VOLTAIRE

The immense bulk of Voltaire's writings is profoundly uninteresting

to me. I once saw--I think it must have been in Liverpool--a

wonderful edition of his complete works published during the

Revolution and with a duplicate copy of every illustrative print. I

couldn't afford the price of the thing just then, amazingly low though

it was, but in my devotion to that great name, I swore that, when I

made my library, that noble edition should be in it.

I have never made any library and never intend to. The sight of

classical authors in row upon row depresses me beyond words.

Public Libraries are still worse. I have no wish to be helped "to get

on in the world" by Mr. Carnegie. I resent the association between

literature and "public benefactions." Does he propose to dole out the

exquisite taste necessary to appreciate these rare things, on condition

that our "home town" pay half the cost? Thank Heaven, a feeling for

what is noble and distinguished in human thought is beyond the

reach of any philanthropist. I mean beyond his power of giving or

taking away, and I do not believe that those among the poor who

really have this feeling are often found in libraries. They probably

have their "Oxford Book of English Verse"--a gift from their

gentlest acquaintance--just as I have; and, for the rest, they can sell

their school prizes to buy Hardy and Henry James.

Except for "Candide" and a few excerpts from the "Philosophical

Dictionary," I must confess I have no wish to turn over another page

of Voltaire. It is simply incredible to me that human beings

possessed of the same senses as ours could find satisfaction for their

imagination in the sterile moralising, stilted sentiment, superficial

wit, and tiresome persiflage of that queer generation. I suppose they

didn't really. I suppose they used to go off on the sly, and read

Rabelais and Villon. I suppose it was only the preposterous "social

world" of those days who enjoyed nothing in literature except

pseudo-classic attitudes and gestures; just as it is only the

preposterous "social world" with us who enjoy nothing but Gaelic

mythology and Oriental Mysticism.

Those pseudo-classic writers of the eighteenth century, in England

and France, have their admirers still. I confess such admiration

excites in me as much wonder as the works themselves excite

distaste. What can they find in them that is thrilling or exciting or

large or luminous or magical? I would pile up the whole lot of them

along with those books that are no books--biblia-a-biblia--of which

Charles Lamb speaks so plaintively. Backgammon boards with

lettering behind them should be their companions.

What a relief to turn from contemplation of the works of Voltaire to

that bust of him by Houdon!

Ah! there we have him, there we apprehend him, there we catch his

undying spirit! And what a man he was! As one looks at that face

wherein a mockery more trenchant than the world is able to endure

leers and wags the tongue, one feels certain that the soul of the

eighteenth century was not really contented with its heroic

sentimental mask. The look upon that face, with its aristocratic

refinement, its deadly intellect, its beautiful cynicism, is worth all

the sessions of the Academy and all the seasons of the Salons. It

makes one think somehow of the gardens of Versailles. One seems

to see it as a mocking fragment of heathen marble--some Priapian

deity of shameless irreverence, peering forth in the moonlight from

among the yew hedges and the fountains; watching the Pierrot of the

Minute make love to Columbine, and the generations of men drift by

like falling leaves.

Voltaire!--He was well advised to choose that name for himself; a

name which sounds even now like the call of a trumpet. And a call it

is; a call to the clear intelligences and the unclouded brains; a call to

the generous hearts and the unperverted instincts; a call to sanity and

sweetness and clarity and noble commonsense; to all that is free and

brave and gay and friendly, to rally to the standard of true

civilisation against the forces of stupidity, brutality and

obscurantism!

Voltaire was one of those great men whose thoughts are armies and

whose words are victories in the cause of the liberation of humanity.

If we do not read his books, we look at his image and we read his

life. We name his name and we seal ourselves of his tribe; the name

and tribe of such as refuse to bow their knees to Baal, and if they

worship in the house of Rimmon, worship with a large reservation!

Voltaire is much more than a man of letters. He is a prophet of the

age to come, when the execrable superstitions of narrow minds shall

no longer darken the sunlight, and the infamous compulsion of

human manners, human intellects, human tastes, into the petty

mould of oppressive public opinion shall be ended forever.

That bust in the Louvre and the sublime story of his life will outlast

all but one of those half a hundred volumes of his which Mr.

Carnegie's liberality has put at the disposal of our "home town."

We too, like the populace of Paris, on the day when he came back to

his own, flock out to see the "saviour of the Calas." We too, like the

passionate actresses who crowned his image in the great

comedy-house while--as they say--he bowed his head so low that his

forehead touched the front of his box, acclaim him still as the

Messiah of the Liberty of the human intellect.

How admirable it is to come back to the spirit and temper of

Voltaire from the fussy self-love and neurotic introspections of

our modern egoists. The new fashionable doctrine among the

"intellectuals" is that one is to live in one's ivory tower and let the

world go; live in one's ivory tower while brutal and detestable

people tyrannise over the gentle and sensitive; live in one's ivory

tower while the heavy hand of popular ignorance lies like a dead

weight upon all that is fine and rare; live in one's ivory tower while

complacent well-paid optimism whispers acquiescence in the "best

of all possible worlds."

The great Voltaire was made in another mould. Few enjoyed the

pleasures of life more than he; but the idea of the stupid brutality

and ignorant tyranny from which in this world so many harmless

people suffer filled him with fury. The Calas were only one--only

the best known--of a long list of victims on whose behalf he entered

the arena. In these campaigns of justice, he was tireless,

inexhaustible, insatiable. He flooded Europe with pamphlets on

behalf of his protégés. He defied Church and State in his crusades to

defend them. His house at Ferney became a sort of universal refuge

and sanctuary for the persecuted persons of the civilised world.

A great and good man! I sometimes think that of all the heroic

champions of sensitiveness against insensitiveness, of weakness

against strength, of the individual against public opinion, I would

soonest call up the noble shade of Voltaire and kiss his pontifical

hand!

The Pantheistic Carlyle grumbles at his levity and rails against his

persiflage. One hopes there will always be a "persiflage" like that of

Voltaire to clear the human stage of stupid tyranny and drive the

mud-monsters of obscurantism back into their mid-night caverns. He

was a queer kind of Apollo--this little great man with his

old-fashioned wig and the fur-cloak "given him by Catherine of

Russia"--but the flame which inspired him was the authentic fire, and

the arrows with which he fought were dipped in the golden light of the

sun.

I said there was one book of Voltaire's to which the souls of honest

people who love literature must constantly return. This, of course, is

"Candide"; a work worthy to be bound up in royal vellum and

stained in Tyrian dyes. If it were not for "Candide"--so stiff and

stilted was the fashionable spirit of that age--there would be little in

Voltaire's huge shelf of volumes, little except stray flashes of his

irrepressible gaiety, to arrest and to hold us. But into the pages of

"Candide" he poured the full bright torrent of his immortal wit, and

with this book in our hands we can feel him and savour him as he

was.

One has only to glance over the face of Europe at this present hour

to get the sting and Pythian poison of this planetary irony. It is like a

Circean philtre of sweet sunbrewed wine, sparkling with rainbow

bubbles and gleaming with the mockery of the deathless gods. Once

for all in this scandalous and beautiful book, the lying optimism of

the preachers receives its crushing blow. "Candide" is the final retort

of all sane and generous spirits, full of magnanimity and laughter, to

that morbid and shameful propitiation of the destinies which cries

"peace when there is no peace."

One feels when one reads it as if it were written by some wanton

and gracious youth, in the marble courts of some happy palace

of Utopia, commenting upon the mad delusions and diseased

hypocrisies of the men of the old time when superstition still reigned.

No book in the world has more spontaneous gaiety, more of the

triumphant spirit of human boyishness in its blood. Certainly the

great Voltaire was to the end of his life--and you can see that very

thing in the old-young face of the famous bust--inspired by the

immortal flame of youth. He never grew old. To the last his attitude

toward life was the attitude of that exuberant and unbounded energy

which takes nothing seriously and loves the contest with darkness

and stupidity for the sake of the divine "sport" of the struggle. There

is a certain sun-born sanity of _commonsense_ about such natural

youthfulness, which contradicts all popular fallacies.

It is the Mercutio spirit, striking up the swords of both Montagues

and Capulets and fooling them all on their grey-haired obsessions. It

comes into this solemn custom-ridden world, as if from some

younger and gayer star, and makes wanton sport of its pious

hypocrisies. It opens its astonished laughing eyes upon the meanness

of men and the cruelties of men and the insane superstitions and

illusions of men, and it mocks them all with mischievous delight. It

refuses to bow its head before hoary idols. It refuses to go weeping

and penitent and stricken with a sense of "sin" in the presence of

natural fleshly instincts. It is absolutely irresponsible--what, in a

world like this, should one be responsible for?--and it is shamelessly

frivolous. Why not? Where the highest sanctities are so lamentably

human, and where the phylacteries of the moralists are embroidered

with such earth-spun threads, why go on tip-toe and with forlorn

visage? It is outrageously indecent. Why not? Who made this

portentous "decency" to be the rule of free-born life? Who put

fig-leaves upon the sweet flesh of the immortals? Decency after all is a

mere modern barbarism; the evocation of morbid vulgarity and a

perverted heart.

The great classic civilisations included a poetic obscenity with easy

nonchalance. They had a god to protect its interests, and its

sun-burnt youthful wantonness penetrates all their art. This modern cult

of "decency"--thrust down the throat of human joy by a set of

Calvins and John Knoxes--is only one of the indications in our

wretched commercialised age of how far we have sunk from the

laughter of the gods and the dancing of the morning stars.

To sit listening in the forlorn streets of a Puritan city--when for one

day the cheating tradesmen leave their barbarous shops--to the

wailing of unlovely hymns, empty of everything except a degraded

sentimentality that would make an Athenian or a Roman slave blush

with shame, is enough to cause one to regard the most scandalous

levity of Voltaire as something positively sacred and holy.

One wonders that scholars are any longer allowed even to read

Aristophanes--far less translate him. And cannot they see--these

perverts of a purity that insults the sunshine--that _humour,_ decent

or indecent, is precisely the thing that puts sex properly in its place?

Cannot they see that by substituting morbid sentiment for honest

Rabelaisianism they are obsessing the minds of every one with a

matter which after all is only one aspect of life?

The great terrible Aphrodite--ruler of gods and men--is not to be

banished by conventicle or council. She will find her way back,

though she has to tread strange paths, and the punishment for the

elimination of natural wantonness is the appearance of hideous

hypocrisy. Driven from the haunts of the Muses, expelled from the

symposia of the wise and witty, the spirit of sexual irreverence takes

refuge in the streets; and the scurrilous vulgarities of the tavern

balance the mincing proprieties of the book-shop.

After all sex _is_ a laughable thing. The tragedies connected with it,

the high and thrilling pleasures connected with it, do not obliterate

its original absurdity. And Voltaire--this sane sun-born child of the

shameless intellect--never permits us for a moment to forget how

ridiculous in the last resort all this fuss about the matter is.

Puritanical suppression and neurotic obsession are found invariably

together. It is precisely in this way that the great goddess revenges

herself upon those who disobey her laws. Voltaire, the least

Puritanical of men, is also the least neurotic. The Satyrish laughter

of his eternally youthful energy clears the air of the world.

Humour of all human things is the most transitory and changing in

its moods. As a perambulating interpreter of literature, ancient as

well as modern, this has especially been borne in upon me. I have

been guilty, in that sickening academic way which makes one howl

with shame in one's self-respecting moments, of "trying out" upon

people the old stock humours of the standard authors.

I have dragged poor Bottom back to life and made the arms of the

Cervantian wind-mill turn and the frogs of Aristophanes croak. But

oh, shade of Yorick! how the sap, the ichor, the sharp authentic tang,

that really tickles our sensibilities, has thinned out and fallen flat

during the centuries. My hearers have smiled and tittered perhaps--with

a pathetic wish to be kind, or a desire to show themselves not

quite dull to these classic amenities--and between us we have, in a

kind of chuckling pedantry, shuffled through the occasion; but it is

not pleasant to recall such moments.

Of course a sly comedian could make anything amusing; but one

cannot help feeling that if the humour of these famous scenes were

really permanent it would force its way even through the frosty air

of academic culture into our human nerves.

"We are not wood; we are not stones, but men"--and being men the

essential spirit of outrageous humour ought surely to hit us, however

poorly interpreted. And it does; only the proprieties and the

decencies sheer us off from what is permanently appealing!

I recollect on one occasion, how, after making my hearers cry over

the natural and permanent tragedy of Shylock, I asked the fatuous

question, addressing it, as one does, to the vague air--

"What are we to say about Launcelot Gobbo?"

Now obviously any one but a professional interpreter of literature

would know that there's _nothing_ to say about this harmless fool.

Shakespeare threw him in as "a comic relief" and probably felt his

strongest appeal to the native genius of the actor who impersonated

him. But I can recall now, with that sense of humiliation which

wrings one's withers, the sweetly murmured tones of some tactful

woman who answered--and the last thing one wants is an answer to

these inanities--

"Oh, we must say that Launcelot Gobbo is charming!"

But Gobbo or no Gobbo, the fact remains that humour is one of the

most delicate, the most evasive, and the most unstable of human

qualities. I am myself inclined to hold that sheer outrageous ribaldry,

especially if graced with an undertone of philosophic irony, is the

only kind of humour which is really permanent. To give permanence

to any human quality in literature, there must be an appeal to

something which is beyond the power of time and change and

fashion and custom and circumstance. And, as a matter of fact,

nothing in the world except sex itself answers this requirement.

The absurdities of men are infinite, but they alter with every

generation. What never alters or can alter, is the absurdity of being a

man at all.

Where Shakespeare's humour still touches us most nearly is

precisely in those scenes which the superficial custom of our age

finds least endurable. It is not in his Gobbos or in his frolicsome

boy-girls, that his essential spirit must be looked for; but in his

Falstaffs and Mercutios.

But Shakespeare's humour is largely, after all, a lovely, dreamy,

poetical thing. I doubt if it has the weight or the massive solidity of

the humour of Rabelais. I think the humour of Charles Lamb wears

well; but that is probably because it has a most indisputable flavour

of Rabelaisian roguery underlying its whimsical grace. Anatole

France has the true classic spirit. His humour will remain fresh

forever, because it is the humour of the eternal absurdity of sexual

desire. Heine can never lose the sharpness of his bite, for his

irreverence is the eternal irreverence of the soul that neither man nor

God can scourge into solemn submission.

Humour to be really permanent and to outlast the changes of fashion

must go plummet-like to the basic root of things. It is nothing less

than extraordinary that Voltaire, living in the age of all ages the

most obsessed with the modishness of the hour, should have written

"Candide," a book full of the old unalterable laughter. For "Candide"

is not only a clever book, a witty book, a wise book. It is a book

preposterously and outrageously funny. It tickles one's liver and

one's gall; it relaxes one's nerves; it vents the suppressed spleen of

years in a shout of irrepressible amusement. Certain passages in

it--and, as one would have suspected they are precisely the passages

that cannot be quoted in a modern book--compel one to laugh aloud

as one thinks of them.

Personally I hold the opinion that "Candide" is the most humorous

piece of human writing in the world. And yet its ribaldry, its

irreverence, is unbounded. It sticks at nothing. It says everything. It

wags the philosophic tongue at every conceivable embodiment of

popular superstition.

If the best books are the books which the authors of them have most

enjoyed writing, the books that have the thrill of excellent pleasure

on every page, then "Candide" certainly bears away the palm. One

would like to have watched Voltaire's countenance as he wrote it.

The man's superb audacity, his courage, his aplomb, his god-like

shamelessness, appear in every sentence.

What an indictment of the human race! What an arraignment of the

"insolence of office"! What a tract for the philanthropists! What a

slap in the face for the philosophers! And all done with such

imperturbable good temper, such magnanimity of fine malice.

Poor Candide! how loyally he struggled on, with Pangloss as his

master and his ideal; and what shocks he experienced! I would

sooner go down to posterity as the author of "Candide" than of any

volume in the world except Goethe's "Faust."

There is something extraordinarily reassuring about the book. It

reconciles one to life even at the moment it is piling up life's

extravagant miseries. Its buoyant and resilient energy, full of the

unconquerable irreverence and glorious shamelessness of youth,

takes life fairly by the throat and mocks it and defies it to its face. It

indicates courageous gaiety as the only victory, and ironical

submission to what even gaiety cannot alter as the only wisdom.

There are few among us, I suppose, who in going to and fro in the

world, have not come upon some much-persecuted, much-battered

Candide, "cultivating his garden" after a thousand disillusions; and

holding fast, in spite of all, to the doctrines of some amazing

Pangloss. Such encounters with such invincible derelicts must put us

most wholesomely to shame. Our neurotic peevishness, our

imaginary grievances, our vanity and our pride, are shown up at

such moments in their true light.

If complacent optimism appears an insolent falsifying of life's facts,

a helpless pessimism appears a cowardly surrender to life's

impertinence. Neither to gloss over the outrageous reality nor to lose

our resistant obstinacy, whatever such reality may do to us, is the

last word of noble commonsense. And it is a noble commonsense

which, after all, is Voltaire's preeminent gift.

The Voltairian spirit refuses to be fooled by man or god. The

universe may batter it and bruise it, but it cannot break it. The

brutality of authority, the brutality of public opinion, may crush it to

the earth; but from the earth it mocks still, mocks and mocks and

mocks, with the eternal youthfulness of its wicked tongue!

Voltaire took the world as he found it. With the weapons of the

world he fought the world; with the weapons of the world he

overcame the world. The neurotic modern vulgarity which,

misinterpreting the doctrines of Nietzsche, worships force and bows

down in the dust before the great unscrupulous man, finds no

support in Voltaire. Honest people, cultivating their gardens and

keeping the prophets away from their backyards, find in the

Voltairian spirit their perpetual refuge.

The old Horatian wisdom, clear-eyed, cynical and friendly, leaps up

once again from the dust of the centuries, a clean bright flame, and

brings joyousness and sanity back to the earth.

Voltaire could be kind and generous without calling to his aid the

"immensities" and the "eternities." He could strike fiercely on behalf

of the weak and the oppressed without darkening the sunshine by

any worship of "sorrow." He could be thoroughly and most entirely

"good," while spitting forth his ribald irreverences against every

pious dogma. He could be long-suffering and considerate and

patient, to a degree hardly ever known among men of genius, while

ruling Europe with his indomitable pen.

The name of Voltaire is more than a trumpet call of liberty for the

oppressed artists and thinkers of the world; it is a challenge to the

individual Candides of our harassed generation to rise above their

own weaknesses and introspections and come forth into the sunshine.

The name of Voltaire is a living indictment of the madness of

politicians and the insanity of parties and sects. It brings us back to

the commonsense of honest men, who "care for none of these

things."

He was a queer Apollo of light and reason--this lean bewigged

figure with cane and snuffbox and laced sleeves--but the powers of

darkness fled from before his wit as they have not fled from before

the wit of any other; for the wit of Voltaire is in harmony with the

spirit of the human race, as it shakes itself free from superstition

"and all uncharitableness."

He was a materialist if you will, for his "deism" meant no more to

him than a distant blue sky giving the world space and perspective

and free air; but a materialism that renders men kind and courteous,

urbane and sweet-tempered, honest and clear-headed, is better than a

spirituality that leads to intolerance and madness.

He was a ribald and a scoffer in the presence of much that the world

holds sacred; but the most sacred thing of all--the _sanity of human

reason_--has never been more splendidly defended.

He mocked at the traditions of men; but he remains a champion of

man's highest prerogative. He turned the churches into indecent

ridicule; but wherever an honest man strikes at tyrannous

superstition, or a solitary "cultivator of his garden" strikes at stupid

mob-rule, one stone the more is added to that great "ecclesia" of

civilisation, which "Deo erexit Voltaire"; which Voltaire built--and

builds--to God.