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 Fréron 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 à'un homme de lettres est un combat perpétuel et on meurt les armes à 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'Infàme” 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 élite 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 Encyclop?dia 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 atmosp............