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 ter kept up here about vertu, honnéte é, grandeur, is one in Natural History: Whence comes it? | sensibilité, ames-nobles; how unspeakably good it What may a man, not otherwise without ele- is to be virtuous, how pleasant, how sublime: vation of mind, of kindly character, of immense "In the Devil and his grandmother's name, be professed philanthropy; and doubtless of ex- virtuous; and let us have an end of it!" In traordinary insight, mean thereby? To us it such sort (we will nevertheless joyfully recog is but another illustration of the fearless, all-nise) does great Nature in spite of all contrafor-logic, thoroughly consistent, Mechanical dictions, declare her royalty, her divineness; Thinker. It coheres well enough with Diderot's and, for the poor Mechanical Philosophe, has theory of man; that there is nothing of sacred prepared since the substance is hidden from either in man or around man; and that chime- him, a shadow wherewith he can be cheered. ras are chimerical. How shall he for whom nothing, that cannot be jargoned of in debatingclubs, exists, have any faintest forecast of the depth, significance, divineness of SILENCE; of the sacredness of "Secrets known to all?”

In fine, to our ill-starred Mechanical Philosophe-Sentimentalist, with his loud preaching and rather poor performing, shall we not, in various respects, "thankfully stretch out the hand?" In all ways, "it was necessary that the logical side of things should likewise be made available." On the whole, wondrous higher developments of much, of Morality among the rest, are visible in the course of the world's doings, at this day. A plausible prediction were that the Ascetic System is not to regain its exclusive dominancy. Ever, indeed, must Self-denial, " Annihilation of Self, be the beginning of all moral action:" meanwhile, he that looks well, may discern filaments of a nobler System, wherein this lies included as one harmonious element. Who knows what new unfoldings and complex adjustments await us, before, (for example,) the true relation of moral Greatness to moral Correctness, and their proportional value, can be established? How, again, is perfect tolerance for the Wrong to co-exist with ever-present conviction that Right stands related to it, as a God does to a Devil,-an Infinite to an opposite Infinite? How, in a word, through what tumultuous vicissitudes, after how many false partial efforts, deepening the confusion, shall it, at length, be made manifest, and kept continually manifest to the hearts of men, that the Good is not properly the highest, but the Beautiful; that the true Beautiful (differing from the false, as Heaven does from Vauxhall,) comprehends in

Nevertheless, Nature is great; and Denis was among her nobler productions. To a soul of his sort something like what we call Conscience could nowise be wanting: the feeling of Moral Relation, of the Infinite character thereof, (as the essence and soul of all else that can be felt or known,) must assert itself in him. Yet how assert itself? An Infinitude to one, in whose whole Synopsis of the Universe no Infinite stands marked? Wonderful enough is Diderot's method; and yet not wonderful, for we see it, and have always seen it, daily. Since there is nothing sacred in the Universe, whence this sacredness of what you call Virtue? Whence or how comes it that you, Denis Diderot, must not do a wrong thing; could not, without some qualm, speak, for example, one Lie, to gain Mohammed's Paradise with all its houris? There is no resource for it, but to get into that interminable ravelment of Reward and Approval, virtue being its own reward; and assert louder and louder, contrary to the stern experience of all men, from the Divine Man, expiring with agony of bloody sweat on the accursed tree, down to us two, O reader (if we have ever done one Duty)—that Virtue is synonymous with Pleasure. Alas! was Paul, an apostle of the Gentiles, virtuous; and was virtue itsit 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, Diderot 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 thar. 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, wai

ment, in his sort: he did the work of many men, yet nothing, or little, which many could not have done.

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. Vivacity, 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, em-racter of Diderot's style, and the fact is well phasis, 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

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. 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 chaenough 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.

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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

one looks a sunny Elysium, through the other a sulphurous Erebus: both hold of the Infinite. This Jacques, perhaps, was not quite so hastily put together: yet there too haste is manifest: the Author finishes it off, not by working out the figures and movements, but by dashing his brush against the canvas; a manœuvre which in this case has not succeeded. The Rameau's Nephew, which is the shorter, is also the better; may pass for decidedly the best of all Diderot's Compositions. It looks like a Sibylline utterance from a heart all in fusion: no ephemeral thing (for it was written as a Satire on Palissot) was ever more perennially treated. Strangely enough, too, it lay some fifty years, in German and Russian Libraries; came out first in the masterly version of Goethe, in 1805; and only (after a deceptive re-translation by a M. Saur, a courageous mystifier otherwise,) reached the Paris public, in 1821,-when perhaps all, for whom, and against whom it was written, were no more!-It is a farce-tragedy; and its fate has corresponded to its purport. One day it must also be translated into English; but will require to be done by head; the common steammachinery will not meet it.

We here (con la bocca dolce) take leave of Di derot in his intellectual aspect, as Artist and Thinker: a richly endowed, unfavourably situ ated 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

pressed forward irresistibly out of the artificial barren sphere of that time, into a truer genial one. His Dramas, the Fils Naturel, the Père de Famille, have indeed ceased to live; yet is the attempt towards great things visible in them; the attempt remains to us, and seeks otherwise, and has found, and is finding, fulfilment. Not less in his Salons, (Judgments of Art-Exhibitions,) written hastily for Grimm, and by ill chance, on artists of quite secondary character, do we find the freest recognition of whatever excellence there is; nay, an impetuous endeavour, not critically but even creatively, towards something more excellent. Indeed, 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 only cannot manipulate,) they are, with some few exceptions in the German tongue, the only Pictorial Criticisms we know of worth reading. Here too, as by his own practice in the Dramatic branch of art, Diderot stands forth as the main originator (almost the sole one in his own country) of that manysided struggle towards what is called Nature, and copying of Nature, and faithfulness to Nature; 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 Goethe's Works. 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 im- neither inexcusable; on the whole, not at all prisoned, stole Promethean fire. Among these quite worthless. Lavater traced in his physimultitudinous, most miscellaneous Writings ognomy" something timorous;" which reading of his, in great part a manufactured farrago his friends admitted to be a correct one. of Philosophism no longer saleable, and now derot, in truth, is no hero: the earnest soul, looking melancholy enough,-are two that we wayfaring and warfaring in the complexities can almost call Poems; that have something of a World like to overwhelm him, yet whereperennially poetic in them: Jacques le Fata-in he by Heaven's grace will keep faithfully liste; in a still higher degree, the Neveu de Ra- warfaring, prevailing or not, can derive small meau. The occasional blueness of both; even solacement from this light, fluctuating, not to that darkest indigo in some parts of the former, say flimsy existence of Diderot: no Gospel in shall not altogether affright us. As it were, a that kind has he left us. The man, in fact, loose straggling sunbeam flies here over Man's with all his high gifts, had rather a female Existence in France, now nigh a century be- character. Susceptible, sensitive, living by hind us: "from the height of luxurious ele- impulses, which at best he had fashioned into gance to the depths of shamelessness;" all is some show of principles; with vehemence here. Slack, careless seems the combination enough, with even a female uncontrollableness; of the picture; wriggling, disjointed, like a with little of manful steadfastness, consideratebundle of flails; yet strangely united in the ness, invincibility. Thus, too, we find him painter's inward unconscious feeling. Weari- living mostly in the society of women, or of somely crackling wit gets silent; a grim, taci- men who, like women, flattered him, and made turn, dare-devil, almost Hogarthian humour, life easy for him; recoiling with horror from rises in the background. Like this there is an earnest Jean Jacques, who understood not nothing that we know of in the whole range the science of walking in a vain show; but of French Literature: La Fontaine is shallow imagined (poor man) that truth was there as in comparision; the La Bruyère wit-species a thing to be told, as a thing to be acted. not to be named. It resembles Don Quixote, rather; of somewhat similar stature; yet of complexion altogether different; through the

Di

We call Diderot, then, not a coward; yet not in any sense a brave man. Neither towards himself, nor towards others, was he

ON HISTORY AGAIN.

[FRASER'S MAGAZINE, 1833.]