This passage is from a fairly late narrative in verse: Ce quí plaît aux dames. It is composed with great care, as may be inferred from the successive impressions the knight receives of Marton’s beauty as he admires it first from afar and then from nearer and nearer. A great part of its charm lies in its tempo. If it were drawn out longer, it would lose its freshness and become trite. And the tempo determines the wit of the piece too. The declaration of love is so comical only because it states the essential data with such astounding brevity. Here as everywhere else, Voltaire’s tempo is part of his philosophy. In this instance he uses it to set in sharp relief the essential motives of human actions as he sees them, to unmask them as it were and show their extreme materialism, without ever permitting himself anything crude. This little love scene contains nothing sublime or spiritual, all that comes out in it is physical lust and the profit motive. The declaration of love begins with an unrhetorical statement of the business side of the transaction, and yet it is charming, elegant, and far from pedestrian. Everybody knows—and Robert and Marton are no exception—that the words, prenez encor mon cœur, tout est à vous, are nothing but a flourish to express the desire for instantaneous sexual gratification. And yet they have all the charm and bloom which Voltaire and his time inherited from classicism (in this case specifically from La Fontaine)3 and which he presses into the service of the materialistic Enlightenment. The content has changed completely, but the pleasing clarity, l’agréable et le fin, of the classics has remained. It is present in every word, in every phrase, in every rhythmic movement. A specifically Voltairian feature is the swift tempo, which never becomes unaesthetic despite the author’s boldness, not to say unscrupulousness, in moral matters and his technique of sophistic surprise attacks. He is completely free from the half-erotic and hence somewhat hazy sentimentality which we have tried to demonstrate in our analysis of the text from Manon Lescaut. His unmaskings in the spirit of the Enlightenment are never crude and clumsy; on the contrary they are light, agile, and as it were appetizing. And above all, he is free from the cloudy, contour-blurring, overemotional rhetoric, equally destructive of clear thinking and pure feeling, which came to the fore in the authors of the Enlightenment during the second half of the century and in the literature of the Revolution, which had a still more luxuriant growth in the nineteenth century through the influence of romanticism, and which has continued to produce its loathsome flowers down to our day.
Closely related to rapidity of tempo, but more generally in use as a propaganda device, is the extreme simplification of all problems. In Voltaire’s case the rapidity, one feels almost tempted to say the alertness, of the tempo is made to serve the purpose of simplification. This simplification is almost always achieved by reducing the problem to an antithesis which is then exhibited in a giddy, swift, high-spirited narrative in which black and white, theory and practice, etc., are set in clear and simple opposition. We can observe this point in our passage on the London stock exchange, where the contrast business versus religion (the one useful and advancing human cooperation, the other senseless and raising barriers between men) is displayed in a vivid sketch which vigorously simplifies the problem in terms of a partisan approach; with this, and no less simplified, the contrast tolerance versus intolerance appears. Even in the little love story, if not a problem, at least the subject of the occurrence is reduced to a simplified antithetical formula (pleasure versus business). Let us consider yet another example. The novel Candide contains a polemic attack upon the metaphysical optimism of Leibnitz’s idea of the best of all possible worlds. In chapter 8 of Candide, Cunégonde—who was lost and has been found again—begins her relation of the adventures she has undergone since Candide’s expulsion from her father’s castle:
J’étais dans mon lit et je dormais profondément, quand il plut au ciel d’envoyer les Bulgares dans notre beau château de Thunder-ten-tronckh; ils égorgèrent mon père et mon frère, et coupèrent ma mère par morceaux. Un grand Bulgare, haut de six pieds, voyant qu’à ce spectacle j’avais perdu connaissance, se mit à me violer; cela me fit revenir, je repris mes sens, je criai, je me débattis, je mordis, j’égratignai, je voulais arracher les yeux à ce grand Bulgare, ne sachant pas que tout ce qui arrivait dans le château de mon père était une chose d’usage: le brutal me donna un coup de couteau dans le flanc gauche dont je porte encore la marque. —Hélas, j’espère bien la voir, dit le naïf Candide. —Vous la verrez, dit Cunégonde; mais continuons. —Continuez, dit Candide.
(I was in my bed, in a deep sleep, when it pleased Heaven to send the Bulgarians into our fair castle of Thunder-ten-tronckh; they cut my father’s throat and my brother’s, and chopped my mother to pieces. A huge Bulgarian, six feet tall, observing that I had fainted at the sight, began to rape me; that brought me to, I recovered consciousness, I screamed, I struggled, I bit, I scratched, I tried to tear out the big Bulgarian’s eyes, not knowing that everything that was happening in my father’s castle was perfectly customary: the brute gave me a knife-thrust in my left side, of which I still bear the scar. “Alas! I hope that I shall see it,” said the simple Candide. “You shall see it,” said Cunégonde; “but let us go on.” “Go on,” said Candide.)
These dreadful incidents appear comic because they come hammering down with almost slapstick speed and because they are represented as willed by God and everywhere prevalent—which is in comic contrast to their dreadfulness and to the aims of their victims. On top of all this comes the erotic quip at the end. Antithetical simplification of the problem and its reduction to anecdotal dimensions, together with dizzying speed of tempo, prevail throughout the novel. Misfortune follows upon misfortune, and again and again they are interpreted as necessary, proceeding from sound causes, reasonable, and worthy of the best of all possible worlds—which is obviously absurd. In this way calm reflection is drowned in laughter, and the amused reader either never observes, or observes only with difficulty, that Voltaire in no way does justice to Leibnitz’s argument and in general to the idea of a metaphysical harmony of the universe, especially since so entertaining a piece as Voltaire’s novel finds many more readers than the difficult essays of his philosophical opponents, which cannot be understood without serious study. Indeed, even the observation that the supposed reality of experience which Voltaire builds up does not correspond to experience at all, that it has been artfully adjusted to his polemic purpose, must have escaped most contemporary readers, or if not, they would hardly have made much of it. The rhythm of the adventures which befall Candide and his companions is to be nowhere observed in the reality of experience. Such a relentless, unrelated torrent of mishaps pouring down from a clear sky on the heads of perfectly innocent and unprepared people whom it involves by mere chance, simply does not exist. It is much more like the mishaps of a comic figure in a farce or a clown in a circus. Even apart from this excessive concentration of mishaps and the fact that in all too many cases they bear no inner relation whatever to their victims, Voltaire falsifies reality by an extreme simplification of the causes of events. The causes of human destinies which appear in his realistic propaganda pieces for the Enlightenment are either natural phenomena or accidents or—insofar as human behavior is admitted as a cause—the promptings of instinct, maliciousness, and especially stupidity. He never pursues historical conditions as determinants of human destinies, convictions, and institutions. This applies both to the history of individuals and to that of states, religions, and human society in general. Just as in our first example (the London exchange) Anabaptism, Judaism, and Quakerism are made to appear meaningless, stupid, and accidental, so in Candide the wars, troop-levies, religious persecutions, and the views of the nobility or the clergy are made to appear equally meaningless, stupid, and accidental. For Voltaire, it is a perfectly self-evident premise that no one in his senses can believe in an inner order of things or an inner justification for views. With equal assurance he assumes as a demonstrated premise that any individual in his personal history may encounter any
destiny which is in accordance with the laws of nature, regardless of the possibility of a connection between destiny and character; and he sometimes amuses himself by putting together causal chains in which he explains only the factors which are phenomena of nature and purposely omits anything to do with morals or the history of the individuals concerned. By way of example we may turn to the fourth chapter of Candide, where Pangloss discusses the origin of his syphilis:
… vous avez connu Paquette, cette jolie suivante de notre auguste baronne; j’ai goûté dans ses bras les délices du paradis, qui ont produit ces tourmens d’enfer dont vous me voyez dévoré; elle en était infectée, elle en est peut-être morte. Paquette tenait ce présent d’un cordelier très savant, qui avait remonté à la source; car il l’avait eue d’une vieille comtesse, qui l’avait reçue d’un capitaine de cavalerie, qui la devait à une marquise, qui la tenait d’un page, qui l’avait reçue d’un jésuite qui, étant novice, l’avait eue en droite ligne d’un des compagnons de Christophe Colomb.…
(… you knew Paquette, our august Baroness’s pretty attendant; in her arms I tasted the joys of Paradise which produced the infernal tortures which you see devouring me; she was infected with them; perhaps she has died of them. Paquette had received the gift from a most learned Franciscan, who himself had gone back to the source; for he had got it from an old countess, who had received it from a cavalry captain, who owed it to a marquise, who had it from a page, who had received it from a Jesuit, who, as a novice, had received it in the direct line from one of the companions of Christopher Columbus.…)
Such an account, which regards only natural causes, and on the moral plane merely lays a satirical emphasis on the mores of the clergy (including their homosexuality), at the same time merrily whisking out of sight and suppressing all details of the personal history of the individuals concerned, although it is these details which brought about the various love affairs—such an account insinuates a very specific conception of the concatenation of events, in which there is room neither for the individual’s responsibility for acts he commits in obedience to his natural instincts nor for anything else in his particular nature or his particular inner and outer development which leads to particular acts. It is not often that Voltaire goes as far as he does in this instance and in Candide in general. Basically he is a moralist; and, especially in his historical writings, there are human portraits in which the individuality comes out clearly. But he is always inclined to simplify, and his simplification is always handled in such a way that the role of sole standard of judgment is assigned to sound, practical common sense (the type of enlightened reason which began to come to the fore during his time and under his influence) and that from among the conditions which determine the course of human lives none but the material and natural are given serious consideration. Everything historical and spiritual he despises and neglects. This has to do with the active and courageous spirit with which the protagonists of Enlightenment were filled. They set out to rid human society of everything that impeded the progress of reason. Such impediments were obviously to be seen in the religious, political, and economic actualities which had grown up historically, irrationally, in contradiction to common sense, and had finally become an inextricable maze. What seemed required was not to understand and justify them but to discredit them.
Voltaire arranges reality so that he can use it for his purposes. There is no denying the presence, in many of his works, of colorful, vivid, everyday reality. But it is incomplete, consciously simplified, and hence—despite the serious didactic purpose—nonchalant and superficial. As for the stylistic level, a lowering of man’s position is implied in the attitude prevailing in the writings of the Enlightenment, even when they are not as impertinently witty as Voltaire’s. The tragic exaltation of the classical hero loses ground from the beginning of the eighteenth century. Tragedy itself becomes more colorful and clever with Voltaire, but it loses weight. But in its stead the intermediate genres, such as the novel and the narrative in verse, begin to flourish, and between tragedy and comedy we now have the intermediate comédie larmoyante [sentimental comedy]. The taste of the age does not favor the sublime; it seeks out the graceful, elegant, clever, sentimental, rational, and useful, all of which is more properly intermediate. In its intermediate level the erotic and sentimental style of Manon Lescaut coincides with Voltaire’s style in propaganda. In both instances the people introduced are no sublime heroes detached from the context of everyday life but individuals embedded in circumstances which are usually intermediate, on which they are dependent, and in which they are enmeshed materially and even spiritually. A certain seriousness in all this cannot be overlooked, not even in Voltaire, who after all takes his ideas perfectly seriously. And so we must conclude that, in contrast to classicism, a mixing of styles now occurs once again. But it does not go far or very deep either in its everyday realism or its seriousness. It continues the aesthetic tradition of classicism inasmuch as its realism remains always pleasant. Tragic and creatural penetration and historical involvement are avoided. The realistic elements, however colorful and amusing they may be, remain mere froth. With Voltaire the pleasantness and frothiness of the realism, which is present only to serve the ends of Enlightenment ideology, have developed into such an art that he is able to use even the “creatural” premonitions of his own decrepitude and death, which come to him during his last years, as material for an amiably jocular introduction to a popular philosophical disquisition. In this connection I will cite an example which has already been analyzed by L. Spitzer (Romanische Stil- und Literaturstudien, Marburg, 1931, 2, 238ff.). It is a letter which the gaunt seventy-six-year old patriarch with the fleshless mask, whom everybody remembers, wrote to Mme Necker4 when the sculptor Pigalle had come to Ferney to do a bust of him. It reads:
A Madame Necker.
Ferney, 19 juin 1770
Quand les gens de mon village ont vu Pigalle déployer quelques instruments de son art: Tiens, tiens, disaient-ils, on va le disséquer; cela sera drôle. C’est ainsi, madame, vous le savez, que tout spectacle amuse les hommes; on va également aux marionnettes, au feu de la Saint-Jean, à l’Opéra-Comique, à la grand’messe, à un enterrement. Ma statue fera sourire quelques philosophes, et renfrognera les sourcils éprouvés de quelque coquin d’hypocrite ou de quelque polisson de folliculaire: vanité des vanités!
Mais tout n’est pas vanité; ma tendre reconnaissance pour mes amis et surtout pour vous, madame, n’est pas vanité.
Mille tendres obéissances à M. Necker.
(When the people of my village saw Pigalle lay out some of the instruments of his art: “Why, look,” said they, “he’s going to be dissected; that will be curious.” So it is, Madame, as you well know, that any spectacle amuses mankind; people go indifferently to a marionette-show, to a Midsummer Eve bonfire, to high mass, to a funeral. My statue will make a few philosophers smile, and knit the practiced brows of some villainous hypocrite or some depraved hack: vanity of vanities! But all is not vanity; my fond gratitude for my friends and above all for you, Madame, is not vanity. A thousand fond homages to Monsieur Necker.)
I refer the reader to Spitzer’s excellent analysis, which pursues and interprets every shade of expression throughout the text, and shall limit myself to adding or summarizing what is essential for the problem of style here under discussion. The realistic anecdote which serves as point of departure is either invented or at least rearranged for the purpose. It is not at all likely that peasants about the year 1770 should have been more familiar with anatomical dissection than with the sculptor’s craft. Who Pigalle was must have been widely discussed; and that portraits should be made of the famous châtelain who had lived among them for a decade must have seemed more natural to them than the idea of dissecting a person who had quite recently still been seen alive. That some half-educated wit among them could have made a remark of this sort is of course not entirely impossible, but I imagine most readers confronted with this question will find it much more
probable that Voltaire himself was the wit. However that may be, whether he arranged the setting himself (as I suppose he did) or whether chance supplied him with it exactly as he describes it, in either case, it is an extraordinary, much too pat, theatrical piece of reality, admirably and exclusively suited to what he appends to it: the trite bit of worldly wisdom, charmingly and amiably presented, the fireworks display of examples in which the sacred and profane are mixed together with the characteristic impertinence of the Enlightenment, the irony in regard to his own fame, the polemic allusions to his enemies, the summing up of the whole in the basic theme from Solomon,5 and finally the recourse to the word vanité to find the turn of expression which concludes the letter and which radiates all the charm of the still amiable and still lively old man, all the charm of the entire century in the formation of which he played so prominent a part. The whole thing is, as Spitzer puts it, a unique phenomenon, the billet of the Rococo Enlightenment. It is so much the more unique in that the texture of worldly wisdom and amiable wit is here linked to an anecdote which conjures up the creaturality of the old man’s decrepit body, but a step from the grave. Yet even with such a subject Voltaire remains witty and pleasing. How many different elements this text contains: there is the artfully arranged realism; there is the perfection of charm in social relations, which combine great warmth of expression with a high degree of reserve; there is the superficiality of a creatural self-confrontation which is at the same time the exalted amiability which refuses to let one’s own somber emotions become a burden to anyone else; there is the didactic ethos which characterized the great men of the Enlightenment and which made them able to use their last breath to formulate some new idea wittily and pleasingly.