Voltaire’s style reaches the summit of its perfection in Candide; but it is perfect in all that he wrote.  His prose is the final embodiment of the most characteristic qualities of the French genius.  If all that that great nation had ever done or thought were abolished from the world, except a single sentence of Voltaire’s, the essence of their achievement would have survived.  His writing brings to a culmination the tradition that Pascal had inaugurated in his Lettres Provinciales:  clarity, simplicity and wit—­these supreme qualities it possesses in an unequalled degree.  But these qualities, pushed to an extreme, have also their disadvantages.  Voltaire’s style is narrow; it is like a rapier—­all point; with such neatness, such lightness, the sweeping blade of Pascal has become an impossibility.  Compared to the measured march of Bossuet’s sentences, Voltaire’s sprightly periods remind one almost of a pirouette.  But the pirouette is Voltaire’s—­executed with all the grace, all the ease, all the latent strength of a consummate dancer; it would be folly to complain; yet it was clear that a reaction was bound to follow—­and a salutary reaction.  Signs of it were already visible in the colour and passion of Diderot’s writing; but it was not until the nineteenth century that the great change came.

Nowhere is the excellence of Voltaire’s style more conspicuous than in his Correspondence, which forms so large and important a portion of his work.  A more delightful and a more indefatigable letter-writer never lived.  The number of his published letters exceeds ten thousand; how many more he may actually have written one hardly ventures to imagine, for the great majority of those that have survived date only from the last thirty years of his long life.  The collection is invaluable alike for the light which it throws upon Voltaire’s career and character, and for the extent to which it reflects the manners, sentiments, and thought of the age.  For Voltaire corresponded with all Europe.  His reputation, already vast before he settled at Ferney, rose after that date to a well-nigh incredible height.  No man had wielded such an influence since the days when Bernard of Clairvaux dictated the conduct of popes and princes from his monastic cell.  But, since then, the wheel had indeed come full circle!  The very antithesis of the Middle Ages was personified in the strange old creature who in his lordly retreat by the Lake of Geneva alternately coquetted with empresses, received the homage of statesmen and philosophers, domineered over literature in all its branches, and laughed Mother Church to scorn.  As the years advanced, Voltaire’s industry, which had always been astonishing, continually increased.  As if his intellectual interests were not enough to occupy him, he took to commercial enterprise, developed the resources of his estates, and started a successful colony of watchmakers at Ferney.  Every day he worked for long hours