CHAP. LII.] CHARACTER OF VOLTAIRE'S WRITINGS. 315 his son in order to prevent his turning Catholic. Voltaire protected Calas's widow and children, who had themselves been subjected to torture; and by bold and persevering efforts vindicated the memory of Calas and obtained an indemnification for his family, by procuring a revision and reversal of his sentence. At a later period he interfered, but with less success, for another victim of clerical fury. In 1766 two young officers, La Barre and D'Etallonde, were prosecuted by the Bishop of Amiens for mutilating a crucifix erected on a bridge at Abbeville. D'Etallonde escaped by flight; La Barre was convicted on very vague testimony, and sentenced by the Jansenist Court of Abbeville to have his hand and tongue amputated, and to be burnt alive. The Parliament of Paris, on appeal, confirmed the sentence in spite of all Voltaire's efforts; according, however, to the criminal the favour of being beheaded instead of being burnt.' If such scenes were calculated to excite the indignation of a philosophic observer, the intellectual state of the Church might inspire him with contempt. Its glories had been extinguished with Bossuet and the eminent prelates of the age of Louis XIV.; since which period its intellect had sunk in an inverse ratio to the growing enlightenment of the age. Hence the Church, like the other institutions of France, contributed to its own destruction. Unhappily, however, the opposition which it engendered, not content with attacking the Church alone, aimed at upsetting Christianity itself; just as the Monarchy perished in the attacks directed against its abuses. But for these results the authors and abettors of these abuses are mainly responsible. Revolutions act by extremes, just as the overstrained bow regains not its equilibrium till it has been equally distorted in an opposite direction. The popular form in which Voltaire disseminated his principles procured for them a ready and extensive circulation. In England the attacks upon religion were made in a learned and didactic manner, and hence they were little read except by the higher and more educated classes, while the popular literature was rather of a religious cast. Voltaire's attacks were often insinuated in a novel or a poem, and being indirect were perhaps the more effective. The stealthy blow finds us unguarded, and our self-love is flattered by being left to apply a covert insinuation. The Pucelle was calculated to degrade at once the national and the religious traditions of France. In the Henriade a higher subject See Martin, Hist. de France, t. xvi. p. 140 sq. 316 POPULARITY OF VOLTAIRE. [CHAP. LII. is treated in a more elevated tone; but the apotheosis of Henry IV. implies the condemnation of Louis XIV., and the praises of the author of the Edict of Nantes are a concealed satire on its abolisher. Voltaire first made history entertaining, released it from its pedantic fetters, and communicated to it graces hitherto deemed incompatible with the gravity proper to its style. At the same time he made it subservient to his attacks upon the Church. Adopting in his Essai sur les Mours the exactly contrary principle to that followed by Bossuet in his Discours sur l'histoire universelle, Voltaire attributed all the misfortunes of the Middle Ages to Christianity and the faults and errors of the clergy. By his tone of mockery, as an eminent critic has remarked,' Voltaire altered the truth of history, and failed in the very object which he chiefly professed, an impartial judgment of the different historical epochs. The same writer observes that Voltaire is not so incorrect in his facts as is generally represented. His chief fault is that he substitutes caricature for a true picture of the human mind. His Siècle de Louis XIV. is less marked with this defect, and is in every way his best and most trustworthy historical production. At a later period he assailed religion in a more direct and formal manner in his Philosophical Dictionary, but not perhaps with such popular success. Voltaire's wit, vivacity, and admirable style made him the most popular of authors. No writer, perhaps, has exercised a greater and more general influence on his age. It was not in France alone that he was regarded as the Apostle of Reason, and the harbinger of a new era. Many of the sovereigns and statesmen of Europe, Frederick the Great of Prussia, Catharine II. of Russia, Joseph II. of Austria, were among his admirers and correspondents. He even exchanged compliments with Pope Benedict XIV. about his tragedy of Mahomet; and Cardinal Quirini amused himself with translating the Henriade into Latin verse, It was through Voltaire's inspiration that D'Aranda in Spain, Pombal in Portugal, were led to expel the Jesuits. Pombal caused the works of Voltaire and Diderot to be translated into the Portuguese language. Thus through the medium of England, the spirit of the Reformation, degenerating into scepticism, reoperated through the genius of Voltaire upon the most bigoted nations of Europe. Sarcasm and ridicule were Voltaire's great weapons, and to an institution like the French Church of that day none could have 1 Villemain, leç. xvi. CHAP. LII.] THE ENCYCLOPÆDISTS. 317 been more dangerous. No man ever had a keener eye for absurdity and hypocrisy, nor a keener relish in exposing them. His mind, nevertheless, was endowed with some poetical fervour, and hence he recoiled from the cold and repulsive doctrine of materialism, and from the philosophy of the Encyclopædists. Voltaire believed in a Deity; and what man had more cause than he to think that his soul, the source of so many brilliant emanations, was something more than a product of brute matter? He may even be suspected of a lingering affection for the Church which he had reviled. It is at least certain that in his last visit to Paris, he was induced during a dangerous illness to receive the sacrament;1 and that he helped to erect a church near his château at Ferney. The philosophical school known as the Encyclopædists, who outran their master Voltaire, were the contemporaries of his later years. D'Holbach, a rich German baron, was their Mæcenas. D'Holbach had himself some literary pretensions, and was the author of the Système de la Nature, the most complete code of atheism that had yet appeared. D'Holbach gave the philosophers two dinners a week for a period of forty years; whence the Abbé Galliani called him the Maître d'Hôtel de la Philosophie. His table was frequented by Diderot, D'Alembert, Helvétius, Grimm, Raynal, and other beaux esprits of the day. Most of these were contributors to the famous Encyclopédie, whence the school derived their name. This storehouse of knowledge, projected by Diderot in 1750, was the first work of the kind, and was intended also to be a vehicle for the propagation of liberal opinions. Diderot's chief assistant was D'Alembert, a man of great mathematical attainments; who was intrusted with the writing of the preface, intended to throw a veil over the principles advocated in the work. From this school also proceeded many separate works aimed against the Church and the Monarchy. Of all its members Diderot had the most original genius; several of his works, which take a wide range from philosophy to comedy and romance, have considerable merit; but he was desultory in his studies, and deficient in that application by which alone great things can be produced. Among the works of his associates the best known are Helvétius's treatise De l'homme, a poor production, borrowed from the thoughts of his predecessors and contemporaries; and the Abbé Raynal's Histoire des établissemens des Européens dans les deux Indes. In this last, in many respects valuable ' Condorcet, Vie de Voltaire, Euvres, t. i. p. 294; Grimm, Correspondance, &c. t. x. p. 22. 318 JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU. [CHAP. LII. work, Raynal contrived to insert denunciations against kings which seem hardly to belong to his subject. Some of the chapters are said to have been written by Diderot. Raynal was ultimately bought by the Court, and wrote, in 1791, a censure of the Revolution.1 Among the guests at D'Holbach's table by far the most remarkable was Jean Jacques Rousseau. He did not, however, long remain a member of that brilliant society. Naturally of an unsocial disposition, Rousseau seems to have felt ill at ease among men whose position in life was superior to his own, and who had established a literary reputation to which, though already past middle life, he was only beginning to aspire. Marmontel, who was also one of D'Holbach's guests, has left us a picture of Rousseau at this period, "before he had become savage." "Nobody," he says, "better observed the dreary maxim to live with his friends as if they were one day to become his enemies. Yet, as his delicate and irritable self-love was well known, he was treated with the same attentions as would have been bestowed on a pretty but vain and capricious woman, whom one might desire to please." It may be, also, that his disapproval of the tenets of those philosophers, which at all events formed a strong contrast to his own, was among his motives for withdrawing into solitude. The consciousness of brilliant intellect led Rousseau to regard with disgust the cynical materialism of the Encyclopædists, which, like the Darwinism of our own times, degraded man to a level with the beasts. What! Should the only being which could observe and understand the phenomena of nature, study other beings and their relations, be sensible of order, beauty, virtue, and from contemplating the works of the creation could rise to the Creator, love what was good and act accordingly, be nothing but a brute! The man who could feel and reason thus had in him the seeds at least of nobleness and virtue, though partly from his peculiar temperament, partly from the circumstances of his life, they produced only abortive fruits. Endowed with an exquisite sensibility, bordering on, if it did not sometimes actually reach, insanity, Jean Jacques had some real, and many imaginary, grievances to allege against society. From childhood his life had been an almost constant struggle with adversity; he was often in positions which he felt to be unworthy of his genius, Montgaillard, Hist. de France, t. ii. p. 329. That writer had seen Raynal's receipt for 24,000 francs. 2 Marmontel, Mémoires, t. i. p. 327 sq. 3 See the Confession de foi d'un vicairt Savoyard. CHAP. LII.] ROUSSEAU'S VIEWS OF SOCIETY. 319 and he sometimes descended to acts which must have made him despise himself. When a little prosperity at length dawned upon him he found himself, from innate shyness and early habits, incapable of playing a becoming part in society, and thus his irritable pride sustained a thousand wounds. So constituted, it is not surprising that he should have conceived a deadly hatred against the whole social system. His thoughts reverted to man in his unsophisticated state and to an ideal primitive society, which existed only in his own imagination. Of this imaginary world, and of the actual world with which it was contrasted, he wrote with burning thoughts, and with an eloquence and purity of style never excelled in French prose. He appealed to the feeling rather than, like Voltaire and the Encyclopædists, to the reason, and in times of ferment sentiment touches the heart, which argument leaves. unmoved. When he reasoned, indeed, as he generally started from false premisses, he fell into contradictions and absurdities, though the flaws were concealed by a show of rigorous logical deduction highly captivating to his French readers. Among those readers, how many thousands were there who had the same quarrel with society as Rousseau himself, and now saw their secret feelings so admirably expressed! Especially he captivated the women, who had an immense influence on the Revolution. As his theories tended to the complete demolition of the existing order of things, and the reconstruction of society from its foundations, they coincided in a great degree with the actual situation; for, as we have before observed, there was no means of reforming the State, no method left but a thorough revolution. As a writer on social and political science Rousseau's views are glaringly inconsistent. It is well known that he established his literary reputation by his answers to two theses proposed by the Academy of Dijon for prize essays. The first subject was: "Whether the progress of Literature and Art has contributed to purify or to corrupt manners?" the second, "What is the origin of the inequality among mankind? and is it authorized by the law of nature?" In his answers to these questions Rousseau maintained that letters and the arts are a source of corruption; that civil society is an unnatural state of existence; that the development of the higher faculties is prejudicial to mankind; that a rude, contented sort of animal life, without any care for mental culture, is the proper and normal condition of man, and that every deviation from it is degeneracy. From this view it follows, that the institution of property, the source of inequality, was a |