PGl. 
 I3i9 
 
 flfontell Unuteraitg 
 
 Dtljaca, Nero IJnrk 
 
 LIBRARY OF 
 
 THE SAGE SCHOOL 
 
 OF 
 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 92402742621 6 
 
VOLTAIBE 
 
 Cornell University Library 
 PQ 2099.M86 1919 
 
 Voltaire / 
 
 3 1924 027 426 216 
 
VOLTAIEE 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN MORLEY 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED 
 ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 
 1919 v ~ 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 Pbeliminaey. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Importance of Voltaire's name 1 
 
 Catholicism, Calvinism, and the Renaissance . . 1 
 
 Voltairism the Renaissance of the eighteenth century 4 
 His power the result of his sincerity, penetration, and 
 
 courage .,•... ,6 
 
 Different tempers proper for different eras 11 
 
 Voltaire's freedom from intellectual cowardice . 12 
 
 And from worldly indifference to truth and justice . 13 
 
 Reason and humanity only a single word to him 15 
 
 His position towards the purely literary life ... 17 
 Enervating regrets that the movement had not a less 
 
 violent leader . ..... 19 
 
 The share of chance in providing leaders . . 20 
 Combination of favourable circumstances in Voltaire's 
 
 case .... .22 
 
 Occasion and necessity of the movement . . 24 
 
 Age of Lewis xiv. entirely loyal to its own ideas . 25 
 
 Subsequent discredit of these ideas ..... 26 
 
Vlll CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Preparation for abandonment of the old system by 
 
 Descartes and Bayle . .... 29 
 Voltaire continues the -work, not wholly to the disadvan- 
 tage of the old system . .... 31 
 No ascetic element in the Voltairean revolt . 33 
 Why primarily an intellectual movement . 34 
 The hostile memory of Christians for it . . .37 
 Comte's estimate of it . 37 
 The estimate of culture . '40 
 Some pleas on the other side .... 40 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 English Influences. 
 
 Significance of the journey to England . 44 - 
 
 His birth and youthful history ... 45 
 
 Ninon de l'Enclos, Chaulieu, and the Regency 46 
 
 Manner of life from 1716 . . 49 
 
 Affront from the Chevalier de Rohan 53 
 
 Leaves France 54 
 
 Had previously been no more than a vague esprit fort 56 
 
 Le Pour et le Contre ... . . 57 
 
 Freethinking a reality in England . . 58 
 
 Condorcet's account of the effect of England upon Voltaire 59 
 
 Social and political consequence of men of letters . . 59 
 
 Evil effect of this in France . . . r 60 
 
 Freedom of speech . , . . 61 
 
 Newton's discoveries ... 65 
 
 Their true influence on Voltaire . . 67 
 
 Locke ...... . 67 
 
 Profound effect of Lockian common-sense on Voltaire . 70 
 
 Contrast between social condition of England and France 73 
 
CONTENTS. IX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Voltaire's imperfect appreciation of the value and working 
 
 of a popular government .... 76 
 
 Confounds two distinct conceptions of civil liberty 79 
 
 A confusion shared by most of his countrymen 79 
 
 The Church of England . 82 
 
 The Quakers . . 84 
 
 Voltaire's diligence in study of English literature . 86 
 
 And in mastering one side of the deistical controversy . 88 
 Through the influence of the deists on Voltaire, the genius 
 
 of Protestantism entered France 91 
 
 Limited consistency of Voltaire's philosophy 93 
 English deism contrasted with that of Leibnitz and with 
 
 the atheism of D'Holbach 95 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Literature. 
 
 Most just way of criticising character . 98 
 
 Some traits in Voltaire . 99 
 
 Acquaintance with the Marquise du Chatelet . 101 
 
 Her character . . ... 103 
 
 .Voltaire's placableness . . 105 
 
 His money transactions . . . 107 
 
 The life at Cirey . . Ill 
 
 His attempts in physical science 116 
 
 Literature his true calling . 117 
 
 Qualities of his style . . 119 
 
 Significance of literature as a profession 125 
 Voltaire's dramatic art . . . . , • 126 
 
 Not deliberately art with a purpose . . . 126 
 His plays a prolongation of the tradition of the great age 
 
 of Lewis xiv. . . .... 129 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 132 
 134 
 
 136 
 
 140 
 141 
 
 His criticism on Hamlet . 
 
 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 ... • 143 
 
 Failure in comedy ... . 144 
 
 Arising from want of deep humour . . . 145 
 
 The Pucelle : offends two modern sentiments . 147 
 
 Its true significance . 148 
 
 Peculiarity of the licence of the eighteenth century . 149 
 
 Sophisms by which it was defended .... 149 
 
 Contempt for the middle ages . . . . . 152 
 
 The Hemiade ......... 153 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Berlin. 
 
 Death of Madame du Chatelet , , , 158 
 
 Voltaire and the court . . , 1 58 
 
 He goes to Berlin ..... .161 
 
 Character of literary activity in Prussia 161 
 The two movements of which Voltaire and the king were 
 
 chiefs 162 
 
 Character of Frederick the Great . . 166 
 
 Breaking up of the European state-system in 1740 171 
 
 The first shock in 1733 172 
 
 Frederick raises international relations into the region of 
 
 real matter ....... 174 
 
 The situation defined . . . . 175 
 
 Two conceptions of progress . . . . .177 
 
CONTENTS. xi 
 
 From which of them the result of the Seven Years' War 
 
 is seen to be truly progressive . 180 
 
 The Jesuits ..... . 181 
 
 Their repulse after the humiliation of Austria . .182 
 Frederick's probable unconsciousness of the ultimate bear- 
 ings of his policy . . . 184 
 His type of monarchy . . .... 186 
 
 He sprang doubly from the critical school 188 
 Other statesmen affected by this school . 188 
 Injustice of stamping Voltaire's influence as merely de- 
 structive . . 191 
 
 Frederick the Great and France 193 
 
 Voltaire's life at Berlin . . 194 
 
 Maupertuis . . . ... 196 
 
 Collision between him and Voltaire . 198 
 
 The Diatribe of Doctor Akakia . 199 
 
 Voltaire's departure from Berlin 201 
 
 The Frankfort episode .... 202 
 
 Unfortunate revelations in the Hirschel affair . . 206 
 
 Relations between Frederick and Voltaire henceforth 207 
 
 Voltaire fears to return to Paris . . 210 
 
 Geneva . .... . 211 
 
 The critical school not specially insensible to the pictur 
 
 Voltaire buys Ferney (1758) 
 
 212 
 215 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Religion. 
 
 (1) Conditions ofithe Voltairean attack. 
 
 ■ Two elements underlying Voltaire's enmity to Christianity 216 
 
 Failure of Catholicism as a social force . . . 217 
 
Xll CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Utility of Protestantism in softening the transition 218 
 
 Compared with repression of free debate in France 219 
 
 Voltaire did not assail modern theosophies . . 221 
 
 The good inextricably bound up with the bad in the old 
 
 system . 224 
 Jesuits and Jansenists - 225 
 Voltaire declared the latter to be the worst foes 227 
 Morellet's Manual for Inquisitors . . 228 
 A reflex of the criminal jurisprudence of the time . 229 
 Cases of Rochette, Calas, and Sirven 229 
 Of La Barre 230 
 Fervour of Voltaire's indignation 232 
 Protests against cynical acquiescence . 233 
 Disappointment of the philosophers, and their courage 235 
 The reactionary fanaticism a proof of the truth of Vol- 
 taire's allegations . . . 237 
 Necessity of transforming spiritual basis of thought . 238 
 Voltaire's abstention from the temporal sphere 239 
 His chief defect as leader of the attack . 241 
 Crippling his historic imagination . 243 
 The just historic calm impossible, until Voltaire had • 
 pressed a previous question . . . 245 
 
 (2) His method. 
 
 His instruments purely literary and dialectical . . 248 
 
 Leaves metaphysics, of religion, and fastens on alleged 
 
 records . . . . . / 25"& 
 
 The other side fell back on the least worthy parts of their , 
 
 system ......... 251 
 
 Hence the narrow and literal character of Voltaire's objec- 
 tions ... 252 
 
 His attack essentially the attack of the English deists 255 
 
CONTENTS. xiii 
 
 T> • PAGE 
 
 Rationalistic questions in scriptural and ecclesiastical 
 
 records . 257 
 
 In doctrine . . . 258 
 
 Argument from comparison with other myths . . 259 
 
 His neglect of primitive religions . . . 260 
 His conviction that monotheism is the first religious 
 
 form . . 261 
 
 Difficulties which he thus passed over . . . 264 
 
 Hume's view . 266 
 
 Voltaire did not assail the general ideas of Christianity 267 
 Such as the idea of evil inherent in matter . . 270 
 And the idea of a deity as then conceived . 271 
 Hence the acerbity of the debate . . . 273 
 And the want of permanence in Voltaire's writings com- 
 pared with Bossuet or Pascal . 274 
 His criticism on Dante . . 275 
 
 (3) His approximation to a solution. 
 
 Voltairean deism . . . . . 276 
 
 Never accepted by the mass of men . . . 278 
 Nor is it likely to be accepted by them . . . ,279 
 
 Voltaire's imperfect adherence to the deistical idea . 280 
 
 Eeasons for this . ... 282 
 
 Does not accept belief in the immortality of the soul 286 
 Asserts less than Rousseau, and denies less than 
 
 Diderot 287 
 
 A popular movement begun by Bayle's Dictionary „ . 288 
 
 Compromising method of Rousseau ..... 290 
 
 Voltaire's view of an atheistical society .... 291 
 
 His belief in the social sufficiency of an analytic spirit . 292 
 
 Synthesis necessary, but more than one is possible . . 293 
 
about the 
 
 295 
 296 
 
 297 
 299 
 301 
 302 
 
 303 
 305 
 
 XIV, CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 History. 
 
 Extraordinary activity in historical composition in the 
 
 eighteenth century 
 Explanation of it 
 Circumstances under which Voltaire thought 
 
 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 307 
 Changed view of the true subject matter of history 308 
 
 War always an object of Voltaire's antipathy . 311 
 
 His distrust of diplomacy 315 
 
 Bossuet's Discourse on Universal History . 316 
 
 » Introduction to the Essay on Manners . . 318 
 
 Irrational disparagement of the Jews . . . 319 
 
 Panegyric on the Emperor Julian . 320 
 
 - False view of the history of the church .... 322 
 Avoids the error of expressing barbarous activity in terms 
 
 of civilisation . . . 323 
 
 Real merit of Voltaire's panorama 325 
 
 He was not alive to the necessity of scientifically studying 
 
 the conditions of the social union .... 326 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Fernet. 
 
 His life at Ferney .... ... 329 
 
 Madame Denis ........ 329 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 His vast correspondence . , . . 333 
 Consulted by Vauvenargues, Chastellux, Turgot, and 
 
 others ... 334 
 
 Complaisance of his letters ...... 336 
 
 Sophistical defence of the practice of denying authorship 339 
 
 Voltaire's just alarm for his own safety .... 340 
 
 His Easter communion of 1768 . . . 341 
 
 Further proceedings with the Bishop of Annecy 342 
 
 Voltaire made temporal father of the Capucins of Gex . 344 
 
 Voltaire's' influence on Rousseau . . 345 
 
 Difference between their respective schools . 347 
 
 Their rivalry represents the social dead-lock of the time . 348 
 
 Voltaire the more far-sighted of the two . 350 
 
 Two signal effects of Rousseau's teaching . . . 352 
 
 Diderot and the Encyclopaedia . . . . 354 
 
 Voltaire's constant efforts to secure redress for the victims 
 
 of wrong ... . . 357 
 
 Calas, Sirven, La Barre . . . 357 
 
 Count Lally . . ... 358 
 
 Admiral Byng 359 
 
 His interest in the pretended liberation of Greece . 360 
 In the partition of Poland . . . . . .361 
 
 In the accession of Turgot to power . . . 362 
 
 Visit to Paris and death . . . . . . 363 
 
Ta jxev yap o~Gi(f>p6vo>v rj&j crcpoSpa p.\v evXafiy) ko.\ 
 SiKdLa /cat (roiTrjpia, Spip.vTrjTOS Si kou' twos it<z//,6V?7tos 
 d^ctas kcu TrpaKTiKrjs ivSeiTau . . . ra. 8' dv8peld ye 
 aS 7rpos /iev to Succuov /cat evA.a/3es eKewmv eiriSeeo-Tepa, 
 to S' Iv tcus wpd^ecrt. <3<.a<£epovT&)s ur^eu 7rdvTa oe 
 KaAais yiyvtcrOaL ra irepl tois iroXets, towtchv /«) 
 7rapayevop,evow d/x^oiv, dSvvaTov.—Politicus, 311 A. 
 
 irorepov tow avSpeions OappaXeovs Aeyeis, ^ aAA.o 
 ti; Kcu tras ye, i'f'V; *$' "■ °' toAAoi fyofBovvrai levai. 
 — Protagoras, 349 e. ' 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 PRELIMINARY. 
 
 When the 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 some- 
 what as we think of Catholicism or the Renaissance 
 or Calvinism. It was one of the cardinal liberations 
 
2 VOLTAIRE. ohap. 
 
 of the growing race, one of the emphatic manifesta- 
 tions 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 per- 
 mitted 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, 
 
t PEELIMINABY. 3 
 
 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 consist- 
 ency of human ideas. Catholicism was a movement 
 of mysticism, and so in darker regions was the Cal- 
 vinism 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 imagina- 
 tion. 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 inexhaustible 
 
4 VOLTAIRE. chap 
 
 novelty 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 
 Eeformation, 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 Eenaissance, 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 Een- 
 aissance 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 false- 
 hood much too seriously ; Christian charity feels con- 
 strained to unmask a demon ' from the depths of the 
 pit. The plain men of the earth, who are apt to 
 
L PRELIMINARY. S 
 
 measure 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 Kousseau'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 conscious- 
 ness 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 contem- 
 porary, Montesquieu, that humanity had lost its title- 
 deeds, and he had recovered them. The fourscore 
 volumes which he wrote are the monument, as they 
 
6 VOLTAIRE. ohap, 
 
 were in some sort the instrument, of a new renascence 
 They are the fruit and representation of a spirit oi 
 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 of 
 
1 PRELIMINARY. 7 
 
 the 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 yearn- 
 ing. 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 litera- 
 ture. He never counted truth a treasure to be 
 discreetly hidden in a napkin. He made it a per- 
 petual 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 keep 
 
8 VOLTAIEB. OitAF. 
 
 adroitly 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 gages to dissemble in how much he was condemn- 
 able. 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 con- 
 temporaries 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 champions 
 
l. PRELIMINARY. 9 
 
 of 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 al^^s 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 ortho- 
 doxies 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 1 
 
 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 aware 
 
10 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 that 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 mate wholly unendurable to them unscratinizing 
 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 adven- 
 ture 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 admira- 
 tion 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 con- 
 solidate. But for this process of perfection we need 
 first the meditative, doubting, critical type, and next, 
 
I. PRELIMINARY. 1 1 
 
 the dogmatic destroyer. 'In counsel it is good tc 
 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 exe- 
 cution ; the hour when those do best who walk most 
 warily, feeling with patience and sagacity and pains- 
 taking 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 bene- 
 volence 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. 
 
12 VOLTAIRE. OHAI 
 
 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 himselfand 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 inex- 
 haustible 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 institu- 
 tions 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 some- 
 what better, punily shivering by the side of his 
 
I. PRELIMINARY. 13 
 
 gigantic conv iction 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 over- 
 thrown 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 
 th e op pressor. 
 
 "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 the 
 
14 VOLTAIRE. ohap 
 
 ' long run to the common weal, as the unjust exter- 
 mination 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 in- 
 flicting 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 to- 
 wards 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 repres- 
 sion. 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 every- 
 thing to the gods. All the social feeling and intel- 
 lectual effort and human energizing which had made 
 the high idea of God possible and real, seemed to have 
 
I. PEELIMINAET. 15 
 
 expended 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 dis- 
 respect for the rights of man, and disrespect for reason 
 or the highest distinction of man, has been an insepar- 
 able 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 remission 
 
16 VOLTAIRE. CHAP 
 
 for 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 con- 
 sequence 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 wag 
 
r. PRELIMINARY. 17 
 
 clouded over with disaster, we again find Voltaire the 
 eager intermediary with Choiseul, pleasantly compar 
 ing himself to the mouse of the fable, busily striving 
 to free the Hon 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 co nditi ons under which 
 the best literary work is done. To have really con- 
 tributed in the humblest degree, for instance, to a 
 peace between Prussia and her enemies in 1759, 
 would have been an immeasurably greater perform- 
 ance 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 seek 
 o 
 
18 VOLTAIRE. 
 
 OHAP. 
 
 the 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 3 'that we must not expect such an 
 
I. PRELIMINARY. 19 
 
 advantage 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 
 
 In short, on all sides, whatever men do and think 
 was real and alive to Voltaire. Whatever had the 
 quality of interesting . any imaginable temperament, 
 had the quality of interesting him. There was no 
 subject which any set of men have ever cared about, 
 which, if he once had mention of it, Voltaire did not 
 care about likewise. And it was just because he was 
 so thoroughly alive himself, that he filled the whole 
 era with life. The more closely one studies the 
 various movements of that time, the more clear it 
 becomes that, if he was not the original centre and 
 first fountain of them all, at any rate he made many 
 channels ready and gave the sign. He was the initial 
 principle of fermentation throughout that vast com- 
 motion. We may deplore, if we think fit, as Erasmus 
 deplored in the case of Luther, that the great change 
 was not allowed to work itself out slowly, calmly, and 
 without violence and disruption. These graceful 
 regrets are powerless, and on the whole they are 
 very enervating. Let us make our account with the 
 actual, rather than seek excuses for self-indulgence in 
 pensive preference of something that might have been. 
 Practically in these great circles of affairs, what only 
 might have been is as though it could not be ; and 
 to know this may well suffice for us. It is not in 
 human power to choose the kind of men who rise from 
 1 (Ewres, xxxy. p. 214. 
 
20 VOLTAIRE. CHAR 
 
 time to time to the supreme control of momentous 
 changes. The force which decides this immensely 
 important matter is as though it were chance. We 
 cannot decisively pronounce any circumstance what- 
 ever an accident, yet history abounds with circum- 
 stances which in our present ignorance of the causes 
 of things are as if they were accidents. 
 
 In this respect history is neither better nor worse 
 than the latest explanation of the origin and order 
 of the world of organised matter. Here too we are 
 landed in the final resort at what is neither more nor 
 less than an accident. Natural selection, or the 
 survival of the fittest in the universal struggle for 
 existence, is now held by the most competent in- 
 quirers to be the principal method to which we owe 
 the extinction, preservation, and distribution of 
 organic forms on the earth. But the appearance both 
 of the forms that conquer and of those that perish 
 still remains a secret, and to science an accident and a 
 secret are virtually and provisionally the same thing. 
 In a word, there is an unknown element at the bottom 
 of the varieties of creation, whether we agree to call 
 that element a volition of a supernatural being, or an 
 undiscovered set of facts in embryology. So in history 
 the Roman or Italo-Hellenic empire, rising when it 
 did, was the salvation of the "West, and yet the 
 .appearance at the moment when anarchy threatened 
 rapidly to dissolve the Roman state, of a man with 
 the power of conceiving the best design for the new 
 structure, seems to partake as much of the nature of 
 
I PRELIMINARY. 21 
 
 chance, as the non-appearance of men with similar 
 vision and power in equally momentous crises, earlier 
 and later. The rise of a great constructive chief like 
 Charlemagne in the eighth century can hardly bo 
 enough to persuade us that the occasion invariably 
 brings the leader whom its conditions require, when 
 we remember that as concerns their demands .the 
 conditions of the end of the eighth century were not 
 radically different from those of the beginning of the 
 sixth, yet that in the earlier epoch there arose no 
 successor to continue the work of Theodoric. "We 
 have only to examine the origin and fundamental 
 circumstances of the types of civilisation which rule 
 western communities and guide their advance, to 
 discern in those original circumstances a something 
 inscrutable, a certain element of what is as though it 
 were fortuitous. No science can as yet tell us how 
 such a variation from previously existing creatures 
 as man had its origin ; nor, any more than this, can 
 history explain the law by which the most striking 
 variations in intellectual and spiritual quality within 
 the human order have had their origin. The appear- 
 ance of the one as of the other is a fact which cannot 
 be further resolved. It is hard to think in imagina- 
 tion of the globe as unpeopled by man, or peopled, 
 as it may at some remote day come to be, by beings 
 of capacity superior enough to extinguish man. It 
 is hard also to think of the scene which western 
 Europe and all the vast space which the light of 
 western Europe irradiates, might have offered at this 
 
22 VOLTAIRE. • CHAP, 
 
 moment, if nature or the unknown forces had not 
 produced a Luther, a Calvin, or a Voltaire. 
 
 It was one of the happy chances of circumstance 
 that there arose in France on the death of Lewis xrv. 
 a man with all Voltaire's peculiar gifts Of intelligence, 
 who added to them an incessant activity in their use, 
 and who besides this enjoyed such length of days as 
 to make his intellectual powers effective to the very 
 fullest extent possible. "This combination of physical 
 and mental conditions so amazingly favourable to the 
 spread of the Voltairean ideas, was a circumstance 
 independent of the state of the surrounding atmos- 
 phere, and was what in the phraseology of prae- 
 scientific times might well have been called provi- 
 dential If Voltaire had seen all that he saw, and 
 yet been indolent ; or if he had been as clear-sighted 
 and as active as he was, and yet had only lived fifty 
 years, instead of eighty-four, Voltairism would never 
 have struck root. 1 As it was, with his genius, his 
 industry, his longevity, and the conditions of the 
 time being what they were, that far-spreading move- 
 ment of destruction was inevitable. 
 
 Once more, we cannot choose. Those whom 
 temperament or culture has made the partisans of 
 calm order, cannot attune progress to the stately and 
 harmonious march which would best please them, 
 and which they are perhaps right in thinking would 
 lead with most security to the goal. 
 
 ouch a liberation of the human mind as Voltairism 
 1 See Comte's PAilosophie Positive, v 520. 
 
I. PRELIMINARY. 23 
 
 can only be effected by the movement of many spirits, 
 and they are only the few who are moved by moder 
 ate, reflective, and scientific traingjjf argument. The 
 many need an extreme type. They are struck by 
 what is flashing and colossal, for they follow imagina- 
 tion and sympathy, and not the exactly disciplined 
 intelligence. They know their own wants, and have 
 dumb feeling of their own better aspirations. Their 
 thoughts move in the obscurity of things quick but 
 unborn, and by instinct they push upwards in what- 
 ever direction the darkness seems breaking. They are 
 not critics nor analysts, but when the time is ripening 
 they never fail to know the word of freedom and of 
 truth, with whatever imperfections it may chance to 
 be spoken. T^o prophet all false has ever yet caught 
 the ear of a series of generations. No prophet all 
 false has succeeded in separating a nation into two 
 clear divisions. Voltaire has in effect for a century 
 so divided the most emancipated of western nations. 
 This is beyond the power of the mere mocker, who 
 perishes like the flash of lightning; he does not 
 abide as a centre of solar heat. 
 
 There are more kinds of Voltaireans than one, but 
 no one who has marched ever so short a way out of 
 the great camp of old ideas is directly or indirectly 
 out of the debt and' out of the hand of the first 
 liberator, however little willing he may be to recog- 
 nise one or the other. Attention has been called by 
 every writer on Voltaire to the immense number of 
 the editions of his works, a number probably un- 
 
24 VOLTAIRE. ohap. 
 
 paralleled in the case of any author within the same 
 limits of time. Besides being one of the most volu- 
 minous book-writers, he is one of the cheapest. We 
 can buy one of Voltaire's books for a few halfpence, and 
 the keepers of the cheap stalls in the cheap quarters 
 of London and Paris will tell you that this is not from 
 lack of demand, but the contrary. So clearly does 
 that light burn for many even now, which scientific- 
 ally speaking ought to be extinct, and for many indeed 
 is long ago extinct and superseded. The reasons for 
 this vitality are that Voltaire was himself thoroughly 
 alive when he did his work, and that the movement 
 which that work began is still unexhausted. 
 
 How shall we attempt to characterise this move- 
 ment ] The historian of the Christian church usually 
 opens his narrative with an account of the depravation 
 of human nature and the corruption of society which 
 preceded the new religion. The Eeformation in like 
 manner is only to be understood after we have 
 perceived the enormous mass of superstition, injustice, 
 and wilful ignorance, by which the theological idea 
 had become so incrusted as to be wholly incompetent 
 to guide society, because it was equally repugnant to 
 the intellectual perceptions and the moral sense, the 
 knowledge and the feelings, of the best and most 
 active-minded persons of the time. The same sort 
 of consideration explains and vindicates the enormous 
 power of Voltaire. France had outgrown the system 
 that had brought her through the middle ages. The 
 further development of her national life was fatally 
 
t. PEEHMINAET. 25 
 
 hindered by the tight bonds of an old order, which 
 clung with the hardy tenacity of a thriving parasite, 
 diverting from the roots all their sustenance, eating 
 into the tissue, and feeding on the juices of the living 
 tree. The picture has often been painted, and we 
 need not try to paint it once more in detail here. 
 The whole power and ordering of the nation were 
 with the sworn and chartered foes of light, who had 
 every interest that a desire to cling to authority and 
 wealth can give, in keeping the understanding subject. 
 "Slid, what was more important, there had been 
 no sign made in the nation itself of a consciousness 
 of the immense realms of knowledge that lay immedi- 
 ately in front of it, and still less of any desire or 
 intention to win lasting possession of them. That 
 intellectual curiosity which was so soon to^produce 
 such amazing fruits was as yet unstirred. An era of 
 extraordinary activity had just come to a close, and 
 the creative and artistic genius of France had risen 
 to the highest mark it attained until the opening of 
 our own century. The grand age of Lewis Xiv. had 
 been an age of magnificent literature and unsurpassed 
 eloquence. But, in spite of the potent seed which 
 Descartes had sown, it had been the age of authority, 
 protection, and patronage. Consequently all those 
 subjects for which there was no patronage, that is 
 to say the subjects which could add nothing to the 
 splendour and dignity of the church and the pageantry 
 of the court, were virtually repressed. This ought 
 not to blind us to the real loftiness and magnanimity 
 
26 _ VOLTAIRE. CHAT 
 
 of the best or earlier part of the age of Lewis xiv. 
 It has been said that the best title of Lewis xiv. to 
 the recollection of posterity is the protection he 
 extended to Moliere ; and one reason why this was 
 so meritorious is that Moliere's work had a markedly 
 critical character, in reference both to the devout 
 and to the courtier. The fact of this, undoubtedly 
 the most durable work of that time, containing critical 
 quality, is not of importance in reference to the 
 generally fixed or positive aspect of the age. For 
 Moliere is only critical by accident. There is nothing 
 organically negative about him, and his plays are the 
 pure dramatic presentation of a peculiar civilisation. 
 He is no more a destructive agency because he drew 
 hypocrites and coxcombs, than Bossuet was destructive 
 or critical because he inveighed against sin and the 
 excess of human vainglory. The e poch was one of 
 entire loyalty to itself and its ideas. Voltaire himself 
 perceived and admired these traits to the full. The 
 greatest of all overthrowers, he always understood 
 that it is towards such ages as these, the too short 
 ages of conviction and self-sufficience, that our endea- 
 vour works. We fight that others may enjoy ; and 
 many generations struggle and debate, that one 
 generation may hold something for proven. 
 
 The glories of the age of Lewis xrv. were the 
 climax of a set of ideas that instantly afterwards lost 
 alike their grace, their usefulness, and the firmness of 
 their hold on the intelligence of men. A dignified 
 and venerable hierarchy, an august and powerful 
 
1. PRELIMINARY. 27 
 
 monarch, a court of gay and luxurious nobles, all lost 
 their grace, because the eyes of men were suddenly 
 caught and appalled by the awful phantom, which 
 was yet so real, of a, perishing nation. Turn from 
 Bossuet's orations to Boisguillebert's Ditail de la 
 France ; from the pulpit rhetorician's courtly re- 
 minders that even majesty must die, to Vauban's pity 
 for the misery of the common people ;* from Corneille 
 and Bacine to La Bruyere's picture of ' certain wild 
 animals, male and female, scattered over the fields, 
 black, livid, all burnt by the sun, bound to the earth 
 that they dig and work with unconquerable perti- 
 nacity ; they have a sort of articulate voice, and when 
 they rise on their feet, they show a human face, and, 
 in fact, are men.' The contrast had existed for 
 generations. The material misery caused by the wars 
 of the great Lewis deepened the dark side, and the 
 lustre of genius consecrated to the glorification of 
 traditional authority and the order of the hour height- 
 ened the brightness of the bright side, until the old 
 contrast was suddenly seen by a few startled eyes, 
 and the new and deepest problem, destined to strain 
 our civilisation to a degree that not many have even 
 now conceived, came slowly into pale outline. 
 
 There is no reason to think that Voltaire ever saw 
 this gaunt and tremendous spectacle. Bousseau was 
 its first voice. Since him the reorganisation of the 
 
 1 Vauban and Boisguillebert are both to be found in La 
 EamomisUs Firumders du XVIIIiims Siicle, published by 
 Guillaumin, 1851. 
 
28 VOLTAIRE. OHA*. 
 
 relations of men has never faded from the sight either 
 of statesmen or philosophers, with vision keen enough, 
 to admit to their eyes even^vhat they dreaded and 
 execrated in their hearts. Voltaire's task was differ- 
 ent and preparatory. It was to make popular the 
 genius and authority of reason. The foundations of 
 the social fabric were in such a condition that the 
 touch of reason was fatal to the whqle structure, 
 which instantly began to crumble. Authority and 
 use oppose a steadfast and invincible resistance to 
 reason, so long as the institutions which thej, protect 
 are of fair practicable service to a society. But after 
 the death of Lewis xiv., not only the grace and 
 pomp, but also the social utility of spiritual and 
 political absolutism passed obviously away. Spiritual 
 absolutism was unable to maintain even a decent 
 semblance of unity and theological order. Political 
 absolutism by its material costliness, its augmenting 
 tendency to repress the application of individual 
 energy and thought to public concerns, and its pur- 
 suit of a policy in Europe which was futile and 
 essentially meaningless as to its ends, and disastrous 
 and incapable in its choice of means, was rapidly 
 exhausting the resources of national well-being and 
 viciously severing the very tap-root of national life. 
 To bring reason into an atmosphere so charged, was, 
 as the old figure goes, to admit air to the chamber of 
 the mummy. And reason was exactly what Voltaire 
 brought ; too narrow, if we will, too contentious, too 
 derisive, too unmitigatedly reasonable, but still reason. 
 
I- PEELIMINAJtY. 29 
 
 And who shall measure the consequence of this 
 difference in the history of two great nations ; that 
 in France absolutism in church and .state fell before 
 the sinewy genius of stark reason, while in England 
 it fell before a respect for social convenience, protest- 
 ing against monopolies, benevolences, ship-money 1 
 That in France speculation had penetrated over the 
 whole field of social inquiry, before a single step had 
 been taken towards application, while in England 
 social principles were applied, before they received 
 any kind of speculative vindication 1 That in France 
 the first effective enemy of the principles of despotism 
 was Voltaire, poet, philosopher, historian, critic ; in 
 England, a band of homely squires 1 
 
 Traditional authority, it is true, had been partially 
 and fatally undermined in France before the time of 
 Voltaire, by one of the most daring of thinkers, and 
 one of the most acute and sceptical of scholars, as 
 well as by writers so acutely careless as Montaigne, 
 and apologists so dangerously rational as Pascal, who 
 gave a rank and consistency to doubt even in showing 
 that its seas were black and shoreless. Descartes's 
 Discourse on Method had been published in 1637, 
 and Bayle's Thoughts on the Comet, first of the series 
 of critical onslaughts on prejudice and authority in 
 matters of belief, had been published in 1682. The 
 metaphysician and the critic had each pressed forward 
 on the path of examination, and had each insisted on 
 finding grounds for belief, or else showing the absence 
 of such grounds with a fatal distinctness that made 
 
30 VOLTAIRE. chap. 
 
 belief impossible. Descartes was constructive, and 
 was bent on reconciling the acceptance of a certain 
 set of ideas as to the relations between man and the 
 universe, and as to the mode and composition of the 
 universe, with the logical reason. Bayle, whose 
 antecedents and environment were Protestant, was 
 careless to replace, but careful to have evidence for 
 whatever was allowed to remain. No parallel nor 
 hint of equality is here intended between the rare 
 genius of Des cartes and the relatively lower quality 
 of Bayle. The one, however high a place we may 
 give to the regeneration of thought effected by Bacon 
 in England, or to that wrought by the brilliant group 
 of physical experimentalists in Italy, still marks a 
 new epoch in the development of the human mind, 
 for he had decisively separated knowledge from theo- 
 logy, and systematically constituted science. The 
 other has a place only in the history of criticism. 
 But, although in widely different ways, and with 
 vast difference in intellectual stature, they both had 
 touched the prevailing notions of French society with 
 a fatal breath." 
 
 Tne blast that finally dispersed and destroyed 
 them came not from Descartes and Bayle, but directly 
 from Voltaire and indirectly from England. In the 
 seventeenth century the surrounding conditions were 
 not ripe. Social needs had not begun to .press. The 
 organs of authority were still too vigorous, and per- 
 formed their functions with something more than the 
 mechanical half-heartedness of the next century. 
 
I. PRELIMINARY. 31 
 
 Long familiarity with sceptical ideas as enemies must 
 go before their reception as friends and deliverers. 
 They have perhaps never gained an effective hold in 
 any community, until they have found allies in the 
 hostile camp of official orthodoxy, and so long as that 
 orthodoxy was able to afford them a vigorous social 
 resistance. Voltaire's universal talents made one of 
 the most powerful instruments for conveying these 
 bold and inquisitive notions among many sorts and 
 conditions of men, including both the multitude of 
 common readers and playgoers in the towns, and the 
 narrower multitude of nobles and sovereigns. More 
 than this, the brilliance and variety of bis gifts 
 attracted, stimulated, and directed the majority of 
 the men of letters of his time, and imparted to them 
 a measure of bis own singular skill in conveying the 
 principles of rationalistic thought. 
 
 The effect of all this was to turn a vast number of 
 personages who were officially inimical to free criticism, 
 to be at heart abettors and fellow-conspirators in the 
 great plot. That fact, combined with the independent 
 causes of the incompetency of the holders of authority 
 to deal with the crying social necessities of the time, 
 left the walls of the citadel undermined and un- 
 defended, and a few of the sacred birds that were 
 still found faithful cackled to no purpose. It has 
 often been said that in the early times of Christianity 
 its influence gave all that was truest and brightest in 
 colour to the compositions of those who were least or 
 not at all affected by its dogma, "it is more certain 
 
32 VOLTAIRE. OHA*. 
 
 that Voltaire by the extraordinary force of his person- 
 ality gave a peculiar tone and life even to those who 
 adhered most staunchly to the ancient ordering. The 
 champions of authority were driven to defend their 
 cause by the unusual weapons of rationality ; and if 
 Voltaire had never written, authority would never, 
 for instance, have found such a soldier on her side as 
 that most able and eminent of reactionaries, Joseph 
 de Maistre. In reply to the favourite assertion of 
 the apologists of Catholicism, that whatever good side 
 its assailants may present is the product of the very 
 teaching which they repudiate, one can only say that 
 there would be at least as much justice in maintaining 
 that the marked improvement which took place in 
 the character and aims of the priesthood between the 
 Regency and the Revolution, 1 was an obligation 
 unconsciously incurred to those just and liberal ideas 
 which Voltaire had helped so powerfully to spread. 
 De Maistre compares Reason putting away Revelation 
 to a child who should beat its nurse. The same 
 figure would serve just as well to describe the thank- 
 lessness of Belief to the Disbelief which has purged 
 and exalted it. 
 
 1 ' Je ne sais si, a tout prendre, et malgre le3 vices eclatant6 
 de quelques uns de ses membres, il y eut jamais dans le monde 
 nn clerge plus remarquable que le clerge catholique de France 
 au moment ou la Revolution l'a surpris, plus eclaire, plus 
 national, moins retranche dans les seules vertus privees, mieux 
 pourvu de vertus publiques et en menie temps de plus de foi : 
 la persecution l'a bien montreV— De t Tocqueville, Ancien 
 Rigime. liv. ii. c 11. 
 
I. PEELIMINAEY. 33 
 
 One of the most striking features of the revolution 
 wrought by Voltaire is that it was the one great 
 revolt in history which contained no element of 
 asceticism, and achieved all its victories without resort 
 to an instrument so potent, inflexible, and easy, but 
 so gravely dangerous. Such revolts are always 
 reactions against surrounding corruption and dark- 
 ness. They are the energetic protests of the purer 
 capacities and aspirations of human nature ; and as is 
 the inevitable consequence of vehement action of this 
 sort, they seem for a while to insist on nothing less 
 than the extirpation of those antagonistic parts which 
 are seen to have brought life into such debasement. 
 With this stern anger and resolve in their hearts, 
 men have no mind to refine, explain, or moderate, 
 and they are forced by one of the strangest instincts 
 of our constitution into some system of mortification, 
 which may seem to clear the soul of the taint of sur- 
 rounding grossness. In such exalted mood, there is 
 no refuge but in withdrawal from the common life 
 into recesses of private conscience, and in severest 
 purification of all desires. There are not many types 
 of good men even in the least ascetic or least reac- 
 tionary epochs, to whom this mood, and its passion 
 for simplicity, self-applied rigour, minute discipline, 
 firm regulation, and veritable continence of life, do not 
 now and again recur, in the midst of days that march 
 normally on a more spacious and expansive theory. 
 
 There was, however, no tinge of ascetic principle 
 in Voltairism. Pascal had remarked that relaxed 
 
 D 
 
34 VOLTAIRE. chap. 
 
 opinions are naturally so pleasing to men, that it is 
 wonderful they should ever be displeasing. To which 
 Voltaire had thus retorted : ' On the contrary, does 
 not experience prove that influence over men's minds 
 is only gained by offering 'them the difficult, nay the 
 impossible, to perform or believe 1 Offer only things 
 that are reasonable, and all the world will answer, 
 We knew as much as that. But enjoin things that 
 are hard, impracticable; paint the deity as ever 
 armed with the thunder ; make blood run before the 
 altars ; and you will win the multitude's ear, and 
 everybody will say of you, He must be right, or he 
 would not so boldly proclaim things so marvellous.' 1 
 Voltaire's ascendency sprung from no appeal to those 
 parts of human nature in which ascetic practice has 
 its foundation. On the \ contrary, full exercise and 
 play for every part was the key of all his teaching, 
 direct and indirect. He had not Greek serenity and 
 composure of spirit, but he had Greek exultation in 
 every known form of intellectual activity, and this 
 audacious curiosity he made general. 
 
 Let us remember that Voltairism was primarily 
 and directly altogether an intellectual movement, for 
 this reason, that it was primarily and directly a 
 reaction against the subordination of the* intellectual 
 to the moral side of men, carried to an excess that 
 was at length fraught with fatal mischief. Are our 
 opinions true, provably answering to the facts of 
 the case, consistent with one another ; is our intelli- 
 1 Rem. sur lea Pensees de M. Pascal. (Evmres, xliii. p. 68. 
 
L PRELIMINARY. 35 
 
 gence radiant with genuine light and knowledge ; 
 and are we bent more than all else on testing and 
 improving and diffusing this knowledge and the 
 instruments for acquiring it t The system to which 
 this was the powerful counter-formula, even in its 
 least dark shapes, always reserved a large class of 
 most important facts from the searching glare of that 
 scrutiny which Voltairism taught men to direct upon 
 evgrf proposition tha.t was presented to them. 
 
 For many centuries truth had been conceived as 
 of the nature of a Real Universal, of which men had 
 full possession by the revelation of a supreme divinity. 
 All truth was organically one ; and the relations of 
 men to something supernatural, their relations to one 
 another, the relations of outward matter, were all 
 comprehended in a single synthesis, within which, 
 and subject to which, all intellectual movement pro- 
 ceeded. An advancing spirit of inquiry dissolved 
 this synthesis ; and the philosophers, as distinguished 
 from the steadfast and single students of science, 
 ceasing to take it for granted as an indisputable 
 starting-point that truth was an assured possession, 
 went off on two different lines. Men of one cast of 
 mind fell into doubt whether truth was a reality after 
 all, and the discovery of it accessible to mankind. 
 Thinkers of a different cast accepted this doctrine of 
 the impotence of the human understanding to dis- 
 cover knowledge and prove truth, but they proceeded 
 to the retrograde inference that therefore the ancient 
 tradition of knowledge actually contains that approved 
 
36 VOLTAIRE. chap. 
 
 truth, which had just been pronounced unattainable. 
 This oblique mode of regaining a position of which 
 they had been by their own act dispossessed, was 
 impossible for so keen and direct a spirit as Vol- 
 taire's. However filled his mind may have been 
 with the false notions of the Tribe, of the Market, 
 and above all of the Cave, at all events it was more 
 free -than most, certainly than most of those subalterns 
 of the schools, from the Idols of the Theatre, and 
 &om either kind of that twofold excess, ' one sort of 
 which too hastily constitutes sciences positive and 
 hierarchic, while the other presents scepticism and 
 the pursuit of a vague inquiry that has no limit.' l 
 
 The consequence of this peculiarity, call it a 
 destructive and blind narrowness, or call it a wise 
 and justly-measured openness of mind, as we may 
 choose, has been that Voltaire has been condemned 
 with unsparing severity by three of the most influen- 
 tial schools of modern opinion. Every one who has 
 a system to defend is the enemy of the famous man 
 who destroyed the reigning system of his day, with 
 engines that seem to point with uncomfortable direct- 
 ness against all other systems. Every one who 
 thinks that we have turned over the last leaf of the 
 book of knowledge, whatever the inscription that he 
 may find written upon it, naturally detests the whole 
 spirit and impulse of one who felt all his life that 
 he and his generation were the first band of men 
 who had shaken off their chains, and ascended to the 
 1 Novum Organum, § 67. 
 
L PRELIMINARY. 37 
 
 light of the sun and the contemplation of some por- 
 tion of an inexhaustible universe of realities. Hence, 
 the partisans of the Christian religion, in any of its 
 forms, have dealt unrelenting contempt and hatred to 
 the foe who did more than any one else to reduce 
 their churches, once so majestically triumphant, to 
 their present level, where they are forced under 
 various guises and with much obsolete pretension to 
 plead for the tolerance of rational men, on the com- 
 paratively modest ground of social fitness. Their 
 hostility, we may agree, is not very astonishing, when 
 we reflect on the provocation. 
 
 Many of those, however, who have least hope of any 
 future revival of the ancient creed, and who least re- 
 gret its fall, are even less hostile to the Jesuits than 
 they are to Voltaire. Comte, for example, who elabor- 
 ated a doctrine with a corresponding system of life 
 deduced from it, and the central principle of whose 
 method of social action and movement is to destroy 
 by replacing, has adjudged an emphatically secondary 
 place to Voltaire's claims on our good-will. 1 Nor 
 
 1 Some fault has been found with this passage by one or two 
 private critics, as being not entirely just to the eminent thinker 
 to whom it refers, and to whom my own obligations, direct and 
 indirect, are so numerous, notwithstanding my final inability 
 to follow him in his ideas of social reconstruction, that the idea 
 of adding to the sum of misrepresentation of which Comte and 
 his doctrines have been the victims, is particularly disagreeable 
 to me. Here, therefore, is one passage in which Comte seems 
 to speak rather more warmly of Voltaire than the words in the 
 text imply : ' Toutefois, l'indispensable necessity mentale et 
 sociale d'une telle elaboration provisoire laissera toujours, dans 
 
38 VOLTAIRE. ohap. 
 
 ought this seriously to surprise us, when we consider 
 that Voltaire trusted to the individual to replace for 
 himself, by the motion of his own faculties, the old 
 collective tradition of action and belief ; and that he 
 showed himself too keenly alive to the curses of that 
 empire of prejudice, authority, social fixity, which he 
 devoted his life to overthrowing, to lend any help to 
 the restoration of a similar reign with changed watch- 
 words. He is perhaps the one great Frenchman who 
 has known how to abide in patient contentment with 
 an all but purely critical reserve, leaving reconstruc- 
 tion, its form, its modes, its epoch, for the fulness of 
 time and maturity of effort 'to disclose. It has been 
 the fatal quality of the genius of his countrymen, 
 from Descartes down to Comte, to decline to rest on 
 an uncompleted interpretation of experience, and to 
 insist on a hasty supplement of unconcluded analysis 
 by what is virtually an a priori synthesis. Voltaire 
 deserves no special praise for this abstention from a 
 
 l'ensemble de l'histoire humaine, une place importaDte a sea 
 principaux cooperateurs, et surtout a leur type le plus eminent, 
 auquel la posterity la plus lointaine assurera une position 
 vraiment unique ; parceque jamais un pareil office n'avait pu 
 jusqu'alors eehoir, et pourra desormais encore moins appartenir 
 a un esprit de cette nature, chez lequel la plus admirable com- 
 binaison qui ait existe jusqu'ici entre les diverses quality 
 secondaires de l'intelligence presentait si sou vent la seduisante 
 apparence de la force et du genie ' {Phil. Pos. v. 518). Against 
 this we have to place the highly significant fact that Voltaire 
 only appears in the calendar as a dramatic poet, as well as the 
 whole tenour and spirit of Comte's teaching, namely, as he puts 
 it in one place, that ' une pure critique ne pent jamais miriier 
 iecmcaup d'estime ' {Politique Positive, iii. 547). 
 
I. PRELIMINAEY. 39 
 
 premature reconstruction ; for it probably was not so 
 much the result of deliberate persuasion that we must 
 wait on the time, as of an inability to conceive of need 
 for a cultus and a firm ordering of our knowledge, as 
 prime demands of human nature and essential con- 
 ditions of stable progress. Whatever value we may 
 set on this, sage reserve, the fact that Voltaire had no 
 scheme for replacing the scheme which he destroyed, 
 accounts very amply for the disparagement of him 
 by those who think almost any fabric of common and 
 ordered belief better for men, than the seeming chaos 
 of intricate and multitudinous growths which now 
 overspread the field of European opinion. And does 
 it not involve us in a defective conception of the way 
 in which human progress accomplishes itself, to place 
 in our calendar of benefactors, supposing us to com- 
 pose a calendar, only those who have built up truth, 
 to the exclusion of those who have with pain and 
 labour helped to demolish impudent error? Has 
 Jericho always fallen without the blasts from the seven 
 trumpets ? Is it sufficiently demonstrated from his- 
 tory that false opinions vanish spontaneously, without 
 a direct blow struofe ; that a system of belief, corro- 
 borated in the breasts of the multitude by all the 
 authority of a long tradition, sanctified to the power- 
 ful few by dignity or emolument, entrenched with a 
 strength that seems inexpugnable among the ordin- 
 ances and institutions and unwritten uses of a great 
 community, will straigntway succumb from inherent 
 want of life and courage ? 
 
40 VOLTAIRK chap. 
 
 There is a third kind of opinion, that is as little 
 merciful in its own way as either of the two others, 
 and this is the scientific or cultured opinion. Objec- 
 tions from this region express themselves in many 
 forms, some of them calm and suggestive, others a 
 little empty and a little brutal. They all seem to 
 come to something of this kind : that Voltaire's assault 
 on religion, being conducted without any smallest 
 spark of the religious spirit, was therefore necessarily 
 unjust to the object of his attack, and did the further 
 mischief of engendering in all on whom his influence 
 was poured out a bitterness and moral temerity which 
 is the worst blight that can fall upon the character 
 either of a man or a generation : that while truth is 
 relative and conditional, and while belief is only to be 
 understood by those who have calmly done justice to 
 the history of its origin and growth, Voltaire care- 
 lessly, unphilosophically, and maliciously, handled 
 what had once possessed a relative truth, as if it had 
 always been absolutely false, and what had sprung 
 from the views and aspirations of the best men, as if 
 it had had its root in the base artifices of the worst : 
 that what ought to have gone on, and would have 
 gone on, as a process of soft autumnal dissolution, 
 was converted by the infection of Voltaire into a 
 stained scene of passion and battle : that assuming to 
 possess and to furnish men with a broad criticism of 
 life, he left out of life its deepest, holiest, and most 
 exalting elements, as well as narrowed and depraved 
 criticism, from its right rank as the high art of stating 
 
I. PRELIMINARY. 41 
 
 and collating ideas, down to an acrid trick of debate, 
 a thing of proofs, arguments, and rancorous polemic. 
 It is certain that there is much truth in this parti- 
 cular strain of objection to Voltaire's power and his use 
 of it, or else it would not have found mouthpieces, as 
 it has done, among some of the finest spirits of the 
 modern time. But it is the natural tendency of the 
 hour rather to exaggerate what weight there really is 
 in such criticism, which, though claiming to be the 
 criticism of temperance and moderation and relativity, 
 does not as a matter of fact escape the fatal law of 
 excess and absoluteness even in its very moderation 
 and relativity. In estimating an innovator's method, 
 all depends on the time and the enemy ; and it may 
 sometimes happen that the time is so out of joint and 
 the enemy so strong, so unscrupulous, so imminently 
 pernicious, as to leave no alternative between finally 
 succumbing, and waging a war of deliverance for which 
 coming generations have to bear the burdens in feuds 
 and bitterness ; between abridging somewhat of the 
 richness and fulness of life, and allowing it all to be 
 gradually choked up by dust and enwrapped in night. 
 For let us not forget that what Catholicism was accom- 
 plishing in France in the first half of the eighteenth 
 century, was really not anything less momentous than 
 the slow strangling of French civilisation. Though 
 Voltaire's spirit may be little edifying to us, who 
 after all partake of the freedom which he did so much 
 to win, yet it is only just to remember what was the 
 spirit of his foe, and that in so pestilent a presence a 
 
42 VOLTAIRE, chap. 
 
 man of direct vision may well be eager to use such 
 weapons as he finds to his hand. Let the scientific 
 spirit move people to speak as it lists about Voltaire's 
 want of respect for things held sacred, for the good 
 deeds of holy men, for the sentiment and faith of 
 thousands of the most worthy among his fellows. 
 Still there are times when it may be very questionable 
 whether, in the region of belief, one with power and 
 with fervid honesty ought to spare the abominable 
 city of the plain, just because it happens to shelter 
 five righteous. There are times when the inhumanity 
 of a system stands out so red and foul, when the 
 burden of its iniquity weighs so heavy, and the con- 
 tagion of its hypocrisy is so laden with mortal plague, 
 that no awe of dilettante condemnation nor minute 
 scruple as to the historic or the relative can stay the 
 hand of the man whose direct sight and moral energy 
 have pierced the veil of use, and revealed the shrine 
 of the infamous thing. The most noble of the holy 
 men said long ago that ' the servant of the Lord must 
 not strive, but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, 
 patient, in meekness instructing those that oppose 
 themselves.' The history of the churches is in one 
 of its most conspicuous aspects the history of a pro- 
 longed outrage upon these words by arrogant and 
 blasphemous persons, 'pretending to draw a sacred 
 spirit from the very saint who uttered them. We 
 may well deplore that Voltaire's attack, and every 
 other attack of the same sort, did not take the fair 
 shapei prescribed by the apostle to the servant of the 
 
I. PRELIMINARY. 43 
 
 Lord, of gentleness, patience, and the instruction of a 
 sweet and firm example. But the partisans of the 
 creed in whose name more human blood has been 
 violently shed than in any other cause whatever, 
 these, I say, can hardly find much ground of serious 
 reproach in a few score epigrams. Voltaire had no 
 calm breadth of wisdom. It may be so. There are 
 moments which need not this calm breadth of wisdom, 
 but a two-edged sword, and when the deliverers of 
 mankind are they who 'come to send fire on the 
 earth.' 
 
CHAPTER IL 
 
 ENGLISH INFLUENCES. 
 
 Voltairism may be said to have begun from the 
 flight of its founder from Paris to London. This, to 
 borrow a name from the most memorable instance of 
 outward change marking inward revolution, Was the 
 decisive hegira, from which the philosophy of destruc- 
 tion in a formal shape may be held seriously to date. 
 Voltaire landed in England in the middle of May, 
 1726. He was in the thirty-third year of his age, 
 that earlier climacteric, when the men with vision first 
 feel conscious of a past, and reflectively mark its 
 shadow. It is then that they either press forward 
 eagerly with new impulse in the way of their high 
 calling, knowing the limitations of circumstance and 
 hour, or else fainting draw back their hand from the 
 plough, and ignobly leave to another or to none the 
 accomplishment of the work. The narrowness of the 
 cribbed deck that we are doomed to tread, amid the 
 vast space of an eternal sea with fair shores dimly 
 seen and never neared, oppresses the soul with a 
 burden that sorely tries its strength, when the fixed 
 limits first define themselves before it. Those are 
 
CHAP. n. ENGLISH INFLUENCES. 45 
 
 the strongest who do not tremble beneath this gray 
 ghostly light, but make it the precursor of an in- 
 dustrious day. 
 
 The past on which Voltaire had to look back was 
 full of turmoil, contention, impatience, and restless 
 production. Francois Marie Arouet was born in 
 1694, so feeble in constitution that, as in the case 
 of Fontenelle, whose hundred years surpassed even 
 Voltaire's lengthy span, his life was long despaired of 
 His father was a notary of good repute for integrity 
 and skill, and was entrusted with the management of 
 their affairs by several of the highest families in 
 France. His mother is supposed to have had some 
 of the intellectual alertness which penetrated the 
 character of her son, but she died when he was seven 
 years old, and he remained alone with his father until 
 1704, when he was sent to school. His instructors at 
 the College Louis-le-Grand were the Jesuits, whose 
 wise devotion to intellectual education in the broadest 
 sense that was then possible, is a partial set-off against 
 their mischievous influence on morals and politics. 
 The hardihood of the young Arouet's temper broke 
 out even from the first,, and we need not inquire 
 minutely what were the precise subjects of education 
 of a child, whom his tutor took an early opportunity 
 of pointing out as the future coryphaeus of deism in 
 France. He used to say in after life that he had 
 learnt nothing worth learning. A lad who could 
 launch infidel epigrams at 'his Jansenist of a brother,' 
 and declaim a poem in which so important a hero as 
 
46 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 Moses figures as an impostor, 1 was of that originality 
 of mental turn on whose freedom the inevitably 
 mechanical instruction of the school cannot be ex- 
 pected to make any deep or decisive impression. The 
 young of this independent humour begin their educa- 
 tion where those of less energetic nerve hardly leave 
 off, with character ready made. 
 
 Between a youth of bold, vivacious, imaginative 
 disposition, and a father of the temperament proper 
 to a notary with many responsibilities, there could be 
 no sympathy, and the two were not long in coming 
 to open quarrel without terms. The son was taken 
 out by his godfather, the abb6 Chateauneuf, into that 
 gay world which presently became the infamous 
 world of the regency, where extraordinary sprightli- 
 ness and facility in verse gained him welcome and 
 patronage. We need waste no words on the corrup- 
 tion and intellectual trifling of the society into which 
 Voltaire was thus launched. For shallowness and 
 levity, concealed by literary artifice and play of 
 frivolous wit which only makes the scene more dreary 
 or detestable, it has never been surpassed. There 
 was brightness in it, compared with the heavy 
 brutality and things obscene of the court of Lewis 
 xv., but after all we seem to see over the brightness 
 a sort of foul glare, like the iridescence of putrefac- 
 tion. Ninon de l'Enclos, a friend of his mother's, 
 was perhaps the one free and honest soul with whom 
 the young Arouet had to do. Now extremely old, 
 
 1 J. B. Rousseau's Moisade. 
 
n. ENGLISH INFLUENCES. 47 
 
 she still preserved both her wit and her fine probity of 
 intellect. She had always kept her heart free of cant, 
 from the time when she had ridiculed, as the Jansenists 
 of love, the pedantical women and platonic gallants of 
 the H6tel Rambouillet, down to her rejection of 
 Madame de Maintenon's offer of an invitation to the 
 court, on condition of her joining the band of the 
 devout. The veteran Aspasia, now over eighty, was 
 struck by the brilliance and dazzling promise of the 
 young versifier, and left him a legacy for the purchase 
 of books. 
 
 The rest of the society into which Voltaire was 
 taken was saturated with a spirit of reaction against 
 the austere bigotry of the court, and bad and miser- 
 able as such austerity is, the rebellion against it is 
 always worse and more miserable stilL The licence 
 seems not to have been of the most joyous sort, as 
 indeed licence protesting and defiant is not apt to be. 
 The abbe 1 Chaulieu, a versifier of sprightly fancy, 
 grace, and natural ease, was the dissolute Anacreon 
 of the people of quality who during the best part of 
 the reign of Lewis xiv. had failed to sympathise with 
 its nobility and stateliness, and during the worst part 
 revolted against its gloom. Voltaire at twenty was 
 his intimate and his professed disciple. 1 To this 
 intimacy we may perhaps trace that remarkable con- 
 tinuity of tradition between Voltaire and the grand 
 age, which distinguishes him from the school of 
 famous men who were called Voltaireans, and of 
 1 CEuvres, lxii. p. 45. 
 
48 VOLTAIRE. CHAP, 
 
 whom the special mark was that they had absolutely 
 broken with the whole past of French history and 
 literature. Princes, dukes, and marquises were of 
 Chaulieu's band. The despair and fury of the elder 
 Arouet at such companions and such follies reproduce 
 once more a very old story in the records of youthful 
 genius. Genius and fine friends reconcile no prudent 
 notary to a son's hatred for law and the desk. Orgies 
 with the Duke of Sully, and rhyming bouts with 
 Chaulieu, have sunk into small size for us, who know 
 that they were but the mischievous and unbecoming 
 prologue of a life of incessant and generous labour, 
 but we may well believe that such enormities bulked 
 big in the vision of the father, as portents of degrada- 
 tion and ruin. "We have a glimpse of the son's temper 
 towards the profession to which his father had tried 
 so hard to bind him, in the ironical definition, thrown 
 out long afterwards, of an avocat as a man who, not 
 having money enough to buy one of those brilliant 
 offices on which the universe has its eyes fixed, studies 
 for three years the laws of Theodosius and Justinian 
 so as to know the custom of Paris, and who at length 
 having got matriculated has the right of pleading for 
 money, if he has a loud voice. 1 The young Arouet 
 did actually himself get matriculated and acquire this 
 right, but his voice proved so loud that his pleadings 
 were destined to fill wider courts than those of Paris. 
 
 Arouet the elder persuaded Chateauneuf's brother, 
 who was a diplomatist, to take into his company the 
 
 1 Dictionnaire Philosophique, «.». (Euvres, lii. p. 378. 
 
a. ENGLISH INFLUENCES. 49 
 
 law-student who had made verse instead of studying 
 the laws of Theodosius. So the youth went to the 
 Hague. Here he straightway fell into new misad- 
 venture by conceiving an undying passion, that lasted 
 several weeks, for a young countrywoman whom he 
 found in Holland. Stolen interviews, letters, tears, 
 and the other accustomed circumstances of a juvenile 
 passion on which the gods frown, were all discovered 
 The ambassador sent the refractory boy back to his 
 father, with full details and documents, with results 
 on the relations of the pair that need not be described. 
 In the autumn of 1715 Lewis Xiv. died, and 
 the Regent D'Orleans reigned in his stead. There 
 presently appeared some pungent lines, entitled Les 
 fai vu, in which the writer recounted a number of 
 evil things which he bad seen in the state — a thousand 
 prisons crowded with brave citizens and faithful 
 subjects, the people groaning un^er rigorous bondage, 
 the magistrates, harassing every town with ruinous 
 taxes and unrighteous edicts ; fai vu, c'est dvre tout, le 
 Jisuite adori. The last line ran that all these ills 
 the writer had seen, yet was but twenty years old. 1 
 Voltaire was twenty-two, but the authorities knew 
 him for a verse-writer of biting turn, so they treated 
 the discrepancy of age as a piece of mere prosopopoeia, 
 and laid him up in the Bastille (1716). As a matter 
 of fact, he had no hand in the offence. Even amid 
 these sombre shades, where he was kept for nearly a 
 year, his spirit was blithe and its fire unquenchable. 
 
 1 (Euvres, i. 513. 
 E 
 
50 VOLTAIRE. OHAP. 
 
 The custom of Paris and the Codes were as little 
 handled as ever; and he divided his time between 
 the study of the two great epics of Greece and Kome, 
 and the preparation of what he designed to be the 
 great epic of France. He also gave the finishing 
 strokes to his tragedy of (Edipe, which was represented 
 in the course of the following year with definite 
 success, and was the opening of a brilliant dramatic 
 career, that perhaps to a mortal of more ordinary 
 mould might alone have sufficed for the glory of a 
 life. 
 
 e_ The next six years he divided between a lively 
 society, mostly of the great, the assiduous composi- 
 tion of new plays, and the completion of the Henriade. 
 His fibre was gradually strengthening. By the end 
 of this period, the recklessness of the boyish disciple 
 of Chaulieu had wholly spent itself; and although 
 Voltaire's manner of life was assuredly not regular 
 nor decorously ordered, now nor for many years to 
 come, if measured by the rigid standard on which an 
 improved society properly insists, yet it was always 
 a life of vigorous industry and clear purposes. For 
 a brief time his passion for the Mar6chale de Villars 
 broke the tenacity of his diligence, and he always 
 looked back on this interruption of his work with the 
 kind of remorse that might afflict a saint for a grave 
 spiritual backsliding. He was often at the country 
 seats of Sully, Villars, and elsewhere, throwing off 
 thousands of trifling verses, arranging theatricals, 
 enlivening festivals, and always corresponding inde- 
 
n- ENGLISH INFLUENCES. 51 
 
 fatigably ; for now and throughout his life his good 
 sense and good will, his business-like quality and his 
 liking for his friends, both united to raise him above 
 the idle pretences and self-indulgence of those who 
 neglect the chief instrument of social intercourse and 
 friendly continuity. He preferred the country to the 
 town. 'I was born,' he says to one, 'to be a faun or 
 creature of the woods ; I am not made to live in a 
 town.' To another, 'I fancy myself in hell, when I 
 am in the accursed city of Paris.' 1 The only recom- 
 mendation of the accursed city was that a solitude 
 was attainable in it, as in other crowded spots, which 
 enabled him to work better there than in the small 
 and exacting throng of country-houses. 'I fear 
 Fontainebleau, Villars, and Sully, both for my health 
 and for Henry iv. ; I should do no work, I should 
 over-eat, and I should lose in pleasures and in com- 
 plaisance to others an amount of precious time that 
 I ought to be using for a necessary and creditable 
 task.' 2 
 
 Yet there was even at this period much of that 
 marvellous hurrying to and fro in France and out oi 
 it, which continued to mark the longer portion of 
 Voltaire's life, and fills it with such a busy air of 
 turmoil and confusion, explaining many things, when 
 we think of the stability of life and permanence oi 
 outward place of the next bright spirit that shone 
 upon Europe. Goethe never saw London, Paris, nor 
 Vienna, and made no journey save the famous visit to 
 1 Qhwres, bdi. pp. 86 and 89. 2 lb. bdi. p. 107. 
 
52 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 Italy, and the march at Valmy. Voltaire moved 
 hither and thither over the face of Europe like the 
 wind, and it is not until he has passed through half 
 of his life that we can begin to think of his home. 
 Every association that belongs to his name recalls 
 tumult and haste and shrill contention with men 
 and circumstance. We have, however, to remember 
 that these constant movements were the price which 
 Voltaire paid for the vigour and freedom of his speech, 
 in days when the party of superstition possessed the 
 ear of the temporal power, and resorted without 
 sparing to the most violent means of obliterating 
 every hardy word and crushing every independent 
 writer. The greater number of Voltaire's ceaseless 
 changes of place were flights from injustice, and the 
 recollection of this may well soothe the disturbance 
 of spirit of the most fastidious zealot for calm and 
 orderly living. They were for the most part retreats 
 before packs of wolves. 
 
 In 1722 the elder Arouet died, to the last relent- 
 lessly set against a son, not any less stubborn than 
 himself, and unfortunately a great deal more poetical. 
 About the same time the name of Arouet falls away, 
 and the poet is known henceforth by that ever famous 
 symbol for so much, Voltaire ; a name for which 
 various explanations, none of them satisfactory, have 
 been offered, the latest and perhaps the least improb- 
 able resolving it into a fanciful anagram. 1 
 
 Industrious as he was, and eager as he was for 
 'a.k.o.v.e.t., l(«). i(,eune). 
 
tl. ENGLISH INFLUENCES. 53 
 
 rural delights and laborious solitude, Voltaire was 
 still pre-eminently social. His letters disclose in him, 
 who really possessed all arts, the art of one who knew 
 how to be graciously respectful to the social superiors 
 who took him for a companion, without forgetting 
 what was due to his own respect for himself. We 
 are all princes or poets, he exclaimed jubilantly on 
 the occasion of one of those nights and suppers of the 
 gods. Such gay-hearted freedom was not always well 
 taken, and in time Voltaire's eyes were opened to 
 the terms on which he really stood. ' Who is the 
 young man who talks so loud?' called out some Chevalier 
 Rohan, at one of these sprightly gatherings at the 
 house of the Duke of Sully. 1 'My lord,' the young 
 man replied promptly, 'he is one who does not carry 
 about a great name, but wins respect for the name he has.' 
 A few days afterwards the high-spirited patrician 
 magnanimously took an opportunity of having a 
 caning inflicted by the hands of his lackeys on the 
 poet who had thrown away this lesson upon him. 
 Voltaire, who had at all events that substitute for true 
 physical courage which springs up in an intensely irrit- 
 able and susceptive temperament, forthwith applied 
 himself to practise with the small-sword. He did his 
 best to sting his enemy to fight, but the chevalier 
 either feared the swordsman, or else despised an 
 antagonist of the middle class ; and by the influence 
 of the Rohan family the poet once more found him- 
 
 1 Chevalier appears to have been a title given by courtesy to 
 the cadets of certain great families. 
 
54 VOLTAIRE. chap. 
 
 self in the Bastille, then the house of correction at 
 the disposal and for the use of the nobles, the court, 
 and the clergy. Here for six months Voltaire, then 
 only representing a very humble and unknown 
 quantity in men's minds, chafed and fretted. The 
 pacific Fleury, as is the wont of the pacific when in 
 power, cared less to punish the wrong-doer than to 
 avoid disturbance, knowing that disturbance was most 
 effectually avoided by not meddling with the person 
 most able to resent. The multitude, however, when 
 the day of reckoning came, remembered all these 
 things, and the first act of their passion was to raze 
 to the ground the fortress into which nearly every 
 distinguished champion of the freedom of human 
 intelligence among them had at one time or anothel 
 been tyrannically thrown. 
 
 On his release Voltaire was ordered to leave Paris. 
 A clandestine visit to the city showed him that there 
 was no hope of redress from authority, which was in 
 the hands of men whose pride of rank prevented them 
 from so much as even perceiving, much more from 
 repairing, such grievance as a mere bourgeois could 
 have : as if, to borrow Condorcet's bitter phrase, a 
 descendant of the conquering Franks, like De Rohan, 
 could have lost the ancient right of life and death over 
 a descendant of the Gauls. 1 And this was no ironic 
 taunt ; for while Voltaire was in the Bastille, that 
 astounding book of the Count of Boulainvilliers was 
 in the press, in which it was shown that the feudal 
 i (Euvres, iv. 18. 
 
II. ENGLISH INFLUENCES. 55 
 
 system is the master-work of the human mind, and 
 that the advance of the royal authority and the in- 
 crease of the liberties of the people were equally unjust 
 usurpations of the rights of the conquering Franks. 1 
 
 Voltaire was no patient victim of the practice which 
 corresponded to this trim historic theory. In a tumult 
 of just indignation he quitted France, and sought 
 refuge with that stout and free people, who had by 
 the execution of one king, the deposition of another, 
 and the definite subjugation of the hierarchy, won a 
 full liberty of thought and speech and person. A 
 modern historian has drawn up a list of the men of 
 mark who made the same invigorating pilgrimage. 
 ' During the two generations which elapsed between 
 the death of Lewis xiv. and the outbreak of the 
 Revolution, there was hardly a Frenchman of eminence 
 who did not either visit England or learn English ; 
 while many of them did both.' 2 Among those who 
 actually came to England and mixed in its society 
 besides Voltaire, were Buffon, Brissot, Helv^tius, 
 Gournay, Jussieu, Lafayette, Montesquieu, Mauper- 
 tuis, Morellet, Mirabeau, Roland and Madame Roland, 
 Rousseau. We who live after Wordsworth, Shelley, 
 Byron, Scott, have begun to forget the brilliant group 
 of the Queen Anne men. They belong to a self-com- 
 placent time, and we to a time of doubt and unsatisfied 
 aspiration, and the two spirits are unsympathetic. 
 Yet they were assuredly a band, from Newton and 
 
 1 Histoire de Vancien Gouvernement de la France (1727). 
 ' Buckle's Rist. of Civilisation, i. 657-664. 
 
56 VOLTAIRE. chap. 
 
 Locke down to Pope, of whom, taking them for all 
 the qualities which they united, in science, correct 
 judgment, love of letters, and taste, England has as 
 good reason to be proud as of any set of contemporary 
 writers in her history. 
 
 Up to this moment Voltaire had been a poet, and 
 his mind had not moved beyond the region of poetic 
 creation. He had beaten every one once and for all 
 on the ground of light and graceful lyric verse, 'a 
 kind of poetry,' says a French critic whose word in 
 such a matter we can hardly refuse to take, ' in which 
 Voltaire is at once with us the only master and the 
 only writer supportable, for he is the only one whom 
 we can read.' 1 He had produced three tragedies. 
 His epic was completed, though undergoing ceaseless 
 labour of the file. Two lines in his first play had 
 served to mark him for no friend to the hierophants : 
 
 Nos pretres ne sont point ce qu'un Tain peuple pense ; 
 Notre credulity fait toute leur science. 2 
 
 And the words of Araspe in the same play had 
 breathed the full spirit of the future liberator : 
 
 Ne nous fions qu'a nous ; voyons tout par nos yeux : 
 Ce sont la nos trepieds, nos oracles, nos dieux. 8 
 
 Such expressions, however, were no more than the 
 vague and casual word of the esprit fort, the friend of 
 Chaulieu, and the rhymer of a dissolute circle, where 
 religion only became tinged with doubt, because 
 
 1 Sainte-Beuve, Caitseries, v. 111. " QSdipe, iv. so. 1. 
 8 It. ii. y. 
 
tr. ENGLISH INFLUENCES. 57 
 
 conduct had already become penetrated with licence 
 More important than such stray words was the 
 Epistle to Uranie (1722), that truly masculine and 
 terse protest against the popular creed, its mean and 
 fatuous and contradictory idea of an omnipotent God, 
 who gave us guilty hearts so as to have the right of 
 punishing us, and planted in us a love of pleasure so 
 as to torment us the more effectually by appalling ills 
 that an eternal miracle prevents from ever ending; 
 who drowned the fathers in the deluge and then died 
 for the children ; who exacts an account of their 
 ignorance from a hundred peoples whom he/ has him- 
 self plunged helplessly into this ignorance : 
 
 Je ne reconnais point a cette indigne image 
 
 Le dieu que je dois adorer ; 
 
 Je eroirais le deshonorer 
 Par une telle insulte et par vm tel hommage. 1 
 
 Though called The For and Against, the poet hardly 
 tries to maintain any proportion between the two 
 sides of the argument. The verses were addressed 
 to a lady in a state of uncertainty as to belief, of 
 whom there were probably more among Voltaire's 
 friends of quality than he can have cared, to cure or 
 convert. Scepticism was at this time not much more 
 than an interesting fashion. 
 
 The dilettante believer is indeed not a strong 
 spirit, but the weakest, and the facts of life were by 
 this time far too serious for Voltaire, for that truth 
 
 1 Le Pour et le Contre, ou Epitre a Uranie. (Euvres, xv 
 pp. 399, 403. 
 
58 VOLTAIKE. OHAP. 
 
 • 
 
 to have missed his keen-seeing eye. It is not hard 
 to suppose that impatient weariness of the poor life 
 that was lived around him, had as large a share as 
 resentment of an injustice, in driving him to a land 
 where men did not merely mouth idle words of mak- 
 ing reason their oracle, their tripod, their god, but 
 where they had actually systematised the rejection of 
 Christianity, and had thrown themselves with grave 
 faith on the disciplined intelligence and its lessons. 
 fVoltaire left a country where freedom of thinking was 
 fonly an empty watchword, the name for a dissipated 
 fashion. It was considered free-thinking if a man 
 allowed himself to regard the existence of the Five 
 Propositions in Jansenius's book as a thing indifferent 
 to the happiness of the human race. 1 He found in 
 England that it was a far-spreading reality, moulding 
 not only the theological ideas, but the literature, 
 manners, politics, and philosophy, of a great society. 
 Voltai re left France a poet, he returned to it a sag e. 
 Before his flight, though we do not know to what 
 extent he may have read such history as was then 
 accessible, he had been actively productive .only in 
 the sphere of the imaginative faculties, and in criti- 
 cism of the form and regulation proper to be imposed 
 upon them. When he returned, while his poetic 
 power had ripened, he had tasted of the fruit of the 
 tree of scientific reas on, and, what was not any less 
 important, he had become alive to the central truth 
 of the social destination of all art and al l knowled^a 
 
 1 Condorcet, Vie de Voltaire. (Euvres, iv. 20. 
 
n. ENGLISH INFLUENCES. 59 
 
 In a word, he was transformed from the penman 
 into the captain and man-at-arms. ' The example of 
 England,' says Condorcet, ' showed him that truth is 
 not made to remain a secret in the hands of a few 
 philosophers, and a limited number of men of the 
 world, instructed, or rather indoctrinated, by the 
 philosophers ; smiling with them at the errors of 
 which the people are the victims, but at the same 
 time making themselves the champions of these very 
 errors, when their rank or position gives them a real 
 or .chimerical interest in them, and quite ready to 
 permit the proscription, or even persecution, of their 
 teachers, if they venture to say what in secret they 
 themselves actually think. From the moment of his 
 return, Voltaire felt himself called to destroy the 
 prejudices of every kind, of which his country was 
 the slave.' 1 
 
 It is not difficult to perceive the sorts of fact 
 which would most strike the exile's attention, though 
 it would be rash to suppose that things struck him in 
 exact proportion to their real weight and the depth 
 of their importance, or that he detected the connection 
 subsisting among them at their roots. Perhaps the 
 first circumstance to press its unfamiliarity upon him 
 was the social and political consequence of the men 
 of letters' "in England, anbTThe recognition given to 
 the™poWe"r~oT~the pen. The patronage of men of 
 genius in the reign of Anne and part of the reign of 
 the first George had been profuse and splendid. The 
 1 Condorcet, Vie de Voltaire. (Euvres. iv. 20. 
 
60 VOLTAIKE. chap. 
 
 poet who had been thrown into prison for resenting a 
 whipping from a nobleman's lackeys, found himself in 
 a land where Newton and Locke were rewarded with 
 lucrative posts in the administration of the country, 
 where Prior and Gay acted in important embassies, 
 and where Addison was a Secretary of State. The 
 author of (Edipe and the Henriade had to hang 
 ignobly about in the crowd at Versailles at the 
 marriage of Lewis xv. to gain a paltry pittance from 
 the queen's privy purse, 1 while in England Hughes 
 and Eowe and Ambrose Philips and Congreve were 
 all enjoying amply endowed sinecures. The familiar 
 intercourse between the ministers and the brilliant 
 literary group of that age has been often painted. 
 At the time of Voltaire's exile it had just come to an 
 end with the accession to supreme power of Walpole, 
 who neither knew anything nor cared anything about 
 the literature of his own time. But the usage was 
 still new, and the men who had profited and given 
 profit by it were alive, and were the central figures 
 in the circles among which Voltaire was introduced 
 by Bolingbroke. Newton died in 1727, and Voltaire 
 saw his death mourned as a public calamity, and sur- 
 rounded with a pomp and circumstance in the eye of 
 the country that could not have been surpassed if he 
 had been, not a geometer, but a king who was the 
 benefactor of his people. 2 The author of Gulliver's 
 
 1 Correspondence, 1725. CEuwes, lzii. pp. 140-49. 
 
 2 Lettres sur les Anglais, xv. (Euvres, xxxv. p. 114. Of 
 ilso Letter xxiv. (pp. 197-202). 
 
II. ENGLISH INFLTJENCES. 6"! 
 
 Travels was still a dignitary in the state church, and 
 there was still a large association of outward power 
 and dignity with literary merit. 
 
 In so far as we consider literature to be one of the 
 purely decorative arts, there can be no harm in this 
 patronage of its most successful, that is its most 
 pleasing, professors by the political minister ; but the 
 more closely literature approaches to being an organ 
 of serious things, a truly spiritual power, the more 
 danger there is likely to be in making it a path to 
 temporal station or emolument. The practical instinct, 
 which on some of its sides seems like a miraculously 
 implanted substitute for scientific intelligence in 
 English politics, has led us almost too far in preserv- 
 ing this important separation of the new church from 
 the functions and rewards of the state. The mis- 
 fortunes of France since the Revolution have been 
 due to no one circumstance so markedly as to the 
 predominance which the man of letters has acquired 
 in that country ; and this fatal predominance was 
 first founded, though assuredly not of set design, by 
 Voltaire. 
 
 Not less amazing than the high honour paid to 
 intellectual eminence was the refugee from the city 
 of the Bastille likely to find the freedom with which 
 public events and public personages were handled by 
 any one who could pay a printer. The licence of 
 this time in press and theatre has only been once or 
 twice equalled since, and it has never been surpassed. 
 From Bolingbroke and Swift down to the author oi 
 
62 VOLTAIRE. chap. 
 
 The Golden Rump, 1 every writer who chose to con- 
 sider himself in opposition treated the minister with 
 a violence and ferocity, which neither irritated nor 
 daunted that sage head, but which would in France 
 have crowded the lowest dungeons of the Bastille 
 with victims of Fleury's anger and fright. Such 
 license was as natural in a country that had within 
 ninety years gone through a violent civil war, a 
 revolutionary change of government and line, and a 
 half-suppressed dispute of succession, as it would have 
 been astonishing in France, where the continuity of 
 outward order had never been more than superficially 
 ruffled, even in the most turbulent times of the factious 
 wars of the League and the Fronde. No new idea 
 of the relations between ruler and subject had ever 
 penetrated into France, as it had done so deeply in 
 the neighbouring country. No serious popular issues 
 had been so much as stated. As Voltaire wrote, in 
 the detestable times of Charles ix. and Henry in. 
 it was only a question whether the people should be 
 the slave of the Guises, while as for the last war, it 
 deserved only hisses and contempt ; for what was De 
 Retz but a rebel without a purpose and a stirrer of 
 sedition without a name, and what was the parliament 
 but a body which knew neither what it meant nor 
 what it did not mean 1 2 The apologies of Jesuit 
 writers for the assassination of tyrants deserve an 
 important place in the history of the doctrine of 
 
 1 Lord Stanhope's Hist, of England, ii. 231 (ed. 1858). 
 * Lettres sur les Anglais, ix. QSwvres, xxxv. p. 73. 
 
fi ENGLISH INFLUENCES. 63 
 
 divine right; but they were theoretical essays in 
 casuistry for the initiated few, and certainly conveyed 
 no general principles of popular right to the many. 
 
 Protestantism, on the other hand, loosened the 
 conception of authority and of the respect proper for 
 authority, to a degree which has never been realised 
 in the most anarchic movements in France, whose 
 anarchy has ever sprung less from a disrespect for 
 authority as such, than from a passionate and uncom- 
 promising resolve in this or that group that the 
 authority shall be in one set of hands and not another. 
 Voltairism has proved itself as little capable as 
 Catholicism of inspiring any piece that may match 
 with Milton's Areopagitica, the noblest defence that 
 was ever made of the noblest of causes. We know 
 not whether Voltaire ever thought much as to the 
 history and foundation of that freedom of speech, 
 which even in its abuse struck him as so wonderful 
 a circumstance in a country that still preserved a 
 stable and orderly society. He was probably content 
 to admire the phenomenon of a liberty so marvellous, 
 without searching very far for its antecedents. The 
 mere spectacle of such free, vigorous, many-sided, 
 and truly social and public activity of intellect as 
 was visible in England at this time, was in itself 
 enough to fix the gaze of one who was so intensely 
 conscious of his own energy of intellect, and so 
 bitterly rebellious against the system which fastened 
 a gag between his lips. 
 
 If we would realise the impression of this scene of 
 
64 VOLTAIRE, chap, 
 
 free speech on Voltaire's ardent spirit, we need only 
 remember that, when in time he returned to his own 
 country, he had to wait long and use many arts and 
 suffer harassing persecution, before he could publish 
 what he had to say on Newton and Locke, and in 
 other less important respects had to suppress much 
 of ' what he had most at heart to say. ' One must 
 disguise at Paris,' he wrote long after his return, 
 'what I could not say too strongly at London ;' and 
 he vaunts his hardihood in upholding Newton against 
 Bene' Descartes, while he confesses that an unfortunate 
 but necessary circumspection forced him to try to 
 make Locke obscure. 1 Judge the light which would 
 qome into such a mind as his, when he first saw the 
 discussion and propagation of truth freed from these 
 vile and demoralising affronts. The very conc eption 
 o f truth w as « new nns, as a goHdess not to be 
 shielded behind the shades of hierophantic mystery, 
 but rather to be sought in the free tumult and joyous 
 strife of many voices, there vindicating her own 
 majesty and marking her own children. 
 
 . 'Penetrating deeper, Voltaire found not only a new 
 iq.ea of truth as a something rude, robust, and self- 
 sufficient, but also what was to him a new order of 
 truths, the triumphs of slow-footed induction and the 
 positive reason. France was the hotbed of systems 
 of the physical universe. The provisional and 
 suspensive attitude was intolerable to her impetuous 
 genius, and the gaps which scientific investigation 
 1 CorresDondence, 1732. QSumes, lxii. -p. 253. 
 
n. ENGLISH INFLUENCES. 65 
 
 was unable to fill, were straightway hidden behind 
 an artificial screen of metaphysical phantasies. The 
 Aristotelian system died harder in France than any- 
 where else, for so late as 1693, while Oxford and 
 Cambridge and London were actually embracing the 
 Newtonian principles, even the Cartesian system was 
 forbidden to be taught by decrees of the Sorbonne 
 and of the Council of the King. 1 When the Cartesian 
 physics once got a foothold, they kept it as firmly as 
 the system which they had found so much difficulty 
 in displacing. It is easy to believe that Voltaire's 
 positive intelligence would hold aloof by a certain 
 instinct from physical explanations which were un- 
 verified and incapable of being verified, and which 
 were imbrangled with theology and metaphysics. 
 
 We can readily conceive, again, the sensation of 
 freshness and delight with which a mind so essentially 
 real, and so fundamentally serious, paradoxical as 
 this may sound in connection with the name of the 
 greatest mocker that has ever lived, would exchange 
 the poetised astronomy of Fontenelle, excellently 
 constituted as Fontenelle was in a great many ways, 
 for the sure and scientific discoveries of a Newton. 
 Voltaire, 'in whatever subject, never failed to see 
 through rhetoric, and for rhetoric as the substitute 
 for clear reasoning he always had an aversion as deep 
 as it was wholesome. Nobody ever loved grace and 
 form in style more sincerely than Voltaire, but he 
 has shown in a great many ways that nobody ever 
 
 1 Martin's Hist, de France, vol xiv. 265-67. 
 F 
 
66 VOLTAIEE. 0H4.P 
 
 valued grace and form more truly at their worth, 
 compared with correctness of argument and precision 
 and solidity of conclusion. 
 
 Descartes, Fontenelle had said, 'essaying a bold 
 flight, insisted on placing himself at the source of all, 
 on making himself master of the first principles of 
 things by a certain number of clear and fundamental 
 ideas, having thus only to descend to the phenomena 
 of nature as necessary consequences ; Newton, more 
 timid or more modest, began his advance by resting 
 on phenomena in order to ascend to the unknown 
 principles, resolved to admit them, however the 
 combination of the results might present them. The 
 one starts from what he understands clearly to discover 
 the cause of what he sees : the other starts from what 
 he sees, to discover its cause, whether clear or obscure.' 
 Caution and reserve and sound method had achieved 
 a generalisation more vast and amazing than the 
 boldest flight, or most resolute reasoning downwards 
 from a clearly held conception to phenomena, could 
 possibly have achieved. This splendid and unrivalled 
 discovery was probably expounded to Voltaire by 
 Dr. Samuel Clarke, with whom he tells us that he 
 had several conferences in 1726, 1 and who was one of 
 the ablest of the Newtonians. He had no doubt 
 learnt the theory of vortices from the Jesuits, and 
 clear exposition was the only thing needed to con- 
 vert him to the new theory, which shines by its own 
 light, and must, in an unbiassed intelligence with the 
 
 1 Philosophie de Newton, Pt. i. c. i. (Euvres, xli. p. 46. 
 
II. ENGLISH INFLUENCES. 67 
 
 humblest scientific quality, have extinguished every 
 artificial explanation. One of the truest signs of 
 the soundness of Voltaire's intellectual activity was 
 that his glad reception of the Newtonian doctrine of 
 attraction did not blind him to the signal service and 
 splendid genius of Descartes. That loud-shouting yet 
 feeble-footed enthusiasm, which can only make sure of 
 itself by disparaging the object of a counter-enthusiasm, 
 had no place in an intellect so emphatically sincere 
 and self-penetrative. He prefaces his account of the 
 system of attraction by a hearty and loyal appreciation 
 of the propounder of the system of vortices. 1 
 
 The acquisition of the special theory of attraction 
 was in itself less important for Voltaire, than the 
 irresistible impulse which it would give to the. innate 
 rationality or positivity of his own mind. It fitted 
 him to encounter with proper freedom not only vor- 
 tices, but that tremendous apparatus of monads, 
 sufficient reason, and pre-established harmony, with 
 which Leibnitz then overawed European philosophy. 
 ' Metaphysics ! ' he cried, ' we have, then, got as 
 far as they had in the time of the earliest Druids !' 2 
 
 L<?cke's essay impelled him further in the same path 
 of patient and cautious interrogation of experience ; 
 for the same method which established gravitation 
 presided over the birth of the experiential psychology. 
 Newton instead of elaborating a system of vortices, 
 or another, out of his own consciousness, industriously 
 
 1 Lettres sur lea Anglais, iv. (Eiwres, xxxv. pp. 115-20. 
 8 Philos. de Newton Pt. i. c. ix. CEuvres, zli. p. 108. 
 
68 VOLTAIRE. chap. 
 
 and patiently waited on the phenomena. Locke, too, 
 instead of inventing a romance of the soul, to use 
 Voltaire's phrase, sagaciously set himself to watch the 
 phenomena of thought, and ' reduced metaphysics to 
 being the experimental physics of the soul.' 1 Male- 
 branche, then the reigning philosopher in France, 
 'astonished the reason of those whom he delighted 
 by his style. People trusted him in what they did 
 not understand, because he began by being right in 
 what they did understand; he seduced people by 
 being delightful, as Descartes seduced them by being 
 daring, while Locke was nothing more than sage.' 2 
 'After all,' Voltaire once wrote, 'we must admit 
 that anybody who has read Locke, or rather who is 
 his own Locke, must find the Platos mere fine talkers, 
 and nothing more. In point of philosophy, a chapter 
 of Locke or Clarke is, compared with the babble of 
 antiquity, what Newton's optics are compared with 
 those of Descartes.' 3 It is curious to observe that 
 De Maistre, who thought more meanly of Plato than 
 Voltaire did, and hardly less meanly than he thought 
 of Voltaire himself, cried out that in the study of 
 philosophy contempt for Locke is the beginning of 
 knowledge. 4 Voltaire, on the other hand, is enchanted 
 to hear that his niece reads the great English philo- 
 sopher, like a good father who sheds tears of joy that 
 
 1 D'Alembert. 
 
 2 Dictioimaire Philosophique, s.v. Locke. (Euvres, lvL p. 447 
 
 3 Corr. 1736. (Euvres, lxiii. p. 29. 
 
 4 Soirees de St Pitersbourg, Gzeme Fentretien, i. 403. 
 
U. ENGLISH INFLUENCES. 69 
 
 his children are turning out well. 1 Augustus published 
 an edict de coercendo intra fines imperio, and like him, 
 Locke has fixed the empire of knowledge in order to 
 strengthen it. 2 Locke, he says elsewhere, traced the 
 development of the human reason, as a good anatomist 
 explains the machinery of the human body : instead 
 of defining all at once what we do not understand, he 
 examines by degrees what we want to understand : 
 he sometimes has the courage to speak positively, but 
 sometimes also he has the courage to, doubt. 3 This 
 is a perfectly appreciative account. Locke perceived 
 the hopelessness of defining things as they are in 
 themselves, and the necessity before all else of under- 
 standing the reach of the human intelligence ; the 
 impossibility of attaining knowledge absolute and 
 transcendent ; and the limitations of our thinking 
 and knowing faculties within the bounds of an ex- 
 perience that must always be relative. The doubt 
 which Voltaire praised in Locke had nothing to do 
 with that shivering mood which receives overmuch 
 poetic praise in our day, as the honest doubt that has 
 more faith than half your creeds. There was no 
 question of the sentimental juvenilities of children 
 crying for light. It was by no means religious doubt, 
 but philosophic; and it affected- only the possibilities 
 of ontological knowledge, leaving the grounds of faith 
 on the one hand, and practical conduct on the other, 
 
 1 Corr. 1737 ; lxiii. p. 154. 
 
 2 lb. p. 248. Cf. also lxii. p. 276. 
 
 8 Lettres sur les Anglais, xiv. CEuvres, xxxv. pp. 102 6. 
 
70 VOLTAIRE. CHAP, 
 
 exactly where they were. His intense feeling for 
 actualities would draw Voltaire irresistibly to the 
 writer who, in his judgment, closed the gates of the 
 dreamland of metaphysics, and banished the vaulting 
 ambition of a prioricertainties, which led nowhere 
 and assured nothing. Voltaire's keen practical instinct 
 may well have revealed to him that men were most 
 likely to attribute to the great social problem of the 
 improvement of mankind its right supremacy, when 
 they had ceased to concentrate intellectual effort on 
 the insoluble ; and Locke went a long way towards 
 showing how insoluble those questions were, on which, 
 as it chanced, the most strenuous efforts of the intellect 
 of Europe since the decline of theology had been 
 concentrated. 
 
 That he should have acquired more scientific views 
 either upon the origin of ideas, or the question whether 
 the soul always thinks,, or upon the reason why an 
 apple falls to the ground, or why the planets remain 
 in their orbits, was on the whole very much less 
 important for Voltaire, than a profound and very 
 vital sentiment which was raised to supreme pro- 
 minence in his mind, by the spectacle of these vast 
 continents of knowledge newly discovered by the 
 adventurous yet sure explorers of English thought. 
 This sentiment was a noble faith, none the less firm 
 because it was so passionate, in the ability of the 
 relative and practical understanding to reach truth/ 
 a deep-rooted reverence for it, as a majestic power 
 bearing munificent and unnumbered gifts to mankind 
 
n. ENGLISH INFLUENCES. 7] 
 
 Hence the vivacity of the annotations which about 
 this time (1728) Voltaire affixed to Pascal's famous 
 Thoughts, and which were regarded at that time as 
 the audacious carpings of a shallow poet against a 
 profound philosopher. They were in truth the pro- 
 test of a lively common sense against a strained, 
 morbid, and often sophistical, misrepresentation of 
 human nature and human circumstance. Voltaire 
 shot a penetrative ray through the clouds of doubt, 
 out of which Pascal had made an apology for mysti- 
 cism. Even if there were no direct allusions to 
 Locke, as there are, we should know from whom the 
 writer had learnt the art of insisting on the relativity 
 of propositions, reducing them to definable terms, 1 
 and being very careful against those slippery unob- 
 served transitions from metaphor to reality, and from 
 a term used in its common sense to the same term in 
 a transcendental sense, by which Pascal brought the 
 seeming contradictions of life, and its supposed petti- 
 ness, into a light as oppressively glaring as it was 
 artificial. ' These pretended oppositions that you call 
 contradictions are necessary ingredients in the com- 
 position of man, who is, like the rest of nature, what 
 he is bound to be.' 2 And where is the wise man 
 who would be full of despair because he cannot find 
 out the exact constitution of his thought, because 
 he only knows a few attributes of matter, because 
 God has not disclosed to him all his secrets 1 He 
 might as well despair because he has not got four feet 
 1 (Euvres, vol. xliii. p. 77. 2 lb. p. 20. 
 
72 VOLTAIRE. OHAJ?. 
 
 and two wings. 1 This sage strain was the restoration 
 to men of their self-respect, the revival of that intelli- 
 gence which Pascal had so humiliated and thrust 
 under foot. It was what he had seen in England of 
 the positive feats which reason had achieved, that 
 filled Voltaire with exultation in its power, and con- 
 fidence in the prospects of the race which possessed 
 such an instrument. ' What strange rage possesses 
 some people, to insist on our all being miserable ! 
 They are like a quack, who would fain have us 
 believe we are ill, in order to sell us his pills. Keep 
 thy drugs, my friend, and leave me my health.' 2 
 
 From this there flowed that other vehement 
 current in his soul, of energetic hatred toward the 
 black clouds of prejudice, of mean self-love, of sinister 
 preference of class or order, of indolence, obstinacy, 
 wanton fancy, and all the other unhappy leanings of 
 human nature, and vexed and fatal conjunctures of 
 circumstance, which interpose between humanity and 
 the beneficent sunbeams of its own intelligence, that 
 central light of the universe. Hence, again, by a 
 sufficiently visible chain of thought, his marked dis- 
 esteem for far-sounding names of brutal conquerors, 
 and his cold regard for those outward and material 
 circumstances in the state of nations, which strike the 
 sense, but do not touch the inward reason. ^Tot 
 long ago,' he writes once, ' a distinguished company 
 were discussing, the trite and frivolous question, who 
 was the greatest man, Csesar, Alexander, Tamerlane, 
 1 (Euvres, vol. xliii. p. 26. 2 Corr. 1737. (Ewwes, lxiii. p. 248, 
 
u- ENGLISH INFLUENCES. 73 
 
 or Cromwell. Somebody answered that it was un- 
 doubtedly Isaac Newton. This person was right ; for 
 if true greatness consists in having received from 
 heaven a powerful understanding and in using it to 
 enlighten oneself and all others, then such an one as 
 Newton, who is hardly to be met with once in ten 
 centuries, is in truth the great man. ... It is to 
 him who masters our minds by the force of truth, not 
 to those who enslave men by violence ; it is to him 
 who understands the universe, not to those who dis- 
 figure it, that we owe our reverence.' 1 This may 
 seem trite to us, as the question which suggested it 
 seemed to Voltaire, but we need only reflect, first, 
 how new this was, even as an idea, in the France 
 which Voltaire had quitted, and, second, how in spite 
 of the nominal acceptance of the idea, in the England 
 of our own time there is, with an immense majority 
 not only of the general vulgar but of the special 
 vulgar who presume to teach in press and pulpit, no 
 name of slight at once so disdainful and so sure of 
 transfixing as the name of thinker. 
 
 The discovery of the New World did not fire the 
 imagination and stir the thought of Europe more 
 intensely, than the vision of these new worlds of 
 knowledge kindled the ardour of the receptive sprit 
 which had just come into contact with them. But 
 besides the speculative aspects of what he saw in 
 England, Voltaire was deeply penetrated by the social 
 differences between a country that had been effec- 
 1 Lettres sur les Anglais, xiii. (Euvres, xxxv. p. 95. 
 
74 VOLTAIRE. ohap. 
 
 tively, if only partially, transformed from feudalism, 
 and his own, where feudalism had only been trans 
 formed into a system more repressive than itself, and 
 more unfit to conduct a nation to the free and 
 industrious developments of new civilisation. It is a 
 remarkable thing that though Voltaire's habitual 
 companions or patrons had belonged to the privileged 
 class, he had been sufficiently struck by the evils 
 incident to the privileged system to notice the 
 absence of such evils in England, and to make a 
 clear attempt, though an insufficient one, to under- 
 stand the secret of the English immunity from them. 
 One of the worst curses of France was the taille or 
 capitation-tax, and the way in which it was levied 
 and assessed. In England, Voltaire noticed, the 
 peasant has not his feet bruised in wooden shoes, he 
 eats white bread, is decently clad, is not terrified to 
 increase the number of his stock, or to roof his dwell- 
 ing with tiles, lest his tax should be raised next year. 
 Again, he placed his finger on one of the circumstances 
 that did most to spoil the growth of a compact and 
 well-knit society in France, when he pointed to the 
 large number of farmers in England with five or six 
 hundred pounds sterling a year, who do not think it 
 beneath them to cultivate the earth which has made 
 them rich, and on which they live in active freedom. 1 
 The profoundest modern investigator of the conditions 
 of French society in the eighteenth century has in- 
 dicated the eagerness of every man who got a little 
 
 1 Lettres, etc. x. (Euvres, xxxv. p. 81. 
 
II. ENGLISH INFLUENCES. 75 
 
 capital to quit the country and buy a place in a town, 
 as doing more harm to the progress of the agriculture 
 and commerce of France than even the taille itself 
 and the trade corporations. 1 
 
 Voltaire perceived the astonishing fact that in 
 this country a man because he is a noble or a priest 
 was not exempt from paying certain taxes, and that 
 the Commons who regulated the taxes, though 
 second to the Lords in rank, were above them in 
 legislative influence. 2 His acute sight also revealed 
 to him the importance of the mixture of ranks and 
 classes in common pursuits, and he records with 
 admiration instances of the yojjager sons of peers of 
 the realm following trade. 'Whoever arrives in 
 Paris from the depths of a remote province with 
 money to spend and a name in dc or tile, can talk 
 about ' a man like me, a man of my quality,' 3 and 
 hold a merchant in sovereign contempt. The mer- 
 chant again so constantly hears his business spoken 
 of with disdain that he is fool enough to blush for it ; 
 yet I am not sure which is the more useful to a state, 
 a thickly-bepowdered lord who knows exactly what 
 time the king rises and what time he goes to bed, 
 and gives himself mighty airs of greatness while he 
 plays the part of a slave in a minister's ante-room ; or 
 the merchant who enriches his country, gives orders 
 
 1 De Tocqueville's Ancien Rfyime, liy. ii. c. 9, p. 137 (ed. 
 1866). 2 Q&wvres, xxxv. p. 80. 
 
 3 The reader of Zadig will remember the 'homme comme 
 mot,' and his ill luck at Babylon. (Euvres, lix. pp. 153-59. 
 
76 VOLTAIRE. chap. 
 
 from his counting-house at Surat or Cairo, and con- 
 tributes to the happiness of the globe.' 1 It is easy 
 to conceive the fury which these contrasts drawn 
 from English observation would excite among the 
 personages in France who happened to get the worst 
 side in them, and there was assuredly nothing sur- 
 prising in the decree of the Parliament of Paris 
 (1734), which condemned the Letters on the English 
 to be publicly burnt, as scandalous and contrary 
 alike to good manners and the respect due to princi- 
 palities and powers. 
 
 The English reader of the Letters is naturally 
 struck by the absence of any adequate account of our 
 political liberties and free constitutional forms. There 
 is a good chapter on Bacon, one on inoculation, and 
 several on the Quakers, but on the civil constitution 
 hardly a word of large appreciativeness. Not only 
 this, but there is no sign that Voltaire either set any 
 due or special value on the popular forms of the 
 Hanoverian time, or clearly understood that the 
 liberty, which was so amazing and so precious to him 
 in the region of speculative and literary activity, was 
 the direct fruit of that general spirit of freedom, 
 which is naturally engendered in a people accustomed 
 to take an active part in the conduct of its own affairs. 
 Liberty in spirituals was adorable to him, but for 
 liberty in temporals he never seems to have had more 
 than a very distant and verbal kind of respect ; just 
 because, with all his unmatched keenness of sight, he 
 1 Lettres sur les Anglais, xi. (Euvres, xxxv. p. 85. 
 
n. ENGLISH INFLUENCES. 77 
 
 failed to discover that the English sturdiness in the 
 matter of civil rights was the very root and cause, 
 not only of that material prosperity which struck him 
 so much, and of the slightness and movableness of 
 the line which divided the aristocracy from the com- 
 mercial classes, but also of the fact that a Newton 
 and a Locke were inwardly emboldened to give free 
 play to their intelligence without fear of being 
 punished for their conclusions, and of the only less 
 important fact that whatever conclusions speculative 
 genius might establish would be given to the world 
 without interposition from any court or university or 
 official tribunal. Voltaire undoubtedly admired the 
 English for their parliament, because the material 
 and superficial advantages that delighted him were 
 evidently due to the system, which happened to be 
 parliamentary. What we miss is any consciousness 
 that these advantages would not have been what they 
 were, if they had been conferred by an absolute sove- 
 reign ; any recognition that political activity through- 
 out a nation works in a thousand indirect but most 
 potent ways, and is not more to be prized for this, 
 than for its direct and most palpable consequences. 
 In One place, indeed, he mentions that the honour 
 paid to men of letters is due to the form of govern- 
 ment, but his language betrays a wholly inadequate 
 and incorrect notion of the true operation of the form 
 of government. 'There are in London,' he says, 
 ' about eight hundred people with the right of speak- 
 ing in public, and maintaining the interests of the 
 
78 VOLTAIKE. ohap. 
 
 nation. Some five or six thousand pretend to the 
 same honour in their turn. All the rest set them- 
 selves up to judge these, and everybody can print 
 what he thinks. So all the nation is bound to instruct 
 itself. All talk is about the governments of Athens 
 and Borne, and it becomes necessary to read the 
 authors who have discussed them.^,That naturally 
 leads to love of polite learning.' 1 This is to confound 
 a very trivial accident of popular governments with 
 their essence. If culture thrives under them — a very 
 doubtful position — it is not because voters wish to 
 understand the historical allusions of candidates, but 
 because the general stir and life of public activity 
 tends to commove the whole system. Political free- 
 dom does not produce men of genius, but its atmos- 
 phere is more favourable than any other to their 
 making the best of their genius in the service of 
 mankind. 
 
 Voltaire, in this as in too much besides, was con- 
 tent with a keen and rapid glance at the surface. 
 The' reader may remember his story of meeting a 
 boatman one day on the Thames, who seeing that he 
 was a Frenchman, with a too characteristic kind of 
 courtesy, took the opportunity of bawling out, with 
 the added emphasis of a round oath, that he would 
 rather be a boatman on the Thames than an arch- 
 bishop in France. The next day Voltaire saw his 
 man in prison with irons on and praying an alms 
 from the passers-by, and so asked him whether he 
 1 Lett. Ang. xxi. ; xxxv. pp. 172, etc. 
 
". ENGLISH INFLUENCES. 79 
 
 still thought as scurvily of an archbishop in France. 
 ' Ah, sir,' cried the man, ' what an abominable govern- 
 ment ! I have been carried off by force to go and 
 serve in one of the king's ships in Norway. They 
 take me from my wife and my children, and lay me 
 up in prison with irons on my legs until the time for 
 going on board, for fear I should run away.' A 
 countryman of Voltaire's confessed that he felt a 
 splenetic joy that a people who were constantly 
 taunting the French with their servitude, were in 
 sooth just as much slaves themselves ; but for my 
 own part, says Voltaire, I felt a humaner sentiment, 
 I was afflicted at there being no liberty on the earth. 1 
 This is well enough as a comment on the abomina- 
 tion of impressment ; yet we feel that there is behind 
 it, and not here only but generally in Voltaire, a sort 
 of confusion between two very distinct conceptions, 
 that both in his day and ever since have been equally 
 designated by the common name of civil liberty. The 
 first of these ideas is a mere privative, undoubtedly 
 of sovereign importance, but still a privative, and 
 implies absence, more or less complete, of arbitrary 
 control from without, of interference with individual 
 action by authority, of any pretension on the part of 
 any organised body to hinder any member of the 
 society from doing or abstaining from doing what 
 may seem right in his own eyes, provided he pays a 
 corresponding respect to the freedom of his fellows. 
 Freedom in this sense Voltaire fully understood, and 
 
 1 Lettres sur les Anglais, i. ; xxxv. p. 31. 
 
80 VOLTAIRE. OHAI 
 
 valued as profoundly as it deserves to be valued. 
 Political liberty, however, has not only a meaning of 
 abstention, but a meaning of participation. If in one 
 sense it is a sheer negative, and a doctrine of rights, 
 in another sense it is thoroughly positive, and a gospel 
 of duties^^he liberty which has really made England 
 what it so delighted and stimulated and inflamed Vol- 
 taire to find her, has been quite as much of the second 
 kind as of the first ; that liberty which consists in a 
 national habit of independent and watchful interest in 
 bhe transaction of the national affairs by the persons 
 most concerned in them ; in a general consciousness 
 of the duty of having some opinion on the business of 
 the state ; in a recognition on the part of the govern- 
 ment that the balance of this opinion is necessary as a 
 sanction to any policy, to which the effective force of 
 the state is applied. It is true that this public par- 
 ticipation in public concerns has sometimes been very 
 dark and blind, as it has often been in the highest 
 degree enlightened, but for good or for evil it has 
 been the root of the matter. 
 
 The great Frenchmen, who have been most char- 
 acteristically French, while valuing all and envying 
 many of the best products of our liberty, may be said 
 generally to have failed entirely to detect that the 
 salt of English character, in days when it had more 
 robustness than we can see just now, sprung from the 
 double circumstance of every man being at liberty 
 to have, and being inclined to take the trouble to 
 have, an opinion about the method and doings of his 
 
II. ENGLISH INFLUENCES. 81 
 
 government ; and of so many men being called upon 
 in high capacity or low, in an important function or 
 an obscure one, to take an independent and free share 
 in controlling or initiating the doings of their govern- 
 ment. Take Montesquieu, for example. He came 
 to England just when Voltaire quitted it, and studied 
 carefully those political facts which his countryman 
 had so neglected. Yet he saw no deeper into the 
 spirit of our institutions than to fix on the constitu- 
 tional balance of powers as the great secret of our 
 freedom and order. And Montesquieu, in spite of 
 this, was wiser than most of his contemporaries, for 
 he at least saw the worth of constitutional freedom, 
 if he failed to see other ingredients of still more 
 importance. French statesmen and publicists have 
 been systematically blind to the great truth that there 
 is no royal road to national well-being, and that 
 nations will deliberately put away happiness from 
 themselves, unless such happiness comes to them in a 
 given way. The Physiocrats, who were with all their 
 shortcomings the most nearly scientific social thinkers 
 France possessed, could rise to no higher conception 
 of a national life than the supreme authority of a 
 wise and benevolent monarch, giving good gifts to 
 his subjects. Turgot, with all the breadth and 
 sagacity of his genius, when five-and-forty years after 
 our present date he came into power, austerely clung 
 to the, same disastrous idea of passing reasoned laws, 
 in the shape of the beneficial edicts of an absolute 
 power. Voltaire, in the same way, never rose above the 
 a 
 
82 VOLTAIRE. chap 
 
 simple political conception of an eastern tale, a good 
 tempered despot with a sage vizier. In politics, then, 
 he failed to carry away from England the very essence 
 and principle of our institutions, with which it was so 
 much more important that his countrymen should be 
 familiarised than that they should follow inoculation. 
 It may at first sight be astonishing to find that, 
 while Voltaire was impressed only in a vague and 
 general way with the free variety of theological 
 opinion which Protestantism had secured for England, 
 the sect which made a sort of mark on his mind was 
 tha.t which conceived the idea that Christianity has 
 after all something to do with the type and example 
 of Christ. We know how laughable and monstrous 
 the Quaker scheme has appeared to people who have 
 been steeped from their youth upwards in elaborate 
 systems of abstruse metaphysical dogma, mystic 
 ceremonies, hierarchic ordering, and profuse con- 
 demnation of rival creeds. Voltaire's imagination 
 was struck by a sect who professed to regard the 
 religion of Christ as a simple and austere discipline of 
 life, who repudiated ritual, and held war for the worst 
 of anti-christian practices. The forms and doctrines 
 of the established church of the country he would be 
 likely to take merely for so much of the common 
 form of the national institutions. He would simply 
 regard it as the English way of narrowing the mind 
 and consolidating the social order. Gibbon's famous 
 sentence was not yet written, which described all 
 religions as equally true in the eyes of the people 
 
II. ENGLISH INFLUENCES. 83 
 
 equally false in the eyes of the philosopher, and equally 
 useful in the eyes of the magistrate. But the idea was 
 the idea of the century, and Voltaire would justly look 
 upon the Anglican profession as a temporarily useful 
 and statesmanlike settlement. He praised its clergy 
 for the superior regularity of their manners. ' That 
 indefinable being, who is neither ecclesiastic nor secular, 
 in a word, who is called ribbi, is an unknown species in 
 England ; the clergy here are all prigs, and nearly all 
 pedants. When they learn that in France young men 
 notorious for their debauchery, and raised to prefer- 
 ment by the intrigues of women, pursue their amours 
 publicly, amuse themselves by the composition of 
 gallant verses, give everyday prolonged and luxurious 
 suppers, and rise from them to implore the enlighten- 
 ment of the holy spirit, boldly calling themselves the 
 successors of the apostles — why, then our English thank 
 God that they are Protestants.' 1 
 
 If, however, in face of a young and lively French 
 graduate, bawling theology in the schools in the 
 morning and in the evening singing tender songs 
 with the ladies, an Anglican divine is a very Cato, 
 this Cato is a downright gallant before a Scotch 
 presbyterian, who assumes a grave step and a sour 
 mien, preaches from the nose, and gives the name of 
 harlot of Babylon to all churches in which some of 
 the ecclesiastics are so fortunate as to receive an 
 income of fifty thousand livres a year. However, 
 each man takes whatever road to heaven he pleases. 
 
 1 Lett. Ang. vi. ; xxxv. p. 62. 
 
84 VOLTAIKE. CHAP. 
 
 If there were one religion in England, they would 
 have to fear its despotism ; if there were only two, 
 they would cut one another's throats ; but there are 
 thirty ; so they live peaceably and happily together. 1 
 In the Quakers Voltaire saw something quite 
 different from the purely political pretensions and 
 internecine quarrels of doctrine of the ordinary worldly 
 sects. It is impossible to say how much of the kind- 
 liness with which he speaks of them is due to real 
 admiration of their simple, dignified, and pacific life, 
 and how much to a mischievous desire to make their 
 praise a handle for the dispraise of overweening com- 
 petitors. On the whole there is a sincerity and 
 heartiness of interest in his long account of this sect, 
 which persuades one that he was moved by a genuine 
 sympathy with a religion that could enjoin the humane 
 and peaceful and spiritual precepts of Christ, while 
 putting away baptism, ceremonial communion, and 
 hierophantic orders. The nobility of the social 
 theories of the Society of Friends would naturally 
 stir Voltaire even more deeply than their abstention 
 from practices that were in his eyes degrading super- 
 stitions. He felt that the repugnance to lower the 
 majesty of their deity, by taking his name upon their 
 lips as solemn ratification of their words, had the 
 effect of elevating the dignity of man, by making his 
 bare word fully credible without this solemn ratifica- 
 tion. Their refusal to comply with the deferential 
 usages of social intercourse, though nominally based 
 1 Lett Ang. vii pp. 62-65. 
 
'1- ENGLISH INFLUENCES. 85 
 
 on the sinfulness of signs of homage to any mere 
 mortal, insinuated a consciousness of equality and 
 self-respect in that mere mortal who was careful to 
 make no bows and to keep his hat on in every 
 presence. Above all, Voltaire, who was nowhere 
 more veritably modern or better entitled to our 
 veneration than by reason of his steadfast hatred of 
 war, revered a sect so far removed from the brutality 
 of the military regime as to hold peace for a first 
 principle of the Christian faith and religious practice. 
 The reason why we do not go to war, his Quaker says, 
 is not that we are afraid of death, hut because we are 
 not wolves, nor tigers, nor dogs, but Christian men. 
 ' Our God, who has bidden us love our enemies and 
 suffer evil without complaint, assuredly has no mind 
 that we should cross the sea to go and cut the throats 
 of our brothers, because murderers in red clothes and 
 hats two feet high enlist citizens, making a noise with 
 two little sticks on an ass's skin tightly stretched. 
 And when, after victories won, all London blazes with 
 illuminations, the sky is aflame with rockets, and the 
 air resounds with the din of bells, organs, cannon, we 
 mourn in silence over the slaughter that causes all 
 the public joy.' * 
 
 Voltaire, let us add, was no dilettante traveller 
 constructing views and deducing theories of national 
 life out of his own uninstructed consciousness. No 
 German could have worked more diligently at the 
 facts,, and we may say here, once for all, that if it is 
 1 Lett. Ang. ii. ; xxxv. p. 42. 
 
86 VOLTAIRE. ohaj, 
 
 often necessary to condemn him for superficiality, 
 this lack of depth seldom at any time proceeds from 
 want of painstaking. His unrivalled brilliance -of 
 expression blinds us to the extreme and conscientious 
 industry that provided matter. The most illustrious 
 exile that our free land has received from France in 
 our own times, and assuredly far more of a giant in 
 the order of imagination than Voltaire, never had 
 intellectual curiosity enough to learn the language of 
 the country that had given him twenty years of 
 shelter. Voltaire, in the few months of his exile 
 here acquired such an astonishing mastery over 
 English as to be able to read and relish an esoteric 
 book like Hudibras, and to compass the enormously 
 difficult feat of rendering portions of it into good 
 French verse. 1 He composed an essay on epic poetry 
 in the English tongue, and he wrote one act of Brutus 
 in English. 
 
 He read Shakespeare, and made an elaborate study 
 of his method. He declares that Milton does as 
 much honour to England as the great Newton, and 
 he took especial pains not only to master and appre- 
 ciate the secret of Milton's poetic power, but even to 
 ascertain the minutest circumstances of his life. 2 He 
 studied Dryden, ' an author who would have a glory 
 without blemish, if he had only written the tenth 
 part of his works.' 8 He found Addison the first 
 
 1 (Euvrea, xxxv. p. 185. 
 
 2 Ess. sur la Poesie Epique. CEuvres, xiii. p. 445, and pp. 
 518-26. 8 (Euwest xxxv. p. 155. 
 
n. ENGLISH INFLUENCES. 87 
 
 Englishman who had written a reasonable tragedy, 
 and Addison's character of Cato one of the finest 
 creations of any stage. 1 Wycherley, Vanbrugh, and 
 Congreve he esteemed more highly than most of their 
 countrymen do now. An act of a play of Lillo's was 
 tb.3 base of the fourth act of Mahomet. Rochester, 
 Waller, Prior, and Pope, he read carefully and admired 
 as heartily as they deserved. Long after he had left 
 England behind, he places Pope and Addison on a level 
 for variety of genius with Machiavel and Leibnitz and 
 Fontenelle ; 2 and Pope he evidently for a long while 
 kept habitually by his elbow. Swift he placed before 
 Rabelais, calling him Rabelais in his senses, and, as 
 usual, giving good reasons for his preference ; for 
 Swift, he says justly, has not the gaiety of Rabelais, 
 but he has all the finesse, the sense, the variety, the 
 fine taste, in which the priest of Meudon was wanting. 3 
 In philosophy, besides Locke, there is evidence that 
 he read something of Hobbes, and something of 
 Berkeley, and something of Cudworth. 4 Always, 
 however, 'harassed, wearied, ashamed of having 
 sought so many truths and found so many chimeras, 
 I returned to Locke ; like a prodigal son returning 
 to his father, I threw myself into the arms of that 
 modest man, who never pretends to know what he 
 
 1 (Euvres, xxxv. p. 159. 
 
 2 Corr. 1736. (Euvres, lxiii. p. 4. lb. 60. 
 8 (Euvres, xxxv. pp. 189, 190. 
 
 * For Berkeley, see Corr. 1736 (CEwo. lxiii. pp. 130, 164, etc.), 
 and for the other two, see Le Philosophe Ignorant ((Euvres, 
 xliv. p. 69 and p. 47). 
 
88 VOLTAIKE. OHAP. 
 
 does not know, who in truth has no enormous pos- 
 sessions, but whose substance is well assured.' 1 
 
 Nor did Voltaire limit himself to the study of 
 science, philosophy, and poetry. He plunged into the 
 field of theology, and mastered that famous deistical 
 controversy, of which the seed had been sown in the 
 first half of the seventeenth century by Lord Herbert 
 of Cherbury, the correspondent of Descartes and the 
 earliest of the English metaphysical thinkers. 2 Lord 
 Herbert's object was to disengage from revelation 
 both our conceptions of the one supreme power, and 
 the sanctions of good and bad conduct. Toland, 
 whom we know also that Voltaire read, aimed at dis- 
 engaging Christianity from mystery, and discrediting 
 the canon of the New Testament. In 1724 Collins 
 published his Discourse on the Grounds and Reasons 
 of the Christian Religion, of which we are told that 
 few books ever made a greater noise than this did at 
 its first publication. The press teemed with vindica- 
 tions, replies, and rejoinders to Collins's arguments 
 during the whole of Voltaire's residence in England 3 
 His position was one which no modern freethinker 
 would dream of making a central point of attack, and 
 which hardly any modern apologist would take the 
 pains to reply to. He maintained that Jesus Christ 
 and the apostles trusted to the prophecies of the Old 
 Testament for their credentials, and then he showed, 
 
 1 QZuv., xliv. p. 47. 2 The De Veritate was published in 1624. 
 3 See the list from 1725 to 1728 in Leland's View of tfu 
 Deistical Writers, i. 132-144. 
 
II. ENGLISH INFLUENCES. 89 
 
 or tried to show, in various ways, that these prophecies 
 would not bear the weight which was thus laid upon 
 them. We may be sure that Voltaire's alert curiosity 
 would interest him profoundly in the lively polemical 
 ferment which this notable contention of Collins's 
 stirred up. 
 
 Woolston's discourses, written to prove that the 
 miracles of the New Testament are as mythical and 
 allegorical as the prophecies of the old, appeared at 
 the same time, and had an enormous sale. Voltaire 
 was much struck by this writer's coarse and hardy 
 way of dealing with the miraculous legends, and the 
 article on Miracles in the Philosophical Dictionary 
 shows how carefully he had read Woolston's book. 1 
 We find references to Shaftesbury and Chubb in 
 Voltaire's letters and elsewhere, though- they are not 
 the references of an admirer, 2 and Bolingbroke was 
 one of the most influential and intimate of his friends. 
 It is not too much to say that Bolingbroke was the 
 direct progenitor of Voltaire's opinions in religion, 
 and that nearly every one of the positive articles in 
 Voltaire's rather moderately sized creed was held 
 and inculcated by that brilliant and disordered genius. 
 He did not always accept Bolingbroke's optimism, but 
 even as late in the century as 1767 Voltaire thought 
 it worth while to borrow his name for a volume of 
 compendious attack on the popular religion. 3 Boling- 
 
 1 CEuvres, lvii. pp. 107-114. 
 
 2 Con-. 1736-37. CEuv. lxiii. p. 60, p. 86, and p. 112. 
 
 :< Examen Important de Milord Bolingbrocke. CEuv. xliv. p. 89 
 
90 VOLTAIRE. chap 
 
 broke's tone was peculiarly light and peculiarly well- 
 bred. His infidelity was strictly infidelity for the 
 upper classes; 1 ingenious, full of literature, and 
 elegantly supercilious. He made no pretence to 
 theological criticism in any sense that can be gravely 
 admitted, but looked at the claims of revelation with 
 the eye of a polished man of the world, and met its 
 arguments with those general considerations of airy 
 probability which go so far with men who insist on 
 having plausible opinions on all subjects, while they 
 will not take pains to work to the bottom of any. 
 
 Villemain's observation that there is not one of 
 Voltaire's writings that does hot bear the mark of his 
 sojourn in England, is specially true of what he wrote 
 against theology. It was the English onslaught which 
 sowed in him the seed of the idea, and eventually 
 supplied him with the argumentative instruments, of 
 a systematic and reasoned attack upon that mass of 
 doctrinal superstition and social abuse, which it had 
 hitherto been the fashion for even the strongest spirits 
 in his own country to do no more than touch with a 
 cool sneer or a flippant insinuation, directed to the 
 private ear of a sympathiser. "Who, born within the 
 last forty years, cried Burke, has read one word of 
 Collins, and Toland, and Chubb, and Morgan, and 
 that whole race who called themselves Freethinkers 1 
 Who now reads Bolingbroke 1 Who ever read him 
 through? 2 This was very well, but hundreds of 
 
 1 See Lechler's Geschichte des Englischen Deismus, p. 396. 
 5 Reflection*. Works, i. 419 (ed. 18421. 
 
II. ENGLISH INFLUENCES. 91 
 
 thousands of persons born within those last forty 
 years had read Voltaire, and Voltaire had drawn from 
 the armoury of these dead and unread Freethinkers 
 the weapons which he made sharp with the mockery 
 of his own spirit. He stood on the platform which 
 they had constructed, to stretch forth his hand against 
 the shrine and the image before which so many credu- 
 lous generations had bowed down. It was in this 
 most transformed shape among others that at length, 
 late and changed, but directly of descent, the free and 
 protesting genius of the Reformation made its decisive 
 entry into France. 
 
 It is easy to cite proofs of the repudiation by Pro- 
 testant bodies of the Protestant principle, to multiply 
 instances of the narrow rigidity of their dogma, and 
 the intolerance of their discipline. This method 
 supplies an excellent answer as against Protestants 
 who tax Catholics with the crime of persecution, or 
 the crime of opposing intellectual independence. It 
 cannot, however, touch the fact that Protestantism 
 was indirectly the means of creating and dispersing 
 an atmosphere of rationalism, in which there speedily 
 sprang up philosophical, theological, and political influ- 
 ences, all of them entirely antagonistic to the old 
 order of thought and institution. The whole intel- 
 lectual temperature underwent a permanent change, 
 that was silently mortal to the most flourishing tenets 
 of all sorts. It is futile to ask for a precise logical 
 chain of relations between the beginning of a move- 
 ment and its end ; and there is no more direct and 
 
92 VOLTAIRK chap. 
 
 logical connection between the right of private judg- 
 ment and an experiential doctrine of psychology, than 
 there is between experiential psychology and deism. 
 Nobody now thinks that the effect is homogeneous 
 with its cause, or that there is any objective resem- 
 blance between a blade of wheat and the moisture and 
 warmth which fill and expand it. All we can see is 
 that the proclamation of the rights of free judgment 
 would tend to substitute reason for authority, and 
 evidence for tradition, as the arbiters of opinion ; and 
 that the political expression of this change in the civil 
 wars of the middle of the seventeenth century would 
 naturally deepen the influence of the new principle, 
 and produce the Lockian rationalism of the end of 
 that century, which almost instantaneously extended 
 from the region of metaphysics into the region of 
 theology. 
 
 The historian of every kind of opinion, and the 
 student of the great chiefs of intellectual movements, 
 habitually do violence to actual circumstances, by 
 imparting too systematic a connection to the various 
 parts of belief, and by assuming an unreal degree of 
 conscious logical continuity among the notions of 
 individual thinkers. Critics fill in the frame with a 
 completeness and exactitude that had no counterpart 
 in the man's own judgments, and they identify him 
 with a multitude of deductions from his premisses, 
 which may be fairly drawn, but which never at all 
 entered into his mind, and formed no part of his 
 character. The philosophy of the majority of men 
 
n. ENGLISH INFLUENCES. 93 
 
 is nothing more shaped and incorporate than a little 
 group of potential and partially incoherent tendencies. 
 To stiffen these into a system of definite formulas is the 
 most deceptive, as it is the most common, of critical 
 processes. A few persons, with an exceptional turn 
 for philosophy, consciously embody their metaphysical 
 principles with a certain detail in all the rest of their 
 thinking. With most people, however, even people of 
 superior capacity, the relation between their ground- 
 system, such as a critic might supply them with, and 
 their manifestations of intellectual activity, is of an 
 extremely indirect and general kind. 
 
 Hence the untrustworthiness of those critical 
 schemata, so attractive for their compact order, which 
 first make Voltaire a Lockian sensationalist, and then 
 trace his deism to his sensationalism. We have 
 already seen that he was a deist before he came to 
 England, just as Lord Herbert of Cherbury was a 
 deist, who wrote before Locke was born. It was not 
 the metaphysical revolution of Locke which led 
 to deism, but the sort of way in which he thought 
 about metaphysics, a way which was immediately 
 applied to theology by other people, whether assailants 
 or defenders of the current opinions. Locke's was 
 ' common-sense thinking,' and the fashion spread. 
 The air was thick with common-sense objections to 
 Christianity, as it was with common-sense ideas as to 
 the way in which we come to have ideas. There was 
 no temperament to which such an atmosphere could 
 be so congenial as Voltaire's, of whom we cannot too 
 
94 VOLTAIRE. OUAP. 
 
 often repeat, considering the vulgar reputation he has 
 for violence and excess, that he was in thought the 
 very genius of good sense, whether or no we fully 
 admit M. Cousin's qualification of it as superficial good 
 sense. It has been said that he always speaks of 
 Descartes, Leibnitz, and Spinoza, like a man to whom 
 nature has refused the metaphysical sense. 1 At any 
 rate he could never agree with them, and he never . 
 tried to find truth by the roads which they had made. 
 It is true, however, that he shows no sign of special 
 fitness for metaphysics, any more than he did for 
 physical science. The metaphysics of Locke lay un- 
 developed in his mind, just as the theory of evolution 
 lies in so many minds at the present time. There is 
 a faint informal reference of other theories to this 
 central and half-seen standard. When metaphysical 
 subjects came before him, he felt that he had this 
 for a sheet-anchor, and he did not greatly care to 
 keep proving it again and again by continued criticism 
 or examination. The upshot of his acquaintance with 
 Locke was a systematic adherence to common- sense 
 modes of thinking ; and he always betrayed the faults 
 and shortcomings to which such modes inevitably lead, 
 when they are brought; to the exclusion of comple- 
 mentary ideas, to the practical subjects that compre- 
 hend more than prudence, self-interest, and sobriety. 
 The subject that does beyond any other comprehend 
 
 1 Encyclopedic Nou'oelle de Jean Reynaud et Pierre Leroux, 
 b.t. Voltaire, p. 736. De Maistre audaciously deities thai 
 Voltaire ever did more than dip into Locke. Soir6ea, vi. 
 
n. ENGLISH INFLUENCES. 95 
 
 more than these elements is religion, and the sub- 
 stantial vices of Voltaire's objections to religion 
 first arose from his familiarity with the English 
 form of deism, and his instinctive feeling for its 
 method. 
 
 The deism of Leibnitz was a positive belief, and 
 made the existence of a supreme power an actual and 
 living object of conviction. The mark of this belief 
 has remained on German speculation throughout its 
 course, down to our own day. English deism, on the 
 contrary, was only a particular way of repudiating 
 Christianity. There was as little of God in it as 
 could well be. Its theory was that God had given 
 each man the light of reason in his own breast ; that 
 by this reason every scheme of belief must be tried, 
 and accepted or rejected; and that the Christian 
 scheme being so tried was in various ways found 
 wanting. The formula of some book of the eighteenth 
 century, that God created nature and nature created 
 the world, must be allowed to have reduced theistic 
 conception to something like the shadow of smoke. 
 The English eighteenth-century formula was, theistic- 
 ally, nearly as void. The Being who set the reason 
 of each individual on a kind of judicial bench 
 within the forum of his own conscience, and left 
 him and it together to settle belief and conduct 
 between them, was a tolerably remote and unreal 
 sort of personage. His spiritual force, according to 
 such a doctrine, became very much as if it had nc 
 existence. 
 
96 VOLTAIRE. OHAJ\ 
 
 It was not to be expected that a sovereign dwelling 
 in such amazingly remote lands as this would continue 
 long with undisputed authority, when all the negative 
 forces of the time had reached their full momentum. 
 In England the reaction against this strange absentee 
 government of the universe took the form which 
 might have been anticipated from the deep hold that 
 Protestantism had won, and the spirituality which 
 had been engendered by Protestant reference to the 
 relations between the individual conscience and the 
 mystic operations of faith Deism became a reality 
 with a God in it in the great Evangelical revival, 
 terrible and inevitable, which has so deeply coloured 
 religious feeling and warped intellectual growth in 
 England ever since. In France, thought took a very 
 different and much simpler turn. Or perhaps it 
 would be more correct to say that it took no turn at 
 all, but carried the godless deism of the English school 
 to its fair conclusion, and dismissed a deity who only 
 reigned and did not govern. The whole movement 
 had a single origin. There is not one of the argu 
 ments of the French philosophers in the eighteenth 
 century, says a very competent authority, which can- 
 not be found in the English school of the beginning 
 of the century. 1 Voltaire, who carried the English 
 way of thinking about the supernatural power into 
 
 1 Villemain's Cows de Lit. Francaiae, i. p. 111. See also De 
 Maistre, Soirees de St. Pitersbourg, vi. p. 424. On the other 
 hand, see Lanfrey's VEglise et lea Philosophes du 18ieme Siecle, 
 pp. 99, 108, etc. 
 
I). ENGLISH INFLUENCES. 97 
 
 France, lived to see a band of trenchant and 
 energetic disciples develop principles which he had 
 planted, into a system of dogmatic atheism. The 
 time came when he was spoken of contemptuously 
 as retrograde and superstitious : ' Voltaire est bigot, 
 il est deiste.' 
 
CHAPTEE ILL 
 
 LITERATURE. 
 
 On the whole, the critic's task is perhaps less to 
 classify a type of character as good or bad, as worthy 
 of so much praise or so much censure, than to mark 
 the material out of which a man has his life to make, 
 and the kind of use and form to which he puts his 
 material. To begin with, the bald division of men 
 into sheep and goats is in one sense so easy as not to 
 be worth performing, and in another sense it is so hard 
 as only to be possible for some being with supernatural 
 insight. And even were the qualities employed in the 
 task of a rarer kind than they are, the utility of the 
 performance is always extremely slight, compared with 
 that other kind of criticism which dwells less on the 
 final balance of good or evil, than on the first innate 
 conditions of temperament, the fixed limitations of 
 opportunity, and the complex interplay of the two 
 with that character, which is first their creature and 
 then their master. It is less the concern of criticism 
 to pronounce its man absolutely rich or absolutely 
 poor, than to count up his talents and the usury of 
 his own which he added to them. Assuredly there 
 
OnAP. in. LITERATURE. 99 
 
 ought to be little condonation of the foibles, and 
 none at all of the moral obliquities, of the dead, 
 because this would mean the demoralisation of the 
 living. But it is seriously to overrate the power of 
 bald words and written opinion, to suppose that a 
 critic's censure of conduct which a thousand other 
 agents, from the child's hornbook up to the obvious 
 and pressing dictates of social convenience, are daily 
 and hourly prescribing, can be other than a work of 
 supererogation, which fixes the mind on platitudes, 
 instead of leading it on in search of special and dis- 
 tinctive traits. 
 
 It would be easy to pour overflowing vials of con- 
 demnation on many sides of Voltaire's character and 
 career. No man possessed of so much good sense ever 
 fell so constantly into the kinds of error against which 
 good sense particularly warns men. There is no more 
 wearisome or pitiful leaf in the biographies of the 
 great, than the tale of Voltaire's quarrels with ignoble 
 creatures ; with a wrecked soul, like J. B. Rousseau 
 (whom the reader will not confound with Jean 
 Jacques) ; with a thievish bookseller, like Jore ; with 
 a calumnious journalist, like Desfontaines ; with a 
 rapacious knave like Hirschel ; and all the other 
 tormentors in the Voltairean history, whose names 
 recall vulgar, dishonest, and indignant pertinacity op 
 the one side, and wasteful, undignified fury on the 
 other. That lesson in the art of life which concerns 
 a man's dealings with those who have shown patent 
 moral inferiority, was never mastered by Voltaire. 
 
100 VOLTAIKE. oh-ap 
 
 Instead of the silence, composure, and austere obli' 
 vion, which it is of the essence of strength to oppose 
 to unworthy natures, he habitually confronted the 
 dusty creeping things that beset his march, as if they 
 stood valiant and erect ; and the more unworthy they 
 were, the more vehement and strenuous and shrill 
 was his contention with them. The ignominy of such 
 strife is clear. One thing only may perhaps be said. 
 His intense susceptibility to vulgar calumny flowed 
 from the same quality in his nature which made 
 unbearable to him the presence of superstition and 
 injustice, those mightier calumnies on humanity. The 
 irritated protests against the small foes of his person 
 were as the dregs of potent wine, and were the lower 
 part of that passionate sensibility which made him 
 the assailant of the giant oppressors of the human 
 mind. This reflection does not make any less tedious 
 to us the damnable iteration of petty quarrel and 
 fretting complaint which fills such a space in his 
 correspondence and in his biographies, nor does it 
 lessen our regret at the havoc which this fatal defect 
 of his qualities made with his contentedness. We 
 think of his consolation to a person as susceptible as 
 himself : ' There have always been Frerons in litera- 
 ture ; but they say there must be caterpillars for 
 nightingales to eat, that they may sing the better : ' 
 and we wish that our nightingale had devoured its 
 portion with something less of tumult But it may 
 do something to prevent us from giving a prominence, 
 that is both unfair and extremely misleading, to mere 
 
HI. LITERATURE. 101 
 
 shadow, as if that had been the whole substance. 
 Alas, why after all should men, from Moses down- 
 wards, be so cheerfully ready to contemplate the 
 hinder parts of their divinities t 
 
 The period of twenty years between Voltaire's 
 departure from England and his departure for Berlin, 
 although often pronounced the happiest time of his 
 life, is very thickly set with these humiliating inci- 
 dents. To us, however, they are dead, because though 
 vivid enough to Voltaire — and it is strange how 
 constantly it happens that the minor circumstance of 
 life is more real and ever-present to a man than his 
 essential and abiding work in it — they were but 
 transitory and accidental. Just as it does little good 
 to the understanding to spend much time over tenth- 
 rate literature, so it is little edifying to the char- 
 acter to rake among the private obscurities of even 
 first-rate men, and it is surely a good rule to keep 
 ourselves as much as we can in contact with what is 
 great. 
 
 The chief personal fact of this time was the con- 
 nection which Voltaire formed with the Marquise du 
 Chatelet, and which lasted from 1733 to 1749. She 
 was to him that important and peculiar influence 
 which, in one shape or another, some woman seems 
 to have been to nearly every foremost man. In 
 Voltaire's case this influence was not the rich and 
 tender inspiration with which women have so many 
 a time sweetened the lives and glorified the thought 
 of illustrious workers, nor was he bound to her by 
 
102 TOLTAIKE. ohap. 
 
 those bonds of passion which have often the effect of 
 exalting the strength and 'widening the range of the 
 whole of the nature that is susceptive of passion. 
 Their inner relations hardly depended on anything 
 more extraordinary or more delicate than the senti- 
 ment of a masculine friendship. Voltaire found in 
 the divine Emily a strong and active head, a keen 
 and generous admiration for his own genius, and an 
 eagerness to surround him with the external condi- 
 tions most favourable to that steady industry which 
 was always a thing so near his own heart. They 
 are two great men, one of whom wears petticoats, 
 said Voltaire of her and of Frederick. It is impos- 
 sible to tell what share vanity had in the beginning 
 of a connection, which probably owed its long con- 
 tinuance more to use and habit than to any deep- 
 rooted sentiment. Vanity was one of the most 
 strongly marked of Voltaire's traits, and to this side 
 of him relations with a woman of quality who adored 
 his genius were no doubt extremely gratifying. Yet 
 one ought to do him the justice to say that his vanity 
 was only skin-deep. It had nothing in common with 
 the greedy egotism which reduces the whole broad 
 universe to a mere microcosm of pygmy self. The 
 vanity which discloses a real flaw in character is a 
 loud and tyrannical claim for acknowledgment of 
 literary supremacy, and with it the mean vices of 
 envy, jealousy, and detraction are usually in company. 
 Voltaire's vanity was something very different from 
 this truculent kind of self-assertion. It had a source 
 
ill. LITERATURE. 103 
 
 in his intensely sympathetic quality, and was a gay 
 and eager asking of assurance from others that his 
 work gave them pleasure. Let us be very careful to 
 remember that it never stood in the way of self- 
 knowledge,— the great test of the difference between 
 the vanity that is harmless, and the vanity that is 
 fatuous and destructive. 
 
 It has been rather the fashion to laugh at the 
 Marquise du CMtelet, for no better reasons perhaps 
 than that she, being a woman, studied Newton, and 
 had relations called tender with a man so little asso- 
 ciated in common opinion with tenderness as Voltaire. 
 The first reason is disgraceful, and the second is per- 
 haps childish. Everything goes to show that Madame 
 du CMtelet possessed a hardy originality of character, 
 of which society is so little likely to have an excess 
 that we can hardly ever be thankful enough for it. 
 There is probably nothing which would lead to so 
 rapid and marked an improvement in the world, as a 
 large increase of the number of women in it with the 
 will and the capacity to master Newton as thoroughly 
 as she did. And her long and sedulous affection for 
 a man of genius of Voltaire's exceptional quality, 
 entitles her to the not too common praise of recognis- 
 ing and revering intellectual greatness as it deserves. 
 Her friendship for him was not the semi-servile and 
 feebly intelligent solicitude which superior men have 
 too often the wretched weakness to seek in their 
 female companions, but an imperial sympathy. She 
 was unamiable, it is true, and possessed neither the 
 
104 VOLTAIKE. CHAP 
 
 delicacy which a more fastidious age requires in a 
 woman, nor the sense of honour which we now 
 demand in a man. These defects, however, were not 
 genuinely personal, hut lay in the manners of the 
 time. It was not so with all her faults. To the 
 weak and dependent she was overbearing, harsh, 
 mean, and even cruel. A fatuous caprice would 
 often destroy the domestic peace and pleasure of 
 a week. But nothing was suffered to impede the 
 labour of a day. The industry of the' house was 
 incessant. 
 
 It is said, and it was said first by one who lived 
 with them for some time, and has left a graphic 
 account of the interior of Cirey, that she made 
 Voltaire's life a little hard to him. 1 There were 
 many occasional storms and short sullen fits even in 
 these high regions of science and the finer tastes. 
 Yet such stormful scenes, with great actors as with 
 small, are perhaps more painful in description than 
 they were in reality ; and Voltaire was less discom- 
 posed by the lively impetuosity of a companion like 
 Madame du Chatelet, than he would have been by 
 the orderly calm of a more precise and perfectly well- 
 regulated person. A man follows the conditions of 
 his temperament, and Voltaire's unresting animation 
 and fire might make him feel a certain joy of life and 
 freedom in the occasional contentiousness of a slightly 
 shrewish temper. We cannot think of him as ever 
 
 1 Madame de Grafigny. Cf. Desnoiresterrea, Voltaire wu 
 Chdteau de Cirey, p. 246, etc. 
 
III. LITERATURE. 105 
 
 shrinking, ever craving for repose, as some men do as 
 for a very necessity of existence. The health of your 
 friend, wrote Madame du CMtelet to D'Argental in 
 1739, is in so deplorable a state that the only hope I 
 have left of restoring it is in the turmoil of a journey. 1 
 A tolerably frequent agitation was a condition of even 
 such health as he had, to one of Voltaire's nervous 
 and feverish habit. 
 
 Let it be said that his restlessness never took a 
 form which involved a sacrifice of the happiness of 
 other people. It was never tyrannical and exigent. 
 There are many, too many, instances of his angry 
 impatience with persons against whom he thought he 
 had cause of offence. There is not a single instance 
 in which any shadow of implacableness lurked for an 
 enemy who had repented or fallen into misfortune ; 
 and if his resentment was constantly aflame against 
 the ignoble, it instantly expired and changed into 
 warm-hearted pity, when the ignoble became either 
 penitent or miserable. There are many tales of the 
 readiness with which his anger was appeased. Any 
 one will suffice as a type. On some occasion when 
 Voltaire was harassed by a storm of libels, and hap- 
 pened to be on good terms with the police, a distri- 
 butor of the libels was arrested. The father, an old 
 man of eighty, hastened to Voltaire to pray for 
 pardon. All Voltaire's fury instantly vanished at the 
 first appeal; he wept with the old man, embraced 
 him, consoled him, and straightway ran to procure 
 1 Desnoiresterres, p. 267. 
 
106 VOLTAIEB. CHAP. 
 
 the liberation of the offender. 1 An eye-witness 
 related to Grimm how he happened to be present at 
 Ferney when Voltaire received Eousseau's Lettres de 
 la Montagne, and read the apostrophe relating to him- 
 self. His face seemed to take fire, his eyes sparkled 
 with fury, his whole frame trembled, and he cried in 
 terrible tones — ' The miscreant ! the monster ! I must 
 have him cudgelled — yes, I will have him cudgelled 
 in his mountains at the knees of his nurse.' ' Pray, 
 calm yourself,' said the bystander, ' for I know that 
 Eousseau means to pay you a visit, and will very 
 shortly be at Ferney.' 'Ah, only let him come,' 
 replied Voltaire. 'But how will you receive him?' 
 'Beceive him ... I will give him supper, put him 
 in my own bed, and say, There is a good supper ; this 
 is the best bed in the house ; do me the pleasure to 
 accept one and the other, and to make yourself happy 
 here.' 2 One does not understand the terrible man, 
 without remembering always how much of the hot 
 generosity of the child he kept in his nature to the 
 last. When the very Jesuits were suppressed with 
 circumstances of extreme harshness, he pitied even 
 them, and took one of their number permanently into 
 his household. 3 
 
 The most important part of a man's private con- 
 duct after that which concerns his relations with 
 
 1 Condorcet, Vie de Voltaire, p. 61. A graceful and dignified 
 letter in this kind is that to Formey, May 12, 1752. Ghiv. lxv 
 p. 64. 
 
 J Grimm, Correspondance IMtiraire, v. p. 5. 
 
 * (Ewv. lxv. p. 395. 
 
III. LITERATtTKE. 107 
 
 women and his family, is generally that which con- 
 cerns his way of dealing with money, because money 
 in its acquisition and its dispersion is the outward 
 and visible sign of the absence or of the presence of 
 so many inward and spiritual graces. As has often 
 been said, it is the measure of some of the most 
 important of a man's virtues, his honesty, his industry, 
 his generosity, his self-denial, and most of the other 
 elements in keeping the difficult balance between 
 his care for himself and his care for other people. 
 Voltaire perceived very early in life that to be needy 
 was to be dependent ; that the rich and poor are as 
 hammer and anvil ; that the chronicles of genius 
 demonstrate that it is not by genius that men either 
 make a fortune or live happy lives. He made up his 
 mind from the beginning that the author of the French 
 epic would not share the poverty and straitened lives 
 of Tasso and Milton, and that he for his part would 
 at any rate be hammer and not anvil. 1 I was so 
 wearied, he wrote in 1752, of the humiliations that 
 dishonour letters, that to stay my disgust I resolved 
 to make what scoundrels call a great fortune. 2 He 
 used to give his books away to the printers. He had 
 a small fortune from his father ; he is said to have 
 made two thousand pounds by the English subscrip- 
 tions to the Henriade ; and he did not hide his talent 
 in the ground, but resorted skilfully to all sorts of 
 
 1 Correspondence. Also, Essai but la Poesie Epique, c. vi 
 (Ewvres, xiii. p. 481. 
 1 (Euvres, lxv. p. 91. 
 
108 VOLTAIRE. _ CHAJ>. 
 
 speculations in stocks, army contracts, and othei 
 authorised means of converting one livre into two 
 while you sleep. He lent large sums of money, 
 presumably at handsome interest, to the Duke of 
 Richelieu and ' others, and though the interest may 
 have been handsome, the trouble of procuring it was 
 often desperate. 1 Yet after much experience Voltaire 
 came to the conclusion that though he had sometimes 
 lost money by bankers, by the devout, by the people 
 of the Old Testament, who would have had many 
 scruples about a larded capon, who would rather die 
 than not be idle on the sabbath, and not be thieving 
 on the Sunday, yet he had lost nothing by the great 
 except his time. 2 
 
 It is easy to point a sneer at a high priest of 
 humanity jobbing in the funds. Only let us remem- 
 ber that Voltaire never made any pretence of being 
 a high priest of humanity ; that his transactions were 
 substantially very like those of any banker or merchant 
 of to-day ; and that for a man who was preaching new 
 opinions it was extremely prudent to place himself 
 out of the necessity of pleasing booksellers or the pit 
 of the theatre on the one hand, and on the other to 
 supply himself with ready means of frequent flight 
 from the ceaseless persecutions of authority. Envious 
 scribes in his lifetime taunted him with avarice, and 
 the evil association still clings to his memory now that 
 
 1 Corr. with the Abb6 Mouasinot, 1737, and afterward* 
 OSuvres, lxiii. pp. 122, 160, 176, etc. 
 
 2 Corr. 1752. CEuvres, \\v. p. 116. 
 
III. LITERATURE. 109 
 
 he is dead. One can only say that good and high- 
 minded men, who never shrank from withstanding 
 him when in fault, men like Condorcet for example, 
 heard such talk with disdain, and set it down to the 
 disgraceful readiness of men to credit anything that 
 relieves them from having to admire. 1 The people 
 who dislike prudence in matters of money in those 
 whose distinction is intellectual or spiritual, resemble 
 a sentimental lover who should lose his illusions at 
 sight of his mistress eating a hearty meal. Is their lot, 
 then, cast in the ethereal fluid of the interstellar spaces? 
 At all events Voltaire had two important gifts 
 which do not commonly belong to the avaricious ; he 
 was a generous helper alike of those who had, and 
 those who had not, a claim upon him, and he knew 
 how to bear serious losses with unbroken composure. 
 Michel, the receiver-general, became bankrupt, and 
 Voltaire lost a considerable sum of money in con- 
 sequence. His fluency of invective and complaint, 
 which was simply boundless when any obscure 
 scribbler earned a guinea by a calumny upon him, 
 went no farther on the occasion of this very substantial 
 injury than a single splenetic phrase, and a harmless 
 
 quatrain : 
 
 Michel an nom de l'Eternel, 
 Mit jadis le diable en deroute ; 
 Mais, apres cette banqueroute, 
 Que le diable emporte Michel ! 
 
 It has been fairly asked whether a genuine misei 
 1 Vie de Voltaire, p. 37. 
 
110 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 would content himself with a stanza upon the man 
 who had robbed him. 1 His correspondence with the 
 Duchess of Saxe-Gotha shows him declining to accept 
 the thousand louis, which she had sent as a fee for 
 the composition of the Annales de FEmpire. 
 
 Much has been made of the bargaining which he 
 carried on with Frederick, as to "the terms on which 
 he would consent to go to Berlin. But then the 
 Prussian king was not one with whom it was wise 
 to be too nice in such affairs. He was the thriftiest 
 of men, and as a king is a person who lives on other 
 people's money, such thrift was in" his case the most 
 princely of virtues. Haggling is not graceful, but it 
 need not imply avarice in either of the parties to it. 
 The truth is that there was in Voltaire a curious 
 admixture of splendid generosity with virulent tenacity 
 about half-pence. The famous quarrel' with the 
 President de Brosses about the fourteen cords of fire- 
 wood is a worse affair. Voltaire, who leased Tourney 
 from him, insisted that De Brosses had made him a 
 present of the fourteen cords. De Brosses, no doubt 
 truly, declared that he had only ordered the wood to 
 be delivered on Voltaire's account. On this despicable 
 matter a long correspondence was carried on, in which 
 Voltaire is seen at his very worst ; insolent, undignified, 
 low-minded, and untruthful. 2 The case happily stands 
 alone in his biography. As a rule, he is a steady 
 
 1 Desnoiresterres, p. 323. 
 
 2 Foisset's Correspond, de Voltaire aveo De Brosses, etc., 
 published in 1836. 
 
III. UTEBATUKE, 111 
 
 practitioner of the Aristotelian fieyaXoirpiireca, or 
 virtue of magnificent expenditure. 
 
 The truly important feature of the life which Vol- 
 taire led at Cirey was its unremitting diligence. Like 
 a Homeric goddess, the divine Emily poured a cloud 
 round her hero. There is a sort of moral climate in 
 a household, an impalpable, unseizable, indefinable 
 set of influences, which predispose the inmates to 
 industry and self-control, or else relax fibre and 
 slacken purpose. At Cirey there was an almost 
 monastic rule. Madame Grafigny says that though 
 Voltaire felt himself bound by politeness to pay her 
 a visit from time to time in her apartment, he usually 
 avoided sitting down, apologetically protesting how 
 frightful a thing is the quantity of time people waste 
 in talking, and that waste of time is the most fatal 
 kind of extravagance of which one can be guilty. 1 
 He seems to have usually passed the whole day at 
 his desk, or in making physical experiments in his 
 chamber. The only occasion on which people met 
 was at the supper at nine in the evening. Until then 
 the privacy of the chamber alike of the hostess, who 
 was analysing Leibnitz or translating Newton, and of 
 the unofficial host, who was compiling material for 
 the Siecle de Louis XIV., or polishing and repolishing 
 Mahomet, or investigating the circumstances of the 
 propagation of fire, was sacredly inviolable. 
 
 The rigour of the rule did not forbid theatrical 
 performances, when any company, even a company 
 1 Quoted in E'esuoiresterres, p. 239. 
 
112 VOLTAIRE. OH at. 
 
 of marionettes, came into the neighbourhood of the 
 desolate Champagne chateau. Sometimes after supper 
 Voltaire would exhibit a magic lantern, with explana- 
 tory comments after the showman's manner, in which 
 he would convulse his friends at the expense of his 
 enemies. 1 But after the evening's amusement was 
 over, the Marquise would retire to work in her 
 chamber until the morning, and, when morning came, 
 a couple of hours' sleep was the only division between 
 the tasks of the night and the tasks of the day. Two 
 splenetic women haye left us a couple of spiteful 
 pictures of Madame du Chatelet, but neither of her 
 detractors could rise io any higher conception of 
 intellectual effort than the fine turn of phrase, the 
 ingenious image, the keen thrust of cruel satire, with 
 which the polished idle of that day whiled away 
 dreary and worthless years. The translator of 
 Newton's Principia was not of this company, and she 
 was wholly indifferent to the raillery, sarcasm, and 
 hate of women whom she justly held her inferiors. It 
 is much the fashion to admire the women of this 
 time, because they contrive to hide behind a veil of 
 witty words the coldness and hollowness of lives 
 which had neither the sweetness of the old industrious 
 domesticity of women, nor the noble largeness of 
 some of those in whom the Revolution kindled a pure 
 fire of patriotism in after days. Madame du Chatelet, 
 with all her faults, was a far loftier character than 
 the malicious gossips who laughed at her, * Every- 
 1 Desnoiresterres, p. 242. 
 
HI. LITERATURE. 113 
 
 thing that occupies society was within her power, 
 except slander. She was never heard to hold up any- 
 body to laughter. When she was informed that 
 certain people were bent on not doing her justice, she 
 would reply that she wished to ignore it.' This was 
 surely better than a talent for barbing epigrams, and 
 she led a worthier life at Cirey than in that Paris 
 which Voltaire described so bitterly. 
 
 La, tons les soirs, la troupe vagabonde, 
 D'un peuple oisif, appele le beau monde, 
 Va promener de reduit en reduit 
 L'inquietude et l'ennui qui la suit. 
 La sont en foule antiques mijaurees, 
 Jeunes oisons et begueules titrees, 
 Disant des riens d'un ton de perroquet, 
 Lorgnant des sots, et triehant au piquet. 
 Blondins y sont, beaucoup plus femmes qu'elles. 
 Profondement remplis de bagatelles, 
 D'un air hautain, d'une bruyante voix, 
 Chantant, dansant, minaudant a la fois. 
 Si par hasard quelque personne honnete, 
 D'un sens plus droit et d'un gout plus heureux 
 Des bons ecrits ayant meuble sa t§te, 
 Leur fait l'affront de penser a leurs yeux ; 
 Tout aussitSt leur brillante eoliue, 
 D'etonnement et de colere emue, 
 Bruyant essaim de frelons envieux, 
 Pique et poursuit eette abeille charmante. 1 
 
 It was not the fault of Madame du CMtelet that 
 the life of Cirey was not the undisturbed type of 
 Voltaire's existence during the fifteen years of their 
 
 1 Epitre a Mdme. la Marquise du Chatelet, sur la Calomnie, 
 CEuvres, xvii. p. 85. 
 
 I 
 
114 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 companionship. Many pages might be filled with a 
 mere list of the movements from place to place to which 
 Voltaire resorted, partly from reasonable fear of the 
 grip of a jealous and watchful government, partly 
 from eagerness to bring the hand of the government 
 upon his enemies, and most of all from the uncon- 
 trollable restlessness of his own nature. Amsterdam, 
 the Hague, Brussels, Berlin, the little court of Lune- 
 ville, and the great world of Paris, too frequently 
 withdrew him from the solitary castle at Cirey, though 
 he never failed to declare on his return, and with 
 perfect sincerity, that he was never so happy any- 
 where else. If it was true that the Marquise made 
 her poet's life a little hard to him, it is impossible to 
 read her correspondence without perceiving that he, 
 too, though for no lack of sensibility and good feeling, 
 often made life extremely hard for her. Besides 
 their moral difference, there was a marked discrepancy 
 in intellectual temperament, which did not fail to lead 
 to outward manifestations. Voltaire was sometimes 
 a little weary of Newton and exact science, while the 
 Marquise was naturally of the rather narrow turn for 
 arid truths which too often distinguishes clever women 
 inadequately disciplined by contact with affairs. She 
 and Voltaire both competed for a prize offered by the 
 Academy for essays on the propagation of fire (1737). 
 Neither of them was successful, for the famous Euler 
 was a competitor. , The second and third prizes were 
 given to two obscurer persons, because their essays 
 were Cartesian, that is to say, they were scientifically 
 
HI. LITERATURE. 115 
 
 orthodox. The two philosophers of Cirey also took 
 part, and on different sides, in the obstinate physico- 
 mathematical controversy which Leibnitz had first 
 raised towards the close of the seventeenth century, 
 as to the measure of moving forces. 1 The Marquise, 
 under circumstances of equivocal glory and with much 
 angry buzzing, with which one has now no concern, 2 
 published her analysis of Leibnitz in 1740, and sided 
 with him against Newton and Descartes. In the 
 notice which Voltaire wrote of his friend's book he 
 gave a marvellously simple and intelligible account of 
 the issue of the special controversy of vis viva, 3 but he re- 
 mained Newtonian, and inl741 presented apaper to the 
 Academy of Sciences, disputing the Leibnitzian view. 4 
 Voltaire was not merely one of those 'paper 
 philosophers,' whose intrusion into the fields of physi- 
 cal science its professional followers are justly wont 
 to resent. He was an active experimenter, and more 
 than one letter remains, containing instructions to 
 his agent in Paris to forward him retorts, air-pumps, 
 and other instruments, with the wise hint in one 
 place, a hint by no means of a miser, ' In the matter 
 of buying things, my friend, you should always prefer 
 the good and sound even if a little dear, to what is 
 only middling but .cheaper.' 5 His correspondence 
 
 1 See Whewell's Bist. Indue. Sci. bk. vi. c. v. 
 
 2 Desnoiresterres, pp. 313-21. 
 
 3 Exposition du Livre des Institutions Physiques. CEuvrcs, 
 xlii. pp. 196-206. 
 
 4 (Euwcs, xlii. p. 207, etc. 
 
 5 Corr. 1737. CEuvres, Ixiii. p. 182. 
 
116 VOLTAIRE. OHAP 
 
 for some years proves the diligence and sincerity of 
 his interest in science. Yet it is tolerably clear that 
 the man who did so much to familiarise France with 
 the most illustrious of physicists, was himself devoid 
 of true scientific aptitude. After long and persevering 
 labour in this region, Voltaire consulted Clairaut on 
 the progress he had made. The latter, with a loyal 
 frankness which Voltaire knew how to appreciate, 
 answered that even with the most stubborn labour he 
 was not likely to attain to anything beyond mediocrity 
 in science, and that he would be only throwing away 
 time which he owed to poetry and philosophy. 1 The 
 advice was taken ; for, as we have already said, 
 Voltaire's self-love was never fatuous, and the inde- 
 pendent search of physical truth was given up. There 
 is plainly no reason to regr&t the pains which Voltaire 
 took in this kind of inquiry, not because the .study of 
 the sciences extends the range of poetic study and 
 enriches verse with fresh images, but because the 
 number of sorts of knowledge in which a man feels 
 at home and is intelligently cognisant of their scope 
 and issues, even if he be wholly incompetent to assist 
 in the progress of discovery, increases that intellectual 
 confidence and self-respect of understanding, which so 
 fortifies and stimulates him in his own special order 
 of work. "We cannot precisely contend that this 
 encyclopaedic quality is an indispensable condition of 
 such self-respect in every kind of temper. It certainly 
 was so with Voltaire. 'After all, my dear friend, 
 
 1 Condorcet Vie de Voltaire, p. 43. 
 
m. LITEKATUKE. 117 
 
 he WTote to Cideville, 'it is right to give every pos- 
 sible form to our soul. It is a flame that God has 
 intrusted to us, we are bound to feed it with all that 
 we find most precious. We should introduce into 
 our existence all imaginable modes, and open every 
 door of the soul to all sorts of knowledge and all sorts 
 of feelings. So long as it does not all go in pell-mell, 
 there is plenty of room for everything.' 1 
 
 To us, who can be wise after the event, it is clear 
 that if ever man was called not to science, nor to 
 poetry, nor to theology, nor to metaphysics, but to 
 literature, the art, so hard to define, of showing the 
 ideas of all subjects in the double light of the practical 
 and the spiritual reason, that man was Voltaire. He 
 has himself dwelt on the vagueness of this much- 
 abused term, without contributing anything more 
 satisfactory towards a better account of it than a crude 
 hint that literature, not being a special art, may be 
 considered a kind of larger grammar of knowledge. 2 
 Although, however, it is true that literature isjiot a 
 particular art, it is not the less true that there is a 
 mental constitution particularly fitted for its success- 
 ful practice. Literature is essentially an art of form, 
 as distinguished from those exercises of intellectual 
 energy which bring new stores of matter to the stock 
 of acquired knowledge, and give new forces to emotion 
 and original and definite articulation to passion. It 
 is a misleading classification to call the work of 
 
 1 Corr. 1737. CEuvres, lvi. p. 428. 
 
 2 Diet. Phil. s.v. CEuvres, lvi. p. 428. 
 
118 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 Shakespeare and Moliere, Shelley and Hugo, literary, 
 just as it -would be an equally inaccurate, though 
 more glaring piece of classification, to count the work 
 of Newton or Locke literature. To take another case 
 from Voltaire, it would not be enough to describe' 
 Bayle's Dictionary as a literary compilation ; it would 
 not even be enough to describe it as a work of im- 
 mense learning, because the distinguishing and superior 
 mark of this book is a profound dialectic. It forms 
 men of letters and is above them. 1 
 
 "What is it then that literature brings to us, that 
 earns its title to high place, though far from a highest 
 place, among the great humanizing arts? Is it not 
 that this is the master organon for giving men the 
 two precious qualities of breadth of interest and 
 balance of judgment ; multiplicity of sympathies and 
 steadiness of sight? Unhappily, literature has too 
 often been identified with the smirks and affectations 
 of mere elegant dispersiveness, with the hollow niceties 
 of the virtuoso, a thing of madrigals. It is not in 
 any sense of this sort that we can think of Voltaire 
 as specially the bom minister of literature. What 
 we mean is that while he had not the loftier endow- 
 ments of the highest poetic conception, subtle specu- 
 lative penetration, or triumphant scientific power, he 
 possessed a superb combination of wide and sincere 
 curiosity, an intelligence of vigorous and exact recep- 
 tivity, a native inclination to candour and justice, and 
 a pre-eminent mastery over a wide range in the art 
 1 Diet. Phil, a.v. (Euvres, lvi. p. 430. 
 
in. LITERATURE. 119 
 
 of expression. Literature being concerned to impose 
 form, to diffuse the light by which common men are 
 able to see the great host of ideas and facts that do 
 not shine in the brightness of their own atmosphere, 
 it is clear what striking gifts Voltaire had in this 
 way. He had a great deal of knowledge, and he was 
 ever on the alert both to increase and broaden his 
 stock, and, what was still better, to impart of it to 
 everybody else. He did not think it beneath him to 
 write on Hemistichs for the Encyclopaedia. 'Tis not 
 a very brilliant task, he said, but perhaps the article 
 will be useful to men of letters and amateurs ; ' one 
 should disdain nothing, and I will do the word Comma, 
 if you choose.' 1 He was very catholic in taste, being 
 able to love Racine without ignoring the lofty stature 
 of Shakespeare. And he was free from the weakness 
 which so often attends on catholicity, when it is not 
 supported by true strength and independence of 
 understanding ; he did not shut his eyes to the short- 
 comings of the great. While loving Moliere, he was 
 aware of the incompleteness of his dramatic construc- 
 tion, as well as of the egregious farce to which that 
 famous writer too often descends. 2 His respect for 
 the sublimity and pathos of Corneille did not hinder 
 him from noting both his violence and his frigid 
 argumentation. 3 Does the reader remember that 
 admirable saying of his to Vauvenargues ; 'It is the 
 
 - 1 Corr. 1758. (Euvres, Ixxv. p. 50. 
 3 Temple du Goilt. (Euvres, xv. p. 99. 
 3 Corr. 1743. (Euvres, lxiv. p. 119. 
 
120 VOLTAIRE. ohap. 
 
 part of a man like you to have preferences, but nc 
 exclusions ?' 1 To this fine principle Voltaire was 
 usually thoroughly true, as every great mind, if 
 only endowed with adequate culture, must neces- 
 sarily be. 
 
 Nul auteur avec lui n'a tort, 
 
 Quand il a trouve l'art de plaire ; 
 
 II le critique sans colere, 
 
 II l'applaudit avec transport. 2 
 
 Thirdly, that circumfusion of bright light which is 
 the highest aim of speech, was easy to Voltaire, in 
 whatever order of subject he happened to treat. His 
 style is like a translucent stream of purest mountain 
 water, moving with swift and animated flow under 
 flashing sunbeams. 'Voltaire,' said an enemy, 'is 
 the very first man in the world at writing down what 
 other people have thought.' What was meant for a 
 spiteful censure, was in fact a truly honourable dis- 
 tinction. 
 
 The secret is incommunicable. No spectrum 
 analysis can decompose for us that enchanting ray. 
 It is rather, after all, the piercing metallic light of 
 electricity than a glowing beam of the sun. "We can 
 detect some of the external qualities of this striking 
 style. We seize its dazzling simplicity, its almost 
 primitive closeness to the letter, its sharpness and 
 precision, above all, its admirable brevity. We see 
 that no writer ever used so few words to produce 
 
 1 (Euwes de Vauvenargues, ii. 252. 
 
 s Temple du Gofit (Euwes, xv. p. 100. 
 
III. LITERATURE. 121 
 
 such pregnant effects. 1 Those whom brevity only 
 makes thin and slight, may look with despair on pages 
 where the nimbleness of the sentence is in proportion 
 to the firmness of the thought. "We find no bastard 
 attempts to reproduce in words deep and complex 
 effects, which can only be adequately presented in 
 colour or in the combinations of musical sound. No- 
 body has ever known better the true limitations of 
 the material in which he worked, or the scope and 
 possibilities of his art. Voltaire's alexandrines, his 
 witty stories, his mock-heroic, his exposition of 
 Newton, his histories, his dialectic, all bear the same 
 mark, the same natural, precise, and condensed mode 
 of expression, the same absolutely faultless knowledge 
 of what is proper and permitted in every given kind 
 of written work. At first there seems something 
 paradoxical in dwelling on the brevity of an author 
 whose works are to be counted by scores of volumes. 
 But this is no real objection. A writer may be in- 
 sufferably prolix in the limits of a single volume, and 
 Voltaire was quite right in saying that there are four 
 times too many words in the one volume of D'Hol- 
 bach's System of Nature. He maintains too that 
 Rabelais might advantageously be reduced to one- 
 eighth, and Bayle to a quarter, and there is hardly a 
 
 1 In some readings given before popular audiences in Paris 
 in 1850, it was found that Voltaire was only partially effective. 
 'Trop d'artifice,' says Ste. Beuve, 'trop d'art nuit aupres des 
 esprits neufs ; trop de simplicity nuit aussi ; ils ne s'en etonne'nt 
 pas, et ils ont jusqu'a un certain point besoin d'etre etonnes.' 
 (Causeries, i. 289.) 
 
122 VOLTAIKE. CHAP. 
 
 book that is not curtailed in the perfecting hands of 
 the divine muses. 1 So conversely an author may not 
 waste a word in a hundred volumes. Style is inde- 
 pendent of quantity, and the world suffers so griev- 
 ously from the mass of books that have been written, 
 not because they are many, but because such vast 
 proportion of their pages say nothing while they pur- 
 port to say so much. 
 
 No study, however, of this outward ease and swift 
 compendiousness of speech will teach us the secret 
 that was beneath it in Voltaire, an eye and a hand 
 that never erred in hitting the exact mark of appro- 
 priateness in every order of prose and verse. Per- 
 haps no such vision for the befitting in expression has 
 ever existed. He is the most trenchant writer in the 
 ■world, yet there is not a sentence of strained emphasis 
 or overwrought antithesis ; he is the wittiest, yet 
 there is not a line of bad buffoonery. And this in- 
 tense sense of the appropriate was by nature and 
 cultivation become so entirely a fixed condition of 
 Voltaire's mind that it shows spontaneous and with- 
 out an effort in his work. Nobody is more free from 
 the ostentatious correctness of the literary precisian, 
 and nobody preserves so much purity and so much 
 dignity of language with so little formality of de- 
 meanour. It is interesting to notice the absence from 
 his writings of that intensely elaborated kind of 
 simplicity in which some of the best authors of a 
 later time express the final outcome of many thoughts, 
 1 Temple da Goftt. CEuvres, xv. p. 95. 
 
HI. LITERATURE. 123 
 
 The strain that society has undergone since Voltaire'a 
 day has taught men to qualify their propositions. 
 It has forced them to follow truth slowly along paths 
 steep and devious. New notes have been struck in 
 human feeling, and all thought has now been touched 
 by complexities that were then unseen. Hence, as 
 all good writers aim at simplicity and directness, we 
 have seen the growth of a new style, in which the 
 rays of many side-lights are concentrated in some 
 single phrase. That Voltaire does not use these 
 focalising words and turns of composition only means 
 that to him thought was less complex than it is to a 
 more subjective generation. Though the literature 
 which possesses Milton and Burke need not fear com- 
 parison with the graver masters of French speech, we 
 have no one to place exactly by the side of Voltaire. 
 But, then, no more has France. There are many 
 pages of Swift which are more like one side of Vol- 
 taire than anything else that we have, and Voltaire 
 probably drew the idea of his famous stories from the 
 creator of Gulliver, just as Swift got the idea of the 
 Tale of a Tub from Fontenelle's History of Mero and 
 Enegu (that is, of Rome and Geneva). Swift has 
 correctness, invention, irony, and a trick of being 
 effectively literal and serious in absurd situations, 
 just as Voltaire has ; but then Swift is often truculent 
 and often brutally gross, both in thought and in 
 phrase. Voltaire is never either brutal or truculent. 
 Even amid the licence of the Pucelle and of his 
 romances, he never forgets what is due to the French 
 
124 VOLTAIKE. chap 
 
 tongue. What always charmed him in Eacine and 
 Boileau, he tells us, was that they said what they 
 intended to say, and that their thoughts have never 
 cost anything to the harmony or the purity of the 
 language. 1 Voltaire ranged over far wider ground 
 than the two poets ever attempted to do, and trod in 
 many slippery places, yet he is entitled to the same 
 praise as that which he gave to them. 
 
 Unhappily, one of the many evil effects which have 
 alloyed the revolution that Voltaire did so much to 
 set in motion, has been both in his country and ours 
 that purity and harmony of language, in spite of the 
 examples of the great masters who have lived since, 
 have on the whole declined In both countries 
 familiarity and slang have actually asserted a place 
 in literature on some pretence that they are real ; an 
 assumed vulgarity tries to pass for native homeliness, 
 and, as though a giant were more impressive for hav- 
 ing • a humped back, some men of true genius seem 
 only to make sure of fame by straining themselves 
 into grotesques. In a word, the reaction against a 
 spurious dignity of style has carried men too far 
 because the reaction against the dignified elements in 
 the old order went too far. Style, after all, as one 
 has always to remember, can never be anything but 
 the reflex of ideas and habits of mind, and when re- 
 spect for one's own personal dignity as a ruling and 
 unique element in character gave way to sentimental 
 love of the human race, often real, and often a pre- 
 1 Corr. 1732. (Euvres. lxii. p. 218. 
 
III. LITERATURE. 125 
 
 tence, old self-respecting modes of expression went 
 out of fashion. And all this has been defended by 
 a sort of argument that might just as appropriately 
 have been used by Diogenes, vindicating the filthiness 
 of his tub against a doctrine of clean linen. 
 
 To follow letters, it is important to observe, meant 
 then, or at least after Voltaire's influence rose to its 
 height, it meant distinctly to enter the ranks of the 
 Opposition. In our own time the profession of letters 
 is placed with other polite avocations, and those who 
 follow it for the most part accept the traditional social 
 ideas of the time, just as clergymen, lawyers, and 
 physicians accept them. The modern man of letters 
 corresponds to the ancient sophist, whose office it was 
 to confirm, adorn, and propagate the current pre- 
 judice. To be a man of letters in France in the 
 middle of the eighteenth century was to be the official 
 enemy of the current prejudices and their sophistical 
 defenders in the church and the parliaments. Parents 
 heard of a son's design to go to Paris and write books, 
 or to mix with those who wrote books, with the same 
 dismay with which a respectable Athenian heard of 
 a son following Socrates. The hyper-hellenistic col- 
 legian need not accuse us of instituting a general 
 parallel between Socrates and Voltaire. The only 
 point oh which we are insisting is that each was the 
 leader of the assault against the sophists of his day, 
 though their tactics and implements of war were 
 sufficiently unlike. To the later assailant the condi- 
 tions of the time made the pen the most effective 
 
126 VOLTAIRE. chap. 
 
 instrument. The clergy had the pulpit and the con. 
 fessional, and their enemies had the press. 
 
 It was during the period of his connection with 
 Madame du Chatelet, that is in the active literary 
 years between his return from England and his re- 
 moval to Berlin, that Voltaire's dramatic talent was 
 most productive. 1 He is usually considered to hold 
 the same place relatively to Corneille and Eacine 
 that Euripides held relatively to j3Cschylus and 
 Sophocles. It is not easy to see what is the exact 
 point of analogy on which the critics agree, beyond 
 the corresponding place in the order of chronological 
 succession, and such parallels are not really very full 
 of instruction. If we are to draw any parallel at all, 
 it must be between the Greek and Eacine. The 
 differences between Euripides and his predecessors 
 are not those between Voltaire and his predecessors. 
 There may be one common peculiarity. Each made 
 the drama an instrument for the expression not merely 
 of passion, but of speculative and philosophical matter, 
 and this in each case of a sceptical kind in reference 
 to the accepted traditions of the time. But apart 
 from the vast superiority of the Greek in depth and 
 passion and dramatic invention, in Voltaire this philo- 
 sophising is very much more indirect, insinuatory, 
 and furtive, than in the marked sententiousness of 
 
 1 The dates of the most famous of Ms tragedies are these : 
 (Edipe, 1718 ; Bruhos, 1730 ; Zaire, 1732 ; Mori de Gisar, 1735 ; 
 Ateire, 1736 ; Mahomet, 1741 ; Mirope, 1743 ; Simiramis, 1748 : 
 Tancride, 1760. 
 
III. LITERATURE. 127 
 
 Euripides. There are critics, indeed, who insist that 
 all Voltaire's poetic work is a series of pamphlets 
 in disguise, and that he ought to be classified, in 
 that jargon which makes an uncouth compound pass 
 muster for a new critical nicety, as a pendency-poet. 1 
 To accept this would simply be to leave out of account 
 the very best of Voltaire's plays, including Merope, 
 Semiramis, Tancrede, in which the most ingenious 
 of men and critics would be at a loss to find any 
 tendency of the pamphleteering kind. Voltaire's 
 ever-present sense of congruity prevented him from 
 putting the harangue of the pulpit or the discourse 
 of the academic doctor upon the tragic stage. If the 
 clergy found in 'Mahomet,' for instance, a covert 
 attack on their own religion, it was much more because 
 the poet was suspected of unbelief, than because the 
 poem contained infidel doctrine. Indeed, nothing 
 shows so clearly as the strange affright at this and 
 some other pieces of Voltaire's, that the purport and 
 effect of poetry must depend nearly as much upon the 
 mind of the audience as upon the lines themselves. 
 His plays may be said to have led to scepticism, only 
 because there was sceptical predisposition in the mind 
 which his public ■ brought to them ; and under other 
 circumstances, if for instance it had been produced in 
 the time of Lewis xiv., the exposure of Mahomet 
 would have been counted a glorification of the rival 
 creed. Indeed, Pope Benedict xrv. did by and by 
 
 1 He ttnerr, for instance : Literaturgeschichte des 18ten Jdhr- 
 hunderts, ii. 227. 
 
128 VOLTAIRE. CHA1-. 
 
 accept Voltaire's dedication of the play, whether in 
 good faith or no we cannot tell, on the express ground 
 that it was an indirect homage to Christianity. Men 
 with a sense of artistic propriety far inferior to 
 Voltaire's, are yet fully alive to the monstrosity of 
 disguising a pamphleteer's polemic in the form of a 
 pretended drama. 
 
 In choice of subject Voltaire, we may believe, was 
 secretly guided by his wish to relax the oppressive 
 hold of religious prejudice. Religion, we cannot too 
 fully realise, was the absorbing burden of the time. 
 There was no sort of knowledge, from geometry 
 onwards, on which it did not weigh. Whatever work 
 Voltaire set himself to, he was confronted in it by the 
 Infamous. Thus in accordance with the narrow theory 
 of his time, he held Mahomet to be a deliberate and 
 conscious impostor, and in presenting the founder of 
 one great religion in this odious shape, he was doubt- 
 less suggesting that the same account might be true 
 of the founder of another. But the suggestion was 
 entirely outside of the play itself, and we who have 
 fully settled these questions for ourselves, may read 
 ' Mahomet ' without suspecting the shade of a refer- 
 ence from Mecca to Jerusalem, though hardly without 
 contemning the feebleness of view which could see 
 nothing but sensuality, ambition, and crime, in the 
 career of the fierce eastern reformer. The sentiments 
 of exalted deism which are put into the mouth of the 
 noble Zopire were perhaps meant to teach people that 
 the greatest devotion of character may go with the 
 
in- LITERATURE. 129 
 
 most unflinching rejection of a pretended revelation 
 from the gods. This again is a gloss from without, 
 and by no means involves Voltaire in the offence of 
 art with a moral purpose. 
 
 Zaire was the first play in which French characters 
 appeared upon the tragic stage. The heroine, the 
 daughter of Lusignan, has been brought up, uncon- 
 scious of her descent, in the Mahometan faith and 
 usage. Consider the philosophy of these lines which 
 are given to her : 
 
 La coutume, la loi plia mes premiers ans 
 A la religion des heureux nmsulmans. 
 Je le vois trop ; les soins qu'on prend de notre enfance 
 Forment nos sentimens, nos mceurs, notre croyance. 
 J'eusse ete pres du Gange esclave des faux dieux, 
 Chretienne dans Paris, musulmane en ces lieux. 
 L'instruetion fait tout ; et la main de nos peres 
 Grave en nos faibles cceurs ces premiers caracteres, 
 Que l'exemple et le temps nous viennent retraeer, 
 Et que peut-etre en nous Dieu seul peut effacer. 1 
 
 This of course implied the doctrine of Pope's Uni- 
 versal Prayer, and contains an idea that was always 
 the favourite weapon for smiting the over-confident 
 votaries of a single supernatural revelation. Locke 
 had asked whether ' the current opinions and licensed 
 guides of every country are sufficient evidence and 
 security to every man to venture his great concern- 
 ments on 1 Or, can these be the certain and infall- 
 ible oracle and standards of truth which teach one 
 thing in Christendom, and another in Turkey i Or 
 
 1 Zaire, act i. sc. 1. 
 K 
 
1 30 VOLTAIKE. CHAP. 
 
 shall a poor countryman be eternally happy for having 
 the chance to be born in Italy 1 Or a day-labourer 
 be unavoidably lost because he had the ill-luck to be 
 born in England?' 1 This was exactly the kind of 
 reasoning to which Zaire's lines pointed ; and Voltaire 
 was never weary of arguing that the divine lay out- 
 side of the multitudinous variety of creeds that were 
 never more than local accidents. Neither, however, 
 in Zaire nor anywhere else is the law of perfect 
 dramatic fitness violated for the sake of a lesson in 
 heterodoxy. With Voltaire tragedy is, as all art 
 ought to be, a manner of disinterested presentation. 
 This is not the noblest energy of the human intelli- 
 gence, but it is truly art, and* Voltaire did not forget it. 
 It would be entirely unprofitable to enter into 
 any comparison of the relative merits of Voltaire's 
 tragedies, and those either of the modern romantic 
 school in his own country, or of the master dramatists 
 of our own. Every form of composition must be 
 judged in its own order, and the order in which 
 Voltaire chose to work was the French classic, with 
 its appointed conditions and fixed laws, its three 
 unities, its stately alexandrines, and all the other 
 essentials of that special dramatic form. Here is one 
 of the many points at which we feel that Voltaire is 
 trying to prolong in literature, if not in thought, the 
 impressive tradition of the grand age. At the same 
 moment, strangely enough, he was giving that stir to 
 the opinion of his time, which was the prime agent in 
 
 1 Essay on Sum. Und. iv. 19, § 3. 
 
III. LITERATURE. 131 
 
 definitely breaking the hold of that tradition. It is 
 no infidelity to the glorious and incomparable genius 
 of Shakespeare, nor does it involve any blindness to 
 the fine creation, fresh fancy, and noble thought and 
 imagery of our less superb men, yet to admit that 
 there is in these limits of construction a concentration 
 and regularity, and in these too . contemned alex- 
 andrines a just and swelling cadence, that confer a 
 high degree of pleasure of the'highest kind, and that 
 demand intellectual quality only less rare than that 
 other priceless and unattainable quality of having the 
 lips touched with divine fire. It is said, however, 
 that such quality does not produce acting plays, but 
 only dramatic poems : this is really laughable if we 
 remember first, that the finest actors in the world have 
 been trained in the recitation of these alexandrines, 
 and second, that as large and as delighted an audience 
 used until within some twenty years ago to crowd to a 
 tragedy of Corneille or Eacine, seen repeatedly before, 
 as to a bran-new vaudeville, never to be seen again. 
 
 'We insist,' said Voltaire, 'that the rhyme shall 
 cost nothing to the ideas; that it shall neither be 
 trivial nor too far-fetched ; we exact rigorously in a 
 verse the same purity, the same precision, as in prose. 
 We do not permit the smallest licence ; we require 
 an author to carry without a break all these chains, 
 and yet that he should appear ever free.' 1 He 
 admitted that sometimes they failed in reaching the 
 
 1 Discours sur la Trage'die, a Milord BoliDgbrocke. GEuwes, 
 ii p. 337. See also the preface to (Edipe. lb. p. 73. 
 
132 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 tragic, through excessive fear of passing its limits. 
 He does justice, if something less than English justice, 
 to the singular merits of our stage in the way of 
 action. 1 Shakespeare, he says, 'had a genius full of 
 force and fertility, of all that is natural and all that 
 is sublime.' It is even the merit of Shakespeare — 
 ' those grand and terrible pieces that abound in his 
 most monstrous farces ' — that has been the undoing 
 of the English stage. 2 
 
 Even the famous criticism on Hamlet has been a 
 good deal misrepresented. Voltaire is vindicating the 
 employment of the machinery of ghosts, and he dwells 
 on the fitness and fine dramatic effect of the ghost in 
 Shakespeare's play. ' I am very far,' he goes on to 
 say, ' from justifying the tragedy of Hamlet in every- 
 thing : it is a rude and barbarous piece. . . . Hamlet 
 goes mad in the second act, and his mistress goes 
 mad in the third ; the prince slays the father of his 
 mistress, pretending to kill a rat, and the heroine 
 throws herself into the river. They dig her grave on 
 the stage ; the gravediggers jest in a way worthy of 
 them, with skulls in their hands; Hamlet answers 
 their odious grossnesses by extravagances no less dis- 
 gusting. Meanwhile one of the characters conquers 
 Poland. Hamlet, his mother, and his stepfather 
 drink together on the stage ; they sing at table, they 
 wrangle, they fight, they kill ; one might suppose such 
 a work to be the fruit of the imagination of a drunken 
 
 1 (Euvres, ii. p. 339. 
 2 Lett sur las Anglais, xix. (Ewvres, xxxv, p. 151. 
 
«I. LITERATURE. 133 
 
 savage. But in the midst of all these rude irregu- 
 larities, which to this day make the English theatre 
 so absurd and so barbarous, the.re are to be found in 
 Hamlet by a yet greater incongruity sublime strokes 
 worthy of the loftiest geniuses. It seems as if nature 
 had taken a delight in collecting within the brain of 
 Shakespeare all that we can imagine of what is greatest 
 and most powerful, with all that rudeness without wit 
 can contain of what is lowest and most detestable.' 1 
 
 If one were to retort upon this that anybody with 
 a true sense of poetry would sacrifice all the plays that 
 Voltaire ever wrote, his eight-and-twenty tragedies, 
 and half -score of comedies, for the soliloquy in Hamlet, 
 or King Henry at Towton Fight, or ' Roses, their sharp 
 spines being gone,' there would be truth in such a 
 retort, but it would be that brutal truth, which is 
 always very near being the most subtle kind of lie. 
 Nature wrought a miracle for us by producing Shake- 
 speare, as she did afterwards in an extremely different 
 way for France by producing Voltaire. Miracles, how- 
 ever, have necessarily a very demoralising effect. A 
 prodigy of loaves and fishes, by slackening the motives 
 to honest industry, must in the end multiply paupers. 
 The prodigy of such amazing results from such glorious 
 carelessness as Shakespeare's, has plunged hundreds 
 of men of talent into a carelessness most inglorious, 
 and made our acting stage a mock. It is quite true 
 
 1 Introduction to Semiramis. (Euvres, v. p. 194. See also 
 Du Theatre Anglaia (1761). lb. x, p. 88. Lettre k VAcad- 
 Franc. (1778), iv. p. 186. 
 
134 VOLTAIRE. CHAP 
 
 that the academic rule is better fitted for mediocrity 
 than for genius ; but we may perhaps trust genius to 
 make a way for itself. It is mediocrity that needs 
 laws and prescriptions for its most effective fertilisa- 
 tion, and the enormous majority even of those who 
 can do good work are still mediocre. We have pre- 
 ferred the methods of lawless genius, and are left 
 with rampant lawlessness and no genius. The very 
 essence of the old French tragedy was painstaking, 
 and painstaking has had its unfailing and exceeding 
 great reward. When people whose taste has been 
 trained in the traditions of romantic and naturalistic 
 art, or even not trained at all except in indolence and 
 presumption, yawn over the French alexandrines, let 
 them remember that Goethe at any rate thought it 
 worth while to translate Mahomet and Tancrede. 
 
 An eminent German writer on Voltaire has recently 
 declared the secret of the French classic dramaturgy 
 to be that the drama was a diversion of the court. 
 ' The personages have to speak not as befits their 
 true feelings, their character, and the situation, but 
 as is seemly in the presence of a king and a court ; 
 not truth, nature, and beauty, but etiquette, is the 
 highest law of the dramatic art.' 1 This may partially 
 explain how it was that a return to some features of 
 the classic form, its dignity, elevation, and severity, 
 came to take place in France, but no explanation can 
 
 1 Voltaire .- sechs Vbrtrdge. Yon D. F. Strauss ; p. 74. The 
 same idea is found in a speech of "Wilhelm Meister, bk. iii 
 oh. 8. 
 
III. LITERATURE. 135 
 
 be at all satisfactory which reduces so distinct and 
 genuine a manner of dramatic expression to a mere 
 outside accident. Corneille, Racine, Voltaire, treated 
 their tragic subjects as they did, with rigorous con- 
 centration of action, stately consistency of motive, and 
 in a solemn and balanced measure, because these con- 
 ditions answered to intellectual qualities of their own, 
 an affinity in themselves for elegance, clearness, eleva- 
 tion, and a certain purified and weighty wisdom. It 
 is true that they do not unseal those deep -hidden 
 fountains of thought and feeling and music, which 
 flow so freely at the waving of Shakespeare's wand. 
 We are not swiftly carried from a scene of clowns 
 up to some sublime pinnacle of the seventh heaven, 
 whence we see the darJc abysses that he about the 
 path of human action, as well as all its sweet and 
 shadowed places. Only let us not unjustly suppose 
 that we are deciding the merits of the old French 
 dramaturgy, its severe structure and stately measure, 
 by answering the question, which no English nor 
 German writer can ever seriouslyput, as to the relative 
 depth and vision in poetic things of Shakespeare and 
 Voltaire. Nor can we be expected to be deeply 
 moved by a form of art that is so unfamiliar to us. 
 It is not a question whether we ought to be so deeply 
 moved The too susceptible Marmontel describes 
 how on the occasion of a visit to Ferney, Voltaire 
 took him into his study and placed a manuscript into 
 bis hands. It was Tancrede, which was just finished. 
 Marmontel eagerly read it, and he tells us how he 
 
136 VOLTAIRE. OHAF 
 
 returned to the author, his face all bathed in tears, 
 'Your tears,' said Voltaire, 'tell me all that it most 
 •concerns me to know.' 1 The most supercilious critic 
 may find this very Tancrede worth reading, when he 
 remembers that Gibbon thought it splendid and inter- 
 esting, 2 and that Goethe found it worth translating. 
 One could hardly be convicted now of want of sensi- 
 bility, if all Voltaire's tragedy together failed to bathe 
 one's face in tears, but this is a very bad reason for 
 denying that it has other merits than pathos. 
 
 We cannot, indeed, compare the author of Zaire 
 and Tancrede with the great author of Cinna and 
 Polyeucte, any more than in another kind we can 
 compare Gray with Milton. Voltaire is the very 
 genius of correctness, elegance, and grace, and if the 
 reader would know what this correctness means, he 
 will find a most wholesome exercise in reading Vol- 
 taire's notes on some of the most celebrated of 
 Corneille's plays. 3 But in masculine energy and in 
 poetic weightiness, as well as in organ-like richness of 
 music, Voltaire must be surely pronounced inferior to 
 his superb predecessor. There is a certain thinness 
 pervading the whole of his work for the stage, the 
 conception of character, the dramatic structure, and 
 the measure alike. Undoubtedly we may frequently 
 come upon weighty and noble lines, of fine music and 
 
 1 Mdm. de Marmontel, liv. vii. ii. 245. For Diderot's criti- 
 cism, see his Mimoires et (Euvr. Inidites, i 234 (1830). For 
 D'Alembert's, cf. Voltaire's CBuv. lxxv. p. 118. 
 
 2 Decline and Fall, u. 52, note 83. 
 
 3 CEuvres, vols. x. and xi. 
 
III. LITERATURE. 137 
 
 lofty sense. But there is on the whole what strikes 
 one as a fatal excess of facility, and a fatal defect 
 of poetic saliency. The fluent ease of the verse 
 destroys the impression of strength. 'Your friend,' 
 wrote Madame du Chatelet once of her friend, ' has 
 had £ slight bout of illness, and you know that when 
 he is ill, he can do nothing but write verses.' 1 "We 
 do not know whether the Marquise meant alexan- 
 drines, or those graceful verses of society of which 
 Voltaire was so incomparable a master. It is certain 
 that he wrote Zaire in three weeks and Olympie in 
 six days, though with respect to the latter we may 
 well agree with the friend who told the author that 
 he should not have rested on the seventh day. How- 
 ever that may be, there is a quality about his tragic 
 verse which to one fresh from the sonorous majesty 
 and dignified beauty of Polyeucte, or even the fine 
 gravity of Tartufe, vibrates too lightly in the ear. 
 Least of all may we compare him to Eacine, whose 
 two great tragedies of Iphigenie and Athalie Voltaire 
 himself declared to mark the nearest approach ever 
 made to dramatic perfection. 2 There is none of the 
 mixed austerity and tenderness, height and sweetness, 
 grace and firmness, that blend together with such 
 invisible art and unique contrivance in the poet whose 
 verses taught Fenelon and Massillon how to make 
 music in their prose. To this Voltaire could only 
 have access from without, for he lacked the famous 
 master's internal depth, seriousness, and veneration 
 1 Deshoiresterres, p. 342. a (Euvres, ix. p, 382. 
 
138 V0LTAIJK15. CHAP. 
 
 of soul. We know how little this approach from 
 without can avail, and how vainly a man follows the 
 harmonious grace of a style, when he lacks the im- 
 palpable graces of spirit that made the style live. 
 It is only when grave thoughts and benignant aspira- 
 tions and purifying images move with even habit 
 through the mind, that a man masters the noblest 
 expression. De Maistre, to whom Voltaire's name 
 was the symbol for all that is accursed, admitted the 
 nobleness of his work in tragedy, but he instantly 
 took back the grudged praise by saying that even here 
 he only resembles his two great rivals as a clever 
 hypocrite resembles a saint. 1 Malignantly expressed, 
 there is in this some truth. 
 
 It was one of the elements in the plan of dramatic 
 reform that sprang up in Voltaire's mind during his 
 residence in England, that the subjects of tragedy 
 should be more masculine, and that love should cease 
 to be an obligatory ingredient. ' It is nearly always 
 the same piece, the same knot, formed by jealousy 
 and a breach, and untied by a marriage ; it is a per- 
 petual coquetry, a simple comedy in which princes are 
 actors, and in which occasionally blood is spilt for 
 form's sake.' 2 This he counted a mistake, for, as he 
 justly said, the heart is but lightly touched by a lover's 
 woes, while it is profoundly softened by the anguish 
 of a mother just about to lose her son. Thus in 
 Merope we have maternal sentiment made the spring 
 of what is probably the best of Voltaire's tragedies, 
 1 Soirtes, 4i£me entretien. ' (Euvres, v. p. 189. 
 
"I- LITERATURE. 139 
 
 abounding in a just vehemence, compact, full of 
 feeling at once exalted and natural, and moving with 
 a sustained energy that is not a too common mark of 
 his work. It was the same conviction of the pro- 
 priety of making tragedy a means of expressing other 
 emotions than that which is so apt to degenerate into 
 an insipidity, which dictated the composition and 
 novel treatment of the Roman subjects, Brutus and 
 La Mort de Cesar. Here the French drama first 
 became in some degree truly political. His pre- 
 decessors when they handled a historic theme did so, 
 not from the historic or social point of view, but as 
 the illustration, or rather the suggestion, of some 
 central human passion. In the Cinna of Corneille the 
 political bearings, the moral of benevolent despotism 
 which Bonaparte found in it, were purely incidental, 
 and were distinctly subordinate to the portrayal of 
 character and the movement of feeling. In Brutus 
 the whole action lies in the region of great public 
 affairs, and of the passions which these affairs stir in 
 noble characters, without any admixture of purely 
 private tenderness. In La Mort de Cesar we are 
 equally in the heroics of public action. Rome -Sauvee, 
 of which the subject is the conspiracy of Catiline, and 
 the hero the most eloquent of consuls or men — a part 
 that Voltaire was very fond of filling in private 
 representations, and with distinguished success — is 
 extremely loose and spasmodic in structure, and the 
 speeches sound strained even when put into Cicero's 
 mouth. But here also private insipidities are banished, 
 
140 VOLTAIRE. CHAP 
 
 though perhaps it is only in favour of public insipidities. 
 It is impossible to tell what share, if any, these plays 
 had in spreading that curious feeling about Roman 
 freedom and its most renowned defenders, which is so 
 striking a feature in some of the great episodes of the 
 Eevolution. We cannot suspect Voltaire of any 
 design to stir political feeling. He was now essen- 
 tially aristocratic and courtly in his predilection, 
 without the smallest active wish for an approach to 
 political revolution, if indeed the conception of a 
 change of that kind ever presented itself to him. He 
 was indefatigable in admiring and praising English 
 freedom, but, as has already been said, it was not the 
 laudation of a lover of popular government, but the 
 envy of a man of letters whose life was tormented by 
 censors of the press and the lieutenant of police. Per- 
 haps the only approach to a public purpose in this fancy 
 for his Roman subjects was a lurking idea of arousing 
 in the nobles, for whom we must remember that hia 
 dramatic work was above all designed, not a passion for 
 freedom from the authority of monarchic government, 
 but a passion of a more general kind for energetic 
 patriotism. Voltaire's letters abound with expres- 
 sions of the writer's belief that he was the witness of 
 an epoch of decay in his own country. He had in 
 truth far too keen and practical and trained an eye not 
 to see how public spirit, political sagacity, national 
 ambition, and even valour had declined in the great 
 orders of France since the age of the Grand Monarch, 
 and how much his country had fallen back in the 
 
£11. LITEKATUKE. 141 
 
 race of civilisation and power. We should be guilty 
 of a very transparent exaggeration of the facts, if 
 any attempt were made to paint Voltaire in the atti- 
 tude and colours of one transcendentally aspiring to 
 regenerate his countrymen. But there is no diffi- 
 culty in believing that a man who had lived in England, 
 and knew so much of Prussia, should have seen the 
 fatal enervation which had come upon France, and 
 that with Voltaire's feeling for the stage, he should 
 have dreamt, by means of a more austere subject and 
 more masculine treatment, of reviving the love of 
 wisdom and glory and devotion in connection with 
 country. In a word, the lesson of La Mort de Cesar 
 or of Brutus was not a specific admonition to slay 
 tyrants, or to execute stern judgments on sons, but 
 a general example of self-sacrificing patriotism and 
 devoted public honour. 
 
 It is often said that Voltaire's Romans are mere 
 creatures of parade and declamation, like the figures 
 of David's paintings, 1 and it. is very likely that the 
 theatre infected the French people with that mis- 
 chievous idea of the Romans, as a nation of declaimers 
 about freedom and the death of tyrants. The true 
 Roman was no doubt very much more like one of our 
 narrow, hard, and able Scotchmen in India, than the 
 lofty talkers who delighted the parterre of Paris or 
 Versailles. Unluckily for truth of historical concep- 
 tion, Cicero was, after Virgil, the most potent of 
 Roman memories, and a man of words became with 
 3 Strauss, p. 79. 
 
142 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 modern writers the favourite type of a people oi 
 action. All this, however, is beside the question. 
 Voltaire would have laughed at the idea of any 
 obligation to present either Romans or other person- 
 ages on the stage with realistic fidelity. The tragic 
 drama with him was the highest of the imaginative 
 and idealistic arts. If he had sought a parallel to it 
 in the plastic arts he would have found one, not in 
 painting, which by reason of the greater flexibility 
 of its material demands a more exact verisimilitude, 
 but in sculpture. Considered as statuesque figures 
 endowed with speech, Brutus, Csesar, and the rest 
 are noble and impressive. We may protest as vigor- 
 ously as we know how against any assimilation of the 
 great art of action with the great art of repose. But 
 we can only criticise the individual productions of a 
 given theory, provided we for the moment accept the 
 conditions which the theory lays down. All art rests 
 upon convention, and if we choose to repudiate any 
 particular set of conventions, we have no more right 
 to criticise the works of those who submit to them 
 than one would have to criticise sculpture, because 
 marble or bronze is not like flesh and blood. Within 
 the conditions of the French classic drama Voltaire's 
 Romans are high and stately figures. 
 
 Voltaire's innovations extended beyond the intro- 
 duction of more masculine treatment. Before his 
 time romantic subjects had been regarded with dis- 
 favour, and Corneille's Bajazet was considered a bold 
 experiment. Bacine was more strictly classic, and 
 
in. LITERATURE. 143 
 
 dramatists went on handling the same ancient fables, 
 ' Thebes, or Pelops' line, or the tale of Troy divine,' 
 just as the Greeks had done, or just as the painters 
 in the Catholic times had never wearied of painting 
 the two eternal figures of human mother and divine 
 child. Voltaire treated the classic subjects as others 
 treated them, and if CEdipe misses the depth, delicate 
 reserve and fateful gloom of the Greeks, Merope at any 
 rate breathes a fine and tragic spirit. But his restless 
 mind pressed forward into subjects which Eacine 
 would have shuddered at, and every quarter of the uni- 
 verse became in turn a portion of the Voltairean stage. 
 L'Orphelin de la Chine introduces us to China and 
 Genghis-Khan, Mahomet to Arabia and its prophet, 
 Tancrede to Sicily ; in Zulime we are among Moors, 
 in Alzire with Peruvians. This revolutionary enlarge- 
 ment of subject was significant of a general and very 
 important enlargement of interest which marked the 
 time, and led presently to those contrasts between 
 the condition of France and the imaginary felicity 
 and nobleness of wilder countries, which did so much 
 to breed an irresistible longing for change. Voltaire's 
 high-minded Scythians, generous Peruvians, and the 
 rest, prepared the way along with other influences 
 for that curious cosmopolitanism, that striking eager- 
 ness to believe in the equal yirtuousness and devotion 
 inherent in human nature, independently of the religi- 
 ous or social form accidentally imposed upon them, 
 which found its ultimate outcome, first in an ardent 
 passion for social equality, and a depreciation of the 
 
144 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 special sanctity of the current religion, and next in 
 the ill-fated emancipating and proselytising aims of 
 the Revolution, and in oratprs of the human race. 
 
 It has usually been thought surprising that Vol- 
 taire, consummate wit as he was, should have been 
 so markedly unsuccessful in comedy. Certainly no 
 one with so right a sense of the value of time as 
 Voltaire himself had, wiH in our day waste many 
 hours over his productions in this order. There are 
 a dozen of them more or less, and we can only hope 
 that they were the most rapid of his writings. Lines 
 of extraordinary vivacity are not wanting, and at 
 their best they offer a certain bustling sprightliness 
 that might have been diverting in actual representa- 
 tion. But the keynote seems to be struck in farce, 
 rather than in comedy ; the intrigue, if not quite as 
 slight as in Moliere, is too forced ; and the characters 
 are nearly all excessively mediocre in conception. In 
 one of the comedies, Le D6positaire, the poet presented 
 the aged patroness of his youth, but the necessity of 
 respecting current ideas of the becoming prevented 
 him from making a great character out of even so 
 striking a figure as Ninon de l'Enclos. La Prude is 
 a version of Wycherly's Plaindealer, and is in respect 
 of force, animation, and the genuine spirit of comedy, 
 very inferior to its admirable original L'Indiscret is 
 a sparkling and unconsidered trifle, L'Ecossaise is only 
 a stinging attack on Freron, and L'Enfant Prodigue, 
 though greater pains were taken with it, has none of 
 the glow of dramatic feeling. The liveliest of all is 
 
III. LITERATURE. 145 
 
 La Femme qui a Raison, a short comedy of situation, 
 which for one reading is entertaining in the closet, 
 and must be excellent on the stage. It is very slight, 
 however, and as usual verges on farce. 
 
 This inferiority of Voltaire's ought not to astonish 
 any one who has reflected how much concentrated 
 feeling and what profundity of vision go to the pro- 
 duction of great comedy, and how in the mind of the 
 dramatist, as in the movement of human life, comedy 
 lies close to portentous tragedy. The author of the 
 Bourgeois Gentilhomme and L'Avare was also the 
 creator of the Misanthrope, that inscrutable piece, 
 where, without plot, fable, or intrigue, we see a sec- 
 tion of the polished life of the time, men and women 
 paying visits, making and receiving compliments, 
 discoursing upon affairs with easy lightness, flitting 
 backwards and forwards with a thousand petty 
 hurries, and among these one strange, rough, hoarse, 
 half-sombre figure, moving solitarily with a chilling 
 reality in the midst of frolicking shadows. Voltaire . 
 entered too eagerly into the interests of the world, 
 was by temperament too exclusively sympathetic and 
 receptive and social, to place himself even in imag- 
 ination thus outside of the common circle. Without 
 capacity for this, there is no comedy of the first order. 
 Without serious consciousness of contrasts, no humour 
 that endures. Shakespeare, Moliere, and even Aristo- 
 phanes, each of them unsurpassed writers of mere 
 farce, were each of them, though with vast difference 
 of degree, master of a tragic breadth of vision. Vol- 
 L 
 
146 VOLTAIEE. CHAP. 
 
 taire had moods of petulant spleen, but who feels that 
 he ever saw, much less brooded over, the dark cavern- 
 ous regions of human nature ? Without this we may 
 have brilliant pleasantry of surprise, inimitable cari- 
 cature, excellent comedy of society, but of the veritable 
 comedy of human character and life, nothing. 
 
 In dazzling and irresistible caricature Voltaire has 
 no equal. There is no deep humour, as in Don 
 Quixote, or Tristram Shandy, which Voltaire did not 
 care for, 1 or Eichter's Siebenkas, which he would not 
 have cared for any more than De Stael did. He was 
 too purely intellectual, too argumentative, too geo- 
 metrical, and cared too much for illustrating a prin- 
 ciple. But in Candide, Zadig, L'Ingenu, wit is as high 
 as mere wit can go. They are better than Hudibras, 
 because the motive is broader and more intellectual. 
 Rapidity of play, infallible accuracy of stroke, perfect 
 copiousness, and above all a fresh and unflagging 
 spontaneity, combine with a surprising invention, to 
 give these stories a singular quality, of which we most 
 effectively observe the real brilliance, by comparing 
 them with the too numerous imitations that their 
 success has unhappily invited since. 
 
 It is impossible to omit from the most cursory study 
 of Voltaire's work, that too famous poem which was 
 his favourite amusement during some of the best. years 
 of his life, which was the delight of all who could by 
 any means get the high favour of sight or hearing of 
 so much as a canto of it, and which is now always 
 1 GEuvres, zviii. p. 250. 
 
in. LITERATURE. 147 
 
 spoken of, when it happens to be spoken of at all, 
 with extreme abhorrence. 1 The Pucelle offends two 
 modern sentiments, the love of modesty, and the love 
 of the heroic personages of history. The moral sense 
 and the historic sense have both been sharpened in 
 some respects since Voltaire, and a poem which not 
 only abounds in immodesty, and centres the whole 
 action in an indecency of conception, but also fastens 
 this gross chaplet round the memory of a great de- 
 liverer of the poet's own country, seems to offer a 
 double outrage to an age when relish for licentious 
 verse has gone out of fashion, and reverence for the 
 heroic dead has come in. Still the fact that the 
 greatest man of his time should have written one of 
 the most unseemly poems that exist in any tongue, is 
 worth trying to understand. Voltaire, let us remem- 
 ber, had no special turn, like Gibbon or Bayle, least 
 of all like the unclean Swift, for extracting a malo- 
 dorous diversion out of grossness or sensuality. His 
 writings betray no irresistible passion for flying to an 
 indelicacy, nor any of the vapid lasciviousness of some 
 more modern French writers. The Pucelle is at least 
 the wit of a rational man, and not the prying beastli- 
 ness of a satyr. It is wit worse than poorly employed, 
 but it is purity itself compared with some of the 
 nameless abominations with which Diderot besmirched 
 his imagination. The Persian Letters contain what 
 we should now account passages of extreme licentious- 
 
 1 Commenced soon after 1730 ; published surreptitiously in 
 1755 ; published by Voltaire himself in 1762. 
 
148 TOLTAIEE. OHAP. 
 
 ness, yet Montesquieu was assuredly no libertine. 
 Voltaire's life again was never indecent or immoderate 
 from the point of view of the manners of the time. 
 A man of grave character and untarnished life, like 
 Condorcet, did not scruple to defend a poem, in which 
 it is hard for us to see anything but a most indecorous 
 burlesque of a most heroic subject. He insists that 
 ' books which divert the imagination without heating 
 or seducing it, which by gay and pleasurable images 
 fill up those moments of exhaustion that are useless 
 alike for labour and meditation, have the effect of 
 inclining men to gentleness and indulgence. ' It was 
 not such books as the Pucelle that Gerard or Clement 
 used to read, or that the satellites of Cromwell carried 
 at the saddle-bow.' 1 
 
 The fact is that in amusing himself by the Pucelle, 
 Voltaire was only giving literary expression to a kind 
 of view which had already in the society of the time 
 found for itself a thoroughly practical expression. 
 The people among whom he lived had systematised 
 that freedom from law or restraint in the relations of 
 the sexes, of which his poem is so vivid a representa- 
 tion. The Duke of Richelieu was the irresistible 
 Lovelace of his time, and it was deemed an honour, 
 an honour to which Madame du CMtelet among so 
 many others has a title, to have yielded to his fascina- 
 tion. A long and profoundly unedifying chronicle 
 might be drawn up of the memorable gallantries of 
 that time, and for our purpose it might fitly close 
 1 Vie de Voltaire, p. 89. 
 
HI. LITEEATUEE. 149 
 
 with the amour with Saint Lambert that led to 
 Madame du Chatelet's death. Of course, these count- 
 less gallantries in the most licentious persons of the 
 day, such as Richelieu or Saxe, were neither more nor 
 less than an outbreak of sheer dissoluteness, such as 
 took place among English people of quality in the 
 time of the Restoration. The idle and luxurious, 
 whose imagination is uncontrolled by the discipline 
 of labour and purpose, and to whom the indulgence 
 of their own inclinations is the first and single law of 
 life, are always ready to profit by any relaxation of 
 restraint, which the moral conditions of the moment 
 may permit. 
 
 The peculiarity of the licence of France in the 
 middle of the eighteenth century is, that it was looked 
 upon with complacency by the great intellectual leaders 
 of opinion. It took its place in the progressive formula. 
 What austerity was to other forward movements, 
 licence was to this. It is not difficult to perceive 
 how so extraordinary a circumstance came to pass. 
 Chastity was the supreme virtue in the eyes of the 
 church, the mystic key to Christian holiness. Con- 
 tinence was one of the most sacred of the pretensions 
 by which the organised preachers of superstition 
 claimed the reverence of men and women. It was 
 identified, therefore, in a particular manner with that 
 Infamous, against which the main assault of the time 
 was directed. So men contended, more or less ex- 
 pressly, first, that continence was no commanding chief 
 among virtues, then that it was a very superficial and 
 
150 VOLTAIRE. chat. 
 
 easily practised virtue, finally that it was no virtue at 
 all, but if sometimes a convenience, generally an im- 
 pediment to free human happiness. These disastrous 
 sophisms show the peril of having morality made an 
 appendage of a set of theological mysteries, because 
 the .mysteries are sure in time to be dragged into the 
 open air of reason, and moral truth crumbles away 
 with the false dogmas with which it had got mixed. 
 
 'If,' says Condorcet, 'we may treat as useful the 
 design to make superstition ridiculous in the eyes of 
 men given to pleasures, and destined, by the very 
 want of self-control which makes pleasures attractive 
 to them, to become one day the unfortunate victims 
 or the mischievous instruments of that vile tyrant of 
 humanity ; if the affectation of austerity in manners, 
 if the excessive value attached to purity, only serves 
 the hypocrites who by putting on the easy mask of 
 chastity can dispense with all virtues, and cover with 
 a sacred veil the vices most pernicious to society, 
 hardness of heart and intolerance ; if by accustoming 
 men to treat as so many crimes faults from which 
 honourable and conscientious persons are not exempt, 
 we extend over the purest souls the power of that dan- 
 gerous caste, which to rule and disturb the earth, has 
 constituteditself exclusively the interpreter of heavenly 
 justice ; — then we shall see in the author of the Pucelle 
 no more than a foe to hypocrisy and superstition.' 1 
 
 1 fiede Voltaire, p. 88. On the same subject of chastity, 
 cf. Condorcet's Works, vi. p. 264, and pp. 523-26 ; also a passage 
 in his correspondence, i. p. 221. 
 
HI. UTEEATUEE. 151 
 
 It helps us to realise the infinite vileness of a 
 system, like that of the Church in the last century, 
 which could engender in men of essential nobleness 
 of character like Condorcet, an antipathy so violent 
 as to shut the eyes of their understanding to the 
 radical sophistry of such pleading as this. Let one 
 reflection out of many, serve to crush the whole of it. 
 The key to effective life is unity of life, and unity of 
 life means as much as anything else the unity of our 
 human relations. Our identity does by no means 
 consist in a historic continuity of tissues, but in an 
 organic moral coherency of relation. It is this, which 
 alone, if we consider the passing shortness of our 
 days, makes life a whole, instead of a parcel of thrums 
 bound together by an accident. Is not every in- 
 centive and every concession to vagrant appetite a 
 force that enwraps a man in gratification of self, and 
 severs him from duty to others, and so a force of dis- 
 solution and dispersion? It might be necessary to 
 pull down the Church, but the worst church that has 
 ever prostituted the name and the idea of religion 
 cannot be so disastrous to society, as a gospel that 
 systematically relaxes self-control as being an un- 
 meaning curtailment of happiness. The apologists 
 for the Pucelle exhibit the doctrine of individualism 
 in one of its worst issues. ' Your proof that this is 
 really the best of all possible worlds is excellent,' 
 says Candide for his famous last word, ' but we must 
 cultivate our garden.' The same principle of exclusive 
 self-regard, applied to the gratification of sense, passed 
 
152 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 for a satisfactory defence of libertinage. In the first 
 form it destroys a state, in the second it destroys the 
 family. 
 
 It is easier to account for Voltaire's contempt for 
 the mediaeval superstition about purity, than his -want 
 of respect for a deliverer of France. The explanation 
 lies in the conviction which had such power in Vol- 
 taire's own mind and with which he impregnated to 
 such a degree the minds of others, that the action of 
 illiterate and unpolished times can have no life in 
 it. His view of progress was a progress of. art and 
 knowledge, and heroic action which was dumb, or 
 which was not expressed in terms of intellect, was to 
 the eighteenth century, and to Voltaire at least as 
 much as to any other of its leaders, mere barbaric 
 energy. In the order of taste, for instance, he can 
 find only words of cool and limited praise for Homer, 
 while for the polish and elegance of Virgil his admira- 
 tion is supreme. The first was the bard of a rude 
 time, while round the second cluster all the associa- 
 tions of a refined and lettered age. A self-devotion 
 that was only articulate in the jargon of mystery and 
 hallucination, and that was surrounded with rude 
 and irrational circumstance, with ignorance, brutality, 
 visions, miraele, was encircled by no halo in the eyes 
 of a poet who found no nobleness where he did not 
 find a definite intelligence, and who rested all his 
 hopes and interests on the long distance set by time 
 and civilisation between ourselves and such conditions 
 and associations as belong to the name of Joan of 
 
III. LITERATURE. 153 
 
 Arc. The foremost men of the eighteenth century 
 despised Joan of Arc, whenever they had occasion tc 
 think of her, for the same reason which made them 
 despise Gothic architecture. 'When,' says Voltaire 
 in one place, ' the arts began to revive, they revived 
 as Goths and Vandals ; what unhappily remains to 
 us of the architecture and sculpture of these times is 
 a fantastic compound of rudeness and filigree.' 1 Just 
 so, even Turgot, while protesting how dear to every 
 sensible heart were the Gothic buildings destined to 
 the use of the poor and the orphan, complained of 
 the outrage done by their rude architecture to the 
 delicacy of our sight. 2 Characters like Joan of Arc 
 ranked in the same rude and fantastic order, and 
 respect for them meant that respect for the middle 
 age which was treason to the new time. Men despised 
 her, just as they despised the majesty and beauty of 
 the great church at Rheims where she brought her 
 work to a climax, or the lofty grace and symmetry 
 of the church of St. Ouen, within sight of which her 
 life came to its terrible end. 
 
 Henry the Fourth was a hero with Voltaire, for no 
 better reason than that he was the first great tolerant, 
 the earliest historic indifferent. The Henriade is only 
 important because it helped to popularise the type of 
 its hero's character, and so to promote the rapidly- 
 growing tendency in public opinion towards a still 
 wider version of the policy of the Edict of Nantes. 
 
 1 Essai sur la Poesie Epique. CEuvres, xiii. p. 474. 
 8 (Euvres, ii. p. 591. 
 
154 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 The reign, of Lewis xiv. had thrown all previous 
 monarchs into obscurity, and the French king who 
 showed a warmer and more generous interest in the 
 happiness of his subjects than any they ever had, was 
 forgotten, until Voltaire brought him into fame. It 
 was just, however, because Henry's exploits were so 
 glorious, and at the same time so near in point of 
 time, that he made an indifferent hero for an epic poem. 
 'He should never choose for an epic poem history,' 
 said Hume very truly, 'the truth of which is well 
 known ; for no fiction can come up to the interest of 
 the actual story and incidents of the singular life of 
 Henry iv.' 1 These general considerations, however, 
 as to the propriety of the subject are hardly worth 
 entering upon. How could any true epic come out of 
 that age, or find fountains in that critical, realistic, and 
 polemical soul? To fuse a long narrative of heroic 
 adventure in animated, picturesque, above all, in 
 sincere verse, is an achievement reserved for men with 
 a steadier glow, a firmer, simpler, more exuberant and 
 more natural poetic feeling, than was possible in that 
 time of mean shifts, purposeless public action, and 
 pitiful sacrifice of private self-respect. Virgil was 
 stirred by the greatness of the newly-united empire, 
 Tasso by the heroic march of Christendom against 
 pagan oppressors, Milton by the noble ardour of our 
 war for public rights. What long and glowing in- 
 spiration was possible to a would-be courtier, thrust 
 into the Bastille for wanting to fight a noble who 
 1 Burton's Life of David Bv/me, ii. 440. 
 
HI. LITERATURE. 155 
 
 had had him caned by lackeys 1 Besides, an epic, of 
 all forms of poetic composition, most demands con- 
 centrated depth, and Voltaire was too widely curious 
 and vivacious on the intellectual side to be capable 
 of this emotional concentration. 
 
 But it is superfluous to give reasons why Voltaire's 
 epic should not be a great poem. The Henriade 
 itself is there, the most indisputable of arguments. 
 Of poems whose names are known out of literary 
 histories and academic catalogues, it is perhaps the 
 least worth reading in any language by any one but 
 a professional student of letters. It is less worth 
 reading than L"ucan's Pharsalia, because it is more 
 deliberately artificial and gratuitously unspontaneous. 
 Paradise Eegained, which it is too ready a fashion 
 among us to pronounce dull, still contains at least 
 three pieces of superb and unsurpassed description, 
 never fails in grave majestic verse, and is at the worst 
 free from all the dreary apparatus of phantom and 
 impersonation and mystic vision, which have never 
 jarred so profoundly with sense of poetic fitness, as 
 when associated with so political and matter-of-fact a 
 hero as Henry the Fourth. The reader has no illu- 
 sion in such transactions as Saint Lewis taking Henry 
 into heaven and hell, Sleep hearing from her secret 
 caves, the Winds at sight of him falling into Silence, 
 and Dreams, children of Hope, flying to cover the 
 hero with olive and laurel. How can we overcome 
 our repugnance to that strange admixture of real and 
 and unreal matter which presents us with a highly- 
 
156 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 coloured picture of the Temple of Love, where in the 
 forecourt sits Joy, with Mystery, Desire, Complaisance, 
 on the soft turf by her side, while in the inner sanc- 
 tuary haunt Jealousy, Suspicion, Malice, Fury ; while 
 the next canto describes 
 
 L'6glise toujours une et partout etendue, 
 
 Libre, mais sous un chef, adorant en tout lien, 
 
 Dans le bonheur des saints, la grandeur de son Dieu, 
 
 Le Christ, de nos pech£s victime renaissante, 
 
 De ses elus cheris nourriture vivante, 
 
 Descend sur les autels a ses yeux e'perdus, ( 
 
 Et lui decouvre un Dieu sous un pain qui n'est plus. 1 
 
 Voltaire congratulated himself in his preface that 
 he had come sufficiently near theological exactitude, 
 and to this qualification, which is so new for poetry, 
 the critic may add elegance and flow ; but neither 
 elegance nor theological exactitude reconciles us to an 
 epic that has neither a stroke of sublimity nor a touch 
 of pathos, that presents no grandeur in character, and 
 no hurrying force and movement in action. Frederick 
 the Great used to speak of Voltaire as the French 
 Virgil, but then Frederick's father had never per- 
 mitted him to learn Latin, and if he ever read Virgil 
 at all, it must have been in some of the jingling 
 French translations. Even so, with the episodes of 
 Dido and of Nisus and Euryalus in our minds, we 
 may wonder . how so monstrous a parallel could have 
 occurred even to Frederick, who was no critic, between 
 two poets who have hardly a quality in common. If 
 ' Henriade, i. 485-491. 
 
in. LITERATURE. 157 
 
 the reader wishes to realise how nearly insipid even 
 Voltaire's genius could become when working in un- 
 suitable forms, he may turn from any canto of the 
 Henriade to any page of Lucretius or the Paradise 
 Lost. A French critic quotes the famous reviewer's 
 sentence, concluding an analysis of some epic, to the 
 effect that on the whole, when all is summed up, the 
 given epic was ' one of the best that had appeared in 
 the course of the current year ; ' and insists that 
 Voltaire's piece will not at any rate perish in the 
 oblivion of poetic annuals like these. If not, the only 
 reason lies in that unfortunate tenderness for the bad 
 work of famous men, which makes of so much reading 
 time worse than wasted. ' The unwise,' said Candide, 
 ' value every word in an author of repute.' 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 BERLIN. 
 
 The Marquise da Chatelet died under circumstances 
 that were tragical enough to herself, but which disgust 
 the grave, while they give a grotesque amusement to 
 those who look with cynical eye upon what they 
 choose to treat as the great human comedy. In 1749 
 the friendship of sixteen years thus came to its end, 
 and Voltaire was left without the tie that, in spite 
 of too frequent breaking away from it, had brought 
 him much happiness and good help so far on the 
 road. He was now free, disastrously free as the 
 event proved, to accept the invitations with which 
 he had so long been pressed to take up his resid- 
 ence with the king who may dispute with him the 
 claim to be held the most extraordinary man of that 
 century. 
 
 Neither credit nor peace followed Voltaire in his 
 own land. Lewis xv., perhaps the most worthless 
 of all the creatures that monarchy has ever corrupted, 
 always disliked him. The whole influence of the 
 court and the official world had been uniformly 
 exerted against him. Many years went by before he 
 
CHAP. IV. BERLIN. 159 
 
 could even win a seat in the academy, a distinction, 
 it may be added, to which Diderot, hardly second to 
 Voltaire in originality and power, never attained tc 
 the end of his days. Madame de Pompadour, the 
 protectress of Quesnay, was Voltaire's first friend at 
 court. He said of her long afterwards that in the 
 bottom of her heart she belonged to the philosophers, 
 and did as much as she could to protect them. 1 She 
 had known him in her obscurer and more reputable 
 days, and she charged him with the composition of a 
 court-piece (1745), to celebrate the marriage of the 
 dauphin. The task was satisfactorily performed, and 
 honours which had been refused to the author of 
 Zaire, Alzire, and the Henriade, were at once given 
 to the writer of the Princess of Navarre, which 
 Voltaire himself ranked as a mere farce of the fair. 
 He was made gentleman of the chamber and historio- 
 grapher of France. He disarmed the devout by the 
 Pope's acceptance of Mahomet, and by a letter which 
 he wrote to Father Latour, head of his former school, 
 protesting his affection for religion and his esteem for 
 the Jesuits. Condorcet most righteously pronounces 
 that, in spite of the art with which he handles his 
 expressions in this letter, it would undoubtedly have 
 been far better to give up the academy than to write 
 it. 2 It answered its purpose, and Voltaire was 
 admitted of the forty (May 1746). This distinction, 
 however, was far from securing for him the tranquil- 
 lity which he had hoped from it, and worse libels 
 
 1 (Euvres, lxxv. p. 266. a Vie de Voltaire, p. 60. 
 
160 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 tormented him than before. The court sun ceased 
 to shine. Madame de Pompadour gave to Cr6billon a 
 preference which Voltaire resented with more agita- 
 tion than any preference of Madame Pompadour's 
 ought to have stirred in the breast of a strong man. 
 
 We cannot, however, too constantly remember not 
 to ask from Voltaire the heroic. He was far too 
 sympathetic, too generously eager to please, too sus- 
 ceptible to opinion. Of that stern and cold stuff 
 which supports a man in firm march and straight 
 course, giving him the ample content of self-respect, 
 he probably had less than any one of equal promin- 
 ence has ever had. Instead of writing his tragedy 
 as well as he knew how, and then leaving it to its 
 destiny, he wrote it as well as he knew how, and then 
 went in disguise to the cafe 1 of the critics to find out 
 what his inferiors had to say about his work Instead 
 of composing his court-piece, and taking such reward 
 as offered, or disdaining such ignoble tasks— and 
 nobody knew better than he how ignoble they were 
 — he sought to catch some crumb of praise by fawn- 
 ingly asking of the vilest of men, Trajan est-il content t 
 Make what allowance we will for difference of time 
 and circumstance, such an attitude to such a man, 
 whether in Seneca towards Nero, or Voltaire towards 
 Lewis XV., is a baseness that we ought never to 
 pardon and never to extenuate. Whether or no 
 there be in the human breast that natural religion of 
 goodness and virtue which was the sheet-anchor of 
 Voltaire's faith, there is at least a something in the 
 
rv. BERLIN. 161 
 
 hearts of good men which sets a fast gulf between 
 them and those who are to the very depths of their 
 souls irredeemably saturated with corruption. 
 
 We may permit ourselves to hope that it was the 
 consciousness of the humiliation of such relations as 
 these, rather than the fact that they did not answer 
 their own paltry purpose, that made Voltaire resolve 
 a second time to shake the dust of his own country 
 from off his feet. In July 1750 he reached Potsdam, 
 and was installed with sumptuous honour in the court 
 of Frederick the Great, twenty -four years since he 
 had installed himself with Mr. Falkener, the English 
 merchant at Wandsworth Diderot was busy with 
 the first volume of the Encyclopaedia, and Rousseau 
 had just abandoned his second child in the hospital 
 for foundlings. If the visit to London did everything 
 for Voltaire, the visit to Berlin did nothing. There 
 was no Prussia, as there was an England. To travel 
 from the dominion of George II. to the dominion of 
 his famous nephew, was to go from the full light of 
 the eighteenth century back to the dimness of the 
 fifteenth An academy of sciences, by the influence 
 of Sophie -Charlotte, and under the guidance of 
 Leibnitz, had been founded at Berlin at the beginning 
 of the eighteenth century ; but Frederick William 
 had an angry contempt for every kind of activity ex- 
 cept drill and the preaching of orthodox theology, and 
 during his reign the academy languished in obscurity. 1 
 
 1 See the late C. Bartholmess's Histoire Fhilosophique de 
 [ 'Acaddmie de Prusse, bk. ii. 
 
 M 
 
162 VOLTAIRE. CHAP 
 
 The accession of Frederick IL was the signal for 
 its reconstitution, and the revival of its activity 
 under the direction of Maupertuis. To the sciences 
 of experiment and observation, which had been its 
 original objects, was added a department of specula- 
 tive philosophy. The court was materialist, sceptical, 
 Voltairean, all at the same time ; but the academy as 
 a body was theologically orthodox, and it was wholly 
 and purely metaphysical in its philosophy. We 
 may partly understand the distance at which Berlin 
 was then behind Paris, when we read D'Alembert's 
 just remonstrances with Frederick against giving as 
 subjects for prize-essays such metaphysical problems 
 as ' The search for a primary and permanent force, at 
 once substance and cause.' 1 
 
 Whatever activity existed outside of the court and 
 the academy was divided between the dialectic of 
 Protestant scholasticism, and Wolf's exposition and 
 development of Leibnitz. In literature proper there 
 arose with the accession of Frederick a small group 
 of essentially secondary critics, of whom Sulzer was 
 the best, without the vivid and radiant force of either 
 Voltaire or Diderot, and without the deep inspiration 
 and invention of those who were to follow them, and 
 to place Germany finally on a level with England and 
 France, Lessing, the founder of the modern German 
 literature, was at this time a youth of twenty-two, 
 and by a striking turn of chance was employed by 
 Voltaire in putting into German his pleadings in the 
 1 Histovre Philosophique de VAcadimie de Prusse, bt i. 230. 
 
IT. BERLIN. 163 
 
 infamous Hirschel case. It was not then worth while 
 for a stranger to learn the language in which Lessing 
 had not yet written, and Voltaire, who was a master 
 of English and Italian, never knew more German 
 than was needed to curse a postilion. 1 Leibnitz 
 wrote everything of importance in Latin or French, 
 the Berlin academy conducted its transactions first in 
 Latin, next and for many years to come in French, 
 and one of its earliest presidents, a man of special 
 competence, 2 pronounced German to be a noble but 
 frightfully barbarised tongue. The famousWolf had 
 done his best to make the tongue of his country literate, 
 but even his influence was unequal to the task 
 
 Society was in its foundations not removed from 
 the mediaeval. The soldiers with whom Frederick 
 won Zorndorf and Leuthen, like the Eussians and 
 Austrians whom he defeated on those bloody days, 
 were not more nor less than serfs. Instead of philo- 
 sophers like Newton and Locke, he had to find the 
 pride and safety of his country in swift rushing 
 troopers like Winterfield and Ziethen. A daring 
 cavalry-charge in season was for the moment more to 
 Prussia than any theory why it is that an apple falls, 
 and a new method of drill much more urgent than a 
 new origin for ideas. She was concerned not with 
 the speculative problem of the causes why the earth 
 keeps its place in the planetary system, but with the 
 practical problem how Prussia was to make her place 
 in the system of Europe. Prussia was then far more 
 1 Corr. 1750. (Euvres, lxiv. p. 447. 2 Jablonski. 
 
164 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 behind France in all thought and all arts, save 1 the 
 soldier's, than England was in front of France. 
 
 Voltaire had nothing to learn at Berlin, and may 
 we not add, as the king was a rooted Voltairean long 
 before this, he had nothing to teach there? The 
 sternest barrack in Europe was not a field in which 
 the apostle of free and refined intelligence could sow 
 seed with good hope of harvest. Voltaire at this 
 time, we have to recollect, was in the public mind 
 only a poet, and perhaps was regarded, if not altogether 
 by Frederick, certainly by those who surrounded him, 
 as much in the same order of being with Frederick's 
 flute, fitted by miracle with a greater number of stops. 
 ' I don't give you any news of literature,' D'Alembert 
 wrote from Potsdam in 1763, ' for I don't know any, 
 and you know how barren literature is in this country, 
 where no one except the king concerns himself with 
 it.' 1 There is no particular disgrace to Berlin or its 
 king in this. Their task was very definite, and it 
 was only a pleasant error of Frederick's rather fantastic 
 youth to suppose that this task lay in the direction 
 of polite letters. The singer of the Henriade was 
 naturally of different quality and turn of mind from 
 a hero who had at least as hard an enterprise in his 
 hand as that of Henry iv. Voltaire and Frederick 
 were the two leaders of the two chief movements then 
 going on, in the great work of the transformation of 
 the old Europe into the new. But the movements 
 were in different matter, demanded vastly different 
 1 QSv/ores, lxxv. p. 224. 
 
IV. BERLIN. 165 
 
 methods, and, as is so often the case, the scope of 
 each was hardly visible to the pursuer of the other. 
 Voltaire's work was to quicken the activity and pro- 
 claim the freedom of human intelligence, and to 
 destroy the supremacy of an old spiritual order. 
 Frederick's work was to shake down the old political 
 order. The sum of their efforts was the definite 
 commencement of that revolution in the thought and 
 the political conformation of the West, of which the 
 momentous local revolution in France must, if we 
 take a sufficiently wide survey before and after, be 
 counted a secondary phase. The conditions of the 
 order which was established after the confusion of 
 the fall of the Roman power before the inroads of the 
 barbarians, and which constituted the Europe of the 
 early and middle ages, are now tolerably well under- 
 stood, and the historic continuity or identity of that 
 order is typified in two institutions, which by the 
 middle of the eighteenth century had reached very 
 different stages of decay, and possessed very different 
 powers of resisting attack. One was the German 
 Empire, and the other was the Holy Catholic Church 
 Frederick dealt a definite blow to the first, and 
 Voltaire did the same to the second. 
 
 Those who read history and biography with a 
 sturdy and childish pre-conception that the critical 
 achievements in the long course of the world's progress 
 must of necessity have fallen to the lot of the salt of 
 the earth, will find it hard to associate the beginning 
 of the great overt side of modern movement with 
 
166 VOLTAIKE. OHAP. 
 
 the two men who versified and wrangled together 
 for some two and a half years in the middle of the 
 eighteenth century at Berlin. It is hard to think of the 
 old state, with all its memories of simple enthusiasm 
 and wild valour and rude aspiration after some better 
 order, finally disappearing into the chaos for which it 
 was more than ripe, under the impulse of an arch 
 cynic. And it is hard, too, to think that the civilising 
 religion which was founded by a Jew, and first seized 
 by Jews, noblest and holiest of their race, got its first 
 and severest blow from one who was not above using 
 a Jew to cheat Christians out of their money. But 
 the fact remains of the vast work which this amazing 
 pair had to do, and did. 
 
 The character of the founder of the greatness of 
 Prussia, if indeed we may call founder one rather 
 than another member of that active, clear, and far- 
 sighted line, can have no attraction for those who 
 require as an indispensable condition of fealty that 
 their hero shall have either purity, or sensibility, or 
 generosity, or high honour, or manly respect for 
 human nature. Frederick's rapidity and firmness of 
 will, his administrative capacity, his military talent, 
 were marvellous and admirable enough ; but on the 
 moral side of character, in his relations to men and 
 women, in his feeling for the unseen, in his ideas of 
 truth and beauty, he belonged to a type which is not 
 altogether uncommon. In his youth he had much of 
 a sort of shallow sensibility, which more sympathetic 
 
IV. BERLIN. 167 
 
 usage might possibly have established and to some 
 small extent even deepened, but which the curiously 
 rough treatment that his pacific tastes and frivolous 
 predilections provoked his father to inflict, turned in 
 time into the most bitter and profound kind of cyni- 
 cism that the world knows. No cynic is so hard and 
 insensible as the man who has once had sensibility, 
 perhaps because the consciousness that he was in 
 earlier days open to more generous impressions per- 
 suades' him that the fault of any change in his own 
 view of things must needs he in the world's villainy, 
 which he has now happily for himself had time to 
 find out. Sensibility of a true sort, springing from 
 natural fountains of simple and unselfish feeling, can 
 neither be corrupted nor dried up. But at its best, 
 Frederick's sensibility was of the literary and aesthetic 
 kind, rather than the humane and social. It concerned 
 taste and expression, and had little root in the recog- 
 nition as at first-hand of those facts of experience, of 
 beauty and tenderness and cruelty and endurance, 
 which are the natural objects that permanently 
 quicken a sensitive nature. In a word, Frederick's 
 was the conventional sensibility of the French litera- 
 ture of the time; a harmless thing enough in the 
 poor souls that only poured themselves out in bad 
 romance and worse verse, but terrible when it helped 
 to fill with contempt for mankind an absolute monarch, 
 with the most perfect military machine in Europe at 
 his command. Frederick is constantly spoken of as a 
 man typical of his century. In truth he was through- 
 
168 VOLTAIEE. CHAP, 
 
 out his life in ostentatious opposition to his century 
 on its most remarkable side. There has never been 
 any epoch whose foremost men had such faith and 
 hope in the virtues of humanity. There has never 
 been any prominent man who despised humanity so 
 bitterly and unaffectedly as Frederick despised it. 
 
 We know what to think of a man who writes a 
 touching and pathetic letter condoling with a friend 
 on the loss of his wife, and on the same day makes 
 an epigram on the dead woman 1 ; who never found 
 so much pleasure in a friendly act as when he could 
 make it the means of hurting the recipient; whose 
 practical pleasantries were always spiteful and sneering 
 and cruel. As we read of his tricks on D'Argens or 
 Pollnitz, we feel how right Voltaire was in borrowing 
 a nickname for him from a mischievous brute whom 
 he kept in his garden. He presented D'Argens with 
 a house ; when D'Argens went to take possession he 
 found the walls adorned with pictures of all the most 
 indecent and humiliating episodes of his own life. 
 This was a type of Frederick's delicacy towards some 
 of those whom he honoured with his friendship. It 
 is true that, except Voltaire and Maupertuis, most of 
 the French philosophers whom Frederick seduced 
 into coming to live at Berlin were not too good for 
 the corporal's horse -play of which they were the 
 victims. But then we know, further, what to think 
 of a man whose self-respect fails to proscribe gross 
 and unworthy companions. He is either a lover of 
 
 1 Corr. 1750. (Euvres, briv. p. 443. 
 
"• BERLIN. 169 
 
 parasites, which Frederick certainly was not, or else 
 the most execrable cynic, the cynic who delights in 
 any folly or depravity that assures him how right he 
 is in despising ' that damned race.' 
 
 Frederick need not have summoned the least 
 worthy French freethinkers, men like D'Argens and 
 La Mettrie and De Prades, in their own way as little 
 attractive in life and in doctrine as any monk or 
 Geneva preacher, to warrant him in thinking meanly 
 of mankind. If any one wants to know what manner 
 of spirit this great temporal deliverer of Europe was 
 of, he may find what he seeks in the single episode 
 of the negotiations at Klein-Schnellendorf in 1741. 
 There, although he had made and was still bound by 
 a solemn treaty of alliance with France, he entered 
 into secret engagements with the Hungarian Queen, 
 to be veiled by adroitly pretended hostilities. Even 
 if, as an illustrious apologist of the Prussian King is 
 reduced to plead, this is in a certain fashion defensible, 
 on the ground that France and Austria were both 
 playing with cogged dice, and therefore the other 
 dicer of the party was in self-defence driven to show 
 himself their superior in these excellent artifices, there 
 still seems a gratuitous infamy in hinting to the 
 Austrian general, as Frederick did, how he might 
 assault with advantage the French enemy, Frederick's 
 own ally at the moment. 1 This was the author of 
 the plea for political morality, called the Anti- 
 Machiavel, whose publication Voltaire had superin- 
 1 Carlyle'8 History of Frederick, bk. xiii. ch. 5. 
 
170 VOLTAIRE. OHAP. 
 
 tended the year before, and, for that matter, had 
 done his best to prevent. Still, as Frederick so 
 graciously said of his new guest and old friend : ' He 
 has all the tricks of a monkey ; but I shall make no 
 sign, for I need him in my study of French style. 
 One may learn good things from a scoundrel : I want 
 to know his French; what is his morality to me?' 
 And so a royal statesman may have the manners of 
 the coarsest corporal, and the morality of the grossest 
 cynic, and still have both the eye to discern, and the 
 hand to control, the forces of a great forward move- 
 ment. 
 
 Frederick had the signal honour of accepting his 
 position, and taking up with an almost perfect forti- 
 tude the burden which it laid upon him. ' We are 
 not masters of our own lot,' he wrote to Voltaire, 
 immediately after his accession to the throne ; ' the 
 whirlwind of circumstances carries us away, and we 
 must suffer ourselves to be carried away.' 1 And 
 what he said in this hour of exaltation he did not 
 deny nearly twenty years later, when his fortunes 
 seemed absolutely desperate. ' If I had been born a 
 private person,' he wrote to him in 1759, 'I would 
 give up everything for love of peace ; but a man is 
 bound to take on the spirit of his position.' 2 'Philo- 
 sophy teaches us to do our duty, to serve our country 
 faithfully at the price of our blood and our ease, to 
 sacrifice for it our whole existence.' 3 Men are also 
 
 1 (Euvres de Voltaire, lzxiii. p. 456. 
 * lb. p. 813. » lb. p. 807. 
 
rv. BERLIN. 171 
 
 called upon by their country to abstain from sacri- 
 ficing their existence, and if Frederick's sense of duty 
 to his subjects had been as perfect as it was excep- 
 tionally near being so, he would not have carried a 
 phial of poison round his neck. 1 Still on the whole 
 he devoted himself to his career with a temper that 
 was as entirely calculated for the overthrow of a 
 tottering system, as Voltaire's own. It is difficult to 
 tell whether Frederick's steady attention to letters 
 and men of letters, and his praiseworthy endeavours 
 to make Berlin a true academic centre, were due to 
 a real and disinterested love of knowledge, and a 
 sense of its worth to the spirit of man, or still more 
 to weak literary vanity, and a futile idea of universal 
 fame so far as his own productions went, and a purely 
 utilitarian purpose so far as his patronage of the 
 national academy was concerned. One thing is cer- 
 tain, that the philosophy which he learnt from French 
 masters, which Voltaire brought in his proper person 
 to Berlin, and to which Frederick to the end of his 
 days was always adding illustrative commentaries, 
 never made any impression on Germany. The teach- 
 ing of Leibnitz and Wolf stood like a fortified wall 
 in the face of the French invasion, and whatever 
 effective share French speculation had upon Germany, 
 was through the influence of Descartes upon Leibnitz. 
 The dissolution of the outer framework of the 
 European state-system, for which Frederick's seizure 
 
 1 For Voltaire's admirably expressed remonstrance, see Corr, 
 Oct. 1757. (Euvres, lxxiii. p. 768. 
 
172 VOLTAIKE. chap. 
 
 of Silesia was the first clear signal, followed as it waa 
 by the indispensable suppression of the mischievous 
 independence, so called, of barbaric and feudal Poland, 
 where bishops and nobles held a people in the most 
 oppressive bondage, can only concern us here slightly, 
 because it was for the time only indirectly connected 
 with the characteristic work of Voltaire's life. But, 
 though indirect, the connection may be seen at our 
 distance of time to have been marked and unmis- 
 takable. The old order and principles of Europe 
 were to receive a new impress, and the decaying 
 system of the middle age to be replaced by a polity 
 of revolution, which should finally change the rela- 
 tions of nations, the types of European government, 
 and the ideas of spiritual controL 
 
 In 1733 the war of the Polish succession between 
 Austria and Russia on the one hand, and France and 
 Spain on the other, had given the first great shock 
 to the house of Austria, which was compelled to re- 
 nounce the pretensions and territory of the Empire 
 in Italy, or nearly all of them, in favour of the Spanish 
 Bourbons, as well as to surrender Lorraine to Stanislas, 
 with reversion to the crown of France. We may notice 
 in passing that it was at Stanislas' court of Luneville 
 that Voltaire and the Marquise du Chatelet passed 
 their last days together. The wars of the Polish 
 succession were remarkable for another circumstance. 
 They were the first occasion of the decisive interference 
 of Eussia in Western affairs, an only less important 
 disturbance of Europe than the first great interference 
 
rv. BERLIN. 173 
 
 of Prussia a few years later. The falling to pieces of 
 • the old Europe was as inevitable as, more than twelve 
 centuries before, had been the dissolution of that yet 
 older Europe whose heart had been not Vienna but 
 Rome. Russia and Prussia were not the only novel 
 elements. There was a third from over the sea, the 
 American colonies of France and England. 
 
 Roman Europe had been a vast imperial state, with 
 slavery for a base. Then, after the feudal organisa- 
 tion had run its course, there was a long and chaotic 
 transition of dynastic and territorial wars, frightfully 
 wasteful of humanity and worse than unfruitful to 
 progress. In vain do historians, intent on vindicating 
 the foregone conclusions of the optimism which a dis- 
 torted notion about final causes demands or engenders 
 in them, try to show these hateful contests as parts 
 of a harmonious scheme of things, in which many 
 diverse forces move in a mysterious way to a common 
 and happy end. As if any good use, for instance, 
 were served by the transfer, for one of the chief 
 results of the war of the Polish succession, of the 
 Italian provinces of the Empire of the Spanish Bour- 
 bons. As if any good or permanent use were served 
 by the wars which ended in the Peace of Utrecht, 
 when victorious England conceded, and with much 
 wisdom conceded, the precise point which she had for 
 so many years been disputing. From the Peace of 
 Westphalia to the beginning of the Seven Years' War. 
 it is not too much to say that there was a century of 
 purely artificial strife on the continent of Europe, of 
 
174 VOLTAIRE. chap. 
 
 wars as factious, as merely personal, as unmeaning, as 
 the civil war of the Fronde was all of these things.- 
 In speaking roundly of this period, we leave out of 
 account the first Silesian War, because the issue be- 
 tween Prussia and Austria was not decisively fought 
 out until the final death-struggle from 1756 to 1763. 
 It was the entry of Frederick the Great upon the 
 scene, that instantly raised international relations into 
 the region of real matter and changed a strife of 
 dynasties, houses, persons, into a vital competition 
 between old forces and principles and new. The aim- 
 less and bloody commotions which had raged over 
 Europe, and ground men's lives to dust in the red 
 mill of battle, came for a time to an end, and their 
 place was taken by a tremendous conflict, on whose 
 issue hung not merely the triumph of a dynasty, but 
 the question of the type to which future civilisation 
 was to conform. 
 
 In the preliminary war which followed immediately 
 upon the death of Charles vi. in 1740, and which had 
 its beginning in Frederick's invasion of Silesia, circum- 
 stances partially marched in the usual tradition, with 
 France and Austria playing opposite sides in an accus- 
 tomed game. Before the opening of the Seven Years' 
 War the cardinal change of policy and alliances had 
 taken place. We are not concerned with the court 
 intrigues that brought the change about, with the 
 intricate manoeuvres of the Jesuits, or the wounded 
 vanity of Bernis, whose verses Frederick laughed at, 
 or the pique of Pompadour, whom Frederick declined 
 
IV. BERLIN. 175 
 
 to count an acquaintance. "When conflicting forces of 
 tidal magnitude are at work, as they were in the 
 middle of the last century, the play of mere personal 
 aims and ambitions is necessarily of secondary import- 
 ance ; because we may always count upon there being 
 at least one great power that clearly discerns its own 
 vital interest, and is sure therefore to press with 
 steady energy in its own special direction: That 
 power was Austria. One force of this kind is enough 
 to secure a universal adjustment of all the others in 
 their natural places. 
 
 The situation was apparently very complex. There 
 were in the middle of the century two great pairs of 
 opposed interests, the interests of France and England 
 on the ocean and in America, and the interests of 
 Austria and Prussia in Central Europe. The contest 
 was in each of the two cases much more than a super- 
 ficial affair of dynasties or division of territory, to 
 meet the requirements of the metaphysical diplomacy 
 of the balance of power. It was a re-opening in far 
 vaster proportions of those profound issues of new 
 religion and old which had only been dammed up, and 
 not permanently settled, by the great Peace of West- 
 phalia in 1648. In vaster proportions, not merely 
 because the new struggle between the Catholic and 
 Protestant powers extended into the new world, but 
 because the forces contained in these two creeds had 
 been widened and developed, and a multitude of 
 indirect consequences, entirely apart from theology 
 and church discipline, depended upon the triumph of 
 
176 VOLTAIRE. chap. 
 
 Great Britain and Prussia The Governments of 
 France and Austria represented the feudal and mili- 
 tary idea, not in the strength of that idea while it 
 was still alive, but in the narrow and oppressive form 
 of its decay. No social growth was possible under its 
 shadow, for one of its essential conditions was discour- 
 agement, active and passive, of commercial industry, 
 the main pathway then open to an advancing people. 
 Again, both France and Austria represented the old 
 type of monarchy, as distinguished alike from the 
 aristocratic oligarchy of England, and the new type 
 of monarchy which Prussia introduced into Europe, 
 frugal, encouraging industry, active in supervision, 
 indefatigable in improving the laws. Let us not 
 omit above all things the splendid religious toleration, 
 of which Prussia set so extraordinarily early an example 
 to Europe. The Protestants whom episcopal tyranny 
 drove from Salzburg found warm hospitality among 
 their northern brethren. While the professors of the 
 reformed faith were denied civil status in France, 
 and subjected to persecution of a mediaeval bloodiness, 
 one Christian was counted exactly as another in 
 Prussia. While England was revelling in the inflic- 
 tion of atrocious penal laws on her Catholic citizens, 
 Prussia extended even to the abhorred Jesuit the 
 shelter which was denied him in Spain and at Rome. 
 The transfer of territory from Austria to Prussia 
 meant the extension of toleration in that territory. 
 Silesia, for instance, no sooner became Prussian, than 
 the University of Breslau, whose advantages had 
 
IV. BERLIN. 177 
 
 hitherto been rigidly confined to Catholics, was at 
 once compulsorily opened to Protestants and Catholics 
 alike. In criticising Frederick's despotism let us recog- 
 nise how much enlightenment, how much of what is 
 truly modern, was to be found in the manner in which 
 this despotic power was exercised, long before the same 
 enlightenedprinciples were accepted in other countries. 
 We cannot understand the issues of the Seven 
 Years' War, nor indeed of the eighteenth century on 
 any of its more important sides, without tolerably 
 distinct ideas about the ages before and behind it, 
 about the sixteenth century and the twentieth; without 
 ideas as to the conditions of the break-up of the 
 Catholic and the feudal organisation, and, next, as to 
 the attitude proper to be assumed, and the methods 
 to be followed, in dealing with the more or less 
 anarchic circumstances in which their break-up and 
 its sequels leave us. There are two ways of regarding 
 these questions. You may say, as Comte says, that 
 the ultimate type of society, perfected on a basis of 
 positive knowledge, will in the essential features of 
 its constitution correspond to the ancient or mediaeval 
 sonstitution which it replaces ; because that gave the 
 fullest possible satisfaction to those elements of human 
 nature which are deepest and permanent, and to those 
 social needs which must always press upon us ; that 
 anything which either seriously retards the dissolution 
 of the old, or draws men aside from the road which 
 leads on to the same organisation transformed, must 
 therefore be an impediment in the way of the new 
 
 N 
 
178 VOLTAIKE. OHAP. 
 
 society, and a peril to civilisation. Hence, they say, 
 the mischievousness of Protestantism, Voltairism, and 
 all the minor manifestations of the critical spirit, 
 because they inspire their followers with a contempt, 
 as mistaken towards the past as it is pernicious to 
 the future, for those fundamental principles of social 
 stability and individual happiness, to which alone we 
 have to look for the establishment of a better order ; 
 because they give to the unguided individual judg- 
 ment the force and authority that can only come with 
 safety from organisation and tradition, that is from a 
 certain definite form of shaping and expressing the 
 common judgment ; and because, moreover, they tend 
 directly and indirectly to detach effort from social 
 aims and the promotion of the common weal, to the 
 attainment of mean and unwholesome individual am- 
 bitions. From this point of view, we should have to 
 regard the acquisition of colonies, for instance, which 
 was one of the chief objects of Lord Chatham's policy, 
 as the mischievous transfer, in the interests of com- 
 mercial cupidity, of an activity, hopefulness, and power, 
 that ought to have been devoted to the solution of the 
 growing social difficulties of Europe ; and that ought to 
 have been bent from a profoundly mean egotism, in the 
 nation and the traders whose interest was the key of 
 the policy, into a generous feeling for the public order. 
 There is, however, another and a very different 
 way of looking at all this. You cannot be sure, it is 
 said, that the method of social advance is to be a 
 return upon the old framework and tho old lines ; to 
 
rv. BERLIN. 179 
 
 be sure of this implies an impatient confidence that 
 social forms have all been exhausted, or else an un- 
 supported assumption that the present transitory 
 form is so full of danger to the stability of civilisation, 
 as to make the acceptance of almost any firm order 
 better than the prolonged endurance of a social state 
 which, on that theory, ought hardly to be accounted 
 much better than the social state of Bedouin Arabs. 
 Is it not far better and safer to refrain from com- 
 mitting ourselves to a given type of social reconstruc- 
 tion, and to work forward patiently upon the only 
 principle that can be received with entire assurance ; 
 namely, that faithful cultivation of the intelligence, 
 and open-minded investigation of all that the intel- 
 ligence may present to us, is the only certain method 
 of not missing the surest and quickest road to the 
 manifold improvements of which the fundamental 
 qualities of human nature, as well as the relations of 
 man in society, are susceptible? There is no good 
 ground for supposing that this steadfast regard to 
 the fruitfulness and variety of the individual intel- 
 ligence tends specially to lead to the concentration 
 of energy upon individual aims. For what lesson 
 does free intelligence teach us more constantly or more 
 impressively than that man standing alone is impotent, 
 that every unsocial act or sentiment tends to over- 
 throw that collectivity of effort to which we owe all, 
 and, most important of all, that this collectivity is 
 most effectively secured by- the just culture of the 
 impulses and affections? No degree nor kind of 
 
180 VOLTAIRE. ohjLP. 
 
 organisation could lead us further than this, and 
 ought it not to be the prime object and chief hope of 
 those who think about society, that this truth shall 
 stand rooted in every one's own reason ] If it does 
 not so stand, you have no security for your spiritual 
 organisation, and if it does, then you have no necessity. 
 It is to the spread of this conviction, by the ever- 
 pressing consciousness of urgent social circumstances, 
 that we must look to suffuse industrial and egotistic 
 energy with a truly moral and social santiment. 
 
 This is the point of view from which we may justly 
 regard the violent change that was the result of the 
 Seven Years' War, as a truly progressive step. We 
 cannot be as reasonably sure that the' old conditions 
 of men's relations in society are in whatever new shape 
 destined to return, as we are sure that it was a good 
 thing to prevent a feudal and Jesuitical government 
 like Austria from retaining a purely obstructive power 
 in Europe, and a Jesuitical government like France 
 from establishing the same obstructive kind of power 
 in America. The advantages of the final acquisition of 
 America by Protestantism, and the decisive consolida- 
 tion of Prussia, were not without alloy. History 
 does not present us with these clean balances. It is 
 not at all difficult to see the injurious elements in 
 this victory of the northern powers, and nobody 
 would be less willing than the present writer to accept 
 either the Prussian polity of Frederick, or the com- 
 mercial polity of England and her western colonies, 
 as offering final types of wholesome social states. 
 
IV. BERLIN. 181 
 
 But the alternative was the triumph of a far worse 
 polity than either, the polity of the Society of Jesus. 
 Even those who claim our respect for the Jesuits 
 as having in the beginning of their course served the 
 very useful purpose of honestly administering that 
 spiritual power which had fallen from the hands of 
 the Popes, who had mischievously entered the ranks 
 and followed the methods of temporal princes, do not 
 deny that within a couple of generations they became 
 a dangerous obstacle to the continuity of European 
 progress. Indeed, it is clear that they grew into the 
 very worst element that has ever appeared in the 
 whole course of European history, because their in- 
 fluence rested on a systematic compromise with moral 
 corruption. They had barely seized the spiritual 
 power in the Catholic countries when it was perceived 
 that as an engine of moral control their supposed 
 power was no power at all ; and that the only con- 
 dition on which they could retain the honour and the 
 political authority which were needful to them was 
 that they should connive at moral depravity. They 
 had the education of the country in their hands, and 
 from the confessor's closet they pulled the wires which 
 moved courts. There was no counter-force, for the 
 mass' of the people was dumb, ignorant, and fettered. 
 Say what we will of the need for a spiritual power, 
 the influence of the Jesuits by the middle of the 
 eighteenth century was cutting off the very root of 
 civilisation. This was the veritably Infamous. And 
 this was the influence which the alliance of England and 
 
182 VOLTAIRE. chap 
 
 Prussia, a thing accidental enough to all appearance, 
 successfully and decisively checked, because the triumph 
 of the two northern powers was naturally the means of 
 . discrediting the Jesuit intrigues in the court of Versailles 
 and elsewhere, and stripping them of those associations 
 of political and material success, which had hitherto 
 stood to them in the stead of true spiritual credit. 
 
 The peace of 1763 had important territorial con- 
 sequences. By the treaty of Paris between France, 
 England, and Spain, Great Britain was assured of her 
 possessions on the other side of the Atlantic. By 
 the treaty of Hubertsburg between Austria, Prussia, 
 and Saxony, Prussia was assured of her position as an 
 independent power in Europe. These things were 
 much. But the decisive repulse of the great Jesuit 
 organisation was yet more. It was the most important 
 side of the same facts. The immediate occasions of 
 this repulse varied in different countries, and had their 
 origin in different sets of superficial circumstance, but 
 the debility of the courts of Austria and France was 
 the only condition on which such occasions could be 
 seized. The very next year, after the treaties of 
 Paris and Hubertsburg, the Society of Jesus was 
 suppressed in France, and its property confiscated. 
 Three years later it was expelled from Spain. Within 
 ten years from the peace of 1763 it was abolished by 
 the virtuous Clement xrv. In Canada, where the 
 order had been extremely powerful, 1 their authority 
 vanished, and with it the probability of establishing 
 1 Martin's Bist. de France, xv. p. 468. 
 
rv. BERLIN. 183 
 
 in the northern half of the new world those ideas of 
 political absolutism and theological casuistry which 
 were undoing the old. Whatever the accidents which 
 hurried the catastrophe, there were two general causes 
 which really produced it, the revolution in ideas, and 
 the revolution in the seat of material power. If this 
 be a true description of the crisis, we can see suffi- 
 ciently plainly to what an extent Voltaire and 
 Frederick, while they appeared to themselves to be 
 fellow-workers only in the culture of the muses, were 
 in fact unconsciously co-operating in a far mightier 
 task. "When the war was drawing to an end, and 
 Frederick was likely to escape from the calamities 
 which had so nearly overwhelmed him and his king- 
 dom in irretrievable ruin, we find Voltaire writing to 
 D'Alembert thus : ' As for Luc ' (the nickname bor- 
 rowed for the king of Prussia from an ape with a 
 trick of biting), ' though I ought to be full of resent- 
 ment against him, yet I confess to you that in my 
 quality of thinking creature and Frenchman, I am 
 heartily content that a certain most devout house has 
 not swallowed Germany up, and that the Jesuits 
 don't confess at Berlin. Superstition is monstrously 
 powerful towards the Danube.' To which his corre- 
 spondent replied that he quite agreed that the triumph 
 of Frederick was a blessing for France and for philo- 
 sophy. 'These Austrians are insolent capucins, 
 whom I would fain see annihilated with the supersti- 
 tion they protect.' J Here was precisely the issue. 
 1 (Euvres, lxxv. p. 207 and p. 210. 
 
184 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 It would be a great mistake to suppose that 
 Frederick consciously and formally recognised the 
 ultimate ends of his policy. Such deliberate marking 
 out of the final destination of their work, imputed to 
 rulers, churchmen, poets, is mostly a figment invented 
 by philosophers. Frederick thought nothing at all 
 about the conformation of the European societies in 
 the twentieth century. It was enough for him to 
 make a strong and independent Prussia, without any 
 far-reaching vision, or indeed without any vision at 
 all, of the effect which a strong and independent 
 Prussia would finally have upon the readjustment of 
 ideas and social forces in western civilisation. We 
 are led to a false notion of history, and of all the 
 conditions of political action and the development of 
 nations, by attributing to statesmen deep and far- 
 reaching sight of consequences, which only completed 
 knowledge and some ingenuity enable those who live 
 after to fit into a harmonious scheme. 'Fate, for 
 whose wisdom I entertain all imaginable reverence, 
 often finds in chance, by which it works, an instru- 
 ment not over manageable.' 1 And the great ruler, 
 knowing this, is content to abstain from playing fate's 
 part, feeling his way slowly to the next step. Hia 
 compass is only true for a very short distance, and 
 his chart has marks for no long course. To make 
 Prussia strong was the aim of Frederick's life. 
 Hence, although the real destiny of his policy was to 
 destroy the house of Austria, he did not scruple in 
 1 Goethe. 
 
IV. BEHL1N. 185 
 
 1741 to offer to assist Maria Theresa with his best 
 help against all the other invaders of the famous 
 Pragmatic Sanction, which they had solemnly sworn 
 to uphold. Afterwards, and before the outbreak of 
 the Seven Years' War, he sought the alliance of France, 
 but happily for Europe, not until after Kaunitz and 
 Maria Theresa had already secured that blind and 
 misguided power, thus driving him into an alliance 
 with Great Britain. And so chance did the work of 
 fate after all. 
 
 It may be said that such a view of the operation 
 of the great forces of the world is destructive of all 
 especial respect and gratitude towards the eminent 
 men, of whom chance and fate have made mere instru- 
 ments. What becomes of hero-worship, if your hero 
 after all only half knew whither he sought to go, and 
 if those achievements which have done such powerful 
 service were not consciously directed towards the ser- 
 viceable end 1 We can only answer that it is not the 
 office of history to purvey heroes, nor always to join 
 appreciation of a set of complex effects with venera- 
 tion for this or that performer. For this veneration, 
 if it is to be an intelligent mood, implies insight into 
 the inmost privacy of aim and motive, and this insight, 
 in the case of those whom circumstance raises on a 
 towering pedestal, we can hardly ever count with 
 assurance on finding faithful and authentic. History 
 is perhaps not less interesting for not being distorted 
 into a new hagiographa. 
 
 It is equally unwarranted to put into Frederick's 
 
186 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 mind conscious ideas as to the type of monarchy 
 proper for Europe in the epoch of passage from old 
 systems. Once more, he thought of his own country, 
 and his own country only, in all those wise measures 
 of internal government which have been so unjustly 
 and so childishly thrust by historians into the second 
 place behind his exploits as a soldier, as if the civil 
 activity of the period between 1763, when peace was 
 made, and 1786, when he died, was not fully as re- 
 markable in itself, and fully as momentous in its 
 results, as the military activity of the period between 
 1763 and 1740. There is in men of the highest 
 governing capacity, like Richelieu, or Cromwell, or 
 Frederick, an instinct for good order and regular 
 administration. They insist upon it for its own sake, 
 independently of its effects either on the happiness of 
 subjects, or on the fundamental policy and march of 
 things. If Frederick had acceded to the supreme 
 power in a highly civilised country, he would have 
 been equally bent on imposing his own will and forc- 
 ing the administration into the exact grooves pre- 
 scribed by himself, and the result would have been 
 as pestilent there as it was beneficial in a backward 
 and semi-barbarous country such as Prussia was in 
 his time. This good internal ordering was no more 
 than a part of the same simple design which shaped 
 his external .policy. He had to make a nation, and 
 its material independence in the face of Austria and 
 Russia was not more a part of this process than giving 
 it the great elements of internal well-being, equal 
 
nr. Berlin. 187 
 
 laws, just administration, financial thrift, and stimulus 
 and encouragement to industry. Such an achieve- 
 ment as the restoration of the germs of order and 
 prosperity, which Frederick so rapidly hrought about 
 after the appalling ruin that seven years of disastrous 
 war had effected, is unmatched in the history of human 
 government. Well might he pride himself, as we 
 know that he did, on replacing this social chaos by 
 order, more than on Eossbach or Leuthen. Above 
 all, he never forgot the truth which every statesman 
 ought to have burning in letters of fire before his 
 eyes ; I am the procurator of the poor. 
 
 It commits us to no general theory of government 
 to recognise the merits of Frederick's internal admin- 
 istration. They constitute a special case, to'be judged 
 by its own conditions. We may safely go so far as 
 to say that in whatever degree the social state of a 
 nation calls for active government, whether, as the 
 people of the American Union boast of themselves, 
 they need no government, or whether, as is the case 
 in Great Britain, the wretched lives of the poor be- 
 neath the combined cupidity and heartless want of 
 thought of the rich cry aloud for justice, in this 
 degree it is good that the statesmen called to govern 
 should be in that capacity of Frederick's type, con- 
 ceding all freedom to thought, but energetic in the 
 use of power as trustees for the whole nation against 
 special classes. To meet completely the demands of 
 their office they should have, what Frederick neither 
 had nor could under the circumstances of his advent 
 
188 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 and the time be expected to have, a firm conviction 
 that the highest ultimate end of all kingship is to 
 enable nations to dispense with that organ of national 
 life, and to fit them for a spontaneous initiative and 
 free control in the conduct of their own affairs. 
 
 Let us be careful to remember that, if Frederick 
 was a great ruler in the positive sense, he sprang 
 from the critical school. The traditions of his house 
 were strictly Protestant, his tutors were Calvinistic 
 refugees, and his personal predilections had from his 
 earliest youth been enthusiastically Voltairean. May 
 we not count it one of the claims of the critical philo- 
 sophy to a place among the leading progressive influ- 
 ences in western history, that it tended to produce 
 statesmen "of this positive type 1 I do not know of 
 any period of corresponding length that can produce 
 such a group of active, wise, and truly positive states- 
 men as existed in Europe between 1760 and 1780. 
 Besides Frederick, we have Turgot in France, Pom- 
 bal in Portugal, Charles in. and D'Aranda in Spain. 
 If Charles in. was faithful to the old creed, the three 
 greatest, at any rate, of these extraordinary men drew 
 inspiration from the centre of the critical school 
 D'Aranda had mixed much with the Voltairean circle 
 while in Paris. Pombal, in spite of the taint of 
 some cruelty, in so many respects one of the most 
 powerful and resolute ministers that has ever held 
 office in Europe, had been for some time in England, 
 and was a warm admirer of Voltaire, whose works 
 he caused to be translated into Portuguese. The 
 
IV- BERLIN. 189 
 
 famous school of Italian publicists, whose speculations 
 bore such admirable fruit in the humane legislation 
 of Leopold of Tuscany, and had so large a share in 
 that code with which the name of the ever hateful 
 Bonaparte has become fraudulently associated, these 
 excellent thinkers found their oracles in that critical 
 philosophy, of which we are so unjustly bidden to 
 think only in connection with shallow and reckless 
 destruction. The application of reason to the ameli- 
 oration of the social condition^ was the device of the 
 great rulers of this time, and the father and inspirer 
 of this device was that Voltaire who is habitually 
 presented to us a mere mocker. s" 
 
 Psychologues like Sulzer might declare that the 
 scourge of right thinking was to be found in ' those 
 philosophers who, more used to sallies of wit than to 
 deep reasoning, assume that they have overthrown 
 by a single smart trope truths only to be known by 
 combining a multitude of observations, so delicate 
 and difficult that we cannot grasp them without the 
 aid of the firmest attention.' 1 How many of these 
 so-called truths were anything but sophistical proposi- 
 tions, the products of intellectual ingenuity run riot, 
 without the smallest bearing either on positive science - 
 or social well-being 1 And is it not rather an abuse 
 of men's willingness to take the profundity of meta- 
 physics on trust, that any one who has formulated a 
 metaphysical proposition, with due technicality of 
 sounding words, has a claim to arrest the serious 
 1 Bartholmess, ii. 111. 
 
190 VOLTAIRE. OHAP. 
 
 attention of every busy passer-by, and to throw on 
 this innocent and laudable person the burden of dis 
 proof 1 If Duns Scotus or St. Thomas Aquinas had 
 risen from the dead, Voltaire would very properly 
 have declined a bout of school dialectic with those 
 famous shades, because he was living in the century 
 of the Encyclopaedia, when the exploration of things 
 and the improvement of institutions had taken the 
 place of subtle manipulation of unverified words, im- 
 portant as that process had once been in the intel- 
 lectual development of Europe. He was equally wise 
 in declining to throw more than a trope or sprightly 
 sally in the direction of people who dealt only in the 
 multiplication of metaphysical abracadabras. It was 
 his task to fix the eyes of men upon action. In the 
 sight of Lutheran or Wolfian conjurors with words 
 this was egregious shallowness. Strangely enough 
 they thought it the climax of philosophic profundity 
 to reconcile their natural spiritualism with the super- 
 natural spiritualism of the scriptures, and rational- 
 istic theism with the historic theism of revelation. J 
 Voltaire repudiated the supernatural and pseudo- 
 historic half of this hybrid combination, and in doing 
 so he showed a far prof ounder logic than the cloudiest 
 and most sonorous of his theologico -metaphysical 
 critics. We may call him negative and destructive 
 on this account if we please, yet surely the abnegation 
 of barren and inconsistent speculation, and of fruitless 
 effort to seize a vain abstract universality, was a very 
 1 See Bartholmess, i. 168. 
 
IT. BERLIN. 191 
 
 meritorious trait in a man who did hot stop here, but 
 by every means, by poetry, by history, by biography, 
 and by the manifestation of all his vivid personal 
 interests, drew every one who was within the sphere 
 of his attraction to the consideration of social action 
 as the first fact for the firm attention of the leaders 
 of mankind. 
 
 It may be said that even from this side Voltaire 
 was destructive only, and undoubtedly, owing to the 
 circumstances of the time, the destructive side seemed 
 to predominate in his social influence. To say this, 
 however, is not to bring an end to the matter. The 
 truth is that no negative thinking can stop at the 
 negative point. To teach men to hate superstition 
 and injustice is a sure, if an indirect, way of teaching 
 them to seek after their opposites. Voltaire could 
 only shake obscurantist institutions by appealing to 
 man's love of light, and the love of light, once stirred, 
 leads far. He appealed to reason, and it was reason 
 in Frederick and the others, which had quickened and 
 strengthened the love of good order, that produced 
 the striking reforming spirit which moved through 
 the eighteenth century, until the reaction against 
 French revolutionary violence arrested its progress. 
 It is one of the most difficult questions in all history 
 to determine whether the change from the old order 
 to the new has been damaged or advanced by that 
 most memorable arrest of the work of social renova- 
 tion in the hands of sovereign and traditional govern- 
 ments, administered by wise statesmen with due re- 
 
192 VOLTAIEK OHAP. 
 
 gard to traditional spirit ; and how far the passionate 
 efforts of those classes, whose only tradition is a tra- 
 dition of squalor and despair, have driven the pos- 
 sessors of superior material power back into obstructive 
 trepidation. The question is more than difficult, it is 
 in our generation insoluble, because the movement is 
 wholly incomplete. But whether the French outbreak 
 from 1789 to 1794 may prove to have been the 
 starting-point of a new society, or only to have been 
 a detrimental interruption and parent of interruptions 
 to stable movement forwards, we have in either case 
 to admit that there was a most vigorous attempt made 
 in all the chief countries in Europe, between the 
 middle of the century and the fall of the French 
 monarchy, to improve government and to perfect 
 administration; that Frederick of Prussia was the 
 author of the most permanently successful of these 
 endeavours ; and that Frederick learnt to break loose 
 from dark usage, to prefer equity of administration, 
 to abandon religious superstition, and to insist on 
 tolerance, from the only effective moral and intel- 
 lectual masters he ever had, first the French Calvinists, 
 and then the French critical school, with Voltaire for 
 chief. It is true, as we shall presently see, that an 
 important change in the spirit of French writers was 
 marked by the Encyclopaedia, which was so much be- 
 sides being critical. But then this famous work only 
 commenced in the year when Voltaire reached Berlin, 
 and Frederick's character had received its final shape 
 long before that time. 
 
rr. BERLIN. 193 
 
 With the exception of Voltaire, D'Alembert was 
 the only really eminent Frenchman whose work ever 
 struck Frederick, and we are even conscious, in com- 
 paring his letters to these two eminent men, of a 
 certain seriousness and deferential respect towards 
 the later friend, which never marked his relations 
 with Voltaire after the early days of youthful en- 
 thusiasm. Frederick's admiration for France, indeed, 
 has been somewhat overstated by French writers, 
 and by those of our own country who have taken 
 their word for granted. 'Your nation,' Frederick 
 once wrote to Voltaire, ' is the most inconsequent in 
 all Europe. It abounds in bright intelligence, but 
 has no consistency in its ideas. This is how it 
 appears through all its history. There is really an 
 indelible character imprinted on it. The only excep- 
 tion in a long succession of reigns is to be found in a 
 few years of Lewis XIV. The reign of Henry IV. 
 was neither tranquil enough nor long enough for us 
 to take that into account. During the administration 
 of Richelieu we observe some consistency of design 
 and some nerve in execution ; but in truth they are 
 uncommonly short epochs of wisdom in so long a 
 chronicle of madnesses. Again, France has been able 
 to produce men like Descartes or Malebranche, but 
 no Leibnitz, no Lockes, no Newtons. On the other 
 hand, for taste, you surpass all other nations, and I 
 will surely range myself under your standards in all 
 that regards delicacy of discernment and the judicious 
 and scrupulous choice between real beauties and those 
 o 
 
194 VOLTAIRE. ohap. 
 
 which are only apparent. That is a great point in 
 polite letters, but it is not everything.' 1 Frederick, 
 however, could never endure the least hint that he 
 was not a perfect Frenchman in the order of polite 
 letters. The article on Prussia in the Encyclopaedia 
 was full of the most flattering eulogies of his work as 
 a soldier and an administrator, and even contained 
 handsome praise for his writings; but Diderot, the 
 author of this part of the article, delicately suggested 
 that a year or two in the Faubourg St. Honore would 
 perhaps have dispersed the few grains of Berlin sand 
 which hindered the perfect purity of note of that 
 admirable flute. Frederick, who had hitherto been 
 an ardent reader of the Encyclopaedia, never opened 
 another volume. 
 
 We can understand Voltaire's character without 
 wading through the slough of mean scandals which 
 sprung up like gross fungi during his stay at Berlin. 
 Who need remember that Frederick spoke of his 
 illustrious guest as an orange of which, when one has 
 squeezed the juice, one throws away the skin? Or 
 how Voltaire retorted by speaking of his illustrious 
 host, whose royal verses he had to correct, as a man 
 sending his dirty linen to him to wash ? or, still worse, 
 as a compound of Julius Caesar and the abb6 Cotin 1 
 Nor need we examine into stories, suspicious products 
 of Berlin malice, how Frederick stopped his guest's 
 supply of sugar and chocolate, and how Voltaire put 
 1 (Euvres de Voltaire, lxxiii. p. 836. 
 
nr. BERLIN. 195 
 
 his host's candle-ends into his pocket. It is enough 
 to know that the king and the poet gradually lost 
 their illusions, and forgot that life was both too short 
 and too valuable to waste in vain efforts of making 
 believe that an illusion is other than it is. Voltaire 
 took a childish delight in his gold key and his star, 
 and in supping as an intimate with a king who had 
 won five battles. His life was at once free and occu- 
 pied, the two conditions of happy existence. He 
 worked diligently at his Siecle de Louis XIV., and 
 diverted himself with operas, comedies, and great en- 
 tertainments among affable queens, charming prin- 
 cesses, and handsome maids of honour. Yet he could 
 not forget the saying, which had been so faithfully 
 carried to him, of the orange-skin. He declared that 
 he was like the man who fell from the top of a high 
 tower, and finding himself softly supported in the 
 air, cried out, Good, if it only lasts. 1 Or he was like a 
 husband striving hard to persuade himself of the 
 fidelity of a suspected wife. He had fits of violent 
 nostalgia. 'I am writing to you by the side of a 
 stove, with drooping head and heavy heart, looking 
 on to the River Spree, because the Spree falls into 
 the Elbe, the Elbe into, the sea, and the sea receives 
 the Seine, and our Paris house is near the River 
 Seine, and I say, Why am I in this palace, in this 
 cabinet looking into this Spree, and not in our own 
 chimney-corner ? . . . How my happiness is poisoned, 
 how short is life ! What wretchedness to seek happi 
 1 Corr. 1751. QSuvres, lxiv. p. 524, 
 
196 VOLTAIRE. chap 
 
 neas far from you ; and what remorse, if one finds it 
 away from you.' 1 This was to Madame Denis, his 
 niece ; but a Christmas in the Berlin barrack made 
 even a plain coquette in Paris attractive and homely. 
 We may imagine with what tender regrets he would 
 look back upon the old days at Cirey. 
 
 Even in respect of the very mischief from which ha 
 had fled, the detraction and caballing of the envious, 
 he was hardly any better off at Berlin than he had 
 been at Paris. D'Argental, one of the wisest of his 
 friends, had forewarned him of this, and that he had 
 fled from enemies whom at any rate he never saw, 
 only to find other enemies with whom he had to live 
 day after day. This was exactly what came to pass. 
 Voltaire often compared the system of life at Berlin 
 and Potsdam to that of a convent, half military, half 
 literary. The vices of conventual life came with its 
 other features, and among them jealousy, envy, and 
 malice. The tale-bearer, that constant parasite of 
 such societies, had exquisite opportunities, and for a 
 susceptible creature like Voltaire, the result "was 
 wholly fatal. The nights and suppers of the gods 
 became, in his own phrase, suppers of Damocles. 
 Alexander the Great was transformed into the tyrant 
 Dionysius. The famous Diatribe of Doctor Akakia, 
 in the autumn of 1752, brought matters to a climax, 
 because its publication was supposed to show marked 
 defiance of the king's wishes. 
 
 Maupertuis had been one of the earliest and most 
 1 Corr. 1751. (Ehtwes, briv. p. 45a 
 
IV. BERLIN. 197 
 
 strenuous Newtonians in France, and had at his own 
 personal risk helped to corroborate the truth of the 
 new system. In 1735 the zeal for experimental 
 , science, which was so remarkable a trait in this 
 century of many-sided intellectual activity, induced 
 the academy of sciences to despatch an expedition to 
 take the actual measure of a degree of meridian 
 below the equator, and the curious and indefatigable 
 De la Condamine, one of the most ardent men of 
 that ardent time, with two other inquirers went to 
 Peru. In 1736 Maupertuis and Clairaut under the 
 same auspices started for the north pole, where, after 
 undergoing the severest hardships, they succeeded in 
 measuring their degree, and verifying by observation 
 Newton's demonstration of the oblate figure of the 
 earth, a verification that was further completed by 
 La Caille's voyage to the Cape of Good Hope in 1750. ] 
 Maupertuis commemorated his share in this excellent 
 work by having a portrait of himself executed, in 
 which the palm of a hand gently flattens the north 
 pole. He was extremely courageous and extremely 
 vain. His costume was eccentric and affected, his 
 temper more jealous and arbitrary than comports with 
 the magnanimity of philosophers, and his manner 
 more gloomily solemn than the conditions of human 
 life can ever justify. With all his absurdities, he 
 was a man of real abilities, and of a solidity of char- 
 acter beyond that of any of his countrymen at 
 Frederick's court. I would rather live with him, 
 1 See Whewell's Hist. Ind. Sci. bk. vii. ch. 4, § 7. 
 
198 VOLTAIRE. 
 
 CHAP, 
 
 Frederick wrote to the princess Wilhelmina, than 
 with Voltaire ; ' his character is surer,' which in 
 itself was saying little. But then, the moment he came 
 into collision with Voltaire, his absurdities became 
 the most important thing about him, because it was 
 precisely these which Voltaire was sure to drag into 
 unsparing prominence. In old days they had been 
 good friends, and a letter still remains, mournfully 
 testifying to the shallowness of men's sight into the 
 roots of their relations with others, for it closes by 
 bidding Maupertuis be sure that Voltaire will love 
 him all the days of his life. 1 The causes of their 
 collision were obvious enough. As Frederick said, 
 Of two Frenchmen in the same court, one must perish. 
 Maupertuis, from the heights of the exact sciences, 
 probably despised Voltaire as a scribbler, while 
 Voltaire, with a heart flowing over with gay vivacity, 
 assuredly counted Maupertuis arbitrary, ridiculously 
 solemn, and something of an impostor. The com- 
 pliances of society, he said of the president of the 
 Berlin academy, are not problems that he is fond of 
 solving. Maupertuis acted to Konig, in the matter 
 of an academic or discoverer's quarrel, in a way that 
 struck Voltaire, and all men since, as tyrannical, 
 unjust, and childish, all in one. He unhappily wrote 
 a book which gave Voltaire such an excuse for 
 punishing the author's injustice to Konig, as even 
 Voltaire's spleen could hardly have hoped for, and 
 the result was the wittiest and most pitiless of all the 
 
 1 CEwores, lxiv. p. 53. 
 
nr. BERLIN. 199 
 
 purely personal satires in the world. The temptation 
 was certainly irresistible. 
 
 Maupertuis, as has been said, was courageous and 
 venturesome, and this venturesomeness being uncor- 
 rected by the severe discipline of a large body of 
 accurate positive knowledge, such as Clairaut and 
 Lagrange possessed, led him into some worse than 
 equivocal speculation. He was in the depths of the 
 metaphysical stage, and developed physical theories 
 out of abstract terms. Of some of these theories the 
 worst that could be said was they were wholly un- 
 proved. He advanced the hypothesis, for instance, 
 that all the animal species sprang from some first 
 creature, prototype of all creatures since. Others of 
 his theories were right in idea, but wrong in form, 
 and without even an attempt at verification. The 
 famous principle of the minimum of action, for 
 example, in spite of the truth at the bottom of it, 
 was valueless and confused, until Lagrange connected 
 it with fundamental dynamic principles, generalised 
 it, and cleared the unsupported metaphysical notions 
 out of it. 1 All this, however, was wise and Newtonic 
 compared with the ideas promulgated in the Philo- 
 sophic Letters, on which the wicked Akakia so swiftly 
 pounced. Here were notions which it needed more 
 audacity to broach, than to face the frosts and snows 
 of Lapland ; strange theories that in a certain state 
 of exaltation of the soul one may foresee the future ; 
 that if the expiration of vital force could only be pre 
 1 See Comte's Phil. Pos. i. 525-529. 
 
200 VOLTATRE. CHAP. 
 
 vented, the body might be kept alive for hundreds of 
 years ; that by careful dissection of the brains of 
 giants, Patagonian and other, we should ascertain 
 something of the composition of the mind ; that a 
 Latin town if it were established, and this was not 
 an original idea, would be an excellent means of 
 teaching the Latin language. Voltaire knew exactly 
 what kind of malicious gravity and feigned respect 
 would surround this amazing performance and its 
 author with inextinguishable laughter, and his thou- 
 sand turns and tropes cut deep into Maupertuis like 
 sharpened swords. 
 
 Voltaire was not by scientific training competent 
 to criticise Maupertuis. This is true ; but then 
 Voltaire had what in such cases dispensed with special 
 competence, a preternatural gift of detecting an 
 impostor, and we must add that here as in every 
 other case his anger was set aflame not by intellectual 
 vapidity, but by what he counted gross wrong. 
 Maupertuis had acted with despotic injustice towards 
 Konig, and Voltaire resolved to punish him. This is 
 perhaps the only side of that world-famous and truly 
 wretched fray which it is worth our while to remember, 
 besides its illustration of the general moral that active 
 interest in public affairs is the only sure safeguard 
 against the inhuman egotism, otherwise so nearly 
 inevitable and in any wise so revolting, of men of 
 letters and men of science. 
 
 Frederick took the side of the president of his 
 academy, and had Doctor Akakia publicly burnt 
 
tv- BERLIN. 201 
 
 within earshot of its author's quarters. 1 Voltaire 
 had long been preparing for the end by depositing 
 his funds in the hands of the Duke of "Wurtemberg, 
 and by other steps, which had come to the king's ears, 
 and had by no means smoothed matters. He sees 
 now that the orange has been squeezed, and that it is 
 his business to think of saving the skin. He drew 
 up for his own instruction, he said, a pocket-dictionary 
 of terms in use with kings : My friend means my 
 slave; my dear friend means that you are more than 
 indifferent to me ; understand by i" will make you happy, 
 I will endure you, as long as I have need of you ; sup 
 with me to-night means I" will make fun of you to-night. 2 
 Voltaire, though he had been, and always was, the 
 most graceful of courtiers, kept to his point, and 
 loudly gave Frederick to understand that in literary 
 disputes he recognised no kings. An act of tyranny 
 had been committed towards Konig, who was his friend, 
 and nothing would induce him to admit either that it 
 was anything else, or that it was other than just to 
 have held up the tyrant to the laughter of Europe. 
 
 Frederick was profoundly irritated, and the terms 
 in which he writes of his French Virgil as an ape who 
 ought to be flogged for his tricks, a man worse than 
 many who have been broken on the wheel, a creature 
 
 1 It may be worth mentioning that there actually existed in 
 the sixteenth century, a French physician, who changed his real 
 name of Sans-Malice into Akakia, and left descendants so called. 
 See M. Jal's Dietionnaire Critique de Biographie et d'Histoire, 
 p. 19 (1869). 
 
 2 Corr. 1752. (Euvres, lxv. p. 138. 
 
202 VOLTAIRE, chap 
 
 who may deserve a statue for his poetry but who cer 
 tainly deserves chains for his conduct, seem to imply 
 a quite special mortification and resentment. He 
 had no doubt a deep and haughty contempt for all 
 these angers of celestial minds. The cabals of men of 
 letters, he wrote to Voltaire, seemed to him the lowest 
 depth of degradation. 1 And he would fain have flung 
 a handful of dust on the furious creatures. After 
 three months of vain effort to achieve the impossible, 
 Voltaire being only moderately compliant, the king 
 in March 1753 gave him leave to depart, though with 
 a sort of nominal understanding for politeness' sake 
 that there was to be a speedy return. 
 
 Voltaire, however, was not a man in whose breast 
 the flame of resentment ever flickered away in polite- 
 ness, until his adversary had humbled himself. Though 
 no one ever so systematically convinced himself each 
 day for thirty years that he was on the very point of 
 death, no one was less careful to measure the things 
 that were worth doing from the point of view of a 
 conventional memento mori. Nobody spoke about 
 dying so much, nor thought about it so little. The 
 first use he made of his liberty was to shoot yet 
 another bolt at Maupertuis from Leipzig, more pierc- 
 ing than any that had gone before. Frederick now 
 in his turn abandoned the forms of politeness, and the 
 renowned episode of Frankfort took place. Voltaire, 
 on reaching Frankfort, was required by the Prussian 
 resident in the free city to surrender his court decora 
 1 Desnoiresterres, 394. 
 
rv. BERLIN. 203 
 
 fcicms, and, more important than these, a certain volume 
 of royal verse containing the Palladium, a poem of 
 indecencies which were probably worse than those of 
 the Pucelle, because an indecent German is usually 
 worse than an indecent Frenchman. The poems, 
 however, were what was far worse than indecent in 
 Frederick's eyes ; they were impolitic, for they con- 
 tained bitter sarcasm on sovereigns whom he might 
 be glad to have, and one of whom he did actually 
 have, on his side in the day of approaching storm. 
 Various delays and unlucky mishaps occurred, and 
 Voltaire underwent a kind of imprisonment for some 
 five weeks (May 31 to July 7, 1753), under extremely 
 mortifying and humiliating circumstances. There 
 v/as on the one part an honest, punctual, methodic, 
 rather dull Prussian subordinate, anxious above all 
 other things in the world, not excepting respect for 
 genius and respect for law, to obey the injunctions 
 of his master from Berlin. On the other part Voltaire, 
 whom we know ; excitable as a demon, burning with 
 fury against enemies who were out of his reach now 
 that he had spent all his ammunition of satire upon 
 them, only half understanding what was said to him 
 in a strange tongue, mad with fear lest Frederick 
 meant to detain him after all. It would need the 
 singer of the battle of the frogs and mice to do justice 
 to this five-weeks' tragi-comedy. A bookseller with 
 whom he had had feuds years before, injudiciously 
 came either to pay his respects, or to demand some 
 trivial arrears of money ; the furious poet and philo- 
 
204 VOLTAIEK. OHAP 
 
 sopher rushed up to his visitor and inflicted a stinging 
 box on the ear, while Collini, his Italian secretary, 
 hastily offered this intrepid consolation to Van Duren, 
 ' Sir, you have received a box on the ear from one of 
 the greatest men in the world.' A clerk came to 
 settle this affair or that, and Voltaire rushed towards 
 him with click of pistol, the friendly Collini again in- 
 terfering to better purpose by striking up the hand 
 that had written Merope and was on the point of 
 despatching a clerk. We need not go into the minute 
 circumstances of the Frankfort outrage. Freytag, the 
 subordinate, clearly overstrained his instructions, and 
 his excess of zeal in detaining and harassing Voltaire 
 can only be laid indirectly to Frederick's charge. But 
 Frederick is responsible, as every principal is, who 
 launches an agent in a lawless and tyrannic course. 
 The German Varnhagen has undoubtedly shown that 
 Voltaire's account, witty and diverting as it is, is not 
 free from many misrepresentations, and some tolerably 
 deliberate lies. French writers have as undoubtedly 
 shown that the detention of a French citizen by a 
 Prussian agent in a free town of the Empire was a 
 distinct and outrageous illegality. 1 "We, who are 
 fortunately not committed by the exigencies of 
 patriotism to close our eyes to either half of the 
 facts, may with facile impartiality admit both halves. 
 Voltaire, though fundamentally a man of exceptional 
 truth, was by no means incapable of an untruth when 
 
 1 Desnoiresterres, Voltaire el Fridiric, cc. 9 and 10. Carlyle's 
 Frederick, t>k. xvi. ch. 12. 
 
IV. BEBLIN. 205 
 
 his imagination was hot, and Frederick was byno means 
 incapable of an outrage upon law, when law stood 
 between him and his purpose. Frederick's subordi- 
 nates had no right to detain Voltaire at all, and they 
 had no right to allow themselves to be provoked by his 
 impatience into the infliction of even small outrages 
 upon him and his obnoxious niece. On the other 
 hand, if Voltaire had been a sort of Benjamin Franklin, 
 if he had possessed a well-regulated mind, a cool and 
 gentle temper, a nice sense of the expedient, then the 
 most grotesque scene of a life in which there was too 
 much of grotesque, would not have been acted as it 
 was, to the supreme delight of those miserable souls 
 who love to contemplate the follies of the wise. 
 
 Any reader who takes the trouble to read the 
 documents affecting this preposterous brawl at Frank- 
 fort between a thoroughly subordinate German and 
 the most insubordinate Frenchman that ever lived, — 
 this adventure, as its victim called it, of Cimbrians 
 and Sicambrians,' — will be rather struck by the ex- 
 treme care with which Frederick impresses on the 
 persons concerned the propriety of having Voltaire's 
 written and signed word for such parts of the trans- 
 action as needed official commemoration. In one 
 , place he expressly insists that a given memorandum 
 should be written by Voltaire's own hand from top to 
 bottom. This precaution, which seems so strange in 
 a king who had won five battles, dealing with the 
 author of a score of tragedies, an epic, and many other 
 fine things, sprang in truth from no desire to cast a 
 
206 VOLTAIRE. ohap. 
 
 wanton slight on Voltaire's honour, but from the 
 painful knowledge that the author of the fine things 
 was not above tampering with papers and denying 
 patent superscriptions. Voltaire's visit had not been 
 of long duration, before the unfortunate lawsuit with 
 Abraham Hirschel occurred. Of this transaction we 
 need only say this much, that Voltaire employed the 
 Jew in some illegal jobbing in Saxon securities ; that 
 he gave him bills on a Paris banker, holding diamonds 
 from the Jew as pledge of honest Christian dealing ; 
 that his suspicions were aroused, that he protested his 
 bills, then agreed to buy the jewels, then quarrelled 
 over the price, and finally plunged into a suit, of which 
 the issues were practically two, whether Hirschel had 
 any rights on one of the Paris bills, and whether the 
 jewels were fairly charged. Voltaire got his bill back, 
 and the jewels .were to be duly valued ; but the pro- 
 ceedings disclosed two facts of considerable seriousness 
 for all who should have dealings with him : first, that 
 he had interpolated matter to his own advantage in a 
 document already signed by his adversary, thus making 
 the Jew to have signed what he had signed not ; and 
 second, that when very hard pushed he would not 
 swerve from a false oath, any more than his great 
 enemy the apostle Peter had done. 1 Frederick had 
 remembered all this, just as every negotiator who had 
 to deal with Frederick remembered that the great 
 
 1 See Desnoiresterres, Voltaire et Frl&iric, pp. 124-153, in- 
 cluding a facsimile of the fraudulently altered agreement. Also 
 Carlyle's Frederick, hk. xvi. ch. 7. 
 
rv. BERLIN. 207 
 
 king was not above such infamies as Klein-Schnellen- 
 dorf, nor such meanness as filching away with his foot 
 a letter that had slipped unseen from an ambassador's 
 pocket. 1 
 
 And so there was an end, if not of correspondence, 
 yet of that friendship, which after all had always 
 belonged rather to the spoken order than to the deep 
 unspeakable. There was now cynical, hoarse-voiced 
 contempt on the one side, and fierce, reverberating, 
 shrill fury on the other. The spectacle and the sound 
 are distressing to those who crave dignity and admis- 
 sion of the serious in the relations of men with one 
 another, as well as some sense of the myriad indefin- 
 able relations which encompass us unawares, giving 
 colour and perspective to our more definable bonds. 
 One would rather that even in their estrangement 
 there had been some grace and firmness and self- 
 control, and that at least the long-cherished illusion 
 had faded away worthily, as when one bids farewell 
 to a friend whom a perverse will carries from us over 
 unknown seas until a far day, and we know not if we 
 shall see his face any more. It jars on us that the 
 moon which has climbed into the night and moved 
 like sound of music over heath and woodland, should 
 finally set in a gray swamp amid the harsh croaking 
 of amphibians. But the intimacy between Frederick 
 and Voltaire had perhaps been always most like the 
 theatre moon. 
 
 We may know what strange admixture of distrust 
 1 Carlyle's Frederick, bk. xiii. ch. 6. 
 
208 VOLTAIEE. CHAP. 
 
 contempt, and tormenting reminiscence, mingled with 
 the admiration of these two men for one another's 
 genius, from the bitterness which occasionally springs 
 up in the midst of their most graceful and amiable 
 letters of a later date. For instance, this is Voltaire 
 to Frederick ; ' You have already done me ill enough ; 
 you put me wrong for ever with the king of France ; 
 you made me lose my offices and pensions; you 
 used me shamefully at Frankfort, me and an innocent 
 woman who was dragged through the mud and thrown 
 into gaol ; and now, while honouring me with letters, 
 you mar the sweetness of this consolation by bitter 
 reproaches. . . . The greatest harm that your works 
 have done, is in the excuse they have given to the 
 enemies of philosophy throughout Europe to say, 
 "These philosophers cannot live in peace, and they 
 cannot live together. Here is a king who does not 
 believe in Jesus Christ ; he invites to his court a man 
 who does not believe in Jesus Christ, and he uses him 
 ill ; there is no humanity in these pretended philo- 
 sophers, and God punishes them by means of one 
 another." . . . Your admirable and solid wisdom is 
 spoiled by the unfortunate pleasure you have always 
 had in seeing the humiliation of other men, and in 
 saying and writing stinging things to them ; a pleasure 
 most unworthy of you, and all the more so as you are 
 raised above them by your rank and by your unique 
 talents.' 1 To which the king answers that he is fully 
 aware how many faults he has, and what great faults 
 1 (Euvres, lxxiii. p. 830 (1760). 
 
rv. BERLIN. 20S 
 
 they are, that he does not treat himself very gently, 
 and that in dealing with himself he pardons nothing. 
 As for Voltaire's conduct, it would not have been 
 endured by any other philosopher. ' If you had not 
 had to do with a man madly enamoured of your fine 
 genius, you would not have got off so well with any- 
 body else. Consider all that as done with, and never 
 let me hear again of that wearisome niece, who has 
 not so much merit as her uncle, with which to cover 
 her defects. People talk of the servant of Moliere, 
 but nobody will ever speak of the niece of Voltaire.' 
 The poet had talked, after his usual manner, of 
 being old and worn out, and tottering on the brink 
 of the grave. 'Why, you are only sixty-two,' said 
 Frederick, 'and your soul is full of that fire which 
 animates and sustains the body. You will bury me 
 and half the present generation. You will have the 
 delight of making a spiteful couplet on my tomb.' 1 
 Voltaire did not make a couplet, but he wrote a prose 
 lampoon on the king's private life, which is one of the 
 bitterest libels that malice ever prompted, and from 
 which the greater part of Europe has been content to 
 borrow its idea of the character of Frederick. 2 This 
 was vengeance enough even for Voltaire. We may 
 add that while Voltaire constantly declared that he 
 could never forget the outrages which the king of 
 Prussia had inflicted on him, neither did he forget to 
 
 1 (Euvres, lxxiii. pp. 835-837. 
 
 8 Printed in vol. i. of the Baudouin edition, as M4moirea 
 pour servir & la vie de M. Voltaire, p. 212. 
 P 
 
210 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 draw his pension from the king of Prussia even in 
 times when Frederick was most urgently pressed. 1 It 
 may be said that he was ready to return favours ; ' If 
 things go on as they are going now,' he wrote with 
 sportive malice, 'I reckon on having to allow a pension 
 to the king of Prussia.' 2 
 
 It was not surprising that Voltaire did not return 
 to Paris. His correspondence during his residence at 
 Berlin attests in every page of it how bitterly he 
 resented the cabals of ignoble men of letters, and the 
 insolence of ignoble men of authority. 'If I had 
 been in Paris this Lent,' he wrote in 1752, 'I should 
 have been hissed in town, and made sport of at 
 court, and the Siecle de Louis xiv. would have been 
 denounced, as smacking of heresy, as audacious, and 
 full of ill significance. I should have had to go to 
 defend myself in the anteroom of the lieutenant of 
 police. The officers would say, as they saw me pass, 
 There is a man who belongs to us. . . . No, my friend, 
 qui bene latuit, bene i)ixit.' s With most just anger, 
 he contrasted German liberality with the tyrannical 
 suspicion of his own government. The emperor, he 
 says, made no difficulty in permitting the publication 
 of a book in which Leopold was called a coward. 
 Holland gave free circulation to statements that the 
 Dutch are ingrates and that their trade is perish- 
 ing. He was allowed to print under the eyes of the 
 king of Prussia that the Great Elector abased himself 
 
 1 Corr. 1758. (Euvres, lxxv. p. 80. 2 It. p. 31. 
 
 8 Con. lxv. p. 23. Cf. also p. 83. 
 
IT. BEBLIN. 21 1 
 
 uselessly before Lewis xiv., and resisted him as 
 uselessly. It was only in France where permission 
 was refused for an eulogy of Lewis xiv. and of 
 France, and that, because he had been neither base 
 enough nor foolish enough to disfigure his eulogy 
 either by shameful silences or cowardly misrepre- 
 sentations. 1 The imprisonment, nine years before 
 this, of Lenglet Dufresnoy, an old man of seventy, 
 for no worse offence than publishing a supplement 
 to De Thou's history, had made a deep impression 
 on Toltaire. 2 He would have been something lower 
 than human if he had forgotten the treatment which 
 he had himself received at the hands of the most 
 feeble and incompetent government that ever was 
 endured by a civilised people. 
 
 So he found his way to Geneva, then and until 
 1798 an independent republic or municipality. There 
 (1755) he made himself two hermitages, one for 
 summer, called the Delices, a short distance from the 
 spot where the Arve falls into the Rhone, and the 
 other near Lausanne (Monrion) for winter. Here, he 
 says, I see from my bed this glorious lake, which 
 bathes a hundred gardens at the foot of my terrace ; 
 which forms on right and left a stream of a dozen 
 leagues, and a calm sea in front of my windows ; and 
 which waters the fields of Savoy, crowned with the 
 
 1 Corr. Ixv. p. 15. 
 
 3 Corr. 1743. CEuv. lviii. p. 131. A very long and careful 
 list of the oppressions practised on writers in this reign is given 
 in Mr. Buckle's Hist, of Civilisation, i. 675-681. 
 
212 VOLTAIRE. OHAP. 
 
 Alps in the distance. 1 You write to me, replied 
 D'Alembert, from your bed, whence you command 
 ten leagues of the lake, and I answer you from my 
 hole, whence I command a patch of sky three ells 
 long. 2 To poor D'Alembert the name of the famous 
 lake was fraught with evil associations, for he had just 
 published his too veracious article on Geneva in the 
 Encyclopaedia, in which he paid the clergy of that city 
 the unwelcome compliment, that they were the most 
 logical of all Protestants, for they were Socinians ; 
 and he was now suffering the penalty of men who 
 stir up angry hives. 
 
 The enjoyment which Voltaire had then and for 
 twenty years to come in his noble landscape, and 
 which he so often commemorates in his letters, is a 
 proof that may be added to others, of the injustice of 
 the common idea that the Voltairean school of the 
 eighteenth century were specially insensible to the 
 picturesque. Morellet, for instance, records his delight 
 and wonder at the Alps and the descent into Italy, 
 in terms quite as warm, if much less profuse, as those 
 of the most impressible modern tourist. 3 Diderot 
 had a strong spontaneous feeling for nature, as he 
 shows not only in his truly remarkable criticisms on 
 the paintings of twenty years, but also in his most 
 private correspondence, where he demonstrates in 
 terms too plain, simple, and homely, to be suspected 
 
 1 Foisset's Carres, de Voltaire avec de Brosses, etc., p. 318 
 ilso Corr. 1757. (Euvres, lxvi. pp. 1-50 passim. 
 
 * (Ewores, lxxv. p. 61. s Memoires, i. ch. iil p. 55. 
 
!▼■ BERLIN. 213 
 
 of insincerity, the meditative delight with which the 
 solitary contemplation of fine landscape inspired him. 
 He has no peculiar felicity in describing natural 
 features in words, or in reproducing the inner har- 
 monies with which the soft lines of distant hills, or 
 the richness of deep embosoming woodlands, or the 
 swift procession of clouds driven by fierce or cheerful 
 winds, compose and strengthen the sympathising 
 spirit. But he was as susceptible to them as men of 
 more sonorous word. 1 And Voltaire finds the liveliest 
 pleasure in the natural sights and objects around him, 
 though they never quickened in him those brooding 
 moods of egotistic introspection and deep-questioning 
 contemplation in which Jean Jacques, Bernardin de 
 St. Pierre, and Senancour, found a sort of refuge from 
 their own desperate impotency of will and of material 
 activity. Voltaire never felt this impotency. As 
 the very apostle of action, how should he have felt it 1 
 It pleased him in the first few months of his settlement 
 in new scenes, and at other times, to borrow some of 
 Frederick's talk about the bestial folly of the human 
 race, and the absurdity of troubling oneself about it ; 
 but what was a sincere cynicism in the king, was in 
 Voltaire only a bit of cant, the passing affectation of 
 an hour. The dramatist whose imagination had 
 produced so long a series of dramas of situation, the 
 historian who had been attracted by such labours as 
 those of Charles XII. of Sweden and Peter the Great 
 
 1 See for instance a letter to Mdlle. de Voland : Mimovres, 
 Carrespondance, et Ouv. inedites, i. 99. 
 
214 VOLTAIEE. ohap 
 
 of Russia, as well as by the achievements of the 
 illustrious men who adorned the age of Lewis xrv., 
 proved himself of far too objective and positive a 
 temperament to be capable of that self-conscious 
 despair of action, that paralysing lack of confidence 
 in will, which drove men of other humour and other 
 experience forlorn into the hermit's caves of a new 
 Thebaid. Voltaire's ostentatious enjoyment of his 
 landscape and his garden was only the expansion of a 
 seafarer, who after a stormful voyage finds himself in 
 a fair haven. His lines to Liberty 1 give us the key- 
 note to his mood at this time. He did^ not suppose 
 that he had got all, but he knew that he had got 
 somewhat. 
 
 Je ne vante point d'avoir en cet asile 
 
 Rencontre le parfait bonheur : 
 II n'est point retire dans le fond d'nn booage ; 
 
 II est encore moins chez les rois ; 
 
 II n'est pas meme chez le sage ; 
 De cette courte vie il n'est point le partage ; 
 II y faut renoncer ; mais on peut quelquefois 
 
 Enibrasser an moins son image. 
 
 '"lis a fine thing, is tranquillity,' he wrote; 'yes, 
 but ennui is of its acquaintance and belongs to the 
 family. To repulse this ugly relation, I have set up 
 a theatre.' 2 Besides the theatre, guests were frequent 
 and multitudinous. He speaks of sometimes having 
 a crowd of fifty persons at table. 8 Besides Les Delices 
 and Lausanne, he purchased from the President da 
 
 1 L'Auteur arrivant k sa terre. CEvm. xvii. 194. 
 » Corr. 1757. OEuv. lxvi. p. 38. 8 lb. p. 32. 
 
IV. BERLIN. 215 
 
 Brosses a life-interest in Tourney, and in the same 
 year (1758) he bought the lordship of Ferney, close 
 by. He was thus a citizen of Geneva, of Berne, and 
 of France, 'for philosophers ought to have two or 
 three holes underground against the hounds who chase 
 them.' If the dogs of France should hunt him, he 
 could take shelter in G-eneva. If the dogs of Geneva 
 began to bay, he could run into France. By and by 
 this consideration of safety grew less absorbing, and 
 all was abandoned except Ferney ; a name that will 
 always remain associated with those vigorous and ter- 
 rible assaults upon the Infamous, which first definitely 
 opened when Voltaire became the ldrd of this little 
 domain. 
 
OHAPTEE V. 
 
 RELIGION. 
 
 In examining the Voltairean attack upon religion we 
 have to remember that it was in the first instance 
 prompted, and throughout its course stimulated and 
 embittered, by antipathy to the external organisation 
 of the religion. It was not merely disbelief in a 
 creed, but exasperation against a church Two dis- 
 tinct elements lay at the bottom of Voltaire's enmity 
 to the peculiar form of monotheism which he found 
 supreme around him. One of them was the intellectual 
 element of repugnance to a system of belief that rested 
 on miracles and mysteries irreconcilable with reason, 
 and was so intimately associated with some of the 
 most odious types of character and most atrocious 
 actions in the Old Testament, which undoubtedly 
 contains so many of both. The other was the moral 
 element of anger against the expounders of this system, 
 their intolerance of light and hatred of knowledge, 
 their fierce yet profoundly contemptible struggles 
 with one another, the scandals of their casuistry, their 
 besotted cruelty. Of these two elements, the second 
 
ohap. v. RELIGION. 217 
 
 was, no doubt, if not the earlier in time, at least tli6 
 stronger in intensity. It was because he perceived 
 the fruit to be so deadly, that Voltaire laid the axe 
 to the root of the tree. It is easy to say that these 
 poisonous Jesuitries and black Jansenisms were no 
 fruit of the tree, but the produce of a mere graft, 
 which could have been lopped off without touching 
 the sacred trunk. Voltaire thought otherwise, and 
 whether he was right or wrong, it is only just to him 
 to keep constantly before us the egregious failure of 
 Catholicism in his day as a social force. This is a 
 fact as to which there can be no dispute among persons 
 with knowledge enough and mental freedom enough 
 to be competent to have an opinion, and Voltairism 
 can only be fairly weighed if we regard it as being in 
 the first instance no outbreak of reckless speculative 
 intelligence, but a righteous social protest against a 
 system socially pestilent. It was the revival of the 
 worst parts of this system in the cruelty and obscur- 
 antism which broke out after the middle of the cen- 
 tury, that converted Voltaire into an active assailant 
 of belief. But for that he would pretty certainly 
 have remained tranquilly in the phase of deism of 
 which some of his early verses are the expression. 
 Philosophy is truly as Callicles says in the Gorgias, 
 a most charming accomplishment for a man to follow 
 at the right age, but to carry philosophy too far is 
 the undoing of humanity. 
 
 Voltaire no doubt deliberately set himself to over = 
 throw the Catholic theology, as well as the ecclesi- r 
 
218 VOLTAIRE. ' CHAP, 
 
 astical system which was bound up with it, and he 
 did so for the very sufficient reason that it has always 
 been impossible for men to become indulgent in act, 
 while they remained fanatical in belief. They will 
 not cease to be persecutors, he said, until they have 
 ceased to be absurd. 1 The object was to secure toler- 
 ance, and tolerance could only be expected as the 
 product of indifference, and indifference could be 
 spread most surely by throwing the fullest light of 
 reason and common sense on the mystical foundations 
 of revealed religion. To stop short at the inculcation 
 of charity and indulgence was to surrender the cause ; 
 for how should the mere homilies of a secular moralist 
 soften those whom the direct injunctions of a deity 
 and his inspired apostles, their own acknowledged 
 masters, failed to make charitable ? . It was essential 
 that the superstitions in which intolerance had its 
 root should be proved detestable and ridiculous. 
 When men had learnt to laugh at superstition, then 
 they would perceive how abominable is the oppressive 
 fanaticism which is its champion. 
 
 It is hardly possible to deny the service which 
 Protestantism rendered in preventing the revolution 
 from Catholicism to scientific modes of thought from 
 being that violent, abrupt, and irreconcilable breach, 
 which we now observe in France and Italy, when we 
 remember that the cause of toleration was system- 
 atically defended in England by men who as system- 
 atically defended the cause of Christianity. The 
 1 Corr. (Ewe. lxxv. p. 249. 
 
V- RELIGION. 219 
 
 Liberty of Prophesying, in which the expediency of 
 tolerance was based on the difficulty of being sure 
 that we are right, was written by one of the most 
 devout and orthodox divines ; while the famous 
 Letters on Toleration (1689), in which the truly re- 
 markable step is taken of confining the functions of 
 civil government to men's civil interests and the 
 things of this world, were the work of the same 
 Locke who vindicated the Reasonableness of Christ- 
 ianity. 1 The English Deists pressed home in a very 
 effectual way the deduction of universal freedom of 
 speech from the first maxims of Protestantism, and 
 their inference was practically admitted. 2 Hence 
 there was no inseparable association between adher-^ 
 ence to the old religious ideas and the prohibition of' 
 free speech in spirituals, and on the other hand there 
 was no obligation on the part of those who claimed 
 free speech to attack a church which did not refuse 
 their claim. 
 
 In France the strictly repressive policy of the 
 church in the eighteenth century, sometimes bloody 
 and cruel as in the persecution of the Protestants, 
 sometimes minutely vexatious as in the persecution 
 of the men of letters, but always stubborn and lynx- 
 
 1 It was to the last-named book, one may' suppose, that 
 Voltaire referred, when he asked how it was that Locke, aftei 
 having so profoundly traced the development of the human 
 understanding, could so degrade his own understanding in an 
 other work. (Diet. Phil. s.v. Platon. (Euv. lvii. p. 369.) 
 
 2 See Collins's Apology for Free Debate and Liberty of Writ 
 ing, prefixed to the Grounds and Reasons of Christianity. 
 
220 VOLTAIRE. chap 
 
 eyed, had the natural effect of making it & point of 
 honour with most of those who valued liberty to hurl 
 themselves upon the religious system, of which rigor- 
 ous intolerance was so prominent a characteristic. 
 The Protestant dilution of the theological spirit seems 
 thus to be in the long run a more effective preparation 
 for decisive abandonment of it, than its virulent dis- 
 solution in the biting acids of Voltairism, because 
 within limits the slower these great transformations 
 are in accomplishing themselves, the better it is for 
 many of the most precious and most tender parts of 
 human character. Our present contention is that the 
 attitude of the religionists left no alternative.) It is 
 best that creeds, like men who have done the work 
 of the day, should die the slow deaths of nature, yet 
 it is counted lawful to raise an armed hand upon the 
 brigand who seeks the life of another. 
 
 Voltaire to the end of his course contended that 
 the church only was to blame for the storm which 
 overtook her teaching in the later years, when his own 
 courageous attack had inspired a host of others, less 
 brilliant but not any less embittered, to throw them- 
 selves on the reeling enemy. The cause of the in- 
 undation of Europe by the literature of negativism and 
 repudiation was to be sought first of all in the fierce 
 theological disputes which revolted the best of the 
 laity. / Of this violent revuMon of feeling Voltaire 
 himself was the great organ. He furnished its justi- 
 fication, and nourished its fire, and invested it with a 
 splendid lustre. Even when with the timidity of ex- 
 
v. RELIGION. 221 
 
 treme age he seemed to deprecate the growing ferocity 
 of the attack, he still taunted the clerical party with 
 their own folly in allowing a mean and egotistic viru- 
 lence to override every consideration of true wisdom 
 and policy. 'Now,' he wrote in 1768, 'a revolution 
 has been accomplished in the human mind, that nothing 
 again can ever arrest. They would have prevented this 
 revolution, if they had been sage and moderate. The 
 quarrels of Jansenists and Molinists have done more 
 harm to the Christian religion than could have been 
 done by four emperors like Julian one after another.' 1 
 / It cannot be too often repeated that the Christianity 
 which Voltaire assailed was not that of the Sermon 
 on the Mount, for there was not a man then alive 
 more keenly sensible than he was of the generous 
 humanity which is there enjoined with a force that 
 so strangely touches the heart, nor one who was on 
 the whole, in spite of constitutional infirmities and 
 words which were far worse than his deeds, more 
 ardent and persevering in its practice. Still less was 
 he the enemy of a form of Christian profession which 
 now fascinates many fine and subtle minds, and which 
 starting from the assumption that there are certain 
 inborn cravings in the human heart, constant, pro- 
 found, and inextinguishable, discerns in the long re- 
 ligious tradition an adequate proof that the mystic 
 faith in the incarnation, and in the spiritual facts 
 which pour like rays from that awful centre, are the 
 highest satisfaction which a divine will has as yet 
 
 1 Corr. 1768. (Ewv. btx. p. 140. 
 
222 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 been pleased to establish for all these yearnings of the 
 race of men. /This graceful development of belief, 
 emancipated from dogma and reducing so many sub- 
 stantial bodies to pale shades, so many articles once 
 held as solid realities to the strange tenuity of dreams, 
 was not the Christianity of Voltaire's time, any more 
 than it was that of the Holy Office. There was 
 nothing resembling the present popularity of a treat- 
 ment which gives generals so immense a preponderance 
 over particulars — somewhat to the neglect of the old 
 saying about the snare that lies hidden in generals, 
 many persons being tolerably indifferent about the 
 dolus so long as they can make sure of the Met. He 
 attacked a definite theology, not a theosophy. We 
 may, indeed, imagine the kind of questions which he 
 would have asked of one pressing such a doctrine 
 on his acceptance ; how he would have sought the 
 grounds for calling aspirations universal, which the 
 numerical majority of the human race appear to have 
 been without, and the grounds for making subjective 
 yearnings the test and the measure of the truth of 
 definite objective records ; how he would have prayed 
 to be instructed of these cravings, whether they spring 
 up spontaneously, or are the products of spiritual self- 
 indulgence, and also of the precise manner in which 
 they come to be satisfied and soothed by the mo- 
 mentary appearance of a humane figu% far off upon 
 the earth ; how he would have paused to consider 
 the intelligibility of so overwhelming a wonder as 
 the incarnation having been wrought, for the benefit 
 
». _ RELIGION. 223 
 
 of so infinitesimally small a fragment of mankind. 
 We can imagine this and much else, hut Voltaire 
 would never have stirred a finger to attack a mys- 
 ticism which is not aggressive, and can hardly be 
 other than negatively hurtful. 
 
 If any one had maintained against Voltaire that 
 the aspirations after a future life, the longing for 
 some token that the deity watches over his creatures 
 and is moved by a tender solicitude for them, and 
 the other spiritual desires alleged to be instinctive in 
 men, constitute as trustworthy and firm a guide to 
 truth as the logical reason, we may be sure that he 
 would have forgiven what he must have considered 
 an enervating abnegation of intelligence, for the sake 
 of the humane, if not very actively improving, course 
 of life to which this kind of pietism is wont to lead. 
 He might possibly have entertained a little contempt 
 for them, but it would have been quiet contempt and 
 unspoken. /There is no case of Voltaire mocking at 
 any set of men who lived good lives. He did not 
 mock the English Quakers. He doubtless attacked 
 many of the beliefs which good men hold sacred, but 
 if good men take up their abode under the same roof 
 which shelters the children of darkness and wrong, 
 it is not the fault of Voltaire if they are hit by the 
 smooth stones shot from his sling against their un- 
 worthy comrades. "JfThe object of his assault was that 
 amalgam of metaphysical subtleties, degrading legends, 
 false miracles, and narrow depraving conceptions of 
 divine government which made the starting-point and 
 
224 VOLTAIRE. OHAP. 
 
 vantage-ground of those ecclesiastical oppressors, whom 
 he habitually and justly designated the enemies of the 
 human race. /The evil and the good, the old purity 
 and the superadded corruptions, were all so inextric- 
 ably bound up in the Catholicism of the eighteenth 
 century, that it was impossible to deal a blow to the 
 one without risk of harm to the other./ The method 
 was desperate, but then the enemy was a true Chimsera, 
 a monster sodden in black corruption, with whom in 
 the breast of a humane man there could be no terms. 
 The popes during the Voltairean period were above 
 the average in virtue and intelligence, but their power 
 was entirely overshadowed by that wonderful order 
 which had assumed all effective spiritual supremacy 
 for something like two centuries. Nor was this order 
 the only retrogressive influence. The eighteenth cen- 
 tury was the century not only of the Sacr6 Cceur, but 
 of the miracles of the dead abbe 1 P&ris, transactions 
 in which Jansenist emulated Jesuit in dragging men 
 and women into the deepest slough of superstition. 
 A Roman augur fresh from the inspection of the 
 sacrificial entrails would have had a right to despise the 
 priests who invented an object for the adoration of men 
 in the diseased and hideous visions of Mary Alacoque. 
 The man who sells rain to savages may almost be held 
 to add to the self-respect of the race, if you contrast 
 him with the convulsionnaires and the fanatics who 
 were transported by their revolting performances. 1 
 
 1 The reader will find an account of them in M. Lanfrey's 
 VEglise et les Philosophes du 18ikme Siicle, pp. 131-136. 
 
v. RELIGION. 225 
 
 /France is the country where reactions are most 
 rapid and most violent. Nowhere else can the re- 
 former count so surely on seeing the completion of 
 his reform followed so instantly by the triumph of 
 its adversaries. The expulsion of the Jesuits, under 
 circumstances of marked and uncompromising harsh- 
 ness, was not consummated, before the tide of religious 
 bigotry flowed in from the opposite shore, and swelled 
 to a portentous height. The exultation of the philo- 
 sophers at the coming fall of their old foes, was in- 
 stantly checked by the yet worse things which befell 
 them and their principles at the hands of new enemies. 
 fThe reign of the Jansenists was speedily pronounced 
 more hateful than the reign of the Jesuits. Various 
 accommodations were possible with heaven, so long as 
 the Jesuits had credit, but the Jansenists were pitiless. 1 
 
 The parliament or supreme judicial tribunal of 
 Paris 2 was Jansenist, mainly out of political hatred 
 of the Jesuits, partly from a hostility, very easily 
 explained, to every manifestation of ultramontane 
 feeling and influence, partly from a professional 
 jealousy of the clergy, but partly also because the 
 austere predestinarian dogma, and the metaphysical 
 theology which brought it into supreme prominence, 
 seem often to have had an unexplained affinity for 
 serious minds trained in legal ideas and their applica- 
 
 1 Corr. (Euv. Ixvi. p. 100. 
 
 2 For the composition of this hody see Voltaire's Histoire du 
 Parlement de Paris. (Euv. xxxiv. Or in Martin's Hist, de 
 France, iv. 295 ; xii. 280 ; and xiii. 53. 
 
 Q 
 
226 VOLTAIRE. chap. 
 
 tion. The Jesuits had systematically abstained as 
 far as was possible from purely speculative theology. 
 Suarez is pronounced one of the greatest writers in 
 speculative ethics! and jurisprudence ; but in the 
 technical metaphysics of theology the Jesuits with 
 all their literary industry did not greatly care to 
 exercise themselves. Their task was social and prac- 
 tical, and as confessors, directors, preachers, and 
 instructors, they had naturally paid less attention to 
 abstract thought than to the arts of eloquence, address, 
 and pliancy. Then, too, in doctrine they had uni- 
 formly clung to the softer, more amiable, more 
 worldly, less repulsive, interpretation of the eternally ( 
 embarrassing claims of grace, election, free-will. The 
 Augustinian, Calvinistic, or Jansenist view of the im- 
 potence of will and the saving importance of grace is 
 the answer of souls eager to feel immediate individual 
 contact with a Supreme Being. The Jesuits and their 
 power represented extremely different sentiments, 
 fundamentally religious, but still fundamentally social 
 also, the desire of men for sympathetic and consider- 
 ate guidance in conduct, and their craving for such a 
 unity of the external ordering of the faith as should 
 leave them undistracted to live their lives. The 
 former concentrated feelings upon the relations of 
 men directly and immediately with a Supreme Being; 
 the latter upon their relations with this Being only 
 mediately, through their relations with one another, 
 and with the church to which a measure of divinity 
 had been' attributed. Hence the decline of the Jesuits 
 
*■ RELIGION. 227 
 
 assumed the form of a depravation of morals, while 
 the Jansenists held more and more tightly to a narrow 
 and bigoted correctness of belief. The parliament 
 was willing to resist a Molinist archbishop and his 
 satellites, when they refused burial to all who should 
 die without having received a certificate of conformity 
 to the famous bull Unigenitus, which proscribed Jan- 
 senist opinion. 1 But none the less for this was it bent 
 on suppressing the common enemy, who despised the 
 bull and the Five propositions, Molina and Jansenius, 
 archbishop Beaumont and Quesnel, all equally. Vol- 
 taire's natural sagacity made him alive to the fact, 
 which perhaps remains as true now as then, that the 
 professional and middle classes are a worse enemy 
 of liberal opinion and are more intolerant than the 
 remnants of the old aristocratic orders.' He says to 
 D'Alembert, ' You are right in declaring yourself 
 the enemy of the great and their flatterers ; still, the 
 great protect one upon occasion, they despise the 
 Infamous, and they will not persecute philosophers ; 
 but as for your pedants of Paris, who have bought their 
 office, as for those insolent bourgeois, half fanatics, 
 half imbecile, they can do nothing but mischief.' 2 
 He had not learnt to look away from both classes, 
 professional and aristocratic alike, to that third estate 
 where the voice of the reformer has always found the 
 first response. Still what he said was true as against 
 the lawyers, whose vision perhaps never extends be- 
 
 1 Sifecle de Louis xv. c. 36. (Euvres, xxix. p. 3. 
 2 Corr. CEuv. \xxv. p. 145. 
 
228 VOLTAIEE. CHAP 
 
 yond the' improvement of that mere surface of order 
 with which their profession is concerned. The Par- 
 liament of Paris was the eager ally of the bigots of 
 the court in 1757, in fulminating deadly edicts against 
 the Encyclopedia and all concerned in its production 
 or circulation. In 1762, the year of the publication 
 of Emile and the Contrat Social, not all the influence 
 of Rousseau's powerful protectors could prevent the 
 launching of a decree of arrest against him. Bloodier 
 measures were not wanting. 
 
 In 1762 Morellet had published under the title of 
 a Manual for Inquisitors a selection of the most cruel 
 and revolting portions of the procedure of the Holy 
 Office, drawn from the Directorium Inquisitorium of 
 Eymeric, a grand inquisitor of the fourteenth century. 
 The cold-blooded cruelties of the regulations, which 
 were thus brought into the light of the eighteenth 
 century, created the most profound sensation among 
 the rapidly increasing adherents of tolerance and 
 humanity. Voltaire was intensely stirred by this 
 resuscitation of horrors that he mistook for dead. It 
 made the same impression upon him, he said, as the 
 bleeding body of Caesar made upon the men of Rome. 1 
 But he soon found that it was an error to impute a 
 special cruelty to the spiritual power. Malesherbes, 
 in giving Morellet the requisite permission to print 
 his Manual, had amazed his friend by telling him, 
 that though he might suppose he was giving to the 
 world a collection of extraordinary facts and unheard 
 
 1 Corr. CEuvres, lxvii. p. 166. 
 
V. RELIGION. 229 
 
 of processes, yet in truth the jurisprudence of Eymeric 
 and his inquisition was as nearly as possible identical 
 with the criminal jurisprudence of France at that 
 very moment. 1 This was very soon to be proved. 
 
 The bigots, infuriated by the blows which were 
 destroying the Jesuits, hunted out against heretical 
 enemies some forgotten portions of this terrible 
 jurisprudence. A protestant pastor, Eochette, was 
 hung for exercising his functions in Languedoc. The 
 Catholics on the occasion of the arrest of Eochette 
 were summoned by sound of tocsin, and three young 
 Protestants, who were brothers, fearing massacre in 
 the midst of the agitation, took up their arms : for 
 this offence they were convicted of rebellion, and had 
 their heads struck off. 2 It became painfully clear how 
 great a mistake it was to suppose the clergy touched 
 with some special curse of cruelty. Then, as usually, 
 for good or for evil, they were on about the same 
 moral level with an immense number of laymen, and 
 were not much more than the incarnation of the 
 average darkness of the hour. If Eymeric's procedure 
 only copied the ordinary criminal jurisprudence, the 
 bigotry of the ecclesiastics was accurately reflected in 
 the bigotry of the secular tribunals. The Protestant 
 Calas was broken on the wheel (1762), because his 
 son had been found dead, and some one chose to say 
 that the father had killed him, to prevent him from 
 turning Catholic. There was not the smallest fragment 
 
 1 Mem. de Morellet, ch. iii. p. 62. 
 ' Martin's Sist. de France, xvi. p. 139. 
 
230 VOLTAIKE. chap. 
 
 of evidence, direct or indirect, for a single link in the 
 chain of circumstances on which the unfortunate man's 
 guilt depended ; while there were many facts which 
 made the theory of his guilt the most improbable 
 that could have been brought forward. The widow 
 and the children of Calas were put to the torture, 
 and eventually fled to Geneva to take refuge with 
 Voltaire. During the same year the same tribunal, 
 the parliament of Toulouse, did its best to repeat this 
 atrocity in the case of Sirven. Sirven was a Pro- 
 testant, and his daughter had been with perfect 
 legality snatched away from him, and shut up in a 
 convent, there to be better instructed in the faith. 
 She ran away, and was found at the bottom of a well. 
 Sirven was accused of murdering his daughter, and he 
 only escaped the wheel by prompt flight. His wife 
 perished of misery amid the snows of the Cevennes, 
 and he joined the wretched family of Calas at Geneva, 
 where the same generous man furnished shelter and 
 protection. 
 
 In the north of France the fire of intolerance burnt 
 at least as hotly as in the south At Abbeville a 
 crucifix was found to have been mutilated in the night. 
 ' Two lads of eighteen, to one of whom Frederick gave 
 shelter in Prussia, were accused under cover of the 
 sacrilege, and La Barre was condemned by the tribunal 
 of Amiens, at the instance of the bishop, to have 
 tongue and right hand cut off, and then be burnt alive ; 
 a sentence that was presently commuted by the Parlia- 
 ment of Paris to decapitation (1766). There was no 
 
V. RELIGION. 231 
 
 proof whatever that either of the two youths was in 
 any way concerned in the outrage. The bishop of 
 the diocese had issued monitory proclamations, and 
 conducted a solemn procession to the insulted crucifix. 
 The imagination of the town was kindled, and the 
 sacrilege became the universal talk of a people growing 
 more and more excited. Rumour ran that a new sect 
 was being formed, which was for breaking all the 
 crucifixes, which threw the host on the ground and cut 
 it with knives. There were women who declared that 
 they had seen these things. All the horrible stories 
 were revived which had been believed against the 
 Jews in the middle ages. A citizen took advantage 
 of this fierce agitation to gratify a private grudge 
 against a relative of La Barre. He set inquiries 
 on foot among the lowest persons for proof that the 
 youth had been concerned in the original crime., By 
 one means or another he got together material enough 
 to support an indictment. Proceedings once begun, a 
 crowd of informers rose up. It was deposed that La 
 Barre and D'Etallonde had passed within thirty yards 
 of the sacred procession without removing their hats, 
 that La Barre had spoken irreverently of the Virgin 
 Mary, that he had been heard to sing unseemly songs 
 and recite ribald litanies. This testimony, given with 
 a vagueness that ought to have proved it legally 
 valueless, was the fruit of the episcopal monitory, 
 which as at Toulouse in the case of Calas, virtually 
 incited the dregs of the people to bring accusations 
 against their superiors, and menaced a man with the 
 
232 VOLTAIRE. CHAP 
 
 pains of hell if he should refuse to put his neighbour 
 in peril of his life. The tribunal, as excited as the 
 witnesses and the rest of the public, relied on a royal 
 ordinance of 1682, directed against sacrilege and 
 superstition and designed to put down sorcery. In 
 the sentence inflicting so bloody a punishment, the 
 offence was described as consisting in singing abomin- 
 able songs against the Virgin Mary. 1 To exact such 
 a penalty for such a delinquency was to make human 
 life a mere plaything for the ignorant passion of the 
 populace and the intellectual confusion of the tribunals; 
 These atrocities kindled in Voltaire a blaze of 
 anger and pity, that remains among the things of 
 which humanity has most reason to be proud. Every- 
 body who has read much of the French writing of 
 the middle of the eighteenth century, is conscious 
 from time to time of a sound of mocking and sardonic 
 laughter in it. This laugh of the eighteenth century 
 has been too often misunderstood as the expression 
 of a cynical hardness of heart, proving the hollowness 
 of the humanitarian pretensions in the midst of which 
 it is heard. It was in truth something very different ; 
 it was the form in which men sought a little relief 
 from the monotony of the abominations which op- 
 pressed them, and from whose taint they had such 
 difficulty to escape. This refrain, that after all a 
 man can do nothing better than laugh, apparently so 
 shallow and inhuman, in reality so penetrated with 
 
 1 Relation de la Mort du Chevalier de la Barre, 1766 ; Le 
 Cri du Sang Innocent, 1775. (Evv. xxxix. p. 99. 
 
<*> KELIGION. 233 
 
 melancholy, we may count most certainly on finding 
 at the close of the narration of some more than usually 
 iniquitous or imbecile exploit of those in authority. 
 It was when the thought of the political and social 
 and intellectual degradation of their country became 
 too vivid to be endured, that men like Voltaire and 
 D'Alembert would abruptly turn away from it, and 
 in the bitterness of their impotence cry that there was 
 nothing for it but to take the world and all that 
 befalls therein in merriment. It was the grimacing 
 of a man who jests when he is perishing of hunger, 
 or is shrinking under knife or cautery. Thus 
 D'Alembert having given Voltaire an account of the 
 execution of the unfortunate La Barre, in words that 
 show how intensely his own narrative was afflicting 
 him, suddenly concludes by saying that he will add 
 no more on this auto- da-f6, so honourable to the 
 French nation, for it made him ill-humoured, and 
 he meant only to mock at whatever might happen. 1 
 But Voltaire could not rest thus. The thought of so 
 hateful a crime, perpetrated by a tribunal of justice, 
 clothed him in the shirt of Nessus. All aflame, he 
 wrote to D'Alembert with noble impetuosity : 
 
 ' This is no longer a time for jesting : witty things 
 do not go well with massacres. What? These 
 Busirises in wigs destroy in the midst of horrible 
 tortures children of sixteen ! And that in face of 
 the verdict of ten upright and humane judges ! And 
 the victim suffers it ! People talk about it for a 
 1 Corr. July 16, 1766. (Em. lxxv. p. 357. 
 
234 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 moment, and the next they are hastening to the comic 
 opera; and barbarity, become the more insolent for 
 our silence, will to-morrow cut throats juridically 
 at pleasure. Here Oalas broken on the wheel, there 
 Sirven condemned to be hung, further off a gag thrust 
 into the mouth of a lieutenant-general, a fortnight 
 after that five youths condemned to the flames for 
 extravagances that deserved nothing worse than Saint 
 Lazare. Is this the country of philosophy and 
 pleasure 1 It is the country rather of the Saint 
 Bartholomew massacre. Why, the Inquisition would 
 not have ventured to do what these Jansenist judges 
 have done.' 1 "When he had received D'Alembert's 
 letter, ending as we have seen, his remonstrance 
 waxed vehement : ' What, you would be content to 
 laugh? We ought rather to resolve to seek venge- 
 ance, or at any rate to leave a country where day 
 after day such horrors are committed. . . . No, once 
 more, I cannot bear that you should finish your letter 
 by saying, I mean to laugh. Ah, my friend, is it a 
 time for laughing ? Did men laugh when they saw 
 Phalaris's bull being made red-hot ] ' 2 
 
 This revival in the tribunals of Paris and the 
 provincial towns alike, of the ignorant fanaticism and 
 the unscientific jurisprudence of the most unenlight- 
 ened times, was the more bitter and insupportable 
 from the new light which shone around such horrors. 
 Beccaria's treatise on Offences and Penalties had just 
 been translated into French by Morellet, and furnished 
 
 1 Coir. (Euv. lxxv. p. 359. 2 lb. p. 361. 
 
f. .RELIGION 235 
 
 a strange commentary upon the atrocities of Toulouse 
 and Abbeville. It seemed, men said, as if at every 
 -striking vindication of the rights of humanity the 
 genius of cruelty broke its chains, and, to prove the 
 futility of all such vindications, inspired new acts of 
 barbarism and violence. 1 The philosophic group had 
 yielded to a premature exultation, and in their inex- 
 perience supposed that they who planted the tree 
 should see the gathering-in of the fruit. The reign 
 of reason was believed to be close at hand, and this 
 belief made the visible recrudescence of fanatical un- 
 reason signally insupportable. It is a high honour to 
 Voltaire and his disciples that the trial did not prove 
 too strong for their faith, and that when they saw 
 how far too sanguine they had been, they were more 
 astonished than they were discouraged, and their 
 energy redoubled with the demands made upon it. 
 The meaner partisans of an orthodoxy which can only 
 make wholly sure of itself by injustice to adversaries, 
 have always loved to paint the Voltairean school in the 
 character of demons, enjoying their work of destruc- 
 tion with a sportive and impish delight. They may 
 have rejoiced in their strength so long as they cherished 
 the illusion that those who first kindled the torch 
 should also complete the long course and bear the 
 lamp to the goal. When the gravity of the enterprise 
 showed itself before them, they remained alert with 
 all courage, but they ceased to fancy that courage 
 necessarily makes men happy. The mantle of philo- 
 
 1 Grimm, Corr. Lit. v. p. 133. 
 
236 VOLTAIKE. CHAP. 
 
 Bophy was rent in a hundred places, and bitter winds 
 entered at a hundred holes, but they only drew it the 
 more closely around them. 1 At the very last Voltaire 
 seems to have seen something of the vast space which 
 every ray of light has to traverse before it reaches the 
 eye of the common understanding. ' I now perceive,' 
 he wrote the year before his death, ' that we must still 
 wait three or four hundred years. One day it cannot 
 but be that good men win their cause ; but before 
 that glorious day arrives how many disgusts have we 
 to undergo, how many dark persecutions, without 
 reckoning the La Barres, of whom from time to time 
 they will make an auto-da-fe.' 2 To speak thus was to 
 recognise the true character of the revolution, and the 
 many elements which go to the transformation of an 
 old society. To speak thus, too, was to mark the true 
 character of the sincere lover of human progress, the 
 soul of steadfast patience and strong hope, mingled with 
 many a pang for the far-off and slow-coming good. 
 
 It was a natural thing to identify the Jesuits with 
 the strongest part of the old society, because their 
 organisation was both the strongest and most striking 
 of its external supports. Their suppression, though 
 not to be dispensed with except on the condition of 
 an ultimate overthrow of morality and an extinction 
 of intellectual light, had one effect which the states- 
 men of the time could hardly be expected to see, and 
 which has not been enough considered. Just as the 
 papacy by the fourteenth century had become more 
 1 Corr. 1774. (Euv. lxxv. p. 627. 2 lb. p. 696. 
 
V. RELIGION. 237 
 
 and more exclusively a temporal power, so the Jesuits 
 by the middle of the eighteenth had become more and 
 more a commercial power. They were a powerful 
 trading corporation, and it was as merchants, rather 
 than as casuists and directors of conscience, that they 
 finally came into collision with secular authority in 
 France, Portugal, and Spain. Now since the revival 
 of the order it has been exclusively engaged in the 
 contest for spiritual supremacy, and for as much of 
 temporal power as has seemed essential to its security. 
 This, however, is only one of the evils which counter- 
 balance the advantages of every progressive measure ; 
 for, alas, when the statesman believes most confidently 
 that he has advanced by a league, a very few years 
 show him or others that his league was after all no 
 more than an ell or two. 
 
 The reactionary outburst of fanaticism for which 
 the humiliation of the Jesuits was a signal, only 
 showed how well founded the Voltairean allegations 
 as to the depraving effects of the existing system of 
 religion had really been. It was the verification of 
 all that Voltaire ever said against the system, and 
 demonstrated both the virulence and the tenacity of 
 the influences which Catholicism in the days of its 
 degradation had exerted over the character of the 
 nation. It was most illogical to expect a people who 
 had been bred in the Catholic tradition suddenly to 
 welcome its enemies. If Catholicism had trained men 
 up to the temper which seeks the light and loves it, 
 how should it have deserved animosity 1 Nearly all 
 
238 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 lovers of improvement are apt in the heat of a generous 
 enthusiasm to forget that if all the world were ready 
 to embrace their cause, their improvement could 
 hardly be needed. It is one of the hardest conditions 
 of things that the more numerous and resolute the 
 enemies of reform, then the more unmistakably urgent 
 the necessity for it. , It was just because the cruelty, 
 persecution, and darkness, in the last ten years of the 
 reign of Lewis xv. were things possible, that the on- 
 slaught upon Catholicism was justifiable and praise- 
 worthy. They showed the depth and strength of the 
 forces of the old society, and they foreshadowed the 
 violence which marked its dissolution. If people had 
 remembered in 1789howfewyears separated them from 
 the wide-spread fanaticism which darkened the last days 
 of Voltaire, they might have calculated better how few 
 years separated them from the Napoleonic Concordat. 
 No permanent transformation of a society, we may 
 be sure, can ever take place until a transformation 
 has been accomplished in the spiritual basis of thought. 
 Voltaire may have distinctly seen this and formulated 
 it to himself, or not ; in any case, he steered his own 
 course exactly as he would have done if he had seen 
 it. As M. Guizot expresses it, the separation between 
 the spiritual and temporal orders was never real in 
 Europe except in the eighteenth century, when for 
 the first time the spiritual order developed itsell 
 entirely apart from the temporal order. 1 Thus Vol- 
 
 1 Hist, de la Civilisation en Europe, 14ieme le<;on, p. 405 
 Cf. also De Tocqueville'e Ancien Regime, liv. iii. ch. I. 
 
▼• RELIGION. 239 
 
 taire acquiesced without murmur or reproach in the 
 conditions of political absolutism, and the disgrace 
 and ruin which the nullity of the government brought 
 upon his country in the Seven Years' War, keenly as 
 he felt it, yet provoked no thought of temporal 
 changes. His correspondence in that fatal time is 
 marked by a startling apathy about public events, and 
 even Eossbach seems not to move him to seek its causes. 
 If we compare his joyful enthusiasm at the accession 
 of Turgot to power in 1774, we can have no doubt 
 that this strange numbness of feeling was only the 
 silence of a wise man despairing of saying or seeing 
 anything useful, and not the criminal folly of a bad 
 citizen to whom the welfare of his country is not dear. 
 The disasters of France were as serious to him as to 
 any one else, as may be plainly seen under the assumed 
 philosophy with which his vivacious spirit loved to 
 veil real feeling ; but the impossibility of doing any- 
 thing, even of taking a part in the process with which 
 we English are so familiar as the forming of public 
 opinion, drove him for consolation to the field where 
 he was certain of doing efficient work. 1 "Writing in 
 1761, a year of crushing national loss, he says to one 
 of the oldest and most intimate of his correspondents : 
 ' There is nothing to laugh at in all this. I am struck 
 to the heart. Our only resource is in the promptest 
 and most humiliating peace. I always fancy, when 
 some overwhelming disaster arrives, that the French 
 will be serious for six weeks. I have not yet been 
 1 Corr. 1757-58. (Bum. lxvi. pp 92, 102, 112, 185, etc. 
 
240 VOLTAIRE. CHAP 
 
 able to disabuse myself of this notion.' 1 . Voltaire was 
 penetrated by the spirit of action, and he perceived 
 and regretted that the organisation of France did not 
 permit of the effective action of private individuals 
 in the field of politics. 2 There are lines in the Hen- 
 riade extolling the freedom of England, 3 and he some- 
 times indulges in the commonplaces of a literary re- 
 publicanism ; but turning to the portion of his works 
 which his editors have classified as political, we scarcely 
 find much beyond the documents, and they are im- 
 portant and interesting enough, still not truly political, 
 that relate to the various affairs of Calas, La Barre, 
 and others, in which he exposed the atrocities of the 
 tribunals. So far as they come into the region of 
 politics at all, it is only to assail the overt and direct 
 injustice done to society by the institutions, privileges, 
 and pretensions of the church. He constantly attacks 
 in a great variety of forms the material mischief in- 
 flicted on society by the vast numbers of monks, 
 mendicant or other ; their unproductive lives, the 
 burden of their maintenance weighing upon more 
 industrious subjects, the restriction of population 
 occasioned by their celibacy. The direct refusal of 
 the clergy in 1750 to consent to pay their share of the 
 taxes like other citizens, though owning as much as 
 a fifth of all the property in the realm, moved him to 
 insist in a vigorous pamphlet that the distinction in a 
 kingdom between spiritual and temporal powers is a 
 
 1 Corr. (Euv. Ixvii. p. 174 ; also lxxv. p. 170. 
 * See ante, p. 19. » Chant i. v. 306. 
 
v. RELIGION. 241 
 
 relic of barbarism; that it is monstrous to permit a 
 body of men to say, Let those pay who work, we 
 ought not to pay because we are idle ; that supersti- 
 tion inevitably tends to make bad citizens, and there- 
 fore princes ought to protect philosophy which destroys 
 superstition. 1 
 
 Voltaire's task, however, was never directly political, 
 but spiritual, to shake the foundations of that religious 
 system which professed to be founded on the revelation 
 of Christ. Was he not right 1 If we find ourselves 
 walking amid a generation of cruel and unjust and 
 darkened spirits, we may be assured that it is their 
 beliefs on what they deem highest that have made 
 them so. There is no counting with certainty on the 
 justice of men who are capable of fashioning and 
 worshipping an unjust divinity, nor on their humanity 
 so long as they incorporate inhuman motives in their 
 most sacred dogma, nor on their reasonableness while 
 they rigorously decline to accept reason as a test of 
 truth. 
 
 It is necessary to admit from the point of view of 
 impartial criticism, that Voltaire had one defect of 
 character, of extreme importance in a leader of this 
 memorable and direct attack. With all his enthusiasm 
 for things noble and lofty, generous and compassion- 
 ate, he missed the peculiar emotion of holiness, the 
 soul and life alike of the words of Christ and Saint 
 Paul, that indefinable secret of the long hold of mystic 
 superstition over so many high natures, otherwise 
 
 1 La Voix du Sage et du Peuple (1750). CEuv. xxxviii. p. 53. 
 R 
 
242 VOLTAIEE. CHAP 
 
 entirely prepared for the brightness of the rational 
 day. From this impalpable essence which magically 
 surrounds us with the mysterious and subtle atmos- 
 phere of the unseen, changing distances and propor- 
 tions, adding new faculties of sight and purpose, 
 extinguishing the flames of disorderly passion in a 
 flood of truly divine aspiration, we have to confess 
 that the virtue went out in the presence of Voltaire. 
 To admire Voltaire, cried a man who detested him, is 
 the sign of a corrupt heart, and if anybody is drawn 
 to his works, then be very sure that God does not 
 love such an one. 1 The truth of which that is so 
 vehement a paraphrase amounts to this, that Voltaire 
 has said no word, nor even shown an indirect appre- 
 ciation of any word said by another, which stirs or 
 expands the emotional susceptibility, indefinite ex- 
 ultation, and far-swelling inner harmony, which De 
 Maistre and others have known as the love of God, 
 and for which a better name, as covering most varieties 
 of form and manifestation, is holiness, deepest of all 
 the words that defy definition. Through the affronts 
 which his reason received from certain pretensions 
 both in the writers and in some of those whose actions 
 they commemorated, this sublime trait in the Bible, in 
 both portions of it, was unhappily lost to Voltaire. He 
 had no ear for the finer vibrations of the spiritual voice. 
 This had no concern in the fact that he hated and 
 despised, and was eager that others should hate and 
 despise, the religious forms that ruled France in his 
 1 De Maistre, Soiries de St. Pitersbourg, 4ieme. 
 
V. RELIGION. 243 
 
 day. The Christianity which he assailed was as little 
 touched as Voltairism itself with that spirit of holi- 
 ness which poured itself round the lives and words 
 of the two founders, the great master and the great 
 apostle. The more deeply imbued a man was with 
 this spirit, the more ardently would he crave the demoli- 
 tion of that Infamous in belief and in practice, which 
 poisoned the stream of holiness in its springs, and 
 shed pestilence along its banks, and choked its issues 
 in barrenness and corruption. 
 
 The point where the failure of this quality in 
 Voltaire was especially a source of weakness to his 
 attack, is to be found in the crippling of his historic 
 imagination, and the inability which this inflicted 
 upon him of conceiving the true meaning and lowest 
 roots of the Catholic legend. The middle age between 
 himself and the polytheism of the Empire was a 
 parched desert to him and to all his school, just as 
 to the Protestant the interval between the apostles 
 and Luther is a long night of unclean things. He 
 saw only a besotted people led in chains by a crafty 
 priesthood ; he heard only the unending repetition of 
 records that were fictitious, and dogmas that drew a 
 curtain of darkness over the understanding. Men 
 spoke to him of the mild beams of Christian charity, 
 and where they pointed he saw only the yellow glare 
 of the stake ; they talked of the gentle solace of 
 Christian faith, and he heard only the shrieks of the 
 thousands and tens of thousands whom faithful 
 Christian persecutors had racked, strangled, gibbeted, 
 
244 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 burnt, broken on the wheel. Through the steam oi 
 innocent blood which Christians for the honour of 
 their belief had spilt in every quarter of the known 
 world, the blood of Jews, Moors, Indians, and all the 
 vast holocausts of heretical sects and people in eastern 
 and western Europe, he saw only dismal tracts of 
 intellectual darkness, and heard only the humming 
 of the doctors, as they served forth to congregations 
 of poor men hungering for spiritual sustenance the 
 draff of theological superstition. 
 
 This vehement and blinding antipathy arose partly 
 from the intense force with which the existing aspect 
 of -Catholicism recalled all that was worst, and shut out 
 all that was best in its former history. One cannot 
 fairly expect the man who is in the grip of a decrepit 
 tyrant, to do absolutely full justice to the seemly 
 deeds and gracious promises of his tormentor's youth. 
 But partly also this blindness arose from the fact that 
 Voltaire measured the achievements of Catholicism by 
 the magnitude of its pretensions. He took its super- 
 natural claims seriously, and his intelligence was. 
 exasperated beyond control by the amazing dispro- 
 portion and incongruity between these claims and the 
 most conspicuous of the actual results. Those who 
 have parted company with a religion, as Voltaire had 
 parted company with Christianity, can only be counted 
 upon to award the well-earned praise to its better 
 part, after they have planted themselves stably on the 
 assumption that the given religion is a human and 
 natural force like another. 
 
v. RELIGION. 245 
 
 The just historic calm on which our modern prides 
 himself, is only possible in proportion to the mature 
 completeness with which he takes for granted, and 
 believes that those to whom he speaks will take for 
 granted, the absence of supernatural intervention in 
 the processes of religious action and development. 
 He is absolutely undisturbed by the thought of that 
 claim, which was omnipotent until Voltaire came to 
 do deadly battle with it, of Christianity to be a 
 crowning miracle of divine favour, which should raise 
 men to be only a little lower than the angels, and 
 should be the instrument for pouring out upon them 
 an ever-flowing stream of special and extraordinary 
 grace. It is not until the idea has dropped out of 
 our minds of the great fathers of the church as saints, 
 that we are free to perceive what services they 
 rendered as statesmen, and it is only when men have 
 ceased to dispute whether Christianity was a revela- 
 tion, that they have eyes to see what services it has 
 rendered as a system. But in Voltaire's time, if 
 Catholicism was justified historically, it was believed 
 dogmatically, and therefore was to be attacked dog- 
 matically also. The surrender of the written legend 
 has never hindered its champions from taking ground 
 which implied some esoteric revelation, that proves to 
 be some special interpretation of the written legend. 
 So long as the thinker is busy disproving the position 
 that a man who happens to live on a certain part of 
 the globe is a being of such singular and exceptional 
 consequence in the universe as to be held worthy by 
 
246 VOLTAIRE. OHAP. 
 
 supreme heavenly powers of receiving a miraculous 
 message and the promise of this and that unspeakable 
 privilege in indescribable worlds to come, so long he 
 is not likely to weigh very fairly the effects of the 
 belief in such power, messages, and privileges, on the 
 education and advancement of this world. The 
 modern historic justice which is done to Catholicism 
 is due to the establishment of a series of convictions 
 that civilisation is a structure which man by his own 
 right arm has raised for himself, that it has been 
 exposed to many an era of storm and stress, and to 
 manifold influences which have been perpetually 
 destroying portions of the great edifice, adding fresh 
 parts, modifying the old, by an interminable succession 
 of changes, resounding and volcanic, or still and 
 imperceptible; that the danger of destruction was 
 never so terrible as in the days of the dissolution of 
 the old Roman society ; that in this prolonged crisis 
 the Christian church emerged, first by its organisation 
 and the ability of some of its chiefs, and next by the 
 attraction of legends that harmonised with the needs 
 of a dark, confused, and terror-stricken time ; that the 
 many barbarous and absurd articles of belief incorpor- 
 ated in the Christian profession by the sophists of the 
 East, received from time to time humane modification 
 in the hands of the wiser churchmen of the West, 
 whose practical judgment was perpetually softening 
 down the crude, savage, unilluminated doctrines 
 which had naturally sprung up in the dismal age when 
 the Catholic system acquired substance and shapa 
 
V. RELIGION. 247 
 
 A just recognition of all these things is only easy to 
 one whose expectations from humanity are moderate, 
 who perceives how tardy and difficult is the accom- 
 plishment of each smallest step in the long process, 
 and how helpful are even "the simplest beliefs of rude 
 times in transforming men from vagrant animals into 
 beings with a consciousness of fixed common relations 
 towards some object of common worship, and so 
 planting the first germs of social consolidation and 
 growth. 
 
 Voltaire was, from the circumstances in which he 
 was placed, too busy proving the purely human origin 
 of Catholicism to have a mind free to examine how 
 much, if we suppose it to be of purely human origin, 
 it has done for those who accepted it. Perhaps we 
 ought rather to praise than blame him for abstaining 
 from planting himself at the historic point of view, 
 before settling the previous question whether the 
 historic point of view is permitted in considering the 
 religious movements of Europe. Until Voltaire and 
 others had divested the current religion of its super- 
 natural pretensions, it was impossible for any thinker, 
 who declines to try to take the second step before he 
 has already taken the first, to survey the operations 
 of such a religion as a merely secular force. This 
 surely is a field of thought where no serious inquirer 
 could content himself with a mere working hypothesis. 
 If the supernatural claims of Catholicism are well 
 founded, then the historic method of treating it is 
 either a frivolous diversion or else a grave and 
 
248 VOLTAIJRE. ohap 
 
 mischievous heresy. The issue being of this moment, 
 everybody who studies the philosophy of history with 
 effect must have made up his mind in one way or the 
 other. Voltaire had made up his mind very definitely, 
 and the conclusion to which, for adequate or inadequate 
 reasons, he came in this matter was one of the most 
 influential agencies in preparing men's minds for the 
 construction and general reception of a sounder histori- 
 cal philosophy than was within his own reach. That 
 he did not see the deduction from his work is a 
 limitation of vision that he shares with most of the 
 men to whom it has fallen to overthrow old sytems, 
 and clear the ground on which the next generation 
 has raised new. 
 
 n. 
 
 Having said thus much on the general causes and 
 conditions of Voltaire's attack, we may next briefly 
 examine his method. A brief examination suffices, 
 because, like all his contemporaries, he was so very 
 imperfectly acquainted with the principles of scientific 
 criticism, and because his weapons, though sharp and 
 deadly enough for their purpose, are now likely to 
 become more and more thoroughly antiquated. In 
 criticism he was, as has often been remarked, the 
 direct descendant of Bayle. That is, his instruments 
 were purely literary and dialectical. He examined 
 the various sacred narratives as if he had been 
 reviewing a contemporary historian. He delights in 
 
f. RELIGION. 249 
 
 the minute cavils of literary pyrrhonism, and rejoices 
 in the artifice of imposing the significance of the letter, 
 where his adversaries strove for interpretation of the 
 spirit. As if, for instance, anything could be more 
 childish than to attack baptism by asking whether 
 Christianity consists in throwing water on the head, 
 with a little salt in it. 1 He is perfectly content with 
 the exposure of a fallacy in words, without seeking to 
 expose the root fallacy of idea. Nothing short of the 
 blindest partisanship can pretend to find in this a 
 proper or adequate method. The utmost that can be 
 said, and no just historian ought to forget to say it, is 
 that it was not more improper nor inadequate than 
 the orthodox method of defence. Bayle's comment- 
 ary on the words, ' Compel them to come in,' would 
 not satisfy the modern requirements of scriptural 
 exegesis, but it was quite good enough to confound 
 those who contended that the text was a direct 
 warrant and injunction from heaven for the bitterest 
 persecution on earth. But the unfair parry of unfair 
 thrust, extenuate it as we may, count it inevitable as 
 we may, even reckoning up such advantages from it 
 as we can, and in the present case they were enormous, 
 can never be any pattern or masterpiece of retort ; 
 and it is folly to allow admiration for the social merit 
 of Voltaire's end to blind us to the logical demerit of 
 his means. It is deliberately to throw away the 
 advantage of our distance from the contest, and to sell 
 for a momentary self-indulgence in the spirit of party 
 1 (Euvres, xxxv. p. 37 
 
250 VOLTAIRE. CHAP 
 
 the birthright of a free and equitable historic vision. 
 Let men not fail to do justice to the gains of humanity 
 won by the emancipation of the eighteenth century ; 
 but we shall be worse off than if they had never been 
 transmitted, if they are allowed to bind us to approve 
 of every detail of the many movements by which the 
 final triumph was obtained. 
 
 The key to his method of attack is given us in a 
 sentence in one of his letters to D'Alembert. ' It 
 is never by means of metaphysics,' he says, ' that you 
 will succeed in delivering men from error ; you must 
 prove the truth by facts.' 1 In other words, the 
 sublime abstract reasoning of a Spinoza will do far 
 less to dispel the narrow ideas, unfounded beliefs, and 
 false restrictive conceptions which cripple the human 
 intelligence so long as it is in bondage to a theological 
 system, than a direct disproval of the alleged facts 
 on which the system professes to rest. It is only by 
 dealing immediately with these that you can make the 
 repulse of error a real question, substantially interesting 
 to ordinary men. Always remembering that Voltaire's 
 intelligence was practical rather than speculative, 
 and, besides this, that from the time when he com- 
 menced his attack in earnest the object which he had 
 at heart was the overthrow of a crushing practical 
 institution, we may agree that in such a humour and 
 with such a purpose the most effective way of 
 harassing so active and pestilent a foe was to carry 
 the war into the enemy's quarters, and to use those 
 1 Corr. 1773. (Ewvres, lxxv. p. 614. 
 
v. KELiaiON. 251 
 
 kinds of arguments which the greatest number of men 
 would be likely to find cogent. We may complain 
 that Voltaire never rises from the ground into the 
 region of the higher facts of religion ; and this is quite 
 true. It would have been controversially futile if he 
 had done so. There was no audience in those times 
 for the discussion of the higher facts ; and the reason 
 of this was that the spiritual instructors and cham- 
 pions themselves thrust into the front place legends, 
 miracles, and the whole of the peculiarly vulgar part 
 of the theological apparatus, which it would have 
 been as absurd to controvert metaphysically, as it 
 would be to try to elevate a Gold-coast negro from 
 his fetish worship by the transcendental parts of 
 Plato. 
 
 It nearly always happens that the defenders of a 
 decaying system, when they find themselves sur- 
 rounded by the wholly uncongenial atmosphere of 
 rationalistic method, fall back, not on the noblest, 
 but on the ignoblest parts of their system. Distressed 
 by the light, they shrink hurriedly into darkest 
 recesses of the familiar caves, partly because they 
 have a sense of especial security in a region that 
 they know so well, and partly because they have 
 misgivings lest the surrender of articles or practices 
 in which they only half believe, should by too 
 stringent process of logical compulsion lead to the 
 destruction of others in which they believe with all 
 their hearts. Such tactics may or may not be politic, 
 but we can at least be quite certain that they tend 
 
252 VOLTAIRE. 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 neither to elevation of religion, nor discovery ol 
 truth, nor profit and sincerity of discussion. If a 
 set of doctrines be attacked from many quarters in 
 an unworthy manner, and taken at their worst 
 instead of at their best, we may be quite sure that 
 this is as much due to the defenders as to the 
 assailants. It was not Voltaire's fault that the 
 controversy turned on issues which a more modern 
 opponent would not care to dispute. He is con- 
 stantly flippant and trivial, and constantly manifests 
 gross irreverence, but it was the writers whom he 
 was combating, writers like Sanchez or the stercorists, 
 who had opened frivolous and unbecoming questions 
 that could hardly be exposed with gravity. He 
 was making war on an institution, and it was not 
 his concern to fight on ground which his adversary 
 had never thought, and was too blind and demoralised 
 to be able to think, of taking up. It was not his 
 fault that the upholders of the creed he attacked, 
 made a stand upon the letter of sacred documents, 
 upon prophecy and miracle and special interven- 
 tion, upon the virtues of relics and the liquefaction 
 of the blood of Saint Januarius. The same wise 
 man who forbade us to answer a fool according to 
 his folly, also enjoined upon us to answer a fool 
 according to his folly, and the moral commentator 
 agrees that each prescription is as sage as its con- 
 tradictory. 
 
 If truth means anything, it was worth while to 
 put to rout the distortions of truth with which the 
 
v. RELIGION. 253 
 
 church lowered the understanding of its votaries. 
 If truth means anything, then it was worth while to 
 reply to the allegation that the history of the Christian 
 church is a long witness of the goodness of heaven 
 and the ever-present guidance of its heavenly founder, 
 by a record of the actual facts ; of the simplicity, 
 equality, absence of multiplied rites, orders, and 
 dogmas, among the primitive members of the con- 
 gregation, and of the radical differences between 
 the use of apostolic times and of times since; of the 
 incurable want of authority for all those tales of 
 demons being cast out, pious inscriptions in letters 
 of gold found graven on the hearts of martyrs, and 
 the rest, which grow rare in proportion as we draw 
 nearer to the times when the evidence for them 
 would have been preserved ; of the infamous character 
 of many Christian heroes, from Oonstantine down- 
 wards, and of the promptitude with which the 
 Christians, as soon as ever they had power, dyed 
 their hands in the blood of their persecutors; of the 
 stupefying circumstances that after a revelation was 
 made to the human race by no less a prodigy than 
 the incarnation of supreme power in a mortal body, 
 and the miraculous maintenance of this event and 
 its significance in the tradition, doctrine, discipline 
 of the Catholic church, yet the whole of Asia, the 
 whole of Africa, all the possessions of the English 
 and Dutch in America, all the uncivilised Indian 
 tribes, all the southern lands, amounting to one-fifth 
 part of the globe still remain in the clutches of the 
 
254 VOLTAIRE. CHAP 
 
 demon, to verify that holy saying of many heing 
 called but few chosen. 1 
 
 It may be said that this kind of argument really 
 proves nothing at all about the supernatural origin 
 or character of the Christian revelation, for which 
 you must seek the responses not of ecclesiastical 
 history but of the human heart. And that may be 
 a fair thing to say, but then this contention of the 
 new revelation being only a message to the heart 
 has only been heard since Voltaire thrust aside the 
 very different contention of his day. Those various 
 beliefs were universally accepted about the progress 
 of the church, which were true in no sense whatever, 
 literal or spiritual, mystical or historical. People 
 accepted traditions and records, sacred and profane, 
 as literal, accurate, categorical declarations and de- 
 scriptions of a long series of things done and suffered. 
 Moreover, the modern argument in favour of the 
 supernatural origin of the Christian religion, drawn 
 from its suitableness to our needs and its divine 
 response to our aspirations, must be admitted by 
 every candid person resorting to it to be of exactly 
 equal force in the mouth of a Mahometan or a fire- 
 worshipper or an astrolater. If you apply a subjective 
 test of this kind, it must be as good for the sincere 
 and satisfied votaries of one creed, as it is for those 
 of any other. The needs and aspirations of the 
 Mahometan would not be satisfied by fetishism or 
 polytheism, nor those of the developed polytheist by 
 
 1 Cf. Diet. Phil. s.v. Eglise. CBwo. liv. pp. 221-248. 
 
▼. RELIGION. 255 
 
 totem-worship. It would be ridiculous for so small 
 a minority of the race as the professors of Christianity 
 to assume that their aspirations are the absolute 
 measure of those of humanity in every stage. The 
 argument can never carry us beyond the relativity 
 of religious truth. 
 
 Now the French apologist a hundred years ago dealt 
 in the most absolute possible matter. Christianity 
 to him meant a set of very concrete ideas of all sorts; 
 any one who accepted them in the concrete and literal 
 form prescribed by the church would share infinite 
 bliss, and any one who rejected them, whether de- 
 liberately or from never having been so happy as to 
 hear of them, would be infinitely tormented. If 
 this theory be right, then Voltaire must naturally 
 be abhorred by all persons who hold it, as a perverse 
 and mischievous hinderer of light. If it be wrong, 
 and we must observe that from its terms this is not 
 one of the marvellously multiplying beliefs of which 
 we hear that they may be half wrong and_ half right, 
 then Voltaire may take rank with other useful ex- 
 pellers of popular error. Everybody must admit 
 how imperfect is all such treatment of popular error ; 
 how little rich, how little comprehensive, how little 
 full Yet the surgeon who has couched his patient's 
 cataract has surely done a service, even if he do not 
 straightway carry him to enjoy the "restored faculty 
 on some high summit of far and noble prospect. 
 
 Voltaire's attack was essentially the attack of the 
 English deists, as indeed he is always willing enough 
 
256 VOLTAIRE. CHAP 
 
 to admit, pursued with far less gravity and honest 
 search for truth, but, it is hardly necessary to say, 
 with far more adroitness, rapidity, and grace of 
 manner than any of them, even than Bolingbroke. 
 As we have seen, he insisted on throwing himself 
 upon the facts in the records that are least easily 
 reconciled with a general sense of probability and 
 evidence, as gradually developed in men by experience. 
 He placed the various incidents of the Bible, the 
 interpretation of them by the church, the statement 
 of doctrine, the characters of prominent actors, in 
 the full light of common experience and of the 
 maxims which experience has made second nature. 
 'I always speak humanly,' he says mockingly, 'I 
 always put myself in the place of a man who, having 
 never heard tell either of Jews or Christians, should 
 read these books for the first time, and not being illu- 
 minated by grace, should be so unhappy as to trust 
 unaided reason in the matter, until he should be 
 enlightened from on high.' 1 
 
 It is superfluous to detail the treatment to which 
 he subjected such mysteries of the faith as the inherit- 
 ance of the curse of sin by all following generations 
 from the first fall of man ; the appearance from time 
 to time, among an obscure oriental tribe, of. prophets 
 who foretold the coming of a dhine deliverer, who 
 should wash away that fatal stain by sacrificial expia- 
 tion; the choice of this specially cruel, treacherous, 
 stubborn, and rebellious tribe, to be the favoured 
 1 Dieu et les Hommes, a. xiv. CEuvres, xlv. p. 318. 
 
V. RELIGION. 257 
 
 people of a deity of spotless mercy and truth; the 
 advent of the deliverer in circumstances of extra- 
 ordinary meanness and obscurity among a generation 
 that greeted his pretensions with incredulity, and 
 finally caused him to be put to death with ignominy, 
 in spite of his appeal to the prophets and to the many 
 signs and wonders which he wrought among them ; 
 the rising of this deliverer from the dead ; the ascrip- 
 tion to him in the course of the next three or four 
 centuries. of claims which he never made in person, 
 and of propositions which he never advanced while 
 he walked on the earth, yet which must now be 
 accepted by every one who would after death escape 
 a pitiless torment without end ; the truly miraculous 
 preservation amid a fiery swarm of heresies, intricate, 
 minute, subtle, barely intelligible, but very soul -de- 
 stroying, of that little fragile thread of pure belief 
 which can alone guide each spirit in the divinely 
 appointed path. Exposed to the light, which they 
 were never meant to endure, of ordinary principles of 
 evidence founded on ordinary experience, the immortal 
 legends, the prophecies, the miracles, the mysteries, on 
 which the spiritual faith of Europe had hung for so 
 many generations, seemed to shrivel up in unlovely 
 dissolution. The authenticity of the texts on which 
 the salvation of man depends, the contradictions and 
 inconsistencies of the documents, the incompatibility 
 between many acts and motives expressly approved 
 by the holiest persons, and the justice and mercy 
 which are supposed to sit enthroned on high in their 
 s 
 
258 VOLTAIBE. OHAP, 
 
 bosoms, the forced constructions of prophecies and 
 their stultifying futility of fulfilment, the extra- 
 ordinary frivolousness of some of the occasions on 
 which the divine power of thaumaturgy was deliber- 
 ately and solemnly exerted, — these were among the 
 points at which the messenger of Satan at Ferney was 
 permitted sorely to buffet the church. What is the 
 date of the Apostles' Creed t What of the so-called 
 Athanasian Creed 1 How were the seven sacraments 
 instituted one after another 1 ! What was the differ- 
 ence between the synaxis and the mass 1 And so 
 forth through many hundreds of pages. 
 
 Along with rationalistic questions in scriptural and 
 ecclesiastical history, are many more as to doctrine, 
 and the assumption on which a doctrine rests ; ques- 
 tions as to the trinity, as to redemption by the shed- 
 ding of innocent blood, as to the daily miracle of 
 transubstantiation, as to the resurrection of the body, 
 as to the existence of an entity called soul independ- 
 ently of that matter which, apart from miracle, seems 
 an inseparable condition of its manifestation. His 
 arguments on all these subjects contain a strange 
 mixture of shallow mockery and just objection. The 
 questions which he suggests for the doctors as to the 
 resurrection of the body may serve for an example. 
 Among them are these : 
 
 ' A Breton soldier goes to Canada. It happens by 
 a not uncommon chance that he falls short of food ; 
 he is forced to eat a piece of an Iroquois whom he 
 has killed over night The Iroquois had fed on 
 
V. RELIGION. 259 
 
 Jesuits for two or three months, a great part of his 
 body had thus become Jesuit So there is the body 
 of the soldier with Iroquois, Jesuit, and whatever he 
 had eaten before, entering into it. How then will 
 each resume exactly what belongs to him V ' In 
 order to come to life again, to be the same person 
 you were, you must have a lively and present recol- 
 lection ; it is memory that makes your identity. 
 Having lost memory, how are you to be the same 
 man V Again, ' considering that only certain material 
 elements are proper for the composition of the human 
 body, where is earth enough to be found to remake 
 all the bodies needed for so many hundreds of genera- 
 tions ? And supposing that by a prodigious miracle 
 the whole human race could b'e resuscitated in the 
 Valley of Jehoshaphat, where are all the spirits mean- 
 while?' 1 
 
 Another very favourite mode of approaching the 
 beliefs, incidents, and personages of Jewish and 
 Christian history was to show that they had counter- 
 parts in some pagan fables or systems, in the books 
 of Chinese philosophers or Brahminical sages. The 
 inference from this identity or correspondence between 
 some Judaical practices and myths, and the practices 
 and myths of Arabians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, 
 Hindoos, was that they were in all cases equally the 
 artificial creations of impostors preying on the credu- 
 lity of men, ' the first prophet or diviner having been 
 the first rogue who met the first fool.' It is curious 
 
 1 Diet. Phil. s.v. R&urrecuon. (Euvres, lviii. p. 67. 
 
260 VOLTAIRE. chap. 
 
 to observe how the modern argument from constantly 
 extending discoveries in comparative mythology tends 
 to the demolition of the special pretensions of Judaical 
 myths of all sorts, by the very opposite inference to 
 that on which the Voltairean school rested. Voltaire 
 urged that as these myths resembled one another in 
 this and that important feature, therefore they were 
 all equally spurious, false, and absurd. The modern, 
 on the contrary, would hold them all equally genuine, 
 equally free from the taint of imposture in priest 01 
 people, and equally faithful representations of the 
 mental states which produced and accepted them. 
 The weakening of the particular sanctity and objective 
 reality of any one form of these common primitive 
 ways of thinking about the action of non- human 
 agents would be just as strong, whether we take the 
 new or the old view of the generation of myths, but 
 the difference of the effect of the two views upon the 
 ( justice and fertility of historic spirit is immeasurable. 
 There is no sign, however, that Voltaire was ever 
 seriously conscious of the importance of a right 
 consideration of the mental conditions of primitive 
 peoples. This study had been commenced in his 
 own time by De Brosses, the inventor of the term 
 fetishism, and pronounced by competent modern 
 authorities to have been a powerful and original 
 thinker upon the facts of the infancy of civilisation. 1 
 Yet Voltaire treated the speculations of this indust- 
 rious inquirer with the same ignorant contempt and 
 1 See, for instance, Tylor's Primitive Culture, t 32, ii. 131, etc. 
 
tf. RELIGION. 261 
 
 scorn that the theological enemies of geology were 
 once accustomed to bestow on men who chipped bits of 
 rock and cherished fossils. 1 Oddly enough, Voltaire's 
 carelessness and want of thought on these matters 
 left him with that very theory of the nature of the 
 development of cultivation, on which the theological 
 school insists to this day as against the scientific 
 ethnologists. The question is whether the earliest 
 men were savages, or partially civilised; in other 
 words, whether civilisation has consisted in a certain 
 uniform progression from a state a little above the 
 brutes, or whether the savage is not a being who 
 has degenerated from a partial degree of civilisation. 
 The progression theory was no doubt in a general 
 way a characteristic doctrine of the men of the 
 eighteenth century, for which De Maistre, an ardent 
 and most ingenious advocate of the degeneration 
 theory, reviled them with his usual heartiness. Yet 
 his eagerness to depress revelation by exalting natural 
 theology led Voltaire to the essentially theological 
 position that the earliest men had a clear and lofty 
 idea of a Supreme Being, and a ready appreciation of 
 justice and charity in their relations with one another, 
 until the vile ambition of priestly and prophetic im- 
 postors succeeded in setting upon their necks the yoke 
 of systems which corrupted the heart and conscience, 
 and sophisticated a pure and simple faith. 
 
 1 Corr. 1770. (Euvres, lxxv. pp. 522, 526, etc. This active 
 spite prevented the accession of De Brasses to a seat in the 
 academy. 
 
262 VOLTAIRE. CHAP 
 
 He did not hold that men were conscious of the 
 one God as they were conscious of light, or that they 
 had perceptions of such a being, as they had percep- 
 tions of the ground they tilled. The idea was derived 
 by process of natural logic from the contemplation of 
 astonishing natural effects, of harvest and dearth, of 
 fair days and tempests, of benefactions and scourges. 
 They saw all these things, and felt the work of a 
 master. 1 Just as in each community there were men 
 who by the force of their reason found out that 
 triangles with the same base and of the same height 
 are equal, and others who in sowing and reaping and 
 tending their flocks perceived that the sun and moon 
 returned pretty nearly to the point from which they 
 had started, and that they never travelled beyond a 
 certain limit to north or south, so there was a third 
 man who considered that men, animals, stars could 
 not have made themselves, and who saw that there- 
 fore a Supreme Being must exist; while a fourth, 
 struck by the wrongs that men inflicted on one 
 another, concluded that if there exists a being who 
 made the stars, the earth, and men, such a being must 
 confer favour on the virtuous, and punishments on 
 the wicked. This idea, Voltaire declares, is so natural 
 and so good that it was most readily embraced. 2 The 
 various forms of revelations were only so many cor- 
 ruptions of that simple, serviceable, and self-proving 
 monotheism, and so were the conceptions of poly- 
 
 1 Diet. Phil. a. v. Dieu. (Euvres, liv. p. 20. 
 ' Dieu et les Homines, c. iii. (Euvres, xlv. p. 270. 
 
V. RELIGION. 263 
 
 theism. He had no notion that monotheism is a later 
 development of the theological spirit than polytheism. 
 Unable to deny that the Greeks and Romans, about 
 whom he knew so little and talked so much, had 
 plurality of gods, he drew a distinction between one 
 Supreme Being and all the rest, and contended that 
 you may search all their records in vain for a single 
 fact or a single word to counterbalance the many 
 passages and monuments which attest their belief of 
 the sovereignty of the one deity and his superiority 
 over all the rest. 1 We do not know whether this 
 was a fortuitous kind of growth in his own mind, 
 or whether it was a scrap of recollection from the 
 painstaking pages in which Cudworth had worked at 
 the establishment of that explanation of polytheism. 
 Voltaire too often writes on these weighty subjects, 
 as if trusting to a memory that snatched effectively 
 at plausible theories, while losing much of their evi- 
 dence and all their deeper bearings. 
 
 It would be not a little extraordinary, if we did not 
 constantly remember that Voltaire's strength did not 
 lie in speculation or systematic thought, that he saw 
 none of the objections to this account of things, and 
 that he was content with so limited an observation of 
 the facts. If De Brosses had magnanimously suffered 
 himself to be cheated in the transaction of the four- 
 teen cords of wood, Voltaire would perhaps have read 
 his book candidly, and if he had read it otherwise 
 than with a foregone resolution to despise it, he would 
 1 Diet. Phil. s. v. Polyth&me. (Euvres, lvii. p. 391. 
 
264 VOLTAIKE. chap 
 
 have come upon a number of circumstances entirely 
 fatal to his smooth theory that many gods are always 
 subordinate to the one, because he would have had to 
 consider those states of the human mind in which 
 there are no spiritual gods at all, but in which every 
 object whatever is invested with volition and power. 
 Tn one place he shows something like a recognition of 
 the true nature of the process. ' I have always been 
 persuaded,' he says in a letter to Mairan, ' that the 
 phenomena of the heavens have been in the main the 
 source of the old fables. Thunder was heard on the 
 inaccessible summit of a mountain ; therefore there 
 must be gods dwelling on the mountain, and launching 
 the thunder. The sun seems to speed from east to 
 west, therefore he has fine coursers. The rain does 
 not touch the head of one who sees a rainbow, so the 
 rainbow is a token that there will never again be a 
 deluge.' 1 But then Voltaire was no systematic 
 thinker, and thus there was no security that any 
 given right idea which came into his mind would 
 either remain present to him, or would be followed 
 up and placed along with other ideas in a scientific 
 order. Apart from this, however, it is extraordinary 
 that Voltaire's extreme acuteness did not suggest to 
 him the question, how it was that the artless and clear 
 belief in one God became more and more obscured by 
 the growing multitude of other gods, just in pro- 
 portion as the primitive tribes became more civilised 
 in all the arts of life. If the nomad progenitors of the 
 1 Corr. 1761. (Euvres, Ixvii. p. 186. 
 
V. KELIGION. 265 
 
 Greeks had only one god, how was it that, as know- 
 ledge, social feeling, love of beauty, and all the other 
 ennobling parts of man became more fully developed, 
 the power of superstition waxed greater, and temples 
 and images were multiplied 1 
 
 Again, the theologist might, consistently with his 
 deliberate principle of resort to the miraculous, con- 
 tend that this first conception of a single supreme 
 power, in the fact of the existence of which he is 
 entirely at one with Voltaire, was directly implanted 
 by a supernatural force. But Voltaire, debarred from 
 such an explanation as this, was driven silently to 
 assume and imply the truly incredible position that 
 the rudest savages, being what we know them, 
 urgently occupied in the struggle for means of sub- 
 sistence, leading lives purely animal, possessed of no 
 vocabulary for any abstract idea, should yet by one 
 leap of natural logic have risen to one of the very 
 highest pinnacles of speculation, and both felt and 
 expressed the idea of cause in the most general and 
 comprehensive of all its forms. Surely this assump- 
 tion, measured by any of those standards of experi- 
 ence or probability to which he professed to appeal, 
 was as much of a miracle as those which he so decisively 
 repudiated. 
 
 In one of his letters Voltaire declared that Locke 
 
 was the only reasonable metaphysician that he knew, 
 
 and that next to him he placed Hume. 1 Did he ever 
 
 read, we may wonder, that masterly essay on the 
 
 1 Core. 1758. (Entires, Ixvi. p. 200. 
 
266 VOLTAIRE. OHAP. 
 
 Natural History of Religion, where Hume not only 
 combats with his usual vigour and effectiveness the 
 idea of the belief in one omniscient, omnipotent, and 
 omnipresent spirit being the primary religion of men, 
 and shows that polytheism precedes monotheism, but 
 also traces the origin of all religion to its rudiment, 
 in that 'universal tendency among mankind to con- 
 ceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to 
 every object those qualities with which they are 
 familiarly acquainted, and of which they are inti- 
 mately conscious V 1 The greater the knowledge we 
 acquire of the spiritual rudiments of primitive people, 
 the more certainly is it established that the idea of 
 theism as the earliest and most elementary belief, 
 which Voltaire had picked up from Bolingbroke and 
 Pope, is untenable, and that Hume has been more 
 and more fully warranted in saying that the only 
 point of theology on which the consent of mankind 
 is nearly universal is that ' there is an invisible, in- 
 telligent power in the world, but whether this power 
 be supreme or subordinate, whether confined to one 
 being or distributed among several, what attributes, 
 qualities, connections, or principles of action, ought to 
 be ascribed to these beings, concerning all these points 
 there is the widest difference in the popular systems 
 of theology.' 2 This might be placing natural theology 
 very low, but Hume at any rate placed it where he 
 did and described it as he did, because he had know- 
 ledge enough of the condition of various nations id 
 1 Nat, Hist, of Religion, sect iii. 
 
v. EELIGION. 267 
 
 various parts of their history, and was sufficiently 
 penetrated with a cautious and scientific spirit, to 
 abstain from the unsupported and purely metaphysical 
 conjectures of men like Voltaire and Rousseau. Well 
 might the keen-eyed De Maistre describe him from 
 the Catholic point of view as the most dangerous and 
 the guiltiest of all those pestilent writers, — the one 
 who employed most talent with most coolness to do 
 most mischief. 1 
 
 If Voltaire had studied Hume, moreover, he might 
 have learnt how futile and inappropriate it is in the 
 long run to examine a religion otherwise than in its 
 most fundamental and comprehensive general ideas, 
 and how narrow and superficial would every philo- 
 sophic appreciation ultimately find what he called 
 refutation by facts. For his own immediate purpose, 
 which was to cover the church and its creed with 
 ridicule, the method of collecting all the ludicrous, 
 immoral, and inconsistent circumstances in the Scrip- 
 tures and their current interpretation, was, as we 
 have already said, a weapon potent enough. Voltaire, 
 however, not only did not use, he never understood 
 nor perceived, the fact that a religion rests for its 
 final base on a certain small number of ideas, or that 
 it is only by touching these, by loosening the firmness 
 of their hold, by revealing their want of coherency 
 and consistency with other accepted ideas, that we 
 can expect to shake the superstructure. For example, 
 if only the official exponents of religion had not been 
 1 Soirees de St, Pitersbourg, vi. p. 403. 
 
268 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 so firmly bent on making the feeblest of all their 
 ramparts into their very citadel, it would have been 
 a very small thing to urge the truly singular quality 
 of such miracles as those of the water made wine at 
 Cana, of the cursing of the barren fig-tree, of the un- 
 fortunate swine who rushed violently down a steep 
 place and were choked. These were legends that 
 from the right point of view of religion were not 
 worth defending, any more than from the right point 
 of view of truth they were worth attacking. The 
 details of the use of a supernaturally conferred power 
 may best be let alone, until the probability of the 
 existence and bestowal of such power has been dis- 
 cussed' and decided. The important issue and matter 
 of vital concern turned upon the general idea of the 
 miraculous ; yet this was what Voltaire, perhaps from 
 an instinctive consciousness of the little capacity he 
 possessed for genuine speculation, postponed to the 
 really secondary purpose of disparaging particular 
 cases of miraculous performance. 
 
 We are now touching what, before Hume, was 
 the central defect of the eighteenth-century attack, 
 judged philosophically rather than practically. The 
 movement was a reaction against a certain set of ideas 
 which had been incorporated in the Christian system, 
 as that system was elaborated by the oriental sophisters. 
 Yet the exact conflict between the old ideas and the 
 new was never conceived, much less was it expressed, 
 in clear comprehensive formulas. Consequently the 
 most general terms for the debate were neither sought 
 
7. RELIGION. 269 
 
 nor found, and hence the oppressive narrowness, the 
 stifling want of free air, throughout the controversy. 
 The truth or falsehood which it is good for us to 
 discover in connection with a religion resides not in 
 detail, but in the largest general ideas of the subject. 
 These draw all else along with them. Let us take an 
 illustration £rom a characteristic of the anti-christian 
 attack which has already been mentioned. The Vol- 
 tairean school, as we have before observed, 1 habitually 
 derided the sacred importance attached by the church 
 in all ages, from Saint Paul downwards, to the practice 
 of continence. But there is no sign, so far as the 
 present writer's knowledge goes, that they ever were 
 near perceiving the origin of that superstition lying 
 deep down for so many centuries in the human mind. 
 The sanctity of continence was only one product of the 
 old far-spreading conviction of all the evil and unholi- 
 ness essentially inherent in matter. This conviction, 
 which has itself a history and genesis well worth 
 tracing, probably accounts for more of the peculiar 
 manifestations contained in Christianity than any one 
 principle of belief besides. From this metaphysical 
 idea sprang the whole theory of asceticism; it had 
 much to do indirectly with the first establishment of 
 the doctrine of the divinity of Christ ; it entered into 
 the triumph of indispensable grace. 2 The speculative 
 origin of practices and sentiments which the heads of 
 
 1 Ante, ch. iii. 
 
 2 See Milman's ffist. of Latin Christianity, bk. ii. chap, ii. 
 and iii. 
 
270 VOLTAIEE. OHjLP 
 
 the western church valued, modified, and sagaciously 
 used for ecclesiastical or political reasons, ought never 
 to be lost sight of, because their duration has depended 
 on the circumstance of the original speculative idea 
 remaining deeply sunk, though not often put into 
 articulate form, in the minds of the faithful, and of 
 all others whom these practices and sentiments have 
 influenced. One key to the central movement of the 
 eighteenth century is the dispersion of this associa- 
 tion of evil and corruption from matter. There was 
 energetic and triumphant jDrogress in the discovery 
 of the laws of matter, in their most stupendous, over- 
 whelming, and majestic order. There was a steady 
 tendency to resolve mental manifestations into func- 
 tions of matter. There was a general inclination to 
 forget those depressing facts connected with the decay 
 and dissolution of matter, which, in the dismal times 
 when the church was founded, had been thrust into 
 a prominence so humiliating to human dignity. The 
 general movement was carried too far by extreme 
 spirits, but on the whole it was a salutary and much- 
 needed protest against the limitation of knowledge 
 within airy cloudlands where no true knowledge was 
 to be reached, and of emotion within transcendental 
 aspirations where the deep reality of human relations 
 faded into dim distance. 
 
 It is only when controversy is conducted with 
 reference to ground ideas of this kind, that the parties 
 to it can be sure of being on the same plane, and, if 
 they are not on the same plane, one of the least mis- 
 
V. RELIGION. 271 
 
 chiefs is that their arguments fly over one another's 
 heads. Voltaire failed, partly from want of historic 
 knowledge, partly from insufficient depth of nature, 
 to see what these ground ideas were, against which 
 he was fighting. Thus, to take another instance, he 
 failed to see that the belief in the exertion of super- 
 natural power, even on occasions which struck him as 
 so frivolous, and in a manner undoubtedly incom- 
 patible with justice, was merely an incidental result 
 of a profoundly rooted idea of the closeness, constancy, 
 and mixed holiness and majesty, of the relations 
 between man and an awful being other than man, 
 endowed with powers denied to us, and animated 
 by motives inscrutable to us. He chose, if we are 
 not wrong in using a term that may imply much con- 
 scious deliberation, to identify his own conception of 
 deity with the conception of deity in the first four 
 centuries of the Christian era, simply because the 
 object of each was called by a common name. He 
 found that the actions attributed to the Supreme 
 Being whom the church revered, were unworthy of 
 a personage endowed with the qualities which he 
 ascribed to a supreme power, in his own version of 
 of that culminating conception. He was thus never 
 on the same plane of thought or argument, but he 
 never was near finding this out. The God whom he 
 conceived was incapable, 'from the very nature attri- 
 buted to him by his worshippers, of the various 
 transactions, lofty and mean, sublime and puerile, 
 described in the documents on which Catholicism 
 
272 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 relied, and the tradition by which it corroborated 
 and interpreted them. The ground idea of the belief 
 in the miraculous was an extremely anthropomorphic 
 notion of a divinity, possessed of complete power, but 
 using it in obedience to motives which finite under- 
 standings cannot pretend to fathom or measure. 
 Such a notion was the natural growth of the human 
 mind, amid such a set of circumstances as attended 
 the development and establishment of Christianity. 
 Men sat in darkness, forlorn and without hope, and 
 it is not hard for us to imagine the exultation with 
 which some greater spirit would produce, and all 
 others would embrace, the idea of this misery and 
 darkness being no more than an outer accident, the 
 mysterious and incomprehensible dispensation of a 
 divine being,' ever alive to the destinies of men, but 
 holding them in the hollow of an unseen hand, and 
 guiding them in ways that are not as our ways ; ever 
 remote from corporeal vision, but operating at a mul- 
 titude of points on the spirit of each man through 
 grace, and finally, by a consummating miracle repeated 
 daily some thousands of times, severing this spirit from 
 the probation of flesh, and prolonging its existence 
 independently of the body through all eternity in 
 modes of being, none the less real for being impos- 
 sible to conceive. To Voltaire this was unspeakable 
 foolishness. The prodigies of grace, of the resurrec- 
 tion of the body, of the incarnation of divinity, were 
 inconsistent with the qualities which he imputed to 
 the creator of the universe, and hence he contented 
 
V. KELIGION. 273 
 
 himself with mocking at them ; the real state of the 
 case was simply that a number of influences had drawn 
 men aside from that conception of the creator, with 
 which such prodigies were not inconsistent, but 
 were on the contrary logically and inseparably asso- 
 ciated. 
 
 This failure to rise to the highest ideas involved 
 in the great debate explains, along with much besides, 
 two striking facts connected with it. It explains the 
 intense acerbity of the conflict, and the flaming depth 
 of the chasm which divided and divides the two camps 
 in France. For the best natures are most violently 
 irritated and outraged by mocking and satiric attack 
 upon the minor details, the accidents, the outside of 
 the objects of faith, when they would have been 
 affected in a very different way by a contrast between 
 the loftiest parts of their own belief and the loftiest 
 parts of some other belief. Many persons who would 
 listen to a grave attack on the consistency, reasonable- 
 ness, and elevation of the currently ascribed attri- 
 butes of the godhead, with something of the respect 
 due to the profound solemnity of the subject, would 
 turn with deaf and implacable resentment upon 
 one who should make merry over the swine of 
 G-adara. 
 
 The same circumstance, secondly, explains the 
 absence of permanent quality about all that Voltaire 
 wrote upon religion. For instance, men who sym- 
 pathise with him in his aims, and even for their 
 sake forgive him his method, who have long ago 
 T 
 
274 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 struck the tents under which, they once found shelter; 
 in the lands of belief, to whom Catholicism has 
 become as extinct a thing as Mahometanism, even 
 they will turn with better chance of edification to 
 the great masters and teachers of the old faith, than 
 to the fiery precursor of the new. And why, if 
 not for the reason that while he dealt mainly with 
 the lower religious ideas, or with the higher ideas 
 in their lowest forms, they put these into the second 
 place, and move with an inspiring exultation amid 
 the loftiest and most general conceptions that fine 
 imagination and a soaring reason could discover 
 among the spiritual treasures of their religion. They 
 turned to the diviner mind, and exercised themselves 
 with the weightiest and most universal circumstances 
 of the destiny of mankind. This is what makes their 
 thought and eloquence of perpetual worth, because 
 the circumstances with which they deal are perpetually 
 present, and the elements of life and character to 
 which they appeal perpetually operative. The awful 
 law of death, the impenetrable secret of the first 
 cause, the fierce play of passion and universal dis- 
 tribution of pain, the momentariness of guilt and 
 eternity of remorse, the anguish of bereavement that 
 chokes and rends, the hopeless inner desolation which 
 is the unbroken lot of myriads of the forlorn of the 
 earth, — these ghostly things ever laying siege to the 
 soul were known to a Bossuet or a Pascal, and re- 
 solved by a series of ideas about the unknowable 
 power and the government of the world, which are no 
 
V. RELIGION. 275 
 
 longer the mighty weapons of exorcism they once 
 were, but they are at any rate of due magnitude and 
 proportion, sublime, solemn, never unworthy. We 
 touch the hands of those who have walked with the 
 most high, and they tell us many moving wonders ; 
 we look on faces that have shone in rays from the 
 heaven of noble thoughts; we hear solemn and melo- 
 dious words from men who received answers from 
 oracles that to us are very mute, but the memory of 
 whose power is still upon us. Hence the work of 
 these glowing mortals lives even for those to whom 
 their faith is dead, while the words that Voltaire 
 wrote on religion are lifeless as the Infamous which 
 they so meritoriously slew. As we have said, he 
 never knew the deeper things of Catholicism. This 
 is what he wrote about the immortal Dante : ' Every- 
 body with a spark of good sense ought to blush at 
 that monstrous assemblage in hell of Dante and 
 Virgil, of Saint Peter and Madonna Beatrice. There 
 are to be found among us, in the eighteenth century, 
 people who force themselves to admire feats of 
 imagination as stupidly extravagant and as bar- 
 barous as this ; they have the brutality to oppose 
 them to the masterpieces of genius, wisdom, and 
 eloquence, that we have in our language. tem- 
 for a, judicium/' 1 To which prodigy of criticism 
 we can only exclaim with the echo, tenvpora, 
 judicium 1 
 
 1 Corr. 1761. (Euvres, lxvii. p. 74. 
 
276 VOLTAIBE, 
 
 m. 
 
 Let us see shortly what was Voltaire's own solu- 
 tion of those facts of life with which religion has to 
 deal. The Catholic solution we know, and can de- 
 finitely analyse and describe; but the vagueness of 
 Voltairean deism defies any attempt at detailed exami- 
 nation. We can perceive a supernatural existence, 
 endowed with indefinable attributes, which are fixed 
 subjectively in the individual consciousness of each 
 believer, and which therefore can never be set forth 
 in a scheme of general acceptance. The Voltairean 
 deist — and such persons exist in ample numbers to 
 this day — hardly ever takes the trouble to reconcile 
 with one another the various attributes which he 
 imputes at various times to some great master power 
 of the universe. There is scarcely one of these 
 attributes to which, when it comes to be definitely 
 described, he does not encounter affronting contra- 
 diction in the real occurrences that arise from time 
 to time to search and try all our theories, deisticaL 
 or other. The phenomena of moral and physical 
 evil on the earth, and the arrival of disasters which 
 make no discrimination between their victims, are 
 constantly dealing sore blows to the conceptions which 
 the deist l6ves to erect in moments of optimistic 
 expansion, of the clemency, justice, and illimitable 
 power of a being who governs the universe, and is 
 a something outside and independent of it. These 
 
7. RELIGION. 277 
 
 optimist conceptions, vague, unverified, free of de- 
 finite relations with any moral or social system, and 
 furnishing no principle of active human association 
 as the Catholic idea of deity had done, constitute 
 the favourite religion or religiosity of those classes 
 in all modern countries, which have found the 
 Voltairean kind of objection to the Christian revela- 
 tion insuperable, and which are so fortunate as to 
 enjoy a full measure of material prosperity. To 
 these classes the black side of life is strange and a 
 matter of hearsay; and hence the awkwardness of 
 reconciling their complacent theory with the 'horror 
 of facts is never forced upon them. In their own 
 happiness they love to superadd the luxury of thank- 
 fulness to the bounty of a being to whom they owe 
 all, and to swell the tide of their own emotions by 
 meditation on his infinite and unspeakable perfections. 
 Proof they require none, beyond the loveliness and 
 variety of external nature, the innocence and delight 
 of all young creatures, the order of the seasons bear- 
 ing us their copious fruit, the vivid intelligence and 
 serviceable power of man, who is the divinely ap- 
 pointed recipient of all these multitudinous favours. 
 Hence in proportion as this sort of deism stirs the 
 soul of a man, the more closely are his inmost 
 thoughts reserved for contemplation of the relations 
 between the Supreme Being and his own individuality. 
 It is a creed which is specially adapted for, and has 
 been generally seized by, those with whom the 
 world has gone very well, owing to their own 
 
278 VOLTAIRE. CHAP 
 
 laudable exertion, and who are inclined to believe 
 that the existing ordering of society is fundamentally 
 the best possible. It is the superlative decoration 
 of optimism. 
 
 The mass of men, those who dwell in dens and 
 whose lives are bitter, have never, in spite even of 
 Eousseau's teaching, accepted deism. An opportunity 
 for trying the experiment had occurred in the fourth 
 century, and the lesson should not be forgotten. 
 Deism had been the prevailing opinion in religion, 
 but, as the most instructive of all the historians of 
 the dissolution of the Empire observes, it was generally 
 felt that deism did not supply the void occasioned by 
 the absence of the multitude of sympathetic divinities 
 of the pagan system. Its influence was cold and in- 
 animate. 1 The common people are wont to crave 
 a revelation, or else they find atheism a rather better 
 synthesis than any other. They either cling to the 
 miraculously transmitted message with its hopes of 
 recompense, and its daily communication of the 
 divine voice in prayer or sacrament, or else they 
 make a world which moves through space as a black 
 monstrous ship with no steersman. The bare deistic 
 idea, of a being endowed at once with sovereign 
 power and sovereign clemency, with might that 
 cannot be resisted and justice that cannot be im- 
 pugned, who loves man with infinite tenderness, yet 
 sends him no word of comfort and gives him no way 
 
 'Finlay's Greece under the Romans (B.C. 146-a.d. 716), pp, 
 146, 147. 
 
V. RELIGION. 279 
 
 of deliverance, is too hard a thing for those who 
 have to endure the hardships of the brutes, but yet 
 preserve the intelligence of men. 
 
 Comment concevoir un Dieu, la bonte meme, 
 Qui prodigua ses biens a ses enfans qu'il aime, 
 Et qui versa sur eux les maux a pleines mains ? 
 Quel oeil peut penftrer dans ses profonds desseins ? 
 De l'etre tout parfait le mal ne pouvait naitre ! 
 II ne vient point d'autrui puisque Dieu seul est maitre : 
 II existe pourtant. tristes verites ! 
 melange 6tonnant de contrarietes ! 
 Un Dieu vint consoler notre race affligee ; 
 II visita la terre et ne l'a point cnangee ! 
 Un sophiste arrogant nous dit qu'il ne l'a pu ; 
 II le pouvait, dit 1' autre, et ne l'a point voulu ; 
 II le voudra, sans doute ; et tandis qu'on raisonne, 
 Des foudres souterraines engloutissent Lisbonne, 
 Et de trente cites dispersent les debris, 
 Des bords sanglans du Tage a la mer de Cadix. 1 
 
 A bald deism has undoubtedly been the creed of 
 some of the purest and most generous men that have 
 ever trod the earth, but none the less on that account 
 is it in its essence a doctrine of self-complacent in- 
 dividualism from which society has little to hope, and 
 with which there is little chance of the bulk of society 
 ever sympathising.* In truth, one can scarcely call it 
 a creed. It is mainly a name for a particular mood of 
 fine spiritual exaltation ; the expression of a state of 
 indefinite aspiration and supreme feeling for lofty 
 things. Are you going to convert the new barbarians 
 of our western world with this fair word of emptiness 
 
 1 Poeme sur le Desastre de Lisbonne. (Euvres, xv. p. 63, 
 
280 VOLTAIRE. chap. 
 
 Will you sweeten the lives of suffering men, and take 
 its heaviness from that droning piteous chronicle oi 
 wrong and cruelty and despair, which everlastingly 
 saddens the compassionating ear like moaning of a 
 midnight sea; will you animate the stout of heart 
 with new fire, and the firm of hand with fresh joy of 
 battle, by the thought of a being without intelligible 
 attributes, a mere abstract creation of metaphysic, 
 whose mercy is not as our mercy, nor his justice as 
 our justice, nor his fatherhood as the fatherhood of 
 men ? It was not by a cold, a cheerless, a radically 
 depraving conception such as this, that the church 
 became the refuge of humanity in the dark times 
 of old, but by the representation, to men sitting 
 in bondage and confusion, of godlike natures mov- 
 ing among them under figure of the most eter- 
 nally touching of human relations, a tender mother 
 ever interceding for them, and an elder brother 
 laying down his life that their burdens might be 
 loosened. 
 
 4 We have spoken of Voltairean deism, and the 
 expression is a convenient one to distinguish from the 
 various forms of mystic theology, which gloomily 
 disclaim any pretence to be rational, the halting-place 
 of spirits too deeply penetrated with the rationalistic 
 objections of Voltaire to accept revelation, and either 
 too timorous or too confident to acquiesce in a neutral 
 solution. It is, unjust, however, to attribute to 
 Voltaire himself a perfect adherence to the deistica] 
 idea. For the first half of his life there is no doubt 
 
V. RELIGION. 281 
 
 that it floated in his mind, as in so many others, in a 
 random manner, as the true explanation of the world. 
 'His introduction to the teaching of Newton would 
 give a firmer shape to such a belief. He has indeed 
 told us that it was so. He mentions that in the 
 course of several interviews he had with Doctor 
 Samuel Clarke in 1726, this philosopher never pro- 
 nounced the name of God without a curious air -of 
 awe and self-collection, and he commemorates the 
 impression which the sight of this habit, and reflection 
 upon its significance, made upon him. 1 Still it was 
 not a very active or vital element of belief with him 
 even then, but rather of the nature of the sublimest 
 of poetic figures. 
 
 Oui, dans le sein de Dien, loin de ce corps mortel, 
 L'esprit semble 6couter la voix l'Eternel. 2 
 
 Clearly this kind of expression means very little, and 
 has no source in the deeper seats of the writer's 
 feeling. A considerable number of Voltaire's deistical 
 ejaculations, and on these occasions he threw into 
 them a measure of real unction, may be fairly traced 
 to the extraordinary polemical utility of an idea of 
 spotless purity, entire justice, inexhaustible mercy, as 
 an engine of battle against men who in the sacred 
 name of this idea were the great practitioners of 
 intolerance and wrong. 
 
 1 Phil, de Newton. (Eva), xli. p. 46. See also the whole 
 chapter. 
 
 2 A Mdme. dn Chatelet sur la Philosophie de Newton (1738} 
 (Suv. xvii. p. 113. 
 
282 VOLTAIRE. OHAR 
 
 Ignorer ton etre supreme, 
 
 Grand Dien ! c'est un moindre blaspheme, 
 
 Et moms digne de ton courroux 
 
 Que de te croire impitoyable, 
 
 De nos malheurs insatiable, 
 
 Jaloux, injuste oomme noma, 
 
 Lorsqu'un deYot atrabilaire 
 
 Nourri de superstition, 
 
 A par cette affreuse chimera, 
 
 CoiTompu sa religion, 
 
 Le voila stupide et farouche : 
 
 Le fiel decoule de sa bouche, 
 
 Le fanatisme arme son bras : 
 
 Et dans sa piete profonde 
 
 Sa rage immolerait le monde 
 
 A son Dieu, qu'il ne connait pas. 1 
 
 To have a conception of perfect goodness was a 
 manifest convenience in confronting men who were to 
 be proved masters of badness. /But when the pressure 
 of circumstance forced Voltaire to seek in earnest for 
 an explanation of the world, which he had formerly 
 been content to take in an easy way upon trust, then 
 the deism, which had been barely more than nominal 
 at best, was transformed into a very different and far 
 sincerer mood. It would obviously be a gross blunder 
 from a logical point to confound optimism with deism, 
 but it is clear that what shook Voltaire's conviction 
 of the existence of a deity was the awakening in him 
 of a keener sense of the calamities that afflict the race 
 of man. Personal misfortunes perhaps had their 
 share. It was after the loss of Madame du Chatelet, 
 and after the rude dispersion of his illusions as to 
 1 Ode sur le Fanatisme. (Ewvres, xvi. p. 331. 
 
V. RELIGION. 283 
 
 Frederick, when he barely knew whither to turn for 
 shelter or a home, that the optimism which he had 
 learnt in England began to lose its hold upon him. 
 We must do him the justice to add that he was yet 
 more sensible of disasters which affected others. The 
 horrid tide of war which devastated Europe and 
 America, the yet more hateful tide of persecution 
 for opinion which swept over France, and the cruel 
 maladministration of justice which disgraced her tri- 
 bunals, stirred all that was best in him to the very 
 depths. The only non-dramatic poem of his which has 
 strength, sincerity, and profundity of meaning enough 
 firmly to arrest the reader's attention, and stimulate 
 both thought and feeling, is that fine and powerful 
 piece which he wrote on the occasion of the great 
 earthquake of Lisbon. 1 Here he threw into ener- 
 getic and passionately argumentative verse the same 
 protest against the theory that whatever is is best, 
 which he afterwards urged in a very different form in 
 the 'refined insolence' of Candide. 2 He approaches 
 more nearly than a quarter of a century before he 
 would have thought possible, to the deep gloom of the 
 Pascal against whose terrible pictures he had then so 
 warmly protested. / He sees mankind imprisoned in a 
 circle of appalling doom, from which there is no way 
 of escape. Unlike Pascal, he can find no solution, 
 and he denounces that mockery of a solution which 
 
 1 CEuvres, xv. pp. 39-62. 
 
 2 Aristotle's definition of eirpaireXta, or wit, as ifipis -neira^ 
 Sev/idvtt marks one of Voltaire's chief talents with entire ac- 
 curacy. 
 
284 VOLTAIRE. CHAP 
 
 cries that all is well in accents stifled with lamentation, 
 He protests against the delusion of forcing the course 
 of the world's destiny into a moral formula, that shall 
 contain the terms of justice and mercy in their human 
 sense. 
 
 Aux cris demi-formfe de leurs voix expirantes, 
 
 Au spectacle effrayant de leurs cendres fumantes, 
 
 Direz-vous : C'est Peffet des ^ternelles lois, 
 
 Qui d'un Dieu libre et bon necessitent le choix ? 
 
 Direz-vous, en voyant cet amas de victimes : 
 
 Dieu s'est veng£, leur mort est le prix de leurs crimes ? 
 
 Quelle crime, quelle faute ont commis ces enfans 
 
 Sur le sein maternel ecrases et sanglans ? 
 
 Lisbonne, qui n'est plus, eut-elle plus de vices 
 
 Que Londres, que Paris, plong^s dans les delices ? 
 
 Lisbonne est abtmee, et l'on danse a Paris. 
 
 J He equally refuses, though not in terms, to comfort 
 himself by the reflection that, in default of a better, 
 the current ragged theory of the providential govern- 
 ment of the universe, because it may be possible, must 
 be true. He can find no answer, and confesses his 
 belief that no answer is to be found by human effort. 
 Whatever side we take, we can only shudder ; there 
 is nothing that we know, nothing that we have not to 
 fear. /Nature is mute, and we interrogate her in vain ; 
 the book of destiny is closed to our eyes. 
 
 L'homme, stranger a soi, de l'homme est ignore. 
 
 Que suis-je ? ou suis-jei ou vais-je ? et d'oii suis-je tiri ! 
 
 Atomes tourmentes sur cet amas de boue, 
 
 Que la mort engloutit, et dont le sort se joue, 
 
 Mais atomes pensans, atomes dont les yeu x, 
 
 Guides par la pensee, ont mesure les cieuz, 
 
*• RELIGION. 285 
 
 An sein de l'infini nous elancons notre etre, 
 
 Sans pouvoir un moment nous voir et nous connattre. 
 
 * * » * « 
 
 he passe n'est pour nous qu'un triste souvenir ; 
 Le present est affreux, s'il n'est point d'avenir, 
 Si la nuit du tombeau d^truit l'etre qui pense. 
 
 He abandons Plato and rejects Epicurus. Bayle 
 knows more than they, as, with the balance in his 
 hand, he teaches men to doubt; wise enough, great 
 enough, to be without a system. 
 
 In a note he adds to this glorification of Bayle, 
 whom he styles the advocate-general of the philoso- 
 phers — the thinker in whose pages all opinions are set 
 forth, all the reasons which shake them and all which 
 uphold are equally investigated, while he abstains 
 from giving any conclusions. 1 Elsewhere he explains 
 that when he describes reason as having made immense 
 progress in Germany, he does not refer to those who 
 openly embrace the system of Spinoza ; but the good 
 folk who have no fixed principles on the nature of 
 things, who do not know what is, but know very well 
 what is not, these are my true philosophers. 2 
 
 It would not be difficult to find a score of passages 
 in which the writer assumes or declares certainty on 
 this high matter to be attainable, and to be entirely 
 in one direction. His opinions undoubtedly shifted 
 with the veering of his moods, but on the whole these 
 axioms of suspense mark the central point to which 
 they constantly tended to return, and at which they 
 rested longest. That dark word, Shut thine eyes and ■ 
 
 1 (E'uwes, xv. p. 58. 2 Corr. 1765. (Ewores, lxxv. p. 811. 
 
286 VOLTAIRE. OHAP, 
 
 thou shalt see, opened no road for him. The saying 
 that the Most High may be easily known, provided 
 one does not press for definition, offered no treasure 
 of spiritual acquisition to the man who never let go, 
 even if he did not always accurately appreciate, 
 Locke's injunction to us to be careful to define our 
 terms. We cannot label Voltaire either spiritualist 
 or materialist, p The success with which he evades 
 these two appellations is one of the best available 
 tests of a man's capacity for approaching the great 
 problems with that care and positive judgment, which 
 are quite as proper to them as to practical affairs or 
 to physical science. 
 
 |Thus with reference to the other great open 
 question, he habitually insisted that the immortality 
 of the soul can never possibly be demonstrated, and 
 that this is why it has been revealed to us by religion, 1 
 which is perhaps Voltaire's way of saying that it is no 
 near concern of his. Sometimes he argued from con- 
 siderations of general probability. The brutes feel 
 and think up to a certain point, and men have only 
 the advantage over them of a greater combination of 
 ideas ; the more or less makes no difference in kind. 
 I ' Well, nobody thinks of giving an immortal soul to a 
 flea ; why should you give one any the more to an 
 elephant, or a monkey, or my Champagne valet, or a 
 village steward who has a trifle more instinct than my 
 valet?' 2 Again, he retorted significantly on those 
 
 1 Lettres Ang. xiv. (Euwes, xxxv. p. 108. 
 
 2 Corr. 1736. CBwvres, briii. p. 31. 
 
V. EELIGION. 287 
 
 who contended with a vehemence of prejudice known 
 in some places even to this day, that belief in the 
 immortality of the soul is an indispensable condition 
 of probity : as if the first Jews accepted that dogma, 
 and as if there were no honest men among them, and 
 no instruction in virtue. 1 
 
 /In fine, then, we search Voltaire in vain for a 
 positive creed, which logic may hold in coherent bonds, 
 or social philosophy accept as a religious force. The 
 old word about his faith must be pronounced true. 
 It remains a creed of negation. But still, be it always 
 understood, negation of darkness. And this inevitably 
 leads in the direction of the day. It was an indis- 
 pensable step in the process of transition. Men, it is 
 constantly being said since the violent breaking-up of 
 French society, will never consent to live on no better 
 base than articles of denial and formulas of suspense, 
 for are not the deepest parts of human character 
 moved by strong yearning for relationship with the 
 unknowable? It may be so, and if it be, the Vol- 
 tairean movement was the great instrument in leading, 
 not merely a scanty group of speculative intellects, but 
 vast bodies, large nations, of common folk to perceive, 
 or dimly to conjecture, that this object of adoration 
 which their eyes strain after is unknowable, and that 
 there is no attainable external correlative of their deep 
 desire. Voltaire never went so far in the direction 
 of assertion as Rousseau, and he never went so far in 
 1 Diet. Phil. s. v. Locke. (Euvres, lvi. p. 338 
 
288 VOLTAIRE. OHAP, 
 
 the direction of denial as Holbach. lAnd, whatever 
 we may say generally of the horror of the world for 
 the spirit that denies, all that was best and most truly 
 progressive in French society during the eighteenth 
 century, Turgot and Condorcet no less than Beaumar- 
 chais, showed itself content to follow him in this 
 middle path. His appreciation of religion was want- 
 ing in a hundred vital things, just as some may say 
 that Luther's was, but it contained the one idea which 
 the deepest spirit of the time prompted men to desire, 
 the decisive repudiation of the religious notions of the 
 past. We must call this negative, no doubt, but no 
 word should frighten us away from seeing how much 
 positive aspiration lay underneath When men are 
 in the mood of France a century and a quarter since, 
 when all that an old civilisation has bestowed on 
 them of what is best and strongest, rises up against 
 all that the same civilisation has bequeathed to them 
 of what is pestilent and dangerous, they are never 
 nice critics. They do not decline a reinvigorating 
 article of faith, because it is not a system, nor do 
 they measure a deliverer by syllogism. The smallest 
 chink may shine like light of the sun to prisoners long 
 held in black and cavernous recesses. 
 
 When Bayle's Dictionary came out, we read, so 
 great was the avidity to have sight of it, that long 
 before the doors of the Mazarin library were open, a 
 little crowd assembled in the early morning of each 
 day, and there was as great a struggle for the first 
 access to the precious book, as for the front row 
 
v. RELIGION. 289 
 
 at the performance of a piece for which there is a 
 rage. 1 This was the beginning of an immense impulse 
 of curiosity, eager to fill the vacuum occasioned by the 
 slow subsidence of the old religion, which had once 
 covered not only faith, but science, history, dialectic, 
 and philosophy, all in a single synthesis. It was this 
 impulse which Voltaire both represented and acceler- 
 ated. In these periods of agitation, men forgive all 
 to one who represents without compromise or diminu- 
 tion their own dominant passions. Vehemence of 
 character counts for more than completeness of 
 doctrine, and they crave a battle-cry, not a disserta- 
 tion. They need to have their own sentiment aggres- 
 sively presented, and their own defects of boldness or 
 courage at once rebuked and supplemented by a leader 
 whose purpose can never be mistaken, and whose 
 words are never nipped by the frost of intellectual 
 misgiving. All through the century there was slowly 
 growing up an inner France, full of angry disgust 
 against the past. Its germ was the crowd eager to 
 read Bayle. Its outcome was the night of the Fourth 
 of August 1789, when the civil order of society was 
 overthrown between a sunset and a dawn. Voltaire, 
 as we have seen, studiously abstained from any public 
 word upon things political, but it was he who in the 
 long interval between these two events held men by 
 a watchword to which the political decay of the 
 country gave such meaning, that of hatred to the old. 
 And there was no such steadfast symbol of the old as 
 
 1 Holberg, quoted in Sainte-Beuve's Nouveaux Lundis, ix. 26. 
 U 
 
290 VOLTAIRE. OHAP. 
 
 the church, to him and his school a lurid beacon on a 
 monster-haunted shore. 
 
 Voltaire's selection of the church as the object of 
 his attacks marks an important difference between 
 him and the other great revolutionary precursor. 
 Rousseau's Savoyard Vicar was perfectly willing to 
 accept -the cultus of Christianity, even when he had 
 ceased to accept its dogma. He regarded all par- 
 ticular religions as so many salutary institutions, all 
 good so long as they were the organs for a due service 
 of God. He actually celebrated mass with more 
 veneration after the acquisition of his new principles, 
 than he had been accustomed to do when he supposed 
 that the mass was an occasion of personal divine 
 presence. This kind of teaching was clearly to per- 
 petuate and transfix for ever the form of religion 
 which each country, or any given set of men in it, 
 might possess. It was to stereotype belief, as it is 
 stereotyped among the millions in the East. Whence 
 was reform to come, whence any ray of new light, 
 whence a principle of growth and activity for the 
 intelligence of men? How on these terms is truth 
 to win the battle at a single point? This was the 
 beginning of a fatal substitution of bland emotional 
 complacency for robust cultivation of the reason, and 
 firm reverence for its lessons as the highest that we 
 can learn. Voltaire ,no doubt did in practice many a 
 time come to terms with his adversary while he was 
 yet on the way with him ; but, disagreeable as these 
 temporisings are to us who live in an easier day, they 
 
V. RELIGION. 291 
 
 never deceived any one, nor could they ever be mis- 
 taken for the establishment of intellectual treason as 
 a principle, or of philosophic indifference as a climax. 
 As has been said, though he writes in the midst of the 
 old regime, in the face of the Bastille, and with the 
 fetters of the enemy in some sort actually upon him, 
 he still finds a thousand means of reaching you. 1 He 
 is always the representative of reason, and never of 
 sentimentalism. He was not above superficial com- 
 promises in matters of conduct, and these it is hard or 
 impossible to condone ; but at any rate he is free from 
 the deeper and more penetrating reproach of erecting 
 hypocrisy into a deliberate doctrine. 
 
 We do not know how far he ever seriously 
 approached the question, so much debated since the 
 overthrow of the old order in France, whether a 
 society can exist without a religion f He says in one 
 place that to believe God and spirits corporeal is an 
 old metaphysical error, but absolutely not to believe 
 in any god would be an error incompatible with wise 
 government. But even this much was said for the 
 sake of introducing a taunt against the orthodox, who 
 by a strange contradiction had risen up with fury 
 against Bayle for believing it possible that a society of 
 atheists could hold together, while they insisted with 
 just as much violence that the empire of China was 
 established on a basis of atheism. 2 His natural 
 
 1 Quinet's La Revolution, i. 168. 
 
 2 Essai sur les McEurs, u. ii. QSuvres, xx. p. 344. See also 
 o. clxxxii. CEwo. xxiv. p. 162. 
 
292 VOLTAIRE. chap. 
 
 sagacity would most likely have shown him that this 
 is one of the sterile problems, with which the obstruc- 
 tive defender of things as they are tries to draw the 
 soldier of improvement away from his strongest posts. 
 Whether a society can exist without religion or not, 
 at least its existence as a structure for whose duration 
 we can be anxious, must depend on the number of 
 men in it who deal honestly with their own under- 
 standings. And, further, is no man to be counted to 
 have a religion who, like Voltaire, left great questions 
 open, and put them aside, as all questions, that must 
 from the limitations of human faculty eternally remain 
 open, well deserve to be put aside 1 Must we ever 
 call an unknown God by one name 1 Are there so 
 few tasks for one on earth, that he must strain all his 
 soul to fix the regimen of high heaven ? 
 
 Voltaire, there is every reason to think, did in an 
 informal kind of way suppose in the bottom of his 
 heart that there is nothing in human nature to hinder 
 a very advanced society from holding perfectly well 
 together, with all its opinions in a constant state of 
 analysis. Whatever we may think of it, this dream 
 of what is possible, if the activity of human intelli- 
 gence were only sufficiently stimulated and the condi- 
 tions of social union were once so adjusted as to give 
 it fair play, unquestionably lies at the root of the 
 revolutionary ideas with all those who were first 
 stirred by Voltaire rather than by Bousseau. Con- 
 dorcet, for instance, manifestly depends with the firm- 
 est confidence upon that possibility being realised 
 
V. RELIGION. 293 
 
 It is the idea of every literary revolutionist, as dis- 
 tinguished from the social or economic revolutionist, 
 in France at the present day. The knowledge that 
 this was the case, added to the sound conviction 
 that men can never live by analysis alone, gave its 
 fire to De Maistre's powerful attack, and its immense 
 force to Burke's plea for what he called prejudice. 
 But the indispensable synthesis need never be immov- 
 ably fixed, nor can it soon again be one and single 
 for our civilisation ; for progress consists in gradual 
 modifications of it, as increase of knowledge and un- 
 foreseen changes in the current of human affairs dis- 
 close imperfections in it, and wherever progress is a 
 law the stages of men's advance are unequal. Above 
 all, it is monstrous to suppose that because a man does 
 not accept your synthesis, he is therefore a being with- 
 out a positive creed or a coherent body of belief 
 capable of guiding and inspiring conduct. 
 
 There are new solutions for him, if the old are 
 fallen dumb. If he no longer believes death to be- 
 a stroke from the sword of God's justice, but the 
 leaden footfall of an inflexible law of matter, the 
 humility of his awe is deepened, and the tenderness 
 of his pity made holier, that creatures who can love 
 so much should have their days so shut round with a 
 wall of darkness. The purifying anguish of remorse 
 will be stronger, not weaker, when he has trained 
 himself to look upon every wrong in thought, every 
 duty omitted from act, each infringement of the inner 
 spiritual law which humanity is constantly perfecting 
 
294 VOLTAIRE. OHAP. V. 
 
 for its own guidance and advantage, less as a breach 
 of the decrees of an unseen tribunal, than as an un- 
 grateful infection, weakening and corrupting the future 
 of his brothers. And he will be less effectually raised 
 from inmost prostration of soul by a doubtful subjec 
 tive reconciliation, so meanly comfortable to his own 
 individuality, than by hearing full in the ear the sound 
 of the cry of humanity craving sleepless succour from 
 her children. That swelling consciousness of height 
 and freedom with which the old legends of an omnipo- 
 tent divine majesty fill the breast, may still remain ; 
 for how shall the universe ever cease to be a sovereign 
 wonder of overwhelming power and superhuman fixed- 
 ness of law 1 And a man will be already in no mean 
 paradise, if at the hour of sunset a good hope can 
 fall upon him like harmonies of music that the earth 
 shall still be fair, and the happiness of every feeling 
 creature still receive a constant augmentation, and 
 each good cause yet find worthy defenders, when the 
 memory of his own poor name and personality haa 
 long been blotted out of the brief recollection of men 
 for ever 
 
GHAPTEE VI. 
 
 HISTORY. 
 
 The activity of the foremost men of the eighteenth 
 century in the composition of history is too remark- 
 able a circumstance, not to deserve some attempt at 
 explanation. There were historians in previous ages, 
 but in the eighteenth century there was both in France, 
 and afterwards in England, a special and extraordinary 
 development in this direction. Partially no doubt this 
 was due to the general movement of curiosity, the 
 widespread desire for all kinds of knowledge, which 
 was in the air. Men were emancipating themselves from 
 the trammels of an authority which had not widened 
 the limits of inquiry in the same proportion as human 
 faculties had strengthened, and, amid the universal 
 expansion of intelligent interest and the eager scrutiny 
 of all the objects of knowledge which the new dawn 
 was baring to sight, it was not possible that the order 
 of political and social facts in former epochs should be 
 neglected. This, however, does not sufficiently explain 
 why such a man as Hume betook himself to the com- 
 position of history, or why Gibbon found himself best 
 able to attack Christianity by tracing some of the 
 
296 VOLTAIRE. OHAP. 
 
 most important parts of its annals, or why Voltaire, 
 who lived so entirely and intensely in the present, 
 should have thought it worth while to give so much 
 labour to presentation of the past. It is a striking 
 fact, which must be something more than an accident, 
 that the best secular histories which remain from 
 this period, one of them the most striking monument 
 in historical literature, were written by the most 
 marked assailants of reigning superstition. 
 
 Was it not, indeed, to be expected that as the dark 
 clouds of an absorbing consciousness of the super- 
 natural cleared away, men of understanding would be 
 more and more drawn towards study of human action, 
 and that the advance of society under purely natural 
 and positive conditions would immediately seize a 
 foremost place among the objects of experiential in- 
 quiry 1 It is too constantly maintained by persons 
 with something of a vested interest in darkness, that 
 those who do not worship the gods are indifferent to 
 the happiness of men. Yet the history of intellectual 
 progress would seem to show that it was not until the 
 commencement of a rapid decline in the acceptance 
 of terrorist and jealous deities and incomprehensible 
 dogmas, that serious attention was given to some of 
 the subjects in which a sound knowledge is among 
 the most indisjjgnsable conditions of the advancing 
 welfare of men. For instance, as soon as the hold of 
 ancient versions of the supernatural was loosened over 
 the stronger spirits, by the middle of the century 
 there instantly took place an astonishing development 
 
VI. HISTORY. 297 
 
 of activity in the physical sciences. The interest of 
 historic and economic studies was at least as pressing. 
 Becoming aware that men had made their own world, 
 thinkers found the consideration of the process by 
 which this world is made, and the order of society 
 established and developed, forced upon them with 
 an entirely new significance. The dry bones of the 
 ancient valley of annalists and chroniclers were made 
 to live, and the great work of the reconstruction of 
 the past was begun, with an alertness and persever- 
 ance that has not been surpassed even in an age of 
 far purer and juster historical intelligence. It was 
 quite reasonable that the conviction of each act in the 
 universe, from the crash of an empire to the fall of a 
 sparrow to the ground, being due to an arbitrary and 
 inscrutable decree, should prevent the rise of history 
 from the level of annals into the region of philosophy. 
 The decay of this theory of the government of the 
 universe was as reasonably the cause of a new mode 
 of looking at the long records of the race, and we 
 find ourselves moving in a day of historical master- 
 pieces. 
 
 Voltaire has told us the circumstances under which 
 he was led to approach the philosophy of history. 
 Madame du Chatelet, whose mind would fain have 
 reached every kind of knowledge, but who was 
 especially apt for metaphysics and geometry, had 
 conceived an aversion for history. 'What does it 
 matter to me,' she would ask, ' a Frenchwoman living 
 on my estate, to know that Egil succeeded Haquin 
 
298 VOLTAIEE. CHAP. 
 
 in Sweden, and that Ottoman was the son of Ortogrull 
 I have read with pleasure the history of the Greeks 
 and the Romans ; they offered me certain great 
 pictures which attracted me. But I have never yet 
 been able to finish any long history of our modern 
 nations. I can see scarcely anything in them but 
 confusion; a host of minute events without connection 
 or sequence, a thousand battles which settled nothing. 
 I renounced a study which overwhelms the mind 
 without illuminating it.' To this frank statement of 
 the case, to which so many thousands, of persons in 
 all epochs would so heartily subscribe, Voltaire replied 
 by pointing out that perhaps the study of history 
 would be no waste of time, if by cutting away all the 
 details of wars, as tedious as they are untrustworthy, 
 all the frivolous negotiations which have been nothing 
 but pieces of purposeless cheating, all the minute 
 incidents which stifle great events, and by retaining 
 those which paint manners, you made of this chaos 
 a general and well-arranged picture ; in short, if you 
 tried to disengage from the concourse of events the 
 history of the human mind. 1 Not all the faults of 
 execution ought to blind us to the merit of this 
 notion of the true way of studying history, or to the 
 admirable clearness of vision with which Voltaire, 
 not only in this but in all his other historical pieces, 
 adhered to his own two leading principles ; first, that 
 laws, arts, manners, are the chief matter and concern 
 of history ; and second, that ' details which lead to 
 1 Essai sur les Moeurs, pp. 1, 2. 
 
VI. HISTORY. 299 
 
 nothing are in history what baggage is to an army, 
 impedimenta, for we must look at things in large, for 
 the very reason that the human mind is small and 
 sinks under the weight of minutiae.' Minutiae ought 
 to be collected by annalists, or in some kind of 
 dictionaries where one might find them at need. 1 In 
 this last point Voltaire, as might be expected, was 
 more just than Bolingbroke7 who had said somewhat 
 petulantly that V he had rather take the Darius whom 
 Alexander conquered for the son of Hystaspes, and 
 make as many anachronisms as a Jewish chronologer, 
 than sacrifice half his life to collect all the learned 
 lumber that fills the head of an antiquary.' 2 ^ The 
 antiquary's is a vocation like another, and the highest 
 kind of history can only flourish on condition that 
 the humbler ancillary kind flourishes also, and that 
 there are patient and scrupulous men to mark the 
 difference between Darius Codomannus and Darius 
 the son of Hystaspes. 
 
 We may say that three kinds of men write history : 
 the gazetteer or annalist, the statesman, and the 
 philosopher. The annalist's business is to investigate 
 and record events, and his highest merits are clearness, 
 accuracy, and simplicity. The political historian 
 seeks the superficial and immediate causes of great 
 transactions, and he serves us by mixed penetration 
 and soundness of judgment. The historical philo- 
 sopher is concerned only with groups of events, the 
 
 1 Essai sur lea Mceurs, p. 9. 
 * On the Study of History, Letter i. ad finem. 
 
300 VOLTAIRE. chap. 
 
 changes and movements that transform communities, 
 and with the trains of conditions that lead to such 
 movements. The majority of historians, from the 
 illustrious Bacon down to the compiler of a manual, 
 illustrate the first kind. Thucydides and Tacitus, 
 among the ancients, a Machiavelli or a Finlay, among 
 moderns, may illustrate the second kind. As Voltaire 
 was sometimes gazetteer and sometimes statesman, so 
 Montesquieu took the statesman's point of view in 
 his reflections on the decline of Rome, and that of the 
 philosopher in the Spirit of Laws. It is the states- 
 man or man of the world, who, after recounting 
 Caesar's failure on one occasion to comply with the 
 etiquette of the senate, proceeds to make the follow- 
 ing reflection, that ' we never offend men more, than 
 when we shock their ceremonies and usages : seek to 
 oppress them, and that is sometimes a proof of the 
 importance you attach to them ; but shock their 
 customs, and that is always a mark of contempt.' 1 
 It is the philosopher, feeling for the causes of things 
 and their order, who being led to inquire into the 
 spirit or meaning of Laws, understands such an inquiry 
 to involve a comparative investigation of the relations 
 between laws and physical climate, the quality of 
 ground, situation and extent of territory, the mode 
 of life of the people, agricultural, hunting, or pastoral ; 
 between laws and the freedom of the constitution, 
 the religion, wealth, trade, moral ideas, and manners, 
 of the inhabitants ; above all, historically, between 
 
 1 Grandeur et Decadence des Eomains, c. xi. 
 
VI. HISTORY. 301 
 
 laws and their origin and the order of things on which 
 they were first founded. 
 
 In a similar way we may divide Voltaire's historical 
 pieces into two main classes. Indeed, if we count the 
 Annals of the Empire, which he wrote to please the 
 Duchess of Saxe-Gotha, he may rank also under the 
 third remaining head among the annalistic historians. 
 This, however, is too unsatisfactory a piece of work 
 for us to care either to classify or to remember it. 
 The subject was not of his own selection, he knew 
 comparatively little about it, his materials were ex- 
 tremely scanty and imperfect, and he composed it at 
 a time when his whole mind was violently perturbed 
 by his recent quarrel with Frederick, and torn by 
 anxiety where he should find a home in rest and 
 freedom. It was the only work he ever wrote, for 
 which he perhaps had no heart, and the least obser- 
 vant reader will notice how vast a difference this made 
 in the temper of its composition. Indeed, Voltaire 
 was not born to be a simple chronicler. The realistic 
 and practical leanings of his intellect naturally gave 
 him a distaste for the collection of mere uninterpreted 
 and unapplied facts. His clear comprehensiveness, 
 the product of a vigorous imagination with strong 
 sense, as naturally impelled him to group circum- 
 stances, and to introduce the widest possible gener- 
 ality among them. He has one of the peculiar gifts 
 of the historian, as distinguished from the gazetteer, 
 of throwing rapid glances over a wide field on the 
 suggestion of a minor fact as he passes by it, and of 
 
302 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 converting what to others would be the mere uncon- 
 sidered trifles of narrative into something possessed 
 of its due measure of vitality and significance. He 
 fills his pages with reflections that are usually not 
 brought from very far depths, but which are almost 
 always lively, just, and in real matter. Perhaps this 
 is not an unmixed good, for it is not unconnected 
 with an extraordinary evenness and light facility of 
 style, which tends to draw the reader somewhat too 
 rapidly and too smoothly over ground that had been 
 rugged enough to the actual travellers. It tends 
 therefore tacitly to plant a false impression about the 
 tardiness, difficulty, peril, and infinitely varied possi- 
 bilities of the social movements which are history's 
 object and material. Perhaps a reader has a better 
 idea of the true manner in which events march, from 
 Oomines or Clarendon, than from all the elegance and 
 manifold graces of Voltaire, and we sometimes feel 
 inclined to repeat De Maistre's angry demand for 
 that grave and unhasting dignity which is the life of 
 history. 
 
 We have already noticed one of the differences 
 between Voltaire and Rousseau, which arose from the 
 predominance of sentiment over reason in the latter. 
 In the present connection another fact well worth 
 noticing is that Eousseau was entirely wanting in 
 either taste or serious regard for history. The past 
 seems to have been to him a kind of blurred tablet, 
 confused and indecipherable, interposed between the 
 vision of men and the only thought or knowledge 
 
vi. HISTORY. 303 
 
 which it is good for them to possess. Voltaire's read- 
 ing of this tablet was inadequate enough, in many 
 respects it was even a grave distortion of the truth ; 
 but with that sound sense in which Rousseau was so 
 absolutely deficient, he felt how irrational it was, in 
 the first place, to shut our eyes deliberately to the 
 course and meaning of all the foregone action of the 
 race, and, in the second, to leave unattacked and 
 unturned the strong position which the traditional 
 parables of the past and their undisturbed interpreta- 
 tion conferred upon the champions of orthodoxy and 
 absolutism. Eousseau, being a sentimentalist, appears 
 to have discerned nothing of this. His ideas all in- 
 volved a breach with the past, as Voltaire's did, but 
 Voltaire deserves credit for perceiving that, to make 
 this effective, you must at least find out as well as 
 you can what the past was. 
 
 For his four works in the class of political history 
 he had the best attainable authorities and material, 
 and no one was ever more diligent in putting them to 
 the best possible use. 1 His acute sense, strengthened 
 by contact with the world and its most active person- 
 ages, made him what we may almost call prematurely 
 scientific in his demand for adequate evidence and 
 proof. It is rather striking, for example, to find him 
 
 1 The dates of the publication of Voltaire's historical works 
 are these : — Charles XII., 1731 ; Siecle de Louis XIV., 1752 (a 
 portion of it in 1739) ; Annates de V Empire, 1753-54 ; Essai sur 
 les Mceurs, 1757 (surreptitiously in 1754) ; Bistoire de Russie, 
 Pt. I. in 1759, Pt. II. in 1763 ; Pricis du Siecle de Louis XV., 
 1768 ; .Histoire du Parlement de Paris, 1769. 
 
304 VOLTAIRE. OHAr. 
 
 anticipating more recent objections to the trust- 
 worthiness of Tacitus, pointing out the extraordinary 
 improbabilities in his account of Tiberius, Nero, and 
 the others. There is all the difference, he says, 
 between a faithful historian equally free from adula- 
 tion and hatred, and ' a malicious wit who poisons' 
 everything through the medium of a concise and ener- 
 getic style.' Are we to believe, he asks elsewhere, 
 on the story of a man who lived long after Tiberius, 
 that this emperor, nearly eighty years old, who had 
 up to that time been decent almost to austerity, yet 
 passed all his time in debaucheries hitherto unknown, 
 and so monstrous as to need new names for them 1 1 
 And in the same way he questions the alleged atroci- 
 ties of Nero and Caligula, as well as the motives 
 imputed to Domitian by Tacitus for the frequency 
 with which he sent to inquire after the health of 
 Agricola. These historic doubts sprang from none 
 of the political judgment or feeling which propounds 
 them in more modern times., but purely from scientific 
 incredulity. 'History,' he once wrote, 'is after all 
 nothing but a parcel of tricks that we play the dead.' 2 
 He did not hold this slightly splenetic theory, in 
 which assuredly there is a painful truth, to absolve 
 him from the duty of doing what he could to belie 
 it, and to make history as correct and as faithfully 
 representative of actual occurrences, as careful inquiry 
 
 1 Le Pyrrhonisme de l'Histoire, cc. xii. xiii. CEuvres, xxxvi 
 j». 346 ; also p. 428. 
 
 a Corr. CEuvres, lxvi. p. 17. 
 
VI. HISTOTIY 305 
 
 from those most likely to know the characters of the 
 most prominent actors could make it. In the com- 
 position of the Siecle de Louis xv. he had of course 
 the advantage of knowing all these leaders of the 
 public activity personally and at first hand, while if 
 he had not that advantage to the same extent in the 
 Siecle de Louis xrv., he at least mixed on intimate 
 terms with many who had been intimate with the 
 court of the great monarch. For the history of 
 Russia he was amply provided with documents and 
 authentic narratives from the Russian court, at whose 
 solicitation he undertook a work which was the first 
 full introduction of that hitherto barbarous and un- 
 known country to the literature of civilised Europe. 
 His letters to Schouvalof, the imperial chamberlain, 
 attest the unremitting industry with which he sought 
 for every kind of information that might be useful 
 to him. 'The enlightened spirit which now reigns 
 among the principal nations of Europe, requires that 
 we should go to the bottom, where in former times a 
 historian barely thought it worth while to skim the 
 surface. People wish to know how a nation grew 
 together ; what was its population before the epoch of 
 which you treat ; the difference in the number of the 
 regular army then and in former times ; the nature 
 and growth of its commerce ; what arts have sprung 
 up within the country, and what have been intro- 
 duced from elsewhere and been perfected there ; what 
 used to be the ordinary average revenue of the state, 
 and what it is now ; the birth and extension of its 
 x 
 
306 VOLTAIRE. CHAP 
 
 navy ; the proportion in numbers between its nobles 
 and its ecclesiastics and monks, and between the 
 latter and the cultivators of the soil, etc.' 1 Even 
 importunities of this kind continued over a space of 
 some years, and the copious responses which they 
 brought, never consoled Voltaire for not having made 
 the journey to the Russian capital in his proper 
 person. 'I should have learnt more from you in a 
 few hours of conversation,' he wrote to Schouvalof, 
 ' than all the compilers in the world will ever teach 
 me.' 2 In writing the History of Charles XII. of 
 Sweden, one of the most delightful of his books, the 
 art of which is none the less because it is so little 
 ostentatious and striking and seems so easy, he had 
 procured a large quantity of material from Fabrice, 
 who knew the Swedish king during his detention at 
 Bender and subsequently, and met Voltaire in London. 
 This material was supplemented in later years by in- 
 formation picked up at Lun^ville from the ex-Polish 
 king Stanislas, who was indebted to Charles for his 
 sovereignty, that true dSpov aSwpov. 'As for the 
 portraits of men,' Voltaire declared, ' they are nearly 
 all the creations of fancy; 'tis a monstrous piece of 
 charlatanry to pretend to paint a personage with 
 whom you have never lived.' 3 Napoleon, in the 
 memorable campaign of 1812, coming to various 
 places which Voltaire had occasion to describe in his 
 History of Charles xn., found his account weak and 
 
 1 Corr. 1757. CEuvres, Ixvi. p. 61. 
 2 Corr. 1761. ffiwo. lxvii. p. 228. 3 (Mimes, xx. p. 10. 
 
VI. HISTORY. 307 
 
 inaccurate, and threw it aside in favour of Adlerfeldt. 
 This was to be expected from the very merit of the 
 book ; for how should a picture, painted in large foT 
 the general instruction of the world, satisfy the 
 minute requirements of strategical topography? It 
 was precisely Voltaire's object to separate history 
 from geography, statistics, anecdote, biography, tactics, 
 and to invest it with an independent character and 
 quality apart from all these. 
 
 It is another of the distinctions of his new method 
 of writing history that, with the exception of the book 
 on Charles xil, he throws persons and personal 
 interests into a second place, as being no more than 
 instruments or convenient names for critical turning- 
 points in the large movements of peoples. In the 
 narration of the rise of Russia to a place among 
 civilised nations, the character of Peter the Great 
 inevitably comes into marked prominence, because 
 when a population lies on the stagnant level of 
 barbarism, the first man who summons them to 
 undertake the task of national elevation constitutes an 
 element of paramount importance in their annals. In 
 proportion, however, as they rise to the fulfilment of 
 this surpassing work, the importance of the heroic 
 individual diminishes ; as the national self-conscious- 
 ness and collective powers become greater, the figure 
 of the individual shows less. 
 
 Voltaire was always conscious, though not so clearly 
 as writers are now, of the great historical principle 
 that besides the prominent men of a generation there 
 
308 VOLTAIRE. chap 
 
 is a something at work underneath, a moving current 
 on whose flood they are borne. He never fixed this 
 current by any of the names which now fall so glibly 
 from our lips, — tendency of the times, tenor of public 
 opinion, spirit of the age, and the like, by which we 
 give a collective name to groups of sentiments and 
 forces, all making in what seems to be a single direc- 
 tion. But although unnamed, this singular and in- 
 visible concurrence of circumstance was yet a reality 
 to him. The age was something besides its heroes, 
 and something besides its noisiest and most resound- 
 ing occurrences. His divisions of the great epochs 
 of humanity are undoubtedly open to much criticism, 
 because the principles on which he drew the dividing 
 lines have lost their force in new generations. It was 
 to be expected that they would do so ; and his four 
 great epochs 1 were not likely to remain the four great 
 epochs of a posterity, which has partially learnt the 
 lesson that he had not learnt at all, that perfection 
 in the fine arts is not the highest mark of an age in 
 which humanity may glory. Nevertheless, we are 
 bound to recognise that a new way of regarding 
 human action, as well as a new way of composing 
 history, was being introduced by a writer whose first 
 paragraph declared that he proposed to himself a 
 greater object than an account of the life of Lewis 
 xiv. ; that he designed to paint for the instruction 
 of posterity, not the actions of a single man, but the 
 spirit of men; and that while all periods must be 
 1 Si£cle de LouiB xiv., o. i CEuvres, xxv. p. 283. 
 
VI. HISTORY. 309 
 
 alike to one who only desires to fill his memory with 
 facts, discrimination among them cannot be dispensed 
 with for one who thinks. 
 
 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 Despreaux, Moliere, 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.' 1 From 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 manoeuvres of an army were no longer in 
 Voltaire's eyes the lit substance of history. One 
 reason for this might be his lively sense of the impos- 
 sibility 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 
 1 Corr. 1735. (Euvres, lxii. pp. 455, 456. 
 
310 VOLTAIHE. CHAP 
 
 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 pros- 
 perity, 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 spirit 
 
n. HISTORY. 311 
 
 which 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, 1 Voltaire 
 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 syste- 
 matically 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 
 mediaeval 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 to 
 1 (Euvres, xxxvi. pp. 428-434 (1768). 
 
312 VOLTAIEE. chap 
 
 consecrate 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 cap- 
 rice 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 con- 
 tain 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 twenty 
 
VI. HISTORY. 313 
 
 in 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 in- 
 terests of a man that we do not know V 1 His 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. 2 '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 con- 
 dition 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 ias made alliances, make alliances on your side. 
 If, having less religion, he has all the more manu- 
 facturers 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, 
 
 1 Diet. Phil. s.v. Guerre. (Ewvres, lv. pp. 488, 489 
 8 Esprit des Lois, x. ii. 
 
314 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 the most serene bordering prince — ! 'twas never foi 
 a president of a pacific order to give you such a piece 
 of counsel.' 1 The 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.' 2 If he had 
 known that, while he was writing, Napoleon Bona- 
 parte 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. Vol- 
 taire 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 abbd Saint-Pierre, so undeservedly laughed at for 
 his dreams of perpetual peace, had no influence to 
 speak of — who deliberately placed war among re- 
 trograde agencies, and deliberately dwelt upon peace- 
 ful industry as the true life of nations. 3 
 
 Diplomacy and its complex subterranean processes, 
 which have occupied so extremely disproportionate a 
 space in written history, and which are in acted 
 
 ' (Euvres, lv. p. 490. a Corr. CEuvres, lxxv. p. 460. 
 3 See a letter of the king of Prussia in Voltaire's Works, lxxiv 
 p. 144, etc. 
 
VI. HISTORY. 315 
 
 history 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 triumph- 
 ant manoeuvres 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. 1 And this repre- 
 sents 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 con- 
 cern 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, 2 that we feel the full breath 
 
 1 C. xxiii. CEuvres, xxi p. 9. 
 
 2 Moeurs, like ^ffoj, is untranslatable by any single English 
 
316 VOLTAIRE. OHAP. 
 
 of 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 uni- 
 versal 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 splen- 
 didly decorated. Bossuet indeed spoke of ' the con- 
 catenation 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 ante- 
 cedent 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 effec- 
 tive hold of that broad sequence and many -linked 
 chain of events, to which Bossuet gave a right name, 
 
 word. The full title is Essai sur Us Mxurs et TEsprit det 
 Nations, et sur Us prmeipawx /aits de VSistoire depuis CharU 
 magne jusqu' a Louis XIII. 
 
VI. HISTORY. 317 
 
 but whose real meaning he never was even near seiz- 
 ing. 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 interde- 
 pendence 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 con- 
 junctures 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 cau- 
 tiously 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, 
 
318 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 A scientific term or two is not enough to disguise tha 
 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 rudi- 
 mentary, 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 by Montesquieu's 
 
vi. HISTORY. 319 
 
 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 scholar- 
 ship 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 sur- 
 prising, and perhaps in no other book of equal gener- 
 ality have there been discovered so few serious inac- 
 curacies, 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 is 
 
320 VOLTAIKE. CHAP 
 
 to deliver to fire and slaughter the small villages oi 
 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.' 1 
 This 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 unfortu- 
 nately 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 com- 
 mensurate 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. 2 A historian 
 may justly contend, if he thinks that the evidence 
 warrants him, that Julian belongs to the type of vir- 
 
 1 C. vi. CEuvres, xx. p. 398. 
 3 C. xi. CEuvres, xx. p. 455. 
 
VI. HISTORY. 321 
 
 tuous 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 apos- 
 tate. A Eoman aristocrat, blind to the real opera- 
 tion 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. 1 There 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 regenera- 
 tion of the Empire than the initiated disciple of 
 Platonist theurgy. 
 
 His account of the history of the church is com- 
 posed in the same vein, and we may see where 
 Gibbon, who was a reader of Voltaire, drew the 
 
 1 See on this interesting subject Finlay's Greece under the 
 Romans (b.c. 146-a.d. 716), pp. 156, 157. 
 
322 VOLTAIRE. 
 
 CHAP 
 
 inspiration of the solemn sneer with which he sapped 
 solemn creed. 1 ' 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 reli- 
 gion. It is unquestionably divine, since seventeen 
 centuries of imposture and imbecility have not 
 destroyed it.' 2 Voltaire 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 deprava- 
 tion were per solium to be followed by an eighteenth 
 and other centuries of boundless virtue and enlighten- 
 ment. 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., 3 and 
 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 deci- 
 sive, 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. But 
 
 1 Childe Harold, iii. 106 and 107. 
 
 2 C. ix. CEuvres, xx. p. 445. 
 
 3 C. lviii. (Euvres, xxi. pp. 328-341. 
 
VI. HISTOKY. _ 323 
 
 Voltaire did not know how much a man is the pro- 
 duct 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. 1 How 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 1 
 
 Even without this inconsistency, the fundamental 
 error is bad enough We get very wearied of the per- 
 sistent 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 nour- 
 ished. 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 per- 
 ceive, in a way in which it were much to be wished 
 1 Quelques petites Hardiesses, etc. (Euvres, xxxvi. p. 445. 
 
324 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 that more recent historians might show an equal dis- 
 cernment, that we ought to use the terms of civilisa- 
 tion, with all their complex and accumulated associ- 
 ations, 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, there- 
 fore the actors in any one of them were both con- 
 scious 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.' 1 This 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 ecclesiastical 
 1 C. xlii (Ewvres, xxi. p. 143. 
 
VI. HISTORY. 325 
 
 pretensions as a thing in the highest degree unphilo- 
 sophical, 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 1 If he gives no 
 explanation of the course of history, none to himself 
 probably, and none to us assuredly, what is his merit J 
 This, that he has fully placed before us the history 
 
326 VOLTAIRE. CHAP 
 
 which 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 Mahom- 
 etan power, or of the crusades, hut that he saw the 
 advantage, as we see the unavoidable necessity, of com- 
 prehending 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 pre- 
 dominance, 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 to 
 
VI. HISTORY. 327 
 
 make 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.' 1 The 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 quali- 
 ties 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 move- 
 ment 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 transforma- 
 tions, 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. 2 In this respect he is as 
 
 1 Notes sur le Desastre de Lisbonne. CEuvres, xv. p. 57. 
 
 2 He ridiculed some of these in one of his most humane and 
 otherwise excellent pieces, L'Homme aux Quarante Ecus (1767). 
 (Em. lix. p. 395. 
 
328 VOLTAIRE. chap. VL 
 
 defective 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 false- 
 hood, 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 Vol- 
 taire 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. 1 Neverthe- 
 less, it was much to lead men to study the history of 
 modern Europe as a whole, and we may say of Vol- 
 taire in connection with history what he said of Cor- 
 neille 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.' 2 
 
 1 The Republic, 1577. Esprit des Lois, 1748. 
 * (Ewv. IxviL p. 94. 
 
OHAPTEE Vn. 
 
 FERNEY. 
 
 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 enjoy- 
 ing 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 erezit Voltaire, — much more 
 noise has been made, than so simple and natural a pro- 
 ceeding at all calls for. 1 Madame 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 incessant 
 
 1 A drawing of Voltaire's chateau at Ferney is given in 
 Blancheton's Vues Pittoresques des Chateaux de France (Paris, 
 1826), Part II. The chateau is still standing, and the pros- 
 pect from the terrace repays a visit, apart from the in- 
 terest of association. The church is now a receptacle for wine, 
 casks. 
 
330 VOLTAIEE. OHAP. 
 
 .and the hospitality ungrudging. 1 He 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. 2 He pro- 
 tests 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 news 
 
 1 The reader ■who is curious as to the most indifferent details, 
 will find what he seeks in a singular monument of painstaking 
 Bpleen, entitled Manage et Finances de Voltaire, by M. Kicolardot 
 (Paris, 1854). 
 
 ' Corr. 1761. (Euv. lxvii. p. 190. 
 
\VH. FEENEY. 331 
 
 which 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. 1 In 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 appear- 
 ance 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. 2 She 
 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 repre- 
 sentation of Merope once drew floods of tears from 
 some English ladies. 3 Her 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 years 
 
 1 Corr. Lit. vi. p. 272 ; v. p. 385. 
 a Grimm, Corr. Lit. v. p. 393. 
 8 Cora. 1761. CEuv. lxzv. p. 158. 
 
332 VOLTAIRE. ohap. 
 
 younger than her uncle, 1 she needed continual festivi- 
 ties 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 Eussians, worse than Siberia itself ; we 
 see thirty leagues of mountain, snow, and precipices : 
 it is Naples in summer, Lapland in winter. 2 One 
 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 passed 
 
 1 Born 1710 ; lost her first husband 1744 ; married one 
 Vlvier in 1779 ; died 1790. 
 
 a Corr. 1770. (Ehiv. lxx. p. 175. 
 
VII. FERNET. 333 
 
 months 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 encyclopaedic church, only praying him not 
 to think her too importunate. Christian vn. of 
 Denmark apologises for not being able at a stroke to 
 remove all the obstacles that He in the way of the 
 civil liberty of his subjects. Gustavus HI. 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. 1 Joseph II. would fain have 
 1 Corr. 1771-72. (Ewv. lxxiv. pp. 733 and 737. 
 
334 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 called at Ferney while travelling incognito through 
 France, hut 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 Felicity 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. 1 
 
 Besides kings and the writers of books, plain men 
 also besought his dictum on high matters. ' A burgo- 
 master of Middleburg,' he informs Madame du 
 Deffand, [ whom I do not know, wrote to me a little 
 
 1 Corr. 1772. (Euvres, lxxi. p. 496. The marked copy is 
 still in existence, along with the rest of Voltaire's books, at St. 
 Petersburg ; see Lavergne's Eamomistes du 18iime Steele, p. 28& 
 
VII. FEKNEY. 335 
 
 while 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.' 1 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 
 Helyetius and with Diderot, who, greatly to the 
 indignation of the business-like patriarch, had a bad 
 habit of leaving letters to answer themselves. 2 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. 3 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 transla- 
 tion of the Eclogues and Fourth ^Eneid into French 
 metric verse. 'They say,' wrote Turgot, 'that he is 
 so busy with his Encyclopedia 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, 
 
 1 Corr. 1761. (Euvres, Ixvii. p. 166. 
 a (Euvres, lxxv. pp. 64, 69, etc. 
 3 Corr. 1770. (Euvres, lxxi. p. 18. 
 
336 VOLTAIRE. OHA* 
 
 and in fact he did get an answer to his own letter ; 
 but it can hardly have been very much more satis- 
 factory 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. 1 As 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.' 2 And 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 Middle- 
 ton'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 disagree- 
 
 i Ghivres de Turgot, ii pp. 814-825. a lb. p. 824. 
 
VII. FEKNEY. 337 
 
 able in the letters of an old man who had so true an 
 interest in the spread of virtuej 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 stiff- 
 ness, a little less pliancy of phrase. We would not go 
 through the world insisting on grim Puritanic earnest- 
 ness 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.' 1 The 
 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, in- 
 tensely 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, 
 
 1 (Euvres, lxxv: p. 33], 
 
 Z 
 
338 VOLTAIEB. CHAP. 
 
 with which he amused all correspondents alike. They 
 came as naturally from his mobile and genial constitu- 
 tion, 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 courteous- 
 uess 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 invari- 
 ably 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. assuredly 
 
vn. FEKNEY. 339 
 
 nothing 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.' 1 Condorcet, 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. 2 Undoubtedly 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 pro- 
 
 1 (Euvres, Lxxv. p. 33. 
 a (Ewvres de Condorcet, iv. pp. 33, 34, and vi. pp. 187-189, 
 
340 VOLTAIRE. OHAP 
 
 tectives against imprisonment, confiscation, and pos- 
 sible 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 manli- 
 ness 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 con- 
 taining only Catholic tenants. The gorgeous ceremony 
 with which in his quality of lord he commemorated 
 
VII. FEKNET. 341 
 
 its 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 com- 
 munion (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. 1 Voltaire, 
 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 cure, be he knave or 
 dunce. One must respect the two hundred and fifty 
 1 Corr. 1768. (Ewvrea, Ixxv. p. 426. 
 
342 VOLTAIBE. OHAR 
 
 timorous 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. 1 
 
 The 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 viati- 
 cum 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 forgive- 
 ness from God and the State ; and finally he forgave 
 the bishop of Annecy, who had calumniated him to 
 1 Corr. 1768. CEuvres, lxx. pp. 198-199. 
 
Vli. FEENBT. 343 
 
 the king, and whose malicious designs had come to 
 nought. The priest and notary afterwards falsified 
 this amazing declaration so as to appease the hishop, 
 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.' 1 A 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. 2 To 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 what- 
 ever 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, 
 
 1 Corr. 1769. (Euvres, lxx. pp. 434, 435 ; lxxv. p. 452 
 Grimm's Corr. Lit. vi. p. 231. 
 
 2 Condorcet, Vie de Voltaire, p. 126. 
 
344 VOLTAIRE. CHAP 
 
 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 Eome, per- 
 haps 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 dig- 
 nity, 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 perse- 
 cution. Then it gave him an opportunity of harassing 
 his enemy, the bishop of Aiinecy. 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 pleasan- 
 tries 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. 1 One of his first enjoyments 
 was to write letters to his episcopal foe, signed with a 
 cross and his name : ' t%t Voltaire, Capucin indigne.' 2 A 
 
 1 Corr. (Euvres, lxxi. pp. 25, 27, 30, etc 
 * Grimm, Corr. Lit. vi. p. 358. 
 
VII. FERNEY. 345 
 
 Bfcory 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. 1 It 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 impos- 
 sible to revolutionise the spiritual basis of belief with- 
 out 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. Eousseau 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, that 
 1 Grimm, Corr. Lit. vi. p. 358. 
 
346 VOLTAIRE. CHAP, 
 
 is 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 after- 
 wards 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. 1 Thus Voltaire, 
 who was eighteen years his elder, gave this extra- 
 ordinary genius his first productive impulse. But a 
 sensibility of temperament, to which perhaps there is 
 no parallel in the list of prominent men, impelled Kous- 
 seau 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 in- 
 telligence. 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 Eous- 
 seau, 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. 
 
 1 Confessions, pt. i. liv. v. Date of 1736. 
 
VII. FEEKET. 347 
 
 'It will not do,' wrote D'Alembert to Voltaire 
 as early as 1762, 'to speak too loudly against Jean 
 Jacques or his book, for lie is rather a king in the 
 Halles.' 1 This 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 xrv. 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 Eousseau shelter, 
 and so did Voltaire; but each of them disliked his 
 work as warmly as the other. They did not under- 
 stand 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 Eousseau 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. 2 It is a stale 
 > (Ewvres, lxxv. p. 182. a Corr. 1762. (Ewvres, lror. p. 188, 
 
348 VOLTAIEE. CHAP. 
 
 romance, 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. 1 The 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 de- 
 fend 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. Bousseau's exaggerated 
 tone was an offence to Voltaire's more just and reason- 
 able spirit, and the feigned austerity of a man whose 
 life and manners he knew, assumed in his eyes a dis- 
 agreeable shade of hypocrisy. 2 Besides 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 social 
 1 CEvmes, lxvii. p. 432. 3 Condorcet, p. 170. 
 
VII. FEENEY. 349 
 
 thought had come; a dead-lock of which the catas- 
 trophe 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 power- 
 ful indirect attack of the Encyclopaedia, 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 regime of en- 
 lightenment and humanity. Eousseau, on the con- 
 trary, 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 such 
 
350 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 an attack as Eousseau'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 Eevolution, 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 
 Eevolution, virtually never to return, in spite of the 
 
Vlt FEKNEY. 351 
 
 transient appearances to the contrary. The church 
 was swept away also, hut only for a year or two ; 
 and so little effectual was the Revolution, which was 
 in fact Eousseau's Eevolution, in permanently modify- 
 ing its position, that those Frenchmen at the present 
 day who most soherly judge the future of their 
 country and look deepest into its state, clearly per- 
 ceive 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 establish- 
 ment 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 dissolvent 
 
352 VOLTAIKE. CHAP 
 
 than 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. 1 
 
 In saying, however, that Rousseau's attack was 
 inevitable, we have perhaps said that it was indispen- 
 sable; 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 away 
 ' Lamartine's Girondins, iv. v. 
 
vii. FERNEY. 353 
 
 their 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 bonds- 
 men 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 Revolu- 
 tion and after Napoleon ; but we must remember the 
 2a 
 
354 VOLTAIRE. CHAP. 
 
 designs 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; fdr even of the 
 Constituent, which was Voltairean, the very soul was 
 Mirabeau, who was Eousseauite. 
 
 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 m 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 turn 
 
VII. FERNEY. 355 
 
 over some of the thirty-five volumes of the Encyclo- 
 paedia, may easily see how that gigantic undertaking 
 (1751 — 1765), in which Voltaire always took the 
 most ardent and practical interest, 1 assisted the move- 
 ment 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. 2 This enter- 
 prise, 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 Encyclopaedia 
 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 on 
 
 1 See his correspondence with D'Alembert (QHuvres, lxxv.) 
 until 1760, the date of D'Alembert's separation from Diderot 
 and the Encyclopaedia. 
 
 2 Phil. Pos. v. 520. 
 
356 VOLTAIRE. chap. 
 
 the 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 power- 
 ful, so as now to be itself the effective indirect sub- 
 stitute for that direct negative criticism, with which 
 the Encyclopaedic design had once thrown it into 
 alliance. 
 
 Diderot, the third chief of the attack, does even 
 fuller justice than Eousseau to Voltaire's share in 
 stimulating thought and opening the mind of France ; 
 and in spite of the extravagance of its first clause, 
 there is a glimpse of true discrimination in the char- 
 acteristic sentence — ' "Were I to call him the greatest 
 man nature has produced, I might find people to 
 agree with me ; but if I say that she has never yet 
 produced, and is never likely to produce again, a man 
 so extraordinary, only his enemies will contradict 
 me.' 1 This panegyric was specially disinterested, 
 because Voltaire's last years had been not least 
 remarkable for his bitter antipathy to the dogmatic 
 atheism and dogmatic materialism of that school, with 
 which Diderot was most intimate personally, and 
 with whose doctrines, if he did not at all times seem 
 entirely to share them, he had at any rate a warmer 
 sympathy than with any other system of that nega- 
 
 1 Essais sur les r&gnes de Claude et Nirpn, vol. vi. pp. 256 
 290, and 191 (Ed. 1819) 
 
VII. FERNET. 357 
 
 tive epoch, when every chief thinker was so vague 
 positively, so weak constructively, and only the sub- 
 alterns, like D'Holbach and Helvetius, presumed to 
 push on to conclusions. 
 
 The story of Voltaire's many long-sustained and 
 unflagging endeavours to procure whatever redress 
 might be possible for the victims of legal injustice, 
 has been very often told, and mere commemoration 
 of these justly renowned achievements may suffice here. 
 ' The worst of the worthy sort of people,' he once said, 
 ' is that they are such cowards. A man groans over 
 wrong, he shuts his lips, he takes his supper, he for- 
 gets.' 1 Voltaire was not of that temper. He was not 
 only an extremely humane man ; extraordinary vivid- 
 ness of imagination, lack of which is at the root of so 
 much cruelty, and unparalleled sympathetic quality, 
 thinness of which explains so much appalling indiffer- 
 ence, animated him to a perseverance in protecting the 
 helpless, which entitles him to a place by the side of 
 Howard and the noblest philanthropists. There were 
 three years in which the chief business of his life was 
 to procure the rehabilitation of the name of the unfor- 
 tunate Calas, and the payment of a money recompense 
 to his family. He agitated the whole world with 
 'indignation and pity by means of narratives, pleas, short 
 statements and long statements, passionate appeals 
 and argumentative appeals. Powerful ministers, fine 
 ladies, lawyers, men of letters, were all constrained 
 1 Corr. 1766. (Ewores, Ixxv. p. 364. 
 
358 VOLTAIRE. chap. 
 
 by his importunate solicitations to lend an ear to the 
 cause of reason and tolerance, and to lift up an arm 
 in its vindication. The same tremendous enginery 
 was again brought into play in the case of Sirven. 
 In the case of La Barre and his comrade D'Etallonde, 
 his tenacity was still more amazing and heroic. For 
 twelve years he persevered in the attempt to have the 
 memory of La Barre rehabilitated. One oi the judicial 
 authorities concerned in that atrocious exploit, struck 
 with horror at the thought of being held up to the 
 execration of Europe by that terrible avenger, con- 
 veyed some menace to Voltaire of what might befall 
 him. Voltaire replied to him by a Chinese anecdote. 
 ' I forbid you,' said a tyrannical emperor to the chief 
 of the tribunal of history, ' to speak a word more of 
 me.' The mandarin began to write. ' What are you 
 doing now V asked the emperor. ' I am writing down 
 the order that your majesty has just given me.' 1 
 There was a something inexorable as doom about 
 Voltaire's unrelenting perseverance in getting wrong 
 definitely stamped and transfixed. If he did not suc- 
 ceed in obtaining justice for the memory of La Barre, 
 and in procuring for D'Etallonde free pardon, at least 
 he never abandoned the endeavour, and he was just 
 as ardent and unwearied in the twelfth year, as he had 
 been while his indignation was freshly kindled. He 
 was more successful in the case of Lally. Count Lally 
 had failed to save India from the English, had been 
 taken prisoner, and had then in a magnanimous Way 
 
 1 Condorcet, p. 124. 
 
VII. FEKNEY. 359 
 
 asked his captors to allow him to go to Paris to 
 clear himself from various charges, which the too 
 numerous enemies he had made were spreading 
 against his character and administration. The French 
 people, infuriated at the loss of their possessions in 
 India and Canada, were crying for a victim, and Lally, 
 after a process tainted with every kind of illegality, 
 was condemned to death by the parliament of Paris 
 (1766) on the vague charge of abuse of authority, 
 exactions, and vexations. 1 The murdered man's son, 
 known in the days of the Revolution as Lally Tollendal, 
 was joined by Voltaire in the honourable work of pro- 
 curing revision of the proceedings; and one of the 
 last crowning triumphs of Voltaire's days was the news 
 brought to him on his dying bed, that his long effort 
 had availed. 
 
 The death of Lally is the parallel in French history 
 to the execution of Byng in the history of England, 
 and, oddly enough, Voltaire was very actively occupied 
 in trying to avert that crime of our government, as 
 well as the crimes of his own. He had known Byng 
 when he was in England. 2 Some one told him that 
 a letter from Richelieu, who had been Byng's opponent 
 at Minorca, would be useful, and Voltaire instantly 
 urged the Duke to allow him to forward a letter he 
 had, stating Richelieu's conviction of his defeated 
 enemy's bravery and good judgment. Voltaire in- 
 sists that this letter turned four votes on the court 
 
 ' x Martin's Hist, de France, iv. pp. 569-572, 
 
 2 Corr. 1757. CEuwes, lxvi. p. 51. 
 
360 VOLTAIRE. chap. 
 
 martial. 1 He informs a correspondent, moreover, oi 
 the fact that Byng had instructed his executor to 
 express his deep obligation both to Voltaire and 
 Eichelieu. 2 Humanity is erroneously counted among 
 commonplace virtues. If it deserved such a place, 
 there would be less urgent need than, alas, there is, for 
 its daily exercise among us. In its pale shape of kindly 
 sentiment and bland pity it is common enough, and is 
 always the portion of the cultivated. But humanity 
 armed, aggressive, and alert, never slumbering and 
 never wearying, moving like ancient hero over the 
 land to slay monsters, is the rarest of virtues, and 
 Voltaire is one of its master-types. 
 
 His interest in public transactions in his latest years 
 was keener than ever. That fruit of Polish anarchy, 
 the war between Russia and Turkey which broke out 
 in 1768, excited his imagination to a pitch of great 
 heat, and the despatch in the spring of , 1770 of a 
 squadron from Cronstadt, for the so-called liberation 
 of Greece, made him weep for joy. He implored 
 Frederick not to leave to Catherine alone the burden 
 of so glorious a task. Superstition had had seven 
 crusades ; was it not a noble thing to undertake one 
 crusade to drive the barbarous Turks from the land 
 of Socrates and Plato, Sophocles and Euripides 1 
 Frederick replied very sensibly that Dantzic was more 
 to him than the Piraeus, and that he is a little indif- 
 ferent about the modern Greeks, who, if ever the arts 
 
 1 Corr. 1756. (Exmres, lxv. p. 568 ; lxvi. pp. 1, 19, 20, 40. 
 2 CEwvres, lxvi. p. 51. 
 
VII. FERNET. 361 
 
 Bhould revive among them, would be jealous to find that 
 a Gaul by his Henriade had surpassed their Homer ; 
 that this same Gaul had beaten Sophocles, equalled 
 Thucydides, and left far behind him Plato, Aristotle, 
 and the whole school of the Porch: 1 — which was, 
 perhaps, not quite so sensibly said. 
 
 The successes of Eussia against Turkey in 1770 
 roused the anxiety of Austria and Prussia, and the 
 solution of what we know as the Eastern question was 
 indefinitely postponed by the device of partitioning 
 Poland (Aug. 5, 1772), the alternative to the acquisi- 
 tion of the whole of that country by Eussia, the least 
 civilised of the three powers. Of this memorable 
 transaction Voltaire heartily approved, and he gave 
 thanks that he had lived to see ' such glorious events.' 2 
 He insisted, decidedly against the king's will, that 
 Frederick had devised the scheme, for he found it full 
 of genius, and to all seeming he discerned none of the 
 execration which the event he had just witnessed was 
 destined to raise in his own country in years to come. 
 His friendship with two of the chief actors may have 
 biassed his judgment ; but Voltaire seldom allowed, 
 indeed by the conditions of his temperament he was 
 unable to allow, personal considerations of this kind 
 to obscure his penetrating sight. He may well have 
 thought the partition of Poland desirable, for the 
 reasons which a statesman of to-day may find adequate : 
 the country's hopeless political anarchy, its crushing 
 material misery, the oppressive power of the church, 
 1 Corr. 1772. (Eumes, lzxiv. p. 36. 2 lb. p. 93, etc. 
 
362 VOLTAIRE OHAP. 
 
 the inevitable and standing peril to Europe of the 
 existence of such a centre of- conflagration. It is worth 
 remarking that Rousseau was much more keenly alive 
 to the gravity of the event, that he protested against 
 what had been done, and that his influence has been 
 one of the main causes of the illogical sympathy of 
 democratic Europe for one of the most pestilent of 
 aristocratic governments. 
 
 The accession of Turgot to power in 1774 "stirred 
 an ardent sympathy in Voltaire. Like the rest of the 
 school, he looked upon this as the advent of the politi- 
 cal messiah, 1 and he shared the extreme hopes of that 
 great and virtuous man's most sanguine lieutenants. 
 He declared that a new heaven and a new earth had 
 opened to him. 2 His sallies against the economists 
 were forgotten, and he now entered into the famous 
 controversy of the free trade in grain with all his usual 
 fire. His fervour went too far for the sage minister, 
 who prayed him to be somewhat less eager in alarming 
 uninformed prejudice. . Still he insisted on hoping all 
 things. 
 
 Contemple la brillante aurore 
 
 Qui t'annonce enfin les beaux jours. 
 
 Un nouveau monde est pres d'eclore ; 
 
 Ate disparait pour toujours. 
 
 Vois l'auguste philosophie, 
 
 Chez toi si long temps poursuivie, 
 
 Dieter ses triomphantes lois. 
 
 1 See Morellet, i. pp. 147, 159, eto. 
 a (Euvres, lxxv. p. 641. 
 
vn. FERNEY. 363 
 
 Je lui dis : ' Ange tutelaire, 
 
 Quels dieux repandent ces bienfaits V 
 
 ' C'est un seul homine. ' 1 
 
 When it proved that one man alone, ' qui ne chercha 
 le vrai, que pour faire le bien,' 2 was no match for the 
 mountain torrent of ignorance, prejudice, selfishness, 
 and usage, and Turgot fell from power (May 1776), 
 Voltaire sunk into a despair for his country, from 
 which he never arose. ' I am as one dashed to the 
 ground. Never can we console ourselves for having 
 seen the golden age dawn and perish. My eyes see 
 only death in front of me, now that M. Turgot is 
 gone. It has fallen like a thunderbolt on my brain 
 and my heart alike. The rest of my days can never 
 be other than pure bitterness.' 8 
 
 The visit to Paris was perhaps a falsification of this 
 prophecy for a moment. In 1778, yielding either to 
 the solicitations of his niece, or to a momentary desire 
 to enjoy the triumph of his renown at its centre, he 
 returned to the great city which he had not seen for 
 nearly thirty years. His reception has been described 
 over and over again. It is one of the historic events 
 of the century. No great captain returning from a 
 prolonged campaign of difficulty and hazard crowned 
 by the most glorious victory, ever received a more 
 splendid and far-resounding greeting. It was the last 
 great commotion in Paris under the old regime. The 
 
 1 Ode sur le Pass^ et le Present (1775). CEuvres, xvi. p. 415. 
 
 2 Epftre a un Homme (1776). CEuvres, xvii. p. 327. 
 " Corr. 1776. (Euvres, lxxii. pp.. 403, 409, 412, etc 
 
364 VOLTAIRE. ohap. 
 
 next great commotion which the historian has to 
 chronicle is the ever -memorable fourteenth day of 
 July, eleven years later, when the Bastille fell, and a 
 new order began for France, and new questions began 
 for all Europe. 
 
 The agitation of so much loud triumph and inces- 
 sant acclamation proved more violent than Voltaire's 
 feeble health could resist, and he died, probably from 
 an over -dose of laudanum, on the thirtieth of May 
 1778. His last writing was a line of rejoicing to the 
 yoimg Lally, that their efforts had been successful in 
 procuring justice for the memory of one who had been 
 put to death unjustly. How far Voltaire realised the 
 nearness of vast changes we cannot tell. There is at 
 least one remarkable prophecy of his, in the well- 
 known letter to Chauvelin : — ' Everything that I see 
 appears the throwing broadcast of the seed of a 
 revolution, which must inevitably come one day, but 
 which I shall not have the pleasure of witnessing. 
 The French always come late to things, but they do 
 come at last. Light extends so from neighbour to 
 neighbour, that there will be a splendid outburst on 
 the first occasion, and then there will be a rare com- 
 motion. The young ars very happy; they will see 
 fine things.' 1 A less sanguine tone marks the close 
 of the apologue in which Reason and Truth, her 
 dafigh.ter, take a triumphant journey in France and 
 elsewhere, about the time of the accession of Turgot 
 'Ah, well,' says Reason, 'let us enjoy these glorious 
 1 April 2, 1764. (Eworea, lxviii. p. 220. 
 
vii. FERNET. 365 
 
 days; let us rest here, if they last; and if storms 
 come on, let us go back to our well.' 1 Whether this 
 meant much or little none can know. It would be 
 shallow to believe that such men as Voltaire, with 
 faculty quickened and outlook widened in the high 
 air to which their fame raises them, really discerned 
 no more than we, who have only their uttered words 
 for authority, can perceive that they discerned. Great 
 position often invests men with a second sight whose 
 visions they lock up in silence, content with the work 
 of the day. 
 
 1 Eloge historique de la Raisou (or Voyage de la Raison) 
 QSuvres, lx. p. 478. 
 
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