Carlyle tells us that the chief quality of Voltaire was adroitness. He denies that he was really a great man, and says that in one essential mark of greatness he was wholly wanting, that is, earnestness. He adds that Voltaire was by birth a mocker; that this was the irresistible bias of his disposition; that the first question with him was always not what is true but what is false, not what is to be loved but what is to be contemned. He was shallow without heroism, full of pettiness, full of vanity; "not a great man, but only a great persifleur."
But certainly some other qualities than these were essential to produce the immense influence which he exerted in his own time, and since. Beside the extreme adroitness of which Carlyle speaks, he had as exhaustless an energy as was ever granted to any of the sons of men. He was never happy except when he was at work. He worked at home, he worked when visiting, he worked in his carriage, he worked at hotels. Amid annoyances and disturbances which would have paralyzed the thought and pen of others, Voltaire labored on. Upon his sick bed, in extreme debility and in old age, that untiring pen was ever in motion, and whatever came from it interested all mankind. Besides the innumerable books, tracts, and treatises which fill the volumes of his collected works, there are said to be in existence fourteen thousand of his letters, half of which have never been printed. But this was only a part of the outcome of his terrible vitality. He was also an enterprising and energetic man of business. He speculated in the funds, lent money on interest, fitted out ships, bought and sold real estate, solicited and obtained pensions. In this way he changed his patrimony of about two hundred thousand francs to an annual income of the same amount,—equal to at least one hundred thousand dollars a year at the present time. He was determined to be rich, and he became so; not because he loved money for itself, nor because he was covetous. He gave money freely; he used it in large ways. He sought wealth as a means of self-defense,—to protect himself against the persecution which his attacks on the Church might bring upon him. He also had, like a great writer of the present century, Walter Scott, the desire of being a large landed proprietor and lord of a manor; and, like Scott, he became one, reigning at Ferney as Scott ruled at Abbotsford.
In defending himself against his persecutors he used other means not so legitimate. One of his methods was systematic falsehood. He first concealed, and then denied, the authorship of any works which would expose him to danger. He took the tone of injured innocence. For example, he had worked with delight, during twenty years, on his wretched "Pucelle." To write new lines in it, or a new canto, was his refreshment; to read them to his friends gave him the most intense satisfaction. But when the poem found its way into print, with what an outcry he denies the authorship, almost before he is charged with it. He assumes the air of calumniated virtue. The charge, he declares, is one of the infamous inventions of his enemies. He writes to the "Journal Encyclopédique," "The crowning point of their devilish manœuvres is the edition of a poem called 'La Pucelle d'Orléans.' The editor has the face to attribute this work to the author of the 'Henriade,' the 'Zaïre,' the 'Mérope,' the 'Alzire,' the 'Siècle de Louis XIV.' He dares to ascribe to this author the flattest, meanest, and most gross work which can come from the press. My pen refuses to copy the tissue of silly and abominable obscenities of this work of darkness." When the "Dictionnaire Philosophique" began to appear, he wrote to D'Alembert, "As soon as any danger arises, I beg you will let me know, that I may disavow the work in all the public papers with my usual candor and innocence." Mr. Parton tells us that he had a hundred and eight pseudonyms. He signed his pamphlets A Benedictine, The Archbishop of Canterbury, A Quaker, Rev. Josias Roussette, the Abbé Lilladet, the Abbé Bigorre, the Pastor Bourn. He was also ready to tell a downright lie when it suited his convenience.
When "Candide" was printed, in 1758, he wrote, as Mr. Parton tells us, to a friendly pastor in Geneva, "I have at length read 'Candide.' People must have lost their senses to attribute to me that pack of nonsense. I have, thank God, better occupation. This optimism [of Pangloss] obviously destroys the foundation of our holy religion." Our holy religion!
An excuse may be found for these falsehoods. A writer, it may be said, has a right to his incognito; if so, he has a right to protect it by denying the authorship of a book when charged with it. This is doubtful morality, but Voltaire went far beyond this. He volunteered his denials. He asserted in every way, with the most solemn asseverations, that he was not the author of a book which he had written with delight. But this was not the worst. He not only told these author's lies, but he was a deliberate hypocrite, professing faith in Christianity, receiving its sacraments, asking spiritual help from the Pope, and begging for relics from the Vatican, at the very time that he was hoping by strenuous efforts to destroy both Catholicism and Christianity.
When he was endeavoring to be admitted to a place in the French Academy, he wrote thus to the Bishop of Mirepoix:[42] "Thanks to Heaven, my religion teaches me to know how to suffer. The God who founded it, as soon as he deigned to become man, was of all men the most persecuted. After such an example, it is almost a crime to complain.... I can say, before God who hears me, that I am a good citizen and a true Catholic.... I have written many pages sanctified by religion." In this Mr. Parton admits that he went too far.
When at Colmar, as a measure of self-protection, he resolved to commune at Easter. Mr. Parton says that Voltaire had pensions and rents to the amount of sixty thousand livres annually, of which the king could deprive him by a stroke of the pen. So he determined to prove himself a good Catholic by taking the sacraments. As a necessary preliminary, he confessed to a Capuchin monk. He wrote to D'Argens just before, "If I had a hundred thousand men, I know what I should do; but as I have them not, I shall commune at Easter!" But, writing to Rousseau, he thinks it shameful in Galileo to retract his opinions. Mr. Parton too, who is disposed to excuse some of these hypocrisies in Voltaire, is scandalized because the pastors of Geneva denied the charges of heresy brought against them by Voltaire; saying that "we live, as they lived, in an atmosphere of insincerity." In the midst of all this, Voltaire took credit to himself for his frank avowals of the truth: "I am not wrong to dare to utter what worthy men think. For forty years I have braved the base empire of the despots of the mind." Mr. Parton elsewhere seems to think it would have been impossible for Voltaire to versify the Psalms; as it was "asked him to give the lie publicly to his whole career." But if communing at Easter did not do this, how could a versification of a few psalms accomplish it? Parton quotes Condorcet as saying that Voltaire could not become a hypocrite, even to be a cardinal. Could any one do a more hypocritical action than to partake the sacraments of a Church which he despised in order to escape the danger of persecution?
When building his house at Ferney, the neighboring Catholic curés interfered with him. They prohibited the laborers from working for him. To meet this difficulty he determined to obtain the protection of the Pope himself. So he wrote to the Pope, asking for a relic to put in the church he had built, and received in return a piece of the hair-shirt of St. Francis. He went to mass frequently. Meantime, in his letters to his brother freethinkers, he added his usual postscript, "Ecrasez l'Infâme;" begging their aid in crushing Catholicism and Christianity. Yet it does not seem that he considered himself a hypocrite in thus conforming outwardly to a religion which he hated. He thinks that others who do so are hypocrites, but not that he is one. In 1764 he writes to Madame du Deffand, "The worst is that we are surrounded by hypocrites, who worry us to make us think what they themselves do not think at all." So singular are the self-deceptions of the human mind. He writes to Frederic ridiculing the sacrament of extreme unction, and then solemnly partakes of the eucharist. Certainly he did not belong to the noble army of martyrs. He expected to overturn a great religious system, not by the power of faith, but by ingenious pamphlets, brilliant sarcasms, adroit deceptions. In thus thinking he was eminently superficial.
His theory on this subject is given in an article in the "Dictionnaire Philosophique," quoted by Mr. Parton: "Distinguish honest people who think, from the populace who were not made to think. If usage obliges you to perform a ridiculous ceremony for the sake of the canaille, and on the road you meet some people of understanding, notify them by a sign of the head, or a look, that you think as they do.... If imbeciles still wish to eat acorns, let them have acorns."
Mr. Parton describes in full (vol. ii. p. 410) the ceremony of the eucharist of which Voltaire partook in his own church at Ferney. It was Easter Sunday, and Voltaire mounted the pulpit and preached a sermon against theft. Hearing of this, the bishop was scandalized, and forbade all the curates of the diocese from confessing, absolving, or giving the sacrament to Voltaire. Upon this Voltaire writes and signs a formal demand on the curate of Ferney to allow him to confess and commune in the Catholic Church, in which he was born, has lived, and wishes to die; offering to make all necessary declarations, all requisite protestations, in public or private, submitting himself absolutely to all the rules of the Church, for the edification of Catholics and Protestants. All this was a mere piece of mystification and fun. He pretended to be too sick to go to the church, and made a Capuchin come and administer the eucharist to him in bed; Voltaire saying, "Having my God in my mouth, I declare that I forgive all my enemies." No wonder that with all his marvelous ability and his long war upon the Catholic Church he was unable to make any lasting impression upon it. Talent is not enough to make revolutions of opinion. No serious faith was ever destroyed by a jest.