offers it to everybody, daily and in every form, in broad
streams and in small drops, without exhaustion or weariness, through
every crevice and by every channel, in prose, in verse, in imposing and
in trifling poems, in the drama, in history, in novels, in pamphlets, in
pleadings, in treatises, in essays, in dictionaries, in correspondence,
openly and in secret, in order that it may penetrate to all depths and
in every soil; such was Voltaire.--"I have accomplished more in my
day," he says somewhere, "than either Luther or Calvin," in which he is
mistaken. The truth is, however, he has something of their spirit. Like
them he is desirous of changing the prevailing religion, he takes
the attitude of the founder of a sect, he recruits and binds together
proselytes, he writes letters of exhortation, of direction and of
predication, he puts watchwords in circulation, he furnishes "the
brethren" with a device; his passion resembles the zeal of an apostle or
of a prophet. Such a spirit is incapable of reserve; it is militant and
fiery by nature; it apostrophizes, reviles and improvises; it writes
under the dictation of impressions; it allows itself every species of
utterance and, if need be, the coarsest. It thinks by explosions; its
emotions are sudden starts, and its images so many sparks; it lets the
rein go entirely; it gives itself up to the reader and hence it takes
possession of him. Resistance is impossible; the contagion is too
overpowering. A creature of air and flame, the most excitable that ever
lived, composed of more ethereal and more throbbing atoms than those of
other men; none is there whose mental machinery is more delicate, nor
whose equilibrium is at the same time more shifting and more exact. He
may be compared to those accurate scales that are affected by a breath,
but alongside of which every other measuring apparatus is incorrect and
clumsy.--But, in this delicate balance only the lightest weights, the
finest specimen must be placed; on this condition only it rigorously
weighs all substances; such is Voltaire, involuntarily, through the
demands of his intellect, and in his own behalf as much as in that of
his readers. An entire philosophy, ten volumes of theology, an abstract
science, a special library, an important branch of erudition, of human
experience and invention, is thus reduced in his hands to a phrase or to
a stanza. From the enormous mass of riven or compact scorioe he extracts
whatever is ess