Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/316

Rh 292 VOLTAIKE the word &quot; 1 infame &quot; and the expression in full or abbrevi ated &quot;ecrasez 1 infame.&quot; This has been misunderstood in many ways, the mistake going so far as in some cases to suppose that Voltaire meant Christ by this opprobrious expression. No careful and competent student of his works, whatever that student s sympathies, has ever failed to correct this gross misapprehension. &quot; L infame &quot; is not God ; it is not Christ ; it is not Christianity; it is not even Catholicism. Its briefest equivalent may be given as &quot; persecuting and privileged orthodoxy &quot; in general, and, more particularly, it is the particular system which Voltaire saw around him, of which he had felt the effects in his own exiles and the confiscations of his books, and of which he saw the still worse effects in the hideous sufferings of Galas and La Barre, and in the less hideous but still severe miseries of persons perfectly guiltless, even accord ing to their tormentors, such as the families of Galas and Sirven. Vast and various as the work of Voltaire is, no article such as the present could be even approximately complete without some attempt to give an outline of its general contents and character istics, for its vastness and variety are of the essence of its writer s peculiar quality. The divisions of it have long been recognized, and may be treated in order. The iirst of these divisions in order, not the least in bulk, and, though not the first in merit, inferior to none in the amount of congenial labour spent on it, is the theatre of Voltaire. Between fifty and sixty different pieces (including a few which exist only in fragments or sketches) are included in his writings, and they cover the entire stretch of his literary life. It is at first sight remarkable that Voltaire, whose comic power was undoubtedly far in excess of his tragic, should have written many tragedies of no small excel lence in their way but only one fair second-class comedy, Naninc. His other efforts in this latter direction are quite inferior, being either slight and almost insignificant in scope, or, as in the case of the somewhat famous Ecossaise, deriving all their interest from being personal libels. His tragedies, on the other hand, though they can never fully satisfy those who have been accustomed to the stronger meat of romantic drama, are works of extraordinary merit in their own way. Although Voltaire had neither the perfect versification of Racine nor the noble poetry of Corneille, he sur passed the latter certainly, and the former in the opinion of some not incompetent judges, in playing the difficult and artificial game of the French tragedy. Zaire, among those where love is admitted as a principal motive, and Meropc, among those where this motive is excluded and kept in subordination, yield to no plays of their class in such sustaining of interest as is possible on the model, in adaptation of that model to stage effect, and in uniform, if never very transporting or extraordinary, literary merit. Voltaire was an enthusiastic lover of the stage ; he was intimately acquainted with its laws ; he knew that the public opinion of his time reserved its highest prizes for a capable and successful dramatist ; and he was determined to win those prizes. He therefore set all his wonderful cleverness to the task, going so far as to adopt a little even of that romantic disobedience to the strict classical theory which he condemned, and no doubt sincerely, in Shakespeare. The consequence is that his work in its kind is unlikely ever to be sur passed. It is very different with his poems proper, of which there are two long ones, the Hcnriade and the Puccllc, besides smaller pieces, of which it is enough to say that a bare catalogue of them fills fourteen royal octavo columns. The value of these is very unequal. The Hcnriade has by universal consent been relegated to the posi tion of a school reading book, and perhaps does not hold even that very securely. Constructed and written in almost slavish imitation of Virgil, employing for medium a very unsuitable vehicle the alexandrine couplet (as reformed and rendered monotonous for dramatic purposes) and animated neither by enthusiasm for the subject nor by real understanding thereof, it could not but be an unsatisfactory performance to posterity. The Pucclle, if morally inferior, is from a literary point of view of far more value. It is desultory to a degree ; it is a base libel on religion and history ; it differs from its model Ariosto in being, not, as Ariosto is, a mixture of romance and burlesque, but a sometimes tedious tissue of burlesque pure and simple ; and it is exposed to the objection often and justly urged that much of its fun depends simply on the fact that there were and are many people who believe enough in Christianity to make its jokes give pain to them, and to make their disgust at such jokes piquant to others. Nevertheless, with all the Pucelle s faults, it is amusing less so indeed than its author s prose tales, but still amusing. The minor poems are as much above the Pucelle as the Puccllc is above the Ilcnriade. It is true that there is nothing, or hardly anything, that properly deserves the name of poetry in them no passion, no sense of the beauty of nature, only a narrow &quot;criticism of life,&quot; only a conventional and restricted choice of language, a cramped and monotonous prosody, and none of that indefinite suggestion which has been rightly said to be of the poetic essence. But there is immense wit, a wonderful command of such metre and language as the taste of the time allowed to the poet, occasionally a singular if somewhat artificial grace, and a curious felicity of diction and manner on occasions proper to the poet s genius. The third division of Voltaire s works in a rational order (though it is usually placed later in the editions) consists of his prose romances 6r tales. These productions incomparably the most remarkable and most absolutely good fruit of his genius were usually, if not always, composed as pamphlets, with a purpose of polemic in religion, politics, or what not. Thus Candide attacks religious and philosophical optimism, L Hommc aux Quarante Ecus certain social and political ways of the time, Zadig and others the received forms of moral and metaphysical orthodoxy, while some are mere lampoons on the Bible, the unfailing source of Voltaire s wit. But (as always happens in the case of literary work where the form exactly suits the author s genius) the purpose in all the best of them disappears almost entirely. It is in these works more than in any others that the peculiar quality of Voltaire ironic style without exaggeration appears. That lie learned it partly from St Evremond, still more from Anthony Hamilton, partly even from his own enemy Le Sage, is perfectly true, but he gave it perfection and completion. There is no room to analyse it here ; but, if one especial peculiarity can be singled out, it is the extreme restraint and simplicity of the verbal treatment. Voltaire never dwells too long on his point, stays to laugh at what he has said, elucidates or comments on his own jokes, guffaws over them, or exaggerates their form. The famous &quot; pour encourager les autres &quot; (that the shooting of Byng did &quot;encourage the others&quot; very much is not to the point) is a typical example, and indeed the whole of Candide shows the style at its perfection. The fourth division of Voltaire s work, as we shall rank it here, his historical icork, is the bulkiest of all except his correspond ence, and some parts of it are or have been among the most read, but it is far from being the best, or even among the best. The universally known small treatises on Charles XII. and Peter the Great are indeed models of clear narrative and ingenious if some what superficial grasp and arrangement in little of considerable subjects. The so-called Siecle de Louis XIV. and Sicclc de Louis XV. (the latter inferior to the former but still valuable) contain a great miscellany of interesting matter, treated by a man of great acuteness and unsurpassed power of writing, who had also had access to much important private information. But even in these books defects are present, which appear much more strongly in the singular olla jwdrida entitled E-ssai sur les Mccurs, in the Annalcs de I Empire, and in the minor historical works of which there are many. These defects are an almost total absence of any compre hension of what has since been called the philosophy of history, the constant presence of gross prejudice, frequent inaccuracy of detail, and, above all, a complete incapacity to look at anything except from the narrow standpoint of a half pessimist and half self- satisfied philosophe of the 18th century. Attempts have been made to argue that Voltaire s admitted want of catholicity and apprecia tion was merely the fault of his time ; but, while this would be an insufficient plea if granted, it is not the fact. Montesquieu, to name no other of his contemporaries, had if not a perfect yet a distinct sense of the necessity of dealing with other times and other manners so as to take to some extent the point of view of the actors ; Voltaire had none. And, though he was very far from being an idle man, he cannot be said to have been extraordinarily anxious to secure accuracy of fact. His work in physics concerns us less than any other here ; it is, however, not inconsiderable in bulk, and is said by experts to give proof of aptitude. To his own age Voltaire was pre-eminently a poet and a philosopher; the unkindness of succeeding ages has sometimes questioned whether he had any title to either name and especially to the latter. His largest philosophical work, at least so-called, is the curious medley entitled Didionnairc Philosopliiquc, which is compounded of the articles contributed by him to the great Encyclopedic and of several minor pieces. No one of Voltaire s works shows his anti-religious or at least anti-ecclesiastical animus more strongly. The various title-words of the several articles are often the merest stalking horses, under cover of which to shoot at the Bible or the church, the target being now and then shifted to the political institutions of the writer s country, his personal foes, &c. , and the whole being largely seasoned with that acute, rather superficial, common-sense, but also commonplace, ethical and social criticism which the 18th century called philosophy. The book ranks perhaps second only to the novels as showing the character, literary and personal, of Voltaire ; and despite its form it is nearly as readable. The minor philosophical works are of no very different