A Dictionary the BLRL Will Never Have

Recently, while reading The Devil's Details, a book about the history of footnotes, I came across the following passage about The Dictionnaire historique et critique (i.e., The Dictionary, Historical and Critical) by Pierre Bayle. First published in 1697, the reference (according to Wikipedia) was developed when Bayle ...

"began making notes on errors and omissions in Louis Moreri's Grand Dictionaire historique (1674), a previous encyclopedia, and these notes ultimately developed into his own Dictionnaire. Bayle used the dictionary to provide evidence of the irrationality of Christianity, to promote his views about religious tolerance, and his anti-authoritarian views on the topic of faith."

Wikipedia notes that the dictionary "influenced the thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment, in particular Denis Diderot and the other Encyclopédistes." It sounds like I would enjoy it too, but alas, the Butter Lamb Reference Library doesn't have the resources to procure rare (and likely long out of print) references such as this. Nevertheless, after coming across the following excerpt about Bayle's dictionary, I thought it'd be fun to start featuring references the BLRL will never have on this blog. So, enjoy the following (somewhat lengthy) excerpt from The Devil's Details by Chuck Zerby:

The five volumes of The Dictionary, Historical and Critical, in the edition that now occupies my desk, weigh in at forty pounds. Opened, a volume spreads out to an ample fourteen by twenty inches. Open its last volume and you find just over 9 of its I,015 pages allocated to the great Roman poet Virgil. His nine pages have forty-four lines of text and 1,144 footnotes of commentary. One hundred and nine additional margin notes refer us to Bayle's sources or, in a rare case or two, provide additional information. Commentary can delve into deeply personal biography: for example, a refutation of  the charge that Virgil was "inclined to unnatural sin." A note can begin as a correction of a critic's grammar: "[Mr. Moréri's] manner of placing his words..." then lead us off to a margin note for a grammar lesson: "Logic teaches us that in all compounded and copulative propositions, all the attributes sought to agree...." [and end] by referring us to the “Art of Thinking, Part Ii, ch. ix …” should we wish further instruction.

What Bayle chooses to include in his dictionary can be pleasantly idiosyncratic, and reflects his own life in a way that is charming, even touching. The River Auriege is one of those entries. The Auriege has no great claim on a historian's time. Though Bayle assures us it is "full of Fish and also very good to drink," that surely could have been said of any number of French backwaters that were left to splash and gurgle unreported upon by Bayle. But the Auriege entry in the dictionary hits a Wordsworthian note of reminiscence and homage. Once when young, Bayle studied so fervently that he made himself sick, and was sent to a country house "situate [sic] on the banks of the Auriege." Twenty years later he remembers the fish and the refreshing water and his slow recovery, and he gives thanks to the Auriege. We appreciate this human touch but, as Bayle must have counted on, seek an intellectual justification for our time wandering along the river in footnotes.... The footnote does not exhaust our interest in the Auriege nor, indeed, does a second one that explores the river's various tributaries, the Lers, the Arget, the Leze, and so forth. And since a sonneteer has made verse out of his love for the river, Bayle, determined to do homage, finds room for the complacent rhymes. "Auriege, thou noble River," it begins in the translated version, "known to Fame/ for thy bright waters, and thy golden name..., and known now because of Bayle's golden memories.

The Dictionnaire historique et critique was an immediate and overwhelming success. An educated person in the eighteenth century was more likely to have Bayle's work in his library than to have something by Locke or Voltaire or Newton or Rousseau. "In fact it was to become the philosophical blockbuster of all time." One is tempted to ascribe the dictionary's popularity simply to the insatiable desire of scholars of that era for reliable facts and to their gratitude for the inspiration someone else's work could provide them. Voltaire (not someone who needed any other person's inspiration, of course) had a love/hate relationship with the dictionary and with Bayle. He was dismayed by Bayle's carelessness, his failure to "chastise" or to correct his prose. The great eighteenth century art historian J. J. Winckelmann was so smitten by the dictionary that he copied out "1,300 pages of articles... in a minute hand." Testimony from other scholars would be easy to supply.