Oration on Voltaire

By Julius Moritzen.

It is hardly to be expected that 144 years after the death of Francois de Voltaire any new and startling facts should have been discovered anent the career of one of the greatest Frenchmen that ever lived. But there is that in the writings of Georg Brandes that when this Danish critic and internationalist undertakes a task like that of writing a new history of Voltaire we are very sure to find an old subject given a new interpretation. That Brandes’ “Francois de Voltaire” is today considered perhaps the most picturesque presentation of a personality whose influence on the history of France has been most profound is but a natural corollary considering what the author of “William Shakespeare, a Critical Study,” did in the case of England when analyzing the character of Shakespeare.

Georg Brandes places Voltaire in the various environments that went to widen the horizon of the French satirist, and it is quite apart from his literary achievements that Voltaire rises before the reader’s mind as having done so much for making nations better acquainted with each other. Himself a man with an international vision, Brandes for this reason emphasizes Voltaire’s English education and what English culture of that period did toward infusing the spirit of liberalism into a France surcharged with the dominance of a Louis XV through an arrogant court circle. Whether or not Voltaire led the way for the Revolution that swept aside a regime that became unbearable, the fact is not to be denied that his last stay at Ferney saw him prepare unconsciously for an event that he had inspired while he himself was far from being revolutionary in spirit.

Banished from French soil for so great a part of his life, Francois de Voltaire could not fail to discern the weak points of his own country’s national life as compared with what England had to show him. Brandes is very explicit on this score.

“Voltaire was released from the Bastile on the second day of May on orders of the King and his royal highness, the Duke,” writes Brandes, “and Conde was instructed to accompany him to Calais and watch him go on board and leave the harbor. His exile, designed as a punishment, proved in every way an advantage to his development.”

Differing as day from night, English social conditions as compared with the France of the period could not fail to impress the young exile.

“Landing at Greenwich,” Brandes continues, “Voltaire slept his first night in London at Lord Bolingbroke’s palace in Pall Mall, after spending the evening in the company of ladies and gentlemen of the most exclusive society. Bolingbroke knew the foremost writers of England, so that through him Voltaire could immediately make their acquaintance, except where language prevented. Bolingbroke called the triumvirate of the English Parnassus, Pope, Swift and Gray, by their first names. Voltaire could not have had a better introduction to the literary and aristocratic world of England.”

It was characteristic of the manners and customs of the day that Voltaire arrived in England supplied with letters of introduction from members of the very French government that had exiled him. The abler men among the ministers were apparently ashamed that they had been obliged to exile a man, not because of what wrongs he had done but because of the injustice he had suffered. The French minister of foreign affairs, M. de Morville, requested Horatio Walpole, a brother of the English Premier, Sir Robert Walpole, and Stair’s successor as England’s ambassador to France, to do all he could for the welfare of Voltaire on English soil.

Brandes places emphasis on a letter Walpole wrote the Duke of Newcastle as follows: “I trust you will pardon me when, at the earnest solicitation of M. de Morville, I recommend to you M. de Voltaire, a writer and a most talented one who has recently come to England in order to have published through subscription a splendid poem, called ‘Henry IV.’ It is true that he has been imprisoned in the Bastile, but not on account of anything having to do with the government. It was merely through a dispute with a private individual, and I therefore hope that your Excellency will bestow on him your favor and protection by furthering the subscription.”

Walpole wrote a similar letter to Bubb Dodington, Duke of Melcombe, the rich and highly placed patron of men of letters in whose house in Eastbury Voltaire lived for more than three months, and whom he always remembered with gratitude as a wealthy and active man, of keen intelligence and sound character. Voltaire at a later period introduced Thierot to him with the remark that he had once sent Dodington his “History of Charles XII” but that now he sent him something much better.

In Eastbury, Voltaire made the acquaintance of Edward Young who, later, was to win repute as a devotional writer, and eventually became his friend. Young had not then become a clergyman and had not yet written his “Night Thoughts” which Voltaire later called a “confusing mixture of bombastical and obscure trivialities.” In Eastbury Voltaire met also James Thomson, the popular author of “The Seasons,” and the impression he left on him was that of a “great genius and great simplicity.”

Very characteristic of Brandes’ style and analytical skill is the following: “From the very first Voltaire had access to the Minister Robert Walpole, the Duke of Newcastle, the Archduchess of Marlborough, and the two courts, that of the King and of the Prince and Princess of Wales. Some years before he had paid his respects, though only in a literary fashion, to King George I, when in 1718 he sent him his ‘Ædipe’ with flattering verses which have a humorous effect today. He termed the clumsy boarish Hanoveranian a man of wisdom and a hero, whereupon the King sent Lord Stair a watch as a gift to Voltaire. A letter from Voltaire to his Lordship requests that he send the watch to his father, for Voltaire evidently hoped to raise himself in his parent’s eyes when he saw that he had a son who received presents from an English monarch.”

“What most impressed Voltaire,” Brandes continues, “who had come from a country where the gag was the sceptre, the chief instrument of the art of government, was the utter absence of such a thing in England. Here every writer, from Swift downward, could attack the policy of the cabinet with a derisive violence that in France would have put him behind the bars for life. Here no one touched a hair on his head. Most remarkable of all, he found this freedom of speech was perfectly consistent with peace and order.

“Voltaire discovered that in England nobility did not stand for caste, but that the great merchant whose trade benefited England and the world was raised to the nobility while he gave the younger sons to civic enterprise and industry. It is unquestionably true that while Voltaire’s exile was meant as a punishment it brought the young writer knowledge and insight. It sharpened his sense for what was actual and his instinct for the possible. It gave to his inborn elasticity of mind that practical understanding without which there can be no great writer.”

II.

While there is no lack of historical accounts about the relations existing between Voltaire and Frederick the Great, yet there are phases of that relationship which still lend themselves to fresh interpretation when viewed by one so keenly analytical as Georg Brandes. The Danish critic declares emphatically that history can show few instances where a ruler in his relations with a great productive mentality has proceeded in such a way as to make the contact significant to both principals.

“In ancient times,” Brandes writes, “Aristotle was the teacher of Alexander, and the latter, when on his campaign would send Aristotle books and material for study. But Alexander could exert no influence on the philosopher. Caesar and Cicero knew each other thoroughly. Cicero was Caesar’s political opponent. Nevertheless, Caesar paid homage to Cicero as the representative of literature and repaid his attacks by showing him knightly attention. But neither Caesar nor Cicero owed each other any intellectual enrichment.

“In later times the relations between Goethe and Karl August lasted from the early youth of both until the death of the prince. Goethe was indebted to the Duke of Weimar for a secure position and received through this connection much experience. But intellectual impression he did not obtain from this source, for in spite of Karl August’s considerable capability, a genius he was not.

“In even later times there is the relationship between Richard Wagner and Ludwig II. Wagner had King Ludwig to thank for comfort and a place where he could work in quiet. But the King did not influence the composer intellectually.

“The historical relation between Voltaire and Frederick the Great stands alone. This is no harmonious relationship. In the course of the first fifteen years enthusiasm is abroad; then the friendship is undermined through Voltaire’s undisciplined methods and Frederick’s exasperation. Then again the relationship is renewed, the break is healed and the friendliness is maintained through the lives of both. This is striking evidence of the spirit of world-citizenship that prevailed in the eighteenth century, since the ruler and the writer belong to two different people, even while their language is the same. But the decisive fact here is that both the writer and the ruler are geniuses, the acknowledged geniuses of the period, and that they influence each other.”

Where Georg Brandes excels in portraying great men of the past is in his masterful pictures of contrasts, the analytical and synthetic so nicely proportioned that in its final presentation the picture leaves no doubt but what scholarly devotion to a set task leaves little to be said on the subject beyond what Brandes himself contributes. On the question of the Voltaire relationship with Frederick he writes further:

“When in August, 1736, Voltaire received the first letter from the Crown Prince of Prussia he was in his forty-second year. The writer was 24 years old. Voltaire was famed throughout Europe and looked upon as the most important author of the period. Frederick was a young prince, unknown except for what he had gone through. He had had to suffer for his inclination and peculiar intellectuality, just as Voltaire had to pay a price for his wit and the revolutionary might of his thinking. Both had been the victims of the brutality of the time and the arbitrariness of the system of government.

“The father of Frederick, whom Carlyle idealized, in spite of all his good qualities as organizer, was restive and quick tempered; with all his rectitude often raw and cruel. He had prescribed an educational program for his son that excluded everything unnecessary, among this Latin and literature. The King detested everything foreign. If he permitted French this was simply because German was then scarcely considered a language. He took pleasure in personally giving his subjects a beating on the street in case the one or other incident gave him dissatisfaction.

“When Frederick as a youth studied forbidden things, got into debt, cared nothing for parades of the troops, the father demanded that he should renounce his right to the throne. When he refused he was treated barbarously, called a coward because he did not resist. In 1730 he made an attempt to escape to England. But an intercepted letter to his friend Katte revealed the scheme to the King. Again he was treated abominably and a court-martial was appointed for the purpose of sentencing him to death. That was the custom of the time. Twelve years before, Peter the Great had his son Alexei beaten to death and he himself wielded the knout. When the Prussian court-martial failed to act as blindly as the Russian the King had the prince put in prison in Kuestrin.”

Passing over the years intervening between that earlier time and when Frederick ascended the throne, May 31, 1740, a period replete with letter writing and exchange of compliments describing in Brandes’ inimitable manner, the Danish critic tells of Frederick’s joy that now at last he can come face to face with the object of his admiration.

“Frederick, in spite of the many things to occupy him, makes his debut as a true disciple of Voltaire,” declares Brandes. “His first act is the doing away with torture as punishment, the dissolution of the Potsdam guard, the guard that the father had hired, secured at whatever cost, and calling back a thinker like Wolff to become once more professor at Halle.”

The first meeting between Voltaire and Frederick the Great gives Brandes an opportunity for bringing into play his exceptional faculty for entering into the very minutest description of these contrasting personalities, and while German culture of that day affected the French satirist quite differently from what he experienced on English soil, still there is no doubt that Voltaire’s international outlook was broadened through contact with the King who in his own way stood head and shoulders over his people.

Badly as Voltaire was being treated at home, the fact that the King of Prussia made so much of him and gave his admiration public expression did not fail to improve his status in the eyes of the leading men of France. The time had gone by when Louis XIV dominated Europe so that fear prevailed because of the French generals and armies. A number of defeats like that at Dettingen resulted in the fact that Europe as a whole made merry on account of French politics and French militarism.

Outside of France Louis the Beloved did not count. All eyes were directed toward the King of Prussia. Every power tried to draw him within its particular circle. The English strove to keep alive his dislike of France. It would mean much to the French nation, who so far had been unable to retain her former allies and had been unsuccessful in gaining new ones, if it by any possibility could enter into an alliance with just that King whose name spelled ingenious energy. Frederick was a hero to Voltaire. On the other hand, Voltaire was the idol of the King. At any rate, therefore, it was worth the trial to utilize the poet as secret diplomat.

What followed has been dealt with exhaustively by many able pens, but Brandes manages to give the historical facts a setting so picturesque and informing that the entire relationships between Frederick the Great and Voltaire appears in a new light and illustrates pointedly what the French nation owed to the man whose doctrines were the cause of a persecution that reflects little glory on the period so far as France was concerned. Nevertheless, Francois de Voltaire has found in the twentieth century no writer who to better purpose brings out the particular qualities that places him among the great internationalists than Georg Brandes has done in his monumental work.

III.

“Voltaire’s ‘Charles XII,’” says Brandes, “stands as a portrait of a remarkable man, executed by a master. It caused Europe to take an interest in the Sweden of that time comparable with what Denmark must thank Shakespeare for in the case of Hamlet.

“Characteristically enough, Voltaire starts his story by a dramatic contrast between the two main persons, Charles XII and Peter the Great, both of whom are sketched in detail. Peter is immediately brought on the scene because no matter how great the interest of the author in the Swedish King’s grandly-planned character and his remarkable fate, his real hero is not Charles, but Peter; not only that bellicose and obstinate in Peter’s character that plunged his country into misfortune, but the sovereign who in spite of the brutal in the pleasures that he sought, in spite of the wildness and cruel vengefulness was an educator, a civilizing influence who conquered a barbarism many centuries old, and introduced industry, technique, building art, science among a people gifted in a way, but fighting against innovations.

“With that clarity that is Voltaire’s foundation quality as historian he places Polish society and the Polish nation side by side with the Swedish and the Russian, and thus the description of August the Strong’s and later Stanislaw Leszczynski’s personalities is as necessary as a background as the characterization of the Swedish and Russian nature through the presentation of Charles XII and Peter the Great.”

With regard to Voltaire’s relations to Russia as a whole, Brandes tells how Frederick the Great looked with jealous eyes on the attention that Voltaire paid to the Russian people in depicting the life-work of Peter, since he looked for undivided devotion of the man whose pen in that day was enough to shed luster on a country. Elizabeth, the daughter of Peter the Great, while uncouth in many ways, was not without taste for intellect and wit, and in approaching Voltaire after becoming Empress sent him her portrait surrounded by large diamonds. But it was in the person of Catherine II that Voltaire a second time enters into acquaintance with a sovereign who is also a genius, a decided and reformative genius, who puts herself into apprenticeship under him and does everything to show him how grateful she is for what he has done.

“There are certain parallels between Frederick and Catherine,” states Brandes. “Both were of German antecedents and had in their blood German respect for intellectual superiority, the German taste for knowledge and mental values. But neither one stood in any cultural relation to Germanism; both wrote and spoke French to perfection. Both were Voltairians to their fingers’ tips. But in spite of their love for French civilization neither one of them had ever seen Paris or France.”

IV.

There is a reference to Voltaire’s internationalism and view of life in the closing chapter of Brandes’ work on the great Frenchman which sums up his personality in a most conspicuous manner, as follows:

“There exists a curious little planet, the highly gifted population of which is distinguished among other things by its equally thoughtless tendency to praise and condemn. It poisons its wise men, it crucifies its saviors, its heroes and thinkers it burns at the stake, its deliverer it puts into prison, then releases them, utilizes them, applauds them after they have died, and then usually puts them into a hole as one would filth or treasure.

“The giant from Sirius discovered this little planet in the universe and found that it was populated by what to him seem funny little creatures, mostly concerned with making existence unpleasant for each other, to destroy and eliminate each other. He did not underestimate their many no doubt valuable and lovable qualities. Now and then he saw them aid each other.

“But he wondered at their marked predilections to misunderstand, ill use and praise their leading personalities. Those who would drag these little beings out of that mudbed of stupidity into which they not unseldom had strayed they liked best of all to drown in this mire. Afterwards they would raise statues in honor of these same individuals, in earliest times made of wood or stone, later of gold and ivory, more recently of marble and bronze. When this was done they took pleasure in throwing all kinds of filthiness on these statues, cleanse them again, then once more defile them, and after a long period let them appear finally in their true shape and color.”

Here we have the story of Francois de Voltaire in a nutshell.