VOLTAIRE
BY
JOHN MORLEY
LONDON
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1886
Printed by R. & R. CLARK, Edinburgh.
NOTE.
The edition to which the references are made in the following pages is that published by Baudouin in 1826, in seventy-five volumes. This edition is to be distinguished from that known as the first Baudouin edition, published 1824-34, in ninety-seven volumes. The extent of the difference between them, which is entirely in favour of the more voluminous form, may be seen in M. Quérard’s Bibliographie Voltairienne (p. 107). The large number of complete and elaborate editions of Voltaire’s works, which were undertaken and executed in the years between the overthrow of the Empire and the overthrow of the Monarchy in 1830, is one of the most striking facts in the history of books.
1872.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. PRELIMINARY. PAGEImportance of Voltaire’s name
1Catholicism, Calvinism, and the Renaissance
1Voltairism the Renaissance of the eighteenth century
4His power the result of his sincerity, penetration, and courage
6Different tempers proper for different eras
11Voltaire’s freedom from intellectual cowardice
12And from worldly indifference to truth and justice
13Reason and humanity only a single word to him
15His position towards the purely literary life
17Enervating regrets that the movement had not a less violent leader
19The share of chance in providing leaders
20Combination of favourable circumstances in Voltaire’s case
22Occasion and necessity of the movement
24Age of Lewis XIV. entirely loyal to its own ideas
25Subsequent discredit of these ideas
26 Preparation for abandonment of the old system by Descartes and Bayle 29Voltaire continues the work, not wholly to the disadvantage of the old system
31No ascetic element in the Voltairean revolt
33Why primarily an intellectual movement
34The hostile memory of Christians for it
37Comte’s estimate of it
37The estimate of culture
40Some pleas on the other side
40 CHAPTER II. ENGLISH INFLUENCES.Significance of the journey to England
44His birth and
Ninon de l’Enclos, Chaulieu, and the Regency
46Manner of life from 1716
49Affront from the Chevalier de Rohan
53Leaves France
54 Had previously been no more than a vague esprit fort 56Le Pour et le Contre
57Freethinking a reality in England
58Condorcet’s account of the effect of England upon Voltaire
59Social and political consequence of men of letters
59Evil effect of this in France
60Freedom of speech
61Newton’s discoveries
65Their true influence on Voltaire
67Locke
67Profound effect of Lockian common-sense on Voltaire
70Contrast between social condition of England and France
73 Voltaire’s imperfect appreciation of the value and working of a popular government 76Confounds two distinct conceptions of civil liberty
79A confusion shared by most of his countrymen
79The Church of England
82The Quakers
84Voltaire’s diligence in study of English literature
86And in mastering one side of the deistical controversy
88Through the influence of the deists on Voltaire, the genius of Protestantism entered France
91Limited consistency of Voltaire’s philosophy
93English deism contrasted with that of Leibnitz and with the atheism of D’Holbach
95 CHAPTER III. LITERATURE.Most just way of criticising character
98Some traits in Voltaire
99Acquaintance with the Marquise du Châtelet
Her character
103Voltaire’s placableness
105His money transactions
107The life at Cirey
111His attempts in physical science
116Literature his true calling
117Qualities of his style
119Significance of literature as a profession
125Voltaire’s dramatic art
126Not deliberately art with a purpose
126His plays a prolongation of the tradition of the great age of Lewis XIV.
129 His criticism on Hamlet 132Merits of the French classic drama
134Voltaire compared with Corneille and Racine
136His ideas of dramatic renovation
140His Roman subjects
141His enlargement of dramatic themes
143Failure in comedy
144Arising from want of deep humour
145The Pucelle: offends two modern sentiments
147Its true significance
148Peculiarity of the licence of the eighteenth century
149Sophisms by which it was defended
149Contempt for the middle ages
152The Henriade
153 CHAPTER IV. BERLIN.Death of Madame du Châtelet
158Voltaire and the court
158He goes to Berlin
161Character of literary activity in Prussia
161The two movements of which Voltaire and the king were chiefs
Character of Frederick the Great
166Breaking up of the European state-system in 1740
171The first shock in 1733
172Frederick raises international relations into the region of real matter
174The situation defined
175Two conceptions of progress
177 From which of them the result of the Seven Years’ War is seen to be truly progressive 180The Jesuits
181Their repulse after the humiliation of Austria
182Frederick’s probable unconsciousness of the ultimate bearings of his policy
184His type of monarchy
186He sprang doubly from the critical school
188Other statesmen affected by this school
188Injustice of stamping Voltaire’s influence as merely destructive
191Frederick the Great and France
193Voltaire’s life at Berlin
194Maupertuis
196Collision between him and Voltaire
198The Diatribe of Doctor Akakia
199Voltaire’s departure from Berlin
201The Frankfort episode
202Unfortunate revelations in the Hirschel affair
206Relations between Frederick and Voltaire henceforth
207Voltaire fears to return to Paris
210Geneva
211The critical school not specially insensible to the picturesque
212Voltaire buys Ferney (1758)
215 CHAPTER V. RELIGION. (1) Conditions of the Voltairean attack.Two elements underlying Voltaire’s enmity to Christianity
216 Failure of Catholicism as a social force 217Utility of Protestantism in softening the transition
218Compared with repression of free debate in France
219Voltaire did not assail modern theosophies
221The good inextricably bound up with the bad in the old system
224Jesuits and Jansenists
225Voltaire declared the latter to be the worst foes
227Morellet’s Manual for Inquisitors
228A reflex of the criminal jurisprudence of the time
229Cases of Rochette, Calas, and Sirven
229Of La Barre
230Fervour of Voltaire’s indignation
232Protests against cynical acquiescence
233Disappointment of the philosophers, and their courage
235The reactionary fanaticism a proof of the truth of Voltaire’s allegations
237Necessity of transforming spiritual basis of thought
238Voltaire’s abstention from the temporal sphere
239His chief defect as leader of the attack
241Crippling his historic imagination
243The just historic calm impossible, until Voltaire had pressed a previous question
245 (2) His method.His instruments purely literary and dialectical
248Leaves metaphysics of religion, and fastens on alleged records
250The other side fell back on the least worthy parts of their system
251Hence the narrow and literal character of Voltaire’s objections
252His attack essentially the attack of the English deists
255 Rationalistic questions in scriptural and ecclesiastical records 257In doctrine
258Argument from comparison with other myths
259His neglect of primitive religions
260His conviction that monotheism is the first religious form
Difficulties which he thus passed over
264Hume’s view
266Voltaire did not assail the general ideas of Christianity
267Such as the idea of evil inherent in matter
270And the idea of a deity as then conceived
271Hence the acerbity of the debate
273And the want of permanence in Voltaire’s writings compared with Bossuet or Pascal
274His criticism on Dante
275 (3) His approximation to a solution.Voltairean deism
276Never accepted by the mass of men
278Nor is it likely to be accepted by them
279Voltaire’s imperfect adherence to the deistical idea
280Reasons for this
282Does not accept belief in the immortality of the soul
286Asserts less than Rousseau, and denies less than Diderot
287A popular movement begun by Bayle’s Dictionary
288Compromising method of Rousseau
290Voltaire’s view of an atheistical society
291His belief in the social sufficiency of an analytic spirit
292Synthesis necessary, but more than one is possible
293 CHAPTER VI. HISTORY.Extraordinary activity in historical composition in the eighteenth century
295Explanation of it
296Circumstances under which Voltaire thought about the philosophy of history
297The three historical styles
299Voltaire’s histories of two kinds
301Rousseau’s disregard for history
302Voltaire’s acute sense
303His diligence in seeking authentic materials
305Changed view of the true subject matter of history
308War always an object of Voltaire’s antipathy
311His distrust of diplomacy
315Bossuet’s Discourse on Universal History
316Introduction to the Essay on Manners
318Irrational disparagement of the Jews
319Panegyric on the Emperor Julian
320False view of the history of the church
322Avoids the error of expressing barbarous activity in terms of civilisation
323Real merit of Voltaire’s panorama
325He was not alive to the necessity of scientifically studying the conditions of the social union
326 CHAPTER VII. FERNEY.His life at Ferney
329Madame Denis
329 His vast correspondence 333Consulted by Vauvenargues, Chastellux, Turgot, and others
334Complaisance of his letters
336Sophistical defence of the practice of denying authorship
339Voltaire’s just alarm for his own safety
340His Easter communion of 1768
341Further proceedings with the Bishop of Annecy
342Voltaire made temporal father of the Capucins of Gex
344Voltaire’s influence on Rousseau
345Difference between their respective schools
347Their rivalry represents the social dead-lock of the time
348Voltaire the more far-sighted of the two
350Two signal effects of Rousseau’s teaching
352Diderot and the Encyclopædia
354Voltaire’s constant efforts to secure redress for the victims of wrong
357Calas, Sirven, La Barre
357Count Lally
358Admiral Byng
359His interest in the pretended liberation of Greece
360In the partition of Poland
361In the accession of Turgot to power
362Visit to Paris and death
363τὰ μὲν γὰρ σωφρόνων ἤθη σφόδρα μὲν εὐλαβῆ καὶ δίκαια καὶ σωτήρια, δριμύτητος δὲ καί τινος ἰταμότητος ὀξείας καὶ πρακτικῆς ἐνδεῖται.... τὰ δ’ ἀνδρεῖά γε αὖ πρὸς μὲν τὸ δίκαιον καὶ εὐλαβὲς ἐκείνων ἐπιδεέστερα, τὸ δ’ ἐν ταῖς πράξεσι διαφερόντως ἴσχει. πάντα δὲ καλῶς γίγνεσθαι τὰ περὶ τὰς πόλεις, τούτοιν μὴ παραγενομένοιν ἀμφοῖν, ἀδύνατον.—Politicus, 311 A.
πότερον τοὺς ἀνδρείους θαῤῥαλέους λέγεις, ἢ ἄλλο τι; Καὶ ἴτας γε, ἔφη, ἐφ’ ἃ οἱ πολλοὶ φοβοῦντας ἰέvαι.—Protagoras, 349 E.
CHAPTER I.
PRELIMINARY.
When the right sense of historical proportion is more fully developed in men’s minds, the name of Voltaire will stand out like the names of the great decisive movements in the European advance, like the Revival of Learning, or the Reformation. The existence, character, and career of this extraordinary person constituted in themselves a new and prodigious era. The peculiarities of his individual genius changed the mind and spiritual conformation of France, and in a less degree of the whole of the West, with as far-spreading and invincible an effect as if the work had been wholly done, as it was actually aided, by the sweep of deep-lying collective forces. A new type of belief, and of its shadow, disbelief, was stamped by the impression of his character and work into the intelligence and feeling of his own and the following times. We may think of Voltairism in France somewhat as we think of Catholicism or the Renaissance or Calvinism. It was one of the cardinal liberations of the growing race, one of the emphatic manifestations of some portion of the minds of men, which an immediately foregoing system and creed had either ignored or outraged.
Christianity originally and generically at once awoke and satisfied a spiritual craving for a higher, purer, less torn and fragmentary being, than is permitted to sons of men on the troubled and corrupt earth. It disclosed to them a gracious, benevolent, and all-powerful being, who would one day redress all wrongs and recompense all pain, and who asked no more from them meanwhile than that they should prove their love of him whom they had not seen, by love of their brothers whom they had seen. Its great glory was to have raised the moral dignity and self-respect of the many to a level which had hitherto been reached only by a few. Calvin, again, like some stern and austere step-son of the Christian God, jealous of the divine benignity and abused open-handedness of his father’s house, with word of merciless power set free all those souls that were more anxious to look the tremendous facts of necessity and evil and punishment full in the face, than to reconcile them with any theory of the infinite mercy and loving-kindness of a supreme creator. Men who had been enervated or helplessly perplexed by a creed that had sunk into ignoble optimism and self-indulgence, became conscious of new fibre in their moral structure, when they realised life as a long wrestling with unseen and invincible forces of grace, election, and fore-destiny, the agencies of a being whose ways and dealings, whose contradictory attributes of unjust justice and loving vindictiveness, it was not for man, who is a worm and the son of a worm, to reconcile with the puny logic of human words, or the shallow consistency of human ideas. Catholicism was a movement of mysticism, and so in darker regions was the Calvinism which in so many important societies displaced it. Each did much to raise the measure of worth and purify the spiritual self-respect of mankind, and each also discouraged and depressed the liberal play of intelligence, the cheerful energizing of reason, the bright and many-sided workings of fancy and imagination. Human nature, happily for us, ever presses against this system or that, and forces ways of escape for itself into freedom and light. The scientific reason urgently seeks instruments and a voice; the creative imagination unconsciously takes form to itself in manifold ways, of all of which the emotions can give good account to the understanding. Hence the glorious suffusion of light which the ardent desire of men brought over the face of Europe in the latter half of the fifteenth century. Before Luther and Calvin in their separate ways brought into splendid prominence their new ideas of moral order, more than two generations of men had almost ceased to care whether there be any moral order or not, and had plunged with the delight of enchantment among ideas of grace and beauty, whose forms were old on the earth, but which were full of seemingly inexhaustible novelty and freshness to men, who had once begun to receive and to understand all the ever-living gifts of Grecian art and architecture and letters. If the Reformation, the great revival of northern Europe, was the enfranchisement of the individual from bondage to a collective religious tradition that had lost its virtue, the Renaissance, the earlier revival of southern Europe, was the admission to participate in the noblest collective tradition of free intellect which the achievements of the race could then hand down.
Voltairism may stand for the name of the Renaissance of the eighteenth century, for that name takes in all the serious haltings and shortcomings of this strange movement, as well as all its terrible fire, swiftness, sincerity, and strength. The rays from Voltaire’s burning and far-shining spirit no sooner struck upon the genius of the time, seated
Yet Voltaire was the very eye of eighteenth-century illumination. It was he who conveyed to his generation in a multitude of forms the consciousness at once of the power and the rights of human intelligence. Another might well have said of him what he magnanimously said of his famous contemporary, Montesquieu, that humanity had lost its title-deeds, and he had recovered them. The fourscore volumes which he wrote are the monument, as they were in some sort the instrument, of a new renascence. They are the fruit and representation of a spirit of encyclopaedic curiosity and productiveness. Hardly a page of all these countless leaves is common form. Hardly a sentence is there which did not come forth alive from Voltaire’s own mind, or which was said because some one else had said it before. His works as much as those of any man that ever lived and thought are truly his own. It is not given, we all know, even to the most original and daring of leaders to be without precursors, and Voltaire’s march was prepared for him before he was born, as it is for all mortals. Yet he impressed on all he said, on good words and bad alike, a marked autochthonic quality, as of the self-raised spontaneous products of some miraculous soil, from which prodigies and portents spring. Many of his ideas were in the air, and did not belong to him peculiarly; but so strangely rapid and perfect was his assimilation of them, so vigorous and minutely penetrative was the quality of his understanding, so firm and independent his initiative, that even these were instantly stamped with the express image of his personality. In a word, Voltaire’s work from first to last was alert with unquenchable life. Some of it, much of it, has ceased to be alive for us now in all that belongs to its deeper significance, yet we recognise that none of it was ever the dreary still-birth of a mind of hearsays. There is no mechanical transmission of untested bits of current coin. In the realm of mere letters, Voltaire is one of the little band of great monarchs, and in style he remains of the supreme potentates. But literary variety and perfection, however admirable, like all purely literary qualities, are a fragile and secondary good which the world is very willing to let die, where it has not been truly begotten and engendered of living forces.
Voltaire was a stupendous power, not only because his expression was incomparably lucid, or even because his sight was exquisitely keen and clear, but because he saw many new things, after which the spirits of others were unconsciously groping and dumbly yearning. Nor was this all. Fontenelle was both brilliant and far-sighted, but he was cold, and one of those who love ease and a safe hearth, and carefully shun the din, turmoil, and danger, of the great battle. Voltaire was ever in the front and centre of the fight. His life was not a mere chapter in a history of literature. He never counted truth a treasure to be discreetly hidden in a napkin. He made it a perpetual war-cry and emblazoned it on a banner that was many a time rent, but was never out of the field.
This is the temper which, when the times are auspicious, and the fortunes of the fight do not hurry the combatant to dungeon or stake, raises him into a force instead of leaving him the empty shadow of a literary name. There is something in our nature which leads men to listen coolly to the most eager hints and pregnant innuendoes of scepticism, on the lips of teachers who still in their own persons keep adroitly away from the fiery darts of the officially orthodox. The same something, perhaps a moral relish for veritable proofs of honesty, perhaps a quality of animal temperament, drives men to grasp even a crudity with fervour, when they see it wielded like a battle-axe against spiritual oppression. A man is always so much more than his words, as we feel every day of our lives; what he says has its momentum indefinitely multiplied, or reduced to nullity, by the impression that the hearer for good reasons or bad happens to have formed of the spirit and moral size of the speaker. There are things enough to be said of Voltaire’s moral size, and no attempt is made in these pages to dissemble in how much he was condemnable. It is at least certain that he hated tyranny, that he refused to lay up his hatred privily in his heart, and insisted on giving his abhorrence a voice, and tempering for his just rage a fine sword, very fatal to those who laid burdens too hard to be borne upon the conscience and life of men. Voltaire’s contemporaries felt this. They were stirred to the quick by the sight and sound and thorough directness of those ringing blows. The strange and sinister method of assault upon religion which we of a later day watch with wondering eyes, and which consists in wearing the shield and device of a faith, and industriously shouting the cry of a church, the more effectually to reduce the faith to a vague futility, and its outward ordering to a piece of ingeniously reticulated pretence; this method of attack might make even the champions of prevailing beliefs long for the shrewd thrusts, the flashing scorn, the relentless fire, the downright grapples, with which the hated Voltaire pushed on his work of ‘crushing the Infamous.’ If he was bitter, he was still direct. If he was often a mocker in form, he was always serious in meaning and laborious in matter. If he was unflinching against theology, he always paid religion respect enough to treat it as the most important of all subjects. The contest was real, and not our present pantomimic stage-play, in which muffled phantoms of debate are made to gesticulate inexpressible things in portentously significant silence. The battle was demoralized by its virulence. True; but is this worse than to have it demoralized by cowardice of heart and understanding, when each controversial man-at-arms is eager to have it thought that he wears the colours of the other side, when the theologian would fain pass for rationalist, and the free-thinker for a person with his own orthodoxies if you only knew them, and when philosophic candour and
A man like Montaigne, as has been said, could slumber tranquilly on the pillow of doubt, content to live his life, leaving many questions open. Such men’s meditations, when composed in the genial literary form proper to them, are naturally the delight of people with whom the world goes fairly well materially, who have sensibility enough to be aware that there are unseen lands of knowledge and truth beyond the present, and destinies beyond their own; but whose sensibility is not intense and ardent enough to make wholly unendurable to them unscrutinizing acquiescence in half-thoughts and faint guesses, and pale unshapen embryos of social sympathy. There are conjunctures when this mingling of apprehension and ease, of aspiration and content, of timorous adventure and reflective indolence, is the natural mood of even high natures. The great tides of circumstance swell so tardily, that whole generations that might have produced their share of skilful and intrepid mariners, wait in vain for the full flood on which the race is borne to new shores.
Nor assuredly is it well for men that every age should mark either a revolution, or the slow inward agitation that prepares the revolution, or that doubters and destroyers should divide between them all admiration and gratitude and sympathy. The violent activity of a century of great change may end in a victory, but it is always a sacrifice. The victory may more than recompense its cost. The sacrifice may repay itself a thousand-fold. It does not always repay itself, as the too neglected list of good causes lost, and noble effort wasted, so abundantly shows. Nor in any case is sacrifice ever an end. Faith and order and steady strong movement are the conditions which everything wise is directed to perfect and consolidate. But for this process of perfection we need first the meditative, doubting, critical type, and next, the dogmatic destroyer. ‘In counsel it is good to see dangers,’ Bacon said; ‘and in execution not to see them, except they be very great,’ There are, as history instructs us, eras of counsel and eras of execution; the hour when those do best who walk most warily, feeling with patience and sagacity and painstaking for the new ways, and then the hour of march and stout-hearted engagement.
Voltaire, if he adroitly or sagely preserved his buckler, felt that the day was come to throw away the scabbard; that it was time to trust firmly to the free understanding of men for guidance in the voyage after truth, and to the instincts of uncorrupted benevolence in men for the upholding of social justice. His was one of the robust and incisive constitutions, to which doubt figures as a sickness, and where intellectual apprehension is an impossibility. The old-fashioned nomenclature puts him down among sceptics, because those who had the official right to affix these labels could think of no more contemptuous name, and could not suppose the most audacious soul capable of advancing even under the leadership of Satan himself beyond a stray doubt or so. He had perhaps as little of the sceptic in his constitution as Bossuet or Butler, and was much less capable of becoming one than De Maistre or Paley. This was a prime secret of his power, for the mere critic and propounder of unanswered doubts never leads more than a handful of men after him. Voltaire boldly put the great question, and he boldly answered it. He asked whether the sacred records were historically true, the Christian doctrine divinely inspired and spiritually exhaustive, and the Christian church a holy and beneficent organization. He answered these questions for himself and for others beyond possibility of misconception. The records were saturated with fable and absurdity, the doctrine imperfect at its best, and a dark and tyrannical superstition at its worst, and the church was the arch-curse and infamy. Say what we will of these answers, they were free from any taint of scepticism. Our lofty new idea of rational freedom as freedom from conviction, and of emancipation of understanding as emancipation from the duty of settling whether important propositions are true or false, had not dawned on Voltaire.