The New Spirit / Third Edition

by Havelock Ellis

He was the same to everybody; not more ready to furnish the Empress with the plan of a university on the largest scale, and in accordance with the most advanced ideas, than to write laughingly Avis au public for a new pomade to promote the luxuriant growth of the hair. He was equally ready to throw out the brilliant suggestions which Helvetius and Holbach worked into their books “De l’Esprit” and the “Système de la Nature,” and to assist some poor devil in tatters who, once at least, after he had long fed and clothed him, turned out to be a police spy; he was none the less bountiful to every comer. Now we see him devising ingenious ruses to obtain succour for a nobleman’s forsaken mistress; again finding a manager for Voltaire’s comedy, the “Dépositaire,” or revising Galiani’s “Dialogues” on the wheat trade. The Dauphin dies; a monument must be erected to him in Sens Cathedral; Diderot is sought out and speedily submits five designs. All the men of talent and all the people in distress found their way to Diderot; dedicatory epistles for needy musicians, plots of comedies for playwrights deficient in invention, prefaces, discourses—no one went away disappointed who climbed up to that fourth-floor door in the corner house of the Rue St. Benoît and the Rue Taranne.

Some of his benevolent schemes were certainly of a rather dubious character; there seems to linger about them a touch of the sanctification of means by ends which we may, if we like, attribute to his Jesuit education. In his comedy, “Est-il bon? Est-il méchant?”—no doubt the best of his plays—he has satirized himself in the person of the hero, Hardouin, a man who gets into terrible scrapes with his friends from the questionable devices by which he tries to serve them; obtaining, for instance, a pension for a widow lady by pretending that her child is illegitimate, and causing an obdurate mother to acquiesce eagerly in the marriage of her daughter by delicately suggesting that she has already been seduced. We find Diderot carrying on various benevolent little intrigues of this kind when we read his letters to Mlle. Voland.

These letters to Mlle. Voland form the most characteristic and intimately personal record of himself that Diderot left. He was forty years old when the correspondence began, and it lasted for more than twenty years. Of Sophie Voland almost nothing is known; we only catch glimpses of her as a woman of wide sympathies and decided intelligence, neither very young nor pretty, and wearing spectacles; she lived with her family, who were clearly more orthodox and conventional than herself, and must not, as Diderot frequently hints, see everything that he writes. Of the depth and reality of his affection for her there is no doubt; his editors have discussed the question as to whether this affection was throughout of the nature of friendship only, or whether, according to the phrase of Sainte-Beuve, an hour’s passion had served as the golden key to the most precious and intimate secrets of friendship. This may be as it will; Diderot had found some one in whose presence he could show himself, without reserve or precaution, on every side of his manifold nature, and he was always tenderly grateful to the woman who had procured him this sweetest of pleasures. “My Sophie is both man and woman,” he wrote to her, “when she pleases;” as such he always addressed her, pouring out recklessly all that happened to be in his head, narrating the incidents of the day, telling what he was thinking about or projecting, repeating current scandal or sometimes not quite decent story, flashing instinctively into wise or witty reflection; always with a swift, almost unconscious pen, forgetting now and again what he has already said. It is only in these letters, where he is, as he says, “rendering an account of all the moments of a life that belongs to you,” that we realize the personal charm, the exuberant strength and at the same time the weakness of the man who in the midst of his manifold energies bursts out: “A delicious repose, a sweet book to read, a walk in some open and solitary spot, a conversation in which one discloses all one’s heart, a strong emotion that brings the tears to one’s eyes and makes the heart beat faster, whether it comes of some tale of generous action or of a sentiment of tenderness, of health, of gaiety, of liberty, of indolence—there is the true happiness, nor shall I ever know any other.”

The “Encyclopædia” seems to us to-day but a small portion of the achievement of Diderot’s life, though it represents the part that he played in relation to the science of his time. His place in science has sometimes been wrongly stated. It has been said, for instance, that he anticipated Lamarck and Darwin. It is true that he wrote, “The need produces the organ; the organization determines the function,” and that this contains the germ of Lamarck’s doctrine; and again, “The world is the abode of the strong,” and that this may be said to be the germ of the doctrine of natural selection; but at both points he was simply putting into epigrammatic form the conceptions of the greatest scientific genius of his age and country, Buffon, the only man of that time who was cast in the same massive mould, and to whom Diderot could turn with fraternal delight and admiration. It is to Buffon also, and not to Diderot, that the honour of anticipating Lyell belongs. It is in his Baconian thoughts on the interpretation of nature, and again in such a comprehensive collection of data as his notes on physiology, discovered of recent years, that Diderot’s searching and inquisitive scientific spirit appears. He frequently startles us by the way in which he vividly realizes and follows out to their legitimate conclusions those floating ideas of his time which we are working out to-day. Above all, and from the first, he clearly grasps the fundamental value of the human body and its processes in the interpretation of mental phenomena; in one of his comparatively early works, the “Lettre sur les Aveugles,” he remarks that he has never doubted that “our most purely intellectual ideas are closely related to the conformation of our bodies.” “How difficult it is,” he says elsewhere, “to be a good philosopher and a good moralist without being anatomist, naturalist, physiologist, and doctor.” Holding firmly by this clue, he was constantly trying to fathom the mysteries of the soul and to picture the processes of life; it is because he has realized that this can only be done fruitfully from the physiological side that the “Rêve de d’Alembert,” his most brilliant effort in this direction, is interesting after the lapse of a century.

He brought the same eager, impressionable spirit to his novels and stories. It is indeed no great step from “Le Rêve de d’Alembert” to “Le Neveu de Rameau,” and from that to “La Religieuse.” Whatever he undertook he carried out with the whole energy and enthusiasm of his nature, and while this takes from the artistic symmetry of his work, it adds to its vitality and significance. It is owing to this quality that “Les Bijoux Indiscrets,” a frivolous novel in the style of the younger Crebillon, pointless and indecent, written, at the age of thirty-five, mainly to obtain money for his mistress, Mme. de Puisieux, contains passages which have been considered among the finest he ever wrote, and by its reflections on the reform of the theatre, its criticisms of manners, and philosophical insight served avowedly as the point of departure for Lessing’s famous “Dramaturgie.” It was not until he read Richardson that Diderot produced any very noteworthy work in fiction; his admiration for the English novelist was extreme, but certainly not out of proportion to Richardson’s historic importance. Richardson not only marks the first real landmark in the evolution of the English novel; he is the point of departure of the modern French novel, and Diderot, more than any one else, helped to make his influence felt in France. Very soon after falling under the spell of the great English story-teller and writing his “Éloge de Richardson,” Diderot produced his most famous novel, “La Religieuse.” It is clear how much Richardson influenced this minute study, in autobiographic form, of the life and sufferings of a young girl forced into a convent with its uncongenial atmosphere and petty persecutions. It was a distinct artistic achievement, the more remarkable as it was certainly intended as an attack on the small vices of a community of women isolated from the world. Even those parts of this attack which have been considered questionable are always in the tone of the unsuspecting young girl who writes them, and only become offensive when a modern editor removes them in order to substitute asterisks; compare these passages with the more ostentatious propriety and zeal for virtue of a modern Parisian in “Mademoiselle Giraud ma Femme.” A year later Diderot wrote an unquestionable artistic masterpiece, only preserved for us by a happy chance, “Le Neveu de Rameau,” a dialogue of unfailing spirit between himself and a strange social parasite whom he is analyzing. Some years later he fell under the influence of Sterne; “Jacques le Fataliste,” so attractive to Goethe and many others, was the result. But he had no great affinity for the sinuous humour of Sterne, and, while he threw himself into it with his usual energy, the result, though Shandean enough, is less happy than his great Richardsonian effort. Yet “Jacques le Fataliste” contains the “Histoire de Mme. de la Pommeraye,” and this little histoire, when disentangled from the manifold episodes which interrupt the hostess of the inn who tells it, is Diderot’s most perfect and most characteristic effort as a story-teller. Even in his novels it is the directness and the veracity of his scientific spirit, united to his emotional impressionability, which gives significance to his work.

The same features mark his plays, though here the result has ceased to be pleasing, and we may be permitted to-day not to read through the “Fils Naturel” and the “Père de Famille.” Yet we must not forget that from them is dated the modern drama, with the notes of sincerity and simple realism, peculiar then to Diderot, which nowadays have become a more common possession. Diderot’s dramas produced a great and immediate effect in Germany, on Goethe and Schiller as well as on Iffland and Kotzebue, and the “Père de Famille” was translated by Lessing.

As a critic of the stage Diderot has, perhaps, attracted exaggerated attention, though he has not escaped misunderstanding, most people’s knowledge of his opinions on this head beginning and ending with the “Paradoxe sur le Comédien.” Diderot at first attributed, as from the nature of his temperament he was sure to do, the chief part in acting to emotion and sensibility; in time he outgrew this youthful opinion, and in the “Paradoxe” he emphasized as strongly as he could the part of study and reflection in the actor’s art, a part which must always be of the first importance, notwithstanding all the tears shed by charming actresses, and carefully bottled for controversial purposes. Diderot was far too sane and many-sided to see only one aspect of so complex an art as the actor’s; it is, as he says, “study, reflection, passion, sensibility, the true imitation of nature,” which go to make up good acting. An interesting and too brief series of letters to Mlle. Jodin is well worth reading from this point of view. Mlle. Jodin, the daughter of an old friend of his, was a rather wild and impetuous young lady of some talent who had suddenly adopted the life of an actress. Diderot performed many small services both for her and her mother, and wrote letters full of wise and, it appears, much-needed counsel as to her conduct both on and off the stage. “Mademoiselle,” he writes, “there is nothing good in this world but that which is true; be true, then, on the stage, true off the stage.... An actor who has nothing but sense and judgment is cold; one who has nothing but verve and sensibility is mad. It is a certain temperament of mingled good sense and warmth which makes men sublime; on the stage and in the world he who shows more than he feels makes us laugh instead of touching us.”

Diderot inaugurated modern art criticism by the notices of the pictures in the Salon, which he wrote during many years for “Grimm’s Correspondence.” One cannot help regretting that he was not born among a greater group of artists. Chardin we still esteem, and Greuze is at the height of his popularity, but it is difficult to take more than an antiquarian interest in Boucher, and who cares now for Loutherbourg or Van Loo? Even before Joseph Vernet, whose variety, freshness, and love of nature appealed so strongly to Diderot, it sometimes requires an effort to be sympathetic. Diderot now and then criticizes with severity—as occasionally when he is dealing with Boucher—but the tone of his criticism, as generally happens with contemporary criticism, seems to us to-day pitched altogether too high. In one respect, at all events, it is unlike most old appreciations of now neglected pictures; it is generally delightful to read, perhaps sometimes more delightful than the picture can ever have seemed. One suspects that Diderot treated pictures like books; Holbach, having read a book he had warmly recommended, came to him to say that the book contained nothing of which he had spoken. “Well,” replied Diderot, “if it wasn’t there it ought to have been there.”