DIDEROT.*

In these volumes on the life and labours of Diderot and his colleagues on the Encyclopedia Mr. John Morley closes a series of studies on the literary preparation for the French Revolution. The former works dealt with Voltaire and Rousseau, and the present is appropriately devoted to the man whose name is always associated with these as one of the great intellectual precursors of the Revolution. The work is characterised by all of Mr. Morley's thoroughness of treatment, which shuns no labour requisite to the full elucidation of its subject. Its style is admirably clear, trenchant, sinewy, and is a fitting vehicle for the keen, strong intelligence and energetic thought. The series of which it forms a part cannot but be attentively studied by every one who desires to attain to an adequate comprehension of the prolific 18th century, which, after it had, under the influence of a passing reaction, been despised as superficial and merely destructive by a couple of generations, we have been made to see, by the labours of such men as Carlyle, Leslie Stephen, Lecky, and Morley, was one of the most noteworthy eras of the intellectual activity and reforming progress of the world.

Denis Diderot was born in 1713, being thus, Mr. Morley reminds us, a few months younger than Rousseau, nearly 20 years younger than Voltaire, two years younger than Hume, and 11 years older than Kant. His family had been cutlers at Langres for two centuries in direct line. Like so many of the 18th century reformers, he was a pupil of the Jesuits. He was reduced to live by his wits as a man of letters. His life for many years was conducted among harassing conditions, and "haggard perplexities." But the squalid adversity he had occasionally to endure left no "sour sediment" in his temper. His spirit was always cheerful and carelessly indifferent to the spite as to the gifts of fortune. " If he found himself absolutely without food and without pence, be began moodily to think of abandoning his books and his pen, and of complying with the wishes of his father. A line of Homer, an idea from the Principia, an interesting problem in algebra or geometry, was enough to restore the eternally invincible spell of knowledge." The versatility displayed by his work in mathematics, philosophy, social science, poetry, and criticism, is wonderful; but, owing to some indifferent stewardship of his splendid talents, it is the fact that "he, perhaps alone in literature, has left a name of almost the first eminence, and impressed his greatness upon men of the strongest and most different intelligence, and yet never produced a masterpiece." Of his highly variable work Mr. Morley presents an interesting and impartial account. He does not stint his condemnation of the indecency of some of Diderot's lighter productions, and in regard to one of them says that after glancing into it he felt the propriety of Carlyle's injunction, " to bathe himself in running water, put on change of raiment, and be unclean until the evening." Neither does he spare censure on the astonishing bad taste with which Diderot, in one of his more serious works, put some highly plain-spoken discussions of an almost undiscussible subject into the form of dialogue, in which a young lady of his time was given as one of the interlocutors. The justness and quick intelligence of his art-criticisms receive warm praise, and his anticipations of the leading thought of Lessing's Laocöon are pointed out. But it is admitted that his writings fail to explain the secret of his great reputation among his contemporaries. "Like Dr. Johnson, he was a great converser rather than the author of great books," and "his personality invested his talk, as happened in the case of Johnson and of Coleridge, with an imposing interest and a power of inspiration which we should never comprehend from the mere perusal of his writings."

Diderot's place in the literary history of his century is much less due to any single work from his pen than to his share of the production of what was regarded as the most wonderful intellectual edifice ever raised by the mind of man, and which proved one of the most potent agencies in the epoch of fundamental change soon setting in. We refer to the great Encyclopaedia, of which Diderot was the originator, the editor, and by far the largest contributor. It was Diderot's initiative which supplied the germ of this famous work, and it was his devoted slavish labour for many years which brought the daring scheme to a successful conclusion. Of this undertaking Mr. Morley supplies an interesting and valuable narrative. He draws attention to the independence assumed by Diderot and his illustrious colleague D'Alembert, and their consciousness of the power and exaltation of the calling of men of letters as qualities which "marked the rise of a new teaching order, and the supercession of the old. The highest moral ideas now belonged no longer to the clergy, but to the writers; no longer to official Catholicism, but to that fertilising medley of new notions about human knowledge and human society which then went by the name of philosophy." It was from the writers rather than from the ecclesiastics that the high ideas came, which reacted on the church itself, and raised it to a higher level of intellect and morality. " It was no Christian prelate, but Diderot, who burst the bonds of a paralysing dogma by the magnificent cry, Détruisez ces enceintes qui rétrécissent vos idées! Elargissez Dieu !" In the meantime the Church had no weapons to oppose to the reforming efforts of the new literary and scientific teachers, save relentless persecution. "Official religion was then a strange union of Byzantine decrepitude with the energetic ferocity of the Holy Office." " Yet," says Mr. Morley, "I should be sorry to be unjust. It is to be said that even in those bad days, when religion meant cruelty and cabal, the one or two men who boldly withstood face to face the King and the Pompadour for the vileness of their lives, were priests of the church. In spite of the utmost efforts of the church, supported by the Government, and in spite of the discouragement and desertion of many of the most valued of its contributors, the great work went on, thanks above all else to the amazing energy and persistency of Diderot.

The character of the movement of philosophic and scientific revolt of which the Encyclopædia was the outcome and the fruit, is admirably discussed in the luminous pages of Mr. Morley. He especially dwells on its humanising tendency and the social aim of alienating the social wretchedness of mankind, which was so conspicuously kept in view throughout these 40 vast folios. The philosophy of the encyclopaedists was, as anybody can now see, imperfectly thought out. But "if the metaphysic of these writers had been a thousandfold more superficial than it was, what mattered that so long as they had vision for every one of the great social improvements on which the progress, and even the very life, of the nation depended?" "It was this band of writers, organised by a harassed man of letters, and not the nobles swarming round Lewis the Fifteenth, nor the churchmen singing masses, who first grasped the great principle of modern society, the honour that is owed to productive industry." If it is affirmed that the Encyclopaedists deliberately prepared the way for a political revolution, "let us remember that what they really did was to shed the light of rational discussion on such practical grievances as even the most fatuous conservative in France does not now dream of bringing back." In regard to religion the Encylopædia represented the principle of rationalistic scepticism, and reserved its attacks for sacerdotalism. At the same time the work excited an indirect influence on religious thought. By its means "secular knowledge was made to present a massive and sumptuous front. It was pictured before the curious eyes of that generation as a great city of glittering palaces and stately mansions; or else as an immense landscape, with mountains, plains, rocks, waters, forests, animals, and a thousand objects, glorious and beautiful in the sunlight. Theology became visibly a shrivelled thing. Men grew to be conscious of the vastness of the universe." "As," says Mr. Morley, in concluding his important chapter on this grand work, " I replace in my shelves this mountain of volumes, 'dusky and huge, enlarging on the sight,' I have a presentiment that their pages will seldom again be disturbed by me or by others. They served a great purpose a hundred years ago. They are now a monumental ruin, clothed with all the profuse associations of history. It is no Ozymandias of Egypt, king of kings, whose wrecked shape of stone and sterile memories we contemplate. We think rather of the grey and crumbling walls of an ancient stronghold, reared by the endeavour of stout hands and faithful, whence in its own day and generation a band once went forth against barbarious hordes to strike a blow for humanity and truth."

In the second volume of his book, while still pursuing the thread of Diderot's life, Mr. Morley introduces sketches of three other noticeable contributions to what we may call the revolutionary literature of that day. We refer to the book of Helvetius on L'Esprit, Abbe Reynal's History of the Indies, and Baron Holbach's famous System of Nature. In this book, with its avowed atheism and materialism, and its fierce denunciations of the crimes and injustices of civil governments, were "gathered up all the scattered explosives of the criticism of the century, into one thundering engine of revolt and destruction." The vigorous attacks of the book on the "religious and political errors which have changed the universe into a valley of tears" form, says our author, "an incessant refrain that sounds with hoarse ground-tone under all the ethics and the metaphysics of the book." Some of its pages make us feel "as if Robespierre were already haranguing in the National Assembly, Camille Desmoulins declaiming in the gardens of the Palais Royal, and Danton thundering at the Club of the Cordeliers. We already watch the smoke of the flaming chateaux, going up like a savoury and righteous sacrifice to the heavens." Its author "lived to get a glimpse of the very edge and sharp bend of the great cataract. He died in the spring of 1789. If he had only lived five years longer he would have seen the great church of Notre Dame solemnly consecrated by legislative decree to the worship of Reason, bishops publicly trampling on crosier and ring amid universal applause, and vast crowds exulting in processions whose hero was an ass crowned with a mitre."

Our author, in his account of the declining years, which were also cheerful and peaceful years, of Diderot's life, glances at the imbecility by which the clergy were blinded to the nature of the position. In their complaints against the resolute attacks against the system of which they were the official champions, "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, tyranny." In the midst of the rapid,smooth, arrowy drift of the current to the cataract that was now inevitable, the life of the weary but staunch and strenuous fighter whom we have under notice quietly passed away in 1784. With all his faults of conduct and temperament, his fitfulness of intellectual power, the somewhat slapdash and impromptu character of much of his best work, he had from the first to the last fought on the side of enlightenment, and progress, and equal justice, and human liberty ; and it is not for the generation which shares in the triumphs he helped to win to judge him unkindly.

* Diderot and the Encylopædists, by John Morley. London; Chapman and Hall 1878.


Australasian (Melbourne, Vic.), 19 October 1878, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article143001846