Guided by thoughts, have measured the faint stars. Ourselves we never see, or come to know. This world, this theatre of pride and wrong, Once did I sing, in less lugubrious tone, The sunny ways of pleasure's general rule; Seeking a light amid the deepening gloom, I can but suffer, and will not repine.1 A few months later the Seven Years' War broke out; Voltaire looked upon it as madness and suicide, the devastation of Europe to settle whether England or France should win "a few acres of snow" in Canada. On the top of this came a public reply, by Jean Jacques Rousseau, to the poem on Lisbon. Man himself was to be blamed for the disaster, said Rousseau; if we lived out in the fields, and not in the towns, we should not be killed on so large a scale; if we lived under the sky, and not in houses, houses would not fall upon us. Voltaire was amazed at the popularity won by this profound theodicy; and angry that his name should be dragged into the dust by such a Quixote, he turned upon Rousseau "that most terrible of all the intellectual weapons ever wielded by man, the mockery of Voltaire." 2 In three days, in 1751, he wrote Candide. Never was pessimism so gaily argued; never was man made to laugh so heartily while learning that this is a world of woe. And seldom has a story been told with such simple and hidden art; it is pure narrative and dialogue; no descriptions pad it out; and the action is riotously rapid. "In Voltaire's fingers," said Anatole France, "the pen runs and laughs.” 3 is perhaps the finest short story in all literature. 1 Selected Works of Voltaire; London, 1911; pp. 3-5. 2 Tallentyre, 231. 3 Introd. to Candide, Modern Library edition. It Candide, as his name indicates, is a simple and honest lad, son of the great Baron of Thunder-Ten-Trockh of Westphalia, and pupil of the learned Pangloss. Pangloss was professor of metaphysicotheologicocosmonigology. . . . "It is demonstrable," said he, "that all is necessarily for the best end. Observe that the nose has been formed to bear spectacles. . . legs were visibly designed for stockings . . . stones were designed to construct castles .. . pigs were made so that we might have pork all the year round. Consequently, they who assert that all is well have said a foolish thing; they should have said all is for the best." While Pangloss is discoursing, the castle is attacked by the Bulgarian army, and Candide is captured and turned into a soldier. He was made to wheel about to the right and to the left, to draw his rammer, to return his rammer, to present, to fire, to march. . . . He resolved, one fine day in spring, to go for a walk, marching straight before him, believing that it was a privilege of the human as well as the animal species to make use of their legs as they pleased. He had advanced two leagues when he was overtaken by four heroes six feet tall, who bound him and carried him to a dungeon. He was asked which he would like the best, to be whipped six and thirty times through all the regiment, or to receive at once two balls of lead in his brain. He vainly said that human will is free, and that he chose neither the one nor the other. He was forced to make a choice; he determined, in virtue of that gift of God called liberty, to run the gauntlet six-andthirty times. He bore this twice.1 Candide escapes, takes passage to Lisbon, and on board ship meets Professor Pangloss, who tells how the Baron and Baroness were murdered and the castle destroyed. "All this," he concludes, "was indispensable; for private misfortune makes the general good, so that the more private misfortunes there are, 1 Candide, p. 7. the greater is the general good." They arrive in Lisbon just in time to be caught in the earthquake. After it is over they tell each other their adventures and sufferings; whereupon an old servant assures them that their misfortunes are as nothing compared with her own. "A hundred times I was on the point of killing myself, but I loved life. This ridiculous foible is perhaps one of our most fatal characteristics; for is there anything more absurd than to wish to carry continually a burden which one can always throw down?" Or, as another character expresses it, "All things considered, the life of a gondolier is preferable to that of a doge; but I believe the difference is so trifling that it is not worth the trouble of examining." Candide, fleeing from the Inquisition, goes to Paraguay; "there the Jesuit Fathers possess all, and the people nothing; it is a masterpiece of reason and justice." In a Dutch colony he comes upon a negro with one hand, one leg, and a rag for clothing. "When we work at the sugar canes," the slave explains, "and the mill snatches hold of a finger, they cut off a hand; and when we try to run away, they cut off a leg. . . This is the price at which you eat sugar in Europe." Candide finds much loose gold in the unexplored interior; he returns to the coast and hires a vessel to take him to France; but the skipper sails off with the gold and leaves Candide philosophizing on the wharf. With what little remains to him, Candide purchases a passage on a ship bound for Bordeaux; and on board strikes up on conversation with an old sage, Martin. "Do you believe," said Candide, "that men have always massacred one another as they do today, that they have always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands, idiots, thieves, scoundrels, gluttons, drunkards, misers, envious, ambitious, bloody-minded, calumniators, debauchees, fanatics, hypocrites and fools?" "Do you believe," said Martin, "that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they have found them?" "Without doubt," said Candide. "Well, then," said Martin, "if hawks have always had the same character, why should you imagine that men have changed theirs?” "Oh!" said Candide, "there is a vast deal of difference, for free will-" And reasoning thus they arrived at Bordeaux.1 We cannot follow Candide through the rest of his adventures, which form a rollicking commentary on the difficulties of medieval theology and Leibnitzian optimism. After suffering a variety of evils among a variety of men, Candide settles down as a farmer in Turkey; and the story ends with a final dialogue between master and pupil: Pangloss sometimes said to Candide: "There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds: for if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle; . . . if you had not been put into the Inquisition; if you had not walked over America; had not lost all your gold; . . you would not be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts." if you "All that is very well," answered Candide; "but let us cultivate our garden." VII. THE ENCYCLOPEDIA AND THE PHILOSOPHIC DICTIONARY The popularity of so irreverent a book as Candide gives us some sense of the spirit of the age. The lordly culture of Louis XIV's time, despite the massive bishops who spoke so eloquent a part in it, had learned to smile at dogma and tradition. The failure of the Reformation to capture France had left for Frenchmen no half-way house between infallibility and infidelity; and while the intellect of Germany and England moved leisurely in the lines of religious evolution, the mind of France leaped from the hot faith which had massacred the Huguenots to the cold hostility with which La Mettrie, Helvetius, Holbach and Diderot turned upon the re 1 P. 104. ligion of their fathers. Let us look for a moment at the intellectual environment in which the later Voltaire moved and had his being. La Mettrie (1709–51) was an army physician who had lost his post by writing a Natural History of the Soul, and had won exile by a work called Man a Machine. He had taken refuge at the court of Frederick, who was himself something of an advanced thinker and was resolved to have the very latest culture from Paris. La Mettrie took up the idea of mechanism where the frightened Descartes, like a boy who has burned his fingers, had dropped it; and announced boldly that all the world, not excepting man, was a machine. The soul is material, and matter is soulful; but whatever they are they act upon each other, and grow and decay with each other in a way that leaves no doubt of their essential similarity and interdependence. If the soul is pure spirit, how can enthusiasm warm the body, or fever in the body disturb the processes of the mind? All organisms have evolved out of one original germ, through the reciprocal action of organism and environment. The reason why animals have intelligence, and plants none, is that animals move about for their food, while plants take what comes to them. Man has the highest intelligence because he has the greatest wants and the widest mobility; "beings without wants are also without mind." Though La Mettrie was exiled for these opinions, Helvetius (1715-71), who took them as the basis of his book On Man, became one of the richest men in France, and rose to position and honor. Here we have the ethic, as in La Mettrie the metaphysic, of atheism. All action is dictated by egoism, self-love; "even the hero follows the feeling which for him is associated with the greatest pleasure"; and "virtue is egoism furnished with a spy-glass." Conscience is not the voice of God, but the fear of the police; it is the deposit left in us from the stream of prohibitions poured over the growing soul 1 Taine, The Ancient Régime. |