Chapter 10

1Joannes de Garlandia (John Garland; fl. 1202-1252) gives the following explanation in hisDictionarius, which is a classed vocabulary:—“Dictionarius dicitur libellus iste a dictionibus magis necessariis, quas tenetur quilibet scolaris, non tantum in scrinio de lignis facto, sed in cordis armariolo firmiter retinere.” This has been supposed to be the first use of the word.2An excellent dictionary of quotations, perhaps the first of the kind; a large folio volume printed in Strassburg about 1475 is entitled “Pharetra auctoritates et dicta doctorum, philosophorum, et poetarum continens.”3This volume was issued with a new title-page asGlossaire du moyen âge, Paris, 1872.

2An excellent dictionary of quotations, perhaps the first of the kind; a large folio volume printed in Strassburg about 1475 is entitled “Pharetra auctoritates et dicta doctorum, philosophorum, et poetarum continens.”

3This volume was issued with a new title-page asGlossaire du moyen âge, Paris, 1872.

DICTYOGENS(Gr.δίκτυον, a net, and the termination-γενης, produced), a botanical name proposed by John Lindley for a class including certain families of Monocotyledons which have net-veined leaves. The class was not generally recognized.

DICTYS CRETENSIS,of Cnossus in Crete, the supposed companion of Idomeneus during the Trojan War, and author of a diary of its events. The MS. of this work, written in Phoenician characters, was said to have been found in his tomb (enclosed in a leaden box) at the time of an earthquake during the reign of Nero, by whose order it was translated into Greek. In the 4th centurya.d.a certain Lucius Septimius brought outDictys Cretensis Ephemeris belli Trojani, which professed to be a Latin translation of the Greek version. Scholars were not agreed whether any Greek original really existed; but all doubt on the point was removed by the discovery of a fragment in Greek amongst the papyri found by B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt in 1905-1906. Possibly the Latin Ephemeris was the work of Septimius himself. Its chief interest lies in the fact that (together with Dares Phrygius’sDe excidio Trojae) it was the source from which the Homeric legends were introduced into the romantic literature of the middle ages.

Best edition by F. Meister (1873), with short but useful introduction and index of Latinity; see also G. Körting,Diktys und Dares(1874), with concise bibliography; H. Dunger,Die Sage vom trojanischen Kriege in den Bearbeitungen des Mittelalters und ihren antiken Quellen(1869, with a literary genealogical table); E. Collilieux,Étude sur Dictys de Crète et Darès de Phrygie(1887), with bibliography; W. Greif, “Die mittelalterlichen Bearbeitungen der Trojanersage,” in E. M. Stengel’sAusgaben und Abhandlungen aus dem Gebiete der romanischen Philologie, No. 61 (1886, esp. sections 82, 83, 168-172); F. Colagrosso, “Ditte Cretese” inAtti della r. Accademia di Archeologia(Naples, 1897, vol. 18, pt. ii. 2); F. Noack, “Der griechische Dictys,” inPhilologus, supp. vi. 403 ff.; N. E. Griffin,Dares and Dictys, Introduction to the Study of the Medieval Versions of the Story of Troy(1907).

DICUIL(fl. 825), Irish monastic scholar, grammarian and geographer. He was the author of theDe mensura orbis terrae, finished in 825, which contains the earliest clear notice of a European discovery of and settlement in Iceland and the most definite Western reference to the old freshwater canal between the Nile and the Red Sea, finally blocked up in 767. In 795 (February 1-August 1) Irish hermits had visited Iceland; on their return they reported the marvel of the perpetual day at midsummer in “Thule,” where there was then “no darkness to hinder one from doing what one would.” These eremites also navigated the sea north of Iceland on their first arrival, and found it ice-free for one day’s sail, after which they came to the ice-wall. Relics of this, and perhaps of other Irish religious settlements, were found by the permanent Scandinavian colonists of Iceland in the 9th century. Of the old Egyptian freshwater canal Dicuil learnt from one “brother Fidelis,” probably another Irish monk, who, on his way to Jerusalem, sailed along the “Nile” into the Red Sea—passing on his way the “Barns of Joseph” or Pyramids of Giza, which are well described. Dicuil’s knowledge of the islands north and west of Britain is evidently intimate; his references to Irish exploration and colonization, and to (more recent) Scandinavian devastation of the same, as far as the Faeroes, are noteworthy, like his notice of the elephant sent by Harun al-Rashid (in 801) to Charles the Great, the most curious item in a political and diplomatic intercourse of high importance. Dicuil’s reading was wide; he quotes from, or refers to, thirty Greek and Latin writers, including the classical Homer, Hecataeus, Herodotus, Thucydides, Virgil, Pliny and King Juba, the sub-classical Solinus, the patristic St Isidore and Orosius, and his contemporary the Irish poet Sedulius;—in particular, he professes to utilize the alleged surveys of the Roman world executed by order of Julius Caesar, Augustus and Theodosius (whether Theodosius the Great or Theodosius II. is uncertain). He probably did not know Greek; his references to Greek authors do not imply this. Though certainly Irish by birth, it has been conjectured (from his references to Sedulius and the caliph’s elephant) that he was in later life in an Irish monastery in the Frankish empire. Letronne inclines to identify him with Dicuil or Dichull, abbot of Pahlacht, born about 760.

There are seven chief MSS. of theDe mensura(Dicuil’s tract on grammar is lost); of these the earliest and best are (1) Paris, National Library, Lat. 4806; (2) Dresden, Regius D. 182; both are of the 10th century. Three editions exist: (1) C. A. Walckenaer’s, Paris, 1807; (2) A. Letronne’s, Paris, 1814, best as to commentary; (3) G. Parthey’s, Berlin, 1870, best as to text. See also C. R. Beazley,Dawn of Modern Geography(London, 1897), i. 317-327, 522-523, 529; T. Wright,Biographia Britannica literaria, Anglo-Saxon Period(London, 1842), pp. 372-376.

(C. R. B.)

DIDACHĒ, THE,orTeaching of the (twelve) Apostles,—the most important of the recent recoveries in the region of early Christian literature (seeApocryphal Literature). It was previously known by name from lists of canonical and extra-canonical books compiled by Eusebius and other writers. Moreover, it had come to be suspected by several scholars that a lost book, variously entitledThe Two WaysorThe Judgment of Peter, had been freely used in a number of works, of which mention must presently be made. In 1882 a critical reconstruction of this book was made by Adam Krawutzcky with marvellous accuracy, as was shown when in the very next year the Greek bishop and metropolitan, Philotheus Bryennius, publishedThe Teaching of the Twelve Apostlesfrom the same manuscript fromwhich he had previously published the complete form of the Epistle of Clement.1

The Didachē, as we now have it in the Greek, falls into two marked divisions: (a) a book of moral precepts, opening with the words, “There are two ways”; (b) a manual of church ordinances, linked on to the foregoing by the words, “Having first said all these things, baptize, &c.” Each of these must be considered separately before we approach the question of the locality and date of the whole book in its present form.

1.The Two Ways.—The author of the complete work, as we now have it, has modified the originalTwo Waysby inserting near the beginning a considerable section containing, among other matter, passages from the Sermon on the Mount, in which the language of St Matthew’s Gospel is blended with that of St Luke’s. He has also added at the close a few sentences, beginning, “If thou canst not bear (the whole yoke of the Lord), bear what thou canst” (vi. 2); and among minor changes he has introduced, in dealing with confession, reference to “the church” (iv. 14). No part of this matter is to be found in the following documents, which present us in varying degrees of accuracy withThe Two Ways: (i.) the Epistle of Barnabas, chaps. xix., xx. (in which the order of the book has been much broken up, and a good deal has been omitted); (ii.) theEcclesiastical Canons of the Holy Apostles, usually called theApostolic Church Order, a book which presents a parallel to theTeaching, in so far as it consists first of a form ofThe Two Ways, and secondly of a number of church ordinances (here, however, as in the SyriacDidascalia, which gives about the same amount ofThe Two Ways, various sections are ascribed to individual apostles,e.g.“John said, There are two ways,” &c.); (iii.) a discourse of the Egyptian monk Schnudi (d. 451), preserved in Arabic (see Iselin,Texte u. Unters., 1895); (iv.) a Latin version, of which a fragment was published by O. von Gebhardt in 1884, and the whole by J. Schlecht in 1900. When by the aid of this evidenceThe Two Waysis restored to us free of glosses, it has the appearance of being a Jewish manual which has been carried over into the use of the Christian church. This is of course only a probable inference; there is no prototype extant in Jewish literature, and, comparing the moral (non-doctrinal) instruction for Christian catechumens in Hermas,Shepherd(Mand.i.-ix.), no real need to assume one. There was a danger of admitting Gentile converts to the church on too easy moral terms; hence the need of such insistence on the ideal as in The Two Ways and theMandates. The recent recovery of the Latin version is of singular interest, as showing that, even without the distinctively Christian additions and interpolations which our full form of theTeachingpresents, it was circulating under the titleDoctrina apostolorum.2

2. The second part of ourTeachingmight be called a church directory. It consists of precepts relating to church life, which are couched in the second person plural; whereasThe Two Waysuses throughout the second person singular. It appears to be a composite work. First (vii. 1-xi. 2) is a short sacramental manual intended for the use of local elders or presbyters, though such are not named, for they were not yet a distinctive order or clergy. This section was probably added toThe Two Waysbefore the addition of the remainder. It orders baptism in the threefold name, making a distinction as to waters which has Jewish parallels, and permitting a threefold pouring on the head, if sufficient water for immersion cannot be had. It prescribes a fast before baptism for the baptizer as well as the candidate. Fasts are to be kept on Wednesday and Friday, not Monday and Thursday, which are the fast days of “the hypocrites,”i.e.by a perversion of the Lord’s words, the Jews. “Neither pray ye as the hypocrites; but as the Lord commanded in His Gospel.” Then follows the Lord’s Prayer, almost exactly as in St Matthew, with a brief doxology—“for Thine is the power and the glory forever.” This is to be said three times a day. Next come three eucharistic prayers, the language of which is clearly marked off from that of the rest of the book, and shows parallels with the diction of St John’s Gospel. They are probably founded on Jewish thanksgivings, and it is of interest to note that a portion of them is prescribed as a grace before meat in (pseudo-) Athanasius’De virginitate. A trace of them is found in one of the liturgical prayers of Serapion, bishop of Thmui, in Egypt, but they have left little mark on the liturgies of the church. As in Ignatius and other early writers, the eucharist, a real meal (x. 1) of a family character, is regarded as producing immortality (cf. “spiritual food and drink and eternal life”). None are to partake of it save those who have been “baptized in the name of the Lord” (an expression which is of interest in a document which prescribes the threefold formula). The prophets are not to be confined to these forms, but may “give thanks as much as they will.” This appears to show that a prophet, if present, would naturally preside over the eucharist. The next section (xi. 3-xiii.) deals with the ministry of spiritual gifts as exercised by apostles, prophets and teachers. An apostle is to be “received as the Lord”; but he must follow the Gospel precepts, stay but one or two days, and take no money, but only bread enough for a day’s journey. Here we have that wider use of the term “apostle” to which Lightfoot had already drawn attention. A prophet, on the contrary, may settle if he chooses, and in that case he is to receive tithes and first-fruits; “for they are your high priests.” If he be once approved as a true prophet, his words and acts are not to be criticized; for this is the sin that shall not be forgiven. Next comes a section (xiv., xv.) reflecting a somewhat later development concerning fixed services and ministry; the desire for a stated service, and the need of regular provision for it, is leading to a new order of things. The eucharist is to be celebrated every Lord’s Day, and preceded by confession of sins, “that your sacrifice may be pure ... for this is that sacrifice which was spoken of by the Lord, In every place and time to offer unto Me a pure sacrifice. Appoint therefore unto yourselves bishops and deacons, worthy of the Lord, men meek and uncovetous, and true and approved; for they also minister unto you the ministration of the prophets and teachers. Therefore despise them not; for they are your honoured ones, together with the prophets and teachers.” This is an arrangement recommended by one who has tried it, and he reassures the old-fashioned believer who clings to the less formal régime (and whose protest was voiced in the Montanist movement), that there will be no spiritual loss under the new system. The book closes (chap. xvi.) with exhortations to steadfastness in the last days, and to the coming of the “world-deceiver” or Antichrist, which will precede the coming of the Lord. This section is perhaps the actual utterance of a Christian prophet, and may be of earlier origin than the two preceding sections.

3. It will now be clear that indications of the locality and date of our presentTeachingmust be sought for only in the second part, and in the Christian interpolations in the first part. We have no ground for thinking that the second part ever existed independently as a separate book. The whole work was in the hands of the writer of the seventh book of theApostolic Constitutions, who embodies almost every sentence of it, interspersing it with passages of Scripture, and modifying the precepts of the second part to suit a later (4th-century) stage of church development; this writer was also the interpolator of the Epistles of Ignatius, and belonged to the Syrian Church. Whether the second part was known to the writer of theApostolic Church Orderis not clear, as his only quotation of it comes from one of the eucharistic prayers. The allusions of early writers seem to point to Egypt, but their references are mostly to the first part, so that we must be careful how we argue from them as to the provenance of the book as a whole. Against Egypt has been urged the allusion in one of the eucharistic prayers to “corn upon the mountains.” This is found in the Prayer-book of Serapion(c. 350) but omitted in a later Egyptian prayer; the form as we have it inThe Didachēmay have passed into Egypt with the authority of tradition which was afterwards weakened. The anti-Jewish tone of the second part suggests the neighbourhood of Jews, from whom the Christians were to be sharply distinguished. Either Egypt or Syria would satisfy this condition, and in favour of Syria is the fact that the presbyterate there was to a late date regarded as a rank rather than an office. If we can connect the injunctions (vi. 3) concerning (abstinence from certain) food and that which is offered to idols with the old trouble that arose at Antioch (Acts xv. 1) and was legislated for by the Jerusalem council, we have additional support for the Syrian claim. But all that we can safely say as to locality is that the community here represented seems to have been isolated, and out of touch with the larger centres of Christian life.

This last consideration helps us in discussing the question of date. For such an isolated community may have preserved primitive customs for some time after they had generally disappeared. Certainly the stage of development is an early one, as is shown,e.g., by the prominence of prophets, and the need that was felt for the vindication of the position of the bishops and deacons (there is no mention at all of presbyters); moreover, there is no reference to a canon of Scripture (though the written Gospel is expressly mentioned) or to a creed. On the other hand the “apostles” of the second part are obviously not “the twelve apostles” of the title; and the prophets seem in some instances to have proved unworthy of their high position. The ministry of enthusiasm which they represent is about to give way to the ministry of office, a transition which is reflected in the New Testament in the 3rd Epistle of John. Three of the Gospels have clearly been for some time in circulation; St Matthew’s is used several times, and there are phrases which occur only in St Luke’s, while St John’s Gospel lies behind the eucharistic prayers which the writer has embodied in his work. There are no indications of any form of doctrinal heresy as needing rebuke; the warnings against false teaching are quite general. While the first part must be dated before the Epistle of Barnabas,i.e.beforea.d.90, it seems wisest not to place the complete work much earlier thana.d.120, and there are passages which may well be later.

A large literature has sprung up round TheDidachēsince 1884. Harnack’s edition inTexte u. Unters.vol. ii. (1884) is indispensable to the student; and his discussions inAltchristl. LitteraturandChronologiegive clear summaries of his work. Other editions of the text are those of F. X. Funk,Patres Apostolici, vol. i. (Tübingen, 1901); H. Lietzmann (Bonn, 1903; with Latin version). Dr J. E. Odgers has published an English translation with introduction and notes (London, 1906). Dr C. Taylor in 1886 drew attention to some important parallels in Jewish literature; his edition contains an English translation. Dr Rendel Harris published in 1887 a complete facsimile, and gathered a great store of patristic illustration. Text and translation will also be found in Lightfoot’sApostolic Fathers(ed. min.) The fullest critical treatment in English is by Dr Vernon Bartlet in the extra volume of Hastings’sDictionary of the Bible; the most complete commentary on the text is by P. Drews in Hennecke’sHandbuch zu den N.T. Apocryphen(1904). Other references to the literature may be found by consulting Harnack’sAltchristl. Litteratur.

1The MS. was found in the Library of the Jerusalem Monastery of the Most Holy Sepulchre, in Phanar, the Greek quarter of Constantinople. It is a small octavo volume of 120 parchment leaves, written throughout by Leo, “notary and sinner,” who finished his task on the 11th of June 1156. Besides TheDidachēand the Epistles of Clement it contains several spurious Ignatian epistles.2The wordtwelvehad no place in the original title and was inserted when the originalDidachēorTeaching(e.g.The Two Ways) was combined with the church manual which mentions apostles outside of the twelve. It may be noted that the division of theDidachēinto chapters is due to Bryennius, that into verses to A. Harnack.

2The wordtwelvehad no place in the original title and was inserted when the originalDidachēorTeaching(e.g.The Two Ways) was combined with the church manual which mentions apostles outside of the twelve. It may be noted that the division of theDidachēinto chapters is due to Bryennius, that into verses to A. Harnack.

DIDACTIC POETRY,that form of verse the aim of which is, less to excite the hearer by passion or move him by pathos, than to instruct his mind and improve his morals. The Greek wordδιδακτικόςsignifies a teacher, from the verbδιδάσκειν, and poetry of the class under discussion approaches us with the arts and graces of a schoolmaster. At no time was it found convenient to combine lyrical verse with instruction, and therefore from the beginning of literature the didactic poets have chosen a form approaching the epical. Modern criticism, which discourages the epic, and is increasingly anxious to limit the word “poetry” to lyric, is inclined to exclude the term “didactic poetry” from our nomenclature, as a phrase absurd in itself. It is indeed more than probable that didactic verse is hopelessly obsolete. Definite information is now to be found in a thousand shapes, directly and boldly presented in clear and technical prose. No farmer, however elegant, will, any longer choose to study agriculture in hexameters, or even in Tusser’s shambling metre. The sciences and the professions will not waste their time on methods of instruction which must, from their very nature, be artless, inexact and vague. But in the morning of the world, those who taught with authority might well believe that verse was the proper, nay, the only serious vehicle of their instruction. What they knew was extremely limited, and in its nature it was simple and straightforward; it had little technical subtlety; it constantly lapsed into the fabulous and the conjectural. Not only could what early sages knew, or guessed, about astronomy and medicine and geography be conveniently put into rolling verse, but, in the absence of all written books, this was the easiest way in which information could be made attractive to the ear and be retained by the memory.

In the prehistoric dawn of Greek civilization there appear to have been three classes of poetry, to which the literature of Europe looks back as to its triple fountain-head. There were romantic epics, dealing with the adventures of gods and heroes; these Homer represents. There were mystic chants and religious odes, purely lyrical in character, of which the best Orphic Hymns must have been the type. And lastly there was a great body of verse occupied entirely with increasing the knowledge of citizens in useful branches of art and observation; these were the beginnings of didactic poetry, and we class them together under the dim name of Hesiod. It is impossible to date these earliest didactic poems, which nevertheless set the fashion of form which has been preserved ever since. TheWorks and Days, which passes as the direct masterpiece of Hesiod (q.v.), is the type of all the poetry which has had education as its aim. Hesiod is supposed to have been a tiller of the ground in a Boeotian village, who determined to enrich his neighbours’ minds by putting his own ripe stores of useful information into sonorous metre. Historically examined, the legend of Hesiod becomes a shadow, but the substance of the poems attributed to him remains. The genuine parts of theWorks and Days, which Professor Gilbert Murray has called “a slow, lowly, simple poem,” deal with rules for agriculture. TheTheogonyis an annotated catalogue of the gods. Other poems attributed to Hesiod, but now lost, were on astronomy, on auguries by birds, on the character of the physical world; still others seem to have been genealogies of famous women. All this mass of Boeotian verse was composed for educational purposes, in an age when even preposterous information was better than no knowledge at all. In slightly later times, as the Greek nation became better supplied with intellectual appliances, the stream of didactic poetry flowed more and more closely in one, and that a theological, channel. The great poem of ParmenidesOn Natureand those of Empedocles exist only in fragments, but enough remains to show that these poets carried on the didactic method in mythology. Cleostratus of Tenedos wrote an astronomical poem in the 6th century, and Periander a medical one in the 4th, but didactic poetry did not flourish again in Greece until the 3rd century, when Aratus, in the Alexandrian age, wrote his famousPhenomena, a poem about things seen in the heavens. Other later Greek didactic poets were Nicander, and perhaps Euphorion.

It was from the hands of these Alexandrian writers that the genius of didactic poetry passed over to Rome, since, although it is possible that some of the lost works of the early republic, and in particular those of Ennius, may have possessed an educational character, the first and by far the greatest didactic Latin poet known to us is Lucretius. A highly finished translation by Cicero into Latin hexameters of the principal works of Aratus is believed to have drawn the attention of Lucretius to this school of Greek poetry, and it was not without reference to the Greeks, although in a more archaic and far purer taste, that he composed, in the 1st century before Christ, his magnificentDe rerum natura. By universal consent, this is the noblest didactic poem in the literature of the world. It was intended to instruct mankind in the interpretation and in the working of the system of philosophy revealed by Epicurus, which at that time was exciting the sympathetic attention of all classes of Roman society. What gave the poem of Lucretius its extraordinary interest, and what has prolonged and even increased its vitality, was the imaginative and illustrative insight of the author, piercing and lighting up therecesses of human experience. On a lower intellectual level, but of a still greater technical excellence, was theGeorgicsof Virgil, a poem on the processes of agriculture, published about 30b.c.The brilliant execution of this famous work has justly made it the type and unapproachable standard of all poetry which desires to impart useful information in the guise of exquisite literature. Himself once a farmer on the banks of the Mincio, Virgil, at the apex of his genius, set himself in his Campanian villa to recall whatever had been essential in the agricultural life of his boyish home, and the result, in spite of the ardours of the subject, was what J. W. Mackail has called “the most splendid literary production of the Empire.” In the rest of surviving Latin didactic poetry, the influence and the imitation of Virgil and Lucretius are manifest. Manilius, turning again to Alexandria, produced a fineAstronomicatowards the close of the reign of Augustus. Columella, regretting that Virgil had omitted to sing of gardens, composed a smooth poem on horticulture. Natural philosophy inspired Lucilius junior, of whom a didactic poem on Etna survives. Long afterwards, under Diocletian, a poet of Carthage, Nemesianus, wrote in the manner of Virgil theCynegetica, a poem on hunting with dogs, which has had numerous imitations in later European literatures. These are the most important specimens of didactic poetry which ancient Rome has handed down to us.

In Anglo-Saxon and early English poetic literature, and especially in the religious part of it, an element of didacticism is not to be overlooked. But it would be difficult to say that anything of importance was written in verse with the sole purpose of imparting information, until we reach the 16th century. Some of the later medieval allegories are didactic or nothing. The first poem, however, which we can in any reasonable way compare with the classic works of which we have been speaking is theHundreth Pointes of Good Husbandrie, published in 1557 by Thomas Tusser; these humble Georgics aimed at a practical description of the whole art of English farming. Throughout the early part of the 17th century, when our national poetry was in its most vivid and brilliant condition, the last thing a poet thought of doing was the setting down of scientific facts in rhyme. We come across, however, one or two writers who were as didactic as the age would permit them to be, Samuel Daniel with his philosophy, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke with his “treatises” of war and monarchy. After the Restoration, as the lyrical element rapidly died out of English poetry, there was more and more room left for educational rhetoric in verse. The poems about prosody, founded upon Horace, and signed by John Sheffield, 3rd earl of Mulgrave (1648-1721), and Lord Roscommon, were among the earliest purely didactic verse-studies in English. John Philips deserves a certain pre-eminence, as his poem called Cyder, in 1706, set the fashion which lasted all down the 18th century, of writing precisely in verse about definite branches of industry or employment. None of the greater poets of the age of Anne quite succumbed to the practice, but there is a very distinct flavour of the purely didactic about a great deal of the verse of Pope and Gay. In such productions as Gilbert West’s (1703-1756)Education, Dyer’sFleece, and Somerville’sChase, we see technical information put forward as the central aim of the poet. Instead of a passionate pleasure, or at least an uplifted enthusiasm, being the poet’s object, he frankly admits that, first and foremost, he has some facts about wool or dogs or schoolmasters which he wishes to bring home to his readers, and that, secondly, he consents to use verse, as brilliantly as he can, for the purpose of gilding the pill and attracting an unwilling attention. As we descend the 18th century, these works become more and more numerous, and more dry, especially when opposed by the descriptive and rural poets of the school of Thomson, the poet ofThe Seasons. But Thomson himself wrote a huge poem ofLiberty(1732), for which we have no name if we must not call it didactic. Even Gray began, though he failed to finish, a work of this class, onThe Alliance of Education and Government. These poems were discredited by the publication ofThe Sugar-Cane(1764), a long verse-treatise about the cultivation of sugar by negroes in the West Indies, by James Grainger (1721-1766), but, though liable to ridicule, such versified treatises continued to appear. Whether so great a writer as Cowper is to be counted among the didactic poets is a question on which readers ofThe Taskmay be divided; this poem belongs rather to the class of descriptive poetry, but a strong didactic tendency is visible in parts of it. Perhaps the latest frankly educational poem which enjoyed a great popularity wasThe Course of Timeby Robert Pollok (1798-1827), in which a system of Calvinistic divinity is laid down with severity and in the pomp of blank verse. This kind of literature had already been exposed, and discouraged, by the teaching of Wordsworth, who had insisted on the imperative necessity of charging all poetry with imagination and passion. Oddly enough,The Excursionof Wordsworth himself is perhaps the most didactic poem of the 19th century, but it must be acknowledged that his influence, in this direction, was saner than his practice. Since the days of Coleridge and Shelley it has been almost impossible to conceive a poet of any value composing in verse a work written with the purpose of inculcating useful information.

The history of didactic poetry in France repeats, in great measure, but in drearier language, that of England. Boileau, like Pope, but with a more definite purpose as a teacher, offered instruction in hisArt poétiqueand in hisEpistles. But his doctrine was always literary, not purely educational. At the beginning of the 18th century, the younger Racine (1692-1763) wrote sermons in verse, and at the close of it the Abbé Delille (1738-1813) tried to imitate Virgil in poems about horticulture. Between these two there lies a vast mass of verse written for the indulgence of intellect rather than at the dictates of the heart; wherever this aims at increasing knowledge, it at once becomes basely and flatly didactic. There is nothing in French literature of the transitional class that deserves mention besideThe TaskorThe Excursion.

During the century which preceded the Romantic revival of poetry in Germany, didactic verse was cultivated in that country on the lines of imitation of the French, but with a greater dryness and on a lower level of utility. Modern German literature began with Martin Opitz (1597-1639) and the Silesian School, who were in their essence rhetorical and educational, and who gave their tone to German verse. Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777) brought a very considerable intellectual force to bear on his huge poems,The Origin of Evil, which was theological, andThe Alps(1729), botanical and topographical. Johann Peter Uz (1720-1796) wrote aTheodicée, which was very popular, and not without dignity. Johann Jacob Dusch (1725-1787) undertook to putThe Sciencesinto the eight books of a great didactic poem. Tiedge (1752-1840) was the last of the school; in a once-famousUrania, he sang of God and Immortality and Liberty. These German pieces were the most unswervingly didactic that any modern European literature has produced. There was hardly the pretence of introducing into them descriptions of natural beauty, as the English poets did, or of grace and wit like the French. The German poets simply poured into a lumbering mould of verse as much solid information and direct instruction as the form would hold.

Didactic poetry has, in modern times, been antipathetic to the spirit of the Latin peoples, and neither Italian nor Spanish literature has produced a really notable work in this class. An examination of the poems, ancient and modern, which have been mentioned above, will show that from primitive times there have been two classes of poetic work to which the epithet didactic has been given. It is desirable to distinguish these a little more exactly. One is the pure instrument of teaching, the poetry which desires to impart all that it knows about the growing of cabbages or the prevention of disasters at sea, the revolution of the planets or the blessings of inoculation. This is didactic poetry proper, and this, it is almost certain, became irrevocably obsolete at the close of the 18th century. No future Virgil will give the world a secondGeorgics. But there is another species which it is very improbable that criticism has entirely dislodged; that is the poetry which combines, with philosophical instruction, an impetus of imaginative movement, and a certain definite cultivationof fire and beauty. In hands so noble as those of Lucretius and Goethe this species of didactic poetry has enriched the world with durable masterpieces, and, although the circle of readers which will endure scientific disquisition in the bonds of verse grows narrower and narrower, it is probable that the great poet who is also a great thinker will now and again insist on being heard. In Sully-Prudhomme France has possessed an eminent writer whose methods are directly instructive, and bothLa Justice(1878) andLe Bonheur(1888) are typically didactic poems. Perhaps future historians may name these as the latest of their class.

(E. G.)

DIDEROT, DENIS(1713-1784), French man of letters and encyclopaedist, was born at Langres on the 5th of October 1713. He was educated by the Jesuits, like most of those who afterwards became the bitterest enemies of Catholicism; and, when his education was at an end, he vexed his brave and worthy father’s heart by turning away from respectable callings, like law or medicine, and throwing himself into the vagabond life of a bookseller’s hack in Paris. An imprudent marriage (1743) did not better his position. His wife, Anne Toinette Champion, was a devout Catholic, but her piety did not restrain a narrow and fretful temper, and Diderot’s domestic life was irregular and unhappy. He sought consolation for chagrins at home in attachments abroad, first with a Madame Puisieux, a fifth-rate female scribbler, and then with Sophie Voland, to whom he was constant for the rest of her life. His letters to her are among the most graphic of all the pictures that we have of the daily life of the philosophic circle in Paris. An interesting contrast may be made between the Bohemianism of the famous English literary set who supped at the Turk’s Head with the Tory Johnson and the Conservative Burke for their oracles, and the Bohemianism of the French set who about the same time dined once a week at the baron D’Holbach’s, to listen to the wild sallies and the inspiring declamations of Diderot. For Diderot was not a great writer; he stands out as a fertile, suggestive and daring thinker, and a prodigious and most eloquent talker.

Diderot’s earliest writings were of as little importance as Goldsmith’sEnquiry into the State of Polite Learningor Burke’sAbridgement of English History. He earned 100 crowns by translating Stanyan’sHistory of Greece(1743); with two colleagues he produced a translation of James’sDictionary of Medicine(1746-1748) and about the same date he published a free rendering of Shaftesbury’sInquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit(1745), with some original notes of his own. With strange and characteristic versatility, he turned from ethical speculation to the composition of a volume of stories, theBijoux indiscrets(1748), gross without liveliness, and impure without wit. In later years he repented of this shameless work, just as Boccaccio is said in the day of his grey hairs to have thought of the sprightliness of theDecameronwith strong remorse. From tales Diderot went back to the more congenial region of philosophy. Between the morning of Good Friday and the evening of Easter Monday he wrote thePensées philosophiques(1746), and he presently added to this a short complementary essay on the sufficiency of natural religion. The gist of these performances is to press the ordinary rationalistic objections to a supernatural revelation; but though Diderot did not at this time pass out into the wilderness beyond natural religion, yet there are signs that he accepted that less as a positive doctrine, resting on grounds of its own, than as a convenient point of attack against Christianity. In 1747 he wrote thePromenade du sceptique, a rather poor allegory—pointing first to the extravagances of Catholicism; second, to the vanity of the pleasures of that world which is the rival of the church; and third, to the desperate and unfathomable uncertainty of the philosophy which professes to be so high above both church and world.

Diderot’s next piece was what first introduced him to the world as an original thinker, his famousLettre sur les aveugles(1749). The immediate object of this short but pithy writing was to show the dependence of men’s ideas on their five senses. It considers the case of the intellect deprived of the aid of one of the senses; and in a second piece, published afterwards, Diderot considered the case of a similar deprivation in the deaf and dumb. TheLettre sur les sourds et muets, however, is substantially a digressive examination of some points in aesthetics. The philosophic significance of the two essays is in the advance they make towards the principle of Relativity. But what interested the militant philosophers of that day was an episodic application of the principle of relativity to the master-conception of God. What makes theLettre sur les aveuglesinteresting is its presentation, in a distinct though undigested form, of the modern theory of variability, and of survival by superior adaptation. It is worth noticing, too, as an illustration of the comprehensive freedom with which Diderot felt his way round any subject that he approached, that in this theoretic essay he suggests the possibility of teaching the blind to read through the sense of touch. If theLettre sur les aveuglesintroduced Diderot into the worshipful company of the philosophers, it also introduced him to the penalties of philosophy. His speculation was too hardy for the authorities, and he was thrown into the prison of Vincennes. Here he remained for three months; then he was released, to enter upon the gigantic undertaking of his life.

The bookseller Lebreton had applied to him with a project for the publication of a translation into French of Ephraim Chambers’sCyclopaedia, undertaken in the first instance by an Englishman, John Mills, and a German, Gottfried Sellius (for particulars seeEncyclopaedia). Diderot accepted the proposal, but in his busy and pregnant intelligence the scheme became transformed. Instead of a mere reproduction of Chambers, he persuaded the bookseller to enter upon a new work, which should collect under one roof all the active writers, all the new ideas, all the new knowledge, that were then moving the cultivated class to its depths, but still were comparatively ineffectual by reason of their dispersion. His enthusiasm infected the publishers; they collected a sufficient capital for a vaster enterprise than they had at first planned; D’Alembert was persuaded to become Diderot’s colleague; the requisite permission was procured from the government; in 1750 an elaborate prospectus announced the project to a delighted public; and in 1751 the first volume was given to the world. The last of the letterpress was issued in 1765, but it was 1772 before the subscribers received the final volumes of the plates. These twenty years were to Diderot years not merely of incessant drudgery, but of harassing persecution, of sufferings from the cabals of enemies, and of injury from the desertion of friends. The ecclesiastical party detested theEncyclopaedia, in which they saw a rising stronghold for their philosophic enemies. By 1757 they could endure the sight no longer. The subscribers had grown from 2000 to 4000, and this was a right measure of the growth of the work in popular influence and power. To any one who turns over the pages of these redoubtable volumes now, it seems surprising that their doctrines should have stirred such portentous alarm. There is no atheism, no overt attack on any of the cardinal mysteries of the faith, no direct denunciation even of the notorious abuses of the church. Yet we feel that the atmosphere of the book may well have been displeasing to authorities who had not yet learnt to encounter the modern spirit on equal terms. TheEncyclopaediatakes for granted the justice of religious tolerance and speculative freedom. It asserts in distinct tones the democratic doctrine that it is the common people in a nation whose lot ought to be the main concern of the nation’s government. From beginning to end it is one unbroken process of exaltation of scientific knowledge on the one hand, and pacific industry on the other. All these things were odious to the old governing classes of France; their spirit was absolutist, ecclesiastical and military. Perhaps the most alarming thought of all was the current belief that theEncyclopaediawas the work of an organized band of conspirators against society, and that a pestilent doctrine was now made truly formidable by the confederation of its preachers into an open league. When the seventh volume appeared, it contained an article on “Geneva,” written by D’Alembert. The writer contrived a panegyric on the pastors of Geneva, of which every word was a stinging reproach to the abbés and prelates of Versailles. At the same moment Helvétius’s book,L’Esprit,appeared, and gave a still more profound and, let us add, a more reasonable shock to the ecclesiastical party. Authority could brook no more, and in 1759 theEncyclopaediawas formally suppressed.

The decree, however, did not arrest the continuance of the work. The connivance of the authorities at the breach of their own official orders was common in those times of distracted government. The work went on, but with its difficulties increased by the necessity of being clandestine. And a worse thing than troublesome interference by the police now befell Diderot. D’Alembert, wearied of shifts and indignities, withdrew from the enterprise. Other powerful colleagues, Turgot among them, declined to contribute further to a book which had acquired an evil fame. Diderot was left to bring the task to an end as he best could. For seven years he laboured like a slave at the oar. He wrote several hundred articles, some of them very slight, but many of them most laborious, comprehensive and ample. He wore out his eyesight in correcting proofs, and he wearied his soul in bringing the manuscript of less competent contributors into decent shape. He spent his days in the workshops, mastering the processes of manufactures, and his nights in reproducing on paper what he had learnt during the day. And he was incessantly harassed all the time by alarms of a descent from the police. At the last moment, when his immense work was just drawing to an end, he encountered one last and crowning mortification: he discovered that the bookseller, fearing the displeasure of the government, had struck out from the proof sheets, after they had left Diderot’s hands, all passages that he chose to think too hardy. The monument to which Diderot had given the labour of twenty long and oppressive years was irreparably mutilated and defaced. It is calculated that the average annual salary received by Diderot for his share in theEncyclopaediawas about £120 sterling. “And then to think,” said Voltaire, “that an army contractor makes £800 in a day!”

Although theEncyclopaediawas Diderot’s monumental work, he is the author of a shower of dispersed pieces that sowed nearly every field of intellectual interest with new and fruitful ideas. We find no masterpiece, but only thoughts for masterpieces; no creation, but a criticism with the quality to inspire and direct creation. He wrote plays—Le Fils naturel(1757) andLe Père de famille(1758)—and they are very insipid performances in the sentimental vein. But he accompanied them by essays on dramatic poetry, including especially theParadoxe sur le comédien, in which he announced the principles of a new drama,—the serious, domestic, bourgeois drama of real life, in opposition to the stilted conventions of the classic French stage. It was Diderot’s lessons and example that gave a decisive bias to the dramatic taste of Lessing, whose plays, and hisHamburgische Dramaturgie(1768), mark so important an epoch in the history of the modern theatre. In the pictorial art, Diderot’s criticisms are no less rich, fertile and wide in their ideas. His article on “Beauty” in theEncyclopaediashows that he had mastered and passed beyond the metaphysical theories on the subject, and theEssai sur la peinturewas justly described by Goethe, who thought it worth translating, as “a magnificent work, which speaks even more helpfully to the poet than to the painter, though to the painter too it is as a blazing torch.” Diderot’s most intimate friend was Grimm, one of the conspicuous figures of the philosophic body. Grimm wrote news-letters to various high personages in Germany, reporting what was going on in the world of art and literature in Paris, then without a rival as the capital of the intellectual activity of Europe. Diderot helped his friend at one time and another between 1759 and 1779, by writing for him an account of the annual exhibitions of paintings. TheseSalonsare among the most readable of all pieces of art criticism. They have a freshness, a reality, a life, which take their readers into a different world from the dry and conceited pedantries of the ordinary virtuoso. As has been said by Sainte-Beuve, they initiated the French into a new sentiment, and introduced people to the mystery and purport of colour by ideas. “Before Diderot,” Madame Necker said, “I had never seen anything in pictures except dull and lifeless colours; it was his imagination that gave them relief and life, and it is almost a new sense for which I am indebted to his genius.”

Greuze was Diderot’s favourite among contemporary artists, and it is easy to see why. Greuze’s most characteristic pictures were the rendering in colour of the same sentiment of domestic virtue and the pathos of common life, which Diderot attempted with inferior success to represent upon the stage. For Diderot was above all things interested in the life of men,—not the abstract life of the race, but the incidents of individual character, the fortunes of a particular family, the relations of real and concrete motives in this or that special case. He delighted with the enthusiasm of a born casuist in curious puzzles of right and wrong, and in devising a conflict between the generalities of ethics and the conditions of an ingeniously contrived practical dilemma. Mostly his interest expressed itself in didactic and sympathetic form; in two, however, of the most remarkable of all his pieces, it is not sympathetic, but ironical.Jacques le fataliste(written in 1773, but not published until 1796) is in manner an imitation ofTristram ShandyandThe Sentimental Journey. Few modern readers will find in it any true diversion. In spite of some excellent criticisms dispersed here and there, and in spite of one or two stories that are not without a certain effective realism, it must as a whole be pronounced savourless, forced, and as leaving unmoved those springs of laughter and of tears which are the common fountain of humour.Le Neveu de Rameauis a far superior performance. If there were any inevitable compulsion to name a masterpiece for Diderot, one must select this singular “farce-tragedy.” Its intention has been matter of dispute; whether it was designed to be merely a satire on contemporary manners, or a reduction of the theory of self-interest to an absurdity, or the application of an ironical clincher to the ethics of ordinary convention, or a mere setting for a discussion about music, or a vigorous dramatic sketch of a parasite and a human original. There is no dispute as to its curious literary flavour, its mixed qualities of pungency, bitterness, pity and, in places, unflinching shamelessness. Goethe’s translation (1805) was the first introduction ofLe Neveu de Rameauto the European public. After executing it, he gave back the original French manuscript to Schiller, from whom he had it. No authentic French copy of it appeared until the writer had been nearly forty years in his grave (1823).

It would take several pages merely to contain the list of Diderot’s miscellaneous pieces, from an infinitely graceful trifle like theRegrets sur ma vieille robe de chambreup toLe Rêve de D’Alembert, where he plunges into the depths of the controversy as to the ultimate constitution of matter and the meaning of life. It is a mistake to set down Diderot for a coherent and systematic materialist. We ought to look upon him “as a philosopher in whom all the contradictions of the time struggle with one another” (Rosenkranz). That is to say, he is critical and not dogmatic. There is no unity in Diderot, as there was in Voltaire or in Rousseau. Just as in cases of conduct he loves to make new ethical assumptions and argue them out as a professional sophist might have done, so in the speculative problems as to the organization of matter, the origin of life, the compatibility between physiological machinery and free will, he takes a certain standpoint, and follows it out more or less digressively to its consequences. He seizes a hypothesis and works it to its end, and this made him the inspirer in others of materialist doctrines which they held more definitely than he did. Just as Diderot could not attain to the concentration, the positiveness, the finality of aim needed for a masterpiece of literature, so he could not attain to those qualities in the way of dogma and system. Yet he drew at last to the conclusions of materialism, and contributed many of its most declamatory pages to theSystème de la natureof his friend D’Holbach,—the very Bible of atheism, as some one styled it. All that he saw, if we reduce his opinions to formulae, was motion in space: “attraction and repulsion, the only truth.” If matter produces life by spontaneous generation, and if man has no alternative but to obey the compulsion of nature, what remains for God to do?

In proportion as these conclusions deepened in him, the moredid Diderot turn for the hope of the race to virtue; in other words, to such a regulation of conduct and motive as shall make us tender, pitiful, simple, contented. Hence his one great literary passion, his enthusiasm for Richardson, the English novelist. Hence, also, his deepening aversion for the political system of France, which makes the realization of a natural and contented domestic life so hard. Diderot had almost as much to say against society as even Rousseau himself. The difference between them was that Rousseau was a fervent theist. The atheism of the Holbachians, as he called Diderot’s group, was intolerable to him; and this feeling, aided by certain private perversities of humour, led to a breach of what had once been an intimate friendship between Rousseau and Diderot (1757). Diderot was still alive when Rousseau’sConfessionsappeared, and he was so exasperated by Rousseau’s stories about Grimm, then and always Diderot’s intimate, that in 1782 he transformed a life of Seneca, that he had written four years earlier, into anEssai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron(1778-1782), which is much less an account of Seneca than a vindication of Diderot and Grimm, and is one of the most rambling and inept productions in literature. As for the merits of the old quarrel between Rousseau and Diderot, we may agree with the latter, that too many sensible people would be in the wrong if Jean Jacques was in the right.

Varied and incessant as was Diderot’s mental activity, it was not of a kind to bring him riches. He secured none of the posts that were occasionally given to needy men of letters; he could not even obtain that bare official recognition of merit which was implied by being chosen a member of the Academy. The time came for him to provide a dower for his daughter, and he saw no other alternative than to sell his library. When the empress Catherine of Russia heard of his straits, she commissioned an agent in Paris to buy the library at a price equal to about £1000 of English money, and then handsomely requested the philosopher to retain the books in Paris until she required them, and to constitute himself her librarian, with a yearly salary. In 1773 Diderot started on an expedition to thank his imperial benefactress in person, and he passed some months at St Petersburg. The empress received him cordially. The strange pair passed their afternoons in disputes on a thousand points of high philosophy, and they debated with a vivacity and freedom not usual in courts. “Fi, donc,” said Catherine one day, when Diderot hinted that he argued with her at a disadvantage, “is there any difference among men?” Diderot returned home in 1774. Ten years remained to him, and he spent them in the industrious acquisition of new knowledge, in the composition of a host of fragmentary pieces, some of them mentioned above, and in luminous declamations with his friends. All accounts agree that Diderot was seen at his best in conversation. “He who only knows Diderot in his writings,” says Marmontel, “does not know him at all. When he grew animated in talk, and allowed his thoughts to flow in all their abundance, then he became truly ravishing. In his writings he had not the art of ensemble; the first operation which orders and places everything was too slow and too painful to him.” Diderot himself was conscious of the want of literary merit in his pieces. In truth he set no high value on what he had done. It is doubtful whether he was ever alive to the waste that circumstance and temperament together made of an intelligence from which, if it had been free to work systematically, the world of thought had so much to hope. He was one of those simple, disinterested and intellectually sterling workers to whom their own personality is as nothing in presence of the vast subjects that engage the thoughts of their lives. He wrote what he found to write, and left the piece, as Carlyle has said, “on the waste of accident, with an ostrich-like indifference.” When he heard one day that a collected edition of his works was in the press at Amsterdam, he greeted the news with “peals of laughter,” so well did he know the haste and the little heed with which those works had been dashed off.

Diderot died on the 30th of July 1784, six years after Voltaire and Rousseau, one year after his old colleague D’Alembert, and five years before D’Holbach, his host and intimate for a lifetime. Notwithstanding Diderot’s peals of laughter at the thought, an elaborate and exhaustive collection of his writings in twenty stout volumes, edited by MM. Assézat and Tourneux, was completed in 1875-1877.

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