CHAPTER III.

LITERATURE.

On the whole, the critic’s task is perhaps less to classify a type of

character as good or bad, as worthy of so much praise or so much

censure, than to mark the material out of which a man has his life to

make, and the kind of use and form to which he puts his material. To

begin with, the bald division of men into sheep and goats is in one

sense so easy as not to be worth performing, and in another sense it is

so hard as only to be possible for some being with supernatural insight.

And even were the qualities employed in the task of a rarer kind than

they are, the utility of the performance is always extremely slight,

compared with that other kind of criticism which dwells less on the

final balance of good or evil, than on the first innate conditions of

temperament, the fixed limitations of opportunity, and the complex

interplay of the two with that character, which is first their creature

and then their master. It is less the concern of criticism to pronounce

its man absolutely rich or absolutely poor, than to count up his talents

and the usury of his own which he added to them. Assuredly there ought

to be little condonation of the foibles, and none at all of the moral

obliquities, of the dead, because this would mean the demoralisation of

the living. But it is seriously to overrate the power of bald words and

written opinion, to suppose that a critic’s censure of conduct which a

thousand other agents, from the child’s hornbook up to the obvious and

pressing dictates of social convenience, are daily and hourly

prescribing, can be other than a work of supererogation, which fixes the

mind on platitudes, instead of leading it on in search of special and

distinctive traits.

It would be easy to pour overflowing vials of condemnation on many sides

of Voltaire’s character and career. No man possessed of so much good

sense ever fell so constantly into the kinds of error against which good

sense particularly warns men. There is no more wearisome or pitiful leaf

in the biographies of the great, than the tale of Voltaire’s quarrels

with ignoble creatures; with a wrecked soul, like J. B. Rousseau (whom

the reader will not confound with Jean Jacques); with a thievish

bookseller, like Jore; with a calumnious journalist, like Desfontaines;

with a rapacious knave like Hirschel; and all the other tormentors in

the Voltairean history, whose names recall vulgar, dishonest, and

indignant pertinacity on the one side, and wasteful, undignified fury on

the other. That lesson in the art of life which concerns a man’s

dealings with those who have shown patent moral inferiority, was never

mastered by Voltaire. Instead of the silence, composure, and austere

oblivion, which it is of the essence of strength to oppose to unworthy

natures, he habitually confronted the dusty creeping things that beset

his march, as if they stood valiant and erect; and the more unworthy

they were, the more vehement and strenuous and shrill was his contention

with them. The ignominy of such strife is clear. One thing only may

perhaps be said. His intense susceptibility to vulgar calumny flowed

from the same quality in his nature which made unbearable to him the

presence of superstition and injustice, those mightier calumnies on

humanity. The irritated protests against the small foes of his person

were as the dregs of potent wine, and were the lower part of that

passionate sensibility which made him the assailant of the giant

oppressors of the human mind. This reflection does not make any less

tedious to us the damnable iteration of petty quarrel and fretting

complaint which fills such a space in his correspondence and in his

biographies, nor does it lessen our regret at the havoc which this fatal

defect of his qualities made with his contentedness. We think of his

consolation to a person as susceptible as himself: ‘There have always

been Frérons in literature; but they say there must be caterpillars for

nightingales to eat, that they may sing the better:’ and we wish that

our nightingale had devoured its portion with something less of tumult.

But it may do something to prevent us from giving a prominence, that is

both unfair and extremely misleading, to mere shadow, as if that had

been the whole substance. Alas, why after all should men, from Moses

downwards, be so cheerfully ready to contemplate the hinder parts of

their divinities?

The period of twenty years between Voltaire’s departure from England and

his departure for Berlin, although often pronounced the happiest time of

his life, is very thickly set with these humiliating incidents. To us,

however, they are dead, because though vivid enough to Voltaire—and it

is strange how constantly it happens that the minor circumstance of life

is more real and ever-present to a man than his essential and abiding

work in it—they were but transitory and accidental. Just as it does

little good to the understanding to spend much time over tenth-rate

literature, so it is little edifying to the character to rake among the

private obscurities of even first-rate men, and it is surely a good rule

to keep ourselves as much as we can in contact with what is great.

The chief personal fact of this time was the connection which Voltaire

formed with the Marquise du Châtelet, and which lasted from 1733 to

1749. She was to him that important and peculiar influence which, in one

shape or another, some woman seems to have been to nearly every foremost

man. In Voltaire’s case this influence was not the rich and tender

inspiration with which women have so many a time sweetened the lives and

glorified the thought of illustrious workers, nor was he bound to her

by those bonds of passion which have often the effect of exalting the

strength and widening the range of the whole of the nature that is

susceptive of passion. Their inner relations hardly depended on anything

more extraordinary or more delicate than the sentiment of a masculine

friendship. Voltaire found in the divine Emily a strong and active head,

a keen and generous admiration for his own genius, and an eagerness to

surround him with the external conditions most favourable to that steady

industry which was always a thing so near his own heart. They are two

great men, one of whom wears petticoats, said Voltaire of her and of

Frederick. It is impossible to tell what share vanity had in the

beginning of a connection, which probably owed its long continuance more

to use and habit than to any deep-rooted sentiment. Vanity was one of

the most strongly marked of Voltaire’s traits, and to this side of him

relations with a woman of quality who adored his genius were no doubt

extremely gratifying. Yet one ought to do him the justice to say that

his vanity was only skin-deep. It had nothing in common with the greedy

egotism which reduces the whole broad universe to a mere microcosm of

pygmy self. The vanity which discloses a real flaw in character is a

loud and tyrannical claim for acknowledgment of literary supremacy, and

with it the mean vices of envy, jealousy, and detraction are usually in

company. Voltaire’s vanity was something very different from this

truculent kind of self-assertion. It had a source in his intensely

sympathetic quality, and was a gay and eager asking of assurance from

others that his work gave them pleasure. Let us be very careful to

remember that it never stood in the way of self-knowledge,—the great

test of the difference between the vanity that is harmless, and the

vanity that is fatuous and destructive.

It has been rather the fashion to laugh at the Marquise du Châtelet, for

no better reasons perhaps than that she, being a woman, studied Newton,

and had relations called tender with a man so little associated in

common opinion with tenderness as Voltaire. The first reason is

disgraceful, and the second is perhaps childish. Everything goes to show

that Madame du Châtelet possessed a hardy originality of character, of

which society is so little likely to have an excess that we can hardly

ever be thankful enough for it. There is probably nothing which would

lead to so rapid and marked an improvement in the world, as a large

increase of the number of women in it with the will and the capacity to

master Newton as thoroughly as she did. And her long and sedulous

affection for a man of genius of Voltaire’s exceptional quality,

entitles her to the not too common praise of recognising and revering

intellectual greatness as it deserves. Her friendship for him was not

the semi-servile and feebly intelligent solicitude which superior men

have too often the wretched weakness to seek in their female companions,

but an imperial sympathy. She was unamiable, it is true, and possessed

neither the delicacy which a more fastidious age requires in a woman,

nor the sense of honour which we now demand in a man. These defects,

however, were not genuinely personal, but lay in the manners of the

time. It was not so with all her faults. To the weak and dependent she

was overbearing, harsh, mean, and even cruel. A fatuous caprice would

often destroy the domestic peace and pleasure of a week. But nothing was

suffered to impede the labour of a day. The industry of the house was

incessant.

It is said, and it was said first by one who lived with them for some

time, and has left a graphic account of the interior of Cirey, that she

made Voltaire’s life a little hard to him.[73] There were many

occasional storms and short sullen fits even in these high regions of

science and the finer tastes. Yet such stormful scenes, with great

actors as with small, are perhaps more painful in description than they

were in reality; and Voltaire was less discomposed by the lively

impetuosity of a companion like Madame du Châtelet, than he would have

been by the orderly calm of a more precise and perfectly well-regulated

person. A man follows the conditions of his temperament, and Voltaire’s

unresting animation and fire might make him feel a certain joy of life

and freedom in the occasional contentiousness of a slightly shrewish

temper. We cannot think of him as ever shrinking, ever craving for

repose, as some men do as for a very necessity of existence. The health

of your friend, wrote Madame du Châtelet to D’Argental in 1739, is in so

deplorable a state that the only hope I have left of restoring it is in

the turmoil of a journey[74]. A tolerably frequent agitation was a

condition of even such health as he had, to one of Voltaire’s nervous

and feverish habit.

Let it be said that his restlessness never took a form which involved a

sacrifice of the happiness of other people. It was never tyrannical and

exigent. There are many, too many, instances of his angry impatience

with persons against whom he thought he had cause of offence. There is

not a single instance in which any shadow of implacableness lurked for

an enemy who had repented or fallen into misfortune; and if his

resentment was constantly aflame against the ignoble, it instantly

expired and changed into warm-hearted pity, when the ignoble became

either penitent or miserable. There are many tales of the readiness with

which his anger was appeased. Any one will suffice as a type. On some

occasion when Voltaire was harassed by a storm of libels, and happened

to be on good terms with the police, a distributor of the libels was

arrested. The father, an old man of eighty, hastened to Voltaire to pray

for pardon. All Voltaire’s fury instantly vanished at the first appeal;

he wept with the old man, embraced him, consoled him, and straightway

ran to procure the liberation of the offender[75]. An eye-witness

related to Grimm how he happened to be present at Ferney when Voltaire

received Rousseau’s Lettres de la Montagne, and read the apostrophe

relating to himself. His face seemed to take fire, his eyes sparkled

with fury, his whole frame trembled, and he cried in terrible tones—‘The

miscreant! the monster! I must have him cudgelled—yes, I will have him

cudgelled in his mountains at the knees of his nurse.’ ‘Pray, calm

yourself,’ said the bystander, ‘for I know that Rousseau means to pay

you a visit, and will very shortly be at Ferney.’ ‘Ah, only let him

come,’ replied Voltaire. ‘But how will you receive him?’ ‘Receive him

... I will give him supper, put him in my own bed, and say, There is a

good supper; this is the best bed in the house; do me the pleasure to

accept one and the other, and to make yourself happy here[76].’ One does

not understand the terrible man, without remembering always how much of

the hot generosity of the child he kept in his nature to the last. When

the very Jesuits were suppressed with circumstances of extreme

harshness, he pitied even them, and took one of their number permanently

into his household[77].

The most important part of a man’s private conduct after that which

concerns his relations with women and his family, is generally that

which concerns his way of dealing with money, because money in its

acquisition and its dispersion is the outward and visible sign of the

absence or of the presence of so many inward and spiritual graces. As

has often been said, it is the measure of some of the most important of

a man’s virtues, his honesty, his industry, his generosity, his

self-denial, and most of the other elements in keeping the difficult

balance between his care for himself and his care for other people.

Voltaire perceived very early in life that to be needy was to be

dependent; that the rich and poor are as hammer and anvil; that the

chronicles of genius demonstrate that it is not by genius that men

either make a fortune or live happy lives. He made up his mind from the

beginning that the author of the French epic would not share the poverty

and straitened lives of Tasso and Milton, and that he for his part would

at any rate be hammer and not anvil.[78] I was so wearied, he wrote in

1752, of the humiliations that dishonour letters, that to stay my

disgust I resolved to make what scoundrels call a great fortune.[79] He

used to give his books away to the printers. He had a small fortune from

his father; he is said to have made two thousand pounds by the English

subscriptions to the Henriade; and he did not hide his talent in the

ground, but resorted skilfully to all sorts of speculations in stocks,

army contracts, and other authorised means of converting one livre into

two while you sleep. He lent large sums of money, presumably at handsome

interest, to the Duke of Richelieu and others, and though the interest

may have been handsome, the trouble of procuring it was often

desperate.[80] Yet after much experience Voltaire came to the conclusion

that though he had sometimes lost money by bankers, by the devout, by

the people of the Old Testament, who would have had many scruples about

a larded capon, who would rather die than not be idle on the sabbath,

and not be thieving on the Sunday, yet he had lost nothing by the great

except his time.[81]

It is easy to point a sneer at a high priest of humanity jobbing in the

funds. Only let us remember that Voltaire never made any pretence of

being a high priest of humanity; that his transactions were

substantially very like those of any banker or merchant of to-day; and

that for a man who was preaching new opinions it was extremely prudent

to place himself out of the necessity of pleasing booksellers or the pit

of the theatre on the one hand, and on the other to supply himself with

ready means of frequent flight from the ceaseless persecutions of

authority. Envious scribes in his lifetime taunted him with avarice, and

the evil association still clings to his memory now that he is dead.

One can only say that good and high-minded men, who never shrank from

withstanding him when in fault, men like Condorcet for example, heard

such talk with disdain, and set it down to the disgraceful readiness of

men to credit anything that relieves them from having to admire[82]. The

people who dislike prudence in matters of money in those whose

distinction is intellectual or spiritual, resemble a sentimental lover

who should lose his illusions at sight of his mistress eating a hearty

meal. Is their lot, then, cast in the ethereal fluid of the interstellar

spaces?

At all events Voltaire had two important gifts which do not commonly

belong to the avaricious; he was a generous helper alike of those who

had, and those who had not, a claim upon him, and he knew how to bear

serious losses with unbroken composure. Michel, the receiver-general,

became bankrupt, and Voltaire lost a considerable sum of money in

consequence. His fluency of invective and complaint, which was simply

boundless when any obscure scribbler earned a guinea by a calumny upon

him, went no farther on the occasion of this very substantial injury

than a single splenetic phrase, and a harmless quatrain:

Michel au nom de l’Eternel,

Mit jadis le diable en déroute;

Mais, après cette banqueroute,

Que le diable emporte Michel!

It has been fairly asked whether a genuine miser would content himself

with a stanza upon the man who had robbed him.[83] His correspondence

with the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha shows him declining to accept the

thousand louis, which she had sent as a fee for the composition of the

Annales de l’Empire.

Much has been made of the bargaining which he carried on with Frederick,

as to the terms on which he would consent to go to Berlin. But then the

Prussian king was not one with whom it was wise to be too nice in such

affairs. He was the thriftiest of men, and as a king is a person who

lives on other people’s money, such thrift was in his case the most

princely of virtues. Haggling is not graceful, but it need not imply

avarice in either of the parties to it. The truth is that there was in

Voltaire a curious admixture of splendid generosity with virulent

tenacity about half-pence. The famous quarrel with the President de

Brosses about the fourteen cords of firewood is a worse affair.

Voltaire, who leased Tourney from him, insisted that De Brosses had made

him a present of the fourteen cords. De Brosses, no doubt truly,

declared that he had only ordered the wood to be delivered on Voltaire’s

account. On this despicable matter a long correspondence was carried on,

in which Voltaire is seen at his very worst; insolent, undignified,

low-minded, and untruthful.[84] The case happily stands alone in his

biography. As a rule, he is a steady practitioner of the Aristotelian

μεγαλοπρέπεια, or virtue of magnificent expenditure.

The truly important feature of the life which Voltaire led at Cirey was

its unremitting diligence. Like a Homeric goddess, the divine Emily

poured a cloud round her hero. There is a sort of moral climate in a

household, an impalpable, unseizable, indefinable set of influences,

which predispose the inmates to industry and self-control, or else relax

fibre and slacken purpose. At Cirey there was an almost monastic rule.

Madame Grafigny says that though Voltaire felt himself bound by

politeness to pay her a visit from time to time in her apartment, he

usually avoided sitting down, apologetically protesting how frightful a

thing is the quantity of time people waste in talking, and that waste of

time is the most fatal kind of extravagance of which one can be

guilty[85]. He seems to have usually passed the whole day at his desk,

or in making physical experiments in his chamber. The only occasion on

which people met was at the supper at nine in the evening. Until then

the privacy of the chamber alike of the hostess, who was analysing

Leibnitz or translating Newton, and of the unofficial host, who was

compiling material for the Siècle de Louis XIV., or polishing and

repolishing Mahomet, or investigating the circumstances of the

propagation of fire, was sacredly inviolable.

The rigour of the rule did not forbid theatrical performances, when any

company, even a company of marionettes, came into the neighbourhood of

the desolate Champagne château. Sometimes after supper Voltaire would

exhibit a magic lantern, with explanatory comments after the showman’s

manner, in which he would convulse his friends at the expense of his

enemies.[86] But after the evening’s amusement was over, the Marquise

would retire to work in her chamber until the morning, and, when morning

came, a couple of hours’ sleep was the only division between the tasks

of the night and the tasks of the day. Two splenetic women have left us

a couple of spiteful pictures of Madame du Châtelet, but neither of her

detractors could rise to any higher conception of intellectual effort

than the fine turn of phrase, the ingenious image, the keen thrust of

cruel satire, with which the polished idle of that day whiled away

dreary and worthless years. The translator of Newton’s Principia was not

of this company, and she was wholly indifferent to the raillery,

sarcasm, and hate of women whom she justly held her inferiors. It is

much the fashion to admire the women of this time, because they contrive

to hide behind a veil of witty words the coldness and hollowness of

lives which had neither the sweetness of the old industrious domesticity

of women, nor the noble largeness of some of those in whom the

Revolution kindled a pure fire of patriotism in after days. Madame du

Châtelet, with all her faults, was a far loftier character than the

malicious gossips who laughed at her. ‘Everything that occupies society

was within her power, _except slander_. She was never heard to hold up

anybody to laughter. When she was informed that certain people were bent

on not doing her justice, she would reply that she wished to ignore it.’

This was surely better than a talent for barbing epigrams, and she led a

worthier life at Cirey than in that Paris which Voltaire described so

bitterly.

Là, tous les soirs, la troupe vagabonde,

D’un peuple oisif, appelé le beau monde,

Va promener de réduit en réduit

L’inquiétude et l’ennui qui la suit.

Là sont en foule antiques mijaurées,

Jeunes oisons et bégueules titrées,

Disant des riens d’un ton de perroquet,

Lorgnant des sots, et trichant au piquet.

Blondins y sont, beaucoup plus femmes qu’elles,

Profondément remplis de bagatelles,

D’un air hautain, d’une bruyante voix,

Chantant, dansant, minaudant à la fois.

Si par hasard quelque personne honnête,

D’un sens plus droit et d’un goût plus heureux,

Des bons écrits ayant meublé sa tête,

Leur fait l’affront de penser à leurs yeux;

Tout aussitôt leur brillante cohue,

D’etonnement et de colère émue,

Bruyant essaim de frélons envieux,

Pique et poursuit cette abeille charmante[87].

It was not the fault of Madame du Châtelet that the life of Cirey was

not the undisturbed type of Voltaire’s existence during the fifteen

years of their companionship. Many pages might be filled with a mere

list of the movements from place to place to which Voltaire resorted,

partly from reasonable fear of the grip of a jealous and watchful

government, partly from eagerness to bring the hand of the government

upon his enemies, and most of all from the uncontrollable restlessness

of his own nature. Amsterdam, the Hague, Brussels, Berlin, the little

court of Lunéville, and the great world of Paris, too frequently

withdrew him from the solitary castle at Cirey, though he never failed

to declare on his return, and with perfect sincerity, that he was never

so happy anywhere else. If it was true that the Marquise made her poet’s

life a little hard to him, it is impossible to read her correspondence

without perceiving that he, too, though for no lack of sensibility and

good feeling, often made life extremely hard for her. Besides their

moral difference, there was a marked discrepancy in intellectual

temperament, which did not fail to lead to outward manifestations.

Voltaire was sometimes a little weary of Newton and exact science, while

the Marquise was naturally of the rather narrow turn for arid truths

which too often distinguishes clever women inadequately disciplined by

contact with affairs. She and Voltaire both competed for a prize offered

by the Academy for essays on the propagation of fire (1737). Neither of

them was successful, for the famous Euler was a competitor. The second

and third prizes were given to two obscurer persons, because their

essays were Cartesian, that is to say, they were scientifically

orthodox. The two philosophers of Cirey also took part, and on different

sides, in the obstinate physico-mathematical controversy which Leibnitz

had first raised towards the close of the seventeenth century, as to the

measure of moving forces[88]. The Marquise, under circumstances of

equivocal glory and with much angry buzzing, with which one has now no

concern[89], published her analysis of Leibnitz in 1740, and sided with

him against Newton and Descartes. In the notice which Voltaire wrote of

his friend’s book he gave a marvellously simple and intelligible account

of the issue of the special controversy of _vis viva_[90], but he

remained Newtonian, and in 1741 presented a paper to the Academy of

Sciences, disputing the Leibnitzian view[91].

Voltaire was not merely one of those ‘paper philosophers,’ whose

intrusion into the fields of physical science its professional followers

are justly wont to resent. He was an active experimenter, and more than

one letter remains, containing instructions to his agent in Paris to

forward him retorts, air-pumps, and other instruments, with the wise

hint in one place, a hint by no means of a miser, ‘In the matter of

buying things, my friend, you should always prefer the good and sound

even if a little dear, to what is only middling but cheaper[92].’ His

correspondence for some years proves the diligence and sincerity of his

interest in science. Yet it is tolerably clear that the man who did so

much to familiarise France with the most illustrious of physicists, was

himself devoid of true scientific aptitude. After long and persevering

labour in this region, Voltaire consulted Clairaut on the progress he

had made. The latter, with a loyal frankness which Voltaire knew how to

appreciate, answered that even with the most stubborn labour he was not

likely to attain to anything beyond mediocrity in science, and that he

would be only throwing away time which he owed to poetry and

philosophy.[93] The advice was taken; for, as we have already said,

Voltaire’s self-love was never fatuous, and the independent search of

physical truth was given up. There is plainly no reason to regret the

pains which Voltaire took in this kind of inquiry, not because the study

of the sciences extends the range of poetic study and enriches verse

with fresh images, but because the number of sorts of knowledge in which

a man feels at home and is intelligently cognisant of their scope and

issues, even if he be wholly incompetent to assist in the progress of

discovery, increases that intellectual confidence and self-respect of

understanding, which so fortifies and stimulates him in his own special

order of work. We cannot precisely contend that this encyclopædic

quality is an indispensable condition of such self-respect in every kind

of temper. It certainly was so with Voltaire. ‘After all, my dear

friend,’ he wrote to Cideville, ‘it is right to give every possible

form to our soul. It is a flame that God has intrusted to us, we are

bound to feed it with all that we find most precious. We should

introduce into our existence all imaginable modes, and open every door

of the soul to all sorts of knowledge and all sorts of feelings. So long

as it does not all go in pell-mell there is plenty of room for

everything.[94]

To us, who can be wise after the event, it is clear that if ever man was

called not to science, nor to poetry, nor to theology, nor to

metaphysics, but to literature, the art, so hard to define, of showing

the ideas of all subjects in the double light of the practical and the

spiritual reason, that man was Voltaire. He has himself dwelt on the

vagueness of this much-abused term, without contributing anything more

satisfactory towards a better account of it than a crude hint that

literature, not being a special art, may be considered a kind of larger

grammar of knowledge.[95] Although, however, it is true that literature

is not a particular art, it is not the less true that there is a mental

constitution particularly fitted for its successful practice. Literature

is essentially an art of form, as distinguished from those exercises of

intellectual energy which bring new stores of matter to the stock of

acquired knowledge, and give new forces to emotion and original and

definite articulation to passion. It is a misleading classification to

call the work of Shakespeare and Molière, Shelley and Hugo, literary,

just as it would be an equally inaccurate, though more glaring piece of

classification, to count the work of Newton or Locke literature. To take

another case from Voltaire, it would not be enough to describe Bayle’s

Dictionary as a literary compilation; it would not even be enough to

describe it as a work of immense learning, because the distinguishing

and superior mark of this book is a profound dialectic. It forms men of

letters and is above them.[96]

What is it then that literature brings to us, that earns its title to

high place, though far from a highest place, among the great humanizing

arts? Is it not that this is the master organon for giving men the two

precious qualities of breadth of interest and balance of judgment;

multiplicity of sympathies and steadiness of sight? Unhappily,

literature has too often been identified with the smirks and

affectations of mere elegant dispersiveness, with the hollow niceties of

the virtuoso, a thing of madrigals. It is not in any sense of this sort

that we can think of Voltaire as specially the born minister of

literature. What we mean is that while he had not the loftier endowments

of the highest poetic conception, subtle speculative penetration, or

triumphant scientific power, he possessed a superb combination of wide

and sincere curiosity, an intelligence of vigorous and exact

receptivity, a native inclination to candour and justice, and a

pre-eminent mastery over a wide range in the art of expression.

Literature being concerned to impose form, to diffuse the light by which

common men are able to see the great host of ideas and facts that do not

shine in the brightness of their own atmosphere, it is clear what

striking gifts Voltaire had in this way. He had a great deal of

knowledge, and he was ever on the alert both to increase and broaden his

stock, and, what was still better, to impart of it to everybody else. He

did not think it beneath him to write on Hemistichs for the

Encyclopædia. ’Tis not a very brilliant task, he said, but perhaps the

article will be useful to men of letters and amateurs; ‘one should

disdain nothing, and I will do the word Comma, if you choose.’[97] He

was very catholic in taste, being able to love Racine without ignoring

the lofty stature of Shakespeare. And he was free from the weakness

which so often attends on catholicity, when it is not supported by true

strength and independence of understanding; he did not shut his eyes to

the shortcomings of the great. While loving Molière, he was aware of the

incompleteness of his dramatic construction, as well as of the egregious

farce to which that famous writer too often descends.[98] His respect

for the sublimity and pathos of Corneille did not hinder him from noting

both his violence and his frigid argumentation.[99] Does the reader

remember that admirable saying of his to Vauvenargues; ‘_It is the part

of a man like you to have preferences, but no exclusions_?’[100] To this

fine principle Voltaire was usually thoroughly true, as every great

mind, if only endowed with adequate culture, must necessarily be.

Nul auteur avec lui n’a tort,

Quand il a trouvé l’art de plaire;

Il le critique sans colère,

Il l’applaudit avec transport.[101]

Thirdly, that circumfusion of bright light which is the highest aim of

speech, was easy to Voltaire, in whatever order of subject he happened

to treat. His style is like a translucent stream of purest mountain

water, moving with swift and animated flow under flashing sunbeams.

‘Voltaire,’ said an enemy, ‘is the very first man in the world at

writing down what other people have thought,’ What was meant for a

spiteful censure, was in fact a truly honourable distinction.

The secret is incommunicable. No spectrum analysis can decompose for us

that enchanting ray. It is rather, after all, the piercing metallic

light of electricity than a glowing beam of the sun. We can detect some

of the external qualities of this striking style. We seize its dazzling

simplicity, its almost primitive closeness to the letter, its sharpness

and precision, above all, its admirable brevity. We see that no writer

ever used so few words to produce such pregnant effects.[102] Those

whom brevity only makes thin and slight, may look with despair on pages

where the nimbleness of the sentence is in proportion to the firmness of

the thought. We find no bastard attempts to reproduce in words deep and

complex effects, which can only be adequately presented in colour or in

the combinations of musical sound. Nobody has ever known better the true

limitations of the material in which he worked, or the scope and

possibilities of his art. Voltaire’s alexandrines, his witty stories,

his mock-heroic, his exposition of Newton, his histories, his dialectic,

all bear the same mark, the same natural, precise, and condensed mode of

expression, the same absolutely faultless knowledge of what is proper

and permitted in every given kind of written work. At first there seems

something paradoxical in dwelling on the brevity of an author whose

works are to be counted by scores of volumes. But this is no real

objection. A writer may be insufferably prolix in the limits of a single

volume, and Voltaire was quite right in saying that there are four times

too many words in the one volume of D’Holbach’s System of Nature. He

maintains too that Rabelais might advantageously be reduced to

one-eighth, and Bayle to a quarter, and there is hardly a book that is

not curtailed in the perfecting hands of the divine muses.[103] So

conversely an author may not waste a word in a hundred volumes. Style is

independent of quantity, and the world suffers so grievously from the

mass of books that have been written, not because they are many, but

because such vast proportion of their pages say nothing while they

purport to say so much.

No study, however, of this outward ease and swift compendiousness of

speech will teach us the secret that was beneath it in Voltaire, an eye

and a hand that never erred in hitting the exact mark of appropriateness

in every order of prose and verse. Perhaps no such vision for the

befitting in expression has ever existed. He is the most trenchant

writer in the world, yet there is not a sentence of strained emphasis or

overwrought antithesis; he is the wittiest, yet there is not a line of

bad buffoonery. And this intense sense of the appropriate was by nature

and cultivation become so entirely a fixed condition of Voltaire’s mind

that it shows spontaneous and without an effort in his work. Nobody is

more free from the ostentatious correctness of the literary precisian,

and nobody preserves so much purity and so much dignity of language with

so little formality of demeanour. It is interesting to notice the

absence from his writings of that intensely elaborated kind of

simplicity in which some of the best authors of a later time express the

final outcome of many thoughts.

The strain that society has undergone since Voltaire’s day has taught

men to qualify their propositions. It has forced them to follow truth

slowly along paths steep and devious. New notes have been struck in

human feeling, and all thought has now been touched by complexities that

were then unseen. Hence, as all good writers aim at simplicity and

directness, we have seen the growth of a new style, in which the rays of

many side-lights are concentrated in some single phrase. That Voltaire

does not use these focalising words and turns of composition only means

that to him thought was less complex than it is to a more subjective

generation. Though the literature which possesses Milton and Burke need

not fear comparison with the graver masters of French speech, we have no

one to place exactly by the side of Voltaire. But, then, no more has

France. There are many pages of Swift which are more like one side of

Voltaire than anything else that we have, and Voltaire probably drew the

idea of his famous stories from the creator of Gulliver, just as Swift

got the idea of the Tale of a Tub from Fontenelle’s History of Mero and

Enegu (that is, of Rome and Geneva). Swift has correctness, invention,

irony, and a trick of being effectively literal and serious in absurd

situations, just as Voltaire has; but then Swift is often truculent and

often brutally gross, both in thought and in phrase. Voltaire is never

either brutal or truculent. Even amid the licence of the Pucelle and of

his romances, he never forgets what is due to the French tongue. What

always charmed him in Racine and Boileau, he tells us, was that they

said what they intended to say, and that their thoughts have never cost

anything to the harmony or the purity of the language[104]. Voltaire

ranged over far wider ground than the two poets ever attempted to do,

and trod in many slippery places, yet he is entitled to the same praise

as that which he gave to them.

Unhappily, one of the many evil effects which have alloyed the

revolution that Voltaire did so much to set in motion, has been both in

his country and ours that purity and harmony of language, in spite of

the examples of the great masters who have lived since, have on the

whole declined. In both countries familiarity and slang have actually

asserted a place in literature on some pretence that they are real; an

assumed vulgarity tries to pass for native homeliness, and, as though a

giant were more impressive for having a humped back, some men of true

genius seem only to make sure of fame by straining themselves into

grotesques. In a word, the reaction against a spurious dignity of style

has carried men too far, because the reaction against the dignified

elements in the old order went too far. Style, after all, as one has

always to remember, can never be anything but the reflex of ideas and

habits of mind, and when respect for one’s own personal dignity as a

ruling and unique element in character gave way to sentimental love of

the human race, often real, and often a pretence, old self-respecting

modes of expression went out of fashion. And all this has been defended

by a sort of argument that might just as appropriately have been used by

Diogenes, vindicating the filthiness of his tub against a doctrine of

clean linen.

To follow letters, it is important to observe, meant then, or at least

after Voltaire’s influence rose to its height, it meant distinctly to

enter the ranks of the Opposition. In our own time the profession of

letters is placed with other polite avocations, and those who follow it

for the most part accept the traditional social ideas of the time, just

as clergymen, lawyers, and physicians accept them. The modern man of

letters corresponds to the ancient sophist, whose office it was to

confirm, adorn, and propagate the current prejudice. To be a man of

letters in France in the middle of the eighteenth century was to be the

official enemy of the current prejudices and their sophistical defenders

in the church and the parliaments. Parents heard of a son’s design to go

to Paris and write books, or to mix with those who wrote books, with the

same dismay with which a respectable Athenian heard of a son following

Socrates. The hyper-hellenistic collegian need not accuse us of

instituting a general parallel between Socrates and Voltaire. The only

point on which we are insisting is that each was the leader of the

assault against the sophists of his day, though their tactics and

implements of war were sufficiently unlike. To the later assailant the

conditions of the time made the pen the most effective instrument. The

clergy had the pulpit and the confessional, and their enemies had the

press.

It was during the period of his connection with Madame du Châtelet, that

is in the active literary years between his return from England and his

removal to Berlin, that Voltaire’s dramatic talent was most

productive.[105] He is usually considered to hold the same place

relatively to Corneille and Racine that Euripides held relatively to

Æschylus and Sophocles. It is not easy to see what is the exact point of

analogy on which the critics agree, beyond the corresponding place in

the order of chronological succession, and such parallels are not really

very full of instruction. If we are to draw any parallel at all, it must

be between the Greek and Racine. The differences between Euripides and

his predecessors are not those between Voltaire and his predecessors.

There may be one common peculiarity. Each made the drama an instrument

for the expression not merely of passion, but of speculative and

philosophical matter, and this in each case of a sceptical kind in

reference to the accepted traditions of the time. But apart from the

vast superiority of the Greek in depth and passion and dramatic

invention, in Voltaire this philosophising is very much more indirect,

insinuatory, and furtive, than in the marked sententiousness of

Euripides. There are critics, indeed, who insist that all Voltaire’s

poetic work is a series of pamphlets in disguise, and that he ought to

be classified, in that jargon which makes an uncouth compound pass

muster for a new critical nicety, as a tendency-poet.[106]

To accept this would simply be to leave out of account the very best of

Voltaire’s plays, including Mérope, Sémiramis, Tancrède, in which the

most ingenious of men and critics would be at a loss to find any

tendency of the pamphleteering kind. Voltaire’s ever-present sense of

congruity prevented him from putting the harangue of the pulpit or the

discourse of the academic doctor upon the tragic stage. If the clergy

found in ‘Mahomet,’ for instance, a covert attack on their own religion,

it was much more because the poet was suspected of unbelief, than

because the poem contained infidel doctrine. Indeed, nothing shows so

clearly as the strange affright at this and some other pieces of

Voltaire’s, that the purport and effect of poetry must depend nearly as

much upon the mind of the audience as upon the lines themselves. His

plays may be said to have led to scepticism, only because there was

sceptical predisposition in the mind which his public brought to them;

and under other circumstances, if for instance it had been produced in

the time of Lewis XIV., the exposure of Mahomet would have been counted

a glorification of the rival creed. Indeed, Pope Benedict XIV. did by

and by accept Voltaire’s dedication of the play, whether in good faith

or no we cannot tell, on the express ground that it was an indirect

homage to Christianity. Men with a sense of artistic propriety far

inferior to Voltaire’s, are yet fully alive to the monstrosity of

disguising a pamphleteer’s polemic in the form of a pretended drama.

In choice of subject Voltaire, we may believe, was secretly guided by

his wish to relax the oppressive hold of religious prejudice. Religion,

we cannot too fully realise, was the absorbing burden of the time. There

was no sort of knowledge, from geometry onwards, on which it did not

weigh. Whatever work Voltaire set himself to, he was confronted in it by

the Infamous. Thus in accordance with the narrow theory of his time, he

held Mahomet to be a deliberate and conscious impostor, and in

presenting the founder of one great religion in this odious shape, he

was doubtless suggesting that the same account might be true of the

founder of another. But the suggestion was entirely outside of the play

itself, and we who have fully settled these questions for ourselves, may

read ‘Mahomet’ without suspecting the shade of a reference from Mecca to

Jerusalem, though hardly without contemning the feebleness of view which

could see nothing but sensuality, ambition, and crime, in the career of

the fierce eastern reformer. The sentiments of exalted deism which are

put into the mouth of the noble Zopire were perhaps meant to teach

people that the greatest devotion of character may go with the most

unflinching rejection of a pretended revelation from the gods. This

again is a gloss from without, and by no means involves Voltaire in the

offence of art with a moral purpose.

Zaïre was the first play in which French characters appeared upon the

tragic stage. The heroine, the daughter of Lusignan, has been brought

up, unconscious of her descent, in the Mahometan faith and usage.

Consider the philosophy of these lines which are given to her:

La coutume, la loi plia mes premiers ans

A la religion des heureux musulmans.

Je le vois trop; les soins qu’on prend de notre enfance

Ferment nos sentimens, nos mœurs, notre croyance.

J’eusse été près du Gange esclave des faux dieux,

Chrétienne dans Paris, musulmane en ces lieux.

L’instruction fait tout; et la main de nos pères

Grave en nos faibles cœurs ces premiers caractères,

Que l’exemple et le temps nous viennent retracer,

Et que peut-être en nous Dieu seul peut effacer.[107]

This of course implied the doctrine of Pope’s Universal Prayer, and

contains an idea that was always the favourite weapon for smiting the

over-confident votaries of a single supernatural revelation. Locke had

asked whether ‘the current opinions and licensed guides of every country

are sufficient evidence and security to every man to venture his great

concernments on? Or, can these be the certain and infallible oracle and

standards of truth which teach one thing in Christendom, and another in

Turkey? Or shall a poor countryman be eternally happy for having the

chance to be born in Italy? Or a day-labourer be unavoidably lost

because he had the ill-luck to be born in England?[108] This was exactly

the kind of reasoning to which Zaïre’s lines pointed; and Voltaire was

never weary of arguing that the divine lay outside of the multitudinous

variety of creeds that were never more than local accidents. Neither,

however, in Zaïre nor anywhere else is the law of perfect dramatic

fitness violated for the sake of a lesson in heterodoxy. With Voltaire

tragedy is, as all art ought to be, a manner of disinterested

presentation. This is not the noblest energy of the human intelligence,

but it is truly art, and Voltaire did not forget it. It would be

entirely unprofitable to enter into any comparison of the relative

merits of Voltaire’s tragedies, and those either of the modern romantic

school in his own country, or of the master dramatists of our own. Every

form of composition must be judged in its own order, and the order in

which Voltaire chose to work was the French classic, with its appointed

conditions and fixed laws, its three unities, its stately alexandrines,

and all the other essentials of that special dramatic form. Here is one

of the many points at which we feel that Voltaire is trying to prolong

in literature, if not in thought, the impressive tradition of the grand

age. At the same moment, strangely enough, he was giving that stir to

the opinion of his time, which was the prime agent in definitely

breaking the hold of that tradition. It is no infidelity to the glorious

and incomparable genius of Shakespeare, nor does it involve any

blindness to the fine creation, fresh fancy, and noble thought and

imagery of our less superb men, yet to admit that there is in these

limits of construction a concentration and regularity, and in these too

contemned alexandrines a just and swelling cadence, that confer a high

degree of pleasure of the highest kind, and that demand intellectual

quality only less rare than that other priceless and unattainable

quality of having the lips touched with divine fire. It is said,

however, that such quality does not produce acting plays, but only

dramatic poems: this is really laughable if we remember first, that the

finest actors in the world have been trained in the recitation of these

alexandrines, and second, that as large and as delighted an audience

used until within some twenty years ago to crowd to a tragedy of

Corneille or Racine, seen repeatedly before, as to a bran-new

vaudeville, never to be seen again.

‘We insist,’ said Voltaire, ‘that the rhyme shall cost nothing to the

ideas; that it shall neither be trivial nor too far-fetched; we exact

rigorously in a verse the same purity, the same precision, as in prose.

We do not permit the smallest licence; we require an author to carry

without a break all chains, and yet that he should appear ever

free.’[109] He admitted that sometimes they failed in reaching the

tragic, through excessive fear of passing its limits. He does justice,

if something less than English justice, to the singular merits of our

stage in the way of action.[110] Shakespeare, he says, ‘had a genius

full of force and fertility, of all that is natural and all that is

sublime.’ It is even the merit of Shakespeare—‘those grand and terrible

pieces that abound in his most monstrous farces’—that has been the

undoing of the English stage.[111]

Even the famous criticism on Hamlet has been a good deal misrepresented.

Voltaire is vindicating the employment of the machinery of ghosts, and

he dwells on the fitness and fine dramatic effect of the ghost in

Shakespeare’s play. ‘I am very far,’ he goes on to say, ‘from justifying

the tragedy of Hamlet in everything: it is a rude and barbarous

piece.... Hamlet goes mad in the second act, and his mistress goes mad

in the third; the prince slays the father of his mistress, pretending to

kill a rat, and the heroine throws herself into the river. They dig her

grave on the stage; the gravediggers jest in a way worthy of them, with

skulls in their hands; Hamlet answers their odious grossnesses by

extravagances no less disgusting. Meanwhile one of the characters

conquers Poland. Hamlet, his mother, and his stepfather drink together

on the stage; they sing at table, they wrangle, they fight, they kill;

one might suppose such a work to be the fruit of the imagination of a

drunken savage. But in the midst of all these rude irregularities,

which to this day make the English theatre so absurd and so barbarous,

there are to be found in Hamlet by a yet greater incongruity sublime

strokes worthy of the loftiest geniuses. It seems as if nature had taken

a delight in collecting within the brain of Shakespeare all that we can

imagine of what is greatest and most powerful, with all that rudeness

without wit can contain of what is lowest and most detestable.’[112]

If one were to retort upon this that anybody with a true sense of poetry

would sacrifice all the plays that Voltaire ever wrote, his

eight-and-twenty tragedies, and half-score of comedies, for the

soliloquy in Hamlet, or King Henry at Towton Fight, or ‘Roses, their

sharp spines being gone,’ there would be truth in such a retort, but it

would be that brutal truth, which is always very near being the most

subtle kind of lie. Nature wrought a miracle for us by producing

Shakespeare, as she did afterwards in an extremely different way for

France by producing Voltaire. Miracles, however, have necessarily a very

demoralising effect. A prodigy of loaves and fishes, by slackening the

motives to honest industry, must in the end multiply paupers. The

prodigy of such amazing results from such glorious carelessness as

Shakespeare’s, has plunged hundreds of men of talent into a carelessness

most inglorious, and made our acting stage a mock. It is quite true

that the academic rule is better fitted for mediocrity than for genius;

but we may perhaps trust genius to make a way for itself. It is

mediocrity that needs laws and prescriptions for its most effective

fertilisation, and the enormous majority even of those who can do good

work are still mediocre. We have preferred the methods of lawless

genius, and are left with rampant lawlessness and no genius. The very

essence of the old French tragedy was painstaking, and painstaking has

had its unfailing and exceeding great reward. When people whose taste

has been trained in the traditions of romantic and naturalistic art, or

even not trained at all except in indolence and presumption, yawn over

the French alexandrines, let them remember that Goethe at any rate

thought it worth while to translate Mahomet and Tancrède.

An eminent German writer on Voltaire has recently declared the secret of

the French classic dramaturgy to be that the drama was a diversion of

the court. ‘The personages have to speak not as befits their true

feelings, their character, and the situation, but as is seemly in the

presence of a king and a court; not truth, nature, and beauty, but

etiquette, is the highest law of the dramatic art.’[113] This may

partially explain how it was that a return to some features of the

classic form, its dignity, elevation, and severity, came to take place

in France, but no explanation can be at all satisfactory which reduces

so distinct and genuine a manner of dramatic expression to a mere

outside accident. Corneille, Racine, Voltaire, treated their tragic

subjects as they did, with rigorous concentration of action, stately

consistency of motive, and in a solemn and balanced measure, because

these conditions answered to intellectual qualities of their own, an

affinity in themselves for elegance, clearness, elevation, and a certain

purified and weighty wisdom. It is true that they do not unseal those

deep-hidden fountains of thought and feeling and music, which flow so

freely at the waving of Shakespeare’s wand. We are not swiftly carried

from a scene of clowns up to some sublime pinnacle of the seventh

heaven, whence we see the dark abysses that lie about the path of human

action, as well as all its sweet and shadowed places. Only let us not

unjustly suppose that we are deciding the merits of the old French

dramaturgy, its severe structure and stately measure, by answering the

question, which no English nor German writer can ever seriously put, as

to the relative depth and vision in poetic things of Shakespeare and

Voltaire. Nor can we be expected to be deeply moved by a form of art

that is so unfamiliar to us. It is not a question whether we ought to be

so deeply moved. The too susceptible Marmontel describes how on the

occasion of a visit to Ferney, Voltaire took him into his study and

placed a manuscript into his hands. It was Tancrède, which was just

finished. Marmontel eagerly read it, and he tells us how he returned to

the author, his face all bathed in tears. ‘Your tears,’ said Voltaire,

‘tell me all that it most concerns me to know.’[114] The most

supercilious critic may find this very Tancrède worth reading, when he

remembers that Gibbon thought it splendid and interesting,[115] and that

Goethe found it worth translating. One could hardly be convicted now of

want of sensibility, if all Voltaire’s tragedy together failed to bathe

one’s face in tears, but this is a very bad reason for denying that it

has other merits than pathos.

We cannot, indeed, compare the author of Zaïre and Tancrède with the

great author of Cinna and Polyeucte, any more than in another kind we

can compare Gray with Milton. Voltaire is the very genius of

correctness, elegance, and grace, and if the reader would know what this

correctness means, he will find a most wholesome exercise in reading

Voltiare’s notes on some of the most celebrated of Corneille’s

plays.[116] But in masculine energy and in poetic weightiness, as well

as in organ-like richness of music, Voltaire must be surely pronounced

inferior to his superb predecessor. There is a certain thinness

pervading the whole of his work for the stage, the conception of

character, the dramatic structure, and the measure alike. Undoubtedly we

may frequently come upon weighty and noble lines, of fine music and

lofty sense. But there is on the whole what strikes one as a fatal

excess of facility, and a fatal defect of poetic saliency. The fluent

ease of the verse destroys the impression of strength. ‘Your friend,’

wrote Madame du Châtelet once of her friend, ‘has had a slight bout of

illness, and you know that when he is ill, he can do nothing but write

verses.’[117] We do not know whether the Marquise meant alexandrines, or

those graceful verses of society of which Voltaire was so incomparable a

master. It is certain that he wrote Zaïre in three weeks and Olympic in

six days, though with respect to the latter we may well agree with the

friend who told the author that he should not have rested on the seventh

day. However that may be, there is a quality about his tragic verse

which to one fresh from the sonorous majesty and dignified beauty of

Polyeucte, or even the fine gravity of Tartufe, vibrates too lightly in

the ear. Least of all may we compare him to Racine, whose two great

tragedies of Iphigénie and Athalie Voltaire himself declared to mark the

nearest approach ever made to dramatic perfection.[118] There is none of

the mixed austerity and tenderness, height and sweetness, grace and

firmness, that blend together with such invisible art and unique

contrivance in the poet whose verses taught Fénelon and Massillon how to

make music in their prose. To this Voltaire could only have access from

without, for he lacked the famous master’s internal depth, seriousness,

and veneration of soul. We know how little this approach from without

can avail, and how vainly a man follows the harmonious grace of a style,

when he lacks the impalpable graces of spirit that made the style live.

It is only when grave thoughts and benignant aspirations and purifying

images move with even habit through the mind, that a man masters the

noblest expression. De Maistre, to whom Voltaire’s name was the symbol

for all that is accursed, admitted the nobleness of his work in tragedy,

but he instantly took back the grudged praise by saying that even here

he only resembles his two great rivals as a clever hypocrite resembles a

saint.[119] Malignantly expressed, there is in this some truth.

It was one of the elements in the plan of dramatic reform that sprang up

in Voltaire’s mind during his residence in England, that the subjects of

tragedy should be more masculine, and that love should cease to be an

obligatory ingredient. “It is nearly always the same piece, the same

knot, formed by jealousy and a breach, and untied by a marriage; it is a

perpetual coquetry, a simple comedy in which princes are actors, and in

which occasionally blood is spilt for form’s sake.”[120] This he counted

a mistake, for, as he justly said, the heart is but lightly touched by a

lover’s woes, while it is profoundly softened by the anguish of a mother

just about to lose her son. Thus in Mérope we have maternal sentiment

made the spring of what is probably the best of Voltaire’s tragedies,

abounding in a just vehemence, compact, full of feeling at once exalted

and natural, and moving with a sustained energy that is not a too common

mark of his work. It was the same conviction of the propriety of making

tragedy a means of expressing other emotions than that which is so apt

to degenerate into an insipidity, which dictated the composition and

novel treatment of the Roman subjects, Brutus and La Mort de César. Here

the French drama first became in some degree truly political. His

predecessors when they handled a historic theme did so, not from the

historic or social point of view, but as the illustration, or rather the

suggestion, of some central human passion. In the Cinna of Corneille the

political bearings, the moral of benevolent despotism which Bonaparte

found in it, were purely incidental, and were distinctly subordinate to

the portrayal of character and the movement of feeling. In Brutus the

whole action lies in the region of great public affairs, and of the

passions which these affairs stir in noble characters, without any

admixture of purely private tenderness. In La Mort de César we are

equally in the heroics of public action. Rome Sauvée, of which the

subject is the conspiracy of Catiline, and the hero the most eloquent of

consuls or men—a part that Voltaire was very fond of filling in private

representations, and with distinguished success—is extremely loose and

spasmodic in structure, and the speeches sound strained even when put

into Cicero’s mouth. But here also private insipidities are banished,

though perhaps it is only in favour of public insipidities. It is

impossible to tell what share, if any, these plays had in spreading that

curious feeling about Roman freedom and its most renowned defenders,

which is so striking a feature in some of the great episodes of the

Revolution. We cannot suspect Voltaire of any design to stir political

feeling. He was now essentially aristocratic and courtly in his

predilection, without the smallest active wish for an approach to

political revolution, if indeed the conception of a change of that kind

ever presented itself to him. He was indefatigable in admiring and

praising English freedom, but, as has already been said, it was not the

laudation of a lover of popular government, but the envy of a man of

letters whose life was tormented by censors of the press and the

lieutenant of police. Perhaps the only approach to a public purpose in

this fancy for his Roman subjects was a lurking idea of arousing in the

nobles, for whom we must remember that his dramatic work was above all

designed, not a passion for freedom from the authority of monarchic

government, but a passion of a more general kind for energetic

patriotism. Voltaire’s letters abound with expressions of the writer’s

belief that he was the witness of an epoch of decay in his own country.

He had in truth far too keen and practical and trained an eye not to see

how public spirit, political sagacity, national ambition, and even

valour had declined in the great orders of France since the age of the

Grand Monarch, and how much his country had fallen back in the race of

civilisation and power. We should be guilty of a very transparent

exaggeration of the facts, if any attempt were made to paint Voltaire in

the attitude and colours of one transcendentally aspiring to regenerate

his countrymen. But there is no difficulty in believing that a man who

had lived in England, and knew so much of Prussia, should have seen the

fatal enervation which had come upon France, and that with Voltaire’s

feeling for the stage, he should have dreamt, by means of a more austere

subject and more masculine treatment, of reviving the love of wisdom and

glory and devotion in connection with country. In a word, the lesson of

La Mort de César or of Brutus was not a specific admonition to slay

tyrants, or to execute stern judgments on sons, but a general example of

self-sacrificing patriotism and devoted public honour.

It is often said that Voltaire’s Romans are mere creatures of parade and

declamation, like the figures of David’s paintings,[121] and it is very

likely that the theatre infected the French people with that mischievous

idea of the Romans, as a nation of declaimers about freedom and the

death of tyrants. The true Roman was no doubt very much more like one of

our narrow, hard, and able Scotchmen in India, than the lofty talkers

who delighted the parterre of Paris or Versailles. Unluckily for truth

of historical conception, Cicero was, after Virgil, the most potent of

Roman memories, and a man of words became with modern writers the

favourite type of a people of action. All this, however, is beside the

question. Voltaire would have laughed at the idea of any obligation to

present either Romans or other personages on the stage with realistic

fidelity. The tragic drama with him was the highest of the imaginative

and idealistic arts. If he had sought a parallel to it in the plastic

arts he would have found one, not in painting, which by reason of the

greater flexibility of its material demands a more exact verisimilitude,

but in sculpture. Considered as statuesque figures endowed with speech,

Brutus, Caesar, and the rest are noble and impressive. We may protest as

vigorously as we know how against any assimilation of the great art of

action with the great art of repose. But we can only criticise the

individual productions of a given theory, provided we for the moment

accept the conditions which the theory lays down. All art rests upon

convention, and if we choose to repudiate any particular set of

conventions, we have no more right to criticise the works of those who

submit to them than one would have to criticise sculpture, because

marble or bronze is not like flesh and blood. Within the conditions of

the French classic drama Voltaire’s Romans are high and stately figures.

Voltaire’s innovations extended beyond the introduction of more

masculine treatment. Before his time romantic subjects had been regarded

with disfavour, and Corneille’s Bajazet was considered a bold

experiment. Racine was more strictly classic, and dramatists went on

handling the same ancient fables, ‘Thebes, or Pelops’ line, or the tale

of ‘Troy divine,’ just as the Greeks had done, or just as the painters

in the Catholic times had never wearied of painting the two eternal

figures of human mother and divine child. Voltaire treated the classic

subjects as others treated them, and if Œdipe misses the depth,

delicate reserve and fateful gloom of the Greeks, Mérope at any rate

breathes a fine and tragic spirit. But his restless mind pressed forward

into subjects which Racine would have shuddered at, and every quarter of

the universe became in turn a portion of the Voltairean stage.

L’Orphelin de la Chine introduces us to China and Genghis-Khan, Mahomet

to Arabia and its prophet, Tancrede to Sicily; in Zulime we are among

Moors, in Alzire with Peruvians. This revolutionary enlargement of

subject was significant of a general and very important enlargement of

interest which marked the time, and led presently to those contrasts

between the condition of France and the imaginary felicity and nobleness

of wilder countries, which did so much to breed an irresistible longing

for change. Voltaire’s high-minded Scythians, generous Peruvians, and

the rest, prepared the way along with other influences for that curious

cosmopolitanism, that striking eagerness to believe in the equal

virtuousness and devotion inherent in human nature, independently of the

religious or social form accidentally imposed upon them, which found its

ultimate outcome, first in an ardent passion for social equality, and a

depreciation of the special sanctity of the current religion, and next

in the ill-fated emancipating and proselytising aims of the Revolution,

and in orators of the human race.

It has usually been thought surprising that Voltaire, consummate wit as

he was, should have been so markedly unsuccessful in comedy. Certainly

no one with so right a sense of the value of time as Voltaire himself

had, will in our day waste many hours over his productions in this

order. There are a dozen of them more or less, and we can only hope that

they were the most rapid of his writings. Lines of extraordinary

vivacity are not wanting, and at their best they offer a certain

bustling sprightliness that might have been diverting in actual

representation. But the keynote seems to be struck in farce, rather than

in comedy; the intrigue, if not quite as slight as in Molière, is too

forced; and the characters are nearly all excessively mediocre in

conception. In one of the comedies, Le Dépositaire, the poet presented

the aged patroness of his youth, but the necessity of respecting current

ideas of the becoming prevented him from making a great character out of

even so striking a figure as Ninon de l’Enclos. La Prude is a version of

Wycherly’s Plaindealer, and is in respect of force, animation, and the

genuine spirit of comedy, very inferior to its admirable original.

L’Indiscret is a sparkling and unconsidered trifle, L’Ecossaise is only

a stinging attack on Fréron, and L’Enfant Prodigue, though greater pains

were taken with it, has none of the glow of dramatic feeling. The

liveliest of all is La Femme qui a Raison, a short comedy of situation,

which for one reading is entertaining in the closet, and must be

excellent on the stage. It is very slight, however, and as usual verges

on farce.

This inferiority of Voltaire’s ought not to astonish any one who has

reflected how much concentrated feeling and what profundity of vision go

to the production of great comedy, and how in the mind of the dramatist,

as in the movement of human life, comedy lies close to portentous

tragedy. The author of the Bourgeois Gentilhomme and L’Avare was also

the creator of the Misanthrope, that inscrutable piece, where, without

plot, fable, or intrigue, we see a section of the polished life of the

time, men and women paying visits, making and receiving compliments,

discoursing upon affairs with easy lightness, flitting backwards and

forwards with a thousand petty hurries, and among these one strange,

rough, hoarse, half-sombre figure, moving solitarily with a chilling

reality in the midst of frolicking shadows. Voltaire entered too eagerly

into the interests of the world, was by temperament too exclusively

sympathetic and receptive and social, to place himself even in

imagination thus outside of the common circle. Without capacity for

this, there is no comedy of the first order. Without serious

consciousness of contrasts, no humour that endures. Shakespeare,

Molière, and even Aristophanes, each of them unsurpassed writers of mere

farce, were each of them, though with vast difference of degree, master

of a tragic breadth of vision. Voltaire had moods of petulant spleen,

but who feels that he ever saw, much less brooded over, the dark

cavernous regions of human nature? Without this we may have brilliant

pleasantry of surprise, inimitable caricature, excellent comedy of

society, but of the veritable comedy of human character and life,

nothing.

In dazzling and irresistible caricature Voltaire has no equal. There is

no deep humour, as in Don Quixote, or Tristram Shandy, which Voltaire

did not care for,[122] or Richter’s Siebenkäs, which he would not have

cared for any more than De Stael did. He was too purely intellectual,

too argumentative, too geometrical, and cared too much for illustrating

a principle. But in Candide, Zadig, L’Ingénu, wit is as high as mere wit

can go. They are better than Hudibras, because the motive is broader and

more intellectual. Rapidity of play, infallible accuracy of stroke,

perfect copiousness, and above all a fresh and unflagging spontaneity,

combine with a surprising invention, to give these stories a singular

quality, of which we most effectively observe the real brilliance, by

comparing them with the too numerous imitations that their success has

unhappily invited since.

It is impossible to omit from the most cursory study of Voltaire’s work,

that too famous poem which was his favourite amusement during some of

the best years of his life, which was the delight of all who could by

any means get the high favour of sight or hearing of so much as a canto

of it, and which is now always spoken of, when it happens to be spoken

of at all, with extreme abhorrence.[123] The Pucelle offends two modern

sentiments, the love of modesty, and the love of the heroic personages

of history. The moral sense and the historic sense have both been

sharpened in some respects since Voltaire, and a poem which not only

abounds in immodesty, and centres the whole action in an indecency of

conception, but also fastens this gross chaplet round the memory of a

great deliverer of the poet’s own country, seems to offer a double

outrage to an age when relish for licentious verse has gone out of

fashion, and reverence for the heroic dead has come in. Still the fact

that the greatest man of his time should have written one of the most

unseemly poems that exist in any tongue, is worth trying to understand.

Voltaire, let us remember, had no special turn, like Gibbon or Bayle,

least of all like the unclean Swift, for extracting a malodorous

diversion out of grossness or sensuality. His writings betray no

irresistible passion for flying to an indelicacy, nor any of the vapid

lasciviousness of some more modern French writers. The Pucelle is at

least the wit of a rational man, and not the prying beastliness of a

satyr. It is wit worse than poorly employed, but it is purity itself

compared with some of the nameless abominations with which Diderot

besmirched his imagination. The Persian Letters contain what we should

now account passages of extreme licentiousness, yet Montesquieu was

assuredly no libertine. Voltaire’s life again was never indecent or

immoderate from the point of view of the manners of the time. A man of

grave character and untarnished life, like Condorcet, did not scruple to

defend a poem, in which it is hard for us to see anything but a most

indecorous burlesque of a most heroic subject. He insists that books

which divert the imagination without heating or seducing it, which by

gay and pleasurable images fill up those moments of exhaustion that are

useless alike for labour and meditation, have the effect of inclining

men to gentleness and indulgence. “It was not such books as the Pucelle

that Gérard or Clément used to read, or that the satellites of Cromwell

carried at the saddle-bow.”[124]

The fact is that in amusing himself by the Pucelle, Voltaire was only

giving literary expression to a kind of view which had already in the

society of the time found for itself a thoroughly practical expression.

The people among whom he lived had systematised that freedom from law or

restraint in the relations of the sexes, of which his poem is so vivid a

representation. The Duke of Richelieu was the irresistible Lovelace of

his time, and it was deemed an honour, an honour to which Madame du

Châtelet among so many others has a title, to have yielded to his

fascination. A long and profoundly unedifying chronicle might be drawn

up of the memorable gallantries of that time, and for our purpose it

might fitly close with the amour with Saint Lambert that led to Madame

du Châtelet’s death. Of course, these countless gallantries in the most

licentious persons of the day, such as Richelieu or Saxe, were neither

more nor less than an outbreak of sheer dissoluteness, such as took

place among English people of quality in the time of the Restoration.

The idle and luxurious, whose imagination is uncontrolled by the

discipline of labour and purpose, and to whom the indulgence of their

own inclinations is the first and single law of life, are always ready

to profit by any relaxation of restraint, which the moral conditions of

the moment may permit.

The peculiarity of the licence of France in the middle of the eighteenth

century is, that it was looked upon with complacency by the great

intellectual leaders of opinion. It took its place in the progressive

formula. What austerity was to other forward movements, licence was to

this. It is not difficult to perceive how so extraordinary a

circumstance came to pass. Chastity was the supreme virtue in the eyes

of the church, the mystic key to Christian holiness. Continence was one

of the most sacred of the pretensions by which the organised preachers

of superstition claimed the reverence of men and women. It was

identified, therefore, in a particular manner with that Infamous,

against which the main assault of the time was directed. So men

contended, more or less expressly, first, that continence was no

commanding chief among virtues, then that it was a very superficial and

easily practised virtue, finally that it was no virtue at all, but if

sometimes a convenience, generally an impediment to free human

happiness. These disastrous sophisms show the peril of having morality

made an appendage of a set of theological mysteries, because the

mysteries are sure in time to be dragged into the open air of reason,

and moral truth crumbles away with the false dogmas with which it had

got mixed.

‘If,’ says Condorcet, ‘we may treat as useful the design to make

superstition ridiculous in the eyes of men given to pleasures, and

destined, by the very want of self-control which makes pleasures

attractive to them, to become one day the unfortunate victims or the

mischievous instruments of that vile tyrant of humanity; if the

affectation of austerity in manners, if the excessive value attached to

purity, only serves the hypocrites who by putting on the easy mask of

chastity can dispense with all virtues, and cover with a sacred veil the

vices most pernicious to society, hardness of heart and intolerance; if

by accustoming men to treat as so many crimes faults from which

honourable and conscientious persons are not exempt, we extend over the

purest souls the power of that dangerous caste, which to rule and

disturb the earth, has constituted itself exclusively the interpreter of

heavenly justice;—then we shall see in the author of the Pucelle no more

than a foe to hypocrisy and superstition.’[125]

It helps us to realise the infinite vileness of a system, like that of

the Church in the last century, which could engender in men of essential

nobleness of character like Condorcet, an antipathy so violent as to

shut the eyes of their understanding to the radical sophistry of such

pleading as this. Let one reflection out of many, serve to crush the

whole of it. The key to effective life is unity of life, and unity of

life means as much as anything else the unity of our human relations.

Our identity does by no means consist in a historic continuity of

tissues, but in an organic moral coherency of relation. It is this,

which alone, if we consider the passing shortness of our days, makes

life a whole, instead of a parcel of thrums bound together by an

accident. Is not every incentive and every concession to vagrant

appetite a force that enwraps a man in gratification of self, and severs

him from duty to others, and so a force of dissolution and dispersion?

It might be necessary to pull down the Church, but the worst church that

has ever prostituted the name and the idea of religion cannot be so

disastrous to society, as a gospel that systematically relaxes

self-control as being an unmeaning curtailment of happiness. The

apologists for the Pucelle exhibit the doctrine of individualism in one

of its worst issues. ‘Your proof that this is really the best of all

possible worlds is excellent,’ says Candide for his famous last word,

‘but we must cultivate our garden.’ The same principle of exclusive

self-regard, applied to the gratification of sense, passed for a

satisfactory defence of libertinage. In the first form it destroys a

state, in the second it destroys the family.

It is easier to account for Voltaire’s contempt for the mediæval

superstition about purity, than his want of respect for a deliverer of

France. The explanation lies in the conviction which had such power in

Voltaire’s own mind and with which he impregnated to such a degree the

minds of others, that the action of illiterate and unpolished times can

have no life in it. His view of progress was a progress of art and

knowledge, and heroic action which was dumb, or which was not expressed

in terms of intellect, was to the eighteenth century, and to Voltaire at

least as much as to any other of its leaders, mere barbaric energy. In

the order of taste, for instance, he can find only words of cool and

limited praise for Homer, while for the polish and elegance of Virgil

his admiration is supreme. The first was the bard of a rude time, while

round the second cluster all the associations of a refined and lettered

age. A self-devotion that was only articulate in the jargon of mystery

and hallucination, and that was surrounded with rude and irrational

circumstance, with ignorance, brutality, visions, miracle, was encircled

by no halo in the eyes of a poet who found no nobleness where he did not

find a definite intelligence, and who rested all his hopes and interests

on the long distance set by time and civilisation between ourselves and

such conditions and associations as belong to the name of Joan of Arc.

The foremost men of the eighteenth century despised Joan of Arc,

whenever they had occasion to think of her, for the same reason which

made them despise Gothic architecture. ‘When,’ says Voltaire in one

place, ‘the arts began to revive, they revived as Goths and Vandals;

what unhappily remains to us of the architecture and sculpture of these

times is a fantastic compound of rudeness and filigree.’[126] Just so,

even Turgot, while protesting how dear to every sensible heart were the

Gothic buildings destined to the use of the poor and the orphan,

complained of the outrage done by their rude architecture to the

delicacy of our sight.[127] Characters like Joan of Arc ranked in the

same rude and fantastic order, and respect for them meant that respect

for the middle age which was treason to the new time. Men despised her,

just as they despised the majesty and beauty of the great church at

Rheims where she brought her work to a climax, or the lofty grace and

symmetry of the church of St. Ouen, within sight of which her life came

to its terrible end.

Henry the Fourth was a hero with Voltaire, for no better reason than

that he was the first great tolerant, the earliest historic indifferent.

The Henriade is only important because it helped to popularise the type

of its hero’s character, and so to promote the rapidly-growing tendency

in public opinion towards a still wider version of the policy of the

Edict of Nantes. The reign of Lewis XIV. had thrown all previous

monarchs into obscurity, and the French king who showed a warmer and

more generous interest in the happiness of his subjects than any they

ever had, was forgotten, until Voltaire brought him into fame. It was

just, however, because Henry’s exploits were so glorious, and at the

same time so near in point of time, that he made an indifferent hero for

an epic poem. ‘He should never choose for an epic poem history,’ said

Hume very truly, ‘the truth of which is well known; for no fiction can

come up to the interest of the actual story and incidents of the

singular life of Henry IV.’[128] These general considerations, however,

as to the propriety of the subject are hardly worth entering upon. How

could any true epic come out of that age, or find fountains in that

critical, realistic, and polemical soul? To fuse a long narrative of

heroic adventure in animated, picturesque, above all, in sincere verse,

is an achievement reserved for men with a steadier glow, a firmer,

simpler, more exuberant and more natural poetic feeling, than was

possible in that time of mean shifts, purposeless public action, and

pitiful sacrifice of private self-respect. Virgil was stirred by the

greatness of the newly-united empire, Tasso by the heroic march of

Christendom against pagan oppressors, Milton by the noble ardour of our

war for public rights. What long and glowing inspiration was possible to

a would-be courtier, thrust into the Bastille for wanting to fight a

noble who had had him caned by lackeys? Besides, an epic, of all forms

of poetic composition, most demands concentrated depth, and Voltaire was

too widely curious and vivacious on the intellectual side to be capable

of this emotional concentration.

But it is superfluous to give reasons why Voltaire’s epic should not be

a great poem. The Henriade itself is there, the most indisputable of

arguments. Of poems whose names are known out of literary histories and

academic catalogues, it is perhaps the least worth reading in any

language by any one but a professional student of letters. It is less

worth reading than Lucan’s Pharsalia, because it is more deliberately

artificial and gratuitously unspontaneous. Paradise Regained, which it

is too ready a fashion among us to pronounce dull, still contains at

least three pieces of superb and unsurpassed description, never fails in

grave majestic verse, and is at the worst free from all the dreary

apparatus of phantom and impersonation and mystic vision, which have

never jarred so profoundly with sense of poetic fitness, as when

associated with so political and matter-of-fact a hero as Henry the

Fourth. The reader has no illusion in such transactions as Saint Lewis

taking Henry into heaven and hell, Sleep hearing from her secret caves,

the Winds at sight of him falling into Silence, and Dreams, children of

Hope, flying to cover the hero with olive and laurel. How can we

overcome our repugnance to that strange admixture of real and unreal

matter which presents us with a highly-coloured picture of the Temple of

Love, where in the forecourt sits Joy, with Mystery, Desire,

Complaisance, on the soft turf by her side, while in the inner sanctuary

haunt Jealousy, Suspicion, Malice, Fury; while the next canto describes

L’église toujours une et partout étendue,

Libre, mais sous un chef, adorant en tout lieu,

Dans le bonheur des saints, la grandeur de son Dieu.

Le Christ, de nos péches victime renaissante,

De ses élus chéris nourriture vivante,

Descend sur les autels à ses yeux éperdus,

Et lui découvre un Dieu sous un pain qui n’est plus.[129]

Voltaire congratulated himself in his preface that he had come

sufficiently near theological exactitude, and to this qualification,

which is so new for poetry, the critic may add elegance and flow; but

neither elegance nor theological exactitude reconciles us to an epic

that has neither a stroke of sublimity nor a touch of pathos, that

presents no grandeur in character, and no hurrying force and movement in

action. Frederick the Great used to speak of Voltaire as the French

Virgil, but then Frederick’s father had never permitted him to learn

Latin, and if he ever read Virgil at all, it must have been in some of

the jingling French translations. Even so, with the episodes of Dido and

of Nisus and Euryalus in our minds, we may wonder how so monstrous a

parallel could have occurred even to Frederick, who was no critic,

between two poets who have hardly a quality in common. If the reader

wishes to realise how nearly insipid even Voltaire’s genius could become

when working in unsuitable forms, he may turn from any canto of the

Henriade to any page of Lucretius or the Paradise Lost. A French critic

quotes the famous reviewer’s sentence, concluding an analysis of some

epic, to the effect that on the whole, when all is summed up, the given

epic was ‘one of the best that had appeared in the course of the current

year;’ and insists that Voltaire’s piece will not at any rate perish in

the oblivion of poetic annuals like these. If not, the only reason lies

in that unfortunate tenderness for the bad work of famous men, which

makes of so much reading time worse than wasted. ‘The unwise,’ said

Candide, ‘value every word in an author of repute.’