Voltaire was a great stimulator of the French _Encyclopaedia_, a work
designed to convey to the many the information of the few. Here again
the inspiration was English. It was the success of the _Cyclopcedia of
Arts and Sciences_, edited by the Freethinker Ephraim Chambers, in 1728,
which suggested the yet more famous work carried out by Diderot and
D'Alembert, with the assistance of such men as Helvetius, Buffon,
Turgot, and Condorcet. Voltaire took an ardent interest in the work, and
contributed many important articles. The leading contributors were all
Freethinkers, but they were under the necessity of advancing their ideas
in a tentative way on account of the vigilant censorship. Voltaire not
only wrote for the _Encyclopaedia_, but gave valuable hints and
suggestions to Diderot and D'Alembert, as well as much sound advice. He
cautioned them, for instance, against patriotic bias. "Why," he asks
D'Alembert, "do you say that the sciences are more indebted to France
than to any other nation? Is it to the French that we are indebted for
the quadrant, the fire-engine, the theory of light, inoculation, the
seed-sower? _Parbleu!_ you are jesting! We have invented only the
wheelbarrow."
Voltaire wrote the section on History. The first page contained a
Voltairean definition of sacred history which even an ignorant censor
could hardly be expected to pass. "Sacred History is a series of
operations, divine and miraculous, by which it pleased God formerly to
conduct the Jewish nation, and to-day to exercise our faith." The iron
hand beneath the velvet glove was too evident for this to pass the
censorship. Vexatious delay and the enforced excision of important
articles attended the progress of the work.
It was the attempted suppression of _l'Encyclopcedie_ which showed
Voltaire that the time had come for battle.
In 1757 a new edict was issued, threatening with death any one who
wrote, printed, or sold any work attacking religion or the royal
authority. The same edict assigned the penalty of the galleys to whoever
published writings without legal permit. Within six months advocate
Barbier recorded in his diary some terrible sentences. La Marteliere,
verse-writer, for printing clandestinely Voltaire's _Pucelle_ and other
"such" works, received nine years in the galleys; eight printers and
binders employed in the same printing office, the pillory and three
years' banishment. Up to the period of the Revolution nothing could be
legally printed in France, and no book could be imported, without
Government authorisation. Mr. Lecky says, in his _History of England in
the Eighteenth Century_: "During the whole of the reign of Lewis XV.
there was scarcely a work of importance which was not burnt or
suppressed, while the greater number of the writers who were at this
time the special, almost the only, glory of France were imprisoned,
banished, or fined." Voltaire determined to render the bigots odious and
contemptible, and henceforth waged incessant war, continued to the day
of his death. In satire on one of the bigots he issued his _Narrative of
the Sickness, Confession, Death and Reappearance of the Jesuit
Berthier_, as rich a burlesque as that which Swift had written
predicting and describing the death of the astrologer Partridge, in
accordance with the prediction. Every sentence is a hit. A priest of a
rival order is hastily summoned to confess the dying Jesuit, who is
condemned to penance in purgatory for 333,333 years, 3 months, 3 weeks,
and 3 days, and then will only be let out if some brother Jesuit be
found humble and good enough to be willing to apply all his merits to
Father Berthier. Even putting his enemy in purgatory, he only condemned
the Jesuit every morning to mix the chocolate of a Jansenist, read aloud
at dinner a Provincial Letter, and employ the rest of the day in mending
the chemises of the nuns of Port Royal.
From Ferney he poured forth a wasp-swarm of such writings under all
sorts of pen-names, and dated from London, Amsterdam, Berne, or Geneva.
He had sufficient stimulus in the bigotry, intolerance, and atrocious
iniquities perpetrated in the name of religion.
Voltaire, moreover, determined himself to uphold the work of the
_Encyclopaedia_ in more popular form. He put forward first his
_Questions upon the Encyclopaedia_, in which he deals with some
important articles of that work, with others of his own. This was the
foundation of the most important of all his works, the _Philosophical
Dictionary_, which he is said to have projected in the days when he was
with Frederick at Berlin. In this work he showed how a dictionary could
be made the most amusing reading in the world. Under an alphabetical
arrangement, he brought together a vast variety of sparkling essays on
all sorts of subjects connected with literature, science, politics and
religion. Some of his headings were mere stalking-horses, under cover of
which he shot at the enemy. Some are concerned with matters now out of
date; but, on the whole, the work presents a vivid picture of his
versatile genius. An abridged edition, containing articles of abiding
interest, would be a service to Free-thought at the present day.
Here is a slight specimen of his style taken from the article on
Fanaticism: "Some one spreads a rumor in the world that there is a giant
in existence 70 feet high. Very soon all the doctors discuss the
questions what color his hair must be, what is the size of his thumb,
what the dimensions of his nails; there is outcry, caballing, fighting;
those who maintain that the giant's little finger is only an inch and a
half in diameter, bring those to the stake who affirm that the little
finger is a foot thick. 'But, gentlemen, does your giant exist?' says a
bystander, modestly.
"'What a horrible doubt!' cry all the disputants; 'what blasphemy! what
absurdity!' Then they all make a little truce to stone the bystander,
and, after having assassinated him in due form, in a manner the most
edifying, they fight among themselves, as before, on the subject of the
little finger and the nails."
"L'Infame."
Voltaire had other provocations to his attack on the bigots, and as he
greatly concerned himself with these, they must be briefly mentioned. In
1761 a tragedy of mingled judicial bigotry, ignorance, and cruelty was
enacted in Languedoc. On October 13th of that year, Marc Antoine, the
son of Jean Calas, a respectable Protestant merchant in Toulouse, a
young man of dissolute habits, who had lived the life of a scapegrace,
hanged himself in his father's shop while the family were upstairs. The
priestly party got hold of the case and turned it into a religious
crime. The Huguenot parents were charged with murdering their son to
prevent his turning Catholic. Solemn services were held for the repose
of the soul of Marc Antoine, and his body was borne to the grave with
more than royal pomp, as that of a martyr to the holy cause of religion.
In the church of the White Penitents a hired skeleton was exhibited,
holding in one hand a branch of palm, emblem of martyrdom, and in the
other an inscription, in large letters, "abjuration of heresy.'' The
populace, who were accustomed yearly to celebrate with rejoicing the
Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, 1572, were excited against the
family. The father, who for sixty years had lived without reproach, was
arrested, with his wife and children. The court before whom the case was
brought, at first was disposed to put the whole family to the torture,
never doubting that the murder would be confessed by one or other of
them. But they ended by only condemning the father to be tortured, in
order to extract a confession of guilt before being broken on the wheel,
after which his body was to be burned and the ashes scattered to the
winds. He was submitted first to the _question ordinaire_. In sight of
the rack he was asked to reveal his crime. His answer was that no crime
had been committed. He was stretched on the rack until every limb was
dislocated and the body drawn out several inches beyond. He was then
subjected to the _question extraordinaire_. This consisted in pouring
water into his mouth from a horn, while his nose was pinched, till his
body was swollen to twice its size, and the sufferer endured the anguish
of a hundred drownings. He submitted without flinching to all the
excruciating agony. Finally, he was placed upon a tumbril and carried
through the howling mob to the place of execution. "I am innocent." he
muttered from time to time. At the scaffold he was exhorted to confess
by a priest: "What!" said he, "you, too, believe a father can kill his
own son!" They bound him to a wooden cross, and the executioner, with an
iron bar, broke each of his limbs in two places, striking eleven blows
in all, and then left him for two hours to die. The executioner
mercifully strangled him at last, before burning the body at the stake.
To the last he persisted in his innocence: he had no confession to make.
By his unutterable agony he saved the lives of his wife and family. Two
daughters were thrown into a convent, and the property was confiscated.
The widow and son escaped, and were provided for by Voltaire.
He spared no time, trouble, or money to arrive at the truth, and that
once reached, he was as assiduous in his search for justice. He went to
work with an energy and thoroughness all his own. He interested the
Pompadour herself in the case. By his own efforts he forced justice to
be heard. "The worst of the worthy sort of people," he said, "is that
they are such cowards. A man groans over his wrong, shuts his lips,
takes his supper, and forgets." Voltaire was not of that fibre. Wrong
went as a knife to his heart. He suffered with the victim, and might
have justly used the words of Shelley, who compared himself unto "a
nerve, o'er which do creep the else unfelt oppressions of the world."
Voltaire had to fire others with his own fervor. He issued pamphlet
after pamphlet in which the shameful story was told with pathetic
simplicity. He employed the best lawyers he could find to vindicate the
memory of the murdered man. For three years he left no stone unturned,
until all that was possible was done to right the foul wrong of those in
authority. During this time no smile escaped him of which he did not
reproach himself as a crime. Carlyle speaks of this as "Voltaire's
noblest outburst, into mere transcendant blaze of pity, virtuous wrath,
and determination to bring rescue and help against the whole world."
He had his pamphlets on the Calas case, seven in number, translated and
published in England and Germany, where they produced a profound effect.
A subscription for the Calas family was headed by the young Queen of
George III. When at length judgment was given, reversing the sentence,
he wrote to Damilaville: "My dear brother, there is, then, justice upon
the earth! There is, then, such a thing as humanity! Men are not all
wicked rascals, as they say! It is the day of your triumph, my dear
brother; you have served the family better than anyone."
It was while the Calas case was pending that Voltaire composed his noble
_Treatise on Toleration_, a work which, besides its great effect in
Europe, caused Catherine II. to promise, if not to grant, universal
religious toleration throughout the vast empire she governed.
This Calas case was scarce ended when another, almost as bad an
exhibition of intolerance, occurred. Sirven, a respectable Protestant
land surveyor, had a Catholic housekeeper, who, with the assent of the
Bishop of Castres, spirited away his daughter for the good of her soul,
and placed her in a convent, with a view to her conversion. She returned
to her parents in a state of insanity, her body covered with the marks
of the whip. She never recovered from the cruelties she had endured at
the convent. One day, when her father was absent on his professional
duties, she threw herself into a well, at the bottom of which she was
found drowned. It was obvious to the authorities that the parents had
murdered their child because she wished to become a Roman Catholic. They
most wisely did not appear, and were sentenced to be hanged when they
could be caught. In their flight the married daughter gave premature
birth to a child, and Madame Sirven died in despair.
It took Voltaire eight years to get this abominable sentence reversed,
and to turn wrong into right. He was now between seventy and eighty
years of age, yet he threw himself into the cause of the Sirvens with
the zeal and energy which has vindicated Calas; appealing to Paris and
Europe, issuing pamphlets, feeing lawyers, and raising a handsome
subscription for the family.
Another case was that of the Chevalier de la Barre. In 1766 a crucifix
was injured--perhaps wantonly, perhaps by accident. The Bishop of Amiens
called for vengeance. Two young officers were accused; one escaped, and
obtained by Voltaire's request a commission in the Prussian service. The
other, La Barre, was tortured to confess, and then condemned to have his
tongue cut out, his hand cut off, and to be burned alive. Voltaire,
seventy years old, devoted himself with untiring energy to save him.
Failing in that, he wrote one of his little pamphlets, a simple, graphic
_Narrative of the Death of Chevalier de la Barre_, which stirred every
humane heart in France. For twelve years this infidel vindicated the
memory of the murdered man and exposed his oppressors. One of the
authorities concerned in this judicial atrocity threatened Voltaire with
vengeance for holding them up to the execration of Europe. Voltaire
replied by a Chinese anecdote. "I forbid you," said a tyrannical emperor
to the historiographer, "to speak a word more of me." The mandarin began
to write. "What are you doing now?" asked the emperor. "I am writing
down the order that your majesty has just given me." Voltaire had sought
to save Admiral Byng. He contended in a similar case at home. Count
Lally had failed to save India from the English, had been taken
prisoner, but allowed to go to Paris to clear his name from charges made
against him. The French people, infuriate at the loss of their
possession, demanded a victim, and Lally, after a process tainted with
every kind of illegality, was condemned to death on the vague charge of
abuse of authority. The murdered man's son, known in the Revolution as
Lally Tollendal, was joined by Voltaire in the honorable work of
procuring revision of the proceedings, and one of the last crowning
triumphs of Voltaire's days was the news brought to him on his dying bed
that his long effort had availed.
"Ecrasez L'infame."
These are samples of what was occuring when Voltaire was exhorting his
friends to _crush the infamous_--a phrase which gave rise to much
misunderstanding, and which priests have even alleged was applied to
Jesus, their idol. A sufficient disproof, if any were needed, is that
Voltaire treats "l'infame" as feminine. _Si vous pouvez ecraser
l'infame, ecrasez-la, et aimez-moi." That oft-repeated phrase was
directed at no person. Nor was it, as some Protestants have alleged,
directed only at Roman Catholicism. As Voltaire saw and said, "fanatic
Papists and fanatic Calvanism are tarred with one brush." "L'infame" was
Christian superstition claiming supernatural authority and enforcing its
claim, as it has ever sought to do, by pains and penalties. He meant by
it the whole spirit of exclusiveness, intolerance, and bigotry,
persecuting and privileged orthodoxy, which he saw-as the outcome of the
divine faith. Practically, as D. F. Strauss justly remarked, "when
Voltaire writes to D'Alembert that he wishes to see the 'Infame' reduced
in France to the same condition in which she finds herself in England,
and when Frederick writes to Voltaire that philosophers flourished
amongst the Greeks and Romans, because their religion had no
dogmas--'*mais les dogmes de notre infame gatent tout_'--it is clear we
must understand by the 'Infame,' whose destruction was the watchword of
the Voltairian circle, the Christian Church, without distinction of
communions, Catholic or Protestant."
The Catholic Joseph de Maistre shrieks: "With a fury without example,
this insolent blasphemer declared himself the personal enemy of the
Savior of men, dared from the depths of his nothingness to give him a
name of ridicule, and that adorable law which the Man-God brought to
earth he called 'l'infame.'" This is a judgment worthy of a bigot, who
dares not look into the reason why his creed is detested. Let us try and
understand this insolent blasphemer to-day.
Voltaire looked deep into the heart of the atrocities that wrung his
every nerve with anguish. They were not new: only the humanity and
courage that assailed them were new. They were the natural outcome of
what had been Christian teaching. It was not simply that, as a matter of
fact, priests and theologians were the opponents of every kind of
rational progress, but their intolerance was the logical result of their
creed. These atrocities could not have been perpetrated had not priests
and magistrates had behind them a credulous and fanatical populace,
whose minds were suborned from childhood to believing that they had
themselves the one and divine faith, and that all heretics were enemies
of God. He saw that to destroy the intolerance he must sap the
superstition from which it sprang. He saw that the core of the Christian
superstition lay in Bibliolatry, and that while Christians believed they
had an exclusive and infallibly divine revelation, they would deem all
opposition to their own beliefs a sin, meriting punishment. Mr. Morley
says, with truth: "If we find ourselves walking amid a generation of
cruel, unjust, and darkened spirits, we may be assured that it is their
beliefs on what they deem highest that have made them so. There is no
counting with certainty on the justice of men who are capable of
fashioning and worshipping an unjust divinity; nor on their humanity, so
long as they incorporate inhuman motives in their most sacred dogma; nor
on their reasonableness, while they rigorously decline to accept reason
as a test of truth."
Voltaire warred on Christian superstition because he keenly felt its
evils. He saw that intolerance naturally flowed from the exclusive and
dogmatic claims which alone differentiated it from other faiths. Its
inducements to right-doing he found to be essentially ignoble, appealing
either to brutal fear of punishment or base expectation of reward, and
in each case alike mercenary. He saw that terrorism engendered
brutality, that a savage will think nothing of slaughtering hundreds to
appease his angry God. He saw that it had been a fine religion for
priests and monks--those caterpillars of the commonwealth, living on the
fat of the land while pretending to hold the keys of heaven, a race of
parasites on the people, who toil not neither do they spin, and whose
direct interest lay in fostering their dupes ignorance and credulity.
The Christian tree was judged, as its founder said it should be, by its
fruits. Men do not gather grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles. He
saw Christianity as Tacitus described it--"a maleficent superstition."
It was a upas tree, to be cut down; and hence he reiterated his terrible
_Delenda est Carthago,_ "Ecrasez l'Infame"--"Destroy the monster."
He wrote to D'Alembert from Ferney: "For forty years I have endured the
outrages of bigots and scoundrels. I have found there is nothing to gain
by moderation, and that it is a deception. I must wage war openly and
die nobly, 'on a crowd of bigots slaughtered at my feet.'" His war was
relentless and unremitting. He assailed "l'Infame" with every weapon
which learning, wit, industry, and indignation could supply.
Frederick wrote to him from the midst of his own wars: "Your zeal burns
against the Jesuits and superstitions. You do well to combat error, but
do you credit that the world will change? The human mind is weak.
Three-fourths of mankind are formed to be the slaves of the absurdest
fanaticism. The fear of the devil and hell is fascinating to them, and
they detest the sage who wishes to enlighten them. I look in vain among
them for the image of God, of which the theologians assure us they carry
the imprint." Madame du Deffand wrote in a similar strain. She assured
him that every person of sense thought as he did; why then continue? No
remonstrance moved him. He had enlisted for the war, and might have said
with Luther: _Hier stehe ich; ich kann nicht anders_.
Much nonsense has been written about Voltaire's employment of ridicule
against religious beliefs. I am reminded of Bishop South's remark to a
dull brother bishop, who reproved him for sprinkling his sermon with
witticisms. "Now, my lord, do you really mean to say that, if God had
given you any wit, you would not have used it?" Voltaire ridiculed what
he esteemed ridiculous. But there is nothing more galling to
superstitionists than to find that others find food for mirth in their
absurdities.
"You mock at sacred things," said the Jesuits to Pascal when he exposed
their casuistry. Doubtless the priests of Baal said the same when Elijah
asked them whether their God was asleep, or peradventure on a journey.
The artifice of inculcating a solemn and reverential manner of treating
absurdities is the perennial recipe for sanctifying and perpetuating
superstition. "Priests of all persuasions," says Oliver Goldsmith, "are
enemies to ridicule, because they know it to be a formidable antagonist
to fanaticism, and they preach up gravity to conceal their own
shallowness of imposture." Approach the mysteries of the faith with
reverence and you concede half the battle. Christian missionaries do not
thus treat the fetishism and sorcery of heathen lands. To overcome it
they must expose its absurdities. Ridicule has been a weapon in the
hands of all the great liberators, Luther, Erasmus, Rabelais, Bruno,
Swift, but none used it more effectively than Voltaire. Buckle well
says; "He used ridicule, not as the test of truth, but as the scourge of
folly." And he adds: "His irony, his wit, his pungent and telling
sarcasms produce more effect than the gravest arguments could have done;
and there can be no doubt he was fully justified in using those great
resources with which nature had endowed him, since by their aid he
advanced the interests of truth, and relieved men from some of their
most inveterate prejudices." Victor Hugo puts the case in poetic fashion
when he declares that Voltaire was irony incarnate for the salvation of
mankind. "Ridicule is not argument"! Well, it is a pointed form of
polemic, the _argumentum ad absurdum_. "Mustapha," said Voltaire, "does
not believe, but he believes that he believes." To shame him out of
hypocrisy, there is nothing better than laughter; and if a true
believer, laughter will best free him from terror of his bogey devil and
no less bogey god. Ridicule can hurt no reality. You cannot make fun of
the multiplication table. The fun begins when the theologians assert
that three times one are one. Shaftesbury, who maintained that ridicule
was a test of truth, remarked with justice, "'tis the persecuting spirit
that has raised the bantering one." Ridicule is the natural retort to
those who seek not to convert but to convict and punish. Ridicule comes
like a stream of sunlight to dissipate the fogs of preconceived
prejudice. A laugh, if no argument, is a splendid preparative. Often, in
Voltaire, ridicule takes an argumentative form. Thus, alluding to a
Monsieur Esprit's book on the Falsity of Human Virtues, he says: "That
great genius, Mons. Esprit, tells us that neither Cato, Aristotle,
Marcus Aurelius, nor Epictetus were good men, and a good reason why,
good men are only found among Christians. Again, among the Christians,
Catholics alone are virtuous, and of the Catholics, the Jesuits, enemies
of the Oratorians, must be excepted. Therefore, there is scarce any
virtue on earth, except among the enemies of the Jesuits."
All his characteristic scorn and ridicule come out when dealing with the
fetish book of his adversaries. The _Philosophical Dictionary_ is full
of wit upon biblical subjects. I content myself with an excerpt from the
less known _Sermon of Fifty_: "If Moses changed the waters into blood,
the sages of Pharoah did the same. He made frogs come upon the land;
this also they were able to do. But when lice were concerned, they were
vanquished; in the matter of lice, the Jews knew more and could do more
than the other nations."
"Finally, Adonai caused every first-born in Egypt to die, in order that
his people might be at their ease. For his people the sea is cloven in
twain; and we must confess it is the least that could be done on this
occasion. All the other marvels are of the same stamp. The Jews wander
in the desert. Some husbands complain of their wives. Immediately water
is found, which makes every woman who has been faithless to her husband
swell and burst. In the desert the Jews have neither bread nor dough,
but quails and manna are rained upon them. Their clothes are preserved
unworn for forty years; as the children grow, their clothes grow with
them. Samson, because he had not undergone the operation of shaving,
defeats a thousand Philistines with the jaw-bone of an ass. He ties
together three hundred foxes, which, as a matter of course, come quite
readily to his hand.
"There is scarcely a page in which tales of this sort are not found. The
ghost of Samuel appears, summoned by the voice of a witch. The shadow of
a dial--as if miserable creatures like the Jews had dials--goes back ten
degrees at the prayer of Hezekiah, who, with great judgment, asks for
this sign. God gives him the choice of making the hour advance or
recede, and the learned Hezekiah thinks that it is not difficult to make
the shadow advance, but very difficult to make it recede. Elijah mounts
to heaven in a chariot of fire; children sing in a hot and raging
furnace. I should never stop if I entered into the detail of all the
monstrous extravagances with which this book swarms. Never was common
sense outraged so vehemently and indecently." Noticing the comparison in
the Song of Solomon, "Her nose is like the tower of Damascus," etc., he
says: "This, I own, is not in the style of the Eclogues of the author of
the AEneid; but all have not a like style, and a Jew is not obliged to
write like Virgil."
This, it may be objected, is caricature and not criticism. But all that
Voltaire sought was that his blows should tell. He did not expect to be
taken _au pied du lettre_. Some of his biblical criticism is faulty, but
it is hard for the reader to recover from the tone of banter and
contempt with which he treats the sacred book. When the idol is
shattered, it is not much use saying its mouth was not quite so big and
ugly as it was represented to be. Priests have never yet been troubled
by dull criticism. They left Tindal and Chubb alone; but when Woolston,
Annet and Paine added liveliness to their infidelity, they loudly called
for the police.
Leslie Stephen well says: "Men have venerated this or that grotesque
monstrosity because they have always approached it with half-shut eyes
and grovelling on their faces in the dust: a single hearty laugh will
encourage them to stand erect and to learn the latest of lessons--that
of seeing what lies before them. And if your holy religion does really
depend upon preserving the credit of Jonah's whale, upon justifying all
the atrocities of the Jews, and believing that a census was punished by
a plague, ridicule is not only an effective but an appropriate mode of
argument."
Voltaire is often sneered at as a mere destructive. The charge is not
true, and, even if it were, he would none the less deserve the
admiration of posterity for his destructive work. It is as necessary for
the gardener to clear away the rubbish and keep down the weeds as to sow
and water. Mr. Morley justly observes: "He had imagination enough and
intelligence enough to perceive that they are the most pestilent of all
the enemies of mankind, the sombre hierarchs of misology, who take away
the keys of knowledge, thrusting truth down to the second place, and
discrowning sovereign reason to be the serving drudge of superstition or
social usuage."
Voltaire was the arch iconoclast of his age, a mere destructive, if you
will. Buckie truly remarks: "All great reforms have consisted, not in
making something new, but in unmaking something old." W. J. Fox
eloquently said: "The destruction of tyranny is political freedom. The
destruction of bigotry is spiritual and mental emancipation. Positive
and negative are mere forms. Creation and destruction, as we call them,
are just one and the same work, the work which man has to do--the
extraction of good from evil."
Much has been made of the pseudonymous character of his attacks on
Christianity, and of the subterfuges and fibs with which he sought to
evade responsibility. One might as well complain of ironclads wearing
armor in warfare.
It was the necessity of his position. He wanted to do his work, not to
become a martyr, leaving it to unknown hands. It should be remembered
that Voltaire had sometimes to bribe publishers to bring out his
writings; and, in such circumstances, the pseudonymity is surely open to
no suspicion of baseness. His poem on _Natural Religion_ was condemned
to the flames by the decree of the Parliament of Paris, 23rd January,
1759. His _Important Examination of the Scriptures_, which he falsely
attributed to Lord Bolingbroke, was condemned with five other of his
pieces by a decree of the Court of Rome, 29th November, 1771. Could the
author have been caught, he would have had a good chance, if not of
sharing the fate of his book, at least of permanent lodgment in the
Bastille, of which he had already sufficient taste. He knew that
although Bolingbroke had no hand in its composition he largely shared
its ideas, and he obtained at once publicity and security by attributing
it to the dead friend who, Morley says, "was the direct progenitor of
Voltaire's opinions in religion." If he stuck at no subterfuge to
achieve his work, his lies injured no one. One of the funniest was the
signing one of his heterodox publications as the Archbishop of
Canterbury, a lie which may remind us of the drunken Sheridan announcing
himself as William Wilberforce. Voltaire had been Bastilled twice, and
verily believed that another taste would end his days. "I am," he said,
"a friend of truth, but no friend at all to martyrdom." Shelter behind
any ambush was necessary in such guerilla warfare as his. Over fifty of
his works were condemned, and placed upon the Index. Voltaire used no
fewer than one hundred and thirty different pen-names, which have
enabled bibliographers to display their erudition.(1) But for this
underground method, he might have been laid by the heels instead of
living to old age, with the satisfaction of seeing the world becoming a
little more humane and tolerant through his efforts. In such warfare the
only test is success, and the fact remains that Voltaire's blows told.
He cleared the course for modern science, and it is not for those who
benefit by his labors to sneer because he did not become a martyr in the
struggle.
1. Special mention should be made of the _Bibliographie
Voltairienne_ of M. L. Querard, and _Voltaire: Bibliographie de
ses OEuvres_, in four volumes, by M. G. Bengesco, 1882- 1890.
Condorcet says: "His zeal against a religion which he regarded as the
cause of the fanaticism which has desolated Europe since its birth, of
the superstition which had burst about it, and as the source of the
mischief which the enemies of human nature still continued to do, seemed
to double his activity and his forces. 'I am tired,' he said one day,
'of hearing it repeated that twelve men were enough to establish
Christianity. I want to show them that one will be enough to destroy
it.'" What one man could do he did. But it took not twelve legendary
apostles, but the labor of countless thousands of men, through many
ages, to build up the great complex of Christianity, and it will need
the labors of as many to destroy it. Voltaire himself came to see this,
and wrote, in the year before his death, "I now perceive that we must
still wait three or four hundred years. One day it cannot but be that
good men will win their cause; but before that glorious day arrives, how
many disgusts have we to undergo, how many dark persecutions, without
reckoning the La Barres of whom they will make an _auto de fe_ from time
to time."
John Morley remarks: "The meaner partisans of an orthodoxy, which can
only make wholly sure of itself by injustice to adversaries, has always
loved to paint the Voltairean school in the characters of demons,
enjoying their work of destruction with a sportive and impish delight.
They may have rejoiced in their strength so long as they cherished the
illusion that those who first kindled the torch should also complete the
long course and bear the lamp to the goal. When the gravity of the
enterprise showed itself before them, they remained alert with all
courage, but they ceased to fancy that courage necessarily makes men
happy. The mantle of philosophy was rent in a hundred places, and bitter
winds entered at a hundred holes; but they only drew it the more closely
around them."
It may remain an inspiration to others, as it assuredly is a proof of
the temperance and moderation of his own life, that much of Voltaire's
best work was done after he had reached his sixtieth year. _Candide_,
his masterpiece, was written at the age of sixty-four. Four years later
he produced his _Sermon of the Fifty_, and he was sixty-nine when he
published his epoch-making _Treatise upon Toleration_, and _Saul_, the
wittiest of his burlesque dramas. At the age of seventy he issued his
most important work, the _Philosophical Dictionary_, and his burlesque
upon existing superstitions, which he entitled _Pot-Pourri_. This was,
indeed, the period of his greatest literary activity against "l'Infame."
His _Questions on the Miracles_, his _Examination of Lord Bolingbroke_,
the _Questions of Zapata_, the _Dinner of Count de Boulainvilliers_ (the
charming _resume_ of Voltaire's religious opinions, which had the honor
to be burnt by the hand of the hangman), the _Canonisation of St.
Cucufin_, the romance of the _Princess of Babylon_, the _A. B. and C._,
the collection of _Ancient Gospels_, and his _God and Men_, all being
issued while he was between seventy and seventy-five. It was at this
time he edited the _Recueil Necessaire avec l'Evangile de la Raison_, a
collection of anti-Christian tracts dated Leipsic and London, but
printed at Amsterdam. He was eighty when he put forth his _White Bull_
(one of the funniest of his pieces, which was translated by Jeremy
Bentham), and his ridiculous skit on Bababec and the Fakirs; eighty-two
when he wrote _The Bible Explained_ and _A Christian against Six Jews_;
and eighty-three when he published his _History of the Establishment of
Christianity_.
It was thus in the last twenty years of his long life that Voltaire did
his best work for the destruction of prejudice and the spread of
enlightenment. At the same time he maintained a large correspondence,
both with the principal sovereigns of Europe, whom he urged in the
direction of tolerance, and with the leading writers, whom he wished to
combine in a great and systematic attempt to sap the creed he believed
to be at the root of superstition and intolerance.
It is in his lengthy and varied correspondence with intimates, extending
over sixty years, that Voltaire most truly reveals himself. He is
therein his own minute biographer, revealing not only his actions, but
their actuation. We see him therein not merely the prince of
_persifleurs_, but the serious sensitive thinker, keenly alive to
friendship, love, and work for the higher interests of humanity. His
letters are among the most varied, interesting, and delightful of any
left by a great man of letters. Like all his other productions, they
display the fertility of his genius. Over ten thousand separate letters
are catalogued by Bengesco. Their very extent prevents their being
widely read, but they reveal the perennial brightness of his mind, his
delight in work, his love of literature and liberty, his constant gaiety
and goodness of heart, with here and there only a flash of indignation
and contempt. They are imbued with the spirit of friendship, abound in
anecdotes and pleasantries, mingled with a passionate earnestness for
the interest of mankind. Constantly we find him endeavoring to elevate
the literary class, to raise the drama, continually seeking to encourage
talent, to relieve suffering, and to defend the oppressed.