From this there flowed that other vehement current in his soul, of energetic hatred toward the black clouds of prejudice, of mean self-love, of sinister preference of class or order, of indolence, obstinacy, wanton fancy, and all the other unhappy leanings of human nature, and vexed and fatal conjunctures of circumstance, which interpose between humanity and the beneficent sunbeams of its own intelligence, that central light of the universe. Hence, again, by a sufficiently visible chain of thought, his marked disesteem for far-sounding names of brutal conquerors, and his cold regard for those outward and material circumstances in the state of nations, which strike the sense, but do not touch the inward reason. ‘Not long ago,’ he writes once, ‘a distinguished company were discussing the trite and frivolous question, who was the greatest man, Caesar, Alexander, Tamerlane, or Cromwell. Somebody answered that it was undoubtedly Isaac Newton. This person was right; for if true greatness consists in having received from heaven a powerful understanding and in using it to enlighten oneself and all others, then such an one as Newton, who is hardly to be met with once in ten centuries, is in truth the great man.... It is to him who masters our minds by the force of truth, not to those who enslave men by violence; it is to him who understands the universe, not to those who disfigure it, that we owe our reverence.’[45] This may seem trite to us, as the question which suggested it seemed to Voltaire, but we need only reflect, first, how new this was, even as an idea, in the France which Voltaire had quitted, and, second, how in spite of the nominal acceptance of the idea, in the England of our own time there is, with an immense majority not only of the general vulgar but of the special vulgar who presume to teach in press and pulpit, no name of slight at once so disdainful and so sure of transfixing as the name of thinker.
The discovery of the New World did not fire the imagination and stir the thought of Europe more intensely, than the vision of these new worlds of knowledge kindled the ardour of the receptive spirit which had just come into contact with them. But besides the speculative aspects of what he saw in England, Voltaire was deeply penetrated by the social differences between a country that had been effectively, if only partially, transformed from feudalism, and his own, where feudalism had only been transformed into a system more repressive than itself, and more unfit to conduct a nation to the free and industrious developments of new civilisation. It is a remarkable thing that though Voltaire’s habitual companions or patrons had belonged to the privileged class, he had been sufficiently struck by the evils incident to the privileged system to notice the absence of such evils in England, and to make a clear attempt, though an insufficient one, to understand the secret of the English immunity from them. One of the worst curses of France was the taille or capitation-tax, and the way in which it was levied and assessed. In England, Voltaire noticed, the peasant has not his feet bruised in wooden shoes, he eats white bread, is decently clad, is not terrified to increase the number of his stock, or to roof his dwelling with tiles, lest his tax should be raised next year. Again, he placed his finger on one of the circumstances that did most to spoil the growth of a compact and well-knit society in France, when he pointed to the large number of farmers in England with five or six hundred pounds sterling a year, who do not think it beneath them to cultivate the earth which has made them rich, and on which they live in active freedom.[46] The profoundest modern investigator of the conditions of French society in the eighteenth century has indicated the eagerness of every man who got a little capital to quit the country and buy a place in a town, as doing more harm to the progress of the agriculture and commerce of France than even the taille itself and the trade corporations.[47]
Voltaire perceived the astonishing fact that in this country a man because he is a noble or a priest was not exempt from paying certain taxes, and that the Commons who regulated the taxes, though second to the Lords in rank, were above them in legislative influence.[48] His acute sight also revealed to him the importance of the mixture of ranks and classes in common pursuits, and he records with admiration instances of the younger sons of peers of the realm following trade. ‘Whoever arrives in Paris from the depths of a remote province with money to spend and a name in ac or ille, can talk about a man like me, a man of my quality,’[49] and hold a merchant in sovereign contempt. The merchant again so constantly hears his business spoken of with disdain that he is fool enough to blush for it; yet I am not sure which is the more useful to a state, a thickly-bepowdered lord who knows exactly what time the king rises and what time he goes to bed, and gives himself mighty airs of greatness while he plays the part of a slave in a minister’s ante-room; or the merchant who enriches his country, gives orders from his counting-house at Surat or Cairo, and contributes to the happiness of the globe.[50] It is easy to conceive the fury which these contrasts drawn from English observation would excite among the personages in France who happened to get the worst side in them, and there was assuredly nothing surprising in the decree of the Parliament of Paris (1734), which condemned the Letters on the English to be publicly burnt, as scandalous and contrary alike to good manners and the respect due to principalities and powers.
The English reader of the Letters is naturally struck by the absence of any adequate account of our political liberties and free constitutional forms. There is a good chapter on Bacon, one on inoculation, and several on the Quakers, but on the civil constitution hardly a word of large appreciativeness. Not only this, but there is no sign that Voltaire either set any due or special value on the popular forms of the Hanoverian time, or clearly understood that the liberty, which was so amazing and so precious to him in the region of speculative and literary activity, was the direct fruit of that general spirit of freedom, which is naturally engendered in a people accustomed to take an active part in the conduct of its own affairs. Liberty in spirituals was adorable to him, but for liberty in temporals he never seems to have had more than a very distant and verbal kind of respect; just because, with all his unmatched keenness of sight, he failed to discover that the English sturdiness in the matter of civil rights was the very root and cause, not only of that material prosperity which struck him so much, and of the slightness and movableness of the line which divided the aristocracy from the commercial classes, but also of the fact that a Newton and a Locke were inwardly emboldened to give free play to their intelligence without fear of being punished for their conclusions, and of the only less important fact that whatever conclusions speculative genius might establish would be given to the world without interposition from any court or university or official tribunal. Voltaire undoubtedly admired the English for their parliament, because the material and superficial advantages that delighted him were evidently due to the system, which happened to be parliamentary. What we miss is any consciousness that these advantages would not have been what they were, if they had been conferred by an absolute sovereign; any recognition that political activity throughout a nation works in a thousand indirect but most potent ways, and is not more to be prized for this, than for its direct and most palpable consequences. In one place, indeed, he mentions that the honour paid to men of letters is due to the form of government, but his language betrays a wholly inadequate and incorrect notion of the true operation of the form of government. ‘There are in London,’ he says, ‘about eight hundred people with the right of speaking in public, and maintaining the interests of the nation. Some five or six thousand pretend to the same honour in their turn. All the rest set themselves up to judge these, and everybody can print what he thinks. So all the nation is bound to instruct itself. All talk is about the governments of Athens and Rome, and it becomes necessary to read the authors who have discussed them. That naturally leads to love of polite learning.’[51] This is to confound a very trivial accident of popular governments with their essence. If culture thrives under them—a very doubtful position—it is not because voters wish to understand the historical allusions of candidates, but because the general stir and life of public activity tends to commove the whole system. Political freedom does not produce men of genius, but its atmosphere is more favourable than any other to their making the best of their genius in the service of mankind.
Voltaire, in this as in too much besides, was content with a keen and rapid glance at the surface. The reader may remember his story of meeting a boatman one day on the Thames, who seeing that he was a Frenchman, with a too characteristic kind of courtesy, took the opportunity of bawling out, with the added emphasis of a round oath, that he would rather be a boatman on the Thames than an archbishop in France. The next day Voltaire saw his man in prison with irons on and praying an alms from the passers-by, and so asked him whether he still thought as scurvily of an archbishop in France. ‘Ah, sir,’ cried the man, ‘what an abominable government! I have been carried off by force to go and serve in one of the king’s ships in Norway. They take me from my wife and my children, and lay me up in prison with irons on my legs until the time for going on board, for fear I should run away.’ A countryman of Voltaire’s confessed that he felt a splenetic joy that a people who were constantly taunting the French with their servitude, were in sooth just as much slaves themselves; but for my own part, says Voltaire, I felt a humaner sentiment, I was afflicted at there being no liberty on the earth.[52]
This is well enough as a comment on the abomination of impressment; yet we feel that there is behind it, and not here only but generally in Voltaire, a sort of confusion between two very distinct conceptions, that both in his day and ever since have been equally designated by the common name of civil liberty. The first of these ideas is a mere privative, undoubtedly of sovereign importance, but still a privative, and implies absence, more or less complete, of arbitrary control from without, of interference with individual action by authority, of any pretension on the part of any organised body to hinder any member of the society from doing or abstaining from doing what may seem right in his own eyes, provided he pays a corresponding respect to the freedom of his fellows. Freedom in this sense Voltaire fully understood, and valued as profoundly as it deserves to be valued. Political liberty, however, has not only a meaning of abstention, but a meaning of participation. If in one sense it is a sheer negative, and a doctrine of rights, in another sense it is thoroughly positive, and a gospel of duties. The liberty which has really made England what it so delighted and stimulated and inflamed Voltaire to find her, has been quite as much of the second kind as of the first; that liberty which consists in a national habit of independent and watchful interest in the transaction of the national affairs by the persons most concerned in them; in a general consciousness of the duty of having some opinion on the business of the state; in a recognition on the part of the government that the balance of this opinion is necessary as a sanction to any policy, to which the effective force of the state is applied. It is true that this public participation in public concerns has sometimes been very dark and blind, as it has often been in the highest degree enlightened, but for good or for evil it has been the root of the matter.
The great Frenchmen, who have been most characteristically French, while valuing all and envying many of the best products of our liberty, may be said generally to have failed entirely to detect that the salt of English character, in days when it had more robustness than we can see just now, sprung from the double circumstance of every man being at liberty to have, and being inclined to take the trouble to have, an opinion about the method and doings of his government; and of so many men being called upon in high capacity or low, in an important function or an obscure one, to take an independent and free share in controlling or initiating the doings of their government. Take Montesquieu, for example. He came to England just when Voltaire quitted it, and studied carefully those political facts which his countryman had so neglected. Yet he saw no deeper into the spirit of our institutions than to fix on the constitutional balance of powers as the great secret of our freedom and order. And Montesquieu, in spite of this, was wiser than most of his contemporaries, for he at least saw the worth of constitutional freedom, if he failed to see other ingredients of still more importance. French statesmen and publicists have been systematically blind to the great truth that there is no royal road to national well-being, and that nations will deliberately put away happiness from themselves, unless such happiness comes to them in a given way. The Physiocrats, who were with all their shortcomings the most nearly scientific social thinkers France possessed, could rise to no higher conception of a national life than the supreme authority of a wise and benevolent monarch, giving good gifts to his subjects. Turgot, with all the breadth and sagacity of his genius, when five-and-forty years after our present date he came into power, austerely clung to the same disastrous idea of passing reasoned laws, in the shape of the beneficial edicts of an absolute power. Voltaire, in the same way, never rose above the simple political conception of an eastern tale, a good-tempered despot with a sage vizier. In politics, then, he failed to carry away from England the very essence and principle of our institutions, with which it was so much more important that his countrymen should be familiarised than that they should follow inoculation.
It may at first sight be astonishing to find that, while Voltaire was impressed only in a vague and general way with the free variety of theological opinion which Protestantism had secured for England, the sect which made a sort of mark on his mind was that which conceived the idea that Christianity has after all something to do with the type and example of Christ. We know how laughable and monstrous the Quaker scheme has appeared to people who have been steeped from their youth upwards in elaborate systems of abstruse metaphysical dogma, mystic ceremonies, hierarchic ordering, and profuse condemnation of rival creeds. Voltaire’s imagination was struck by a sect who professed to regard the religion of Christ as a simple and austere discipline of life, who repudiated ritual, and held war for the worst of anti-christian practices. The forms and doctrines of the established church of the country he would be likely to take merely for so much of the common form of the national institutions. He would simply regard it as the English way of narrowing the mind and consolidating the social order. Gibbon’s famous sentence was not yet written, which described all religions as equally true in the eyes of the people, equally false in the eyes of the philosopher, and equally useful in the eyes of the magistrate. But the idea was the idea of the century, and Voltaire would justly look upon the Anglican profession as a temporarily useful and statesmanlike settlement. He praised its clergy for the superior regularity of their manners. ‘That indefinable being, who is neither ecclesiastic nor secular, in a word, who is called abbé, is an unknown species in England; the clergy here are all prigs, and nearly all pedants. When they learn that in France young men notorious for their debauchery, and raised to preferment by the intrigues of women, pursue their amours publicly, amuse themselves by the composition of gallant verses, give everyday prolonged and luxurious suppers, and rise from them to implore the enlightenment of the holy spirit, boldly calling themselves the successors of the apostles—why, then our English thank God that they are Protestants.’[53]
If, however, in face of a young and lively French graduate, bawling theology in the schools in the morning and in the evening singing tender songs with the ladies, an Anglican divine is a very Cato, this Cato is a downright gallant before a Scotch presbyterian, who assumes a grave step and a sour mien, preaches from the nose, and gives the name of harlot of Babylon to all churches in which some of the ecclesiastics are so fortunate as to receive an income of fifty thousand livres a year. However, each man takes whatever road to heaven he pleases. If there were one religion in England, they would have to fear its despotism; if there were only two, they would cut one another’s throats; but there are thirty; so they live peaceably and happily together.[54]
In the Quakers Voltaire saw something quite different from the purely political pretensions and internecine quarrels of doctrine of the ordinary worldly sects. It is impossible to say how much of the kindliness with which he speaks of them is due to real admiration of their simple, dignified, and pacific life, and how much to a mischievous desire to make their praise a handle for the dispraise of overweening competitors. On the whole there is a sincerity and heartiness of interest in his long account of this sect, which persuades one that he was moved by a genuine sympathy with a religion that could enjoin the humane and peaceful and spiritual precepts of Christ, while putting away baptism, ceremonial communion, and hierophantic orders. The nobility of the social theories of the Society of Friends would naturally stir Voltaire even more deeply than their abstention from practices that were in his eyes degrading superstitions. He felt that the repugnance to lower the majesty of their deity, by taking his name upon their lips as solemn ratification of their words, had the effect of elevating the dignity of man, by making his bare word fully credible without this solemn ratification. Their refusal to comply with the deferential usages of social intercourse, though nominally based on the sinfulness of signs of homage to any mere mortal, insinuated a consciousness of equality and self-respect in that mere mortal who was careful to make no bows and to keep his hat on in every presence. Above all, Voltaire, who was nowhere more veritably modern or better entitled to our veneration than by reason of his steadfast hatred of war, revered a sect so far removed from the brutality of the military régime as to hold peace for a first principle of the Christian faith and religious practice. The reason why we do not go to war, his Quaker says, is not that we are afraid of death, but because we are not wolves, nor tigers, nor dogs, but Christian men. ‘Our God, who has bidden us love our enemies and suffer evil without complaint, assuredly has no mind that we should cross the sea to go and cut the throats of our brothers, because murderers in red clothes and hats two feet high enlist citizens, making a noise with two little sticks on an ass’s skin tightly stretched. And when, after victories won, all London blazes with illuminations, the sky is aflame with rockets, and the air resounds with the din of bells, organs, cannon, we mourn in silence over the slaughter that causes all the public joy.’[55]