Voltaire was no patient victim of the practice which corresponded to this trim historic theory. In a tumult of just indignation he quitted France, and sought refuge with that stout and free people, who had by the execution of one king, the deposition of another, and the definite subjugation of the hierarchy, won a full liberty of thought and speech and person. A modern historian has drawn up a list of the men of mark who made the same invigorating pilgrimage. ‘During the two generations which elapsed between the death of Lewis XIV. and the outbreak of the Revolution, there was hardly a Frenchman of eminence who did not either visit England or learn English; while many of them did both.’[18] Among those who actually came to England and mixed in its society besides Voltaire, were Buffon, Brissot, Helvétius, Gournay, Jussieu, Lafayette, Montesquieu, Maupertuis, Morellet, Mirabeau, Roland and Madame Roland, Rousseau. We who live after Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Scott, have begun to forget the brilliant group of the Queen Anne men. They belong to a self-complacent time, and we to a time of doubt and unsatisfied aspiration, and the two spirits are unsympathetic. Yet they were assuredly a band, from Newton and Locke down to Pope, of whom, taking them for all the qualities which they united, in science, correct judgment, love of letters, and taste, England has as good reason to be proud as of any set of contemporary writers in her history.
Up to this moment Voltaire had been a poet, and his mind had not moved beyond the region of poetic creation. He had beaten every one once and for all on the ground of light and graceful lyric verse, ‘a kind of poetry,’ says a French critic whose word in such a matter we can hardly refuse to take, ‘in which Voltaire is at once with us the only master and the only writer supportable, for he is the only one whom we can read.’[19] He had produced three tragedies. His epic was completed, though undergoing ceaseless labour of the file. Two lines in his first play had served to mark him for no friend to the hierophants:
Nos prêtres ne sont point ce qu’un vain peuple pense; Notre crédulité fait toute leur science.[20]
And the words of Araspe in the same play had breathed the full spirit of the future liberator:
Ne nous fions qu’à nous; voyons tout par nos yeux: Ce sont là nos trépieds, nos oracles, nos dieux.[21]
Such expressions, however, were no more than the vague and casual word of the esprit fort, the friend of Chaulieu, and the rhymer of a dissolute circle, where religion only became tinged with doubt, because conduct had already become penetrated with licence. More important than such stray words was the Epistle to Uranie (1722), that truly masculine and terse protest against the popular creed, its mean and fatuous and contradictory idea of an omnipotent God, who gave us guilty hearts so as to have the right of punishing us, and planted in us a love of pleasure so as to torment us the more effectually by appalling ills that an eternal miracle prevents from ever ending; who drowned the fathers in the deluge and then died for the children; who exacts an account of their ignorance from a hundred peoples whom he has himself plunged helplessly into this ignorance:
Je ne reconnais point à cette indigne image Le dieu que je dois adorer; Je croirais le déshonorer Par une telle insulte et par un tel hommage.[22]
Though called The For and Against, the poet hardly tries to maintain any proportion between the two sides of the argument. The verses were addressed to a lady in a state of uncertainty as to belief, of whom there were probably more among Voltaire’s friends of quality than he can have cared to cure or convert. Scepticism was at this time not much more than an interesting fashion.
The dilettante believer is indeed not a strong spirit, but the weakest, and the facts of life were by this time far too serious for Voltaire, for that truth to have missed his keen-seeing eye. It is not hard to suppose that impatient weariness of the poor life that was lived around him, had as large a share as resentment of an injustice, in driving him to a land where men did not merely mouth idle words of making reason their oracle, their tripod, their god, but where they had actually systematised the rejection of Christianity, and had thrown themselves with grave faith on the disciplined intelligence and its lessons. Voltaire left a country where freedom of thinking was only an empty watchword, the name for a dissipated fashion. It was considered free-thinking if a man allowed himself to regard the existence of the Five Propositions in Jansenius’s book as a thing indifferent to the happiness of the human race.[23] He found in England that it was a far-spreading reality, moulding not only the theological ideas, but the literature, manners, politics, and philosophy, of a great society. Voltaire left France a poet, he returned to it a sage. Before his flight, though we do not know to what extent he may have read such history as was then accessible, he had been actively productive only in the sphere of the imaginative faculties, and in criticism of the form and regulation proper to be imposed upon them. When he returned, while his poetic power had ripened, he had tasted of the fruit of the tree of scientific reason, and, what was not any less important, he had become alive to the central truth of the social destination of all art and all knowledge.
In a word, he was transformed from the penman into the captain and man-at-arms. ‘The example of England,’ says Condorcet, ‘showed him that truth is not made to remain a secret in the hands of a few philosophers, and a limited number of men of the world, instructed, or rather indoctrinated, by the philosophers; smiling with them at the errors of which the people are the victims, but at the same time making themselves the champions of these very errors, when their rank or position gives them a real or chimerical interest in them, and quite ready to permit the proscription, or even persecution, of their teachers, if they venture to say what in secret they themselves actually think. From the moment of his return, Voltaire felt himself called to destroy the prejudices of every kind, of which his country was the slave.’[24]