The quality and eminence of his critical position.
I should be prepared to multiply the citation and discussion of the critical “places” in Diderot to almost any extent, if such multiplication were reconcilable with my plan; but, as has been said, to do so would be as superfluous logically as it is methodically impossible.[[170]] Diderot’s commanding position, in criticism as well as in aesthetics, is due not more to the number and variety of his individual utterances than to the fact that he certainly obtrudes, and in all probability conceals, no general æsthetic “preventions” (as the French would say, and as Dryden very wisely does say) whatsoever. One of the great resources and one of the great charms of his criticism is the way in which he draws it from, and returns it to, all the arts without letting any of them interfere with the other. The pedants of art-criticism have of course said that his is too literary; but the pedant is always pedantic, and always negligible, whether he draws his principles from French classrooms in the seventeenth century or from French studios in the nineteenth and twentieth. No matter whether he is talking of writing or of acting, of painting or of sculpture, the work of art is for Diderot something which ought to give the human sense and the human soul pleasure, which, if it does so, is to be welcomed and extolled, not without (if anybody feels thereto disposed) inquiry into the manner and the causes, rather mediate and immediate than ultimate, of that pleasure. He can everywhere display a really encyclopædic “curiosity,” in the good sense. He can be extremely inventive and subtle, as in the famous Paradoxe;[[171]] he can enter into infinite detail and yet never lose grasp of principle, as in the essay De la Poésie Dramatique;[[172]] he can glance and digress in lightning fashion as he does everywhere, but especially in the Salons. As good an instance of this as any is the admirable excursus on Mannerism in the Salon of 1767,[[173]] which is applicable to literature quite as much as to painting.
Certainly, if any devout Arnoldian says that Diderot’s greatness is due to his “fertility in ideas,” no contradiction will be thought of here. But then we have the old difficulty as to what “ideas” mean. I do not remember that Mr Arnold himself makes much reference to our Denis; and, indeed, Diderot must have been, from some points of view, nearly as horrible—let us lay cards on table and say as incomprehensible—to him as to his friend M. Scherer. But it may be that the critical “idea” is neither more nor less than the result of that contact of subject and critic which has been glanced at before—a contact intimate, physical, uninterrupted, and resulting in conception and birth. This, if anything, is the “idea” of modern criticism; and while few have been more prolific of such results than Diderot, none before him and hardly any since have so invariably and consciously guided themselves by its law. I do not know that he has ever positively stated this law; I really do not know that it ever has been explicitly laid down by any of the constituted, or even the non-constituted, critical authorities. But his whole work is an exemplification of it.
And the result is, that this whole work, wherever it approaches criticism, is alive; and that he cannot help its becoming alive, even if he has apparently given hostages to Death by attempting set dissertations on cut-and-dried subjects, or by dallying with science, or atheism, or what not. It is a further reason why even such contemporaries as Lessing, and later, Goethe, found in him such an extraordinary stimulus. The dead, mechanical deductions of too many critics under the older system could produce nothing but copies, even more dead and more mechanical than themselves, though, as we have seen in many a figure of our gallery, the principle of life in human nature made the greater critics of the older dispensation sometimes quicken under it. But Diderot’s fecundity was contagious: his “cultures” have propagated themselves from generation to generation directly, have set the example of a similar creation of critical entities to fit subjects ever since. From a formula you will never get anything but formulas: from the living contact of critic and subject you will get live criticism.
Rousseau revisited.
I was so severely rebuked by an excellent and friendly critic for dismissing Rousseau, with but a reference, from the last volume, that I thought it my duty to reconsider the matter, though the principal plea of the rebuker, that M. Texte had devoted some hundred pages to Jean-Jacques, appeared to me nihil ad rem. But I might have committed an error as to the res itself, and so I took down the four quartos, and went through them to see if my memory had played me false, as that faculty sometimes does when one is walking in the browner shades. I need not have alarmed myself; but it is perhaps worth while to spare a page to put the pièces actually before the reader. There is in Rousseau practically no literary criticism at all from the first line of the “Confessions” to the last of the “Correspondence.”[[174]] No writer known to me abstains with such an inevitable and tell-tale deflection from “judging of authors.” His attitude is that of his favourite Plutarch heightened to a Jean-Jacquian intensity. It is always of the moral, never of the literary, character and effect of a book that he is thinking. His fervid sensibility to the fascination of women, of scenery, of mere food and wine (for he admits this), does not seem to have extended to literature at all. By an extremely humorous coincidence (I do not know whether any one has noticed it before me, but probably some one has) he writes from Venice—the very place where he had just received, or was just to receive, the withering advice, “Zanetto! studia la matematica!”—to order books from Paris; and they are nearly all mathematics. The famous Discours about arts and sciences blinks the literary point of view altogether. The famous Letter to D’Alembert on Plays would almost adjust itself to plays in dumb show, except that spoken words have an additional moral or immoral effect. When Saint-Preux writes to Julie about her studies, he never so much as glances at the literary value of books: nor is this touched in all the talk about Education in Emile. The everlasting moral has dinned the Muses out. So it is in the two only less famous letters to Voltaire; so everywhere. I replace my four quartos, having found just one really critical sentence, in allocation and application only, for Jean-Jacques, probably, was not thinking of literature at all. But when he asked himself, “Serais-je damné?” and replied, “Selon mes Jansénistes la chose était indubitable, mais selon ma conscience il me paraissait que non,” he does mutatis mutandis suggest the revolt of the Romantic conscience against the Neoclassic.
“Ah, but,” they say, “Rousseau’s influence on the mind of Europe counted for so much in its changes of critical and creative taste.” A la bonne heure! and I have recognised this, and shall recognise it in the proper places. But the agencies that bring about changes of critical and creative taste, proper to be mentioned, are not also as proper to be worked out here. Of such influences the capture of Constantinople is a famous and undoubted one. Was I bound to tell the story of Byzantine decadence, and the story of Mussulman progress? It has in innumerable instances, if not universally, influenced a man’s criticism, a man’s creation—whether he is in love at the time; whether he has arrived at that right and happy point, which Mr Thackeray would not call “a pint” in the drinking of good wine; whether he has been under the soothing influence of the Indian weed. Am I therefore bound to insert in this History a treatise on “Feminine Attraction,” a book on “The Wines of the World,” and an “Anti-Counterblast” to King James? In all seriousness, it may, I think, be requested once more of readers and of critics that they will “look at the bill of fare.” If the meat and the wine suit them, well and good; if not, are there not, in this particular instance, M. Texte and his hundred pages to make quaere aliud diversorium no merely churlish or vindictive dismissal? While, as to such remarks as are proper to be made here on the general critical temper and tendency of the Romantic movement, they were deliberately postponed in the last volume, and will find their proper place, not here, but in the Interchapters of the present.
This indirect influence of Rousseau, with the direct influence of Diderot, no doubt cast a mighty leaven into the mind of France during the later decades of the eighteenth century; and it is noteworthy that, of the three remarkable writers with whom we shall next deal, while Madame de Staël directly and Chateaubriand indirectly express the first, Joubert was much in contact with Diderot during his youth. But the dominant criticism of the last twenty or five-and-twenty years of the century remained neo-classic; and we have accordingly dealt with it[[175]] in the last volume. Nay, the dominant criticism of the first twenty or so of the next abode in no very different state. Here we shall deal with what has not yet been handled of this half century, or nearly so, in France, isolating more or less the three great figures above mentioned, and dealing more in group with these “Empire Critics,” who in different ways reflect the transition to Romanticism.