Part 4 (2/2)
Voltaire's work went deeper than political reform. He dealt with ideas, not inst.i.tutions. In a little treatise called the _Voyage of Reason_, which he wrote as late as 1774, he enumerates with exultation the triumphs of reforms which he himself had witnessed. He had previously written, in 1764: ”Everything I see scatters the seeds of a revolution which will indubitably arrive, and which I shall not have the happiness to witness.” Buckle notes that ”the further he advanced in years, the more pungent were his sarcasms against ministers, the more violent were his invectives against despotism”; and it was said of him in the early days of the Revolution, when it was sanguine but not yet sanguinary, ”He did not see what has been done, but he did all that we see.”
He teaches no mystery, but the open secret of Secularism-_il faut cultiver notre jardin_ (we must cultivate our garden). ”Life,” he said, ”is thickly sown with thorns. I know no other remedy than to pa.s.s rapidly over them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes the greater is their power to harm us.” Economy, he declared, is the source of liberality, and this maxim he reduced to practice. He ridiculed all pretences; those of the physician as well as of the metaphysician. ”What have you undertaken?” he said, smiling, to a young man, who answered that he was studying medicine. ”Why, to convey drugs of which you know little into a body of which you know less!” ”Regimen,” said he, ”is better than physic. Everyone should be his own physician. Eat with moderation what you know by experience agrees with your const.i.tution.
Nothing is good for the body but what we can digest. What medicine can procure digestion? Exercise. What recruit strength? Sleep. What alleviate incurable evils? Patience.”
The tone of Voltaire is not fervid or heroic, like, for instance, that of Carlyle; but he worked, as Carlyle did not, for a great cause. He felt for suffering outside himself. Without mysticism or fanaticism, aiming at no remote or impracticable ideal, he ever insisted on meeting the problems of life with practical good sense, toleration, and humanity. He sought always for clear ideas, tangible results, and as Mr.
Lecky says, ”labored steadily within the limits of his ideals and of his sympathies, to make the world wiser, happier, and better place than he found it.”
Voltaire wrote: ”My motto is, 'Straight to the fact,'” and this was a characteristic which equally marked him and Frederick. He had a horror of phrases. ”Your fine phrases,” said one to him. ”My fine phrases!
Learn that I never made one in my life.” His style is indeed marked by restraint and simplicity of diction. He wrote to D'Alembert: ”You will never succeed in delivering men from error by means of metaphysics. You must prove the truth by facts.” As an instance of his apt mingling of fact with reason and ridicule, take his treatment of the doctrine of the Resurrection in the _Philosophical Dictionary_. ”A Breton soldier goes to Canada. He finds by chance he falls short of food. He is forced to eat an Iroquois he has killed over-night. This Iroquois had nourished himself on Jesuits during two or three months, a great part of his body has become Jesuit. So there is the body of this soldier composed of Iroquois, Jesuit, and whatever he had eaten before. How will each resume precisely what belonged to him?”
Magnify his failings as you may, you cannot obliterate his one transcendent merit, his humanity ever responsive to every claim of suffering or wrong. He stood for the rights of conscience, for the dignity of human reason, for the gospel of Freethought.
Voltaire may not be placed with the great inspiring teachers of mankind.
But it must be acknowledged that, as Mr. George Saintsbury, no mean critic, says: ”In literary craftsmans.h.i.+p, at once versatile and accomplished, he has no superior and scarcely a rival.”
He declared that he loved the whole of the nine Muses, and that the doors of the soul should be open to all sciences and all sentiments. He employed every species of composition-poetry, prose, tragedy, comedy, history, dialogue, epistle, essay or epigram-as it suited his purpose, and he excelled in all. Argument or raillery came alike. He made reason amusing, and none like him could ridicule the ridiculous. His charm as a writer has been the occasion of the obloquy attached to his name by bigots. They can never forgive that he forced people to smile at their superst.i.tion.
Much, of course, of Voltaire's mult.i.tudinous work was directed to immediate ends, and but for his grace of style would be of little present interest. But after all winnowings by the ever-swaying fan of time much is left of enduring value. The name of Voltaire will ever be a mighty one in literature: a glorious example of what a man may achieve who is strong in his love of humanity.
TRIBUTES TO VOLTAIRE
As a contrast to the views of Dr. Johnson and De Maistre, which for generations represented the current opinion of Protestants and Catholics, I bring together a few independent testimonies. As time goes on his admirers increase in volume, while his detractors now are mainly those who have an interest in or secret sympathy with the abuses he destroyed. And first, I will give the testimony of Goldsmith who had met him. It was written while Voltaire was alive, but when a false report of his death had been received in England. ”Should you look for the character of Voltaire among the journalists and illiterate writers of the age, you will find him there characterised as a monster, with a head turned to wisdom, and a heart inclining to vice-the powers of his mind and the baseness of his principles forming a detestable contrast. But seek for his character among writers like himself, and you will find him very differently described. You perceive him, in their accounts, possessed of good nature, humanity, greatness of soul, fort.i.tude, and almost every virtue: in this description those who might be supposed best acquainted with his character are unanimous. The royal Prussian, D'Argens, Diderot, D'Alembert, and Fontenelle conspire in drawing the picture, in describing the friend of man, and the patron of every rising genius.”
Lord Byron's lines on Voltaire and Gibbon (_Childe Harold_, iii., 105-107) are well known. He says:
They were gigantic minds, and their steep aim Was, t.i.tan-like, on daring doubts to pile Thoughts which should call down thunder, and the flame Of Heaven again a.s.sail'd, if Heaven the while On man and man's research could deign do more than smile.
The one was fire and fickleness, a child Most mutable in wishes, but in mind A wit as various,-gay, grave, sage, or wild,- Historian, bard, philosopher, combined; He multiplied himself among mankind, The Proteus of their talents: But his own Breathed most in ridicule,-which, as the wind, Blew where it listed, laying all things p.r.o.ne,- Now to o'erthrow a fool, and now to shake a throne.
The other, deep and slow, exhausting thought, And having wisdom with each studious year, In meditation dwelt, with learning wrought, And shaped his weapon with an edge severe, Sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer; The lord of iron,-that master-spell, Which stung his foes to wrath, which grew from fear, And doom'd him to the zealot's ready h.e.l.l, Which answers to all doubts so eloquently well.
Warton, the learned critic and author of a _History of Poetry_ (Dissertation I.) remarked: ”Voltaire, a writer of much deeper research than is imagined, and the first who has displayed the literature and customs of the dark ages with any degree of penetration and comprehension.” Robertson, the historian, similarly observed that, had Voltaire only given his authorities, ”many of his readers who only consider him as an entertaining and lively writer would have found that he is a learned and well informed historian.”
Lord Holland wrote, in his account of the _Life and Writings of Lope de Vega_: ”Till Voltaire appeared there was no nation more ignorant of its neighbors' literature than the French. He first exposed and then corrected this neglect in his countrymen. There is no writer to whom the authors of other nations, especially of England, are so indebted for the extension of their fame in France, and, through France, in Europe. There is no critic who has employed more time, wit, ingenuity, and diligence in promoting the literary intercourse between country and country, and in celebrating in one language the triumphs of another. His enemies would fain persuade us that such exuberance of wit implies a want of information; but they only succeed in showing that a want of wit by no means implies an exuberance of information.”
Goethe said: ”Voltaire will ever be regarded as the greatest name in literature in modern times, and perhaps even in all ages, as the most astonis.h.i.+ng creation of nature, in which she united, in one frail human organisation, all the varieties of talent, all the glories of genius, all the potencies of thought. If you wish depth, genius, imagination, taste, reason, sensibility, philosophy, elevation, originality, nature, intellect, fancy, rect.i.tude, facility, flexibility, precision, art, abundance, variety, fertility, warmth, magic, charm, grace, force, an eagle sweep of vision, vast understanding, instruction rich, tone excellent, urbanity, suavity, delicacy, correctness, purity, cleanness, eloquence, harmony, brilliancy, rapidity, gaiety, pathos, sublimity and universality-perfection indeed-behold Voltaire.”
Lord Brougham, in his _Lives of Men of Letters and Science who flourished in the time of George III_., devotes a considerable section to Voltaire. After censuring ”the manner in which he devoted himself to crying down the sacred things of his country,” he continues: ”But, though it would be exceedingly wrong to pa.s.s over this great and prevailing fault without severe reprobation, it would be equally unjust, nay, ungrateful, ever to forget the immense obligations under which Voltaire has laid mankind by his writings, the pleasure derived from his fancy and his wit, the amus.e.m.e.nt which his singular and original humor bestows, even the copious instruction with which his historical works are pregnant, and the vast improvement in the manner of writing history which we owe to him. Yet, great as these services are-among the greatest that can be rendered by a man of letters-they are really of far inferior value to the benefits which have resulted from his long and arduous struggle against oppression, especially against tyranny in the worst form which it can a.s.sume, the persecution of opinion, the infraction of the sacred right to exercise the reason upon all subjects, unfettered by prejudice, uncontrolled by authority, whether of great names or of temporal power.”
Macaulay, in his _Essay on Frederick the Great_, observes: ”In truth, of all the intellectual weapons which have ever been wielded by man, the most terrible was the mockery of Voltaire. Bigots and tyrants, who had never been moved by the wailing and cursing of millions, turned pale at his name.”
Carlyle, in his depreciatory essay, acknowledged: ”Perhaps there is no writer, not a mere compiler, but writing from his own invention or elaboration, who has left so many volumes behind him; and if to the merely arithmetical we add a critical estimate, the singularity is still greater; for these volumes are not written without an appearance of due care and preparation; perhaps there is not one altogether feeble and confused treatise, nay, one feeble and confused sentence to be found in them.” And at the end he admits: ”He gave the death-stab to modern Superst.i.tion! _That_ horrid incubus, which dwelt in darkness, shunning the light, is pa.s.sing away; with all its racks and poison chalices, and foul sleeping-draughts, is pa.s.sing away without return. It was a most weighty service.”
One of the strangest of tributes to Voltaire is that from Ruskin, the disciple of Carlyle. In his _Fors Clavigera_ (vol. viii., p. 76) he says: ”There are few stronger adversaries to St. George than Voltaire.
But my scholars are welcome to read as much of Voltaire as they like.
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