XV.
VOLTAIRE.
1694-1778.
By the volume and the variety, joined to the unfailing brilliancy, of his production; by his prodigious effectiveness; and by his universal fame, Voltaire is undoubtedly entitled to rank first, with no fellow, among the eighteenth-century literary men, not merely of France, but of the world. He was not a great man, he produced no great single work, but he must nevertheless be pronounced a great writer. There is hardly any species of composition to which, in the long course of his activity, he did not turn his talent. It cannot be said that he succeeded splendidly in all; but in some he succeeded splendidly, and he failed abjectly in none. There is not a great thought, and there is not a flat expression, in the whole bulk of his multitudinous and multifarious works. Read him wherever you will, in the ninety-seven volumes (equivalent, probably in the aggregate, to two hundred volumes like the present) which, in one leading edition, collect his productions, you may often find him superficial, you may often find him untrustworthy, you will certainly often find him flippant, but not less certainly you will never find him obscure, and you will never find him dull. The clearness, the vivacity of this man’s mind were something almost preternatural. So, too, were his readiness, his versatility, his audacity. He had no distrust of himself, no awe of his fellow-men, no reverence for God, to deter him from any attempt with his pen, however presuming. If a state ode were required, it should be ready to order at twelve to-morrow; if an epic poem—to be classed with the “Iliad” and the “Æneid “—the “Henriade” was promptly forthcoming, to answer the demand. He did not shrink from flouting a national idol, by freely finding fault with Corneille; and he lightly undertook the task of extinguishing a venerable form of Christianity, simply with pricks, innumerably repeated, of his tormenting pen.
A very large part of the volume of Voltaire’s production consists of letters, written by him to correspondents perhaps more numerous, and more various in rank, from kings on the throne down to scribblers in the garret, than ever, in any other case, exchanged such communications with a literary man. Another considerable proportion of his work in literature took the form of pamphlets, either anonymously or pseudonymously published, in which this master-spirit of intellectual disturbance and ferment found it convenient, or advantageous, or safe, to promulge and propagate his ideas. A shower of such publications was incessantly escaping from Voltaire’s pen. More formal and regular, more confessedly ambitious, literary essays of his, were poems in every kind—heroic, mock-heroic, lyric, elegiac, comic, tragic, satiric—historical and biographical monographs, and tales or novels of a peculiar class.
Voltaire’s poetry does not count for very much now. Still, its first success was so great that it will always remain an important topic in literary history. Besides this, it really is, in some of its kinds, remarkable work. Voltaire’s epic verse is almost an exception, needful to be made, from our assertion that this author is nowhere dull. “The Henriade” comes dangerously near that mark. It is a tasteless reproduction of Lucan’s faults, with little reproduction of Lucan’s virtues. Voltaire’s comedies are bright and witty, but they are not laughter-provoking; and they do not possess the elemental and creative character of Shakespeare’s or Molière’s work. His tragedies are better; but they do not avoid that cast of mechanical which seems necessarily to belong to poetry produced by talent, however consummate, unaccompanied with genius. Voltaire’s histories are luminous and readable narratives, but they cannot claim the merit either of critical accuracy or of philosophic breadth and insight. His letters would have to be read in considerable volume in order to furnish a full satisfactory idea of the author. His tales, finally, afford the most available, and, on the whole, likewise the best means of arriving shortly and easily at a knowledge of Voltaire.
But, before coming to these, we owe it to our readers, and perhaps to ourselves, to justify with example what, a little way back, we said of Voltaire as epic poet.
Voltaire was profoundly influenced by his personal observations of what England was, alike in her literary, her political, and her theological aspects. Voltairism may, in fact, be pronounced a transplantation from English soil. It was English deism “mixed with cunning sparks of”—French wit. A very short passage from the “Henriade” will suffice the double purpose of showing what in quality of style that poem of Voltaire’s is, and of suggesting its author’s sense of debt to the England which, for its freedom and its free-thinking, he so much admired. The reader will not fail to note the skill with which Voltaire manages in praising another country to give a very broad hint to his own. The old-fashioned formal heroic couplet, with rhyme, in which the following passage appears translated, is not inapposite to the artificial cast and style of the original. Various passions, such as “Fear,” are not only personified in the “Henriade,” but made to play the part of veritable characters in the action of the poem. Supernatural interferences occur. History is boldly fabricated or falsified at the pleasure of the poet. Of this audacious freedom the passage from which we take our extract presents an instance. Voltaire sends his hero on a mythical mission to England to solicit help from Queen Elizabeth. He here meets every reader’s familiar old friend, “a venerable hermit,” who instructs him in English history and manners. Voltaire wrote prefaces and notes to vindicate his epic practices. He went to Virgil for precedents. Lucan he censured for not making free enough with his history. “Eliza” is, of course, Queen Elizabeth, and “Bourbon,” is the hero of the epic, Henry IV. of France, from whose name, it need not be said, comes the title, “Henriade.” We quote from the first canto of the poem:
A poem flaunting on its front invidious praise like the foregoing of a foreign government so different from the government of France, could not be very acceptable to the ruling classes of his time in the author’s own country. But in England, during the poet’s two years’ stay in that island, a revised edition of the “Henriade” was issued under auspices the most august and imposing. Queen Caroline headed the list of subscribers, and such was the brilliancy of the patronage extended to the poem that Voltaire, as is with probability said, netted forty thousand dollars from his English edition—a sum of money equivalent to, say, one hundred thousand dollars, present value. This early success laid the foundation of a fortune for Voltaire, which the skill, the prudence, the servility, the greed, and the unscrupulousness of the owner subsequently built into proportions that were nothing less than princely. Voltaire’s annual income at his death was about a hundred thousand dollars. It seems incredible that a man so rich, and, in some ways, it must be acknowledged, so generous, should have been at the same time so mean, so sordid, so literally perjured in sordidness, as Voltaire is demonstrated, and admitted even by his farthest-going admirers, for instance, Mr. John Morley, to have been.