gold, which polite nations so highly value; can there be a greater proof of their wanting common sense? It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures to be men, because, allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow, that we ourselves are not Christians."

A far more numerous class of writers before the Revolution was distinctly aimed at, express, in their polite and easy pages, the sneering, heartless, polished scepticism of the hour, unrelieved by any vestiges of Christian or moral reverence save as perchance for sentimental or artistic effect. Laborious about trifles and triflers in serious things, they delighted their admirers with a never wearying sprightliness, and demoralized them with an atmosphere, inhaled at every pore, of subtlest, most fragrant miasm. Among these authors, Le Sage still finds readers, beyond his own countrymen, to laugh over the whimsical adventures of "Gil Blas" and "Le Diable Boiteux." But, passing others, Fontenelle is the chief of this corps of littérateurs; in nothing great, says Hallam, though for the most part of a life of one hundred years enjoying "the full sunshine of Parisian literature, without care and without disease." * We get the exact type of his times in this passionless, fantastical, witty, semi-serious, philosophist; paradoxical, good-natured, egotistical, and always sure to take care of himself. "His wisdom consisted in living morally and intellectually in a moderate temperature a tepid existence, but pleasant, like everything which is lukewarm.' For the last third career he devoted himself to scientific memoirs. His own spirit and that of his age may be seen in the coquettish, boudoir-air' prettiness and pettyness with which he opens a treatise on astronomy. He brings in an imaginary interlocutor:

6

of his long

"Do you not feel, said I to her, that the day even is not so beautiful as a beautiful night? Yes, she answered; the beauty of the day is like a beauty with a fair complexion, who has more brilliancy; but the beauty of the night is a brunette who is more striking. I agree, replied I; but in return, a person of fair complexion, such as you, would make me enjoy a more pleasant dream than the finest night in the world, with all its beauty, resembling a brunette."

This was the lettered training of a generation of people for

* "Introduction to the Literature of Europe," Vol. II. p. 400.

that coming ruffled ruffianism which Fontenelle lived long enough to see the beginnings of, and which made him exclaim, in his hundredth year, "I am afraid of the horrible certainty which I now meet with everywhere." The miserable hypocrisies and godlessness of his day were bringing forth their serpentbroods. But even a French revolution could not go forward without its silk-hosed escort, though trailing along its bloody route a countless sans culottes rank and file. We never get out of the reach of the perfumed kerchief, even within hearing of the guillotine's stroke. "A sub-delegate complained to the intendant of Paris that his feelings were so sensitive he could not discharge the duties of his office without moments of poignant grief." The sublime of affectation!

We are fast approaching the time, when (to quote again the author just referred to and the same work) "the French made, in 1789, the greatest effort that has ever been made by any people to sever their history into two parts, so to speak, and to tear open a gulf between their past and their future." Το accomplish this, literary men with no experience of public affairs, mere speculative thinkers, had inaugurated themselves as the nation's political oracles, and inoculated the people with their doctrines, heralding a kind of logical revolution on abstract ideas, draped in rhetorical phrases, but as soulless as a statue of snow. "When the time came for action, men dealt with political questions on literary principles." The Corypheus of this accelerating movement was the man whose name is alike most famous and most infamous in French letters.

Voltaire's works, numbering at first a hundred volumes, now fill, in their collected form, a library by themselves of seventy volumes. He kept himself incessantly before the public, issuing something almost every month; tolerating no rival near his throne; "vengeance, pride, hatred," his chief inspiration. He wrote every sort of literature with the same seeming facility, but always with the special pleading of an attorney sharpening his logic or his rhetoric to the propagandism of his one idea the constructing of a mere intellectual and materialistic civilization, which he tried hard to persuade himself and his clan was possible. What Voltaire failed to do, will Mr. Buckle

* De Tocqueville's "Old Régime and the Revolution," p. 85.

succeed in accomplishing? A poet without the vital spark, his fluent versification was original and impressive after the insipidities of Fontenelle. But no lofty enthusiasm fires his muse; merely a hot thirst for glory. "Epic poems (says Vinet) are true human bibles;" but Voltaire had not only no "religious heart," he had not even a "religious imagination." The "Henriade" glitters, but never warms. In the drama, he is a good artificer of situations, complications, and stageeffects. His perfect knowledge of human nature in society gave him the mastery of the popular ear and passion. But he knew not the soul of man as did Shakespeare; he had no line to sound its profoundest depths, no vision to penetrate the mysteries of the infinite, to comprehend the greatness of a spiritual existence. He had no self-knowledge, nor power of reflection by which to acquire it, and, through it, a true conception of humanity. This is fatal to dramatic excellence. He puts up grand bazaars and fancy summer-palaces secundum artem, but he builds no grand cathedrals in which the spirit may feel its own divineness, and adore its Maker. In prose composition, his characteristics are a natural simplicity and clearness of expression, an unfailing vivacity, and a surprising practical adaptability to the men and the times about him, a common sense in pursuing his objects which is as sure in him as an animal instinct. But there is no weight nor majesty of movement. The philosophy of life is of the lowest grade, without loftiness of aspiration or breadth of apprehension. The man has no wings, however nimble of foot. He has the sharpness of shortsighted people for very near objects, but no eye-glass to bring distant prospects within reach. This describes his handling of literary criticism. In history, he was a tasteful eulogist of periods and persons that captivated his fancy for some exhibition of uncommon power or splendor as Charles of Sweden and Louis XIV.; of such he wrote with rare elegance, but without regard to consistency or sincerity, to truth or justice. Without faith in God or providence, without any grasp of a unity of causation or purpose thus derived, he gives us a marked illustration of Lamertine's landscape to which the painter has forgotten to put a sky.

Voltaire's emergence upon the stage of French affairs was

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just at the transition-line between the empires of hypocrisy and licentiousness. Respectably born, the Jesuits were his first schoolmasters, and he put their well-remembered lessons to adroit uses in after years. The youthful protége of a Parisian woman of pleasure, he early saw behind the curtain of more than a mock theatre; he took degrees in free living and thinking, which thoroughly corrupted his whole being before his boyhood ended. Incapable of repose as quicksilver, with which his veins seemed to be injected, he was always moving, stirring, hurrying from spot to spot-bold, reckless, fearless of comment and scandal, the concentrated distillation of a revolutionary Frenchman a born destructive. His nature was a compound of audacity, vanity, sensibility, intellectuality, frivolity, sensuality. Gorge yourselves with pleasures (he wrote in advanced life); as for me, I can do no more. I have finished my time." Incapable of love, he never forgave an unfavorable criticism, even of his allies in the antichristian crusade. This is what he says of Rousseau: "I should not have attributed to Jean-Jacques genius and eloquence. I find in him no genius. His detestable romance, Heloise,' is absolutely devoid of it. Emilius,' in like manner, and all his other works, are those of an empty declaimer. . . He thought that he resembled Diogenes, and he has scarcely the honor of resembling his dog.' He told the truth, all but in the "friendship," when he said once: "I am of a character which nothing can bend, firm in friendship and in feeling, and fearing nothing either in this world or in the world to come." Few loved him; his whole generation feared him. His satire was like scalding lava, and he poured it out with a malignant luxury of delight, it mattered little upon whom, as in that most atrocious of his dramas, "La Pucelle ;" and then most solemnly denied the parentage of his own wicked spite. He was a libertine in letters beyond all his compeers, acknowledging no law but his own changeful mood. But strong as was his destructive arm, the havoc of his onsets was largely owing to the weakness of goodness, the universal lack of faith, in his day. He did not make his age; it caught him up on its already swollen current, to which, in turn, he gave a deeper and more rapid flow. He smote the corners of a rotten house, like a wind from the

desert, and its beams and pillars tumbled into a heap of confusion.

Voltaire is the human Mephistophiles; heartless, sardonic, brilliant, selfish, full of power.and ineffable meanness, the culmination of scoffing infidelity. When he is merry, "there is hell in that smile; "a satanic mockery

"That laughs alike at ruin and redemption."

Yet he was opposed to persecution, and is said to have taken an annual fever on St. Bartholomew's Day. When dangerously sick, his courage failed him. In a slighter illness, twenty years before, he had taken the eucharist as a matter of sport, for which scandalous comedy even D'Alembert censured him. Now his ovation in Paris, amidst the shouts of the million, "Long live the author of 'La Pucelle!"" was speedily followed by his wretched death; just before which he again sent for a priest, and put his name to this confession, which alone was wanting to change our horror at his crimes into a contempt of his pusillanimity :

"I, the undersigned, declare, that being attacked four days since with a vomiting of blood, at the age of eighty-four, as I was unable to crawl to church, the rector of St. Sulpice wished to add to his good works by sending to me the Abbé Gauthier, a priest. I confessed myself to him, and if I die, I die in the holy Catholic religion in which I was born, hoping in the mercy of God that he will pardon all my faults; and if I have scandalized the church, I ask pardon for it from God and from her."

M. Vinet holds the balances with a steady hand in weighing the life of this strange being. We use some of his terms, but not with exact quotation. Not more wicked than some others, his wickedness was more freely developed. God and conscience gave no law to his conduct; he had only instincts, many positively bad, others not. There was no harmony in his nature; he was made up of ever-repeating antitheses, and multiplying extravagances. He is great, but never sublime. Bitter and gross in his assaults upon Christianity, he forged authorities for his statements which had no existence. He appealed to prejudices, and argued by sophisms. He was not an atheist, but