Voltaire

“ But as the “amazing genius” of Shakespeare took the stillborn children of lesser men’s brains and breathed on them the breath of life, so did Voltaire. Everything that makes a story immortal is his own in those matchless contes. Charm, wit, delicacy, an exquisite lightness of touch, the finest taste in satire, humour, variety, epigram, gaiety—with that ever-present undercurrent of biting meaning—almost all the Voltairian gifts are here. Every story is a pungent satire on the King, Court, régime, or religion of that evil day. The characters are very palpably drawn from life. ”

“ How did Longchamp come by such letters?
There was a sharper bark in the fact that while Voltaire was weeping for a woman who had been false to him, that dreary old Crébillon was making fine headway at Court, had a pension from the false Pompadour, and all Paris applauding his bad verses.
It was his enemy, not his friends, who roused Voltaire at last. He woke as after a disturbed dream—at first dazed; shook himself; looked round; and began life afresh. ”

“ Brief articles on an enormous variety of subjects gave infinite scope for Voltaire’s versatility. Since he had written that first article, “Abraham,” which had made even sullen Frederick laugh, the thing had been its author’s commonplace book. If an article is too daring even for the “Encyclopædia”—put it in the “Dictionary.” If one feels gay, write buffoonery; or seriously, write with passion. The “Dictionary” had room for everything. Mockery, sarcasm, lightness, wit, gaiety, profundity, the most earnest thought, the most burning zeal, banter, irony, audacity—they are all here. ”

“ Doubtful in morals, and a most trenchant unbeliever, the scoffer Voltaire yet sets a splendid example to all inert Christians who, comfortably cultivating the selfish virtues, care nothing for the race and recognise no mission but to save their own miserable souls.
Who has done more good for the world—the stainless anchorite, be his cloister a religious one or his own easy home; or this sinner, of whom it was said at his death, with literal truth, that the history of what had been accomplished in Europe in favour of reason and humanity was the history of his writings and of his deeds? ”

“ But though we thus bring in doubt the work of Voltaire, both as to the purity of its motive and as to the value of its fruit, we should wrong our sense of justice to ourselves if we permitted our readers to suppose us blind to the generous things that this arch-infidel did on behalf of the suffering and the oppressed. Voltaire more than once wielded that pen of his, the most dreaded weapon in Europe, like a knight sworn to take on himself the championship of the forlornest of causes. ”

“ In a room in the Hôtel Villette, at the corner of the Rue de Beaune in Paris, a dying old Voltaire received that news. The splendid intellect which had served him for more than eighty years, as never mind served man before, was waning too. But for a moment its strength came back. To Lally-Tollendal Voltaire dictated his last letter.
“The dead returns to life on learning this great news; he tenderly embraces M. Lally; he sees that the King is the Defender of Justice; and will die, content.” ”

“ I thank Voltaire, that great man who for half a century was the intellectual monarch of Europe, and who, from his throne at the foot of the Alps, pointed the finger of scorn at every hypocrite in Christendom. I thank the inventors, I thank the discoverers, the thinkers and the scientists, and I thank the honest millions who have toiled. I thank the brave men with brave thoughts. They are the Atlases upon whose broad and mighty shoulders rests the grand fabric of civilization; they are the men who have broken, and are still breaking, the chains of superstition. ”

“ And a call it is; a call to the clear intelligences and the unclouded brains; a call to the generous hearts and the unperverted instincts; a call to sanity and sweetness and clarity and noble commonsense; to all that is free and brave and gay and friendly, to rally to the standard of true civilisation against the forces of stupidity, brutality and obscurantism!
Voltaire was one of those great men whose thoughts are armies and whose words are victories in the cause of the liberation of humanity. If we do not read his books, we look at his image and we read his life. ”

“ Could Voltaire have thought even in 1750 that they were politic truths to utter in a city where he had just bought a house and was much minded to settle down and be at peace? It is to his infinite and lifelong credit that he seldom cared whether a truth were politic or not. The moment he saw it to be truth he must utter it in scorn of consequence.
Even “Rome Sauvée” and “Oreste” could not shield a man responsible for the paternity of such writing as this, nor the uncertain smile of a Pompadour save him from its consequences. Well, he had better go! He had always wished to travel in Italy. ”

“ We only half live if we dare only half think.”
Voltaire was fully alive at all events. However widely one may differ from his opinions they are at least entitled to respect. They were passionately genuine, the vivid convictions of his soul. He was no dilettante, fine-gentleman unbeliever—too bored and idle to find in the world “the footmarks of a God.” ”

“ Here was the man who was poet, playwright, novelist, letter-writer, historian, critic, philosopher, theologian, socialist, philanthropist, agriculturist, humorist, reformer, wit, and man of the world.
England has no counterpart for him. But then neither has France, nor any other country. Think of the great names of earthly fame. Of which can it be said—with even approximate truth—“Here is another Voltaire?”
As a poet, he was the king of those society verses which he modestly said himself “are good for nothing but society and only for the moment for which they are written.” ”

“ If any man could have done it, that man was Voltaire. There is no writer in the world who so well knows, if he chooses, how to put blame as if it were praise, to turn censure into a dainty compliment, and to trick out harsh realities in a charming dress. ”

“ He could be long-suffering and considerate and patient, to a degree hardly ever known among men of genius, while ruling Europe with his indomitable pen.
The name of Voltaire is more than a trumpet call of liberty for the oppressed artists and thinkers of the world; it is a challenge to the individual Candides of our harassed generation to rise above their own weaknesses and introspections and come forth into the sunshine. ”

“ Perhaps in the midst of gaiety and enjoyment Voltaire recalled the last time he was here, Pimpette, and that wild episode of his youth. But this was the man who was always agog for the future; never a dreamer of the past—a doer, an actor, the most energetic spirit in history. ”

“ With an ear as exquisitely delicate for a harmony as a discord, with that single-minded love of good literature which equally prevented him being flatterer or caviller, Voltaire was the critic who, like the poet, is born, not made. ”

“ 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. ”

“ With a mind as wholly incapable of real cultivation as was her heart of any great or sustained feeling, from long association with Voltaire she caught the accent of cleverness, as after living in a foreign country one catches the accent of a language though one may know nothing of its construction, its grammar, or its literature. ”

“ THE COLONY OF WATCHMAKERS AND WEAVERS “What harm can a book do that costs a hundred crowns?” Voltaire had written to Damilaville on April 5, 1765. “Twenty volumes folio will never make a revolution; it is the little pocket pamphlets of thirty sous that are to be feared.”
He had acted on that principle all his life. But he had never acted upon it so much as in his hand-to-hand battle with l’infâme. He never acted upon it so often as in his eighteen months’ solitude at Ferney in 1768-69. ”

“ The whole thing was but an episode after all, a penchant more than a passion, the light fancy of the senses that touched the deeper soul not at all. But posterity should be grateful to Mademoiselle. Voltaire had his portrait painted for her by Largillière, and may be seen to-day as he looked then—flowing wig, wide mouth, the ruffled hand thrust lightly in the waistcoat; a lover, young, satisfied with his mistress, himself, and all the world; and in the eyes and forehead, latent but present, power and will extraordinary. ”

“ He spoke of himself as being always at the tail of that lawsuit—which the indefatigable and persistent Marquise must pursue to the bitter end.
They lingered in Paris through May, June, July—in their fine Palais Lambert now—and all the time no “Mahomet.” Voltaire should have been used to disappointments and delays, if any man should. He brought out everything he ever wrote at the point of the sword. There were always anxiously waiting to take offence the acutely susceptible feelings of a Church, a king, a court, a nobility, and a press censor. ”

“ We see a court rotten to the core with indulgence in every form of sensuality and vice, yet glittering with the veneer of a social polish which made it the admiration of the world. A dissolute king was ruled by a succession of mistresses, and all the courtiers vied in emulating the vice and extravagance of their master. Yet in this foul compost-heap art and literature nourished with a tropical luxuriance. Voltaire was at the height of his splendid career, the most brilliant wit and philosopher of his age. ”

“ Frederick did not see his way to this. He had in his own possession a finer monument to Voltaire’s greatness—a part of that correspondence which is one of Arouet’s “surest titles to immortality” and contains at once “the history of Voltaire intime and of the eighteenth century.”
No one had mourned Voltaire more passionately than the other great sovereign, Catherine. “Since he is dead, wit has lost its honour; he was the divinity of gaiety.” ”

“ He not only analysed, with extraordinary brilliancy and fairness, the writings of Voltaire, of friend Rousseau, and of Buffon, but he sat in discerning judgment on the works of English novelists and poets. He criticised books which have not lived, in criticisms which are undying. As to the value and the longevity of the productions, he was sometimes, naturally and inevitably, mistaken; but as a rule his opinions have been confirmed by posterity and have weathered the test of time. ”

“ By the volume and the variety, joined to the unfailing brilliancy, of his production; by his prodigious effectiveness; and by his universal fame,—Voltaire is undoubtedly entitled to rank first, with no fellow, among the eighteenth-century literary men, not merely of France, but of the world. He was not a great man,—he produced no single great work,—but he must nevertheless be pronounced a great writer. There is hardly any species of composition to which, in the long course of his activity, he did not turn his talent. ”

“ In its November, Algarotti, the Italian savant, and the friend of Prince Frederick of Prussia, came to stay at Cirey. He read aloud his “Dialogues on Philosophy”: and Voltaire read aloud a canto of the “Pucelle,” or “Louis XIV.,” or a tragedy. The rest of the time they laughed over their champagne and studied Newton and Locke. What extraordinary people! The bonhomme, if he was there at all, did not count. The Marquise, who, as has been seen, had learnt English in a fortnight, already translated at sight and had her inborn genius for philosophy and science. ”

“ He was not sorry, too, to obtain the cachet which would accrue to him for having robbed a Voltaire.
But whether the passion on both sides was born full-grown, dominant, and irresistible, or had slower roots in vanity and idleness, matters not. It was soon an accomplished fact. Madame du Châtelet wrote her Saint-Lambert the most mad, adoring letters on rose-coloured or sky-blue notepaper with an edge of lace. She put the letters in Madame de Boufflers’s harp in the salon. And when everyone had gone to bed, the young guardsman came and found them there. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To fawn on that sensual stupidity the King, to cajole the Pope, to flatter the mistress—they were not occupations that commended themselves to a man with such a passion for work and such a supreme consciousness of a mission in life crying aloud to be fulfilled, as Voltaire. ”

“ We fancy we see the two gifted men, the one the representative of the scepticism of France, the other, of the belief of England, meeting and conversing together. Voltaire is not much in advance of thirty; Young is fifty, and more. Voltaire’s face is worn with premature thought and inordinate laughter; Young’s, though older, bears a warmer and more sanguine flush. Voltaire has the insincerest of smiles playing constantly over his face like the light of an aurora borealis; Young’s countenance is grave, settled, open, and serene, as the radiance of an autumn sunset. ”

“ Voltaire is much more than a man of letters. He is a prophet of the age to come, when the execrable superstitions of narrow minds shall no longer darken the sunlight, and the infamous compulsion of human manners, human intellects, human tastes, into the petty mould of oppressive public opinion shall be ended forever. ”