Chapter 1

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LIBRARY OF THE WORLD'S BEST LITERATURE ANCIENT AND MODERN

CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER

EDITOR

HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE LUCIA GILBERT RUNKLE GEORGE HENRY WARNER

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Connoisseur Edition

VOL. XII.

NEW YORK THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY

Connoisseur Edition

LIMITED TO FIVE HUNDRED COPIES IN HALF RUSSIA

_No_. ..........

Copyright, 1896, by R. S. PEALE AND J. A. HILL _All rights reserved_

THE ADVISORY COUNCIL

CRAWFORD H. TOY, A. M., LL. D., Professor of Hebrew, HARVARD UNIVERSITY, Cambridge, Mass.

THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY, LL. D., L. H. D., Professor of English in the Sheffield Scientific School of YALE UNIVERSITY, New Haven, Conn.

WILLIAM M. SLOANE, PH. D., L. H. D., Professor of History and Political Science, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, Princeton, N. J.

BRANDER MATTHEWS, A. M., LL. B., Professor of Literature, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, New York City.

JAMES B. ANGELL, LL. D., President of the UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, Ann Arbor, Mich.

WILLARD FISKE, A. M., PH. D., Late Professor of the Germanic and Scandinavian Languages and Literatures, CORNELL UNIVERSITY, Ithaca, N. Y.

EDWARD S. HOLDEN, A. M., LL. D., Director of the Lick Observatory, and Astronomer, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, Berkeley, Cal.

ALCÉE FORTIER, LIT. D., Professor of the Romance Languages, TULANE UNIVERSITY, New Orleans, La.

WILLIAM P. TRENT, M. A., Dean of the Department of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of English and History, UNIVERSITY OF THE SOUTH, Sewanee, Tenn.

PAUL SHOREY, PH. D., Professor of Greek and Latin Literature, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, Chicago, Ill.

WILLIAM T. HARRIS, LL. D., United States Commissioner of Education, BUREAU OF EDUCATION, Washington, D. C.

MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN, A. M., LL. D., Professor of Literature in the CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA, Washington, D. C.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

VOL. XII

LIVED PAGE DENIS DIDEROT 1713-1784 4689 From 'Rameau's Nephew'

FRANZ VON DINGELSTEDT 1814-1881 4704 A Man of Business ('The Amazon') The Watchman (same)

DIOGENES LAERTIUS 200-250 A. D.? 4711 Life of Socrates ('Lives and Sayings of the Philosophers') Examples of Greek Wit and Wisdom: Bias; Plato; Aristippus; Aristotle; Theophrastus; Demetrius; Antisthenes; Diogenes; Cleanthes; Pythagoras

ISAAC D'ISRAELI 1766-1848 4725 Poets, Philosophers, and Artists Made by Accident ('Curiosities of Literature') Martyrdom of Charles the First ('Commentaries on the Reign of Charles the First')

SYDNEY DOBELL 1824-1874 4733 Epigram on the Death of Edward Forbes How's My Boy? The Sailor's Return Afloat and Ashore The Soul ('Balder') England (same) America Amy's Song of the Willow ('Balder')

AUSTIN DOBSON 1840- 4741 BY ESTHER SINGLETON On a Nankin Plate The Old Sedan-Chair Ballad of Prose and Rhyme The Curé's Progress "Good-Night, Babbette" The Ladies of St. James's Dora _versus_ Rose Une Marquise A Ballad to Queen Elizabeth The Princess De Lamballe ('Four Frenchwomen')

MARY MAPES DODGE 1840?- 4751 The Race ('Hans Brinker')

JOHN DONNE 1573-1631 4771 The Undertaking A Valediction Forbidding Mourning Song Love's Growth Song

FEODOR MIKHAILOVITCH DOSTOÉVSKY 1821-1881 4779 BY ISABEL F. HAPGOOD From 'Poor People': Letter from Varvara Debrosyeloff to Makar Dyevushkin; Letter from Makar Dyevushkin to Varvara Alexievna Dobrosyeloff The Bible Reading ('Crime and Punishment')

EDWARD DOWDEN 1843- 4806 The Humor of Shakespeare ('Shakespeare; a Critical Study of His Mind and Art') Shakespeare's Portraiture of Women ('Transcripts and Studies') The Interpretation of Literature (same)

A. CONAN DOYLE 1859- 4815 The Red-Headed League ('The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes') Bowmen's Song ('The White Company')

HOLGER DRACHMANN 1846- 4840 The Skipper and His Ship ('Paul and Virginia of a Northern Zone') The Prince's Song ('Once Upon a Time')

JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE 1795-1820 4851 A Winter's Tale ('The Croakers') The Culprit Fay The American Flag

JOHN WILLIAM DRAPER 1811-1882 4865 The Vedas and Their Theology ('The Intellectual Development of Europe') Primitive Beliefs Dismissed by Scientific Knowledge (same) The Koran (same)

MICHAEL DRAYTON 1563-1631 4877 Sonnet The Ballad of Agincourt Queen Mab's Excursion ('Nymphidia, the Court of Faery')

GUSTAVE DROZ 1832-1895 4885 How the Baby Was Saved ('The Seamstress's Story') A Family New-Year's ('Monsieur, Madame, and Bébé') Their Last Excursion ('Making an Omelette')

HENRY DRUMMOND 1851- 4897 The Country and Its People ('Tropical Africa') The East-African Lake Country (same) White Ants (same)

WILLIAM DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN 1585-1649 4913 Sextain Madrigal Reason and Feeling On Death ('Cypress Grove') Degeneracy of the World Briefness of Life The Universe

JOHN DRYDEN 1631-1700 4919 BY THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY From 'The Hind and the Panther' To My Dear Friend Mr. Congreve Ode to the Pious Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew A Song Lines Printed under Milton's Portrait Alexander's Feast; or, The Power of Music Achitophel ('Absalom and Achitophel')

MAXIME DU CAMP 1822- 4951 Street Scene during the Commune ('The Convulsions of Paris')

ALEXANDRE DUMAS, SENIOR 1802-1870 4957 BY ANDREW LANG The Cure for Dormice that Eat Peaches ('The Count of Monte Cristo') The Shoulder of Athos, the Belt of Porthos, and the Handkerchief of Aramis ('The Three Musketeers') Defense of the Bastion St.-Gervais (same) Consultation of the Musketeers (same) The Man in the Iron Mask ('The Viscount of Bragelonne') A Trick is Played on Henry III. by Aid of Chicot ('The Lady of Monsoreau')

ALEXANDRE DUMAS, JUNIOR 1824-1895 5001 BY FRANCISQUE SARCEY The Playwright Is Born--and Made (Preface to 'The Prodigal Father') An Armed Truce ('A Friend to the Sex') Two Views of Money ('The Money Question') M. De Remonin's Philosophy of Marriage ('L'Étrangére') Reforming a Father ('The Prodigal Father') Mr. and Mrs. Clarkson ('L'Étrangére')

GEORGE DU MAURIER 1834-1896 5041 At the Heart of Bohemia ('Trilby') Christmas in the Latin Quarter (same) "Dreaming True" ('Peter Ibbetson') Barty Josselin at School ('The Martian')

WILLIAM DUNBAR 1465?-1530? 5064 The Thistle and the Rose From 'The Golden Targe' No Treasure Avails Without Gladness

JEAN VICTOR DURUY 1811-1894 5069 The National Policy ('History of Rome') Results of the Roman Dominion (same)

FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS

VOLUME XII

PAGE Javanese Manuscript (Colored Plate) Frontispiece The Alexandrine Manuscript (Fac-simile) xii Old Black-Letter Quarto (Fac-simile) 4726 "Charles I. Going to Execution" (Photogravure) 4730 "The Skater of the Zuyder Zee" (Photogravure) 4758 African Arabic Manuscript (Fac-simile) 4870 John Dryden (Portrait) 4920 Alexandre Dumas (Portrait) 4958 Alexandre Dumas, Fils (Portrait) 5002

VIGNETTE PORTRAITS

Denis Diderot Joseph Rodman Drake Franz von Dingelstedt John William Draper Isaac D'Israeli Michael Drayton Austin Dobson Gustav Droz Mary Mapes Dodge Henry Drummond John Donne William Drummond Feodor Dostoévsky Maxime Du Camp A. Conan Doyle George du Maurier Holger Drachmann Jean Victor Duruy

DENIS DIDEROT

(1713-1784)

Among the French Encyclopædists of the eighteenth century Denis Diderot holds the place of leader. There were intellects of broader scope and of much surer balance in that famous group, but none of such versatility, brilliancy, and outbursting force. To his associates he was a marvel and an inspiration.

He was born in October 1713, in Langres, Haute-Marne, France; and died in Paris July 31st, 1784. After a classical education in Jesuit schools, he utterly disgusted his father by turning to the Bohemian life of a littérateur in Paris. Although very poor, he married at the age of thirty. The whole story of his married life--the common Parisian story in those days--reflects no credit on him; though his _liaison_ with Mademoiselle Voland presents the aspects of a friendship abiding through life. Poverty spurred him to exertion. Four days of work in 1746 are said to have produced 'Pensées Philosophiques' (Philosophic Thoughts). This book, with a little essay following it, 'Interprétation de la Nature,' was his first open attack on revealed religion. Its argument, though only negative, and keeping within the bounds of theism, foretokened a class of utterances which were frequent in Diderot's later years, and whose assurance of his materialistic atheism would be complete had they not been too exclamatory for settled conviction. He contents himself with glorifying the passions, to the annulling of all ethical standards. On this point at least his convictions were stable, for long afterward he writes thus to Mademoiselle Voland:--"The man of mediocre passion lives and dies like the brute.... If we were bound to choose between Racine, a bad husband, a bad father, a false friend, and a sublime poet, and Racine, good father, good husband, good friend, and dull worthy man, I hold to the first. Of Racine the bad man, what remains? Nothing. Of Racine the man of genius? The work is eternal."

About 1747 he produced an allegory, 'Promenade du Sceptique.' This French 'Pilgrim's Progress' scoffs at the Church of Rome for denying pleasure, then decries the pleasures of the world, and ends by asserting the hopeless uncertainty of the philosophy which both scoffs at the Church and decries worldly pleasure. At this period he was evidently inclined to an irregular attack on the only forms of Christianity familiar to him, asceticism and pietism.

In 1749 Diderot first showed himself a thinker of original power, in his Letter on the Blind. This work, 'Lettre sur les Avengles à l'Usage de Ceux qui Voient' (Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those who See) opened the eyes of the public to Diderot's peculiar genius, and the eyes of the authorities to the menace in his principles. The result was his imprisonment, and from that the spread of his views. His offense was, that through his ingenious supposition of the mind deprived of its use of one or more of the bodily senses, he had shown the relativity of all man's conceptions, and had thence deduced the relativity, the lack of absoluteness, of all man's ethical standards--thus invalidating the foundations of civil and social order. The broad assertion that Diderot and his philosophic group caused the French Revolution has only this basis, that these men were among the omens of its advance, feeling its stir afar but not recognizing the coming earthquake. Yet it may be conceded that Diderot anticipated things great and strange; for his mind, although neither precise nor capable of sustained and systematic thought, was amazingly original in conception and powerful in grasp. The mist, blank to his brethren, seems to have wreathed itself into wonderful shapes to his eye; he was the seer whose wild enthusiasm caught the oracles from an inner shrine. A predictive power appears in his Letter on the Blind, where he imagines the blind taught to read by touch; and nineteenth-century hypotheses gleam dimly in his random guess at variability in organisms, and at survival of those best adapted to their environment.

Diderot's monumental work, 'L'Encyclopédie,' dates from the middle of the century. It was his own vast enlargement of Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopædia of 1727, of which a bookseller had demanded a revision in French. D'Alembert was secured as his colleague, and in 1751 the first volume appeared. The list of contributors includes most of the great contemporary names in French literature. From these, Diderot and D'Alembert gathered the inner group known as the French Encyclopædists, to whose writings has been ascribed a general tendency to destroy religion and to reconstitute society. The authorities interfered repeatedly, with threats and prohibitions of the publication; but the science of government included the science of connivance for an adequate consideration, and the great work went forward. Its danger lurked in its principles; for Diderot dealt but little in the cheap flattery which the modern demagogue addresses to the populace. D'Alembert, wearied by ten years of persecution, retired in 1759, leaving the indefatigable Diderot to struggle alone through seven years, composing and revising hundreds of articles, correcting proofs, supervising the unrivaled illustrations of the mechanic arts, while quieting the opposition of the authorities.

The Encyclopædia under Diderot followed no one philosophic path. Indeed, there are no signs that he ever gave any consideration to either the intellectual or the ethical force of consistency. His writing indicates his utter carelessness both as to the direction and as to the pace of his thought. He had an abiding conviction that Christianity was partly delusion and largely priestcraft, and was maintained chiefly for upholding iniquitous privilege. His antagonism was developed primarily from his emotions and sympathies rather than from his intellect; hence it sometimes swerved, drawing perilously near to formal orthodoxy. Moreover, this vivacious philosopher sometimes rambled into practical advice, and easily effervesced into fervid moralizings of the sentimental and almost tearful sort. His immense natural capacity for sentiment appears in his own account of his meeting with Grimm after a few months' absence. His sentimentalism, however, had its remarkable counterpoise in a most practical tendency of mind. In the Encyclopædia the interests of agriculture and of all branches of manufacture were treated with great fullness; and the reform of feudal abuses lingering in the laws of France was vigorously urged in a style more practical than cyclopædic.

Diderot gave much attention to the drama, and his 'Paradoxe sur le Comédien' (Paradox on the Actor) is a valuable discussion. He is the father of the modern domestic drama. His influence upon the dramatic literature of Germany was direct and immediate; it appeared in the plays of Lessing and Schiller, and much of Lessing's criticism was inspired by Diderot. His 'Père de Famille' (Family-Father) and 'Le Fils Naturel' (The Natural Son) marked the beginning of a new era in the history of the stage, in the midst of which we are now living. Breaking with the old traditions, Diderot abandoned the lofty themes of classic tragedy and portrayed the life of the _bourgeoisie_. The influence of England, frequently manifest in the work of the Encyclopædists, is evident also here. Richardson was then the chief force in fiction, and the sentimental element so characteristic in him reappears in the dramas of Diderot.

Goethe was strongly attracted by the genius of Diderot, and thought it worth his while not only to translate but to supply with a long and luminous commentary the latter's 'Essay on Painting.' It was by a singular trick of fortune, too, that one of Diderot's most powerful works should first have appeared in German garb, and not in the original French until after the author's death. A manuscript copy of the book chanced to fall into the hands of Goethe, who so greatly admired it that he at once translated, annotated, and published it. This was the famous dialogue 'Le Neveu de Rameau' (Rameau's Nephew), a work which only Diderot's peculiar genius could have produced. Depicting the typical parasite, shameless, quick-witted for every species of villainy, at home in every possible meanness, the dialogue is a probably unequaled compound of satire, high æsthetics, gleaming humor, sentimental moralizing, fine musical criticism, and scientific character analysis, with passages of brutal indecency.

Among literary critics of painting, Diderot has his place in the highest rank. His nine 'Salons'--criticisms which in his good-nature he wrote for the use of his friend Grimm, on the annual exhibitions in the Paris Salon from 1759 onward--have never been surpassed among non-technical criticisms for brilliancy, freshness, and philosophic suggestiveness. They reveal the man's elemental strength; which was not in his knowledge, for he was without technical training in art and had seen scarcely any of the world's masterpieces, but in his sensuously sympathetic nature, which gave him quickness of insight and delicacy in interpretation.

He had the faculty of making and keeping friends, being unaffected, genial, amiable, enthusiastically generous and helpful to his friends, and without vindictiveness to his foes. He needed these qualities to counteract his almost utter lack of conscientiousness, his gush of sentiment, his unregulated morals, his undisciplined genius, his unbalanced thought. His style of writing, often vivid and strong, is as often awkward and dull, and is frequently lacking in finish. As a philosophic author and thinker his voluminous work is of little enduring worth, for though plentiful in original power it totally lacks organic unity; his thought rambles carelessly, his method is confused. It has been said of him that he was a master who produced no masterpiece. But as a talker, a converser, all witnesses testify that he was wondrously inspiring and suggestive, speaking sometimes as from mysterious heights of vision or out of unsearchable deeps of thought.

FROM 'RAMEAU'S NEPHEW'

Be the weather fair or foul, it is my custom in any case at five o'clock in the afternoon to stroll in the Palais Royal. I am always to be seen alone and meditative, on the bench D'Argenson. I hold converse with myself on politics or love, on taste or philosophy, and yield up my soul entirely to its own frivolity. It may follow the first idea that presents itself, be the idea wise or foolish. In the Allée de Foi one sees our young rakes following upon the heels of some courtesan who passes on with shameless mien, laughing face, animated glance, and a pug nose; but they soon leave her to follow another, teasing them all, joining none of them. My thoughts are my courtesans.

When it is really too cold or rainy, I take refuge in the Café de la Régence and amuse myself by watching the chess-players. Paris is the place of the world and the Café de la Régence the place of Paris where the best chess is played. There one witnesses the most carefully calculated moves; there one hears the most vulgar conversation; for since it is possible to be at once a man of intellect and a great chess-player, like Légal, so also one may be at once a great chess-player and a very silly person, like Foubert or Mayot.