this great work and to carry it to triumphal completion. He said once
of himself that he belonged to his windy countryside of Langres;
“the man of Langres has a head on his shoulders like the weathercock
on the top of the church spire--it is never fixed at one point.” He
was scarcely just to himself; with all his emotional vivacity and
his readiness to receive new impressions, there was in him also an
infinite patience and a tenacity to hold on to the end in spite of
all. Both his versatility and his patience were called for here. He
was indefatigable, for ever animating the waverers, stimulating the
slow-paced, fighting with timid publishers, himself having a hand in
everything, ever ready to suggest new ideas or to spend months in
studying the details of machines or factories, or anything else that
had to be done; knowing all the time that at every moment he might be
exiled or imprisoned. The personal qualities of the man, even more
than his varied abilities, carried him through. Someone speaks of
“his eyes on fire and the prophetic air which seemed always announcing
the enthusiasm of actual labour;” we hear of his “éloquence fougueuse
et entraînante;” and, with this, of his feminine sensibility, his wit
and tact and fertility of resource. We divine these qualities in his
head as it has come down to us, though his characteristics do not
easily lend themselves to brush or chisel. He has himself some remarks
on this point. In his _Salons_ he comes upon his own portrait by Van
Loo, and, after some good-humoured criticism, he adds: “But what will
my grandchildren say when they come to compare my sad books with
that smiling, mincing, effeminate old flirt? My children, I warn you
that I am not like that. I had a hundred different faces in one day,
according to the thing that affected me. I was calm, sad, dreaming,
tender, violent, passionate, enthusiastic, but I was never as you see
me there. I had a large forehead, very bright eyes, tolerably large
features, a head quite like that of an ancient orator, a _bonhomie_
which approached stupidity, and an old-fashioned rusticity. I wear a
mask which deceives the artist, whether it is that there are too many
things mixed together, or that the mental impressions which trace
themselves on my face succeed one another so rapidly that the painter’s
task becomes more difficult than he expected. I have never been well
done except by a poor devil called Garand, who caught me as it happens
to a fool who utters a _bon mot_.” Meister, Grimm’s secretary, who knew
Diderot well, says of him: “The artist who would seek an ideal head for
Plato or Aristotle could hardly meet a modern head more worth his study
than Diderot’s. His large forehead, uncovered and slightly rounded,
bore the imposing imprint of his large, luminous, and fertile spirit.
The great physiognomist, Lavater, thought he detected there some
traces of timidity and lack of enterprise, and this intuition, founded
only on such portraits as he could see, has always seemed to me that
of a keen observer.[3] His nose was of masculine beauty, the contour
of his upper eyelid full of delicacy, the habitual expression of his
eyes sensitive and gentle; but when he became excited they gleamed
with fire; his mouth revealed an interesting mixture of refinement,
of grace, of _bonhomie_; and, whatever indifference there might be
about his bearing, there was naturally in the carriage of his head,
especially when he began to talk, much energy and dignity. Enthusiasm
seemed to have become the most natural attitude of his voice, of his
soul, of all his features. When his mental attitude was cold and calm,
one might find in him constraint, awkwardness, timidity, even a sort
of affectation; he was only truly Diderot, he was only truly himself,
when his thoughts transported him beyond himself.”
[3] “Timid and awkward in his own cause,” says Meister elsewhere, “he
was scarcely ever so in that of others.”
It was the inexhaustible profusion and generosity of Diderot’s genius
which seems to have impressed men chiefly. A small literary man of
the time wrote his impression of Diderot, as he appeared in later
life, with what is probably but a very mild touch of good-natured
caricature:--“Some time ago I had a desire to write a book. I sought
solitude in order to meditate. A friend lent me an apartment in a
charming house amid delightful scenery. Hardly had I arrived when I
learnt that M. Diderot occupied a room in the same house. I do not
exaggerate when I say that my heart beat violently; I forgot all my
literary projects, and thought only of seeing the great man whose
genius I so much admired. I entered his room with the dawn, and he
seemed no more surprised to see me than it. He spared me the trouble of
stammering awkwardly the object of my visit. He guessed it apparently
by my air of admiration. He spared me likewise the long windings of
a conversation which must be led to poetry and prose. Hardly was it
mentioned than he rose, fixed his eyes upon me, and, it was quite
clear, did not see me at all. He began to speak, at first very low and
fast, so that though I was quite close to him I could scarcely hear or
follow him. I saw at once that my part in the conversation would be
limited to silent admiration, a part which it costs me little to play.
Gradually his voice rose and became distinct and sonorous; he had been
almost immovable; now his gestures became frequent and animated. He
had never seen me before, and when we were standing he put his arms
round me; when we were seated he struck my thighs as though they were
his own. If the rapid courses of his talk brought in the word ‘law,’
he made me a plan of legislation; if the word ‘theatre’ came in, he
offered me the choice between five or six plans of dramas. _A propos_
of the relation between the scene and the dialogue, he recalls that
Tacitus is the greatest painter of antiquity, and recites or translates
for me the Annals or the History. But how terrible that the barbarians
should have buried in the ruins of architectural masterpieces so many
of Tacitus’s _chefs-d’œuvre_! Thereupon he grows as tender over those
lost beauties as though he had known them. But if the excavations at
Herculaneum should reveal fresh Annals and Histories! And this hope
transports him with joy. But how often in the process of discovery
ignorant hands have destroyed the masterpieces preserved in tombs! And
here he dissertates like an Italian engineer on methods of excavation.
Then his imagination turns to ancient Italy, and he recalls how the
arts of Athens had softened the terrible virtues of the conquerors of
the world. He turns to the happy days of Lælius and Scipio, when even
the conquered assisted with delight in the triumphs of the conquerors.
He acts for me an entire scene of Terence; he almost sings several
songs of Horace. He concludes by actually singing a song full of grace
and wit, an impromptu of his own at a supper, and recites for me a very
agreeable comedy of which, to save the trouble of copying, he has had
a single copy printed. Then a number of people entered the room. The
noise of chairs makes him break off his enthusiastic monologue. Then he
distinguishes me in the midst of the company, and comes up to me as to
a person whom one has previously met with pleasure. He reminds me that
we have talked about many very interesting things--law, drama, history;
he acknowledges that there was much to be learnt from my conversation,
and makes me promise to cultivate an acquaintance the value of which
he appreciates. At parting he gives me two kisses on the forehead, and
snatches his hand from mine with genuine sorrow.” Diderot is recorded
to have laughed heartily at this sketch when he saw it in the “Mercure”
of 1779: “I must be an eccentric sort of fellow; but is it such a great
fault to have preserved amid all the friction of society some vestiges
of the angularity of nature?”
These impressions are confirmed by those of the Empress Catherine,
whose delicate generosity in buying Diderot’s library and appointing
him librarian smoothed the last years of his life. She wrote to
Mme. Geoffrin: “Your Diderot is an extraordinary man. I emerge from
interviews with him with thighs bruised and quite black. I have been
obliged to put a table between us to protect myself and my members.” He
could not understand, his daughter remarks, that one must not behave
the same way in a palace as in a barn. It must be added, in justice to
Diderot, that Catherine was no lover of ceremony, as she certainly let
Diderot know.
He was the same to everybody; not more ready to furnish the Empress
with the plan of a university on the largest scale, and in accordance
with the most advanced ideas, than to write laughingly _Avis au public_
for a new pomade to promote the luxuriant growth of the hair. He was
equally ready to throw out the brilliant suggestions which Helvetius
and Holbach worked into their books “De l’Esprit” and the “Système
de la Nature,” and to assist some poor devil in tatters who, once
at least, after he had long fed and clothed him, turned out to be a
police spy; he was none the less bountiful to every comer. Now we
see him devising ingenious ruses to obtain succour for a nobleman’s
forsaken mistress; again finding a manager for Voltaire’s comedy,
the “Dépositaire,” or revising Galiani’s “Dialogues” on the wheat
trade. The Dauphin dies; a monument must be erected to him in Sens
Cathedral; Diderot is sought out and speedily submits five designs.
All the men of talent and all the people in distress found their way
to Diderot; dedicatory epistles for needy musicians, plots of comedies
for playwrights deficient in invention, prefaces, discourses--no one
went away disappointed who climbed up to that fourth-floor door in the
corner house of the Rue St. Benoît and the Rue Taranne.
Some of his benevolent schemes were certainly of a rather dubious
character; there seems to linger about them a touch of the
sanctification of means by ends which we may, if we like, attribute to
his Jesuit education. In his comedy, “Est-il bon? Est-il méchant?”--no
doubt the best of his plays--he has satirized himself in the person
of the hero, Hardouin, a man who gets into terrible scrapes with his
friends from the questionable devices by which he tries to serve them;
obtaining, for instance, a pension for a widow lady by pretending that
her child is illegitimate, and causing an obdurate mother to acquiesce
eagerly in the marriage of her daughter by delicately suggesting that
she has already been seduced. We find Diderot carrying on various
benevolent little intrigues of this kind when we read his letters to
Mlle. Voland.
These letters to Mlle. Voland form the most characteristic and
intimately personal record of himself that Diderot left. He was forty
years old when the correspondence began, and it lasted for more than
twenty years. Of Sophie Voland almost nothing is known; we only catch
glimpses of her as a woman of wide sympathies and decided intelligence,
neither very young nor pretty, and wearing spectacles; she lived with
her family, who were clearly more orthodox and conventional than
herself, and must not, as Diderot frequently hints, see everything that
he writes. Of the depth and reality of his affection for her there
is no doubt; his editors have discussed the question as to whether
this affection was throughout of the nature of friendship only, or
whether, according to the phrase of Sainte-Beuve, an hour’s passion had
served as the golden key to the most precious and intimate secrets of
friendship. This may be as it will; Diderot had found some one in whose
presence he could show himself, without reserve or precaution, on every
side of his manifold nature, and he was always tenderly grateful to the
woman who had procured him this sweetest of pleasures. “My Sophie is
both man and woman,” he wrote to her, “when she pleases;” as such he
always addressed her, pouring out recklessly all that happened to be
in his head, narrating the incidents of the day, telling what he was
thinking about or projecting, repeating current scandal or sometimes
not quite decent story, flashing instinctively into wise or witty
reflection; always with a swift, almost unconscious pen, forgetting now
and again what he has already said. It is only in these letters, where
he is, as he says, “rendering an account of all the moments of a life
that belongs to you,” that we realize the personal charm, the exuberant
strength and at the same time the weakness of the man who in the midst
of his manifold energies bursts out: “A delicious repose, 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.”
The “Encyclopædia” seems to us to-day but a small portion of the
achievement of Diderot’s life, though it represents the part that he
played in relation to the science of his time. His place in science
has sometimes been wrongly stated. It has been said, for instance,
that he anticipated Lamarck and Darwin. It is true that he wrote, “The
need produces the organ; the organization determines the function,”
and that this contains the germ of Lamarck’s doctrine; and again,
“The world is the abode of the strong,” and that this may be said to
be the germ of the doctrine of natural selection; but at both points
he was simply putting into epigrammatic form the conceptions of the
greatest scientific genius of his age and country, Buffon, the only
man of that time who was cast in the same massive mould, and to whom
Diderot could turn with fraternal delight and admiration. It is to
Buffon also, and not to Diderot, that the honour of anticipating
Lyell belongs. It is in his Baconian thoughts on the interpretation
of nature, and again in such a comprehensive collection of data as
his notes on physiology, discovered of recent years, that Diderot’s
searching and inquisitive scientific spirit appears. He frequently
startles us by the way in which he vividly realizes and follows out to
their legitimate conclusions those floating ideas of his time which
we are working out to-day. Above all, and from the first, he clearly
grasps the fundamental value of the human body and its processes in the
interpretation of mental phenomena; in one of his comparatively early
works, the “Lettre sur les Aveugles,” he remarks that he has never
doubted that “our most purely intellectual ideas are closely related
to the conformation of our bodies.” “How difficult it is,” he says
elsewhere, “to be a good philosopher and a good moralist without being
anatomist, naturalist, physiologist, and doctor.” Holding firmly by
this clue, he was constantly trying to fathom the mysteries of the soul
and to picture the processes of life; it is because he has realized
that this can only be done fruitfully from the physiological side that
the “Rêve de d’Alembert,” his most brilliant effort in this direction,
is interesting after the lapse of a century.
He brought the same eager, impressionable spirit to his novels and
stories. It is indeed no great step from “Le Rêve de d’Alembert” to
“Le Neveu de Rameau,” and from that to “La Religieuse.” Whatever he
undertook he carried out with the whole energy and enthusiasm of his
nature, and while this takes from the artistic symmetry of his work, it
adds to its vitality and significance. It is owing to this quality that
“Les Bijoux Indiscrets,” a frivolous novel in the style of the younger
Crebillon, pointless and indecent, written, at the age of thirty-five,
mainly to obtain money for his mistress, Mme. de Puisieux, contains
passages which have been considered among the finest he ever wrote,
and by its reflections on the reform of the theatre, its criticisms
of manners, and philosophical insight served avowedly as the point of
departure for Lessing’s famous “Dramaturgie.” It was not until he read
Richardson that Diderot produced any very noteworthy work in fiction;
his admiration for the English novelist was extreme, but certainly
not out of proportion to Richardson’s historic importance. Richardson
not only marks the first real landmark in the evolution of the English
novel; he is the point of departure of the modern French novel, and
Diderot, more than any one else, helped to make his influence felt
in France. Very soon after falling under the spell of the great
English story-teller and writing his “Éloge de Richardson,” Diderot
produced his most famous novel, “La Religieuse.” It is clear how much
Richardson influenced this minute study, in autobiographic form, of
the life and sufferings of a young girl forced into a convent with
its uncongenial atmosphere and petty persecutions. It was a distinct
artistic achievement, the more remarkable as it was certainly intended
as an attack on the small vices of a community of women isolated from
the world. Even those parts of this attack which have been considered
questionable are always in the tone of the unsuspecting young girl who
writes them, and only become offensive when a modern editor removes
them in order to substitute asterisks; compare these passages with the
more ostentatious propriety and zeal for virtue of a modern Parisian
in “Mademoiselle Giraud ma Femme.” A year later Diderot wrote an
unquestionable artistic masterpiece, only preserved for us by a happy
chance, “Le Neveu de Rameau,” a dialogue of unfailing spirit between
himself and a strange social parasite whom he is analyzing. Some years
later he fell under the influence of Sterne; “Jacques le Fataliste,”
so attractive to Goethe and many others, was the result. But he had no
great affinity for the sinuous humour of Sterne, and, while he threw
himself into it with his usual energy, the result, though Shandean
enough, is less happy than his great Richardsonian effort. Yet “Jacques
le Fataliste” contains the “Histoire de Mme. de la Pommeraye,” and
this little _histoire_, when disentangled from the manifold episodes
which interrupt the hostess of the inn who tells it, is Diderot’s most
perfect and most characteristic effort as a story-teller. Even in his
novels it is the directness and the veracity of his scientific spirit,
united to his emotional impressionability, which gives significance to
his work.
The same features mark his plays, though here the result has ceased to
be pleasing, and we may be permitted to-day not to read through the
“Fils Naturel” and the “Père de Famille.” Yet we must not forget that
from them is dated the modern drama, with the notes of sincerity and
simple realism, peculiar then to Diderot, which nowadays have become a
more common possession. Diderot’s dramas produced a great and immediate
effect in Germany, on Goethe and Schiller as well as on Iffland and
Kotzebue, and the “Père de Famille” was translated by Lessing.
As a critic of the stage Diderot has, perhaps, attracted exaggerated
attention, though he has not escaped misunderstanding, most people’s
knowledge of his opinions on this head beginning and ending with the
“Paradoxe sur le Comédien.” Diderot at first attributed, as from the
nature of his temperament he was sure to do, the chief part in acting
to emotion and sensibility; in time he outgrew this youthful opinion,
and in the “Paradoxe” he emphasized as strongly as he could the part
of study and reflection in the actor’s art, a part which must always
be of the first importance, notwithstanding all the tears shed by
charming actresses, and carefully bottled for controversial purposes.
Diderot was far too sane and many-sided to see only one aspect of so
complex an art as the actor’s; it is, as he says, “study, reflection,
passion, sensibility, the true imitation of nature,” which go to make
up good acting. An interesting and too brief series of letters to Mlle.
Jodin is well worth reading from this point of view. Mlle. Jodin, the
daughter of an old friend of his, was a rather wild and impetuous young
lady of some talent who had suddenly adopted the life of an actress.
Diderot performed many small services both for her and her mother, and
wrote letters full of wise and, it appears, much-needed counsel as
to her conduct both on and off the stage. “Mademoiselle,” he writes,
“there is nothing good in this world but that which is true; be true,
then, on the stage, true off the stage.... An actor who has nothing
but sense and judgment is cold; one who has nothing but _verve_ and
sensibility is mad. It is a certain temperament of mingled good sense
and warmth which makes men sublime; on the stage and in the world he
who shows more than he feels makes us laugh instead of touching us.”
Diderot inaugurated modern art criticism by the notices of the
pictures in the Salon, which he wrote during many years for “Grimm’s
Correspondence.” One cannot help regretting that he was not born among
a greater group of artists. Chardin we still esteem, and Greuze is at
the height of his popularity, but it is difficult to take more than an
antiquarian interest in Boucher, and who cares now for Loutherbourg
or Van Loo? Even before Joseph Vernet, whose variety, freshness, and
love of nature appealed so strongly to Diderot, it sometimes requires
an effort to be sympathetic. Diderot now and then criticizes with
severity--as occasionally when he is dealing with Boucher--but the tone
of his criticism, as generally happens with contemporary criticism,
seems to us to-day pitched altogether too high. In one respect, at all
events, it is unlike most old appreciations of now neglected pictures;
it is generally delightful to read, perhaps sometimes more delightful
than the picture can ever have seemed. One suspects that Diderot
treated pictures like books; Holbach, having read a book he had warmly
recommended, came to him to say that the book contained nothing of
which he had spoken. “Well,” replied Diderot, “if it wasn’t there it
ought to have been there.”
Everything that Diderot touched he vitalized. There were few things
that he left untouched. There were very few roads of modern life on
which he was not an enthusiastic and often audacious pioneer. He
seems to have known instinctively the things that we are laboriously
learning. So it is with politics, sexual morality, various social and
politico-economical questions, education, philosophy. He touched all
the social questions which absorb our attention to-day. He approached
the problem of the place of the workers in society in the same temper
in which we approach it to-day, and the practical knowledge of
industries and industrial life which he had obtained in order to write
some of his most remarkable articles in the “Encyclopædia” gave him
some right to be heard.
His views on education, chiefly expressed in the “Plan d’une Université
pour le Gouvernement de Russie,” are on a level with the most advanced
views to-day. The education he demands is free and compulsory, and
he is in favour of giving children free meals at school. He censures
classical teaching, advocates professional education and instruction
in the natural sciences, “the study of things rather than the study
of words.” “I think,” he says, “that we should give in our schools
something of all the knowledge necessary to a citizen, from legislation
to the mechanical arts, and in these mechanical arts I include the
occupations of the lowest class of citizens. The spectacle of human
industry is in itself large and satisfying, and it is good to know the
different ways in which each contributes to the advantages of society.
This kind of knowledge is attractive to children, who are naturally
inquisitive.” Certainly, from more than one point of view, such an
element in education would have an important social significance.