The most curious part of this curious letter is the conclusion, where Rousseau, loosely wandering from his theme, separates Voltaire from the philosopher, and beseeches him to draw up a moral code or profession of civil faith that should contain positively the social maxims that everybody should be bound to admit, and negatively the intolerant maxims that everybody should be forced to reject as seditious. Every religion in accord with the code should be allowed, and every religion out of accord with it proscribed, or a man might be free to have no other religion but the code itself.

Voltaire was much too clear-headed a person to take any notice of nonsense like this. Rousseau's letter remained unanswered, nor is there any reason to suppose that Voltaire ever got through it, though Rousseau chose to think that Candide (1759) was meant for a reply to him.' He is careful to tell us that he never read that incomparable satire, for which one would be disposed to pity any one except Rousseau, whose appreciation of wit, if not of humour also, was probably more deficient than in any man who ever lived, either in Geneva or any other country fashioned after Genevan guise. Rousseau's next letter to Voltaire was four years later, and by that time the alienation which had no definitely avowed cause, and can be marked by no special date, had become complete. "I hate you, in fact," he concluded, "since you have so willed it; but I hate you like a man still worthier to have loved you, if you had willed it. Of all the sentiments with which my heart was full towards you, there only remains the admiration that we cannot refuse to your fine genius, and love for your writings. If there is nothing in you which I can honour but your talents, that is no fault of mine." 2 We know that Voltaire did not take reproach with serenity, and he behaved with bitter violence towards Rousseau in circumstances when silence would have been both more magnanimous and more humane. Rousseau occasionally, though not very often, retaliated in the same vein.3

Conf., ix. 277. Also Corr., iii. 326. Mar. 11, 1764. Tronchin's long letter to which Rousseau refers in this passage is given in M. StreckeisenMoultou's collection, i. 323, and is interesting to people who care to know how Voltaire looked to a doctor who saw him closely.

2 Corr., ii. 132. June 17, 1760. Also Conf., x. 91.

3 Some other interesting references to Voltaire in Rousseau's letters are, ii.

1

On the whole his judgment of Voltaire, when calmly given, was not meant to be unkind. "Voltaire's first impulse," he said, "is to be good; it is reflection that makes him bad." Tronchin had said in the same way that Voltaire's heart was the dupe of his understanding. Rousseau is always trying to like him, he always recognises him as the first man of the time, and he subscribed his mite for the erection of a statue to him. It was the satire and mockery in Voltaire which irritated Rousseau more than the doctrines or denial of doctrine which they cloaked; in his eyes sarcasm was always the veritable dialect of the evil power. It says something for the sincerity of his efforts after equitable judgment, that he should have had the patience to discern some of the fundamental merit of the most remorseless and effective mocker that ever made superstition look mean, and its doctors ridiculous.

II.

Voltaire was indirectly connected with Rousseau's energetic attack upon another great Encyclopædist leader, the famous Letter to D'Alembert on Stage Plays. There," Rousseau said after

wards, "is my favourite book, my Benjamin, because I produced it without effort, at the first inspiration, and in the most lucid moments of my life." " Voltaire, who to us figures so little as a poet and dramatist, was to himself and to his contemporaries of this date a poet and dramatist before all else, the author of Zaïre and Mahomet, rather than of Candide and the Philosophical Dictionary. D'Alembert was Voltaire's staunchest henchman.

170 (Nov. 29, 1760), denouncing Voltaire as "that trumpet of impiety, that fine genius, and that low soul," and so forth :-iii. 29 (Oct. 30, 1762), accusing Voltaire of malicious intrigues against him in Switzerland: - iii. 168 (Mar. 21, 1763), that if there is to be any reconciliation, Voltaire must make first advances :-iii. 280 (Dec., 1763), described a trick played by Voltaire :-iv. 40, Jan. 31, 1765) 64:—Corr., v. 74 (Jan. 5, 1767), replying to Voltaire's calumnious account of his early life: note on this subject giving Voltaire the lie direct, iv. 150, May 31, 1765): the Lettre à D'Alembert, p. 193, etc.

1 Bernardin St. Pierre. xii. 96. In the same sense, in Dusaulx, Mes Rapports avec J. J. R. (Paris: 1798), p. 101. See also Corr., iv. 254. Dec. 30, 1765. And again, iv. 276, Feb. 23, 1766, and p. 356.

2 Dusaulx, p. 102.

He only wrote his article on Geneva for the Encyclopædia, to gratify the master. Fresh from a visit to him when he composed it, he took occasion to regret that the austerity of the tradition of the city deprived it of the manifold advantages of a theatre. This suggestion had its origin partly in a desire to promote something that would please the eager vanity of the dramatist whom Geneva now had for so close a neighbour, and who had just set her the example by setting up a theatre of his own; and partly, also, because it gave the writer an opportunity of denouncing the intolerant rigour with which the church nearer home treated the stage and all who appeared on it. Geneva was to set an example that could not be resisted, and France would no longer see actors on the one hand pensioned by the government, and on the other an object of anathema, excommunicated by priests and regarded with contempt by citizens.1

The inveterate hostility of the church to the theatre was manifested by the French ecclesiastics in the full eighteenth century as bitterly as ever. The circumstance that Voltaire was the great play-writer of the time would not tend to soften their traditional prejudice, and the persecution of players by priests was in some sense an episode of the war between the priest and the philosophers. The latter took up the cause of the stage partly because they hoped to make the drama an effective rival to the teaching of pulpit and confessional, partly from their natural sympathy with an elevated form of intellectual manifestation, and partly from their abhorrence of the practical inhumanity with which the officers of the church treated stage-performers. While people of quality eagerly sought the society of those who furnished them as much diversion in private as in public, the church refused to all players the marriage blessing; when an actor or actress wished to marry, they were obliged to renounce the stage, and the Archbishop of Paris diligently resisted evasion or subterfuge. The atrocities connected with the refusal of burial, as well in the case of players as of philosophers, are known to all readers in a dozen illus

1 This part of D'Alembert's article is reproduced in Rousseau's preface, and the whole is given at the end of the volume in M. Auguis's edition, p. 409.

2 Goncourt, Femme au 18ème siècle, p. 256. Grimm, Corr. Lit., vi. 248.

trious instances, from Molière and Adrienne Lecouvreur downwards.

Here as along the whole line of the battle between new light and old prejudice, Rousseau took part, if not with the church, at least against its adversaries. His point of view was at bottom truly puritanical. Jeremy Collier in his Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage (1698) takes up quite a different position. This once famous piece was not a treatment of the general question, but an attack on certain specific qualities of the plays of his time-their indecency of phrase, their oaths, their abuse of the clergy, the gross libertinism of the characters. One can hardly deny that this was richly deserved by the English drama of the Restoration, and Collier's strictures were not applicable, nor meant to apply, either to the ancients, for he has a good word even for Aristophanes, or to the French drama. Bossuet's loftier denunciation, like Rousseau's, was puritanical, and it extended to the whole body of stage plays. He objected to the drama as a school of concupiscence, as a subtle or gross debaucher of the gravity and purity of the understanding, as essentially a charmer of the senses, and therefore the most equivocal and untrustworthy of teachers. He appeals to the fathers, to scripture, to Plato, and even to Christ, who cried, Woe unto you that laugh. There is a fine austerity about Bossuet's energetic criticism; it is so free from breathless eagerness, and so severe without being thinly bitter. The churchmen of a generation or two later had fallen from this height into gloomy peevishness.

Rousseau's letter on the theatre, it need hardly be said, is meant to be an appeal to the common sense and judgment of his readers, (and not conceived in the ecclesiastical tone of unctuous anathema and fulgurant menace. It is no bishop's pastoral, replete with solecisms of thought and idiom, but a piece of firm dialectic in real matter.) His position is this; that the moral effect of the stage can never be salutary in itself, while it may easily be extremely pernicious, and that the habit of frequenting the theatre, the taste for imitating the style of the actors, the cost in money,

1 Maximes sur la Comédie, § 15, etc. They were written in reply to a plea for Comedy by Caffaro, a Jesuit father.

the waste in time, and all the other accessory conditions, apart from the morality of the matter represented, are bad things in themselves, absolutely and in every circumstance. Secondly, these effects in all kinds are specially bad in relation to the social condition and habits of Geneva. The first part of the discussion is an ingenious answer to some of the now trite pleas for the morality of the drama, such as that tragedy leads to pity through terror, that comedy corrects men while amusing them, that both make virtue attractive and vice hateful.2 Rousseau insists with abundance of acutely chosen illustration that the pity that is awaked by tragedy is a fleeting emotion which subsides when the curtain falls; that comedy as often as not amuses men at the expense of old age, uncouth virtue, paternal carefulness, and other objects which we should be taught rather to revere than to ridicule; and that both tragedy and comedy, instead of making vice hateful, constantly win our sympathy for it. Is not the French stage, he asks, as much the triumph of great villains, like Catilina, Mahomet, Atreus, as of illustrious heroes?

This rude handling of accepted commonplace is always one of the most interesting features in Rousseau's polemic. It was of course a characteristic of the eighteenth century always to take up the ethical and high prudential view of whatever had to be justified, and Rousseau seems from this point to have been successful in demolishing arguments which might hold of Greek tragedy at its best, but which certainly do not hold of any other dramatic forms. The childishness of the old criticism which attaches the label of some moral from the copybook to each piece, as its lesson and point of moral aim, is evident. In repudiating this Rousseau was certainly right. Both the assailants and the defenders of the

3

1 The letter may be conveniently divided into three parts: I. pp. 1-89, II. pp. 90—145, III. pp. 146 to the end. Of course if Rousseau in saying that tragedy leads to pity through terror, was thinking of the famous passage in the sixth chapter of Aristotle's Poetics, he was guilty of a shocking mistranslation.

2 Some of the arguments seem drawn from Plato; see, besides the wellknown passages in the Republic, the Laws, iv. 719, and still more directly, Gorgias, 502.

Yet D'Alembert in his very cool and sensible reply (p. 245) repeats the old saws, as that in Catilina we learn the lesson of the harm which may be done to the human race by the abuse of great talents, and so forth.