,

as we saw a few pages further back; for these risks he recompensed

himself by his prices. A prohibition by the authorities would send a

book up within four-and-twenty hours from half a crown to a couple of

louis. This only increased the public curiosity, quickened the demand,

led to clandestine reprints, and extended the circulation of the book

that was nominally suppressed. When the condemnation of a book was cried

through the streets, the compositors said, "Good, another edition!"

There was no favour that an unknown author could have asked from the

magistrates so valuable to him as a little decree condemning his work to

be torn up and burnt at the foot of the great staircase of the Palace of

Justice.[241]

It was this practical impossibility of suppression that interested both

the guild of publishers and the government in the conditions of the book

trade. The former were always harassed, often kept poor, and sometimes

ruined, by systematic piracy and the invasion of their rights. The

government, on the other hand, could not help seeing that, as the books

could not possibly be kept out of the realm, it was to be regretted

that their production conferred no benefit on the manufacturing industry

of the realm, the composition, the printing, the casting of type, the

fabrication of paper, the preparation of leather and vellum, the making

of machines and tools. When Bayle's Dictionary appeared, it was the rage

of Europe. Hundreds of the ever-renowned folios found their way into

France, and were paid for by French money. The booksellers addressed the

minister, and easily persuaded him of the difference, according to the

economic light of those days, between an exchange of money against

paper, compared with an exchange of paper against paper. The minister

replied that this was true, but still that the gates of the kingdom

would never be opened to a single copy of Bayle. "The best thing to do,"

he said, "is to print it here." And the third edition of Bayle was

printed in France, much to the contentment of the French printers,

binders, and booksellers.

In 1761 the booksellers were afflicted by a new alarm. Foreign pirates

and domestic hawkers were doing them mischief enough. But in that year

the government struck a blow at the very principle of literary property.

The King's Council conferred upon the descendants of La Fontaine the

exclusive privilege of publishing their ancestor's works. That is to

say, the Council took away without compensation from La Fontaine's

publishers a copyright for which they had paid in hard cash. The whole

corporation naturally rose in arms, and in due time the lieutenant of

police was obliged to take the whole matter into serious

consideration--whether the maintenance of the guild of publishers was

expedient; whether the royal privilege of publishing a book should be

regarded as conferring a definite and unassailable right of property in

the publication; whether the tacit permission to publish what it would

have been thought unbecoming to authorise expressly by royal sanction,

should not be granted liberally or even universally; and whether the old

restriction of the booksellers to one quarter of the town ought to

remain in force any longer. M. de Sartine invited Diderot to write him a

memorandum on the subject, and was disappointed to find Diderot

staunchly on the side of the booksellers (1767). He makes no secret,

indeed, that for his own part he would like to see the whole apparatus

of restraint abolished, but meanwhile he is strong for doing all that a

system of regulation, as opposed to a system of freedom, can do to make

the publication of books a source of prosperity to the bookseller, and

of cheap acquisition to the book-buyer. Above all things, Diderot is

vehemently in favour of the recognition of literary property, and

against such infringement of it as had been ventured upon in the case of

La Fontaine. He had no reason to be especially friendly to booksellers,

but for one thing, he saw that to nullify or to tamper with copyright

was in effect to prevent an author from having any commodity to sell,

and so to do him the most serious injury possible. And for another

thing, Diderot had equity and common sense enough to see that no

high-flown nonsense about the dignity of letters and the spiritual power

could touch the fact that a book is a piece of marketable ware, and that

the men who deal in such wares have as much claim to be protected in

their contracts as those who deal in any other wares.[242]

There is a vivid illustration of this unexpected business-like quality

in Diderot, in a conversation that he once had with D'Alembert. The

dialogue is interesting to those who happen to be curious as to the

characters of two famous men. It was in 1759, when D'Alembert was tired

of the Encyclopædia, and was for making hard terms as the condition of

his return to it. "If," said Diderot to him, "six months ago, when we

met to deliberate on the continuation of the work, you had then proposed

these terms, the booksellers would have closed with them on the spot,

but now, when they have the strongest reasons to be out of humour with

you, that is another thing."

"And pray, what reasons?"

"Can you ask me?"

"Certainly."

"Then I will tell you. You have a bargain with the booksellers; the

terms are stipulated; you have nothing to ask beyond them. If you worked

harder than you were bound to do, that was out of your interest in the

book, out of friendship to me, out of respect for yourself; people do

not pay in money for such motives as these. Still they sent you twenty

louis a volume: that makes a hundred and forty louis that you had beyond

what was due to you. You plan a journey to Wesel [in 1752, to meet

Frederick of Prussia] at a time when you were wanted by them here; they

do not detain you; on the contrary, you are short of money, and they

supply you. You accept a couple of hundred louis; this debt you forget

for two or three years. At the end of that rather long term you bethink

you of paying. What do they do? They hand you back your note of hand

torn up, with all the air of being very glad to have served you. Then,

after all, you turn your back on an undertaking in which they have

embarked their whole fortunes: an affair of a couple of millions is a

trifle unworthy of the attention of a philosopher like you.... But that

is not all. You have a fancy for collecting together different pieces

scattered through the Encyclopædia; nothing can be more opposed to

their interests; they put this to you, you insist, the edition is

produced, they advance the cost, you share the profits. It seemed that,

after having thus twice paid you for their work, they had a right to

look upon it as theirs. Yet you go in search of a bookseller in some

quite different direction, and sell him in a mass what does not belong

to you."

"They gave me a thousand grounds for dissatisfaction."

"_Quelle défaite!_ There are no small things between friends. Everything

weighs, because friendship is a commerce of purity and delicacy; but are

the booksellers your friends? Then your behaviour to them is horrible.

If not, then you have nothing to say against them. If the public were

called upon to judge between you and them, my friend, you would be

covered with shame."

"What, can it be you, Diderot, who thus take the side of the

booksellers?"

"My grievances against them do not prevent me from seeing their

grievances against you. After all this show of pride, confess now that

you are cutting a very sorry figure?"[243]

All this was the language of good sense, and there is no evidence that

Diderot ever swerved from that fair and honourable attitude in his own

dealings with the booksellers. Yet he was able to treat them with a

sturdy spirit when they forgot themselves. Panckoucke, one of the great

publishers of the time, came to him one day. "He was swollen with the

arrogance of a parvenu, and thinking apparently that he could use me

like one of those poor devils who depend upon him for a crust of bread,

he permitted himself to fly into a passion; but it did not succeed at

all. I let him go on as he pleased; then I got up abruptly, I took him

by the arm, and I said to him: 'M. Panckoucke, in whatever place it may

be, in the street, in church, in a bad house, and to whomsoever it may

be, it is always right to keep a civil tongue in one's head. But that is

all the more necessary still, when you speak to a man who has as little

patience as I have, and that, too, in his own house. Go to the devil,

you and your work. If you would give me twenty thousand louis, and I

could do your business for you in the twinkling of an eye, I would not

stir a finger. Be kind enough to be off."[244]

Before returning from the author to his books, it is interesting to know

how he and his circle appeared at this period to some who did not belong

to them. Gibbon, for instance, visited Paris in the spring of 1763. "The

moment," he says, "was happily chosen. At the close of a successful war

the British name was respected on the continent; _clarum et venerabile

nomen gentibus_. Our opinions, our fashions, even our games were adopted

in France, a ray of national glory illuminated each individual, and

every Englishman was supposed to be born a patriot and philosopher." He

mentions D'Alembert and Diderot as those among the men of letters whom

he saw, who "held the foremost rank in merit, or at least in fame."[245]

Horace Walpole was often in Paris, and often saw the philosophic

circle, but it did not please his supercilious humour.

"There was no soul in Paris but philosophers, whom I wished in

heaven, though they do not wish themselves so. They are so

overbearing and underbred.... I sometimes go to Baron

d'Holbach's, but I have left off his dinners, as there was no

bearing the authors and philosophers and savants of which he

has a pigeon-house full. They soon turned my head with a

system of antediluvian deluges which they have invented to

prove the eternity of matter.... In short, nonsense for

nonsense, I liked the Jesuits better than the

philosophers."[246]

Hume, as everybody knows, found "the men of letters really very

agreeable; all of them men of the world, living in entire, or almost

entire harmony, among themselves, and quite irreproachable in their

morals." He places Diderot among those whose person and conversation he

liked best.

We have always heard much of the power of the Salon in the eighteenth

century, and it was no doubt a remarkable proof of the incorporation of

intellectual interests in manners, that so many groups of men and women

should have met habitually every week for the purpose of conversing

about the new books and new plays, the fresh principles and fresh ideas,

that were produced by the incessant vivacity of the time. The Salon of

the eighteenth century passed through various phases; its character

shifted with the intellectual mood of the day, but in all its phases it

was an institution in which women occupied a place that they have never

acquired in any society out of France. We are not here called upon to

speculate as to the reasons for this; it is only worth remarking that

Diderot was not commonly at his ease in the society of ladies, and that

though he was a visitor at Madame Geoffrin's and at Mademoiselle

Lespinasse's, yet he was not a constant attendant at any of the famous

circles of which women had made themselves the centre. The reader of

Madame d'Epinay's memoir is informed how hard she found it to tame

Diderot into sociability. "What a pity," she exclaims, "that men of

genius and of such eminent merit as M. Diderot should thus wrap

themselves up in their philosophy, and disdain the homage that people

would eagerly pay them in any society that they would honour with their

presence."[247] One of the soundest social observers of the time was

undoubtedly Duclos. His _Considerations on the Manners of the Century_,

which was published in 1751, abounds in admirable criticism. He makes

two remarks with which we may close our chapter. "The relaxation of

morals does not prevent people from being very loud in praise of honour

and virtue; those who have least of them know very well how much they

are concerned in other people having them." Again, "The French," he

said, "are the only people among whom it is possible for morals to be

depraved, without either the heart being corrupted, or their courage

being weakened."