The life of Voltaire. Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Read casually, they are chiefly remarkable for their luminous and amusing criticisms on the genius of England, and on the men and events of that day.
Voltaire found Shakespeare exactly, after all, what a Voltaire would have found him—“nature and sublimity,” “force and fecundity,” “an amazing genius”—he was too great a genius himself not to recognise in a Shakespeare such matchless traits as these. But Voltaire was also an eighteenth-century Frenchman, with his dramatic gift pinioned by the unities, by a hundred prim, foolish, and artificial rules, and he was the writer who above all other writers valued style, polish, finish, and culture. How should he have forgiven Shakespeare what he called his “heavy grossness,” his “barbarisms,” his “monstrosities”? Voltaire did not know, with the moderns, that many of the clowns and the clownish jokes to which he took a just objection were interpolations, not Shakespeare himself. And what wonder that this most impressionable child of a country and an age where an abstraction called Taste was as a god, should have missed its polite influence in a Shakespeare, and have found the rugged grandeur of that vast intelligence imperfect without it? Not the less, it was Voltaire who first revealed this man, who had been “the ruin of the English stage,” to the French; who copied and translated him; and then abused him so fiercely in the famous preface to “Semiramis” and the quarrel with Letourneur, as to make him of as supreme an interest on the Continent as in his own country.
Voltaire wrote one admirable letter “On Mr. Pope and other famous Poets,” another “On Comedy,” a third “On Tragedy,” and a fourth “On Nobles who cultivate Literature.” He praised Swift; adored “the judicious Mr. Addison”; and did due homage to Wycherley and Congreve. But if the “English Letters” had been nothing but a series of literary criticisms, however brilliant, they would not have been the Letters which made Lafayette a republican at nine, and which Heine spoke of as a stepping-stone to the Revolution.
In the “Henriade” the bird’s heart had throbbed against the bars of the cage; in the “English Letters” it had found the gate of liberty and taken its first sweeping flight through free air.
Voltaire came straight from the Bastille to the most liberal and enlightened country in the world. What wonder that he conceived that hero-worship for England and the English which no time could change, and which in his old age at Ferney was still a burning and a shining light?
He was from the first an impassioned admirer of almost every Anglican institution. “The English, as a free people, chose their own road to heaven.” “You do not see any imbeciles here who put their souls into the keeping of others.”
“You have no priests then?” said I. “No, friend,” answered the Quaker; “and we get on very well without them.” “When the English clergy know that in France young men famous for their excesses and raised to the prelature by the intrigues of women, make love publicly, amuse themselves by composing love songs, give every day elaborate and elegant suppers and go straight from them to ask the illumination of the Holy Spirit and boldly call themselves successors of the Apostles, they thank God that they are Protestants. But they are vile heretics, fit for burning with all devils, as Master François Rabelais said; that is why I do not mix myself up with their affairs.”
The last touches are admirably Voltairian.
The live-and-let-live policy of a country where thirty religions dwelt together quite amicably and comfortably could not but appeal to the man who was Armand’s brother and who remembered Unigenitus.
As for the government—what a contrast he saw there too! In this country the sovereign was only powerful to do good “with his hands tied from doing evil”; the great were “great without insolence and without vassals”; and “the people share in the government without disorder.” What a contrast indeed! what a glaring contrast! The pen trembled in the man’s nervous hand as he wrote; and his soul was on fire. “It has taken seas of blood to drown the idol of despotism; but the English do not think they have bought their laws too dearly.” How much more dearly France was to buy hers, this man, who himself expended the work and genius of his life to gain Frenchmen a little liberty, had no idea. He had seen Newton buried at Westminster with the honours due to so great a genius. When Voltaire was very old it is said “his eye would grow bright and his cheek flush” when he said that he had once lived in a land where “a professor of mathematics, only because he was great in his vocation,” had been buried “like a king who had done good to his subjects.”
What a country to live in! to be proud of! where there were better ways to glory than the favour of a royal mistress or the unearned virtue of an ancestral name!
He saw Mrs. Oldfield, the actress, buried with the honours due to her far different and very inferior talent. Perhaps the honours were greater than her desert. But Voltaire, with his passion for the stage, was not the man to think of that.
Thirty-five years later he recalled how he had heard when in England that the daughter of the poet Milton was in London—old, ill, and poor. “In a quarter of an hour she was rich.”
“What would you have done if you had been born in Spain?” said his secretary to Voltaire long after. “I would have gone to mass every day: kissed the monks’ robes: and set fire to their convents. I was not made to live in Spain, nor in France.” “Where then?” “In England.”
But if Voltaire loved the tolerant English religion and the liberal English government and the generous English people, he loved far more “the noble liberty of thinking.” His Letters on Bacon and on Locke, on Descartes and Newton, on the History of Attraction and on Newton’s Optics, are a worship of that free thought that dared to doubt, that searched and tried the old truths which men believed because they were old and for no better reason, and which found them too often to be no truths, but a prejudice, a delusion, and a lie. Voltaire passionately declared that it was the theologians, and not the Lockes, the Bayles, the Hobbes, the Spinozas, who sowed “discord in a state.” He spoke of Locke as “the wisest of human beings”; of Bacon as “the father of experimental philosophy.” “A catechism reveals God to children,” he said; “but Newton has revealed Him to sages.” “Before Locke, the great philosophers had positively decided what the soul of man is, but as they did not know in the least, it is only natural they should all have been of different opinions. … Locke dares sometimes to speak positively but he also dares to doubt.” “How I love English daring!” he cried à propos of Swift’s “Tale of a Tub.” “How I love people who say what they think! We only half live if we dare only half think.”
Voltaire was fully alive at all events. However widely one may differ from his opinions they are at least entitled to respect. They were passionately genuine, the vivid convictions of his soul. He was no dilettante, fine-gentleman unbeliever—too bored and idle to find in the world “the footmarks of a God.” He was from this time henceforth and always one of the most zealous seekers after truth who ever lived. It was to be no more “a fountain sealed”; no more a luxury for a few, but the common property of all. To free Frenchmen by bringing to them the light and knowledge of England—to destroy, so far as in him lay, everywhere and for all men, darkness, ignorance and superstition—that was the Voltairian mission. “He swore to devote his life to that end, and kept his word.”
CHAPTER VI
PLAYS, A BURLESQUE, AND THE APPEARANCE OF THE “LETTERS”
In the middle of March, 1729, there was a man calling himself M. Sansons, living over a wigmaker’s at St. Germain-en-Laye. At the end of the month M. Sansons came to Paris, and lived for a while at the house of one of his father’s old clerks. Being so advised by his friends he applied for a warrant, annulling his order of exile. He obtained it; and lo! M. de Voltaire, after an absence of nearly three years, is returned from his English travels, and once more at work on his profession in the capital.
He had no thought at present of bringing out those “English