Thirty years after he had left England behind him forever, he wrote English letters to English friends. He quarrelled in that tongue with his mistress in middle life, wrote a couplet in it when he was eighty, and talked in it with his friends in his extreme old age.
He made his headquarters at Wandsworth, already a colony of French refugees, with one Everard Falkener, whom he had met in Paris, the best type of an English merchant, cultivated, hospitable, enlightened. The two bore each other a lifelong friendship. The visitor was never of the idle kind, waiting about to be amused. He was always, on the other hand, indefatigably busy. He was supremely interested in everything, greedy of information, matchlessly quick to observe. Besides, he could never have been very long together at Falkener’s Wandsworth villa.
Three months out of the thirty-four he spent in England he stayed at Lord Peterborough’s. He was constantly at Lord Bolingbroke’s, either at his town house in Pall Mall or in the country. He speaks himself of having known Bishop Berkeley, and Gay of the “Beggar’s Opera.” Before he left England he had visited almost every celebrated person in it.
It is easy to understand Voltaire’s passionate admiration for a country in which genius was everywhere the best passport to glory, riches, and honour. He had lived under a system so different! Here his own talent immediately procured him an entrance into that noblest aristocracy, the aristocracy of intellect. When was it that he went to stay at Bubb Dodington’s at Eastbury in Dorsetshire, and at that Liberty Hall of the Muses met Young of the “Night Thoughts” and Thomson of the “Seasons”? The man who was to be English parson and author of those solemn religious periods of the “Thoughts” was now writing his “Satires” and had not a little in common with the sceptical, cynic Frenchman of the “Epistle to Uranie.” The one was as brilliant a conversationalist as the other. As for the “Seasons,” though Voltaire politely praised them, he considered Nature an ill-chosen subject for a Scotchman who knew nothing of the warmth and glow of the South.
At Lord Peterborough’s Voltaire met Swift—“Rabelais in his Senses,” that greater than any Rabelais—“one of the most extraordinary men that England has produced.” That was Voltaire’s judgment of him. He did not like him the less because he was “a priest and mocked at everything.” At bottom, the dark and awful genius of Swift and the vivid and passionate inspiration of Voltaire had something in common. At Peterborough’s table there sat then the two finest masters of invective who ever lived.
Voltaire was still quite new to the country when he made the acquaintance of little, crooked, papist Mr. Pope of Twit’nam. It has been maliciously said that on the occasion the visitor talked so blasphemously and indecently that he sent Pope’s poor old mother shuddering from the room. But as at the time Voltaire did not know English and Pope and his mother did not know French, the story may be taken for what it is worth. A great and very natural admiration had the French author, to whom precision, the unities, and poetical neatness were so dear, for the polished easy rhythm of Mr. Pope; but that did not prevent him, long after, when he was talking to James Boswell of Auchinleck at Ferney, from diagnosing the respective merits of Pope and Dryden in a truly Voltairian criticism. “Pope drives a handsome chariot with a couple of neat nags, and Dryden a coach and six stately horses.” Nor did his love of Mr. Pope’s style prevent him loathing Mr. Pope’s philosophy.
One day he went to see old Sarah Marlborough at Blenheim, and audaciously asked her to let him see the memoirs she was writing. “You must wait,” answered Sarah; “I am just altering my account of Queen Anne’s character. I have begun to love her again since the present lot have become our rulers.” Is it hard to fancy the delighted cynic humour on her guest’s shrewd face at that naïve reply?
Goldsmith says that she did show him the memoirs, and when he remonstrated with her for abusing her friends therein, seized them out of his hands in a rage. “I thought the man had sense, but I find him at bottom either a fool or a philosopher.”
Presently Gay was reading aloud to him that “Beggar’s Opera” before its publication; and he went to see old Congreve, who spoke of his plays as trifles beneath notice, “and told me to look upon him merely as a private gentleman.” That literary snobbishness was very little to the taste of a Voltaire. “If you had the misfortune to be only a gentleman like any other,” he answered, “I should never have come to see you.” It is to be hoped the foolish old playwright felt duly snubbed.
The great Lord Chesterfield—“the only Englishman who ever recommended the art of pleasing as the first duty of life”—invited Voltaire to dinner. When he was asked a second time, he had to decline, as the gratuities expected by the servants were too much for his slenderly equipped pockets.