VOLTAIRE (Francois-Marie Arouet, 1694-1778) is probably the last great writer in Western history with any claim to universal scope. In his day he was admired all over Europe as a poet and dramatist (tastes have changed, of course), and there is a span of sixty years between his first tragedy, Oedipe, produced in 1718 and his last, Irene, at the production of which in Paris the frail old man of eighty-four witnessed the crowning of his bust on the stage; the excitement of this apotheosis no doubt helped to hasten his death a few weeks later. He was a scientist and philosopher of more than amateur competence, a distinguished historian, the first in France to lift history from the level of chronicles of kings and battles, or one-sided propaganda exercises such as Bossuet's Histoire universelle. He was a supreme master of prose fiction, whose philosophical tales, such as Zadig and Candide, have never been equalled. A deadly satirist and polemicist, he was yet full of compassion and practical kindness towards victims of injustice, cruelty or ill-fortune. In the midst of all this he found time to keep up the most voluminous correspondence ever known, not merely in his own country but with people all over Europe. And for clarity, lightness and simplicity his prose style is unique. For the last twenty or thirtyyears of his long lifehe was revered throughout Europe as the monarch of letters, and every distinguished traveller made a point of calling at his house at Ferney, near Geneva (though it is said that soon after Boswell's arrival Voltaire found he had a cold and was confined to his room).
The story, partly mythological, surrounding Voltaire's "Lettres philosophiques (here called "Letters on England) is well known. The young writer, already notorious for satirical poems and lampoons of all kinds, was publicly insulted by the Chevalier de Rohan. He committed the social impudence of challenging an aristocrat to a duel. The Chevalier, too grand to accept such a challenge, set his servants on to him to beat him up, and Voltaire, to escape the Bastille or worse, fled to England with the connivance of the authorities, arriving in London in early May 1726. He stayed in England, apart from one quick dash to France for business reasons, for the best part of three years, and what he saw, heard and read changed his life (so goes the legend). He had left a land of slavery, intolerance and darkness and he found one of freedom, tolerance and enlightenment. He had left a virtually feudal civilization in which the people had no say, and any independent thought was subversive; where the Catholic Church was totally intolerant; in which artists, scientists and men of letters were treated as domestics and, without patronage or independent means, had no hope of success. He found a country enjoying religious tolerance (relative, of course), political freedom and democracy (limited by modern standards), with enlightened views on science and philosophy. Literary men were listened to, artists were honoured. He wrote down his impressions in these LETTERS, published in 1734, well after his return to France, an English version, LETTERS CONCERNING THE ENGLISH NATION BY M. DE VOLTAIRE, having appeared in London in 1733. The book outraged the French authorities, who rightly saw in it a wholesale criticism of the French system, and its printing was forbidden in France. The fuss caused by its appearance sent Voltaire on his travels again. He deemed it prudent to live in Lorraine, and indeed for most of the rest of his life he lived very near some frontier over which he could skip into safety at the first sign of trouble.
The truth about Voltaire's conversion into an admirer of things English is less dramatic and more complicated, as real life usually is. The rarest thing in the world is sudden conversion without any predisposition or preparation; more often people find what they have already been looking for. Which may help to answer the question: Why go to England? Why not cross a simple land frontier into the Low Countries or one of the German states? French was almost a second language there, and in Holland the business of publishing French books, especially those held to be subversive, had already gone on for generations.
The answer is that for a long time before 1726 Voltaire had been intensely interested in English thought and institutions, and had admired much in England's civilization which appealed to the practical side of his character. Throughout Voltaire's thought there runs, like a recurring LEITMOTIV, his dislike and mistrust of the purely theoretical edifice of unsupported reasoning so characteristic of the French genius, and his preference for practical proof, demonstration, application. A theory is valueless until experiment proves its truth. Hence his mistrust, for example, of Descartes, with his carefully constructed edifice of pure reason, and preference for Locke, who observes the development of a child through the impressions of the material world registered by its five senses. Hence his profound admiration for Newton who, when he found that his calculations did not tally with the then known measurements of the earth, promptly abandoned his calculations until those measurements could be properly established. This is the Voltaire who will say thirty years later with his Candide: il faut FAUT CULTIVER SON JARDIN, which might very loosely be rendered: abandoning philosophical hot air, we must each get on with the practical job that lies to hand.
Moreover, this admiration for England is found in his writings well before his sojourn in England. In his epic poem LA HENRIADE, on Henri IV, first published in 1724, there is more than one passage extolling Elizabethan England, its practical success, its trade and prosperity.
But there was a personal influence of the first importance. Bolingbroke, the great Tory politician under Queen Anne, having compromised himself with the Jacobites, retired to France at the advent of George I and stayed there from 1714 until 1723. There he married, as his second wife, the Marquise de Villette and kept open house in a chateau not far from Paris. It was here that Voltaire was a frequent visitor and from this source that he imbibed much of his knowledge and opinions about England. After his arrival in this country Voltaire renewed the acquaintance at the Bolingbroke home near Uxbridge.
Throughout his career Voltaire was an astute business man-indeed he managed his affairs so well that he became one of the wealthiest of all writers before modern times, when copyright, serial rights and properly organized royalties have made literary success financially rewarding. It is not therefore to be wondered at that, in addition to these other inducements to live in England (not unlike the attractions of the United States to Europeans early this century), he was influenced by the chance of publishing LA HENRIADE in a good, luxurious edition in London instead of having to rely on clandestine printing and publication, as had been the case in France. To this end, and to make his stay in England useful, he set to work very seriously to perfect his English. How else to understand our literature and get information from the famous people he met? Remarkably soon he was able to write, in October 1726, a letter to his friend Thieriot in very passable English. So he put this to good account by publishing at the end of 1727 AN ESSAY UPON EPICK POETRY, a historical review of the epic genre, including Milton (to flatter his English readers), designed clearly as a boost for his forthcoming HENRIADE which was published in March 1728 and astutely dedicated to the Queen of England. Everything was grist to his mill.
During his stay of nearly three years Voltaire was constantly on the move in London or visiting country houses, ceaselessly talking to representative people, picking up information. He renewed contact with Bolingbroke, he lived for some months at the home in Wandsworth, then an outlying village, of Everard Fawkener (or Falkener), a wealthy business man whom he had met in Paris in 1725. He did not allow his devotion to Bolingbroke to prevent his frequenting Walpole and the Whig hierarchy, for they were now in power. He met the distinguished writers of the day, John Gay, Pope, whose guest he was at Twickenham, saw Swift on one of the Dean's absences from Dublin and established a correspondence with him, Samuel Clarke and many others. He met Congreve, knew theatrical figures such as Colley Cibber, admired the art of the actress Mrs Oldfield (mentioned in Letter 23), was in London at the time of the run of the BEGGAR'S OPERA, was a frequent member of the audience at Drury Lane, where he saw productions of Shakespeare. Since he mentions the star singers Senesino and Cuzzoni (Letter 23) it is a fair guess that he went to the Handel operas at the Haymarket. He was presented at Court and patronized by Queen Caroline who, like all good Germans at that time, spoke French; and, perhaps most significant of all, witnessed in April 1727 the state funeral in Westminster Abbey of Isaac Newton, a mere scientist, at which the highest in the land were proud to act as pall-bearers.
Given all these demonstrations of English freedom, tolerance and the liveliness of English thought, and the fact that the obvious intention of the LETTERS was to attack the French system by holding up the English model, it would not have been surprising if Voltaire had overdone the merits and virtues of England. So many since, when criticizing their own country, have held up some other as a flawless Utopia. Voltaire never. He is wise enough to moderate his idolatry and flatter the French with some timely bubble-prickings, ironical references to faults, shortcomings or comical quirks of the English, sensing rightly that to hold up the English as perfect would merely put the French reader off". Throughout his career Voltaire was an expert at sugaring the pill. So we are shown, for instance, the funny side of the Quakers, the dreary, life-denying gloom of the Presbyterians. Nor, in the midst of a hymn of praise to the religious tolerance of the English, does he omit to mention that of course nobody's religion is allowed to interfere with the important business of the City and Stock Exchange. Our political system of a limited, constitutional monarchy may be preferable to French despotism, but there is no harm in waxing merry over the antics of the House of Commons. The enlightenment of the English in introducing vaccination for smallpox, then one of the major scourges of mankind, may be admirable, but it is as well to point out that the practice, brought back from Turkey by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, only became common after the Princess of Wales, later Queen Caroline, had tried it on her own children, when it immediately became fashionable. For all their anti-French propaganda the LETTERS are almost as much a satire on the English.
All this explains the curious composition of the book and some of its omissions. The French reader in search of information about English life, manners and customs, would find nothing except accounts of various religious sects, a sketchy treatment of our political system, the famous letter on vaccination for smallpox, long and fairly detailed studies of our science, with particular reference to Newton, whom Voltaire rightly hails as one of the greatest geniuses the world had so far seen, a perfunctory study of our literature and cultural life (but nothing on music, painting or architecture) and finally the examination of some of the Pensées of Pascal which has no obvious connection with the rest. Not a word about the buildings or streets of London or the grand country houses in which he frequently stayed. The only two architectural features in London that he mentions are Westminster Abbey, because Newton's funeral was there, and the Monument, because he attended a Quaker meeting nearby. And, of course, nothing about the English way of life - food, clothing, amusements. Here Voltaire is very much of his age, but he will evolve later with the century and bring touches of local colour into his plays and his tales.
Popular legend, especially outside France, has portrayed Voltaire as the eternal mocker, even a sort of grinning atheist. Nothing could be further from the truth. At least one full-length book has been written about Voltaire's religion. He was haunted by religion all his life, but religion does not imply accepting involved theology or subscribing to ridiculous dogmas. To Voltaire it simply meant leading a good and useful life (practical again) in the hope that there is at last some ultimate justice in the universe. As he expressed it in a famous line: 'If God did not exist, he would have to be invented.' His attitude towards religion, very simplified, may be expressed as follows: a man's religion is his own honest views about the universe and the possible existence of a supernatural agency. His views are his business AND NOBODY ELSE'S. Given that it is equally impossible to prove by reason either that God exists or that He does not, nobody whatsoever has any right to dictate what another man believes or whether he believes at all. Any intellectual system which says: 'I am right and all the others are wrong', automatically disqualifies itself. Any dogma claiming exclusive possession of the truth is intolerant of other equally well- or ill-founded views. Intolerance is one of the unforgivable sins in Voltaire's eyes, the others being injustice and cruelty. Now, a religious system which reinforces its intellectual intolerance by denying human rights to those who disagree, by persecution, torture or even death, is not merely indefensible but evil. Hence Voltaire's implacable, lifelong opposition to the Catholic Church. But this raises a question: How far can tolerance go without becoming lazy permissiveness? Where is the point at which tolerance itself becomes evil? How does Voltaire's anti-Catholicism square with the famous remark attributed to him: 'I hate your opinions, but I would die to defend your right to express them.'? Was Voltaire himself being intolerant? But how can a man tolerate a system committed to destroying him? The same dilemma is posed by some political systems today.
It was from this point of view that he looked at the various manifestations of organized religion in England (and by England he means the United Kingdom). The acid test of tolerance is applied once again. The established Anglican Church is ruled out not merely by the scandalously wealthy and slothful lives of many of its priests at that time, but because it denies university education and therefore closes most of the learned professions to non-Anglicans. The Presbyterians are morally intolerant as well as ridiculous because they ban as sinful most of the things that make social life civilized, the innocent pleasures that make life worth living.
This is why Voltaire is so attracted by the Quakers, with their simple, undogmatic cult of spiritual and moral values, the good life, unselfishness and kindness. But although he admires them more than any other sect (ever practical, he judges by the visible effect of their religion upon their fives), he cannot help seeing the comic side of their behaviour. To wear funny clothes and funny hats, to 'thee-thou' everybody, to refuse to take legal oaths, in a word to advertise that they are different, a people apart, is, in Voltaire's view, vanity, however harmless.
Voltaire deliberately blurs the frontiers between Arianism, Socinianism and Anti-Trinitarianism probably in order to show that English Unitarians, or indeed all monotheists, amount to the same thing and have widespread support all over Europe, if not the world. But he regrets that this belief, supported as he claims by the finest intellects in England, Locke, Newton, Samuel Clarke, can never have much popular appeal because it is purely intellectual and its adherents have no wish to make proselytes.
Voltaire's review of the state of religion in England was very ill-served by events. Within about five years of the publication of his attack on the corruption and intolerance of the Anglican Church, perfectly true at that moment, two ordained priests of that Church, John and Charles Wesley, led a nationwide revival of pure Christianity, and a new sect, Methodism, came into being to complicate his rather simple story.
It is a typically Voltairean trick to add a dose of propaganda to everything — he was an inspired journalist. So he tacks on to these letters about England a critical consideration of some Pensees of Pascal, with no immediately obvious connection. Two of the dominant themes of his writing will always be horror at the suffering inflicted upon mankind throughout the ages by religious bigotry and sectarian disputes, and hostility to any form of puritanical austerity which aims to suppress the arts, the beautiful things, the pleasant occupations that make the joy of life. Life is to be enjoyed, and the only sanctions should be against enjoyments that hurt or imperil our fellow men. Now, Pascal was the spokesman of Jansenism, the austere puritanical movement within the Catholic Church, which, moreover, subscribed to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, that is, the terrible belief that only a tiny minority of us is chosen by grace for salvation, and then only on condition that those elect must by their lives and actions deserve it. The rest of mankind, whatever it does and however virtuously it lives, is doomed to everlasting hell. Against this warped view of a good, loving and just God Voltaire recoiled with horror. On the other hand the supreme intelligence of Pascal, who was a great scientist, and his position as master of some of the most eloquent, spell-binding prose in the French language compelled Voltaire's admiration and led to a sort of love-hate relationship with Pascal that lasted all his life. It was this emotional spell of Pascal that Voltaire felt he must struggle against, and the resemblance between some of the more frightening PENSEES and the dreary and cruel ideas of some British Nonconformists justifies this long appendix.
In politics and economics the tale is similar and needs far less elaboration here. Voltaire admires the progressive liberation of the English, since Magna Carta, from the despotism of King and Church, the gradual development of equality before the law, and above all the system of taxation, however rudimentary it may seem to us compared with the complexity of modern times, whereby nobody is exempt from tax. The inequity of the tax system in France was a scandal which was to be one of the causes of the Revolution, for the aristocracy and the higher clergy were exempt, which of course meant that not only trade and commerce, the real sources of wealth and always respected in England, but also the working people and peasants were crushed beneath the burden of taxation, while the drones and spendthrifts went scot free. But Voltaire had no illusions about the virtues of the 'natural man'. He was much too near the seventeenth century, and also far too clear an observer of human kind, to be taken in by such naivete. The dictatorship of the mob was to be an invention of Rousseau, or that was what the mob read into him. Years later, when the natural man became fashionable, Voltaire was to write one of his greatest stories about him. L'INGENU, a Huron, drops straight from his prairies into eighteenth-century France and behaves as a natural man, to the consternation of all but a few prurient ladies who see in him the possibility of a new thrill.
Important though religious freedom and political liberalism might be to him, the most significant part of these LETTERS, and the part which was to exert a decisive influence upon eighteenth-century France, was the change of values due to his discovery of English philosophical thought and scientific knowledge. The letters on Bacon, Locke and Newton are the most serious and technical in the book. Bacon and Locke are hailed as great, practical thinkers whose empirical approach freed scientific thought from the fogs of speculation, metaphysics, A PRIORI assumptions, and brought it into the light of observed, experimental reality. For a little book purporting to be notes on aspects of English life and thought, the chapters on Newton are remarkably detailed and epoch-making as popular expositions of Newtonian physics, that is to say of science, that remained valid for nearly two centuries. He expounds with a clarity that renders them comprehensible to non-scientists such things as the theory of attraction, optics, astronomy, the reform of chronology and the calculus. He was of course to return to a more detailed exposition of this in his ELEMENTS DE LA PHYSIQUE DE NEWTON, published in 1738, only four years later.
In any work, but above all in a work of propaganda, it is valuable to look for the omissions and ask oneself what rule, deliberate falsehood, guile or mere obtuseness explains the selective character of the data used. The omissions from these LETTERS are extremely suggestive, and the reasons for them fairly clear. His preoccupation with religion and the variety of sects would lead us to expect some mention of the important role of the English Freethinkers, especially as Voltaire himself could not accept dogmatic religion. Indeed the position of Toland, Collins, Tindal and the rest ought to have appealed strongly to Voltaire, for they merely demanded that belief in any religious theory must depend upon reason. The omission is all the more surprising since he devotes a chapter to what he calls Socinians, and welcomes the unitarianism he ascribes to such eminent thinkers as Newton and, he claims, Locke. One can only conclude that here Voltaire was being prudent in the knowledge that the inclusion of all this would cause his book to be condemned out of hand.
But it is in the letters on English literature that Voltaire is at his most selective. To begin with, the section on literature is the most perfunctory in the book, often consisting of a page or two of generalities for a whole genre or some important authors. Some of the omissions, however, are so glaring that they cannot be due to mere sketchiness, but must have a reason. The most obvious, perhaps, is GULLIVER'S TRAVELS. We know he admired Swift and especially Swift's great satire. It can only be thatGULLIVER, with its ferocious exposure of so many faults and idiocies of the English, would undermine all his carefully constructed edifice of England as the land of tolerance, democracy and humane civilization. Equally surprising is the omission of Milton from his study of poetry, especially as he had recently discussed him in his ESSAY UPON EPICK POETRY. Of course the puritanism of Milton was foreign to all Voltaire's instincts, but to omit PARADISE LOST while making room for people like Waller or Rochester does seem a little one-sided. It is true that Voltaire was the first Frenchman to make an effort to see something in Shakespeare, several of whose plays he saw performed at Drury Lane. He even saw genius in Shakespeare while condemning him as wholly lacking in taste, moderation, observance of the ' rules' and in fact all the qualities of the French classical theatre. He does, however, show some shrewdness when he remarks that the very success of Shakespeare on the stage has inhibited initiative ever since, as writers have thought him beyond praise and therefore simply imitated him. A similar thing was to happen to English music in the eighteenth century, when Handel was deemed incomparable and the only model to imitate. But it is sad to see Voltaire acclaiming Addison's CATO as the NE PLUS ULTRA of the English theatre
The truth of the matter is that Voltaire came at the most Frenchified moment of our literature, at least since Anglo-Norman times, and his informants all belonged to that way of thinking. The compatriot of Corneille, Moliere, Racine and Boileau felt quite at home with Dryden, Congreve, Addison and Pope, though he did find Wycherley somewhat strong meat. It is a pity that Voltaire was only interested in poetical or dramatic literature, for the great prose writers (unless scientific or philosophical) seem to have passed him by. Not only is no prose of Swift discussed, but he spent three years in the land of Bunyan and Defoe without apparently having heard of them. Less surprising, given his French upbringing (and he was Parisian into the bargain) and the English circles in which he moved, but none the less serious a case of blindness, is that he never even noticed that the English, at any rate since Chaucer, have carried on a love-affair with nature. Love is not blind, and the English have always had eyes for flowers, trees, skies, seasons, beasts and birds, described them accurately and called them by their proper names. Not even the most bewigged classicism could resist this national instinct, and it is ironical that at the very time when Voltaire was in England Thomson was publishing his SEASONS, which was to have an immense influence upon the revival of interest in nature in France.
This little book contains the seed of so much of Voltaire's later thought and was one of the most influential books of the century upon social, economic and political thinking. By its radical change of values and attitudes it may be said to be a purely intellectual ingredient in the mixture that was to explode some sixty years later in the French Revolution, though had he lived to see it Voltaire would have deplored it as an outbreak of unreason, intolerance and violence bringing civilized human beings down to the level of animals.
But he did live to see one development which was far from his mind when he wrote it. By helping to make English things fashionable he threw open the door to the cult of English sentimentality, the immense influence of Richardson (translated into French by the Abbé Prévost), the stock Englishman in fiction (such as Milord Edouard in Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïs), Le Jardin Anglais, picturesque ruins, ' Gothick ' horrors; in a word the whole apparatus of pre-Romanticism.
Voltaire tinkered with his texts all through his life. Passages were suppressed, added and sometimes lifted from one work and published again in another. This makes the selection of the 'right' text very hazardous, and it is unwise to use any of the complete editions of his works.
But fortunately in this case the work of deciding on a definitive text has been done by Gustave Lanson in his masterly edition ( Lettres Philosophiques, Société des Textes Francais Modernes, Hachette, 2 vols, 1915). Lanson uses the first French edition of 1734, published, in spite of the name Amsterdam on the title-page, by Jore in Rouen. The Lanson text is followed by Raymond Naves (Classiques Garnier, 1951) which I have used as a working text. The text in the Pleiade edition (1961) also follows Lanson, but it has at least one very serious misreading.
The number of books on Voltaire, even in English, is of course considerable. Theodore Besterman: VOLTAIRE (Longmans, 1969) is the fullest biography, extremely interesting to read, with many letters of Voltaire, as one would expect from the editor of Voltaire's correspondence, but it contains a lot of what must be called gossip, however amusing, and is less helpful on the purely literary and critical side. Those looking for good, short, general appreciations in English are advised to read two earlier books: Richard Aldington: VOLTAIRE (G. Rout-ledge & Sons, 1925) and H. N. Brailsford: VOLTAIRE (Home University Library, Butterworth, 193 5). Their age has not lessened their interest as critical assessments.
I am indebted to a most interesting full-page article in THE TIMES (22 April 1978) entitled ' Voltaire in London ', by Dr Norma Perry, of the University of Exeter.
It would be quite unfair not to mention how much I have owed to my wife throughout the preparation of this translation.
OCTOBER 1978 L.W.T