The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (16 page)

The frankness of Voltaire's attack created an uproar. When a warrant of arrest was issued in 1734, he fled Paris and settled at Cirey in Champagne with Mme du Châtelet, who became his patroness and mistress. There he continued his theatrical writing, and he also turned to scientific research and the systematic study of religions and culture. Because of a lawsuit, he followed Mme du Châtelet to Brussels in May 1739, and thereafter they were constantly on the move between Belgium, Cirey, and Paris. After her death, in 1749, he spent periods in Berlin and Geneva; in 1754 he settled in Switzerland, and in 1758 he bought Ferney, a property on the Swiss border which, together with Tourney in France, enabled him, by crossing the frontier, to safeguard himself against police incursion from either country.

A period of intense and wide-ranging work followed, and there was scarcely a subject of importance on which he did not speak. In addition to his many works on philosophical and moral problems, he wrote
contes
(“tales”), including
Zadig
(1747), which is a kind of allegorical autobiography in which the Babylonian sage Zadig, like Voltaire, suffers persecution, is pursued by ill fortune, and ends by doubting the tender care of Providence for human beings, and
Micromégas
(1752), which measures the littleness of man in the cosmic scale. His best-known work,
Candide
(1759), is a satire on philosophical optimism. In it, the youth Candide, disciple of Doctor Pangloss (himself a disciple of the philosophical optimism of Leibniz), saw and suffered such misfortune that he was unable to believe that this was “the best of all possible worlds.” Having
retired with his companions to the shores of the Propontis, he discovered that the secret of happiness was “to cultivate one's garden,” a practical philosophy excluding excessive idealism and nebulous metaphysics.

Voltaire's fame was now worldwide. As the “Innkeeper of Europe,” as he was called, he welcomed such literary figures as James Boswell, Giovanni Casanova, Edward Gibbon, the Prince de Ligne, and the fashionable philosophers of Paris. He kept up an enormous correspondence—with the Philosophes, with his actresses and actors, and with those high in court circles, such as the duc de Richelieu (grandnephew of the Cardinal de Richelieu), the duc de Choiseul, and Mme du Barry, Louis XV's favourite. He renewed his correspondence with Frederick II and exchanged letters with Catherine II of Russia. His main interest at this time, however, was his opposition to
l'infâme
, a word he used to designate the church, especially when it was identified with intolerance.

Voltaire's epic poetry, lyrical verse, and plays are virtually unknown today, but his
contes
are continually republished, and his letters are regarded as one of the great monuments of French literature. Yet it was the theatre that brought Voltaire back to Paris in 1778. Wishing to direct the rehearsals of
Irène
, he made his triumphal return to the city he had not seen for 28 years. His health was profoundly impaired by the ensuing excitement, and he died several months later.

(b. April 22, 1707, Sharpham Park, Somerset, Eng.—d. Oct. 8, 1754, Lisbon, Port.)

H
enry Fielding was a novelist and playwright who is considered one of the founders of the English novel.
He began his literary career as a playwright who wrote satirical plays often targeting political corruption of the times. The passage in 1737 of the Licensing Act, by which all new plays had to be approved and licensed by the Lord Chamberlain before production, ended this work. Fielding then became a barrister but had little success. He probably wrote
Shamela
(1741), a burlesque of Samuel Richardson's novel
Pamela
that he never claimed.

Fielding's
Joseph Andrews
also satirizes
Pamela
, with Joseph, Pamela's virtuous footman brother, resisting the attempts of a highborn lady to seduce him. The parodic intention soon becomes secondary, and the novel develops into a masterpiece of sustained irony and social criticism. At its centre is Parson Adams, one of the great comic figures of literature. Fielding explains in his preface that he is writing “a comic Epic-Poem in Prose.” He was certainly inaugurating a new genre in fiction.

Journalistic work after the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 made Fielding a trusted supporter of the government. His reward came in 1748, when he was appointed justice of the peace (or magistrate) for Westminster and Middlesex, with his own courthouse, which was also his residence, in Bow Street in central London. Together with his blind half brother, John Fielding, also a magistrate, he turned an office without honour—it carried no salary—into one of great dignity and importance and established a new tradition of justice and the suppression of crime in London. Among other things, Fielding strengthened the police force at his disposal by recruiting a small body of able and energetic “thieftakers”—the Bow Street Runners.

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
(1749), with its great comic gusto, vast gallery of characters, and contrasted scenes of high and low life in London and the provinces, has always constituted the most popular of his works. Like
its predecessor,
Joseph Andrews
, it is constructed around a romance plot. The hero, whose true identity remains unknown until the denouement, loves the beautiful Sophia Western, and at the end of the book he wins her hand. Numerous obstacles have to be overcome before he achieves this, however, and in the course of the action the various sets of characters pursue each other from one part of the country to another, giving Fielding an opportunity to paint an incomparably vivid picture of England in the mid-18th century. The introductory chapters at the beginning of each book make it clear how carefully Fielding had considered the problem of planning the novel. No novelist up until then had so clear an idea of what a novel should be, so that it is not surprising that
Tom Jones
is a masterpiece of literary engineering.

Amelia
(1751), a much more sombre work, anticipates the Victorian domestic novel, being a study of the relationship between a man and his wife. It is also Fielding's most intransigent representation of the evils of the society in which he lived, and he clearly finds the spectacle no longer comic.

(b. Sept. 18, 1709, Lichfield, Staffordshire, Eng.—d. Dec. 13, 1784, London)

S
amuel Johnson, an English critic, biographer, essayist, poet, and lexicographer, is regarded as one of the greatest figures of 18th-century life and letters.

Johnson was the son of a poor bookseller. In 1728 he entered Pembroke College, Oxford. He stayed only 13 months, until December 1729, because he lacked the funds to continue. Johnson then became undermaster at Market Bosworth grammar school in 1732 but was unhappy there;
with only £20 inheritance from his father, he left his position with the feeling that he was escaping prison. In 1735 Johnson married Elizabeth Porter, a widow 20 years his senior. His wife's marriage settlement enabled him to open a school in Edial, near Lichfield, the following year. One of his students, David Garrick, would become the greatest English actor of the age and a lifelong friend, though their friendship was not without its strains. The school soon proved a failure, however, and he and Garrick left for London in 1737.

A year later Johnson began his long association with
The Gentleman's Magazine
, often considered the first modern magazine, with a wide range of poetry and prose. In the mid-1740s he began to work toward two of his major literary accomplishments. His
Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth
(1745), intended as a preliminary sample of his work, was his first significant Shakespeare criticism, which remains his greatest work of literary criticism. The work culminated in his editing an edition of Shakespeare, which appeared in eight volumes in 1765. Johnson edited and annotated the text and wrote a preface.

In 1746 he wrote
The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language
and signed a contract for
A Dictionary of the English Language
, which was eventually published in two volumes in 1755—six years later than planned, but remarkably quickly for so extensive an undertaking. There had been earlier English dictionaries, but none on the scale of Johnson's. In addition to giving etymologies, not the strong point of Johnson and his contemporaries, and definitions, in which he excelled, Johnson illustrated usage with quotations drawn almost entirely from writing from the Elizabethan period to his own time.

Johnson's other works include
The Vanity of Human Wishes
(1749), his most impressive poem as well as the first
work published with his name, and the long fiction
Rasselas
(originally published as
The Prince of Abissinia: A Tale
), which he wrote in 1759, during the evenings of a single week, in order to be able to pay for the funeral of his mother. His many essays appeared in the periodicals
The Rambler
(1750–52),
The Literary Magazine
(from 1756), and
The Universal Chronicle
(in a series known as
The Idler
, 1758–60), among others.

In 1765 Johnson received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Trinity College, Dublin, and 10 years later he was awarded the Doctor of Civil Laws from the University of Oxford. He never referred to himself as Dr. Johnson, though a number of his contemporaries did; James Boswell's consistent use of the title in his famous biography of Johnson,
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D
. (1791), made it popular.

In the early 1770s Johnson wrote a series of political pamphlets supporting positions favourable to the government but in keeping with his own views. His subsequent works include
A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
(1775), based on travels with Boswell, and
Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets
(conventionally known as
The Lives of the Poets
), which was conceived modestly as short prefatory notices to an edition of English poetry but which expanded in scope so that Johnson's prefaces alone filled the first 10 volumes (1779–81) and the poetry grew to 56 volumes.

While Johnson is well remembered for his aphorisms—which contributed to his becoming, after Shakespeare, the most frequently quoted of English writers—his criticism is, perhaps, the most significant part of his writings. Through his
Dictionary
, his edition of Shakespeare, and his
Lives of the Poets
in particular, he helped invent what we now call “English Literature.”

(b. Aug. 28, 1749, Frankfurt am Main [Germany]—d. March 22, 1832, Weimar, Saxe-Weimar)

J
ohann Wolfgang von Goethe was a poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, critic, and amateur artist. He is considered the greatest German literary figure of the modern era.

Goethe is the only German literary figure whose range and international standing equal those of Germany's supreme philosophers (who have often drawn on his works and ideas) and composers (who have often set his works to music). In the literary culture of the German-speaking countries, he has had so dominant a position that, since the end of the 18th century, his writings have been described as “classical.” In a European perspective he appears as the central and unsurpassed representative of the Romantic movement, broadly understood. He could be said to stand in the same relation to the culture of the era that began with the Enlightenment and continues to the present day as William Shakespeare does to the culture of the Renaissance and Dante to the culture of the High Middle Ages. His
Faust
, though eminently stage-worthy when suitably edited, is also Europe's greatest long poem since John Milton's
Paradise Lost
, if not since Dante's
The Divine Comedy
.

From April 1770 until August 1771 Goethe studied in Strasbourg for the doctorate. However, he had now emerged from his Christian period, and for his dissertation he chose a potentially shocking subject from ecclesiastical law concerning the nature of ancient Jewish
religion. The dissertation, which questioned the status of the Ten Commandments, proved too scandalous to be accepted, as perhaps he intended, and he took instead the Latin oral examination for the licentiate in law (which by convention also conferred the title of doctor).

He later returned to Frankfurt. There he created a first draft over six weeks in the autumn of 1771 of
Geschichte Gottfriedens von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand, dramatisirt
(“The History of Gottfried von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand, Dramatized”), later titled simply
Götz von Berlichingen
. It was eventually translated by Sir Walter Scott, who was inspired by Goethe's example to think of using his own local history as the material for his novels. It also contains, however, an invented love-intrigue, focusing on the weak-willed Weislingen, a man who is unable to remain faithful to a worthy woman and betrays his class origins for the sake of a brilliant career.
Götz
was not published immediately but became known to a few friends in manuscript, and Goethe, already well-connected at the cultivated local court of Darmstadt, was asked to start reviewing for a new intellectual Frankfurt journal, the
Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen
(“Frankfurt Review of Books”), which was hostile to the enlightened despotism of the German princely states, notably Prussia and Austria. He thereby effectively became part of the literary movement subsequently known as the Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”).

The years from 1773 to 1776 proved to be the most productive period in Goethe's life; poems and other works, mainly fragments, poured out.
Die Leiden des jungen Werthers
(
The Sorrows of Young Werther
), written in two months early in 1774, appeared that autumn and captured the imagination of a generation. It was almost immediately translated into French and in 1779 into English. The uncompromising
concentration on the principal character's viewpoint—no one else's letters are communicated to the reader—permits the depiction from within of emotional and intellectual disintegration and partly accounts for the strength of the public reaction. Much moral outrage was generated by a work that appeared to condone both adultery and suicide, but for 35 years Goethe was known in the first instance as the author of
Werther
.