aken men
to new love of tolerance, enlightenment, charity, and justice. Voltaire
was playing the refractory courtier at Potsdam when the first two
volumes appeared. With characteristic vehemence, he instantly pronounced
it a work which should be the glory of France, and the shame of its
persecutors. Diderot and D'Alembert were raising an immortal edifice,
and he would gladly furnish them with a little stone here or there,
which they might find convenient to stuff into some corner or crevice in
the wall. He was incessant in his industry. Unlike those feebler and
more consequential spirits, the _petits-maitres_ of thought, by whom
editors are harassed and hindered, this great writer was as willing to
undertake small subjects as large ones, and to submit to all the
mutilations and modifications which the exigencies of the work and the
difficulties of its conductors recommended to them.[118] As the
structure progresses, his enthusiasm waxes warmer. Diderot and his
colleague are cutting their wings for a flight to posterity. They are
Atlas and Hercules bearing a world upon their shoulders. It is the
greatest work in the world; it is a superb pyramid; its printing-office
is the office for the instruction of the human race; and so forth, in
every phrase of stimulating sympathy and energetic interest. Nor does
his sympathy blind him to faults of execution. Voltaire's good sense and
sound judgment were as much at the service of his friends in warning
them of shortcomings, as in eulogising what they achieved. And he had
good faith enough to complain to his friends, instead of complaining of
them. In one place he tells them, what is perfectly true, that their
journeymen are far too declamatory, and too much addicted to substitute
vague and puerile dissertations for that solid instruction which is what
the reader of an Encyclopaedia seeks. In another he remonstrates against
certain frivolous affectations, and some of the coxcombries of literary
modishness. Everywhere he recommends them to insist on a firm and
distinct method in their contributors--etymologies, definitions,
examples, reasons, clearness, brevity. "You are badly seconded," he
writes; "there are bad soldiers in the army of a great general."[119] "I
am sorry to see that the writer of the article _Hell_ declares that
hell was a point in the doctrine of Moses; now by all the devils that is
not true. Why lie about it? Hell is an excellent thing, to be sure, but
it is eviden