By far the most momentous and the most influential, both on Voltaire’s own fortunes and on the public intellect, of any of his works written for the most part in England, were his “English Letters” or the “Philosophical Letters.”
They were originally written to Theriot; but they must always have been meant for publication. They are not the best example, but they are no bad example, of the Voltairian manner—polished, easy, witty, sarcastic, not so much daring in word as daring in meaning, more remarkable for what they imply than for what they say—yet of all letters in the world, perhaps, those which have had the most far-reaching as well as the profoundest effect on the human mind.
Read casually, they are chiefly remarkable for their luminous and amusing criticisms on the genius of England, and on the men and events of that day.
Voltaire found Shakespeare exactly, after all, what a Voltaire would have found him—“nature and sublimity,” “force and fecundity,” “an amazing genius”—he was too great a genius himself not to recognise in a Shakespeare such matchless traits as these. But Voltaire was also an eighteenth-century Frenchman, with his dramatic gift pinioned by the unities, by a hundred prim, foolish, and artificial rules, and he was the writer who above all other writers valued style, polish, finish, and culture. How should he have forgiven Shakespeare what he called his “heavy grossness,” his “barbarisms,” his “monstrosities”? Voltaire did not know, with the moderns, that many of the clowns and the clownish jokes to which he took a just objection were interpolations, not Shakespeare himself. And what wonder that this most impressionable child of a country and an age where an abstraction called Taste was as a god, should have missed its polite influence in a Shakespeare, and have found the rugged grandeur of that vast intelligence imperfect without it? Not the less, it was Voltaire who first revealed this man, who had been “the ruin of the English stage,” to the French; who copied and translated him; and then abused him so fiercely in the famous preface to “Semiramis” and the quarrel with Letourneur, as to make him of as supreme an interest on the Continent as in his own country.
Voltaire wrote one admirable letter “On Mr. Pope and other famous Poets,” another “On Comedy,” a third “On Tragedy,” and a fourth “On Nobles who cultivate Literature.” He praised Swift; adored “the judicious Mr. Addison”; and did due homage to Wycherley and Congreve. But if the “English Letters” had been nothing but a series of literary criticisms, however brilliant, they would not have been the Letters which made Lafayette a republican at nine, and which Heine spoke of as a stepping-stone to the Revolution.
In the “Henriade” the bird’s heart had throbbed against the bars of the cage; in the “English Letters” it had found the gate of liberty and taken its first sweeping flight through free air.
Voltaire came straight from the Bastille to the most liberal and enlightened country in the world. What wonder that he conceived that hero-worship for England and the English which no time could change, and which in his old age at Ferney was still a burning and a shining light?
He was from the first an impassioned admirer of almost every Anglican institution. “The English, as a free people, chose their own road to heaven.” “You do not see any imbeciles here who put their souls into the keeping of others.”
“You have no priests then?” said I. “No, friend,” answered the Quaker; “and we get on very well without them.” “When the English clergy know that in France young men famous for their excesses and raised to the prelature by the intrigues of women, make love publicly, amuse themselves by composing love songs, give every day elaborate and elegant suppers and go straight from them to ask the illumination of the Holy Spirit and boldly call themselves successors of the Apostles, they thank God that they are Protestants. But they are vile heretics, fit for burning with all devils, as Master François Rabelais said; that is why I do not mix myself up with their affairs.”
The last touches are admirably Voltairian.