Edward Bruce Hamley

“ Voltaire not only read critically the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Butler, Swift, and Pope, but was the first to introduce them to French readers. England appeared to him as at once the land of reason and the paradise of men of letters. He was never tired of telling how posts in the State had been conferred on Prior and Addison, and how Newton and Pope were held in higher esteem than the king's ministers. He was convinced that among the chief results of the liberty of thought which prevailed among us were the advances made in philosophy and science by Locke and Newton. ”

“ Never had the nation a hero so enduringly popular as the skilful general and brilliant knight whose white plume is a point of light in history—the conqueror who was clement amid the merciless, generous in an age of rapacity, genial in an atmosphere of bloody fanaticism—the good king who wished to see the day when every French peasant should have his fowl in the pot. ”

“ The early part of Louis's reign had been by no means remarkable for morality, but it had always been distinguished by decorum. Perhaps the best and most enduring result of that reign was the amelioration in manners which it diffused far beyond the boundaries of France. The flowing courtesy, the refined address, the consideration for others, which Sterne, in the next century, found alike in peasant, shopkeeper, and noble, had their source in the splendid Court where the stately and gracious king was for so long the glass of fashion. ”

“ Will it, he asks, console the wretched inhabitants of the desolated city to be told that they suffer for the good of the world, that other hands will rebuild their shattered homes, that the towns of the north will be enriched by their ruin, and that all their sufferings are a benefit in the general scheme of law? These unchangeable laws of necessity the poet does not believe in: God, he says, holds in His hand the chain which binds the system of the universe, and is not Himself bound by it; He is free, just, and not implacable. ”

“ A city takes up arms to defend its privileges, whether in Spain, Barbary, or Turkey; immediately mercenary soldiers subjugate it, executioners punish it, and the rest of the nation kisses the rod. The French think the government of this isle of Britain more stormy than the sea which surrounds it, and this is true—but it is when the king begins the tempest, by wishing to make himself master of the vessel of which he is only chief pilot. The civil wars of France have been longer, more cruel, more fertile in crime, than those of England ”

“ The habits of pleasure fortified my taste for the French theatre, and that taste has perhaps abated my idolatry for the gigantic genius of Shakespeare, which is inculcated from our infancy as the first duty of an Englishman. The wit and philosophy of Voltaire, his table and theatre, refined, in a visible degree, the manners of Lausanne; and, however addicted to study, I enjoyed my share of the amusements of society. After the representation of Monrepos, I sometimes supped with the actors. ”

“ In despotic monarchies, access to the king's person, even if it be only to powder his wig, is a matter of, high importance; for the dexterous use of a moment of good-humour or caprice in the source of all honour and prosperity, a pretty speech, or an apt flattery, or that mysterious and debasing quality, a talent for intrigue, may be the making of a courtier. What now lent a double sharpness to disappointment was Voltaire's consciousness that he had stooped to flatter this semblance of a king. ”

“ I confine myself to expressing astonishment at the silence of all the Egyptians and all the Greeks. Providence doubtless does not wish that a history so divine should be transmitted to us by any profane hand. ”

“ Nabussan confided his trouble to Zadig: 'You who know so many fine things,' said he, 'can you not tell me how to find a treasurer who will not rob me?' 'Assuredly,' said Zadig, 'I know an infallible mode of giving you a man who will keep his hands clean' The king was charmed, and asked, while he embraced him, how this was to be done. 'You have only,' said Zadig, 'to cause all those who present themselves for the dignity of treasurer to dance; he who dances the lightest will be infallibly the most honest man.' 'You jest,' said the king ”

“ Never has the wit of man devised a faith which is consistent with the facts of life, or which renders them clear to the hapless being who stumbles darkling among them. Nor can it be said that Voltaire has been more successful than others in this adventure, the special object of which in his case is to explain how the bestowal of happiness on man, seemingly so fortuitous, is yet consistent with divine justice. ”

“ Henry was a witness, almost a victim, of what is one of the most horrible crimes in history, in which queen-mother, king, and princes took part, and of which the Pope heartily approved; and living in an atmosphere of domestic treachery and murder, with a Reine Margot for a wife, and her mother and brothers, together with the infamous crew who formed their Court, for associates, it is astonishing that he should have preserved an ordinary share of the better feelings of humanity, and almost a miracle that he should have continued to show himself so manly and so sound of heart. ”

“ It was by far his strongest passion, and, in fact, absorbed and turned to its own account all the others. "Heavens, my dear Cideville!" he exclaims, "what a delicious life to find one's self living with three or four literary people who have talents but no jealousy—to live thus in harmony, to cultivate our art, to talk it over, to enlighten each other! I fancy I may live some day in such a little paradise." ”

“ A finer subject could not offer itself to a Frenchman than the long reign in which France, seeming, at a bound, to emerge from a base condition of manners, of public morals, of government, and of policy, stood forth resplendent in letters, arts, arms, statecraft, and social refinement. ”

“ At the word sister, Orosman is as a man who wakes from a deadly dream; he knows his error—he sees all he has lost—he is too deeply plunged in horror to complain. Nerestan and Fatima speak to him, but he understands nothing of what they say except that he was loved. He calls on Zaire—runs to her—they stop him—he falls back in the stupor of despair. "What is to be my doom?" said Nerestan. After a long silence the Soldan orders his fetters to be taken off, loads him and the other Christians with presents, and then kills himself beside Zaire. ”

“ What is no less extraordinary is, that possessing the courage, power, and disposition to defy those whom it was so dangerous to provoke, he never assailed the Government under which it had been possible to inflict on him such a measure of injury, and the hostility of which, directed by his potent enemies, rendered his long existence one of contest, evasion, and exile. No Frenchman living was more alive than he to the evils of absolute power. ”

“ There have been many atheists among Christians; their number is now much diminished. What looks like a paradox, but which on examination will prove to be a truth, is that theology has often precipitated minds into atheism, while philosophy has rescued them from it. It was in fact pardonable in men to doubt of a Divinity, when the only persons who asserted it disputed as to its nature. ”

“ This state of things was not, of course, pleasing to the French, who, indeed, were in the lowest stage of misery from the enormous taxes, which were the result of constant extravagance and war; but so powerful was the habit of submission, acquired in a reign already of unusual length, and so imposing the authority and the personal bearing of the old monarch, that, though the people manifested a natural if somewhat indecent joy when he died in 1715, he remained to the last every inch a king. ”

“ His intellect is at work incessantly; every drop of ink is a trait of wit from his pen. He declaimed his Mahomet to us—an admirable tragedy; he transported us out of ourselves; I could only admire him and hold my tongue. The Du Châtelet is lucky to have him; for, of the good things he flings out at random, a person who had no faculty but memory might make a brilliant book."
In the next three years Voltaire paid three other visits to Frederick. In December of the same year when they first met, he spent six days with the king at Reinsberg. ”

“ The gilded youth of the time ceased to haunt taverns, ceased to brawl in the streets and fight duels, and vied with each other in deference to women. It was out of these conditions that sprang also the felicity and fineness of wit so characteristic of Voltaire, and which could hardly have been the product of a different age. ”

“ I took good care to contest nothing—there is nothing to gain by disputing with an enthusiast: it is not expedient either to tell a lover of the faults of his mistress, or an advocate of the weakness of his cause, or to talk of reason to one who has spiritual light—so I passed to other matters... I see the sect dying out every day in London. In every country the dominant religion, when it abstains from persecution, swallows up all the others in the end."
On the whole, he treats the Quakers very tenderly, as if he liked them. ”

“ Voltaire took La Mettrie's communication much to heart, and dwelt upon it in his correspondence. He made it, with his doubts and reflections thereupon, the subject of a long letter to his niece, and referred to it more than once afterwards. "I am always thinking of the orange-skin. I try not to believe it, but I fear I am like those betrayed husbands who force themselves to believe that their wives are very faithful. The poor people perceive something at the bottom of their hearts which warns them of their disaster." ”

“ Celestial gifts that o'er me spread,
A charm to cause all cares to flee?
Two deaths we die, 'tis plain decreed;
To cease to love, nor know the bliss
Of being loved, is death indeed—
To cease to live is nought to this. ”

“ He was generous; he was not afraid of bestowing favours on the ungrateful, observing the great precept of Zoroaster: 'When you are eating, give something to the dogs lest they bite you.' He was also as wise as it is possible to be, for it was his aim to live with wise men. Learned in the sciences of the ancient Chaldeans, he was not ignorant of the facts of nature as ascertained in his own time, and knew of metaphysics as much as in all ages has been known—that is to say, very little. ”

“ We will examine, by-and-by, how the Greeks borrowed from the Egyptians the ideas of hell, and the apotheosis of the dead; how they believed, like other peoples, in a second life, without suspecting the spirituality of the soul. On the contrary, they could not imagine how an incorporeal being could feel good or ill. And I know not if Plato is not the first who has spoken of a purely spiritual being. That is, perhaps, one of the greatest efforts of the human intellect. ”

“ Candide found the opportunity of running away. He meets a beggar all covered with sores, the end of his nose corroded, his mouth on one side, his teeth black, tormented with a violent cough, and spitting out a tooth at each paroxysm. The phantom looks fixedly at him, and then leaps on his neck: "'Alas!' said this wretch to the other, 'don't you recognise your dear Pangloss?'" The philosopher recounts the misfortunes which have brought him into this condition, but is none the less persuaded that they were all for the best, and that this is the best of all possible worlds. ”

“ Believe, Uranie, that the everlasting wisdom of the Most High has graven in the depths of thy heart a natural religion. Know that before His throne, in all times, in all places, the heart of the just man is precious ”

“ Zaire's love increases with the indulgent tenderness of her lover. She casts herself in tears at his feet and beseeches him to defer the marriage till the morrow. She calculates that her brother will then be gone—that she will have received baptism—that she will have acquired the strength to resist; she even flatters herself that the Christian religion will permit her to love a man so generous, so virtuous, to whom nothing is wanting but to be a Christian. ”

“ That he chose a classical subject for his essay in tragedy was owing partly to the fashion set by Racine and Corneille, partly to his recent studies at the Jesuit College; and he chose this particular story because, as he tells us, he did not approve of the Œdipus either of Sophocles or of Corneille, and endeavoured in his own play to avoid the faults which they had committed. But it was a subject that no genius could make attractive in our day. To represent a good man as the sport of a malignant destiny is of itself an idea belonging to a pagan rather than a Christian age ”

“ While the mind of the time saw before it the prospects, so full of promise, which the great movements of the sixteenth century had opened, the dominant religious body opposed a rigid bar to progress, not only in the doctrines which it inculcated, but in its system of education, which, dealing well and thoroughly with the learning of the past, sought to arrest, in all directions, the advance of thought. ”

“ But his companions there were men whose doctrines and practice would, in life, have revolted him. Beside him was laid the wretch Marat, whom he would have loathed and denounced. The violent overturning of the old monarchy, the proscriptions, the massacres, the guillotine—these would have received no countenance from him, and found no warrant in his writings, which had always inculcated those principles of toleration and justice that were no more respected by the Revolutionary Government than by the despotism which it destroyed. ”

“ That indefinable being who is neither churchman nor layman—in one word, an abbé—is a species unknown in England. The clergy are all set apart, and nearly all pedants. When they hear that in France young men noted for profligacy, and raised to the prelacy by the intrigues of women, make love publicly, cheer themselves with love-songs, give elaborate dinners, and then go to implore the light of the Holy Spirit, boldly calling themselves successors to the apostles—they thank heaven they are Protestants. ”

“ While Voltaire awaited the audience in the ante-chamber, a great storm broke over Paris. "Things could not go on worse," he said aloud, looking at the sky, "if there was a Regency up there." His conductor, introducing him to the Regent, said, repeating the remark which the irrepressible youth had then made, "I bring you a young man whom your Highness has just released from the Bastille, and whom you should send back again." ”

“ It is certainly for the interest of all men that there should be a divinity who punishes what human justice cannot repress; but it is also clear that it is better not to recognise a God than to adore a barbarous deity, to whom human beings are sacrificed, as has been done by so many nations... ”

“ The state of things, however, against which he contended, did not exist in England. With the degree of freedom of thought to which we had then attained, and which contented the nation, we, all through George III.'s reign, feared tyranny less than licence, and superstition less than free-thinking. Deism was in disgrace: it threw a dark shadow on the repute of writers of the highest rank, such as Hume and Gibbon; and to lesser men the imputation of it was extinction. In these days opinion, far more tolerant, would probably not be very severe on Voltaire ”

“ He now perceived an opportunity of quitting the frivolities and dissipation of Paris, and of living in comfort and security in a spot so near the French frontier that a single step would place him beyond the grasp of arbitrary and capricious power, while he would at the same time enjoy the solace of the most congenial female society which, perhaps, all France could supply to him. ”

“ Frederick the Great specially admired the device of taking Henry to heaven and hell in spirit, in his sleep, rather than in the body, as Æneas and Ulysses went. "The single idea," says the admiring monarch, " of attributing to Henry's dream what he sees in heaven and hell, and what is prognosticated to him in the temple of Destiny, is worth the whole of the 'Iliad;' for the dream brings all which happens within the rules of reality, whereas the journey of Ulysses into hell is devoid of all the ornaments which might have given an air of truth to the ingenious fiction of Homer." ”

“ Voltaire generally wants the condensity, the sharp effects, the careful, neat antitheses of Pope—for his compositions were always rapidly executed, and such attributes can only be, except by happy chance, the last results of the prolonged distillation of ideas and the fastidious selection of words; but these compositions possess all his characteristic ease and grace, and much happiness of illustration. ”

“ You are the most seductive creature that I know, capable of making everybody love you when you wish. You have so many graces of intellect that you can at the same time offend, and deserve the indulgence of everybody. ”

“ To take a professor of optimism and his disciple, and to cause them to pass through such a series of misfortunes as the conditions of the world in Voltaire's time might bring upon them, constituted the whole plan of the piece; and it is obvious that, to render the satire effective, the evils of the world, and the sufferings of the characters, should be treated with the indifference which an optimist would naturally feel for them. ”

“ All the early misfortunes of Zadig, like those of Voltaire, are persecutions caused by his efforts to set people right. When these have quite crushed him, a happy discovery not only rescues him from capital punishment, by hanging, but renders him the favourite of the King of Babylon, in whose good graces he makes such progress as presently to become grand vizier ”

“ It is indeed very deplorable to see such a multitude of soldiers maintained by all princes; but this evil produces good. The people do not now mix in the wars which their masters wage; the citizens of besieged towns often pass from one domination to another without loss of life to a single inhabitant; they are only the prize of him who has most soldiers, cannon, and money."
In all this the reader may perhaps discern a spirit which, at least in humanity and liberality, was in advance of his own time, and possibly of ours. ”

“ Ages were necessary to do justice to humanity—to perceive that it was horrible that the great number should sow and the small number reap; and is it not happy for the French that the authority of these minor brigands has been extinguished in France by the legitimate power of the kings, as it has been in England by that of king and people? ”

“ A heart like his could not love otherwise than madly. He resolved to throw off the effeminate habits which had been the bane of so many Asiatic sovereigns, and to possess in Zaire one who should share his heart with the duties of a prince and warrior. The faint ideas of Christianity, barely traced on the heart of Zaire, vanished at sight of the Soldan; she loved him no less than she was loved by him, without letting ambition mix in the least with the purity of her tenderness. This is how she speaks to her confidante Fatima:—
"Who could refuse to give him all her heart? ”

“ Besides building a theatre, he pulled down the ruinous church of Ferney and replaced it with another at his own cost, which bore the inscription, Deo erexit Voltaire. "The church that I have built," he wrote, "is the only church in the universe that is dedicated to God alone—all the others are dedicated to saints. For my part, I would rather build for the master than the valets." He built also the chateau of Ferney, and surrounded it with gardens in the English taste, and drained and improved the surrounding land. ”

“ The spectacle of a gloomy and intolerant bigotry, enforced by a sanctimonious old king, by the widow of Scarron, and by the fanatics who had charge of what the pair believed to be their consciences, had brought religion itself into discredit, and infidelity was not only common but matter of boast in the highest Parisian society. ”

“ Besides, so many great masters—Corneille, Racine, Boileau—have so accustomed our ears to the harmony of rhyme, that we could not endure any other; and he who wished to deliver himself from the burthen which the great Corneille carried, would be regarded with reason, not as a bold genius adventuring in a new route, but as a weak man who could not journey in the ancient ways. ”