England has no counterpart for him. But then neither has France, nor any other country. Think of the great names of earthly fame. Of which can it be said—with even approximate truth—“Here is another Voltaire?”
As a poet, he was the king of those society verses which he modestly said himself “are good for nothing but society and only for the moment for which they are written.”
But such as they are—madrigal, epigram, epitaph, the gracefullest flattery in four lines, and the daintiest malice in a couplet—if Voltaire had written nothing else, his supremacy in these alone would have given him a perpetual place in the literature of his country.
His longer and graver poems are immortal for what he said, not for how he said it.
As a playwright, his tragedies were the most famous of his age. Ours applies to them those fatal adjectives—fluent, elegant, correct. Without any of the indomitable life and swing which characterise almost all his other works, they were perfectly suited to that exceedingly bad public taste which preferred smoothness before vigour, and a careful consideration of the unities to the genius of a Shakespeare.
Voltaire’s comedies are only sprightly and fluent.
As a historian, whether in prose or verse, he is celebrated for his broad and comprehensive views, his enormous general knowledge (for his time), “the vehemence and sincerity of his abhorrence of the military spirit,” his savage hatred of the religious culte, and his inimitably interesting and vivacious style. Until his day the learned rarely had wit and the witty rarely had learning. Voltaire set an example which has been singularly little followed: he made facts more amusing than fiction.
His fiction indeed is, with the multitude, one of his chief titles to fame. But all his fiction, rhyming or prose, was to teach fact; though his heart was so perfect that the facts never spoilt the fancy. He was the pioneer in France of the short story, the conte. There may be traced, in a slight degree, the influence of Swift. But Voltaire’s satire is gayer, brighter, and cleaner than the great Dean’s.
Voltaire is the first letter-writer in the world. He was himself interested in everything, and so interesting to everybody.
His letters contain not only his own best biography, and not only the literary history of the eighteenth century. They touch on all contemporary history—social, religious, scientific, political. They are at once the wittiest and the most natural extant. He wrote with that liquid ease with which a bird shakes out his song. His French is at one and the same time the most perfect French for the Frenchman and the stylist, and the simplest for the foreigner to understand.