Mr. Parton has given us in these volumes[35] another of his interesting
and instructive biographies. Not as interesting, indeed, as some
others,--for example, as his life of Andrew Jackson; nor as instructive
as his lives of Franklin and of Jefferson. The nature of the case made
this impossible. The story of Jackson had never been told till Mr.
Parton undertook it. It was a history of frontier life, of strange
adventures, of desperate courage, of a force of character which
conquered all obstacles and achieved extraordinary results; a story
"Of moving accidents by flood and field,
Of hair-breadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe."
No such interest attaches to the "Life of Voltaire." His most serious
adventure was being shut up in the Bastille for a pasquinade, and
being set free again on his solemn protestation, true or false,
that he never wrote it. It is an old story, told a thousand times,
with all its gloss, if it ever had any, quite worn off. The "Life
of Franklin," which, on the whole, we think the best of Parton's
biographies, was full of interest and instruction of another kind.
It was the life of a builder,--of one who gave his great powers to
construction, to building up new institutions and new sciences, to the
discovery of knowledge and the creation of national life. Voltaire was
a diffuser of knowledge already found, but he had not the patience
nor the devotion of a discoverer. His gift was not to construct good
institutions, but to destroy bad ones,--a work the interest of which is
necessarily ephemeral. No wonder, therefore, that Mr. Parton, with all
his practiced skill as a biographer, has not been able to give to the
story of Voltaire the thrilling interest which he imparted to that of
Franklin and of Jackson.
We gladly take the present opportunity to add our recognition of Mr.
Parton's services to those which have come to him from other quarters.
A writer of unequal merit, and one whose judgment is often biased by
his prejudices, he nevertheless has done much to show how biography
should be written. Of all forms of human writing there is none which
ought to be at once so instructive and so interesting as this, but in
the large majority of instances it is the most vapid and empty. The
good biographies, in all languages, are so few that they can almost be
counted on the fingers; but these are among the most precious books in
the literature of mankind. The story of Ruth, the Odyssey of Homer,
Plutarch's lives, the Memorabilia of Xenophon, the life of Agricola,
the Confessions of Augustine, among the ancients; and, in modern times,
Boswell's "Johnson," the autobiographies of Alfieri, Benvenuto Cellini,
Franklin, Goethe, Voltaire's "Charles XII.," and Southey's "Life of
Wesley" are specimens of what may be accomplished in this direction. It
has been thought that any man can write a biography, but it requires
genius to understand genius. How much intelligence is necessary to
collect with discrimination the significant facts of a human life; to
penetrate to the law of which they are the expression; to give the
picturesque proportions to every part, to arrange the foreground, the
middle distance, and the background of the panorama; to bring out
in proper light and shadow the features and deeds of the hero! Few
biographers take this trouble. They content themselves with collecting
the letters written by and to their subject; sweeping together the
facts of his life, important or otherwise; arranging them in some kind
of chronological order; and then having this printed and bound up in
one or two heavy volumes.
To all this many writers of biography add another fault, which is
almost a fatal one. They treat their subject _de haut en bas_,
preferring to look down upon him rather than to look up to him. They
occupy themselves in criticising his faults and pointing out his
deficiencies, till they forget to mention what he has accomplished to
make him worthy of having his life written at all. We lately saw a
life of Pope treated in this style. One unacquainted with Pope, after
reading it, would say, "If he was such a contemptible fellow, and his
writings so insignificant, why should we have to read his biography?"
Thomas Carlyle has the great merit of leading the way in the opposite
direction, and of thus initiating a new style of biography. The old
method was for the writer to regard himself as a judge on the bench,
and the subject of his biography as a prisoner at the bar. Carlyle,
in his "Life of Schiller," showed himself a loving disciple, sitting
at the feet of his master. We recollect that when this work first
appeared there were only a few copies known to be in this country.
One was in the possession of an eminent professor in Harvard College,
of whom the present writer borrowed it. On returning it, he was asked
what he thought of it, and replied that he considered it written with
much enthusiasm. "Yes," responded the professor, "I myself thought it
rather extravagant." Enthusiasm in a biographer was then considered
to be the same as extravagance. But this hero-worship, which is the
charm in Plutarch, Xenophon, and Boswell, inspired a like interest in
Carlyle's portraits of Schiller, Goethe, Richter, Burns, and the actors
in the French Revolution. So true is his own warning: "Friend, if you
wish me to take an interest in what you say, be so kind as to take some
interest in it yourself"--a golden maxim, to be kept in mind by all
historians, writers of travels, biographers, preachers, and teachers.
A social success may sometimes be accomplished by assuming the _blasé_
air of the Roman emperor who said, "Omnia fui, nihil expedit;" but this
tone is ruinous for one who wishes the ear of the public.
Since the days of Carlyle, others have written in the same spirit,
allowing themselves to take more or less interest in the man whose life
they were relating. So Macaulay, in his sketches of Clive, Hastings,
Chatham, Pym, and Hampden; so Lewes, in his "Life of Goethe;" and so
Parton, in his various biographies.
In some respects Mr. Parton's biography reminds us of Macaulay's
History. Both have been credited with the same qualities, both charged
with the same defects. Both are indefatigable in collecting material
from all quarters,--from other histories and biographies, memoirs,
letters, newspapers, broadsides, and personal communications gathered
in many out-of-the-way localities. Both have the power of discarding
insignificant details and retaining what is suggestive and picturesque.
Both, therefore, have the same supreme merit of being interesting.
Both have strong prejudices, take sides earnestly, forget that they
are narrators, and begin to plead as attorneys and advocates. Both
have been accused, rightly or wrongly, of grave inaccuracies. But their
defects will not prevent them from holding their place as teachers of
the English-speaking public. English and American readers will long
continue to think of Marlborough as Macaulay represents him; of Jackson
and Jefferson as Parton describes them. Such Rembrandt-like portraits
fix the attention by their strange chiaro-oscuro. They may not be like
nature, but they take the place of nature. The most remarkable instance
of this kind is the representation of Tiberius by Tacitus, which has
caused mankind, until very recently, to consider Tiberius a monster
of licentiousness and cruelty, in spite of the almost self-evident
absurdity and self-contradiction of this assumption.[36] Limners with
such a terrible power of portraiture should be very careful how they
use it, and not abuse the faculty in the interest of their prejudices.
If Mr. Parton resembles Macaulay in some respects, in one point, at
least, he is like Carlyle: that is, that his last hero is the least
interesting. From Schiller and Goethe to Frederic the Great was a fall;
and so from Franklin to Voltaire. Carlyle tells us what a weary task
he had with his Prussian king, and we think that Mr. Parton's labors
over the patriarch of the eighteenth-century literature must have been
equally distressing. At a distance, Voltaire is a striking phenomenon:
the most brilliant wit of almost any period; the most prolific
writer; a successful dramatist, historian, biographer, story-teller,
controversialist, lyrical poet, student of science. "Truly, a universal
genius, a mighty power!" we say. But look more closely, and this genius
turns into talent; this encyclopædic knowledge becomes only superficial
half knowledge; this royalty is a sham royalty; it does not lead the
world, but follows it. The work into which Voltaire put his heart was
destruction--the destruction of falsehoods, bigotries, cruelties, and
shams. It was an important duty, and some one had to do it. But it was
temporary, and one of which the interest is soon over. If Luther and
the other reformers had aimed at only destroying the Church of Rome,
their influence would have speedily ceased. But they rebuilt, as they
destroyed; the sword in one hand, and the trowel in the other. They
destroyed in order to build; they took away the outgrown house, to put
another in its place. Voltaire did not go so far as that; he wanted no
new church in the place of the old one.
Voltaire and Rousseau are often spoken of as though they were
fellow-workers, and are associated in many minds as sharing the same
convictions. Nothing can be more untrue. They were radically opposite
in the very structure of their minds, and their followers and admirers
are equally different. If all men can be divided into Platonists
and Aristotelians, they may be in like manner classified as those
who prefer Voltaire to Rousseau, and _vice versa_. Both were indeed
theists, and both opposed to the popular religion of their time. Both
were brilliant writers, masters of the French language, listened to
by the people, and with a vast popularity. Both were more or less
persecuted for their religious heresies. So far they resemble each
other. But these are only external resemblances; radically and inwardly
they were polar opposites. What attracted one repelled the other.
Voltaire was a man of the world, fond of society and social pleasures;
the child of his time, popular, a universal favorite. Rousseau shrank
from society, hated its fashions, did not enjoy its pleasures, and
belonged to another epoch than the eighteenth century. Rousseau
believed in human nature, and thought that if we could return to our
natural condition the miseries of life would cease. Voltaire despised
human nature; he forever repeated that the majority of men were knaves
and fools. Rousseau distrusted education and culture as they are
commonly understood; but to Voltaire's mind they were the only matters
of any value,--all that made life worth living. Rousseau was more like
Pascal than like Voltaire; far below Pascal, no doubt, in fixed moral
principles and ascetic virtue. Yet he resembled him in his devotion
to ideas, his enthusiasm for some better day to come. Both were out of
place in their own time; both were prophets crying in the wilderness.
Put Voltaire between Pascal and Rousseau, and it would be something
like the tableau of Goethe between Basedow and Lavater.
"Prophete rechts, Propliete links,
Das Weltkind in der Mitte."
The difference between Voltaire and Rousseau was really that between a
man of talent and a man of genius. Voltaire, brilliant, adroit, full of
resource, quick as a flash, versatile, with immense powers of working,
with a life full of literary successes, has not left behind him a
single masterpiece. He comes in everywhere second best. As a tragedian
he is inferior to Racine; as a wit and comic writer far below Molière;
and he is quite surpassed as a historian and biographer by many modern
French authors. No germinating ideas are to be found in his writings,
no seed corn for future harvests. He thought himself a philosopher,
and was so regarded by others; but neither had his philosophy any
roots to it. A sufficient proof of this is the fact that he shared the
superficial optimism of the English deists, as expressed by Bolingbroke
and Pope, until the Lisbon earthquake, by destroying thirty thousand
people, changed his whole mental attitude. Till then he could say with
Pope, "Whatever is, is right." After that, most things which are,
appeared to him fatally and hopelessly wrong. That thirty thousand
persons should perish in a few minutes, in great suffering, he thought
inconsistent with the goodness of God. But take the whole world over,
thirty thousand people are continually perishing, in the course of a
few hours or days. What difference does it make, in a philosophical
point of view, if they die all at once in a particular place, or at
longer intervals in many places? Voltaire asks, "What crime had those
infants committed who lie crushed on their mother's breasts?" What
crime, we reply, have the infants committed who have been dying by
millions, in suffering, since the world began? "Was Lisbon," he asks,
"more wicked than Paris?" But had Voltaire never noticed before that
wicked people often live on in health and pleasure, while the good
suffer and die? Voltaire did not see, what it requires very little
philosophy to discover, that a Lisbon earthquake really presents no
more difficulty to the reason than the suffering and death of a single
child.
Another fact which shows the shallow nature of Voltaire's way of
thinking is his expectation of destroying Christianity by a combined
attack upon it of all the wits and philosophers. Mr. Parton tells us
that "l'Infâme," which Voltaire expected to crush, "was not religion,
nor the Christian religion, nor the Roman Catholic Church. It was,"
he says, "_religion claiming supernatural authority, and enforcing
that claim by pains and penalties_." No doubt it was the spirit
of intolerance and persecution which excited his indignation. But
the object of that indignation was not the abstraction which Mr.
Parton presents to us. It was something far more concrete. There is
no doubt that Voltaire confounded Christianity with the churches
about him, and these with their abuses; and thus his object was to
sweep away all positive religious institutions, and to leave in
their place a philosophic deism. Else what meaning in his famous
boast that "it required twelve men to found a belief, which it would
need only one man to destroy"? What meaning, otherwise, in his
astonishment that Locke, "having in one book so profoundly traced
the development of the understanding, could so degrade his own
understanding in another"?--referring, as Mr. Morley believes, to
Locke's "Reasonableness of Christianity." Voltaire saw around him
Christianity represented by cruel bigots, ecclesiastics living in
indolent luxury, narrow-minded and hard-hearted priests. That was all
the Christianity he saw with his sharp perceptive faculty; and he
had no power of penetrating into the deeper life of the soul which
these corruptions misrepresented. We do not blame him for this; he
was made so; but it was a fatal defect in a reformer. The first work
of a reformer is to discover the truth and the good latent amid the
abuses he wishes to reform, and for the sake of which men endure the
evil. A Buddhist proverb says, "The human mind is like a leech: it
never lets go with its tail till it has taken hold somewhere else with
its head." Distinguish the good in a system from the evil; show how
the good can be preserved, though the evil is abandoned, and then you
may hope to effect a truly radical reform. Radicalism means going to
the roots of anything. Voltaire was incapable of becoming a radical
reformer of the Christian Church, because he had in himself no faculty
by which he could appreciate the central forces of Christianity. Mr.
Morley says that Voltaire "has said no word, nor even shown an indirect
appreciation of any word said by another, which stirs and expands that
indefinite exaltation known as the love of God," "or of the larger word
holiness." "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." And so also speaks Carlyle: "It is
a much more serious ground of offense that he intermeddled in religion
without being himself, in any measure, religious; that he entered the
temple and continued there with a levity which, in any temple where
men worship, can beseem no brother man; that, in a word, he ardently,
and with long-continued effort, warred against Christianity, without
understanding beyond the mere superficies of what Christianity was."
In fact, in the organization of Voltaire, the organ of reverence, "the
crown of the whole moral nature," seems to have been at its minimum. A
sense of justice there was; an ardent sympathy with the oppressed, a
generous hatred of the oppressor, a ready devotion of time, thought,
wealth, to the relief of the down-trodden victim. Therefore, with
such qualities, Voltaire, by the additional help of his indefatigable
energy, often succeeded in plucking the prey from the jaws of the lion.
He was able to defeat the combined powers of Church and State in his
advocacy of some individual sufferer, in his battle against some single
wrong. But his long war against the Catholic Church in France left it
just where it was when that war began. Its power to-day in France is
greater than it was then, because it is a purer and better institution
than it was then. That Sphinx still sits by the roadside propounding
its riddle. Voltaire was not the Œdipus who could solve it, and so the
life of that mystery remains untouched until now.
The Henriade has often been considered the great epic poem of France.
This merely means that France has never produced a great epic poem. The
Henriade is artificial, prosaic, and has no particle of the glow, the
fire, the prolonged enthusiasm, which alone can give an epic poem to
mankind. In this sentence all competent critics are agreed.
Voltaire was busy with literature during his whole life. He not
only wrote continually himself, but he was a critic of the writings
of others. His mind was essentially critical,--formed to analyze,
discriminate sharply, compare, and judge by some universal standard
of taste. Here, if anywhere, he ought to be at his best; here, if in
any department, he should stand at the head of the world's board of
literary censors. But here, again, he is not even second-rate; here,
more than elsewhere, he shows how superficial are his judgments. He
tests every writer by the French standard in the eighteenth century.
Every word which Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, have said of other
writers is full of value and interest to-day. But who would go to
Voltaire for light on any book or author? We have an instinctive but
certain conviction that all his views are limited by his immediate
environment, perverted by his personal prejudices. Thus, he prefers
Ariosto to the Odyssey, and Tasso's Jerusalem to the Iliad.[37] His
inability to comprehend the greatness of Shakespeare is well known.
He is filled with indignation because a French critic had called
Shakespeare "the god of the stage." "The blood boils in my old veins,"
says he; "and what is frightful to think of, it was I myself who first
showed to Frenchmen the few pearls to be found in the dunghill."[38]
Chesterfield's Letters to his Son he considers "the best book upon
education ever written."[39] This is the book in which a father teaches
his son the art of polite falsehood, of which Dr. Johnson says that "it
shows how grace can be united with wickedness,"--the book whose author
is called by De Vere the philosopher of flattery and dissimulation. He
admitted that there were some good things in Milton, but speaks of his
conceptions as "odd and extravagant."[40] He thought Condorcet much
superior to Pascal. The verses of Helvetius he believed better than
any but those of Racine. The era was what Villemain calls "the golden
age of mediocre writers;" and Voltaire habitually praised them all.
But these writers mostly belonged to a mutual admiration society. The
anatomist Tissot, in one of his physiological works, says that the
genius of Diderot came to show to mankind how every variety of talent
could be brought to perfection in one man. Diderot, in his turn, went
into frantic delight over the novels of Richardson. "Since I have read
these works," he says, "I make them my touchstone; those who do not
admire them are self-condemned. O my friends, what majestic dramas
are these three, Clarissa, Sir Charles Grandison, and Pamela!" Such
was the eighteenth century; and Voltaire belonged to it with all the
intensity of his ardent nature. He may be said never to have seen or
foreseen anything better. Living on the very verge of a great social
revolution, he does not appear to have suspected what its nature would
be, even if he suspected its approach. The cruelties of the Church
exasperated him, but the political condition of society, the misery of
the peasants, the luxury of the nobles, the despotism of the king, left
him unmoved. He was singularly deficient in any conception of the value
of political liberty or of free institutions. If he had lived to see
the coming of the Revolution, it would have utterly astounded him. His
sympathies were with an enlightened aristocracy, not with the people.
In this, too, he was the man of his time, and belonged to the middle of
his century, not the end of it. He saw and lamented the evils of bad
government. He pointed out the miseries produced by war. He abhorred
and denounced the military spirit. He called on the clergy, in the
name of their religion, to join him in his righteous appeals against
this great curse of mankind. "Where," he asks, "in the five or six
thousand sermons of Massillon, are there two in which anything is said
against the scourge of war?" He rebukes the philosophers and moralists,
also, for their delinquency in this matter, and replies forcibly to
Montesquieu's argument that self-defense sometimes makes it necessary
to begin the attack on a neighboring nation. But he does not go back
to trace the evil to its root in the absence of self-government. In
a letter to the King of Prussia he says, "When I asked you to become
the deliverer of Greece, I did not mean to have you restore the
democracy. I do not love the rule of the rabble" (_gouvernement de la
canaille_). Again, writing to the same, in January, 1757, he says,
"Your majesty will confer a great benefit by destroying this infamous
superstition [Christianity]; I do not say among the _canaille_, who
do not deserve to be enlightened, and who ought to be kept down under
all yokes, but among honest people, people who think. Give white bread
to the children, but only black bread to the dogs." In 1762, writing
to the Marquis d'Argens, he says, "The Turks say that their Koran has
sometimes the face of an angel, sometimes the face of a beast. This
description suits our time. There are a few philosophers,--they have
the face of an angel; all else much resembles that of a beast." Again,
he says to Helvetius, "Consider no man your neighbor but the man who
thinks; look on all other men as wolves, foxes, and deer." "We shall
soon see," he writes to D'Alembert, "new heavens and a new earth,--I
mean for honest people; for as to the _canaille_, the stupidest heaven
and earth is all they are fit for." The real government of nations,
according to him, should be administered by absolute kings, in the
interest of freethinkers.
It is true that after Rousseau had published his trumpet-call in
behalf of democratic rights, Voltaire began to waver. It has been
remarked that "at the very time when he expressed an increasing
ill-will against the person of the author of 'Emile,' he was
irresistibly attracted to the principal doctrines of Rousseau. He
entered, as if in spite of himself, into paths toward which his feet
were never before directed. As if to revenge himself for coming under
this salutary influence, he pursued Rousseau with blind anger."[41] He
harshly attacked the Social Contract, but accepted the sovereignty of
the people; saying that "civil government is the will of all, executed
by a single one, or by several, in virtue of the laws which all have
enacted." He, however, speedily restricted this democratic principle
by confining the right of making laws to the owners of real estate.
He declares that those who have neither house nor land ought not to
have any voice in the matter. He now began (in 1764) to look forward
to the end of monarchies, and to expect a revolution. Nevertheless,
he plainly declares, "The pretended equality of man is a pernicious
chimera. If there were not thirty laborers to one master, the earth
would not be cultivated." But in practical and humane reforms Voltaire
took the lead, and did good work. He opposed examination by torture,
the punishment of death for theft, the confiscation of the property of
the condemned, the penalties against heretics; secret trials; praised
trial by jury, civil marriage, right of divorce, and reforms in the
direction of hygiene and education.
And, above all, whatever fault may be found with Voltaire, let us never
cease to appreciate his generous efforts in behalf of the unfortunate
victims of the atrocious bigotry which then prevailed in France. It
is not necessary to dwell here on the cases of Calas, the Sirvens, La
Barre, and the Count de Lally. They are fully told by Mr. Parton, and
to his account we refer our readers. In 1762 the Protestant pastor
Rochette was hanged, by order of the Parliament of Toulouse, for
having exercised his ministry in Languedoc. At the same time three
young gentlemen, Protestants, were beheaded, for having taken arms to
defend themselves from being slaughtered by the Catholics. In 1762, the
Protestant merchant Calas, an aged and worthy citizen of Toulouse, was
tortured and broken on the wheel, on a wholly unsupported charge of
having killed his son to keep him from turning Catholic. A Protestant
girl named Sirven was, about the same time, taken from her parents,
and shut up in a convent, to compel her to change her religion. She
escaped, and perished by accident during her flight. The parents were
accused of having killed her to keep her from becoming a Catholic. They
escaped, but the wife died of exposure and want. In 1766 a crucifix
was injured by some wanton persons. The Bishop of Amiens called out
for vengeance. Two young officers, eighteen years old, were accused.
One escaped; the other, La Barre, was condemned to have his tongue
cut out, his right hand cut off, and to be burned alive. The sentence
was commuted to death by decapitation. Voltaire, seventy years old,
devoted himself with masterly ability and untiring energy to save
these victims; and when he failed in that, to show the falsehood of
the charges, and to obtain a revision of the judgments. He used all
means: personal appeals to men in power and to female favorites,
eloquence, wit, pathos in every form of writing. He called on all his
friends to aid him. He poured a flood of light into these dark places
of iniquity. His generous labors were crowned with success. He procured
a reversal of these iniquitous decisions; in some cases a restoration
of the confiscated property, and a public recognition of the innocence
of those condemned. Without knowing it, he was acting as a disciple of
Jesus. Perhaps he may have met in the other world with the great leader
of humanity, whom he never understood below, and been surprised to hear
him say, "Inasmuch as thou hast done it to the least of my little ones,
thou hast done it unto me."
Carlyle tells us that the chief quality of Voltaire was _adroitness_.
He denies that he was really a great man, and says that in one
essential mark of greatness he was wholly wanting, that is,
earnestness. He adds that Voltaire was by birth a mocker; that this
was the irresistible bias of his disposition; that the first question
with him was always not what is true but what is false, not what is to
be loved but what is to be contemned. He was shallow without heroism,
full of pettiness, full of vanity; "not a great man, but only a great
_persifleur_."
But certainly some other qualities than these were essential to
produce the immense influence which he exerted in his own time, and
since. Beside the extreme adroitness of which Carlyle speaks, he
had as exhaustless an energy as was ever granted to any of the sons
of men. He was never happy except when he was at work. He worked at
home, he worked when visiting, he worked in his carriage, he worked at
hotels. Amid annoyances and disturbances which would have paralyzed
the thought and pen of others, Voltaire labored on. Upon his sick bed,
in extreme debility and in old age, that untiring pen was ever in
motion, and whatever came from it interested all mankind. Besides the
innumerable books, tracts, and treatises which fill the volumes of his
collected works, there are said to be in existence fourteen thousand
of his letters, half of which have never been printed. But this was
only a part of the outcome of his terrible vitality. He was also an
enterprising and energetic man of business. He speculated in the funds,
lent money on interest, fitted out ships, bought and sold real estate,
solicited and obtained pensions. In this way he changed his patrimony
of about two hundred thousand francs to an annual income of the same
amount,--equal to at least one hundred thousand dollars a year at the
present time. He was determined to be rich, and he became so; not
because he loved money for itself, nor because he was covetous. He gave
money freely; he used it in large ways. He sought wealth as a means of
self-defense,--to protect himself against the persecution which his
attacks on the Church might bring upon him. He also had, like a great
writer of the present century, Walter Scott, the desire of being a
large landed proprietor and lord of a manor; and, like Scott, he became
one, reigning at Ferney as Scott ruled at Abbotsford.
In defending himself against his persecutors he used other means
not so legitimate. One of his methods was systematic falsehood. He
first concealed, and then denied, the authorship of any works which
would expose him to danger. He took the tone of injured innocence.
For example, he had worked with delight, during twenty years, on his
wretched "Pucelle." To write new lines in it, or a new canto, was his
refreshment; to read them to his friends gave him the most intense
satisfaction. But when the poem found its way into print, with what
an outcry he denies the authorship, almost before he is charged with
it. He assumes the air of calumniated virtue. The charge, he declares,
is one of the infamous inventions of his enemies. He writes to the
"Journal Encyclopédique," "The crowning point of their devilish
manœuvres is the edition of a poem called 'La Pucelle d'Orléans.'
The editor has the face to attribute this work to the author of the
'Henriade,' the 'Zaïre,' the 'Mérope,' the 'Alzire,' the 'Siècle de
Louis XIV.' He dares to ascribe to this author the flattest, meanest,
and most gross work which can come from the press. My pen refuses to
copy the tissue of silly and abominable obscenities of this work of
darkness." When the "Dictionnaire Philosophique" began to appear, he
wrote to D'Alembert, "As soon as any danger arises, I beg you will let
me know, that I may disavow the work in all the public papers with
my usual candor and innocence." Mr. Parton tells us that he had _a
hundred and eight_ pseudonyms. He signed his pamphlets A Benedictine,
The Archbishop of Canterbury, A Quaker, Rev. Josias Roussette, the Abbé
Lilladet, the Abbé Bigorre, the Pastor Bourn. He was also ready to tell
a downright lie when it suited his convenience.
When "Candide" was printed, in 1758, he wrote, as Mr. Parton tells
us, to a friendly pastor in Geneva, "I have at length read 'Candide.'
People must have lost their senses to attribute to me that pack of
nonsense. I have, thank God, better occupation. This optimism [of
Pangloss] obviously destroys the foundation of our holy religion." Our
holy religion!
An excuse may be found for these falsehoods. A writer, it may be said,
has a right to his incognito; if so, he has a right to protect it by
denying the authorship of a book when charged with it. This is doubtful
morality, but Voltaire went far beyond this. He volunteered his
denials. He asserted in every way, with the most solemn asseverations,
that he was not the author of a book which he had written with delight.
But this was not the worst. He not only told these author's lies,
but he was a deliberate hypocrite, professing faith in Christianity,
receiving its sacraments, asking spiritual help from the Pope,
and begging for relics from the Vatican, at the very time that he
was hoping by strenuous efforts to destroy both Catholicism and
Christianity.
When he was endeavoring to be admitted to a place in the French
Academy, he wrote thus to the Bishop of Mirepoix:[42] "Thanks to
Heaven, my religion teaches me to know how to suffer. The God who
founded it, as soon as he deigned to become man, was of all men the
most persecuted. After such an example, it is almost a crime to
complain.... I can say, before God who hears me, that I am a good
citizen and a true Catholic.... I have written many pages sanctified by
religion." In this Mr. Parton admits that he went too far.
When at Colmar, as a measure of self-protection, he resolved to
commune at Easter. Mr. Parton says that Voltaire had pensions and
rents to the amount of sixty thousand livres annually, of which the
king could deprive him by a stroke of the pen. So he determined to
prove himself a good Catholic by taking the sacraments. As a necessary
preliminary, he confessed to a Capuchin monk. He wrote to D'Argens
just before, "If I had a hundred thousand men, I know what I should
do; but as I have them not, I shall commune at Easter!" But, writing
to Rousseau, he thinks it shameful in Galileo to retract his opinions.
Mr. Parton too, who is disposed to excuse some of these hypocrisies
in Voltaire, is scandalized because the pastors of Geneva denied the
charges of heresy brought against them by Voltaire; saying that "we
live, as they lived, in an atmosphere of insincerity." In the midst
of all this, Voltaire took credit to himself for his frank avowals of
the truth: "I am not wrong to dare to utter what worthy men think. For
forty years I have braved the base empire of the despots of the mind."
Mr. Parton elsewhere seems to think it would have been impossible for
Voltaire to versify the Psalms; as it was "asked him to give the lie
publicly to his whole career." But if communing at Easter did not do
this, how could a versification of a few psalms accomplish it? Parton
quotes Condorcet as saying that Voltaire could not become a hypocrite,
even to be a cardinal. Could any one do a more hypocritical action
than to partake the sacraments of a Church which he despised in order
to escape the danger of persecution?
When building his house at Ferney, the neighboring Catholic curés
interfered with him. They prohibited the laborers from working for him.
To meet this difficulty he determined to obtain the protection of the
Pope himself. So he wrote to the Pope, asking for a relic to put in the
church he had built, and received in return a piece of the hair-shirt
of St. Francis. He went to mass frequently. Meantime, in his letters
to his brother freethinkers, he added his usual postscript, "Ecrasez
l'Infâme;" begging their aid in crushing Catholicism and Christianity.
Yet it does not seem that he considered himself a hypocrite in thus
conforming outwardly to a religion which he hated. He thinks that
others who do so are hypocrites, but not that he is one. In 1764 he
writes to Madame du Deffand, "The worst is that we are surrounded by
hypocrites, who worry us to make us think what they themselves do
not think at all." So singular are the self-deceptions of the human
mind. He writes to Frederic ridiculing the sacrament of extreme
unction, and then solemnly partakes of the eucharist. Certainly he
did not belong to the noble army of martyrs. He expected to overturn
a great religious system, not by the power of faith, but by ingenious
pamphlets, brilliant sarcasms, adroit deceptions. In thus thinking he
was eminently superficial.
His theory on this subject is given in an article in the "Dictionnaire
Philosophique," quoted by Mr. Parton: "Distinguish honest people who
think, from the populace who were not made to think. If usage obliges
you to perform a ridiculous ceremony for the sake of the canaille, and
on the road you meet some people of understanding, notify them by a
sign of the head, or a look, that you think as they do.... If imbeciles
still wish to eat acorns, let them have acorns."
Mr. Parton describes in full (vol. ii. p. 410) the ceremony of the
eucharist of which Voltaire partook in his own church at Ferney. It was
Easter Sunday, and Voltaire mounted the pulpit and preached a sermon
against theft. Hearing of this, the bishop was scandalized, and forbade
all the curates of the diocese from confessing, absolving, or giving
the sacrament to Voltaire. Upon this Voltaire writes and signs a formal
demand on the curate of Ferney to allow him to confess and commune
in the Catholic Church, in which he was born, has lived, and wishes
to die; offering to make all necessary declarations, all requisite
protestations, in public or private, submitting himself absolutely
to all the rules of the Church, for the edification of Catholics and
Protestants. All this was a mere piece of mystification and fun. He
pretended to be too sick to go to the church, and made a Capuchin come
and administer the eucharist to him in bed; Voltaire saying, "Having
my God in my mouth, I declare that I forgive all my enemies." No
wonder that with all his marvelous ability and his long war upon the
Catholic Church he was unable to make any lasting impression upon it.
Talent is not enough to make revolutions of opinion. No serious faith
was ever destroyed by a jest.
If we return to Rousseau, and compare his influence with that of
Voltaire, we shall find that it went far deeper. Voltaire was a man of
immense talent. Talent originates nothing, but formulates into masterly
expression what has come to it from the age in which it lives. Not
a new idea can be found, we believe, in all Voltaire's innumerable
writings. But genius has a vision of ideal truth. It is a prophet of
the future. Rousseau, with his many faults, weaknesses, follies, was
a man of genius. He was probably the most eloquent writer of French
prose who has ever appeared. He was a man possessed by his ideas. He
had none of the adroitness, wit, ingenuity, of Voltaire. Instead of
amassing an enormous fortune, he supported himself by copying music.
Instead of being surrounded by admirers and flatterers, he led a
solitary life, alone with his ideas. Instead of denying the authorship
of his works, and so giving an excuse to the authorities to leave him
quiet, he put his name to his writings. He worked for his bread with
his hands, and in his "Emile" he recommended that all boys should be
taught some manual craft. Voltaire ridiculed the _gentleman carpenter_
of Rousseau; but before that generation passed away, many a French
nobleman had reason to lament that he had not been taught to use the
saw and the plane.
If Voltaire belonged to the eighteenth century, and brought to a
brilliant focus its scattered rays, Rousseau belonged more to the
nineteenth. Amidst the _persiflage_, the mockery, the light and easy
philosophy, of his day, he stood, "among them, but not of them, in a
crowd of thoughts which were not their thoughts." This is the true
explanation of his weakness and strength, and of the intense dislike
felt for him by Voltaire and the school of Voltaire. They belonged to
their time, Rousseau to a coming time.
The eighteenth century, especially in France, was one in which nature
was at its minimum and art at its maximum. All was art. But art
separated from nature becomes artificial, not to say artful. Decorum
was the law in morals; the _bienséances_ and _convenances_ ruled in
society. The stage was bound by conventional rules. Poetry walked
in silk attire, and made its toilette with the elaborate dignity of
the _levée_ of the Grand Monarque. Against all this Rousseau led the
reaction--the reaction inevitable as destiny. As art had been pushed
to an extreme, so now naturalism was carried to the opposite extreme.
Rousseau was the apostle of nature in all things. Children were to be
educated by the methods of nature, not according to the routine of old
custom. Governments were to go back to their origin in human nature;
society was to be reorganized on first principles. This voice crying in
the wilderness was like the trumpet of doom to the age, announcing the
age to come. It laid the axe at the root of the tree. Its outcome was
the French Revolution, that rushing, mighty flood, which carried away
the throne, the aristocracy, the manners, laws, and prejudices of the
past.
In his first great work, the work which startled Europe, Rousseau
recalled man to himself. He said, "The true philosophy is to commune
with one's self,"--the greatest saying, thinks Henri Martin, that had
been pronounced in that century. Rousseau condemned luxury, and uttered
a prophetic cry of woe over the tangled perplexities of the time.
"There is no longer a remedy, _unless through some great revolution,
almost as much to be feared as the evil it would cure,--which it is
blamable to desire, impossible to foresee_."
"_Man is naturally good_," says Rousseau. Before the frightful words
"mine" and "thine" were invented, how could there have been, he asks,
any vices or crimes? He denounced all slavery, all inequality, all
forms of oppression. His writings were full of exaggeration, but,
says the French historian, "no sooner had he opened his lips than he
restored earnestness to the world." The same writer, after speaking
of the faults of the "Nouvelle Héloïse," adds that nevertheless "a
multitude of the letters of his 'Julie' are masterpieces of eloquence,
passion, and profundity; and the last portions are signalized by a
moral purity, a wisdom of views, and a religious elevation altogether
new in the France of the eighteenth century." Concerning "Emile," he
says, "It is the profoundest study of human nature in our language; it
was an ark of safety, launched by Providence on the waves of skepticism
and materialism. If Rousseau had been stricken out of the eighteenth
century, whither, we seriously ask, would the human mind have
drifted?"[43]
The "Social Contract" appeared in 1762. In this work Rousseau swept
away by his powerful eloquence the arguments which placed sovereignty
elsewhere than in the hands of the people. This fundamental idea was
the seed corn which broke from the earth in the first Revolution, and
bears its ripe fruit in republican France to-day. D'Alembert, who
disliked Rousseau, said of "Emile" that "it placed him at the head of
all writers." The "Social Contract," illogical and unsound in many
things, yet tore down the whole framework of despotism. Van Laun, a
more recent historian, tells us that Rousseau was a man of the people,
who knew all their wants; that every vice he attacked was one that they
saw really present in their midst; that he "opened the flood-gates of
suppressed desires, which gushed forth, overwhelming a whole artificial
world." Villemain writes that the words of Rousseau, "descending like
a flame of fire, moved the souls of his contemporaries;" and that "his
books glow with an eloquence which can never pass away." Morley, to
whom Rousseau is essentially antipathic, says of the "Social Contract"
that its first words, "Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains,"
thrilled two continents,--that it was the gospel of the Jacobins; and
the action of the convention in 1794 can be explained only by the
influence of Rousseau. He taught France to believe in a government of
the people, by the people, and for the people. Locke had already taught
this doctrine in England, where it produced no such violent outbreak,
because it encountered no such glaring abuses.
Such is the striking contrast between these two greatest writers in
modern French literature. It is singular to observe their instinctive
antagonism in every point of belief and character. The merits of one
are precisely opposite to those of the other: their faults are equally
opposed.
The events of Voltaire's life have been so often told that Mr. Parton
has not been able to add much to our knowledge of his biography. He
was born in 1694 and died in 1778, at the age of eighty-four, though
at his birth he was so feeble that those who believe that the world's
progress depends on the survival of the fittest would have thought
him not fit to be brought up. This was also the case with Goethe and
Walter Scott. His father was a notary, and the name Arouet had that
of Voltaire added to it, it being a name in his mother's family. This
affix was adopted by the lad when in the Bastille, at the age of
twenty-four. As a duck takes to water, so Voltaire took to his pen. In
his twelfth year he wrote verses addressed to the Dauphin, which so
pleased the famous Ninon de l'Enclos, then in her ninetieth year, that
she left the boy a legacy of two thousand francs. He went to a Jesuits'
school, and always retained a certain liking for the Jesuits. His
father wished to make him a notary, but he would "pen a stanza when he
should engross;" and the usual struggles between the paternal purpose
and the filial instinct ended, as usual, in the triumph of the latter.
He led a wild career for a time, in the society of dissipated abbès,
debauched noblemen, and women to whom pleasure was the only object.
Suspected of having written a lampoon on the death of Louis XIV., he
was sent to the Bastille, and came forth not only with a new name,
but with literature as his aim for the rest of his life. His first
play appeared on the stage in 1718, and from that time he continued to
write till his death. He traveled from the _château_ of one nobleman
to another, pouring out his satires and sarcasms through the press;
threatened by the angry rulers and priests who governed France, but
always escaping by some adroit manœuvre. In England he became a deist
and a mathematician. His views of Christ and Christianity were summed
up in a quatrain which may be thus translated. Speaking of Jesus, he
says,--
"His actions are holy, his ethics divine;
Into hearts which are wounded he pours oil and wine.
And if, through imposture, those truths are received,
It still is a blessing to be thus deceived."
He lived many years at Cirey with the Marchioness of Châtelet; the
marquis, her husband, accepting the curious relation without any
objection. Then followed the still stranger episode of his residence
with Frederic the Great, their love quarrels and reconciliations. After
this friendship came to an end, Voltaire went to live near Geneva in
Switzerland, but soon bought another estate just out of Switzerland,
in France, and a third a short distance away, in the territory of
another power. Thus, if threatened in one state, he could easily pass
into another. Here he lived and worked till the close of his life,
an untiring writer. He was a man of infinite wit, kind-hearted, with
little malignity of any sort, wishing in the main to do good. His
violent attacks upon Christianity may be explained by the fact of the
corruptions of the Church which were around him. The Church of France
in that day, in its higher circles, was a persecuting Church, yet
without faith: greedy for wealth, living in luxury, careless of the
poor, and well deserving the attacks of Voltaire. That he could not
look deeper and see the need of religious institutions of a better sort
was his misfortune.
This work is a storehouse of facts for the history of Voltaire and his
time. We do not think it will materially alter the judgment pronounced
on him by such critics as Carlyle, Morley, and the majority of French
writers in our day. Voltaire was a shining light in his age, but that
age has gone by, and can never return.