From the Bust by Houdon
of August, 1756. It was not till the early part of 1759 that there crept out stealthily, secretly, quietly, the gayest little volatile laughing romance called “Candide.”
Written in some keen moment of inspiration—perhaps at the Elector Palatine’s, perhaps at Délices, where, it matters not—in that brief masterpiece of literature Voltaire brought out all his batteries at once and confronted the foe with that ghoulish mockery, that bantering jest, and that deadly levity which few could face and live.
If the optimists had talked down the passionate reasonings of the “Poem on the Disaster of Lisbon” with that reiterated “All is well,” “All chance, direction which thou canst not see—all partial evil, universal good,” “Candide’s” laugh drowned those affirmations—so loudly and so often affirmed that the affirmers had come to mistake them for argument. In this novel of two hundred pages Voltaire withered by a grin the cheap, current, convenient optimism of the leisured classes of his day, and confounded Pope as well as Rousseau. This time he did not argue with their theories. He only exposed them. In that searching light, in that burning sunshine, the comfortable dogmas of the neat couplets of the “Essay on Man” blackened and died, and Rousseau was shown forth the laughing-stock of the nations.
One of the few literary classics which is not only still talked about but still sometimes read, is “Candide.” Nothing grows old-fashioned sooner than humour. The jests which amuse one age bore and depress the next. But it is part of Voltaire’s genius in general, and of “Candide” in particular, that its wit is almost as witty to-day as when it was written. It still trips and dances on feet which never age or tire. Nothing is more astounding in it than what one critic has called its “fresh and unflagging spontaneity”—its “surpassing invention.” Its vigour is such as no time can touch. It reads like the work of a superabundant youth. Yet Voltaire was actually sixty-four when he wrote it; and if indeed “we live in deeds, not years: in thought, not breaths: in feelings, not in figures on a dial,” he was a thousand.
The story is, briefly, that of a young man brought up in implicit belief in the everything-for-the-best doctrine, who goes out into a world where he meets with a hundred adventures which give it the lie. Life is a bad bargain, but one can make the best of it. That is the moral of “Candide.” “What I know,” says Candide, “is that we must cultivate our garden.” “Let us work without reasoning: that is the only way to render life supportable.”
As children read the “Gulliver’s Travels” of that past master of irony, Jonathan Swift, as the most innocent and amusing of fairy tales, so can “Candide” be read as a rollicking farce and as nothing else in the world.
Who knows, indeed, when he puts down that marvellous novelette, whether to laugh at those inimitable traits of the immortal Dr. Pangloss—“noses have been made to carry spectacles, therefore we have spectacles; legs have been made for stockings, therefore we have stockings; pigs were made to be eaten, and therefore we have pork all the year round”—or to weep over the wretchedness of a humanity which perforce consoles itself with lies, and, too miserable to face its misery, pretends that all is well?
One woman, with her heart wrung by that cruel mockery, speaks of “Candide’s” “diabolical gaiety.” “It seems to be written by a being of another nature than our own, indifferent to our fate, pleased with our sufferings, and laughing like a demon or a monkey at the miseries of that humankind with which he has nothing in common.” Some have found in it the blasphemies of a devil against the tender and ennobling Christianity which has been the faith and the hope of sorrowing millions; and others discover in it only one of the most potent of arguments for embracing that Christianity—the confession that no other system so consolatory can be found. To one reader it is the supreme expression of a genius who, wherever he stands, stands alone—“as high as mere wit can go”; to another, shorn of its indecency, it is, like “Gulliver,” but a bizarre absurdity for youth; while a third finds it “most useful as a philosophical work, because it is read by people who would never read philosophy.”