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DIDEROT AND THE ENCYCLOPAEDISTS
BY
JOHN MORLEY
VOL. II.
London
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1905
_First published elsewhere_
_New Edition 1886. Reprinted 1891, 1897, 1905_
CONTENTS OF VOL. II.
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
OTHER DIALOGUES.
(1) _The Conversations of a Father with his Children_ 1
Remarks upon it.
(2) _The Inconsistency of Public Judgment on Private Actions_ 8
Observations.
(3) _Supplement to Bougainville's Travels_ 14
Philosophical qualities of the discussion not satisfactory 19
Nothing gained by his criticism on marriage 21
CHAPTER II.
ROMANCE.
Digression inevitable in dealing with Diderot 24
Richardson's influence in Europe 26
Diderot's _Eloge_ upon him 28
Rousseau and Richardson 29
Diderot writes _The Nun_ (1796) 31
Circumstances of its composition 32
Its intention 33
And characteristics 35
Sterne 36
Diderot writes _Jacques le Fataliste_ 37
Its history 38
Goethe's criticism on it 38
Nature of Diderot's imitation of Richardson and Sterne 40
No true creation in _Jacques le Fataliste_ 41
Its unredeemed grossness 43
Its lack of poetry and of flavour 44
CHAPTER III.
ART.
The _Salons_ 45
Qualities of their criticism 45
Deep foundation of Diderot's critical quality 46
French art-criticism 48
Dufresnoy, Dubos, Webb, Andre, Batteux 48, 49
Travellers in Italy 50
Diderot never in Italy 52
Spirit of French art in his day 52
Greuze, Diderot's favourite 56
Greuze's _Accordee de Village_ 57
Hogarth would have displeased Diderot 59
Diderot's considerateness in criticism 60
Boucher 62
Fragonard 62
Diderot adds literary charm to scientific criticism 63
His readiness for moral asides 65
His suggestions of pictorial subjects 68
His improved versions 69
Illustration of his variety of approach 72
Diderot's Essay on Painting 73
Goethe's commentary 73
Difference of type between Goethe and Diderot 76
Diderot's Essay on Beauty 78
His anticipation of Lessing 82
Music 83
CHAPTER IV.
ST. PETERSBURG AND THE HAGUE.
Diderot's resolution to visit the Empress of Russia 84
The Princess Dashkow 84
Prince Galitzin 85
Diderot in Holland (1773) 86
St. Petersburg and Russian civilisation 89
The Empress 91
Accounts of her by men of affairs 92
Her pursuit of French culture 94
Her interest in the French philosophic party 96
Partly the result of political calculation 98
The philosophers and the Partition of Poland 101
Rulhiere's narrative of Catherine's accession 102
Falconet, the first Frenchman welcomed by her 104
Diderot arrives at St. Petersburg (1773) 106
His conversations with the Empress 107
Not successful as a politician 108
General impression of him 109
Grimm outstrips him in court favour 110
Diderot's return to the Hague 112
Bjoernstaehl's report of him 114
Contemporary literature in Holland 117
Hemsterhuys 118
The Princess Galitzin 119
Diderot's return to Paris 121
CHAPTER V.
HELVETIUS.
Three works of which Diderot was regarded as the inspirer 123
Helvetius's _L'Esprit_ 123
Contemporary protests against it 123
Turgot's weighty criticism 124
Real drift of the book 127
Account of Helvetius 127
The style of his book 134
The momentous principle contained in it 135
Adopted from Helvetius by Bentham 136
Helvetius's statement of doctrine of Utility 137
Miscarriage of the doctrine in his hands 139
His fallacy 140
True side of his objectionable position 140
Helvetius's reckless presentation of a true theory 141
Confusion of beneficence with self-love 142
Imitation from Mandeville 143
Mean anecdotes 144
Nature of Helvetius's errors 144
Explanation of them 146
Positive side of his speculation 147
Its true significance 149
Second great paradox of _L'Esprit_ 149
Benjamin Constant's _Adolphe_ 152
CHAPTER VI.
HOLBACH'S SYSTEM OF NATURE.
Publication of the _System of Nature_ (1770) 155
Its startling effect 156
Voltaire's alarm 158
He never understood Holbach's position 159
Account of Holbach 160
Disregard of historic opinion in his book 163
Its remarkable violence against the government 165
The sting of this violence 166
The doctrine from which Holbach's book arose 167
Account of Holbach's Naturalism 168
His proposition concerning Man 173
He uses the orthodox language about the pride of man 177
His treatment of Morals 178
Onslaught upon the theory of Free Will 178
Connection of necessarianism with humanity in punishment 181
His answer to some objections against necessarianism 181
Chapter on the Immortality of the Soul 183
His enthusiasm for reforms 185
The literature of a political revolution 187
Misrepresentation of Holbach's ethical theory 188
The _System of Nature_, a protest against ascetic ideals 191
The subject of the second half of the book 193
Repudiation of the _a priori_ method 194
Replies to the common charges against atheism 197
The chapter on the superiority of Naturalism 198
Political side of the indictment against religion 199
Holbach's propagandism 202
CHAPTER VII.
RAYNAL'S HISTORY OF THE INDIES.
Contemporary estimate of _The History of the Indies_ 204
Account of Raynal 205
Composition of the book 207
Its varied popularity 209
Frederick the Great dislikes it 210
Signal merit of the History 213
Its shortcomings 214
Its idyllic inventions 215
Its animation and variety 218
Superficial causes of its popularity 220
Its deeper source 221
Catholicism in contact with the lower races 222
The other side of this 223
Raynal's book a plea for justice and humanity 224
Morality towards subject races 226
Slavery 227
Raynal's conduct in the Revolution 229
His end 231
CHAPTER VIII.
DIDEROT'S CLOSING YEARS.
Diderot's meditation on life and death 232
Age overtakes him on his return from Russia 233
Writes his life of Seneca 235
Its quality 236
Interest to Diderot of Seneca's career 237
Strange digression in the Essay 239
Reason for Diderot's anger against Rousseau 240
His usual magnanimity 241
Diderot's relations with Voltaire 244
Naigeon 246
Romilly's account of Diderot 247
Palissot and the conservative writers 249
The ecclesiastical champions of the old system 251
The precursors gradually disappearing 253
Galiani 254
Beaumarchais's _Mariage de Figaro_ 255
Diderot's famous couplet 256
His fellow-townsmen at Langres 257
Last days 258
CHAPTER IX.
CONCLUSION.
The variety of Diderot's topics 261
(1) _Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature_ 262
Maupertuis's _Loi d'Epargne_ 262
General scope of Diderot's aphorisms 263
Prophecy about geometry 264
Utility made to prescribe limits to speculation 267
The other side of this principle 267
On Final Causes 268
Adaptation of the Leibnitzian law of economy 269
(2) _D'Alembert's Dream_ 271
Diderot not the originator of French materialism 272
Materialism of the three dialogues 273
Mdlle. Lespinasse's moral objections 274
(3) _Plan of a University for Russia_ 275
Religious instruction 276
Latin and Greek 277
Letter to the Countess of Forbach 278
(4) _Conversation with the Marechale de ----_ 278
Parable of the young Mexican 279
(5) _Letters to Falconet_ 281
Diderot defends the feeling for posterity 283
APPENDIX.
_Rameau's Nephew: a Translation_ 285
DIDEROT.
CHAPTER I.
OTHER DIALOGUES.
We may now pass to performances that are nearer to the accepted surface
of things. A short but charming example of Diderot's taste for putting
questions of morals in an interesting way, is found in the _Conversation
of a Father with his Children_ (published in 1773). This little dialogue
is perfect in the simple realism of its form. Its subject is the peril
of setting one's own judgment of some special set of circumstances above
the law of the land. Diderot's venerable and well-loved father is
sitting in his arm-chair before the fire. He begins the discussion by
telling his two sons and his daughter, who are tending him with pious
care, how very near he had once been to destroying their inheritance. An
old priest had died leaving a considerable fortune. There was believed
to be no will, and the next of kin were a number of poor people whom the
inheritance would have rescued from indigence for the rest of their
days. They appointed the elder Diderot to guard their interests and
divide the property. He finds at the bottom of a disused box of ancient
letters, receipts, and other waste-paper, a will made long years ago,
and bequeathing all the fortune to a very rich bookseller in Paris.
There was every reason to suppose that the old priest had forgotten the
existence of the will, and it involved a revolting injustice. Would not
Diderot be fulfilling the dead man's real wishes by throwing the
unwelcome document into the flames?
At this point in the dialogue the doctor enters the room and interrupts
the tale. It appears that he is fresh from the bedside of a criminal who
is destined to the gallows. Diderot the younger reproaches him for
labouring to keep in the world an offender whom it were best to send out
of it with all despatch. The duty of the physician is to say to so
execrable a patient--"I will not busy myself in restoring to life a
creature whom it is enjoined upon me by natural equity, the good of
society, the well-being of my fellow-creatures, to give up. Die, and let
it never be said that through my skill there exists a monster the more
on earth!" The doctor parries these energetic declamations with
sufficient skill. "My business is to cure, not to judge; I shall cure
him, because that is my trade; then the judge will have him hung,
because that is his trade." This episodic discussion ended, the story of
the will is resumed. The father, when on the point of destroying it, was
seized with a scruple of conscience, and hastened to a cure well versed
in casuistry. As in England the agents of the law itself not seldom play
the part of arbitrary benevolence, which the old Diderot would fain have
played against the law, the scene may perhaps be worth transcribing:
"'Nothing is more praiseworthy, sir, than the sentiment of
compassion that touches you for these unfortunate people. Suppress
the testament and succour them--good; but on condition of restoring
to the rightful legatee the exact sum of which you deprive him,
neither more nor less. Who authorised you to give a sanction to
documents, or to take it away? Who authorised you to interpret the
intentions of the dead?'
'But then, father Bouin, the old box?'
'Who authorised you to decide whether the will was thrown away on
purpose, or mislaid by accident? Has it never happened to you to do
such a thing, and to find at the bottom of a chest some valuable
paper that you had tossed there inadvertently?'
'But, father Bouin, the far-off date of the paper, and its
injustice?'
'Who authorised you to pronounce on the justice or injustice of the
document, and to regard the bequest as an unlawful gift, rather
than as a restitution or any other lawful act which you may choose
to imagine?'
'But, these poor kinsfolk here on the spot, and that mere
collateral, distant and wealthy?'
'Who authorised you to weigh in your balance what the dead man owed
to his distant relations, whom you don't know?'
'But, father Bouin, that pile of letters from the legatee, which
the departed never even took the trouble to open?'
'There is neither old box, nor date, nor letters, nor father Bouin,
nor if, nor but, in the case. No one has any right to infringe the
laws, to enter into the intention of the dead, or to dispose of
other people's property. If providence has resolved to chastise
either the heir or the legatee or the testator--we cannot tell
which--by the accidental preservation of the will, the will must
remain.'"[1]
[1] _Oeuv._, v. 289.
Diderot the younger declaims against all this with his usual vehemence,
while his brother, the abbe, defends the supremacy of the law on the
proper ground, that to evade or defy it in any given case is to open the
door to the sophistries of all the knaves in the universe. At this point
a journeyman of the neighbourhood comes in with a new case of
conscience. His wife has died after twenty years of sickness; in these
twenty years the cost of her illness has consumed all that he would
otherwise have saved for the end of his days. But, as it happens, the
marriage portion that she brought him has lain untouched. By law this
ought to go to her family. Equity, however, seems to justify him in
keeping what he might have spent if he had chosen. He consults the party
round the fire. One bids him keep the money; another forbids him; a
third thinks it fair for him to repay himself the cost of his wife's
illness. Diderot's father cries out, that since on his own confession
the detention of the inheritance has brought him no comfort, he had
better surrender it as speedily as possible, and eat, drink, sleep,
work, and make himself happy so.
"'Not I,' cried the journeyman abruptly, 'I shall be off to
Geneva.'
'And dost thou think to leave remorse behind?'
'I can't tell, but to Geneva I go.'
'Go where thou wilt, there wilt thou find thy conscience.'
The hatter went away; his odd answer became the subject of our
talk. We agreed that perhaps distance of place and time had the
effect of weakening all the feelings more or less, and stifling the
voice of conscience even in cases of downright crime. The assassin
transported to the shores of China is too far off to perceive the
corpse that he has left bleeding on the banks of the Seine.
Remorse springs perhaps less from horror of self than from fear of
others; less from shame for the deed, than from the blame and
punishment that would attend its discovery. And what clandestine
criminal is tranquil enough in his obscurity not to dread the
treachery of some unforeseen circumstance, or the indiscretion of
some thoughtless word? What certainty can he have that he will not
disclose his secret in the delirium of fever, or in dreams? People
will understand him if they are on the scene of the action, but
those about him in China will have no key to his words."[2]
[2] v. 295, 296.
Two other cases come up. Does the husband or wife who is the first to
break the marriage vow, restore liberty to the other? Diderot answered
affirmatively. The second case arose from a story that the abbe had been
reading. A certain honest cobbler of Messina saw his country overrun by
lawlessness. Each day was marked by a crime. Notorious assassins braved
the public exasperation. Parents saw their daughters violated; the
industrious saw the fruits of their toil ravished from them by the
monopolist or the fraudulent tax-gatherer. The judges were bribed, the
innocent were afflicted, the guilty escaped unharmed. The cobbler
meditating on these enormities devised a plan of vengeance. He
established a secret court of justice in his shop; he heard the
evidence, gave a verdict, pronounced sentence, and went out into the
street with his gun under his cloak to execute it. Justice done, he
regained his stall, rejoicing as though he had slain a rabid dog. When
some fifty criminals had thus met their doom, the viceroy offered a
reward of two thousand crowns for information of the slayer, and swore
on the altar that he should have full pardon if he gave himself up. The
cobbler presented himself, and spoke thus: "I have done what was your
duty. 'Tis I who condemned and put to death the miscreants that you
ought to have punished. Behold the proofs of their crimes. There you
will see the judicial process which I observed. I was tempted to begin
with yourself; but I respected in your person the august master whom you
represent. My life is in your hands: dispose of it as you think right."
Well, cried the abbe, the cobbler, in spite of all his fine zeal for
justice, was simply a murderer. Diderot protested. His father decided
that the abbe was right, and that the cobbler was an assassin.
Nothing short of a transcript of the whole would convey a right idea of
the dramatic ease of this delightful dialogue--its variety of
illustration with unity of topic, the naturalness of movement, the
pleasant lightness of touch. At its close the old man calls for his
nightcap; Diderot embraces him, and in bidding him good-night whispers
in his ear, "Strictly speaking, father, there are no laws for the sage.
All being open to exception, 'tis for him to judge the cases in which we
ought to submit to them, or to throw them over." "I should not be
sorry," his father answers, "if there were in the town one or two
citizens like thee; but nothing would induce me to live there, if they
all thought in that way." The conclusion is just, and Diderot might have
verified it by the state of the higher society of his country at that
very moment. One cause of the moral corruption of France in the closing
years of the old _regime_ was undoubtedly the lax and shifting
interpretations, by which the Jesuit directors had softened the rigour
of general moral principles. Many generations must necessarily elapse
before a habit of loosely superseding principles in individual cases
produces widespread demoralisation, but the result is inevitable, sooner
or later; and this, just in proportion as the principles are sound. The
casuists practically constructed a system for making the observance
alike of the positive law, and of the accepted ethical maxims, flexible
and conditional. The Diderot of the present dialogue takes the same
attitude, but has the grace to leave the demonstration of its
impropriety to his wise and benevolent sire.
* * * * *
II. We shall presently see that Diderot did not shrink from applying a
vigorous doubt to some of the most solidly established principles of
modern society. Let us meanwhile in passing notice that short piece of
plangent irony, which did not appear until many years after his death
(1798), and which he or some one else entitled, _On the inconsistency of
the Public Judgment on our Private Actions_. This too is in the form of
dialogue, but the argument of the story is in its pith as follows.
Desroches, first an abbe, then a lawyer, lastly a soldier, persuades a
rich and handsome widow to marry him. She is aware of his previous
gallantries, and warns him in very dramatic style before a solemn
gathering of friends, that if he once wounds her by an infidelity, she
will shut herself up and speedily die of grief. He makes such vows as
most men would make under such circumstances; he presses her hands
ardently to his lips, bedews them with his tears, and moves the whole
company to sympathy with his own agitation. The scene is absurd enough,
or seems so to us dull people of phlegmatic habit. Yet Diderot, even for
us, redeems it by the fine remark: "'Tis the effect of what is good and
virtuous to leave a large assembly with only one thought and one soul.
How all respect one another, love one another in such moments! For
instance, how beautiful humanity is at the play! Ah, why must we part so
quickly? Men are so good, so happy, when what is worthy unites all their
suffrages, melts them, makes them one."[3] For some time all went well,
and our pair were the happiest of men and women. Then various assaults
were made on the faithfulness of Desroches. He resisted them, until in
endeavouring to serve a friend he was forced to sue for the goodwill of
a lady with whom in his unregenerate days he had had passages of
gallantry. The old intrigue was renewed. Letters of damning proof fell
by ill hazard into his wife's hands. She reassembled her friends,
denounced the culprit, and forthwith carried away her child to seek
shelter with her aged mother. Desroches's fervent remorse was unheeded,
his letters were sent back unopened, he was denied the door. Presently,
the aged mother died. Then the infant. Lastly, the wife herself. Now,
says Diderot to his interlocutor, I pray you to turn your eyes to the
public--that imbecile crowd that pronounces judgment on us, that
disposes of our honour, that lifts us to the clouds or trails us through
the mud. Opinion passed through every phase about Desroches. The
shifting event is ever their one measure of praise and blame. A fault
which nobody thought more than venial became gradually aggravated in
their eyes by a succession of incidents which it was impossible for
Desroches either to foresee or to prevent. At first opinion was on his
side, and his wife was thought to have carried things with too high a
hand. Then, after she had fallen ill, and her child had died, and her
aged mother had passed away in the fulness of years, he began to be held
answerable for all this sea of troubles. Why had not Desroches written
to his wife, beset her doors, waylaid her as she went to church? He
had, as matter of fact, done all these things, but the public did not
know it. The important thing is, not to know, but to talk. Then, as it
befell, his wife's brother took Desroches's place in his regiment; there
he was killed. More exclamations as to the misfortune of being connected
with such a man. How was Desroches responsible for the death of his
mother-in-law, already well stricken in years? How could he foresee that
a hostile ball would pierce his brother-in-law in his first campaign?
But his wife? He must be a barbarian, a monster, who had gradually
pressed a poniard into the bosom of a divine woman, his wife, his
benefactress, and then left her to die, without showing the least sign
of interest or feeling. And all this, cries Diderot, for not knowing
what was concealed from him, and what was unknown and unsuspected even
by those who were daily about her? What presumption, what bad logic,
what incoherence, what unjustified veering and vacillation in all these
public verdicts from beginning to end!
[3] _Oeuv._, v. 342.
Yet we feel that Diderot's impetuous taunts fail to press to the root of
the matter. Diderot excels in opening a subject; he places it in a new
light; he furnishes telling concrete illustrations; he thoroughly
disturbs and unsettles the medium of conventional association in which
it has become fixed. But he does not leave the question readjusted. His
mind was not of that quality which is slow to complain where it cannot
explain; which does not quit a discussion without a calm and orderly
review of the conditions that underlie the latest exhibition of human
folly, shortsightedness, or injustice. The public condemnation of
Desroches for consequences that were entirely strange to his one
offence, was indefensible on grounds of strict logic. But then men have
imagination as well as reason. Imagination is stronger than reason with
most of them. Their imagination was touched by the series of disasters
that followed Madame Desroches's abandonment of her husband. They admit
no plea of remoteness of damage, such as law courts allow. In a way that
was loose and unreasonable, but still easily intelligible, the husband
became associated with a sequel for which he was not really answerable.
If the world's conduct in such cases were accurately expressed, it would
perhaps be found that people have really no intention to pronounce a
judicial sentence; they only mean that an individual's associations have
become disagreeable and doubtful to them. They may think proper to
justify the grievously meagre definition of _homo_ as _animal
rationale_, by varnishing their distaste with reasons; the true reason
is that the presence of a Desroches disturbs their comfort, by recalling
questionable and disorderly circumstances. That this selfish and rough
method many a time inflicts horrible cruelty is too certain, and those
to whom the idea of conduct is serious and deep-reaching will not fall
into it. A sensible man is aware of the difficulty of pronouncing wisely
upon the conduct of others, especially where it turns upon the
intricate and unknowable relations between a man and a woman. He will
not, however, on that account break down the permanent safeguards, for
the sake of leniency in a given case. _A great enemy to indifference, a
great friend to indulgence_, said Turgot of himself; and perhaps it is
what we should all do well to be able to say of ourselves.
Again, though these ironical exposures of the fatuity and recklessness
and inconsistency of popular verdicts are wholesome enough in their
degree in all societies, yet it has been, and still remains, a defect of
some of the greatest French writers to expect a fruit from such
performances which they can never bear. In the long run a great body of
men and women is improved less by general outcry against its collective
characteristics than by the inculcation of broader views, higher
motives, and sounder habits of judgment, in such a form as touches each
man and woman individually. It is better to awaken in the individual a
sense of responsibility for his own character than to do anything,
either by magnificent dithyrambs or penetrating satire, to dispose him
to lay the blame on Society. Society is after all only a name for other
people. An instructive contrast might be drawn between the method of
French writers of genius, from Diderot down to that mighty master of our
own day, Victor Hugo, in pouring fulminant denunciations upon Society,
and the other method of our best English writers, from Milton down to
Mill, in impressing new ideas on the Individual, and exacting a
vigorous personal answer to the moral or spiritual call.
One other remark may be worth making. It is characteristic of the
immense sociability of the eighteenth century, that when he saw
Desroches sitting alone in the public room, receiving no answers to his
questions, never addressed by any of those around him, avoided, coldly
eyed, and morally proscribed, Diderot never thought of applying the
artificial consolation of the Stoic. He never dreamed of urging that
expulsion from the society of friends was not a hardship, a true
punishment, and a genuine evil. No one knew better than Diderot that a
man should train himself to face the disapprobation of the world with
steadfast brow and unflinching gaze; but he knew also that this is only
done at great cost, and is only worth doing for clear and far-reaching
objects. Life was real to Diderot, not in the modern canting sense of
earnestness and making a hundred thousand pounds; but in the sense of
being an agitated scene of living passion, interest, sympathy, struggle,
delight, and woe, in which the graceful ascetic commonplaces of the
writer and the preacher barely touch the actual conditions of human
experience, or go near to softening the smart of chagrin, failure,
mistake, and sense of wrong, any more than the sweet music of the birds
poised in air over a field of battle can still the rage and horror of
the plain beneath. As was said by a good man, who certainly did not fail
to try the experiment,--"Speciosa quidem ista sunt, oblitaque rhetoricae
et musicae melle dulcedinis; tum tantum cum audiuntur oblectant. Sed
miseris malorum altior sensus est. Itaque quum haec auribus insonare
desierint, insitus animum moeror praegravat."[4]
[4] Boethius.
* * * * *
III. We may close this chapter with a short account of the _Supplement
to Bougainville's Travels_, which was composed in 1772, and published
twenty-four years later. The second title is, _A dialogue on the
disadvantage of attaching moral ideas to certain physical actions which
do not really comport with them_. Those who believe that the ruling
system of notions about marriage represents the last word that is to be
said as to the relations between men and women, will turn away from
Diderot's dialogue with some impatience. Those, on the contrary, who
hold that the present system is no more immovably fixed in ultimate laws
of human nature, no more final, no more unimprovable, no more sacred,
and no more indisputably successful, than any other set of social
arrangements and the corresponding moral ideas, will find something to
interest them, though, as it seems to the present writer, very little to
instruct. Bougainville was the first Frenchman who sailed round the
world. He did in 1766-69 what Captain Cook did about the same time. The
narrative of his expedition appeared in 1771, and the picture of life
among the primitive people of the Southern Seas touched Diderot almost
as deeply as if he had been Rousseau. As one says so often in this
history of the intellectual preparation for the Revolution, the
corruption and artificiality of Parisian society had the effect of
colouring the world of primitive society with the very hues of paradise.
Diderot was more free from this besetting weakness than any of his
contemporaries. He never fell into Voltaire's fancy that China is a land
of philosophers.[5] But he did not look very critically into the real
conditions of life in the more rudimentary stages of development, and
for the moment he committed the sociological anachronism of making the
poor people of Otaheite into wise and benevolent patriots and sound
reasoners. The literary merit of the dialogue is at least as striking as
in any of the pieces of which we have already spoken. The realism of the
scenes between the ship-chaplain and his friendly savage, with too
kindly wife, and daughters as kindly as either, is full of sweetness,
simplicity, and a sort of pathos. A subject which easily takes on an air
of grossness, and which Diderot sometimes handled very grossly indeed,
is introduced with an idyllic grace that to the pure will hardly be
other than pure. We have of course always to remember that Diderot is an
author for grown-up people, as are the authors of the Bible or any other
book that deals with more than the surface of human experience. Our
English practice of excluding from literature subjects and references
that are unfit for boys and girls, has something to recommend it, but it
undeniably leads to a certain narrowness and thinness, and to some most
nauseous hypocrisy. All subjects are evidently not to be discussed by
all; and one result in our case is that some of the most important
subjects in the world receive no discussion whatever.
[5] See, however, above, vol. i. p. 274.
The position which Diderot takes up in the present dialogue may be
inferred from the following extract. The ship-chaplain has been
explaining to the astonished Otaheitan the European usage of strict
monogamy, as the arrangement enjoined upon man by the Creator of the
universe, and vigilantly guarded by the priest and the magistrate. To
which, Orou thus:
"These singular precepts I find opposed to nature and contrary to
reason. They are contrary to nature because they suppose that a
being who thinks, feels, and is free, can be the property of a
creature like itself. Dost thou not see that in thy land they have
confounded the thing that has neither sensibility, nor thought, nor
desire, nor will; that one leaves, one takes, one keeps, one
exchanges, without its suffering or complaining--with a thing that
is neither exchanged nor acquired, that has freedom, will, desire,
that may give or may refuse itself for the moment; that complains
and suffers; and that cannot become a mere article of commerce,
unless you forget its character and do violence to nature? And they
are contrary to the general law of things. Can anything seem more
senseless to thee than a precept which proscribes the law of change
that is within us, and which commands a constancy that is
impossible, and that violates the liberty of the male and the
female, by chaining them together in perpetuity;--anything more
senseless than are oaths of immutability, taken by two creatures of
flesh, in the face of a sky that is not an instant the same, under
vaults that threaten ruin, at the base of a rock crumbling to
dust, at the foot of a tree that is splitting asunder?... You may
command what is opposed to nature, but you will not be obeyed. You
will multiply evil-doers and the unhappy by fear, by punishment,
and by remorse; you will deprave men's consciences; you will
corrupt their minds; they will have lost the polar star of their
pathway." (225.)
After this declamation he proceeds to put some practical questions to
the embarrassed chaplain. Are young men in France always continent, and
wives always true, and husbands never libertines? The chaplain's answers
disclose the truth to the keen-eyed Orou:
"What a monstrous tissue is this that thou art unfolding to me! And
even now thou dost not tell me all; for as soon as men allow
themselves to dispose at their own will of the ideas of what is
just and unjust, to take away, or to impose an arbitrary character
on things; to unite to actions or to separate from them the good
and the evil, with no counsellor save caprice--then come blame,
accusation, suspicion, tyranny, envy, jealousy, deception, chagrin,
concealment, dissimulation, espionage, surprise, lies; daughters
deceive their parents, wives their husbands, husbands their wives;
young women, I don't doubt, will smother their children; suspicious
fathers will despise and neglect their children; mothers will leave
them to the mercy of accident; and crime and debauchery will show
themselves in every guise. I know all that, as if I had lived among
you. It is so, because it must be so; and that society of thine, in
spite of thy chief who vaunts its fine order, is nothing but a
collection of hypocrites who secretly trample the laws under foot;
or of unfortunate wretches who make themselves the instrument of
their own punishment, by submitting to these laws; or of imbeciles,
in whom prejudice has absolutely stifled the voice of nature."
(227.)
The chaplain has the presence of mind to fall back upon the radical
difficulty of all such solutions of the problem of family union as were
practised in Otaheite, or were urged by philosophers in Paris, or are
timidly suggested in our own times in the droll-sounding form of
marriages for terms of years with option of renewal. That difficulty is
the disposal of the children which are the fruit of such unions. Orou
rejoins to this argument by a very eloquent account how valuable, how
sought after, how prized, is the woman who has her quiver full of them.
His contempt for the condition of Europe grows more intense, as he
learns that the birth of a child among the bulk of the people of the
west is rather a sorrow, a perplexity, a hardship, than a delight and
ground of congratulation.
The reader sees by this time that in the present dialogue Diderot is
really criticising the most fundamental and complex arrangement of our
actual western society, from the point of view of an arbitrary and
entirely fanciful naturalism. Rousseau never wrote anything more
picturesque, nor anything more dangerous, nor more anarchic and
superficially considered. It is true that Diderot at the close of the
discussion is careful to assert that while we denounce senseless laws,
it is our duty to obey them until we have procured their reform. "He who
of his own private authority infringes a bad law, authorises every one
else to infringe good laws. There are fewer inconveniences in being mad
with the mad, than in being wise by oneself. Let us say to ourselves,
let us never cease to cry aloud, that people attach shame, chastisement,
and infamy to acts that in themselves are innocent; but let us abstain
from committing them, because shame, punishment, and infamy are the
greatest of evils." And we hear Diderot's sincerest accents when he
says, "Above all, one must be honest, and true to a scruple, with the
fragile beings who cannot yield to our pleasures without renouncing the
most precious advantages of society."[6]
[6] _Oeuv._, ii. 249.
This, however, does not make the philosophical quality of the discussion
any more satisfactory. Whatever changes may ultimately come about in the
relations between men and women, we may at least be sure that such
changes will be in a direction even still further away than the present
conditions of marriage, from anything like the naturalism of Diderot and
the eighteenth-century school. Even if--what does not at present seem at
all likely to happen--the idea of the family and the associated idea of
private property should eventually be replaced by that form of communism
which is to be seen at Oneida Creek, still the discipline of the
appetites and affections of sex will necessarily on such a system be not
less, but far more rigorous to nature than it is under prevailing
western institutions.[7] Orou would have been a thousand times more
unhappy among the Perfectionists under Mr. Noyes than in Paris or
London. We cannot pretend here to discuss the large group of momentous
questions involved, but we may make a short remark or two. One reason
why the movement, if progressive, must be in the direction of greater
subordination of appetite, is that all experience proves the position
and moral worth of women, taking society as a whole, to be in proportion
to the self-control of their male companions. Nobody doubts that man is
instinctively polygamous. But the dignity and self-respect, and
consequently the whole moral cultivation of women, depends on the
suppression of this vagrant instinct. And there is no more important
chapter in the history of civilisation than the record of the steps by
which its violence has been gradually reduced.
[7] See Nordhoff's _Communistic Societies of the United States_
(London: Murray, 1875), pp. 259-293. This grave and most instructive
book shows how modifiable are some of those facts of existing human
character which are vulgarly deemed to be ultimate and ineradicable.
There is another side, we admit. The home, of which sentimental
philosophers love to talk, is too often a ghastly failure. The conjugal
union, so tender and elevating in its ideal, is in more cases than we
usually care to recognise, the cruellest of bonds to the woman, the most
harassing, deadening, spirit-breaking of all possible influences to the
man. The purity of the family, so lovely and dear as it is, has still
only been secured hitherto by retaining a vast and dolorous host of
female outcasts. When Catholicism is praised for the additions which it
has made to the dignity of womanhood and the family, we have to set
against that gain the frightful growth of this caste of poor creatures,
upon whose heads, as upon the scapegoat of the Hebrew ordinance, we put
all the iniquities of the children of the house, and all their
transgressions in all their sins, and then banish them with maledictions
into the foul outer wilderness and the land not inhabited.
On this side there is much wholesome truth to be told, in the midst of
the complacent social cant with which we are flooded. But Diderot does
not help us. Nothing can possibly be gained by reducing the attraction
of the sexes to its purely physical elements, and stripping it of all
the moral associations which have gradually clustered round it, and
acquired such force as in many cases among the highest types of mankind
to reduce the physical factor to a secondary place. Such a return to the
nakedness of the brute must be retrograde. And Diderot, as it happened,
was the writer who, before all others, habitually exalted the delightful
and consolatory sentiment of the family. Nobody felt more strongly the
worth of domestic ties, when faithfully cherished. It can only have been
in a moment of elated paradox that he made one of the interlocutors in
the dialogue on Bougainville pronounce Constancy, "The poor vanity of
two children who do not know themselves, and who are blinded by the
intoxication of a moment to the instability of all that surrounds them:"
and Fidelity, "The obstinacy and the punishment of a good man and a
good woman:" and Jealousy, "The passion of a miser; the unjust sentiment
of man; the consequence of our false manners, and of a right of property
extending over a feeling, willing, thinking, free creature."[8]
[8] _Oeuv._, ii. 243.
It is a curious example of the blindness which reaction against excess
of ascetic doctrine bred in the eighteenth century, that Diderot should
have failed to see that such sophisms as these are wholly destructive of
that order and domestic piety, to whose beauty he was always so keenly
alive. It is curious, too, that he should have failed to recognise that
the erection of constancy into a virtue would have been impossible, if
it had not answered first, to some inner want of human character at its
best, and second, to some condition of fitness in society at its best.
How is it, says one of the interlocutors, that the strongest, the
sweetest, the most innocent of pleasures is become the most fruitful
source of depravation and misfortune? This is indeed a question well
worth asking. And it is comforting after the anarchy of the earlier part
of the dialogue to find so comparatively sensible a line of argument
taken in answer as the following. This evil result has been brought
about, he says, by the tyranny of man, who has converted the possession
of woman into a property; by manners and usages that have overburdened
the conjugal union with superfluous conditions; by the civil laws that
have subjected marriage to an infinity of formalities; by religious
institutions that have attached the name of vices and virtues to actions
that are not susceptible of morality. If this means that human happiness
will be increased by making the condition of the wife more independent
in respect of property; by treating in public opinion separation between
husband and wife as a transaction in itself perfectly natural and
blameless, and often not only laudable, but a duty; and by abolishing
that barbarous iniquity and abomination called restitution of conjugal
rights, then the speaker points to what has been justly described as the
next great step in the improvement of society. If it means that we do
wrong to invest with the most marked, serious, and unmistakable
formality an act that brings human beings into existence, with uncounted
results both to such beings themselves and to others who are equally
irresponsible for their appearance in the world, then the position is
recklessly immoral, and it is, moreover, wholly repugnant to Diderot's
own better mind.