VOLTAIRE'S SERVICE 229 "Old the progress toward freedom his work cannot be overlooked. He fancied, doubtless, that he had done more than expose enslaving customs, and hence the point of Carlyle's sarcasm: Ludovicus has a story of a clown that killed his ass because it had drunk up the moon, and he thought the world could ill-spare that luminary. So he killed his ass, ut lunam redderet. The clown was well-intentioned, but unwise. Let us not imitate him: let us not slay a faithful servant, who has carried us far. He has not drunk the moon, but only the reflection of the moon, in his own poor water-pail, where too, it may be, he was drinking with purposes the most harmless." 1 This sarcasm fits the mood of the Frenchman and his popular critics. To himself and to them he was the destroyer of religion. Here humor and fear run up against the irony of truth; the laugh is on the mocker for his ludicrous mistake, and on the believer for his equally ludicrous ignorance. But it is essential to distinguish between what men think that they are and what they really are. Because Voltaire was less than he imagined, he may be justly visited with sarcasm, but he cannot fairly be dismissed by it. When the illusion born of vanity has been dissipated, Voltaire's merit is still solid and honorable. The exposure of Antichrist is always a service in the 1 Miscellaneous Essays, vol. i. pp. 460, 461. interest of truth; the sincere attack upon unworthy forms of the truth is an indispensable warfare. "De Maistre compares Reason putting away Revelation to a child who should beat its nurse. The same figure would serve just as well to describe the thanklessness of Belief to the Disbelief which has purged and exalted it." 1 Much of the religious custom of the age deserved Voltaire's exposure and mockery. It was in the interest of a better future than he himself represented that he spread so widely the mood of antagonism to ecclesiastical Christianity. He could not do the highest service, he was unable to discriminate between the counterfeit and the reality; he was far from being able to displace the floods of error by planting the mountain of the Lord in the midst of them. But enslaving error, widespread and evil custom walking under the sanction of ecclesiastical Christianity, he did smite hip and thigh, and the wise believer will not fail to remember this service. In the nineteenth century, this warfare against superstition has been carried on by a multitude of writers through the agency of science. One vast benefit has certainly accrued to the people from the silence into which the supernatural has fallen. During this silence the fear of nature has been passing away. The cosmos has slowly 1 John Morley, Voltaire, p. 32. THE SCIENTIFIC HERCULES 231 emerged into a trustworthy character. It has been sifting itself into the popular mind as an order, and as an order that stands ready to serve the intelligence that masters it. Witches, ghosts, devils, supernatural horrors no longer people the darkness or lie in wait for lonely wayfarers. There are no traditions in existence to-day like those out of which Burns, at the close of the eighteenth century, constructed "Tam O'Shanter." The serious and terrible traditions of witches and fiends and kindred uncanny presences have become a ludicrous mythology. Common-sense has had a good deal to do with the transformation, but science has been to an incalculable extent its friend and helper. Under the sarcasm of fact, the irony of knowledge, the noble mockery and laughter of truth, whole hosts of imposing superstitions have passed clean out of existence. In cleaning this Augean stable, science has been our Hercules; and one can do no less than commemorate the broom that has swept into tolerable condition such unspeakable spaces. That ideas should have an opportunity in their best expression to appeal to the human mind is always ultimately a service for truth. The call of truth is for the forcible suppression of no idea. Free speech is the universal and absolute right of ideas; and it is the privilege that only the true idea can endure. Let an idea like a man talk, and if it is not true, it will swiftly give itself away. The seeker for truth has therefore the deepest interest in the classic expression of opposing ideas. He wishes to meet materialism and idealism, atheism and theism, in their strongest forms. The believer has the best of reasons for desiring that the negative moods of the race should attain the completest expression. The enemy is not overcome until he is crushed in his citadel; a doubt is not answered until it is met in its highest form. The answer of Demosthenes is to the challenge of Æschines, that of Cicero to Catiline, of Burke to those who skillfully drew" an indictment against a whole people," of Webster to Calhoun. And along another line the answer of Plato is to Protagoras, of Kant to Hume, and, gréatest of all, of Christ to Pilate. For pessimism it is believed that the two most powerful utterances are the literary expression of Swift in the eighteenth century and the philosophical expression of Schopenhauer in the nineteenth. The bitterness of the deepest and sincerest unbelief in man is in every characteristic sentence that Swift ever wrote. Inside the inclosure of institutional Christianity, with scrupulous fidelity to the forms of its service, and with absolute sphinx-like silence upon the question of its fundamental reality or unreality, and with a personal life wholly free from the stains that so SWIFT AND SCHOPENHAUER 233 often pollute his speech, Swift is yet the profoundest, intensest, and completest pessimist in English literature. The vision of the dark side of life is wide and accurate; the expression is deliberate, generally within bounds, and yet deadly in its aim. There is nothing hysterical about Swift's pessimism. Its awful passion is subdued or veiled by the sanest humor. The popular expression of the pessimistic mood could hardly be more powerful, and this of itself is a great service. Here is the mood at its best so far as literary genius is concerned. It is believed that pessimism has never found a more adequate philosophical expression than in the writings of Schopenhauer. He has discovered the supreme sorrow to be in the will to live. Life is a mistake, its desire to go on is its curse. "That this most perfect manifestation of the will to live, the human organism, with the cunning and complex working of its machinery, must fall to dust and yield up itself and all its strivings to extinction, this is the naïve way in which nature, who is always so true and sincere in what she says, proclaims the whole struggle of this will barren and unprofitable. Were it of any value in itself, anything unconditioned and absolute, it could not thus end in mere nothing." 1 The nature of will, then, is inherently and endlessly discontent and sorrow. The German 1 Studies in Pessimism, p. 39. |