A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson
10. The rest of Voltaire's long life was a sleepless and dexterous
1798 words | Chapter 126
warfare, by all manner of literary stratagem, [987] facilitated by
vast literary fame and ample acquired wealth, against what he called
"the Infamous"--the Church and the creed which he found still swift to
slay for mere variation of belief, and slow to let any good thing be
wrought for the bettering of men's lives. Of his prodigious literary
performance it is probably within the truth to say that in respect
of rapid influence on the general intelligence of the world it has
never been equalled by any one man's writing; and that, whatever its
measure of error and of personal misdirection, its broader influence
was invariably for peace on earth, for tolerance among men, and for
reason in all things. His faults were many, and some were serious; but
to no other man of his age, save possibly Beccaria, can be attributed
so much beneficent accomplishment. He can perhaps better be estimated
as a force than as a man. So great was the area of his literary
energy that he is inevitably inadequate at many points. Lessing
could successfully impugn him in drama; Diderot in metaphysic;
Gibbon in history; and it is noteworthy that all of these men [988]
at different times criticized him with asperity, testing him by the
given item of performance, and disparaging his personality. Yet in
his own way he was a greater power than any of them; and his range,
as distinguished from his depth, outgoes theirs. In sum, he was the
greatest mental fighter of his age, perhaps of any age: in that aspect
he is a "power-house" not to be matched in human history; and his
polemic is mainly for good. It was a distinguished English academic
who declared that "civilization owes more to Voltaire than to all the
Fathers of the Church put together." [989] If in a literary way he
hated his personal foes, much more did he hate cruelty and bigotry;
and it was his work more than any that made impossible a repetition in
Europe of such clerical crimes as the hanging of the Protestant pastor,
La Rochette; the execution of the Protestant, Calas, on an unproved
and absurdly false charge; the torture of his widow and children;
the beheading of the lad La Barre for ill-proved blasphemy. [990]
As against his many humanities, there is not to be charged on him one
act of public malevolence. In his relations with his fickle admirer,
Frederick the Great, and with others of his fellow-thinkers, he and
they painfully brought home to freethinkers the lesson that for them
as for all men there is a personal art of life that has to be learned,
over and above the rectification of opinion. But he and the others
wrought immensely towards that liberation alike from unreason and
from bondage which must precede any great improvement of human things.
Voltaire's constant burden was that religion was not only untrue
but pernicious, and when he was not dramatically showing this of
Christianity, as in his poem La Ligue (1723), he was saying it by
implication in such plays as Zaïre (1732) and Mahomet (1742), dealing
with the fanaticism of Islam; while in the Essai sur les moeurs (1756),
really a broad survey of general history, and in the Siècle de Louis
XIV, he applied the method of Montesquieu, with pungent criticism
thrown in. Later, he added to his output direct criticisms of the
Christian books, as in the Examen important de Milord Bolingbroke
(1767), and the Recherches historiques sur le Christianisme (? 1769),
continuing all his former lines of activity. Meanwhile, with the aid of
his companion the Marquise du Chatelet, an accomplished mathematician,
he had done much to popularize the physics of Newton and discredit
the scientific fallacies of the system of Descartes; all the while
preaching a Newtonian but rather agnostic deism. This is the purport
of his Philosophe Ignorant, his longest philosophical essay. [991]
The destruction of Lisbon by the earthquake of 1755 seems to have
shaken him in his deistic faith, since the upshot of his poem on that
subject is to leave the moral government of the universe an absolute
enigma; and in the later Candide (1759) he attacks theistic optimism
with his matchless ridicule. Indeed, as early as 1749, in his Traité
de la Métaphysique, written for the Marquise du Chatelet, he reaches
virtually pantheistic positions in defence of the God-idea, declaring
with Spinoza that deity can be neither good nor bad. But, like so
many professed pantheists, he relapsed, and he never accepted the
atheistic view; on the contrary, we find him arguing absurdly enough,
in his Homily on Atheism (1765), that atheism had been the destruction
of morality in Rome; [992] on the publication of d'Holbach's System
of Nature in 1770 he threw off an article Dieu: réponse au Système
de la Nature, where he argued on the old deistic lines; and his tale
of Jenni; or, the Sage and the Atheist (1775), is a polemic on the
same theme. By this time the inconsistent deism of his youth had
itself been discredited among the more thoroughgoing freethinkers;
and for years it had been said in one section of literary society
that Voltaire after all "is a bigot; he is a deist!" [993]
But for freethinkers of all schools the supreme service of Voltaire lay
in his twofold triumph over the spirit of religious persecution. He
had contrived at once to make it hateful and to make it ridiculous;
and it is a great theistic poet of our own day that has pronounced
his blade the
sharpest, shrewdest steel that ever stabbed
To death Imposture through the armour joints. [994]
To be perfect, the tribute should have noted that he hated cruelty
much more than imposture; and such is the note of the whole movement of
which his name was the oriflamme. Voltaire personally was at once the
most pugnacious and the most forgiving of men. Few of the Christians
who hated him had so often as he fulfilled their own precept of
returning good for evil to enemies; and none excelled him in hearty
philanthropy. It is notable that most of the humanitarian ideas of
the latter half of the century--the demand for the reform of criminal
treatment, the denunciation of war and slavery, the insistence on
good government, and toleration of all creeds--are more definitely
associated with the freethinking than with any religious party,
excepting perhaps the laudable but uninfluential sect of Quakers.
The character of Voltaire is still the subject of chronic debate;
but the old deadlock of laudation and abuse is being solved
in a critical recognition of him as a man of genius flawed by
the instability which genius so commonly involves. Carlyle
(that model of serenity), while dwelling on his perpetual
perturbations, half-humanely suggests that we should think of
him as one constantly hag-ridden by maladies of many kinds; and
this recognition is really even more important in Voltaire's
case than in Carlyle's own. He was "a bundle of nerves," and
the clear light of his sympathetic intelligence was often blown
aside by gusts of passion--often enough excusably. But while his
temperamental weaknesses exposed him at times to humiliation,
and often to sarcasm; and while his compelled resort to constant
stratagem made him more prone to trickery than his admirers can
well care to think him, the balance of his character is abundantly
on the side of generosity and humanity.
One of the most unjustifiable of recent attacks upon him
(one regrets to have to say it) came from the pen of the late
Prof. Churton Collins. In his book on Voltaire, Montesquieu,
and Rousseau in England (1908) that critic gives in the main
an unbiassed account of Voltaire's English experience; but at
one point (p. 39) he plunges into a violent impeachment with
the slightest possible justification. He in effect adopts the
old allegation of Ruffhead, the biographer of Pope--a statement
repeated by Johnson--that Voltaire used his acquaintance with Pope
and Bolingbroke to play the spy on them, conveying information
to Walpole, for which he was rewarded. The whole story collapses
upon critical examination. Ruffhead's story is, in brief, that
Pope purposely lied to Voltaire as to the authorship of certain
published letters attacking Walpole. They were by Bolingbroke;
but Pope, questioned by Voltaire, said they were his own, begging
him to keep the fact absolutely secret. Next day at court everyone
was speaking of the letters as Pope's; and Pope accordingly knew
that Voltaire was a traitor. For this tale there is absolutely
nothing but hearsay evidence. Ruffhead, as Johnson declared, knew
nothing of Pope, and simply used Warburton's material. The one
quasi-confirmation cited by Mr. Collins is Bolingbroke's letter
to Swift (May 18, 1727) asking him to "insinuate" that Walpole's
only ground for ascribing the letters to Bolingbroke "is the
authority of one of his spies ... who reports, not what he hears
... but what he guesses." This is an absolute contradiction of the
Pope story, at two points. It refers to a guess at Bolingbroke,
and tells of no citation from Pope. To put it as confirming the
charge is to exhibit a complete failure of judgment.
After this irrational argument, Mr. Collins offers a worse. He
admits (p. 43) that Voltaire always remained on friendly
terms with both Pope and Bolingbroke; but adds that this "can
scarcely be alleged as a proof of his innocence, for neither
Pope nor Bolingbroke would, for such an offence, have been
likely to quarrel with a man in a position so peculiar as that
of Voltaire. His flattery was pleasant...." Such an argument is
worse than nugatory. That Bolingbroke spoke ill in private of
Voltaire on general grounds counts for nothing. He did the same of
Pope and of nearly all his friends. Mr. Collins further accuses
Voltaire of baseness, falsehood, and hypocrisy on the mere score
of his habit of extravagant flattery. This was notoriously the
French mode in that age; but it had been just as much the mode
in seventeenth-century England, from the Jacobean translators of
the Bible to Dryden--to name no others. And Mr. Collins in effect
charges systematic hypocrisy upon both Pope and Bolingbroke.
Other stories of Ruffhead's against Voltaire are equally improbable
and ill-vouched--as Mr. Collins incidentally admits, though he
forgets the admission. They all come from Warburton, himself
convicted of double-dealing with Pope; and they finally stand for
the hatred of Frenchmen which was so common in eighteenth-century
England, and is apparently not yet quite extinct. Those who would
have a sane, searching, and competent estimate of Voltaire,
leaning humanely to the side of goodwill, should turn to the
Voltaire of M. Champion. A brief estimate was attempted by the
present writer in the R. P. A. Annual for 1912.
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