and guests met in the _salon_, and went in to dinner--the famous dinner,
exquisitely arranged and appointed; servants numerous, noiseless, and
perfectly _au fait_ in their duties; the most delicate wines, and the
most irreproachable of _chefs_. A couple of Englishmen, perhaps, and
half a dozen French men and women had driven down to it from Paris.
There were generally from twelve to fifteen persons at table, and
sometimes more. Good as the fare was--much too good for the health of
some of the diners--‘the only intoxication’ at this table ‘was of
ideas.’
The talk ranged from the history and customs of the Chinese to the final
annihilation of the human race. Sometimes it lit on ‘Clarissa Harlowe,’
and the company divided itself into For and Against Sentiment as
understood by the bookseller Richardson. Occasionally the meal was given
up to buffoonery, and Madame d’Aine led the way with jokes of such a
character that if Morellet is conscientious in declaring in his
‘Memoirs’ that all freedoms, except freedoms as to speculation, were
banished from d’Holbach’s gatherings, he must certainly have been deaf.
One day, a story going the round of the Paris cafés, holds the table
curious and laughing. The Baron, says Grimm, was as amusingly credulous
of gossip as he was sceptical of everything else. Another day, it is a
question of _ton_ or of _mode_; and a third, of art or of literature.
There was scarcely one of d’Holbach’s _convives_--there was not one of
Voltaire’s co-operators--who did not contribute, at one time or another,
a masterpiece, or at least a Book of the Moment, for d’Holbach’s table
to discuss.
In 1755, it is the famous article on ‘Existence’ in the Encyclopædia, by
young Turgot, our shy, rare guest, which brings the heads of the older
Encyclopædists together over the walnuts and the wine, and inspires them
with prophecies of a great future for its quiet author. Three or four
years later, the great suppression of that Encyclopædia itself inflames
the passions of the party, goads Diderot to fury, and d’Alembert to
despair.
In 1759, the ‘Candide’ of the Master sets the table in a roar of
delight. ‘The Social Contract’ of our impossible, impassioned Jean
Jacques sounds for us, in 1762, the trumpet-note of battle in that
sonorous opening sentence: ‘Man is born free, and is everywhere in
chains.’ The next year, the guests give their ever-generous admiration
to a far wiser work--one of the mightiest weapons ever forged against
‘the greatest of human curses’--‘The Treatise on Tolerance.’ In 1765,
d’Alembert comes out of his shell again with his ‘History of the
Destruction of the Jesuits;’ while Diderot is for ever finger deep in
ink--up to the neck in ideas.
Only, at the head of the table, d’Holbach, host and president, always
applauding, encouraging, (and sometimes also financing) the producers,
himself produces nothing. Yet it is not because he does not go, as it
were, with his guests. He goes far beyond them. Here, the women of the
party left the table after dinner as they do in England, to exchange
what Diderot called their ‘little confidences.’ Then the conversation
took, not the kind of freedoms which Morellet declared he did not hear,
but speculative liberties which, said he, ‘would have brought down
thunderbolts on the house a hundred times if they ever fell for that.’
At d’Holbach’s table, with d’Holbach pushing, urging, with a quiet,
invincible persistence, with Diderot waving the flag, leading, pleading,
inciting, the ‘club holbachique’ dragged every dogma, every so-called
fact of existence, every creed, into court before them; judged by the
tribunal of their own reason, and cast away all that failed to satisfy
it, as fagots for the burning.
Grandval did not speculate, as did Voltaire and his guests at Ferney, on
the attributes of God and the nature of the Soul. It began where he left
off: asked not, What is God? but, Is there a God? not, What is the Soul?
but, Have we a Soul? and in each case answered, No.
Gagged for hundreds of years, Grandval used the newly seized freedom of
thought and speech as a very little later the mob used its social and
political liberty. The bloody extremes of the Terror, and the
speculative extremes of d’Holbach’s table, were alike the result of long
slavery and repression.
That d’Holbach at least was strongly and honestly persuaded of the truth
of his own unbelief, and was convinced that he did well to destroy in
men those faiths which, looking back on history, he saw were responsible
for the intolerable miseries of religious persecution, is not doubtful.
D’Holbach was an honest man. It is true, indeed, that he was not one of
the highest intellectual capacity. His seems to have been just the kind
of clever mind--much more common among women than men--which is the dupe
of its own cleverness, and easily led by it into absurdities which both
wise people, and very simple ones, detect and avoid.
Set the problem of deriving Everything from Nothing, it is not
marvellous that the Grandval talkers descended sometimes to the wildest
nonsense. Horace Walpole said acidly that they soon turned _his_ head
with ‘a new system of antediluvian deluges which they have invented to
prove the eternity of matter.... Nonsense for nonsense, I prefer the
Jesuits.’ No wonder poor little Galiani (he _was_ an Abbé, though he
very often forgot it) fled to the more circumspect gatherings of Madame
Geoffrin, that the wise Turgot also turned away from Grandval, and
d’Alembert drew back from an atheism so positive and arrogant.
By the time the philosophers joined the women it was four, five, or even
six o’clock. It _does_ take some hours to construct Man and the Universe
out of Chaos, with nothing but blind Force to help us! Then came for the
host himself, and some few of the other men of the party, a walk in the
beautiful gardens. Most of the Baron’s guests, however, sat indoors with
the women, Nature and exercise being both greatly out of fashion in the
eighteenth century.
When the walkers returned the evening was drawing in, and there were
lights and cards on the table. Some of the guests rested on long chairs.
Some played picquet, some billiards, some tric-trac. Some visited their
host’s picture gallery or his famous cabinet of natural history. He was
himself always pleasant, courteous, cheerful. He loved to rally gently
‘the old mummy,’ as he called Father Hoop, and, perhaps, other Fathers,
certain Jesuit priests, whom, in defiance of all his own principles, he
generously made free of his house.
Old Madame d’Aine entertained the whole company with her perfectly
indecorous and perfectly good-natured wit. Madame d’Holbach, always
‘douce et honnête,’ ‘très aimable,’ and exquisitely dressed (the
description is Madame d’Épinay’s), accepted her mother’s buffooneries
with absolute complacency.
Coarse as this society was in its speech--worse as it was in its easy
condonation of vice than the worst social sets of our own day--in one
respect at least it was immeasurably superior. Except for an occasional
desultory game proposed by their hosts, the guests at Grandval were
expected to bring, and did bring, their own entertainment with them in
their own heads. To be bored would have been to confess oneself stupid.
For the costly freaks of amusement, the elaborately idiotic devices of
modern times to prevent the visitor having to fall back for an instant
on his own resources or intelligence, Grandval had no need. If
materialism was its creed, there was, as has been justly said, a great
deal of ‘indirect spiritualism’ in its practice. Its lengthy dinners
_were_ feasts of reason (in spite of those intellectual extravagances)
as well as of costly meats and wines, and the ill-flavoured jests were
only interludes in the midst of brilliant and fruitful talk on
literature, history, politics, and the new world beginning for France.
Supper came about nine--‘wit, gaiety, and champagne,’ Diderot described
it. Then more conversation, until sometimes the party were still
ardently philosophising with their bedroom candle-sticks in their hands.
When d’Holbach had been entertaining, apparently without a break, for at
least ten years, he took what seemed to his friends the foolhardy, not
to say desperate, resolve of crossing the Channel. To bury himself in
what Diderot called ‘the depths of England’ for two months is a very
different thing, the Baron will find, from entertaining Englishmen (and
those quite the most enlightened of their species) in Paris! He did find
it so. If England delighted Voltaire, soothed wounded Helvétius, and
pleased even critical Grimm, she thoroughly disgusted d’Holbach. He gave
Diderot his vivid first impressions of her, and Diderot retailed them,
red-hot, for Sophie Volland and for posterity.
The Baron was hospitably received and entertained in this island by a
rich and generous host, whose name has not transpired; he had the best
of health during his visit, and he paid that visit in August, when even
the British climate can be very tolerable; he had the pleasure of
calling on his guest, Garrick; he went to Oxford and Cambridge;
travelled in some of the prettiest English counties, and he was
bored--to extinction.
Our confessedly bad manners he found worse than anyone had ever found
them before, and was dreadfully disgusted with people ‘on whose faces
one never sees friendliness, confidence, or gaiety, but which all wear
the inscription, “What is there in common between you and me?”’ The
aristocracy struck him as cold and haughty, the common people as rough
and violent. As for the dinner parties, ‘where people sit according to
their rank, and formality and ceremony are beside each guest,’ after the
gracious ease of Grandval, the Baron may be forgiven for finding them
intolerable.
Then the public entertainments: ‘This people is sad and melancholy,
especially in places built for pleasure. You can hear a pin drop. A
hundred stiff and silent women promenade round an orchestra discoursing
the most delicious music,’ and the promenade can only be compared to
‘the processions of the Egyptians round the mausoleum of Osiris.’
Then the gambling: ‘Englishmen lose incredible sums in perfect silence.
By thirty they have exhausted all the pleasures, even beneficence. Ennui
... conducts them to the Thames, unless they prefer a pistol.’
At the universities, the good Baron found many ‘rich do-nothings
drinking and sleeping half the day;’ at Court, corruption; among the
people, no public education and great inequality of riches. The King, to
be sure, was powerful chiefly to do good, but still he was much the
master. With regard to religion, ‘the Christian religion,’ said the
Baron, ‘is almost extinct in England.’ This was an advantage from his
point of view. But then, though there were innumerable Deists, like
Hume, there was not an atheist, or not an avowed one. The travelling
facilities he praised--there were always post-horses in plenty; and at
the meals at inns, he found himself ‘served promptly, but with no
affability.’ It must be owned that now and again the Baron has us on the
hip.
But, after all, there was very great good in England: it made one so
delighted to get back to France. D’Holbach, who had left Paris about
August 1, 1765, had returned there by September 20. He dined that same
evening with his dear Diderot and a whole colony of English, ‘who had
left their _morgue_ and sadness on the banks of the Thames.’
Two years after his return, there appeared, not only to the horror of
Court, Church, and Government, but to the horror of the philosophers
also, a book called ‘Christianity Unveiled, or an Examination of the
Principles and Effects of Revealed Religion.’
It purported to be by a person called Boulanger. It asserted
Christianity to be unnecessary for the maintenance of law and order;
declared its dogmas incoherent, its morals fit only to make enthusiasts
and fanatics, and its political results infinitely fatal and disastrous.
Voltaire fell upon the thing tooth and nail. ‘Impiety Unveiled,’ he
called it. It was not Christianity, but the perversions of Christianity,
with which _he_ quarrelled. In the margin of his own copy of the book he
wrote criticisms as scathing as they are brief. That it was both
discussed and condemned at d’Holbach’s table, is practically certain.
Galiani at least professed Christianity; Turgot practised it. There are
many men--there were some even round d’Holbach’s board--who, having
themselves relinquished a faith, are yet greatly averse to hearing that
faith blasphemed; and who would fain leave for the souls of others the
consolations their reason denies to their own. D’Holbach, to be sure,
would commend the thing. ‘A proselytising atheist,’ as his friends had
long known him to be--he _must_ approve this daring effort to make men
think as he did.
Soon came talk of other books--from the same hand it might be--certainly
from a hand as bold. In 1767 appeared a pamphlet called ‘The Mind of the
Clergy;’ in 1768 ‘Priests Unmasked,’ and ‘Portable Theology.’ The last
was condemned to be burnt.
Then came whispers of yet another work on the same lines, but on a far
larger scale, written with an even greater daring, with ‘the zeal of a
missionary for atheism,’ with a passion, a fanaticism, an enthusiasm,
usually associated with the ‘heated pulpiteer’ of some narrow sect; and
yet having in it, too, something of the serenity, the calm and confident
faith of the believer wholly satisfied with his belief. Who has written
it? A. M. Mirabaud, Perpetual Secretary to the French Academy, is to be
the name, it is said, on the title-page. But the real author? Diderot,
whose Encyclopædic labours bring him in touch with all the literary men
in Paris, is impulsively positive that he has not the slightest idea.
Naigeon--Naigeon, the Baron’s factotum--is abroad on some business of
the Baron’s and cannot be appealed to. Most of the company condemn the
book unseen. The extremists of the party are always the worst enemies
the party has to dread. At the head of his table, fingering his glass
thoughtfully, the Baron, with his benevolent, leisurely air, is only
following his usual custom in saying little and listening much.
In August 1770, there was published in London and Amsterdam ‘The System
of Nature, or The Laws of the Physical and Moral World,’ by Mirabaud,
Perpetual Secretary to the French Academy.
The best kept literary secret in history is the authorship of the
‘Letters of Junius,’ for that remains a secret still. But the Baron
d’Holbach’s authorship of ‘The System of Nature’ is certainly among the
most piquant concealments in literature.
He had begun by sitting and listening to criticisms, mostly adverse, on
his ‘Christianity Unveiled’ and the pamphlets which followed it, which
were all from his pen. Many people start a literary career under as
thick a veil of anonymity. A few have died still under the disguise. But
no book has ever attracted such howls of rage and imprecation, such a
storm of universal loathing and opprobrium as did ‘The System of
Nature,’ while its author sat in perfect peace and comfort, beloved by
all his fellows, safe, unsuspected, and serene. D’Holbach, said Grimm
long after, when d’Holbach was dead and the secret out, never ran any
danger from his books, save the danger of being bored by them.
Naigeon, La Grange, and Diderot were in his confidence. Diderot was more
than in it. To most of the Baron’s works--certainly to ‘The System of
Nature’--he lent some of the colour and fire of his genius. Poor Diderot
was always suspect of anything rash and extreme. ‘The System of Nature’
was published quite early in August. On the 10th of that month, Denis
slipped off to Langres and the baths of Bourbonne. The Baron went on
having dinner parties. On the 18th, the book was condemned to be burnt.
The Baron continued to dine in peace. Then, as men read it, and passed
it secretly from one to the other, the murmurs of horror and hatred
swelled to a roar--the roar of the great multitude, always deafening and
terrible. Above it, d’Holbach heard, close, distinct, and scathing, the
bitter condemnations of his own guests and friends. He went on dining to
that accompaniment.
From Ferney, Voltaire pronounced the work ‘a philippic against God’ and
‘a sin against nature;’ swore it had wrought irreparable harm to
philosophy; passionately refuted it in his article on ‘God’ in the
Philosophical Dictionary; while it wrung from him, in a letter to the
Duc de Richelieu, that famous confession: ‘_I_ think it very good to
sustain the doctrine of the existence of a punishing and rewarding God:
society has need of this opinion.’ Galiani declared ‘this Mirabaud’ to
be ‘the Abbé Terrai of metaphysics: he causes the bankruptcy of
knowledge, of happiness, and of the human mind.’ La Harpe called it
‘this infamous book.’ Young Goethe said he fled from it as from a
spectre. It caused Frederick the Great to break with the philosophic
party. Grimm, indeed--but this was after d’Holbach’s death, when it was
no longer dangerous to hold such opinions--praised the purity of its
author’s intentions, and the passages of ‘imposing eloquence’ the book
contained--though these, he added, Grimm-like, ‘were by Diderot.’
Who reads ‘The System of Nature’ now? It never was in any sense a great
book. But it certainly was one of the three or four most famous books of
an age richer in them than any other age in history. It was, after all,
simply the logical outcome, the natural, though the extreme result of
the rationalistic criticism of the fifty or sixty years which preceded
it. The philosophers had sought to define God. D’Holbach said aloud,
what the fool of David’s time said in his heart, ‘THERE IS NO GOD.’
In Part I. he disposed of Kings as effete, luxurious, war-making, and
tyrannical. Then he expounded his views on Happiness. Men will never be
happy till they are enlightened, and never enlightened till they have
ceased to believe in a God. Study Nature, and obey Nature’s laws--that
is the way to felicity, if way there be. Then he went on to Mind. All
Mind is Matter. Of Free Will he denied the existence, as twelve years
earlier his friend Helvétius had denied it in his book ‘On the Mind.’
Still, even if one cannot help one’s wrong-doing, punishments there must
be, for the good of society; only such punishments should be reformative
and never cruel. In his protest against torture and the brutalising
effect of public executions, one sees for a moment the man behind the
book. With regard to the Immortality of the Soul, since there is no such
thing as soul, it cannot be immortal. The false doctrine of Hell is
useless even as a deterrent from sin.
Part II. contains what is certainly the most burning and outspoken
attack on the Existence of God to be found in literature. That there is
a Force behind Matter, I admit. He who does not admit this, must be a
madman. But further I will not go. As for morality depending on a belief
in a Deity--not at all. Nature bids man do right as his own best
interest. Let each try to do his utmost for the greatest good of the
greatest number, and there stands established a high and an unselfish
ideal.
Preached, as these doctrines were, in a style not a little vehement and
abundant, with much Teutonic pomposity and rhetoric, it could soon be
said of d’Holbach that he had ‘accommodated atheism to chambermaids and
to hairdressers.’ More learned critics disliked his manner as much as
his matter. ‘Four times too many words in the book,’ says Voltaire
acidly. But the uneducated, or the half-educated, prefer both their
oratory and their literature rich and fruity.
Simple and learned alike would, or should, had they known him, have
given the author credit for the certain fact that ‘no sordid end, no
personal consideration, attached him to his dismal system.’ If his
anonymity shielded him from danger, it kept from him fame and celebrity
too, and gave him the wholesome, but not soothing, experience of hearing
expressed to his face criticisms of the kind generally only made behind
one’s back. He did not gain even the painful glories of martyrdom; and
had money been an object to him, by the publication of such works as
his, he can only have lost it.
Long before the tumult ‘The System of Nature’ raised had passed away,
the Baron was busy supplementing it. In 1772 appeared ‘Good Sense, or
Natural Ideas opposed to Supernatural Ideas,’ which was a sort of
simplification of ‘The System of Nature.’ It was burnt. Then appeared
‘The Social System,’ which tried to establish a rule of morality totally
unfounded on religion. That was burnt too. Then there was a translation
from Hobbes. The last, or one of the last, of d’Holbach’s published
works was entitled ‘Universal Morality, or the Duties of Man founded on
his Nature.’ This appeared in 1776. He had the pleasure of watching all
the bonfires from a distance where there was not the least danger of
scorching.
In 1781 one of his daughters was married. Her father was now
fifty-eight years old. Did philosophy, as Galiani inquired (Galiani had
returned to Italy in 1769), still eat at his table with its old
appetite? Grimm said--in Grimm’s caustic fashion--that the guests fell
off somewhat when the Baron had to retrench his expenses to establish
his children. Some of the _convives_ had gone before that, to solve for
themselves those questions on a future world, and the existence of the
soul, which they had discussed so often. In 1771 died Helvétius; in 1778
Voltaire himself. In 1783, d’Alembert, who had indeed long ceased to
frequent the Baron’s society, or any society, laid down the burden of
his life. In the next year, Diderot, the friend of his heart, the
fruitful inspiration of his work, was called away from d’Holbach’s side
for ever.
It must have been with this society, as it is with all societies at
last: the sight of vacant chairs stops the mirth, and among the living
guests glide others, dear and dead. When one has more memories than
hopes, the time has come to give up such gatherings. That time came even
to _the_ Host of his generation. By his own fireside he had to the end
the wife he loved. She long survived him. He had, too, that tranquil and
even disposition which is surely one of the best of assets--a possession
indeed.
The Baron was as prudent in the time of his death as he had been in the
conduct of his life. He died on January 21 of that _annus mirabilis_,
1789. Five years more, and he would have seen his own principles
enthroned with the Goddess of Reason at Notre-Dame, and as, in part at
least, the consequence of her reign, the streets of Paris running with
blood. Directly after his death, the secret of his authorship became
public property.
It is permissible only to think of d’Holbach now as his guests and
friends thought of him in life--not as the author of ‘The System of
Nature’ at all, but as the liberal patron of letters, the best and
kindliest of good, easy men. One may be permitted to hate as bitterly as
Voltaire did the unreasonableness of his philosophy of pure reason; and
yet to regard the philosopher with gratitude and appreciation, as the
man who played in the great intellectual revival of his time one of the
homeliest, yet one of the most necessary of parts.
For d’Holbach provided the _rendez-vous_.
VI
_GRIMM: THE JOURNALIST_
The great Encyclopædia of Diderot and d’Alembert was to bring light to
the people; the ‘Literary Correspondence’ of Melchior Grimm was to bring
light to kings. The Encyclopædia was the conception of those who knew
that they were preparing mighty changes, but who did not live to see
them; the ‘Literary Correspondence’ was the work of a man whose shrewd
eyes foresaw little, but who lived to see all. The Encyclopædia
is dead, as a great man dies, having finished his work. The
‘Correspondence’--which could not cure those royal maladies, blindness,
ignorance, and hardness of heart--still lives a gay little life as the
most perfect contemporary record of any literary epoch in history.
* * * * *
In 1753, the sensibilities of sentimental Paris were most agreeably
touched by the pathetic story of a young gentleman who, having had his
suit rejected by a charming opera-dancer, Mademoiselle
[Illustration: FRÉDÉRIC-MELCHIOR GRIMM.
_From an Engraving, after Carmontelle, in the Bibliothèque Nationale,
Paris._]