VOLTAIRE AND D'ALEMBERT.
Everybody in the full tide of the eighteenth century had something to do with Voltaire, from serious personages like Frederick the Great and Turgot, down to the sorriest poetaster who sent his verses to be corrected or bepraised. Rousseau's debt to him in the days of his unformed youth we have already seen, as well as the courtesies with which they approached one another, when Richelieu employed the struggling musician to make some modifications in the great man's unconsidered court-piece. Neither of them then dreamed that their two names were destined to form the great literary antithesis of the century. In the ten years that elapsed between their first interchange of letters and their first fit of coldness, it must have been tolerably clear to either of them, if either of them gave thought to the matter, that their dissidence was increasing and likely to increase. Their methods were different, their training different, their points of view different, and above all these things, their temperaments were different by a whole heaven's breadth.
A great number of excellent and pointed half-truths have been uttered by various persons in illustration of all these contrasts. The philosophy of Voltaire, for instance, is declared to be that of the happy, while Rousseau is the philosopher of the unhappy. Voltaire steals away their faith from those who doubt, while Rousseau strikes doubt into the mind of the unbeliever. The gaiety of the one saddens, while the sadness of the other consoles. If we pass from the marked divergence in tendencies, which is imperfectly hinted at in such sayings as these, to the divergence between them in all the fundamental conditions of intellectual and moral life, then the variation which divided the revolutionary stream into two channels, flowing broadly apart through unlike regions and climates down to the great sea, is intelligible enough. Voltaire was the arch-representative of all those elements in contemporary thought, its curiosity, irreverence, intrepidity, vivaciousness, rationality, to which, as we have so often had to say, Rousseau's temperament and his Genevese spirit made him profoundly antipathetic. Voltaire was the great high priest, robed in the dazzling vestments of poetry and philosophy and history, of that very religion of knowledge and art which Rousseau declared to be the destroyer of the felicity of men. The glitter has faded away from Voltaire's philosophic raiment since those days, and his laurel bough lies a little leafless. Still this can never make us forget that he was in his day and generation one of the sovereign emancipators, because he awoke one dormant set of energies, just as Rousseau presently came to awake another set. Each was a power, not merely by virtue of some singular preeminence of understanding or mysterious unshared insight of his own, but for a far deeper reason. No partial and one-sided direction can permanently satisfy the manifold aspirations and faculties of the human mind in the great average of common men, and it is the common average of men to whom exceptional thinkers speak, whom they influence, and by whom they are in turn influenced, depressed, or buoyed up, just as a painter or a dramatist is affected. Voltaire's mental constitution made him eagerly objective, a seeker of true things, quivering for action, admirably sympathetic with all life and movement, a spirit restlessly traversing the whole world. Rousseau, far different from this, saw in himself a reflected microcosm of the outer world, and was content to take that instead of the outer world, and as its truest version. He made his own moods the premisses from which he deduced a system of life for humanity, and so far as humanity has shared his moods or some parts of them, his system was true, and has been accepted. To him the bustle of the outer world was only a hindrance to that process of self-absorption which was his way of interpreting life. Accessible only to interests of emotion and sense, he was saved from intellectual sterility, and made eloquent, by the vehemence of his emotion and the fire of his senses. He was a master example of sensibility, as Voltaire was a master example of clear-eyed penetration.
This must not be taken for a rigid piece of mutually exclusive division, for the edges of character are not cut exactly sharp, as words are. Especially when any type is intense, it seems to meet and touch its opposite. Just as Voltaire's piercing activity and soundness of intelligence made him one of the humanest of men, so Rousseau's emotional susceptibility endowed him with the gift of a vision that carried far into the social depths. It was a very early criticism on the pair, that Voltaire wrote on more subjects, but that Rousseau was the more profound. In truth one was hardly much more profound than the other. Rousseau had the sonorousness of speech which popular confusion of thought is apt to identify with depth. And he had seriousness. If profundity means the quality of seeing to the heart of subjects, Rousseau had in a general way rather less of it than the shrewd-witted crusher of the Infamous. What the distinction really amounts to is that Rousseau had a strong feeling for certain very important aspects of human life, which Voltaire thought very little about, or never thought about at all, and that while Voltaire was concerned with poetry, history, literature, and the more ridiculous parts of the religious superstition of his time, Rousseau thought about social justice and duty and God and the spiritual consciousness of men, with a certain attempt at thoroughness and system. As for the substance of his thinking, as we have already seen in the Discourses, and shall soon have an opportunity of seeing still more clearly, it was often as thin and hollow as if he had belonged to the company of the epigrammatical, who, after all, have far less of a monopoly of shallow thinking than is often supposed. The prime merit of Rousseau, in comparing him with the brilliant chief of the rationalistic school of the time, is his reverence; reverence for moral worth in however obscure intellectual company, for the dignity of human character and the loftiness of duty, for some of those cravings of the human mind after the divine and incommensurable, which may indeed often be content with solutions proved by long time and slow experience to be inadequate, but which are closely bound up with the highest elements of nobleness of soul.
It was this spiritual part of him which made Rousseau a third great power in the century, between the Encyclopædic party and the Church. He recognised a something in men, which the Encyclopædists treated as a chimera imposed on the imagination by theologians and others for their own purposes. And he recognised this in a way which did not offend the rational feeling of the times, as the Catholic dogmas offended it. In a word he was religious. In being so, he separated himself from Voltaire and his school, who did passably well without religion. Again, he was a puritan. In being this, he was cut off from the intellectually and morally unreformed church, which was then the organ of religion in France. Nor is this all. It was Rousseau, and not the feeble controversialists put up from time to time by the Jesuits and other ecclesiastical bodies, who proved the effective champion of religion, and the only power who could make head against the triumphant onslaught of the Voltaireans. He gave up Christian dogmas and mysteries, and, throwing himself with irresistible ardour upon the emotions in which all religions have their root and their power, he breathed new life into them, he quickened in men a strong desire to have them satisfied, and he beat back the army of emancipators with the loud and incessantly repeated cry that they were not come to deliver the human mind, but to root out all its most glorious and consolatory attributes. This immense achievement accomplished,—the great framework of a faith in God and immortality and providential government of the world thus preserved, it was an easy thing by and by for the churchmen to come back, and once more unpack and restore to their old places the temporarily discredited paraphernalia of dogma and mystery. How far all this was good or bad for the mental elevation of France and Europe, we shall have a better opportunity of considering presently.
We have now only to glance at the first skirmishes between the religious reactionist, on the one side, and, on the other, the leader of the school who believed that men are better employed in thinking as accurately, and knowing as widely, and living as humanely, as all those difficult processes are possible, than in wearying themselves in futile search after gods who dwell on inaccessible heights.
Voltaire had acknowledged Rousseau's gift of the second Discourse with his usual shrewd pleasantry: "I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs in reading your book to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in search of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves. So I content myself with being a very peaceable savage in the solitude which I have chosen near your native place, where you ought to be too." After an extremely inadequate discussion of one or two points in the essay,[331] he concludes:—"I am informed that your health is bad; you ought to come to set it up again in your native air, to enjoy freedom, to drink with me the milk of our cows and browse our grass."[332] Rousseau replied to all this in a friendly way, recognising Voltaire as his chief, and actually at the very moment when he tells us that the corrupting presence of the arrogant and seductive man at Geneva helped to make the idea of returning to Geneva odious to him, hailing him in such terms as these:—"Sensible of the honour you do my country, I share the gratitude of my fellow-citizens, and hope that it will increase when they have profited by the lessons that you of all men are able to give them. Embellish the asylum you have chosen; enlighten a people worthy of your instruction; and do you who know so well how to paint virtue and freedom, teach us to cherish them in our walls."[333]
Within a year, however, the bright sky became a little clouded. In 1756 Voltaire published one of the most sincere, energetic, and passionate pieces to be found in the whole literature of the eighteenth century, his poem on the great earthquake of Lisbon (November 1755). No such word had been heard in Europe since the terrible images in which Pascal had figured the doom of man. It was the reaction of one who had begun life by refuting Pascal with doctrines of cheerfulness drawn from the optimism of Pope and Leibnitz, who had done Pope's Essay on Man (1732-34) into French verse as late as 1751,[334] and whose imagination, already sombred by the triumphant cruelty and superstition which raged around him, was suddenly struck with horror by a catastrophe which, in a world where whatever is is best, destroyed hundreds of human creatures in the smoking ashes and engulfed wreck of their city. How, he cried, can you persist in talking of the deliberate will of a free and benevolent God, whose eternal laws necessitated such an appalling climax of misery and injustice as this? Was the disaster retributive? If so, why is Lisbon in ashes, while Paris dances? The enigma is desperate and inscrutable, and the optimist lives in the paradise of the fool. We ask in vain what we are, where we are, whither we go, whence we came. We are tormented atoms on a clod of earth, whom death at last swallows up, and with whom destiny meanwhile makes cruel sport. The past is only a disheartening memory, and if the tomb destroys the thinking creature, how frightful is the present!