The Friends of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

He set forth a flaming prospectus, promising an ‘unlimited truthfulness.’ The sheets shall be ‘dedicated to confidence and frankness!’ They were. To those distant Courts and Kings there went forth every fortnight the inimitable criticisms of the most bold, just, and cool critic who ever breathed. He not only analysed, with extraordinary brilliancy and fairness, the writings of Voltaire, of friend Rousseau, and of Buffon, but he sat in discerning judgment on the works of English novelists and poets. He criticised books which have not lived, in criticisms which are undying. As to the value and the longevity of the productions, he was sometimes, naturally and inevitably, mistaken; but as a rule his opinions have been confirmed by posterity and have weathered the test of time.

He also described to his readers the condition of the drama, the plots of the plays, the art of the players. Of course he was clever enough if the season was rather a dull one, to fill out his pages with extracts from a tragedy or from a novel; sometimes, it is said, the ingenious man gave quotations from works which had never been written.

He dealt with medical questions, and did not think it beneath his dignity to examine the merits of a mouth-wash. He wrote many pages on Tronchin, the great physician, and on inoculation. Here, surely, was one of the chances to enlighten kings—kings who, more than any other class of men, suffered and died from the ignorant tyranny of their physicians, and who had to wait eighteen centuries before any man told them that fresh air was a valuable property, and health a kingdom to be taken by temperance, soberness, and chastity.

If there was a scientific marvel in the air, such as ventriloquism, why, of course, Grimm must tell his correspondents about that; and the music, French or Italian, of the capital, must also receive its comment. Then there was the news of the day, and of Academical disputes, and, though Grimm had declared he would not report them, occasional piquant anecdotes with a sufficient spice of scandal in them to have pleased King Frederick.

He further drew pen-portraits of celebrities. Nothing could be more fair and shrewd than Grimm’s character-sketches. He solves in them the supreme difficulty—how to be at once honest and charitable.

Next there is an epigram to be reported. While a charade that has amused a Parisian line lady is surely good enough for a German duchess!

Politics were supposed to be excluded, and they were excluded in the sense that there were no remarks on public events until those events had become so notorious that the ‘Correspondence’ did not add to its readers’ knowledge of them. But though, or because, he wrote for governors, Grimm adduced his theories on government, he himself believing in the divine rights neither of the ‘Social Contract’ nor of kings. To his views on tolerance, finance, and education, he gave utterance soberly, thoughtfully, and at length. He had a subscription list in his paper for Voltaire’s unfortunate protégés, the Calas; and if his pen was to flow freely, as he had promised, how could he stay his indignation against the trial and the sacrifice of the Chevalier de la Barre?

To the friend and intimate of the philosophers, the most ordinary event suggested philosophical reflections. His religious views could hardly help appearing; but Grimm’s was a quiet agnosticism, and had nothing in common with the excited certainties of Diderot’s unbelief. He had, of course, his theories on women, on art, and on languages; and he aired them all. He brought out, in the same tantalising fashion in which serials are now produced in weekly illustrated newspapers, Diderot’s two novels.

He was himself not only the first critic of his day, but he was thinker as well as chronicler, worldling and scholar, reporter and savant. Foreigner though he was, he had learnt to write the French language in a style inimitably clear, supple, and forcible. His command of irony alone should have been a fortune to him. Add to this, his singularly wise, calm head, and his unrivalled position as the friend of the women of the salons and the nobility of Paris as well as of its writers and politicians. Further, this critic of music was himself a musician, this judge of authors himself an author. He lived in one of the most momentous and thrilling periods in the history of this earth, and in one of the most stimulating of her cities, and was able to write wholly without fear of consequence for readers of whose intelligent interest he was sure, while he had ever before him the magnificent hope of so opening the hearts and feeding the knowledge of those readers that they might turn and do good unto their people and be a blessing, and not a curse, to their lands.

Consider all this, and it is not marvellous that Grimm remains the first journalist and the ‘Literary Correspondence’ the first newspaper in the world.