Voltaire/Chapter 11
CHAPTER XI.
LETTERS ON THE ENGLISH.
The untiring and audacious pen of our author soon brought him into trouble which more than counterbalanced the popularity acquired through his tragedy. In his "Temple of Taste" (a satirical poem) he not only treated the most respected names in French literature—Racine, Corneille, Boileau—with a freedom of criticism which, however honest and fair, seemed to their admirers disrespectful, but dealt out to his contemporaries what he (but not they) considered justice. "The work," he says, "has roused up against me all those whom I have not praised sufficiently to their mind, and still more those whom I have not praised at all." The publication of the "Epistle to Uranie," written ten years before, and which, as has been said, he attempted to disown, inflamed yet more the animosity which raged against him. Yet he was at the same time engaged in adding to his "Letters on the English," then nearly ready for publication, an attack on the "Thoughts" of Pascal, which would be fuel to the fire. He had intrusted the work to a printer of Rouen for publication. But he long hesitated to publish it for fear of the consequences, and felt his way carefully by gaining opinions about it. "I have read," he says, "to Cardinal Fleury two letters on the Quakers which I had taken great care to cut and trim, so as not to frighten his devout and sage Eminence. He has found what was left pleasant enough, but the poor man does not know what he has lost." Finally, the Rouen publisher, instigated by the hope of profit which Voltaire's extraordinary repute promised, gave them to the world without the permission of the author. The opposition they aroused was even more violent than Voltaire had anticipated,—the publisher was sent to the Bastille; the whole edition was seized and burnt by order of the Parliament; and the author, finding that another warrant was out against him, found it necessary to seek concealment. "I fear much," he says, "that in present circumstances a fatal blow may be dealt me. There are times when one may do anything with impunity; at others nothing is blameless. It is my hap to experience the hardest treatment for the most frivolous causes. Yet, in two months from this, I might possibly print the Koran without censure." The reader who considers the specimens of these terrible letters, about to be given, will probably agree with Voltaire that it was the writer rather than the book that was the object of such unreasonable persecution.
It is easy to see how a discussion on the various religious sects to be found in England might be made to convey reflections on the Catholic priesthood. He begins with the Quakers. "It seems to me," he says, "that the doctrine and history of a people so remarkable as the Quakers deserve the curiosity of a reasonable man." He had therefore sought an interview with "one of the most celebrated Quakers of England," whose name, it appears, was Andrew Pitt, and who received him in due Quaker fashion. In reply to Voltaire, he explains and justifies by texts the peculiarities of the sect; why they do not acknowledge the efficacy of the two sacraments—why they have no ministers of their religion—why they refuse to address others with salutations and titles, to take oaths, and to serve in war—and why they wear a particular dress.
"You see," comments Voltaire, "how my holy man misused, plausibly enough, three or four passages of sacred writ which seemed to favour his sect, forgetting, in perfect good faith, a hundred passages which crush it. I took good care to contest nothing—there is nothing to gain by disputing with an enthusiast: it is not expedient either to tell a lover of the faults of his mistress, or an advocate of the weakness of his cause, or to talk of reason to one who has spiritual light—so I passed to other matters… I see the sect dying out every day in London. In every country the dominant religion, when it abstains from persecution, swallows up all the others in the end."
On the whole, he treats the Quakers very tenderly, as if he liked them. Nevertheless, what he said about them did not satisfy Andrew Pitt, who afterwards wrote to the author to complain that he had a little embellished the facts of the interview, and "to assure him that God was displeased at his having passed jests on the Quakers."
His next essay, on the Anglican Church, begins by saying, "England is the country of sects: in my Father's house there are many mansions. An Englishman goes to heaven, like a free man, by the road that pleases him." He then gives a satirical sketch of the clergy, such as Fielding might have written without being accused of particular irreverence:—
"The Anglican clergy have retained many Catholic ceremonies, and, above all, that of receiving tithes, with scrupulous exactness. They have also the pious ambition which makes them desire to be the masters; for what vicar does not want to be pope in his own village?" "With respect to morals, the English clergy is better regulated than that of France." This he ascribes to our universities, and to the fact that "they are not called to the dignities of the Church till very late, and at an age when men have no other passions than avarice. Besides, the priests are nearly all married, and the awkward manners contracted at the university, and the little they enjoy of female society there, are the causes why a bishop is ordinarily obliged to be content with his own wife. The priests go sometimes to the tavern because custom allows it; and if they get tipsy, it is with gravity and without scandal."
"That indefinable being who is neither churchman nor layman—in one word, an abbé—is a species unknown in England. The clergy are all set apart, and nearly all pedants. When they hear that in France young men noted for profligacy, and raised to the prelacy by the intrigues of women, make love publicly, cheer themselves with love-songs, give elaborate dinners, and then go to implore the light of the Holy Spirit, boldly calling themselves successors to the apostles—they thank heaven they are Protestants. But these are, as Master Francis Rabelais says, nothing but vile heretics, to be burnt and sent to all the devils—which is the reason why I do not concern myself at all in their affairs."
Presbyterianism fares no better:—
"It is nothing but pure Calvinism, such as had been established in France, and now exists at Geneva. As the clergy of this sect have only very middling salaries from their Church, and consequently cannot live like bishops, they have taken the natural course of exclaiming against honours to which they cannot attain. Figure to yourself the proud Diogenes, who trampled on the pride of Plato—the Scotch Presbyterians do not ill resemble that haughty and beggarly reasoner. They treated their king Charles II. with much less respect than Diogenes showed for Alexander; for when they took up arms for him against Cromwell, who had betrayed them, they made that unfortunate king undergo four sermons a-day.
"Compared with a young and lively French bachelor, gabbling in the morning in the schools of theology, and in the evening carolling with ladies, an Anglican theologian is a Cato; but this Cato would seem a gay youth by the side of a Scotch Presbyterian. He affects a grave deportment, an afflicted air, carries an immense hat, a long cloak over a short coat, preaches through his nose, and gives the name of 'harlot of Babylon' to all Churches in which some ecclesiastics are lucky enough to have two thousand a-year, and where the people are good enough to suffer it, and to call them 'Monseigneur,' 'Your Grandeur, 'Your Eminence.'
"While the Episcopal and Presbyterian sects are the two dominant ones in Great Britain, all the others are welcome, and live well enough together; while most of their preachers hate each other reciprocally with nearly as much cordiality as that with which a Jansenist damns a Jesuit."
And he winds up this letter by saying—
"If there were but one religion in England, its despotism would be formidable; if there were only two, they would throttle each other; but there are thirty, and they live happily and peaceably."
In the same vein he treats other persuasions, and then passes to the Government. He compares the Senates of England and of Rome, and finds no resemblance in them except—
"That in London some members of Parliament are suspected, no doubt wrongfully, of selling their votes on occasion, as was done in Rome. The horrible folly of a war of religion was never known among the Romans; that abomination was reserved for the devout preachers of humility and patience. Pompey and Cæsar, Antony and Augustus, did not fight in order to decide whether the high priest should wear his robe over his shirt or his shirt over his robe."
This, he says, the English have done, though he thinks they never will be guilty of such folly again. He then goes on to draw a comparison between the Governments of Rome and of England altogether to our advantage, and in which he ceases to be sarcastic:—
"The fruit of civil wars in Rome has been slavery—in England, liberty. The English have shed a great deal of blood, no doubt, in their struggles for liberty; but others have shed as much, with the result only of cementing their bonds.
"That which becomes a revolution in England is only a sedition in other countries. A city takes up arms to defend its privileges, whether in Spain, Barbary, or Turkey; immediately mercenary soldiers subjugate it, executioners punish it, and the rest of the nation kisses the rod. The French think the government of this isle of Britain more stormy than the sea which surrounds it, and this is true—but it is when the king begins the tempest, by wishing to make himself master of the vessel of which he is only chief pilot. The civil wars of France have been longer, more cruel, more fertile in crime, than those of England; but not one of them has had for its object a wise liberty."
After describing the condition of the country in the time of King John—
"Whilst the barons, the bishops, the popes, thus tore to pieces the land where each wished to rule, the people, the most useful and even the most virtuous part of a community of men, composed of those who study laws and sciences, of merchants, artisans, lastly of labourers, who exercise the first and most despised of callings—the people, I say, were regarded by them as animals below man. It was far from advisable that these should have part in the government—they were villeins; their labour, their blood, belonged to their masters, who called themselves nobles. The great majority in Europe was what it still is in many countries—serfs of a lord, a species of cattle bought and sold with the land. Ages were necessary to do justice to humanity—to perceive that it was horrible that the great number should sow and the small number reap; and is it not happy for the French that the authority of these minor brigands has been extinguished in France by the legitimate power of the kings, as it has been in England by that of king and people?"
This last sentence is one of his ironical touches. The state of the French peasantry was shocking, as nobody knew better than Voltaire; the "minor brigands," of whom, perhaps, the Chevalier Rohan-Chabot was one, were in full exercise of their oppressive privileges, and so became a chief cause of the Revolution.
"Everything proves," he says, "that the English are bolder and more philosophic than we. A good deal of time must elapse before a certain degree of reason and of intellectual courage can cross the Straits of Dover."
The remaining letters treat chiefly of our philosophers—Bacon, Locke, and Newton—of our Tragedy and Comedy, and of our poets and men of letters. The essay on Locke concludes thus:—
"It is neither Montaigne, nor Locke, nor Bayle, nor Spinosa, nor Hobbes, nor my Lord Shaftesbury, nor Mr Collins, nor Mr Toland, &c., who have lighted the torch of discord in their country; it is, for the most part, those theologians who, having had first the ambition of being chiefs of a sect, have very soon aspired to be chiefs of a party. All the books of modern philosophers put together will never make as much noise in the world as was once caused by the dispute of the Franciscans about the shape of their sleeve and their hood."
The reader will think that there is nothing that we have quoted which could be supposed worthy of imprisonment or persecution; yet there is no doubt that Voltaire's apprehensions were but too well founded. Constantly impelled by his active and clear-sighted intellect to combat what he considered to be abuses, he was often induced to withhold from publication what he had written, because he was not prepared to undergo martyrdom for his opinions; and thus it is that many of his works, after lying in his desk for years, and being made known only to intimate friends, slipt into the world, either through a foreign press, or because the hope of profiting by the fame of the great writer had tempted some knavish publisher to get surreptitious possession of a manuscript, and to print it without the author's sanction. With his eagerness for fame this suppression of his writings was a source of mortification, while to one so excitable of temperament the apprehension of arrest was vexatious in extreme degree; and the twofold annoyance thus inflicted naturally aggravated his animosity against the priests, whom he considered the chief authors of the persecution. But, besides personal resentment, there is no doubt that his very genuine philanthropy also prejudiced him against the clergy: he honestly believed that superstition and fanaticism had caused the greatest calamities and bloodiest wars which history tells of; the religion of his persecutors appeared to him as necessarily a superstitious and fanatical religion; and hence he was constantly impelled to provoke the fresh exercise of their arbitrary authority by the indignation which his former injuries had aroused in him. His desire to enjoy free utterance had often led him to contemplate a voluntary exile, and was very strong in him now. "When I gave permission," he says, "to Thiriot, two years ago, to print these cursed letters, I had arranged to quit France, and to go to enjoy in a free country the greatest delight I know, and the best right of humanity, which is to be dependent on law only, not on the caprice of man. I was very resolute in this idea: friendship alone made me entirely change my determination, and has rendered this country dearer to me than I had hoped for." The particular friendship alluded to forms, as we shall now see, a main element in this epoch of his life.