In some respects Mr. Parton's biography reminds us of Macaulay's History. Both have been credited with the same qualities, both charged with the same defects. Both are indefatigable in collecting material from all quarters,—from other histories and biographies, memoirs, letters, newspapers, broadsides, and personal communications gathered in many out-of-the-way localities. Both have the power of discarding insignificant details and retaining what is suggestive and picturesque. Both, therefore, have the same supreme merit of being interesting. Both have strong prejudices, take sides earnestly, forget that they are narrators, and begin to plead as attorneys and advocates. Both have been accused, rightly or wrongly, of grave inaccuracies. But their defects will not prevent them from holding their place as teachers of the English-speaking public. English and American readers will long continue to think of Marlborough as Macaulay represents him; of Jackson and Jefferson as Parton describes them. Such Rembrandt-like portraits fix the attention by their strange chiaro-oscuro. They may not be like nature, but they take the place of nature. The most remarkable instance of this kind is the representation of Tiberius by Tacitus, which has caused mankind, until very recently, to consider Tiberius a monster of licentiousness and cruelty, in spite of the almost self-evident absurdity and self-contradiction of this assumption.[36] Limners with such a terrible power of portraiture should be very careful how they use it, and not abuse the faculty in the interest of their prejudices.
If Mr. Parton resembles Macaulay in some respects, in one point, at least, he is like Carlyle: that is, that his last hero is the least interesting. From Schiller and Goethe to Frederic the Great was a fall; and so from Franklin to Voltaire. Carlyle tells us what a weary task he had with his Prussian king, and we think that Mr. Parton's labors over the patriarch of the eighteenth-century literature must have been equally distressing. At a distance, Voltaire is a striking phenomenon: the most brilliant wit of almost any period; the most prolific writer; a successful dramatist, historian, biographer, story-teller, controversialist, lyrical poet, student of science. "Truly, a universal genius, a mighty power!" we say. But look more closely, and this genius turns into talent; this encyclopædic knowledge becomes only superficial half knowledge; this royalty is a sham royalty; it does not lead the world, but follows it. The work into which Voltaire put his heart was destruction—the destruction of falsehoods, bigotries, cruelties, and shams. It was an important duty, and some one had to do it. But it was temporary, and one of which the interest is soon over. If Luther and the other reformers had aimed at only destroying the Church of Rome, their influence would have speedily ceased. But they rebuilt, as they destroyed; the sword in one hand, and the trowel in the other. They destroyed in order to build; they took away the outgrown house, to put another in its place. Voltaire did not go so far as that; he wanted no new church in the place of the old one.
Voltaire and Rousseau are often spoken of as though they were fellow-workers, and are associated in many minds as sharing the same convictions. Nothing can be more untrue. They were radically opposite in the very structure of their minds, and their followers and admirers are equally different. If all men can be divided into Platonists and Aristotelians, they may be in like manner classified as those who prefer Voltaire to Rousseau, and vice versa. Both were indeed theists, and both opposed to the popular religion of their time. Both were brilliant writers, masters of the French language, listened to by the people, and with a vast popularity. Both were more or less persecuted for their religious heresies. So far they resemble each other. But these are only external resemblances; radically and inwardly they were polar opposites. What attracted one repelled the other. Voltaire was a man of the world, fond of society and social pleasures; the child of his time, popular, a universal favorite. Rousseau shrank from society, hated its fashions, did not enjoy its pleasures, and belonged to another epoch than the eighteenth century. Rousseau believed in human nature, and thought that if we could return to our natural condition the miseries of life would cease. Voltaire despised human nature; he forever repeated that the majority of men were knaves and fools. Rousseau distrusted education and culture as they are commonly understood; but to Voltaire's mind they were the only matters of any value,—all that made life worth living. Rousseau was more like Pascal than like Voltaire; far below Pascal, no doubt, in fixed moral principles and ascetic virtue. Yet he resembled him in his devotion to ideas, his enthusiasm for some better day to come. Both were out of place in their own time; both were prophets crying in the wilderness. Put Voltaire between Pascal and Rousseau, and it would be something like the tableau of Goethe between Basedow and Lavater.
"Prophete rechts, Propliete links,
Das Weltkind in der Mitte."
The difference between Voltaire and Rousseau was really that between a man of talent and a man of genius. Voltaire, brilliant, adroit, full of resource, quick as a flash, versatile, with immense powers of working, with a life full of literary successes, has not left behind him a single masterpiece. He comes in everywhere second best. As a tragedian he is inferior to Racine; as a wit and comic writer far below Molière; and he is quite surpassed as a historian and biographer by many modern French authors. No germinating ideas are to be found in his writings, no seed corn for future harvests. He thought himself a philosopher, and was so regarded by others; but neither had his philosophy any roots to it. A sufficient proof of this is the fact that he shared the superficial optimism of the English deists, as expressed by Bolingbroke and Pope, until the Lisbon earthquake, by destroying thirty thousand people, changed his whole mental attitude. Till then he could say with Pope, "Whatever is, is right." After that, most things which are, appeared to him fatally and hopelessly wrong. That thirty thousand persons should perish in a few minutes, in great suffering, he thought inconsistent with the goodness of God. But take the whole world over, thirty thousand people are continually perishing, in the course of a few hours or days. What difference does it make, in a philosophical point of view, if they die all at once in a particular place, or at longer intervals in many places? Voltaire asks, "What crime had those infants committed who lie crushed on their mother's breasts?" What crime, we reply, have the infants committed who have been dying by millions, in suffering, since the world began? "Was Lisbon," he asks, "more wicked than Paris?" But had Voltaire never noticed before that wicked people often live on in health and pleasure, while the good suffer and die? Voltaire did not see, what it requires very little philosophy to discover, that a Lisbon earthquake really presents no more difficulty to the reason than the suffering and death of a single child.
Another fact which shows the shallow nature of Voltaire's way of thinking is his expectation of destroying Christianity by a combined attack upon it of all the wits and philosophers. Mr. Parton tells us that "l'Infâme," which Voltaire expected to crush, "was not religion, nor the Christian religion, nor the Roman Catholic Church. It was," he says, "religion claiming supernatural authority, and enforcing that claim by pains and penalties." No doubt it was the spirit of intolerance and persecution which excited his indignation. But the object of that indignation was not the abstraction which Mr. Parton presents to us. It was something far more concrete. There is no doubt that Voltaire confounded Christianity with the churches about him, and these with their abuses; and thus his object was to sweep away all positive religious institutions, and to leave in their place a philosophic deism. Else what meaning in his famous boast that "it required twelve men to found a belief, which it would need only one man to destroy"? What meaning, otherwise, in his astonishment that Locke, "having in one book so profoundly traced the development of the understanding, could so degrade his own understanding in another"?—referring, as Mr. Morley believes, to Locke's "Reasonableness of Christianity." Voltaire saw around him Christianity represented by cruel bigots, ecclesiastics living in indolent luxury, narrow-minded and hard-hearted priests. That was all the Christianity he saw with his sharp perceptive faculty; and he had no power of penetrating into the deeper life of the soul which these corruptions misrepresented. We do not blame him for this; he was made so; but it was a fatal defect in a reformer. The first work of a reformer is to discover the truth and the good latent amid the abuses he wishes to reform, and for the sake of which men endure the evil. A Buddhist proverb says, "The human mind is like a leech: it never lets go with its tail till it has taken hold somewhere else with its head." Distinguish the good in a system from the evil; show how the good can be preserved, though the evil is abandoned, and then you may hope to effect a truly radical reform. Radicalism means going to the roots of anything. Voltaire was incapable of becoming a radical reformer of the Christian Church, because he had in himself no faculty by which he could appreciate the central forces of Christianity. Mr. Morley says that Voltaire "has said no word, nor even shown an indirect appreciation of any word said by another, which stirs and expands that indefinite exaltation known as the love of God," "or of the larger word holiness." "Through the affronts which his reason received from certain pretensions, both in the writers and in some of those whose actions they commemorated, this sublime trait in the Bible, in both portions of it, was unhappily lost to Voltaire. He had no ear for the finer vibrations of the spiritual voice." And so also speaks Carlyle: "It is a much more serious ground of offense that he intermeddled in religion without being himself, in any measure, religious; that he entered the temple and continued there with a levity which, in any temple where men worship, can beseem no brother man; that, in a word, he ardently, and with long-continued effort, warred against Christianity, without understanding beyond the mere superficies of what Christianity was." In fact, in the organization of Voltaire, the organ of reverence, "the crown of the whole moral nature," seems to have been at its minimum. A sense of justice there was; an ardent sympathy with the oppressed, a generous hatred of the oppressor, a ready devotion of time, thought, wealth, to the relief of the down-trodden victim. Therefore, with such qualities, Voltaire, by the additional help of his indefatigable energy, often succeeded in plucking the prey from the jaws of the lion. He was able to defeat the combined powers of Church and State in his advocacy of some individual sufferer, in his battle against some single wrong. But his long war against the Catholic Church in France left it just where it was when that war began. Its power to-day in France is greater than it was then, because it is a purer and better institution than it was then. That Sphinx still sits by the roadside propounding its riddle. Voltaire was not the Œdipus who could solve it, and so the life of that mystery remains untouched until now.
The Henriade has often been considered the great epic poem of France. This merely means that France has never produced a great epic poem. The Henriade is artificial, prosaic, and has no particle of the glow, the fire, the prolonged enthusiasm, which alone can give an epic poem to mankind. In this sentence all competent critics are agreed.
Voltaire was busy with literature during his whole life. He not only wrote continually himself, but he was a critic of the writings of others. His mind was essentially critical,—formed to analyze, discriminate sharply, compare, and judge by some universal standard of taste. Here, if anywhere, he ought to be at his best; here, if in any department, he should stand at the head of the world's board of literary censors. But here, again, he is not even second-rate; here, more than elsewhere, he shows how superficial are his judgments. He tests every writer by the French standard in the eighteenth century. Every word which Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, have said of other writers is full of value and interest to-day. But who would go to Voltaire for light on any book or author? We have an instinctive but certain conviction that all his views are limited by his immediate environment, perverted by his personal prejudices. Thus, he prefers Ariosto to the Odyssey, and Tasso's Jerusalem to the Iliad.[37] His inability to comprehend the greatness of Shakespeare is well known. He is filled with indignation because a French critic had called Shakespeare "the god of the stage." "The blood boils in my old veins," says he; "and what is frightful to think of, it was I myself who first showed to Frenchmen the few pearls to be found in the dunghill."[38] Chesterfield's Letters to his Son he considers "the best book upon education ever written."[39] This is the book in which a father teaches his son the art of polite falsehood, of which Dr. Johnson says that "it shows how grace can be united with wickedness,"—the book whose author is called by De Vere the philosopher of flattery and dissimulation. He admitted that there were some good things in Milton, but speaks of his conceptions as "odd and extravagant."[40] He thought Condorcet much superior to Pascal. The verses of Helvetius he believed better than any but those of Racine. The era was what Villemain calls "the golden age of mediocre writers;" and Voltaire habitually praised them all. But these writers mostly belonged to a mutual admiration society. The anatomist Tissot, in one of his physiological works, says that the genius of Diderot came to show to mankind how every variety of talent could be brought to perfection in one man. Diderot, in his turn, went into frantic delight over the novels of Richardson. "Since I have read these works," he says, "I make them my touchstone; those who do not admire them are self-condemned. O my friends, what majestic dramas are these three, Clarissa, Sir Charles Grandison, and Pamela!" Such was the eighteenth century; and Voltaire belonged to it with all the intensity of his ardent nature. He may be said never to have seen or foreseen anything better. Living on the very verge of a great social revolution, he does not appear to have suspected what its nature would be, even if he suspected its approach. The cruelties of the Church exasperated him, but the political condition of society, the misery of the peasants, the luxury of the nobles, the despotism of the king, left him unmoved. He was singularly deficient in any conception of the value of political liberty or of free institutions. If he had lived to see the coming of the Revolution, it would have utterly astounded him. His sympathies were with an enlightened aristocracy, not with the people. In this, too, he was the man of his time, and belonged to the middle of his century, not the end of it. He saw and lamented the evils of bad government. He pointed out the miseries produced by war. He abhorred and denounced the military spirit. He called on the clergy, in the name of their religion, to join him in his righteous appeals against this great curse of mankind. "Where," he asks, "in the five or six thousand sermons of Massillon, are there two in which anything is said against the scourge of war?" He rebukes the philosophers and moralists, also, for their delinquency in this matter, and replies forcibly to Montesquieu's argument that self-defense sometimes makes it necessary to begin the attack on a neighboring nation. But he does not go back to trace the evil to its root in the absence of self-government. In a letter to the King of Prussia he says, "When I asked you to become the deliverer of Greece, I did not mean to have you restore the democracy. I do not love the rule of the rabble" (gouvernement de la canaille). Again, writing to the same, in January, 1757, he says, "Your majesty will confer a great benefit by destroying this infamous superstition [Christianity]; I do not say among the canaille, who do not deserve to be enlightened, and who ought to be kept down under all yokes, but among honest people, people who think. Give white bread to the children, but only black bread to the dogs." In 1762, writing to the Marquis d'Argens, he says, "The Turks say that their Koran has sometimes the face of an angel, sometimes the face of a beast. This description suits our time. There are a few philosophers,—they have the face of an angel; all else much resembles that of a beast." Again, he says to Helvetius, "Consider no man your neighbor but the man who thinks; look on all other men as wolves, foxes, and deer." "We shall soon see," he writes to D'Alembert, "new heavens and a new earth,—I mean for honest people; for as to the canaille, the stupidest heaven and earth is all they are fit for." The real government of nations, according to him, should be administered by absolute kings, in the interest of freethinkers.
It is true that after Rousseau had published his trumpet-call in behalf of democratic rights, Voltaire began to waver. It has been remarked that "at the very time when he expressed an increasing ill-will against the person of the author of 'Emile,' he was irresistibly attracted to the principal doctrines of Rousseau. He entered, as if in spite of himself, into paths toward which his feet were never before directed. As if to revenge himself for coming under this salutary influence, he pursued Rousseau with blind anger."[41] He harshly attacked the Social Contract, but accepted the sovereignty of the people; saying that "civil government is the will of all, executed by a single one, or by several, in virtue of the laws which all have enacted." He, however, speedily restricted this democratic principle by confining the right of making laws to the owners of real estate. He declares that those who have neither house nor land ought not to have any voice in the matter. He now began (in 1764) to look forward to the end of monarchies, and to expect a revolution. Nevertheless, he plainly declares, "The pretended equality of man is a pernicious chimera. If there were not thirty laborers to one master, the earth would not be cultivated." But in practical and humane reforms Voltaire took the lead, and did good work. He opposed examination by torture, the punishment of death for theft, the confiscation of the property of the condemned, the penalties against heretics; secret trials; praised trial by jury, civil marriage, right of divorce, and reforms in the direction of hygiene and education.
And, above all, whatever fault may be found with Voltaire, let us never cease to appreciate his generous efforts in behalf of the unfortunate victims of the atrocious bigotry which then prevailed in France. It is not necessary to dwell here on the cases of Calas, the Sirvens, La Barre, and the Count de Lally. They are fully told by Mr. Parton, and to his account we refer our readers. In 1762 the Protestant pastor Rochette was hanged, by order of the Parliament of Toulouse, for having exercised his ministry in Languedoc. At the same time three young gentlemen, Protestants, were beheaded, for having taken arms to defend themselves from being slaughtered by the Catholics. In 1762, the Protestant merchant Calas, an aged and worthy citizen of Toulouse, was tortured and broken on the wheel, on a wholly unsupported charge of having killed his son to keep him from turning Catholic. A Protestant girl named Sirven was, about the same time, taken from her parents, and shut up in a convent, to compel her to change her religion. She escaped, and perished by accident during her flight. The parents were accused of having killed her to keep her from becoming a Catholic. They escaped, but the wife died of exposure and want. In 1766 a crucifix was injured by some wanton persons. The Bishop of Amiens called out for vengeance. Two young officers, eighteen years old, were accused. One escaped; the other, La Barre, was condemned to have his tongue cut out, his right hand cut off, and to be burned alive. The sentence was commuted to death by decapitation. Voltaire, seventy years old, devoted himself with masterly ability and untiring energy to save these victims; and when he failed in that, to show the falsehood of the charges, and to obtain a revision of the judgments. He used all means: personal appeals to men in power and to female favorites, eloquence, wit, pathos in every form of writing. He called on all his friends to aid him. He poured a flood of light into these dark places of iniquity. His generous labors were crowned with success. He procured a reversal of these iniquitous decisions; in some cases a restoration of the confiscated property, and a public recognition of the innocence of those condemned. Without knowing it, he was acting as a disciple of Jesus. Perhaps he may have met in the other world with the great leader of humanity, whom he never understood below, and been surprised to hear him say, "Inasmuch as thou hast done it to the least of my little ones, thou hast done it unto me."