"PHASIS FIRST (1725-1728).The accomplished Duc de Sulli (Year 1725, day not recorded), is giving in his hotel a dinner, such as usual; and a bright witty company is assembled;the brightest young fellow in France sure to be there; and with his electric coruscations illuminating everything, and keeping the table in a roar. To the delight of most; not to that of a certain splenetic ill-given Duc de Rohan; grandee of high rank, great haughtiness, and very ill-behavior in the world; who feels impatient at the notice taken of a mere civic individual, Arouet Junior. 'Quel est done ce jeune homme qui parle si haut, Who is this young man that talks so loud, then?' exclaims the proud splenetic Duke. 'Monseigneur,' flashes the young man back upon him in an electric manner, 'it is one who does not drag a big name about with him; but who secures respect for the name he has!' Figure that, in the penetrating grandly clangorous voice (VOIX SOMBRE ET MAJESTUEUSE), and the momentary flash of eyes that attended it. Duc de Rohan rose, in a sulphurous frame of mind; and went his ways. What date? You ask the idle French Biographer in vain;see only, after more and more inspection, that the incident is true; and with labor date it, summer of the Year 1725. Treaty of Utrecht itself, though all the Newspapers and Own Correspondents were so interested in it, was perhaps but a foolish matter to date in comparison!
"About a week after, M. Arouet Junior was again dining with the Duc de Sulli, and a fine company as before. A servant whispers him, That somebody has called, and wants him below. 'Cannot come,' answers Arouet; 'how can I, so engaged?' Servant returns after a minute or two: 'Pardon, Monsieur; I am to say, it is to do an act of beneficence that you are wanted below!' Arouet lays down his knife and fork; descends instantly to see what act it is. A carriage is in the court, and hackney-coach near it: 'Would Monsieur have the extreme goodness to come to the door of the carriage, in a case of necessity?' At the door of the carriage, hands seize the collar of him, hold him as in a vice; diabolic visage of Duc de Rohan is visible inside, who utters, looking to the hackney-coach, some "VOILA, Now then!" Whereupon the hackney-coach opens, gives out three porters, or hired bullies, with the due implements: scandalous actuality of horsewhipping descends on the back of poor Arouet, who shrieks and execrates to no purpose, nobody being near. 'That will do,' says Rohan at last, and the gallant ducal party drive off; young Arouet, with torn frills and deranged hair, rushing up stairs again, in such a mood as is easy to fancy. Everybody is sorry, inconsolable, everybody shocked; nobody volunteers to help in avenging. 'Monseigneur de Sulli, is not such atrocity done to one of your guests, an insult to yourself?' asks Arouet. 'Well, yes perhaps, but'Monseigneur de Sulli shrugs his shoulders, and proposes nothing. Arouet withdrew, of course in a most blazing condition, to consider what he could, on his own strength, do in this conjuncture.
"His Biographer Duvernet says, he decided on doing two things: learning English and the small-sword exercise. [La Vie de Voltaire, par M(a Geneve, 1786), pp. 55-57; or pp. 60-63, in his SECOND form of the Book. The "M" is an Abbe Duvernet; of no great mark otherwise. He got into Revolution trouble afterwards, but escaped with his head; and republished his Book, swollen out somewhat by new "Anecdotes" and republican bluster, in this second instance; signing himself T. J. D. V(Paris, 1797). A vague but not dark or mendacious little Book; with traces of real EYESIGHT in it,by one who had personally known Voltaire, or at least seen and heard him.] He retired to the country for six months, and perfected himself in these two branches. Being perfect, he challenged Duc de Rohan in the proper manner; applying ingenious compulsives withal, to secure acceptance of the challenge. Rohan accepted, not without some difficulty, and compulsion at the Theatre or otherwise:accepted, but withal confessed to his wife. The result was, no measuring of swords took place; and Rohan only blighted by public opinion, or incapable of farther blight that way, went at large; a convenient LETTRE DE CACHET having put Arouet again in the Bastille. Where for six months Arouet lodged a second time, the innocent not the guilty; making, we can well suppose, innumerable reflections on the phenomena of human life. Imprisonment once over, he hastily quitted for England; shaking the dust of ungrateful France off his feet,resolved to change his unhappy name, for one thing.
"Smelfungus, denouncing the torpid fatuity of Voltaire's Biographers, says he never met with one Frenchman, even of the Literary classes, who could tell him whence this name VOLTAIRE originated. 'A PETITE TERRE, small family estate,' they said; and sent him hunting through Topographies, far and wide, to no purpose. Others answered, 'Volterra in Italy, some connection with Volterra,'and seemed even to know that this was but fatuity. 'In ever-talking, ever-printing Paris, is it as in Timbuctoo, then, which neither prints nor has anything to print?' exclaims poor Smelfungus! He tells us at last, the name VOLTAIRE is a mere Anagram of AROUET L. J.you try it; A.R.O.U.E.T.L.J.=V.O.L.T.A.I.R.E and perceive at once, with obligations to Smelfungus, that he has settled this small matter for you, and that you can be silent upon it forever thenceforth.
"The anagram VOLTAIRE, gloomily settled in the Bastille in this manner, can be reckoned a very famous wide-sounding outer result of the Rohan impertinence and blackguardism; but it is not worth naming beside the inner intrinsic result, of banishing Voltaire to England at this point of his course. England was full of Constitutionality and Freethinking; Tolands, Collinses, Wollastons, Bolingbrokes, still living; very free indeed. England, one is astonished to see, has its royal-republican ways of doing; something Roman in it, from Peerage down to Plebs; strange and curious to the eye of M. de Voltaire. Sciences flourishing; Newton still alive, white with fourscore years, the venerable hoary man; Locke's Gospel of Common Sense in full vogue, or even done into verse, by incomparable Mr. Pope, for the cultivated upper classes. In science, in religion, in politics, what a surprising 'liberty' allowed or taken! Never was a freer turn of thinking. And (what to M. de Voltaire is a pleasant feature) it is Freethinking with ruffles to its shirt and rings on its fingers;never yet, the least, dreaming of the shirtless or SANSCULOTTIC state that lies ahead for it! That is the palmy condition of English Liberty, when M. de Voltaire arrives there.
"In a man just out of the Bastille on those terms, there is a mind driven by hard suffering into seriousness, and provoked by indignant comparisons and remembrances. As if you had elaborately ploughed and pulverized the mind of this Voltaire to receive with its utmost avidity, and strength of fertility, whatever seed England may have for it. That was a notable conjuncture of a man with circumstances. The question, Is this man to grow up a Court Poet; to do legitimate dramas, lampoons, witty verses, and wild spiritual and practical magnificences, the like never seen; Princes and Princesses recognizing him as plainly divine, and keeping him tied by enchantments to that poor trade as his task in life? is answered in the negative. No: and it is not quite to decorate and comfort your 'dry dung-heap' of a world, or the fortunate cocks that scratch on it, that the man Voltaire is here; but to shoot lightnings into it, and set it ablaze one day! That was an important alternative; truly of world-importance to the poor generations that now are; and it was settled, in good part, by this voyage to England, as one may surmise. Such is sometimes the use of a dissolute Rohan in this world; for the gods make implements of all manner of things.
"M. de Voltaire (for we now drop the Arouet altogether, and never hear of it more) came to Englandwhen? Quitted Englandwhen? Sorrow on all fatuous Biographers, who spend their time not in laying permanent foundation-stones, but in fencing with the wind!I at last find indisputably, it was in 1726 that he came to England: [Got out of the Bastille, with orders to leave France, "29th April" of that year (OEuvres de Voltaire, i. 40 n.).] and he himself tells us that he 1728.' Spent, therefore, some two years there in all,last year of George I.'s reign, and first of George II.'s. But mere inanity and darkness visible reign, in all his Biographies, over this period of his life, which was above all others worth investigating: seek not to know it; no man has inquired into it, probably no competent man now ever will. By hints in certain Letters of the period, we learn that he lodged, or at one time lodged, in 'Maiden Lane, Covent Garden;' one of those old Houses that yet stand in Maiden Lane: for which small fact let us be thankful. His own Letters of the period are dated now and then from 'Wandsworth.' Allusions there are to Bolingbroke; but the Wandsworth is not Bolingbroke's mansion, which stood in Battersea; the Wandsworth was one Edward Fawkener's; a man somewhat admirable to young Voltaire, but extinct now, or nearly so, in human memory. He had been a Turkey Merchant, it would seem, and nevertheless was admitted to speak his word in intellectual, even in political circles; which was wonderful to young Voltaire. This Fawkener, I think, became Sir Edward Fawkener, and some kind of 'Secretary to the Duke of Cumberland:'I judge it to be the same Fawkener; a man highly unmemorable now, were it not for the young Frenchman he was hospitable to. Fawkener's and Bolingbroke's are perhaps the only names that turn up in Voltaire's LETTERS of this English Period: over which generally there reigns, in the French Biographies, inane darkness, with an intimation, half involuntary, that it SHOULD have been made luminous, and would if perfectly easy.
"We know, from other sources, that he had acquaintance with many men in England, with all manner of important men: Notes to Pope in Voltaire-English, visit of Voltaire to Congreve, Notes even to such as Lady Sundon in the interior of the Palace, are known of. The brightest young fellow in the world did not want for introductions to the highest quarters, in that time of political alliance, and extensive private acquaintance, between his Country and ours. And all this he was the man to improve, both in the trivial and the deep sense. His bow to the divine Princess Caroline and suite, could it fail in graceful reverence or what else was needed? Dexterous right words in the right places, winged with ESPRIT so called: that was the man's supreme talent, in which he had no match, to the last. A most brilliant, swift, far-glancing young man, disposed to make himself generally agreeable. For the rest, his wonder, we can see, was kept awake; wonder readily inclining, in his circumstances, towards admiration. The stereotype figure of the Englishman, always the same, which turns up in Voltaire's WORKS, is worth noting in this respect. A rugged surly kind of fellow, much-enduring, not intrinsically bad; splenetic without complaint, standing oddly inexpugnable in that natural stoicism of his; taciturn, yet with strange flashes of speech in him now and then, something which goes beyond laughter and articulate logic, and is the taciturn elixir of these two, what they call 'humor' in their dialect: this is pretty much the REVERSE of Voltaire's own self, and therefore all the welcomer to him; delineated always with a kind of mockery, but with evident love. What excellences are in England, thought Voltaire; no Bastille in it, for one thing! Newton's Philosophy annihilated the vortexes of Descartes for him; Locke's Toleration is very grand (especially if all is uncertain, and YOU are in the minority); then Collins, Wollaston and Company,no vile Jesuits here, strong in their mendacious mal-odorous stupidity, despicablest yet most dangerous of creatures, to check freedom of thought! Illustrious Mr. Pope, of the Essay on Man, surely he is admirable; as are Pericles Bolingbroke, and many others. Even Bolingbroke's high-lacquered brass is gold to this young French friend of his.Through all which admirations and exaggerations the progress of the young man, toward certain very serious attainments and achievements, is conceivable enough.
"One other man, who ought to be mentioned in the Biographies, I find Voltaire to have made acquaintance with, in England: a German M. Fabrice, one of several Brothers called Fabrice or Fabricius,concerning whom, how he had been at Bender, and how Voltaire picked CHARLES DOUSE from the memory of him, there was already mention. The same Fabrice who held poor George I. in his arms while they drove, galloping, to Osnabriick, that night, IN EXTREMIS:not needing mention again. The following is more to the point.
"Voltaire, among his multifarious studies while in England, did not forget that of economics: his Poem LA LIGUE,surreptitiously printed, three years since, under that title (one Desfontaines, a hungry Ex-Jesuit, the perpetrator), [1723, VIE, par T. J. D. V. (that is, "M" in the second form), p. 59.]he now took in hand for his own benefit; washed it clean of its blots; christened it HENRIADE, under which name it is still known over all the world;and printed it; published it here, by subscription, in 1726; one of the first things he undertook. Very splendid subscription; headed by Princess Caroline, and much favored by the opulent of quality. Which yielded an unknown but very considerable sum of thousands sterling, and grounded not only the world-renown but the domestic finance of M. de Voltaire. For the fame of the 'new epic,' as this HENRIADE was called, soon spread into all lands. And such fame, and other agencies on his behalf, having opened the way home for Voltaire, he took this sum of Thousands Sterling along with him; laid it out judiciously in some city lottery, or profitable scrip then going at Paris, which at once doubled the amount: after which he invested it in Corn-trade, Army Clothing, Barbary-trade, Commissariat Bacon-trade, all manner of well-chosen trades,being one of the shrewdest financiers on record;and never from that day wanted abundance of money, for one thing. Which he judged to be extremely expedient for a literary man, especially in times of Jesuit and other tribulation. 'You have only to watch,' he would say, 'what scrips, public loans, investments in the field of agio, are offered; if you exert any judgment, it is easy to gain there: do not the stupidest of mortals gain there, by intensely attending to it?'
"Voltaire got almost nothing by his Books, which he generally had to disavow, and denounce as surreptitious supposititious scandals, when some sharp-set Book-seller, in whose way he had laid the savory article as bait, chose to risk his ears for the profit of snatching and publishing it. Next to nothing by his Books; but by his fine finance-talent otherwise, he had become possessed of ample moneys. Which were so cunningly disposed, too, that he had resources in every Country; and no conceivable combination of confiscating Jesuits and dark fanatic Official Persons could throw him out of a livelihood, whithersoever he might be forced to run. A man that looks facts in the face; which is creditable of him. The vulgar call it avarice and the like, as their way is: but M. de Voltaire is convinced that effects will follow causes; and that it well beseems a lonely Ishmaelite, hunting his way through the howling wildernesses and confused ravenous populations of this world, to have money in his pocket. He died with a revenue of some 7,000 pounds a year, probably as good as 20,000 pounds at present; the richest literary man ever heard of hitherto, as well as the remarkablest in some other respects. But we have to mark the second phasis of his life [in which Friedrich now sees him], and how it grew out of this first one.