t every conceivable embodiment of
popular superstition.

If the best books are the books which the authors of them have most
enjoyed writing, the books that have the thrill of excellent pleasure
on every page, then "Candide" certainly bears away the palm. One
would like to have watched Voltaire's countenance as he wrote it.
The man's superb audacity, his courage, his aplomb, his god-like
shamelessness, appear in every sentence.

What an indictment of the human race! What an arraignment of the
"insolence of office"! What a tract for the philanthropists! What a
slap in the face for the philosophers! And all done with such
imperturbable good temper, such magnanimity of fine malice.

Poor Candide! how loyally he struggled on, with Pangloss as his
master and his ideal; and what shocks he experienced! I would
sooner go down to posterity as the author of "Candide" than of any
volume in the world except Goethe's "Faust."

There is something extraordinarily reassuring about the book. It
reconciles one to life even at the moment it is piling up life's
extravagant miseries. Its buoyant and resilient energy, full of the
unconquerable irreverence and glorious shamelessness of youth,
takes life fairly by the throat and mocks it and defies it to its face. It
indicates courageous gaiety as the only victory, and ironical
submission to what even gaiety cannot alter as the only wisdom.

There are few among us, I suppose, who in going to and fro in the
world, have not come upon some much-persecuted, much-battered
Candide, "cultivating his garden" after a thousand disillusions; and
holding fast, in spite of all, to the doctrines of some amazing
Pangloss. Such encounters with such invincible derelicts must put us
most wholesomely to shame. Our neurotic peevishness, our
imaginary grievances, our vanity and our pride, are shown up at
such moments in their true light.

If complacent optimism appears an insolent falsifying of life's facts,
a helpless pessimism appears a cowardly surrender to life's
impertinence. Neither to gloss over the outrageous reality nor to lose
our resistant obstinacy, whatever such reality may do to us, is the
last word of noble commonsense. And it is a noble commonsense
which, after all, is Voltaire's preeminent gift.

The Voltairian spirit refuses to be fooled by man or god. The
universe may batter it and bruise it, but it cannot break it. The
brutality of authority, the brutality of public opinion, may crush