stock, should have broken so energetically away from it, and that
he should have done so, shows how open and how strong was the feeling in
him for reality and actual circumstance.

Rousseau was amazed that a man overwhelmed as Voltaire was with
prosperity and glory, should declaim against the miseries of this life
and pronounce that all is evil and vanity. "Voltaire in seeming always
to believe in God, never really believed in anybody but the devil, since
his pretended God is a maleficent being who according to him finds all
his pleasure in working mischief. The absurdity of this doctrine is
especially revolting in a man crowned with good things of every sort,
and who from the midst of his own happiness tries to fill his
fellow-creatures with despair, by the cruel and terrible image of the
serious calamities from which he is himself free."[336]

As if any doctrine could be more revolting than this which Rousseau so
quietly takes for granted, that if it is well with me and I am free from
calamities, then there must needs be a beneficent ruler of the universe,
and the calamities of all the rest of the world, if by chance they catch
the fortunate man's eye, count for nothing in our estimate of the method
of the supposed divine government. It is hard to imagine a more
execrable emotion than the complacent religiosity of the prosperous.
Voltaire is more admirable in nothing than in the ardent humanity and
far-spreading lively sympathy with which he interested himself in all
the world's fortunes, and felt the catastrophe of Lisbon as profoundly
as if the Geneva at his gates had been destroyed. He relished his own
prosperity keenly enough, but his prosperity became ashes in his mouth
when he heard of distress or wrong, and he did not rest until he had
moved heaven and earth to soothe the distress and repair the wrong. It
was his impatience in the face of the evils of the time which wrung from
him this desperate cry, and it is precisely because these evils did not
touch him in his own person, that he merits the greater honour for the
surpassing energy and sincerity of his feeling for them.

Rousseau, however, whose biographer has no such stories to tell as those
of Calas and La Barre, Sirven and Lally, but only tales of a maiden
wrongfully accused of theft, and a friend left senseless on the pavement
of a strange town, and a benefactress abandoned to the cruelty of her
fate, still was moved in the midst of his erotic visions