STATESMAN AS LITERARY MAN.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXII, Issue 4, 14 December 1911, Page 2

STATESMAN AS LITERARY MAN.

Mr John Robertson, M.P., who has just been appointed Under-Secretary to the Home Office, is one of the most accomplished men in the Ministry, and in culture probably comes next to Lord Morley and Lord Haldane. When the first list of changes in the Ministry was made last week the “Manchester Guardian” said that “it could not ho contended that any one out of nearly half a dozen of themen mentioned in to-day’s list of appointments is seriously comparable with Mr J. M. Robertson in knowledge, ability, or visible enthusiasm for Liberal ends, or as an interpreter of what the living Liberalism of the country is thinking about the questions of to-day and to-morrow.” Some indication of Mr Robertson’s literary tastes are given in the R.P.A. Annual just issued, which also contains many articles of great literary and social interest'. Writing on “Voltaire,” Mr Robertson says : Author For a Desert Isle. “It used to be said that if an Englishman and a Frenchman should respectively have the choice of one autnor for reading on a desert island, the former would infallibly choose Shakespeare and the latter as certainly Voltaire. A German, in tuna, might be expected to call for Goethe. “1 count myself tolerably staunch in my devotion to Shakespeare, and 1 greatly value oGethe; but 1 should not like to have that particular choice pressed upon me in tne circumstances specified. There would be a strong temptation to rely on memory for the one or three volumes of the Master Dramatist; to let Goethe go, remembering only the poems i knew by heart; and to clutch at the fifty or sixty or seventy or one hundred volumes which: constitute Voltaire in the editions 1 have handled.

As poet and dramatist ho is to Shakespeare as Harlequin or Harpagon to Hyperion ; but as writer, talker, thinker, tale-teller, wit, humourist, essayist, humanist, moralist, let-ter-writer, critic, historian, versifier, satirist, freethinker, politician, dramatic theorist, literary artist, ho is really not less entitled than Shakespeare, in his way, to the epithet of •myriad-minded.’ "For a reader whose own interests are various there is probably no more variously entertaining writer in all literature than Voltaire. It was his works, and not Shakespeare’s, that Macaulay took with him for his long sea-voyage to India. “jNo injore vivid personality ever lived. One sees him in the foyer of the Theatre Fraucais as a kind of immortal old man radiating intellectual life; and that is fitting, for it was after maturity tlyit he hid most of his greatest work. But he was about the most famous man in France before lie had produced a really great work in prose; and we must know his life down to the rupture with Frederick to realise the wonder of all the later achievement. Infinitely precocious in youth,, he is infinitely young at eighty. ■‘Macaulay, in his splashing tar-and-wiiiting fashion ot portraiture, absurdly sums up Voltaire as waging a ‘long war against all that, whether for good or evil, had authority over men’,' The judgment is pf the order to which Arnold applied the French term saugrenu. it is, , blantantly wrong. Voltaire was politically a Conservative, tempered by the love of justice; of all the leading philosophes he did least to upset authority in the State. Even in religion he was staunch to his early Deism, lighting for it to the last on the score that the . belief was a necessary restraint on men, so that ‘if there were not a God it would be necessary to invent him.’ , Voltaire a Religious Man.

“He 'Was a much more religious man ifelian Macaulay. His tribute to the Gospel Jbsus, indeed, puts much official Christianity to shame. ‘Hie died, as he declared, believing in God and hating no man. We whose freedom was made possible by his battling can forgive him his imperfect philosophy as we do his backwardness in geology 1 after he had introduced Newton in France. And Englishmen owe him some special favour, for he built himself largely on English deism, and wrote good idiomatic English to the last, when he would. “On two subjects 1 should hesitate to sound him—God and Shakespeare. But on all other topics, from the shells of the Alps to the art of writing, what talk this would be!”