The New Spirit

ent influence; he was, for the most part, too far ahead of his time, and his tremendo

ll 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.[35] 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

en, 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 bit

ttle 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[38] 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,

erot 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[40] 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 “Encyclop?dia” 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 “Encyclop?dia” was more than an encyclop?dia; it was not founded on that of Chambers, by which it was suggested, nor is it represented by our own estimable

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[43] 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

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’?uvre! 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[46] softened the terrible

ffrin: “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 u

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[48] Galiani’s “Dialogues” on the wheat trade. The Dauphin dies; a monument mus

est 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

4

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[50] about or projecting, repeating current scandal or sometimes not quite decent story, flashing instinctively into wise or witty reflection; always with a swi

nly 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

c 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

t 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 posse

5

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 ma

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

laboriously learning. So it is with politics, sexual morality, various social and politico-economical questions, education, philosophy. He touched all the social questions which absorb our attention to-day. He approached the problem of the place of the worke

uction in the natural sciences, “the study of things rather than the study of words.” “I think,” he says, “that we should give in our schools something of all the knowledge necessary to a citizen, from legislation to the mechanical arts, and in these mechanical arts I include the occupations of the lowest class of citizens. The spectacle of hu

erning this morality, easily succeeds in confounding him and in pouring keen ridicule on the inconsistencies of European morals. With reference to rules of conduct which vary with the country and the time, Diderot makes Orou say, “We must have a surer rule, and what shall this rule be? Do you know any other than the good of the community and the advantage of the individual?” “You were unhappy,” he remarks again to the chaplain, “when I presented to you last night my two daughters and my wife; you exclaimed, ‘But my religion! my office!’ Do you wish to know what in every time and place is good and bad? Concern yourself with the nature of things and of actions, and with your relations to your fellows. Consider the influence of your conduct on yourself and on the community. You are mad if you think that there is anything in the universe, above or below, which can add to or take from the laws of nature.” That rule, he explains, is the polar star on the path of life, a

ake people good against their wills, nor is it desirable to treat men like sheep. “If they say, ‘We are well enough here,’ or if, even, they say, ‘We are not well here, but we will stay,’ let us try to enlighten them, to undeceive them, to bring them to saner views by persuasion, but never by force.” “The arbitrary government of a just and enlightened prince is always bad.” He insists, again and again, that we must never let our pretended masters do good to us against our wills. “Whenever you see the sovereign authority in a country extending beyond the region of police, you may say that that country is badly governed.” Diderot, Goethe, Adam Smith, Beccaria, Mill, to mention but a few typical names, threw all the weight of their influence, sometimes with passionate emphasis, on the side of individuality and freedom, and their teaching reached its final

ai quelqu

hacun fasse

or priest nor laws, nor meum nor tuum, nor property in goods or land, nor vices nor virtues.” This is the anarchism that stands at the end of all social progress, but as an attainable social state it is still certainly, as Diderot adds, “diablement idéal.” He had[63] no faith in moralization by Act

ther you have the right.” Not many men have had so much reason as Diderot for becoming misanthropic; few men have had in them less of the misanthrope. “My life is not stolen from me,” he writes; “I give it.... A pleasure which is for myself alone touches me slightly. It is for myself and for my friends that I read, that I reflect, that I write, that I meditate, that I hear, that I observe, that I feel.... I have consecrated to them the use of all my senses, and that is perhaps the reason why every[64]thing is a

sentially fermentative. He knew by a native instinct every promising germ of thought, and he knew how to make it fruitful. He was, as Voltaire called him, Pantophile, the man who loved and was interested in everything. His extreme sensitiveness to impressions was the source of his strength and of his weakness. In his sane,[65] massive, and yet so sensitive temperament, aspirations keen and lyrical as Shelley’s seem to blend harmoniously with laughter broad and tolerant as Ra

h little grasp of practical life, the men who have directed European thought,[66] especially in England, have been men whose imaginations were profoundly impressed, and their mental equilibrium considerably disturbed, by that brief convulsion of France; and they developed a curious timidity and distrust, visible even when they had the courage to adopt a short-sighted optimism. It is very interesting now to turn back to the essay in which Carlyle, perhaps the most brilliant and distinguished representative of the Counter-Revolution, recorded his estimate of Diderot. How curiously old-fashioned seem to us to-day its mitigated admiration, its vague mysti

In many fields of physical and social knowledge—from electricity at the one end to criminology at the other—we are now laying anew great foundations, and the walls are being raised so rapidly that it is sometimes hard to know where we are, or to realize what is being done. When science is thus ren

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