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slowly by. The bosom of the Thames presented a scene of unbroken pageant and on every side could be discerned the signs of freedom and prosperity. It was a pretty welcome from England, in which even the climate was persuaded by the Muses to join, to the man who was to take knightly service on her behalf in the field of letters. Voltaire had plenty of money in his pocket; he was in good spirits, having just been liberated from the Bastille. Still young-he was thirty-two-he was also enjoying one of his brief respites from the ill-health which pursued him all his life. He was to dine that night with Bolingbroke, whose friendship he had already acquired during Bolingbroke's exile at La Source, and he had also a letter in his pocket from Horace Walpole the elder to Bubb Dodington the great patron of literature among the Whigs.

While in England he enjoyed and extended these advantages. He frequented politicians both Whig and Tory and succeeded in collecting £2000 in subscriptions for the 'Henriade,' which he completed during his English visit and dedicated to Queen Caroline. He was, however, more interested in savants and men of letters than in politicians. In 1727 he assists at Newton's funeral and makes friends with Mrs.Conduit, the great man's niece. He frequents the meetings of the Royal Society and also Quaker meetings at Hampstead. He reads the English philosophers, Bacon, Locke, Hobbes, Cudworth, Berkeley, Woolston, Tindal. With some of these he becomes intimate, as also with Clarke, whose 'metaphysical imagina'tion' alarms him. He makes friends with Pope, Young, and Gay. Although he never mastered English for purposes of conversation, he acquired it sufficiently to write and publish an 'Essay on the Civil Wars of France. And also upon the 'Epick poetry of the European nations from Homer down to 'Milton,' a copy of which work presented by him to Sir Hans Sloane, the president of the Royal Society, may be seen in the British Museum. Of these essays Mr. Churton Collins says that they are composed 'not in such English as we should expect to find written by one who had acquired the language, but in such English as would in truth have reflected no 'discredit on Dryden or Swift.'

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Considering the brevity of his sojourn among us—not quite three years-and that during that time he also completed and published the 'Henriade,' collected notes for his ' Charles XII,'

wrote his Brutus,' the first act of which was sketched in English prose, not to speak of the 'Lettres Anglaises' themselves, his activity seems to have been perfectly super-human. He possessed like so many Frenchmen that enviable quality le travail facile. Also he never digs below a certain depth, and his brilliant nimble intelligence was not prone to hesitation. No doubt he played the 'sedulous ape' to thinkers like Bolingbroke and Clarke- picked up' innumerable philosophical perquisites from their conversation. Yet he was no mere plagiarist although his vanity prompted him to conceal his 'sources.' Everything that passed through his mind was transformed in its passage. Truisms as they flashed through his brain became epigrams, his lambent wit flickered round the dry bones of theological controversy till they arose and positively danced with vitality in his crisp and caustic pages. On his arrival in England he found the controversy between the Deists and the apologists of Christianity at its height. The great champion of eighteenth century orthodoxy, Bishop Butler, was still to come, and for the moment the Deists had the best of the fight.

Anthony Collins' 'Discourse on the Grounds and Reasons of 'the Christian Religion' had appeared in 1724 and had made an enormous impression on the public mind. It furnished much matter for denunciation from the pulpit and even for acrimonious discussion in the press. In 1725 appeared the first of Woolston's 'Six Discourses on the Miracles of Christ.' The book was dedicated to the Bishop of London and made an even greater sensation than Collins' attack. Voltaire became intimate with Woolston and gave in the 'Dictionnaire Philo'sophique' a long and enthusiastic account of his labours, and when Woolston was imprisoned and fined for his heterodox views Voltaire made himself responsible for a third of the fine.

No doubt it was not from the English that Voltaire learned his doubts of Christianity. Their scepticism was already to be found in Fontenelle and Bayle, not to mention his own early works. But he found in the English deistic controversy not only encouragement for his own ideas but also an open, serious, methodical and argumentative exposition of them. There were indeed plenty of anti-religious arguments in Bayle, but they were hidden under rhetoric and commonplace. A favourite disguise of the early French free-thinkers was to pose

as extravagant advocates of the dark and mysterious certitudes of faith. After you had shown that all observation and all reasoning led to sceptical conclusions, you wound up by remarking that the orthodox belief so irrefutable and widely held could only owe its vigour to the supernatural virtue of faith depending not on the feeble efforts of human reason but on a direct infusion of supernatural grace. The pages of Fontenelle's 'Histoire des Oracles,' in particular, abound with this trick. The attitude of authority in France armed with the Bastille may have justified, as it certainly explained, this strategy. In England, although Deists were occasionally fined and imprisoned, the appeal was ostensibly to discussion and argument. Dissenters from Christianity spoke out their mind clearly and indeed crudely.

'La liberté de penser, quelque répandue qu'elle fut en France, n'y faisait point partie, comme en Angleterre, de l'esprit public, évitait de s'étaler ouvertement, et ne prenait pas d'allures aussi aggressives. Voltaire trouva donc, sur ce point, l'Angleterre en progrès sur la France. Et de même, il trouva dans les livres anglais toute une philosophie nouvelle, très affirmative et très précise, dont Bayle lui-même ne renfermait que le germe, et qu'il vulgarisa parmi nous. . . . En ce sens donc, l'Angleterre a fait de Voltaire, sceptique, mondain et bel esprit, un philosophe qu'il n'était pas. La philosophie anglaise a donné un corps à son incroyance. Suivant le mot de M. John Morley, "quand il quitta la France, c'était un poète; quand il y revint, c'était un sage.'

Montesquieu in his 'Notes de Voyage' says that there is no religious belief in England, that if a man mentions the subject, his hearers burst into laughter. Montesquieu obviously exaggerates. Nevertheless both the intellectual and moral standards of the Anglican clergy had fallen very low, the elimination of the Nonjurors, who held fast to the high church doctrines and lofty spirituality of the great Caroline divines, had had a disastrous effect on their spiritual character and popular prestige. Apart from a few praiseworthy exceptions the Georgian bishops with their huge incomes differed but little from other great Whig nobles except that they were rather more assiduous courtiers and sycophants. The Free-thinkers of the first half of the century, on the contrary, were remarkable men. They were thoroughly sincere, having nothing to gain and in many cases everything to lose by the expression of unpopular opinions. They had immense energy and a truly

apostolic zeal for their propaganda. They came from all classes. Collins and Tindal were men of the people, always in touch with their readers and using their language. The works of Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke appealed to a more cultured audience. The arguments of the Deists to-day seem flimsy enough, they were in truth finally disposed of in the terms of the controversy by Bishop Butler, but in spite of their inadequacy, in spite of their ultimate defeat, they kept alive in their day a spirit that is infinitely precious. They stood for liberty and the rights of the mind, for the intelligibility of opinions, for the conscientious use of those great words which the well-paid defenders of the Anglican Zion were only too ready to degrade to the controversial necessities of their official position. Voltaire with his amazing flair for the actual detected the spiritual quality of these men and was rewarded by the privilege of its absorption as far as was possible to his mobile, mercurial, so essentially different nature. This is why, however much there may be to criticise in him both as a man and a writer, he remains for ever so important a figure among those who have won for us the liberty of the mind. Under his most prejudiced diatribes, and he is at times the most unfair disputant imaginable, under the veil of fanciful petulance that so often disfigures his pages, a critic worth his ink can always perceive the passion for mental clarity, for the righteousness of the spirit. The effect of the 'Lettres Anglaises' was immediate in France. Public opinion, prepared by the Protestant refugees and by Prévost, was carried off its feet. The next ten years assured the success of English ideas in France.

That success was so great and lasting that it is not too much to say that the French owed to England the great change that produced itself in their literature and their ideas during the second half of the eighteenth century. In large measure that change was due to the respect for the experimental sciences which commerce with English ideas had introduced. Since the seventeenth century, England had been the home of the experimental sciences. The name of Bacon symbolised all the aspirations born of the spirit of observation of natureall those aspirations so magnificently realised by Newton. It is not surprising that the man who maintained that 'discoveries 'should be sought in the light of nature rather than in the 'darkness of antiquity' should have been described by VOL. 225. NO. 459.

D'Alembert in the preliminary discourse to the Encyclopædia as the greatest, the most universal, and the most eloquent ' of philosophers.' What Bacon aspired to, Newton realised. As Voltaire with flippant wit remarked, the heavens declared the glory of the Author of the 'Principia' and the 'Laws 'of Optics.' English science, widening every day its scope, produced on the contemporaries of Voltaire the effect of the greatest renovation of the human spirit since antiquity. The experimental method-the method of Bacon-triumphed over the abstract ideas of Descartes. As early as 1732 Le Clerc wrote:

'Je crois que le monde commence à revenir de cet air décisif que Descartes avait introduit en débitant des conjectures pour des démonstrations, et on ne voit pas un habile homme qui soit autant systématique, pour ainsi dire, qu'il était. Les Anglais surtout sont ceux qui en sont les plus éloignés.'

The moral and social ideals akin to the scientific spirit developed pari passu with its development both in England and in France. Thirty years later, in 1763, Voltaire could write to Helvetius :

'Nous avons pris des Anglais, les annuités, les rentes tournantes, les fonds d'arrondissement, la construction et la manœuvre des vaisseaux, l'attraction, le calcul différentiel, les sept couleurs primitives, l'inoculation. Nous prendrons insensiblement leur noble liberté de penser, et leur profond mépris pour les fadaises de l'école.'

That England happened to be at war with France from time to time did not affect the deeper entente that was not of the flesh but of the spirit. Their governments might fight, but the two nations, pioneers of progress of every description, walked arm in arm, like the great Twins who protected of old the civilisation of Rome. Certainly whatever we may say about the discoveries of Newton, this union of mind between France and England has been the most significant phenomenon of the modern world. No doubt both countries have at times faltered in the path of progress. A stupid king and incompetent ministers lost a large part of a continent to English rule. Nor in more recent days have our 'little wars always been waged on philosophical principles. The French know better than we do their own errors and the explanation of them. It is not given to nations any more than to men to

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