VOLTAIRE'S "CANDIDE."*
THERE is a use in illustrations even if they do not illustrate. Nothing displayed to us so clearly the essential qualities of Alice in Wonderland as did Mr. Rackham's charming, but boundlessly unsuitable, illustrations. We realized that we liked " Alice " for its matter-of-fact wit, its perfectly-adjusted mixture of the commonplace and the outrageous, and above all for its quality of limpid narrative. Mr. Alan Odel's painstaking illustrations to Candide, if they do nothing else, make us reflect upon the peculiar qualities of that most individual, strange, and passionate piece of work. Mr. Ode's illustrations are conceived in a Rabelaisian, a grotesque and a horrible mood. They have humour ; he could illustrate Swift, but he has not caught the very different genius of Voltaire. " L'homme de Cams" wrote Candide, the affair of the Bulgarian army shows him clearly, and here and there in different episodes we can see the same dropping of the mask. For Voltaire wore a mask : Swift was like the uninvited guest in Poe's "Masquerade of the Red Death " ; he had no mask to drop.
But Mr. (Mel 'has not understood, it seems to us, the out- standing quality of Candide, which is that it has the nature of a patter song, its whole satiric essence is in the swift flash past of its repeated resuscitations, incredible pains and ridiculous love-making. Candide could never be made into a film for a dozen good reasons, but it remains the literary equivalent of a cinema burlesque. The illustrations should • Voltaire's " Candide." illustrated by Alan Odel. London: George Boutledge
and Sons. tid. net.)
surely, then, have shown us, as does the text, a score of little hurrying figures, for the most part drawn only in silhouette, bustling untiringly, but uselessly, across the ever changing scenes of their labours and their misfortunes here and there enjoying a burst of the sunlight of prosperity, which a skinny, ape-like hand as quickly curtains from them. As for the present translation, it is for the most part very good, though the translator has not- quite managed to give us the ironical rapidity of the original.
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