Voltaire

t like the names of the great decisive movements in the European advance, like the Revival of Learning, or the Reformati

ep 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

o 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 itsel

ntless orthodox sects his name is the symbol for the prevailing of the gates of hell. Erudition figures him as shallow and a trifler; culture condemns him for pushing his hatred of spiritual falsehood much too seriously; Christian charity feels constrained to unmask a demon from the depths of the pit. The plain men of the earth, who are apt to measure the merits of a philosopher by the strength of his sympathy with existing sources of comfort, would generally approve the saying of Dr. Johnson, that he would sooner sign a sentence for Rousseau's transportation than that of any felon who had gone from the Old Bailey these many years, and that the difference between him and Voltaire was so

e 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

arning. 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 th

e, 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

hat 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 appre

ay 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, critic

uld 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 Ch

ions that are not altogether so useful as some might think possible; his cordiality towards progress and improvement in a general way, and his coldness or antipathy to each progressive proposal in particular; his pygmy hope that life will one day become somewhat better, punily shivering by the side of his gigantic conviction that it might well be infinitely worse. To Voltaire, far different from this, an irrational prejudice was not the object of a polite cold

on to be the serving drudge of superstition or social usage. The system which threw obstacles into the way of publishing an exposition of Newton's discoveries and ideas was as mischievous and hateful to him, as the darker bigotry which broke Calas on the wheel because he was a Protestant. To check the energetic discovery and wide propagation of scientific truth, he rightly held to be at least as destructive in the long run to the common weal,

towards a black man, or than the conception of pity exists in the mind of a sportsman towards his prey. These were ages of social cruelty, as they were ages of intellectual repression. The debt of each to his neighbour was as little felt, as the debt of all to the common faculties and intelligence. Men owed nothing to man, but everything to the gods. All the social feeling and intellectual effort and human energizing which had made the high idea of God possible and real, seemed to have expended themselves in a creation which instantly swallowed them up and obl

and humanity were but a single word, and love of truth and passion for justice but one emotion. None of the famous men who have fought that they themselves might think freely and speak truly, have ever seen more clearly that the fundamental aim of the contest was that others might live happily. Who has not been touched by that admirable word of his, of the three years in which he laboured without remission for justice to the widow and descendants of Calas: 'Dur

n king at Aix-la-Chapelle, he is supposed to have hinted to Cardinal Fleury that to have written epic and drama does not disqualify a man for serving his king and country on the busy fields of affairs. The following year, after Fleury's death, when French fortunes in the war of the Austrian succession were near their lowest, Voltaire's own idea that he might be useful from his intimacy with Frederick, seems to have

remote garden, constructing past, present, and future, out of his own consciousness, is not qualified either to lead mankind safely, or to think on the course of human affairs correctly. Every page of Voltaire has the bracing air of the life of the world in it, and the instinct which led him to seek the society of the conspicuous actors on the great scene was essentially a right one. The book-writer takes good advantage of his opportunity to assure men expressly or by implication that he is their true king, and that the sacred bard is a mightier man than his hero. Voltaire knew better. Though himself perhaps the most puissant man of letters that ever lived, he rated literature as it ought to be rated below action, not because written speech is less of a force, but because the speculation and criticism of the literature that substantially influences the world, make far less demand than the actual conduct of great affairs on qualities which are not rare in detail, but are amazingly rar

vely pronounce any circumstance whatever an accident, yet history abounds with circumstances which in our present ignorance of the causes of things are as if they were accidents. In this respect history is neither better nor worse than the latest explanation of the origin and order of the world of organised matter. Here too we are landed in the final resort at what is neither more nor less than an accident. Natural selection, or the survival of the fittest in the universal struggle for existence, is now held by the most competent inquirers to be the principal method to which we owe the extinction, preservation, and distribution of organic forms on the earth. But the appearance both of the forms that conquer and of those that perish still remains a secret, and to science an accident and a secret are virtually and provisionally the same thing. In a word, there is an unknown element at the bottom of the varieties of creation, whether we agree to call that element a volition of a supernatural being, or an undiscovered set of facts in embryology. So in history the Roman or Italo-Hellenic empire, rising when it did, was the salvation of the West, and yet the appearance at the moment when anarchy threatened rapidly to dissolve the Roman state, of a man with the power of conceiving the best design for the new structure, seems to partake as much of the nature of chance, as the non-appearance of men with similar vision and power in equally momentous crises, earlier and later. The rise of a

ble. This combination of physical and mental conditions so amazingly favourable to the spread of the Voltairean ideas, was a circumstance independent of the state of the surrounding atmosphere, and was what in the phraseology of pr?scientific times might well have been called providential. If Voltaire had seen all that he saw, and yet bee

m order, cannot attune progress to the stately and harmonious march which would best please

own wants, and have dumb feeling of their own better aspirations. Their thoughts move in the obscurity of things quick but unborn, and by instinct they push upwards in whatever direction the darkness seems breaking. They are not critics nor analysts, but when the time is ripening they never fail to know the word of freedom and of truth, with whatever imperfections it may chance to be

editions of his works, a number probably unparalleled in the case of any author within the same limits of time. Besides being one of the most voluminous book-writers, he is one of the cheapest. We can buy one of Voltaire's books for a few halfpence, and the keepers of the cheap stalls in the cheap quarters of London and Paris will tell you that this is not

uide society, because it was equally repugnant to the intellectual perceptions and the moral sense, the knowledge and the feelings, of the best and most active-minded persons of the time. The same sort of consideration explains and vindicates the enormous power of Voltaire. France had outgrown the system that had brought her through the middle ages. The further development of her national life was fatally hindered by the tight bonds of an old order, which clung

jects for which there was no patronage, that is to say the subjects which could add nothing to the splendour and dignity of the church and the pageantry of the court, were virtually repressed. This ought not to blind us to the real loftiness and magnanimity of the best or earlier part of the age of Lewis XIV. It has been said that the best title of Lewis XIV. to the recollection of posterity is the protection he extended to Molière; and one reason why this was so meritorious is that Molière's work had a markedly critical character, in reference both to the devout and to the courtier. The fact of this, undoubtedly the most durable work of that time, containing critical quality, is not of importance in reference to the generally fixed or positive aspect of the age. F

s Détail de la France; from the pulpit rhetorician's courtly reminders that even majesty must die, to Vauban's pity for the misery of the common people;3 from Corneille and Racine to La Bruyère's picture of 'certain wild animals, male and female, scattered over the fields, black, livid, all burnt by the sun, bound to the earth that they dig and work with unconquerable pertinacity; they have a sort of articulate voice, and when they rise on their feet, they show a human face, and, in fact, are m

ly the grace and pomp, but also the social utility of spiritual and political absolutism passed obviously away. Spiritual absolutism was unable to maintain even a decent semblance of unity and theological order. Political absolutism by its material costliness, its augmenting tendency to repress the application of individual energy and thought to public concerns, and its pursuit of a policy in Europe which was futile and essentially meaningless as to its ends, and disastrous and incapable in its choice of means, was rapidly exhausting the resources of national well-being and viciously severing the very tap-root of national life. To bring reason into an atmosphere so charged, was, as the old figure goes, to admit air to the chamber of the mummy. And reason was exactly what Voltaire brought; too narro

d the critic had each pressed forward on the path of examination, and had each insisted on finding grounds for belief, or else showing the absence of such grounds with a fatal distinctness that made belief impossible. Descartes was constructive, and was bent on reconciling the acceptance of a certain set of ideas as to the relations between man and the universe, and as to the mode and composition of the universe, with the logical reason. Bayle, whose antecedents and environment were Protestant, was careless to replace, but careful to have evidence for whatever was allowed to remain. No parallel nor hint of equality is here intended betwee

ith sceptical ideas as enemies must go before their reception as friends and deliverers. They have perhaps never gained an effective hold in any community, until they have found allies in the hostile camp of official orthodoxy, and so long as that orthodoxy was able to afford them a vigorous social resistance. Voltaire's universal talents made one of the most powerful instruments for conveying these bold and inquisitive

those who were least or not at all affected by its dogma. It is more certain that Voltaire by the extraordinary force of his personality gave a peculiar tone and life even to those who adhered most staunchly to the ancient ordering. The champions of authority were driven to defend their cause by the unusual weapons of rationality; and if Voltaire had never written, authority would never, for instance, have found such a soldier on her side as that most able and eminent of reactionaries, Joseph de Maistre. In reply to the favourite assertion of the apologists of Catholicism, that whatever good side its assailants

of vehement action of this sort, they seem for a while to insist on nothing less than the extirpation of those antagonistic parts which are seen to have brought life into such debasement. With this stern anger and resolve in their hearts, men have no mind to refine, explain, or moderate, and they are forced by one of the strangest instincts of our constitution into some system of mortification, which may seem to clear the soul of the taint of surrounding grossness. In such exalted

believe? Offer only things that are reasonable, and all the world will answer, We knew as much as that. But enjoin things that are hard, impracticable; paint the deity as ever armed with the thunder; make blood run before the altars; and you will win the multitude's ear, and everybody will say of you, He must be right, or he would not so boldly proclaim things so marvellous.'5 Voltaire'

tal mischief. Are our opinions true, provably answering to the facts of the case, consistent with one another; is our intelligence radiant with genuine light and knowledge; and are we bent more than all else on testing and improving and diffusing this knowledge and the instruments for

for granted as an indisputable starting-point that truth was an assured possession, went off on two different lines. Men of one cast of mind fell into doubt whether truth was a reality after all, and the discovery of it accessible to mankind. Thinkers of a different cast accepted this doctrine of the impotence of the human understanding to discover knowledge and prove truth, but they proceeded to the retrograde inference that therefore the ancient tradition of knowledge actually contains that approved truth, which had just been pronounced unattainable. This oblique mode of regainin

her systems. Every one who thinks that we have turned over the last leaf of the book of knowledge, whatever the inscription that he may find written upon it, naturally detests the whole spirit and impulse of one who felt all his life that he and his generation were the first band of men who had shaken off their chains, and ascended to the light of the sun and the contemplation of some portion of an inexhaustible universe of realities. Hence, the partisans of the Chri

an all but purely critical reserve, leaving reconstruction, its form, its modes, its epoch, for the fulness of time and maturity of effort to disclose. It has been the fatal quality of the genius of his countrymen, from Descartes down to Comte, to decline to rest on an uncompleted interpretation of experience, and to insist on a hasty supplement of unconcluded analysis by what is virtually an à priori synthesis. Voltaire deserves no special praise for this abstention from a premature reconstruction; for it probably was not so much the result of deliberate persuasion that we must wait on the time, as of an inability to conceive of need for a cultus and a firm ordering of our knowledge, as prime demands of human nature and essential conditions of stable progress. Whatever value we may set on this sage reserve, the fact that Voltaire had no scheme for replacing the scheme which he destroyed, accounts very amply for the disparagement of him by those who think almost any fabric of common and o

his influence was poured out a bitterness and moral temerity which is the worst blight that can fall upon the character either of a man or a generation: that while truth is relative and conditional, and while belief is only to be understood by those who have calmly done justice to the history of its origin and growth, Voltaire carelessly, unphilosophically, and maliciously, handled what had once possessed a relative truth, as if it had always been absolutely false, and what had sprung from the views and aspirations of the best men, as if it had had its root i

really not anything less momentous than the slow strangling of French civilisation. Though Voltaire's spirit may be little edifying to us, who after all partake of the freedom which he did so much to win, yet it is only just to remember what was the spirit of his foe, and that in so pestilent a presence a man of direct vision may well be eager to use such weapons as he finds to his hand. Let the scientific spirit move people to speak as it lists about Voltaire's want of respect for things held sacred, for the good deeds of holy men, for the sentiment and faith of thousands of the most worthy among his fellows. Still there are times when it may be very questionable whether, in the region of belief, one with power and with fervid honesty ought to spare the abominable city of the plain, just because it happens to shelter five righteous. There are times when the inhumanity of a system stands out so red and foul, when the burden of its iniquity weighs so heavy, and the contagion of its hypocrisy is so laden with mortal plague, that no awe of dilettante condemnation nor minute scruple as to the historic or the relative can stay the hand of the man whose direct sight and mo