Candide

  To be quite sure that a thing is evil one must see at the same time that something better is possible.11

  The Angel Jesrad in Zadig, which comes before Candide, is on the whole Leibnizian in his statement that a world without evil would be another kind of world. So is the Quaker, Freind, in the very late conte, L’Histoire de Jenni. In other works of his later years—the Homélies prononcées à Londres en 1765, Questions sur l’Encyclopédie, Il faut prendre un parti and Fragments historiques sur l’Inde—Voltaire contradicts himself, saying in one place that God is obviously limited and repeating in another that evil exists only from the human point of view and must be unknown to God in His perfection.

  Have we to conclude, then, that Voltaire had a shallow mind which casually adopted different sets of ideas at different times? Is Candide an irresponsible attack on beliefs that he was capable of putting forward as his own, when they happened to serve his purpose? Is he simply a jester who does not understand what the philosophers are about? I do not think so. The extraordinary resonance of Candide and the strange frenzy in which Voltaire seems to have lived during most of his life, and particularly during the latter half, point to a very different conclusion. Here was a man who, through his personal experience, his reading of history and his observation of contemporary events, gradually came to be obsessed with the scandal of the presence of evil in the universe. At the same time, with his clear and vigorous brain he could only suppose that God was an immeasurably greater Voltaire who had organized the universe on rational lines and was not, ultimately, responsible for evil. How could God have willed evil since Voltaire, like any decent person, found it intolerable? Yet evil existed, and God must be good. But how could a good God … etc. He never escaped from the dilemma, but tried out different verbal solutions at different stages and was presumably never convinced by any of them. Through some psychological accident of which we shall no doubt always remain ignorant (perhaps he went through a phase like Shakespeare’s tragic period), he produced Candide at a time when his awareness of evil was at its most violent and his vitality at its strongest. In this one book, the horror of evil and an instinctive zest for life are almost equally matched and it is the contrast between them, inside the paragraph and even inside the sentence, which produces the unique tragicomic vibration. The lesson of Candide is the permanent one that there is no verbal, that is intellectual, solution to the problem of evil, but that we go on living even so, and even when we think we have no faith.

  If this interpretation is correct, two consequences follow. In the first place, Voltaire is not simply attacking Pope or Leibniz or the Neo-Leibnizians or J.-J. Rousseau; he is also attacking himself, because when he trusted to the philosophical use of language, he found himself arguing like them. He himself is Pangloss, just as he is Candide, Martin and Pococurante. The book is a transposition of his inner debate. And it is surely an underestimation of his wit to imply that his rapid jokes are not valid against the more elaborate explanations of evil. They are genuine caricatures. To the question: ‘Why, if God is good (and we must suppose that He is), does evil exist?’ there is no articulate answer which is not a juggling with words. Book VII of St. Augustine’s Confessions is quite elaborate, but are its logical fallacies not obvious? Chapter VII of Book III of St. Thomas’s Summa Contra Gentiles seems no less purely verbal. And when we open Leibniz to see how Voltaire misunderstood him, we find this sort of argument:

  For God sees from the beginning of time that there will be a certain Judas; and the notion or idea that God has of him contains this future free action. Only this question now remains, why this Judas, the traitor, who is only a possibility in the idea of God, exists in actuality. But to this question there can be no answer here below, except that in general one can say that since God found it proper that he should exist in spite of the sin He foresaw, it must be that this evil will be repaid with interest somewhere else in the universe, that God will derive a greater good from it, and in short it will be found that the sequence of events which includes the existence of this sinner is the most perfect of all those which were possible. But to explain in every instance the admirable economy of a particular choice, that cannot be done while we inhabit this transitory sphere; it suffices to know it without understanding it.12

  The ‘admirable economy’ of a choice we know nothing about and only suppose to have existed is an excellent example of Panglossian applauding of the cosmos. Before Leibniz wrote the Théodicée, Bayle had said all there was to be said about this kind of circular argument in dealing with Lactantius, St. Basil and Maximus of Tyre,13 and he was not adequately refuted by Leibniz. In particular intellectual gifts, Bayle and Voltaire may have been much inferior to Leibniz, but on this precise issue they saw more clearly the futility of verbalizations. As Barber says:

  Leibniz … never really abandons a priori argument. He bases his knowledge of God’s nature on a priori rational considerations … and once God’s infinite goodness and wisdom have thus been established, all else also follows deductively. Thus he never really meets Bayle on his own ground. To all Bayle’s paradoxes he has at bottom only one reply, though his subtlety of argument sometimes conceals the fact; the world as it is is God’s creation, therefore no better world is possible.14

  In the second place, Candide is not in the last resort a message of hope, or at least not exactly in the way suggested by some critics who take a favourable view of it. Morize, Barber and René Pomeau, the author of La Religion de Voltaire, all seem to me to underestimate the virulence of the work. Morize writes:

  The world is in shambles, blood flows, Jesuits and Molinists rage, innocents are slaughtered and dupes exploited; but there are in the world delicious asylums, where life remains possible, joyous, and sweet: let us cultivate our garden.15

  This suggests an ability to shut out the spectacle of the world which Voltaire never possessed, and does not correspond to the tone of dogged persistence in the final chapters of Candide. According to Barber:

  The practical philosophy to which Candide finally attains is the application to the limited field of personal activity of that espérance [hope] which Voltaire had offered to humanity on a transcendental level in the conclusion of the Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne.

  In rejecting the doctrines of Pangloss and his like … he is seeking … a safe foundation in an insecure world for that profound belief in the value of activity which is characteristic of European man and was particularly strong in him.16

  But does he find any such foundation? There is no evidence in Candide, and very little in his biography, that he had a profound belief in the value of activity. He believed in man’s need for activity and he himself had a tremendous urge to be active, but these can be independent of any conviction of value. Would it not be more plausible to suppose that his feverish busyness was the only relief he could find for his acute awareness of evil? Pomeau speaks of the “epicurean motive for action which is the last word of the tale” and says that Voltaire “will make a philosophy of activity … A lesson revolutionary in its banality.” No doubt, Voltaire borrowed the image of the garden from Epicurus,17 but he has no trace of Epicurean serenity or moderation. Actually, Pomeau is uncertain about the ultimate significance of the work. In La Religion de Voltaire (1956), he declares roundly:

  Is the philosophy of Candide a philosophy of the “absurd”? Certainly not. Candide is not, any more than Jacques or Figaro, a hero tragically abandoned in a wrong world. Whatever surprises existence may hold for them, these wanderers are not “outsiders” … Amid the worst disasters, Candide’s universe always furnishes a lifesaving plank.18

  However, in his critical edition of 1959, after making some excellent remarks about the poetic quality of Candide, he contradicts his earlier statement:

  Spontaneously, from the poetry of the unforeseen, there arises a philosophy of the absurd.19

  Only one critic appears to have stressed unequivocally the strength of the dark side of Voltaire’s temperament, which is so obvio
us in Candide and in the correspondence. This is André Delattre, in his stimulating little book, Voltaire l’impétueux, where we read:

  It is only when, in Candide, he accepts certain perspectives of Pascal’s, it is only when he ceases to strain against a dark and healthy pessimism, and ceases to hold open the empty sack of his optimism, that he finally creates, after his sixtieth year, his real masterpiece.20

  This is a good pointer to the quality of the work. Candide is not just a clever, unfair satire on optimism which concludes with the bracing recommendation that we should do what we can to improve matters in our immediate vicinity. It is a work in which an unappeasable sense of the mystery and horror of life is accompanied, at every step, by an instinctive animal resilience. Negative and positive are juxtaposed (as they are, indeed, in some religious temperaments) with no unsatisfactory ratiocinative bridge between them. Voltaire has a faith, but it is not a political faith nor an easily defined religious one. It is the sort of faith that keeps the severed fractions of a worm still wriggling, or produces laughter at a funeral. In this sense, Voltaire’s humanism is a very basic and simple characteristic, exceptional only in that it has at its service extraordinary intelligence and wit.

  I say ‘at its service’ advisedly, because Candide is not, in the first place, an intellectual work. Its driving force is an intellectual bewilderment, which is felt as a strong emotion. Pomeau makes the interesting suggestion that the chronological irregularity in the composition of the contes is proof of their springing from a level well below Voltaire’s everactive, normal consciousness:

  The intermittent quality of the invention in the tales makes clear that here a deeper self is finding outlet, which does not get expressed every day.21

  He also adduces evidence to show that Candide, instead of being a rapid improvisation as has often been thought, was probably written at intervals over a period of a year. He concludes that it shows signs of deliberate artistry:

  A work of spontaneous fantasy, no doubt, but in the course of working on it, retouchings and additions appear, which make plain a very conscious impulse toward artistic form.22

  I think it is possible to accept the first suggestion, while remaining unconvinced by the second. The alterations and additions Pomeau mentions are comparatively slight, and although Candide may have been in the making for a year, it could still be a happy fluke in which the artistry is largely unconscious. Voltaire himself seems never to have realized that it was his masterpiece, and he probably devoted more deliberate attention to denying its authorship than he had to its composition. His still-born tragedies he composed with great care, passing them round amongst his friends for comment and improvement. His tales were rattled off much more spontaneously, and he does not appear to have understood how original and gifted he was in this genre. If he had, he would presumably have taken more pains with some of the others, which are all either imperfect or slight. It is impossible not to agree with Delattre on this score:

  As for the tales, apart from Candide which is in a class by itself, they are really thin, quite slender.23

  There is no progression up to Candide, nor any sign of further development afterwards. Good contes and less good were written higgledy-piggledy. Zadig, which came twelve years before Candide, and L’Ingénu, written eight years after, are probably the next best, but the first is uncertain in design and ends feebly, while the second begins in one tone and finishes rather abruptly in another, without the transition having been properly justified. Neither is firmly centered on a major theme. Other contes, such as Le Monde comme il va and Micromégas, which keep to one theme, repeat the same effect rather monotonously. It is very curious that, in Zadig, Le Monde comme il va, Memnon and Scarmentado, Voltaire should appear to be fumbling towards Candide and then, having produced his masterpiece, that he should go on to imperfect works such as L’homme aux quarante écus and L’Histoire de Jenni, which we would be tempted, on artistic grounds, to place before Candide, if we did not know their date of composition. Candide is the only conte which has an overall pattern, a major theme worked out with a variety of incidental effects, a full complement of significant characters and an almost constant felicity of style.

  Some slight discrepancies show that Voltaire did not finish the work with absolute care. Pomeau mentions the abrupt change, between Chapters I and II, from a springlike atmosphere to a shower of snow. Voltaire could, no doubt, have replied that fine spring days are quite often followed by snowstorms. More definite slips are the attribution of young wives to old men in Chapter III, the use by the inhabitants of El Dorado of gold and precious stones for the adornment of their houses, while referring to these commodities as ‘boue’ [mud] and ‘cailloux’ [pebbles] and the implication in Chapter 20 that Manicheism is a belief in the all-powerfulness of evil. But these flaws pass unnoticed in the general effectiveness of the work.

  I think H. N. Brailsford is right in saying that Candide “ranks in its own way with Don Quixote and Faust,” and the reason is that, like them, it is a parable of an aspect of the human plight. It is a pilgrim’s progress, only this pilgrim can find no meaning in life nor establish any relationship with the transcendent. Candide has, of course, a clear literary ancestry; he is adapted from the hero of the picaresque novel of adventure, who could so easily represent the post-Renaissance displaced individual engaged on some more or less significant journey. More immediately, he is Voltaire himself, who was déclassé [a social outcast] like the picaresque hero, had been beaten and snubbed, ‘tremblait comme un philosophe’ [“trembled like a philosopher”] and had been frequently on the move. But he is also a symbol of the central part of the human soul which never loses its original innocence and, as Simone Weil says, always goes on expecting that good will be done to it rather than evil. And again, in spite of Pomeau’s denial, he is l’étranger [the outsider], a fatherless bastard whose cosy sense of belonging to a coherent society and a comprehensible universe is a childhood illusion, soon to be shattered at the onset of puberty. Cunégonde is at first Eve who tempts him, with the result that he is driven out of the early paradise by the irate master of his little world. Then Cunégonde becomes the symbol of a lost happiness which will be recovered in the future, when the world falls again into some pattern reminiscent of the patriarchal social cell which preceded adulthood. But gradually it becomes clear that the world has no pattern, all human communities are in a state of perpetual flux and strife, and the best Candide can do is to reconstitute the battered Westphalian society of his childhood as a refugee colony on the borders of barbarism, with himself as its disillusioned head, in place of the self-confident Baron Thunder-Ten-Tronckh. Pangloss, the linguistic part of the brain, is still looking irrepressibly for explanations, but the numbed soul now knows that the quest is futile.

  Just as the Candide/Cunégonde conjunction is far more significant than the parallel couples, Zadig/Astarte and Ingénu/St. Yves, so the structure of Candide is more complex and much better balanced than that of the other contes. It is not just one story, like the adventures of Zadig or the Ingénu; it is an interweaving of several different stories, which are linked and knotted and contrasted in an almost musical way. Dorothy M. McGhee, in her study, Voltairian Narrative Devices,24 gives an interesting diagram showing that one method of analyzing Candide is to see it as a series of oscillations between Candide’s “mental path of optimism” and the “level of reality” to which he is always being brought back by disaster. But there is much more to it than this. In addition to the up-and-down movement, there are complexities in the linear development. The stories of Candide, Cunégonde and La Vieille [the Old Woman] follow each other like three variations on the same theme, each slightly more preposterous than the previous one and with an increasing urbanity of tone as the events become more shocking. The pope’s daughter, whose exquisite breeding has remained unaffected by the excision of a buttock, gives her account while the scene of action is shifting from Europe to America. In the New World, the same figure is repeated
once more with a final flourish in the Jesuit’s story, which leads into the El Dorado episode. This is an interlude of calm, coming in Chapter 17, almost exactly in the middle of the book. Candide is now as far away as he ever will be from Europe and from the realities of ordinary life. Then, since the beatific vision can never be more than a fleeting experience, he begins on his long return journey, picking up the threads in the reverse order. The second half is, however, different from the first in two important respects. Candide is no longer an underdog; he has acquired money and he sees the world from a new angle. At the same time, he has lost his initial freshness; Martin has replaced the absent Pangloss and the accumulated experience of horror has added a permanent sob to the gaiety of the music. The hero has mastered life to some small extent, in that the terrible accidents no longer happen so often to him, but this is a hollow achievement since it leaves him freer to contemplate the sufferings of others. The second half of the book may seem weaker, artistically, precisely because Candide has become a spectator, but it is psychologically true in the sense that adulthood involves awareness of general evil.

  Other aspects of the musical dance of the characters provide further refinements in the pattern. Each is killed once or more and bobs up again with heartening inconsequentiality. Voltaire expresses the strength of man’s unconquerable soul by making Pangloss and the Baron, for instance, step out of the galley and begin at once behaving with characteristic foolishness, as if they had never been hanged, stabbed or beaten. He also balances the horror of evil by never leaving the hero in solitude for very long. Candide is always part of a group of two or more, and he is always assuming solidarity until it is proved illusory. A minority of human beings are, like himself, decent and well-meaning; the majority are selfish and stupid, but the implication is that all are involved in evil in more or less the same way. In this respect, Candide is both fiercely critical of human nature and curiously tolerant. The Grand Inquisitor, the brutal sailor and the levanti patron are carried along on the same inevitable melody as Maître Jacques or Martin. In this one work, especially, Voltaire strikes a note which is very much deeper than propaganda and which is perhaps in the last analysis, not very far removed from inarticulate religious faith.