[<italic> OEuvres de Frederic, <end italic> xv. 59-64 (not dated;datable "October, 1752").] which Piece, of some length, we cannot give here; but will briefly describe as manifesting no real knowledge of the LAW-OF-THRIFT Controversy; but as taking the above loose view of it, and as directed principally against "the pretended Member of our Academy" (mischievous Voltaire, to wit), whom it characterizes as "such a manifest retailer of lies," a "concocter of stupid libels:" "have you ever seen an action more malicious, more dastardly, more infamous?"--and other hard terms, the hardest he can find. This is the privilege of anonymity, on both sides of it.
But imagine now a King and his Voltaire doing witty discourse over their Supper of the gods (as, on the set days, is duly the case);with such a consciousness, burning like Bude light, though close veiled, on the part of Host and Guest! The Friedrich-Voltaire relation is evidently under sore stress of weather, in those winter-autumn months of 1752,--brown leaves, splashy rains and winds moaning outwardly withal. And, alas, the irrepressibly electric Voltaire, still far from having ended, still only just beginning his Anti-Maupertuis discharges, has, in the interim, privately got his DOCTOR AKAKIA ready. Compared to which, the former missile is as a popgun to a park of artillery shotted with old nails and broken glass!--Such a constraint, at the Royal dinner-table, amid wine and wit, could not continue. The credible account is, it soon cracked asunder; and, after the conceivable sputterings, sparklings and flashings of various complexion, issued in lambent airs of "tacit mutual understanding; and in reading of AKAKIA together,--with peals of laughter from the King," as the common French Biographers assert.
"Readers know AKAKIA," [DIATRIBE DU DOCTEUR AKAKIA (in Voltaire, <italic> OEuvres, <end italic> lxi. 19-62).] says Smelfungus:
"it is one of the famous feats of Satirical Pyrotechny; only too pleasant to the corrupt Race of Adam! There is not much, or indeed anything, of true poetic humor in it: but there is a gayety of malice, a dexterity, felicity, inexhaustibility of laughing mockery and light banter, capable of driving a Perpetual President delirious. What an Explosion of glass-crackers, fire-balls, flaming-serpents;--generally, of sleeping gunpowder, in its most artistic forms,--flaming out sky-high over all the Parish, on a sudden! The almost-sublime of Maupertuis, which exists in large quantities, here is a new artist who knows how to treat it.
The engineer of the Sublime (always painfully engineering thitherward without effect),--an engineer of the Comic steps in on him, blows him up with his own petards in a most unexampled manner.
Not an owlery has that poor Maupertuis, in the struggle to be sublime (often nearly successful, but never once quite), happened to drop from him, but Voltaire picks it up; manipulates it, reduces it to the sublimely ridiculous; lodges it, in the form of burning dust, about the head of MON PRESIDENT. Needless to say of the Comic engineer that he is unfair, perversely exaggerative, reiterative, on the owleries of poor Maupertuis;--it is his function to BE all that. Clever, but wrong, do you say? Well, yes:--and yet the ridiculous does require ridicule; wise Nature has silently so ordered. And if ever truculent President in red wig, with his absurd truculences, tyrannies and perpetual struggles after the sublime, did deserve to be exploded in laughter, it could not have been more consummately done;--though perversely always, as must be owned.
"'The hole bored through the Earth,' for instance: really, one sometimes reflects on such a thing; How you would see daylight, and the antipodal gentleman (if he bent a little over) foot to foot;how a little stone flung into it would exactly (but for air and friction) reach the other side of the world; would then, in a computable few moments, come back quiescent to your hand, and so continue forevermore;--with other the like uncriminal fancies.
"'The Latin Town,' again: truly, if learning the Ancient Languages be human Education, it might, with a Greek Ditto, supersede the Universities, and prove excellently serviceable in our struggle Heavenward by that particular route. I can assure M. de Voltaire, it was once practically proposed to this King's Great-grandfather, the Grosse Kurfurst;--who looked into it, with face puckered to the intensest, in his great care for furtherance of the Terrestrial Sciences and Wisdoms; but forbore for that time. [Minute details about it in Stenzel, ii. 234-238; who quotes "Erman" (a poor old friend of ours) "SUR LE PROJET D'UNE VILLE SAVANTE DANS LEBRANDEBOURG (Berlin, 1792):" date of the Project was 1667.] Then as to 'Dissecting the Brains of Patagonians;' what harm, if you can get them gross enough? And as to that of (exalting your mind to predict the future,' does not, in fact, man look BEFORE and AFTER;are not Memory and (in a small degree) Prophecy the Two Faculties he has?
"These things--which are mostly to be found in the 'LETTRES DEMAUPERTUIS' (Dresden, 1752, then a brand-new Book), but are now clipt out from the Maupertuis Treatises--we can fancy to be almost sublimities.--Almost, unfortunately not altogether. And then there is such a Sisyphus-effort visible in dragging them aloft so far: