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William Cleaver Wilkinson

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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 Bruyère; Vauvenargues)

55

VI.

La Fontaine

66

VII.

Molière

76

VIII.

Pascal

91

IX.

Madame de Sévigné

105

X.

Corneille

117

XI.

Racine

127

XII.

Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Massillon, Saurin

137

XIII.

Fénelon

158

XIV.

Le Sage

174

XV.

Montesquieu, Tocqueville

184

XVI.

Voltaire

199

XVII.

Rousseau (St. Pierre)

212

XVIII.

The Encyclopædists

235

XIX.

Madame de Stael

239

XX.

Chateaubriand

248

XXI.

Béranger

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 oïl, yes—severally peculiar to them, and thus to be known respectively as langue d’oc and langue d’oïl. 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’oïl, 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. Provençal is an alternative name of the language.

Side by side with the southern troubadours, or a little later than they, the trouvères of the north sang, with more manly ambition, of national themes, and, like Virgil, of arms and of heroes. Some productions of the trouvères 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 trouvère 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 Béranger 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 Abélard, 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 Hôtel de Rambouillet was one, and the French Academy was the other. The Hôtel 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 Sévigné 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 Hôtel 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 Récamier 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 Hôtel 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, Fénelon, Massillon, Molière, La Fontaine, Boileau, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère—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 Encyclopædists 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 Molière, 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 cyclopædias 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 cyclopædias, or several successive editions of some one cyclopædia, as, for example, the “Encyclopædia 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 mediæval Herodotus. His time is, indeed, almost this side the Middle Ages; but by character and by sympathy he belongs rather to the mediæval 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 Phœbus 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 François 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 Thélème [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 Thélème—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 Thélème 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 æsthetic was the matin réveille 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 père; 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 Cæsar 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 Boëtie is forever associated with the name of Montaigne. La Boëtie 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 Boëtie 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 Boëtie is sometimes now printed with Montaigne’s “Essays,” in French editions of our author’s works; La Boëtie 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 Boëtie’s death, Mr. St. John boldly, and not presumptuously, parallels with the “Phædon” 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 præterita 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 sçai-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 sçai-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 Bruyère: 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 François, 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 Bruyère 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 Bruyère’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 Bruyère 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 Bruyère 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 Bruyère’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 Bruyère 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 Bruyère 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 Bruyère 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 Bruyère 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 Bruyère 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 pensée-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 Château-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 Sablière. 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. Molière, 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 Sablière, 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, Fénelon 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 Æsop and Phædrus. 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.

MOLIÈRE.

1623-1673.

Molière 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? Molière’s works survive, and his greatness may be measured.

We have stinted our praise. Molière 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 Molière.

Molière’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 Molière is rated one of the few greatest producers of literature. Molière’s comedy constitutes to Molière 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, Molière 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 Molière the substance of his dramatic creations. Now and again, if you read Molière 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 Molière.

This character in Molière the writer accords with the character of the man Molière. It might not have seemed natural to say of Molière, as was said of Dante, “There goes the man that has been in hell.” But Molière 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 Molière 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 Æschylus), 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 Molière. Mr. Swinburne might perhaps make the list nine, but he would certainly include Victor Hugo himself.

Curiously enough, Molière 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 Théâtre, it was, twenty years after, recognized by the national title of Théâtre Français. Molière’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. Molière’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—Molière finally married. She led her jealous husband a wretched conjugal life. A peculiarly dark tradition of shame, connected with Molière’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. (Molière, 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 Molière and his wife, confronted with each other in performing the piece.

Despite his faults, Molière 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.

Molière 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 Molière 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 Molière 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 Hôtel de Rambouillet reduced to absurdity. That fashionable affectation Molière made the subject of his comedy, “The Learned Women.”

In the following extracts, Molière 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.

Bélise. 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.

Bél. 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.

Bél. 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.

Bél. 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.

Bél. 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.

Bél. I am of your opinion: whate’er men say is a happy expression.

Arm. I wish I had written it.

Bél. It is worth a whole poem.

Phil. But do you, like me, thoroughly understand the wit of it?

Arm. and Bél. 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.

Bél. 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 Bél. Whate’er men say!

Triss. From out your chamber, decked so gay—

Phil., Arm. and Bél. Chamber decked so gay!

Triss. Where, ingrate vile, with murderous knife—

Phil., Arm., and Bél. That ingrate fever!

Triss. Bold she assails your lovely life.

Triss. Your lovely life!

Arm. and Bél. Ah!

Triss.

What! reckless of your ladyhood,

Still fiercely seeks to shed your blood—

Phil., Arm. and Bél. 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.

Bél. I faint.

Arm. I die from pleasure.

Phil. A thousand sweet thrills seize one.

Arm. When to the baths sometime you’ve brought her.

Bél. 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.

Bél. 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.

Bél. (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 Moliére’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.

Bél. 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.

Bél. 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.

Bél. 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 Précieuses 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 Hôtel 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 précieuse.” Hence at last the term précieuse as a designation of ridicule. Madame de Sévigné was a précieuse. But she, with many of her peers, was too rich in sarcastic common sense to be a précieuse ridicule. Molière 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 Molière’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 Molière’s comedies, is written in rhymed verse. We could not, with any effort, make the English-reading student of Molière 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 Molière 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 Cléante, his brother, whom, in his eagerness, he begs to excuse his not answering a question just addressed to him:

Orgon (to Cléante). 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.

Clé. (to Orgon). You must see who it is and what the man wants.

Org. (to Cléante). He is coming, perhaps, to settle matters between us in a friendly way. How, in this case, ought I to behave to him?

Clé. 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 Cléante). 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 Valère, the noble lover of that daughter whom the infatuated father was bent on sacrificing to Tartuffe. Valère comes to announce that Tartuffe, the villain, has accused Orgon to the king. Orgon must fly. Valère 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.

Clé. 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 Valère 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.

Molière 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 Molière.

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 that of his father, and rejoice when it happens; provided always it is for the sake of the profit that is to accrue from the event, and not from personal aversion.’”

“Good,” cried I. “That is certainly a very happy hit, and I can easily see that the doctrine admits of a wide application. But yet there are certain cases, the solution of which, though of great importance for gentlemen, might present still greater difficulties.”

“Propose such, if you please, that we may see,” said the monk.

“Show me, with all your directing of the intention,” returned I, “that it is allowable to fight a duel.”

“Our great Hurtado de Mendoza,” said the father, “will satisfy you on that point in a twinkling. ‘If a gentleman,’ says he, in a passage cited by Diana, ‘who is challenged to fight a duel, is well known to have no religion, and if the vices to which he is openly and unscrupulously addicted are such as would lead people to conclude, in the event of his refusing to fight, that he is actuated, not by the fear of God, but by cowardice, and induce them to say of him that he was a hen, and not a man—gallina, et non vir; in that case he may, to save his honor, appear at the appointed spot—not, indeed, with the express intention of fighting a duel, but merely with that of defending himself, should the person who challenged him come there unjustly to attack him. His action in this case, viewed by itself, will be perfectly indifferent; for what moral evil is there in one’s stepping into a field, taking a stroll in expectation of meeting a person, and defending one’s self in the event of being attacked? And thus the gentleman is guilty of no sin whatever; for, in fact, it cannot be called accepting a challenge at all, his intention being directed to other circumstances, and the acceptance of a challenge consisting in an express intention to fight, which we are supposing the gentleman never had.’”

The humorous irony of Pascal, in the “Provincial Letters,” plays like the diffusive sheen of an aurora borealis over the whole surface of the composition. It does not often deliver itself startlingly in sudden discharges as of lightning. You need to school your sense somewhat, not to miss a fine effect now and then. Consider the broadness and coarseness in pleasantry, that, before Pascal, had been common, almost universal, in controversy, and you will better understand what a creative touch it was of genius, of feeling, and of taste, that brought into literature the far more than Attic, the ineffable Christian, purity of that wit and humor in the “Provincial Letters” which will make these writings live as long as men anywhere continue to read the productions of past ages. Erasmus, perhaps, came the nearest of all modern predecessors to anticipating the purified pleasantry of Pascal.

It will be interesting and instructive to see Pascal’s own statement of his reasons for adopting the bantering style which he did in the “Provincial Letters,” as well as of the sense of responsibility to be faithful and fair, under which he wrote. Pascal says:

I have been asked why I employed a pleasant, jocose, and diverting style. I reply ... I thought it a duty to write so as to be comprehended by women, and men of the world, that they might know the danger of their maxims and propositions which were then universally propagated.... I have been asked, lastly, if I myself read all the books, which I quoted. I answer, No. If I had done so, I must have passed a great part of my life in reading very bad books; but I read Escobar twice through, and I employed some of my friends in reading the others. But I did not make use of a single passage without having myself read it in the book from which it is cited, without having examined the subject of which it treats, and without having read what went before and followed, so that I might run no risk of quoting an objection as an answer which would have been blameworthy and unfair.

Of the wit of the “Provincial Letters,” their wit and their controversial effectiveness, the specimens given will have afforded readers some approximate idea. We must deny ourselves the gratification of presenting a brief passage, which we had selected and translated for the purpose, to exemplify from the same source Pascal’s serious eloquence. It was Voltaire who said of these productions: “Molière’s best comedies do not excel them in wit, nor the compositions of Bossuet in sublimity.” Something of Bossuet’s sublimity, or of a sublimity perhaps finer than Bossuet’s, our readers will discover in citations to follow from the “Thoughts.”

Pascal’s “Thoughts,” the printed book, has a remarkable history. It was a posthumous publication. The author died, leaving behind him a considerable number of detached fragments of composition, first jottings of thought on a subject that had long occupied his mind. These precious manuscripts were almost undecipherable. The writer had used for his purpose any chance scrap of paper—old wrapping, for example, or margin of letter—that, at the critical moment of happy conception, was nearest his hand. Sentences, words even, were often left unfinished. There was no coherence, no sequence, no arrangement. It was, however, among his friends perfectly well understood that Pascal for years had meditated a work on religion designed to demonstrate the truth of Christianity. For this he had been thinking arduously. Fortunately he had even, in a memorable conversation, sketched his project at some length to his Port Royal friends. With so much, scarcely more, in the way of clew, to guide their editorial work, these friends prepared and issued a volume of Pascal’s “Thoughts.” With the most loyal intentions, the Port-Royalists unwisely edited too much. They pieced out incompletenesses, they provided clauses or sentences of connection, they toned down expressions deemed too bold, they improved Pascal’s style! After having suffered such things from his friends, the posthumous Pascal, later, fell into the hands of an enemy. The infidel Condorcet published an edition of the “Thoughts.” Whereas the Port-Royalists had suppressed to placate the Jesuits, Condorcet suppressed to please the “philosophers.” Between those on the one side and these on the other, Pascal’s “Thoughts” had experienced what might well have killed any production of the human mind that could die. It was not till near the middle of the present century that Cousin called the attention of the world to the fact that we had not yet, but that we still might have, a true edition of Pascal’s “Thoughts.” M. Faugère took the hint, and, consulting the original manuscripts, preserved in the national library at Paris, produced, with infinite editorial labor, almost two hundred years after the thinker’s death, the first satisfactory edition of Pascal’s “Thoughts.” Since Faugère, M. Havet has also published an edition of Pascal’s works entire, by him now first adequately annotated and explained. The arrangement of the “Thoughts” varies in order, according to the varying judgment of editors. We use, for our extracts, a current translation, which we modify at our discretion by comparison of the original text as given in M. Havet’s elaborate work.

Our first extract is a passage in which the writer supposes a skeptic of the more shallow, trifling sort, to speak. This skeptic represents his own state of mind in the following strain as of soliloquy:

“I do not know who put me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I am myself. I am in a frightful ignorance of all things. I do not know what my body is, what my senses are, what my soul is, and that very part of me which thinks what I am saying, which reflects upon every thing and upon itself, and is no better acquainted with itself than with any thing else. I see these appalling spaces of the universe which inclose me, and I find myself tethered in one corner of this immense expansion without knowing why I am stationed in this place rather than in another, or why this moment of time which is given me to live is assigned me at this point rather than at another of the whole eternity that has preceded me, and of that which is to follow me.

“I see nothing but infinities on every side, which inclose me like an atom, and like a shadow which endures but for an instant, and returns no more.

“All that I know is, that I am soon to die; but what I am most ignorant of is, that very death which I am unable to avoid.

“As I know not whence I came, so I know not whither I go; and I know only, that in leaving this world I fall forever either into nothingness or into the hands of an angry God, without knowing which of these two conditions is to be eternally my lot. Such is my state—full of misery, of weakness, and of uncertainty.

“And from all this I conclude that I ought to pass all the days of my life without a thought of trying to learn what is to befall me hereafter. Perhaps in my doubts I might find some enlightenment; but I am unwilling to take the trouble, or go a single step in search of it; and, treating with contempt those who perplex themselves with such solicitude, my purpose is to go forward without forethought and without fear to try the great event, and passively to approach death in uncertainty of the eternity of my future condition.”

Who would desire to have for a friend a man who discourses in this manner? Who would select such a one for the confidant of his affairs? Who would have recourse to such a one in his afflictions? And, in fine, for what use of life could such a man be destined?

The central thought on which the projected apologetic of Pascal was to revolve as on a pivot is, the contrasted greatness and wretchedness of man—with Divine Revelation, in its doctrine of a fall on man’s part from original nobleness, supplying the needed link, and the only link conceivable, of explanation, to unite the one with the other, the human greatness with the human wretchedness. This contrast of dignity and disgrace should constantly be in the mind of the reader of the “Thoughts” of Pascal. It will often be found to throw a very necessary light upon the meaning of the separate fragments that make up the series.

We now present a brief fragment asserting, with vivid metaphor, at the same time the fragility of man’s frame and the majesty of man’s nature. This is a very famous “Thought”:

Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. It is not necessary that the entire universe arm itself to crush him. An exhalation, a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But were the universe to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and knows the advantage that the universe has over him. The universe knows nothing of it.

Our whole dignity consists, then, in thought.

One is reminded of the memorable saying of a celebrated philosopher: “In the universe there is nothing great but man; in man there is nothing great but mind.”

What a sudden, almost ludicrous, reduction in scale, the greatness of Cæsar, as conqueror, is made to suffer when looked at in the way in which Pascal asks you to look at it in the following “Thought”! (Remember that Cæsar, when he began fighting for universal empire, was fifty-one years of age:)

Cæsar was too old, it seems to me, to amuse himself with conquering the world. This amusement was well enough for Augustus or Alexander; they were young people, whom it is difficult to stop; but Cæsar ought to have been more mature.

That is as if you should reverse the tube of your telescope, with the result of seeing the object observed made smaller instead of larger.

The following sentence might be a “Maxim” of La Rochefoucauld. Pascal was, no doubt, a debtor to him as well as to Montaigne:

I lay it down as a fact, that, if all men knew what others say of them there would not be four friends in the world.

Here is one of the most current of Pascal’s sayings:

Rivers are highways that move on and bear us whither we wish to go.

The following “Thought” condenses the substance of the book proposed into three short sentences:

The knowledge of God without that of our misery produces pride. The knowledge of our misery without that of God gives despair. The knowledge of Jesus Christ is intermediate, because therein we find God and our misery.

The prevalent seeming severity and intellectual coldness of Pascal’s “Thoughts” yield to a touch from the heart, and become pathetic, in such utterances as the following, supposed to be addressed by the Saviour to the penitent seeking to be saved:

Console thyself; thou wouldst not seek me if thou hadst not found me.

I thought on thee in my agony; such drops of blood I shed for thee.

It is austerity again, but not unjust austerity, that speaks as follows:

Religion is a thing so great that those who would not take the pains to seek it if it is obscure, should be deprived of it. What do they complain of, then, if it is such that they could find it by seeking it?

But we must take our leave of Pascal. His was a suffering as well as an aspiring spirit. He suffered because he aspired. But, at least, he did not suffer long. He aspired himself quickly away. Toward the last he wrought at a problem in his first favorite study, that of mathematics, and left behind him, as a memorial of his later life, a remarkable result of investigation on the curve called the cycloid. During his final illness he pierced himself through with many sorrows—unnecessary sorrows, sorrows, too, that bore a double edge, hurting not only him, but also his kindred—in practicing, from mistaken religious motives, a hard repression upon his natural instinct to love, and to welcome love. He thought that God should be all, the creature nothing. The thought was half true, but it was half false. God should, indeed, be all. But, in God, the creature also should be something.

In French history—we may say, in the history of the world—if there are few brighter, there also are few purer, fames than the fame of Pascal.

IX.

MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ.

1626-1696.

Of Madame de Sévigné, if it were permitted here to make a pun and a paradox, one might justly and descriptively say that she was not a woman of letters, but only a woman of—letters. For Madame de Sévigné’s addiction to literature was not at all that of an author by profession. She simply wrote admirable private letters in great profusion, and became famous thereby.

Madame de Sévigné’s fame is partly her merit, but it is also partly her good fortune. She was rightly placed to be what she was. This will appear from a sketch of her life, and still more from specimens to be exhibited of her own epistolary writing.

Marie de Rabutin-Chantal was her maiden name. She was born a baroness. She was married, young, a marchioness. First early left an orphan, she was afterward early left a widow—not too early, however, to have become the mother of two children, a son and a daughter. The daughter grew to be the life-long idol of the widowed mother’s heart. The letters she wrote to this daughter, married and living remote from her, compose the greater part of that voluminous epistolary production by which Madame de Sévigné became, without her ever aiming at such a result, or probably ever thinking of it, one of the classics of the French language.

Madame de Sévigné was wealthy as orphan heiress, and she should have been wealthy as widow. But her husband was profligate, and he wasted her substance. She turned out to be a thoroughly capable woman of affairs who managed her property well. During her long and stainless widowhood—her husband fell in a shameful duel when she was but twenty-five years old, and she lived to be seventy—she divided her time between her estate, “The Rocks,” in Brittany, and her residence in Paris. This period was all embraced within the protracted reign of Louis XIV., perhaps upon the whole the most memorable age in the history of France.

Beautiful, and, if not brilliantly beautiful, at least, brilliantly witty, Madame de Sévigné was virtuous—in that chief sense of feminine virtue—amid an almost universal empire of profligacy around her. Her social advantages were unsurpassed, and her social success was equal to her advantages. She had the woman courtier’s supreme triumph in being once led out to dance by the king—her own junior by a dozen years—no vulgar king, remember, but the “great” Louis XIV. Her cynical cousin, himself a writer of power, who had been repulsed in dishonorable proffers of love by the young marchioness during the lifetime of her husband—we mean Count Bussy—says, in a scurrilous work of his, that Madame de Sévigné remarked, on returning to her seat after her dancing-bout with the king, that Louis possessed great qualities, and would certainly obscure the luster of all his predecessors. “I could not help laughing in her face,” the ungallant cousin declared, “seeing what had produced this panegyric.” Probably, indeed, the young woman was pleased. But, whatever may have been her faults or her follies, nothing can rob Madame de Sévigné of the glory that is hers, in having been strong enough in womanly and motherly honor to preserve, against many dazzling temptations, amid general bad example, and even under malignant aspersions, a chaste and spotless name. When it is added that, besides access to the royal court itself, this gifted woman enjoyed the familiar acquaintance of La Rochefoucauld—with other high-bred wits, less famous, not a few—enough will have been said to show that her position was such as to give her talent its best possible chance. The French history of the times of Louis XIV. is hinted in glimpses the most vivid and the most suggestive, throughout the whole series of the letters.

We owe it to our readers (and to Madame de Sévigné no less) first of all to let them see a specimen of the affectionate adulation that this French woman of rank and of fashion, literally in almost every letter of hers, effuses on her daughter—a daughter who, by the way, seems very languidly to have responded to such demonstrations:

The Rocks, Sunday, June 28, 1671.

You have amply made up to me my late losses; I have received two letters from you which have filled me with transports of joy. The pleasure I take in reading them is beyond all imagination. If I have in any way contributed to the improvement of your style, I did it in the thought that I was laboring for the pleasure of others, not for my own. But Providence, who has seen fit to separate us so often, and to place us at such immense distances from each other, has repaid me a little for the privation in the charms of your correspondence, and still more in the satisfaction you express in your situation, and the beauty of your castle; you represent it to me with an air of grandeur and magnificence that enchants me. I once saw a similar account of it by the first Madame de Grignan; but I little thought at that time that all these beauties were to be one day at your command. I am very much obliged to you for having given me so particular an account of it. If I could be tired in reading your letters, it would not only betray a very bad taste in me, but would likewise show that I could have very little love or friendship for you. Divest yourself of the dislike you have taken to circumstantial details. I have often told you, and you ought yourself to feel the truth of this remark, that they are as dear to us from those we love as they are tedious and disagreeable from others. If they are displeasing to us, it is only from the indifference we feel for those who write them. Admitting this observation to be true, I leave you to judge what pleasure yours afford me. It is a fine thing truly to play the great lady, as you do at present.

Conceive the foregoing multiplied by the whole number of the separate letters composing the correspondence, and you will have no exaggerated idea of the display that Madame de Sévigné makes of her regard for her daughter. This regard was a passion, morbid, no doubt, by excess, and, even at that, extravagantly demonstrated; but it was fundamentally sincere. Madame de Sévigné idealized her absent daughter, and literally “loved but only her.” We need not wholly admire such maternal affection. But we should not criticise it too severely.

We choose next a marvelously vivid “instantaneous view” in words, of a court afternoon and evening at Versailles. This letter, too is addressed to the daughter—Madame de Grignan, by her married name. It bears date, “Paris, Wednesday, 29th July.” The year is 1676, and the writer is just fifty:

I was at Versailles last Saturday with the Villarses.... At three the king, the queen, Monsieur [eldest brother to the king], Madame [that brother’s wife], Mademoiselle [that brother’s eldest unmarried daughter], and every thing else which is royal, together with Madame de Montespan [the celebrated mistress of the king] and train, and all the courtiers, and all the ladies—all, in short, which constitutes the court of France, is assembled in the beautiful apartment of the king’s, which you remember. All is furnished divinely, all is magnificent. Such a thing as heat is unknown; you pass from one place to another without the slightest pressure. A game at reversis [the description is of a gambling scene, in which Dangeau figures as a cool and skillful gamester] gives the company a form and a settlement. The king and Madame de Montespan keep a bank together; different tables are occupied by Monsieur, the queen, and Madame de Soubise, Dangeau and party, Langlée and party. Everywhere you see heaps of louis d’ors; they have no other counters. I saw Dangeau play, and thought what fools we all were beside him. He dreams of nothing but what concerns the game; he wins where others lose: he neglects nothing, profits by every thing, never has his attention diverted; in short his science bids defiance to chance. Two hundred thousand francs in ten days, a hundred thousand crowns in a month, these are the pretty memorandums he puts down in his pocket-book. He was kind enough to say that I was partners with him, so that I got an excellent seat. I made my obeisance to the king, as you told me; and he returned it as if I had been young and handsome.... The duke said a thousand kind things without minding a word he uttered. Marshal de Lorgnes attacked me in the name of the Chevalier de Grignan; in short, tutti quanti [the whole company]. You know what it is to get a word from every body you meet. Madame de Montespan talked to me of Bourbon, and asked me how I liked Vichi, and whether the place did me good. She said that Bourbon, instead of curing a pain in one of her knees, injured both.... Her size is reduced by a good half, and yet her complexion, her eyes, and her lips, are as fine as ever. She was dressed all in French point, her hair in a thousand ringlets, the two side ones hanging low on her cheeks, black ribbons on her head, pearls (the same that belonged to Madame de l’Hôpital), the loveliest diamond earrings, three or four bodkins—nothing else on the head; in short a triumphant beauty, worthy the admiration of all the foreign embassadors. She was accused of preventing the whole French nation from seeing the king; she has restored him, you see, to their eyes; and you cannot conceive the joy it has given everybody, and the splendor it has thrown upon the court. This charming confusion, without confusion, of all which is the most select, continues from three till six. If couriers arrive, the king retires a moment to read the despatches and returns. There is always some music going on, to which he listens, and which has an excellent effect. He talks with such of the ladies as are accustomed to enjoy that honor.... At six the carriages are at the door. The king is in one of them with Madame de Montespan, Monsieur and Madame de Thianges, and honest d’Hendicourt in a fool’s paradise on the stool. You know how these open carriages are made; they do not sit face to face, but all looking the same way. The queen occupies another with the princess; and the rest come flocking after, as it may happen. There are then gondolas on the canal, and music; and at ten they come back, and then there is a play; and twelve strikes, and they go to supper; and thus rolls round the Saturday. If I were to tell you how often you were asked after, how many questions were put to me without waiting for answers, how often I neglected to answer, how little they cared, and how much less I did, you would see the iniqua corte [wicked court] before you in all its perfection. However, it never was so pleasant before, and everybody wishes it may last.

There is your picture. Picture, pure and simple, it is—comment none, least of all, moralizing comment. The wish is sighed by “everybody,” that such pleasant things may “last.” Well, they did last the writer’s time. But meanwhile the French revolution was a-preparing. A hundred years later it will come, with its terrible reprisals.

We have gone away from the usual translations to find the foregoing extract in an article published forty years ago and more, in the “Edinburgh Review.” Again we draw from the same source—this time, the description of a visit paid by a company of grand folks, of whom the writer of the letter was one, to an iron-foundery:

Friday, 1st Oct. (1677).

Yesterday evening at Cone we descended into a veritable hell, the true forges of Vulcan. Eight or ten Cyclops were at work, forging, not arms for Æneas, but anchors for ships. You never saw strokes redoubled so justly nor with so admirable a cadence. We stood in the midst of four furnaces; and the demons came passing about us, all melting in sweat, with pale faces, wild-staring eyes, savage mustaches, and hair long and black—a sight enough to frighten less well-bred folks than ourselves. As for me, I could not comprehend the possibility of refusing any thing which these gentlemen, in their hell, might have chosen to exact. We got out at last, by the help of a shower of silver, with which we took care to refresh their souls, and facilitate our exit.

Once more:

Paris, 29th November (1679).

I have been to the wedding of Madame de Louvois. How shall I describe it? Magnificence, illuminations, all France, dresses all gold and brocade, jewels, braziers full of fire, and stands full of flowers, confusions of carriages, cries out of doors, lighted torches, pushings back, people run over; in short, a whirlwind, a distraction; questions without answers, compliments without knowing what is said, civilities without knowing who is spoken to, feet entangled in trains. From the midst of all this issue inquiries after your health, which not being answered as quick as lightning, the inquirers pass on, contented to remain in the state of ignorance and indifference in which they [the inquiries] were made. O vanity of vanities! Pretty little De Mouchy has had the small-pox. O vanity, et cætera!

Yet again. The gay writer has been sobered, perhaps hurt, by a friend’s frankly writing to her, “You are old.” To her daughter:

So you were struck with the expression of Madame de la Fayette, blended with so much friendship. ’Twas a truth, I own, which I ought to have borne in mind; and yet I must confess it astonished me, for I do not yet perceive in myself any such decay. Nevertheless, I cannot help making many reflections and calculations, and I find the conditions of life hard enough. It seems to me that I have been dragged, against my will, to the fatal period when old age must be endured; I see it; I have come to it; and I would fain, if I could help it, not go any farther; not advance a step more in the road of infirmities, of pains, of losses of memory, of disfigurements ready to do me outrage; and I hear a voice which says, “You must go on in spite of yourself; or, if you will not go on, you must die;” and this is another extremity from which nature revolts. Such is the lot, however, of all who advance beyond middle life. What is their resource? To think of the will of God and of universal law, and so restore reason to its place, and be patient. Be you, then, patient accordingly, my dear child, and let not your affection soften into such tears as reason must condemn.

She dates a letter, and recalls that the day was the anniversary of an event in her life:

Paris, Friday, Feb. 5, 1672.

This day thousand years I was married.

Here is a passage with power in it. The great war minister of Louis has died. Madame de Sévigné was now sixty-five years old. The letter is to her cousin Coulanges:

I am so astonished at the news of the sudden death of M. de Louvois, that I am at a loss how to speak of it. Dead, however, he is, this great minister, this potent being, who occupied so great a place; whose personality [le moi], as M. Nicole says, had so wide a sway; who was the center of so many orbs. What affairs had he not to manage! what designs, what projects! what secrets! what interests to unravel, what wars to undertake, what intrigues, what noble games at chess to play and to direct! Ah! my God, grant me a little time; I want to give check to the Duke of Savoy—checkmate to the Prince of Orange. No, no, you shall not have a moment, not a single moment. Are events like these to be talked of? Not they. We must reflect upon them in our closets.

A glimpse of Bourdaloue:

Ah, that Bourdaloue! his sermon on the Passion was, they say, the most perfect thing of the kind that can be imagined; it was the same he preached last year, but revised and altered with the assistance of some of his friends, that it might be wholly inimitable. How can one love God if one never hears him properly spoken of? You must really possess a greater portion of grace than others.

A distinguished caterer or steward, a gentleman described as possessing talent enough to have governed a province, commits suicide on a professional point of honor:

Paris, Sunday, April 26, 1671.

I have just learned from Moreuil of what passed at Chantilly with regard to poor Vatel. I wrote to you last Friday that he had stabbed himself—these are the particulars of the affair: The king arrived there on Thursday night; the walk, and the collation, which was served in a place set apart for the purpose, and strewed with jonquils, were just as they should be. Supper was served; but there was no roast meat at one or two of the tables, on account of Vatel’s having been obliged to provide several dinners more than were expected. This affected his spirits; and he was heard to say several times, “I have lost my honor! I cannot bear this disgrace!” “My head is quite bewildered,” said he to Gourville. “I have not had a wink of sleep these twelve nights; I wish you would assist me in giving orders.” Gourville did all he could to comfort and assist him, but the failure of the roast meat (which, however, did not happen at the king’s table, but at some of the other twenty-five) was always uppermost with him. Gourville mentioned it to the prince [Condé, the great Condé, the king’s host], who went directly to Vatel’s apartment and said to him, “Every thing is extremely well conducted, Vatel; nothing could be more admirable than his majesty’s supper.” “Your highness’s goodness,” replied he, “overwhelms me; I am sensible that there was a deficiency of roast meat at two tables.” “Not at all,” said the prince; “do not perplex yourself, and all will go well.” Midnight came; the fireworks did not succeed; they were covered with a thick cloud; they cost sixteen thousand francs. At four o’clock in the morning Vatel went round and found every body asleep. He met one of the under-purveyors, who was just come in with only two loads of fish. “What!” said he, “is this all?” “Yes, sir,” said the man, not knowing that Vatel had despatched other people to all the seaports around. Vatel waited for some time; the other purveyors did not arrive; his head grew distracted; he thought there was no more fish to be had. He flew to Gourville: “Sir,” said he, “I cannot outlive this disgrace.” Gourville laughed at him. Vatel, however, went to his apartment, and setting the hilt of his sword against the door, after two ineffectual attempts, succeeded, in the third, in forcing his sword through his heart. At that instant the couriers arrived with the fish; Vatel was inquired after to distribute it. They ran to his apartment, knocked at the door, but received no answer; upon which they broke it open, and found him weltering in his blood. A messenger was immediately dispatched to acquaint the prince with what had happened, who was like a man in despair. The duke wept, for his Burgundy journey depended upon Vatel.

The italics here are our own. We felt that we must use them.

Is it not all pathetic? But how exquisitely characteristic of the nation and of the times! “Poor Vatel,” is the extent to which Madame de Sévigné allows herself to go in sympathy. Her heart never bleeds very freely—for anybody except her daughter. Madame de Sévigné’s heart, indeed, we grieve to fear, was somewhat hard.

In another letter, after a long strain as worldly as any one could wish to see, this lively woman thus touches, with a sincerity as unquestionable as the levity is, on the point of personal religion:

But, my dear child, the greatest inclination I have at present is to be a little religious. I plague La Mousse about it every day. I belong neither to God nor to the devil. I am quite weary of such a situation; though, between you and me, I look upon it as the most natural one in the world. I am not the devil’s, because I fear God, and have at the bottom a principle of religion; then, on the other hand, I am not properly God’s, because his law appears hard and irksome to me, and I cannot bring myself to acts of self-denial; so that altogether I am one of those called lukewarm Christians, the great number of whom does not in the least surprise me, for I perfectly understand their sentiments, and the reasons that influence them. However, we are told that this is a state highly displeasing to God; if so, we must get out of it. Alas! this is the difficulty. Was ever any thing so mad as I am, to be thus eternally pestering you with my rhapsodies?

Madame de Sévigné involuntarily becomes a maxim-maker:

The other day I made a maxim off-hand without once thinking of it; and I liked it so well that I fancied I had taken it out of M. de la Rochefoucauld’s. Pray tell me whether it is so or not, for in that case my memory is more to be praised than my judgment. I said, with all the ease in the world, that “ingratitude begets reproach, as acknowledgment begets new favors.” Pray, where did this come from? Have I read it? Did I dream it? Is it my own idea? Nothing can be truer than the thing itself, nor than that I am totally ignorant how I came by it. I found it properly arranged in my brain, and at the end of my tongue.

The partial mother lets her daughter know whom the maxim was meant for. She says, “It is intended for your brother.” This young fellow had, we suspect, been first earning his mother’s “reproaches” for spendthrift habits, and then getting more money from her by “acknowledgment.”

She hears that son of hers read “some chapters out of Rabelais,” “which were enough,” she declares, “to make us die with laughing.” “I cannot affect,” she says, “a prudery which is not natural to me.” No, indeed, a prude this woman was not. She had the strong æsthetic stomach of her time. It is queer to have Rabelais rubbing cheek and jowl with Nicole (“We are going to begin a moral treatise of Nicole’s”), a severe Port-Royalist, in one and the same letter. But this is French; above all, it is Madame de Sévigné. By the way, she and her friends, first and last, “die” a thousand jolly deaths “with laughing.”

A contemporary allusion to “Tartuffe,” with more French manners implied:

The other day La Biglesse played Tartuffe to the life. Being at table, she happened to tell a fib about some trifle or other, which I noticed, and told her of it; she cast her eyes to the ground, and with a very demure air, “Yes, indeed, madam,” said she, “I am the greatest liar in the world; I am very much obliged to you for telling me of it.” We all burst out a-laughing, for it was exactly the tone of Tartuffe—“Yes, brother, I am a wretch, a vessel of iniquity.”

M. de la Rochefoucauld appears often by name in the letters. Here he appears anonymously by his effect:

“Warm affections are never tranquil;” a maxim.

Not a very sapid bit of gnomic wisdom, certainly. We must immediately make up to our readers, on Madame de Sévigné’s behalf, for the insipidity of the foregoing “maxim” of hers, by giving here two or three far more sententious excerpts from the letters, excerpts collected by another:

There may be so great a weight of obligation that there is no way of being delivered from it but by ingratitude.

Long sicknesses wear out grief, and long hopes wear out joy.

Shadow is never long taken for substance; you must be, if you would appear to be. The world is not unjust long.

Madame de Sévigné makes a confession which will comfort readers who may have experienced the same difficulty as that of which she speaks:

I send you M. de Rochefoucauld’s “Maxims,” revised and corrected, with additions; it is a present to you from himself. Some of them I can make shift to guess the meaning of; but there are others, that, to my shame be it spoken, I cannot understand at all. God knows how it will be with you.

What was it changed this woman’s mood to serious? She could not have been hearing Massillon’s celebrated sermon on the “Fewness of the Elect,” for Massillon was yet only a boy of nine years; she may have been reading Pascal’s “Thoughts”—Pascal had been dead ten years, and the “Thoughts” had been published; or she may have been listening to one of those sifting, heart-searching discourses of Bourdaloue—the date of her letter is March 16, 1672, and during the Lent of that year Bourdaloue preached at Versailles—when she wrote somberly as follows:

You ask me if I am as fond of life as ever. I must own to you that I experience mortifications, and severe ones too; but I am still unhappy at the thoughts of death; I consider it so great a misfortune to see the termination of all my pursuits, that I should desire nothing better, if it were practicable, than to begin life again. I find myself engaged in a scene of confusion and trouble; I was embarked in life without my own consent, and know I must leave it again; this distracts me, for how shall I leave it? In what manner? By what door? At what time? In what disposition? Am I to suffer a thousand pains and torments that will make me die in a state of despair? Shall I lose my senses? Am I to die by some sudden accident? How shall I stand with God? What shall I have to offer to him? Will fear and necessity make my peace with him? Shall I have no other sentiment but that of fear? What have I to hope? Am I worthy of heaven? Or have I deserved the torments of hell? Dreadful alternative! Alarming uncertainty! Can there be greater madness than to place our eternal salvation in uncertainty? Yet what is more natural, or can be more easily accounted for, than the foolish manner in which I have spent my life? I am frequently buried in thoughts of this nature, and then death appears so dreadful to me that I hate life more for leading me to it, than I do for all the thorns that are strewed in its way. You will ask me, then, if I would wish to live forever? Far from it; but if I had been consulted, I would very gladly have died in my nurse’s arms; it would have spared me many vexations, and would have insured heaven to me at a very easy rate; but let us talk of something else.

A memorable sarcasm saved for us by Madame de Sévigné, at the very close of one of her letters:

Guilleragues said yesterday that Pelisson abused the privilege men have of being ugly.

Readers familiar with Dickens’s “Tale of Two Cities” will recognize in the following narrative a state of society not unlike that described by the novelist as immediately preceding the French Revolution:

The Archbishop of Rheims, as he returned yesterday from St. Germain, met with a curious adventure. He drove at his usual rate, like a whirlwind. If he thinks himself a great man, his servants think him still greater. They passed through Nanterre, when they met a man on horseback, and in an insolent tone bid him clear the way. The poor man used his utmost endeavors to avoid the danger that threatened him, but his horse proved unmanageable. To make short of it, the coach-and-six turned them both topsy-turvy; but at the same time the coach, too, was completely overturned. In an instant the horse and the man, instead of amusing themselves with having their limbs broken, rose almost miraculously; the man remounted, and galloped away, and is galloping still, for aught I know; while the servants, the archbishop’s coachman, and the archbishop himself at the head of them, cried out, “Stop that villain! stop him! thrash him soundly!” The rage of the archbishop was so great, that afterward, in relating the adventure, he said if he could have caught the rascal he would have broke all his bones, and cut off both his ears.

If such things were done by the aristocracy—and the spiritual aristocracy at that!—in the green tree, what might not be expected from them in the dry? The writer makes no comment—draws no moral. “Adieu, my dear, delightful child. I cannot express my eagerness to see you,” are her next words. She rattles along, three short sentences more, and finishes her letter.

We should still not have done with these letters were we to go on a hundred pages, or two hundred, farther. Readers have already seen truly what Madame de Sévigné is. They have only not seen fully all that she is. And that they would not see short of reading her letters entire. Horace Walpole aspired to do in English for his own time something like what Madame de Sévigné had done in French for hers. In a measure he succeeded. The difference is, that he was imitative and affected, where she was original and genuine.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu must, of course, also be named, as, by her sex, her social position, her talent, and the devotion of her talent, an English analogue to Madame de Sévigné. But these comparisons, and all comparison, leave the French woman without a true parallel, alone in her rank, the most famous letter-writer in the world.

X.

CORNEILLE.

1606-1684.

The two great names in French tragedy are Corneille and Racine. French tragedy is a very different affair from either modern tragedy in English or ancient tragedy in Greek. It comes nearer being Roman epic, such as Lucan wrote Roman epic, dramatized.

Drama is everywhere and always, and this from the nature of things, a highly conventional literary form. But the convention under which French tragedy should be judged, differs, on the one hand, from that which existed for Greek tragedy, and, on the other hand, from that existing for the English. The atmosphere of real life present in English tragedy is absent in French. The quasi-supernatural religious awe that reigned over Greek tragedy, French tragedy does not affect. You miss also in French tragedy the severe simplicity, the self-restraint, the statuesque repose, belonging to the Greek model. Loftiness, grandeur, a loftiness somewhat strained, a grandeur tending to be tumid, an heroic tone sustained at sacrifice of ease and nature—such is the element in which French tragedy lives and flourishes. You must grant your French tragedists this their conventional privilege, or you will not enjoy them. You must grant them this, or you cannot understand them. Resolve that you will like grandiloquence, requiring only that the grandiloquence be good, and on this condition we can promise that you will be pleased with Corneille and Racine. In fact, our readers, we are sure, will find the grandiloquence of these two tragedy-writers so very good that a little will suffice them.

Voltaire in his time impressed himself strongly enough on his countrymen to get accepted by his own generation as an equal third in tragedy with Corneille and Racine. There was then a French triumvirate of tragedists to be paralleled with the triumvirate of the Greeks. Corneille was Æschylus; Racine was Sophocles; and, of course, Euripides had his counterpart in Voltaire. Voltaire has since descended from the tragic throne, and that neat symmetry of trine comparison is spoiled. There is, however, some trace of justice in making Corneille as related to Racine resemble Æschylus as related to Sophocles. Corneille was first, more rugged, loftier; Racine was second, more polished, more severe in taste. Racine had, too, in contrast with Corneille, more of the Euripidean sweetness. In fact, La Bruyère’s celebrated comparison of the two Frenchmen—made, of course, before Voltaire—yoked them, Corneille with Sophocles, Racine with Euripides. Mr. John Morley, however, in his elaborate monograph on Voltaire, remarks: “He [Voltaire] is usually considered to hold the same place relatively to Corneille and Racine that Euripides held relatively to Æschylus and Sophocles.”

It was perhaps not without its influence on the style of Corneille, that a youthful labor of his in authorship was to translate, wholly or partially, the “Pharsalia” of Lucan. His fondness for Lucan, Corneille always retained. This taste on his part, and the rhymed Alexandrines in which he wrote tragedy, may together help account for the hyperheroic style which is Corneille’s great fault. A lady criticised his tragedy, “The Death of Pompey,” by saying: “Very fine, but too many heroes in it.” Corneille’s tragedies generally have, if not too many heroes, at least too much hero, in them. Concerning the historian Gibbon’s habitual pomp of expression, it was once wittily said that nobody could possibly tell the truth in such a style as that. It would be equally near the mark if we should say of Corneille’s chosen mold of verse, that nobody could possibly be simple and natural in that. Molière’s comedy, however, would almost confute us.

Pierre Corneille was born in Rouen. He studied law, and he was admitted to practice as an advocate, like Molière; but, like Molière, he heard and he heeded an inward voice summoning him away from the bar to the stage. Corneille did not, however, like Molière, tread the boards as an actor. He had a lively sense of personal dignity. He was eminently the “lofty, grave tragedian,” in his own esteem. “But I am Pierre Corneille notwithstanding,” he self-respectingly said once, when friends were regretting to him some deficiency of grace in his personal carriage. One can imagine him taking off his hat to himself with unaffected deference.

But this serious genius began dramatic composition with writing comedy. He made several experiments of this kind with no commanding success; but at thirty he wrote the tragedy of “The Cid,” and instantly became famous. His subsequent plays were chiefly on classical subjects. The subject of “The Cid” was drawn from Spanish literature. This was emphatically what has been called an “epoch-making” production. Richelieu’s “Academy,” at the instigation, indeed almost under the dictation, of Richelieu, who was jealous of Corneille, tried to write it down. They succeeded about as Balaam succeeded in prophesying against Israel. “The Cid” triumphed over them, and over the great minister. It established not only Corneille’s fame, but his authority. The man of genius taken alone proved stronger than the men of taste taken together.

For all this, however, our readers would hardly relish “The Cid.” Let us go at once to that tragedy of Corneille’s which, by the general consent of French critics, is the best work of its author, the “Polyeuctes.” The following is the rhetorical climax of praise in which Gaillard, one of the most enlightened of Corneille’s eulogists, arranges the different masterpieces of his author: “’The Cid’ raised Corneille above his rivals; the ‘Horace’ and the ‘Cinna’ above his models; the ‘Polyeuctes’ above himself.” This tragedy will, we doubt not, prove to our readers the most interesting of all the tragedies of Corneille.

“The great Corneille”—to apply the traditionary designation which, besides attributing to our tragedian his conceded general eminence in character and genius, serves also to distinguish him by merit from his younger brother, who wrote very good tragedy—was an illustrious figure at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, that focus of the best literary criticism in France. Corneille reading a play of his to the coterie of wits assembled there under the presidency of ladies whose eyes, as in a kind of tournament of letters, rained influence on authors, and judged the prize of genius, is the subject of a striking picture by a French painter. Corneille read “Polyeuctes” at the Hôtel Rambouillet, and that awful court decided against the play. Corneille, like Michael Angelo, had to a good degree the courage of his own productions: but, in the face of adverse decision so august on his work, he needed encouragement, which happily he did not fail to receive, before he would allow his “Polyeuctes” to be represented. The theatre crowned it with the laurels of victory. It thus fell to Corneille to triumph successively, single-handed, over two great adversary courts of critical appreciation—the Academy of Richelieu and the not less formidable Hôtel de Rambouillet.

The objection raised by the Hôtel de Rambouillet against the “Polyeuctes” was that it made the stage encroach on the prerogative of the pulpit, and preach instead of simply amusing. And, indeed, never, perhaps, since the Greek tragedy, was the theatre made so much to serve the solemn purposes of religion. (We except the miracle and passion plays and the mysteries of the Middle Ages, as not belonging within the just bounds of a comparison like that now made.) Corneille’s final influence was to elevate and purify the French theatre. In his early works, however, he made surprising concessions to the lewd taste in the drama that he found prevailing when he began to write. With whatever amount of genuine religious scruple affecting his conscience—on that point we need not judge the poet—Corneille used, before putting them on the stage, to take his plays to the “Church”—that is, to the priestly hierarchy who constituted the “Church”—that they might be authoritatively judged as to their possible influence on the cause of Christian truth.

In the “Polyeuctes” the motive is religion. Polyeuctes is historic or traditional saint of the Roman Catholic church. His conversion from paganism is the theme of the play. Polyeuctes has a friend Nearchus who is already a Christian convert, and who labors earnestly to make Polyeuctes a proselyte to the faith. Polyeuctes has previously married a noble Roman lady, daughter of Felix, governor of Armenia, in which province the action of the story occurs. (The persecuting Emperor Decius is on the throne of the Roman world.) Paulina married Polyeuctes against her own choice, for she loved Roman Severus better. Her father had put his will upon her, and Paulina had filially obeyed in marrying Polyeuctes. Such are the relations of the different persons of the drama. It will be seen that there is ample room for the play of elevated and tragic passions. Paulina, in fact, is the lofty, the impossible, ideal of wifely and daughterly truth and devotion. Pagan though she is, she is pathetically constant, both to the husband that was forced upon her, and to the father that did the forcing; while still she loves, and cannot but love, the man whom, in spite of her love for him, she, with an act like prolonged suicide, stoically separates from her torn and bleeding heart.

But Severus on his part emulates the nobleness of the woman whom he vainly loves. Learning the true state of the case, he rises to the height of his opportunity for magnanimous behavior, and bids the married pair be happy in a long life together.

A change in the situation occurs, a change due to the changed mood of the father, Felix. Felix learns that Severus is high in imperial favor, and he wishes now that Severus, instead of Polyeuctes, were his son-in-law. A decree of the emperor makes it possible that this preferable alternative may yet be realized. For the emperor has decreed that Christians must be persecuted to the death, and Polyeuctes has been baptized a Christian—though of this Felix will not hear till later.

A solemn sacrifice to the gods is to be celebrated in honor of imperial victories lately won. Felix sends to summon Polyeuctes, his son-in-law. To Felix’s horror, Polyeuctes, with his friend Nearchus, coming to the temple, proceeds in a frenzy of enthusiasm to break and dishonor the images of the gods, proclaiming himself a Christian. In obedience to the imperial decree, Nearchus is hurried to execution, in the sight of his friend, while Polyeuctes is thrown into prison to repent and recant.

“Now is my chance,” muses Felix. “I dare not disobey the emperor to spare Polyeuctes. Besides, with Polyeuctes once out of the way, Severus and Paulina may be husband and wife.”

Polyeuctes in prison hears that his Paulina is coming to see him. With a kind of altruistic nobleness which seems contagious in this play, Polyeuctes resolves that Severus shall come too, and he will resign his wife, soon to be a widow, to the care of his own rival, her Roman lover. First, Polyeuctes and Paulina are alone together—Polyeuctes having, before she arrived, fortified his soul for the conflict with her tears, by singing in his solitude a song of high resolve and of anticipative triumph over his temptation.

The scene between Paulina, exerting all her power to detach Polyeuctes from what she believes to be his folly, and Polyeuctes, on the other hand, rapt to the pitch of martyrdom, exerting all his power to resist his wife, and even to convert her—this scene, we say, is full of noble height and pathos, as pathos and height were possible in the verse which Corneille had to write. Neither struggler in this tragic strife moves the other. Paulina is withdrawing when Severus enters. She addresses her lover severely, but Polyeuctes intervenes to defend him. In a short scene, Polyeuctes, by a sort of last will and testament, bequeaths his wife to his rival, and retires with his guard. Now, Severus and Paulina are alone together. If there was a trace of the false heroic in Polyeuctes’s resignation of his wife to Severus, the effect of that is finely counteracted by the scene which immediately follows between Paulina and Severus. Severus begins doubtfully, staggering, as it were, to firm posture, while he speaks to Paulina. He expresses amazement at the conduct of Polyeuctes. Christians certainly deport themselves strangely, he says. He at length finds himself using the following lover-like language:

As for me, had my destiny become a little earlier propitious and honored my devotion by marriage with you, I should have adored only the splendor of your eyes; of them I should have made my kings; of them I should have made my gods; sooner would I have been reduced to dust, sooner would I have been reduced to ashes, than—

But here Paulina interrupts, and Severus is not permitted to finish his protestation. Her reply is esteemed, and justly esteemed, one of the noblest things in French tragedy—a French critic would be likely to say, the very noblest in tragedy. She says:

Let us break off there; I fear listening too long; I fear lest this warmth which feels your first fires, force on some sequel unworthy of us both. [Voltaire, who edited Corneille with a feeling of freedom toward a national idol comparable to the sturdy independence that animated Johnson in annotating Shakespeare, says of “This warmth which feels your first fires and which forces on a sequel:” “That is badly written, agreed; but the sentiment gets the better of the expression, and what follows is of a beauty of which there had been no example. The Greeks were frigid declaimers in comparison with this passage of Corneille.”] Severus, learn to know Paulina all in all.

My Polyeuctes touches on his last hour; he has but a moment to live; you are the cause of this, though innocently so. I know not if your heart, yielding to your desires, may have dared build any hope on his destruction; but know that there is no death so cruel that to it with firm brow I would not bend my steps, that there are in hell no horrors that I would not endure, rather than soil a glory so pure, rather than espouse, after his sad fate, a man that was in any wise the cause of his death; and if you suppose me of a heart so little sound, the love which I had for you would all turn to hate. You are generous; be so even to the end. My father is in a state to yield every thing to you; he fears you; and I further hazard this saying, that, if he destroys my husband, it is to you that he sacrifices him. Save this unhappy man, use your influence in his favor, exert yourself to become his support. I know that this is much that I ask; but the greater the effort, the greater the glory from it. To preserve a rival of whom you are jealous, that is a trait of virtue which appertains only to you. And if your renown is not motive sufficient, it is much that a woman once so well beloved, and the love of whom perhaps is still capable of touching you, will owe to your great heart the dearest possession that she owns; remember, in short, that you are Severus. Adieu. Decide with yourself alone what you ought to do; if you are not such as I dare to hope that you are, then, in order that I may continue to esteem you, I wish not to know it.

Voltaire, as editor and commentator of Corneille, is freezingly cold. It is difficult not to feel that at heart he was unfriendly to the great tragedist’s fame. His notes often are remorselessly grammatical. “This is not French”; “This is not the right word”; “According to the construction, this should mean so and so—according to the sense it must mean so and so”; “This is hardly intelligible”; “It is a pity that such or such a fault should mar these fine verses”; “An expression for comedy rather than tragedy”—are the kind of remarks with which Voltaire chills the enthusiasm of the reader. It is useless, however, to deny that the criticisms thus made are, many of them, just. Corneille does not belong to the class of the “faultily faultless” writers.

Severus proves equal to Paulina’s noble hopes of him. With a great effort of self-sacrifice, he resolves to intercede for Polyeuctes. This is shown in an interview between Severus and his faithful attendant Fabian. Fabian warns him that he appeals for Polyeuctes at his own peril. Severus loftily replies (and here follows one of the most lauded passages in the play:)

That advice might be good for some common soul. Though he [the Emperor Decius] holds in his hands my life and my fortune, I am yet Severus; and all that mighty power is powerless over my glory, and powerless over my duty. Here honor compels me, and I will satisfy it; whether fate afterward show itself propitious or adverse, perishing glorious I shall perish content.

I will tell thee further, but under confidence, the sect of Christians is not what it is thought to be. They are hated, why I know not; and I see Decius unjust only in this regard. From curiosity I have sought to become acquainted with them. They are regarded as sorcerers taught from hell; and, in this supposition, the punishment of death is visited on secret mysteries which we do not understand. But Eleusinian Ceres and the Good Goddess have their secrets, like those at Rome and in Greece; still we freely tolerate everywhere, their God alone excepted, every kind of god; all the monsters of Egypt have their temples in Rome; our fathers, at their will, made a god of a man; and, their blood in our veins preserving their errors, we fill heaven with all our emperors; but, to speak without disguise of deifications so numerous, the effect is very doubtful of such metamorphoses.

Christians have but one God, absolute master of all, whose mere will does whatever he resolves; but, if I may venture to say what seems to me true, our gods very often agree ill together; and, though their wrath crush me before your eyes, we have a good many of them for them to be true gods. Finally, among the Christians, morals are pure, vices are hated, virtues flourish; they offer prayers on behalf of us who persecute them; and, during all the time since we have tormented them, have they ever been seen mutinous? Have they ever been seen rebellious? Have our princes ever had more faithful soldiers? Fierce in war, they submit themselves to our executioners; and, lions in combat, they die like lambs. I pity them too much not to defend them. Come, let us find Felix; let us commune with his son-in-law; and let us thus, with one single action, gratify at once Paulina, and my glory, and my compassion.

Such is the high heroic style in which pagan Severus resolves and speaks. And thus the fourth act ends.

Felix makes a sad contrast with the high-heartedness which the other characters, most of them, display. He is base enough to suspect that Severus is base enough to be false and treacherous in his act of intercession for Polyeuctes. He imagines he detects a plot against himself to undermine him with the emperor. Voltaire criticises Corneille for giving this sordid character to Felix. He thinks the tragedist might better have let Felix be actuated by zeal for the pagan gods. The mean selfishness that animates the governor, Voltaire regards as below the right tragic pitch. It is the poet himself, no doubt, with that high Roman fashion of his, who, unconsciously to the critic, taught him to make the criticism.

Felix summons Polyeuctes to an interview, and adjures to be a prudent man. Felix at length says, “Adore the gods or die.” “I am a Christian,” simply replies the martyr. “Impious! Adore them, I bid you, or renounce life.” (Here again Voltaire offers one of his refrigerant criticisms: “Renounce life does not advance upon the meaning of die; when one repeats the thought, the expression should be strengthened.”) Paulina meantime has entered to expostulate with Polyeuctes and with her father. Polyeuctes bids her, “Live with Severus.” He says he has revolved the subject, and he is convinced that another love is the sole remedy for her woe. He proceeds in the calmest manner to point out the advantages of the course recommended. Voltaire remarks—justly we are bound to say—that these maxims are here somewhat revolting; the martyr should have had other things to say. On Felix’s final word, “Soldiers, execute the order that I have given,” Paulina exclaims, “Whither are you taking him?” “To death,” says Felix. “To glory,” says Polyeuctes. “Admirable dialogue, and always applauded,” is Voltaire’s note on this.

The tragedy does not end with the martyrdom of Polyeuctes. Paulina becomes a Christian, but remains pagan enough to call her father “barbarous,” in acrimoniously bidding him finish his work by putting his daughter also to death. Severus reproaches Felix for his cruelty, and threatens him with his own enmity. Felix undergoes instantaneous conversion—a miracle of grace which, under the circumstances provided by Corneille, we may excuse Voltaire for laughing at. Paulina is delighted; and Severus asks, “Who would not be touched by a spectacle so tender?”

The tragedy thus comes near ending happily enough to be called a comedy.

Such as the foregoing exhibits him is the father of French tragedy, Corneille, where at his best; where at his worst, he is something so different that you would hardly admit him to be the same man. For never was genius more unequal in different manifestations of itself, than Corneille in his different works. Molière is reported to have said that Corneille had a familiar, or a fairy, that came to him at times, and enabled him to write sublimely; but that, when the poet was left to himself, he could write as poorly as another man.

Corneille produced some thirty-three dramatic pieces in all, but of these not more than six or seven retain their place on the French stage.

Corneille and Bossuet together constitute a kind of rank by themselves among the Dii Majores of the French literary Olympus.

XI.

RACINE.

1639-1699.

Jean Racine was Pierre Corneille reduced to rule. The younger was to the elder somewhat as Sophocles or Euripides was to Æschylus, as Virgil was to Lucretius, as Pope was to Dryden. Nature was more in Corneille, art was more in Racine. Corneille was a pathfinder in literature. He led the way even for Molière still more for Racine. But Racine was as much before Corneille in perfection of art as Corneille was before Racine in audacity of genius. Racine, accordingly, is much more even and uniform than Corneille. Smoothness, polish, ease, grace, sweetness—these, and monotony in these, are the mark of Racine. But if there is, in the latter poet, less to admire, there is also less to forgive. His taste and his judgment were surer than the taste and the judgment of Corneille. He enjoyed, moreover, an inestimable advantage in the life-long friendship of the great critic of his time, Boileau. Boileau was a literary conscience to Racine. He kept Racine constantly spurred to his best endeavors in art. Racine was congratulating himself to his friends on the ease with which he produced his verse. “Let me teach you to produce easy verse with difficulty,” was the critic’s admirable reply. Racine was a docile pupil. He became as painstaking an artist in verse as Boileau would have him.

It will always be a matter of individual taste, and of changing fashion in criticism, to decide which of the two is, on the whole, to be preferred to the other. Racine eclipsed Corneille in vogue during the lifetime of the latter. Corneille’s old age was, perhaps, seriously saddened by the consciousness, which he could not but have, of being retired from the place of ascendency once accorded to him over all. His case repeated the fortune of Æschylus in relation to Sophocles. The eighteenth century, taught by Voltaire, established the precedence of Racine. But the nineteenth century has restored the crown to the brow of Corneille. To such mutations is subject the fame of an author.

Jean Racine was early left an orphan. His grandparents put him, after preparatory training at another establishment, to school at Port Royal, where during three years he had the best opportunities of education that the kingdom afforded. His friends wanted to make a clergyman of him; but the preferences of the boy prevailed, and he addicted himself to literature. The Greek tragedists became familiar to him in his youth, and their example in literary art exercised a sovereign influence over Racine’s development as author. It pained the good Port-Royalists to see their late gifted pupil, now out of their hands, inclined to write plays. Nicole printed a remonstrance against the theater, in which Racine discovered something that he took to slant anonymously at himself. He wrote a spirited reply, of which no notice was taken by the Port-Royalists. Somebody, however, on their behalf, rejoined to Racine, whereupon the young author wrote a second letter to the Port-Royalists, which he showed to his friend Boileau. “This may do credit to your head, but it will do none to your heart,” was that faithful mentor’s comment, in returning the document. Racine suppressed his second letter, and did his best to recall the first. But he went on in his course of writing for the stage.

Racine’s second tragedy, the “Alexander the Great,” the youthful author took to the great Corneille, to get his judgment on it. Corneille was thirty-three years the senior of Racine, and he was at this time the undisputed master of French tragedy. “You have undoubted talent for poetry—for tragedy, not; try your hand in some other poetical line,” was Corneille’s sentence on the unrecognized young rival, who was so soon to supplant him in popular favor.

It was a pretty, girlish fancy of the brilliant Princess Henriette (that same daughter of English Charles I., Bossuet’s funeral oration on whom, presently to be spoken of, is so celebrated) to engage the two great tragedists, Corneille and Racine, both at once, in labor, without their mutual knowledge, upon the same subject—a subject which she herself, drawing it from the history of Tacitus, conceived to be eminently fit for tragical treatment. Corneille produced his “Berenice” and Racine his “Titus and Berenice.” The princess died before the two plays which she had inspired were produced; but, when they were produced, Racine’s work won the palm. The rivalry created a bitterness between the two authors, of which, naturally, the defeated one tasted the more deeply. An ill-considered pleasantry, too, of Racine’s, in making out of one of Corneille’s tragic lines in his “Cid,” a comic line for “The Suitors,” hurt the old man’s pride. That pride suffered a worse hurt still. The chief Parisian theater, completely occupied with the works of his victorious rival, rejected tragedies offered by Corneille.

Still, Racine did not have things all his own way. Some good critics considered the rage for this younger dramatist a mere passing whim of fashion. These—Madame de Sévigné was of them—stood by their “old admiration,” and were true to Corneille.

A memorable mortification and chagrin for our poet was now prepared by his enemies—he seems never to have lacked enemies—with lavish and elaborate malice. Racine had produced a play from Euripides, the “Phædra,” on which he had unstintingly bestowed his best genius and his best art. It was contrived that another poet, one Pradon, should, at the self-same moment, have a play represented on the self-same subject. At a cost of many thousands of dollars, the best seats at Racine’s theater were all bought by his enemies, and left solidly vacant. The best seats at Pradon’s theater were all bought by the same interested parties, and duly occupied with industrious and zealous applauders. This occurred at six successive representations. The result was the immediate apparent triumph of Pradon over the humiliated Racine. Boileau in vain bade his friend be of good cheer, and await the assured reversal of the verdict. Racine was deeply wounded.

This discomposing experience of the poet’s, joined with conscientious misgivings on his part as to the propriety of his course in writing for the stage, led him now, at the early age of thirty-eight, to renounce tragedy altogether. His son Louis, from whose life of Racine we have chiefly drawn our material for the present sketch, conceives this change in his father as a profound and genuine religious conversion. Writers whose spirit inclines them not to relish a condemnation such as seems thus to be reflected on the theater take a less charitable view of the change. They account for it as a reaction of mortified pride. Some of them go so far as groundlessly to impute sheer hypocrisy to Racine.

A long interval of silence, on Racine’s part, had elapsed, when Madame de Maintenon, the wife of Louis XIV., asked the unemployed poet to prepare a sacred play for the use of the high-born girls educated under her care at St. Cyr. Racine consented, and produced his “Esther.” This achieved a prodigious success; for the court took it up, and an exercise written for a girls’ school became the admiration of a kingdom. A second similar play followed, the “Athaliah”—the last, and, by general agreement, the most perfect work of its author. We thus reach that tragedy of Racine’s which both its fame and its character dictate to us as the one by eminence to be used here in exhibition of the quality of this Virgil among tragedists.

Our readers may, if they please, refresh their recollection of the history on which the drama is founded by perusing Second Kings, chapter eleven, and Second Chronicles, chapters twenty-two and twenty-three. Athaliah, whose name gives its title to the tragedy, was daughter to the wicked king, Ahab. She reigns as queen at Jerusalem over the kingdom of Judah. To secure her usurped position, she had sought to kill all the descendants of King David, even her own grandchildren. She had succeeded, but not quite. Young Joash escaped, to be secretly reared in the temple by the high-priest. The final disclosure of this hidden prince, and his coronation as king in place of usurping Athalia, destined to be fearfully overthrown, and put to death in his name, afford the action of the play. Action, however, there is almost none in classic French tragedy. The tragic drama is, with the French, as it was with the Greeks, after whom it was framed, merely a succession of scenes in which speeches are made by the actors. Lofty declamation is always the character of the play. In the “Athalia,” as in the “Esther,” Racine introduced the feature of the chorus, a restoration which had all the effect of an innovation. The chorus in “Athalia” consisted of Hebrew virgins, who at intervals marking the transitions between the acts, chanted the spirit of the piece in its successive stages of progress toward the final catastrophe. The “Athalia” is almost proof against technical criticism. It is acknowledged to be, after its kind, a nearly ideal product of art.

First, in specimen of the choral feature of the drama, we content ourselves with giving a single chorus from the “Athalia.” This we turn into rhyme, clinging pretty closely all the way to the form of the original. Attentive readers may, in one place of our rendering, observe an instance of identical rhyme. This, in a piece of verse originally written in English, would, of course, be a fault. In translation from French, it may pass for a merit; since, to judge from the practice of the national poets, the French ear seems to be even better pleased with such strict identities of sound, at the close of corresponding lines, than it is with those definite, mere resemblances to which, in English versification, rhymes are rigidly limited.

Suspense between hope and dread, dread preponderating, is the state of feeling represented in the present chorus. Salomith is the leading singer:

Salomith.

The Lord hath deigned to speak,

But what he to his prophet now hath shown—

Who unto us will make it clearly known?

Arms he himself to save us, poor and weak?

Arms he himself to have us overthrown?

The whole Chorus.

O promises! O threats! O mystery profound!

What woe, what weal, are each in turn foretold?

How can so much of wrath be found

So much of love to enfold?

A Voice.

Zion shall be no more; a cruel flame

Will all her ornaments devour.

A Second Voice.

God shelters Zion; she has shield and tower

In his eternal name.

First Voice.

I see her splendor all from vision disappear.

Second Voice.

I see on every side her glory shine more clear.

First Voice.

Into a deep abyss is Zion sunk from sight.

Second Voice.

Zion lifts up her brow amid celestial light.

First Voice.

What dire despair!

Second Voice.

What praise from every tongue!

First Voice.

What cries of grief!

Second Voice.

What songs of triumph sung!

A Third Voice.

Cease we to vex ourselves; our God, one day,

Will this great mystery make clear.

All Three Voices.

Let us his wrath revere,

While on his love, no less, our hopes we stay.

The catastrophe is reached in the coronation of little Joash as king, and in the destruction of usurping and wicked Athaliah. Little Joash, by the way, with his rather precocious wisdom of reply, derived to himself for the moment a certain factitious interest, from the resemblance, meant by the poet to be divined by spectators, between him and the little Duke of Burgundy, Louis XIV.’s grandson, then of about the same age with the Hebrew boy, and of high reputation for mental vivacity.

The scene in which the high-priest, Jehoiada, for the first time discloses to his foster-son, Joash, the latter’s royal descent from David, and his true heirship to the throne of Judah, will serve sufficiently to exhibit what maturity of modest and pious wisdom the dramatist attributes to this Hebrew boy of nine or ten years. Nine or ten years of age Racine makes Joash, instead of seven, as Scripture interpreted without violence would make him. The lad has had his sage curiosity excited by seeing preparations in progress for some important ceremonial. That ceremonial is his own coronation, but he does not guess the secret. Nay, he has just touchingly asked his foster-mother, observed by him to be in tears:

What pity touches you? Is it that, in a holocaust to be this day offered, I, like Jephtha’s daughter in other times, must pacify by my death the anger of the Lord? Alas, a son has nothing that does not belong to his father!

The discreet foster-mother refers the lad to her husband, Jehoiada, now approaching. Joash rushes into the arms of the high-priest, exclaiming, “My father!” “Well, my son?” the high-priest replies. “What preparations, then, are these?” asks Joash. The high-priest bids him prepare himself to listen and learn, the time being now come for him to pay his debt to God:

Joash. I feel myself ready, if he wishes it, to give to him my life.

Jehoiada. You have often heard read the history of our kings. Do you remember, my son, what strict laws a king worthy of the crown ought to impose upon himself?

Joash. A wise and good king, so hath God himself declared, puts not his reliance upon riches and gold; he fears the Lord his God, has ever before him his precepts, his laws, his judgments severe, and does not with unjust burdens overwhelm his brethren.

Fénelon had already been two years preceptor to the Duke of Burgundy when this tragedy was written. It is impossible not to feel that Racine must have had that prince in mind when he put into the mouth of young Joash sentiments so likely to have been instilled into the heart of his royal pupil, the great king’s grandson, by such a preceptor as Fénelon. How could the selfish old monarch of France contrive to avoid recognizing his own portrait suggested by contrast in that description of the good king from the lips of little Joash? Racine was here treading on treacherous ground. He will presently find his footing quite give way under him, to let him down into the “horrible pit” of disgrace with his king. This not, however, in the present play.

The tragedist has generously bestowed upon wicked Queen Athaliah a certain loftiness of spirit which, in its display in the final catastrophe, almost redeems her to admiration, if not to sympathy. There is nothing in the play more nearly sublime in declamation than the final speech in which Athaliah greets her own doom, and blasphemously forecasts, for young King Joash, a future of apostasy from God. With this admirable piece of rhetoric, resembling a burst of blasphemy from Satan in “Paradise Lost,” so far as French poetry may be allowed to resemble English, we conclude our representation of Racine. Athaliah has now just heard the announcement of things that assure her of the overthrow of her usurpation. She expresses herself in a speech, the first words of which were, no doubt, designed by the poet to recall the celebrated traditional exclamation of Julian the Apostate, uttered at a moment of irretrievable disaster to his impious hopes—“O Galilean, thou hast conquered!” as follows:

God of the Jews, ’tis thou that dost prevail!

Ay, it is Joash; all without avail

Seek I to cheat myself with other thought:

I know the wound my weapon on him wrought;

I see his father Ahaziah’s face;

Naught but brings back to me that hated race.

David doth triumph, Ahab only fall—

Unpitying God, thou only hast done all!

’Tis thou that, flattering me to hope in vain

For easy vengeance, o’er and o’er again

Hast with myself myself embroiled anew,

Now pangs of conscience rousing, not a few,

Now dazzling me with thy rich treasures rare,

Which I to burn or pillage did not dare.

Let him, then, reign, this son, thy care, thy toil,

And, so to signalize his new-got spoil,

Let him into my bosom plunge the knife,

And take with filial hand his mother’s life.

Hearken what wish for him she dying breathes—

Wish? nay, what hope, assured hope, bequeaths—

That, disobedient, proud, rebellious, he,

Faithful to Ahab’s blood received from me,

To his grandfather, to his father, like,

Abhorrent heir of David, down may strike

Thy worship and thy fane, avenger fell

Of Athaliah, Ahab, Jezebel!

With words thus rendered into such English verse as we could command for the purpose, Athaliah disappears from the stage. Her execution follows immediately. This is not exhibited, but is announced with brief, solemn comment from Jehoiada. And so the tragedy ends.

The interest of the piece, to the modern reader, is by no means equal to its fame. One reproaches one’s self, but one yawns in conscientiously perusing it. Still, one feels the work of the author to be irreproachably, nay, consummately, good. But fashions in taste change; and we cannot hold ourselves responsible for admiring, or, at any rate, for enjoying, according to the judgment of other races and of former generations. It is—so, with grave concurrence, we say—It is a great classic, worthy of the praise that it receives. We are glad that we have read it; and, let us be candid, equally glad that we have not to read it again.

As has already been intimated, Racine, after “Athaliah,” wrote tragedy no more. He ceased to interest himself in the fortune of his plays. His son “Louis,” in his Life of his father, testifies that he never heard his father speak in the family of the dramas that he had written. His theatrical triumphs seemed to afford him no pleasure. He repented of them rather than gloried in them.

While one need not doubt that this regret of Racine’s for the devotion of his powers to the production of tragedy was a sincere regret of his conscience, one may properly wish that the regret had been more heroic. The fact is, Racine was somewhat feminine in character as well as in genius. He could not beat up with stout heart undismayed against an adverse wind. And the wind blew adverse at length to Racine, from the principal quarter, the court of Versailles. From being a chief favorite with his sovereign, Racine fell into the position of an exile from the royal presence. The immediate occasion was one honorable rather than otherwise to the poet.

In conversation with Madame de Maintenon, Racine had expressed views on the state of France, and on the duties of a king to his subjects, which so impressed her mind that she desired him to reduce his observations to writing and confide them to her, she promising to keep them profoundly secret from Louis. But Louis surprised her with the manuscript in her hand. Taking it from her, he read in it, and demanded to know the author. Madame de Maintenon could not finally refuse to tell. “Does M. Racine, because he is a great poet, think that he knows every thing?” the despot angrily asked. Louis never spoke to Racine again. The distressed and infatuated poet still made some paltry request of the king—to experience the humiliation that he invoked. His request was not granted. Racine wilted, like a tender plant, under the sultry frown of his monarch. He could not rally. He soon after died, literally killed by the mere displeasure of one man. Such was the measureless power wielded by Louis XIV.; such was the want of virile stuff in Racine. A spirit partly kindred to the tragedist, Archbishop Fénelon, will presently be shown to have had at about the same time a partly similar experience.

XII.

BOSSUET: 1627-1704; BOURDALOUE: 1632-1704; MASSILLON: 1663-1742; SAURIN: 1677-1730.

We group four names in one title, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Massillon, Saurin, to represent the pulpit orators of France. There are other great names—as Fléchier and Claude—but the names we choose are the greatest.

Bossuet’s individual distinction is, that he was a great man as well as a great orator; Bourdaloue’s, that he was priest-and-preacher simply; Massillon’s, that his sermons, regarded quite independently of their subject, their matter, their occasion, regarded merely as masterpieces of style, became at once, and permanently became, a part of French literature; Saurin’s, that he was the pulpit theologian of Protestantism.

The greatness of Bossuet is an article in the French national creed. No Frenchman disputes it; no Frenchman, indeed, but proclaims it. Protestant agrees with Catholic, infidel with Christian, at least in this. Bossuet, twinned here with Corneille, is to the Frenchman, as Milton is to the Englishman, his synonym for sublimity. Eloquence, somehow, seems a thing too near the common human level to answer fully the need that Frenchmen feel in speaking of Bossuet. Bossuet is not eloquent, he is sublime. That in French it is in equal part oratory, while in English it is poetry almost alone, that supplies in literature its satisfaction to the sentiment of the sublime, very well represents the difference in genius between the two races. The French idea of poetry is eloquence; and it is eloquence carried to its height, whether in verse or in prose, that constitutes for the Frenchman sublimity. The difference is a difference of blood. English blood is Teutonic in base, and the imagination of the Teuton is poetic. French blood, in base, is Celtic; and the imagination of the Celt is oratoric.

Jacques Bénigne Bossuet was of good bourgeois, or middle-class, stock. He passed a well-ordered and virtuous youth, as if in prophetic consistency with what was to be his subsequent career. He was brought forward while a young man in the Hôtel de Rambouillet, where, on a certain occasion, he preached a kind of show sermon, under the auspices of his admiring patron. In due time he attracted wide public attention, not merely as an eloquent orator, but as a profound student and as a powerful controversialist. His character and influence became in their maturity such that La Bruyère aptly called him a “Father of the Church.” “The Corneille of the pulpit,” was Henri Martin’s characterization and praise. A third phrase, “the eagle of Meaux,” has passed into almost an alternative name for Bossuet. He soared like an eagle in his eloquence, and he was bishop of Meaux.

Bossuet and Louis XIV. were exactly suited to each other, in the mutual relation of subject and sovereign. Bossuet preached sincerely—as every body knows Louis sincerely practiced—the doctrine of the divine right of kings to rule absolutely. But the proud prelate compromised neither his own dignity nor the dignity of the Church in the presence of the absolute monarch.

Bossuet threw himself with great zeal, and to prodigious effect, into the controversy against Protestantism. His “History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches,” in two good volumes, was one of the mightiest pamphlets ever written. As tutor to the Dauphin (the king’s eldest son), he produced, with other works, his celebrated “Discourse on Universal History.”

In proceeding now to give, from the four great preachers named in our title, a few specimen passages of the most famous pulpit oratory in the world, we need to prepare our readers against a natural disappointment. That which they are about to see has nothing in it of what will at first strike them as brilliant. The pulpit eloquence of the Augustan age of France was distinctly “classic,” and not at all “romantic,” in style. Its character is not ornate, but severe. There is little rhetorical figure in it, little of that “illustration” which our own different national taste is accustomed to demand from the pulpit. There is plenty of white light, “dry light” and white, for the reason; but there is almost no bright color for the fancy, and, it must be added, not a great deal of melting warmth for the heart.

The funeral orations of Bossuet are generally esteemed the masterpieces of this orator’s eloquence. He had great occasions, and he was great to match them. Still, readers might easily be disappointed in perusing a funeral oration of Bossuet’s. The discourse will generally be found to deal in commonplaces of description, of reflection, and of sentiment. Those commonplaces, however, are often made very impressive by the lofty, the magisterial, the imperial manner of the preacher in treating them. We exhibit a specimen, a single specimen only, and a brief one, in the majestic exordium to the funeral oration on the Princess Henrietta of England.

This princess was daughter to that unfortunate Stuart, King Charles I. of England. Her mother’s death—her mother was of the French house of Bourbon—had occurred but a short time before, and Bossuet had on that occasion pronounced the eulogy. The daughter, scarcely returned to France from a secret mission of state to England, the success of which made her an object of distinguished regard at Versailles, suddenly fell ill and died. Bossuet was summoned to preach at her funeral. (We have not been able to find an English translation of Bossuet, and we accordingly make the present transfer from French ourselves. We do the same, for the same reason, in the case of Massillon. In the case of Bourdaloue, we succeeded in obtaining a printed translation which we could modify to suit our purpose.) Bossuet:

It was then reserved for my lot to pay this funereal tribute to the high and potent princess, Henrietta of England, Duchess of Orleans. She whom I had seen so attentive while I was discharging a like office for the queen, her mother, was so soon after to be the subject of a similar discourse, and my sad voice was predestined to this melancholy service. O vanity! O nothingness! O mortals! ignorant of their destiny! Ten months ago would she have believed it? And you, my hearers, would you have thought, while she was shedding so many tears in this place, that she was so soon to assemble you here to deplore her own loss? O princess! the worthy object of the admiration of two great kingdoms, was it not enough that England should deplore your absence, without being yet further compelled to deplore your death? France, who with so much joy beheld you again, surrounded with a new brilliancy, had she not in reserve other pomps and other triumphs for you, returned from that famous voyage whence you had brought hither so much glory, and hopes so fair? “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” Nothing is left for me to say but that: that is the only sentiment which, in presence of so strange a casualty, grief so well-grounded and so poignant permits me to indulge. Nor have I explored the Holy Scriptures in order to find therein some text which I might apply to this princess; I have taken, without premeditation and without choice, the first expression presented to me by the Preacher with whom vanity, although it has been so often named, is yet, to my mind, not named often enough to suit the purpose that I have in view. I wish, in a single misfortune, to lament all the calamities of the human race, and in a single death to exhibit the death and the nothingness of all human greatness. This text, which suits all the circumstances and all the occurrences of our life, becomes, by a special adaptedness, appropriate to my mournful theme; since never were the vanities of the earth either so clearly disclosed or so openly confounded. No, after what we have just seen, health is but a name, life is but a dream, glory is but a shadow, charms and pleasures are but a dangerous diversion. Every thing is vain within us, except the sincere acknowledgment made before God of our vanity, and the fixed judgment of the mind, leading us to despise all that we are.

But did I speak the truth? Man, whom God made in his own image, is he but a shadow? That which Jesus Christ came from heaven to earth to seek, that which he deemed that he could, without degrading himself, ransom with his own blood, is that a mere nothing? Let us acknowledge our mistake; surely this sad spectacle of the vanity of things human was leading us astray, and public hope, baffled suddenly by the death of this princess, was urging us too far. It must not be permitted to man to despise himself entirely, lest he, supposing, in common with the wicked, that our life is but a game in which chance reigns, take his way without rule and without self-control, at the pleasure of his own blind wishes. It is for this reason that the Preacher, after having commenced his inspired production by the expression which I have cited, after having filled all its pages with contempt for things human, is pleased at last to show man something more substantial by saying to him, “Fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.” Thus every thing is vain in man, if we regard what he gives to the world: but, on the contrary, every thing is important, if we consider what he owes to God. Once again: every thing is vain in man, if we regard the course of his mortal life; but every thing is of value, every thing is important, if we contemplate the goal where it ends, and the account of it which he must render. Let us, therefore, meditate to-day, in presence of this altar and of this tomb, the first and the last utterance of the Preacher; of which the one shows the nothingness of man, the other establishes his greatness. Let this tomb convince us of our nothingness, provided that this altar, where is daily offered for us a Victim of price so great, teach us at the same time our dignity. The princess whom we weep shall be a faithful witness, both of the one and of the other. Let us survey that which a sudden death has taken away from her; let us survey that which a holy death has bestowed upon her. Thus shall we learn to despise that which she quitted without regret, in order to attach all our regard to that which she embraced with so much ardor—when her soul, purified from all earthly sentiments, full of the heaven on whose border she touched, saw the light completely revealed. Such are the truths which I have to treat, and which I have deemed worthy to be proposed to so great a prince, and to the most illustrious assembly in the world.

It will be felt how removed is the foregoing from any thing like an effort, on the preacher’s part, to startle his audience with the far-fetched and unexpected. It must, however, be admitted that Bossuet was not always—as, of our Webster, it has well been said that he always was—superior to the temptation to exaggerate an occasion by pomps of rhetoric. Bossuet was a great man, but he was not quite great enough to be wholly free from pride of self-consciousness in matching himself as an orator against “the most illustrious assembly in the world.”

The ordinary sermons of Bossuet are less read, and they perhaps less deserve to be read, than those of Bourdaloue and Massillon.

Bourdaloue was a voice. He was the voice of one crying, not in the wilderness, but amid the homes and haunts of men, and, by eminence, in the court of the most powerful and most splendid of earthly monarchs. He was a Jesuit; one of the most devoted and most accomplished of an order filled with devoted and accomplished men. It belonged to his Jesuit character and Jesuit training that Bourdaloue should hold the place that he did, as ever-successful courtier at Versailles, all the while that, as preacher, he was using the “holy freedom of the pulpit” to launch those blank fulminations of his at sin in high places, at sin even in the highest, and all the briefer while that, as confessor to Madame de Maintenon, he was influencing the policy of Louis XIV.

No scandal of any sort attaches to the reputation of Louis Bourdaloue. He was a man of spotless fame—unless it be a spot on his fame that he could please the most selfish of sinful monarchs well enough to be that monarch’s chosen preacher during a longer time than any other pulpit orator whatever was tolerated at Versailles. He is described by all who knew him as a man of gracious spirit. If he did not reprobate and denounce the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, that was rather of the age than of Bourdaloue.

Sainte-Beuve, in a remarkably sympathetic appreciation of Bourdaloue—free, contrary to the critic’s wont, from hostile insinuation even—regards it as part of the merit of this preacher that there is, and that there can be, no biography of him. His public life is summed up in simply saying that he was a preacher. During thirty-four laborious and fruitful years he preached the doctrines of the Church; and this is the sole account to be given of him, except, indeed, that in the confessional he was, all that time, learning those secrets of the human heart which he used to such effect in composing his sermons. He had very suave and winning ways as confessor, though he enjoined great strictness as preacher. This led a witty woman of his time to say of him: “Father Bourdaloue charges high in the pulpit, but he sells cheap in the confessional.” How much laxity he allowed as confessor, it is, of course, impossible to say. But his sermons remain to show that, though indeed he was severe and high in requirement as preacher, he did not fail to soften asperity by insisting on the goodness, while he insisted on the awfulness, of God. Still, it cannot be denied that somehow the elaborate compliments which, as an established convention of his pulpit, he not infrequently delivered to Louis XIV., tended powerfully to make it appear that his stern denunciation of sin, which at first blush might seem directly leveled at the king, had in reality no application at all, or but the very gentlest application, to the particular case of his Most Christian Majesty.

We begin our citations from Bourdaloue with an extract from a sermon of his on “A Perverted Conscience.” The whole discourse is one well worth the study of any reader. It is a piece of searching psychological analysis, and pungent application to conscience. Bourdaloue, in his sermons, has always the air of a man seriously intent on producing practical results. There are no false motions. Every swaying of the preacher’s weapon is a blow, and every blow is a hit. There is hardly another example in homiletic literature of such compactness, such solidity, such logical consecutiveness, such cogency, such freedom from surplusage. Tare and tret are excluded. Every thing counts. You meet with two or three adjectives, and you at first naturally assume, that, after the usual manner of homilists, Bourdaloue has thrown these in without rigorously definite purpose, simply to heighten a general effect. Not at all. There follows a development of the preacher’s thought, constituting virtually a distinct justification of each adjective employed. You soon learn that there is no random, no waste, in this man’s words. But here is the promised extract from the sermon on “A Perverted Conscience.” In it Bourdaloue depresses his gun, and discharges it point-blank at the audience before him. You can almost imagine you see the ranks of “the great” laid low. Alas! one fears that, instead of biting the dust, those courtiers, with the king in the midst of them to set the example, only cried bravo in their hearts at the skill of the gunner:

I have said more particularly that in the world in which you live—-I mean the court—the disease of a perverted conscience is far more common, and far more difficult to be avoided; and I am sure that in this you will agree with me. For it is at the court that the passions bear sway, that desires are more ardent, that self-interest is keener, and that, by infallible consequence, self-blinding is more easy, and consciences, even the most enlightened and the most upright, become gradually perverted. It is at the court that the goddess of the world, I mean fortune, exercises over the minds of men, and in consequence over their consciences, a more absolute dominion. It is at the court that the aim to maintain one’s self, the impatience to raise one’s self, the frenzy to push one’s self, the fear of displeasing, the desire of making one’s self agreeable, produce consciences which anywhere else would pass for monstrous, but which, finding themselves there authorized by custom, seem to have acquired a right of possession and of prescription. People, from living at court, and from no other cause than having lived there, are filled with these errors. Whatever uprightness of conscience they may have brought thither, by breathing its air and by hearing its language they are habituated to iniquity, they come to have less horror of vice, and, after having long blamed it, a thousand times condemned it, they at last behold it with a more favorable eye, tolerate it, excuse it; that is to say, without observing what is happening, they make over their consciences, and, by insensible steps, from Christian, which they were, by little and little become quite worldly, and not far from pagan.

What could surpass the adaptedness of such preaching as that to the need of the moment for which it was prepared? And how did the libertine French monarch contrive to escape the force of truth like the following, with which the preacher immediately proceeds?

You would say, and it really seems, that for the court there are other principles of religion than for the rest of the world, and that the courtier has a right to make for himself a conscience different in kind and in quality from that of other men; for such is the prevailing idea of the matter—an idea well sustained, or rather unfortunately justified, by experience.... Nevertheless, my dear hearers, St. Paul assures us, that there is but one God and one faith; and woe to the man who dividing him, this one God, shall represent him as at court less an enemy to human transgressions than he is outside of the court; or, severing this one faith, shall suppose it in the case of one class more indulgent than in the case of another.

Bourdaloue, as Jesuit, could not but feel the power of Pascal, in his “Provincial Letters,” constantly undermining the authority of his order. His preaching, as Sainte-Beuve well says, may be considered to have been, in the preacher’s intention, one prolonged confutation of Pascal’s immortal indictment. We borrow of Sainte-Beuve a short extract from Bourdaloue’s sermon on slander, which may serve as an instance to show with what adroitness the Jesuit retorted anonymously upon the Jansenist:

Behold one of the abuses of our time. Means have been found to consecrate slander, to change it into a virtue, and even into one of the holiest virtues—-that means is, zeal for the glory of God.... We must humble those people, is the cry; and it is for the good of the Church to tarnish their reputation and to diminish their credit. That idea becomes, as it were, a principle; the conscience is fashioned accordingly, and there is nothing that is not permissible to a motive so noble. You fabricate, you exaggerate, you give things a poisonous taint, you tell but half the truth; you make your prejudices stand for indisputable facts; you spread abroad a hundred falsehoods; you confound what is individual with what is general; what one man has said that is bad, you pretend that all have said; and what many have said that is good, you pretend that nobody has said; and all that once again for the glory of God. For such direction of the intention justifies all that. Such direction of the intention will not suffice to justify a prevarication, but it is more than sufficient to justify calumny, provided only you are convinced that you are serving God thereby.

In conclusion, we give a passage or two of Bourdaloue’s sermon on “An Eternity of Woe.” Stanch orthodoxy the reader will find here. President Edwards’s discourse, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” is not more unflinching. But what a relief of contrasted sweetness does Bourdaloue interpose in the first part of the ensuing extract, to set off the grim and grisly horror of that which is to follow! We draw, for this case, from a translation, issued in Dublin under Roman Catholic auspices, of select sermons by Bourdaloue. The translator, throughout his volume, has been highly loyal in spirit toward the great French preacher; but this has not prevented much enfeebling by him of the style of his original, to which we here do what we can to restore the tone:

There are some just, fervent, perfect souls, who, like children in the house of the Heavenly Father, strive to please and possess him, in order only to possess and to love him; and who, incessantly animated by this unselfish motive, inviolably adhere to his divine precepts, and lay it down as a rigorous and unalterable rule, to obey the least intimation of his will. They serve him with an affection entirely filial. But there are also dastards, worldlings, sinners, terrestrial and sensual men, who are scarcely susceptible of any other impressions than those of the judgments and vengeance of God. Talk to them of his greatness, of his perfections, of his benefits, or even of his rewards, and they will hardly listen to you; and, if they are prevailed upon to pay some attention and respect to your words, these will sound in their ears, but not reach their hearts.... Therefore, to move them, to stir them up, to awaken them from the lethargic sleep with which they are overwhelmed, the thunder of divine wrath and the decree that condemns them to eternal flames must be dinned into their ears: “Depart from me, ye accursed, into everlasting fire” (Matt. xxv). Make them consider attentively, and represent to them with all the force of grace, the consequences and horror of this word “eternal.”...

It is not imagination, it is pure reason and intelligence, that now in Bourdaloue goes about the business of impressing the thought of the dreadfulness of an eternity of woe. The effect produced is not that of the lightning-flash suddenly revealing the jaws agape of an unfathomable abyss directly before you. It is rather that of steady, intolerable pressure gradually applied to crush, to annihilate, the soul:

... Struck with horror at so doleful a destiny, I apply to this eternity all the powers of my mind; I examine and scrutinize it in all its parts; and I survey, as it were, its whole dimensions. Moreover, to express it in more lively colors, and to represent it in my mind more conformably to the senses and the human understanding, I borrow comparisons from the Fathers of the Church, and I make, if I may so speak, the same computations. I figure to myself all the stars of the firmament; to this innumerable multitude I add all the drops of water in the bosom of the ocean; and if this be not enough, I reckon, or at least endeavor to reckon, all the grains of sand on its shore. Then I interrogate myself, I reason with myself, and I put to myself the question: If I had for as many ages, and a thousand times as many, undergone torments in that glowing fire which is kindled by the breath of the Lord in his anger to take eternal vengeance, would eternity be at an end? No; and why? Because it is eternity, and eternity is endless. To number up the stars that shine in the heavens, to count the drops of water that compose the sea, to tell the grains of sand that lie upon the shore, is not absolutely impossible; but to measure in eternity the number of days, of years, of ages, is what cannot be compassed, because the days, the years, and the ages are without number; or to speak more properly, because in eternity there are neither days, nor years, nor ages, but a single endless, infinite duration.

To this thought I devote my mind. I imagine I see and rove through this same eternity, and discover no end, but find it to be always a boundless tract. I imagine that the wide prospect lies open on all sides, and encompasses me around: that if I rise up or if I sink down, or what way soever I turn my eyes, this eternity meets them; and that after a thousand efforts to get forward I have made no progress, but find it still eternity. I imagine that after long revolutions of time, I behold in the midst of this eternity a damned soul, in the same state, in the same affliction, in the same misery still; and putting myself mentally in the place of this soul, I imagine that in this eternal punishment I feel myself continually devoured by that fire which nothing extinguishes; that I continually shed those floods of tears which nothing can dry up; that I am continually gnawed by the worm of conscience, which never dies; that I continually express my despair and anguish by that gnashing of teeth, and those lamentable cries, which never can move the compassion of God. This idea of myself, this representation, amazes and terrifies me. My whole body shudders, I tremble with fear, I am filled with horror, I have the same feelings as the royal prophet when he cried, “Pierce thou my flesh with thy fear, for I am afraid of thy judgments.”

That was a touching tribute from the elder to the younger—tribute touching, whether wrung, perforce, from a proudly humble, or freely offered by a simply magnanimous heart—when, like John the Baptist speaking of Jesus, Bourdaloue, growing old, said of Massillon, enjoying his swiftly crescent renown: “He must increase, and I must decrease.” It was a true presentiment of the comparative fortune of fame that impended for these two men. It was not, however, in the same path, but in a different, that Massillon outran Bourdaloue. In his own sphere, that of unimpassioned appeal to reason and to conscience, Bourdaloue is still without a rival. No one else, certainly, ever earned, so well as he, the double title which his epigrammatic countrymen were once fond of bestowing upon him—“The king of preachers, and the preacher of kings.”

Jean Baptiste Massillon became priest by his own internal sense of vocation to the office, against the preference of his family that he should become, like his father, a notary. He seems to have been by nature sincerely modest in spirit. He had to be forced into the publicity of a preaching career at Paris. His ecclesiastical superior peremptorily required at his hands the sacrifice of his wish to be obscure. He at once filled Paris with his fame. The inevitable consequence followed. He was summoned to preach before the king at Versailles. Here he received, as probably he deserved, that celebrated compliment in epigram from Louis XIV.: “In hearing some preachers, I feel pleased with them; in hearing you, I feel displeased with myself.”

It must not, however, be supposed that Massillon preached like a prophet Nathan saying to King David, “Thou art the man”; or like a John the Baptist saying to King Herod, “It is not lawful for thee to have her”; or like a John Knox denouncing Queen Mary. Massillon, if he was stern, was suavely stern. He complimented the king. The sword with which he wounded was wreathed with flowers. It is difficult not to feel that some unspoken understanding subsisted between the preacher and the king, which permitted the king to separate the preacher from the man, when Massillon used that great plainness of speech to his sovereign. The king did not, however, often invite this master of eloquence to make the royal conscience displacent with itself. Bourdaloue was ostensibly as outspoken as Massillon; but somehow that Jesuit preacher contented the king to be his hearer during as many as ten annual seasons, against the one or two only that Massillon preached at court before Louis.

The work of Massillon generally judged, though according to Sainte-Beuve not wisely judged, to be his choicest, is contained in that volume of his which goes by the name of “Le Petit Carême”—literally, “The Little Lent”—a collection of sermons preached during a Lent before the king’s great-grandson and successor, youthful Louis XV. These sermons especially have given to their author a fame that is his by a title perhaps absolutely unique in literature. We know no other instance of a writer, limited in his production strictly to sermons, who holds his place in the first rank of authorship simply by virtue of supreme mastership in literary style.

Still, from the text of his printed discourses—admirable, exquisite, ideal compositions in point of form as these are—it will be found impossible to conceive adequately the living eloquence of Massillon. There are interesting traditions of the effects produced by particular passages of particular sermons of his. When Louis XIV. died, Massillon preached his funeral sermon. He began with that celebrated single sentence of exordium which, it is said, brought his whole audience, by instantaneous, simultaneous impulse, in a body to their feet. The modern reader will experience some difficulty in comprehending at once why that perfectly commonplace-seeming expression of the preacher should have produced an effect so powerful. The element of the opportune, the apposite, the fit, is always great part of the secret of eloquence. Nothing more absolutely appropriate can be conceived than was the sentiment, the exclamation, with which Massillon opened that funeral sermon. The image and symbol of earthly greatness, in the person of Louis XIV., had been shattered under the touch of iconoclast death. “God only is great!” said the preacher; and all was said. Those four short words had uttered completely, and with a simplicity incapable of being surpassed, the thought that usurped every breast. It is not the surprise of some striking new thought that is the most eloquent thing. The most eloquent thing is the surprise of that one word, suddenly spoken, which completely expresses some thought, present already and uppermost, but silent till now, awaiting expression, in a multitude of minds. This most eloquent thing it was which, from Massillon’s lips that day, moved his susceptible audience to rise, like one man, and bow in mute act of submission to the truth of his words. The inventive and curious reader may exercise his ingenuity at leisure. He will strive in vain to conceive any other exordium than Massillon’s that would have matched the occasion presented.

There is an admirable anecdote of the pulpit, which—though since often otherwise applied—had, perhaps, its first application to Massillon. Some one congratulating the orator, as he came down from his pulpit, on the eloquence of the sermon just preached, that wise self-knower fenced by replying, “Ah, the devil has already apprised me of that!” The recluse celibate preacher was one day asked whence he derived that marvelous knowledge which he displayed of the passions, the weaknesses, the follies, the sins, of human nature. “From my own heart,” was his reply. Source sufficient, perhaps; but from the confessional, too, one may confidently add.

There is probably no better brief, quotable passage to represent Massillon at his imaginative highest in eloquence, than that most celebrated one of all, occurring toward the close of his memorable sermon on the “Fewness of the Elect.” The effect attending the delivery of this passage, on both of the two recorded occasions on which the sermon was preached, is reported to have been remarkable. The manner of the orator—downcast, as with the inward oppression of the same solemnity that he, in speaking, cast like a spell on the audience—indefinitely heightened the magical power of the awful conception excited. Not Bourdaloue himself, with that preternatural skill of his to probe the conscience of man to its innermost secret, could have exceeded the heart-searching rigor with which, in the earlier part of the discourse, Massillon had put to the rack the quivering consciences of his hearers. The terrors of the Lord, the shadows of the world to come, were thus already on all hearts. So much as this, Bourdaloue, too, with his incomparable dialectic, could have accomplished. But there immediately follows a culmination in power, such as was distinctly beyond the height of Bourdaloue. Genius must be super-added to talent if you would have the supreme, either in poetry or in eloquence. There was an extreme point in Massillon’s discourses at which mere reason, having done, and done terribly, its utmost, was fain to confess that it could not go a single step farther. At that extreme point, suddenly, inexhaustible imagination took up the part of exhausted reason. Reason had made men afraid; imagination now appalled them. Massillon said:

I confine myself to you, my brethren, who are gathered here. I speak no longer of the rest of mankind. I look at you as if you were the only ones on the earth; and here is the thought that seizes me, and that terrifies me. I make the supposition that this is your last hour, and the end of the world; that the heavens are about to open above your heads, that Jesus Christ is to appear in his glory in the midst of this sanctuary, and that you are gathered here only to wait for him, and as trembling criminals on whom is to be pronounced either a sentence of grace or a decree of eternal death. For, vainly do you flatter yourselves; you will die such in character as you are to-day. All those impulses toward change with which you amuse yourselves, you will amuse yourselves with them down to the bed of death. Such is the experience of all generations. The only thing new you will then find in yourselves will be, perhaps, a reckoning a trifle larger than that which you would to-day have to render; and according to what you would be if you were this moment to be judged, you may almost determine what will befall you at the termination of your life.

Now I ask you, and I ask it smitten with terror, not separating in this matter my lot from yours, and putting myself into the same frame of mind into which I desire you to come—I ask you, then, If Jesus Christ were to appear in this sanctuary, in the midst of this assembly, the most illustrious in the world, to pass judgment on us, to draw the dread line of distinction between the goats and the sheep, do you believe that the majority of all of us who are here would be set on his right hand? Do you believe that things would even be equal? Nay, do you believe there would be found so many as the ten righteous men whom anciently the Lord could not find in five whole cities? I put the question to you, but you know not; I know not myself. Thou only, O my God, knowest those that belong to thee! But if we know not those who belong to him, at least we know that sinners do not belong to him. Now, of what classes of persons do the professing Christians in this assembly consist? Titles and dignities must be counted for naught; of these you shall be stripped before Jesus Christ. Who make up this assembly? Sinners, in great number, who do not wish to be converted; in still greater number, sinners who would like it, but who put off their conversion; many others who would be converted, only to relapse into sin; finally, a multitude who think they have no need of conversion. You have thus made up the company of the reprobate. Cut off these four classes of sinners from this sacred assembly, for they will be be cut off from it at the great day! Stand forth now, ye righteous! where are you? Remnant of Israel, pass to the right hand! True wheat of Jesus Christ, disengage yourselves from this chaff, doomed to the fire! O God! where are thine elect? and what remains there for thy portion?

Brethren, our perdition is well nigh assured, and we do not give it a thought. Even if in that dread separation which one day shall be made, there were to be but a single sinner out of this assembly found on the side of the reprobate, and if a voice from heaven should come to give us assurance of the fact in this sanctuary, without pointing out the person intended, who among us would not fear that he might himself be the wretch? Who among us would not at once recoil upon his conscience, to inquire whether his sins had not deserved that penalty? Who among us would not, seized with dismay, ask of Jesus Christ, as did once the apostles, “Lord, is it I?”

What is there wanting in such eloquence as the foregoing? Wherein lies its deficiency of power to penetrate and subdue? Voltaire avowed that he found the sermons of Massillon to be among “the most agreeable books we have in our language. I love,” he went on, “to have them read to me at table.” There are things in Massillon that Voltaire should not have delighted to read, or to hear read—things that should have made him wince and revolt, if they did not make him yield and be converted. Was there fault in the preacher? Did he preach with professional, rather than with personal, zeal? Did his hearers feel themselves secretly acquitted by the man, at the self-same moment at which they were openly condemned by the preacher? It is impossible to say. But Massillon’s virtue was not lofty and regal; however it may have been free from just reproach. He was somewhat too capable of compliance. He was made bishop of Clermont, and his promotion cost him the anguish of having to help consecrate a scandalously unfit candidate as archbishop of Cambray. Massillon’s, however, is a fair, if not an absolutely spotless, fame. Hierarch as he was, and orthodox Catholic, this most elegant of eloquent orators had a liberal strain in his blood which allied him politically with the “philosophers” of the time succeeding. He, with Fénelon, and perhaps with Racine, makes seem less abrupt the transition in France from the age of absolutism to the age of revolt and final revolution. There is distinct advance in Massillon, and advance more than is accounted for by his somewhat later time, toward the easier modern spirit in Church and in State, from the high, unbending austerity of that antique pontiff and minister, Bossuet.

In dealing with Saurin we are irresistibly reminded of the train of historic misfortunes that age after age have visited France. It bears eloquent, if tragic testimony to the enduring noble qualities of the French people, that they have survived so splendidly so much national suicide. What other great nation is there that has continued great and spilled so often her own best blood? The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, with its sequel of frightful hemorrhage in the loss to France of her Huguenots, the guillotine of the Revolution, the decimations of Napoleon, the madness of the Franco-German war, the Commune!

To such reflections we are forced; for Jacques Saurin preached his great sermons in French as a compulsory exile from France. He had a year or two’s experience as French preacher in London; but from his twenty-eighth year till he died at fifty-two he was pastor of the French church at The Hague in Holland.

Saurin’s living renown was great; and his renown has never been less, though it has been less resounding, since he died. This is as it could not but be; for the reputation of Saurin as preacher rested from the first on solid foundations that were not to be shaken. If he had been a loyal Roman Catholic, he would have been twinned with Bossuet, whom he somewhat resembles, in the acclamations of general fame. It is far more in name than in merit that Bossuet surpasses him. Bossuet’s quasi-pontifical relation to the Gallican Church indeed engaged him in various activities which seemed to display a talent in him correspondingly more various than that of Saurin, who remained almost exclusively a preacher. But the difference is probably a difference of fortune rather than a difference of original gift. The intellect that expresses itself in Saurin’s sermons is certainly a spacious intellect. Saurin is in mere intellect as distinctly “great” as is Bossuet. In imagination, however, that attribute of genius as distinguished from talent, to Bossuet we suppose must be accorded superiority over Saurin.

Clearness, French clearness; order, French order; solidity of matter; sobriety of thought; soundness of doctrine; breadth of comprehension; sagacity and instructedness of interpretation; solemnity of inculcation; progress and cumulation of effect; strength and elevation, rather than grace and winningness, of style; address to the understanding, rather than appeal to the emotions; certitude of logic, rather than play of imagination; a theological, more than a practical, tendency of interest—such are the distinguishing characteristics of Saurin as preacher.

Sermons are literary products in which change from fashion to fashion of thought and of form makes itself felt more than in almost any other kind of literature. The sermons of one age are generally doomed to be obsolete in the age next following. But to this general rule Saurin’s sermons come near constituting an exception. They might, many of them, perhaps most of them, still be preached. This, certain pulpit plagiarists of a generation or two ago, are said to have learned.

The following extract will give our readers an idea how Saurin, toward the close of a discourse—having now done, for the occasion, with dispassionate argument—would follow up and press his hearer with deliberately vehement, unescapable oratoric harangue and appeal. His text is: “Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world.” Analyzing this, he states thus his second head of discourse: “Motives to virtue are superior to motives to vice.”

What [under the first head] I affirmed of all known truth, that its force is irresistible, I affirm, on the same principle, of all motives to virtue: the most hardened sinners cannot resist them if they attend to them; there is no other way of becoming insensible to them than to turn the eyes away from them....

And where is the man so blinded as to digest the falsehoods which the motives to vice imply? Where is the wretch desperate enough to reason in this manner:

“I love to be esteemed; I will, therefore, devote myself exclusively to acquiring the esteem of those men who, like me, will in a few days be devoured by worms, and whose ashes will in a few days, like my own, be mixed with the dust of the earth; but I will not take the least pains to obtain the approbation of those noble intelligences, of those sublime spirits, of those angels, of those seraphims, who are without ceasing around the throne of God; I will not take the least pains to have a share in those praises with which the great God will one day, in the sight of heaven and of earth, crown those who have been faithful to him.

“I love glory; I will therefore apply myself exclusively to make the world say of me: That man has a taste quite exceptional in dress, his table is delicately served, there has never been either base blood or plebeian marriage in his family, nobody offends him with impunity, he permits none but a respectful approach; but I will never take the least pains to make envy itself say of me: That man fears God, he prefers his duty above all other things, he thinks there is more magnanimity in forgiving an affront than in revenging it, in being holy than in being noble in the world’s esteem, and so on.

“I am very fond of pleasure; I will therefore give myself wholly up to gratify my senses, to lead a voluptuous life, to have the spectacle follow the feast, debauchery the spectacle, and so on; but I will never take the least pains to secure that fullness of joy which is at God’s right hand, that river of pleasure whereof he gives to drink to those who put their trust under the shadow of his wings.

“I hate constraint and trouble; I will apply myself therefore exclusively to escape the idea of emotions of penitence, above all, the idea of prison cells, of exile, of the rack, of the stake; but I will brave the chains of darkness with their weight, the demons with their fury, hell with its torments, eternity with its horrors. I have made my decision; I consent to curse eternally the day of my birth, to look eternally upon annihilation as a blessing beyond price, to seek eternally for death without being able to find it, to vomit eternally blasphemies against my Creator, to hear eternally the howlings of the damned, to howl eternally with them, and to be eternally, like them, the object of that sentence, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.” Once more, Where is the wretch desperate enough to digest these propositions? Yet these are the motives to vice.

To illustrate the point-blank directness, the almost excessive fidelity, amounting to something very like truculence, with which Saurin would train his guns and fire his broadsides into the faces and eyes of his hearers, let the following, our final citation, serve; we quote from the conclusion to a powerful sermon on infidelity:

Let us here put a period to this discourse. We turn to you, my brethren.... You congratulate yourselves for the most part,... on detesting infidelity, and on respecting religion. But shall we tell you, my brethren, how odious soever the men are whom we have just been describing, we know of others more odious still. There is a restriction in the judgment which the prophet pronounces on the first, when he calls them, in the words of my text, the most foolish and the most brutish among the people; and there are men who surpass them in brutality and in extravagance.

Do not think we exceed the truth of the matter, or that we are endeavoring to obtain your attention by paradoxes. In all good faith, I speak as I think, I find more refinement, and even, if I may venture to say so, a less fund of corruption in men who, having resolved to abandon themselves to the torrent of their passions, strive to persuade themselves, either that there is no God in heaven, or that he pays no attention to what men do on earth; than in those who, believing in a God who sees them and heeds them, live as if they believed nothing of the sort. Infidels were not able to support, in their excesses, the idea of a benefactor outraged, of a Supreme Judge provoked to anger, of an eternal salvation neglected, of a hell braved, a lake burning with fire and brimstone, and smoke ascending up for ever and ever. It was necessary, in order to give free course to their passions it was necessary for them to put far away from their eyes these terrifying objects, and to efface from their minds these overwhelming truths.

But you, you who believe that there is a God in heaven, you who believe yourselves under his eye, and who insult him without remorse and without repentance, you who believe that this God holds the thunderbolt in his hand to crush sinners, and who live in sin, you who believe that there are devouring flames and chains of darkness, and who brave their horrors, you who believe the soul immortal, and who concern yourselves only with time; what forehead, what forehead of brass, is the one you wear!

One thing in just qualification of the praise due to Saurin for his pulpit eloquence requires to be added. When he attempts the figure of apostrophe, as he frequently does, personifying inanimate objects and addressing them in the way of oratoric appeal, he is very apt to produce a frigid effect, the absolute opposite of genuine eloquence. Nothing but imagination white-hot with passion justifies, in the use of the orator, the expedient of such apostrophe as this which Saurin affects. With Saurin, both the necessary imagination and the necessary passion seem somehow to fail; and he possessed neither the perfect judgment nor the perfect taste, nor yet the fine feeling, that might have chastised the audacities to which his ambition incited him. His rhetorically bold things he did in a certain cold-blooded way; so that, with him, what should have been the climax of oratoric effectiveness, or else not been at all, produces sometimes instead a reaction and recoil of disappointment. We thus indicate a shortcoming in Saurin which deposes this great preacher, one is compelled to admit, despite his remarkable merits, from the first into the second rank of orators.

Both the Roman Catholic and the Protestant lines of French pulpit eloquence are continued down to our own day. Lacordaire, Père Félix, Père Hyacinthe, of the Catholics, Frédéric Monod, Adolph Monod, Coquerel, of the Protestants, are names worthy to be here set down; and it may be added that Eugène Bersier, deceased in 1889, challenges on the whole not unequal comparison with the men treated in this chapter for pulpit power. He may be described as a kind of nineteenth-century Bossuet, tempered to Massillon, among French Protestant preachers.

But there is no Louis XIV. now to cast over any great preachers, even of the Roman Catholics, the illusive, factitious, reflected glory of the person and court, the sentence and seal, of the “most illustrious sovereign of the world.”

The seventeenth-century sacred eloquence of France, the sacred eloquence, that is to say, of the “great” French age, will always remain a unique tradition in the history of the pulpit.

XIII.

FÉNELON.

1651-1715.

If Bossuet is to Frenchmen a synonym for sublimity, no less to them is Fénelon a synonym for saintliness. From the French point of view, one might say, “the sublime Bossuet,” “the saintly Fénelon,” somewhat as one says, “the learned Selden,” “the judicious Hooker.” It is as much a French delight to idealize Fénelon an archangel Raphael, affable and mild, as it is to glorify Bossuet a Michael in majesty and power.

But saintliness of character was in Fénelon commended to the world by equal charm of person and of genius. The words of Milton describing Eve might be applied, with no change but that of gender, to Fénelon, both the exterior and the interior man:

Grace was in all his steps, heaven in his eye,

In every gesture dignity and love.

The consent is general among those who saw Fénelon, and have left behind them their testimony, that alike in person, in character, and in genius, he was such as we thus describe him.

Twice, in his youth, he was smitten to the heart with a feeling of vocation to be a missionary. Both times he was thwarted by the intervention of friends. The second time, he wrote disclosing his half-romantic aspiration in a glowing letter of confidence and friendship to Bossuet, his senior by many years, but not yet become famous. Young Fénelon’s friend Bossuet was destined later to prove a bitter antagonist, almost a personal foe.

Until he was forty-two years old, François Fénelon lived in comparative retirement, nourishing his genius with study, with contemplation, with choice society. He experimented in writing verse. Not succeeding to his mind, he turned to prose composition, and, leading the way, in a new species of literature, for Rousseau, for Chateaubriand, for Lamartine, and for many others, to follow, went on writing what, in ceasing to be verse, did not cease to be poetry.

The great world will presently involve Fénelon in the currents of history. Louis XIV., grown old, and become as selfishly greedy now of personal salvation as all his life he had been selfishly greedy of personal glory, seeks that object of his soul by serving the Church in the wholesale conversion of Protestants. He revokes the Edict of Nantes, which had secured religious toleration for the realm, and proceeds to dragoon the Huguenots into conformity with the Roman Catholic Church. The reaction in public sentiment against such rigors grew a cry that had to be silenced. Fénelon was selected to visit the heretic provinces, and win them to willing submission. He stipulated that every form of coercion should cease, and went to conquer all with love. His success was remarkable. But not even Fénelon quite escaped the infection of violent zeal for the Church. It seems not to be given to any man to rise wholly superior to the spirit of the world in which he lives.

The luster of Fénelon’s name, luminous from the triumphs of his mission among the Protestants, was sufficient to justify the choice of this man, a man both by nature and by culture so ideally formed for the office as was he, to be tutor to the heir prospective of the French monarchy. The Duke of Burgundy, grandson to Louis XIV., was accordingly put under the charge of Fénelon to be trained for future kingship. Never, probably, in the history of mankind, has there occurred a case in which the victory of a teacher could be more illustrious than actually was the victory of Fénelon as teacher to this scion of the house of Bourbon. We shall be giving our readers a relishable taste of St. Simon, the celebrated memoir-writer of the age of Louis XIV., if out of the portrait in words, drawn by him from life, of Fénelon’s princely pupil, we transfer here a few strong lines to our pages. St. Simon says:

In the first place, it must be said that Monseigneur the Duke of Burgundy had by nature a most formidable disposition. He was passionate to the extent of wishing to dash to pieces his clocks when they struck the hour which called him to what he did not like, and of flying into the utmost rage against the rain if it interfered with what he wanted to do. Resistance threw him into paroxysms of fury. I speak of what I have often witnessed in his early youth. Moreover, an ungovernable impulse drove him into whatever indulgence, bodily or mental, was forbidden him. His sarcasm was so much the more cruel, as it was witty and piquant, and as it seized with precision upon every point open to ridicule. All this was sharpened by a vivacity of body and of mind that proceeded to the degree of impetuosity, and that during his early days never permitted him to learn any thing except by doing two things at once. Every form of pleasure he loved with a violent avidity, and all this with a pride and a haughtiness impossible to describe; dangerously wise, moreover, to judge of men and things, and to detect the weak point in a train of reasoning, and to reason himself more cogently and more profoundly than his teachers. But at the same time, as soon as his passion was spent, reason resumed her sway; he felt his faults, he acknowledged them, and sometimes with such chagrin that his rage was rekindled. A mind lively, alert, penetrating, stiffening itself against obstacles, excelling literally in every thing. The prodigy is, that in a very short time piety and grace made of him a different being, and transformed faults so numerous and so formidable into virtues exactly opposite.

St. Simon attributes to Fénelon “every virtue under heaven”; but his way was to give to God rather than to man the praise of the remarkable change which, during Fénelon’s charge of the Duke of Burgundy, came over the character of the prince.

The grandfather survived the grandson; and it was never put to the stern proof of historical experiment whether Fénelon had indeed turned out one Bourbon entirely different from all the other members, earlier or later, of that royal line.

Before, however, the Duke of Burgundy was thus snatched away from the perilous prospect of a throne, his beloved teacher was parted from him, not indeed by death, but by what, to the archbishop’s susceptible and suffering spirit, was worse than death, by “disgrace.” The disgrace was such as has ever since engaged for its subject the interest, the sympathy, and the admiration of mankind. Fénelon lost the royal favor. That was all—for the present; but that was much. He was banished from court, and he ceased to be preceptor to the Duke of Burgundy. The king, in signal severity, used his own hand to strike Fénelon’s name from the list of the household of his grandson and heir. The archbishop—for Fénelon had previously been made archbishop of Cambray—returned into his diocese as into an exile. But his cup of humiliation was by no means full. Bossuet will stain his own glory by following his exiled former pupil and friend, with hostile pontifical rage, to crush him in his retreat.

The occasion was a woman, a woman with the charm of genius and of exalted character, a Christian, a saint, but a mystic—it was Madame Guyon. Madame Guyon taught that it was possible to love God for himself alone, purely and disinterestedly. Fénelon received the doctrine, and Madame Guyon was patronized by Madame de Maintenon. Bossuet scented heresy. He was too much a “natural man” to understand Madame Guyon. The king was like the prelate, his minister, in spirit, and in consequent incapacity. It was resolved that Fénelon must condemn Madame Guyon. But Fénelon would not. He was very gentle, very conciliatory, but in fine he would not. Controversy ensued, haughty, magisterial, domineering, on the part of Bossuet; on the part of Fénelon, meek, docile, suasive. The world wondered, and watched the duel. Fénelon finally did what king James’s translators misleadingly make Job wish that his adversary had done—he wrote a book, “The Maxims of the Saints.” In this book, he sought to show that the accepted and even canonized teachers of the Church had taught the doctrine for which, in his own case and in the case of Madame Guyon, condemnation was now invoked. Bossuet was pope at Paris: and he, in full presence, denounced to the monarch the heresy of Fénelon. At this moment of crisis for Fénelon, it happened that news was brought him of the burning of his mansion at Cambray with all his books and manuscripts. It will always be remembered that Fénelon only said: “It is better so than if it had been the cottage of a poor laboring-man.”

Madame de Maintenon, till now his friend, with perfect frigid facility separated herself from the side of the accused. The controversy was carried to Rome, where at length Fénelon’s book was condemned—condemned mildly, but condemned. The pope is said to have made the remark that Fénelon erred by loving God too much, and Fénelon’s antagonists by loving their fellow-man too little. Fénelon bowed to the authority of the Church, and meekly in his own cathedral confessed his error. It was a logical thing for him, as loyal Catholic, to do; and he did it with a beautiful grace of humility. The Protestant spirit, however, rebels on his behalf, and finds it difficult even to admire the manner in which was done by him a thing that seems so unfit to have been done by him at all. Bossuet did not long survive his inglorious triumph over so much sanctity of personal character, over so much difficult and beautiful height of doctrinal and practical instruction to virtue. Fénelon seems to have been reported as preaching a funeral sermon on the dead prelate. “I have wept and prayed,” he wrote to a friend, “for this old instructor of my youth; but it is not true that I celebrated his obsequies in my cathedral, and preached his funeral sermon. Such affectation, you know, is foreign to my nature.” The iron must have gone deep, to wring from that gentle bosom even so much cry as this of wounded feeling.

It is hard to tell what might now have befallen Fénelon, in the way of good fortune—he might even have been recalled to court, and re-installed in his office of tutor to the prince—had not a sinister incident, not to have been looked for, at an inopportune moment occurred. The “Telemachus” appeared in print, and kindled a sudden flame of popular feeling, which instantly spread in universal conflagration over the face of Europe. This composition of Fénelon’s the author had written to convey, under a form of quasi-poetical fiction, lessons of wisdom in government to the mind of his royal pupil. The existence of the manuscript book would seem to have been intended to be a secret from the king—indeed, from almost every one, except the pupil himself for whose use it was made. But a copyist proved false to his trust, and furnished a copy of “Telemachus” to a printer in Holland, who lost no time in publishing a book so likely to sell. But the sale of the book surpassed all expectation. Holland not only, but Belgium, Germany, France, and England multiplied copies as fast as they could; still Europe could not get copies as fast as she wanted them.

The secret of such popularity did not lie simply in the literary merits of “Telemachus.” It lay more in a certain interpretation that the book was supposed to bear. “Telemachus” was understood to be a covert criticism of Louis XIV., and of the principle of absolute monarchy embodied in him. This imputed intention of the book could not fail to become known at Versailles. The result, of course, was fatal, and finally fatal, to the prospects, whatever these may have been, of Fénelon’s restoration to favor at court. The archbishop thenceforward was left to do in comparative obscurity the duties of his episcopal office in his diocese of Cambray. He devoted himself, with exemplary and touching fidelity, to the interests of his flock, loving them and loved by them, until he died. It was an entirely worthy and adequate employment of his powers. The only abatement needful from the praise to be bestowed upon his behavior in this pastoral relation is that he suffered himself sometimes to think of his position as one of “disgrace.” His reputation meantime for holy character and conduct was European. His palace at Cambray, hospitably open ever to the resort of suffering need, indeed almost his whole diocese, lying on the frontier of France, was by mutual consent of contending armies, treated in war as a kind of mutual inviolable ground, invested with privilege of sanctuary. It was an instructive example of the serene and beautiful ascendency sometimes divinely accorded to illustrious personal goodness.

There had been a moment, even subsequently to the affair of the “Telemachus” publication, when it looked as if, after long delay, a complete worldly triumph for Fénelon was assured, and was near. The father of the Duke of Burgundy died, and nothing then seemed to stand between Fénelon’s late pupil and the throne, nothing but the precarious life of an aged monarch, visibly approaching the end. The Duke of Burgundy, through all changes, had remained unchangingly fast in his affectionate loyalty to Fénelon. Sternly forbidden, by the jealous and watchful king, his grandfather, to communicate with his old teacher, he yet had found means to send to Fénelon, from time to time, reassuring signals of his trust and love. Fénelon was now, in all eyes, the predestined prime minister of a new reign about to commence. Through devoted friends of his own, near to the person of the prince at court, Fénelon sent minutes of advice to his pupil, which outlined a whole beneficent policy of liberal monarchical rule. A new day seemed dawning for France. The horrible reaction of the Regency and of Louis XV. might, perhaps, have been averted, and, with that spared to France, the revolution itself might have been accomplished without the Revolution. But it was not to be. The Duke of Burgundy first buried his wife, and then, within a few days, followed her himself to the grave. He died sincerely rejoicing that God had taken him away from the dread responsibility of reigning.

“All my ties are broken,” mourned Fénelon; “there is no longer any thing to bind me to the earth.” In truth, the teacher survived his pupil but two or three years. When he died, his sovereign, gloomy with well-grounded apprehension for the future of his realm, said, with tardy revival of recognition for the virtue that had perished in Fénelon: “Here was a man who could have served us well under the disasters by which my kingdom is about to be assailed.”

Fénelon’s literary productions are various; but they all have the common character of being works written for the sake of life, rather than for the sake of literature. They were inspired each by a practical purpose, and adapted each to a particular occasion. His treatise on the “Education of Girls” was written for the use of a mother who desired instruction on the topic from Fénelon. His argument on the “Being of a God” was prepared as a duty of his preceptorship to the prince. But the one book of Fénelon, which was an historical event when it appeared, and which stands an indestructible classic in literature, is the “Telemachus.” It remains for us briefly to give some idea of this book.

The first thing to be said is, that those are mistaken who suppose themselves to have obtained a true idea of “Telemachus” from having partly read it at school, as an exercise in French. The essence of the work lies beyond those few opening pages to which the exploration of school-boys and school-girls is generally limited. This masterpiece of Fénelon is much more than a charming piece of romantic and sentimental poetry in prose. It is a kind of epic, indeed, like the “Odyssey,” only written in rhythmical prose instead of rhythmical verse; but, unlike the “Odyssey,” it is an idyllic epic written with an ulterior purpose of moral and political didactics. It was designed as a manual of instruction—instruction made delightful to a prince—to inculcate the duties incumbent on a sovereign.

Telemachus, our readers will remember, was the son of Ulysses. Fénelon’s story relates the adventures encountered by Telemachus in search for his father, so long delayed on his return from Troy to Ithaca. Telemachus is imagined by Fénelon to be attended by Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, masked from his recognition, as well as from the recognition of others, under the form of an old man. Minerva, of course, constantly imparts the wisest counsel to young Telemachus, who has his weaknesses, as had the young Duke of Burgundy, but who is essentially well-disposed, as Fénelon hoped his royal pupil would finally turn out to be. Nothing can exceed the urbanity and grace with which the delicate business is conducted by Fénelon, of teaching a bad prince, with a very bad example set him by his grandfather, to be a good king. The style in which the story is told, and in which the advice is insinuated, is exquisite, is beyond praise. The “soft delicious” stream of sound runs on, as from a fountain, and like “linked sweetness long drawn out.” Never had prose a flow of melody more luscious. It is perpetual ravishment to the ear. The invention, too, of incident is fruitful, while the landscape and coloring are magical for beauty. We give a few extracts, to be read with that application in mind to Louis XIV., and to the state of France, which, when the book was first printed, gave it such an exciting interest in the eyes of Europe. Telemachus, after the manner of Æneas to Queen Dido, is relating to the goddess Calypso, into whose island he has come, the adventures that have previously befallen him. He says that he, with Mentor (Minerva in disguise), found himself in Crete. Mentor had been there before, and was ready to tell Telemachus all about the country. Telemachus was naturally interested to learn respecting the Cretan monarchy. Mentor, he says, informed him as follows:

The king’s authority over the subject is absolute, but the authority of the law is absolute over him. His power to do good is unlimited, but he is restrained from doing evil. The laws have put the people into his hands, as the most valuable deposit, upon condition that he shall treat them as his children. It is the intent of the law that the wisdom and equity of one man shall be the happiness of many, and not that the wretchedness and slavery of many should gratify the pride and luxury of one. The king ought to possess nothing more than the subject, except what is necessary to alleviate the fatigue of his station, and impress upon the minds of the people a reverence of that authority by which the laws are executed. Moreover, the king should indulge himself less, as well in ease as in pleasure, and should be less disposed to the pomp and the pride of life than any other man. He ought not to be distinguished from the rest of mankind by the greatness of his wealth, or the vanity of his enjoyments, but by superior wisdom, more heroic virtue, and more splendid glory. Abroad he ought to be the defender of his country, by commanding her armies; and at home the judge of his people, distributing justice among them, improving their morals, and increasing their felicity. It is not for himself that the gods have intrusted him with royalty. He is exalted above individuals only that he may be the servant of the people. To the public he owes all his time, all his attention, and all his love; he deserves dignity only in proportion as he gives up private enjoyments for the public good.

Pretty sound doctrine, the foregoing, on the subject of the duties devolving on a king. The “paternal” idea, to be sure, of government is in it; but there is the idea, too, of limited or constitutional monarchy. The spirit of just and liberal political thought had, it seems, not been wholly extinguished, even at the court, by that oppression of mind—an oppression seldom, if ever, in human history exceeded—which was enforced under the unmitigated absolutism of Louis XIV. The literature that, with Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, the Encyclopædists, prepared the Revolution, had already begun virtually to be written when Fénelon wrote his “Telemachus.” It is easy to see why the fame of Fénelon should by exception have been dear even to the hottest infidel haters of that ecclesiastical hierarchy to which the archbishop of Cambray himself belonged. This lover of liberty, this gentle rebuker of kings, was of the freethinkers, at least in the sympathy of political thought. Nay, the Revolution itself is foreshown in a remarkable glimpse of conjectural prophecy which occurs in the “Telemachus.” Idomeneus is a headstrong king, whom Mentor is made by the author to reprove and instruct for the Duke of Burgundy’s benefit. To Idomeneus—a character taken, and not unplausibly taken, to have been suggested to Fénelon by the example of Louis XIV.—to this imaginary counterpart of the reigning monarch of France, Mentor holds the following language. How could the sequel of Bourbon despotism in France—a sequel suspended now for a time, but two or three generations later to be dreadfully visited on the heirs of Louis XIV.—have been more fully foreshadowed? The “Telemachus”:

Remember that the sovereign who is most absolute is always least powerful; he seizes upon all, and his grasp is ruin. He is, indeed, the sole proprietor of whatever his state contains; but, for that reason, his state contains nothing of value; the fields are uncultivated, and almost a desert; the towns lose some of their few inhabitants every day; and trade every day declines. The king, who must cease to be a king when he ceases to have subjects, and who is great only in virtue of his people, is himself insensibly losing his character and his power, as the number of his people, from whom alone both are derived, insensibly diminishes. His dominions are at length exhausted of money and of men: the loss of men is the greatest and the most irreparable he can sustain. Absolute power degrades every subject to a slave. The tyrant is flattered even to an appearance of adoration, and every one trembles at the glance of his eye; but, at the least revolt, this enormous power perishes by its own excess. It derived no strength from the love of the people; it wearied and provoked all that it could reach, and rendered every individual of the state impatient of its continuance. At the first stroke of opposition, the idol is overturned, broken to pieces, and trodden under foot. Contempt, hatred, fear, resentment, distrust, and every other passion of the soul unite against so hateful a despotism. The king who, in his vain prosperity, found no man bold enough to tell him the truth, in his adversity finds no man kind enough to excuse his faults, or to defend him against his enemies.

So much is perhaps enough to indicate the political drift of the “Telemachus.” That drift is, indeed, observable everywhere throughout the book.

We conclude our exhibition of this fine classic, by letting Fénelon appear more purely now in his character as dreamer and poet. Young Prince Telemachus has, Ulysses-like, and Æneas-like, his descent into Hades. This incident affords Fénelon opportunity to exercise his best powers of awful and of lovely imagining and describing. Christian ideas are, in this episode of the “Telemachus,” superinduced upon pagan, after a manner hard, perhaps, to reconcile with the verisimilitude required by art, but at least productive of very noble and very beautiful results. First, one glimpse of Tartarus as conceived by Fénelon. It is the spectacle of kings who on earth abused their power that Telemachus is beholding:

Telemachus observed the countenance of these criminals to be pale and ghastly, strongly expressive of the torment they suffered at the heart. They looked inward with a self-abhorrence now inseparable from their existence. Their crimes themselves had become their punishment, and it was not necessary that greater should be inflicted. They haunted them like hideous specters, and continually started up before them in all their enormity. They wished for a second death, that might separate them from these ministers of vengeance, as the first had separated their spirits from the body—a death that might at once extinguish all consciousness and sensibility. They called upon the depths of hell to hide them from the persecuting beams of truth, in impenetrable darkness; but they are reserved for the cup of vengeance, which, though they drink of it forever, shall be ever full. The truth, from which they fled, has overtaken them, an invincible and unrelenting enemy. The ray which once might have illuminated them, like the mild radiance of the day, now pierces them like lightning—a fierce and fatal fire, that, without injury to the external parts, infixes a burning torment at the heart. By truth, now an avenging flame, the very soul is melted like metal in a furnace; it dissolves all, but destroys nothing; it disunites the first elements of life, yet the sufferer can never die. He is, as it were, divided against himself, without rest and without comfort; animated by no vital principle, but the rage that kindles at his own misconduct, and the dreadful madness that results from despair.

If the “perpetual feast of nectar’d sweets” that the “Telemachus” affords is felt at times to be almost cloying, it is not, as our readers have now seen, for want of occasional contrasts of a bitterness sufficiently mordant and drastic. But the didactic purpose is never lost sight of by the author. Here is an aspect of the Elysium found by Telemachus. How could any thing be more delectably conceived and described? The translator, Dr. Hawkesworth, is animated to an English style that befits the sweetness of his original. The “Telemachus:”

In this place resided all the good kings who had wisely governed mankind from the beginning of time. They were separated from the rest of the just; for, as wicked princes suffer more dreadful punishment than other offenders in Tartarus, so good kings enjoy infinitely greater felicity than other lovers of virtue, in the fields of Elysium.

Telemachus advanced toward these kings, whom he found in groves of delightful fragrance, reclining upon the downy turf, where the flowers and herbage were perpetually renewed. A thousand rills wandered through these scenes of delight, and refreshed the soil with a gentle and unpolluted wave; the song of innumerable birds echoed in the groves. Spring strewed the ground with her flowers, while at the same time autumn loaded the trees with her fruit. In this place the burning heat of the dog-star was never felt, and the stormy north was forbidden to scatter over it the frosts of winter. Neither War that thirsts for blood, nor Envy that bites with an envenomed tooth, like the vipers that are wreathed around her arms and fostered in her bosom, nor Jealousy, nor Distrust, nor Fears, nor vain Desires, invade these sacred domains of peace. The day is here without end, and the shades of night are unknown. Here the bodies of the blessed are clothed with a pure and lambent light, as with a garment. The light does not resemble that vouchsafed to mortals upon earth, which is rather darkness visible; it is rather a celestial glory than a light—an emanation that penetrates the grossest body with more subtilty than the rays of the sun penetrate the purest crystal, which rather strengthens than dazzles the sight, and diffuses through the soul a serenity which no language can express. By this ethereal essence the blessed are sustained in everlasting life; it pervades them; it is incorporated with them, as food with the mortal body; they see it, they feel it, they breathe it, and it produces in them an inexhaustible source of serenity and joy. It is a fountain of delight, in which they are absorbed as fishes are absorbed in the sea; they wish for nothing, and, having nothing, they possess all things. This celestial light satiates the hunger of the soul; every desire is precluded; and they have a fulness of joy which sets them above all that mortals seek with such restless ardor, to fill the vacuity that aches forever in their breast. All the delightful objects that surround them are disregarded; for their felicity springs up within, and, being perfect, can derive nothing from without. So the gods, satiated with nectar and ambrosia, disdain, as gross and impure, all the dainties of the most luxurious table upon earth. From these seats of tranquillity all evils fly far away; death, disease, poverty, pain, regret, remorse, fear, even hope—which is sometimes not less painful than fear itself—animosity, disgust, and resentment can never enter there.

The leaden good sense of Louis XIV. pronounced Fénelon the “most chimerical” man in France. The founder of the kingdom of heaven would have been a dreamer, to this most worldly-minded of “Most Christian” monarchs. Bossuet, who, about to die, read something of Fénelon’s “Telemachus,” said it was a book hardly serious enough for a clergyman to write. A more serious book, whether its purpose be regarded, or its undoubted actual influence in molding the character of a prospective ruler of France, was not written by any clergyman of Fénelon’s or Bossuet’s time.

Fénelon was an eloquent preacher as well as an elegant writer. His influence exerted in both the two functions, that of the writer and that of the preacher, was powerfully felt in favor of the freedom of nature in style as against the conventionality of culture and art. He insensibly helped on that reform from a too rigid classicism, which in our day we have seen pushed to its extreme in the exaggerations of romanticism. Few wiser words have ever been spoken on the subject of oratory than are to be found in his “Dialogues on Eloquence.”

Disappearing space warns us that we must perforce let pass from presence the gracious spirit of Fénelon. But we should wrong this most engaging of prelates, and we should wrong our readers, not still to represent a side of his character and of his literary work, a very important side, that thus far has been only hinted at in incidental allusion. We mean that distinctively religious side which belongs alike to the man and to the writer.

Fénelon, as priest, was something more than professional preacher, pastor, theologian. He was a devout soul, the subject of a transcendent Christian experience, even verging on mysticism. In his capacity of spiritual director, he wrote what are called “spiritual letters,” many of which survive, included in his published works. These have a very peculiarly ripe, sweet, chaste, St. John-like quality of tone, and they are written in a pure, simple, transparent style, that reads as if the thought found its own form of expression without the smallest trouble on the part of the writer. The style, in fact, is absolute perfection; you cannot tell the mere literal truth about it and not thus seem to be exaggerating its merit. Even in translation some charm of such ultimate felicity in it cannot fail to be felt.

Almost any “spiritual” letter that we happen first to strike will be as good as any other, to illustrate the rare culture of heart, the deep spiritual wisdom, the perfect urbanity in manner, reconciled with the perfect frankness in fact, and the circumfluent grace of literary style, with which this heavenly-minded man conducted, through correspondence, his cure of individual souls. We pluck out a few specimen sentences from two different letters, and present them detached, without setting of context:

Consent to be humiliated; silence and peace in humiliation are the true good of the soul. One might be tempted to speak humbly, and one might find a thousand fine pretexts for doing so; but it is still better to be silent humbly. The humility which still speaks is still to be suspected; in speaking, self-love consoles itself a little.

What now follows, ending our extracts from Fénelon’s writings, we give, not only for its own value, but for the light it throws on the charming humility of the author:

It has seemed to me that you needed to enlarge your heart in the matter of the defects of others....

Perfection bears with ease the imperfection of others; it becomes all things to all men. One must grow accustomed to the idea of the grossest defects in good souls....

I beg of you more than ever not to spare me in respect of my defects. Should you believe that you see one that I perhaps have not, that will be no great misfortune. If your hints wound me, that sensitiveness will show me that you have touched the quick; thus you will always have conferred on me a great benefit in disciplining me to be little, and in accustoming me to take reproof. I ought to be more abased that another in proportion as I am more exalted by my position, and as God requires of me more complete death to all. I need such simplicity, and I hope that, far from weakening, it will strengthen our union of heart.

It is impossible not to associate with Fénelon, in the thought of this spiritual life of his, explored and purified so deep, that remarkable woman, Madame Guyon, to whom in certain religious relations the great and gentle archbishop ostensibly, and perhaps really, submitted himself, as one who learns to one who teaches. Her exaltation—how far real, and how far illusory only, let us leave it for the All-knower to judge—made Madame Guyon easily equal to the seemingly audacious part of spiritual guide to a man who was at once one of the most illustrious writers, one of the most highly placed Church dignitaries, and one of the saintliest Christians in Europe. It is undoubtedly true that the sage can learn more from the fool than the fool can from the sage; and therefore if it could be proved to have been indeed the fact that, of the two, Fénelon was the greater gainer from the relation existing between himself and Madame Guyon, that might well be only because he was already a wiser person than she.

We have no room here to show Madame Guyon by any of her extant letters addressed to Fénelon; but we may take the present occasion to introduce at least a few stanzas from one of those sweet little Christian poems of hers which a spirit not far alien from Fénelon’s own, we mean William Cowper, has put for us into fairly happy English expression. Madame Guyon spent ten years in prison—for teaching that souls should love God unselfishly, for his own sake only!—and it is in prison that this meekly triumphing song of hers must be imagined as sung by the author. It bears the title, “The Soul that Loves God Finds Him Everywhere.”

*****

To me remains nor place nor time;

My country is in every clime;

I can be calm and free from care

On any shore, since God is there.

While place we seek, or place we shun,

The soul finds happiness in none;

But, with a God to guide our way,

’Tis equal joy to go or stay.

Could I be cast where thou art not,

That were indeed a dreadful lot;

But regions none remote I call,

Secure of finding God in all.

*****

Ah, then! to his embrace repair;

My soul, thou art no stranger there;

There love divine shall be thy guard,

And peace and safety thy reward.

French literature, unfortunately, is on the whole such in character as to need all that it can show to be cast into the scale of moral elevation and purity. Fénelon alone—he was not alone, as the instance of Madame Guyon has just freshly been reminding us—but Fénelon alone were enough, in quality supported by quantity, not indeed to overcome, but to go far toward overcoming, the perverse inclination of the balance.

XIV.

LE SAGE.

1668-1747.

Le Sage was a fruitful father of literary product, but it is as the author of “Gil Blas” that he is entitled to his place in these pages. “The Adventures of Gil Blas” justly enjoys the distinction of being among the few works of fiction that are read everywhere, and everywhere acknowledged to be masterpieces in literature. Lapse of time and change of fashion seem not to tend at all toward making “Gil Blas” obsolete. With every generation of men it takes as it were a fresh lease of inexhaustible immortality.

Of course, there must be something elemental in the quality and merit of a book, especially a book of fiction, concerning which this can truly be said. A novel “Gil Blas” is generally called. The name is hardly descriptive. Le Sage’s masterpiece is rather a book of human nature and of human life. It constitutes already, embraced within the compass of a single work, that which it was the ambition of the novelist Balzac to achieve in an Alexandrian library of fiction; “Gil Blas” is the whole “comedy” of man. The breadth of it is enormous. There is hardly any thing lacking to it that is human—unless it be some truly noble human character, some truly noble human action.

We spoke of it not amiss, when we used Balzac’s half-cynical word and called it the comedy of man. Le Sage involuntarily reveals his own limitation in the fact that he has converted into comedy the whole mingled drama of man’s earthly condition. Within his proper individual bounds, this man’s dimensions are so large that he has been not unfitly styled Shakespearean. But Shakespeare exceeds Le Sage in measure by a whole hemisphere. Shakespeare knows how to be serious, to be tragic; as Le Sage does not. Matter of tragedy indeed abounds in “Gil Blas,” but it is all treated lightly, in the manner of comedy. You are allured, in reading, to laugh, when, if you return at all upon yourself, you are conscious you ought rather to weep. Le Sage is the antithesis of Rousseau, of Chateaubriand, of Lamartine, of George Sand—writers who know as little of laughter as Le Sage does of tears.

But it should at once, and strongly, be said that Le Sage is no cynic. It is not a sneering, but a smiling, mask that he wears. The smile is of a worldly-wisdom not ill-pleased with itself, and therefore not ill-pleased with the world which it rallies. It is a genial smile. But for all that, if you are yourself at bottom a serious man, you are disturbed at last. You are vexed to find yourself incessantly brought to smile at what you know ought to move your shame, your indignation, or your grief. The moral temper which Le Sage exhibits and which he engenders is not the “enthusiasm of humanity.” It is less the temper to help your fellow-men than the temper to profit the most that you can by their weaknesses, by their follies, and even by their crimes. Le Sage’s hero, “Gil Blas,” goes through a series of “adventures,” in which nearly every human sin is committed by him and by his fellows, either unblushingly, or, if with any show of compunction at all, then with such show of compunction as is almost worse than perfect indifference would be. The book is not in intention immoral, but only unmoral. It may well be questioned whether in effect it be not the more immoral for this very character in it. The abounding gay animal spirits of the narrative go frisking along as if let loose in a lucky world where moral distinctions were things that did not exist; the real world indeed, only with the deepest reality of all left out!

Verisimilitude seems hardly sought. The situations often waver on the edge of the ludicrously farcical. The tenor of the production stops barely short of sheer extravaganza. There is no unity, progressiveness, culmination of plot. The whole book is a mere concatenation, scarcely concatenation, succession, say rather, of “adventures,” any one of which is nearly as good a starting-point for the reader as any other would be.

The scene of the story and the local color are all Spanish. Le Sage’s previous experience of travel in Spain, as well as his long occupation in translating from the Spanish into French, probably influenced him to this choice of medium for his masterpiece; which, by the way, it cost the author intervals of time covering twenty-two years to bring to its completion. The fact of its Spanish character gave color to the charge, deemed now to have been exploded, that “Gil Blas” was plagiarized by Le Sage from a Spanish original. It may be added that laying the scene and action of his story in Spain left Le Sage the more free to satirize, as he undoubtedly does, certain persons and certain manners belonging to his own country, France.

Of Alain René Le Sage, the man, there need little be said. He was a successful writer of comedies for the stage. Of these the most were ephemeral productions. Two, however, and one especially, the “Turcaret,” have the honor of ranking, in French literature, next to the very highest in their kind, the comedies of Molière. Never rich, Le Sage was always independent in spirit. The story is told of him that, arriving once unavoidably late at a noble mansion where he had made an appointment to read one of his own productions, he was reproached by the distinguished hostess for making the company lose an hour in waiting; whereupon he replied: “I give the company a chance to recover their lost hour,” and refusing to be placated bowed himself out.

Smollet, the celebrated English novelist—and historian so-called—has translated “Gil Blas.” We make use of his translation in presenting our extracts from this novel to our readers. There are two passages, both deservedly famous, which will admirably exemplify Le Sage at his best; one of these is the immortal episode concerning the illustrious physician, Doctor Sangrado, and the other is the instructive relation of Gil Blas’s experience in discharging the office of what one might call literary valet and critic to an archbishop.

First we introduce Doctor Sangrado.

Gil Blas is at this time in the Spanish town of Valladolid serving an ecclesiastic in the capacity of lackey. His master, falling sick, sends for a physician. Gil Blas—the novel is autobiographic in form—shall tell his own story:

I therefore went in search of Dr. Sangrado, and brought him to the house.... The licentiate having promised to obey him in all things, Sangrado sent me for a surgeon, whom he named, and ordered him to take from my master six good porringers of blood, as the first effort, in order to supply the want of perspiration. Then he said to the surgeon: “Master Martin Omnez, return in three hours and take as much more; and repeat the same evacuation to-morrow. It is a gross error to think that blood is necessary for the preservation of life; a patient cannot be blooded too much; for as he is obliged to perform no considerable motion or exercise, but just only to breathe, he has no more occasion for blood than a man who is asleep—life, in both, consisting in the pulse and respiration only.” The doctor having ordered frequent and copious evacuations of this kind, he told us that we must make the canon drink warm water incessantly; assuring us that water, drank in abundance, was the true specific in all distempers whatever.... We set about warming water with all despatch; and as the physician had recommended to us, above all things, not to be too sparing of it, we made my master drink for the first dose two or three pints, at as many draughts. An hour after we repeated it, and returning to the charge, from time to time, overwhelmed his stomach with a deluge of water, the surgeon seconding us, on the other hand, by the quantity of blood which he drew from him. In less than two days the old canon was reduced to extremity.

Blood-letting, as an expedient of the healing art, has happily gone out of fashion; but Dr. Sangrado’s other master secret, the therapeutic drinking of hot water, has been rehabilitated in our days. We sincerely hope that none of our hot-water-drinking readers will let Le Sage laugh them out of countenance in holding to their habit—if it really does them good!

Gil Blas is promoted to be servant, and then professional assistant, to the famous Dr. Sangrado. Gil Blas and the doctor’s maid were warned by their master against eating much, but, now, however, Gil Blas shall himself again resume the part of narrator:

He allowed us, by way of recompense, to drink as much water as we could swallow: far from restricting us in this particular, he would sometimes say, “Drink, my children; health consists in the suppleness and humectation of the parts: drink water in great abundance: it is an universal menstruum that dissolves all kinds of salt. When the course of the blood is too languid, this accelerates its motion; and when too rapid, checks its impetuosity”.... “If thou feelest in thyself,” said he to me, “any reluctance to simple element, there are innocent aids in plenty that will support thy stomach against the insipid taste of water; sage, for example, and balm will give it an admirable flavor; and an infusion of corn-poppy, gillyflower, and rosemary, will render it still more delicious.”

Notwithstanding all he could say in praise of water, and the excellent beverages he taught me to compose, I drank of it with such moderation, that perceiving my temperance, he said: “Why, truly, Gil Blas, I am not at all surprised that thou dost not enjoy good health. Thou dost not drink enough, my friend. Water taken in small quantities serves only to disentangle the particles of the bile, and give them more activity; whereas they should be drowned in a copious dilution: don’t be afraid, my child, that abundance of water will weaken and relax thy stomach: lay aside that panic fear which perhaps thou entertainest of plentiful drinking.”

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:

“I have a regard for thee, and without further delay will make thy fortune.... I spare thee the trouble of studying pharmacy, anatomy, botany, and physic: know, my friend, all that is required is to bleed the patients and make them drink warm water. This is the secret of curing all the distempers incident to man”.... I assured him that I would follow his maxims as long as I lived, even if they should be contrary to those of Hippocrates. But this assurance was not altogether sincere; for I disapproved of his opinion with regard to water, and resolved to drink wine every day, when I went out to visit my patients.

This resolution Gil Blas carried out, and, returning home drunk in consequence, gave Dr. Sangrado an artfully heightened account of a scuffle he had had with a rival physician of his master named Cuchillo. Let Gil Blas pursue the narrative:

“Thou hast done well, Gil Blas,” said Dr. Sangrado, “in defending the honor of our remedies against that little abortion of the faculty. He affirms, then, that aqueous draughts are improper for the dropsy! Ignorant wretch! I maintain, I do, that a dropsical patient cannot drink too much.”... He perceived that I drank more water that evening than usual, the wine having made me very thirsty, ... and said, with a smile, “I see, Gil Blas, thou hast no longer an aversion to water. Heaven be praised! thou drinkest it now like nectar.”... “Sir,” I replied, “there is a time for all things: I would not at present give a pint of water for an hogshead of wine.” The doctor, charmed with this answer, did not neglect such a fair opportunity of extolling the excellence of water.... “There are still a few,” he exclaimed, “who, like thou and I, drink nothing but water; and, who, as a preservative from, or cure of all distempers, trust to hot water unboiled: for I have observed that boiled water is more heavy and less agreeable to the stomach.”

... I entered into the doctor’s sentiments, inveighed against the use of wine, and lamented that mankind had contracted a taste for such a pernicious liquor. Then (as my thirst was not sufficiently quenched) I filled a large goblet with water, and having swallowed long draughts of it: “Come, sir,” said I to my master, “let us regale ourselves with this benevolent liquor.” ... He applauded my zeal, and during a whole quarter of an hour exhorted me to drink nothing but water. In order to familiarize myself to this prescription, I promised to swallow a great quantity every evening; and that I might the more easily perform my promise, went to bed with a resolution of going to the tavern every day.

In passing from the humor of Le Sage’s Dr. Sangrado, we cannot refrain from exhorting the reader not to miss that refinement about water made hot without actually boiling. The present writer seems to himself to have encountered the same delicacy of hot-water-drinking in his own personal observation of those who now practice this method of health or of cure.

A later fortune of Gil Blas, in his long career of extremely various “adventures,” shaken from change to change as in a kaleidoscope, was to fall into the service of an archbishop, by whom he was soon advanced to a post of confidential favor. Gil Blas became in fact the archbishop’s “guide, philosopher, and friend,” in the very important matter of that high dignitary’s literary and historical reputation. This happened through Gil Blas’s felicity in copying out with judicious calligraphy—a calligraphy such as seemed to their author to commend those productions in some fit proportion to their worth—the venerable archbishop’s homilies. Gil Blas thus relates the immediate, and then the more remote, result of his submitting to the archbishop his maiden essay in copy-hand reproduction of that prelate’s pulpit rhetoric:

“Good heaven!” cried he in a transport, when he had surveyed all the sheets of my copy, “was ever anything seen so correct? You transcribe so well that you must certainly understand grammar. Tell me ingenuously, my friend, have you found nothing that shocked you in writing it over? Some neglect, perhaps, in the style, or improper term?” “O, sir,” answered I, with an air of modesty, “I am not learned enough to make critical observations; and if I was, I am persuaded that the works of your grace would escape my censure.” The prelate smiled at my reply; and, though he said nothing, discovered through all his piety, that he was a downright author.

By this kind of flattery, I entirely gained his good graces, became more and more dear to him every day.... One evening he repeated in his closet, when I was present, with great enthusiasm, an homily which he intended to pronounce the next day in the cathedral; and, not satisfied with asking my opinion of it in general, obliged me to single out the particular passages which I most admired. I had the good luck to mention those that he himself looked upon to be the best, his own favorite morceaus: by which means I passed, in his judgment, for a man who had a delicate knowledge of the true beauties of a work. “This is,” cried he, “what is called having taste and sentiment: well, friend, I assure thee thou hast not got Bœotian ears.” In a word, he was so well satisfied with me, that he pronounced with some vivacity, “Gil Blas, henceforth give thyself no uneasiness about thy fortune: I undertake to make it extremely agreeable; I love thee; and, as a proof of my affection, make thee my confidant.”

I no sooner heard these words than I fell at his grace’s feet, quite penetrated with gratitude; I heartily embraced his bandy legs, and looked upon myself as a man on the high way to wealth and opulence. “Yes, my child,” resumed the archbishop, whose discourse had been interrupted by my prostration, “thou shalt be the repository of my most secret thoughts. Listen with attention to what I am going to say: my chief pleasure consists in preaching; the Lord gives a blessing to my homilies; they touch the hearts of sinners, make them seriously reflect on their conduct, and have recourse to repentance.... I will confess my weakness; I propose to myself another reward, a reward which the delicacy of my virtue reproaches me with in vain! I mean the esteem that the world shows for fine polished writing. The honor of being reckoned a perfect orator has charmed my imagination; my performances are thought equally strong and delicate; but I would, of all things, avoid the fault of good authors who write too long, and retire without forfeiting the least tittle of my reputation. Wherefore, my dear Gil Blas,” continued the prelate, “one thing that I exact of thy zeal is, whenever thou shalt perceive my pen smack of old age, and my genius flag, don’t fail to advertise me of it: for I don’t trust to my own judgment, which may be seduced by self-love.” ... “Thank heaven, sir,” said I, “that period is far off: besides, a genius like that of your grace will preserve its vigor much better than any other; or, to speak more justly, will be always the same. I look upon you as another Cardinal Ximenes, whose superior genius, instead of being weakened by age, seemed to receive new strength from it.” “No flattery, friend,” said he, interrupting me. “I know I am liable to sink all at once: people at my age begin to feel infirmities, and the infirmities of the body often affect the understanding. I repeat it to thee again, Gil Blas, as soon as thou shalt judge mine in the least impaired, be sure to give me notice; and be not afraid of speaking freely and sincerely, for I shall receive thy advice as a mark of thy affection. Besides, thy interest is concerned; if, unhappily for thee, it should come to my ears that the public says my discourses have no longer their wonted force, and that it is high time for me to repose myself, I frankly declare that thou shalt lose my friendship, as well as the fortune I have promised. Such will be the fruit of thy foolish reserve!”

Gil Blas was destined soon to be put to the extreme proof of his fidelity. Himself must tell how:

In the very zenith of my favor we had a hot alarm in the episcopal palace: the archbishop was seized with a fit of the apoplexy; he was, however, succored immediately, and such salutary medicines administered that in a few days his health was re-established; but his understanding had received a rude shock, which I plainly perceived in the very next discourse which he composed. I did not, however, find the difference between this and the rest so sensible as to make me conclude that the orator began to flag, and waited for another homily to fix my resolution. This, indeed, was quite decisive; sometimes the good old prelate repeated the same thing over and over, sometimes rose too high or sunk too low; it was a vague discourse, the rhetoric of an old professor, a mere capucinade. [The word, “capucinade,” satirizes the Capuchin monks.]

I was not the only person who took notice of this. The greatest part of the audience when he pronounced it, as if they had been also hired to examine it, said softly to one another, “This sermon smells strong of the apoplexy.” Come, master homily-critic, said I then to myself, prepare to do your office; you see that his grace begins to fail; it is your duty to give him notice of it, not only as the depository of his thoughts, but, likewise, lest some one of his friends should be free enough with him to prevent you; in that case you know what would happen: your name would be erased from his last will....

After these reflections I made others of a quite contrary nature. To give the notice in question, seemed a delicate point. I imagined that it might be ill-received by an author like him, conceited of his own works; but, rejecting this suggestion, I represented to myself that he could not possibly take it amiss after having exacted it of me in so pressing a manner. Add to this that I depended upon my being able to mention it with address, and make him swallow the pill without reluctance. In a word, finding that I ran a greater risk in keeping silence than in breaking it, I determined to speak.

The only thing that embarrassed me now was how to break the ice. Luckily the orator himself extricated me from that difficulty by asking what people said of him, and if they were satisfied with his last discourse. I answered that his homilies were always admired, but in my opinion the last had not succeeded so well as the rest in affecting the audience. “How, friend!” replied he with astonishment, “has it met with any Aristarchus?” “No, sir,” said I, “by no means; such works as yours are not to be criticised; everybody is charmed with them. Nevertheless, since you have laid your injunctions upon me to be free and sincere, I will take the liberty to tell you that your last discourse, in my judgment, has not altogether the energy of your other performances. Are you not of the same opinion?”

My master grew pale at these words, and said with a forced smile, “So, then, Mr. Gil Blas, this piece is not to your taste?” “I don’t say so, sir,” cried I, quite disconcerted, “I think it excellent, although a little inferior to your other works.” “I understand you,” he replied, “you think I flag, don’t you? Come, be plain; you believe it is time for me to think of retiring.” “I should not have been so bold,” said I, “as to speak so freely if your grace had not commanded me; I do no more, therefore, than obey you, and I most humbly beg that you will not be offended at my freedom.” “God forbid,” cried he, with precipitation, “God forbid that I should find fault with it. In so doing I should be very unjust. I don’t at all take it ill that you speak your sentiment; it is your sentiment only that I find bad. I have been most egregiously deceived in your narrow understanding.”

Though I was disconcerted, I endeavored to find some mitigation in order to set things to rights again; but how is it possible to appease an incensed author, one especially who has been accustomed to hear himself praised? “Say no more, my child,” said he, “you are yet too raw to make proper distinctions. Know that I never composed a better homily than that which you disapprove, for my genius, thank heaven, hath as yet lost nothing of its vigor. Henceforth I will make a better choice of a confidant and keep one of greater ability than you. Go,” added he, pushing me by the shoulders out of his closet, “go tell my treasurer to give you a hundred ducats, and may heaven conduct you with that sum. Adieu, Mr. Gil Blas, I wish you all manner of prosperity, with a little more taste.”

It would be hard, we think, to overmatch anywhere in literature the shrewd but genial satire, the quiet, effective comedy, of the foregoing. How deep it gently goes, probing and searching into the secret springs of our common human nature! The cool, the frontless calculation of self-interest on Gil Blas’s part throughout the whole course of his conduct of the relation between himself and the archbishop is perfectly characteristic of the impudent easy-heartedness everywhere displayed of this conscienceless adventurer. It illustrates the consummate art of the author that the whole is so managed that, while you do not sympathize with his hero, you still are by no means forced to feel unplesantly offended at him. This is a great feat of lullaby to the conscience of the reader; for the character of the work is such that if, in perusing it, you should throughout keep vigilantly obeying the wholesome safeguard injunction of the apostle, “Abhor that which is evil,” you would be so busy doing the duty of abhorring as seriously to interfere with your enjoyment of the comedy. To get the pleasure or the profit, and at the same time leave the taint, that is the problem often in studying the masterpieces of literature. As generally, so in the case of “Gil Blas,” it is a problem perhaps best to be solved by being still more intent on leaving the taint than on getting the pleasure or the profit.

On the whole, the reading of “Gil Blas” entire is a task or a diversion that may safely in most cases be postponed to the leisure of late life. The whole is such, or is not so good, as the part that has here been shown. It is an instance in which the building is very fairly represented by a single specimen brick. Multiply what you have seen by the necessary factor, and you have the total product with little or no loss.

It ought to be added that “Gil Blas,” as in local color and in what might be styled medium not French at all, is also in general character the least French of French productions. It seems almost as if expressly written to be part of what Goethe taught his disciples to look for, namely, a “world-literature.” “Gil Blas,” though French in form, is in essence French only because it is human. And for the same reason it is of every other nation as well. It possesses, therefore, as French literature a unique and, so to speak, paradoxical importance in not being French literature; it is, in fact, perhaps quite the only French book that is less national than universal.

XV.

MONTESQUIEU: 1689-1755; DE TOCQUEVILLE: 1805-1859.

To Montesquieu belongs the glory of being the founder, or inventor, of the philosophy of history. Bossuet might dispute this palm with him; but Bossuet, in his “Discourse on Universal History,” only exemplified the principle which it was left to Montesquieu afterward more consciously to develop.

Three books, still living, are associated with the name of Montesquieu—“The Persian Letters,” “The Greatness and the Decline of the Romans,” and “The Spirit of Laws.” “The Persian Letters” are a series of epistles purporting to be written by a Persian sojourning in Paris and observing the manners and morals of the people around him. The idea is ingenious; though the ingenuity, we suppose, was not original with Montesquieu. Such letters afford the writer of them an admirable advantage for telling satire on contemporary follies. This production of Montesquieu became the suggestive example to Goldsmith for his “Citizen of the World; or, Letters of a Chinese Philosopher.” We shall have here no room for illustrative citations from Montesquieu’s “Persian Letters.”

The second work, that on the “Greatness and the Decline of the Romans,” is less a history than a series of essays on the history of Rome. It is brilliant, striking, suggestive. It aims to be philosophical rather than historical. It deals in bold generalizations. The spirit of it is, perhaps, too constantly and too profoundly hostile to the Romans. Something of the ancient Gallic enmity—as if a derivation from that last and noblest of the Gauls, Vercingetorix—seems to animate the Frenchman in discussing the character and the career of the great conquering nation of antiquity. The critical element is the element chiefly wanting to make Montesquieu’s work equal to the demands of modern historical scholarship. Montesquieu was, however, a full worthy forerunner of the philosophical historians of to-day. We give a single extract in illustration—an extract condensed from the chapter in which the author analyzes and expounds the foreign policy of the Romans. The generalizations are bold and brilliant,—too bold, probably, for strict critical truth. (We use, for our extract, the recent translation by Mr. Jehu Baker, who enriches his volume with original notes of no little interest and value.) Montesquieu:

This body [the Roman Senate] erected itself into a tribunal for the judgment of all peoples, and at the end of every war it decided upon the punishment and the recompenses which it conceived each to be entitled to. It took away parts of the lands of the conquered states, in order to bestow them upon the allies of Rome, thus accomplishing two objects at once—attaching to Rome those kings of whom she had little to fear and much to hope, and weakening those of whom she had little to hope and all to fear.

Allies were employed to make war upon an enemy, but the destroyers were at once destroyed in their turn. Philip was beaten with the half of the Ætolians, who were immediately afterward annihilated for having joined themselves to Antiochus. Antiochus was beaten with the help of the Rhodians, who, after having received signal rewards, were humiliated forever, under the pretext that they had requested that peace might be made with Perseus.

When they had many enemies on hand at the same time, they accorded a truce to the weakest, which considered itself happy in obtaining such a respite, counting it for much to be able to secure a postponement of its ruin.

When they were engaged in a great war, the Senate affected to ignore all sorts of injuries, and silently awaited the arrival of the proper time for punishment; when, if it saw that only some individuals were culpable, it refused to punish them, choosing rather to hold the entire nation as criminal, and thus reserve to itself a useful vengeance.

As they inflicted inconceivable evils upon their enemies, there were not many leagues formed against them; for those who were most distant from danger were not willing to draw nearer to it. The consequence of this was, that they were rarely attacked; whilst, on the other hand, they constantly made war at such time, in such manner, and against such peoples, as suited their convenience; and, among the many nations which they assailed, there were very few that would not have submitted to every species of injury at their hands if they had been willing to leave them in peace.

It being their custom to speak always as masters, the ambassadors whom they sent to nations which had not yet felt their power were certain to be insulted; and this was an infallible pretext for a new war.

As they never made peace in good faith, and as, with the design of universal conquest, their treaties were, properly speaking, only suspensions of war, they always put conditions in them which began the ruin of the states which accepted them. They either provided that the garrisons of strong places should be withdrawn, or that the number of troops should be limited, or that the horses or the elephants of the vanquished party should be delivered over to themselves; and if the defeated people was powerful on sea, they compelled it to burn its vessels, and sometimes to remove, and occupy a place of habitation farther inland.

After having destroyed the armies of a prince, they ruined his finances by excessive taxes, or by the imposition of a tribute under the pretext of requiring him to pay the expenses of the war—a new species of tyranny, which forced the vanquished sovereign to oppress his own subjects, and thus to alienate their affection.

When they granted peace to a king, they took some of his brothers or children as hostages. This gave them the means of troubling his kingdom at their pleasure. If they held the nearest heir, they intimidated the possessor; if only a prince of a remote degree, they used him to stir up revolts against the legitimate ruler.

Whenever any people or prince withdrew their obedience from their sovereign, they immediately accorded to them the title of allies of the Roman people, and thus rendered them sacred and inviolable; so that there was no king, however great he might be, who would for a moment be sure of his subjects, or even of his family.

Although the title of Roman ally was a species of servitude, it was, nevertheless, very much sought after; for the possession of this title made it certain that the recipients of it would receive injuries from the Romans only, and there was ground for the hope that this class of injuries would be rendered less grievous than they would otherwise be.

Thus, there was no service which nations and kings were not ready to perform, nor any humiliation which they did not submit to, in order to obtain this distinction....

These customs were not merely some particular facts which happened at hazard. They were permanently established principles, as may be readily seen; for the maxims which the Romans acted upon against the greatest powers were precisely those which they had employed in the beginning of their career against the small cities which surrounded them....

But nothing served Rome more effectually than the respect which she inspired among all nations. She immediately reduced kings to silence, and rendered them as dumb. With the latter, it was not a mere question of the degree of their power; their very persons were attacked. To risk a war with Rome was to expose themselves to captivity, to death, and to the infamy of a triumph. Thus it was that kings, who lived in pomp and luxury, did not dare to look with steady eyes upon the Roman people, and, losing courage, they hoped, by their patience and their obsequiousness, to obtain some postponement of the calamities with which they were menaced.

The “Spirit of Laws” is probably to be considered the masterpiece of Montesquieu. It is our duty, however, to say that this work is quite differently estimated by different authorities. By some, it is praised in terms of the highest admiration, as a great achievement in wide and wise political or juridical philosophy. By others, it is dismissed very lightly, as the ambitious, or, rather, pretentious, effort of a superficial man, a showy mere sciolist.

The philosophical aim and ambition of the author at once appear in the inquiry which he institutes for the three several animating principles of the several forms of government respectively distinguished by him; namely, democracy (or republicanism), monarchy, and despotism. What these three principles are will be seen from the following statement: “As virtue is necessary in a republic, and in a monarchy honor, so fear is necessary in a despotic government.” The meaning is that in republics virtue possessed by the citizens is the spring of national prosperity; that under a monarchy the desire of preferment at the hands of the sovereign is what quickens men to perform services to the State; that despotism thrives by fear inspired in the breasts of those subject to its sway.

To illustrate the freely discursive character of the work, we give the whole of chapter sixteen—there are chapters still shorter—in Book VII.:

AN EXCELLENT CUSTOM OF THE SAMNITES.

The Samnites had a custom which in so small a republic, and especially in their situation, must have been productive of admirable effects. The young people were all convened in one place and their conduct was examined. He that was declared the best of the whole assembly had leave given him to take which girl he pleased for his wife; the second best chose after him, and so on. Admirable institution! The only recommendation that young men could have on this occasion was their virtue and the service done their country. He who had the greatest share of these endowments chose which girl he liked out of the whole nation. Love, beauty, chastity, virtue, birth, and even wealth itself, were all, in some measure, the dowry of virtue. A nobler and grander recompense, less chargeable to a petty state and more capable of influencing both sexes, could scarce be imagined.

The Samnites were descended from the Lacedemonians; and Plato, whose institutes are only an improvement of those of Lycurgus, enacted nearly the same law.

The relation of the foregoing chapter to the subject indicated in the title of the book is sufficiently obscure and remote for a work like this, purporting to be philosophical. What relation exists seems to be found in the fact that the custom described tends to produce that popular virtue by which republics flourish. But the information, at all events, is curious and interesting.

The following paragraphs, taken from the second chapter of Book XIV., contain in germ a large part of the philosophy underlying M. Taine’s essays on the history of literature:

OF THE DIFFERENCE OF MEN IN DIFFERENT CLIMATES.

A cold air constringes the extremities of the external fibers of the body; this increases their elasticity, and favors the return of the blood from the extreme parts to the heart. It contracts those very fibers; consequently it increases also their force. On the contrary, a warm air relaxes and lengthens the extremes of the fibers; of course it diminishes their force and elasticity.

People are therefore more vigorous in cold climates. Here the action of the heart and the reaction of the extremities of the fibers are better performed, the temperature of the humors is greater, the blood moves freer toward the heart, and reciprocally the heart has more power. This superiority of strength must produce various effects; for instance, a greater boldness—that is, more courage; a greater sense of superiority—that is, less desire of revenge; a greater opinion of security—that is, more frankness, less suspicion, policy, and cunning. In short, this must be productive of very different tempers. Put a man into a close, warm place, and for the reasons above given he will feel a great faintness. If under this circumstance you propose a bold enterprise to him, I believe you will find him very little disposed towards it; his present weakness will throw him into a despondency; he will be afraid of every thing, being in a state of total incapacity. The inhabitants of warm countries are, like old men, timorous; the people in cold countries are, like young men, brave.

In the following extract, from chapter five, Book XXIV., the climatic theory is again applied, this time to the matter of religion, in a style that makes one think of Buckle’s “History of Civilization”:

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.

The reason is plain: the people of the north have, and will forever have, a spirit of liberty and independence, which the people of the south have not; and therefore a religion which has no visible head is more agreeable to the independency of the climate than that which has one.

Climate is a “great matter” with Montesquieu. In treating of the subject of a State changing its religion, he says:

The ancient religion is connected with the constitution of the kingdom, and the new one is not; the former agrees with the climate, and very often the new one is opposite to it.

For the Christian religion, Montesquieu professes profound respect—rather as a pagan political philosopher might do, than as one intimately acquainted with it by a personal experience of his own. His spirit, however, is humane and liberal. It is the spirit of Montaigne, it is the spirit of Voltaire, speaking in the idiom of this different man, and of this different man as influenced by his different circumstances. Montesquieu had had practical proof of the importance to himself of not offending the dominant hierarchy.

On the whole, concerning Montesquieu it may justly be said, that of all political philosophers, he, if not the profoundest, is at least one of the most interesting; if not the most accurate and critical, at least one of the most brilliant and suggestive.

As to Montesquieu the man, it is perhaps sufficient to say that he seems to have been a very good type of the French gentleman of quality. An interesting story told by Sainte-Beuve reveals, if true, a side at once attractive and repellent of his personal character. Montesquieu at Marseilles employed a young boatman, whose manner and speech indicated more cultivation than was to have been looked for in one plying his vocation. The philosopher learned his history. The youth’s father was at the time a captive in one of the Barbary States, and this son of his was now working to earn money for his ransom. The stranger listened apparently unmoved, and went his way. Some months later, home came the father, released he knew not how, to his surprised and overjoyed family. The son guessed the secret, and, meeting Montesquieu a year or so after in Marseilles, threw himself in grateful tears at his feet, begged the generous benefactor to reveal his name and to come and see the family he had blessed. Montesquieu, calmly expressing himself ignorant of the whole business, actually shook the young fellow off, and turned away without betraying the least emotion. It was not till after the cold-blooded philanthropist’s death that the fact came out.

A tranquil, happy temperament was Montesquieu’s. He would seem to have come as near as any one ever did to being the natural master of his part in life. But the world was too much for him; as it is for all—at last. Witness the contrast of these two different sets of expressions from his pen. In earlier manhood he says:

Study has been for me the sovereign remedy for all the dissatisfactions of life, having never had a sense of chagrin that an hour’s reading would not dissipate. I wake in the morning with a secret joy to behold the light. I behold the light with a kind of ravishment, and all the rest of the day I am happy.

In late life, the brave, cheerful tone had declined to this:

I am broken down with fatigue; I must repose for the rest of my life

Then it took a further fall to this:

I have expected to kill myself for the last three months, finishing an addition to my work on the origin and changes of the French civil law. It will take only three hours to read it; but, I assure you, it has been such a labor to me, that my hair has turned white under it all.

Finally it touches nadir:

It [his work] has almost cost me my life; I must rest; I can work no more.

My candles are all burned out; I have set off all my cartridges.

When Montesquieu died, only Diderot, among Parisian men of letters, followed him to his tomb.

Belonging to an entirely different world, literary, social, political, from that in which Montesquieu flourished—more than one full century, and that a French century, had intervened—was a man kindred in genius with him, to whom, for the double reason that his intellectual rank deserves it, and that the subject of his principal work is one to command especially the interest of Americans, we feel compelled to devote serious, though it must be hastening, attention. We refer to Alexis de Tocqueville, the author of that famous book, “Democracy in America.” We can most conveniently discharge our duty by letting their likeness in intellectual character and achievement bridge for us the chasm of time between the two men, and thus considering the later in conjunction here with the earlier author.

“Democracy in America” is a most remarkable book to have been, as in fact it was, the production of a young man of thirty. It was the fruit of a tour in the United States undertaken by the writer ostensibly to visit in an official capacity the prisons of the new nation that France had helped create, in a kind of counterpoise to England, on this side of the Atlantic. The inquisitive young French inspector inspected much more than the prison system of the lusty infant republic. He observed and studied American institutions and manners at large, in order to lay a base line for the boldest speculative triangulation into the probable political future of the world.

Tocqueville held the belief that democracy, as a system of government, was destined to prevail universally. He wrote his observations and reflections, and he made his guesses, primarily for the instruction of France. So confident was his conviction on the subject of democratic destiny for his own country at least, that, while as yet the apparently profound peace was undisturbed of the monarchical reaction under Louis Philippe, he predicted an impending revolution; predicted in fact the revolution which actually occurred in 1848. France, after that date, both during the prophet’s life, and subsequently to his death, experienced her vibrations from, one form of government to another; but no one can now deny that thus far the resultant tendency is in favor of Tocqueville’s bold speculative forecast of the political future of his nation. The same thing is true, we think, more broadly, of the world in general; and of this Brazil apparently furnishes a striking late instance in confirmation.

“Democracy in America” is a classic in literature. Its credit is highest with those best qualified to form a judgment. But its fame is universal. It associates its author in rank of genius with the foremost political philosophers of the world—with Machiavelli, with Montesquieu, with Burke. Every American aiming at a political career, every American journalist having to discuss political subjects should be familiar with this book. Mr. Bryce’s more recent work on the United States, which has sprung so suddenly into such commanding fame, by no means supersedes, though it does most usefully supplement, the monumental treatise of Tocqueville—a name generally miscalled “De Tocqueville.”

Of Alexis de Tocqueville’s life it need only be said that, sprung of a noble French family, he ran a respectable, though neither a brilliant, nor a very influential, career in the politics of his country; until, discontented with the second empire, that of the usurper, Louis Napoleon, he retired, about 1851, from public service and devoted himself to labor with the pen. His second chief work was “The Ancient Régime,” published in 1856, three years before his death.

We cannot probably make a better brief selection, at once more characteristic and more interesting, from Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” than by presenting in large part the chapter entitled: “Causes which render democratic armies weaker than other armies at the outset of a campaign, and more formidable in a protracted warfare.”

A striking illustrative light was destined to be thrown by momentous subsequent history in our own land on the sagacity and justness of the speculations hazarded here by the author on his particular topic.

It would not be far wrong to consider that Americans, by the great civil war, furnished, in a single historical case, the double example required for complete illustration of Tocqueville’s point: an example of the democratic, together with an example of the aristocratic, community engaging in war after a long peace. Readers may make each his own comparison of the Frenchman’s philosophical speculations with the actual facts that emerged in the course of our national strife:

Any army is in danger of being conquered at the outset of a campaign, after a long peace; any army which has long been engaged in warfare has strong chances of victory: this truth is peculiarly applicable to democratic armies. In aristocracies the military profession, being a privileged career, is held in honor even in time of peace. Men of great talents, great attainments, and great ambition embrace it; the army is in all respects on a level with the nation, and frequently above it.

We have seen, on the contrary, that among a democratic people the choicer minds of the nation are gradually drawn away from the military profession to seek, by other paths, distinction, power, and especially wealth. After a long peace—and in democratic ages the periods of peace are long—the army is always inferior to the country itself. In this state it is called into active service: and until war has altered it, there is danger for the country as well as for the army.

I have shown that in democratic armies, and in time of peace, the rule of seniority is the supreme and inflexible law of advancement. This is not only a consequence, as I have before observed, of the constitution of these armies, but of the constitution of the people, and it will always occur.

The words italicized by us above illustrate the intrepid firmness of our author in staking the fortune of an opinion of his upon the risk of confutation by future fact. He affirms, it will be seen, absolutely, and does not seek to save himself by a clause.

Again, as among these nations the officer derives his position in the country solely from his position in the army, and as he draws all the distinction and the competency he enjoys from the same source, he does not retire from his profession or is not superannuated till toward the extreme close of life. The consequence of these two causes is that when a democratic people goes to war after a long interval of peace all the leading officers of the army are old men. I speak not only of the generals, but of the non-commissioned officers, who have most of them been stationary, or have only advanced step by step. It may be remarked with surprise that in a democratic army after a long peace all the soldiers are mere boys, and all the superior officers in declining years; so that the former are wanting in experience, the latter in vigor. This is a strong element of defeat, for the first condition of successful generalship is youth. I should not have ventured to say so if the greatest captain of modern times had not made the observation. [The unequaled success of the aged Von Moltke in the conduct of the Prussian war against France in 1870 is here a curious comment on the text.]

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I am therefore of opinion that when a democratic people engages in a war after a long peace, it incurs much more risk of defeat than any other nation; but it ought not easily to be cast down by its reverses, for the chances of success for such an army are increased by the duration of the war. When a war has at length by its long continuance roused the whole community from their peaceful occupations and ruined their minor undertakings the same passions which made them attach so much importance to the maintenance of peace will be turned to arms. War, after it has destroyed all modes of speculation, becomes itself the great and sole speculation, to which all the ardent and ambitious desires which equality engenders are exclusively directed. Hence it is that the self-same democratic nations which are so reluctant to engage in hostilities sometimes perform prodigious achievements when once they have taken the field.

As the war attracts more and more of public attention, and is seen to create high reputations and great fortunes in a short space of time, the choicest spirits of the nation enter the military profession. All the enterprising, proud, and martial minds, no longer of the aristocracy solely, but of the whole country, are drawn in this direction. As the number of competitors for military honors is immense, and war drives every man to his proper level, great generals are always sure to spring up. A long war produces upon a democratic army the same effects that a revolution produces upon a people; it breaks through regulations, and allows extraordinary men to rise above the common level. Those officers whose bodies and minds have grown old in peace are removed, or superannuated, or they die. In their stead a host of young men are pressing on whose frames are already hardened, whose desires are extended and inflamed by active service. They are bent on advancement at all hazards, and perpetual advancement. They are followed by others with the same passions and desires, and after these are others yet, unlimited by aught but the size of the army. The principle of equality opens the door of ambition to all, and death provides chances for ambition. Death is constantly thinning the ranks, making vacancies, closing and opening the career of arms.

There is, moreover, a secret connection between the military character and the character of democracies which war brings to light. The men of democracies are naturally passionately eager to acquire what they covet, and to enjoy it on easy conditions. They, for the most part, worship chance, and are much less afraid of death than of difficulty. This is the spirit which they bring to commerce and manufactures; and this same spirit, carried with them to the field of battle, induces them willingly to expose their lives in order to secure in a moment the rewards of victory. No kind of greatness is more pleasing to the imagination of a democratic people than military greatness—a greatness of vivid and sudden luster, obtained without toil, by nothing but the risk of life.

Thus, while the interest and the tastes of the members of a democratic community divert them from war, their habits of mind fit them for carrying on war well; they soon make good soldiers when they are roused from their business and their enjoyments.

If peace is peculiarly hurtful to democratic armies, war secures to them advantages which no other armies ever possess; and these advantages, however little felt at first, cannot fail in the end to give them the victory. An aristocratic nation which, in a contest with a democratic people, does not succeed in ruining the latter at the outset of the war always runs a great risk of being conquered by it.

“Democracy in America” must be credited with a very important teaching influence on the political thought of mankind. This influence is more than the impulse of stimulating speculation. It is a practical force fruitful of solid political result. The present writer remembers hearing Tocqueville taught to eager audiences of French students in the Collège de France, at Paris, by M. Laboulaye, a popular professor in that national institution. This was while in France the second empire remained as yet apparently firm on its base, and while in this country the great duel between section and section remained as yet apparently doubtful. The applause with which the lecturer’s praise of free institutions was greeted signified much. It signified that the leaven of Tocqueville’s ideas was working in those youthful hearts. (M. Laboulaye’s lectures, which possessed original merit of their own, were finally published in a volume.) Present republican France owes, in no despicable degree, its existence to the fact that Tocqueville had visited, and reported, and interpreted the United States to his countrymen. Perhaps, also, it is true that the American Union is standing to-day partly because the popular sentiment created by Tocqueville in France favorable to American democracy was too strong, too vivid, and too universal, for the emperor safely to disregard it, in imperial acts, long threatened, hostile to the integrity of the republic. If Tocqueville’s guess is right, if democratic institutions are indeed ultimately to prevail throughout the world, certainly it cannot be denied that the prophet himself will have done his part toward fulfilling his prophecy.

We feel that we shall have done scant justice to the high and serious spirit who forms the subject of these concluding pages of the present chapter, if we do not go from the one work itself, by example out of which we have shown him, to expressions of his in his correspondence that may let us a little deeper into the personal secret of the man himself. Tocqueville, although, as we have intimated, a believer in the democratic destiny of the world, was not such in virtue of being a democrat by preference himself. On the contrary, his own aristocratic blood favoring it perhaps, his individual choice would apparently have gone, not for, but against, democracy. This seems to be indicated in what follows, written to a friend concerning the purpose of his work, “Democracy in America”:

I wished to show what in our days a democratic people really was, and, by a rigorously accurate picture, to produce a double effect on the men of my day. To those who have fancied an ideal democracy, as a brilliant and easily realized dream, I undertook to show that they had clothed the picture in false colors; that the democratic government which they desired, though it may procure real benefits to the people who can bear it, has none of the elevated features with which their imaginations would endow it; and moreover, that such a government can only maintain itself under certain conditions of faith, enlightenment, and private morality, which we have not yet reached, and which we must labor to attain before grasping their political results.

To men for whom the word “democracy” is the synonym of overthrow, spoliation, anarchy, and murder, I have endeavored to prove that it was possible for democracy to govern society, and yet to respect property, to recognize rights, to spare liberty, to honor religion; that if democratic government is less fitted than other forms to develop some of the finest faculties of the human soul, it has yet its noble and its lovely features; and that perhaps, after all, it may be the will of God to distribute a moderate degree of happiness to the mass of men, and not to concentrate great felicity and great perfection on a few. I have tried, moreover, to demonstrate that, whatever might be their opinion upon these points, the time for discussing them was past; that the world marched onward day by day towards a condition of social equality, and dragged them and every one along with it; that their only choice now lay between evils henceforth inevitable; that the practical question of this day was not whether you would have an aristocracy or a democracy, but whether you would have a democratic society, without poetry and without grandeur, but with morality and order; or a democratic society disorganized and depraved, delivered over to a furious frenzy, or else bent beneath a yoke heavier than any that have weighed upon mankind since the fall of the Roman Empire.

The “Commune” in France, “Nihilism” in Russia, “Socialism” in Germany, “Nationalism” in the United States, are all of them, each in its own different way, remarkable historical commentaries on the prophetic political forecast contained in the foregoing letter.

Here is ripe practical wisdom occurring in a letter written by Tocqueville about two years before his death:

You know that my most settled principle is, that there is no period of a man’s life at which he is entitled to rest; and that effort out of one’s self, and still more above one’s self, is as necessary in age as in youth—nay, even more necessary. Man in this world is like a traveler who is always walking towards a colder region, and who is therefore obliged to be more active as he goes farther north. The great malady of the soul is cold. And in order to counteract and combat this formidable illness, he must keep up the activity of his mind not only by work, but by contact with his fellow-men and with the world. Retirement from the great conflicts of the world is desirable no doubt for those whose strength is on the decline; but absolute retirement, away from the stir of life, is not desirable for any man, nor at any age.

His experience as practical politician made him write thus:

It is a sad side of humanity that politics uncovers. We may say, without making any exception, that nothing there is either thoroughly pure or thoroughly disinterested; nothing really generous, nothing hearty or spontaneous. There is no youth, even among the youngest; and something cold, selfish, and premeditated may be detected even in the most apparently passionate proceedings.

There was so much wholesome reaction in Tocqueville’s moral nature that, notwithstanding the disparaging views, on his part, thus revealed of human worth, he never became cynical. He could even write as follows to a friend of his who, he thought, went too far in decrying mankind:

You make humanity out worse than it is. I have seen many countries, studied many men, mingled in many public transactions, and the result of my observation is not what you suppose. Men in general are neither very good nor very bad; they are simply mediocre. I have never closely examined even the best without discovering faults and frailties invisible at first. I have always in the end found among the worst certain elements and holding-points of honesty. There are two men in every man: it is childish to see only one; it is sad and unjust to look only at the other.... Man, with all his vices, his weaknesses, and his virtues, this strange mixture of good and bad, of low and lofty, of sincere and depraved, is, after all, the object most deserving of study, interest, pity, affection, and admiration to be found upon this earth; and since we have no angels, we cannot attach ourselves to anything greater or worthier than our fellow-creatures.

On the whole, Alexis de Tocqueville’s own practice in life showed that he wrote not only with sincerity, but with earnestness, when he wrote those words. It was not of such Frenchmen as was Tocqueville that the author of that heavy sentence on France could have been thinking—that the French character was made up without conscience. We, for our part, cannot but maintain that Tocqueville is as much more solid as he may be less brilliant than his predecessor and fellow, Montesquieu. They were both too theoretical; that is, too exclusively French as distinguished, for instance, from English, in political philosophy. They began to be deductive, when to be inductive yet longer would have been their wiser part. In a word—like Guizot, too, the author of the “History of Civilization,” and the minister of Citizen-King Louis Philippe—both Montesquieu and Tocqueville failed of escaping what the French would call the defect of their quality.

XV.

VOLTAIRE.

1694-1778.

By the volume and the variety, joined to the unfailing brilliancy, of his production; by his prodigious effectiveness; and by his universal fame, Voltaire is undoubtedly entitled to rank first, with no fellow, among the eighteenth-century literary men, not merely of France, but of the world. He was not a great man, he produced no great single work, but he must nevertheless be pronounced a great writer. There is hardly any species of composition to which, in the long course of his activity, he did not turn his talent. It cannot be said that he succeeded splendidly in all; but in some he succeeded splendidly, and he failed abjectly in none. There is not a great thought, and there is not a flat expression, in the whole bulk of his multitudinous and multifarious works. Read him wherever you will, in the ninety-seven volumes (equivalent, probably in the aggregate, to two hundred volumes like the present) which, in one leading edition, collect his productions, you may often find him superficial, you may often find him untrustworthy, you will certainly often find him flippant, but not less certainly you will never find him obscure, and you will never find him dull. The clearness, the vivacity of this man’s mind were something almost preternatural. So, too, were his readiness, his versatility, his audacity. He had no distrust of himself, no awe of his fellow-men, no reverence for God, to deter him from any attempt with his pen, however presuming. If a state ode were required, it should be ready to order at twelve to-morrow; if an epic poem—to be classed with the “Iliad” and the “Æneid “—the “Henriade” was promptly forthcoming, to answer the demand. He did not shrink from flouting a national idol, by freely finding fault with Corneille; and he lightly undertook the task of extinguishing a venerable form of Christianity, simply with pricks, innumerably repeated, of his tormenting pen.

A very large part of the volume of Voltaire’s production consists of letters, written by him to correspondents perhaps more numerous, and more various in rank, from kings on the throne down to scribblers in the garret, than ever, in any other case, exchanged such communications with a literary man. Another considerable proportion of his work in literature took the form of pamphlets, either anonymously or pseudonymously published, in which this master-spirit of intellectual disturbance and ferment found it convenient, or advantageous, or safe, to promulge and propagate his ideas. A shower of such publications was incessantly escaping from Voltaire’s pen. More formal and regular, more confessedly ambitious, literary essays of his, were poems in every kind—heroic, mock-heroic, lyric, elegiac, comic, tragic, satiric—historical and biographical monographs, and tales or novels of a peculiar class.

Voltaire’s poetry does not count for very much now. Still, its first success was so great that it will always remain an important topic in literary history. Besides this, it really is, in some of its kinds, remarkable work. Voltaire’s epic verse is almost an exception, needful to be made, from our assertion that this author is nowhere dull. “The Henriade” comes dangerously near that mark. It is a tasteless reproduction of Lucan’s faults, with little reproduction of Lucan’s virtues. Voltaire’s comedies are bright and witty, but they are not laughter-provoking; and they do not possess the elemental and creative character of Shakespeare’s or Molière’s work. His tragedies are better; but they do not avoid that cast of mechanical which seems necessarily to belong to poetry produced by talent, however consummate, unaccompanied with genius. Voltaire’s histories are luminous and readable narratives, but they cannot claim the merit either of critical accuracy or of philosophic breadth and insight. His letters would have to be read in considerable volume in order to furnish a full satisfactory idea of the author. His tales, finally, afford the most available, and, on the whole, likewise the best means of arriving shortly and easily at a knowledge of Voltaire.

But, before coming to these, we owe it to our readers, and perhaps to ourselves, to justify with example what, a little way back, we said of Voltaire as epic poet.

Voltaire was profoundly influenced by his personal observations of what England was, alike in her literary, her political, and her theological aspects. Voltairism may, in fact, be pronounced a transplantation from English soil. It was English deism “mixed with cunning sparks of”—French wit. A very short passage from the “Henriade” will suffice the double purpose of showing what in quality of style that poem of Voltaire’s is, and of suggesting its author’s sense of debt to the England which, for its freedom and its free-thinking, he so much admired. The reader will not fail to note the skill with which Voltaire manages in praising another country to give a very broad hint to his own. The old-fashioned formal heroic couplet, with rhyme, in which the following passage appears translated, is not inapposite to the artificial cast and style of the original. Various passions, such as “Fear,” are not only personified in the “Henriade,” but made to play the part of veritable characters in the action of the poem. Supernatural interferences occur. History is boldly fabricated or falsified at the pleasure of the poet. Of this audacious freedom the passage from which we take our extract presents an instance. Voltaire sends his hero on a mythical mission to England to solicit help from Queen Elizabeth. He here meets every reader’s familiar old friend, “a venerable hermit,” who instructs him in English history and manners. Voltaire wrote prefaces and notes to vindicate his epic practices. He went to Virgil for precedents. Lucan he censured for not making free enough with his history. “Eliza” is, of course, Queen Elizabeth, and “Bourbon,” is the hero of the epic, Henry IV. of France, from whose name, it need not be said, comes the title, “Henriade.” We quote from the first canto of the poem:

A virgin queen the regal scepter sway’d,

And fate itself her sovereign power obeyed.

The wise Eliza, whose directing hand

Had the great scale of Europe at command;

And ruled a people that alike disdain

Or freedom’s ease, or slavery’s iron chain.

Of every loss her reign oblivion bred;

There, flocks unnumbered graze each flowery mead.

Britannia’s vessels rule the azure seas,

Corn fills her plains, and fruitage loads her trees.

From pole to pole her gallant navies sweep

The waters of the tributary deep.

On Thames’s banks each flower of genius thrives,

There sports the Muse, and Mars his thunder gives.

Three different powers at Westminster appear,

And all admire the ties which join them there.

Whom interest parts the laws together bring,

The people’s deputies, the peers and king.

One whole they form, whose terror wide extends

To neighboring nations, and their rights defends.

Thrice happy times, when grateful subjects show

That loyal, warm affection which is due!

But happier still, when freedom’s blessings spring

From the wise conduct of a prudent king!

O when, cried Bourbon, ravished at the sight,

In France shall peace and glory thus unite?

A poem flaunting on its front invidious praise like the foregoing of a foreign government so different from the government of France, could not be very acceptable to the ruling classes of his time in the author’s own country. But in England, during the poet’s two years’ stay in that island, a revised edition of the “Henriade” was issued under auspices the most august and imposing. Queen Caroline headed the list of subscribers, and such was the brilliancy of the patronage extended to the poem that Voltaire, as is with probability said, netted forty thousand dollars from his English edition—a sum of money equivalent to, say, one hundred thousand dollars, present value. This early success laid the foundation of a fortune for Voltaire, which the skill, the prudence, the servility, the greed, and the unscrupulousness of the owner subsequently built into proportions that were nothing less than princely. Voltaire’s annual income at his death was about a hundred thousand dollars. It seems incredible that a man so rich, and, in some ways, it must be acknowledged, so generous, should have been at the same time so mean, so sordid, so literally perjured in sordidness, as Voltaire is demonstrated, and admitted even by his farthest-going admirers, for instance, Mr. John Morley, to have been.

Among Voltaire’s tales doubtless the one most eligible for use, to serve our present purpose, is his “Candide.” This is a nondescript piece of fiction, the design of which is, by means of a narrative of travel and adventure, constructed without much regard to the probability of particular incidents, to set forth, in the characteristic mocking vein of Voltaire, the vanity and misery of mankind. The author’s invention is often whimsical enough; but it is constantly so ready, so reckless, and so abundant, that the reader never tires as he is hurried ceaselessly forward from change to change of scene and circumstance. The play of wit is incessant. The style is limpidity itself. Your sympathies are never painfully engaged, even in recitals of experience that ought to be the most heart-rending. There is never a touch of noble moral sentiment to relieve the monotony of mockery that lightly laughs at you and tantalizes you, page after page, from the beginning to the end of the book. The banter is not good-natured; though, on the other hand, it cannot justly be pronounced ill-natured; and it is, in final effect upon the reader’s mind, bewildering and depressing in the extreme. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity; such is the comfortless doctrine of the book. The apples are the apples of Sodom, everywhere in the world. There is no virtue anywhere, no good, no happiness. Life is a cheat, the love of life is a cruelty, and beyond life there is nothing. At least, there is no glimpse given of any compensating future reserved for men, a future to redress the balance of good and ill experienced here and now. Faith and hope, those two eyes of the soul, are smilingly quenched in their sockets, and you are left blind, in a whirling world of darkness, with a whirling world of darkness before you.

Such is “Candide.” We select a single passage for specimen. The passage we select is more nearly free than almost any other passage as long, in this extraordinary romance, would probably be found, from impure implications. It is, besides, more nearly serious in apparent motive than is the general tenor of the production. Here, however, as elsewhere, the writer keeps carefully down his mocking mask. At least, you are left tantalizingly uncertain all the time how much the grin you face is the grin of the man, and how much the grin of a visor that he wears.

Candide, the hero, is a young fellow of ingenuous character brought successively under the lead of several different persons wise in the ways of the world, who act toward him, each in his turn, the part of “guide, philosopher, and friend.” Candide, with such a mentor bearing the name Martin, has now arrived at Venice. Candide speaks: