ENGLISH INFLUENCES.
Voltairism may be said to have begun from the flight of its founder from
Paris to London. This, to borrow a name from the most memorable instance
of outward change marking inward revolution, was the decisive hegira,
from which the philosophy of destruction in a formal shape may be held
seriously to date. Voltaire landed in England in the middle of May,
1726. He was in the thirty-third year of his age, that earlier
climacteric, when the men with vision first feel conscious of a past,
and reflectively mark its shadow. It is then that they either press
forward eagerly with new impulse in the way of their high calling,
knowing the limitations of circumstance and hour, or else fainting draw
back their hand from the plough, and ignobly leave to another or to none
the accomplishment of the work. The narrowness of the cribbed deck that
we are doomed to tread, amid the vast space of an eternal sea with fair
shores dimly seen and never neared, oppresses the soul with a burden
that sorely tries its strength, when the fixed limits first define
themselves before it. Those are the strongest who do not tremble
beneath this gray ghostly light, but make it the precursor of an
industrious day.
The past on which Voltaire had to look back was full of turmoil,
contention, impatience, and restless production. François Marie Arouet
was born in 1694, so feeble in constitution that, as in the case of
Fontenelle, whose hundred years surpassed even Voltaire’s lengthy span,
his life was long despaired of. His father was a notary of good repute
for integrity and skill, and was entrusted with the management of their
affairs by several of the highest families in France. His mother is
supposed to have had some of the intellectual alertness which penetrated
the character of her son, but she died when he was seven years old, and
he remained alone with his father until 1704, when he was sent to
school. His instructors at the College Louis-le-Grand were the Jesuits,
whose wise devotion to intellectual education in the broadest sense that
was then possible, is a partial set-off against their mischievous
influence on morals and politics. The hardihood of the young Arouet’s
temper broke out even from the first, and we need not inquire minutely
what were the precise subjects of education of a child, whom his tutor
took an early opportunity of pointing out as the future coryphaeus of
deism in France. He used to say in after life that he had learnt nothing
worth learning. A lad who could launch infidel epigrams at ‘his
Jansenist of a brother,’ and declaim a poem in which so important a hero
as Moses figures as an impostor,[8] was of that originality of mental
turn on whose freedom the inevitably mechanical instruction of the
school cannot be expected to make any deep or decisive impression. The
young of this independent humour begin their education where those of
less energetic nerve hardly leave off, with character ready made.
Between a youth of bold, vivacious, imaginative disposition, and a
father of the temperament proper to a notary with many responsibilities,
there could be no sympathy, and the two were not long in coming to open
quarrel without terms. The son was taken out by his godfather, the abbé
Châteauneuf, into that gay world which presently became the infamous
world of the regency, where extraordinary sprightliness and facility in
verse gained him welcome and patronage. We need waste no words on the
corruption and intellectual trifling of the society into which Voltaire
was thus launched. For shallowness and levity, concealed by literary
artifice and play of frivolous wit which only makes the scene more
dreary or detestable, it has never been surpassed. There was brightness
in it, compared with the heavy brutality and things obscene of the court
of Lewis XV., but after all we seem to see over the brightness a sort of
foul glare, like the iridescence of putrefaction. Ninon de l’Enclos, a
friend of his mother’s, was perhaps the one free and honest soul with
whom the young Arouet had to do. Now extremely old, she still preserved
both her wit and her fine probity of intellect. She had always kept her
heart free of cant, from the time when she had ridiculed, as the
Jansenists of love, the pedantical women and platonic gallants of the
Hôtel Rambouillet, down to her rejection of Madame de Maintenon’s offer
of an invitation to the court, on condition of her joining the band of
the devout. The veteran Aspasia, now over eighty, was struck by the
brilliance and dazzling promise of the young versifier, and left him a
legacy for the purchase of books.
The rest of the society into which Voltaire was taken was saturated with
a spirit of reaction against the austere bigotry of the court, and bad
and miserable as such austerity is, the rebellion against it is always
worse and more miserable still. The licence seems not to have been of
the most joyous sort, as indeed licence protesting and defiant is not
apt to be. The abbé Chaulieu, a versifier of sprightly fancy, grace, and
natural ease, was the dissolute Anacreon of the people of quality who
during the best part of the reign of Lewis XIV. had failed to sympathise
with its nobility and stateliness, and during the worst part revolted
against its gloom. Voltaire at twenty was his intimate and his professed
disciple.[9] To this intimacy we may perhaps trace that remarkable
continuity of tradition between Voltaire and the grand age, which
distinguishes him from the school of famous men who were called
Voltaireans, and of whom the special mark was that they had absolutely
broken with the whole past of French history and literature. Princes,
dukes, and marquises were of Chaulieu’s band. The despair and fury of
the elder Arouet at such companions and such follies reproduce once more
a very old story in the records of youthful genius. Genius and fine
friends reconcile no prudent notary to a son’s hatred for law and the
desk. Orgies with the Duke of Sully, and rhyming bouts with Chaulieu,
have sunk into small size for us, who know that they were but the
mischievous and unbecoming prologue of a life of incessant and generous
labour, but we may well believe that such enormities bulked big in the
vision of the father, as portents of degradation and ruin. We have a
glimpse of the son’s temper towards the profession to which his father
had tried so hard to bind him, in the ironical definition, thrown out
long afterwards, of an _avocat_ as a man who, not having money enough to
buy one of those brilliant offices on which the universe has its eyes
fixed, studies for three years the laws of Theodosius and Justinian so
as to know the custom of Paris, and who at length having got
matriculated has the right of pleading for money, if he has a loud
voice.[10] The young Arouet did actually himself get matriculated and
acquire this right, but his voice proved so loud that his pleadings were
destined to fill wider courts than those of Paris.
Arouet the elder persuaded Châteauneuf’s brother, who was a diplomatist,
to take into his company the law-student who had made verse instead of
studying the laws of Theodosius. So the youth went to the Hague. Here he
straightway fell into new misadventure by conceiving an undying passion,
that lasted several weeks, for a young countrywoman whom he found in
Holland. Stolen interviews, letters, tears, and the other accustomed
circumstances of a juvenile passion on which the gods frown, were all
discovered. The ambassador sent the refractory boy back to his father,
with full details and documents, with results on the relations of the
pair that need not be described.
In the autumn of 1715 Lewis XIV. died, and the Regent D’Orleans reigned
in his stead. There presently appeared some pungent lines, entitled _Les
j’ai vu_, in which the writer recounted a number of evil things which he
had seen in the state—a thousand prisons crowded with brave citizens and
faithful subjects, the people groaning under rigorous bondage, the
magistrates harassing every town with ruinous taxes and unrighteous
edicts; _j’ai vu, c’est dire tout, le Jésuite adoré_. The last line ran
that all these ills the writer had seen, yet was but twenty years
old.[11] Voltaire was twenty-two, but the authorities knew him for a
verse-writer of biting turn, so they treated the discrepancy of age as a
piece of mere prosopopœia, and laid him up in the Bastille (1716). As a
matter of fact, he had no hand in the offence. Even amid these sombre
shades, where he was kept for nearly a year, his spirit was blithe and
its fire unquenchable. The custom of Paris and the Codes were as
little handled as ever; and he divided his time between the study of the
two great epics of Greece and Rome, and the preparation of what he
designed to be the great epic of France. He also gave the finishing
strokes to his tragedy of Œdipe, which was represented in the course of
the following year with definite success, and was the opening of a
brilliant dramatic career, that perhaps to a mortal of more ordinary
mould might alone have sufficed for the glory of a life.
The next six years he divided between a lively society, mostly of the
great, the assiduous composition of new plays, and the completion of the
Henriade. His fibre was gradually strengthening. By the end of this
period, the recklessness of the boyish disciple of Chaulieu had wholly
spent itself; and although Voltaire’s manner of life was assuredly not
regular nor decorously ordered, now nor for many years to come, if
measured by the rigid standard on which an improved society properly
insists, yet it was always a life of vigorous industry and clear
purposes. For a brief time his passion for the Maréchale de Villars
broke the tenacity of his diligence, and he always looked back on this
interruption of his work with the kind of remorse that might afflict a
saint for a grave spiritual backsliding. He was often at the country
seats of Sully, Villars, and elsewhere, throwing off thousands of
trifling verses, arranging theatricals, enlivening festivals, and always
corresponding indefatigably; for now and throughout his life his good
sense and good will, his business-like quality and his liking for his
friends, both united to raise him above the idle pretences and
self-indulgence of those who neglect the chief instrument of social
intercourse and friendly continuity. He preferred the country to the
town. ‘I was born,’ he says to one, ‘to be a faun or creature of the
woods; I am not made to live in a town.’ To another, ‘I fancy myself in
hell, when I am in the accursed city of Paris.’[12] The only
recommendation of the accursed city was that a solitude was attainable
in it, as in other crowded spots, which enabled him to work better there
than in the small and exacting throng of country-houses. ‘I fear
Fontainebleau, Villars, and Sully, both for my health and for Henry IV;
I should do no work, I should over-eat, and I should lose in pleasures
and in complaisance to others an amount of precious time that I ought to
be using for a necessary and creditable task.’[13]
Yet there was even at this period much of that marvellous hurrying to
and fro in France and out of it, which continued to mark the longer
portion of Voltaire’s life, and fills it with such a busy air of turmoil
and confusion, explaining many things, when we think of the stability of
life and permanence of outward place of the next bright spirit that
shone upon Europe. Goethe never saw London, Paris, nor Vienna, and made
no journey save the famous visit to Italy, and the march at Valmy.
Voltaire moved hither and thither over the face of Europe like the wind,
and it is not until he has passed through half of his life that we can
begin to think of his home. Every association that belongs to his name
recalls tumult and haste and shrill contention with men and
circumstance. We have, however, to remember that these constant
movements were the price which Voltaire paid for the vigour and freedom
of his speech, in days when the party of superstition possessed the ear
of the temporal power, and resorted without sparing to the most violent
means of obliterating every hardy word and crushing every independent
writer. The greater number of Voltaire’s ceaseless changes of place were
flights from injustice, and the recollection of this may well soothe the
disturbance of spirit of the most fastidious zealot for calm and orderly
living. They were for the most part retreats before packs of wolves.
In 1722 the elder Arouet died, to the last relentlessly set against a
son, not any less stubborn than himself, and unfortunately a great deal
more poetical. About the same time the name of Arouet falls away, and
the poet is known henceforth by that ever famous symbol for so much,
Voltaire; a name for which various explanations, none of them
satisfactory, have been offered, the latest and perhaps the least
improbable resolving it into a fanciful anagram.[14]
Industrious as he was, and eager as he was for rural delights and
laborious solitude, Voltaire was still pre-eminently social. His letters
disclose in him, who really possessed all arts, the art of one who knew
how to be graciously respectful to the social superiors who took him for
a companion, without forgetting what was due to his own respect for
himself. We are all princes or poets, he exclaimed jubilantly on the
occasion of one of those nights and suppers of the gods. Such
gay-hearted freedom was not always well taken, and in time Voltaire’s
eyes were opened to the terms on which he really stood. ‘_Who is the
young man who talks so loud?_’ called out some Chevalier Rohan, at one
of these sprightly gatherings at the house of the Duke of Sully.[15]
‘_My lord_,’ the young man replied promptly, ‘_he is one who does not
carry about a great name, but wins respect for the name he has._’ A few
days afterwards the high-spirited patrician magnanimously took an
opportunity of having a caning inflicted by the hands of his lackeys on
the poet who had thrown away this lesson upon him. Voltaire, who had at
all events that substitute for true physical courage which springs up in
an intensely irritable and susceptive temperament, forthwith applied
himself to practise with the small-sword. He did his best to sting his
enemy to fight, but the chevalier either feared the swordsman, or else
despised an antagonist of the middle class; and by the influence of the
Rohan family the poet once more found himself in the Bastille, then the
house of correction at the disposal and for the use of the nobles, the
court, and the clergy. Here for six months Voltaire, then only
representing a very humble and unknown quantity in men’s minds, chafed
and fretted. The pacific Fleury, as is the wont of the pacific when in
power, cared less to punish the wrong-doer than to avoid disturbance,
knowing that disturbance was most effectually avoided by not meddling
with the person most able to resent. The multitude, however, when the
day of reckoning came, remembered all these things, and the first act of
their passion was to raze to the ground the fortress into which nearly
every distinguished champion of the freedom of human intelligence among
them had at one time or another been tyrannically thrown.
On his release Voltaire was ordered to leave Paris. A clandestine visit
to the city showed him that there was no hope of redress from authority,
which was in the hands of men whose pride of rank prevented them from so
much as even perceiving, much more from repairing, such grievance as a
mere bourgeois could have: as if, to borrow Condorcet’s bitter phrase, a
descendant of the conquering Franks, like De Rohan, could have lost the
ancient right of life and death over a descendant of the Gauls.[16] And
this was no ironic taunt; for while Voltaire was in the Bastille, that
astounding book of the Count of Boulainvilliers was in the press, in
which it was shown that the feudal system is the master-work of the
human mind, and that the advance of the royal authority and the increase
of the liberties of the people were equally unjust usurpations of the
rights of the conquering Franks.[17]
Voltaire was no patient victim of the practice which corresponded to
this trim historic theory. In a tumult of just indignation he quitted
France, and sought refuge with that stout and free people, who had by
the execution of one king, the deposition of another, and the definite
subjugation of the hierarchy, won a full liberty of thought and speech
and person. A modern historian has drawn up a list of the men of mark
who made the same invigorating pilgrimage. ‘During the two generations
which elapsed between the death of Lewis XIV. and the outbreak of the
Revolution, there was hardly a Frenchman of eminence who did not either
visit England or learn English; while many of them did both.’[18] Among
those who actually came to England and mixed in its society besides
Voltaire, were Buffon, Brissot, Helvétius, Gournay, Jussieu, Lafayette,
Montesquieu, Maupertuis, Morellet, Mirabeau, Roland and Madame Roland,
Rousseau. We who live after Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Scott, have
begun to forget the brilliant group of the Queen Anne men. They belong
to a self-complacent time, and we to a time of doubt and unsatisfied
aspiration, and the two spirits are unsympathetic. Yet they were
assuredly a band, from Newton and Locke down to Pope, of whom, taking
them for all the qualities which they united, in science, correct
judgment, love of letters, and taste, England has as good reason to be
proud as of any set of contemporary writers in her history.
Up to this moment Voltaire had been a poet, and his mind had not moved
beyond the region of poetic creation. He had beaten every one once and
for all on the ground of light and graceful lyric verse, ‘a kind of
poetry,’ says a French critic whose word in such a matter we can hardly
refuse to take, ‘in which Voltaire is at once with us the only master
and the only writer supportable, for he is the only one whom we can
read.’[19] He had produced three tragedies. His epic was completed,
though undergoing ceaseless labour of the file. Two lines in his first
play had served to mark him for no friend to the hierophants:
Nos prêtres ne sont point ce qu’un vain peuple pense;
Notre crédulité fait toute leur science.[20]
And the words of Araspe in the same play had breathed the full spirit of
the future liberator:
Ne nous fions qu’à nous; voyons tout par nos yeux:
Ce sont là nos trépieds, nos oracles, nos dieux.[21]
Such expressions, however, were no more than the vague and casual word
of the _esprit fort_, the friend of Chaulieu, and the rhymer of a
dissolute circle, where religion only became tinged with doubt, because
conduct had already become penetrated with licence. More important than
such stray words was the Epistle to Uranie (1722), that truly masculine
and terse protest against the popular creed, its mean and fatuous and
contradictory idea of an omnipotent God, who gave us guilty hearts so as
to have the right of punishing us, and planted in us a love of pleasure
so as to torment us the more effectually by appalling ills that an
eternal miracle prevents from ever ending; who drowned the fathers in
the deluge and then died for the children; who exacts an account of
their ignorance from a hundred peoples whom he has himself plunged
helplessly into this ignorance:
Je ne reconnais point à cette indigne image
Le dieu que je dois adorer;
Je croirais le déshonorer
Par une telle insulte et par un tel hommage.[22]
Though called The For and Against, the poet hardly tries to maintain any
proportion between the two sides of the argument. The verses were
addressed to a lady in a state of uncertainty as to belief, of whom
there were probably more among Voltaire’s friends of quality than he can
have cared to cure or convert. Scepticism was at this time not much more
than an interesting fashion.
The dilettante believer is indeed not a strong spirit, but the weakest,
and the facts of life were by this time far too serious for Voltaire,
for that truth to have missed his keen-seeing eye. It is not hard to
suppose that impatient weariness of the poor life that was lived around
him, had as large a share as resentment of an injustice, in driving him
to a land where men did not merely mouth idle words of making reason
their oracle, their tripod, their god, but where they had actually
systematised the rejection of Christianity, and had thrown themselves
with grave faith on the disciplined intelligence and its lessons.
Voltaire left a country where freedom of thinking was only an empty
watchword, the name for a dissipated fashion. It was considered
free-thinking if a man allowed himself to regard the existence of the
Five Propositions in Jansenius’s book as a thing indifferent to the
happiness of the human race.[23] He found in England that it was a
far-spreading reality, moulding not only the theological ideas, but the
literature, manners, politics, and philosophy, of a great society.
Voltaire left France a poet, he returned to it a sage. Before his
flight, though we do not know to what extent he may have read such
history as was then accessible, he had been actively productive only in
the sphere of the imaginative faculties, and in criticism of the form
and regulation proper to be imposed upon them. When he returned, while
his poetic power had ripened, he had tasted of the fruit of the tree of
scientific reason, and, what was not any less important, he had become
alive to the central truth of the social destination of all art and all
knowledge.
In a word, he was transformed from the penman into the captain and
man-at-arms. ‘The example of England,’ says Condorcet, ‘showed him that
truth is not made to remain a secret in the hands of a few philosophers,
and a limited number of men of the world, instructed, or rather
indoctrinated, by the philosophers; smiling with them at the errors of
which the people are the victims, but at the same time making themselves
the champions of these very errors, when their rank or position gives
them a real or chimerical interest in them, and quite ready to permit
the proscription, or even persecution, of their teachers, if they
venture to say what in secret they themselves actually think. From the
moment of his return, Voltaire felt himself called to destroy the
prejudices of every kind, of which his country was the slave.’[24]
It is not difficult to perceive the sorts of fact which would most
strike the exile’s attention, though it would be rash to suppose that
things struck him in exact proportion to their real weight and the depth
of their importance, or that he detected the connection subsisting among
them at their roots. Perhaps the first circumstance to press its
unfamiliarity upon him was the social and political consequence of the
men of letters in England, and the recognition given to the power of the
pen. The patronage of men of genius in the reign of Anne and part of the
reign of the first George had been profuse and splendid. The poet who
had been thrown into prison for resenting a whipping from a nobleman’s
lackeys, found himself in a land where Newton and Locke were rewarded
with lucrative posts in the administration of the country, where Prior
and Gay acted in important embassies, and where Addison was a Secretary
of State. The author of Œdipe and the Henriade had to hang ignobly
about in the crowd at Versailles at the marriage of Lewis XV. to gain a
paltry pittance from the queen’s privy purse,[25] while in England
Hughes and Rowe and Ambrose Philips and Congreve were all enjoying amply
endowed sinecures. The familiar intercourse between the ministers and
the brilliant literary group of that age has been often painted. At the
time of Voltaire’s exile it had just come to an end with the accession
to supreme power of Walpole, who neither knew anything nor cared
anything about the literature of his own time. But the usage was still
new, and the men who had profited and given profit by it were alive, and
were the central figures in the circles among which Voltaire was
introduced by Bolingbroke. Newton died in 1727, and Voltaire saw his
death mourned as a public calamity, and surrounded with a pomp and
circumstance in the eye of the country that could not have been
surpassed if he had been, not a geometer, but a king who was the
benefactor of his people.[26] The author of Gulliver’s Travels was
still a dignitary in the state church, and there was still a large
association of outward power and dignity with literary merit.
In so far as we consider literature to be one of the purely decorative
arts, there can be no harm in this patronage of its most successful,
that is its most pleasing, professors by the political minister; but the
more closely literature approaches to being an organ of serious things,
a truly spiritual power, the more danger there is likely to be in making
it a path to temporal station or emolument. The practical instinct,
which on some of its sides seems like a miraculously implanted
substitute for scientific intelligence in English politics, has led us
almost too far in preserving this important separation of the new church
from the functions and rewards of the state. The misfortunes of France
since the Revolution have been due to no one circumstance so markedly as
to the predominance which the man of letters has acquired in that
country; and this fatal predominance was first founded, though assuredly
not of set design, by Voltaire.
Not less amazing than the high honour paid to intellectual eminence was
the refugee from the city of the Bastille likely to find the freedom
with which public events and public personages were handled by any one
who could pay a printer. The licence of this time in press and theatre
has only been once or twice equalled since, and it has never been
surpassed. From Bolingbroke and Swift down to the author of The Golden
Rump,[27] every writer who chose to consider himself in opposition
treated the minister with a violence and ferocity, which neither
irritated nor daunted that sage head, but which would in France have
crowded the lowest dungeons of the Bastille with victims of Fleury’s
anger and fright. Such license was as natural in a country that had
within ninety years gone through a violent civil war, a revolutionary
change of government and line, and a half-suppressed dispute of
succession, as it would have been astonishing in France, where the
continuity of outward order had never been more than superficially
ruffled, even in the most turbulent times of the factious wars of the
League and the Fronde. No new idea of the relations between ruler and
subject had ever penetrated into France, as it had done so deeply in the
neighbouring country. No serious popular issues had been so much as
stated. As Voltaire wrote, in the detestable times of Charles IX. and
Henry III. it was only a question whether the people should be the slave
of the Guises, while as for the last war, it deserved only hisses and
contempt; for what was De Retz but a rebel without a purpose and a
stirrer of sedition without a name, and what was the parliament but a
body which knew neither what it meant nor what it did not mean?[28] The
apologies of Jesuit writers for the assassination of tyrants deserve an
important place in the history of the doctrine of divine right; but
they were theoretical essays in casuistry for the initiated few, and
certainly conveyed no general principles of popular right to the many.
Protestantism, on the other hand, loosened the conception of authority
and of the respect proper for authority, to a degree which has never
been realised in the most anarchic movements in France, whose anarchy
has ever sprung less from a disrespect for authority as such, than from
a passionate and uncompromising resolve in this or that group that the
authority shall be in one set of hands and not another. Voltairism has
proved itself as little capable as Catholicism of inspiring any piece
that may match with Milton’s Areopagitica, the noblest defence that was
ever made of the noblest of causes. We know not whether Voltaire ever
thought much as to the history and foundation of that freedom of speech,
which even in its abuse struck him as so wonderful a circumstance in a
country that still preserved a stable and orderly society. He was
probably content to admire the phenomenon of a liberty so marvellous,
without searching very far for its antecedents. The mere spectacle of
such free, vigorous, many-sided, and truly social and public activity of
intellect as was visible in England at this time, was in itself enough
to fix the gaze of one who was so intensely conscious of his own energy
of intellect, and so bitterly rebellious against the system which
fastened a gag between his lips.
If we would realise the impression of this scene of free speech on
Voltaire’s ardent spirit, we need only remember that, when in time he
returned to his own country, he had to wait long and use many arts and
suffer harassing persecution, before he could publish what he had to say
on Newton and Locke, and in other less important respects had to
suppress much of what he had most at heart to say. ‘One must disguise at
Paris,’ he wrote long after his return, ‘what I could not say too
strongly at London;’ and he vaunts his hardihood in upholding Newton
against René Descartes, while he confesses that an unfortunate but
necessary circumspection forced him to try to make Locke obscure.[29]
Judge the light which would come into such a mind as his, when he first
saw the discussion and propagation of truth freed from these vile and
demoralising affronts. The very conception of truth was a new one, as a
goddess not to be shielded behind the shades of hierophantic mystery,
but rather to be sought in the free tumult and joyous strife of many
voices, there vindicating her own majesty and marking her own children.
Penetrating deeper, Voltaire found not only a new idea of truth as a
something rude, robust, and self-sufficient, but also what was to him a
new order of truths, the triumphs of slow-footed induction and the
positive reason. France was the hotbed of systems of the physical
universe. The provisional and suspensive attitude was intolerable to her
impetuous genius, and the gaps which scientific investigation was
unable to fill, were straightway hidden behind an artificial screen of
metaphysical phantasies. The Aristotelian system died harder in France
than anywhere else, for so late as 1693, while Oxford and Cambridge and
London were actually embracing the Newtonian principles, even the
Cartesian system was forbidden to be taught by decrees of the Sorbonne
and of the Council of the King.[30] When the Cartesian physics once got
a foothold, they kept it as firmly as the system which they had found so
much difficulty in displacing. It is easy to believe that Voltaire’s
positive intelligence would hold aloof by a certain instinct from
physical explanations which were unverified and incapable of being
verified, and which were imbrangled with theology and metaphysics.
We can readily conceive, again, the sensation of freshness and delight
with which a mind so essentially real, and so fundamentally serious,
paradoxical as this may sound in connection with the name of the
greatest mocker that has ever lived, would exchange the poetised
astronomy of Fontenelle, excellently constituted as Fontenelle was in a
great many ways, for the sure and scientific discoveries of a Newton.
Voltaire, in whatever subject, never failed to see through rhetoric, and
for rhetoric as the substitute for clear reasoning he always had an
aversion as deep as it was wholesome. Nobody ever loved grace and form
in style more sincerely than Voltaire, but he has shown in a great many
ways that nobody ever valued grace and form more truly at their worth,
compared with correctness of argument and precision and solidity of
conclusion. Descartes, Fontenelle had said, ‘essaying a bold flight,
insisted on placing himself at the source of all, on making himself
master of the first principles of things by a certain number of clear
and fundamental ideas, having thus only to descend to the phenomena of
nature as necessary consequences; Newton, more timid or more modest,
began his advance by resting on phenomena in order to ascend to the
unknown principles, resolved to admit them, however the combination of
the results might present them. The one starts from what he understands
clearly to discover the cause of what he sees: the other starts from
what he sees, to discover its cause, whether clear or obscure.’ Caution
and reserve and sound method had achieved a generalisation more vast and
amazing than the boldest flight, or most resolute reasoning downwards
from a clearly held conception to phenomena, could possibly have
achieved. This splendid and unrivalled discovery was probably expounded
to Voltaire by Dr. Samuel Clarke, with whom he tells us that he had
several conferences in 1726,[31] and who was one of the ablest of the
Newtonians. He had no doubt learnt the theory of vortices from the
Jesuits, and clear exposition was the only thing needed to convert him
to the new theory, which shines by its own light, and must, in an
unbiassed intelligence with the humblest scientific quality, have
extinguished every artificial explanation. One of the truest signs of
the soundness of Voltaire’s intellectual activity was that his glad
reception of the Newtonian doctrine of attraction did not blind him to
the signal service and splendid genius of Descartes. That loud-shouting
yet feeble-footed enthusiasm, which can only make sure of itself by
disparaging the object of a counter-enthusiasm, had no place in an
intellect so emphatically sincere and self-penetrative. He prefaces his
account of the system of attraction by a hearty and loyal appreciation
of the propounder of the system of vortices.[32]
The acquisition of the special theory of attraction was in itself less
important for Voltaire, than the irresistible impulse which it would
give to the innate rationality or positivity of his own mind. It fitted
him to encounter with proper freedom not only vortices, but that
tremendous apparatus of monads, sufficient reason, and pre-established
harmony, with which Leibnitz then overawed European philosophy. ‘O
Metaphysics!’ he cried, ‘we have, then, got as far as they had in the
time of the earliest Druids!’[33]
Locke’s essay impelled him further in the same path of patient and
cautious interrogation of experience; for the same method which
established gravitation presided over the birth of the experiential
psychology. Newton instead of elaborating a system of vortices, or
another, out of his own consciousness, industriously and patiently
waited on the phenomena. Locke, too, instead of inventing a romance of
the soul, to use Voltaire’s phrase, sagaciously set himself to watch the
phenomena of thought, and ‘reduced metaphysics to being the experimental
physics of the soul.’[34] Malebranche, then the reigning philosopher in
France, ‘astonished the reason of those whom he delighted by his style.
People trusted him in what they did not understand, because he began by
being right in what they did understand; he seduced people by being
delightful, as Descartes seduced them by being daring, while Locke was
nothing more than sage.’[35] ‘After all,’ Voltaire once wrote, ‘we must
admit that anybody who has read Locke, or rather who is his own Locke,
must find the Platos mere fine talkers, and nothing more. In point of
philosophy, a chapter of Locke or Clarke is, compared with the babble of
antiquity, what Newton’s optics are compared with those of
Descartes.’[36] It is curious to observe that De Maistre, who thought
more meanly of Plato than Voltaire did, and hardly less meanly than he
thought of Voltaire himself, cried out that in the study of philosophy
contempt for Locke is the beginning of knowledge.[37] Voltaire, on the
other hand, is enchanted to hear that his niece reads the great English
philosopher, like a good father who sheds tears of joy that his
children are turning out well.[38] Augustus published an edict _de
coercendo intra fines imperio_, and like him, Locke has fixed the empire
of knowledge in order to strengthen it.[39] Locke, he says elsewhere,
traced the development of the human reason, as a good anatomist explains
the machinery of the human body: instead of defining all at once what we
do not understand, he examines by degrees what we want to understand: he
sometimes has the courage to speak positively, but sometimes also he has
the courage to doubt.[40] This is a perfectly appreciative account.
Locke perceived the hopelessness of defining things as they are in
themselves, and the necessity before all else of understanding the reach
of the human intelligence; the impossibility of attaining knowledge
absolute and transcendent; and the limitations of our thinking and
knowing faculties within the bounds of an experience that must always be
relative. The doubt which Voltaire praised in Locke had nothing to do
with that shivering mood which receives overmuch poetic praise in our
day, as the honest doubt that has more faith than half your creeds.
There was no question of the sentimental juvenilities of children crying
for light. It was by no means religious doubt, but philosophic; and it
affected only the possibilities of ontological knowledge, leaving
the grounds of faith on the one hand, and practical conduct on the
other, exactly where they were. His intense feeling for actualities
would draw Voltaire irresistibly to the writer who, in his judgment,
closed the gates of the dreamland of metaphysics, and banished the
vaulting ambition of a priori certainties, which led nowhere and assured
nothing. Voltaire’s keen practical instinct may well have revealed to
him that men were most likely to attribute to the great social problem
of the improvement of mankind its right supremacy, when they had ceased
to concentrate intellectual effort on the insoluble; and Locke went a
long way towards showing how insoluble those questions were, on which,
as it chanced, the most strenuous efforts of the intellect of Europe
since the decline of theology had been concentrated.
That he should have acquired more scientific views either upon the
origin of ideas, or the question whether the soul always thinks, or upon
the reason why an apple falls to the ground, or why the planets remain
in their orbits, was on the whole very much less important for Voltaire,
than a profound and very vital sentiment which was raised to supreme
prominence in his mind, by the spectacle of these vast continents of
knowledge newly discovered by the adventurous yet sure explorers of
English thought. This sentiment was a noble faith, none the less firm
because it was so passionate, in the ability of the relative and
practical understanding to reach truth; a deep-rooted reverence for it,
as a majestic power bearing munificent and unnumbered gifts to mankind.
Hence the vivacity of the annotations which about this time (1728)
Voltaire affixed to Pascal’s famous Thoughts, and which were regarded at
that time as the audacious carpings of a shallow poet against a profound
philosopher. They were in truth the protest of a lively common sense
against a strained, morbid, and often sophistical, misrepresentation of
human nature and human circumstance. Voltaire shot a penetrative ray
through the clouds of doubt, out of which Pascal had made an apology for
mysticism. Even if there were no direct allusions to Locke, as there
are, we should know from whom the writer had learnt the art of insisting
on the relativity of propositions, reducing them to definable terms,[41]
and being very careful against those slippery unobserved transitions
from metaphor to reality, and from a term used in its common sense to
the same term in a transcendental sense, by which Pascal brought the
seeming contradictions of life, and its supposed pettiness, into a light
as oppressively glaring as it was artificial. ‘These pretended
oppositions that you call contradictions are necessary ingredients in
the composition of man, who is, like the rest of nature, what he is
bound to be.’[42] And where is the wise man who would be full of despair
because he cannot find out the exact constitution of his thought,
because he only knows a few attributes of matter, because God has not
disclosed to him all his secrets? He might as well despair because he
has not got four feet and two wings.[43] This sage strain was the
restoration to men of their self-respect, the revival of that
intelligence which Pascal had so humiliated and thrust under foot. It
was what he had seen in England of the positive feats which reason had
achieved, that filled Voltaire with exultation in its power, and
confidence in the prospects of the race which possessed such an
instrument. ‘What strange rage possesses some people, to insist on our
all being miserable! They are like a quack, who would fain have us
believe we are ill, in order to sell us his pills. Keep thy drugs, my
friend, and leave me my health.’[44]
From this there flowed that other vehement current in his soul, of
energetic hatred toward the black clouds of prejudice, of mean
self-love, of sinister preference of class or order, of indolence,
obstinacy, wanton fancy, and all the other unhappy leanings of human
nature, and vexed and fatal conjunctures of circumstance, which
interpose between humanity and the beneficent sunbeams of its own
intelligence, that central light of the universe. Hence, again, by a
sufficiently visible chain of thought, his marked disesteem for
far-sounding names of brutal conquerors, and his cold regard for those
outward and material circumstances in the state of nations, which strike
the sense, but do not touch the inward reason. ‘Not long ago,’ he writes
once, ‘a distinguished company were discussing the trite and frivolous
question, who was the greatest man, Caesar, Alexander, Tamerlane, or
Cromwell. Somebody answered that it was undoubtedly Isaac Newton. This
person was right; for if true greatness consists in having received from
heaven a powerful understanding and in using it to enlighten oneself and
all others, then such an one as Newton, who is hardly to be met with
once in ten centuries, is in truth the great man.... It is to him who
masters our minds by the force of truth, not to those who enslave men by
violence; it is to him who understands the universe, not to those who
disfigure it, that we owe our reverence.’[45] This may seem trite to us,
as the question which suggested it seemed to Voltaire, but we need only
reflect, first, how new this was, even as an idea, in the France which
Voltaire had quitted, and, second, how in spite of the nominal
acceptance of the idea, in the England of our own time there is, with an
immense majority not only of the general vulgar but of the special
vulgar who presume to teach in press and pulpit, no name of slight at
once so disdainful and so sure of transfixing as the name of thinker.
The discovery of the New World did not fire the imagination and stir the
thought of Europe more intensely, than the vision of these new worlds of
knowledge kindled the ardour of the receptive spirit which had just come
into contact with them. But besides the speculative aspects of what he
saw in England, Voltaire was deeply penetrated by the social differences
between a country that had been effectively, if only partially,
transformed from feudalism, and his own, where feudalism had only been
transformed into a system more repressive than itself, and more unfit to
conduct a nation to the free and industrious developments of new
civilisation. It is a remarkable thing that though Voltaire’s habitual
companions or patrons had belonged to the privileged class, he had been
sufficiently struck by the evils incident to the privileged system to
notice the absence of such evils in England, and to make a clear
attempt, though an insufficient one, to understand the secret of the
English immunity from them. One of the worst curses of France was the
taille or capitation-tax, and the way in which it was levied and
assessed. In England, Voltaire noticed, the peasant has not his feet
bruised in wooden shoes, he eats white bread, is decently clad, is not
terrified to increase the number of his stock, or to roof his dwelling
with tiles, lest his tax should be raised next year. Again, he placed
his finger on one of the circumstances that did most to spoil the growth
of a compact and well-knit society in France, when he pointed to the
large number of farmers in England with five or six hundred pounds
sterling a year, who do not think it beneath them to cultivate the earth
which has made them rich, and on which they live in active freedom.[46]
The profoundest modern investigator of the conditions of French society
in the eighteenth century has indicated the eagerness of every man who
got a little capital to quit the country and buy a place in a town, as
doing more harm to the progress of the agriculture and commerce of
France than even the taille itself and the trade corporations.[47]
Voltaire perceived the astonishing fact that in this country a man
because he is a noble or a priest was not exempt from paying certain
taxes, and that the Commons who regulated the taxes, though second to
the Lords in rank, were above them in legislative influence.[48] His
acute sight also revealed to him the importance of the mixture of ranks
and classes in common pursuits, and he records with admiration instances
of the younger sons of peers of the realm following trade. ‘Whoever
arrives in Paris from the depths of a remote province with money to
spend and a name in _ac_ or _ille_, can talk about a man like me, a man
of my quality,’[49] and hold a merchant in sovereign contempt. The
merchant again so constantly hears his business spoken of with disdain
that he is fool enough to blush for it; yet I am not sure which is the
more useful to a state, a thickly-bepowdered lord who knows exactly what
time the king rises and what time he goes to bed, and gives himself
mighty airs of greatness while he plays the part of a slave in a
minister’s ante-room; or the merchant who enriches his country, gives
orders from his counting-house at Surat or Cairo, and contributes to
the happiness of the globe.[50] It is easy to conceive the fury which
these contrasts drawn from English observation would excite among the
personages in France who happened to get the worst side in them, and
there was assuredly nothing surprising in the decree of the Parliament
of Paris (1734), which condemned the Letters on the English to be
publicly burnt, as scandalous and contrary alike to good manners and the
respect due to principalities and powers.
The English reader of the Letters is naturally struck by the absence of
any adequate account of our political liberties and free constitutional
forms. There is a good chapter on Bacon, one on inoculation, and several
on the Quakers, but on the civil constitution hardly a word of large
appreciativeness. Not only this, but there is no sign that Voltaire
either set any due or special value on the popular forms of the
Hanoverian time, or clearly understood that the liberty, which was so
amazing and so precious to him in the region of speculative and literary
activity, was the direct fruit of that general spirit of freedom, which
is naturally engendered in a people accustomed to take an active part in
the conduct of its own affairs. Liberty in spirituals was adorable to
him, but for liberty in temporals he never seems to have had more than a
very distant and verbal kind of respect; just because, with all his
unmatched keenness of sight, he failed to discover that the English
sturdiness in the matter of civil rights was the very root and cause,
not only of that material prosperity which struck him so much, and of
the slightness and movableness of the line which divided the aristocracy
from the commercial classes, but also of the fact that a Newton and a
Locke were inwardly emboldened to give free play to their intelligence
without fear of being punished for their conclusions, and of the only
less important fact that whatever conclusions speculative genius might
establish would be given to the world without interposition from any
court or university or official tribunal. Voltaire undoubtedly admired
the English for their parliament, because the material and superficial
advantages that delighted him were evidently due to the system, which
happened to be parliamentary. What we miss is any consciousness that
these advantages would not have been what they were, if they had been
conferred by an absolute sovereign; any recognition that political
activity throughout a nation works in a thousand indirect but most
potent ways, and is not more to be prized for this, than for its direct
and most palpable consequences. In one place, indeed, he mentions that
the honour paid to men of letters is due to the form of government, but
his language betrays a wholly inadequate and incorrect notion of the
true operation of the form of government. ‘There are in London,’ he
says, ‘about eight hundred people with the right of speaking in public,
and maintaining the interests of the nation. Some five or six thousand
pretend to the same honour in their turn. All the rest set themselves up
to judge these, and everybody can print what he thinks. So all the
nation is bound to instruct itself. All talk is about the governments of
Athens and Rome, and it becomes necessary to read the authors who have
discussed them. That naturally leads to love of polite learning.’[51]
This is to confound a very trivial accident of popular governments with
their essence. If culture thrives under them—a very doubtful position—it
is not because voters wish to understand the historical allusions of
candidates, but because the general stir and life of public activity
tends to commove the whole system. Political freedom does not produce
men of genius, but its atmosphere is more favourable than any other to
their making the best of their genius in the service of mankind.
Voltaire, in this as in too much besides, was content with a keen and
rapid glance at the surface. The reader may remember his story of
meeting a boatman one day on the Thames, who seeing that he was a
Frenchman, with a too characteristic kind of courtesy, took the
opportunity of bawling out, with the added emphasis of a round oath,
that he would rather be a boatman on the Thames than an archbishop in
France. The next day Voltaire saw his man in prison with irons on and
praying an alms from the passers-by, and so asked him whether he still
thought as scurvily of an archbishop in France. ‘Ah, sir,’ cried the
man, ‘what an abominable government! I have been carried off by force to
go and serve in one of the king’s ships in Norway. They take me from my
wife and my children, and lay me up in prison with irons on my legs
until the time for going on board, for fear I should run away.’ A
countryman of Voltaire’s confessed that he felt a splenetic joy that a
people who were constantly taunting the French with their servitude,
were in sooth just as much slaves themselves; but for my own part, says
Voltaire, I felt a humaner sentiment, I was afflicted at there being no
liberty on the earth.[52]
This is well enough as a comment on the abomination of impressment; yet
we feel that there is behind it, and not here only but generally in
Voltaire, a sort of confusion between two very distinct conceptions,
that both in his day and ever since have been equally designated by the
common name of civil liberty. The first of these ideas is a mere
privative, undoubtedly of sovereign importance, but still a privative,
and implies absence, more or less complete, of arbitrary control from
without, of interference with individual action by authority, of any
pretension on the part of any organised body to hinder any member of the
society from doing or abstaining from doing what may seem right in his
own eyes, provided he pays a corresponding respect to the freedom of his
fellows. Freedom in this sense Voltaire fully understood, and valued as
profoundly as it deserves to be valued. Political liberty, however, has
not only a meaning of abstention, but a meaning of participation. If in
one sense it is a sheer negative, and a doctrine of rights, in another
sense it is thoroughly positive, and a gospel of duties. The liberty
which has really made England what it so delighted and stimulated and
inflamed Voltaire to find her, has been quite as much of the second kind
as of the first; that liberty which consists in a national habit of
independent and watchful interest in the transaction of the national
affairs by the persons most concerned in them; in a general
consciousness of the duty of having some opinion on the business of the
state; in a recognition on the part of the government that the balance
of this opinion is necessary as a sanction to any policy, to which the
effective force of the state is applied. It is true that this public
participation in public concerns has sometimes been very dark and blind,
as it has often been in the highest degree enlightened, but for good or
for evil it has been the root of the matter.
The great Frenchmen, who have been most characteristically French, while
valuing all and envying many of the best products of our liberty, may be
said generally to have failed entirely to detect that the salt of
English character, in days when it had more robustness than we can see
just now, sprung from the double circumstance of every man being at
liberty to have, and being inclined to take the trouble to have, an
opinion about the method and doings of his government; and of so many
men being called upon in high capacity or low, in an important function
or an obscure one, to take an independent and free share in controlling
or initiating the doings of their government. Take Montesquieu, for
example. He came to England just when Voltaire quitted it, and studied
carefully those political facts which his countryman had so neglected.
Yet he saw no deeper into the spirit of our institutions than to fix on
the constitutional balance of powers as the great secret of our freedom
and order. And Montesquieu, in spite of this, was wiser than most of his
contemporaries, for he at least saw the worth of constitutional freedom,
if he failed to see other ingredients of still more importance. French
statesmen and publicists have been systematically blind to the great
truth that there is no royal road to national well-being, and that
nations will deliberately put away happiness from themselves, unless
such happiness comes to them in a given way. The Physiocrats, who were
with all their shortcomings the most nearly scientific social thinkers
France possessed, could rise to no higher conception of a national life
than the supreme authority of a wise and benevolent monarch, giving good
gifts to his subjects. Turgot, with all the breadth and sagacity of his
genius, when five-and-forty years after our present date he came into
power, austerely clung to the same disastrous idea of passing reasoned
laws, in the shape of the beneficial edicts of an absolute power.
Voltaire, in the same way, never rose above the simple political
conception of an eastern tale, a good-tempered despot with a sage
vizier. In politics, then, he failed to carry away from England the very
essence and principle of our institutions, with which it was so much
more important that his countrymen should be familiarised than that they
should follow inoculation.
It may at first sight be astonishing to find that, while Voltaire was
impressed only in a vague and general way with the free variety of
theological opinion which Protestantism had secured for England, the
sect which made a sort of mark on his mind was that which conceived the
idea that Christianity has after all something to do with the type and
example of Christ. We know how laughable and monstrous the Quaker scheme
has appeared to people who have been steeped from their youth upwards in
elaborate systems of abstruse metaphysical dogma, mystic ceremonies,
hierarchic ordering, and profuse condemnation of rival creeds.
Voltaire’s imagination was struck by a sect who professed to regard the
religion of Christ as a simple and austere discipline of life, who
repudiated ritual, and held war for the worst of anti-christian
practices. The forms and doctrines of the established church of the
country he would be likely to take merely for so much of the common form
of the national institutions. He would simply regard it as the English
way of narrowing the mind and consolidating the social order. Gibbon’s
famous sentence was not yet written, which described all religions as
equally true in the eyes of the people, equally false in the eyes of
the philosopher, and equally useful in the eyes of the magistrate. But
the idea was the idea of the century, and Voltaire would justly look
upon the Anglican profession as a temporarily useful and statesmanlike
settlement. He praised its clergy for the superior regularity of their
manners. ‘That indefinable being, who is neither ecclesiastic nor
secular, in a word, who is called _abbé_, is an unknown species in
England; the clergy here are all prigs, and nearly all pedants. When
they learn that in France young men notorious for their debauchery, and
raised to preferment by the intrigues of women, pursue their amours
publicly, amuse themselves by the composition of gallant verses, give
everyday prolonged and luxurious suppers, and rise from them to implore
the enlightenment of the holy spirit, boldly calling themselves the
successors of the apostles—why, then our English thank God that they are
Protestants.’[53]
If, however, in face of a young and lively French graduate, bawling
theology in the schools in the morning and in the evening singing tender
songs with the ladies, an Anglican divine is a very Cato, this Cato is a
downright gallant before a Scotch presbyterian, who assumes a grave step
and a sour mien, preaches from the nose, and gives the name of harlot of
Babylon to all churches in which some of the ecclesiastics are so
fortunate as to receive an income of fifty thousand livres a year.
However, each man takes whatever road to heaven he pleases. If there
were one religion in England, they would have to fear its despotism; if
there were only two, they would cut one another’s throats; but there are
thirty; so they live peaceably and happily together.[54]
In the Quakers Voltaire saw something quite different from the purely
political pretensions and internecine quarrels of doctrine of the
ordinary worldly sects. It is impossible to say how much of the
kindliness with which he speaks of them is due to real admiration of
their simple, dignified, and pacific life, and how much to a mischievous
desire to make their praise a handle for the dispraise of overweening
competitors. On the whole there is a sincerity and heartiness of
interest in his long account of this sect, which persuades one that he
was moved by a genuine sympathy with a religion that could enjoin the
humane and peaceful and spiritual precepts of Christ, while putting away
baptism, ceremonial communion, and hierophantic orders. The nobility of
the social theories of the Society of Friends would naturally stir
Voltaire even more deeply than their abstention from practices that were
in his eyes degrading superstitions. He felt that the repugnance to
lower the majesty of their deity, by taking his name upon their lips as
solemn ratification of their words, had the effect of elevating the
dignity of man, by making his bare word fully credible without this
solemn ratification. Their refusal to comply with the deferential usages
of social intercourse, though nominally based on the sinfulness of
signs of homage to any mere mortal, insinuated a consciousness of
equality and self-respect in that mere mortal who was careful to make no
bows and to keep his hat on in every presence. Above all, Voltaire, who
was nowhere more veritably modern or better entitled to our veneration
than by reason of his steadfast hatred of war, revered a sect so far
removed from the brutality of the military régime as to hold peace for a
first principle of the Christian faith and religious practice. The
reason why we do not go to war, his Quaker says, is not that we are
afraid of death, but because we are not wolves, nor tigers, nor dogs,
but Christian men. ‘Our God, who has bidden us love our enemies and
suffer evil without complaint, assuredly has no mind that we should
cross the sea to go and cut the throats of our brothers, because
murderers in red clothes and hats two feet high enlist citizens, making
a noise with two little sticks on an ass’s skin tightly stretched. And
when, after victories won, all London blazes with illuminations, the sky
is aflame with rockets, and the air resounds with the din of bells,
organs, cannon, we mourn in silence over the slaughter that causes all
the public joy.’[55]
Voltaire, let us add, was no dilettante traveller constructing views and
deducing theories of national life out of his own uninstructed
consciousness. No German could have worked more diligently at the facts,
and we may say here, once for all, that if it is often necessary to
condemn him for superficiality, this lack of depth seldom at any time
proceeds from want of painstaking. His unrivalled brilliance of
expression blinds us to the extreme and conscientious industry that
provided matter. The most illustrious exile that our free land has
received from France in our own times, and assuredly far more of a giant
in the order of imagination than Voltaire, never had intellectual
curiosity enough to learn the language of the country that had given him
twenty years of shelter. Voltaire, in the few months of his exile here
acquired such an astonishing mastery over English as to be able to read
and relish an esoteric book like Hudibras, and to compass the enormously
difficult feat of rendering portions of it into good French verse.[56] He
composed an essay on epic poetry in the English tongue, and he wrote one
act of Brutus in English.
He read Shakespeare, and made an elaborate study of his method. He
declares that Milton does as much honour to England as the great Newton,
and he took especial pains not only to master and appreciate the secret
of Milton’s poetic power, but even to ascertain the minutest
circumstances of his life.[57] He studied Dryden, ‘an author who would
have a glory without blemish, if he had only written the tenth part of
his works.’[58] He found Addison the first Englishman who had written a
reasonable tragedy, and Addison’s character of Cato one of the finest
creations of any stage.[59] Wycherley, Vanbrugh, and Congreve he
esteemed more highly than most of their countrymen do now. An act of a
play of Lillo’s was the base of the fourth act of Mahomet. Rochester,
Waller, Prior, and Pope, he read carefully and admired as heartily as
they deserved. Long after he had left England behind, he places Pope and
Addison on a level for variety of genius with Machiavel and Leibnitz and
Fontenelle;[60] and Pope he evidently for a long while kept habitually
by his elbow. Swift he placed before Rabelais, calling him Rabelais in
his senses, and, as usual, giving good reasons for his preference; for
Swift, he says justly, has not the gaiety of Rabelais, but he has all
the finesse, the sense, the variety, the fine taste, in which the priest
of Meudon was wanting.[61] In philosophy, besides Locke, there is
evidence that he read something of Hobbes, and something of Berkeley,
and something of Cudworth.[62] Always, however, ‘harassed, wearied,
ashamed of having sought so many truths and found so many chimeras, I
returned to Locke; like a prodigal son returning to his father, I threw
myself into the arms of that modest man, who never pretends to know what
he does not know, who in truth has no enormous possessions, but whose
substance is well assured.’[63]
Nor did Voltaire limit himself to the study of science, philosophy, and
poetry. He plunged into the field of theology, and mastered that famous
deistical controversy, of which the seed had been sown in the first half
of the seventeenth century by Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the
correspondent of Descartes and the earliest of the English metaphysical
thinkers.[64] Lord Herbert’s object was to disengage from revelation
both our conceptions of the one supreme power, and the sanctions of good
and bad conduct. Toland, whom we know also that Voltaire read, aimed at
disengaging Christianity from mystery, and discrediting the canon of the
New Testament. In 1724 Collins published his Discourse on the Grounds
and Reasons of the Christian Religion, of which we are told that few
books ever made a greater noise than this did at its first publication.
The press teemed with vindications, replies, and rejoinders to Collins’s
arguments during the whole of Voltaire’s residence in England.[65] His
position was one which no modern free-thinker would dream of making a
central point of attack, and which hardly any modern apologist would
take the pains to reply to. He maintained that Jesus Christ and the
apostles trusted to the prophecies of the Old Testament for their
credentials, and then he showed, or tried to show, in various ways,
that these prophecies would not bear the weight which was thus laid upon
them. We may be sure that Voltaire’s alert curiosity would interest him
profoundly in the lively polemical ferment which this notable contention
of Collins’s stirred up.
Woolston’s discourses, written to prove that the miracles of the New
Testament are as mythical and allegorical as the prophecies of the old,
appeared at the same time, and had an enormous sale. Voltaire was much
struck by this writer’s coarse and hardy way of dealing with the
miraculous legends, and the article on Miracles in the Philosophical
Dictionary shows how carefully he had read Woolston’s book.[66] We find
references to Shaftesbury and Chubb in Voltaire’s letters and elsewhere,
though they are not the references of an admirer,[67] and Bolingbroke
was one of the most influential and intimate of his friends. It is not
too much to say that Bolingbroke was the direct progenitor of Voltaire’s
opinions in religion, and that nearly every one of the positive articles
in Voltaire’s rather moderately sized creed was held and inculcated by
that brilliant and disordered genius. He did not always accept
Bolingbroke’s optimism, but even as late in the century as 1767 Voltaire
thought it worth while to borrow his name for a volume of compendious
attack on the popular religion.[68] Bolingbroke’s tone was peculiarly
light and peculiarly well-bred. His infidelity was strictly infidelity
for the upper classes;[69] ingenious, full of literature, and elegantly
supercilious. He made no pretence to theological criticism in any sense
that can be gravely admitted, but looked at the claims of revelation
with the eye of a polished man of the world, and met its arguments with
those general considerations of airy probability which go so far with
men who insist on having plausible opinions on all subjects, while they
will not take pains to work to the bottom of any.
Villemain’s observation that there is not one of Voltaire’s writings
that does not bear the mark of his sojourn in England, is specially true
of what he wrote against theology. It was the English onslaught which
sowed in him the seed of the idea, and eventually supplied him with the
argumentative instruments, of a systematic and reasoned attack upon that
mass of doctrinal superstition and social abuse, which it had hitherto
been the fashion for even the strongest spirits in his own country to do
no more than touch with a cool sneer or a flippant insinuation, directed
to the private ear of a sympathiser. Who, born within the last forty
years, cried Burke, has read one word of Collins, and Toland, and Chubb,
and Morgan, and that whole race who called themselves Freethinkers? Who
now reads Bolingbroke? Who ever read him through?[70] This was very
well, but hundreds of thousands of persons born within those last forty
years had read Voltaire, and Voltaire had drawn from the armoury of
these dead and unread Freethinkers the weapons which he made sharp with
the mockery of his own spirit. He stood on the platform which they had
constructed, to stretch forth his hand against the shrine and the image
before which so many credulous generations had bowed down. It was in
this most transformed shape among others that at length, late and
changed, but directly of descent, the free and protesting genius of the
Reformation made its decisive entry into France.
It is easy to cite proofs of the repudiation by Protestant bodies of the
Protestant principle, to multiply instances of the narrow rigidity of
their dogma, and the intolerance of their discipline. This method
supplies an excellent answer as against Protestants who tax Catholics
with the crime of persecution, or the crime of opposing intellectual
independence. It cannot, however, touch the fact that Protestantism was
indirectly the means of creating and dispersing an atmosphere of
rationalism, in which there speedily sprang up philosophical,
theological, and political influences, all of them entirely antagonistic
to the old order of thought and institution. The whole intellectual
temperature underwent a permanent change, that was silently mortal to
the most flourishing tenets of all sorts. It is futile to ask for a
precise logical chain of relations between the beginning of a movement
and its end; and there is no more direct and logical connection between
the right of private judgment and an experiential doctrine of
psychology, than there is between experiential psychology and deism.
Nobody now thinks that the effect is homogeneous with its cause, or that
there is any objective resemblance between a blade of wheat and the
moisture and warmth which fill and expand it. All we can see is that the
proclamation of the rights of free judgment would tend to substitute
reason for authority, and evidence for tradition, as the arbiters of
opinion; and that the political expression of this change in the civil
wars of the middle of the seventeenth century would naturally deepen the
influence of the new principle, and produce the Lockian rationalism of
the end of that century, which almost instantaneously extended from the
region of metaphysics into the region of theology.
The historian of every kind of opinion, and the student of the great
chiefs of intellectual movements, habitually do violence to actual
circumstances, by imparting too systematic a connection to the various
parts of belief, and by assuming an unreal degree of conscious logical
continuity among the notions of individual thinkers. Critics fill in the
frame with a completeness and exactitude that had no counterpart in the
man’s own judgments, and they identify him with a multitude of
deductions from his premisses, which may be fairly drawn, but which
never at all entered into his mind, and formed no part of his character.
The philosophy of the majority of men is nothing more shaped and
incorporate than a little group of potential and partially incoherent
tendencies. To stiffen these into a system of definite formulas is the
most deceptive, as it is the most common, of critical processes. A few
persons, with an exceptional turn for philosophy, consciously embody
their metaphysical principles with a certain detail in all the rest of
their thinking. With most people, however, even people of superior
capacity, the relation between their ground-system, such as a critic
might supply them with, and their manifestations of intellectual
activity, is of an extremely indirect and general kind.
Hence the untrustworthiness of those critical schemata, so attractive
for their compact order, which first make Voltaire a Lockian
sensationalist, and then trace his deism to his sensationalism. We have
already seen that he was a deist before he came to England, just as Lord
Herbert of Cherbury was a deist, who wrote before Locke was born. It was
not the metaphysical revolution of Locke which led to deism, but the
sort of way in which he thought about metaphysics, a way which was
immediately applied to theology by other people, whether assailants or
defenders of the current opinions. Locke’s was ‘common-sense thinking,’
and the fashion spread. The air was thick with common-sense objections
to Christianity, as it was with common-sense ideas as to the way in
which we come to have ideas. There was no temperament to which such an
atmosphere could be so congenial as Voltaire’s, of whom we cannot too
often repeat, considering the vulgar reputation he has for violence and
excess, that he was in thought the very genius of good sense, whether or
no we fully admit M. Cousin’s qualification of it as superficial good
sense. It has been said that he always speaks of Descartes, Leibnitz,
and Spinoza, like a man to whom nature has refused the metaphysical
sense.[71] At any rate he could never agree with them, and he never
tried to find truth by the roads which they had made. It is true,
however, that he shows no sign of special fitness for metaphysics, any
more than he did for physical science. The metaphysics of Locke lay
undeveloped in his mind, just as the theory of evolution lies in so many
minds at the present time. There is a faint informal reference of other
theories to this central and half-seen standard. When metaphysical
subjects came before him, he felt that he had this for a sheet-anchor,
and he did not greatly care to keep proving it again and again by
continued criticism or examination. The upshot of his acquaintance with
Locke was a systematic adherence to common-sense modes of thinking; and
he always betrayed the faults and shortcomings to which such modes
inevitably lead, when they are brought, to the exclusion of
complementary ideas, to the practical subjects that comprehend more than
prudence, self-interest, and sobriety. The subject that does beyond any
other comprehend more than these elements is religion, and the
substantial vices of Voltaire’s objections to religion first arose from
his familiarity with the English form of deism, and his instinctive
feeling for its method.
The deism of Leibnitz was a positive belief, and made the existence of a
supreme power an actual and living object of conviction. The mark of
this belief has remained on German speculation throughout its course,
down to our own day. English deism, on the contrary, was only a
particular way of repudiating Christianity. There was as little of God
in it as could well be. Its theory was that God had given each man the
light of reason in his own breast; that by this reason every scheme of
belief must be tried, and accepted or rejected; and that the Christian
scheme being so tried was in various ways found wanting. The formula of
some book of the eighteenth century, that God created nature and nature
created the world, must be allowed to have reduced theistic conception
to something like the shadow of smoke. The English eighteenth-century
formula was, theistically, nearly as void. The Being who set the reason
of each individual on a kind of judicial bench within the forum of his
own conscience, and left him and it together to settle belief and
conduct between them, was a tolerably remote and unreal sort of
personage. His spiritual force, according to such a doctrine, became
very much as if it had no existence.
It was not to be expected that a sovereign dwelling in such amazingly
remote lands as this would continue long with undisputed authority, when
all the negative forces of the time had reached their full momentum. In
England the reaction against this strange absentee government of the
universe took the form which might have been anticipated from the deep
hold that Protestantism had won, and the spirituality which had been
engendered by Protestant reference to the relations between the
individual conscience and the mystic operations of faith. Deism became a
reality with a God in it in the great Evangelical revival, terrible and
inevitable, which has so deeply coloured religious feeling and warped
intellectual growth in England ever since. In France, thought took a
very different and much simpler turn. Or perhaps it would be more
correct to say that it took no turn at all, but carried the godless
deism of the English school to its fair conclusion, and dismissed a
deity who only reigned and did not govern. The whole movement had a
single origin. There is not one of the arguments of the French
philosophers in the eighteenth century, says a very competent authority,
which cannot be found in the English school of the beginning of the
century.[72] Voltaire, who carried the English way of thinking about the
supernatural power into France, lived to see a band of trenchant and
energetic disciples develop principles which he had planted, into a
system of dogmatic atheism. The time came when he was spoken of
contemptuously as retrograde and superstitious: ‘_Voltaire est bigot, il
est déiste_.’