Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/726

708 correspondence of Voltaire now comprises more than ten thousand letters. The works relating to him and his doings form a catalogue of four hundred and twenty-eight entries, which will probably be increased before these volumes see the light. Scarcely a month passes without some addition to the wonderful mass. At one time it is a series of letters found in a grocer's shop, or rendered accessible by the death of an heir of one of his princely correspondents; now, an enterprising editor gives his readers an unpublished poem; recently, Mr. Gallatin deposited in the library of the New York Historical Society sixty-six pieces of paper and card containing words written or dictated by him; and in September, 1880, came from Paris the announcement of "Le Sottisier de Voltaire," from one of the eighteen volumes of manuscript in his library at Petersburg. No sooner is an edition of his works published, than it is made incomplete by a new discovery. Since the issue of the ninety-seven-volume edition in 1834, enough matter has accumulated to fill six or seven volumes more.

Still more strange, the mass of his writings, and I may even say every page of them, has to this hour a certain vitality and interest. If it has not intrinsic excellence, it possesses the interest of an obsolete kind of agreeable folly; if it is not truth, it is a record of error that instructs or amuses. He was mistaken in supposing that no man could go to posterity laden with so much baggage. In some cases it is the baggage that floats him, and many readers of today find his prefaces, notes, and introductions more entertaining than the work hidden in the midst of them. Nearly every 'page of this printed matter contains at least an atom of biography, and I can fairly claim to have had my eye upon it, indexed it, and given it consideration.

The reader is probably aware that every circumstance in the history of this man, from the date of his birth to the resting-place of his bones, is matter of controversy. If I had paused to state the various versions of each event and the interpretations put upon each action, this work would have been ten volumes instead of two. It would have been, like many other biographies, not a history of the man, but a history of the struggles of the author in getting at the man. Generally, therefore, I have given only the obvious or most probable truth, and have often refrained from even mentioning anecdotes and statements that I knew to be groundless. Why prolong the life of a falsehood merely for the sake of refuting it?

The Voltaire of these volumes is the nearest to the true one that I have been able to gather and construct. I think the man is to be found In these pages delineated by himself. But he was such an enormous personage, that another writer, equally intent upon truth, could find in the mass of his remains quite another Voltaire.

Now, it is obvious enough from these statements that the work of sifting materials and discussing minutiæ in regard to Voltaire, his multitude of works, and the interminable comment thereon, might have no end. Its perfection, according to the ideals of a pedantic scholarship, is impossible. Numberless details must remain for ever unsettled, and there would remain room for charges of error, no matter how far investigation was pushed. Mr. Parton is the last man who will claim that his treatment of the subject is infallible, but he may justly claim that he has gone as far as fair criticism can demand, toward making his book accurate and trustworthy. Mr. George Saintsbury, who has the reputation of being "one of the highest English authorities on French literature," reviewing Mr. Parton's work in "The Academy," recognizes that Mr. Parton is no "mere book-maker," but a "perfectly honest writer, and appears to have digested his enormous materials with a great deal of diligent effort"; but he thinks he has failed in producing "a work of art and an independent contribution to literature." And what is the evidence of this? Why, that "an innumerable multitude of small errors disfigures his pages." Mr. Saintsbury read the first 250 pages of Mr. Parton's book in careful search of defects, and says that he finds on the margins no less than fifty-four black marks, indicating what he deems imperfections. Some are awkwardnesses of expression, some excusable slips, some inept observations, some critical mistakes, and some actual errors. The examples he gives show the triviality of the blemishes he has marked, and they are mainly of a sort which could never be perfectly eliminated from a performance of this kind. Mr. Saintsbury objects that Parton's biography is not a "work of art," but works of art appeal to the taste, and tastes differ. Mr. Saintsbury comes to his work of criticism as "one of the highest English authorities on French literature." He is an adept in Voltairean studies, and in the first half of a large volume he finds fifty-four petty flaws, some of which are differences of opinion, and some, no doubt, real faults. We want no better evidence of the general ability and fidelity of the work than that a master of the subject can find no more to say against it than is stated in this criticism of "The Academy."