French Classics
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Title: French Classics
Author: William Cleaver Wilkinson
Release date: May 20, 2011 [eBook #36174]
Language: English
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Produced by Marius Masi, Juliet Sutherland and the Online
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Transcriber's note:
The following typographical errors have been corrected:
Page 23: "The people--that is, the promiscuous mass of
mankind--hardly exist to Froissart." 'promiscuous' amended from
'promiscous'.
Page 178: "Gil Blas, discouraged, was about to leave Dr. Sangrado's
service, when that distinguished physician said to him--we take up
the text of the story once more:" 'Blas' amended from 'Glas'.
Page 189: "When the Christian religion, two centuries ago, became
unhappily divided into Catholic and Protestant, the people of the
north embraced the Protestant, and those south adhered still to the
Catholic." 'unhappily' amended from 'unhappilly'.
Page 238: "His European reputation in science made his name a tower
of strength to the 'Encyclopaedia,'--even after he ceased to be an
editorial coadjutor in the enterprise." 'editorial' amended from
'editoral'.
Page 295: "Dickens's Pegasus often flies with his bit between his
teeth. 'between' amended from 'beween'.
OTHER BOOKS BY PROFESSOR WILKINSON
THE EPIC OF SAUL
THE EPIC OF PAUL
WEBSTER: AN ODE. WITH NOTES
POEMS
A FREE LANCE IN THE FIELD OF LIFE AND LETTERS (Volume of Essays)
EDWIN ARNOLD AS POETIZER AND AS PAGANIZER
THE DANCE OF MODERN SOCIETY
FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY NEW YORK AND LONDON
_WILKINSON'S FOREIGN CLASSICS IN ENGLISH_
FRENCH CLASSICS
BY
WILLIAM CLEAVER WILKINSON
PROFESSOR OF POETRY AND CRITICISM
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
* * * * *
FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
NEW YORK AND LONDON
1909
COPYRIGHT 1900
BY
WILLIAM CLEAVER WILKINSON.
(_Printed in the United States of America_)
PREFACE.
The preparation of the present volume proposed to the author a task more
difficult far than that undertaken in the case of either of the
literatures, the Greek or the Latin, treated in the four preceding
volumes of the present series. Those volumes dealt with literatures
limited and finished; this volume deals with a literature indefinitely
vast in extent, and still in vital process of growth. The selection of
material to be used was, in the case of the earlier volumes, virtually
made for the author beforehand, in a manner greatly to ease his sense of
responsibility for the exercise of individual judgment and taste. Long
prescription, joined to the winnowing effect of wear and waste through
time and chance, had left little doubt what works of what writers, Greek
and Roman, best deserved now to be shown to the general reader. Besides
this, the prevalent custom of the schools of classical learning could
then wisely be taken as a clew of guidance to be implicitly followed,
whatever might be the path through which it should lead. There is here
no similar avoidance of responsibility possible; for the schools have
not established a custom, and French literature is a living body, from
which no important members have ever yet been rent by the ravages of
time.
The plan of this volume, together with the compass proposed for it,
created the necessity of establishing from the outset certain limits to
be very strictly observed. There could be no introductory general
matter, beyond a rapid and summary review of that literature, as a
whole, which is the subject of the book. The list of authors selected
for representation must not include the names of any still living. A
third thing resolved upon was to make the number of representative
names small rather than large, choice rather than inclusive. The
principle at this point adopted was to choose those authors only whose
merit, or whose fame, or whose influence, might be supposed
unquestionably such that their names and their works would certainly be
found surviving, though the language in which they wrote should, like
its parent Latin, have perished from the tongues of men. The proportion
of space severally allotted to the different authors was to be measured
partly according to their relative importance, and partly according to
their estimated relative capacity of interesting in translation the
average intelligent reader of to-day.
In one word, the single inspiring aim of the author has here been to
furnish enlightened readers, versed only in the English language, the
means of acquiring, through the medium of their vernacular, some
proportioned, trustworthy, and effective knowledge and appreciation, in
its chief classics, of the great literature which has been written in
French. This object has been sought, not through narrative and
description, making books and authors the subject, but through the
literature itself, in specimen extracts illuminated by the necessary
explanation and criticism.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
I.
FRENCH LITERATURE 5
II.
FROISSART 22
III.
RABELAIS 29
IV.
MONTAIGNE 40
V.
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD (LA BRUYERE; VAUVENARGUES) 55
VI.
LA FONTAINE 66
VII.
MOLIERE 76
VIII.
PASCAL 91
IX.
MADAME DE SEVIGNE 105
X.
CORNEILLE 117
XI.
RACINE 127
XII.
BOSSUET, BOURDALOUE, MASSILLON, SAURIN 137
XIII.
FENELON 158
XIV.
LE SAGE 174
XV.
MONTESQUIEU, TOCQUEVILLE 184
XVI.
VOLTAIRE 199
XVII.
ROUSSEAU (ST. PIERRE) 212
XVIII.
THE ENCYCLOPAEDISTS 235
XIX.
MADAME DE STAEL 239
XX.
CHATEAUBRIAND 248
XXI.
BERANGER 256
XXII.
LAMARTINE 263
XXIII.
THE GROUP OF 1830 274
XXIV.
JOUBERT (SWETCHINE; AMIEL) 307
XXV.
EPILOGUE 318
INDEX 319
FRENCH CLASSICS IN ENGLISH
I.
FRENCH LITERATURE.
Of French literature, taken as a whole, it may boldly be said that it
is, not the wisest, not the weightiest, not certainly the purest and
loftiest, but by odds the most brilliant and the most interesting,
literature in the world. Strong at many points, at some points
triumphantly strong, it is conspicuously weak at only one point,--the
important point of poetry. In eloquence, in philosophy, even in
theology; in history, in fiction, in criticism, in epistolary writing,
in what may be called the pamphlet; in another species of composition,
characteristically, peculiarly, almost uniquely, French--the Thought and
the Maxim; by eminence in comedy, and in all those related modes of
written expression for which there is scarcely any name but a French
name--the _jeu d'esprit_, the _bon mot_, _persiflage_, the _phrase_; in
social and political speculation; last, but not least, in scientific
exposition elegant enough in form and in style to rise to the rank of
literature proper--the French language has abundant achievement to show,
that puts it, upon the whole, hardly second in wealth of letters to any
other language whatever, either ancient or modern.
What constitutes the charm--partly a perilous charm--of French
literature is before all else its incomparable clearness, its precision,
its neatness, its point; then, added to this, its lightness of touch,
its sureness of aim; its vivacity, sparkle, life; its inexhaustible
gayety; its impulsion toward wit--impulsion so strong as often to land
it in mockery; the sense of release that it breathes and inspires; its
freedom from prick to the conscience; its exquisite study and choice of
effect; its deference paid to decorum--decorum, we mean, in taste, as
distinguished from morals; its infinite patience and labor of art,
achieving the perfection of grace and of ease--in one word, its style.
We speak, of course, broadly and in the gross. There are plenty of
French authors to whom some of the traits just named could by no means
be attributed, and there is certainly not a single French author to whom
one could truthfully attribute them all. Voltaire insisted that what was
not clear was not French--so much, to the conception of this typical
Frenchman, was clearness the genius of the national speech. Still,
Montaigne, for example, was sometimes obscure; and even the tragedist
Corneille wrote here and there what his commentator, Voltaire, declared
to be hardly intelligible. So, too, Rabelais, coarsest of humorists,
offending decorum in various ways, offended it most of all exactly in
that article of taste, as distinguished from morals, which, with
first-rate French authors in general, is so capital a point of regard.
On the other hand, Pascal--not to mention the moralists by profession,
such as Nicole, and the preachers Bourdaloue and Massillon--Pascal,
quivering himself, like a soul unclad, with sense of responsibility to
God, constantly probes you, reading him, to the inmost quick of your
conscience. Rousseau, notably in the "Confessions," and in the
"Reveries" supplementary to the "Confessions;" Chateaubriand, echoing
Rousseau; and that wayward woman of genius, George Sand, disciple she to
both--were so far from being always light-heartedly gay, that not seldom
they spread over their page a somber atmosphere almost of gloom--gloom
flushed pensively, as with a clouded "setting sun's pathetic light." In
short, when you speak of particular authors, and naturally still more
when you speak of particular works, there are many discriminations to be
made. Such exceptions, however, being duly allowed, the literary product
of the French mind, considered in the aggregate, will not be
misconceived if regarded as possessing the general characteristics in
style that we have now sought briefly to indicate.
French literature, we have hinted, is comparatively poor in poetry. This
is due in part, no doubt, to the genius of the people; but it is also
due in part to the structure of the language. The language, which is
derived chiefly from Latin, is thence in such a way derived as to have
lost the regularity and stateliness of its ancient original, without
having compensated itself with any richness and sweetness of sound
peculiarly its own; like, for instance, that canorous vowel quality of
its sister derivative, the Italian. The French language, in short, is
far from being an ideal language for the poet.
In spite, however, of this fact, disputed by nobody, it is true of
French literature, as it is true of almost any national literature, that
it took its rise in verse instead of in prose. Anciently there were two
languages subsisting together in France which came to be distinguished
from each other in name by the word of affirmation--_oc_ or _oil_,
yes--severally peculiar to them, and thus to be known respectively as
_langue d'oc_ and _langue d'oil_. The future belonged to the latter of
the two forms of speech--the one spoken in the northern part of the
country. This, the _langue d'oil_, became at length the French language.
But the _langue d'oc_, a soft and musical tongue, survived long enough
to become the vehicle of lyric strains, mostly on subjects of love and
gallantry, still familiar in mention, and famous as the songs of the
troubadours. The flourishing time of the troubadours was in the eleventh
and twelfth centuries. Provencal is an alternative name of the language.
Side by side with the southern _troubadours_, or a little later than
they, the _trouveres_ of the north sang, with more manly ambition, of
national themes, and, like Virgil, of arms and of heroes. Some
productions of the _trouveres_ may fairly be allowed an elevation of aim
and of treatment entitling them to be called epic in character.
_Chansons de geste_ (songs of exploit), or _romans_, is the native name
by which those primitive French poems are known. They exist in three
principal cycles, or groups, of productions--one cycle composed of those
pertaining to Charlemagne; one, of those pertaining to British Arthur,
and a third, of those pertaining to ancient Greece and Rome, notably to
Alexander the Great. The cycle revolving around the majestic legend of
Charlemagne for its center was Teutonic, rather than Celtic, in spirit
as well as in theme. It tended to the religious in tone. The Arthurian
cycle was properly Celtic. It dealt more with adventures of love. The
Alexandrian cycle, so named from one principal theme celebrated--namely,
the deeds of Alexander the Great--mixed fantastically the traditions of
ancient Greece and Rome with the then prevailing ideas of chivalry, and
with the figments of fairy lore. (The metrical form employed in these
poems gave its name to the Alexandrine line later so predominant in
French poetry.) The volume of this quasi-epical verse, existing in its
three groups, or cycles, is immense. So is that of the satire and the
allegory in meter that followed. From this latter store of stock and
example, Chaucer drew to supply his muse with material. The _fabliaux_,
so called--fables, that is, or stories--were still another form of
French literature in verse. It is only now, within the current decade of
years, that a really ample collection of _fabliaux_--hitherto, with the
exception of a few printed volumes of specimens, extant exclusively in
manuscript--has been put into course of publication. Rutebeuf, a
_trouvere_ of the reign of St. Louis (Louis IX., thirteenth century), is
perhaps as conspicuous a personal name as any that thus far emerges out
of the sea of practically anonymous early French authorship. A frankly
sordid and mercenary singer, Rutebeuf always tending to mockery, was not
seldom licentious--in both these respects anticipating, as probably also
to some extent by example conforming, the subsequent literary spirit of
his nation. The _fabliaux_ generally mingled with their narrative
interest that spice of raillery and satire constantly so dear to the
French literary appetite. Thibaud was, in a double sense, a royal singer
of songs; for he reigned over Navarre, as well as chanted sweetly in
verse his love and longing, so the disputed legend asserts, for Queen
Blanche of Castile. Thibaud bears the historic title of The Song-maker.
He has been styled the Beranger of the thirteenth century. To Thibaud is
said to be due the introduction of the feminine rhyme into French
poetry--a metrical variation of capital importance. The songs of
Abelard, in the century preceding Thibaud, won a wide popularity.
Prose, meantime, had been making noteworthy approaches to form.
Villehardouin must be named as first in time among French writers of
history. His work is entitled, "Conquest of Constantinople." It gives an
account of the fourth crusade. Joinville, a generation later, continues
the succession of chronicles with his admiring story of the life of St.
Louis, whose personal friend he was. But Froissart of the fourteenth
century, and Comines of the fifteenth, are greater names. Froissart, by
his simplicity and his narrative art, was the Herodotus, as Philip de
Comines, for his political sagacity, has been styled the Tacitus, of
French historical literature. Up to the time of Froissart, the
literature which we have been treating as French was different enough in
form from the French of to-day to require what might be called
translation in order to become generally intelligible to the living
generation of Frenchmen. The text of Froissart is pretty archaic, but it
definitely bears the aspect of French.
With the name of Comines, who wrote of Louis XI. (compare Walter Scott's
"Quentin Durward"), we reach the fifteenth century, and are close upon
the great revival of learning which accompanied the religious
reformation under Luther and his peers. Now come Rabelais, boldly
declared by Coleridge one of the great creative minds of literature; and
Montaigne, with those essays of his, still living, and, indeed, certain
always to live. John Calvin, meantime, writes his "Institutes of the
Christian Religion" in French as well as in Latin, showing, once and for
all, that in the right hands his vernacular tongue was as capable of
gravity as many a writer before him had superfluously shown that it was
capable of levity. Amyot, the translator of Plutarch, is a French writer
of power, without whom the far greater Montaigne could hardly have been.
The influence of Amyot on French literary history is wider in reach and
longer in duration than we thus indicate; but Montaigne's indebtedness
to him is alone enough to prove that a mere translator had in this man
made a very important contribution to the forming prose literature of
France.
"The Pleiades," so called, were a group of seven writers, who, about the
middle of the sixteenth century, banded themselves together in France,
with the express aim of supplying influential example to improve the
French language for literary purposes. Their peculiar appellation, "The
Pleiades," was copied from that of a somewhat similar group of Greek
writers that existed in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus. Of course, the
implied allusion in it is to the constellation of the Pleiades. The
individual name by which the "Pleiades" of the sixteenth century may
best be remembered is that of Ronsard, the poet, associated with the
romantic and pathetic memory of Mary Queen of Scots. Never, perhaps, in
the history of letters was the fame of a poet in the poet's own
life-time more universal and more splendid than was the fame of Ronsard.
A high court of literary judicature formally decreed to Ronsard the
title of The French Poet by eminence. This occurred in the youth of the
poet. The wine of success so brilliant turned the young fellow's head.
He soon began to play lord paramount of Parnassus, with every air of one
born to the purple. The kings of the earth vied with each other to do
him honor. Ronsard affected scholarship, and the foremost scholars of
his time were proud to place him with Homer and with Virgil on the roll
of the poets. Ronsard's peculiarity in style was the free use of words
and constructions not properly French. Boileau indicated whence he
enriched his vocabulary and his syntax, by satirically saying that
Ronsard spoke Greek and Latin in French. At his death, Ronsard was
almost literally buried under praises. Sainte-Beuve strikingly says that
he seemed to go forward into posterity as into a temple.
Sharp posthumous reprisals awaited the extravagant fame of Ronsard.
Malherbe, coming in the next generation, legislator of Parnassus,
laughed the literary pretensions of Ronsard to scorn. This stern critic
of form, such is the story, marked up his copy of Ronsard with notes of
censure so many, that a friend of his, seeing the annotated volume,
observed, "What here is not marked will be understood to have been
approved by you." Whereupon Malherbe, taking his pen, with one
indiscriminate stroke drew it abruptly through the whole volume. "There
I Ronsardized," the contemptuous critic would exclaim, when in reading
his own verses to an acquaintance--for Malherbe was a poet himself--he
happened to encounter a word that struck him as harsh or improper.
Malherbe, in short, sought to chasten and check the luxuriant overgrowth
to which the example and method of the Pleiades were tending to push the
language of poetry in French. The resultant effect of the two contrary
tendencies--that of literary wantonness on the one hand, and that of
literary prudery on the other--was at the same time to enrich and to
purify French poetical diction. Balzac (the elder), close to Malherbe in
time, performed a service for French prose similar to that which the
latter performed for French verse. These two critical and literary
powers brought in the reign of what is called classicism in France.
French classicism had its long culmination under Louis XIV.
But it was under Louis XIII., or rather under that monarch's great
minister, Cardinal Richelieu, that the rich and splendid Augustan age of
French literature was truly prepared. Two organized forces, one of them
private and social, the other official and public, worked together,
though sometimes perhaps not in harmony, to produce the magnificent
literary result that illustrated the time of Louis XIV. Of these two
organized forces the Hotel de Rambouillet was one, and the French
Academy was the other. The Hotel de Rambouillet has become the adopted
name of a literary society, presided over by the fine inspiring genius
of the beautiful and accomplished Italian wife of the Marquis de
Rambouillet, a lady who generously conceived the idea of rallying the
feminine wit and virtue of the kingdom to exert a potent influence for
regenerating the manners and morals, and indeed the literature, of
France. At the high court of blended rank and fashion and beauty and
polish and virtue and wit, thus established in the exquisitely builded
and decorated saloons of the Rambouillet mansion, the selectest literary
genius and fame of France were proud and glad to assemble for the
discussion and criticism of literature. Here came Balzac and Voiture;
here Corneille read aloud his masterpieces before they were represented
on the stage; here Descartes philosophized; here the large and splendid
genius of Bossuet first unfolded itself to the world; here Madame de
Sevigne brought her bright, incisive wit, trebly commended by stainless
reputation, unwithering beauty, and charming address, in the woman who
wielded it. The noblest blood of France added the decoration and
inspiration of their presence. It is not easy to overrate the diffusive
beneficent influence that hence went forth to change the fashion of
literature, and to change the fashion of society, for the better. The
Hotel de Rambouillet proper lasted two generations only; but it had a
virtual succession, which, though sometimes interrupted, was scarcely
extinct until the brilliant and beautiful Madame Recamier ceased, about
the middle of the present century, to hold her famous _salons_ in Paris.
The continuous fame and influence of the French Academy, founded by
Richelieu, everybody knows. No other European language has been
elaborately and sedulously formed and cultivated like the French.
But great authors are better improvers of a language than any societies,
however influential. Corneille, Descartes, Pascal, did more for French
style than either the Hotel de Rambouillet or the Academy--more than
both these two great literary societies together. In verse, Racine,
following Corneille, advanced in some important respects upon the
example and lead of that great original master; but in prose, when
Pascal published his "Provincial Letters," French style reached at once
a point of perfection beyond which it never since has gone. Bossuet,
Bourdaloue, Fenelon, Massillon, Moliere, La Fontaine, Boileau, La
Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere--what a constellation of names are these to
glorify the age of Louis XIV.! And Louis XIV. himself, royal embodiment
of a literary good sense carried to the pitch of something very like
real genius in judgment and taste--what a sun was he (with that talent
of his for kingship, probably never surpassed), to balance and to sway,
from his unshaken station, the august intellectual system of which he
alone constituted the despotic center to attract and repel! Seventy-two
years long was this sole individual reign. Louis XIV. still sat on the
throne of France when the seventeenth century became the eighteenth.
The eighteenth century was an age of universal reaction in France.
Religion, or rather ecclesiasticism--for, in the France of those times,
religion was the Church, and the Church was the Roman Catholic
hierarchy--had been the dominant fashion under Louis XIV. Infidelity was
a broad literary mark, written all over the face of the eighteenth
century. It was the hour and power of the Encyclopaedists and the
Philosophers--of Voltaire, of Diderot, of D'Alembert, of Rousseau.
Montesquieu, though contemporary, belongs apart from these writers. More
really original, more truly philosophical, he was far less
revolutionary, far less destructive, than they. Still, his influence
was, on the whole, exerted in the direction, if not of infidelity, at
least of religious indifferentism. The French Revolution was laid in
train by the great popular writers whom we have now named, and by their
fellows. It needed only the spark, which the proper occasion would be
sure soon to strike out, and the awful earthshaking explosion would
follow. After the Revolution, during the First Empire, so called--the
usurpation, that is, of Napoleon Bonaparte--literature was well-nigh
extinguished in France. The names, however, then surpassingly brilliant,
of Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael, belong to this period.
Three centuries have now elapsed since the date of "The Pleiades."
Throughout this long period, French literature has been chiefly under
the sway of that spirit of classicism in style which the reaction
against Ronsardism, led first by Malherbe and afterward by Boileau, had
established as the national standard in literary taste and aspiration.
But Rousseau's genius acted as a powerful solvent of the classic
tradition. Chateaubriand's influence was felt on the same side,
continuing Rousseau's. George Sand, too, and Lamartine, were forces that
strengthened this component. Finally, the great personality of Victor
Hugo proved potent enough definitively to break the spell that had been
so long and so heavily laid on the literary development of France. The
bloodless warfare was fierce between the revolutionary Romanticists and
the conservative Classicists in literary style, but the victory seemed
at last to remain with the advocates of the new romantic revival. It
looked, on the face of the matter, like a signal triumph of originality
over prescription, of genius over criticism, of power over rule. We
still live in the midst of the dying echoes of this resonant strife.
Perhaps it is too early, as yet, to determine on which side, by the
merit of the cause, the advantage truly belongs. But, by the merit of
the respective champions, the result was, for a time at least,
triumphantly decided in favor of the Romanticists, against the
Classicists. The weighty authority, however, of Sainte-Beuve, at first
thrown into the scale that was destined to sink, was thence withdrawn,
and at last, if not resolutely cast upon the opposite side of the
balance, was left wavering in a kind of equipoise between the one and
the other.
But our preliminary sketch already reaches the limit within which our
choice of authors for representation is necessarily confined.
With first a few remarks, naturally suggested, that may be useful, on
the general subject thus rather touched merely than handled, the present
writer gives way to let now the representative authors themselves,
selected for the purpose, supply to the reader a just and lively idea of
French literature.
The first thing, perhaps, to strike the thoughtful mind in a
comprehensive view of the subject is not so much the length--though this
is remarkable--as the long _continuity_ of French literary history. From
its beginning down to the actual moment, French literature has suffered
no serious break in the course of its development. There have been
periods of greater and periods of less prosperity and fruit; but wastes
of marked suspension and barrenness there have been none.
The second thing noticeable is, that French literature has, to a
singular degree, lived an independent life of its own. It has found
copious springs of health and growth within its own bosom.
But then a third thing to be also observed is that, on the other hand,
the touch of foreign influence, felt and acknowledged by this most
proudly and self-sufficiently national of literatures, has proved to it,
at various epochs, a sovereign force of revival and elastic expansion.
Thus, the great renascence in the sixteenth century of ancient Greek and
Latin letters was new life to French literature. So, again, Spanish
literature, brought into contact with French through Corneille and
Moliere, with others, gave to the national mind of France a new literary
launch. But the most recent and perhaps the most remarkable example of
foreign influence quickening French literature to make it freshly
fruitful is supplied in the great romanticizing movement under the lead
of Victor Hugo. English literature--especially Shakespeare--was largely
the pregnant cause of this attempted emancipation of the French literary
mind from the bondage of classicism.
A fourth very salient trait in French literary history consists in the
self-conscious, elaborate, persistent efforts put forth from time to
time by individuals, and by organizations, both public and private, in
France, to improve the language and to elevate the literature of the
nation. We know of nothing altogether comparable to this anywhere else
in the literature of the world.
A fifth striking thing about French literature is, that it has, to a
degree as we believe beyond parallel, exercised a real and vital
influence on the character and the fortune of the nation. The social,
the political, the moral, the religious, history of France is from age
to age a faithful reflex of the changing phases of its literature. Of
course, a reciprocal influence has been constantly reflected back and
forth from the nation upon its literature, as well as from its
literature upon the nation. But where else in the world has it ever been
so extraordinarily, we may say so appallingly, true as in France, that
the nation was such because such was its literature?
French literature, it will at once be seen, is a study possessing,
beyond the literary, a social, a political, and even a religious,
interest.
Readers desiring to push their conversance with the literary history of
France further into the catalogue of its less important names than the
present volume will enable them to do will consult with profit either
the Primer, or the Short History, of French Literature, by Mr. George
Saintsbury. Mr. Saintsbury is a well-informed writer, who diffuses
himself perhaps too widely to do his best possible work. But he has made
French literature a specialty, and he is in general a trustworthy
authority on the subject.
Another writer on the subject is Mr. H. Van Laun. Him, although a
predecessor of his own in the field, Mr. Saintsbury severely ignores, by
claiming that he is himself the first to write in English a history of
French literature based on original and independent reading of the
authors. We are bound to say that Mr. Van Laun's work is of very poor
quality. It offers, indeed, to the reader one advantage not afforded by
either of Mr. Saintsbury's works--the advantage, namely, of illustrative
extracts from the authors treated extracts, however, not unfrequently
marred by wretched translation.
A noteworthy book of the year 1889 is "A History of French Literature"
by Charles Woodward Hutson, Professor of Modern Languages in the
University of Mississippi. This is an intelligent, well-studied,
well-written, carefully conscientious, comprehensive account of French
letters from the beginning down to the present day. It has, as a
concluding chapter, a notice of the "French Writers of Louisiana." An
admirable series of books, translated from the French, on the great
French writers, has recently been brought out in Chicago. These two last
mentions, by the way, strikingly suggest how wide, territorially, the
bounds of the republic of letters are becoming in our country.
The cyclopaedias are, some of them, both in articles on particular
authors and in their sketches of French literary history as a whole,
good sources of general information on the subject. Readers who command
the means of comparing several different cyclopaedias, or several
successive editions of some one cyclopaedia, as, for example, the
"Encyclopaedia Britannica," will find enlightening and stimulating the
not always harmonious views presented on the same topics. Hallam's
"History of Literature in Europe" is an additional authority by no means
to be overlooked. And, finally, it is to be remembered that any good
general history of France will almost certainly contain notices of the
more important literary events co-ordinately with those of political,
social, economic, or scientific moment.
II.
FROISSART.
1337-1410.
French literature, for the purposes of the present volume, may be said
to commence with Froissart. Froissart is a kind of mediaeval Herodotus.
His time is, indeed, almost this side the Middle Ages; but by character
and by sympathy he belongs rather to the mediaeval than to the modern
world. He is delightfully like Herodotus in the style and the spirit of
his narrative. Like Herodotus, he became a traveler in order to become
an historian. Like Herodotus, he was cosmopolite enough not to be
narrowly patriotic. Frenchman though he was, he took as much pleasure in
recounting English victories as he did in recounting French. His
countrymen have even accused him of unpatriotic partiality for the
English. His Chronicles have been, perhaps, more popular in their
English form than in their original French. Two prominent English
translations have been made, of which the later, that by Thomas Johnes,
is now most read. Sir Walter Scott thought the earlier excelled in charm
of style.
Jehan or Jean Froissart was a native of Valenciennes. His father meant
to make a priest of him, but the boy had tastes of his own. Before he
was well out of his teens he began writing history. This was under the
patronage of a great noble. Froissart was all his life a natural
courtier. He throve on the patronage of the great. It was probably not a
fawning spirit in him that made him this kind of man; it was rather an
innate love of splendor and high exploit. He admired chivalry, then in
its last days, and he painted it with the passion of an idealizer. His
father had been an heraldic painter, so it was perhaps an hereditary
strain in the son that naturally attached him to rank and royalty. The
people--that is, the promiscuous mass of mankind--hardly exist to
Froissart. His pages, spacious as they are, have scarcely room for more
than kings and nobles, and knights and squires. He is a picturesque and
romantic historian, in whose chronicles the glories of the world of
chivalry--a world, as we have said, already dying, and so soon to
disappear--are fixed forever on an ample canvas, in moving form and
shifting color, to delight the backward-looking imagination of mankind.
Froissart, besides being chronicler, was something of a poet. It would
still be possible to confront one who should call this in question with
thirty thousand surviving verses from the chronicler's pen. Quantity,
indeed, rather than quality, is the strong point of Froissart as poet.
He had no sooner finished the first part of his Chronicles, a
compilation from the work of an earlier hand, than he posted to England
for the purpose of formally presenting his work to the queen, a princess
of Hainault. She rewarded him handsomely. Woman enough, too, she was,
woman under the queen, duly to despatch him back again to his native
land, where the young fellow's heart, she saw, was lost to a noble lady,
whom, from his inferior station, he could woo only as moth might woo the
moon. He subsequently returned to Great Britain, and rode about on
horseback gathering materials of history. He visited Italy under
excellent auspices, and, together with Chaucer and with Petrarch,
witnessed a magnificent marriage ceremonial in Milan. Froissart
continued to travel far and wide, always a favorite with princes, but
always intent on achieving his projected work. He finally died at
Chimay, where he had spent his closing years in rounding out to their
completeness his "Chronicles of England, France, and the Adjoining
Countries."
Froissart is the most leisurely of historians, or, rather, he is a
writer who presupposes the largest allowance of leisure at the command
of his readers. He does not seek proportion and perspective. He simply
tells us all he has been able to find out respecting each transaction
in its turn as it successively comes up in the progress of his
narrative. If he goes wrong to-day, he will perhaps correct himself
to-morrow, or day after to-morrow--this not by changing the first record
where it stands, to make it right, but by inserting a note of his
mistake at the point, whatever it may be, which he shall chance to have
reached in the work of composition when the new and better light breaks
in on his eyes. The student is thus never quite certain but that what he
is at one moment reading in his author may be an error of which at some
subsequent moment he will be faithfully advised. A little discomposing,
this, but such is Froissart; and it is the philosophical way to take
your author as he is, and make the best of him.
Of such an historian, an historian so diffuse, and so little selective,
it would obviously be difficult to give any suitably brief specimen that
should seem to present a considerable historic action in full. We go to
Froissart's account of the celebrated battle of Poitiers (France). This
was fought in 1356, between Edward the Black Prince on the English side,
and King John on the side of the French. King John, as a result of the
battle, fell into the hands of the enemy.
The king of the French was, of course, a great prize to be secured by
the victorious English. There was eager individual rivalry as to what
particular warrior should be adjudged his true captor. Froissart thus
describes the strife and the issue:
There was much pressing at this time, through eagerness to take the
king; and those who were nearest to him, and knew him, cried out,
"Surrender yourself, surrender yourself, or you are a dead man!" In
that part of the field was a young knight from St. Omer, who was
engaged by a salary in the service of the king of England; his name
was Denys de Morbeque, who for five years had attached himself to the
English, on account of having been banished in his younger days from
France, for a murder committed in an affray at St. Omer. It
fortunately happened for this knight, that he was at the time near to
the king of France, when he was so much pulled about. He, by dint of
force, for he was very strong and robust, pushed through the crowd,
and said to the king, in good French, "Sire, sire, surrender
yourself!" The king, who found himself very disagreeably situated,
turning to him, asked, "To whom shall I surrender myself? to whom?
Where is my cousin, the Prince of Wales? If I could see him, I would
speak to him." "Sire," replied Sir Denys, "he is not here; but
surrender yourself to me, and I will lead you to him." "Who are you?"
said the king. "Sire, I am Denys de Morbeque, a knight from Artois;
but I serve the king of England because I cannot belong to France,
having forfeited all I possessed there." The king then gave him his
right-hand glove, and said, "I surrender myself to you." There was
much crowding and pushing about; for every one was eager to cry out,
"I have taken him!" Neither the king nor his youngest son Philip were
able to get forward, and free themselves from the throng....
The Prince [of Wales] asked them [his marshals] if they knew any thing
of the king of France; they replied, "No, sir, not for a certainty;
but we believe he must be either killed or made prisoner, since he has
never quitted his batallion." The prince then, addressing the Earl of
Warwick and Lord Cobham, said: "I beg of you to mount your horses, and
ride over the field so that on your return you may bring me some
certain intelligence of him." The two barons, immediately mounting
their horses, left the prince, and made for a small hillock, that they
might look about them. From their stand they perceived a crowd of
men-at-arms on foot, who were advancing very slowly. The king of
France was in the midst of them, and in great danger; for the English
and Gascons had taken him from Sir Denys de Morbeque, and were
disputing who should have him, the stoutest bawling out, "It is I that
have got him." "No, no," replied the others, "we have him." The king,
to escape from this peril, said: "Gentlemen, gentlemen, I pray you
conduct me and my son in a courteous manner to my cousin the prince;
and do not make such a riot about my capture, for I am so great a lord
that I can make all sufficiently rich." These words, and others which
fell from the king, appeased them a little; but the disputes were
always beginning again, and they did not move a step without rioting.
When the two barons saw this troop of people, they descended from the
hillock, and, sticking spurs into their horses, made up to them. On
their arrival, they asked what was the matter. They were answered,
that it was the king of France, who had been made prisoner, and that
upward of ten knights and squires challenged him at the same time, as
belonging to each of them. The two barons then pushed through the
crowd by main force, and ordered all to draw aside. They commanded, in
the name of the prince, and under pain of instant death, that every
one should keep his distance, and not approach unless ordered or
desired so to do. They all retreated behind the king; and the two
barons, dismounting, advanced to the king with profound reverences,
and conducted him in a peaceable manner to the Prince of Wales.
We continue our citation from Froissart with the brief chapter in which
the admiring chronicler tells the gallant story of the Black Prince's
behavior as host toward his royal captive, King John of France (it was
the evening after the battle):
When evening was come, the Prince of Wales gave a supper in his
pavilion to the king of France, and to the greater part of the princes
and barons who were prisoners. The prince seated the king of France,
and his son the Lord Philip, at an elevated and well-covered table;
with them were Sir James de Bourbon, the Lord John d'Artois, the Earls
of Tancarville, of Estampes, of Dammartin, of Graville, and the Lord
of Partenay. The other knights and squires were placed at different
tables. The prince himself served the king's table, as well as the
others, with every mark of humility, and would not sit down at it, in
spite of all his entreaties for him so to do, saying that "he was not
worthy of such an honor, nor did it appertain to him to seat himself
at the table of so great a king, or of so valiant a man as he had
shown himself by his actions that day." He added, also, with a noble
air, "Dear sir, do not make a poor meal because the Almighty God has
not gratified your wishes in the event of this day; for be assured
that my lord and father will show you every honor and friendship in
his power, and will arrange your ransom so reasonably, that you will
henceforward always remain friends. In my opinion, you have cause to
be glad that the success of this battle did not turn out as you
desired; for you have this day acquired such high renown for prowess
that you have surpassed all the best knights on your side. I do not,
dear sir, say this to flatter you: for all those of our side who have
seen and observed the actions of each party, have unanimously allowed
this to be your due, and decree you the prize and garland for it." At
the end of this speech, there were murmurs of praise heard from every
one; and the French said the prince had spoken nobly and truly, and
that he would be one of the most gallant princes in Christendom if God
should grant him life to pursue his career of glory.
A splendid and a gracious figure the Black Prince makes in the pages of
Froissart. It was great good fortune for the posthumous fame of chivalry
that the institution should have come by an artist so gifted and so
loyal as this Frenchman, to deliver its features in portrait to
after-times, before the living original vanished forever from the view
of history. How much the fiction of Sir Walter Scott owes to Froissart,
and to Philip de Comines after Froissart, those only can understand who
have read both the old chronicles and the modern romances.
It was one of the congenial labors of Sidney Lanier--pure flame of
genius that late burned itself out so swiftly among us!--to edit a
reduction or abridgment of Froissart's Chronicles dedicated especially
to the use of the young. "The Boy's Froissart," he called it. This book
is enriched with a wise and genial appreciation of Froissart's quality
by his American editor.
Whoever reads Froissart needs to remember that the old chronicler is too
much enamored of chivalry, and is too easily dazzled by splendor of
rank, to be a rigidly just censor of faults committed by knights and
nobles and kings. Froissart, in truth, seems to have been nearly
destitute of the sentiment of humanity. War to him was chiefly a game
and a spectacle.
Our presentation of Froissart must close with a single passage
additional, a picturesque one, in which the chronicler describes the
style of living witnessed by him at the court--we may so not unfitly
apply a royal word--of the Count de Foix. The reader must understand,
while he reads what we here show, that Froissart himself, in close
connection, relates at full, in the language of an informant of his, how
this magnificent Count de Foix had previously killed, with a knife at
his throat, his own and his only son. "I was truly sorry," so, at the
conclusion of the story, Froissart, with characteristic direction of his
sympathy, says, "for the count his father, whom I found a magnificent,
generous, and courteous lord, and also for the country that was
discontented for want of an heir." Here is the promised passage; it
occurs in the ninth chapter of the third volume:
Count Gaston Phoebus de Foix, of whom I am now speaking, was at that
time fifty-nine years old; and I must say, that although I have seen
very many knights, kings, princes, and others, I have never seen any
so handsome, either in the form of his limbs and shape, or in
countenance, which was fair and ruddy, with gray and amorous eyes,
that gave delight whenever he chose to express affection. He was so
perfectly formed, one could not praise him too much. He loved
earnestly the things he ought to love, and hated those which it was
becoming him so to hate. He was a prudent knight, full of enterprise
and wisdom. He had never any men of abandoned character with him,
reigned prudently, and was constant in his devotions. There were
regular nocturnals from the Psalter, prayers from the rituals to the
Virgin, to the Holy Ghost, and from the burial service. He had every
day distributed as alms, at his gate, five florins in small coin, to
all comers. He was liberal and courteous in his gifts, and well knew
how to take when it was proper, and to give back where he had
confidence. He mightily loved dogs above all other animals, and during
the summer and winter amused himself much with hunting....
When he quitted his chamber at midnight for supper, twelve servants
bore each a lighted torch before him, which were placed near his
table, and gave a brilliant light to the apartment. The hall was full
of knights and squires, and there were plenty of tables laid out for
any person who chose to sup. No one spoke to him at his table, unless
he first began a conversation. He commonly ate heartily of poultry,
but only the wings and thighs; for in the day-time, he neither ate nor
drank much. He had great pleasure in hearing minstrels; as he himself
was a proficient in the science, and made his secretaries sing songs,
ballads, and roundelays. He remained at table about two hours, and was
pleased when fanciful dishes were served up to him, which having seen,
he immediately sent them to the tables of his knights and squires.
In short, every thing considered, though I had before been in several
courts of kings, dukes, princes, counts, and noble ladies, I was never
at one that pleased me more, nor was I ever more delighted with feats
of arms, than at this of the Count de Foix. There were knights and
squires to be seen in every chamber, hall, and court, going backward,
and forward, and conversing on arms and amours. Every thing honorable
was there to be found. All intelligence from distant countries was
there to be learnt, for the gallantry of the count had brought
visitors from all parts of the world. It was there I was informed of
the greater part of those events which had happened in Spain,
Portugal, Arragon, Navarre, England, Scotland, and on the borders of
Languedoc; for I saw, during my residence, knights and squires arrive
from every nation. I therefore made inquiries from them, or from the
count himself, who cheerfully conversed with me.
The foregoing is one of the most celebrated passages of description in
Froissart. At the same time that it discloses the form and spirit of
those vanished days, which will never come again to the world, it
discloses likewise the character of the man, who must indeed have loved
it all well, to have been able so well to describe it.
We take now a somewhat long forward step, in going, as we do, at once
from Froissart to Rabelais. Comines, an historian intervening, we must
reluctantly pass, with thus barely mentioning his name.
III.
RABELAIS.
1495-1553.
Rabelais is one of the most famous of writers. But he is, at the same
time, of famous writers perhaps quite incomparably the coarsest.
The real quality of such a writer it is evidently out of the question to
exhibit at all adequately here. But equally out of the question it is to
omit Rabelais altogether from an account of French literature.
Of the life of Francois Rabelais, the man, these few facts will be
sufficient to know. In early youth he joined the monastic order of
Franciscans. That order hated letters; but Rabelais loved them. He, in
fact, conceived a voracious ambition of knowledge. He became immensely
learned. This fact, with what it implies of long labor patiently
achieved, is enough to show that Rabelais was not without seriousness of
character. But he was much more a merry-andrew than a pattern monk. He
made interest enough with influential friends to get himself transferred
from the Franciscans to the Benedictines, an order more favorable to
studious pursuits. But neither among the Benedictines was this
roistering spirit at ease. He left them irregularly, but managed to
escape punishment for his irregularity. At last, after various
vicissitudes of occupation, he settled down as curate of Meudon, where
(the place, however, is doubtful, as also the date) in 1553 he died. He
was past fifty years of age before he finished the work which has made
him famous.
This work is "The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel," a grotesque and
nondescript production, founded, probably, on some prior romance or
traditionary tale of giants. The narrative of Rabelais is a tissue of
adventures shocking every idea of verisimilitude, and serving only as a
vehicle for the strange humor of the writer. The work is replete with
evidences of Rabelais's learning. It would be useless to attempt giving
any abstract or analysis of a book which is simply a wild chaos of
material jumbled together with little regard to logic, order, or method
of whatever sort. We shall better represent its character by giving a
few specimen extracts.
Rabelais begins his romance characteristically. According as you
understand him here, you judge the spirit of the whole work. Either he
now gives you a clew by which, amid the mazes of apparent sheer
frivolity on his part, you may follow till you win your way to some
veiled serious meaning that he had all the time, but never dared frankly
avow; or else he is playfully misleading you on a false scent, which,
however long held to, will bring you out nowhere--in short, is quizzing
you. Let the reader judge for himself. Here is the opening passage--the
"Author's Prologue," it is called in the English translation executed by
Sir Thomas Urquhart and Motteaux; a version, by the way, which, with
whatever faults of too much freedom, is the work of minds and
consciences singularly sympathetic with the genius of the original; the
English student is perhaps hardly at all at disadvantage, in comparison
with the French, for the full appreciation of Rabelais:
Most noble and illustrious drinkers, and you thrice precious pockified
blades (for to you, and none else, do I dedicate my writings),
Alcibiades, in that dialogue of Plato's which is entitled "The
Banquet," whilst he was setting forth the praises of his schoolmaster
Socrates (without all question the prince of philosophers), amongst
other discourses to that purpose said that he resembled the Sileni.
Sileni of old were little boxes, like those we now may see in the
shops of apothecaries, painted on the outside with wanton toyish
figures, as harpies, satyrs, bridled geese, horned hares, saddled
ducks, flying goats, thiller harts, and other such counterfeited
pictures, at pleasure, to excite people unto laughter, as Silenus
himself, who was the foster-father of good Bacchus, was wont to do;
but within those capricious caskets called Sileni, were carefully
preserved and kept many rich and fine drugs, such as balm,
ambergreese, amomon, musk, civet, with several kinds of precious
stones, and other things of great price. Just such another thing was
Socrates; for to have eyed his outside, and esteemed of him by his
exterior appearance, you would not have given the peel of an onion for
him, so deformed he was in body, and ridiculous in his gesture....
Opening this box you would have found within it a heavenly and
inestimable drug, a more than human understanding, an admirable
virtue, matchless learning, invincible courage, inimitable sobriety,
certain contentment of mind, perfect assurance, and an incredible
disregard of all that for which men commonly do so much watch, run,
sail, fight, travel, toil and turmoil themselves.
Whereunto (in your opinion) doth this little flourish of a preamble
tend? For so much as you, my good disciples, and some other jolly
fools of ease and leisure, ... are too ready to judge, that there is
nothing in them [Rabelais's writings] but jests, mockeries, lascivious
discourse, and recreative lies; ... therefore is it, that you must
open the book, and seriously consider of the matter treated in it.
Then shall you find that it containeth things of far higher value than
the box did promise; that is to say, that the subject thereof is not
so foolish, as by the title at the first sight it would appear to be.
... Did you ever see a dog with a marrow-bone in his mouth? ... Like
him, you must, by a sedulous lecture [reading], and frequent
meditation, break the bone, and suck out the marrow; that is, my
allegorical sense, or the things I to myself propose to be signified
by these Pythagorical symbols; ... the most glorious doctrines and
dreadful mysteries, as well in what concerneth our religion, as
matters of the public state and life economical.
Up to this point the candid reader has probably been conscious of a
growing persuasion that this author must be at bottom a serious if also
a humorous man--a man, therefore, excusably intent not to be
misunderstood as a mere buffoon. But now let the candid reader proceed
with the following, and confess, upon his honor, if he is not
scandalized and perplexed. What shall be said of a writer who thus plays
with his reader?
Do you believe, upon your conscience, that Homer, whilst he was
couching his Iliad and Odyssey, had any thought upon those allegories
which Plutarch, Heraclides Ponticus, Eustathius, Phornutus, squeezed
out of him, and which Politian filched again from them? If you trust
it, with neither hand nor foot do you come near to my opinion, which
judgeth them to have been as little dreamed of by Homer, as the
gospel sacraments were by Ovid, in his Metamorphoses; though a certain
gulligut friar, and true bacon-picker, would have undertaken to prove
it if, perhaps, he had met with as very fools as himself, and, as the
proverb says, "a lid worthy of such a kettle."
If you give any credit thereto, why do not you the same to these
jovial new Chronicles of mine? Albeit, when I did dictate them, I
thought thereof no more than you, who possibly were drinking the
whilst, as I was. For, in the composing of this lordly book, I never
lost nor bestowed any more, nor any other time, than what was
appointed to serve me for taking of my bodily refection; that is,
whilst I was eating and drinking. And, indeed, that is the fittest and
most proper hour, wherein to write these high matters and deep
sentences; as Homer knew very well, the paragon of all philologues,
and Ennius, the father of the Latin poets, as Horace calls him,
although a certain sneaking jobbernol alleged that his verses smelled
more of the wine than oil.
Does this writer quiz his reader, or, in good faith, give him a needed
hint? Who shall decide?
We have let our first extract thus run on to some length, both for the
reason that the passage is as representative as any we could properly
offer of the quality of Rabelais, and also for the reason that the key
of interpretation is here placed in the hand of the reader, for
unlocking the enigma of this remarkable book. The extraordinary
horse-play of pleasantry, which makes Rabelais unreadable for the
general public of to-day, begins so promptly, affecting the very
prologue, that we could not present even that piece of writing entire in
our extract. We are informed that the circulation in England of the
works of Rabelais, in translation, has been interfered with by the
English government, on the ground of their indecency. We are bound to
admit that, if any writings whatever were to be suppressed on that
ground, the writings of Rabelais are certainly entitled to be of the
number. It is safe to say that never, no, not even in the boundless
license of the comedy of Aristophanes, was more flagrant indecency, and
indecency proportionately more redundant in volume, perpetrated in
literature, than was done by Rabelais. Indecency, however, it is, rather
than strict lasciviousness. Rabelais sinned against manners more than he
sinned against morals. But his obscenity is an ocean, without bottom or
shore. Literally, he sticks at nothing that is coarse. Nay, this is
absurdly short of expressing the fact. The genius of Rabelais teems with
invention of coarseness, beyond what any one could conceive as possible,
who had not taken his measure of possibility from Rabelais himself. And
his diction was as opulent as his invention.
Such is the character of Rabelais the author. What, then, was it, if not
fondness for paradox, that could prompt Coleridge to say, "I could write
a treatise in praise of the moral elevation of Rabelais's works, which
would make the church stare and the conventicle groan, and yet would be
truth, and nothing but the truth?" If any thing besides fondness for
paradox inspired Coleridge in saying this, it must, one would guess,
have been belief on his part in an allegorical sense hidden deep
underneath the monstrous mass of the Rabelaisian buffoonery. A more
judicious sentence is that of Hallam, the historian of the literature of
Europe: "He [Rabelais] is never serious in a single page, and seems to
have had little other aim, in his first two volumes, than to pour out
the exuberance of his animal gayety."
The supply of animal gayety in this man was something portentous. One
cannot, however, but feel that he forces it sometimes, as sometimes did
Dickens those exhaustless animal spirits of his. A very common trick of
the Rabelaisian humor is to multiply specifications, or alternative
expressions, one after another, almost without end. From the second book
of his romance--an afterthought, probably, of continuation to his
unexpectedly successful first book--we take the last paragraph of the
prologue, which shows this. The veracious historian makes obtestation of
the strict truth of his narrative, and imprecates all sorts of evil upon
such as do not believe it absolutely. We cleanse our extract a little:
And, therefore, to make an end of this Prologue, even as I give myself
to an hundred thousand panniers-full of fair devils, body and soul,
... in case that I lie so much as one single word in this whole
history; after the like manner, St. Anthony's fire burn you, Mahoom's
disease whirl you, the squinance with a stitch in your side, and the
wolf in your stomach truss you, the bloody flux seize upon you, the
cursed sharp inflammations of wild fire, as slender and thin as cow's
hair strengthened with quicksilver, enter into you, ... and, like
those of Sodom and Gomorrha, may you fall into sulphur, fire, and
bottomless pits, in case you do not firmly believe all that I shall
relate unto you in this present Chronicle.
So much for Rabelais's prologues. Our readers must now see something of
what, under pains and penalties denounced so dire, they are bound to
believe. We condense and defecate for this purpose the thirty-eighth
chapter of the first book, which is staggeringly entitled, "How
Gargantua did eat up Six Pilgrims in a Sallad:"
The story requireth that we relate that which happened unto six
pilgrims, who came from Sebastian near to Nantes; and who, for shelter
that night, being afraid of the enemy, had hid themselves in the
garden upon the chickling peas, among the cabbages and lettuces.
Gargantua, finding himself somewhat dry, asked whether they could get
any lettuce to make him a sallad; and, hearing that there were the
greatest and fairest in the country--for they were as great as plum
trees, or as walnut trees--he would go thither himself, and brought
thence in his hand what he thought good, and withal carried away the
six pilgrims, who were in so great fear that they did not dare to
speak nor cough. Washing them, therefore, first at the fountain, the
pilgrims said one to another, softly, "What shall we do? We are almost
drowned here amongst these lettuce: shall we speak? But if we speak,
he will kill us for spies." And, as they were thus deliberating what
to do, Gargantua put them, with the lettuce, into a platter of the
house, as large as the huge tun of the White Friars of the Cistercian
order; which done, with oil, vinegar, and salt, he ate them up to
refresh himself a little before supper, and had already swallowed up
five of the pilgrims, the sixth being in the platter, totally hid
under a lettuce, except his bourdon, or staff, that appeared, and
nothing else. Which Grangousier [Gargantua's father] seeing, said to
Gargantua, "I think that is the horn of a shell snail: do not eat it."
"Why not?" said Gargantua; "they are good all this month:" which he no
sooner said, but, drawing up the staff, and therewith taking up the
pilgrim, he ate him very well, then drank a terrible draught of
excellent white wine. The pilgrims, thus devoured, made shift to save
themselves, as well as they could, by drawing their bodies out of the
reach of the grinders of his teeth, but could not escape from thinking
they had been put in the lowest dungeon of a prison. And, when
Gargantua whiffed the great draught, they thought to have drowned in
his mouth, and the flood of wine had almost carried them away into
the gulf of his stomach. Nevertheless, skipping with their bourdons,
as St. Michael's palmers used to do, they sheltered themselves from
the danger of that inundation under the banks of his teeth. But one of
them, by chance, groping, or sounding the country with his staff, to
try whether they were in safety or no, struck hard against the cleft
of a hollow tooth, and hit the mandibulary sinew or nerve of the jaw,
which put Gargantua to very great pain, so that he began to cry for
the rage that he felt. To ease himself, therefore, of his smarting
ache, he called for his tooth-picker, and, rubbing towards a young
walnut-tree, where they lay skulking, unnestled you, my gentleman
pilgrims. For he caught one by the legs, another by the scrip, another
by the pocket, another by the scarf, another by the band of the
breeches; and the poor fellow that had hurt him with the bourdon, him
he hooked to by [another part of his clothes].... The pilgrims, thus
dislodged, ran away.
Rabelais closes his story with jocose irreverent application of
Scripture--a manner of his which gives some color to the tradition of a
biblical pun made by him on his death-bed.
The closest English analogue to Rabelais is undoubtedly Dean Swift. We
probably never should have had "Gulliver's Travels" from Swift if we had
not first had Gargantua and Pantagruel from Rabelais. Swift, however,
contrasts Rabelais as well as resembles him. Whereas Rabelais is simply
monstrous in invention, Swift in invention submits himself loyally to
law. Give Swift his world of Lilliput and Brobdingnag respectively, and
all, after that, is quite natural and probable. The reduction or the
exaggeration is made upon a mathematically calculated scale. For such
verisimilitude Rabelais cares not a straw. His various inventions are
recklessly independent one of another. A characteristic of Swift thus is
scrupulous conformity to whimsical law. Rabelais is remarkable for
whimsical disregard of even his own whimseys. Voltaire put the matter
with his usual felicity--Swift is Rabelais in his senses.
One of the most celebrated--justly celebrated--of Rabelais's
imaginations is that of the Abbey of Theleme [Thelema]. This constitutes
a kind of Rabelaisian Utopia. It was proper of the released monk to give
his Utopian dream the form of an abbey, but of an abbey in which the
opposite should obtain of all that he had so heartily hated in his own
monastic experience. A humorously impossible place and state was the
Abbey of Theleme--a kind of sportive Brook Farm set far away in a world
unrealized. How those Thelemites enjoyed life, to be sure! It was like
endless plum pudding--for every body to eat, and nobody to prepare:
All their life was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but
according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of their
beds when they thought good; they did eat, drink, labor, sleep, when
they had a mind to it, and were disposed for it. None did awake them,
none did offer to constrain them to eat, drink, nor to do any other
thing; for so had Gargantua established it. In all their rule, and
strictest tie of their order, there was but this one clause to be
observed,
DO WHAT THOU WILT.
... By this liberty they entered into a very laudable emulation, to do
all of them what they saw did please one. If any of the gallants or
ladies should say, Let us drink, they would all drink. If any one of
them said, Let us play, they all played. If one said, Let us go
a-walking into the fields, they went all.... There was neither he nor
she amongst them but could read, write, sing, play upon several
musical instruments, speak five or six several languages, and compose
in them all very quaintly, both in verse and prose. Never were seen so
valiant knights, so noble and worthy, so dextrous and skilful both on
foot and a horseback, more brisk and lively, more nimble and quick, or
better handling all manner of weapons than were there. Never were seen
ladies so proper and handsome, so miniard and dainty, less forward, or
more ready with their hand and with their needle, in every honest and
free action belonging to that sex, than were there. For this reason,
when the time came, that any man of the said abbey, either at the
request of his parents, or for some other cause, had a mind to go out
of it, he carried along with him one of the ladies, namely her who had
before that accepted him as her lover, and they were married together.
The foregoing is one of the most purely sweet imaginative passages in
Rabelais's works. The representation, as a whole, sheathes, of course, a
keen satire on the religious houses. Real religion Rabelais nowhere
attacks.
The same colossal Gargantua who had that eating adventure with the six
pilgrims is made, in Rabelais's second book, to write his youthful son
Pantagruel--also a giant, but destined to be, when mature, a model of
all princely virtues--a letter on education, in which the most pious
paternal exhortation occurs. The whole letter reads like some learned
Puritan divine's composition. Here are a few specimen sentences:--
Fail not most carefully to peruse the books of the Greek, Arabian, and
Latin physicians, not despising the Talmudists and Cabalists; and by
frequent anatomies get thee the perfect knowledge of that other world,
called the microcosm, which is man. And at some of the hours of the
day apply thy mind to the study of the Holy Scriptures: first, in
Greek, the New Testament, with the Epistles of the Apostles; and then
the Old Testament in Hebrew. In brief, let me see thee an abyss and
bottomless pit of knowledge....
... It behooveth thee to serve, to love, to fear God, and on him to
cast all thy thoughts and all thy hope, and, by faith formed in
charity, to cleave unto him, so that thou mayest never be separated
from him by thy sins. Suspect the abuses of the world. Set not thy
heart upon vanity, for this life is transitory; but the Word of the
Lord endureth forever.
"Friar John" is a mighty man of valor, who figures equivocally in the
story of Gargantua and Pantagruel. The Abbey of Theleme is given him in
reward of his services. Some have identified this fighting monk with
Martin Luther. The representation is, on the whole, so conducted as to
leave the reader's sympathies at least half enlisted in favor of the
fellow, rough and roistering as he is.
Panurge is the hero of the romance of Pantagruel,--almost more than
Pantagruel himself. It would be unpardonable to dismiss Rabelais without
first making our readers know Panurge by, at least, a few traits of his
character and conduct. Panurge was a shifty but unscrupulous adventurer,
whom Pantagruel, pious prince as he was, coming upon him by chance, took
and kept under his patronage. Panurge was an arch-imp of
mischief---mischief indulged in the form of obscene and malicious
practical jokes. Rabelais describes his accomplishments in a long strain
of discourse, from which we purge our selection to follow--thereby
transforming Panurge into a comparatively proper and virtuous person:
He had threescore and three tricks to come by it [money] at his need
of which the most honorable and most ordinary was in manner of
thieving, secret purloining, and filching, for he was a wicked, lewd
rogue, a cozener, drinker, roisterer, rover, and a very dissolute and
debauched fellow, if there were any in Paris; otherwise, and in all
matters else, the best and most virtuous man in the world; and he was
still contriving some plot, and devising mischief against the
sergeants and the watch.
At one time he assembled three or four especial good hacksters and
roaring boys; made them in the evening drink like Templars, afterward
led them till they came under St. Genevieve, or about the college of
Navarre, and, at the hour that the watch was coming up that way--which
he knew by putting his sword upon the pavement, and his ear by it,
and, when he heard his sword shake, it was an infallible sign that the
watch was near at that instant--then he and his companions took a
tumbrel or garbage-cart, and gave it the brangle, hurling it with all
their force down the hill, and then ran away upon the other side; for
in less than two days he knew all the streets, lanes, and turnings in
Paris as well as his _Deus det_.
At another time he laid, in some fair place where the said watch was
to pass, a train of gunpowder, and, at the very instant that they went
along, set fire to it, and then made himself sport to see what good
grace they had in running away, thinking that St. Anthony's fire had
caught them by the legs.... In one of his pockets he had a great many
little horns full of fleas and lice, which he borrowed from the
beggars of St. Innocent, and cast them, with small canes or quills to
write with, into the necks of the daintiest gentlewomen that he could
find, yea, even in the church; for he never seated himself above in
the choir, but always in the body of the church amongst the women,
both at mass, at vespers, and at sermon.
Coleridge, in his metaphysical way, keen at the moment on the scent of
illustrations for the philosophy of Kant, said, "Pantagruel is the
Reason; Panurge the Understanding." Rabelais himself, in the fourth book
of his romance, written in the last years of his life, defines the
spirit of the work. This fourth book, the English translator says, is
"justly thought his masterpiece." The same authority adds with
enthusiasm, "Being wrote with more spirit, salt, and flame than the
first part." Here, then, is Rabelais's own expression, sincere or
jocular, as you choose to take it, for what constitutes the essence of
his writing. We quote from the "Prologue:"
By the means of a little Pantagruelism (which, you know, is _a certain
jollity of mind, pickled in the scorn of fortune_), you see me now
["at near seventy years of age," his translator says], hale and
cheery, as sound as a bell, and ready to drink, if you will.
It is impossible to exaggerate the mad, rollicking humor, sticking at
nothing, either in thought or in expression, with which especially this
last book of Rabelais's work is written. But we have no more space for
quotation.
Coleridge's theory of interpretation for Rabelais's writings is hinted
in his "Table Talk," as follows: "After any particularly deep thrust ...
Rabelais, as if to break the blow and to appear unconscious of what he
has done, writes a chapter or two of pure buffoonery."
The truth seems to us to be, that Rabelais's supreme taste, like his
supreme power, lay in the line of humorous satire. He hated monkery, and
he satirized the system as openly as he dared--this, however, not so
much in the love of truth and freedom as in pure fondness for exercising
his wit. That he was more than willing to make his ribald drollery the
fool's mask from behind which he might aim safely his shafts of ridicule
at what he despised and hated is, indeed, probable. But in this is
supplied to him no sufficient excuse for his obscene and blasphemous
pleasantry. Nor yet are the manners of the age an excuse sufficient.
Erasmus belonged to the same age, and he disliked the monks not less.
But what a contrast, in point of decency, between Rabelais and Erasmus.
IV.
MONTAIGNE.
1533-1592.
Montaigne is signally the author of one book. His "Essays" are the whole
of him. He wrote letters, to be sure, and he wrote journals of travel
undertaken in quest of health and pleasure. But these are chiefly void
of interest. Montaigne the Essayist alone is emphatically the Montaigne
that survives. "Montaigne the Essayist"--that has become, as it were, a
personal name in literary history.
The "Essays" are one hundred and seven in number, distributed in three
books. They are very unequal in length: and they are on the most various
topics--topics often the most whimsical in character. We give a few of
his titles, taking them as found in Cotton's translation:
That men by various ways arrive at the same end; Whether the governor
of a place ought himself to go out to parley; Of liars; Of quick or
slow speech; A proceeding of some ambassadors; Various events from the
same counsel; Of cannibals; That we laugh and cry from the same thing;
Of smell; That the mind hinders itself; Of thumbs; Of virtue; Of
coaches; Of managing the will; Of cripples; Of experience.
Montaigne's titles cannot be trusted to indicate the nature of the
essays to which they belong. The author's pen will not be bound. It runs
on at its own pleasure. Things the most unexpected are incessantly
turning up in Montaigne--things, probably, that were as unexpected to
the writer when he was writing as they will be to the reader when he is
reading. The writing, on whatever topic, in whatever vein, always
revolves around the writer for its pivot. Montaigne, from no matter what
apparent diversion, may constantly be depended upon to bring up in due
time at himself. The tether is long and elastic, but it is tenacious,
and it is securely tied to Montaigne. This, as we shall presently let
the author himself make plain, is no accident of which Montaigne was
unconscious. It is the express idea on which the "Essays" were written.
Montaigne, in his "Essays," is a pure and perfect egotist, naked and not
ashamed. Egotism is Montaigne's note, his _differentia_, in the world of
literature. Other literary men have been egotists--since. But Montaigne
may be called the first, and he is the greatest; by no means the most
monstrous, but the greatest.
Montaigne was a Gascon, and Gasconisms adulterate the purity of his
French. But his style--a little archaic now, and never finished to the
nail--had virtues of its own which have exercised a wholesome influence
on classic French prose. It is simple, direct, manly, genuine. It is
fresh and racy of the writer. It is flexible to every turn, it is
sensitive to every rise or fall, of the thought. It is a steadfast
rebuke to rant and fustian. It quietly laughs to scorn the folly of that
style which writhes in an agony of expression, with neither thought nor
feeling present to be expressed. Montaigne's "Essays" have been a great
and a beneficent formative force in the development of prose style in
French.
For substance, Montaigne is rich in practical wisdom, his own by
original reflection or by discreet purveyal. He had read much, he had
observed much, he had experienced much. The result of all, digested in
brooding thought, he put into his "Essays." These grew as he grew. He
got himself transferred whole into them. Out of them, in turn, the world
has been busy ever since dissolving Montaigne.
Montaigne's "Essays" are, as we have said, himself. Such is his own way
of putting the fact. To one admiring his essays to him, he frankly
replied, "You will like me if you like my essays, for they are myself."
The originality, the creative character and force of the "Essays" lies
in this autobiographical quality in them. Their fascination, too,
consists in the revelation they contain. This was, first,
self-revelation on the part of the writer; but no less it becomes, in
each case, self-revelation in the experience of the reader. For, as face
answereth to face in the glass, so doth the heart of man to man--from
race to race and from generation to generation. If Montaigne, in his
"Essays," held the mirror up to himself, he, in the same act, held up
the mirror to you and to me. The image that we, reading, call Montaigne,
is really ourselves. We never tire of gazing on it. We are all of us
Narcissuses. This is why Montaigne is an immortal and a universal
writer.
Here is Montaigne's preface to his "Essays"--"The Author to the Reader,"
it is entitled:
Reader, thou hast here an honest book; it doth at the outset forewarn
thee that, in contriving the same, I have proposed to myself no other
than a domestic and private end: I have had no consideration at all
either to thy service or to my glory. My powers are not capable of any
such design. I have dedicated it to the particular commodity of my
kinsfolk and friends, so that, having lost me (which they must do
shortly), they may therein recover some traits of my conditions and
humours, and by that means preserve more whole, and more life-like,
the knowledge they had of me. Had my intention been to seek the
world's favor, I should surely have adorned myself with borrowed
beauties. I desire therein to be viewed as I appear in mine own
genuine, simple, and ordinary manner, without study and artifice; for
it is myself I paint. My defects are therein to be read to the life,
and my imperfections and my natural form, so far as public reverence
hath permitted me. If I had lived among those nations which (they say)
yet dwell under the sweet liberty of nature's primitive laws, I assure
thee I would most willingly have painted myself quite fully, and quite
naked. Thus, reader, myself am the matter of my book. There's no
reason thou shouldst employ thy leisure about so frivolous and vain a
subject. Therefore, farewell.
From Montaigne, the 12th of June, 1580.
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, our author, as the foregoing date will have
suggested, derived his most familiar name from the place at which he was
born and at which he lived. Readers are not to take too literally
Montaigne's notice of his dispensing with "borrowed beauties." He was,
in fact, a famous borrower. He himself warns his readers to be careful
how they criticise him; they may be flouting unawares Seneca, Plutarch,
or some other, equally redoubtable, of the reverend ancients. Montaigne
is perhaps as signal an example as any in literature of the man of
genius exercising his prescriptive right to help himself to his own
wherever he may happen to find it. But Montaigne has in turn been freely
borrowed from. Bacon borrowed from him, Shakespeare borrowed from him,
Dryden, Pope, Hume, Burke, Byron--these, with many more, in England;
and, in France, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Voltaire, Rousseau--directly
or indirectly, almost every writer since his day. No modern writer,
perhaps, has gone in solution into subsequent literature more widely
than Montaigne. But no writer remains more solidly and insolubly entire.
We go at once to chapter twenty-five of the first book of the "Essays,"
entitled, in the English translation, "On the Education of Children."
The translation we use henceforth throughout is the classic one of
Charles Cotton, in a text of it edited by Mr. William Carew Hazlitt. The
"preface," already given, Cotton omitted to translate. We have allowed
Mr. Hazlitt to supply the deficiency. Montaigne addresses his
educational views to a countess. Several others of his essays are
similarly inscribed to women. Mr. Emerson's excuse of Montaigne for his
coarseness--that he wrote for a generation in which women were not
expected to be readers--is thus seen to be curiously impertinent to the
actual case that existed. Of a far worse fault in Montaigne than his
coarseness--we mean his outright immorality--Mr. Emerson makes no
mention, and for it, therefore, provides no excuse. We shall ourselves,
in due time, deal more openly with our readers on this point.
It was for a "boy of quality" that Montaigne aimed to adapt his
suggestions on the subject of education. In this happy country of ours
all boys are boys of quality; and we shall go nowhere amiss in selecting
from the present essay:
For a boy of quality, then, I say, I would also have his friends
solicitous to find him out a tutor who has rather a well-made than a
well-filled head, seeking, indeed, both the one and the other, but
rather of the two to prefer manners and judgment to mere learning, and
that this man should exercise his charge after a new method.
'Tis the custom of pedagogues to be eternally thundering in their
pupil's ears, as they were pouring into a funnel, whilst the business
of the pupil is only to repeat what the others have said: now, I
would have a tutor to correct this error, and that, at the very first,
he should, according to the capacity he has to deal with, put it to
the test, permitting his pupil himself to taste things, and of himself
to discern and choose them, sometimes opening the way to him, and
sometimes leaving him to open it for himself; that is, I would not
have him alone to invent and speak, but that he should also hear his
pupil speak in turn.... Let him make him put what he has learned into
a hundred several forms, and accommodate it to so many several
subjects, to see if he yet rightly comprehends it, and has made it his
own.... 'Tis a sign of crudity and indigestion to disgorge what we eat
in the same condition it was swallowed: the stomach has not performed
its office, unless it have altered the form and condition of what was
committed to it to concoct....
Let him make him examine and thoroughly sift every thing he reads and
lodge nothing in his fancy upon simple authority and upon trust,
Aristotle's principles will then be no more principles to him than
those of Epicurus and the stoics: let this diversity of opinions be
propounded to, and laid before, him; he will himself choose, if he be
able; if not, he will remain in doubt.
"Che, non men che saper, dubbiar m'aggrata."
DANTE, _Inferno_, xl, 93.
["That doubting pleases me, not less than knowing."
LONGFELLOW'S _Translation_.]
For, if he embrace the opinions of Xenophon and Plato, by his own
reason they will no more be theirs, but become his own. Who follows
another follows nothing, finds nothing, nay, is inquisitive after
nothing. "Non sumus sub rege; sibi quisque se vindicet." ["We are
under no king; let each look to himself."--SENECA, _Ep._ 33.] Let him,
at least, know that he knows. It will be necessary that he imbibe
their knowledge, not that he be corrupted with their precepts; and no
matter if he forget where he had his learning, provided he know how to
apply it to his own use. Truth and reason are common to every one, and
are no more his who spake them first, than his who speaks them after;
'tis no more according to Plato, than according to me, since both he
and I equally see and understand them. Bees cull their several sweets
from this flower and that blossom, here and there where they find
them; but themselves afterward make the honey, which is all and purely
their own, and no more thyme and marjoram: so the several fragments he
borrows from others he will transform and shuffle together, to compile
a work that shall be absolutely his own; that is to say, his judgment:
his instruction, labor, and study tend to nothing else but to form
that.... Conversation with men is of very great use, and travel into
foreign countries, ... to be able chiefly to give an account of the
humors, manners, customs, and laws of those nations where he has been,
and that we may whet and sharpen our wits by rubbing them against
those of others....
In this conversing with men, I mean also, and principally, those who
live only in the records of history: he shall, by reading those books,
converse with the great and heroic souls of the best ages.
It is difficult to find a stopping-place in discourse so wise and so
sweet. We come upon sentences like Plato for height and for beauty. An
example: "The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness;
her state is like that of things in the regions above the moon, always
clear and serene." But the genius of Montaigne does not often soar,
though even one little flight like that shows that it has wings.
Montaigne's garnishes of quotation from foreign tongues are often a
cold-blooded device of afterthought with him. His first edition was
without them in many places where subsequently they appear. Readers
familiar with Emerson will be reminded of him in perusing Montaigne.
Emerson himself said, "It seemed to me [in reading the 'Essays' of
Montaigne], as if I myself had written the book in some former life, so
sincerely it spoke to my thoughts and experience." The rich old English
of Cotton's translation had evidently a strong influence on Emerson, to
mold his own style of expression. Emerson's trick of writing "'tis," was
apparently caught from Cotton. The following sentence, from the present
essay of Montaigne, might very well have served Mr. Emerson for his own
rule of writing: "Let it go before, or come after, a good sentence, or a
thing well said, is always in season; if it neither suit well with what
went before, nor has much coherence with what follows after, it is good
in itself." Montaigne, at any rate, wrote his "Essays" on that easy
principle. The logic of them is the logic of mere chance association in
thought. But, with Montaigne--whatever is true of Emerson--the
association at least is not occult; and it is such as pleases the reader
not less than it pleased the writer. So this Gascon gentleman of the
olden time never tires us, and never loses us out of his hand. We go
with him cheerfully where he so blithely leads.
Montaigne tells us how he was himself trained under his father. The
elder Montaigne, too, had his ideas on education--the subject which his
son, in this essay, so instructively treats. The essayist leads up to
his autobiographical episode by an allusion to the value of the
classical languages, and to the question of method in studying them. He
says:
In my infancy, and before I began to speak, he [my father] committed
me to the care of a German,... totally ignorant of our language, but
very fluent, and a great critic, in Latin. This man, whom he had
fetched out of his own country, and whom he entertained with a very
great salary, for this only end, had me continually with him: to him
there were also joined two others, of inferior learning, to attend me,
and to relieve him, who all of them spoke to me in no other language
but Latin. As to the rest of his family, it was an inviolable rule,
that neither himself nor my mother, man nor maid, should speak any
thing in my company but such Latin words as every one had learned only
to gabble with me. It is not to be imagined how great an advantage
this proved to the whole family: my father and my mother by this means
learned Latin enough to understand it perfectly well, and to speak it
to such a degree as was sufficient for any necessary use, as also
those of the servants did who were most frequently with me. In short,
we Latined it at such a rate that it overflowed to all the neighboring
villages, where there yet remain, that have established themselves by
custom, several Latin appellations of artisans and their tools. As for
what concerns myself, I was above six years of age before I understood
either French or Perigordin ["Perigordin" is Montaigne's name for the
dialect of his province, Perigord (Gascony)], any more than Arabic;
and, without art, book, grammar, or precept, whipping, or the expense
of a tear, I had, by that time, learned to speak as pure Latin as my
master himself, for I had no means of mixing it up with any other.
We are now to see how, helped by his wealth, the father was able to
gratify a pleasant whimsey of his own in the nurture of his boy. Highly
aesthetic was the matin _reveille_ that broke the slumbers of this
hopeful young heir of Montaigne:
Some being of opinion that it troubles and disturbs the brains of
children suddenly to wake them in the morning, and to snatch them
violently and over-hastily from sleep, wherein they are much more
profoundly involved than we, he [the father] caused me to be wakened
by the sound of some musical instrument, and was never unprovided of a
musician for that purpose.... The good man, being extremely timorous
of any way failing in a thing he had so wholly set his heart upon,
suffered himself at last to be overruled by the common opinions:...
he sent me, at six years of age, to the College of Guienne, at that
time the best and most flourishing in France.
In short, as in the case of Mr. Tulliver, the world was "too many" for
Eyquem _pere_; and, in the education of his son, the stout Gascon,
having started out well as dissenter, fell into dull conformity at last.
We ought to give some idea of the odd instances, classic and other, with
which Montaigne plentifully bestrews his pages. He is writing of the
"Force of Imagination." He says:
A woman, fancying she had swallowed a pin in a piece of bread, cried
and lamented as though she had an intolerable pain in her throat,
where she thought she felt it stick; but an ingenious fellow that was
brought to her, seeing no outward tumor nor alteration, supposing it
to be only a conceit taken at some crust of bread that had hurt her as
it went down, caused her to vomit, and, unseen, threw a crooked pin
into the basin, which the woman no sooner saw, but, believing she had
cast it up, she presently found herself eased of her pain....
Such as are addicted to the pleasures of the field have, I make no
question, heard the story of the falconer, who, having earnestly fixed
his eyes upon a kite in the air, laid a wager that he would bring her
down with the sole power of his sight, and did so, as it was said; for
_the tales I borrow, I charge upon the consciences of those from whom
I have them_.
We italicize the last foregoing words, to make readers see that
Montaigne is not to be read for the truth of his instances. He uses what
comes to hand. He takes no trouble to verify. "The discourses are my
own," he says; but even this, as we have hinted, must not be pressed too
hard in interpretation. Whether a given reflection of Montaigne's is
strictly his own, in the sense of not having been first another's, who
gave it to him, is not to be determined except upon very wide reading,
very well remembered, in all the books that Montaigne could have got
under his eye. That was full fairly his own, he thought, which he had
made his own by intelligent appropriation. And this, perhaps, expresses
in general the sound law of property in the realm of mind. At any rate,
Montaigne will wear no yoke of fast obligation. He will write as pleases
him. Above all things else, he likes his freedom.
Here is one of those sagacious historical scepticisms, in which
Montaigne was so fond of poising his mind between opposite views. It
occurs in his essay entitled, "Of the Uncertainty of our Judgments:"
Amongst other oversights Pompey is charged withal at the battle of
Pharsalia, he is condemned for making his army stand still to receive
the enemy's charge, "by reason that" (I shall here steal Plutarch's
own words, which are better than mine) "he by so doing deprived
himself of the violent impression the motion of running adds to the
first shock of arms, and hindered that clashing of the combatants
against one another, which is wont to give them greater impetuosity
and fury, especially when they come to rush in with their utmost
vigor, their courages increasing by the shouts and the career; 'tis to
render the soldiers' ardor, as a man may say, more reserved and cold."
This is what he says. But, if Caesar had come by the worse, why might
it not as well have been urged by another, that, on the contrary, the
strongest and most steady posture of fighting is that wherein a man
stands planted firm, without motion; and that they who are steady upon
the march, closing up, and reserving their force within themselves for
the push of the business, have a great advantage against those who are
disordered, and who have already spent half their breath in running on
precipitately to the charge? Besides that, an army is a body made up
of so many individual members, it is impossible for it to move in this
fury with so exact a motion as not to break the order of battle, and
that the best of them are not engaged before their fellows can come on
to help them.
The sententiousness of Montaigne may be illustrated by transferring here
a page of brief excerpts from the "Essays," collected by Mr. Bayle St.
John in his biography of the author. The apothegmatic or proverbial
quality in Montaigne had a very important sequel of fruitful influence
on subsequent French writers, as chapters to follow in this volume will
abundantly show. In reading the sentences sub-joined, you will have the
sensation of coming suddenly upon a treasure-trove of coined proverbial
wisdom:
Our minds are never at home, but ever beyond home.
I will take care, if possible, that my death shall say nothing that my
life has not said.
Life in itself is neither good nor bad: it is the place of what is
good or bad.
Knowledge should not be stuck on to the mind, but incorporated in it.
Irresolution seems to me the most common and apparent vice of our
nature.
Age wrinkles the mind more than the face.
Habit is a second nature.
Hunger cures love.
It is easier to get money than to keep it.
Anger has often been the vehicle of courage.
It is more difficult to command than to obey.
A liar should have a good memory.
Ambition is the daughter of presumption.
To serve a prince, you must be discreet and a liar.
We learn to live when life has passed.
The mind is ill at ease when its companion has the colic.
We are all richer than we think, but we are brought up to go
a-begging.
The greatest masterpiece of man is ... to be born at the right time.
We append a saying of Montaigne's not found in Mr. St. John's
collection:
There is no so good man, who so squares all his thoughts and actions
to the laws, that he is not faulty enough to deserve hanging ten times
in his life.
Montaigne was too intensely an egotist, in his character as man no less
than in his character as writer, to have many personal relations that
exhibit him in aspects engaging to our love. But one friendship of his
is memorable--is even historic. The name of La Boetie is forever
associated with the name of Montaigne. La Boetie is remarkable for
being, as we suppose, absolutely the first voice raised in France
against the idea of monarchy. His little treatise _Contr' Un_
(literally, "Against One"), or "Voluntary Servitude," is by many
esteemed among the most important literary productions of modern times.
Others, again, Mr. George Saintsbury, for example, consider it an
absurdly overrated book. For our own part, we are inclined to give it
conspicuous place in the history of free thought in France. La Boetie
died young; and his _Contr' Un_ was published posthumously--first by the
Protestants, after the terrible day of St. Bartholomew. Our readers may
judge for themselves whether a pamphlet in which such passages as the
following could occur must not have had an historic effect upon the
inflammable sentiment of the French people. We take Mr. Bayle St. John's
translation, bracketing a hint or two of correction suggested by
comparison of the original French. The treatise of La Boetie is
sometimes now printed with Montaigne's "Essays," in French editions of
our author's works; La Boetie says:
You sow your fruits [crops] that he [the king] may ravage them; you
furnish and fill your houses that he may have something to steal; you
bring up your daughters that he may slake his luxury; you bring up
your sons that he may take them to be butchered in his wars, to be the
ministers of his avarice, the executors of his vengeance; you
disfigure your forms by labor [your own selves you inure to toil] that
he may cocker himself in delight, and wallow in nasty and disgusting
pleasure.
Montaigne seems really to have loved this friend of his, whom he
reckoned the greatest man in France. His account of La Boetie's death,
Mr. St. John boldly, and not presumptuously, parallels with the "Phaedon"
of Plato. Noble writing, it certainly is, though its stateliness is a
shade too self-conscious, perhaps.
We have thus far presented Montaigne in words of his own such as may
fairly be supposed likely to prepossess the reader in his favor. We
could multiply our extracts indefinitely in a like unexceptionable vein
of writing. But to do so, and to stop with these, would misrepresent
Montaigne. Montaigne is very far from being an innocent writer. His
moral tone generally is low, and often it is execrable. He is coarse,
but coarseness is not the worst of him. Indeed, he is cleanliness itself
compared with Rabelais. But Rabelais is morality itself compared with
Montaigne. Montaigne is corrupt and corrupting. This feature of his
writings we are necessarily forbidden to illustrate. In an essay
written in his old age--which we will not even name, its general tenor
is so evil--Montaigne holds the following language:
I gently turn aside, and avert my eyes from the stormy and cloudy sky
I have before me, which, thanks be to God, I regard without fear, but
not without meditation and study, and amuse myself in the remembrance
of my better years:
"Animus quod perdidit, optat,
Atque in praeterita se totus imagine versat."--_Petronius_, c. 128.
["The mind desires what it has lost, and in fancy flings itself wholly
into the past."]
Let childhood look forward, and age backward; is not this the
signification of Janus' double face? Let years haul me along if they
will, but it shall be backward; as long as my eyes can discern the
pleasant season expired, I shall now and then turn them that way;
though it escape from my blood and veins, I shall not, however, root
the image of it out of my memory:
"Hoc est
Vivere bis, vita posse priore frui."--_Martial_, x. 23, 7.
["'Tis to live twice to be able to enjoy former life again."]
Harmlessly, even engagingly, pensive seems the foregoing strain of
sentiment. Who could suppose it a prelude to detailed reminiscence on
the author's part of sensual pleasures--the basest--enjoyed in the past?
The venerable voluptuary keeps himself in countenance for his lascivious
vein by writing as follows:
I have enjoined myself to dare to say all that I dare to do; even
thoughts that are not to be published displease me; the worst of my
actions and qualities do not appear to me so evil, as I find it evil
and base not to dare to own them....
... I am greedy of making myself known, and I care not to how many,
provided it be truly.... Many things that I would not say to a
particular individual, I say to the people; and, as to my most secret
thoughts, send my most intimate friends to my book.... For my part, if
any one should recommend me as a good pilot, as being very modest, or
very chaste, I should owe him no thanks [because the recommendation
would be false].
We must leave it--as, however, Montaigne himself is far enough from
leaving it--to the imagination of readers to conjecture what "pleasures"
they are, of which this worn-out debauchee (nearing death, and thanking
God that he nears it "without fear") speaks in the following sentimental
strain:
In farewells, we oftener than not heat our affections toward the
things we take leave of: I take my last leave of the pleasures of this
world; these are our last embraces.
Mr. Emerson, in his "Representative Men," makes Montaigne stand for The
Skeptic. Skeptic, Montaigne was. He questioned, he considered, he
doubted. He stood poised in equilibrium, in indifference, between
contrary opinions. He saw reasons on this side, but he saw reasons also
on that, and he did not clear his mind. "_Que scai-je?_" was his motto
("What know I?"), a question as of hopeless ignorance--nay, as of
ignorance also void of desire to know. His life was one long
interrogation, a balancing of opposites, to the end.
Such, speculatively, was Montaigne. Such, too, speculatively, was
Pascal. The difference, however, was greater than the likeness, between
these two minds. Pascal, doubting, gave the world of spiritual things
the benefit of his doubt. Montaigne, on the other hand, gave the benefit
of his doubt to the world of sense. He was a sensualist, he was a
glutton, he was a lecher. He, for his portion, chose the good things of
this life. His body he used, to get him pleasures of the body. In
pleasures of the body he sunk and drowned his conscience, if he ever had
a conscience. But his intelligence survived. He became, at last--if he
was not such from the first--almost pure sense, without soul.
Yet we have no doubt Montaigne was an agreeable gentleman. We think we
should have got on well with him as a neighbor of ours. He was a
tolerably decent father, provided the child were grown old enough to be
company for him. His own lawful children, while infants, had to go out
of the house for their nursing; so it not unnaturally happened that all
but one died in their infancy. Five of such is the number that you can
count in his own journalistic entries of family births and deaths. But,
in his "Essays," speaking as "moral philosopher," he says, carelessly,
that he had lost "two or three" "without repining." This, perhaps, is
affectation. But what affectation!
Montaigne was well-to-do; and he ranked as a gentleman, if not as a
great nobleman. He lived in a castle, bequeathed to him, and by him
bequeathed--a castle still standing, and full of personal association
with its most famous owner. He occupied a room in the tower, fitted up
as a library. Over the door of this room may still, we believe, be read
Montaigne's motto, "_Que scai-je?_" Votaries of Montaigne perform their
pious pilgrimages to this shrine of their idolatry, year after year,
century after century.
For, remember, it is now three centuries since Montaigne wrote. He was
before Bacon and Shakespeare. He was contemporary with Charles IX., and
with Henry of Navarre. But date has little to do with such a writer as
Montaigne. His quality is sempiternal. He overlies the ages, as the long
hulk of a great steamship overlies the waves of the sea, stretching from
summit to summit. Not that, in the form of his literary work, he was
altogether independent of time and of circumstance. Not that he was
uninfluenced by his historic place, in the essential spirit of his work.
But, more than often happens, Montaigne may fairly be judged out of
himself alone. His message he might, indeed, have delivered differently;
but it would have been substantially the same message, had he been
differently placed, in the world, and in history. We need hardly,
therefore, add any thing about Montaigne's outward life. His true life
is in his book.
Montaigne the Essayist is the consummate, the ideal, expression,
practically incapable of improvement, of the spirit and wisdom of the
world. This characterization, we think, fairly and sufficiently sums up
the good and the bad of Montaigne. We might seem to describe no very
mischievous thing. But to have the spirit and wisdom of this world
expressed, to have it expressed as in a last authoritative form, a form
to commend it, to flatter it, to justify it, to make it seem sufficient,
to erect it into a kind of gospel--that means much. It means hardly less
than to provide the world with a new Bible--a Bible of the world's own,
a Bible that shall approve itself as better than the Bible of the Old
and New Testaments. Montaigne's "Essays" constitute, in effect, such a
book. The man of the world may--and, to say truth, does--in this volume,
find all his needed texts. Here is _viaticum_--daily manna--for him, to
last the year round, and to last year after year; an inexhaustible
breviary for the church of this world! It is of the gravest historical
significance that Rabelais and Montaigne, but especially that Montaigne,
should, to such an extent, for now three full centuries, have been
furnishing the daily intellectual food of Frenchmen.
Pascal, in an interview with M. de Saci (carefully reported by the
latter), in which the conversation was on the subject of Montaigne and
Epictetus contrasted--these two authors Pascal acknowledged to be the
ones most constantly in his hand--said gently of Montaigne, "Montaigne
is absolutely pernicious to those who have any inclination toward
irreligion, or toward vicious indulgences." We, for our part, are
disposed, speaking more broadly than Pascal, to say that, to a somewhat
numerous class of naturally dominant minds, Montaigne's "Essays" in
spite of all that there is good in them--nay, greatly because of so much
good in them--are, by their subtly insidious persuasion to evil, upon
the whole quite the most powerfully pernicious book known to us in
literature either ancient or modern.
V.
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD: 1613-1680; La Bruyere: 1646(?)-1696; Vauvenargues:
1715-1747.
In La Rouchefoucauld we meet another eminent example of the author of
one book. "Letters," "Memoirs," and "Maxims," indeed name productions in
three kinds, productions all of them notable, and all still extant, from
La Rochefoucauld's pen. But the "Maxims" are so much more famous than
either the "Letters" or the "Memoirs" that their author may be said to
be known only by those. If it were not for the "Maxims," the "Letters"
and "Memoirs" would probably now be forgotten. We here may dismiss these
from our minds and concentrate our attention exclusively upon the
"Maxims." Voltaire said, "The 'Memoirs' of the Duc de La Rochefoucauld
are read, but we know his 'Maxims' by heart."
La Rochefoucauld's "Maxims" are detached sentences of reflection and
wisdom on human character and conduct. They are about seven hundred in
number, but they are all comprised in a very small volume; for they
generally are each only two or three lines in length, and almost never
does a single maxim occupy more than the half of a moderate-sized page.
The "Maxims," detached, as we have described them, have no very marked
logical sequence in the order in which they stand. They all, however,
have a profound mutual relation. An unvarying monotone of sentiment, in
fact, runs through them. They are so many different expressions,
answering to so many different observations taken at different angles,
of one and the same persisting estimate of human nature. Self-love is
the mainspring and motive of every thing we do, or say, or feel, or
think--that is the total result of the "Maxims" of La Rochefoucauld.
The writer's qualifications for treating his theme were unsurpassed. He
had himself the right character, moral and intellectual; his scheme of
conduct in life corresponded; he wrote in the right language--French;
and he was rightly situated in time, in place, and in circumstance. He
needed but to look closely within him and without him--which he was
gifted with eyes to do--and then report what he saw, in the language to
which he was born. This he did, and his "Maxims" are the fruit. His
method was largely the skeptical method of Montaigne. His result, too,
was much the same result as his master's. But the pupil surpassed the
master in the quality of his work. There is a fineness, an
exquisiteness, in the literary form of La Rochefoucauld, which Montaigne
might indeed have disdained to seek, but which he could never, even with
seeking, have attained. Each maxim of La Rochefoucauld is a "gem of
purest ray serene," wrought to the last degree of perfection in form
with infinite artistic pains. Purity, precision, clearness, density,
point, are perfectly reconciled in La Rochefoucauld's style with ease,
grace and brilliancy of expression. The influence of such literary
finish, well bestowed on thought worthy to receive it, has been
incalculably potent in raising the standard of French production in
prose. It was Voltaire's testimony, "One of the works which has most
contributed to form the national taste, and give it a spirit of accuracy
and precision, was the little collection of 'Maxims' by Francois, Duc de
La Rochefoucauld."
There is a high-bred air about La Rochefoucauld the writer, which well
accords with the rank and character of the man La Rochefoucauld. He was
of one of the noblest families in France. His instincts were all
aristocratic. His manners and his morals were those of his class. Brave,
spirited, a touch of chivalry in him, honorable and amiable as the world
reckons of its own, La Rochefoucauld ran a career consistent throughout
with his own master-principle--self-love. He had a wife whose conjugal
fidelity her husband seems to have thought a sufficient supply in that
virtue for both himself and her. He behaved himself accordingly. His
illicit relations with other women were notorious. But they unhappily
did not make La Rochefoucauld in that respect at all peculiar among the
distinguished men of his time. His brilliant female friends collaborated
with him in working out his "Maxims." These were the labor of years.
They were published in successive editions, during the lifetime of the
author; and some final maxims were added from his manuscripts after his
death.
Using for the purpose a very recent translation, that of A. S. Bolton
(which, in one or two places, we venture to conform more exactly to the
sense of the original), we give almost at hazard a few specimens of
these celebrated apothegms. We adopt the numbering given in the best
Paris edition of the "Maxims":
No. 11. The passions often beget their contraries. Avarice sometimes
produces prodigality, and prodigality avarice: we are often firm from
weakness, and daring from timidity.
No. 13. Our self-love bears more impatiently the condemnation of our
tastes than of our opinions.
How much just such detraction from all mere natural human greatness is
contained in the following penetrative maxim:
No. 18. Moderation is a fear of falling into the envy and contempt
which those deserve who are intoxicated with their good fortune; it is
a vain parade of the strength of our mind; and, in short, the
moderation of men in their highest elevation is a desire to appear
greater than their fortune.
What effectively quiet satire in these few words:
No. 19. We have strength enough to bear the ills of others.
This man had seen the end of all perfection in the apparently great of
this world. He could not bear that such should flaunt a false plume
before their fellows:
No. 20. The steadfastness of sages is only the art of locking up their
uneasiness in their hearts.
Of course, had it lain in the author's chosen line to do so, he might,
with as much apparent truth, have pointed out, that to lock up
uneasiness in the heart requires steadfastness no less--nay, more--than
not to feel uneasiness.
The inflation of "philosophy" vaunting itself is thus softly eased of
its painful distention:
No. 22. Philosophy triumphs easily over troubles passed and troubles
to come, but present troubles triumph over it.
When Jesus once rebuked the fellow-disciples of James and John for
blaming those brethren as self-seekers, he acted on the same profound
principle with that disclosed in the following maxim:
No. 34. If we had no pride, we should not complain of that of others.
How impossible it is for that Proteus, self-love, to elude the presence
of mind, the inexorable eye, the fast hand, of this incredulous
Frenchman:
No. 39. Interest [self-love] speaks all sorts of languages, and plays
all sorts of parts, even that of disinterestedness.
No. 49. We are never so happy, or so unhappy, as we imagine.
No. 78. The love of justice is, in most men, only the fear of
suffering injustice.
What a subtly unsoldering distrust the following maxim introduces into
the sentiment of mutual friendship:
No. 83. What men have called friendship is only a partnership, a
mutual accommodation of interests, and an exchange of good offices: it
is, in short, only a traffic, in which self-love always proposes to
gain something.
No. 89. Every one complains of his memory and no one complains of his
judgment.
How striking, from its artful suppression of strikingness, is the first
following, and what a wide, easy sweep of well-bred satire it contains:
No. 93. Old men like to give good advice, to console themselves for
being no longer able to give bad examples.
No. 119. We are so much accustomed to disguise ourselves to others,
that, at last, we disguise ourselves to ourselves.
No. 127. The true way to be deceived is to think one's self sharper
than others.
The plain-spoken proverb, "A man that is his own lawyer has a fool for
his client," finds a more polished expression in the following:
No. 132. It is easier to be wise for others, than to be so for one's
self.
How pitilessly this inquisitor pursues his prey, the human soul, into
all its useless hiding-places:
No. 138. We would rather speak ill of ourselves, than not talk of
ourselves.
The following maxim, longer and less felicitously phrased than is usual
with La Rochefoucauld, recalls that bitter definition of the bore--"One
who insists on talking about himself all the time that you are wishing
to talk about yourself":
No. 139. One of the causes why we find so few people who appear
reasonable and agreeable in conversation, is that there is scarcely
any one who does not think more of what he wishes to say, than of
replying exactly to what is said to him. The cleverest and the most
compliant think it enough to show an attentive air; while we see in
their eyes and in their mind a wandering from what is said to them,
and a hurry to return to what they wish to say, instead of considering
that it is a bad way to please or to persuade others, to try so hard
to please one's self, and that to listen well is one of the greatest
accomplishments we can have in conversation.
If we are indignant at the maxims following, it is probably rather
because they are partly true than because they are wholly false:
No. 144. We are not fond of praising, and, without interest, we never
praise any one. Praise is a cunning flattery, hidden and delicate,
which, in different ways, pleases him who gives and him who receives
it. The one takes it as a reward for his merit: the other gives it to
show his equity and his discernment.
No. 146. We praise generally only to be praised.
No. 147. Few are wise enough to prefer wholesome blame to treacherous
praise.
No. 149. Disclaiming praise is a wish to be praised a second time.
No. 152. If we did not flatter ourselves, the flattery of others could
not hurt us.
No. 184. We acknowledge our faults in order to atone, by our
sincerity, for the harm they do us in the minds of others.
No. 199. The desire to appear able often prevents our becoming so.
No. 201. Whoever thinks he can do without the world, deceives himself
much; but whoever thinks the world cannot do without him, deceives
himself much more.
With the following, contrast Ruskin's noble paradox, that the soldier's
business, rightly conceived, is self-sacrifice; his ideal purpose being,
not to kill, but to be killed:
No. 214. Valor, in private soldiers, is a perilous calling, which they
have taken to in order to gain their living.
Here is, perhaps, the most current of all La Rochefoucauld's maxims:
No. 218. Hypocrisy is a homage which vice renders to virtue.
Of the foregoing maxim it may justly be said, that its truth and point
depend upon the assumption, implicit, that there is such a thing as
virtue--an assumption which the whole tenor of the "Maxims" in general
contradicts.
How incisive the following:
No. 226. Too great eagerness to requite an obligation is a kind of
ingratitude.
No. 298. The gratitude of most men is only a secret desire to receive
greater favors.
No. 304. We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive
those whom we bore.
No. 313. Why should we have memory enough to retain even the smallest
particulars of what has happened to us, and yet not have enough to
remember how often we have told them to the same individual?
The first following maxim satirizes both princes and courtiers. It might
be entitled, "How to insult a prince, and not suffer for your
temerity":
No. 320. To praise princes for virtues they have not, is to insult
them with impunity.
No. 347. We find few sensible people, except those who are of our way
of thinking.
No. 409. We should often be ashamed of our best actions, if the world
saw the motives which cause them.
No. 424. We boast of faults the reverse of those we have: when we are
weak, we boast of being stubborn.
Here, at length, is a maxim that does not depress--that animates you:
No. 432. To praise noble actions heartily is in some sort to take part
in them.
The following is much less exhilarating:
No. 454. There are few instances in which we should make a bad
bargain, by giving up the good that is said of us, on condition that
nothing bad be said.
This, also:
No. 458. Our enemies come nearer to the truth, in the opinions they
form of us, than we do ourselves.
Here is a celebrated maxim, vainly "suppressed" by the author, after
first publication:
No. 583. In the adversity of our best friends, we always find
something which does not displease us.
Before La Rochefoucauld, Montaigne had said, "Even in the midst of
compassion we feel within us an unaccountable bitter-sweet titillation
of ill-natured pleasure in seeing another suffer;" and Burke, after
both, wrote (in his "Sublime and Beautiful") with a heavier hand, "I am
convinced that we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in
the real misfortunes and pains of others."
La Rochefoucauld is not fairly cynical, more than is Montaigne. But as a
man he wins upon you less. His maxims are like hard and sharp crystals,
precipitated from the worldly wisdom blandly solute and dilute in
Montaigne.
The wise of this world reject the dogma of human depravity, as taught in
the Bible. They willingly accept it--nay, accept it complacently,
hugging themselves for their own penetration--as taught in the "Maxims"
of La Rochefoucauld.
JEAN DE LA BRUYERE is personally almost as little known as if he were an
ancient of the Greek or Roman world surviving, like Juvenal, only in his
literary production. Bossuet got him employed to teach history to a
great duke, who became his patron, and settled a life-long annuity upon
him. He published his one book, the "Characters," in 1687, was made
member of the French Academy in 1693, and died in 1696. That, in short,
is La Bruyere's biography.
His book is universally considered one of the most finished products of
the human mind. It is not a great work--it lacks the unity and the
majesty of design necessary for that. It consists simply of detached
thoughts and observations on a variety of subjects. It shows the author
to have been a man of deep and wise reflection, but especially a
consummate master of style. The book is one to read in, rather than to
read. It is full of food to thought. The very beginning exhibits a
self-consciousness on the writer's part very different from that
spontaneous simplicity in which truly great books originate. La Bruyere
begins:
Every thing has been said; and one comes too late, after more than
seven thousand years that there have been men, and men who have
thought.
La Bruyere has something to say, and that to length unusual for him, of
pulpit eloquence. We select a few specimen sentences:
Christian eloquence has become a spectacle. That gospel sadness, which
is its soul, is no longer to be observed in it; its place is supplied
by advantages of facial expression, by inflections of the voice, by
regularity of gesticulation, by choice of words, and by long
categories. The sacred word is no longer listened to seriously; it is
a kind of amusement, one among many; it is a game in which there is
rivalry, and in which there are those who lay wagers.
Profane eloquence has been transferred, so to speak, from the bar ...
where it is no longer employed, to the pulpit where it ought not to be
found.
Matches of eloquence are made at the very foot of the altar, and in
the presence of the mysteries. He who listens sits in judgment on him
who preaches, to condemn or to applaud, and is no more converted by
the discourse which he praises than by that which he pronounces
against. The orator pleases some, displeases others, and has an
understanding with all in one thing--that as he does not seek to
render them better, so they do not think of becoming better.
The almost cynical acerbity of the preceding is ostensibly relieved of
an obvious application to certain illustrious contemporary examples
among preachers by the following open allusion to Bossuet and
Bourdaloue:
The Bishop of Meaux [Bossuet] and Father Bourdaloue make me think of
Demosthenes and Cicero. Both of them, masters of pulpit eloquence,
have had the fortune of great models; the one has made bad critics,
the other bad imitators.
Here is a happy instance of La Bruyere's successful pains in redeeming a
commonplace sentiment by means of a striking form of expression; the
writer is disapproving the use of oaths in support of one's testimony:
An honest man who says Yes, or No, deserves to be believed; his
character swears for him.
Highly satiric in his quiet way, La Bruyere knew how to be. Witness the
following thrust at a contemporary author, not named by the satirist,
but, no doubt, recognized by the public of the time:
He maintains that the ancients, however unequal and negligent they may
be, have fine traits; he points these out; and they are so fine that
they make his criticism readable.
How painstakingly, how self-consciously, La Bruyere did his literary
work is evidenced by the following:
A good author, and one who writes with care, often has the experience
of finding that the expression which he was a long time in search of
without reaching it, and which at length he has found, is that which
was the most simple, the most natural, and that which, as it would
seem, should have presented itself at first, and without effort.
We feel that the quality of La Bruyere is such as to fit him for the
admiration and enjoyment of but a comparatively small class of readers.
He was somewhat over-exquisite. His art at times became
artifice--infinite labor of style to make commonplace thought seem
valuable by dint of perfect expression. We dismiss La Bruyere with a
single additional extract--his celebrated parallel between Corneille and
Racine:
Corneille subjects us to his characters and to his ideas; Racine
accommodates himself to ours. The one paints men as they ought to be;
the other paints them as they are. There is more in the former of what
one admires, and of what one ought even to imitate; there is more in
the latter of what one observes in others, or of what one experiences
in one's self. The one inspires, astonishes, masters, instructs; the
other pleases, moves, touches, penetrates. Whatever there is most
beautiful, most noble, most imperial, in the reason is made use of by
the former; by the latter whatever is most seductive and most delicate
in passion. You find in the former maxims, rules, and precepts; in the
latter, taste and sentiment. You are more absorbed in the plays of
Corneille; you are more shaken and more softened in those of Racine.
Corneille is more moral; Racine, more natural. The one appears to make
Sophocles his model; the other owes more to Euripides.
Less than half a century after La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere had shown
the way, VAUVENARGUES followed in a similar style of authorship,
promising almost to rival the fame of his two predecessors. This writer,
during his brief life (he died at thirty-two), produced one not
inconsiderable literary work more integral and regular in form,
entitled, "Introduction to the Knowledge of the Human Mind;" but it is
his disconnected thoughts and observations chiefly that continue to
preserve his name.
Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues, though nobly born, was poor.
His health was frail. He did not receive a good education in his youth.
Indeed, he was still in his youth when he went to the wars. His culture
always remained narrow. He did not know Greek and Latin, when to know
Greek and Latin was, as it were, the whole of scholarship. To crown his
accidental disqualifications for literary work, he fell a victim to the
small-pox, which left him wrecked in body. This occurred almost
immediately after he abandoned a military career which had been fruitful
to him of hardship, but not of promotion. In spite of all that was thus
against him, Vauvenargues, in those years, few and evil, that were his,
thought finely and justly enough to earn for himself a lasting place in
the literary history of his nation. He was in the eighteenth century of
France without being of it. You have to separate him in thought from the
infidels and the "philosophers" of his time. He belongs in spirit to an
earlier age. His moral and intellectual kindred was with such as Pascal,
far more than with such as Voltaire. Vauvenargues is, however, a writer
for the few, instead of for the many. His fame is high but it is not
wide. Historically, he forms a stepping-stone of transition to a
somewhat similar nineteenth-century name, that of Joubert. A very few
sentences of his will suffice to indicate to our readers the quality of
Vauvenargues. Self-evidently, the following antithesis drawn by him
between Corneille and Racine is subtly and ingeniously thought, as well
as very happily expressed--this, whatever may be considered to be its
aptness in point of literary appreciation:
Corneille's heroes often say great things without inspiring them;
Racine's inspire them without saying them.
Here is a good saying:
It is a great sign of mediocrity always to be moderate in praising.
There is worldly wisdom also here:
He who knows how to turn his prodigalities to good account practices a
large and noble economy.
Virgil's "They are able, because they seem to themselves to be able," is
recalled by this:
The consciousness of our strength makes our strength greater.
So much for Vauvenargues.
And so much for what--considering that, logically, though not quite
chronologically, Vauvenargues belongs with them--we may call the
seventeenth-century group of French _pensee_-writers. A
nineteenth-century group of the same literary class will form the
subject of a chapter in due course to follow.
VI.
LA FONTAINE.
1621-1695.
La Fontaine enjoys a unique fame. He has absolutely "no fellow in the
firmament" of literature. He is the only fabulist, of any age or any
nation, that, on the score simply of his fables, is admitted to be poet
as well as fabulist. There is perhaps no other literary name whatever
among the French by long proof more secure than is La Fontaine's, of
universal and of immortal renown. Such a fame is, of course, not the
most resplendent in the world; but to have been the first, and to remain
thus far the only, writer of fables enjoying recognition as true
poetry--this, surely, is an achievement entitling La Fontaine to
monumental mention in any sketch, however summary, of French literature.
Jean de La Fontaine was humbly born, at Chateau-Thierry, in Champagne.
His early education was sadly neglected. At twenty years of age he was
still phenomenally ignorant. About this time, being now better situated,
he developed a taste for the classics and for poetry. With La Fontaine
the man, it is the sadly familiar French story of debauchee manners in
life and in literary production. We cannot acquit him, but we are to
condemn him only in common with the most of his age and of his nation.
As the world goes, La Fontaine was a "good fellow," never lacking
friends. These were held fast in loyalty to the poet, not so much by any
sterling worth of character felt in him as by an exhaustless,
easy-going good-nature that, despite his social insipidity, made La
Fontaine the most acceptable of every-day companions. It would be easy
to repeat many stories illustrative of this personal quality in La
Fontaine, while to tell a single story illustrative of any lofty trait
in his character would be perhaps impossible. Still, La Fontaine seemed
not ungrateful for the benefits he received from others; and gratitude,
no commonplace virtue, let us accordingly reckon to the credit of a man
in general so slenderly equipped with positive claims to admiring
personal regard. The mirror of _bonhomie_ (easy-hearted
good-fellowship), he always was. Indeed, that significant, almost
untranslatable, French word might have been coined to fit La Fontaine's
case. On his amiable side--a full hemisphere or more of the man--it sums
him up completely. Twenty years long this mirror of _bonhomie_ was
domiciliated, like a pet animal, under the hospitable roof of the
celebrated Madame de la Sabliere. There was truth as well as humor
implied in what she said one day: "I have sent away all my domestics; I
have kept only my dog, my cat, and La Fontaine."
But La Fontaine had that in him which kept the friendship of serious
men. Moliere, a grave, even melancholy spirit, however gay in his
comedies; Boileau and Racine, decorous both of them, at least in
manners, constituted, together with La Fontaine, a kind of private
"Academy," existing on a diminutive scale, which was not without its
important influence on French letters. La Fontaine seems to have been a
sort of Goldsmith in this club of wits, the butt of many pleasantries
from his colleagues, called out by his habit of absent-mindedness. St.
Augustine was one night the subject of an elaborate eulogy, which La
Fontaine lost the benefit of, through a reverie of his own indulged
meantime on a quite different character. Catching, however, at the name,
La Fontaine, as he came to himself for a moment, betrayed the secret of
his absent thought by asking, "Do you think St. Augustine had as much
wit as Rabelais?" "Take care, Monsieur La Fontaine: you have put one of
your stockings on wrong side out"--he had actually done so--was the only
answer vouchsafed to his question. The speaker in this case was a doctor
of the Sorbonne (brother to Boileau), present as guest. The story is
told of La Fontaine, that egged on to groundless jealousy of his wife--a
wife whom he never really loved, and whom he soon would finally
abandon,--he challenged a military friend of his to combat with swords.
The friend was amazed, and, amazed, reluctantly fought with La Fontaine,
whom he easily put at his mercy. "Now, what is this for?" he demanded.
"The public says you visit my house for my wife's sake, not for mine,"
said La Fontaine. "Then I never will come again." "Far from it,"
responds La Fontaine, seizing his friend's hand. "I have satisfied the
public. Now you must come to my house every day, or I will fight you
again." The two went back in company, and breakfasted together in mutual
good humor.
A trait or two more and there will have been enough of the man La
Fontaine. It is said that when, on the death of Madame de la Sabliere,
La Fontaine was homeless, he was met on the street by a friend, who
exclaimed, "I was looking for you; come to my house, and live with me!"
"I was on the way there," La Fontaine characteristically replied. At
seventy, La Fontaine went through a process of "conversion," so called,
in which he professed repentance of his sins. On the genuineness of this
inward experience of La Fontaine, it is not for a fellow-creature of
his, especially at this distance of time, to pronounce. When he died, at
seventy-three, Fenelon could say of him (in Latin), "La Fontaine is no
more! He is no more; and with him have gone the playful jokes, the merry
laugh, the artless graces, and the sweet Muses!" La Fontaine's earliest
works were "Contes," so styled; that is, tales, or romances. These are
in character such that the subsequent happy change in manners, if not in
morals, has made them unreadable, for their indecency. We need concern
ourselves only with the Fables, for it is on these that La Fontaine's
fame securely rests. The basis of story in them was not generally
original with La Fontaine. He took whatever fittest came to his hand.
With much modesty he attributed all to AEsop and Phaedrus. But invention
of his own is not altogether wanting to his books of fables. Still, it
is chiefly the consummate artful artlessness of the form that
constitutes the individual merit of La Fontaine's productions. With
something, too, of the air of real poetry, he has undoubtedly invested
his verse.
We give, first, the brief fable which is said to have been the prime
favorite of the author himself. It is the fable of "The Oak and the
Reed." Of this fable French critics have not scrupled to speak in terms
of almost the very highest praise. Chamfort says, "Let one consider,
that, within the limit of thirty lines, La Fontaine, doing nothing but
yield himself to the current of his story, has taken on every tone, that
of poetry the most graceful, that of poetry the most lofty, and one will
not hesitate to affirm, that, at the epoch at which this fable appeared,
there was nothing comparable to it in the French language." There are,
to speak precisely, thirty-two lines in the fable. In this one case let
us try representing La Fontaine's compression by our English form. For
the rest of our specimens, after a single further exception, introduced,
we confess, partly because it could be given in a graceful version by
Bryant, we shall use Elizur Wright's translation--a meritorious one,
still master of the field which, about fifty years ago, it entered as
pioneer. Mr. Wright here expands La Fontaine's thirty-two verses to it
forty-four. The additions are not ill-done, but they encumber somewhat
the Attic neatness and simplicity of the original. We ought to say, that
La Fontaine boldly broke with the tradition which had been making
Alexandrines--lines of six feet--obligatory in French verse. He rhymes
irregularly, at choice, and makes his verses long or short, as pleases
him. The closing verse of the present piece is, in accordance with the
intended majesty of the representation, an Alexandrine:
The Oak one day said to the Reed,
"Justly might you dame Nature blame.
A wren's weight would bow down your frame;
The lightest wind that chance may make
Dimple the surface of the lake
Your head bends low indeed,
The while, like Caucasus, my front
To meet the branding sun is wont,
Nay, more, to take the tempest's brunt.
A blast you feel, I feel a breeze.
Had you been born beneath my roof,
Wide-spread, of leafage weather-proof,
Less had you known your life to tease;
I should have sheltered you from storm.
But oftenest you rear your form
On the moist limits of the realm of wind.
Nature, methinks, against you sore has sinned."
"Your pity," answers him the Reed,
"Bespeaks you kind; but spare your pain;
I more than you may winds disdain.
I bend, and break not. You, indeed,
Against their dreadful strokes till now
Have stood, nor tamed your back to bow:
But wait we for the end."
Scarce had he spoke,
When fiercely from the far horizon broke
The wildest of the children, fullest fraught
With terror, that till then the North had brought.
The tree holds good; the reed it bends.
The wind redoubled might expends,
And so well works that from his bed
Him it uproots who nigh to heaven his head
Held, and whose feet reached to the kingdom of the dead.
Here is that fable of La Fontaine's graced by the hand of Bryant upon it
as translator. It is entitled "Love and Folly:"
Love's worshipers alone can know
The thousand mysteries that are his;
His blazing torch, his twanging bow,
His blooming age are mysteries.
A charming science--but the day
Were all too short to con it o'er;
So take of me this little lay,
A sample of its boundless lore.
As once, beneath the fragrant shade
Of myrtles fresh, in heaven's pure air,
The children, Love and Folly, played--
A quarrel rose betwixt the pair.
Love said the gods should do him right--
But Folly vowed to do it then,
And struck him, o'er the orbs of sight,
So hard he never saw again.
His lovely mother's grief was deep,
She called for vengeance on the deed;
A beauty does not vainly weep,
Nor coldly does a mother plead.
A shade came o'er the eternal bliss
That fills the dwellers of the skies;
Even stony-hearted Nemesis
And Rhadamanthus wiped their eyes.
"Behold," she said, "this lovely boy,"
While streamed afresh her graceful tears,
"Immortal, yet shut out from joy
And sunshine all his future years.
The child can never take, you see
A single step without a staff--
The harshest punishment would be
Too lenient for the crime by half."
All said that Love had suffered wrong,
And well that wrong should be repaid;
When weighed the public interest long,
And long the party's interest weighed,
And thus decreed the court above--
"Since Love is blind from Folly's blow,
Let Folly be the guide of Love,
Where'er the boy may choose to go."
In the fable of the "Rat Retired from the World," La Fontaine rallies
the monks. With French _finesse_ he hits his mark by expressly avoiding
it. "What think you I mean by my disobliging rat? A monk? No, but a
Mahometan devotee; I take it for granted that a monk is always ready
with his help to the needful!"
The sage Levantines have a tale
About a rat that weary grew
Of all the cares which life assail,
And to a Holland cheese withdrew.
His solitude was there profound,
Extending through his world so round.
Our hermit lived on that within;
And soon his industry had been
With claws and teeth so good,
That in his novel hermitage
He had in store, for wants of age,
Both house and livelihood.
What more could any rat desire?
He grew fat, fair, and round.
God's blessings thus redound
To those who in his vows retire.
One day this personage devout,
Whose kindness none might doubt,
Was asked, by certain delegates
That came from Rat-United-States,
For some small aid, for they
To foreign parts were on their way,
For succor in the great cat-war:
Ratopolis beleaguered sore,
Their whole republic drained and poor,
No morsel in their scrips they bore.
Slight boon they craved, of succor sure
In days at utmost three or four.
"My friends," the hermit said,
"To worldly things I'm dead.
How can a poor recluse
To such a mission be of use?
What can he do but pray
That God will aid it on its way?
And so, my friends, it is my prayer
That God will have you in his care."
His well-fed saintship said no more
But in their faces shut the door.
What think you, reader, is the service,
For which I use this niggard rat?
To paint a monk? No, but a dervise.
A monk, I think, however fat,
Must be more bountiful than that.
The fable entitled "Death and the Dying," is much admired for its union
of pathos with wit. "The Two Doves," is another of La Fontaine's more
tender inspirations. "The Mogul's Dream" is a somewhat ambitious flight
of the fabulist's muse. On the whole, however, the masterpiece among the
fables of La Fontaine is that of "The Animals Sick of the Plague." Such
at least is the opinion of critics in general. The idea of this fable is
not original with La Fontaine. The homilists of the middle ages used a
similar fiction to enforce on priests the duty of impartiality in
administering the sacrament, so called, of confession. We give this
famous fable as our closing specimen of La Fontaine:
The sorest ill that Heaven hath
Sent on this lower world in wrath--
The plague (to call it by its name),
One single day of which
Would Pluto's ferryman enrich,
Waged war on beasts, both wild and tame.
They died not all, but all were sick:
No hunting now, by force or trick,
To save what might so soon expire.
No food excited their desire:
Nor wolf nor fox now watched to slay
The innocent and tender prey.
The turtles fled,
So love and therefore joy were dead.
The lion council held, and said,
"My friends, I do believe
This awful scourge, for which we grieve,
Is for our sins a punishment
Most righteously by Heaven sent.
Let us our guiltiest beast resign
A sacrifice to wrath divine.
Perhaps this offering, truly small,
May gain the life and health of all.
By history we find it noted
That lives have been just so devoted.
Then let us all turn eyes within,
And ferret out the hidden sin.
Himself let no one spare nor flatter,
But make clean conscience in the matter.
For me, my appetite has played the glutton
Too much and often upon mutton.
What harm had e'er my victims done?
I answer, truly, None.
Perhaps, sometimes, by hunger pressed,
I've eat the shepherd with the rest.
I yield myself if need there be;
And yet I think, in equity,
Each should confess his sins with me;
For laws of right and justice cry,
The guiltiest alone should die."
"Sire," said the fox, "your majesty
Is humbler than a king should be,
And over-squeamish in the case.
What! eating stupid sheep a crime?
No, never, sire, at any time.
It rather was an act of grace,
A mark of honor to their race.
And as to shepherds, one may swear,
The fate your majesty describes
Is recompense less full than fair
For such usurpers o'er our tribes."
Thus Renard glibly spoke,
And loud applause from listeners broke
Of neither tiger, boar, nor bear,
Did any keen inquiry dare
To ask for crimes of high degree;
The fighters, biters, scratchers, all
From every mortal sin were free;
The very dogs, both great and small,
Were saints, as far as dogs could be.
The ass, confessing in his turn,
Thus spoke in tones of deep concern:
"I happened through a mead to pass;
The monks, its owners, were at mass:
Keen hunger, leisure, tender grass,
And, add to these the devil, too,
All tempted me the deed to do.
I browsed the bigness of my tongue:
Since truth must out, I own it wrong."
On this, a hue and cry arose,
As if the beasts were all his foes.
A wolf, haranguing lawyer-wise,
Denounced the ass for sacrifice--
The bald-pate, scabby, ragged lout,
By whom the plague had come, no doubt.
His fault was judged a hanging crime.
What! eat another's grass? Oh, shame!
The noose of rope, and death sublime,
For that offense were all too tame!
And soon poor Grizzle felt the same.
Thus human courts acquit the strong,
And doom the weak as therefore wrong.
It is suitable to add, in conclusion, that La Fontaine is a crucial
author for disclosing the irreconcilable difference that exists, at
bottom, between the Englishman's and the Frenchman's idea of poetry. No
English-speaker, heir of Shakespeare and Milton, will ever be able to
satisfy a Frenchman with admiration such as he can conscientiously
profess for the poetry of La Fontaine.
VII.
MOLIERE.
1623-1673.
Moliere is confessedly the greatest writer of comedy in the world. Greek
Menander might have disputed the palm; but Menander's works have
perished, and his greatness must be guessed. Who knows but we guess him
too great? Moliere's works survive, and his greatness may be measured.
We have stinted our praise. Moliere is not only the foremost name in a
certain department of literature; he is one of the foremost names in
literature. The names are few on which critics are willing to bestow
this distinction. But critics generally agree in bestowing this
distinction on Moliere.
Moliere's comedy is by no means mere farce. Farces he wrote,
undoubtedly; and some element of farce, perhaps, entered to qualify
nearly every comedy that flowed from his pen. But it is not for his
farce that Moliere is rated one of the few greatest producers of
literature. Moliere's comedy constitutes to Moliere the patent that it
does, of high degree in genius, not because it provokes laughter, but
because, amid laughter provoked, it not seldom reveals, as if with
flashes of lightning--lightning playful, indeed, but lightning that
might have been deadly--the "secrets of the nethermost abyss" of human
nature. Not human manners merely, those of a time, or a race, but human
attributes, those of all times, and of all races, are the things with
which, in his higher comedies, Moliere deals. Some transient whim of
fashion may in these supply to him the mould of form that he uses, but
it is human nature itself that supplies to Moliere the substance of his
dramatic creations. Now and again, if you read Moliere wisely and
deeply, you find your laughter at comedy fairly frozen in your throat,
by a gelid horror seizing you, to feel that these follies or these
crimes displayed belong to that human nature, one and the same
everywhere and always, of which also you yourself partake. Comedy,
Dante, too, called his poem, which included the _Inferno_. And a
Dantesque quality, not of method, but of power, is to be felt in
Moliere.
This character in Moliere the writer accords with the character of the
man Moliere. It might not have seemed natural to say of Moliere, as was
said of Dante, "There goes the man that has been in hell." But Moliere
was melancholy enough in temper and in mien to have well inspired an
exclamation such as, "There goes the man that has seen the human heart."
A poet as well as a dramatist, his own fellow-countrymen, at least,
feel Moliere to be. In Victor Hugo's list of the eight greatest poets of
all time, two are Hebrews (Job and Isaiah), two Greeks (Homer and
AEschylus), one is a Roman (Lucretius), one an Italian (Dante), one an
Englishman (Shakespeare)--seven. The eighth could hardly fail to be a
Frenchman, and that Frenchman is Moliere. Mr. Swinburne might perhaps
make the list nine, but he would certainly include Victor Hugo himself.
Curiously enough, Moliere is not this great writer's real name. It is a
stage name. It was assumed by the bearer when he was about twenty-four
years of age, on occasion of his becoming one in a strolling band of
players--in 1646 or thereabout. This band, originally composed of
amateurs, developed into a professional dramatic company, which passed
through various transformations, until, from being at first
grandiloquently self-styled, L'Illustre Theatre, it was, twenty years
after, recognized by the national title of Theatre Francais. Moliere's
real name was Jean Baptiste Poquelin.
Young Poquelin's bent, early encouraged by seeing plays and ballets, was
strongly toward the stage. The drama, under the quickening patronage of
Louis XIII.'s lordly minister, Cardinal Richelieu, was a great public
interest of those times in Paris. Moliere's evil star, too, it was
perhaps in part that brought him back to Paris, from Orleans. He admired
a certain actress in the capital. She became the companion--probably not
innocent companion--of his wandering life as actor. A sister of this
actress--a sister young enough to be daughter, instead of
sister--Moliere finally married. She led her jealous husband a wretched
conjugal life. A peculiarly dark tradition of shame, connected with
Moliere's marriage, has lately been to a good degree dispelled. But it
is not possible to redeem this great man's fame to chastity and honor.
He paid heavily, in like misery of his own, for whatever pangs of
jealousy he inflicted. There was sometimes true tragedy for himself
hidden within the comedy that he acted for others. (Moliere, to the very
end of his life, acted in the comedies that he wrote.) When some play of
his represented the torments of jealousy in the heart of a husband, it
was probably not so much acting, as it was real life, that the
spectators saw proceeding on the stage between Moliere and his wife,
confronted with each other in performing the piece.
Despite his faults, Moliere was cast in a noble, generous mold, of
character as well as of genius. Expostulated with for persisting to
appear on the stage when his health was such that he put his life at
stake in so doing, he replied that the men and women of his company
depended for their bread on the play's going through, and appear he
would. He actually died an hour or so after playing the part of the
Imaginary Invalid in his comedy of that name. That piece was the last
work of his pen.
Moliere produced in all some thirty dramatic pieces, from among which we
select a few of the most celebrated for brief description and
illustration.
The "Bourgeois Gentilhomme" ("Shopkeeper turned Gentleman") partakes of
the nature of the farce quite as much as it does of the comedy. But it
is farce such as only a man of genius could produce. In it Moliere
ridicules the airs and affectations of a rich man vulgarly ambitious to
figure in a social rank too exalted for his birth, his breeding, or his
merit. Jourdain is the name under which Moliere satirizes such a
character. We give a fragment from one of the scenes. M. Jourdain is in
process of fitting himself for that higher position in society to which
he aspires. He will equip himself with the necessary knowledge. To this
end he employs a professor of philosophy to come and give him lessons at
his house:
_M. Jourdain._ I have the greatest desire in the world to be learned;
and it vexes me more than I can tell, that my father and mother did
not make me learn thoroughly all the sciences when I was young.
_Professor of Philosophy._ This is a praiseworthy feeling. _Nam sine
doctrina vita est quasi mortis imago._ You understand this, and you
have, no doubt, a knowledge of Latin?
_M. Jour._ Yes; but act as if I had none. Explain to me the meaning of
it--
_Prof. Phil._ The meaning of it is, that, without science, life is an
image of death.
_M. Jour._ That Latin is quite right.
_Prof. Phil._ Have you any principles, any rudiments, of science?
_M. Jour._ Oh, yes! I can read and write.
_Prof. Phil._ With what would you like to begin? Shall I teach you
logic?
_M. Jour._ And what may this logic be?
_Prof. Phil._ It is that which teaches us the three operations of the
mind.
_M. Jour._ What are they--these three operations of the mind?
_Prof. Phil._ The first, the second, and the third. The first is to
conceive well by means of universals; the second, to judge well by
means of categories; and the third, to draw a conclusion aright by
means of the figures Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferio, Baralipton, etc.
_M. Jour._ Pooh! what repulsive words! This logic does not by any
means suit me. Teach me something more enlivening.
_Prof. Phil._ Will you learn moral philosophy?
_M. Jour._ Moral philosophy?
_Prof. Phil._ Yes.
_M. Jour._ What does it say, this moral philosophy?
_Prof. Phil._ It treats of happiness, teaches men to moderate their
passions, and--
_M. Jour._ No, none of that. I am devilishly hot-tempered, and,
morality or no morality, I like to give full vent to my anger whenever
I have a mind to it.
_Prof. Phil._ Would you like to learn physics?
_M. Jour._ And what have physics to say for themselves?
_Prof. Phil._ Physics is that science which explains the principles of
natural things and the properties of bodies; which discourses of the
nature of the elements, of metals, minerals, stones, plants, and
animals; which teaches us the cause of all the meteors, the rainbow,
the _ignis fatuus_, comets, lightning, thunder, thunderbolts, rain,
snow, hail, and whirlwinds.
_M. Jour._ There is too much hullaballoo in all that, too much riot
and rumpus.
_Prof. Phil._ Very good.
_M. Jour._ And now I want to intrust you with a great secret. I am in
love with a lady of quality; and I should be glad if you would help me
to write something to her in a short letter which I mean to drop at
her feet.
_Prof. Phil._ Very well.
_M. Jour._ That will be gallant, will it not?
_Prof. Phil._ Undoubtedly. Is it verse you wish to write to her?
_M. Jour._ Oh, no! not verse.
_Prof. Phil._ You only wish prose?
_M. Jour._ No. I wish for neither verse nor prose.
_Prof. Phil._ It must be one or the other.
_M. Jour._ Why?
_Prof. Phil._ Because, sir, there is nothing by which we can express
ourselves except prose or verse.
_M. Jour._ There is nothing but prose or verse?
_Prof. Phil._ No, sir. Whatever is not prose, is verse; and whatever
is not verse, is prose.
_M. Jour._ And when we speak, what is that, then?
_Prof. Phil._ Prose.
_M. Jour._ What! when I say, "Nicole, bring me my slippers, and give
me my nightcap," is that prose?
_Prof. Phil._ Yes, sir.
_M. Jour._ Upon my word, I have been speaking prose these forty years
without being aware of it; and I am under the greatest obligation to
you for informing me of it. Well, then, I wish to write to her in a
letter, "Fair Marchioness, your beautiful eyes make me die of love";
but I would have this worded in a gallant manner, turned genteelly.
_Prof. Phil._ Say that the fire of her eyes has reduced your heart to
ashes; that you suffer day and night for her the torments of a--
_M. Jour._ No, no, no, I don't wish any of that. I simply wish what I
tell you--"Fair Marchioness, your beautiful eyes make me die of love."
_Prof. Phil._ Still, you might amplify the thing a little.
_M. Jour._ No, I tell you, I will have nothing but these very words in
the letter; but they must be put in a fashionable way, and arranged as
they should be. Pray show me a little, so that I may see the different
ways in which they can be put.
_Prof. Phil._ They may be put first of all, as you have said, "Fair
Marchioness, your beautiful eyes make me die of love;" or else, "Of
love die make me, fair Marchioness, your beautiful eyes;" or, "Your
beautiful eyes of love make me, fair Marchioness, die;" or, "Die of
love your beautiful eyes, fair Marchioness, make me;" or else, "Me
make your beautiful eyes die, fair Marchioness, of love."
_M. Jour._ But of all these ways, which is the best?
_Prof. Phil._ The one you said--"Fair Marchioness, your beautiful eyes
make me die of love."
_M. Jour._ Yet I have never studied, and I did all right off at the
first shot.
The "Bourgeois Gentilhomme" is a very amusing comedy throughout.
From "Les Femmes Savantes" ("The Learned Women")--"The Blue-Stockings,"
we might perhaps freely render the title--we present one scene to
indicate the nature of the comedy. There had grown to be a fashion in
Paris, among certain women high in social rank, of pretending to the
distinction of skill in literary criticism, and of proficiency in
science. It was the Hotel de Rambouillet reduced to absurdity. That
fashionable affectation Moliere made the subject of his comedy, "The
Learned Women."
In the following extracts, Moliere satirizes, under the name of
Trissotin, a contemporary writer, one Cotin. The poem which Trissotin
reads, for the learned women to criticise and admire, is an actual
production of this gentleman. Imagine the domestic _coterie_ assembled,
and Trissotin, the poet, their guest. He is present, prepared to regale
them with what he calls his sonnet. We need to explain that the original
poem is thus inscribed: "To Mademoiselle de Longueville, now Duchess of
Namur, on her Quartan Fever." The conceit of the sonneteer is that the
fever is an enemy luxuriously lodged in the lovely person of its victim,
and there insidiously plotting against her life:
_Trissotin._ Sonnet to the Princess Urania on her Fever.
Your prudence sure is fast asleep,
That thus luxuriously you keep
And lodge magnificently so
Your very hardest-hearted foe.
_Belise._ Ah! what a pretty beginning!
_Armande._ What a charming turn it has!
_Philaminte._ He alone possesses the talent of making easy verses.
_Arm._ We must yield to _prudence fast asleep_.
_Bel._ _Lodge one's very hardest-hearted foe_ is full of charms for
me.
_Phil._ I like _luxuriously_ and _magnificently_: these two adverbs
joined together sound admirably.
_Bel._ Let us hear the rest.
_Triss._ Your prudence sure is fast asleep,
That thus luxuriously you keep
And lodge magnificently so
Your very hardest-hearted foe.
_Arm._ _Prudence fast asleep._
_Bel._ _To lodge one's foe._
_Phil._ _Luxuriously_ and _magnificently_.
_Triss._ Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say,
From out your chamber, decked so gay,
Where, ingrate vile, with murderous knife,
Bold she assails your lovely life.
_Bel._ Ah! gently. Allow me to breathe, I beseech you.
_Arm._ Give us time to admire, I beg.
_Phil._ One feels, at hearing these verses, an indescribable something
which goes through one's inmost soul, and makes one feel quite faint.
_Arm._ Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say,
From out your chamber, decked so gay--
How prettily _chamber, decked so gay_, is said here! And with what wit
the metaphor is introduced!
_Phil._ Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say.
Ah! in what an admirable taste that _whate'er men say_ is! To my mind,
the passage is invaluable.
_Arm._ My heart is also in love with _whate'er men say_.
_Bel._ I am of your opinion: _whate'er men say_ is a happy expression.
_Arm._ I wish I had written it.
_Bel._ It is worth a whole poem.
_Phil._ But do you, like me, thoroughly understand the wit of it?
_Arm. and Bel._ Oh! Oh!
_Phil._ Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say.
Although another should take the fever's part, pay no attention; laugh
at the gossips.
Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say,
Whate'er men say, whate'er men say.
This _whate'er men say_, says a great deal more than it seems. I do
not know if every one is like me, but I discover in it a hundred
meanings.
_Bel._ It is true that it says more than its size seems to imply.
_Phil._ (_to Trissotin._) But when you wrote this charming _whate'er
men say_, did you yourself understand all its energy? Did you realize
all it tells us? And did you then think that you were writing
something so witty?
_Triss._ Ah! ah!
_Arm._ I have likewise the _ingrate_ in my head--this ungrateful,
unjust, uncivil fever that ill-treats people who entertain her.
_Phil._ In short, both the stanzas are admirable. Let us come quickly
to the triplets, I pray.
_Arm._ Ah! once more, _what'er men say_, I beg.
_Triss._ Drive forth that foe, whate'er men say--
_Phil., Arm., and Bel._ _Whate'er men say!_
_Triss._ From out your chamber, decked so gay--
_Phil., Arm. and Bel._ _Chamber decked so gay!_
_Triss._ Where, ingrate vile, with murderous knife--
_Phil., Arm., and Bel._ That _ingrate_ fever!
_Triss._ Bold she assails your lovely life.
_Triss._ _Your lovely life!_
_Arm. and Bel._ Ah!
_Triss._ What! reckless of your ladyhood,
Still fiercely seeks to shed your blood--
_Phil., Arm. and Bel._ Ah!
_Triss._ And day and night to work you harm.
When to the baths sometime you've brought her,
No more ado, with your own arm
Whelm her and drown her in the water.
_Phil._ Ah! It is quite overpowering.
_Bel._ I faint.
_Arm._ I die from pleasure.
_Phil._ A thousand sweet thrills seize one.
_Arm._ _When to the baths sometime you've brought her._
_Bel._ _No more ado, with your own arm._
_Phil._ _Whelm her and drown her in the water._
With your own arm, drown her there in the baths.
_Arm._ In your verses we meet at each step with charming beauty.
_Bel._ One promenades through them with rapture.
_Phil._ One treads on fine things only.
_Arm._ They are little lanes all strewn with roses.
_Triss._ Then, the sonnet seems to you--
_Phil._ Admirable, new; and never did any one make any thing more
beautiful.
_Bel._ (_to Henriette_). What! my niece, you listen to what has been
read without emotion! You play there but a sorry part!
_Hen._ We each of us play the best part we can, my aunt; and to be a
wit does not depend on our will.
_Triss._ My verses, perhaps, are tedious to you.
_Hen._ No. I do not listen.
_Phil._ Ah! Let us hear the epigram.
But our readers, we think, will consent to spare the epigram. They will
relish, however, a fragment taken from a subsequent part of the same
protracted scene. The conversation has made the transition from literary
criticism to philosophy, in Moliere's time a fashionable study, rendered
such by the contemporary genius and fame of Descartes. Armande resents
the limitations imposed upon her sex:
_Arm._ It is insulting our sex too grossly to limit our intelligence
to the power of judging of a skirt, of the make of a garment, of the
beauties of lace, or of a new brocade.
_Bel._ We must rise above this shameful condition, and bravely
proclaim our emancipation.
_Triss._ Every one knows my respect for the fairer sex, and that, if I
render homage to the brightness of their eyes, I also honor the
splendor of their intellect.
_Phil._ And our sex does you justice in this respect; but we will show
to certain minds who treat us with proud contempt, that women also
have knowledge; that, like men, they can hold learned
meetings--regulated, too, by better rules; that they wish to unite
what elsewhere is kept apart, join noble language to deep learning,
reveal nature's laws by a thousand experiments; and, on all questions
proposed, admit every party, and ally themselves to none.
_Triss._ For order, I prefer peripateticism.
_Phil._ For abstractions, I love platonism.
_Arm._ Epicurus pleases me, for his tenets are solid.
_Bel._ I agree with the doctrine of atoms; but I find it difficult to
understand a vacuum, and I much prefer subtile matter.
_Triss._ I quite agree with Descartes about magnetism.
_Arm._ I like his vortices.
_Phil._ And I, his falling worlds.
_Arm._ I long to see our assembly opened, and to distinguish ourselves
by some great discovery.
_Triss._ Much is expected from your enlightened knowledge, for nature
has hidden few things from you.
_Phil._ For my part, I have, without boasting, already made one
discovery; I have plainly seen men in the moon.
_Bel._ I have not, I believe as yet, quite distinguished men, but I
have seen steeples as plainly as I see you.
_Arm._ In addition to natural philosophy, we will dive into grammar,
history, verse, ethics, and politics.
_Phil._ I find in ethics charms which delight my heart; it was
formerly the admiration of great geniuses; but I give the preference
to the Stoics, and I think nothing so grand as their founder.
"Les Precieuses Ridicules" is an earlier and lighter treatment of the
same theme. The object of ridicule in both these pieces was a lapsed and
degenerate form of what originally was a thing worthy of respect, and
even of praise. At the Hotel de Rambouillet, conversation was cultivated
as a fine art. There was, no doubt, something overstrained in the
standards which the ladies of that circle enforced. Their mutual
communication was all conducted in a peculiar style of language, the
natural deterioration of which was into a kind of euphuism, such as
English readers will remember to have seen exemplified in Walter Scott's
Sir Piercie Shafton. These ladies called each other, with demonstrative
fondness, "Ma precieuse." Hence at last the term _precieuse_ as a
designation of ridicule. Madame de Sevigne was a _precieuse_. But she,
with many of her peers, was too rich in sarcastic common sense to be a
_precieuse ridicule_. Moliere himself, thrifty master of policy that he
was, took pains to explain that he did not satirize the real thing, but
only the affectation.
"Tartuffe, or the Impostor," is perhaps the most celebrated of all
Moliere's plays. Scarcely comedy, scarcely tragedy, it partakes of both
characters. Like tragedy, serious in purpose, it has a happy ending like
comedy. Pity and terror are absent; or, if not quite absent, these
sentiments are present raised only to a pitch distinctly below the
tragic. Indignation is the chief passion excited, or detestation,
perhaps, rather than indignation. This feeling is provided at last with
its full satisfaction in the condign punishment visited on the impostor.
The original "Tartuffe," like the most of Moliere's comedies, is written
in rhymed verse. We could not, with any effort, make the English-reading
student of Moliere sufficiently feel how much is lost when the form is
lost which the creations of this great genius took, in their native
French, under his own master hand. A satisfactory metrical rendering is
out of the question. The sense, at least, if not the incommunicable
spirit, of the original, is very well given in Mr. C. H. Wall's version,
which we use.
The story of "Tartuffe" is briefly this: Tartuffe, the hero, is a pure
villain. He mixes no adulteration of good in his composition. He is
hypocrisy itself, the strictly genuine article. Tartuffe has completely
imposed upon one Orgon, a man of wealth and standing. Orgon, with his
wife, and with his mother, in fact, believes in him absolutely. These
people have received the canting rascal into their house, and are about
to bestow upon him their daughter in marriage. The following scene from
act first shows the skill with which Moliere could exhibit, in a few
strokes of bold exaggeration, the infatuation of Orgon's regard for
Tartuffe. Orgon has been absent from home. He returns, and meets
Cleante, his brother, whom, in his eagerness, he begs to excuse his not
answering a question just addressed to him:
_Orgon (to Cleante)._ Brother, pray excuse me: you will kindly allow
me to allay my anxiety by asking news of the family. (_To Dorine, a
maid-servant._) Has every thing gone on well these last two days? What
has happened? How is every body?
_Dor._ The day before yesterday our mistress was very feverish from
morning to night, and suffered from a most extraordinary headache.
_Org._ And Tartuffe?
_Dor._ Tartuffe! He is wonderfully well, stout, and fat with blooming
cheeks and ruddy lips.
_Org._ Poor man!
_Dor._ In the evening she felt very faint, and the pain in her head
was so great that she could not touch any thing at supper.
_Org._ And Tartuffe?
_Dor._ He ate his supper by himself before her, and very devoutly
devoured a brace of partridges and half a leg of mutton hashed.
_Org._ Poor man!
_Dor._ She spent the whole of the night without getting one wink of
sleep: she was very feverish, and we had to sit up with her until the
morning.
_Org._ And Tartuffe?
_Dor._ Overcome by a pleasant sleepiness, he passed from the table to
his room and got at once into his warmed bed, where he slept
comfortably till the next morning.
_Org._ Poor man!
_Dor._ At last, yielding to our persuasions, she consented to be bled,
and immediately felt relieved.
_Org._ And Tartuffe?
_Dor._ He took heart right valiantly, and fortifying his soul against
all evils, to make up for the blood which our lady had lost, drank at
breakfast four large bumpers of wine.
_Org._ Poor man!
_Dor._ Now, at last, they are both well: and I will go and tell our
lady how glad you are to hear of her recovery.
Tartuffe repays the trust and love of his benefactor by making improper
advances to that benefactor's wife. Orgon's son, who does not share his
father's confidence in Tartuffe, happens to be an unseen witness of the
man's infamous conduct. He exposes the hypocrite to Orgon, with the
result of being himself expelled from the house for his pains; while
Tartuffe, in recompense for the injury done to his feelings, is
presented with a gift-deed of Orgon's estate. But now Orgon's wife
contrives to let her husband see and hear for himself the vileness of
Tartuffe. This done, Orgon confronts the villain, and, with just
indignation, orders him out of his house. Tartuffe reminds Orgon that
the shoe is on the other foot; that he is himself now owner there, and
that it is Orgon, instead of Tartuffe, who must go. Orgon has an
interview with his mother, who is exasperatingly sure still that
Tartuffe is a maligned good man:
_Madame Pernelle._ I can never believe, my son, that he would commit
so base an action.
_Org._ What?
_Per._ Good people are always subject to envy.
_Org._ What do you mean, mother?
_Per._ That you live after a strange sort here, and that I am but too
well aware of the ill-will they all bear him.
_Org._ What has this ill-will to do with what I have just told you?
_Per._ I have told it you a hundred times when you were young, that in
this world virtue is ever liable to persecution, and that, although
the envious die, envy never dies.
_Org._ But what has this to do with what has happened to-day?
_Per._ They have concocted a hundred foolish stories against him.
_Org._ I have already told you that I saw it all myself.
_Per._ The malice of evil-disposed persons is very great.
_Org._ You would make me swear, mother! I tell you that I saw his
audacious attempt with my own eyes.
_Per._ Evil tongues have always some venom to pour forth; and here
below, there is nothing proof against them.
_Org._ You are maintaining a very senseless argument. I saw it, I tell
you--saw it with my own eyes! what you can call s-a-w, saw! Must I din
it over and over into your ears, and shout as loud as half a dozen
people?
_Per._ Gracious goodness! appearances often deceive us! We must not
always judge by what we see.
_Org._ I shall go mad!
_Per._ We are by nature prone to judge wrongly, and good is often
mistaken for evil.
_Org._ I ought to look upon his desire of seducing my wife as
charitable?
_Per._ You ought to have good reasons before you accuse another, and
you should have waited till you were quite sure of the fact.
_Org._ Heaven save the mark! how could I be more sure? I suppose,
mother, I ought to have waited till--you will make me say something
foolish.
_Per._ In short, his soul is possessed with too pure a zeal; and I
cannot possibly conceive that he would think of attempting what you
accuse him of.
_Org._ If you were not my mother, I really don't know what I might now
say to you, you make me so savage.
The short remainder of the scene has for its important idea the
suggestion that, under the existing circumstances, some sort of peace
ought to be patched up between Orgon and Tartuffe. Meantime one _Loyal_
is observed coming, whereupon the fourth scene of act fifth opens:
_Loy. (to Dorine at the farther part of the stage)._ Good-day, my dear
sister; pray let me speak to your master.
_Dor._ He is with friends, and I do not think he can see any one just
now.
_Loy._ I would not be intrusive. I feel sure that he will find nothing
unpleasant in my visit; in fact, I come for something which will be
very gratifying to him.
_Dor._ What is your name?
_Loy._ Only tell him that I come from Mr. Tartuffe for his benefit.
_Dor. (to Orgon)._ It is a man who comes in a civil way from Mr.
Tartuffe, on some business which will make you glad, he says.
_Cle. (to Orgon)._ You must see who it is and what the man wants.
_Org. (to Cleante)._ He is coming, perhaps, to settle matters between
us in a friendly way. How, in this case, ought I to behave to him?
_Cle._ Don't show any resentment, and, if he speaks of an agreement,
listen to him.
_Loy. (to Orgon)._ Your servant, sir. May heaven punish whoever wrongs
you; and may it be as favorable to you, sir, as I wish!
_Org. (aside to Cleante)._ This pleasant beginning agrees with my
conjectures, and argues some sort of reconciliation.
_Loy._ All your family was always dear to me, and I served your
father.
_Org._ I am sorry and ashamed to say that I do not know who you are,
neither do I remember your name.
_Loy._ My name is Loyal; I was born in Normandy, and am a royal
bailiff in spite of envy. For the last forty years I have had the good
fortune to fill the office, thanks to heaven, with great credit; and I
come, sir, with your leave, to serve you the writ of a certain order.
_Org._ What! you are here--
_Loy._ Gently, sir, I beg. It is merely a summons--a notice for you to
leave this place, you and yours; to take away all your goods and
chattels, and make room for others, without delay or adjournment, as
hereby decreed.
_Org._ I! leave this place?
_Loy._ Yes, sir, if you please. The house incontestably belongs, as
you are well aware, to the good Mr. Tartuffe. He is now lord and
master of your estates, according to a deed I have in my keeping. It
is in due form, and cannot be challenged.
_Damis (to Mr. Loyal)._ This great impudence is, indeed, worthy of all
admiration.
_Loy. (to Damis.)_ Sir, I have nothing at all to do with you.
(_Pointing to Orgon._) My business is with this gentleman. He is
tractable and gentle, and knows too well the duty of a gentleman to
try to oppose authority.
_Org._ But--
_Loy._ Yes, sir; I know that you would not, for any thing, show
contumacy; and that you will allow me, like a reasonable man, to
execute the orders I have received.
The scene gives in conclusion some spirited byplay of asides and
interruptions from indignant members of the family. Then follows scene
fifth, one exchange of conversation from which will sufficiently
indicate the progress of the plot:
_Org._ Well, mother, you see whether I am right; and you can judge of
the rest by the writ. Do you at last acknowledge his rascality?
_Per._ I am thunderstruck, and can scarcely believe my eyes and ears.
The next scene introduces Valere, the noble lover of that daughter whom
the infatuated father was bent on sacrificing to Tartuffe. Valere comes
to announce that Tartuffe, the villain, has accused Orgon to the king.
Orgon must fly. Valere offers him his own carriage and money--will, in
fact, himself keep him company till he reaches a place of safety. As
Orgon, taking hasty leave of his family, turns to go, he is encountered
by--the following scene will show whom:
_Tar. (stopping Orgon.)_ Gently, sir, gently; not so fast, I beg. You
have not far to go to find a lodging, and you are a prisoner in the
king's name.
_Org._ Wretch! you had reserved this shaft for the last; by it you
finish me, and crown all your perfidies.
_Tar._ Your abuse has no power to disturb me, and I know how to suffer
every thing for the sake of heaven.
_Cle._ Your moderation is really great, we must acknowledge.
_Da._ How impudently the infamous wretch sports with heaven!
_Tar._ Your anger cannot move me. I have no other wish but to fulfill
my duty.
_Marianne._ You may claim great glory from the performance of this
duty: it is a very honorable employment for you.
_Tar._ The employment cannot be otherwise than glorious, when it comes
from the power that sends me here.
_Org._ But do you remember that my charitable hand, ungrateful
scoundrel, raised you from a state of misery?
_Tar._ Yes, I know what help I have received from you; but the
interest of my king is my first duty. The just obligation of this
sacred duty stifles in my heart all other claims; and I would
sacrifice to it friend, wife, relations, and myself with them.
_Elmire._ The impostor!
_Dor._ With what treacherous cunning he makes a cloak of all that men
revere!...
_Tar. (to the Officer)._ I beg of you, sir, to deliver me from all
this noise, and to act according to the orders you have received.
_Officer._ I have certainly put off too long the discharge of my duty,
and you very rightly remind me of it. To execute my order, follow me
immediately to the prison in which a place is assigned to you.
_Tar._ Who? I, sir?
_Officer._ Yes, you.
_Tar._ Why to prison?
_Officer._ To you I have no account to render. (_To Orgon._) Pray,
sir, recover from your great alarm. We live under a king [Louis XIV.]
who is an enemy to fraud--a king who can read the heart, and whom all
the arts of impostors cannot deceive. His great mind, endowed with
delicate discernment, at all times sees things in their true light....
He annuls, by his sovereign will, the terms of the contract by which
you gave him [Tartuffe] your property. He moreover forgives you this
secret offense in which you were involved by the flight of your
friend. This to reward the zeal which you once showed for him in
maintaining his rights, and to prove that his heart, when it is least
expected, knows how to recompense a good action. Merit with him is
never lost, and he remembers good better than evil.
_Dor._ Heaven be thanked!
_Per._ Ah! I breathe again.
_El._ What a favorable end to our troubles!
_Mar._ Who would have foretold it?
_Org. (to Tartuffe as the Officer leads him off)._ Ah, wretch! now you
are--
Tartuffe thus disposed of, the play promptly ends with a vanishing
glimpse afforded us of a happy marriage in prospect for Valere with the
daughter.
"The Tartuffian Age" is the title of a late Italian book admirably
translated into English by an American, Mr. W. A. Nettleton. That such
should be the Italian author's chosen title for his work incidentally
shows how cosmopolitan is our French dramatist's fame. The book is a
kindly-caustic satire on the times in which we live, found by the
satirist to be abundant in the quality of Tartuffe, that leaven of the
Pharisees which is hypocrisy.
Moliere is said to have had a personal aim in drawing the character of
Tartuffe. This, at least, was like Dante. There is not much sweet
laughter in such a comedy. But there is a power that is dreadful.
Each succeeding generation of Frenchmen supplies its bright and
ingenious wits who produce comedy. But as there is no second
Shakespeare, so there is but one Moliere.
VIII.
PASCAL.
1623-1662.
Pascal's fame is distinctly the fame of a man of genius. He achieved
notable things. But it is what he might have done, still more than what
he did, that fixes his estimation in the world of mind. Blaise Pascal is
one of the chief intellectual glories of France.
Pascal, the boy, had a strong natural bent toward mathematics. The story
is that his father, in order to turn his son's whole force on the study
of languages, put out of the lad's reach all books treating his favorite
subject. Thus shut up to his own resources the masterful little fellow,
about his eighth year, drawing charcoal diagrams on the floor, made
perceptible progress in working out geometry for himself. At sixteen he
produced a treatise on conic sections that excited the wonder and
incredulity of Descartes. Later he experimented in barometry, and
pursued investigations in mechanics. Later still he made what seemed to
be approaches toward Newton's binomial theorem.
Vivid religious convictions meantime deeply affected Pascal's mind. His
health, never robust, began to give way. His physicians prescribed
mental diversion, and forced him into society. That medicine, taken at
first with reluctance, proved dangerously delightful to Pascal's
vivacious and susceptible spirit. His pious sister Jacqueline warned her
brother that he was going too far. But he was still more effectively
warned by an accident, in which he almost miraculously escaped from
death. Withdrawing from the world, he adopted a course of ascetic
practices, in which he continued till he died--in his thirty-ninth year.
He wore about his waist an iron girdle armed with sharp points; and this
he would press smartly with his elbow when he detected himself at fault
in his spirit.
Notwithstanding what Pascal did or attempted worthy of fame, in science,
it was his fortune to become chiefly renowned by literary achievement.
His, in fact, would now be a half-forgotten name if he had not written
the "Provincial Letters" and the "Thoughts."
The "Provincial Letters" is an abbreviated title. The title in full
originally was, "Letters written by Louis de Montalte to a Provincial,
one of his friends, and to the Reverend Fathers, the Jesuits, on the
subject of the morality and the policy of those Fathers."
Of the "Provincial Letters," several English translations have been
made. No one of these that we have been able to find seems entirely
satisfactory. There is an elusive quality to Pascal's style, and in
losing this you seem to lose something of Pascal's thought. For with
Pascal the thought and the style penetrate each other inextricably and
almost indistinguishably. You cannot print a smile, an inflection of the
voice, a glance of the eye, a French shrug of the shoulders. And such
modulations of the thought seem everywhere to lurk in the turns and
phrases of Pascal's inimitable French. To translate them is impossible.
Pascal is beyond question the greatest modern master of that
indescribably delicate art in expression, which, from its illustrious
ancient exemplar, has received the name of the Socratic irony. With this
fine weapon, in great part, it was, wielded like a magician's invisible
wand, that Pascal did his memorable execution on the Jesuitical system
of morals and casuistry, in the "Provincial Letters." In great part, we
say; for the flaming moral earnestness of the man could not abide only
to play with his adversaries to the end of the famous dispute. His
lighter cimeter blade he flung aside before he had done, and, toward the
last, brandished a sword that had weight as well as edge and temper. The
skill that could halve a feather in the air with the sword of Saladin
was proved to be also strength that could cleave a suit of mail with the
brand of Richard the Lion-hearted.
It is generally acknowledged that the French language has never in any
hands been a more obedient instrument of intellectual power than it was
in the hands of Pascal. He is rated the earliest writer to produce what
may be called the final French prose. "The creator of French style,"
Villemain boldly calls him. Pascal's style remains to this day almost
perfectly free from adhesions of archaism in diction and in
construction. Pascal showed, as it were at once, what the French
language was capable of doing in response to the demands of a master. It
was the joint achievement of genius, of taste, and of skill, working
together in an exquisite balance and harmony.
But let us be entirely frank. The "Provincial Letters" of Pascal are
now, to the general reader, not so interesting as from their fame one
would seem entitled to expect. You cannot read them intelligently
without considerable previous study. You need to have learned,
imperfectly, with labor, a thousand things that every contemporary
reader of Pascal perfectly knew as if by simply breathing--the necessary
knowledge being then, so to speak, abroad in the air. Even thus you
cannot possibly derive that vivid delight from perusing in bulk the
"Provincial Letters" now, which the successive numbers of the series,
appearing at brief irregular intervals, communicated to the eagerly
expecting French public, at a time when the topics discussed were topics
of a present and pressing practical interest. Still, with whatever
disadvantage unavoidably attending, we must give our readers a taste of
the quality of Pascal's "Provincial Letters."
We select a passage at the commencement of the "Seventh Letter." We use
the translation of Mr. Thomas M'Crie. This succeeds very well in
conveying the sense, though it necessarily fails to convey either the
vivacity or the eloquence, of the incomparable original. The first
occasion of the "Provincial Letters" was a championship proposed to
Pascal to be taken up by him on behalf of his beleaguered and endangered
friend Arnauld, the Port-Royalist. (Port Royal was a Roman Catholic
abbey situated some eight miles to the south-west of Versailles, and
therefore not very remote from Paris.) Arnauld was "for substance of
doctrine" really a Calvinist, though he quite sincerely disclaimed being
such; and it was for his defense of Calvinism (under its ancient form of
Augustinianism) that he was threatened, through Jesuit enmity, with
condemnation for heretical opinion. The problem was to enlist the
sentiment of general society in his favor. The friends in council at
Port Royal said to Pascal, "You must do this." Pascal said, "I will
try." In a few days the first letter of a series destined to such fame
was submitted for judgment to Port Royal, and approved. It was
printed--anonymously. The success was instantaneous and brilliant. A
second letter followed, and a third. Soon, from strict personal defense
of Arnauld, the writer went on to take up a line of offense and
aggression. He carried the war into Africa. He attacked the Jesuits as
teachers of immoral doctrine.
The plan of these later letters was to have a Paris gentleman write to a
friend of his in the country (the "provincial"), detailing interviews
held by him with a Jesuit priest of the city. The supposed Parisian
gentleman in his interviews with the supposed Jesuit father affects the
air of a very simple-hearted seeker after truth. He represents himself
as, by his innocent-seeming docility, leading his Jesuit teacher on to
make the most astonishingly frank exposures of the secrets of the
casuistical system held and taught by his order.
The "Seventh Letter" tells the story of how Jesuit confessors were
instructed to manage their penitents in a matter made immortally famous
by the wit and genius of Pascal, the matter of "directing the
intention." There is nothing in the "Provincial Letters" better suited
than this at the same time to interest the general reader, and to
display the quality of these renowned productions. (We do not scruple to
change our chosen translation a little at points where it seems to us
susceptible of some easy improvement.) Remember it is an imaginary
Parisian gentleman who now writes to a friend of his in the country. Our
extract introduces first the Jesuit father speaking:
"You know," he said, "that the ruling passion of persons in that rank
of life [the rank of gentleman] is 'the point of honor,' which is
perpetually driving them into acts of violence apparently quite at
variance with Christian piety; so that, in fact, they would be almost
all of them excluded from our confessionals, had not our fathers
relaxed a little from the strictness of religion, to accommodate
themselves to the weakness of humanity. Anxious to keep on good terms,
both with the gospel, by doing their duty to God, and with the men of
the world, by showing charity to their neighbor, they needed all the
wisdom they possessed to devise expedients for so nicely adjusting
matters as to permit these gentlemen to adopt the methods usually
resorted to for vindicating their honor without wounding their
consciences, and thus reconcile things apparently so opposite to each
other as piety and the point of honor."...
"I should certainly [so replies M. Montalte, with the most exquisite
irony crouched under a cover of admiring simplicity]--I should
certainly have considered the thing perfectly impracticable, if I had
not known, from what I have seen of your fathers, that they are
capable of doing with ease what is impossible to other men. This led
me to anticipate that they must have discovered some method for
meeting the difficulty--a method which I admire, even before knowing
it, and which I pray you to explain to me."
"Since that is your view of the matter," replied the monk, "I cannot
refuse you. Know, then, that this marvelous principle is our grand
method of _directing the intention_--the importance of which, in our
moral system, is such, that I might almost venture to compare it with
the doctrine of _probability_. You have had some glimpses of it in
passing, from certain maxims which I mentioned to you. For example,
when I was showing you how servants might execute certain troublesome
jobs with a safe conscience, did you not remark that it was simply by
diverting their intention from the evil to which they were accessory,
to the profit which they might reap from the transaction? Now, that is
what we call _directing the intention_. You saw, too, that, were it
not for a similar divergence of _the mind_, those who give money for
benefices might be downright simoniacs. But I will now show you this
grand method in all its glory, as it applies to the subject of
homicide--a crime which it justifies in a thousand instances--in order
that, from this startling result, you may form an idea of all that it
is calculated to effect.
"I foresee already," said I, "that, according to this mode, every
thing will be permitted: it will stick at nothing."
"You always fly from the one extreme to the other," replied the monk;
"prithee, avoid that habit. For just to show you that we are far from
permitting every thing, let me tell you that we never suffer such a
thing as a formal intention to sin, with the sole design of sinning;
and, if any person whatever should persist in having no other end but
evil in the evil that he does, we break with him at once; such conduct
is diabolical. This holds true, without exception of age, sex, or
rank. But when the person is not of such a wretched disposition as
this, we try to put in practice our method of _directing the
intention_, which consists in his proposing to himself, as the end of
his actions, some allowable object. Not that we do not endeavor, as
far as we can, to dissuade men from doing things forbidden; but, when
we cannot prevent the action, we at least purify the motive, and thus
correct the viciousness of the means by the goodness of the end. Such
is the way in which our fathers have contrived to permit those acts of
violence to which men usually resort in vindication of their honor.
They have no more to do than to turn off their intention from the
desire of vengeance, which is criminal, and direct it to a desire to
defend their honor, which, according to us, is quite warrantable. And
in this way our doctors discharge all their duty toward God and
toward man. By permitting the action, they gratify the world and by
purifying the intention, they give satisfaction to the gospel. This is
a secret, sir, which was entirely unknown to the ancients; the world
is indebted for the discovery entirely to our doctors. You understand
it now, I hope?"
"Perfectly," was my reply. "To men you grant the outward material
effect of the action, and to God you give the inward and spiritual
movement of the intention; and, by this equitable partition, you form
an alliance between the laws of God and the laws of men. But, my dear
sir, to be frank with you, I can hardly trust your premises, and I
suspect that your authors will tell another tale."
"You do me injustice," rejoined the monk; "I advance nothing but what
I am ready to prove, and that by such a rich array of passages, that
altogether their number, their authority, and their reasonings, will
fill you with admiration. To show you, for example, the alliance which
our fathers have formed between the maxims of the gospel and those of
the world, by thus regulating the intention, let me refer you to
Reginald. (_In Praxi._, liv. xxi., num. 62, p. 260.) [These, and all
that follow, are verifiable citations from real and undisputed Jesuit
authorities, not to this day repudiated by that order.] 'Private
persons are forbidden to avenge themselves; for St. Paul says to the
Romans (ch. 12th), "Recompense to no man evil for evil;" and
Ecclesiasticus says (ch. 28th), "He that taketh vengeance shall draw
on himself the vengeance of God, and his sins will not be forgotten."
Besides all that is said in the gospel about forgiving offenses, as in
the 6th and 18th chapters of St. Matthew.'"
"Well, father, if after that, he [Reginald] says any thing contrary to
the Scripture, it will, at least, not be from lack of scriptural
knowledge. Pray, how does he conclude?"
"You shall hear," he said. "From all this it appears that a military
man may demand satisfaction on the spot from the person who has
injured him--not, indeed, with the intention of rendering evil for
evil, but with that of preserving his honor--_non ut malum pro malo
reddat, sed ut conservat honorem_. See you how carefully, because the
Scripture condemns it, they guard against the intention of rendering
evil for evil? This is what they will tolerate on no account. Thus
Lessius observes (_De Just._, liv. ii., c. 9, d. 12, n. 79), that, 'If
a man has received a blow on the face, he must on no account have an
intention to avenge himself; but he may lawfully have an intention to
avert infamy, and may, with that view, repel the insult immediately,
even at the point of the sword--_etiam cum gladio_.' So far are we
from permitting any one to cherish the design of taking vengeance on
his enemies, that our fathers will not allow any even to _wish their
death_--by a movement of hatred. 'If your enemy is disposed to injure
you,' says Escobar, 'you have no right to wish his death, by a
movement of hatred; though you may, with a view to save yourself from
harm.' So legitimate, indeed, is this wish, with such an intention,
that our great Hurtado de Mendoza says that 'we may _pray God_ to
visit with speedy death those who are bent on persecuting us, if there
is no other way of escaping from it.'" (In his book, _De Spe_, vol.
ii., d. 15, sec. 4, 48.)
"May it please your reverence," said I, "the Church has forgotten to
insert a petition to that effect among her prayers."
"They have not put every thing into the prayers that one may lawfully
ask of God," answered the monk. "Besides, in the present case, the
thing was impossible, for this same opinion is of more recent standing
than the Breviary. You are not a good chronologist, friend. But, not
to wander from the point, let me request your attention to the
following passage, cited by Diana from Gaspar Hurtado (_De Sub.
Pecc._, diff. 9; Diana, p. 5; tr. 14, r. 99), one of Escobar's
four-and-twenty fathers: 'An incumbent may, without any mortal sin,
desire the decease of a life-renter on his benefice, and a son
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