But for freethinkers of all schools the supreme service of Voltaire lay in his twofold triumph over the spirit of religious persecution. He had contrived at once to make it hateful and to make it ridiculous; and it is a great theistic poet of our own day that has pronounced his blade the
sharpest, shrewdest steel that ever stabbed
To death Imposture through the armour joints.[69]
To be perfect, the tribute should have noted that he hated cruelty much more than imposture; and such is the note of the whole movement of which his name was the oriflamme. Voltaire personally was at once the most pugnacious and the most forgiving of men. Few of the Christians who hated him had so often as he fulfilled their own precept of returning good for evil to enemies; and none excelled him in hearty philanthropy. It is notable that most of the humanitarian ideas of the latter half of the century—the demand for the reform of criminal treatment, the denunciation of war and slavery, the insistence on good government, and toleration of all creeds—are more definitely associated with the freethinking than with any religious party, excepting perhaps the laudable but uninfluential sect of Quakers.
The character of Voltaire is still the subject of chronic debate; but the old deadlock of laudation and abuse is being solved in a critical recognition of him as a man of genius flawed by the instability which genius so commonly involves. Carlyle (that model of serenity), while dwelling on his perpetual perturbations, half-humanely suggests that we should think of him as one constantly hag-ridden by maladies of many kinds; and this recognition is really even more important in Voltaire’s case than in Carlyle’s own. He was “a bundle of nerves,” and the clear light of his sympathetic intelligence was often blown aside by gusts of passion—often enough excusably. But while his temperamental weaknesses exposed him at times to humiliation, and often to sarcasm; and while his compelled resort to constant stratagem made him more prone to trickery than his admirers can well care to think him, the balance of his character is abundantly on the side of generosity and humanity.
One of the most unjustifiable of recent attacks upon him (one regrets to have to say it) came from the pen of the late Prof. Churton Collins. In his book on Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau in England (1908) that critic gives in the main an unbiassed account of Voltaire’s English experience; but at one point (p. 39) he plunges into a violent impeachment with the slightest possible justification. He in effect adopts the old allegation of Ruffhead, the biographer of Pope—a statement repeated by Johnson—that Voltaire used his acquaintance with Pope and Bolingbroke to play the spy on them, conveying information to Walpole, for which he was rewarded. The whole story collapses upon critical examination. Ruffhead’s story is, in brief, that Pope purposely lied to Voltaire as to the authorship of certain published letters attacking Walpole. They were by Bolingbroke; but Pope, questioned by Voltaire, said they were his own, begging him to keep the fact absolutely secret. Next day at court everyone was speaking of the letters as Pope’s; and Pope accordingly knew that Voltaire was a traitor. For this tale there is absolutely nothing but hearsay evidence. Ruffhead, as Johnson declared, knew nothing of Pope, and simply used Warburton’s material. The one quasi-confirmation cited by Mr. Collins is Bolingbroke’s letter to Swift (May 18, 1727) asking him to “insinuate” that Walpole’s only ground for ascribing the letters to Bolingbroke “is the authority of one of his spies ... who reports, not what he hears ... but what he guesses.” This is an absolute contradiction of the Pope story, at two points. It refers to a guess at Bolingbroke, and tells of no citation from Pope. To put it as confirming the charge is to exhibit a complete failure of judgment.
After this irrational argument, Mr. Collins offers a worse. He admits (p. 43) that Voltaire always remained on friendly terms with both Pope and Bolingbroke; but adds that this “can scarcely be alleged as a proof of his innocence, for neither Pope nor Bolingbroke would, for such an offence, have been likely to quarrel with a man in a position so peculiar as that of Voltaire. His flattery was pleasant....” Such an argument is worse than nugatory. That Bolingbroke spoke ill in private of Voltaire on general grounds counts for nothing. He did the same of Pope and of nearly all his friends. Mr. Collins further accuses Voltaire of baseness, falsehood, and hypocrisy on the mere score of his habit of extravagant flattery. This was notoriously the French mode in that age; but it had been just as much the mode in seventeenth-century England, from the Jacobean translators of the Bible to Dryden—to name no others. And Mr. Collins in effect charges systematic hypocrisy upon both Pope and Bolingbroke.
Other stories of Ruffhead’s against Voltaire are equally improbable and ill-vouched—as Mr. Collins incidentally admits, though he forgets the admission. They all come from Warburton, himself convicted of double-dealing with Pope; and they finally stand for the hatred of Frenchmen which was so common in eighteenth-century England, and is apparently not yet quite extinct. Those who would have a sane, searching, and competent estimate of Voltaire, leaning humanely to the side of goodwill, should turn to the Voltaire of M. Champion. A brief estimate was attempted by the present writer in the R. P. A. Annual for 1912.
11. It is difficult to realize how far the mere demand for tolerance which sounds from Voltaire’s plays and poems before he has begun to assail credences was a signal and an inspiration to new thinkers. Certain it is that the principle of toleration, passed on by Holland to England, was regarded by the orthodox priesthood in France as the abomination of desolation, and resisted by them with all their power. But the contagion was unquenchable. It was presumably in Holland that there were printed in 1738 the two volumes of Lettres sur la religion essentielle à l’homme, distinguée de ce qui n’en est que l’accessoire, by Marie Huber, a Genevese lady living in Lyons; also the two following parts (1739), replying to criticisms on the earlier. In its gentle way, the book stands very distinctly for the “natural” and ethical principle in religion, denying that the deity demands from men either service or worship, or that he can be wronged by their deeds, or that he can punish them eternally for their sins. This was one of the first French fruits, after Voltaire, of the English deistic influence;[70] and it is difficult to understand how the authoress escaped molestation. Perhaps the memory of the persecution inflicted on the mystic Madame Guyon withheld the hand of power. As it was, four Protestant theologians opened fire on her, regarding her doctrine as hostile to Christianity. One pastor wrote from Geneva, one from Amsterdam, and two professors from Zurich—the two last in Latin.[71]
From about 1746 onwards, the rationalist movement in eighteenth-century France rapidly widens and deepens. The number of rationalistic writers, despite the press laws which in that age inflicted the indignity of imprisonment on half the men of letters, increased from decade to decade, and the rising prestige of the philosophes in connection with the Encyclopédie (1751–72) gave new courage to writers and printers. At once the ecclesiastical powers saw in the Encyclopédie a dangerous enemy; and in January, 1752, the Sorbonne condemned a thesis “To the celestial Jerusalem,” by the Abbé de Prades. It had at first (1751) been received with official applause, but was found on study to breathe the spirit of the new work,[72] to which the Abbé had contributed, and whose editor, Diderot, was his friend. Sooth to say, it contained not a little matter calculated to act as a solvent of faith. Under the form of a vindication of orthodox Catholicism, it negated alike Descartes and Leibnitz; and declared that the science of Newton and the Dutch physiologists was a better defence of religion than the theses of Clarke, Descartes, Cudworth, and Malebranche, which made for materialism. The handling, too, of the question of natural versus revealed religion, in which “theism” is declared to be superior to all religions si unam excipias veram, “if you except the one true,” might well arouse distrust in a vigilant Catholic reader.[73] The whole argument savours far more of the scientific comparative method than was natural in the work of an eighteenth-century seminarist; and the principle, “Either we are ocular witnesses of the facts or we know them only by hearsay,”[74] was plainly as dangerous to the Christian creed as to any other. According to Naigeon,[75] the treatise was wholly the work of de Prades and another Abbé, Yvon;[76] but it remains probable that Diderot inspired not a little of the reasoning; and the clericals, bent on putting down the Encyclopédie, professed to have discovered that he was the real author of the thesis. Either this belief or a desire to strike at the Encyclopédie through one of its collaborators[77] was the motive of the absurdly belated censure. Such a fiasco evoked much derision from the philosophic party, particularly from Voltaire; and the Sorbonne compassed a new revenge. Soon after came the formal condemnation of the first two volumes of the Encyclopédie, of which the second had just appeared.[78]