The life of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

But these enemies he knew, or had known, in the flesh.

To admire or to despise Shakespeare was but a literary question. Old Eighty-two in this July of 1776 took it as a burning personal one. He had not precisely adored Shakespeare in the “English Letters.” A barbarian, a monster—but of very great genius. For the sake of that genius he had permitted the polished French people to condone that “heavy grossness” and the shocking lack of taste; and in his famous criticism on “Hamlet,” written in 1748, though he had called its author “a drunken savage,” he had found in the play, not the less, “sublime touches worthy of the loftiest genius.” To Sherlock, but three months ago, though he had uttered “horrors” in his criticism, he had admitted that “amazing genius” again.

And now one Letourneur publishes a new translation of the great William, and takes upon himself to call him the “god of the theatre,” the only model for true tragedy; and ignores Corneille and Racine (to say nothing of the author of “Zaire”) in toto.

Then Voltaire beat his breast and tore his hair to think that it was I—I—who showed to the French the pearls in this English dunghill; that I suffered persecution for telling them that though the god had feet of clay, the head and heart were gold.

So in a rage M. de Voltaire sat down and wrote a letter to the Academy—“his factotum against Shakespeare”; gave himself the lie; literally translated many passages, knowing, as he had said himself, that in a translation the letter killeth and the spirit giveth life; presented, as he meant to do, a gross and coarse Shakespeare, an indecent buffoon who had “ruined the taste of England for two hundred years.” Various persons rushed into the fray on either side.

On August 25th, Voltaire’s letter was read at a public meeting at the Academy, and a good-natured Marquis de Villevieille galloped off post-haste to Ferney to tell of its success. But there had been dissentient voices. Anglomania was already a power in the land. The young Queen had her Crawfords and Dillons, her English garden, her English jockeys, her English billiards. D’Alembert was too cool, too cool! The untrammelled nature of the great Diderot was formed to appreciate the broad and daring genius of the great Englishman. And Madame Necker, with the sure instincts of a clever woman, criticised Voltaire’s letter in a letter to Garrick. Voltaire had but shown Shakespeare’s dead body—“But I—I have seen the soul animating it, and know it is something more even than a majestic ghost which Garrick, the enchanter, summons from the grave.”

The letter to the Academy was the last utterance on the great Englishman of the man who—whether he hotly regretted it, as he did now and in the famous Preface to “Semiramis,” or was, or said he was, proud of it, as when he wrote to Walpole—first revealed Shakespeare to the people of France.

August saw the arrival of a visitor who was hereafter herself to be a celebrity, Madame de Genlis. Now only thirty years old, she was not yet famous for her literary works or that grave and religious turn of mind which did not prevent her occupying the very equivocal position of gouvernante to the children of the Duke of Orleans. As Madame Suard came to Ferney prepared to go into raptures, so Madame Genlis came prepared to disapprove.

The serious lady carried out her intention as thoroughly as the frivolous one. Her account of her visit contains much more about herself than about Voltaire, but states, no doubt very truly, that the impiety of his conversation was shocking, and, certainly untruly, that his manners lacked tact and urbanity. For this too particular lady the very trees in the Ferney garden grew too low and upset her temper and her hair; while the wild enthusiasm for their host of her companion, a painter, M. Ott, quite distressed a person who had so firmly resolved not to make a fool of herself in that direction.

As her point of view was unfavourable, her testimony as to her host’s “ingenuous goodness” to his colonists, to the perfect modesty and simplicity with which he regarded his great work for them, is the more valuable. She confirmed the opinion of many others as to the piercing brilliancy of the old eyes—“which have in them an inexpressible sweetness.” Madame Saint-Julien was there at the same time—little and gay and kind—and presently Marie Dupuits’s little girl ran into the room and put her arms round Grandpapa Voltaire’s neck.