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Candide's Naysayer in lively modern dress.

Article Excerpt
The Blessed Human Race: Essays on Reconsideration. By George Jochnowitz. Hamilton Books (4501 Forbes Boulevard #200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, 2007), 123 Pages.

There is a wonderful scene in chapter 25 of Voltaire's Candide in which the latter, along with a companion, Martin, arrive in Venice and decide to pay a visit to a Venetian noble named Pococurante. The sixty-year-old gentleman, who fives in a luxurious palace surrounded by beautiful gardens, statuaries and paintings, welcomes his guests warmly and then proceeds to respond to comments made by his admiring visitors on his art works, library collection, and musical tastes.

Surprisingly this Venetian mandarin informs his guests, in opposition to the received wisdom, that the painter Raphael is an expensive fraud, that contemporary music fatigues and bores everyone and that the current operas feature ridiculous singing. As for literature, Pococurante tells Candide that Homer is nothing but repetitive battle scenes, that Virgil is a cold and disagreeable poet and Horace an irrelevant babbler. And what about Cicero, Candide interjects. "I never read him," replies his hose "When I learned that he doubted everything, I concluded that I knew as much as he did and that...

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