The Friends of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

All the great people, including King George the Third, received the persecuted philosopher with empressement. ‘Savants and politicians’ flocked to be introduced to him. Gibbon found him ‘a sensible man, an agreeable companion, and the worthiest creature in the world.’ Hume (remembering the compliments it contained and the many more it would have contained but for that wretched censor) naturally thought ‘On the Mind’ the most pleasing of writings, and had even entered into an agreement with its author to translate it into English, if he, on his part, would translate Hume’s philosophical works into French. (This bargain was never concluded.) Warburton, indeed, declined to meet this French ‘rogue and atheist’ at dinner. But Helvétius, as a whole, had every reason to like Englishmen, and he came back to France, Diderot told Mademoiselle Volland, as madly attached to England as d’Holbach was the reverse. ‘This poor Helvétius,’ says Diderot, to excuse him, ‘saw only in England the persecutions his book had brought him in France.’ There may certainly be truth in that.

A year later, in 1765, he went to stay with Frederick the Great. That astute monarch had not at all approved of ‘On the Mind.’ ‘If I wanted to punish a province, I would give it to philosophers to govern,’ said he. But he found Helvétius, as all the world found him, a thousand times better than his book, and observed very justly that in writing he had much better have consulted his heart than his head.

But that was what Helvétius could never do.

When he got back to Voré, to Minette and the little daughters (he had not found any spotless and disinterested members of parliament to marry them and enjoy their fortunes of fifty thousand pounds apiece), he settled down to literature again and wrote, with seven years’ severe and unremitting labour, ‘On Man, his Intellectual Faculties, and his Education,’ which was a sort of defence of ‘On the Mind’ and an answer to the criticisms both friends and foes had brought against that work. If he had been persistently lively on ‘Mind,’ he was persistently dull on ‘Man.’ When it was published, after his death, only a few friends who had loved its author defended it. Mademoiselle de Lespinasse voiced a very general opinion when she declared herself ‘staggered’ at its preposterous length; and Grimm (of course) declared that, for his part, he would rather have ten lines of the dear little Abbé Galiani than ten volumes such as that.

Meanwhile, it had given Helvétius the best solace chagrins and declining life can have—a regular occupation. He was not old, and he was framed, says Guillois, to be a centenarian. But at that epoch men spent their health and strength with such fearful prodigality in their youth, that they rarely lived beyond what is now called middle age. Helvétius was not more than five-and-fifty when he became conscious of failing powers. Sport, which had been the delight of his life, lost its zest. The bankrupt condition of his country, her light-hearted descent to ruin, lay heavily now on a soul framed by nature to take the world serenely and to see the future fair. He was occupied, it is true, to the end in those works of benevolence and kindness which pay an almost certain interest in happiness to him who invests in them. Then, too, to the last, there was his wife, who might have loved a better man than he, but who—love, fortunately for most people, not being given entirely to worth—spent on him the fidelity and devotion of her life.

On December 26, 1771, Helvétius died. He was buried in the Church of Saint-Roch, in Paris.

Minette, a very rich widow, bought a house in Auteuil, where, visited by Turgot, Condorcet, Benjamin Franklin, Morellet, and the famous young doctor, Cabanis, she lived ‘to love those her husband had loved, and to do good to those he had benefited.’ Franklin, it is said, would fain have married her. And Turgot—who knows? Elizabeth and Geneviève, enormously rich heiresses, were married on the same day, a year after their father’s death, each to a Count.

In 1772, ‘On Man’ was published, with the reception which has been recorded. That early poem, ‘Happiness,’ also now publicly appeared for the first time, with a prose preface by Saint-Lambert—the prose, said Galiani, being much better than the verse.

To Helvétius’ works, or rather to his work, for ‘On the Mind’ is the only one that counts, is now generally meted the judgment which should have been meted to it when it appeared. Catch thistledown, imprison it, examine it beneath a microscope, and a hundred learned botanists will soon be confabulating and fighting over it. Put it in the free air and sunshine—and, lo! it is gone. ‘On the Mind’ was but thistledown, and the winds have blown it away.

But the man who wrote it deserves recollection because, though he wrote it, he and Turgot alone among their compeers realised in practice that the best way to do good to mankind is to do good to individual man, here and to-day, and that the surest means to relieve the sorrows of the world is to help the one poor Lazarus lying, full of sores, at the gate.