BOLINGBROKE AND VOLTAIRE.•
Tam book consists of essays republished from the Quarterly Review, for the coupling together of which in one volume there is no apparent reason, beyond the fact that it was necessary to make a volume, and that Voltaire when in England happened to be received as a friend by Bolingbroke. The essay, if such it can be called, on Voltaire is no more than a collection of all the gossiping notices of his stay and doings in England which can be found scattered about in English writers of good, bad, and indifferent authority. Mr. Collins seems to claim them at the beginning of the essay as a serious contribution to the study of Voltaire. "The residence of Voltaire in England is," he tells us, " an unwritten chapter in the literary history of the eighteenth century ;" and the implication is, we suppose, that he has been the first to write it. But Mr. John Morley has already made common knowledge to the English reader- the importance in the development of Voltaireism and the life of Voltaire, of his visit to England and the chief events connected with it; and except as materials for a detailed biography, we confess that we do not see that Mr. Collins has added anything of any particular interest to our knowledge. The most interesting fact, if fact it is, that he attempts to establish, is that we owe the story of Newton and the apple to Voltaire. But as to this, the evidence seems hardly conclusive. The story rests on the authority of John Conduit, who married Newton's niece, and included it in his notes on Newton ; but these, it seems, were not published in England till 1806, while Voltaire states in a " Lettre sur les Anglais," published in 1733, that " voyant des fruits tomber d'un arbre," he set himself to think out the reason. Bat the vague statement, "seeing fruit fall from a tree," can hardly be the origin of the precise story of the famous apple- tree. It seems more probable that the story was current in conversation before it actually appeared in print.
The essay on Bolingbroke is a more serious affair. For reasons perhaps hardly creditable to the state of political morality, numerous efforts have been made of late to push the reputation of Bolingbroke as a politician. Under the stress of some natural elective affinity, it suited Lord Beaconsfield's pur- pose to puff Lord Bolingbroke in his novels, and, indeed, he seems to have chosen him as his model in practical politics. The real Bolingbroke appears to have been a person of entire cynicism, with a complete disbelief in anything but personal interest as the rule of life. But with a view to personal ascendency and his own personal interest, he was ready to profess unhesitating devotion to country, King, or- religion, jest as it might happen to suit him for the moment. While he thought he could gain by Whiggery, he was a Whig ; when he saw his way to power as a Tory, he was a Tory ; he became a furious Jacobite and intrigued with the Hanoverians, a furious Hanoverian and intrigued with the Jacobites ; he was ready to lick Walpole's shoes when he thought he could get anything from Walpole, and to throw dirt at Walpole when he found he could get nothing. To the ordinary reader, his politi- cal and his philosophical writings are nowadays equally un- interesting; but his philosophical writings, being apparently founded on a real principle of religious unbelief, if superficial and commonplace, are sensible, coherent, and consistent ; his political writings, being founded on no principle whatever, are a farrago of inconsistent, incoherent dicta, of no more than momentary application and of quite ephemeral interest. Mr. Collins's own views of Bolingbroke seem not greatly to differ from those here eipressed. His opening sentence is remarkable : —" We have little respect for the public conduct of Boling. broke ; we have no liking for his personal character ; we regard his political writings with suspicion, and his meta- physical writings with contempt." But Mr. Collins has set himself to write a brilliant essay in the style of Macaulay; and this tremendous philippic is only the pre- lude to eulogiums even more tremendous. The worst of it is, that Mr. Collins seems to think a good deal more of being Macanlayesque than of delivering careful, temperate, or well- founded judgments. The whole essay is vitiated by its excellent imitation of Macaulay. It is rather the fashion at the present day to run down Macaulay, especially amongst those who have none of the brilliancy of his style, the solidity of his work, or the intuitive rapidity of his judgment. But there is a more fatal fashion in literature than to decry its past masters,—and that is to flatter them by a would-be exactness of imitation.
• Boll nybroke, a Historical Study ; and Voltaire in Sngland. By J. Oburton Collins. London : John Murray. This is the fault into which Mr. Collins has fallen. His facility for mimicry is wonderful, and the results are proportionately disastrous. The copy is so exact that it becomes a parody. You can shoot with Robin Hood's bow, and yet not shoot like Robin Hood; and many men can write Mac zulayese without the power, the sparkle, the felicity of Macaulay. Mr. Collins is able, eloquent, and forcible; yet we confess to being sincerely bored with Mr. Collins's perpetual succession of jerky sentences, his quasi- epigrammatic paragraphs, his exaggeration of statement, and his confused metaphors. Surely Macaulay would never have said of any one. that" his vast and visionary ambition was bounded only by the highest pinnacle of human glory," thus confusing the notion of the object of ambition, considered as a position of eminence and as an extent of possession ; or that "his promises were like the promises of Grenville, as ready and profuse as they were feigned or forgotten." Turning over the pages, one may seize at random on dozens of inaccurate phrases couched in Macaulayese form, but, because of their inaccuracy, wholly false to the Macaulayese spirit. Nor would Macaulay have been guilty of such a vulgarism as to write, " Into Bolingbroke's relations with the cur Malet we have no intention of entering,"--when Malet had not been previously mentioned, except in the preceding sentence as " that bad man who was always at his elbow," .and two hundred pages before as the author of • Bolingbroke's biography. We cannot think Mr•. Collins has been more successful in substance than in style. He indulges in panegyrics on Bolingbroke's ability as a politician and party leader which would be exaggerated if applied to Walpole or Pitt ; yet there was never a single party with which he was connected which he did not try to betray, or which did not throw him over. As he was equally unable to retain the confidence of the Tories, the Jacobites, and the Opposition Whigs, his wonderful talents for polities would seem to have been singu- larly unsuccessful; and the one chance he did have, under Anne, of setting and keeping a party of his own in power, he ruined by his unscrupulousness, his rashness, and his intemperance. Yet Mr. Collins would have us believe that if Bolingbroke had been allowed his own way, the Jacobite rising of 1715 would have been successful, and he would have altered the whole coarse of European history. So, too, The Patriot King, which Mr. Collins himself describes as a tissue of absurdities, which could not for a moment be taken by any one with the smallest political education as a serious political work, and the success of which the modern reader can only impute to the keenness of party spirit against Walpole at the time, so unreadable is it, is described in a way which would be flattery if applied to the Letters of " Junius," or Burke on the French Revolution. The fact is, that the success of The Patriot King was due to very much the same causes as the success of Killing No Murder, or No. 45 of the North Briton. It put in outspoken terms the animosity felt by a large party against the great man of the day, and so took the town by storm rather because it said forcibly what every one was saying or thinking, than from any permanent literary merits of its own. There is no doubt that as an able and unscrupulous political pam- phleteer, Bolingbroke was in his own day unrivalled. But it is difficult for any one who reads him in cold blood to think very highly of the intrinsic merits of his political writings, still less to regard them as paragons of style, as Mr. Collins does. Bolingbroke's fame in his own day rested on his speeches and his conversation, neither of which, unfortunately, have descended to us ; and we are in the position of rather having to take his transcendent abilities on trust, than of being able really to discover them for ourselves. Or, if we can discern his abilities in his philosophical and political writings, we rather perceive them than are moved by them. Mr. Collins has stated the case for Bolingbroke with great ability and eloquence, marred only by the borrowed style in which it is conveyed; bat he will never be able to persuade the present generation that Boling- broke is a great writer whom it ought to study, or a great statesman from whom it has anything to learn.
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