"The Life of Voltaire."

By S. G. Tallontyre. London: Smith, Elder, & Co.

Destiny has been slow in doing justice to the memory of the amazing Frenchman whom Mr. Morley ranks, with Luther and Calvin, among the spiritual regenerators of the world. While Calvin and Luther in their separate ways brought into prominence new ideas of moral order and Divine government, Voltaire proclaimed the power and rights of human intelligence. He led a powerful reaction against the subordination of the intellectual to the moral side of men, and henceforth he was branded as a infidel, and what would now be called a anarchist. Immediately after the French Revolution he was regarded as in some degree an accomplice of its crimes. Napolean, who dreaded Voltaire dead almost more than Madame de Stael living, hired writers to blacken his memory, and the priests, spared no effort on the same side. Dr. Johnson's saying that he would sooner sign a sentence for Rousseau's transportation than for that of any felon who had appeared at the Old Bailey for a long time, and that the difference between Rousseau and Voltaire was so slight that it would be difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity between them, represented for many years afterwards the prevailing English opinion of the rival philosophers who were thus bracketed in a common anathema. Even after the horror and alarm with which he was once regarded by all orthodox people had passed away, although Voltaire was judged more fairly, he was far from being popular, for his scoffing was out of harmony with the more earnest and passionate humanity of the age. In our own day his true character and position have been very clearly marked out both by French and other critics; he has been regarded as something more than a mere smart freethinker, with a fluent tongue and biting pen. Upon the facts of Voltaire's life, which extended from 1694 to 1778, Mr. Tallontyre does not pretend to throw any new light. He takes them as he finds them, and, except on some minor points, he has no quarrel with, the familiar biographers. He thinks that a too exclusive prominence has been given to the grotesque side of Voltaire's career, and that there was as much to command sympathy as to provoke laughter in the hardships of his life with Madame du Chatelet, his unhappy experiences at Frederick's Court, his tiffs with printers, booksellers, and others. Voltaire's liaison with Madame du Chatelet and their life at Cirey, their country seat in Lorraine, is the subject of a lively sketch. The "divine Emilie" was as remarkable a woman as he was a man.

He had a boundless and most generous admiration for her talents—the warmest enthusiasm for her whom he called "a great man, whose only fault was being a woman." He was, indeed, as faithful to her person as he was faithful to his belief in her great intellectual gifts. She was for ever his ideal of feminine erudition, "who listens to Virgil and Tasso and does not disdain a game of picquet," "who understands Newton and loves verses and the wine of Champagne as you do," the sorceress whose charms worked all their magic on his mind but never touched his heart. Metaphysics were her passion. She had the accuracy of Euclid, Voltaire said, and algebra was her amusement. Voltaire was certainly the soul of loyalty. His infatuation for Emilie may have lasted for five years; their friendship endured for fifteen, though there were frequent quarrels and scenes, for Voltaire was hasty and a valetudinarian, and madame was very jealous. Their relationship did not interrupt the work of either; it rather stimulated them to fresh efforts.

No one excited Emilie's jealousy more than Frederick of Prussia. She saw in Frederick a rival for the attention and regard of her lover, and she did her utmost to keep them apart. Yet between the greatest of French wits and the greatest of German soldier-kings there was no real affection. Their admiration for each other's intellect was sincere and great; :in an equal degree they, despised one an other as men; and yet for the pleasure which one found in the other's wit, and the other in the convenience and distinction of being a guest in a palace, they were content to live together, and alternately to flatter and revile one another as long as it was possible to hold together. The King made no secret that he thought Voltaire a swindler, a liar, and a coxcomb. Voltaire laughed in his sleeve at the ridiculous ambition of the great King to win a place in French literature. He let the world know how vainly his Royal friend tried to rise to the level of a third-rate scribbler, and how the coarseness and brutality of his German nature forced itself through the thin varnish of philosophy, and what was in those days called poetry. All this is admirably told in the pages of Macaulay, and we do not know that there is much to learn from Sir. Tallontyre's version, yet that version, like Macaulays, is fairer than Carlyle's. For the Sage of Chelsea, in his desperate effort to make the facts of Frederick's career fit in with the idea he wishes to present of him as a hero, struggles hard to weaken the effect of failures which would have entitled the King to a place in a Dunciad, and of the coarse and brutal manners which went along with his silly vanity, by contrasting his long-suffering forbearance with the tricks and apish mischievousness of Frederick's extraordinary guest. The King, as his biographer depicts him, is a high-souled hero, full of admiration for Voltaire's brightness, and, for the sake of that admiration, pardoning his excesses. As a matter of fact, there is not a pin to choose between the two men, who, be ginning with the most fulsome adulation of one another to be found in all literary history, ended by the bitterest and most unscrupulous hostility.

Their quarrel culminated in a famous farewell in 1753 on the parade-ground at Potsdam.

"Sire, here is M. de Voltaire, who comes to take his orders."
"Eh, bien! M. de Voltaire, you are resolved then, to set out?"
"Sire, urgent business and my health make it necessary for me to do so."
"Monsieur, I wish you a pleasant journey." They, never met again.

Voltaire always repudiated the charge of atheism. He had a far greater belief in God than Spencer, Huxley, and Tyndall, who are more respectfully designated "agnostics." Like Tom Paine, he was a Deist, and would if he were alive to-day perhaps be attending a Unitarian Church. He, indeed, it was, who said, "If God did not exist, it would be necessary, to invent him." All profane jests were fathered on the luckless Voltaire; one need not believe them unless they are specially good. "I die," he wrote, "adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition." His death was hailed with transports of joy by the secular and clerical authorities alike. Yet for any Government that he thought honestly wished to do its duty he had always been ready with applause. Even in extreme old age he upheld Louis XVI. when, as he thought, the Parliament showed itself ungrateful to its restorer, and persuaded himself that the good purpose and patriotism of the King must reap their harvest, and that an era of great prosperity and tranquillity was setting in just as he himself was about to quit the world. It was like laughing at the world, he wrote, to quit it just when the golden age was beginning to dawn. "I myself," he said in 1769, "shall not eat the fruits of the tree of toleration which I have planted. I am too old; my teeth are all gone, but you may be sure that you will one day enjoy them."' He took every occasion to express his sympathy with the cause which had humanity and civilisation with it. He tried hard to save the life of Admiral Byng, who was shot, as Voltaire said in one of his best remembered sarcasms, "pour encourager les autres." When two of his servants robbed him, he helped them to escape from the hanging which would have befallen them had they been arrested. Turks and spiders were his peculiar aversions. The former he hated with the aversion of a Gladstone; the latter he would kill out of a chivalrous feeling for flies. The author closes with an admirable estimate of Voltaire's greatness:—

His real claim to eternal remembrance is far less how he thought or what he wrote than what his writings did. He found the good land covered with abuses in Church and State, and every social order; abuse political, personal, of the rights of the living, and the decent respect owed to the dead —and he uprooted them. With a laugh and blasphemy on his lips, but with eyes and soul afire, and the nervous, tireless hands trembling with eagerness, the most dauntless, passionate, dogged little worker in all human history hewed and hacked at the monstrous tyrannies of centuries, and flung them, dead, from the fine and beautiful soil they had usurped.

 The Advertiser 8 July 1905, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article4939631