the furniture vans had unloaded their freight in the new house. we were installed, or, at least, we were left to make the best of an unbearable life in the dirt and the confusion. one of the pre-raphaelites, i forget at the moment which, once painted a picture called “the last day in the old home.” a touching subject. but it would need a grimmer, harder brush to depict the horrors of “the first day in the new home.” i had sat down in despair among the tumbled movables when i noticed—with what a thrill of pleased recognition—the top of a little leather-bound book protruding from among a mass of bulkier volumes in an uncovered case. it was candide, my treasured little first edition of 1759, with its discreetly ridiculous title-page, “candide ou l’optimisme, traduit de l’allemand de mr. le docteur ralph.”
optimism—i had need of a little at the moment, and as mr. le docteur ralph is notoriously one of the preachers most capable of inspiring it, i took up the volume and began to read: “il y avait en westphalie, 20dans le chateau de mr. le baron de thunder-ten-tronckh....” i did not put down the volume till i had reached the final: “il faut cultiver notre jardin.” i felt the wiser and the more cheerful for doctor ralph’s ministrations.
but the remarkable thing about re-reading candide is not that the book amuses one, not that it delights and astonishes with its brilliance; that is only to be expected. no, it evokes a new and, for me at least, an unanticipated emotion. in the good old days, before the flood, the history of candide’s adventures seemed to us quiet, sheltered, middle-class people only a delightful phantasy, or at best a high-spirited exaggeration of conditions which we knew, vaguely and theoretically, to exist, to have existed, a long way off in space and time. but read the book to-day; you feel yourself entirely at home in its pages. it is like reading a record of the facts and opinions of 1922; nothing was ever more applicable, more completely to the point. the world in which we live is recognizably the world of candide and cunégonde, of martin and the old woman who was a pope’s daughter and the betrothed of the sovereign prince of massa-carrara. the only difference is that the horrors crowd rather more thickly on the 21world of 1922 than they did on candide’s world. the man?uvrings of bulgare and abare, the intestine strife in morocco, the earthquake and auto-da-fé are but pale poor things compared with the great war, the russian famine, the black and tans, the fascisti, and all the other horrors of which we can proudly boast. “quand sa hautesse envoye un vaisseau en egypte,” remarked the dervish, “s’embarrasse-t-elle si les souris qui sont dans le vaisseau sont à leur aise ou non?” no; but there are moments when sa hautesse, absent-mindedly no doubt, lets fall into the hold of the vessel a few dozen of hungry cats; the present seems to be one of them.
cats in the hold? there is nothing in that to be surprised at. the wisdom of martin and the old woman who was once betrothed to the prince of massa-carrara has become the everyday wisdom of all the world since 1914. in the happy victorian and edwardian past, western europe, like candide, was surprised at everything. it was amazed by the frightful conduct of king bomba, amazed by the turks, amazed by the political chicanery and loose morals of the second empire—(what is all zola but a prolonged exclamation of astonishment at the goings-on of his contemporaries?). 22after that we were amazed at the disgusting behaviour of the boers, while the rest of europe was amazed at ours. there followed the widespread astonishment that in this, the so-called twentieth century, black men should be treated as they were being treated on the congo and the amazon. then came the war: a great outburst of indignant astonishment, and afterwards an acquiescence as complete, as calmly cynical as martin’s. for we have discovered, in the course of the somewhat excessively prolonged histoire à la candide of the last seven years, that astonishment is a supererogatory emotion. all things are possible, not merely for providence, whose ways we had always known, albeit for some time rather theoretically, to be strange, but also for men.
men, we thought, had grown up from the brutal and rampageous hobbledehoyism of earlier ages and were now as polite and genteel as gibbon himself. we now know better. create a hobbledehoy environment and you will have hobbledehoy behaviour; create a gibbonish environment and every one will be, more or less, genteel. it seems obvious, now. and now that we are living in a hobbledehoy world, we have learnt martin’s lesson so well that we can look on almost unmoved at the most appalling natural catastrophes 23and at exhibitions of human stupidity and wickedness which would have aroused us in the past to surprise and indignation. indeed, we have left martin behind and are become, with regard to many things, pococurante.
and what is the remedy? mr. le docteur ralph would have us believe that it consists in the patient cultivation of our gardens. he is probably right. the only trouble is that the gardens of some of us seem hardly worth cultivating. the garden of the bank clerk and the factory hand, the shop-girl’s garden, the garden of the civil servant and the politician—can one cultivate them with much enthusiasm? or, again, there is my garden, the garden of literary journalism. in this little plot i dig and delve, plant, prune, and finally reap—sparsely enough, goodness knows!—from one year’s end to another. and to what purpose, to whom for a good, as the latin grammar would say? ah, there you have me.
there is a passage in one of tchekov’s letters which all literary journalists should inscribe in letters of gold upon their writing desks. “i send you,” says tchekov to his correspondent, “mihailovsky’s article on tolstoy.... it’s a good article, but it’s strange: one might write a thousand such 24articles and things would not be one step forwarder, and it would still remain unintelligible why such articles are written.”
il faut cultiver notre jardin. yes, but suppose one begins to wonder why?
