I.—Let us see. Now why did you say that of him?
He.—Because all the fine things he did never brought him twenty thousand francs, and if he had been a silk merchant in the Rue Saint Denis or Saint Honoré, a good wholesale grocer, an apothecary with plenty of customers, he would have amassed an immense fortune, and in amassing it, he could have enjoyed every pleasure in life; he would have thrown a pistole from time to time to a poor devil of a droll like me; we should have had good dinners at his house, played high play, drunk first-rate wines, first-rate liqueurs, first-rate coffee, had glorious excursions into the country. Now you see I know what I meant. You laugh? But let me go on. It would have been better for everybody about him.
I.—No doubt it would, provided that he had not put to unworthy use what gain he had made in lawful commerce, and had banished from his house all those gamesters, all those parasites, all those idle flatterers, all those depraved ne’er-do-wells, and had bidden his shop-boys give a sound beating to the officious creature who offers to play pander.
He.—A beating, sir, a beating! No one is beaten in any well-governed town. It is a decent enough trade; plenty of people with fine titles meddle with it. And what the deuce would you have him do with his money, if he is not to have a good table, good company, good wines, handsome women, pleasures of every colour, diversion of every sort? I would as lief be a beggar as possess a mighty fortune without any of these enjoyments. But go back to Racine. He was only good for people who did not know him, and for a time when he had ceased to exist.
I.—Granted, but weigh the good and bad. A thousand years from now he will draw tears, he will be the admiration of men in all the countries of the earth; he will inspire compassion, tenderness, pity. They will ask who he was, and to what land he belonged, and France will be envied. He brought suffering on one or two people who are dead, and in whom we take hardly any interest; we have nothing to fear from his vices or his foibles. It would have been better, no doubt, that he should have received from nature the virtues of a good man, instead of the talents of a great one. He is a tree which made a few other trees planted near him wither up, and which smothered the plants that grew at his feet; but he reared his height to the clouds, and his branches spread far; he lends his shadow to all who came, or come now, or ever shall come, to repose by his majestic trunk; he brought forth fruits of exquisite savour which are renewed again and again without ceasing.
We might wish that Voltaire had the mildness of Duclos, the ingenuousness of the Abbé Trublet, the rectitude of the Abbé d’Olivet. But as that cannot be, let us look at the thing on the side of it that is really interesting; let us forget for an instant the point we occupy in space and time, and let us extend our vision over centuries to come, and peoples yet unborn, and distant lands yet unvisited. Let us think of the good of our race: if we are not generous enough, at least let us forgive nature for being wiser than ourselves. If you throw cold water on Greuze’s head, very likely you will extinguish his talent along with his vanity. If you make Voltaire less sensitive to criticism, he will lose the art that took him to the inmost depths of the soul of Merope, and will never stir a single emotion in you more.
He.—But if nature be as powerful as she is wise, why did she not make them as good as she made them great?
I.—Do you not see how such reasoning as that overturns the general order, and that if all were excellent here below, then there would be nothing excellent.
He.—You are right. The important point is that you and I should be here; provided only that you and I are you and I, then let all besides go as it can. The best order of things, in my notion, is that in which I was to have a place, and a plague on the most perfect of worlds, if I don’t belong to it! I would rather exist, and even be a bad hand at reasoning, than not exist at all.
I.—There is nobody but thinks as you do, and whoever brings his indictment against the order of things, forgets that he is renouncing his own existence.