DIDEROT'S CLOSING YEARS.
At the end of a long series of notes and questions on points in anatomy
and physiology, which he had been collecting for many years, Diderot
wound up with a strange outburst:
"I shall not know until the end what I have lost or gained in this vast
gaming-house, where I shall have passed some threescore years, dice-box
in hand, _tesseras agitans_.
"What do I perceive? Forms. And what besides? Forms. Of the substance I
know nothing. We walk among shadows, ourselves shadows to ourselves and
to others.
"If I look at a rainbow traced on a cloud, I can perceive it; for him
who looks at it from another angle, there is nothing.
"A fancy common enough among the living is to dream that they are dead,
that they stand by the side of their own corpse, and follow their own
funeral. It is like a swimmer watching his garments stretched out on the
shore.
"Philosophy, that habitual and profound meditation which takes us away
from all that surrounds us, which annihilates our own personality, is
another apprenticeship for death."[174]
[174] _Elemens de Physiologie_, _Oeuv._, ix. 428.
This was now to be seen. Diderot, as we have said, came back from his
expedition to Russia in the autumn of 1744, tranquilly counting on half
a score more years to make up the tale of his days. He remained in
temper and habit through this long evening of his life what he had been
in its morning and noontide--friendly, industrious, cheerful, exuberant
in conversation, keenly interested in the march of liberal and
progressive ideas. On his return his wife and daughter found him thin
and altered. A few months of absence so often suffice to reveal that our
friend has grown old, and that time is casting long shadows. Age seems
to have come in a day, like sudden winter. He was as gay and as kindly
as ever. Some of his friends had declared that he would never bethink
himself of returning at all. "Time and space in his eyes," said Galiani,
"are as in the eyes of the Almighty; he thinks that he is everywhere,
and that he is eternal."[175] They had predicted for Diderot at St.
Petersburg the fate of Descartes at the court of Queen Christina. But
the philosopher triumphantly vindicated his character. "My good wife,"
said he, when he had reached the old familiar fourth floor, "prithee,
count my things; thou wilt find no reason for scolding; I have not lost
a single handkerchief."[176]
[175] _Corresp._, ii. 180.
[176] _Oeuv._, i. 54
This cheerfulness, however, did not hide from his friends that he was
subject to a languor which had been unknown before his journey to
Russia. It was not the peevish fatigue that often brings life to an
unworthy close. He remained true to the healthy temper of his prime, and
found himself across the threshold of old age without repining. As the
veteran Cephalus said to Socrates, regrets and complaints are not in a
man's age, but in his temper; and he who is of a happy nature will
scarcely feel the burden of the years.
In 1762 Diderot had written to Mdlle. Voland a page of affecting musings
on the great pathetic theme:
"You ask me why, the more our life is filled up and busy, the less
are we attached to it? If that is true, it is because a busy life
is for the most part an innocent life. We think less about Death,
and so we fear it less. Without perceiving it, we resign ourselves
to the common lot of all the beings that we watch around us, dying
and being born again in an incessant, ever renewing circle. After
having for a season fulfilled the tasks that nature year by year
imposes on us, we grow weary of them, and release ourselves.
Energies fade, we become feebler, we crave the close of life, as
after working hard we crave the close of the day. Living in harmony
with nature, we learn not to rebel against the orders that we see
in necessary and universal execution.... There is nobody among us
who, having worn himself out in toil, has not seen the hour of rest
approach with supreme delight. Life for some of us is only one long
day of weariness, and death a long slumber, and the coffin a bed of
rest, and the earth only a pillow where it is sweet, when all is
done, to lay one's head, never to raise it again. I confess to you
that, when looked at in this way, and after the long endless
crosses that I have had, death is the most agreeable of prospects.
I am bent on teaching myself more and more to see it so."[177]
[177] Letter to Mdlle. Voland, Sept. 23, 1762. xix. 136, 137.
Again, we are reminded by Diderot's words on this last gentle epilogue
to a harassing performance, of Plato's picture of aged Cephalus sitting
in a cushioned chair, with the garland round his brows. "I was in the
country almost alone, free from cares and disquiet, letting the hours
flow on, with no other object than to find myself by the evening as
sometimes one finds one's self in the morning, after a night that has
been busy with a pleasant dream. The years had left me none of the
passions that are our torment, none of the weariness that follows them;
I had lost my taste for all the frivolities that are made so important
by our hope that we shall enjoy them long. I said to myself: If the
little that I have done, and the little that is left for me to do,
should perish with me, what would the human race be the loser? What
should I be the loser myself?"[178]
[178] The dedication of the _Regnes de Claude et de Neron_ to
Naigeon, iii. 9.
This was the mood in which Diderot wrote his singular apology for the
life and character of Seneca. Rosenkranz makes the excellent reflection
that though Diderot attained to a more free comprehension of Greek art,
and especially of Homer, than most of his contemporaries, yet even with
him the Roman element was dominant. It was Horace, Terence, Lucretius,
Tacitus, Seneca, who to the very end came closer to him than any of the
Greeks. The moralising reflection, the satirical tendency, the
declamatory form of the Romans, all had an irresistible attraction for
him.[179] Both Roger Bacon and Francis Bacon had preceded him in
admiration for Seneca, and Montaigne found Cicero tiresome and
unprofitable compared with the author of the Epistles to Lucilius. "When
there comes any misfortune to a European," says the imaginary oriental
of Montesquieu's _Persian Letters_, "his only resource is the reading of
a philosopher called Seneca."[180]
[179] Diderot's _Leben_, ii. 357.
[180] See Mr. Brewer's preface to Roger Bacon, p. 73.; Montaigne's
chapter _Des Livres_, and the _Defense de Seneque et de Plutarque._;
_Let. Pers._, 33.
But Diderot was not a man to admire by halves, and to literary praise of
Seneca's writings he added a thoroughgoing vindication of his career. In
his early days he had referred disparagingly to Seneca,[181] but
reflection or accident had made him change his mind. The cheap severity
of abstract ethics has always abounded against Seneca, and this severity
was what Diderot had all his life found insupportable. Holbach had
induced Lagrange, a young man of letters whom he had rescued from want,
to undertake the translation of Seneca, and when Lagrange died, Holbach
prevailed on Naigeon, Diderot's fervid disciple, to complete and revise
the work, which still remains the best of the French versions. That
done, then both Holbach and Naigeon urged Diderot to write an account
of the philosopher.
[181] _Essai sur le Merite et la Vertu._ _Oeuv._, i. 118, _note_.
The Essay on the Reigns of Claudius and Nero[182] is marked by as much
vehemence, as much sincerity of enthusiasm, as if Seneca had been
Diderot's personal friend. There is a flame, a passion, about it, an
ingenuous air of conviction, which are not common in historical
apologies. It is inevitable, as the composition is Diderot's, that it
should have many a rambling and declamatory page. His paraphrases of
Tacitus are the most curious case in literature of the expansion of a
style of sombre poetic concentration into the style of exuberant
rhetoric. Both Grimm and a Russian princess of the blood urged him even
to translate the whole of Tacitus's works, but it is certain that nobody
in the world had ever less of Tacitean quality. Still the history is
alive. "_I do not compose_," Diderot said in the dedication. "_I am no
author; I read or I converse; I ask questions and I give answers._" The
writer throws himself into the historic situation with the vivid
freshness of a contemporary, and if the criticism is sophistical, at
least the picture is admirably dramatic. Seneca's position as the
minister of Nero seemed exactly one of those cases which always excited
Diderot's deepest interest--a case, we mean, in which the general rules
of morality condemn, but common sense acquits.
[182] The first edition (1778) was entitled _Essai sur la Vie de
Seneque le philosophe, sur ses ecrits, et sur le regne de Claude et
de Neron_. In the second edition (1782) this was changed into _Essai
sur les regnes de Claude et de Neron, et sur la vie et les ecrits de
Seneque_.
Diderot, as we have already pointed out,[183] was always very near to
the position that there is no such thing as an absolute rule of right
and wrong, defining classes of acts unconditionally, but each act must
be judged on its merits with reference to all the circumstances of the
given case. Seneca's career tests this way of looking at things very
severely. His connivance with the minor sensualities of Nero's youth, as
a means of restraining him from downright crime, and of keeping a
measure of order in the government, will perhaps be pardoned by most of
those who realise the awful perils of the Empire. As Diderot says,
nobody blames Fenelon or Bossuet for remaining at the court of Lewis
XIV. in its days of license. But connivance with a king's amours,
however degrading it may be from a certain point of view, is a very
different thing from acquiescence in a king's murder of his mother. Even
here Diderot's impetuosity carries him in two or three bounds over every
obstacle. The various courses open to the minister, after the murder of
Agrippina, are discussed and dismissed. What, after Nero had slain his
mother, was there nothing left to be done by a firm, just, and
enlightened man, with an immense burden of affairs on his back, and
capable by his courage and benevolence, of bearing succour, repairing
misfortunes, hindering depredations, removing the incompetent, and
giving power to men of virtue, knowledge, and ability? If he had only
saved the honour of a single good woman, or the life or fortune of a
single good citizen; if he could bring a day of tranquillity to the
provinces, or cross for a week the designs of the miscreants by whom the
emperor was surrounded, then Seneca would have been blamed, and would
have deserved blame, if he had either retired from court or put an end
to his life.[184] This is all true enough, and if Seneca had been only a
statesman, the world would probably have applauded him for clinging to
the helm at all cost. Unhappily, he was not only a statesman, but a
moralist. The two characters are always hard to reconcile, as perhaps
any parliamentary candidate might tell us. The contrast between lofty
writing and slippery policy has been too violent for Seneca's good fame,
as it was for Francis Bacon's. It is ever at his own proper risk and
peril that a man dares to present high ideals to the world.
[183] Above, vol. ii. chap. i.
[184] iii. 110, 111.
One of the strangest of the many strange digressions in which the Essay
on Claudius and Nero abounds, brings us within the glare of the great
literary quarrel of the century. Soon after Rousseau settled in Paris
for the last time, on his return from England and the subsequent
vagabondage, it was known that he had written the _Confessions_, dealing
at least as freely with the lives of others as with his own. He had even
in 1770 and 1771 given readings of certain passages from them, until
Madame d'Epinay, and perhaps also the Marechale de Luxemburg, prevailed
on the authorities to interfere. No one was angrier than Diderot, and
in the first edition of the Essay, published in the year of Rousseau's
death (1778), he incongruously placed in the midst of his disquisitions
on the philosopher of the first century, a long and acrimonious note
upon the perversities of the reactionary philosopher of the eighteenth.
He was believed by those who talked to him to be in dread of the
appearance of the _Confessions_, and we may accept this readily enough,
without assuming that Diderot was conscious of hidden enormities which
he was afraid of seeing publicly uncovered. Rousseau, as Diderot well
knew, was so wayward, so strangely oblique both in vision and judgment,
that innocence was no security against malice and misrepresentation.
Rousseau's name has never lacked fanatical partisans down to our own
day, and Diderot was attacked by some of the earliest of them for his
note of disparagement. The first part of the _Confessions_--all that
Diderot ever saw--appeared in 1782, and in the same year Diderot
published a second edition of the Essay on Claudius and Nero, so
augmented by replies, inserted in season and out of season, to the
diatribes of the party of Rousseau, that as it now stands the reader may
well doubt whether the substance and foundation of the book is an
apology for Seneca or a vindication of Denis Diderot. As Grimm said, we
have to make up our minds to see the author suddenly pass from the
palace of the Caesars to the garret of MM. Royou, Grosier, and company;
from Paris to Rome, and from Rome back again to Paris; from the reign
of Claudius to the reign of Lewis XV.; from the college of the Sorbonne
to the college of the augurs; to turn now to the masters of the world,
and now to the yelping curs of literature; to see him in his dramatic
enthusiasm making the one speak and the others answer; apostrophising
himself and apostrophising his readers, and leaving them often enough in
perplexity as to the personage who is speaking and the personage whom he
addresses.[185] We may agree with Grimm that this gives an air of
originality to the performance, but such originality is of a kind to
displease the serious student, without really attracting the few readers
who have a taste for rebelling against the pedantries of literary form.
We become confused by the long strain of uncertainty whether we are
reading about the Roman Emperor or the French King; about Seneca,
Burrhus, and Thrasea, or Turgot, Malesherbes, and Necker.
[185] Grimm, _Corr. Lit._, xi. 77.
Diderot's candour, simplicity, happy bonhommie, and sincerity in real
interests raised him habitually above the pettiness, the bustling
malice, the vain self-consciousness, the personalities that infest all
literary and social cliques. It is surprising at first that Diderot, who
had all his life borne the sting of the gnats of Grub Street with decent
composure, should have been so moved by Rousseau, or by meaner
assailants, whom Rousseau himself would have rudely disclaimed. The
explanation seems to lie in this fact of human character, that a man of
Diderot's temperament, while entirely heedless of criticism directed
against his opinions or his public position, is specially sensitive to
innuendoes against his private benevolence and loyalty. An insult to the
force of his understanding was indifferent to him, but an affront to
one's _belle ame_ is beyond pardon. It was hard that a man who had
prodigally thrown away the forces of his life for others should be
charged with malignity of heart and an incapacity for friendship. This
was the harder, because it was the moral fashion of that day to place
friendliness, amiability, the desire to please and to serve, at the very
head of all the virtues. The whole correspondence of the time is
penetrated to an incomparable degree by a caressing spirit; it is
sometimes too elaborate and far-fetched in expression, but it marks a
vivid sociability, and even a true humanity, that softens and harmonises
the sharpness of men's egotism.
Again, though Diderot himself is not ungenerously handled in the
_Confessions_, there are passages about Madame d'Epinay and Madame
d'Houdetot which not only stamp Rousseau with ingratitude towards two
women who had treated him kindly, but which were calculated to make
practical mischief among people still living. All this was atrocious in
itself, and the atrocity seemed more black to Diderot than to others,
because he had for some years known Madame d'Epinay as a friendly
creature, and, above all, because Grimm was her lover. Perhaps we may
add among the reasons that stirred him to pen these diatribes, a
consciousness of the harm that Rousseau's sentimentalism had done to
sound and positive thinking. But this, we may be sure, would be
infinitely less potent than the motives that sprang from Diderot's own
sentimentalism. The quarrel, for all save a few foolish partisans, is
now dead, and we may leave the dust once more to settle thick upon it.
Diderot's own way of reading history is not unworthy of imitation, and
it is capable of application in spirit to private conduct no less than
to the history of great public events. "Does the narrative present me
with some fact that dishonours humanity? Then I examine it with the most
rigorous severity; whatever sagacity I may be able to command, I employ
in detecting contradictions that throw suspicion on the story. It is not
so when an action is beautiful, lofty, noble. Then I never think of
arguing against the pleasure that I feel in sharing the name of man with
one who has done such an action. I will say more; it is to my heart, and
perhaps too it is only conformable to justice, to hazard an opinion that
tends to whiten an illustrious personage, in the face of authorities
that seem to contradict the tenour of his life, of his doctrine, and of
his general repute."[186]
[186] _Oeuv._, iii. 57.
The elaborate outbreak against Rousseau is perhaps Diderot's only breach
of what ought thus to be a rule for all magnanimous men. Diderot, or his
shade, paid the penalty. La Harpe retaliated for some slight wound to
pitiful literary vanity, by a lecture on Seneca in which he raked up
all the old accusations against Seneca's champion. La Harpe, for various
reasons into which we need not now more particularly enter, got the ear
of the European public in the years of reaction after he had himself
deserted his old philosophic friends, and gone over to the conservative
camp. He found the world eager to listen to all that could be said
against men who were believed to have corrupted their age; and his
bitter misrepresentations, not seldom invigorated by lies, were the
origin of much of the vulgar prejudice that has only begun to melt away
in our own generation.
Rousseau died in 1778. The more versatile literary genius of the century
had died a couple of months earlier in the same year. It was not until
the occasion of Voltaire's triumphant visit to Paris, after an absence
of seven-and-twenty years, that he and Diderot at length met. Their
correspondence had been less constant and less cordial than was common
where Voltaire was concerned; but though their sympathy was imperfect,
there was no lack of mutual goodwill and admiration. The poet is said to
have done his best to push Diderot into the Academy, but the king was
incurably hostile, and Diderot was not anxious for an empty distinction.
He had none of that vanity nor eagerness for recognition--pardonable
enough, for that matter--which such distinctions gratify. And he perhaps
agreed with Voltaire himself, who said of academies and parliaments
that, when men come together, their ears instantly become elongated.
After Diderot's return from Russia Voltaire wrote to him: "I am
eighty-three years of age, and I repeat that I am inconsolable at the
thought of dying without ever having seen you. I have tried to collect
around me as many of your children as possible, but I am a long way from
having the whole family.... We are not so far apart, at bottom, and it
only needs a conversation to bring us to an understanding."[187]
[187] Dec. 8, 1776.
Of such conversations we have almost nothing to tell. No sacred bard has
commemorated the salutation of the heroes. We only know that at the end
of their first interview Diderot's facility of discourse had been so
copious that, after he had taken his leave, Voltaire said: "The man is
clever, assuredly; but he lacks one talent, and an essential
talent--that of dialogue." Diderot's remark about Voltaire was more
picturesque. "He is like one of those old haunted castles, which are
falling into ruins in every part; but you easily perceive that it is
inhabited by some ancient sorcerer."[188] They had a dispute as to the
merits of Shakespeare, and Diderot displeased the patriarch by repeating
the expression that we have already quoted (vol. i. p. 330) about
Shakespeare being like the statue of St. Christopher at Notre Dame,
unshapely and rude, but such a giant that ordinary men could pass
between his legs without touching him.[189]
[188] Metra's _Corresp. Secrete_, vi. 292.
[189] See Diderot's _Oeuv._, xix. 465, _note_.
There was one man who might have told us a thousand interesting things
both about Diderot's conversations with Voltaire, and his relations
with other men. This man was Naigeon, to whom Diderot gave most of his
papers, and who always professed, down to his death in 1814, to be
Diderot's closest adherent and most authoritative expounder. Diderot
was, as he always knew and said, less an author than a talker; not a
talker like Johnson, but like Coleridge. If Naigeon could only have
contented himself with playing reporter, and could have been blessed by
nature with the rare art of Boswell. "We wanted," as Carlyle says, "to
see and know how it stood with the bodily man, the working and warfaring
Denis Diderot; how he looked and lived, what he did, what he said."
Instead of which, nothing but "a dull, sulky, snuffling, droning,
interminable lecture on Atheistic Philosophy," delivered with the
vehemence of some pulpit-drumming Gowkthrapple, or "precious Mr. Jabesh
Rentowel." Naigeon belonged to the too numerous class of men and women
overabundantly endowed with unwise intellect. He was acute, diligent,
and tenacious; fond of books, especially when they had handsome margins
and fine bindings; above all things, he was the most fanatical atheist,
and the most indefatigable propagandist and eager proselytiser which
that form of religion can boast. We do not know the date of his first
acquaintance with Diderot;[190] we only know that at the end of
Diderot's days he had no busier or more fervent disciple than Naigeon.
To us, at all events, whatever it may have been to Diderot, the
acquaintance and discipleship have proved good for very little.
[190] The _Biographie Universelle_, after giving 1738 as the date of
Naigeon's birth, absurdly attributes to him the article on _Ame_ in
the Encyclopaedia, which was published in 1752, when Naigeon was
fourteen years old.
Our last authentic glimpse of Diderot is from the pen of a humane and
enlightened Englishman, whose memory must be held in perpetual honour
among us. Samuel Romilly, then a young man of four-and-twenty, visited
Paris in 1781. He made the acquaintance of the namesake who had written
the articles on watch-making in the Encyclopaedia, and whose son had
written the more famous articles on Toleration and Virtue. By this
honest man Romilly was introduced to D'Alembert and Diderot. The former
was in weak health and said very little. Diderot, on the contrary, was
all warmth and eagerness, and talked to his visitor with as little
reserve as if he had been long and intimately acquainted with him. He
spoke on politics, religion, and philosophy. He praised the English for
having led the way to sound philosophy, but the adventurous genius of
the French, he said, had pushed them on before their guides. "You
others," he continued, "mix up theology with your philosophy; that is to
spoil everything, it is to mix up lies with truth; _il faut sabrer la
theologie_--we must put theology to the sword." He was ostentatious,
Romilly says, of a total disbelief in the existence of a God. He quoted
Plato, "the author of all the good theology that ever existed in the
world, as saying that there is a vast curtain drawn over the heavens,
and that men must content themselves with what passes beneath that
curtain, without ever attempting to raise it; and in order to complete
my conversion from my unhappy errors, he read me all through a little
work of his own"--of which we shall presently speak. On politics he
talked very eagerly, "and inveighed with great warmth against the
tyranny of the French government. He told me that he had long meditated
a work upon the death of Charles the First; that he had studied the
trial of that prince; and that his intention was to have tried him over
again, and to have sent him to the scaffold if he had found him guilty,
but that he had at last relinquished the design. In England he would
have executed it, but he had not the courage to do so in France.
D'Alembert, as I have observed was more cautious; he contented himself
with observing what an effect philosophy had in his own time produced on
the minds of the people. The birth of the Dauphin (known afterwards as
Lewis XVII., the unhappy prisoner of the Temple) afforded him an
example. He was old enough, he said, to remember when such an event had
made the whole nation drunk with joy (1729), but now they regarded with
great indifference the birth of another master."[191]
[191] _Memoirs of Sir Samuel Romilly_, i. 63, 179, etc.
It was thus clear to the two veterans of the Encyclopaedia that the
change for which they had worked was at hand. The press literally teemed
with pamphlets, treatises, poems, histories, all shouting from the
house-tops open destruction to beliefs which fifty years before were
actively protected against so much as a whisper in the closet. Every
form of literary art was seized and turned into an instrument in the
remorseless attack on _L'Infame_. The conservative or religious
opposition showed a weakness that is hardly paralleled in the long
history of the mighty controversy. Ability, adroitness, vigour, and
character were for once all on one side. Palissot was perhaps, after
all, the best of the writers on the conservative side.[192] With all his
faults, he had the literary sense. Some of what he said was true, and
some of the third-rate people whom he assailed deserved the assault. His
criticism on Diderot's drama, _The Natural Son_, was not a whit more
severe than that bad play demanded.[193] Not seldom in the course of
this work we have wished with Palissot that the excellent Diderot were
less addicted to prophetic and apocalyptical turns of speech, that there
were less of chaos round his points of burning and shining light, and
that he had less title to the hostile name of the Lycophron of
philosophy.[194] But the comedy of _The Philosophers_ was a scandalous
misrepresentation, introducing Diderot personally on the stage, and
putting into his mouth a mixture of folly and knavery that was as
foreign to Diderot as to any one else in the world. In 1782 the satirist
again attacked his enemy, now grown old and weary. In _Le Satyrique_,
Valere, a spiteful and hypocritical poetaster, is intended partially at
least for Diderot. A colporteur, not ill-named as M. Pamphlet, comes to
urge payment of his bill.
[192] See above, vol. i. p. 362.
[193] _Petites Lettres sur de Grands Philosophes_, ii.
[194] _Oeuv. de Palissot_, i. 445. iv. 244.
Daignez avoir egard a mes vives instances.
Je suis humilie d'y mettre tant de feu:
Mais les temps sont si durs! le comptoir rend si peu!
Imprimeur, Colporteur, Relieur, et Libraire,
Avec tous ces metiers, je suis dans la misere:
Mais j'ai toujours grand soin, malgre ma pauvrete,
De ne peser mon gain qu'au poids de l'equite.
Vous en allez juger par le susdit memoire.
[_Il prend ses lunettes comme pour lire._
VALERE. (_Avec humeur._) Eh, monsieur, finissez.
M. PAMPHLET. C'est trahir votre gloire
Que de vouloir caeher les immortels ecrits
[_Il lit._
Dont vous etes l'auteur. _Les Boudoirs de Paris,_
_On Journal des Abbes._ _L'Espion des Coulisses,_
Ouvrage assez piquant sur les moeurs des actrices.
And the intention of the pleasantry is pointed by a malicious footnote,
to the effect that people who might be surprised that a serious man like
Valere should have written works of this licentious and frivolous kind,
will conceive that in a moment of leisure a philosopher should write
_Les Bijoux Indiscrets_, for instance, and the next day follow it by a
treatise on morality,[195]--as Diderot unhappily had done.
[195] _Le Satyrique_, iii. p. 84. _note_.
Palissot was not so good as Moliere, Boileau, and Pope, as he was
fatuous enough to suppose; but he was certainly better than the
scribbler who asked--
Mais enfin de quoi se glorifie
Ce siecle de mollesse et de Philosophie?
Dites-moi: le Francais a-t-il un coeur plus franc
Plus prodigue a l'etat de son genereux sang,
Plus ardent a venger la plaintive innocence
Contre l'iniquite que soutient la puissance?
Le Francais philosophe est-il plus respecte
Pour la foi, la candeur, l'exacte probite?
Ou sont-ils ces Heros, ces vertueux modeles
Que l'Encyclopedie a couve sous ses ailes?[196]
[196] Metra, vi. 128.
Tiresome doggrel of this kind was the strongest retort that the party of
obscurantism could muster against the vigour, grace, and sparkle of
Voltaire.
The great official champions of the old system were not much wiser than
their hacks in the press. The churchmen were given over to a blind mind.
The great edition of Voltaire's works which Beaumarchais was printing
over the frontier at Kehl, excited their anger to a furious pitch. The
infamous Cardinal de Rohan, archbishop of Strasburg (1781), denounced
the publication as sacrilege. The archbishop of Paris (1785) thundered
against the monument of scandal and the work of darkness. The archbishop
of Vienne forbade the faithful of his diocese to subscribe to it under
pain of mortal sin. In the general assembly of the clergy which opened
in the summer of 1780, the bishops, in memorials to the king, deplored
the homage paid to the famous writer who was "less known for the beauty
of his genius and the superiority of his talents, than for the
persevering and implacable war which for sixty years he had waged
against the Lord and his Christ." They cursed in solemn phrase the
"revolting blasphemies" of Raynal's _History of the Indies_, and
declared that the publication of a new edition of that celebrated book
with the name and the portrait of its author, showed that the most
elementary notions of shame and decency lay in profound sleep.
In the midst of those prolonged cries of distress, we have no word of
recognition that the only remedy for a moral disease is a moral remedy.
The single resource that occurred to their debilitated souls was the
familiar armoury of suppression, menace, violence, and tyranny. "Sire,"
they cried, "it is time to put a term to this deplorable lethargy." They
reminded the king of the declaration of 1757, which inflicted on all
persons who printed or circulated writings hostile to religion, the
punishment of death. But "their paternal bowels shuddered at the sight
of these severe enactments;" all that they sought was plenty of rigorous
imprisonment, ruinous fining, and diligent espionage.[197] If the reader
is revolted by the rashness of Diderot's expectation of the speedy decay
of the belief in a God,[198] he may well be equally revolted by the
obstinate infatuation of the men who expected to preserve the belief in
a God by the spies of the department of police. Much had no doubt been
done for the church in past times by cruelty and oppression, but the
folly of the French bishops, after the reign of Voltaire and the
apostolate of the Encyclopaedia, lay exactly in their blindness to the
fact that the old methods were henceforth impossible in France, and
impossible for ever. How can we wonder at the hatred and contempt felt
by men of the social intelligence of Diderot and D'Alembert for this
desperate union of impotence and malignity?
[197] See for abundant matter of the same kind, M. Rocquain's
_L'Esprit Revolutionnaire avant la Revolution_, bk. x. pp. 382, 390,
etc.
[198] Montesquieu more sensibly had given the Church not more than
five hundred years to live. _Let. Pers._, 117. One hundred and fifty
of them have already passed.
The band of the precursors was rapidly disappearing. Grimm and Holbach,
Catherine and Frederick, still survived.[199] D'Alembert, tended to the
last hour by Condorcet with the lovable reverence of a son, died at the
end of October 1783. Turgot, gazing with eyes of astonished sternness on
a society hurrying incorrigibly with joyful speed along the path of
destruction, had passed away two years before (1781). Voltaire, the
great intellectual director of Europe for fifty years, and Rousseau, the
great emotional reactionist, had both, as we know, died in 1778. The
little companies in which, from Adrienne Lecouvreur, the Marquise de
Lambert, and Madame de Tencin, in the first half of the century, groups
of intelligent men and women had succeeded in founding informal schools
of disinterested opinion, and in finally removing the centre of
criticism and intellectual activity from Versailles to Paris, had now
nearly all come to an end. Madame du Deffand died in 1780, Madame
Geoffrin in 1779, and in 1776 Mdlle. Lespinasse, whose letters will long
survive her, as giving a burning literary note to the vagueness of
suffering and pain of soul. One of Diderot's favourite companions in
older days, Galiani, the antiquary, the scholar, the politician, the
incomparable mimic, the shrewdest, wittiest, and gayest of men after
Voltaire, was feeling the dull grasp of approaching death under his
native sky at Naples. Galiani's _Dialogues on the Trade in Grain_
(1769-70) contained, under that most unpromising title, a piece of
literature which for its verve, rapidity, wit, dialectical subtlety, and
real strength of thought, has hardly been surpassed by masterpieces of a
wider recognition. Voltaire vowed that Plato and Moliere must have
combined to produce a book that was as amusing as the best of romances,
and as instructive as the best of serious books. Diderot, who had a hand
in retouching the _Dialogues_ for the press,[200] went so far as to
pronounce them worthy of a place along with the _Provincial Letters_ of
Pascal, and declared that, like those immortal pieces, Galiani's
dialogues would remain as a model of perfection in their own kind, long
after both the subject and the personages concerned had lost their
interest.[201] The prophecy has not come quite true, for the world is
busy, and heedless, and much the prey of accident and capricious
tradition in the books that it reads. Yet even now, although Galiani
was probably wrong on the special issue between himself and the
economists, it would be well if people would turn to his demolition, as
wise as witty, of the doctrine of absolute truths in political economy.
Galiani's constant correspondent was Madame d'Epinay, the kindly
benefactress of Rousseau a quarter of a century earlier, the friend of
Diderot, the more than friend of Grimm. In 1783 she died, and either in
that year or the next, Mademoiselle Voland, who had filled so great a
space in the life of Diderot. The ghosts and memories of his friends
became the majority, and he consoled himself that he should not long
survive.
[199] Grimm died in 1807, Holbach in 1789, Catherine in 1796, and
Frederick in 1786.
[200] See _Oeuv._, xix. 317, 326.
[201] _Oeuv._, vi. 442, where Diderot gives a sketch of this
interesting man.
The days of intellectual excitement and philanthropic hope seemed at
their very height, but in fact they were over. "Nobody," said
Talleyrand, "who has not lived before 1789, knows how sweet life can
be." The old world had its last laugh over the _Marriage of Figaro_
(April 1784), but in the laugh of Figaro there is a strange ring. Under
all its gaiety, its liveliness, its admirable _naivete_, was something
sombre. It was pregnant with menace. Its fooling was the ironical
enforcement of Raynal's trenchant declaration that "the law is nothing,
if it be not a sword gliding indistinctly over the heads of all, and
striking down whatever rises above the horizontal plane along which it
moves."
Diderot himself is commonly accused of having fomented an atrocious
spirit by the horrible couplet--
Et ses mains ourdiraient les entrailles du pretre,
Au defaut d'un cordon pour etrangler les rois.[202]
[202] "Is it not possible that the virtuous and moderate proposal to
strangle the last Jesuit in the bowels of the last Jansenist might
do something towards reconciling matters?"--Voltaire to Helvetius,
May 11, 1761.
That the verses could have actually excited the spirit of the Terrorists
is impossible, for they were not given to the world until 1795. And in
the second place, so far as Diderot's intention is concerned, any one
who reads the piece from which the lines are taken, will perceive that
the whole performance is in a vein of playful phantasy, and that the
particular verses are placed dramatically in the mouth of a proclaimed
Eleutheromane, or maniac for liberty.[203] Diderot was not likely to
foresee that what he designed for an illustration of the frenzy of the
Pindaric dithyramb, would so soon be mistaken for a short formula of
practical politics.[204]
[203] _Les Eleutheromanes, ou les Furieux de la Liberte._ _Oeuv._,
ix. 16.
[204] It is a curious illustration of the carelessness with which
the so-called negative school have been treated, that so
conscientious a writer as M. Henri Martin (_Hist. de France_, xvi.
146) should have taxed Diderot, among other sinister maxims, with
this, that "the public punishment of a king changes the spirit of a
nation for ever." Now the words occur in a collection of
observations on government, which Diderot wrote on the margin of his
copy of Tacitus, and which are entitled _Principes de Politique des
Souverains_ (1775). Some of the most pungent maxims are obviously
intended for irony on the military and Machiavellian policy of
Frederick the Great, while others on the policy of the Roman
emperors are shrewd and sagacious. The maxim from which M. Martin
quotes is the 147th, and in it the sombre words of his quotation
follow this:--"_Let the people never see royal blood flow for any
cause whatever._ The public punishment of a king," etc.! See
_Oeuv._, ii. 486.
In 1780 his townsmen of Langres paid him a compliment, which showed that
the sage was not without honour in his own country. They besought him to
sit for his portrait, to be placed among the worthies in the town hall.
Diderot replied by sending them Houdon's bronze bust, which was received
with all distinction and honour. Naigeon hints that in the last years of
his life Diderot paid more attention to money than he had ever done
before;[205] not that he became a miser, but because, like many other
persons, he had not found out until the close of a life's experience
that care of money really means care of the instrument that procures
some of the best ends in life. For a moment we may regret that he was
too much occupied in attending to his affairs to take the unwise
Naigeon's wise counsel, that he should devote himself to a careful
revision of all that he had written. Perhaps Diderot's instinct was
right. Among the distractions of old age, he had turned back to his
Letter on the Blind, and read it over again without partiality. He
found, as was natural, some defects in a piece that was written
three-and-thirty years before, but he abstained from attempting to
remove them, for fear that the page of the young man should be made the
worse by the retouching of the old man. "There comes a time," he
reflects, "when taste gives counsels whose justice you recognise, but
which you have no longer strength to follow. It is the pusillanimity
that springs from consciousness of weakness, or else it is the idleness
that is one of the results of weakness and pusillanimity, which disgusts
me with a task that would be more likely to hurt than to improve my
work.
Solve senescentem mature sanus equum, ne
Peccet ad extremum ridendus et ilia ducat."
And so he contented himself with some rough notes of phenomena that were
corroborative of the speculation of his youth.[206]
[205] _Mem. sur la Vie et les Ouvrages de Diderot_, p. 412.
[206] Grimm, _Corr. Lit._, xi. 120.
In the early spring of 1784 Diderot had an attack which he knew to be
the presage of the end. Dropsy set in, and he lingered until the summer.
The priest of Saint Sulpice, the centre of the philosophic quarter, came
to visit him two or three times a week, hoping to achieve at least the
semblance of a conversion. Diderot did not encourage conversation on
theology, but when pressed he did not refuse it. One day when they
found, as two men of sense will always find, that they had ample common
ground in matters of morality and good works, the priest ventured to
hint that an exposition of such excellent maxims, accompanied by a
slight retractation of Diderot's previous works, would have a good
effect on the world. "I daresay it would, monsieur le cure, but confess
that I should be acting an impudent lie." And no word of retractation
was ever made. As the end came suddenly, the priest escaped from the
necessity of denying the funeral rites of the Church.
For thirty years Diderot had been steadfast to his quarters on an upper
floor in the Rue Taranne, and even now, when the physicians told him
that to climb such length of staircase was death to him, he still could
not be induced to stir. It would have been easier, his daughter says, to
effect a removal from Versailles itself. Grimm at length asked the
Empress of Russia to provide a house for her librarian, and when the
request was conceded, Diderot, who could never be ungracious, allowed
himself to be taken from his garret to palatial rooms in the Rue de
Richelieu. He enjoyed them less than a fortnight. Though visibly growing
weaker every day, he did all that he could to cheer the people around
him, and amused himself and them by arranging his pictures and his
books. In the evening, to the last, he found strength to converse on
science and philosophy to the friends who were eager as ever for the
last gleanings of his prolific intellect. In the last conversation that
his daughter heard him carry on, his last words were the pregnant
aphorism that _the first step towards philosophy is incredulity_.
On the evening of the 30th of July 1784 he sat down to table, and at the
end of the meal took an apricot. His wife, with kindly solicitude,
remonstrated. _Mais quel diable de mal veux-tu que cela me fasse?_ he
said, and ate the apricot. Then he rested his elbow on the table,
trifling with some sweetmeats. His wife asked him a question; on
receiving no answer, she looked up and saw that he was dead. He had died
as the Greek poet says that men died in the golden age--[Greek: thneskon
d' hos hypno dedmemenoi], _they passed away as if mastered by sleep_. It
had always been his opinion that an examination of the organs after
death is a useful practice, and his wish that the operation should take
place in his own case was respected. Nothing interesting or remarkable
was revealed, and his remains were laid in the vaults of the church of
Saint Roche.
So the curtain fell upon this strange tragi-comedy of a man of letters.
There is no better epilogue than words of his own:--"We fix our gaze on
the ruins of a triumphal arch, of a portico, a pyramid, a temple, a
palace, and we return upon ourselves. All is annihilated, perishes,
passes away. It is only the world that remains; only time that endures.
I walk between two eternities. To whatever side I turn my eyes, the
objects that surround me tell of an end, and teach me resignation to my
own end. What is my ephemeral existence in comparison with that of the
crumbling rock and the decaying forest? I see the marble of the tomb
falling to dust, and yet I cannot bear to die! Am I to grudge a feeble
tissue of fibres and flesh to a general law, that executes itself
inexorably even on very bronze!"