The pieces represented having been written by himself, is another circumstance which, in my opinion, should naturally tend to prevent their effect on him. Some people indeed assert that this, so far from diminishing, is the real cause of all his sensibility; and they urge, as a proof of this assertion that he attends the theatre only when some of his own pieces are to be acted.
That he should be better pleased to see his own tragedies represented than any others, is natural; but I do not readily comprehend, how he can be more easily moved and deceived, by distresses which he himself invented. Yet this degree of deception seems necessary to make a man shed tears. While these tears are flowing, he must believe the woes he weeps are real: he must have been so far deceived by the cunning of the scene, as to have forgot that he was in a playhouse. The moment he recollects that the whole is fiction, his sympathy and tears must cease.
I should be glad, however, to see Voltaire present at the representation of some of Corneille or Racine’s tragedies, that I might observe whether he would discover more or less sensibility than he has done at his own. We should then be able to ascertain this curious, disputed point, whether his sympathy regarded the piece or the author.
Happy, if this extraordinary man had confined his genius to its native home, to the walks which the muses love, and where he has always been received with distinguished honour, and that he had never deviated from these, into the thorny paths of controversy! For while he attacked the tyrants and oppressors of mankind, and those who have perverted the benevolent nature of Christianity to the most selfish and malignant purposes, it is for ever to be regretted, that he allowed the shafts of his ridicule to glance upon the Christian religion itself.
By persevering in this, he has not only shocked the pious, but even disgusted infidels, who accuse him of borrowing from himself, and repeating the same argument in various publications; and seem as tired of the stale sneer against the Christian doctrines, as of the dullest and most tedious sermons in support of them.
Voltaire’s behaviour during sickness has been represented in very opposite lights, I have heard much of his great contrition and repentance, when he had reason to believe his end approaching. These stories, had they been true, would have proved, that his infidelity was affectation, and that he was a believer and Christian in his heart.
I own I could never give any credit to such reports; for though I have frequently met with vain young men, who have given themselves airs of free-thinking, while in reality they were even superstitious, yet I never could understand what a man like Voltaire, or any man of common understanding, could propose to himself by such absurd affectation. To pretend to despise what we really revere, and to treat as human, what we believe to be divine, is certainly, of all kinds of hypocrisy, the most unpardonable.