Now and then a man of genius, of sense, of intellectual honesty, has appeared. Such men have denounced the superstitions of their day. They have pitied the multitude. To see priests devour the substance of the people--priests who made begging one of the learned professions--filled them with loathing and contempt. These men were honest enough to tell their thoughts, brave enough to speak the truth. Then they were denounced, tried, tortured, killed by rack or flame. But some escaped the fury of the fiends who love their enemies, and died naturally in their beds. It would not do for the church to admit that they died peacefully. That would show that religion was not essential at the last moment. Superstition gets its power from the terror of death. It would not do to have the common people understand that a man could deny the Bible--refuse to kiss the cross--contend that Humanity was greater than Christ, and then die as sweetly as Torquemada did, after pouring molten lead into the ears of an honest man; or as calmly as Calvin after he had burned Servetus; or as peacefully as King David after advising with his last breath one son to assassinate another.
The church has taken great pains to show that the last moments of all infidels (that Christians did not succeed in burning) were infinitely wretched and despairing. It was alleged that words could not paint the horrors that were endured by a dying infidel. Every good Christian was expected to, and generally did, believe these accounts. They have been told and retold in every pulpit of the world. Protestant ministers have repeated the lies invented by Catholic priests, and Catholics, by a kind of theological comity, have sworn to the lies told by the Protestants.
Upon this point they have always stood together, and will as long as the same falsehood can be used by both.
Instead of doing these things, Voltaire wilfully closed his eyes to the light of the gospel, examined the Bible for himself, advocated intellectual liberty, struck from the brain the fetters of an arrogant faith, assisted the weak, cried out against the torture of man, appealed to reason, endeavored to establish universal toleration, succored the indigent, and defended the oppressed.
He demonstrated that the origin of all religions is the same--the same mysteries--the same miracles--the same imposture--the same temples and ceremonies--the same kind of founders, apostles and dupes--the same promises and threats--the same pretence of goodness and forgiveness and the practice of the same persecution and murder. He proved that religion made enemies--philosophy friends--and that above the rights of Gods were the rights of man.
These were his crimes. Such a man God would not suffer to die in peace.
If allowed to meet death with a smile, others might follow his example, until none would be left to light the holy fires of the _auto da fe_. It would not do for so great, so successful, an enemy of the church to die without leaving some shriek of fear, some shudder of remorse, some ghastly prayer of chattered horror uttered by lips covered with blood and foam.
For many centuries the theologians have taught that an unbeliever--an infidel--one who spoke or wrote against their creed, could not meet death with composure; that in his last moments God would fill his conscience with the serpents of remorse.
For a thousand years the clergy have manufactured the facts to fit this theory--this infamous conception of the duty of man and the justice of God.
The theologians have insisted that crimes against man were, and are, as nothing compared with crimes against God.
Upon the death-bed subject the clergy grow eloquent. When describing the shudderings and shrieks of the dying unbeliever, their eyes glitter with delight.
It is a festival.
They are no longer men. They become hyenas. They dig open graves. They devour the dead.
It is a banquet.
Unsatisfied still, they paint the terrors of hell. They gaze at the souls of the infidels writhing in the coils of the worm that never dies.
They see them in flames--in oceans of fire--in gulfs of pain--in abysses of despair. They shout with joy. They applaud.
It is an _auto da fe_, presided over by God.
VIII. THE SECOND RETURN.
FOR four hundred years the Bastile had been the outward symbol of oppression. Within its walls the noblest had perished. It was a perpetual threat. It was the last, and often the first, argument of king and priest. Its dungeons, damp and rayless, its massive towers, its secret cells, its instruments of torture, denied the existence of God.
In 1789, on the 14th of July, the people, the multitude, frenzied by suffering, stormed and captured the Bastile. The battle-cry was "Vive Voltaire."
In 1791 permission was given to place in the Pantheon the ashes of Voltaire. He had been buried 110 miles from Paris. Buried by stealth, he was to be removed by a nation. A funeral procession of a hundred miles; every village with its flags and arches; all the people anxious to honor the philosopher of France--the Savior of Calas--the Destroyer of Superstition.
On reaching Paris the great procession moved along the Rue St. Antoine.
Here it paused, and for one night upon the ruins of the Bastile rested the body of Voltaire--rested in triumph, in glory--rested on fallen wall and broken arch, on crumbling stone still damp with tears, on rusting chain and bar and useless bolt--above the dungeons dark and deep, where light had faded from the lives of men and hope had died in breaking hearts.
The conqueror resting upon the conquered.--Throned upon the Bastile, the fallen fortress of Night, the body of Voltaire, from whose brain had issued the Dawn.
For a moment his ashes must have felt the Promethean fire, and the old smile must have illumined once more the face of death.
The vast multitude bowed in reverence, hushed with love and awe heard these words uttered by a priest: "God shall be avenged."
The cry of the priest was a prophecy. Priests skulking in the shadows with faces sinister as night, ghouls in the name of the gospel, desecrated the grave. They carried away the ashes of Voltaire.
The tomb is empty.
God is avenged.
The world is filled with his fame.
Man has conquered.
Was there in the eighteenth century, a man wearing the vestments of the church, the equal of Voltaire?
What cardinal, what bishop, what priest in France raised his voice for the rights of men? What ecclesiastic, what nobleman, took the side of the oppressed--of the peasant? Who denounced the frightful criminal code--the torture of suspected persons? What priest pleaded for the liberty of the citizen? What bishop pitied the victims of the rack? Is there the grave of a priest in France on which a lover of liberty would now drop a flower or a tear? Is there a tomb holding the ashes of a saint from which emerges one ray of light?
If there be another life--a day of judgment, no God can afford to torture in another world the man who abolished torture in this. If God be the keeper of an eternal penitentiary, he should not imprison there the men who broke the chains of slavery here. He cannot afford to make an eternal convict of Voltaire.
Voltaire was a perfect master of the French language, knowing all its moods, tenses and declinations, in fact and in feeling--playing upon it as skillfully as Paganini on his violin, finding expression for every thought and fancy, writing on the most serious subjects with the gayety of a harlequin, plucking jests from the crumbling mouth of death, graceful as the waving of willows, dealing in double meanings that covered the asp with flowers and flattery--master of satire and compliment--mingling them often in the same line, always interested himself, and therefore interesting others--handling thoughts, questions, subjects as a juggler does balls, keeping them in the air with perfect ease--dressing old words in new meanings, charming, grotesque, pathetic, mingling mirth with tears, wit and wisdom, and sometimes wickedness, logic and laughter. With a woman's instinct knowing the sensitive nerves--just where to touch--hating arrogance of place, the stupidity of the solemn--snatching masks from priest and king, knowing the springs of action and ambition's ends--perfectly familiar with the great world--the intimate of kings and their favorites, sympathizing with the oppressed and imprisoned, with the unfortunate and poor, hating tyranny, despising superstition, and loving liberty with all his heart. Such was Voltaire writing "Odipus" at seventeen, "Irene" at eighty-three, and crowding between these two tragedies the accomplishment of a thousand lives.
From his throne at the foot of the Alps, he pointed the finger of scorn at every hypocrite in Europe. For half a century, past rack and stake, past dungeon and cathedral, past altar and throne, he carried with brave hands the sacred torch of Reason, whose light at last will flood the world.
LIBERTY IN LITERATURE.
(A TESTIMONIAL TO WALT WHITMAN.)
* An address delivered in Philadelphia, Oct. 21, 1890. Used by permission of the Truth Seeker Co.
I. LET US PUT WREATHS ON THE BROWS OF THE LIVING.
IN the year 1855 the American people knew but little of books. Their ideals, their models, were English. Young and Pollok, Addison and Watts, were regarded as great poets. Some of the more reckless read Thomson's "Seasons" and the poems and novels of Sir Walter Scott. A few, not quite orthodox, delighted in the mechanical monotony of Pope, and the really wicked--those lost to all religious shame--were worshipers of Shakespeare. The really orthodox Protestant, untroubled by doubts, considered Milton the greatest poet of them all. Byron and Shelley were hardly respectable--not to be read by young persons. It was admitted on all hands that Burns was a child of nature of whom his mother was ashamed and proud.
In the blessed year aforesaid, candor, free and sincere speech, were under the ban. Creeds at that time were entrenched behind statutes, prejudice, custom, ignorance, stupidity, Puritanism and slavery; that is to say, slavery of mind and body.
Of course it always has been, and forever will be, impossible for slavery, or any kind or form of injustice, to produce a great poet. There are hundreds of verse makers and writers on the side of wrong--enemies of progress--but they are not poets, they are not men of genius.
At this time a young man--he to whom this testimonial is given--he upon whose head have fallen the snows of more than seventy winters--this man, born within the sound of the sea, gave to the world a book, "Leaves of Grass." This book was, and is, the true transcript of a soul. The man is unmasked. No drapery of hypocrisy, no pretence, no fear. The book was as original in form as in thought. All customs were forgotten or disregarded, all rules broken--nothing mechanical--no imitation--spontaneous, running and winding like a river, multitudinous in its thoughts as the waves of the sea--nothing mathematical or measured--in everything a touch of chaos; lacking what is called form, as clouds lack form, but not lacking the splendor of sunrise or the glory of sunset. It was a marvelous collection and aggregation of fragments, hints, suggestions, memories, and prophecies, weeds and flowers, clouds and clods, sights and sounds, emotions and passions, waves, shadows and constellations.
His book was received by many with disdain, with horror, with indignation and protest--by the few as a marvelous, almost miraculous, message to the world--full of thought, philosophy, poetry and music.
In the republic of mediocrity genius is dangerous. A great soul appears and fills the world with new and marvelous harmonies. In his words is the old Promethean flame. The heart of nature beats and throbs in his line. The respectable prudes and pedagogues sound the alarm, and cry, or rather screech: "Is this a book for a young person?"
A poem true to life as a Greek statue--candid as nature--fills these barren souls with fear.
They forget that drapery about the perfect was suggested by immodesty.
The provincial prudes, and others of like mold, pretend that love is a duty rather than a passion--a kind of self-denial--not an over-mastering joy. They preach the gospel of pretence and pantalettes, In the presence of sincerity, of truth, they cast down their eyes and endeavor to feel immodest. To them, the most beautiful thing is hypocrisy adorned with a blush.