Hence also the propriety of discrimination among the various kinds of fact which are at the historian’s disposal, and in this order Voltaire’s whole soul revolted against the reigning practice and prescription. ‘I would rather have details,’ he wrote to one of his intimates so early in his career as 1735, {about Racine and Despréaux, Molière, Bossuet, Descartes, than I would about the battle of Steinkirk. There is nothing left but the names of men who led battalions and squadrons. There is no return to the human race from a hundred engagements; but the great men I have spoken of prepared pure and everlasting pleasures for mortals still unborn. A canal-sluice, a picture by Poussin, a fine tragedy, a truth established, are all of them things a thousand times more precious than the whole mass of annals of the court, and than all the narratives of campaigns.’[245] From this and from a multitude of other passages, as well as from his actual compositions, we perceive that the activity of a court and the manœuvres of an army were no longer in Voltaire’s eyes the fit substance of history. One reason for this might be his lively sense of the impossibility of knowing the character and motives of people with whom one has not lived, or the real cause of even the most momentous intrigues and negotiations in which one has not taken a personal share. A still
deeper reason would be his most rational conviction that these matters are only of moment to us for their larger results and unmistakable outcome, and from the profoundly true and important principle that the progress of intellectual enlightenment, material prosperity, and moral elevation is not only a feature in the history of a nation, but does itself constitute that history, while all records of other transactions in the course of its annals, achievements in diplomacy, feats of arms, revolutions in policy, have no true historic value, except for the light they shed upon this economic, intellectual, and moral progress, and are not worth studying except in that light. We may see the immediate effects of Voltaire’s influence most markedly of all in Gibbon, but in a less important shape in the general account of the middle ages which Robertson contributed to his History of Charles V. (1769), and which remained for many years the most instructive piece that our literature possessed upon the character and spirit of the feudal system and other features of the middle ages. Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) bears traces of the same influence. In both of these cases much also must be added for the kindred authority of Montesquieu. One has some hesitation in adding Hume to the list in the present connection, because his history, the composition of which extended from 1752 to 1763, ought perhaps to be counted rather the direct and independent outcome of the French philosophic spirit, than of the French historic spirit which itself proceeded from the philosophy; and because, moreover, Hume, as a historian, has some of Voltaire’s most serious defects, without that breadth and size which constituted his greatest merit, though it is needless to point out how many merits Hume had of his own. It is worth remarking that in some pages which he wrote on Hume’s History,[246] Voltaire gave it a joyful welcome, as might be expected, and particularly to those parts which we now esteem most lightly, such as the contemptuous account of Cromwell.
To return, however, to the point from which we have digressed. One very direct consequence of the historical principle we have described, and of the way in which it was illustrated in the histories of Lewis XIV. and Lewis XV., and most of all in the Essay on Manners, was the degradation of war from the highest to the lowest place among the objects of the historian’s regard. War began for the first time to be systematically considered and treated as a mere instrument and means, and not as one of the most serious of social ends. We can never honour Voltaire too long nor too deeply for the vehemence and sincerity of his abhorrence of the military spirit. Nowhere do we feel more distinctly that he marked the end of the mediæval temper, than in his noble protests against the glory of bloodshed. The great orators of the church to the very last donned the robes of their most sumptuous rhetoric, when they were called to consecrate the virtues of the victorious soldier. The pages of the Old Testament supplied them with a hundred baleful heroes to whom they might liken their warrior, and a hundred cruel and bloody tropes with which they might decorate the funeral oration. So long as the atrocities of the Hebrew chiefs and people, their treacheries and slaughters, were held sacred and celebrated with unction, it was not likely that the voice of the peacemaker could make itself heard.
Voltaire not only held up these demoralising records to the odium they deserve; he directly taxed the clergy with their failure to discharge the very highest part of their duty. Of the five or six thousand sermons of Massillon, he asked, are there a couple where you could pick out a word or two against the scourge and crime of war? Bourdaloue preached against impurity, but what sermon did he ever direct against the murder, rapine, brigandage, and universal rage, which desolate the world? ‘Miserable physicians of souls, you declaim for five quarters of an hour against the mere pricks of a pin, and say no word on the curse which tears us into a thousand pieces! Philosophers and moralists, burn your books: so long as the caprice of a handful of men will cause the massacring in all loyalty of thousands of our brothers, the part of the human race which is devoted to heroism will contain all that is most frightful in human nature. What concern to me are humanity, benevolence, modesty, temperance, gentleness, wisdom, piety, so long as half an ounce of lead shatters my body, and I die at twenty in torments unspeakable, surrounded by five or six thousand dead or dying, while my eyes, opening for the last time, see the town I was born in delivered to fire and sword, and the last sounds that reach my ears are the shrieks of women and children expiring in the ruins—and the whole for the pretended interests of a man that we do not know?’[247] His rebuke to Montesquieu is still more distinctively modern. The author of the Esprit des Lois had said that among societies it sometimes happens that natural defence possibly involves the necessity of attack, when a nation perceives that a longer peace would place another nation in a position to destroy it.[248] ‘If ever there was a war evidently unjust,’ Voltaire replies, ‘it is that which you propose; it is to go and kill your neighbour for fear your neighbour should be in a condition to attack you; that is to say, you must run the risk of ruining your country, in the hope of ruining without reason some other country.... If your neighbour grows too powerful during a time of peace, what hinders you from growing powerful like him? If he has made alliances, make alliances on your side. If, having less religion, he has all the more manufacturers and soldiers for it, imitate him in so sage an economy. If he drills his sailors better, drill yours too: all that is perfectly just. But to expose your people to the most horrible misery, in the idea, which is so often chimerical, of crushing your dear brother, the most serene bordering prince—! ‘twas never for a president of a pacific order to give you such a piece of counsel.’[249] The book in which this sound view of justice and expediency in the dealings of nations with one another was pressed upon the attention of France, was published in 1764, five years before the birth of the man who turned the tide back, and made the international policy of France a synonym both for iniquity and folly. On the 15th of August 1769 Voltaire concluded his letter to D’Alembert with his usual vivacity: ‘Adieu; my compliments to the devil, for it is he who governs the world.’[250] If he had known that, while he was writing, Napoleon Bonaparte had come into the world, and could at the same time have foreseen the new-comer’s destiny, he might have said the same thing more seriously. Voltaire never played the sentimentalist. He knew that there are complexities of affairs which only the sword can cut. But he was the first influential writer—for the abbé Saint-Pierre, so undeservedly laughed at for his dreams of perpetual peace, had no influence to speak of—who deliberately placed war among retrograde agencies, and deliberately dwelt upon peaceful industry as the true life of nations.[251]
Diplomacy and its complex subterranean processes, which have occupied so extremely disproportionate a space in written history, and which are in acted history responsible for so much evil, were in the same way informally relegated to the region of inhuman occupations. Its methods were the tortuous and depressing methods of the same past, which had made the many the playthings and unhappy instruments of the few, and had never interrupted the triumphant manœuvres of craft and subtlety by a whisper for the claims of humanity and justice. Voltaire scarcely ever speaks of negotiations between contending powers without a shrewd thrust, half contemptuous and half angry. The plain where some negotiations took place in the struggles among the descendants of Charles the Great is still called the Field of Lies; a name, he says, that might well be common to most spots where men have negotiated.[252] And this represents his general tone in speaking of a branch of activity which may interest the professional diplomatist in all its details, but which, as he thought, can only concern the historical student in its results. Here Voltaire represented a marked tendency, which waxes stronger as societies grow more penetrated with popular forces, to divest diplomacy of a professional quality, and to throw the adjustment of the relations between nations as entirely as possible into the hands of plain men of firm and upright character, and full knowledge of the special matters at issue.
It is, however, when we come to the ground idea of the Essay on Manners,[253] that we feel the full breath of the modern spirit, and perceive that at length we are nearing the wide expanse of the sea. There we emerge absolutely from the narrow conception of universal history, with which Bossuet had familiarised men’s minds in the Discourse on Universal History. This famous piece, which has had at least as much praise as it merits, if we are to consider reason as well as eloquence, was fundamentally and in substance no more than a bit of theological commonplace splendidly decorated. Bossuet indeed spoke of ‘the concatenation of human affairs,’ but only in the same sentence with ‘the sequence of the counsels of God.’ The gorgeous rhetorician of the church was not likely to rise philosophically into the larger air of universal history, properly so called. His eloquent discourse is a vindication of divine foresight, by means of an intensely narrow survey of such sets of facts as might be thought not inconsistent with the deity’s fixed purpose to make one final and decisive revelation to men. No one who looks upon the vast assemblage of stupendous human circumstances, from the first origin of man upon the earth, as merely the ordained antecedent of what, seen from the long procession of all the ages, figures in so diminutive a consummation as the Catholic church, is likely to obtain a very effective hold of that broad sequence and many-linked chain of events, to which Bossuet gave a right name, but whose real meaning he never was even near seizing. His merit is that he did in a small and rhetorical way, what Montesquieu and Voltaire afterwards did in a truly comprehensive and philosophical way; he pressed forward general ideas in connection with the recorded movements of the chief races of mankind. For a teacher of history to leave the bare chronicler’s road so far as to declare, for example, the general principle, inadequate and overstated as it is, that ‘religion and civil government are the two points on which human things revolve,’ even this was a clear step in advance—and to dismiss the long series of emperors from Augustus to Alexander Severus in two or three pages was to show a rare sense of large historic proportion. Again, Bossuet’s expressions of ‘the concatenation of the universe,’ of the interdependence of the parts of so vast a whole, of there coming no great change without having its causes in foregoing centuries, and of the true object of history being to observe in connection with each epoch those secret dispositions of events which prepared the way for great changes, as well as the momentous conjunctures which more immediately brought them to pass—all these phrases seem to point to a true and philosophic survey. But they end in themselves, and lead nowhither. The chain is an arbitrary and one-sided collection of facts. The writer does not cautiously follow and feel after the successive links, but forges and chooses and arranges them after a pattern of his own, which was fixed independently of them. A scientific term or two is not enough to disguise the purely theological essence of the treatise.
Bossuet’s Discourse is moreover constructed wholly on the theory that a special revelation was delivered to the Jews, and in tracing their course we have fast hold of the chain by which it has pleased heaven to communicate to earth all the truths we possess as to the highest things. Such a conception stifles a modern reader. The first pages of the Essay on Manners, sometimes placed separately as the Philosophy of History, prove that we have escaped from the cave. The chosen people fell into rank with other peoples, that equally supposed themselves to be chosen by their own peculiar gods. They lose the towering pre-eminence in virtue and light and divine favour with which their own records and Bossuet’s interpretation had so splendidly invested them. We find that their pretensions were not unique, but universal among nations in such a stage; that their virtues were not singular, though some of their vices seem so. In a word, if some of Voltaire’s details are crude and rudimentary, at least he has the merit of showing to his unaccustomed readers what vast epochs of time, what uncounted multitudes of men, what varied movements of the human spirit, surround the little speck of Judaism.
The bulk of the Essay was composed in 1740, but it is probable that this preliminary examination of other oriental nations, their practices, institutions, and religious ideas, was suggested by Montesquieu’s memorable book, which appeared in 1748, some years before the publication of the Essay on Manners. It is in point of execution much less satisfactory than what follows, for Voltaire’s knowledge of Greek and Hebrew was inadequate, and he fell into various errors which his adversaries happily possessed scholarship enough to expose. In the modern provinces of the book, which constitute the important part of it, he was much more entirely at home in his subject. Here his familiarity with detail, considering the vast quantity of his other employments, is extremely surprising, and perhaps in no other book of equal generality have there been discovered so few serious inaccuracies, though none have encountered more hostile critics.
Prejudice, alas, spares truth and light no more when it narrows the vision of a free-thinker, than when it distorts the faculty of the devout. Being a reaction against Bossuet’s unreasonable exaltation of the Jews and their history, Voltaire’s conception of the place due to them partook of the inevitable fault of all reactions, and left out of sight considerations which it is eminently unscientific not to remember. ‘You never find,’ he says, ‘a generous action in the annals of the Hebrews; they knew neither hospitality nor liberality nor clemency. Their sovereign bliss is to practise usury with foreigners, and this spirit of usury is so rooted in their hearts, that it is the continual object of the figures they employ in the eloquence which is peculiar to them. Their glory is to deliver to fire and slaughter the small villages of which they may be able to take possession. They assassinate their masters when they are slaves, and they never know how to pardon when they are victorious; they are the enemies of the human race.’[254] This is as great an exaggeration on one side, as Bossuet’s exaltation of them and their deeds was on the other side. We ought to admit what abominable traits the character and history of this race unfortunately present, without forgetting how much is owing to them for preserving in its sublimest shape, and investing with the most deeply impressive images and associations, that idea of monotheism which, if destined to be superseded by other ideas more commensurate with the limits of human intelligence, must still be counted the germ of much that is purest and loftiest and most inspiring among the ideals of western civilisation.
The same kind of extreme prejudice which drove Voltaire into maintaining of the Jews, not that they were a people whom we should do very ill either to imitate or admire, but nothing less than that they were the enemies of the human race, found vent in such assertions as that if any one could have restored the Empire to its strength, or at all events retarded its fall, that man was the Emperor Julian.[255] A historian may justly contend, if he thinks that the evidence warrants him, that Julian belongs to the type of virtuous reactionists, just as we may say it of Wesley or the chiefs of the Tractarians. But to make such an assertion as that the repression of Christianity after the middle of the fourth century, even supposing it to have been possible of achievement, could have given back to the rapidly declining empire a strength of which all the roots were lifeless, was to falsify history for the sake of exalting the name of an apostate. A Roman aristocrat, blind to the real operation and comparative value of the forces at work, might be pardoned for holding Christianity guilty of the general dissolution around him; but it was a strange phantasy for a philosopher of the eighteenth century to suppose that the Christian system, in the shape which it had assumed by Julian’s time, did not offer principles of firmer association, than the mere rites of a paganism which was spontaneously decaying with a rapidity that increased day by day.[256] There is no stronger illustration of the twist which polemical fury may give to the most acute intelligence, than this belief of Voltaire’s, that an organisation which had attracted to itself every able and statesmanlike intellect of the time, could do less for the regeneration of the Empire than the initiated disciple of Platonist theurgy.