Читать книгу The life of Voltaire - Evelyn Beatrice Hall - Страница 15

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After the death of Madame du Châtelet, Longchamp, Voltaire’s secretary, rescued from the flames in which many of her papers were burning, a number of letters in a very small handwriting. They were the “Treatise on Metaphysics.” Voltaire dedicated them to her in a quatrain which is as graceful in the original as it is clumsy in the translation.

He, who wrote these metaphysics

Which he gives you as your own,

Should die for them, as a traitor,

But he dies for you alone.

They were intended only for her eye. They contain the whole Voltairian creed in brief, but in every essential. They were indeed, in the opinion of that day, fit matter for the hangman, and to bring their author to the Bastille.

The title is not alluring, it must be confessed. But the matter has that witchery of style which Voltaire’s writings never missed. There is no thinking man but must some time or other have asked himself such questions on God and the soul, free-will, liberty, vice, and virtue, as Voltaire here proposes and answers. Like his hero Newton, he knows how to doubt. He passionately seeks truth and pursues that quest even when he has found the truth is not what he wishes it to be. No man ever made a more clear, logical, and honest statement of his religion, as far as it had then progressed, than Voltaire in the “Treatise on Metaphysics”: and no student of his works or character can afford to pass it by.

The “Discourses on Man” form seven epistles in easy verse: and may be said to be founded on Pope’s “Essay on Man” in much the same way as the ribald “Pucelle” was founded on the “Maid of Orleans” of the dull and respectable Chapelain. Their sentiments certainly differ widely from the comfortable optimism and orthodox theology of Mr. Pope. In this work, as in all his others, Voltaire was not so much the enemy of religion, as of a religion: and less the foe of Christianity than of that form of it called Roman Catholicism. The Epistles are upon the Nature of Pleasure, the Nature of Man, True Virtue, Liberty, the writer’s favourite subjects. They are easy reading—light, graceful, delicate, witty. In brief, they are Voltaire.

On January 27, 1736, was produced in Paris Voltaire’s Peruvian comedy “Alzire.” “My Americans” he called it usually. It was a brilliant success, and ran for twenty consecutive nights. Voltaire gave all the proceeds to the actors. He had no great opinion of it. “As for comedy, I will have nothing to do with it: I am only a tragic animal,” said he: and again, “You must be a good poet to write a good tragedy, a good comedy only requires a certain talent for versemaking.” He was right—with regard to himself at least. His comedies are all sprightly and vivacious, but not much else. Between the lines, indeed, even of “Alzire”—which the author, with a twinkle in his eye, called “a very Christian piece … which should reconcile me with some of the devout”—may be read the most characteristic of the Voltairian opinions. But he was too true an artist to allow those opinions to override his play, and never forgot to disguise the powder in a great deal of jam. It was twice performed at Court.

He was living quietly at Cirey when it was pleasing the popular taste of Paris. One is not surprised that overtaxed Nature had her revenge at last. By February, he was thoroughly ill. Madame du Châtelet sat on the end of his bed and read aloud Cicero in Latin and Pope in English. They were not wasting their time anyhow! One of them, at least, considered it nothing short of “a degradation” to allow bodily ill-health to stop mental industry.

In March, he wrote that he was “overwhelmed by maladies and occupations.” By April, he was well enough to be plunged into a quarrel with the faithless Jore, bookseller of Rouen.

If Voltaire was a very good friend, he was also a very good enemy. A more hot-headed, energetic, pugnacious foe certainly never existed. While he hated, he hated well. He lashed his enemy with such brilliant invective, such delicate gibes, such rollicking sarcasms, that one must needs pity the poor wretch if he deserved his fate ever so fully. Did he get up and retaliate, Voltaire was at him again in a moment, dancing round him, goading him to madness with the daintiest whip flicked with mots and jests and little cunning allusions, which looked so innocent, and always caught the victim on the raw. Diatribe, gaiety, quip, mockery—this man had all the weapons. He never used one where another would have done better. He had a dreadful instinct for finding out the weak place in his adversary’s armour and logic. “God make my enemies ridiculous!” was one of his few prayers. It was granted in full measure.

But if he was a dangerous and an untiring foe, he was not an ungenerous one. In this case, Jore was certainly the aggressor. He had played Voltaire false in the matter of the “English Letters.” He had endangered the author’s safety and condemned him to exile. He wrote now from the Bastille saying that if Voltaire would avow himself the author of the book, he, Jore, would be released. Voltaire was as quick to compassion as he was quick to anger. If he had hated a pigmy like Jore with a fierceness he should have kept for a worthier foe, the moment the man was fallen, his enemy became his friend. He wrote the letter asked of him, declaring himself to be the writer of the abominable thing. Then Jore demanded fourteen hundred francs, the cost of the confiscated edition. On April 15th Voltaire hurried up to Paris. There he saw Jore, and, though denying that he had any claim upon him, offered him half the sum he had demanded. Jore refused it: brought a lawsuit against Voltaire, and published a defamatory account of him. Voltaire’s quick passions were up in arms in a moment. He was as much agog to get at his enemy as a terrier is agog for a rat. He would have shaken the wretched little bookseller in just such a terrier fashion, if he could have got hold of him. But all Voltaire’s friends advised compromise with such insistence that he at last yielded. He spent twelve breathless indignant weeks in the capital. He had to pay Jore five hundred francs, in lieu of the fourteen hundred he had demanded. “I sign my shame,” he wrote. But he signed and paid all the same. He returned to Cirey in July sick in mind and body, baffled, bitter, and sore. In a year or two Jore professed penitence, and lived for the rest of his life on a small pension allowed him—by Voltaire.

While he was in Paris, two seats had fallen vacant in the Academy. But what chance could there be of one for the hero of a public scandal, a notorious firebrand, like Voltaire? Villars and Richelieu did their best for him—in vain.

He professed himself gaily indifferent, and was bitterly disappointed. He had to further postpone too the production of his “Prodigal Son.” He could not give that son, he said, so unpopular a father.

The man needed rest after his battles. He had soon what was far better than rest to one of his vivid temperament—a victory. In August began his correspondence with Prince Frederick of Prussia, afterwards Frederick the Great. It comprises many letters remarkable on both sides, extraordinary on Voltaire’s. It lasted for many years—before they met, in the early golden days of an almost lover-like infatuation—and long after they had quarrelled and parted. Voltaire was not the man at any time to be insensible to the honour of being the correspondent of one who was “almost a king.” He was a great deal too impressionable not to be in some sort the child of his age. In all his glowing dreams of liberty, he never wished royalty abolished—only restrained, enlightened, ennobled. And behold! the means were given him now, himself to show a king the way in which kings should walk—to influence a man who would influence a great people—to teach Europe, by a master to whom it must listen, those emancipating truths which were the passion of Voltaire’s own soul. What an opportunity! It was characteristic of the man that he realised and seized it at once.

“Believe that there have never been any good kings save those who, like you, have begun by teaching themselves, by knowing men, by loving the truth, by hating persecution and superstition. There is no prince who, thus thinking, cannot bring back the golden age to his country. Why do so few sovereigns seek this great good? You know why it is, monseigneur; it is because they all think more of royalty than of humanity.”

These words occur in Voltaire’s very first letter, written August 26, 1736. They are the text of all the others. If there were compliments and flatteries, French grace and politesse, and the adulation of the “Solomon of the North” somewhat overdone, those were the inevitable courtly trappings which adorned all letters of the time. The monitor of Solomon, as shown in that very first letter, knew himself to be the monitor; and, for all that exquisite turn of phrase and those pretty eulogies, was going to remain the monitor to the end. The flattery was by no means all humbug either. This royal pupil was the aptest that ever man had. He answered his Voltaire, not unworthily. At five-and-twenty he was himself philosopher and thinker: as great a natural genius as he was a natural barbarian. All learning and cultivation left him as much the one as the other.

The correspondence, once started, went on its way with a will. On Voltaire’s side it was from the first profoundly philosophic. His style was as clear, easy, and lucid when he wrote on the deepest and subtlest problems of free-will and personal identity as when he wrote scandal to Theriot or bagatelles to Mademoiselle Quinault. He wrote on the most abstruse subjects with a limpid simplicity of language, unachieved by any other writer before or since. It is the greatest glory of Voltaire as an author in general, as well as the author of the letters to Frederick the Great, that he made profound truths, common truths, and the knowledge that had been the heritage of a few, the heritage of all.

Madame du Châtelet read the letters, of course, before they were despatched from Cirey. One fills eleven large pages of print and is practically an Essay on Personal Liberty—reasonable enough, said Madame, to bring its author to the stake. Theriot showed Frederick’s letters about the salons of Paris: the prudent Voltaire thinking that the correspondence with a king might just as well do him all the good it could, and proclaim to his enemies that all temporal powers did not hate and fear him. At Cirey, the royal association certainly gave pleasure at first. Madame was singularly superior to kingly attractions: but Frederick was a thinker as well as a prince and loved philosophy as she did. She had not begun to look upon him as a rival in her lover’s affections. In his very first letter Voltaire had declined an invitation to be his visitor on the score that friends should always be preferred before kings.

The bloom of that summer of 1736 came and went on Cirey. Jore was hardly silenced and by no means forgotten when Voltaire flung aside his princely philosopher, as it were, to reply to a long, scandalous, and very personal attack which bitter old J. B. Rousseau, infuriated by the “Temple of Taste,” had made upon his rival, in a publication called the “Bibliothèque Française.” That attack dated from the May of this year. It was not until September 20th Voltaire decided to answer it. He had been very patient, or had crouched awhile for a surer spring. His answer is a masterpiece of gay and biting satire. “Rousseau has printed in your journal a long letter on me in which, happily for me, there are only calumnies, and, unfortunately for him, there is no wit. What makes the thing so bad, gentlemen, is that it is entirely his own … it is the second time in his life he has had any imagination. He has no success when he is original. … As for his verses, I can only wish for the sake of all the honest people he attacks, that he should go on writing in the same style.”

And in answer to Rousseau’s insinuations on Voltaire’s origin, “I have a valet who is his near relative and a very honest man. The poor youth begs me every day to pardon his relation’s bad verses.”

And in reply to that little story Rousseau had once circulated about Voltaire’s profane behaviour at a mass, “Do you think … it sits well on the author of the ‘Moïsade’ to accuse me of having talked in church sixteen years ago? … Thank God, that Rousseau is as clumsy as he is hypocritical. Without this counterpoise he would be too dangerous.” The letter finishes by recalling all the humiliating episodes in Rousseau’s life he would have most wished forgotten.

From which it will be seen that Voltaire did not scruple to employ his adversaries’ weapons—and to use them with a most deadly skill and finish.

On October 10, 1736, a play called “Britannicus” could not be played at the Théâtre Français in Paris on account of the illness of the principal actress. A new comedy called “The Prodigal Son” by an anonymous author was therefore produced in its stead, and performed to a crowded house with enormous success.

It had been acted already by a company beaten up in that desolate neighbourhood of Cirey. Voltaire had written reams of letters about it to Mademoiselle Quinault, filled with rather doubtful jokes—which were apparently, however, to the taste of Mademoiselle and of the period. The “Prodigal” is in verse and five acts, and perhaps reaches a higher level than most of Voltaire’s easy comedies. There were many surmises as to its authorship. Voltaire himself suggested that it was by one Gresset. Before he withdrew the veil of anonymity, “The Prodigal Son” had been lavishly praised by most of its father’s enemies.

He had other pleasures just now, too, besides that success, to distract him from the thoughts of his health which, as usual, “went to the devil.” “Émilie, reading Newton, … terraces fifty feet wide, balconies, porcelain baths, yellow and silver rooms, niches for Chinese trifles, all that takes a long time,” he wrote to Theriot. Passing travellers too came to Cirey, and told travellers’ tales about it when they returned to Paris. In this year, 1736, Voltaire began an immense correspondence with a Parisian agent of his, an Abbé Moussinot, to whom he wrote about investments and speculations, and whom he commissioned to buy tapestries, diamond shoe-buckles, and scrubbing brushes; reflecting telescopes and hair powder; thermometers, barometers, scent, sponges, dusters—everything in the world. “If you do not want to commit suicide, always have something to do” was one of his own axioms.

Even now, unfortunately for him, all these varied occupations did not give him so much to do that he could not read, re-read, delight in, and talk about until it became public property, a certain little bizarrerie of his versatile mind called “Le Mondain.” A gay little piece is the “Mondain,” three or four pages long, in very flowing verse, a little impertinent, perhaps, and quite volatile and careless. It was written about the same time as “Alzire.” It contains a flippant allusion to Adam and Eve, and the famous expression “le superflu, chose très nécessaire.” Those are the most memorable things in it. The most memorable thing about it is the fury of persecution it brought down on the author and the storm of hatred it excited. The offence was supposed to lie in the allusion to our first parents. The real offence was the name and reputation of Voltaire.

On December 21, 1736, he received a warning letter from his friend d’Argental in Paris, telling him that the “Mondain” rendered its author’s position once more unsafe. It is said that the authorities thought of warning the Marquis that he must no longer give refuge to such a firebrand. Voltaire and Madame had a hurried consultation. Madame wept not a little: for though she was a philosopher she was also a woman, and as a woman, and after her capacity, she loved Voltaire. She strongly opposed the idea of his taking refuge with Prince Frederick: but agreed that he must fly across the frontier. She went with him as far as four-mile distant Vassy, and they parted there, with many tears. The man’s heart was hot with anger and bitterness. The old serpent of injustice and oppression entered into every Eden he found. Madame only remembered that she loved him and that he must leave her. The strange convenances of the day, which permitted so many things, had a few rules, and those few had to be observed rigidly to make up for many laxities. If the Marquise could have gone with Voltaire to England or Prussia, all would have been well. But that was not permitted. Neither she could go with him nor he stay with her. They said good-bye in a bitter cold. It was winter—the winter had come so soon! A few days later there arrived in Brussels, in deep snow, one M. Renol, merchant.

No personal injustice which he ever suffered so deeply affected Voltaire as this one. In some cases if he did not deserve, he at least tempted, the anger of the authorities. But here! “Is it possible that anyone can have taken the thing seriously?” he wrote. “It needs the absurdity and denseness of the golden age to find it dangerous, and the cruelty of the age of iron to persecute the author of a badinage so innocent.” He went to Antwerp, to Amsterdam, and to Leyden. At Brussels “Alzire” was performed in his honour—for all that he was travelling incognito, and M. Renol, merchant, had no reason to be more interested in “Alzire” than anybody else. At Leyden crowds flocked to see him, and he was introduced to Boerhaave, the great doctor. He was at Amsterdam in January, 1737, received with all honour, “living as a philosopher,” studying much, working at Newton—as Voltaire alone knew how to work—at any hour of the night and day, passionately, thoroughly, devotedly. He superintended the printing of his “Elements of Newton’s Philosophy” then in the Dutch press. He tried to forget. But he could not. The offence was rank and smelt to heaven. He was abroad until March. Then in answer to the tears and prayers of his Marquise, he gave out he was going to England—and went to Cirey. But for those tears, but for that faith unfaithful which kept him falsely true, he would have gone to England as he said. “If friendship stronger than all other feelings had not recalled me, I would willingly have spent the rest of my days in a country where at least my enemies could not hurt me: and where caprice, superstition, and the power of a minister need not be feared. … I have always told you that if my father, brother, or son were Prime Minister in a despotic state I would leave it to-morrow. But Madame du Châtelet is more to me than father, brother, or son.” She was. She had been not a little sore and wretched while he was away. Prudence had made his letters perforce so cold! “He calls me ‘Madame’!” The overwhelming vigour of her affection brought him back to her. But even her entreaties for prudence could not keep him from writing a “Defence of Le Mondain,” and an answer to the criticisms thereon, called the “Use of Life.” His heart was hot within him. Fifteen years later the fever burnt still.

“You will say fifteen years have passed since it all happened” he wrote to d’Argental. “No! only one day. For great wrongs are always recent wounds.”