The Project Gutenberg eBook ofVoltaireThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: VoltaireAuthor: John MorleyRelease date: September 23, 2012 [eBook #40846]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Turgut Dincer and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VOLTAIRE ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: VoltaireAuthor: John MorleyRelease date: September 23, 2012 [eBook #40846]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Turgut Dincer and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Title: Voltaire
Author: John Morley
Author: John Morley
Release date: September 23, 2012 [eBook #40846]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Turgut Dincer and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VOLTAIRE ***
Theedition to which the references are made in the following pages is that published by Baudouin in 1826, in seventy-five volumes. This edition is to be distinguished from that known as the first Baudouin edition, published 1824-34, in ninety-seven volumes. The extent of the difference between them, which is entirely in favour of the more voluminous form, may be seen in M. Quérard’sBibliographie Voltairienne(p. 107). The large number of complete and elaborate editions of Voltaire’s works, which were undertaken and executed in the years between the overthrow of the Empire and the overthrow of the Monarchy in 1830, is one of the most striking facts in the history of books.
1872.
Importance of Voltaire’s name
Catholicism, Calvinism, and the Renaissance
Voltairism the Renaissance of the eighteenth century
His power the result of his sincerity, penetration, and courage
Different tempers proper for different eras
Voltaire’s freedom from intellectual cowardice
And from worldly indifference to truth and justice
Reason and humanity only a single word to him
His position towards the purely literary life
Enervating regrets that the movement had not a less violent leader
The share of chance in providing leaders
Combination of favourable circumstances in Voltaire’s case
Occasion and necessity of the movement
Age of Lewis XIV. entirely loyal to its own ideas
Subsequent discredit of these ideas
Voltaire continues the work, not wholly to the disadvantage of the old system
No ascetic element in the Voltairean revolt
Why primarily an intellectual movement
The hostile memory of Christians for it
Comte’s estimate of it
The estimate of culture
Some pleas on the other side
Significance of the journey to England
His birth and youthful history
Ninon de l’Enclos, Chaulieu, and the Regency
Manner of life from 1716
Affront from the Chevalier de Rohan
Leaves France
Le Pour et le Contre
Freethinking a reality in England
Condorcet’s account of the effect of England upon Voltaire
Social and political consequence of men of letters
Evil effect of this in France
Freedom of speech
Newton’s discoveries
Their true influence on Voltaire
Locke
Profound effect of Lockian common-sense on Voltaire
Contrast between social condition of England and France
Confounds two distinct conceptions of civil liberty
A confusion shared by most of his countrymen
The Church of England
The Quakers
Voltaire’s diligence in study of English literature
And in mastering one side of the deistical controversy
Through the influence of the deists on Voltaire, the genius of Protestantism entered France
Limited consistency of Voltaire’s philosophy
English deism contrasted with that of Leibnitz and with the atheism of D’Holbach
Most just way of criticising character
Some traits in Voltaire
Acquaintance with the Marquise du Châtelet
Her character
Voltaire’s placableness
His money transactions
The life at Cirey
His attempts in physical science
Literature his true calling
Qualities of his style
Significance of literature as a profession
Voltaire’s dramatic art
Not deliberately art with a purpose
His plays a prolongation of the tradition of the great age of Lewis XIV.
Merits of the French classic drama
Voltaire compared with Corneille and Racine
His ideas of dramatic renovation
His Roman subjects
His enlargement of dramatic themes
Failure in comedy
Arising from want of deep humour
The Pucelle: offends two modern sentiments
Its true significance
Peculiarity of the licence of the eighteenth century
Sophisms by which it was defended
Contempt for the middle ages
The Henriade
Death of Madame du Châtelet
Voltaire and the court
He goes to Berlin
Character of literary activity in Prussia
The two movements of which Voltaire and the king were chiefs
Character of Frederick the Great
Breaking up of the European state-system in 1740
The first shock in 1733
Frederick raises international relations into the region of real matter
The situation defined
Two conceptions of progress
The Jesuits
Their repulse after the humiliation of Austria
Frederick’s probable unconsciousness of the ultimate bearings of his policy
His type of monarchy
He sprang doubly from the critical school
Other statesmen affected by this school
Injustice of stamping Voltaire’s influence as merely destructive
Frederick the Great and France
Voltaire’s life at Berlin
Maupertuis
Collision between him and Voltaire
The Diatribe of Doctor Akakia
Voltaire’s departure from Berlin
The Frankfort episode
Unfortunate revelations in the Hirschel affair
Relations between Frederick and Voltaire henceforth
Voltaire fears to return to Paris
Geneva
The critical school not specially insensible to the picturesque
Voltaire buys Ferney (1758)
Two elements underlying Voltaire’s enmity to Christianity
Utility of Protestantism in softening the transition
Compared with repression of free debate in France
Voltaire did not assail modern theosophies
The good inextricably bound up with the bad in the old system
Jesuits and Jansenists
Voltaire declared the latter to be the worst foes
Morellet’s Manual for Inquisitors
A reflex of the criminal jurisprudence of the time
Cases of Rochette, Calas, and Sirven
Of La Barre
Fervour of Voltaire’s indignation
Protests against cynical acquiescence
Disappointment of the philosophers, and their courage
The reactionary fanaticism a proof of the truth of Voltaire’s allegations
Necessity of transforming spiritual basis of thought
Voltaire’s abstention from the temporal sphere
His chief defect as leader of the attack
Crippling his historic imagination
The just historic calm impossible, until Voltaire had pressed a previous question
His instruments purely literary and dialectical
Leaves metaphysics of religion, and fastens on alleged records
The other side fell back on the least worthy parts of their system
Hence the narrow and literal character of Voltaire’s objections
His attack essentially the attack of the English deists
In doctrine
Argument from comparison with other myths
His neglect of primitive religions
His conviction that monotheism is the first religious form
Difficulties which he thus passed over
Hume’s view
Voltaire did not assail the general ideas of Christianity
Such as the idea of evil inherent in matter
And the idea of a deity as then conceived
Hence the acerbity of the debate
And the want of permanence in Voltaire’s writings compared with Bossuet or Pascal
His criticism on Dante
Voltairean deism
Never accepted by the mass of men
Nor is it likely to be accepted by them
Voltaire’s imperfect adherence to the deistical idea
Reasons for this
Does not accept belief in the immortality of the soul
Asserts less than Rousseau, and denies less than Diderot
A popular movement begun by Bayle’s Dictionary
Compromising method of Rousseau
Voltaire’s view of an atheistical society
His belief in the social sufficiency of an analytic spirit
Synthesis necessary, but more than one is possible
Extraordinary activity in historical composition in the eighteenth century
Explanation of it
Circumstances under which Voltaire thought about the philosophy of history
The three historical styles
Voltaire’s histories of two kinds
Rousseau’s disregard for history
Voltaire’s acute sense
His diligence in seeking authentic materials
Throws persons and personal interests into the second place
Changed view of the true subject matter of history
War always an object of Voltaire’s antipathy
His distrust of diplomacy
Bossuet’s Discourse on Universal History
Introduction to the Essay on Manners
Irrational disparagement of the Jews
Panegyric on the Emperor Julian
False view of the history of the church
Avoids the error of expressing barbarous activity in terms of civilisation
Real merit of Voltaire’s panorama
He was not alive to the necessity of scientifically studying the conditions of the social union
His life at Ferney
Madame Denis
Consulted by Vauvenargues, Chastellux, Turgot, and others
Complaisance of his letters
Sophistical defence of the practice of denying authorship
Voltaire’s just alarm for his own safety
His Easter communion of 1768
Further proceedings with the Bishop of Annecy
Voltaire made temporal father of the Capucins of Gex
Voltaire’s influence on Rousseau
Difference between their respective schools
Their rivalry represents the social dead-lock of the time
Voltaire the more far-sighted of the two
Two signal effects of Rousseau’s teaching
Diderot and the Encyclopædia
Voltaire’s constant efforts to secure redress for the victims of wrong
Calas, Sirven, La Barre
Count Lally
Admiral Byng
His interest in the pretended liberation of Greece
In the partition of Poland
In the accession of Turgot to power
Visit to Paris and death
τὰ μὲν γὰρ σωφρόνων ἤθη σφόδρα μὲν εὐλαβῆ καὶ δίκαια καὶ σωτήρια, δριμύτητος δὲ καί τινος ἰταμότητος ὀξείας καὶ πρακτικῆς ἐνδεῖται.... τὰ δ’ ἀνδρεῖά γε αὖ πρὸς μὲν τὸ δίκαιον καὶ εὐλαβὲς ἐκείνων ἐπιδεέστερα, τὸ δ’ ἐν ταῖς πράξεσι διαφερόντως ἴσχει. πάντα δὲ καλῶς γίγνεσθαι τὰ περὶ τὰς πόλεις, τούτοιν μὴ παραγενομένοιν ἀμφοῖν, ἀδύνατον.—Politicus, 311A.
πότερον τοὺς ἀνδρείους θαῤῥαλέους λέγεις, ἢ ἄλλο τι; Καὶ ἴτας γε, ἔφη, ἐφ’ ἃ οἱ πολλοὶ φοβοῦντας ἰέvαι.—Protagoras, 349E.
Whenthe right sense of historical proportion is more fully developed in men’s minds, the name of Voltaire will stand out like the names of the great decisive movements in the European advance, like the Revival of Learning, or the Reformation. The existence, character, and career of this extraordinary person constituted in themselves a new and prodigious era. The peculiarities of his individual genius changed the mind and spiritual conformation of France, and in a less degree of the whole of the West, with as far-spreading and invincible an effect as if the work had been wholly done, as it was actually aided, by the sweep of deep-lying collective forces. A new type of belief, and of its shadow, disbelief, was stamped by the impression of his character and work into the intelligence and feeling of his own and the following times. We may think of Voltairism in France somewhat as we think of Catholicism or the Renaissance or Calvinism. It was one of the cardinal liberationsof the growing race, one of the emphatic manifestations of some portion of the minds of men, which an immediately foregoing system and creed had either ignored or outraged.
Christianity originally and generically at once awoke and satisfied a spiritual craving for a higher, purer, less torn and fragmentary being, than is permitted to sons of men on the troubled and corrupt earth. It disclosed to them a gracious, benevolent, and all-powerful being, who would one day redress all wrongs and recompense all pain, and who asked no more from them meanwhile than that they should prove their love of him whom they had not seen, by love of their brothers whom they had seen. Its great glory was to have raised the moral dignity and self-respect of the many to a level which had hitherto been reached only by a few. Calvin, again, like some stern and austere step-son of the Christian God, jealous of the divine benignity and abused open-handedness of his father’s house, with word of merciless power set free all those souls that were more anxious to look the tremendous facts of necessity and evil and punishment full in the face, than to reconcile them with any theory of the infinite mercy and loving-kindness of a supreme creator. Men who had been enervated or helplessly perplexed by a creed that had sunk into ignoble optimism and self-indulgence, became conscious of new fibre in their moral structure, when they realised life as a long wrestling with unseen and invincible forces of grace, election, and fore-destiny,the agencies of a being whose ways and dealings, whose contradictory attributes of unjust justice and loving vindictiveness, it was not for man, who is a worm and the son of a worm, to reconcile with the puny logic of human words, or the shallow consistency of human ideas. Catholicism was a movement of mysticism, and so in darker regions was the Calvinism which in so many important societies displaced it. Each did much to raise the measure of worth and purify the spiritual self-respect of mankind, and each also discouraged and depressed the liberal play of intelligence, the cheerful energizing of reason, the bright and many-sided workings of fancy and imagination. Human nature, happily for us, ever presses against this system or that, and forces ways of escape for itself into freedom and light. The scientific reason urgently seeks instruments and a voice; the creative imagination unconsciously takes form to itself in manifold ways, of all of which the emotions can give good account to the understanding. Hence the glorious suffusion of light which the ardent desire of men brought over the face of Europe in the latter half of the fifteenth century. Before Luther and Calvin in their separate ways brought into splendid prominence their new ideas of moral order, more than two generations of men had almost ceased to care whether there be any moral order or not, and had plunged with the delight of enchantment among ideas of grace and beauty, whose forms were old on the earth, but which were full of seemingly inexhaustiblenovelty and freshness to men, who had once begun to receive and to understand all the ever-living gifts of Grecian art and architecture and letters. If the Reformation, the great revival of northern Europe, was the enfranchisement of the individual from bondage to a collective religious tradition that had lost its virtue, the Renaissance, the earlier revival of southern Europe, was the admission to participate in the noblest collective tradition of free intellect which the achievements of the race could then hand down.
Voltairism may stand for the name of the Renaissance of the eighteenth century, for that name takes in all the serious haltings and shortcomings of this strange movement, as well as all its terrible fire, swiftness, sincerity, and strength. The rays from Voltaire’s burning and far-shining spirit no sooner struck upon the genius of the time, seated dark and dead like the black stone of Memnon’s statue, than the clang of the breaking chord was heard through Europe, and men awoke in new day and more spacious air. The sentimentalist has proclaimed him a mere mocker. To the critic of the schools, ever ready with compendious label, he is the revolutionary destructive. To each alike of the countless orthodox sects his name is the symbol for the prevailing of the gates of hell. Erudition figures him as shallow and a trifler; culture condemns him for pushing his hatred of spiritual falsehood much too seriously; Christian charity feels constrained to unmask a demon from the depths of the pit. The plain men of the earth, who are apt tomeasure the merits of a philosopher by the strength of his sympathy with existing sources of comfort, would generally approve the saying of Dr. Johnson, that he would sooner sign a sentence for Rousseau’s transportation than that of any felon who had gone from the Old Bailey these many years, and that the difference between him and Voltaire was so slight, that ‘it would be difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity between them.’ Those of all schools and professions who have the temperament which mistakes strong expression for strong judgment, and violent phrase for grounded conviction, have been stimulated by antipathy against Voltaire to a degree that in any of them with latent turns for humour must now and then have even stirred a kind of reacting sympathy. The rank vocabulary of malice and hate, that noisome fringe of the history of opinion, has received many of its most fulminant terms from critics of Voltaire, along with some from Voltaire himself, who unwisely did not always refuse to follow an adversary’s bad example.
Yet Voltaire was the very eye of eighteenth-century illumination. It was he who conveyed to his generation in a multitude of forms the consciousness at once of the power and the rights of human intelligence. Another might well have said of him what he magnanimously said of his famous contemporary, Montesquieu, that humanity had lost its title-deeds, and he had recovered them. The fourscore volumes which he wrote are the monument, as theywere in some sort the instrument, of a new renascence. They are the fruit and representation of a spirit of encyclopaedic curiosity and productiveness. Hardly a page of all these countless leaves is common form. Hardly a sentence is there which did not come forth alive from Voltaire’s own mind, or which was said because some one else had said it before. His works as much as those of any man that ever lived and thought are truly his own. It is not given, we all know, even to the most original and daring of leaders to be without precursors, and Voltaire’s march was prepared for him before he was born, as it is for all mortals. Yet he impressed on all he said, on good words and bad alike, a marked autochthonic quality, as of the self-raised spontaneous products of some miraculous soil, from which prodigies and portents spring. Many of his ideas were in the air, and did not belong to him peculiarly; but so strangely rapid and perfect was his assimilation of them, so vigorous and minutely penetrative was the quality of his understanding, so firm and independent his initiative, that even these were instantly stamped with the express image of his personality. In a word, Voltaire’s work from first to last was alert with unquenchable life. Some of it, much of it, has ceased to be alive for us now in all that belongs to its deeper significance, yet we recognise that none of it was ever the dreary still-birth of a mind of hearsays. There is no mechanical transmission of untested bits of current coin. In the realm of mere letters, Voltaire is one ofthe little band of great monarchs, and in style he remains of the supreme potentates. But literary variety and perfection, however admirable, like all purely literary qualities, are a fragile and secondary good which the world is very willing to let die, where it has not been truly begotten and engendered of living forces.
Voltaire was a stupendous power, not only because his expression was incomparably lucid, or even because his sight was exquisitely keen and clear, but because he saw many new things, after which the spirits of others were unconsciously groping and dumbly yearning. Nor was this all. Fontenelle was both brilliant and far-sighted, but he was cold, and one of those who love ease and a safe hearth, and carefully shun the din, turmoil, and danger, of the great battle. Voltaire was ever in the front and centre of the fight. His life was not a mere chapter in a history of literature. He never counted truth a treasure to be discreetly hidden in a napkin. He made it a perpetual war-cry and emblazoned it on a banner that was many a time rent, but was never out of the field.
This is the temper which, when the times are auspicious, and the fortunes of the fight do not hurry the combatant to dungeon or stake, raises him into a force instead of leaving him the empty shadow of a literary name. There is something in our nature which leads men to listen coolly to the most eager hints and pregnant innuendoes of scepticism, on the lips of teachers who still in their own persons keepadroitly away from the fiery darts of the officially orthodox. The same something, perhaps a moral relish for veritable proofs of honesty, perhaps a quality of animal temperament, drives men to grasp even a crudity with fervour, when they see it wielded like a battle-axe against spiritual oppression. A man is always so much more than his words, as we feel every day of our lives; what he says has its momentum indefinitely multiplied, or reduced to nullity, by the impression that the hearer for good reasons or bad happens to have formed of the spirit and moral size of the speaker. There are things enough to be said of Voltaire’s moral size, and no attempt is made in these pages to dissemble in how much he was condemnable. It is at least certain that he hated tyranny, that he refused to lay up his hatred privily in his heart, and insisted on giving his abhorrence a voice, and tempering for his just rage a fine sword, very fatal to those who laid burdens too hard to be borne upon the conscience and life of men. Voltaire’s contemporaries felt this. They were stirred to the quick by the sight and sound and thorough directness of those ringing blows. The strange and sinister method of assault upon religion which we of a later day watch with wondering eyes, and which consists in wearing the shield and device of a faith, and industriously shouting the cry of a church, the more effectually to reduce the faith to a vague futility, and its outward ordering to a piece of ingeniously reticulated pretence; this method of attack might make even the championsof prevailing beliefs long for the shrewd thrusts, the flashing scorn, the relentless fire, the downright grapples, with which the hated Voltaire pushed on his work of ‘crushing the Infamous.’ If he was bitter, he was still direct. If he was often a mocker in form, he was always serious in meaning and laborious in matter. If he was unflinching against theology, he always paid religion respect enough to treat it as the most important of all subjects. The contest was real, and not our present pantomimic stage-play, in which muffled phantoms of debate are made to gesticulate inexpressible things in portentously significant silence. The battle was demoralized by its virulence. True; but is this worse than to have it demoralized by cowardice of heart and understanding, when each controversial man-at-arms is eager to have it thought that he wears the colours of the other side, when the theologian would fain pass for rationalist, and the free-thinker for a person with his own orthodoxies if you only knew them, and when philosophic candour and intelligence are supposed to have hit their final climax in the doctrine that everything is both true and false at the same time?
A man like Montaigne, as has been said, could slumber tranquilly on the pillow of doubt, content to live his life, leaving many questions open. Such men’s meditations, when composed in the genial literary form proper to them, are naturally the delight of people with whom the world goes fairly well materially, who have sensibility enough to be awarethat there are unseen lands of knowledge and truth beyond the present, and destinies beyond their own; but whose sensibility is not intense and ardent enough to make wholly unendurable to them unscrutinizing acquiescence in half-thoughts and faint guesses, and pale unshapen embryos of social sympathy. There are conjunctures when this mingling of apprehension and ease, of aspiration and content, of timorous adventure and reflective indolence, is the natural mood of even high natures. The great tides of circumstance swell so tardily, that whole generations that might have produced their share of skilful and intrepid mariners, wait in vain for the full flood on which the race is borne to new shores.
Nor assuredly is it well for men that every age should mark either a revolution, or the slow inward agitation that prepares the revolution, or that doubters and destroyers should divide between them all admiration and gratitude and sympathy. The violent activity of a century of great change may end in a victory, but it is always a sacrifice. The victory may more than recompense its cost. The sacrifice may repay itself a thousand-fold. It does not always repay itself, as the too neglected list of good causes lost, and noble effort wasted, so abundantly shows. Nor in any case is sacrifice ever an end. Faith and order and steady strong movement are the conditions which everything wise is directed to perfect and consolidate. But for this process of perfection we need first the meditative, doubting, critical type, and next,the dogmatic destroyer. ‘In counsel it is good to see dangers,’ Bacon said; ‘and in execution not to see them, except they be very great,’ There are, as history instructs us, eras of counsel and eras of execution; the hour when those do best who walk most warily, feeling with patience and sagacity and painstaking for the new ways, and then the hour of march and stout-hearted engagement.
Voltaire, if he adroitly or sagely preserved his buckler, felt that the day was come to throw away the scabbard; that it was time to trust firmly to the free understanding of men for guidance in the voyage after truth, and to the instincts of uncorrupted benevolence in men for the upholding of social justice. His was one of the robust and incisive constitutions, to which doubt figures as a sickness, and where intellectual apprehension is an impossibility. The old-fashioned nomenclature puts him down among sceptics, because those who had the official right to affix these labels could think of no more contemptuous name, and could not suppose the most audacious soul capable of advancing even under the leadership of Satan himself beyond a stray doubt or so. He had perhaps as little of the sceptic in his constitution as Bossuet or Butler, and was much less capable of becoming one than De Maistre or Paley. This was a prime secret of his power, for the mere critic and propounder of unanswered doubts never leads more than a handful of men after him. Voltaire boldly put the great question, and he boldly answered it.He asked whether the sacred records were historically true, the Christian doctrine divinely inspired and spiritually exhaustive, and the Christian church a holy and beneficent organization. He answered these questions for himself and for others beyond possibility of misconception. The records were saturated with fable and absurdity, the doctrine imperfect at its best, and a dark and tyrannical superstition at its worst, and the church was the arch-curse and infamy. Say what we will of these answers, they were free from any taint of scepticism. Our lofty new idea of rational freedom as freedom from conviction, and of emancipation of understanding as emancipation from the duty of settling whether important propositions are true or false, had not dawned on Voltaire.
He had just as little part or lot in the complaisant spirit of the man of the world, who from the depths of his mediocrity and ease presumes to promulgate the law of progress, and as dictator to fix its speed. Who does not know this temper of the man of the world, that worst enemy of the world? His inexhaustible patience of abuses that only torment others; his apologetic word for beliefs that may perhaps not be so precisely true as one might wish, and institutions that are not altogether so useful as some might think possible; his cordiality towards progress and improvement in a general way, and his coldness or antipathy to each progressive proposal in particular; his pygmy hope that life will one day become somewhat better, punily shivering by the side of hisgigantic conviction that it might well be infinitely worse. To Voltaire, far different from this, an irrational prejudice was not the object of a polite coldness, but a real evil to be combated and overthrown at every hazard. Cruelty was not to him as a disagreeable dream of the imagination, from thought of which he could save himself by arousing to sense of his own comfort, but a vivid flame burning into his thoughts and destroying peace. Wrong-doing and injustice were not simple words on his lips; they went as knives to the heart; he suffered with the victim, and consumed with an active rage against the oppressor.
Nor was the coarse cruelty of the inquisitor or the politician, who wrought iniquity by aid of the arm of flesh, the only kind of injury to the world which stirred his passion. He had imagination enough and intelligence enough to perceive that they are the most pestilent of all the enemies of mankind, the sombre hierarchs of misology, who take away the keys of knowledge, thrusting truth down to the second place, and discrowning sovereign reason to be the serving drudge of superstition or social usage. The system which threw obstacles into the way of publishing an exposition of Newton’s discoveries and ideas was as mischievous and hateful to him, as the darker bigotry which broke Calas on the wheel because he was a Protestant. To check the energetic discovery and wide propagation of scientific truth, he rightly held to be at least as destructive in thelong run to the common weal, as the unjust extermination of human life; for it is the possession of ever more and more truth that makes life ever better worth having and better worth preserving. And must we not admit that he was right, and that no age nor school of men nor individual has ever been mortally afraid, as every good man is afraid, of inflicting any wrong on his fellow, and has not also been afraid of extinguishing a single ray from the great sun of knowledge?
It is well enough to say that in unscientific ages, like the twelfth century for instance, the burner of books and the tormentor of those who wrote them, did not feel either that he was doing an injustice to man or a mischief to truth. It is hard to deny that St. Bernard was a good man, nor is it needful that we should deny it; for good motives, owing to our great blindness and slow enlightenment, have made grievous havoc in the world. But the conception of justice towards heretics did not exist, any more than it existed in the mind of a low type of white man towards a black man, or than the conception of pity exists in the mind of a sportsman towards his prey. These were ages of social cruelty, as they were ages of intellectual repression. The debt of each to his neighbour was as little felt, as the debt of all to the common faculties and intelligence. Men owed nothing to man, but everything to the gods. All the social feeling and intellectual effort and human energizing which had made the high idea of God possible and real, seemed to haveexpended themselves in a creation which instantly swallowed them up and obliterated their recollection. The intelligence which by its active straining upwards to the light had opened the way for the one God, became itself forthwith identified with the chief of the devils. He who used his reason was the child of this demon. Where it is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat. The times when such was the universal idea of the rights of the understanding, were also the times when human life was cheapest, and the tiny bowl of a man’s happiness was spilt upon the ground with least compunction.
The companionship between these two ideas of disrespect for the rights of man, and disrespect for reason or the highest distinction of man, has been an inseparable companionship. The converse is unhappily only true with a modification, for there have been too many men with an honourable respect for a demonstration and a proper hospitality towards a probability, who look on the rights of man, without disrespect indeed, but also without fervour. To Voltaire reason and humanity were but a single word, and love of truth and passion for justice but one emotion. None of the famous men who have fought that they themselves might think freely and speak truly, have ever seen more clearly that the fundamental aim of the contest was that others might live happily. Who has not been touched by that admirable word of his, of the three years in which he laboured without remissionfor justice to the widow and descendants of Calas: ‘During that time not a smile escaped me without my reproaching myself for it, as for a crime.’ Or by his sincere avowal that of all the words of enthusiasm and admiration which were so prodigally bestowed upon him on the occasion of his last famous visit to Paris in 1778, none went to his heart like that of a woman of the people, who in reply to one asking the name of him whom the crowd followed, gave answer, ‘Do you not know that he is the preserver of the Calas?’
The same kind of feeling, though manifested in ways of much less unequivocal nobleness, was at the bottom of his many efforts to make himself of consequence in important political business. We know how many contemptuous sarcasms have been inspired by his anxiety at various times to perform diplomatic feats of intervention between the French government and Frederick the Second. In 1742, after his visit to the Prussian king at Aix-la-Chapelle, he is supposed to have hinted to Cardinal Fleury that to have written epic and drama does not disqualify a man for serving his king and country on the busy fields of affairs. The following year, after Fleury’s death, when French fortunes in the war of the Austrian succession were near their lowest, Voltaire’s own idea that he might be useful from his intimacy with Frederick, seems to have been shared by Amelot, the secretary of state, and at all events he aspired to do some sort of active, if radically futile, diplomatic work. In later times when the tide had turned, and Frederick’s star wasclouded over with disaster, we again find Voltaire the eager intermediary with Choiseul, pleasantly comparing himself to the mouse of the fable, busily striving to free the lion from the meshes of the hunter’s net.
The man of letters, usually unable to conceive loftier services to mankind or more attractive aims to persons of capacity than the composition of books, has treated these pretensions of Voltaire with a supercilious kind of censure, which teaches us nothing about Voltaire, while it implies a particularly shallow idea alike of the position of the mere literary life in the scale of things, and of the conditions under which the best literary work is done. To have really contributed in the humblest degree, for instance, to a peace between Prussia and her enemies in 1759, would have been an immeasurably greater performance for mankind than any given book which Voltaire could have written. And, what is still better worth observing, Voltaire’s books would not have been the powers they were, but for this constant desire of his to come into the closest contact with the practical affairs of the world. He who has never left the life of a recluse, drawing an income from the funds and living in a remote garden, constructing past, present, and future, out of his own consciousness, is not qualified either to lead mankind safely, or to think on the course of human affairs correctly. Every page of Voltaire has the bracing air of the life of the world in it, and the instinct which led him to seekthe society of the conspicuous actors on the great scene was essentially a right one. The book-writer takes good advantage of his opportunity to assure men expressly or by implication that he is their true king, and that the sacred bard is a mightier man than his hero. Voltaire knew better. Though himself perhaps the most puissant man of letters that ever lived, he rated literature as it ought to be rated below action, not because written speech is less of a force, but because the speculation and criticism of the literature that substantially influences the world, make far less demand than the actual conduct of great affairs on qualities which are not rare in detail, but are amazingly rare in combination,—on temper, foresight, solidity, daring,—on strength, in a word, strength of intelligence and strength of character. Gibbon rightly amended his phrase, when he described Boethius not as stooping, but rather as rising, from his life of placid meditation to an active share in the imperial business. That he held this sound opinion is quite as plausible an explanation of Voltaire’s anxiety to know persons of station and importance, as the current theory that he was of sycophantic nature. Why, he asks, are the ancient historians so full of light? ‘It is because the writer had to do with public business; it is because he could be magistrate, priest, soldier; and because if he could not rise to the highest functions of the state, he had at least to make himself worthy of them. I admit,’ he concludes, ‘that we must not expect such anadvantage with us, for our own constitution happens to be against it;’ but he was deeply sensible what an advantage it was that they thus lost.1