table in a roar. Diderot himself was at his best--full of _bonhomie_ and
_joie-de-vivre_--laughing one minute and crying the next, warm in
generous pity for sorrow, quick to be irritated or appeased, pouring out
torrents of splendid ideas and then of grossest ribaldry, his mouth
speaking always from the fulness of his heart, utterly indiscreet,
brilliant, ingenuous, delightful; an orator ‘drunk with the exuberance
of his own verbosity,’ who could argue that black was white, and then
that white was black again, and whose seduction and danger lay in the
fact that he always fully believed both impossibilities himself. No
subject that was started found him cool or neutral. ‘He is too hot an
oven,’ said Voltaire; ‘everything gets burnt in him.’
When the dinner was over he would thrust his arm through his host’s and
walk in the garden with him. He at least did his best to imbue the
dogmatic atheism of d’Holbach with luxuriance and warmth. At seven they
came back to the house, and supper was followed by picquet and by talk
till they went to bed.
Among many other visitors whom Diderot met while he was what he called
‘veuf’ at Grandval were at least four Englishmen--Sterne, Wilkes,
Garrick, and Hume.
Diderot has been well called the most English of the Frenchmen of the
eighteenth century. He began his literary career by making translations
from our language. In a passion of admiration he had fallen at the feet
of the ‘divine Richardson,’ and imitated ‘Pamela’ in a very bad novel of
his own, ‘The Nun;’ in another, ‘Jacques, the Fatalist,’ he tried to
accustom France to romance in the style of Sterne. He had taught his
fellow-citizens, he said, to read and to esteem Bacon. He was familiar
with the works of Pope, Chaucer, Tillotson, and Locke; and he has left a
noble and famous criticism upon Shakespeare: ‘He is like the St.
Christopher of Notre-Dame, an unshapen Colossus, rudely carven, but
beneath whose legs we can all walk without our brows touching him.’
To Garrick, Diderot paid exaggerated homage, and went into raptures over
the wonderful play of his face. He admired Wilkes’s morals as well as
his mind, and in 1768 wrote him a flattering letter. As for Hume, he
liked the delightful Diderot better than any other philosopher he met in
France. It is Diderot who tells the story of Hume saying at d’Holbach’s
table, ‘I do not believe there is such a thing as an atheist; I have
never seen one,’ and of d’Holbach’s replying, ‘Then you have been a
little unfortunate; you are sitting now with seventeen.’ Sterne, whose
‘Tristram Shandy’ was delighting France in general and Diderot in
particular when its author was at Grandval, on his return home sent
Denis English books.
In 1761 Diderot produced a play. ‘The Father of the Family’ is, it must
be confessed, a sad bore with his lachrymose moralities; but he is
exhilarating compared to ‘The Natural Son,’ Diderot’s second play, which
was acted in 1771. The universal Denis was no playwright.
In 1772 he published the ten volumes of plates which he had laboriously
prepared to supplement the text of the Encyclopædia; and in May 1773,
when he was sixty years old, he visited Catherine the Great.
He had had relations with her for some years. One fine day, in 1765, it
had suddenly occurred to him that his dearest Angélique, over whom he
had poured such streams of paternal sentiment, would have positively no
_dot_. Her fond, improvident father had, of course, never attempted to
save anything for her, and, if he knew his own disposition, must have
known too he never would save anything. The only thing he had of value
in the world, besides his head, was his library. Catherine the Great was
a magnificent patron of letters; and Diderot was her especial _protégé_.
He would sell his books to her! She delightedly accepted the offer. She
gave him for them a sum equal to about seven hundred pounds, and
appointed him her librarian at a salary of a thousand livres a year,
fifty years’ payment being made in advance.
For the first time in his history Diderot found himself rich. When a
patron so munificent asked him to visit her, how could he decline? All
the Encyclopædists were her warm admirers; she herself used to say
modestly that Voltaire had made her the fashion. Denis hated long
journeys and loved Paris, but go he must. He left France on May 10,
1773. He stopped at The Hague--where he characteristically admired the
beauty of the women, and the turbot--and at last arrived at St.
Petersburg.
For a monarch who complained that she might have been the head of
Medusa--everyone turned to stone when she entered the room--Diderot must
have been a singularly refreshing guest. It was one of the most charming
traits in his character that he respected persons no more than a child
does, or a dog. All etiquette fled before his breezy, impulsive
personality. The very clothes he arrived in were so shabby, her Majesty
had to present him immediately with a court suit. He was with her every
afternoon. He said what he liked, and as much as he liked, which was a
very great deal. In the heat and excitement of his arguments he would
hammer the Imperial knees black and blue, till the Empress had to put a
table in front of her for safety. If he ever did recollect her august
position, ‘_Allons!_’ she would cry; ‘between men everything is
permissible.’ He evolved the most magnificent, impossible schemes for
the government of her empire--which would have upset it in a week if she
had tried them, said she. During his stay, his dearest Grimm was also a
guest. In March 1774, Denis left; and by the time he reached Paris
again, was persuaded that he had enjoyed himself very much indeed.
Four years later, in 1778, he first saw in the flesh the great elder
brother of his order, the master-worker in the temple slowly lifting
its gorgeous towers towards the light--Voltaire. They had not always
agreed on paper: their goal had been the same, but not the road to it.
‘But we are not so far apart,’ says old Voltaire; ‘we only want a
conversation to understand each other.’ Accordingly, when he came on his
last triumph to the capital, Diderot went to see him in the Villettes’
house on what is now the Quai Voltaire. Few details of their interviews
have been preserved; but it is said that they discussed Shakespeare, and
that when Diderot left, Voltaire said of him: ‘He is clever, but he
lacks one very necessary talent--that of dialogue.’ On his part, Diderot
compared Voltaire to a haunted castle falling into ruins--‘but one can
easily see it is still inhabited by a magician.’
Voltaire died. Diderot was himself growing old; he had acquired, he
thought in Russia, the seeds of a lung disease. Angélique married a M.
de Vandeul, on the strength of the _dot_ provided by the sale of the
library. Madame Diderot, poor soul, had become not a little worried and
embittered. It is the careless who make the care-worn, and Diderot was
almost to the last the engaging, light-hearted scamp whose troubles are
always flung on to some patient scapegoat.
In 1783, or 1784, the death of Mademoiselle Volland gave him a real
grief. Twenty years before he had written to her with an exquisite
eloquence of the calm and gentle approach of the great rest, Death: ‘One
longs for the end of life as, after hard toil, one longs for the end of
the day.’ He proved in himself the truth of his own words. He had not
even a hope of the immortality of the soul; but he had worked hard, the
evening was come, and he was weary. He was still working--writing the
‘Life of Seneca.’ He was still his all too lovable, spontaneous self,
talking with that marvellous inspiration of which the best of his books
can convey little idea.
A fortnight before he died he moved into a new home, given him by
Catherine the Great, in the Rue Richelieu, opposite the birthplace of
Molière and almost next door to the house where Voltaire had lived with
Madame du Châtelet, and after her death. The _curé_ of Saint-Sulpice
came to see him, and suggested that a retractation of his sceptical
opinions would produce good effect. ‘I dare say it would,’ said Denis,
‘but it would be a most impudent lie.’ In his last conversation Madame
de Vandeul records that she heard him say: ‘The first step towards
philosophy is unbelief.’
The end came very suddenly. On the last day of July 1784, he was supping
with his wife and daughter, and at dessert took an apricot. Nanette
gently remonstrated. ‘Mais que diable de mal veux-tu que cela me fasse?’
he cried. They were his last words and perfectly characteristic. He died
as he sat, a few minutes later.
If to be great means to be good, then Denis Diderot was a little man.
But if to be great means to do great things in the teeth of great
obstacles, then none can refuse him a place in the temple of the
Immortals.
His fiction, taken from rottenness, has returned to it, and is justly
dead. His plays were damned on their appearance. His moving criticisms
on art and the drama, his satirical dialogue, ‘Rameau’s Nephew’--nearly
all the printed talk of this most matchless of all talkers--are rarely
read. His letters to Mademoiselle Volland will last so long as the
proper study of mankind is man. But it is as the father of the
Encyclopædia that Denis Diderot merits eternal recognition. Guilty as he
was in almost every relation of life towards the individual, for
mankind, in the teeth of danger and of infidelity, at the ill-paid
sacrifice of the best years of his exuberant life, he produced that book
which first levelled a free path to knowledge and enfranchised the soul
of his generation.
III
_GALIANI: THE WIT._
‘How can you say I do not know Galiani?’ wrote Voltaire to Madame
d’Épinay. ‘I have read him; therefore I have seen him.’
Of that Brotherhood of Progress, united by a love, sometimes for each
other and always for mankind, if Voltaire was the leader, and d’Alembert
the thinker, Galiani was certainly the wit. In his own day he was
celebrated as the man who made Paris laugh--and ponder--by his famous
‘Dialogues on Corn;’ and in our day he is remembered as the gay little
buffoon of the eighteenth century and the author of a most amusing
correspondence. Voltaire went on to declare the Abbé must be as much
like his Dialogues as two jets of fire are like each other; and Diderot
swore that if he had written a word of the book, he _must_ have written
it exactly as it was.
Light, sparkling, irresponsible, like the brilliant babble of some
precocious child, not in the
[Illustration: THE ABBÉ FERDINAND GALIANI.
_From a Print._]
least hampered by respect for the _convenances_, as quick and flashing
as sunshine on diamonds, as bubbling and spontaneous as a dancing little
mountain torrent, perfectly free from the bitterness, the malignity, and
the sarcasm which make Voltaire’s jests so terrible--the talk and the
writing of Galiani are alike unique. The ‘dear little Abbé’ of the
women, with his dwarf’s figure and his great head, his crafty Italian
brain to conceive a brilliant scheme and his easy flow of wit to present
it to his world, stands out alone against the horizon of the eighteenth
century.
Ferdinand Galiani first saw the light at Chieti, in Abruzzo, on December
2, 1728. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, in two senses at
least. His father was Royal Auditor in one of the provinces of the
Neapolitan Government; and his uncle was Monseigneur Celestin Galiani,
first chaplain to the King of Naples, and a most wealthy, learned, and
enlightened churchman.
Little Ferdinand was eight when he was sent to be educated, with his
elder brother, Bernard, under this uncle’s supervision at Naples. For a
time the two children were taught at the convent of the Celestins, as
Monseigneur was in Rome, negotiating a peace on behalf of the King of
the Two Sicilies. When he returned, he took the boys back to his own
palace and gave them the best and the most delightful of all forms of
learning, the society of clever people. The visitors soon recognised
that the way to the uncle’s heart was through the precocious brain of
the little nephew--that to teach Ferdinand was to delight Monseigneur.
Whatever brother Bernard may have been, Ferdinand was surely the aptest
and sharpest of infant prodigies. He heard discussed around him
antiquarianism, history, literature, commerce; and not one seed of
information fell on barren ground. Many years after Grimm declared that
there was only one man in Paris who really knew Latin, and he was the
Abbé Galiani.
He was still a mere boy when he represented Bernard at a meeting of the
Academy of Naples and read an article on the Immaculate Conception. The
worthy Academicians, naturally shocked at such a little creature
attempting a subject so serious, forbade him to read it. ‘Very well,’
thinks young Ferdinand, ‘I can wait.’ The executioner of Naples died
soon after. The Academy was famous for its _éloges funèbres_. And
behold, there appears, in wicked and most unmistakable travesty of the
Academical funeral orations, the _éloge_ of the executioner! The Academy
was very indignant, the world very much amused, and Galiani had made his
bow to the public in the _rôle_ he was never to relinquish. He confessed
all to the First Minister, Tanucci. Tanucci introduced him to the King
and Queen of Naples, who were delighted, and then appeased the Academy
by condemning the delinquent to ten days’ spiritual exercises in a
neighbouring convent.
At sixteen the boy was already an ardent Political Economist. As England
was the country where that science was brought to perfection, he learnt
English, translated Locke’s ‘Essay on Money,’ and set to work to write
one himself. All the time he was studying diligently the ancient
navigation, peoples, and commerce of the Mediterranean, throwing off a
satire here, a mocking set of verses there, and cultivating that pretty
talent for epigram and story-telling.
When ‘Money’ was finished, he read it to Monseigneur, without mentioning
its authorship. ‘Why do not _you_ give your mind to serious works such
as that?’ said the King’s chaplain, and praised the thing extravagantly.
When Galiani told his secret, Monseigneur was so delighted that he at
once set to work at Court to procure this promising nephew something
really worth having. At two-and-twenty years old, having never studied
theology and having taken minor orders only, and with the sole object of
obtaining these emoluments, Galiani found himself the possessor of the
benefice of Centola and the abbey of Saint-Laurent, while a
dispensation from Rome gave him the title of Monseigneur and the honour
of the mitre. Soon after, the admiring Court of Naples also presented
him with the rich abbey of Saint Catherine of Celano.
The wonder is, not that Galiani writhed with laughter (like the little
Punchinello his friends dubbed him) when he alluded to the religion of
his fathers, but that to the end of his days he saw in that religion,
beneath its shameless venality and its hideous moral corruptions, some
saving truth to bless and comfort man’s soul. When all Paris laughed at
the credulity of Madame Geoffrin, whose death was said to have been
brought about from over-devotion to her religious duties, it was Galiani
who wrote that he considered that unbelief was ‘the greatest effort the
mind of man could make against his natural instincts and wishes.... As
the soul grows old, belief reappears.’ Unlike nearly all his philosophic
friends, if his own illusions were few, he was careful to leave
undisturbed those of happier people.
In respect to the emoluments he received from Rome, and on which he
fattened all his life, it may be justly said that he took them as a man
takes a fortune out of a business he knows to be rotten, congratulating
himself on his own perspicacity, and believing that beneath the
rottenness there still lies the making of a true and honest enterprise.
The Neapolitan Government having adopted all the ideas suggested in
‘Money,’ the fortunate young gentleman who had written it started off in
excellent spirits, in November 1751, for Rome, Florence, and Venice. The
Pope, and all the grandees, _savants_, and _littérateurs_ in Italy
petted and made much of the agreeable little prodigy.
In June 1753 his uncle, Celestin, died, leaving Ferdinand his fortune.
Galiani still remained in Naples, the spirit and the delight of the
brilliant society that Monseigneur had gathered about him. But there was
never any time in his life when it was enough for this wit to be wit
only. He said of himself that he had all the vices, and his friends
declared he had all the tastes. The friends were right. He soon began to
make a collection of the stones thrown up by Vesuvius, classified them,
wrote a beautiful dissertation on them, and sent them to the Pope with
the inscription, _Holy Father, command that these stones be made bread_.
Benedict the Fourteenth was a comfortable person who loved a joke and
thought it worth its reward. He replied by giving the little Abbé yet
another benefice, Amalfi, worth three hundred ducats. Then, of course,
the Geological Academy of Herculaneum must do something more for such a
lively geologist than merely make him a member of its body: it presented
him with a pension.
In 1758 this spoilt child of fortune had the honour of composing Pope
Benedict’s funeral oration. Then he was made Chancellor to the King,
and, in 1759, Secretary to the Embassy in Paris.
It was the turning-point of his life, and the greatest event of his
history. But for that appointment, he might have been nothing, after
all, but some brilliant little local light, with his sparkling Southern
talents only employed for the advantage of Italy and certainly never
heard of beyond her borders. To it he owed all his fame and the gayest
and most successful epoch in his existence. To it the world owes its
picture of the man himself, the ‘Dialogues on Corn,’ and the
Correspondence with Madame d’Épinay.
Galiani was at first pleased to go. But he was thirty years old, and had
never yet been out of his own country. She had done generously by him,
and he was extremely rich. On the other hand, the secretaryship involved
further large emoluments, and Galiani was not one of those rare, wise
people who know how easy it is to be rich enough; he had not learned
from the possession of money how very little it can buy. Paris was then
not only the capital of France, but the social capital of the world.
She was at the height of her ancient glory. Revolutions had not
shattered her splendid buildings or the delicate fabric of the most
easy, polished, accomplished society under heaven. She was the finishing
school of Europe. Her language was the language of many Courts, of
Frederick of Prussia, and of the letters of Catherine the Great. From
her printing presses she poured forth, almost daily, masterpieces of
literature, or pamphlets which were to change dynasties and shake
kingdoms. On her throne sat Louis the Fifteenth, as rotten as the
society of which he was the head, but, like that society, with a
rottenness covered by a magnificence which awed investigation into
silence. Choiseul was the minister in name, and Madame de Pompadour in
reality; and over the _salons_, then in the height of their power and
distinction, presided women ‘who in the decline of their beauty revealed
the dawn of their intelligence.’
Such a world should have pleased Galiani, or any happy Southerner who
loved to bask in the warmth of prosperity and shrug his shoulders at the
possibility of future disaster. But at first it did not. He was cold and
homesick. His health, he wrote, would certainly not survive the unequal
climate. Foreign customs, bad air, detestable water, everything here is
noxious to my Italian temperament! Then Choiseul received the petted
wit of the Neapolitan parties coldly, nonchalantly, indifferently. And
Versailles--Versailles was yet more objectionable. When Galiani was
presented there in June 1760, with his four-and-a-half-foot figure
overladen with the ridiculous gala dress of the period, the men burst
into open laughter and the women sneered behind their fans. Why should
that cruel age, which had no compassion on the helplessness of little
children, on poverty, on misfortune, on weakness, and which, when it did
not mock at moral suffering, fled from it as from a disease one might
catch--why should such an age pity the sensibilities of a deformed
little foreigner, an absurd dwarf of an abbé, whom no one in Paris
(which is to say the world) had ever heard of before?
Galiani was more than a match for the laughers. ‘Sire,’ he said to the
King, ‘you now see only a sample of the secretary; the secretary will
arrive later.’ The King was delighted; but the secretary retired with
that cruel laughter ringing in his heart. For a whole year he pleaded
passionately for his recall. He wrote bitterly of the French as ‘a
mobile and superficial race full at once of passion and lightness.... My
clothes, my character, my way of thinking, and all my natural defects
will always make me insupportable to this people and to myself.’
From being the most popular and successful man in Naples, he was in
Paris the insignificant secretary at whom, as he passed by, men mocked
with the tongue in the cheek. They did not indeed mock for ever. His own
sharp tongue was bound to win him respect and reputation. First it was a
jest uttered here; and then a story, with his own inimitable
gesticulation, told there. This little secretary is going to be amusing!
Further, he was always accompanied by his _âme damnée_, the most
intelligent of monkeys, who was only something less entertaining than
his master. The master, moreover, could play on the clavecin, and sing
to it, wonderfully. Even for the Parisians of that day his conversation
was free, naïf, unhampered. The man has ideas, as we all have, on the
liberty of the Press and the Masses, on the Deluge that is coming after
us; only he can put those ideas so that the expression reads like a
romance or sounds like a jest!
Then he was introduced to Baron Gleichen, and to Grimm, the first
journalist in Europe. Grimm made him known to Madame d’Épinay; and his
acquaintance with her, with Madame Necker, with Madame Geoffrin, and
with Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, implied an introduction to the society
of all witty Paris, and of all travelling England. He became the friend
of d’Alembert, who had just published his ‘Elements of Philosophy,’ of
Diderot, of d’Holbach, of Helvétius, of Morellet, and of Marmontel. He
met that magnificent icicle, Saint Lambert, still writing his ‘Seasons’
and stealing Madame d’Houdetot from Rousseau. He knew Suard, Thomas,
Raynal, and that picturesque and ill-fated young Spaniard, the Marquis
de Mora.
In a word, by 1760, Galiani was launched--the gayest little skiff that
ever danced into a summer sea. The Parisian climate improved in the
twinkling of an eye; the bad water became drinkable; the light and
fickle people turned into one ‘loving and worthy to be loved.’ Some fool
of a wit, who had declared that the Abbé would never succeed at Court
because he thought too loud and spoke too low, must needs eat his words.
However low he spoke now, the audience always heard. They expected a
_bon mot_ or a _naïveté_, every time he opened his mouth, and he did not
disappoint them. Instead of a poor little dwarf from that God-forsaken
Naples, the secretary became ‘the prettiest little Harlequin Italy has
produced,’ ‘the incomparable Abbé,’ ‘the head of Machiavelli,’
‘Machiavellino,’ ‘ce drôle de Napolitain,’ ‘Plato, with the verve and
gestures of Harlequin.’ In a word, he was the mode. The women raved
about him--he understood them so well!--and fought among each other for
his presence at their parties. If Choiseul remained cold, his
Duchess--‘the gentlest, amiablest, civil little creature that ever came
out of a fairy egg,’ said Horace Walpole--was as fond of her Abbé as
were her society sisters. Galiani was asked everywhere and went
everywhere. He had found his true element at last. How tame and
provincial the Neapolitan parties looked now! How dull and restricted
were ambitions that limited one to Italy! Paris was the theatre of
Europe--with a crowded audience of all nations watching, half laughing
and half afraid, the next move in her breathless tragi-comedy. There was
hardly ever a more effective actor on her boards than this buffoon, this
keen-set little wit, this jester, with here and there, now and then, as
if by accident, some poignant meaning, some thrilling prophecy beating
beneath his jests, and startling his hearers to a brief and sudden
gravity.