the other remains, the sarcophagus at Sainte Genevieve (the Pantheon) was opened and found to be empty.
In person Voltaire was not engaging, even as a young man. His extraordinary thinness is commemorated, among other things, by the very poor but well-known epigram attributed to Young, and identifying him at once with “Satan, Death and Sin.” In old age he was a mere skeleton, with a long nose and eyes of preternatural brilliancy peering out of his wig. He never seems to have been addicted to any manly sport, and took little exercise. He was sober enough (for his day and society) in eating and drinking generally; but drank coffee, as his contemporary, counterpart and enemy, Johnson, drank tea, in a hardened and inveterate manner. It may be presumed with some certainty that his attentions to women were for the most part platonic; indeed, both on the good and the bad side of him, he was all brain. He appears to have had no great sense of natural beauty, in which point he resembled his generation (though one remarkable story is told of his being deeply affected by Alpine scenery); and, except in his passion for the stage, he does not seem to have cared much for any of the arts. Conversation and literature were, again as in Johnson's case, the sole gods of his idolatry. As for his moral character, the wholly intellectual cast of mind just referred to makes it difficult to judge that. His beliefs or absence of beliefs emancipated him from conventional scruples; and he is not a good subject for those who maintain that a nice morality may exist independently of religion. He was good-natured when not crossed, generous to dependents who made themselves useful to him, and indefatigable in defending the cause of those who were oppressed by the systems with which he was at war. But he was inordinately vain, and totally unscrupulous in gaining money, in attacking an enemy, or in protecting himself when he was threatened with danger. His peculiar fashion of attacking the popular beliefs of his time has also failed to secure the approval of some who had very little sympathy with those beliefs. The only excuse made for the alternate cringing and insult, the alternate abuse and lying, which marked his course in this matter, has been the very weak plea that a man cannot fight with a system—a plea which is sufficiently answered by the retort that a great many men have so fought and have won. Voltaire's works, and especially his private letters, constantly contain the word “l'infâme” and the expression (in full or abbreviated) “ecrasez l'infâme.” 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 has ever failed to correct this gross misapprehension. “L'infâme” is not God; it is not Christ; it is not Christianity; it is not even Catholicism. Its briefest equivalent may be given as “persecuting and privileged orthodoxy” 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 Calas and La Barre.
Vast and various as the work of Voltaire is, 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 regularly.
The first 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. Between fifty and sixty
different pieces (including a few which exist only in fragments or
sketches) are included in his writings, and they cover 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 excellence in their way, but
only one fair second-class comedy, Nanine. His other efforts in
this latter direction are either slight and almost insignificant in
scope, or, as in the case of the somewhat famous Écossaise, deriving
all their interest from being personal libels. His tragedies, on the
other hand, 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 surpassed 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.
Zaïre, among those where love is admitted as a principal motive,
and Mérope, among those where this motive is excluded and kept in
subordination, yield to no plays of their classe
in such interest as is
possible on the model, in stage effect and in uniform literary merit.
Voltaire knew that the public opinion of his time reserved its highest
prizes for a capable and successful dramatist, and he was determined
to win these 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.
As regards his poems proper, of which there are two long ones, the Henriade and the Pucelle, besides smaller pieces, of which a bare catalogue fills fourteen royal octavo columns, their value is very unequal. The Henriade has by universal consent been relegated to the position of a school reading book. 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. The Pucelle, 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 Pucclle's faults, it is amusing. The minor poems are as much above the Pucelle as the Pucelle is above the Henriade. 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 “criticism of life,” 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.
The third division of Voltaire's works in a rational order consists of his prose romances or tales. These productions—incomparably the most remarkable and most absolutely good fruit of his genius—were usually composed as pamphlets, with a purpose of polemic in religion, politics, or what not. Thus Candide attacks religious and philosophical optimism, L'Homme aux quarante écus 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 he learned it partly from Saint Evremond, still more from Anthony Hamilton, partly even from his own enemy Le Sage, is perfectly true, but he gave it perfection and completion. 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 this 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 “pour encourager les autres” (that the shooting of Byng did “encourage the others” 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, the historical, is the bulkiest of all except his correspondence, and some parts of it are or have been among the most read, but it is far from being even among the best. The small treatises on Charles XII. and Peter the Great are indeed models of clear narrative and ingenious if somewhat superficial grasp and arrangement. The so-called Siècle de Louis XIV. and Siècle 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 podrida entitled Essai sur les mœurs, in the Annales de l'empire and in the minor historical works. These defects are an almost total absence of any comprehension 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.
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
