Voltaire is never so passionately in earnest as when he speaks against cruelty and oppression. Every sentence quivers with humanity. He denounces war as no “moralist for hire” in a pulpit has ever done, as a scourge of the poor, the weak, and the helpless, to whom he is ever tender. Whenever he sees tyranny or injustice, he attacks it. He wrote against torture when its employment was an established principle of law. He denounced duelling when that form of murder was the chief feature of the code of honor. He waged warfare upon war when, it was considered man’s highest glory.
His attacks on the judicial iniquity of torture—so often callously employed on those supposed instruments of Satan, heretics and witches—were incessant, and it was owing to his influence that the practice was abolished in France by Turgot, his friend, as it had been in Prussia by Frederick, and in Russia by Catherine, his disciples. He advocated the abolition of mutilation, and all forms of cruelty in punishment. He satirised the folly of punishing murder and robbery by the same capital penalty, and thus making assassination the interest of the thief; the barbarity of confiscating the property of children for the crime of the father; and the intricacies and consequent injustice of legal methods. He sought to abolish the sale of offices, to equalise taxation, and to restrict the power of priests to prescribe degrading penances and excessive abstinences. He wrote with fervor against the remnants of serfdom, and defended the rights of the serfs in the Jura against their monastic oppressors. Mr. Lecky says: “His keen and luminous intellect judged with admirable precision most of the popular delusions of his time. He exposed with great force the common error which confounds all wealth with the precious metals. He wrote against sumptuary laws. He refuted Rousseau’s doctrine of the evil of all luxury.”
Voltaire’s work went deeper than political reform. He dealt with ideas, not institutions. In a little treatise called the Voyage of Reason, which he wrote as late as 1774, he enumerates with exultation the triumphs of reforms which he himself had witnessed. He had previously written, in 1764: “Everything I see scatters the seeds of a revolution which will indubitably arrive, and which I shall not have the happiness to witness.” Buckle notes that “the further he advanced in years, the more pungent were his sarcasms against ministers, the more violent were his invectives against despotism”; and it was said of him in the early days of the Revolution, when it was sanguine but not yet sanguinary, “He did not see what has been done, but he did all that we see.”
He teaches no mystery, but the open secret of Secularism—il faut cultiver nôtre jardin (we must cultivate our garden). “Life,” he said, “is thickly sown with thorns. I know no other remedy than to pass rapidly over them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes the greater is their power to harm us.” Economy, he declared, is the source of liberality, and this maxim he reduced to practice. He ridiculed all pretences; those of the physician as well as of the metaphysician. “What have you undertaken?” he said, smiling, to a young man, who answered that he was studying medicine. “Why, to convey drugs of which you know little into a body of which you know less!” “Regimen,” said he, “is better than physic. Everyone should be his own physician. Eat with moderation what you know by experience agrees with your constitution. Nothing is good for the body but what we can digest. What medicine can procure digestion? Exercise. What recruit strength? Sleep. What alleviate incurable evils? Patience.”
The tone of Voltaire is not fervid or heroic, like, for instance, that of Carlyle; but he worked, as Carlyle did not, for a great cause. He felt for suffering outside himself. Without mysticism or fanaticism, aiming at no remote or impracticable ideal, he ever insisted on meeting the problems of life with practical good sense, toleration, and humanity. He sought always for clear ideas, tangible results, and as Mr. Lecky says, “labored steadily within the limits of his ideals and of his sympathies, to make the world wiser, happier, and better place than he found it.”
Voltaire wrote: “My motto is, ‘Straight to the fact,’” and this was a characteristic which equally marked him and Frederick. He had a horror of phrases. “Your fine phrases,” said one to him. “My fine phrases! Learn that I never made one in my life.” His style is indeed marked by restraint and simplicity of diction. He wrote to D’Alembert: “You will never succeed in delivering men from error by means of metaphysics. You must prove the truth by facts.” As an instance of his apt mingling of fact with reason and ridicule, take his treatment of the doctrine of the Resurrection in the Philosophical Dictionary. “A Breton soldier goes to Canada. He finds by chance he falls short of food. He is forced to eat an Iroquois he has killed over-night. This Iroquois had nourished himself on Jesuits during two or three months, a great part of his body has become Jesuit. So there is the body of this soldier composed of Iroquois, Jesuit, and whatever he had eaten before. How will each resume precisely what belonged to him?”
Magnify his failings as you may, you cannot obliterate his one transcendent merit, his humanity ever responsive to every claim of suffering or wrong. He stood for the rights of conscience, for the dignity of human reason, for the gospel of Freethought.
Voltaire may not be placed with the great inspiring teachers of mankind. But it must be acknowledged that, as Mr. George Saintsbury, no mean critic, says: “In literary craftsmanship, at once versatile and accomplished, he has no superior and scarcely a rival.”
He declared that he loved the whole of the nine Muses, and that the doors of the soul should be open to all sciences and all sentiments. He employed every species of composition—poetry, prose, tragedy, comedy, history, dialogue, epistle, essay or epigram—as it suited his purpose, and he excelled in all. Argument or raillery came alike. He made reason amusing, and none like him could ridicule the ridiculous. His charm as a writer has been the occasion of the obloquy attached to his name by bigots. They can never forgive that he forced people to smile at their superstition.
Much, of course, of Voltaire’s multitudinous work was directed to immediate ends, and but for his grace of style would be of little present interest. But after all winnowings by the ever-swaying fan of time much is left of enduring value. The name of Voltaire will ever be a mighty one in literature: a glorious example of what a man may achieve who is strong in his love of humanity.