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_ and the
_Philosophical Dictionary_. D'Alembert was Voltaire's staunchest
henchman. He only wrote his article on Geneva for the Encyclopaedia to
gratify the master. Fresh from a visit to him when he composed it, he
took occasion to regret that the austerity of the tradition of the city
deprived it of the manifold advantages of a theatre. This suggestion had
its origin partly in a desire to promote something that would please the
eager vanity of the dramatist whom Geneva now had for so close a
neighbour, and who had just set her the example by setting up a theatre
of his own; and partly, also, because it gave the writer an opportunity
of denouncing the intolerant rigour with which the church nearer home
treated the stage and all who appeared on it. Geneva was to set an
example that could not be resisted, and France would no longer see
actors on the one hand pensioned by the government, and on the other an
object of anathema, excommunicated by priests and regarded with contempt
by citizens.[345]

The inveterate hostility of the church to the theatre was manifested by
the French ecclesiastics in the full eighteenth century as bitterly as
ever. The circumstance that Voltaire was the great play-writer of the
time would not tend to soften their traditional prejudice, and the
persecution of players by priests was in some sense an episode of the
war between the priest and the philosophers. The latter took up the
cause of the stage partly because they hoped to make the drama an
effective rival to the teaching of pulpit and confessional, partly from
their natural sympathy with an elevated form of intellectual
manifestation, and partly from their abhorrence of the practical
inhumanity with which the officers of the church treated stage
performers. While people of quality eagerly sought the society of those
who furnish