X. Dénouement
Meanwhile the old “laughing philosopher” was cultivating his garden at Ferney; this “is the best thing we can do on earth.” He had asked for a long life: “my fear is that I shall die before I have rendered service”;116 but surely now he had done his share. The records of his generosity are endless. Everyone, far or near, claimed his good offices; people consulted him, related the wrongs of which they were the victims, and solicited the help of his pen and his credit.”117 Poor people guilty of some misdemeanor were his especial care; he would secure a pardon for them and then set them up in some honest occupation, meanwhile watching and counselling them. When a young couple who had robbed him went down on their knees to beg his forgiveness, he knelt to raise them, telling them that his pardon was freely theirs, and that they should kneel only for God’s.118 One of his characteristic undertakings was to bring up, educate, and provide a dowry for the destitute niece of Corneille. “The little good I have done,” he said, “is my best work . . . . When I am attacked I fight like a devil; I yield to no one; but at bottom I am a good devil, and I end by laughing.”119
In 1770 his friends arranged a subscription to have a bust made of him. The rich had to be forbidden to give more than a mite, for thousands asked the honor of contributing. Frederick inquired how much he should give; he was told, “A crown piece, sire, and your name.” Voltaire congratulated him on adding to his cultivation of the other sciences this encouragement of anatomy by subscribing for the statue of a skeleton. He demurred to the whole undertaking on the ground that he had no face left to be modeled. “You would hardly guess where it ought to be. My eyes have sunk in three inches; my cheeks are like old parchment; . . . the few teeth I had are gone.” To which d’Alembert replied: “Genius . . . has always a countenance which genius, its brother, will easily find.”120 When his pet, Bellet-Bonne, kissed him, he said it was “Life kissing Death.”
He was now eighty-three; and a longing came over him to see Paris before he died. The doctors advised him not to undertake so arduous a trip; but “if I want to commit a folly,” he answered, “nothing will prevent me”; he had lived so long, and worked so hard, that perhaps he felt he had a right to die in his own way, and in that electric Paris from which he had been so long exiled. And so he went, weary mile after weary mile, across France; and when his coach entered the capital his bones hardly held together. He went at once to the friend of his youth, d’Argentaclass="underline" “I have left off dying to come and see you,” he said. The next day his room was stormed by three hundred visitors, who welcomed him as a king; Louis XVI fretted with jealousy. Benjamin Franklin was among the callers, and brought his grandson for Voltaire’s blessing; the old man put his thin hands upon the youth’s head and bade him dedicate himself to “God and Liberty.”
He was so ill now that a priest came to shrive him. “From whom do you come, M. l’Abbé?” asked Voltaire. “From God Himself,” was the answer. “Well, well, sir,” said Voltaire; “your credentials?”121 The priest went away without his prey. Later Voltaire sent for another abbé, Gautier, to come and hear his confession; Gautier came, but refused Voltaire absolution until he should sign a profession of full faith in Catholic doctrine. Voltaire rebelled; instead, he drew up a statement which he gave to his secretary, Wagner: “I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition. (Signed) Voltaire. February 28, 1778.”122
Though sick and tottering, he was driven to the Academy, through tumultuous crowds that clambered on his carriage and tore into souvenirs the precious pelisse which Catherine of Russia had given him. “It was one of the historic events of the century. No great captain returning from a prolonged campaign of difficulty and hazard crowned by the most glorious victory, ever received a more splendid and far-resounding greeting.”123 At the Academy he proposed a revision of the French dictionary; he spoke with youthful fire, and offered to undertake all such part of the work as would come under the letter A. At the close of the sitting he said, “Gentlemen, I thank you in the name of the alphabet.” To which the chairman, Chastellux replied: “And we thank you in the name of letters.”
Meanwhile his play, Irène, was being performed at the theatre; against the advice of the physicians again, he insisted on attending. The play was poor; but people marveled not so much that a man of eighty-three should write a poor play, but that he should write any play at all,124 and they drowned the speech of the players with repeated demonstrations in honor of the author. A stranger, entering, supposed himself to be in a madhouse, and rushed back frightened into the street.125
When the old patriarch of letters went home that evening he was almost reconciled to death. He knew that he was exhausted now; that he had used to the full that wild and marvelous energy which nature had given to him perhaps more than to any man before him. He struggled as he felt life being torn from him; but death could defeat even Voltaire. The end came on May 30, 1778.
He was refused Christian burial in Paris; but his friends set him up grimly in a carriage, and got him out of the city by pretending that he was alive. At Scellières they found a priest who understood that rules were not made for geniuses; and the body was buried in holy ground. In 1791 the National Assembly of the triumphant Revolution forced Louis XVI to recall Voltaire’s remains to the Panthéon. The dead ashes of the great flame that had been were escorted through Paris by a procession of 100,000 men and women, while 600,000 flanked the streets. On the funeral car were the words: “He gave the human mind a great impetus; he prepared us for freedom.” On his tombstone only three words were necessary:
HERE LIES VOLTAIRE
CHAPTER SIX
Immanuel Kant and German Idealism
I. Roads to Kant
Never has a system of thought so dominated an epoch as the philosophy of Immanuel Kant dominated the thought of the nineteenth century. After almost three-score years of quiet and secluded development, the uncanny Scot of Königsberg roused the world from its “dogmatic slumber,” in 1781, with his famous Critique of Pure Reason; and from that year to our own the “critical philosophy” has ruled the speculative roost of Europe. The philosophy of Schopenhauer rose to brief power on the romantic wave that broke in 1848; the theory of evolution swept everything before it after 1859; and the exhilarating iconoclasm of Nietzsche won the center of the philosophic stage as the century came to a close. But these were secondary and surface developments; underneath them the strong and steady current of the Kantian movement flowed on, always wider and deeper; until today its essential theorems are the axioms of all mature philosophy. Nietzsche takes Kant for granted, and passes on,1 Schopenhauer calls the Critique “the most important work in German literature,” and considers any man a child until he has understood Kant;2 Spencer could not understand Kant, and for precisely that reason, perhaps, fell a little short of the fullest philosophic stature. To adapt Hegel’s phrase about Spinoza: to be a philosopher, one must first have been a Kantian.