n 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. 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. We should have
had quarter distances, far horizons, the altering silhouettes of an
Ionian island. Colored birds would have filled Paraguay with their
silver or acid cries.

Dr. Pangloss, to prove the existence of design in the universe, says
that noses were made to carry spectacles, and so we have spectacles. A
modern satirist would not try to paint with Voltaire's quick brush the
doctrine that he wanted to expose. And he would choose a more
complicated doctrine than Dr. Pangloss's optimism, would study it more
closely, feel his destructive way about it with a more learned and
caressing malice. 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. Now and then he would
bore us. "Candide" never bored anybody except William Wordsworth.

Voltaire's men and women point his case against optimism by starting
high and falling low. A modern could not go about it after this fashion.
He would not plunge his people into an unfamiliar misery. He would just
keep them in the misery they were born to.

But such an account of Voltaire's procedure is as misleading as the
plaster cast of a dance. Look at his procedure again. Mademoiselle
Cunegonde, the illustrious Westphalian, sprung from a family that could
prove seventy-one quarterings, descends and descends until we find her
earning her keep by washing dishes in the Propontis. The aged faithful
attendant, victim of a hundred acts of rape by negro pirates, remembers
that she is the daughter of a pope, and that in honor of her
approaching marriage with a Prince of Massa-Carrara all Italy wrote
sonnets of which not one was passable. We do not need to know French
literature before Voltaire in order to feel, although the lurking parody
may escape us, that he is poking fun at us and at himself. His laughter
at his own methods grows more unmistakable at the last, when he
caricatures them by casually assembling six fallen monarchs in an inn at
Venice.

A modern assailant of optimism would arm himself with social pity. There
is no social