complacent well-paid optimism whispers acquiescence in the "best
of all possible worlds."

The great Voltaire was made in another mould. Few enjoyed the
pleasures of life more than he; but the idea of the stupid brutality
and ignorant tyranny from which in this world so many harmless
people suffer filled him with fury. The Calas were only one--only
the best known--of a long list of victims on whose behalf he entered
the arena. In these campaigns of justice, he was tireless,
inexhaustible, insatiable. He flooded Europe with pamphlets on
behalf of his proteges. He defied Church and State in his crusades to
defend them. His house at Ferney became a sort of universal refuge
and sanctuary for the persecuted persons of the civilised world.

A great and good man! I sometimes think that of all the heroic
champions of sensitiveness against insensitiveness, of weakness
against strength, of the individual against public opinion, I would
soonest call up the noble shade of Voltaire and kiss his pontifical
hand!

The Pantheistic Carlyle grumbles at his levity and rails against his
persiflage. One hopes there will always be a "persiflage" like that of
Voltaire to clear the human stage of stupid tyranny and drive the
mud-monsters of obscurantism back into their mid-night caverns. He
was a queer kind of Apollo--this little great man with his
old-fashioned wig and the fur-cloak "given him by Catherine of
Russia"--but the flame which inspired him was the authentic fire, and
the arrows with which he fought were dipped in the golden light of the
sun.

I said there was one book of Voltaire's to which the souls of honest
people who love literature must constantly return. This, of course, is
"Candide"; a work worthy to be bound up in royal vellum and
stained in Tyrian dyes. If it were not for "Candide"--so stiff and
stilted was the fashionable spirit of that age--there would be little in
Voltaire's huge shelf of volumes, little except stray flashes of his
irrepressible gaiety, to arrest and to hold us. But into the pages of
"Candide" he poured the full bright torrent of his immortal wit, and
with this book in our hands we can feel him and savour him as he
was.

One has only to glance over the face of Europe at this present hour
to get the sting and Pythian poison of this planetary irony. It is like a
Circean philtre of sweet sunbrewed wine, sparkling with rainbow
bubbles and gleaming with the mockery of the deathless gods. Once
for all