ART.
In 1759 Diderot wrote for Grimm the first of his criticisms on the
exhibition of paintings in the Salon. At the beginning of the reign of
Lewis XV. these exhibitions took place every year, as they take place
now. But from 1751 onwards, they were only held once in two years.
Diderot has left his notes on every salon from 1759 to 1781, with the
exception of that of 1773, when he was travelling in Holland and Russia.
We have already seen how Grimm made Diderot work for him. The nine
_Salons_ are one of the results of this willing bondage, and they are
perhaps the only part of Diderot's works that has enjoyed a certain
measure of general popularity. Mr. Carlyle describes them with emphatic
enthusiasm: "What with their unrivalled clearness, painting the picture
over again for us, so that we too _see_ it, and can judge it; what with
their sunny fervour, inventiveness, real artistic genius, which wants
nothing but a _hand_, they are with some few exceptions in the German
tongue, the only Pictorial Criticisms we know of worth reading."[18] I
only love painting in poetry, Madame Necker said to Diderot, and it is
into poetry that you have found out the secret of rendering the works of
our modern painters, even the commonest of them. It would be a truly
imperial luxury, wrote A. W. Schlegel, to get a collection of pictures
described for oneself by Diderot.
[18] _Essays_, iv. 303. (Ed. 1869.)
There is a freshness, a vivacity, a zeal, a sincerity, a brightness of
interest in his subject, which are perhaps unique in the whole history
of criticism. He flings himself into the task with the perfection of
natural abandonment to a joyous and delightful subject. His whole
personality is engaged in a work that has all the air of being
overflowing pleasure, and his pleasure is contagious. His criticism
awakens the imagination of the reader. Not only do we see the picture;
we hear Diderot's own voice in ecstasies of praise and storms of
boisterous wrath. There is such mass in his criticism; so little of the
mincing and niggling of the small virtuoso. In facility of expression,
in animation, in fecundity of mood, in fine improvisation, these pieces
are truly incomparable. There is such an _impetus animi et quaedam artis
libido_. Some of the charm and freedom may be due to the important
circumstance that he was not writing for the public. He was not exposed
to the reaction of a large unknown audience upon style; hence the
absence of all the stiffness of literary pose. But the positive
conditions of such success lay in the resources of Diderot's own
character.
The sceptic, the dogmatist, the dialectician, and the other personages
of a heterogeneous philosophy who existed in Diderot's head, all
disappear or fall back into a secondary place, and he surrenders himself
with a curious freedom to such imaginative beauty as contemporary art
provided for him. Diderot was perhaps the one writer of the time who was
capable on occasion of rising above the strong prevailing spirit of the
time; capable of forgetting for a season the passion of the great
philosophical and ecclesiastical battle. No one save Diderot could have
been moved by sight of a picture to such an avowal as this:
"Absurd rigorists do not know the effect of external ceremonies on
the people; they can never have seen the enthusiasm of the
multitude at the procession of the _Fete Dieu_, an enthusiasm that
sometimes gains even me. I have never seen that long file of
priests in their vestments; those young acolytes clad in their
white robes, with broad blue sashes engirdling their waists, and
casting flowers on the ground before the Holy Sacrament; the crowd
as it goes before and follows after them hushed in religious
silence, and so many with their faces bent reverently to the
ground; I have never heard that grave and pathetic chant, as it is
led by the priests and fervently responded to by an infinity of
voices of men, of women, of girls, of little children, without my
inmost heart being stirred, and tears coming into my eyes. There is
in it something, I know not what, that is grand, solemn, sombre,
and mournful."
Thus to find the material of religious reaction in the author of
_Jacques le Fataliste_ and the centre of the atheistic group, completes
the circle of Diderot's immense and deep-lying versatility. And in his
account of such a mood, we see how he came to be so great and poetical a
critic; we see the sincerity, the alertness, the profound mobility, with
which he was open to impressions of colour, of sound, of the pathos of
human aspiration, of the solemn concourses of men.
France has long been sovereign in criticism in its literary sense. In
that department she has simply never had, and has not now, any serious
rival. In the profounder historic criticism, Germany exhibits her one
great, peculiar, and original gift. In the criticism of art Germany has
at least three memorable names; but save where history is concerned most
modern German aesthetics are so clouded with metaphysical speculation as
to leave the obscurity of a very difficult subject as thick as it was
before. In France the beginnings of art-criticism were literary rather
than philosophic, and with the exception of Cousin's worthless
eloquence, and of the writers whose philosophy Cousin dictated, and of
M. Taine's ingenious paradoxes, Diderot is the only writer who has
deliberately brought a vivid spirit and a philosophic judgment to the
discussion of the forms of Beauty, as things worthy of real elucidation.
As far back as the time of the English Restoration, Dufresnoy had
written in bad Latin a poem on the art of Painting, which had the signal
honour of being translated into good English by no less illustrious a
master of English than Dryden, and it was again translated by Mason, the
friend of Reynolds and of Gray. Imitations, applied to the pictorial
art, of the immortal Epistle to the Pisos, came thick in France in the
eighteenth century.[19] But these effusions are merely literary, and
they are very bad literature indeed. The abbe Dubos published in 1719 a
volume of Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting, including
observations also on the relations of those arts to Music. Lessing is
known to have made use of this work in his _Laocoeon_, and Diderot gave
it a place among the books which he recommended in his Plan of a
University.[20] This, as it is the earliest, seems to have been the best
contribution to aesthetic thought before Lessing and Diderot. Daniel
Webb, the English friend of Raphael Mengs, published an Enquiry into the
Beauties of Painting (1760), and Diderot wrote a notice of it,[21] but
it appears to have made no mark on his mind. Andre, a Jesuit father,
wrote an Essay on the Beautiful (1741), which distributed the kinds of
art with precision, but omitted to say in what the Beautiful consists.
The abbe Batteux wrote a volume reducing the fine arts to a single
principle, and another volume attempting a systematic classification of
them. The first of these was the occasion of Diderot's Letter on Deaf
Mutes, and Diderot described their author as a good man of letters, but
without taste, without criticism, and without philosophy; _a ces
bagatelles pres, le plus joli garcon du monde_.[22]
[19] _E.g._ Watelet's poem, _Sur l'Art de Peindre_, 1760; Le
Mierre's _Sur la Peinture_, 1769; Marsy's _Pictura Carmen_, 1736.
See Diderot's works, xiii. 17, etc.
[20] _Oeuv._, iii. 486. Guhrauer, ii. 15. Also Bluemner's admirable
edition of the _Laocoeon_, p. 173.
[21] xiii. 33.
[22] Grimm, _Corr. Lit._, iv. 136. In another place in the same work
either Grimm or Diderot makes a remark about Batteux, which is worth
remembering in our own age of official vindications of orthodoxy.
The abbe had written a book about first causes. "I venture to
observe moreover to M. l'abbe Batteux that when in this world a man
has put on the dress of any sort of harlequin, red or black, with a
pair of bands or a frill, he ought to give up once for all every
kind of philosophic discussion, because it is impossible for him to
speak according to his faith and his conscience; and a writer of bad
faith is all the more odious, as nothing compelled him to break
silence." _Ib._ vi. 120.
Travellers to the land where criticism of art has been so slight, and
where production has been so noble, so bounteous, so superb, published
the story of what Italy had shown to them. Madame de Pompadour designed
to make her brother the Superintendent of fine arts, and she despatched
Cochin, the great engraver of the day, to accompany him in a studious
tour through the holy land of the arts. Cochin was away nearly two
years, and on his return produced three little volumes (1758), in which
he deals such blows to some vaunted immortalities as made the idolators
by convention not a little angry. The abbe Richard (1766) published six
very stupid volumes on Italy, and such criticism on art as they contain
is not worthy of serious remark. The President de Brosses spent a year
in Italy (1739-40), and wrote letters to his friends at home, which may
be read to-day with interest and pleasure for their graphic picture of
Italian society; but the criticisms which they contain on the great
works of art are those of a well-informed man of the world, taking many
things for granted, rather than of a philosophical critic industriously
using his own mind. His book recalls to us how true the eighteenth
century was to itself in its hatred of Gothic architecture, that symbol
and associate of mysticism, and of the age which the eighteenth century
blindly abhorred as the source of all the tyrannical laws and cruel
superstitions that still weighed so heavily on mankind. "You know the
Palace of Saint Mark at Venice," says De Brosses: "_c'est un vilain
monsieur, s'il eu fut jamais, massif, sombre, et gothique, du plus
mechant gout_!"[23]
[23] _Lettres Familieres_, i. 174. (Ed. 1869.)
Dupaty, like De Brosses, an eminent lawyer, an acquaintance of Diderot
and an early friend of a conspicuous figure of a later time, the
ill-starred Vergniaud, travelled in Italy almost immediately before the
Revolution (1785), and his letters, when read with those of De Brosses,
are a curious illustration of the change that had come over the spirit
of men in the interval. He leaves the pictures of the Pitti collection
at Florence, and plunges into meditation in the famous gardens behind
the palace, rejoicing with much expansion in the glories of light and
air, in greenery and the notes of birds, and finally sums all up in one
rapturous exclamation of the vast superiority of nature over art.[24]
[24] Dupaty's _Lettres sur l'Italie_, No. 40. In talking of Rome, he
complains in a very Diderotian spirit of the want of _le beau
moral_. "On ne trouve ici dans les moeurs ni des hommes prives ni
des hommes publics, cette moralite, cette bienseance, dont les
moeurs francoises sont pleines. _Le beau moral est absolument
inconnu._ Or, c'est pour atteindre a ce beau moral dans tous les
genres que la sensibilite est la plus tourmentee; qu'elle est en
proie aux contentions de l'esprit, aux emulations de l'ame ...
qu'elle pare avec tant de raffinement et de peine, les ecrits, les
discours, les passions, enfin toute la vie publique et privee.'
It is impossible, in reading how deeply Diderot was affected by
fifth-rate paintings and sculpture, not to count it among the great
losses of literature that he saw few masterpieces. He never made the
great pilgrimage. He was never at Venice, Florence, Parma, Rome. A
journey to Italy was once planned, in which Grimm and Rousseau were to
have been his travelling companions;[25] the project was not realised,
and the strongest critic of art that his country produced never saw the
greatest glories of art. If Diderot had visited Florence and Rome, even
the mighty painter of the Last Judgment and the creator of those sublime
figures in the New Sacristy at San Lorenzo, would have found an
interpreter worthy of him. But it was not to be. "It is rare," he once
wrote, "for an artist to excel without having seen Italy, just as a man
seldom becomes a great writer or a man of great taste without having
given severe study to the ancients."[26] Diderot at least knew what he
lost.
[25] x. 514, _n._
[26] xi. 241.
French art was then, as art usually is, the mirror of its time,
reproducing such imaginative feeling as society could muster. When the
Republic and the Empire came, and twenty years of battle and siege, then
the art of the previous generation fell into a degree of contempt for
which there is hardly a parallel. Pictures that had been the delight of
the town and had brought fortunes to their painters, rotted on the quays
or were sold for a few pence at low auctions. Fragonard, who had been
the darling of his age, died in neglect and beggary. David and his
hideous art of the Empire utterly effaced what had thrown the
contemporaries of Diderot into rapture.[27] Every one knows all that can
be said against the French paintings of Diderot's time. They are
executed hastily and at random; they abound in technical defects of
colour, of drawing, of composition; their feeling is light and shallow.
Watteau died in 1721--at the same premature age as Raphael,--but he
remained as the dominating spirit of French art through the eighteenth
century. Of course the artists went to Rome, but they changed sky and
not spirit. The pupils of the academy came back with their portfolios
filled with sketches in which we see nothing of the "lone mother of dead
empires," nothing of the vast ruins and the great sombre desolate
Campagna, but only Rome turned into a decoration for the scenes of a
theatre or the panels of a boudoir. The Olympus of Homer and of Virgil,
as has been well said, becomes the Olympus of Ovid. Strength, sublimity,
even stateliness disappeared, unless we admit some of the first two
qualities in the landscapes of Vernet. Not only is beauty replaced by
prettiness, but by prettiness in season and out of season. The common
incongruity of introducing a spirit of elegance and literature into the
simplicities of the true pastoral, was condemned by Diderot as a mixture
of Fontenelle with Theocritus. We do not know what name he would have
given to that still more curious incongruity of taste, which made a
publisher adorn a treatise on Differential and Integral Calculus with
amusing plates by Cochin, and introduce dainty little vignettes into a
Demonstration of the Properties of the Cycloid.
[27] Goncourt's _L'Art au 18ieme Siecle_, i.
There is one true story that curiously illustrates the spirit of French
art in those equivocal days. When Madame de Pompadour made up her mind
to play pander to the jaded appetites of the king, she had a famous
female model of the day introduced into a _Holy Family_, which was
destined for the private chapel of the queen. The portrait answered its
purpose; it provoked the curiosity and desire of the king, and the model
was invited to the Parc-aux-Cerfs.[28] This was typical of the service
that painting was expected to render to the society that adored it and
paid for it. "All is daintiness, delicate caressing for delicate senses,
even down to the external decoration of life, down to the sinuous lines,
the wanton apparel, the refined commodity of rooms and furniture. In
such a place and in such company, it is enough to be together to feel
at ease. Their idleness does not weigh upon them; life is their
plaything."[29]
[28] Goncourt's _Art au 18ieme Siecle_, i. 213.
[29] Taine's _Ancien Regime_, p. 186.
Only let us not, while reserving our serious admiration for Titian,
Rembrandt, Raphael, and the rest of the gods and demigods, refuse at
least a measure of historic tolerance to these light and graceful
creations. Boucher, whose dreams of rose and blue were the delight of
his age, came away from Rome saying: "Raphael is a woman, Michael Angelo
is a monster; one is paradise, the other is hell; they are painters of
another world; it is a dead language that nobody speaks in our day. We
others are the painters of our own age: we have not common sense, but we
are charming." This account of them was not untrue. They filled up the
space between the grandiose pomp of Le Brun and the sombre
pseudo-antique of David, just as the incomparable grace and sparkle of
Voltaire's lighter verse filled up the space in literature between
Racine and Chenier. They have a poetry of their own; they are cheerful,
sportive, full of fancy, and like everything else of that day, intensely
sociable. They are, at any rate, even the most sportive of them, far
less unwholesome and degrading than the acres of martyrdoms,
emaciations, bad crucifixions, bad pietas, that make some galleries more
disgusting than a lazar-house.[30]
[30] "Si tous les tableaux de martyrs que nos grands peintres ont si
sublimement peints, passaient a une posterite reculee, pour qui nous
prendrait-elle? Pour des betes feroces ou des
anthropophages."--Diderot's _Pensees sur la Peinture_.
For Watteau himself, the deity of the century, Diderot cared very
little. "I would give ten Watteaus," he said, "for one Teniers." This
was as much to be expected, as it was characteristic in Lewis XIV., when
some of Teniers's pictures were submitted to him, imperiously to command
"_ces magots la_" to be taken out of his sight.
Greuze (_b. 1725, d. 1805_) of all the painters of the time was
Diderot's chief favourite. Diderot was not at all blind to Greuze's
faults, to his repetitions, his frequent want of size and amplitude, the
excess of gray and of violet in his colouring. But all these were
forgotten in transports of sympathy for the sentiment. As we glance at a
list of Greuze's subjects, we perceive that we are in the very heart of
the region of the domestic, the moral, "_l'honnete_," the homely pathos
of the common people. The Death of a father of a family, regretted by
his children; The Death of an unnatural father, abandoned by his
children; The beloved mother caressed by her little ones; A child
weeping over its dead bird; A Paralytic tended by his family, or the
Fruit of a Good Education:--Diderot was ravished by such themes. The
last picture he describes as a proof that compositions of that kind are
capable of doing honour to the gifts and the sentiments of the
artist.[31] The _Girl bewailing her dead bird_ throws him into raptures.
"O, the pretty elegy!" he begins, "the charming poem! the lovely idyll!"
and so forth, until at length he breaks into a burst of lyric
condolence addressed to the weeping child, that would fill four or five
of these pages.[32]
[31] x. 143.
[32] x. 343.
No picture of the eighteenth century was greeted with more enthusiasm
than Greuze's _Accordee de Village_, which was exhibited in 1761. It
seems to tell a story, and therefore even to-day, in spite of its dulled
pink and lustreless blue, it arrests the visitor to one of the less
frequented halls of the Louvre.[33] Paris, weary of mythology and sated
with pretty indecencies, was fascinated by the simplicity of Greuze's
village tale. "_On se sent gagner d'une emotion douce en le regardant_,"
said Diderot, and this gentle emotion was dear to the cultivated classes
in France at that moment of the century. It was the year of the _New
Heloisa_.
[33] No. 260 of the French School.
The subject is of the simplest: a peasant paying the dower-money of his
daughter. "The father"--it is prudent of us to borrow Diderot's
description--"is seated in the great chair of the house. Before him his
son-in-law standing, and holding in his left hand the bag that contains
the money. The betrothed, standing also, with one arm gently passed
under the arm of her lover, the other grasped by her mother, who is
seated. Between the mother and the bride, a younger sister standing,
leaning on the bride and with an arm thrown round her shoulders. Behind
this group, a child standing on tiptoes to see what is going on. To the
extreme left in the background, and at a distance from the scene, two
women-servants who are looking on. To the right a cupboard with its
usual contents--all scrupulously clean.... A wooden staircase leading to
the upper floor. In the foreground near the feet of the mother, a hen
leading her young ones, to whom a little girl throws crumbs of bread; a
basin full of water, and on the edge of it, one of the small chickens
with its beak up in the air so as to let the water go down." Diderot
then proceeds to criticise the details, telling us the very words that
he hears the father addressing to the bridegroom, and as a touch of
observation of nature, that while one of the old man's hands, of which
we see the back, is tanned and brown, the other, of which we see the
palm, is white. "To the bride the painter has given a face full of
charm, of seemliness, of reserve. She is dressed to perfection. That
apron of white stuff could not be better; there is a trifle of luxury in
her ornament; but then it is a wedding-day. You should note how true are
the folds and creases in her dress, and in those of the rest. The
charming girl is not quite straight; but there is a light and gentle
inflexion in all her figure and her limbs that fills her with grace and
truth. Indeed she is pretty and very pretty. If she had leaned more
towards her lover, it would have been unbecoming; more to her mother and
her father, and she would have been false. She has her arm half passed
under that of her future husband, and the tips of her fingers rest
softly on his hand; that is the only mark of tenderness that she gives
him, and perhaps without knowing it herself: it is a delicate idea in
the painter."[34]
[34] x. 151-156. Dr. Waagen pronounces this picture to be as truly
an expression of _das Nationalfranzoesiche_ as Wilkie's paintings are
of _das Englische_. See his _Kunstwerke und Kuenstler in Paris_, p.
675.
"Courage, my good Greuze," he cries, "_fais de la morale en peinture_.
What, has not the pencil been long enough and too long consecrated to
debauchery and vice? Ought we not to be delighted at seeing it at last
unite with dramatic poetry in instructing us, correcting us, inviting us
to virtue?"[35] It has been sometimes said that Diderot would have
exulted in the paintings of Hogarth, and we may admit that he would have
sympathised with the spirit of such moralities as the Idle and the
Industrious Apprentice, the Rake's Progress, and Mariage a la Mode. The
intensity and power of that terrible genius would have had their
attraction, but the minute ferocities of Hogarth's ruthless irony would
certainly have revolted him. Such a scene as Lord Squanderfield's visit
to the quack doctor, or as the Rake's debauch, would have filled him
with inextinguishable horror. He could never have forgiven an artist
who, in the ghastly pathos of a little child straining from the arms of
its nurse towards the mother, as she lies in the very article of death,
could still find in his heart to paint on it the dark patches of foul
disease. He would have fled with shrieks from those appalling scenes of
murder, torture, madness, bestial drunkenness, rapacity, fury--from
that delirium of scrofula, palsy, entrails, the winding-sheet, and the
grave-worm. Diderot's method was to improve men, not by making their
blood curdle, but by warming and softening the domestic affections.
[35] x. 208.
Diderot, as a critic, seems always to have remembered a pleasant
remonstrance once addressed at the Salon by the worthy Chardin to
himself and Grimm: "Gently, good sirs, gently! Out of all the pictures
that are here seek the very worst; and know that two thousand unhappy
wretches have bitten their brushes in two with their teeth, in despair
of ever doing even as badly. Parrocel, whom you call a dauber, and who
for that matter is a dauber, if you compare him to Vernet, is still a
man of rare talent relatively to the multitude of those who have flung
up the career in which they started with him." And then the artist
recounts the immense labours, the exhausting years, the boundless
patience, attention, tenacity, that are the conditions even of a
mediocre degree of mastery. We are reminded of the scene in a famous
work of art in our own day, where Herr Klesmer begs Miss Gwendolen
Harleth to reflect, how merely to stand or to move on the stage is an
art that requires long practice. "_O le triste et plat metier que celui
de critique!_" Diderot cries on one occasion: "_Il est si difficile de
produire une chose meme mediocre; il est si facile de sentir la
mediocrite._"[36] No doubt, as experience and responsibility gather upon
us, we learn how hard in every line is even moderate skill. The wise
are perhaps content to find what a man can do, without making it a
reproach to him that there is something else which he cannot do.
[36] x. 177.
But Diderot knew well enough that Chardin's kindly principle might
easily be carried too far. In general, he said, criticism displeases me;
it supposes so little talent. "What a foolish occupation, that of
incessantly hindering ourselves from taking pleasure, or else making
ourselves blush for the pleasure that we have taken! And that is the
occupation of criticism!"[37] Yet in one case he writes a score of pages
of critical dialogue, in which the chief interlocutor is a painter who
avenges his own failure by stringent attacks on the work of happier
rivals of the year. And speaking in his own proper person, Diderot knows
how to dismiss incompetence with the right word, sometimes of scorn,
more often of good-natured remonstrance. Bad painters, a Parrocel, a
Brenet, fare as ill at his hands as they deserved to do. He remarks
incidentally that the condition of the bad painter and the bad actor is
worse than that of the bad man of letters: the painter hears with his
own ears the expressions of contempt for his talent, and the hisses of
the audience go straight to the ears of the actor, whereas the author
has the comfort of going to his grave without a suspicion that you have
cried out at every page: "_The fool, the animal, the jackass!_" and have
at length flung his book into a corner. There is nothing to prevent the
worst author, as he sits alone in his library, and reads himself over
and over again, from congratulating himself on being the originator of a
host of rare and felicitous ideas.[38]
[37] xii. 8, 79.
[38] xi. 149.
The one painter whom Diderot never spares is Boucher, who was an idol of
the time, and made an income of fifty thousand livres a year out of his
popularity. He laughs at him as a mere painter of fans, an artist with
no colours on his palette save white and red. He admits the fecundity,
the _fougue_, the ease of Boucher, just as Sir Joshua Reynolds admits
his grace and beauty and good skill in composition.[39] Boucher, says
Diderot, is in painting what Ariosto is in poetry, and he who admires
the one is inconsistent if he is not mad for the other. What is wanting
is disciplined taste, more variety, more severity. Yet he cannot refuse
to concede about one of Boucher's pictures that after all he would be
glad to possess it. Every time you saw it, he says, you would find fault
with it, yet you would go on looking at it.[40] This is perhaps what the
severest modern amateur, as he strolls carelessly through the French
school at his leisure, would not in his heart care to deny.
[39] See Reynolds's Twelfth Discourse, p. 106.
[40] x. 102.
Fragonard, whose picture of Coresus and Callirrhoe made a great
sensation in its day, and still attracts some small share of attention
in the French school, was not a favourite with Diderot. The Callirrhoe
inspired an elaborate but not very felicitous criticism. Then the
painter changed his style in the direction of Boucher, and as far away
as possible from _l'honnete_ and _le beau moral_, and Diderot turned
away from him; at last describing an oval picture representing groups of
children in heaven as "_une belle et grande omelette d'enfants_," heads,
legs, thighs, arms, bodies, all interlaced together among yellowish
clouds--"_bien omelette, bein douillette, bein jaune, et bien
brulee_."[41]
[41] xi. 296. For the Callirrhoe, see x. 397.
On the whole, we cannot wonder either that painters hold literary talk
about their difficult and complex art so cheap, or that the lay public
prizes it so much above its intrinsic worth. It helps the sluggish
imagination and dull sight of the one, while it is apt to pass
ignorantly over both the true difficulties and the true successes of the
other. Diderot, unlike most of those who have come after him, had
carefully studied the conditions prescribed to the painter by the
material in which he works. Although he was a master of the literary
criticism of art, he had artists among his intimate companions, and was
too eager for knowledge not to wring from them the secrets of technique,
just as he extorted from weavers and dyers the secrets of their
processes and instruments. He makes no ostentatious display of this
special knowledge, yet it is present, giving a firmness and accuracy to
what would otherwise be too like mere arbitrary lyrics suggested by a
painting, and not really dealing with it. His special gift was the
transformation of scientific criticism into something with the charm of
literature. Take, for instance, a picture by Vien:
"_Psyche approaching with her lamp to surprise Love in his
sleep._--The two figures are of flesh and blood, but they have
neither the elegance, nor the grace, nor the delicacy that the
subject required. Love seems to me to be making a grimace. Psyche
is not like a woman who comes trembling on tiptoe. I do not see on
her face that mixture of surprise, fear, love, desire, and
admiration, which ought all to be there. It is not enough to show
in Psyche a curiosity to see Love; I must also perceive in her the
fear of awakening him. She ought to have her mouth half open, and
to be afraid of drawing her breath. 'Tis her lover that she
sees--that she sees for the first time, at the risk of losing him
for ever. What joy to look upon him, and to find him so fair! Oh,
what little intelligence in our painters, how little they
understand nature! The head of Psyche ought to be inclined towards
Love; the rest of her body drawn back, as it is when you advance
towards a spot where you fear to enter, and from which you are
ready to flee back; one foot planted on the ground and the other
barely touching it. And the lamp; ought she to let the light fall
on the eyes of Love? Ought she not to hold it apart, and to shield
it with her hand to deaden its brightness? Moreover, that would
have lighted the picture in a striking way. These good people do
not know that the eyelids have a kind of transparency; they have
never seen a mother coming in the night to look at her child in the
cradle, with a lamp in her hand, and fearful of awakening it."[42]
[42] x. 121.
There have been many attempts to imitate this manner since Diderot. No
less a person than M. Thiers tried it, when it fell to him as a young
writer for the newspapers to describe the Salon of 1822. One brilliant
poet, novelist, traveller, critic, has succeeded, and Diderot's
art-criticism is at least equalled in Theophile Gautier's pages on
Titian's Assunta and Bellini's Madonna at Venice, or Murillo's Saint
Anthony of Padua at Seville.[43]
[43] _Voyage en Italie_, 230. _Voyage en Espagne_, 330. See the same
critic's _Abecedaire du Salon de 1861_.
Just as in his articles in the Encyclopaedia, here too Diderot is always
ready to turn from his subject for a moral aside. Even the modern reader
will forgive the discursive apostrophe addressed to the judges of the
unfortunate Calas, the almost lyric denunciation of an atrocity that
struck such deep dismay into the hearts of all the brethren of the
Encyclopaedia.[44] But Diderot's asides are usually in less tragic
matter. A picture of Michael Van Loo's reminds him that Van Loo had once
a friend in Spain. This friend took it into his head to equip a vessel
for a trading expedition, and Van Loo invested all his fortune in his
friend's vessel. The vessel was wrecked, the fortune was lost, and the
master was drowned. When Van Loo heard of the disaster, the first word
that came to his mouth was--_I have lost a good friend_. And on this
Diderot sails off into a digression on the grounds of praise and blame.
[44] xi. 309.
Here are one or two illustrations of the same moralising:
"The effect of our sadness on others is very singular. Have you not
sometimes noticed in the country the sudden stillness of the
birds, if it happens that on a fine day a cloud comes and lingers
over the spot that was resounding with their music? A suit of deep
mourning in company is the cloud that, as it passes, causes the
momentary silence of the birds. It goes, and the song is resumed."
"We should divide a nation into three classes: the bulk of the
nation, which forms the national taste and manners; those who rise
above these are called madmen, originals, oddities; those who fall
below are noodles. The progress of the human mind causes the level
to shift, and a man often lives too long for his reputation.... He
who is too far in front of his generation, who rises above the
general level of the common manners, must expect few votes; he
ought to be thankful for the oblivion that rescues him from
persecution. Those who raise themselves to a great distance above
the common level are not perceived; they die forgotten and
tranquil, either like everybody else, or far away from everybody
else. That is my motto."[45]
"But Vernet will never be more than Vernet, a mere man. No, and for
that very reason all the more astonishing, and his work all the
more worthy of admiration. It is, no doubt, a great thing, is this
universe; but when I compare it with the energy of the productive
cause, if I had to wonder at aught, it would be that its work is
not still finer and still more perfect. It is just the reverse when
I think of the weakness of man, of his poor means, of the
embarrassments and of the short duration of his life, and then of
certain things that he has undertaken and carried out."[46]
[45] xi. 294.
[46] xi. 102.
These digressions are one source of the charm of Diderot's criticism.
They impart ease and naturalness to it, because they evidently reproduce
the free movement of his mind as it really was, and not as the supposed
dignity of authorship might require him to pretend. There is no
stiffness nor sense, as we have said, of literary strain, and yet there
is no disturbing excess of what is random, broken, _decousu_. The
digression flows with lively continuity from the main stream and back
again into it, leaving some cheerful impression or curious suggestion
behind it. Something, we cannot tell what, draws him off to wonder
whether there is not as much verve in the first scene of Terence and in
the Antinoues as in any scene of Moliere or any work of Michael Angelo?
"I once answered this question, but rather too lightly. Every moment I
am apt to make a mistake, because language does not furnish me with the
right expression for the truth at the moment. I abandon a thesis for
lack of words that shall supply my reasons. I have one thing in the
bottom of my heart, and I find myself saying another. There is the
advantage of living in retirement and solitude. There a man speaks, asks
himself questions, listens to himself, and listens in silence. His
secret sensation develops itself little by little." Then when he is
about to speak of one of Greuze's pictures, he bethinks himself of
Greuze's vanity, and this leads him to a vein of reflection which it is
good for all critics, whether public or private, to hold fast in their
minds. "If you take away Greuze's vanity, you will take away his verve,
you will extinguish his fire, his genius will undergo an eclipse. _Nos
qualites tiennent de pres a nos defauts._" And of this important truth,
the base of wise tolerance, there follow a dozen graphic examples.[47]
[47] x. 342. He says elsewhere of Greuze (xviii. 247) that he is _un
excellent artiste, mais une bien mauvaise tete_.
Gretry, the composer, more than once consulted Diderot in moments of
perplexity. It was not always safe, he says, to listen to the glowing
man when he allowed his imagination to run away with him, but the first
burst was of inspiration divine.[48] Painters found his suggestions as
potent and as hopeful as the musician found them. He delighted in being
able to tell an artist how he might change his bad picture into a good
one.[49] "Chardin, La Grenee, Greuze, and others," says Diderot, "have
assured me (and artists are not given to flattering men of letters) that
I was about the only one whose images could pass at once to canvas,
almost exactly as they came into my head." And he gives illustrations,
how he instantly furnished to La Grenee a subject for a picture of
Peace; to Greuze, a design introducing a nude figure without wounding
the modesty of the spectator; to a third, a historical subject.[50] The
first of the three is a curious example of the difficulty which even a
strong genius like Diderot had in freeing himself from artificial
traditions. For Peace, he cried to La Grenee, show me Mars with his
breastplate, his sword girded on, his head noble and firm. Place
standing by his side a Venus, full, divine, voluptuous, smiling on him
with an enchanting smile; let her point to his casque, in which her
doves have made their nest. Is it not singular that even Diderot
sometimes failed to remember that Mars and Venus are dead, that they can
never be the source of a fresh and natural inspiration, and that neither
artist nor spectator can be moved by cold and vapid allegories in an
extinct dialect? If Diderot could have seen such a treatment of La
Grenee's subject as Landseer's _Peace_, with its children playing at the
mouth of the slumbering gun, he would have been the first to cry out how
much nearer this came to the spirit of his own aesthetic methods, than
all the pride of Mars and all the beauty of Venus. He is truer to
himself in the subject with which he met Greuze's perplexity in the
second of his two illustrations. He bade Greuze paint the Honest Model;
a girl sitting to an artist for the first time, her poor garments on the
ground beside her; her head resting on one of her hands, and a tear
rolling down each cheek. The mother, whose dress betrays the extremity
of indigence, is by her side, and with her own hands and one of the
hands of her daughter covers her face. The painter, witness of the
scene, softened and touched, lets his palette or his brush fall from his
hand. Greuze at once exclaimed that he saw his subject; and we may at
least admit that this pretty bit of commonplace sentimentalism is more
in Diderot's vein than pagan gods and goddesses.
[48] Quoted in Diderot's _Oeuv._, v. 460, _n._
[49] E.g. _Oeuv._, xi. 258.
[50] xi. 74.
Diderot is never more truly himself than when he takes the subject of a
picture that is before him, and shows how it might have been more
effectively handled. Thus:
"The Flight into Egypt is treated in a fresh and piquant manner.
But the painter has not known how to make the best of his idea. The
Virgin passes in the background of the picture, bearing the infant
Jesus in her arms. She is followed by Joseph and the ass carrying
the baggage. In the foreground are the shepherds prostrating
themselves, their hands upturned towards her, and wishing her a
happy journey. Ah, what a fine painting, if the artist had known
how to make mountains at the foot of which the Virgin had passed;
if he had known how to make the mountains very steep, escarped,
majestic; if he had covered them with moss and wild shrubs; if he
had given to the Virgin simplicity, beauty, grandeur, nobleness; if
the road that she follows had led into the paths of some forest,
lonely and remote; if he had taken his moment at the rise of day,
or at its fall!"[51]
[51] x. 115.
The picture of Saint Benedict by Deshays--whom at one moment Diderot
pronounces to be the first painter in the nation--stirs the same spirit
of emendation. Diderot thinks that in spite of the pallor of the dying
saint's visage, one would be inclined to give him some years yet to
live.
"I ask whether it would not have been better that his legs should
have sunk under him; that he should have been supported by two or
three monks; that he should have had the arms extended, the head
thrown back, with death on his lips and ecstasy on his brow. If the
painter had given this strong expression to his Saint Benedict,
consider, my friend, how it would have reflected itself on all the
rest of the picture. That slight change in the principal figure
would have influenced all the others. The celebrant, instead of
being upright, would in his compassion have leaned more forward;
distress and anguish would have been more strongly depicted in all
the bystanders. There is a piece from which you could teach young
students that, by altering one single circumstance, you alter all
others, or else the truth disappears. You could make out of it an
excellent chapter on the _force of unity_: you would have to
preserve the same arrangement, the same figures, and to invite them
to execute the picture according to the different changes that were
made in the figure of the communicant."[52]
[52] x. 125.
The admirable Salons were not Diderot's only contributions to aesthetic
criticism. He could not content himself with reproductions, in eloquent
language upon paper, of the combinations of colour and form upon canvas.
No one was further removed from vague or indolent expansion. He returns
again and again to examine with keenness and severity the principles,
the methods, the distinctions of the fine arts, and though he is often a
sentimentalist and a declaimer, he can also, when the time comes,
transform himself into an accurate scrutiniser of ideas and phrases, a
seeker after causes and differences, a discoverer of kinds and classes
in art, and of the conditions proper to success in each of them. In
short, the fact of being an eloquent and enthusiastic critic of
pictures, did not prevent him from being a truly philosophical thinker
about the abstract laws of art, with the thinker's genius for analysis,
comparison, classification. Who that has read them can ever forget the
dialogues that are set among the landscapes of Vernet in the Salons of
1767?[53] The critic supposes himself unable to visit the Salon of the
year, and to be staying in a gay country-house amid some fine landscapes
on the sea-coast. He describes his walks among these admirable scenes,
and the strange and varying effects of light and colour, and all the
movements of the sky and ocean; and into the descriptions he weaves a
series of dialogues with an abbe, a tutor of the children of the house,
upon art and landscape and the processes of the universe. Nothing can be
more excellent and lifelike: it is not until the end that he lets the
secret slip that the whole fabric has been a flight of fancy, inspired
by no real landscape, but by the sea-pieces sent to the exhibition by
Vernet.
[53] xi. 98-149.
This is an illustration of the variety of approach which makes Diderot
so interesting, so refreshing a critic. He never sinks into what is
mechanical, and the evidence of this is that his mind, while intent on
the qualities of a given picture, yet moves freely to the outside of the
picture, and is ever cordially open to the most general thoughts and
moods, while attending with workmanlike fidelity to what is particular
in the object before him.[54]
[54] _E.g._ xi. 223.
In the light of modern speculation upon the philosophy of the fine arts,
Diderot makes no commanding figure, because he is so egregiously
unsystematic. But as Goethe said, in a piece where he was withstanding
Diderot to the face, _die hoechste Wirkung des Geistes ist, den Geist
hervorzurufen_--the highest influence of mind is to call out mind. This
stimulating provocation of the intelligence was the master faculty in
Diderot. For the sake of that men are ready to pardon all excesses, and
to overlook many offences against the law of Measure. From such a point
of view, Goethe's treatment of Diderot's Essay on Painting (written in
1765, but not given to the world until 1796) is an instructive lesson.
"Diderot's essay," he wrote to Schiller, "is a magnificent work, and it
speaks even more usefully to the poet than to the painter, though for
the painter, too, it is a torch of powerful illumination." Yet Diderot's
critical principle in the essay was exactly opposite to Goethe's; and
when Goethe translated some portions of it, he was forced to add a
commentary of stringent protest. Diderot, as usual, energetically extols
nature, as the one source and fountain of true artistic inspiration.
Even in what looks to us like defect and monstrosity, she is never
incorrect. If she inflicts on the individual some unusual feature, she
never fails to draw other parts of the system into co-ordination and a
sort of harmony with the abnormal element. We say of a man who passes in
the street that he is ill-shapen. Yes, according to our poor rules; but
according to nature, it is another matter. We say of a statue that it is
of fine proportions. Yes, according to our poor rules; but according to
nature?[55]
[55] x. 481, 462.
In the same vein, he breaks out against the practice of drawing from
the academic model. All these academic positions, affected, constrained,
artificial, as they are; all these actions coldly and awkwardly
expressed by some poor devil, and always the same poor devil, hired to
come three times a week, to undress himself, and to play the puppet in
the hands of the professor--what have these in common with the positions
and actions of nature? What is there in common between the man who draws
water from the well in your courtyard, and the man who pretends to
imitate him on the platform of the drawing-school? If Diderot thought
the seven years passed in drawing the model no better than wasted, he
was not any more indulgent to the practice of studying the minutiae of
the anatomy of the human frame. He saw the risk of the artist becoming
vain of his scientific acquirement, of his eye being corrupted, of his
seeking to represent what is under the surface, of his forgetting that
he has only the exterior to show. A practice that is intended to make
the student look at nature most commonly tends to make him see nature
other than she really is. To sum up, mannerism would disappear from
drawing and from colour, if people would only scrupulously imitate
nature. Mannerism comes from the masters, from the academy, from the
school, and even from the antique.[56]
[56] x. 467. For a more respectful view of the antique, and of
Winckelmann's position, see _Salon de 1765_, x. 418.
We may easily believe how many fallacies were discerned in such lessons
as these by the author of _Iphigenie_, and the passionate admirer of
the ancient marbles. Diderot's fundamental error, said Goethe, is to
confound nature and art, completely to amalgamate nature with art. "Now
Nature organises a living, an indifferent being, the Artist something
dead, but full of significance; Nature something real, the Artist
something apparent. In the works of Nature the spectator must import
significance, thought, effect, reality; in a work of Art he will and
must find this already there. A perfect imitation of Nature is in no
sense possible; the Artist is only called to the representation of the
surface of an appearance. The outside of the vessel, the living whole
that speaks to all our faculties of mind and sense, that stirs our
desire, elevates our intelligence--that whose possession makes us happy,
the vivid, potent, finished Beautiful--for all this is the Artist
appointed." In other words, art has its own laws, as it has its own
aims, and these are not the laws and aims of nature. To mock at rules is
to overthrow the conditions that make a painting or a statue possible.
To send the pupil away from the model to the life of the street, the
gaol, the church, is to send him forth without teaching him for what to
look. To make light of the study of anatomy in art, is like allowing the
composer to forget thorough bass in his enthusiasm, or the poet in his
enthusiasm to forget the number of syllables in his verse. Again, though
art may profit by a free and broad method, yet all artistic significance
depends on the More and the Less. Beauty is a narrow circle in which
one may only move in modest measure. And of this modest measure the
academy, the school, the master, above all the antique, are the
guardians and the teachers.[57]
[57] Diderot's _Versuch ueber die Malerei_. Goethe's _Werke_, xxv.
309, etc.
It is unnecessary to labour the opposition between the two great masters
of criticism. Goethe, as usual, must be pronounced to have the last word
of reason and wisdom, the word which comprehends most of the truth of
the matter. And it is delivered in that generous and loyal spirit which
nobody would have appreciated more than the free-hearted Diderot
himself. The drift of Goethe's contention is, in fact, the thesis of
Diderot's Paradox on the Comedian. But the state of painting in
France--and Goethe admits it--may have called for a line of criticism
which was an exaggeration of what Diderot, if he had been in Goethe's
neutral position, would have found in his better mind.[58]
[58] And of course on occasion did actually find. See xi. 101. Sir
Joshua Reynolds, who was too sincere a lover of his art not to be
above mere patriotic prejudice, describes the condition of things.
"I have heard painters acknowledge that they could do better without
nature than with her, or, as they expressed themselves, it only put
them out. Our neighbours, the French, are much in this practice of
extempore invention, and their dexterity is such as even to excite
admiration, if not envy; but how rarely can this praise be given to
their finished pictures!" Twelfth Discourse, p. 105.
There is a passage in one of the Salons which sheds a striking
side-light on the difference between these two great types of genius.
The difference between the mere virtuoso and the deep critic is that, in
the latter, behind views on art we discern far-reaching thoughts on
life. And in Diderot, no less than in Goethe, art is ever seen in its
associations with character, aspiration, happiness, and conduct.
"The sun, which was on the edge of the horizon, disappeared; over
the sea there came all at once an aspect more sombre and solemn.
Twilight, which is at first neither day nor night--an image of our
feeble thoughts, and an image that warns the philosopher to stay in
his speculations--warns the traveller too to turn his steps towards
home. So I turned back, and as I continued the thread of my
thoughts, I began to reflect that if there is a particular morality
belonging to each species, so perhaps in the same species there is
a different morality for different individuals, or at least for
different kinds and collections of individuals. And in order not to
scandalise you by too serious an example, it came into my head that
there is perhaps a morality peculiar to artists or to art, and that
this morality might well be the very reverse of the common
morality. Yes, my friend, I am much afraid that man marches
straight to misery by the very path that leads the imitator of
nature to the sublime. To plunge into extremes--that is the rule
for poets. To keep in all things the just mean--there is the rule
for happiness. One must not make poetry in real life. The heroes,
the romantic lovers, the great patriots, the inflexible
magistrates, the apostles of religion, the philosophers _a toute
outrance_--all these rare and divine insensates make poetry in
their life, and that is their bane. It is they who after death
provide material for great pictures. They are excellent to paint.
Experience shows that nature condemns to misery the man to whom she
has allotted genius, and whom she has endowed with beauty; it is
they who are the figures of poetry. Then within myself I lauded
the mediocrity that shelters one alike from praise and blame; and
yet why, I asked myself, would no one choose to let his sensibility
go, and to become mediocre? O vanity of man!"[59]
[59] x. 124, 125.
Goethe's _Tasso_, a work so full of finished poetry and of charm, is the
idealised and pathetic version of the figure that Diderot has thus
conceived for genius. The dialogues between the hapless poet and
Antonio, the man of the world, are a skilful, lofty, and impressive
statement of the problem that often vexed Diderot. Goethe sympathised
with Antonio's point of view; he had in his nature so much of the spirit
of conduct, of saneness, of the common reason of the world. And in art
he was a lover of calm ideals. In Diderot, as our readers by this time
know, these things were otherwise.
The essay on Beauty in the Encyclopaedia is less fertile than most of
Diderot's contributions to the subject.[60] It contains a careful
account of two or three other theories, especially that of Hutcheson.
The object is to explain the source of Beauty. Diderot's own conclusion
is that this is to be found in "relations." Our words for the different
shades of the beautiful are expressive of notions (acquired by
experience through the senses) of order, proportion, symmetry, unity,
and so forth. But, after all, the real question remains unanswered--what
makes some relations beautiful, and others not so; and the same objects
beautiful to me, and indifferent to you; and the same object beautiful
to me to-day, and indifferent or disgusting to me to-morrow? Diderot
does, it is true, enumerate twelve sources of such diversity of
judgment, in different races, ages, individuals, moods, but their force
depends upon the importation into the conception of beauty of some more
definite element than the bare idea of relation. Some sentences show
that he came very near to the famous theory of Alison, that beauty is
only attributed to sounds and sights, where, and because, they recall
what is pleasing, sublime, pathetic, and set our ideas and emotions
flowing in one of these channels. But he does not get fairly on the
track of either Alison's or any other decisive and marking adjective,
with which to qualify his _rapports_. He wastes some time, moreover, in
trying to bring within the four corners of his definition some uses of
the terms of beauty, which are really only applied to objects by way of
analogy, and are not meant to predicate the beautiful in any literal or
scientific sense.
[60] _Oeuv._, x.
There is no more interesting department of aesthetic inquiry than the
relations of the arts to one another, and the nature of the
delimitations of the provinces of poetry, painting, sculpture, music.
Diderot, from the very beginning of his career, had turned his thoughts
to this intricate subject. In his letter on Deaf Mutes (1751) he had
stated the problem--to collect the common beauties of poetry, painting,
and music; to show their analogies; to explain how the poet, the
painter, and the musician render the same image; to seize the fugitive
emblems of their expression. Why should a situation that is admirable in
a poem become ridiculous in a painting?[61] For instance, what is it
that prevents a painter from reproducing the moment when Neptune raises
his head above the tossing waters, as he is represented in Virgil:
Interea magno misceri murmure pontum.
Emissamque hiemem sensit Neptunus, et imis
Stagna refusa vadis; graviter commotus, et alto
Prospiciens, summa placidum caput extulit unda.
[61] It is to be observed also that he shows true perspicacity in
connecting the difficulty of transforming a poetic into a pictorial
description, with the kindred difficulty of translating a finished
poem in one language into another language. See also xi. 107.
Diderot's answer to the question is an anticipation of the main position
of the famous little book which appeared fifteen years afterwards, and
which has been well described as the Organum of aesthetic cultivation. In
_Laocooen_ Lessing contends against Spence, the author of _Polymetis_
against Caylus, and others of his contemporaries, that poetry and
painting are divided from one another in aim, in effects, in reach, by
the limits set upon each by the nature of its own material.[62] So
Diderot says that the painter could not seize the Virgilian moment,
because a body that is partially immersed in water is disfigured by an
effect of refraction, which a faithful painter would be bound to
reproduce; because the image of the body could not be seen
transparently through the stormy waters, and therefore the god would
have the appearance of being decapitated; because it is indispensable,
if you would avoid the impression of a surgical amputation, that some
visible portion of hidden limbs should be there to inform us of the
existence of the rest.[63] He takes another instance, where a
description that is admirable in poetry would be insupportable in
painting. Who, he asks, could bear upon canvas the sight of Polyphemus
grinding between his teeth the bones of one of the companions of
Ulysses? Who could see without horror a giant holding a man in his
enormous mouth, with blood dripping over his head and breast?
[62] Lessing appears to have been directly led to this by Aristotle.
See Gotschlich's _Lessing's Aristotelische Studien_, p. 120.
[63] _Oeuv._, i. 382, 403.
Among the many passages in which Diderot touches on the differences
between poetry and painting, none is more just and true than that in
which he implores the poet not to attempt description of details: "True
taste fastens on one or two characteristics, and leaves the rest to
imagination. 'Tis when Armida advances with noble mien in the midst of
the ranks of the army of Godfrey, and when the generals begin to look at
one another with jealous eyes, that Armida is beautiful to us. It is
when Helen passes before the old men of Troy, and they all cry out--it
is then that Helen is beautiful. And it is when Ariosto describes Alcina
from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet, that
notwithstanding the grace, the facility, the soft elegance of his verse,
Alcina is not beautiful. He shows me everything; he leaves me nothing to
do; he makes me wearied and impatient. If a figure walks, describe to
me its carriage and its lightness; I will undertake the rest. If it is
stooping, speak to me only of arms and shoulders; I will take all else
on myself. If you do more, you confuse the kinds of work; you cease to
be a poet, and become a painter or sculptor. One single trait, a great
trait; leave the rest to my imagination. That is true taste, great
taste."[64] And then he quotes with admiration Ovid's line of the
goddess of the seas:
Nec brachia longo
Margine terrarum porrexerat Amphitrite.
[64] _Oeuv._, xi. 328.
Quel image! Quels bras! Quel prodigieux mouvement! Quelle figure! and so
forth, after Diderot's manner.
Nobody will compare these detached and fragmentary deliverances with the
full and easy mastery which Lessing, in _Laocoeon_ and its unfinished
supplements, exhibits over the many ramifications of his central idea.
We can only notice that Diderot had a foot on the track along which
Lessing afterwards made such signal progress. The reader who cares to
measure the advantage of Lessing's more serious and concentrated
attention to his subject, may compare the twelfth chapter of _Laocoeon_
with Diderot's criticism on Doyen's painting of the Battle between
Diomede and Aeneas.[65] As we see how near Diderot came to the real and
decisive truths of all these matters, and yet how far he remains from
the full perception of what a little consecutive study must have
revealed to his superior genius, we can only think painfully of his
avowal--"I have not the consciousness of having employed the half of my
strength: _jusqu'a present je n'ai que baguenaude_."
[65] _Salon de 1761_; _Oeuv._, v. 140.
On the great art of music Diderot has said little that is worth
attending to. Bemetzrieder, a German musician, who taught Diderot's
daughter to play on the clavecin, wrote an elementary book called
Lessons on the Clavecin and Principles of Harmony. This is pronounced by
the modern teachers to be not less than contemptible. Diderot, however,
with his usual boundless good nature, took the trouble to set the book
in a series of dialogues, in which teacher, pupil, and a philosopher
deal in all kinds of elaborate amenities, and pay one another many
compliments. It reminds one of the old Hebrew grammar which is couched
in the form of Conversations with a Duchess--"Your Grace having kindly
condescended to approve of the plan that I have sketched. All this your
Grace probably knows already, but your Grace has probably never
attempted," and so forth.
The unwise things that men of letters have written from a good-natured
wish to help their friends, are not so numerous that we need be afraid
of extending to them a good-natured pardon. The beauty of Diderot's
Salons is remarkable enough to cover a multitude of sins in other arts.
There are few other compositions in European literature which show so
well how criticism of art itself may become a fine art.