CHAPTER V VOLTAIRE AND THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT A I. PARIS: EDIPE T Paris in 1742 Voltaire was coaching Mlle. Dumes nil to rise to tragic heights in a rehearsal of his play Mérope. She complained that she would have to have "the very devil" in her to simulate such passion as he required. “That is just it," answered Voltaire; “you must have the devil in you to succeed in any of the arts." 1 Even his critics and his enemies admitted that he himself met this requirement perfectly. "Il avait le diable au corps-he had the devil in his body," said Sainte-Beuve; 2 and De Maistre called him the man "into whose hands hell had given all its powers." 99 3 Unprepossessing, ugly, vain, flippant, obscene, unscrupulous, even at times dishonest,-Voltaire was a man with the faults of his time and place, missing hardly one. And yet this same Voltaire turns out to have been tirelessly kind, considerate, lavish of his energy and his purse, as sedulous in helping friends as in crushing enemies, able to kill with a stroke of his pen and yet disarmed by the first advance of conciliation;-so contradictory is man. But all these qualities, good and bad, were secondary, not of the essence of Voltaire; the astounding and basic thing in him was the inexhaustible fertility and brilliance of his mind. His works fill ninety-nine volumes, of which every page is sparkling and fruitful, though they range from subject to 1 Tallentyre, Life of Voltaire; third edition; p. 145. 2 Portraits of the Eighteenth Century; New York, 1905; vol. i, p. 196. 3 Brandes, Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature; vol. iii, p. 107. subject across the world as fitfully and bravely as in an encyclopedia. "My trade is to say what I think": 1 and what he thought was always worth saying, as what he said was always said incomparably well. If we do not read him now (though men like Anatole France have been formed to subtlety and wisdom by poring over his pages), it is because the theological battles which he fought for us no longer interest us intimately; we have passed on perhaps to other battle-fields, and are more absorbed with the economics of this life than with the geography of the next; the very thoroughness of Voltaire's victory over ecclesiasticism and superstition makes dead those issues which he found alive. Much of his fame, too, came of his inimitable conversation; but scripta manent, verba volant-written words remain, while spoken words fly away, the winged words of Voltaire with the rest. What is left to us is too much the flesh of Voltaire, too little the divine fire of his spirit. And yet, darkly as we see him through the glass of time, what a spirit!"sheer intelligence transmuting anger into fun, fire into light"; 2 "a creature of air and flame, the most excitable that ever lived, composed of more ethereal and more throbbing atoms than those of other men; there is none whose mental machinery is more delicate, nor whose equilibrium is at the same time more shifting and more exact." 3 Was he, perhaps, the greatest intellectual energy in all history? Certainly he worked harder, and accomplished more, than any other man of his epoch. "Not to be occupied, and not to exist, amount to the same thing," he said. “All people are good except those who are idle." His secretary said that he was a miser only of his time. "One must give one's self all the occupation one can to make life supportable in this world. . . . The further I advance in age, the more I find work necessary. It becomes in the long run the greatest of 1 Tallentyre, p. 32. 2 J. M. Robertson, Voltaire; London, 1922; p. 67. pleasures, and takes the place of the illusions of life." 1 "If you do not want to commit suicide always have something to do." 2 99 Suicide must have been forever tempting him, for he was ever at work. "It was because he was so thoroughly alive that he filled the whole era with his life." 3 Contemporary with one of the greatest of centuries (1694-1778), he was the soul and essence of it. "To name Voltaire," said Victor Hugo, "is to characterize the entire eighteenth century. " 4 Italy had a Renaissance, and Germany had a Reformation, but France had Voltaire; he was for his country both Renaissance and Reformation, and half the Revolution. He carried on (the antiseptic scepticism of Montaigne, and the healthy earthy humor of Rabelais; he fought superstition and corruption more savagely and effectively than Luther or Erasmus, Calvin or Knox or Melanchthon; he helped to make the powder with which Mirabeau and Marat, Danton and Robespierre blew up the Old Régime. "If we judge of men by what they have done," said Lamartine, "then Voltaire is incontestably the greatest writer of modern Europe. . . . Destiny gave him eighty-three years of existence, that he might slowly decompose the decayed age; he had the time to combat time; and when he fell he was the conqueror." No, never has a writer had in his lifetime such influence. Despite exile, imprisonment, and the suppression of almost every one of his books by the minions of church and state, he forged fiercely a path for his truth, until at last kings, popes and emperors catered to him, thrones trembled before him, and half the world listened to catch his every word. It was an age in which many things called for a destroyer. "Laughing lions must come," said Nietzsche; well, Voltaire 1 In Sainte-Beuve, i, 226. 2 Tallentyre, 93. 3 Morley, Voltaire; London, 1878; p. 14. 4 Centenary address on Voltaire. 5 Romances, pp. vi and ix. 1 came, and "annihilated with laughter.” 1 He and Rousseau were the two voices of a vast process of economic and political transition from feudal aristocracy to the rule of the middle class. When a rising class is inconvenienced by existing law or custom it appeals from custom to reason and from law to nature—just as conflicting desires in the individual sparkle into thought. So the wealthy bourgeoisie supported the rationalism of Voltaire and the naturalism of Rousseau; it was necessary to loosen old habits and customs, to renovate and invigorate feeling and thought, to open the mind to experiment and change, before the great Revolution could come. Not that Voltaire and Rousseau were the causes of the Revolution; perhaps rather they were co-results with it of the forces that seethed and surged beneath the political and social surface of French life; they were the accompanying light and brilliance of the volcanic heat and conflagration. Philosophy is to history as reason is to desire: in either case an unconscious process determines from below the conscious thought above. Yet we must not bend back too far in attempting to correct the philosopher's tendency to exaggerate the influence of philosophy. Louis XVI, seeing in his Temple prison the works of Voltaire and Rousseau, said, "Those two men have destroyed France," "—meaning his dynasty. "The Bourbons might have preserved themselves," said Napoleon, "if they had controlled writing materials. The advent of cannon killed the feudal system; ink will kill the modern social organization." 3 "Books rule the world," said Voltaire, "or at least those nations in it which have a written language; the others do not count." "Nothing enfranchises like education";and he proceeded to enfranchise France. "When once nation begins to think, it is impossible to stop it." 4 But with Voltaire, France began to think. 1 Brandes, 57. 2 Tallentyre, 526. 3 Bertaut, Napoleon in His Own Words; Chicago, 1916; p. 63. 4 Tallentyre, 101. "Voltaire," that is to say, François Marie Arouet, was born at Paris in 1694, the son of a comfortably successful notary and a somewhat aristocratic mother. He owed to his father, perhaps, his shrewdness and irascibility, and to his mother something of his levity and wit. He came into the world, so to speak, by a narrow margin: his mother did not survive his birth; and he was so puny and sickly an infant that the nurse did not give him more than a day to live. She was slightly in error, as he lived almost to eighty-four; but throughout his life his frail body tormented with illness his unconquerable spirit. He had for his edification a model elder brother, Armand, a pious lad who fell in love with the Jansenist heresy, and courted martyrdom for his faith. "Well," said Armand to a friend who advised the better part of valor, "if you do not want to be hanged, at least do not put off other people." The father said he had two fools for his sons-one in verse and the other in prose. The fact that François made verses almost as soon as he could write his name, convinced his very practical father that nothing good would come of him. But the famous hetaira, Ninon de l'Enclos, who lived in the provincial town to which the Arouets had returned after the birth of François, saw in the youth signs of greatness; and when she died she left him 2000 francs for the purchase of books. His early education came from these, and from a dissolute abbé (a Jérome Coignard in the flesh) who taught him scepticism along with his prayers. His later educators, the Jesuits, gave him the very instrument of scepticism by teaching him dialectic-the art of proving anything, and therefore at last the habit of believing nothing. François became an adept at argument: while the boys played games in the fields, he, aged twelve, stayed behind to discuss theology with the doctors. When the time came for him to earn his living, he scandalized his father by proposing to take up literature as profession. "Literature," said M. Arouet, "is the profession of the man who wishes to be useless to society |