Certainly old things are passing away; not the old ideals only, but even the regret they leave behind is dead, and we are shaping instinctively our new ideals. Yet we are at peace with the past. The streams of hot lava flow forth and cover the world; the lava is but the minute fragments of former life. We marvel at the prodigality of nature, but how marvellous, too, the economy! The old cycles are for ever renewed, and it is no paradox that he who would advance can never cling too close to the past. The thing that has been is the thing that will be again; if we realize that, we may avoid many of the disillusions, miseries, insanities, that for ever accompany the throes of new birth. Set your shoulder joyously to the world’s wheel: you may spare yourself some unhappiness if, beforehand, you slip the book of Ecclesiastes beneath your arm.
DIDEROT.
Of the three intellectual heroes of the Revolution, Diderot exercised the least apparent influence; he was, for the most part, too far ahead of his time, and his tremendous energies were frequently either concealed or dissipated along innumerable channels. The humane Voltaire, short-sighted, but so keen within his range, whose sarcasm was always on the side of benevolence; the morbid, wrong-headed, suffering Rousseau, who spent his life in bringing to birth an exquisite emotional thrill which is now a common possession—these two men stood out in the eyes of all, then and long after, as the standard-bearers of revolution. On the other hand, Diderot’s great German contemporary, Goethe, the only man with whom he may fairly be compared, has during most part of this century seemed to us the inaugurator of the spiritual activities of the modern world. Goethe is still full of meaning; it will be long before we have exhausted “Wilhelm Meister” or “Faust.” Perhaps, now that we are so anxious to reform the world before reforming ourselves, we need more than ever the example of Goethe’s self-culture and self-restraint, of his wise reverence for temperance and harmony. But even Goethe, with that peaceful Weimar atmosphere about him, seems to us a little antique and remote from our modern ways. Diderot, on the other hand, who grew up and lived among the various and turbulent activities of the city that was in his time the focus of European life, appears before us now as a spirit of the latter nineteenth century, at one with our aspirations to-day. It was fitting that his works should wait until our own time for the most adequate and complete publication yet possible, and that he should now first receive full and ungrudging appreciation.[2] “At the distance of some centuries Diderot will appear prodigious; men will look from afar at that universal head with admiration mingled with astonishment, as we to-day look at the heads of Plato and Aristotle.” So Rousseau wrote, at the end of his life, of the friend whose unwearying kindness he—almost alone among human beings—had at last wearied out; to-day the prophecy seems in a fair way of fulfilment.
The whole life of Diderot, all his actions and all his words, everything that he wrote, bears the impress of his ever-flaming enthusiasm. That “air vif, ardent et fou,” which, in his own words, marked him in early life, meets us at every turn. As a boy at the Jesuit College he wished to go out into the world. “But what do you wish to be?” asked over and over again that most excellent of fathers, the cutler of Langres. And the young Diderot persisted that he wanted to be nothing: “mais rien, mais rien du tout.” He was not the last youth who, feeling the stirring of a deep instinct, would not, and could not, shut himself down to one narrow path of life. But to the men of this stamp “nothing” means “everything.” Then ten years passed, ten years, as his daughter wrote, passed “sometimes in good society, sometimes in indifferent, not to say bad, society, given up to work, to pain, to pleasure, to weariness, to want, sometimes intoxicated with gaiety, sometimes drowned in bitter reflection.” He taught mathematics: if the scholar was apt, he taught him all day; if he was a fool, he left him. “He was paid in books, in furniture, in linen, in money, or not at all.” When teaching failed he had to earn money how he could—as by supplying a missionary with a stock of sermons. Once he had to starve for a few days. That was not the least instructive experience to the youth, for he resolved that, whenever he could help it, no fellow-creature should suffer the like.
There could have been no better education. It was the seed-time of all his energies, of his encyclopædic knowledge, of his manifold hold on life, of his extraordinary capacity. He found time in the midst of it to fall in love with and marry a pious, honest, and affectionate girl who happened to be living in a room near him, but who was so ignorant that she once scolded him for the amount (very far from excessive) that he took for his writings; she could not imagine that mere writing could be worth so much. That he was not always faithful to her scarcely needs to be told; that could, perhaps, have been otherwise at no period, least of all in eighteenth-century Paris. There is a deep pathos in the brief story of her long life and her devotion to the husband whose own energies were at the service of any human being, however poor or disreputable, who cared to climb up the stairs to his room. In the early days of poverty she would make little sacrifices to procure a cup of coffee or similar trifling luxury for her husband; and during his last illness, though she would have given her life, her daughter wrote, to make him a Christian, yet realizing how deeply rooted his convictions were, she shielded him from the efforts of the orthodox, and would not leave the parish curé alone with him for an instant; at his death, the daughter adds, she “regretted the unhappiness he had caused her as another would have regretted happiness.” But we do not regret unhappiness; it is but another way of saying that life is complex and full of mitigation. In tenderness Diderot was never deficient; he was clearly a man of deep family affection; he seems to have inherited this from his father; so judicious a critic as Sainte-Beuve remarks that of the whole group of philosophes—not eminent, perhaps, in this respect—Diderot was the one who “most piously cultivated the relations of father, of son, of brother, and who best felt and practised family morality,” and we constantly come across traces of this “piety.” He tells us with great glee how, when he was once walking through his native Langres, a townsman came up to him and said, “Monsieur Diderot, you are a good man, but, if you think that you will ever be equal to your father, you are mistaken.” His eldest sister seems to have had something of his own downrightness and solidity; he loves her, he says, not because she is his sister, but because he “likes excellent things.” His only brother was an ecclesiastic and a bigot, but Diderot dwells on the inexhaustible charity by which this rather eccentric man had impoverished himself. At the latter part of his life Diderot’s letters are full of proof of his tender love for his daughter, of the care and thought he devoted to her education, of the gentleness with which he sought to open to her the mysteries of the world.
At the age of twenty-eight Diderot conceived the plan of that “Encyclopædia” which became the central activity of his life. A few years later he published his first work, a free translation of Shaftesbury’s “Essay on Merit and Virtue,” which indicates well the philosophical point from which he set out. It was followed, a year after, by the “Pensées Philosophiques,” a few brief pages, full of condensed and vigorous satire on the theologians and of robust faith in man and nature. Perhaps the most memorable is that in which he imagines that a man, betrayed by his wife, his children, his friends, retired into a cavern to meditate some awful revenge against the human race, a perpetual source of dread and misery; at last the misanthrope rushed out of his cavern shouting. “God! God!” and his fatal desire was accomplished: this account of the matter at all events indicates how little, even at this early period of his life, Diderot sympathized with the fashionable Deism of his day. The book was condemned to be burned by command of Parliament, but it was subsequently reinforced by still more audacious additions. So began characteristically, if with something of the reckless impetuosity of youth, a series of writings, far too long even to name here, many that were only published at his death, some that are only now being published, a large number that have probably been lost altogether—all marked by the same prodigious wealth and variety and eloquence. Yet they lie apart from the great work of his life. The “Encyclopædia” occupied thirty years; the appearance of the first volume was retarded by Diderot’s imprisonment at Vincennes, and it appeared in 1751; the last appeared in 1772. The “Encyclopædia” was more than an encyclopædia; it was not founded on that of Chambers, by which it was suggested, nor is it represented by our own estimable “Encyclopædia Britannica.” It was not a simple summary of the knowledge of the time, for the benefit of a community trained to appreciate the value of science. It was in the words of the prospectus, “a general picture of the efforts of the human spirit in every field, in every age.” It was the frank and audacious application to the whole of knowledge of new ideas, for the first time loudly proclaimed to a society slowly crumbling to ruin, but still by no means powerless. It was an evangelistic enterprise among infidels, with dangers on every side, and where one holds one’s life in one’s hands. We may still appreciate the significance of such a struggle. The future in every age belongs to those who can see further ahead than their fellows, and who fight their way towards the vision that they see; but the risks are equally great under any condition of society, and some sort of Bastille or Vincennes is always at hand.
Diderot was certainly of all men most fitted to organize and uphold this great work and to carry it to triumphal completion. He said once of himself that he belonged to his windy countryside of Langres; “the man of Langres has a head on his shoulders like the weathercock on the top of the church spire—it is never fixed at one point.” He was scarcely just to himself; with all his emotional vivacity and his readiness to receive new impressions, there was in him also an infinite patience and a tenacity to hold on to the end in spite of all. Both his versatility and his patience were called for here. He was indefatigable, for ever animating the waverers, stimulating the slow-paced, fighting with timid publishers, himself having a hand in everything, ever ready to suggest new ideas or to spend months in studying the details of machines or factories, or anything else that had to be done; knowing all the time that at every moment he might be exiled or imprisoned. The personal qualities of the man, even more than his varied abilities, carried him through. Someone speaks of “his eyes on fire and the prophetic air which seemed always announcing the enthusiasm of actual labour;” we hear of his “éloquence fougueuse et entraînante;” and, with this, of his feminine sensibility, his wit and tact and fertility of resource. We divine these qualities in his head as it has come down to us, though his characteristics do not easily lend themselves to brush or chisel. He has himself some remarks on this point. In his Salons he comes upon his own portrait by Van Loo, and, after some good-humoured criticism, he adds: “But what will my grandchildren say when they come to compare my sad books with that smiling, mincing, effeminate old flirt? My children, I warn you that I am not like that. I had a hundred different faces in one day, according to the thing that affected me. I was calm, sad, dreaming, tender, violent, passionate, enthusiastic, but I was never as you see me there. I had a large forehead, very bright eyes, tolerably large features, a head quite like that of an ancient orator, a bonhomie which approached stupidity, and an old-fashioned rusticity. I wear a mask which deceives the artist, whether it is that there are too many things mixed together, or that the mental impressions which trace themselves on my face succeed one another so rapidly that the painter’s task becomes more difficult than he expected. I have never been well done except by a poor devil called Garand, who caught me as it happens to a fool who utters a bon mot.” Meister, Grimm’s secretary, who knew Diderot well, says of him: “The artist who would seek an ideal head for Plato or Aristotle could hardly meet a modern head more worth his study than Diderot’s. His large forehead, uncovered and slightly rounded, bore the imposing imprint of his large, luminous, and fertile spirit. The great physiognomist, Lavater, thought he detected there some traces of timidity and lack of enterprise, and this intuition, founded only on such portraits as he could see, has always seemed to me that of a keen observer.[3] His nose was of masculine beauty, the contour of his upper eyelid full of delicacy, the habitual expression of his eyes sensitive and gentle; but when he became excited they gleamed with fire; his mouth revealed an interesting mixture of refinement, of grace, of bonhomie; and, whatever indifference there might be about his bearing, there was naturally in the carriage of his head, especially when he began to talk, much energy and dignity. Enthusiasm seemed to have become the most natural attitude of his voice, of his soul, of all his features. When his mental attitude was cold and calm, one might find in him constraint, awkwardness, timidity, even a sort of affectation; he was only truly Diderot, he was only truly himself, when his thoughts transported him beyond himself.”
It was the inexhaustible profusion and generosity of Diderot’s genius which seems to have impressed men chiefly. A small literary man of the time wrote his impression of Diderot, as he appeared in later life, with what is probably but a very mild touch of good-natured caricature:—“Some time ago I had a desire to write a book. I sought solitude in order to meditate. A friend lent me an apartment in a charming house amid delightful scenery. Hardly had I arrived when I learnt that M. Diderot occupied a room in the same house. I do not exaggerate when I say that my heart beat violently; I forgot all my literary projects, and thought only of seeing the great man whose genius I so much admired. I entered his room with the dawn, and he seemed no more surprised to see me than it. He spared me the trouble of stammering awkwardly the object of my visit. He guessed it apparently by my air of admiration. He spared me likewise the long windings of a conversation which must be led to poetry and prose. Hardly was it mentioned than he rose, fixed his eyes upon me, and, it was quite clear, did not see me at all. He began to speak, at first very low and fast, so that though I was quite close to him I could scarcely hear or follow him. I saw at once that my part in the conversation would be limited to silent admiration, a part which it costs me little to play. Gradually his voice rose and became distinct and sonorous; he had been almost immovable; now his gestures became frequent and animated. He had never seen me before, and when we were standing he put his arms round me; when we were seated he struck my thighs as though they were his own. If the rapid courses of his talk brought in the word ‘law,’ he made me a plan of legislation; if the word ‘theatre’ came in, he offered me the choice between five or six plans of dramas. A propos of the relation between the scene and the dialogue, he recalls that Tacitus is the greatest painter of antiquity, and recites or translates for me the Annals or the History. But how terrible that the barbarians should have buried in the ruins of architectural masterpieces so many of Tacitus’s chefs-d’œuvre! Thereupon he grows as tender over those lost beauties as though he had known them. But if the excavations at Herculaneum should reveal fresh Annals and Histories! And this hope transports him with joy. But how often in the process of discovery ignorant hands have destroyed the masterpieces preserved in tombs! And here he dissertates like an Italian engineer on methods of excavation. Then his imagination turns to ancient Italy, and he recalls how the arts of Athens had softened the terrible virtues of the conquerors of the world. He turns to the happy days of Lælius and Scipio, when even the conquered assisted with delight in the triumphs of the conquerors. He acts for me an entire scene of Terence; he almost sings several songs of Horace. He concludes by actually singing a song full of grace and wit, an impromptu of his own at a supper, and recites for me a very agreeable comedy of which, to save the trouble of copying, he has had a single copy printed. Then a number of people entered the room. The noise of chairs makes him break off his enthusiastic monologue. Then he distinguishes me in the midst of the company, and comes up to me as to a person whom one has previously met with pleasure. He reminds me that we have talked about many very interesting things—law, drama, history; he acknowledges that there was much to be learnt from my conversation, and makes me promise to cultivate an acquaintance the value of which he appreciates. At parting he gives me two kisses on the forehead, and snatches his hand from mine with genuine sorrow.” Diderot is recorded to have laughed heartily at this sketch when he saw it in the “Mercure” of 1779: “I must be an eccentric sort of fellow; but is it such a great fault to have preserved amid all the friction of society some vestiges of the angularity of nature?”
These impressions are confirmed by those of the Empress Catherine, whose delicate generosity in buying Diderot’s library and appointing him librarian smoothed the last years of his life. She wrote to Mme. Geoffrin: “Your Diderot is an extraordinary man. I emerge from interviews with him with thighs bruised and quite black. I have been obliged to put a table between us to protect myself and my members.” He could not understand, his daughter remarks, that one must not behave the same way in a palace as in a barn. It must be added, in justice to Diderot, that Catherine was no lover of ceremony, as she certainly let Diderot know.