Diderot and the Encyclopaedists Volume II Part 5

[76] Rambaud, p. 573.

As soon as Catherine came into power (1762), she at once applied herself to make friends in this powerful region. It was a matter of course that she should begin with the omnipotent pontiff at Ferney. Graceful verses from Voltaire were as indispensable an ornament to a crowned head as a diadem, and Catherine answered with compliments that were perhaps more sincere than his verses. She wonders how she can repay him for a bundle of books that he had sent to her, and at last bethinks herself that nothing will please the lover of mankind so much as the introduction of inoculation into the great empire; so she sends for Dr. Dimsdale from England, and submits to the unfamiliar rite in her own sacred person.

Presents of furs are sent to the hermit of the Alps, and he is told how fortunate the imperial messenger counts himself in being despatched to Ferney. What flattered Voltaire more than furs was Catherine's prompt.i.tude and exactness in keeping him informed of her military and political movements against Turkey. It made him a centre of European intelligence in more senses than one, and helped him in his lifelong battle to pose, in his letters at least, as the equal of his friend, the King of Prussia. For D'Alembert the Empress professed an admiration only less than she felt for Voltaire. She was eager that he should come to Russia to superintend the instruction of the young Grand Duke. But D'Alembert was too prudent to go to St. Petersburg, as he was too prudent to go to Berlin. Montesquieu had died five years before her accession, but his influence remained. She habitually called the Spirit of Laws the breviary of kings, and when she drew up her Instruction for a new code, she acknowledged how much she had pillaged from Montesquieu.

"I hope," she said, "that if from the other world he sees me at work, he will forgive my plagiarism for the sake of the twenty millions of men who will benefit by it." In truth the twenty millions of men got very little benefit indeed by the code. Montesquieu's own method might have taught her that not even absolute power can force the civil system of free labour into a society resting on serfdom. But it is not surprising that Catherine was no wiser than more democratic reformers who had drunk from the French springs. Or probably she had a lower estimate in her own heart of the value of her code for practical purposes than it suited her to disclose to a Parisian philosopher.

Catherine did not forget that, though the French at this time were pre-eminent in the literature of new ideas, yet there were meritorious and useful men in other countries. One of her correspondents was Zimmermann of Hanover, whose essay on Solitude the shelves of no second-hand bookseller's shop is ever without. She had tried hard to bribe Beccaria to leave Florence for St. Petersburg. She succeeded in persuading Euler to return to a capital whither he had been invited many years before by the first Catherine, and where he now remained.

Both Catherine's position and her temperament made the society of her own s.e.x of little use or interest to her. "I don't know whether it is custom or inclination," she wrote, "but somehow I can never carry on conversation except with men. There are only two women in the world with whom I can talk for half an hour at once." Yet among her most intimate correspondents was one woman well known in the Encyclopaedic circle. She kept up an active exchange of letters with Madame Geoffrin--that interesting personage, who though belonging to the bourgeoisie, and possessing not a trace of literary genius, yet was respectfully courted not only by Catherine, but by Stanislas, Gustavus, and Joseph II.[77]

[77] See M. Mouy's Introduction to her Correspondence with Stanislas.

On the whole then we must regard Catherine's European correspondence as at least in some measure the result of political calculation. Its purposes, as has been said, were partly those to which in our own times some governments devote a Reptile-fund. There is a letter from the d.u.c.h.esse de Choiseul to Madame du Deffand, her intimate friend, and the friend of so many of the literary circle, in which the secret of the relations between Catherine and the men of letters is very plainly told.

"All that," she writes--protection of arts and sciences--"is mere luxury and a caprice of fashion in our age. All such pompous jargon is the product of vanity, not of principles or of reflection.... The Empress of Russia has another object in protecting literature; she has had sense enough to feel that she had need of the protection of the men of letters. She has flattered herself that their base praises would cover with an impenetrable veil in the eyes of her contemporaries and of posterity, the crimes with which she has astonished the universe and revolted humanity.... The men of letters, on the other hand, flattered, cajoled, caressed by her, are vain of the protection that they are able to throw over her, and dupes of the coquetries that she lavishes on them. These people who say and believe that they are the instructors of the masters of the world, sink so low as actually to take a pride in the protection that this monster seems in her turn to accord to them, simply because she sits on a throne."[78]

[78] _Corresp. Complete de Mdme. du Deffand_, i. 115. (Ed. 1877.) June, 1767.

In short, the monarchs of the north understood and used the new forces of the men of letters, whom their own sovereign only recognised to oppress. The contrast between the liberalism of the northern sovereigns, and the obscurantism of the court of France, was never lost from sight.

Marmontel's _Belisarius_ was condemned by the Sorbonne, and burnt at the foot of the great staircase of the Palace of Justice; in Russia a group of courtiers hastened to translate it, and the Empress herself undertook one chapter of the work. Diderot, who was not allowed to enter the French Academy, was an honoured guest at the Russian palace. For all this Catherine was handsomely repaid. When Diderot visited St.

Petersburg, Voltaire congratulated the Empress on seeing that unique man; but Diderot is not, he added, "the only Frenchman who is an enthusiast for your glory. We are lay missionaries who preach the religion of Saint Catherine, and we can boast that our church is tolerably universal."[79] We have already seen Catherine's generosity in buying Diderot's books, and paying him for guarding them as her librarian. "I should never have expected," she says, "that the purchase of a library would bring me so many fine compliments; all the world is bepraising me about M. Diderot's library. But now confess, you to whom humanity is indebted for the strong support that you have given to innocence and virtue in the person of Calas, that it would have been cruel and unjust to separate a student from his books."[80] "Ah, madam,"

replies the most graceful of all courtiers, "let your imperial majesty forgive me; no, you are not the aurora borealis; you are a.s.suredly the most brilliant star of the north, and never was there one so beneficent as you. Andromeda, Perseus, Callisto are not your equals. All these stars would have left Diderot to die of starvation. He was persecuted in his own country, and your benefactions came thither to seek him! Lewis XIV. was less munificent than your majesty: he rewarded merit in foreign countries, but other people pointed it out to him, whereas you, madame, go in search of it and find it for yourself. Your generous pains to establish freedom of conscience in Poland are a piece of beneficence that the human race must ever celebrate."[81]

[79] November 1, 1773.

[80] November 1766.

[81] December 22, 1766.

When the first Part.i.tion of Poland took place seven years later, Catherine found that she had not cultivated the friendship of the French philosophers to no purpose. The action of the dominant party in Poland enabled Catherine to take up a line which touched the French philosophers in their tenderest part. The Polish oligarchy was Catholic, and imposed crushing disabilities on the non-Catholic part of the population. "At the slightest attempt in favour of the non-Catholics,"

King Stanislas writes to Madame Geoffrin, of the Diet of 1764, "there arose such a cry of fanaticism! The difficulty as to the naturalisation of foreigners, the contempt for _roturiers_ and the oppression of them, and Catholic intolerance, are the three strongest national prejudices that I have to fight against in my countrymen; they are at bottom good folk, but their education and ignorance render them excessively stubborn on these three heads."[82] Poland in short reproduced in an aggravated and more barbaric form those evils of Catholic feudalism, in which the philosophers saw the arch-curse of their own country. Catherine took the side of the Dissidents, and figured as the champion of religious toleration. Toleration was chief among the philosophic watchwords, and seeing that great device on her banners, the Encyclopaedic party asked no further questions. So, with the significant exception of Rousseau, they all abstained from the cant about the Part.i.tion which has so often been heard from European liberals in later days. And so with reference to more questionable transactions of an earlier date, no one could guess from the writings of the philosophers that Catherine had ever been suspected of uniting with her husband in a plot to poison the Empress Elizabeth, and then uniting with her lover in a plot to strangle her husband. "I am quite aware," said Voltaire, "that she is reproached with some bagatelles in the matter of her husband, but these are family affairs with which I cannot possibly think of meddling."

[82] _Corresp._, pp. 135, 144, etc.

One curious instance of Catherine's sensibility to European opinion is connected with her relations to Diderot. Rulhiere, afterwards well known in literature as a historian, began life as secretary to Breteuil, in the French emba.s.sy at St. Petersburg. An eyewitness of the tragedy which seated Catherine on the throne, he wrote an account of the events of the revolution of 1762. This piquant narrative, composed by a young man who had read Tacitus and Sall.u.s.t was circulated in ma.n.u.script among the salons of Paris (1768). Diderot had warned Rulhiere that it was infinitely dangerous to speak about princes, that not everything that is true is fit to be told, that he could not be too careful of the feelings of a great sovereign who was the admiration and delight of her people.

Catherine pretended that a mere secretary of an emba.s.sy could know very little about the real springs and motives of the conspiracy. Diderot had described the ma.n.u.script as painting her in a commanding and imperious att.i.tude. "There was nothing of that sort," she said; "it was only a question of perishing with a madman, or saving oneself with the mult.i.tude who insisted on coming to the rescue." What she saw was that the ma.n.u.script must be bought, and she did her best first to buy the author and then, when this failed, to have him locked up in the Bastille. She succeeded in neither. The French government were not sorry to have a scourge to their hands. All that Diderot could procure from Rulhiere was a promise that the work should not be published during the Empress's lifetime. It was actually given to the world in 1797. When Diderot was at St. Petersburg, the Empress was importunate to know the contents of the ma.n.u.script, which he had seen, but of which she was unable to procure a copy. "As far as you are concerned," he said, "if you attach great importance, Madame, to the decencies and virtues, the worn-out rags of your s.e.x, this work is a satire against you; but if large views and masculine and patriotic designs concern you more, the author depicts you as a great princess." The Empress answered that this only increased her desire to read the book. Diderot himself truly enough described it as a historic romance, containing a mixed tissue of lies and truths that posterity would compare to a chapter of Tacitus.[83]

Perhaps the only piece of it that posterity will really value is the page in which the writer describes Catherine's personal appearance; her broad and open brow, her large and slightly double chin, her hair of resplendent chestnut, her eyes of a brilliant brown into which the reflections of the light brought shades of blue. "Pride," he says, "is the true characteristic of her physiognomy. The amiability and grace which are there too only seem to penetrating eyes to be the effect of an extreme desire to please, and these seductive expressions somehow let the design of seducing be rather too clearly seen."

[83] _Satire I. sur les caracteres, etc. Oeuv._, vi. 313.

The first Frenchman whom Catherine welcomed in person to her court was Falconet, of whose controversy with the philosopher we shall have a few words to say in a later chapter. This introduction to her was due to Diderot. She had entreated him to find for her a sculptor who would undertake a colossal statue of Peter the Great. Falconet was at the height of his reputation in his own country; in leaving it he seems to have been actuated by no other motive than the desire of an opportunity of erecting an immense monument of his art, though Diderot's eloquence was not wanting. Falconet had the proverbial temperament of artistic genius. Diderot called him the Jean Jacques of sculpture. He had none of the rapacity for money which has distinguished so many artists in their dealings with foreign princes, but he was irritable, turbulent, restless, intractable. He was a chivalrous defender of poorer brethren in art, and he was never a respecter of persons. His feuds with Betzki, the Empress's faithful factotum, were as acrid as the feuds between Voltaire and Maupertuis. Betzki had his own ideas about the statue that was to do honour to the founder of the Empire, and he insisted that the famous equestrian figure of Marcus Aurelius should be the model.

Falconet was a man of genius, and he retorted that what might be good for Marcus Aurelius would not be good for Peter the Great. The courtly battle does not concern us, though some of its episodes offer tempting ill.u.s.trations of biting French malice. Falconet had his own way, and after the labour of many years, a colossus of bronze bestrode a charger rearing on a monstrous ma.s.s of unhewn granite. Catherine took the liveliest interest in her artist's work, frequently visiting his studio, and keeping up a busy correspondence. With him, as with the others, she insisted that he should stand on no ceremony, and should not spin out his lines with epithets on which she set not the smallest value. She may be said to have encouraged him to pester her with a host of his obscure countrymen in search of a living, and a little colony of Frenchmen whose names tell us nothing, hung about the Russian capital. Diderot's account of this group of his countrymen at St. Petersburg recalls the picture of a corresponding group at Berlin. "Most of the French who are here rend and hate one another, and bring contempt both on themselves and their nation: 'tis the most unworthy set of rascals that you can imagine."[84]

[84] _Oeuv._, xx. 58.

Diderot reached St. Petersburg towards the end of 1773, and he remained some five months, until the beginning of March, 1774. His impulsive nature was shocked by a chilly welcome from Falconet, but at the palace his reception was most cordial, as his arrival had been eagerly antic.i.p.ated. The Empress always professed to detest ceremony and state.

In a letter to Madame Geoffrin she insists, as we have already seen her doing with Falconet, on being treated to no oriental prostrations, as if she were at the court of Persia. "There is nothing in the world so ugly and detestable as greatness. When I go into a room, you would say that I am the head of Medusa: everybody turns to stone. I constantly scream like an eagle against such ways; yet the more I scream, the less are they at their ease.... If you came into my room, I should say to you,--Madame, be seated; let us chatter at our ease. You would have a chair in front of me; there would be a table between us. _Et puis des batons rompus, tant et plus, c'est mon fort._"

This is an exact description of her real behaviour to Diderot. On most days he was in her society from three in the afternoon until five or six. Etiquette was banished. Diderot's simplicity and vehemence were as conspicuous and as unrestrained at Tsarskoe-selo as at Grandval or the Rue Taranne. If for a moment the torrent of his improvisation was checked by the thought that he was talking to a great lady, Catherine encouraged him to go on. "_Allons_," she cried, "_entre hommes tout est permis_." The philosopher in the heat of exposition brought his hands down upon the imperial knees with such force and iteration, that Catherine complained that he made them black and blue. She was sometimes glad to seek shelter from such zealous enforcement of truth, behind a strong table. Watchful diplomatists could not doubt that such interviews must have reference to politics. Cathcart, the English amba.s.sador, writes to his government that M. Diderot is still with the Empress at Tsarskoe-selo, "pursuing his political intrigues." And, amazing as it may seem, the French minister and the French amba.s.sador both of them believed that they had found in this dreaming rhapsodical genius a useful diplomatic instrument. "The interviews between Catherine and Diderot follow one another incessantly, and go on from day to day. He told me, and I have reasons for believing that he is speaking the truth, that he has painted the danger of the alliance of Russia with the King of Prussia, and the advantage of an alliance with us. The Empress, far from blaming this freedom, encouraged him by word and gesture. 'You are not fond of that prince,' she said to Diderot. 'No,' he replied, 'he is a great man, but a bad king, and a dealer in counterfeit coin.' 'Oh,'

said she laughing, 'I have had my share of his coin.'"

The first Part.i.tion of Poland had been finally consummated in the Polish Diet in the autumn of 1773, a few weeks before Diderot's arrival at St.

Petersburg. Lewis XV., now drawing very near to his end, and D'Aiguillon, his minister, had some uneasiness at this opening of the great era of territorial revolution, and looked about in a shiftless way for an ally against Russia and Prussia. England sensibly refused to stir. Then France, as we see, was only anxious to detach Catherine from Frederick. All was shiftless and feeble, and the French government can have known little of the Empress, if they thought that Diderot was the man to affect her strong and positive mind. She told Segur in later years what success Diderot had with her as a politician.

"I talked much and frequently with him," said Catherine, "but with more curiosity than profit. If I had believed him, everything would have been turned upside down in my kingdom; legislation, administration, finances--all to be turned topsy-turvy to make room for impracticable theories. Yet as I listened more than I talked, any witness who happened to be present, would have taken him for a severe pedagogue, and me for his humble scholar. Probably he thought so himself, for after some time, seeing that none of these great innovations were made which he had recommended, he showed surprise and a haughty kind of dissatisfaction.

Then speaking openly, I said to him: _Mr. Diderot, I have listened with the greatest pleasure to all that your brilliant intelligence has inspired; and with all your great principles, which I understand very well, one would make fine books, but very bad business. You forget in all your plans of reform the difference in our positions; you only work on paper, which endures all things; it opposes no obstacle either to your imagination or to your pen. But I, poor Empress as I am, work on the human skin, which is irritable and ticklish to a very different degree._ I am persuaded that from this moment he pitied me as a narrow and vulgar spirit. For the future he only talked about literature, and politics vanished from our conversation."[85]

[85] Segur, iii. 34.

Catherine was mistaken, as we shall see, in supposing that Diderot ever thought her less than the greatest of men. Cathcart, the English amba.s.sador, writes in a sour strain: "All his letters are filled with panegyrics of the Empress, whom he depicts as above humanity. His flatteries of the Grand Duke have been no less gross, but be it said to the young prince's honour, he has shown as much contempt for such flatteries as for the mischievous principles of this pretended philosopher."

Frederick tells D'Alembert that though the Empress overwhelms Diderot with favours, people at St. Petersburg find him tiresome and disputatious, and "talking the same rigmarole over and over again." In her letters to Voltaire, Catherine lets nothing of this be seen. She finds Diderot's imagination inexhaustible, and ranks him among the most extraordinary men that have ever lived; she delights in his conversation, and his visits have given her the most uncommon pleasure.

All this was perhaps true enough. Catherine probably rated the philosopher at his true worth as a great talker and a singular and original genius, but this did not prevent her, any more than it need prevent us, from seeing the limits and measure. She was not one of the weaker heads who can never be content without either wholesale enthusiasm or wholesale disparagement.

Diderot had a companion who pleased her better than Diderot himself.

Grimm came to St. Petersburg at this time to pay his first visit, and had a great success. "The Empress," wrote Madame Geoffrin to King Stanislas, "lavished all her graces on Grimm. And he has everything that is needed to make him worthy of them. Diderot has neither the fineness of perception, nor the delicate tact that Grimm has, and so he has not had the success of Grimm. Diderot is always in himself, and sees nothing in other people that has not some reference to himself. He is a man of a great deal of understanding, but his nature and turn of mind make him good for nothing, and, more than that, would make him a very dangerous person in any employment. Grimm is quite the contrary."[86]

[86] Mouy's _Corresp. du roi Stanislas_, p. 501.

In truth, as we have said before, Grimm was one of the shrewdest heads in the Encyclopaedic party; he had much knowledge, a judgment both solid and acute, and a certain easy fashion of social commerce, free from raptures and full of good sense. Yet he was as devoted and ecstatic in his feelings about the Empress as his more impetuous friend. "Here," he says, "was no conversation of leaps and bounds, in which idleness traverses a whole gallery of ideas that have no connection with one another, and weariness draws you away from one object to skim a dozen others. They were talks in which all was bound together, often by imperceptible threads, but all the more naturally, as not a word of what was to be said had been led up to or prepared beforehand." Grimm cannot find words to describe her verve, her stream of brilliant sallies, her dashing traits, her eagle's _coup d'oeil_. No wonder that he used to quit her presence so electrified as to pa.s.s half the night in marching up and down his room, beset and pursued by all the fine and marvellous things that had been said. How much of all this is true, and how much of it is the voice of the bewildered courtier, it might be hard to decide.

But the rays of the imperial sun did not so far blind his prudence, as to make him accept a pressing invitation to remain permanently in Catherine's service. When Diderot quitted St. Petersburg, Grimm went to Italy. After an interlude there, he returned to Russia and was at once restored to high favour. When the time came for him to leave her, the Empress gave him a yearly pension of two thousand roubles, or about ten thousand livres, and with a minute considerateness that is said not to be common among the great, she presently ordered that it should be paid in such a form that he should not lose on the exchange between France and Russia. Whether she had a special object in keeping Grimm in good humour, we hardly know. What is certain is that from 1776 until the fall of the French monarchy she kept up a voluminous correspondence with him, and that he acted as an unofficial intermediary between her and the ministers at Versailles. Every day she wrote down what she wished to say to Grimm, and at the end of every three months these daily sheets were made into a bulky packet and despatched to Paris by a special courier, who returned with a similar packet from Grimm. This intercourse went on until the very height of the Revolution, when Grimm at last, in February, 1792, fled from Paris. The Empress's helpful friendship continued to the end of her life (1796).[87]

[87] _Memoire Historique_, printed in vol. i. of the new edition (1877) of the Correspondence of Grimm and Diderot, by M. Maurice Tourneux.

Diderot arrived at the Hague on his return from Russia in the first week of April (1774), after making a rapid journey of seven hundred leagues in three weeks and a day. D'Alembert had been anxious that Frederick of Prussia should invite Diderot to visit him at Berlin. Frederick had told him that, intrepid reader as he was, he could not endure to read Diderot's books. "There reigns in them a tone of self-sufficiency and an arrogance which revolt the instinct of my freedom. It was not in such a style that Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Ga.s.sendi, Bayle, and Newton wrote." D'Alembert replied that the king would judge more favourably of the philosopher's person than of his works; that he would find in Diderot, along with much fecundity, imagination, and knowledge, a gentle heat and a great deal of amenity.[88] Frederick, however, did not send the invitation, and Diderot willingly enough went homeward by the northern route by which he had come. He pa.s.sed Konigsberg, where, if he had known it, Kant was then meditating the Critic of Pure Reason. It is hardly probable that Diderot met the famous worthy who was destined to deal so heavy a blow to the Encyclopaedic way of thinking, and to leave a name not less ill.u.s.trious than Frederick or Catherine. A court official was sent in charge of the philosopher. The troubles of posting by the sea-road between Konigsberg and Memel had moved him to the composition of some very bad verses on his first journey; and the horror of crossing the Dwina inspired others that were no better on his return.

The weather was hard; four carriages were broken in the journey. He expected to be drowned as the ice creaked under his horses' feet at Riga, and he thought that he had broken an arm and a shoulder as he crossed the ferry at Mittau. But all ended well, and he found himself once more under the roof of Prince Galitzin at the Hague. Hence he wrote to his wife and his other friends in Paris, that it must be a great consolation to them to know that he was only separated from them by a journey of four days. That journey was not taken, however, for nearly four months. Diderot had promised the Empress that he would publish a set of the regulations for the various inst.i.tutions which she had founded for the improvement of her realm. This could only be done, or could best be done, in Holland. His life there was spent as usual in the slavery of proof-sheets, tempered by daily bursts of conversation, rhapsody, discussion, and dreamy contemplation. He made the acquaintance of a certain Bjornstahl, a professor of oriental languages at the university of Lund in Sweden, and a few pages in this obscure writer's obscure book contain the only glimpse that we have of the philosopher on his travels.[89] Diderot was as ecstatic in conversation, as we know him to have been in his correspondence, in praise of the august friend whom he had left. The least of his compliments was that she united the charms of Cleopatra to the soul of Caesar, or sometimes it was, to the soul of Brutus.

[88] D'Alembert au Roi de Prusse. Feb. 14, 1774.

[89] _Briefe aus seinen auslandischen Reisen_, iii. 217-233.

(Leipsic, 1780--a German translation from the Swedish.)

"At the Hague," says Bjornstahl, "we go about every day with M. Diderot.

He has views extending over an incredibly wide field, possesses a vivacity that I cannot describe, is pleasant and friendly in intercourse, and has new and unusual observations to make on every subject.... Who could fail to prize him? He is so bright, so full of instruction, has so many new thoughts and suggestions, that n.o.body can help admiring him. But willingly as he talks when one goes to him, he shows to little advantage in large companies, and that is why he did not please everybody at St. Petersburg. You will easily see the reason why this incomparable man in such companies, where people talk of fashion, of clothes, of frippery, and all other sorts of triviality, neither gives pleasure to others nor finds pleasure himself." And the friendly Swede rises to the height of generalisation in the quaint maxim, Where an empty head shines, there a thoroughly cultivated man comes too short.

Bjornstahl quotes a saying of Voltaire, that Diderot would have been a poet if he had not wished to be a philosopher--a remark that was rather due perhaps to Voltaire's habitual complaisance than to any serious consideration of Diderot's qualities. But if he could not be a poet himself, at least he knew Pindar and Homer by heart, and at the Hague he never stirred out without a Horace in his pocket. And though no poet, he was full of poetic sentiment. Scheveningen, the little bathing-place a short distance from the Hague, was Diderot's favourite spot. "It was there," he writes, "that I used to see the horizon dark, the sea covered with white haze, the waves rolling and tumbling, and far out the poor fishermen in their great clumsy boats; on the sh.o.r.e a mult.i.tude of women frozen with cold or apprehension, trying to warm themselves in the sun.

When the work was at an end and the boats had landed, the beach was covered with fish of every kind. These good people have the simplicity, the openness, the filial and fraternal piety of old time. As the men come down from their boats, their wives throw themselves into their arms, they embrace their fathers and their little ones; each loads himself with fish; the son tosses his father a codfish or a salmon, which the old man carries off in triumph to his cottage, thanking heaven that it has given him so industrious and worthy a son. When he has gone indoors, the sight of the fish rejoices the old man's mate; it is quickly cut in pieces, the less lucky neighbours invited, it is speedily eaten, and the room resounds with thanks to G.o.d, and cheerful songs."[90]

[90] xvii. 449.

These scenes, with their sea-background, their animation, their broad strokes of the simple, tender, and real in life, may well have been after Diderot's own heart. He often told me, says Bjornstahl, that he never found the hours pa.s.s slowly in the company of a peasant, or a cobbler, or any handicraftsman, but that he had many a time found them pa.s.s slowly enough in the society of a courtier. "For of the one," he said, "one can always ask about useful and necessary things, but the other is mostly, so far as anything useful is concerned, empty and void."

The characteristics of the European capitals a century ago were believed to be hit off in the saying, that each of them would furnish the proper cure for a given defect of character. The over-elegant were to go to London, savages to Paris, bigots to Berlin, rebels to St. Petersburg, people who were too sincere to Rome, the over-learned to Brussels, and people who were too lively to the Hague. Yet the dulness thus charged against the Hague was not universally admitted. Impartial travellers a.s.signed to the talk of cultivated circles there a rank not below that of similar circles in France and England. Some went even farther, and declared Holland to have a distinct advantage, because people were never embarra.s.sed either by the levity and sparkling wit of France on the one hand, nor by the depressing reserve and taciturnity of England on the other.[91] Yet Holland was fully within the sphere of the great intellectual commonwealth of the west, and was as directly accessible to the literary influences of the time as it had ever been. If Diderot had inquired into the vernacular productions of the country, he would have found that here also the wave of reaction against French conventions, the tide of English simplicity and domestic sentimentalism, had pa.s.sed into literature. The _Spectator_ and _Clarissa Harlowe_ inspired the writers of Holland, as they had inspired Diderot himself.[92]

[91] George Forster's _Ansichten vom Niederrhein_, etc. ii. 396 (1790).

[92] Jonckbloet's _Gesch. d. Niederland. Lit._ (German trans.) ii.

502, etc.

In erudition, it was still what, even after the death of Scaliger, it had remained through the seventeenth century, the most learned state of Europe; and the elder Hemsterhuys, with such pupils as Ruhnken and Valckenaer, kept up as well as he could the scholarly tradition of Gronovius and Graevius. But the eighteenth century was not the century of erudition. Scholarship had given way to speculation.