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Updated: June 25, 2025
I make these introductory remarks to show how shallow is the criticism passed upon a novelist or poet like Scott, in that he is not now so popular or so much read as he was in his own day. It is the fate of most great writers, the Augustines, the Voltaires, the Bayles of the world.
I swear it is humiliating to humanity to know that the Jacques Harets of this world always get the better of the François Marie Voltaires. Jacques Haret had no blushes for his fall, and Voltaire blushed for his rise! But such is the curious way of the world.
Writes many Letters, too; finds moments even for some verses; and occasionally draws a snatch of melody from his flute. His Letters are copiously preserved; but, as usual, they are in swift official tone, and tell us almost nothing. To his Sisters he writes assurances; to his friends, his Suhms, Duhans, Voltaires, eager invitations, general or particular, to come to him.
In Great Britain alone were the people even reputed to have a share in the government, and to Great Britain the Voltaires and the Montesquieus of the Continent turned for a model in politics. Let us join them in considering the peculiar organization of the British monarchy, and then we shall observe how the other governments of Europe met the demand for reform.
Yes, Zola is not Voltaire, and we are none of us Voltaires, but there are in life conjunctions of circumstances when the reproach that we are not Voltaires is least of all appropriate. Think of Korolenko, who defended the Multanovsky natives and saved them from penal servitude. Dr. Haas is not a Voltaire either, and yet his wonderful life has been well spent up to the end.
Eventually the Subaltern picked out a volume by Ségur, not because he wanted to read about war, but because he feared that the Voltaires, the Rousseaux, and the Hugos would be too difficult for him. Ségur was easy: one could skip whole phrases without losing his gist: one was not worried by the words one did not know.
Readers are languidly aware that phenomena do go on round their Friedrich; that their busy Friedrich, with his few Voltaires and renowned persons, are not the only population of their Century, by any means. Everybody is aware of that fact; yet, in practice, almost everybody is as good as not aware; and the World all round one's Hero is a darkness, a dormant vacancy.
They leave such heroic scourges to be decorated by the Voltaires and D'Alemberts of the Gauls, or wait till by the improvement of balloons they may be transported to some of those millions of worlds that Herschel is discovering every day; for this new Columbus has thrown open the great gates of astronomy, and neither Spanish inquisitors nor English Nabobs will be able to torture and ransack the new regions and their inhabitants.
There is Don Quixote and Hudibras, Gulliver and Hume, Paley and Butler, Hervey and Watts, Lavater and Trenck, Seneca and Gregory, Nepos and even Aspasia Vindicated to say nothing of Abelard and He1oise and Thomas a Kempis. All the Voltaires have been sold, however, and the Tom Paines went off at a rattling gait.
He recognized that there were two Voltaires one covetous, quibbling, spiteful and greedy; and the other the peerless poet and philosopher the man who hated shams and pretense, and had made a brave fight for liberty; the charming companion, the gracious friend.
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