The bishops, the superiors, and students of the college, the priests who were present, and the laity, approached to offer their homage to the pontiff and receive his blessing. This over, he departed, but not until he had declared that he was delighted, more than delighted, with his visit.
Rome, February 17, 1870.
FOREIGN LITERARY NOTES.
For the sake of making a point against the Catholic Church, Protestants and indifferents are frequently so poverty-stricken in authorities as to quote Voltaire. When told that they cite the authority of a man who was unprincipled, cynical, and impious, they answer that such an estimate is simply the result of a bigoted and narrow-minded prejudice, and that the great French philosopher was liberal, honorable, and conscientious.
An incident has lately occurred in France to call forth the deliberate opinion of a body of men eminently fitted from superior education, elevated position, and freedom from any possible suspicion of Catholic bias, to form an estimate which to our friends above referred to must be looked upon as authoritative and decisive, although open to the objection of being too mild and qualified.
Some fifteen years ago, a proposition was started in a Paris daily newspaper for the popular collection, in small sums, of a sufficient amount to erect a statue to Voltaire in the French capital. When the success of the subscription seemed sufficiently assured, petition was made to the government to grant a site on some public square on which to place the statue. After long delay, and some appearance of unwillingness, the petition was finally granted; but the announcement of this fact was immediately followed by the presentation of a large number of protests against the erection of the statue, which came in from all parts of the empire. One of these protests, signed by a thousand inhabitants of the departments of Le Gard and the Drôme, and the city of Nîsmes, and addressed to the senate, was referred to a committee of senators for consideration and report. The committee has made a report, which is understood to be written by M. Silvestre de Sacy, well known as former chief editor of the Journal des Débats, and a distinguished member of the French Academy. From it we learn something of the petition, but not as much as we would like to know. After a recital of the facts we have stated, the report goes on to say: Undoubtedly, the government had authority to refuse the permission asked, and still has the power to withdraw it. The right of private persons to award statues to whomsoever they please, and to meet and raise money to pay for them, is certainly lawful. But the public streets and squares are not their property. The number of these persons does not increase their right. They act, in such a matter, solely for themselves, and not for the whole country, of which they have no right to pretend to be the representatives. Among the serious considerations which might have made the government hesitate, is the very name Voltaire, which has two significations: the one glorious for the human intellect and for French literature; the other for which Voltaire himself would now blush, dragging down as it does the great historian and great poet to the miserable calling of an impious and cynical pamphleteer. But it appears that the subscribers have obtained the permission asked for. The site has been selected, and the statue will be erected in one of the squares of the new Rue de Rennes. The petition before us protests against this permission, and prays the intervention of the senate with the government to obtain the withdrawal of a permission which it characterizes in the strongest terms. These petitioners see but one Voltaire—an impious, immoral Voltaire, hostile to all religion; a Voltaire who conspired with all the enemies of France for the humiliation and ruin of his country; a Voltaire who, Prussian at Rosbach with King Frederick, Russian with Catherine II., against unfortunate Poland, the violator of our purest glory in his poem Jeanne d'Arc, the enemy of liberty, equality, and fraternity, as may be shown from a hundred passages in his correspondence and writings, an abject courtier and a servile adulator of kings. "I ask," says the first petitioner, speaking for all the others—"I ask that the image of this man shall not appear upon our public squares, to cast insult in the face of the country. I ask that this disgrace be spared France." The senatorial report then goes on to say that there are two Voltaires—the Voltaire described in the petition, and the Voltaire who wrote La Henriade, who, by various masterpieces in poetry and the drama, placed himself near Horace, Corneille, and Boileau; Voltaire the historian, to whom we are indebted for Le Siècle de Louis XIV., the essay Sur l'Esprit et sur les Mœurs des Nations, and that perfect model of rapid and lively narration, L'Histoire de Charles XII.; the Voltaire, in fine, whose name could not be covered with oblivion without obscuring some of the glories of French literature. No, continues the report, whatever may be asserted to the contrary, all of Voltaire is not in some shafts of satire which fell from the ill-humor of the partisan and the angry writer, in pamphlets against religion, as poor in good taste and good sense as in true science, in a poem in which it is most sad to see wit and talent pressed into the disreputable service of ornamenting the wretched obscenity of the argument; all of Voltaire is not in single passages selected from a correspondence of sixty years. If in these were the whole of Voltaire, his memory would long since have been accursed or dead, his works long since have been without readers or publishers, and the idea of raising a statue in his honor would have occurred to no one. Although the avowal is a painful one, it must be confessed that Voltaire has himself and the deplorable errors of his genius alone to blame for the bitterness of the recriminations which injure his brilliant fame. He has too often been unjust to others not to expect that others should be unjust to him. It is his own fault if his name recalls to pious thinkers, to timid hearts, to the faith of ardent souls, only the writer who would not respect in others the noble hopes he himself had lost. Voltaire desired to be the leader of incredulity. He was; and now he pays the penalty for it. Something equivocal remains, and will ever remain associated with his fame. Respectable people can consent to award him eulogies and statues only with distinctions and reserves. The declared enemy of disorder and demagogism, he is sometimes invoked as a seditious tribune, as a burner of churches; and one of the most elegant minds has left in his writings, along with a great many marvellous works, food for passions which, in his better days, his good taste and his good sense would energetically condemn. The report concludes against asking the revocation of the permission granted by the government, on the ground that it will be understood by all that the honor of a statue is conceded not to the Voltaire with reason petitioned against, but to the author whose works are subjects of legitimate national pride.
In the year 400, a Buddhist priest, Fah-Hian, commenced the long journey from China to India and back, and left a narrative of his travels. A century later, a similar journey was made by another Buddhist priest, Sung-Yun, who also left an account of his foreign experiences. Singularly enough, these works have survived all these centuries, and have long been objects of great interest to the oriental scholars of Europe. Remusat and Klaproth published a translation of Fah-Hian at Paris in 1836. This work, in quarto, was soon followed by an English translation by Laidley. Many serious errors, especially in geography, were pointed out in these translations by St. Julien, and Professor Neumann also gave a translation of the two Buddhist works, in the Zeitschrift für historische Theologie, vol. iii., 1833. Meantime, additional light had been thrown upon the subject by such publications as Edkin's Notice of Buddhism in China, and General Cunningham's work; and a full and amended version of the Buddhist priests' travels, together with an interesting treatise on Buddhism, is now published in London by Trübner & Co. Its title is, Travels of Fah-Hian and Sung-Yun, Buddhist Pilgrims, from China to India, (400-518 A.D.,) translated from the Chinese by Samuel Beal.