But such an account of Voltaire's procedure is as misleading as the plaster cast of a dance. He would just keep them in the misery they were born to. He would not plunge his people into an unfamiliar misery. A modern could not go about it after this fashion. Voltaire's men and women point his case against optimism by starting high and falling low. "Candide" never bored anybody except William Wordsworth. His attack, stealthier, more flexible and more patient than Voltaire's, would call upon us, especially when his learning got a little out of control, to be more than patient. Pangloss's optimism, would study it more closely, feel his destructive way about it with a more learned and caressing malice.
And he would choose a more complicated doctrine than Dr. A modern satirist would not try to paint with Voltaire's quick brush the doctrine that he wanted to expose. Pangloss, to prove the existence of design in the universe, says that noses were made to carry spectacles, and so we have spectacles. Colored birds would have filled Paraguay with their silver or acid cries. We should have had quarter distances, far horizons, the altering silhouettes of an Ionian island. When Martin and Candide were sailing the length of the Mediterranean we should have had a contrast between naked scarped Balearic cliffs and headlands of Calabria in their mists. A modern writer would have tried to catch and fix in words some of those Atlantic changes which broke the Atlantic monotony of that voyage from Cadiz to Buenos Ayres. It would have been, among other things, a book of sights and sounds. Yet how different the book would have looked if Voltaire had written it a hundred and fifty years later than 1759. Voltaire wrote it in three days, and five or six generations have found that its laughter does not grow old. INTRODUCTION Ever since 1759, when Voltaire wrote "Candide" in ridicule of the notion that this is the best of all possible worlds, this world has been a gayer place for readers. PUBLISHERS NEW YORKĬopyright, 1918, by BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC. Every reader of books will find titles he needs at a low price in an attractive form.īY VOLTAIRE INTRODUCTION BY PHILIP LITTELL BONI AND LIVERIGHT, INC.
The list is representative of the Great Moderns and is one of the most important contributions to publishing that has been made for many years. THE MODERN LIBRARY OF THE WORLD'S BEST BOOKSĬANDIDE BY VOLTAIRE The Publishers will be glad to mail complete list of titles in the Modern Library. For a complete list, please see the bottom of this document.
Transcriber's Note: Obvious typographical errors have been corrected in this text. Produced by Chuck Greif, Fox in the Stars and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
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