ST. PETERSBURG AND THE HAGUE.
"What would you say of the owner of an immense palace, who should spend
all his life in going up from the cellars to the attics, and going down
from attics to cellar, instead of sitting quietly in the midst of his
family? That is the image of the traveller." Yet Diderot, whose words
these are, resolved at the age of sixty to undertake no less formidable
a journey than to the remote capital on the shores of the Neva. It had
come into his head, or perhaps others had put it into his head, that he
owed a visit to his imperial benefactress whose bounty had rendered life
easier to him. He had recently made the acquaintance of two Russian
personages of consideration. One of them was the Princess Dashkow, who
was believed to have taken a prominent part in that confused conspiracy
of 1762, which ended in the murder of Peter III. by Alexis Orloff, and
the elevation of Catherine II. to the throne. Her services at that
critical moment had not prevented her disgrace, if indeed they were not
its cause, and in 1770 the Princess set out on her travels. Horace
Walpole has described the curiosity of the London world to see the
Muscovite Alecto, the accomplice of the northern Athaliah, the amazon
who had taken part in a revolution when she was only nineteen. In
England she made a pleasant impression, in spite of eyes of "a very
Catiline fierceness." She was equally delighted with England, and when
she went on from London to Paris, she took very little trouble to make
friends in the capital of the rival nation. Diderot seems to have been
her only intimate. The Princess (1770) called nearly every afternoon at
his door, carried him off to dinner, and kept him talking and declaiming
until the early hours of the next morning. The "hurricanes of his
enthusiastic nature" delighted her, and she remembered for years
afterwards how on one occasion she excited him to such a pitch that he
sprang from his chair as if by machinery, strode rapidly up and down the
room, and spat upon the floor with passion.[66]
[66] _Memoirs of Princess Dashkoff_ (vol. ii.). By Mrs. Bradford, an
English companion and friend of the Princess. (London, 1840.) See
Diderot's account of her, _Oeuv._, xvii. 487. Compare Horace
Walpole's _Letters_, v. 266.
The Prince Galitzin was a Russian friend of greater importance. Prince
Galitzin was one of those foreigners, like Holbach, Grimm, Galiani, who
found themselves more at home in Paris than anywhere else in the world.
Living mostly among artists and men of letters, he became an established
favourite. With Diderot's assistance (1767) he acquired for the Empress
many of the pictures that adorn the great gallery at St. Petersburg,
and Diderot praises his knowledge of the fine arts, the reason being
that he has that great principle of true taste, the _belle ame_.[67] He
wrote eclogues in French, and he attempted the more useful but more
difficult task of writing in the half-formed tongue of his own country
an account of the great painters of Italy and Holland.[68] Diderot makes
the pointed remark about him, that he believed in equality of ranks by
instinct, which is better than believing in it by reflection.[69] It was
through the medium of this friendly and intelligent man that the Empress
had acted in the purchase of Diderot's library. In 1769 he was appointed
Russian minister at the Hague, and his chief ground for delight at the
appointment was that it brought him within reach of his friends in
Paris.
[67] _Oeuv._, xviii. 239.
[68] Grimm, _Cor. Lit._, xv. 18. Diderot, xviii. 251.
[69] _Oeuv._, xix. 250.
Diderot set out on his expedition some time in the summer of 1773--the
date also of Johnson's memorable tour to the Hebrides--and his first
halt was at the Dutch capital, then at the distance of a four days'
journey from Paris. Here he remained for many weeks, in some doubt
whether or not to persist in the project of a more immense journey. He
passed most of his time with the Prince and Princess Galitzin, as
between a good brother and a good sister. Their house, he notices, had
once been the residence of Barneveldt. Men like Diderot are the last
persons to think of their own historic position, else we might have
expected to find him musing on the saving shelter which this land of
freedom and tolerance had given to more than one of his great precursors
in the literature of emancipation. Descartes had found twenty years of
priceless freedom (1629-1649) among the Dutch burghers. The ruling ideas
of the Encyclopaedia came in direct line from Bayle (_d. 1706_) and Locke
(_d. 1704_), and both Bayle and Locke, though in different measures,
owed their security to the stout valour with which the Dutch defended
their own land, and taught the English how to defend theirs, against the
destructive pretensions of Catholic absolutism. Of these memories
Diderot probably thought no more than Descartes thought about the
learning of Grotius or the art of Rembrandt. It was not the age, nor was
his the mind, for historic sentimentalism. "The more I see of this
country," he wrote to his good friends in Paris, "the more I feel at
home in it. The soles, fresh herrings, turbot, perch, are all the best
people in the world. The walks are charming; I do not know whether the
women are all very sage, but with their great straw hats, their eyes
fixed on the ground, and the enormous fichus spread over their bosoms,
they have the air of coming back from prayers or going to confession."
Diderot did not fail to notice more serious things than this. His
remarks on the means of travelling with most profit are full of sense,
and the account which he wrote of Holland shows him to have been as
widely reflective and observant as we should have expected him to
be.[70] It will be more convenient to say something on this in
connection with the stay which he again made at the Hague on his return
from his pilgrimage to Russia.
[70] _Oeuv._, xviii. 365, 471.
After many hesitations the die was cast. Nariskin, a court chamberlain,
took charge of the philosopher, and escorted him in an excellent
carriage along the dreary road that ended in the capital reared by Peter
the Great among the northern floods. It is worth while to digress for a
few moments, to mark shortly the difference in social and intellectual
conditions between the philosopher's own city and the city for which he
was bound, and to touch on the significance of his journey. We can only
in this way understand the position of the Encyclopaedists in Europe, and
see why it is interesting to the student of the history of Western
civilisation to know something about them. It is impossible to have a
clear idea of the scope of the revolutionary philosophy, as well as of
the singular pre-eminence of Paris over the western world, until we have
placed ourselves, not only at Ferney and Grandval, and in the parlours
of Madame Geoffrin and Mademoiselle Lespinasse, but also in palaces at
Florence, Berlin, Vienna, and St. Petersburg.
From Holland with its free institutions, its peaceful industry, its
husbanded wealth, its rich and original art, its great political and
literary tradition, to go to Russia was to measure an arc of Western
progress, and to retrace the steps of the genius of civilisation. The
political capital of Russia represented a forced and artificial union
between old and new conditions. In St. Petersburg, says an onlooker,
were united the age of barbarism and the age of civilisation, the tenth
century and the eighteenth, the manners of Asia and the manners of
Europe, the rudest Scythians and the most polished Europeans, a
brilliant and proud aristocracy and a people sunk in servitude. On one
side were elegant fashions, magnificent dresses, sumptuous repasts,
splendid feasts, theatres like those which gave grace and animation to
the select circles of London or Paris: on the other side, shopkeepers in
Asiatic dress, coachmen, servants, and peasants clad in sheepskins,
wearing long beards, fur caps, and long fingerless gloves of skin, with
short axes hanging from their leathern girdles. The thick woollen bands
round their feet and legs resembled a rude cothurnus, and the sight of
these uncouth figures reminded one who had seen the bas-reliefs on
Trajan's column at Rome, of the Scythians, the Dacians, the Goths, the
Roxolani, who had been the terror of the Empire.[71] Literary
cultivation was confined to almost the smallest possible area. Oriental
as Russia was in many respects, it was the opposite of oriental in one:
women were then, as they are still sometimes said to be in Russia, more
cultivated and advanced than men. Many of them could speak half a dozen
languages, could play on several instruments, and were familiar with
the works of the famous poets of France, Italy, and England. Among the
men, on the contrary, outside of a few exceptional families about the
court, the vast majority were strangers to all that was passing beyond
the limits of their own country. The few who had travelled and were on
an intellectual level with their century, were as far removed from the
rest of their countrymen as Englishmen are removed from Iroquois.
[71] Segur's _Mem._, ii. 230.
To paint the court of Catherine in its true colours it has been said
that one ought to have the pen of Procopius. It was a hot-bed of
corruption, intrigue, jealousy, violence, hatred. One day, surrounded by
twenty-seven of her courtiers, Catherine said: "If I were to believe
what you all say about one another, there is not one of you who does not
richly deserve to have his head cut off." A certain princess was
notorious for her inhuman barbarity. One day she discovered that one of
her attendants was with child; in a frenzy she pursued the hapless
Callisto from chamber to chamber, came up with her, dashed in her skull
with a heavy weapon, and finally in a delirium of passion ripped up her
body. When two nobles had a quarrel, they fell upon one another then and
there like drunken navvies, and Potemkin had an eye gouged out in a
court brawl. Such horrors give us a measure of the superior humanity of
Versailles, and enable us also in passing to see how duelling could be a
sign of a higher civilisation. The reigning passions were love of money
and the gratification of a coarse vanity. Friendship, virtue, manners,
delicacy, probity, said one witness, are here merely words, void of all
meaning. The tone in public affairs was as low as in those of private
conduct. I might as well, says Sir G. Macartney, quote Clarke and
Tillotson at the divan of Constantinople, as invoke the authority of
Puffendorf and Grotius here.
The character of the Empress herself has been more disputed than that of
the society in which she was the one imposing personage. She stands in
history with Elizabeth of England, with Catherine de' Medici, with Maria
Theresa, among the women who have been like great men. Of her place in
the record of the creation of that vast empire which begins with Prussia
and ends with China, we have not here to speak. The materials for
knowing her and judging her are only in our own time becoming
accessible.[72] As usual, the mythic elements that surrounded her like
a white fog from the northern seas out of which she loomed like a
portent, are rapidly disappearing, and are replaced by the outlines of
ordinary humanity, with more than the ordinary human measure of
firmness, resolution, and energetic grasp of the facts of her position
in the world.
[72] The Imperial Historical Society are publishing a _Recueil
General_ of documents, many of which shed an interesting light on
Catherine's intercourse with the men of letters. In the Archives of
the House of Woronzow (especially vol. xii.), amid much of what for
our purpose is chaff, are a few grains of what is interesting. M.
Rambaud, the author of the learned work on the Greek Empire in the
Tenth Century, gave interesting selections from these sources in two
articles in the _Revue des deux Mondes_ for February and April,
1877. Besides what is to be gathered from such well-known
authorities as William Tooke, Segur, Dashkoff, there are many
interesting pages in the memoirs of that attractive and interesting
person, the Prince de Ligne. The passages from English and French
despatches I have taken from an anonymous but authentic work
published at Berlin in 1858, _La Cour de la Russie il y a cent ans:
1725-83: extraits des depeches des Ambassadeurs anglais et
francais_. Catherine's own Memoirs, published in London in 1859 by
Alexander Herzen, are perhaps too doubtful.
We must go from the philosophers to the men of affairs for a true
picture. These tell us that she offered an unprecedented mixture of
courage and weakness, of knowledge and incompetence, of firmness and
irresolution; passing in turn from the most opposite extremes, she
presented a thousand diverse surfaces, until at last the observer had to
content himself with putting her down as a consummate comedian. She had
no ready apprehension. Too refined a pleasantry was thrown away upon
her, and there was always a chance of her reversing its drift. No
playful reference to the finances, or the military force, or even to the
climate of her empire, was ever taken in good part.[73] The political
part was the serious part of her nature. Catherine had the literary
tastes, but not the literary skill, of Frederick. She is believed, on
good evidence, to have written for the use of her grandsons not only an
Abridgment of Russian History, but a volume of Moral Tales.[74] The
composition of moral tales was entirely independent of morality. Just
as Lewis XV. had a long series of Chateauroux, Pompadours, Dubarrys, so
Catherine had her Orloffs and Potemkins, and a countless host of obscure
and miscellaneous Wassiltchikows, Zavadowskys, Zoriczes, Korsaks. On the
serious side, Lewis XIV. was her great pattern and idol. She resented
criticism on that renowned memory, as something personal to herself. To
her business as sovereign--_mon petit menage_, as she called the control
of her huge formless empire--she devoted as much indefatigable industry
as Lewis himself had done in his best days. Notwithstanding all her
efforts to improve her country, she was not popular, and never won the
affection of her subjects; but she probably cared less for the opinion
and sentiment of Russia than for the applause of Europe. Tragedy
displeases her, writes the French Minister, and comedy wearies her; she
does not like music; her table is without any sort of exquisiteness; in
a garden she cares only for roses; her only taste is to build and to
drill her court, for the taste that she has for reigning, and for making
a great figure in the universe, is really not so much taste as a
downright absorbing passion.
[73] _Mem. du Prince de Ligne_, p. 101.
[74] Segur, 219.
Gunning, the English charge d'affaires, insists that the motive of all
her patriotic labours was not benevolence, but an insatiable and
unbounded thirst for fame. "If it were not so, we must charge her with
an inconsistency amounting to madness, for undertaking so many immense
works of public utility, such as the foundation of colleges and
academies on a most extensive plan and at an enormous outlay, and then
leaving them incomplete, not even finishing the buildings for them."
They had served the purpose of making foreigners laud the glory of the
Semiramis of the north, and that was enough. The arts and sciences, said
the French Minister, have plenty of academies here, but the academies
have few subjects and fewer pupils. How could there be pupils in a
country where there is nobody who is not either a courtier, a soldier,
or a slave? The Princess Sophie of Anhalt, long before she dreamed of
becoming the Czarina Catherine II., had been brought up by a French
governess, and the tastes that her governess had implanted grew into a
passion for French literature, which can only be compared to the same
passion in Frederick the Great. Catherine only continued a movement that
had already in the reign of her predecessor gone to a considerable
length. The social reaction against German political predominance had
been accompanied by a leaning to France. French professors in art and
literature had been tempted to Moscow, the nobles sent to Paris for
their clothes and their furniture, and a French theatre was set up in
St. Petersburg, where the nobles were forced to attend the performances
under pain of a fine. Absentees and loiterers were hurried to their
boxes by horse-patrols.
Catherine was more serious and intelligent than this in her pursuit of
French culture. She had begun with the books in which most of the salt
of old France was to be found, with Rabelais, Scarron, Montaigne; she
cherished Moliere and Corneille; and of the writers of the eighteenth
century, apart from Voltaire, the author of Gil Blas was her favourite.
Such a list tells its own tale of a mind turned to what is masculine,
racy, pungent, and thoroughly sapid. "I am a Gauloise of the north," she
said, "I only understand the old French; I do not understand the new. I
made up my mind to get something out of your gentry, the learned men in
_ist_: I have tried them; I made some of them come here; I occasionally
wrote to them; they wearied me to death, and never understood me; there
was only my good protector, Voltaire. Do you know it was Voltaire who
made me the fashion?"[75] This was a confidential revelation, made long
after most of the philosophers were dead. We might have penetrated the
secret of her friendship for such a man as Diderot, even with less
direct evidence than this. It was the vogue of the philosophers, and not
their philosophy that made Catherine their friend. They were the great
interest of Europe at this time, just as Greek scholars had been its
interest in one century, painters in another, great masters of religious
controversy in a third. "What makes the great merit of France," said
Voltaire, "what makes its unique superiority, is a small number of
sublime or delightful men of genius, who cause French to be spoken at
Vienna, at Stockholm, and at Moscow. Your ministers, your intendants,
your chief secretaries have no part in all this glory." This vogue of
the philosophers brought the whole literature of their country into
universal repute. In the depths of the Crimea a khan of the Tartars took
a delight in having Tartufe and the Bourgeois Gentilhomme read aloud to
him.[76]
[75] To the Prince de Ligne.
[76] Rambaud, p. 573.
As soon as Catherine came into power (1762), she at once applied herself
to make friends in this powerful region. It was a matter of course that
she should begin with the omnipotent pontiff at Ferney. Graceful verses
from Voltaire were as indispensable an ornament to a crowned head as a
diadem, and Catherine answered with compliments that were perhaps more
sincere than his verses. She wonders how she can repay him for a bundle
of books that he had sent to her, and at last bethinks herself that
nothing will please the lover of mankind so much as the introduction of
inoculation into the great empire; so she sends for Dr. Dimsdale from
England, and submits to the unfamiliar rite in her own sacred person.
Presents of furs are sent to the hermit of the Alps, and he is told how
fortunate the imperial messenger counts himself in being despatched to
Ferney. What flattered Voltaire more than furs was Catherine's
promptitude and exactness in keeping him informed of her military and
political movements against Turkey. It made him a centre of European
intelligence in more senses than one, and helped him in his lifelong
battle to pose, in his letters at least, as the equal of his friend, the
King of Prussia. For D'Alembert the Empress professed an admiration only
less than she felt for Voltaire. She was eager that he should come to
Russia to superintend the instruction of the young Grand Duke. But
D'Alembert was too prudent to go to St. Petersburg, as he was too
prudent to go to Berlin. Montesquieu had died five years before her
accession, but his influence remained. She habitually called the Spirit
of Laws the breviary of kings, and when she drew up her Instruction for
a new code, she acknowledged how much she had pillaged from Montesquieu.
"I hope," she said, "that if from the other world he sees me at work, he
will forgive my plagiarism for the sake of the twenty millions of men
who will benefit by it." In truth the twenty millions of men got very
little benefit indeed by the code. Montesquieu's own method might have
taught her that not even absolute power can force the civil system of
free labour into a society resting on serfdom. But it is not surprising
that Catherine was no wiser than more democratic reformers who had drunk
from the French springs. Or probably she had a lower estimate in her own
heart of the value of her code for practical purposes than it suited her
to disclose to a Parisian philosopher.
Catherine did not forget that, though the French at this time were
pre-eminent in the literature of new ideas, yet there were meritorious
and useful men in other countries. One of her correspondents was
Zimmermann of Hanover, whose essay on Solitude the shelves of no
second-hand bookseller's shop is ever without. She had tried hard to
bribe Beccaria to leave Florence for St. Petersburg. She succeeded in
persuading Euler to return to a capital whither he had been invited many
years before by the first Catherine, and where he now remained.
Both Catherine's position and her temperament made the society of her
own sex of little use or interest to her. "I don't know whether it is
custom or inclination," she wrote, "but somehow I can never carry on
conversation except with men. There are only two women in the world with
whom I can talk for half an hour at once." Yet among her most intimate
correspondents was one woman well known in the Encyclopaedic circle. She
kept up an active exchange of letters with Madame Geoffrin--that
interesting personage, who though belonging to the bourgeoisie, and
possessing not a trace of literary genius, yet was respectfully courted
not only by Catherine, but by Stanislas, Gustavus, and Joseph II.[77]
[77] See M. Mouy's Introduction to her Correspondence with
Stanislas.
On the whole then we must regard Catherine's European correspondence as
at least in some measure the result of political calculation. Its
purposes, as has been said, were partly those to which in our own times
some governments devote a Reptile-fund. There is a letter from the
Duchesse de Choiseul to Madame du Deffand, her intimate friend, and the
friend of so many of the literary circle, in which the secret of the
relations between Catherine and the men of letters is very plainly told.
"All that," she writes--protection of arts and sciences--"is mere luxury
and a caprice of fashion in our age. All such pompous jargon is the
product of vanity, not of principles or of reflection.... The Empress of
Russia has another object in protecting literature; she has had sense
enough to feel that she had need of the protection of the men of
letters. She has flattered herself that their base praises would cover
with an impenetrable veil in the eyes of her contemporaries and of
posterity, the crimes with which she has astonished the universe and
revolted humanity.... The men of letters, on the other hand, flattered,
cajoled, caressed by her, are vain of the protection that they are able
to throw over her, and dupes of the coquetries that she lavishes on
them. These people who say and believe that they are the instructors of
the masters of the world, sink so low as actually to take a pride in the
protection that this monster seems in her turn to accord to them, simply
because she sits on a throne."[78]
[78] _Corresp. Complete de Mdme. du Deffand_, i. 115. (Ed. 1877.)
June, 1767.
In short, the monarchs of the north understood and used the new forces
of the men of letters, whom their own sovereign only recognised to
oppress. The contrast between the liberalism of the northern sovereigns,
and the obscurantism of the court of France, was never lost from sight.
Marmontel's _Belisarius_ was condemned by the Sorbonne, and burnt at
the foot of the great staircase of the Palace of Justice; in Russia a
group of courtiers hastened to translate it, and the Empress herself
undertook one chapter of the work. Diderot, who was not allowed to enter
the French Academy, was an honoured guest at the Russian palace. For all
this Catherine was handsomely repaid. When Diderot visited St.
Petersburg, Voltaire congratulated the Empress on seeing that unique
man; but Diderot is not, he added, "the only Frenchman who is an
enthusiast for your glory. We are lay missionaries who preach the
religion of Saint Catherine, and we can boast that our church is
tolerably universal."[79] We have already seen Catherine's generosity in
buying Diderot's books, and paying him for guarding them as her
librarian. "I should never have expected," she says, "that the purchase
of a library would bring me so many fine compliments; all the world is
bepraising me about M. Diderot's library. But now confess, you to whom
humanity is indebted for the strong support that you have given to
innocence and virtue in the person of Calas, that it would have been
cruel and unjust to separate a student from his books."[80] "Ah, madam,"
replies the most graceful of all courtiers, "let your imperial majesty
forgive me; no, you are not the aurora borealis; you are assuredly the
most brilliant star of the north, and never was there one so beneficent
as you. Andromeda, Perseus, Callisto are not your equals. All these
stars would have left Diderot to die of starvation. He was persecuted in
his own country, and your benefactions came thither to seek him! Lewis
XIV. was less munificent than your majesty: he rewarded merit in foreign
countries, but other people pointed it out to him, whereas you, madame,
go in search of it and find it for yourself. Your generous pains to
establish freedom of conscience in Poland are a piece of beneficence
that the human race must ever celebrate."[81]
[79] November 1, 1773.
[80] November 1766.
[81] December 22, 1766.
When the first Partition of Poland took place seven years later,
Catherine found that she had not cultivated the friendship of the French
philosophers to no purpose. The action of the dominant party in Poland
enabled Catherine to take up a line which touched the French
philosophers in their tenderest part. The Polish oligarchy was Catholic,
and imposed crushing disabilities on the non-Catholic part of the
population. "At the slightest attempt in favour of the non-Catholics,"
King Stanislas writes to Madame Geoffrin, of the Diet of 1764, "there
arose such a cry of fanaticism! The difficulty as to the naturalisation
of foreigners, the contempt for _roturiers_ and the oppression of them,
and Catholic intolerance, are the three strongest national prejudices
that I have to fight against in my countrymen; they are at bottom good
folk, but their education and ignorance render them excessively stubborn
on these three heads."[82] Poland in short reproduced in an aggravated
and more barbaric form those evils of Catholic feudalism, in which the
philosophers saw the arch-curse of their own country. Catherine took the
side of the Dissidents, and figured as the champion of religious
toleration. Toleration was chief among the philosophic watchwords, and
seeing that great device on her banners, the Encyclopaedic party asked no
further questions. So, with the significant exception of Rousseau, they
all abstained from the cant about the Partition which has so often been
heard from European liberals in later days. And so with reference to
more questionable transactions of an earlier date, no one could guess
from the writings of the philosophers that Catherine had ever been
suspected of uniting with her husband in a plot to poison the Empress
Elizabeth, and then uniting with her lover in a plot to strangle her
husband. "I am quite aware," said Voltaire, "that she is reproached with
some bagatelles in the matter of her husband, but these are family
affairs with which I cannot possibly think of meddling."
[82] _Corresp._, pp. 135, 144, etc.
One curious instance of Catherine's sensibility to European opinion is
connected with her relations to Diderot. Rulhiere, afterwards well known
in literature as a historian, began life as secretary to Breteuil, in
the French embassy at St. Petersburg. An eyewitness of the tragedy which
seated Catherine on the throne, he wrote an account of the events of the
revolution of 1762. This piquant narrative, composed by a young man who
had read Tacitus and Sallust was circulated in manuscript among the
salons of Paris (1768). Diderot had warned Rulhiere that it was
infinitely dangerous to speak about princes, that not everything that is
true is fit to be told, that he could not be too careful of the feelings
of a great sovereign who was the admiration and delight of her people.
Catherine pretended that a mere secretary of an embassy could know very
little about the real springs and motives of the conspiracy. Diderot had
described the manuscript as painting her in a commanding and imperious
attitude. "There was nothing of that sort," she said; "it was only a
question of perishing with a madman, or saving oneself with the
multitude who insisted on coming to the rescue." What she saw was that
the manuscript must be bought, and she did her best first to buy the
author and then, when this failed, to have him locked up in the
Bastille. She succeeded in neither. The French government were not sorry
to have a scourge to their hands. All that Diderot could procure from
Rulhiere was a promise that the work should not be published during the
Empress's lifetime. It was actually given to the world in 1797. When
Diderot was at St. Petersburg, the Empress was importunate to know the
contents of the manuscript, which he had seen, but of which she was
unable to procure a copy. "As far as you are concerned," he said, "if
you attach great importance, Madame, to the decencies and virtues, the
worn-out rags of your sex, this work is a satire against you; but if
large views and masculine and patriotic designs concern you more, the
author depicts you as a great princess." The Empress answered that this
only increased her desire to read the book. Diderot himself truly enough
described it as a historic romance, containing a mixed tissue of lies
and truths that posterity would compare to a chapter of Tacitus.[83]
Perhaps the only piece of it that posterity will really value is the
page in which the writer describes Catherine's personal appearance; her
broad and open brow, her large and slightly double chin, her hair of
resplendent chestnut, her eyes of a brilliant brown into which the
reflections of the light brought shades of blue. "Pride," he says, "is
the true characteristic of her physiognomy. The amiability and grace
which are there too only seem to penetrating eyes to be the effect of an
extreme desire to please, and these seductive expressions somehow let
the design of seducing be rather too clearly seen."
[83] _Satire I. sur les caracteres, etc. Oeuv._, vi. 313.
The first Frenchman whom Catherine welcomed in person to her court was
Falconet, of whose controversy with the philosopher we shall have a few
words to say in a later chapter. This introduction to her was due to
Diderot. She had entreated him to find for her a sculptor who would
undertake a colossal statue of Peter the Great. Falconet was at the
height of his reputation in his own country; in leaving it he seems to
have been actuated by no other motive than the desire of an opportunity
of erecting an immense monument of his art, though Diderot's eloquence
was not wanting. Falconet had the proverbial temperament of artistic
genius. Diderot called him the Jean Jacques of sculpture. He had none of
the rapacity for money which has distinguished so many artists in their
dealings with foreign princes, but he was irritable, turbulent,
restless, intractable. He was a chivalrous defender of poorer brethren
in art, and he was never a respecter of persons. His feuds with Betzki,
the Empress's faithful factotum, were as acrid as the feuds between
Voltaire and Maupertuis. Betzki had his own ideas about the statue that
was to do honour to the founder of the Empire, and he insisted that the
famous equestrian figure of Marcus Aurelius should be the model.
Falconet was a man of genius, and he retorted that what might be good
for Marcus Aurelius would not be good for Peter the Great. The courtly
battle does not concern us, though some of its episodes offer tempting
illustrations of biting French malice. Falconet had his own way, and
after the labour of many years, a colossus of bronze bestrode a charger
rearing on a monstrous mass of unhewn granite. Catherine took the
liveliest interest in her artist's work, frequently visiting his studio,
and keeping up a busy correspondence. With him, as with the others, she
insisted that he should stand on no ceremony, and should not spin out
his lines with epithets on which she set not the smallest value. She may
be said to have encouraged him to pester her with a host of his obscure
countrymen in search of a living, and a little colony of Frenchmen whose
names tell us nothing, hung about the Russian capital. Diderot's
account of this group of his countrymen at St. Petersburg recalls the
picture of a corresponding group at Berlin. "Most of the French who are
here rend and hate one another, and bring contempt both on themselves
and their nation: 'tis the most unworthy set of rascals that you can
imagine."[84]
[84] _Oeuv._, xx. 58.
Diderot reached St. Petersburg towards the end of 1773, and he remained
some five months, until the beginning of March, 1774. His impulsive
nature was shocked by a chilly welcome from Falconet, but at the palace
his reception was most cordial, as his arrival had been eagerly
anticipated. The Empress always professed to detest ceremony and state.
In a letter to Madame Geoffrin she insists, as we have already seen her
doing with Falconet, on being treated to no oriental prostrations, as if
she were at the court of Persia. "There is nothing in the world so ugly
and detestable as greatness. When I go into a room, you would say that I
am the head of Medusa: everybody turns to stone. I constantly scream
like an eagle against such ways; yet the more I scream, the less are
they at their ease.... If you came into my room, I should say to
you,--Madame, be seated; let us chatter at our ease. You would have a
chair in front of me; there would be a table between us. _Et puis des
batons rompus, tant et plus, c'est mon fort._"
This is an exact description of her real behaviour to Diderot. On most
days he was in her society from three in the afternoon until five or
six. Etiquette was banished. Diderot's simplicity and vehemence were as
conspicuous and as unrestrained at Tsarskoe-selo as at Grandval or the
Rue Taranne. If for a moment the torrent of his improvisation was
checked by the thought that he was talking to a great lady, Catherine
encouraged him to go on. "_Allons_," she cried, "_entre hommes tout est
permis_." The philosopher in the heat of exposition brought his hands
down upon the imperial knees with such force and iteration, that
Catherine complained that he made them black and blue. She was sometimes
glad to seek shelter from such zealous enforcement of truth, behind a
strong table. Watchful diplomatists could not doubt that such interviews
must have reference to politics. Cathcart, the English ambassador,
writes to his government that M. Diderot is still with the Empress at
Tsarskoe-selo, "pursuing his political intrigues." And, amazing as it
may seem, the French minister and the French ambassador both of them
believed that they had found in this dreaming rhapsodical genius a
useful diplomatic instrument. "The interviews between Catherine and
Diderot follow one another incessantly, and go on from day to day. He
told me, and I have reasons for believing that he is speaking the truth,
that he has painted the danger of the alliance of Russia with the King
of Prussia, and the advantage of an alliance with us. The Empress, far
from blaming this freedom, encouraged him by word and gesture. 'You are
not fond of that prince,' she said to Diderot. 'No,' he replied, 'he is
a great man, but a bad king, and a dealer in counterfeit coin.' 'Oh,'
said she laughing, 'I have had my share of his coin.'"
The first Partition of Poland had been finally consummated in the Polish
Diet in the autumn of 1773, a few weeks before Diderot's arrival at St.
Petersburg. Lewis XV., now drawing very near to his end, and
D'Aiguillon, his minister, had some uneasiness at this opening of the
great era of territorial revolution, and looked about in a shiftless way
for an ally against Russia and Prussia. England sensibly refused to
stir. Then France, as we see, was only anxious to detach Catherine from
Frederick. All was shiftless and feeble, and the French government can
have known little of the Empress, if they thought that Diderot was the
man to affect her strong and positive mind. She told Segur in later
years what success Diderot had with her as a politician.
"I talked much and frequently with him," said Catherine, "but with more
curiosity than profit. If I had believed him, everything would have been
turned upside down in my kingdom; legislation, administration,
finances--all to be turned topsy-turvy to make room for impracticable
theories. Yet as I listened more than I talked, any witness who happened
to be present, would have taken him for a severe pedagogue, and me for
his humble scholar. Probably he thought so himself, for after some time,
seeing that none of these great innovations were made which he had
recommended, he showed surprise and a haughty kind of dissatisfaction.
Then speaking openly, I said to him: _Mr. Diderot, I have listened with
the greatest pleasure to all that your brilliant intelligence has
inspired; and with all your great principles, which I understand very
well, one would make fine books, but very bad business. You forget in
all your plans of reform the difference in our positions; you only work
on paper, which endures all things; it opposes no obstacle either to
your imagination or to your pen. But I, poor Empress as I am, work on
the human skin, which is irritable and ticklish to a very different
degree._ I am persuaded that from this moment he pitied me as a narrow
and vulgar spirit. For the future he only talked about literature, and
politics vanished from our conversation."[85]
[85] Segur, iii. 34.
Catherine was mistaken, as we shall see, in supposing that Diderot ever
thought her less than the greatest of men. Cathcart, the English
ambassador, writes in a sour strain: "All his letters are filled with
panegyrics of the Empress, whom he depicts as above humanity. His
flatteries of the Grand Duke have been no less gross, but be it said to
the young prince's honour, he has shown as much contempt for such
flatteries as for the mischievous principles of this pretended
philosopher."
Frederick tells D'Alembert that though the Empress overwhelms Diderot
with favours, people at St. Petersburg find him tiresome and
disputatious, and "talking the same rigmarole over and over again." In
her letters to Voltaire, Catherine lets nothing of this be seen. She
finds Diderot's imagination inexhaustible, and ranks him among the most
extraordinary men that have ever lived; she delights in his
conversation, and his visits have given her the most uncommon pleasure.
All this was perhaps true enough. Catherine probably rated the
philosopher at his true worth as a great talker and a singular and
original genius, but this did not prevent her, any more than it need
prevent us, from seeing the limits and measure. She was not one of the
weaker heads who can never be content without either wholesale
enthusiasm or wholesale disparagement.
Diderot had a companion who pleased her better than Diderot himself.
Grimm came to St. Petersburg at this time to pay his first visit, and
had a great success. "The Empress," wrote Madame Geoffrin to King
Stanislas, "lavished all her graces on Grimm. And he has everything that
is needed to make him worthy of them. Diderot has neither the fineness
of perception, nor the delicate tact that Grimm has, and so he has not
had the success of Grimm. Diderot is always in himself, and sees nothing
in other people that has not some reference to himself. He is a man of a
great deal of understanding, but his nature and turn of mind make him
good for nothing, and, more than that, would make him a very dangerous
person in any employment. Grimm is quite the contrary."[86]
[86] Mouy's _Corresp. du roi Stanislas_, p. 501.
In truth, as we have said before, Grimm was one of the shrewdest heads
in the Encyclopaedic party; he had much knowledge, a judgment both solid
and acute, and a certain easy fashion of social commerce, free from
raptures and full of good sense. Yet he was as devoted and ecstatic in
his feelings about the Empress as his more impetuous friend. "Here," he
says, "was no conversation of leaps and bounds, in which idleness
traverses a whole gallery of ideas that have no connection with one
another, and weariness draws you away from one object to skim a dozen
others. They were talks in which all was bound together, often by
imperceptible threads, but all the more naturally, as not a word of what
was to be said had been led up to or prepared beforehand." Grimm cannot
find words to describe her verve, her stream of brilliant sallies, her
dashing traits, her eagle's _coup d'oeil_. No wonder that he used to
quit her presence so electrified as to pass half the night in marching
up and down his room, beset and pursued by all the fine and marvellous
things that had been said. How much of all this is true, and how much of
it is the voice of the bewildered courtier, it might be hard to decide.
But the rays of the imperial sun did not so far blind his prudence, as
to make him accept a pressing invitation to remain permanently in
Catherine's service. When Diderot quitted St. Petersburg, Grimm went to
Italy. After an interlude there, he returned to Russia and was at once
restored to high favour. When the time came for him to leave her, the
Empress gave him a yearly pension of two thousand roubles, or about ten
thousand livres, and with a minute considerateness that is said not to
be common among the great, she presently ordered that it should be paid
in such a form that he should not lose on the exchange between France
and Russia. Whether she had a special object in keeping Grimm in good
humour, we hardly know. What is certain is that from 1776 until the fall
of the French monarchy she kept up a voluminous correspondence with him,
and that he acted as an unofficial intermediary between her and the
ministers at Versailles. Every day she wrote down what she wished to say
to Grimm, and at the end of every three months these daily sheets were
made into a bulky packet and despatched to Paris by a special courier,
who returned with a similar packet from Grimm. This intercourse went on
until the very height of the Revolution, when Grimm at last, in
February, 1792, fled from Paris. The Empress's helpful friendship
continued to the end of her life (1796).[87]
[87] _Memoire Historique_, printed in vol. i. of the new edition
(1877) of the Correspondence of Grimm and Diderot, by M. Maurice
Tourneux.
Diderot arrived at the Hague on his return from Russia in the first week
of April (1774), after making a rapid journey of seven hundred leagues
in three weeks and a day. D'Alembert had been anxious that Frederick of
Prussia should invite Diderot to visit him at Berlin. Frederick had told
him that, intrepid reader as he was, he could not endure to read
Diderot's books. "There reigns in them a tone of self-sufficiency and
an arrogance which revolt the instinct of my freedom. It was not in such
a style that Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Gassendi, Bayle, and
Newton wrote." D'Alembert replied that the king would judge more
favourably of the philosopher's person than of his works; that he would
find in Diderot, along with much fecundity, imagination, and knowledge,
a gentle heat and a great deal of amenity.[88] Frederick, however, did
not send the invitation, and Diderot willingly enough went homeward by
the northern route by which he had come. He passed Koenigsberg, where, if
he had known it, Kant was then meditating the Critic of Pure Reason. It
is hardly probable that Diderot met the famous worthy who was destined
to deal so heavy a blow to the Encyclopaedic way of thinking, and to
leave a name not less illustrious than Frederick or Catherine. A court
official was sent in charge of the philosopher. The troubles of posting
by the sea-road between Koenigsberg and Memel had moved him to the
composition of some very bad verses on his first journey; and the horror
of crossing the Dwina inspired others that were no better on his return.
The weather was hard; four carriages were broken in the journey. He
expected to be drowned as the ice creaked under his horses' feet at
Riga, and he thought that he had broken an arm and a shoulder as he
crossed the ferry at Mittau. But all ended well, and he found himself
once more under the roof of Prince Galitzin at the Hague. Hence he
wrote to his wife and his other friends in Paris, that it must be a
great consolation to them to know that he was only separated from them
by a journey of four days. That journey was not taken, however, for
nearly four months. Diderot had promised the Empress that he would
publish a set of the regulations for the various institutions which she
had founded for the improvement of her realm. This could only be done,
or could best be done, in Holland. His life there was spent as usual in
the slavery of proof-sheets, tempered by daily bursts of conversation,
rhapsody, discussion, and dreamy contemplation. He made the acquaintance
of a certain Bjoernstaehl, a professor of oriental languages at the
university of Lund in Sweden, and a few pages in this obscure writer's
obscure book contain the only glimpse that we have of the philosopher on
his travels.[89] Diderot was as ecstatic in conversation, as we know him
to have been in his correspondence, in praise of the august friend whom
he had left. The least of his compliments was that she united the charms
of Cleopatra to the soul of Caesar, or sometimes it was, to the soul of
Brutus.
[88] D'Alembert au Roi de Prusse. Feb. 14, 1774.
[89] _Briefe aus seinen auslaendischen Reisen_, iii. 217-233.
(Leipsic, 1780--a German translation from the Swedish.)
"At the Hague," says Bjoernstaehl, "we go about every day with M. Diderot.
He has views extending over an incredibly wide field, possesses a
vivacity that I cannot describe, is pleasant and friendly in
intercourse, and has new and unusual observations to make on every
subject.... Who could fail to prize him? He is so bright, so full of
instruction, has so many new thoughts and suggestions, that nobody can
help admiring him. But willingly as he talks when one goes to him, he
shows to little advantage in large companies, and that is why he did not
please everybody at St. Petersburg. You will easily see the reason why
this incomparable man in such companies, where people talk of fashion,
of clothes, of frippery, and all other sorts of triviality, neither
gives pleasure to others nor finds pleasure himself." And the friendly
Swede rises to the height of generalisation in the quaint maxim, Where
an empty head shines, there a thoroughly cultivated man comes too short.
Bjoernstaehl quotes a saying of Voltaire, that Diderot would have been a
poet if he had not wished to be a philosopher--a remark that was rather
due perhaps to Voltaire's habitual complaisance than to any serious
consideration of Diderot's qualities. But if he could not be a poet
himself, at least he knew Pindar and Homer by heart, and at the Hague he
never stirred out without a Horace in his pocket. And though no poet, he
was full of poetic sentiment. Scheveningen, the little bathing-place a
short distance from the Hague, was Diderot's favourite spot. "It was
there," he writes, "that I used to see the horizon dark, the sea covered
with white haze, the waves rolling and tumbling, and far out the poor
fishermen in their great clumsy boats; on the shore a multitude of women
frozen with cold or apprehension, trying to warm themselves in the sun.
When the work was at an end and the boats had landed, the beach was
covered with fish of every kind. These good people have the simplicity,
the openness, the filial and fraternal piety of old time. As the men
come down from their boats, their wives throw themselves into their
arms, they embrace their fathers and their little ones; each loads
himself with fish; the son tosses his father a codfish or a salmon,
which the old man carries off in triumph to his cottage, thanking heaven
that it has given him so industrious and worthy a son. When he has gone
indoors, the sight of the fish rejoices the old man's mate; it is
quickly cut in pieces, the less lucky neighbours invited, it is speedily
eaten, and the room resounds with thanks to God, and cheerful
songs."[90]
[90] xvii. 449.
These scenes, with their sea-background, their animation, their broad
strokes of the simple, tender, and real in life, may well have been
after Diderot's own heart. He often told me, says Bjoernstaehl, that he
never found the hours pass slowly in the company of a peasant, or a
cobbler, or any handicraftsman, but that he had many a time found them
pass slowly enough in the society of a courtier. "For of the one," he
said, "one can always ask about useful and necessary things, but the
other is mostly, so far as anything useful is concerned, empty and
void."
The characteristics of the European capitals a century ago were believed
to be hit off in the saying, that each of them would furnish the proper
cure for a given defect of character. The over-elegant were to go to
London, savages to Paris, bigots to Berlin, rebels to St. Petersburg,
people who were too sincere to Rome, the over-learned to Brussels, and
people who were too lively to the Hague. Yet the dulness thus charged
against the Hague was not universally admitted. Impartial travellers
assigned to the talk of cultivated circles there a rank not below that
of similar circles in France and England. Some went even farther, and
declared Holland to have a distinct advantage, because people were never
embarrassed either by the levity and sparkling wit of France on the one
hand, nor by the depressing reserve and taciturnity of England on the
other.[91] Yet Holland was fully within the sphere of the great
intellectual commonwealth of the west, and was as directly accessible to
the literary influences of the time as it had ever been. If Diderot had
inquired into the vernacular productions of the country, he would have
found that here also the wave of reaction against French conventions,
the tide of English simplicity and domestic sentimentalism, had passed
into literature. The _Spectator_ and _Clarissa Harlowe_ inspired the
writers of Holland, as they had inspired Diderot himself.[92]
[91] George Forster's _Ansichten vom Niederrhein_, etc. ii. 396
(1790).
[92] Jonckbloet's _Gesch. d. Niederland. Lit._ (German trans.) ii.
502, etc.
In erudition, it was still what, even after the death of Scaliger, it
had remained through the seventeenth century, the most learned state of
Europe; and the elder Hemsterhuys, with such pupils as Ruhnken and
Valckenaer, kept up as well as he could the scholarly tradition of
Gronovius and Graevius. But the eighteenth century was not the century of
erudition. Scholarship had given way to speculation.
Among the interesting persons whom Diderot saw at the Hague, the most
interesting is the amiable and learned son of the elder Hemsterhuys,
himself by the way not Dutch, but the son of a Frenchman. Hemsterhuys
had been greatly interested in what he had heard of Diderot's
character,[93] though we have no record of the impression that was made
by personal acquaintance. If Diderot was playfully styled the French
Socrates, the younger Hemsterhuys won from his friends the name of the
Dutch Plato. The Hollanders pointed to this meditative figure, to his
great attainments in the knowledge of ancient literature and art, to his
mellowed philosophising, to his gracious and well-bred style, as a proof
that their country was capable of developing both the strength and the
sensibility of human nature to their highest point.[94] And he has a
place in the history of modern speculation. As we think of him and
Diderot discussing, we feel ourselves to be placed at a point that seems
to command the diverging streams and eddying currents of the time. In
this pair two great tides of thought meet for a moment, and then flow
on in their deep appointed courses. For Hemsterhuys, born a Platonist to
the core, became a leader of the reaction against the French philosophy
of illumination--of sensation, of experience, of the verifiable. He
contributed a marked current to the mysticism and pietism which crept
over Germany before the French revolution, and to that religious
philosophy which became a point of patriotic honour both in Germany and
at the Russian Court, after the revolutionary war had seemed to identify
the rival philosophy of the Encyclopaedists with the victorious fury of
the national enemy. Jacobi, a chief of the mystic tribe, had begun the
attack on the French with weapons avowedly borrowed from the
sentimentalism of Rousseau, but by and by he found in Hemsterhuys more
genuinely intellectual arguments for his vindication of feeling and the
heart against the Encyclopaedist claim for the supremacy of the
understanding.
[93] _Oeuv. Phil. de Fr. Hemsterhuys_, iii. 141. (Ed. Meyboom.)
[94] Forster, ii. 398. Galiani, _Corresp._ ii. 189.
Diderot's hostess at the Hague is a conspicuous figure in the history of
this movement. Prince Galitzin had married the daughter of Frederick's
field-marshal, Schmettau. Goethe, who saw her (1797) many years after
Diderot was dead, describes her as one of those whom one cannot
understand without seeing; as a person not rightly judged unless
considered not only in connection, but in conflict, with her time. If
she was remarkable to Goethe when fifty years had set their mark upon
her, she was even more so to the impetuous Diderot in all the flush and
intellectual excitement of her youth. It was to the brilliance and
versatility of the Princess Galitzin that her husband's house owed its
consideration and its charm. "She is very lively," said Diderot, "very
gay, very intelligent; more than young enough, instructed and full of
talents; she has read; she knows several languages, as Germans usually
do; she plays on the clavecin, and sings like an angel; she is full of
expressions that are at once ingenuous and piquant; she is exceedingly
kind-hearted."[95] But he could not persuade her to take his philosophy
on trust. Diderot is said, by the Princess's biographer, to have been a
fervid proselytiser, eager to make people believe "his poems about
eternally revolving atoms, through whose accidental encounter the
present ordering of the world was developed." The Princess met his
brilliant eloquence with a demand for proof. Her ever-repeated _Why?_
and _How?_ are said to have shown "the hero of atheism his complete
emptiness and weakness."[96] In the long run Diderot was completely
routed in favour of the rival philosophy. Hemsterhuys became bound to
the Princess by the closest friendship, and his letters to her are as
striking an illustration as any in literature of the peculiar devotion
and admiration which a clever and sympathetic woman may arouse in
philosophic minds of a certain calibre--in a Condillac, a Joubert, a
D'Alembert, a Mill. Though Hemsterhuys himself never advanced from a
philosophy of religion to the active region of dogmatic professions, his
disciple could not find contentment on his austere heights. In the very
year of Diderot's death (1784) the Princess Galitzin became a catholic,
and her son became not only a catholic but a zealous missionary of the
faith in America.
[95] _Oeuv._, xix. 342.
[96] Dr. Katerkamp's _Denkwuerdigkeiten aus dem Leben der Furstinn
Amalie von Gallitzin_, p. 45.
This, however, was not yet. The patriotic Bjoernstaehl was very anxious
that Diderot should go to Stockholm, to see for himself that the
Holstein blood was as noble in Sweden as it was in Russia. Diderot
replied that he would greatly have liked to see on the throne the
sovereign (Gustavus III.) who was so nearly coming to pay him a visit on
his own fourth storey in Paris. But he confessed that he was growing
homesick, and Stockholm must remain unvisited. In September (1774)
Diderot set his face homewards. "I shall gain my fireside," he wrote on
the eve of his journey, "never to quit it again for the rest of my life.
The time that we count by the year has gone, and the time that we must
count by the day comes in its stead. The less one's income, the more
important to use it well. I have perhaps half a score of years at the
bottom of my wallet. In these ten years, fluxions, rheumatisms, and the
other members of that troublesome family will take two or three of them;
let us try to economise the seven that are left, for the repose and the
small happinesses that a man may promise himself on the wrong side of
sixty." The guess was a good one. Diderot lived ten years more, and
although his own work in the world was done, they were years of great
moment both to France and the world. They witnessed the establishment of
a republic in the American colonies, and they witnessed the final stage
in the decay of the old monarchy in France. Turgot had been made
controller-general in the months before Diderot's return, and Turgot's
ministry was the last serious experiment in the direction of orderly
reform. The crash that followed resounded almost as loudly at St.
Petersburg and in Holland as in France itself, and Catherine, in 1792,
ordered all the busts of Voltaire that had adorned the saloons and
corridors of her palace to be thrust ignominiously down into the
cellars.