HISTORY
The activity of the foremost men of the eighteenth century in the
composition of history is too remarkable a circumstance, not to deserve
some attempt at explanation. There were historians in previous ages, but
in the eighteenth century there was both in France, and afterwards in
England, a special and extraordinary development in this direction.
Partially no doubt this was due to the general movement of curiosity,
the wide spread desire for all kinds of knowledge, which was in the air.
Men were emancipating themselves from the trammels of an authority which
had not widened the limits of inquiry in the same proportion as human
faculties had strengthened, and, amid the universal expansion of
intelligent interest and the eager scrutiny of all the objects of
knowledge which the new dawn was baring to sight, it was not possible
that the order of political and social facts in former epochs should be
neglected. This, however, does not sufficiently explain why such a man
as Hume betook himself to the composition of history, or why Gibbon
found himself best able to attack Christianity by tracing some of the
most important parts of its annals, or why Voltaire, who lived so
entirely and intensely in the present, should have thought it worth
while to give so much labour to presentation of the past. It is a
striking fact, which must be something more than an accident, that the
best secular histories which remain from this period, one of them the
most striking monument in historical literature, were written by the
most marked assailants of reigning superstition.
Was it not, indeed, to be expected that as the dark clouds of an
absorbing consciousness of the supernatural cleared away, men of
understanding would be more and more drawn towards study of human
action, and that the advance of society under purely natural and
positive conditions would immediately seize a foremost place among the
objects of experiential inquiry? It is too constantly maintained by
persons with something of a vested interest in darkness, that those who
do not worship the gods are indifferent to the happiness of men. Yet the
history of intellectual progress would seem to show that it was not
until the commencement of a rapid decline in the acceptance of terrorist
and jealous deities and incomprehensible dogmas, that serious attention
was given to some of the subjects in which a sound knowledge is among
the most indispensable conditions of the advancing welfare of men. For
instance, as soon as the hold of ancient versions of the supernatural
was loosened over the stronger spirits, by the middle of the century
there instantly took place an astonishing development of activity in
the physical sciences. The interest of historic and economic studies was
at least as pressing. Becoming aware that men had made their own world,
thinkers found the consideration of the process by which this world is
made, and the order of society established and developed, forced upon
them with an entirely new significance. The dry bones of the ancient
valley of annalists and chroniclers were made to live, and the great
work of the reconstruction of the past was begun, with an alertness and
perseverance that has not been surpassed even in an age of far purer and
juster historical intelligence. It was quite reasonable that the
conviction of each act in the universe, from the crash of an empire to
the fall of a sparrow to the ground, being due to an arbitrary and
inscrutable decree, should prevent the rise of history from the level of
annals into the region of philosophy. The decay of this theory of the
government of the universe was as reasonably the cause of a new mode of
looking at the long records of the race, and we find ourselves moving in
a day of historical masterpieces.
Voltaire has told us the circumstances under which he was led to
approach the philosophy of history. Madame du Châtelet, whose mind would
fain have reached every kind of knowledge, but who was especially apt
for metaphysics and geometry, had conceived an aversion for history.
‘What does it matter to me,’ she would ask, ‘a Frenchwoman living on my
estate, to know that Egil succeeded Haquin in Sweden, and that Ottoman
was the son of Ortogrul? I have read with pleasure the history of the
Greeks and the Romans; they offered me certain great pictures which
attracted me. But I have never yet been able to finish any long history
of our modern nations. I can see scarcely anything in them but
confusion; a host of minute events without connection or sequence, a
thousand battles which settled nothing. I renounced a study which
overwhelms the mind without illuminating it.’ To this frank statement of
the case, to which so many thousands of persons in all epochs would so
heartily subscribe, Voltaire replied by pointing out that perhaps the
study of history would be no waste of time, if by cutting away all the
details of wars, as tedious as they are untrustworthy, all the frivolous
negotiations which have been nothing but pieces of purposeless cheating,
all the minute incidents which stifle great events, and by retaining
those which paint manners, you made of this chaos a general and
well-arranged picture; in short, if you tried to disengage from the
concourse of events the history of the human mind.[234] Not all the
faults of execution ought to blind us to the merit of this notion of the
true way of studying history, or to the admirable clearness of vision
with which Voltaire, not only in this but in all his other historical
pieces, adhered to his own two leading principles; first, that laws,
arts, manners, are the chief matter and concern of history; and second,
that ‘details which lead to nothing are in history what baggage is to
an army, _impedimenta_, for we must look at things in large, for the
very reason that the human mind is small and sinks under the weight of
minutiæ.’ Minutiæ ought to be collected by annalists, or in some kind
of dictionaries where one might find them at need.[235] In this last
point Voltaire, as might be expected, was more just than Bolingbroke,
who had said somewhat petulantly that ‘he had rather take the Darius
whom Alexander conquered for the son of Hystaspes, and make as many
anachronisms as a Jewish chronologer, than sacrifice half his life to
collect all the learned lumber that fills the head of an
antiquary.’[236] The antiquary’s is a vocation like another, and the
highest kind of history can only flourish on condition that the humbler
ancillary kind flourishes also, and that there are patient and
scrupulous men to mark the difference between Darius Codomannus and
Darius the son of Hystaspes.
We may say that three kinds of men write history: the gazetteer or
annalist, the statesman, and the philosopher. The annalist’s business is
to investigate and record events, and his highest merits are clearness,
accuracy, and simplicity. The political historian seeks the superficial
and immediate causes of great transactions, and he serves us by mixed
penetration and soundness of judgment. The historical philosopher is
concerned only with groups of events, the changes and movements that
transform communities, and with the trains of conditions that lead to
such movements. The majority of historians, from the illustrious Bacon
down to the compiler of a manual, illustrate the first kind. Thucydides
and Tacitus, among the ancients, a Machiavelli or a Finlay, among
moderns, may illustrate the second kind. As Voltaire was sometimes
gazetteer and sometimes statesman, so Montesquieu took the statesman’s
point of view in his reflections on the decline of Rome, and that of the
philosopher in the Spirit of Laws. It is the statesman or man of the
world, who, after recounting Caesar’s failure on one occasion to comply
with the etiquette of the senate, proceeds to make the following
reflection, that ‘we never offend men more, than when we shock their
ceremonies and usages: seek to oppress them, and that is sometimes a
proof of the importance you attach to them; but shock their customs, and
that is always a mark of contempt.’[237] It is the philosopher, feeling
for the causes of things and their order, who being led to inquire into
the spirit or meaning of Laws, understands such an inquiry to involve a
comparative investigation of the relations between laws and physical
climate, the quality of ground, situation and extent of territory, the
mode of life of the people, agricultural, hunting, or pastoral; between
laws and the freedom of the constitution, the religion, wealth, trade,
moral ideas, and manners, of the inhabitants; above all, historically,
between laws and their origin and the order of things on which they
were first founded.
In a similar way we may divide Voltaire’s historical pieces into two
main classes. Indeed, if we count the Annals of the Empire, which he
wrote to please the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha, he may rank also under the
third remaining head among the annalistic historians. This, however, is
too unsatisfactory a piece of work for us to care either to classify or
to remember it. The subject was not of his own selection, he knew
comparatively little about it, his materials were extremely scanty and
imperfect, and he composed it at a time when his whole mind was
violently perturbed by his recent quarrel with Frederick, and torn by
anxiety where he should find a home in rest and freedom. It was the only
work he ever wrote, for which he perhaps had no heart, and the least
observant reader will notice how vast a difference this made in the
temper of its composition. Indeed, Voltaire was not born to be a simple
chronicler. The realistic and practical leanings of his intellect
naturally gave him a distaste for the collection of mere uninterpreted
and unapplied facts. His clear comprehensiveness, the product of a
vigorous imagination with strong sense, as naturally impelled him to
group circumstances, and to introduce the widest possible generality
among them. He has one of the peculiar gifts of the historian, as
distinguished from the gazetteer, of throwing rapid glances over a wide
field on the suggestion of a minor fact as he passes by it, and of
converting what to others would be the mere unconsidered trifles of
narrative into something possessed of its due measure of vitality and
significance. He fills his pages with reflections that are usually not
brought from very far depths, but which are almost always lively, just,
and in real matter. Perhaps this is not an unmixed good, for it is not
unconnected with an extraordinary evenness and light facility of style,
which tends to draw the reader somewhat too rapidly and too smoothly
over ground that had been rugged enough to the actual travellers. It
tends therefore tacitly to plant a false impression about the tardiness,
difficulty, peril, and infinitely varied possibilities of the social
movements which are history’s object and material. Perhaps a reader has
a better idea of the true manner in which events march, from Comines or
Clarendon, than from all the elegance and manifold graces of Voltaire,
and we sometimes feel inclined to repeat De Maistre’s angry demand for
that grave and unhasting dignity which is the life of history.
We have already noticed one of the differences between Voltaire and
Rousseau, which arose from the predominance of sentiment over reason in
the latter. In the present connection another fact well worth noticing
is that Rousseau was entirely wanting in either taste or serious regard
for history. The past seems to have been to him a kind of blurred
tablet, confused and indecipherable, interposed between the vision of
men and the only thought or knowledge which it is good for them to
possess. Voltaire’s reading of this tablet was inadequate enough, in
many respects it was even a grave distortion of the truth; but with that
sound sense in which Rousseau was so absolutely deficient, he felt how
irrational it was, in the first place, to shut our eyes deliberately to
the course and meaning of all the foregone action of the race, and, in
the second, to leave unattacked and unturned the strong position which
the traditional parables of the past and their undisturbed
interpretation conferred upon the champions of orthodoxy and absolutism.
Rousseau, being a sentimentalist, appears to have discerned nothing of
this. His ideas all involved a breach with the past, as Voltaire’s did,
but Voltaire deserves credit for perceiving that, to make this
effective, you must at least find out as well as you can what the past
was.
For his four works in the class of political history he had the best
attainable authorities and material, and no one was ever more diligent
in putting them to the best possible use.[238] His acute sense,
strengthened by contact with the world and its most active personages,
made him what we may almost call prematurely scientific in his demand
for adequate evidence and proof. It is rather striking, for example, to
find him anticipating more recent objections to the trustworthiness of
Tacitus, pointing out the extraordinary improbabilities in his account
of Tiberius, Nero, and the others. There is all the difference, he says,
between a faithful historian equally free from adulation and hatred, and
‘a malicious wit who poisons everything through the medium of a concise
and energetic style.’ Are we to believe, he asks elsewhere, on the story
of a man who lived long after Tiberius, that this emperor, nearly eighty
years old, who had up to that time been decent almost to austerity, yet
passed all his time in debaucheries hitherto unknown, and so monstrous
as to need new names for them?[239] And in the same way he questions the
alleged atrocities of Nero and Caligula, as well as the motives imputed
to Domitian by Tacitus for the frequency with which he sent to inquire
after the health of Agricola. These historic doubts sprang from none of
the political judgment or feeling which propounds them in more modern
times, but purely from scientific incredulity. ‘History,’ he once wrote,
‘is after all nothing but a parcel of tricks that we play the
dead.’[240] He did not hold this slightly splenetic theory, in which
assuredly there is a painful truth, to absolve him from the duty of
doing what he could to belie it, and to make history as correct and as
faithfully representative of actual occurrences, as careful inquiry
from those most likely to know the characters of the most prominent
actors could make it. In the composition of the Siècle de Louis XV., he
had of course the advantage of knowing all these leaders of the public
activity personally and at first hand, while if he had not that
advantage to the same extent in the Siècle de Louis XIV., he at least
mixed on intimate terms with many who had been intimate with the court
of the great monarch. For the history of Russia he was amply provided
with documents and authentic narratives from the Russian court, at whose
solicitation he undertook a work which was the first full introduction
of that hitherto barbarous and unknown country to the literature of
civilised Europe. His letters to Schouvalof, the imperial chamberlain,
attest the unremitting industry with which he sought for every kind of
information that might be useful to him. ‘The enlightened spirit which
now reigns among the principal nations of Europe, requires that we
should go to the bottom, where in former times a historian barely
thought it worth while to skim the surface. People wish to know how a
nation grew together; what was its population before the epoch of which
you treat; the difference in the number of the regular army then and in
former times; the nature and growth of its commerce; what arts have
sprung up within the country, and what have been introduced from
elsewhere and been perfected there; what used to be the ordinary average
revenue of the state, and what it is now; the birth and extension of
its navy; the proportion in numbers between its nobles and its
ecclesiastics and monks, and between the latter and the cultivators of
the soil, etc.’[241] Even importunities of this kind continued over a
space of some years, and the copious responses which they brought, never
consoled Voltaire for not having made the journey to the Russian capital
in his proper person. ‘I should have learnt more from you in a few hours
of conversation,’ he wrote to Schouvalof, ‘than all the compilers in the
world will ever teach me.’[242] In writing the History of Charles XII.
of Sweden, one of the most delightful of his books, the art of which is
none the less because it is so little ostentatious and striking and
seems so easy, he had procured a large quantity of material from
Fabrice, who knew the Swedish king during his detention at Bender and
subsequently, and met Voltaire in London. This material was supplemented
in later years by information picked up at Lunéville from the ex-Polish
king Stanislas, who was indebted to Charles for his sovereignty, that
true δῶρον ἄδωρον. ‘As for the portraits of men,’ Voltaire declared,
‘they are nearly all the creations of fancy; ’tis a monstrous piece of
charlatanry to pretend to paint a personage with whom you have never
lived.’[243] Napoleon, in the memorable campaign of 1812, coming to
various places which Voltaire had occasion to describe in his History of
Charles XII., found his account weak and inaccurate, and threw it aside
in favour of Adlerfeldt. This was to be expected from the very merit of
the book; for how should a picture, painted in large for the general
instruction of the world, satisfy the minute requirements of strategical
topography? It was precisely Voltaire’s object to separate history from
geography, statistics, anecdote, biography, tactics, and to invest it
with an independent character and quality apart from all these.
It is another of the distinctions of his new method of writing history
that, with the exception of the book on Charles XII., he throws persons
and personal interests into a second place, as being no more than
instruments or convenient names for critical turning-points in the large
movements of peoples. In the narration of the rise of Russia to a place
among civilised nations, the character of Peter the Great inevitably
comes into marked prominence, because when a population lies on the
stagnant level of barbarism, the first man who summons them to undertake
the task of national elevation constitutes an element of paramount
importance in their annals. In proportion, however, as they rise to the
fulfilment of this surpassing work, the importance of the heroic
individual diminishes; as the national self-consciousness and collective
powers become greater, the figure of the individual shows less.
Voltaire was always conscious, though not so clearly as writers are now,
of the great historical principle that besides the prominent men of a
generation there is a something at work underneath, a moving current on
whose flood they are borne. He never fixed this current by any of the
names which now fall so glibly from our lips,—tendency of the times,
tenor of public opinion, spirit of the age, and the like, by which we
give a collective name to groups of sentiments and forces, all making in
what seems to be a single direction. But although unnamed, this singular
and invisible concurrence of circumstance was yet a reality to him. The
age was something besides its heroes, and something besides its noisiest
and most resounding occurrences. His divisions of the great epochs of
humanity are undoubtedly open to much criticism, because the principles
on which he drew the dividing lines have lost their force in new
generations. It was to be expected that they would do so; and his four
great epochs[244] were not likely to remain the four great epochs of a
posterity, which has partially learnt the lesson that he had not learnt
at all, that perfection in the fine arts is not the highest mark of an
age in which humanity may glory. Nevertheless, we are bound to recognise
that a new way of regarding human action, as well as a new way of
composing history, was being introduced by a writer whose first
paragraph declared that he proposed to himself a greater object than an
account of the life of Lewis XIV.; that he designed to paint for the
instruction of posterity, not the actions of a single man, but the
spirit of men; and that while all periods must be alike to one who only
desires to fill his memory with facts, discrimination among them cannot
be dispensed with for one who thinks.
Hence also the propriety of discrimination among the various kinds of
fact which are at the historian’s disposal, and in this order Voltaire’s
whole soul revolted against the reigning practice and prescription. ‘I
would rather have details,’ he wrote to one of his intimates so early in
his career as 1735, ‘about Racine and Despréaux, Molière, Bossuet,
Descartes, than I would about the battle of Steinkirk. There is nothing
left but the names of men who led battalions and squadrons. There is no
return to the human race from a hundred engagements; but the great men I
have spoken of prepared pure and everlasting pleasures for mortals still
unborn. A canal-sluice, a picture by Poussin, a fine tragedy, a truth
established, are all of them things a thousand times more precious than
the whole mass of annals of the court, and than all the narratives of
campaigns.’[245] From this and from a multitude of other passages, as
well as from his actual compositions, we perceive that the activity of a
court and the manœuvres of an army were no longer in Voltaire’s eyes the
fit substance of history. One reason for this might be his lively sense
of the impossibility of knowing the character and motives of people with
whom one has not lived, or the real cause of even the most momentous
intrigues and negotiations in which one has not taken a personal share.
A still deeper reason would be his most rational conviction that these
matters are only of moment to us for their larger results and
unmistakable outcome, and from the profoundly true and important
principle that the progress of intellectual enlightenment, material
prosperity, and moral elevation is not only a feature in the history of
a nation, but does itself constitute that history, while all records of
other transactions in the course of its annals, achievements in
diplomacy, feats of arms, revolutions in policy, have no true historic
value, except for the light they shed upon this economic, intellectual,
and moral progress, and are not worth studying except in that light. We
may see the immediate effects of Voltaire’s influence most markedly of
all in Gibbon, but in a less important shape in the general account of
the middle ages which Robertson contributed to his History of Charles V.
(1769), and which remained for many years the most instructive piece
that our literature possessed upon the character and spirit of the
feudal system and other features of the middle ages. Adam Ferguson’s
Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) bears traces of the same
influence. In both of these cases much also must be added for the
kindred authority of Montesquieu. One has some hesitation in adding Hume
to the list in the present connection, because his history, the
composition of which extended from 1752 to 1763, ought perhaps to be
counted rather the direct and independent outcome of the French
philosophic spirit, than of the French historic spirit which itself
proceeded from the philosophy; and because, moreover, Hume, as a
historian, has some of Voltaire’s most serious defects, without that
breadth and size which constituted his greatest merit, though it is
needless to point out how many merits Hume had of his own. It is worth
remarking that in some pages which he wrote on Hume’s History,[246]
Voltaire gave it a joyful welcome, as might be expected, and
particularly to those parts which we now esteem most lightly, such as
the contemptuous account of Cromwell.
To return, however, to the point from which we have digressed. One very
direct consequence of the historical principle we have described, and of
the way in which it was illustrated in the histories of Lewis XIV. and
Lewis XV., and most of all in the Essay on Manners, was the degradation
of war from the highest to the lowest place among the objects of the
historian’s regard. War began for the first time to be systematically
considered and treated as a mere instrument and means, and not as one of
the most serious of social ends. We can never honour Voltaire too long
nor too deeply for the vehemence and sincerity of his abhorrence of the
military spirit. Nowhere do we feel more distinctly that he marked the
end of the mediæval temper, than in his noble protests against the glory
of bloodshed. The great orators of the church to the very last donned
the robes of their most sumptuous rhetoric, when they were called to
consecrate the virtues of the victorious soldier. The pages of the Old
Testament supplied them with a hundred baleful heroes to whom they might
liken their warrior, and a hundred cruel and bloody tropes with which
they might decorate the funeral oration. So long as the atrocities of
the Hebrew chiefs and people, their treacheries and slaughters, were
held sacred and celebrated with unction, it was not likely that the
voice of the peacemaker could make itself heard.
Voltaire not only held up these demoralising records to the odium they
deserve; he directly taxed the clergy with their failure to discharge
the very highest part of their duty. Of the five or six thousand sermons
of Massillon, he asked, are there a couple where you could pick out a
word or two against the scourge and crime of war? Bourdaloue preached
against impurity, but what sermon did he ever direct against the murder,
rapine, brigandage, and universal rage, which desolate the world?
‘Miserable physicians of souls, you declaim for five quarters of an hour
against the mere pricks of a pin, and say no word on the curse which
tears us into a thousand pieces! Philosophers and moralists, burn your
books: so long as the caprice of a handful of men will cause the
massacring in all loyalty of thousands of our brothers, the part of the
human race which is devoted to heroism will contain all that is most
frightful in human nature. What concern to me are humanity, benevolence,
modesty, temperance, gentleness, wisdom, piety, so long as half an ounce
of lead shatters my body, and I die at twenty in torments unspeakable,
surrounded by five or six thousand dead or dying, while my eyes, opening
for the last time, see the town I was born in delivered to fire and
sword, and the last sounds that reach my ears are the shrieks of women
and children expiring in the ruins—and the whole for the pretended
interests of a man that we do not know?’[247] His rebuke to Montesquieu
is still more distinctively modern. The author of the Esprit des Lois
had said that among societies it sometimes happens that natural defence
possibly involves the necessity of attack, when a nation perceives that
a longer peace would place another nation in a position to destroy
it.[248] ‘If ever there was a war evidently unjust,’ Voltaire replies,
‘it is that which you propose; it is to go and kill your neighbour for
fear your neighbour should be in a condition to attack you; that is to
say, you must run the risk of ruining your country, in the hope of
ruining without reason some other country.... If your neighbour grows
too powerful during a time of peace, what hinders you from growing
powerful like him? If he has made alliances, make alliances on your
side. If, having less religion, he has all the more manufacturers and
soldiers for it, imitate him in so sage an economy. If he drills his
sailors better, drill yours too: all that is perfectly just. But to
expose your people to the most horrible misery, in the idea, which is so
often chimerical, of crushing your dear brother, the most serene
bordering prince—! ’twas never for a president of a pacific order to
give you such a piece of counsel.’[249] The book in which this sound
view of justice and expediency in the dealings of nations with one
another was pressed upon the attention of France, was published in 1764,
five years before the birth of the man who turned the tide back, and
made the international policy of France a synonym both for iniquity and
folly. On the 15th of August 1769 Voltaire concluded his letter to
D’Alembert with his usual vivacity: ‘Adieu; my compliments to the devil,
for it is he who governs the world.’[250] If he had known that, while he
was writing, Napoleon Bonaparte had come into the world, and could at
the same time have foreseen the new-comer’s destiny, he might have said
the same thing more seriously. Voltaire never played the sentimentalist.
He knew that there are complexities of affairs which only the sword can
cut. But he was the first influential writer—for the abbé Saint-Pierre,
so undeservedly laughed at for his dreams of perpetual peace, had no
influence to speak of—who deliberately placed war among retrograde
agencies, and deliberately dwelt upon peaceful industry as the true life
of nations.[251]
Diplomacy and its complex subterranean processes, which have occupied so
extremely disproportionate a space in written history, and which are in
acted history responsible for so much evil, were in the same way
informally relegated to the region of inhuman occupations. Its methods
were the tortuous and depressing methods of the same past, which had
made the many the playthings and unhappy instruments of the few, and had
never interrupted the triumphant manœuvres of craft and subtlety by a
whisper for the claims of humanity and justice. Voltaire scarcely ever
speaks of negotiations between contending powers without a shrewd
thrust, half contemptuous and half angry. The plain where some
negotiations took place in the struggles among the descendants of
Charles the Great is still called the Field of Lies; a name, he says,
that might well be common to most spots where men have negotiated.[252]
And this represents his general tone in speaking of a branch of activity
which may interest the professional diplomatist in all its details, but
which, as he thought, can only concern the historical student in its
results. Here Voltaire represented a marked tendency, which waxes
stronger as societies grow more penetrated with popular forces, to
divest diplomacy of a professional quality, and to throw the adjustment
of the relations between nations as entirely as possible into the hands
of plain men of firm and upright character, and full knowledge of the
special matters at issue.
It is, however, when we come to the ground idea of the Essay on
Manners,[253] that we feel the full breath of the modern spirit, and
perceive that at length we are nearing the wide expanse of the sea.
There we emerge absolutely from the narrow conception of universal
history, with which Bossuet had familiarised men’s minds in the
Discourse on Universal History. This famous piece, which has had at
least as much praise as it merits, if we are to consider reason as well
as eloquence, was fundamentally and in substance no more than a bit of
theological commonplace splendidly decorated. Bossuet indeed spoke of
‘the concatenation of human affairs,’ but only in the same sentence with
‘the sequence of the counsels of God.’ The gorgeous rhetorician of the
church was not likely to rise philosophically into the larger air of
universal history, properly so called. His eloquent discourse is a
vindication of divine foresight, by means of an intensely narrow survey
of such sets of facts as might be thought not inconsistent with the
deity’s fixed purpose to make one final and decisive revelation to men.
No one who looks upon the vast assemblage of stupendous human
circumstances, from the first origin of man upon the earth, as merely
the ordained antecedent of what, seen from the long procession of all
the ages, figures in so diminutive a consummation as the Catholic
church, is likely to obtain a very effective hold of that broad sequence
and many-linked chain of events, to which Bossuet gave a right name,
but whose real meaning he never was even near seizing. His merit is
that he did in a small and rhetorical way, what Montesquieu and Voltaire
afterwards did in a truly comprehensive and philosophical way; he
pressed forward general ideas in connection with the recorded movements
of the chief races of mankind. For a teacher of history to leave the
bare chronicler’s road so far as to declare, for example, the general
principle, inadequate and overstated as it is, that ‘religion and civil
government are the two points on which human things revolve,’ even this
was a clear step in advance—and to dismiss the long series of emperors
from Augustus to Alexander Severus in two or three pages was to show a
rare sense of large historic proportion. Again, Bossuet’s expressions of
‘the concatenation of the universe,’ of the interdependence of the parts
of so vast a whole, of there coming no great change without having its
causes in foregoing centuries, and of the true object of history being
to observe in connection with each epoch those secret dispositions of
events which prepared the way for great changes, as well as the
momentous conjunctures which more immediately brought them to pass—all
these phrases seem to point to a true and philosophic survey. But they
end in themselves, and lead nowhither. The chain is an arbitrary and
one-sided collection of facts. The writer does not cautiously follow and
feel after the successive links, but forges and chooses and arranges
them after a pattern of his own, which was fixed independently of them.
A scientific term or two is not enough to disguise the purely
theological essence of the treatise.
Bossuet’s Discourse is moreover constructed wholly on the theory that a
special revelation was delivered to the Jews, and in tracing their
course we have fast hold of the chain by which it has pleased heaven to
communicate to earth all the truths we possess as to the highest things.
Such a conception stifles a modern reader. The first pages of the Essay
on Manners, sometimes placed separately as the Philosophy of History,
prove that we have escaped from the cave. The chosen people fell into
rank with other peoples, that equally supposed themselves to be chosen
by their own peculiar gods. They lose the towering pre-eminence in
virtue and light and divine favour with which their own records and
Bossuet’s interpretation had so splendidly invested them. We find that
their pretensions were not unique, but universal among nations in such a
stage; that their virtues were not singular, though some of their vices
seem so. In a word, if some of Voltaire’s details are crude and
rudimentary, at least he has the merit of showing to his unaccustomed
readers what vast epochs of time, what uncounted multitudes of men, what
varied movements of the human spirit, surround the little speck of
Judaism.
The bulk of the Essay was composed in 1740, but it is probable that this
preliminary examination of other oriental nations, their practices,
institutions, and religious ideas, was suggested by Montesquieu’s
memorable book, which appeared in 1748, some years before the
publication of the Essay on Manners. It is in point of execution much
less satisfactory than what follows, for Voltaire’s knowledge of Greek
and Hebrew was inadequate, and he fell into various errors which his
adversaries happily possessed scholarship enough to expose. In the
modern provinces of the book, which constitute the important part of it,
he was much more entirely at home in his subject. Here his familiarity
with detail, considering the vast quantity of his other employments, is
extremely surprising, and perhaps in no other book of equal generality
have there been discovered so few serious inaccuracies, though none have
encountered more hostile critics.
Prejudice, alas, spares truth and light no more when it narrows the
vision of a free-thinker, than when it distorts the faculty of the
devout. Being a reaction against Bossuet’s unreasonable exaltation of
the Jews and their history, Voltaire’s conception of the place due to
them partook of the inevitable fault of all reactions, and left out of
sight considerations which it is eminently unscientific not to remember.
‘You never find,’ he says, ‘a generous action in the annals of the
Hebrews; they knew neither hospitality nor liberality nor clemency.
Their sovereign bliss is to practise usury with foreigners, and this
spirit of usury is so rooted in their hearts, that it is the continual
object of the figures they employ in the eloquence which is peculiar to
them. Their glory is to deliver to fire and slaughter the small
villages of which they may be able to take possession. They assassinate
their masters when they are slaves, and they never know how to pardon
when they are victorious; they are the enemies of the human race.’[254]
This is as great an exaggeration on one side, as Bossuet’s exaltation of
them and their deeds was on the other side. We ought to admit what
abominable traits the character and history of this race unfortunately
present, without forgetting how much is owing to them for preserving in
its sublimest shape, and investing with the most deeply impressive
images and associations, that idea of monotheism which, if destined to
be superseded by other ideas more commensurate with the limits of human
intelligence, must still be counted the germ of much that is purest and
loftiest and most inspiring among the ideals of western civilisation.
The same kind of extreme prejudice which drove Voltaire into maintaining
of the Jews, not that they were a people whom we should do very ill
either to imitate or admire, but nothing less than that they were the
enemies of the human race, found vent in such assertions as that if any
one could have restored the Empire to its strength, or at all events
retarded its fall, that man was the Emperor Julian.[255] A historian may
justly contend, if he thinks that the evidence warrants him, that Julian
belongs to the type of virtuous reactionists, just as we may say it of
Wesley or the chiefs of the Tractarians. But to make such an assertion
as that the repression of Christianity after the middle of the fourth
century, even supposing it to have been possible of achievement, could
have given back to the rapidly declining empire a strength of which all
the roots were lifeless, was to falsify history for the sake of exalting
the name of an apostate. A Roman aristocrat, blind to the real operation
and comparative value of the forces at work, might be pardoned for
holding Christianity guilty of the general dissolution around him; but
it was a strange phantasy for a philosopher of the eighteenth century to
suppose that the Christian system, in the shape which it had assumed by
Julian’s time, did not offer principles of firmer association, than the
mere rites of a paganism which was spontaneously decaying with a
rapidity that increased day by day.[256] There is no stronger
illustration of the twist which polemical fury may give to the most
acute intelligence, than this belief of Voltaire’s, that an organisation
which had attracted to itself every able and statesmanlike intellect of
the time, could do less for the regeneration of the Empire than the
initiated disciple of Platonist theurgy.
His account of the history of the church is composed in the same vein,
and we may see where Gibbon, who was a reader of Voltaire, drew the
inspiration of the solemn sneer with which he sapped solemn creed.[257]
‘So many frauds, so many errors, so many disgusting absurdities,’ says
Voltaire, ‘with which we have been inundated for seventeen hundred
years, have been unable to do any harm to our religion. It is
unquestionably divine, since seventeen centuries of imposture and
imbecility have not destroyed it.’[258] Voltaire thought as ill as
possible of the century to which he belonged; we cannot therefore charge
him with the inconsistency which marks some of his most prominent
disciples, who while they accepted such an account of the vileness of
the church as he had given them, did not scruple to believe that, as if
by miracle, seventeen centuries of steady depravation were _per saltum_
to be followed by an eighteenth and other centuries of boundless virtue
and enlightenment. Still it is wonderful that he should have been able
to appreciate the admirable character of the best sovereign of the
thirteenth century, Lewis IX.,[259] and to describe his motives and his
achievements so generously, and yet should never have thought of the
education and surrounding spiritual conditions by which such a character
had been formed. If the power of Catholicism for evil was so great and
decisive, it would have been reasonable to suppose that it had some
share also in moulding to good those who came forth from it the very
flower of humanity. But Voltaire did not know how much a man is the
product of a system operating on, and with, the individual
predisposition, or he would not have chidden St. Lewis for remaining on
the level of the prejudice of his time, instead of changing the spirit
of his age.[260] How should St. Lewis have risen from the prejudice of
his age, when it was exactly that prejudice which had formed him, and of
which he represented the worthy side?
Even without this inconsistency, the fundamental error is bad enough. We
get very wearied of the persistent identification of the church
throughout the dark ages with fraud and imposture and sinister
self-seeking, when we have once learnt, what is undoubtedly the most
important principle in the study of those times, that it was the
churchmen who kept the flickering light of civilisation alive, amid the
raging storms of uncontrolled passion and violence. The truth is that
Voltaire never realised civilisation as an organism, which if not
surrounded with the proper conditions of life will perish, and which
will prosper and wax stronger exactly in proportion as it is nourished.
That the light was more than once very near sinking in the west under
the waves of barbarism, as it has actually sunk in the eastern portions
of the Empire, seems to have been an all-important fact which he either
never saw, or which, if he saw it, never impressed him as assuredly it
ought to have done.
This is the more curious as he was able to perceive, in a way in which
it were much to be wished that more recent historians might show an
equal discernment, that we ought to use the terms of civilisation, with
all their complex and accumulated associations, in an extremely modified
sense in speaking of the centuries between the fifth and the thirteenth,
just as it is the gravest mistake to suppose that, because you can
express the results of the various contests of those times in terms of
philosophy, therefore the actors in any one of them were both conscious
of its most general bearings, and were animated by large and
philosophical inclinations. For example, after he has told us how
William the Conqueror sent to the Pope Harold’s battle-standard and a
small portion of the small treasure that an English king might possess
in those times, he proceeds to reduce the transaction to what he
conceived to be its true proportions, in the following manner: ‘Thus,’
he says, ‘a barbarian, the son of a harlot, the murderer of a legitimate
king, shares the plunder of this king with another barbarian; for if you
take away the names of duke of Normandy, king of England, and pope, all
is reduced to the action of a Norman brigand and a Lombard receiver of
plunder.[261] This being the case, the secular possessors of power being
so rude, petty, and barbarous, their contests being ‘those of bears and
wolves,’ their rapacity and violence being tempered by few of those
ideas of justice which form the bonds of society in its more advanced
stages, it ought to have struck even the most ardent enemy of
ecclesiastical pretensions as a thing in the highest degree
unphilosophical, to pour all the ill epithets of usurpation upon the
virtuous efforts of the great churchmen, who were least touched by the
spirit of violence, to take away as much power as they could from
barbarous princes and nobles, who were most impregnated with that and
all other dark spirits. The smaller the difference between the least
moral and the most moral orders in a community, the more desirable it is
that the order with even a small advantage should acquire as much power
as possible; for the reason that so near an approach to equality in
morals is most likely to occur when the average is low, and when
therefore the need to prevent it from falling any lower is most urgent.
Granting that the ecclesiastics were only slightly the superiors of the
barbarous laymen, this is all the better ground for rejoicing that they
succeeded in converting their ascendancy of moral idea into an
ascendancy of political fact.
In short, Voltaire’s great panorama, magnificent as it is and most
royally planned, is not drawn in lines and with colour that explain the
story or lay bare the principles of its progress. The plan is imposed
from without, just as in Bossuet’s case, not carefully sought from
within the facts themselves. What is meant then by the assertion that
Voltaire’s Essay is one of the foundations of modern history? If he
gives no explanation of the course of history, none to himself probably,
and none to us assuredly, what is his merit? This, that he has fully
placed before us the history which is to be explained; that he has
presented the long external succession of facts in their true magnitude
and in a definite connection; that he did not write a history of France,
or of the papacy, or of the Mahometan power, or of the crusades, but
that he saw the advantage, as we see the unavoidable necessity, of
comprehending in a single idea and surveying in a single work the
various activities, the rise and fall of power, the transference from
one to another of political predominance, the contributions to the art
of living, among the societies which were once united in a single
empire. The history of each of these societies, England, France, Spain,
Italy, the Byzantine Empire, is followed in relation to the history of
Europe, which is indeed composed of these co-ordinate parts. The
movement of communities since the dissolution of the Roman Empire is
exhibited in a collective form, and that it should be exhibited and
accepted in this form was obviously a preliminary step to an organic
treatment of the multiplied laws of social physics.
‘There are some events,’ he wrote in a note to his best poem, ‘which
have effects, and others which have none. It is with the chain of events
as it is with a genealogical tree, where we perceive branches that
become extinct at the first generation, and others that continue the
race. Many events remain without any filiation. It is thus that in every
machine there are effects necessary to the movement, while others are
indifferent, following the operation of the first, and leading to
nothing. The wheels of a vehicle serve to make it go; but whether they
raise a little more or a little less dust, the journey is accomplished
equally. Such is the general order of the world, that the links of the
chain are not deranged by a little more or a little less of
irregularity.’[262] The figures in this passage serve adequately to
describe his own treatment. We see in the Essay the lines of the
genealogical tree, but we do not learn the laws of the transmission of
qualities from one stock to another; we see the links of the chain, but
not the conditions which fastened each to the other; conditions, indeed,
only to be grasped through a scientific study of human nature which
Voltaire had never made; and finally we see the towering car drawn
slowly along a devious road by sweat and strain of millions, but we know
not why it went by this road rather than another. In a word, the inner
machinery of societies and of their movement remains as far from our
sight as it ever was. The study of those economic and material forces
which have so profound an influence upon social transformations, was in
its infancy, and the Economists, who really saw that there are definite
laws regulating the play of these forces, unfortunately mixed up with
their speculations a number of chimerical fancies, which Voltaire was
too acute to accept, but not patient enough to sift.[263] In this
respect he is as defective as Gibbon, in whose book, so justly famous
for its splendid breadth of conception and industrious elaboration of
detail, we have much of that meagre philosophy which consisted in the
exposure of falsehood, but little of the true science which shows us the
numerous organs of society in connection with their actual play and
function. Neither Gibbon nor Voltaire made any contribution, nor seems
to have been aware of the importance of contributing, to that study of
the fundamental conditions of the social union, which Aristotle
commenced, and which both Bodin in the sixteenth century and Montesquieu
in the eighteenth had so meritoriously continued.[264] Nevertheless, it
was much to lead men to study the history of modern Europe as a whole,
and we may say of Voltaire in connection with history what he said of
Corneille in connection with tragedy—‘It is so great a merit to have
opened the career, and inventors are so much above other men, that
posterity pardons their greatest faults.’[265]