According to the estimate of the common or vulgate (I do not say "vulgar," though in the best English there is little or no difference) literary history, Rousseau[362] ranks far higher in the scale of novel-writing than Voltaire, having left long and ambitious books of the kind against Voltaire's handful of short, shorter, and shortest stories. It might be possible to accept this in one sense, but in one which would utterly disconcert the usual valuers. The Confessions, if it were not an autobiography, would be one of the great novels of the world. A large part of it is probably or certainly "fictionised"; if the whole were fictitious, it would lose much of its repulsiveness, retain (except for a few very matter-of-fact judges) all its interest, and gain the enormous advantage of art over mere reportage of fact. Of course Rousseau's art of another kind, his mere mastery of style and presentation, does redeem this reportage to some extent; but this would remain if the thing were wholly fiction, and the other art of invention, divination, mimesis—call it what you will—would come in. Yet it is not worth while to be idly unlike other people and claim it as an actual novel. It may be worth while to point out how it displays some of the great gifts of the novel-writer. The first of these—the greatest and, in fact, the mother of all the rest—is the sheer faculty, so often mentioned but not, alas! so invariably found, of telling the tale and holding the reader, not with any glittering eye or any enchantment, white or black, but with the pure grasping—or, as French admirably has it, "enfisting"—power of the tale itself. Round this there cluster—or, rather, in this necessarily abide—the subsidiary arts of managing the various parts of the story, of constructing characters sufficient to carry it on, of varnishing it with description, and to some extent, though naturally to a lesser one than if it had been fiction pure and simple, "lacing" it, in both senses of the word, with dialogue. Commonplace (but not the best commonplace) taste often cries "Oh! if this were only true!" The wiser mind is fain sometimes—not often, for things are not often good enough—to say, "Oh! if this were only false!"

But if a severe auditor were to strike the Confessions out of Rousseau's novel-account to the good, on the score of technical insufficiency or disqualification, he could hardly refuse to do the same with Émile on the other side of the sheet. In fact its second title (de l'Éducation), its opening remarks, and the vastly larger part of the text, not only do not pretend to be a novel but frankly decline to be one. In what way exactly the treatise, from the mere assumption of a supposed "soaring human boy" named Émile, who serves as the victim of a few Sandford-and-Merton-like illustrations, burgeoned into the romance of actual novel-kind with Sophie in the Fifth Book, and the purely novel-natured, but unfinished and hardly begun, sequel of Émile et Sophie ou Les Solitaires, it is impossible to say. From the sketch of the intended conclusion of this latter given by Prévost[363] it would seem that we have not lost much, though with Rousseau the treatment is so constantly above the substance that one cannot tell. As it is, the novel part is nearly worthless. Neither Émile nor Sophie is made in the least a live person; the catastrophe of their at first ideal union might be shown, by an advocate of very moderate skill, to be largely if not wholly due to the meddlesome, muddle-headed, and almost inevitably mischievous advice given to them just after their marriage by their foolish Mentor; and one neither finds nor foresees any real novel interest whatever. Anilities in the very worst style of the eighteenth century—such as the story how Émile instigated mutiny in an Algerian slave-gang, failed, made a noble protest, and instead of being impaled, flayed, burnt alive, or otherwise taught not to do so, was made overseer of his own projects of reformed discipline—are sufficiently unrefreshing in fact. And the sort of "double arrangement" foreshadowed in the professorial programme of the unwritten part, where, in something like Davenant and Dryden's degradation of The Tempest, Émile and Sophie, she still refusing to be pardoned her fault, are brought together after all, and are married, in an actual though not consummated cross-bigamy, with a mysterious couple, also marooned on a desert island, is the sort of thing that Rousseau never could have managed, though Voltaire, probably to the discontent of Mrs. Grundy, could have done it in one way, and Sir William Gilbert would have done it delightfully in another. But Jean-Jacques's absolute lack of humour would have ensured a rather ghastly failure, relieved, it may be, by a few beautiful passages.

If, therefore, Rousseau had nothing but Émile, or even nothing but Émile and the Confessions to put to his credit, he could but obtain a position in our "utmost, last, provincial band," and that more because of his general literary powers than of special right. But, as everybody knows, there is a third book among his works which, whether universally or only by a majority, whether in whole or in part, whether with heavy deductions and allowances or with light ones, has been reckoned among the greatest and most epoch-making novels of the world. The full title of it is Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, ou Lettres de deux Amans, habitans d'une petite ville au pied des Alpes, recueillies et publiées, par J. J. Rousseau.[364] Despite its immense fame, direct and at second-hand—for Byron's famous outburst, though scarcely less rhetorical, is decidedly more poetical than most things of his, and has inscribed itself in the general memory—one rather doubts whether the book is as much read as it once was. Quotations, references, and those half-unconscious reminiscences of borrowing which are more eloquent than anything else, have not recently been very common either in English or in French. It has had the fate—elsewhere, I think, alluded to—of one of the two kinds of great literature, that it has in a manner seeded itself out. An intense love-novel—it is some time since we have seen one till the other day—would be a descendant of Rousseau's book, but would not bear more than a family likeness to it. Yet this, of itself, is a great testimony.

Except in rhetoric or rhapsody, the allowances and deductions above referred to must be heavy; and, according to a custom honoured both by time and good result, it is well to get them off first. That peculiarity of being a novelist only par interim, much more than Aramis was a mousquetaire, appears, even in Julie, so glaringly as to be dangerous and almost fatal. The book fills, in the ordinary one-volume editions, nearly five hundred pages of very small and very close print. Of these the First Part contains rather more than a hundred, and it would be infinitely better if the whole of the rest, except a few passages (which would be almost equally good as fragments), were in the bosom of the ocean buried. Large parts of them are mere discussions of some of Rousseau's own fads; clumsy parodies of Voltaire's satiric manners-painting; waterings out of the least good traits in the hero and heroine; uninteresting and superfluous appearances of the third and only other real person, Claire; a dreary account of Julie's married life; tedious eccentricities of the impossible and not very agreeable Lord Edward Bomston, who shares with Dickens's Lord Frederick Verisopht the peculiarity of being alternately a peer and a person with a courtesy "Lord"-ship; a rather silly end for the heroine herself;[365] and finally, a rather repulsive and quite incongruous acknowledgment of affection for the creature Saint-Preux, with a refusal to "implement" it (as they say in Scotland) matrimonially, by Claire, who is by this time a widow.[366] If mutilating books[367] were not a crime deserving terrible retribution in this life or after it, one could be excused for tearing off the Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Parts, with the Amours de Lord Édouard which follow. If one was rich, one would be amply justified in having a copy of Part I., and the fragments above indicated, printed for oneself on vellum.

But this is not all. Even the First Part—even the presentation of the three protagonists—is open to some, and even to severe, criticism. The most guiltless, but necessarily much the least important, is Claire. She is, of course, an obvious "borrow" from Richardson's lively second heroines; but she is infinitely superior to them. It is at first sight, though not perhaps for long, curious—and it is certainly a very great compliment to Madame de Warens or Vuarrens and Madame d'Houdetot, and perhaps other objects of his affections—that Rousseau, cad as he was, and impossible as it was for him to draw a gentleman, could and did draw ladies. It was horribly bad taste in both Julie and Claire to love such a creature as Saint-Preux; but then cela s'est vu from the time of the Lady of the Strachy downwards, if not from that of Princess Michal. But Claire is faithful and true as steel, and she is lively without being, as Charlotte Grandison certainly is, vulgar. She is very much more a really "reasonable woman," even putting passion aside, than the somewhat sermonising and syllogising Julie; and it would have been both agreeable and tormenting to be M. d'Orbe. (Tormenting because she only half-loved him, and agreeable because she did love him a little, and, whether it was little or much, allowed herself to be his.) He himself, slight and rather "put upon" as he is, is also much the most agreeable of the "second" male characters. Of Bomston and Wolmar we shall speak presently; and there is so little of the Baron d'Étange that one really does not know whether he was or was not something more than the tyrannical husband and father, and the ill-mannered specimen of the lesser nobility, that it pleased Saint-Preux or Rousseau to represent him as being. He had provocation enough, even in the case of his otherwise hardly pardonable insolence to Bomston.[368]

But Saint-Preux himself? How early was the obvious jest made that he is about as little of a preux as he is of a saint? I have heard, or dreamt, of a schoolboy who, being accidentally somewhat precocious in French, and having read the book, ejaculated, "What a sweep he is!" and I remember no time of my life at which I should not have heartily agreed with that youth. I do not suppose that either of us—though perhaps we ought to be ashamed of ourselves for not doing so—founded our condemnation on Saint-Preux's "forgetfulness of all but love." That is a "forfeit," in French and English sense alike, which has itself registered and settled in various tariffs and codes, none of which concerns the present history. It is not even that he is a most unreasonable creature now and then; that can be pardoned, being understood, though he really does strain the benefit of amare et sapere etc. It is that, except when he is in the altitudes of passion, and not always then, he never "knows how to behave," as the simple and sufficient old phrase had it. If M. d'Étange had had the wits, and had deigned to do it, he might even, without knowing his deepest cause of quarrel with the treacherous tutor, have pointed out that Saint-Preux's claim to be one of God Almighty's gentlemen was as groundless as his "proofs," in the French technical sense of gentility, were non-existent. It is impossible to imagine anything in worse taste than his reply to the Baron's no doubt offensive letter, and Julie's enclosed renunciation. Even the adoring Julie herself, and the hardly less adoring Claire—the latter not in the least a prude, nor given to giving herself "airs"—are constantly obliged to pull him up for his want of délicatesse. He is evidently a coxcomb, still more evidently a prig; selfish beyond even that selfishness which is venial in a lover; not in the least, though he can exceed in wine, a "good fellow," and in many ways thoroughly unmanly. A good English school and college might have made him tolerable: but it is rather to be doubted, and it is certain that his way as a transgressor would have been hard at both. As it is, he is very largely the embodiment—and it is more charitable than uncharitable to regard him as largely the cause—of the faults of the worst kind of French, and not quite only French, novel-hero ever since.

One approaches Julie herself, in critical intent, with mixed feelings. One would rather say nothing but good of her, and there is plenty of good to say: how much will be seen in a moment. Most of what is not so good belongs, in fact, to the dreary bulk of sequel tacked on by mistaken judgment to that more than true history of a hundred pages, which leaves her in despair, and might well have left her altogether. Even here she is not faultless, quite independently of her sins according to Mrs. Grundy and the Pharisees. If she had not been, as Claire herself fondly but truly calls her, such a prêcheresse, she might not have fallen a victim to such a prig. One never can quite forgive her for loving him, except on the all-excusing ground that she loved him so much; and though she is perhaps not far beyond the licence of "All's fair, in certain conditions," there is no doubt that, like her part-pattern Clarissa, she is not passionately attached to the truth. It might be possible to add some cavils, but for the irresistible plea just glanced at, which stops one.

Quia multum amavit! Nobody—at least no woman—had loved like that in a prose novel before; nobody at all except Des Grieux, and he is but as a sketch to an elaborate picture. She will wander after Pallas, and would like to think that she would like to be of the train of Dian (one shudders at imagining the scowl and the shrug and the twist of the skirt of the goddess!). But the kiss of Aphrodite has been on her, and has mastered her whole nature. How the thing could be done, out of poetry, has always been a marvel to me; but I have explained it by the supposition that the absolute impossibility of writing poetry at this time in French necessitated the break-out in prose. Rousseau's wonderful style—so impossible to analyse, but so irresistible—does much; the animating sense of his native scenery something. But, after all, what gives the thing its irresistibleness is the strange command he had of Passion and of Sorrow—two words, the first of which is actually, in the original sense, a synonym of the second, though it has been expanded to cover the very opposite.

But it would be unfair to Rousseau, especially in such a place as this, to confine the praise of Julie as a novel to its exhibition of passion, or even to the charm of Julie herself. Within its proper limits—which are, let it be repeated, almost if not quite exactly those of the First Part—many other gifts of the particular class of artist are shown. The dangerous letter-scheme, which lends itself so easily, and in the other parts surrenders itself so helplessly and hopelessly, to mere "piffle" about this and that, is kept well in hand. Much as Rousseau owes to Richardson, he has steered entirely clear of that system of word-for-word and incident-for-incident reporting which makes the Englishman's work so sickening to some. You have enough of each and no more, this happy mean affecting both dialogue and description. The plot (or rather the action) is constantly present, probably managed, always enlivened by the imminence of disastrous discovery. As has been already pointed out, one may dislike—or feel little interest in—some of the few characters; but it is impossible to say that they are out of drawing or keeping. Saint-Preux, objectionable and almost loathsome as he may be sometimes, is a thoroughly human creature, and is undoubtedly what Rousseau meant him to be, for the very simple reason that he is (like the Byronic hero who followed) what Rousseau wished to be, if not exactly what he was, himself. Bomston is more of a lay figure; but then the Anglais philosophe de qualité of the French imagination in the eighteenth century was a lay figure, and, as has been excellently said by De Quincey in another matter, nothing can be wrong which conforms to the principles of its own ideal. As for Julie and Claire, they once more

Even the "talking-book" is here hardly excessive, and comes legitimately under the excuse of showing how the relations between the hero and heroine originally got themselves established.[369]

Are we, then, from the excellence of the "Confessions" in pari materia and in ipsa of Julie, to lament that Rousseau did not take to novel-writing as a special and serious occupation? Probably not. The extreme weakness and almost fadeur of the strictly novel part of Émile, and the going-off of Julie itself, are very open warnings; the mere absence of any other attempts worth mentioning[370] is evidence of a kind; and the character of all the rest of the work, and of all this part of the work but the opening of Julie, and even of that opening itself, counsel abstention, here as everywhere, from quarrelling with Providence. Rousseau's superhuman concentration on himself, while it has inspired the relevant parts of the Confessions and of Julie, has spoilt a good deal else that we have, and would assuredly have spoilt other things that we have not. It has been observed, by all acute students of the novel, that the egotistic variety will not bear heavy crops of fruit by itself; and that it is incapable, or capable with very great difficulty, of letting the observed and so far altruistic kind grow from the same stool. Of what is sometimes called the dramatic faculty (though, in fact, it is only one side of that),—the faculty which in different guise and with different means the general novelist must also possess,—Rousseau had nothing. He could put himself in no other man's skin, being so absolutely wrapped up in his own, which was itself much too sensitive to be disturbed, much less shed. Anything or anybody that was (to use Mill's language) a permanent or even a temporary possibility of sensation to him was within his power; anything out of immediate or closely impending contact was not. Now some of the great novelists have the external power—or at least the will to use that power—alone, others have had both; but Rousseau had the internal only, and so was, except by miracle of intensive exercise, incapable of further range.

Neither of the disabilities which weighed on Voltaire and Rousseau—the incapacity of the former to construct any complex character, and of the latter to portray any but his own, or some other brought into intensest communion, actually or as a matter of wish, with his own—weighed upon the third of the great trio of philosophe leaders. There is every probability that Diderot might have been a very great novelist if he had lived a hundred years later; and not a little evidence that he only missed being such, even as it was, because of that mysterious curse which was epigrammatically expressed about him long ago (I really forget who said it first), "Good pages, no good book." So far from being self-centred or of limited interests, he could, as hardly any other man ever could, claim the hackneyed Homo sum, etc., as his rightful motto. He had, when he allowed himself to give it fair play, an admirable gift of tale-telling; he could create character, and set it to work, almost after the fashion of the very greatest novelists; his universal interest and "curiosity" included such vivid appreciation of literature, and of art, and of other things useful to the novel-writer, that he never could have been at a loss for various kinds of "seasoning." He had keen observation, an admittedly marvellous flow of ideas, and a style which (though, like everything else about him, careless) was of singular vigour and freshness when, once more, he let it have fair play. But his time, his nature, and his circumstances combined to throw in his way traps and snares and nets which he could not, or would not, avoid. His anti-religiosity, though sometimes greatly exaggerated, was a bad stumbling-block; although he was free from the snigger of Voltaire and of Sterne, you could not prevent him, as Horace Walpole complains of his distinguished sire, from blurting out the most improper remarks and stories at the most inconvenient times and in the most unsuitable companies; while his very multiscience, and his fertility of thought and imagination, kept him in a whirl which hindered his "settling" to anything. Although in one sense he had the finest and wisest critical taste of any man then living—I do not bar even Gray or even Lessing—his taste in some other ways was utterly untrustworthy and sometimes horribly bad; while even his strictly critical faculty seems never to have been exercised on his own books—a failure forming part of the "ostrich-like indifference" with which he produced and abandoned them.[371]

It is sometimes contended, and in many cases, no doubt, is the fact, that "Selections" are disgraceful and unscholarly. But what has been said will show that this is an exceptional case. The present writer waded through the whole of twenty-volume edition of Assézat and Tourneux when it first appeared, and is very glad he did; nor is there perhaps one volume (he does not say one page, chapter, or even work) which he has not revisited more or fewer times during the forty years in which (alas! for the preterite) they remained on his shelves. But it is scarcely to be expected that every one, that many, or that more than a very few readers, have done or will do the same. It so happens, however, that Génin's Œuvres Choisies—though it has been abused by some anti-Ydgrunites as too much Bowdlerised—gives a remarkably full and satisfactory idea of this great and seldom[372] quite rightly valued writer. It must have cost much, besides use of paste and scissors, to do; for the extracts are often very short, and the bulk of matter to be thoroughly searched for extraction is, as has just been said, huge. A third volume might perhaps be added;[373] but the actual two are far from unrepresentative, while the Bowdlerising is by no means ultra-Bowdlerish.

The reader, even of this selection, will see how, in quite miscellaneous or heterogeneous writing, Diderot bubbles out into a perfectly told tale or anecdote, no matter what the envelope (as we may call it) of this tale or anecdote may be. All his work is more or less like conversation: and these excursus are like the stories which, if good, are among the best, just as, if bad, they are the worst, sets-off to conversation itself. Next to these come the longer histoires—as one would call them in the Heroic novel and its successors—things sometimes found by themselves, sometimes ensconced in larger work[374]—the story of Desroches and Mme. de la Carlière, Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne, the almost famous Le Marquis des Arcis et Mme. de la Pommeraye, of which more may be said presently; and things which are not exactly tales, but which have the tale-quality in part, like the charming Regrets sur ma Vieille Robe de Chambre, Ceci n'est pas un conte, etc. Thirdly, and to be spoken of in more detail, come the things that are nearest actual novels, and in some cases are called so, Le Neveu de Rameau, the "unspeakable" Bijoux Indiscrets, Jacques le Fataliste (the matrix of Le Marquis des Arcis) and La Religieuse.

The "unspeakable" one does not need much speaking from any point of view. If it is not positively what Carlyle called it, "the beastliest of all dull novels, past, present, or to come," it really would require a most unpleasant apprenticeship to scavenging in order to discover a dirtier and duller. The framework is a flat imitation of Crébillon, the "insets" are sometimes mere pornography, and the whole thing is evidently scribbled at a gallop—it was actually a few days' work, to get money, from some French Curll or Drybutter, to give (the appropriateness of the thing at least is humorous) to the mistress of the moment, a Madame de Puisieux,[375] who, if she was like Crébillon's heroines in morals, cannot have been like the best of them in manners. Its existence shows, of course, Diderot's worst side, that is to say, the combination of want of breeding with readiness to get money anyhow. If it is worth reading at all, which may be doubted, it is to show the real, if equivocal, value of Crébillon himself. For it is vulgar, which he never is.

Le Neveu de Rameau, has only touches of obscenity, and it has been enormously praised by great persons. It is very clever, but it seems to me that, as a notable critic is said to have observed of something else, "it has been praised quite enough." It is a sketch, worked out in a sort of monologue,[376] of something like Diderot's own character without his genius and without his good fellowship—a gutter-snipe of art and letters possessed of some talent and of infinite impudence. It shows Diderot's own power of observation and easy fluid representation of character and manners, but not, as I venture to think, much more.

Jacques le Fataliste is what may be called, without pedantry or preciousness, eminently a "document." It is a document of Diderot's genius only indirectly (save in part), and to those who can read not only in the lines but between them: it is a document, directly, of the insatiable and restless energy of the man, and of the damage which this restlessness, with its accompanying and inevitable want of self-criticism, imposed upon that genius. Diderot, though he did not rhapsodise about Sterne as he rhapsodised about Richardson, was, like most of his countrymen then, a great admirer of "Tristram," and in an evil hour he took it into his head to Shandyise. The book starts with an actual adaptation of Sterne,[377] which is more than once repeated; its scheme—of a master (who is as different as possible from my Uncle Toby, except that when not in a passion he is rather good-natured, and at almost all times very easily humbugged) and a man (who is what Trim never is, both insolent and indecent)—is at least partially the same. But the most constant and the most unfortunate imitation is of Sterne's literally eccentric, or rather zigzag and pillar-to-post, fashion of narration. In the Englishman's own hands, by some prestidigitation of genius, this never becomes boring, though it probably would have become so if either book had been finished; for which reason we may be quite certain that it was not only his death which left both in fragments. In the hands of his imitators the boredom—simple or in the form of irritation—has been almost invariable;[378] and with all his great intellectual power, his tale-telling faculty, his bonhomie, and other good qualities, Diderot has not escaped it—has, in fact, rushed upon it and compelled it to come in. It is comparatively of little moment that the main ostensible theme—the very unedifying account of the loves, or at least the erotic exercises, of Jacques and his master—is deliberately, tediously, inartistically interrupted and "put off." The great feature of the book, which has redeemed it with some who would otherwise condemn it entirely, the Arcis and La Pommeraye episode (v. inf.), is handled after a fashion which suggests Mr. Ruskin's famous denunciation in another art. The inkpot is "flung in the face of the public" by a purely farcical series of interruptions, occasioned by the affairs of the inn-landlady, who tells the story, by her servants, dog, customers, and Heaven only knows what else; while the minor incidents and accidents of the book are treated in the same way, in and out of proportion to their own importance; the author's "simple plan," though by no means "good old rule," being that everything shall be interrupted. Although, in the erotic part, the author never returns quite to his worst Bijoux Indiscrets style, he once or twice goes very near it, except that he is not quite so dull; and when the book comes to an end in a very lame and impotent fashion (the farce being kept up to the last, and even this end being "recounted" and not made part of the mainly dialogic action), one is rather relieved at there being no more. One has seen talent; one has almost glimpsed genius; but what one has been most impressed with is the glaring fashion in which both the certainty and the possibility have been thrown away.

The story which has been referred to in passing as muddled, or, to adopt a better French word, for which we have no exact equivalent, affublé (travestied and overlaid) with eccentricities and interruptions, the Histoire of the Marquis des Arcis and the Marquise de la Pommeraye, has received a great deal of praise, most of which it deserves. The Marquis and the Marquise have entered upon one of the fashionable liaisons which Crébillon described in his own way. Diderot describes this one in another. The Marquis gets tired—it is fair to say that he has offered marriage at the very first, but Madame de la Pommeraye, a widow with an unpleasant first experience of the state, has declined it. He shows his tiredness in a gentlemanly manner, but not very mistakably. His mistress, who is not at first femina furens, but who possesses some feminine characteristics in a dangerous degree, as he might perhaps have found out earlier if he had been a different person, determines to make sure of it. She intimates her tiredness, and the Marquis makes his first step downwards by jumping at the release. They are—the old, old hopeless folly!—to remain friends, but friends only. But she really loves him, and after almost assuring herself that he has really ceased to love her (which, in the real language of love, means that he has never loved her at all), devises a further, a very clever, but a rather diabolical system of last proof, involving vengeance if it fails. She has known, in exercises of charity (the femme du monde has seldom quite abandoned these), a mother and daughter who, having lost their means, have taken to a questionable, or rather a very unquestionable manner of life, keeping a sort of private gaming-house, and extending to those frequenters of it who choose, what the late George Augustus Sala not inelegantly called, in an actual police-court instance, "the thorough hospitality characteristic of their domicile." She prevails on them to leave the house, get rid of all their belongings (down to clothes) which could possibly be identified, change their name, move to another quarter of Paris, and set up as dévotes under the full protection of the local clergy. Then she manages an introduction, of an apparently accidental kind, to the Marquis. He falls in love at once with the daughter, who is very pretty, and with masculine (or at least some masculine) fatuity, makes Madame de la Pommeraye his confidante. She gives him rope, but he uses it, of course, only to hang himself. He tries the usual temptations; but though the mother at least would not refuse them, Madame de la Pommeraye's hand on the pair is too tight. At last he offers marriage, and—with her at least apparent consent—is married. The next day she tells him the truth. But her diabolism fails. At first there is of course a furious outburst. But the girl is beautiful, affectionate, and humble; the mother is pensioned off; the Marquis and Marquise des Arcis retire for some years to those invaluable terres, after a sojourn at which everything is forgotten; and the story ends. Diderot, by not too skilfully throwing in casuistical attacks and defences of the two principal characters, but telling us nothing of Madame de la Pommeraye's subsequent feelings or history, does what he can, unluckily after his too frequent fashion, to spoil or at least to blunt his tale. It is not necessary to imitate him by discussing the pros and cons at length. I think myself that the Marquis, both earlier and later, is made rather too much of a benêt, or, in plain English, a nincompoop. But nincompoops exist: in fact how many of us are not nincompoops in certain circumstances? Madame de la Pommeraye is, I fear, rather true, and is certainly sketched with extraordinary ability. On a larger scale the thing would probably, at that time and by so hasty and careless a workman, have been quite spoilt. But it is obviously the skeleton—and something more—of a really great novel.

It may seem that a critic who speaks in this fashion, after an initial promise of laudation, is a sort of Balaam topsyturvied, and merely curses where he is expected to bless. But ample warning was given of the peculiar position of Diderot, and when we come to his latest known and by far his best novel, La Religieuse, the paradox (he was himself very fond of paradoxes,[379] though not of the wretched things which now disgrace the name) remains. The very subject of the book, or of the greatest part of it, was for a long time, if it is not still, taboo; and even if this had not been the case, it has other drawbacks. It originated in, and to some extent still retains traces of, one of the silly and ill-bred "mystifications" in which the eighteenth and early nineteenth century delighted.[380] It is, at least in appearance, badly tainted with purpose; and while it is actually left unfinished, the last pages of it, as they stand, are utterly unworthy of the earlier part, and in fact quite uninteresting. Momus or Zoilus must be allowed to say so much: but having heard him, let us cease to listen to the half-god or the whole philologist.

Yet La Religieuse, for all its drawbacks, is almost a great, and might conceivably have been a very great book. Madame d'Holbach is credited by Diderot's own generosity with having suggested its crowning mot,[381] and her influence may have been in other ways good by governing the force and fire, so often wasted or ill-directed, of Diderot's genius. Sœur Sainte-Suzanne is the youngest daughter of a respectable middle-class family. She perceives, or half-perceives (for, though no fool, she is a guileless and unsuspicious creature), that she is unwelcome there; the most certain sign of which is that, while her sisters are married and dowered handsomely, she is condemned to be a nun. She has, though quite real piety, no "vocation," and though she allows herself to be coaxed through her novitiate, she at last, in face of almost insuperable difficulties, summons up courage enough to refuse, at the very altar, the final profession. There is, of course, a terrible scandal; she has more black looks in the family than ever, and at last her mother confesses that she is an illegitimate child, and therefore hated by her putative father, whose love for his wife, however, has induced him to forgive her, and not actually renounce (as indeed, by French law, he could not) the child. Broken in heart and spirit, Suzanne at last accepts her doom. She is fortunate in one abbess, but the next persecutes her, brings all sorts of false accusations against her, strips, starves, imprisons, and actually tortures her by means of the amende honorable. She manages to get her complaints known and to secure a counsel, and though she cannot obtain liberation from her vows, the priest who conducts the ecclesiastical part of the enquiry is a just man, and utterly repudiates the methods of persecution, while he and her lay lawyer procure her transference to another convent. Here her last trial (except those of the foolish post-scrap, as we may call it) begins, as well as the most equivocal and the greatest part of the book. Her new superior is in every respect different from any she has known—of a luxurious temperament, good-natured, though capricious, and inclined to be very much too affectionate. Her temptation of the innocent Suzanne is defeated by this very innocence, and by timely revelation, though the revealer does not know what she reveals, to a "director"; and the wayward and corrupted fancy turns by degrees to actual madness, which proves fatal, Suzanne remaining unharmed, though a piece of not inexcusable eavesdropping removes the ignorance of her innocence.

If the subject be not simply ruled out, and the book indexed for silence, it is practically impossible to suggest that it could have been treated better. Even the earlier parts, which could easily have been made dull, are not so; and it is noteworthy that, anti-religionist as Diderot was, and directly as the book is aimed at the conventual system,[382] all the priests who are introduced are men of honour, justice, and humanity. But the wonder is in the treatment of the "scabrous" part of the matter by the author of Diderot's other books. Whether Madame d'Holbach's[383] influence, as has been suggested, was more widely and subtly extended than we know, or whatever else may be the cause, there is not a coarse word, not even a coarsely drawn situation, in the whole. Suzanne's innocence is, in the subtlest manner, prevented from being in the least bête. The fluctuations and ficklenesses of the abbess's passion, and in a less degree of that of another young nun, whom Suzanne has partially ousted from her favour, are marvellously and almost inoffensively drawn, and the stages by which erotomania passes into mania general and mortal, are sketched slightly, but with equal power. There is, I suppose, hardly a book which one ought to discommend to the young person more than La Religieuse. There are not many in which the powers required by the novelist, in delineating morbid, and not only morbid, character, are more brilliantly shown.

It is not the least remarkable thing about this remarkable book, and not the least characteristic of its most remarkable author, that its very survival has something extraordinary about it. Grimm, who was more likely than any one else to know, apparently thought it was destroyed or lost; it never appeared at all during Diderot's life, nor for a dozen years after his death, nor till seven after the outbreak of the Revolution, and six after the suppression of the religious orders in France. That it might have brought its author into difficulties is more than probable; but the undisguised editor of the Encyclopédie, the author, earlier, of the actually disgraceful Bijoux Indiscrets, and the much more than suspected principal begetter of the Système de la Nature, could not have been much influenced by this. The true cause of its abscondence, as in so much else of his work, was undoubtedly that ultra-Bohemian quality of indifference which distinguished Diderot—the first in a way, probably for ever the greatest, and, above all, the most altruistic of literary Bohemians. Ask him to do something definite, especially for somebody else's profit, to be done off-hand, and it was done. Ask him to bear the brunt of a dangerous, laborious, by no means lucrative, but rather exciting adventure, and he would, one cannot quite say consecrate, but devote (which has two senses) his life to it. But set him to elaborate artistic creation, confine him to it, and expect him to finish it, and you were certain to be disappointed. At another time, even at this time, if his surroundings and his society, his education and his breeding had been less unfortunate, he might, as it seems to me, have become a very great novelist indeed. As it is, he is a great possibility of novel and of much other writing, with occasional outbursts of actuality. The Encyclopédie itself, for aught I care, might have gone in all its copies, and with all possibility of recovering or remembering it on earth, to the place where so many people at the time would have liked to send it. But in the rest of him, and even in some of his own Encyclopædia articles,[384] there is much of quite different stuff. And among the various gifts, critical and creative, which this stuff shows, not the least, I think, was the half-used and mostly ill-used gift of novel-writing.

What has been called the second generation of the philosophes, who were naturally the pupils of the first, "were not like [that] first," that is to say, they did not reproduce the special talents of their immediate masters in this department of ours, save in two instances. Diderot's genius did not propagate itself in the novel way at all[385]: indeed, as has been said, his best novel was not known till this second generation itself was waning. The most brilliant of his direct hearers, Joubert, took to another department; or rather, in his famous Pensées, isolated and perfected the utterances scattered through the master's immense and disorderly work. Naigeon, the most devoted, who might have taken for his motto a slight alteration of the Mahometan confession of faith, "There is no God; but there is only one Diderot, and I am his prophet," was a dull fellow, and also, to adopt a Carlylian epithet, a "dull-snuffling" one, who could not have told a neck-tale if the Hairibee of the guillotine had caught him and given him a merciful chance. Voltaire in Marmontel, and Rousseau in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, were more fortunate, though both the juniors considerably transformed their masters' fashions; and Marmontel was always more or less, and latterly altogether, an apostate from the principle that the first and last duty of man is summed up in écrasons l'infâme.

This latter writer has had vicissitudes both in English and French appreciation. We translated him early, and he had an immense influence on the general Edgeworthian school, and on Miss Edgeworth herself. Much later Mr. Ruskin "took him up."[386] But neither his good nor his bad points have, for a long time, been such as greatly to commend themselves, either to the major part of the nineteenth century, or to what has yet passed of the twentieth, on either side of the channel.

He was, no doubt, only a second-class man of letters, and though he ranks really high in this class, he was unfortunately much influenced by more or less passing fashions, fads, and fancies of his time—sensibilité (see next chapter) philosophism, politico-philanthropic economy, and what not. He was also much of a "polygraph," and naturally a good deal of his polygraphy does not concern us, though parts of his Memoirs, especially the rather well-known accounts of his sufferings as a new-comer[387] in the atrocious Bastille, show capital tale-telling faculty. His unequal criticism, sometimes very acute, hardly concerns us at all; his Essai sur les Romans being very disappointing.[388] But he wrote not a little which must, in different ways and "strengths," be classed as actual fiction, and this concerns us pretty nearly, both as evidencing that general set towards the novel which is so important, and also in detail.