FERNEY.
Voltaire, as we have seen, took possession of Ferney in 1758, and he
lived here almost without a break for something like twenty years. His
estate was a feudal seigniory in the district of Gex, on the very
frontier of Switzerland, but in France, though enjoying immunity from
French taxation. He built a new manor-house, and in his capacity of lord
of the manor replaced the dilapidated little church of the estate by a
new one, very small, very plain, and about which, notwithstanding its
famous inscription of which he so often boasted,—_Deo erexit
Voltaire_,—much more noise has been made, than so simple and natural a
proceeding at all calls for.[266] Madame Denis kept house for him, and
according to the Paris gossips of the time, on an extravagant scale,
which often produced ruptures between the two. Guests were incessant
and the hospitality ungrudging.[267] He complained during the Seven
Years’ War of the embarrassment of being a Frenchman, when he had to
entertain daily at dinner Russians, English, and Germans.[268] He
protests that he is weary of being hotel-keeper in general for all
Europe, and so weary was he at one time of this noisy and costly post,
that the establishment was partially suspended for upwards of a year.
One of the most generous of Voltaire’s many generous acts was his
reception into his house of a child who had no other claim on him than
that of being the great-grand-daughter of the uncle of Corneille. A
soldier ought to succour the niece of his general, he said. He took the
liveliest interest in the little maid’s education, though she appears to
have been a sulky pupil, and eventually he married her with due dower to
one Dupuits. The bustle and expense of his establishment became greater
than ever, and in the spring of 1768 Paris was as much electrified by
news of a revolution at Ferney, as she has been since by some
revolutions in her own streets. Madame Denis and the two Dupuits had
suddenly made their way to Paris, and for a year and a half Voltaire was
left in peace, part of which he employed sensibly in having his house
cleaned from cellar to garret,—a bit of news which is handed down to
our times, since, according to Grimm, the domestic arrangements of the
manor-house at Ferney interested at that moment more or less every court
in Europe.[269] In the autumn of 1769 Madame Denis returned, and with
her the old stir and extravagance were resumed, for Voltaire was one of
the best-humoured of men to his family and friends, and could deny his
niece nothing. We have more than one description of this too immortal
niece. They are all equally unflattering. Her homeliness of appearance
amounted to the ugliness that is bitter. She was destitute of wit, and
had a vulgar soul. Born to be the insipid gossip of a bourgeois circle,
says one charitable writer, but having by chance the first man in the
nation for an uncle, she learnt to chatter about literature and the
theatre, as a parrot learns.[270] She wrote a comedy; but the players,
out of respect for Voltaire, declined to act in it. She wrote a tragedy;
but the one favour, which the repeated entreaties of years could never
wring from Voltaire, was that he would read it. She had histrionic as
well as dramatic ambition, and here worked a miracle, for her
representation of Mérope once drew floods of tears from some English
ladies.[271] Her affectation of intellect had not cooled the reality of
simple sensation, and if she loved art, she was said not to despise
gallantry. At any rate, though she was only sixteen years younger than
her uncle,[272] she needed continual festivities and crowds of guests.
Ferney was rather a difficult spot for a woman with a passion for the
hum of cities. For five months in the year, says Voltaire, my deserts
are, on the admission of Russians, worse than Siberia itself; we see
thirty leagues of mountain, snow, and precipices: it is Naples in
summer, Lapland in winter.[273] One year he marks with word of
bitterness snow falling thick in the middle of May. Four feet of snow in
the courtyard constituted a normal winter state. He commemorates with
enthusiasm how one day, through these four feet of snow, he saw porters
bringing him a hamper of Champagne from a friend; for the more generous
sort of Burgundy with which he ordinarily recruited himself had fallen
short, and he had been reduced to the humble vintage of Beaujolais.
Yet in the midst of a thousand discomforts and hardships we never hear
him wishing to be back in Paris. It remained to him the accursed city,
as it had been before his journey to England. He always thought with
horror of its cabal, intrigue, frivolity, and sovereign indifference to
the ruin of the kingdom and the shedding of innocent blood. There can be
no doubt that this wise exile prolonged his days. He was constantly
complaining of illness, and he passed months at a time in bed, which
may in truth have been the best possible preservative of life for one of
his temperament. Yet in spite of this avoidance of society, this passion
for his study, the man of ordinary capacity, with no more than an
ordinary working day, may marvel how amid so many distractions the
master of the house contrived to write so many scores of pieces, large
and small, and so many hundreds of letters, grave and gay. Of these
letters nearly seven thousand are already in print, and M. Beuchot, most
carefully informed of all Voltaire’s editors, thinks there are likely to
be quite as many more still in undiscovered existence. Ferney was the
centre of the most universal and varied correspondence that any one man
has ever carried on. Frederick the Great was not the only crowned head
with whom Voltaire interchanged royal communication. Catherine II. of
Russia, of Anhalt-Zerbst by birth, was the helpful patroness of Diderot
and D’Alembert, and was always eager to hear some word from the
patriarch of their encyclopædic church, only praying him not to think
her too importunate. Christian VII. of Denmark apologises for not being
able at a stroke to remove all the obstacles that lie in the way of the
civil liberty of his subjects. Gustavus III. of Sweden is elated by the
thought that Voltaire sometimes casts a glance on what is going on in
the North, and protests that this is their greatest encouragement to do
as well as they can in all ways.[274] Joseph II. would fain have called
at Ferney while travelling incognito through France, but fear of his
mother’s displeasure held him back, the high and devout nature of Maria
Theresa always finding Voltaire’s mockery of sacred things deeply
repugnant, as we may easily believe.
Beside sovereigns who wrote to him as to an equal, every young aspirant
to literary distinction, however unknown and obscure, sought a criticism
from Ferney. Twenty years before he settled down here, Voltaire had been
consulted by Vauvenargues, and had replied with words of painstaking and
generous counsel. It was always the same with him. No young author ever
solicited advice in vain, and he was never sparing either of trouble or
praise. The Marquis of Chastellux sent him a copy of his Félicité
Publique, and was raised to the seventh heaven by a letter of thanks, in
which Voltaire tells him: ‘I covered the margin of my copy with notes,
as I always do when a book charms and instructs me; I even took the
liberty of not always sharing the author’s opinion. I am very old and
very feeble, but such reading makes me young again.’ And the letter
contains a large number of points where he thinks the author in
error.[275]
Besides kings and the writers of books, plain men also besought his
dictum on high matters. ‘A burgomaster of Middleburg,’ he informs Madame
du Deffand, ‘whom I do not know, wrote to me a little while since, to
ask me in confidence whether there is a God or not; whether, in case
there be one, he takes any heed of us; whether matter is eternal;
whether it can think; whether the soul is immortal; and begging me to
answer by return of post.’[276]
One may suspect that a little colouring is added here by the master
hand, but the substantial facts are probable enough. He corresponded
with cardinals, marshals of France, and bishops, and he corresponded
with Helvétius and with Diderot, who, greatly to the indignation of the
business-like patriarch, had a bad habit of leaving letters to answer
themselves.[277]
If two cavalry officers fell to disputing over the mess-table as to the
propriety of using some bit of old French, it was to Ferney that the
reference was instantly made.[278]
We get an idea of the kind of imperial authority which attached to
Voltaire’s judgment, from the eagerness with which Turgot sought,
without revealing his name, an opinion from Ferney as to the worth of a
translation with which he lightened the heavy burden of his intendance
at Limoges, a translation of the Eclogues and Fourth Æneid into French
metric verse. ‘They say,’ wrote Turgot, ‘that he is so busy with his
Encyclopædia as neither to speak nor to write to any one.’ If Turgot
could have seen Voltaire’s correspondence for 1770, he would have found
out how far this rumour was from the truth, and in fact he did get an
answer to his own letter; but it can hardly have been very much more
satisfactory than silence would have been, for Voltaire, while profuse
in praise of the fidelity and spirit of the translation, unfortunately
did not detect that it was meant for anything more ambitious than simple
prose with enthusiasm in it.[279] As Turgot especially valued in the
patriarch his ’superb ear,’ the blow was as sharp as it well could be.
He was little concerned or surprised on learning the fallacious
reasoning of the poet in political economy. ‘Reasoning,’ he adds, ‘has
never been Voltaire’s strong point.’[280] And that was true in matters
of abstract science, but he was an unrivalled populariser of the results
of other people’s reasoning, from Newton’s Principia down to Middleton’s
Free Enquiry, and this popularisation was what the conditions of the
time caused to be most ardently demanded. The proof of the demand we may
see in the extraordinary respect and curiosity, or dislike and alarm,
with which Voltaire for the twenty crowning years of his life was
regarded throughout the whole of civilised Europe.
It is impossible to read the multitudinous volumes of Voltaire’s
correspondence, and they are being added to every two or three years,
with entire satisfaction. They are wittier than any other letters in the
world. For lightness, swiftness, grace, spontaneity, you can find no
second to them, at however long an interval. But they abound in many
things which are disagreable in the letters of an old man who had
so true an interest in the spread of virtue, knowledge, and the other
conditions of human dignity. These, however, may be passed over as the
innocent and unconscious unseemliness of a very gay nature living in a
very free age. It is less easy to banish the unpleasant impressions with
which we find him playing the equivocal part of being all things to all
men. One would have been pleased to have a little more stiffness, a
little less pliancy of phrase. We would not go through the world
insisting on grim Puritanic earnestness at every moment of a man’s life,
but Voltaire’s lively complaisance with all sorts of unworthy people is
something worse than unedifying. One can hardly help sympathising with
D’Alembert’s remonstrance. ‘You have rather spoilt the people who
persecute us. ’Tis true you have had greater need than anybody else to
keep them quiet, and that you have been obliged to offer a candle to
Lucifer to save yourself from Beelzebub, but Lucifer has only grown the
prouder, without Beelzebub growing the less malignant.’[281] The truth
probably is that Voltaire did not always take—much thought of Lucifer or
Beelzebub. For one thing, he was, as we have said more than once,
intensely sympathetic by temperament, and in writing to a friend, or
even an acquaintance only, he was for the moment animated by a lively
good will and anxiety to be in harmony with his correspondent. There was
nothing false in these purring pleasantries, with which he amused all
correspondents alike. They came as naturally from his mobile and genial
constitution, as an equality of prosaic moroseness comes from persons of
fundamentally different constitutions. For another thing, the old
fashion of his youth never dropped away from him, and the elaborate
courteousness and friendly ardour of manner, which he had learnt among
the aristocratic friends of the days of the Regency and afterwards at
Paris and Versailles, did not desert him in the solitudes of the Jura.
He was to the last a man of quality, as well as a crusher of the
Infamous, and to the last he kept up the tone of one who had been a
gentleman of the chamber to one king, and court-chamberlain to another.
Voltaire’s temperament and earliest surroundings fully explain what was
a more public, as well as more serious, falling away from the rigorous
integrity which men are now accustomed to demand from the leaders of
unpopular causes. His sins in this order are nearly as numerous as his
public acts. Rousseau, perhaps we may say without breach of charity, as
much from vanity as principle, prefixed his name to all that he wrote,
and he paid the penalty in a life of wandering and persecution. Voltaire
in his later days as invariably sheltered himself behind the anonymous,
and not only disclaimed works of which it was notorious that he was the
author, but insisted that his friends should impute them to this or that
dead name. Nobody was deceived. While he got unwelcome credit for a
multitude of pieces that were not his own, assuredly nothing really his
ever failed to be set down to its true author. We can only say that this
was the evil practice of the time, and that Voltaire was here little
worse than Turgot and many another man of general virtuousness, to whom
the ferocity of authority would not even allow freedom enough to plead
for tolerance, much less to utter uncertified opinion. ‘Time,’ said
D’Alembert, apologising for some whiff of orthodoxy which Voltaire
scented in one or two articles in the Encyclopædia, ‘will make people
distinguish what we thought from what we said.’[282] Condorcet, as we
know, deliberately defended these deceptions, which did not deceive,
while they did protect. He contended that if you rob a man of his
natural right of publishing his opinions, then you lose your own right
to hear the truth from the man’s lips.[283] Undoubtedly all laws admit
that duress introduces new conditions into the determination of what is
right and wrong in action, or at least that it mitigates pains and
penalties, and the position of every claimant for free speech was in
those days emphatically a position of duress. The choice lay between
disavowal on the one hand, and on the other abstention from proclaiming
truths by which only society could gain the freedom it so much needed;
between strict anonymity and leaving the darkness unbroken. And we must
remember that disingenuous tricks to conceal authorship were not
assuredly so unpardonable, when resorted to as protectives against
imprisonment, confiscation, and possible peril of life, as they are now
among ourselves, when they serve no more defensible purpose than
sheltering men who have not the courage of their opinions, against one
or two paltry social deprivations. The monstrous proceedings against La
Barre, and the ease with which in this and numerous other cases the
jurisprudence of the tribunals lent itself to the cruelty of fanatics,
no doubt excited in Voltaire a very genuine alarm for his own safety,
and probably with good reason. We know that he could not venture to
visit Italy, in consequence of his just fear lest the Inquisition should
throw their redoubtable foe into prison, and the parliaments of Toulouse
and Abbeville had perpetrated juridical murders as iniquitous as any of
the proceedings of the Holy Office. And though it is easy and right for
the young, who live in a time when you are not imprisoned or hung or
decapitated for holding unpopular opinions, to call out for manliness to
the uttermost in these things, one must make allowance for an occasional
fit of timorousness in a man of eighty, whom nature had never cut out
for a martyr. Yet, more than once, these fits committed Voltaire to acts
which were as great a scandal to the devout as to the atheists. That he
should rebuild the ruinous little chapel of his estate was not much more
remarked, than it would be for a Protestant landlord to subscribe to
repair the Catholic church on an Irish property containing only Catholic
tenants. The gorgeous ceremony with which in his quality of lord he
commemorated its opening, made everybody laugh, not excepting the chief
performer, for he actually took the opportunity of lifting up his voice
in the new temple and preaching a sermon against theft. The bishop of
Annecy in Savoy, his diocesan, was furious at this mockery, and urged
the minister at Paris to banish Voltaire from France. In order to avert
the blow, Voltaire tried to make a nominal peace with the church by
confessing, and participating in the solemnity of an Easter communion
(1768). The bishop wrote him a long letter of unctuous impertinences, to
which Voltaire replied by asking very tartly why the discharge of so
ordinary a duty called for this insolent congratulation. The
philosophers of Paris were bitterly scandalised, and some of them wrote
to the patriarch of the sect to remonstrate. Even D’Alembert, his own
familiar friend, could not refrain from protest.[284] Voltaire could
give no better reasons for his strange lapse than we may hear given
every day in our own country, by men who practise hypocritical
compliances for the sake of a little ignoble ease, and thus perpetuate
the yoke. He owed an example to his parish, as if the example of
feigning a belief which he repudiates could be a good example for one to
set in any parish. It was very well to shirk these observances in Paris,
because there in the tide of business one finds an excuse or is not
missed, but in the country no such excuse offers itself. One must stand
well with the curé, be he knave or dunce. One must respect the two
hundred and fifty timorous consciences around one. And so forth, down
that well-worn list of pleas by which men make anxiety about the
consciences of others a substantial reason for treachery to their own.
Voltaire, besides all these, honestly added the one true reason, that he
did not mean to be burnt alive, and that the only way of making sure
against such a fate was to close the lips of spies and informers.[285]
The bishop knew perfectly well that the squire, who had made his Easter
communion in so remarkable a manner in 1768, was the author of the
Philosophical Dictionary, of which a bran-new edition, amended and
revised, made its appearance in 1769; and he appears to have forbidden
the priest of Ferney to confess or administer the eucharist to the chief
of the flock. Voltaire was at once seized with a fever, and summoned the
priest to administer ghostly comfort. The priest pleaded the horrible
rumours of the world as to the damnable books of which the sick man was
alleged to be the author. Voltaire replied by warning him very
peremptorily that in refusing to administer the viaticum he was
infringing the law, and the consequence was that he did duly receive the
viaticum, after which he signed a solemn act in the presence of a
notary, declaring that he pardons his various calumniators; that ‘if any
indiscretion prejudicial to the religion of the State should have
escaped him,’ he seeks forgiveness from God and the State; and finally
he forgave the bishop of Annecy, who had calumniated him to the king,
and whose malicious designs had come to nought. The priest and notary
afterwards falsified this amazing declaration so as to appease the
bishop, and came to Voltaire praying him not to betray them. ‘I prove to
them,’ he says, ‘that they will be damned, I give them something to
drink, and they go away delighted.’[286] A younger philosopher of his
school remarks with his accustomed gravity on this most singular
transaction, that the satisfaction of forcing his priest to administer
by fear of the secular judges, and of insulting the bishop of Annecy in
a juridical manner, cannot excuse such a proceeding in the eyes of the
free and firm man, who weighs calmly the claims of truth and the
requirements of prudence, when laws contrary to natural justice render
truth dangerous and prudence indispensable.[287] To which reflection we
may perhaps add another, suggested by the cruel experience of the church
in France within five and twenty years from Voltaire’s impious
communion, that if any order, secular or spiritual, constrains its
adversaries under penalties to the commission of base acts, then if the
chances of time should ever transfer the power to the other side, that
order has only itself to blame for whatever wrong may mark the
retaliation. There is no more dangerous policy in affairs of state than
to strip your opponent of self-respect, and this the descendants of the
persecutors found out to their extreme cost, when in 1793 they had to
deal with the descendants of the persecuted.
One other curious piece of sportiveness in his dealings with the church
deserves to be noticed. In the year 1770 the post of temporal father of
the order of Capucins for the district of Gex became vacant. Voltaire
applied for it, and the general at Rome, perhaps listening to a word
from Ganganelli, or else from the Duchess of Choiseul, sent to Ferney
the letters patent conferring upon its patriarch this strange dignity,
and also affiliating him to the order. What were Voltaire’s motives in
so odd a transaction, it is not very hard to divine. Probably, he
thought even this humble office would be some protection against
persecution. Then it gave him an opportunity of harassing his enemy, the
bishop of Annecy. Thirdly, it amused that whimsical element of farce and
mischief which was always so irrepressible in him, from the early days
when he is said to have nearly damned his own play by appearing on the
stage as the high-priest’s train-bearer, and burlesquing that august
person’s solemn gait. Voltaire filled his letters with infinite
pleasantries about the new Capucin, and seemed as much pleased at the
idea of wearing the cord of Saint Francis, as he had been with the gold
key of a Prussian chamberlain.[288] One of his first enjoyments was to
write letters to his episcopal foe, signed with a cross and his name:
‘✠ _Voltaire, Capucin indigne._’[289] A story is told by Grimm of a
visitor arriving at Ferney, and being greeted by the patriarch with
the news that he would find his host a changed man. ‘One grows a bigot
in one’s old age; I have a habit of having some pious work read to me
when I sit down at table.’ And in fact, some one began to read a
sermon of Massillon, Voltaire throwing in exclamations on the beauty,
eloquence, imagination of the preacher. Suddenly after three or four
pages, he called out ‘Off with Massillon!’ and launched forth during
the rest of the meal with his usual verve and fanciful extravagance of
imagination.[290] It is profoundly unedifying, but not the less
characteristic.
Voltaire, there can be little doubt, never designed a social revolution,
being in this the representative of the method of Hobbes. His single
object was to reinstate the understanding in its full rights, to
emancipate thought, to extend knowledge, to erect the standard of
critical common sense. He either could not see, or else, as one
sometimes thinks, he closes his eyes and refuses for his part to see,
that it was impossible to revolutionise the spiritual basis of belief
without touching the social forms, which were inseparably connected with
the old basis by the strong bonds of time and a thousand fibres of
ancient association and common interest. Rousseau began where Voltaire
left off. He informs us that in the days when his character was forming,
nothing which Voltaire wrote escaped, him, and that the Philosophical
Letters, that is the Letters on the English, though assuredly not the
writer’s best work, were what first attracted him to study, and
implanted a taste which never afterwards became extinct. The
correspondence between Voltaire and the prince of Prussia, afterwards
the great Frederick, inspired Rousseau with a passionate desire to learn
how to compose with elegance, and to imitate the colouring of so fine an
author.[291] Thus Voltaire, who was eighteen years his elder, gave this
extraordinary genius his first productive impulse. But a sensibility of
temperament, to which perhaps there is no parallel in the list of
prominent men, impelled Rousseau to think, or rather to feel, about the
concrete wrongs and miseries of men and women, and not the abstract
rights of their intelligence. Hence the two great revolutionary schools,
the school which appealed to sentiment, and the school which appealed to
intelligence. The Voltarian principles of the strictest political
moderation and of literary common sense, negative, merely emancipatory,
found their political outcome, as French historians early pointed out,
in the Constituent Assembly, which was the creation of the upper and
middle class, while the spirit of Rousseau, ardent, generous, passionate
for the relief of the suffering, overwhelmed by the crowding forms of
manhood chronically degraded and womanhood systematically polluted, came
to life and power in the Convention and the sections of the Commune of
Paris which overawed the Convention.
‘It will not do,’ wrote D’Alembert to Voltaire as early as 1762, ‘to
speak too loudly against Jean Jacques or his book, for he is rather a
king in the Halles.’[292] This must have been a new word in the ears of
the old man, who had grown up in the habit of thinking of public opinion
as the opinion, not of markets where the common people bought and sold,
but of the galleries of Versailles. Except for its theology, the age of
Lewis XIV. always remained the great age to Voltaire, the age of pomp
and literary glory, and it was too difficult a feat to cling on one side
to the Grand Monarch, and to stretch out a hand on the other to the
Social Contract. It was too difficult for the man who had been embraced
by Ninon de l’Enclos, who was the correspondent of the greatest
sovereigns in Europe, and the intimate of some of the greatest nobles in
France, to feel much sympathy with writings that made their author king
of the Halles. Frederick offered Rousseau shelter, and so did Voltaire;
but each of them disliked his work as warmly as the other. They did not
understand one who, if he wrote with an eloquence that touched all
hearts, repulsed friends and provoked enemies like a madman or a savage.
The very language of Rousseau was to Voltaire as an unknown tongue, for
it was the language of reason clothing the births of passionate
sensation. Emile only wearied him, though there were perhaps fifty pages
of it which he would have had bound in morocco.[293] It is a stale
romance, he cries, while the Social Contract is only remarkable for
some insults rudely thrown at kings by a citizen of Geneva, and for four
insipid pages against the Christian religion, which are simply
plagiarised from Bayle’s centos.[294] The author is a monster of
ingratitude and insolence, the arch-scoundrel and chief of charlatans,
the lineal descendant of the dog of Diogenes the cynic, and other evil
things not readily to be named in a polite age. Partly no doubt this
extreme irritation was due to the insults with which Jean Jacques had
repulsed his offers of shelter and assistance, had repudiated Voltaire’s
attempts to defend him, and had held up Voltaire himself as a proper
object for the persecutions of Geneva. But there was a still deeper root
of discrepancy, which we have already pointed out. Rousseau’s
exaggerated tone was an offence to Voltaire’s more just and reasonable
spirit, and the feigned austerity of a man whose life and manners he
knew, assumed in his eyes a disagreeable shade of hypocrisy.[295]
Besides these things, he was clearly apprehensive of the storms which
Rousseau’s extraordinary hardihood had the very natural effect of
raising in the circles of authority, though it is true that the most
acute observers of the time thought that they noticed a very perceptible
increase of Voltaire’s own hardihood, as a consequence of the example
which the other set him.
The rivalry between the schools of Rousseau and Voltaire represents the
dead-lock to which social thought had come; a dead-lock of which the
catastrophe of the Revolution was both expression and result. At the
time of Voltaire’s death there was not a single institution in France
with force enough to be worth a month’s purchase. The monarchy was
decrepit; the aristocracy was as feeble and impotent as it was arrogant;
the bourgeoisie was not without aspiration, but it lacked courage and it
possessed no tradition; and the church was demoralised, first by the
direct attack of Voltaire and the not less powerful indirect attack of
the Encyclopædia, and second by the memory of its own cruelty and
selfishness in the generation just closing. But Voltaire’s theory, so
far as he ever put it into its most general form, was that the temporal
order was safe and firm, and that it would endure until criticism had
transformed thought and prepared the way for a régime of enlightenment
and humanity. Rousseau, on the contrary, directed all the engines of
passion against the whole temporal fabric, and was so little careful of
freedom of thought, so little confident in the plenary efficacy of
rational persuasion, as to insist upon the extermination of atheists by
law. The position of each was at once irrefragable and impossible. It
was impossible to effect a stable reconstitution of the social order
until men had been accustomed to use their minds freely, and had
gradually thrown off the demoralising burden of superstition. But then
the existing social order had become intolerable, and its forces were
practically extinct, and consequently such an attack as Rousseau’s was
inevitable, and was at the same time and for the same reasons
irresistible. To overthrow the power of the church only was to do
nothing in a society perishing from material decay and political
emasculation. Yet to regenerate such a society without the aid of moral
and spiritual forces, with whose activity the existence of a dominant
ecclesiastical power was absolutely incompatible, was one of the wildest
feats that ever passionate sophist attempted.
If, however, it must be admitted that each of these two famous
destroyers was attempting an equally desperate task, it is the
contention of these pages that Voltaire was the more right and
far-sighted of the two in his perception of the conditions of the
problem. We have now for various adequate reasons acquired the habit of
looking upon the church and speaking of it, as an organisation outside
of society, or at least as a separate organisation and independent
integer within it. The truth is that in a Catholic country like France
before the Revolution, the church more than the secular order actually
was the society, as it had been, though to a far wider degree,
throughout Europe in the days of Hildebrand and Innocent. That is to
say, it furnished the strongest of the ideas, sentiments, hopes, and
associations which bound men together in a single community. The
monarchy, the nobles, the old historic French tradition, the various
bodies and processes of law, were swept away by the Revolution,
virtually never to return, in spite of the transient appearances to the
contrary. The church was swept away also, but only for a year or two;
and so little effectual was the Revolution, which was in fact Rousseau’s
Revolution, in permanently modifying its position, that those Frenchmen
at the present day who most soberly judge the future of their country
and look deepest into its state, clearly perceive that the battle to be
fought in the order of ideas is a battle between the new moral and
social ideas of the workmen, and the old moral and social ideas which
Catholicism has implanted in the breasts of the peasants, and on which
the middle class privately and unconsciously lean for the support of
their own consciences, though they may have put away Catholic dogma. We
may see here, once more, the help which Protestantism gave to the
dissolution of the old society, by the increased room it gave, apart
from the specific influence of a more democratic dogma, for that gradual
intellectual expansion throughout a community, which for those who have
faith in the reasoning faculty is the one sure secret of social advance.
The subjection of the spiritual power to the temporal, which has
commonly followed the establishment of the Protestant communion, has
very likely retarded the final disappearance of many ideas which foster
anti-social tendencies; but the subjection of the spiritual power in
such a set of circumstances has the effect of softening shocks.
Protestantism in the sixteenth century, if it could have been accepted
in France, would have been a more edifying dissolvent than Voltairism
was in the eighteenth; but it is certain that the loosening of
theological ideas and the organisation connected with them and upholding
them, was the first process towards making truly social ideas possible,
and their future realisation a thing which good men might hope for.
Napoleon, the great organ of political reaction, knew what he was about
in paying writers for years to denigrate the memory of Voltaire, whose
very name he abhorred.[296]
In saying, however, that Rousseau’s attack was inevitable, we have
perhaps said that it was indispensable; for where a society is not able
to resist an assault upon its fundamental conditions, we may be
tolerably sure that the time has arrived when either these conditions
must be dispersed, or else the society must fall into rapid dissolution.
We may refute Rousseau’s sophisms as often and as conclusively as we
please, and may dwell as forcibly as we know how upon the untold
penalties which France has paid, and is still doomed to pay, for
whatever benefits he may have bestowed on her. But, after all this, the
benefits remain, and they may be briefly set down as two in number. In
the first place he spoke words that can never be unspoken, and kindled a
hope that can never be extinguished; he first inflamed men with a
righteous conviction that the evils of the existing order of things
reduced civilisation to a nullity for the great majority of mankind, and
that it cannot for ever be tolerable that the mass should wear away
their lives in unbroken toil without hope or aim, in order that the few
may live selfish and vacuous days. Rousseau presented this sentiment in
a shape which made it the ‘negation of society;’ but it was much to
induce thinkers to ask themselves, and the bondsmen of society to ask
their masters, whether the last word of social philosophy had been
uttered, and the last experiment in the relations of men to one another
decisively tried and irrevocably accepted. Second, by his fervid
eloquence and the burning conviction which he kindled in the breasts of
great numbers of men, he inspired energy enough in France to awaken her
from the torpor as of death which was stealing so rapidly over her.
Nobody was more keenly aware of the presence of this breath of decay in
the air than Voltaire was. It had seized such hold of the vital parts of
the old order, that, but for the fiery spirit and unquenchable ardour of
the men who read Rousseau as men of old had read the gospel, but for the
spirit and ardour which animated the Convention, and made it alike in
the tasks of peace and the tasks of war one of the most effective and
formidable assemblies that the world has ever beheld, we do not see what
there was to stop France from sinking lower and lower into impotence,
until at last the powers who vainly threatened the republic with
partition, might in the course of time actually have consummated the
threat against the monarchy. This may seem impossible to us who live
after the Revolution and after Napoleon; but we must remember the
designs of partitioning Prussia in the middle of the century, the
accomplishment of a partition of the Italian possessions of the house of
Austria in 1735, and the partition of Poland; and why was France to be
eternal, any more than the Byzantine empire, or the power of the house
of Austria, or the power of Spain, had been eternal? It was the fire
kindled by Rousseau’s passion that saved her; for even of the
Constituent, which was Voltairean, the very soul was Mirabeau, who was
Rousseauite.
It will be seen that in one sense Rousseau was a far more original
personage than his first chief and inspirer. He contributed new ideas,
of extremely equivocal and perilous character, but still new, to the
multitudinous discussions which were throwing all the social elements
into confusion. These ideas might indeed have been found substantially
in the writings of previous thinkers like Montaigne and Locke; but
Rousseau’s passion invested them with a quality which was virtually to
constitute them a fresh and original force. Voltaire contributed
initiative and a temperament, which made his propagation of ideas that
were not new, as important a fact in social if not in intellectual
history, as if he had been possessed of superlative gifts in
speculation. This has also to be remembered when we think of comparing
him with Diderot, who, while his equal in industry, was greatly his
superior both in fresh simplicity of imagination, and in grasp and
breadth of positive knowledge. Whoever will take the trouble to turn
over some of the thirty-five volumes of the Encyclopædia, may easily see
how that gigantic undertaking (1751-1765), in which Voltaire always took
the most ardent and practical interest,[297] assisted the movement that
Voltaire had commenced. It seemed to gather up into a single great
reservoir all that men knew, and this fact of mere mechanical
collocation was a sort of substitute for a philosophic synthesis. As
Comte says, it furnished a provisional rallying-point for efforts the
most divergent, without requiring the sacrifice of any points of
essential independence, in such a way as to secure for a body of
incoherent speculation an external look of system.[298] This enterprise,
the history of which is a microcosm of the whole battle between the two
sides in France, enabled the various opponents of theological
absolutism, the Voltaireans, Rousseauites, atheists, and all other sorts
and conditions of protesting men, to confront the church and its
doctrine with a similar semblance of organic unity and completeness. The
Encyclopædia was not simply negative and critical. It was an unexampled
manual of information, and was the means of spreading over the country
some knowledge of that active scientific culture, which was producing
such abundant and astonishing discoveries. The two streams of dissolvent
influences, negative criticism on the one hand, and positive knowledge
and scientific method on the other, were led into a single channel of
multiplied volume and force. There was no real nor logical connection
between the two elements, and while one of them has daily grown less
serviceable, the other has daily grown more absorbingly powerful, so as
now to be itself the effective indirect substitute for that direct
negative criticism, with which the Encyclopædic design had once thrown
it into alliance.
Diderot, the third chief of the attack, does even fuller justice than
Rousseau to Voltaire’s share in stimulating thought and opening the mind
of France; and in spite of the extravagance of its first clause, there
is a glimpse of true discrimination in the characteristic sentence—‘Were
I to call him the greatest man nature has produced, I might find people
to agree with me; but if I say that she has never yet produced, and is
never likely to produce again, a man so extraordinary, only his enemies
will contradict me.’[299] This panegyric was specially disinterested,
because Voltaire’s last years had been not least remarkable for his
bitter antipathy to the dogmatic atheism and dogmatic materialism of
that school, with which Diderot was most intimate personally, and with
whose doctrines, if he did not at all times seem entirely to share them,
he had at any rate a warmer sympathy than with any other system of that
negative epoch, when every chief thinker was so vague positively, so
weak constructively, and only the subalterns, like D’Holbach and
Helvétius, presumed to push on to conclusions.
The story of Voltaire’s many long-sustained and unflagging endeavours to
procure whatever redress might be possible for the victims of legal
injustice, has been very often told, and mere commemoration of these
justly renowned achievements may suffice here. ‘The worst of the worthy
sort of people,’ he once said, ‘is that they are such cowards. A man
groans over wrong, he shuts his lips, he takes his supper, he
forgets.’[300] Voltaire was not of that temper. He was not only an
extremely humane man; extraordinary vividness of imagination, lack of
which is at the root of so much cruelty, and unparalleled sympathetic
quality, thinness of which explains so much appalling indifference,
animated him to a perseverance in protecting the helpless, which
entitles him to a place by the side of Howard and the noblest
philanthropists. There were three years in which the chief business of
his life was to procure the rehabilitation of the name of the
unfortunate Calas, and the payment of a money recompense to his family.
He agitated the whole world with indignation and pity by means of
narratives, pleas, short statements and long statements, passionate
appeals and argumentative appeals. Powerful ministers, fine ladies,
lawyers, men of letters, were all constrained by his importunate
solicitations to lend an ear to the cause of reason and tolerance, and
to lift up an arm in its vindication. The same tremendous enginery was
again brought into play in the case of Sirven. In the case of La Barre
and his comrade D’Etallonde, his tenacity was still more amazing and
heroic. For twelve years he persevered in the attempt to have the memory
of La Barre rehabilitated. One of the judicial authorities concerned in
that atrocious exploit, struck with horror at the thought of being held
up to the execration of Europe by that terrible avenger, conveyed some
menace to Voltaire of what might befall him. Voltaire replied to him by
a Chinese anecdote. ‘I forbid you,’ said a tyrannical emperor to the
chief of the tribunal of history, ‘to speak a word more of me.’ The
mandarin began to write. ‘What are you doing now?’ asked the emperor. ‘I
am writing down the order that your majesty has just given me.’[301]
There was a something inexorable as doom about Voltaire’s unrelenting
perseverance in getting wrong definitely stamped and transfixed. If he
did not succeed in obtaining justice for the memory of La Barre, and in
procuring for D’Etallonde free pardon, at least he never abandoned the
endeavour, and he was just as ardent and unwearied in the twelfth year,
as he had been while his indignation was freshly kindled. He was more
successful in the case of Lally. Count Lally had failed to save India
from the English, had been taken prisoner, and had then in a magnanimous
way asked his captors to allow him to go to Paris to clear himself from
various charges, which the too numerous enemies he had made were
spreading against his character and administration. The French people,
infuriated at the loss of their possessions in India and Canada, were
crying for a victim, and Lally, after a process tainted with every kind
of illegality, was condemned to death by the parliament of Paris (1766)
on the vague charge of abuse of authority, exactions, and
vexations.[302] The murdered man’s son, known in the days of the
Revolution as Lally Tollendal, was joined by Voltaire in the honourable
work of procuring revision of the proceedings; and one of the last
crowning triumphs of Voltaire’s days was the news brought to him on his
dying bed, that his long effort had availed.
The death of Lally is the parallel in French history to the execution of
Byng in the history of England, and, oddly enough, Voltaire was very
actively occupied in trying to avert that crime of our government, as
well as the crimes of his own. He had known Byng when he was in
England.[303] Some one told him that a letter from Richelieu, who had
been Byng’s opponent at Minorca, would be useful, and Voltaire instantly
urged the Duke to allow him to forward a letter he had, stating
Richelieu’s conviction of his defeated enemy’s bravery and good
judgment. Voltaire insists that this letter turned four votes on the
court-martial.[304] He informs a correspondent, moreover, of the fact
that Byng had instructed his executor to express his deep obligation
both to Voltaire and Richelieu.[305] Humanity is erroneously counted
among commonplace virtues. If it deserved such a place, there would be
less urgent need than, alas, there is, for its daily exercise among us.
In its pale shape of kindly sentiment and bland pity it is common
enough, and is always the portion of the cultivated. But humanity armed,
aggressive, and alert, never slumbering and never wearying, moving like
ancient hero over the land to slay monsters, is the rarest of virtues,
and Voltaire is one of its master-types.
His interest in public transactions in his latest years was keener than
ever. That fruit of Polish anarchy, the war between Russia and Turkey
which broke out in 1768, excited his imagination to a pitch of great
heat, and the despatch in the spring of 1770 of a squadron from
Cronstadt, for the so-called liberation of Greece, made him weep for
joy. He implored Frederick not to leave to Catherine alone the burden of
so glorious a task. Superstition had had seven crusades; was it not a
noble thing to undertake one crusade to drive the barbarous Turks from
the land of Socrates and Plato, Sophocles and Euripides? Frederick
replied very sensibly that Dantzic was more to him than the Piræus, and
that he is a little indifferent about the modern Greeks, who, if ever
the arts should revive among them, would be jealous to find that a Gaul
by his Henriade had surpassed their Homer; that this same Gaul had
beaten Sophocles, equalled Thucydides, and left far behind him Plato,
Aristotle, and the whole school of the Porch;[306]—which was, perhaps,
not quite so sensibly said.
The successes of Russia against Turkey in 1770 roused the anxiety of
Austria and Prussia, and the solution of what we know as the Eastern
question was indefinitely postponed by the device of partitioning Poland
(Aug. 5, 1772), the alternative to the acquisition of the whole of that
country by Russia, the least civilised of the three powers. Of this
memorable transaction Voltaire heartily approved, and he gave thanks
that he had lived to see ‘such glorious events.’[307] He insisted,
decidedly against the king’s will, that Frederick had devised the
scheme, for he found it full of genius, and to all seeming he discerned
none of the execration which the event he had just witnessed was
destined to raise in his own country in years to come. His friendship
with two of the chief actors may have biassed his judgment; but Voltaire
seldom allowed, indeed by the conditions of his temperament he was
unable to allow, personal considerations of this kind to obscure his
penetrating sight. He may well have thought the partition of Poland
desirable, for the reasons which a statesman of to-day may find
adequate: the country’s hopeless political anarchy, its crushing
material misery, the oppressive power of the church, the inevitable and
standing peril to Europe of the existence of such a centre of
conflagration. It is worth remarking that Rousseau was much more keenly
alive to the gravity of the event, that he protested against what had
been done, and that his influence has been one of the main causes of the
illogical sympathy of democratic Europe for one of the most pestilent of
aristocratic governments.
The accession of Turgot to power in 1774 stirred an ardent sympathy in
Voltaire. Like the rest of the school, he looked upon this as the advent
of the political messiah,[308] and he shared the extreme hopes of that
great and virtuous man’s most sanguine lieutenants. He declared that a
new heaven and a new earth had opened to him.[309] His sallies against
the economists were forgotten, and he now entered into the famous
controversy of the free trade in grain with all his usual fire. His
fervour went too far for the sage minister, who prayed him to be
somewhat less eager in alarming uninformed prejudice. Still he insisted
on hoping all things.
Contemple la brillante aurore
Qui t’annonce enfin les beaux jours.
Un nouveau monde est près d’éclore;
Até disparaît pour toujours.
Vois l’auguste philosophie,
Chez toi si long temps poursuivie,
Dicter ses triomphantes lois.
* * * * *
Je lui dis: ‘Ange tutélaire,
Quels dieux répandent ces bienfaits?’
‘C’est un seul homme.’[310]
When it proved that one man alone, ‘qui ne chercha le vrai, que pour
faire le bien,’[311] was no match for the mountain torrent of ignorance,
prejudice, selfishness, and usage, and Turgot fell from power (May
1776), Voltaire sunk into a despair for his country, from which he never
arose. ‘I am as one dashed to the ground. Never can we console ourselves
for having seen the golden age dawn and perish. My eyes see only death
in front of me, now that M. Turgot is gone. It has fallen like a
thunderbolt on my brain and my heart alike. The rest of my days can
never be other than pure bitterness.’[312]
The visit to Paris was perhaps a falsification of this prophecy for a
moment. In 1778, yielding either to the solicitations of his niece, or
to a momentary desire to enjoy the triumph of his renown at its centre,
he returned to the great city which he had not seen for nearly thirty
years. His reception has been described over and over again. It is one
of the historic events of the century. No great captain returning from a
prolonged campaign of difficulty and hazard crowned by the most glorious
victory, ever received a more splendid and far-resounding greeting. It
was the last great commotion in Paris under the old régime. The next
great commotion which the historian has to chronicle is the
ever-memorable fourteenth day of July, eleven years later, when the
Bastille fell, and a new order began for France, and new questions began
for all Europe.
The agitation of so much loud triumph and incessant acclamation proved
more violent than Voltaire’s feeble health could resist, and he died,
probably from an over-dose of laudanum, on the thirtieth of May 1778.
His last writing was a line of rejoicing to the young Lally, that their
efforts had been successful in procuring justice for the memory of one
who had been put to death unjustly. How far Voltaire realised the
nearness of vast changes we cannot tell. There is at least one
remarkable prophecy of his, in the well-known letter to
Chauvelin:—‘Everything that I see appears the throwing broadcast of the
seed of a revolution, which must inevitably come one day, but which I
shall not have the pleasure of witnessing. The French always come late
to things, but they do come at last. Light extends so from neighbour to
neighbour, that there will be a splendid outburst on the first occasion,
and then there will be a rare commotion. The young are very happy; they
will see fine things.’[313] A less sanguine tone marks the close of the
apologue in which Reason and Truth, her daughter, take a triumphant
journey in France and elsewhere, about the time of the accession of
Turgot. ‘Ah, well,’ says Reason, ‘let us enjoy these glorious days; let
us rest here, if they last; and if storms come on, let us go back to our
well.’[314] Whether this meant much or little none can know. It would be
shallow to believe that such men as Voltaire, with faculty quickened and
outlook widened in the high air to which their fame raises them, really
discerned no more than we, who have only their uttered words for
authority, can perceive that they discerned. Great position often
invests men with a second sight whose visions they lock up in silence,
content with the work of the day.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Œuvres_, xxxv. p. 214.
[2] See Comte’s _Philosophic Positive_, v. 520.
[3] Vauban and Boisguillebert are both to be found in _Les Economistes
Financiers du XVIIIième Siècle_, published by Guillaumin, 1851.
[4] ‘Je ne sais si, à tout prendre, et malgré les vices éclatants de
quelques uns de ses membres, il y eut jamais dans le monde un clergé
plus remarquable que le clergé catholique de France au moment où la
Révolution l’a surpris, plus éclairé, plus national, moins retranché
dans les seules vertus privées, mieux pourvu de vertus publiques et en
meme temps de plus de foi: la persécution l’a bien montré’—De
Tocqueville, _Ancien Régime_, liv. ii. c. 11.
[5] Rem. sur les Pensées de M. Pascal. _Œuvres_, xliii. p. 68.
[6] _Novum Organum_, § 67.
[7] Some fault has been found with this passage by one or two private
critics, as being not entirely just to the eminent thinker to whom it
refers, and to whom my own obligations, direct and indirect, are so
numerous, notwithstanding my final inability to follow him in his ideas
of social reconstruction, that the idea of adding to the sum of
misrepresentation of which Comte and his doctrines have been the
victims, is particularly disagreeable to me. Here, therefore, is one
passage in which Comte seems to speak rather more warmly of Voltaire
than the words in the text imply: ‘Toutefois, l’indispensable nécessité
mentale et sociale d’une telle élaboration provisoire laissera toujours,
dans l’ensemble de l’histoire humaine, une place importante à ses
principaux coopérateurs, et surtout à leur type le plus éminent, auquel
la postérité la plus lointaine assurera une position vraiment unique;
parceque jamais un pareil office n’avait pu jusqu’alors échoir, et
pourra désormais encore moins appartenir à un esprit de cette nature,
chez lequel la plus admirable combinaison qui ait existé jusqu’ici entre
les diverses qualités secondaires de l’intelligence présentait si
souvent la séduisante apparence de la force et du génie’ (_Phil. Pos._
v. 518). Against this we have to place the highly significant fact that
Voltaire only appears in the calendar as a dramatic poet, as well as the
whole tenour and spirit of Comte’s teaching, namely, as he puts it in
one place, that ‘_une pure critique ne peut jamais mériter beaucoup
d’estime_’ (_Politique Positive_, iii. 547).
[8] J. B. Rousseau’s _Moïsade_.
[9] _Œuvres_, lxii. p. 45.
[10] Dictionnaire Philosophique, _s.v. Œuvres_, lii. p. 378.
[11] _Œuvres_, i. 513.
[12] _Œuvres_, lxii. pp. 86 and 89.
[13] _Ib._ lxii. p. 107.
[14] A.R.O.V.E.T., L(_e_). I(_eune_).
[15] Chevalier appears to have been a title given by courtesy to the
cadets of certain great families.
[16] _Œuvres_, iv. 18.
[17] _Histoire de l’ancien Gouvernement de la France_ (1727).
[18] Buckle’s _Hist. of Civilisation_, i. 657-664.
[19] Sainte-Beuve, _Causeries_, v. 111.
[20] _Œdipe_, iv. sc. 1.
[21] _Ib._ ii. v.
[22] Le Pour et le Contre, ou Epître à Uranie. _Œuvres_, xv. pp. 399,
403.
[23] Condorcet, _Vie de Voltaire. Œuvres_, iv. 20.
[24] Condorcet, _Vie de Voltaire. Œuvres_, iv. 20.
[25] Correspondence, 1725. _Œuvres_, lxii. pp. 140-49.
[26] Lettres sur les Anglais, xv. _Œuvres_, xxxv. p. 114. Cf. also
Letter xxiv. (pp. 197-202).
[27] Lord Stanhope’s _Hist. of England_, ii. 231 (ed. 1858).
[28] Lettres sur les Anglais, ix. _Œuvres_, xxxv. p. 73.
[29] Correspondence, 1732. _Œuvres_, lxii. p. 253.
[30] Martin’s _Hist. de France_, vol. xiv. 265-67.
[31] Philosophie de Newton, Pt. i. c. i. _Œuvres_, xli. p. 46.
[32] Lettres sur les Anglais, xv. _Œuvres_, xxxv. pp. 115-20.
[33] Philos. de Newton, Pt. i. c. ix. _Œuvres_, xli. p. 108.
[34] D’Alembert.
[35] Dictionnaire Philosophique, s.v. Locke. _Œuvres_, lvi. p. 447.
[36] Corr. 1736. _Œuvres_, lxiii. p. 29.
[37] _Soirées de St. Pétersbourg, 6ième Fentretien_, i. 403.
[38] Corr. 1737; lxiii. p. 154.
[39] _Ib._ p. 248. Cf. also lxii. p. 276.
[40] Lettres sur les Anglais, xiv. _Œuvres_, xxxv. pp. 102-5.
[41] _Œuvres_, vol. xliii. p. 77.
[42] _Ib._ p. 20.
[43] _Œuvres_, vol. xliii. p. 26.
[44] Corr. 1737. _Œuvres_, lxiii. p. 248.
[45] Lettres sur les Anglais, xiii. _Œuvres_, xxxv. p. 95.
[46] Lettres, etc. x. _Œuvres_, xxxv. p. 81.
[47] De Tocqueville’s _Ancien Régime_, liv. ii. c. 9, p. 137 (ed. 1866).
[48] _Œuvres_, xxxv. p. 80.
[49] The reader of _Zadig_ will remember the ‘_homme comme moi_,’ and
his ill luck at Babylon. _Œuvres_, lix. pp. 153-59.
[50] Lettres sur les Anglais, xi. _Œuvres_, xxxv. p. 85.
[51] Lett. Ang. xxi.; xxxv. pp. 172, etc.
[52] Lettres sur les Anglais, i.; xxxv. p. 31.
[53] Lett. Ang. vi.; xxxv. p. 62.
[54] Lett. Ang. vii. pp. 62-65.
[55] Lett. Ang. ii.; xxxv. p. 42.
[56] _Œuvres_, xxxv. p. 185.
[57] Ess. sur la Poésie Epique. _Œuvres_, xiii. p. 445, and pp. 513-26.
[58] _Œuvres_, xxxv. p. 155.
[59] _Œuvres_, xxxv. p. 159.
[60] Corr. 1736. _Œuvres_, lxiii. p. 4. _Ib._ 60.
[61] _Œuvres_, xxxv. pp. 189, 190.
[62] For Berkeley, see Corr. 1736 _(Œuv_. lxiii. pp. 130, 164, etc.),
and for the other two, see Le Philosophe Ignorant (_Œuvres_, xliv. p.
69 and p. 47).
[63] _Œuv._ xliv. p. 47.
[64] The _De Veritate_ was published in 1624.
[65] See the list from 1725 to 1728 in Leland’s _View of the Deistical
Writers_, i. 132-144.
[66] _Œuvres_, lvii. pp. 107-114.
[67] Corr. 1736-37. _Œuv._ lxiii. p. 60, p. 86, and p. 112.
[68] Examen Important de Milord Bolingbrocke. _Œuv._ xliv. p. 89.
[69] See Lechler’s _Geschichte des Englischen Deismus_, p. 396.
[70] _Reflections. Works_, i. 419 (ed. 1842).
[71] _Encyclopédic Nouvelle_ de Jean Reynaud et Pierre Leroux, s.v.
Voltaire, p. 736. De Maistre audaciously denies that Voltaire ever did
more than dip into Locke. _Soirées_, vi.
[72] Villemain’s _Cours de Lit. Française_, i. p. 111. See also De
Maistre, _Soirées de St. Pétersbourg_, vi. p. 424. On the other hand,
see Lanfrey’s _L’Eglise et les Philosophes du 18ième Siècle_, pp. 99,
108, etc.
[73] Madame de Grafigny. Cf. Desnoiresterres, _Voltaire au Château de
Cirey_, p. 246, etc.
[74] Desnoiresterres, p. 257.
[75] Condorcet, _Vie de Voltaire_, p. 61. A graceful and dignified
letter in this kind is that to Formey, May 12, 1752. _Œuv._ lxv. p. 64.
[76] Grimm, _Correspondance Littéraire_, v. p. 5.
[77] _Œuv._ lxv. p. 395.
[78] Correspondence. Also, Essai sur la Poésie Epique, c. vi. _Œuvres_,
xiii. p. 481.
[79] _Œuvres_, lxv. p. 91.
[80] Corr. with the Abbé Moussinot, 1737, and afterwards. _Œuvres_,
lxiii. pp. 122, 160, 176, etc.
[81] Corr. 1752. _Œuvres_, lxv. p. 115.
[82] _Vie de Voltaire_, p. 37.
[83] Desnoiresterres, p. 323.
[84] Foisset’s _Correspond. de Voltaire avec De Brosses, etc._,
published in 1836.
[85] Quoted in Desnoiresterres, p. 239.
[86] Desnoiresterres, p. 242.
[87] Epître à Mdme. la Marquise du Châtelet, sur la Calomnie. _Œuvres_,
xvii. p. 85.
[88] See Whewell’s _Hist. Induc. Sci._ bk. vi. c. v.
[89] Desnoiresterres, pp. 313-21.
[90] Exposition du Livre des Institutions Physiques. _Œuvres _, xlii.
pp. 196-206.
[91] _Œuvres_, xlii. p. 207, etc.
[92] Corr. 1737. _Œuvres_, lxiii. p. 182.
[93] Condorcet, _Vie de Voltaire_, p. 43.
[94] Corr. 1737. _Œuvres_, lvi. p. 428.
[95] Dict. Phil. s.v. _Œuvres_, lvi. p. 428.
[96] Dict. Phil. s.v. _Œuvres_, lvi. p. 430.
[97] Corr. 1758. _Œuvres_, lxxv. p. 50.
[98] Temple du Goût. _Œuvres_, xv. p. 99.
[99] Corr. 1743. _Œuvres_, lxiv. p. 119.
[100] _Œuvres de Vauvenargues_, ii. 252.
[101] Temple du Goût. _Œuvres_, xv. p. 100.
[102] In some readings given before popular audiences in Paris in 1850,
it was found that Voltaire was only partially effective. ‘Trop
d’artifice,’ says Ste. Beuve, ‘trop d’art nuit auprès des esprits neufs;
trop de simplicité nuit aussi; ils ne s’en étonnent pas, et ils ont
jusqu’à un certain point besoin d’être étonnés.’ (_Causeries_, i. 289.)
[103] Temple du Goût. _Œuvres_; xv. p. 95.
[104] Corr. 1732. _Œuvres_, lxii. p. 218.
[105] The dates of the most famous of his tragedies are these: _Œdipe_,
1718; _Brutus_, 1730; _Zaïre_, 1732; _Mort de César_, 1735; _Alzire_,
1736; _Mahomet_, 1741; _Mérope_, 1743; _Sémiramis_, 1748; _Tancrède_,
1760.
[106] Hettnerr, for instance: _Literaturgeschichte des 18ten
Jahrhunderts_, ii. 227.
[107] _Zaïre_, act i. sc. 1
[108] _Essay on Hum. Und._ iv. 19, § 3.
[109] Discours sur la Tragédie, à Milord Bolingbrocke. _Œuvres_, ii. p.
337. See also the preface to Œdipe. _Ib._ p. 73.
[110] _Œuvres_, ii. p. 339.
[111] Lett. sur les Anglais, xix. _Œuvres_, xxxv. p. 151.
[112] Introduction to Semiramis. _Œuvres_, v. p. 194. See also Du
Théâtre Anglais (1761). _Ib._ x. p. 88. Lettre à l’Acad. Franç. (1778),
iv. p. 186.
[113] _Voltaire: sechs Vorträge_. Von D. F. Strauss; p. 74. The same
idea is found in a speech of Wilhelm Meister, bk. iii. ch. 8.
[114] _Mém. de Marmontel_, liv. vii. ii. 245. For Diderot’s criticism,
see his _Mémoires et Œuv. Inédites_, i. 234 (1830). For D’Alembert’s,
cf. Voltaire’s _Œuv._ lxxv. p. 118.
[115] _Decline and Fall_, c. 52, note 83.
[116] _Œuvres_, vols. x. and xi.
[117] Desnoiresterres, p. 342.
[118] _Œuvres_, ix. p. 382.
[119] _Soirées_, 4ième entretien.
[120] _Œuvres_, v. p. 189.
[121] Strauss, p. 79.
[122] _Œuvres_, xviii. p. 250.
[123] Commenced soon after 1730; published surreptitiously in 1755;
published by Voltaire himself in 1762.
[124] _Vie de Voltaire_, p. 89.
[125] _Vie de Voltaire_, p. 88. On the same subject of chastity, of
Condorcet’s Works, vi. p. 264, and pp. 523-26; also a passage in his
correspondence, i. p. 221.
[126] Essai sur la Poésie Epique. _Œuvres_, xiii. p. 474
[127] _Œuvres_, ii. p. 591.
[128] Burton’s _Life of David Hume_, ii. 440.
[129] Henriade, x. 485-491.
[130] _Œuvres_, lxxv. p.266.
[131] _Vie de Voltaire_ p.60.
[132] See the late C. Bartholmess’s _Histoire Philosophique de
l’Académie de Prusse_, bk. ii.
[133] _Histoire Philosophique de l’Academie de Prusse_, bk. i. 230.
[134] Corr. 1750. _Œuvres_, lxiv. p. 447.
[135] Jablonski.
[136] _Œuvres_, lxxv. p. 224.
[137] Corr. 1750. _Œuvres_, lxiv. p. 443.
[138] Carlyle’s _History of Frederick_, bk. xiii. ch. 5.
[139] _Œuvres de Voltaire_, lxxiii. p. 456.
[140] _Ib._ p. 813.
[141] _Ib._ p. 807.
[142] For Voltaire’s admirably expressed remonstrance, see Corr. Oct.
1757. _Œuvres_, lxiii. p. 768.
[143] Martin’s _Hist. de France_, xv. p. 468.
[144] _Œuvres_, lxxv. p. 207 and p. 210.
[145] Goethe.
[146] Bartholmess, ii. 111.
[147] See Bartholmess, i. 168.
[148] _Œuvres de Voltaire_, lxxiii. p. 836.
[149] Corr. 1751. _Œuvres_, lxiv. p. 524.
[150] Corr. 1751. _Œuvres_, lxiv. p. 453.
[151] See Whewell’s _Hist. Ind, Sci._ bk. VII. ch. 4, § 7.
[152] _Œuvres_, lxiv. p. 53.
[153] See Comte’s _Phil. Pos._ i. 525-529.
[154] It may be worth mentioning that there actually existed in the
sixteenth century a French physician, who changed his real name of
Sans-Malice into Akakia, and left descendants so called. See M. Jal’s
_Dictionnaire Critique de Biographie et d’Histoire_, p. 19 (1869).
[155] Corr. 1752. _Œuvres_, lxv. p. 138.
[156] Desnoiresterres, 394.
[157] Desnoiresterres, _Voltaire et Fréderic_, cc. 9 and 10. Carlyle’s
_Frederick_, bk. xvi. ch. 12.
[158] See Desnoiresterres, _Voltaire et Frédéric_, pp. 124-153,
including a facsimile of the fraudulently altered agreement. Also
Carlyle’s _Frederick_, bk. xvi. ch. 7.
[159] Carlyle’s _Frederick_, bk. xiii. ch. 5.
[160] _Œuvres_, lxxiii. p. 830 (1760).
[161] _Œuvres_, lxxiii. pp. 835-837.
[162] Printed in vol. i. of the Baudouin edition, as _Mémoires pour
servir à la vie de M. Voltaire_, p. 212.
[163] Corr. 1758. _Œuvres_, lxxv. p. 80.
[164] _Ib._ p. 31.
[165] Corr. lxv. p. 23. Cf. also p. 83.
[166] Corr. lxv. p. 15.
[167] Corr. 1743. _Œuv._ lviii. p. 131. A very long and careful list of
the oppressions practised on writers in this reign is given in Mr.
Buckle’s _Hist. of Civilisation_, i. 675-681.
[168] Foisset’s _Corres. de Voltaire avec de Brasses_, etc., p. 318.
Also Corr. 1757. _Œuvres_, lxvi. pp. 1-50 passim.
[169] _Œuvres_, lxxv. p. 61.
[170] _Mémoires_, i. ch. in. p. 55.
[171] See for instance a letter to Mdlle. de Voland: _Mémoires,
Correspondance, et Ouv. inédites_, i. 99.
[172] L’Auteur arrivant à sa terre. _Œuv._ xvii. 194.
[173] Corr. 1757. _Œuv._ lxvi. p. 38.
[174] _Ib._ p. 32.
[175] Corr. _Œuv._ lxxv. p. 249.
[176] It was to the last-named book, one may suppose, that Voltaire
referred, when he asked how it was that Locke, after having so
profoundly traced the development of the human understanding, could so
degrade his own understanding in another work. (Diet Phil. s.v. Platon.
_Œuv._ lvii. p. 369.)
[177] See Collins’s Apology for Free Debate and Liberty of Writing,
prefixed to the _Grounds and Reasons of Christianity_.
[178] Corr. 1768. _Œuv._ lxx. p. 140.
[179] The reader will find an account of them in M. Lanfrey’s _L’Eglise
et les Philosophes du 18ième Siècle_, pp. 131-135.
[180] Corr. _Œuv._ lxvi. p. 100.
[181] For the composition of this body see Voltaire’s Histoire du
Parlement de Paris. _Œuv._ xxxiv. Or in Martin s _Hist, de France_, iv.
295; xii. 280; and xii. 53.
[182] Siècle de Louis xv. c. 36. _Œuvres_, xxix. p. 3.
[183] Corr. _Œuv._ lxxv. p. 145.
[184] Corr. _Œuvres_, lxvii. p. 166.
[185] Mém. de Morellet, ch. iii. p. 62.
[186] Martin’s _Hist. de France_, xvi. p. 139.
[187] Relation de la Mort du Chevalier de la Barre, 1766; Le Cri du Sang
Innocent, 1775, _Œuv._ xxxix. p. 99.
[188] Corr. July 16, 1766. _Œuv._ lxxv. p. 357.
[189] Corr. _Œuv._ lxxv. p. 359.
[190] _Ib._ p. 361.
[191] Grimm, _Corr. Lit._ v. p. 133.
[192] Corr. 1774. _Œuv._ lxxv. p. 627.
[193] _Ib._ p. 696.
[194] _Hist. de la Civilisation en Europe_, 14ième leçon, p. 405. Cf.
also De Tocqueville’s _Ancien Régime_, liv. iii. ch. I.
[195] Corr. 1757-58. _Œuv._ lxvi. pp. 92, 102, 112, 185, etc.
[196] Corr. _Œuv._ lxvii. p. 174; also lxxv. p. 170.
[197] See ante, p. 19.
[198] Chant i. v. 306.
[199] La Voix du Sage et du Peuple (1750). _Œuv._ xxxviii. p. 53.
[200] De Maistre, _Soirées de St. Pétersbourg_, 4ième.
[201] _Œuvres_, xxxv. p. 37.
[202] Corr. 1773. _Œuvres_, lxxv. p. 614.
[203] Cf. Dict. Phil. s.v. Eglise. _Œuv._ pp. 221-248.
[204] Dieu et les Hommes, c. xiv. _Œuvres_, xlv. p. 318.
[205] Dict. Phil. s.v. Resurrection. _Œuvres_, lviii. p. 67.
[206] See, for instance, Tylor’s _Primitive Culture_, i. 32, ii. 131,
etc.
[207] Corr. 1770. _Œuvres_, lxxv. pp. 522, 526, etc. This active spite
prevented the accession of De Brosses to a seat in the academy.
[208] Diet. Phil. s. v. Dieu. _Œuvres_, liv. p. 20.
[209] Dieu et les Hommes, c. iii. _Œuvres_, xlv. p. 270.
[210] Dict. Phil. s. v. Polythéisme. _Œuvres_, lvii. p. 391.
[211] Corr. 1761. _Œuvres_, lxvii. p. 186.
[212] Corr. 1758. _Œuvres_, lxvi. p. 200.
[213] _Nat. Hist. of Religion_, sect. iii.
[214] _Ib._ sect. iv.
[215] _Soirées de St. Pétersbourg_, vi. p. 403.
[216] Ante, ch. iii.
[217] See Milman’s _Hist. of Latin Christianity_, bk. ii. chap. ii. and
iii.
[218] Corr. 1761. _Œuvres_, lxvii. p. 74.
[219] Finlay’s _Greece under the Romans_ (B.C. 146-A.D. 716), pp. 146,
147.
[220] Poëme sur le Desastre de Lisbonne. _Œuvres_, xv. p. 53.
[221] Phil. de Newton. _Œuv._ xli. p. 46. See also the whole chapter.
[222] A Mdme. du Châtelet sur la Philosophic de Newton (1738). _Œuv._
xvii. p. 113.
[223] Ode sur le Fanatisme. _Œuvres_, xvi. p. 331.
[224] _Œuvres_, xv. pp. 39-62.
[225] Aristotle’s definition of εὐτραπελία, or wit, as ὕβρις
πεπαιδευμένη marks one of Voltaire’s chief talents with entire accuracy.
[226] _Œuvres_, xv. p. 58.
[227] Corr. 1765. _Œuvres_, lxxv. p. 311.
[228] Lettres Ang. xiv. _Œuvres_, xxxv. p. 108.
[229] Corr. 1736. _Œuvres_, lxiii. p. 31.
[230] Dict. Phil. s. v. Locke. _Œuvres_, lvi. p. 338.
[231] Holberg, quoted in Sainte-Beuve’s _Nouveaux Lundis_, ix. 26.
[232] Quinet’s _La Révolution_, i. 168.
[233] Essai sur les Mœurs, c. ii. _Œuvres_, xx. p. 344. See also c.
clxxxii. _Œuv._ xxiv. p. 162.
[234] Essai sur les Mœurs, pp. 1, 2.
[235] Essai sur les Mœurs, p. 9.
[236] _On the Study of History_, Letter i. ad finem.
[237] _Grandeur et Décadence des Romains_, c. xi.
[238] The dates of the publication of Voltaire’s historical works are
these:—_Charles XII._, 1731; _Siècle de Louis XIV_., 1752 (a portion of
it in 1739); _Annales de l’Empire_, 1753-54; _Essai sur les Mœurs_, 1757
(surreptitiously in 1754); _Histoire de Russie_, Pt. I. in 1759, Pt. II.
in 1763; _Precis du Siècle de Louis XV._, 1768; _Histoire du Parlement
de Paris_, 1769.
[239] Le Pyrrhonisme de l’Histoire, cc. xii. xiii. _Œuvres_, xxxvi, p.
346; also p. 428.
[240] Corr. _Œuvres_, lxvi. p. 17.
[241] Corr. 1757. _Œuvres_, lxvi. p. 61.
[242] Corr. 1761. _Œuv._ lxvii. p. 228.
[243] _Œuvres_, xx. p. 10
[244] Siècle de Louis XIV., c. i. _Œuvres_, xxv. p. 283.
[245] Corr. 1735. _Œuvres_, lxii. pp. 455, 456.
[246] _Œuvres_, xxxvi. pp. 428-434 (1768).
[247] Diet. Phil. s.v. Guerre. _Œuvres_, lv. pp. 488, 489.
[248] _Esprit des Lois_, x. ii.
[249] _Œuvres_, lv. p. 490.
[250] Corr. _Œuvres_, lxxv. p. 460.
[251] See a letter of the king of Prussia in Voltaire’s _Works_, lxxiv.
p. 144, etc.
[252] C. xxiii. _Œuvres_, xxi. p. 9.
[253] _Mœurs_, like ἤθη is untranslatable by any single English word.
The full title is _Essai sur les Mœurs et l’Esprit des Nations, et sur
les principaux faits de l’Histoire depuís Charlemagne jusqu’ à Louis
XIII._
[254] C. vi. _Œuvres_, xx. p. 396.
[255] C. xi. _Œuvres_, xx. p. 455.
[256] See on this interesting subject Finlay’s _Greece under the Romans_
(B.C. 146-A.D. 716), pp. 156, 157.
[257] _Childe Harold_, iii. 106 and 107.
[258] C. ix. _Œuvres_, xx. p. 445.
[259] C. lviii. _Œuvres_, xxi. pp. 328-341.
[260] Quelques petites Hardiesses, etc. _Œuvres_, xxxvi. p. 445.
[261] C. xlii. _Œuvres_, xxi. p. 143.
[262] Notes sur le Désastre de Lisbonne. _Œuvres_, xv. p. 57.
[263] He ridiculed some of these in one of his most humane and otherwise
excellent pieces, L’Homme aux Quarante Ecus (1767). _Œuv._ lix. p. 395.
[264] _The Republic_, 1577. _Esprit des Lois_, 1748.
[265] _Œuv._ lxvii. p. 94.
[266] A drawing of Voltaire’s château at Ferney is given in Blancheton’s
_Vues Pittoresques des Châteaux de France_ (Paris, 1826), Part II. The
château is still standing, and the prospect from the terrace repays a
visit, apart from the interest of association. The church is now a
receptacle for wine-casks.
[267] The reader who is curious as to the most indifferent details, will
find what he seeks in a singular monument of painstaking spleen,
entitled _Ménage et Finances de Voltaire_, by M. Nicolardot (Paris,
1854).
[268] Corr. 1761. _Œuv._ lxvii. p. 190.
[269] _Corr. Lit._ vi. p. 272; v. p. 385.
[270] Grimm, _Corr. Lit._ v. p. 393.
[271] Corr. 1761. _Œuv._ lxxv. p. 158.
[272] Born 1710; lost her first husband 1744; married one Vivier in
1779; died 1790.
[273] Corr. 1770. _Œuv._ lxx. p. 175.
[274] Corr. 1771-72. _Œuv._ lxxiv. pp. 733 and 737.
[275] Corr. 1772. _Œuvres_, lxxi. p. 496. The marked copy is still in
existence, along with the rest of Voltaire’s books, at St. Petersburg;
see Lavergne’s _Economistes du 18ième Siècle_, p. 285.
[276] Corr. 1761. _Œuvres_, lxvii. p. 166.
[277] _Œuvres_, lxxv. pp. 64, 69, etc.
[278] Corr. 1770. _Œuvres_, lxxi, p. 18.
[279] _Œuvres de Turgot_, ii. pp. 814-825.
[280] _Ib._ p. 824.
[281] _Œuvres_, lxxv. p. 331.
[282] _Œuvres_, lxxv. p. 33.
[283] _Œuvres de Condorcet_, iv. pp. 33, 34, and vi. pp. 187-189.
[284] Corr. 1768. _Œuvres_, lxxv. p. 426.
[285] Corr. 1768. _Œuvres_, lxx. pp. 198-199.
[286] Corr. 1769. _Œuvres_, lxx. pp. 434, 435; lxxv. p. 452. Grimm’s
_Corr. Lit._ vi. p. 231.
[287] Condorcet, _Vie de Voltaire_, p. 126.
[288] Corr. _Œuvres_, lxxi. pp. 25, 27, 30, etc.
[289] Grimm, _Corr. Lit._ vi. p. 358.
[290] Grimm, _Corr. Lit._ vi. p. 358.
[291] _Confessions_, pt. i. liv. v. Date of 1736.
[292] _Œuvres_, lxxv. p. 182.
[293] Corr. 1762. _Œuvres_, lxxv. p. 188.
[294] _Œuvres_, lxvii. p. 432.
[295] Condorcet, p. 170.
[296] Lamartine’s _Girondins_, iv. v.
[297] See his correspondence with D’Alembert (_Œuvres_, lxxv.) until
1760, the date of D’Alembert’s separation from Diderot and the
Encyclopædia.
[298] _Phil. Pos._ v. 520.
[299] _Essais sur les règnes de Claude et Néron_, vol. vi. pp. 256, 290,
and 191 (Ed. 1819).
[300] Corr. 1766. _Œuvres_, lxxv. p. 364.
[301] Condorcet, p. 124.
[302] Martin’s _Hist. de France_, xv. pp. 569-572.
[303] Corr. 1757. _Œuvres_, lxvi. p. 51.
[304] Corr. 1756. _Œuvres_, lxv. p. 568; lxvi. pp. 1, 19, 20, 40.
[305] _Œuvres_, lxvi. p. 51.
[306] Corr. 1772. _Œuvres_, lxxiv. p. 36.
[307] _Ib._ p. 93, etc.
[308] See Morellet, i. pp. 147, 159, etc.
[309] _Œuvres_, lxxv. p. 641.
[310] Ode sur le Passé et le Présent (1775). _Œuvres_, xvi. p. 415.
[311] Epître à un Homme (1776). _Œuvres_, xvii. p. 327.
[312] Corr. 1776. _Œuvres_, lxxii. pp. 403, 409, 412, etc.
[313] April 2, 1764. _Œuvres_, lxviii. p. 220.
[314] Eloge historique de la Raison (_or_ Voyage de la Raison).
_Œuvres_, lx. p. 478.
THE END.
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, _Edinburgh_.