ycS 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



correspondence of Voltaire now comprises more 

 than ten thousand letters. The works relating 

 to him and his doini,'S form a catalogue of four 

 hundred and twenty-eight entries, which will 

 probably be increased before these volumes see 

 the light. Scarcely a month passes without 

 some addition to the wonderful mass. At one 

 time it is a series of letters found in a grocer's 

 shop, or rendered accessible by the death of an 

 heir of one of his princely correspondents ; 

 now, au enterprising editor gives his readers an 

 unpublished poem ; recently, Mr. Gallatin depos- 

 ited in the library of the New York Historical 

 Society sixty-six pieces of paper and card con- 

 taining words written or dictated by him ; and 

 in September, 1880, came from Paris the an- 

 nouncement of "Le Sottisier de Voltaire," from 

 one of the eighteen volumes of manuscript in 

 his library at Petersburg. No sooner is an edi- 

 tion of his works published, than it is made in- 

 complete by a new discovery. Since the issue of 

 the ninety-seven-volume edition in 1834, enough 

 matter has accumulated to fill six or seven vol- 

 umes more. 



Still more strange, the mass of his writings, 

 and I may even say every page of them, has to 

 this hour a certain vitality and interest. If it 

 has not intrinsic excellence, it possesses the 

 interest of an obsolete kind of agreeable folly ; 

 if it is not truth, it is a record of error that in- 

 structs or amuses. He was mistaken in sup- 

 posing that no man could go to posterity laden 

 with so much baggage. In some cases it is the 

 baggage that floats him, and many readers of to- 

 day find his prefaces, notes, and introductions 

 more entertaining than the work hidden in the 

 midst of them. Nearly every 'page of this 

 printed matter contains at least an atom of 

 biography, and I can fairly claim to have had 

 my eye upon it, indexed it, and given it con- 

 sideration. 



The reader is probably aware that every cir- 

 cumstance in the history of this man, from the 

 date of his birth to the resting-place of his bones, 

 is matter of controversy. If I had paused to 

 state the various versions of each event and the 

 interpretations put upon each action, this work 

 would have been ten volumes instead of two. 

 It would have been, like many other biographies, 

 not a history of the man, but a history of the 

 struggles of the author in getting at the man. 

 Generally, therefore, I have given only the ob- 

 vious or most probable truth, and have often 

 refrained from even mentioning anecdotes and 

 statements that I knew to be groundless. Why 

 prolong the life of a falsehood merely for the 

 sake of refuting it ? 



The Voltaire of these volumes is the nearest 

 to the true one that I have been able to gather 

 and construct. I think the man is to be found 

 In these pages delineated by himself. But he 

 was such an enormous personage, that another 

 writer, equally intent upon truth, could find in 

 the mass of his remains quite another Voltaire. 



Now, it is obvious enough from these 

 statements that the work of sifting mate- 



rials and discussing minutiae in regard to 

 Voltaire, his multitude of works, and the 

 interminable comment thereon, might have 

 no end. Its perfection, according to the 

 ideals of a pedantic scholarship, is impos- 

 sible. Numberless details must remain for 

 ever unsettled, and there would remain 

 room for charges of error, no matter how 

 far investigation was pushed. Mr. Parton 

 is the last man who will claim that his 

 treatment of the subject is infallible, but 

 he may justly claim that he has gone as far as 

 fair criticism can demand, toward making his 

 book accurate and trustworthy. Mr. George 

 Saintsbury, who has the reputation of being 

 " one of the highest English authorities on 

 French literature," reviewing Mr. Parton's 

 work in " The Academy," recognizes that Mr. 

 Parton is no " mere book-maker," but a 

 "perfectly honest writer, and appears to 

 have digested his enormous materials M'ith 

 a great deal of diligent effort " ; but he 

 thinks he has failed in producing " a work 

 of art and an independent contribution to 

 literature." And Avhat is the evidence of 

 this ? Why, that " an innumerable multi- 

 tude of small errors disfigures his pages." 

 Mr. Saintsbury read the first 250 pages of 

 Mr. Parton's book in careful search of de- 

 fects, and says that he finds on the margins 

 no less than fifty-four black marks, indicat- 

 ing what he deems imperfections. Some 

 are awkwardnesses of expression, some ex- 

 cusable slips, some inept observations, some 

 critical mistakes, and some actual errors. 

 The examples he gives show the triviality 

 of the blemishes he has marked, and they 

 are mainly of a sort which could never be 

 perfectly eliminated from a performance of 

 this kind. Mr. Saintsbury objects that Par- 

 ton's biography is not a " work of art," but 

 works of art appeal to the taste, and tastes 

 differ. Mr. Saintsbury comes to his work 

 of criticism as " one of the highest English 

 authorities on French literature." He is an 

 adept in Voltairean studies, and in the first 

 half of a large volume he finds fifty-four 

 petty flaws, some of which are differences 

 of opinion, and some, no doubt, real faults. 

 We want no better evidence of the general 

 al^ility and fidelity of the work than that a 

 master of the subject can find no more to 

 say against it than is stated in this criticism 

 of " The Academy." 



