ntirely free from
boisterousness yet with constant "wap" of wavelet and bursting of
foam-bubble; above all, the pure unadulterated faculty of tale-telling,
must have found vent and play somehow. It had been well if the
playfulness had not been, as playfulness too often is, of what
contemporary English called an "unlucky" (that is, a "mischievous")
kind; and if the author had not been constantly longing to make somebody
or many bodies uncomfortable,[352] to damage and defile shrines, to
exhibit a misanthropy more really misanthropic, because less passionate
and tragical, than Swift's, and, in fact, as his patron, persecutor, and
counterpart, Frederick the Jonathan-Wildly Great, most justly observed
of him, to "play monkey-tricks," albeit monkey-tricks of immense talent,
if not actually of genius. If the recent attempts to interpret
monkey-speech were to come to something, and if, as a consequence,
monkeys were taught to write, one may be sure that prose fiction would
be their favourite department, and that their productions would be,
though almost certainly disreputable, quite certainly amusing. In fact
there would probably be some among these which would be claimed, by
critics of a certain type, as hitherto unknown works of Voltaire
himself.

Yet if the straightforward tale had not, owing to the influences
discussed in the foregoing chapters, acquired a firm hold, it is at
least possible that he would not have adopted it (for originality of
form was not Voltaire's _forte_), but would have taken the dialogue, or
something else capable of serving his purpose. As it was, the particular
field or garden had already been marked out and hedged after a fashion;
tools and methods of cultivation had been prepared; and he set to work
to cultivate it with the application and intelligence recommended in the
famous moral of his most famous tale--a moral which, it is only fair to
say, he did carry out almost invariably. A garden of very questionable
plants was his, it may be; but that is another matter. The fact and the
success of the cultivation are both undeniable.

[Sidenote: General characteristics of his tales.]

At the same time, Voltaire--if indeed, as was doubted just now, he be a
genius at all--is not a genius, or even a djinn, of the kind that
creates and leaves something Melchisedec-like; alone and isolated from
what comes before and what comes after. He is an immense talent--perhaps
the greatest talent-but-not-genius ev