VOLTAIEE
VOSMAER
Great for nearly three years a long asso
ciation for two men of such different
temperaments. At Berlin he finished his
Siecle de Louis XIV, and began his Dic-
tionnaire Philosophique. Permission to
return to France was refused, and he
settled in Switzerland. In 1758 he bought
an estate at Ferney, four miles from
Geneva, yet on French soil, and from the
security and comfort of this convenient
home he poured out the flood of satires,
stories, poems, etc., which (rather than
his great dramas) have made him immortal.
Candida was published in 1759, to ridicule
the optimistic Theism of Eousseau and
the orthodox ; and after that date his out
put was enormous. It is more material
to notice that his mature idealism was
expressed in a hundred practical ways.
A more kindly and generous lord of the
manor none could have. He even built a
church for his people, and he promoted
the industries of the district with excellent
wisdom. He was now wealthy. Some of
his works sold as many as 300,000 copies.
With his wealth he, in the words of the
historian Lanson, "chased misery from
his part of France." Horrible miscarriages
of justice still occurred, especially in the
name of religion, and time after time (the
Galas case, the Sirven case, etc.) the
" mocker," and now aged writer, flung
himself ardently into the fray, and generally
secured a posthumous justice. His Traite
de la ToUrance (1766), which was con
demned by Kome, was a dignified rebuke
to Europe. His Commentaire sur le livre
des dclits (1768) was a fine lesson in justice
to civilization, and was put on the Index.
His fame rose throughout the world as his
clerical opponents sank one by one into
unhonoured graves. Voltaire was im
measurably the greatest Rationalist who
ever lived. He remained to the end a
Deist, though his poem on the Lisbon
earthquake (1756) shows him wavering
for a moment ; and in the best and last
expression of his mature views, II faut
choisir (1772), his God is not a Creator
(matter is eternal), but merely an Infinite
853
and Eternal Being. In the same work
(translated in McCabe s Selected Works of
Voltaire, 1911) he rejects freewill and
ridicules the idea of " soul." In 1778
Voltaire was invited to Paris, and the
extraordinary enthusiasm and excitement
killed him. In the notice of Voltaire in
the Encyclopcedia Britannica Professor
Saintsbury says : " The legends about his
death in a state of terror and despair are
certainly false ; but it must be regarded as
singular and unfortunate that he who had
more than once gone out of his way to
conform, ostentatiously, with his tongue
in his cheek should have neglected or
missed this last opportunity." Priests had
been summoned as Voltaire lay dying, and
Voltaire had refused to let them approach
him. It is rather " singular and unfor
tunate " that the English critic fails to
appreciate this last act of courage (for
there was a grave possibility of disturbance
at his funeral) and love of truth on the
part of the dying man. Voltaire suffered
terribly in his last few days, but he ended
peacefully, courteously declining to see the
priest. The form of confession of faith
which he had written a few weeks before
was recognized by all as "a scrap of
paper," for the formal purpose of securing
a decent and quiet funeral. His remains
were interred with great honour in the
Pantheon in 1791 ; but the first act of the
Catholics on their return in 1814 was to
cast them into a pit outside Paris. He
had many defects the defects of his
morally sceptical age, whether Catholic or
not but his services to the race and the
general dignity and courage of his mature
years raise him immeasurably above his
religious contemporaries. D. May 30,
1778.
YOSMAER, Carel, LL.D., Dutch writer and artist. B. Mar. 20, 1826. Ed. Leyden University. Vosmaer was trained in law, and he obtained an appointment at the Hague Court of Cassation. At the same time he devoted himself to journalism and literature. He published Studies on War
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