an
that ever lived and thought are truly his own. It is not given, we all
know, even to the most original and daring of leaders, to be without
precursors, and Voltaire's march was prepared for him before he was
born, as it is for all mortals. Yet he impressed on all he said, on good
words and bad alike, a marked autochthonic quality, as of the
self-raised spontaneous products of some miraculous soil, from which
prodigies and portents spring. Many of his ideas were in the air, and
did not belong to him peculiarly; but so strangely rapid and perfect was
his assimilation of them, so vigorous and minutely penetrative was the
quality of his understanding, so firm and independent his initiative,
that even these were instantly stamped with the express image of his
personality. In a word, Voltaire's work from first to last was alert
with unquenchable life. Some of it, much of it, has ceased to be alive
for us now in all that belongs to its deeper significance, yet we
recognize that none of it was ever the dreary still-birth of a mind of
hearsays. There is no mechanical transmission of untested bits of
current coin. In the realm of mere letters Voltaire is one of the little
band of great monarchs, and in style he remains of the supreme
potentates. But literary variety and perfection, however admirable, like
all purely literary qualities are a fragile and secondary good which the
world is very willing to let die, where it has not been truly begotten
and engendered of living forces.

Voltaire was a stupendous power, not only because his expression was
incomparably lucid, or even because his sight was exquisitely keen and
clear, but because he saw many new things after which the spirits of
others were unconsciously groping and dumbly yearning. Nor was this all.
Fontenelle was both brilliant and far-sighted, but he was cold, and one
of those who love ease and a safe hearth, and carefully shun the din,
turmoil, and danger of the great battle. Voltaire was ever in the front
and centre of the fight. His life was not a mere chapter in a history of
literature. He never counted truth a treasure to be discreetly hidden in
a napkin. He made it a perpetual war-cry and emblazoned it on a banner
that was many a time rent, but was never out of the field.

There are things enough to be said of Voltaire's moral size, and no
attempt is made in these pages to dissemble in how much he was
condemnable. It is at least certain that he hated tyranny, t