Part 2 (1/2)
”Well, my dear Pangloss,” said Candide to him, ”now you have been hanged, dissected, whipped, and tugging at the oar, do you continue to think that everything in this world happens for the best?” ”I have always abided by my first opinion,” replied Pangloss; ”for, after all, I am a philosopher; it would not become me to retract. Leibnitz could not be wrong, and 'pre-established harmony' is, besides, the finest thing in the world, as well as a 'plenum' and the 'materia subtilis'.”
When Cunegonde is at last found, she is no longer beautiful-but sunburnt, blear-eyed, haggard, withered, and scrofulous. Though ready to fulfil his promise, her brother, a baron whom Candide has rescued from slavery, declares that sister of his shall never marry a person of less rank than a baron. The book is a ma.s.s of seeming extravagance, with a deep vein of gold beneath. All flows so smoothly, the reader fancies such fantastic nonsense could not only be easily written, but easily improved. Yet when he notices how every sally and absurdity adds to the effect, how every lightest touch tells, he sees that only the most consummate wit and genius could thus deftly dissect a philosophy of the universe for the amus.e.m.e.nt of the mult.i.tude.
Voltaire tried to save England from the judicial murder of Admiral Byng, who was sacrificed to national pride and political faction in 1757, yet how lightly he touches the history in a sentence: ”Dans ce pays ci il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres.”
The pride, pomp, and circ.u.mstance of glorious war had no charms for Voltaire. He shows it in its true colors as mult.i.tudinous murder and rapine. Religious intolerance and hypocrisy, court domination and intrigue, the evils attendant on idlers, soldiers and priests, are all sketched in lightest outline, and the reader of this fantastic story finds he has traversed the history of last century, seen it at its worst, and seen, too, the forces that tended to make it better, and is ready to exclaim: Would we had another Voltaire now!
The philosophy of _Candide_ is that of Secularism. The world as we find it abounds in misery and suffering. If any being is responsible for it, his benevolence can only be vindicated by limiting his power, or his power credited by limiting his goodness. Our part is simply to make the best of things and improve this world here and now. ”Work, then, without disputing; it is the only way to render life supportable.”
Carlyle did much to impair the influence of Voltaire in England. Yet what is Carlyle's essential doctrine but ”Do the work nearest hand,” and what is this but a translation of the conclusion of _Candide_: ”Il faut cultiver notre jardin”?
Those who forget how far more true it is that man is an irrational animal than that he is a rational one, may wonder how Voltaire, having in _Candide_ sapped the foundations of belief in an all-good G.o.d by a portrayal of the evils afflicting mankind, could yet remain a Theist.
The truth seems to be that Voltaire had neither taste nor talents for metaphysics. In the _Ignorant Philosopher_ Voltaire seeks to answer Spinoza, without fully understanding his monistic position. He appears to have remained a dualist or modern Manichean-an opinion which James Mill considered was the only Theistic view consistent with the facts.
Writing to D'Alembert on the 15th of August, 1767, Voltaire says: ”Give my compliments to the Devil, for it is he who governs the world.” It is curious that on the day he was writing these lines, one Napoleon Bonaparte had just entered upon the world.
Voltaire appears to have been satisfied with the design argument as proving a deity, though he considered speculation as to the nature of deity useless. He showed the Positivist spirit in his rejection of metaphysical subtleties. ”When,” he writes, ”we have well disputed over spirit and matter, we end ever by no advance. No philosopher has been able to raise by his own efforts the veil which nature has spread over the first principles of things.” Again: ”I do not know the _quo modo_, true. I prefer to stop short rather than to lose myself.” Also: ”Philosophy consists in stopping where physics fail us. I observe the effects of nature, but I confess I know no more than you do about first principles.” But a deist he ever remained.
Baron de Gleichen, who visited him in 1757, relates that a young author, at his wits' end for the means of living, knocked one day at the poet's door, and to recommend himself said: ”I am an apprentice atheist at your service.” Voltaire replied: ”I have the honor to be a master deist; but though our trades are opposed, I will give you some supper to-night and some work to-morrow. I wish to avail myself of your arms and not of your head.”
He thought both atheism and fanaticism inimical to society; but, said he, ”the atheist, in his error, preserves reason, which cuts his claws, while those of the fanatic are sharpened in the incessant madness which afflicts him.”
Voltaire seems to have been at bottom agnostic holding on to the narrow ledge of theism and afraid to drop.
He says: ”For myself, I am sure of nothing. I believe that there is an intelligence, a creative power, a G.o.d. I express an opinion to-day; I doubt of it to-morrow; the day after I repudiate it. All honest philosophers have confessed to me, when they were warmed with wine, that the great Being has not given to them one particle more evidence than to me.” He believed in the immortality of the soul, yet expresses himself dubiously, saying to Madame du Deffand that he knew a man who believed that when a bee died it ceased to hum. That man was himself.
On the appearance, however, in 1770 of the Baron d'Holbach's _System of Nature_-in which he was very considerably helped by Diderot-Voltaire took alarm at its openly p.r.o.nounced atheism. ”The book,” he wrote,
”has made all the philosophers execrable in the eyes of the King and his court. Through this fatal work philosophy is lost for ever in the eyes of all magistrates and fathers of families.” He accordingly took in hand to combat its atheism, which he does in the article _Dieu_ in the _Philosophical Dictionary_, and in his _History of Jenni_ (Johnny), a lad supposed to be led on a course of vice by atheism and reclaimed to virtue by the design argument. Voltaire's real att.i.tude seems fairly expressed in his celebrated mot: ”S'il n'y avait pas un dieu, il fraudrait l'inventer”-”If there was not a G.o.d it would be necessary to invent one,” which, Morin remarks, was exactly what had been done.
Morley says: ”It was not the truth of the theistic belief in itself that Voltaire prized, but its supposed utility as an a.s.sistant to the police.”
THE ENCYCLOPaeDIA
Voltaire was a great stimulator of the French _Encyclopaedia_, a work designed to convey to the many the information of the few. Here again the inspiration was English. It was the success of the _Cyclopcedia of Arts and Sciences_, edited by the Freethinker Ephraim Chambers, in 1728, which suggested the yet more famous work carried out by Diderot and D'Alembert, with the a.s.sistance of such men as Helvetius, Buffon, Turgot, and Condorcet. Voltaire took an ardent interest in the work, and contributed many important articles. The leading contributors were all Freethinkers, but they were under the necessity of advancing their ideas in a tentative way on account of the vigilant censors.h.i.+p. Voltaire not only wrote for the _Encyclopaedia_, but gave valuable hints and suggestions to Diderot and D'Alembert, as well as much sound advice. He cautioned them, for instance, against patriotic bias. ”Why,” he asks D'Alembert, ”do you say that the sciences are more indebted to France than to any other nation? Is it to the French that we are indebted for the quadrant, the fire-engine, the theory of light, inoculation, the seed-sower? _Parbleu!_ you are jesting! We have invented only the wheelbarrow.”
Voltaire wrote the section on History. The first page contained a Voltairean definition of sacred history which even an ignorant censor could hardly be expected to pa.s.s. ”Sacred History is a series of operations, divine and miraculous, by which it pleased G.o.d formerly to conduct the Jewish nation, and to-day to exercise our faith.” The iron hand beneath the velvet glove was too evident for this to pa.s.s the censors.h.i.+p. Vexatious delay and the enforced excision of important articles attended the progress of the work.
It was the attempted suppression of _l'Encyclopcedie_ which showed Voltaire that the time had come for battle.
In 1757 a new edict was issued, threatening with death any one who wrote, printed, or sold any work attacking religion or the royal authority. The same edict a.s.signed the penalty of the galleys to whoever published writings without legal permit. Within six months advocate Barbier recorded in his diary some terrible sentences. La Marteliere, verse-writer, for printing clandestinely Voltaire's _Pucelle_ and other ”such” works, received nine years in the galleys; eight printers and binders employed in the same printing office, the pillory and three years' banishment. Up to the period of the Revolution nothing could be legally printed in France, and no book could be imported, without Government authorisation. Mr. Lecky says, in his _History of England in the Eighteenth Century_: ”During the whole of the reign of Lewis XV.
there was scarcely a work of importance which was not burnt or suppressed, while the greater number of the writers who were at this time the special, almost the only, glory of France were imprisoned, banished, or fined.” Voltaire determined to render the bigots odious and contemptible, and henceforth waged incessant war, continued to the day of his death. In satire on one of the bigots he issued his _Narrative of the Sickness, Confession, Death and Reappearance of the Jesuit Berthier_, as rich a burlesque as that which Swift had written predicting and describing the death of the astrologer Partridge, in accordance with the prediction. Every sentence is a hit. A priest of a rival order is hastily summoned to confess the dying Jesuit, who is condemned to penance in purgatory for 333,333 years, 3 months, 3 weeks, and 3 days, and then will only be let out if some brother Jesuit be found humble and good enough to be willing to apply all his merits to Father Berthier. Even putting his enemy in purgatory, he only condemned the Jesuit every morning to mix the chocolate of a Jansenist, read aloud at dinner a Provincial Letter, and employ the rest of the day in mending the chemises of the nuns of Port Royal.
From Ferney he poured forth a wasp-swarm of such writings under all sorts of pen-names, and dated from London, Amsterdam, Berne, or Geneva.
He had sufficient stimulus in the bigotry, intolerance, and atrocious iniquities perpetrated in the name of religion.
Voltaire, moreover, determined himself to uphold the work of the _Encyclopaedia_ in more popular form. He put forward first his _Questions upon the Encyclopaedia_, in which he deals with some important articles of that work, with others of his own. This was the foundation of the most important of all his works, the _Philosophical Dictionary_, which he is said to have projected in the days when he was with Frederick at Berlin. In this work he showed how a dictionary could be made the most amusing reading in the world. Under an alphabetical arrangement, he brought together a vast variety of sparkling essays on all sorts of subjects connected with literature, science, politics and religion. Some of his headings were mere stalking-horses, under cover of which he shot at the enemy. Some are concerned with matters now out of date; but, on the whole, the work presents a vivid picture of his versatile genius. An abridged edition, containing articles of abiding interest, would be a service to Free-thought at the present day.
Here is a slight specimen of his style taken from the article on Fanaticism: ”Some one spreads a rumor in the world that there is a giant in existence 70 feet high. Very soon all the doctors discuss the questions what color his hair must be, what is the size of his thumb, what the dimensions of his nails; there is outcry, caballing, fighting; those who maintain that the giant's little finger is only an inch and a half in diameter, bring those to the stake who affirm that the little finger is a foot thick. 'But, gentlemen, does your giant exist?' says a bystander, modestly.
”'What a horrible doubt!' cry all the disputants; 'what blasphemy! what absurdity!' Then they all make a little truce to stone the bystander, and, after having a.s.sa.s.sinated him in due form, in a manner the most edifying, they fight among themselves, as before, on the subject of the little finger and the nails.”
”L'Infame.”