DIDEROT'S VERSATILITY Diderot's interest in human nature expressed itself in didactic and sympathetic 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. Le Neveu de Rameau is a far superior performance. 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 ironical clincher 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 (i8o5) was the first introduction of Le Neveu de Rameau to the European public. After executing it, he gave back the original French manuscript to Schiller, from whom he had it. No authentic French copy of it appeared until 1823.
It would take several pages merely to contain the list of Dide rot's miscellaneous pieces, from an infinitely graceful trifle like the Regrets sur ma vieille robe de chambre up to Le Reve de D'Alembert, where he plunges into the depths of the controversy as to the ultimate constitution 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 philosopher in whom all the contradictions of the time struggle with one another" (Rosenkranz). That is to say, he is critical and not dogmatic. There is no unity in Diderot, as there was in Voltaire or in Rousseau. Yet he drew at last to the conclusions of materialism, and contributed many of its most declamatory pages to the Sys teme de la nature of his friend D'Holbach,—the very Bible of atheism, as some one styled it. All that he saw, if we reduce his opinions to formulae, was motion in space: "attraction and re pulsion, the only truth." If matter produces life by spontaneous generation, and if man has no alternative but to obey the com pulsion 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, in other words, to such a regulation of conduct and motive as shall make us tender, pitiful, simple, contented. Hence his one great literary passion, his enthusiasm for Richardson, the English novelist. Hence, also, his deepening aversion for the political system of France, which makes the realization of a natural and contented domestic life so hard. Diderot had almost as much to say against society as even Rous seau himself. The difference between them was that Rousseau was a fervent theist. The atheism of the Holbachians, as he called Diderot's group, was intolerable to him; and this feeling, aided by certain private perversities of humour, led to a breach of what had once been an intimate friendship between Rousseau and Dide rot (1757). Diderot was still alive when Rousseau's Confessions appeared, 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 Essai sur les regnes de Claude et de Neron (1 7 7 8-82 ), 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.
Diderot's mental activity was not of a kind to bring him riches. He could not even obtain that bare official recognition 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 f i,000 of English money, and then 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 Diderot passed some months at St. Petersburg. The empress re ceived him cordially. The strange pair passed their afternoons in disputes on a thousand points of high philosophy, and they de bated with a vivacity and freedom not usual in courts. "Fi, donc," 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 industrious acquisition of new knowledge, in the composition of a host of fragmentary pieces, and in luminous declamations with his friends. Diderot was seen at his best in con versation. "He who only knows Diderot in his writings," says Marmontel, "does not know him at all. When he grew animated in talk, and allowed his thoughts to flow in all their abundance, then he became truly ravishing. In his writings he had not the art of ensemble; the first operation which orders and places everything was too slow and too painful to him." Diderot died on July 30,1784, six years after Voltaire and Rous seau, one year after his old colleague D'Alembert, and five years before D'Holbach, his host and intimate for a lifetime. An elabor ate and exhaustive collection of his writings in 20 stout volumes, edited by MM. Assezat and Tourneux, was completed in 1875-77.
(J. Mo.; X.) on Diderot by Scherer (188o) ; by E. Faguet (189o) ; by Sainte-Beuve in the Causeries du lundi; by F. Brunetiere in the Etudes critiques, 2nd series, may be consulted. In English Diderot has been the subject of a biography by John Morley (Viscount Morley of Blackburn) (1878). See also Karl Rosenkranz, Diderots Leben und Werke (1866) ; G. Hirn, Diderot (Stockholm, 1917) ; P. Hermand, Les Idees morales de Diderot (1923). For a dis cussion of the authenticity of the posthumous works of Diderot see R. Dominic in the Revue des deux mondes (Oct. 15, 1902).