François Marie Arouet de), the glory and the shame of French literature, was born at Châtenay, near Sceaux, 20th February 1694. His parents were François Arouet, notary at Châtelet, and Marguerite d'Aumart, of a noble family of Poitou. Like Newton, he came into the world with little chance of remaining in it; yet, like Newton, lived to fill it with his fame. There, however, the parallel ends; the pure, steady lustre of Newton's name little resembles the fitful, phosphorescent light of that baleful glory which streams from the name of Voltaire. Could the friends of the sickly infant have cast his horoscope, and foreseen all the misery which that long life, destined to reach the extreme age of man, would endure and inflict, they would have wished that his life might be as frail as it promised to be.

He was baptised 22d November 1694, his godfather being the Abbé de Châteauneuf, one of the most abandoned men even of that corrupt age. As a biographer of Voltaire remarks, "impurity seems to have received him from his very cradle;" certainly from the baptismal font. His godfather proved an apt teacher of a ready pupil. He boasted that, at the age of three, his precocious charge knew by heart an impious poem attributed to J. B. Rousseau, which the prudent Abbé had made his first reading book. Certainly some excuse is to be made for this wretched child; the tendencies to scepticism and impiety, which probably the most careful education could not have eradicated, were assiduously nurtured from his infancy; it was like forcing fruit in the tropics.

Accordingly we are told that, even while a boy at the College of Louis-le-grand, his sallies of blasphemous precocity often astonished his comrades and terrified his masters, though they must, we should imagine, have delighted his godfather. This institution was then under the management of the Jesuits. One of the professors, Father Le Jay, sorrowfully and truly predicted that the young scapegrace would prove a "pillar of Deism in France."

From college his father, who destined him for public life, sent him to study law. Like Hume, he was soon disgusted with jurisprudence, and from that time resolved to give his life to literature. His godfather introduced him to some of that improving "polite society" which reigned in Paris during the closing years of Louis Quatorze. It was a fine school for the next generation, and for the one immediately preceding the Revolution. It is thus described in the article on Voltaire in the Biographie Universelle:

"While the superstitious devotion of the old king forced all faces to put on a mask of hypocrisy, or at least of decorum, some men, distinguished by rank or genius, lovers of poetry and pleasure, emancipated from all prejudice and free from all belief, took a piquant delight in secretly insulting all that they seemed to respect in public; that is, religion, government, and good manners. In their elegant orgies they practised refined debauchery, lampooned with gaiety, and blasphemed with a grace." Among them figured no less than the Prince of Conti, the Duke of Vendôme and his brother the Grand Prior, the Duke of Sully, and others equally ennobled by rank and degraded by vice. This was the second stage of Voltaire's curriculum, and surely his pious godfather the Abbé must have watched with transports his rapid graduation in the graces in which he himself excelled. The vivacity and genius of Voltaire made him a favourite in this brilliant society. But it did not make him quite idle; his dramatic taste was already strong, and, youth as he was, he had a tragedy—his subject no less than Œdipus—on the anvil. In his eighteenth year (1712) he competed for a poetic prize proposed by the academy, and was defeated by a very inferior competitor. His father, like the merchant in Rob Roy, thought his son lost when he heard of his making verses and living in such improving company; and by way of operating a diversion, sent him to Holland in 1713, in the train of the French ambassador. But he had still greater reason for apprehension when he heard that, in his new position, his son was not only making verses but making love, which last he did with great ardour to the daughter of a Madame du Noyer, a Protestant by profession, but an intriguing and profligate woman. She made a complaint to the ambassador, and to back it had the shameless folly to publish the correspondence of Voltaire and her daughter. Voltaire was recalled. With characteristic zeal for the faith, Voltaire would fain have pressed religion into the service of his passion. He persuaded some of the bishops and Jesuits that Mlle. Noyer ought to be forcibly reclaimed and educated in France, to save her soul from heresy! This pious design was not carried into effect, and Voltaire had to mourn the loss of the church—and his own.

Voltaire had considerable trouble, as may be supposed, in making his peace with his father. The old man was as much plagued by an elder son, who had become a Jansenist, as by the literature and the libertinism of the younger. "I have two fools of sons," said he; "the one a fool in verse, the other a fool in prose." Voltaire proposed to exile himself to America, only begging beforehand, as he sentimentally expressed it, "to embrace his father's knees." This was granted, and the old man relented. He placed the young penitent in the office of an attorney; but Voltaire found the practice of the law at least as distasteful as the science of it had been, and he sought solace in very different pursuits. His father now despaired of fixing him to anything. At length a friend of the family, M. de Caumartin, who held an office under government, offered to take the youth to his estate at Saint Ange, and pledged himself that his charge should not return till he had made choice of a profession. He fulfilled his promise in one sense, but not in that intended; for it so chanced that Voltaire was confirmed in all his literary predilections. At the chateau lived M. de Caumartin the elder, a very old man, who was full of stories about the court of Henry IV., and the friends of Sully, and of course knew all the intrigues of the court of Louis XIV. Voltaire with characteristic ardour instantly began to meditate his Henriade and his Age of Louis XIV.

His next step was into the Bastille. Louis XIV. was just dead; and Voltaire, whose satirical humour and malice were already pretty notorious, was unjustly suspected of writing some lines, which reflected on the Grand Monarque. His imprisonment lasted more than a year, which he employed on his Henriade and his Œdipus. He was at length through the intervention of a courtier relieved by the regent, who, pleased with his genius, consoled the young poet for his captivity with the promise of a sum of money. "I thank your royal highness," said Voltaire, "for the care you have taken of my board, but I hope you will never more trouble yourself about my lodging." It was at this time that he changed his name from Arouet to Voltaire, saying, "I have done very badly with my first name, I should like to see whether this will succeed better."

In 1718 was acted his play of Œdipus; it was received with great applause; and his father, a gratified witness of his triumph, condescended at last to sanction his being a poet. Banished soon after from the capital, for presumed Voltaire, complicity in some political intrigue, he was permitted to return to Paris in 1720, for the representation of his tragedy of *Artemire*; but he returned to no triumphs—his tragedy was unmercifully hissed. Two years after he visited Holland, in company with Madame Rupelmunde. In passing through Brussels he saw J. B. Rousseau, and commenced and finished his concise friendship with that eccentric man, "whose genius he admired, and whose misfortunes he pitied." They met with the complimentary raptures with which Frenchmen alone can meet; but the enchantment lasted only a moment. Rousseau read to Voltaire his *Ode to Posterity.* "My friend," said Voltaire, "I am afraid that is a letter which will never reach its address." Voltaire, in his turn, read to Rousseau his *Epistle to Urania,* whereupon Rousseau put on a long face, and severely rebuked him for the impieties of that performance! The scene must have been exquisitely comic. They parted lifelong enemies.

On his return to France, Voltaire passed some time in retirement, finishing his *Henriade.* Meantime in 1724 the *Marianne* of this fertile writer was acted, but with no better success than his *Artemire.* At length, anxious to publish the *Henriade,* he summoned the most fastidious of his friends to a critical rehearsal. It was to be read canto by canto. The ordeal proved a harder one than vanity could bear; and one day, losing patience under the severity of criticism, Voltaire cast his manuscript into the fire. It cost the President Hennault a fine pair of lace ruffles to save it from the flames. While Voltaire delayed the printing of his poem in order to render it more perfect, the infamous Abbé Desfontaines got hold of a copy, impudently interpolated some lines of his own, and surreptitiously printed it for his own profit, under the title of *La Ligue.* Voltaire was, of course, enraged; but the poem, disguised though it was, made so favourable an impression that he forgot his anger in the intoxication of success. His complacency even overflowed on the unprincipled instrument of that success. He not only forgave Desfontaines, but busied himself sometime after in procuring his release from the Bicêtre; but he was a man whom neither forgiveness nor benefits could bind, and he pursued Voltaire with inextinguishable malevolence.

If the *Henriade* increased his fame, it provoked the zeal of courtiers and priests; the one smelt sedition in his praises of Coligny, and the other discovered that the author was no better than a semi-Pelagian! No doubt it was news to Voltaire to find that he was even thus far on the road to orthodoxy. Liberty to publish was denied him, and the young king refused to accept the dedication.

About this time an adventure befell him, which revealed some of the perils of that brilliant circle of fashion which he still aspired to frequent. For some petulant reply to the chevalier de Rohan-Chabot, at the table of the Duke of Sully, the offended guest, shortly after, ordered his servants to inflict a dastardly personal chastisement on Voltaire. Having complained in vain to the Duke, whom he implored to aid him in his revenge, he is said to have shut himself up in a rage, and to have practised fencing, till he felt himself a match for his opponent; he then sent a challenge, couched in the most contemptuous terms. It was accepted; and the duel was to take place the next day. Meantime the affair got wind, and his base assailants took characteristic measures to prevent it. He was arrested, and a second time immured in the Bastille. There he remained six months; and on recovering his liberty, was ordered to leave the kingdom. He took refuge in England.

How deeply he felt the personal insult we may gather from the fact, that he is said to have covertly visited France, in the hope of confronting his adversary. Failing in this, and afraid of being discovered, he quickly returned to his asylum, where he sojourned more than two years (1726–1728).

He here made himself well acquainted with our language, and read very extensively in our literature. He was especially familiar with those infidel writers who, in the middle of the last century, exercised so malign an influence on our country,—such as Tindal, Clubb, Woolston, Collins, and, above all, Bolingbroke. From these Voltaire borrowed nearly all the arguments he afterwards used against Christianity; nor do we believe that in all his voluminous writings there is a single objection the germ of which may not be found in their pages. He had no occasion to borrow their ribaldry or their sarcasm; he had more than enough of his own. All their weapons he wielded after his own manner, with more wit, with more profanity, with more effrontery, and, if we except Bolingbroke, with more spirit and eloquence. But the weapons are all second-hand; in all the learning really necessary to decide on the claims of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, he was a mere sciolist. He was equally disqualified calmly to weigh the evidence by his intense prejudices. But we shall return to this topic by and by.

While in England, he wrote the tragedy of *Brutus,* which added a little, but not much, to his fame; published his first edition of the *Henriade*; collected some authentic materials for his *Life of Charles XII.*; and sketched those *Philosophical Letters* (otherwise called *Lettres Anglaises*) which were not published till some years after, but which, when published, roused against him the most violent resentment.

He at length returned to Paris, and taking lodgings in a remote faubourg, lived for some time an obscure life, occupied alternately with making books and making his fortune—two things very different, in general, but which Voltaire managed to combine. In the latter, he showed himself a very skilful adept, and was not less lucky than skilful; by his speculations in a lottery, in public scrip, and by some other ventures, he made considerable gains, and what he thus realized, he skilfully invested: so that, though some of his great friends sometimes condescended to borrow of him, and even so far honoured him as to forget to pay the interest, and now and then even to restore the principal, he somehow managed to repair these losses; and after "having lost much, given away much, and spent freely," he was at the end of life a rich man, "worth, it is said, 160,000 livres, or about £7,000 a year."

On this subject, Voltaire speaks, in his autobiography, very sensibly. "I was not born rich, and it may be asked how I came to acquire wealth enough to live like a farmer-general; to which I answer, and I would have others make me their example, I had seen so many men of letters poor and despised, that I had long determined not to augment their number."

Involved in another political peril, in consequence of the publication of some bold verses in defence of a deceased comic actress, Madame Leconveur, who had been refused the rites of burial, Voltaire had reason to dread a third visit to the Bastille. He concealed himself at Rouen, under an English name, and busied himself in secretly printing his *History of Charles XII.* (of which the last edition had been seized), and the *Philosophical Letters,* for which he did not dare to ask a licence. In 1730, he brought on the stage his *Brutus,* and, shortly after, his *Erigyle,* neither of which had much success; he was amply compensated, however, by the applauses which waited on *Zaire,* acted soon after. In the two or three following years, his fertile pen produced several other pieces, of which the *Temple du Gout* (1733) was the most remarkable. The severity of its criticism on the principal writers of France seemed little short of literary blasphemy, and literary bigotry carried its resentment so far as to beg the government to punish the author. The *Epistle to Urania,* which even Rousseau had condemned for its impiety, was surreptitiously printed, and gave new umbrage to the government. Voltaire scrupled Voltaire, not to disavow the piece, and attributed it to the Abbé Chauvire, who had been dead some years. The falsehood, like most of Voltaire's, deceived nobody. The publisher of the Philosophical Letters was imprisoned, the author menaced, and the work itself publicly burned by the hands of the executioner. Under these circumstances, it is not wonderful that Voltaire should have meditated flight, not only from Paris, but from France. From this last, he was deterred by his liaison with Madame du Châtelet, which lasted till the death of that lady. She was a singular woman, or rather man and woman both in one; that is, she united all the strength of a masculine intellect with all the vivacity and passionate sensibility of a woman's nature. She had received an education proper to a man, and profited by it as perhaps no other woman of her time could have done. She understood Latin; she successfully prosecuted geometry and metaphysics, translated Newton, studied Leibnitz, and, on one occasion, only just failed of winning a prize offered by the Academy of Sciences.

It was once supposed that the attachment of Voltaire to this lady, whose husband was living, was purely Platonic; "but," as M. Auger says, "it would be ridiculous now to dissemble that Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet were lovers."

Both were weary of the fashionable circles, where "they lost time, money, and health," and this, together with the dangers which gathered round Voltaire, suggested the thought of retiring to Cirey, an estate situated on the confines of Champagne and Lorraine. In that solitude, they studied together in such constant communion, that they seemed for a time to exchange tastes; Madame du Châtelet, in spite of her geometry and metaphysics, addicted herself to the polite literature of England and Italy, the languages of which she learned from Voltaire, and according to his account, with miraculous facility: while Voltaire, on the other hand, was so inoculated with her love of science, as to beguile himself for a moment, in spite of his very nature, into the notion that he had a genuine penchant for it, and that it was his true vocation. They worked together at the Éléments de la Philosophie de Newton; they competed, once conjointly and once as rivals, for prizes proposed by the Academy of Sciences. In the first case, both were compelled to yield to the illustrious Euler; in the second, Voltaire, who defended Newton against Leibnitz, beat his mistress, who defended Leibnitz against Newton.

This excursion into science seems to have satisfied Voltaire, and he returned to literature, which he forsook no more. At Cirey he composed Alzire, Zulime, Mahomet, Merope, and L'Enfant Prodigue; finished the Discours sur l'Homme; commenced Le Siècle de Louis XIV.; and collected the materials for his Essais sur les Meurs et l'Esprit des Nations. It was there also, says M. Auger, "that he completed that too famous poem which religion, morals, and patriotism will ever condemn; which could not increase his renown; which tormented his life; which dishonours his memory." It was there, too, that he received the first advances from Prince Frederick of Prussia, which paved the way for that strange episode in the life of these two singular men, which made both of them at once the wonder and the laughingstock of Europe.

About this time, 1738, Voltaire was incessantly harassed by the attacks of Desfontaines, who, in reply to Voltaire's Preservatif, an anonymous piece, issued his Voltairemanie, likewise anonymous. "No attack," says the writer just cited, "ever moved Voltaire so much." His rage was unbounded, and even his health was affected by the violence of his passions." This miserable controversy was at length terminated by a disavowal obtained from Desfontaines by the intervention of the police,—a sort of rhetoric to which that worthy would yield anything, and such a trifle as truth most readily of all. While Voltaire was involved in these scandalous squabbles, Madame du Châtelet watched over him with the tenderest assiduity, and strove with all a woman's address and affection to mitigate the evils which she could not prevent. But when no foreign quarrel was in hand, they were but too apt to quarrel with one another. So ungovernable were the passions of both, that the repose of Cirey was by no means free from storms; violent alterations often occurred between Voltaire and his "divine Emilie." From the Letters of Madame de Graffigny, it sufficiently appears that Cirey was not the serene abode of philosophy which it was sometimes thought to be, and that habit and necessity, still more than affection, continued to link this strange couple together. After many years, it was broken by an event which formed but too natural a termination to such an union. The lady had an intrigue with M. de St Lambert whilst she and Voltaire were visiting at the court of King Stanislas at Luneville. She gave birth to a child, and died a few days after.

Voltaire, in 1746, was admitted a member of the Academy, an honour to which he had long aspired, and for which he had been twice an unsuccessful candidate. His inaugural discourse was much admired.

Shortly after, not to mention other quarrels in which he was incessantly embroiled, began Voltaire's miserable squabble with Crébillon, a competitor for dramatic honours quite unworthy of entering the lists with the author of Zaire. Nevertheless, angry at the preference given to this rival by aid of court intrigue, he eagerly engaged in an emulous strife for superiority, and rapidly poured forth a series of tragedies on subjects similar to those treated by Crébillon. Even, if a little better than those of Crébillon, they were, as might be expected from the circumstances under which they were produced, unworthy of Voltaire, and they were received by the public with mortifying coldness.

During the life of Madame du Châtelet, Voltaire refused to listen to the invitations of Frederick to visit his court and become his Mentor. At the lady's death, Voltaire listened, but hesitated; he was now between fifty and sixty, and dreaded the effect of the climate on his health. But Frederick took him on the side of his vanity, and effectually timed him. Some indifferent verses, in which his majesty had praised Arnaud as "the rising sun," in contrast with the "setting" Voltaire, were shown to the latter, of course on purpose. He was in bed. He sprang up in a rage, raved, danced about the room in his shirt, and called for post-horses. "Il faut," he said, "que le Roi de Prusse apprenne que je ne me couche pas encore." It was not his first or second interview with Frederick. In 1743, at the instance of the Duchess of Chateauroux, when France Voltaire seemed likely to be threatened by the conjoint hostility of England and Austria. Voltaire was selected to undertake a secret mission to Frederick, the issue of which Lord Macaulay has so amusingly characterised. "Voltaire was received with every mark of respect and friendship, was lodged in the palace, and had a seat daily at the royal table. The negotiation was of an extraordinary description. Nothing can be conceived more whimsical than the conferences which took place between the first literary man and the first practical man of the age, whom a strange weakness had induced to exchange parts. The great poet would talk of nothing but treaties and guarantees, and the great king of nothing but metaphors and rhymes. On one occasion Voltaire put into his majesty's hands a paper on the state of Europe, and received it back with verses scrawled on the margin. In secret, they both laughed at each other. Voltaire did not spare the king's poems, and the king has left on record his opinion of Voltaire's diplomacy. 'He had no credentials,' says Frederick, 'and the whole mission was a joke, a mere farce.'"

It was in 1750 that Voltaire took up his abode at Frederick's court, and his visit extended over three years. Of the scenes, at once most humiliating and most grotesque, to which it gave rise, we have no space to speak in detail. The friendship began in visionary raptures, and ended in real and lasting disgust. Nor could it be otherwise. True friendship was never founded on vanity and heartlessness, and these two great men possessed these faults in perhaps as large a measure as is compatible with human limitations. The flatteries with which Voltaire was received, his sumptuous lodgings, his offices, his titles, and his salary, did not long conceal from him that the position which he was invited to occupy was at best but a splendid slavery. If he indulged the freedom to which he was invited, and exhibited the petulant humour which was inseparable from his nature whether permitted or not, he soon found that he must, and did, give offence; while Frederick, who affected, in the literary coterie of which he was the centre, to lay aside the king, and to dispense with all ceremony, was equally offended whether they took him at his word or not. If they did not, he treated them with insolent sarcasm for their servile bearing; if they did, with equal sarcasm for their presumption. Thus Voltaire, like all the rest, was much in the condition of a monkey playing with a bear. At best it was dangerous sport in which a hug might at any moment be fatal.

Add to all this, the jealousies of the many little minds which envied Voltaire's superiority and the king's favour; Voltaire's irascible temperaments; and Frederick's hereditary love of plaguing, and not least, the loss of all mutual esteem which must have followed from seeing each other without a mask, and we cannot wonder that the friendship was soon dissolved.

Some of the incidents of the quarrel, such, for example as Voltaire's squabble with Maupertuis, the president of Frederick's little academy; his most comic squib against that worthy, entitled *Diatrib du Docteur Akakia*; Frederick's hearty laugh over it in private, while he earnestly pleaded for its suppression; Voltaire's pretended compliance, while he reserved a copy, which soon appeared in print, and covered the luckless president with ridicule; the mutual trickeries by which Voltaire sought to get away, and Frederick sought to keep him; above all, when he did get away, the scenes at Frankfort, where the king's messenger demanded the restoration of that volume of the *Royal Poésie* which Voltaire was charged with having nefariously carried off, and the poet's humiliating detention till it was recovered from Leipsic, where he had left the precious treasure—these things, as detailed in Voltaire's bitter autobiography, form one of the strangest tragi-comedies in the world; but it is also pitiable to think how much misery the vanity and malevolence of this singular pair must have inflicted on both. In all their correspondence of after years the traces are seen; it is obvious that the wounds with which they then pierced one another never kindly healed.

One alleged insult of Frederick, of course whispered to Voltaire, seems to have especially angered him. Frederick had said to some envious detractor of Voltaire: "Leave him alone. We squeeze an orange, and when we have sucked the juice, throw away the peel." "After this," says Voltaire in his *Memoirs*, which are full of stinging sarcasms against his royal friend, "I resolved to take all possible care of the peel." On the other hand, Voltaire's sayings, reported with an equally punctual kindness, must have stung Frederick to the quick. "See," said he one day, when Frederick had sent him a large quantity of his indifferent verse to be corrected, "see what a quantity of dirty linen he has sent me to wash." Contempt, especially from affected friendship, is the last thing that human nature can forgive; and the king and Voltaire had inflicted on each other contempt enough to insure a lifelong remembrance.

The details, and probably much more than the details, of this strange episode in his life are given in Voltaire's *Memoirs*. A most graphic sketch of the principal incidents will also be found in the *Essay on Frederick the Great* by the late lamented Lord Macaulay.

At length Voltaire was free, and after short visits to

---

1 The darker representations of Frederick in Voltaire's *Autobiography* are to be read with distrust, and some of his imputations we would not believe of any man without far better proofs than Voltaire's word.—Enough is authentically known of both, may, is disclosed in their own characters, as self-delivered in their voluminous correspondence, to prove that the only cordial feeling they could have had must have been admiration of each other's genius, for neither had virtue enough for true friendship. Meanwhile, it is most significant of Voltaire's character, that at all times he was penning the most contemptuous satire perhaps ever written, on his "Solomon," as he calls Frederick, he did thus, and up to the close of his life, engaged in a correspondence, in which the most ardent expressions of attachment, and the most fulsome adulation, are continually interchanged between the two. It shows Voltaire to be a monster of insincerity. It is true that sometimes the old wounds visibly fester, as when Voltaire says, April 1760, "Vous m'avez fait assez de mal, vous m'avez brouillé pour jamais avec le roi de France; vous m'avez fait perdre mes emplois et mes pensions, vous m'avez maltraité à Frankfort, moi, et une femme innocente, une femme considérée, qui a été traînée dans la boue, et mise en prison; et ensuite, en m'honorant des vos lettres, vous corrompez la douceur de cette consolation, par des reproches amers." "La femme innocentée" is, of course, Madame Denis; and in his letter of the 12th of May, the king replies characteristically enough—"Votre conduite n'est été tolerée par aucun philosophe, ... I have pardoned all, and even wish to forget all. But if you had not had to do with a fool in love with your genius, you would not have got off so well. ... Be sure of that, and moreover that I do not intend to spend more of that niece of yours, of whom I am tired enough (qui m'ennuie), and who, at least, has no such merits as cover her uncle's faults. One speaks of the servant-maid of Molieres, but depend upon it no one will speak of the niece of Voltaire." Lord Macaulay, who has condensed, in his lively way, a sentence or two from these letters, says of the early correspondence, that it may be studied with advantage by those who wish to become proficient in the ignoble art of flattery. Sometimes, no doubt, compliments are turned with great elegance, and want nothing but a little truth to recommend them; but in general, it must be confessed that the adulation is so gross and fulsome that nothing but an ostrich stomach could digest it. So it continued to the last. Thus writes Frederick in 1770:—"If ever knowledge should flourish again amongst the Greeks, they will be jealous that a Frenchman, by his *Henriade*, has surpassed Homer, has carried away the bell from Sophocles, has rivalled Thucydides, and has left far behind him Plato, Aristotle, and the whole school of the Porch." Nor is Voltaire a whit behind—"I have ever," says he, "at my heart the irreparable evil which Maupertuis has done me; I shall ever think of the calumny about 'the dirty linen sent to the washerwoman,' that lascivious calumny which was mortal to me, with a sorrow which will poison my last days. But all that D'Alembert tells me of your Majesty's goodness is a balm for my wounds..." Voltaire. Strasbourg, Colmar, the abbey of Senones, where he met with Calmet, who chivalrously attempted his conversion; to Plombières, where he went to visit M. d'Argental; to Colmar again; he at length, on finding that his presence at Paris would not be agreeable to royalty, decided on living out of France. After residing sometime at Montrion, and sometime at Les Delices, he at length bought the estates of Tourney and Ferney, in Gex. He at first lived alternately at one and the other, but finally settled at Ferney. Here he spent the last twenty years of his life, and in circumstances which strangely contrasted with the previous portion of it. Hitherto he had seldom been long anywhere: a vagabond on the face of the earth, his past life was an image of his restless self. At Ferney he fixed, and his opulence enabled him to sustain the character of a lord of the soil.

In some respects he did credit to his position. Constitutionally good-natured, though his good-nature was capricious and fickle—generous also where he felt no enmities—he sought to promote, and to a considerable extent did promote, the material interests of his tenantry and neighbourhood. He improved the land; he encouraged agriculture; pulled down the wretched cabins of his tenants, and replaced them by pretty houses; he built himself the substantial chateau of Ferney, not forgetting to add to it, among other luxurious appurtenances, a little theatre; if indeed that, to one of his tastes and habits, did not seem rather a necessity than a luxury. Here sometimes actors from Paris came to grace the performance of his own plays. Strangest of all, he even rebuilt the church, at his own expense, and on a larger scale, though not without uttering many sarcasms and performing many pranks in the course of the operation, which gave dire offence to the clergy. But they might have looked for such things from so peculiar a church reformer.

His incessant activity of mind was by no means exhausted by his many new occupations of a practical nature; his study was still the place in which he was most often found, and composition, as it had ever been, his principal employment and delight. Neither did the constant visits he received prevent his devotion to study: very often he did not appear, but left the ladies of his household to do the honours for him; or, if he appeared, stayed only a very short time. In fact, unless he had used this freedom with visitors, they would soon have absorbed his entire time, for Ferney soon became a centre of attraction to all the wandering savans and litterateurs of Europe. It was, as M. Auger says, the holy city of philosophers, something like what Mecca is to Mussulmen; "it was necessary, at least once in one's life, to make a pilgrimage there."

Neither here nor anywhere else could Voltaire have lived without getting embroiled in discreditable quarrels. Amongst these, that which sprang out of his pious zeal for restoring the ruinous church of Ferney was not the least; and, generally, the singular manner in which this curious patron of the parish conducted himself involved him in perpetual broils with his curé, and sometimes even with his bishop. The indecorous liberties which he took, and especially the impiety with which he trifled with an old wooden cross, at length caused the bishop to denounce him to the government. On one occasion he resorted to a strange method of proving his loyalty and devotion. He wished, he said, to fulfil his duties as a Christian, as an officer of the king, and as lord of the parish, and partook of the communion at the church at Ferney. In 1769, learning that the bishop of Annecy had forbidden every priest in his diocese to confess him, to absolve him, or to admit him to the communion, he betook himself to bed, declared himself to be sick and dying, and terrified a capuchin into giving him absolution and administering the Eucharist, threatening, in case of refusal, to complain to the parliament. Having received the communion in his chamber, he caused a notary, on the spot, to draw up a procès-verbal of the facts. These acts were regarded by the philosophers of Paris as pusillanimous "compliances," and by religious men as a sacrilegious farce. Both were right. It would be unjust to say that Voltaire wanted courage, for he sometimes gave proofs of the contrary; but no man ever had less of the spirit of a martyr. He never lost any advantage, or robbed himself of any revenge, which such a trifling thing as a lie or an act of hypocrisy could procure for him.

It was at Ferney that his infidelity displayed itself with the greatest virulence—became, in fact, a passion. It was the blind zeal of an iconoclast. "While he was at Paris, or retained the hope of returning thither," says a writer in the Biographie Universelle, "his impetuosity manifested itself only at intervals; he used a little management, and put on, sometimes, the veil of pretended doubt, sometimes the mask of a thoughtless pleasantry. When he saw himself, as it were, for ever exiled from the capital, his infidelity became systematic, positive, persevering, and furious."

To this many causes contributed. He felt himself safer; he lived on the frontiers of three independent states, into any one of which he might slip if he gave umbrage to either of the others; and with all his infidelity, there was one precept of the Gospel which, having no genius for martyrdom, he constantly practised: "If they persecuted him in one city, he fled to another." One of these little states, the republic of Geneva—of which he drolly said, "that if he but shook his wig, the powder would cover its territory"—was not loved by him, and he preferred to live just out of it; but in the event of a hard chase, the fox could, at any rate, take earth there. Thus happily located, his property also was, for the most part, so invested that, wherever he removed, his income was secure. Then, again, his admirers were numerous and ardent almost everywhere, and thousands who hated his sentiments were yet willing to show indulgence to his genius. His old age, too, the privileges of which, it has been well said, he most punctiliously exacted of others, though he paid no respect to it himself, was another protection; which was still strengthened by his own constant parade of his physical sufferings, and perpetual prophecies of his approaching death. For many years before his death, he was, according to his own account, always dying.

Other securities less creditable he did not hesitate to avail himself of whenever it was necessary. His most offensive brochures, which were continually issuing from the press, he did not scruple to palm off under names sometimes fictitious, sometimes real but not his own—sometimes even under those of the dead; nay, he did not scruple to disavow, if need be with solemn oaths, anything which it might be inconvenient to father. It is true, that these artifices deceived no one; and perhaps, says the writer in the Biographie Universelle, his vanity would have been vexed if any one had been deceived. Be this as it may, in this sheltered spot, he emptied the full quiver of his bitterness and hatred against religion, in one incessant volley. Nor did he scruple to poison the arrows. "Gross invective," says M. Auger, "cynical buffoonery, garbling and falsification, defamation and calumny, all appeared to..." Voltaire. him legitimate. . . . His most indulgent friends have agreed to mourn over the shameful excesses into which he was carried against those who essayed to vindicate Revelation or morality, outraged by him in twenty different works." His abhorrence of everything which bore the semblance of Christianity became more intense and indiscriminating every day. All forms of religion at last became identified in his mind with superstition; Christianity was but another name for priestcraft, and was presumed to be inimical to the rights, the freedom, and the reason of mankind. No wonder that, in these transports of an infidel bigotry (for such it really was), the scoffing, mocking tone became more and more bitter.

One may make some excuse for him from the corruptions of the system around him, the flagrant hypocrisies with which men, often as unbelieving as himself, turned Christianity into a gainful superstition; the wrongs and persecutions he had himself endured; and the provocation which he received from controvertists who, shameless as himself, employed against him arts as shameless as his own. Be this as it may, the writings of Voltaire undoubtedly exhibit more intense, bitter, gratuitous mockery of the Bible, and indeed of almost everything held sacred among men, than probably those of any other writer since the Christian era.

In justice, it must be said, that it was at Ferney also that Voltaire exhibited the traits and performed the actions which posterity now contemplates with most pleasure. They show like streaks of light in a dark cloud. It was here that he received under his protection the orphan descendant of the great Corneille, with the graceful welcome—"That he felt as an old soldier who had the child of his general consigned to him." He adopted her, had her carefully educated, married her to a young gentleman of good family, and dowered her, when she married, with the profits of his own editorial labours on her ancestor's works.

It was here, too, that he performed those real services in behalf of religious liberty which it is impossible to record without respect. His first considerable achievement was in aid of the Calvinist family of John Calas, who had just suffered, at Toulouse, the frightful punishment of being broken on the wheel, on the charge of having murdered his son, in order to prevent his conversion to Catholicism. Voltaire refused to believe in the possibility of the crime, and strained all his energies to procure such redress as was still possible. He freely employed his pen, his purse, and his influence in this good cause; he inflamed the zeal of the pathetic public, hired the eloquence of advocates, and, above all, incessantly used his own. The cause was rejudged, the sentence reversed, the memory of Calas vindicated; and his widow and children, whom bigotry had condemned to infamy and their property to confiscation, were reinstated in public opinion, and consoled with marks of the royal favour. Though this was the most remarkable of Voltaire's triumphs in this way, it was by no means a solitary one. His success on this occasion seemed to produce an impression, to employ a metaphor of his biographers, that he was a sort of knight-errant, whose mission it was to champion the oppressed and to redress the wrongs of public justice; its victims everywhere appealed to him, and, it must be allowed, that they did not appeal in vain. Another Protestant, Sirven, had been condemned to the same punishment as Calas, and for a similar crime. His daughter had been shut up in a convent in the hope of her conversion. She escaped, and threw herself into a well; the father was accused of having drowned her, and escaped execution only by flight. Voltaire taxed all his energies in his defence, persevered through many years of resistance or apathy on the part of the authorities, and secured at last Sirven's acquittal. Other instances, equally honourable to him, might be mentioned. It is true, indeed, that the applause which attended his efforts was enormous, and must have given one so sensitive to praise intense gratification; but there is no reason to doubt that he sincerely hated oppression, and loved freedom—almost the only pure and lofty sentiment which he consistently cherished. It is only to be regretted that in his writings on this, as on all other subjects, he confounds religion with superstition, and Christianity with priestcraft. It is profoundly to be deplored that the abominable cruelties which he opposed, as well as the gross corruptions of the system which sanctioned them, should have given his prejudices, exasperated by the long contest, a seeming justification. It must be pleaded as a palliation for the embittered tone which pervades his later writings; but it can form no sufficient apology. He had only to look into the New Testament to see that if Christ's commands are obeyed, persecution is impossible, and that it must be not only a monstrous perversion, but an absolute boulvertement of the meaning of the Gospel which pretends to sanction it.

The end was approaching. Madame Denis, who, ennuyée with the solitude of Ferney, and yearning, as only a Frenchwoman and an ancient coquette could, for the dissipations of Paris and of her vanished youth, strove with all her art to induce Voltaire to pay the capital a visit. She succeeded (1778).

The clergy and the court were by no means so delighted as Madame Denis; they started as at an apparition; but the philosophers and the litterateurs, and plenty of people of rank and fashion, were all in a flutter of delight. The fame of his works, his long exile, the renown of his late retreat, his very age, all made his visit a triumph, which was turned, however, into a veritable funeral procession. It is hardly a figure to say, that he died, stifled with the incense and worn out with the flatteries of that last visit. It is true that, at eighty-four, nothing could have kept the dying flame long alive: when a taper is just expiring, an idle moth's wing can flap it out; and even so, the faint spark of life was extinguished by the gay flutter of his Parisian parasites. The number of visits he received and returned, the hurry and excitement of thus living in a crowd, the exhaustion consequent on his efforts to entertain and be brilliant at eighty-four, brought on a severe hemorrhage and his life was in danger. Some chivalrous ecclesiastics from the first moment of his visit to Paris, had hardly proposed to themselves the achievement of his conversion; among them one or two who, if truth be spoken, gave but indifferent proof of being converted themselves. However, the Abbé Gaullier and the Curé of St Sulpice were

---

1 It is the indiscriminate attack of Voltaire upon all sorts of opinions, true and false, good and evil, which perhaps most strikes one in his career. In his case "the half would have been more than the whole." No doubt many of the things he assailed were hideous enough, and deserved to perish; it would have been sad if such a temper as he helped to raise, and which spent its violence in the next generation, had not killed some noxious insects, and left the atmosphere clearer. The misfortune was, that Voltaire's influence was simply destructive. "No human teacher," says Lord Macaulay, "ever left behind him so vast and terrible a wreck of truths and falsehoods, of things noble and things base, of things useful and things pernicious." Lord Byron has expressed the same trait in Voltaire by a happy metaphor—

"He multiplied himself among mankind, The Proteus of their talents; but his own Breathed most in ridicule; which, as the wind Blow where it listed, laying all things prone,— Now to o'erthrow a fool, and now to shake a throne." Voltaire, the principal and among the most respectable. The former, on hearing of Voltaire's illness, hastened to his octogenarian catechumen. The affair was characteristic. Voltaire, thinking himself in danger said, he did not wish his body "to be cast to the vultures," and bargained with the Abbé Gauthier, to whom he committed it, for the rites of sepulture, if nothing else. The preliminaries for duly receiving such a deposit were soon settled; Voltaire had no objection at all to the little ceremonies proper to the occasion. He made a declaration that he wished to die in the Catholic religion in which he had been born, asked pardon of God and the church for the offences he had committed against them, and received absolution. The Curé of St Salpice complained that he had not been called to so edifying a scene. Voltaire wrote a complimentary letter, full of regard for his ministry and his virtues, and the latter replied in a style equally full of courtesy and charity. But the hemorrhage ceased, Voltaire got better, and the patient "turned from the church to the theatre." On the day of the sixth representation of his Irene, which had been applauded, not for its own sake (for it was the last cracked strain of his aged muse), but in compliment to its author, Voltaire received from crowds, drunk with a grotesque enthusiasm, a tawdry homage, which only vanity like his could at such an age have enjoyed. After having been the admired and admiring spectator of his own play, which he vaingloriously thought was a new triumph of his genius, his bust was placed on the stage and crowned by the actors! Amidst the shouts and in the arms of the people, the decrepit object of this anticipatory apotheosis was borne to his coach; the crowds followed him to his hotel, rending the air with his name and the titles of his principal works, and ending with that of the Pucelle. On arriving at his hotel, Voltaire turned to the crowd and exclaimed, "My friends, you will stifle me with roses." Perhaps only vanity in its dotage would have been content to apply so delicate a metaphor to such gross perfume, but there is sober truth in describing the suffocating effects.

"He begs their flattery with his latest breath, And, smothered in't at last, is praised to death."

On the same day on which he passed through this exciting scene, he had sufficiently taxed the strength and spirits of an old man of eighty-four by being present at a long sitting of the academy, where he had received similar, but less tumultuous honours, from the representatives of science and literature. Such scenes as these, combined with some efforts at literary work, and his immoderate recourse to coffee, brought on a fit of dysuria, a complaint from which he had previously suffered. He took opium to relieve his pangs, and, it is said, took too much; it probably hastened his death, which occurred May 30, 1778.

A deep cloud rests on the last hours of Voltaire,—so various and so contradictory are the accounts which enemies and friends have transmitted to us, and so hopeless the imbroglio of doubts which those differences have occasioned. Some say he died in agonies of remorse and terror; some that he made an edifying confession, and died reconciled to the church; some that he persisted in his hardihood of unbelief to the last. We are content to let the cloud rest upon the scene without any attempt to pierce it. Indeed, on any hypothesis, we can learn nothing worth knowing. If he made confession and received absolution and the eucharist, what value can be attached to such things when he had already acted a similar part in the very wantonness of profanity, and for purposes the most frivolous? If he persisted in his unbelief, it is only what multitudes of a less confirmed and obdurate scepticism, have done before him. It is certain that such a life could not have yielded, in the retrospect, any solid satisfaction, or anything that could naturally tend to disarm the terrors of that hour; but it does not follow that Voltaire felt them. In fact, those who would draw omens of the truth of this or that system of belief or unbelief from the phenomena of a deathbed, have often laid on them a stress which is by no means justified. Many an abbe of Voltaire's time, quite as bad as Voltaire, and worse in one respect, that they added hypocrisy to a flagitious life, passed away very calmly; while many a man of exemplary and undoubted goodness—Cowper, for example—has died in frightful agonies of despair. In truth, not only cannot the death of an individual justify us in pronouncing confidently for or against any system of opinion, but not even his life will. Such argument is in effect two-edged. As to the general tendencies of systems, when really acted on, to produce moral effects in life, and peace or dismay in death, we may see enough to justify ample confidence in our conclusions. But a solitary instance here and there may seemingly fail to verify them. That they, for example, who scoff at all notions of a moral government of the world and a future retribution; who believe that conscience is but the voice of self-interest; who avowedly see neither crime nor shame in the unrestrained indulgence of sensual passions, and proclaim that it is superstitious to dread the consequences, are less likely to be honest, temperate, or chaste, than those of opposite creeds, we should hold it absurd to deny, and should not care to argue with any one who did. And at certain epochs, as in our own country in the seventeenth, and in France in the eighteenth century, we may see the influence of such a creed exemplified on a sufficient scale to demonstrate its sinister effects on practical morals. But the case of individuals proves little, or rather nothing; for it cuts both ways. There are too many examples of men who have held perfectly orthodox views, who yet have been every whit as bad as those who abjured them; and, on the other hand, some who have denied them, have, under the influence of a cold temperament, prudential motives, and purely secular interests, been, in their outward life, so much better than Voltaire that they may well shame many professed Christians.

It was once the fashion to speak of Voltaire as an universal genius; as not only having made incursions into all the realms of science and literature, but as having conquered and appropriated them; as a profound philosopher, an original thinker, a poet worthy to rank with the first names, whether of epic or dramatic renown; as a great historical writer, whose comprehensive knowledge of facts was only equalled by the sagacity with which he philosophized upon them. Such is the vein of exaggeration which pervades his life by Condorcet; in fact, rather an eloge than a life, and (which is saying a great deal) as indiscriminate and absurd in its flatteries as any of the panegyrics ever pronounced before the French Academy. One word will show the infamy of adulation to which he stoops: he descends to palliate, on the whole, the tendency even of Pucelle, on the ground that the victims of the sensuality there so shamelessly pandered to, may possibly be fortified against all superstitious fears of the consequences!

The estimate of such eulogists of Voltaire's genius, as at once "universal and profound" (wonderfully versatile and active it really was), is simply ridiculous. His whole mind must have been projected on a far greater scale really to master the many branches of science and literature which he essayed. "He has not bequeathed to us," says the great critic whom we have already twice cited, "a single doctrine to be called by his name, not a single addition to our stock of knowledge."

---

1 Macaulay justly says, that "what Burke said of the Constituent Assembly was true of this its great forerunner; Voltaire could not It may be added, that none of his books, even in the branches of composition in which he most excelled, are master-pieces, or entitled to be placed in the first rank. It is well remarked by the above critic, when speaking of the youthful Frederick's extravagant admiration of Voltaire, and ascribing it to his defective education, that "had Frederick been able to read Homer and Milton, or even Virgil and Tasso, his admiration of the Henriade would prove that he was utterly destitute of the power of discerning what is excellent in art. Had he been familiar with Sophocles or Shakespeare, we should have expected him to appreciate Zaire more justly. Had he been able to study Thucydides and Tacitus, in the original Greek and Latin, he would have known that there were heights in the eloquence of history far beyond the reach of the author of the Life of Charles the Twelfth." But though not entitled to the first rank in any of the great branches of composition he attempted, it is certainly wonderful that he should have achieved fame in so many, and that he should have passed with so much versatility from one species of literary labour to another. It is not surprising that he had the usual lot of the pentathlete, and, excelling in many branches, failed of the highest excellence in all. Nor, even had his genius been more specifically fitted for a single sphere, could he have done himself full justice, or attained the excellence of which he was really capable; for he was writing perpetually, and the only wonder is, that he did not much oftener fall below mediocrity. No man ever left, as he did, fourscore volumes behind him, or even half the number, without leaving a great deal of rubbish in them. Chef d'œuvres, where there is the genius to produce them, can be the result only of patient toil and prolonged meditation, and they will, therefore, be few. Such voluminous works as Voltaire's must be marked not only by haste and frequent common-place, but by repetitions; Voltaire, in fact, had written all his works long before he had got to the end of his eighty volumes; it is well remarked by Madame Necker, "that he had extracted from his genius everything of which it was susceptible; like a sponge, he had drained it to the last drop."

But without claiming for Voltaire's genius the epithets either of "universal" or "profound," it had qualities, no doubt, which justly challenge our wonder. His wit was enormous; but though this was his predominant faculty, perhaps the qualities which most strike us are his marvellous mobility and versatility. He played in rapid alternation almost all literary parts, some with great éclat, most with more than average success, and passed from one to the other—from verse to prose, from tragedy to burlesque, from history to fiction—with astonishing facility. His restless activity demanded unceasing employment, and his versatility prompted to the most various kinds of it. He himself says that he "was born with the love of labour," and it is true; though, had he not varied his employment as he did, we question whether this would have been so marked a trait of his character. Indeed, such industry has rarely been conjoined with such versatility.

The characteristics of intellect we have indicated, are the very reverse of those which distinguish a great philosopher; and assuredly Voltaire was none. Of depth or subtlety of speculation; of patient or comprehensive thought; of judicial candour or calmness in the survey of evidence; of a genius for philosophy, properly so called, there are few traces in Voltaire's writings. He has left little or nothing that can be called original or novel in speculation; his materials, especially in his philosophical and theological writings are, for the most part, second-hand. He knew, however, how to make use of the knowledge he had, as well of his readers' ignorance, and manages to parade sciolism with the airs of erudition. Had he been as accurate and comprehensive as he was lively, his graces of style would have made him, if not a great philosopher, one of the best exponents of the philosophy of others the world ever saw. Knowledge varied and extensive but neither deep nor accurate, brilliant superficiality, a never tiring vivacity of wit and humour, which in him were alone creative faculties, chiefly characterise him. These, combined with great felicity of style, make him one of the most vivacious of writers. He has often all the gravest faults with which an author can be chargeable—shallowness, impurity, grossness, disingenuousness, sophistry, scurrility, and contempt of truth; but one fault he has not—he is never dull. Open him where we will, he is always vivacious.

His incessant activity of mind, and his extreme love of labour, are both exemplified in the vast variety and voluminousness of his works. Though he led a life of unusual activity for an author—though it was full of movement and incident—he has left behind him no less than fourscore octavo volumes. Computed merely by their solid contents, as so many cubical feet of printed matter, the products of his mind were enormous. His correspondence alone, extending over fourteen or fifteen volumes (with the letters of D'Alembert and Frederick of Prussia to him, it fills eighteen), makes as much as the opera omnia of many considered rather voluminous authors.

The vivacity and activity of mind which so eminently distinguished his writings were as eminently displayed, we are told, in his conversation; so that, in fact, his whole life must have been a perpetual play of intellectual pyrotechny; he was a sort of catherine-wheel, whose incessant revolution was continually throwing off a shower of brilliant scintillations.

It is true, that to secure this perennial vivacity, he had, in addition to his great intellectual endowments, some other facilities for which he is more the object of wonder than of build, he could only pull down; he was the very Vitruvius of ruin." It is freely admitted, that in his long war with all that had been previously revered among men, Voltaire often assaulted error as well as truth, superstition as well as religion, which indeed he never took the trouble to distinguish. It was only, perhaps, by such explosive and destructive forces that the dreadful social edifice, reared before Voltaire saw the light, could be destroyed; nor, perhaps, was it inexpedient that men should be taught, by the terrible experiments which a sed-dissent philosophy was commissioned to make, that genuine freedom is at least as incompatible with unbelief as with superstition. It is curious to see how Voltaire absolutely identifies oppression with religion, and how partial, accordingly, are his views of liberty itself. There is hardly a passage in his writings which shows that he had any true conceptions of, or sympathies with, civil and political liberty; nor is there any proof that he ever actively opposed any of the political abuses of his day, or strove, when he had opportunity, to enlighten in this matter the despotic princes with whom he came in contact. It has been well said by one of his biographers, that with such political views as his, it is by no means impossible that he might have been one of the first victims of that Revolution of which he was the unconscious pioneer.

1 Many of his repartees were infinitely ready. For example, he was once warmly eulogizing the celebrated Haller before a guest disposed to matter. "Ah, sir," said the latter, "if M. Haller would but speak of your works as you speak of his." "Possibly," said Voltaire, "we are both mistaken." Nevertheless, it is said he was once completely disconcerted by Young, the author of the Night Thoughts. Voltaire—so the story goes—was depreciating the Paradise Lost, of which the subject was doubtless as distasteful as the poetry. He was particularly disposed to make game of the celebrated personifications of Death, Sin, and the Devil, as he has also done in his writings. Young, looking him steadily in the face, is said to have said,— "Thou art so witty, wicked, and so thin, Thou art at once the Devil, Death, and Sin." Voltaire. envy. He did not suppress a sarcasm for a trifle, or allow modesty or severe truth to stand in the way of a piquant pleasantry. A brilliant paradox; a jest, though on the most solemn or sacred subject provided it was but clever and pointed; an effective sophism, though founded on the most egregious suppressio veri or perversione recti, carried the day against all idle scrupulous punctilios of decorum, equity, and charity. As old Thomas Fuller puts it, he would "have washed his hands in the baptismal font," and "drunk healths out of the church chalice." To use the language of the jockey, he rode light.

His powers of acquisition were very great; of his indefatigable industry we have already spoken. Both together unquestionably put him in possession of very multifarious, though, as we have said, by no means accurate knowledge. He easily retained what he had read, and had what many men of great genius have possessed—his English contemporary Johnson in particular—an art of gutting books, and appropriating what is best worth remembering, without a slow and equable perusal of every syllable. Such a gift is very valuable; but it is also a very dangerous one, and often leads to inaccuracies from which a more plodding and patient industry is exempt. In general, it may be said, that Voltaire read too many books, and on too many subjects, not to have all the superficiality which must ever attend the effort to acquire a quasi-encyclopaedic knowledge.

The mobility which characterized Voltaire's intellect characterized equally his moral temperament. His whole nature was restless as his mind. The aspen vibrating at every breath can alone symbolize his sensitiveness to every external impulse; the glancing of shot-silk, or the changes of the chameleon, can alone express the varying aspects of his mind under such impulses. In this respect he was a child all his days; and if he had had the simplicity and innocence of a child, nothing could have been more riant or delightful than the social character of Voltaire; and, indeed, these childlike qualities are represented as constituting, in his best moods, one of the great charms of his manner. Unhappily he was not only a child, but a spoiled child, or rather united all the variable humour and abandon of a child with all the irascibility and malice of a monkey. In grief or anger he had no more self-control (as has been well said) than a "petted child or an hysterical woman;" or than an untutored savage, who freely gives way to every emotion without check or stint. In anger especially (and he kindled as readily as phosphorus) he gesticated, made grimaces, cursed, stamped, capered, and poured forth a torrent of words, or even tears, in the effort to express his turbulent emotions. The next moment he was all sunshine and laughter. His placability, however, was by no means uniform. Constitutionally, as we have said, good natured, his resentments were often as deep as they were vivid; against Rousseau, for example, his hatred was both intense and unquenchable.

Of Voltaire's rapid changes of mood we have two or three examples most graphically described in Marmontel's delightful memoirs. They cannot well be omitted in any sketch of this singular man. The first extract thus paints his demeanour after the death of Madame du Châtelet:

"When I went to console with him," says Marmontel, "on the death of Madame du Châtelet, his most beloved mistress, 'Come,' said he, on seeing me, 'Come and share my sorrow. I have lost my illustrious friend; I am in despair; I am inconsolable.' I, to whom he had often said that she was like a fury that hunted his steps, and who knew, that in those disputes, they had more than once been at daggers drawn,—I let him weep, and seemed to sympathise with him. And there he was, exhausting language in the praises of that incomparable woman, and redoubling his tears and his sobs. At this moment arrives the intendant Chauvelin, who tells him some ridiculous story, and with him Voltaire is bursting with laughter. I laughed too, as I went away, to see in this great man the facility of a child, in passing from one extreme to another in the passions that agitated him. One only was fixed in him, and, as it were, inherent in his soul; it was ambition and love of glory."

Thus did this unballasted soul roll and pitch under every wind and wave of life. Another example is given in Marmontel's description of his visit to Ferney:

"Nothing can be more singular nor more original than the reception Voltaire gave us. He was in bed when we arrived. He extended to us his arms; he wept for joy as he embraced me; he embraced the son of his old friend, M. Gaulard, with the same emotion. 'You find me dying,' said he; 'do you come to restore me to life, or to receive my last sigh?' My companion was alarmed at this preface; but I, who had a hundred times heard Voltaire say that he was dying, gave Gaulard a gentle sign of encouragement; and, indeed, a moment afterwards, the dying man, making us sit down by his bedside, 'My dear friend,' said he, 'how happy I am to see you! particularly at this moment, when I have a man with me whom you will be charmed to hear. It is M. de l'Ecluse, the surgeon-dentist of the late king of Poland, now the lord of an estate near Montargis, and who has been pleased to come to regain the irreparable teeth of Madame Denis. He is a charming man; but don't you know him?' 'The only l'Ecluse that I know,' answered I, 'is the actor of the old comic opera-house,' 'Tis he, my friend,' tis he himself. If you know him you know the song of the Griselda, that he plays, and sings so well.' And there was Voltaire instantly imitating l'Ecluse, and with his bare arms and sepulchral voice, playing the Griselda and singing the song. . . . We were bursting with laughter and he quite serious. 'I imitate him very ill,' said he, 'tis l'Ecluse that you must hear, and his song of the Spinster and that of the Postilion, and the quarrel of the apple-woman with Vadé, it is truth itself. Oh you will be delighted! Go and speak to Madame Denis; I, ill as I am, will get up and dine with you. We'll eat some wild-fowl, and listen to M. de l'Ecluse. The pleasure of seeing you has suspended my ills, and I feel myself quite revived.'"

The temper of Voltaire always irritable, and never controlled, became often ungovernable. On the most trivial affront it was apt to break out in demonstrations as ludicrous as they were violent. The incessant incense of flattery, which was ever fuming before him in the latter years of his life, aggravated this irritability by intensifying his vanity and amour-propre, and he became at last impatient of the slightest contradiction; all suavity as long as compliments were going, opposition put him into a fury.

Some of his displays of temper, as, for example, the rage in which he broke away from the dinner-table of the Marquis of Villette, at not finding his silver cup in the accustomed place; the sudden wrath with which he danced up to the astonished bookseller, Vanüren (who had sent in what he thought an unjust demand), struck him a blow, and then vanished without one word of explanation; the droll vehemence with which his own greed raved against the greed of Frederick, because that prince had refused to grant 1000 louis, to enable Voltaire to bring his niece Madame Denis with him, drily saying, "that he had not invited the lady?"—these, and many other examples, exhibit our philosopher in a ludicrous light.

The poetry of Voltaire—though, to much of his composition in verse, it is hardly less than profanity to apply the name—is now pretty justly estimated in France itself. His Henriade is admitted to be no epic worthy of ranking with the great master-pieces so called. His Pucelle deservedly covers his name with infamy. His other light poems, as well as his comedies, are generally allowed to be mediocre, to say nothing of the moral blemishes which disfigure them. His tragedies have all the faults of the French drama in general, and some of their own besides. But it is perhaps hardly possible for Englishmen to criticise fairly works conceived in a spirit so utterly antipodal to that which reigns amongst us. He who thought Shakspeare "an inspired barbarian," or "a savage not destitute of imagination," as he elsewhere expresses it, was hardly Voltaire likely to satisfy us in his poetical theory. His rigorous adherence to the so-called *Unities* seems to English tastes pedantic formality. The finest passages are not free from strained sentiment and bombastic rant; rhetorical declamation is substituted for real energy and passion; the very language in which he writes, admirable though it be for prose, is, in English estimate, essentially unpoetical; and the tinkling rhyme and metre seem to transform the severe tragic muse into a dancing girl with castanets. Such compositions, subjected to English critical taste, will receive no better treatment than Voltaire has bestowed upon Shakspeare's, and certainly they cannot meet with worse. We shall, therefore, content ourselves with referring the reader to the discriminating, and, as it appears to us, judicious criticism, of Voltaire's poetic character inserted in the *Biographie Universelle*. On the *Pucelle* we make no remarks. In that loathsome work he has caricatured every truth and sentiment deserving of veneration or invested with dignity. Religion, morals, and patriotism are alike outraged. The soul of Voltaire was incapable of veneration; in this poem it would seem to be equally insensible of the sublime and beautiful. The most glorious traditions of his own country—traditions which, even if they had less historic truth in them than they have, every Frenchman with a spark of patriotism would cherish in the deepest feelings of his soul—Voltaire has treated with the same impartial ribaldry with which he has outraged religion and morals. It is, perhaps, well that he has done so; for it is a sufficient answer to his attacks on these last, that they proceed from one who revered nothing in the world when it came in competition with the indulgence of his prurient fancy, or his love of buffoonery. He who could write the *Pucelle* is not likely to prove a formidable opponent to any system of morals or religion, unless mankind should first lose their senses or their shame altogether.

The way in which he has masqueraded Joan of Arc before his countrymen may be faintly, and but faintly, conceived, by imagining an English author to select Alfred the Great as the subject of a burlesque poem like Hudibras. It is in vain that Voltaire pleads that he has imitated Ariosto. The grossness of Ariosto is decency itself compared with the impurities of Voltaire.

The prose of Voltaire in his best moods is admirable. For narrative and didactic purposes it is hardly possible to imagine a more perfect vehicle of thought. He was one of a long series of great French writers who, beginning with Descartes and Pascal, have given to the world inimitable specimens of prose style; concise yet clear; simple and easy, but vivid and elegant; sparing in ornament, but with much grace of diction and harmony of structure. Its charm is, that it seems the natural dress of the thoughts, adapts itself to all its movements with spontaneous flexibility, and is free from all mannerism.

It is not always, indeed, that Voltaire does his very best, and is sometimes careless enough; but in general he abounds in spontaneous grace and unlaboured felicities. Sometimes, and especially in his *Philosophical Dictionary*, there is an affectation of epigrammatic point,—of an oracular brevity designed to suggest more than is expressed, but by no means always suggesting it. Voltaire's manner, in such cases, looks like an unsuccessful imitation of that of Pascal in his *Pensées*. But in Pascal this suggestive manner is suggestive; it is no inexpressive mask, but an animated countenance, which speaks though silent.

Of Voltaire's voluminous prose works it is impossible to speak in detail. The life of the heroic madman of Sweden will always be read with interest from the clearness and elegance of the narrative, and the exciting romance of the adventure. The *Life of Peter the Great* is but a sketch. It is not without reason that one of his biographers regrets that Voltaire did not produce a more elaborate work on the reign of the great founder of the Russian empire; a subject of far more intrinsic interest than the brilliant meteoric career of the Swedish conqueror. Yet it may be doubted whether Voltaire's powers were adequate to the true philosophical treatment of such a subject. His *Essais sur les moeurs et l'Esprit des Nations*, and *Le Siècle de Louis XIV.* et *Louis XV.*, are the principal contributions of Voltaire to history. Though they may be superficial, if measured by the requirements of the modern spirit of severe historical research, first adequately exemplified by Gibbon, Voltaire certainly acquitted himself in this respect better than the generality of the historical writers of his time, while the graces of his style and, not seldom, the originality and comprehensiveness of his views will always secure readers. His philosophical tales are a brilliant reflection of all the powers of his mind, and, it must be added, of all the vices of his heart; of his wit and fancy, his invention, his ease, his elegance, but also of his cynical humour, his buffoonery, and his *grossiereté*. He had powers which eminently fitted him to excel in this species of composition, and he might have produced essays as full of innocent pleasantry as those of Addison. But there is not one which is not tarnished by some offence to modesty and virtue; not one which does not bear witness to the essential impurity of his mind; not one which is not deformed by polluting images. Even that exquisite little tale, *Micromegas*, the purely philosophical character of which would seem to render it impossible to introduce such offensive matter, is not free from it. Though it consists of little more than a couple of sheets, even this little piece must be expurgated before it could be read entire to modest ears. The impurities of many writers appear as blotches and blains, breaking out here and there; in Shakspeare, for example, whose indecency Voltaire modestly reproves. The impurity of Voltaire is a disease of the blood, and infiltrates every vein and artery with its diffusive malignity.

Much superfluous terror for the fate of Christianity was once occasioned by the writings of Voltaire and that host of sceptical writers of whom he was the Coryphaeus. It is sufficient to ask, at this distance of time, whether their works or the Bible be nearer oblivion,—whether they or it be most read? Is Christianity less powerful than when they commenced their crusade against it? Have they succeeded in diminishing the world's veneration for the Book they hated? of checking its translation or diffusion? of making the nations who then professed Christianity renounce it? Nothing of the kind: their indiscriminate assaults on the fabric of Christianity have had the effect, indeed, of shaking down some ruinous turrets, of exploding some pernicious superstitions and abuses, and it would have been well if they had destroyed more; but as to Christianity itself—the religion of the Bible—their assaults on it only roused the slumbering zeal of its defenders and champions. Never since the apostolic age has this religion been more energetic than since the reaction against the great sceptical attacks of the middle and close of the last century. The nations that professed Christianity then profess it still, and generally with somewhat more enlightened faith in it and wiser love for it than they cherished then; partly, no doubt, (let us candidly acknowledge it),

---

1 Thus he closes one of his articles with the enigmatical words:—"Oh much admired Plato, I fear that thou hast told us nothing but fables, that thou hast spoken only as a sophist. Thou hast done more mischief than thou art aware of. 'How so?' you will ask. I will not tell you."

VOL. XXI. owing to the hostile criticism of those who would fain have destroyed it altogether. The Bible speaks at this day in a hundred more languages than it spoke then, while cobwebs are already gathering over the greater part of the sceptical literature of the last century. The mass of it is fast being conveyed, like that of preceding sceptical epochs, to the dust of the upper shelf; or if, as in the case of Bolingbroke, Gibbon, and Voltaire, genius still redeems large portions from neglect, it is the portions, for the most part, in which their infidelity does not appear; those which it infests being generally considered as blots and not beauties in their works. But as for supplanting the Bible,—its circulation, the veneration with which it is regarded, and the efforts to make it utter the vernacular of all nations, are incomparably greater than in Voltaire's day. It is even ludicrous now to read in Voltaire's letters his unfulfilled prophecies of the approaching glories of the new dispensation of "Reason," in whose splendour the waning Bible was to be lost. On the contrary, the infidel literature of the day has, for the most part, gone into deep shadow, while that shines with a brighter and more diffused light than ever. The talent devoted to its vindication—its illustration—its criticism—and the toil and cost spent in its translation and circulation, have been far greater than at any other equal period since Christianity was first proclaimed to be "the truth of God." This, it may be said, does not prove Christianity true: it is admitted; but it conclusively proves this,—the folly of the vaunting tone ever assumed by every fresh storming party, and the equal folly of the transient panics as constantly felt by those who man the walls.

In truth, however we may lament that minds like those of Voltaire, Hume, or Gibbon, should have been prostituted to the cause of infidelity, or mourn the mischief which their writings may have done, especially during their own time, there is one point of view in which we can hardly regret that Christianity has met with such assailants. The attacks of such men on Christianity furnish most powerful proofs of its indomitable life. Its inherent strength would never have been so conspicuously seen except it had been thus tried; we can now more safely repose in the solidity of a structure on which so many storms have burst in vain. Never since Christianity entered the world have writers of greater talent or wider popularity conspired for its downfall, or under circumstances more favourable to the success of the enterprise, (could anything have made it successful), than during the latter half of the eighteenth century.

Of all these writers, Voltaire was by far the most active, the most witty, the most variously endowed with the gifts of genius; the most voluminous, the most incessant in his attacks, the most widely circulated, the most eagerly read; and yet it is no paradox to say, that he has proved in reality one of the least dangerous. His general character has, in a great degree, destroyed his influence as an assailant of Christianity. Not only is there so much in his general writings which the universal voice of all decent society condemns—not only is the tone in which he speaks of all things reverenced by man, whether human or divine, so impartially profane—not only is his morality so lax, his estimate of human nature so contemptuous, his reputation for mendacity and malice so well established, as to make him a questionable ally of any cause, but it is impossible that a mind imbued with the least particle of candour or love of truth can fail to see all his worst traits conspicuously exemplified when he touches on Christianity. "Per fata nefas," seems to be his motto, when the object is to discredit or cast ridicule on the Bible.

The libertine, who has come to a foregone conclusion, and is willing to accept anything which insults the religion he hates and the truths which are unwelcome to him, can alone gloat upon the perpetual ribaldry of Voltaire, or Voltaire accept his jests and mockery for argument. The bulk of ordinary readers will ever feel, that it is passionate hatred which speaks, that there is no fair or honest attempt to investigate evidence, and that truth, candour, decency, are all perpetually outraged.

As far as argument is concerned, perhaps one of the best ways of conveying to the minds of general readers an idea of Voltaire's incompetency to deal with such large subjects as Christianity and the Bible, is to give a slight specimen of his mode of dealing with matters where prejudice and passion were not likely to be half so strong. We may there see, clearly enough, how completely his genius was the reverse of that of a philosopher, how unfitting to investigate evidence; how completely it was the slave of preconception; how incapable of breaking through the little circle of previous theory or presumed experience. His credulous incredulity—we know not what else to call it—is coaxed with strange facility into accepting anything which makes for a preconception, and rejecting everything that makes against it. Let us consider two striking examples, in one of which science is concerned, and in the other literary taste. In the article "Shells" in the Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire attempts to deal with the puzzling fact, then beginning to excite notice, that true marine fossils are found on the mountains of Switzerland and in other elevated regions. He will not hear of it; no evidence shall establish it; and he resorts to the most ridiculous hypotheses to evade it. The "shells" may be "snails' shells," or they are the "cockle shells" of the multitude of palmers who made their way to Rome over the Alps during the middle ages! It may be thought that this last is one of the jests by which his petulance was accustomed to turn the edge of any inconvenient argument. If it be so, what can be said of such a mode of getting rid of plain facts which imperatively required to be accounted for? But, in truth, he seems to urge it as a really plausible solution; and it is not incredible, since he resorts to others hardly less ridiculous. "Lastly," says he, "I deny not that, a hundred miles from the sea we meet with petrified oysters, conches, univalves, productions which perfectly resemble marine ones, but are we sure that the soil of the earth may not produce these fossils?" The formation of vegetable agate should make us suspend our judgment. A tree has not borne the agate that is like a tree, and the sea may not have produced the fossil shells which seem to be those of little marine animals. Thus does incredulity become as credulous as superstition itself; and all this because Voltaire had resolved that, whatever came of it, the fact which seemed to say that the sea had once flowed over what are now high mountain-ranges, in short, pointed to a "deluge" of some sort, must be ignored or denied! It may be supposed that he had objections to "deluges" of all kind, but from the article entitled "Deluge" in the same work, one may shrewdly infer that it was chiefly the thought of the Noachian deluge that made him resolve that there should be no fossil marine shells in such inconvenient places. At any rate a genuine philosopher, whether he accepted the Noachian deluge or not, would have accepted the facts; hypothesis might come after. It was of a piece with the same credulous incredulity to declare, as he so frankly does in one of his letters to D'Alembert, that no evidence should make him believe a miracle; though to suppose it false, in the case he supposes, would certainly involve a greater mystery. "If a hundred thousand men," says he, "were to assure me that they all with their own eyes saw a dead man raised, I should say that they were all dazzled." That is, to avoid believing a great improbability, he would believe one that would amount to an impossibility.

Now, let us look at him when prejudices of another kind are concerned,—those of his narrow poetic, and especially Voltaire, dramatic theory,—and see how he speaks of Shakespeare.

Thus he writes to La Harpe, August 15, 1776:—“M. D’Alembert and your other friends are doing a patriotic work; it seems to me, in daring to defend, in full academy, Sophocles, Corneille, Euripides, and Racine, against Gilles Shakespeare and Pierre le Tourneau.” It will be needful to wash your hands after that battle, for you will combat against scavengers (contre des gadouards).”

In the same letter, the author of Pucelle complains vehemently of the indecencies of Shakespeare, and shows how impossible it would be to translate him literally without shocking the delicacy of a Parisian audience! It is likely; but it is certainly droll to hear such a man lecturing on the claims of decency; and equally so to think that his timid modesty is in alarm for the delicacy of a social condition, of which the refinement was so exquisite as to speech, and the grossness so great as regards conduct.

After some similar compliments to Shakespeare, Voltaire concludes his letter thus:—

“I know very well that Corneille has great faults; I have said only too much on that point; but they are the faults of a great man; and Rimer had very good reason to say that Shakespeare is but an ugly ape (n’était qu’un vilain singe).” In 1765, he writes, “Shakespeare is a savage, who had some imagination. He has many happy lines, but his plays can only please in London and Canada! It is no good sign of the taste of a nation when what it admires, is admired nowhere else.”

(A. M. Saurin.)

It was not from ignorance of the language that Voltaire did not appreciate Shakespeare, for there have been few Frenchmen better acquainted with English than himself. Indeed, it appears that he early translated some scenes of Julius Caesar, selecting as he politely expresses it, “a few pearls from Shakspeare’s enormous dunghill (énorme fumier).” So early as 1735 we find him, in a letter to M. de Chateville, speaking of his translations of the above scenes thus,—"It is a sufficiently faithful translation from an English author who lived a hundred and fifty years ago; it is Shakespeare—the Corneille of London—a great fool elsewhere (grand fou d’ailleurs).”

One whose prejudices are so strong, tastes so narrow, and criticism so conventional, all whose notions, once impressed, seem stereotyped, can hardly be expected, when far deeper antipathies were involved, to weigh evidence calmly or judge fairly. He who wrote such articles as that on “Shells” might be expected to deal summarily with the evidences for the Bible; and he who thus appraised the merits of Shakespeare, might well despise its sublimity and beauty.

The extraordinary liberties which he took both with truth and his antagonists, whenever passion was involved, are but too obvious in many a literary squabble of his life. It was not to be expected that Christianity should fare any better than his literary enemies.

If a difficulty stands in the way he escapes by any road venturing upon the most hardy assertions, even when in Voltaire, utter ignorance of the subject on which he is writing. He often asserts only what the shallowest sciolism could have risked; or which, if we do not attribute it to sciolism, we can only account for by supposing his effrontery yet more astounding than his ignorance. Thus, to give a slight example; when impugning the authenticity of the Pentateuch, he employs the almost incredible argument, that the names of the books—Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy—are Greek; that there are none such in the Hebrew; and that, therefore, the books probably had an origin far later than the alleged age of Moses. It may be thought but decent, that persons writing against the authenticity of a book should at least know as much as its title in the language in which it was originally written. Some may say that a man of Voltaire’s information could not have been ignorant that the above are but the names assigned to these books by the Septuagint translators, and that the books, in Hebrew, are known by their own Hebrew titles. Voltaire has given us in his writings so many examples of haste and ignorance, that it is hazardous to say that even this may not be amongst them. But supposing it is not so, we leave it to the reader to say whether it makes the matter any better. For if he knew the utter absurdity of the argument he was using, how can we absolve him from the vilest tracasserie in resorting to it?

His flagrant faults as a controvertist are strikingly exemplified in the articles on religious topics, inserted in his Philosophical Dictionary. It is everywhere evident that, so far from being a philosopher, he is writing as a passionate advocate, and for the sake of effect; his method corresponds; nothing can better answer his purpose than the rambling and disjointed manner in which he has treated the various subjects, giving only just what it was convenient to give, mingling history with fable and legend; while banter, ludicrous apologue, sneer, sarcasm, irony, and the whole rhetoric of malignant scorn, are perpetually appealed to. It is in this random work,—in part, a collection of the articles which he contributed to the celebrated Encyclopédie,—that he has vented, perhaps as freely as anywhere, his spleen against Christianity. It is not possible to look into it without seeing how completely justice and candour are forgotten in every page. Retailing every cavil he had got second-hand from the English deists, he ignores altogether the replies of the great writers, such as Butler or Lardner, on the other side. Every difficulty in Scripture history is exaggerated, and for the most part the solutions ignored. If there be a perfectly legitimate choice of a less difficulty, it is seldom hinted at; and if there are two equally plausible interpretations, as far as the letter is concerned—one sensible, the other foolish—he is sure to take that which gives the foolish meaning, and to

---

1 This writer had, much to his own honour, and the horror of Voltaire, maintained the supremacy of Shakespeare as a dramatist.

2 If Voltaire is not precisely the person to reprove Shakespeare for indecency, one would imagine he is still less entitled to lecture Pascal about profanity; yet he does so in one place with edifying solemnity. In his annotations on that celebrated portion of the Pensées, in which Pascal reasons with the atheist, he says:—“Cet article paraît un peu indécent et pueril; cette idée de jeu, de perte, et de gain, ne convient point à la gravité du sujet.” This is, indeed, “the devil reviving sin!”

3 From this amusing letter, in which he gives expression to his indignation against Tourneur, and regrets that himself, by an early translation of a scene or two of Shakespeare, should have paved the way for such sacrilege, we give an extract:—“Auriez-vous lu deux volumes de ce misérable Tourneur, dans lesquels il veut nous faire regarder Shakespeare comme le seul modèle de la véritable tragédie? Il l’appelle le dieu du théâtre. Il sacrifie tous les Français sans exception à son idée, comme on sacrifiait autrefois des cochons à Cérès. Il ne daigne pas même nommer Corneille et Racine. Ces deux grands hommes sont seulement enveloppés dans la proscription générale, sans que leurs noms soient prononcés. Il y a déjà deux tomes imprimés de ce Shakespeare, qu’on prendrait pour des pièces de la foire, faîtes il y a deux cents ans.

“Ce barbouilleur a trouvé le secret de faire engager le roi, la reine, et toute la famille royale, à souscrire à son ouvrage. Avez-vous lu son abominable grimoire, dont il y aura encore cinq volumes? Avez-vous une haute assez vigoureuse contre cet impudent imbécile? Souffrirez-vous l’affront qu’il fait à la France? Vous et M. de Thibouville, vous êtes trop doux. Il n’y a point en France assez de camouflages, assez de bouches d’âne, assez de piloris pour un pareil faquin. Le sang paille dans mes vieilles veines, en vous parlant de lui. Si je ne vous ai pas mis en colère, je vous tiens pour un homme impassible. Ce qu’il y a d’affectueux, c’est que le monstre a un parti en France, et pour compte de calomnie et d’horreur, c’est moi qui autrefois parlai le premier de ce Shakespeare; c’est moi qui le premier montrai aux Français, quelques perles que j’avais trouvées dans son énorme fumier. Je ne m’attendais pas que je servirais un jour à fouler aux pieds les couronnes de Racine et de Corneille, pour en orner le front d’un histrion barbare.” Voltaire insist upon it, as if there were no doubt of its being the true interpretation. Take, as a trifling example, one very short section in the article on "Christianity," in which he is dealing with the old but shallow objection, that we find the profane historians so silent as to the facts of the evangelical history. He says that "Josephus says nothing of Christ" (he of course summarily rejects the disputed passage), "and yet Josephus' father must have witnessed all the miracles of Christ"—a gratuitous assumption, for we know not one syllable about Josephus' father. If the profane historians are silent, Voltaire, it seems, can make them speak when it answers his purpose. If Christians were to use the same licence, they could doubtless make them speak too.

Similarly, on the statement that, at the crucifixion, there was "darkness over the whole land for three hours," Voltaire chooses to pass by, without mentioning, the more natural interpretation, and will have it that the whole "earth" is meant, and that since Rome must have been in utter darkness three hours, it is unaccountable that no historian should have mentioned the phenomenon. Speaking in the same article of the massacre of Bethlehem, he, by way of exaggerating the horrors of the deed, and rendering it more strange that nothing has been said about it by Josephus, reminds us that the traditions of the Greek Church (for which, in any other case, he would have had as much respect as for Baron Munchausen's Travels) make the number of the victims about 14,000, though the size of the village of Bethlehem at once shows the statement to be a lying legend of the most enormous dimensions. This, by the by, is an example of his constant habit of infusing a deceitful colouring-matter into the narrative. When dealing with the sacred history, he perpetually throws in (for the purpose no doubt of increasing the effect of ridicule, and confounding things that differ *toto ccelo*) copious references to the apocryphal books both of the Old and New Testaments, to the wildest follies of the early heresies, and to the idlest legends, whether of rabbinical or Romish origin, as if the Bible were implicated with them or responsible for them!

Many of his statements certainly astonish us for their temerity, whether we attribute them to ignorance or effrontery. Thus, for example, he says, in the article "Gospel"—"It is a decided truth, whatever Abbadie may say to the contrary, that none of the first Fathers of the Church, down to Irenaeus inclusive, have quoted any passage from the four gospels with which we are acquainted;" and under the article "Christianity" he affirms, with still more marvellous assurance, that "Fifty-four societies had fifty-four different gospels, all secret, like their mysteries, all unknown to the Gentiles, who never saw our four canonical gospels until the end of two hundred and fifty years."

The above are comparatively venial specimens of his ordinary manner; the worst, for obvious reasons, we purposely refrain from giving. Suffice it to say, that so transparent is the animus with which he writes, so unscrupulous the way in which he trifles with evidence, so arbitrary both his credulity and his incredulity, that for this, as well as for the other serious reasons we have stated, he can never be a very formidable propagandist of infidelity. Gibbon and Hume were far more plausible assailants.

In one respect Voltaire is almost unique among infidels, and we trust will ever remain so; we mean in the entire absence, as of all veneration for what his fellow-men deem sacred, so of all courtesy and forbearance towards his fellow-men in the expression of his contempt for it. Things which, in their esteem, are most sacred mysteries, he contemptuously uses as a butt for his ribald wit. Over the most solemn and touching narratives of Holy Writ he chat-

ters and hops about, and voids his dirt, with as little sense of indecorum as a jackdaw would feel in doing the like on the towers of Notre Dame.

We do not of course demand that he who does not believe the Bible to be true should approach its contents, or argue against its evidence, with the veneration of a man who does. But no one with the slightest tincture of right feeling; still more, no one who at all sincerely desires to convince his fellows of what he deems their error, will make their most sacred convictions the theme of obscene jest and revolting witticisms. This, nevertheless, Voltaire has done; and it is this chiefly which makes us say that Voltaire will never do much mischief as an apostle of infidelity. Those must be already infidels, and infidels of a very coarse stamp, who will tolerate him when he gets on such subjects. The generality of people will simply be disgusted with him; and while they wonder at his wit, will wonder as much at his abuse of it. He can here receive applause only from those who, being lost to shame, can receive no injury from him; who have prepared themselves to be initiated in his mysteries by first stripping themselves naked.

In dealing with the doctrines of Revelation, Voltaire constantly employs arguments equally applicable to some of the principal doctrines of Natural Religion; his objections against the one are equally valid, if valid at all, against the other, and are fairly met, if the objector still holds the latter, by the irrefragable reasoning of Butler. But for Voltaire, the "Analogy" might as well never have been written. Provided he can get a plausible argument against a doctrine of the Bible, he does not mind though his reasoning involve the moral administration of the world, and the complementary doctrine of a future state of retribution, in the same dilemma. And perhaps, as regards his own views, there was no reason why he should care; for it is pretty certain that he did not hold the above doctrines, or, at all events, with any firmness. Assuredly his faith does not prevent his often making himself very merry with them. The only theological doctrine which he seems to have retained with a firm grasp, and to have constantly defended, is, that the universe is certainly the product of Power and Intelligence adequate to the phenomena. He seems to have had a sincere contempt for all the ordinary theories by which atheism vainly strives to account for the indications of design in the universe, without supposing any design at all. His plain, strong, natural sagacity recoiled in undissembled disgust from the metaphysical systems by which it studies to sophisticate the plain deductions of human reason on this subject. Nor is there, in all his Philosophical Dictionary, a more characteristic specimen of his genius than the 3rd, 4th, and 5th sections of the article entitled "Dieu—Dieux," in which he touches on the theories of the author of the *Système de la Nature* and other atheists, and vindicates the natural logic of common sense in the argument from design. That article will give the reader an amusing and, what cannot be readily found in the theological portions of the work, an instructive specimen of Voltaire's manner.

But beyond this one point, the barren acknowledgment of a Being whose creative power and wisdom originally called this universe into being, Voltaire leaves everything in doubt. Whether the universal parent takes any special care of the children he has made, or any cognisance of their conduct; whether he exercises any moral government over the world; whether there is any future state in which that government will be consummated and vindicated, is all left in darkness. His general mood would seem, however, to be much the same as that of Bolingbroke—denying all

---

1 Divide the 14,000 by 1000, and we get at the number which Michellis very justly conjectures to be about the truth. He thinks that 14 will be an ample allowance. Voltaire. Providence but that of general laws, and questioning the doctrine of a future retribution. In his *Condé* and other tales, he sedulously inculcates principles which imply that the doctrines of what is called "natural religion" (with the single exception that there is an architect of the world, whether we know anything else about him or not), are quite as doubtful, and involve principles quite as repugnant to the human intellect, as those of Revelation itself. It is not surprising, therefore, that he should often have used arguments against Christianity, the issues of which, in relation to theism, he did not trouble his head about. But it is of importance that the reader should remember it; for to any men who still maintain the ordinary doctrines of natural religion, the favourite arguments of Voltaire against Christianity become *felum imbelle*, unless they be willing to go further, and apply Voltaire's arguments as far as Voltaire did himself. It must also be confessed, that in touching on subjects connected with "natural religion," as in the celebrated tale of *Condé*, he indulges just the same reckless tone, the same disregard of counter-evidence, the same ribald jests on solemn themes, as in his criticisms on the Bible.

We have conceded that it is some palliation of Voltaire's injustice to Christianity, that he had chiefly before his eyes the caricature of it which the spectacle of the corruptions, profligacy, hypocrisy, and cruelty of the Roman Church of his day presented; the persecution he had himself suffered at its hands still further inflamed and embittered his feelings. That there is much in all this to explain the acrimony of Voltaire, and of many other philosophers of his day, against the church, there can be no doubt; and we would exercise no niggard charity towards them on this account; but it will not avail for the effectual defence of such men as Voltaire. It is of far greater force as urged on behalf of some whose ignorance of history was greater, while, to their credit, their virulence was less—of D'Alembert for example. But it is plain that Voltaire did not content himself with hating and ridiculing the vices of the actual system he saw before his eyes, and which made many a man an infidel, because in his ignorance of what Christianity was, he thought that to be it. Voltaire's *Philosophical Dictionary* and other writings show plainly enough that he had diligently ransacked not only the voluminous writings of the English deists, but the Scriptures both of the Old and New Testaments, in search of objections and difficulties, though he troubles himself not at all about the answers.

The habitual profanity of Voltaire has led to one charge against him which, it is due to justice to say, is very doubtful. He has often been accused of applying the well-known expression "ecrasez l'infame" (usually in his printed letters contracted into "*cerasez l'inf*," or more briefly still, *cer. Fin*) to the Saviour. There is, however, reason to believe that this offensive application was not designed. The first, so far as we are aware, who undertook to defend him from this charge was Professor De Morgan, in his interesting sketch of D'Alembert, inserted some years ago in a *Biographical Dictionary*, which, unfortunately for literature, was discontinued after the publication of a few volumes. The phrase occurs in Voltaire's letters to D'Alembert, and also in D'Alembert's letters to him. De Morgan urges that the feminine forms of the articles and pronouns with which it is construed, the nature of the context, and Voltaire's known abhorrence of the ecclesiastical system of his times, justify the supposition that it was to the actually existing church of France as seen before his eyes, with all its cruelties, hypocrisy, and corruption, that he applies this opprobrious expression. The interpretation seems to us the most probable, and is certainly the most charitable, one.

Professor De Morgan only adduces three instances of the phrase, all occurring in the correspondence between Voltaire and D'Alembert. The phrase is, however, of very frequent occurrence, not only there but in the correspondence with Frederick of Prussia and others, and especially in the letters to M. Damilaville. We have examined very many more instances, and in all, the examination of the context and the grammatical construction tends to bear out Professor De Morgan's interpretation, or at least elicits nothing that contradicts it. The feminine forms of articles, pronouns, and adjectives, are constantly construed with it; as *cette*, *inconnue*, &c.

It is also observable, that the phrase occurs principally, if not exclusively, in the letters written after the proceedings in connection with Calas and other victims of ecclesiastical oppression had so inflamed the ire of Voltaire. This synchronism is not insignificant. Though Voltaire principally meant the church of France, it is very obvious, from numberless passages, that he would not have been at all sorry if the "destruction" he so passionately desires had extended to the Christian church in general. He evidently was not particular; nor at all inclined to divorce what his imagination had married—the Christian religion and superstition. Still one would willingly absolve him from the opprobrium of using the above words in the gratuitously offensive sense so often imputed to them.

The form of the ribaldry in which Voltaire very generally indulges, as, for example, in the articles in his *Philosophical Dictionary*, is not more offensive than it is clumsy and stupid. He often begins by a solemn asseveration of his entire belief, on the ground of their being revealed, of the things he is about to deride. His opening sentence in the article "Deluge" may afford a brief specimen. "We commence with the observation that we are believers in the universal deluge because it is recorded in the Holy Scriptures transmitted to Christians." In like manner he is constantly in the habit of prefaces his scoffs at miracle and mystery, by such declarations as these:—"He implicitly receives them as matter of faith, though wholly inscrutable to the human understanding;"—"If Holy Writ had not revealed them, they must have been rejected, from the contradictions and impossibilities they involve;"—"That it is natural and inevitable for man to disbelieve these things; but we must submit our reason to our faith—God's ways are not as our ways." The last text is cited to point this profane jest a score of times; he seems never tired of it.

Now what surprises one is, not that, considering his general character, he should have indulged in this style, but that he should have thought this poor feint of believing docility, instantly followed by scoff and profanity, to be such superlative wit as to bear perpetual repetition. Ironical agreement with an opponent's views may be very effective if consistently carried into the whole argumentation, in order to give zest and piquancy to a *reductio ad absurdum*. Admirable specimens are to be found in *Pascal's Provincial Letters*, where the matter of the pleasantry is as innocent as the manner. But Pascal's exquisite taste would have thought it a clumsy artifice to affect an implicit belief in what he was just about to denounce as an incredible absurdity. As employed by Voltaire in the articles now referred to, the raillery enters not into the argument at all; it is a mere insulated sneer, which becomes disgusting from its repetition, as it is offensive from its profanity. Even those who would not be scandalized at the profanity would be disposed to ask, "Why should the author be always affirming this gratuitous lie, or think that we can never be wearied of this stale jest?" It is as absurd as if a man, refuting the opinions of Voltaire, were to preface

---

1 Biographical Dictionary of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, vol. i., p. 812.