ENGLAND, AND THE “ENGLISH LETTERS”
It was the last year of the reign of George I. Swift was Dean of St.
Patrick’s. Pope was writing that masterpiece of brilliant malice, the
“Dunciad,” at Twickenham. Gay, Young, and Thomson were in the plenitude
of their poetic powers. Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, was compiling her
memoirs at Blenheim. Bolingbroke, Hervey, and the Walpoles shed their
lustre on politics. Even at the boorish Court there was one brilliant
woman--Caroline, Princess of Wales. Newton was near his dying. And Locke
being dead yet spoke.
It was one of those rare spring days, with a cloudless sky and a soft
west wind, when Voltaire first set foot in England. Greenwich was _en
fête_, with its Fair in full progress--Olympian games and the pretty
daughters of the people, whom, in their gala dress, the traveller
mistook for fine ladies. When he met the fine ladies that very evening
in London, most likely at the house of his old friend Lord Bolingbroke,
their hauteur and malice disgusted him, and he said very frankly that he
preferred the maidens of Greenwich.
He tells how the very next morning he went to a coffee-house in the
City, and gives a gay description of the phlegmatic apathy of the
company. If they were laughing in their sleeves at the foreigner, the
foreigner’s description of them remains to-day a notable example of that
keen, clear-cut, airy, bantering humour of which he was so perfect a
master.
But if he wrote lightly hereafter, his mood when he landed in England
was no laughing one.
This _vif_ and sensitive child of fortune could not forget that he was
an exile--and exiled unjustly. His pensions both from King and Queen
had been stopped. He had an exchange letter on a Jew in London, but
before he presented it the Jew was bankrupt and could not pay him, and
he was forced to accept a few guineas King George I. “had the generosity
to give me.” His health was as indifferent as usual. He was in a country
of which he knew little or nothing of the language or the customs. He
had begun the world brilliantly perhaps, but he had greatly fallen.
Those first few weeks in England are likely to have been among the
unhappiest in his life.
He had been on English shores but a very short time when he slipped back
_incognito_ to Paris (he had promised the paternal government to _go_ to
England, not to _stay_ there), and, with his life in his hands, waited
about in the capital for two months for the man Rohan, “whom the
instinct of his cowardice hid from me.” Theriot knew of the escapade,
but no one else. Voltaire wrote him an account of it on August 12, 1726.
He was hardly back in England again when, in September and in the first
budget of letters he had had in his exile, he received the news of the
death of his sister Catherine. She was nine years older than himself.
She had long been married to M. Mignot, and had children and cares of
her own to engross her affections and her thoughts. It does not seem
that Voltaire had of late seen very much of her. But all the mothering
he had had since he was seven years old she had given him. Her death
filled his soul with a gloomy despair. “I should have died and she have
lived,” he wrote to Madame de Bernières. “It was a mistake of destiny.”
To the end of his days he benefited her children with a large
generosity. Bearing evident reference to her death is that letter,
called the Letter of Consolation, written from England in 1728 to a
friend in sorrow. No reader of it who has himself suffered will doubt
that its writer knew how to suffer too, and will find in that wise and
patient philosophy a soothing of the troubles common to a Voltaire and
to all men.
He had plenty of introductions in England. His acquaintance with the
Count de Morville, the intimate of the Walpoles, gave him the _entrée_
of the great Whig houses. Bolingbroke, who had returned from France in
1723, would present him to the Tories. He further knew, it is said,
Lord Stair and Bishop Atterbury. He had a talent--that delightful French
talent--for making new friends. And he was soon engrossed in an
astounding application to the English language, and a study of its
government, laws, literature, and progress which remains the best ever
made by a Frenchman.
It is doubtful if, when he landed here in May, 1726, he knew a single
syllable of English except what he had gathered from the English books
Theriot had procured for him when he was in the Bastille. There is a
letter to a wine merchant, in very bad English certainly, but still in
English, which he is supposed to have written when he had been at the
most a few months in England.
The year 1726 was not out when he was writing to other friends in that
intricate tongue and attacking its idioms with a splendid dash and
audacity.
In 1727, he composed some melodious English verses to Lady Harley; and
in his English letters of this and the next year to Theriot and others
it will be seen that the language was sufficiently his own for him to
stamp it with his inimitable style. Authorities differ as to how good or
how bad was the accent with which he spoke.
He is said, when he discovered that the word “plague” was pronounced as
one syllable, to have wished that plague would take one half of the
language and ague the other; and to have complained a good deal of a
tongue in which a word spelt _handkerchief_ was pronounced _’ankicher_.
That he was fluent in it there is no doubt. An uncharitable person
declared that he had soon mastered the language, even to the oaths and
curses. Why not? Oaths and curses adorned the polite conversation of the
day, and why should a Voltaire omit them? But besides that dinner-table
English he could soon speak easily the very different English required
for discussing science, philosophy, religion--the speciality of an
English expert, in that expert’s mother tongue.
Soon after he returned to France he declared, in the dedication of his
play “Brutus” to Lord Bolingbroke, that, having “passed two years in a
constant study of the English language,” he found it awkward to write
in French. “I was almost accustomed to think in English.”
Thirty years after he had left England behind him forever, he wrote
English letters to English friends. He quarrelled in that tongue with
his mistress in middle life, wrote a couplet in it when he was eighty,
and talked in it with his friends in his extreme old age.
He made his headquarters at Wandsworth, already a colony of French
refugees, with one Everard Falkener, whom he had met in Paris, the best
type of an English merchant, cultivated, hospitable, enlightened. The
two bore each other a lifelong friendship. The visitor was never of the
idle kind, waiting about to be amused. He was always, on the other hand,
indefatigably busy. He was supremely interested in everything, greedy of
information, matchlessly quick to observe. Besides, he could never have
been very long together at Falkener’s Wandsworth villa.
Three months out of the thirty-four he spent in England he stayed at
Lord Peterborough’s. He was constantly at Lord Bolingbroke’s, either at
his town house in Pall Mall or in the country. He speaks himself of
having known Bishop Berkeley, and Gay of the “Beggar’s Opera.” Before he
left England he had visited almost every celebrated person in it.
It is easy to understand Voltaire’s passionate admiration for a country
in which genius was everywhere the best passport to glory, riches, and
honour. He had lived under a system so different! Here his own talent
immediately procured him an entrance into that noblest aristocracy, the
aristocracy of intellect. When was it that he went to stay at Bubb
Dodington’s at Eastbury in Dorsetshire, and at that Liberty Hall of the
Muses met Young of the “Night Thoughts” and Thomson of the “Seasons”?
The man who was to be English parson and author of those solemn
religious periods of the “Thoughts” was now writing his “Satires” and
had not a little in common with the sceptical, cynic Frenchman of the
“Epistle to Uranie.” The one was as brilliant a conversationalist as the
other. As for the “Seasons,” though Voltaire politely praised them, he
considered Nature an ill-chosen subject for a Scotchman who knew
nothing of the warmth and glow of the South.
At Lord Peterborough’s Voltaire met Swift--“Rabelais in his Senses,”
that greater than any Rabelais--“one of the most extraordinary men that
England has produced.” That was Voltaire’s judgment of him. He did not
like him the less because he was “a priest and mocked at everything.” At
bottom, the dark and awful genius of Swift and the vivid and passionate
inspiration of Voltaire had something in common. At Peterborough’s table
there sat then the two finest masters of invective who ever lived.
Voltaire was still quite new to the country when he made the
acquaintance of little, crooked, papist Mr. Pope of Twit’nam. It has
been maliciously said that on the occasion the visitor talked so
blasphemously and indecently that he sent Pope’s poor old mother
shuddering from the room. But as at the time Voltaire did not know
English and Pope and his mother did not know French, the story may be
taken for what it is worth. A great and very natural admiration had the
French author, to whom precision, the unities, and poetical neatness
were so dear, for the polished easy rhythm of Mr. Pope; but that did not
prevent him, long after, when he was talking to James Boswell of
Auchinleck at Ferney, from diagnosing the respective merits of Pope and
Dryden in a truly Voltairian criticism. “Pope drives a handsome chariot
with a couple of neat nags, and Dryden a coach and six stately horses.”
Nor did his love of Mr. Pope’s style prevent him loathing Mr. Pope’s
philosophy.
One day he went to see old Sarah Marlborough at Blenheim, and
audaciously asked her to let him see the memoirs she was writing. “You
must wait,” answered Sarah; “I am just altering my account of Queen
Anne’s character. I have begun to love her again since the present lot
have become our rulers.” Is it hard to fancy the delighted cynic humour
on her guest’s shrewd face at that naïve reply?
Goldsmith says that she _did_ show him the memoirs, and when he
remonstrated with her for abusing her friends therein, seized them out
of his hands in a rage. “I thought the man had sense, but I find him at
bottom either a fool or a philosopher.”
Presently Gay was reading aloud to him that “Beggar’s Opera” before its
publication; and he went to see old Congreve, who spoke of his plays as
trifles beneath notice, “and told me to look upon him merely as a
private gentleman.” That literary snobbishness was very little to the
taste of a Voltaire. “If you had the misfortune to be only a gentleman
like any other,” he answered, “I should never have come to see you.” It
is to be hoped the foolish old playwright felt duly snubbed.
The great Lord Chesterfield--“the only Englishman who ever recommended
the art of pleasing as the first duty of life”--invited Voltaire to
dinner. When he was asked a second time, he had to decline, as the
gratuities expected by the servants were too much for his slenderly
equipped pockets.
He visited Newton’s niece, Mrs. Conduit, who told him the famous story
of Newton and the apple. Voltaire twice repeated it in his works, and
thus preserved it for posterity. He frequently met and talked with
Newton’s friend and disciple, Clarke.
In 1727, he was introduced at the English Court. Had he not dedicated
“Œdipe” to its King? Just as in 1728 he was to dedicate his English
edition of the “Henriade” to “that amiable philosopher on the throne,”
Caroline, the wife of George II. At Court, doubtless, he met that lean
malice, my Lord Hervey, and Lady Hervey, “beautiful Molly Lepell.” He
met everybody, in fact, and saw everything. He went to Newmarket races
and to a Quakers’ meeting. He was continually at the play. He mixed with
bishops and boatmen, lords, play-actors, merchants and politicians. When
on one of his rambles round London he was insulted by a mob, he mounted
on a few handy steps: “Brave Englishmen!” said he, “am I not already
unfortunate enough in not having been born among you?” And they were
with him at once.
Perhaps he was not sorry to get away from the wits and the parties, to
the quiet of Falkener’s villa. He had always something better to do
than to be a social light for his own or other men’s entertainment.
When he was at Wandsworth he wrote, in English prose, the first act of
“Brutus.” In these thirty-four months he composed nearly the whole of
his “History of Charles XII.” of Sweden. In 1727, he took up his abode
for a time at the Sign of the White Peruke, Maiden Lane, Covent Garden,
that he might the more conveniently arrange for the publication by
subscription of the new edition of his “Henriade.” “The English
generally make good their words and promises,” he said long after. They
did in 1728. The book went into three editions. From them Voltaire had
omitted the tale of the noble exploits of Rosny, the ancestor of his
false friend Sully.
Swift pushed the “Henriade” in Ireland. The English were inclined to
think it too Catholic, as the Catholics had thought it too Protestant.
But, in their character of a free and generous people, they bought and
read it not the less.
After a few months’ residence in the country this amazing Frenchman was
turning “Hudibras” into French verse.
After eighteen months, he wrote, in English, a little volume containing
two essays: “An Essay upon the Civil Wars of France,” and upon “The
Epick Poetry of the European Nations.” A presentation copy of the first
edition of this daring little work, published in 1727, may still be seen
in the British Museum with a few words in Voltaire’s handwriting in the
corner--“to Sr. hanslone from his most humble servant voltaire.” Sir
Hans Sloane was the President of the Royal Society. This book is now so
rare as to be practically unobtainable. It went into a second edition in
1728, and into a fourth in 1731.
By it, by “Brutus,” and the “Henriade” Voltaire gained a sum of about
two thousand pounds.
The chronology of the events of his English visit remains, and must
remain, very imperfect. He wrote very few letters during that period and
dates are not the _forte_ of his English hosts. So much, however, is
certain. He arrived in England about the end of the first week in May,
1726. By September, he had paid his stolen visit to France and returned
to these shores. In January, 1727, he was presented at Court. On March
28th, he was at Newton’s lying-in-state in Westminster Abbey. In July
the French authorities gave him permission to return to France for a
while to see to some business, but he did not go. He spent the greater
part of the year preparing his English edition of the “Henriade” and
writing “Charles XII.” In December, 1727, appeared the two English
essays. The year 1728 saw the publication of the English edition of his
“Henriade.”
Archibald Ballantyne’s “Voltaire’s Visit to England” gives the best and
most exhaustive account of that visit yet published.
By far the most momentous and the most influential, both on Voltaire’s
own fortunes and on the public intellect, of any of his works written
for the most part in England, were his “English Letters” or the
“Philosophical Letters.”
They were originally written to Theriot; but they must always have been
meant for publication. They are not the best example, but they are no
bad example, of the Voltairian manner--polished, easy, witty, sarcastic,
not so much daring in word as daring in meaning, more remarkable for
what they imply than for what they say--yet of all letters in the world,
perhaps, those which have had the most far-reaching as well as the
profoundest effect on the human mind.
Read casually, they are chiefly remarkable for their luminous and
amusing criticisms on the genius of England, and on the men and events
of that day.
Voltaire found Shakespeare exactly, after all, what a Voltaire _would_
have found him--“nature and sublimity,” “force and fecundity,” “an
amazing genius”--he was too great a genius himself not to recognise in a
Shakespeare such matchless traits as these. But Voltaire was also an
eighteenth-century Frenchman, with his dramatic gift pinioned by the
unities, by a hundred prim, foolish, and artificial rules, and he was
the writer who above all other writers valued style, polish, finish, and
culture. How should he have forgiven Shakespeare what he called his
“heavy grossness,” his “barbarisms,” his “monstrosities”? Voltaire did
not know, with the moderns, that many of the clowns and the clownish
jokes to which he took a just objection were interpolations, not
Shakespeare himself. And what wonder that this most impressionable child
of a country and an age where an abstraction called Taste was as a god,
should have missed its polite influence in a Shakespeare, and have found
the rugged grandeur of that vast intelligence imperfect without it? Not
the less, it was Voltaire who first revealed this man, who had been “the
ruin of the English stage,” to the French; who copied and translated
him; and then abused him so fiercely in the famous preface to
“Semiramis” and the quarrel with Letourneur, as to make him of as
supreme an interest on the Continent as in his own country.
Voltaire wrote one admirable letter “On Mr. Pope and other famous
Poets,” another “On Comedy,” a third “On Tragedy,” and a fourth “On
Nobles who cultivate Literature.” He praised Swift; adored “the
judicious Mr. Addison”; and did due homage to Wycherley and Congreve.
But if the “English Letters” had been nothing but a series of literary
criticisms, however brilliant, they would not have been the Letters
which made Lafayette a republican at nine, and which Heine spoke of as a
stepping-stone to the Revolution.
In the “Henriade” the bird’s heart had throbbed against the bars of the
cage; in the “English Letters” it had found the gate of liberty and
taken its first sweeping flight through free air.
Voltaire came straight from the Bastille to the most liberal and
enlightened country in the world. What wonder that he conceived that
hero-worship for England and the English which no time could change, and
which in his old age at Ferney was still a burning and a shining light?
He was from the first an impassioned admirer of almost every Anglican
institution. “The English, as a free people, chose their own road to
heaven.” “You do not see any imbeciles here who put their souls into the
keeping of others.”
“You have no priests then?” said I. “No, friend,” answered the Quaker;
“and we get on very well without them.” “When the English clergy know
that in France young men famous for their excesses and raised to the
prelature by the intrigues of women, make love publicly, amuse
themselves by composing love songs, give every day elaborate and elegant
suppers and go straight from them to ask the illumination of the Holy
Spirit and boldly call themselves successors of the Apostles, they thank
God that they are Protestants. But they are vile heretics, fit for
burning with all devils, as Master François Rabelais said; that is why I
do not mix myself up with their affairs.”
The last touches are admirably Voltairian.
The live-and-let-live policy of a country where thirty religions dwelt
together quite amicably and comfortably could not but appeal to the man
who was Armand’s brother and who remembered Unigenitus.
As for the government--what a contrast he saw there too! In this country
the sovereign was only powerful to do good “with his hands tied from
doing evil”; the great were “great without insolence and without
vassals”; and “the people share in the government without disorder.”
What a contrast indeed! what a glaring contrast! The pen trembled in the
man’s nervous hand as he wrote; and his soul was on fire. “It has taken
seas of blood to drown the idol of despotism; but the English do not
think they have bought their laws too dearly.” How much more dearly
France was to buy hers, this man, who himself expended the work and
genius of his life to gain Frenchmen a little liberty, had no idea. He
had seen Newton buried at Westminster with the honours due to so great a
genius. When Voltaire was very old it is said “his eye would grow bright
and his cheek flush” when he said that he had once lived in a land where
“a professor of mathematics, only because he was great in his vocation,”
had been buried “like a king who had done good to his subjects.”
What a country to live in! to be proud of! where there were better ways
to glory than the favour of a royal mistress or the unearned virtue of
an ancestral name!
He saw Mrs. Oldfield, the actress, buried with the honours due to her
far different and very inferior talent. Perhaps the honours were
greater than her desert. But Voltaire, with his passion for the stage,
was not the man to think of that.
Thirty-five years later he recalled how he had heard when in England
that the daughter of the poet Milton was in London--old, ill, and poor.
“In a quarter of an hour she was rich.”
“What would you have done if you had been born in Spain?” said his
secretary to Voltaire long after. “I would have gone to mass every day:
kissed the monks’ robes: and set fire to their convents. I was not made
to live in Spain, nor in France.” “Where then?” “In England.”
But if Voltaire loved the tolerant English religion and the liberal
English government and the generous English people, he loved far more
“the noble liberty of thinking.” His Letters on Bacon and on Locke, on
Descartes and Newton, on the History of Attraction and on Newton’s
Optics, are a worship of that free thought that dared to doubt, that
searched and tried the old truths which men believed because they _were_
old and for no better reason, and which found them too often to be no
truths, but a prejudice, a delusion, and a lie. Voltaire passionately
declared that it was the theologians, and not the Lockes, the Bayles,
the Hobbes, the Spinozas, who sowed “discord in a state.” He spoke of
Locke as “the wisest of human beings”; of Bacon as “the father of
experimental philosophy.” “A catechism reveals God to children,” he
said; “but Newton has revealed Him to sages.” “Before Locke, the great
philosophers had positively decided what the soul of man is, but as they
did not know in the least, it is only natural they should all have been
of different opinions.... Locke dares sometimes to speak positively but
he also dares to doubt.” “How I love English daring!” he cried _à
propos_ of Swift’s “Tale of a Tub.” “How I love people who say what they
think! We only half live if we dare only half think.”
Voltaire was fully alive at all events. However widely one may differ
from his opinions they are at least entitled to respect. They were
passionately genuine, the vivid convictions of his soul. He was no
_dilettante_, fine-gentleman unbeliever--too bored and idle to find in
the world “the footmarks of a God.” He was from this time henceforth and
always one of the most zealous seekers after truth who ever lived. It
was to be no more “a fountain sealed”; no more a luxury for a few, but
the common property of all. To free Frenchmen by bringing to them the
light and knowledge of England--to destroy, so far as in him lay,
everywhere and for all men, darkness, ignorance and superstition--that
was the Voltairian mission. “He swore to devote his life to that end,
and kept his word.”