La coutume, la loi plia mes premiers ansA la religion des heureux musulmans.Je le vois trop; les soins qu’on prend de notre enfanceFerment nos sentimens, nos mœurs, notre croyance.J’eusse êtè près du Gange esclave des faux dieux,Chrétienne dans Paris, musulmane en ces lieux.L’instruction fait tout; et la main de nos pèresGrave en nos faibles cœurs ces premiers caractères,Que l’exemple et le temps nous viennent retracer,Et que peut-être en nous Dieu seul peut effacer.107
La coutume, la loi plia mes premiers ansA la religion des heureux musulmans.Je le vois trop; les soins qu’on prend de notre enfanceFerment nos sentimens, nos mœurs, notre croyance.J’eusse êtè près du Gange esclave des faux dieux,Chrétienne dans Paris, musulmane en ces lieux.L’instruction fait tout; et la main de nos pèresGrave en nos faibles cœurs ces premiers caractères,Que l’exemple et le temps nous viennent retracer,Et que peut-être en nous Dieu seul peut effacer.107
This of course implied the doctrine of Pope’s Universal Prayer, and contains an idea that was always the favourite weapon for smiting the over-confident votaries of a single supernatural revelation. Locke had asked whether ‘the current opinions and licensed guides of every country are sufficient evidence and security to every man to venture his great concernments on? Or, can these be the certain and infallible oracle and standards of truth which teach one thing in Christendom, and another in Turkey? Orshall a poor countryman be eternally happy for having the chance to be born in Italy? Or a day-labourer be unavoidably lost because he had the ill-luck to be born in England?108This was exactly the kind of reasoning to which Zaïre’s lines pointed; and Voltaire was never weary of arguing that the divine lay outside of the multitudinous variety of creeds that were never more than local accidents. Neither, however, in Zaïre nor anywhere else is the law of perfect dramatic fitness violated for the sake of a lesson in heterodoxy. With Voltaire tragedy is, as all art ought to be, a manner of disinterested presentation. This is not the noblest energy of the human intelligence, but it is truly art, and Voltaire did not forget it. It would be entirely unprofitable to enter into any comparison of the relative merits of Voltaire’s tragedies, and those either of the modern romantic school in his own country, or of the master dramatists of our own. Every form of composition must be judged in its own order, and the order in which Voltaire chose to work was the French classic, with its appointed conditions and fixed laws, its three unities, its stately alexandrines, and all the other essentials of that special dramatic form. Here is one of the many points at which we feel that Voltaire is trying to prolong in literature, if not in thought, the impressive tradition of the grand age. At the same moment, strangely enough, he was giving that stir to the opinion of his time, which was the prime agent indefinitely breaking the hold of that tradition. It is no infidelity to the glorious and incomparable genius of Shakespeare, nor does it involve any blindness to the fine creation, fresh fancy, and noble thought and imagery of our less superb men, yet to admit that there is in these limits of construction a concentration and regularity, and in these too contemned alexandrines a just and swelling cadence, that confer a high degree of pleasure of the highest kind, and that demand intellectual quality only less rare than that other priceless and unattainable quality of having the lips touched with divine fire. It is said, however, that such quality does not produce acting plays, but only dramatic poems: this is really laughable if we remember first, that the finest actors in the world have been trained in the recitation of these alexandrines, and second, that as large and as delighted an audience used until within some twenty years ago to crowd to a tragedy of Corneille or Racine, seen repeatedly before, as to a bran-new vaudeville, never to be seen again.
‘We insist,’ said Voltaire, ‘that the rhyme shall cost nothing to the ideas; that it shall neither be trivial nor too far-fetched; we exact rigorously in a verse the same purity, the same precision, as in prose. We do not permit the smallest licence; we require an author to carry without a break all chains, and yet that he should appear ever free.’109He admitted that sometimes they failed in reaching thetragic, through excessive fear of passing its limits. He does justice, if something less than English justice, to the singular merits of our stage in the way of action.110Shakespeare, he says, ‘had a genius full of force and fertility, of all that is natural and all that is sublime.’ It is even the merit of Shakespeare—‘those grand and terrible pieces that abound in his most monstrous farces’—that has been the undoing of the English stage.111
Even the famous criticism on Hamlet has been a good deal misrepresented. Voltaire is vindicating the employment of the machinery of ghosts, and he dwells on the fitness and fine dramatic effect of the ghost in Shakespeare’s play. ‘I am very far,’ he goes on to say, ‘from justifying the tragedy of Hamlet in everything: it is a rude and barbarous piece.... Hamlet goes mad in the second act, and his mistress goes mad in the third; the prince slays the father of his mistress, pretending to kill a rat, and the heroine throws herself into the river. They dig her grave on the stage; the gravediggers jest in a way worthy of them, with skulls in their hands; Hamlet answers their odious grossnesses by extravagances no less disgusting. Meanwhile one of the characters conquers Poland. Hamlet, his mother, and his stepfather drink together on the stage; they sing at table, they wrangle, they fight, they kill; one might suppose such a work to be the fruit of the imagination of a drunkensavage. But in the midst of all these rude irregularities, which to this day make the English theatre so absurd and so barbarous, there are to be found in Hamlet by a yet greater incongruity sublime strokes worthy of the loftiest geniuses. It seems as if nature had taken a delight in collecting within the brain of Shakespeare all that we can imagine of what is greatest and most powerful, with all that rudeness without wit can contain of what is lowest and most detestable.’112
If one were to retort upon this that anybody with a true sense of poetry would sacrifice all the plays that Voltaire ever wrote, his eight-and-twenty tragedies, and half-score of comedies, for the soliloquy in Hamlet, or King Henry at Towton Fight, or ‘Roses, their sharp spines being gone,’ there would be truth in such a retort, but it would be that brutal truth, which is always very near being the most subtle kind of lie. Nature wrought a miracle for us by producing Shakespeare, as she did afterwards in an extremely different way for France by producing Voltaire. Miracles, however, have necessarily a very demoralising effect. A prodigy of loaves and fishes, by slackening the motives to honest industry, must in the end multiply paupers. The prodigy of such amazing results from such glorious carelessness as Shakespeare’s, has plunged hundreds of men of talent into a carelessness most inglorious, and made our acting stage a mock. It is quite truethat the academic rule is better fitted for mediocrity than for genius; but we may perhaps trust genius to make a way for itself. It is mediocrity that needs laws and prescriptions for its most effective fertilisation, and the enormous majority even of those who can do good work are still mediocre. We have preferred the methods of lawless genius, and are left with rampant lawlessness and no genius. The very essence of the old French tragedy was painstaking, and painstaking has had its unfailing and exceeding great reward. When people whose taste has been trained in the traditions of romantic and naturalistic art, or even not trained at all except in indolence and presumption, yawn over the French alexandrines, let them remember that Goethe at any rate thought it worth while to translate Mahomet and Tancrède.
An eminent German writer on Voltaire has recently declared the secret of the French classic dramaturgy to be that the drama was a diversion of the court. ‘The personages have to speak not as befits their true feelings, their character, and the situation, but as is seemly in the presence of a king and a court; not truth, nature, and beauty, but etiquette, is the highest law of the dramatic art.’113This may partially explain how it was that a return to some features of the classic form, its dignity, elevation, and severity, came to take place in France, but no explanation canbe at all satisfactory which reduces so distinct and genuine a manner of dramatic expression to a mere outside accident. Corneille, Racine, Voltaire, treated their tragic subjects as they did, with rigorous concentration of action, stately consistency of motive, and in a solemn and balanced measure, because these conditions answered to intellectual qualities of their own, an affinity in themselves for elegance, clearness, elevation, and a certain purified and weighty wisdom. It is true that they do not unseal those deep-hidden fountains of thought and feeling and music, which flow so freely at the waving of Shakespeare’s wand. We are not swiftly carried from a scene of clowns up to some sublime pinnacle of the seventh heaven, whence we see the dark abysses that lie about the path of human action, as well as all its sweet and shadowed places. Only let us not unjustly suppose that we are deciding the merits of the old French dramaturgy, its severe structure and stately measure, by answering the question, which no English nor German writer can ever seriously put, as to the relative depth and vision in poetic things of Shakespeare and Voltaire. Nor can we be expected to be deeply moved by a form of art that is so unfamiliar to us. It is not a question whether we ought to be so deeply moved. The too susceptible Marmontel describes how on the occasion of a visit to Ferney, Voltaire took him into his study and placed a manuscript into his hands. It was Tancrède, which was just finished. Marmontel eagerly read it, and he tells us how hereturned to the author, his face all bathed in tears. ‘Your tears,’ said Voltaire, ‘tell me all that it most concerns me to know.’114The most supercilious critic may find this very Tancrède worth reading, when he remembers that Gibbon thought it splendid and interesting,115and that Goethe found it worth translating. One could hardly be convicted now of want of sensibility, if all Voltaire’s tragedy together failed to bathe one’s face in tears, but this is a very bad reason for denying that it has other merits than pathos.
We cannot, indeed, compare the author of Zaïre and Tancrède with the great author of Cinna and Polyeucte, any more than in another kind we can compare Gray with Milton. Voltaire is the very genius of correctness, elegance, and grace, and if the reader would know what this correctness means, he will find a most wholesome exercise in reading Voltiare’s notes on some of the most celebrated of Corneille’s plays.116But in masculine energy and in poetic weightiness, as well as in organ-like richness of music, Voltaire must be surely pronounced inferior to his superb predecessor. There is a certain thinness pervading the whole of his work for the stage, the conception of character, the dramatic structure, and the measure alike. Undoubtedly we may frequently come upon weighty and noble lines, of fine music andlofty sense. But there is on the whole what strikes one as a fatal excess of facility, and a fatal defect of poetic saliency. The fluent ease of the verse destroys the impression of strength. ‘Your friend,’ wrote Madame du Châtelet once of her friend, ‘has had a slight bout of illness, and you know that when he is ill, he can do nothing but write verses.’117We do not know whether the Marquise meant alexandrines, or those graceful verses of society of which Voltaire was so incomparable a master. It is certain that he wrote Zaïre in three weeks and Olympic in six days, though with respect to the latter we may well agree with the friend who told the author that he should not have rested on the seventh day. However that may be, there is a quality about his tragic verse which to one fresh from the sonorous majesty and dignified beauty of Polyeucte, or even the fine gravity of Tartufe, vibrates too lightly in the ear. Least of all may we compare him to Racine, whose two great tragedies of Iphigénie and Athalie Voltaire himself declared to mark the nearest approach ever made to dramatic perfection.118There is none of the mixed austerity and tenderness, height and sweetness, grace and firmness, that blend together with such invisible art and unique contrivance in the poet whose verses taught Fénelon and Massillon how to make music in their prose. To this Voltaire could only have access from without, for he lacked the famous master’s internal depth, seriousness, and venerationof soul. We know how little this approach from without can avail, and how vainly a man follows the harmonious grace of a style, when he lacks the impalpable graces of spirit that made the style live. It is only when grave thoughts and benignant aspirations and purifying images move with even habit through the mind, that a man masters the noblest expression. De Maistre, to whom Voltaire’s name was the symbol for all that is accursed, admitted the nobleness of his work in tragedy, but he instantly took back the grudged praise by saying that even here he only resembles his two great rivals as a clever hypocrite resembles a saint.119Malignantly expressed, there is in this some truth.
It was one of the elements in the plan of dramatic reform that sprang up in Voltaire’s mind during his residence in England, that the subjects of tragedy should be more masculine, and that love should cease to be an obligatory ingredient. “It is nearly always the same piece, the same knot, formed by jealousy and a breach, and untied by a marriage; it is a perpetual coquetry, a simple comedy in which princes are actors, and in which occasionally blood is spilt for form’s sake.”120This he counted a mistake, for, as he justly said, the heart is but lightly touched by a lover’s woes, while it is profoundly softened by the anguish of a mother just about to lose her son. Thus in Mérope we have maternal sentiment made the spring of what is probably the best of Voltaire’s tragedies,abounding in a just vehemence, compact, full of feeling at once exalted and natural, and moving with a sustained energy that is not a too common mark of his work. It was the same conviction of the propriety of making tragedy a means of expressing other emotions than that which is so apt to degenerate into an insipidity, which dictated the composition and novel treatment of the Roman subjects, Brutus and La Mort de César. Here the French drama first became in some degree truly political. His predecessors when they handled a historic theme did so, not from the historic or social point of view, but as the illustration, or rather the suggestion, of some central human passion. In the Cinna of Corneille the political bearings, the moral of benevolent despotism which Bonaparte found in it, were purely incidental, and were distinctly subordinate to the portrayal of character and the movement of feeling. In Brutus the whole action lies in the region of great public affairs, and of the passions which these affairs stir in noble characters, without any admixture of purely private tenderness. In La Mort de César we are equally in the heroics of public action. Rome Sauvée, of which the subject is the conspiracy of Catiline, and the hero the most eloquent of consuls or men—a part that Voltaire was very fond of filling in private representations, and with distinguished success—is extremely loose and spasmodic in structure, and the speeches sound strained even when put into Cicero’s mouth. But here also private insipidities are banished,though perhaps it is only in favour of public insipidities. It is impossible to tell what share, if any, these plays had in spreading that curious feeling about Roman freedom and its most renowned defenders, which is so striking a feature in some of the great episodes of the Revolution. We cannot suspect Voltaire of any design to stir political feeling. He was now essentially aristocratic and courtly in his predilection, without the smallest active wish for an approach to political revolution, if indeed the conception of a change of that kind ever presented itself to him. He was indefatigable in admiring and praising English freedom, but, as has already been said, it was not the laudation of a lover of popular government, but the envy of a man of letters whose life was tormented by censors of the press and the lieutenant of police. Perhaps the only approach to a public purpose in this fancy for his Roman subjects was a lurking idea of arousing in the nobles, for whom we must remember that his dramatic work was above all designed, not a passion for freedom from the authority of monarchic government, but a passion of a more general kind for energetic patriotism. Voltaire’s letters abound with expressions of the writer’s belief that he was the witness of an epoch of decay in his own country. He had in truth far too keen and practical and trained an eye not to see how public spirit, political sagacity, national ambition, and even valour had declined in the great orders of France since the age of the Grand Monarch, and how much his country had fallen back in therace of civilisation and power. We should be guilty of a very transparent exaggeration of the facts, if any attempt were made to paint Voltaire in the attitude and colours of one transcendentally aspiring to regenerate his countrymen. But there is no difficulty in believing that a man who had lived in England, and knew so much of Prussia, should have seen the fatal enervation which had come upon France, and that with Voltaire’s feeling for the stage, he should have dreamt, by means of a more austere subject and more masculine treatment, of reviving the love of wisdom and glory and devotion in connection with country. In a word, the lesson of La Mort de César or of Brutus was not a specific admonition to slay tyrants, or to execute stern judgments on sons, but a general example of self-sacrificing patriotism and devoted public honour.
It is often said that Voltaire’s Romans are mere creatures of parade and declamation, like the figures of David’s paintings,121and it is very likely that the theatre infected the French people with that mischievous idea of the Romans, as a nation of declaimers about freedom and the death of tyrants. The true Roman was no doubt very much more like one of our narrow, hard, and able Scotchmen in India, than the lofty talkers who delighted the parterre of Paris or Versailles. Unluckily for truth of historical conception, Cicero was, after Virgil, the most potent of Roman memories, and a man of words became withmodern writers the favourite type of a people of action. All this, however, is beside the question. Voltaire would have laughed at the idea of any obligation to present either Romans or other personages on the stage with realistic fidelity. The tragic drama with him was the highest of the imaginative and idealistic arts. If he had sought a parallel to it in the plastic arts he would have found one, not in painting, which by reason of the greater flexibility of its material demands a more exact verisimilitude, but in sculpture. Considered as statuesque figures endowed with speech, Brutus, Caesar, and the rest are noble and impressive. We may protest as vigorously as we know how against any assimilation of the great art of action with the great art of repose. But we can only criticise the individual productions of a given theory, provided we for the moment accept the conditions which the theory lays down. All art rests upon convention, and if we choose to repudiate any particular set of conventions, we have no more right to criticise the works of those who submit to them than one would have to criticise sculpture, because marble or bronze is not like flesh and blood. Within the conditions of the French classic drama Voltaire’s Romans are high and stately figures.
Voltaire’s innovations extended beyond the introduction of more masculine treatment. Before his time romantic subjects had been regarded with disfavour, and Corneille’s Bajazet was considered a bold experiment. Racine was more strictly classic, anddramatists went on handling the same ancient fables, ‘Thebes, or Pelops’ line, or the tale of ‘Troy divine,’ just as the Greeks had done, or just as the painters in the Catholic times had never wearied of painting the two eternal figures of human mother and divine child. Voltaire treated the classic subjects as others treated them, and if Œdipe misses the depth, delicate reserve and fateful gloom of the Greeks, Mérope at any rate breathes a fine and tragic spirit. But his restless mind pressed forward into subjects which Racine would have shuddered at, and every quarter of the universe became in turn a portion of the Voltairean stage. L’Orphelin de la Chine introduces us to China and Genghis-Khan, Mahomet to Arabia and its prophet, Tancrede to Sicily; in Zulime we are among Moors, in Alzire with Peruvians. This revolutionary enlargement of subject was significant of a general and very important enlargement of interest which marked the time, and led presently to those contrasts between the condition of France and the imaginary felicity and nobleness of wilder countries, which did so much to breed an irresistible longing for change. Voltaire’s high-minded Scythians, generous Peruvians, and the rest, prepared the way along with other influences for that curious cosmopolitanism, that striking eagerness to believe in the equal virtuousness and devotion inherent in human nature, independently of the religious or social form accidentally imposed upon them, which found its ultimate outcome, first in an ardent passion for social equality, and a depreciation of thespecial sanctity of the current religion, and next in the ill-fated emancipating and proselytising aims of the Revolution, and in orators of the human race.
It has usually been thought surprising that Voltaire, consummate wit as he was, should have been so markedly unsuccessful in comedy. Certainly no one with so right a sense of the value of time as Voltaire himself had, will in our day waste many hours over his productions in this order. There are a dozen of them more or less, and we can only hope that they were the most rapid of his writings. Lines of extraordinary vivacity are not wanting, and at their best they offer a certain bustling sprightliness that might have been diverting in actual representation. But the keynote seems to be struck in farce, rather than in comedy; the intrigue, if not quite as slight as in Molière, is too forced; and the characters are nearly all excessively mediocre in conception. In one of the comedies, Le Dépositaire, the poet presented the aged patroness of his youth, but the necessity of respecting current ideas of the becoming prevented him from making a great character out of even so striking a figure as Ninon de l’Enclos. La Prude is a version of Wycherly’s Plaindealer, and is in respect of force, animation, and the genuine spirit of comedy, very inferior to its admirable original. L’Indiscret is a sparkling and unconsidered trifle, L’Ecossaise is only a stinging attack on Fréron, and L’Enfant Prodigue, though greater pains were taken with it, has none of the glow of dramatic feeling. The liveliest of all isLa Femme qui a Raison, a short comedy of situation, which for one reading is entertaining in the closet, and must be excellent on the stage. It is very slight, however, and as usual verges on farce.
This inferiority of Voltaire’s ought not to astonish any one who has reflected how much concentrated feeling and what profundity of vision go to the production of great comedy, and how in the mind of the dramatist, as in the movement of human life, comedy lies close to portentous tragedy. The author of the Bourgeois Gentilhomme and L’Avare was also the creator of the Misanthrope, that inscrutable piece, where, without plot, fable, or intrigue, we see a section of the polished life of the time, men and women paying visits, making and receiving compliments, discoursing upon affairs with easy lightness, flitting backwards and forwards with a thousand petty hurries, and among these one strange, rough, hoarse, half-sombre figure, moving solitarily with a chilling reality in the midst of frolicking shadows. Voltaire entered too eagerly into the interests of the world, was by temperament too exclusively sympathetic and receptive and social, to place himself even in imagination thus outside of the common circle. Without capacity for this, there is no comedy of the first order. Without serious consciousness of contrasts, no humour that endures. Shakespeare, Molière, and even Aristophanes, each of them unsurpassed writers of mere farce, were each of them, though with vast difference of degree, master of a tragic breadth of vision.Voltaire had moods of petulant spleen, but who feels that he ever saw, much less brooded over, the dark cavernous regions of human nature? Without this we may have brilliant pleasantry of surprise, inimitable caricature, excellent comedy of society, but of the veritable comedy of human character and life, nothing.
In dazzling and irresistible caricature Voltaire has no equal. There is no deep humour, as in Don Quixote, or Tristram Shandy, which Voltaire did not care for,122or Richter’s Siebenkäs, which he would not have cared for any more than De Stael did. He was too purely intellectual, too argumentative, too geometrical, and cared too much for illustrating a principle. But in Candide, Zadig, L’Ingénu, wit is as high as mere wit can go. They are better than Hudibras, because the motive is broader and more intellectual. Rapidity of play, infallible accuracy of stroke, perfect copiousness, and above all a fresh and unflagging spontaneity, combine with a surprising invention, to give these stories a singular quality, of which we most effectively observe the real brilliance, by comparing them with the too numerous imitations that their success has unhappily invited since.
It is impossible to omit from the most cursory study of Voltaire’s work, that too famous poem which was his favourite amusement during some of the best years of his life, which was the delight of all who could by any means get the high favour of sight or hearing of so much as a canto of it, and which is now alwaysspoken of, when it happens to be spoken of at all, with extreme abhorrence.123The Pucelle offends two modern sentiments, the love of modesty, and the love of the heroic personages of history. The moral sense and the historic sense have both been sharpened in some respects since Voltaire, and a poem which not only abounds in immodesty, and centres the whole action in an indecency of conception, but also fastens this gross chaplet round the memory of a great deliverer of the poet’s own country, seems to offer a double outrage to an age when relish for licentious verse has gone out of fashion, and reverence for the heroic dead has come in. Still the fact that the greatest man of his time should have written one of the most unseemly poems that exist in any tongue, is worth trying to understand. Voltaire, let us remember, had no special turn, like Gibbon or Bayle, least of all like the unclean Swift, for extracting a malodorous diversion out of grossness or sensuality. His writings betray no irresistible passion for flying to an indelicacy, nor any of the vapid lasciviousness of some more modern French writers. The Pucelle is at least the wit of a rational man, and not the prying beastliness of a satyr. It is wit worse than poorly employed, but it is purity itself compared with some of the nameless abominations with which Diderot besmirched his imagination. The Persian Letters contain what we should now account passages of extremelicentiousness, yet Montesquieu was assuredly no libertine. Voltaire’s life again was never indecent or immoderate from the point of view of the manners of the time. A man of grave character and untarnished life, like Condorcet, did not scruple to defend a poem, in which it is hard for us to see anything but a most indecorous burlesque of a most heroic subject. He insists that books which divert the imagination without heating or seducing it, which by gay and pleasurable images fill up those moments of exhaustion that are useless alike for labour and meditation, have the effect of inclining men to gentleness and indulgence. “It was not such books as the Pucelle that Gérard or Clément used to read, or that the satellites of Cromwell carried at the saddle-bow.”124
The fact is that in amusing himself by the Pucelle, Voltaire was only giving literary expression to a kind of view which had already in the society of the time found for itself a thoroughly practical expression. The people among whom he lived had systematised that freedom from law or restraint in the relations of the sexes, of which his poem is so vivid a representation. The Duke of Richelieu was the irresistible Lovelace of his time, and it was deemed an honour, an honour to which Madame du Châtelet among so many others has a title, to have yielded to his fascination. A long and profoundly unedifying chronicle might be drawn up of the memorable gallantries of that time, and for our purpose it might fitly closewith the amour with Saint Lambert that led to Madame du Châtelet’s death. Of course, these countless gallantries in the most licentious persons of the day, such as Richelieu or Saxe, were neither more nor less than an outbreak of sheer dissoluteness, such as took place among English people of quality in the time of the Restoration. The idle and luxurious, whose imagination is uncontrolled by the discipline of labour and purpose, and to whom the indulgence of their own inclinations is the first and single law of life, are always ready to profit by any relaxation of restraint, which the moral conditions of the moment may permit.
The peculiarity of the licence of France in the middle of the eighteenth century is, that it was looked upon with complacency by the great intellectual leaders of opinion. It took its place in the progressive formula. What austerity was to other forward movements, licence was to this. It is not difficult to perceive how so extraordinary a circumstance came to pass. Chastity was the supreme virtue in the eyes of the church, the mystic key to Christian holiness. Continence was one of the most sacred of the pretensions by which the organised preachers of superstition claimed the reverence of men and women. It was identified, therefore, in a particular manner with that Infamous, against which the main assault of the time was directed. So men contended, more or less expressly, first, that continence was no commanding chief among virtues, then that it was a very superficial andeasily practised virtue, finally that it was no virtue at all, but if sometimes a convenience, generally an impediment to free human happiness. These disastrous sophisms show the peril of having morality made an appendage of a set of theological mysteries, because the mysteries are sure in time to be dragged into the open air of reason, and moral truth crumbles away with the false dogmas with which it had got mixed.
‘If,’ says Condorcet, ‘we may treat as useful the design to make superstition ridiculous in the eyes of men given to pleasures, and destined, by the very want of self-control which makes pleasures attractive to them, to become one day the unfortunate victims or the mischievous instruments of that vile tyrant of humanity; if the affectation of austerity in manners, if the excessive value attached to purity, only serves the hypocrites who by putting on the easy mask of chastity can dispense with all virtues, and cover with a sacred veil the vices most pernicious to society, hardness of heart and intolerance; if by accustoming men to treat as so many crimes faults from which honourable and conscientious persons are not exempt, we extend over the purest souls the power of that dangerous caste, which to rule and disturb the earth, has constituted itself exclusively the interpreter of heavenly justice;—then we shall see in the author of the Pucelle no more than a foe to hypocrisy and superstition.’125
It helps us to realise the infinite vileness of a system, like that of the Church in the last century, which could engender in men of essential nobleness of character like Condorcet, an antipathy so violent as to shut the eyes of their understanding to the radical sophistry of such pleading as this. Let one reflection out of many, serve to crush the whole of it. The key to effective life is unity of life, and unity of life means as much as anything else the unity of our human relations. Our identity does by no means consist in a historic continuity of tissues, but in an organic moral coherency of relation. It is this, which alone, if we consider the passing shortness of our days, makes life a whole, instead of a parcel of thrums bound together by an accident. Is not every incentive and every concession to vagrant appetite a force that enwraps a man in gratification of self, and severs him from duty to others, and so a force of dissolution and dispersion? It might be necessary to pull down the Church, but the worst church that has ever prostituted the name and the idea of religion cannot be so disastrous to society, as a gospel that systematically relaxes self-control as being an unmeaning curtailment of happiness. The apologists for the Pucelle exhibit the doctrine of individualism in one of its worst issues. ‘Your proof that this is really the best of all possible worlds is excellent,’ says Candide for his famous last word, ‘but we must cultivate our garden.’ The same principle of exclusive self-regard, applied to the gratification of sense, passedfor a satisfactory defence of libertinage. In the first form it destroys a state, in the second it destroys the family.
It is easier to account for Voltaire’s contempt for the mediæval superstition about purity, than his want of respect for a deliverer of France. The explanation lies in the conviction which had such power in Voltaire’s own mind and with which he impregnated to such a degree the minds of others, that the action of illiterate and unpolished times can have no life in it. His view of progress was a progress of art and knowledge, and heroic action which was dumb, or which was not expressed in terms of intellect, was to the eighteenth century, and to Voltaire at least as much as to any other of its leaders, mere barbaric energy. In the order of taste, for instance, he can find only words of cool and limited praise for Homer, while for the polish and elegance of Virgil his admiration is supreme. The first was the bard of a rude time, while round the second cluster all the associations of a refined and lettered age. A self-devotion that was only articulate in the jargon of mystery and hallucination, and that was surrounded with rude and irrational circumstance, with ignorance, brutality, visions, miracle, was encircled by no halo in the eyes of a poet who found no nobleness where he did not find a definite intelligence, and who rested all his hopes and interests on the long distance set by time and civilisation between ourselves and such conditions and associations as belong to the name of Joan ofArc. The foremost men of the eighteenth century despised Joan of Arc, whenever they had occasion to think of her, for the same reason which made them despise Gothic architecture. ‘When,’ says Voltaire in one place, ‘the arts began to revive, they revived as Goths and Vandals; what unhappily remains to us of the architecture and sculpture of these times is a fantastic compound of rudeness and filigree.’126Just so, even Turgot, while protesting how dear to every sensible heart were the Gothic buildings destined to the use of the poor and the orphan, complained of the outrage done by their rude architecture to the delicacy of our sight.127Characters like Joan of Arc ranked in the same rude and fantastic order, and respect for them meant that respect for the middle age which was treason to the new time. Men despised her, just as they despised the majesty and beauty of the great church at Rheims where she brought her work to a climax, or the lofty grace and symmetry of the church of St. Ouen, within sight of which her life came to its terrible end.
Henry the Fourth was a hero with Voltaire, for no better reason than that he was the first great tolerant, the earliest historic indifferent. The Henriade is only important because it helped to popularise the type of its hero’s character, and so to promote the rapidly-growing tendency in public opinion towards a still wider version of the policy of the Edict of Nantes.The reign of Lewis XIV. had thrown all previous monarchs into obscurity, and the French king who showed a warmer and more generous interest in the happiness of his subjects than any they ever had, was forgotten, until Voltaire brought him into fame. It was just, however, because Henry’s exploits were so glorious, and at the same time so near in point of time, that he made an indifferent hero for an epic poem. ‘He should never choose for an epic poem history,’ said Hume very truly, ‘the truth of which is well known; for no fiction can come up to the interest of the actual story and incidents of the singular life of Henry IV.’128These general considerations, however, as to the propriety of the subject are hardly worth entering upon. How could any true epic come out of that age, or find fountains in that critical, realistic, and polemical soul? To fuse a long narrative of heroic adventure in animated, picturesque, above all, in sincere verse, is an achievement reserved for men with a steadier glow, a firmer, simpler, more exuberant and more natural poetic feeling, than was possible in that time of mean shifts, purposeless public action, and pitiful sacrifice of private self-respect. Virgil was stirred by the greatness of the newly-united empire, Tasso by the heroic march of Christendom against pagan oppressors, Milton by the noble ardour of our war for public rights. What long and glowing inspiration was possible to a would-be courtier, thrust into the Bastille for wanting to fight a noble whohad had him caned by lackeys? Besides, an epic, of all forms of poetic composition, most demands concentrated depth, and Voltaire was too widely curious and vivacious on the intellectual side to be capable of this emotional concentration.
But it is superfluous to give reasons why Voltaire’s epic should not be a great poem. The Henriade itself is there, the most indisputable of arguments. Of poems whose names are known out of literary histories and academic catalogues, it is perhaps the least worth reading in any language by any one but a professional student of letters. It is less worth reading than Lucan’s Pharsalia, because it is more deliberately artificial and gratuitously unspontaneous. Paradise Regained, which it is too ready a fashion among us to pronounce dull, still contains at least three pieces of superb and unsurpassed description, never fails in grave majestic verse, and is at the worst free from all the dreary apparatus of phantom and impersonation and mystic vision, which have never jarred so profoundly with sense of poetic fitness, as when associated with so political and matter-of-fact a hero as Henry the Fourth. The reader has no illusion in such transactions as Saint Lewis taking Henry into heaven and hell, Sleep hearing from her secret caves, the Winds at sight of him falling into Silence, and Dreams, children of Hope, flying to cover the hero with olive and laurel. How can we overcome our repugnance to that strange admixture of real and unreal matter which presents us with a highly-colouredpicture of the Temple of Love, where in the forecourt sits Joy, with Mystery, Desire, Complaisance, on the soft turf by her side, while in the inner sanctuary haunt Jealousy, Suspicion, Malice, Fury; while the next canto describes
L’église toujours une et partout étendue,Libre, mais sous un chef, adorant en tout lieu,Dans le bonheur des saints, la grandeur de son Dieu.Le Christ, de nos péches victime renaissante,De ses élus chéris nourriture vivante,Descend sur les autels à ses yeux éperdus,Et lui découvre un Dieu sous un pain qui n’est plus.129
L’église toujours une et partout étendue,Libre, mais sous un chef, adorant en tout lieu,Dans le bonheur des saints, la grandeur de son Dieu.Le Christ, de nos péches victime renaissante,De ses élus chéris nourriture vivante,Descend sur les autels à ses yeux éperdus,Et lui découvre un Dieu sous un pain qui n’est plus.129
Voltaire congratulated himself in his preface that he had come sufficiently near theological exactitude, and to this qualification, which is so new for poetry, the critic may add elegance and flow; but neither elegance nor theological exactitude reconciles us to an epic that has neither a stroke of sublimity nor a touch of pathos, that presents no grandeur in character, and no hurrying force and movement in action. Frederick the Great used to speak of Voltaire as the French Virgil, but then Frederick’s father had never permitted him to learn Latin, and if he ever read Virgil at all, it must have been in some of the jingling French translations. Even so, with the episodes of Dido and of Nisus and Euryalus in our minds, we may wonder how so monstrous a parallel could have occurred even to Frederick, who was no critic, between two poets who have hardly a quality in common. Ifthe reader wishes to realise how nearly insipid even Voltaire’s genius could become when working in unsuitable forms, he may turn from any canto of the Henriade to any page of Lucretius or the Paradise Lost. A French critic quotes the famous reviewer’s sentence, concluding an analysis of some epic, to the effect that on the whole, when all is summed up, the given epic was ‘one of the best that had appeared in the course of the current year;’ and insists that Voltaire’s piece will not at any rate perish in the oblivion of poetic annuals like these. If not, the only reason lies in that unfortunate tenderness for the bad work of famous men, which makes of so much reading time worse than wasted. ‘The unwise,’ said Candide, ‘value every word in an author of repute.
’
The Marquise du Châtelet died under circumstances that were tragical enough to herself, but which disgust the grave, while they give a grotesque amusement to those who look with cynical eye upon what they choose to treat as the great human comedy. In 1749 the friendship of sixteen years thus came to its end, and Voltaire was left without the tie that, in spite of too frequent breaking away from it, had brought him much happiness and good help so far on the road. He was now free, disastrously free as the event proved, to accept the invitations with which he had so long been pressed to take up his residence with the king who may dispute with him the claim to be held the most extraordinary man of that century.
Neither credit nor peace followed Voltaire in his own land. Lewis XV., perhaps the most worthless of all the creatures that monarchy has ever corrupted, always disliked him. The whole influence of the court and the official world had been uniformly exerted against him. Many years went by before hecould even win a seat in the academy, a distinction, it may be added, to which Diderot, hardly second to Voltaire in originality and power, never attained to the end of his days. Madame de Pompadour, the protectress of Quesnay, was Voltaire’s first friend at court. He said of her long afterwards that in the bottom of her heart she belonged to the philosophers, and did as much as she could to protect them.130She had known him in her obscurer and more reputable days, and she charged him with the composition of a court-piece (1745), to celebrate the marriage of the dauphin. The task was satisfactorily performed, and honours which had been refused to the author of Zaïre, Alzire, and the Henriade, were at once given to the writer of the Princess of Navarre, which Voltaire himself ranked as a mere farce of the fair. He was made gentleman of the chamber and historiographer of France. He disarmed the devout by the Pope’s acceptance of Mahomet, and by a letter which he wrote to Father Latour, head of his former school, protesting his affection for religion and his esteem for the Jesuits. Condorcet most righteously pronounces that, in spite of the art with which he handles his expressions in this letter, it would undoubtedly have been far better to give up the academy than to write it.131It answered its purpose, and Voltaire was admitted of the forty (May 1746). This distinction, however, was far from securing for him the tranquillity which he had hoped from it, and worse libelstormented him than before. The court sun ceased to shine. Madame de Pompadour gave to Crébillon a preference which Voltaire resented with more agitation than any preference of Madame Pompadour’s ought to have stirred in the breast of a strong man.
We cannot, however, too constantly remember not to ask from Voltaire the heroic. He was far too sympathetic, too generously eager to please, too susceptible to opinion. Of that stern and cold stuff which supports a man in firm march and straight course, giving him the ample content of self-respect, he probably had less than any one of equal prominence has ever had. Instead of writing his tragedy as well as he knew how, and then leaving it to its destiny, he wrote it as well as he knew how, and then went in disguise to the café of the critics to find out what his inferiors had to say about his work. Instead of composing his court-piece, and taking such reward as offered, or disdaining such ignoble tasks—and nobody knew better than he how ignoble they were—he sought to catch some crumb of praise by fawningly asking of the vilest of men,Trajan est-il content?Make what allowance we will for difference of time and circumstance, such an attitude to such a man, whether in Seneca towards Nero, or Voltaire towards Lewis XV., is a baseness that we ought never to pardon and never to extenuate. Whether or no there be in the human breast that natural religion of goodness and virtue which was the sheet-anchor of Voltaire’s faith, there is at least a something in thehearts of good men which sets a fast gulf between them and those who are to the very depths of their souls irredeemably saturated with corruption.
We may permit ourselves to hope that it was the consciousness of the humiliation of such relations as these, rather than the fact that they did not answer their own paltry purpose, that made Voltaire resolve a second time to shake the dust of his own country from off his feet In July 1750 he reached Potsdam, and was installed with sumptuous honour in the court of Frederick the Great, twenty-four years since he had installed himself with Mr. Falkener, the English merchant at Wandsworth. Diderot was busy with the first volume of the Encyclopædia, and Rousseau had just abandoned his second child in the hospital for foundlings. If the visit to London did everything for Voltaire, the visit to Berlin did nothing. There was no Prussia, as there was an England. To travel from the dominion of George II. to the dominion of his famous nephew, was to go from the full light of the eighteenth century back to the dimness of the fifteenth. An academy of sciences, by the influence of Sophie-Charlotte, and under the guidance of Leibnitz, had been founded at Berlin at the beginning of the eighteenth century; but Frederick William had an angry contempt for every kind of activity except drill and the preaching of orthodox theology, and during his reign the academy languished in obscurity.132
The accession of Frederick II. was the signal for its reconstitution, and the revival of its activity under the direction of Maupertuis. To the sciences of experiment and observation, which had been its original objects, was added a department of speculative philosophy. The court was materialist, sceptical, Voltairean, all at the same time; but the academy as a body was theologically orthodox, and it was wholly and purely metaphysical in its philosophy. We may partly understand the distance at which Berlin was then behind Paris, when we read D’Alembert’s just remonstrances with Frederick against giving as subjects for prize-essays such metaphysical problems as ‘The search for a primary and permanent force, at once substance and cause.’133
Whatever activity existed outside of the court and the academy was divided between the dialectic of Protestant scholasticism, and Wolf’s exposition and development of Leibnitz. In literature proper there arose with the accession of Frederick a small group of essentially secondary critics, of whom Sulzer was the best, without the vivid and radiant force of either Voltaire or Diderot, and without the deep inspiration and invention of those who were to follow them, and to place Germany finally on a level with England and France. Lessing, the founder of the modern German literature, was at this time a youth of twenty-two, and by a striking turn of chance was employed by Voltaire in putting into German his pleadings in theinfamous Hirschel case. It was not then worth while for a stranger to learn the language in which Lessing had not yet written, and Voltaire, who was a master of English and Italian, never knew more German than was needed to curse a postilion.134Leibnitz wrote everything of importance in Latin or French, the Berlin academy conducted its transactions first in Latin, next and for many years to come in French, and one of its earliest presidents, a man of special competence,135pronounced German to be a noble but frightfully barbarised tongue. The famous Wolf had done his best to make the tongue of his country literate, but even his influence was unequal to the task.
Society was in its foundations not removed from the mediæval. The soldiers with whom Frederick won Zorndorf and Leuthen, like the Russians and Austrians whom he defeated on those bloody days, were not more nor less than serfs. Instead of philosophers like Newton and Locke, he had to find the pride and safety of his country in swift rushing troopers like Winterfield and Ziethen. A daring cavalry-charge in season was for the moment more to Prussia than any theory why it is that an apple falls, and a new method of drill much more urgent than a new origin for ideas. She was concerned not with the speculative problem of the causes why the earth keeps its place in the planetary system, but with the practical problem how Prussia was to make her place in the system of Europe. Prussia was then far morebehind France in all thought and all arts, save the soldier’s, than England was in front of France.
Voltaire had nothing to learn at Berlin, and may we not add, as the king was a rooted Voltairean long before this, he had nothing to teach there? The sternest barrack in Europe was not a field in which the apostle of free and refined intelligence could sow seed with good hope of harvest. Voltaire at this time, we have to recollect, was in the public mind only a poet, and perhaps was regarded, if not altogether by Frederick, certainly by those who surrounded him, as much in the same order of being with Frederick’s flute, fitted by miracle with a greater number of stops. ‘I don’t give you any news of literature,’ D’Alembert wrote from Potsdam in 1763, ‘for I don’t know any, and you know how barren literature is in this country, where no one except the king concerns himself with it.’136There is no particular disgrace to Berlin or its king in this. Their task was very definite, and it was only a pleasant error of Frederick’s rather fantastic youth to suppose that this task lay in the direction of polite letters. The singer of the Henriade was naturally of different quality and turn of mind from a hero who had at least as hard an enterprise in his hand as that of Henry IV. Voltaire and Frederick were the two leaders of the two chief movements then going on, in the great work of the transformation of the old Europe into the new. But the movements were in different matter, demanded vastly differentmethods, and, as is so often the case, the scope of each was hardly visible to the pursuer of the other. Voltaire’s work was to quicken the activity and proclaim the freedom of human intelligence, and to destroy the supremacy of an old spiritual order. Frederick’s work was to shake down the old political order. The sum of their efforts was the definite commencement of that revolution in the thought and the political conformation of the West, of which the momentous local revolution in France must, if we take a sufficiently wide survey before and after, be counted a secondary phase. The conditions of the order which was established after the confusion of the fall of the Roman power before the inroads of the barbarians, and which constituted the Europe of the early and middle ages, are now tolerably well understood, and the historic continuity or identity of that order is typified in two institutions, which by the middle of the eighteenth century had reached very different stages of decay, and possessed very different powers of resisting attack. One was the German Empire, and the other was the Holy Catholic Church. Frederick dealt a definite blow to the first, and Voltaire did the same to the second.
Those who read history and biography with a sturdy and childish pre-conception that the critical achievements in the long course of the world’s progress must of necessity have fallen to the lot of the salt of the earth, will find it hard to associate the beginning of the great overt side of modern movement withthe two men who versified and wrangled together for some two and a half years in the middle of the eighteenth century at Berlin. It is hard to think of the old state, with all its memories of simple enthusiasm and wild valour and rude aspiration after some better order, finally disappearing into the chaos for which it was more than ripe, under the impulse of an arch cynic. And it is hard, too, to think that the civilising religion which was founded by a Jew, and first seized by Jews, noblest and holiest of their race, got its first and severest blow from one who was not above using a Jew to cheat Christians out of their money. But the fact remains of the vast work which this amazing pair had to do, and did.
The character of the founder of the greatness of Prussia, if indeed we may call founder one rather than another member of that active, clear, and far-sighted line, can have no attraction for those who require as an indispensable condition of fealty that their hero shall have either purity, or sensibility, or generosity, or high honour, or manly respect for human nature. Frederick’s rapidity and firmness of will, his administrative capacity, his military talent, were marvellous and admirable enough; but on the moral side of character, in his relations to men and women, in his feeling for the unseen, in his ideas of truth and beauty, he belonged to a type which is not altogether uncommon. In his youth he had much of a sort of shallow sensibility, which more sympatheticusage might possibly have established and to some small extent even deepened, but which the curiously rough treatment that his pacific tastes and frivolous predilections provoked his father to inflict, turned in time into the most bitter and profound kind of cynicism that the world knows. No cynic is so hard and insensible as the man who has once had sensibility, perhaps because the consciousness that he was in earlier days open to more generous impressions persuades him that the fault of any change in his own view of things must needs lie in the world’s villainy, which he has now happily for himself had time to find out. Sensibility of a true sort, springing from natural fountains of simple and unselfish feeling, can neither be corrupted nor dried up. But at its best, Frederick’s sensibility was of the literary and aesthetic kind, rather than the humane and social. It concerned taste and expression, and had little root in the recognition as at first-hand of those facts of experience, of beauty and tenderness and cruelty and endurance, which are the natural objects that permanently quicken a sensitive nature. In a word, Frederick’s was the conventional sensibility of the French literature of the time; a harmless thing enough in the poor souls that only poured themselves out in bad romance and worse verse, but terrible when it helped to fill with contempt for mankind an absolute monarch, with the most perfect military machine in Europe at his command. Frederick is constantly spoken of as a man typical of his century. In truth he was throughouthis life in ostentatious opposition to his century on its most remarkable side. There has never been any epoch whose foremost men had such faith and hope in the virtues of humanity. There has never been any prominent man who despised humanity so bitterly and unaffectedly as Frederick despised it.
We know what to think of a man who writes a touching and pathetic letter condoling with a friend on the loss of his wife, and on the same day makes an epigram on the dead woman137; who never found so much pleasure in a friendly act as when he could make it the means of hurting the recipient; whose practical pleasantries were always spiteful and sneering and cruel. As we read of his tricks on D’Argens or Pöllnitz, we feel how right Voltaire was in borrowing a nickname for him from a mischievous brute whom he kept in his garden. He presented D’Argens with a house; when D’Argens went to take possession he found the walls adorned with pictures of all the most indecent and humiliating episodes of his own life. This was a type of Frederick’s delicacy towards some of those whom he honoured with his friendship. It is true that, except Voltaire and Maupertuis, most of the French philosophers whom Frederick seduced into coming to live at Berlin were not too good for the corporal’s horse-play of which they were the victims. But then we know, further, what to think of a man whose self-respect fails to proscribe gross and unworthy companions. He is either a lover ofparasites, which Frederick certainly was not, or else the most execrable cynic, the cynic who delights in any folly or depravity that assures him how right he is in despising ‘that damned race.’
Frederick need not have summoned the least worthy French freethinkers, men like D’Argens and La Mettrie and De Prades, in their own way as little attractive in life and in doctrine as any monk or Geneva preacher, to warrant him in thinking meanly of mankind. If any one wants to know what manner of spirit this great temporal deliverer of Europe was of, he may find what he seeks in the single episode of the negotiations at Klein-Schnellendorf in 1741. There, although he had made and was still bound by a solemn treaty of alliance with France, he entered into secret engagements with the Hungarian Queen, to be veiled by adroitly pretended hostilities. Even if, as an illustrious apologist of the Prussian King is reduced to plead, this is in a certain fashion defensible, on the ground that France and Austria were both playing with cogged dice, and therefore the other dicer of the party was in self-defence driven to show himself their superior in these excellent artifices, there still seems a gratuitous infamy in hinting to the Austrian general, as Frederick did, how he might assault with advantage the French enemy, Frederick’s own ally at the moment.138This was the author of the plea for political morality, called the Anti-Machiavel, whose publication Voltaire had superintendedthe year before, and, for that matter, had done his best to prevent. Still, as Frederick so graciously said of his new guest and old friend: ‘He has all the tricks of a monkey; but I shall make no sign, for I need him in my study of French style. One may learn good things from a scoundrel: I want to know his French; what is his morality to me?’ And so a royal statesman may have the manners of the coarsest corporal, and the morality of the grossest cynic, and still have both the eye to discern, and the hand to control, the forces of a great forward movement.
Frederick had the signal honour of accepting his position, and taking up with an almost perfect fortitude the burden which it laid upon him. ‘We are not masters of our own lot,’ he wrote to Voltaire, immediately after his accession to the throne; ‘the whirlwind of circumstances carries us away, and we must suffer ourselves to be carried away.’139And what he said in this hour of exaltation he did not deny nearly twenty years later, when his fortunes seemed absolutely desperate. ‘If I had been born a private person,’ he wrote to him in 1759, ‘I would give up everything for love of peace; but a man is bound to take on the spirit of his position.’140‘Philosophy teaches us to do our duty, to serve our country faithfully at the price of our blood and our case, to sacrifice for it our whole existence.’141Men are alsocalled upon by their country to abstain from sacrificing their existence, and if Frederick’s sense of duty to his subjects had been as perfect as it was exceptionally near being so, he would not have carried a phial of poison round his neck.142Still on the whole he devoted himself to his career with a temper that was as entirely calculated for the overthrow of a tottering system, as Voltaire’s own. It is difficult to tell whether Frederick’s steady attention to letters and men of letters, and his praiseworthy endeavours to make Berlin a true academic centre, were due to a real and disinterested love of knowledge, and a sense of its worth to the spirit of man, or still more to weak literary vanity, and a futile idea of universal fame so far as his own productions went, and a purely utilitarian purpose so far as his patronage of the national academy was concerned. One thing is certain, that the philosophy which he learnt from French masters, which Voltaire brought in his proper person to Berlin, and to which Frederick to the end of his days was always adding illustrative commentaries, never made any impression on Germany. The teaching of Leibnitz and Wolf stood like a fortified wall in the face of the French invasion, and whatever effective share French speculation had upon Germany, was through the influence of Descartes upon Leibnitz.
The dissolution of the outer framework of the European state-system, for which Frederick’s seizureof Silesia was the first clear signal, followed as it was by the indispensable suppression of the mischievous independence, so called, of barbaric and feudal Poland, where bishops and nobles held a people in the most oppressive bondage, can only concern us here slightly, because it was for the time only indirectly connected with the characteristic work of Voltaire’s life. But, though indirect, the connection may be seen at our distance of time to have been marked and unmistakable. The old order and principles of Europe were to receive a new impress, and the decaying system of the middle age to be replaced by a polity of revolution, which should finally change the relations of nations, the types of European government, and the ideas of spiritual control.
In 1733 the war of the Polish succession between Austria and Russia on the one hand, and France and Spain on the other, had given the first great shock to the house of Austria, which was compelled to renounce the pretensions and territory of the Empire in Italy, or nearly all of them, in favour of the Spanish Bourbons, as well as to surrender Lorraine to Stanislas, with reversion to the crown of France. We may notice in passing that it was at Stanislas’ court of Lunéville that Voltaire and the Marquise du Châtelet passed their last days together. The wars of the Polish succession were remarkable for another circumstance. They were the first occasion of the decisive interference of Russia in Western affairs, an only less important disturbance of Europe than the first great interferenceof Prussia a few years later. The falling to pieces of the old Europe was as inevitable as, more than twelve centuries before, had been the dissolution of that yet older Europe whose heart had been not Vienna but Rome. Russia and Prussia were not the only novel elements. There was a third from over the sea, the American colonies of France and England.
Roman Europe had been a vast imperial state, with slavery for a base. Then, after the feudal organisation had run its course, there was a long and chaotic transition of dynastic and territorial wars, frightfully wasteful of humanity and worse than unfruitful to progress. In vain do historians, intent on vindicating the foregone conclusions of the optimism which a distorted notion about final causes demands or engenders in them, try to show these hateful contests as parts of a harmonious scheme of things, in which many diverse forces move in a mysterious way to a common and happy end. As if any good use, for instance, were served by the transfer, for one of the chief results of the war of the Polish succession, of the Italian provinces of the Empire of the Spanish Bourbons. As if any good or permanent use were served by the wars which ended in the Peace of Utrecht, when victorious England conceded, and with much wisdom conceded, the precise point which she had for so many years been disputing. From the Peace of Westphalia to the beginning of the Seven Years’ War, it is not too much to say that there was a century of purely artificial strife on the continent of Europe, ofwars as factious, as merely personal, as unmeaning, as the civil war of the Fronde was all of these things. In speaking roundly of this period, we leave out of account the first Silesian War, because the issue between Prussia and Austria was not decisively fought out until the final death-struggle from 1756 to 1763. It was the entry of Frederick the Great upon the scene, that instantly raised international relations into the region of real matter and changed a strife of dynasties, houses, persons, into a vital competition between old forces and principles and new. The aimless and bloody commotions which had raged over Europe, and ground men’s lives to dust in the red mill of battle, came for a time to an end, and their place was taken by a tremendous conflict, on whose issue hung not merely the triumph of a dynasty, but the question of the type to which future civilisation was to conform.
In the preliminary war which followed immediately upon the death of Charles VI. in 1740, and which had its beginning in Frederick’s invasion of Silesia, circumstances partially marched in the usual tradition, with France and Austria playing opposite sides in an accustomed game. Before the opening of the Seven Years’ War the cardinal change of policy and alliances had taken place. We are not concerned with the court intrigues that brought the change about, with the intricate manœuvres of the Jesuits, or the wounded vanity of Bernis, whose verses Frederick laughed at, or the pique of Pompadour, whom Frederick declinedto count an acquaintance. When conflicting forces of tidal magnitude are at work, as they were in the middle of the last century, the play of mere personal aims and ambitions is necessarily of secondary importance; because we may always count upon there being at least one great power that clearly discerns its own vital interest, and is sure therefore to press with steady energy in its own special direction. That power was Austria. One force of this kind is enough to secure a universal adjustment of all the others in their natural places.
The situation was apparently very complex. There were in the middle of the century two great pairs of opposed interests, the interests of France and England on the ocean and in America, and the interests of Austria and Prussia in Central Europe. The contest was in each of the two cases much more than a superficial affair of dynasties or division of territory, to meet the requirements of the metaphysical diplomacy of the balance of power. It was a re-opening in far vaster proportions of those profound issues of new religion and old which had only been dammed up, and not permanently settled, by the great Peace of Westphalia in 1648. In vaster proportions, not merely because the new struggle between the Catholic and Protestant powers extended into the new world, but because the forces contained in these two creeds had been widened and developed, and a multitude of indirect consequences, entirely apart from theology and church discipline, depended upon the triumph ofGreat Britain and Prussia. The Governments of France and Austria represented the feudal and military idea, not in the strength of that idea while it was still alive, but in the narrow and oppressive form of its decay. No social growth was possible under its shadow, for one of its essential conditions was discouragement, active and passive, of commercial industry, the main pathway then open to an advancing people. Again, both France and Austria represented the old type of monarchy, as distinguished alike from the aristocratic oligarchy of England, and the new type of monarchy which Prussia introduced into Europe, frugal, encouraging industry, active in supervision, indefatigable in improving the laws. Let us not omit above all things the splendid religious toleration, of which Prussia set so extraordinarily early an example to Europe. The Protestants whom episcopal tyranny drove from Salzburg found warm hospitality among their northern brethren. While the professors of the reformed faith were denied civil status in France, and subjected to persecution of a mediæval bloodiness, one Christian was counted exactly as another in Prussia. While England was revelling in the infliction of atrocious penal laws on her Catholic citizens, Prussia extended even to the abhorred Jesuit the shelter which was denied him in Spain and at Rome. The transfer of territory from Austria to Prussia meant the extension of toleration in that territory. Silesia, for instance, no sooner became Prussian, than the University of Breslau, whose advantages hadhitherto been rigidly confined to Catholics, was at once compulsorily opened to Protestants and Catholics alike. In criticising Frederick’s despotism let us recognise how much enlightenment, how much of what is truly modern, was to be found in the manner in which this despotic power was exercised, long before the same enlightened principles were accepted in other countries.