VOLTAIRE
“the wittiest, worldliest and most lifeloving of us all, the very symbol and
archetype of humanism” — Cyril Connolly
“I have never loved Voltaire overmuch:
his mind has no shade — but one must
honour him as nature’s triumph, as a
model of what intelligence can
accomplish.” — Cyril Connolly
“Voltaire is remarkable for his style. No
man ever wrote more lucid French. The
witty turn of his genius gave every page
of his prose interest, and whatever other
criticisms may be leveled against him,
he is never dull.” — Brown
Paul Valéry, one of the greatest modern
French poets, has made several of the
most incisive and useful remarks on
Voltaire. He wrote, for example, that
Voltaire was:
“specifically French and unimaginable
under any other skies—I would even
say, under any other sky than Paris. The
result is that in France, after two
hundred and fifty years, his name still
provokes strong and sharply conflicting
reactions. Some people still fear and
detest the man who delighted in
ridiculing the objects of their beliefs, in
heaping up mockery designed to
destroy their faith, in pitting the letter of
the Scriptures against their deeper
meaning and their spirit. Other people
see in him the apostle of freedom of
thought and the defender of the sacred
rights that every man owes it to himself
to grant to every other man.” — Valéry
Cp. Joyce in Ireland.
Voltaire was “a man on whom Joseph
de Maistre, who admired and detested
him, pronounced this antithetical
verdict in which he combined his
doctrine and his taste: ‘I should like,’ he
said, ‘to have a statue raised to him …
by the public executioner.’” — Valéry
“Voltaire replaced massive argument by
the tactics of speed, short thrusts, feints,
and a harassing irony. He moved from
the logical to the comical, from good
sense to pure fantasy, exploited all the
weaknesses of his opponent and then
tossed him to one side looking
ridiculous, if he did not end by making
him completely odious.
It was in this way that he achieved
one very considerable result which has
not attracted sufficient attention. What
is known as ‘opinion’ had been created
up to that time by the Court of
Versailles; it spread from there to the
City, and thence, after a certain time,
might reach a comparatively small
number of aristocrats and people of
breeding living in the provinces.
Voltaire broke this circle and extended
the sphere of action of the written word.
His style, the immense interest aroused
by his appeals for justice, and the sort of
scandal they created, attracted
throughout the kingdom and beyond its
frontiers a large number of readers.
What had been the attitude of the Court
and the City became the opinion of the
public. Here we can see the full import
and significance of a mere change in
style: the public was created by an easy
style. Simply increase the numbers still
more; relax all the rules and restraints of
language, making it immediately
accessible to the masses; borrow from
the masses their familiar and
picturesque expressions, and the word
‘public’ can no longer be applied to that
collective body at which the written
word is aimed — to rouse, convince,
and goad it into action. We must speak
of the people, and the whole of the
Revolution is contained in that one word.” —
Valéry
“He had the gall to believe in nothing,
or to think he did. And he forced his
view onto the public. Freedom of
thought has belonged ever since to the
general public — no longer the preserve
of the few…. In short, Voltaire is a
divide in the history of Europe. After
him, all religious thought became a
special case, a paradox, or a prejudice.” —
Valéry
And finally: “Voltaire is the classic par
excellence, much more classical than the
17th-century authors [who in France are
the classics]….” — Valéry
CANDIDE
Published anonymously in Geneva in
1759, when Voltaire was 65. It was
widely denounced, and he was accused
of writing it, which he denied.
Cp. Robinson Crusoe, 40 years earlier.
Shortly after Candide’s publication, a
magazine asserted, correctly of
course, that there was no kingdom of
the Jesuits in Paraguay, and that the
book had actually been written by
Voltaire. Voltaire, using the
pseudonym “Demad,”sent the
magazine a letter forcefully denying
both assertions and saying that the
book had been written by his
brother, Captain Demad. He dated
the letter April 1, which had the
same significance for eighteenthcentury Parisians that it does for us.
Candide is literally ‘a mixture of ridicule
and horror’ [Voltaire], an unflinching
scrutiny of the miseries of life carried on
with comic detachment.” — Aldridge
“Candide is, above all, a rollicking and
caustic satire which deals a strong blow
at the blissful optimism of the inveterate
followers of Leibnitz. Voltaire had for a
time leaned towards philosophical
optimism, but his own experience at the
hands of men and circumstances
brought him to consider at close range
the problem of evil in the world. [Cp.
Job and Paradise Lost from 2330 —
Indeed, Voltaire called it “Job brought
up to date.”]…. Voltaire, disgusted with
human stupidity and crulety, had in
mind one single objective: to make fun
of man’s aberrations and heap sarcasm
on them.” — Brown
“Voltaire’s major philosophical themes
are not as apparent in his title, Candide
or Optimism, Translated from the German
of Doctor Ralph, as they are in the title of
the metaphysical treatise by Leibnitz,
which he is attacking, Essay of Theodicy
on the Goodness of God, the Liberty of Man
and the Origin of Evil. In both works, the
questions of the goodness of god and
the origin of evil are interrelated, as are
those of free will and determinism.”—
Aldridge
“The completely opposite point of view
is expressed by two characters who
serve as foils to Candide and his
mentor: Jacques, a charitable
Anabaptist, expounds the doctrine of
the moral degeneration of man
[Anabaptists—that is, Again-baptized—
wouldn’t, among other things, bear
arms, use force, or hold government
office]; and Martin, nominally a
Manichean, teaches the supremacy of
evil rather than a balance of evil and
good. Both are more often than not
spokesmen for Voltaire.” — Aldridge
“It is true that he [Voltaire] no longer
believes in a beneficial Providence, yet
he still has faith in true progress.
Indeed, his opponents who proclaim
that ‘all is for the best are precisely those
who would like to maintain humanity in
the lamentable situation in which it is at
the present, and always by invoking the
most sacred causes.” — Brown
Voltaire “has been accused of excessive
sarcasm without the redeeming
counterbalance of adequate moral
teaching. . . . [For the remaining 18 years
of his life, though,] he strove with
youthful ardor and disintertestedness to
act, to work, to struggle against
ignorance and tyranny, to build, to sow,
to defend the cause of the oppressed
and underprivileged.” — Brown
“The basic structure of Candide consists
of a naïve, idealistic mind coming into
constant contact with opposing realities.
Doctrines are repeated by events, not
arguments.” — Aldridge
In this sense, Voltaire belongs more
with the realists than with the
Neoclassicists.
“One of Voltaire’s purposes is to parody
the romance of adventure and the socalled philosophical novels which were
in vogue at the time.” — Brown
Cp. Don Quixote if they have taken
English 2330
CONCLUSION: “Voltaire’s conclusion,
‘We must cultivate our garden,’ is at one
and the same time his most modest and
most sweeping statement. Work not
only eliminates the three great curses of
mankind—want, boredom, and vice—it
also transforms the chronological
sequence of a lifetime, in itself a mere
elapsing of time, into a creation that
constantly renews itself…. [Man] must
keep from useless theorizing, for that
will not teach him that most important
task of all: the art of living. Resigned in
the end to accepting an absurd reality—
there is no viable alternative—Voltaire
shows us how to make the best of a bad
situation and suggests that, on a small
scale at least, improvement may be
possible.” — Peyton Richter & Ilona Ricardo