[379] His longest, most avowed, and most famous, the Paradoxe sur le Comédien, has been worthily Englished by Mr. Walter H. Pollock.
[380] Its heroine, Suzanne Simonin, was, as far as the attempt to relieve herself of her vows went, a real person; and a benevolent nobleman, the Marquis de Croixmare, actually interested himself in this attempt—which failed. But Diderot and his evil angel Grimm got up sham letters between themselves and her patron, which are usually printed with the book.
[381] Mon père, je suis damnée ... the opening words, and the only ones given, of the confession of the half-mad abbess.
[382] Evangelical Protestantism has more than once adopted the principle that the Devil should not be allowed to have all the best tunes: and I remember in my youth an English religious novel of ultra-anti-Roman purpose, which, though, of course, dropping the "scabrousness," had, as I long afterwards recognised when I came to read La Religieuse, almost certainly borrowed a good deal from our most unsaintly Denis of Langres.
[383] She seems to have been, in many ways, far too good for her society, and altogether a lady.—The opinions of the late M. Brunetière and mine on French literature were often very different—though he was good enough not to disapprove of some of my work on it. But with the terms of his expression of mere opinion one had seldom to quarrel. I must, however, take exception to his attribution of grossièreté to La Religieuse. Diderot, as has been fully admitted, was too often grossier: sometimes when it was almost irrelevant to the subject. But here, "scabrous" as the subject might be, the treatment is scrupulously not coarse. Nor do I think, after intimate and long familiarity with the whole of his work, that he was ever a faux bonhomme.
[384] They have hardly had a fair opportunity of comparison with Voltaire's Dictionnaire Philosophique; but they can stand it.
[385] Unless Dulaurens' not quite stupid, but formless and discreditable, Compère Mathieu be excepted.
[386] In consequence of which Mr. Ruskin's favourite publisher, the late Mr. George Allen, asked the present writer, some twenty years ago, to revise and "introduce" the old translation of his Contes Moraux. The volume had, at least, the advantage of very charming illustrations by Miss Chris. Hammond.
[387] They were even worse than Leigh Hunt's in the strictly English counterpart torture-house for the victims of tyranny—consisting, for instance, in the supply of so good a dinner, at His Most Christian Majesty's expense, for the prisoner's servant, that the prisoner ate it himself, and had afterwards, on the principles of rigid virtue and distributive justice, to resign, to the minion who accompanied him, his own still better one which came later, also supplied by the tyrant.
[388] One expects something of value from the part-contemporary, part-successor of the novelists from Lesage to Rousseau. But where it is not mere blether about virtue and vice, and le cœur humain and so on, it has some of the worst faults of eighteenth-century criticism. He thinks it would have been more "moral" if Mme. de Clèves had actually succumbed as a punishment for her self-reliance (certainly one of the most remarkable topsyturvifications of morality ever crotcheted); is, of course, infinitely shocked at being asked and induced to "interest himself in a prostitute and a card-sharper" by Manon Lescaut; and, equally of course, extols Richardson, though it is fair to say that he speaks well of Tom Jones.