Anglomania by Ian Buruma Read Free Book Online Page B

disdain for commerce coexisted with active participation in it. Not just that, but traders often received official honors. Fawkener was more than a shopkeeper. Among other things he became British ambassador to Constantinople (the source of his silk trade) and private secretary to the duke of Cumberland, whom he accompanied in 1746 to Culloden Moor, where he watched the Jacobite rebellion end in a bloody defeat.
    It was nonetheless shockingly progressive of Voltaire—for a Frenchman, that is—to dedicate his play Zaïre in 1732 to “Mr Fawkener, English merchant.” Voltaire wrote: “You are an Englishman, my dear friend, and I was born in France; but lovers of the arts are fellow-citizens … At the same time I rejoice in the opportunity of telling my own country in what light men of business are regarded in yours, and in what esteem England can hold a calling which makes the greatness of the State.” No French author had done such a thing before. Theearlier dedication of La Henriade to Queen Caroline was more conventional, though suffused with Enlightenment sentiments: “ YOUR MAJESTY will find in this Book, bold impartial truths, Morality unstained with Superstition, a Spirit of Liberty, equally abhorrent of Rebellion and of Tyranny, the Rights of Kings always asserted, and those of Mankind never laid aside.”
    The shift from monarch to merchant was indicative of a general shift from official patronage to the marketplace. Voltaire believed in a Republic of Letters, where lovers of the arts were fellow citizens, or indeed fellow aristocrats of the mind. But he also believed in the writer as a businessman. He was unimpressed by British amateurism. When William Congreve, whom Voltaire admired, told him he thought of himself as a gentleman, whose plays were mere trifles, Voltaire was offended. If it hadn’t been for the plays, he thought, he never would have bothered to visit Congreve. Even though he solicited, and certainly accepted, support from Frederick of Prussia, among other noble patrons, Voltaire aspired to be what we would call a public intellectual, independent of official patronage. He thought the freedom of England would give him that chance. It is an arresting notion: a French thinker coming to England to become a successful intellectual. But if we think of the many Europeans in the twentieth century who went to America for just that reason, it is perhaps less strange.
    V OLTAIRE ’ S L ETTERS CONCERNING the English Nation , the outstanding product of his time spent in England, was written in English for the British market. It is a most unusual book, for which Voltaire had invented a new genre. Unlike the authors of the kind of travel book, popular in his day, who concentrated on famous sites and exotic descriptions, Voltaire approached his subject as an intellectual traveler. The book is a journey of ideas. Voltaire made no effort to describe what England looked like; he was concerned with what Englishmen thought. Because of this, his actual life in England remains obscure. We know he met Swift, visited the theater, dined with Lord Chesterfield, met two kings (George I and II), was accused of being a spy, attended Quaker meetings, wrote a play ( Brutus ) comparing Englishliberty to French tyranny, and made love to Lord Hervey’s wife (and possibly Lord Hervey himself). We know little more.
    The longest sections in the book are about the ideas of Newton and Locke. Wielding the empiricism of the English thinkers and his own rather heavy irony as his bludgeon, Voltaire hammers Descartes, especially his notion of innate ideas: “Descartes … maintains that the Soul is the same Thing with Thought, and Mr. Locke has given a pretty good Proof of the contrary.” He contrasts French dogmatism with the skepticism of “English thinking,” which affirms “nothing but what it conceives clearly …” It was Voltaire who popularized the anecdote of Isaac Newton’s apple and his theory of gravity. He had