And gambolling with the other.
"To be seated beside him at supper, how delightful!" she adds. Voltaire
at Cirey was out of harm's way, and could and did devote himself to his
natural bent in literary work. Madame du Chatelet was sometimes "gey ill
to live with." but she preserved him from many annoyances and helped him
somewhat at Court. Thanks to the Duc de Richelieu, his patron and
debtor, he was appointed historiographer-royal in 1745, with a salary of
two thousand livres attached, and in the following year was elected one
of the Forty of the French Academy.
His life with Madame du Chatelet had shown him the possibility of woman
being man's intellectual companion. With what scorn does he make a lady,
who claims equal rights in the matter of divorce with her husband, say:
"My husband replies that he is my head and my superior, that he is
taller than me by more than an inch, that he is hairy as a bear, and
that, consequently, I owe him everything and that he owes me nothing."
This was long before woman's rights were thought of.
Voltaire and Frederick the Great.
While still at Cirey, Voltaire received many a flattering invitation
from the Prince Royal of Prussia. Their correspondence, in the words of
Carlyle, "sparkles notably with epistolary grace and vivacity," though
now mainly interesting as an illustration of two memorable characters
and of their century. Voltaire helped him with his _Anti-Machiavelli_,
remarking afterwards that had Machiavelli had a prince for a pupil, the
very first thing he would have advised him to do would have been so to
write. Frederick was bent on having the personal acquaintance and
attendance of the renowned poet and philosopher. Much incense and mutual
admiration passed, and at length, when he ascended the throne, Voltaire
paid him several visits. On one occasion it was a diplomatic one, to
cement a union between France and Prussia. Macaulay sneers at this
"childish craving for political distinction," and Frederick remarks that
he brought no credentials with him. The correspondence and mutual
admiration continued. Carlyle characteristically says: "Admiration
sincere on both sides, most so on the Prince's, and extravagantly
expressed on both sides, most so on Voltaire's." In one of his letters,
Frederick says "there can be in nature but one God and one Voltaire." If
Voltaire was more extravagant than this, at least the paint was laid on
more delicately. Frederick's flattery, indeed, was not very carefully
done. Thus, in writing to Voltaire he says: "You are like the white
elephant for which the King of Persia and the Great Mogul make war; and
the possession of which forms one of their titles. If you come here you
will see at the head of mine, 'Frederick by the Grace of God, King of
Prussia, Elector of Brandenburg, Possessor of Voltaire, &c., &c.'" But
the Marquise du Chatelet considered that no King should displace a lady.
She loved him; _"jamais pour deux"_ she says; and perhaps, at the bottom
of her heart, regretted the reputation which must have been ever a
rival. At her death, Frederick renewed his invitation, expressing
himself as now "one of your oldest friends," and Voltaire, cut loose
from his moorings, submitted to be tempted to the atmosphere of a court
which he had before found little suited to a lover of truth, justice,
and liberty.
The first of these visits, in September 1740, is thus satirically
described by Voltaire: "I was conducted into his majesty's apartment, in
which I found nothing but four bare walls. By the light of a wax candle
I perceived a small truckle bed, two feet and a half wide, in a closet,
upon which lay a little man, wrapped up in a morning gown of blue cloth.
It was his majesty, who lay sweating and shaking, beneath a beggarly
coverlet, in a violent ague fit. I made my bow, and began my
acquaintance by feeling his pulse, as if I had been his first physician.
The fit left him, and he rose, dressed himself, and sat down to table
with Algarotti, Keizerling, Maupertuis, the ambassador to the
states-general, and myself; where, at supper, we treated most profoundly
on the immortality of the soul, natural liberty, and the _Androgynes_ of
Plato." Frederick says, in a letter to Jordan, dated September 24th: "I
have at length seen Voltaire, whom I was so anxious to become acquainted
with; but, alas! I saw him when I was under the influence of my fever,
and when my mind and my body were equally languid. Now, with persons
like him, one must not be ill; on the contrary, one must be very well,
and even, if possible, in better health than usual. He has the eloquence
of Cicero, the mildness of Pliny, and the wisdom of Agrippa: he unites,
in a word, all that is desirable of the virtues and talents of three of
the greatest men of antiquity. His intellect is always at work; and
every drop of ink that falls from his pen, is transformed at once into
wit. He declaimed to us _Mahomet_, an admirable tragedy he has composed,
which transported us with delight: for myself, I could only admire in
silence."
The intercourse and disruption of the friendship between Voltaire and
Frederick--"the two original men of their century," as Carlyle calls
them--has been inimitably told by that great writer whose temperament
and training enabled him to do so much justice to the one and so little
to the other. Voltaire must be excused for wishing to lead the King in
the path of reason and enlightened toleration to peace. But the Court of
Potsdam was in truth no place for him, and the Frenchmen not unnaturally
regarded him as a deserter. Macaulay says: "We have no hesitation in
saying that the poorest author of that time in London, sleeping in a
hulk, dining in a cellar with a cravat of paper and a skewer for a
shirt-pin, was a happier man than any of the literary inmates of
Frederick's Court." Voltaire's position was sure to excite jealousy, and
his scathing wit was bound to get him in trouble. He could touch up the
King's French verses for a consideration, but could not be kept from
laughing at his poetry. "I have here a bundle of the King's dirty linen
to bleach," he said once, pointing to the MSS. sent to him for
correction; and the bearers of course conveyed the sarcasm to his
Majesty. On the other side Voltaire heard from Julien Offray de la
Mettrie, author of _Man a Machine_, whom Voltaire called the most frank
atheist in Europe, that the King had said: "I still want Voltaire for
another year--one sucks the orange before throwing away the skin." That
orange-skin stuck in Voltaire's throat, and when atheist La Mettrie died
11th November,
1751, from eating a pie supposed to be of pheasant but in reality of
eagle and pork, Voltaire observes: "I should have liked to put to La
Mettrie, in the article of death, fresh inquiries about the orange-skin.
That fine soul, on the point of quitting the world, would not have dared
to-lie. There is much reason to suppose that he spoke the truth."
Voltaire could neither submit to the domination of the Court coterie nor
to that of their master. He offended Frederick, not so much by writing
as by publishing his merciless ridicule of Maupertuis, the President of
the Berlin Academy of Sciences--an institution suggested by Voltaire,
who had indeed recommended Maupertuis as President--in his inimitable
_Diatribe of Doctor Akakia, Physician to the Pope_, which Macaulay says,
even at this time of day, it is not easy for any person who has the
least perception of the ridiculous to read without laughing till he
cries. But a public insult to the President of his Academy was an insult
to the King, and the work was publicly burnt and Voltaire placed under
arrest. But the matter blew over, though Voltaire sent back his cross
and key of office, which the King returned. Voltaire wisely tried to rid
himself of the intolerable constraint, and made ill-health the pretext
of flight, going first to Plombieres to take the waters. But he could
not resist sending another shot at poor Maupertuis; and the King,
perhaps considering he had forfeited claim to consideration, resolved to
punish him. At Frankfort, nominally a free city but really dominated by
a Prussian resident, he was arrested, together with his niece Madame
Denis, and detained in an inn, even after he had given up his gold key
as chamberlain, his cross and ribbon of the Order of Merit, and his copy
of a privately printed volume of the royal rhymester's poetry, for which
he was ordered to be arrested. The volume was evidently the most
important article in such mischievous hands, especially as it was said
to contain satires on reigning potentates. Voltaire had left it at
Leipsic, and had to wait, guarded by soldiers, till it arrived, and also
till the King's permission was accorded him to pass on to France.
Voltaire relieved his rage by composing what he called _Memoirs of the
Life of M. de Voltaire_, in which all the king's faults and foibles,
real and imaginary, as well as his literary pretensions, were
unsparingly ridiculed. Frederick forgave Voltaire for having been
ill-used by him, and some time after took the first step in
reconciliation by sending him back the volume of poems. An amicable
correspondence was renewed, though probably each felt they were better
at a distance. Voltaire, even while he kept in his desk this libellous
_Life_ which perhaps he never, intended to publish, was generous and
far-sighted enough to seek to make peace between Prussia and France at a
time when Frederick was at the lowest ebb of his fortunes; while
Frederick was great enough to permit the free circulation of the libel
in Berlin. Morley says: "To have really contributed in the humblest
degree, for instance, to a peace between Prussia and her enemies, in
1759, would have been an immeasurably greater performance for mankind
than any given book which Voltaire could have written. And, what is
still better worth observing, Voltaire's books would not have been the
powers they were but for this constant desire in him to come into the
closest contact with the practical affairs of the world." "What
sovereign in Europe do you fear the most?" was once asked of Frederick,
who frankly replied "_Le roi Voltaire_," for here he knew was a
potentate whose kingdom had no bounds, and who would transmit his
influence to posterity. Frederick lived to pronounce a panegyric upon
him before the Berlin Academy, in the year of his death. "The renown of
Voltaire," he predicted, "will grow from age to age, transmitting his
name to immortality."
"CANDIDE"
After this disastrous termination of court life Voltaire determined to
try complete independence. Permission to establish himself in France
being refused, he purchased an estate near Geneva. His residence here
brought him into correspondence, at first amicable, with the most famous
of her citizens, Jean Jacques Rousseau. There was a natural
incompatibility of temper which speedily led to a quarrel. Both were
sensitive, and Rousseau could not bear even kindly-meant banter. On
Rousseau's _Social Contract_ Voltaire said it so convinced him of the
beauty of man in a state of nature that, after reading it, he ran round
me room on all fours. His reply to Rousseau's rebuke for his pessimist
poem on the earthquake of Lisbon was the immortal _Candide_, and
Rousseau's revenge was to say, slightingly, that he had not read it.
When Rousseau thought fit to include Voltaire in the imaginary
machinations against him, with which he absurdly changed Hume, Voltaire
wrote to D'Alembert: "I have nothing to reproach myself with, save
having thought and spoken too well of him."
Voltaire at first seems to have been captivated by the doctrine of
Pope's _Essay on Man._ He, however, afterwards wrote: "Those who exclaim
that all is well are charlatans. Shaftesbury, who first made the fable
fashionable, was a very unhappy man. I have seen Bolingbroke a prey to
vexation and rage, and Pope, whom he induced to put this sorry jest into
verse, was as much to be pitied as any man I have ever known, misshapen
in body, dissatisfied in mind, always ill, always a burden to himself,
and harassed by a hundred enemies to his very last moment. Give me, at
least, the names of some happy men who will tell me 'All is well.'" His
optimism got injured during his journey through life, and was completely
shattered by the earthquake at Lisbon in 1755. On this subject he
produced a grave poem, notable for its confession of the difficult
reconciling the evil of the world with the Beneficence of God? The same
subject was dealt with in grotesque fashion in _Candide_, one of the
wisest as well as one of the wittiest of works. A philosophy was never
more triumphantly reasoned and ridiculed out of court than is optimism
in _Candide_. Incident crowds on incident, argument jostles satire,
illustration succeeds raillery, all to show the miseries of existence
disprove this being the best of all possible worlds. At one moment we
are forced to tears at contemplating the atrocities of inhumanity; the
next we are forced to laugh at its absurdities. Prudes may be shocked at
some incidents. Voltaire said he was not born to sing the praises of
saints. He was himself no saint, but rather one of those sinners who had
done the world more good than all its saints. But the influence of the
work is profoundly good. It is purely humanitarian, War, persecution for
religion, slavery, torture, and all forms of cruelty are made hateful by
a recital of their facts; and all this is done in so charming, even
flippant a manner, that we are laughing all the while we are most
profoundly moved. Schopenhauer and Hartmann both enjoyed life, while
Voltaire was an invalid most of his days; but they never threw into
their pessimism the gaiety of _Candide_. And his peculiarity is, that he
makes all man's lower instincts ridiculous as well as detestable.
This character appears in all his work, but, as a fantastic tale,
_Candide_ stands alone. It brings out Voltaire's most characteristic
qualities: his keen eye for whimsicalities and weaknesses; his
abhorrence of cruelty and iniquity in high places; his contempt for
shams and absence of all veneration for the majesty of nonsensical
custom. For mordant satire it is surpassed by _Gulliver's Travels_. But
it is briefer; the touch is lighter, and instinct not with morose
misanthropy, but hearty philanthropy. The characters are gross
caricatures. Was there ever so preposterous an absurdity as Dr.
Pangloss? And the incidents are improbable. Was ever so luckless a hero
as Candide? What a succession of misfortunes! Candide travels the world
in search of his lost beloved Cunegonde, meeting war, the Inquisition,
torture, shipwreck, piracy, and slavery, with all their attendant
horrors. Even the earthquake of Lisbon is brought in; yet with whimsical
pertinacity, Pangloss clings to his flimsy philosophy.
When he re-meets Candide, who had left his tutor as dead, he thus
relates his adventures: "But," my dear Pangloss, "how happens it that I
see you again?" said Candide. "It is true," answered Pangloss, "you saw
me hanged; I ought properly to have been burnt; but, you remember, it
rained in torrents when they were going to roast me. The storm was so
violent they despaired of kindling the fire; so I was hanged, because
they could do no better. A surgeon bought my body, carried it home, and
dissected me. He made first a crucial incision from the navel to the
neck. One could not have been more badly hanged than I. The executioner
of the Holy Inquisition was a sub-deacon, and truly burnt people
capitally, but, as for hanging, he was a novice; the cord was wet, and
not slipping properly, the noose did not join--in short, I still
continued to breathe. The crucial incision made me shriek so that my
surgeon fell back, and, imagining it was the devil he was dissecting,
ran away in mortal fear, tumbling downstairs in his fright. His wife,
hearing the noise, flew from the next room, and saw me stretched upon
the table with my crucial incision. Still more terrified than her
husband, she ran down also, and fell upon him. When they had a little
recovered themselves, I heard her say to the surgeon, 'My dear, how
could you think of dissecting a heretic? Don't you know that the devil
is always in them? I'll run directly to a priest, to come and exorcise
the evil spirit.' I trembled from head to foot at hearing her talk in
this manner, and exerted what little strength I had left to cry out,
'Have pity on me!' At length, the Portuguese barber took courage, sewed
up my wound, and his wife even nursed me. I was upon my legs in about a
fortnight. The barber got me a place as lacquey to a Knight of Malta,
who was going to Venice; but finding my master had no money to pay me my
wages, I entered into the service of a Venetian merchant, and went with
him to Constantinople. One day I took the fancy to enter a mosque, where
I saw no one but an old Iman and a very pretty young female devotee, who
was saying her prayers. Her neck was quite bare, and in her bosom she
had a fine nosegay of tulips, roses, anemones, ranunculuses, hyacinths,
and auriculas. She let fall her bouquet. I ran to take it up, and
presented it to her with a bow. I was so long in replacing it, that the
Iman began to be angry, and, perceiving I was a Christian, he cried out
for help. They took me before the Cadi, who ordered me to receive one
hundred bastinadoes, and sent me to the galleys. We were continually
whipt, and received twenty lashes a day, when the concatenation of
sublunary events brought you on board our galley to ransom us from
slavery."
"Well, my dear Pangloss," said Candide to him, "now you have been
hanged, dissected, whipped, and tugging at the oar, do you continue to
think that everything in this world happens for the best?" "I have
always abided by my first opinion," replied Pangloss; "for, after all, I
am a philosopher; it would not become me to retract. Leibnitz could not
be wrong, and 'pre-established harmony' is, besides, the finest thing in
the world, as well as a 'plenum' and the 'materia subtilis'."
When Cunegonde is at last found, she is no longer beautiful--but
sunburnt, blear-eyed, haggard, withered, and scrofulous. Though ready to
fulfil his promise, her brother, a baron whom Candide has rescued from
slavery, declares that sister of his shall never marry a person of less
rank than a baron. The book is a mass of seeming extravagance, with a
deep vein of gold beneath. All flows so smoothly, the reader fancies
such fantastic nonsense could not only be easily written, but easily
improved. Yet when he notices how every sally and absurdity adds to the
effect, how every lightest touch tells, he sees that only the most
consummate wit and genius could thus deftly dissect a philosophy of the
universe for the amusement of the multitude.
Voltaire tried to save England from the judicial murder of Admiral Byng,
who was sacrificed to national pride and political faction in 1757, yet
how lightly he touches the history in a sentence: "Dans ce pays ci il
est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres."
The pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war had no charms for
Voltaire. He shows it in its true colors as multitudinous murder and
rapine. Religious intolerance and hypocrisy, court domination and
intrigue, the evils attendant on idlers, soldiers and priests, are all
sketched in lightest outline, and the reader of this fantastic story
finds he has traversed the history of last century, seen it at its
worst, and seen, too, the forces that tended to make it better, and is
ready to exclaim: Would we had another Voltaire now!
The philosophy of _Candide_ is that of Secularism. The world as we find
it abounds in misery and suffering. If any being is responsible for it,
his benevolence can only be vindicated by limiting his power, or his
power credited by limiting his goodness. Our part is simply to make the
best of things and improve this world here and now. "Work, then, without
disputing; it is the only way to render life supportable."
Carlyle did much to impair the influence of Voltaire in England. Yet
what is Carlyle's essential doctrine but "Do the work nearest hand," and
what is this but a translation of the conclusion of _Candide_: "Il faut
cultiver notre jardin"?
Those who forget how far more true it is that man is an irrational
animal than that he is a rational one, may wonder how Voltaire, having
in _Candide_ sapped the foundations of belief in an all-good God by a
portrayal of the evils afflicting mankind, could yet remain a Theist.
The truth seems to be that Voltaire had neither taste nor talents for
metaphysics. In the _Ignorant Philosopher_ Voltaire seeks to answer
Spinoza, without fully understanding his monistic position. He appears
to have remained a dualist or modern Manichean--an opinion which James
Mill considered was the only Theistic view consistent with the facts.
Writing to D'Alembert on the 15th of August, 1767, Voltaire says: "Give
my compliments to the Devil, for it is he who governs the world." It is
curious that on the day he was writing these lines, one Napoleon
Bonaparte had just entered upon the world.
Voltaire appears to have been satisfied with the design argument as
proving a deity, though he considered speculation as to the nature of
deity useless. He showed the Positivist spirit in his rejection of
metaphysical subtleties. "When," he writes, "we have well disputed over
spirit and matter, we end ever by no advance. No philosopher has been
able to raise by his own efforts the veil which nature has spread over
the first principles of things." Again: "I do not know the _quo modo_,
true. I prefer to stop short rather than to lose myself." Also:
"Philosophy consists in stopping where physics fail us. I observe the
effects of nature, but I confess I know no more than you do about first
principles." But a deist he ever remained.
Baron de Gleichen, who visited him in 1757, relates that a young author,
at his wits' end for the means of living, knocked one day at the poet's
door, and to recommend himself said: "I am an apprentice atheist at your
service." Voltaire replied: "I have the honor to be a master deist; but
though our trades are opposed, I will give you some supper to-night and
some work to-morrow. I wish to avail myself of your arms and not of your
head."
He thought both atheism and fanaticism inimical to society; but, said
he, "the atheist, in his error, preserves reason, which cuts his claws,
while those of the fanatic are sharpened in the incessant madness which
afflicts him."
Voltaire seems to have been at bottom agnostic holding on to the narrow
ledge of theism and afraid to drop.
He says: "For myself, I am sure of nothing. I believe that there is an
intelligence, a creative power, a God. I express an opinion to-day; I
doubt of it to-morrow; the day after I repudiate it. All honest
philosophers have confessed to me, when they were warmed with wine, that
the great Being has not given to them one particle more evidence than to
me." He believed in the immortality of the soul, yet expresses himself
dubiously, saying to Madame du Deffand that he knew a man who believed
that when a bee died it ceased to hum. That man was himself.
On the appearance, however, in 1770 of the Baron d'Holbach's _System of
Nature_--in which he was very considerably helped by Diderot--Voltaire
took alarm at its openly pronounced atheism. "The book," he wrote,
"has made all the philosophers execrable in the eyes of the King and his
court. Through this fatal work philosophy is lost for ever in the eyes
of all magistrates and fathers of families." He accordingly took in hand
to combat its atheism, which he does in the article _Dieu_ in the
_Philosophical Dictionary_, and in his _History of Jenni_ (Johnny), a
lad supposed to be led on a course of vice by atheism and reclaimed to
virtue by the design argument. Voltaire's real attitude seems fairly
expressed in his celebrated mot: "S'il n'y avait pas un dieu, il
fraudrait l'inventer"--"If there was not a God it would be necessary to
invent one," which, Morin remarks, was exactly what had been done.
Morley says: "It was not the truth of the theistic belief in itself that
Voltaire prized, but its supposed utility as an assistant to the
police."