Year: 1878

Voltaire died a hundred years ago, May 30, 1776 yet we all know him and have heard him and seen him. There is no getting rid of that face of his, and while he cannot bY any means be called handsome, he has the advan- tage of most handsome men in this respect, that when you have once looked at him in any bust or portrait you can never forget him. Call him what you please: take your pick of the hard names by which he was called, or put them all together and say that he was eagle, ape and snake all in one in that compound of daring, grimace and vile; and yet you do net put him away, but rather fix him in your inn agination by those strong marks He is not lovely character, yet there is much to like in him; and in our judgment of men, as in our criticism of art, a certain amount of contrast or contradiction is needed to command interest and combine sympathy with fear in due pro- portions.

 The mistake that we Americans have gener- ally made in the estimate of Voltaire has come from our looking at him as man by himself, and not as product and representative Of his nation and age. We have regarged him as 8 scoffer, who made war upon the faith of Chris endom and upon the tastes and usages of so- ciety from inborn perversity or wilful mischief, and not as champion of the times in life long fight with the old despotism. Surely no man was more the child of his age than he ]; and although his clear and dashing style brings whatever he wrote home to us now as if he were one of us, we fail to see his point and feel his fire unless we read the men and the conflicts of his own time between the lines. Mir. Morley strongly says of him: ''Yet Vol taire was the very eve of modern illumination. It was he who conveyed to his generation in a multitude of forms the consciousness at once of the power and the rights of human intelli- gence." This is more than we can say of this slashing Frenchman, if we mean by 'his gen. eration' the men in England and America as well as in France in the eighteenth century; but it is quite fair to say that he headed the renaissance of French culture in the last cen- tury, and he took the lead in the fight against the cast-iron state-church absolutism of Bour- bonlsm in behalf of the liberty of citizenship, reason and progress, which had been arrested and driven back by the reactionary policy of the throne and the clergy. There would have been no Voltaire if the French had been allow ed to have the same freedom of development as the English. It was the aim alike of the magnificent administration of Louis XIV, and the execrable dynasty of his great-grandson, Louis XV., not enly te keep down the people, but to make war upon the human mind itself whenever it ventured to step out of the pres cribed paths of conformity. Queen Elizabeth was as fond of having her way as Louis XIV, but in her reign England rose into a sense of national life and generous manhood, and Shakespeare and Bacon Hooker and Milton were genuine developments of it's genus. She did not like the Puritans but they grew in her reign, and they produced that type of religion and of manhood that rose up in vengeance in Cromwell and settled down in institutional or der under William and Mary. That religion and manhood were repressed in France, and this repression and what came of it tells the story of the causes of Voltaire's fiery protest with the pen and of the more fiery protest that came in the revolutions of 1799, and 1793. Voltaire, indeed, was no Puritan, but very much of pagan every way, with evident pre- ference for Marcus Aurelius over Saint Paul, and for Julian the Apostate over Saint Angus tine He did not go with the Puritan party in England, but he assailed them with espe- cial spite, and lauded the Quakers at their ex- pense. Yet the crushing of the Huguenots,

 who were essentially Puritans in France, and all the abominations that went with that move ment, from the murders of St. Bartholmew's

 night to the executions of Calas and La Baue

 made his opportunity, and had much to dc

 with his motive. He went for what he called reasonable opinions, and in this respect he was by no means alone; and thousands were with

 him in every natlon while in England he found powerful body of Deists quite of his

 way of thinking. But what gave hlm power

 was the attempt to put him down, and not on- ly him, but the whole human mind with him.

 He fought because he was obligedSto fight or to be crushed, and so far as making a manly stand against the reigning despotism was con- cerned he was right, and we Americans go with him. For while the pet of court circles, he early tasted the bitterness of court enmity, and after being assaulted by the rufians of a grandee who had been stung by his wit, and after two terms of imprisonment in the Bastile without trial and without law, he started for England in 1726. His three years in England make the second period of his career, the re- mainder of which was comprised within four leading periods-his return to Paris and his re- treat to Civey, 1729- -1749; his visit to Frede- rick the Great and his relations with him, 1750- 1753; his abode in Switzerland mainly at Ferney, 1754-1778: and finally his return to

 Paris February 10, 1778, and his death there

 May 30.

 Voltaire began to write very early, and some of his verses when he was but twelve years old were talked about in the drawing-rooms of Paris He was destined for the bar by his father, but he soon left the study of law for 6eIEes- -lettres, and at the age of twenty-feur years he brought out his first tragedy (''Edi- dus') and had begun his epic poem, the "Hen- riade." There is portrait of him at this pe- ried which, according to his euloglst Houssaye shows him as 'full Of grace and spirit, with a mocking mouth, refined profile, the air of a gentleman, luminous forehead, fine hand in fine ruffle. Yet there must have been something uncanny in his face even at this early age, else women like the Duchess of Berry, who sometimes petted the rising wit, would not have called him 'the wicked mum my" Scapegrace as he was in his youth, he seems to have had within him the germs of his great works, and when he went to England he carried with him the epic poem which has given him his most conspicuous claim to fame, and he had written several tragedies and his best comedy. What England has done for for him it is not easy to say, but it is probable that his historical spirit had it's great impulse from that visit, while his deism took it's set tied form, and he was led as never before to read the destiny of nations in their combined and continuous life. We cannot help asking what would have become of this gifted young Frenchman if he had been allowed to grow up and do his work under the generous influences that surrounded and cheered his cherished as- sociates during that three years visit, at the time when the toleration of William and Mary and the counsels of Locke and Tillotson had done so much to liberalize the religion and the thought of England. He might have been a poet by the side of Pope, and satirist in the style of Swift, but he could never have been the commanding thinker and leader in an age and nation which was to look up to Pitt and Burke as masters of politics, and to Butler and Wesley as champions of religion and ethics.

 If France had given him fair play by ac- cepting the essential principles of civil and re- hgious liberty Voltaire might have done good service in the reconstruction of the nation and might have anticipated the age of Guizot and Thiers. There is somethingin his ''Henriade" that makes patriotic blood jingle with enthusi- asm, and we can conceive of Voltaire joining in the work of reform in 175O that might have made the uprising of 1789 successful, and per haps might have made it as needless as the revolution of 1793 ought to have been. But things were not SO ordered, and the storm came upon France which Voltaire was to ride as the spirit of destruction, aristocratic as at heart he was, a lover of money as well as of courts, and never wholly at swords points with all that goes by the name of religion. His task was mainly that of the destroyer, and he struck at the two powers which he looked upon as at AL zH ! Al