“Several men of letters [thus Voltaire briefly describes the project], most estimable by their learning and character, formed an association to compose an immense Dictionary of whatever could enlighten the human mind, and it became an object of commerce with the booksellers. The Chancellor, the Ministry, all encouraged so noble an enterprise. Seven volumes had already appeared, and were translated into English, German, Dutch, and Italian. This treasure, opened by the French to all nations, may be considered as what did us most honour at the time, so much were the excellent articles in the Encyclopédie superior to the bad, which also were tolerably numerous. One had little to complain of in the work, except too many puerile declamations unfortunately adopted by the editors, who seized whatever came to hand to swell the work. But all which those editors wrote themselves was good.”
The article which was particularly selected by the prosecution was that on the Soul, “one of the worst in the work, written by a poor doctor of the Sorbonne, who killed himself with declaiming, rightly or wrongly, against materialism.” The writers, as “encyclopédistes” and “philosophers” were long marked by those titles for the public opprobrium. This general persecution had the effect of uniting that party for common defence. For Voltaire himself an important advantage was secured. Most of the principal men of letters and science, up to this time either avowed enemies or coldly-distant friends, henceforward enrolled themselves under his undisputed leadership.
About the same period he published a number of pieces, prose and verse, directed against his enemies of various kinds, theatrical as well as theological. Amongst the latter, conspicuous by their attacks, but still more so by their punishment, were Fréron and Desfontaines, whose chastisement was such that, according to Macaulay’s hyperbolic expression, “scourging, branding, pillorying would have been a trifle to it.” It is more pleasing, however, to turn from this fierce war of retaliation, in which neither party was free from blame, to proofs of the real benevolence of his disposition. We can merely note the strenuous efforts he made, unsolicited, on behalf of Admiral Byng and the Comte de Lally, and the still more meritorious labours in the less well-known histories of Calas and Serven. Not by these public acts alone did the man, who has been accused of malignity, discover the humanity of his character: to whose ready assistance in money, as well as in counsel, the unfortunate of the literary tribe and others acknowledged their obligations.
His Philosophie de l’Histoire, the prototype of its successors in name at least, was designed to expose that long-established and prevailing idolatry of Antiquity, which received everything bequeathed by it with astounding credulity. The Philosophie called forth a numerous host of small critics, to which men who knew, or ought to have known better, allied themselves. Their curious way of maintaining the credit of Antiquity afforded, as may be imagined, the author of the Defence of my Uncle, under which title Voltaire chose to defend himself, full scope for the exercise of his unrivalled powers of irony. Warburton, the pedant Bishop of Gloucester, with his odd theories about the “Divine Legation,” comes in for a share of this Dunciad sort of immortalisation.
A work of equal merit with the Philosophie are the Questions, addressed to the lovers of science, upon the Encyclopædia, wherein, in the form of a dictionary, he treats, as the Marquis de Condorcet eloquently describes,
“Successively of theology, grammar, natural philosophy, and literature. At one time he discusses subjects of Antiquity; at another questions of policy, legislation, and public economy. His style, always animated and seductive, clothed these various subjects with a charm hitherto known to himself alone, and which springs chiefly from the licence with which, yielding to his successive emotions, adapting his style less to his subject than to the momentary disposition of his mind, sometimes he spreads ridicule over objects which seem capable of inspiring only horror, and almost instantaneously hurried away by the energy and sensibility of his soul, he vehemently and eloquently exclaims against abuses which he had just before treated with mockery. His anger is excited by false taste; he quickly perceives that his indignation ought to be reserved for interests more important, and he finishes by laughing in his usual way. Sometimes he abruptly leaves a moral or political discussion for a literary criticism, and in the midst of a lesson on taste he pronounces abstract maxims of the profoundest philosophy, or makes a sudden and terrible attack on fanaticism and tyranny.”
It is with his romances that we are here chiefly concerned, since it is in those lighter productions of his genius that he has most especially allowed us to see his opinions upon flesh-eating. In the charming tale of The Princess of Babylon, her attendant Phœnix thus accounts to his mistress for the silence of his brethren of the inferior races:—
“It is because men fell into the practice of eating us in place of holding converse with and being instructed by us. The barbarians! Ought they not to have convinced themselves that, having the same organs as they, the same power of feeling, the same wants, the same desires, we have what they call soul as well as themselves, that we are their brethren, and that only the wicked and bad deserve to be cooked and eaten? We are to such a degree your brethren that the Great Being, the Eternal and Creative Being, having made a covenant with men[164], expressly comprised us in the treaty. He forbad you to feed yourselves upon our blood, and us to suck yours. The fables of your Lokman, translated into so many languages, will be an everlasting witness of the happy commerce which you formerly had with us. It is true that there are many women among you who are always talking to their Dogs; but they have resolved never to make any answer, from the time that they were forced by blows of the whip to go hunting and to be the accomplices of the murder of our old common friends, the Deer and the Hares and the Partridges. You have still some old poems in which Horses talk and your coachmen address them every day, but with so much grossness and coarseness, and with such infamous words, that Horses who once loved you now detest you.... The shepherds of the Ganges, born all equal, are the owners of innumerable flocks who feed in meadows that are perpetually covered with flowers. They are never slaughtered there. It is a horrible crime in the country of the Ganges to kill and eat one’s fellows [semblables]. Their wool, finer and more brilliant than the most beautiful silk, is the greatest object of commerce in the Orient.”
A certain king had the temerity to attack this innocent people:—