A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

warfare, by all manner of literary stratagem, [987] facilitated by vast literary fame and ample acquired wealth, against what he called "the Infamous"--the Church and the creed which he found still swift to slay for mere variation of belief, and slow to let any good thing be wrought for the bettering of men's lives. Of his prodigious literary performance it is probably within the truth to say that in respect of rapid influence on the general intelligence of the world it has never been equalled by any one man's writing; and that, whatever its measure of error and of personal misdirection, its broader influence was invariably for peace on earth, for tolerance among men, and for reason in all things. His faults were many, and some were serious; but to no other man of his age, save possibly Beccaria, can be attributed so much beneficent accomplishment. He can perhaps better be estimated as a force than as a man. So great was the area of his literary energy that he is inevitably inadequate at many points. Lessing could successfully impugn him in drama; Diderot in metaphysic; Gibbon in history; and it is noteworthy that all of these men [988] at different times criticized him with asperity, testing him by the given item of performance, and disparaging his personality. Yet in his own way he was a greater power than any of them; and his range, as distinguished from his depth, outgoes theirs. In sum, he was the greatest mental fighter of his age, perhaps of any age: in that aspect he is a "power-house" not to be matched in human history; and his polemic is mainly for good. It was a distinguished English academic who declared that "civilization owes more to Voltaire than to all the Fathers of the Church put together." [989] If in a literary way he hated his personal foes, much more did he hate cruelty and bigotry; and it was his work more than any that made impossible a repetition in Europe of such clerical crimes as the hanging of the Protestant pastor, La Rochette; the execution of the Protestant, Calas, on an unproved and absurdly false charge; the torture of his widow and children; the beheading of the lad La Barre for ill-proved blasphemy. [990] As against his many humanities, there is not to be charged on him one act of public malevolence. In his relations with his fickle admirer, Frederick the Great, and with others of his fellow-thinkers, he and they painfully brought home to freethinkers the lesson that for them as for all men there is a personal art of life that has to be learned, over and above the rectification of opinion. But he and the others wrought immensely towards that liberation alike from unreason and from bondage which must precede any great improvement of human things. Voltaire's constant burden was that religion was not only untrue but pernicious, and when he was not dramatically showing this of Christianity, as in his poem La Ligue (1723), he was saying it by implication in such plays as Zaïre (1732) and Mahomet (1742), dealing with the fanaticism of Islam; while in the Essai sur les moeurs (1756), really a broad survey of general history, and in the Siècle de Louis XIV, he applied the method of Montesquieu, with pungent criticism thrown in. Later, he added to his output direct criticisms of the Christian books, as in the Examen important de Milord Bolingbroke (1767), and the Recherches historiques sur le Christianisme (? 1769), continuing all his former lines of activity. Meanwhile, with the aid of his companion the Marquise du Chatelet, an accomplished mathematician, he had done much to popularize the physics of Newton and discredit the scientific fallacies of the system of Descartes; all the while preaching a Newtonian but rather agnostic deism. This is the purport of his Philosophe Ignorant, his longest philosophical essay. [991] The destruction of Lisbon by the earthquake of 1755 seems to have shaken him in his deistic faith, since the upshot of his poem on that subject is to leave the moral government of the universe an absolute enigma; and in the later Candide (1759) he attacks theistic optimism with his matchless ridicule. Indeed, as early as 1749, in his Traité de la Métaphysique, written for the Marquise du Chatelet, he reaches virtually pantheistic positions in defence of the God-idea, declaring with Spinoza that deity can be neither good nor bad. But, like so many professed pantheists, he relapsed, and he never accepted the atheistic view; on the contrary, we find him arguing absurdly enough, in his Homily on Atheism (1765), that atheism had been the destruction of morality in Rome; [992] on the publication of d'Holbach's System of Nature in 1770 he threw off an article Dieu: réponse au Système de la Nature, where he argued on the old deistic lines; and his tale of Jenni; or, the Sage and the Atheist (1775), is a polemic on the same theme. By this time the inconsistent deism of his youth had itself been discredited among the more thoroughgoing freethinkers; and for years it had been said in one section of literary society that Voltaire after all "is a bigot; he is a deist!" [993] But for freethinkers of all schools the supreme service of Voltaire lay in his twofold triumph over the spirit of religious persecution. He had contrived at once to make it hateful and to make it ridiculous; and it is a great theistic poet of our own day that has pronounced his blade the sharpest, shrewdest steel that ever stabbed To death Imposture through the armour joints. [994] To be perfect, the tribute should have noted that he hated cruelty much more than imposture; and such is the note of the whole movement of which his name was the oriflamme. Voltaire personally was at once the most pugnacious and the most forgiving of men. Few of the Christians who hated him had so often as he fulfilled their own precept of returning good for evil to enemies; and none excelled him in hearty philanthropy. It is notable that most of the humanitarian ideas of the latter half of the century--the demand for the reform of criminal treatment, the denunciation of war and slavery, the insistence on good government, and toleration of all creeds--are more definitely associated with the freethinking than with any religious party, excepting perhaps the laudable but uninfluential sect of Quakers. The character of Voltaire is still the subject of chronic debate; but the old deadlock of laudation and abuse is being solved in a critical recognition of him as a man of genius flawed by the instability which genius so commonly involves. Carlyle (that model of serenity), while dwelling on his perpetual perturbations, half-humanely suggests that we should think of him as one constantly hag-ridden by maladies of many kinds; and this recognition is really even more important in Voltaire's case than in Carlyle's own. He was "a bundle of nerves," and the clear light of his sympathetic intelligence was often blown aside by gusts of passion--often enough excusably. But while his temperamental weaknesses exposed him at times to humiliation, and often to sarcasm; and while his compelled resort to constant stratagem made him more prone to trickery than his admirers can well care to think him, the balance of his character is abundantly on the side of generosity and humanity. One of the most unjustifiable of recent attacks upon him (one regrets to have to say it) came from the pen of the late Prof. Churton Collins. In his book on Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau in England (1908) that critic gives in the main an unbiassed account of Voltaire's English experience; but at one point (p. 39) he plunges into a violent impeachment with the slightest possible justification. He in effect adopts the old allegation of Ruffhead, the biographer of Pope--a statement repeated by Johnson--that Voltaire used his acquaintance with Pope and Bolingbroke to play the spy on them, conveying information to Walpole, for which he was rewarded. The whole story collapses upon critical examination. Ruffhead's story is, in brief, that Pope purposely lied to Voltaire as to the authorship of certain published letters attacking Walpole. They were by Bolingbroke; but Pope, questioned by Voltaire, said they were his own, begging him to keep the fact absolutely secret. Next day at court everyone was speaking of the letters as Pope's; and Pope accordingly knew that Voltaire was a traitor. For this tale there is absolutely nothing but hearsay evidence. Ruffhead, as Johnson declared, knew nothing of Pope, and simply used Warburton's material. The one quasi-confirmation cited by Mr. Collins is Bolingbroke's letter to Swift (May 18, 1727) asking him to "insinuate" that Walpole's only ground for ascribing the letters to Bolingbroke "is the authority of one of his spies ... who reports, not what he hears ... but what he guesses." This is an absolute contradiction of the Pope story, at two points. It refers to a guess at Bolingbroke, and tells of no citation from Pope. To put it as confirming the charge is to exhibit a complete failure of judgment. After this irrational argument, Mr. Collins offers a worse. He admits (p. 43) that Voltaire always remained on friendly terms with both Pope and Bolingbroke; but adds that this "can scarcely be alleged as a proof of his innocence, for neither Pope nor Bolingbroke would, for such an offence, have been likely to quarrel with a man in a position so peculiar as that of Voltaire. His flattery was pleasant...." Such an argument is worse than nugatory. That Bolingbroke spoke ill in private of Voltaire on general grounds counts for nothing. He did the same of Pope and of nearly all his friends. Mr. Collins further accuses Voltaire of baseness, falsehood, and hypocrisy on the mere score of his habit of extravagant flattery. This was notoriously the French mode in that age; but it had been just as much the mode in seventeenth-century England, from the Jacobean translators of the Bible to Dryden--to name no others. And Mr. Collins in effect charges systematic hypocrisy upon both Pope and Bolingbroke. Other stories of Ruffhead's against Voltaire are equally improbable and ill-vouched--as Mr. Collins incidentally admits, though he forgets the admission. They all come from Warburton, himself convicted of double-dealing with Pope; and they finally stand for the hatred of Frenchmen which was so common in eighteenth-century England, and is apparently not yet quite extinct. Those who would have a sane, searching, and competent estimate of Voltaire, leaning humanely to the side of goodwill, should turn to the Voltaire of M. Champion. A brief estimate was attempted by the present writer in the R. P. A. Annual for 1912.