Suspended Judgments Part 5

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 G.o.ds. Once for all in this scandalous and beautiful book, the lying optimism of the preachers receives its crushing blow. "Candide" is the final retort of all sane and generous spirits, full of magnanimity and laughter, to that morbid and shameful propitiation of the destinies which cries "peace when there is no peace."

One feels when one reads it as if it were written by some wanton and gracious youth, in the marble courts of some happy palace of Utopia, commenting upon the mad delusions and diseased hypocrisies of the men of the old time when superst.i.tion still reigned.

No book in the world has more spontaneous gaiety, more of the triumphant spirit of human boyishness in its blood. Certainly the great Voltaire was to the end of his life--and you can see that very thing in the old-young face of the famous bust--inspired by the immortal flame of youth. He never grew old. To the last his att.i.tude toward life was the att.i.tude of that exuberant and unbounded energy which takes nothing seriously and loves the contest with darkness and stupidity for the sake of the divine "sport" of the struggle. There is a certain sun-born sanity of _commonsense_ about such natural youthfulness, which contradicts all popular fallacies.

It is the Mercutio spirit, striking up the swords of both Montagues and Capulets and fooling them all on their grey-haired obsessions. It comes into this solemn custom-ridden world, as if from some younger and gayer star, and makes wanton sport of its pious hypocrisies. It opens its astonished laughing eyes upon the meanness of men and the cruelties of men and the insane superst.i.tions and illusions of men, and it mocks them all with mischievous delight. It refuses to bow its head before h.o.a.ry idols. It refuses to go weeping and penitent and stricken with a sense of "sin" in the presence of natural fleshly instincts. It is absolutely irresponsible--what, in a world like this, should one be responsible for?--and it is shamelessly frivolous. Why not? Where the highest sanct.i.ties are so lamentably human, and where the phylacteries of the moralists are embroidered with such earth-spun threads, why go on tip-toe and with forlorn visage? It is outrageously indecent. Why not? Who made this portentous "decency" to be the rule of free-born life? Who put fig-leaves upon the sweet flesh of the immortals? Decency after all is a mere modern barbarism; the evocation of morbid vulgarity and a perverted heart.

The great cla.s.sic civilisations included a poetic obscenity with easy nonchalance. They had a G.o.d to protect its interests, and its sun-burnt youthful wantonness penetrates all their art. This modern cult of "decency"--thrust down the throat of human joy by a set of Calvins and John Knoxes--is only one of the indications in our wretched commercialised age of how far we have sunk from the laughter of the G.o.ds and the dancing of the morning stars.

To sit listening in the forlorn streets of a Puritan city--when for one day the cheating tradesmen leave their barbarous shops--to the wailing of unlovely hymns, empty of everything except a degraded sentimentality that would make an Athenian or a Roman slave blush with shame, is enough to cause one to regard the most scandalous levity of Voltaire as something positively sacred and holy.

One wonders that scholars are any longer allowed even to read Aristophanes--far less translate him. And cannot they see--these perverts of a purity that insults the sunshine--that _humour,_ decent or indecent, is precisely the thing that puts s.e.x properly in its place?

Cannot they see that by subst.i.tuting morbid sentiment for honest Rabelaisianism they are obsessing the minds of every one with a matter which after all is only one aspect of life?

The great terrible Aphrodite--ruler of G.o.ds and men--is not to be banished by conventicle or council. She will find her way back, though she has to tread strange paths, and the punishment for the elimination of natural wantonness is the appearance of hideous hypocrisy. Driven from the haunts of the Muses, expelled from the symposia of the wise and witty, the spirit of s.e.xual irreverence takes refuge in the streets; and the scurrilous vulgarities of the tavern balance the mincing proprieties of the book-shop.

After all s.e.x _is_ a laughable thing. The tragedies connected with it, the high and thrilling pleasures connected with it, do not obliterate its original absurdity. And Voltaire--this sane sun-born child of the shameless intellect--never permits us for a moment to forget how ridiculous in the last resort all this fuss about the matter is.

Puritanical suppression and neurotic obsession are found invariably together. It is precisely in this way that the great G.o.ddess revenges herself upon those who disobey her laws. Voltaire, the least Puritanical of men, is also the least neurotic. The Satyrish laughter of his eternally youthful energy clears the air of the world.

Humour of all human things is the most transitory and changing in its moods. As a perambulating interpreter of literature, ancient as well as modern, this has especially been borne in upon me. I have been guilty, in that sickening academic way which makes one howl with shame in one's self-respecting moments, of "trying out" upon people the old stock humours of the standard authors.

I have dragged poor Bottom back to life and made the arms of the Cervantian wind-mill turn and the frogs of Aristophanes croak. But oh, shade of Yorick! how the sap, the ichor, the sharp authentic tang, that really tickles our sensibilities, has thinned out and fallen flat during the centuries. My hearers have smiled and t.i.ttered perhaps--with a pathetic wish to be kind, or a desire to show themselves not quite dull to these cla.s.sic amenities--and between us we have, in a kind of chuckling pedantry, shuffled through the occasion; but it is not pleasant to recall such moments.

Of course a sly comedian could make anything amusing; but one cannot help feeling that if the humour of these famous scenes were really permanent it would force its way even through the frosty air of academic culture into our human nerves.

"We are not wood; we are not stones, but men"--and being men the essential spirit of outrageous humour ought surely to hit us, however poorly interpreted. And it does; only the proprieties and the decencies sheer us off from what is permanently appealing!

I recollect on one occasion, how, after making my hearers cry over the natural and permanent tragedy of Shylock, I asked the fatuous question, addressing it, as one does, to the vague air--

"What are we to say about Launcelot Gobbo?"

Now obviously any one but a professional interpreter of literature would know that there's _nothing_ to say about this harmless fool.

Shakespeare threw him in as "a comic relief" and probably felt his strongest appeal to the native genius of the actor who impersonated him. But I can recall now, with that sense of humiliation which wrings one's withers, the sweetly murmured tones of some tactful woman who answered--and the last thing one wants is an answer to these inanities--

"Oh, we must say that Launcelot Gobbo is charming!"

But Gobbo or no Gobbo, the fact remains that humour is one of the most delicate, the most evasive, and the most unstable of human qualities. I am myself inclined to hold that sheer outrageous ribaldry, especially if graced with an undertone of philosophic irony, is the only kind of humour which is really permanent. To give permanence to any human quality in literature, there must be an appeal to something which is beyond the power of time and change and fashion and custom and circ.u.mstance. And, as a matter of fact, nothing in the world except s.e.x itself answers this requirement.

The absurdities of men are infinite, but they alter with every generation. What never alters or can alter, is the absurdity of being a man at all.

Where Shakespeare's humour still touches us most nearly is precisely in those scenes which the superficial custom of our age finds least endurable. It is not in his Gobbos or in his frolicsome boy-girls, that his essential spirit must be looked for; but in his Falstaffs and Mercutios.

But Shakespeare's humour is largely, after all, a lovely, dreamy, poetical thing. I doubt if it has the weight or the ma.s.sive solidity of the humour of Rabelais. I think the humour of Charles Lamb wears well; but that is probably because it has a most indisputable flavour of Rabelaisian roguery underlying its whimsical grace. Anatole France has the true cla.s.sic spirit. His humour will remain fresh forever, because it is the humour of the eternal absurdity of s.e.xual desire. Heine can never lose the sharpness of his bite, for his irreverence is the eternal irreverence of the soul that neither man nor G.o.d can scourge into solemn submission.

Humour to be really permanent and to outlast the changes of fashion must go plummet-like to the basic root of things. It is nothing less than extraordinary that Voltaire, living in the age of all ages the most obsessed with the modishness of the hour, should have written "Candide," a book full of the old unalterable laughter. For "Candide"

is not only a clever book, a witty book, a wise book. It is a book preposterously and outrageously funny. It tickles one's liver and one's gall; it relaxes one's nerves; it vents the suppressed spleen of years in a shout of irrepressible amus.e.m.e.nt. Certain pa.s.sages in it--and, as one would have suspected they are precisely the pa.s.sages that cannot be quoted in a modern book--compel one to laugh aloud as one thinks of them.

Personally I hold the opinion that "Candide" is the most humorous piece of human writing in the world. And yet its ribaldry, its irreverence, is unbounded. It sticks at nothing. It says everything. It wags the philosophic tongue at every conceivable embodiment of popular superst.i.tion.

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 G.o.d-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 rea.s.suring 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 n.o.ble commonsense. And it is a n.o.ble commonsense which, after all, is Voltaire's preeminent gift.

The Voltairian spirit refuses to be fooled by man or G.o.d. The universe may batter it and bruise it, but it cannot break it. The brutality of authority, the brutality of public opinion, may crush it to the earth; but from the earth it mocks still, mocks and mocks and mocks, with the eternal youthfulness of its wicked tongue!

Voltaire took the world as he found it. With the weapons of the world he fought the world; with the weapons of the world he overcame the world. The neurotic modern vulgarity which, misinterpreting the doctrines of Nietzsche, worships force and bows down in the dust before the great unscrupulous man, finds no support in Voltaire. Honest people, cultivating their gardens and keeping the prophets away from their backyards, find in the Voltairian spirit their perpetual refuge.

The old Horatian wisdom, clear-eyed, cynical and friendly, leaps up once again from the dust of the centuries, a clean bright flame, and brings joyousness and sanity back to the earth.

Voltaire could be kind and generous without calling to his aid the "immensities" and the "eternities." He could strike fiercely on behalf of the weak and the oppressed without darkening the sunshine by any worship of "sorrow." He could be thoroughly and most entirely "good," while spitting forth his ribald irreverences against every pious dogma. He could be long-suffering and considerate and patient, to a degree hardly ever known among men of genius, while ruling Europe with his indomitable pen.

The name of Voltaire is more than a trumpet call of liberty for the oppressed artists and thinkers of the world; it is a challenge to the individual Candides of our hara.s.sed generation to rise above their own weaknesses and introspections and come forth into the sunshine.

The name of Voltaire is a living indictment of the madness of politicians and the insanity of parties and sects. It brings us back to the commonsense of honest men, who "care for none of these things."

He was a queer Apollo of light and reason--this lean bewigged figure with cane and snuffbox and laced sleeves--but the powers of darkness fled from before his wit as they have not fled from before the wit of any other; for the wit of Voltaire is in harmony with the spirit of the human race, as it shakes itself free from superst.i.tion "and all uncharitableness."

He was a materialist if you will, for his "deism" meant no more to him than a distant blue sky giving the world s.p.a.ce and perspective and free air; but a materialism that renders men kind and courteous, urbane and sweet-tempered, honest and clear-headed, is better than a spirituality that leads to intolerance and madness.

He was a ribald and a scoffer in the presence of much that the world holds sacred; but the most sacred thing of all--the _sanity of human reason_--has never been more splendidly defended.

He mocked at the traditions of men; but he remains a champion of man's highest prerogative. He turned the churches into indecent ridicule; but wherever an honest man strikes at tyrannous superst.i.tion, or a solitary "cultivator of his garden" strikes at stupid mob-rule, one stone the more is added to that great "ecclesia" of civilisation, which "Deo erexit Voltaire"; which Voltaire built--and builds--to G.o.d.

ROUSSEAU

Nothing is more clear than that the enjoyment of art and letters is forbidden, in any rich or subtle degree, to the apprehension of the moralist. It is also forbidden, for quite other reasons, to the apprehension of the extravagantly vicious.

The moralist is debarred from any free and pa.s.sionate love of literature by the simple fact that all literature is created out of the vices of men of letters. The extravagantly vicious man is debarred from such a love by the still simpler fact that his own dominant obsession narrows down his interest to the particular writers who share his own vice.

When I encounter a catholic and impa.s.sioned lover of books--of many books and many authors--I know two things about him--I know that he is the opposite of a moralist, and I know that he is free from any maniacal vice. I might go further and say that I know he has a rooted hatred of moralists and a tolerant curiosity about every other form of human aberration.

When I say that literature is created out of the vices of men of letters, I use the word in a large and liberal sense. A vice is a pleasant sensation condemned by Puritans. It is an over-emphasis laid upon some normal reaction; or it is a perverse and morbid deviation from the normal path.

It would not require any fantastic stretch of psychological interpretation to show how all the great men of letters are driven forward along their various paths by some demoniac urge, some dynamic impulse, that has its sensual as well as its intellectual origin.

The "psychology of genius" is still in its infancy. It seems a pity that so much of the critical interpretation of the great writers of the world should be in the hands of persons who--by the reason of their academic profession--are naturally more interested in the effect of such work upon youthful minds than in its intrinsic quality.