D’Alembert declined the education of the hereditary Grand Duke, just as he had declined the presidency of the Academy at Berlin; an infidel and almost a materialist by the geometer’s rule, who knows no power but the laws of mathematics, he did not carry into anti-religious strife the bitterness of Voltaire, or the violence of Diderot. “Squelch the thing! you are always repeating to me,” he said to Voltaire on the 4th of May, 1762. “Ah! my good friend, let it go to rack and ruin of itself, it is hurrying thereto faster than you suppose.” More and more absorbed by pure science, which he never neglected save for the French Academy, whose perpetual secretary he had become, D’Alembert left to Diderot alone the care of continuing the Encyclopaedia. When he died, in 1783, at fifty-six years of age, the work had been finished nearly twenty years. In spite of the bad faith of publishers, who mutilated articles to render them acceptable, in spite of the condemnation of the clergy and the severities of the council, the last volumes of the Encyclopaedia had appeared in 1765.
This immense work, unequal and confused as it was, a medley of various and often ill-assorted elements, undertaken for and directed to the fixed end of an aggressive emancipation of thought, had not sufficed to absorb the energy and powers of Diderot. “I am awaiting with impatience the reflections of Pantophile Diderot on Tancrede,” wrote Voltaire: “everything is within the sphere of activity of his genius: he passes from the heights of metaphysics to the weaver’s trade, and thence he comes to the stage.”
The stage, indeed, occupied largely the attention of Diderot, who sought to introduce reforms, the fruit of his own thought as well as of imitation of the Germans, which he had not perhaps sufficiently considered. For the classic tragedies, the heritage of which Voltaire received from the hands of Racine, Diderot aspired to substitute the natural drama. His two attempts in that style, Le Pere de Famille and Le Fils natural, had but little success in France, and contributed to develop in Germany the school already founded by Lessing. An excess of false sensibility and an inflation of expression had caused certain true ideas to fall flat on the French stage.
“You have the inverse of dramatic talent,” said Abbe Arnauld to Diderot; “the proper thing is to transform one’s self into all the characters, and you transform all the characters into yourself.” The criticism did Diderot wrong: he had more wits than his characters, and he was worth more at bottom than those whom he described. Carried away by the richness as well as the unruliness of his mind, destitute as he was of definite and fixed principles, he recognized no other moral law than the natural impulse of the soul. “There is no virtue or vice,” he used to say, “but innate goodness or badness.” Certain religious cravings, nevertheless, sometimes: asserted themselves in his conscience: he had. a glimmering perception of the necessity for a higher rule and law. “O God, I know not whether Thou art,” he wrote in his Interpretation de la Nature, “but I will think as if Thou didst see into my soul, I will act as if I were in Thy presence.”
A strange illusion on the part of the philosopher about the power of ideas as well as about the profundity of evil in the human heart! Diderot fancied he could regulate his life by a perchance, and he was constantly hurried away by the torrent of his passion into a violence of thought and language foreign to his natural benevolence. It was around his name that the philosophic strife had waxed most fierce: the active campaign undertaken by his friends to open to him the doors of the French Academy remained unsuccessful. “He has too many enemies,” said Louis XV. “his election shall not be sanctioned.” Diderot did not offer himself; he set out for St. Petersburg; the Empress Catherine had loaded him with kindnesses. Hearing of the poverty of the philosopher who was trying to sell his library to obtain a dower for his daughter, she bought the books, leaving the enjoyment of them to Diderot, whom she appointed her librarian, and, to secure his maintenance in advance, she had a sum of fifty thousand livres remitted to him. “So here I am obliged, in conscience, to live fifty years,” said Diderot.
He passed some months in Russia, admitted several hours a day to the closet of the empress, chatting with a frankness and a freedom which sometimes went to the extent of license. Catherine II. was not alarmed. “Go on,” she would say; “amongst men anything is allowable.” When the philosopher went away, he shed hot tears, and “so did she, almost,” he declares. He refused to go to Berlin; absolute power appeared to him more arbitrary and less indulgent in the hands of Frederick than with Catherine. “It is said that at Petersburg Diderot is considered a tiresome reasoner,” wrote the King of Prussia to D’ Alembert in January, 1774; “he is incessantly harping on the same things. All I know is that I couldn’t stand the reading of his, books, intrepid reader as I am; there is a self-sufficient tone and an arrogance in them which revolts my sense of freedom.” The same sense of freedom which the king claimed for himself whilst refusing it to the philosopher, the philosopher, in his turn, refused to Christians not less intolerant than he. The eighteenth century did not practise on its own account that respect for conscience which it, nevertheless, powerfully and to its glory promoted.
Diderot died on the 29th of July, 1784, still poor, an invalid for some time past, surrounded to the end by his friends, who rendered back to him that sincere and devoted affection which he made the pride of his life. Hearing of his sufferings from Grimm, the Empress Catherine had hired a furnished apartment for him; he had just installed himself in it when he expired; without having retracted any one of his works, nearly all published under the veil of the anonymous, he was, nevertheless, almost reconciled with the church, and was interred quietly in the chapel of the Virgin at St. Roch. The charm of his character had often caused people to forget his violence, which he himself no longer remembered the next day. “I should like to know this hot-headed metaphysician,” was the remark made to Buffon by President De Brosses, who happened to be then at Paris; and he afterwards added,
“He is a nice fellow, very pleasant, very amiable, a great philosopher, a mighty arguer, but a maker of perpetual digressions. Yesterday he made quite five and twenty between nine o’clock and one, during which time he remained in my room. O, how much more lucid is Buffon than all those gentry!”