Candide's Garden

Abstract

“Voltaire'S tales,” asserts Norman L. Torrey, “have a way . . . of summing up certain periods of his existence and certain problems with which he was then faced” (Spirit of Voltaire, New York, 1938, p. 50). In the case of Candide, the period was the decade of the fifties; the central problem, that of human conduct in relation to the somber mystery of physical and social evil. And it is an eloquent testimony to the distinctiveness and realism of its content that, viewed as a whole, Candide pursues a course of intellectual argument which parallels the evolution of Voltaire's cultural attitude during that decade—a decade wherein the most illustrious personality of a highly optimistic age irrevocably abandoned the relative complacency of his earlier years, inclined toward pessimism, and finally won through to a melioristic affirmation.