Several incidents combined to direct Voltaire’s attention to clericalism as the enemy of progress and humanity. Soon after his return to France, the famous actress, Adrienne Lecouvreur, for whom he had a high esteem, and who had represented the heroines of his plays, died. The clergy of Paris refused her Christian burial because of her profession, and her corpse was put in a ditch in a cattle-field on the banks of the Seine. Voltaire, who regarded the theatre as one of the most potent instruments of culture and civilisation, at once avenged and consecrated her memory in a fine ode, burning with the fire of a deep pathos, in which he takes occasion to contrast the treatment in England of Mrs. Oldfield, the actress, who was buried in Westminster Abbey. Mr. Lecky says: “The man who did more than any other to remove the stigma that rested upon actors was unquestionably Voltaire. There is, indeed, something singularly noble in the untiring zeal with which he directs poetry and eloquence, the keenest wit, and the closest reasoning to the defence of those who had so long been friendless and despised.” When Voltaire published his Letters on the English Nation the copies were seized by the Government and the publisher was thrown into the Bastille. The author would have again tasted the discomforts of that abode if he had not had timely warning from his friend D’Argental, and taken refuge in Lorraine, and afterwards on the Rhine, while his book was torn to pieces and burned in Paris by the public executioner, as offensive to religion, good morals, and respect for authority. Voltaire had apparently good reason to apprehend treatment of unusual rigor if he had obeyed the summons to give himself up into custody, as he took good care not to do. “I have a mortal aversion to prison,” he wrote to D’Argental. “I am ill; a confined air would have killed me, and I should probably have been thrust into a dungeon.”
Voltaire’s Letters on the English reads at the present day as so mild a production that it is hard to understand its suppression. Yet it was a true instinct which detected that the work was directed against the principle of authority. The introduction of English thought was destined to become an explosive element shattering the feudalism of Europe. There were, moreover, some hard hits at the state of things in France. “The English nation,” says Voltaire, “is the only one which has succeeded in restricting the power of kings by resisting it.” Again: “How I love the English boldness, how I love men who say what they think!”
Voltaire gives a peculiar reason for the non-appreciation by the English of Molière’s Tartuffe, the original of Mawworm if not of Uriah Heep. He says they are not pleased with the portrayal of characters they do not know. “One there hardly knows the name of devotee, but they know well that of honest man. One does not see there imbeciles who put their souls into others’ hands, nor those petty ambitious men who establish a despotic sway over women formerly wanton and always weak, and over men yet more weak and contemptible.” We fancy Voltaire must have seen society mainly as found among the Freethinkers. Could he give so favorable a verdict did he visit us now? The same remark applies to his statement that there was “no privilege of hunting in the grounds of a citizen, who, at the same time, is not permitted to fire a gun in his own field.” But this, as well as the more important passage that “no one is exempted from taxation for being a nobleman or priest,” was probably intended exclusively for the benefit of his compatriots. He was, however, not without a little touch of ridicule at the incongruities he detected in our countrymen. Thus he notes in one of his letters: “They learn Vanini and translate Lucretius for Monsieur le Dauphin to get by heart, and then, while they deride the polytheism of the ancients, they worship the Congregation of the Saints.”
Those educated in the current delusion that Voltaire was a mere mocker will be surprised to find the temperate way in which he speaks of the Quakers. Here, where there was such excellent opportunity for raillery, Voltaire shows he had a genuine admiration for their simplicity of life, the courage of their convictions, their freedom from priestcraft, and their distaste for warfare. In these Letters, as in all his writings, he proves how far he was the embodiment of the new era by his boldly expressed preference for industrial over military pursuits.
In his remarks on the Church of England, Voltaire, however, gives an unmistakable touch of his quality: “One cannot have public employment in England or Ireland, without being of the number of faithful Anglicans. This reason, which is an excellent proof, has converted so many Nonconformists that not a twentieth part of the nation is out of the pale of the dominant church.”
After alluding to the “holy zeal” of ministers against dissenters, and of the lower House of Convocation, who “from time to time burnt impious books, that is, books against themselves,” he says: “When they learn that, in France, young fellows noted only for debauchery and raised to the prelacy by female intrigue, openly pursue their amours, compose love-songs, give every day elaborate delicate suppers, then go to implore the illumination of the Holy Spirit, boldly calling themselves the successors of the Apostles—they thank God they are Protestants. But they are abominable heretics, to be burnt by all the devils, as Master Fran?ois Rabelais says; and that is why I do not meddle with their affairs.”
The Presbyterians fare little better, for Voltaire relates that, when King Charles surrendered to the Scots, they made that unfortunate monarch undergo four sermons a day. To them it is owing that only genteel people play cards on Sunday: “the rest of the nation go either to church, to the tavern, or to see their mistresses.”
His admiration for English philosophy was startling to the French mind. Locke’s Essay became his philosophical gospel. “For thirty years,” he writes in 1768, “I have been persecuted by a crowd of fanatics because I said that Locke is the Hercules of Metaphysics, who has fixed the boundaries of the human mind.”