Voltaire - John Morley

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and indirectly from England. In the seventeenth century the surrounding conditions were not ripe. Social needs had not begun to press. The organs of authority were still too vigorous, and performed their functions with something more than the mechanical half-heartedness of the next century. Long familiarity with sceptical ideas as enemies must go before their reception as friends and deliverers. They have perhaps never gained an effective hold in any community, until they have found allies in the hostile camp of official orthodoxy, and so long as that orthodoxy was able to afford them a vigorous social resistance. Voltaire’s universal talents made one of the most powerful instruments for conveying these bold and inquisitive notions among many sorts and conditions of men, including both the multitude of common readers and playgoers in the towns, and the narrower multitude of nobles and sovereigns. More than this, the brilliance and variety of his gifts attracted, stimulated, and directed the majority of the men of letters of his time, and imparted to them a measure of his own singular skill in conveying the principles of rationalistic thought.

      The effect of all this was to turn a vast number of personages who were officially inimical to free criticism, to be at heart abettors and fellow-conspirators in the great plot. That fact, combined with the independent causes of the incompetency of the holders of authority to deal with the crying social necessities of the time, left the walls of the citadel undermined and undefended, and a few of the sacred birds that were still found faithful cackled to no purpose. It has often been said that in the early times of Christianity its influence gave all that was truest and brightest in colour to the compositions of those who were least or not at all affected by its dogma. It is more certain that Voltaire by the extraordinary force of his personality gave a peculiar tone and life even to those who adhered most staunchly to the ancient ordering. The champions of authority were driven to defend their cause by the unusual weapons of rationality; and if Voltaire had never written, authority would never, for instance, have found such a soldier on her side as that most able and eminent of reactionaries, Joseph de Maistre. In reply to the favourite assertion of the apologists of Catholicism, that whatever good side its assailants may present is the product of the very teaching which they repudiate, one can only say that there would be at least as much justice in maintaining that the marked improvement which took place in the character and aims of the priesthood between the Regency and the Revolution,4 was an obligation unconsciously incurred to those just and liberal ideas which Voltaire had helped so powerfully to spread. De Maistre compares Reason putting away Revelation to a child who should beat its nurse. The same figure would serve just as well to describe the thanklessness of Belief to the Disbelief which has purged and exalted it.

      One of the most striking features of the revolution wrought by Voltaire is that it was the one great revolt in history which contained no element of asceticism, and achieved all its victories without resort to an instrument so potent, inflexible, and easy, but so gravely dangerous. Such revolts are always reactions against surrounding corruption and darkness. They are the energetic protests of the purer capacities and aspirations of human nature; and as is the inevitable consequence of vehement action of this sort, they seem for a while to insist on nothing less than the extirpation of those antagonistic parts which are seen to have brought life into such debasement. With this stern anger and resolve in their hearts, men have no mind to refine, explain, or moderate, and they are forced by one of the strangest instincts of our constitution into some system of mortification, which may seem to clear the soul of the taint of surrounding grossness. In such exalted mood, there is no refuge but in withdrawal from the common life into recesses of private conscience, and in severest purification of all desires. There are not many types of good men even in the least ascetic or least reactionary epochs, to whom this mood, and its passion for simplicity, self-applied rigour, minute discipline, firm regulation, and veritable continence of life, do not now and again recur, in the midst of days that march normally on a more spacious and expansive theory.

      There was, however, no tinge of ascetic principle in Voltairism. Pascal had remarked that relaxed opinions are naturally so pleasing to men, that it is wonderful they should ever be displeasing. To which Voltaire had thus retorted: ‘On the contrary, does not experience prove that influence over men’s minds is only gained by offering them the difficult, nay the impossible, to perform or believe? Offer only things that are reasonable, and all the world will answer, We knew as much as that. But enjoin things that are hard, impracticable; paint the deity as ever armed with the thunder; make blood run before the altars; and you will win the multitude’s ear, and everybody will say of you, He must be right, or he would not so boldly proclaim things so marvellous.’5 Voltaire’s ascendency sprung from no appeal to those parts of human nature in which ascetic practice has its foundation. On the contrary, full exercise and play for every part was the key of all his teaching, direct and indirect. He had not Greek serenity and composure of spirit, but he had Greek exultation in every known form of intellectual activity, and this audacious curiosity he made general.

      Let us remember that Voltairism was primarily and directly altogether an intellectual movement, for this reason, that it was primarily and directly a reaction against the subordination of the intellectual to the moral side of men, carried to an excess that was at length fraught with fatal mischief. Are our opinions true, provably answering to the facts of the case, consistent with one another; is our intelligence radiant with genuine light and knowledge; and are we bent more than all else on testing and improving and diffusing this knowledge and the instruments for acquiring it? The system to which this was the powerful counter-formula, even in its least dark shapes, always reserved a large class of most important facts from the searching glare of that scrutiny which Voltairism taught men to direct upon every proposition that was presented to them.

      For many centuries truth had been conceived as of the nature of a Real Universal, of which men had full possession by the revelation of a supreme divinity. All truth was organically one; and the relations of men to something supernatural, their relations to one another, the relations of outward matter, were all comprehended in a single synthesis, within which, and subject to which, all intellectual movement proceeded. An advancing spirit of inquiry dissolved this synthesis; and the philosophers, as distinguished from the steadfast and single students of science, ceasing to take it for granted as an indisputable starting-point that truth was an assured possession, went off on two different lines. Men of one cast of mind fell into doubt whether truth was a reality after all, and the discovery of it accessible to mankind. Thinkers of a different cast accepted this doctrine of the impotence of the human understanding to discover knowledge and prove truth, but they proceeded to the retrograde inference that therefore the ancient tradition of knowledge actually contains that approved truth, which had just been pronounced unattainable. This oblique mode of regaining a position of which they had been by their own act dispossessed, was impossible for so keen and direct a spirit as Voltaire’s. However filled his mind may have been with the false notions of the Tribe, of the Market, and above all of the Cave, at all events it was more free than most, certainly than most of those subalterns of the schools, from the Idols of the Theatre, and from either kind of that twofold excess, ‘one sort of which too hastily constitutes sciences positive and hierarchic, while the other presents scepticism and the pursuit of a vague inquiry that has no limit.’6

      The consequence of this peculiarity, call it a destructive and blind narrowness, or call it a wise and justly-measured openness of mind, as we may choose, has been that Voltaire has been condemned with unsparing severity by three of the most influential schools of modern opinion. Every one who has a system to defend is the enemy of the famous man who destroyed the reigning system of his day, with engines that seem to point with uncomfortable directness against all other systems. Every one who thinks that we have turned over the last leaf of the book of knowledge, whatever the inscription that he may find written upon it, naturally detests the whole spirit and impulse of one who felt all his life that he and his generation were the first band of men who had shaken off their chains, and ascended to the light of the sun and the contemplation of some portion of an inexhaustible universe of realities. Hence, the partisans of the Christian religion, in any of its forms, have dealt unrelenting contempt and hatred to the foe who did more than any one else to reduce their churches, once so majestically triumphant, to their present level, where they are forced under various guises and with much obsolete pretension to plead for the tolerance of rational men, on the comparatively modest ground of social fitness. Their hostility, we may agree, is not very astonishing, when we

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