Hence also the propriety of discrimination among the various kinds of fact which are at the historian’s disposal, and in this order Voltaire’s whole soul revolted against the reigning practice and prescription. ‘I would rather have details,’ he wrote to one of his intimates so early in his career as 1735, {about Racine and Despréaux, Molière, Bossuet, Descartes, than I would about the battle of Steinkirk. There is nothing left but the names of men who led battalions and squadrons. There is no return to the human race from a hundred engagements; but the great men I have spoken of prepared pure and everlasting pleasures for mortals still unborn. A canal-sluice, a picture by Poussin, a fine tragedy, a truth established, are all of them things a thousand times more precious than the whole mass of annals of the court, and than all the narratives of campaigns.’245From this and from a multitude of other passages, as well as from his actual compositions, we perceive that the activity of a court and the manœuvres of an army were no longer in Voltaire’s eyes the fit substance of history. One reason for this might be his lively sense of the impossibility of knowing the character and motives of people with whom one has not lived, or the real cause of even the most momentous intrigues and negotiations in which one has not taken a personal share. A still
deeper reason would be his most rational conviction that these matters are only of moment to us for their larger results and unmistakable outcome, and from the profoundly true and important principle that the progress of intellectual enlightenment, material prosperity, and moral elevation is not only a feature in the history of a nation, but does itself constitute that history, while all records of other transactions in the course of its annals, achievements in diplomacy, feats of arms, revolutions in policy, have no true historic value, except for the light they shed upon this economic, intellectual, and moral progress, and are not worth studying except in that light. We may see the immediate effects of Voltaire’s influence most markedly of all in Gibbon, but in a less important shape in the general account of the middle ages which Robertson contributed to his History of Charles V. (1769), and which remained for many years the most instructive piece that our literature possessed upon the character and spirit of the feudal system and other features of the middle ages. Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) bears traces of the same influence. In both of these cases much also must be added for the kindred authority of Montesquieu. One has some hesitation in adding Hume to the list in the present connection, because his history, the composition of which extended from 1752 to 1763, ought perhaps to be counted rather the direct and independent outcome of the French philosophic spirit, than of the French historic spiritwhich itself proceeded from the philosophy; and because, moreover, Hume, as a historian, has some of Voltaire’s most serious defects, without that breadth and size which constituted his greatest merit, though it is needless to point out how many merits Hume had of his own. It is worth remarking that in some pages which he wrote on Hume’s History,246Voltaire gave it a joyful welcome, as might be expected, and particularly to those parts which we now esteem most lightly, such as the contemptuous account of Cromwell.
To return, however, to the point from which we have digressed. One very direct consequence of the historical principle we have described, and of the way in which it was illustrated in the histories of Lewis XIV. and Lewis XV., and most of all in the Essay on Manners, was the degradation of war from the highest to the lowest place among the objects of the historian’s regard. War began for the first time to be systematically considered and treated as a mere instrument and means, and not as one of the most serious of social ends. We can never honour Voltaire too long nor too deeply for the vehemence and sincerity of his abhorrence of the military spirit. Nowhere do we feel more distinctly that he marked the end of the mediæval temper, than in his noble protests against the glory of bloodshed. The great orators of the church to the very last donned the robes of their most sumptuous rhetoric, when they were called toconsecrate the virtues of the victorious soldier. The pages of the Old Testament supplied them with a hundred baleful heroes to whom they might liken their warrior, and a hundred cruel and bloody tropes with which they might decorate the funeral oration. So long as the atrocities of the Hebrew chiefs and people, their treacheries and slaughters, were held sacred and celebrated with unction, it was not likely that the voice of the peacemaker could make itself heard.
Voltaire not only held up these demoralising records to the odium they deserve; he directly taxed the clergy with their failure to discharge the very highest part of their duty. Of the five or six thousand sermons of Massillon, he asked, are there a couple where you could pick out a word or two against the scourge and crime of war? Bourdaloue preached against impurity, but what sermon did he ever direct against the murder, rapine, brigandage, and universal rage, which desolate the world? ‘Miserable physicians of souls, you declaim for five quarters of an hour against the mere pricks of a pin, and say no word on the curse which tears us into a thousand pieces! Philosophers and moralists, burn your books: so long as the caprice of a handful of men will cause the massacring in all loyalty of thousands of our brothers, the part of the human race which is devoted to heroism will contain all that is most frightful in human nature. What concern to me are humanity, benevolence, modesty, temperance, gentleness, wisdom, piety, so long as half an ounce of lead shatters my body, and I die at twentyin torments unspeakable, surrounded by five or six thousand dead or dying, while my eyes, opening for the last time, see the town I was born in delivered to fire and sword, and the last sounds that reach my ears are the shrieks of women and children expiring in the ruins—and the whole for the pretended interests of a man that we do not know?’247His rebuke to Montesquieu is still more distinctively modern. The author of the Esprit des Lois had said that among societies it sometimes happens that natural defence possibly involves the necessity of attack, when a nation perceives that a longer peace would place another nation in a position to destroy it.248‘If ever there was a war evidently unjust,’ Voltaire replies, ‘it is that which you propose; it is to go and kill your neighbour for fear your neighbour should be in a condition to attack you; that is to say, you must run the risk of ruining your country, in the hope of ruining without reason some other country.... If your neighbour grows too powerful during a time of peace, what hinders you from growing powerful like him? If he has made alliances, make alliances on your side. If, having less religion, he has all the more manufacturers and soldiers for it, imitate him in so sage an economy. If he drills his sailors better, drill yours too: all that is perfectly just. But to expose your people to the most horrible misery, in the idea, which is so often chimerical, of crushing your dear brother,the most serene bordering prince—! ‘twas never for a president of a pacific order to give you such a piece of counsel.’249The book in which this sound view of justice and expediency in the dealings of nations with one another was pressed upon the attention of France, was published in 1764, five years before the birth of the man who turned the tide back, and made the international policy of France a synonym both for iniquity and folly. On the 15th of August 1769 Voltaire concluded his letter to D’Alembert with his usual vivacity: ‘Adieu; my compliments to the devil, for it is he who governs the world.’250If he had known that, while he was writing, Napoleon Bonaparte had come into the world, and could at the same time have foreseen the new-comer’s destiny, he might have said the same thing more seriously. Voltaire never played the sentimentalist. He knew that there are complexities of affairs which only the sword can cut. But he was the first influential writer—for the abbé Saint-Pierre, so undeservedly laughed at for his dreams of perpetual peace, had no influence to speak of—who deliberately placed war among retrograde agencies, and deliberately dwelt upon peaceful industry as the true life of nations.251
Diplomacy and its complex subterranean processes, which have occupied so extremely disproportionate a space in written history, and which are in actedhistory responsible for so much evil, were in the same way informally relegated to the region of inhuman occupations. Its methods were the tortuous and depressing methods of the same past, which had made the many the playthings and unhappy instruments of the few, and had never interrupted the triumphant manœuvres of craft and subtlety by a whisper for the claims of humanity and justice. Voltaire scarcely ever speaks of negotiations between contending powers without a shrewd thrust, half contemptuous and half angry. The plain where some negotiations took place in the struggles among the descendants of Charles the Great is still called the Field of Lies; a name, he says, that might well be common to most spots where men have negotiated.252And this represents his general tone in speaking of a branch of activity which may interest the professional diplomatist in all its details, but which, as he thought, can only concern the historical student in its results. Here Voltaire represented a marked tendency, which waxes stronger as societies grow more penetrated with popular forces, to divest diplomacy of a professional quality, and to throw the adjustment of the relations between nations as entirely as possible into the hands of plain men of firm and upright character, and full knowledge of the special matters at issue.
It is, however, when we come to the ground idea of the Essay on Manners,253that we feel the full breathof the modern spirit, and perceive that at length we are nearing the wide expanse of the sea. There we emerge absolutely from the narrow conception of universal history, with which Bossuet had familiarised men’s minds in the Discourse on Universal History. This famous piece, which has had at least as much praise as it merits, if we are to consider reason as well as eloquence, was fundamentally and in substance no more than a bit of theological commonplace splendidly decorated. Bossuet indeed spoke of ‘the concatenation of human affairs,’ but only in the same sentence with ‘the sequence of the counsels of God.’ The gorgeous rhetorician of the church was not likely to rise philosophically into the larger air of universal history, properly so called. His eloquent discourse is a vindication of divine foresight, by means of an intensely narrow survey of such sets of facts as might be thought not inconsistent with the deity’s fixed purpose to make one final and decisive revelation to men. No one who looks upon the vast assemblage of stupendous human circumstances, from the first origin of man upon the earth, as merely the ordained antecedent of what, seen from the long procession of all the ages, figures in so diminutive a consummation as the Catholic church, is likely to obtain a very effective hold of that broad sequence and many-linked chain of events, to which Bossuet gave a right name,but whose real meaning he never was even near seizing. His merit is that he did in a small and rhetorical way, what Montesquieu and Voltaire afterwards did in a truly comprehensive and philosophical way; he pressed forward general ideas in connection with the recorded movements of the chief races of mankind. For a teacher of history to leave the bare chronicler’s road so far as to declare, for example, the general principle, inadequate and overstated as it is, that ‘religion and civil government are the two points on which human things revolve,’ even this was a clear step in advance—and to dismiss the long series of emperors from Augustus to Alexander Severus in two or three pages was to show a rare sense of large historic proportion. Again, Bossuet’s expressions of ‘the concatenation of the universe,’ of the interdependence of the parts of so vast a whole, of there coming no great change without having its causes in foregoing centuries, and of the true object of history being to observe in connection with each epoch those secret dispositions of events which prepared the way for great changes, as well as the momentous conjunctures which more immediately brought them to pass—all these phrases seem to point to a true and philosophic survey. But they end in themselves, and lead nowhither. The chain is an arbitrary and one-sided collection of facts. The writer does not cautiously follow and feel after the successive links, but forges and chooses and arranges them after a pattern of his own, which was fixed independently of them.A scientific term or two is not enough to disguise the purely theological essence of the treatise.
Bossuet’s Discourse is moreover constructed wholly on the theory that a special revelation was delivered to the Jews, and in tracing their course we have fast hold of the chain by which it has pleased heaven to communicate to earth all the truths we possess as to the highest things. Such a conception stifles a modern reader. The first pages of the Essay on Manners, sometimes placed separately as the Philosophy of History, prove that we have escaped from the cave. The chosen people fell into rank with other peoples, that equally supposed themselves to be chosen by their own peculiar gods. They lose the towering pre-eminence in virtue and light and divine favour with which their own records and Bossuet’s interpretation had so splendidly invested them. We find that their pretensions were not unique, but universal among nations in such a stage; that their virtues were not singular, though some of their vices seem so. In a word, if some of Voltaire’s details are crude and rudimentary, at least he has the merit of showing to his unaccustomed readers what vast epochs of time, what uncounted multitudes of men, what varied movements of the human spirit, surround the little speck of Judaism.
The bulk of the Essay was composed in 1740, but it is probable that this preliminary examination of other oriental nations, their practices, institutions, and religious ideas, was suggested byMontesquieu’s memorable book, which appeared in 1748, some years before the publication of the Essay on Manners. It is in point of execution much less satisfactory than what follows, for Voltaire’s knowledge of Greek and Hebrew was inadequate, and he fell into various errors which his adversaries happily possessed scholarship enough to expose. In the modern provinces of the book, which constitute the important part of it, he was much more entirely at home in his subject. Here his familiarity with detail, considering the vast quantity of his other employments, is extremely surprising, and perhaps in no other book of equal generality have there been discovered so few serious inaccuracies, though none have encountered more hostile critics.
Prejudice, alas, spares truth and light no more when it narrows the vision of a free-thinker, than when it distorts the faculty of the devout. Being a reaction against Bossuet’s unreasonable exaltation of the Jews and their history, Voltaire’s conception of the place due to them partook of the inevitable fault of all reactions, and left out of sight considerations which it is eminently unscientific not to remember. ‘You never find,’ he says, ‘a generous action in the annals of the Hebrews; they knew neither hospitality nor liberality nor clemency. Their sovereign bliss is to practise usury with foreigners, and this spirit of usury is so rooted in their hearts, that it is the continual object of the figures they employ in the eloquence which is peculiar to them. Their glory isto deliver to fire and slaughter the small villages of which they may be able to take possession. They assassinate their masters when they are slaves, and they never know how to pardon when they are victorious; they are the enemies of the human race.’254This is as great an exaggeration on one side, as Bossuet’s exaltation of them and their deeds was on the other side. We ought to admit what abominable traits the character and history of this race unfortunately present, without forgetting how much is owing to them for preserving in its sublimest shape, and investing with the most deeply impressive images and associations, that idea of monotheism which, if destined to be superseded by other ideas more commensurate with the limits of human intelligence, must still be counted the germ of much that is purest and loftiest and most inspiring among the ideals of western civilisation.
The same kind of extreme prejudice which drove Voltaire into maintaining of the Jews, not that they were a people whom we should do very ill either to imitate or admire, but nothing less than that they were the enemies of the human race, found vent in such assertions as that if any one could have restored the Empire to its strength, or at all events retarded its fall, that man was the Emperor Julian.255A historian may justly contend, if he thinks that the evidence warrants him, that Julian belongs to the type ofvirtuous reactionists, just as we may say it of Wesley or the chiefs of the Tractarians. But to make such an assertion as that the repression of Christianity after the middle of the fourth century, even supposing it to have been possible of achievement, could have given back to the rapidly declining empire a strength of which all the roots were lifeless, was to falsify history for the sake of exalting the name of an apostate. A Roman aristocrat, blind to the real operation and comparative value of the forces at work, might be pardoned for holding Christianity guilty of the general dissolution around him; but it was a strange phantasy for a philosopher of the eighteenth century to suppose that the Christian system, in the shape which it had assumed by Julian’s time, did not offer principles of firmer association, than the mere rites of a paganism which was spontaneously decaying with a rapidity that increased day by day.256There is no stronger illustration of the twist which polemical fury may give to the most acute intelligence, than this belief of Voltaire’s, that an organisation which had attracted to itself every able and statesmanlike intellect of the time, could do less for the regeneration of the Empire than the initiated disciple of Platonist theurgy.
His account of the history of the church is composed in the same vein, and we may see where Gibbon, who was a reader of Voltaire, drew theinspiration of the solemn sneer with which he sapped solemn creed.257‘So many frauds, so many errors, so many disgusting absurdities,’ says Voltaire, ‘with which we have been inundated for seventeen hundred years, have been unable to do any harm to our religion. It is unquestionably divine, since seventeen centuries of imposture and imbecility have not destroyed it.’258Voltaire thought as ill as possible of the century to which he belonged; we cannot therefore charge him with the inconsistency which marks some of his most prominent disciples, who while they accepted such an account of the vileness of the church as he had given them, did not scruple to believe that, as if by miracle, seventeen centuries of steady depravation wereper saltumto be followed by an eighteenth and other centuries of boundless virtue and enlightenment. Still it is wonderful that he should have been able to appreciate the admirable character of the best sovereign of the thirteenth century, Lewis IX.,259and to describe his motives and his achievements so generously, and yet should never have thought of the education and surrounding spiritual conditions by which such a character had been formed. If the power of Catholicism for evil was so great and decisive, it would have been reasonable to suppose that it had some share also in moulding to good those who came forth from it the very flower of humanity. ButVoltaire did not know how much a man is the product of a system operating on, and with, the individual predisposition, or he would not have chidden St. Lewis for remaining on the level of the prejudice of his time, instead of changing the spirit of his age.260How should St. Lewis have risen from the prejudice of his age, when it was exactly that prejudice which had formed him, and of which he represented the worthy side?
Even without this inconsistency, the fundamental error is bad enough. We get very wearied of the persistent identification of the church throughout the dark ages with fraud and imposture and sinister self-seeking, when we have once learnt, what is undoubtedly the most important principle in the study of those times, that it was the churchmen who kept the flickering light of civilisation alive, amid the raging storms of uncontrolled passion and violence. The truth is that Voltaire never realised civilisation as an organism, which if not surrounded with the proper conditions of life will perish, and which will prosper and wax stronger exactly in proportion as it is nourished. That the light was more than once very near sinking in the west under the waves of barbarism, as it has actually sunk in the eastern portions of the Empire, seems to have been an all-important fact which he either never saw, or which, if he saw it, never impressed him as assuredly it ought to have done.
This is the more curious as he was able to perceive, in a way in which it were much to be wishedthat more recent historians might show an equal discernment, that we ought to use the terms of civilisation, with all their complex and accumulated associations, in an extremely modified sense in speaking of the centuries between the fifth and the thirteenth, just as it is the gravest mistake to suppose that, because you can express the results of the various contests of those times in terms of philosophy, therefore the actors in any one of them were both conscious of its most general bearings, and were animated by large and philosophical inclinations. For example, after he has told us how William the Conqueror sent to the Pope Harold’s battle-standard and a small portion of the small treasure that an English king might possess in those times, he proceeds to reduce the transaction to what he conceived to be its true proportions, in the following manner: ‘Thus,’ he says, ‘a barbarian, the son of a harlot, the murderer of a legitimate king, shares the plunder of this king with another barbarian; for if you take away the names of duke of Normandy, king of England, and pope, all is reduced to the action of a Norman brigand and a Lombard receiver of plunder.261This being the case, the secular possessors of power being so rude, petty, and barbarous, their contests being ‘those of bears and wolves,’ their rapacity and violence being tempered by few of those ideas of justice which form the bonds of society in its more advanced stages, it ought to have struck even the most ardent enemy of ecclesiasticalpretensions as a thing in the highest degree unphilosophical, to pour all the ill epithets of usurpation upon the virtuous efforts of the great churchmen, who were least touched by the spirit of violence, to take away as much power as they could from barbarous princes and nobles, who were most impregnated with that and all other dark spirits. The smaller the difference between the least moral and the most moral orders in a community, the more desirable it is that the order with even a small advantage should acquire as much power as possible; for the reason that so near an approach to equality in morals is most likely to occur when the average is low, and when therefore the need to prevent it from falling any lower is most urgent. Granting that the ecclesiastics were only slightly the superiors of the barbarous laymen, this is all the better ground for rejoicing that they succeeded in converting their ascendancy of moral idea into an ascendancy of political fact.
In short, Voltaire’s great panorama, magnificent as it is and most royally planned, is not drawn in lines and with colour that explain the story or lay bare the principles of its progress. The plan is imposed from without, just as in Bossuet’s case, not carefully sought from within the facts themselves. What is meant then by the assertion that Voltaire’s Essay is one of the foundations of modern history? If he gives no explanation of the course of history, none to himself probably, and none to us assuredly, what is his merit? This, that he has fully placed before us the historywhich is to be explained; that he has presented the long external succession of facts in their true magnitude and in a definite connection; that he did not write a history of France, or of the papacy, or of the Mahometan power, or of the crusades, but that he saw the advantage, as we see the unavoidable necessity, of comprehending in a single idea and surveying in a single work the various activities, the rise and fall of power, the transference from one to another of political predominance, the contributions to the art of living, among the societies which were once united in a single empire. The history of each of these societies, England, France, Spain, Italy, the Byzantine Empire, is followed in relation to the history of Europe, which is indeed composed of these co-ordinate parts. The movement of communities since the dissolution of the Roman Empire is exhibited in a collective form, and that it should be exhibited and accepted in this form was obviously a preliminary step to an organic treatment of the multiplied laws of social physics.
‘There are some events,’ he wrote in a note to his best poem, ‘which have effects, and others which have none. It is with the chain of events as it is with a genealogical tree, where we perceive branches that become extinct at the first generation, and others that continue the race. Many events remain without any filiation. It is thus that in every machine there are effects necessary to the movement, while others are indifferent, following the operation of the first, and leading to nothing. The wheels of a vehicle serve tomake it go; but whether they raise a little more or a little less dust, the journey is accomplished equally. Such is the general order of the world, that the links of the chain are not deranged by a little more or a little less of irregularity.’262The figures in this passage serve adequately to describe his own treatment. We see in the Essay the lines of the genealogical tree, but we do not learn the laws of the transmission of qualities from one stock to another; we see the links of the chain, but not the conditions which fastened each to the other; conditions, indeed, only to be grasped through a scientific study of human nature which Voltaire had never made; and finally we see the towering car drawn slowly along a devious road by sweat and strain of millions, but we know not why it went by this road rather than another. In a word, the inner machinery of societies and of their movement remains as far from our sight as it ever was. The study of those economic and material forces which have so profound an influence upon social transformations, was in its infancy, and the Economists, who really saw that there are definite laws regulating the play of these forces, unfortunately mixed up with their speculations a number of chimerical fancies, which Voltaire was too acute to accept, but not patient enough to sift.263In this respect he is asdefective as Gibbon, in whose book, so justly famous for its splendid breadth of conception and industrious elaboration of detail, we have much of that meagre philosophy which consisted in the exposure of falsehood, but little of the true science which shows us the numerous organs of society in connection with their actual play and function. Neither Gibbon nor Voltaire made any contribution, nor seems to have been aware of the importance of contributing, to that study of the fundamental conditions of the social union, which Aristotle commenced, and which both Bodin in the sixteenth century and Montesquieu in the eighteenth had so meritoriously continued.264Nevertheless, it was much to lead men to study the history of modern Europe as a whole, and we may say of Voltaire in connection with history what he said of Corneille in connection with tragedy—‘It is so great a merit to have opened the career, and inventors are so much above other men, that posterity pardons their greatest faults.’265
Voltaire, as we have seen, took possession of Ferney in 1758, and he lived here almost without a break for something like twenty years. His estate was a feudal seigniory in the district of Gex, on the very frontier of Switzerland, but in France, though enjoying immunity from French taxation. He built a new manor-house, and in his capacity of lord of the manor replaced the dilapidated little church of the estate by a new one, very small, very plain, and about which, notwithstanding its famous inscription of which he so often boasted,—Deo erexit Voltaire,—much more noise has been made, than so simple and natural a proceeding at all calls for.266Madame Denis kept house for him, and according to the Paris gossips of the time, on an extravagant scale, which often produced ruptures between the two. Guests were incessantand the hospitality ungrudging.267He complained during the Seven Years’ War of the embarrassment of being a Frenchman, when he had to entertain daily at dinner Russians, English, and Germans.268He protests that he is weary of being hotel-keeper in general for all Europe, and so weary was he at one time of this noisy and costly post, that the establishment was partially suspended for upwards of a year. One of the most generous of Voltaire’s many generous acts was his reception into his house of a child who had no other claim on him than that of being the great-grand-daughter of the uncle of Corneille. A soldier ought to succour the niece of his general, he said. He took the liveliest interest in the little maid’s education, though she appears to have been a sulky pupil, and eventually he married her with due dower to one Dupuits. The bustle and expense of his establishment became greater than ever, and in the spring of 1768 Paris was as much electrified by news of a revolution at Ferney, as she has been since by some revolutions in her own streets. Madame Denis and the two Dupuits had suddenly made their way to Paris, and for a year and a half Voltaire was left in peace, part of which he employed sensibly in having his house cleaned from cellar to garret,—a bit of newswhich is handed down to our times, since, according to Grimm, the domestic arrangements of the manor-house at Ferney interested at that moment more or less every court in Europe.269In the autumn of 1769 Madame Denis returned, and with her the old stir and extravagance were resumed, for Voltaire was one of the best-humoured of men to his family and friends, and could deny his niece nothing. We have more than one description of this too immortal niece. They are all equally unflattering. Her homeliness of appearance amounted to the ugliness that is bitter. She was destitute of wit, and had a vulgar soul. Born to be the insipid gossip of a bourgeois circle, says one charitable writer, but having by chance the first man in the nation for an uncle, she learnt to chatter about literature and the theatre, as a parrot learns.270She wrote a comedy; but the players, out of respect for Voltaire, declined to act in it. She wrote a tragedy; but the one favour, which the repeated entreaties of years could never wring from Voltaire, was that he would read it. She had histrionic as well as dramatic ambition, and here worked a miracle, for her representation of Mérope once drew floods of tears from some English ladies.271Her affectation of intellect had not cooled the reality of simple sensation, and if she loved art, she was said not to despise gallantry. At any rate, though she was only sixteen yearsyounger than her uncle,272she needed continual festivities and crowds of guests.
Ferney was rather a difficult spot for a woman with a passion for the hum of cities. For five months in the year, says Voltaire, my deserts are, on the admission of Russians, worse than Siberia itself; we see thirty leagues of mountain, snow, and precipices: it is Naples in summer, Lapland in winter.273One year he marks with word of bitterness snow falling thick in the middle of May. Four feet of snow in the courtyard constituted a normal winter state. He commemorates with enthusiasm how one day, through these four feet of snow, he saw porters bringing him a hamper of Champagne from a friend; for the more generous sort of Burgundy with which he ordinarily recruited himself had fallen short, and he had been reduced to the humble vintage of Beaujolais.
Yet in the midst of a thousand discomforts and hardships we never hear him wishing to be back in Paris. It remained to him the accursed city, as it had been before his journey to England. He always thought with horror of its cabal, intrigue, frivolity, and sovereign indifference to the ruin of the kingdom and the shedding of innocent blood. There can be no doubt that this wise exile prolonged his days. He was constantly complaining of illness, and he passedmonths at a time in bed, which may in truth have been the best possible preservative of life for one of his temperament. Yet in spite of this avoidance of society, this passion for his study, the man of ordinary capacity, with no more than an ordinary working day, may marvel how amid so many distractions the master of the house contrived to write so many scores of pieces, large and small, and so many hundreds of letters, grave and gay. Of these letters nearly seven thousand are already in print, and M. Beuchot, most carefully informed of all Voltaire’s editors, thinks there are likely to be quite as many more still in undiscovered existence. Ferney was the centre of the most universal and varied correspondence that any one man has ever carried on. Frederick the Great was not the only crowned head with whom Voltaire interchanged royal communication. Catharine II. of Russia, of Anhalt-Zerbst by birth, was the helpful patroness of Diderot and D’Alembert, and was always eager to hear some word from the patriarch of their encyclopædic church, only praying him not to think her too importunate. Christian VII. of Denmark apologises for not being able at a stroke to remove all the obstacles that lie in the way of the civil liberty of his subjects. Gustavus III. of Sweden is elated by the thought that Voltaire sometimes casts a glance on what is going on in the North, and protests that this is their greatest encouragement to do as well as they can in all ways.274Joseph II. would fain havecalled at Ferney while travelling incognito through France, but fear of his mother’s displeasure held him back, the high and devout nature of Maria Theresa always finding Voltaire’s mockery of sacred things deeply repugnant, as we may easily believe.
Beside sovereigns who wrote to him as to an equal, every young aspirant to literary distinction, however unknown and obscure, sought a criticism from Ferney. Twenty years before he settled down here, Voltaire had been consulted by Vauvenargues, and had replied with words of painstaking and generous counsel. It was always the same with him. No young author ever solicited advice in vain, and he was never sparing either of trouble or praise. The Marquis of Chastellux sent him a copy of his Félicité Publique, and was raised to the seventh heaven by a letter of thanks, in which Voltaire tells him: ‘I covered the margin of my copy with notes, as I always do when a book charms and instructs me; I even took the liberty of not always sharing the author’s opinion. I am very old and very feeble, but such reading makes me young again.’ And the letter contains a large number of points where he thinks the author in error.275
Besides kings and the writers of books, plain men also besought his dictum on high matters. ‘A burgomaster of Middleburg,’ he informs Madame du Deffand, ‘whom I do not know, wrote to me a littlewhile since, to ask me in confidence whether there is a God or not; whether, in case there be one, he takes any heed of us; whether matter is eternal; whether it can think; whether the soul is immortal; and begging me to answer by return of post.’276
One may suspect that a little colouring is added here by the master hand, but the substantial facts are probable enough. He corresponded with cardinals, marshals of France, and bishops, and he corresponded with Helvétius and with Diderot, who, greatly to the indignation of the business-like patriarch, had a bad habit of leaving letters to answer themselves.277
If two cavalry officers fell to disputing over the mess-table as to the propriety of using some bit of old French, it was to Ferney that the reference was instantly made.278
We get an idea of the kind of imperial authority which attached to Voltaire’s judgment, from the eagerness with which Turgot sought, without revealing his name, an opinion from Ferney as to the worth of a translation with which he lightened the heavy burden of his intendance at Limoges, a translation of the Eclogues and Fourth Æneid into French metric verse. ‘They say,’ wrote Turgot, ‘that he is so busy with his Encyclopaedia as neither to speak nor to write to any one.’ If Turgot could have seen Voltaire’s correspondence for 1770, he would have found out how far this rumour was from the truth,and in fact he did get an answer to his own letter; but it can hardly have been very much more satisfactory than silence would have been, for Voltaire, while profuse in praise of the fidelity and spirit of the translation, unfortunately did not detect that it was meant for anything more ambitious than simple prose with enthusiasm in it.279As Turgot especially valued in the patriarch his ’superb ear,’ the blow was as sharp as it well could be. He was little concerned or surprised on learning the fallacious reasoning of the poet in political economy. ‘Reasoning,’ he adds, ‘has never been Voltaire’s strong point.’280And that was true in matters of abstract science, but he was an unrivalled populariser of the results of other people’s reasoning, from Newton’s Principia down to Middleton’s Free Enquiry, and this popularisation was what the conditions of the time caused to be most ardently demanded. The proof of the demand we may see in the extraordinary respect and curiosity, or dislike and alarm, with which Voltaire for the twenty crowning years of his life was regarded throughout the whole of civilised Europe.
It is impossible to read the multitudinous volumes of Voltaire’s correspondence, and they are being added to every two or three years, with entire satisfaction. They are wittier than any other letters in the world. For lightness, swiftness, grace, spontaneity, you can find no second to them, at however long an interval. But they abound in many things which are disagreeablein the letters of an old man who had so true an interest in the spread of virtue, knowledge, and the other conditions of human dignity. These, however, may be passed over as the innocent and unconscious unseemliness of a very gay nature living in a very free age. It is less easy to banish the unpleasant impressions with which we find him playing the equivocal part of being all things to all men. One would have been pleased to have a little more stiffness, a little less pliancy of phrase. We would not go through the world insisting on grim Puritanic earnestness at every moment of a man’s life, but Voltaire’s lively complaisance with all sorts of unworthy people is something worse than unedifying. One can hardly help sympathising with D’Alembert’s remonstrance. ‘You have rather spoilt the people who persecute us. ’Tis true you have had greater need than anybody else to keep them quiet, and that you have been obliged to offer a candle to Lucifer to save yourself from Beelzebub, but Lucifer has only grown the prouder, without Beelzebub growing the less malignant.’281The truth probably is that Voltaire did not always take—much thought of Lucifer or Beelzebub. For one thing, he was, as we have said more than once, intensely sympathetic by temperament, and in writing to a friend, or even an acquaintance only, he was for the moment animated by a lively good will and anxiety to be in harmony with his correspondent. There was nothing false in these purring pleasantries,with which he amused all correspondents alike. They came as naturally from his mobile and genial constitution, as an equality of prosaic moroseness comes from persons of fundamentally different constitutions. For another thing, the old fashion of his youth never dropped away from him, and the elaborate courteousness and friendly ardour of manner, which he had learnt among the aristocratic friends of the days of the Regency and afterwards at Paris and Versailles, did not desert him in the solitudes of the Jura. He was to the last a man of quality, as well as a crusher of the Infamous, and to the last he kept up the tone of one who had been a gentleman of the chamber to one king, and court-chamberlain to another. Voltaire’s temperament and earliest surroundings fully explain what was a more public, as well as more serious, falling away from the rigorous integrity which men are now accustomed to demand from the leaders of unpopular causes. His sins in this order are nearly as numerous as his public acts. Rousseau, perhaps we may say without breach of charity, as much from vanity as principle, prefixed his name to all that he wrote, and he paid the penalty in a life of wandering and persecution. Voltaire in his later days as invariably sheltered himself behind the anonymous, and not only disclaimed works of which it was notorious that he was the author, but insisted that his friends should impute them to this or that dead name. Nobody was deceived. While he got unwelcome credit for a multitude of pieces that were not his own, assuredlynothing really his ever failed to be set down to its true author. We can only say that this was the evil practice of the time, and that Voltaire was here little worse than Turgot and many another man of general virtuousness, to whom the ferocity of authority would not even allow freedom enough to plead for tolerance, much less to utter uncertified opinion. ‘Time,’ said D’Alembert, apologising for some whiff of orthodoxy which Voltaire scented in one or two articles in the Encyclopaedia, ‘will make people distinguish what we thought from what we said.’282Condorcet, as we know, deliberately defended these deceptions, which did not deceive, while they did protect. He contended that if you rob a man of his natural right of publishing his opinions, then you lose your own right to hear the truth from the man’s lips.283Undoubtedly all laws admit that duress introduces new conditions into the determination of what is right and wrong in action, or at least that it mitigates pains and penalties, and the position of every claimant for free speech was in those days emphatically a position of duress. The choice lay between disavowal on the one hand, and on the other abstention from proclaiming truths by which only society could gain the freedom it so much needed; between strict anonymity and leaving the darkness unbroken. And we must remember that disingenuous tricks to conceal authorship were not assuredly so unpardonable, when resorted to as protectivesagainst imprisonment, confiscation, and possible peril of life, as they are now among ourselves, when they serve no more defensible purpose than sheltering men who have not the courage of their opinions, against one or two paltry social deprivations. The monstrous proceedings against La Barre, and the ease with which in this and numerous other cases the jurisprudence of the tribunals lent itself to the cruelty of fanatics, no doubt excited in Voltaire a very genuine alarm for his own safety, and probably with good reason. We know that he could not venture to visit Italy, in consequence of his just fear lest the Inquisition should throw their redoubtable foe into prison, and the parliaments of Toulouse and Abbeville had perpetrated juridical murders as iniquitous as any of the proceedings of the Holy Office. And though it is easy and right for the young, who live in a time when you are not imprisoned or hung or decapitated for holding unpopular opinions, to call out for manliness to the uttermost in these things, one must make allowance for an occasional fit of timorousness in a man of eighty, whom nature had never cut out for a martyr. Yet, more than once, these fits committed Voltaire to acts which were as great a scandal to the devout as to the atheists. That he should rebuild the ruinous little chapel of his estate was not much more remarked, than it would be for a Protestant landlord to subscribe to repair the Catholic church on an Irish property containing only Catholic tenants. The gorgeous ceremony with which in his quality of lord he commemoratedits opening, made everybody laugh, not excepting the chief performer, for he actually took the opportunity of lifting up his voice in the new temple and preaching a sermon against theft. The bishop of Annecy in Savoy, his diocesan, was furious at this mockery, and urged the minister at Paris to banish Voltaire from France. In order to avert the blow, Voltaire tried to make a nominal peace with the church by confessing, and participating in the solemnity of an Easter communion (1768). The bishop wrote him a long letter of unctuous impertinences, to which Voltaire replied by asking very tartly why the discharge of so ordinary a duty called for this insolent congratulation. The philosophers of Paris were bitterly scandalised, and some of them wrote to the patriarch of the sect to remonstrate. Even D’Alembert, his own familiar friend, could not refrain from protest.284Voltaire could give no better reasons for his strange lapse than we may hear given every day in our own country, by men who practise hypocritical compliances for the sake of a little ignoble ease, and thus perpetuate the yoke. He owed an example to his parish, as if the example of feigning a belief which he repudiates could be a good example for one to set in any parish. It was very well to shirk these observances in Paris, because there in the tide of business one finds an excuse or is not missed, but in the country no such excuse offers itself. One must stand well with the curé, be he knave or dunce. One must respect the two hundred and fiftytimorous consciences around one. And so forth, down that well-worn list of pleas by which men make anxiety about the consciences of others a substantial reason for treachery to their own. Voltaire, besides all these, honestly added the one true reason, that he did not mean to be burnt alive, and that the only way of making sure against such a fate was to close the lips of spies and informers.285The bishop knew perfectly well that the squire, who had made his Easter communion in so remarkable a manner in 1768, was the author of the Philosophical Dictionary, of which a bran-new edition, amended and revised, made its appearance in 1769; and he appears to have forbidden the priest of Ferney to confess or administer the eucharist to the chief of the flock. Voltaire was at once seized with a fever, and summoned the priest to administer ghostly comfort. The priest pleaded the horrible rumours of the world as to the damnable books of which the sick man was alleged to be the author. Voltaire replied by warning him very peremptorily that in refusing to administer the viaticum he was infringing the law, and the consequence was that he did duly receive the viaticum, after which he signed a solemn act in the presence of a notary, declaring that he pardons his various calumniators; that ‘if any indiscretion prejudicial to the religion of the State should have escaped him,’ he seeks forgiveness from God and the State; and finally he forgave the bishop of Annecy, who had calumniated him tothe king, and whose malicious designs had come to nought. The priest and notary afterwards falsified this amazing declaration so as to appease the bishop, and came to Voltaire praying him not to betray them. ‘I prove to them,’ he says, ‘that they will be damned, I give them something to drink, and they go away delighted.’286A younger philosopher of his school remarks with his accustomed gravity on this most singular transaction, that the satisfaction of forcing his priest to administer by fear of the secular judges, and of insulting the bishop of Annecy in a juridical manner, cannot excuse such a proceeding in the eyes of the free and firm man, who weighs calmly the claims of truth and the requirements of prudence, when laws contrary to natural justice render truth dangerous and prudence indispensable.287To which reflection we may perhaps add another, suggested by the cruel experience of the church in France within five and twenty years from Voltaire’s impious communion, that if any order, secular or spiritual, constrains its adversaries under penalties to the commission of base acts, then if the chances of time should ever transfer the power to the other side, that order has only itself to blame for whatever wrong may mark the retaliation. There is no more dangerous policy in affairs of state than to strip your opponent of self-respect, and this the descendants of the persecutors found out to their extreme cost,when in 1793 they had to deal with the descendants of the persecuted.
One other curious piece of sportiveness in his dealings with the church deserves to be noticed. In the year 1770 the post of temporal father of the order of Capucins for the district of Gex became vacant. Voltaire applied for it, and the general at Rome, perhaps listening to a word from Ganganelli, or else from the Duchess of Choiseul, sent to Ferney the letters patent conferring upon its patriarch this strange dignity, and also affiliating him to the order. What were Voltaire’s motives in so odd a transaction, it is not very hard to divine. Probably, he thought even this humble office would be some protection against persecution. Then it gave him an opportunity of harassing his enemy, the bishop of Annecy. Thirdly, it amused that whimsical element of farce and mischief which was always so irrepressible in him, from the early days when he is said to have nearly damned his own play by appearing on the stage as the high-priest’s train-bearer, and burlesquing that august person’s solemn gait. Voltaire filled his letters with infinite pleasantries about the new Capucin, and seemed as much pleased at the idea of wearing the cord of Saint Francis, as he had been with the gold key of a Prussian chamberlain.288One of his first enjoyments was to write letters to his episcopal foe, signed with a cross and his name: ‘✠Voltaire, Capucin indigne.’289Astory is told by Grimm of a visitor arriving at Ferney, and being greeted by the patriarch with the news that he would find his host a changed man. ‘One grows a bigot in one’s old age; I have a habit of having some pious work read to me when I sit down at table.’ And in fact, some one began to read a sermon of Massillon, Voltaire throwing in exclamations on the beauty, eloquence, imagination of the preacher. Suddenly after three or four pages, he called out ‘Off with Massillon!’ and launched forth during the rest of the meal with his usual verve and fanciful extravagance of imagination.290It is profoundly unedifying, but not the less characteristic.
Voltaire, there can be little doubt, never designed a social revolution, being in this the representative of the method of Hobbes. His single object was to reinstate the understanding in its full rights, to emancipate thought, to extend knowledge, to erect the standard of critical common sense. He either could not see, or else, as one sometimes thinks, he closes his eyes and refuses for his part to see, that it was impossible to revolutionise the spiritual basis of belief without touching the social forms, which were inseparably connected with the old basis by the strong bonds of time and a thousand fibres of ancient association and common interest. Rousseau began where Voltaire left off. He informs us that in the days when his character was forming, nothing which Voltaire wrote escaped, him, and that the Philosophical Letters, thatis the Letters on the English, though assuredly not the writer’s best work, were what first attracted him to study, and implanted a taste which never afterwards became extinct. The correspondence between Voltaire and the prince of Prussia, afterwards the great Frederick, inspired Rousseau with a passionate desire to learn how to compose with elegance, and to imitate the colouring of so fine an author.291Thus Voltaire, who was eighteen years his elder, gave this extraordinary genius his first productive impulse. But a sensibility of temperament, to which perhaps there is no parallel in the list of prominent men, impelled Rousseau to think, or rather to feel, about the concrete wrongs and miseries of men and women, and not the abstract rights of their intelligence. Hence the two great revolutionary schools, the school which appealed to sentiment, and the school which appealed to intelligence. The Voltarian principles of the strictest political moderation and of literary common sense, negative, merely emancipatory, found their political outcome, as French historians early pointed out, in the Constituent Assembly, which was the creation of the upper and middle class, while the spirit of Rousseau, ardent, generous, passionate for the relief of the suffering, overwhelmed by the crowding forms of manhood chronically degraded and womanhood systematically polluted, came to life and power in the Convention and the sections of the Commune of Paris which overawed the Convention.
‘It will not do,’ wrote D’Alembert to Voltaire as early as 1762, ‘to speak too loudly against Jean Jacques or his book, for he is rather a king in the Halles.’292This must have been a new word in the ears of the old man, who had grown up in the habit of thinking of public opinion as the opinion, not of markets where the common people bought and sold, but of the galleries of Versailles. Except for its theology, the age of Lewis XIV. always remained the great age to Voltaire, the age of pomp and literary glory, and it was too difficult a feat to cling on one side to the Grand Monarch, and to stretch out a hand on the other to the Social Contract. It was too difficult for the man who had been embraced by Ninon de l’Enclos, who was the correspondent of the greatest sovereigns in Europe, and the intimate of some of the greatest nobles in France, to feel much sympathy with writings that made their author king of the Halles. Frederick offered Rousseau shelter, and so did Voltaire; but each of them disliked his work as warmly as the other. They did not understand one who, if he wrote with an eloquence that touched all hearts, repulsed friends and provoked enemies like a madman or a savage. The very language of Rousseau was to Voltaire as an unknown tongue, for it was the language of reason clothing the births of passionate sensation. Emile only wearied him, though there were perhaps fifty pages of it which he would have had bound in morocco.293It is a staleromance, he cries, while the Social Contract is only remarkable for some insults rudely thrown at kings by a citizen of Geneva, and for four insipid pages against the Christian religion, which are simply plagiarised from Bayle’s centos.294The author is a monster of ingratitude and insolence, the arch-scoundrel and chief of charlatans, the lineal descendant of the dog of Diogenes the cynic, and other evil things not readily to be named in a polite age. Partly no doubt this extreme irritation was due to the insults with which Jean Jacques had repulsed his offers of shelter and assistance, had repudiated Voltaire’s attempts to defend him, and had held up Voltaire himself as a proper object for the persecutions of Geneva. But there was a still deeper root of discrepancy, which we have already pointed out. Rousseau’s exaggerated tone was an offence to Voltaire’s more just and reasonable spirit, and the feigned austerity of a man whose life and manners he knew, assumed in his eyes a disagreeable shade of hypocrisy.295Besides these things, he was clearly apprehensive of the storms which Rousseau’s extraordinary hardihood had the very natural effect of raising in the circles of authority, though it is true that the most acute observers of the time thought that they noticed a very perceptible increase of Voltaire’s own hardihood, as a consequence of the example which the other set him.
The rivalry between the schools of Rousseau and Voltaire represents the dead-lock to which socialthought had come; a dead-lock of which the catastrophe of the Revolution was both expression and result. At the time of Voltaire’s death there was not a single institution in France with force enough to be worth a month’s purchase. The monarchy was decrepit; the aristocracy was as feeble and impotent as it was arrogant; the bourgeoisie was not without aspiration, but it lacked courage and it possessed no tradition; and the church was demoralised, first by the direct attack of Voltaire and the not less powerful indirect attack of the Encyclopædia, and second by the memory of its own cruelty and selfishness in the generation just closing. But Voltaire’s theory, so far as he ever put it into its most general form, was that the temporal order was safe and firm, and that it would endure until criticism had transformed thought and prepared the way for a régime of enlightenment and humanity. Rousseau, on the contrary, directed all the engines of passion against the whole temporal fabric, and was so little careful of freedom of thought, so little confident in the plenary efficacy of rational persuasion, as to insist upon the extermination of atheists by law. The position of each was at once irrefragable and impossible. It was impossible to effect a stable reconstitution of the social order until men had been accustomed to use their minds freely, and had gradually thrown off the demoralising burden of superstition. But then the existing social order had become intolerable, and its forces were practically extinct, and consequently suchan attack as Rousseau’s was inevitable, and was at the same time and for the same reasons irresistible. To overthrow the power of the church only was to do nothing in a society perishing from material decay and political emasculation. Yet to regenerate such a society without the aid of moral and spiritual forces, with whose activity the existence of a dominant ecclesiastical power was absolutely incompatible, was one of the wildest feats that ever passionate sophist attempted.
If, however, it must be admitted that each of these two famous destroyers was attempting an equally desperate task, it is the contention of these pages that Voltaire was the more right and far-sighted of the two in his perception of the conditions of the problem. We have now for various adequate reasons acquired the habit of looking upon the church and speaking of it, as an organisation outside of society, or at least as a separate organisation and independent integer within it. The truth is that in a Catholic country like France before the Revolution, the church more than the secular order actually was the society, as it had been, though to a far wider degree, throughout Europe in the days of Hildebrand and Innocent. That is to say, it furnished the strongest of the ideas, sentiments, hopes, and associations which bound men together in a single community. The monarchy, the nobles, the old historic French tradition, the various bodies and processes of law, were swept away by the Revolution, virtually never to return, in spite of thetransient appearances to the contrary. The church was swept away also, but only for a year or two; and so little effectual was the Revolution, which was in fact Rousseau’s Revolution, in permanently modifying its position, that those Frenchmen at the present day who most soberly judge the future of their country and look deepest into its state, clearly perceive that the battle to be fought in the order of ideas is a battle between the new moral and social ideas of the workmen, and the old moral and social ideas which Catholicism has implanted in the breasts of the peasants, and on which the middle class privately and unconsciously lean for the support of their own consciences, though they may have put away Catholic dogma. We may see here, once more, the help which Protestantism gave to the dissolution of the old society, by the increased room it gave, apart from the specific influence of a more democratic dogma, for that gradual intellectual expansion throughout a community, which for those who have faith in the reasoning faculty is the one sure secret of social advance. The subjection of the spiritual power to the temporal, which has commonly followed the establishment of the Protestant communion, has very likely retarded the final disappearance of many ideas which foster anti-social tendencies; but the subjection of the spiritual power in such a set of circumstances has the effect of softening shocks. Protestantism in the sixteenth century, if it could have been accepted in France, would have been a more edifying dissolventthan Voltairism was in the eighteenth; but it is certain that the loosening of theological ideas and the organisation connected with them and upholding them, was the first process towards making truly social ideas possible, and their future realisation a thing which good men might hope for. Napoleon, the great organ of political reaction, knew what he was about in paying writers for years to denigrate the memory of Voltaire, whose very name he abhorred.296
In saying, however, that Rousseau’s attack was inevitable, we have perhaps said that it was indispensable; for where a society is not able to resist an assault upon its fundamental conditions, we may be tolerably sure that the time has arrived when either these conditions must be dispersed, or else the society must fall into rapid dissolution. We may refute Rousseau’s sophisms as often and as conclusively as we please, and may dwell as forcibly as we know how upon the untold penalties which France has paid, and is still doomed to pay, for whatever benefits he may have bestowed on her. But, after all this, the benefits remain, and they may be briefly set down as two in number. In the first place he spoke words that can never be unspoken, and kindled a hope that can never be extinguished; he first inflamed men with a righteous conviction that the evils of the existing order of things reduced civilisation to a nullity for the great majority of mankind, and that it cannot for ever be tolerable that the mass should wear awaytheir lives in unbroken toil without hope or aim, in order that the few may live selfish and vacuous days. Rousseau presented this sentiment in a shape which made it the ‘negation of society;’ but it was much to induce thinkers to ask themselves, and the bondsmen of society to ask their masters, whether the last word of social philosophy had been uttered, and the last experiment in the relations of men to one another decisively tried and irrevocably accepted. Second, by his fervid eloquence and the burning conviction which he kindled in the breasts of great numbers of men, he inspired energy enough in France to awaken her from the torpor as of death which was stealing so rapidly over her. Nobody was more keenly aware of the presence of this breath of decay in the air than Voltaire was. It had seized such hold of the vital parts of the old order, that, but for the fiery spirit and unquenchable ardour of the men who read Rousseau as men of old had read the gospel, but for the spirit and ardour which animated the Convention, and made it alike in the tasks of peace and the tasks of war one of the most effective and formidable assemblies that the world has ever beheld, we do not see what there was to stop France from sinking lower and lower into impotence, until at last the powers who vainly threatened the republic with partition, might in the course of time actually have consummated the threat against the monarchy. This may seem impossible to us who live after the Revolution and after Napoleon; but we must remember thedesigns of partitioning Prussia in the middle of the century, the accomplishment of a partition of the Italian possessions of the house of Austria in 1735, and the partition of Poland; and why was France to be eternal, any more than the Byzantine empire, or the power of the house of Austria, or the power of Spain, had been eternal? It was the fire kindled by Rousseau’s passion that saved her; for even of the Constituent, which was Voltairean, the very soul was Mirabeau, who was Rousseauite.
It will be seen that in one sense Rousseau was a far more original personage than his first chief and inspirer. He contributed new ideas, of extremely equivocal and perilous character, but still new, to the multitudinous discussions which were throwing all the social elements into confusion. These ideas might indeed have been found substantially in the writings of previous thinkers like Montaigne and Locke; but Rousseau’s passion invested them with a quality which was virtually to constitute them a fresh and original force. Voltaire contributed initiative and a temperament, which made his propagation of ideas that were not new, as important a fact in social if not in intellectual history, as if he had been possessed of superlative gifts in speculation. This has also to be remembered when we think of comparing him with Diderot, who, while his equal in industry, was greatly his superior both in fresh simplicity of imagination, and in grasp and breadth of positive knowledge. Whoever will take the trouble to turnover some of the thirty-five volumes of the Encyclopædia, may easily see how that gigantic undertaking (1751-1765), in which Voltaire always took the most ardent and practical interest,297assisted the movement that Voltaire had commenced. It seemed to gather up into a single great reservoir all that men knew, and this fact of mere mechanical collocation was a sort of substitute for a philosophic synthesis. As Comte says, it furnished a provisional rallying-point for efforts the most divergent, without requiring the sacrifice of any points of essential independence, in such a way as to secure for a body of incoherent speculation an external look of system.298This enterprise, the history of which is a microcosm of the whole battle between the two sides in France, enabled the various opponents of theological absolutism, the Voltaireans, Rousseauites, atheists, and all other sorts and conditions of protesting men, to confront the church and its doctrine with a similar semblance of organic unity and completeness. The Encyclopædia was not simply negative and critical. It was an unexampled manual of information, and was the means of spreading over the country some knowledge of that active scientific culture, which was producing such abundant and astonishing discoveries. The two streams of dissolvent influences, negative criticism onthe one hand, and positive knowledge and scientific method on the other, were led into a single channel of multiplied volume and force. There was no real nor logical connection between the two elements, and while one of them has daily grown less serviceable, the other has daily grown more absorbingly powerful, so as now to be itself the effective indirect substitute for that direct negative criticism, with which the Encyclopædic design had once thrown it into alliance.