[VOLTAIRE]
1694-1778.
It is impossible to commence the biography of this extraordinary man without feelings of apprehension as to our power of well executing the task. To write the life of Voltaire in a full and satisfactory manner, is to write not only the biography of an individual author, and the history of French literature during the course of nearly a century, but also of a revolution in the minds of men, in their opinions and rules of action, which, if not brought about entirely by him, was fostered and supported by his influence, in a manner the most singular and powerful. We are apt, as we read his letters, to laugh at the petulance which he evinced when attacked, and to reprove the vehemence with which he attacked others in return. But when we consider that an absolute monarch and a powerful hierarchy supported opinions which he and his friends struggled to subvert, we feel that it required all his dogmatic spirit, all his bitterness of sarcasm and vehemence of temper, to combat opposition, and to support both his own courage and that of his followers, in his attempt.
Voltaire has been called the Apostle of Infidelity. He denied the truths of revealed religion—he desired to subvert Christianity. He disbelieved its divine origin; he was blind to the excellence of its morality—insensible to its sublime tenets. It is easy to make his life one diatribe against the wickedness and folly of such principles and intentions—to intersperse the pages that compose his history with various epithets of condemnation of a man so lost to the knowledge of truth. But we do not intend to do this. We consider that Voltaire had many excuses, and he had also his uses. We do not mean, on the other hand, to write an elaborate defence of a system that cannot be defended; but we will mention the heads of those topics which we consider available for his justification to a certain limited extent.
In the first place, Catholicism is not Christianity. Voltaire's great war was against the church of Rome, and more particularly against the Gallican church, which was one of great persecution, bigotry, and misused power. We turn to the pages that record the history of his country, during the years that immediately preceded him, and of his own age, and we find them stained with brawls and cruelties, excited and exercised by the priesthood. The quarrels of the violinists, the Jansenists, the Quietists, and the disgraceful exhibitions of the convulsionaries, absorbed so much of the talent, and perverted so much the uprightness and charity, of men of first-rate genius, that we turn with pity and loathing from the history of the misuse of one of the best gifts of God. Voltaire had it deeply at heart to put an end to these discussions—to prevent such men as Bossuet and Fénélon from expending their vast talents on unworthy squabbles, and to prevent such men as Pascal and Racine from sacrificing their talents at the altars of superstition. He wished to redeem such of his countrymen as were slaves to the priests, from the miseries of bigotry and ignorance; and he most ardently desired to liberate those, whose piety was enlightened, from persecution at the hands of bigots. The cruelties exercised on the Huguenots raised a tumult of generous indignation in his benevolent heart; the insolence and barbarity with which the French priesthood endeavoured to quell all rebellion to their authority roused his anger and pointed his sarcasms. Liberty for the soul was the aim of his endeavours. It was a noble and a useful one.
He went too far. There are two classes of minds among men of education. Those who live for the affections—for the elegances of literature—for moral and intellectual purposes; who are virtuous and enlightened, but devoid of enthusiasm for truth or the dissemination of opinion. There is another class, to whom what they consider truth is the great all in all. It is vain to talk to them of a falsehood or mistake that has its good uses; they consider truth, that most glorious attribute of God, as the best of all things—the reformer of abuses—the sustainer of the unfortunate—the advancer of human excellence—the rock in which we ought to put our trust. To them, truth, or what they consider truth, is light; falsehood, darkness. Such a mind was Voltaire. He did not distinguish the truths of the Gospel from the multifarious, sometimes ridiculous, but always pernicious, impostures of papacy. He read of, and his heart revolted from, the series of intolerable evils brought upon the world by the Roman Catholic religion; he forgot the civilisation produced by the Gospel, and even the uses of the system of the church of Rome during days of feudal barbarism: he saw only the evil, and visited the whole with his reprobation, his ridicule, his unflinching and unwearied opposition. He fell into great and mischievous mistakes. As is often the case, he destroyed, but he could not construct. France owed to his mighty labours and powerful influence a great and swift advance in civilisation, and enfranchisement from political and priestly thraldom. But he went beyond the useful and right in his struggle; and, not contented with warring against superstition, made inroads into the blessed fields of rational piety. This must be admitted and censured. Let some among us rise to drive him back and barricade him from his invasion on revealed religion; but let us do this without, rancour or scurrility, feeling grateful at the same time for the good he did achieve, and acknowledging our esteem for his motives and abilities. Let us, above all, in writing his life, show ourselves just and impartial. From the limited nature of this work, we can only present the reader with a sketch of his labours and their effects; it is our earnest desire that this sketch should be one drawn from undoubted sources, and prove itself to the minds of all, a fair, exact, and impartial account of so great a man.
François-Marie Arouet was born at Chatenay, 20th of February, 1694. His enemies, in after life, displayed their spite by promulgating that his father was a peasant—an assertion without foundation. His father was a notary by profession, and filled the situation of treasurer of the chamber of accounts; a lucrative place, which he occupied with such integrity as to save but a small fortune, where others amassed great riches. His mother was named Marguerite d'Aumont, of a noble family of Poitou. The child was so feeble at the time of his birth that he was not expected to survive; he was hastily baptized in the house, nor considered sufficiently strong to be carried to church until he was nine months old, when he was baptized over again by the parish curate, from whom his age was concealed. Condorcet, in his life, remarks the singularity that two illustrious men of letters of that day, Voltaire and Fontenelle, were both born so feeble as not to be expected to survive, and yet lived to extreme age. He might have added the more curious instance of their contemporary, the marshal de Richelieu, a six months' child, fostered in cotton and reared artificially, who enjoyed strong and robust health, and lived till a still more advanced age.
The child was quick and sprightly; he had an elder brother, who was dull and sombre. The elder, in progress of time, became a Jansenist, a convulsionary, and a bigot; the germ of his tendency to superstition existed even in childhood; and the brothers disputed, in prose and verse, to the amusement of the family. The abbé de Chateauneuf, godfather to François-Marie, took pleasure in educating him, and taught him some of La Fontaine's fables. The boy got hold also of a deistical ode, attributed to J. B. Rousseau, called the "Mosaide," a poem, which said—
"Les hommes vains et fanatiques
Reçoivent, sans difficulté,
Les fables les plus chimériques;
Un petit mot d'éternité
Les rend bénins et pacifiques;
Et l'on réduit ainsi le peuple hébété
A baiser les liens dont il est garrotté."