seven thousand years that there have been men, and men who have
thought.
La Bruyere has something to say, and that to length unusual for him, of
pulpit eloquence. We select a few specimen sentences:
Christian eloquence has become a spectacle. That gospel sadness, which
is its soul, is no longer to be observed in it; its place is supplied
by advantages of facial expression, by inflections of the voice, by
regularity of gesticulation, by choice of words, and by long
categories. The sacred word is no longer listened to seriously; it is
a kind of amusement, one among many; it is a game in which there is
rivalry, and in which there are those who lay wagers.
Profane eloquence has been transferred, so to speak, from the bar ...
where it is no longer employed, to the pulpit where it ought not to be
found.
Matches of eloquence are made at the very foot of the altar, and in
the presence of the mysteries. He who listens sits in judgment on him
who preaches, to condemn or to applaud, and is no more converted by
the discourse which he praises than by that which he pronounces
against. The orator pleases some, displeases others, and has an
understanding with all in one thing--that as he does not seek to
render them better, so they do not think of becoming better.
The almost cynical acerbity of the preceding is ostensibly relieved of
an obvious application to certain illustrious contemporary examples
among preachers by the following open allusion to Bossuet and
Bourdaloue:
The Bishop of Meaux [Bossuet] and Father Bourdaloue make me think of
Demosthenes and Cicero. Both of them, masters of pulpit eloquence,
have had the fortune of great models; the one has made bad critics,
the other bad imitators.
Here is a happy instance of La Bruyere's successful pains in redeeming a
commonplace sentiment by means of a striking form of expression; the
writer is disapproving the use of oaths in support of one's testimony:
An honest man who says Yes, or No, deserves to be believed; his
character swears for him.
Highly satiric in his quiet way, La Bruyere knew how to be. Witness the
following thrust at a contemporary author, not named by the satirist,
but, no doubt, recognized by the public of the time:
He maintains that the ancients, however unequal and negligent they may
be, have fine traits; he points these out; and they are so fine that
they make his criticism readable.
How painstakingly, how self-consciously, La Bruyere did his literary
work is evidenced by the following:
A good author, and one who writes with care, often has the experience
of finding that the expression which he was a long time in search of
without reaching it, and which at length he has found, is that which
was the most simple, the most natural, and that which, as it would
seem, should have presented itself at first, and without effort.
We feel that the quality of La Bruyere is such as to fit him for the
admiration and enjoyment of but a comparatively small class of readers.
He was somewhat over-exquisite. His art at times became
artifice--infinite labor of style to make commonplace thought seem
valuable by dint of perfect expression. We dismiss La Bruyere with a
single additional extract--his celebrated parallel between Corneille and
Racine:
Corneille subjects us to his characters and to his ideas; Racine
accommodates himself to ours. The one paints men as they ought to be;
the other paints them as they are. There is more in the former of what
one admires, and of what one ought even to imitate; there is more in
the latter of what one observes in others, or of what one experiences
in one's self. The one inspires, astonishes, masters, instructs; the
other pleases, moves, touches, penetrates. Whatever there is most
beautiful, most noble, most imperial, in the reason is made use of by
the former; by the latter whatever is most seductive and most delicate
in passion. You find in the former maxims, rules, and precepts; in the
latter, taste and sentiment. You are more absorbed in the plays of
Corneille; you are more shaken and more softened in those of Racine.
Corneille is more moral; Racine, more natural. The one appears to make
Sophocles his model; the other owes more to Euripides.
Less than half a century after La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere had shown
the way, VAUVENARGUES followed in a similar style of authorship,
promising almost to rival the fame of his two predecessors. This writer,
during his brief life (he died at thirty-two), produced one not
inconsiderable literary work more integral and regular in form,
entitled, "Introduction to the Knowledge of the Human Mind;" but it is
his disconnected thoughts and observations chiefly that continue to
preserve his name.
Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues, though nobly born, was poor.
His health was frail. He did not receive a good education in his youth.
Indeed, he was still in his youth when he went to the wars. His culture
always remained narrow. He did not know Greek and Latin, when to know
Greek and Latin was, as it were, the whole of scholarship. To crown his
accidental disqualifications for literary work, he fell a victim to the
small-pox, which left him wrecked in body. This occurred almost
immediately after he abandoned a military career which had been fruitful
to him of hardship, but not of promotion. In spite of all that was thus
against him, Vauvenargues, in those years, few and evil, that were his,
thought finely and justly enough to earn for himself a lasting place in
the literary history of his nation. He was in the eighteenth century of
France without being of it. You have to separate him in thought from the
infidels and the "philosophers" of his time. He belongs in spirit to an
earlier age. His moral and intellectual kindred was with such as Pascal,
far more than with such as Voltaire. Vauvenargues is, however, a writer
for the few, instead of for the many. His fame is high but it is not
wide. Historically, he forms a stepping-stone of transition to a
somewhat similar nineteenth-century name, that of Joubert. A very few
sentences of his will suffice to indicate to our readers the quality of
Vauvenargues. Self-evidently, the following antithesis drawn by him
between Corneille and Racine is subtly and ingeniously thought, as well
as very happily expressed--this, whatever may be considered to be its
aptness in point of literary appreciation:
Corneille's heroes often say great things without inspiring them;
Racine's inspire them without saying them.
Here is a good saying:
It is a great sign of mediocrity always to be moderate in praising.
There is worldly wisdom also here:
He who knows how to turn his prodigalities to good account practices a
large and noble economy.
Virgil's "They are able, because they seem to themselves to be able," is
recalled by this:
The consciousness of our strength makes our strength greater.
So much for Vauvenargues.
And so much for what--considering that, logically, though not quite
chronologically, Vauvenargues belongs with them--we may call the
seventeenth-century group of French _pensee_-writers. A
nineteenth-century group of the same literary class will form the
subject of a chapter in due course to follow.
VI.
LA FONTAINE.
1621-1695.
La Fontaine enjoys a unique fame. He has absolutely "no fellow in the
firmament" of literature. He is the only fabulist, of any age or any
nation, that, on the score simply of his fables, is admitted to be poet
as well as fabulist. There is perhaps no other literary name whatever
among the French by long proof more secure than is La Fontaine's, of
universal and of immortal renown. Such a fame is, of course, not the
most resplendent in the world; but to have been the first, and to remain
thus far the only, writer of fables enjoying recognition as true
poetry--this, surely, is an achievement entitling La Fontaine to
monumental mention in any sketch, however summary, of French literature.
Jean de La Fontaine was humbly born, at Chateau-Thierry, in Champagne.
His early education was sadly neglected. At twenty years of age he was
still phenomenally ignorant. About this time, being now better situated,
he developed a taste for the classics and for poetry. With La Fontaine
the man, it is the sadly familiar French story of debauchee manners in
life and in literary production. We cannot acquit him, but we are to
condemn him only in common with the most of his age and of his nation.
As the world goes, La Fontaine was a "good fellow," never lacking
friends. These were held fast in loyalty to the poet, not so much by any
sterling worth of character felt in him as by an exhaustless,
easy-going good-nature that, despite his social insipidity, made La
Fontaine the most acceptable of every-day companions. It would be easy
to repeat many stories illustrative of this personal quality in La
Fontaine, while to tell a single story illustrative of any lofty trait
in his character would be perhaps impossible. Still, La Fontaine seemed
not ungrateful for the benefits he received from others; and gratitude,
no commonplace virtue, let us accordingly reckon to the credit of a man
in general so slenderly equipped with positive claims to admiring
personal regard. The mirror of _bonhomie_ (easy-hearted
good-fellowship), he always was. Indeed, that significant, almost
untranslatable, French word might have been coined to fit La Fontaine's
case. On his amiable side--a full hemisphere or more of the man--it sums
him up completely. Twenty years long this mirror of _bonhomie_ was
domiciliated, like a pet animal, under the hospitable roof of the
celebrated Madame de la Sabliere. There was truth as well as humor
implied in what she said one day: "I have sent away all my domestics; I
have kept only my dog, my cat, and La Fontaine."
But La Fontaine had that in him which kept the friendship of serious
men. Moliere, a grave, even melancholy spirit, however gay in his
comedies; Boileau and Racine, decorous both of them, at least in
manners, constituted, together with La Fontaine, a kind of private
"Academy," existing on a diminutive scale, which was not without its
important influence on French letters. La Fontaine seems to have been a
sort of Goldsmith in this club of wits, the butt of many pleasantries
from his colleagues, called out by his habit of absent-mindedness. St.
Augustine was one night the subject of an elaborate eulogy, which La
Fontaine lost the benefit of, through a reverie of his own indulged
meantime on a quite different character. Catching, however, at the name,
La Fontaine, as he came to himself for a moment, betrayed the secret of
his absent thought by asking, "Do you think St. Augustine had as much
wit as Rabelais?" "Take care, Monsieur La Fontaine: you have put one of
your stockings on wrong side out"--he had actually done so--was the only
answer vouchsafed to his question. The speaker in this case was a doctor
of the Sorbonne (brother to Boileau), present as guest. The story is
told of La Fontaine, that egged on to groundless jealousy of his wife--a
wife whom he never really loved, and whom he soon would finally
abandon,--he challenged a military friend of his to combat with swords.
The friend was amazed, and, amazed, reluctantly fought with La Fontaine,
whom he easily put at his mercy. "Now, what is this for?" he demanded.
"The public says you visit my house for my wife's sake, not for mine,"
said La Fontaine. "Then I never will come again." "Far from it,"
responds La Fontaine, seizing his friend's hand. "I have satisfied the
public. Now you must come to my house every day, or I will fight you
again." The two went back in company, and breakfasted together in mutual
good humor.
A trait or two more and there will have been enough of the man La
Fontaine. It is said that when, on the death of Madame de la Sabliere,
La Fontaine was homeless, he was met on the street by a friend, who
exclaimed, "I was looking for you; come to my house, and live with me!"
"I was on the way there," La Fontaine characteristically replied. At
seventy, La Fontaine went through a process of "conversion," so called,
in which he professed repentance of his sins. On the genuineness of this
inward experience of La Fontaine, it is not for a fellow-creature of
his, especially at this distance of time, to pronounce. When he died, at
seventy-three, Fenelon could say of him (in Latin), "La Fontaine is no
more! He is no more; and with him have gone the playful jokes, the merry
laugh, the artless graces, and the sweet Muses!" La Fontaine's earliest
works were "Contes," so styled; that is, tales, or romances. These are
in character such that the subsequent happy change in manners, if not in
morals, has made them unreadable, for their indecency. We need concern
ourselves only with the Fables, for it is on these that La Fontaine's
fame securely rests. The basis of story in them was not generally
original with La Fontaine. He took whatever fittest came to his hand.
With much modesty he attributed all to AEsop and Phaedrus. But invention
of his own is not altogether wanting to his books of fables. Still, it
is chiefly the consummate artful artlessness of the form that
constitutes the individual merit of La Fontaine's productions. With
something, too, of the air of real poetry, he has undoubtedly invested
his verse.
We give, first, the brief fable which is said to have been the prime
favorite of the author himself. It is the fable of "The Oak and the
Reed." Of this fable French critics have not scrupled to speak in terms
of almost the very highest praise. Chamfort says, "Let one consider,
that, within the limit of thirty lines, La Fontaine, doing nothing but
yield himself to the current of his story, has taken on every tone, that
of poetry the most graceful, that of poetry the most lofty, and one will
not hesitate to affirm, that, at the epoch at which this fable appeared,
there was nothing comparable to it in the French language." There are,
to speak precisely, thirty-two lines in the fable. In this one case let
us try representing La Fontaine's compression by our English form. For
the rest of our specimens, after a single further exception, introduced,
we confess, partly because it could be given in a graceful version by
Bryant, we shall use Elizur Wright's translation--a meritorious one,
still master of the field which, about fifty years ago, it entered as
pioneer. Mr. Wright here expands La Fontaine's thirty-two verses to it
forty-four. The additions are not ill-done, but they encumber somewhat
the Attic neatness and simplicity of the original. We ought to say, that
La Fontaine boldly broke with the tradition which had been making
Alexandrines--lines of six feet--obligatory in French verse. He rhymes
irregularly, at choice, and makes his verses long or short, as pleases
him. The closing verse of the present piece is, in accordance with the
intended majesty of the representation, an Alexandrine:
The Oak one day said to the Reed,
"Justly might you dame Nature blame.
A wren's weight would bow down your frame;
The lightest wind that chance may make
Dimple the surface of the lake
Your head bends low indeed,
The while, like Caucasus, my front
To meet the branding sun is wont,
Nay, more, to take the tempest's brunt.
A blast you feel, I feel a breeze.
Had you been born beneath my roof,
Wide-spread, of leafage weather-proof,
Less had you known your life to tease;
I should have sheltered you from storm.
But oftenest you rear your form
On the moist limits of the realm of wind.
Nature, methinks, against you sore has sinned."
"Your pity," answers him the Reed,
"Bespeaks you kind; but spare your pain;
I more than you may winds disdain.
I bend, and break not. You, indeed,
Against their dreadful strokes till now
Have stood, nor tamed your back to bow:
But wait we for the end."
Scarce had he spoke,
When fiercely from the far horizon broke
The wildest of the children, fullest fraught
With terror, that till then the North had brought.
The tree holds good; the reed it bends.
The wind redoubled might expends,
And so well works that from his bed
Him it uproots who nigh to heaven his head
Held, and whose feet reached to the kingdom of the dead.
Here is that fable of La Fontaine's graced by the hand of Bryant upon it
as translator. It is entitled "Love and Folly:"
Love's worshipers alone can know
The thousand mysteries that are his;
His blazing torch, his twanging bow,
His blooming age are mysteries.
A charming science--but the day
Were all too short to con it o'er;
So take of me this little lay,
A sample of its boundless lore.
As once, beneath the fragrant shade
Of myrtles fresh, in heaven's pure air,
The children, Love and Folly, played--
A quarrel rose betwixt the pair.
Love said the gods should do him right--
But Folly vowed to do it then,
And struck him, o'er the orbs of sight,
So hard he never saw again.
His lovely mother's grief was deep,
She called for vengeance on the deed;
A beauty does not vainly weep,
Nor coldly does a mother plead.
A shade came o'er the eternal bliss
That fills the dwellers of the skies;
Even stony-hearted Nemesis
And Rhadamanthus wiped their eyes.
"Behold," she said, "this lovely boy,"
While streamed afresh her graceful tears,
"Immortal, yet shut out from joy
And sunshine all his future years.
The child can never take, you see
A single step without a staff--
The harshest punishment would be
Too lenient for the crime by half."
All said that Love had suffered wrong,
And well that wrong should be repaid;
When weighed the public interest long,
And long the party's interest weighed,
And thus decreed the court above--
"Since Love is blind from Folly's blow,
Let Folly be the guide of Love,
Where'er the boy may choose to go."
In the fable of the "Rat Retired from the World," La Fontaine rallies
the monks. With French _finesse_ he hits his mark by expressly avoiding
it. "What think you I mean by my disobliging rat? A monk? No, but a
Mahometan devotee; I take it for granted that a monk is always ready
with his help to the needful!"
The sage Levantines have a tale
About a rat that weary grew
Of all the cares which life assail,
And to a Holland cheese withdrew.
His solitude was there profound,
Extending through his world so round.
Our hermit lived on that within;
And soon his industry had been
With claws and teeth so good,
That in his novel hermitage
He had in store, for wants of age,
Both house and livelihood.
What more could any rat desire?
He grew fat, fair, and round.
God's blessings thus redound
To those who in his vows retire.
One day this personage devout,
Whose kindness none might doubt,
Was asked, by certain delegates
That came from Rat-United-States,
For some small aid, for they
To foreign parts were on their way,
For succor in the great cat-war:
Ratopolis beleaguered sore,
Their whole republic drained and poor,
No morsel in their scrips they bore.
Slight boon they craved, of succor sure
In days at utmost three or four.
"My friends," the hermit said,
"To worldly things I'm dead.
How can a poor recluse
To such a mission be of use?
What can he do but pray
That God will aid it on its way?
And so, my friends, it is my prayer
That God will have you in his care."
His well-fed saintship said no more
But in their faces shut the door.
What think you, reader, is the service,
For which I use this niggard rat?
To paint a monk? No, but a dervise.
A monk, I think, however fat,
Must be more bountiful than that.
The fable entitled "Death and the Dying," is much admired for its union
of pathos with wit. "The Two Doves," is another of La Fontaine's more
tender inspirations. "The Mogul's Dream" is a somewhat ambitious flight
of the fabulist's muse. On the whole, however, the masterpiece among the
fables of La Fontaine is that of "The Animals Sick of the Plague." Such
at least is the opinion of critics in general. The idea of this fable is
not original with La Fontaine. The homilists of the middle ages used a
similar fiction to enforce on priests the duty of impartiality in
administering the sacrament, so called, of confession. We give this
famous fable as our closing specimen of La Fontaine:
The sorest ill that Heaven hath
Sent on this lower world in wrath--
The plague (to call it by its name),
One single day of which
Would Pluto's ferryman enrich,
Waged war on beasts, both wild and tame.
They died not all, but all were sick:
No hunting now, by force or trick,
To save what might so soon expire.
No food excited their desire:
Nor wolf nor fox now watched to slay
The innocent and tender prey.
The turtles fled,
So love and therefore joy were dead.
The lion council held, and said,
"My friends, I do believe
This awful scourge, for which we grieve,
Is for our sins a punishment
Most righteously by Heaven sent.
Let us our guiltiest beast resign
A sacrifice to wrath divine.
Perhaps this offering, truly small,
May gain the life and health of all.
By history we find it noted
That lives have been just so devoted.
Then let us all turn eyes within,
And ferret out the hidden sin.
Himself let no one spare nor flatter,
But make clean conscience in the matter.
For me, my appetite has played the glutton
Too much and often upon mutton.
What harm had e'er my victims done?
I answer, truly, None.
Perhaps, sometimes, by hunger pressed,
I've eat the shepherd with the rest.
I yield myself if need there be;
And yet I think, in equity,
Each should confess his sins with me;
For laws of right and justice cry,
The guiltiest alone should die."
"Sire," said the fox, "your majesty
Is humbler than a king should be,
And over-squeamish in the case.
What! eating stupid sheep a crime?
No, never, sire, at any time.
It rather was an act of grace,
A mark of honor to their race.
And as to shepherds, one may swear,
The fate your majesty describes
Is recompense less full than fair
For such usurpers o'er our tribes."
Thus Renard glibly spoke,
And loud applause from listeners broke
Of neither tiger, boar, nor bear,
Did any keen inquiry dare
To ask for crimes of high degree;
The fighters, biters, scratchers, all
From every mortal sin were free;
The very dogs, both great and small,
Were saints, as far as dogs could be.
The ass, confessing in his turn,
Thus spoke in tones of deep concern:
"I happened through a mead to pass;
The monks, its owners, were at mass:
Keen hunger, leisure, tender grass,
And, add to these the devil, too,
All tempted me the deed to do.
I browsed the bigness of my tongue:
Since truth must out, I own it wrong."
On this, a hue and cry arose,
As if the beasts were all his foes.
A wolf, haranguing lawyer-wise,
Denounced the ass for sacrifice--
The bald-pate, scabby, ragged lout,
By whom the plague had come, no doubt.
His fault was judged a hanging crime.
What! eat another's grass? Oh, shame!
The noose of rope, and death sublime,
For that offense were all too tame!
And soon poor Grizzle felt the same.
Thus human courts acquit the strong,
And doom the weak as therefore wrong.
It is suitable to add, in conclusion, that La Fontaine is a crucial
author for disclosing the irreconcilable difference that exists, at
bottom, between the Englishman's and the Frenchman's idea of poetry. No
English-speaker, heir of Shakespeare and Milton, will ever be able to
satisfy a Frenchman with admiration such as he can conscientiously
profess for the poetry of La Fontaine.
VII.
MOLIERE.
1623-1673.
Moliere is confessedly the greatest writer of comedy in the world. Greek
Menander might have disputed the palm; but Menander's works have
perished, and his greatness must be guessed. Who knows but we guess him
too great? Moliere's works survive, and his greatness may be measured.
We have stinted our praise. Moliere is not only the foremost name in a
certain department of literature; he is one of the foremost names in
literature. The names are few on which critics are willing to bestow
this distinction. But critics generally agree in bestowing this
distinction on Moliere.