VOLTAIRE AND HIS PANEGYRISTS.
Voltaire has to this day, among a certain class of people, the unenviable privilege of sharing with his great friend and patron the devil a popularity which he richly deserves. He belongs to that race of scoffers and liars that has never been wanting in the world since the arch-deceiver was allowed entrance into it, and will never be wanting as long as he sees in it anything bearing the image of God which he may hope to destroy, any truth which he may contradict, any beauty which he may defile, any goodness which he may turn into evil. Celsus, Porphyry, Jamblichus, Julian the Apostate, Luther, were of that race; and if Voltaire be inferior to most of these in genius, he has nevertheless done the work of their common master as zealously, and certainly as successfully, as any of his predecessors. Give, then, the devil his due, and let the philosopher of Ferney have the admiration of his votaries. Let him inhale in long draughts the incense which they offer him. It is not the rich perfumes of Arabia that they burn upon his altars. The god of the Revolution would have very little relish for anything sweet and pure. He delights in filth, and filth they serve him in abundance. From every cess-pool and garbage-plot, from every loathsome swamp and poisonous marsh, from every infected spot, a thick cloud laden with nauseous odors and death rises up to his nostrils. Surely the god must be satisfied. What else has he sought during his long career from his boyhood to his old age? To what did he devote his wonderful activity but to create those very sinks of moral degradation which send back to him from their unclean depths the impure homage which they are fit to give? Voltaire deserves a statue; let him have it. Why should the French government hesitate to comply with the desires of the Commune in this regard? What more worthy hands can they find for the purpose than those stained by the blood of so many innocent victims? Why should not one who thirsted during his whole life for the destruction of what is most sacred suffer the well-merited punishment of having a monument raised in his behalf by cut-throats to perpetuate his ignominy? A statue to Voltaire? Yes; and in Paris, too. Only choose the right place, and let it be emblematical of the lewdness with which the works of that infamous man reek. The fitting spot is that where all the sewers of the great city empty themselves into the Seine.
The idol of the French Commune is not without his admirers on this side of the Atlantic. One of our leading journals, speaking of the demonstration that took place on the 30th of May in the French capital in honor of Voltaire, gave us the following eulogistic and edifying editorial, which we quote as a fair specimen of the cant that is now and then reproduced in this country from the French radical papers of the most advanced school:
“France, it is said, celebrated in a characteristic way the memory of one of her great men, one of the makers of the great Revolution. Voltaire did France more service than any twenty generals, but did it by strictly intellectual methods; by operation on the national mind; by exposure of the shams, pretences, villanies, and oppressions of the system of organized wrong that those exposures did so much to undermine and destroy. He created in great part that public opinion, that common judgment of the nation, in the presence of which it was impossible that the ancient régime should continue to exist beyond the day when the power to end it fell into the hands of the representatives of the people. As his influence was felt by its intellectual results, it is characteristic and just that his memory should be celebrated, not by monuments or other preservations of a great man’s name, but by the dissemination of a printed volume of his own best thoughts, so distributed that a copy may be given to every Frenchman. By this method honor is done to Voltaire and good is done to the people; for the world is very much as yet in the condition in which he criticised it, and his keen, sound judgments on liberty, on the rights of the people and persons, on the church, on law, on government, on freedom of the press, may yet continue his influence with great advantage to society” (New York Herald, May 31).
It would be difficult to condense into a short page a greater number of false assertions, of wrong appreciations and misleading suggestions. “Mentons; il en restera toujours quelque chose,” the favorite motto of Voltaire, continues to inspire his disciples all over the world. It is the idiosyncrasy by which the members of the family are recognized. The result of these often-repeated falsehoods is, in France, to keep the people in a chronic state of dissatisfaction periodically finding vent in those violent up-heavings of society which have more than once during the last hundred years brought that beautiful country to the verge of ruin; and though, in other places where they are rehearsed, they may not produce the same fatal effects, they serve, nevertheless, to make dupes of the ignorant who are unable to judge for themselves of the truth or falsity of assertions stated with such unhesitating boldness and assurance that the most glaring errors are accepted by them as articles of faith; they are an insult to the conscience not only of Catholics but of all those who still profess to retain the least vestige of Christianity; they are a gross calumny thrown in the face of France herself, who, by the voice of her most illustrious children and by a vast majority, protests against the idea that Voltaire is one of her great or representative men. “Lately,” says a French writer (the Correspondant, May 25), “the radicals conceived the purpose of showing to Europe the genius of France, personified in the image of Voltaire. A lying symbol, assuredly. For if it be the glory of France that they intended to represent, there are in our history twenty reputations nobler, wider, purer which would contend with our rivals for the admiration of the world. Voltaire possessed only one feeble spark of the French genius; but, thank God, the flame has been more powerful and shone with a deeper and brighter lustre, it ascended to greater heights, with St. Bernard, Pascal, Bossuet, Corneille, Racine, Molière, Mirabeau, Châteaubriand, Lamartine; and as to the other qualities that are characteristic of the French people, France would disavow them had they their type and model in Voltaire; and, in fact, how could she recognize in him that generosity which is foremost amongst the gifts of her race, her warm heart, her heroic soul, her chivalrous valor, her Christian beneficence, her love for the weak and the oppressed, her loyalty, her passion for great ideas and great actions? How could she sacrifice to the genius of Voltaire all that she had of French genius in those times of Charlemagne, of Godfrey de Bouillon, of St. Louis, of Joan of Arc, of Richelieu, of Louis XIV., when those who were her chief ornaments by their brilliant virtues so little resembled Voltaire? To pretend that a nation which has deserved to be called by Shakspere ‘the soldier of God’; a nation that has given to religion so many saints and heroes, so many doctors and martyrs; a nation that has raised by its thought and art so many monuments to Catholicity; a nation that can cite so many names dear to the church from St. Jerome, Pope Sylvester, Peter the Hermit and Suger, to St. Francis of Sales, De Bérulle, Fénelon, Massillon, and Lacordaire—to pretend that such a nation ought and desires to have its personification in Voltaire is a mockery.”
Bold indeed is the man who dares associate the idea of greatness with the name of Voltaire in presence of the evidence we have to the contrary, and which cannot be ignored by any one who has the slightest acquaintance with the literature of the last century. He uses words at random and cares very little about their true signification, or he unduly presumes on the ignorance of others. We find in Voltaire no element that constitutes the great man. He lacks those qualities of the heart which ennoble their possessor and surround him with a halo of serene splendor even in the lowliest station; his private life from beginning to end is there to show us all the meanness of his character. He had no civic virtue; he denied his country and despised the people. As a philosopher he has discovered no truth, elucidated none, contributed nothing to the advancement of knowledge. What he did was to direct all his efforts to obscure by sophistry and revile by sarcasms those truths of which mankind was in time-honored possession. He has no claim to the reputation of a great poet; all critics worthy of the name, even those of the age in which he lived, are at one in assigning to him an inferior rank in this regard. Voltaire tried his hand in every department, in literature, in the natural sciences, in philosophy, in politics, in history, in theology, and has only succeeded in giving proofs of his ignorance of the subjects he attempted to treat or of his mediocrity. “Voltaire,” says W. Schlegel (Dramatic Literature, lect. xix.), “wished to shine in every department; a restless vanity permitted him not to be satisfied with the pursuit of perfection in any single walk of literature; and, from the variety of subjects in which his mind was employed, it was impossible for him to avoid shallowness and immaturity of ideas.... He made use of poetry as a means to accomplish ends foreign and extrinsical to it; and this has often polluted the artistic purity of his compositions.”
We often read in the lives of holy personages that, in their very infancy, they gave signs of their future greatness and sanctity. As to Voltaire, he manifested in his early youth a degree of perverseness which foreshadowed but too well what he subsequently proved to be. The precocity of his mind showed itself by his precocious unbelief. Every one knows the prediction which his impious sneers at religion elicited from Father Le Jay when at the college of Louis-le-Grand—a prediction which was so truly realized afterwards: “Wretch,” said the father to him, “you will one day be the standard-bearer of infidelity in France.” Expelled several times from his father’s house for improper conduct, he pursues his career in the world, which he fills with the scandals of his life. His disgraceful intrigues in politics and in love, his dishonesty in business matters, his greed of money, his writings breathing lust and revolt, fixed upon him the attention of the police, and more than once brought him to the Bastille and sent him into exile. He had no heart; he proved it by the contempt he entertained for his nearest relations. He felt no shame in destroying the reputation of his mother; from allusions he makes in a letter addressed to Richelieu, and in other passages of his works, he throws suspicions upon the legitimacy of his birth. Voltaire at first signed his name “Arouet”; but soon this family name disgusted him, as he himself avows, and he rejected it for that of Voltaire. To discard the name of one’s own family is certainly no sign of a good son. He was no better citizen. The French having been beaten at Rossbach by the King of Prussia, Frederick II., Voltaire, who kept a correspondence with that prince, ridiculed his countrymen, and heaped upon them the most injurious epithets. He wishes a Prussian officer to come and take a certain city of France. He writes to the King of Prussia: “Look upon me as the most devoted subject that you have, for I have no other, and wish to have no other, master but yourself. It is to my own sovereign that I write.” The vile and crouching sycophant goes so far as to call Frederick “a god” and “the son of God.” Is it not incredible and the height of impudence that men who call themselves Frenchmen should urge their country to decree national honors to be paid to this idolatrous worshipper of Prussia, and that after the disasters of 1871? These men deserve the scorn of the whole world. Not satisfied with having turned Prussian, the ambition of Voltaire was to become Russian, and for this purpose he disowned France. In a letter of the 18th of October, 1771, to the Empress of Russia, Catherine II., after having called the French who had gone to the assistance of Poland fools and boors, he adds: “It is the Tartars who are civilized, and the French have become Scythians. Please to observe, madame, that I am not Welsh (that is, French); I am a Swiss, and, if I were younger, I would become Russian.” And Russian he soon became in spite of his old age, and Catherine could send him her felicitations on his being already “so good a Russian.” We shall not transcribe the words of sacrilegious adulation which he addressed to his idol, to a woman stained with the blood of her husband and living in adultery. “To make of the flatterer of Frederick II., the adulator of Catherine II., the adorer of Mme. de Pompadour, a republican citizen, would be a difficult task. But to make a patriot of the man who applauded the victory of Rossbach, who saw without pity the blood of France flow, who defiled the reputation of Joan of Arc with the loathsome profanation that we know, and who aspired to the happiness ‘to die a Prussian,’ would be a want of respect for France and of pride for the republic. In presence of the victors of Metz and of Sedan, in presence of Alsace-Lorraine, France would betray herself and the republic would disown France, were the one with the help of the other to erect the image of Voltaire as that of our wounded country, which stands waiting and hoping” (Correspondant).
We must never be astonished at anything from such a courtier of Fortune as Voltaire was. The most irascible of poets is the most flexible servant of the reigning powers. If, to use an expression of Diderot, he bore a grudge to every pedestal placed in the path of his literary glory, no one more grovellingly than he kissed the dust before every statue of success raised to command men or to impose upon them. He deserts to the King of Prussia after the defeat of De Rohan, he kisses the blood-stained hand of that other Lady Macbeth seated on the throne of Russia; he will do more: he will lower the purple of Richelieu before that of the ignoble Dubois, to whom the Revolution alone could give notoriety. Young, he had not the dignity which talent imparts; old, he had not that of his gray hairs. His pretty prose and his small, prurient madrigals will be scattered freely in the antechamber of every courtesan who has usurped for the time being the rightful place of the queens of France. It is to a Marquise de Prie, mistress of the heart and of the politics of the Duke of Bourbon, or to a Mme. de Pompadour, that he offers his mean and impure adulations. Mme. de Pompadour, metamorphosed into an Agnes Sorel, is still but a mortal; Mme. du Barry will be a divinity in this distich of the octogenarian of Ferney:
“C’est assez aux mortels d’adorer votre image,
L’original était fait pour les Dieux.”
So much for the irreproachable citizen who reviled his country, rejoiced at her misfortunes, and sold himself to her enemies; so much for the model republican who fawned on despots and courted the good graces of the most abandoned characters, provided they stood around a throne. But what of Voltaire, the great democrat, the devoted friend of the people? Those who wish to enlighten the working classes by the dissemination among them of a printed volume of Voltaire’s own best thoughts have taken care, of course, to exclude from the precious popular volume, destined to perpetuate the great man’s influence in France, such passages as these, which clearly show his sentiments on the subject. He writes to a friend:
“I believe that we do not understand each other on the question of the people, who, according to you, deserve to be instructed. I understand by people the populace, or those who are forced to gain their livelihood by the labor of their hands. I doubt whether that class of citizens will ever have the leisure or the capacity required for instruction. It appears to me essential that there should be ‘ignorant boors.’ When the vulgar begin to reason, all is lost. The absurd insolence of those who tell you that you must think like your tailor and your washerwoman should not be tolerated. As to the canaille, it will never be anything else but the canaille. I have nothing to do with it.”
And again: “The canaille whom every yoke fits is not worth enlightening.” That hatred for the poor, the laboring classes, the people, is a satanic trait characteristic of Voltaire. Were the principles which he sought to establish to obtain in the world, we would soon see the worst times of paganism return, when the vast majority of men were slaves under unfeeling masters. From this abject condition Christianity rescued the human race. It is Christianity that can still make the people free; it is Christianity that saves it now, in spite of the efforts made to exclude Christ’s influence from the face of the earth and substitute for it that of Freemasonry, socialism, and radicalism, which would willingly replace the worship of the Redeemer by that of a Voltaire or a Mazzini. Were it possible to abolish the Christian religion in the world, the earth would at once become a den of wild beasts tearing one another to pieces. Witness the French Revolution. It is Christ who said: “Come to me, all you that labor and are burdened, and I will refresh you”; it is Christ who ennobled labor by embracing a life of toil; it is Christ who taught the poor that poverty is no disgrace, but rather an honor, ever since the King of Kings sanctified it and glorified it in his own person; it is Christ who gave us the true signification of sufferings, and revealed to us their chastening and purifying influence when they are borne with resignation. But it is Christ also who taught the rich to be charitable to those not possessed of the goods of this world, and to consider themselves but as God’s stewards in favor of the needy. In the acceptance of those principles is to be found the solution of the social problems which become more and more entangled in proportion as society withdraws itself from the light of the Gospel. “Jesus has wept and Voltaire has smiled,” said Victor Hugo at the celebration of the 20th of May, “and from those divine tears and that human smile the sweetness of our civilization was the result,” and the crowd applauded. Foolish and blasphemous words! To associate Christ and his reviler in the same mission for the regeneration of the human race! Voltaire never smiled—he grinned, and in his infernal sneer he embraced those for whom Jesus especially came and wept, suffered and died. But the tactics of the evil one are always the same and are followed by his disciples, to draw men into his snares by creating illusions around them.
The age of Voltaire had no philosophy. Its great voice was silent, and was heard no more until it resounded again in the first part of this century in De Maistre and De Bonald. The generation of Malebranche, Descartes, and Bossuet had passed away, and was succeeded by a sect of sophists headed by Voltaire, whom they nicknamed the “Philosopher of Ferney.” The eighteenth century was the reign, not of philosophy, but of philosophism, which consisted in an abuse of reason directed to the demolition, by means of sarcasm and ridicule, by the corruption of morals and by falsehood, of the religion of Christ and of all the principles upon which human society is based. The pretended Reformation had given the signal; in weakening the foundations of faith and the respect for spiritual authority it opened the door to every error, to revolt, and to all corruptions. Germany began, England followed, and from England came out that spirit of incredulity and atheism which would have plunged Europe into all the agonies of dissolution, and made it a prey to renewed barbarism, had not the terrific thunder-peals of the French Revolution awakened it on the brink of the abyss and warned men to turn their eyes towards God and his church. Rousseau gives us in his Emile a faithful picture of those mad dreamers, possessed by the genius of evil, who in his time proudly called themselves philosophers:
“Turn away from those who, under pretext of explaining nature, sow in the hearts of men subversive doctrines, and whose apparent scepticism is a hundred times more affirmative and dogmatic than the decided tone of their adversaries. Under the haughty pretence that they alone are enlightened, true, and sincere, they impose upon us their peremptory decisions, and pretend to give us for the true principles of things the unintelligible systems which their imagination has built. Besides overthrowing, destroying, and trampling upon everything that men revere, they take away from the afflicted the last consolation in their miseries, from the powerful and the rich the only check of their passions; they snatch from the depth of the human heart remorse for crime, the hope which supports virtue, and still boast of being the benefactors of mankind. Never, do they say, is truth injurious to men. I believe as they do, and it is, in my opinion, a strong proof that what they teach is not the truth.”
Of all those who, at that period, took part in the infernal struggle against Christianity, Voltaire was the recognized chief and leader. He and Rousseau are the two men who did most to undermine the foundations of religion, to extend the reign of unbelief, and destroy the bulwarks that protect order and the family; the former by his inexhaustible fund of impious raillery that scoffed at everything, and the latter by an affectation of sickly sentimentality that paved the way but too well for the atrocities by which the last years of that disgraceful century were polluted. The eighteenth century is appropriately called the Siècle de Voltaire; it will be its eternal shame. For Voltaire, notwithstanding his sparkling wit and a few happy productions in literature, will remain eternally the type of a mean character, of a corrupt intellect and perverted reason. It is the conclusion to which men will necessarily arrive who wish to draw their knowledge of Voltaire from another source than that of an ignorant fanaticism, and who, not satisfied with vague sounds floating in the air, will take the trouble to study his life and his works. Not long ago the illustrious Bishop of Orleans, from his senator’s seat, instructed the radicals of his country on this subject, and his method is sure. It would be more in the interest of truth to re-echo his voice on our shores than to spread amongst us those groundless and erroneous appreciations issuing from disordered brains maddened by passion. He cited to them the judgments of men whom their party chiefly consults, to whom they defer, whom they admire and revere most, as Rousseau, Marat, Béranger, Victor Hugo, Louis Blanc, Sainte-Beuve, and Renan. He placed before their eyes the very writings of Voltaire; and thus, by testimony that commanded their confidence, he taught them what Voltaire was worth as a democrat, a citizen, a patriot, and even as a philosopher. We have no space to give quotations from those writers; but we cannot resist the temptation to place before our readers a few lines written by Victor Hugo himself, when he had not as yet lent his unquestionable genius to the vagaries of modern radicalism. They tell us what the distinguished poet then thought of the man whom he now extols to the skies and dares to put on a level with Christ. He speaks of that filthy production of Voltaire’s pen, The Maid of Orleans, and warns purity and innocence to beware of the poison contained in that infamous book: “An old book is there, a romance of the last century! A work of ignominy! Voltaire then reigned, that monkey of genius, sent on a mission to man by the devil himself. O eighteenth century, impious and chastised, society without God, struck by God’s hand! world-blind for Christ, which Satan illumines! Shame on thy writers in the face of nations! The reflection of thy crimes is in their renown! Beware, O child! in whose tender heart no tainted breath has as yet been felt. O daughter of Eve! Poor young mind! Voltaire the serpent, Doubt, and Irony is in a corner of thy blessed sanctuary; with his eye of fire he spies thee and laughs. Tremble! This false sage has caused the ruin of many an angel. That demon, that black kite, pounces upon pious hearts and crushes them. Oftentimes have I seen under his cruel claws the feathers fall one by one from white wings made to rise and take flight towards heaven” (Rayons et Ombres).
Voltaire was not a great thinker, not a great poet, not a great historian, not a great novelist, and not a great manager or man of action. Of his twenty-eight or thirty dramatic pieces scarcely one rises to the highest line of dramatic art; his comedies, like his epics, are no longer read; his histories are sprightly and entertaining, but not authentic; and his essays, both in prose and verse, with perhaps the single exception of his historical disquisitions, have ceased to instruct. This is the judgment about the man which we find recorded in the American Cyclopædia, and we have no doubt of its correctness. If we seek, then, for the secret of his success, we must turn not to his lighter compositions, as has been advised, but to the corruption of the age in which he lived. Voltaire found around him a society in a state of disorganization produced by the orgies of the Regency, and the spirit of incredulity which had invaded the whole of Europe. He seized upon those materials which he used against Christianity. He wished to destroy it. His intention was not doubtful; it had been clearly revealed by his Mahomet, a tragedy given to the public in 1741. The piece had no success at first, or rather people were frightened by it. Christianity was too openly attacked in it not to revolt public opinion, which was as yet profoundly Christian. It was withdrawn after three representations; but, resumed ten years later, it was received with enthusiasm. It is at that date and with that the eighteenth century properly begins. In 1751 all was changed. Religion, morals, taste, national honor, military glory were soon to disappear from the soil of France. Fleury had ceased to live, and voluptuousness had seated a Pompadour upon the throne; flattery erected altars in her honor, whilst a philosophy, the enemy of God and of the laws, placed itself under the protection of that worthy patroness. It was not difficult to see already looming on the horizon the horrors of 1793. Voltaire, undoubtedly, was one of the makers of the great Revolution—“that grand conflict which,” as Schlegel says, “must be looked upon in no other light than as a religious war; for a formal separation, not only from the church, but from all Christianity, a total abolition of the Christian religion, was an object of this Revolution.” It is no wonder, then, that all revolutionists have made an idol of Voltaire, who played so prominent a part in bringing it about. It is still Voltaire the enemy of Christianity whom they celebrate. This they openly avow. One of the organs of the party, the Bien Public, declared that it was not the centenary of Voltaire the man of letters that they intended to celebrate, but that of him who had said “Écrasons l’infâme” (Let us crush the wretch). The Droits de l’Homme also wrote: “Voltaire had no respect for things established; he dared look Christ in the face; he insulted him. This is the reason why we have chosen Voltaire to pay him our respects.” It is his hatred for the religion of Christ which they wish to propagate. The volume containing Voltaire’s best thoughts, ordered to be printed and distributed among the people, tells us that “everything which is related of Jesus is worthy of a pack of fools”; that “miracles are ridiculous and the work of charlatans”; that “Christ himself was a vile mechanic from the scum of the people, a seducer who had lost all scruple”; that “our sacred books are the work of insanity, and that Christians are dupes, fools, and cowards.” And they desire such a book to replace among the masses the catechism and the Gospel! Do so, and you have wolves instead of men.