[ Tallentyre's Commentary: Helvétius was to become the author of one of the most famous books of the eighteenth century, On the Mind (De l'Esprit), whose frank material-ism, adorned by the most easy and entertaining style, disgusted even that materialistic age, and particularly disgusted Voltaire. At the date of this letter, however, Helvétius was only twenty-four, a young man about town, gallant, delightful, just made Farmer-General, and seeking to woo fame by rhymed Epistles on The Love of Study and on Happiness. But not even the generous encouragement and the careful and illuminating criticism of a Voltaire could make those stilted verses poetry, and Helvétius evidently waited till he took to prose to profit by Voltaire's advice and try to write simply instead of trying to write finely.

Shortly after the date of this letter, he was a guest at Cirey, and the friendship between him and his monitor was confirmed: though to Voltaire, with his burning and active pity for the oppressed, the Farmers-General--those extortionate tax-gatherers of old France--were a class wholly odious. But Helvétius, whose heart was as much better than his profession as his mind was above his book on it, used his office to plead in high places for the poor, and in 1751 renounced it, proving "he was not insatiable like the rest of them."

When, in 1759, On the Mind was burnt by the public hangman in company with Voltaire's poem On Natural Law, though he had soundly hated (and roundly abused) Helvétius' masterpiece, he fought for its right to live, tooth and nail, up hill and down dale, on the essentially Voltairean principle: "I wholly disapprove of what you say--and will defend to the death your right to say it." ]

Cirey, February 25, 1739.

My dear friend--the friend of Truth and the Muses--your Epistle is full of bold reasoning in advance of your age, and still more in advance of those craven writers who rhyme for the book-sellers and restrict themselves within the compass of a royal censor, who is either jealous of them, or more cowardly than they are themselves.

What are they but miserable birds, with their wings close clipped, who, longing to soar, are for ever falling back to earth, breaking their legs! You have a fearless genius, and your work sparkles with imagination. I much prefer your generous faults to the mediocre prettinesses with which we are cloyed. If you will allow me to tell you where I think you can improve yourself in your art, I should say: Beware, lest in attempting the grand, you overshoot the mark and fall into the grandiose: only employ true similes: and be sure always to use exactly the right word.

Shall I give you an infallible little rule for verse? Here it is. When a thought is just and noble, something still remains to be done with it: see if the way you have expressed it in verse would be effective in prose: and if your verse, without the swing of the rhyme, seems to you to have a word too many--if there is the least defect in the construction--if a conjunction is forgotten--if, in brief, the right word is not used, or not used in the right place, you must then conclude that the jewel of your thought is not well set. Be quite sure that lines which have any one of these faults will never be learnt by heart, and never re-read: and the only good verses are those which one re--reads and remembers, in spite of oneself. There are many of this kind in your "Epistle"--lines which no one else in this generation can write at your age such as were written fifty years ago.

Do not be afraid, then, to bring your talents to a Parnassus; they will undoubtedly redound to your credit because you never neglect your duties; for them: they are themselves very pleasant duties. Surely, those your position demand of you must be very uncongenial to such a nature as yours. They are as much routine as looking after a house, or the housebook of one's steward. Why should you be deprived of liberty of thought because you happen to be a farmer-general? Atticus was a farmer-general, the old Romans were farmers-general, and they thought--as Romans. Go ahead, Atticus.