King of England, and the philosopher preferred him for his patron. He lived four years longer at the court of Hanover, writing political works again, and some philosophical pieces, and died there at the age of sixty-eight.
His eulogists dwell on the great variety of topics that he treated, and styles which he attempted. They say that Natural History was the only study which he did not pursue. From another side, the fact of the case looks very mournful. The man’s faculties and years were encroached upon and frittered away by persons who should have humbly waited upon his powers, and left him free to follow his natural bent; and hence he was always busy about unworthy tasks (worthy enough for lesser men), and the prodigious promise of his early years was never fulfilled. He and Newton were making the same mathematical discovery at the same time; and the man who was once Newton’s peer let anybody set him tasks who would give him a place and pension at court. It was no fault of theirs that they took liberties if he laid himself open to them; and they might well patronise him, in all kindness, when he invited patronage; but the world has sustained immense loss by his mistake. What the loss is mankind can never know; and all we can do now is to draw a lesson from the illustration which the life of Leibnitz affords of the unfitness of courts to be the abode or the resort of men whose genius tends to science or philosophy.
We need not dwell long on the case of Voltaire. It was a lustrous example of the situation, certainly; but Voltaire was not the kind of philosopher who needed repose, privacy, and leisure for the accomplishment of his life’s work. His topics were social; he was himself full of social tastes; and life in a court was a spectacle in his way, instead of a mere impediment to business. I am not saying that Voltaire was no philosopher. I am of a contrary opinion; and I feel confident that his deserts will yet be better appreciated than they have been: but he made a mistake, which such a man should have known better than to make, when he went to the court of Frederick the Great at Berlin. If he had been the dishonest and frivolous person he is supposed by some of us to be, the experiment might have answered. As he was honest, and capable of sound thought, it soon came to an end. There was something forced in the bringing together of clever and celebrated men at the King’s supper-table; and, though Voltaire made the conversation as gay and amiable as he could, the constraint wearied him. It wearied him to read and praise the King’s compositions, and to correct his French verses, which, of course, in the case of a homebred German prince, were very bad. The King, with all his desire for his own improvement, and for the welfare of the wise men he gathered about him, was not loveable; the savans were out of their element and jealous of each other. The praise of the Prince, which had begun in sincerity, and a sort of enthusiasm, at a distance, could not be kept up without effort, face to face with the imperious King, who expected more homage rather than less, as time went on. There was nothing in the pension, or the gold key as chamberlain, or the honour of having the King for his chief disciple, which could make up to Voltaire for the constraint, and the bore of correcting the King’s effusions; and he broke away. The King desired and expected him to return; but he was resolved never to enter Prussia again. He was arrested at Frankfort, in order to prevent his carrying with him the volume of the King’s poems, which the author was well aware might afford occasion for quizzing. The arrest caused much delay, expense, and vexation; but the philosopher, with all his ability for satire, was placable and good-natured in matters of personal concern; and he afterwards slid into a literary correspondence with Frederick, and afforded criticism of the King’s productions, as if there had been no rupture.
Here the philosopher wanted nothing, and his resort to the Prussian court was a mere mistaken whim. Voltaire could live where and as he pleased, and needed no patronage from any quarter. He was weak, and perhaps vain, in yielding to an invitation about which he hesitated long, and which he accepted at last with evident doubt and reluctance. He was sufficiently punished by the mortifications which ensued. I bring in the case only because it is the most notorious in modern literary history, and because, while it is the most talked about, it is less important than perhaps any other that can be cited. It cannot be shown that the world has lost anything by the short residence of Voltaire at the court of Prussia.
This can hardly be said of the connection of another literary philosopher with another German court. It is conceivable that Göthe’s work was not materially hindered by his connection with the court of Weimar; but no one probably will undertake to say that the impression of Göthe as courtier is not just so much drawback on the impression of Göthe as man, citizen, poet, and philosopher. It, in fact, blotted out the citizen function from the programme of his life altogether. Right and wrong, despotism and liberty, war and peace, went on between rulers and people in the most critical periods of modern history, without notice from the courtier-philosopher. While, on the one hand, he is represented as much too comprehensive in his view of life to look with any interest on those ebbs and flows, and ripples and surges of events and interests, he is shown, on the other hand, to be much engaged and solemnly interested in the solicitudes of a life of etiquette, which most people consider a smaller matter. While society thought the fate of German nationality and freedom, under the menaces of Napoleon, was a worthy subject for the anxiety and enthusiasm of every student of Man and History, while it mattered little how tea-parties and hunts and the theatre went on at Weimar, Göthe was of the opposite way of thinking; and this is our warrant for supposing his example to rank among the warnings we have that, in great thinkers, the course of thinking is grievously disturbed by a resort to interests which have no affinity with those of Thought.
If in any case the evil could have been escaped, it would have been in Göthe’s; for not only was he independent in his possession of fame and a competence, but the Grand Duke had intel-