Volume VI Part 15 (1/2)
”You have the inverse of dramatic talent,” said Abbe Arnauld to Diderot; ”the proper thing is to transform one's self into all the characters, and you transform all the characters into yourself.” The criticism did Diderot wrong: he had more wits than his characters, and he was worth more at bottom than those whom he described. Carried away by the richness as well as the unruliness of his mind, dest.i.tute as he was of definite and fixed principles, he recognized no other moral law than the natural impulse of the soul. ”There is no virtue or vice,” he used to say, ”but innate goodness or badness.” Certain religious cravings, nevertheless, sometimes: a.s.serted themselves in his conscience: he had.
a glimmering perception of the necessity for a higher rule and law.
”O G.o.d, I know not whether Thou art,” he wrote in his _Interpretation de la Nature,_ but I will think as if Thou didst see into my soul, I will act as if I were in Thy presence.”
A strange illusion on the part of the philosopher about the power of ideas as well as about the profundity of evil in the human heart!
Diderot fancied he could regulate his life by a perchance, and he was constantly hurried away by the torrent of his pa.s.sion into a violence of thought and language foreign to his natural benevolence. It was around his name that the philosophic strife had waxed most fierce: the active campaign undertaken by his friends to open to him the doors of the French Academy remained unsuccessful. ”He has too many enemies,” said Louis XV.
”his election shall not be sanctioned.” Diderot did not offer himself; he set out for St. Petersburg; the Empress Catherine had loaded him with kindnesses. Hearing of the poverty of the philosopher who was trying to sell his library to obtain a dower for his daughter, she bought the books, leaving the enjoyment of them to Diderot, whom she appointed her librarian, and, to secure his maintenance in advance, she had a sum of fifty thousand livres remitted to him. ”So here I am obliged, in conscience, to live fifty years,” said Diderot.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Diderot and Catherine II----321]
He pa.s.sed some months in Russia, admitted several hours a day to the closet of the empress, chatting with a frankness and a freedom which sometimes went to the extent of license. Catherine II. was not alarmed.
”Go on,” she would say; amongst men anything is allowable.” When the philosopher went away, he shed hot tears, and ”so did she, almost,” he declares. He refused to go to Berlin; absolute power appeared to him more arbitrary and less indulgent in the hands of Frederick than with Catherine. ”It is said that at Petersburg Diderot is considered a tiresome reasoner,” wrote the King of Prussia to D' Alembert in January, 1774; ”he is incessantly harping on the same things. All I know is that I couldn't stand the reading of his, books, intrepid reader as I am; there is a self-sufficient tone and an arrogance in them which revolts my sense of freedom.” The same sense of freedom which the king claimed for himself whilst refusing it to the philosopher, the philosopher, in his turn, refused to Christians not less intolerant than he. The eighteenth century did not practise on its own account that respect for conscience which it, nevertheless, powerfully and to its glory promoted.
Diderot died on the 29th of July, 1784, still poor, an invalid for some time past, surrounded to the end by his friends, who rendered back to him that sincere and devoted affection which he made the pride of his life.
Hearing of his sufferings from Grimm, the Empress Catherine had hired a furnished apartment for him; he had just installed himself in it when he expired; without having retracted any one of his works, nearly all published under the veil of the anonymous, he was, nevertheless, almost reconciled with the church, and was interred quietly in the chapel of the Virgin at St. Roch. The charm of his character had often caused people to forget his violence, which he himself no longer remembered the next day. ”I should like to know this hot-headed metaphysician,” was the remark made to Buffon by President De Brosses, who happened to be then at Paris; and he afterwards added,
”He is a nice fellow, very pleasant, very amiable, a great philosopher, a mighty arguer, but a maker of perpetual digressions. Yesterday he made quite five and twenty between nine o'clock and one, during which time he remained in my room. O, how much more lucid is Buffon than all those gentry!”
The magistrate's mind understood and appreciated the great naturalist's genius. Diderot felt in his own fas.h.i.+on the charm of nature, but, as was said by Chevalier Chastellux, ”his ideas got drunk and set to work chasing one another.” The ideas of Buffon, on the other hand, came out in the majestic order of a system under powerful organization, and informed as it were with the very secrets of the Creator. ”The general history of the world,” he says, ”ought to precede the special history of its productions; and the details of singular facts touching the life and habits of animals, or touching the culture and vegetation of plants, belong perhaps less to natural history than do the general results of the observations which have been made on the different materials which compose the terrestrial globe, on the elevations, the depressions, and the unevennesses of its form, on the movement of the seas, on the trending of mountains, on the position of quarries, on the rapidity and effects of the currents of the sea--this is nature on the grand scale.”
M. Fleurens truly said, ” Bufon aggrandizes every subject he touches.”
Born at Montbard in Burgundy on the 7th of September, 1707, Buffon belonged to a family of wealth and consideration in his province. In his youth he travelled over Europe with his friend the Duke of Kingston; on returning home, he applied himself at first to mathematics, with sufficient success to be appointed at twenty-six years of age, in 1733, adjunct in the mechanical cla.s.s at the Academy of Sciences. In 1739, he received the superintendence of the _Jardin du Roi,_ not long since enlarged and endowed by Richelieu, and lovingly looked after by the scholar Dufay, who had just died, himself designating Buffon as his successor. He had s.h.i.+fted from mechanics to botany, ”not,” he said, ”that he was very fond of that science, which he had learned and forgotten three times,” but he was aspiring just then to the _Jardin du Roi;_ his genius was yet seeking its proper direction. ”There are some things for me,” he wrote to President De Brosses, ”but there are some against, and especially my age; however, if people would but reflect, they would see that the superintendence of the _Jardin du Roi_ requires an active young man, who can stand the sun, who is conversant with plants and knows the way to make them multiply, who is a bit of a connoisseur in all the sorts used in demonstration there, and above all who understands buildings, in such sort that, in my own heart, it appears to me that I should be exactly made for them: but I have not as yet any great hope.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: Buffon 323]
In Buffon's hands the _Jardin du Roi_ was transformed; in proportion as his mind developed, the requirements of the study appeared to him greater and greater; he satisfied them fearlessly, getting together collections at his own expense, opening new galleries, constructing hot-houses, being constantly seconded by the good-will of Louis XV., who never shrank from expenses demanded by Buffon's projects. The great naturalist died at eighty years of age, without having completed his work; but he had imprinted upon it that indisputable stamp of greatness which was the distinctive feature of his genius. The _Jardin du Roi,_ which became the _Jardin des Plantes,_ has remained unique in Europe.
Fully engaged as he was in those useful labors, from the age of thirty, Buffon gave up living at Paris for the greater part of the year. He had bought the ruins of the castle of Montbard, the ancient residence of the Dukes of Burgundy, overlooking his native town. He had built a house there which soon became dear to him, and which he scarcely ever left for eight months in the year. There it was, in a pavilion which overhung the garden planted in terraces, and from which he had a view of the rich plains of La Brenne, that the great naturalist, carefully dressed by five o'clock in the morning, meditated the vast plan of his works as he walked from end to end and side to side. ”I pa.s.sed delightful hours there,” he used to say. When he summoned his secretary, the work of composition was completed. ”M. de Buffon gives reasons for the preference he shows as to every word in his discourses, without excluding from the discussion even the smallest particles, the most insignificant conjunctions,” says Madame Necker; ”he never forgot that he had written 'the style is the man.'
The language could not be allowed to derogate from the majesty of the subject. 'I made it a rule,' he used to say, 'to always fix upon the n.o.blest expressions.'”
It was in this dignified and studious retirement that Buffon quietly pa.s.sed his long life. ”I dedicated,” he says, ” twelve, nay, fourteen, hours to study; it was my whole pleasure. In truth, I devoted myself to it far more than I troubled myself about fame; fame comes afterwards, if it may, and it nearly always does.”
Buffon did not lack fame; on the appearance of the first three volumes of his ”Histoire naturelle,” published in 1749, the breadth of his views, the beauty of his language, and the strength of his mind excited general curiosity and admiration. The Sorbonne was in a flutter at certain bold propositions; Buffon, without being disconcerted, took pains to avoid condemnation. ”I took the liberty,” he says in a letter to M. Leblant, ”of writing to the Duke of Nivernais (then amba.s.sador at Rome), who has replied to me in the most polite and most obliging way in the world; I hope, therefore, that my book will not be put in the Index, and, in truth, I have done all I could not to deserve it and to avoid theological squabbles, which I fear far more than I do the criticisms of physicists and geometricians.” ”Out of a hundred and twenty a.s.sembled doctors,” he adds before long, ”I had a hundred and fifteen, and their resolution even contains eulogies which I did not expect.” Despite certain boldnesses which had caused anxiety, the Sorbonne had reason to compliment the great naturalist. The unity of the human race as well as its superior dignity were already vindicated in these first efforts of Buffon's genius, and his mind never lost sight of this great verity. ”In the human species,”
he says, ”the influence of climate shows itself only by slight varieties, because this species is one, and is very distinctly separated from all other species; man, white in Europe, black in Africa, yellow in Asia, and red in America, is only the same man tinged with the hue of climate; as he is made to reign over the earth, as the whole globe is his domain, it seems as if his nature were ready prepared for all situations; beneath the fires of the south, amidst the frosts of the north, he lives, he multiplies, he is found to be so spread about everywhere from time immemorial that he appears to affect no climate in particular. . . .
Whatever resemblance there may be between the Hottentot and the monkey, the interval which separates them is immense, since internally he is garnished with mind and externally with speech.”
Buffon continued his work, adroitly availing himself of the talent and researches of the numerous co-operators whom he had managed to gather about him, directing them all with indefatigable vigilance in their labors and their observations. ”Genius is but a greater apt.i.tude for perseverance,” he used to say, himself justifying his definition by the a.s.siduity of his studies. ”I had come to the sixteenth volume of my work on natural history,” he writes with bitter regret, ”when a serious and long illness interrupted for nearly two years the course of my labors.
This shortening of my life, already far advanced, caused one in my works.
I might, in the two years I have lost, have produced two or three volumes of the history of birds, without abandoning for that my plan of a history of minerals, on which I have been engaged for several years.”
In 1753 Buffon had been nominated a member of the French Academy. He had begged his friends to vote for his compatriot, Piron, author of the celebrated comedy _Metromanie,_ at that time an old man and still poor.
”I can wait,” said Buffon. ”Two days before that fixed for the election,” writes Grimm, ”the king sent for President Montesquieu, to whose lot it had fallen to be director of the Academy on that occasion, and told him that, understanding that the Academy had cast their eyes upon M. Piron, and knowing that he was the author of several licentious works, he desired the Academy to choose some one else to fill the vacant place. His Majesty at the same time told him that he would not have any member belonging to the order of advocates.”
Buffon was elected, and on the 25th of August, 1754, St. Louis' day, he was formally received by the Academy; Grimm describes the session.
”M. de Buffon did not confine himself to reminding us that Chancellor Seguier was a great man, that Cardinal Richelieu was a very great man, that Kings Louis XIV. and Louis XV. were very great men too, that the Archbishop of Sens (whom he succeeds) was also a great man, and finally that all the forty were great men; this celebrated man, disdaining the stale and heavy eulogies which are generally the substance of this sort of speech, thought proper to treat of a subject worthy of his pen and worthy of the Academy. He gave us his ideas on style, and it was said, in consequence, that the Academy had engaged a writing-master.”
”Well-written works are the only ones which will go down to posterity,”
said Buffon in his speech; ”quant.i.ty of knowledge, singularity of facts, even novelty in discoveries, are not certain guaranties of immortality; knowledge, facts, discoveries, are easily abstracted and transferred.