Voltaire: A Sketch of his Life and Works Part 4

In person Voltaire was always slim, with the long head which, Carlyle says, "is the best sign of intelligence." His thinness is commemorated by the poor but well-known epigram attributed to Young, and identifying him at once with "Satan, Death, and Sin." In old age he became a mere skeleton, with eyes of great brilliancy peering beneath his wig. He was sober and temperate save in coffee, which he drank as inveterately as Johnson did tea. Conversation and literature were, as with Johnson, the G.o.ds of his idolatry.

HIS CHARACTER AND SERVICES

Bolingbroke finely said of Marlborough: "He was so great a man that I forget his errors." One can as justly say the same of Voltaire. I have scant sympathy with those who, dealing with great men, seek every opportunity of bringing them down to the common level. Voltaire was by no means a faultless character. He was far indeed from being an immaculate hero: he had the failings of his age and of his training. But they form no essential part of his work. How much has been made of the coa.r.s.eness and immorality of Luther by men like Father Anderdon! All men have the defects of their qualities. Condorcet, in his _Life of Voltaire_, has placed on record this just criticism: "The happy qualities of Voltaire were often obscured and distorted by a natural mobility, aggravated by the habit of writing tragedies. He pa.s.sed in a moment from anger to sympathetic emotion; from indignation to pleasantry. His pa.s.sions, naturally violent, sometimes transported him too far; and his excessive mobility deprived him of the advantages ordinarily attached to pa.s.sionate tempers-firmness in conduct-courage which no terrors can withhold from action, and which no dangers, antic.i.p.ated beforehand, can shake by their actual presence. Voltaire has often been seen to expose himself rashly to the storm-seldom to meet it with fort.i.tude. These alternations of audacity and weakness have often afflicted his friends, and prepared unworthy triumphs for his envenomed enemies."

He was too ready to lash the curs who barked at his heels, thereby stimulating them to further noise. Scandalous ex-Jesuit Desfontaines, L'Ane de Mirepoix, Thersites Freron and the rest, would be forgotten had he not condescended to apply the whip. Voltaire was always something of a spoilt child, over-sensitive to every reproach. His petulance impelled him to absurd displays of weakness and frenzy, which he was the first to regret. He was generous even to his enemies when they were in trouble.

The weaknesses of Voltaire were, like his smile, on the surface, but there was a great human heart beating beneath.

The restlessness of Voltaire has been contrasted with the repose of Goethe, and Gallic fury with calm Teutonic strength. But which of the two men did most for humanity? Voltaire might have been as calm as Goethe had he been indifferent to everything but his own culture and comfort. No! he loved the fight. When the battle of freedom raged, there was he in the thick of it, considering not his reputation, but what he could do to crush the infamous. An enemy said of him: "He is the first man in the world at writing down what other people have thought." Mr.

Morley justly considers this high and sufficient praise.

The life of a writer was defined by Pope as "a warfare upon earth."

Never was this truer than in the case of Voltaire, who himself said: "_La vie a'un homme de lettres est un combat perpetuel et on meurt les armes a la main._" He was ever in the midst of the fight, and usually alone and surrounded by enemies. And his unfailing resources not merely kept them at bay, but compelled their surrender of an immense territory.

His was a life of creation and contest. In the war against despotism and Christianity he achieved a new kings.h.i.+p of public opinion, and proved that the pen was indeed mightier than the sword.

Heine said: "We should forgive our enemies-but not until they are hung."

Voltaire forgave his when he had gibbeted them in his writings. People who find it difficult to understand his bitterness against "L'Infame"

should remember the revolting cruelty of which religious bigotry was still capable in his day. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the prolonged horrors of the Thirty Years' War, and the Ma.s.sacre of St.

Bartholomew vibrated still. Condorcet wrote: "The blood of many millions of men, ma.s.sacred in the name of G.o.d, still steams up to heaven around us. The earth on which we tread is everywhere covered with the bones of the victims of barbarous intolerance." His rhetoric expressed the feeling of a generation who knew by experience the evils of religious bigotry and fanaticism.

It is as a champion of Freethought that Voltaire deserves chiefly to be remembered. In that capacity I can only find words of praise. Complaints of his flippancy, his _persiflage_, his ridicule, his scurrility, his etc., came, and still come, from the enemy, and show that his blows told and tell. If he did not crush the infamous he at least crippled it. No doubt, under different circ.u.mstances,

Voltaire would have fought differently. But he would never have thought of treating atrocities without indignation, or absurdities without ridicule. Gravity is a part of the game of imposture, and there is nothing the hypocrites and humbugs resent so much as having their solemn pretensions laughed at. .

He knew the subtle power of ridicule. It was the most effective weapon, not only for the time and the nation in which he wrote, but for our time also. His blows were all dealt with grace and agility; his pills were sugar-coated. Grimm well said of him: "He makes arrows of every kind of wood, brilliant and rapid in their flight, but with a keen, unerring point. Under his sparkling pen, erudition ceases to be ponderous and becomes full of life. If he cannot sweep the grand chords of the lyre, he can j strike on golden medals his favorite maxims, and is j irreproachable in the lighter order of poetry." But, I contend, there was a fundamental earnestness in his character; he was the apostle of plain every-day common sense and good feeling.

Voltaire is judged by the character which distinguishes him from other writers, his light touch and superficial raillery. Because he is _par excellence_ a _persifleur_, he is set down as merely a _persifleur_.

Never was there a greater mistake. It is forgotten that he did not write witty tales and squibs only; that he made France acquainted with the philosophy of Locke and the science of Newton; that he wrote the _Age of Louis XIV._, the _History of the Parliament of Paris_, and the _Essay on Manners_ (which revived the historic method), and that he wrote more than twenty tragedies which transformed the French theatre. Voltaire was no mere mocker: his _manner_ was that of a _persifleur_, but his matter was as solid as that of any theologian.

M. Louis de Brouckere, of the University of Brussels, justly claims for Voltaire a double share in the formation of modern culture and the development of modern science. He contributed to it directly by his personal works, and indirectly by antagonising the forces r.e.t.a.r.ding knowledge and creating an intellectual environment eminently favorable to the formation of synthetic knowledge, and a new public opinion common to the intellectual _elite_ of Europe.

Voltaire knew how to marshal against reigning prejudices and errors all the resources of vast learning and an incomparable wit; but no one more clearly than he saw that the doctrines he destroyed must be replaced by others, that humanity cannot get along without a body of common beliefs; and he contributed more than any one else to the elaboration of the new intellectual code by uniting and harmonising the efforts of special _savants_ and isolated thinkers, by giving them a clear consciousness that what they aimed at was the same thing and common to them all.

He never slackened his efforts to appease the quarrels which broke out in the camp of the philosophers, to group all his _spiritual brothers_ in one compact bundle, capable of joint action, to unite them in a laic _church_ which could be utilised to oppose existing churches. The words I here italicise were underlined by him; they are found on every page of his correspondence, and he loses no opportunity to reiterate them and explain their meaning precisely.

If the publication of the _Encyclopdia_ was the work of Diderot, the union of the group of men who rendered that publication possible was, in great measure, the work of Voltaire. If Condorcet wrote just before his death his immortal _Sketch_, Voltaire took a preponderating part in the creation of the intellectual atmosphere in which Condorcet lived and could develop his genius.

Voltaire was a.s.suredly not so coa.r.s.e as Luther, nor even as his contemporary Warburton. He carried lighter guns than Luther, but was more alert and equally persistent. His war against superst.i.tion and intolerance was life-long. Luther smote powerful blows at the church with a bludgeon; Voltaire made delicate pa.s.ses with a rapier. Catholics often declaim against the coa.r.s.eness of the monk-trained Protestant champion. They also protest against the trickery of the Jesuit-trained Freethinker. It is sufficient to say Luther could not have done his work had he not been coa.r.s.e. Nor could Voltaire have done his had he not been a tricksy spirit. Judged by his work, he was one of the best of men, because he did most good to his fellows, and because in his heart was the most burning love of truth, of justice and toleration. In the words of Lecky, he did "more to destroy the greatest of human curses than any other of the sons of men." His numerous volumes are the fruit and exposition of a spirit of encyclopaedic curiosity. He a.s.similated all the thought and learning of his time, and brought to bear on it a wit and common sense that was all his own.

Voltaire is never so pa.s.sionately in earnest as when he speaks against cruelty and oppression. Every sentence quivers with humanity. He denounces war as no "moralist for hire" in a pulpit has ever done, as a scourge of the poor, the weak, and the helpless, to whom he is ever tender. Whenever he sees tyranny or injustice, he attacks it. He wrote against torture when its employment was an established principle of law.

He denounced duelling when that form of murder was the chief feature of the code of honor. He waged warfare upon war when, it was considered man's highest glory.

His attacks on the judicial iniquity of torture-so often callously employed on those supposed instruments of Satan, heretics and witches-were incessant, and it was owing to his influence that the practice was abolished in France by Turgot, his friend, as it had been in Prussia by Frederick, and in Russia by Catherine, his disciples. He advocated the abolition of mutilation, and all forms of cruelty in punishment. He satirised the folly of punis.h.i.+ng murder and robbery by the same capital penalty, and thus making a.s.sa.s.sination the interest of the thief; the barbarity of confiscating the property of children for the crime of the father; and the intricacies and consequent injustice of legal methods. He sought to abolish the sale of offices, to equalise taxation, and to restrict the power of priests to prescribe degrading penances and excessive abstinences. He wrote with fervor against the remnants of serfdom, and defended the rights of the serfs in the Jura against their monastic oppressors. Mr. Lecky says: "His keen and luminous intellect judged with admirable precision most of the popular delusions of his time. He exposed with great force the common error which confounds all wealth with the precious metals. He wrote against sumptuary laws. He refuted Rousseau's doctrine of the evil of all luxury."

Voltaire's work went deeper than political reform. He dealt with ideas, not inst.i.tutions. In a little treatise called the _Voyage of Reason_, which he wrote as late as 1774, he enumerates with exultation the triumphs of reforms which he himself had witnessed. He had previously written, in 1764: "Everything I see scatters the seeds of a revolution which will indubitably arrive, and which I shall not have the happiness to witness." Buckle notes that "the further he advanced in years, the more pungent were his sarcasms against ministers, the more violent were his invectives against despotism"; and it was said of him in the early days of the Revolution, when it was sanguine but not yet sanguinary, "He did not see what has been done, but he did all that we see."

He teaches no mystery, but the open secret of Secularism-_il faut cultiver notre jardin_ (we must cultivate our garden). "Life," he said, "is thickly sown with thorns. I know no other remedy than to pa.s.s rapidly over them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes the greater is their power to harm us." Economy, he declared, is the source of liberality, and this maxim he reduced to practice. He ridiculed all pretences; those of the physician as well as of the metaphysician. "What have you undertaken?" he said, smiling, to a young man, who answered that he was studying medicine. "Why, to convey drugs of which you know little into a body of which you know less!" "Regimen," said he, "is better than physic. Everyone should be his own physician. Eat with moderation what you know by experience agrees with your const.i.tution.

Nothing is good for the body but what we can digest. What medicine can procure digestion? Exercise. What recruit strength? Sleep. What alleviate incurable evils? Patience."

The tone of Voltaire is not fervid or heroic, like, for instance, that of Carlyle; but he worked, as Carlyle did not, for a great cause. He felt for suffering outside himself. Without mysticism or fanaticism, aiming at no remote or impracticable ideal, he ever insisted on meeting the problems of life with practical good sense, toleration, and humanity. He sought always for clear ideas, tangible results, and as Mr.

Lecky says, "labored steadily within the limits of his ideals and of his sympathies, to make the world wiser, happier, and better place than he found it."

Voltaire wrote: "My motto is, 'Straight to the fact,'" and this was a characteristic which equally marked him and Frederick. He had a horror of phrases. "Your fine phrases," said one to him. "My fine phrases!

Learn that I never made one in my life." His style is indeed marked by restraint and simplicity of diction. He wrote to D'Alembert: "You will never succeed in delivering men from error by means of metaphysics. You must prove the truth by facts." As an instance of his apt mingling of fact with reason and ridicule, take his treatment of the doctrine of the Resurrection in the _Philosophical Dictionary_. "A Breton soldier goes to Canada. He finds by chance he falls short of food. He is forced to eat an Iroquois he has killed over-night. This Iroquois had nourished himself on Jesuits during two or three months, a great part of his body has become Jesuit. So there is the body of this soldier composed of Iroquois, Jesuit, and whatever he had eaten before. How will each resume precisely what belonged to him?"

Magnify his failings as you may, you cannot obliterate his one transcendent merit, his humanity ever responsive to every claim of suffering or wrong. He stood for the rights of conscience, for the dignity of human reason, for the gospel of Freethought.

Voltaire may not be placed with the great inspiring teachers of mankind.

But it must be acknowledged that, as Mr. George Saintsbury, no mean critic, says: "In literary craftsmans.h.i.+p, at once versatile and accomplished, he has no superior and scarcely a rival."

He declared that he loved the whole of the nine Muses, and that the doors of the soul should be open to all sciences and all sentiments. He employed every species of composition-poetry, prose, tragedy, comedy, history, dialogue, epistle, essay or epigram-as it suited his purpose, and he excelled in all. Argument or raillery came alike. He made reason amusing, and none like him could ridicule the ridiculous. His charm as a writer has been the occasion of the obloquy attached to his name by bigots. They can never forgive that he forced people to smile at their superst.i.tion.

Much, of course, of Voltaire's mult.i.tudinous work was directed to immediate ends, and but for his grace of style would be of little present interest. But after all winnowings by the ever-swaying fan of time much is left of enduring value. The name of Voltaire will ever be a mighty one in literature: a glorious example of what a man may achieve who is strong in his love of humanity.

TRIBUTES TO VOLTAIRE

As a contrast to the views of Dr. Johnson and De Maistre, which for generations represented the current opinion of Protestants and Catholics, I bring together a few independent testimonies. As time goes on his admirers increase in volume, while his detractors now are mainly those who have an interest in or secret sympathy with the abuses he destroyed. And first, I will give the testimony of Goldsmith who had met him. It was written while Voltaire was alive, but when a false report of his death had been received in England. "Should you look for the character of Voltaire among the journalists and illiterate writers of the age, you will find him there characterised as a monster, with a head turned to wisdom, and a heart inclining to vice-the powers of his mind and the baseness of his principles forming a detestable contrast. But seek for his character among writers like himself, and you will find him very differently described. You perceive him, in their accounts, possessed of good nature, humanity, greatness of soul, fort.i.tude, and almost every virtue: in this description those who might be supposed best acquainted with his character are unanimous. The royal Prussian, D'Argens, Diderot, D'Alembert, and Fontenelle conspire in drawing the picture, in describing the friend of man, and the patron of every rising genius."

Lord Byron's lines on Voltaire and Gibbon (_Childe Harold_, iii., 105-107) are well known. He says:

They were gigantic minds, and their steep aim Was, t.i.tan-like, on daring doubts to pile Thoughts which should call down thunder, and the flame Of Heaven again a.s.sail'd, if Heaven the while On man and man's research could deign do more than smile.

The one was fire and fickleness, a child Most mutable in wishes, but in mind A wit as various,-gay, grave, sage, or wild,- Historian, bard, philosopher, combined; He multiplied himself among mankind, The Proteus of their talents: But his own Breathed most in ridicule,-which, as the wind, Blew where it listed, laying all things p.r.o.ne,- Now to o'erthrow a fool, and now to shake a throne.

The other, deep and slow, exhausting thought, And having wisdom with each studious year, In meditation dwelt, with learning wrought, And shaped his weapon with an edge severe, Sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer; The lord of iron,-that master-spell, Which stung his foes to wrath, which grew from fear, And doom'd him to the zealot's ready h.e.l.l, Which answers to all doubts so eloquently well.

Warton, the learned critic and author of a _History of Poetry_ (Dissertation I.) remarked: "Voltaire, a writer of much deeper research than is imagined, and the first who has displayed the literature and customs of the dark ages with any degree of penetration and comprehension." Robertson, the historian, similarly observed that, had Voltaire only given his authorities, "many of his readers who only consider him as an entertaining and lively writer would have found that he is a learned and well informed historian."

Lord Holland wrote, in his account of the _Life and Writings of Lope de Vega_: "Till Voltaire appeared there was no nation more ignorant of its neighbors' literature than the French. He first exposed and then corrected this neglect in his countrymen. There is no writer to whom the authors of other nations, especially of England, are so indebted for the extension of their fame in France, and, through France, in Europe. There is no critic who has employed more time, wit, ingenuity, and diligence in promoting the literary intercourse between country and country, and in celebrating in one language the triumphs of another. His enemies would fain persuade us that such exuberance of wit implies a want of information; but they only succeed in showing that a want of wit by no means implies an exuberance of information."

Goethe said: "Voltaire will ever be regarded as the greatest name in literature in modern times, and perhaps even in all ages, as the most astonis.h.i.+ng creation of nature, in which she united, in one frail human organisation, all the varieties of talent, all the glories of genius, all the potencies of thought. If you wish depth, genius, imagination, taste, reason, sensibility, philosophy, elevation, originality, nature, intellect, fancy, rect.i.tude, facility, flexibility, precision, art, abundance, variety, fertility, warmth, magic, charm, grace, force, an eagle sweep of vision, vast understanding, instruction rich, tone excellent, urbanity, suavity, delicacy, correctness, purity, cleanness, eloquence, harmony, brilliancy, rapidity, gaiety, pathos, sublimity and universality-perfection indeed-behold Voltaire."

Lord Brougham, in his _Lives of Men of Letters and Science who flourished in the time of George III_., devotes a considerable section to Voltaire. After censuring "the manner in which he devoted himself to crying down the sacred things of his country," he continues: "But, though it would be exceedingly wrong to pa.s.s over this great and prevailing fault without severe reprobation, it would be equally unjust, nay, ungrateful, ever to forget the immense obligations under which Voltaire has laid mankind by his writings, the pleasure derived from his fancy and his wit, the amus.e.m.e.nt which his singular and original humor bestows, even the copious instruction with which his historical works are pregnant, and the vast improvement in the manner of writing history which we owe to him. Yet, great as these services are-among the greatest that can be rendered by a man of letters-they are really of far inferior value to the benefits which have resulted from his long and arduous struggle against oppression, especially against tyranny in the worst form which it can a.s.sume, the persecution of opinion, the infraction of the sacred right to exercise the reason upon all subjects, unfettered by prejudice, uncontrolled by authority, whether of great names or of temporal power."

Macaulay, in his _Essay on Frederick the Great_, observes: "In truth, of all the intellectual weapons which have ever been wielded by man, the most terrible was the mockery of Voltaire. Bigots and tyrants, who had never been moved by the wailing and cursing of millions, turned pale at his name."

Carlyle, in his depreciatory essay, acknowledged: "Perhaps there is no writer, not a mere compiler, but writing from his own invention or elaboration, who has left so many volumes behind him; and if to the merely arithmetical we add a critical estimate, the singularity is still greater; for these volumes are not written without an appearance of due care and preparation; perhaps there is not one altogether feeble and confused treatise, nay, one feeble and confused sentence to be found in them." And at the end he admits: "He gave the death-stab to modern Superst.i.tion! _That_ horrid incubus, which dwelt in darkness, shunning the light, is pa.s.sing away; with all its racks and poison chalices, and foul sleeping-draughts, is pa.s.sing away without return. It was a most weighty service."

One of the strangest of tributes to Voltaire is that from Ruskin, the disciple of Carlyle. In his _Fors Clavigera_ (vol. viii., p. 76) he says: "There are few stronger adversaries to St. George than Voltaire.

But my scholars are welcome to read as much of Voltaire as they like.