their backs on him, and he was again thrown into the Bastille, and got out only upon promise to leave France.

He went to England, where he lived for three years. It was a new England, based upon the revolution which had driven out the Stuarts; a Protestant England, prosperous, busy, and from the point of view of a French refugee, amazingly free; an England in which Pope was preaching common sense, and Swift was lashing hypocrisy, and Newton was discovering the laws of the universe. When Voltaire returned to France, it was no longer to be a society fop and darling of the aristocracy; it was to be an intellectual pioneer, undermining the wall which French absolutism had built about the country.

Voltaire wrote a book dealing with the things he had learned in England, all the ideas of the new science and the new philosophy and the new toleration. Refused permission to publish it, he had it published secretly, whereupon it was solemnly banned by authority, and a copy was burned by the hangman. This made the fortune of the book; it had a big circulation, and all intellectual France fell to arguing about it. And that was to be Voltaire's life for some forty-five years thereafter; writing forbidden books and pamphlets under an infinity of pen names, having them secretly printed in England, or in Holland, or in Switzerland, having them publicly burned, and no less publicly debated.

The name Voltaire thus means to us a champion of free thought against religious superstition; but we must get clear the fact that during his life Voltaire was the most eminent poet and dramatist of France. Also it is interesting to note that, revolutionary as he was in the field of philosophy, he was a complete conservative in the field of art; following the models of Corneille and Racine, and respecting the sacred unities, the artificial laws whereby the French stage was fettered. Among the discoveries he had made in England was a playwright by the name of Shakespeare, whom he described as "a drunken savage, without the smallest scrap of good taste, and without the least acquaintance with the rules." Voltaire was much annoyed when this dictum had the effect of causing some Frenchmen to be curious about Shakespeare! As time passed, he found that he had to give more and more energy

to denouncing this "drunken savage," and rebuking those who professed to find merit in his work.

All of which has a vital lesson for us; it shows us how tight is the grip of culture conventions upon the educated mind. It is possible for men to think for themselves concerning God and immortality, concerning the divine right of emperors and kings, and even of oil magnates and international financiers. But it is extremely difficult for them to think freely on the subject of what constitutes good taste, and whether or not they ought to permit themselves to enjoy a new and strange work of art. I note with interest that our own young intellectuals, who count themselves thorough-going revolters, who boast of unorthodoxy in religion, politics, economics, and morals, are usually of Tory inclination in matters of culture; cherishing the aristocratic superstition that art exists for cultured classes, and that whatever is popular is obviously contemptible.

We in America do not make any fuss about poets, so it is hard for us to understand the power which Voltaire wielded over French society. He was cynical, he was obscene, he was jealous and vain and exasperating; but he was a kind of god, to whom critical authority bowed, even monarchs with their worldly power. He produced a score of dramas, most of them tragedies in the heroic style, and with few exceptions each was a separate ovation, a coronation in the kingdom of letters. It never occurred to anyone in Voltaire's time that he was not the equal of Racine, as a dramatist; while his epics were put above Homer and Virgil. We today begin one of his plays with determination to go through to the end, but we cannot make it; we desire some Greenwich Village wit to produce it in mock heroic style, so that we can laugh heartily at these pompous aristocrats raging and storming, stabbing and killing each other. We laugh, because it is so apparent that the poet himself has never felt any of this emotion, he has thought only how magnificent it sounds.

But at this time French culture was supreme throughout Europe, and Voltaire, cynic and skeptic, was at once the idol and the terror of the courts. He was a good business man, and invested the money he made from his plays, and become enormously rich. He purchased an estate in Switzerland, just over the French border; an admirable

strategic location, a sort of literary emplacement for a high-caliber gun. He could have his pamphlets printed in Germany and Holland, and secretly shipped into France, and the French police were powerless to touch him. The Swiss Calvinists were glad to have attacks made upon French and Catholic absolutism, so they let the poet alone.

Voltaire was a frail ghost of a man, almost a skeleton, but with quick bright eyes in his bare skull. He was ill most of his life; when he visited King Frederick he described himself as suffering from four mortal diseases, yet he lived to the age of eighty-four, and worked under terrific pressure all the time. He carried on an enormous correspondence-more than ten thousand of his letters have been edited and published. He was capable of almost every kind of meanness and malice, but he was also capable of heroic and unselfish idealism, as the world was

now to see.

In the city of Toulouse, in southern France, a young man named Calas committed suicide, as result of religious mania; he was a member of a Protestant family, and the Catholic authorities in Toulouse accused the father of having murdered the boy to keep him from turning Catholic. They had no shred of evidence, but they cruelly tortured the old man, and finally executed him, and confiscated the property of the family. Voltaire took up the case in a frenzy of indignation; he employed investigators and lawyers, he wrote pamphlets and circulated them, he wrote innumerable letters and appeals; for three years he devoted his time to making the case a political and religious issue in France. No man could have displayed nobler public spirit, or more genuine human sympathy; for three years, so he wrote, he never smiled without feeling that he had committed a crime. When at last the verdict of the Toulouse courts was reversed, he fell into the arms of one of the Calas lads, and wept like a child. He said he, the veteran playwright: "This is the most splendid fifth act I have ever seen on any stage!"

There came one such case after another. Just as in Russia the Black Hundreds spread the rumor that the Jews were accustomed to shed the blood of Christian children, so this Catholic machine made war on the Protestants by accusing them of hideous crimes. Voltaire

espoused the "Sirven case" in the same fury of indignation; it had taken the courts two hours to condemn the victims, he said, and nine years to do them justice! Out of his agony of protest came one of his greatest works, the "Treatise on Toleration"-burned by the hangman, like everything else. Also there came his immortal slogan, which he took to putting on all his letters: "Écrasez l'infame"-that is, crush the infamous thing, meaning Catholic absolutism.

Now America also has its "infame," which is capitalist absolutism; and we await the arrival of some man of letters, capable of the heroic and unselfish idealism of Voltaire. To him there were brought ten or a dozen cases of cruelty and torture in the course of twenty years; but hardly a month passes that my mail does not contain a story of cruelty and torture equally hideous, committed by the powers which are now destroying liberty and enlightenment in America. Consider, for example, the case of the Centralia prisoners, a story of brutality, torture, murder, terrorism, and the subornation of the law by the lumber barons of the Northwest; a story just as pitiful, just as revolting, just as worthy of Voltaire's immortal slogan.

"If you are not careful," says Mrs. Ogi, "you will be accused of putting propaganda into this chapter!"

It was as the champion of freedom of thought that Voltaire stood before the French people; he, with his wealth and fame, was able to do what they did not dare to do. From his mountain retreat he sent his ideas all over Europe; and meantime the blind, deluded rulers of France did all they could to plow the soil for his sowing. The great-grandson of the "grand monarch," who ascended the throne as a child in 1715, ruled for almost sixty years. Beginning with the name of "the well-beloved," he squandered the revenues of the state upon his mistresses, and led his country to a series of disasters, including the loss of the American colonies and India. He left the nation bankrupt, and died with the famous phrase, "After us the deluge."

Four years later, the old Voltaire, made bold by all his honors, came down from his mountain fortress and entered Paris. He had a pageant like a conquering hero; his plays were produced to enormous audiences, and even

the Academy of Richelieu welcomed him-strange irony of history! It was like Tolstoi in Russia; the authorities would have liked to chop off his head, but they could only gnash their teeth in impotence. However, what their hatred could not do, the love of the people accomplished; Voltaire was literally killed by kindness, and died amid the excitements of this holiday. It is interesting to us to note that among those he met in Paris was Benjamin Franklin, fellow skeptic, scientist, and revolutionary propagandist from the new world. This was in 1778, two years after the Declaration of Independence, and less than ten years before the French revolution.

In the case of Voltaire we see a man of letters who ranks as one of the great world forces, and purely and simply because of his propaganda. If he had written nothing but heroic tragedies and sublime epics, he would be a forgotten name today; it was only because he took upon himself the task of setting free the mind of his country, and labored at it incessantly for the greater part of his life, that we know of him and honor him as one of the glories of France. Great as were his faults, no one can deny that he stood to all the world for the fundamental idea of freedom of thought.

CHAPTER XLIV

THE TRUMPETER OF REVOLUTION

We have seen that Voltaire was a Tory as to art; his revolution was of the intellect. There was needed a revolutionist of the feelings, and he appeared in the person of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a stormy, embittered, unhappy man, the object of endless controversy, continuing to our own day; a character full of contradictions, difficult to cover within the limits of a chapter.

His father was a watch-maker in Geneva; he ran away from home and became a vagabond, and remained that all his life. He never had any property; as for friends, he had them only for short periods, because he quarreled with everyone. Among the occupations he followed in youth was that of a footman, which ought to have barred him from rising in eighteenth century France. But he