Part 14

From Spain Mr. Buckle passes to Scotland, where he finds a still more complicated problem. Superstition and loyalty ought to go together, he thinks,--and usually do; but in Scotland they are divorced. The Scotch have always been superstitious, but disloyal. To the explanation of this fact Mr. Buckle bends his energies of thought, and of course is able to find a theory to account for it. This theory we shall not stop to detail; it is too complex, and at the same time too superficial, to dwell upon. Its chief point is that the Protestant noblemen and Protestant clergy quarreled about the wealth of the Catholic Church, and so there was in Scotland a complete rupture between the two classes elsewhere in alliance. Thus "the clergy, finding themselves despised by the governing class, united themselves heartily with the people, and advocated democratic principles." Such is the explanation given to the course of history in a great nation. A quarrel between its noblemen and its ministers (who are of course represented as mercenary self-seekers) determines its permanent character!

Mr. Buckle, to whom the love of plunder appears as the cause of what other men regard as loyalty or religion, explains by the same fact the loyalty of the Highlanders to King Charles. They thought that, if he conquered, he would allow them to plunder the Lowlanders once more. This is Buckle's explanation. An ethnologist would have remembered the fact that the Gaels are pure-blooded Kelts, and that the Kelts _pur sang_ are everywhere distinguished for loyalty to their chiefs.

Mr. Buckle encounters another difficulty in Scottish history in this, that though a new and splendid literature arose in Scotland at the beginning of the eighteenth century, it was unable to diminish national superstition. It was thoroughly skeptical, and yet did not produce the appropriate effect of skepticism. So that at this point one of Mr. Buckle's four great laws of history seems to break down. For a moment he appears discouraged, and laments, with real pathos, the limitations of the human intellect. But in the next chapter he addresses himself again to the solution of his two-fold problem, viz.: "1st, that the same people should be liberal in their politics and illiberal in their religion; and, 2d, that their free and skeptical literature in the eighteenth century should have been unable to lessen their religious illiberality."

In approaching this part of his task, in the fifth chapter, our author gives a very elaborate and highly colored picture of the religion of Scotland. It is _too_ well done. Like some of Macaulay's descriptions, it is so very striking as to impress us almost inevitably as a caricature. Every statement in which the horrors and cruelties of Calvinism are described is indeed reinforced by ample citations or plentiful references in the footnotes. But some of these seem capable of a different inference from that drawn in the text. For instance, he charges the Scottish clergy with teaching, that, though the arrangements originally made by the Deity to punish his creatures were ample, "they were insufficient; and hell, not being big enough to contain the countless victims incessantly poured into it, had in these latter days been enlarged. There was now sufficient room." He supports the charge by this reference to Abernethy,--"Hell has enlarged itself,"--apparently not being aware that Abernethy was merely quoting from Isaiah. He says that to write poetry was considered by the Scotch clergy to be a grievous offence, and worthy of special condemnation. He supports his statement by this reference: "A mastership in a grammar school was offered in 1767 to John Wilson, the author of 'Clyde'" (a poet, by the by, not found among the twenty John Wilsons commemorated by Watt). "But, says his biographer, the magistrates and ministers of Greenock thought fit, before they would admit Mr. Wilson to the superintendence of the grammar school, to stipulate that he should abandon 'the profane and unprofitable art of poem-making.'" This fact, however, by no means proves that poetry was considered, theologically, a sin, for perhaps it was regarded practically as only a disqualification. It is to be feared that many of our school committees now--country shopkeepers, perhaps, or city aldermen--would, apart from Calvinism, think that a poet must be necessarily a dreamer and an unpractical man.

A few exaggerations of this kind there may be. But, on the whole, the account seems to be correctly given; and it is one which will do good.

In the remaining portion of the second volume Mr. Buckle gives a very vigorous description of the intellectual progress of the Scotch during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His account of Adam Smith as a writer is peculiarly brilliant. His views of Hume and Reid are ably drawn. Thence he proceeds to discuss the discoveries of Black and Leslie in natural philosophy, of Smith and Hutton in geology, of Cavendish in chemistry, of Cullen and Hunter in physiology and pathology. These discussions are interesting, and show a great range of knowledge and power of study in the writer. Yet they are episodes, and have little bearing on the main course of his thought.

We have thus given a cursory survey of these volumes. We do not think Buckle's philosophy sound, his method good, or his doctrines tenable. Yet we cannot but sympathize with one who has devoted his strength and youth with such untiring industry to such a great enterprise. And we must needs be touched with the plaintive confession which breaks from his wearied mind and exhausted hope in the last volume, when he accepts the defeat of his early endeavor, and submits to the disappointment of his youthful hope. We should be glad to quote the entire passage,[33] because it is the best in the book, and because he expresses in it, in the most condensed form, his ideas and purposes as an historic writer. But our limited space allows us only to commend it to the special attention of the reader.

VOLTAIRE[34]

Mr. Parton has given us in these volumes[35] another of his interesting and instructive biographies. Not as interesting, indeed, as some others,--for example, as his life of Andrew Jackson; nor as instructive as his lives of Franklin and of Jefferson. The nature of the case made this impossible. The story of Jackson had never been told till Mr. Parton undertook it. It was a history of frontier life, of strange adventures, of desperate courage, of a force of character which conquered all obstacles and achieved extraordinary results; a story

"Of moving accidents by flood and field, Of hair-breadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly breach, Of being taken by the insolent foe."

No such interest attaches to the "Life of Voltaire." His most serious adventure was being shut up in the Bastille for a pasquinade, and being set free again on his solemn protestation, true or false, that he never wrote it. It is an old story, told a thousand times, with all its gloss, if it ever had any, quite worn off. The "Life of Franklin," which, on the whole, we think the best of Parton's biographies, was full of interest and instruction of another kind. It was the life of a builder,--of one who gave his great powers to construction, to building up new institutions and new sciences, to the discovery of knowledge and the creation of national life. Voltaire was a diffuser of knowledge already found, but he had not the patience nor the devotion of a discoverer. His gift was not to construct good institutions, but to destroy bad ones,--a work the interest of which is necessarily ephemeral. No wonder, therefore, that Mr. Parton, with all his practiced skill as a biographer, has not been able to give to the story of Voltaire the thrilling interest which he imparted to that of Franklin and of Jackson.

We gladly take the present opportunity to add our recognition of Mr. Parton's services to those which have come to him from other quarters. A writer of unequal merit, and one whose judgment is often biased by his prejudices, he nevertheless has done much to show how biography should be written. Of all forms of human writing there is none which ought to be at once so instructive and so interesting as this, but in the large majority of instances it is the most vapid and empty. The good biographies, in all languages, are so few that they can almost be counted on the fingers; but these are among the most precious books in the literature of mankind. The story of Ruth, the Odyssey of Homer, Plutarch's lives, the Memorabilia of Xenophon, the life of Agricola, the Confessions of Augustine, among the ancients; and, in modern times, Boswell's "Johnson," the autobiographies of Alfieri, Benvenuto Cellini, Franklin, Goethe, Voltaire's "Charles XII.," and Southey's "Life of Wesley" are specimens of what may be accomplished in this direction. It has been thought that any man can write a biography, but it requires genius to understand genius. How much intelligence is necessary to collect with discrimination the significant facts of a human life; to penetrate to the law of which they are the expression; to give the picturesque proportions to every part, to arrange the foreground, the middle distance, and the background of the panorama; to bring out in proper light and shadow the features and deeds of the hero! Few biographers take this trouble. They content themselves with collecting the letters written by and to their subject; sweeping together the facts of his life, important or otherwise; arranging them in some kind of chronological order; and then having this printed and bound up in one or two heavy volumes.

To all this many writers of biography add another fault, which is almost a fatal one. They treat their subject _de haut en bas_, preferring to look down upon him rather than to look up to him. They occupy themselves in criticising his faults and pointing out his deficiencies, till they forget to mention what he has accomplished to make him worthy of having his life written at all. We lately saw a life of Pope treated in this style. One unacquainted with Pope, after reading it, would say, "If he was such a contemptible fellow, and his writings so insignificant, why should we have to read his biography?" Thomas Carlyle has the great merit of leading the way in the opposite direction, and of thus initiating a new style of biography. The old method was for the writer to regard himself as a judge on the bench, and the subject of his biography as a prisoner at the bar. Carlyle, in his "Life of Schiller," showed himself a loving disciple, sitting at the feet of his master. We recollect that when this work first appeared there were only a few copies known to be in this country. One was in the possession of an eminent professor in Harvard College, of whom the present writer borrowed it. On returning it, he was asked what he thought of it, and replied that he considered it written with much enthusiasm. "Yes," responded the professor, "I myself thought it rather extravagant." Enthusiasm in a biographer was then considered to be the same as extravagance. But this hero-worship, which is the charm in Plutarch, Xenophon, and Boswell, inspired a like interest in Carlyle's portraits of Schiller, Goethe, Richter, Burns, and the actors in the French Revolution. So true is his own warning: "Friend, if you wish me to take an interest in what you say, be so kind as to take some interest in it yourself"--a golden maxim, to be kept in mind by all historians, writers of travels, biographers, preachers, and teachers. A social success may sometimes be accomplished by assuming the _blasé_ air of the Roman emperor who said, "Omnia fui, nihil expedit;" but this tone is ruinous for one who wishes the ear of the public.

Since the days of Carlyle, others have written in the same spirit, allowing themselves to take more or less interest in the man whose life they were relating. So Macaulay, in his sketches of Clive, Hastings, Chatham, Pym, and Hampden; so Lewes, in his "Life of Goethe;" and so Parton, in his various biographies.

In some respects Mr. Parton's biography reminds us of Macaulay's History. Both have been credited with the same qualities, both charged with the same defects. Both are indefatigable in collecting material from all quarters,--from other histories and biographies, memoirs, letters, newspapers, broadsides, and personal communications gathered in many out-of-the-way localities. Both have the power of discarding insignificant details and retaining what is suggestive and picturesque. Both, therefore, have the same supreme merit of being interesting. Both have strong prejudices, take sides earnestly, forget that they are narrators, and begin to plead as attorneys and advocates. Both have been accused, rightly or wrongly, of grave inaccuracies. But their defects will not prevent them from holding their place as teachers of the English-speaking public. English and American readers will long continue to think of Marlborough as Macaulay represents him; of Jackson and Jefferson as Parton describes them. Such Rembrandt-like portraits fix the attention by their strange chiaro-oscuro. They may not be like nature, but they take the place of nature. The most remarkable instance of this kind is the representation of Tiberius by Tacitus, which has caused mankind, until very recently, to consider Tiberius a monster of licentiousness and cruelty, in spite of the almost self-evident absurdity and self-contradiction of this assumption.[36] Limners with such a terrible power of portraiture should be very careful how they use it, and not abuse the faculty in the interest of their prejudices.

If Mr. Parton resembles Macaulay in some respects, in one point, at least, he is like Carlyle: that is, that his last hero is the least interesting. From Schiller and Goethe to Frederic the Great was a fall; and so from Franklin to Voltaire. Carlyle tells us what a weary task he had with his Prussian king, and we think that Mr. Parton's labors over the patriarch of the eighteenth-century literature must have been equally distressing. At a distance, Voltaire is a striking phenomenon: the most brilliant wit of almost any period; the most prolific writer; a successful dramatist, historian, biographer, story-teller, controversialist, lyrical poet, student of science. "Truly, a universal genius, a mighty power!" we say. But look more closely, and this genius turns into talent; this encyclopædic knowledge becomes only superficial half knowledge; this royalty is a sham royalty; it does not lead the world, but follows it. The work into which Voltaire put his heart was destruction--the destruction of falsehoods, bigotries, cruelties, and shams. It was an important duty, and some one had to do it. But it was temporary, and one of which the interest is soon over. If Luther and the other reformers had aimed at only destroying the Church of Rome, their influence would have speedily ceased. But they rebuilt, as they destroyed; the sword in one hand, and the trowel in the other. They destroyed in order to build; they took away the outgrown house, to put another in its place. Voltaire did not go so far as that; he wanted no new church in the place of the old one.

Voltaire and Rousseau are often spoken of as though they were fellow-workers, and are associated in many minds as sharing the same convictions. Nothing can be more untrue. They were radically opposite in the very structure of their minds, and their followers and admirers are equally different. If all men can be divided into Platonists and Aristotelians, they may be in like manner classified as those who prefer Voltaire to Rousseau, and _vice versa_. Both were indeed theists, and both opposed to the popular religion of their time. Both were brilliant writers, masters of the French language, listened to by the people, and with a vast popularity. Both were more or less persecuted for their religious heresies. So far they resemble each other. But these are only external resemblances; radically and inwardly they were polar opposites. What attracted one repelled the other. Voltaire was a man of the world, fond of society and social pleasures; the child of his time, popular, a universal favorite. Rousseau shrank from society, hated its fashions, did not enjoy its pleasures, and belonged to another epoch than the eighteenth century. Rousseau believed in human nature, and thought that if we could return to our natural condition the miseries of life would cease. Voltaire despised human nature; he forever repeated that the majority of men were knaves and fools. Rousseau distrusted education and culture as they are commonly understood; but to Voltaire's mind they were the only matters of any value,--all that made life worth living. Rousseau was more like Pascal than like Voltaire; far below Pascal, no doubt, in fixed moral principles and ascetic virtue. Yet he resembled him in his devotion to ideas, his enthusiasm for some better day to come. Both were out of place in their own time; both were prophets crying in the wilderness. Put Voltaire between Pascal and Rousseau, and it would be something like the tableau of Goethe between Basedow and Lavater.

"Prophete rechts, Propliete links, Das Weltkind in der Mitte."

The difference between Voltaire and Rousseau was really that between a man of talent and a man of genius. Voltaire, brilliant, adroit, full of resource, quick as a flash, versatile, with immense powers of working, with a life full of literary successes, has not left behind him a single masterpiece. He comes in everywhere second best. As a tragedian he is inferior to Racine; as a wit and comic writer far below Molière; and he is quite surpassed as a historian and biographer by many modern French authors. No germinating ideas are to be found in his writings, no seed corn for future harvests. He thought himself a philosopher, and was so regarded by others; but neither had his philosophy any roots to it. A sufficient proof of this is the fact that he shared the superficial optimism of the English deists, as expressed by Bolingbroke and Pope, until the Lisbon earthquake, by destroying thirty thousand people, changed his whole mental attitude. Till then he could say with Pope, "Whatever is, is right." After that, most things which are, appeared to him fatally and hopelessly wrong. That thirty thousand persons should perish in a few minutes, in great suffering, he thought inconsistent with the goodness of God. But take the whole world over, thirty thousand people are continually perishing, in the course of a few hours or days. What difference does it make, in a philosophical point of view, if they die all at once in a particular place, or at longer intervals in many places? Voltaire asks, "What crime had those infants committed who lie crushed on their mother's breasts?" What crime, we reply, have the infants committed who have been dying by millions, in suffering, since the world began? "Was Lisbon," he asks, "more wicked than Paris?" But had Voltaire never noticed before that wicked people often live on in health and pleasure, while the good suffer and die? Voltaire did not see, what it requires very little philosophy to discover, that a Lisbon earthquake really presents no more difficulty to the reason than the suffering and death of a single child.

Another fact which shows the shallow nature of Voltaire's way of thinking is his expectation of destroying Christianity by a combined attack upon it of all the wits and philosophers. Mr. Parton tells us that "l'Infâme," which Voltaire expected to crush, "was not religion, nor the Christian religion, nor the Roman Catholic Church. It was," he says, "_religion claiming supernatural authority, and enforcing that claim by pains and penalties_." No doubt it was the spirit of intolerance and persecution which excited his indignation. But the object of that indignation was not the abstraction which Mr. Parton presents to us. It was something far more concrete. There is no doubt that Voltaire confounded Christianity with the churches about him, and these with their abuses; and thus his object was to sweep away all positive religious institutions, and to leave in their place a philosophic deism. Else what meaning in his famous boast that "it required twelve men to found a belief, which it would need only one man to destroy"? What meaning, otherwise, in his astonishment that Locke, "having in one book so profoundly traced the development of the understanding, could so degrade his own understanding in another"?--referring, as Mr. Morley believes, to Locke's "Reasonableness of Christianity." Voltaire saw around him Christianity represented by cruel bigots, ecclesiastics living in indolent luxury, narrow-minded and hard-hearted priests. That was all the Christianity he saw with his sharp perceptive faculty; and he had no power of penetrating into the deeper life of the soul which these corruptions misrepresented. We do not blame him for this; he was made so; but it was a fatal defect in a reformer. The first work of a reformer is to discover the truth and the good latent amid the abuses he wishes to reform, and for the sake of which men endure the evil. A Buddhist proverb says, "The human mind is like a leech: it never lets go with its tail till it has taken hold somewhere else with its head." Distinguish the good in a system from the evil; show how the good can be preserved, though the evil is abandoned, and then you may hope to effect a truly radical reform. Radicalism means going to the roots of anything. Voltaire was incapable of becoming a radical reformer of the Christian Church, because he had in himself no faculty by which he could appreciate the central forces of Christianity. Mr. Morley says that Voltaire "has said no word, nor even shown an indirect appreciation of any word said by another, which stirs and expands that indefinite exaltation known as the love of God," "or of the larger word holiness." "Through the affronts which his reason received from certain pretensions, both in the writers and in some of those whose actions they commemorated, this sublime trait in the Bible, in both portions of it, was unhappily lost to Voltaire. He had no ear for the finer vibrations of the spiritual voice." And so also speaks Carlyle: "It is a much more serious ground of offense that he intermeddled in religion without being himself, in any measure, religious; that he entered the temple and continued there with a levity which, in any temple where men worship, can beseem no brother man; that, in a word, he ardently, and with long-continued effort, warred against Christianity, without understanding beyond the mere superficies of what Christianity was." In fact, in the organization of Voltaire, the organ of reverence, "the crown of the whole moral nature," seems to have been at its minimum. A sense of justice there was; an ardent sympathy with the oppressed, a generous hatred of the oppressor, a ready devotion of time, thought, wealth, to the relief of the down-trodden victim. Therefore, with such qualities, Voltaire, by the additional help of his indefatigable energy, often succeeded in plucking the prey from the jaws of the lion. He was able to defeat the combined powers of Church and State in his advocacy of some individual sufferer, in his battle against some single wrong. But his long war against the Catholic Church in France left it just where it was when that war began. Its power to-day in France is greater than it was then, because it is a purer and better institution than it was then. That Sphinx still sits by the roadside propounding its riddle. Voltaire was not the Œdipus who could solve it, and so the life of that mystery remains untouched until now.