I
"When I recall Diderot," wrote his friend Meister, "the immense variety of his ideas, the amazing multiplicity of his knowledge, the rapid flight, the warmth, the impetuous tumult of his imagination, all the charm and all the disorder of his conversation, I venture to liken his character to Nature herself, exactly as he used to conceive her—rich, fertile, abounding in germs of every sort ... without any dominating principle, without a master, and without a God." No image more suitable could be found; and his works resemble the man, in their richness, their fertility, their variety, and their disorder. A great writer we can hardly call him, for he has left no body of coherent thought, no piece of finished art; but he was the greatest of literary improvisators.
DENIS DIDEROT, son of a worthy cutler of Langres, was born in 1713. Educated by the Jesuits, he turned away from the regular professions, and supported himself and his ill-chosen wife by hack-work for the Paris booksellers—translations, philosophical essays directed against revealed religion, stories written to suit the appetite for garbage. From deism he advanced to atheism. Arguing in favour of the relativity of human knowledge in his Lettre sur les Aveugles (1749), he puts his plea for atheism into the lips of an English man of science, but the device did not save him from an imprisonment of three months.
In 1745 the booksellers, contemplating a translation of the English "Cyclopædia" of Chambers, applied to Diderot for assistance. He readily undertook the task, but could not be satisfied with a mere translation. In a Prospectus (1750) he indicated the design of the "Encyclopædia" as he conceived it: the order and connection of the various branches of knowledge should be set forth, and in dictionary form the several sciences, liberal arts, and mechanical arts should be dealt with by experts. The homage which he rendered to science expressed the mind of his time; in the honour paid to mechanical toil and industry he was in advance of his age, and may be called an organiser of modern democracy. At his request JEAN LE ROND D'ALEMBERT (1717-83) undertook the direction of the mathematical articles, and wrote the Discours Préliminaire, which classified the departments of human knowledge on the basis of Bacon's conceptions, and gave a survey of intellectual progress. It was welcomed with warm applause. The aid of Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Buffon, Turgot, Quesnay, and a host of less illustrious writers was secured; but the vast enterprise excited the alarms of the ecclesiastical party; the Jesuits were active in rivalry and opposition; Rousseau deserted and became an enemy; D'Alembert, timid, and a lover of peace, withdrew. In 1759 the privilege of publication was revoked, but the Government did not enforce its own decree. Through all difficulties and dangers Diderot held his ground. One day he wrote a fragment of the history of philosophy; the next he was in a workshop examining the construction of some machine: nothing was too great or too small for his audacity or his patience. To achieve the work, tact was needed as well as courage; at times he condescended to disguise his real opinions, striving to weather the storm by yielding to it. In 1765 his gigantic labours were substantially accomplished, though the last plates of the Encyclopédie were not issued until 1772. When all was finished, the scientific movement of the century was methodised and popularised; a barrier against the invasion of the past was erected; the rationalist philosophy, with all its truths and all its errors, its knowledge and its ignorance, had obtained its Summa.
But, besides this co-operative work, Diderot did much, and in many directions, single-handed, flinging out his thoughts with ardent haste, and often leaving what he had written to the mercies of chance; a prodigal sower of good and evil seed. Several of his most remarkable pieces came to light, as it were, by accident, and long after his death. His novel La Religieuse—influenced to some extent by Richardson, whom he superstitiously admired—is a repulsive exposure of conventual life as it appeared to him, and of its moral disorder. Jacques le Fataliste, in which the manner is coarsely imitated from Sterne, a book ill-composed and often malodorous, contains, among its heterogeneous tales, one celebrated narrative, the Histoire de Mme. de la Pommeraye, relating a woman's base revenge on a faithless lover. If anything of Diderot's can be named a masterpiece, it is certainly Le Neveu de Rameau, a satire and a character-study of the parasite, thrown into the form of dialogue, which he handled with brilliant success; it remained unknown until the appearance of a German version (1805), made by Goethe from a manuscript copy.
In his Salons, Diderot elevated and enlarged the criticism of the pictorial art in France. His eye for colour and for contour was admirable; but it is less the technique of paintings that he studies than the subjects, the ideas, and the moral significance. Such criticism may be condemned as literary rather than artistic; it was, however, new and instructive, and did much to quicken the public taste. Diderot pleaded for a return to nature in the theatre; for a bourgeois drama, domestic tragedy and serious comedy, touched with pathos, studied from real life, and inspired by a moral purpose; for the presentation on the stage of "conditions" rather than individual types—that is, of character as modified by social environments and the habits which they produce. He maintained that the actor should rather possess than be possessed by his theme, should be the master rather than the slave of his sensibility.
The examples of dramatic art which Diderot gave in his own plays, the Père de Famille and the Fils Naturel, are poor affectations of a style supposed to be natural, and are patently doctrinaire in their design, laboured developments of a moral thesis. One piece in which he paints himself, Est-il bon? Est-il méchant? and this alone, falls little short of being admirable, and yet it fails of true success.
A coherent system of thought cannot be found in Diderot's writings, but they are pregnant with ideas. He is deist, pantheist, atheist; he is a materialist—one, however, who conceives matter not as inert, but quick with force. He is edifying and sincere in his morality; and presently his morals become the doctrines of an anarchical licence. All the ideas of his age struggle within him, and are never reduced to unity or harmony; light is never separate in his nature from heat, and light and warmth together give rise to thoughts which are sometimes the anticipations of scientific genius; he almost leaps forward to some of the conclusions of Darwin. His great powers and his incessant energy were not directed to worldly prosperity. Diderot was never rich. The Empress Catherine of Russia magnificently purchased his library, and entrusted him with the books, as her librarian, providing a salary which to him was wealth. He travelled to St. Petersburg to thank her in person for her generous and delicate gift. But her imperial generosity was not greater than his own; he was always ready to lavish the treasures of his knowledge and thought in the service of others; no small fragment of his work was a free gift to his friends, and passed under their name; Holbach and Raynal were among his debtors.
His correspondence presents a vivid image of the man and of the group of philosophers to which he belonged; the letters addressed to Mlle. Volland, to whom he was devotedly attached during many years, are frank betrayals of his character and his life. Her loss saddened his last days, but the days of sorrow were few. In July 1784, Diderot died. His reputation and influence were from time to time enhanced by posthumous publications. Other writers of his century impressed their own personalities more distinctly and powerfully upon society; no other writer mingled his genius so completely with external things, or responded so fully and variously to the stimulus of the spirit of his age.