Candide

Candide, by Voltaire

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Title: Candide
Author: Voltaire
Commentator: Philip Littell
Release Date: November 27, 2006 [EBook #19942]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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CANDIDE BY VOLTAIRE
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[Illustration: Voltaire.]

CANDIDE
BY VOLTAIRE
INTRODUCTION BY PHILIP LITTELL
BONI AND LIVERIGHT, INC.
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
Copyright, 1918, by BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.
Printed in the United States of America

INTRODUCTION
Ever since 1759, when Voltaire wrote "Candide" in ridicule of the

notion that this is the best of all possible worlds, this world has been a
gayer place for readers. Voltaire wrote it in three days, and five or six
generations have found that its laughter does not grow old.
"Candide" has not aged. Yet how different the book would have looked
if Voltaire had written it a hundred and fifty years later than 1759. It
would have been, among other things, a book of sights and sounds. A
modern writer would have tried to catch and fix in words some of those
Atlantic changes which broke the Atlantic monotony of that voyage
from Cadiz to Buenos Ayres. When Martin and Candide were sailing
the length of the Mediterranean we should have had a contrast between
naked scarped Balearic cliffs and headlands of Calabria in their mists.
We should have had quarter distances, far horizons, the altering
silhouettes of an Ionian island. Colored birds would have filled
Paraguay with their silver or acid cries.
Dr. Pangloss, to prove the existence of design in the universe, says that
noses were made to carry spectacles, and so we have spectacles. A
modern satirist would not try to paint with Voltaire's quick brush the
doctrine that he wanted to expose. And he would choose a more
complicated doctrine than Dr. Pangloss's optimism, would study it
more closely, feel his destructive way about it with a more learned and
caressing malice. His attack, stealthier, more flexible and more patient
than Voltaire's, would call upon us, especially when his learning got a
little out of control, to be more than patient. Now and then he would
bore us. "Candide" never bored anybody except William Wordsworth.
Voltaire's men and women point his case against optimism by starting
high and falling low. A modern could not go about it after this fashion.
He would not plunge his people into an unfamiliar misery. He would
just keep them in the misery they were born to.
But such an account of Voltaire's procedure is as misleading as the
plaster cast of a dance. Look at his procedure again. Mademoiselle
Cunégonde, the illustrious Westphalian, sprung from a family that
could prove seventy-one quarterings, descends and descends until we
find her earning her keep by washing dishes in the Propontis. The aged
faithful attendant, victim of a hundred acts of rape by negro pirates,

remembers that she is the daughter of a pope, and that in honor of her
approaching marriage with a Prince of Massa-Carrara all Italy wrote
sonnets of which not one was passable. We do not need to know French
literature before Voltaire in order to feel, although the lurking parody
may escape us, that he is poking fun at us and at himself. His laughter
at his own methods grows more unmistakable at the last, when he
caricatures them by casually assembling six fallen monarchs in an inn
at Venice.
A modern assailant of optimism would arm himself with social pity.
There is no social pity in "Candide." Voltaire, whose light touch on
familiar institutions opens them and reveals their absurdity, likes to
remind us that the slaughter and pillage and murder which Candide
witnessed among the Bulgarians was perfectly regular, having been
conducted according to the laws