BERLIN.
The Marquise du Châtelet died under circumstances that were tragical
enough to herself, but which disgust the grave, while they give a
grotesque amusement to those who look with cynical eye upon what they
choose to treat as the great human comedy. In 1749 the friendship of
sixteen years thus came to its end, and Voltaire was left without the
tie that, in spite of too frequent breaking away from it, had brought
him much happiness and good help so far on the road. He was now free,
disastrously free as the event proved, to accept the invitations with
which he had so long been pressed to take up his residence with the king
who may dispute with him the claim to be held the most extraordinary man
of that century.
Neither credit nor peace followed Voltaire in his own land. Lewis XV.,
perhaps the most worthless of all the creatures that monarchy has ever
corrupted, always disliked him. The whole influence of the court and the
official world had been uniformly exerted against him. Many years went
by before he could even win a seat in the academy, a distinction, it
may be added, to which Diderot, hardly second to Voltaire in originality
and power, never attained to the end of his days. Madame de Pompadour,
the protectress of Quesnay, was Voltaire’s first friend at court. He
said of her long afterwards that in the bottom of her heart she belonged
to the philosophers, and did as much as she could to protect them.[130]
She had known him in her obscurer and more reputable days, and she
charged him with the composition of a court-piece (1745), to celebrate
the marriage of the dauphin. The task was satisfactorily performed, and
honours which had been refused to the author of Zaïre, Alzire, and the
Henriade, were at once given to the writer of the Princess of Navarre,
which Voltaire himself ranked as a mere farce of the fair. He was made
gentleman of the chamber and historiographer of France. He disarmed the
devout by the Pope’s acceptance of Mahomet, and by a letter which he
wrote to Father Latour, head of his former school, protesting his
affection for religion and his esteem for the Jesuits. Condorcet most
righteously pronounces that, in spite of the art with which he handles
his expressions in this letter, it would undoubtedly have been far
better to give up the academy than to write it.[131] It answered its
purpose, and Voltaire was admitted of the forty (May 1746). This
distinction, however, was far from securing for him the tranquillity
which he had hoped from it, and worse libels tormented him than before.
The court sun ceased to shine. Madame de Pompadour gave to Crébillon a
preference which Voltaire resented with more agitation than any
preference of Madame Pompadour’s ought to have stirred in the breast of
a strong man.
We cannot, however, too constantly remember not to ask from Voltaire the
heroic. He was far too sympathetic, too generously eager to please, too
susceptible to opinion. Of that stern and cold stuff which supports a
man in firm march and straight course, giving him the ample content of
self-respect, he probably had less than any one of equal prominence has
ever had. Instead of writing his tragedy as well as he knew how, and
then leaving it to its destiny, he wrote it as well as he knew how, and
then went in disguise to the café of the critics to find out what his
inferiors had to say about his work. Instead of composing his
court-piece, and taking such reward as offered, or disdaining such
ignoble tasks—and nobody knew better than he how ignoble they were—he
sought to catch some crumb of praise by fawningly asking of the vilest
of men, _Trajan est-il content?_ Make what allowance we will for
difference of time and circumstance, such an attitude to such a man,
whether in Seneca towards Nero, or Voltaire towards Lewis XV., is a
baseness that we ought never to pardon and never to extenuate. Whether
or no there be in the human breast that natural religion of goodness and
virtue which was the sheet-anchor of Voltaire’s faith, there is at least
a something in the hearts of good men which sets a fast gulf between
them and those who are to the very depths of their souls irredeemably
saturated with corruption.
We may permit ourselves to hope that it was the consciousness of the
humiliation of such relations as these, rather than the fact that they
did not answer their own paltry purpose, that made Voltaire resolve a
second time to shake the dust of his own country from off his feet In
July 1750 he reached Potsdam, and was installed with sumptuous honour in
the court of Frederick the Great, twenty-four years since he had
installed himself with Mr. Falkener, the English merchant at Wandsworth.
Diderot was busy with the first volume of the Encyclopædia, and Rousseau
had just abandoned his second child in the hospital for foundlings. If
the visit to London did everything for Voltaire, the visit to Berlin did
nothing. There was no Prussia, as there was an England. To travel from
the dominion of George II. to the dominion of his famous nephew, was to
go from the full light of the eighteenth century back to the dimness of
the fifteenth. An academy of sciences, by the influence of
Sophie-Charlotte, and under the guidance of Leibnitz, had been founded
at Berlin at the beginning of the eighteenth century; but Frederick
William had an angry contempt for every kind of activity except drill
and the preaching of orthodox theology, and during his reign the academy
languished in obscurity.[132]
The accession of Frederick II. was the signal for its reconstitution,
and the revival of its activity under the direction of Maupertuis. To
the sciences of experiment and observation, which had been its original
objects, was added a department of speculative philosophy. The court was
materialist, sceptical, Voltairean, all at the same time; but the
academy as a body was theologically orthodox, and it was wholly and
purely metaphysical in its philosophy. We may partly understand the
distance at which Berlin was then behind Paris, when we read
D’Alembert’s just remonstrances with Frederick against giving as
subjects for prize-essays such metaphysical problems as ‘The search for
a primary and permanent force, at once substance and cause.’[133]
Whatever activity existed outside of the court and the academy was
divided between the dialectic of Protestant scholasticism, and Wolf’s
exposition and development of Leibnitz. In literature proper there arose
with the accession of Frederick a small group of essentially secondary
critics, of whom Sulzer was the best, without the vivid and radiant
force of either Voltaire or Diderot, and without the deep inspiration
and invention of those who were to follow them, and to place Germany
finally on a level with England and France. Lessing, the founder of the
modern German literature, was at this time a youth of twenty-two, and by
a striking turn of chance was employed by Voltaire in putting into
German his pleadings in the infamous Hirschel case. It was not then
worth while for a stranger to learn the language in which Lessing had
not yet written, and Voltaire, who was a master of English and Italian,
never knew more German than was needed to curse a postilion.[134]
Leibnitz wrote everything of importance in Latin or French, the Berlin
academy conducted its transactions first in Latin, next and for many
years to come in French, and one of its earliest presidents, a man of
special competence,[135] pronounced German to be a noble but frightfully
barbarised tongue. The famous Wolf had done his best to make the tongue
of his country literate, but even his influence was unequal to the task.
Society was in its foundations not removed from the mediæval. The
soldiers with whom Frederick won Zorndorf and Leuthen, like the Russians
and Austrians whom he defeated on those bloody days, were not more nor
less than serfs. Instead of philosophers like Newton and Locke, he had
to find the pride and safety of his country in swift rushing troopers
like Winterfield and Ziethen. A daring cavalry-charge in season was for
the moment more to Prussia than any theory why it is that an apple
falls, and a new method of drill much more urgent than a new origin for
ideas. She was concerned not with the speculative problem of the causes
why the earth keeps its place in the planetary system, but with the
practical problem how Prussia was to make her place in the system of
Europe. Prussia was then far more behind France in all thought and all
arts, save the soldier’s, than England was in front of France.
Voltaire had nothing to learn at Berlin, and may we not add, as the king
was a rooted Voltairean long before this, he had nothing to teach there?
The sternest barrack in Europe was not a field in which the apostle of
free and refined intelligence could sow seed with good hope of harvest.
Voltaire at this time, we have to recollect, was in the public mind only
a poet, and perhaps was regarded, if not altogether by Frederick,
certainly by those who surrounded him, as much in the same order of
being with Frederick’s flute, fitted by miracle with a greater number of
stops. ‘I don’t give you any news of literature,’ D’Alembert wrote from
Potsdam in 1763, ‘for I don’t know any, and you know how barren
literature is in this country, where no one except the king concerns
himself with it.’[136] There is no particular disgrace to Berlin or its
king in this. Their task was very definite, and it was only a pleasant
error of Frederick’s rather fantastic youth to suppose that this task
lay in the direction of polite letters. The singer of the Henriade was
naturally of different quality and turn of mind from a hero who had at
least as hard an enterprise in his hand as that of Henry IV. Voltaire
and Frederick were the two leaders of the two chief movements then going
on, in the great work of the transformation of the old Europe into the
new. But the movements were in different matter, demanded vastly
different methods, and, as is so often the case, the scope of each was
hardly visible to the pursuer of the other. Voltaire’s work was to
quicken the activity and proclaim the freedom of human intelligence, and
to destroy the supremacy of an old spiritual order. Frederick’s work was
to shake down the old political order. The sum of their efforts was the
definite commencement of that revolution in the thought and the
political conformation of the West, of which the momentous local
revolution in France must, if we take a sufficiently wide survey before
and after, be counted a secondary phase. The conditions of the order
which was established after the confusion of the fall of the Roman power
before the inroads of the barbarians, and which constituted the Europe
of the early and middle ages, are now tolerably well understood, and the
historic continuity or identity of that order is typified in two
institutions, which by the middle of the eighteenth century had reached
very different stages of decay, and possessed very different powers of
resisting attack. One was the German Empire, and the other was the Holy
Catholic Church. Frederick dealt a definite blow to the first, and
Voltaire did the same to the second.
Those who read history and biography with a sturdy and childish
pre-conception that the critical achievements in the long course of the
world’s progress must of necessity have fallen to the lot of the salt of
the earth, will find it hard to associate the beginning of the great
overt side of modern movement with the two men who versified and
wrangled together for some two and a half years in the middle of the
eighteenth century at Berlin. It is hard to think of the old state, with
all its memories of simple enthusiasm and wild valour and rude
aspiration after some better order, finally disappearing into the chaos
for which it was more than ripe, under the impulse of an arch cynic. And
it is hard, too, to think that the civilising religion which was founded
by a Jew, and first seized by Jews, noblest and holiest of their race,
got its first and severest blow from one who was not above using a Jew
to cheat Christians out of their money. But the fact remains of the vast
work which this amazing pair had to do, and did.
The character of the founder of the greatness of Prussia, if indeed we
may call founder one rather than another member of that active, clear,
and far-sighted line, can have no attraction for those who require as an
indispensable condition of fealty that their hero shall have either
purity, or sensibility, or generosity, or high honour, or manly respect
for human nature. Frederick’s rapidity and firmness of will, his
administrative capacity, his military talent, were marvellous and
admirable enough; but on the moral side of character, in his relations
to men and women, in his feeling for the unseen, in his ideas of truth
and beauty, he belonged to a type which is not altogether uncommon. In
his youth he had much of a sort of shallow sensibility, which more
sympathetic usage might possibly have established and to some small
extent even deepened, but which the curiously rough treatment that his
pacific tastes and frivolous predilections provoked his father to
inflict, turned in time into the most bitter and profound kind of
cynicism that the world knows. No cynic is so hard and insensible as the
man who has once had sensibility, perhaps because the consciousness that
he was in earlier days open to more generous impressions persuades him
that the fault of any change in his own view of things must needs lie in
the world’s villainy, which he has now happily for himself had time to
find out. Sensibility of a true sort, springing from natural fountains
of simple and unselfish feeling, can neither be corrupted nor dried up.
But at its best, Frederick’s sensibility was of the literary and
aesthetic kind, rather than the humane and social. It concerned taste
and expression, and had little root in the recognition as at first-hand
of those facts of experience, of beauty and tenderness and cruelty and
endurance, which are the natural objects that permanently quicken a
sensitive nature. In a word, Frederick’s was the conventional
sensibility of the French literature of the time; a harmless thing
enough in the poor souls that only poured themselves out in bad romance
and worse verse, but terrible when it helped to fill with contempt for
mankind an absolute monarch, with the most perfect military machine in
Europe at his command. Frederick is constantly spoken of as a man
typical of his century. In truth he was throughout his life in
ostentatious opposition to his century on its most remarkable side.
There has never been any epoch whose foremost men had such faith and
hope in the virtues of humanity. There has never been any prominent man
who despised humanity so bitterly and unaffectedly as Frederick despised
it.
We know what to think of a man who writes a touching and pathetic letter
condoling with a friend on the loss of his wife, and on the same day
makes an epigram on the dead woman[137]; who never found so much
pleasure in a friendly act as when he could make it the means of hurting
the recipient; whose practical pleasantries were always spiteful and
sneering and cruel. As we read of his tricks on D’Argens or Pöllnitz, we
feel how right Voltaire was in borrowing a nickname for him from a
mischievous brute whom he kept in his garden. He presented D’Argens with
a house; when D’Argens went to take possession he found the walls
adorned with pictures of all the most indecent and humiliating episodes
of his own life. This was a type of Frederick’s delicacy towards some of
those whom he honoured with his friendship. It is true that, except
Voltaire and Maupertuis, most of the French philosophers whom Frederick
seduced into coming to live at Berlin were not too good for the
corporal’s horse-play of which they were the victims. But then we know,
further, what to think of a man whose self-respect fails to proscribe
gross and unworthy companions. He is either a lover of parasites, which
Frederick certainly was not, or else the most execrable cynic, the cynic
who delights in any folly or depravity that assures him how right he is
in despising ‘that damned race.’
Frederick need not have summoned the least worthy French freethinkers,
men like D’Argens and La Mettrie and De Prades, in their own way as
little attractive in life and in doctrine as any monk or Geneva
preacher, to warrant him in thinking meanly of mankind. If any one wants
to know what manner of spirit this great temporal deliverer of Europe
was of, he may find what he seeks in the single episode of the
negotiations at Klein-Schnellendorf in 1741. There, although he had made
and was still bound by a solemn treaty of alliance with France, he
entered into secret engagements with the Hungarian Queen, to be veiled
by adroitly pretended hostilities. Even if, as an illustrious apologist
of the Prussian King is reduced to plead, this is in a certain fashion
defensible, on the ground that France and Austria were both playing with
cogged dice, and therefore the other dicer of the party was in
self-defence driven to show himself their superior in these excellent
artifices, there still seems a gratuitous infamy in hinting to the
Austrian general, as Frederick did, how he might assault with advantage
the French enemy, Frederick’s own ally at the moment.[138] This was the
author of the plea for political morality, called the Anti-Machiavel,
whose publication Voltaire had superintended the year before, and, for
that matter, had done his best to prevent. Still, as Frederick so
graciously said of his new guest and old friend: ‘He has all the tricks
of a monkey; but I shall make no sign, for I need him in my study of
French style. One may learn good things from a scoundrel: I want to know
his French; what is his morality to me?’ And so a royal statesman may
have the manners of the coarsest corporal, and the morality of the
grossest cynic, and still have both the eye to discern, and the hand to
control, the forces of a great forward movement.
Frederick had the signal honour of accepting his position, and taking up
with an almost perfect fortitude the burden which it laid upon him. ‘We
are not masters of our own lot,’ he wrote to Voltaire, immediately after
his accession to the throne; ‘the whirlwind of circumstances carries us
away, and we must suffer ourselves to be carried away.’[139] And what he
said in this hour of exaltation he did not deny nearly twenty years
later, when his fortunes seemed absolutely desperate. ‘If I had been
born a private person,’ he wrote to him in 1759, ‘I would give up
everything for love of peace; but a man is bound to take on the spirit
of his position.’[140] ‘Philosophy teaches us to do our duty, to serve
our country faithfully at the price of our blood and our case, to
sacrifice for it our whole existence.’[141] Men are also called upon by
their country to abstain from sacrificing their existence, and if
Frederick’s sense of duty to his subjects had been as perfect as it was
exceptionally near being so, he would not have carried a phial of poison
round his neck.[142] Still on the whole he devoted himself to his career
with a temper that was as entirely calculated for the overthrow of a
tottering system, as Voltaire’s own. It is difficult to tell whether
Frederick’s steady attention to letters and men of letters, and his
praiseworthy endeavours to make Berlin a true academic centre, were due
to a real and disinterested love of knowledge, and a sense of its worth
to the spirit of man, or still more to weak literary vanity, and a
futile idea of universal fame so far as his own productions went, and a
purely utilitarian purpose so far as his patronage of the national
academy was concerned. One thing is certain, that the philosophy which
he learnt from French masters, which Voltaire brought in his proper
person to Berlin, and to which Frederick to the end of his days was
always adding illustrative commentaries, never made any impression on
Germany. The teaching of Leibnitz and Wolf stood like a fortified wall
in the face of the French invasion, and whatever effective share French
speculation had upon Germany, was through the influence of Descartes
upon Leibnitz.
The dissolution of the outer framework of the European state-system, for
which Frederick’s seizure of Silesia was the first clear signal,
followed as it was by the indispensable suppression of the mischievous
independence, so called, of barbaric and feudal Poland, where bishops
and nobles held a people in the most oppressive bondage, can only
concern us here slightly, because it was for the time only indirectly
connected with the characteristic work of Voltaire’s life. But, though
indirect, the connection may be seen at our distance of time to have
been marked and unmistakable. The old order and principles of Europe
were to receive a new impress, and the decaying system of the middle age
to be replaced by a polity of revolution, which should finally change
the relations of nations, the types of European government, and the
ideas of spiritual control.
In 1733 the war of the Polish succession between Austria and Russia on
the one hand, and France and Spain on the other, had given the first
great shock to the house of Austria, which was compelled to renounce the
pretensions and territory of the Empire in Italy, or nearly all of them,
in favour of the Spanish Bourbons, as well as to surrender Lorraine to
Stanislas, with reversion to the crown of France. We may notice in
passing that it was at Stanislas’ court of Lunéville that Voltaire and
the Marquise du Châtelet passed their last days together. The wars of
the Polish succession were remarkable for another circumstance. They
were the first occasion of the decisive interference of Russia in
Western affairs, an only less important disturbance of Europe than the
first great interference of Prussia a few years later. The falling to
pieces of the old Europe was as inevitable as, more than twelve
centuries before, had been the dissolution of that yet older Europe
whose heart had been not Vienna but Rome. Russia and Prussia were not
the only novel elements. There was a third from over the sea, the
American colonies of France and England.
Roman Europe had been a vast imperial state, with slavery for a base.
Then, after the feudal organisation had run its course, there was a long
and chaotic transition of dynastic and territorial wars, frightfully
wasteful of humanity and worse than unfruitful to progress. In vain do
historians, intent on vindicating the foregone conclusions of the
optimism which a distorted notion about final causes demands or
engenders in them, try to show these hateful contests as parts of a
harmonious scheme of things, in which many diverse forces move in a
mysterious way to a common and happy end. As if any good use, for
instance, were served by the transfer, for one of the chief results of
the war of the Polish succession, of the Italian provinces of the Empire
of the Spanish Bourbons. As if any good or permanent use were served by
the wars which ended in the Peace of Utrecht, when victorious England
conceded, and with much wisdom conceded, the precise point which she had
for so many years been disputing. From the Peace of Westphalia to the
beginning of the Seven Years’ War, it is not too much to say that there
was a century of purely artificial strife on the continent of Europe,
of wars as factious, as merely personal, as unmeaning, as the civil war
of the Fronde was all of these things. In speaking roundly of this
period, we leave out of account the first Silesian War, because the
issue between Prussia and Austria was not decisively fought out until
the final death-struggle from 1756 to 1763. It was the entry of
Frederick the Great upon the scene, that instantly raised international
relations into the region of real matter and changed a strife of
dynasties, houses, persons, into a vital competition between old forces
and principles and new. The aimless and bloody commotions which had
raged over Europe, and ground men’s lives to dust in the red mill of
battle, came for a time to an end, and their place was taken by a
tremendous conflict, on whose issue hung not merely the triumph of a
dynasty, but the question of the type to which future civilisation was
to conform.
In the preliminary war which followed immediately upon the death of
Charles VI. in 1740, and which had its beginning in Frederick’s invasion
of Silesia, circumstances partially marched in the usual tradition, with
France and Austria playing opposite sides in an accustomed game. Before
the opening of the Seven Years’ War the cardinal change of policy and
alliances had taken place. We are not concerned with the court intrigues
that brought the change about, with the intricate manœuvres of the
Jesuits, or the wounded vanity of Bernis, whose verses Frederick laughed
at, or the pique of Pompadour, whom Frederick declined to count an
acquaintance. When conflicting forces of tidal magnitude are at work, as
they were in the middle of the last century, the play of mere personal
aims and ambitions is necessarily of secondary importance; because we
may always count upon there being at least one great power that clearly
discerns its own vital interest, and is sure therefore to press with
steady energy in its own special direction. That power was Austria. One
force of this kind is enough to secure a universal adjustment of all the
others in their natural places.
The situation was apparently very complex. There were in the middle of
the century two great pairs of opposed interests, the interests of
France and England on the ocean and in America, and the interests of
Austria and Prussia in Central Europe. The contest was in each of the
two cases much more than a superficial affair of dynasties or division
of territory, to meet the requirements of the metaphysical diplomacy of
the balance of power. It was a re-opening in far vaster proportions of
those profound issues of new religion and old which had only been dammed
up, and not permanently settled, by the great Peace of Westphalia in
1648. In vaster proportions, not merely because the new struggle between
the Catholic and Protestant powers extended into the new world, but
because the forces contained in these two creeds had been widened and
developed, and a multitude of indirect consequences, entirely apart from
theology and church discipline, depended upon the triumph of Great
Britain and Prussia. The Governments of France and Austria represented
the feudal and military idea, not in the strength of that idea while it
was still alive, but in the narrow and oppressive form of its decay. No
social growth was possible under its shadow, for one of its essential
conditions was discouragement, active and passive, of commercial
industry, the main pathway then open to an advancing people. Again, both
France and Austria represented the old type of monarchy, as
distinguished alike from the aristocratic oligarchy of England, and the
new type of monarchy which Prussia introduced into Europe, frugal,
encouraging industry, active in supervision, indefatigable in improving
the laws. Let us not omit above all things the splendid religious
toleration, of which Prussia set so extraordinarily early an example to
Europe. The Protestants whom episcopal tyranny drove from Salzburg found
warm hospitality among their northern brethren. While the professors of
the reformed faith were denied civil status in France, and subjected to
persecution of a mediæval bloodiness, one Christian was counted exactly
as another in Prussia. While England was revelling in the infliction of
atrocious penal laws on her Catholic citizens, Prussia extended even to
the abhorred Jesuit the shelter which was denied him in Spain and at
Rome. The transfer of territory from Austria to Prussia meant the
extension of toleration in that territory. Silesia, for instance, no
sooner became Prussian, than the University of Breslau, whose advantages
had hitherto been rigidly confined to Catholics, was at once
compulsorily opened to Protestants and Catholics alike. In criticising
Frederick’s despotism let us recognise how much enlightenment, how much
of what is truly modern, was to be found in the manner in which this
despotic power was exercised, long before the same enlightened
principles were accepted in other countries.
We cannot understand the issues of the Seven Years’ War, nor indeed of
the eighteenth century on any of its more important sides, without
tolerably distinct ideas about the ages before and behind it, about the
sixteenth century and the twentieth; without ideas as to the conditions
of the break-up of the Catholic and the feudal organisation, and, next,
as to the attitude proper to be assumed, and the methods to be followed,
in dealing with the more or less anarchic circumstances in which their
break-up and its sequels leave us. There are two ways of regarding these
questions. You may say, as Comte says, that the ultimate type of
society, perfected on a basis of positive knowledge, will in the
essential features of its constitution correspond to the ancient or
mediæval constitution which it replaces; because that gave the fullest
possible satisfaction to those elements of human nature which are
deepest and permanent, and to those social needs which must always press
upon us; that anything which either seriously retards the dissolution of
the old, or draws men aside from the road which leads on to the same
organisation transformed, must therefore be an impediment in the way of
the new society, and a peril to civilisation. Hence, they say, the
mischievousness of Protestantism, Voltairism, and all the minor
manifestations of the critical spirit, because they inspire their
followers with a contempt, as mistaken towards the past as it is
pernicious to the future, for those fundamental principles of social
stability and individual happiness, to which alone we have to look for
the establishment of a better order; because they give to the unguided
individual judgment the force and authority that can only come with
safety from organisation and tradition, that is from a certain definite
form of shaping and expressing the common judgment; and because,
moreover, they tend directly and indirectly to detach effort from social
aims and the promotion of the common weal, to the attainment of mean and
unwholesome individual ambitions. From this point of view, we should
have to regard the acquisition of colonies, for instance, which was one
of the chief objects of Lord Chatham’s policy, as the mischievous
transfer, in the interests of commercial cupidity, of an activity,
hopefulness, and power, that ought to have been devoted to the solution
of the growing social difficulties of Europe; and that ought to have
been bent from a profoundly mean egotism, in the nation and the traders
whose interest was the key of the policy, into a generous feeling for
the public order.
There is, however, another and a very different way of looking at all
this. You cannot be sure, it is said, that the method of social advance
is to be a return upon the old framework and the old lines; to be sure
of this implies an impatient confidence that social forms have all been
exhausted, or else an unsupported assumption that the present transitory
form is so full of danger to the stability of civilisation, as to make
the acceptance of almost any firm order better than the prolonged
endurance of a social state which, on that theory, ought hardly to be
accounted much better than the social state of Bedouin Arabs. Is it not
far better and safer to refrain from committing ourselves to a given
type of social reconstruction, and to work forward patiently upon the
only principle that can be received with entire assurance; namely, that
faithful cultivation of the intelligence, and open-minded investigation
of all that the intelligence may present to us, is the only certain
method of not missing the surest and quickest road to the manifold
improvements of which the fundamental qualities of human nature, as well
as the relations of man in society, are susceptible? There is no good
ground for supposing that this steadfast regard to the fruitfulness and
variety of the individual intelligence tends specially to lead to the
concentration of energy upon individual aims. For what lesson does free
intelligence teach us more constantly or more impressively than that man
standing alone is impotent, that every unsocial act or sentiment tends
to overthrow that collectivity of effort to which we owe all, and, most
important of all, that this collectivity is most effectively secured by
the just culture of the impulses and affections? No degree nor kind of
organisation could lead us further than this, and ought it not to be the
prime object and chief hope of those who think about society, that this
truth shall stand rooted in every one’s own reason? If it does not so
stand, you have no security for your spiritual organisation, and if it
does, then you have no necessity. It is to the spread of this
conviction, by the ever-pressing consciousness of urgent social
circumstances, that we must look to suffuse industrial and egotistic
energy with a truly moral and social sentiment.
This is the point of view from which we may justly regard the violent
change that was the result of the Seven Years’ War, as a truly
progressive step. We cannot be as reasonably sure that the old
conditions of men’s relations in society are in whatever new shape
destined to return, as we are sure that it was a good thing to prevent a
feudal and jesuitical government like Austria from retaining a purely
obstructive power in Europe, and a jesuitical government like France
from establishing the same obstructive kind of power in America. The
advantages of the final acquisition of America by Protestantism, and the
decisive consolidation of Prussia, were not without alloy. History does
not present us with these clean balances. It is not at all difficult to
see the injurious elements in this victory of the northern powers, and
nobody would be less willing than the present writer to accept either
the Prussian polity of Frederick, or the commercial polity of England
and her western colonies, as offering final types of wholesome social
states But the alternative was the triumph of a far worse polity than
either, the polity of the Society of Jesus.
Even those who claim our respect for the Jesuits as having in the
beginning of their course served the very useful purpose of honestly
administering that spiritual power which had fallen from the hands of
the Popes, who had mischievously entered the ranks and followed the
methods of temporal princes, do not deny that within a couple of
generations they became a dangerous obstacle to the continuity of
European progress. Indeed, it is clear that they grew into the very
worst element that has ever appeared in the whole course of European
history, because their influence rested on a systematic compromise with
moral corruption. They had barely seized the spiritual power in the
Catholic countries when it was perceived that as an engine of moral
control their supposed power was no power at all; and that the only
condition on which they could retain the honour and the political
authority which were needful to them was that they should connive at
moral depravity. They had the education of the country in their hands,
and from the confessor’s closet they pulled the wires which moved
courts. There was no counter-force, for the mass of the people was dumb,
ignorant, and fettered. Say what we will of the need for a spiritual
power, the influence of the Jesuits by the middle of the eighteenth
century was cutting off the very root of civilisation. This was the
veritably Infamous. And this was the influence which the alliance of
England and Prussia, a thing accidental enough to all appearance,
successfully and decisively checked, because the triumph of the two
northern powers was naturally the means of discrediting the Jesuit
intrigues in the court of Versailles and elsewhere, and stripping them
of those associations of political and material success, which had
hitherto stood to them in the stead of true spiritual credit.
The peace of 1763 had important territorial consequences. By the treaty
of Paris between France, England, and Spain, Great Britain was assured
of her possessions on the other side of the Atlantic. By the treaty of
Hubertsburg between Austria, Prussia, and Saxony, Prussia was assured of
her position as an independent power in Europe. These things were much.
But the decisive repulse of the great Jesuit organisation was yet more.
It was the most important side of the same facts. The immediate
occasions of this repulse varied in different countries, and had their
origin in different sets of superficial circumstance, but the debility
of the courts of Austria and France was the only condition on which such
occasions could be seized. The very next year, after the treaties of
Paris and Hubertsburg, the Society of Jesus was suppressed in France,
and its property confiscated. Three years later it was expelled from
Spain. Within ten years from the peace of 1763 it was abolished by the
virtuous Clement XIV. In Canada, where the order had been extremely
powerful,[143] their authority vanished, and with it the probability of
establishing in the northern half of the new world those ideas of
political absolutism and theological casuistry which were undoing the
old. Whatever the accidents which hurried the catastrophe, there were
two general causes which really produced it, the revolution in ideas,
and the revolution in the seat of material power. If this be a true
description of the crisis, we can see sufficiently plainly to what an
extent Voltaire and Frederick, while they appeared to themselves to be
fellow-workers only in the culture of the muses, were in fact
unconsciously co-operating in a far mightier task. When the war was
drawing to an end, and Frederick was likely to escape from the
calamities which had so nearly overwhelmed him and his kingdom in
irretrievable ruin, we find Voltaire writing to D’Alembert thus: ‘As for
Luc’ (the nickname borrowed for the king of Prussia from an ape with a
trick of biting), ‘though I ought to be full of resentment against him,
yet I confess to you that in my quality of thinking creature and
Frenchman, I am heartily content that a certain most devout house has
not swallowed Germany up, and that the Jesuits don’t confess at Berlin.
Superstition is monstrously powerful towards the Danube.’ To which his
correspondent replied that he quite agreed that the triumph of Frederick
was a blessing for France and for philosophy. ‘These Austrians are
insolent capucins, whom I would fain see annihilated with the
superstition they protect.’[144] Here was precisely the issue.
It would be a great mistake to suppose that Frederick consciously and
formally recognised the ultimate ends of his policy. Such deliberate
marking out of the final destination of their work, imputed to rulers,
churchmen, poets, is mostly a figment invented by philosophers.
Frederick thought nothing at all about the conformation of the European
societies in the twentieth century. It was enough for him to make a
strong and independent Prussia, without any far-reaching vision, or
indeed without any vision at all, of the effect which a strong and
independent Prussia would finally have upon the readjustment of ideas
and social forces in western civilisation. We are led to a false notion
of history, and of all the conditions of political action and the
development of nations, by attributing to statesmen deep and
far-reaching sight of consequences, which only completed knowledge and
some ingenuity enable those who live after to fit into a harmonious
scheme. ‘Fate, for whose wisdom I entertain all imaginable reverence,
often finds in chance, by which it works, an instrument not over
manageable.’[145] And the great ruler, knowing this, is content to
abstain from playing fate’s part, feeling his way slowly to the next
step. His compass is only true for a very short distance, and his chart
has marks for no long course. To make Prussia strong was the aim of
Frederick’s life. Hence, although the real destiny of his policy was to
destroy the house of Austria, he did not scruple in 1741 to offer to
assist Maria Theresa with his best help against all the other invaders
of the famous Pragmatic Sanction, which they had solemnly sworn to
uphold. Afterwards, and before the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War, he
sought the alliance of France, but happily for Europe, not until after
Kaunitz and Maria Theresa had already secured that blind and misguided
power, thus driving him into an alliance with Great Britain. And so
chance did the work of fate after all.
It may be said that such a view of the operation of the great forces of
the world is destructive of all especial respect and gratitude towards
the eminent men, of whom chance and fate have made mere instruments.
What becomes of hero-worship, if your hero after all only half knew
whither he sought to go, and if those achievements which have done such
powerful service were not consciously directed towards the serviceable
end? We can only answer that it is not the office of history to purvey
heroes, nor always to join appreciation of a set of complex effects with
veneration for this or that performer. For this veneration, if it is to
be an intelligent mood, implies insight into the inmost privacy of aim
and motive, and this insight, in the case of those whom circumstance
raises on a towering pedestal, we can hardly ever count with assurance
on finding faithful and authentic. History is perhaps not less
interesting for not being distorted into a new hagiographa.
It is equally unwarranted to put into Frederick’s mind conscious ideas
as to the type of monarchy proper for Europe in the epoch of passage
from old systems. Once more, he thought of his own country, and his own
country only, in all those wise measures of internal government which
have been so unjustly and so childishly thrust by historians into the
second place behind his exploits as a soldier, as if the civil activity
of the period between 1763, when peace was made, and 1786, when he died,
was not fully as remarkable in itself, and fully as momentous in its
results, as the military activity of the period between 1763 and 1740.
There is in men of the highest governing capacity, like Richelieu, or
Cromwell, or Frederick, an instinct for good order and regular
administration. They insist upon it for its own sake, independently of
its effects either on the happiness of subjects, or on the fundamental
policy and march of things. If Frederick had acceded to the supreme
power in a highly civilised country, he would have been equally bent on
imposing his own will and forcing the administration into the exact
grooves prescribed by himself, and the result would have been as
pestilent there as it was beneficial in a backward and semi-barbarous
country such as Prussia was in his time. This good internal ordering was
no more than a part of the same simple design which shaped his external
policy. He had to make a nation, and its material independence in the
face of Austria and Russia was not more a part of this process than
giving it the great elements of internal well-being, equal laws, just
administration, financial thrift, and stimulus and encouragement to
industry. Such an achievement as the restoration of the germs of order
and prosperity, which Frederick so rapidly brought about after the
appalling ruin that seven years of disastrous war had effected, is
unmatched in the history of human government. Well might he pride
himself, as we know that he did, on replacing this social chaos by
order, more than on Eossbach or Leuthen. Above all, he never forgot the
truth which every statesman ought to have burning in letters of fire
before his eyes; _I am the procurator of the poor_.
It commits us to no general theory of government to recognise the merits
of Frederick’s internal administration. They constitute a special case,
to be judged by its own conditions. We may safely go so far as to say
that in whatever degree the social state of a nation calls for active
government, whether, as the people of the American Union boast of
themselves, they need no government, or whether, as is the case in Great
Britain, the wretched lives of the poor beneath the combined cupidity
and heartless want of thought of the rich cry aloud for justice, in this
degree it is good that the statesmen called to govern should be in that
capacity of Frederick’s type, conceding all freedom to thought, but
energetic in the use of power as trustees for the whole nation against
special classes. To meet completely the demands of their office they
should have, what Frederick neither had nor could under the
circumstances of his advent and the time be expected to have, a firm
conviction that the highest ultimate end of all kingship is to enable
nations to dispense with that organ of national life, and to fit them
for a spontaneous initiative and free control in the conduct of their
own affairs.
Let us be careful to remember that, if Frederick was a great ruler in
the positive sense, he sprang from the critical school. The traditions
of his house were strictly Protestant, his tutors were Calvinistic
refugees, and his personal predilections had from his earliest youth
been enthusiastically Voltairean. May we not count it one of the claims
of the critical philosophy to a place among the leading progressive
influences in western history, that it tended to produce statesmen of
this positive type? I do not know of any period of corresponding length
that can produce such a group of active, wise, and truly positive
statesmen as existed in Europe between 1760 and 1780. Besides Frederick,
we have Turgot in France, Pombal in Portugal, Charles III and D’Aranda
in Spain. If Charles III was faithful to the old creed, the three
greatest, at any rate, of these extraordinary men drew inspiration from
the centre of the critical school. D’Aranda had mixed much with the
Voltairean circle while in Paris. Pombal, in spite of the taint of some
cruelty, in so many respects one of the most powerful and resolute
ministers that has ever held office in Europe, had been for some time in
England, and was a warm admirer of Voltaire, whose works he caused to be
translated into Portuguese. The famous school of Italian publicists,
whose speculations bore such admirable fruit in the humane legislation
of Leopold of Tuscany, and had so large a share in that code with which
the name of the ever hateful Bonaparte has become fraudulently
associated, these excellent thinkers found their oracles in that
critical philosophy, of which we are so unjustly bidden to think only in
connection with shallow and reckless destruction. The application of
reason to the amelioration of the social condition was the device of the
great rulers of this time, and the father and inspirer of this device
was that Voltaire who is habitually presented to us a mere mocker.
Psychologues like Sulzer might declare that the scourge of right
thinking was to be found in ‘those philosophers who, more used to
sallies of wit than to deep reasoning, assume that they have overthrown
by a single smart trope truths only to be known by combining a multitude
of observations, so delicate and difficult that we cannot grasp them
without the aid of the firmest attention.’[146] How many of these
so-called truths were anything but sophistical propositions, the
products of intellectual ingenuity run riot, without the smallest
bearing either on positive science or social well-being? And is it not
rather an abuse of men’s willingness to take the profundity of
metaphysics on trust, that any one who has formulated a metaphysical
proposition, with due technicality of sounding words, has a claim to
arrest the serious attention of every busy passer-by, and to throw on
this innocent and laudable person the burden of disproof? If Duns Scotus
or St. Thomas Aquinas had risen from the dead, Voltaire would very
properly have declined a bout of school dialectic with those famous
shades, because he was living in the century of the Encyclopædia, when
the exploration of things and the improvement of institutions had taken
the place of subtle manipulation of unverified words, important as that
process had once been in the intellectual development of Europe. He was
equally wise in declining to throw more than a trope or sprightly sally
in the direction of people who dealt only in the multiplication of
metaphysical abracadabras. It was his task to fix the eyes of men upon
action. In the sight of Lutheran or Wolfian conjurors with words this
was egregious shallowness. Strangely enough they thought it the climax
of philosophic profundity to reconcile their natural spiritualism with
the supernatural spiritualism of the scriptures, and rationalistic
theism with the historic theism of revelation.[147] Voltaire repudiated
the supernatural and pseudo-historic half of this hybrid combination,
and in doing so he showed a far profounder logic than the cloudiest and
most sonorous of his theologico-metaphysical critics. We may call him
negative and destructive on this account if we please, yet surely the
abnegation of barren and inconsistent speculation, and of fruitless
effort to seize a vain abstract universality, was a very meritorious
trait in a man who did not stop here, but by every means, by poetry, by
history, by biography, and by the manifestation of all his vivid
personal interests, drew every one who was within the sphere of his
attraction to the consideration of social action as the first fact for
the firm attention of the leaders of mankind.
It may be said that even from this side Voltaire was destructive only,
and undoubtedly, owing to the circumstances of the time, the destructive
side seemed to predominate in his social influence. To say this,
however, is not to bring an end to the matter. The truth is that no
negative thinking can stop at the negative point. To teach men to hate
superstition and injustice is a sure, if an indirect, way of teaching
them to seek after their opposites. Voltaire could only shake
obscurantist institutions by appealing to man’s love of light, and the
love of light, once stirred, leads far. He appealed to reason, and it
was reason in Frederick and the others, which had quickened and
strengthened the love of good order, that produced the striking
reforming spirit which moved through the eighteenth century, until the
reaction against French revolutionary violence arrested its progress. It
is one of the most difficult questions in all history to determine
whether the change from the old order to the new has been damaged or
advanced by that most memorable arrest of the work of social renovation
in the hands of sovereign and traditional governments, administered by
wise statesmen with due regard to traditional spirit; and how far the
passionate efforts of those classes, whose only tradition is a tradition
of squalor and despair, have driven the possessors of superior material
power back into obstructive trepidation. The question is more than
difficult, it is in our generation insoluble, because the movement is
wholly incomplete. But whether the French outbreak from 1789 to 1794 may
prove to have been the starting-point of a new society, or only to have
been a detrimental interruption and parent of interruptions to stable
movement forwards, we have in either case to admit that there was a most
vigorous attempt made in all the chief countries in Europe, between the
middle of the century and the fall of the French monarchy, to improve
government and to perfect administration; that Frederick of Prussia was
the author of the most permanently successful of these endeavours; and
that Frederick learnt to break loose from dark usage, to prefer equity
of administration, to abandon religious superstition, and to insist on
tolerance, from the only effective moral and intellectual masters he
ever had, first the French Calvinists, and then the French critical
school, with Voltaire for chief. It is true, as we shall presently see,
that an important change in the spirit of French writers was marked by
the Encyclopædia, which was so much besides being critical. But then
this famous work only commenced in the year when Voltaire reached
Berlin, and Frederick’s character had received its final shape long
before that time.
With the exception of Voltaire, D’Alembert was the only really eminent
Frenchman whose work ever struck Frederick, and we are even conscious,
in comparing his letters to these two eminent men, of a certain
seriousness and deferential respect towards the later friend, which
never marked his relations with Voltaire after the early days of
youthful enthusiasm. Frederick’s admiration for France, indeed, has been
somewhat overstated by French writers, and by those of our own country
who have taken their word for granted. ‘Your nation,’ Frederick once
wrote to Voltaire, ‘is the most inconsequent in all Europe. It abounds
in bright intelligence, but has no consistency in its ideas. This is how
it appears through all its history. There is really an indelible
character imprinted on it. The only exception in a long succession of
reigns is to be found in a few years of Lewis XIV. The reign of Henry
IV. was neither tranquil enough nor long enough for us to take that into
account. During the administration of Richelieu we observe some
consistency of design and some nerve in execution; but in truth they are
uncommonly short epochs of wisdom in so long a chronicle of madnesses.
Again, France has been able to produce men like Descartes or
Malebranche, but no Leibnitz, no Lockes, no Newtons. On the other hand,
for taste, you surpass all other nations, and I will surely range myself
under your standards in all that regards delicacy of discernment and the
judicious and scrupulous choice between real beauties and those which
are only apparent. That is a great point in polite letters, but it is
not everything.’[148] Frederick, however, could never endure the least
hint that he was not a perfect Frenchman in the order of polite letters.
The article on Prussia in the Encyclopædia was full of the most
flattering eulogies of his work as a soldier and an administrator, and
even contained handsome praise for his writings; but Diderot, the author
of this part of the article, delicately suggested that a year or two in
the Faubourg St. Honoré would perhaps have dispersed the few grains of
Berlin sand which hindered the perfect purity of note of that admirable
flute. Frederick, who had hitherto been an ardent reader of the
Encyclopædia, never opened another volume.
We can understand Voltaire’s character without wading through the slough
of mean scandals which sprung up like gross fungi during his stay at
Berlin. Who need remember that Frederick spoke of his illustrious guest
as an orange of which, when one has squeezed the juice, one throws away
the skin? Or how Voltaire retorted by speaking of his illustrious host,
whose royal verses he had to correct, as a man sending his dirty linen
to him to wash? or, still worse, as a compound of Julius Caesar and the
abbé Cotin? Nor need we examine into stories, suspicious products of
Berlin malice, how Frederick stopped his guest’s supply of sugar and
chocolate, and how Voltaire put his host’s candle-ends into his pocket.
It is enough to know that the king and the poet gradually lost their
illusions, and forgot that life was both too short and too valuable to
waste in vain efforts of making believe that an illusion is other than
it is. Voltaire took a childish delight in his gold key and his star,
and in supping as an intimate with a king who had won five battles. His
life was at once free and occupied, the two conditions of happy
existence. He worked diligently at his Siècle de Louis XIV., and
diverted himself with operas, comedies, and great entertainments among
affable queens, charming princesses, and handsome maids of honour. Yet
he could not forget the saying, which had been so faithfully carried to
him, of the orange-skin. He declared that he was like the man who fell
from the top of a high tower, and finding himself softly supported in
the air, cried out, _Good, if it only lasts._[149] Or he was like a
husband striving hard to persuade himself of the fidelity of a suspected
wife. He had fits of violent nostalgia. ‘I am writing to you by the side
of a stove, with drooping head and heavy heart, looking on to the River
Spree, because the Spree falls into the Elbe, the Elbe into the sea, and
the sea receives the Seine, and our Paris house is near the River Seine,
and I say, Why am I in this palace, in this cabinet looking into this
Spree, and not in our own chimney-corner?... How my happiness is
poisoned, how short is life! What wretchedness to seek happiness far
from you; and what remorse, if one finds it away from you.’[150] This
was to Madame Denis, his niece; but a Christmas in the Berlin barrack
made even a plain coquette in Paris attractive and homely. We may
imagine with what tender regrets he would look back upon the old days at
Cirey.
Even in respect of the very mischief from which he had fled, the
detraction and caballing of the envious, he was hardly any better off at
Berlin than he had been at Paris. D’Argental, one of the wisest of his
friends, had forewarned him of this, and that he had fled from enemies
whom at any rate he never saw, only to find other enemies with whom he
had to live day after day. This was exactly what came to pass. Voltaire
often compared the system of life at Berlin and Potsdam to that of a
convent, half military, half literary. The vices of conventual life came
with its other features, and among them jealousy, envy, and malice. The
tale-bearer, that constant parasite of such societies, had exquisite
opportunities, and for a susceptible creature like Voltaire, the result
was wholly fatal. The nights and suppers of the gods became, in his own
phrase, suppers of Damocles. Alexander the Great was transformed into
the tyrant Dionysius. The famous Diatribe of Doctor Akakia, in the
autumn of 1752, brought matters to a climax, because its publication was
supposed to show marked defiance of the king’s wishes.
Maupertuis had been one of the earliest and most strenuous Newtonians
in France, and had at his own personal risk helped to corroborate the
truth of the new system. In 1735 the zeal for experimental science,
which was so remarkable a trait in this century of many-sided
intellectual activity, induced the academy of sciences to despatch an
expedition to take the actual measure of a degree of meridian below the
equator, and the curious and indefatigable De la Condamine, one of the
most ardent men of that ardent time, with two other inquirers went to
Peru. In 1736 Maupertuis and Clairaut under the same auspices started
for the north pole, where, after undergoing the severest hardships, they
succeeded in measuring their degree, and verifying by observation
Newton’s demonstration of the oblate figure of the earth, a verification
that was further completed by La Caille’s voyage to the Cape of Good
Hope in 1750.[151] Maupertuis commemorated his share in this excellent
work by having a portrait of himself executed, in which the palm of a
hand gently flattens the north pole. He was extremely courageous and
extremely vain. His costume was eccentric and affected, his temper more
jealous and arbitrary than comports with the magnanimity of
philosophers, and his manner more gloomily solemn than the conditions of
human life can ever justify. With all his absurdities, he was a man of
real abilities, and of a solidity of character beyond that of any of his
countrymen at Frederick’s court. I would rather live with him,
Frederick wrote to the princess Wilhelmina, than with Voltaire; ‘his
character is surer,’ which in itself was saying little. But then, the
moment he came into collision with Voltaire, his absurdities became the
most important thing about him, because it was precisely these which
Voltaire was sure to drag into unsparing prominence. In old days they
had been good friends, and a letter still remains, mournfully testifying
to the shallowness of men’s sight into the roots of their relations with
others, for it closes by bidding Maupertuis be sure that Voltaire will
love him all the days of his life.[152] The causes of their collision
were obvious enough. As Frederick said, Of two Frenchmen in the same
court, one must perish. Maupertuis, from the heights of the exact
sciences, probably despised Voltaire as a scribbler, while Voltaire,
with a heart flowing over with gay vivacity, assuredly counted
Maupertuis arbitrary, ridiculously solemn, and something of an impostor.
The compliances of society, he said of the president of the Berlin
academy, are not problems that he is fond of solving. Maupertuis acted
to König, in the matter of an academic or discoverer’s quarrel, in a way
that struck Voltaire, and all men since, as tyrannical, unjust, and
childish, all in one. He unhappily wrote a book which gave Voltaire such
an excuse for punishing the author’s injustice to König, as even
Voltaire’s spleen could hardly have hoped for, and the result was the
wittiest and most pitiless of all the purely personal satires in the
world. The temptation was certainly irresistible.
Maupertuis, as has been said, was courageous and venturesome, and this
venturesomeness being uncorrected by the severe discipline of a large
body of accurate positive knowledge, such as Clairaut and Lagrange
possessed, led him into some worse than equivocal speculation. He was in
the depths of the metaphysical stage, and developed physical theories
out of abstract terms. Of some of these theories the worst that could be
said was they were wholly unproved. He advanced the hypothesis, for
instance, that all the animal species sprang from some first creature,
prototype of all creatures since. Others of his theories were right in
idea, but wrong in form, and without even an attempt at verification.
The famous principle of the minimum of action, for example, in spite of
the truth at the bottom of it, was valueless and confused, until
Lagrange connected it with fundamental dynamic principles, generalised
it, and cleared the unsupported metaphysical notions out of it.[153] All
this, however, was wise and Newtonic compared with the ideas promulgated
in the Philosophic Letters, on which the wicked Akakia so swiftly
pounced. Here were notions which it needed more audacity to broach, than
to face the frosts and snows of Lapland; strange theories that in a
certain state of exaltation of the soul one may foresee the future; that
if the expiration of vital force could only be prevented, the body
might be kept alive for hundreds of years; that by careful dissection of
the brains of giants, Patagonian and other, we should ascertain
something of the composition of the mind; that a Latin town if it were
established, and this was not an original idea, would be an excellent
means of teaching the Latin language. Voltaire knew exactly what kind of
malicious gravity and feigned respect would surround this amazing
performance and its author with inextinguishable laughter, and his
thousand turns and tropes cut deep into Maupertuis like sharpened
swords.
Voltaire was not by scientific training competent to criticise
Maupertuis. This is true; but then Voltaire had what in such cases
dispensed with special competence, a preternatural gift of detecting an
impostor, and we must add that here as in every other case his anger was
set aflame not by intellectual vapidity, but by what he counted gross
wrong. Maupertuis had acted with despotic injustice towards König, and
Voltaire resolved to punish him. This is perhaps the only side of that
world-famous and truly wretched fray which it is worth our while to
remember, besides its illustration of the general moral that active
interest in public affairs is the only sure safeguard against the
inhuman egotism, otherwise so nearly inevitable and in any wise so
revolting, of men of letters and men of science.
Frederick took the side of the president of his academy, and had Doctor
Akakia publicly burnt within earshot of its author’s quarters.[154]
Voltaire had long been preparing for the end by depositing his funds in
the hands of the Duke of Würtemberg, and by other steps, which had come
to the king’s ears, and had by no means smoothed matters. He sees now
that the orange has been squeezed, and that it is his business to think
of saving the skin. He drew up for his own instruction, he said, a
pocket-dictionary of terms in use with kings: _My friend_ means _my
slave_; _my dear friend_ means that _you are more than indifferent to me;_
understand by _I will make you happy_, _I will endure you, as long as I
have need of you_; _sup with me to-night_ means _I will make fun of you
to-night._[155] Voltaire, though he had been, and always was, the most
graceful of courtiers, kept to his point, and loudly gave Frederick to
understand that in literary disputes he recognised no kings. An act of
tyranny had been committed towards König, who was his friend, and
nothing would induce him to admit either that it was anything else, or
that it was other than just to have held up the tyrant to the laughter
of Europe.
Frederick was profoundly irritated, and the terms in which he writes of
his French Virgil as an ape who ought to be flogged for his tricks, a
man worse than many who have been broken on the wheel, a creature who
may deserve a statue for his poetry but who certainly deserves chains
for his conduct, seem to imply a quite special mortification and
resentment. He had no doubt a deep and haughty contempt for all these
angers of celestial minds. The cabals of men of letters, he wrote to
Voltaire, seemed to him the lowest depth of degradation.[156] And he
would fain have flung a handful of dust on the furious creatures. After
three months of vain effort to achieve the impossible, Voltaire being
only moderately compliant, the king in March 1753 gave him leave to
depart, though with a sort of nominal understanding for politeness’ sake
that there was to be a speedy return.
Voltaire, however, was not a man in whose breast the flame of resentment
ever flickered away in politeness, until his adversary had humbled
himself. Though no one ever so systematically convinced himself each day
for thirty years that he was on the very point of death, no one was less
careful to measure the things that were worth doing from the point of
view of a conventional _memento mori_. Nobody spoke about dying so much,
nor thought about it so little. The first use he made of his liberty was
to shoot yet another bolt at Maupertuis from Leipzig, more piercing than
any that had gone before. Frederick now in his turn abandoned the forms
of politeness, and the renowned episode of Frankfort took place.
Voltaire, on reaching Frankfort, was required by the Prussian resident
in the free city to surrender his court decorations, and, more
important than these, a certain volume of royal verse containing the
Palladium, a poem of indecencies which were probably worse than those of
the Pucelle, because an indecent German is usually worse than an
indecent Frenchman. The poems, however, were what was far worse than
indecent in Frederick’s eyes; they were impolitic, for they contained
bitter sarcasm on sovereigns whom he might be glad to have, and one of
whom he did actually have, on his side in the day of approaching storm.
Various delays and unlucky mishaps occurred, and Voltaire underwent a
kind of imprisonment for some five weeks (May 31 to July 7, 1753), under
extremely mortifying and humiliating circumstances. There was on the one
part an honest, punctual, methodic, rather dull Prussian subordinate,
anxious above all other things in the world, not excepting respect for
genius and respect for law, to obey the injunctions of his master from
Berlin. On the other part Voltaire, whom we know; excitable as a demon,
burning with fury against enemies who were out of his reach now that he
had spent all his ammunition of satire upon them, only half
understanding what was said to him in a strange tongue, mad with fear
lest Frederick meant to detain him after all. It would need the singer
of the battle of the frogs and mice to do justice to this five-weeks’
tragi-comedy. A bookseller with whom he had had feuds years before,
injudiciously came either to pay his respects, or to demand some trivial
arears of money; the furious poet and philosopher rushed up to his
visitor and inflicted a stinging box on the ear, while Collini, his
Italian secretary, hastily offered this intrepid consolation to Van
Duren, ‘Sir, you have received a box on the ear from one of the greatest
men in the world.’ A clerk came to settle this affair or that, and
Voltaire rushed towards him with click of pistol, the friendly Collini
again interfering to better purpose by striking up the hand that had
written Mérope and was on the point of despatching a clerk. We need not
go into the minute circumstances of the Frankfort outrage. Freytag, the
subordinate, clearly overstrained his instructions, and his excess of
zeal in detaining and harassing Voltaire can only be laid indirectly to
Frederick’s charge. But Frederick is responsible, as every principal is,
who launches an agent in a lawless and tyrannic course. The German
Varnhagen has undoubtedly shown that Voltaire’s account, witty and
diverting as it is, is not free from many misrepresentations, and some
tolerably deliberate lies. French writers have as undoubtedly shown that
the detention of a French citizen by a Prussian agent in a free town of
the Empire was a distinct and outrageous illegality.[157] We, who are
fortunately not committed by the exigencies of patriotism to close our
eyes to either half of the facts, may with facile impartiality admit
both halves. Voltaire, though fundamentally a man of exceptional truth,
was by no means incapable of an untruth when his imagination was hot,
and Frederick was by no means incapable of an outrage upon law, when law
stood between him and his purpose. Frederick’s subordinates had no right
to detain Voltaire at all, and they had no right to allow themselves to
be provoked by his impatience into the infliction of even small outrages
upon him and his obnoxious niece. On the other hand, if Voltaire had
been a sort of Benjamin Franklin, if he had possessed a well-regulated
mind, a cool and gentle temper, a nice sense of the expedient, then the
most grotesque scene of a life in which there was too much of grotesque,
would not have been acted as it was, to the supreme delight of those
miserable souls who love to contemplate the follies of the wise.
Any reader who takes the trouble to read the documents affecting this
preposterous brawl at Frankfort between a thoroughly subordinate German
and the most insubordinate Frenchman that ever lived,—this adventure, as
its victim called it, of Cimbrians and Sicambrians,—will be rather
struck by the extreme care with which Frederick impresses on the persons
concerned the propriety of having Voltaire’s written and signed word for
such parts of the transaction as needed official commemoration. In one
place he expressly insists that a given memorandum should be written by
Voltaire’s own hand from top to bottom. This precaution, which seems so
strange in a king who had won five battles, dealing with the author of a
score of tragedies, an epic, and many other fine things, sprang in truth
from no desire to cast a wanton slight on Voltaire’s honour, but from
the painful knowledge that the author of the fine things was not above
tampering with papers and denying patent superscriptions. Voltaire’s
visit had not been of long duration, before the unfortunate lawsuit with
Abraham Hirschel occurred. Of this transaction we need only say this
much, that Voltaire employed the Jew in some illegal jobbing in Saxon
securities; that he gave him bills on a Paris banker, holding diamonds
from the Jew as pledge of honest Christian dealing; that his suspicions
were aroused, that he protested his bills, then agreed to buy the
jewels, then quarrelled over the price, and finally plunged into a suit,
of which the issues were practically two, whether Hirschel had any
rights on one of the Paris bills, and whether the jewels were fairly
charged. Voltaire got his bill back, and the jewels were to be duly
valued; but the proceedings disclosed two facts of considerable
seriousness for all who should have dealings with him: first, that he
had interpolated matter to his own advantage in a document already
signed by his adversary, thus making the Jew to have signed what he had
signed not; and second, that when very hard pushed he would not swerve
from a false oath, any more than his great enemy the apostle Peter had
done.[158] Frederick had remembered all this, just as every negotiator
who had to deal with Frederick remembered that the great king was not
above such infamies as Klein-Schnellendorf, nor such meanness as
filching away with his foot a letter that had slipped unseen from an
ambassador’s pocket.[159]
And so there was an end, if not of correspondence, yet of that
friendship, which after all had always belonged rather to the spoken
order than to the deep unspeakable. There was now cynical, hoarse-voiced
contempt on the one side, and fierce, reverberating, shrill fury on the
other. The spectacle and the sound are distressing to those who crave
dignity and admission of the serious in the relations of men with one
another, as well as some sense of the myriad indefinable relations which
encompass us unawares, giving colour and perspective to our more
definable bonds. One would rather that even in their estrangement there
had been some grace and firmness and self-control, and that at least the
long-cherished illusion had faded away worthily, as when one bids
farewell to a friend whom a perverse will carries from us over unknown
seas until a far day, and we know not if we shall see his face any more.
It jars on us that the moon which has climbed into the night and moved
like sound of music over heath and woodland, should finally set in a
gray swamp amid the harsh croaking of amphibians. But the intimacy
between Frederick and Voltaire had perhaps been always most like the
theatre moon.
We may know what strange admixture of distrust, contempt, and
tormenting reminiscence, mingled with the admiration of these two men
for one another’s genius, from the bitterness which occasionally springs
up in the midst of their most graceful and amiable letters of a later
date. For instance, this is Voltaire to Frederick; ‘You have already
done me ill enough; you put me wrong for ever with the king of France;
you made me lose my offices and pensions; you used me shamefully at
Frankfort, me and an innocent woman who was dragged through the mud and
thrown into gaol; and now, while honouring me with letters, you mar the
sweetness of this consolation by bitter reproaches.... The greatest harm
that your works have done, is in the excuse they have given to the
enemies of philosophy throughout Europe to say, “These philosophers
cannot live in peace, and they cannot live together. Here is a king who
does not believe in Jesus Christ; he invites to his court a man who does
not believe in Jesus Christ, and he uses him ill; there is no humanity
in these pretended philosophers, and God punishes them by means of one
another.” ... Your admirable and solid wisdom is spoiled by the
unfortunate pleasure you have always had in seeing the humiliation of
other men, and in saying and writing stinging things to them; a pleasure
most unworthy of you, and all the more so as you are raised above them
by your rank and by your unique talents.’[160] To which the king answers
that he is fully aware how many faults he has, and what great faults
they are, that he does not treat himself very gently, and that in
dealing with himself he pardons nothing. As for Voltaire’s conduct, it
would not have been endured by any other philosopher. ‘If you had not
had to do with a man madly enamoured of your fine genius, you would not
have got off so well with anybody else. Consider all that as done with,
and never let me hear again of that wearisome niece, who has not so much
merit as her uncle, with which to cover her defects. People talk of the
servant of Molière, but nobody will ever speak of the niece of
Voltaire.’
The poet had talked, after his usual manner, of being old and worn out,
and tottering on the brink of the grave. ‘Why, you are only sixty-two,’
said Frederick, ‘and your soul is full of that fire which animates and
sustains the body. You will bury me and half the present generation. You
will have the delight of making a spiteful couplet on my tomb.’[161]
Voltaire did not make a couplet, but he wrote a prose lampoon on the
king’s private life, which is one of the bitterest libels that malice
ever prompted, and from which the greater part of Europe has been
content to borrow its idea of the character of Frederick.[162] This was
vengeance enough even for Voltaire. We may add that while Voltaire
constantly declared that he could never forget the outrages which the
king of Prussia had inflicted on him, neither did he forget to draw his
pension from the king of Prussia even in times when Frederick was most
urgently pressed.[163] It may be said that he was ready to return
favours; ‘If things go on as they are going now,’ he wrote with sportive
malice, ‘I reckon on having to allow a pension to the king of
Prussia.’[164]
It was not surprising that Voltaire did not return to Paris. His
correspondence during his residence at Berlin attests in every page of
it how bitterly he resented the cabals of ignoble men of letters, and
the insolence of ignoble men of authority. ‘If I had been in Paris this
Lent,’ he wrote in 1752, ‘I should have been hissed in town, and made
sport of at court, and the Siècle de Louis XIV. would have been
denounced, as smacking of heresy, as audacious, and full of ill
significance. I should have had to go to defend myself in the ante-room
of the lieutenant of police. The officers would say, as they saw me
pass, _There is a man who belongs to us_.... No, my friend, _qui bene
latuit, bene vixit_.’[165] With most just anger, he contrasted German
liberality with the tyrannical suspicion of his own government. The
emperor, he says, made no difficulty in permitting the publication of a
book in which Leopold was called a coward. Holland gave free circulation
to statements that the Dutch are ingrates and that their trade is
perishing. He was allowed to print under the eyes of the king of Prussia
that the Great Elector abased himself uselessly before Lewis XIV., and
resisted him as uselessly. It was only in France where permission was
refused for an eulogy of Lewis XIV. and of France, and that, because he
had been neither base enough nor foolish enough to disfigure his eulogy
either by shameful silences or cowardly misrepresentations.[166] The
imprisonment, nine years before this, of Lenglet Dufresnoy, an old man
of seventy, for no worse offence than publishing a supplement to De
Thou’s history, had made a deep impression on Voltaire.[167] He would
have been something lower than human if he had forgotten the treatment
which he had himself received at the hands of the most feeble and
incompetent government that ever was endured by a civilised people.
So he found his way to Geneva, then and until 1798 an independent
republic or municipality. There (1755) he made himself two hermitages,
one for summer, called the Délices, a short distance from the spot where
the Arve falls into the Rhone, and the other near Lausanne (Monrion) for
winter. Here, he says, I see from my bed this glorious lake, which
bathes a hundred gardens at the foot of my terrace; which forms on right
and left a stream of a dozen leagues, and a calm sea in front of my
windows; and which waters the fields of Savoy, crowned with the Alps in
the distance.[168] You write to me, replied D’Alembert, from your bed,
whence you command ten leagues of the lake, and I answer you from my
hole, whence I command a patch of sky three ells long.[169] To poor
D’Alembert the name of the famous lake was fraught with evil
associations, for he had just published his too veracious article on
Geneva in the Encyclopædia, in which he paid the clergy of that city the
unwelcome compliment, that they were the most logical of all
Protestants, for they were Socinians; and he was now suffering the
penalty of men who stir up angry hives.
The enjoyment which Voltaire had then and for twenty years to come in
his noble landscape, and which he so often commemorates in his letters,
is a proof that may be added to others, of the injustice of the common
idea that the Voltairean school of the eighteenth century were specially
insensible to the picturesque. Morellet, for instance, records his
delight and wonder at the Alps and the descent into Italy, in terms
quite as warm, if much less profuse, as those of the most impressible
modern tourist.[170] Diderot had a strong spontaneous feeling for
nature, as he shows not only in his truly remarkable criticisms on the
paintings of twenty years, but also in his most private correspondence,
where he demonstrates in terms too plain, simple, and homely, to be
suspected of insincerity, the meditative delight with which the
solitary contemplation of fine landscape inspired him. He has no
peculiar felicity in describing natural features in words, or in
reproducing the inner harmonies with which the soft lines of distant
hills, or the richness of deep embosoming woodlands, or the swift
procession of clouds driven by fierce or cheerful winds, compose and
strengthen the sympathising spirit. But he was as susceptible to them as
men of more sonorous word.[171] And Voltaire finds the liveliest
pleasure in the natural sights and objects around him, though they never
quickened in him those brooding moods of egotistic introspection and
deep questioning contemplation in which Jean Jacques, Bernardin de St.
Pierre, and Sénancour, found a sort of refuge from their own desperate
impotency of will and of material activity. Voltaire never felt this
impotency. As the very apostle of action, how should he have felt it? It
pleased him in the first few months of his settlement in new scenes, and
at other times, to borrow some of Frederick’s talk about the bestial
folly of the human race, and the absurdity of troubling oneself about
it; but what was a sincere cynicism in the king, was in Voltaire only a
bit of cant, the passing affectation of an hour. The dramatist whose
imagination had produced so long a series of dramas of situation, the
historian who had been attracted by such labours as those of Charles
XII. of Sweden and Peter the Great of Russia, as well as by the
achievements of the illustrious men who adorned the age of Lewis XIV.,
proved himself of far too objective and positive a temperament to be
capable of that self-conscious despair of action, that paralysing lack
of confidence in will, which drove men of other humour and other
experience forlorn into the hermit’s caves of a new Thebaid. Voltaire’s
ostentatious enjoyment of his landscape and his garden was only the
expansion of a seafarer, who after a stormful voyage finds himself in a
fair haven. His lines to Liberty[172] give us the keynote to his mood at
this time. He did not suppose that he had got all, but he knew that he
had got somewhat.
Je ne vante point d’avoir en cet asile
Rencontré le parfait bonheur:
Il n’est point retiré dans le fond d’un bocage;
Il est encore moins chez les rois;
Il n’est pas même chez le sage;
De cette courte vie il n’est point le partage;
Il y faut renoncer; mais on peut quelquefois
Embrasser au moins son image.
‘’Tis a fine thing, is tranquillity,’ he wrote; ‘yes, but ennui is of
its acquaintance and belongs to the family. To repulse this ugly
relation, I have set up a theatre.’[173] Besides the theatre, guests
were frequent and multitudinous. He speaks of sometimes having a crowd
of fifty persons at table.[174] Besides Les Délices and Lausanne, he
purchased from the President de Brosses a life-interest in Tourney, and
in the same year(1758) he bought the lordship of Ferney, close by. He
was thus a citizen of Geneva, of Berne, and of France, ‘for philosophers
ought to have two or three holes underground against the hounds who
chase them.’ If the dogs of France should hunt him, he could take
shelter in Geneva. If the dogs of Geneva began to bay, he could run into
France. By and by this consideration of safety grew less absorbing, and
all was abandoned except Ferney; a name that will always remain
associated with those vigorous and terrible assaults upon the Infamous,
which first definitely opened when Voltaire became the lord of this
little domain.