(1713-1784)
[Illustration: DENIS DIDEROT]
Among the French Encyclopaedists of the eighteenth century Denis
Diderot holds the place of leader. There were intellects of broader
scope and of much surer balance in that famous group, but none of such
versatility, brilliancy, and outbursting force. To his associates he
was a marvel and an inspiration.
He was born in October 1713, in Langres, Haute-Marne, France; and
died in Paris July 31st, 1784. After a classical education in Jesuit
schools, he utterly disgusted his father by turning to the Bohemian
life of a litterateur in Paris. Although very poor, he married at
the age of thirty. The whole story of his married life--the common
Parisian story in those days--reflects no credit on him; though
his _liaison_ with Mademoiselle Voland presents the aspects of a
friendship abiding through life. Poverty spurred him to exertion.
Four days of work in 1746 are said to have produced 'Pensees
Philosophiques' (Philosophic Thoughts). This book, with a little
essay following it, 'Interpretation de la Nature,' was his first open
attack on revealed religion. Its argument, though only negative, and
keeping within the bounds of theism, foretokened a class of utterances
which were frequent in Diderot's later years, and whose assurance of
his materialistic atheism would be complete had they not been too
exclamatory for settled conviction. He contents himself with
glorifying the passions, to the annulling of all ethical standards.
On this point at least his convictions were stable, for long afterward
he writes thus to Mademoiselle Voland:--"The man of mediocre passion
lives and dies like the brute.... If we were bound to choose between
Racine, a bad husband, a bad father, a false friend, and a sublime
poet, and Racine, good father, good husband, good friend, and dull
worthy man, I hold to the first. Of Racine the bad man, what remains?
Nothing. Of Racine the man of genius? The work is eternal."
About 1747 he produced an allegory, 'Promenade du Sceptique.' This
French 'Pilgrim's Progress' scoffs at the Church of Rome for denying
pleasure, then decries the pleasures of the world, and ends by
asserting the hopeless uncertainty of the philosophy which both scoffs
at the Church and decries worldly pleasure. At this period he was
evidently inclined to an irregular attack on the only forms of
Christianity familiar to him, asceticism and pietism.
In 1749 Diderot first showed himself a thinker of original power, in
his Letter on the Blind. This work, 'Lettre sur les Avengles a l'Usage
de Ceux qui Voient' (Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those who See)
opened the eyes of the public to Diderot's peculiar genius, and the
eyes of the authorities to the menace in his principles. The result
was his imprisonment, and from that the spread of his views. His
offense was, that through his ingenious supposition of the mind
deprived of its use of one or more of the bodily senses, he had shown
the relativity of all man's conceptions, and had thence deduced
the relativity, the lack of absoluteness, of all man's ethical
standards--thus invalidating the foundations of civil and social
order. The broad assertion that Diderot and his philosophic group
caused the French Revolution has only this basis, that these men
were among the omens of its advance, feeling its stir afar but not
recognizing the coming earthquake. Yet it may be conceded that Diderot
anticipated things great and strange; for his mind, although neither
precise nor capable of sustained and systematic thought, was amazingly
original in conception and powerful in grasp. The mist, blank to his
brethren, seems to have wreathed itself into wonderful shapes to his
eye; he was the seer whose wild enthusiasm caught the oracles from
an inner shrine. A predictive power appears in his Letter on the
Blind, where he imagines the blind taught to read by touch; and
nineteenth-century hypotheses gleam dimly in his random guess at
variability in organisms, and at survival of those best adapted to
their environment.
Diderot's monumental work, 'L'Encyclopedie,' dates from the middle of
the century. It was his own vast enlargement of Ephraim Chambers's
Cyclopaedia of 1727, of which a bookseller had demanded a revision
in French. D'Alembert was secured as his colleague, and in 1751 the
first volume appeared. The list of contributors includes most of
the great contemporary names in French literature. From these,
Diderot and D'Alembert gathered the inner group known as the French
Encyclopaedists, to whose writings has been ascribed a general tendency
to destroy religion and to reconstitute society. The authorities
interfered repeatedly, with threats and prohibitions of the
publication; but the science of government included the science of
connivance for an adequate consideration, and the great work went
forward. Its danger lurked in its principles; for Diderot dealt but
little in the cheap flattery which the modern demagogue addresses to
the populace. D'Alembert, wearied by ten years of persecution, retired
in 1759, leaving the indefatigable Diderot to struggle alone through
seven years, composing and revising hundreds of articles, correcting
proofs, supervising the unrivaled illustrations of the mechanic arts,
while quieting the opposition of the authorities.
The Encyclopaedia under Diderot followed no one philosophic path.
Indeed, there are no signs that he ever gave any consideration to
either the intellectual or the ethical force of consistency. His
writing indicates his utter carelessness both as to the direction and
as to the pace of his thought. He had an abiding conviction that
Christianity was partly delusion and largely priestcraft, and was
maintained chiefly for upholding iniquitous privilege. His antagonism
was developed primarily from his emotions and sympathies rather than
from his intellect; hence it sometimes swerved, drawing perilously
near to formal orthodoxy. Moreover, this vivacious philosopher
sometimes rambled into practical advice, and easily effervesced
into fervid moralizings of the sentimental and almost tearful sort.
His immense natural capacity for sentiment appears in his own account
of his meeting with Grimm after a few months' absence. His
sentimentalism, however, had its remarkable counterpoise in a most
practical tendency of mind. In the Encyclopaedia the interests of
agriculture and of all branches of manufacture were treated with great
fullness; and the reform of feudal abuses lingering in the laws of
France was vigorously urged in a style more practical than cyclopaedic.
Diderot gave much attention to the drama, and his 'Paradoxe sur le
Comedien' (Paradox on the Actor) is a valuable discussion. He is the
father of the modern domestic drama. His influence upon the dramatic
literature of Germany was direct and immediate; it appeared in the
plays of Lessing and Schiller, and much of Lessing's criticism was
inspired by Diderot. His 'Pere de Famille' (Family-Father) and 'Le
Fils Naturel' (The Natural Son) marked the beginning of a new era in
the history of the stage, in the midst of which we are now living.
Breaking with the old traditions, Diderot abandoned the lofty themes
of classic tragedy and portrayed the life of the _bourgeoisie_.
The influence of England, frequently manifest in the work of the
Encyclopaedists, is evident also here. Richardson was then the chief
force in fiction, and the sentimental element so characteristic in
him reappears in the dramas of Diderot.
Goethe was strongly attracted by the genius of Diderot, and thought it
worth his while not only to translate but to supply with a long and
luminous commentary the latter's 'Essay on Painting.' It was by a
singular trick of fortune, too, that one of Diderot's most powerful
works should first have appeared in German garb, and not in the
original French until after the author's death. A manuscript copy of
the book chanced to fall into the hands of Goethe, who so greatly
admired it that he at once translated, annotated, and published it.
This was the famous dialogue 'Le Neveu de Rameau' (Rameau's Nephew),
a work which only Diderot's peculiar genius could have produced.
Depicting the typical parasite, shameless, quick-witted for every
species of villainy, at home in every possible meanness, the dialogue
is a probably unequaled compound of satire, high aesthetics, gleaming
humor, sentimental moralizing, fine musical criticism, and scientific
character analysis, with passages of brutal indecency.
Among literary critics of painting, Diderot has his place in the
highest rank. His nine 'Salons'--criticisms which in his good-nature
he wrote for the use of his friend Grimm, on the annual exhibitions
in the Paris Salon from 1759 onward--have never been surpassed among
non-technical criticisms for brilliancy, freshness, and philosophic
suggestiveness. They reveal the man's elemental strength; which was
not in his knowledge, for he was without technical training in art
and had seen scarcely any of the world's masterpieces, but in his
sensuously sympathetic nature, which gave him quickness of insight
and delicacy in interpretation.
He had the faculty of making and keeping friends, being unaffected,
genial, amiable, enthusiastically generous and helpful to his friends,
and without vindictiveness to his foes. He needed these qualities to
counteract his almost utter lack of conscientiousness, his gush of
sentiment, his unregulated morals, his undisciplined genius, his
unbalanced thought. His style of writing, often vivid and strong,
is as often awkward and dull, and is frequently lacking in finish.
As a philosophic author and thinker his voluminous work is of little
enduring worth, for though plentiful in original power it totally
lacks organic unity; his thought rambles carelessly, his method is
confused. It has been said of him that he was a master who produced no
masterpiece. But as a talker, a converser, all witnesses testify that
he was wondrously inspiring and suggestive, speaking sometimes as from
mysterious heights of vision or out of unsearchable deeps of thought.