THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

CHAPTER V
Voltaire and the French Enlightenment
I. PARIS: CEDIPE
AT PARIS in 1 742 Voltaire was coaching Mile. Dumesnil to rise to tragic
heights in a rehearsal of his play Merope. She complained that she would
have to have "the very devil" in her to simulate such passion as he required.
"That is just it," answered Voltaire; "you must have the devil in
you to succeed in any of the arts." 1 Even his critics and his enemies
ff
admitted that he himself met this requirement perfectly.
ll avait le diable
said Sainte-Beuve; 2 and De
au corps he had the devil in his body/ 9
Maistre called him the man "into whose hands hell had given all its
powers.'* 3
Unprepossessing, ugly, vain, flippant, obscene, unscrupulous, even at
times dishonest, Voltaire was a man with the faults of his time and
place, missing hardly one. And yet this same Voltaire turns out to have
been tirelessly kind, considerate, lavish of his energy and his purse, as
sedulous in helping friends as in crushing enemies, able to kill with a
stroke of his pen and yet disarmed by the first advance of conciliation;
so contradictory is man.
But all these qualities, good and bad, were secondary, not of the essence
of Voltaire; the astounding and basic thing in him was the inexhaustible
fertility and brilliance of his mind. His works fill ninety-nine volumes, of
which every page is sparkling and fruitful, though they range from sub-
ject to subject across the world as fitfully and bravely as in an encyclopedia.
"My trade is to say what I think": 4 and what he thought was
always worth saying, as what he said was always said incomparably well.
If we do not read him now (though men like Anatole France have been
formed to subtlety and wisdom by poring over his pages), it is because
the theological battles which he fought for us no longer interest us
intimately; we have passed on perhaps to other battle-fields, and are
more absorbed with the economics of this life than with the geography of
the next; the very thoroughness of Voltaire's victory over ecclesiasticism
'Tallentyre, Life of Voltaire; third edition; p. 145.
^Portraits of the Eighteenth Century; New York, 1905; vol. i, p. 196.
""Brandes, Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature; vol. iii, p. 107*