century, for that name takes in all the serious haltings and
shortcomings of this strange movement, as well as all its terrible fire,
swiftness, sincerity, and strength. The rays from Voltaire's burning and
far-shining spirit no sooner struck upon the genius of the time, seated
dark and dead like the black stone of Memnon's statue, than the clang of
the breaking chord was heard through Europe, and men awoke in new day
and more spacious air. The sentimentalist has proclaimed him a mere
mocker. To the critic of the schools, ever ready with compendious label,
he is the revolutionary destructive. To each alike of the countless
orthodox sects his name is the symbol for the prevailing of the gates of
hell. Erudition figures him as shallow and a trifler; culture condemns
him for pushing his hatred of spiritual falsehood much too seriously;
Christian charity feels constrained to unmask a demon from the depths of
the pit. The plain men of the earth, who are apt to measure the merits
of a philosopher by the strength of his sympathy with existing sources
of comfort, would generally approve the saying of Dr. Johnson, that he
would sooner sign a sentence for Rousseau's transportation than that of
any felon who had gone from the Old Bailey these many years, and that
the difference between him and Voltaire was so slight that "it would be
difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity between them." Those of
all schools and professions who have the temperament which mistakes
strong expression for strong judgment, and violent phrase for grounded
conviction, have been stimulated by antipathy against Voltaire to a
degree that in any of them with latent turns for humor must now and then
have even stirred a kind of reacting sympathy. The rank vocabulary of
malice and hate, that noisome fringe of the history of opinion, has
received many of its most fulminant terms from critics of Voltaire,
along with some from Voltaire himself, who unwisely did not always
refuse to follow an adversary's bad example.
Yet Voltaire was the very eye of eighteenth-century illumination. It was
he who conveyed to his generation in a multitude of forms the
consciousness at once of the power and the rights of human intelligence.
Another might well have said of him what he magnanimously said of his
famous contemporary, Montesquieu, that humanity had lost its
title-deeds, and he had recovered them. The fourscore volumes which he
wrote are the monument, as they were in some sort the instrument, of a
new renaissance. They are the fruit and representation of a spirit of
encyclopædic curiosity and productiveness. Hardly a page of all these
countless leaves is common form. Hardly a sentence is there which did
not come forth alive from Voltaire's own mind or which was said because
someone else had said it before. His works as much as those of any man
that ever lived and thought are truly his own. It is not given, we all
know, even to the most original and daring of leaders, to be without
precursors, and Voltaire's march was prepared for him before he was
born, as it is for all mortals. Yet he impressed on all he said, on good
words and bad alike, a marked autochthonic quality, as of the
self-raised spontaneous products of some miraculous soil, from which
prodigies and portents spring. Many of his ideas were in the air, and
did not belong to him peculiarly; but so strangely rapid and perfect was
his assimilation of them, so vigorous and minutely penetrative was the
quality of his understanding, so firm and independent his initiative,
that even these were instantly stamped with the express image of his
personality. In a word, Voltaire's work from first to last was alert
with unquenchable life. Some of it, much of it, has ceased to be alive
for us now in all that belongs to its deeper significance, yet we
recognize that none of it was ever the dreary still-birth of a mind of
hearsays. There is no mechanical transmission of untested bits of
current coin. In the realm of mere letters Voltaire is one of the little
band of great monarchs, and in style he remains of the supreme
potentates. But literary variety and perfection, however admirable, like
all purely literary qualities are a fragile and secondary good which the
world is very willing to let die, where it has not been truly begotten
and engendered of living forces.
Voltaire was a stupendous power, not only because his expression was
incomparably lucid, or even because his sight was exquisitely keen and
clear, but because he saw many new things after which the spirits of
others were unconsciously groping and dumbly yearning. Nor was this all.
Fontenelle was both brilliant and far-sighted, but he was cold, and one
of those who love ease and a safe hearth, and carefully shun the din,
turmoil, and danger of the great battle. Voltaire was ever in the front
and centre of the fight. His life was not a mere chapter in a history of
literature. He never counted truth a treasure to be discreetly hidden in
a napkin. He made it a perpetual war-cry and emblazoned it on a banner
that was many a time rent, but was never out of the field.
There are things enough to be said of Voltaire's moral size, and no
attempt is made in these pages to dissemble in how much he was
condemnable. It is at least certain that he hated tyranny, that he
refused to lay up his hatred privily in his heart, and insisted on
giving his abhorrence a voice, and tempering for his just rage a fine
sword, very fatal to those who laid burdens too hard to be borne upon
the conscience and life of men. Voltaire's contemporaries felt this.
They were stirred to the quick by the sight and sound and thorough
directness of those ringing blows.
If he was often a mocker in form, he was always serious in meaning and
laborious in matter. If he was unflinching against theology, he always
paid religion respect enough to treat it as the most important of all
subjects.
The old-fashioned nomenclature puts him down among sceptics, because
those who had the official right to affix these labels could think of no
more contemptuous name, and could not suppose the most audacious soul
capable of advancing even under the leadership of Satan himself beyond a
stray doubt or so. He had perhaps as little of the sceptic in his
constitution as Bossuet or Butler, and was much less capable of becoming
one than De Maistre or Paley. This was a prime secret of his power, for
the mere critic and propounder of unanswered doubts never leads more
than a handful of men after him. Voltaire boldly put the great question,
and he boldly answered it. He asked whether the sacred records were
historically true, the Christian doctrine divinely inspired and
spiritually exhaustive, and the Christian Church a holy and beneficent
organization. He answered these questions for himself and for others
beyond possibility of misconception. The records he declared saturated
with fable and absurdity, the doctrine imperfect at its best, and a dark
and tyrannical superstition at its worst, and the Church was the
arch-curse and infamy. Say what we will of these answers, they were free
from any taint of scepticism. Our lofty new idea of rational freedom as
freedom from conviction, and of emancipation of understanding as
emancipation from the duty of settling whether important propositions
are true or false, had not dawned on Voltaire.
He had just as little part or lot in the complaisant spirit of the man
of the world, who from the depths of his mediocrity and ease presumes to
promulgate the law of progress, and as dictator to fix its speed. Who
does not know this temper of the man of the world, that worst enemy of
the world? His inexhaustible patience of abuses that only torment
others; his apologetic word for beliefs that may perhaps not be so
precisely true as one might wish, and institutions that are not
altogether so useful as some might think possible; his cordiality toward
progress and improvement in a general way, and his coldness or antipathy
to each progressive proposal in particular; his pygmy hope that life
will one day become somewhat better, punily shivering by the side of his
gigantic conviction that it might well be infinitely worse. To Voltaire,
far different from this, an irrational prejudice was not the object of a
polite coldness, but a real evil to be combated and overthrown at every
hazard. Cruelty was not to him as a disagreeable dream of the
imagination, from thought of which he could save himself by arousing to
a sense of his own comfort, but a vivid flame burning into his thoughts
and destroying peace. Wrong-doing and injustice were not simple words on
his lips; they went as knives to the heart; he suffered with the victim,
and consumed with an active rage against the oppressor.
To Voltaire reason and humanity were but a single word, and love of
truth and passion for justice but one emotion. None of the famous men
who have fought, that they themselves might think freely and speak
truly, has ever seen more clearly that the fundamental aim of the
contest was that others might live happily. Who has not been touched by
that admirable word of his, of the three years in which he labored
without remission for justice to the widow and descendants of
Calas--"During that time not a smile escaped me without my reproaching
myself for it as for a crime"? Or by his sincere avowal that of all the
words of enthusiasm and admiration which were so prodigally bestowed
upon him on the occasion of his last famous visit to Paris in 1778, none
went to his heart like that of a woman of the people, who in reply to
one asking the name of him whom the crowd followed gave answer, "Do you
not know that he is the preserver of the Calas?"
The same kind of feeling, though manifested in ways of much less
unequivocal nobleness, was at the bottom of his many efforts to make
himself of consequence in important political business. We know how many
contemptuous sarcasms have been inspired by his anxiety at various times
to perform diplomatic feats of intervention between the French
government and Frederick II. In 1742, after his visit to the Prussian
King at Aix-la-Chapelle, he is supposed to have hinted to Cardinal
Fleury that to have written epic and drama does not disqualify a man for
serving his king and country on the busy fields of affairs. The
following year, after Fleury's death, when French fortunes in the war
of the Austrian succession were near their lowest, Voltaire's own idea
that he might be useful from his intimacy with Frederick seems to have
been shared by Amelot, the secretary of state, and at all events he
aspired to do some sort of active, if radically futile, diplomatic work.
In later times when the tide had turned, and Frederick's star was
clouded over with disaster, we again find Voltaire the eager
intermediary with Choiseul, pleasantly comparing himself to the mouse of
the fable, busily striving to free the lion from the meshes of the
hunter's net.
In short, on all sides, whatever men do and think was real and alive to
Voltaire. Whatever had the quality of interesting any imaginable
temperament had the quality of interesting him. There was no subject
which any set of men have ever cared about which, if he once had mention
of it, Voltaire did not care about likewise. And it was just because he
was so thoroughly alive himself that he filled the whole era with life.
The more closely one studies the various movements of that time, the
more clear it becomes that, if he was not the original centre and first
fountain of them all, at any rate he made many channels ready and gave
the sign. He was the initial principle of fermentation throughout that
vast commotion. We may deplore, if we think fit, as Erasmus deplored in
the case of Luther, that the great change was not allowed to work itself
out slowly, calmly, and without violence and disruption. These graceful
regrets are powerless, and on the whole they are very enervating. Let us
make our account with the actual, rather than seek excuses for
self-indulgence in pensive preference of something that might have been.
Practically in these great circles of affairs, what only might have been
is as though it could not be; and to know this may well suffice for us.
It is not in human power to choose the kind of men who rise from time to
time to the supreme control of momentous changes. The force which
decides this immensely important matter is as though it were chance. We
cannot decisively pronounce any circumstance whatever an accident, yet
history abounds with circumstances which in our present ignorance of the
causes of things are as if they were accidents.
It was one of the happy chances of circumstance that there arose in
France on the death of Louis XIV a man with all Voltaire's peculiar
gifts of intelligence, who added to them an incessant activity in their
use, and who besides this enjoyed such length of days as to make his
intellectual powers effective to the very fullest extent possible. This
combination of physical and mental conditions so amazingly favorable to
the spread of the Voltairean ideas was a circumstance independent of the
state of the surrounding atmosphere, and was what in the phraseology of
prescientific times might well have been called providential. If
Voltaire had seen all that he saw, and yet been indolent; or if he had
been as clear-sighted and as active as he was, and yet had only lived
fifty years, instead of eighty-four, Voltairism would never have struck
root. As it was, with his genius, his industry, his longevity, and the
conditions of the time being what they were, that far-spreading movement
of destruction was inevitable.
There are more kinds of Voltaireans than one, but no one who has marched
ever so short a way out of the great camp of old ideas is directly or
indirectly out of the debt and out of the hand of the first liberator,
however little willing he may be to recognize one or the other.
Attention has been called by every writer on Voltaire to the immense
number of the editions of his works, a number probably unparalleled in
the case of any author within the same limits of time. Besides being one
of the most voluminous book-writers, he is one of the cheapest. We can
buy one of Voltaire's books for a few halfpence, and the keepers of the
cheap stalls in the cheap quarters of London and Paris will tell you
that this is not from lack of demand, but the contrary. So clearly does
that light burn for many even now, which scientifically speaking ought
to be extinct, and for many indeed is long ago extinct and superseded.
The reasons for this vitality are that Voltaire was himself thoroughly
alive when he did his work, and that the movement which that work began
is still unexhausted.
How shall we attempt to characterize this movement? The historian of the
Christian church usually opens his narrative with an account of the
depravation of human nature and the corruption of society which preceded
the new religion. The Reformation in like manner is only to be
understood after we have perceived the enormous mass of superstition,
injustice, and wilful ignorance by which the theological idea had
become so incrusted as to be wholly incompetent to guide society,
because it was equally repugnant to the intellectual perceptions and the
moral sense, the knowledge and the feelings, of the best and most
active-minded persons of the time. The same sort of consideration
explains and vindicates the enormous power of Voltaire. France had
outgrown the system that had brought her through the Middle Ages. The
further development of her national life was fatally hindered by the
tight bonds of an old order, which clung with the hardy tenacity of a
thriving parasite, diverting from the roots all their sustenance, eating
into the tissue, and feeding on the juices of the living tree. The
picture has often been painted, and we need not try to paint it once
more in detail here. The whole power and ordering of the nation were
with the sworn and chartered foes of light, who had every interest that
a desire to cling to authority and wealth can give in keeping the
understanding subject.
The glories of the age of Louis XIV were the climax of a set of ideas
that instantly afterward lost alike their grace, their usefulness, and
the firmness of their hold on the intelligence of men. A dignified and
venerable hierarchy, an august and powerful monarch, a court of gay and
luxurious nobles, all lost their grace because the eyes of men were
suddenly caught and appalled by the awful phantom, which was yet so
real, of a perishing nation. Turn from Bossuet's orations to
Boisguillebert's _Détail de la France_; from the pulpit rhetorician's
courtly reminders that even majesty must die, to Vauban's pity for the
misery of the common people;[31] from Corneille and Racine to La
Bruyère's picture of "certain wild animals, male and female, scattered
over the fields, black, livid, all burned by the sun, bound to the earth
that they dig and work with unconquerable pertinacity; they have a sort
of articulate voice, and when they rise on their feet they show a human
face, and, in fact, are men." The contrast had existed for generations.
The material misery caused by the wars of the great Louis deepened the
dark side, and the lustre of genius consecrated to the glorification of
traditional authority and the order of the hour heightened the
brightness of the bright side, until the old contrast was suddenly seen
by a few startled eyes, and the new and deepest problem, destined to
strain our civilization to a degree that not many have even now
conceived, came slowly into pale outline.
There is no reason to think that Voltaire ever saw this gaunt and
tremendous spectacle. Rousseau was its first voice. Since him the
reorganization of the relations of men has never faded from the sight
either of statesmen or philosophers, with vision keen enough to admit to
their eyes even what they dreaded and execrated in their hearts.
Voltaire's task was different and preparatory. It was to make popular
the genius and authority of reason. The foundations of the social fabric
were in such a condition that the touch of reason was fatal to the whole
structure, which instantly began to crumble. Authority and use oppose a
steadfast and invincible resistance to reason, so long as the
institutions which they protect are of fair practicable service to a
society. But after the death of Louis XIV, not only the grace and pomp,
but also the social utility of spiritual and political absolutism,
passed obviously away. Spiritual absolutism was unable to maintain even
a decent semblance of unity and theological order. Political absolutism
by its material costliness, its augmenting tendency to repress the
application of individual energy and thought to public concerns, and its
pursuit of a policy in Europe which was futile and essentially
meaningless as to its ends, and disastrous and incapable in its choice
of means, was rapidly exhausting the resources of national well-being
and viciously severing the very tap-root of national life. To bring
reason into an atmosphere so charged was, as the old figure goes, to
admit air to the chamber of the mummy. And reason was exactly what
Voltaire brought; too narrow, if we will, too contentious, too derisive,
too unmitigatedly reasonable, but still reason. And who shall measure
the consequence of this difference in the history of two great nations:
that in France absolutism in church and state fell before the sinewy
genius of stark reason, while in England it fell before a respect for
social convenience, protesting against monopolies, benevolences,
ship-money? that in France speculation had penetrated over the whole
field of social inquiry, before a single step had been taken toward
application, while in England social principles were applied before
they received any kind of speculative vindication? that in France the
first effective enemy of the principles of despotism was Voltaire, poet,
philosopher, historian, critic; in England, a band of homely squires?
Voltaire, there can be little doubt, never designed a social revolution,
being in this the representative of the method of Hobbes. His single
object was to reinstate the understanding in its full rights, to
emancipate thought, to extend knowledge, to erect the standard of
critical common-sense. He either could not see, or else, as one
sometimes thinks, he closes his eyes and refuses for his part to see,
that it was impossible to revolutionize the spiritual basis of belief
without touching the social forms, which were inseparably connected with
the old basis by the strong bonds of time and a thousand fibres of
ancient association and common interest. Rousseau began where Voltaire
left off. He informs us that, in the days when his character was
forming, nothing which Voltaire wrote escaped him, and that the
_Philosophical Letters_ (that is, the Letters on the English), though
assuredly not the writer's best work, were what first attracted him to
study, and implanted a taste which never afterward became extinct. The
correspondence between Voltaire and the Prince of Prussia, afterward the
great Frederick, inspired Rousseau with a passionate desire to learn how
to compose with elegance, and to imitate the coloring of so fine an
author.[32] Thus Voltaire, who was eighteen years his elder, gave this
extraordinary genius his first productive impulse. But a sensibility of
temperament, to which perhaps there is no parallel in the list of
prominent men, impelled Rousseau to think, or rather to feel, about the
concrete wrongs and miseries of men and women, and not the abstract
rights of their intelligence. Hence the two great revolutionary schools,
the school which appealed to sentiment, and the school which appealed to
intelligence. The Voltairean principles of the strictest political
moderation and of literary common-sense, negative, merely emancipatory,
found their political outcome, as French historians early pointed out,
in the Constituent Assembly, which was the creation of the upper and
middle class, while the spirit of Rousseau, ardent, generous, passionate
for the relief of the suffering, overwhelmed by the crowding forms of
manhood chronically degraded and womanhood systematically polluted, came
to life and power in the Convention and the sections of the Commune of
Paris which overawed the Convention.