Diderot and the Encyclopaedists Volume II Part 12

Je suis humilie d'y mettre tant de feu: Mais les temps sont si durs! le comptoir rend si peu!

Imprimeur, Colporteur, Relieur, et Libraire, Avec tous ces metiers, je suis dans la misere: Mais j'ai toujours grand soin, malgre ma pauvrete, De ne peser mon gain qu'au poids de l'equite.

Vous en allez juger par le susdit memoire.

[_Il prend ses lunettes comme pour lire._

VALeRE. (_Avec humeur._) Eh, monsieur, finissez.

M. PAMPHLET. C'est trahir votre gloire Que de vouloir caeher les immortels ecrits

[_Il lit._

Dont vous etes l'auteur. _Les Boudoirs de Paris,_ _On Journal des Abbes._ _L'Espion des Coulisses,_ Ouvrage a.s.sez piquant sur les moeurs des actrices.

And the intention of the pleasantry is pointed by a malicious footnote, to the effect that people who might be surprised that a serious man like Valere should have written works of this licentious and frivolous kind, will conceive that in a moment of leisure a philosopher should write _Les Bijoux Indiscrets_, for instance, and the next day follow it by a treatise on morality,[195]--as Diderot unhappily had done.

[195] _Le Satyrique_, iii. p. 84. _note_.

Palissot was not so good as Moliere, Boileau, and Pope, as he was fatuous enough to suppose; but he was certainly better than the scribbler who asked--

Mais enfin de quoi se glorifie Ce siecle de mollesse et de Philosophie?

Dites-moi: le Francais a-t-il un coeur plus franc Plus prodigue a l'etat de son genereux sang, Plus ardent a venger la plaintive innocence Contre l'iniquite que soutient la puissance?

Le Francais philosophe est-il plus respecte Pour la foi, la candeur, l'exacte probite?

Ou sont-ils ces Heros, ces vertueux modeles Que l'Encyclopedie a couve sous ses ailes?[196]

[196] Metra, vi. 128.

Tiresome doggrel of this kind was the strongest retort that the party of obscurantism could muster against the vigour, grace, and sparkle of Voltaire.

The great official champions of the old system were not much wiser than their hacks in the press. The churchmen were given over to a blind mind.

The great edition of Voltaire's works which Beaumarchais was printing over the frontier at Kehl, excited their anger to a furious pitch. The infamous Cardinal de Rohan, archbishop of Strasburg (1781), denounced the publication as sacrilege. The archbishop of Paris (1785) thundered against the monument of scandal and the work of darkness. The archbishop of Vienne forbade the faithful of his diocese to subscribe to it under pain of mortal sin. In the general a.s.sembly of the clergy which opened in the summer of 1780, the bishops, in memorials to the king, deplored the homage paid to the famous writer who was "less known for the beauty of his genius and the superiority of his talents, than for the persevering and implacable war which for sixty years he had waged against the Lord and his Christ." They cursed in solemn phrase the "revolting blasphemies" of Raynal's _History of the Indies_, and declared that the publication of a new edition of that celebrated book with the name and the portrait of its author, showed that the most elementary notions of shame and decency lay in profound sleep.

In the midst of those prolonged cries of distress, we have no word of recognition that the only remedy for a moral disease is a moral remedy.

The single resource that occurred to their debilitated souls was the familiar armoury of suppression, menace, violence, and tyranny. "Sire,"

they cried, "it is time to put a term to this deplorable lethargy." They reminded the king of the declaration of 1757, which inflicted on all persons who printed or circulated writings hostile to religion, the punishment of death. But "their paternal bowels shuddered at the sight of these severe enactments;" all that they sought was plenty of rigorous imprisonment, ruinous fining, and diligent espionage.[197] If the reader is revolted by the rashness of Diderot's expectation of the speedy decay of the belief in a G.o.d,[198] he may well be equally revolted by the obstinate infatuation of the men who expected to preserve the belief in a G.o.d by the spies of the department of police. Much had no doubt been done for the church in past times by cruelty and oppression, but the folly of the French bishops, after the reign of Voltaire and the apostolate of the Encyclopaedia, lay exactly in their blindness to the fact that the old methods were henceforth impossible in France, and impossible for ever. How can we wonder at the hatred and contempt felt by men of the social intelligence of Diderot and D'Alembert for this desperate union of impotence and malignity?

[197] See for abundant matter of the same kind, M. Rocquain's _L'Esprit Revolutionnaire avant la Revolution_, bk. x. pp. 382, 390, etc.

[198] Montesquieu more sensibly had given the Church not more than five hundred years to live. _Let. Pers._, 117. One hundred and fifty of them have already pa.s.sed.

The band of the precursors was rapidly disappearing. Grimm and Holbach, Catherine and Frederick, still survived.[199] D'Alembert, tended to the last hour by Condorcet with the lovable reverence of a son, died at the end of October 1783. Turgot, gazing with eyes of astonished sternness on a society hurrying incorrigibly with joyful speed along the path of destruction, had pa.s.sed away two years before (1781). Voltaire, the great intellectual director of Europe for fifty years, and Rousseau, the great emotional reactionist, had both, as we know, died in 1778. The little companies in which, from Adrienne Lecouvreur, the Marquise de Lambert, and Madame de Tencin, in the first half of the century, groups of intelligent men and women had succeeded in founding informal schools of disinterested opinion, and in finally removing the centre of criticism and intellectual activity from Versailles to Paris, had now nearly all come to an end. Madame du Deffand died in 1780, Madame Geoffrin in 1779, and in 1776 Mdlle. Lespina.s.se, whose letters will long survive her, as giving a burning literary note to the vagueness of suffering and pain of soul. One of Diderot's favourite companions in older days, Galiani, the antiquary, the scholar, the politician, the incomparable mimic, the shrewdest, wittiest, and gayest of men after Voltaire, was feeling the dull grasp of approaching death under his native sky at Naples. Galiani's _Dialogues on the Trade in Grain_ (1769-70) contained, under that most unpromising t.i.tle, a piece of literature which for its verve, rapidity, wit, dialectical subtlety, and real strength of thought, has hardly been surpa.s.sed by masterpieces of a wider recognition. Voltaire vowed that Plato and Moliere must have combined to produce a book that was as amusing as the best of romances, and as instructive as the best of serious books. Diderot, who had a hand in retouching the _Dialogues_ for the press,[200] went so far as to p.r.o.nounce them worthy of a place along with the _Provincial Letters_ of Pascal, and declared that, like those immortal pieces, Galiani's dialogues would remain as a model of perfection in their own kind, long after both the subject and the personages concerned had lost their interest.[201] The prophecy has not come quite true, for the world is busy, and heedless, and much the prey of accident and capricious tradition in the books that it reads. Yet even now, although Galiani was probably wrong on the special issue between himself and the economists, it would be well if people would turn to his demolition, as wise as witty, of the doctrine of absolute truths in political economy.

Galiani's constant correspondent was Madame d'Epinay, the kindly benefactress of Rousseau a quarter of a century earlier, the friend of Diderot, the more than friend of Grimm. In 1783 she died, and either in that year or the next, Mademoiselle Voland, who had filled so great a s.p.a.ce in the life of Diderot. The ghosts and memories of his friends became the majority, and he consoled himself that he should not long survive.

[199] Grimm died in 1807, Holbach in 1789, Catherine in 1796, and Frederick in 1786.

[200] See _Oeuv._, xix. 317, 326.

[201] _Oeuv._, vi. 442, where Diderot gives a sketch of this interesting man.

The days of intellectual excitement and philanthropic hope seemed at their very height, but in fact they were over. "n.o.body," said Talleyrand, "who has not lived before 1789, knows how sweet life can be." The old world had its last laugh over the _Marriage of Figaro_ (April 1784), but in the laugh of Figaro there is a strange ring. Under all its gaiety, its liveliness, its admirable _navete_, was something sombre. It was pregnant with menace. Its fooling was the ironical enforcement of Raynal's trenchant declaration that "the law is nothing, if it be not a sword gliding indistinctly over the heads of all, and striking down whatever rises above the horizontal plane along which it moves."

Diderot himself is commonly accused of having fomented an atrocious spirit by the horrible couplet--

Et ses mains ourdiraient les entrailles du pretre, Au defaut d'un cordon pour etrangler les rois.[202]

[202] "Is it not possible that the virtuous and moderate proposal to strangle the last Jesuit in the bowels of the last Jansenist might do something towards reconciling matters?"--Voltaire to Helvetius, May 11, 1761.

That the verses could have actually excited the spirit of the Terrorists is impossible, for they were not given to the world until 1795. And in the second place, so far as Diderot's intention is concerned, any one who reads the piece from which the lines are taken, will perceive that the whole performance is in a vein of playful phantasy, and that the particular verses are placed dramatically in the mouth of a proclaimed Eleutheromane, or maniac for liberty.[203] Diderot was not likely to foresee that what he designed for an ill.u.s.tration of the frenzy of the Pindaric dithyramb, would so soon be mistaken for a short formula of practical politics.[204]

[203] _Les Eleutheromanes, ou les Furieux de la Liberte._ _Oeuv._, ix. 16.

[204] It is a curious ill.u.s.tration of the carelessness with which the so-called negative school have been treated, that so conscientious a writer as M. Henri Martin (_Hist. de France_, xvi.

146) should have taxed Diderot, among other sinister maxims, with this, that "the public punishment of a king changes the spirit of a nation for ever." Now the words occur in a collection of observations on government, which Diderot wrote on the margin of his copy of Tacitus, and which are ent.i.tled _Principes de Politique des Souverains_ (1775). Some of the most pungent maxims are obviously intended for irony on the military and Machiavellian policy of Frederick the Great, while others on the policy of the Roman emperors are shrewd and sagacious. The maxim from which M. Martin quotes is the 147th, and in it the sombre words of his quotation follow this:--"_Let the people never see royal blood flow for any cause whatever._ The public punishment of a king," etc.! See _Oeuv._, ii. 486.

In 1780 his townsmen of Langres paid him a compliment, which showed that the sage was not without honour in his own country. They besought him to sit for his portrait, to be placed among the worthies in the town hall.

Diderot replied by sending them Houdon's bronze bust, which was received with all distinction and honour. Naigeon hints that in the last years of his life Diderot paid more attention to money than he had ever done before;[205] not that he became a miser, but because, like many other persons, he had not found out until the close of a life's experience that care of money really means care of the instrument that procures some of the best ends in life. For a moment we may regret that he was too much occupied in attending to his affairs to take the unwise Naigeon's wise counsel, that he should devote himself to a careful revision of all that he had written. Perhaps Diderot's instinct was right. Among the distractions of old age, he had turned back to his Letter on the Blind, and read it over again without partiality. He found, as was natural, some defects in a piece that was written three-and-thirty years before, but he abstained from attempting to remove them, for fear that the page of the young man should be made the worse by the retouching of the old man. "There comes a time," he reflects, "when taste gives counsels whose justice you recognise, but which you have no longer strength to follow. It is the pusillanimity that springs from consciousness of weakness, or else it is the idleness that is one of the results of weakness and pusillanimity, which disgusts me with a task that would be more likely to hurt than to improve my work.

Solve senescentem mature sa.n.u.s equum, ne Peccet ad extremum ridendus et ilia ducat."

And so he contented himself with some rough notes of phenomena that were corroborative of the speculation of his youth.[206]

[205] _Mem. sur la Vie et les Ouvrages de Diderot_, p. 412.

[206] Grimm, _Corr. Lit._, xi. 120.

In the early spring of 1784 Diderot had an attack which he knew to be the presage of the end. Dropsy set in, and he lingered until the summer.

The priest of Saint Sulpice, the centre of the philosophic quarter, came to visit him two or three times a week, hoping to achieve at least the semblance of a conversion. Diderot did not encourage conversation on theology, but when pressed he did not refuse it. One day when they found, as two men of sense will always find, that they had ample common ground in matters of morality and good works, the priest ventured to hint that an exposition of such excellent maxims, accompanied by a slight retractation of Diderot's previous works, would have a good effect on the world. "I daresay it would, monsieur le cure, but confess that I should be acting an impudent lie." And no word of retractation was ever made. As the end came suddenly, the priest escaped from the necessity of denying the funeral rites of the Church.

For thirty years Diderot had been steadfast to his quarters on an upper floor in the Rue Taranne, and even now, when the physicians told him that to climb such length of staircase was death to him, he still could not be induced to stir. It would have been easier, his daughter says, to effect a removal from Versailles itself. Grimm at length asked the Empress of Russia to provide a house for her librarian, and when the request was conceded, Diderot, who could never be ungracious, allowed himself to be taken from his garret to palatial rooms in the Rue de Richelieu. He enjoyed them less than a fortnight. Though visibly growing weaker every day, he did all that he could to cheer the people around him, and amused himself and them by arranging his pictures and his books. In the evening, to the last, he found strength to converse on science and philosophy to the friends who were eager as ever for the last gleanings of his prolific intellect. In the last conversation that his daughter heard him carry on, his last words were the pregnant aphorism that _the first step towards philosophy is incredulity_.

On the evening of the 30th of July 1784 he sat down to table, and at the end of the meal took an apricot. His wife, with kindly solicitude, remonstrated. _Mais quel diable de mal veux-tu que cela me fa.s.se?_ he said, and ate the apricot. Then he rested his elbow on the table, trifling with some sweetmeats. His wife asked him a question; on receiving no answer, she looked up and saw that he was dead. He had died as the Greek poet says that men died in the golden age--[Greek: thneskon d' hos hypno dedmemenoi], _they pa.s.sed away as if mastered by sleep_. It had always been his opinion that an examination of the organs after death is a useful practice, and his wish that the operation should take place in his own case was respected. Nothing interesting or remarkable was revealed, and his remains were laid in the vaults of the church of Saint Roche.

So the curtain fell upon this strange tragi-comedy of a man of letters.

There is no better epilogue than words of his own:--"We fix our gaze on the ruins of a triumphal arch, of a portico, a pyramid, a temple, a palace, and we return upon ourselves. All is annihilated, perishes, pa.s.ses away. It is only the world that remains; only time that endures.

I walk between two eternities. To whatever side I turn my eyes, the objects that surround me tell of an end, and teach me resignation to my own end. What is my ephemeral existence in comparison with that of the crumbling rock and the decaying forest? I see the marble of the tomb falling to dust, and yet I cannot bear to die! Am I to grudge a feeble tissue of fibres and flesh to a general law, that executes itself inexorably even on very bronze!"

CHAPTER IX.

CONCLUSION.

A few more pages must be given to one or two of Diderot's writings which have not hitherto been mentioned. An exhaustive survey of his works is out of the question, nor would any one be repaid for the labour of criticism. A mere list of the topics that he handled would fill a long chapter. A redaction of a long treatise on harmony, a vast sheaf of notes on the elements of physiology, a collection of miscellanea on the drama, a still more copious collection of miscellanea on a hundred points in literature and art, a fragment on the exercise of young Russians, an elaborate plan of studies for a proposed Russian University,--no less panurgic and less encyclopaedic a critic than Diderot himself could undertake to sweep with ever so light a wing over this vast area. Everybody can find something to say about the collection of tales, in which Diderot thought that he was satirising the manners of his time, after the fas.h.i.+on of Rabelais, Montaigne, La Mothe-le-Vayer, and Swift. But not everybody is competent to deal, for instance, with the five memoirs on different subjects in mathematics (1748), with which Diderot hoped to efface the scandal of his previous performance.

I.

Decidedly the most important of the pieces of which we have not yet spoken must be counted the _Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature_ (1754). His study of Bacon and the composition of the introductory prospectus of the Encyclopaedia had naturally filled Diderot's mind with ideas about the universe as a whole. The great problem of man's knowledge of this universe,--the limits, the instruments, the meaning of such knowledge, came before him with a force that he could not evade.