Voltaire was much too clear-headed a person to take any notice of nonsense like this.  Rousseau’s letter remained unanswered, nor is there any reason to suppose that Voltaire ever got through it, though Rousseau chose to think that Candide (1759) was meant for a reply to him.[340] He is careful to tell us that he never read that incomparable satire, for which one would be disposed to pity any one except Rousseau, whose appreciation of wit, if not of humour also, was probably more deficient than in any man who ever lived, either in Geneva or any other country fashioned after Genevan guise.  Rousseau’s next letter to Voltaire was four years later, and by that time the alienation which had no definitely avowed cause, and can be marked by no special date, had become complete.  “I hate you, in fact,” he concluded, “since you have so willed it; but I hate you like a man still worthier to have loved you, if you had willed it.  Of all the sentiments with which my heart was full towards you, there only remains the admiration that we cannot refuse to your fine genius, and love for your writings.  If there is nothing in you which I can honour but your talents, that is no fault of mine."[341] We know that Voltaire did not take reproach with serenity, and he behaved with bitter violence towards Rousseau in circumstances when silence would have been both more magnanimous and more humane.  Rousseau occasionally, though not very often, retaliated in the same vein.[342] On the whole his judgment of Voltaire, when calmly given, was not meant to be unkind.  “Voltaire’s first impulse,” he said, “is to be good; it is reflection that makes him bad."[343] Tronchin had said in the same way that Voltaire’s heart was the dupe of his understanding.  Rousseau is always trying to like him, he always recognises him as the first man of the time, and he subscribed his mite for the erection of a statue to him.  It was the satire and mockery in Voltaire which irritated Rousseau more than the doctrines or denial of doctrine which they cloaked; in his eyes sarcasm was always the veritable dialect of the evil power.  It says something for the sincerity of his efforts after equitable judgment, that he should have had the patience to discern some of the fundamental merit of the most remorseless and effective mocker that ever made superstition look mean, and its doctors ridiculous.

II.

Voltaire was indirectly connected with Rousseau’s energetic attack upon another great Encyclopaedist leader, the famous Letter to D’Alembert on Stage Plays.  “There,” Rousseau said afterwards, “is my favourite book, my Benjamin, because I produced it without effort, at the first inspiration, and in the most lucid moments of my life."[344] Voltaire, who to us figures so little as a poet and dramatist, was to himself and to his contemporaries of this date a poet and dramatist before all else, the author of Zaire and Mahomet, rather than of Candide