No one who has made the slightest expedition into that curious and
fascinating country, Eighteenth-Century France, can have come away from
it without at least _one_ impression strong upon him--that in no other
place and at no other time have people ever squabbled so much. France in
the eighteenth century, whatever else it may have been--however splendid
in genius, in vitality, in noble accomplishment and high endeavour--was
certainly not a quiet place to live in. One could never have been
certain, when one woke up in the morning, whether, before the day was
out, one would not be in the Bastille for something one had said at
dinner, or have quarrelled with half one's friends for something one had
never said at all.
Of all the disputes and agitations of that agitated age none is more
remarkable than the famous quarrel between Rousseau and his friends,
which disturbed French society for so many years, and profoundly
affected the life and the character of the most strange and perhaps the
most potent of the precursors of the Revolution. The affair is
constantly cropping up in the literature of the time; it occupies a
prominent place in the later books of the _Confessions_; and there is an
account of its earlier phases--an account written from the anti-Rousseau
point of view--in the _Mémoires_ of Madame d'Epinay. The whole story is
an exceedingly complex one, and all the details of it have never been
satisfactorily explained; but the general verdict of subsequent writers
has been decidedly hostile to Rousseau, though it has not subscribed to
all the virulent abuse poured upon him by his enemies at the time of the
quarrel. This, indeed, is precisely the conclusion which an unprejudiced
reader of the _Confessions_ would naturally come to. Rousseau's story,
even as he himself tells it, does not carry conviction. He would have us
believe that he was the victim of a vast and diabolical conspiracy, of
which Grimm and Diderot were the moving spirits, which succeeded in
alienating from him his dearest friends, and which eventually included
all the ablest and most distinguished persons of the age. Not only does
such a conspiracy appear, upon the face of it, highly improbable, but
the evidence which Rousseau adduces to prove its existence seems totally
insufficient; and the reader is left under the impression that the
unfortunate Jean-Jacques was the victim, not of a plot contrived by
rancorous enemies, but of his own perplexed, suspicious, and deluded
mind. This conclusion is supported by the account of the affair given by
contemporaries, and it is still further strengthened by Rousseau's own
writings subsequent to the _Confessions_, where his endless
recriminations, his elaborate hypotheses, and his wild inferences bear
all the appearance of mania. Here the matter has rested for many years;
and it seemed improbable that any fresh reasons would arise for
reopening the question. Mrs. F. Macdonald, however, in a
recently-published work[7], has produced some new and important
evidence, which throws entirely fresh light upon certain obscure parts
of this doubtful history; and is possibly of even greater interest. For
it is Mrs. Macdonald's contention that her new discovery completely
overturns the orthodox theory, establishes the guilt of Grimm, Diderot,
and the rest of the anti-Rousseau party, and proves that the story told
in the _Confessions_ is simply the truth.
If these conclusions really do follow from Mrs. Macdonald's
newly-discovered data, it would be difficult to over-estimate the value
of her work, for the result of it would be nothing less than a
revolution in our judgments upon some of the principal characters of the
eighteenth century. To make it certain that Diderot was a cad and a
cheat, that d'Alembert was a dupe, and Hume a liar--that, surely, were
no small achievement. And, even if these conclusions do not follow from
Mrs. Macdonald's data, her work will still be valuable, owing to the
data themselves. Her discoveries are important, whatever inferences may
be drawn from them; and for this reason her book, 'which represents,' as
she tells us, 'twenty years of research,' will be welcome to all
students of that remarkable age.
Mrs. Macdonald's principal revelations relate to the _Mémoires_ of
Madame d'Epinay. This work was first printed in 1818, and the concluding
quarter of it contains an account of the Rousseau quarrel, the most
detailed of all those written from the anti-Rousseau point of view. It
has, however, always been doubtful how far the _Mémoires_ were to be
trusted as accurate records of historical fact. The manuscript
disappeared; but it was known that the characters who, in the printed
book, appear under the names of real persons, were given pseudonyms in
the original document; and many of the minor statements contradicted
known events. Had Madame d'Epinay merely intended to write a _roman à
clef_? What seemed, so far as concerned the Rousseau narrative, to put
this hypothesis out of court was the fact that the story of the quarrel
as it appears in the _Mémoires_ is, in its main outlines, substantiated
both by Grimm's references to Rousseau in his _Correspondance
Littéraire_, and by a brief memorandum of Rousseau's misconduct, drawn
up by Diderot for his private use, and not published until many years
after Madame d'Epinay's death. Accordingly most writers on the subject
have taken the accuracy of the _Mémoires_ for granted; Sainte-Beuve, for
instance, prefers the word of Madame d'Epinay to that of Rousseau, when
there is a direct conflict of testimony; and Lord Morley, in his
well-known biography, uses the _Mémoires_ as an authority for many of
the incidents which he relates. Mrs. Macdonald's researches, however,
have put an entirely different complexion on the case. She has
discovered the manuscript from which the _Mémoires_ were printed, and
she has examined the original draft of this manuscript, which had been
unearthed some years ago, but whose full import had been unaccountably
neglected by previous scholars. From these researches, two facts have
come to light. In the first place, the manuscript differs in many
respects from the printed book, and, in particular, contains a
conclusion of two hundred sheets, which has never been printed at all;
the alterations were clearly made in order to conceal the inaccuracies
of the manuscript; and the omitted conclusion is frankly and palpably a
fiction. And in the second place, the original draft of the manuscript
turns out to be the work of several hands; it contains, especially in
those portions which concern Rousseau, many erasures, corrections, and
notes, while several pages have been altogether cut out; most of the
corrections were made by Madame d'Epinay herself; but in nearly every
case these corrections carry out the instructions in the notes; and the
notes themselves are in the handwriting of Diderot and Grimm. Mrs.
Macdonald gives several facsimiles of pages in the original draft, which
amply support her description of it; but it is to be hoped that before
long she will be able to produce a new and complete edition of the
_Mémoires_, with all the manuscript alterations clearly indicated; for
until then it will be difficult to realise the exact condition of the
text. However, it is now beyond dispute both that Madame d'Epinay's
narrative cannot be regarded as historically accurate, and that its
agreement with the statements of Grimm and Diderot is by no means an
independent confirmation of its truth, for Grimm and Diderot themselves
had a hand in its compilation.
Thus far we are on firm ground. But what are the conclusions which Mrs.
Macdonald builds up from these foundations? The account, she says, of
Rousseau's conduct and character, as it appears in the printed version,
is hostile to him, but it was not the account which Madame d'Epinay
herself originally wrote. The hostile narrative was, in effect, composed
by Grimm and Diderot, who induced Madame d'Epinay to substitute it for
her own story; and thus her own story could not have agreed with
theirs. Madame d'Epinay knew the truth; she knew that Rousseau's conduct
had been honourable and wise; and so she had described it in her book;
until, falling completely under the influence of Grimm and Diderot, she
had allowed herself to become the instrument for blackening the
reputation of her old friend. Mrs. Macdonald paints a lurid picture of
the conspirators at work--of Diderot penning his false and malignant
instructions, of Madame d'Epinay's half-unwilling hand putting the last
touches to the fraud, of Grimm, rushing back to Paris at the time of the
Revolution, and risking his life in order to make quite certain that the
result of all these efforts should reach posterity. Well! it would be
difficult--perhaps it would be impossible--to prove conclusively that
none of these things ever took place. The facts upon which Mrs.
Macdonald lays so much stress--the mutilations, the additions, the
instructing notes, the proved inaccuracy of the story the manuscripts
tell--these facts, no doubt, may be explained by Mrs. Macdonald's
theories; but there are other facts--no less important, and no less
certain--which are in direct contradiction to Mrs. Macdonald's view, and
over which she passes as lightly as she can. Putting aside the question
of the _Mémoires_, we know nothing of Diderot which would lead us to
entertain for a moment the supposition that he was a dishonourable and
badhearted man; we do know that his writings bear the imprint of a
singularly candid, noble, and fearless mind; we do know that he devoted
his life, unflinchingly and unsparingly, to a great cause. We know less
of Grimm; but it is at least certain that he was the intimate friend of
Diderot, and of many more of the distinguished men of the time. Is all
this evidence to be put on one side as of no account? Are we to dismiss
it, as Mrs. Macdonald dismisses it, as merely 'psychological'? Surely
Diderot's reputation as an honest man is as much a fact as his notes in
the draft of the _Mémoires_. It is quite true that his reputation _may_
have been ill-founded, that d'Alembert, and Turgot, and Hume _may_ have
been deluded, or _may_ have been bribed, into admitting him to their
friendship; but is it not clear that we ought not to believe any such
hypotheses as these until we have before us such convincing proof of
Diderot's guilt that we _must_ believe them? Mrs. Macdonald declares
that she has produced such proof; and she points triumphantly to her
garbled and concocted manuscripts. If there is indeed no explanation of
these garblings and concoctions other than that which Mrs. Macdonald
puts forward--that they were the outcome of a false and malicious
conspiracy to blast the reputation of Rousseau--then we must admit that
she is right, and that all our general 'psychological' considerations as
to Diderot's reputation in the world must be disregarded. But, before we
come to this conclusion, how careful must we be to examine every other
possible explanation of Mrs. Macdonald's facts, how rigorously must we
sift her own explanation of them, how eagerly must we seize upon every
loophole of escape!
It is, I believe, possible to explain the condition of the d'Epinay
manuscript without having recourse to the iconoclastic theory of Mrs.
Macdonald. To explain everything, indeed, would be out of the question,
owing to our insufficient data, and the extreme complexity of the
events; all that we can hope to do is to suggest an explanation which
will account for the most important of the known facts. Not the least
interesting of Mrs. Macdonald's discoveries went to show that the
_Mémoires_, so far from being historically accurate, were in reality
full of unfounded statements, that they concluded with an entirely
imaginary narrative, and that, in short, they might be described, almost
without exaggeration, in the very words with which Grimm himself
actually did describe them in his _Correspondance Littéraire_, as
'l'ébauche d'un long roman.' Mrs. Macdonald eagerly lays emphasis upon
this discovery, because she is, of course, anxious to prove that the
most damning of all the accounts of Rousseau's conduct is an untrue one.
But she has proved too much. The _Mémoires_, she says, are a fiction;
therefore the writers of them were liars. The answer is obvious: why
should we not suppose that the writers were not liars at all, but
simply novelists? Will not this hypothesis fit into the facts just as
well as Mrs. Macdonald's? Madame d'Epinay, let us suppose, wrote a
narrative, partly imaginary and partly true, based upon her own
experiences, but without any strict adherence to the actual course of
events, and filled with personages whose actions were, in many cases,
fictitious, but whose characters were, on the whole, moulded upon the
actual characters of her friends. Let us suppose that when she had
finished her work--a work full of subtle observation and delightful
writing--she showed it to Grimm and Diderot. They had only one criticism
to make: it related to her treatment of the character which had been
moulded upon that of Rousseau. 'Your Rousseau, chère Madame, is a very
poor affair indeed! The most salient points in his character seem to
have escaped you. We know what that man really was. We know how he
behaved at that time. _C'était un homme à faire peur_. You have missed a
great opportunity of drawing a fine picture of a hypocritical rascal.'
Whereupon they gave her their own impressions of Rousseau's conduct,
they showed her the letters that had passed between them, and they
jotted down some notes for her guidance. She rewrote the story in
accordance with their notes and their anecdotes; but she rearranged the
incidents, she condensed or amplified the letters, as she thought
fit--for she was not writing a history, but 'l'ébauche d'un long roman.'
If we suppose that this, or something like this, was what occurred,
shall we not have avoided the necessity for a theory so repugnant to
common-sense as that which would impute to a man of recognised integrity
the meanest of frauds?
To follow Mrs. Macdonald into the inner recesses and elaborations of her
argument would be a difficult and tedious task. The circumstances with
which she is principally concerned--the suspicions, the accusations, the
anonymous letters, the intrigues, the endless problems as to whether
Madame d'Epinay was jealous of Madame d'Houdetot, whether Thérèse told
fibs, whether, on the 14th of the month, Grimm was grossly impertinent,
and whether, on the 15th, Rousseau was outrageously rude, whether
Rousseau revealed a secret to Diderot, which Diderot revealed to
Saint-Lambert, and whether, if Diderot revealed it, he believed that
Rousseau had revealed it before--these circumstances form, as Lord
Morley says, 'a tale of labyrinthine nightmares,' and Mrs. Macdonald has
done very little to mitigate either the contortions of the labyrinths or
the horror of the dreams. Her book is exceedingly ill-arranged; it is
enormously long, filling two large volumes, with an immense apparatus of
appendices and notes; it is full of repetitions and of irrelevant
matter; and the argument is so indistinctly set forth that even an
instructed reader finds great difficulty in following its drift.
Without, however, plunging into the abyss of complications which yawns
for us in Mrs. Macdonald's pages, it may be worth while to touch upon
one point with which she has dealt (perhaps wisely for her own case!)
only very slightly--the question of the motives which could have induced
Grimm and Diderot to perpetuate a series of malignant lies.
It is, doubtless, conceivable that Grimm, who was Madame d'Epinay's
lover, was jealous of Rousseau, who was Madame d'Epinay's friend. We
know very little of Grimm's character, but what we do know seems to show
that he was a jealous man and an ambitious man; it is possible that a
close alliance with Madame d'Epinay may have seemed to him a necessary
step in his career; and it is conceivable that he may have determined
not to rest until his most serious rival in Madame d'Epinay's affections
was utterly cast out. He was probably prejudiced against Rousseau from
the beginning, and he may have allowed his prejudices to colour his view
of Rousseau's character and acts. The violence of the abuse which Grimm
and the rest of the Encyclopaedists hurled against the miserable
Jean-Jacques was certainly quite out of proportion to the real facts of
the case. Whenever he is mentioned one is sure of hearing something
about _traître_ and _mensonge_ and _scélératesse_. He is referred to as
often as not as if he were some dangerous kind of wild beast. This was
Grimm's habitual language with regard to him; and this was the view of
his character which Madame d'Epinay finally expressed in her book. The
important question is--did Grimm know that Rousseau was in reality an
honourable man, and, knowing this, did he deliberately defame him in
order to drive him out of Madame d'Epinay's affections? The answer, I
think, must be in the negative, for the following reason. If Grimm had
known that there was something to be ashamed of in the notes with which
he had supplied Madame d'Epinay, and which led to the alteration of her
_Mémoires_, he certainly would have destroyed the draft of the
manuscript, which was the only record of those notes having ever been
made. As it happens, we know that he had the opportunity of destroying
the draft, and he did not do so. He came to Paris at the risk of his
life in 1791, and stayed there for four months, with the object,
according to his own account, of collecting papers belonging to the
Empress Catherine, or, according to Mrs. Macdonald's account, of having
the rough draft of the _Mémoires_ copied out by his secretary. Whatever
his object, it is certain that the copy--that from which ultimately the
_Mémoires_ were printed--was made either at that time, or earlier; and
that there was nothing on earth to prevent him, during the four months
of his stay in Paris, from destroying the draft. Mrs. Macdonald's
explanation of this difficulty is lamentably weak. Grimm, she says, must
have wished to get away from Paris 'without arousing suspicion by
destroying papers.' This is indeed an 'exquisite reason,' which would
have delighted that good knight Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Grimm had four
months at his disposal; he was undisturbed in his own house; why should
he not have burnt the draft page by page as it was copied out? There can
be only one reply: Why _should_ he?
If it is possible to suggest some fairly plausible motives which might
conceivably have induced Grimm to blacken Rousseau's character, the case
of Diderot presents difficulties which are quite insurmountable. Mrs.
Macdonald asserts that Diderot was jealous of Rousseau. Why? Because he
was tired of hearing Rousseau described as 'the virtuous'; that is all.
Surely Mrs. Macdonald should have been the first to recognise that such
an argument is a little too 'psychological.' The truth is that Diderot
had nothing to gain by attacking Rousseau. He was not, like Grimm, in
love with Madame d'Epinay; he was not a newcomer who had still to win
for himself a position in the Parisian world. His acquaintance with
Madame d'Epinay was slight; and, if there were any advances, they were
from her side, for he was one of the most distinguished men of the day.
In fact, the only reason that he could have had for abusing Rousseau was
that he believed Rousseau deserved abuse. Whether he was right in
believing so is a very different question. Most readers, at the present
day, now that the whole noisy controversy has long taken its quiet place
in the perspective of Time, would, I think, agree that Diderot and the
rest of the Encyclopaedists were mistaken. As we see him now, in that
long vista, Rousseau was not a wicked man; he was an unfortunate, a
distracted, a deeply sensitive, a strangely complex, creature; and,
above all else, he possessed one quality which cut him off from his
contemporaries, which set an immense gulf betwixt him and them: he was
modern. Among those quick, strong, fiery people of the eighteenth
century, he belonged to another world--to the new world of
self-consciousness, and doubt, and hesitation, of mysterious melancholy
and quiet intimate delights, of long reflexions amid the solitudes of
Nature, of infinite introspections amid the solitudes of the heart. Who
can wonder that he was misunderstood, and buffeted, and driven mad? Who
can wonder that, in his agitations, his perplexities, his writhings, he
seemed, to the pupils of Voltaire, little less than a frenzied fiend?
'Cet homme est un forcené!' Diderot exclaims. 'Je tâche en vain de faire
de la poésie, mais cet homme me revient tout à travers mon travail; il
me trouble, et je suis comme si j'avais à côté de moi un damné: il est
damné, cela est sûr. ... J'avoue que je n'ai jamais éprouvé un trouble
d'âme si terrible que celui que j'ai ... Que je ne revoie plus cet
homme-là, il me ferait croire au diable et à l'enfer. Si je suis jamais
forcé de retourner chez lui, je suis sûr que je frémirai tout le long du
chemin: j'avais la fièvre en revenant ... On entendait ses cris jusqu'au
bout du jardin; et je le voyais!... Les poètes ont bien fait de mettre
un intervalle immense entre le ciel et les enfers. En vérité, la main me
tremble.' Every word of that is stamped with sincerity; Diderot was
writing from his heart. But he was wrong; the 'intervalle immense,'
across which, so strangely and so horribly, he had caught glimpses of
what he had never seen before, was not the abyss between heaven and
hell, but between the old world and the new.
1907.