The life of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

If Madame du Châtelet “despised history a little,” it had not the less been her and her lover’s chief employment at Cirey. “The Century of Louis XIV.” was not enough to occupy such an energy as Voltaire’s. That cramped him to one time and to one country. And behold! there was the world to look back upon; the history of all nations to study—the progress of mankind to regard as a whole.

The “Essay on the Manners and Mind of Nations” is of all Voltaire’s works the one which has exerted the most powerful influence on the mind of men. On July 10, 1791, when his body was taken to Paris and placed on the ruins of the Bastille on the very spot where he himself had been a prisoner, on the funeral car were written the memorable words, “He gave the human mind a great impetus: he prepared us for freedom.” That line might have served as the motto of his great essay. It prepared men for freedom. It records the history of human progress from Charlemagne to Louis XIII. It was the first history which dealt not with kings, the units, but with the great, panting, seething masses they ruled; which took history to mean the advance of the whole human race—a general view of the great march of all nations towards light and liberty. It was the first history which struck out boldly, and hit prejudice and oppression a staggering blow from which they have not yet recovered. Yet its style is infinitely frank, gay, and daring. It is such easy reading, so light, clear, and sarcastic. It is the one book of its kind the frivolous will finish for pleasure. It has such a jesting manner to hide its weighty matter. It is infinitely significant; and yet sounds as if it were simply meant to be amusing. It is said that Voltaire put it into such a form to overcome Madame du Châtelet’s dislike of history. But it was his lifelong principle as a writer that to be dull is the greatest of all errors. He was always wishing that Newton had written vaudevilles; and praying that his own taste might never be “stifled with study.” What Frederick the Great called the “effervescence of his genius” bubbles over in the “Essay on the Manners and Mind of Nations,” as in all his works. But it must be remembered that easy reading means hard writing; and that this “picture of the centuries,” this “history of the human mind,” needed, as its author declared, “the patience of a Benedictine and the pen of a Bossuet.” When he wrote “Finis” on the last page of the last edition in 1775, the book numbered six volumes, and was in every sense the greatest of its author’s works. Parton has justly said that to it “Grote, Niebuhr, Gibbon, Colenso, and especially Buckle, are all indebted.” That it is full of mistakes which any fairly well-educated person of to-day could easily correct does not make it a less extraordinary production for the age in which it was produced. That it is now obsolete, only proves how thoroughly it accomplished its aim. The great new truths for which Voltaire fought with his life in his hand are the commonplaces and the truisms of to-day.

But then he made them so.

Jean Néaulme, the pirate publisher at The Hague, said he had bought the manuscript from a servant of Prince Charles of Lorraine—Charles having obtained it either by persuasion or treachery from Frederick the Great. Voltaire had given a manuscript copy of the book to his royal friend. In his present state of mind, it was only natural he should suspect Frederick of foul play.

However this might be, the thing was printed. It was called, and miscalled, “An Abridgment of Universal History.” It was filled from end to end with astounding, and, very often, wilful blunders. It confused the eighth century with the fourth, and the twelfth with the thirteenth, and Boniface VIII. with Boniface VII. The unhappy author, with tears in his eyes, called it “the disgrace of literature.” He had, of course, never corrected the proofs. Since writing that first

LEKAIN

From an Engraving after a Painting by S. B. Le Noir

manuscript, intrusted to Frederick, he had written other manuscripts wherein he had not only modified but actually changed his first ideas. This time at least, when he followed his old plan of loudly disavowing the work, he had much justification. The “pretended Universal History,” as he called it, was his “Essay,” but so mauled and disfigured he may be forgiven for refusing to acknowledge it.