THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

VOLTAIRE
and superstition makes dead those issues which he found alive. Much of
his fame, too, came of his inimitable conversation; but scripta manent,
verba volant written words remain, while spoken words fiy away, the
winged words of Voltaire with the rest. What is left to us is too much the
flesh of Voltaire, too little the divine fire of his spirit. And yet, darkly as
we see him through the glass of time, what a spirit!
"sheer intelligence
transmuting anger into fun, fire into light"; 5 "a creature of air and flame,
the most excitable that ever lived, composed of more ethereal and more
throbbing atoms than those of other men; there is none whose mental
machinery is more delicate, nor whose equilibrium is at the same time
more shifting and more exact. 5 ' 6 Was he, perhaps, the greatest intellectual
energy in all history?
Certainly he worked harder, and accomplished more, than any other
man of his epoch. "Not to be occupied, and not to exist, amount to the
same thing," he said. "All people are good except those who are idle."
His secretary said that he was a miser only of his time. 7 "One must give
one's self all the occupation one can to make life supportable in this
world. . . . The further I advance in age, the more I find work nec-
essary. It becomes in the long run the greatest of pleasures, and takes the
place of the illusions of life." 8 "If you do not want to commit suicide
always have something to do." 9
Suicide must have been forever tempting him, for he was ever at work.
"It was because he was so thoroughly alive that he filled the whole era
with his life." 10
Contemporary with one of the greatest of centuries
(1694-1778), he was the soul and essence of it. "To name Voltaire," said
Victor Hugo, "is to characterize the entire eighteenth century." 11
Italy
had a Renaissance, and Germany had a Reformation, but France had
Voltaire; he was for his country both Renaissance and Reformation, and
half the Revolution. He carried on the antiseptic scepticism of Montaigne,
and the healthy earthy humor of Rabelais; he fought superstition and
corruption more savagely and effectively than Luther or Erasmus, Calvin
or Knox or Melanchthon; he helped to make the powder with which
Mirabeau and Marat, Danton and Robespierre blew up the Old Regime.
"If we judge of men by what they have done," said Lamartine, "then
Voltaire is incontestably the greatest writer of modern Europe. . . .
Destiny gave him eighty-three years of existence, that he might slowly
decompose the decayed age; he had the time to combat time; and when
he fell he was the conqueror." 12
5
J. M. Robertson, Voltaire; London, 1922; p. 67.
Taine, The Ancient Regime; New York, 1876; p. 262.
Woltaire, Romances; New York, 1889; p. 12.
8 In Sainte-Beuve, i, 226. Tallentyre, 93.
w Morley, Voltaire; London, 1878; p. 14. "Centenary address on Voltaire.
^Romances, pp. vi and ix.
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