ROMANCE.
The President de Brosses on a visit to Paris, in 1754, was anxious to
make the acquaintance of that "furious metaphysical head," as he styled
Diderot. Buffon introduced him. "He is a good fellow," said the
President, "very pleasant, very amiable, a great philosopher, a strong
reasoner, but given to perpetual digressions. He made twenty-five
digressions yesterday in my room, between nine o'clock and one o'clock."
And so it is that a critic who has undertaken to give an account of
Diderot, finds himself advancing from digression to digression, through
a chain of all the subjects that are under the sun. The same Diderot,
however, is present amid them all, and behind each of them; the same
fresh enthusiasm, the same expansive sympathy, the same large
hospitality of spirit. Always, too, the same habitual reference of
ideas, systems, artistic forms, to the complex realities of life, and to
these realities as they figured to sympathetic emotions.
It was inevitable that Diderot should make an idol of the author of
_Clarissa Harlowe_. The spirit of reaction against the artificiality of
the pseudo-classic drama, which drove him to feel the way to a drama of
real life in the middle class, made him exult in the romance of ordinary
private life which was invented by Richardson. It was no mere accident
that the modern novel had its origin in England, but the result of
general social causes. The modern novel essentially depends on the
interest of the private life of ordinary men and women. But this
interest was only possible on condition that the feudal and aristocratic
spirit had received its deathblow, and it was only in England that such
a revolution had taken place even partially. It was only in England as
yet that the middle class had conquered a position of consideration,
equality, and independence. Only in England, as has been said, had every
man the power of making the best of his own personality, and arranging
his own destiny according to his private goodwill and pleasure.[9] The
greatest of Richardson's successors in the history of English fiction
adds to this explanation. "Those," says Sir Walter Scott, "who with
patience had studied rant and bombast in the folios of Scuderi, could
not readily tire of nature, sense, and genius in the octavos of
Richardson." The old French romances in which Europe had found a dreary
amusement, were stories of princes and princesses. It was to be expected
that the first country where princes and princesses were shorn of
divinity and made creatures of an Act of Parliament, would also be the
country where imagination would be most likely to seek for serious
passion, realistic interest, and all the material for pathos and tragedy
in the private lives of common individuals. It is true that Marivaux,
the author of _Marianne_, was of the school of Richardson before
Richardson wrote a word. But this was an almost isolated appearance, and
not the beginning of a movement. Richardson's popularity stamped the
opening of a new epoch. It was the landmark of a great social, no less
than a great literary transition, when all England went mad with
enthusiasm over the trials, the virtue, the triumph of a rustic
ladies'-maid.
[9] Hettner's _Literaturgeschichte_, i. 462.
In the literary circles of France the enthusiasm for Richardson was
quite as great as it was in England. There it was one of the signs of
the certain approach of that transformation which had already taken
place in England; the transformation from feudalism to industrial
democracy. It may sound a paradox to say that a passion for Richardson
was a symbol that a man was truly possessed by the spirit of political
revolution. Yet it is true. Voltaire was a revolter against superstition
and the tyranny of the church, but he never threw off the monarchic
traditions of his younger days; he was always a friend of great nobles;
he had no eye and no inclination for social overthrow. And this is what
Voltaire said of _Clarissa Harlowe_: "It is cruel for a man like me to
read nine whole volumes in which you find nothing at all. I said--Even
if all these people were my relations and friends, I could take no
interest in them. I can see nothing in the writer but a clever man who
knows the curiosity of the human race, and is always promising something
from volume to volume, in order to go on selling them." In the same way,
and for exactly the same reasons, he could never understand the
enthusiasm for the _New Heloisa_, the greatest of the romances that were
directly modelled on Richardson. He had no vision for the strange social
aspirations that were silently haunting the inner mind of his
contemporaries. Of these aspirations, in all their depth and
significance, Diderot was the half-conscious oracle and unaccepted
prophet. It was not deliberate philosophical calculation that made him
so, but the spontaneous impulse of his own genius and temperament. He
was no conscious political destroyer, but his soul was open to all those
voices of sentiment, to all those ideals of domestic life, to those
primary forces of natural affection, which were so urgently pressing
asunder the old feudal bonds, and so swiftly ripening a vast social
crisis. Thus his enthusiasm for Richardson was, at its root, another
side of that love of the life of peaceful industry, which gave one of
its noblest characteristics to the Encyclopaedia.
To this enthusiasm Diderot gave voice in half a dozen pages which are
counted among his masterpieces. Richardson died in 1761, and Diderot
flung off a commemorative piece, which is without any order and
connection; but this makes it more an echo, as he called it, of the
tumult of his own heart. Here, indeed, he merits Gautier's laudatory
phrase, and is as "flamboyant" as one could desire. To understand the
march of feeling in French literature, and to measure the growth and
expansion in criticism, we need only compare Diderot's _eloge_ on
Richardson with Fontenelle's _eloge_ on Dangeau or Leibnitz. The
exaggerations of phrase, the violences of feeling, the broken
apostrophes, give to Diderot's _eloge_ an unpleasant tone of
declamation. Some of us may still prefer the moderation, the subtlety,
the nice discrimination, of the critics of another school. Still it
would be a sign of narrowness and short-sight not to discern the
sincerity, the movement, the real meaning underneath all that profusion
of glaring colour.
"O Richardson, Richardson, unique among men in my eyes, thou shalt
be my favourite all my life long! If I am hard driven by pressing
need, if my friend is overtaken by want, if the mediocrity of my
fortune is not enough to give my children what is necessary for
their education, I will sell my books; but thou shalt remain to me,
thou shalt remain on the same shelf with Moses, Homer, Euripides,
Sophocles!
"O Richardson, I make bold to say that the truest history is full
of falsehoods, and that your romance is full of truths. History
paints a few individuals; you paint the human race. History sets
down to its few individuals what they have neither said nor done;
whatever you set down to man, he has both said and done.... No; I
say that history is often a bad novel; and the novel, as you have
handled it, is good history. O painter of nature, 'tis you who are
never false!
"You accuse Richardson of being long! You must have forgotten how
much trouble, pains, busy movement, it costs to bring the smallest
undertaking to a good issue,--to end a suit, to settle a marriage,
to bring about a reconciliation. Think of these details what you
please, but for me they will be full of interest if they are only
true, if they bring out the passions, if they display character.
They are common, you say; it is all what one sees every day. You
are mistaken; 'tis what passes every day before your eyes, and what
you never see."
In Richardson's work, he says, as in the world, men are divided into two
classes, those who enjoy and those who suffer, and it is always to the
latter that he draws the mind of the reader. It is due to Richardson, he
cries, "if I have loved my fellow-creatures better, and loved my duties
better; if I have never felt anything but pity for the bad; if I have
conceived a deeper compassion for the unfortunate, more veneration for
the good, more circumspection in the use of present things, more
indifference about future things, more contempt for life, more love for
virtue." The works of Richardson are his touch-stone; those who do not
love them, stand judged and condemned in his eyes. Yet in the midst of
this tumult of admiration Diderot admits that the number of readers who
will feel all their value can never be great; it requires too severe a
taste, and then the variety of events is such, relations are so
multiplied, the management of them is so complicated, there are so many
things arranged, so many personages! "O Richardson; if thou hast not
enjoyed in thy lifetime all the reputation of thy deserts, how great
wilt thou be to our grandchildren when they see thee from the distance
at which we now view Homer! Then who will there be with daring enough to
strike out a line of thy sublime work?"[10] Yet of the very moderate
number of living persons who have ever read _Clarissa Harlowe_, it would
be safe to say that the large majority have read it in a certain
abridgment in three volumes which appeared some years ago.
[10] The _Eloge de Richardson_ is in Diderot's Works, v. 212-227.
Doctor Johnson made the answer of true criticism to some one who
complained to him that Richardson is tedious. "Why, sir," he said, "if
you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so
much frighted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for
the sentiment, and consider the story only as giving occasion to the
sentiment." And this is just what Diderot and the Paris of the middle of
the eighteenth century were eager to do. It was the sentiment that
touched and delighted them in _Clarissa_, just as it was the sentiment
that made the fortune of the great romance in their own tongue, which
was inspired by _Clarissa_, and yet was so different from _Clarissa_.
Rousseau threw into the _New Heloisa_ a glow of passion of which the
London printer was incapable, and he added a beauty of external
landscape and a strong feeling for the objects and movement of wild
natural scenery that are very different indeed from the atmosphere of
the cedar-parlour and the Flask Walk at Hampstead. But the sentiment,
the adoration of the _belle ame_, is the same, and it was the _belle
ame_ that fascinated that curious society, where rude logic and a stern
anti-religious dialectic went hand-in-hand with the most tender and
exalted sensibility.[11] It is singular that Diderot says nothing about
Rousseau's famous romance, and we can only suppose that his silence
arose from his contempt for the private perversity and seeming
insincerity of the author.
[11] The _belle ame_ was the origin of the _schoene Seele_ that has
played such a part in German literature and life. The reader will
find a history of the expression in an appendix to Dr. Erich
Schmidt's study. _Richardson, Rousseau, und Goethe_ (Jena, 1875).
Diderot made one attempt of his own, in which we may notice the
influence of the minute realism and the tearful pathos of Richardson.
_The Nun_ was not given to the world until 1796, when its author had
been twelve years in his grave. Since then it has been reproduced in
countless editions in France and Belgium, and has been translated into
English, Spanish, and German. It fell in with certain passionate
movements of the popular mind against some anti-social practices of the
Catholic Church. Perhaps it is not unjust to suppose that the horrible
picture of the depraved abbess has had some share in attracting a
public.
It is thoroughly characteristic of Diderot's dreamy, heedless humour,
and of the sincerity both of his interest in his work for its own sake,
and of his indifference to the popular voice, that he should have
allowed this, like so many other pieces, to lie in his drawer, or at
most to circulate clandestinely among three or four of his more
intimate friends. It was written about 1760, and ingenious historians
have made of it a signal for the great crusade against the Church. In
truth, as we have seen, it was a strictly private performance, and could
be no signal for a public movement. _La Religieuse_ was undoubtedly an
expression of the strong feeling of the Encyclopaedic school about
celibacy, renunciation of the world, and the burial of men and women
alive in the cloister.
The circumstances under which the story was written are worthy of a word
or two. Among the friends of Madame d'Epinay, Grimm, and Diderot was a
certain Marquis de Croismare. He had deserted the circle, and retired to
his estates in Normandy. It occurred to one of them that it would be a
pleasant stratagem for recalling him to Paris, to invent a personage who
should be shut up in a convent against her will, and then to make this
personage appeal to the well-known courage and generosity of the Marquis
de Croismare to rescue her. A previous adventure of the Marquis
suggested the fiction, and made its success the more probable. Diderot
composed the letters of the imaginary nun, and the conspirators had the
satisfaction of making merry at supper over the letters which the loyal
and unsuspecting Marquis sent in reply. At length the Marquis's interest
became so eager that they resolved that the best way of ending his
torment was to make the nun die. When the Marquis de Croismare returned
to Paris, the plot was confessed, the victim of the mystification
laughed at the joke, and the friendship of the party seemed to be
strengthened by their common sorrow for the woes of the dead sister. But
Diderot had been taken in his own trap. His imagination, which he had
set to work in jest, was caught by the figure and the situation. One day
while he was busy about the tale, a friend paid him a visit, and found
him plunged in grief and his face bathed in tears. "What in the world
can be the matter with you?" cried the friend. "What the matter?"
answered Diderot in a broken voice; "I am filled with misery by a story
that I am writing!" This capacity of thinking of imaginary personages as
if they were friends living in the next street, had been stirred by
Richardson. His acquaintances would sometimes notice anxiety and
consternation on his countenance, and would ask him if anything had
befallen his health, his friends, his family, his fortune. "O my
friends," he would reply, "Pamela, Clarissa, Grandison ...!" It was in
their world, not in the Rue Taranne, that he really lived when these
brooding moods overtook him. And while he was writing _The Nun_, Sister
Susan and Sister Theresa, the lady superior of Longchamp, and the
libertine superior of Saint Eutropius, were as alive to him as Clarissa
was alive to the score of correspondents who begged Richardson to spare
her honour, not to let her die, to make Lovelace marry her, or by no
means to allow Lovelace to marry her.
_The Nun_ professes to be the story of a young lady whose family have
thrust her into a convent, and her narrative, with an energy and
reality that Diderot hardly ever surpassed, presents the odious sides of
monastic life, and the various types of superstition, tyranny, and
corruption that monastic life engenders. Yet Diderot had far too much
genius to be tempted into the exaggerations of more vulgar assailants of
monkeries and nunneries. He may have begun his work with the purpose of
attacking a mischievous and superstitious system that mutilates human
life, but he certainly continued it because he became interested in his
creations. Diderot was a social destroyer by accident, but in intention
he was a truly scientific moralist, penetrated by the spirit of
observation and experiment; he shrunk from no excess in dissection, and
found nothing in human pathology too repulsive for examination. Yet _The
Nun_ has none of the artificial violences of the modern French school,
which loves moral disease for its own sake. The action is all very
possible, and the types are all sufficiently human and probable. The
close realistic touches which flowed from the intensity of the writer's
illusion, naturally convey a certain degree of the same illusion to the
mind of the reader.
Existence as it goes on in these strange hives is caught with what one
knows to be true fidelity; its dulness, its littleness, its goings and
comings, its spite, its reduction of the spiritual to the most purely
mechanical.
"The first moments passed in mutual praises, in questions about the
house that I had quitted, in experiments as to my character, my
inclinations, my tastes, my understanding. They feel you all over;
there is a number of little snares that they set for you, and from
which they draw the most just conclusions. For example, they throw
out some word of scandal, and then they look at you; they begin a
story, and then wait to see whether you will ask for the end or
will leave it there; if you make the most ordinary remark, they
declare that it is charming, though they know well enough that it
is nothing; they praise or they blame you with a purpose; they try
to worm out your most hidden thoughts; they question you as to what
you read; they offer you religious books and profane, and carefully
notice your choice; they invite you to some slight infractions of
the rule; they tell you little confidences, and throw out hints
about the foibles of the Lady Superior. All is carefully gathered
up and told over again. They leave you, they take you up again;
they try to sound your sentiments about manners, about piety, about
the world, about religion, about the monastic life, about
everything. The result of all these repeated experiments is an
epithet that stamps your character, and is always added by way of
surname to the name that you already bear. I was called Sister
Susan the Reserved."[12]
[12] _La Religieuse._ _Oeuv._, v. 110.
The portraits we feel to be to the life. The strongest of them all is
undoubtedly the most disagreeable, the most atrocious; it is, if you
will, the most infamous. We can only endure it as we endure to traverse
the ward for epileptics in an hospital for the insane. It is appalling,
it fills you with horror, it haunts you for days and nights, it leaves a
kind of stain on the memory. It is a possibility of character of which
the healthy, the pure, the unthinking have never dreamed. Such a
portrait is not art, that is true; but it is science, and that delivers
the critic from the necessity of searching his vocabulary for the cheap
superlatives of moral censure. Whether it be art or science, however,
men cannot but ask themselves how Diderot came to think it worth while
to execute so painful a study. The only answer is that the
irregularities of human nature--those more shameful parts of it, which
in some characters survive the generations of social pressure that have
crushed them down in civilised communities--had an irresistible
attraction for the curiosity of his genius. The whole story is full of
power; it abounds in phrases that have the stamp of genius; and
suppressed vehemence lends to it strength. But it is fatally wanting in
the elements of tenderness, beauty, and sympathy. If we chance to take
it up for a second or for a tenth time, it infallibly holds us; but
nobody seeks to return to it of his own will, and it holds us under
protest.
If Richardson created one school in France, Sterne created another. The
author of _Tristram Shandy_ was himself only a follower of one of the
greatest of French originals, and a follower at a long distance. Even
those who have the keenest relish for our "good-humoured, civil,
nonsensical, Shandean kind of a book," ought to admit how far it falls
behind Rabelais in exuberance, force, richness of extravagance, breadth
of colour, fulness of blood. They may claim, however, for Sterne what,
in comparison with these great elements, are the minor qualities of
simplicity, tenderness, precision, and finesse. These are the qualities
that delighted the French taste. In 1762 Sterne visited Paris, and found
_Tristram Shandy_ almost as well known there as in London, and he
instantly had dinners and suppers for a fortnight on his hands. Among
them were dinners and suppers at Holbach's, where he made the
acquaintance of Diderot, and where perhaps he made the discovery that
"notwithstanding the French make such a pother about the word
_sentiment_, they have no precise idea attached to it."[13] The
_Sentimental Journey_ appeared in 1768, and was instantly pronounced by
the critics in both countries to be inimitable. It is no wonder that a
performance of such delicacy of literary expression, united with so much
good-nature, such easy, humane, amiable feeling, went to the hearts of
the French of the eighteenth century. "My design in it," said Sterne,
"was to teach us to love the world and our fellow-creatures better than
we do, so it runs most upon those gentle passions and affections which
aid so much to it."[14] This exactly fell in with the reigning Parisian
modes, and with such sentiment as that of Diderot most of all. There
were several French imitations of the _Sentimental Journey_,[15] but the
only one that has survived in popular esteem, if indeed this can be said
to have survived, is Diderot's _Jacques le Fataliste_.
[13] Sterne's Letters, May 23, 1765.
[14] Nov. 12, 1767.
[15] E.g. _Le Voyageur Sentimental_ of Vernes (Grimm, _Corr. Lit._,
xiii. 227).
It seems to have been composed about the time (1773) of Diderot's
journey to Holland and St. Petersburg, of which we shall have more to
say in a later chapter. Its history is almost as singular as the history
of _Rameau's Nephew_. A contemporary speaks of a score of copies as
existing in different parts of Germany, and we may conjecture that they
found their way there from friends whom Diderot made in Holland, and
some of them were no doubt sent by Grimm to his subscribers. The first
fragment of it that saw the light in print was in a translation that
Schiller made of its most striking episode, in the year 1785. This is
another illustration of the eagerness of the best minds of Germany to
possess and diffuse the most original products of French intelligence
and hardihood. Diderot, as we have said, stands in the front rank along
with Rousseau, along also with Richardson, Sterne, and Goldsmith, among
those who in Germany kindled the glow of sentimentalism, both in its
good and its bad forms. It was in Germany that the first complete
version of the whole of _Jacques le Fataliste_ appeared, in 1792. Not
until four years later did the French obtain an original transcript.
This they owed to the generosity of Prince Henri of Prussia, the brother
of Frederick the Great; he presented it to the Institute.
"There is going about here," wrote Goethe in 1780, while Diderot was
still alive, "a manuscript of Diderot's called _Jacques le Fataliste et
son Maitre_, and it is really first-rate--a very fine and exquisite
meal, prepared and dished up with great skill, as if for the palate of
some singular idol. I set myself in the place of this Bel, and in six
uninterrupted hours swallowed all the courses in the order, and
according to the intentions, of this excellent cook and _maitre
d'hotel_."[16] He goes on to say that when other people came to read it,
some preferred one story, and some another. On the whole, one is
strongly inclined to judge that few modern readers will equal Goethe's
unsparing appetite. The reader sighs in thinking of the brilliant and
unflagging wit, the verve, the wicked graces of _Candide_, and we long
for the ease and simplicity and light stroke of the _Sentimental
Journey_. Diderot has the German heaviness. Perhaps this is because he
had too much conscience, and laboured too deeply under the burdensome
problems of the world. He could not emancipate himself sufficiently from
the tumult of his own sympathies. At many a page both of _Jacques le
Fataliste_, and of others of his pieces, we involuntarily recall the
writer's own contention that excess of sensibility makes a mediocre
actor. The same law is emphatically true of the artist. Diderot never
writes as if his spirit were quite free--and perhaps it never was free.
If we are to enjoy these reckless outbursts of all that is bizarre and
grotesque, these defiances of all that is sane, coherent, and rational,
we must never feel conscious of a limitation, or a possibility of stint
or check. The draught must seem to come from an exhaustless fountain of
boisterous laughter, irony, and caprice. Perfect fooling is so rare an
art, that not half a dozen men in literature have really possessed it;
perhaps only Aristophanes, Rabelais, Shakespeare. _Candide_, wonderful
as it is, has many a stroke of malice, and _Tristram Shandy_, wonderful
as that is too, is not without tinges of self-consciousness; and neither
malice nor self-consciousness belongs to the greater gods of buffoonery.
Cervantes and Moliere, those great geniuses of finest temper, still have
none of the reckless buffoonery of such scenes as that between Prince
Henry and the drawer, or the mad extravagances of the _Merry Wives_;
still less of the wild topsy-turvy of the _Birds_ or the _Peace_. They
have not the note of true Pantagruelism. Most critics, again, would find
in Swift a truculence, sometimes latent and sometimes flagrant, that
would deprive him, too, of his place among these great masters of free
and exuberant farce. Diderot, at any rate, must rank in the second class
among those who have attempted to tread a measure among the whimsical
zigzags of unreason. The sincere sentimentalist makes a poor reveller.
[16] Quoted in Rosenkranz, ii. 326.
We have spoken, as many others have done before us, of Diderot as
imitating our two English celebrities, and in one sense that is a
perfectly true description. In _Jacques le Fataliste_ whole sentences
are transcribed in letter and word from _Tristram Shandy_. Yet imitation
is hardly the right word for the process by which Diderot showed that an
author had seized and affected him. _La Religieuse_ would not have been
written if there had been no Richardson, nor _Jacques le Fataliste_ if
there had been no Sterne; yet Diderot's work is not really like the work
of either of his celebrated contemporaries. They gave him the suggestion
of a method and a sentiment to start from, and he mused and brooded over
it until, from among the clouds of his imagination, there began to loom
figures of his own, moving along a path which was also his own. This was
the history of his adaptation of _The Natural Son_ from Goldoni. We can
only be sure that nothing became blithe in its passage through his mind.
He was too much of a preacher to be an effective humorist.
There is in _Jacques le Fataliste_ none of that gift of true creation
which produced such figures as Trim, and my Uncle Toby, and Mr. Shandy.
Jacques's master is a mere lay figure, and Jacques himself, with his
monotonous catchword, "_Il etait ecrit la-haut_," has no real
personality; he has none of the naturalness that wins us to Corporal
Trim, still less has he any touch of the profound humour of the immortal
Sancho. The book is a series of stories, rather than Sterne's subtle
amalgam of pathos, gentle irony, and frank buffoonery; and the stories
themselves are for the most part either insipid or obscene. There is
perhaps one exception. The longest and the most elaborate of them, that
which Schiller translated, is more like one of the modern French novels
of a certain kind, than any other production of the eighteenth century.
The adventure of Madame de Pommeraye and the Marquis d'Arcis is a crude
foreshadowing of a style that has been perfected by M. Feydeau and M.
Flaubert. The Marquis has been the lover of Madame de Pommeraye; he
grows weary of her, and in time the lady discovers the bitter truth.
Resignation is not among her virtues, and in her rage and anguish she
devises an elaborate plan of revenge, which she carries out with the
utmost tenacity and resolution. It consists in leading him on, by
skilful incitements, to marry a woman whom he supposes to be an angel of
purity, but whom Madame de Pommeraye triumphantly reveals to him on the
morning after his marriage as a creature whose past history has been one
of notorious depravity. This disagreeable story, of which Balzac would
have made a masterpiece, is told in an interesting way, and the
humoristic machinery by which the narrative is managed is less tiresome
than usual. It is at least a story with meaning, purpose, and character.
It is neither a jumble without savour or point, nor is it rank and gross
like half the pages in the book. "Your _Jacques_," Diderot supposes some
one to say to him, "is only a tasteless rhapsody of facts, some real,
others imaginary, written without grace, and distributed without order.
How can a man of sense and conduct, who prides himself on his
philosophy, find amusement in spinning out tales so obscene as
these?"[17] And this is exactly what the modern critic is bound to ask.
In Rabelais there is at least puissant laughter; in Montaigne, when he
dwells on such matters, there is _naivete_. In Diderot we do not even
feel that he is having any enjoyment in his grossnesses; they have not
even the bad excuse of seeming spontaneous and coming from the fulness
of his heart. "Reader," he says, "I amuse myself in writing the follies
that you commit; your follies make me laugh; and my book puts you out of
humour. To speak frankly to you, I find that the more wicked of us two
is not myself." Unhappily, he does not convey the impression of
amusement to his readers; it has no infection in it, and if his book
puts us out of humour, it is not by its satire on mankind, but by its
essential want of point and want of meaning, either moral or aesthetic.
The few masters of this style have known how to bind the heterogeneous
elements together, if not by some deep-lying purpose, at least by some
pervading mood of rich and mellow feeling. In _Jacques le Fataliste_ is
neither.
[17] vi. 221, 222.
That men of the stamp of Goethe and Schiller should have found such a
book of delicious feast, naturally makes the disparaging critic pause.
In truth, we can easily see how it was. Like all the rest of Diderot's
work, it breaks roughly in upon that starved formalism which had for
long lain so heavily both on art and life. Its hardihood, its very
license, its contempt of conventions, its presentation of common people
and coarse passions and rough lives, all made it a dissolvent of the
thin, dry, and frigid rules which tyrannised over the world, and
interposed between the artist or the thinker and the real existence of
man on the earth. When we think of what European literature was, it
ceases to be wonderful that Goethe should have been unable for six whole
hours to tear himself away from a book that so few men to-day, save
under some compulsion, could persuade themselves to read through. On
great wholesome minds the grossness left no stain, and the interest of
Diderot's singularities worked as a stimulus to a happier originality in
men of more disciplined endowments. And let us add, of more poetic
endowments. It is the lack of poetry in _Jacques_ that makes its irony
so heavy to us. We only willingly suffer those to take us down into the
depths who can also raise us on the wings of a beautiful fancy. Even
Rabelais has his poetic moments, as in the picture of Cupid
self-disarmed before the industrious serenity of the Muses. A single
lovely image, like Sterne's figure of the recording angel, reconciles us
to many a miry page. But in _Jacques le Fataliste_, Diderot never raises
his eye for an instant to the blue aether, his ear catches no harmony of
awe, of hope, nor even of a noble despair. With a kind of clumsy
jubilancy he holds us fast in the ways and language of thick and clogged
sense. The _fatrasie_ of old France has its place in literature, but it
can never be restored in ages when a host of moral anxieties have laid
siege to men's souls. The uncommon is always welcome to the lover of
art, but it must justify itself. _Jacques_ has the quality of the
uncommon; it is a curiously prepared dish, as Goethe said; but it lacks
the pinch of salt and the handful of herbs with sharp diffusive
flavour.