Diderot and the Encyclopaedists Volume I Part 12

"_He._--No, no; gained. People grow rich every moment; a day less to live, or a crown piece to the good, 'tis all one. When the last moment comes, one is as rich as another. Samuel Bernard, who by pillaging and stealing and playing bankrupt, leaves seven-and-twenty million francs in gold, is no better than Rameau, who leaves not a penny, and will be indebted to charity for a shroud to wrap about him. The dead man hears not the tolling of the bell; 'tis in vain that a hundred priests bawl dirges for him, in vain that a long file of blazing torches go before.

His soul walks not by the side of the master of the funeral ceremonies.

To moulder under marble, or to moulder under clay, 'tis still to moulder. To have around one's bier children in red and children in blue, or to have not a creature, what matters it?"

These are the gleams of the _mens divinior_, that relieve the perplexing moral squalor of the portrait. Even here we have the painful innuendo that a thought which is solemnising and holy to the n.o.ble, serves equally well to point a trait of cynical defiance in the ign.o.ble.

Again, there is an indirectly imaginative element in the sort of terror which the thoroughness of the presentation inspires. For indeed it is an emotion hardly short of terror that seizes us, as we listen to the stringent unflinching paradox of this heterogeneous figure. Rameau is the squalid and tattered Satan of the eighteenth century. He is a Mephistopheles out at elbows, a Lucifer in low water; yet always diabolic, with the bright flash of the pit in his eye. Disgust is transformed into horror and affright by the trenchant confidence of his spirit, the daring thoroughness and consistency of his dialectic, the lurid sarcasm, the vile penetration. He discusses a horrible action, or execrable crime, as a virtuoso examines a statue or a painting. He has that rarest fort.i.tude of the vicious, not to shrink from calling his character and conduct by their names. He is one of Swift's Yahoos, with the courage of its opinions. He seems to give one reason for hating and dreading oneself. The effect is of mixed fear and fascination, as of a magician whose miraculous crystal is to show us what and how we shall be twenty years from now; or as when a surgeon tells the tale of some ghastly disorder, that may at the very moment be stealthily preparing for us a doom of anguish.

Hence our dialogue is a.s.suredly no "meat for little people nor for fools." Some of it is revolting in its brutal indecency. Even Goethe's self-possession cannot make it endurable to him. But it is a study to be omitted by no one who judges the corruption of the old society in France an important historic subject. The picture is very like the corruption of the old society in Rome. We see the rotten material which the purifying flame of Jacobinism was soon to consume out of the land with fiery swiftness. We watch the very cla.s.ses from which, as we have been so often told, the regeneration of France would have come, if only demagogues and rabble had not violently interposed. There is no gaiety in the style; none of that laughter which makes such a delineation of the manners of the time as we find in Colle's play of _Truth in Wine_, _naf_, true to nature, and almost exhilarating. In _Rameau_ we are afflicted by the odour of deadly taint.

As the dialogue is not in every hand--nor could any one wish that it should be--I have thought it worth while to print an English rendering of a considerable part of it in an appendix. Mr. Carlyle told us long ago that it must be translated into English, and although such a piece of work is less simple than it may seem, it appears right to give the reader an opportunity of judging for himself of the flavour of the most characteristic of all Diderot's performances. Only let no reader turn to it who has any invincible repugnance to that curious turn for _wildbret_, which Goethe has described as the secret of some arts.

Dixeris haec inter varicosos centuriones, Continuo cra.s.sum ridet Pulfenius ingens Et centum Graecos curto centusse licebit.

As I have already said, it must be judged as something more than a literary diversion. "You do not suspect, Sir Philosopher," says Rameau, "that at this moment I represent the most important part of the town and the court." As the painter of the picture says, Rameau confessed the vices that he had, and that most of the people about us have; but he was no hypocrite. He was neither more nor less abominable than they; he was only more frank and systematic and profound in his depravity. This is the social significance of the dialogue. This is what, apart from other considerations, makes _Rameau's Nephew_ so much more valuable a guide to the moral sentiment of the time than merely licentious compositions like those of Louvet or La Olos. Its instructiveness is immense to those who examine the conditions that prepared the Revolution. Rameau is not the [Greek: akolastos] of Aristotle, nor the creature of [Greek: aponoia]

described by Theophrastus--the castaway by individual idiosyncrasy, the reprobate by accident. The men whom he represented, the courtiers, the financiers, the merchants, the shopkeepers, were immoral by formula and depraved on principle. Vice was a doctrine to them, and wretchlessness of unclean living was reduced to a system of philosophy. Any one, I venture to repeat, who realises the extent to which this had corroded the ruling powers in France, will perceive that the furious flood of social energy which the Jacobins poured over the country was not less indispensable to France than the flood of the barbarians was indispensable for the transformation of the Roman Empire.

Scattered among the more serious fragments of the dialogue is some excellent by-play of sarcasm upon Palissot, and one or two of the other a.s.sailants of the new liberal school. Palissot is an old story. The Palissots are an eternal species. The family never dies out, and it thrives in every climate. All societies know the literary dangler in great houses, and the purveyor to fashionable prejudices. Not that he is always servile. The reader, I daresay, remembers that La Bruyere described a curious being in Troilus, the despotic parasite. Palissot, eighteenth century or nineteenth century, is often like Troilus, parasite and tyrant at the same time. He usually happens to have begun life with laudable aspirations and sincere interests of his own; and when, alas, the mediocrity of his gifts proves too weak to bear the burden of his ambitions, the recollection of a generous youth only serves to sour old age.

Bel esprit abhorre de tous les bons esprits, Il pense par la haine echapper au mepris.

A force d'attentats il se croit ill.u.s.tre; Et s'il n'etait mechant, il serait ignore.

Palissot began with a tragedy. He proceeded to an angry pamphlet against the Encyclopaedists and the fury for innovation. Then he achieved immense vogue among fine ladies, bishops, and the lighter heads of the town, by the comedy in which he held Diderot, D'Alembert, and the others, up to hatred and ridicule. Finally, after coming to look upon himself as a serious personage, he disappeared into the mire of half-oblivious contempt and disgust that happily awaits all the poor Palissots and all their works. His name only survives in connection with the men whom he maligned. He lived to be old, as, oddly enough, Spite so often does. In the Terror he had a narrow escape, for he was brought before Chaumette. Chaumette apostrophised the a.s.sailant of Rousseau and Diderot with rude energy, but did not send him to the guillotine. In this the practical disciple only imitated the magnanimity of his theoretical masters. Rousseau had declined an opportunity of punishing Palissot's impertinences, and Diderot took no worse vengeance upon him than by making an occasional reference of contempt to him in a dialogue which he perhaps never intended to publish.

Another subject is handled in _Rameau's Nephew,_ which is interesting in connection with the mental activity of Paris in the eighteenth century.

Music was the field of as much pa.s.sionate controversy as theology and philosophy. The Bull Unigenitus itself did not lead to livelier disputes, or more violent cabals, than the conflict between the partisans of French music and the partisans of Italian music. The horror of a Jansenist for a Molinist did not surpa.s.s that of a Lullist for a Dunist, or afterwards of a Gluckist for a Piccinist.[298] Lulli and Rameau (the uncle of our parasite) had undisputed possession of Paris until the arrival, in 1752, of a company of Italian singers. The great quarrel at once broke out as to the true method and destination of musical composition. Is music an independent art, appealing directly to a special sense, or is it to be made an instrument for expressing affections of the mind in a certain deeper way? The Italians asked only for delicious harmonies and exquisite melodies. The French insisted that these should be subordinate to the work of the poet. The former were content with delight, the latter pressed for significance. The one declared that Italian music was no better than a silly tickling of the ears; the other that the overture to a French opera was like a prelude to a Miserere in plain-song. In 1772-73 the ill.u.s.trious Gluck came to Paris. His art was believed to reconcile the two schools, to have more melody than the old French style, and more severity and meaning than the purely Italian style. French dignity was saved. But soon the old battle, which had been going on for twenty years, began to rage with greater violence than ever. Piccini was brought to Paris by the Neapolitan amba.s.sador. The old cries were heard in a shriller key than before.

Pamphlets, broadsheets, sarcasms flew over Paris from every side.

Was music only to flatter the ear, or was it to paint the pa.s.sions in all their energy, to harrow the soul, to raise men's courage, to form citizens and heroes? The coffee-houses were thrown into dire confusion, and literary societies were rent by fatal discord. Even dinner-parties breathed only constraint and mistrust, and the intimacies of a lifetime came to cruel end. _Rameau's Nephew_ was composed in the midst of the first part of this long campaign of a quarter of a century, and its seems to have been revised by its author in the midst of the second great episode. Diderot declares against the school of Rameau and Lulli.

That he should do so was a part of his general reaction in favour of what he called the natural, against the artifice and affectation. Goethe has pointed out the inconsistency between Diderot's sympathy for the less expressive kind of music, and his usual vehement pa.s.sion for the expressive in art. He truly observes that Diderot's sympathy went in this way, because the novelty and agitation seemed likely to break up the old, stiff, and abhorred fashion, and to clear the ground afresh for other efforts.[299]

END OF VOL. I.

_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_. FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: _Oeuv._, xviii. 505.]

[Footnote 2: _Oeuv._, xviii. 364.]

[Footnote 3: _Ib._ 379.]

[Footnote 4: _Oeuv._, i. 30.]

[Footnote 5: _Wahlverwandschaften_, pt. ii. ch. vii. The reader will do well to consult the philosophical estimate of the function of the man of letters given by Comte, _Philosophie Positive_, v. 512, vi. 192, 287.

The best contemporary account of the principles and policy of the men of letters in the eighteenth century is to be found in Condorcet's _Esquisse d'un Tableau, etc._, pp. 187-189 (ed. 1847).]

[Footnote 6: Naigeon, p. 24.]

[Footnote 7: _Oeuv._, xix. 162.]

[Footnote 8: _Oeuv._, xix. 89.]

[Footnote 9: _Oeuv._, xix. 93.]

[Footnote 10: _Oeuv._, i. xlviii.]

[Footnote 11: Marmontel, _Mem._, vol. ii. b. vii. p. 315.]

[Footnote 12: Morellet, _Mem._, i. p. 29.]

[Footnote 13: _Oeuv._, i. xlviii.]

[Footnote 14: _Ib._ xix. 55.]

[Footnote 15: _Oeuv._, xviii. 376.]

[Footnote 16: Madame de Vandeul says 1744. But M. Jal (_Dict. Crit._, 495) reproduces the certificate of the marriage. Perhaps we may charitably hope that Diderot himself is equally mistaken, when in later years he sets down a disreputable adventure to 1744. (_Oeuv._, xix.

85.)]

[Footnote 17: For an account of Madame de Puisieux in her later years, see Mdme. Roland's _Memoirs_, i. 156.]

[Footnote 18: Sainte Beuve, _Causeries_, ix. 136.]

[Footnote 19: _Oeuv._, xix. 159. See also _Salons_, 1767, No, 118.]

[Footnote 20: _Les Regnes de Claud et de Neron, -- 79.]

[Footnote 21: Account of Diderot by Meister, printed in Grimm's _Correspondence Litteraire_ xiii. 202-211.]

[Footnote 22: Gretry, quoted in Genin's _Oeuv. choisies de Diderot_, 42.]

[Footnote 23: Marmontel, _Mem_., bk. vii. vol. ii. 312.]

[Footnote 24: Plato, _Theages_, 130, c.]

[Footnote 25: Art. _Encyclopedie_.]

[Footnote 26: See Barbier's Journal, iv. 166.]

[Footnote 27: The book was among those found in the possession of the unfortunate La Barre.]

[Footnote 28: Honegger's _Kritische Geschichte der franzosischen Cultureinflusse in den letzten Jahrhunderten_, pp. 267-273.]