Voltaire/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI.
IN EXILE.
Hitherto Voltaire's literary reputation was altogether that of a poet, and his unorthodox opinions could only be surmised from the gossip of the society which he frequented; nor was scepticism at that time so uncommon as to render him who avowed it at all remarkable. But to avow it in society was one thing—to proclaim it in print another; the clergy were prompt and powerful to meet assailants, as he afterwards found, and as he then knew—for he did not venture to publish the "Epistle to Uranie" till some years afterwards, when, from the storm it helped to raise, he found it expedient to cause a rumour to be spread that its author was the Abbé Chaulieu, then dead, to whose memory the imputation of unorthodoxy could do no possible harm. And as a poet only, Voltaire might have continuéd to be known but for an incident which changed the current of his life and influence.
At the Duke of Sully's table one day a Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot—one of the great house of Rohan—making an insolent remark about Voltaire, received a sarcastic retort. It is to be hoped that his mode of avenging it was such as the high society of the time did not approve. When Voltaire was again dining with the Duke a few days afterwards, he was induced to leave the table by a false message, and descending to the courtyard of the hotel, found there this Rohan-Chabot, who, having brought with him some ruffians armed with sticks, directed them to seize and chastise Voltaire. This accomplished, the party drove away. Burning with rage, the poet rushed back to the dining-room, and called on the Duke of Sully to take a host's part in avenging the outrage. But the Duke preferred to remain neutral (for which reason the name of his ancestor was expunged from the "Henriade," and that of Duplessis-Mornay substituted); and Voltaire, unable of himself to procure redress against a nobleman, challenged Rohan to fight, in terms that he could not evade. The bully, seeming to accept the challenge, made it known to his wife, and his friends obtained from the minister of the young king (the Regent had made a highly characteristic exit from the world in 1723) another order for Voltaire's committal to the Bastille. He remained there six months, and was only liberated on condition that he quitted France.
He chose England for his place of exile, and brought with him excellent introductions. Lord Bolingbroke, then in banishment, had married a French lady, and owned a beautiful place near Orleans—of a visit to which, and of its lord, Voltaire gives an enthusiastic account in a letter to Thiriot. Bolingbroke reciprocated the esteem, warmly praised "Œdipe" and the "Henriade," and recommended him to his friends. These and other such advantages, joined to his charming address and his wit, placed him in the best society of the time, which was the last year of George I.'s reign. Only one letter remains descriptive of his impressions of the country, in which he describes what may have been Greenwich fair—a multitude of gay boats on the Thames escorting the king and queen, and horse-races and sports near the town of Greenwich, of which he gives the most appreciative and pleased account. He was extremely vexed to be told afterwards that there had been much illusion for him in the scene—that all the pretty girls were servants or villagers, all the brilliant youths caracoling about the course students or apprentices on hired horses. The same evening he was presented to some Court ladies, whom he found reserved and cold, taking tea, making a great noise with their fans, and either saying nothing or crying out all together in disparagement of somebody present. He takes a humorously exaggerated view of the effect of the east wind in producing moroseness and even suicide among the English, and says a famous doctor told him that the wind was in that quarter when Charles I.'s head was cut off, and when James II. was dethroned. "'If you have any favour to ask at Court,' he whispered in my ear, 'never urge it except when the wind is in the west or south.'… Besides this contrariness, the English have those which spring from the animosity of parties; and nothing puts a stranger out so much as this. I have heard it said, literally, that my Lord Marlborough was the greatest poltroon in the world, and that Mr Pope was a fool. I came here full of the notion that a Wigh was a refined Republican, enemy of royalty, and a Tory the partisan of passive obedience. But I find that in Parliament nearly all the Wighs are for the Court, and the Torys against it."… "I ask you if you think it easy to define a nation which cut off Charles I.'s head because he wished to introduce the surplice into Scotland, and demanded a tribute which the judges declared to belong to him; whilst the same nation, without a murmur, saw Cromwell drive out Parliament, lords and bishops, and upset all the laws. Understand that James II. was dethroned partly because he gave a place in a college to a Catholic pedant: and remember also that the sanguinary tyrant, Henry VIII., half Catholic, half Protestant, changed the religion of the country because he wished to marry a brazen woman whom he afterwards sent to the scaffold; that he wrote a bad book against Luther in favour of the Pope, and then made himself Pope in England, hanging those who denied his supremacy, and burning those who did not believe in transubstantiation—and all this with gaiety and impunity. A spirit of enthusiasm, a furious superstition, had seized the nation during the civil wars: a soft and lazy irreligion succeeded these troublous times under Charles II. So everything changes and seems to contradict itself. What is truth at one time is error at another. The Spaniards say of a man, 'He was brave yesterday.' It is something in this way we must judge nations, the English in particular: we must say, 'They were of such a mind in this year, in this month.'"
With his usual energy, Voltaire, immediately on coming to England, set himself to learn our language, which he was considered to have mastered, though the proper names seem to have been something of a stumbling-block: the "Wighs and the Torys" are not his only confusions of this kind; Sir John Vanbrugh, having a foreign name, may excusably be represented as the "Chevalier Wanbruck;" but our historical Admiral Drake need not have become "Dracke;" and the identity of a celebrated actress, whom he addresses in verse, is almost lost when he apostrophises her as "Ofilds;" nor is the matter rendered much clearer when she reappears as "Ophils." However, he felt so sure of his footing in our tongue that he wrote in it some acts of his tragedy of "Brutus."
He stayed nearly two years in England (living during part of the time in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, and during another part at Wandsworth), but no mention of his visit is to be found in contemporary records. Almost the only anecdote respecting it that has come down to us is the well-known one of his visit to Congreve. When Voltaire told him of the desire he had felt to converse with so famous a dramatist, Congreve intimated that he preferred to be visited as a private gentleman. "If you were nothing but that," said Voltaire, "I should never have come to see you." For three months he was the guest of the famous Lord Peterborough. His intimacy with Bolingbroke procured for him the acquaintance of Pope, with whom he had before maintained a correspondence. In a passage of the 'Age of Louis XIV.,' correcting an error about Pope, he says, "I had lived a whole year with Pope." This can only mean near Pope, and in the habit of seeing him. It is somewhat remarkable that in all Pope's correspondence of those years, with men to whom Voltaire was probably known, and who would certainly have received news of him with interest, there is no mention of personal acquaintance with the French poet. Voltaire not only read critically the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Butler, Swift, and Pope, but was the first to introduce them to French readers. England appeared to him as at once the land of reason and the paradise of men of letters. He was never tired of telling how posts in the State had been conferred on Prior and Addison, and how Newton and Pope were held in higher esteem than the king's ministers. He was convinced that among the chief results of the liberty of thought which prevailed among us were the advances made in philosophy and science by Locke and Newton. He studied and criticised the works of Locke, and became a chief exponent of the theories of Newton, whom he never mentioned but with reverence. But it was from the number of sceptical English philosophers, who had set up natural against revealed religion, that he received the impulse which may be regarded as forming a main influence in the rest of his career. It is true he was already a professed disciple of natural religion. But it was one thing to hold opinions in common with the abbés and rakes among whom he lived in Paris, and another to find those opinions gravely maintained by philosophers. Hitherto his shafts against Christianity had been mere jests; he now gathered the means of reinforcing them with facts and arguments. Shaftesbury (whose opinions he recognised again as versified by Pope), Bolingbroke, Toland, Collins, Wollaston, Chubb, formed the school in which his deism was confirmed and rendered aggressive.
But the main influence which England exercised on him was through its general atmosphere of free thought. From the standpoint of these shores tyranny of all sorts in France wore a new aspect. There he had only dreamed of what a country might be if relieved from the domination of priests and despots; here he saw what it was. Liberty was no longer an idea, but a fact; and thenceforth superstition, oppression, and ignorance were the "Gorgons and Hydras and Chimæras dire" against which he vowed to wage perpetual war.
Of this, and other important epochs of his early life, there remain but scanty records. When he grew famous, his letters became cherished possessions; but at this time very few had been preserved, An indefatigable letter-writer, with many correspondents to whom he could without reserve impart his projects, his opinions, and his affairs, abundant material for this part of his biography no doubt once existed, and in no scattered hands. He was more than commonly constant to his early friendships, and held sustained correspondence with the objects of them. Cideville, an advocate at Rouen, had been Voltaire's schoolfellow. Thiriot had become known to him when both were studying for the bar. Voltaire made him a sort of agent; and while the poet was in England, Thiriot, receiving on his behalf subscriptions for the English edition of the "Henriade," seems to have appropriated them to his own use. Nevertheless Voltaire forgave this injury, as he had done the treason of Genonville, and often befriended Thiriot, with whom his intimacy continued until that associate's death in 1772. Concluding a letter to M. de Formont, another Rouen friend of his youth, he says, "I embrace you with all my heart, and count myself something more than your very humble servant, for I am your friend, and tenderly attached to you for all my life." D'Argenson, son of the Police Minister, was another schoolfellow; the young Count D'Argental, another advocate, was also a friend of his youth. These, and the fine old warrior Villars, were the young poet's trusted correspondents, not to mention the many ladies whom he favoured with his confidence; and he used to write in most respectful and affectionate terms to the Jesuit Fathers who had been his instructors.