72, and published
twenty-four years later. The second title is, _A dialogue on the
disadvantage of attaching moral ideas to certain physical actions which
do not really comport with them_. Those who believe that the ruling
system of notions about marriage represents the last word that is to be
said as to the relations between men and women, will turn away from
Diderot's dialogue with some impatience. Those, on the contrary, who
hold that the present system is no more immovably fixed in ultimate laws
of human nature, no more final, no more unimprovable, no more sacred,
and no more indisputably successful, than any other set of social
arrangements and the corresponding moral ideas, will find something to
interest them, though, as it seems to the present writer, very little to
instruct. Bougainville was the first Frenchman who sailed round the
world. He did in 1766-69 what Captain Cook did about the same time. The
narrative of his expedition appeared in 1771, and the picture of life
among the primitive people of the Southern Seas touched Diderot almost
as deeply as if he had been Rousseau. As one says so often in this
history of the intellectual preparation for the Revolution, the
corruption and artificiality of Parisian society had the effect of
colouring the world of primitive society with the very hues of paradise.
Diderot was more free from this besetting weakness than any of his
contemporaries. He never fell into Voltaire's fancy that China is a land
of philosophers.[5] But he did not look very critically into the real
conditions of life in the more rudimentary stages of development, and
for the moment he committed the sociological anachronism of making the
poor people of Otaheite into wise and benevolent patriots and sound
reasoners. The literary merit of the dialogue is at least as striking as
in any of the pieces of which we have already spoken. The realism of the
scenes between the ship-chaplain and his friendly savage, with too
kindly wife, and daughters as kindly as either, is full of sweetness,
simplicity, and a sort of pathos. A subject which easily takes on an air
of grossness, and which Diderot sometimes handled very grossly indeed,
is introduced with an idyllic grace that to the pure will hardly be
other than pure. We have of course always to remember that Diderot is an
author for grown-up people, as are the authors of the Bible or any other
book that deals with more than the surface of human experience. Our