"Voltaire": What The C.H.

Said In 1936
More Noyes-Sheed Letters
I n view of the prolonged controversy about Mr. Noyes' life of Voltaire, declared " worthy of condemnation " by the Holy Office, we reprint below the greater part of the review of the book written by Mr. Bernard Wall in the CATHOLIC HERALD of November 27, 1936.
It will be seen from this review that an independent Catholic critic was forced to state: " I find myself in disagreement with a good deal of his actual thesis and many of his conclusions."
We append two further letters to The Times. The first by Mr. Noyes appeared on Saturday, August 26, and the second by Mr. Sheed on Tuesday, August 3o.
By BERNARD WALL (November 27, 1936) There is not a dull page in this book of six hundred and thirty-five pages. Probably nothing about Voltaire could be dull; but Mr. Noyes sees Voltaire very vividly as a living subject and presents him as though he were writing about a living man, At the same time it is a difficult book to review, because on the one hand I admire immensely the spirit in which Mr. Noyes approaches Voltaire, while, on the other hand, I find myself in disagreement with a good deal of his actual thesis and many of his conclusions.
There scarcely could be a less sectarian hook, and to write about Voltaire in an unsectarian way is no mean achievement. As the author repeatedly points out, Voltaire the "Atheist " has been the figure of countless legends and misrepresentations, and, indeed, a whole generation was brought up to think of him as a demoniacal and destructive figure, his face distorted with an eternal grin, an ape who mocked everything that tradition taught was holy.
This book would he the best corrective imaginable against such false conceptions of Voltaire the man—always excepting a perusal of Voltaire himself. Voltaire's Deism, indeed Deism in general, was popularly thought to be Atheism in the eighteenth century; his attacks on the corruption of French and European clericalism, which fed the fires of the French Revolution, were taken as attacks on all religion; and many of his wittiest remarks, which, as the author says, remind one of Erasmus, have in them something that has always gone with Catholicism and belief, especially in Paris and Rome. The rapier-like epigram, together with the peculiar rabelaisian humour which is called gauloiserie, will probably last as long as France lasts.
Mr. Noyes is one of Voltaire's greatest apologists. Voltaire is the " hero " of this book in the most accepted sense, and in defending Voltaire against his worst accusers the author seems to me to have gone to the opposite extreme. It is more than an apologia of Voltaire; it could almost be called an apotheosis. At times I have an uneasy feeling that the author uses some of those methods of appreciation which are employed in hagiography, which is a separate art and different from history. I finished the book wondering "Could such a great man ever have existed?"
Frankly I do not believe that he did exist. When we come to the more questionable actions of Voltaire, for instance his financial operations which made him rich, or the dishonesty of his treatment of Frederick the Great, the author puts forward a passionate plea to justify Voltaire absolutely. In the case of the quarrel between Voltaire and Frederick the sympathy of the reader may well be half on Frederick's side--even as Mr. Noyes states the case —nor will he be entirely bereft of a certain condolence with the much-abused Maupertuis, the target of Voltaire's wit. It is impossible to go into all the details here, but Macaulay's interpretation of Voltaire's behaviour in his well-known essay on Fred erick the Great still seems to stand against Mr. Noyes' facts Countless instances [of Voltaire's antiChristianity] Mr. Noyes dismisses as being justified in a pamphleteer and as being primarily aimed at reforming Christians: the Fathers of the Church led the way in a similar method for carrying out that
onerous taxi:. For psychological reasons, I cannot believe this was Voltaire's motive, and time and time again I fancy I perceive in Voltaire that snigger which still afflicts so many educated Frenchmen--a snigger that convulses the students at the Sorbonne when a professor makes a witty remark about nuns. Perhaps there are three stages of intelligence in a Catholic country: superstition, anti-superstition and wisdom. Voltaire only reached the second. Less wise than Montaigne, he was the greatest writer
of that long line of French writers whose last representative was Anatole France.
I am not sure that the reader of this book will not be confused by Mr. Noyes' use of the words religious and Christian. Both Voltaire and Rousseau, in different ways, were profoundly religious men and they ought to be distinguished in this from d'Holbach and perhaps from the Encyclo pedists in general. They were religious men but they were Deists not Theists—and from the point of view of European culture, quite apart from theology, there is a great gulf between the two which Mr. Noyes does not sufficiently emphasise.
I believe it is quite misleading to say that Rousseau's Confession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicaire " constitutes one of the great stages in the work of religious reconstruction," or to refer to the " really Christian conditions of the little colony at Ferney." This last remark may be the crux of the whole matter and may show how easy it is for us to use the word Christian in a deracinate and protestant sense rather than its old theological and cultural sense. The colony at Ferney was religious, but with the religious Deism of Voltaire. Its morality was humanitarian morality rather'than the morality of the Church and Christendom.
Voltaire was nearer the roots of Christianity than Renan was able to be a hundred years later, and much nearer than Mr. Aldous Huxley is able to be today. But I believe that those roots were already severed, and that is why Voltaire's influence was far more destructive than constructive.
The author has always before him that " shadow of the Valois yawning at the mass," and he is always bringing before our minds a comparison between Voltaire's devotion to his cause and the hypocrisy of French prelates or Louis XV's relationship with Mme. de Pompadour. But surely Catholicism has always maintained—and must essentially maintain as long as Christendom subsists—that whatever the subjective issues, heresy is a greater crime against society than immorality, that the first test of Christianity is the profession— however weakly, however inconsistently— of certain facts about man and God and society, facts that Louis XV may have contributed to destroy indirectly; but Voltaire endeavoured to root them up.
Voltaire was thus one of the fathers of the French Revolution, as he has always and rightly been considered to be.
MR. NOYES ACCUSES MR. SHEED
To the Editor of The Times.
SIR,—Mr. Sheed's letter in The Times today contains another of those inaccuracies which are rapidly becoming an outrage
to the public conscience. Fortunately I have the documeqas, and nothing less than the publication of the relevant passages can meet the case. Mr. Sheed says that the greater part of my statement to the Holy Office has already appeared in The Times, but that certain concluding sen
tences were omitted. He then gives his own version of these sentences, including the following:—
With regard to all the editions of the book in any way under my control. the directions of the Holy Office have., of course, been obeyed.
This is the version which he wanted me to send in. On June 29 he had written to me with regard to this version as follows: " I enclose a copy of your statement with the end slightly altered."
I did not accept his version, but took my own statement personally to Cardinal Hinsley. In that statement I said
With regard to all editions of the book in any way under the control of Messrs. Sheed and Ward the directions of the Holy Office have been obeyed.
The difference here is vital. Incidentally may add that Ma Sheed also sent me a model covering letter, to go with the statement, typed and ready for signature, in which i was to say something absolutely untrue. The first part of it ran :— My dear Lord Cardinal,—Will you please convey to the Holy See this expression of my profound desire to carry out their instructions with regard to the withdrawal of my book " Voltaire"? I have withdrawn from circulation all editions under my control.
This letter also I rejected, and sent one, of my own, in which I stated the truth: that the book had been withdrawn by my publishers. Mr. Shoed says it was with my agreement that he withdrew the book. This is a complete misuse of words. I certainly recognised the dilemma in which he as a Catholic publisher had been placed by the receipt of private instructions to withdraw the book before any direct communication had been made to the author; but I never for a moment wavered in my assertion that the procedure adopted was unjust, thoroughly wrong, and against the law of the land. From the very first, also, I told him of my strong feeling that the book should be transferred to a neutral publisher, so that I might stand on my own feet and answer with my own conscience to any requirements that might be made of me. His answer to this, at a time when he was the sole intermediary between myself and the authorities, was that it would probably be taken as " defiance" and lead to my being deprived of the Sacraments.
The Society of Authors will probably regard this as an entirely new relationship between author and publisher during a dis
cussion to whether an author should go elsewhere. There is a continuous series of letters pressing for the transference, and in the face of this it is impossible for him to maintain that I have acquiesced in the situation which has been forced upon me. Mr. Sheed denies that it was only because my book was published by a Catholic firm that its 'complete suppression could have been carried out in the way adopted, but the facts were as I stated them in my letter to The Times last Saturday. If 1 had remained in the security of the old-established firm which had published for me for over a quarter of a century all that the authorities would have, or could have, done would have been to notify me personally that they wished me to make some correc tions in a future edition. I should thus have been standing on my own feet. This was exactly what happened to Wilfrid Ward. It is impossible I suppose that Mr. Sliced does not see the difference. It was simply and solely because I went, not merely for selfish reasons, to a Catholic firm that the private instructions for the withdrawal of the book could have been given to the publishers without any explanation or any direct communication to the author. My mind has not changed, as Mr. Sliced suggests, during the last month or two, but the full iniquity of the proceedings was only revealed to me piecemeal. The decree did not affict myself only. The French translator, who is over 70, had been working long hours on the book for over a year, and was looking forward to a cer tain literary recognition. He had been writing with the greatest anxiety about the unexplained withholding of the French edition He was told that this was due to the author's personal wish. A considerable time elapsed before, indirectly, I heard of this. There were others who were made to suffer a personal anxiety of a deeper kind about which I can say nothing except that those who are nearest to me are absolutely in accord with my recent letter.
I am, Sir, yours, &c.,
ALFRED NOYES.
St. Lawrence, Isle of Wight, Aug. 25.
ACCUSATION WAS UNJUST
To the Editor of The Times.
Suit,-1 must apologise for writing one more letter in a correspondence from which the interest seems rather to have
(Continued on page 11)