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Candide Introduction · The Voltaire Library

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  Speaker 1: INTRODUCTION Ever since 1759, when Voltaire wrote Candide in ridicule
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  Speaker 1: of the notion that this is the best of all
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  Speaker 1: possible worlds, This world has been a gayer place for readers.
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  Speaker 1: Voltaire wrote it in three days, and five or six
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  Speaker 1: generations have found that its laughter does not grow old.
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  Speaker 1: Candide has not aged. Yet how different the book would
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  Speaker 1: have looked if Voltaire had written it 150 years later
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  Speaker 1: than 1759. It would have been, among other things, a
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  Speaker 1: book of sights and sounds. A modern writer would have
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  Speaker 1: tried to catch and fix in words some of those
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  Speaker 1: Atlantic changes which broke the Atlantic monotony of that voyage
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  Speaker 1: from Cadiz to Buenos Aires. When Martin and Candide were
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  Speaker 1: sailing the length of the Mediterranean, we should have had
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  Speaker 1: a contrast between naked, scarped, Balearic cliffs and headlands of
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  Speaker 1: Calabria in their mists. We should have had quarter-distances, far horizons,
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  Speaker 1: the altering silhouettes of an Ionian island— colored birds would
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  Speaker 1: have filled paraguay with their silver or acid cries dr
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  Speaker 1: pangloss to prove the existence of design in the universe
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  Speaker 1: says that noses were made to carry spectacles and so
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  Speaker 1: we have spectacles a modern satirist would not try to
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  Speaker 1: paint with voltaire's quick brush the doctrine that he wanted
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  Speaker 1: to expose and he would choose a more complicated doctrine
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  Speaker 1: than dr pangloss's optimism would study it more closely, feel
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  Speaker 1: his destructive way about it with a more learned and
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  Speaker 1: caressing malice. His attack, stealthier, more flexible and more patient
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  Speaker 1: than Voltaire's, would call upon us, especially when his learning
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  Speaker 1: got a little out of control, to be more than patient.
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  Speaker 1: Now and then he would bore us. Candide never bored
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  Speaker 1: anybody except William Wordsworth. Voltaire's men and women point his
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  Speaker 1: case against optimism by starting high and falling low. A
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  Speaker 1: modern could not go about it after this fashion. He
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  Speaker 1: would not plunge his people into an unfamiliar misery. He
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  Speaker 1: would just keep them in the misery they were born to.
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  Speaker 1: But such an account of Voltaire's procedure is as misleading
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  Speaker 1: as the plaster cast of a dance. Look at his
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  Speaker 1: procedure again, Mademoiselle Cunegonde. The illustrious Westphalian, sprung from a
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  Speaker 1: family that could prove seventy-one quarterings, descends and descends until
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  Speaker 1: we find her earning her keep by washing dishes in
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  Speaker 1: the propontis. The aged faithful attendant, victim of a hundred
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  Speaker 1: acts of rape by negro pirates, remembers that she is
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  Speaker 1: the daughter of a pope, and that in honor of
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  Speaker 1: her approaching marriage with a prince of Massacarrara, all Italy
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  Speaker 1: wrote sonnets of which not one was passable. We do
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  Speaker 1: not need to know French literature before Voltaire in order
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  Speaker 1: to feel, although the lurking parody may escape us, that
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  Speaker 1: he is poking fun at us and at himself. His
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  Speaker 1: laughter at his own methods grows more unmistakable at the last,
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  Speaker 1: when he caricatures them by casually assembling six fallen monarchs
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  Speaker 1: in an inn at Venice. A modern assailant of optimism
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  Speaker 1: would arm himself with social pity. There is no social
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  Speaker 1: pity in Candide. Voltaire, whose light touch on familiar institutions
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  Speaker 1: opens them and reveals their absurdity, likes to remind us
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  Speaker 1: that the slaughter and pillage and murder which Candide witnessed
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  Speaker 1: among the Bulgarians was perfectly regular. having been conducted according
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  Speaker 1: to the laws and usages of war. Had Voltaire lived to-day,
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  Speaker 1: he would have done to poverty what he did to war.
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  Speaker 1: Pitying the poor, he would have shown us poverty as
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  Speaker 1: a ridiculous anachronism, and both the ridicule and the pity
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  Speaker 1: would have expressed his indignation. Almost any modern essaying a
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  Speaker 1: philosophic tale would make it long. Candide is only a
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  Speaker 1: hamlet and a half long. It would hardly have been
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  Speaker 1: shorter if Voltaire had spent three months on it, instead
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  Speaker 1: of those three days. A conciseness to be matched in
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  Speaker 1: English by nobody except Pope, who can say a plagiarizing enemy,
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  Speaker 1: steals much, spends little, and has nothing left. A conciseness
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  Speaker 1: which Pope toiled and sweated for, came as easy as
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  Speaker 1: wit to Voltaire. He can afford to be witty parenthetically,
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  Speaker 1: by the way, prodigally without saving, because he knows there
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  Speaker 1: is more wit where that came from. One of Max
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  Speaker 1: Bierbaum's cartoons shows us the young twentieth century going at
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  Speaker 1: top speed and watched by two of his predecessors. Underneath
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  Speaker 1: is this legend. The grave misgivings of the nineteenth century
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  Speaker 1: and the wicked amusement of the eighteenth in watching the
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  Speaker 1: progress— or whatever it is, of the twentieth. This eighteenth-century
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  Speaker 1: snuff-taking and malicious is like Voltaire, who nevertheless must know,
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  Speaker 1: if he happens to think of it, that not yet
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  Speaker 1: in the twentieth century, not for all its speed mania,
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  Speaker 1: has anyone come near to equaling the speed of a
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  Speaker 1: prose tale by Voltaire. Candide is a fool book. It
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  Speaker 1: is filled with mockery, With inventiveness, with things as concrete
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  Speaker 1: as things to eat and coins, it has time for
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  Speaker 1: the neatest intellectual clickings. It is never hurried, and it
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  Speaker 1: moves with the most amazing rapidity. It has the rapidity
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  Speaker 1: of high spirits playing a game. The dry high spirits
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  Speaker 1: of this destroyer of optimism make most optimists look damp
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  Speaker 1: and depressed. contemplation of the stupidity which deems happiness possible
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  Speaker 1: almost made voltaire happy his attack on optimism is one
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  Speaker 1: of the gayest books in the world gaiety has been
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  Speaker 1: scattered everywhere up and down its pages by voltaire's lavish
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  Speaker 1: hand by his thin fingers many propagandist satirical books have
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  Speaker 1: been written with candide in mind but not too many
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  Speaker 1: TODAY ESPECIALLY WHEN NEW FAITHS ARE CHANGING THE STRUCTURE OF
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  Speaker 1: THE WORLD, FAITHS WHICH ARE STILL PLASTIC ENOUGH TO BE
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  Speaker 1: DEFORMED BY EVERY DISCIPLE, EACH DISCIPLE FOR HIMSELF, AND WHICH
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  Speaker 1: HAVE NOT YET RECEIVED THE FINAL DEFORMATION KNOWN AS UNIVERSAL ACCEPTANCE.
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  Speaker 1: TODAY CANDIDE IS AN INSPIRATION TO EVERY NARRATIVE SATIRIST WHO
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  Speaker 1: HATES ONE OF THESE NEW FAITHS, OR HATES EVERY INTERPRETATION
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  Speaker 1: OF IT BUT HIS OWN. Either hatred will serve as
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  Speaker 1: a motive to satire. That is why the present is
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  Speaker 1: one of the right moments to republish Candide. I hope
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  Speaker 1: it will inspire younger men and women, the only ones
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  Speaker 1: who can be inspired, to have a try at Theodore
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  Speaker 1: or militarism, Jane or pacifism, at so-and-so the pragmatist or
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  Speaker 1: the Freudian. And I hope to— that they will without
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  Speaker 1: trying hold their pens with an eighteenth-century lightness, not inappropriate
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  Speaker 1: to a philosophic tale. In Voltaire's fingers, as Anatoly France
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  Speaker 1: has said, the pen runs and laughs.