And if this was the temper of mind of most thoughtful persons, how much more of a Voltaire!
The news took nearly a month to reach him. For many months after he received it, there is hardly one of his letters which does not allude to it in terms of a passionate horror or a passionate inquiry. “The best of all possible worlds!” “If Pope had been there would he have said ‘Whatever is, is right’?” “All is well seems to me absurd, when evil is on land and sea.” “I no longer dare to complain of my ailments: none must dare to think of himself in a disaster so general.” “Beaumont, who has escaped, says there is not a house left in Lisbon—this is optimism.” Over and over again he reverts to the comfortable dogmas of Mr. Pope’s “Essay on Man”—conceived sitting safe and easy in a Twickenham villa. The stories of the earthquake reached Voltaire exaggerated. But the bald truth was enough. “Voltaire,” said Joubert, “is sometimes sad; he is moved; but he is never serious.” He was serious once—over the Earthquake of Lisbon.
When the horrors were still fresh in his mind, when the burning questions to which they gave rise were still loudly demanding an answer, he wrote the most passionate and touching of all his compositions; one of the most vigorous and inspired works of any author of the age.
The “Poem on the Disaster of Lisbon” is only two hundred and fifty lines long; but it contains a statement of almost all those searching problems which every thinking man, of whatever belief or unbelief he be, has to face at last.
What am I? Whence am I? Whither go I? What is the origin of evil? What end is accomplished by the suffering and sorrow I see around me? “Why is Lisbon engulfed while Paris, no less wicked, dances?” Your “whatever is, is right” may be an easy doctrine for the happy, the rich, the healthy; but a hard saying for the poor, the sick, and the wretched. I will none of it! All Nature gives it the lie. The lips that utter it in prosperity to-day will deny it in misery to-morrow. At the end, the note of consolation is struck in the story of the caliph who, dying, worshipped God in the prayer “‘I bring to Thee all that which Thou hast not in Thy immensity—faults, regrets, evils, ignorance.’ He might have added also Hope.”
The philosophy of “The Disaster of Lisbon” is the philosophy of “In Memoriam.”
Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last—far off—at last, to all,
And every winter change to Spring.
Voltaire’s poem has not the tender beauty of the other: but it is not less reverent, and not less religious.
One line of it, at least, has found a place in the immortalities of poetry:
Que suis-je, où suis-je, où vais-je, et d’où suis-je tiré?