¹ Wladyslaw Folkierski, in his Entre le classicisme et le romantisme (Paris, 1925), pp. 509–510, was the first to call attention to certain correspondences between the two works. More recent critics have been content to repeat Folkierski's general observation without any further investigation into this question: J. J. Mayoux, “Diderot and the Technique of Modern Literature,” MLR, xxxi (1936), 528–529; Dixon Wecter, “Burke's Theory concerning Words, Images, and Emotion,” PMLA, LV (March 1940), 177. Also see J. T. Boulton's critical edition of Burke's Enquiry (New York, 1958), pp. cxx-cxxii. As for R. Loyalty Cru, author of Diderot as a Disciple of English Thought (New York, 1913), neither in his text nor in his bibliography does he refer to Burke's treatise and only mentions him in connection with his stay in Paris in 1773 (p. 110).

² Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique par Grimm, Diderot, Raynal, Meister, etc., ed. Maurice Tourneux (Paris, 1877–82), vi, 237.

³ This is not the only instance of Diderot's proclivity for borrowing other men's ideas on aesthetics. For Hogarth's influence, see Jean Seznec, Essais sur Diderot et l'antiquité (Oxford, 1957), pp. 25–29; and for the critic's indebtedness to Christian Ludwig von Hagedorn, see J. Koscziusko, “Diderot et Hagedorn,” RLC, xvi (1936), 635–669 and Paul Vernière, “Diderot et C. L. de Hagedorn: Une étude d'influence,” RLC, xxx (1956), 239–254.

⁴ Œuvres complètes de Diderot, ed. Assézat-Tourneux (Paris, 1875–77), xi, 22. Hereafter all references to Diderot's works are to this edition.

⁶ There is no reference to Diderot in Burke's works, and, as has already been pointed out, the converse is also true. Nevertheless, Burke's biographers generally allude to a possible meeting between the two men in Paris in February 1773: see John Morley, Burke (New York, 1894), p. 66; Robert H. Murray, Edmund Burke (Oxford, 1931), p. 209; and Donald C. Bryant, Edmund Burke and his Literary Friends (St. Louis, 1939), pp. 6, 302. R. L. Cm erroneously states (p. 110) that “it must have been shortly after his return from Petersburg… that Diderot met Burke.” Since it is evident from one of Burke's own letters (Correspondence, ed. C. W. Fitzwiliam [London, 1844], I, 424), as well as from those of Mme du Deffand to Walpole that the statesman was in Paris during the month of February 1773, he could only have become acquainted with Diderot before the latter's departure for Holland and Russia in June of that year. However, I found no evidence confirming this encounter which, according to tradition, took place in Mlle de Lespinasse's salon.

⁶ For such an examination of Burke's own sources as well as his impact on contemporary and later writers, see Folkier-ski, Wecter, and Boulton. Also see Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1935), Marjorie H. Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse (Princeton, 1946), and Walter J. Hippie, Jr., The Beautiful, the Sublime and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale, 1957).

⁷ It will shortly be shown that these borrowings are not confined to Part Two of the Enquiry, as scholars like Fol-kierski and Wecter have thought to be the case.

⁸ In addition to his familiarity with the Greek and Roman writers, notably Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Plotinus, and Longinus, he had a first-hand knowledge of all the important theorists of his century: Dubos, Batteux, Crousaz, Condillac, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Spence, Hogarth, Webb, Wolff, Mengs, Winckelmann, Hagedorn, and others.

⁹ Neither Diderot nor Burke established an ontological difference between organic and artistic beauty. For them aesthetic pleasure can be derived from a natural scene as well as from a painted landscape, and both writers stressed the intimate relationship between man and nature. Diderot, however, shows a sharpened awareness of the constant process of transmutation and simplification involved in representing nature on canvas.

¹⁰ Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton (New York, 1958), p. 11. All references to Burke's work are to this edition.

¹¹ It is this type of empirical reasoning which will excite Blake's anger, who will see in it a disparagement of the cognitive value of imagination and of divine “Inspiration and Vision” (cf. Marginalia to Reynolds, in The Portable Blake [New York, 1946], p. 584).

¹² For a study of Diderot's conception of imagination, see Margaret Gilman, “Imagination and Creation in Diderot,” Diderot Studies II, ed. O. E. Fellows and N. L. Torrey (Syracuse, 1952), pp. 200–220. However, there is no attempt in this essay to relate Diderot's aesthetics to that of Burke.

¹³ See Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines, ed. Raymond Lenoir (Paris, 1924), p. 149. Rousseau, in turn, was to set forth similar notions—although charging them with his characteristic emotive eloquence—in his posthumously published Essai sur l'origine des langues (1781). See Œuvres complètes de J.-J. Rousseau, ed. V. D. Musset-Pathay (Paris, 1824), n, 422–428.

¹⁴ See La Fontaine, Les Amours de Psyché et Cupidon, Œuvres, ed. H. Régnier (Paris, 1883–97), vin, 114: “Je vous soutiens… que les maux d'autrui nous divertissent, c'està-dire qu'ils nous attachent l'esprit.” La Rochefoucauld's maxim is quoted below, n. 15.

¹⁵ Maxim N° 99 in the 1665 edition, and suppressed by the author in subsequent editions, reads: “Dans l'adversité de nos meilleurs amis nous trouvons toujours quelque chose qui ne nous déplaît pas.”

¹⁶ Dubos' Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture was first published in 1719, and translated into English in 1748. Both Diderot and Burke were well acquainted with this work (I quote from the 1740 edition [i, 110]): “Commencez par faire estimer aux hommes ceux que vous voudrez leur faire plaindre. Il est donc nécessaire que les personnages de la Tragédie ne méritent point d‘être malheureux, ou du moins d‘être aussi malheureux qu'ils le sont.”

¹⁷ Dubos had already established this distinction, but without relating the aesthetic pleasure experienced to the innate impulse of self-preservation and to the social one of sympathy (i, 28). In his Famous Lettre à d'Alembert sur les spectacles (1758), Rousseau also compares the effect of an imitated event to that of the event itself (Œuvres, ii, 32).

¹⁸ Voltaire also liked to practice this melodramatic type of bravura piece. For a similar example, although in terser style, see his A.B.C. (Œuvres complètes, ed. Louis Moland [Paris, 1877–85], xxvii, 340).

¹⁹ Voltaire, too, insists that only curiosity, not selfish enjoyment, prompts people to witness executions and tortures. See his A.B.C. (xxvii, 340) and “Curiosité,” Dictionnaire philosophique (xviii, 306–308).

²⁰ In his Lettre à d'Alemberl sur les spectacles (ii, 32), Rousseau makes a similar observation, but uses it to disparage the theatre: “Au fond, quand un homme est allé admirer de belles actions dans des fables et pleurer des malheurs imaginaires, qu'a-t-on encore à exiger de lui? N'est-il pas content de lui-même? Ne s'applaudit-il pas de sa belle âme?”

²¹ For an examination of the Longinian sublime as viewed by Boileau, see Jules Brody, Boileau and Longinus (Geneva, 1958), and for an assessment of the early stages of the English approach to the sublime, see Monk, pp. 10–83 and Boulton, pp. xliv-liv.

²² Probably the most Burkean distinction between the sublime and beautiful is to be found in the Encyclopédie article “Génie” (1757), an article claimed by Saint-Lambert, attributed to the latter by Grimm, but included in the Assézat-Tourneux edition of Diderot's works (xv, 35–41) and believed by such scholars as Dieckmann and Wilson to have been largely composed or reworked by the Encyclopedist himself (Herbert Dieckmann, “Diderot's Conception of Genius,” JHI, ii [1941], 163; Arthur M. Wilson, Diderot: The Testing Years [New York, 1957], p. 389, n. 18). As for the Encyclopédie article “Sublime,” by the Chevalier de Jaucourt, it presents little of interest, for it is derivative and superficially reproduces theories and formulae of Longinus, Boileau, Batteux, and Sylvain. Another article under the rubric “Sublime,” in the Supplement of the Encyclopédie and signed by Marmontel, is equally a hack piece.

²³ The influence of Montesquieu, whom Burke held in high esteem, is quite perceptible here.

²⁴ Interestingly, “clock,” due to a mistranslation or deliberate change, becomes “cloche” in the French text. It is more likely, though, that Diderot knowingly chose the knelling of a bell, since it intimates a particularly portentous meaning.

²⁵ Daniel Mornet, Le Neveu de Rameau (Paris, 1947), D. 214.

²⁶ An allusion to Job, xxxix. 19.

²⁷ Like Diderot, Lessing read the Enquiry and used certain sections of it in his own work. See J. T. Boulton, pp. cxxii-cxxv.

²⁸ See above, pp. 533–534.

²⁹ For Lessing's analogous observation, see Laocoon, transi. Ellen Forthingham (New York, 1957), p. 136.

³⁰ In view of Burke's position as a staunch defender of religion, it is somewhat surprising to see him quote some of Lucretius' most anti-religious lines.

³¹ For a detailed study of this aspect of Burke's aesthetics, see Wecter, pp. 169–172.

³² While some scholars, like Marjorie Nicolson, tend toward the view that Burke had completed the Enquiry by 1748, when he was not more than nineteen (Newton Demands the Muse, p. 123), it is more likely that he composed and revised this work in the years 1747–54 (for conclusive evidence, see Boulton, pp. xv-xxvi).

³³ See Wecter, p. 176. According to Arthur Wilson (Diderot, p. 128), the Lettre sur les aveugles was notorious in English learned circles. Professor Wilson also rightly states (p. 367, n. 33) that the Lettre sur les sourds et muets “anticipated some of the conclusions of Edmund Burke in his treatise On the Sublime and Beautiful.” These similarities, however, are more occasional and peripheral than the numerous and often textual parallels between the Salon de 1767 and the Enquiry.

³⁴ Eugène Delacroix, Journal, ed. André Joubin (Paris 1932), iii, 222.