nightingale are _galimatias_, while the carrion crow thinks the
eagle a fool for dwelling so high and flying so much higher. But as for
the other side of the matter, how thin and poor and puerile even those
smartest things of Voltaire's, some of which have been quoted and
praised, sound, if one attempts to read them after the last sentence of
the _Apology_, or after passage on passage of the rest of the
"galimatias" of Plato!

Nevertheless, though you may answer a fool according to his folly, you
should not, especially when he is not a fool absolute, judge him solely
thereby. When Voltaire was making himself gay with Plato, with the
Bible, and with some other things, he was talking, not merely of
something which he did not completely understand, but of something
altogether outside the range of his comprehension. But in the judgment
of literature the process of "cancelling" does not exist. A quality is
not destroyed or neutralised by a defect, and, properly speaking (though
it is hard for the critic to observe this), to strike a balance between
the two is impossible. It is right to enter the non-values; but the
values remain and require chief attention.

[Sidenote: An attempt at different evaluation of himself.]

From what has been already said, it will be clear that there is no
disposition here to give Voltaire anything short of the fullest credit,
both as an individual writer of prose fiction and as a link in the chain
of its French producers. He worked for the most part in miniature, and
even _Candide_ runs but to its bare hundred pages. But these are of the
first quality in their own way, and give the book the same position for
the century, in satiric and comic fiction, which _Manon Lescaut_ holds
in that of passion. That both should have taken this form, while,
earlier, _Manon_, if written at all, would probably have been a poem,
and _Candide_ would have been a treatise, shows on the one side the
importance of the position which the novel had assumed, and on the other
the immense advantages which it gave, as a kind, to the artist in
literature. I like poetry better than anything, but though the subject
could have been, and often has been, treated satirically in verse, a
verse _narrative_ could hardly have avoided inferiority, while even
Berkeley (who himself borrowed a little of novel-form for _Alciphron_)
could not have made _Candide_ more effective than it is. It is of course
true that Voltaire's powers as a "fi