Voltaire: Candide (1758)

[L4 in that new publishing venture, the Penguin Classics, published in 1947.]

'Did Mr. Vanderdendur treat you like this?' asked Candide.
   'Yes, Sir,' said the negro, 'it's the custom. For clothing, we are given a pair of canvas drawers twice a year. Those of us who work in the factories and happen to catch a finger in the grindstone have a hand chopped off; if we try to escape, they cut off one leg. Both accidents happened to me. That's the price of your eating sugar in Europe. ...' (Candide, Ch XIX, translated by John Butt)

Sometimes people say -- I've probably said it myself -- that comedy tends to be conservative: from Aristophanes through Chaucer and Jane Austen and Scott to Wodehouse and Morecambe and Wise, it has guyed the pretension, egotism and hypocrisy of radicals and innovators, and invited us to laugh in shared defence of  the deep values of common existence as we know it.  Candide is a signal example of why that picture is too simple. It was a book that drastically changed our values, as much a maker of our modern outlook as Shakespeare's plays, and it's hilarious. Voltaire wasn't alone; I can see that Gil Blas and other picaresque novels had prepared the way; nevertheless Candide was a dizzying transformation.

Voltaire made sure that even those who only managed to read the first ten or twenty pages would still receive the book's main payloads. Candide begins like a train; here it is, about five pages in:

His new companions then asked him to accept a few shillings. Candide took them gratefully and wanted to give a receipt; but his offer was brushed aside, and they all sat down to table.
   'Are you not a devoted admirer . . .?' began one of the men in blue.
   'Indeed I am,' said Candide earnestly, 'I am a devoted admirer of Lady Cunégonde.'
   'No doubt,' replied the man; 'but what we want to know is whether you are a devoted admirer of the King of the Bulgars.'
   'Good Heavens, no!' said Candide, 'I've never seen him.'
   'Oh, but he is the most amiable of kings and we must drink his health.'
   'By all means, gentlemen,' replied Candide, and emptied his glass.
   'That's enough,' they cried. 'You are now his support and defender, and a Bulgar hero into the bargain,. Your fortune is made. Go where glory waits you.'
   And with that they clapped him in irons and hauled him off to the barracks . . .
   ... At the court martial he was graciously permitted to choose between being flogged thirty-six times by the whole regiment or having twelve bullets in his brain. It was useless to declare his belief in Free Will and say he wanted neither; he had to make his choice. So, exercising that divine gift called Liberty, he decided to run the gauntlet thirty-six times, and survived two floggings. . . .
   CHAPTER III
   How Candide escaped from the Bulgars, and what happened to him afterwards   Those who have never seen two well-trained armies drawn up for battle, can have no idea of the beauty and brilliance of the display. Bugles, fifes, oboes, drums, and salvoes of artillery produced such a harmony as Hell itself could not rival. The opening barrage destroyed about six thousand men on each side. Rifle-fire which followed rid this best of worlds of about nine or ten thousand villains who infested its surface. Finally the bayonet provided 'sufficient reason' for the death of several thousand more. The total casualties amounted to about thirty thousand. Candide trembled like a philosopher, and hid himself as best he could during this heroic butchery.
   When all was over and the rival kings were celebrating their victory with Te Deums in their respective camps, Candide decided to find somewhere else to pursue his reasoning into cause and effect. He picked his way over piles of dead and dying, and reached a neighbouring village on the Abar side of the border. It was now no more than a smoking ruin, for the Bulgars had burned it to the ground in accordance with the terms of international law. Old men, crippled with wounds, watched helplessly the death-throes of their butchered women-folk, who still clasped their children to their bloodstained breasts. Girls who had satisfied the appetites of several heroes lay disembowelled in their last agonies. . .
   Candide made off as quickly as he could to another village. This was in Bulgar territory, and had been treated in the same way by Abar heroes . . .

Voltaire is talking about the Seven Years' War (1756-1763) -- though it had only been a two years' war when he wrote Candide. Winston Churchill described it as the first "world war". Britain was its major beneficiary, especially in terms of colonial possessions, thus accelerating the export of misery to other lands. (One outcome of the war, arguably, is that most Americans speak English rather than French.)

The striking internationalism of Candide was an essential response to a world that was changing; the furious pace of the narrative is literature trying to catch up with reality.

*

Candide wouldn't work so brilliantly if it didn't continuously send itself up. Voltaire understood the lesson in negotiation about how you mustn't back people into a corner, leave them with no dignified way to embrace the outcome. Certainly his portrait of the world is sufficient reproof to the facile "optimism" of Dr. Pangloss, that we live in "this best of all possible worlds". But despite numerous horrific experiences and apparently certain deaths, Candide and his little circle absurdly survive to the end of this roller-coaster, neither dead nor traumatized. Candide's ever-resourceful servant Cacambo doesn't betray him (despite Voltaire's broad wink to the reader in Ch XIX). Candide gains and loses incredible wealth, but he never loses everything, or not for very long anyway. Is it the best of all possible worlds after all? Voltaire laughs as much at the follies of literary convention as at the follies of the world.

*

As I read through Sa'di, I'm trying to confirm my hunch that the wise conclusions of Candide's final chapter were inspired by the Persian author that Voltaire so admired.

*

'By the way,' said Candide, 'do you agree with what they say in that big book the captain has, that the earth was originally all sea?'
   'I no more believe it,' said Martin, 'than I believe all the other delirious ravings that are published from time to time.'
   'But what was this world created for?' said Candide.
   'To drive us mad,' replied Martin.
   'You remember that story I told you,' continued Candide, 'about the love of those two Oreillon girls for their monkeys. Doesn't that astonish you?'
   'Not at all,' said Martin. 'I don't see anything strange in an infatuation like that. I have seen so many extraordinary things, that nothing is extraordinary any longer.'
   'Do you think,' said Candide, 'that men have always massacred each other, as they do to-day, that they have always been false, cozening, faithless, ungrateful, thieving, weak, inconstant, mean-spirited, envious, greedy, drunken, miserly, ambitious, bloody, slanderous, debauched, fanatic, hypocritical, and stupid?'
   'Do you think,' said Martin, 'that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they could find them?'
   'Of course I do,' said Candide.
   'Well,' said Martin, 'if hawks have always had the same character, why should you suppose that men have changed theirs?'
   'Oh, but there's a great difference,' said Candide; 'for Free Will . . .'
   They were still talking when the ship reached Bordeaux.     (Ch XXI)

the corner of devotion

Saadi in the rose garden, from a Mughal manuscript of the Gulistan, c. 1645

[Image source: Wikipedia.]

I heard a padshah giving orders to kill a prisoner. The helpless
fellow began to insult the king on that occasion of despair, with
the tongue he had, and to use foul expressions according to the
saying:

Who washes his hands of life
Says whatever he has in his heart.

When a man is in despair his tongue becomes long and he is like a
vanquished cat assailing a dog.

In time of need, when flight is no more possible,
The hand grasps the point of the sharp sword.

When the king asked what he was saying, a good-natured vezierr replied, 'My lord, he says: Those who bridle their anger and forgive men:  for Allah loveth the beneficent.' The king, moved with pity, forebore taking his life but another
vezier, the antagonist of the former, said: 'Men of our rank ought to speak nothing but the truth in the presence of padshahs. This
fellow has insulted the king and spoken unbecomingly.' The king, being displeased with these words, said: 'That lie was more acceptable to me than this truth thou hast uttered because the former proceeded from
a conciliatory disposition and the latter from malignity; and wise men have said: "A falsehood resulting in conciliation is better than a truth producing trouble."'

He whom the shah follows in what he says,
It is a pity if he speaks anything but what is good.

The following inscription was upon the portico of the hall of
Feridun:

O brother, the world remains with no one.
Bind the heart to the Creator, it is enough.
Rely not upon possessions and this world
Because it has cherished many like thee and slain them.
When the pure soul is about to depart,
What boots it if one dies on a throne or on the ground?

[Sourced from PoemHunter. Unknown translation of the first story in the Gulistan (The Flower Garden or Rose Garden).]



The Story of How Tukla was Rebuked by a Devotee

Tukla, king of Persia, once visited a devotee and said, "Fruitless have been my years. None but the beggar carries riches from the world when earthly dignities are past. Hence, would I now sit in the corner of devotion that I might usefully employ the few short days that yet remain to me."

The devotee was angered at these words.

"Enough!" he cried. "Religion consists alone in the service of the people; it finds no place in the prayer-beads, or prayer-rug, or tattered garment. Be a king in sovereignty and a devotee in purity of morals. Action, not words, is demanded by religion, for words without action are void of substance."

----

A story illustrative of doing good to the evil

A woman said to her husband, "Do not again buy bread from the baker in this street. make thy purchases in the market, for this man shows wheat and sells barley, and he has no customers but a swarm of flies."

"O, light of my life," the husband answered, "pay no heed to his trickery. In the hope of our custom has he settled in this place, and not humane would it be to deprive him of his profits."

Follow the path of the righteous, and, if thou stand upon thy feet, stretch out thy hand to them that are fallen.



[Source: Iran Chamber Society, the Bostan of Saadi , a complete (I think) anonymous translation of Saadi's Bostan or Bustan (The Orchard).]

Saadi, or Sa'di, or Saadi of Shiraz (1210 - c.1291 AD).  (Capital of Fars province, in the southern part of modern-day Iran.)
"Saadi" was his pen name. His real name was Abū-Muhammad Muslih al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī.

Saadi's writing was first translated into a western language by the orientalist André du Ryer in 1634. He became well-known in Europe during the Age of Enlightenment. Voltaire was so fervent an admirer that he was sometimes nicknamed Saadi by his friends. (Voltaire may have intended the fictional "Sadi" who writes the Dedication to Zadig to be the historical Saadi, though the date he gives is outside Saadi's lifetime (AH 837 = about 1433-1434 AD).)

I came to Saadi via Balzac, talking about Félix's "flower symphonies" in The Lily of the Valley:

She would ever return to them, and feast upon them, she would answer all the thoughts I had placed in them when, in order to accept them she raised her head from her tapestry frame, with: "Good Heavens, how beautiful that is!" You will understand this delicious correspondence from a detailed account of a bouquet, as after a fragment of poetry you would understand Saadi.   (p. 145)

Balzac mentions Saadi at least once more, in The Girl with the Golden Eyes.

She was an Oriental poem, in which shone the sun that Saadi, that Hafiz, have set in their pulsing strophes. Only, neither the rhythm of Saadi, nor that of Pindar, could have expressed the ecstasy—full of confusion and stupefaction—which seized the delicious girl when the error in which an iron hand had caused her to live was at an end.

Balzac's expressions seem to imply acquaintance with Saadi's lyric poetry. Perhaps he was exaggerating, or perhaps French is better served than English in this respect. Saadi wrote four books of ghazals, but I haven't tracked down any translations. *

Wikipedia lists some other western Saadi fans in that orientalist era: Hegel, Pushkin, La Fontaine, Benjamin Franklin, Emerson.  (Post written, rather appropriately, while listening to Rameau's Les Indes Galantes !)

Another Saadi fan was the reclusive English composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892 - 1988). The nocturne Gulistān (1940), a piano piece of around 30 minutes, is one of his most admired works. 

*

* However, The Delphi Press Collected Works of Saadi (Kindle only) is irresistible at £1.49: it contains the Bustan (composed in epic metre, translated into prose by A. Hart Edwards for the Wisdom of the East series in 1911), Pand Namah (The Scroll of Wisdom, a short collection of moral poems, translated into verse lines with no particular meter by Arthur N. Wollaston, Wisdom of the East, 1906) and Gulistan (prose translated into prose by James Ross, probably around the same date).

There is a just God

Crossing the Berezina, 26th-27th November, 1812

The destruction of the Grande Armée in 1812 horrified, fascinated and, you might say, troubled the intellects of all Europeans. How could the great Napoleon, the master of lightning-quick manoeuvres in Lombardy and on the Danube, the greatest of military minds, ... How could he with such rank stupidity engage on so ruinous and futile an expedition as the invasion of Russia? ... Already warned by the example of Charles XII at Pultowa, and so poorly planned, so defiant of advice, so insufficiently motivated? (But it's easy to be wise in hindsight, and perhaps Napoleon's judgement was as sound as ever? Andrew Roberts' recent biography Napoleon the Great seems to list in that direction.)

Tolstoy argued against the "great man" view of history, but his own book undercuts him: it's Tolstoy who elevates Kutuzov to the status of saviour of the fatherland. Tolstoy tried to reframe history as the will of the people, but the idea that the will of the French people demanded the expedition to Moscow is contrary to all evidence.

Much earlier, Scott had thought about it. He rubbishes the idea that the catastrophe arose principally from an early onset of winter. This only exacerbated the sufferings of an army that was already doomed.

Scott proposed an explanation in moral terms. Bonaparte's invasion of a recent ally was unjust, evidence how low his ideas had fallen by continual resort to power politics. His own grotesque pride, moreover, had deranged his judgement; he thought he would triumph just by turning up.

Scott concludes:

Thus a hallucination, for such it may be termed, led this great soldier into a train of conduct, which, as a military critic, he would have been the first to condemn, and which was the natural consequence of his deep moral error. He was hurried by this self-opinion, this ill-founded trust in the predominance of his own personal influence, into a gross neglect of the usual and prescribed rules of war. He put in motion an immense army, too vast in numbers to be supported either by the supplies of the country through which they marched, or by the provisions they could transport along with them. And when, plunging into Russia, he defeated her armies and took her metropolis, he neglected to calculate his line of advance on such an extent of base, as should enable him to consolidate his conquests, and turn to real advantage the victories which he attained. His army was but precariously connected with Lithuania when he was at Moscow, and all communication was soon afterwards entirely destroyed. Thus, one unjust purpose, strongly and passionately entertained, marred the councils of the wise, and rendered vain the exertions of the brave.

We may read the moral in the words of Claudian.

 “ Jam non ad culmina rerum Injustos circvisse queror; tolluntur in altum, Ut lapsu graviore ruant.” CLAUDIAN, in Rufinum, Lib. i., T. 21.

Life of Buonaparte, Ch LXIII.


The quotation, by the late Latin poet Claudius Claudianus, comes from a poem celebrating the downfall of a corrupt opponent of his patron. It is the last two sentences of this passage:

My mind has often wavered between two opinions: have the gods a care for the world or is there no ruler therein and do mortal things drift as dubious chance dictates? For when I investigated the laws and the ordinances of heaven and observed the sea's appointed limits, the year's fixed cycle and the alternation of light and darkness, then methought everything was ordained according to the direction of a God who had bidden the stars move by fixed laws, plants grow at different seasons, the changing moon fulfil her circle with borrowed light and the sun shine by his own, who spread the shore before the waves and balanced the world in the centre of the firmament. But when I saw the impenetrable mist which surrounds human affairs, the wicked happy and long prosperous and the good discomforted, then in turn my belief in God was weakened and failed, and even against mine own will I embraced the tenets of that other philosophy which teaches that atoms drift in purposeless motion and that new forms throughout the vast void are shaped by chance and not design — that philosophy which believes in God in an ambiguous sense, or holds that there be no gods, or that they are careless of our doings. At last Rufinus' fate has dispelled this uncertainty and freed the gods from this imputation. No longer can I complain that the unrighteous man reaches the highest pinnacle of success. He is raised aloft that he may be hurled down in more headlong ruin. 

But does Napoleon's disastrous campaign really vindicate a just God in the way described by Claudian? Yes, Napoleon lost, it was a bodyblow to his empire. But his expedition led directly to the death of around a million people, none of whom was Napoleon himself. How could it be just that those million people should die?

'You observe,' said Candide to Martin, 'that crime is sometimes punished. That rogue of a Dutch captain has had the fate he deserved.'
   'Yes,' said Martin. 'But why should the passengers have perished too? God has punished a scoundrel, but the devil has drowned the rest.'  (Candide, Ch XX)