D I D E B T 19." literature in Paris, then without a rival as the capital of I the intellectual activity of Europe. Diderot helped his friend at onetime and another between 1759 and 1779, by writing for him an account of the annual exhibitions of paintings. These Salons are among the most readable of all pieces of art criticism. They have a freshness, a reality, a life, which took their readers into a different world from the dry and conceited pedantries of the ordinary virtuoso. As has been said by Ste-Beuve, they initiated the French into a new sentiment, and introduced people to the mystery and purport of colour by ideas. " Before Diderot," Madame Necker said, " I had never seen anything in pictures except dull and lifeless colours ; it was his imagi nation that gave them relief and life, and it is almost a new sense for which I am indebted to his genius." Greuze was Diderot s favourite among contemporary artists, and it is easy to see why. Greuze s most character istic pictures were the rendering in colour of the same senti ment of domestic virtue and the pathos of common life, which Diderot attempted with inferior success to represent upon the stage. For Diderot was above all things interested in the life of men, not the abstract life of the race, but the incidents of individual character, the fortunes of a particu lar family, the relations of real and concrete motives in this or that special case. He delighted with the enthusiasm of a born casuist in curious puzzles of right and wrong, and in devising a conflict between the generalities of ethics and the conditions of an ingeniously contrived practical dilemma. Mostly his interest expressed itself in didactic and sympa thetic form ; in two, however, of the most remarkable of all his pieces, it is not sympathetic but ironical. Jacques le Fataliste (written in 1773, but not published until 1796) is in manner an imitation of Tristram Shandy and The Sentimental Journey. Few modern readers will find in it any true diversion. In spite of some excellent criticisms dispersed here and there, and in spite of one or two stories that are not without a certain effective realism, it must as a whole be pronounced savourless, forced, and as leaving un moved those springs of laughter and of tears which are the common fountain of humour. Rameau s Nephew is a far superior performance. If there were any inevitable compul sion to name a masterpiece for Diderot, one must select this singular " farce-tragedy." Its intention has been matter of dispute ; whether it was designed to be merely a satire on contemporary manners, or a reduction of the theory of self-interest to an absurdity, or the application of an ironi cal clencher to the ethics of ordinary convention, or a mere setting for a discussion about music, or a vigorous dramatic sketch of a parasite and a human original. There is no dispute as to its curious literary flavour, its mixed qualities of pungency, bitterness, pity, and, in places, unflinching shamelessness. Goethe s translation (1805) was the first introduction of Rameau s Nephew to the European public. After executing it, he gave back the original French manu script ,to Schiller, from whom he had it. ]S"o authentic French copy of it appeared until the writer had been nearly forty years in his grave (1823). It would take several pages of this encyclopaedia merely to contain the list of Diderot s miscellaneous pieces, from an infinitely graceful trifle like the Regrets on My Old Dressing Gown up to D Alembcrfs Dream, where he plunges into the depths of the controversy as to the ultimate con stitution of matter and the meaning of life. It is a mistake to set down Diderot for a coherent and systematic materialist. We ought to look upon him " as a philosophe in whom all the contradictions of the time struggle with one another " (Rosenkranz). That is to say, he is critica and not dogmatic. There is no unity in Diderot, as then was in Voltaire or in Rousseau. Just as in cases of conduc he loves to make new ethical assumptions and argue them out as a professional sophist might have done, so in the peculative problems as to the organization of matter, the rigin of life, the compatibility between physiological aachinery and free will, he takes a certain stand-point, and ollows it out more or less digressively to its consequences. le seizes an hypothesis and works it to its end, and this riade him. the inspirer in others of materialist doctrines vhich they held more definitely than he did. Just as )iderot could not attain to the concentration, the positive- less, the finality of aim needed for a master-piece of iterature, so he could not attain to those qualities in the vay of dogma and system. Yet he drew at last to the onclusions of materialism, and contributed many of its nost declamatory pages to the Systeme de la Nature of his riend D Holbach, the very Bible of atheism, as some one tyled it. All that he saw, if we reduce his opinions to ormulas, was motion in space : " attraction and repulsion, he only truth." If matter produces life by spontaneous generation, and if man has no alternative but to obey the ompulsion of nature, what remains for God to do ? In proportion as these conclusions deepened in him, the more did Diderot turn for the hope of the race to virtue ; n other words, to such a regulation of conduct and motive is shall make us tender, pitiful, simple, contented. Hence lis one great literary passion, his enthusiasm for Richardson, 3ur English novelist. Hence, also, his deepening aversion ! or the political system of France, which made the realiza- ion of a natural .and contented domestic life so hard. Diderot had almost as much to say against society as even ilousseau himself. The difference between them was that Elousseau was a fervent theist. The atheism of the EEolbachians, as he called Diderot s group, was intolerable to him,; and this feeling, aided by certain private per versities of humour, led to a breach of what had once been an intimate friendship between Rousseau and Diderot (1757). Diderot was still alive when the Confessions .ippeared, and he was so exasperated by Rousseau s stories about Grimm, then and always Diderot s intimate, that in 1782 he transformed a life of Seneca, that he had written four years earlier, into an Essay on the Reigns of Claudius and Nero, which is much less an account of Seneca than a vindication of Diderot and Grimm, and is one of the most rambling and inept productions in literature. As for the merits of the old quarrel between Rousseau and Diderot, we may agree with the latter, that too many sensible people would be in the wrong if Jean Jacques was in the right. Varied and incessant as was Diderot s mental activity, it was not of a kind to bring him richas. He secured none of the posts that were occasionally given to needy men of letters ; he could not even obtain that bare official recogni tion of merit which was implied by being chosen a member of the Academy. The time came for him to provide a dower for his daughter, and he saw no other alternative than to sell his library. When the empress Catherine of Russia heard of his straits, she commissioned an agent in Paris to buy the library at a price equal to about 1000 of our money, and then she handsomely requested the philosopher to retain the books in Paris until she required them, and to constitute himself her librarian, with a yearly salary. In 1773 Diderot started on an expedition to thank his imperial benefactress in person, and he passed some months at St Petersburg. The empress received him cordially. The strange pair passed their afternoons in disputes on a thousand points of high philosophy, and they debated with a vivacity and freedom not usual in courts. " Fi, done," said Catherine one day, when Diderot hinted that he argued with her at a disadvantage, " is there any difference among men?" Diderot returned home in 1774. Ten years remained to him, and he spent them in the in
dustrious acquisition of new knowledge, in the composition