Bolingbroke finely said of Marlborough: "He was so great a man that I
forget his errors." One can as justly say the same of Voltaire. I have
scant sympathy with those who, dealing with great men, seek every
opportunity of bringing them down to the common level. Voltaire was by
no means a faultless character. He was far indeed from being an
immaculate hero: he had the failings of his age and of his training. But
they form no essential part of his work. How much has been made of the
coarseness and immorality of Luther by men like Father Anderdon! All men
have the defects of their qualities. Condorcet, in his _Life of
Voltaire_, has placed on record this just criticism: "The happy
qualities of Voltaire were often obscured and distorted by a natural
mobility, aggravated by the habit of writing tragedies. He passed in a
moment from anger to sympathetic emotion; from indignation to
pleasantry. His passions, naturally violent, sometimes transported him
too far; and his excessive mobility deprived him of the advantages
ordinarily attached to passionate tempers--firmness in conduct--courage
which no terrors can withhold from action, and which no dangers,
anticipated beforehand, can shake by their actual presence. Voltaire has
often been seen to expose himself rashly to the storm--seldom to meet it
with fortitude. These alternations of audacity and weakness have often
afflicted his friends, and prepared unworthy triumphs for his envenomed
enemies."
He was too ready to lash the curs who barked at his heels, thereby
stimulating them to further noise. Scandalous ex-Jesuit Desfontaines,
L'Ane de Mirepoix, Thersites Freron and the rest, would be forgotten had
he not condescended to apply the whip. Voltaire was always something of
a spoilt child, over-sensitive to every reproach. His petulance impelled
him to absurd displays of weakness and frenzy, which he was the first to
regret. He was generous even to his enemies when they were in trouble.
The weaknesses of Voltaire were, like his smile, on the surface, but
there was a great human heart beating beneath.
The restlessness of Voltaire has been contrasted with the repose of
Goethe, and Gallic fury with calm Teutonic strength. But which of the
two men did most for humanity? Voltaire might have been as calm as
Goethe had he been indifferent to everything but his own culture and
comfort. No! he loved the fight. When the battle of freedom raged, there
was he in the thick of it, considering not his reputation, but what he
could do to crush the infamous. An enemy said of him: "He is the first
man in the world at writing down what other people have thought." Mr.
Morley justly considers this high and sufficient praise.
The life of a writer was defined by Pope as "a warfare upon earth."
Never was this truer than in the case of Voltaire, who himself said:
"_La vie a'un homme de lettres est un combat perpetuel et on meurt les
armes a la main._" He was ever in the midst of the fight, and usually
alone and surrounded by enemies. And his unfailing resources not merely
kept them at bay, but compelled their surrender of an immense territory.
His was a life of creation and contest. In the war against despotism and
Christianity he achieved a new kingship of public opinion, and proved
that the pen was indeed mightier than the sword.
Heine said: "We should forgive our enemies--but not until they are
hung." Voltaire forgave his when he had gibbeted them in his writings.
People who find it difficult to understand his bitterness against
"L'Infame" should remember the revolting cruelty of which religious
bigotry was still capable in his day. The Revocation of the Edict of
Nantes, the prolonged horrors of the Thirty Years' War, and the Massacre
of St. Bartholomew vibrated still. Condorcet wrote: "The blood of many
millions of men, massacred in the name of God, still steams up to heaven
around us. The earth on which we tread is everywhere covered with the
bones of the victims of barbarous intolerance." His rhetoric expressed
the feeling of a generation who knew by experience the evils of
religious bigotry and fanaticism.
It is as a champion of Freethought that Voltaire deserves chiefly to be
remembered. In that capacity I can only find words of praise. Complaints
of his flippancy, his _persiflage_, his ridicule, his scurrility, his
etc., came, and still come, from the enemy, and show that his blows told
and tell. If he did not crush the infamous he at least crippled it. No
doubt, under different circumstances,
Voltaire would have fought differently. But he would never have thought
of treating atrocities without indignation, or absurdities without
ridicule. Gravity is a part of the game of imposture, and there is
nothing the hypocrites and humbugs resent so much as having their solemn
pretensions laughed at. .
He knew the subtle power of ridicule. It was the most effective weapon,
not only for the time and the nation in which he wrote, but for our time
also. His blows were all dealt with grace and agility; his pills were
sugar-coated. Grimm well said of him: "He makes arrows of every kind of
wood, brilliant and rapid in their flight, but with a keen, unerring
point. Under his sparkling pen, erudition ceases to be ponderous and
becomes full of life. If he cannot sweep the grand chords of the lyre,
he can j strike on golden medals his favorite maxims, and is j
irreproachable in the lighter order of poetry." But, I contend, there
was a fundamental earnestness in his character; he was the apostle of
plain every-day common sense and good feeling.
Voltaire is judged by the character which distinguishes him from other
writers, his light touch and superficial raillery. Because he is _par
excellence_ a _persifleur_, he is set down as merely a _persifleur_.
Never was there a greater mistake. It is forgotten that he did not write
witty tales and squibs only; that he made France acquainted with the
philosophy of Locke and the science of Newton; that he wrote the _Age of
Louis XIV._, the _History of the Parliament of Paris_, and the _Essay on
Manners_ (which revived the historic method), and that he wrote more
than twenty tragedies which transformed the French theatre. Voltaire was
no mere mocker: his _manner_ was that of a _persifleur_, but his matter
was as solid as that of any theologian.
M. Louis de Brouckere, of the University of Brussels, justly claims for
Voltaire a double share in the formation of modern culture and the
development of modern science. He contributed to it directly by his
personal works, and indirectly by antagonising the forces retarding
knowledge and creating an intellectual environment eminently favorable
to the formation of synthetic knowledge, and a new public opinion common
to the intellectual _elite_ of Europe.
Voltaire knew how to marshal against reigning prejudices and errors all
the resources of vast learning and an incomparable wit; but no one more
clearly than he saw that the doctrines he destroyed must be replaced by
others, that humanity cannot get along without a body of common beliefs;
and he contributed more than any one else to the elaboration of the new
intellectual code by uniting and harmonising the efforts of special
_savants_ and isolated thinkers, by giving them a clear consciousness
that what they aimed at was the same thing and common to them all.
He never slackened his efforts to appease the quarrels which broke out
in the camp of the philosophers, to group all his _spiritual brothers_
in one compact bundle, capable of joint action, to unite them in a laic
_church_ which could be utilised to oppose existing churches. The words
I here italicise were underlined by him; they are found on every page of
his correspondence, and he loses no opportunity to reiterate them and
explain their meaning precisely.
If the publication of the _Encyclopoedia_ was the work of Diderot, the
union of the group of men who rendered that publication possible was, in
great measure, the work of Voltaire. If Condorcet wrote just before his
death his immortal _Sketch_, Voltaire took a preponderating part in the
creation of the intellectual atmosphere in which Condorcet lived and
could develop his genius.
Voltaire was assuredly not so coarse as Luther, nor even as his
contemporary Warburton. He carried lighter guns than Luther, but was
more alert and equally persistent. His war against superstition and
intolerance was life-long. Luther smote powerful blows at the church
with a bludgeon; Voltaire made delicate passes with a rapier. Catholics
often declaim against the coarseness of the monk-trained Protestant
champion. They also protest against the trickery of the Jesuit-trained
Freethinker. It is sufficient to say Luther could not have done his work
had he not been coarse. Nor could Voltaire have done his had he not been
a tricksy spirit. Judged by his work, he was one of the best of men,
because he did most good to his fellows, and because in his heart was
the most burning love of truth, of justice and toleration. In the words
of Lecky, he did "more to destroy the greatest of human curses than any
other of the sons of men." His numerous volumes are the fruit and
exposition of a spirit of encyclopaedic curiosity. He assimilated all
the thought and learning of his time, and brought to bear on it a wit
and common sense that was all his own.
Voltaire is never so passionately in earnest as when he speaks against
cruelty and oppression. Every sentence quivers with humanity. He
denounces war as no "moralist for hire" in a pulpit has ever done, as a
scourge of the poor, the weak, and the helpless, to whom he is ever
tender. Whenever he sees tyranny or injustice, he attacks it. He wrote
against torture when its employment was an established principle of law.
He denounced duelling when that form of murder was the chief feature of
the code of honor. He waged warfare upon war when, it was considered
man's highest glory.
His attacks on the judicial iniquity of torture--so often callously
employed on those supposed instruments of Satan, heretics and
witches--were incessant, and it was owing to his influence that the
practice was abolished in France by Turgot, his friend, as it had been
in Prussia by Frederick, and in Russia by Catherine, his disciples. He
advocated the abolition of mutilation, and all forms of cruelty in
punishment. He satirised the folly of punishing murder and robbery by
the same capital penalty, and thus making assassination the interest of
the thief; the barbarity of confiscating the property of children for
the crime of the father; and the intricacies and consequent injustice of
legal methods. He sought to abolish the sale of offices, to equalise
taxation, and to restrict the power of priests to prescribe degrading
penances and excessive abstinences. He wrote with fervor against the
remnants of serfdom, and defended the rights of the serfs in the Jura
against their monastic oppressors. Mr. Lecky says: "His keen and
luminous intellect judged with admirable precision most of the popular
delusions of his time. He exposed with great force the common error
which confounds all wealth with the precious metals. He wrote against
sumptuary laws. He refuted Rousseau's doctrine of the evil of all
luxury."
Voltaire's work went deeper than political reform. He dealt with ideas,
not institutions. In a little treatise called the _Voyage of Reason_,
which he wrote as late as 1774, he enumerates with exultation the
triumphs of reforms which he himself had witnessed. He had previously
written, in 1764: "Everything I see scatters the seeds of a revolution
which will indubitably arrive, and which I shall not have the happiness
to witness." Buckle notes that "the further he advanced in years, the
more pungent were his sarcasms against ministers, the more violent were
his invectives against despotism"; and it was said of him in the early
days of the Revolution, when it was sanguine but not yet sanguinary, "He
did not see what has been done, but he did all that we see."
He teaches no mystery, but the open secret of Secularism--_il faut
cultiver notre jardin_ (we must cultivate our garden). "Life," he said,
"is thickly sown with thorns. I know no other remedy than to pass
rapidly over them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes the greater is
their power to harm us." Economy, he declared, is the source of
liberality, and this maxim he reduced to practice. He ridiculed all
pretences; those of the physician as well as of the metaphysician. "What
have you undertaken?" he said, smiling, to a young man, who answered
that he was studying medicine. "Why, to convey drugs of which you know
little into a body of which you know less!" "Regimen," said he, "is
better than physic. Everyone should be his own physician. Eat with
moderation what you know by experience agrees with your constitution.
Nothing is good for the body but what we can digest. What medicine can
procure digestion? Exercise. What recruit strength? Sleep. What
alleviate incurable evils? Patience."
The tone of Voltaire is not fervid or heroic, like, for instance, that
of Carlyle; but he worked, as Carlyle did not, for a great cause. He
felt for suffering outside himself. Without mysticism or fanaticism,
aiming at no remote or impracticable ideal, he ever insisted on meeting
the problems of life with practical good sense, toleration, and
humanity. He sought always for clear ideas, tangible results, and as Mr.
Lecky says, "labored steadily within the limits of his ideals and of his
sympathies, to make the world wiser, happier, and better place than he
found it."
Voltaire wrote: "My motto is, 'Straight to the fact,'" and this was a
characteristic which equally marked him and Frederick. He had a horror
of phrases. "Your fine phrases," said one to him. "My fine phrases!
Learn that I never made one in my life." His style is indeed marked by
restraint and simplicity of diction. He wrote to D'Alembert: "You will
never succeed in delivering men from error by means of metaphysics. You
must prove the truth by facts." As an instance of his apt mingling of
fact with reason and ridicule, take his treatment of the doctrine of the
Resurrection in the _Philosophical Dictionary_. "A Breton soldier goes
to Canada. He finds by chance he falls short of food. He is forced to
eat an Iroquois he has killed over-night. This Iroquois had nourished
himself on Jesuits during two or three months, a great part of his body
has become Jesuit. So there is the body of this soldier composed of
Iroquois, Jesuit, and whatever he had eaten before. How will each resume
precisely what belonged to him?"
Magnify his failings as you may, you cannot obliterate his one
transcendent merit, his humanity ever responsive to every claim of
suffering or wrong. He stood for the rights of conscience, for the
dignity of human reason, for the gospel of Freethought.
Voltaire may not be placed with the great inspiring teachers of mankind.
But it must be acknowledged that, as Mr. George Saintsbury, no mean
critic, says: "In literary craftsmanship, at once versatile and
accomplished, he has no superior and scarcely a rival."
He declared that he loved the whole of the nine Muses, and that the
doors of the soul should be open to all sciences and all sentiments. He
employed every species of composition--poetry, prose, tragedy, comedy,
history, dialogue, epistle, essay or epigram--as it suited his purpose,
and he excelled in all. Argument or raillery came alike. He made reason
amusing, and none like him could ridicule the ridiculous. His charm as a
writer has been the occasion of the obloquy attached to his name by
bigots. They can never forgive that he forced people to smile at their
superstition.
Much, of course, of Voltaire's multitudinous work was directed to
immediate ends, and but for his grace of style would be of little
present interest. But after all winnowings by the ever-swaying fan of
time much is left of enduring value. The name of Voltaire will ever be a
mighty one in literature: a glorious example of what a man may achieve
who is strong in his love of humanity.