RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Voltaire
conveniently situated near the Swiss frontier; and during this period some of the best features of his personal character came to light. Later Life. There were forty-six miserable peasants at Ferney when he bought the estate; when he died, there were 1,200 well-to-do inhabitants engaged in watch-making, silk-weaving, and other industries, and it was he who built their houses, bought their tools, and sold their productions. His defense of Jean Calas the Huguenot (see Rasaur, Pau) and protection of Sirven show a humanity and courage wholly admirable, while his unwearied endeavors to rehabilitate the names and fortunes of these and of La Barre and Count Lally add only luster to his reputation for justice and fair play. But his writings— and among them are some of his most prominent works: Hssai sur les Meurs et l Esprit des Nations, Dictionnaire Philosophique—show that his polemical passion had become intensified almost to the bursting-point, that his whole mental energy had concentrated itself around the famous motto, Hcrasez Vin- Jame (“crush the infamous one’’), with which he ended every letter he sent to his friends. L’infadme meant, originally, the Roman Catholic Church, then any church which has the support of the State for the enforcement of its doctrine and discipline, and finally it came to mean all religion, so far as it claims a supernatural origin. On this point his hatred is insatiable.. It pervades all his writing, from Candide and Le Diner du comte de Boulinvilliers to La Pucelle and L’Orphéline de la Chine; and in his minor pamphlets, newspaper articles, letters, it drags him not only below his dignity, but beneath decency. This was not the estimate of his own time. When he went to Paris in 1778, he was received with such enthusiasm and such ovations as the world had hardly ever seen before. But the excitement thereby produced was too much for his strength; he fell ill, took too big a dose of opium, and died in delirium.
Voltaire made his mark in literature as a poet. His Zaire, Mahomet, and Mérope were considered the very acme of tragic art. To the public for which
Voltaire wrote, tragic art was only a
His Poetry maze of intricate conventional rules; and but he mastered those rules so com- Philosophy. pletely that his audience sat enchanted, transported, and gazed upon his trag-
edies as upon clouds of ‘“‘ woven wind ”’ floating in the sunshine. Of more solid worth are his historical works. His true merit lies in his respect for facts, for which he may very well have been indebted to Newton and Locke. For history as an organic movement with inner laws of development he had no more conception than others of his age. In part owing to him, history has since his day taken its place as essential to all liberal education. As to his philosophy, strictly speaking Voltaire was no philosopher at all. The higher methods of extracting truth he had never learned, and he was by natural disposition incapable of that sustained effort of thought without which systematic views can not be formed. Nevertheless, he is the true representative of the “‘ Age of Reason’; and the great boast of that age was just its philosophy. Voltaire was
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not an atheist. He could sneer as heartily at the atheists as at the fanatics. His deism was partly a reaction against the corruption, cruelty, bigotry, and superstition of both Roman Catholics and Protestantsin hisday. Asa Deist he started from the three well-known premises of Deism: God, the world, and between them no relation which can be represented under the form of divine revelation or special providence. But to Voltaire God is, because he is a necessity of thought: “‘ if he were not, we would have to invent him.” Of a personal relation between himself and God there was no trace; and, what is still worse, he did not understand that such a relation could truly exist. Of his general conception of God he often spoke with an undercurrent of cold indifference, illuminated now and then with sparks of cynicism, which, to men of strongly marked religious disposition, has made his works an abomination. His method was to attack not so much the principles as the alleged facts of Christianity, or to show the irreconcilability of one Christian notion with other necessary beliefs. He understood nothing of the deeper truths of the Gospel or the lives of its adherents. His criticism, so far as it related to the ultimate nature of Christianity, was literary, superficial, negative, and transitory. The immortality of the soul had no vital place in his thought. The world, on the contrary, was a very serious affair to Voltaire, and a thing he understood.
As a critic, he stands in the very front rank. His instinct of truth was sharp and vivid. With that instinct he combined a never equaled power of illuminating statement. In the service of his vanity, envy, and malice, and used to cover up deliberate falsehoods and lies, his wit is often shocking. But the directness, clearness, and precision of his statement of a fact or an idea has still more often made truth irresistible; and without entering into the details of his activity, his victories, and his defeats, it may be generally said that his criticism developed in modern literature a sense for that which is simple, natural, and clear. See Drtsm, IT., ale C. A. BreckwITH.
BrsuioGRapHy: The ‘‘ Works’ have been repeatedly published—30 vols., Geneva, 1768-77; 70 vols., Kehl and Paris, 1785-89; 54 vols., ib. 1800; 52 vols., with Condorcet’s Vie de Voltaire, ib. 1877-85; they appeared in Eng. transl., 25 vols., London, 1761-65; and a splendid edition, with Life by Morley, was issued in 42 vols., London and New York, 1901. For full list of works by and on Voltaire consult: G. Benegesco, Voltaire: bibliographie, 4 vols., Paris, 1882-90. On his life and works consult: L. M. Chaudon, Historical and Critical Memoirs of the Life and Writings of M. de Voltaire, London, 1786; M. J. A. N. Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, Vie de Voltaire, Kehl, 1789, Paris, 1822, 1895, Eng. transl., 2 vols., London, 1790; E. M. G. Lepan, Vie politique, littéraire et morale de Voltaire, Paris, 1817, 2d ed., 1819; Henry, Lord Brougham, Lives of Men of Letters, vol. iv., London, 1845; J. M. Quérard, Ferney-Voltaire, Paris, 1848; J. Janin, Le Rot Voltaire, 3d ed., Paris, 1861; M. U. Maynard, Voltaire, sa vie et ses euvres, 2 vols., Paris, 1867; B. H. C. K. van der Wyck, Voltaire, Amsterdam, 1868; J. Morley, Voltaire, London, 1872, new ed., 1886; H. Beaune, Voltaire au collége, sa famille, ses études, ses premiers amis, Paris, 1873; E. B. Humley, Voltaire, Edinburgh, 1877; R. d’Argental, Histoire compléte de la vie de Voltaire, Neuchatel, 1878; E. Noel, Voltaire, sa vie et ses euvres, Paris, 1878; G. Norga, Voltaire, sa vie, ses euvres, Paris, 1878; E. de Pompery, La Vie de Voltaire, Paris, 1878; J. Parton, Life of Voltaire, 2 vols., London, 1881; G. Renard, Vie de Voltaire, Paris, 1883; R. Kreiten, Voltaire, 2d ed.,
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