Part 15

The Henriade has often been considered the great epic poem of France. This merely means that France has never produced a great epic poem. The Henriade is artificial, prosaic, and has no particle of the glow, the fire, the prolonged enthusiasm, which alone can give an epic poem to mankind. In this sentence all competent critics are agreed.

Voltaire was busy with literature during his whole life. He not only wrote continually himself, but he was a critic of the writings of others. His mind was essentially critical,--formed to analyze, discriminate sharply, compare, and judge by some universal standard of taste. Here, if anywhere, he ought to be at his best; here, if in any department, he should stand at the head of the world's board of literary censors. But here, again, he is not even second-rate; here, more than elsewhere, he shows how superficial are his judgments. He tests every writer by the French standard in the eighteenth century. Every word which Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, have said of other writers is full of value and interest to-day. But who would go to Voltaire for light on any book or author? We have an instinctive but certain conviction that all his views are limited by his immediate environment, perverted by his personal prejudices. Thus, he prefers Ariosto to the Odyssey, and Tasso's Jerusalem to the Iliad.[37] His inability to comprehend the greatness of Shakespeare is well known. He is filled with indignation because a French critic had called Shakespeare "the god of the stage." "The blood boils in my old veins," says he; "and what is frightful to think of, it was I myself who first showed to Frenchmen the few pearls to be found in the dunghill."[38] Chesterfield's Letters to his Son he considers "the best book upon education ever written."[39] This is the book in which a father teaches his son the art of polite falsehood, of which Dr. Johnson says that "it shows how grace can be united with wickedness,"--the book whose author is called by De Vere the philosopher of flattery and dissimulation. He admitted that there were some good things in Milton, but speaks of his conceptions as "odd and extravagant."[40] He thought Condorcet much superior to Pascal. The verses of Helvetius he believed better than any but those of Racine. The era was what Villemain calls "the golden age of mediocre writers;" and Voltaire habitually praised them all. But these writers mostly belonged to a mutual admiration society. The anatomist Tissot, in one of his physiological works, says that the genius of Diderot came to show to mankind how every variety of talent could be brought to perfection in one man. Diderot, in his turn, went into frantic delight over the novels of Richardson. "Since I have read these works," he says, "I make them my touchstone; those who do not admire them are self-condemned. O my friends, what majestic dramas are these three, Clarissa, Sir Charles Grandison, and Pamela!" Such was the eighteenth century; and Voltaire belonged to it with all the intensity of his ardent nature. He may be said never to have seen or foreseen anything better. Living on the very verge of a great social revolution, he does not appear to have suspected what its nature would be, even if he suspected its approach. The cruelties of the Church exasperated him, but the political condition of society, the misery of the peasants, the luxury of the nobles, the despotism of the king, left him unmoved. He was singularly deficient in any conception of the value of political liberty or of free institutions. If he had lived to see the coming of the Revolution, it would have utterly astounded him. His sympathies were with an enlightened aristocracy, not with the people. In this, too, he was the man of his time, and belonged to the middle of his century, not the end of it. He saw and lamented the evils of bad government. He pointed out the miseries produced by war. He abhorred and denounced the military spirit. He called on the clergy, in the name of their religion, to join him in his righteous appeals against this great curse of mankind. "Where," he asks, "in the five or six thousand sermons of Massillon, are there two in which anything is said against the scourge of war?" He rebukes the philosophers and moralists, also, for their delinquency in this matter, and replies forcibly to Montesquieu's argument that self-defense sometimes makes it necessary to begin the attack on a neighboring nation. But he does not go back to trace the evil to its root in the absence of self-government. In a letter to the King of Prussia he says, "When I asked you to become the deliverer of Greece, I did not mean to have you restore the democracy. I do not love the rule of the rabble" (_gouvernement de la canaille_). Again, writing to the same, in January, 1757, he says, "Your majesty will confer a great benefit by destroying this infamous superstition [Christianity]; I do not say among the _canaille_, who do not deserve to be enlightened, and who ought to be kept down under all yokes, but among honest people, people who think. Give white bread to the children, but only black bread to the dogs." In 1762, writing to the Marquis d'Argens, he says, "The Turks say that their Koran has sometimes the face of an angel, sometimes the face of a beast. This description suits our time. There are a few philosophers,--they have the face of an angel; all else much resembles that of a beast." Again, he says to Helvetius, "Consider no man your neighbor but the man who thinks; look on all other men as wolves, foxes, and deer." "We shall soon see," he writes to D'Alembert, "new heavens and a new earth,--I mean for honest people; for as to the _canaille_, the stupidest heaven and earth is all they are fit for." The real government of nations, according to him, should be administered by absolute kings, in the interest of freethinkers.

It is true that after Rousseau had published his trumpet-call in behalf of democratic rights, Voltaire began to waver. It has been remarked that "at the very time when he expressed an increasing ill-will against the person of the author of 'Emile,' he was irresistibly attracted to the principal doctrines of Rousseau. He entered, as if in spite of himself, into paths toward which his feet were never before directed. As if to revenge himself for coming under this salutary influence, he pursued Rousseau with blind anger."[41] He harshly attacked the Social Contract, but accepted the sovereignty of the people; saying that "civil government is the will of all, executed by a single one, or by several, in virtue of the laws which all have enacted." He, however, speedily restricted this democratic principle by confining the right of making laws to the owners of real estate. He declares that those who have neither house nor land ought not to have any voice in the matter. He now began (in 1764) to look forward to the end of monarchies, and to expect a revolution. Nevertheless, he plainly declares, "The pretended equality of man is a pernicious chimera. If there were not thirty laborers to one master, the earth would not be cultivated." But in practical and humane reforms Voltaire took the lead, and did good work. He opposed examination by torture, the punishment of death for theft, the confiscation of the property of the condemned, the penalties against heretics; secret trials; praised trial by jury, civil marriage, right of divorce, and reforms in the direction of hygiene and education.

And, above all, whatever fault may be found with Voltaire, let us never cease to appreciate his generous efforts in behalf of the unfortunate victims of the atrocious bigotry which then prevailed in France. It is not necessary to dwell here on the cases of Calas, the Sirvens, La Barre, and the Count de Lally. They are fully told by Mr. Parton, and to his account we refer our readers. In 1762 the Protestant pastor Rochette was hanged, by order of the Parliament of Toulouse, for having exercised his ministry in Languedoc. At the same time three young gentlemen, Protestants, were beheaded, for having taken arms to defend themselves from being slaughtered by the Catholics. In 1762, the Protestant merchant Calas, an aged and worthy citizen of Toulouse, was tortured and broken on the wheel, on a wholly unsupported charge of having killed his son to keep him from turning Catholic. A Protestant girl named Sirven was, about the same time, taken from her parents, and shut up in a convent, to compel her to change her religion. She escaped, and perished by accident during her flight. The parents were accused of having killed her to keep her from becoming a Catholic. They escaped, but the wife died of exposure and want. In 1766 a crucifix was injured by some wanton persons. The Bishop of Amiens called out for vengeance. Two young officers, eighteen years old, were accused. One escaped; the other, La Barre, was condemned to have his tongue cut out, his right hand cut off, and to be burned alive. The sentence was commuted to death by decapitation. Voltaire, seventy years old, devoted himself with masterly ability and untiring energy to save these victims; and when he failed in that, to show the falsehood of the charges, and to obtain a revision of the judgments. He used all means: personal appeals to men in power and to female favorites, eloquence, wit, pathos in every form of writing. He called on all his friends to aid him. He poured a flood of light into these dark places of iniquity. His generous labors were crowned with success. He procured a reversal of these iniquitous decisions; in some cases a restoration of the confiscated property, and a public recognition of the innocence of those condemned. Without knowing it, he was acting as a disciple of Jesus. Perhaps he may have met in the other world with the great leader of humanity, whom he never understood below, and been surprised to hear him say, "Inasmuch as thou hast done it to the least of my little ones, thou hast done it unto me."

Carlyle tells us that the chief quality of Voltaire was _adroitness_. He denies that he was really a great man, and says that in one essential mark of greatness he was wholly wanting, that is, earnestness. He adds that Voltaire was by birth a mocker; that this was the irresistible bias of his disposition; that the first question with him was always not what is true but what is false, not what is to be loved but what is to be contemned. He was shallow without heroism, full of pettiness, full of vanity; "not a great man, but only a great _persifleur_."

But certainly some other qualities than these were essential to produce the immense influence which he exerted in his own time, and since. Beside the extreme adroitness of which Carlyle speaks, he had as exhaustless an energy as was ever granted to any of the sons of men. He was never happy except when he was at work. He worked at home, he worked when visiting, he worked in his carriage, he worked at hotels. Amid annoyances and disturbances which would have paralyzed the thought and pen of others, Voltaire labored on. Upon his sick bed, in extreme debility and in old age, that untiring pen was ever in motion, and whatever came from it interested all mankind. Besides the innumerable books, tracts, and treatises which fill the volumes of his collected works, there are said to be in existence fourteen thousand of his letters, half of which have never been printed. But this was only a part of the outcome of his terrible vitality. He was also an enterprising and energetic man of business. He speculated in the funds, lent money on interest, fitted out ships, bought and sold real estate, solicited and obtained pensions. In this way he changed his patrimony of about two hundred thousand francs to an annual income of the same amount,--equal to at least one hundred thousand dollars a year at the present time. He was determined to be rich, and he became so; not because he loved money for itself, nor because he was covetous. He gave money freely; he used it in large ways. He sought wealth as a means of self-defense,--to protect himself against the persecution which his attacks on the Church might bring upon him. He also had, like a great writer of the present century, Walter Scott, the desire of being a large landed proprietor and lord of a manor; and, like Scott, he became one, reigning at Ferney as Scott ruled at Abbotsford.

In defending himself against his persecutors he used other means not so legitimate. One of his methods was systematic falsehood. He first concealed, and then denied, the authorship of any works which would expose him to danger. He took the tone of injured innocence. For example, he had worked with delight, during twenty years, on his wretched "Pucelle." To write new lines in it, or a new canto, was his refreshment; to read them to his friends gave him the most intense satisfaction. But when the poem found its way into print, with what an outcry he denies the authorship, almost before he is charged with it. He assumes the air of calumniated virtue. The charge, he declares, is one of the infamous inventions of his enemies. He writes to the "Journal Encyclopédique," "The crowning point of their devilish manœuvres is the edition of a poem called 'La Pucelle d'Orléans.' The editor has the face to attribute this work to the author of the 'Henriade,' the 'Zaïre,' the 'Mérope,' the 'Alzire,' the 'Siècle de Louis XIV.' He dares to ascribe to this author the flattest, meanest, and most gross work which can come from the press. My pen refuses to copy the tissue of silly and abominable obscenities of this work of darkness." When the "Dictionnaire Philosophique" began to appear, he wrote to D'Alembert, "As soon as any danger arises, I beg you will let me know, that I may disavow the work in all the public papers with my usual candor and innocence." Mr. Parton tells us that he had _a hundred and eight_ pseudonyms. He signed his pamphlets A Benedictine, The Archbishop of Canterbury, A Quaker, Rev. Josias Roussette, the Abbé Lilladet, the Abbé Bigorre, the Pastor Bourn. He was also ready to tell a downright lie when it suited his convenience.

When "Candide" was printed, in 1758, he wrote, as Mr. Parton tells us, to a friendly pastor in Geneva, "I have at length read 'Candide.' People must have lost their senses to attribute to me that pack of nonsense. I have, thank God, better occupation. This optimism [of Pangloss] obviously destroys the foundation of our holy religion." Our holy religion!

An excuse may be found for these falsehoods. A writer, it may be said, has a right to his incognito; if so, he has a right to protect it by denying the authorship of a book when charged with it. This is doubtful morality, but Voltaire went far beyond this. He volunteered his denials. He asserted in every way, with the most solemn asseverations, that he was not the author of a book which he had written with delight. But this was not the worst. He not only told these author's lies, but he was a deliberate hypocrite, professing faith in Christianity, receiving its sacraments, asking spiritual help from the Pope, and begging for relics from the Vatican, at the very time that he was hoping by strenuous efforts to destroy both Catholicism and Christianity.

When he was endeavoring to be admitted to a place in the French Academy, he wrote thus to the Bishop of Mirepoix:[42] "Thanks to Heaven, my religion teaches me to know how to suffer. The God who founded it, as soon as he deigned to become man, was of all men the most persecuted. After such an example, it is almost a crime to complain.... I can say, before God who hears me, that I am a good citizen and a true Catholic.... I have written many pages sanctified by religion." In this Mr. Parton admits that he went too far.

When at Colmar, as a measure of self-protection, he resolved to commune at Easter. Mr. Parton says that Voltaire had pensions and rents to the amount of sixty thousand livres annually, of which the king could deprive him by a stroke of the pen. So he determined to prove himself a good Catholic by taking the sacraments. As a necessary preliminary, he confessed to a Capuchin monk. He wrote to D'Argens just before, "If I had a hundred thousand men, I know what I should do; but as I have them not, I shall commune at Easter!" But, writing to Rousseau, he thinks it shameful in Galileo to retract his opinions. Mr. Parton too, who is disposed to excuse some of these hypocrisies in Voltaire, is scandalized because the pastors of Geneva denied the charges of heresy brought against them by Voltaire; saying that "we live, as they lived, in an atmosphere of insincerity." In the midst of all this, Voltaire took credit to himself for his frank avowals of the truth: "I am not wrong to dare to utter what worthy men think. For forty years I have braved the base empire of the despots of the mind." Mr. Parton elsewhere seems to think it would have been impossible for Voltaire to versify the Psalms; as it was "asked him to give the lie publicly to his whole career." But if communing at Easter did not do this, how could a versification of a few psalms accomplish it? Parton quotes Condorcet as saying that Voltaire could not become a hypocrite, even to be a cardinal. Could any one do a more hypocritical action than to partake the sacraments of a Church which he despised in order to escape the danger of persecution?

When building his house at Ferney, the neighboring Catholic curés interfered with him. They prohibited the laborers from working for him. To meet this difficulty he determined to obtain the protection of the Pope himself. So he wrote to the Pope, asking for a relic to put in the church he had built, and received in return a piece of the hair-shirt of St. Francis. He went to mass frequently. Meantime, in his letters to his brother freethinkers, he added his usual postscript, "Ecrasez l'Infâme;" begging their aid in crushing Catholicism and Christianity. Yet it does not seem that he considered himself a hypocrite in thus conforming outwardly to a religion which he hated. He thinks that others who do so are hypocrites, but not that he is one. In 1764 he writes to Madame du Deffand, "The worst is that we are surrounded by hypocrites, who worry us to make us think what they themselves do not think at all." So singular are the self-deceptions of the human mind. He writes to Frederic ridiculing the sacrament of extreme unction, and then solemnly partakes of the eucharist. Certainly he did not belong to the noble army of martyrs. He expected to overturn a great religious system, not by the power of faith, but by ingenious pamphlets, brilliant sarcasms, adroit deceptions. In thus thinking he was eminently superficial.

His theory on this subject is given in an article in the "Dictionnaire Philosophique," quoted by Mr. Parton: "Distinguish honest people who think, from the populace who were not made to think. If usage obliges you to perform a ridiculous ceremony for the sake of the canaille, and on the road you meet some people of understanding, notify them by a sign of the head, or a look, that you think as they do.... If imbeciles still wish to eat acorns, let them have acorns."

Mr. Parton describes in full (vol. ii. p. 410) the ceremony of the eucharist of which Voltaire partook in his own church at Ferney. It was Easter Sunday, and Voltaire mounted the pulpit and preached a sermon against theft. Hearing of this, the bishop was scandalized, and forbade all the curates of the diocese from confessing, absolving, or giving the sacrament to Voltaire. Upon this Voltaire writes and signs a formal demand on the curate of Ferney to allow him to confess and commune in the Catholic Church, in which he was born, has lived, and wishes to die; offering to make all necessary declarations, all requisite protestations, in public or private, submitting himself absolutely to all the rules of the Church, for the edification of Catholics and Protestants. All this was a mere piece of mystification and fun. He pretended to be too sick to go to the church, and made a Capuchin come and administer the eucharist to him in bed; Voltaire saying, "Having my God in my mouth, I declare that I forgive all my enemies." No wonder that with all his marvelous ability and his long war upon the Catholic Church he was unable to make any lasting impression upon it. Talent is not enough to make revolutions of opinion. No serious faith was ever destroyed by a jest.

If we return to Rousseau, and compare his influence with that of Voltaire, we shall find that it went far deeper. Voltaire was a man of immense talent. Talent originates nothing, but formulates into masterly expression what has come to it from the age in which it lives. Not a new idea can be found, we believe, in all Voltaire's innumerable writings. But genius has a vision of ideal truth. It is a prophet of the future. Rousseau, with his many faults, weaknesses, follies, was a man of genius. He was probably the most eloquent writer of French prose who has ever appeared. He was a man possessed by his ideas. He had none of the adroitness, wit, ingenuity, of Voltaire. Instead of amassing an enormous fortune, he supported himself by copying music. Instead of being surrounded by admirers and flatterers, he led a solitary life, alone with his ideas. Instead of denying the authorship of his works, and so giving an excuse to the authorities to leave him quiet, he put his name to his writings. He worked for his bread with his hands, and in his "Emile" he recommended that all boys should be taught some manual craft. Voltaire ridiculed the _gentleman carpenter_ of Rousseau; but before that generation passed away, many a French nobleman had reason to lament that he had not been taught to use the saw and the plane.

If Voltaire belonged to the eighteenth century, and brought to a brilliant focus its scattered rays, Rousseau belonged more to the nineteenth. Amidst the _persiflage_, the mockery, the light and easy philosophy, of his day, he stood, "among them, but not of them, in a crowd of thoughts which were not their thoughts." This is the true explanation of his weakness and strength, and of the intense dislike felt for him by Voltaire and the school of Voltaire. They belonged to their time, Rousseau to a coming time.

The eighteenth century, especially in France, was one in which nature was at its minimum and art at its maximum. All was art. But art separated from nature becomes artificial, not to say artful. Decorum was the law in morals; the _bienséances_ and _convenances_ ruled in society. The stage was bound by conventional rules. Poetry walked in silk attire, and made its toilette with the elaborate dignity of the _levée_ of the Grand Monarque. Against all this Rousseau led the reaction--the reaction inevitable as destiny. As art had been pushed to an extreme, so now naturalism was carried to the opposite extreme. Rousseau was the apostle of nature in all things. Children were to be educated by the methods of nature, not according to the routine of old custom. Governments were to go back to their origin in human nature; society was to be reorganized on first principles. This voice crying in the wilderness was like the trumpet of doom to the age, announcing the age to come. It laid the axe at the root of the tree. Its outcome was the French Revolution, that rushing, mighty flood, which carried away the throne, the aristocracy, the manners, laws, and prejudices of the past.