not debate of, we might almost say measure and weigh, and carry off with him to be eaten and enjoyed, is simply not there for him. He dwelt all his days in the "thin rind of the Conscious;" the deep fathomless domain of the Unconscious, whereon the other rests, and has its meaning, was not, under any shape, surmised by him. Thus must the Sanctuary of Man's Soul stand perennially shut against this man; where his hand ceased to grope, the World ended within such strait conditions had he to live and labour. And naturally to distort and dislocate, more or less, all things he laboured on for whosoever, in one way or another, recognises not that "Divine Idea of the World, which lies at the bottom of Appearances," can rightly interpret no Appearance; and whatsoever spiritual thing he does, must do it partially, do it falsely. : were a clencher, "thou makest a vow o' eternal constancy under a rock, which is even then crumbling away." True, O Denis! the rock crumbles away: all things are changing; man changes faster than most of them. That, in the meanwhile, an Unchangeable lies under all this, and looks forth, solemn and benign, through the whole destiny and workings of man, is another truth; which no Mechanical Philosophe, in the dust of his logic-mill, can be expected to grind out for himself. Man changes, and will change: the question then arises, Is it wise in him to tumbie forth, in headlong obedience to this love of change; is it so much as possible for him? Among the dualisms of man's wholly dualistic nature, this we might fancy was an observable one: that along with his unceasing tendency to change, there is a no less ineradicable tendency to persevere. Were man only here to change, let him, far from marrying, cease even to hedge in fields, and plough them; before the autumn Mournful enough, accordingly, is the account which Diderot has given himself of Man's existence; on the duties, relations, possessions whereof he had been a sedulous think-season, he may have lost the whim of reaping er. In every conclusion we have this fact of his Mechanical culture. Coupled too with another fact honourable to him: that he stuck not at half measures; but resolutely drove on to the result, and held by it. So that we cannot call him a skeptic; he has merited the more decisive name of Denier. He may be said to have denied that there was any the smallest Sacredness in Man, or in the Universe; and to have both speculated and lived on this singular footing. We behold in him the notable extreme of a man guiding himself with the least spiritual Belief that thinking man perhaps ever had. Religion, in all recognisable shapes and senses, he has done what man can do to clear out of him. He believes that pleasure is plea sant; that a lie is unbelievable; and there, his credo terminates; nay there, what perhaps makes his case almost unique, his very fancy seems to fall silent. For a consequent man, all possible spiritual perversions are included under that grossest one of "proselytizing Atheism;" the rest, of what kind and degree soever, cannot any longer astonish us. Diderot has them of all kinds and degrees; indeed, we might say, the French Philosophe (take him at his word, for inwardly much that was foreign adhered to him, do what he could) has emitted a Scheme of the World, to which all that Oriental Mullah, Bonze, or Talapoin have done in that kind is poor and feeble. Omitting his whole unparalleled Cosmoganies and Physiologies; coming to his much milder Tables of the Moral Law, we shall glance here but at one minor external item, the relation between man and man; and at only one branch of this, and with all slightness, the relation of covenants; for example, the most important of these, Marriage. Diderot has convinced himself, and, indeed, as above became plain enough, acts on the conviction, that Marriage, contract it, solemnize it in what way you will, involves a solecism which reduces the amount of it to simple zero. It is a suicidal covenant; annuls itself in the very forming. “Thou_makest a vow," says he, twice or thrice, as if the argument | them. Let him return to the nomadic state, and set his house on wheels; nay there too a certain restraint must curb his love of change, or his cattle will perish by incessant driving, without grazing in the intervals. O Denis, what things thou babblest in thy sleep! How, in this world of perpetual flux, shall man secure himself the smallest foundation, except hereby alone: that he take pre-assurance of his Fate; that in this and the other high act of life, his Will, with all solemnity, abdicate its right to change; voluntarily become involuntary, and say once for all, Be there then no further dubitation on it! Nay, the poor unheroic craftsman; that very stocking-weaver, on whose loom thou now as amateur weavest: must not even he do as much,-when he signed his apprentice-indentures? The fool! who had such a relish in himself for all things, for kingship and emperorship; yet made a vow (under penalty of death by hunger) of eternal constancy to stocking-weaving. Yet otherwise, were no thriving craftsmen possible; only botchers, bunglers, transitory nondescripts; unfed, mostly gallows-feeding. But, on the whole, what feeling it was in the ancient devout deep soul, which of Marriage made a Sacrament: this, of all things in the world, is what Denis will think of for eons, without discovering. Unless, perhaps, it were to increase the vestry-fees! Indeed, it must be granted, nothing yet seen or dreamt of can surpass the liberality of friend Denis as mugister morum; nay, often our poor Philosophe feels called on, in an age of such Spartan rigor, to step forth into the public Stews, and emit his inspiring Macte virtute! there. Whither let the curious in such matters follow him: we, having work elsewhere, wish him "good journey,”—or rather “safe return. "safe return." Of Diderot's indelicacy and indecency there is for us but little to say. Diderot is not what we call indelicate and indecent; he is utterly unclean, scandalous, shameless, sansculottic-samoedic. To declare with lyric fury that this is wrong; or with historic calmness, that a pig of sensibinty would go distracted did you accuse him of it, ter kept up here about vertu, honnételé, grandeur, sensibilité, ames-nobles; how unspeakably good it is to be virtuous, how pleasant, how sublime: "In the Devil and his grandmother's name, be virtuous; and let us have an end of it!" In such sort (we will nevertheless joyfully recogdictions, declare her royalty, her divineness; and, for the pocr Mechanical Philosophe, has prepared since the substance is hidden from him, a shadow wherewith he can. be cheered. In fine, to our ill-starred Mechanical Phi may (especially in countries where "indecent | to become a Philosophe-Sentimentalist. Most exposure" is cognised at police-offices) be wearisome, accordingly, is the perpetual clatconsidered superfluous. The only question is one in Natural History: Whence comes it? What may a man, not otherwise without elevation of mind, of kindly character, of immense professed philanthropy; and doubtless of extraordinary insight, mean thereby? To us it is but another illustration of the fearless, all-nise) does great Nature in spite of all contrafor-logic, thoroughly consistent, Mechanical Thinker. It coheres well enough with Diderot's theory of man; that there is nothing of sacred either in man or around man; and that chimeras are chimerical. How shall he for whom nothing, that cannot be jargoned of in debating-losophe-Sentimentalist, with his loud preaching clubs, exists, have any faintest forecast of the and rather poor performing, shall we not, in depth, significance, divineness of SILENCE; of various respects, "thankfully stretch out the the sacredness of "Secrets known to all ?" hand?" In all ways, "it was necessary that Nevertheless, Nature is great; and Denis the logical side of things should likewise be was among her nobler productions. To a made available." On the whole, wondrous soul of his sort something like what we call higher developments of much, of Morality Conscience could nowise be wanting: the among the rest, are visible in the course of the feeling of Moral Relation, of the Infinite charac- | world's doings, at this day. A plausible preter thereof, (as the essence and soul of all else diction were that the Ascetic System is not to that can be felt or known,) must assert itself regain its exclusive dominancy. Ever, indeed, in him. Yet how assert itself? An Infini- must Self-denial, "Annihilation of Self, be the tude to one, in whose whole Synopsis of the beginning of all moral action:" meanwhile, he Universe no Infinite stands marked? Won-that looks well, may discern filaments of a derful enough is Diderot's method; and yet nobler System, wherein this lies included as not wonderful, for we see it, and have always one harmonious element. Who knows what seen it, daily. Since there is nothing sacred new unfoldings and complex adjustments await in the Universe, whence this sacredness of us, before, (for example,) the true relation of what you call Virtue? Whence or how comes moral Greatness to moral Correctness, and it that you, Denis Diderot, must not do a wrong their proportional value, can be established? thing; could not, without some qualm, speak, | How, again, is perfect tolerance for the Wrong for example, one Lie, to gain Mohammed's to co-exist with ever-present conviction that Paradise with all its houris? There is no re- Right stands related to it, as a God does to a source for it, but to get into that interminable Devil,-an Infinite to an opposite Infinite? ravelment of Reward and Approval, virtue How, in a word, through what tumultuous vibeing its own reward; and assert louder and cissitudes, after how many false partial efforts, louder, contrary to the stern experience of all deepening the confusion, shall it, at length, be men, from the Divine Man, expiring with made manifest, and kept continually manifest agony of bloody sweat on the accursed tree, to the hearts of men, that the Good is not prodown to us two, O reader (if we have ever perly the highest, but the Beautiful; that the done one Duty)—that Virtue is synonymous true Beautiful (differing from the false, as with Pleasure. Alas! was Paul, an apostle Heaven does from Vauxhall,) comprehends in of the Gentiles, virtuous; and was virtue its it the Good?—In some future century, it may own reward, when his approving conscience be found that Denis Diderot, acting and protold him that he was "the chief of sinners," fessing, in wholeness and with full conviction, and (bounded to this life alone) "of all men what the immense multitude act in halfness the most miserable?" Or has that same so and without conviction,-has, though by strange sublime Virtue, at bottom, little to do with inverse methods, forwarded the result. It was Pleasure, if with far other things? Are long ago written, the Omnipotent" maketh the Eudoxia, and Eusebeia, and Euthanasia, and wrath of the wicked" (the folly of the foolish) all the rest of them, of small account to Eubo-"to praise Him." In any case, Dide Fot acted sia and Eupepsia; and the pains of any it, and not we; Diderot bears it, and not we: moderately-paced Career of Vice (Denis him- peace be with Diderot! self being judge) as a drop in the bucket to the "Career of Indigestions?" This is what Denis never in this world will grant. The other branch of his renown is excellence as a Talker. Or in wider view, (think But what then will he do? One of two his admirers,) his philosophy was not more things admit, with Grimm, that there are surpassing than his delivery thereof. What "two justices," which may be called by many his philosophy amounts to we have been exhandsome names, but properly are nothing amining: but now, that in this other conversabut the pleasant justice, and the unpleasant; tional province he was eminent, is easily bewhereof only the former is binding. Herein, lieved. A frank, ever-hoping, social character; however, Nature has been unkind to Denis; a mind full of knowledge, full of fervour; of he is not a literary court-toad-eater; but a free, great compass, of great depth, ever on the genial, even poetic creature. There remains, alert: such a man could not have other that. therefore, nothing but the second expedient; a "mouth of gold." It is still plain, whatto" assert louder and louder;" in other words, soever thing imaged itself before him, was imaged in the most lucent clearness; was rendered back, with light labour, in corresponding clearness. Whether, at the same time, Diderot's conversation, relatively so superior, deserved the intrinsic character of supreme, may admit of question. The worth of words spoken depends, after all, on the wisdom that resides in them; and in Diderot's words there was often too little of this. ViVivacity, far-darting brilliancy, keenness of theoretic vision, paradoxical ingenuity, gayety, even touches of humour; all this must have been here; whosoever had preferred sincerity, earnestness, depth of practical rather than theoretic insight, with not less of impetuosity, of clearness and sureness, with humour, emphasis, or such other melody or rhythm as that utterance demanded,-must have come over to London; and (with forbearant submissiveness) listened to our Johnson. Had we the stronger man, then? Be it rather, as in that Duel of Coeur-de-Leon with the light, nimble, yet also invincible Saladin, that each nation had the strength which most befitted it. Closely connected with this power of conversation is Diderot's facility of composition. A talent much celebrated; numerous really surprising proofs whereof are on record; how he wrote long works within the week; sometimes within almost the four-and-twenty hours. Unhappily, enough still remains to make such feats credible. Most of Diderot's Works bear the clearest traces of extemporaneousness; stans pede in uno! They are much liker printed talk, than the concentrated well-considered utterance, which, from a man of that weight, we expect to see set in types. It is said, "he wrote good pages, but could not write a good book." Substitute did not for could not; and there is some truth in the saying. Clearness, as has been observed, comprehensibility at a glance, is the character of whatever Diderot wrote a clearness which, in visual objects, rises into the region of the Artistic, and resembles that of Richardson or Defoe. Yet, grant that he makes his meaning clear, what is the nature of that meaning itself? Alas, for most part, only a hasty, flimsy, superficial meaning, with gleams of a deeper vision peering through. More or less of Disorder reigns in all Works that Diderot wrote; not order, but the plausible appearance of such: the true heart of the matter is not found; "he skips deftly along the radii, and skips over the centre, and misses it." Thus may Diderot's admired Universality and admired facility have both turned to disadvantage for him. We speak not of his reception by the world: this indeed is the "age of specialities;" yet, owing to other causes, Inderot the Encyclopedist had success enough. But, what is of far more importance, his inward growth was marred: the strong tree shot not up in any one noble stem, (bearing boughs, and fruit, and shade all round;) but spread out horizontally, after a very moderate height, into innumerable branches, not useless, yet of quite secondary use. Diderot could have been an Artist; and he was little better than an Encyclopedic Artisan. No smatterer indeed; a faithful artisan; of really universal equip ment, in his sort: he did the work of many men, yet nothing, or little, which many could not have done. Accordingly, his Literary Works, now lying finished some fifty years, have already, to the most surprising degree, sunk in importance. Perhaps no man so much talked of is so little known; to the great majority he is no longer a Reality, but a Hearsay. Reality, but a Hearsay. Such, indeed, partly, is the natural fate of Works Polemical, which almost all Diderot's are. The Polemic annihilates his opponent; but in so doing annihilates himself too, and both are swept away to make room for something other and farther. Add to this, the slight-textured transitory cha racter of Diderot's style, and the fact is well enough explained. Meanwhile, let him, to whom it applies, consider it; him among whose gifts it was to rise into the Perennial, and who dwelt rather low down in the Ephemeral, and ephemerally fought and scrambled there! Diderot the great has contracted into Diderot the easily-measurable: so must it be with others of the like. In how many sentences can the net-product of all that tumultuous Atheism, printed over many volumes, be comprised! Nay, the whole Encyclopédie, that world's wonder of the eighteenth century, the Belus' Tower of an age of refined Illumination, what has it become! Alas! no stone-tower, that will stand there as our strength and defence through all times: but, at best, a wooden Helepolis, (City-taker,) wherein stationed, the Philosophus Policaster has burnt and battered down many an old ruinous Sorbonne; and which now, when that work is pretty well over, may, in turn, be taken asunder, and used as firewood. The famed Encyclopedical Tree itself has proved an artificial one, and borne no fruit. We mean that, in its nature, it is mechanical only; one of those attempts to parcel out the invisible mystical Soul of Man, with its infinitude of phases and character, into shop-lists of what are called faculties," "motives," and such like; which attempts may indeed be made with all degrees of insight, from that of a Doctor Spurzheim to that of Denis Diderot, or Jeremy Bentham; and prove useful for a day, but for a day only. Nevertheless it were false to regard Diderot as a Mechanist and nothing more; as one working and grinding blindly in the mill of mechanical Logic, joyful with his lot there, and unconscious of any other. Call him one rather who contributed to deliver us therefrom both by his manful whole spirit as a Mechanist, which drove all things to their ultimatum and crisis; and even by a dim-struggling faculty, which virtually aimed beyond this. Diderot, we said, was gifted by Nature for an Artist: strangely flashing through his mechanical encumbrances, are rays of thought, which belong to the Poet, to the Prophet; which, in other environment, could have revealed the deepest to us. Not to seek far, consider this one little sentence, which he makes the last of the dying Sanderson: Le temps, la matière, et l'espace ne sont peut-être qu'un point (Time, Matter, and Space are perhaps but a point !) So too, in Art, both as a speaker and a doer, he is to be reckoned as one of those who | pressed forward irresistibly out of the artifi- | one looks a sunny Elysium, through the other cial barren sphere of that time, into a truer a sulphurous Erebus: both hold of the Infigenial one. His Dramas, the Fils Naturel, the nite. This Jacques, perhaps, was not quite so Père de Famulle, have indeed ceased to live; hastily put together: yet there too haste is yet is the attempt towards great things visible manifest: the Author finishes it off, not by in them; the attempt remains to us, and seeks working out the figures and movements, but otherwise, and has found, and is finding, fulfil- by dashing his brush against the canvas; a ment. Not less in his Sulons, (Judgments of manœuvre which in this case has not sucArt-Exhibitions,) written hastily for Grimm, ceeded. The Rameau's Nephew, which is the and by ill chance, on artists of quite seconda- shorter, is also the better; may pass for deciry character, do we find the freest recognition dedly the best of all Diderot's Compositions. of whatever excellence there is; nay, an im- It looks like a Sibylline utterance from a heart petuous endeavour, not critically but even crea- all in fusion: no ephemeral thing (for it was tively, towards something more excellent. In- written as a Satire on Palissot) was ever more deed, what with their unrivalled clearness, perennially treated. Strangely enough, too, it painting the picture over again for us, so that lay some fifty years, in German and Russian we too see it, and can judge it; what with their Libraries; came out first in the masterly versunny fervour, inventiveness, real artistic ge- sion of Goethe, in 1805; and only (after a denius, (which only cannot manipulate,) they are, ceptive re-translation by a M. Saur, a couragewith some few exceptions in the German ous mystifier otherwise,) reached the Paris tongue, the only Pictorial Criticisms we know public, in 1821,—when perhaps all, for whom, of worth reading. Here too, as by his own and against whom it was written, were no practice in the Dramatic branch of art, Dide- more!-It is a farce-tragedy; and its fate has rot stands forth as the main originator (almost corresponded to its purport. One day it must the sole one in his own country) of that many- also be translated into English; but will resided struggle towards what is called Nature, and quire to be done by head; the common steamcopying of Nature, and faithfulness to Nature; machinery will not meet it. a deep indispensable truth, subversive of the old error; yet under that figure, only a halftruth, for Art too is Art, as surely as Nature is Nature; which struggle, meanwhile, either as half-truth or working itself into a whole truth, may be seen (in countries that have any Art) still forming the tendency of all artistic endeavour. In which sense, Diderot's Essay on Painting has been judged worth translation by the greatest modern Judge of Art, and greatest modern Artist, in the highest kind of Art; and may be read anew, with argumentative commentary and exposition, in Goe.he's Works. Di We here (con la bocca dolce) take leave of Di derot in his intellectual aspect, as Artist and Thinker: a richly endowed, unfavourably situated nature; whose effort, much marred, yet not without fidelity of aim, can triumph, on rare occasions; is perhaps nowhere utterly fruitless. In the moral aspect, as Man, he makes a somewhat similar figure; as indeed, in all men, in him especially, the Opinion and the Practice stand closely united; and as a wise man has remarked, "the speculative principles are often but a supplement (or excuse) to the Nay, let us grant, with pleasure, that for Di-practical manner of life." In conduct, Didederot himself the realms of Art were not rot can nowise seem admirable to us; yet wholly unvisited; that he too, so heavily imprisoned, stole Promethean fire. Among these multitudinous, most miscellaneous Writings of his, in great part a manufactured farrago of Philosophism no longer saleable, and now looking melancholy enough,-are two that we can almost call Poems; that have something perennially poetic in them: Jacques le Fata liste; in a still higher degree, the Neveu de Rameau. The occasional blueness of both; even that darkest indigo in some parts of the former, shall not altogether affright us. As it were, a loose straggling sunbeam flies here over Man's Existence in France, now nigh a century behind us: "from the height of luxurious elegance to the depths of shamelessness;" all is here. Slack, careless seems the combination of the picture; wriggling, disjointed, like a bundle of flails; yet strangely united in the painter's inward unconscious feeling. Weari-living mostly in the society of women, or of somely crackling wit gets silent; a grim, taciturn, dare-devil, almost Hogarthian humour, rises in the background. Like this there is nothing that we know of in the whole range of French Literature: La Fontaine is shallow in comparision; the La Bruyère wit-species not to be named. It resembles Don Quixote, rather; of somewhat similar stature; yet of complexion altogether different; through the neither inexcusable; on the whole, not at all men who, like women, flattered him, and made We call Diderot, then, not a coward; yet not in any sense a brave man. Neither towards himself, nor towards others, was he brave. All the virtues, says M. de Meister, which require not "a great suite (sequency) of ideas," were his: all that do require such a suite were not his. In other words, what duties were easy for him, he did: happily Nature had rendered several easy. His spiritual aim, moreover, seemed not so much to be enforcement, exposition of Duty, as discovery of a Duty-made-easy. Natural enough that he should strike into that province of sentiment, cœur-noble, and so forth. Alas, to declare that the beauty of virtue is beautiful, costs comparatively little; to win it, and wear it, is quite another enterprise,-wherein the loud braggart, we know, is not the likeliest to succeed. On the whole, peace be with sentiment, for that also lies behind us!-For the rest, as hinted, what duties were difficult our Diderot left undone. How should he, the cœur sensible, front such a monster as Pain? And now, since misgivings cannot fail in that course, what is to be done but fill up all asperities with floods of Sensibilité, and so voyage more or less smoothly along? Est-il bon? Est-il méchant? is his own account of himself. At all events, he was no voluntary hypocrite; that great praise can be given him. And thus with Mechanical Philosophism, and passion vive; working, flirting; "with more of softness than of true affection, sometimes with the malice and rage of a child, but on the whole an inexhaustible fund of goodnatured simplicity," has he come down to us for better for worse: and what can we do but receive him? not done what lay at our hand towards reducing that same Memoirism of the Eighteenth Century into History, and "weaving" a thread or two thereof nearer to the condition of a "web?" But finally, if we rise with this matter (as we should try to do with all) into the proper region of Universal History, and look on it with the eye not of this time, or of that time, but of Time at large, perhaps the prediction might stand here, that intrinsically, essentially little lies in it; that one day when the netresult of our Euro ean way of life comes to be summed up, this whole as yet so boundless concern of French Philosophism will dwindle into the thinnest of fractions, or vanish into nonentity! Alas, while the rude History and Thoughts of those same “Juifs miserables,” the barbaric War-song of a Deborah and Barak, the rapt prophetic Utterance of an unkempt Isaiah, last now (with deepest significance) say only these three thousand years,-what has the thrice resplendent Encyclopédie shrivelled into within these three-score! This is a fact which, explain it, express it, in which way he will, your Encyclopedist should actually consider. Those were tones caught from the sacred Melody of the All, and having harmony and meaning for ever; these of his are but outer discords, and their jangling dies away without result. "The special, sole, and deepest theme of the World's and Man's History," says the Thinker of our time, whereto all other themes are subordinated, emains the Conflict of UNBELIEF and BELIEF. All epochs wherein Belief prevails, under what form it If now we and our reader, reinterpreting may, are splendid, heart-elevating, fruitful for for our present want that Life and Perform-contemporaries and posterity. All epochs, on ance of Diderot, have brought it clearer before us, be the hour spent thereon, were it even more wearisome, no profitless one! Have we not striven to unite our own brief present moment more and more compactly with the Past and with the Future; have we the contrary, wherein Unbelief, under wha form soever, maintains its sorry victory, should they even for a moment glitter with a sham splendour, vanish from the eyes of posterity; because no one chooses to burden himself with study of the unfruitful. ON HISTORY AGAIN. [FRASER'S MAGAZINE, 1833.] The following singular fragment on History forms part, as may be recognised, of the Inaugural Discourse delivered by our assiduous "D. T." at the opening of the Society for the Diffusion of Common Honesty. The Discourse, if one may credit the Morning Papers, "touched in the most wonderful manner, didactically, poetically, almost prophetically, on all things in this world and the next, in a strain of sustained or rather of suppressed passionate eloquence rarely witnessed in Parliament or out of it: the chief bursts were received with profound silence,”—interrupted, we fear, by snuff taking. As will be seen, it is one of the didactic passages that we introduce here. The Editor of this Magazine is responsible for its accuracy, and publishes, if not with leave given, then with leave taken.-O. Y.] *** HISTORY recommends itself as the most profitable of all studies and truly, for such a being as Man, who is born, and has to learn and work, and then after a measured term of years to depart, leaving descendants and performself as vital portion of a Mankind, no study ances, and so, in all ways, to vindicate himcould be fitter. History is the Letter of Instructions, which the old generations write and posthumously transmit to the new; nay |