The Philosophy of Voltaire - Collected Works: Treatise On Tolerance, Philosophical Dictionary, Candide, Letters on England, Plato's Dream, Dialogues, The Study of Nature, Ancient Faith and Fable…. Вольтер
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governed?
The ancient Brahmins sometimes burned themselves to prevent the pains and the languor of old age; but, above all, to make themselves admired. Calanus would not, perhaps, have placed himself on the pile, but for the purpose of being gazed at by Alexander. The Christian renegade Peregrinus burned himself in public, for the same reason that a madman goes about the streets dressed like an Armenian, to attract the notice of the populace.
Is there not also an unfortunate mixture of vanity in this terrible sacrifice of the Indian women? Perhaps, if a law were passed that the burning should take place in the presence of one waiting woman only, this abominable custom would be forever destroyed.
One word more: A few hundreds of Indian women, at most, have furnished this horrid spectacle; but our inquisitions, our atrocious madmen calling themselves judges, have put to death in the flames more than a hundred thousand of our brethren—men, women, and children—for things which no one has understood. Let us pity and condemn the Brahmins; but let us not forget our miserable selves!
Truly, we have forgotten one very essential point in this short article on the Brahmins, which is, that their sacred books are full of contradictions; but the people know nothing of them, and the doctors have solutions ready—senses figured and figurative, allegories, types, express declarations of Birma, Brahma, and Vishnu, sufficient to shut the mouth of any reasoner.
BREAD-TREE.
The bread-tree grows in the Philippine islands, and principally in those of Guam and Tinian, as the cocoa-tree grows in the Indies. These two trees, alone, if they could be multiplied in our climate, would furnish food and drink sufficient for all mankind.
The bread-tree is taller and more bulky than our common apple-trees; its leaves are black, its fruit is yellow, and equal in dimensions to the largest apple. The rind is hard; and the cuticle is a sort of soft, white paste, which has the taste of the best French rolls; but it must be eaten fresh, as it keeps only twenty-four hours, after which it becomes dry, sour and disagreeable; but, as a compensation, the trees are loaded with them eight months of the year. The natives of the islands have no other food; they are all tall, stout, well made, sufficiently fleshy, and in the vigorous health which is necessarily produced by the use of one wholesome aliment alone: and it is to negroes that nature has made this present.
Corn is assuredly not the food of the greater part of the world. Maize and cassava are the food of all America. We have whole provinces in which the peasants eat none but chestnut bread, which is more nourishing and of better flavor than the rye or barley bread on which so many feed, and is much better than the rations given to the soldiers. Bread is unknown in all southern Africa. The immense Indian Archipelago, Siam, Laos, Pegu, Cochin-China, Tonquin, part of China, the Malabar and Coromandel coasts, and the banks of the Ganges, produce rice, which is easier of cultivation, and for which wheat is neglected. Corn is absolutely unknown for the space of five hundred leagues on the coast of the Icy Sea.
The missionaries have sometimes been in great tribulation, in countries where neither bread nor wine is to be found. The inhabitants told them by interpreters: "You would baptize us with a few drops of water, in a burning climate, where we are obliged to plunge every day into the rivers; you would confess us, yet you understand not our language; you would have us communicate, yet you want the two necessary ingredients, bread and wine. It is therefore evident that your universal religion cannot have been made for us." The missionaries replied, very justly, that good will is the one thing needful; that they should be plunged into the water without any scruple; that bread and wine should be brought from Goa; and that, as for the language, the missionaries would learn it in a few years.
BUFFOONERY—BURLESQUE—LOW COMEDY.
He was a very subtle schoolman, who first said that we owe the origin of the word "buffoon" to a little Athenian sacrificer called Bupho, who, being tired of his employment, absconded, and never returned. The Areopagus, as they could not punish the priest, proceeded against his hatchet. This farce, which was played every year in the temple of Jupiter, is said to have been called "buffoonery." This story is not entitled to much credit Buffoon was not a proper name; bouphonos signifies an immolator of oxen. The Greeks never called any jest bouphonia. This ceremony, frivolous as it appears, might have an origin wise and humane, worthy of true Athenians.
Once a year, the subaltern sacrificer, or more properly the holy butcher, when on the point of immolating an ox, fled as if struck with horror, to put men in mind that in wiser and happier times only flowers and fruits were offered to the gods, and that the barbarity of immolating innocent and useful animals was not introduced until there were priests desirous of fattening on their blood and living at the expense of the people. In this idea there is no buffoonery.
This word "buffoon" has long been received among the Italians and the Spaniards, signifying mimus, scurra, joculator—a mimic, a jester, a player of tricks. Ménage, after Salmasius, derives it from bocca infiata—a bloated face; and it is true that a round face and swollen cheeks are requisite in a buffoon. The Italians say bufo magro—a meagre buffoon, to express a poor jester who cannot make you laugh.
Buffoon and buffoonery appertain to low comedy, to mountebanking, to all that can amuse the populace. In this it was—to the shame of the human mind be it spoken—that tragedy had its beginning: Thespis was a buffoon before Sophocles was a great man.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Spanish and English tragedies were all degraded by disgusting buffooneries. The courts were still more disgraced by buffoons than the stage. So strong was the rust of barbarism, that men had no taste for more refined pleasures. Boileau says of Molière:
C'est par-là que Molière, illustrant ses écrits, Peut-être de son art eût emporté le prix, Si, moins ami du peuple en ses doctes peintures, Il n'eût fait quelquefois, grimacer ses figures, Quitté pour le bouffon l'agréable et fin, Et sans honte à Terence allié Tabarin. Dans ce sac ridicule où Scapin s'enveloppe, Je ne reconnais plus l'auteur du Misanthrope. Molière in comic genius had excelled, And might, perhaps, have stood unparalleled, Had he his faithful portraits ne'er allowed To gape and grin to gratify the crowd; Deserting wit for low grimace and jest, And showing Terence in a motley vest. Who in the sack, where Scapin plays the fool, Will find the genius of the comic school?
But it must be considered that Raphael condescended to paint grotesque figures. Molière would not have descended so low, if all his spectators had been such men as Louis XIV., Condé, Turenne, La Rochefoucauld, Montausier, Beauvilliers, and such women as Montespan and Thianges; but he had also to please the whole people of Paris, who were yet quite unpolished. The citizen liked broad farce, and he paid for it. Scarron's "Jodelets" were all the rage. We are obliged to place ourselves on the level of our age, before we can rise above it; and, after all, we like to laugh now and then. What is Homer's "Battle of the Frogs and Mice," but a piece of buffoonery—a burlesque poem?
Works of this kind give no reputation, but they may take from that which we already enjoy.
Buffoonery is not always in the burlesque style, "The Physician in Spite of Himself," and the "Rogueries of Scapin," are not in the style of Scarron's "Jodelets." Molière does not, like Scarron, go in search of slang terms; his lowest characters do not play the mountebank. Buffoonery is in the thing, not in the expression.
Boileau's "Lutrin" was at first called a burlesque poem, but it was the subject that was burlesque; the style was pleasing and refined, and sometimes even heroic.
The Italians had another kind of burlesque, much superior to ours—that of Aretin, of Archbishop La Caza, of Berni, Mauro, and Dolce. It often sacrifices decorum to pleasantry, but obscene words are wholly banished from it. The subject of Archbishop La Caza's "Capitolo del Forno" is,