Diderot and the Encyclopaedists Volume II Part 4

"The sun, which was on the edge of the horizon, disappeared; over the sea there came all at once an aspect more sombre and solemn.

Twilight, which is at first neither day nor night--an image of our feeble thoughts, and an image that warns the philosopher to stay in his speculations--warns the traveller too to turn his steps towards home. So I turned back, and as I continued the thread of my thoughts, I began to reflect that if there is a particular morality belonging to each species, so perhaps in the same species there is a different morality for different individuals, or at least for different kinds and collections of individuals. And in order not to scandalise you by too serious an example, it came into my head that there is perhaps a morality peculiar to artists or to art, and that this morality might well be the very reverse of the common morality. Yes, my friend, I am much afraid that man marches straight to misery by the very path that leads the imitator of nature to the sublime. To plunge into extremes--that is the rule for poets. To keep in all things the just mean--there is the rule for happiness. One must not make poetry in real life. The heroes, the romantic lovers, the great patriots, the inflexible magistrates, the apostles of religion, the philosophers _a toute outrance_--all these rare and divine insensates make poetry in their life, and that is their bane. It is they who after death provide material for great pictures. They are excellent to paint.

Experience shows that nature condemns to misery the man to whom she has allotted genius, and whom she has endowed with beauty; it is they who are the figures of poetry. Then within myself I lauded the mediocrity that shelters one alike from praise and blame; and yet why, I asked myself, would no one choose to let his sensibility go, and to become mediocre? O vanity of man!"[59]

[59] x. 124, 125.

Goethe's _Ta.s.so_, a work so full of finished poetry and of charm, is the idealised and pathetic version of the figure that Diderot has thus conceived for genius. The dialogues between the hapless poet and Antonio, the man of the world, are a skilful, lofty, and impressive statement of the problem that often vexed Diderot. Goethe sympathised with Antonio's point of view; he had in his nature so much of the spirit of conduct, of saneness, of the common reason of the world. And in art he was a lover of calm ideals. In Diderot, as our readers by this time know, these things were otherwise.

The essay on Beauty in the Encyclopaedia is less fertile than most of Diderot's contributions to the subject.[60] It contains a careful account of two or three other theories, especially that of Hutcheson.

The object is to explain the source of Beauty. Diderot's own conclusion is that this is to be found in "relations." Our words for the different shades of the beautiful are expressive of notions (acquired by experience through the senses) of order, proportion, symmetry, unity, and so forth. But, after all, the real question remains unanswered--what makes some relations beautiful, and others not so; and the same objects beautiful to me, and indifferent to you; and the same object beautiful to me to-day, and indifferent or disgusting to me to-morrow? Diderot does, it is true, enumerate twelve sources of such diversity of judgment, in different races, ages, individuals, moods, but their force depends upon the importation into the conception of beauty of some more definite element than the bare idea of relation. Some sentences show that he came very near to the famous theory of Alison, that beauty is only attributed to sounds and sights, where, and because, they recall what is pleasing, sublime, pathetic, and set our ideas and emotions flowing in one of these channels. But he does not get fairly on the track of either Alison's or any other decisive and marking adjective, with which to qualify his _rapports_. He wastes some time, moreover, in trying to bring within the four corners of his definition some uses of the terms of beauty, which are really only applied to objects by way of a.n.a.logy, and are not meant to predicate the beautiful in any literal or scientific sense.

[60] _Oeuv._, x.

There is no more interesting department of aesthetic inquiry than the relations of the arts to one another, and the nature of the delimitations of the provinces of poetry, painting, sculpture, music.

Diderot, from the very beginning of his career, had turned his thoughts to this intricate subject. In his letter on Deaf Mutes (1751) he had stated the problem--to collect the common beauties of poetry, painting, and music; to show their a.n.a.logies; to explain how the poet, the painter, and the musician render the same image; to seize the fugitive emblems of their expression. Why should a situation that is admirable in a poem become ridiculous in a painting?[61] For instance, what is it that prevents a painter from reproducing the moment when Neptune raises his head above the tossing waters, as he is represented in Virgil:

Interea magno misceri murmure pontum.

Emissamque hiemem sensit Neptunus, et imis Stagna refusa vadis; graviter commotus, et alto Prospiciens, summa placidum caput extulit unda.

[61] It is to be observed also that he shows true perspicacity in connecting the difficulty of transforming a poetic into a pictorial description, with the kindred difficulty of translating a finished poem in one language into another language. See also xi. 107.

Diderot's answer to the question is an antic.i.p.ation of the main position of the famous little book which appeared fifteen years afterwards, and which has been well described as the Organum of aesthetic cultivation. In _Laoc.o.o.n_ Lessing contends against Spence, the author of _Polymetis_ against Caylus, and others of his contemporaries, that poetry and painting are divided from one another in aim, in effects, in reach, by the limits set upon each by the nature of its own material.[62] So Diderot says that the painter could not seize the Virgilian moment, because a body that is partially immersed in water is disfigured by an effect of refraction, which a faithful painter would be bound to reproduce; because the image of the body could not be seen transparently through the stormy waters, and therefore the G.o.d would have the appearance of being decapitated; because it is indispensable, if you would avoid the impression of a surgical amputation, that some visible portion of hidden limbs should be there to inform us of the existence of the rest.[63] He takes another instance, where a description that is admirable in poetry would be insupportable in painting. Who, he asks, could bear upon canvas the sight of Polyphemus grinding between his teeth the bones of one of the companions of Ulysses? Who could see without horror a giant holding a man in his enormous mouth, with blood dripping over his head and breast?

[62] Lessing appears to have been directly led to this by Aristotle.

See Gotschlich's _Lessing's Aristotelische Studien_, p. 120.

[63] _Oeuv._, i. 382, 403.

Among the many pa.s.sages in which Diderot touches on the differences between poetry and painting, none is more just and true than that in which he implores the poet not to attempt description of details: "True taste fastens on one or two characteristics, and leaves the rest to imagination. 'Tis when Armida advances with n.o.ble mien in the midst of the ranks of the army of G.o.dfrey, and when the generals begin to look at one another with jealous eyes, that Armida is beautiful to us. It is when Helen pa.s.ses before the old men of Troy, and they all cry out--it is then that Helen is beautiful. And it is when Ariosto describes Alcina from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet, that notwithstanding the grace, the facility, the soft elegance of his verse, Alcina is not beautiful. He shows me everything; he leaves me nothing to do; he makes me wearied and impatient. If a figure walks, describe to me its carriage and its lightness; I will undertake the rest. If it is stooping, speak to me only of arms and shoulders; I will take all else on myself. If you do more, you confuse the kinds of work; you cease to be a poet, and become a painter or sculptor. One single trait, a great trait; leave the rest to my imagination. That is true taste, great taste."[64] And then he quotes with admiration Ovid's line of the G.o.ddess of the seas:

Nec brachia longo Margine terrarum porrexerat Amphitrite.

[64] _Oeuv._, xi. 328.

Quel image! Quels bras! Quel prodigieux mouvement! Quelle figure! and so forth, after Diderot's manner.

n.o.body will compare these detached and fragmentary deliverances with the full and easy mastery which Lessing, in _Laoc.o.o.n_ and its unfinished supplements, exhibits over the many ramifications of his central idea.

We can only notice that Diderot had a foot on the track along which Lessing afterwards made such signal progress. The reader who cares to measure the advantage of Lessing's more serious and concentrated attention to his subject, may compare the twelfth chapter of _Laoc.o.o.n_ with Diderot's criticism on Doyen's painting of the Battle between Diomede and Aeneas.[65] As we see how near Diderot came to the real and decisive truths of all these matters, and yet how far he remains from the full perception of what a little consecutive study must have revealed to his superior genius, we can only think painfully of his avowal--"I have not the consciousness of having employed the half of my strength: _jusqu'a present je n'ai que baguenaude_."

[65] _Salon de 1761_; _Oeuv._, v. 140.

On the great art of music Diderot has said little that is worth attending to. Bemetzrieder, a German musician, who taught Diderot's daughter to play on the clavecin, wrote an elementary book called Lessons on the Clavecin and Principles of Harmony. This is p.r.o.nounced by the modern teachers to be not less than contemptible. Diderot, however, with his usual boundless good nature, took the trouble to set the book in a series of dialogues, in which teacher, pupil, and a philosopher deal in all kinds of elaborate amenities, and pay one another many compliments. It reminds one of the old Hebrew grammar which is couched in the form of Conversations with a d.u.c.h.ess--"Your Grace having kindly condescended to approve of the plan that I have sketched. All this your Grace probably knows already, but your Grace has probably never attempted," and so forth.

The unwise things that men of letters have written from a good-natured wish to help their friends, are not so numerous that we need be afraid of extending to them a good-natured pardon. The beauty of Diderot's Salons is remarkable enough to cover a mult.i.tude of sins in other arts.

There are few other compositions in European literature which show so well how criticism of art itself may become a fine art.

CHAPTER IV.

ST. PETERSBURG AND THE HAGUE.

"What would you say of the owner of an immense palace, who should spend all his life in going up from the cellars to the attics, and going down from attics to cellar, instead of sitting quietly in the midst of his family? That is the image of the traveller." Yet Diderot, whose words these are, resolved at the age of sixty to undertake no less formidable a journey than to the remote capital on the sh.o.r.es of the Neva. It had come into his head, or perhaps others had put it into his head, that he owed a visit to his imperial benefactress whose bounty had rendered life easier to him. He had recently made the acquaintance of two Russian personages of consideration. One of them was the Princess Dashkow, who was believed to have taken a prominent part in that confused conspiracy of 1762, which ended in the murder of Peter III. by Alexis Orloff, and the elevation of Catherine II. to the throne. Her services at that critical moment had not prevented her disgrace, if indeed they were not its cause, and in 1770 the Princess set out on her travels. Horace Walpole has described the curiosity of the London world to see the Muscovite Alecto, the accomplice of the northern Athaliah, the amazon who had taken part in a revolution when she was only nineteen. In England she made a pleasant impression, in spite of eyes of "a very Catiline fierceness." She was equally delighted with England, and when she went on from London to Paris, she took very little trouble to make friends in the capital of the rival nation. Diderot seems to have been her only intimate. The Princess (1770) called nearly every afternoon at his door, carried him off to dinner, and kept him talking and declaiming until the early hours of the next morning. The "hurricanes of his enthusiastic nature" delighted her, and she remembered for years afterwards how on one occasion she excited him to such a pitch that he sprang from his chair as if by machinery, strode rapidly up and down the room, and spat upon the floor with pa.s.sion.[66]

[66] _Memoirs of Princess Dashkoff_ (vol. ii.). By Mrs. Bradford, an English companion and friend of the Princess. (London, 1840.) See Diderot's account of her, _Oeuv._, xvii. 487. Compare Horace Walpole's _Letters_, v. 266.

The Prince Galitzin was a Russian friend of greater importance. Prince Galitzin was one of those foreigners, like Holbach, Grimm, Galiani, who found themselves more at home in Paris than anywhere else in the world.

Living mostly among artists and men of letters, he became an established favourite. With Diderot's a.s.sistance (1767) he acquired for the Empress many of the pictures that adorn the great gallery at St. Petersburg, and Diderot praises his knowledge of the fine arts, the reason being that he has that great principle of true taste, the _belle ame_.[67] He wrote eclogues in French, and he attempted the more useful but more difficult task of writing in the half-formed tongue of his own country an account of the great painters of Italy and Holland.[68] Diderot makes the pointed remark about him, that he believed in equality of ranks by instinct, which is better than believing in it by reflection.[69] It was through the medium of this friendly and intelligent man that the Empress had acted in the purchase of Diderot's library. In 1769 he was appointed Russian minister at the Hague, and his chief ground for delight at the appointment was that it brought him within reach of his friends in Paris.

[67] _Oeuv._, xviii. 239.

[68] Grimm, _Cor. Lit._, xv. 18. Diderot, xviii. 251.

[69] _Oeuv._, xix. 250.

Diderot set out on his expedition some time in the summer of 1773--the date also of Johnson's memorable tour to the Hebrides--and his first halt was at the Dutch capital, then at the distance of a four days'

journey from Paris. Here he remained for many weeks, in some doubt whether or not to persist in the project of a more immense journey. He pa.s.sed most of his time with the Prince and Princess Galitzin, as between a good brother and a good sister. Their house, he notices, had once been the residence of Barneveldt. Men like Diderot are the last persons to think of their own historic position, else we might have expected to find him musing on the saving shelter which this land of freedom and tolerance had given to more than one of his great precursors in the literature of emanc.i.p.ation. Descartes had found twenty years of priceless freedom (1629-1649) among the Dutch burghers. The ruling ideas of the Encyclopaedia came in direct line from Bayle (_d. 1706_) and Locke (_d. 1704_), and both Bayle and Locke, though in different measures, owed their security to the stout valour with which the Dutch defended their own land, and taught the English how to defend theirs, against the destructive pretensions of Catholic absolutism. Of these memories Diderot probably thought no more than Descartes thought about the learning of Grotius or the art of Rembrandt. It was not the age, nor was his the mind, for historic sentimentalism. "The more I see of this country," he wrote to his good friends in Paris, "the more I feel at home in it. The soles, fresh herrings, turbot, perch, are all the best people in the world. The walks are charming; I do not know whether the women are all very sage, but with their great straw hats, their eyes fixed on the ground, and the enormous fichus spread over their bosoms, they have the air of coming back from prayers or going to confession."

Diderot did not fail to notice more serious things than this. His remarks on the means of travelling with most profit are full of sense, and the account which he wrote of Holland shows him to have been as widely reflective and observant as we should have expected him to be.[70] It will be more convenient to say something on this in connection with the stay which he again made at the Hague on his return from his pilgrimage to Russia.

[70] _Oeuv._, xviii. 365, 471.

After many hesitations the die was cast. Nariskin, a court chamberlain, took charge of the philosopher, and escorted him in an excellent carriage along the dreary road that ended in the capital reared by Peter the Great among the northern floods. It is worth while to digress for a few moments, to mark shortly the difference in social and intellectual conditions between the philosopher's own city and the city for which he was bound, and to touch on the significance of his journey. We can only in this way understand the position of the Encyclopaedists in Europe, and see why it is interesting to the student of the history of Western civilisation to know something about them. It is impossible to have a clear idea of the scope of the revolutionary philosophy, as well as of the singular pre-eminence of Paris over the western world, until we have placed ourselves, not only at Ferney and Grandval, and in the parlours of Madame Geoffrin and Mademoiselle Lespina.s.se, but also in palaces at Florence, Berlin, Vienna, and St. Petersburg.

From Holland with its free inst.i.tutions, its peaceful industry, its husbanded wealth, its rich and original art, its great political and literary tradition, to go to Russia was to measure an arc of Western progress, and to retrace the steps of the genius of civilisation. The political capital of Russia represented a forced and artificial union between old and new conditions. In St. Petersburg, says an onlooker, were united the age of barbarism and the age of civilisation, the tenth century and the eighteenth, the manners of Asia and the manners of Europe, the rudest Scythians and the most polished Europeans, a brilliant and proud aristocracy and a people sunk in servitude. On one side were elegant fas.h.i.+ons, magnificent dresses, sumptuous repasts, splendid feasts, theatres like those which gave grace and animation to the select circles of London or Paris: on the other side, shopkeepers in Asiatic dress, coachmen, servants, and peasants clad in sheepskins, wearing long beards, fur caps, and long fingerless gloves of skin, with short axes hanging from their leathern girdles. The thick woollen bands round their feet and legs resembled a rude cothurnus, and the sight of these uncouth figures reminded one who had seen the bas-reliefs on Trajan's column at Rome, of the Scythians, the Dacians, the Goths, the Roxolani, who had been the terror of the Empire.[71] Literary cultivation was confined to almost the smallest possible area. Oriental as Russia was in many respects, it was the opposite of oriental in one: women were then, as they are still sometimes said to be in Russia, more cultivated and advanced than men. Many of them could speak half a dozen languages, could play on several instruments, and were familiar with the works of the famous poets of France, Italy, and England. Among the men, on the contrary, outside of a few exceptional families about the court, the vast majority were strangers to all that was pa.s.sing beyond the limits of their own country. The few who had travelled and were on an intellectual level with their century, were as far removed from the rest of their countrymen as Englishmen are removed from Iroquois.

[71] Segur's _Mem._, ii. 230.

To paint the court of Catherine in its true colours it has been said that one ought to have the pen of Procopius. It was a hot-bed of corruption, intrigue, jealousy, violence, hatred. One day, surrounded by twenty-seven of her courtiers, Catherine said: "If I were to believe what you all say about one another, there is not one of you who does not richly deserve to have his head cut off." A certain princess was notorious for her inhuman barbarity. One day she discovered that one of her attendants was with child; in a frenzy she pursued the hapless Callisto from chamber to chamber, came up with her, dashed in her skull with a heavy weapon, and finally in a delirium of pa.s.sion ripped up her body. When two n.o.bles had a quarrel, they fell upon one another then and there like drunken navvies, and Potemkin had an eye gouged out in a court brawl. Such horrors give us a measure of the superior humanity of Versailles, and enable us also in pa.s.sing to see how duelling could be a sign of a higher civilisation. The reigning pa.s.sions were love of money and the gratification of a coa.r.s.e vanity. Friends.h.i.+p, virtue, manners, delicacy, probity, said one witness, are here merely words, void of all meaning. The tone in public affairs was as low as in those of private conduct. I might as well, says Sir G. Macartney, quote Clarke and Tillotson at the divan of Constantinople, as invoke the authority of Puffendorf and Grotius here.

The character of the Empress herself has been more disputed than that of the society in which she was the one imposing personage. She stands in history with Elizabeth of England, with Catherine de' Medici, with Maria Theresa, among the women who have been like great men. Of her place in the record of the creation of that vast empire which begins with Prussia and ends with China, we have not here to speak. The materials for knowing her and judging her are only in our own time becoming accessible.[72] As usual, the mythic elements that surrounded her like a white fog from the northern seas out of which she loomed like a portent, are rapidly disappearing, and are replaced by the outlines of ordinary humanity, with more than the ordinary human measure of firmness, resolution, and energetic grasp of the facts of her position in the world.

[72] The Imperial Historical Society are publis.h.i.+ng a _Recueil General_ of doc.u.ments, many of which shed an interesting light on Catherine's intercourse with the men of letters. In the Archives of the House of Woronzow (especially vol. xii.), amid much of what for our purpose is chaff, are a few grains of what is interesting. M.

Rambaud, the author of the learned work on the Greek Empire in the Tenth Century, gave interesting selections from these sources in two articles in the _Revue des deux Mondes_ for February and April, 1877. Besides what is to be gathered from such well-known authorities as William Tooke, Segur, Dashkoff, there are many interesting pages in the memoirs of that attractive and interesting person, the Prince de Ligne. The pa.s.sages from English and French despatches I have taken from an anonymous but authentic work published at Berlin in 1858, _La Cour de la Russie il y a cent ans: 1725-83: extraits des depeches des Amba.s.sadeurs anglais et francais_. Catherine's own Memoirs, published in London in 1859 by Alexander Herzen, are perhaps too doubtful.

We must go from the philosophers to the men of affairs for a true picture. These tell us that she offered an unprecedented mixture of courage and weakness, of knowledge and incompetence, of firmness and irresolution; pa.s.sing in turn from the most opposite extremes, she presented a thousand diverse surfaces, until at last the observer had to content himself with putting her down as a consummate comedian. She had no ready apprehension. Too refined a pleasantry was thrown away upon her, and there was always a chance of her reversing its drift. No playful reference to the finances, or the military force, or even to the climate of her empire, was ever taken in good part.[73] The political part was the serious part of her nature. Catherine had the literary tastes, but not the literary skill, of Frederick. She is believed, on good evidence, to have written for the use of her grandsons not only an Abridgment of Russian History, but a volume of Moral Tales.[74] The composition of moral tales was entirely independent of morality. Just as Lewis XV. had a long series of Chateauroux, Pompadours, Dubarrys, so Catherine had her Orloffs and Potemkins, and a countless host of obscure and miscellaneous Wa.s.siltchikows, Zavadowskys, Zoriczes, Korsaks. On the serious side, Lewis XIV. was her great pattern and idol. She resented criticism on that renowned memory, as something personal to herself. To her business as sovereign--_mon pet.i.t menage_, as she called the control of her huge formless empire--she devoted as much indefatigable industry as Lewis himself had done in his best days. Notwithstanding all her efforts to improve her country, she was not popular, and never won the affection of her subjects; but she probably cared less for the opinion and sentiment of Russia than for the applause of Europe. Tragedy displeases her, writes the French Minister, and comedy wearies her; she does not like music; her table is without any sort of exquisiteness; in a garden she cares only for roses; her only taste is to build and to drill her court, for the taste that she has for reigning, and for making a great figure in the universe, is really not so much taste as a downright absorbing pa.s.sion.

[73] _Mem. du Prince de Ligne_, p. 101.

[74] Segur, 219.

Gunning, the English charge d'affaires, insists that the motive of all her patriotic labours was not benevolence, but an insatiable and unbounded thirst for fame. "If it were not so, we must charge her with an inconsistency amounting to madness, for undertaking so many immense works of public utility, such as the foundation of colleges and academies on a most extensive plan and at an enormous outlay, and then leaving them incomplete, not even finis.h.i.+ng the buildings for them."

They had served the purpose of making foreigners laud the glory of the Semiramis of the north, and that was enough. The arts and sciences, said the French Minister, have plenty of academies here, but the academies have few subjects and fewer pupils. How could there be pupils in a country where there is n.o.body who is not either a courtier, a soldier, or a slave? The Princess Sophie of Anhalt, long before she dreamed of becoming the Czarina Catherine II., had been brought up by a French governess, and the tastes that her governess had implanted grew into a pa.s.sion for French literature, which can only be compared to the same pa.s.sion in Frederick the Great. Catherine only continued a movement that had already in the reign of her predecessor gone to a considerable length. The social reaction against German political predominance had been accompanied by a leaning to France. French professors in art and literature had been tempted to Moscow, the n.o.bles sent to Paris for their clothes and their furniture, and a French theatre was set up in St. Petersburg, where the n.o.bles were forced to attend the performances under pain of a fine. Absentees and loiterers were hurried to their boxes by horse-patrols.

Catherine was more serious and intelligent than this in her pursuit of French culture. She had begun with the books in which most of the salt of old France was to be found, with Rabelais, Scarron, Montaigne; she cherished Moliere and Corneille; and of the writers of the eighteenth century, apart from Voltaire, the author of Gil Blas was her favourite.

Such a list tells its own tale of a mind turned to what is masculine, racy, pungent, and thoroughly sapid. "I am a Gauloise of the north," she said, "I only understand the old French; I do not understand the new. I made up my mind to get something out of your gentry, the learned men in _ist_: I have tried them; I made some of them come here; I occasionally wrote to them; they wearied me to death, and never understood me; there was only my good protector, Voltaire. Do you know it was Voltaire who made me the fas.h.i.+on?"[75] This was a confidential revelation, made long after most of the philosophers were dead. We might have penetrated the secret of her friends.h.i.+p for such a man as Diderot, even with less direct evidence than this. It was the vogue of the philosophers, and not their philosophy that made Catherine their friend. They were the great interest of Europe at this time, just as Greek scholars had been its interest in one century, painters in another, great masters of religious controversy in a third. "What makes the great merit of France," said Voltaire, "what makes its unique superiority, is a small number of sublime or delightful men of genius, who cause French to be spoken at Vienna, at Stockholm, and at Moscow. Your ministers, your intendants, your chief secretaries have no part in all this glory." This vogue of the philosophers brought the whole literature of their country into universal repute. In the depths of the Crimea a khan of the Tartars took a delight in having Tartufe and the Bourgeois Gentilhomme read aloud to him.[76]

[75] To the Prince de Ligne.