Voltaire - John Morley

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      Many of those, however, who have least hope of any future revival of the ancient creed, and who least regret its fall, are even less hostile to the Jesuits than they are to Voltaire. Comte, for example, who elaborated a doctrine with a corresponding system of life deduced from it, and the central principle of whose method of social action and movement is to destroy by replacing, has adjudged an emphatically secondary place to Voltaire’s claims on our good-will.7 Nor ought this seriously to surprise us, when we consider that Voltaire trusted to the individual to replace for himself, by the motion of his own faculties, the old collective tradition of action and belief; and that he showed himself too keenly alive to the curses of that empire of prejudice, authority, social fixity, which he devoted his life to overthrowing, to lend any help to the restoration of a similar reign with changed watchwords. He is perhaps the one great Frenchman who has known how to abide in patient contentment with an all but purely critical reserve, leaving reconstruction, its form, its modes, its epoch, for the fulness of time and maturity of effort to disclose. It has been the fatal quality of the genius of his countrymen, from Descartes down to Comte, to decline to rest on an uncompleted interpretation of experience, and to insist on a hasty supplement of unconcluded analysis by what is virtually an à priori synthesis. Voltaire deserves no special praise for this abstention from a premature reconstruction; for it probably was not so much the result of deliberate persuasion that we must wait on the time, as of an inability to conceive of need for a cultus and a firm ordering of our knowledge, as prime demands of human nature and essential conditions of stable progress. Whatever value we may set on this sage reserve, the fact that Voltaire had no scheme for replacing the scheme which he destroyed, accounts very amply for the disparagement of him by those who think almost any fabric of common and ordered belief better for men, than the seeming chaos of intricate and multitudinous growths which now overspread the field of European opinion. And does it not involve us in a defective conception of the way in which human progress accomplishes itself, to place in our calendar of benefactors, supposing us to compose a calendar, only those who have built up truth, to the exclusion of those who have with pain and labour helped to demolish impudent error? Has Jericho always fallen without the blasts from the seven trumpets? It is sufficiently demonstrated from history that false opinions vanish spontaneously, without a direct blow struck; that a system of belief, corroborated in the breasts of the multitude by all the authority of a long tradition, sanctified to the powerful few by dignity or emolument, entrenched with a strength that seems inexpugnable among the ordinances and institutions and unwritten uses of a great community, will straightway succumb from inherent want of life and courage?

      There is a third kind of opinion, that is as little merciful in its own way as either of the two others, and this is the scientific or cultured opinion. Objections from this region express themselves in many forms, some of them calm and suggestive, others a little empty and a little brutal. They all seem to come to something of this kind: that Voltaire’s assault on religion, being conducted without any smallest spark of the religious spirit, was therefore necessarily unjust to the object of his attack, and did the further mischief of engendering in all on whom his influence was poured out a bitterness and moral temerity which is the worst blight that can fall upon the character either of a man or a generation: that while truth is relative and conditional, and while belief is only to be understood by those who have calmly done justice to the history of its origin and growth, Voltaire carelessly, unphilosophically, and maliciously, handled what had once possessed a relative truth, as if it had always been absolutely false, and what had sprung from the views and aspirations of the best men, as if it had had its root in the base artifices of the worst: that what ought to have gone on, and would have gone on, as a process of soft autumnal dissolution, was converted by the infection of Voltaire into a stained scene of passion and battle: that assuming to possess and to furnish men with a broad criticism of life, he left out of life its deepest, holiest, and most exalting elements, as well as narrowed and depraved criticism, from its right rank as the high art of stating and collating ideas, down to an acrid trick of debate, a thing of proofs, arguments, and rancorous polemic.

      It is certain that there is much truth in this particular strain of objection to Voltaire’s power and his use of it, or else it would not have found mouthpieces, as it has done, among some of the finest spirits of the modern time. But it is the natural tendency of the hour rather to exaggerate what weight there really is in such criticism, which, though claiming to be the criticism of temperance and moderation and relativity, does not as a matter of fact escape the fatal law of excess and absoluteness even in its very moderation and relativity. In estimating an innovator’s method, all depends on the time and the enemy; and it may sometimes happen that the time is so out of joint and the enemy so strong, so unscrupulous, so imminently pernicious, as to leave no alternative between finally succumbing, and waging a war of deliverance for which coming generations have to bear the burdens in feuds and bitterness; between abridging somewhat of the richness and fulness of life, and allowing it all to be gradually choked up by dust and enwrapped in night. For let us not forget that what Catholicism was accomplishing in France in the first half of the eighteenth century, was really not anything less momentous than the slow strangling of French civilisation. Though Voltaire’s spirit may be little edifying to us, who after all partake of the freedom which he did so much to win, yet it is only just to remember what was the spirit of his foe, and that in so pestilent a presence a man of direct vision may well be eager to use such weapons as he finds to his hand. Let the scientific spirit move people to speak as it lists about Voltaire’s want of respect for things held sacred, for the good deeds of holy men, for the sentiment and faith of thousands of the most worthy among his fellows. Still there are times when it may be very questionable whether, in the region of belief, one with power and with fervid honesty ought to spare the abominable city of the plain, just because it happens to shelter five righteous. There are times when the inhumanity of a system stands out so red and foul, when the burden of its iniquity weighs so heavy, and the contagion of its hypocrisy is so laden with mortal plague, that no awe of dilettante condemnation nor minute scruple as to the historic or the relative can stay the hand of the man whose direct sight and moral energy have pierced the veil of use, and revealed the shrine of the infamous thing. The most noble of the holy men said long ago that ‘the servant of the Lord must not strive, but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient, in meekness instructing those that oppose themselves.’ The history of the churches is in one of its most conspicuous aspects the history of a prolonged outrage upon these words by arrogant and blasphemous persons, pretending to draw a sacred spirit from the very saint who uttered them. We may well deplore that Voltaire’s attack, and every other attack of the same sort, did not take the fair shape prescribed by the apostle to the servant of the Lord, of gentleness, patience, and the instruction of a sweet and firm example. But the partisans of the creed in whose name more human blood has been violently shed than in any other cause whatever, these, I say, can hardly find much ground of serious reproach in a few score epigrams. Voltaire had no calm breadth of wisdom. It may be so. There are moments which need not this calm breadth of wisdom, but a two-edged sword, and when the deliverers of mankind are they who ‘come to send fire on the earth.

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      ENGLISH INFLUENCES.

      Voltairism may be said to have begun from the flight of its founder from Paris to London. This, to borrow a name from the most memorable instance of outward change marking inward revolution, was the decisive hegira, from which the philosophy of destruction in a formal shape may be held seriously to date. Voltaire landed in England in the middle of May, 1726. He was in the thirty-third year of his age, that earlier climacteric, when the men with vision first feel conscious of a past, and reflectively mark its shadow. It is then that they either press forward eagerly with new impulse in the way of their high calling, knowing the limitations of circumstance and hour, or else fainting draw back their hand from the plough, and ignobly leave to another or to none the accomplishment of the work. The narrowness of the cribbed deck that we are doomed to tread, amid the vast space of an eternal sea with fair shores dimly seen and never neared, oppresses the soul with a burden that sorely tries its strength, when the fixed limits first define themselves

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