Là, tous les soirs, la troupe vagabonde, D’un peuple oisif, appelé le beau monde, Va promener de réduit en réduit L’inquiétude et l’ennui qui la suit. Là sont en foule antiques mijaurées, Jeunes oisons et bégueules titrées, Disant des riens d’un ton de perroquet, Lorgnant des sots, et trichant au piquet. Blondins y sont, beaucoup plus femmes qu’elles, Profondément remplis de bagatelles, D’un air hautain, d’une bruyante voix, Chantant, dansant, minaudant à la fois. Si par hasard quelque personne honnête, D’un sens plus droit et d’un goût plus heureux, Des bons écrits ayant meublé sa tête, Leur fait l’affront de penser à leurs yeux; Tout aussitôt leur brillante cohue, D’etonnement et de colère émue, Bruyant essaim de frélons envieux, Pique et poursuit cette abeille charmante[87].
It was not the fault of Madame du Châtelet that the life of Cirey was not the undisturbed type of Voltaire’s existence during the fifteen years of their companionship. Many pages might be filled with a mere list of the movements from place to place to which Voltaire resorted, partly from reasonable fear of the grip of a jealous and watchful government, partly from eagerness to bring the hand of the government upon his enemies, and most of all from the uncontrollable restlessness of his own nature. Amsterdam, the Hague, Brussels, Berlin, the little court of Luneville, and the great world of Paris, too frequently withdrew him from the solitary castle at Cirey, though he never failed to declare on his return, and with perfect sincerity, that he was never so happy anywhere else. If it was true that the Marquise made her poet’s life a little hard to him, it is impossible to read her correspondence without perceiving that he, too, though for no lack of sensibility and good feeling, often made life extremely hard for her. Besides their moral difference, there was a marked discrepancy in intellectual temperament, which did not fail to lead to outward manifestations. Voltaire was sometimes a little weary of Newton and exact science, while the Marquise was naturally of the rather narrow turn for arid truths which too often distinguishes clever women inadequately disciplined by contact with affairs. She and Voltaire both competed for a prize offered by the Academy for essays on the propagation of fire (1737). Neither of them was successful, for the famous Euler was a competitor. The second and third prizes were given to two obscurer persons, because their essays were Cartesian, that is to say, they were scientifically orthodox. The two philosophers of Cirey also took part, and on different sides, in the obstinate physico-mathematical controversy which Leibnitz had first raised towards the close of the seventeenth century, as to the measure of moving forces[88]. The Marquise, under circumstances of equivocal glory and with much angry buzzing, with which one has now no concern[89], published her analysis of Leibnitz in 1740, and sided with him against Newton and Descartes. In the notice which Voltaire wrote of his friend’s book he gave a marvellously simple and intelligible account of the issue of the special controversy of vis viva[90], but he remained Newtonian, and in 1741 presented a paper to the Academy of Sciences, disputing the Leibnitzian view[91].
Voltaire was not merely one of those ‘paper philosophers,’ whose intrusion into the fields of physical science its professional followers are justly wont to resent. He was an active experimenter, and more than one letter remains, containing instructions to his agent in Paris to forward him retorts, air-pumps, and other instruments, with the wise hint in one place, a hint by no means of a miser, ‘In the matter of buying things, my friend, you should always prefer the good and sound even if a little dear, to what is only middling but cheaper[92].’ His correspondence for some years proves the diligence and sincerity of his interest in science. Yet it is tolerably clear that the man who did so much to familiarise France with the most illustrious of physicists, was himself devoid of true scientific aptitude. After long and persevering labour in this region, Voltaire consulted Clairaut on the progress he had made. The latter, with a loyal frankness which Voltaire knew how to appreciate, answered that even with the most stubborn labour he was not likely to attain to anything beyond mediocrity in science, and that he would be only throwing away time which he owed to poetry and philosophy.[93] The advice was taken; for, as we have already said, Voltaire’s self-love was never fatuous, and the independent search of physical truth was given up. There is plainly no reason to regret the pains which Voltaire took in this kind of inquiry, not because the study of the sciences extends the range of poetic study and enriches verse with fresh images, but because the number of sorts of knowledge in which a man feels at home and is intelligently cognisant of their scope and issues, even if he be wholly incompetent to assist in the progress of discovery, increases that intellectual confidence and self-respect of understanding, which so fortifies and stimulates him in his own special order of work. We cannot precisely contend that this encyclopædic quality is an indispensable condition of such self-respect in every kind of temper. It certainly was so with Voltaire. ‘After all, my dear friend,’ he wrote to Cideville, ‘it is right to give every possible form to our soul. It is a flame that God has intrusted to us, we are bound to feed it with all that we find most precious. We should introduce into our existence all imaginable modes, and open every door of the soul to all sorts of knowledge and all sorts of feelings. So long as it does not all go in pell-mell there is plenty of room for everything.[94]
To us, who can be wise after the event, it is clear that if ever man was called not to science, nor to poetry, nor to theology, nor to metaphysics, but to literature, the art, so hard to define, of showing the ideas of all subjects in the double light of the practical and the spiritual reason, that man was Voltaire. He has himself dwelt on the vagueness of this much-abused term, without contributing anything more satisfactory towards a better account of it than a crude hint that literature, not being a special art, may be considered a kind of larger grammar of knowledge.[95] Although, however, it is true that literature is not a particular art, it is not the less true that there is a mental constitution particularly fitted for its successful practice. Literature is essentially an art of form, as distinguished from those exercises of intellectual energy which bring new stores of matter to the stock of acquired knowledge, and give new forces to emotion and original and definite articulation to passion. It is a misleading classification to call the work of Shakespeare and Molière, Shelley and Hugo, literary, just as it would be an equally inaccurate, though more glaring piece of classification, to count the work of Newton or Locke literature. To take another case from Voltaire, it would not be enough to describe Bayle’s Dictionary as a literary compilation; it would not even be enough to describe it as a work of immense learning, because the distinguishing and superior mark of this book is a profound dialectic. It forms men of letters and is above them.[96]
What is it then that literature brings to us, that earns its title to high place, though far from a highest place, among the great humanizing arts? Is it not that this is the master organon for giving men the two precious qualities of breadth of interest and balance of judgment; multiplicity of sympathies and steadiness of sight? Unhappily, literature has too often been identified with the smirks and affectations of mere elegant dispersiveness, with the hollow niceties of the virtuoso, a thing of madrigals. It is not in any sense of this sort that we can think of Voltaire as specially the born minister of literature. What we mean is that while he had not the loftier endowments of the highest poetic conception, subtle speculative penetration, or triumphant scientific power, he possessed a superb combination of wide and sincere curiosity, an intelligence of vigorous and exact receptivity, a native inclination to candour and justice, and a pre-eminent mastery over a wide range in the art of expression. Literature being concerned to impose form, to diffuse the light by which common men are able to see the great host of ideas and facts that do not shine in the brightness of their own atmosphere, it is clear what striking gifts Voltaire had in this way. He had a great deal of knowledge, and he was ever on the alert both to increase and broaden his stock, and, what was still better, to impart of it to everybody else. He did not think it beneath him to write on Hemistichs for the Encyclopaedia. ’Tis not a very brilliant task, he said, but perhaps the article will be useful to men of letters and amateurs; ‘one should disdain nothing, and I will do the word Comma, if you choose.’[97] He was very catholic in taste, being able to love Racine without ignoring the lofty stature of Shakespeare. And he was free from the weakness which so often attends on catholicity, when it is not supported by true strength and independence of understanding; he did not shut his eyes to the shortcomings of the great. While loving Moliere, he was aware of the incompleteness of his dramatic construction, as well as of the egregious farce to which that famous writer too often descends.[98] His respect for the sublimity and pathos of Corneille did not hinder him from noting both his violence and his frigid argumentation.[99] Does the reader remember that admirable saying of his to Vauvenargues; ‘It is the part of a man like you to have preferences, hut no exclusions?’[100] To this fine principle Voltaire was usually thoroughly true, as every great mind, if only endowed with adequate culture, must necessarily be.
Nul auteur avec lui n’a tort, Quand il a trouvé l’art de plaire; Il le critique sans colere, Il l’applaudit avec transport.[101]
Thirdly, that circumfusion of bright light which is the highest aim of speech, was easy to Voltaire, in whatever order of subject he happened to treat. His style is like a translucent stream of purest mountain water, moving with swift and animated flow under flashing sunbeams. ‘Voltaire,’ said an enemy, ‘is the very first man in the world at writing down what other people have thought,’ What was meant for a spiteful censure, was in fact a truly honourable distinction.
The secret is incommunicable. No spectrum analysis can decompose for us that enchanting ray. It is rather, after all, the piercing metallic light of electricity than a glowing beam of the sun. We can detect some of the external qualities of this striking style. We seize its dazzling simplicity, its almost primitive closeness to the letter, its sharpness and precision, above all, its admirable brevity. We see that no writer ever used so few words to produce such pregnant effects.[102] Those whom brevity only makes thin and slight, may look with despair on pages where the nimbleness of the sentence is in proportion to the firmness of the thought. We find no bastard attempts to reproduce in words deep and complex effects, which can only be adequately presented in colour or in the combinations of musical sound. Nobody has ever known better the true limitations of the material in which he worked, or the scope and possibilities of his art. Voltaire’s alexandrines, his witty stories, his mock-heroic, his exposition of Newton, his histories, his dialectic, all bear the same mark, the same natural, precise, and condensed mode of expression, the same absolutely faultless knowledge of what is proper and permitted in every given kind of written work. At first there seems something paradoxical in dwelling on the brevity of an author whose works are to be counted by scores of volumes. But this is no real objection. A writer may be insufferably prolix in the limits of a single volume, and Voltaire was quite right in saying that there are four times too many words in the one volume of D’Holbach’s System of Nature. He maintains too that Rabelais might advantageously be reduced to one-eighth, and Bayle to a quarter, and there is hardly a book that is not curtailed in the perfecting hands of the divine muses.[103] So conversely an author may not waste a word in a hundred volumes. Style is independent of quantity, and the world suffers so grievously from the mass of books that have been written, not because they are many, but because such vast proportion of their pages say nothing while they purport to say so much.
No study, however, of this outward ease and swift compendiousness of speech will teach us the secret that was beneath it in Voltaire, an eye and a hand that never erred in hitting the exact mark of appropriateness in every order of prose and verse. Perhaps no such vision for the befitting in expression has ever existed. He is the most trenchant writer in the world, yet there is not a sentence of strained emphasis or overwrought antithesis; he is the wittiest, yet there is not a line of bad buffoonery. And this intense sense of the appropriate was by nature and cultivation become so entirely a fixed condition of Voltaire’s mind that it shows spontaneous and without an effort in his work. Nobody is more free from the ostentatious correctness of the literary precisian, and nobody preserves so much purity and so much dignity of language with so little formality of demeanour. It is interesting to notice the absence from his writings of that intensely elaborated kind of simplicity in which some of the best authors of a later time express the final outcome of many thoughts.
The strain that society has undergone since Voltaire’s day has taught men to qualify their propositions. It has forced them to follow truth slowly along paths steep and devious. New notes have been struck in human feeling, and all thought has now been touched by complexities that were then unseen. Hence, as all good writers aim at simplicity and directness, we have seen the growth of a new style, in which the rays of many side-lights are concentrated in some single phrase. That Voltaire does not use these focalising words and turns of composition only means that to him thought was less complex than it is to a more subjective generation. Though the literature which possesses Milton and Burke need not fear comparison with the graver masters of French speech, we have no one to place exactly by the side of Voltaire. But, then, no more has France. There are many pages of Swift which are more like one side of Voltaire than anything else that we have, and Voltaire probably drew the idea of his famous stories from the creator of Gulliver, just as Swift got the idea of the Tale of a Tub from Fontenelle’s History of Mero and Enegu (that is, of Rome and Geneva). Swift has correctness, invention, irony, and a trick of being effectively literal and serious in absurd situations, just as Voltaire has; but then Swift is often truculent and often brutally gross, both in thought and in phrase. Voltaire is never either brutal or truculent. Even amid the licence of the Pucelle and of his romances, he never forgets what is due to the French tongue. What always charmed him in Racine and Boileau, he tells us, was that they said what they intended to say, and that their thoughts have never cost anything to the harmony or the purity of the language[104]. Voltaire ranged over far wider ground than the two poets ever attempted to do, and trod in many slippery places, yet he is entitled to the same praise as that which he gave to them.