aps not be so
precisely true as one might wish, and institutions that are not
altogether so useful as some might think possible; his cordiality toward
progress and improvement in a general way, and his coldness or antipathy
to each progressive proposal in particular; his pygmy hope that life
will one day become somewhat better, punily shivering by the side of his
gigantic conviction that it might well be infinitely worse. To Voltaire,
far different from this, an irrational prejudice was not the object of a
polite coldness, but a real evil to be combated and overthrown at every
hazard. Cruelty was not to him as a disagreeable dream of the
imagination, from thought of which he could save himself by arousing to
a sense of his own comfort, but a vivid flame burning into his thoughts
and destroying peace. Wrong-doing and injustice were not simple words on
his lips; they went as knives to the heart; he suffered with the victim,
and consumed with an active rage against the oppressor.

To Voltaire reason and humanity were but a single word, and love of
truth and passion for justice but one emotion. None of the famous men
who have fought, that they themselves might think freely and speak
truly, has ever seen more clearly that the fundamental aim of the
contest was that others might live happily. Who has not been touched by
that admirable word of his, of the three years in which he labored
without remission for justice to the widow and descendants of
Calas--"During that time not a smile escaped me without my reproaching
myself for it as for a crime"? Or by his sincere avowal that of all the
words of enthusiasm and admiration which were so prodigally bestowed
upon him on the occasion of his last famous visit to Paris in 1778, none
went to his heart like that of a woman of the people, who in reply to
one asking the name of him whom the crowd followed gave answer, "Do you
not know that he is the preserver of the Calas?"

The same kind of feeling, though manifested in ways of much less
unequivocal nobleness, was at the bottom of his many efforts to make
himself of consequence in important political business. We know how many
contemptuous sarcasms have been inspired by his anxiety at various times
to perform diplomatic feats of intervention between the French
government and Frederick II. In 1742, after his visit to the Prussian
King at Aix-la-Chapelle, he is supposed to have hinted to Cardinal
Fleury that to have written epic and dra