Chapter III: Part 3

Ferney became an asylum for the oppressed both from France and Switzerland. Many of these Voltaire located in and about his chateau, but, as their number increased, he built nice stone houses, and, in a little time, the miserable hamlet which before his arrival had been a wilderness, became a prosperous colony of twelve hundred individuals and a veritable free State. There were both Protestants and Catholics among them, but such was the unanimity in which they lived under his protection, that we are told no one could conceive that different religions existed among them. Among this colony he established the manufacture of weaving and of watches, by means of which his people presently became wealthy; the Empress Catherine II., even when engaged in her Turkish campaigns, paying her _bon ami_ Voltaire the compliment of assisting the Ferney colony by an order for watches to the value of some thousand roubles. He pushed the work of his colonists into repute throughout the world, and was justified in saying to the Duke of Richelieu, "Give me a fair chance, and I am the man to build a city."

Though everywhere maligned as an infidel and a scoffer, his life was one long act of benevolence. The watches of Ferney became known as those of Geneva. "Fifteen years ago," said a visitor, "there were barely at Ferney three or four cottages and forty inhabitants; now it is astonishing to see a numerous and civilised colony, a theatre, and more than a hundred pretty houses." "His charities," says General Hamley, "were munificent. When the Order of Jesuits was suppressed he took one of the body, Father Adam, into his house, and made him his almoner, a post which was far from being a sinecure." Hearing that Mademoiselle Corneille, the grandniece of the poet, was in poverty, Voltaire, in the most delicate manner, invited her to his house, treated her as a relation, and gave her an education suitable to her descent. "It is," he said, "the duty of an old soldier to be useful to the daughter of his general." That she might not feel under personal obligation, he devoted to her dowry the profits of his _Commentaries on Corneille_.

"A description is given of him in his last days at Ferney, seated under a vine, on the occasion of a _fete_, and receiving the congratulations and complimentary gifts of his tenantry and neighbors, when a young lady, whom he had adopted, brought him in a basket a pair of white doves with pink beaks, as her offering. He afterwards entertained about 200 guests at a splendid repast, followed by illuminations, songs, and dances, and was himself so carried away in an access of gaiety as to throw his hat into the air. But his merriment ended in a tempest of wrath; for learning, in the course of the evening, that the two doves which had figured so prettily in the _fete_ had been killed for the table, his indignation at the stolid cruelty which could shed the blood of the creatures they had all just admired and caressed, knew no bounds."

Diderot, who shares with Voltaire the glory of being the intellectual landmark of last century, and who equalled him as an artist and excelled him as a philosopher, only met Voltaire a little before his death. The fame of Voltaire's wealth had kept him from Ferney. Speaking of Voltaire in old age, Diderot says: "He is like one of those old haunted castles, which are falling into ruins in every part; but you easily perceive that it is inhabited by some ancient magician." Diderot was the better critic, and controverted the patriarch as to the merits of Shakespeare, whom he compared to the statue of Saint Christopher at Notre Dame--unshapely and rude; but: such a colossus that ordinary petty men could pass between his legs without touching him.

Late in life, Voltaire adopted Reine Philiberte de Vericourt, a young girl of noble but poor family, whom he had rescued from a convent life, installed in his own house, and married to the Marquis de Villette. Her pet name was _Belle et Bonne_, and no one had more to do with the happiness of the last years of Voltaire than she. She watched by the dying Voltaire's bedside, and Lady Morgan thus records her report: "To his last moment everything he said and did breathed the benevolence and goodness of his character. All announced in him tranquility, peace, resignation; except a little moment of ill-humor which he showed to the _cure_ of St. Sulpice when he begged him to withdraw, and said, 'Let me die in peace.'"

Voltaire himself wrote to Mme. du Deffand: "They say sometimes of a man, 'He died like a dog'; but, truly, a dog is very happy to die without all the ceremony with which they persecute the last moments of our lives. If they had a little charity for us, they would let us die without saying anything about it. The worst is that we are then surrounded by hypocrites, who worry us to make us think as they do not in the least think; or else by imbeciles, who desire us to be as stupid as they are. All this is very disgusting. The only pleasure of life at Geneva is that people can die there as they like; many worthy persons summon no priest at all. People kill themselves if they please, without any one objecting; or they await the last moment, and no one troubles them about it."

Under suffering, age, and impending death, Voltaire's bearing, as Carlyle acknowledges, "one must say is rather beautiful." Voltaire had all his life "enjoyed" bad health. He had always a feeble constitution, and was a confirmed invalid for the greater part of his life, suffering from bladder disorder, and a variety of other diseases that would have soon finished an ordinary man. We may say he was sustained by his work, which was ever gay, even when most pessimistic. "My eyes are as red as a drunkard's," he writes, "and I have not the honor to be one." His wit lasted in old age. A visitor to Ferney, hearing him praise Haller enthusiastically, told him that Haller did not do him equal justice. "Ah," said Voltaire, lightly, "perhaps we are both mistaken." To Bailly, the astronomer, he wrote, at the age of eighty-one: "A hundred thanks for the book of medicine which you sent me, together with your own [_History of Ancient Astronomy_], when I was very unwell. I have not opened the first. The second I have read and feel much better." He kept himself at work with coffee. His interest was ever in his work. At the very last, the new dictionary he had proposed to the Academy was on his mind; it was not proceeding as rapidly as his indefatigable spirit desired. "J'ai fait un pen de bien; c'est mon meilleur ouvrage"--"I have done a little good; that is my best work," was one of his latest utterances.

His physicians gave their opinion that he might have lived even longer than he did had he not been lured to Paris by his niece (unprepossessing Madame Denis) to superintend the production of his last tragedy _Irene_. Asked at the barrier if there was anything contraband in the carriage, he replied, "Only myself." On entering Paris he received a shock in the news that his friend Le Kain, the actor, had been buried the day before. He was visited by Benjamin Franklin, who brought his grandson, whom they desired to kneel for the patriarch's blessing. Pronouncing in English the words, "God, Liberty, Toleration"--"this," said Voltaire, "is the most suitable benediction for the grandson of Franklin." Poems, addresses and deputations came thick upon him, and his hotel was thronged with visitors of rank and eminence. The popular voice hailed the aged patriarch, especially as the defender of Calas, the apostle of universal toleration; and this title was more gratifying to him than any other.

In one house where Voltaire called on his last visit to Paris, the mistress reproached him for the obstinacy with which, in extreme old age (over eighty-three), he continued to assail the Church and its beliefs. "Be moderate and generous," said she, "after the victory. What can you fear now from such adversaries? The fanatics are prostrate (_a terre_). They can no longer injure. Their reign is over." Voltaire replied: "You are in error, madame; it is a fire that is covered but not extinguished. Those fanatics, those Tartuffes, are mad dogs. They are muzzled, but they have not lost their teeth. It is true they bite no more; but on the first opportunity, if their teeth are not drawn, you will see if they will not bite." All that one man could do was done by Voltaire. More than any other, he helped to muzzle the mad dog of religious intolerance, lassoing it dexterously with his finespun silken thread, since replaced by a stronger cord. But the beast even yet is not dead; its teeth are not all drawn. Give it a chance and it will still bite. What we have to thank Voltaire for is, that he has left works which, as he himself said, are "scissors and files to file the teeth and pare the talons of the monsters."

Voltaire was, as he said, stifled in roses. He sat up at night perfecting _Irene_, and his unwearied activity induced him at his great age to begin a Dictionary upon a novel plan which he prevailed upon the French Academy to take up. At the performance of his tragedy he was crowned with laurel in his box, amid the plaudits of the audience. To keep himself up under the excitement, he exceeded even his usual excess of coffee. These labors and dissipation brought on spitting of blood, and sleeplessness, to obviate which he took opium. Condorcet says the servant mistook one of the doses, which threw him into a state of lethargy, from which he never recovered. He lingered for some time, but at length expired on the 30th of May, 1778, in his eighty-fourth year.

Of course lying tales of dying horrors were floated, and disbelieved in by all who knew him. He wished to rest in his own churchyard, and let the _abbe_ Gaultier and the _cure_ de St. Sulpice squabble as to who should have, the honor of his conversion. His secretary, being alone with him, begged him to state what his view continued to be when he believed himself dying; and received this written declaration: "I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, detesting superstition"--"Je meurs eti adorant dieu, en aimant mes amis, en ne baissant pas mes ennemis, de testant superstition." This dying declaration may be seen at the _Bibliotheque Nationale_, Paris (Fr. 11,460), written, signed and dated by him in a still firm hand, February, 1778.

Into the stories told of Voltaire's dying moments and many similar legends, my colleague, Mr. G. W. Foote, has fully entered in his _Infidel Deathbeds_. He quotes the following extract from a letter by Dr. Burard, who, as assistant physician, was constantly about Voltaire in his last moments:

"I feel happy in being able, while paying homage to truth, to destroy the effect of the lying stories which have been told respecting the last moments of Mons. de Voltaire. I was, by office, one of those who were appointed to watch the whole progress of his illness, with MM. Tron-chin, Lorry, and Try, his medical attendants. I never left him for an instant during his last moments, and I can certify that we invariably observed in him the same strength of character, though his disease was necessarily attended with horrible pain. (Here follow the details of his case.) We positively forbade him to speak, in order to prevent the increase of a spitting of blood, with which he was attacked; still he continued to communicate with us by means of little cards, on which he wrote his questions; we replied to him verbally, and if he was not satisfied, he always made his observations to us in writing. He therefore retained his faculties up to the last moment, and the fooleries which have been attributed to him are deserving of the greatest contempt. It could not even be said that such or such person had related any circnmstance of his death, as being witness to it; for at the last, admission to his chamber was forbidden to any person. Those who came to obtain intelligence respecting the patient, waited in the saloon, and other apartments at hand. The proposition, therefore, which has been put in the mouth of Marshal Richelieu is as unfounded as the rest.

"Paris, April 3rd, 1819.

"(Signed) Burard."

The actual facts are thus told by Mr. Parton: "Ten minutes before he breathed his last he roused from his slumber, took the hand of his valet, pressed it, and said to him: 'Adieu, my dear Morand; I am dying.' These were his last words."

D'Alembert, in a letter to Frederick, written after Voltaire's death, thus recorded the impression made on him by the dying man. Having described the stupefying effects of the opium which left his head clear only for brief intervals, D'Alembert, who saw him during one of them, proceeds: "He recognised me and even spoke to me some friendly words. But the moment after he fell back into his state of stupor, for he was almost always dying. He awoke only to complain and to say 'he had come to Paris to die.'" Throughout his illness, D'Alembert adds, "he exhibited, to the extent which his condition permitted, much tranquility of mind, although he seemed to regret life. I saw him again the day before his death, and to some friendly words of mine he replied, pressing my hand, 'You are my consolation.'"

It is certain the heads of the French Church did not consider that Voltaire had made a death-bed conversion, for they refused his body burial in consecrated ground. They had anathematised him when alive and proscribed him when dead. He had prepared a tomb for himself under the sky, where he had grown old and done good, but he was cheated out of his rights, and it was decided that he who built the church had no right to have his bones bleach in the cemetery. Letters were sent to the Bishop of Annecy, in whose diocese Ferney was, enjoining him to prohibit the _cure_ thereof from giving Voltaire's remains Christian burial in his own churchyard. Voltaire's nephew, the _abbe_ Mignot, held a ruined abbey at Scillieres, in Champagne, a hundred miles or so from Paris; and here the body was secretly hurried off and interred. On the very day of interment the Bishop of the diocese wrote to the Prior forbidding the burial. There was even some talk of having the body exhumed, and the clergy clamored for the expulsion of the Prior. Grimm relates that "the players were forbidden to act M. de Voltaire's pieces till further orders, the editors of the public papers to speak of his death in any terms, either favorable or unfavorable, and the preceptors of the colleges to suffer any of their scholars to learn his verses."

In 1791, by a decree of the National Assembly and amid the acclamation of the people, his body was brought and placed in the Pantheon, where it rested beside that of Rousseau. At the Restoration in 1814 some bigoted Royalist stole away the bones, which were thrown into a hole with lime poured on them.

In person Voltaire was always slim, with the long head which, Carlyle says, "is the best sign of intelligence." His thinness is commemorated by the poor but well-known epigram attributed to Young, and identifying him at once with "Satan, Death, and Sin." In old age he became a mere skeleton, with eyes of great brilliancy peering beneath his wig. He was sober and temperate save in coffee, which he drank as inveterately as Johnson did tea. Conversation and literature were, as with Johnson, the gods of his idolatry.

HIS CHARACTER AND SERVICES

Bolingbroke finely said of Marlborough: "He was so great a man that I forget his errors." One can as justly say the same of Voltaire. I have scant sympathy with those who, dealing with great men, seek every opportunity of bringing them down to the common level. Voltaire was by no means a faultless character. He was far indeed from being an immaculate hero: he had the failings of his age and of his training. But they form no essential part of his work. How much has been made of the coarseness and immorality of Luther by men like Father Anderdon! All men have the defects of their qualities. Condorcet, in his _Life of Voltaire_, has placed on record this just criticism: "The happy qualities of Voltaire were often obscured and distorted by a natural mobility, aggravated by the habit of writing tragedies. He passed in a moment from anger to sympathetic emotion; from indignation to pleasantry. His passions, naturally violent, sometimes transported him too far; and his excessive mobility deprived him of the advantages ordinarily attached to passionate tempers--firmness in conduct--courage which no terrors can withhold from action, and which no dangers, anticipated beforehand, can shake by their actual presence. Voltaire has often been seen to expose himself rashly to the storm--seldom to meet it with fortitude. These alternations of audacity and weakness have often afflicted his friends, and prepared unworthy triumphs for his envenomed enemies."

He was too ready to lash the curs who barked at his heels, thereby stimulating them to further noise. Scandalous ex-Jesuit Desfontaines, L'Ane de Mirepoix, Thersites Freron and the rest, would be forgotten had he not condescended to apply the whip. Voltaire was always something of a spoilt child, over-sensitive to every reproach. His petulance impelled him to absurd displays of weakness and frenzy, which he was the first to regret. He was generous even to his enemies when they were in trouble. The weaknesses of Voltaire were, like his smile, on the surface, but there was a great human heart beating beneath.

The restlessness of Voltaire has been contrasted with the repose of Goethe, and Gallic fury with calm Teutonic strength. But which of the two men did most for humanity? Voltaire might have been as calm as Goethe had he been indifferent to everything but his own culture and comfort. No! he loved the fight. When the battle of freedom raged, there was he in the thick of it, considering not his reputation, but what he could do to crush the infamous. An enemy said of him: "He is the first man in the world at writing down what other people have thought." Mr. Morley justly considers this high and sufficient praise.

The life of a writer was defined by Pope as "a warfare upon earth." Never was this truer than in the case of Voltaire, who himself said: "_La vie a'un homme de lettres est un combat perpetuel et on meurt les armes a la main._" He was ever in the midst of the fight, and usually alone and surrounded by enemies. And his unfailing resources not merely kept them at bay, but compelled their surrender of an immense territory. His was a life of creation and contest. In the war against despotism and Christianity he achieved a new kingship of public opinion, and proved that the pen was indeed mightier than the sword.

Heine said: "We should forgive our enemies--but not until they are hung." Voltaire forgave his when he had gibbeted them in his writings. People who find it difficult to understand his bitterness against "L'Infame" should remember the revolting cruelty of which religious bigotry was still capable in his day. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the prolonged horrors of the Thirty Years' War, and the Massacre of St. Bartholomew vibrated still. Condorcet wrote: "The blood of many millions of men, massacred in the name of God, still steams up to heaven around us. The earth on which we tread is everywhere covered with the bones of the victims of barbarous intolerance." His rhetoric expressed the feeling of a generation who knew by experience the evils of religious bigotry and fanaticism.

It is as a champion of Freethought that Voltaire deserves chiefly to be remembered. In that capacity I can only find words of praise. Complaints of his flippancy, his _persiflage_, his ridicule, his scurrility, his etc., came, and still come, from the enemy, and show that his blows told and tell. If he did not crush the infamous he at least crippled it. No doubt, under different circumstances,

Voltaire would have fought differently. But he would never have thought of treating atrocities without indignation, or absurdities without ridicule. Gravity is a part of the game of imposture, and there is nothing the hypocrites and humbugs resent so much as having their solemn pretensions laughed at. .

He knew the subtle power of ridicule. It was the most effective weapon, not only for the time and the nation in which he wrote, but for our time also. His blows were all dealt with grace and agility; his pills were sugar-coated. Grimm well said of him: "He makes arrows of every kind of wood, brilliant and rapid in their flight, but with a keen, unerring point. Under his sparkling pen, erudition ceases to be ponderous and becomes full of life. If he cannot sweep the grand chords of the lyre, he can j strike on golden medals his favorite maxims, and is j irreproachable in the lighter order of poetry." But, I contend, there was a fundamental earnestness in his character; he was the apostle of plain every-day common sense and good feeling.

Voltaire is judged by the character which distinguishes him from other writers, his light touch and superficial raillery. Because he is _par excellence_ a _persifleur_, he is set down as merely a _persifleur_. Never was there a greater mistake. It is forgotten that he did not write witty tales and squibs only; that he made France acquainted with the philosophy of Locke and the science of Newton; that he wrote the _Age of Louis XIV._, the _History of the Parliament of Paris_, and the _Essay on Manners_ (which revived the historic method), and that he wrote more than twenty tragedies which transformed the French theatre. Voltaire was no mere mocker: his _manner_ was that of a _persifleur_, but his matter was as solid as that of any theologian.

M. Louis de Brouckere, of the University of Brussels, justly claims for Voltaire a double share in the formation of modern culture and the development of modern science. He contributed to it directly by his personal works, and indirectly by antagonising the forces retarding knowledge and creating an intellectual environment eminently favorable to the formation of synthetic knowledge, and a new public opinion common to the intellectual _elite_ of Europe.

Voltaire knew how to marshal against reigning prejudices and errors all the resources of vast learning and an incomparable wit; but no one more clearly than he saw that the doctrines he destroyed must be replaced by others, that humanity cannot get along without a body of common beliefs; and he contributed more than any one else to the elaboration of the new intellectual code by uniting and harmonising the efforts of special _savants_ and isolated thinkers, by giving them a clear consciousness that what they aimed at was the same thing and common to them all.

He never slackened his efforts to appease the quarrels which broke out in the camp of the philosophers, to group all his _spiritual brothers_ in one compact bundle, capable of joint action, to unite them in a laic _church_ which could be utilised to oppose existing churches. The words I here italicise were underlined by him; they are found on every page of his correspondence, and he loses no opportunity to reiterate them and explain their meaning precisely.

If the publication of the _Encyclopoedia_ was the work of Diderot, the union of the group of men who rendered that publication possible was, in great measure, the work of Voltaire. If Condorcet wrote just before his death his immortal _Sketch_, Voltaire took a preponderating part in the creation of the intellectual atmosphere in which Condorcet lived and could develop his genius.

Voltaire was assuredly not so coarse as Luther, nor even as his contemporary Warburton. He carried lighter guns than Luther, but was more alert and equally persistent. His war against superstition and intolerance was life-long. Luther smote powerful blows at the church with a bludgeon; Voltaire made delicate passes with a rapier. Catholics often declaim against the coarseness of the monk-trained Protestant champion. They also protest against the trickery of the Jesuit-trained Freethinker. It is sufficient to say Luther could not have done his work had he not been coarse. Nor could Voltaire have done his had he not been a tricksy spirit. Judged by his work, he was one of the best of men, because he did most good to his fellows, and because in his heart was the most burning love of truth, of justice and toleration. In the words of Lecky, he did "more to destroy the greatest of human curses than any other of the sons of men." His numerous volumes are the fruit and exposition of a spirit of encyclopaedic curiosity. He assimilated all the thought and learning of his time, and brought to bear on it a wit and common sense that was all his own.

Voltaire is never so passionately in earnest as when he speaks against cruelty and oppression. Every sentence quivers with humanity. He denounces war as no "moralist for hire" in a pulpit has ever done, as a scourge of the poor, the weak, and the helpless, to whom he is ever tender. Whenever he sees tyranny or injustice, he attacks it. He wrote against torture when its employment was an established principle of law. He denounced duelling when that form of murder was the chief feature of the code of honor. He waged warfare upon war when, it was considered man's highest glory.

His attacks on the judicial iniquity of torture--so often callously employed on those supposed instruments of Satan, heretics and witches--were incessant, and it was owing to his influence that the practice was abolished in France by Turgot, his friend, as it had been in Prussia by Frederick, and in Russia by Catherine, his disciples. He advocated the abolition of mutilation, and all forms of cruelty in punishment. He satirised the folly of punishing murder and robbery by the same capital penalty, and thus making assassination the interest of the thief; the barbarity of confiscating the property of children for the crime of the father; and the intricacies and consequent injustice of legal methods. He sought to abolish the sale of offices, to equalise taxation, and to restrict the power of priests to prescribe degrading penances and excessive abstinences. He wrote with fervor against the remnants of serfdom, and defended the rights of the serfs in the Jura against their monastic oppressors. Mr. Lecky says: "His keen and luminous intellect judged with admirable precision most of the popular delusions of his time. He exposed with great force the common error which confounds all wealth with the precious metals. He wrote against sumptuary laws. He refuted Rousseau's doctrine of the evil of all luxury."

Voltaire's work went deeper than political reform. He dealt with ideas, not institutions. 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 pass 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 constitution. 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 craftsmanship, 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 superstition.

Much, of course, of Voltaire's multitudinous 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, fortitude, 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, Titan-like, on daring doubts to pile
Thoughts which should call down thunder, and the flame
Of Heaven again assail'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 prone,--
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 Hell,
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 astonishing 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, rectitude, 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 pass 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 amusement 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 assume, 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 Superstition! _That_ horrid incubus, which dwelt in darkness, shunning the light, is passing away; with all its racks and poison chalices, and foul sleeping-draughts, is passing 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. His voice is mighty among the ages."

Dr. D. F. Strauss wrote: "Voltaire's historical significance has been illustrated by the observation of Goethe that, as in families whose existence has been of long duration, Nature sometimes at length produces an individual who sums up in himself the collective qualities of all his ancestors, so it happens also with nations, whose collective merits (and demerits) sometimes appear epitomised in one individual person. Thus in Louis XIV. stood forth the highest figure of a French monarch. Thus, in Voltaire, the highest conceivable and congenial representative of French authorship. We may extend the observation farther, if, instead of the French nation only, we take into view the whole European generation on which Voltaire's influence was exercised. From this point of view we may call Voltaire emphatically the representative writer of the eighteenth century, as Goethe called him, in the highest sense, the representative writer of France."

Victor Hugo, in the magnificent oration which he pronounced on the centenary of Voltaire's death, said: "Voltaire waged the splendid kind of warfare, the war of one alone against all--that is to say, the grand warfare; the war of thought against matter; the war of reason against prejudice; the war of the just against the unjust; the war of the oppressed against the oppressor; the war of goodness; the war of kindness. He had the tenderness of a woman and the wrath of a hero. He was a great mind and an immense heart. He conquered the old code and the old dogma. He conquered the feudal lord, the Gothic judge, the Roman priest. He raised the populace to the dignity of people. He taught, pacified, and civilised. He fought for Sirven and Montbailly, as for Calas and La Barre. He accepted all the menaces, all the persecutions, calumny, and exile. He was indefatigable and immovable. He conquered violence by a smile, despotism by sarcasm, infallibility by irony, obstinacy by perseverance, ignorance by truth."

Buckle, in his _History of Civilisation_ (vol. ii., p. 304) says: "It would be impossible to relate all the original remarks of Voltaire, which, when he made them, were attacked as dangerous paradoxes, and are now valued as sober truths. He was the first historian who recommended universal freedom of trade; and although he expresses himself with great caution, still, the mere announcement of the idea is a popular history forms an epoch in the progress of the French mind. He is the originator of that important distinction between the increase of population and the increase of food, to which political economy has been greatly indebted, a principle adopted several years later by Townsend, and then used by Malthus as the basis of his celebrated work. He has, moreover, the merit of being the first who dispelled the childish admiration with which the Middle Ages had been hitherto regarded. In his works the Middle Ages are for the first time represented as what they really were--a period of ignorance, ferocity, and licentiousness; a period when injuries were unredressed, crime unpunished, and superstition unrebuked." Again (page 308): "No one reasoned more closely than Voltaire when reasoning suited his purpose. But he had to deal with men impervious to argument; men whose inordinate reverence for antiquity had only left them two ideas, namely, that everything old is right, and that everything new is wrong. To argue against these opinions would be idle indeed; the only other resource was to make them ridiculous, and weaken their influence by holding up their authors to contempt. This was one of the tasks Voltaire set himself to perform; and he did it well. He therefore used ridicule, not as the test of truth, but as the scourge of folly. And with such effect was the punishment administered that not only did the pedants and theologians of his own time wince under the lash, but even their successors feel their ears tingle when they read his biting words; and they revenge themselves by reviling the memory of the great writer whose works are as a thorn in their side, and whose very name they hold in undisguised abhorrence."

Mr. Lecky, in his _History of Rationalism in Europe_ (vol. ii., p. 66) says: "Voltaire was at all times the unflinching opponent of persecution. No matter how powerful was the persecutor, no matter how insignificant was the victim, the same scathing eloquence was launched against the crime, and the indignation of Europe was soon concentrated upon the oppressor. The fearful storm of sarcasm and invective that avenged the murder of Calas, the magnificent dream in the _Philosophical Dictionary_ reviewing the history of persecution from the slaughtered Canaanites to the latest victim who had perished at the stake, the indelible stigma branded upon the persecutors of every age and of every creed, all attested the intense and passionate earnestness with which Voltaire addressed himself to his task. On other subjects a jest or a caprice could often turn him aside. When attacking intolerance he employed, indeed, every weapon; but he employed them all with the concentrated energy of a profound conviction. His success was equal to his zeal; the spirit of intolerance sank blasted beneath his genius. Wherever his influence passed, the arm of the inquisitor was palsied, the chain of the captive riven, the prison door flung open. Beneath his withering irony, persecution appeared not only criminal but loathsome, and since his time it has ever shrunk from observation and masked its features under other names. He died, leaving a reputation that is indeed far from spotless, but having done more to destroy the greatest of human curses than any other of the sons of men."

Mr. Lecky, in his _History of England in the Eighteenth Century_ (v., 312), observes: "No previous writer can compare with him in the wideness and justness of his conceptions of history, and even now no historian can read without profit his essays on the subject. No one before had so strongly urged that history should not be treated as a collection of pictures or anecdotes relating to courts or battles, but should be made a record and explanation of the true development of nations, of the causes of their growth and decay, of their characteristic virtues and vices, of the changes that pass over their laws, customs, opinions, social and economical conditions, and over the relative importance and well-being of their different classes... (p. 315). Untiring industry, an extraordinary variety of interests and aptitudes, a judgment at once sound, moderate, and independent, a rare power of seizing in every subject the essential argument or facts, a disposition to take no old opinions on trust and to leave no new opinions unexamined, combined in him with the most extraordinary literary talent. Never, perhaps, was there an intellect at once so luminous, versatile, and flexible, which produced so much, which could deal with such a vast range of difficult subjects without being ever obscure, tangled, or dull."

Colonel Hamley wrote: "But after the winnowings of generations, a wide and deep repute still remains to him; nor will any diminution which it may have suffered be without compensation, for, with the fading of old prejudices, and with better knowledge, his name will be regarded with increased liking and respect. Yet it must not be supposed that he is here held up as a pattern man. He was, indeed, an infinitely better one than the religious bigots of that time. He believed, with far better effect on his practice than they could boast, in a Supreme Ruler. He was the untiring and eloquent advocate at the bar of the universe of the rights of humanity."

Mr. Swinburne has well expressed this characteristic. "Voltaire's great work," he says, "was to have done more than any other man on record to make the instinct of cruelty not only detestable, but ludicrous; and so to accomplish what the holiest and the wisest of saints and philosophers had failed to achieve: to attack the most hideous and pernicious of human vices with a more effective weapon than preaching and denunciation: to make tyrants and torturers look not merely horrible and hateful, but pitiful and ridiculous."

Edgar Quinet, in his lectures on the Church, says: "I watch for forty years the reign of one man who is himself the spiritual direction, not of his country, but of his age. From the corner of his chamber he governs the realm of mind. Everyday intellects are regulated by his; one word written by his hand traverses Europe. Princes love and kings fear him. Nations repeat the words that fall from his pen. Who exercises this incredible power which has nowhere been seen since the Middle Ages? Is he another Gregory VII? Is he a Pope? No--Voltaire."

And Lamartine, in similar strain, remarks: "If we judge of men by what they have _done_, then Voltaire is incontestibly the greatest writer of modern Europe. No one has caused, through the powerful influence of his genius alone and the perseverance of his will, so great a commotion in the minds of men. His pen aroused a sleeping world, and shook a far mightier empire than that of Charlemagne, the European empire of a theocracy. His genius was not _force_, but _light_. Heaven had destined him not to destroy, but to illuminate; and wherever he trod, light followed him, for Reason--which is light--had destined him to be, first her poet, then her apostle, and lastly her idol."

Mr. Alexander A. Knox, writing in the _Nineteenth Century_ (October 1882), says: "That the man's aspirations were in the main noble and honorable to humanity, I am sure. I am equally so that few men have exercised so great an influence upon their fellow creatures.... The wonderful old man! When he was past eighty years of age he set to work, like another Jeremy Bentham, to abolish the admission of hearsay evidence into French legal proceedings. But his great work was that by his wit and irony he broke down the _principle of authority_ which had been so foully abused in France. Would the most strictly religious man wish to see religion as it was in France in the eighteenth century? Would the greatest stickler for authority wish to find a country governed as France was governed in the days of Voltaire?"

Du Bois-Reymond, the eminent German scientist, remarks: "Voltaire is so little to us at present because the things he fought for, 'toleration, spiritual freedom, human dignity, justice,' have become, as it were, the air we breathe, and do not think of except when we are deprived of it."

Col. R. G. Ingersoll, in his fine _Oration on Voltaire_, observes: "Voltaire was perfectly equipped for his work. A perfect master of the French language, knowing all its moods, tenses, and declinations--in fact and in feeling playing upon it as skilfully as Paganini on his violin, finding expression for every thought and fancy, writing on the most serious subjects with the gaiety of a harlequin, plucking jests from the mouth of death, graceful as the waving of willows, dealing in double meanings that covered the asp with flowers and flattery, master of satire and compliment, mingling them often in the same line, always interested himself, therefore interesting others, handling thoughts, questions, subjects as a juggler does balls, keeping them in the air with perfect ease, dressing old words in new meanings, charming, grotesque, pathetic, mingling mirth with tears, wit and wisdom, and sometimes wickedness, logic and laughter. With a woman's instinct, knowing the sensitive nerves--just where to touch--hating arrogance of place, the stupidity, of the solemn, snatching masks from priest and king, knowing the springs of action and ambition's ends, perfectly familiar with the great world, the intimate of kings and their favorites, sympathising with the oppressed and imprisoned, with the unfortunate and poor, hating tyranny, despising superstition, and loving liberty with all his heart. Such was Voltaire, writing _OEdipus_ at seventeen, _Irene_ at eighty-three, and crowding between these two tragedies the accomplishment of a thousand lives."

The Right Hon. John Morley testifies: "Voltaire was the very eye of modern 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 four-score volumes which he wrote are the monument, as they were 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. 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. 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." We may fitly conclude with Browning's incisive lines in _The Two Poets of Croisie_:--

_"Ay, sharpest, shrewdest steel that ever stabbed_

_To death Imposture through the armour joints."_

SELECTIONS FROM VOLTAIRE'S WORKS

History

The world is old, but history is of yesterday.--_Melanges Historiques_.

If you would put to profit the present time, one must not spend his life in propagating ancient fables.--_Ibid_.

A mature man who has serious business does not repeat the tales of his nurse.--_Ibid_.

Search through all nations and you will not find one whose history does not begin with stories worthy of the Four Sons of Aymon and of Robert the Devil.--_Politique et Legislation._

Ancient histories are enigmas proposed by antiquity to posterity, which understands them not--_Dict. Phil._ (Art. "Histoire").

A real fact is of more value than a hundred antitheses.--_Melanges Historiques_.