voltaire was a great stimulator of the french encyclop?dia, a work designed to convey to the many the information of the few. here again the inspiration was english. it was the success of the cyclopcedia of arts and sciences, edited by the freethinker ephraim chambers, in 1728, which suggested the yet more famous work carried out by diderot and d’alembert, with the assistance of such men as helvetius, buffon, turgot, and condorcet. voltaire took an ardent interest in the work, and contributed many important articles. the leading contributors were all freethinkers, but they were under the necessity of advancing their ideas in a tentative way on account of the vigilant censorship. voltaire not only wrote for the encyclop?dia, but gave valuable hints and suggestions to diderot and d’alembert, as well as much sound advice. he cautioned them, for instance, against patriotic bias. “why,” he asks d’alembert, “do you say that the sciences are more indebted to france than to any other nation? is it to the french that we are indebted for the quadrant, the fire-engine, the theory of light, inoculation, the seed-sower? parbleu! you are jesting! we have invented only the wheelbarrow.”
voltaire wrote the section on history. the first page contained a voltairean definition of sacred history which even an ignorant censor could hardly be expected to pass. “sacred history is a series of operations, divine and miraculous, by which it pleased god formerly to conduct the jewish nation, and to-day to exercise our faith.” the iron hand beneath the velvet glove was too evident for this to pass the censorship. vexatious delay and the enforced excision of important articles attended the progress of the work.
it was the attempted suppression of l'encyclopcedie which showed voltaire that the time had come for battle.
in 1757 a new edict was issued, threatening with death any one who wrote, printed, or sold any work attacking religion or the royal authority. the same edict assigned the penalty of the galleys to whoever published writings without legal permit. within six months advocate barbier recorded in his diary some terrible sentences. la martelière, verse-writer, for printing clandestinely voltaire’s pucelle and other “such” works, received nine years in the galleys; eight printers and binders employed in the same printing office, the pillory and three years’ banishment. up to the period of the revolution nothing could be legally printed in france, and no book could be imported, without government authorisation. mr. lecky says, in his history of england in the eighteenth century: “during the whole of the reign of lewis xv. there was scarcely a work of importance which was not burnt or suppressed, while the greater number of the writers who were at this time the special, almost the only, glory of france were imprisoned, banished, or fined.” voltaire determined to render the bigots odious and contemptible, and henceforth waged incessant war, continued to the day of his death. in satire on one of the bigots he issued his narrative of the sickness, confession, death and reappearance of the jesuit berthier, as rich a burlesque as that which swift had written predicting and describing the death of the astrologer partridge, in accordance with the prediction. every sentence is a hit. a priest of a rival order is hastily summoned to confess the dying jesuit, who is condemned to penance in purgatory for 333,333 years, 3 months, 3 weeks, and 3 days, and then will only be let out if some brother jesuit be found humble and good enough to be willing to apply all his merits to father berthier. even putting his enemy in purgatory, he only condemned the jesuit every morning to mix the chocolate of a jansenist, read aloud at dinner a provincial letter, and employ the rest of the day in mending the chemises of the nuns of port royal.
from ferney he poured forth a wasp-swarm of such writings under all sorts of pen-names, and dated from london, amsterdam, berne, or geneva. he had sufficient stimulus in the bigotry, intolerance, and atrocious iniquities perpetrated in the name of religion.
voltaire, moreover, determined himself to uphold the work of the encyclop?dia in more popular form. he put forward first his questions upon the encyclop?dia, in which he deals with some important articles of that work, with others of his own. this was the foundation of the most important of all his works, the philosophical dictionary, which he is said to have projected in the days when he was with frederick at berlin. in this work he showed how a dictionary could be made the most amusing reading in the world. under an alphabetical arrangement, he brought together a vast variety of sparkling essays on all sorts of subjects connected with literature, science, politics and religion. some of his headings were mere stalking-horses, under cover of which he shot at the enemy. some are concerned with matters now out of date; but, on the whole, the work presents a vivid picture of his versatile genius. an abridged edition, containing articles of abiding interest, would be a service to free-thought at the present day.
here is a slight specimen of his style taken from the article on fanaticism: “some one spreads a rumor in the world that there is a giant in existence 70 feet high. very soon all the doctors discuss the questions what color his hair must be, what is the size of his thumb, what the dimensions of his nails; there is outcry, caballing, fighting; those who maintain that the giant’s little finger is only an inch and a half in diameter, bring those to the stake who affirm that the little finger is a foot thick. ‘but, gentlemen, does your giant exist?’ says a bystander, modestly.
“‘what a horrible doubt!’ cry all the disputants; ‘what blasphemy! what absurdity!’ then they all make a little truce to stone the bystander, and, after having assassinated him in due form, in a manner the most edifying, they fight among themselves, as before, on the subject of the little finger and the nails.”
“l’infame.”
voltaire had other provocations to his attack on the bigots, and as he greatly concerned himself with these, they must be briefly mentioned. in 1761 a tragedy of mingled judicial bigotry, ignorance, and cruelty was enacted in languedoc. on october 13th of that year, marc antoine, the son of jean calas, a respectable protestant merchant in toulouse, a young man of dissolute habits, who had lived the life of a scapegrace, hanged himself in his father’s shop while the family were upstairs. the priestly party got hold of the case and turned it into a religious crime. the huguenot parents were charged with murdering their son to prevent his turning catholic. solemn services were held for the repose of the soul of marc antoine, and his body was borne to the grave with more than royal pomp, as that of a martyr to the holy cause of religion. in the church of the white penitents a hired skeleton was exhibited, holding in one hand a branch of palm, emblem of martyrdom, and in the other an inscription, in large letters, “abjuration of heresy.’’ the populace, who were accustomed yearly to celebrate with rejoicing the massacre of st. bartholomew’s day, 1572, were excited against the family. the father, who for sixty years had lived without reproach, was arrested, with his wife and children. the court before whom the case was brought, at first was disposed to put the whole family to the torture, never doubting that the murder would be confessed by one or other of them. but they ended by only condemning the father to be tortured, in order to extract a confession of guilt before being broken on the wheel, after which his body was to be burned and the ashes scattered to the winds. he was submitted first to the question ordinaire. in sight of the rack he was asked to reveal his crime. his answer was that no crime had been committed. he was stretched on the rack until every limb was dislocated and the body drawn out several inches beyond. he was then subjected to the question extraordinaire. this consisted in pouring water into his mouth from a horn, while his nose was pinched, till his body was swollen to twice its size, and the sufferer endured the anguish of a hundred drownings. he submitted without flinching to all the excruciating agony. finally, he was placed upon a tumbril and carried through the howling mob to the place of execution. “i am innocent.” he muttered from time to time. at the scaffold he was exhorted to confess by a priest: “what!” said he, “you, too, believe a father can kill his own son!” they bound him to a wooden cross, and the executioner, with an iron bar, broke each of his limbs in two places, striking eleven blows in all, and then left him for two hours to die. the executioner mercifully strangled him at last, before burning the body at the stake. to the last he persisted in his innocence: he had no confession to make. by his unutterable agony he saved the lives of his wife and family. two daughters were thrown into a convent, and the property was confiscated. the widow and son escaped, and were provided for by voltaire.
he spared no time, trouble, or money to arrive at the truth, and that once reached, he was as assiduous in his search for justice. he went to work with an energy and thoroughness all his own. he interested the pompadour herself in the case. by his own efforts he forced justice to be heard. “the worst of the worthy sort of people,” he said, “is that they are such cowards. a man groans over his wrong, shuts his lips, takes his supper, and forgets.” voltaire was not of that fibre. wrong went as a knife to his heart. he suffered with the victim, and might have justly used the words of shelley, who compared himself unto “a nerve, o’er which do creep the else unfelt oppressions of the world.” voltaire had to fire others with his own fervor. he issued pamphlet after pamphlet in which the shameful story was told with pathetic simplicity. he employed the best lawyers he could find to vindicate the memory of the murdered man. for three years he left no stone unturned, until all that was possible was done to right the foul wrong of those in authority. during this time no smile escaped him of which he did not reproach himself as a crime. carlyle speaks of this as “voltaire’s noblest outburst, into mere transcendant blaze of pity, virtuous wrath, and determination to bring rescue and help against the whole world.”
he had his pamphlets on the calas case, seven in number, translated and published in england and germany, where they produced a profound effect. a subscription for the calas family was headed by the young queen of george iii. when at length judgment was given, reversing the sentence, he wrote to damilaville: “my dear brother, there is, then, justice upon the earth! there is, then, such a thing as humanity! men are not all wicked rascals, as they say! it is the day of your triumph, my dear brother; you have served the family better than anyone.”
it was while the calas case was pending that voltaire composed his noble treatise on toleration, a work which, besides its great effect in europe, caused catherine ii. to promise, if not to grant, universal religious toleration throughout the vast empire she governed.
this calas case was scarce ended when another, almost as bad an exhibition of intolerance, occurred. sirven, a respectable protestant land surveyor, had a catholic housekeeper, who, with the assent of the bishop of castres, spirited away his daughter for the good of her soul, and placed her in a convent, with a view to her conversion. she returned to her parents in a state of insanity, her body covered with the marks of the whip. she never recovered from the cruelties she had endured at the convent. one day, when her father was absent on his professional duties, she threw herself into a well, at the bottom of which she was found drowned. it was obvious to the authorities that the parents had murdered their child because she wished to become a roman catholic. they most wisely did not appear, and were sentenced to be hanged when they could be caught. in their flight the married daughter gave premature birth to a child, and madame sirven died in despair.
it took voltaire eight years to get this abominable sentence reversed, and to turn wrong into right. he was now between seventy and eighty years of age, yet he threw himself into the cause of the sirvens with the zeal and energy which has vindicated calas; appealing to paris and europe, issuing pamphlets, feeing lawyers, and raising a handsome subscription for the family.
another case was that of the chevalier de la barre. in 1766 a crucifix was injured—perhaps wantonly, perhaps by accident. the bishop of amiens called for vengeance. two young officers were accused; one escaped, and obtained by voltaire’s request a commission in the prussian service. the other, la barre, was tortured to confess, and then condemned to have his tongue cut out, his hand cut off, and to be burned alive. voltaire, seventy years old, devoted himself with untiring energy to save him. failing in that, he wrote one of his little pamphlets, a simple, graphic narrative of the death of chevalier de la barre, which stirred every humane heart in france. for twelve years this infidel vindicated the memory of the murdered man and exposed his oppressors. one of the authorities concerned in this judicial atrocity threatened voltaire with vengeance for holding them up to the execration of europe. voltaire replied by a chinese anecdote. “i forbid you,” said a tyrannical emperor to the historiographer, “to speak a word more of me.” the mandarin began to write. “what are you doing now?” asked the emperor. “i am writing down the order that your majesty has just given me.” voltaire had sought to save admiral byng. he contended in a similar case at home. count lally had failed to save india from the english, had been taken prisoner, but allowed to go to paris to clear his name from charges made against him. the french people, infuriate at the loss of their possession, demanded a victim, and lally, after a process tainted with every kind of illegality, was condemned to death on the vague charge of abuse of authority. the murdered man’s son, known in the revolution as lally tollendal, was joined by voltaire in the honorable work of procuring revision of the proceedings, and one of the last crowning triumphs of voltaire’s days was the news brought to him on his dying bed that his long effort had availed.
“ecrasez l'infàme.”
these are samples of what was occuring when voltaire was exhorting his friends to crush the infamous—a phrase which gave rise to much misunderstanding, and which priests have even alleged was applied to jesus, their idol. a sufficient disproof, if any were needed, is that voltaire treats “l’infàme” as feminine. si vous pouvez écraser l'infame, ecrasez-la, et aimez-moi.” that oft-repeated phrase was directed at no person. nor was it, as some protestants have alleged, directed only at roman catholicism. as voltaire saw and said, “fanatic papists and fanatic calvanism are tarred with one brush.” “l’infàme” was christian superstition claiming supernatural authority and enforcing its claim, as it has ever sought to do, by pains and penalties. he meant by it the whole spirit of exclusiveness, intolerance, and bigotry, persecuting and privileged orthodoxy, which he saw-as the outcome of the divine faith. practically, as d. f. strauss justly remarked, “when voltaire writes to d’alembert that he wishes to see the ‘infame’ reduced in france to the same condition in which she finds herself in england, and when frederick writes to voltaire that philosophers flourished amongst the greeks and romans, because their religion had no dogmas—‘*mais les dogmes de notre infàme gatent tout’—it is clear we must understand by the ‘infame,’ whose destruction was the watchword of the voltairian circle, the christian church, without distinction of communions, catholic or protestant.”
the catholic joseph de maistre shrieks: “with a fury without example, this insolent blasphemer declared himself the personal enemy of the savior of men, dared from the depths of his nothingness to give him a name of ridicule, and that adorable law which the man-god brought to earth he called ‘l’infame.’” this is a judgment worthy of a bigot, who dares not look into the reason why his creed is detested. let us try and understand this insolent blasphemer to-day.
voltaire looked deep into the heart of the atrocities that wrung his every nerve with anguish. they were not new: only the humanity and courage that assailed them were new. they were the natural outcome of what had been christian teaching. it was not simply that, as a matter of fact, priests and theologians were the opponents of every kind of rational progress, but their intolerance was the logical result of their creed. these atrocities could not have been perpetrated had not priests and magistrates had behind them a credulous and fanatical populace, whose minds were suborned from childhood to believing that they had themselves the one and divine faith, and that all heretics were enemies of god. he saw that to destroy the intolerance he must sap the superstition from which it sprang. he saw that the core of the christian superstition lay in bibliolatry, and that while christians believed they had an exclusive and infallibly divine revelation, they would deem all opposition to their own beliefs a sin, meriting punishment. mr. morley says, with truth: “if we find ourselves walking amid a generation of cruel, unjust, and darkened spirits, we may be assured that it is their beliefs on what they deem highest that have made them so. there is no counting with certainty on the justice of men who are capable of fashioning and worshipping an unjust divinity; nor on their humanity, so long as they incorporate inhuman motives in their most sacred dogma; nor on their reasonableness, while they rigorously decline to accept reason as a test of truth.”
voltaire warred on christian superstition because he keenly felt its evils. he saw that intolerance naturally flowed from the exclusive and dogmatic claims which alone differentiated it from other faiths. its inducements to right-doing he found to be essentially ignoble, appealing either to brutal fear of punishment or base expectation of reward, and in each case alike mercenary. he saw that terrorism engendered brutality, that a savage will think nothing of slaughtering hundreds to appease his angry god. he saw that it had been a fine religion for priests and monks—those caterpillars of the commonwealth, living on the fat of the land while pretending to hold the keys of heaven, a race of parasites on the people, who toil not neither do they spin, and whose direct interest lay in fostering their dupes ignorance and credulity. the christian tree was judged, as its founder said it should be, by its fruits. men do not gather grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles. he saw christianity as tacitus described it—“a maleficent superstition.” it was a upas tree, to be cut down; and hence he reiterated his terrible delenda est carthago, “ecrasez l’infàme”—“destroy the monster.”
he wrote to d’alembert from ferney: “for forty years i have endured the outrages of bigots and scoundrels. i have found there is nothing to gain by moderation, and that it is a deception. i must wage war openly and die nobly, 'on a crowd of bigots slaughtered at my feet.’” his war was relentless and unremitting. he assailed “l’infàme” with every weapon which learning, wit, industry, and indignation could supply.
frederick wrote to him from the midst of his own wars: “your zeal burns against the jesuits and superstitions. you do well to combat error, but do you credit that the world will change? the human mind is weak. three-fourths of mankind are formed to be the slaves of the absurdest fanaticism. the fear of the devil and hell is fascinating to them, and they detest the sage who wishes to enlighten them. i look in vain among them for the image of god, of which the theologians assure us they carry the imprint.” madame du deffand wrote in a similar strain. she assured him that every person of sense thought as he did; why then continue? no remonstrance moved him. he had enlisted for the war, and might have said with luther: hier stehe ich; ich kann nicht anders.
much nonsense has been written about voltaire’s employment of ridicule against religious beliefs. i am reminded of bishop south’s remark to a dull brother bishop, who reproved him for sprinkling his sermon with witticisms. “now, my lord, do you really mean to say that, if god had given you any wit, you would not have used it?” voltaire ridiculed what he esteemed ridiculous. but there is nothing more galling to superstitionists than to find that others find food for mirth in their absurdities.
“you mock at sacred things,” said the jesuits to pascal when he exposed their casuistry. doubtless the priests of baal said the same when elijah asked them whether their god was asleep, or peradventure on a journey. the artifice of inculcating a solemn and reverential manner of treating absurdities is the perennial recipe for sanctifying and perpetuating superstition. “priests of all persuasions,” says oliver goldsmith, “are enemies to ridicule, because they know it to be a formidable antagonist to fanaticism, and they preach up gravity to conceal their own shallowness of imposture.” approach the mysteries of the faith with reverence and you concede half the battle. christian missionaries do not thus treat the fetishism and sorcery of heathen lands. to overcome it they must expose its absurdities. ridicule has been a weapon in the hands of all the great liberators, luther, erasmus, rabelais, bruno, swift, but none used it more effectively than voltaire. buckle well says; “he used ridicule, not as the test of truth, but as the scourge of folly.” and he adds: “his irony, his wit, his pungent and telling sarcasms produce more effect than the gravest arguments could have done; and there can be no doubt he was fully justified in using those great resources with which nature had endowed him, since by their aid he advanced the interests of truth, and relieved men from some of their most inveterate prejudices.” victor hugo puts the case in poetic fashion when he declares that voltaire was irony incarnate for the salvation of mankind. “ridicule is not argument”! well, it is a pointed form of polemic, the argumentum ad absurdum. “mustapha,” said voltaire, “does not believe, but he believes that he believes.” to shame him out of hypocrisy, there is nothing better than laughter; and if a true believer, laughter will best free him from terror of his bogey devil and no less bogey god. ridicule can hurt no reality. you cannot make fun of the multiplication table. the fun begins when the theologians assert that three times one are one. shaftesbury, who maintained that ridicule was a test of truth, remarked with justice, “’tis the persecuting spirit that has raised the bantering one.” ridicule is the natural retort to those who seek not to convert but to convict and punish. ridicule comes like a stream of sunlight to dissipate the fogs of preconceived prejudice. a laugh, if no argument, is a splendid preparative. often, in voltaire, ridicule takes an argumentative form. thus, alluding to a monsieur esprit’s book on the falsity of human virtues, he says: “that great genius, mons. esprit, tells us that neither cato, aristotle, marcus aurelius, nor epictetus were good men, and a good reason why, good men are only found among christians. again, among the christians, catholics alone are virtuous, and of the catholics, the jesuits, enemies of the oratorians, must be excepted. therefore, there is scarce any virtue on earth, except among the enemies of the jesuits.”
all his characteristic scorn and ridicule come out when dealing with the fetish book of his adversaries. the philosophical dictionary is full of wit upon biblical subjects. i content myself with an excerpt from the less known sermon of fifty: “if moses changed the waters into blood, the sages of pharoah did the same. he made frogs come upon the land; this also they were able to do. but when lice were concerned, they were vanquished; in the matter of lice, the jews knew more and could do more than the other nations.”
“finally, adona? caused every first-born in egypt to die, in order that his people might be at their ease. for his people the sea is cloven in twain; and we must confess it is the least that could be done on this occasion. all the other marvels are of the same stamp. the jews wander in the desert. some husbands complain of their wives. immediately water is found, which makes every woman who has been faithless to her husband swell and burst. in the desert the jews have neither bread nor dough, but quails and manna are rained upon them. their clothes are preserved unworn for forty years; as the children grow, their clothes grow with them. samson, because he had not undergone the operation of shaving, defeats a thousand philistines with the jaw-bone of an ass. he ties together three hundred foxes, which, as a matter of course, come quite readily to his hand.
“there is scarcely a page in which tales of this sort are not found. the ghost of samuel appears, summoned by the voice of a witch. the shadow of a dial—as if miserable creatures like the jews had dials—goes back ten degrees at the prayer of hezekiah, who, with great judgment, asks for this sign. god gives him the choice of making the hour advance or recede, and the learned hezekiah thinks that it is not difficult to make the shadow advance, but very difficult to make it recede. elijah mounts to heaven in a chariot of fire; children sing in a hot and raging furnace. i should never stop if i entered into the detail of all the monstrous extravagances with which this book swarms. never was common sense outraged so vehemently and indecently.” noticing the comparison in the song of solomon, “her nose is like the tower of damascus,” etc., he says: “this, i own, is not in the style of the eclogues of the author of the ?neid; but all have not a like style, and a jew is not obliged to write like virgil.”
this, it may be objected, is caricature and not criticism. but all that voltaire sought was that his blows should tell. he did not expect to be taken au pied du lettre. some of his biblical criticism is faulty, but it is hard for the reader to recover from the tone of banter and contempt with which he treats the sacred book. when the idol is shattered, it is not much use saying its mouth was not quite so big and ugly as it was represented to be. priests have never yet been troubled by dull criticism. they left tindal and chubb alone; but when woolston, annet and paine added liveliness to their infidelity, they loudly called for the police.
leslie stephen well says: “men have venerated this or that grotesque monstrosity because they have always approached it with half-shut eyes and grovelling on their faces in the dust: a single hearty laugh will encourage them to stand erect and to learn the latest of lessons—that of seeing what lies before them. and if your holy religion does really depend upon preserving the credit of jonah’s whale, upon justifying all the atrocities of the jews, and believing that a census was punished by a plague, ridicule is not only an effective but an appropriate mode of argument.”
voltaire is often sneered at as a mere destructive. the charge is not true, and, even if it were, he would none the less deserve the admiration of posterity for his destructive work. it is as necessary for the gardener to clear away the rubbish and keep down the weeds as to sow and water. mr. morley justly observes: “he had imagination enough and intelligence enough to perceive that they are the most pestilent of all the enemies of mankind, the sombre hierarchs of misology, who take away the keys of knowledge, thrusting truth down to the second place, and discrowning sovereign reason to be the serving drudge of superstition or social usuage.”
voltaire was the arch iconoclast of his age, a mere destructive, if you will. buckie truly remarks: “all great reforms have consisted, not in making something new, but in unmaking something old.” w. j. fox eloquently said: “the destruction of tyranny is political freedom. the destruction of bigotry is spiritual and mental emancipation. positive and negative are mere forms. creation and destruction, as we call them, are just one and the same work, the work which man has to do—the extraction of good from evil.”
much has been made of the pseudonymous character of his attacks on christianity, and of the subterfuges and fibs with which he sought to evade responsibility. one might as well complain of ironclads wearing armor in warfare.
it was the necessity of his position. he wanted to do his work, not to become a martyr, leaving it to unknown hands. it should be remembered that voltaire had sometimes to bribe publishers to bring out his writings; and, in such circumstances, the pseudonymity is surely open to no suspicion of baseness. his poem on natural religion was condemned to the flames by the decree of the parliament of paris, 23rd january, 1759. his important examination of the scriptures, which he falsely attributed to lord bolingbroke, was condemned with five other of his pieces by a decree of the court of rome, 29th november, 1771. could the author have been caught, he would have had a good chance, if not of sharing the fate of his book, at least of permanent lodgment in the bastille, of which he had already sufficient taste. he knew that although bolingbroke had no hand in its composition he largely shared its ideas, and he obtained at once publicity and security by attributing it to the dead friend who, morley says, “was the direct progenitor of voltaire’s opinions in religion.” if he stuck at no subterfuge to achieve his work, his lies injured no one. one of the funniest was the signing one of his heterodox publications as the archbishop of canterbury, a lie which may remind us of the drunken sheridan announcing himself as william wilberforce. voltaire had been bastilled twice, and verily believed that another taste would end his days. “i am,” he said, “a friend of truth, but no friend at all to martyrdom.” shelter behind any ambush was necessary in such guerilla warfare as his. over fifty of his works were condemned, and placed upon the index. voltaire used no fewer than one hundred and thirty different pen-names, which have enabled bibliographers to display their erudition.(1) but for this underground method, he might have been laid by the heels instead of living to old age, with the satisfaction of seeing the world becoming a little more humane and tolerant through his efforts. in such warfare the only test is success, and the fact remains that voltaire’s blows told. he cleared the course for modern science, and it is not for those who benefit by his labors to sneer because he did not become a martyr in the struggle.
1. special mention should be made of the bibliographie voltairienne of m. l. querard, and voltaire: bibliographie de ses ?uvres, in four volumes, by m. g. bengesco, 1882- 1890.
condorcet says: “his zeal against a religion which he regarded as the cause of the fanaticism which has desolated europe since its birth, of the superstition which had burst about it, and as the source of the mischief which the enemies of human nature still continued to do, seemed to double his activity and his forces. ‘i am tired,’ he said one day, ‘of hearing it repeated that twelve men were enough to establish christianity. i want to show them that one will be enough to destroy it.’” what one man could do he did. but it took not twelve legendary apostles, but the labor of countless thousands of men, through many ages, to build up the great complex of christianity, and it will need the labors of as many to destroy it. voltaire himself came to see this, and wrote, in the year before his death, “i now perceive that we must still wait three or four hundred years. one day it cannot but be that good men will win their cause; but before that glorious day arrives, how many disgusts have we to undergo, how many dark persecutions, without reckoning the la barres of whom they will make an auto de fe from time to time.”
john morley remarks: “the meaner partisans of an orthodoxy, which can only make wholly sure of itself by injustice to adversaries, has always loved to paint the voltairean school in the characters of demons, enjoying their work of destruction with a sportive and impish delight. they may have rejoiced in their strength so long as they cherished the illusion that those who first kindled the torch should also complete the long course and bear the lamp to the goal. when the gravity of the enterprise showed itself before them, they remained alert with all courage, but they ceased to fancy that courage necessarily makes men happy. the mantle of philosophy was rent in a hundred places, and bitter winds entered at a hundred holes; but they only drew it the more closely around them.”
it may remain an inspiration to others, as it assuredly is a proof of the temperance and moderation of his own life, that much of voltaire’s best work was done after he had reached his sixtieth year. candide, his masterpiece, was written at the age of sixty-four. four years later he produced his sermon of the fifty, and he was sixty-nine when he published his epoch-making treatise upon toleration, and saul, the wittiest of his burlesque dramas. at the age of seventy he issued his most important work, the philosophical dictionary, and his burlesque upon existing superstitions, which he entitled pot-pourri. this was, indeed, the period of his greatest literary activity against “l’infame.” his questions on the miracles, his examination of lord bolingbroke, the questions of zapata, the dinner of count de boulainvilliers (the charming resumé of voltaire’s religious opinions, which had the honor to be burnt by the hand of the hangman), the canonisation of st. cucufin, the romance of the princess of babylon, the a. b. and c., the collection of ancient gospels, and his god and men, all being issued while he was between seventy and seventy-five. it was at this time he edited the recueil nécessaire avec l'evangile de la raison, a collection of anti-christian tracts dated leipsic and london, but printed at amsterdam. he was eighty when he put forth his white bull (one of the funniest of his pieces, which was translated by jeremy bentham), and his ridiculous skit on bababec and the fakirs; eighty-two when he wrote the bible explained and a christian against six jews; and eighty-three when he published his history of the establishment of christianity.
it was thus in the last twenty years of his long life that voltaire did his best work for the destruction of prejudice and the spread of enlightenment. at the same time he maintained a large correspondence, both with the principal sovereigns of europe, whom he urged in the direction of tolerance, and with the leading writers, whom he wished to combine in a great and systematic attempt to sap the creed he believed to be at the root of superstition and intolerance.
it is in his lengthy and varied correspondence with intimates, extending over sixty years, that voltaire most truly reveals himself. he is therein his own minute biographer, revealing not only his actions, but their actuation. we see him therein not merely the prince of persifleurs, but the serious sensitive thinker, keenly alive to friendship, love, and work for the higher interests of humanity. his letters are among the most varied, interesting, and delightful of any left by a great man of letters. like all his other productions, they display the fertility of his genius. over ten thousand separate letters are catalogued by bengesco. their very extent prevents their being widely read, but they reveal the perennial brightness of his mind, his delight in work, his love of literature and liberty, his constant gaiety and goodness of heart, with here and there only a flash of indignation and contempt. they are imbued with the spirit of friendship, abound in anecdotes and pleasantries, mingled with a passionate earnestness for the interest of mankind. constantly we find him endeavoring to elevate the literary class, to raise the drama, continually seeking to encourage talent, to relieve suffering, and to defend the oppressed.
