Diderot and the Encyclopaedists Volume II Part 2

That men of the stamp of Goethe and Schiller should have found such a book of delicious feast, naturally makes the disparaging critic pause.

In truth, we can easily see how it was. Like all the rest of Diderot's work, it breaks roughly in upon that starved formalism which had for long lain so heavily both on art and life. Its hardihood, its very license, its contempt of conventions, its presentation of common people and coa.r.s.e pa.s.sions and rough lives, all made it a dissolvent of the thin, dry, and frigid rules which tyrannised over the world, and interposed between the artist or the thinker and the real existence of man on the earth. When we think of what European literature was, it ceases to be wonderful that Goethe should have been unable for six whole hours to tear himself away from a book that so few men to-day, save under some compulsion, could persuade themselves to read through. On great wholesome minds the grossness left no stain, and the interest of Diderot's singularities worked as a stimulus to a happier originality in men of more disciplined endowments. And let us add, of more poetic endowments. It is the lack of poetry in _Jacques_ that makes its irony so heavy to us. We only willingly suffer those to take us down into the depths who can also raise us on the wings of a beautiful fancy. Even Rabelais has his poetic moments, as in the picture of Cupid self-disarmed before the industrious serenity of the Muses. A single lovely image, like Sterne's figure of the recording angel, reconciles us to many a miry page. But in _Jacques le Fataliste_, Diderot never raises his eye for an instant to the blue aether, his ear catches no harmony of awe, of hope, nor even of a n.o.ble despair. With a kind of clumsy jubilancy he holds us fast in the ways and language of thick and clogged sense. The _fatrasie_ of old France has its place in literature, but it can never be restored in ages when a host of moral anxieties have laid siege to men's souls. The uncommon is always welcome to the lover of art, but it must justify itself. _Jacques_ has the quality of the uncommon; it is a curiously prepared dish, as Goethe said; but it lacks the pinch of salt and the handful of herbs with sharp diffusive flavour.

CHAPTER III.

ART.

In 1759 Diderot wrote for Grimm the first of his criticisms on the exhibition of paintings in the Salon. At the beginning of the reign of Lewis XV. these exhibitions took place every year, as they take place now. But from 1751 onwards, they were only held once in two years.

Diderot has left his notes on every salon from 1759 to 1781, with the exception of that of 1773, when he was travelling in Holland and Russia.

We have already seen how Grimm made Diderot work for him. The nine _Salons_ are one of the results of this willing bondage, and they are perhaps the only part of Diderot's works that has enjoyed a certain measure of general popularity. Mr. Carlyle describes them with emphatic enthusiasm: "What with their unrivalled clearness, painting the picture over again for us, so that we too _see_ it, and can judge it; what with their sunny fervour, inventiveness, real artistic genius, which wants nothing but a _hand_, they are with some few exceptions in the German tongue, the only Pictorial Criticisms we know of worth reading."[18] I only love painting in poetry, Madame Necker said to Diderot, and it is into poetry that you have found out the secret of rendering the works of our modern painters, even the commonest of them. It would be a truly imperial luxury, wrote A. W. Schlegel, to get a collection of pictures described for oneself by Diderot.

[18] _Essays_, iv. 303. (Ed. 1869.)

There is a freshness, a vivacity, a zeal, a sincerity, a brightness of interest in his subject, which are perhaps unique in the whole history of criticism. He flings himself into the task with the perfection of natural abandonment to a joyous and delightful subject. His whole personality is engaged in a work that has all the air of being overflowing pleasure, and his pleasure is contagious. His criticism awakens the imagination of the reader. Not only do we see the picture; we hear Diderot's own voice in ecstasies of praise and storms of boisterous wrath. There is such ma.s.s in his criticism; so little of the mincing and niggling of the small virtuoso. In facility of expression, in animation, in fecundity of mood, in fine improvisation, these pieces are truly incomparable. There is such an _impetus animi et quaedam artis libido_. Some of the charm and freedom may be due to the important circ.u.mstance that he was not writing for the public. He was not exposed to the reaction of a large unknown audience upon style; hence the absence of all the stiffness of literary pose. But the positive conditions of such success lay in the resources of Diderot's own character.

The sceptic, the dogmatist, the dialectician, and the other personages of a heterogeneous philosophy who existed in Diderot's head, all disappear or fall back into a secondary place, and he surrenders himself with a curious freedom to such imaginative beauty as contemporary art provided for him. Diderot was perhaps the one writer of the time who was capable on occasion of rising above the strong prevailing spirit of the time; capable of forgetting for a season the pa.s.sion of the great philosophical and ecclesiastical battle. No one save Diderot could have been moved by sight of a picture to such an avowal as this:

"Absurd rigorists do not know the effect of external ceremonies on the people; they can never have seen the enthusiasm of the mult.i.tude at the procession of the _Fete Dieu_, an enthusiasm that sometimes gains even me. I have never seen that long file of priests in their vestments; those young acolytes clad in their white robes, with broad blue sashes engirdling their waists, and casting flowers on the ground before the Holy Sacrament; the crowd as it goes before and follows after them hushed in religious silence, and so many with their faces bent reverently to the ground; I have never heard that grave and pathetic chant, as it is led by the priests and fervently responded to by an infinity of voices of men, of women, of girls, of little children, without my inmost heart being stirred, and tears coming into my eyes. There is in it something, I know not what, that is grand, solemn, sombre, and mournful."

Thus to find the material of religious reaction in the author of _Jacques le Fataliste_ and the centre of the atheistic group, completes the circle of Diderot's immense and deep-lying versatility. And in his account of such a mood, we see how he came to be so great and poetical a critic; we see the sincerity, the alertness, the profound mobility, with which he was open to impressions of colour, of sound, of the pathos of human aspiration, of the solemn concourses of men.

France has long been sovereign in criticism in its literary sense. In that department she has simply never had, and has not now, any serious rival. In the profounder historic criticism, Germany exhibits her one great, peculiar, and original gift. In the criticism of art Germany has at least three memorable names; but save where history is concerned most modern German aesthetics are so clouded with metaphysical speculation as to leave the obscurity of a very difficult subject as thick as it was before. In France the beginnings of art-criticism were literary rather than philosophic, and with the exception of Cousin's worthless eloquence, and of the writers whose philosophy Cousin dictated, and of M. Taine's ingenious paradoxes, Diderot is the only writer who has deliberately brought a vivid spirit and a philosophic judgment to the discussion of the forms of Beauty, as things worthy of real elucidation.

As far back as the time of the English Restoration, Dufresnoy had written in bad Latin a poem on the art of Painting, which had the signal honour of being translated into good English by no less ill.u.s.trious a master of English than Dryden, and it was again translated by Mason, the friend of Reynolds and of Gray. Imitations, applied to the pictorial art, of the immortal Epistle to the Pisos, came thick in France in the eighteenth century.[19] But these effusions are merely literary, and they are very bad literature indeed. The abbe Dubos published in 1719 a volume of Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting, including observations also on the relations of those arts to Music. Lessing is known to have made use of this work in his _Laoc.o.o.n_, and Diderot gave it a place among the books which he recommended in his Plan of a University.[20] This, as it is the earliest, seems to have been the best contribution to aesthetic thought before Lessing and Diderot. Daniel Webb, the English friend of Raphael Mengs, published an Enquiry into the Beauties of Painting (1760), and Diderot wrote a notice of it,[21] but it appears to have made no mark on his mind. Andre, a Jesuit father, wrote an Essay on the Beautiful (1741), which distributed the kinds of art with precision, but omitted to say in what the Beautiful consists.

The abbe Batteux wrote a volume reducing the fine arts to a single principle, and another volume attempting a systematic cla.s.sification of them. The first of these was the occasion of Diderot's Letter on Deaf Mutes, and Diderot described their author as a good man of letters, but without taste, without criticism, and without philosophy; _a ces bagatelles pres, le plus joli garcon du monde_.[22]

[19] _E.g._ Watelet's poem, _Sur l'Art de Peindre_, 1760; Le Mierre's _Sur la Peinture_, 1769; Marsy's _Pictura Carmen_, 1736.

See Diderot's works, xiii. 17, etc.

[20] _Oeuv._, iii. 486. Guhrauer, ii. 15. Also Blumner's admirable edition of the _Laoc.o.o.n_, p. 173.

[21] xiii. 33.

[22] Grimm, _Corr. Lit._, iv. 136. In another place in the same work either Grimm or Diderot makes a remark about Batteux, which is worth remembering in our own age of official vindications of orthodoxy.

The abbe had written a book about first causes. "I venture to observe moreover to M. l'abbe Batteux that when in this world a man has put on the dress of any sort of harlequin, red or black, with a pair of bands or a frill, he ought to give up once for all every kind of philosophic discussion, because it is impossible for him to speak according to his faith and his conscience; and a writer of bad faith is all the more odious, as nothing compelled him to break silence." _Ib._ vi. 120.

Travellers to the land where criticism of art has been so slight, and where production has been so n.o.ble, so bounteous, so superb, published the story of what Italy had shown to them. Madame de Pompadour designed to make her brother the Superintendent of fine arts, and she despatched Cochin, the great engraver of the day, to accompany him in a studious tour through the holy land of the arts. Cochin was away nearly two years, and on his return produced three little volumes (1758), in which he deals such blows to some vaunted immortalities as made the idolators by convention not a little angry. The abbe Richard (1766) published six very stupid volumes on Italy, and such criticism on art as they contain is not worthy of serious remark. The President de Brosses spent a year in Italy (1739-40), and wrote letters to his friends at home, which may be read to-day with interest and pleasure for their graphic picture of Italian society; but the criticisms which they contain on the great works of art are those of a well-informed man of the world, taking many things for granted, rather than of a philosophical critic industriously using his own mind. His book recalls to us how true the eighteenth century was to itself in its hatred of Gothic architecture, that symbol and a.s.sociate of mysticism, and of the age which the eighteenth century blindly abhorred as the source of all the tyrannical laws and cruel superst.i.tions that still weighed so heavily on mankind. "You know the Palace of Saint Mark at Venice," says De Brosses: "_c'est un vilain monsieur, s'il eu fut jamais, ma.s.sif, sombre, et gothique, du plus mechant gout_!"[23]

[23] _Lettres Familieres_, i. 174. (Ed. 1869.)

Dupaty, like De Brosses, an eminent lawyer, an acquaintance of Diderot and an early friend of a conspicuous figure of a later time, the ill-starred Vergniaud, travelled in Italy almost immediately before the Revolution (1785), and his letters, when read with those of De Brosses, are a curious ill.u.s.tration of the change that had come over the spirit of men in the interval. He leaves the pictures of the Pitti collection at Florence, and plunges into meditation in the famous gardens behind the palace, rejoicing with much expansion in the glories of light and air, in greenery and the notes of birds, and finally sums all up in one rapturous exclamation of the vast superiority of nature over art.[24]

[24] Dupaty's _Lettres sur l'Italie_, No. 40. In talking of Rome, he complains in a very Diderotian spirit of the want of _le beau moral_. "On ne trouve ici dans les moeurs ni des hommes prives ni des hommes publics, cette moralite, cette bienseance, dont les moeurs francoises sont pleines. _Le beau moral est absolument inconnu._ Or, c'est pour atteindre a ce beau moral dans tous les genres que la sensibilite est la plus tourmentee; qu'elle est en proie aux contentions de l'esprit, aux emulations de l'ame ...

qu'elle pare avec tant de raffinement et de peine, les ecrits, les discours, les pa.s.sions, enfin toute la vie publique et privee.'

It is impossible, in reading how deeply Diderot was affected by fifth-rate paintings and sculpture, not to count it among the great losses of literature that he saw few masterpieces. He never made the great pilgrimage. He was never at Venice, Florence, Parma, Rome. A journey to Italy was once planned, in which Grimm and Rousseau were to have been his travelling companions;[25] the project was not realised, and the strongest critic of art that his country produced never saw the greatest glories of art. If Diderot had visited Florence and Rome, even the mighty painter of the Last Judgment and the creator of those sublime figures in the New Sacristy at San Lorenzo, would have found an interpreter worthy of him. But it was not to be. "It is rare," he once wrote, "for an artist to excel without having seen Italy, just as a man seldom becomes a great writer or a man of great taste without having given severe study to the ancients."[26] Diderot at least knew what he lost.

[25] x. 514, _n._

[26] xi. 241.

French art was then, as art usually is, the mirror of its time, reproducing such imaginative feeling as society could muster. When the Republic and the Empire came, and twenty years of battle and siege, then the art of the previous generation fell into a degree of contempt for which there is hardly a parallel. Pictures that had been the delight of the town and had brought fortunes to their painters, rotted on the quays or were sold for a few pence at low auctions. Fragonard, who had been the darling of his age, died in neglect and beggary. David and his hideous art of the Empire utterly effaced what had thrown the contemporaries of Diderot into rapture.[27] Every one knows all that can be said against the French paintings of Diderot's time. They are executed hastily and at random; they abound in technical defects of colour, of drawing, of composition; their feeling is light and shallow.

Watteau died in 1721--at the same premature age as Raphael,--but he remained as the dominating spirit of French art through the eighteenth century. Of course the artists went to Rome, but they changed sky and not spirit. The pupils of the academy came back with their portfolios filled with sketches in which we see nothing of the "lone mother of dead empires," nothing of the vast ruins and the great sombre desolate Campagna, but only Rome turned into a decoration for the scenes of a theatre or the panels of a boudoir. The Olympus of Homer and of Virgil, as has been well said, becomes the Olympus of Ovid. Strength, sublimity, even stateliness disappeared, unless we admit some of the first two qualities in the landscapes of Vernet. Not only is beauty replaced by prettiness, but by prettiness in season and out of season. The common incongruity of introducing a spirit of elegance and literature into the simplicities of the true pastoral, was condemned by Diderot as a mixture of Fontenelle with Theocritus. We do not know what name he would have given to that still more curious incongruity of taste, which made a publisher adorn a treatise on Differential and Integral Calculus with amusing plates by Cochin, and introduce dainty little vignettes into a Demonstration of the Properties of the Cycloid.

[27] Goncourt's _L'Art au 18ieme Siecle_, i.

There is one true story that curiously ill.u.s.trates the spirit of French art in those equivocal days. When Madame de Pompadour made up her mind to play pander to the jaded appet.i.tes of the king, she had a famous female model of the day introduced into a _Holy Family_, which was destined for the private chapel of the queen. The portrait answered its purpose; it provoked the curiosity and desire of the king, and the model was invited to the Parc-aux-Cerfs.[28] This was typical of the service that painting was expected to render to the society that adored it and paid for it. "All is daintiness, delicate caressing for delicate senses, even down to the external decoration of life, down to the sinuous lines, the wanton apparel, the refined commodity of rooms and furniture. In such a place and in such company, it is enough to be together to feel at ease. Their idleness does not weigh upon them; life is their plaything."[29]

[28] Goncourt's _Art au 18ieme Siecle_, i. 213.

[29] Taine's _Ancien Regime_, p. 186.

Only let us not, while reserving our serious admiration for t.i.tian, Rembrandt, Raphael, and the rest of the G.o.ds and demiG.o.ds, refuse at least a measure of historic tolerance to these light and graceful creations. Boucher, whose dreams of rose and blue were the delight of his age, came away from Rome saying: "Raphael is a woman, Michael Angelo is a monster; one is paradise, the other is h.e.l.l; they are painters of another world; it is a dead language that n.o.body speaks in our day. We others are the painters of our own age: we have not common sense, but we are charming." This account of them was not untrue. They filled up the s.p.a.ce between the grandiose pomp of Le Brun and the sombre pseudo-antique of David, just as the incomparable grace and sparkle of Voltaire's lighter verse filled up the s.p.a.ce in literature between Racine and Chenier. They have a poetry of their own; they are cheerful, sportive, full of fancy, and like everything else of that day, intensely sociable. They are, at any rate, even the most sportive of them, far less unwholesome and degrading than the acres of martyrdoms, emaciations, bad crucifixions, bad pietas, that make some galleries more disgusting than a lazar-house.[30]

[30] "Si tous les tableaux de martyrs que nos grands peintres ont si sublimement peints, pa.s.saient a une posterite reculee, pour qui nous prendrait-elle? Pour des betes feroces ou des anthropophages."--Diderot's _Pensees sur la Peinture_.

For Watteau himself, the deity of the century, Diderot cared very little. "I would give ten Watteaus," he said, "for one Teniers." This was as much to be expected, as it was characteristic in Lewis XIV., when some of Teniers's pictures were submitted to him, imperiously to command "_ces magots la_" to be taken out of his sight.

Greuze (_b. 1725, d. 1805_) of all the painters of the time was Diderot's chief favourite. Diderot was not at all blind to Greuze's faults, to his repet.i.tions, his frequent want of size and amplitude, the excess of gray and of violet in his colouring. But all these were forgotten in transports of sympathy for the sentiment. As we glance at a list of Greuze's subjects, we perceive that we are in the very heart of the region of the domestic, the moral, "_l'honnete_," the homely pathos of the common people. The Death of a father of a family, regretted by his children; The Death of an unnatural father, abandoned by his children; The beloved mother caressed by her little ones; A child weeping over its dead bird; A Paralytic tended by his family, or the Fruit of a Good Education:--Diderot was ravished by such themes. The last picture he describes as a proof that compositions of that kind are capable of doing honour to the gifts and the sentiments of the artist.[31] The _Girl bewailing her dead bird_ throws him into raptures.

"O, the pretty elegy!" he begins, "the charming poem! the lovely idyll!"

and so forth, until at length he breaks into a burst of lyric condolence addressed to the weeping child, that would fill four or five of these pages.[32]

[31] x. 143.

[32] x. 343.

No picture of the eighteenth century was greeted with more enthusiasm than Greuze's _Accordee de Village_, which was exhibited in 1761. It seems to tell a story, and therefore even to-day, in spite of its dulled pink and l.u.s.treless blue, it arrests the visitor to one of the less frequented halls of the Louvre.[33] Paris, weary of mythology and sated with pretty indecencies, was fascinated by the simplicity of Greuze's village tale. "_On se sent gagner d'une emotion douce en le regardant_,"

said Diderot, and this gentle emotion was dear to the cultivated cla.s.ses in France at that moment of the century. It was the year of the _New Helosa_.

[33] No. 260 of the French School.

The subject is of the simplest: a peasant paying the dower-money of his daughter. "The father"--it is prudent of us to borrow Diderot's description--"is seated in the great chair of the house. Before him his son-in-law standing, and holding in his left hand the bag that contains the money. The betrothed, standing also, with one arm gently pa.s.sed under the arm of her lover, the other grasped by her mother, who is seated. Between the mother and the bride, a younger sister standing, leaning on the bride and with an arm thrown round her shoulders. Behind this group, a child standing on tiptoes to see what is going on. To the extreme left in the background, and at a distance from the scene, two women-servants who are looking on. To the right a cupboard with its usual contents--all scrupulously clean.... A wooden staircase leading to the upper floor. In the foreground near the feet of the mother, a hen leading her young ones, to whom a little girl throws crumbs of bread; a basin full of water, and on the edge of it, one of the small chickens with its beak up in the air so as to let the water go down." Diderot then proceeds to criticise the details, telling us the very words that he hears the father addressing to the bridegroom, and as a touch of observation of nature, that while one of the old man's hands, of which we see the back, is tanned and brown, the other, of which we see the palm, is white. "To the bride the painter has given a face full of charm, of seemliness, of reserve. She is dressed to perfection. That ap.r.o.n of white stuff could not be better; there is a trifle of luxury in her ornament; but then it is a wedding-day. You should note how true are the folds and creases in her dress, and in those of the rest. The charming girl is not quite straight; but there is a light and gentle inflexion in all her figure and her limbs that fills her with grace and truth. Indeed she is pretty and very pretty. If she had leaned more towards her lover, it would have been unbecoming; more to her mother and her father, and she would have been false. She has her arm half pa.s.sed under that of her future husband, and the tips of her fingers rest softly on his hand; that is the only mark of tenderness that she gives him, and perhaps without knowing it herself: it is a delicate idea in the painter."[34]

[34] x. 151-156. Dr. Waagen p.r.o.nounces this picture to be as truly an expression of _das Nationalfranzosiche_ as Wilkie's paintings are of _das Englische_. See his _Kunstwerke und Kunstler in Paris_, p.

675.

"Courage, my good Greuze," he cries, "_fais de la morale en peinture_.

What, has not the pencil been long enough and too long consecrated to debauchery and vice? Ought we not to be delighted at seeing it at last unite with dramatic poetry in instructing us, correcting us, inviting us to virtue?"[35] It has been sometimes said that Diderot would have exulted in the paintings of Hogarth, and we may admit that he would have sympathised with the spirit of such moralities as the Idle and the Industrious Apprentice, the Rake's Progress, and Mariage a la Mode. The intensity and power of that terrible genius would have had their attraction, but the minute ferocities of Hogarth's ruthless irony would certainly have revolted him. Such a scene as Lord Squanderfield's visit to the quack doctor, or as the Rake's debauch, would have filled him with inextinguishable horror. He could never have forgiven an artist who, in the ghastly pathos of a little child straining from the arms of its nurse towards the mother, as she lies in the very article of death, could still find in his heart to paint on it the dark patches of foul disease. He would have fled with shrieks from those appalling scenes of murder, torture, madness, b.e.s.t.i.a.l drunkenness, rapacity, fury--from that delirium of scrofula, palsy, entrails, the winding-sheet, and the grave-worm. Diderot's method was to improve men, not by making their blood curdle, but by warming and softening the domestic affections.

[35] x. 208.

Diderot, as a critic, seems always to have remembered a pleasant remonstrance once addressed at the Salon by the worthy Chardin to himself and Grimm: "Gently, good sirs, gently! Out of all the pictures that are here seek the very worst; and know that two thousand unhappy wretches have bitten their brushes in two with their teeth, in despair of ever doing even as badly. Parrocel, whom you call a dauber, and who for that matter is a dauber, if you compare him to Vernet, is still a man of rare talent relatively to the mult.i.tude of those who have flung up the career in which they started with him." And then the artist recounts the immense labours, the exhausting years, the boundless patience, attention, tenacity, that are the conditions even of a mediocre degree of mastery. We are reminded of the scene in a famous work of art in our own day, where Herr Klesmer begs Miss Gwendolen Harleth to reflect, how merely to stand or to move on the stage is an art that requires long practice. "_O le triste et plat metier que celui de critique!_" Diderot cries on one occasion: "_Il est si difficile de produire une chose meme mediocre; il est si facile de sentir la mediocrite._"[36] No doubt, as experience and responsibility gather upon us, we learn how hard in every line is even moderate skill. The wise are perhaps content to find what a man can do, without making it a reproach to him that there is something else which he cannot do.

[36] x. 177.

But Diderot knew well enough that Chardin's kindly principle might easily be carried too far. In general, he said, criticism displeases me; it supposes so little talent. "What a foolish occupation, that of incessantly hindering ourselves from taking pleasure, or else making ourselves blush for the pleasure that we have taken! And that is the occupation of criticism!"[37] Yet in one case he writes a score of pages of critical dialogue, in which the chief interlocutor is a painter who avenges his own failure by stringent attacks on the work of happier rivals of the year. And speaking in his own proper person, Diderot knows how to dismiss incompetence with the right word, sometimes of scorn, more often of good-natured remonstrance. Bad painters, a Parrocel, a Brenet, fare as ill at his hands as they deserved to do. He remarks incidentally that the condition of the bad painter and the bad actor is worse than that of the bad man of letters: the painter hears with his own ears the expressions of contempt for his talent, and the hisses of the audience go straight to the ears of the actor, whereas the author has the comfort of going to his grave without a suspicion that you have cried out at every page: "_The fool, the animal, the jacka.s.s!_" and have at length flung his book into a corner. There is nothing to prevent the worst author, as he sits alone in his library, and reads himself over and over again, from congratulating himself on being the originator of a host of rare and felicitous ideas.[38]