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VOLTAIRE
BY JOHN MORLEY
LONDON MACMILLAN AND CO. 1886
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, _Edinburgh_.
NOTE.
The edition to which the references are made in the following pages is
that published by Baudouin in 1826, in seventy-five volumes. This
edition is to be distinguished from that known as the first Baudouin
edition, published 1824-34, in ninety-seven volumes. The extent of the
difference between them, which is entirely in favour of the more
voluminous form, may be seen in M. Quérard’s _Bibliographie
Voltairienne_ (p. 107). The large number of complete and elaborate
editions of Voltaire’s works, which were undertaken and executed in the
years between the overthrow of the Empire and the overthrow of the
Monarchy in 1830, is one of the most striking facts in the history of
books.
1872.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PRELIMINARY.
PAGE
Importance of Voltaire’s name 1
Catholicism, Calvinism, and the Renaissance 1
Voltairism the Renaissance of the eighteenth century 4
His power the result of his sincerity, penetration, and
courage 6
Different tempers proper for different eras 11
Voltaire’s freedom from intellectual cowardice 12
And from worldly indifference to truth and justice 13
Reason and humanity only a single word to him 15
His position towards the purely literary life 17
Enervating regrets that the movement had not a less
violent leader 19
The share of chance in providing leaders 20
Combination of favourable circumstances in Voltaire’s
case 22
Occasion and necessity of the movement 24
Age of Lewis XIV. entirely loyal to its own ideas 25
Subsequent discredit of these ideas 26
Preparation for abandonment of the old system by
Descartes and Bayle 29
Voltaire continues the work, not wholly to the disadvantage
of the old system 31
No ascetic element in the Voltairean revolt 33
Why primarily an intellectual movement 34
The hostile memory of Christians for it 37
Comte’s estimate of it 37
The estimate of culture 40
Some pleas on the other side 40
CHAPTER II.
ENGLISH INFLUENCES.
Significance of the journey to England 44
His birth and youthful history 45
Ninon de l’Enclos, Chaulieu, and the Regency 46
Manner of life from 1716 49
Affront from the Chevalier de Rohan 53
Leaves France 54
Had previously been no more than a vague _esprit fort_ 56
Le Pour et le Contre 57
Freethinking a reality in England 58
Condorcet’s account of the effect of England upon Voltaire 59
Social and political consequence of men of letters 59
Evil effect of this in France 60
Freedom of speech 61
Newton’s discoveries 65
Their true influence on Voltaire 67
Locke 67
Profound effect of Lockian common-sense on Voltaire 70
Contrast between social condition of England and France 73
Voltaire’s imperfect appreciation of the value and working
of a popular government 76
Confounds two distinct conceptions of civil liberty 79
A confusion shared by most of his countrymen 79
The Church of England 82
The Quakers 84
Voltaire’s diligence in study of English literature 86
And in mastering one side of the deistical controversy 88
Through the influence of the deists on Voltaire, the genius
of Protestantism entered France 91
Limited consistency of Voltaire’s philosophy 93
English deism contrasted with that of Leibnitz and with
the atheism of D’Holbach 95
CHAPTER III.
LITERATURE.
Most just way of criticising character 98
Some traits in Voltaire 99
Acquaintance with the Marquise du Châtelet 101
Her character 103
Voltaire’s placableness 105
His money transactions 107
The life at Cirey 111
His attempts in physical science 116
Literature his true calling 117
Qualities of his style 119
Significance of literature as a profession 125
Voltaire’s dramatic art 126
Not deliberately art with a purpose 126
His plays a prolongation of the tradition of the great age
of Lewis XIV. 129
His criticism on Hamlet 132
Merits of the French classic drama 134
Voltaire compared with Corneille and Racine 136
His ideas of dramatic renovation 140
His Roman subjects 141
His enlargement of dramatic themes 143
Failure in comedy 144
Arising from want of deep humour 145
The Pucelle: offends two modern sentiments 147
Its true significance 148
Peculiarity of the licence of the eighteenth century 149
Sophisms by which it was defended 149
Contempt for the middle ages 152
The Henriade 153
CHAPTER IV.
BERLIN.
Death of Madame du Châtelet 158
Voltaire and the court 158
He goes to Berlin 161
Character of literary activity in Prussia 161
The two movements of which Voltaire and the king were
chiefs 162
Character of Frederick the Great 166
Breaking up of the European state-system in 1740 171
The first shock in 1733 172
Frederick raises international relations into the region of
real matter 174
The situation defined 175
Two conceptions of progress 177
From which of them the result of the Seven Years’ War
is seen to be truly progressive 180
The Jesuits 181
Their repulse after the humiliation of Austria 182
Frederick’s probable unconsciousness of the ultimate bearings
of his policy 184
His type of monarchy 186
He sprang doubly from the critical school 188
Other statesmen affected by this school 188
Injustice of stamping Voltaire’s influence as merely
destructive 191
Frederick the Great and France 193
Voltaire’s life at Berlin 194
Maupertuis 196
Collision between him and Voltaire 198
The Diatribe of Doctor Akakia 199
Voltaire’s departure from Berlin 201
The Frankfort episode 202
Unfortunate revelations in the Hirschel affair 206
Relations between Frederick and Voltaire henceforth 207
Voltaire fears to return to Paris 210
Geneva 211
The critical school not specially insensible to the picturesque 212
Voltaire buys Ferney (1758) 215
CHAPTER V.
RELIGION.
(1) _Conditions of the Voltairean attack_.
Two elements underlying Voltaire’s enmity to Christianity 216
Failure of Catholicism as a social force 217
Utility of Protestantism in softening the transition 218
Compared with repression of free debate in France 219
Voltaire did not assail modern theosophies 221
The good inextricably bound up with the bad in the old
system 224
Jesuits and Jansenists 225
Voltaire declared the latter to be the worst foes 227
Morellet’s Manual for Inquisitors 228
A reflex of the criminal jurisprudence of the time 229
Cases of Rochette, Calas, and Sirven 229
Of La Barre 230
Fervour of Voltaire’s indignation 232
Protests against cynical acquiescence 233
Disappointment of the philosophers, and their courage 235
The reactionary fanaticism a proof of the truth of Voltaire’s
allegations 237
Necessity of transforming spiritual basis of thought 238
Voltaire’s abstention from the temporal sphere 239
His chief defect as leader of the attack 241
Crippling his historic imagination 243
The just historic calm impossible, until Voltaire had
pressed a previous question 245
(2) _His method_.
His instruments purely literary and dialectical 248
Leaves metaphysics of religion, and fastens on alleged
records 250
The other side fell back on the least worthy parts of their
system 251
Hence the narrow and literal character of Voltaire’s
objections 252
His attack essentially the attack of the English deists 255
Rationalistic questions in scriptural and ecclesiastical
records 257
In doctrine 258
Argument from comparison with other myths 259
His neglect of primitive religions 260
His conviction that monotheism is the first religious
form 261
Difficulties which he thus passed over 264
Hume’s view 266
Voltaire did not assail the general ideas of Christianity 267
Such as the idea of evil inherent in matter 270
And the idea of a deity as then conceived 271
Hence the acerbity of the debate 273
And the want of permanence in Voltaire’s writings compared
with Bossuet or Pascal 274
His criticism on Dante 275
(3) _His approximation to a solution_.
Voltairean deism 276
Never accepted by the mass of men 278
Nor is it likely to be accepted by them 279
Voltaire’s imperfect adherence to the deistical idea 280
Reasons for this 282
Does not accept belief in the immortality of the soul 286
Asserts less than Rousseau, and denies less than
Diderot 287
A popular movement begun by Bayle’s Dictionary 288
Compromising method of Rousseau 290
Voltaire’s view of an atheistical society 291
His belief in the social sufficiency of an analytic spirit 292
Synthesis necessary, but more than one is possible 293
CHAPTER VI.
HISTORY.
Extraordinary activity in historical composition in the
eighteenth century 295
Explanation of it 296
Circumstances under which Voltaire thought about the
philosophy of history 297
The three historical styles 299
Voltaire’s histories of two kinds 301
Rousseau’s disregard for history 302
Voltaire’s acute sense 303
His diligence in seeking authentic materials 305
Throws persons and personal interests into the second place 307
Changed view of the true subject matter of history 308
War always an object of Voltaire’s antipathy 311
His distrust of diplomacy 315
Bossuet’s Discourse on Universal History 316
Introduction to the Essay on Manners 318
Irrational disparagement of the Jews 319
Panegyric on the Emperor Julian 320
False view of the history of the church 322
Avoids the error of expressing barbarous activity in terms
of civilisation 323
Real merit of Voltaire’s panorama 325
He was not alive to the necessity of scientifically studying
the conditions of the social union 326
CHAPTER VII.
FERNEY.
His life at Ferney 329
Madame Denis 329
His vast correspondence 333
Consulted by Vauvenargues, Chastellux, Turgot, and
others 334
Complaisance of his letters 336
Sophistical defence of the practice of denying authorship 339
Voltaire’s just alarm for his own safety 340
His Easter communion of 1768 341
Further proceedings with the Bishop of Annecy 342
Voltaire made temporal father of the Capucins of Gex 344
Voltaire’s influence on Rousseau 345
Difference between their respective schools 347
Their rivalry represents the social dead-lock of the time 348
Voltaire the more far-sighted of the two 350
Two signal effects of Rousseau’s teaching 352
Diderot and the Encyclopædia 354
Voltaire’s constant efforts to secure redress for the victims
of wrong 357
Calas, Sirven, La Barre 357
Count Lally 358
Admiral Byng 359
His interest in the pretended liberation of Greece 360
In the partition of Poland 361
In the accession of Turgot to power 362
Visit to Paris and death 363
τὰ μὲν γὰρ σωφρόνων ἤθη σφόδρα μὲν εὐλαβῆ καὶ δίκαια καὶ σωτήρια,
δριμύτητος δὲ καί τινος ἰταμότητος ὀξείας καὶ πρακτικῆς ἐνδεῖται.... τὰ
δ’ ἀνδρεῖά γε αὖ πρὸς μὲν τὸ δίκαιον καὶ εὐλαβὲς ἐκείνων ἐπιδεέστερα,
τὸ δ’ ἐν ταῖς πράξεσι διαφερόντως ἴσχει. πάντα δὲ καλῶς γίγνεσθαι τὰ περὶ
τὰς πόλεις, τούτοιν μὴ παραγενομένοιν ἀμφοῖν, ἀδύνατον.—_Politicus_, 311 A.
πότερον τοὺς ἀνδρείους θαῤῥαλέους λέγεις, ἢ ἄλλο τι;
Καὶ ἴτας γε, ἔφη, ἐφ’ ἃ οἱ πολλοὶ φοβοῦντας ἰέvαι.—_Protagoras_, 349 E.
CHAPTER I.
PRELIMINARY.
When the right sense of historical proportion is more fully developed in
men’s minds, the name of Voltaire will stand out like the names of the
great decisive movements in the European advance, like the Revival of
Learning, or the Reformation. The existence, character, and career of
this extraordinary person constituted in themselves a new and prodigious
era. The peculiarities of his individual genius changed the mind and
spiritual conformation of France, and in a less degree of the whole of
the West, with as far-spreading and invincible an effect as if the work
had been wholly done, as it was actually aided, by the sweep of
deep-lying collective forces. A new type of belief, and of its shadow,
disbelief, was stamped by the impression of his character and work into
the intelligence and feeling of his own and the following times. We may
think of Voltairism in France somewhat as we think of Catholicism or the
Renaissance or Calvinism. It was one of the cardinal liberations of the
growing race, one of the emphatic manifestations of some portion of the
minds of men, which an immediately foregoing system and creed had either
ignored or outraged.
Christianity originally and generically at once awoke and satisfied a
spiritual craving for a higher, purer, less torn and fragmentary being,
than is permitted to sons of men on the troubled and corrupt earth. It
disclosed to them a gracious, benevolent, and all-powerful being, who
would one day redress all wrongs and recompense all pain, and who asked
no more from them meanwhile than that they should prove their love of
him whom they had not seen, by love of their brothers whom they had
seen. Its great glory was to have raised the moral dignity and
self-respect of the many to a level which had hitherto been reached only
by a few. Calvin, again, like some stern and austere step-son of the
Christian God, jealous of the divine benignity and abused
open-handedness of his father’s house, with word of merciless power set
free all those souls that were more anxious to look the tremendous facts
of necessity and evil and punishment full in the face, than to reconcile
them with any theory of the infinite mercy and loving-kindness of a
supreme creator. Men who had been enervated or helplessly perplexed by a
creed that had sunk into ignoble optimism and self-indulgence, became
conscious of new fibre in their moral structure, when they realised life
as a long wrestling with unseen and invincible forces of grace,
election, and fore-destiny, the agencies of a being whose ways and
dealings, whose contradictory attributes of unjust justice and loving
vindictiveness, it was not for man, who is a worm and the son of a worm,
to reconcile with the puny logic of human words, or the shallow
consistency of human ideas. Catholicism was a movement of mysticism, and
so in darker regions was the Calvinism which in so many important
societies displaced it. Each did much to raise the measure of worth and
purify the spiritual self-respect of mankind, and each also discouraged
and depressed the liberal play of intelligence, the cheerful energizing
of reason, the bright and many-sided workings of fancy and imagination.
Human nature, happily for us, ever presses against this system or that,
and forces ways of escape for itself into freedom and light. The
scientific reason urgently seeks instruments and a voice; the creative
imagination unconsciously takes form to itself in manifold ways, of all
of which the emotions can give good account to the understanding. Hence
the glorious suffusion of light which the ardent desire of men brought
over the face of Europe in the latter half of the fifteenth century.
Before Luther and Calvin in their separate ways brought into splendid
prominence their new ideas of moral order, more than two generations of
men had almost ceased to care whether there be any moral order or not,
and had plunged with the delight of enchantment among ideas of grace and
beauty, whose forms were old on the earth, but which were full of
seemingly inexhaustible novelty and freshness to men, who had once
begun to receive and to understand all the ever-living gifts of Grecian
art and architecture and letters. If the Reformation, the great revival
of northern Europe, was the enfranchisement of the individual from
bondage to a collective religious tradition that had lost its virtue,
the Renaissance, the earlier revival of southern Europe, was the
admission to participate in the noblest collective tradition of free
intellect which the achievements of the race could then hand down.
Voltairism may stand for the name of the Renaissance of the eighteenth
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 humour 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 renascence. 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
some one 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
recognise 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.
This is the temper which, when the times are auspicious, and the
fortunes of the fight do not hurry the combatant to dungeon or stake,
raises him into a force instead of leaving him the empty shadow of a
literary name. There is something in our nature which leads men to
listen coolly to the most eager hints and pregnant innuendoes of
scepticism, on the lips of teachers who still in their own persons keep
adroitly away from the fiery darts of the officially orthodox. The same
something, perhaps a moral relish for veritable proofs of honesty,
perhaps a quality of animal temperament, drives men to grasp even a
crudity with fervour, when they see it wielded like a battle-axe against
spiritual oppression. A man is always so much more than his words, as we
feel every day of our lives; what he says has its momentum indefinitely
multiplied, or reduced to nullity, by the impression that the hearer for
good reasons or bad happens to have formed of the spirit and moral size
of the speaker. 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. The strange and sinister method of
assault upon religion which we of a later day watch with wondering eyes,
and which consists in wearing the shield and device of a faith, and
industriously shouting the cry of a church, the more effectually to
reduce the faith to a vague futility, and its outward ordering to a
piece of ingeniously reticulated pretence; this method of attack might
make even the champions of prevailing beliefs long for the shrewd
thrusts, the flashing scorn, the relentless fire, the downright
grapples, with which the hated Voltaire pushed on his work of ‘crushing
the Infamous.’ If he was bitter, he was still direct. 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
contest was real, and not our present pantomimic stage-play, in which
muffled phantoms of debate are made to gesticulate inexpressible things
in portentously significant silence. The battle was demoralized by its
virulence. True; but is this worse than to have it demoralized by
cowardice of heart and understanding, when each controversial
man-at-arms is eager to have it thought that he wears the colours of the
other side, when the theologian would fain pass for rationalist, and the
free-thinker for a person with his own orthodoxies if you only knew
them, and when philosophic candour and intelligence are supposed to have
hit their final climax in the doctrine that everything is both true and
false at the same time?
A man like Montaigne, as has been said, could slumber tranquilly on the
pillow of doubt, content to live his life, leaving many questions open.
Such men’s meditations, when composed in the genial literary form proper
to them, are naturally the delight of people with whom the world goes
fairly well materially, who have sensibility enough to be aware that
there are unseen lands of knowledge and truth beyond the present, and
destinies beyond their own; but whose sensibility is not intense and
ardent enough to make wholly unendurable to them unscrutinizing
acquiescence in half-thoughts and faint guesses, and pale unshapen
embryos of social sympathy. There are conjunctures when this mingling of
apprehension and ease, of aspiration and content, of timorous adventure
and reflective indolence, is the natural mood of even high natures. The
great tides of circumstance swell so tardily, that whole generations
that might have produced their share of skilful and intrepid mariners,
wait in vain for the full flood on which the race is borne to new
shores.
Nor assuredly is it well for men that every age should mark either a
revolution, or the slow inward agitation that prepares the revolution,
or that doubters and destroyers should divide between them all
admiration and gratitude and sympathy. The violent activity of a century
of great change may end in a victory, but it is always a sacrifice. The
victory may more than recompense its cost. The sacrifice may repay
itself a thousand-fold. It does not always repay itself, as the too
neglected list of good causes lost, and noble effort wasted, so
abundantly shows. Nor in any case is sacrifice ever an end. Faith and
order and steady strong movement are the conditions which everything
wise is directed to perfect and consolidate. But for this process of
perfection we need first the meditative, doubting, critical type, and
next, the dogmatic destroyer. ‘In counsel it is good to see dangers,’
Bacon said; ‘and in execution not to see them, except they be very
great,’ There are, as history instructs us, eras of counsel and eras of
execution; the hour when those do best who walk most warily, feeling
with patience and sagacity and painstaking for the new ways, and then
the hour of march and stout-hearted engagement.
Voltaire, if he adroitly or sagely preserved his buckler, felt that the
day was come to throw away the scabbard; that it was time to trust
firmly to the free understanding of men for guidance in the voyage after
truth, and to the instincts of uncorrupted benevolence in men for the
upholding of social justice. His was one of the robust and incisive
constitutions, to which doubt figures as a sickness, and where
intellectual apprehension is an impossibility. 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 were 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
towards 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 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.
Nor was the coarse cruelty of the inquisitor or the politician, who
wrought iniquity by aid of the arm of flesh, the only kind of injury to
the world which stirred his passion. 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 usage. The system which threw obstacles into the way of
publishing an exposition of Newton’s discoveries and ideas was as
mischievous and hateful to him, as the darker bigotry which broke Calas
on the wheel because he was a Protestant. To check the energetic
discovery and wide propagation of scientific truth, he rightly held to
be at least as destructive in the long run to the common weal, as the
unjust extermination of human life; for it is the possession of ever
more and more truth that makes life ever better worth having and better
worth preserving. And must we not admit that he was right, and that no
age nor school of men nor individual has ever been mortally afraid, as
every good man is afraid, of inflicting any wrong on his fellow, and has
not also been afraid of extinguishing a single ray from the great sun of
knowledge?
It is well enough to say that in unscientific ages, like the twelfth
century for instance, the burner of books and the tormentor of those who
wrote them, did not feel either that he was doing an injustice to man or
a mischief to truth. It is hard to deny that St. Bernard was a good man,
nor is it needful that we should deny it; for good motives, owing to our
great blindness and slow enlightenment, have made grievous havoc in the
world. But the conception of justice towards heretics did not exist, any
more than it existed in the mind of a low type of white man towards a
black man, or than the conception of pity exists in the mind of a
sportsman towards his prey. These were ages of social cruelty, as they
were ages of intellectual repression. The debt of each to his neighbour
was as little felt, as the debt of all to the common faculties and
intelligence. Men owed nothing to man, but everything to the gods. All
the social feeling and intellectual effort and human energizing which
had made the high idea of God possible and real, seemed to have
expended themselves in a creation which instantly swallowed them up and
obliterated their recollection. The intelligence which by its active
straining upwards to the light had opened the way for the one God,
became itself forthwith identified with the chief of the devils. He who
used his reason was the child of this demon. Where it is a duty to
worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of
heat. The times when such was the universal idea of the rights of the
understanding, were also the times when human life was cheapest, and the
tiny bowl of a man’s happiness was spilt upon the ground with least
compunction.
The companionship between these two ideas of disrespect for the rights
of man, and disrespect for reason or the highest distinction of man, has
been an inseparable companionship. The converse is unhappily only true
with a modification, for there have been too many men with an honourable
respect for a demonstration and a proper hospitality towards a
probability, who look on the rights of man, without disrespect indeed,
but also without fervour. 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, have 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
laboured 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 the Second. 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.
The man of letters, usually unable to conceive loftier services to
mankind or more attractive aims to persons of capacity than the
composition of books, has treated these pretensions of Voltaire with a
supercilious kind of censure, which teaches us nothing about Voltaire,
while it implies a particularly shallow idea alike of the position of
the mere literary life in the scale of things, and of the conditions
under which the best literary work is done. To have really contributed
in the humblest degree, for instance, to a peace between Prussia and her
enemies in 1759, would have been an immeasurably greater performance for
mankind than any given book which Voltaire could have written. And, what
is still better worth observing, Voltaire’s books would not have been
the powers they were, but for this constant desire of his to come into
the closest contact with the practical affairs of the world. He who has
never left the life of a recluse, drawing an income from the funds and
living in a remote garden, constructing past, present, and future, out
of his own consciousness, is not qualified either to lead mankind
safely, or to think on the course of human affairs correctly. Every page
of Voltaire has the bracing air of the life of the world in it, and the
instinct which led him to seek the society of the conspicuous actors on
the great scene was essentially a right one. The book-writer takes good
advantage of his opportunity to assure men expressly or by implication
that he is their true king, and that the sacred bard is a mightier man
than his hero. Voltaire knew better. Though himself perhaps the most
puissant man of letters that ever lived, he rated literature as it ought
to be rated below action, not because written speech is less of a force,
but because the speculation and criticism of the literature that
substantially influences the world, make far less demand than the actual
conduct of great affairs on qualities which are not rare in detail, but
are amazingly rare in combination,—on temper, foresight, solidity,
daring,—on strength, in a word, strength of intelligence and strength of
character. Gibbon rightly amended his phrase, when he described Boethius
not as stooping, but rather as rising, from his life of placid
meditation to an active share in the imperial business. That he held
this sound opinion is quite as plausible an explanation of Voltaire’s
anxiety to know persons of station and importance, as the current theory
that he was of sycophantic nature. Why, he asks, are the ancient
historians so full of light? ‘It is because the writer had to do with
public business; it is because he could be magistrate, priest, soldier;
and because if he could not rise to the highest functions of the state,
he had at least to make himself worthy of them. I admit,’ he concludes,
‘that we must not expect such an advantage with us, for our own
constitution happens to be against it;’ but he was deeply sensible what
an advantage it was that they thus lost.[1]
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.
In this respect history is neither better nor worse than the latest
explanation of the origin and order of the world of organised matter.
Here too we are landed in the final resort at what is neither more nor
less than an accident. Natural selection, or the survival of the fittest
in the universal struggle for existence, is now held by the most
competent inquirers to be the principal method to which we owe the
extinction, preservation, and distribution of organic forms on the
earth. But the appearance both of the forms that conquer and of those
that perish still remains a secret, and to science an accident and a
secret are virtually and provisionally the same thing. In a word, there
is an unknown element at the bottom of the varieties of creation,
whether we agree to call that element a volition of a supernatural
being, or an undiscovered set of facts in embryology. So in history the
Roman or Italo-Hellenic empire, rising when it did, was the salvation of
the West, and yet the appearance at the moment when anarchy threatened
rapidly to dissolve the Roman state, of a man with the power of
conceiving the best design for the new structure, seems to partake as
much of the nature of chance, as the non-appearance of men with similar
vision and power in equally momentous crises, earlier and later. The
rise of a great constructive chief like Charlemagne in the eighth
century can hardly be enough to persuade us that the occasion invariably
brings the leader whom its conditions require, when we remember that as
concerns their demands the conditions of the end of the eighth century
were not radically different from those of the beginning of the sixth,
yet that in the earlier epoch there arose no successor to continue the
work of Theodoric. We have only to examine the origin and fundamental
circumstances of the types of civilisation which rule western
communities and guide their advance, to discern in those original
circumstances a something inscrutable, a certain element of what is as
though it were fortuitous. No science can as yet tell us how such a
variation from previously existing creatures as man had its origin; nor,
any more than this, can history explain the law by which the most
striking variations in intellectual and spiritual quality within the
human order have had their origin. The appearance of the one as of the
other is a fact which cannot be further resolved. It is hard to think in
imagination of the globe as unpeopled by man, or peopled, as it may at
some remote day come to be, by beings of capacity superior enough to
extinguish man. It is hard also to think of the scene which western
Europe and all the vast space which the light of western Europe
irradiates, might have offered at this moment, if nature or the unknown
forces had not produced a Luther, a Calvin, or a Voltaire.
It was one of the happy chances of circumstance that there arose in
France on the death of Lewis 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 favourable 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 præscientific 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.[2] 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.
Once more, we cannot choose. Those whom temperament or culture has made
the partisans of calm order, cannot attune progress to the stately and
harmonious march which would best please them, and which they are
perhaps right in thinking would lead with most security to the goal.
Such a liberation of the human mind as Voltairism can only be effected
by the movement of many spirits, and they are only the few who are moved
by moderate, reflective, and scientific trains of argument. The many
need an extreme type. They are struck by what is flashing and colossal,
for they follow imagination and sympathy, and not the exactly
disciplined intelligence. They know their own wants, and have dumb
feeling of their own better aspirations. Their thoughts move in the
obscurity of things quick but unborn, and by instinct they push upwards
in whatever direction the darkness seems breaking. They are not critics
nor analysts, but when the time is ripening they never fail to know the
word of freedom and of truth, with whatever imperfections it may chance
to be spoken. No prophet all false has ever yet caught the ear of a
series of generations. No prophet all false has succeeded in separating
a nation into two clear divisions. Voltaire has in effect for a century
so divided the most emancipated of western nations. This is beyond the
power of the mere mocker, who perishes like the flash of lightning; he
does not abide as a centre of solar heat.
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 recognise 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 half-pence, 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 characterise 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.
And, what was more important, there had been no sign made in the nation
itself of a consciousness of the immense realms of knowledge that lay
immediately in front of it, and still less of any desire or intention to
win lasting possession of them. That intellectual curiosity which was so
soon to produce such amazing fruits was as yet unstirred. An era of
extraordinary activity had just come to a close, and the creative and
artistic genius of France had risen to the highest mark it attained
until the opening of our own century. The grand age of Lewis XIV. had
been an age of magnificent literature and unsurpassed eloquence. But, in
spite of the potent seed which Descartes had sown, it had been the age
of authority, protection, and patronage. Consequently all those subjects
for which there was no patronage, that is to say the subjects which
could add nothing to the splendour and dignity of the church and the
pageantry of the court, were virtually repressed. This ought not to
blind us to the real loftiness and magnanimity of the best or earlier
part of the age of Lewis XIV. It has been said that the best title of
Lewis XIV. to the recollection of posterity is the protection he
extended to Molière; and one reason why this was so meritorious is that
Molière’s work had a markedly critical character, in reference both to
the devout and to the courtier. The fact of this, undoubtedly the most
durable work of that time, containing critical quality, is not of
importance in reference to the generally fixed or positive aspect of the
age. For Molière is only critical by accident. There is nothing
organically negative about him, and his plays are the pure dramatic
presentation of a peculiar civilisation. He is no more a destructive
agency because he drew hypocrites and coxcombs, than Bossuet was
destructive or critical because he inveighed against sin and the excess
of human vainglory. The epoch was one of entire loyalty to itself and
its ideas. Voltaire himself perceived and admired these traits to the
full. The greatest of all overthrowers, he always understood that it is
towards such ages as these, the too short ages of conviction and
self-sufficience, that our endeavour works. We fight that others may
enjoy; and many generations struggle and debate, that one generation may
hold something for proven.
The glories of the age of Lewis XIV. were the climax of a set of ideas
that instantly afterwards 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;[3] from Corneille and Racine to La
Bruyère’s picture of ‘certain wild animals, male and female, scattered
over the fields, black, livid, all burnt 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 Lewis 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 civilisation 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
reorganisation 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 Lewis 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 towards
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?
Traditional authority, it is true, had been partially and fatally
undermined in France before the time of Voltaire, by one of the most
daring of thinkers, and one of the most acute and sceptical of scholars,
as well as by writers so acutely careless as Montaigne, and apologists
so dangerously rational as Pascal, who gave a rank and consistency to
doubt even in showing that its seas were black and shoreless.
Descartes’s Discourse on Method had been published in 1637, and Bayle’s
Thoughts on the Comet, first of the series of critical onslaughts on
prejudice and authority in matters of belief, had been published in
1682. The metaphysician and the critic had each pressed forward on the
path of examination, and had each insisted on finding grounds for
belief, or else showing the absence of such grounds with a fatal
distinctness that made belief impossible. Descartes was constructive,
and was bent on reconciling the acceptance of a certain set of ideas as
to the relations between man and the universe, and as to the mode and
composition of the universe, with the logical reason. Bayle, whose
antecedents and environment were Protestant, was careless to replace,
but careful to have evidence for whatever was allowed to remain. No
parallel nor hint of equality is here intended between the rare genius
of Descartes and the relatively lower quality of Bayle. The one, however
high a place we may give to the regeneration of thought effected by
Bacon in England, or to that wrought by the brilliant group of physical
experimentalists in Italy, still marks a new epoch in the development of
the human mind, for he had decisively separated knowledge from theology,
and systematically constituted science. The other has a place only in
the history of criticism. But, although in widely different ways, and
with vast difference in intellectual stature, they both had touched the
prevailing notions of French society with a fatal breath.
The blast that finally dispersed and destroyed them came not from
Descartes and Bayle, but directly from Voltaire and indirectly from
England. In the seventeenth century the surrounding conditions were not
ripe. Social needs had not begun to press. The organs of authority were
still too vigorous, and performed their functions with something more
than the mechanical half-heartedness of the next century. Long
familiarity with sceptical ideas as enemies must go before their
reception as friends and deliverers. They have perhaps never gained an
effective hold in any community, until they have found allies in the
hostile camp of official orthodoxy, and so long as that orthodoxy was
able to afford them a vigorous social resistance. Voltaire’s universal
talents made one of the most powerful instruments for conveying these
bold and inquisitive notions among many sorts and conditions of men,
including both the multitude of common readers and playgoers in the
towns, and the narrower multitude of nobles and sovereigns. More than
this, the brilliance and variety of his gifts attracted, stimulated, and
directed the majority of the men of letters of his time, and imparted to
them a measure of his own singular skill in conveying the principles of
rationalistic thought.
The effect of all this was to turn a vast number of personages who were
officially inimical to free criticism, to be at heart abettors and
fellow-conspirators in the great plot. That fact, combined with the
independent causes of the incompetency of the holders of authority to
deal with the crying social necessities of the time, left the walls of
the citadel undermined and undefended, and a few of the sacred birds
that were still found faithful cackled to no purpose. It has often been
said that in the early times of Christianity its influence gave all that
was truest and brightest in colour to the compositions of those who were
least or not at all affected by its dogma. It is more certain that
Voltaire by the extraordinary force of his personality gave a peculiar
tone and life even to those who adhered most staunchly to the ancient
ordering. The champions of authority were driven to defend their cause
by the unusual weapons of rationality; and if Voltaire had never
written, authority would never, for instance, have found such a soldier
on her side as that most able and eminent of reactionaries, Joseph de
Maistre. In reply to the favourite assertion of the apologists of
Catholicism, that whatever good side its assailants may present is the
product of the very teaching which they repudiate, one can only say that
there would be at least as much justice in maintaining that the marked
improvement which took place in the character and aims of the priesthood
between the Regency and the Revolution,[4] was an obligation
unconsciously incurred to those just and liberal ideas which Voltaire
had helped so powerfully to spread. De Maistre compares Reason putting
away Revelation to a child who should beat its nurse. The same figure
would serve just as well to describe the thanklessness of Belief to the
Disbelief which has purged and exalted it.
One of the most striking features of the revolution wrought by Voltaire
is that it was the one great revolt in history which contained no
element of asceticism, and achieved all its victories without resort to
an instrument so potent, inflexible, and easy, but so gravely dangerous.
Such revolts are always reactions against surrounding corruption and
darkness. They are the energetic protests of the purer capacities and
aspirations of human nature; and as is the inevitable consequence of
vehement action of this sort, they seem for a while to insist on nothing
less than the extirpation of those antagonistic parts which are seen to
have brought life into such debasement. With this stern anger and
resolve in their hearts, men have no mind to refine, explain, or
moderate, and they are forced by one of the strangest instincts of our
constitution into some system of mortification, which may seem to clear
the soul of the taint of surrounding grossness. In such exalted mood,
there is no refuge but in withdrawal from the common life into recesses
of private conscience, and in severest purification of all desires.
There are not many types of good men even in the least ascetic or least
reactionary epochs, to whom this mood, and its passion for simplicity,
self-applied rigour, minute discipline, firm regulation, and veritable
continence of life, do not now and again recur, in the midst of days
that march normally on a more spacious and expansive theory.
There was, however, no tinge of ascetic principle in Voltairism. Pascal
had remarked that relaxed opinions are naturally so pleasing to men,
that it is wonderful they should ever be displeasing. To which Voltaire
had thus retorted: ‘On the contrary, does not experience prove that
influence over men’s minds is only gained by offering them the
difficult, nay the impossible, to perform or believe? Offer only things
that are reasonable, and all the world will answer, We knew as much as
that. But enjoin things that are hard, impracticable; paint the deity as
ever armed with the thunder; make blood run before the altars; and you
will win the multitude’s ear, and everybody will say of you, He must be
right, or he would not so boldly proclaim things so marvellous.’[5]
Voltaire’s ascendency sprung from no appeal to those parts of human
nature in which ascetic practice has its foundation. On the contrary,
full exercise and play for every part was the key of all his teaching,
direct and indirect. He had not Greek serenity and composure of spirit,
but he had Greek exultation in every known form of intellectual
activity, and this audacious curiosity he made general.
Let us remember that Voltairism was primarily and directly altogether an
intellectual movement, for this reason, that it was primarily and
directly a reaction against the subordination of the intellectual to the
moral side of men, carried to an excess that was at length fraught with
fatal mischief. Are our opinions true, provably answering to the facts
of the case, consistent with one another; is our intelligence radiant
with genuine light and knowledge; and are we bent more than all else on
testing and improving and diffusing this knowledge and the instruments
for acquiring it? The system to which this was the powerful
counter-formula, even in its least dark shapes, always reserved a large
class of most important facts from the searching glare of that scrutiny
which Voltairism taught men to direct upon every proposition that was
presented to them.
For many centuries truth had been conceived as of the nature of a Real
Universal, of which men had full possession by the revelation of a
supreme divinity. All truth was organically one; and the relations of
men to something supernatural, their relations to one another, the
relations of outward matter, were all comprehended in a single
synthesis, within which, and subject to which, all intellectual movement
proceeded. An advancing spirit of inquiry dissolved this synthesis; and
the philosophers, as distinguished from the steadfast and single
students of science, ceasing to take it for granted as an indisputable
starting-point that truth was an assured possession, went off on two
different lines. Men of one cast of mind fell into doubt whether truth
was a reality after all, and the discovery of it accessible to mankind.
Thinkers of a different cast accepted this doctrine of the impotence of
the human understanding to discover knowledge and prove truth, but they
proceeded to the retrograde inference that therefore the ancient
tradition of knowledge actually contains that approved truth, which had
just been pronounced unattainable. This oblique mode of regaining a
position of which they had been by their own act dispossessed, was
impossible for so keen and direct a spirit as Voltaire’s. However filled
his mind may have been with the false notions of the Tribe, of the
Market, and above all of the Cave, at all events it was more free than
most, certainly than most of those subalterns of the schools, from the
Idols of the Theatre, and from either kind of that twofold excess, ‘one
sort of which too hastily constitutes sciences positive and hierarchic,
while the other presents scepticism and the pursuit of a vague inquiry
that has no limit.’[6]
The consequence of this peculiarity, call it a destructive and blind
narrowness, or call it a wise and justly-measured openness of mind, as
we may choose, has been that Voltaire has been condemned with unsparing
severity by three of the most influential schools of modern opinion.
Every one who has a system to defend is the enemy of the famous man who
destroyed the reigning system of his day, with engines that seem to
point with uncomfortable directness against all other systems. Every one
who thinks that we have turned over the last leaf of the book of
knowledge, whatever the inscription that he may find written upon it,
naturally detests the whole spirit and impulse of one who felt all his
life that he and his generation were the first band of men who had
shaken off their chains, and ascended to the light of the sun and the
contemplation of some portion of an inexhaustible universe of realities.
Hence, the partisans of the Christian religion, in any of its forms,
have dealt unrelenting contempt and hatred to the foe who did more than
any one else to reduce their churches, once so majestically triumphant,
to their present level, where they are forced under various guises and
with much obsolete pretension to plead for the tolerance of rational
men, on the comparatively modest ground of social fitness. Their
hostility, we may agree, is not very astonishing, when we reflect on the
provocation.
Many of those, however, who have least hope of any future revival of the
ancient creed, and who least regret its fall, are even less hostile to
the Jesuits than they are to Voltaire. Comte, for example, who
elaborated a doctrine with a corresponding system of life deduced from
it, and the central principle of whose method of social action and
movement is to destroy by replacing, has adjudged an emphatically
secondary place to Voltaire’s claims on our good-will.[7] Nor ought
this seriously to surprise us, when we consider that Voltaire trusted to
the individual to replace for himself, by the motion of his own
faculties, the old collective tradition of action and belief; and that
he showed himself too keenly alive to the curses of that empire of
prejudice, authority, social fixity, which he devoted his life to
overthrowing, to lend any help to the restoration of a similar reign
with changed watchwords. He is perhaps the one great Frenchman who has
known how to abide in patient contentment with an all but purely
critical reserve, leaving reconstruction, its form, its modes, its
epoch, for the fulness of time and maturity of effort to disclose. It
has been the fatal quality of the genius of his countrymen, from
Descartes down to Comte, to decline to rest on an uncompleted
interpretation of experience, and to insist on a hasty supplement of
unconcluded analysis by what is virtually an à priori synthesis.
Voltaire deserves no special praise for this abstention from a
premature reconstruction; for it probably was not so much the result of
deliberate persuasion that we must wait on the time, as of an inability
to conceive of need for a cultus and a firm ordering of our knowledge,
as prime demands of human nature and essential conditions of stable
progress. Whatever value we may set on this sage reserve, the fact that
Voltaire had no scheme for replacing the scheme which he destroyed,
accounts very amply for the disparagement of him by those who think
almost any fabric of common and ordered belief better for men, than the
seeming chaos of intricate and multitudinous growths which now
overspread the field of European opinion. And does it not involve us in
a defective conception of the way in which human progress accomplishes
itself, to place in our calendar of benefactors, supposing us to compose
a calendar, only those who have built up truth, to the exclusion of
those who have with pain and labour helped to demolish impudent error?
Has Jericho always fallen without the blasts from the seven trumpets? It
is sufficiently demonstrated from history that false opinions vanish
spontaneously, without a direct blow struck; that a system of belief,
corroborated in the breasts of the multitude by all the authority of a
long tradition, sanctified to the powerful few by dignity or emolument,
entrenched with a strength that seems inexpugnable among the ordinances
and institutions and unwritten uses of a great community, will
straightway succumb from inherent want of life and courage?
There is a third kind of opinion, that is as little merciful in its own
way as either of the two others, and this is the scientific or cultured
opinion. Objections from this region express themselves in many forms,
some of them calm and suggestive, others a little empty and a little
brutal. They all seem to come to something of this kind: that Voltaire’s
assault on religion, being conducted without any smallest spark of the
religious spirit, was therefore necessarily unjust to the object of his
attack, and did the further mischief of engendering in all on whom his
influence was poured out a bitterness and moral temerity which is the
worst blight that can fall upon the character either of a man or a
generation: that while truth is relative and conditional, and while
belief is only to be understood by those who have calmly done justice to
the history of its origin and growth, Voltaire carelessly,
unphilosophically, and maliciously, handled what had once possessed a
relative truth, as if it had always been absolutely false, and what had
sprung from the views and aspirations of the best men, as if it had had
its root in the base artifices of the worst: that what ought to have
gone on, and would have gone on, as a process of soft autumnal
dissolution, was converted by the infection of Voltaire into a stained
scene of passion and battle: that assuming to possess and to furnish men
with a broad criticism of life, he left out of life its deepest,
holiest, and most exalting elements, as well as narrowed and depraved
criticism, from its right rank as the high art of stating and collating
ideas, down to an acrid trick of debate, a thing of proofs, arguments,
and rancorous polemic.
It is certain that there is much truth in this particular strain of
objection to Voltaire’s power and his use of it, or else it would not
have found mouthpieces, as it has done, among some of the finest spirits
of the modern time. But it is the natural tendency of the hour rather to
exaggerate what weight there really is in such criticism, which, though
claiming to be the criticism of temperance and moderation and
relativity, does not as a matter of fact escape the fatal law of excess
and absoluteness even in its very moderation and relativity. In
estimating an innovator’s method, all depends on the time and the enemy;
and it may sometimes happen that the time is so out of joint and the
enemy so strong, so unscrupulous, so imminently pernicious, as to leave
no alternative between finally succumbing, and waging a war of
deliverance for which coming generations have to bear the burdens in
feuds and bitterness; between abridging somewhat of the richness and
fulness of life, and allowing it all to be gradually choked up by dust
and enwrapped in night. For let us not forget that what Catholicism was
accomplishing in France in the first half of the eighteenth century, was
really not anything less momentous than the slow strangling of French
civilisation. Though Voltaire’s spirit may be little edifying to us, who
after all partake of the freedom which he did so much to win, yet it is
only just to remember what was the spirit of his foe, and that in so
pestilent a presence a man of direct vision may well be eager to use
such weapons as he finds to his hand. Let the scientific spirit move
people to speak as it lists about Voltaire’s want of respect for things
held sacred, for the good deeds of holy men, for the sentiment and faith
of thousands of the most worthy among his fellows. Still there are times
when it may be very questionable whether, in the region of belief, one
with power and with fervid honesty ought to spare the abominable city of
the plain, just because it happens to shelter five righteous. There are
times when the inhumanity of a system stands out so red and foul, when
the burden of its iniquity weighs so heavy, and the contagion of its
hypocrisy is so laden with mortal plague, that no awe of dilettante
condemnation nor minute scruple as to the historic or the relative can
stay the hand of the man whose direct sight and moral energy have
pierced the veil of use, and revealed the shrine of the infamous thing.
The most noble of the holy men said long ago that ‘the servant of the
Lord must not strive, but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient,
in meekness instructing those that oppose themselves.’ The history of
the churches is in one of its most conspicuous aspects the history of a
prolonged outrage upon these words by arrogant and blasphemous persons,
pretending to draw a sacred spirit from the very saint who uttered them.
We may well deplore that Voltaire’s attack, and every other attack of
the same sort, did not take the fair shape prescribed by the apostle to
the servant of the Lord, of gentleness, patience, and the instruction
of a sweet and firm example. But the partisans of the creed in whose
name more human blood has been violently shed than in any other cause
whatever, these, I say, can hardly find much ground of serious reproach
in a few score epigrams. Voltaire had no calm breadth of wisdom. It may
be so. There are moments which need not this calm breadth of wisdom, but
a two-edged sword, and when the deliverers of mankind are they who ‘come
to send fire on the earth.’