Apparently aware that Candide would shock and offend many readers, Voltaire did not acknowledge authorship of the tale at first. He gave the work the fictitious subtitle: "Translated from the German of Dr. Ralph, with the additions found in the doctor's pocket when he died at Minden, in the year of grace 1759." Its immediate and sustained popularity is indicated by the fact that forty-three editions appeared between 1759 and 1789. A second part, or sequel, was published with the original first in an English edition and erroneously attributed to Voltaire. Further evidence of the popularity of the work is found in the attention given to it by critics from the very start.
In a letter to Voltaire dated February 23, 1759, Nicholas-Claude Theirot praised him as the "most excellent author and inventor of quips and jests" and said that his "book is snatched from hand to hand." Theirot went so far as to predict that Voltaire's work would live for a century and considered it "more like Lucian, Rabelais, and Swift than all three put together." In the same year, Friedrich M. Grimm expressed his views in a letter. He too appreciated the wit and gaiety in Candide but deplored what he considered the author's bad taste, referring to the "vulgarity, indecent talk, and filth without disguise to make them bearable." For him, Candide was no more than a plaisanterie. But for many others, like Mme. de Staël, it was the serious work of a scoffing philosopher.
The same division in critical estimates of the tale is to be found abroad. We have Boswell's word for it that Samuel Johnson, literary dictator of his age, never tired of expressing his admiration for Candide, which in its "plan and conduct" is so much like his own philosophical tale, Rasselas. But to the poet Edward Young, whom Voltaire had met in England, Candide was no more than "bold trash." So with the romanticist William Wordsworth, who referred to it as
this dull product of a scoffer's pen,
Impure conceits discharging from a heart
Hardened by impious pride.
(The Excursion, II, 484-486)
Carlyle's name may be added to those who either dismissed the tale as a kind of joke or deplored Voltaire's cynicism. Carlyle denied that the Frenchman had one great thought and described the work as "mere logical pleasantry."
The pendulum has, however, swung far in Voltaire's favor as the years have advanced. William Hazlitt, refuting Wordsworth, flatly declared that "Candide is a masterpiece of wit"; Henry Brougham (in Lives of Men of Letters, 1856) praised it as "most extraordinary"; John Morley, perhaps best known among the many biographers of Voltaire, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, admired its "fresh and unflagging spontaneity." G. Lytton-Strachey and Aldous Huxley are among the many who have hailed Candide as a masterpiece. Ira O. Wade has provided the correct explanation of why there should have been such widely divergent views of the tale: "Candide is . . . in its inner substance not wholly optimistic, or pessimistic, or skeptical or cynical; it is all these things at the same time" (Voltaire and Candide, 1959, 319). Whether viewed favorably or unfavorably, Candide remains a classic. Theirot wrote that it would live a hundred years; it has already survived for well over two hundred and will continue to live as long as there is an intelligent reading public.
