by Voltaire, would
have been a priceless possession for posterity; but it was never to be
painted. The first sketch revealing in its perfection the hand of the
master, was lightly drawn, and then thrown aside for ever. And in
reality it is better so. Voltaire decided to aim at something higher and
more important, something more original and more profound. He determined
to write a book which should be, not the sparkling record of an
ingenious traveller, but a work of propaganda and a declaration of
faith. That new mood, which had come upon him first in Sully's
dining-room and is revealed to us in the quivering phrases of the note
to Madame de Bernieres, was to grow, in the congenial air of England,
into the dominating passion of his life. Henceforth, whatever quips and
follies, whatever flouts and mockeries might play upon the surface, he
was to be in deadly earnest at heart. He was to live and die a fighter
in the ranks of progress, a champion in the mighty struggle which was
now beginning against the powers of darkness in France. The first great
blow in that struggle had been struck ten years earlier by Montesquieu
in his _Lettres Persanes_; the second was struck by Voltaire in the
_Lettres Philosophiques_. The intellectual freedom, the vigorous
precision, the elegant urbanity which characterise the earlier work
appear in a yet more perfect form in the later one. Voltaire's book, as
its title indicates, is in effect a series of generalised reflections
upon a multitude of important topics, connected together by a common
point of view. A description of the institutions and manners of England
is only an incidental part of the scheme: it is the fulcrum by means of
which the lever of Voltaire's philosophy is brought into operation. The
book is an extremely short one--it fills less than two hundred small
octavo pages; and its tone and style have just that light and airy
gaiety which befits the ostensible form of it--a set of private letters
to a friend. With an extraordinary width of comprehension, an
extraordinary pliability of intelligence, Voltaire touches upon a
hundred subjects of the most varied interest and importance--from the
theory of gravitation to the satires of Lord Rochester, from the effects
of inoculation to the immortality of the soul--and every touch tells. It
is the spirit of Humanism carried to its furthest, its quintessential
point; indeed, at first sight, one is tempted to think that this quality
of rar