the concentrated essence of his whole work.  Equally effective and equally characteristic is the Dictionnaire Philosophique, which contains a great number of very short miscellaneous articles arranged in alphabetical order.  This plan gave Voltaire complete freedom both in the choice of subjects and in their manipulation; as the spirit seized him he could fly out into a page of sarcasm or speculation or criticism or buffoonery, and such liberty was precisely to his taste; so that the book which had first appeared as a pocket dictionary—­’ce diable de portatif’, he calls it in a letter proving quite conclusively that he, at any rate, was not responsible for the wretched thing—­were there not Hebrew quotations in it? and who could accuse him of knowing Hebrew?—­had swollen to six volumes before he died.

The subjects of these writings were very various.  Ostensibly, at least, they were by no means limited to matters of controversy.  Some were successful tragedies, others were pieces of criticism, others were historical essays, others were frivolous short stories, or vers de societe.  But, in all of them, somewhere or other, the cloven hoof was bound to show itself at last.  Whatever disguises he might assume, Voltaire in reality was always writing for his ‘convent’; he was pressing forward, at every possible opportunity, the great movement against the old regime.  His attack covers a wide ground.  The abuses of the financial system, the defects in the administration of justice, the futility of the restraints upon trade—­upon these and a hundred similar subjects he poured out an incessant torrent of gay, penetrating, frivolous and remorseless words.  But there was one theme to which he was perpetually recurring, which forms the subject for his bitterest jests, and which, in fact, dominates the whole of his work, ‘Ecrasez l’infame!’ was his constant exclamation; and the ‘infamous thing’ which he wished to see stamped underfoot was nothing less than religion.  The extraordinary fury of his attack on religion has, in the eyes of many, imprinted an indelible stigma upon his name; but the true nature of his position in this matter has often been misunderstood, and deserves some examination.

Voltaire was a profoundly irreligious man.  In this he resembled the majority of his contemporaries; but he carried the quality perhaps to a further pitch than any man of his age.  For, with him, it was not merely the purely religious and mystical feelings that were absent; he lacked all sympathy with those vague, brooding, emotional states of mind which go to create the highest forms of poetry, music, and art, and which are called forth into such a moving intensity by the beauties of Nature.  These things Voltaire did not understand; he did not even perceive them; for him, in fact, they did not exist; and the notion that men could be influenced by them, genuinely and deeply, he considered to be so absurd as hardly to need discussion.  This was certainly a great weakness