and the pettiness and misery of man seem to borrow a new intensity from the relentless laughter of Voltaire. But perhaps the most wonderful thing about _Candide_ is that it contains, after all, something more than mere pessimism--it contains a positive doctrine as well. Voltaire's common sense withers the Ideal; but it remains common sense. 'Il faut cultiver notre jardin' is his final word--one of the very few pieces of practical wisdom ever uttered by a philosopher. Voltaire's style reaches the summit of its perfection in _Candide_; but it is perfect in all that he wrote. His prose is the final embodiment of the most characteristic qualities of the French genius. If all that that great nation had ever done or thought were abolished from the world, except a single sentence of Voltaire's, the essence of their achievement would have survived. His writing brings to a culmination the tradition that Pascal had inaugurated in his _Lettres Provinciales_: clarity, simplicity and wit--these supreme qualities it possesses in an unequalled degree. But these qualities, pushed to an extreme, have also their disadvantages. Voltaire's style is narrow; it is like a rapier--all point; with such neatness, such lightness, the sweeping blade of Pascal has become an impossibility. Compared to the measured march of Bossuet's sentences, Voltaire's sprightly periods remind one almost of a pirouette. But the pirouette is Voltaire's--executed with all the grace, all the ease, all the latent strength of a consummate dancer; it would be folly to complain; yet it was clear that a reaction was bound to follow--and a salutary reaction. Signs of it were already visible in the colour and passion of Diderot's writing; but it was not until the nineteenth century that the great change came.