Wednesday 7 January 2009

A Note on Voltaire

I cannot say I am utterly at home with Voltaire’s works, though, being no great admirer, I confess I have little desire to change this state of affairs — but I must say that the characterisation quoted below rings somewhat false to me, at least as far as Voltaire’s opinions on the Turks are concerned:
Long before the late Eduard Said invented “Orientalism” to exalt Arab culture and Islamic society at the expense of the West, bien-pensants like Voltaire inclined to express their rebellion against the dwindling vestiges of Christendom by representing Europeans as bigots or clowns and raising up exotic foreigners — Voltaire himself wrote about Turks and Persians of the Muslim fold — to be the fonts of wisdom and models of refined life in their tracts and stories. [1]
I have been and still am under the impression — perhaps false after all — that Voltaire was a lifelong reviler of the Turks, expressing himself in a hostile manner thereto countless times in his long career. As he wrote in his twilight years:
I am seventy-nine, if you please, and upon the stroke of eighty. Thus shall I never see, what I have so passionately wished for, the destruction of those rogues, the Turks, who shut up the women, and do not cultivate the fine arts. [2]
Nor, whilst I am making note, can I rightly say that he was the anti-religionist of modern secularist fable, his being somewhat religious himself. It is nevertheless true to say that he was a gadfly and a trouble-maker, and, to a devout Roman Catholic such as Mozart, nothing more than a rogue. As the composer expressed it to his father at the time of Voltaire’s death: “I give you news which you will perhaps already know, namely, that the godless arch-scoundrel Voltaire has died wretchedly like a dog — like a brute.” [3] Naturally there are all sorts of fables about Mozart too. I have even heard it said that he was a political and social revolutionary in whom modern revolutionaries might take some comradely interest — said, that is, by modern revolutionaries who would have made Voltaire look to Mozart like a saint and a staunch conservative.

[1] Thomas F. Bertonneau, “The West’s Cultural Continuity: Aristotle at Mont Saint-Michel”, The Brussels Journal, 5th January 2009.
[2] Voltaire, “Extract of a Letter from M. Voltaire to the King of Prussia”, Annual Register, Vol. XVII, December 1774, p.177, republished online at the Internet Library of Early Journals. (Another example: “How I should like to see those scoundrels hunted out of the country of Pericles and Plato: it is true, they are not persecutors, but they are brutes.” Letter to M. d’Alembert, 4th September 1769, in Voltaire in His Letters; Being a Selection from His Correspondence, tr. S.G. Tallentyre (London: John Murray, 1919), p.228.)
[3] [“Nun gebe ich Ihnen eine Nachricht, die Sie vielleicht schon wissen werden, daß nemlich der gottlose und Erz-Spitzbub Voltaire so zu sagen wie ein Hund — wie ein Vieh crepirt ist.”] Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Letter to His Father (no.107), 3. Juli 1778, in Mozarts Briefe (Salzburg: Verlag der Mayrischen Buchhandlung, 1865), p.165.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nicely observed and nicely said.
Not a day goes by without somebody trying to tell all and sundry how it wasn't.

Anonymous said...

"to express their rebellion against the dwindling vestiges of Christendom": eh? It's probably true that he wasn't in too much danger of being burnt at the stake, but "dwindling vestiges" is surely wide of the mark?

James Higham said...

It is nevertheless true to say that he was a gadfly and a trouble-maker ...

Closer to the truth but without realizing the implications of his mischief making.