CHAPTER IV

THE AGE OF LOUIS XIV

When Louis XIV assumed the reins of government France suddenly and

wonderfully came to her maturity; it was as if the whole nation had

burst into splendid flower. In every branch of human activity--in war,

in administration, in social life, in art, and in literature--the same

energy was apparent, the same glorious success. At a bound France won

the headship of Europe; and when at last, defeated in arms and

politically shattered, she was forced to relinquish her dreams of

worldly power, her pre-eminence in the arts of peace remained unshaken.

For more than a century she continued, through her literature and her

manners, to dominate the civilized world.

At no other time have the conditions of society exercised a more

profound influence upon the works of great writers. Though, with the

ascendancy of Louis, the political power of the nobles finally came to

an end, France remained, in the whole complexion of her social life,

completely aristocratic. Louis, with deliberate policy, emphasized the

existing rigidity of class-distinctions by centralizing society round

his splendid palace of Versailles. Versailles is the _clou_ to the age

of Louis XIV. The huge, almost infinite building, so stately and so

glorious, with its vast elaborate gardens, its great trees transported

from distant forests, its amazing waterworks constructed in an arid soil

at the cost of millions, its lesser satellite parks and palaces, its

palpitating crowds of sumptuous courtiers, the whole accumulated mass of

piled-up treasure and magnificence and power--this was something far

more significant than the mere country residence of royalty; it was the

summary, the crown, and the visible expression of the ideals of a great

age. And what were these ideals? The fact that the conception of society

which made Versailles possible was narrow and unjust must not blind us

to the real nobility and the real glory which it brought into being. It

is true that behind and beyond the radiance of Louis and his courtiers

lay the dark abyss of an impoverished France, a ruined peasantry, a

whole system of intolerance, and privilege, and maladministration; yet

it is none the less true that the radiance was a genuine radiance--no

false and feeble glitter, but the warm, brilliant, intense illumination

thrown out by the glow of a nation's life. That life, with all it meant

to those who lived it, has long since vanished from the earth--preserved

to us now only in the pages of its poets, or strangely shadowed forth to

the traveller in the illimitable desolation of Versailles. That it has

gone so utterly is no doubt, on the whole, a cause for rejoicing; but,

as we look back upon it, we may still feel something of the old

enchantment, and feel it, perhaps, the more keenly for its

strangeness--its dissimilarity to the experiences of our own days. We

shall catch glimpses of a world of pomp and brilliance, of ceremony and

decoration, a small, vital passionate world which has clothed itself in

ordered beauty, learnt a fine way of easy, splendid living, and come

under the spell of a devotion to what is, to us, no more than the

gorgeous phantom of high imaginations--the divinity of a king. When the

morning sun was up and the horn was sounding down the long avenues, who

would not wish, if only in fancy, to join the glittering cavalcade where

the young Louis led the hunt in the days of his opening glory? Later,

we might linger on the endless terrace, to watch the great monarch, with

his red heels and his golden snuff-box and his towering periwig, come

out among his courtiers, or in some elaborate grotto applaud a ballet by

Molière. When night fell there would be dancing and music in the gallery

blazing with a thousand looking-glasses, or masquerades and feasting in

the gardens, with the torches throwing strange shadows among the trees

trimmed into artificial figures, and gay lords and proud ladies

conversing together under the stars.

Such were the surroundings among which the classical literature of

France came into existence, and by which it was profoundly influenced in

a multitude of ways. This literature was, in its form and its essence,

aristocratic literature, though its writers were, almost without

exception, middle-class men brought into prominence by the royal favour.

The great dramatists and poets and prose-writers of the epoch were in

the position of artists working by special permission for the benefit

and pleasure of a select public to which they themselves had no claim

to belong. They were _in_ the world of high birth and splendid manners,

but they were not of it; and thus it happened that their creations,

while reflecting what was finest in the social ideals of the time,

escaped the worst faults of the literary productions of persons of

rank--superficiality and amateurishness. The literature of that age was,

in fact, remarkable to an extraordinary degree for precisely contrary

qualities--for the solidity of its psychological foundations and for the

supreme excellence of its craftsmanship. It was the work of profound and

subtle artists writing for a small, leisured, distinguished, and

critical audience, while retaining the larger outlook and sense of

proportion which had come to them from their own experience of life.

The fact, too, that this aristocratic audience was no longer concerned

with the activities of political power, exercised a further influence

upon the writers of the age. The old interests of aristocracy--the

romance of action, the exalted passions of chivalry and war--faded into

the background, and their place was taken by the refined and intimate

pursuits of peace and civilization. The exquisite letters of Madame de

Sévigné show us society assuming its modern complexion, women becoming

the arbiters of taste and fashion, and drawing-rooms the centre of life.

These tendencies were reflected in literature; and Corneille's tragedies

of power were replaced by Racine's tragedies of the heart. Nor was it

only in the broad outlines that the change was manifest; the whole

temper of life, in all its details, took on the suave, decorous,

dignified tone of good breeding, and it was impossible that men of

letters should escape the infection. Their works became remarkable for

clarity and elegance, for a graceful simplicity, an easy strength; they

were cast in the fine mould of perfect manners--majestic without

pretension, expressive without emphasis, simple without carelessness,

and subtle without affectation. These are the dominating qualities in

the style of that great body of literature, which has rightly come to be

distinguished as the _Classical_ literature of France.

Yet there was a reverse to the medal; for such qualities necessarily

involved defects, which, hardly perceptible and of small importance in

the work of the early masters of the Classical school, became more

prominent in the hands of lesser men, and eventually brought the whole

tradition into disrepute. It was inevitable that there should be a

certain narrowness in a literature which was in its very essence

deliberate, refined, and select; omission is the beginning of all art;

and the great French classicists, more supremely artistic, perhaps, than

any other body of writers in the history of the world, practised with

unsparing devotion the virtue of leaving out. The beauties of clarity,

simplicity, and ease were what they aimed at; and to attain them

involved the abandonment of other beauties which, however attractive,

were incompatible with those. Vague suggestion, complexity of thought,

strangeness of imagination--to us the familiar ornaments of poetry--were

qualities eschewed by the masters of the age of Louis XIV. They were

willing to forgo comprehensiveness and elaboration, they were ready to

forswear the great effects of curiosity and mystery; for the pursuit of

these led away from the high path of their chosen endeavour--the

creation, within the limits they had marked out, of works of flawless

art. The fact that they succeeded so well is precisely one of the

reasons why it is difficult for the modern reader--and for the

Anglo-Saxon one especially, with his different æsthetic traditions--to

appreciate their work to the full. To us, with our broader outlook, our

more complicated interests, our more elusive moods, their small bright

world is apt to seem uninteresting and out of date, unless we spend some

patient sympathy in the discovery of the real charm and the real beauty

that it contains. Nor is this our only difficulty: the classical

tradition, like all traditions, became degenerate; its virtues hardened

into mannerisms, its weaknesses expanded into dogmas; and it is

sometimes hard for us to discriminate between the artist who has

mastered the convention in which he works, and the artisan who is the

slave of it. The convention itself, if it is unfamiliar to us, is what

fills our attention, so that we forget to look for the moving spirit

behind. And indeed, in the work of the later classicists, there was too

often no spirit to look for. The husk alone remained--a finicky

pretentious framework, fluttering with the faded rags of ideals long

outworn. Every great tradition has its own way of dying; and the

classical tradition died of timidity. It grew afraid of the flesh and

blood of life; it was too polite to face realities, too elevated to

tread the common ground of fact and detail; it would touch nothing but

generalities, for they alone are safe, harmless, and respectable; and,

if they are also empty, how can that he helped? Starving, it shrank into

itself, muttering old incantations; and it continued to mutter them,

automatically, some time after it had expired.

But, in the heyday of the age of Louis XIV, literature showed no signs

of such a malady--though no doubt it contained the latent germs of the

disease; on the contrary, the masterpieces of that epoch are charged to

the full with vitality and force. We may describe them, in one word, as

worldly--worldly in the broadest and the highest acceptation of the

term. They represent, in its perfect expression, the spirit of this

world--its greatness, its splendour, its intensity, the human drama that

animates it, the ordered beauty towards which it tends. For that was an

age in which the world, in all the plenitude of its brilliance, had come

into its own, when the sombre spirituality of the Middle Ages had been

at last forgotten, when the literatures of Greece and Rome had delivered

their benignant message, when civilization could enjoy for a space its

new maturity, before a larger vision had brought questionings, and an

inward vision aspirations unknown before. The literature of those days

was founded upon a general acceptance--acceptance both in the sphere of

politics and of philosophy. It took for granted a fixed and autocratic

society; it silently assumed the orthodox teaching of the Roman Catholic

Church. Thus, compared with the literature of the eighteenth century, it

was unspeculative; compared with that of the Middle Ages, unspiritual.

It was devoid of that perception of the marvellous and awful

significance of Natural phenomena which dominates the literature of the

Romantic Revival. Fate, Eternity, Nature, the destiny of Man, 'the

prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come'--such

mysteries it almost absolutely ignored. Even Death seemed to lie a

little beyond its vision. What a difference, in this respect, between

the literature of Louis XIV and the literature of Elizabeth! The latter

is obsessed by the smell of mortality; its imagination, penetrating to

the depths and the heights, shows us mankind adrift amid eternities, and

the whole universe the doubtful shadow of a dream. In the former, these

magnificent obscurities find no place: they have been shut out, as it

were, like a night of storm and darkness on the other side of the

window. The night is there, no doubt; but it is outside, invisible and

neglected, while within, the candles are lighted, the company is

gathered together, and all is warmth and brilliance. To eyes which have

grown accustomed to the elemental conflicts without, the room may seem

at first confined, artificial, and insignificant. But let us wait a

little! Gradually we shall come to feel the charm of the well-ordered

chamber, to appreciate the beauty of the decorations, the distinction

and the penetration of the talk. And, if we persevere, that is not all

we shall discover. We shall find, in that small society, something more

than ease and good breeding and refinement; we shall find the play of

passion and the subtle manifestation of the soul; we shall realize that

the shutting out of terrors and of mysteries has brought at least the

gain of concentration, so that we may discern unhindered the movements

of the mind of man--of man, not rapt aloft in the vast ardours of

speculation, nor involved in the solitary introspection of his own

breast; but of man, civilized, actual, among his fellows, in the bright

light of the world.

Yet, if it is true that a refined and splendid worldliness was the

dominant characteristic of the literature of the age, it is no less true

that here and there, in its greatest writers, a contrary tendency--faint

but unmistakable--may be perceived. The tone occasionally changes; below

the polished surface a disquietude becomes discernible; a momentary

obscure exception to the general easy-flowing rule. The supreme artists

of the epoch seem to have been able not only to give expression to the

moving forces of their time, but to react against them. They were rebels

as well as conquerors, and this fact lends an extraordinary interest to

their work. Like some subtle unexpected spice in a masterly confection,

a strange, profound, unworldly melancholy just permeates their most

brilliant writings, and gives the last fine taste.

Before considering these supreme artists more particularly, it will be

well to notice briefly the work of one who can lay no claim to such a

title, but who deserves attention as the spokesman of the literary

ideals of his age. BOILEAU, once the undisputed arbiter of taste

throughout Europe, is now hardly remembered save as the high-priest of

an effete tradition and as the author of some brilliant lines which have

passed as proverbs into the French language. He was a man of vivid

intelligence--courageous, independent, passionately devoted to

literature, and a highly skilled worker in the difficult art of writing

verse. But he lacked the force and the finesse of poetic genius; and it

is not as a poet that he is interesting: it is as a critic. When the

lines upon which French literature was to develop were still uncertain,

when the Classical school was in its infancy, and its great

leaders--Molière, Racine, La Fontaine--were still disputing their right

to pre-eminence among a host of inferior and now forgotten writers whose

works were carrying on the weak and tasteless traditions of the former

age--it was at this moment that Boileau brought to the aid of the new

movement the whole force of his admirable clear-sightedness, his

dauntless pertinacity, and his caustic, unforgettable wit. No doubt,

without him, the Classical school would have triumphed--ultimately, like

all good things--but it would be hard to exaggerate the service which

was rendered it by Boileau. During many years, in a long series of

satires and epistles, in the _Art Poétique_ and in various prose works,

he impressed upon the reading public the worthlessness of the old

artificial school of preciosity and affectation, and the high value of

the achievements of his great contemporaries. He did more: he not only

attacked and eulogized the works of individuals, he formulated general

principles and gave pointed and repeated expression to the ideals of the

new school. Thus, through him, classicism gained self-consciousness; it

became possessed of a definite doctrine; and a group of writers was

formed, united together by common aims, and destined to exercise an

immense influence upon the development not only of French, but of

European literature. For these reasons--for his almost unerring

prescience in the discernment of contemporary merit and for his

triumphant consolidation of the classical tradition--Boileau must be

reckoned as the earliest of that illustrious company of great critics

which is one of the peculiar glories of French letters. The bulk of his

writing will probably never again be read by any save the curious

explorer; but the spirit of his work lies happily condensed in one short

epistle--_À son Esprit_--where his good sense, his wit, his lucid vigour

and his essential humanity find their consummate expression; it is a

spirit which still animates the literature of France.

His teaching, however, so valuable in its own day, is not important as a

contribution towards a general theory of æesthetics. Boileau attempted

to lay down the principles universally binding upon writers of poetry;

but he had not the equipment necessary for such a task. His knowledge

was limited, his sympathies were narrow, and his intellectual powers

lacked profundity. The result was that he committed the common fault of

writers immersed in the business of contemporary controversy--he erected

the precepts, which he saw to be salutary so far as his own generation

was concerned, to the dignity of universal rules. His message, in

reality, was for the France of Louis XIV; he enunciated it as if it was

the one guide to literary salvation for all ages and in all

circumstances; and it so happened that for about a century it was

accepted at his own valuation by the majority of civilized mankind.

Boileau detested--and rightly detested--the extravagant affectations of

the _précieux_ school, the feeble pomposities of Chapelain, the

contorted, inflated, logic-chopping heroes of Corneille's later style;

and the classical reaction against these errors appeared to him in the

guise of a return to the fundamental principles of Nature, Reason, and

Truth. In a sense he was right: for it is certain that the works of

Molière and Racine were more natural, more reasonable, and more truthful

than those of l'Abbé Cotin and Pradon; his mistake lay in his assumption

that these qualities were the monopoly of the Classical school.

Perceiving the beauty of clarity, order, refinement, and simplicity, he

jumped to the conclusion that these were the characteristics of Nature

herself, and that without them no beauty could exist. He was wrong.

Nature is too large a thing to fit into a system of aesthetics; and

beauty is often--perhaps more often than not--complex, obscure,

fantastic, and strange. At the bottom of all Boileau's theories lay a

hearty love of sound common sense. It was not, as has sometimes been

asserted, imagination that he disliked, but singularity. He could write,

for instance, an enthusiastic appreciation of the sublime sentence, 'God

said, Let there be light, and there was light'; for there imagination is

clothed in transparent beauty, and grandeur is achieved by the simplest

means. More completely than any of his great contemporaries, Boileau was

a representative of middle-class France.

Certainly the most famous, and perhaps the greatest, of the writers for

whom Boileau acted as the apologist and the interpreter was MOLIÈRE. In

the literature of France Molière occupies the same kind of position as

Cervantes in that of Spain, Dante in that of Italy, and Shakespeare in

that of England. His glory is more than national--it is universal.

Gathering within the plenitude of his genius the widest and the

profoundest characteristics of his race, he has risen above the

boundaries of place and language and tradition into a large dominion

over the hearts of all mankind. To the world outside France he alone, in

undisputed eminence, speaks with the authentic voice of France herself.

That this is so is owing mainly, of course, to the power of his genius;

but it is also owing, in some degree, to the particular form which his

genius took. Judging by quality alone, it is difficult to say whether

his work stands higher or lower in the scale of human achievement than

that of Racine--whether the breadth of vision, the diversity, and the

humanity of his comedies do or do not counterbalance the poetry, the

intensity, and the perfect art of his friend's tragedies; at least it

seems certain that the difference between the reputations of the two men

with the world in general by no means corresponds with the real

difference in their worth. It is by his very perfection, by the very

completeness of his triumph, that Racine loses. He is so absolute, so

special a product of French genius, that it is well-nigh impossible for

any one not born a Frenchman to appreciate him to the full; it is by his

incompleteness, and to some extent even by his imperfections, that

Molière gains. Of all the great French classics, he is the least

classical. His fluid mind overflowed the mould he worked in. His art,

sweeping over the whole range of comic emotions, from the wildest

buffoonery to the grimmest satire and the subtlest wit, touched life too

closely and too often to attain to that flawless beauty to which it

seems to aspire. He lacked the precision of form which is the mark of

the consummate artist; he was sometimes tentative and ambiguous, often

careless; the structure of some of his finest works was perfunctorily

thrown together; the envelope of his thought--his language--was by no

means faultless, his verse often coming near to prose, and his prose

sometimes aping the rhythm of verse. In fact, it is not surprising that

to the rigid classicists of the eighteenth century this Colossus had

feet of clay. But, after all, even clay has a merit of its own: it is

the substance of the common earth. That substance, entering into the

composition of Molière, gave him his broad-based solidity, and brought

him into kinship with the wide humanity of the world.

It was on this side that his work was profoundly influenced by the

circumstances of his life. Molière never knew the leisure, the

seclusion, the freedom from external cares, without which it is hardly

possible for art to mature to perfection; he passed his existence in the

thick of the battle, and he died as he had lived--in the harness of the

professional entertainer. His early years were spent amid the rough and

sordid surroundings of a travelling provincial company, of which he

became the manager and the principal actor, and for which he composed

his first plays. He matured late. It was not till he was thirty-seven

that he produced _Les Précieuses Ridicules_--his first work of genius;

and it was not till three years later that he came into the full

possession of his powers with _L'École des Femmes_. All his masterpieces

were written in the ten years that followed (1662-73). During that

period the patronage of the king gave him an assured position; he became

a celebrity at Paris and Versailles; he was a successful man. Yet, even

during these years of prosperity, he was far from being free from

troubles. He was obliged to struggle incessantly against the intrigues

of his enemies, among whom the ecclesiastical authorities were the most

ferocious; and even the favour of Louis had its drawbacks, for it

involved a constant expenditure of energy upon the frivolous and

temporary entertainments of the Court. In addition, he was unhappy in

his private life. Unlike Shakespeare, with whom his career offers many

analogies, he never lived to reap the quiet benefit of his work, for he

died in the midst of it, at the age of fifty-one, after a performance in

the title-rôle of his own _Malade Imaginaire_.

What he had achieved was, in the first place, the creation of French

Comedy. Before him, there had been boisterous farces, conventional

comedies of intrigue borrowed from the Italian, and extravagant pieces

of adventure and burlesque cast in the Spanish mould. Molière did for

the comic element in French literature what Corneille had done for the

tragic: he raised it to the level of serious art. It was he who first

completely discovered the æsthetic possibilities that lay in the

ordinary life of every day. He was the most unromantic of writers--a

realist to the core; and he understood that the true subject of comedy

was to be found in the actual facts of human society--in the

affectations of fools, the absurdities of cranks, the stupidities of

dupes, the audacities of impostors, the humours and the follies of

family life. And, like all great originators, his influence has been

immense. At one blow, he established Comedy in its true position and

laid down the lines on which it was to develop for the next two hundred

years. At the present day, all over Europe, the main characteristics of

the average play may be traced straight back to their source in the

dominating genius of Molière.

If he fell short of the classical ideal in his workmanship, if he

exceeded it in the breadth and diversity of his mind, it is still true

that the essence of his dramatic method was hardly less classical than

that of Racine himself. His subject-matter was rich and various; but his

treatment of it was strictly limited by the classical conception of art.

He always worked by selection. His incidents are very few, chosen with

the utmost care, impressed upon the spectator with astonishing force,

and exquisitely arranged to succeed each other at the most effective

moment. The choice of the incidents is determined invariably by one

consideration--the light which they throw upon the characters; and the

characters themselves appear to us from only a very few carefully chosen

points of view. The narrowed and selective nature of Molière's treatment

of character presents an illuminating contrast when compared with the

elaborately detailed method of such a master of the romantic style as

Shakespeare. The English dramatist shows his persons to us in the round;

innumerable facets flash out quality after quality; the subtlest and

most elusive shades of temperament are indicated; until at last the

whole being takes shape before us, endowed with what seems to be the

very complexity and mystery of life itself. Entirely different is the

great Frenchman's way. Instead of expanding, he deliberately narrows his

view; he seizes upon two or three salient qualities in a character and

then uses all his art to impress them indelibly upon our minds. His

Harpagon is a miser, and he is old--and that is all we know about him:

how singularly limited a presentment compared with that of

Shakespeare's bitter, proud, avaricious, vindictive, sensitive, and

almost pathetic Jew! Tartufe, perhaps the greatest of all Molière's

characters, presents a less complex figure even than such a slight

sketch as Shakespeare's Malvolio. Who would have foreseen Malvolio's

exquisitely preposterous address to Jove? In Tartufe there are no such

surprises. He displays three qualities, and three only--religious

hypocrisy, lasciviousness, and the love of power; and there is not a

word that he utters which is not impregnated with one or all of these.

Beside the vast elaboration of a Falstaff he seems, at first sight,

hardly more solid than some astounding silhouette; yet--such was the

power and intensity of Molière's art--the more we look, the more

difficult we shall find it to be certain that Tartufe is a less

tremendous creation even than Falstaff himself.

For, indeed, it is in his characters that Molière's genius triumphs

most. His method is narrow, but it is deep. He rushes to the essentials

of a human being--tears out his vitals, as it were--and, with a few

repeated master-strokes, transfixes the naked soul. His flashlight never

fails: the affected fop, the ignorant doctor, the silly tradesman, the

heartless woman of fashion--on these, and on a hundred more, he turns

it, inexorably smiling, just at the compromising moment; then turns it

off again, to leave us with a vision that we can never forget. Nor is it

only by its vividness that his portraiture excels. At its best it rises

into the region of sublimity, giving us new visions of the grandeur to

which the human spirit can attain. It is sometimes said that the essence

of Molière lies in his common sense; that his fundamental doctrine is

the value of moderation, of the calm average outlook of the sensible man

of the world--_l'honnête homme_. And no doubt this teaching is to be

found throughout his work, devoted as it is, by its very nature, to the

eccentricities and exaggerations which beset humanity. But if he had

been nothing more than a sober propounder of the golden mean he never

would have come to greatness. No man realized more clearly the

importance of good sense; but he saw farther than that: he looked into

the profundities of the soul, and measured those strange forces which

brush aside the feeble dictates of human wisdom like gossamer, and lend,

by their very lack of compromise, a dignity and almost a nobility to

folly and even vice itself. Thus it is that he has invested the feeble,

miserable Harpagon with a kind of sordid splendour, and that he has

elevated the scoundrel Don Juan into an alarming image of intellectual

power and pride. In his satire on learned ladies--_Les Femmes

Savantes_--the ridicule is incessant, remorseless; the absurd, pedantic,

self-complacent women are turned inside out before our eyes amid a

cataract of laughter; and, if Molière had been merely the well-balanced

moralist some critics suppose, that, no doubt, would have been enough.

But for the true Molière it was not enough. The impression which he

leaves upon us at the end of the play is not simply one of the utter

folly of learning out of place; in Philaminte, the central female

figure, he has depicted the elevation that belongs even to a mistaken

and perverted love of what is excellent; and when she finally goes out,

ridiculous, baffled, but as unyielding as ever in her devotion to

grammar and astronomy, we come near, in the face of her majestic

absurdity, to a feeling of respect. More remarkable still is Molière's

portrayal of the eminence of the human spirit in the case of Tartufe.

Here it is vice in its meanest and most repulsive forms which has become

endowed with an awful grandeur. Tartufe, the hypocrite, the swindler,

the seducer of his benefactor's wife, looms out on us with the kind of

horrible greatness that Milton's Satan might have had if he had come to

live with a bourgeois family in seventeenth-century France.

Molière's genius was many-sided; he was a master not only of the smile,

but of the laugh. He is the gayest of writers, and his farces, in their

wild hilarity, their contagious absurdity, are perfect models of what a

farce should be. He has made these light, frivolous, happy things as

eternal as the severest and the weightiest works of man. He has filled

them with a wonderful irresponsible wisdom, condensing into single

phrases the ridiculousness of generations: 'Nous avons changé tout

cela.'--'Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère?'--'Vous êtes

orfèvre, Monsieur Josse.' So effectually has he contrived to embalm in

the spice of his humour even the momentary affectations of his own time

that they have come down to us fresh as when they first appeared, and

the _Précieuses Ridicules_--a skit upon the manners and modes of speech

affected by the fops of 1650--still raises to-day our inextinguishable

laughter. This is the obvious side of Molière; and it is hardly in need

of emphasis.

It is the more remote quality of his mind--his brooding melancholy, shot

through with bitterness and doubt--that may at first sight escape the

notice of the reader, and that will repay the deepest attention. His

greatest works come near to tragedy. _Le Tartufe_, in spite of its

patched-up happy ending, leaves an impression of horror upon the mind.

_Don Juan_ seems to inculcate a lesson of fatalistic scepticism. In

this extraordinary play--of all Molière's works the farthest removed

from the classical ideal--the conventional rules of religion and

morality are exposed to a withering scorn; Don Juan, the very embodiment

of the arrogance of intellect, and his servant Sganarelle, the futile

and superstitious supporter of decency and law, come before us as the

only alternatives for our choice; the antithesis is never resolved; and,

though in the end the cynic is destroyed by a _coup de théâtre_, the

fool in all his foolishness still confronts us when the curtain falls.

_Don Juan_--so enigmatic in its meaning and so loose in its

structure--might almost be the work of some writer of the late

nineteenth century; but _Le Misanthrope_--at once so harmonious and so

brilliant, so lucid and so profound--could only have been produced in

the age of Louis XIV. Here, in all probability, Molière's genius reached

its height. The play shows us a small group of ladies and gentlemen, in

the midst of which one man--Alceste--stands out pre-eminent for the

intensity of his feelings and the honesty of his thoughts. He is in love

with Célimène, a brilliant and fascinating woman of the world; and the

subject of the play is his disillusionment. The plot is of the

slightest; the incidents are very few. With marvellous art Molière

brings on the inevitable disaster. Célimène will not give up the world

for the sake of Alceste; and he will take her on no other terms. And

that is all. Yet, when the play ends, how much has been revealed to us!

The figure of Alceste has been often taken as a piece of

self-portraiture; and indeed it is difficult not to believe that some at

any rate of Molière's own characteristics have gone to the making of

this subtle and sympathetic creation. The essence of Alceste is not his

misanthropy (the title of the play is somewhat misleading), it is his

sensitiveness. He alone, of all the characters in the piece, really

feels intensely. He alone loves, suffers, and understands. His

melancholy is the melancholy of a profound disillusionment. Molière, one

fancies, might have looked out upon the world just so--from 'ce petit

coin sombre, avec mon noir chagrin'. The world! To Alceste, at any rate,

the world was the great enemy--a thing of vain ideals, cold hearts, and

futile consolations. He pitted himself against it, and he failed. The

world swept on remorselessly, and left him, in his little corner, alone.

That was his tragedy. Was it Molière's also?--a tragedy, not of kings

and empires, of vast catastrophes and magnificent imaginations; but

something hardly less moving, and hardly less sublime--a tragedy of

ordinary life.

Englishmen have always loved Molière. It is hardly an exaggeration to

say that they have always detested RACINE. English critics, from Dryden

to Matthew Arnold, have steadily refused to allow him a place among the

great writers of the world; and the ordinary English reader of to-day

probably thinks of him--if he thinks of him at all--as a dull, frigid,

conventional writer, who went out of fashion with full-bottomed wigs and

never wrote a line of true poetry. Yet in France Racine has been the

object of almost universal admiration; his plays still hold the stage

and draw forth the talents of the greatest actors; and there can be no

doubt that it is the name of Racine that would first rise to the lips of

an educated Frenchman if he were asked to select the one consummate

master from among all the writers of his race. Now in literature, no

less than in politics, you cannot indict a whole nation. Some justice,

some meaning, France must have when she declares with one voice that

Racine is not only one of the greatest of dramatists, but also one of

the greatest of poets; and it behoves an Englishman, before he condemns

or despises a foreign writer, to practise some humility and do his best

to understand the point of view from which that writer is regarded by

his own compatriots. No doubt, in the case of Racine, this is a

particularly difficult matter. There are genuine national antipathies to

be got over--real differences in habits of thought and of taste. But

this very difficulty, when it is once surmounted, will make the gain the

greater. For it will be a gain, not only in the appreciation of one

additional artist, but in the appreciation of a new _kind_ of artist; it

will open up a whole undiscovered country in the continent of art.

English dramatic literature is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare; and

it is almost inevitable that an English reader should measure the value

of other poetic drama by the standards which Shakespeare has already

implanted in his mind. But, after all, Shakespeare himself was but the

product and the crown of a particular dramatic convention; he did not

compose his plays according to an ideal pattern; he was an Elizabethan,

working so consistently according to the methods of his age and country

that, as we know, he passed 'unguessed at' among his contemporaries. But

what were these methods and this convention? To judge of them properly

we must look, not at Shakespeare's masterpieces, for they are transfused

and consecrated with the light of transcendent genius, but at the

average play of an ordinary Elizabethan play-wright, or even at one of

the lesser works of Shakespeare himself. And, if we look here, it will

become apparent that the dramatic tradition of the Elizabethan age was

an extremely faulty one. It allowed, it is true, of great richness,

great variety, and the sublimest heights of poetry; but it also allowed

of an almost incredible looseness of structure and vagueness of purpose,

of dullness, of insipidity, and of bad taste. The genius of the

Elizabethans was astonishing, but it was genius struggling with

difficulties which were well-nigh insuperable; and, as a matter of fact,

in spite of their amazing poetic and dramatic powers, their work has

vanished from the stage, and is to-day familiar to but a few of the

lovers of English literature. Shakespeare alone was not subdued to what

he worked in. His overwhelming genius harmonized and ennobled the

discordant elements of the Elizabethan tradition, and invested them not

only with immortality, but with immortality understanded of the people.

His greatest works will continue to be acted and applauded so long as

there is a theatre in England. But even Shakespeare himself was not

always successful. One has only to look at some of his secondary

plays--at _Troilus and Cressida_, for instance, or _Timon of Athens_--to

see at once how inveterate and malignant were the diseases to which the

dramatic methods of the Elizabethans were a prey. Wisdom and poetry are

intertwined with flatness and folly; splendid situations drift

purposeless to impotent conclusions; brilliant psychology alternates

with the grossest indecency and the feeblest puns. 'O matter and

impertinency mixed!' one is inclined to exclaim at such a spectacle. And

then one is blinded once more by the glamour of _Lear_ and _Othello_;

one forgets the defective system in the triumph of a few exceptions, and

all plays seem intolerable unless they were written on the principle

which produced _Pericles_ and _Titus Andronicus_ and the whole multitude

of distorted and disordered works of genius of the Elizabethan age.

Racine's principles were, in fact, the direct opposite of these.

'Comprehension' might be taken as the watchword of the Elizabethans;

Racine's was 'concentration'. His great aim was to produce, not an

extraordinary nor a complex work of art, but a flawless one; he wished

to be all matter and no impertinency. His conception of a drama was of

something swift, simple, inevitable; an action taken at the crisis, with

no redundancies however interesting, no complications however

suggestive, no irrelevances however beautiful--but plain, intense,

vigorous, and splendid with nothing but its own essential force. Nor can

there be any doubt that Racine's view of what a drama should be has been

justified by the subsequent history of the stage. The Elizabethan

tradition has died out--or rather it has left the theatre, and become

absorbed in the modern novel; and it is the drama of crisis--such as

Racine conceived it--which is now the accepted model of what a

stage-play should be. And, in this connexion, we may notice an old

controversy, which still occasionally raises its head in the waste

places of criticism--the question of the three unities. In this

controversy both sides have been content to repeat arguments which are

in reality irrelevant and futile. It is irrelevant to consider whether

the unities were or were not prescribed by Aristotle; and it is futile

to ask whether the sense of probability is or is not more shocked by the

scenic representation of an action of thirty-six hours than by one of

twenty-four. The value of the unities does not depend either upon their

traditional authority or--to use the French expression--upon their

_vraisemblance_. Their true importance lies simply in their being a

powerful means towards concentration. Thus it is clear that in an

absolute sense they are neither good nor bad; their goodness or badness

depends upon the kind of result which the dramatist is aiming at. If he

wishes to produce a drama of the Elizabethan type--a drama of

comprehension--which shall include as much as possible of the varied

manifestations of human life, then obviously the observance of the

unities must exercise a restricting and narrowing influence which would

be quite out of place. On the other hand, in a drama of crisis they are

not only useful but almost inevitable. If a crisis is to be a real

crisis it must not drag on indefinitely; it must not last for more than

a few hours, or--to put a rough limit--for more than a single day; in

fact, the unity of time must be preserved. Again, if the action is to

pass quickly, it must pass in one place, for there will be no time for

the movement of the characters elsewhere; thus the unity of place

becomes a necessity. Finally, if the mind is to be concentrated to the

full upon a particular crisis, it must not be distracted by side issues;

the event, and nothing but the event, must be displayed; in other words,

the dramatist will not succeed in his object unless he employs the unity

of action.

Let us see how Racine carries out these principles by taking one of his

most characteristic plays--_Bérénice_--and comparing it with an equally

characteristic work of Shakespeare's--_Antony and Cleopatra_. The

comparison is particularly interesting because the two dramas, while

diametrically opposed in treatment, yet offer some curious parallels in

the subjects with which they deal. Both are concerned with a pair of

lovers placed in the highest position of splendour and power; in both

the tragedy comes about through a fatal discordance between the claims

of love and of the world; in both the action passes in the age of Roman

greatness, and vast imperial issues are intertwined with individual

destinies. Of Shakespeare's drama it is hardly necessary to speak.

Nowhere else, perhaps, has that universal genius displayed more

completely the extraordinary fertility of his mind. The play is crammed

full and running over with the multifarious activities of human

existence. 'What is there in the whole of life, in all the experience of

the world,' one is inclined to ask after a perusal of it, 'that is not

to be found somewhere or other among these amazing pages?' This

tremendous effect has been produced, in the first place, by means of the

immense variety of the characters; persons of every rank and every

occupation--generals and waiting-women, princesses and pirates,

diplomatists and peasants, eunuchs and emperors--all these we have, and

a hundred more; and, of course, as the grand consummation of all, we

have the dazzling complexity of Cleopatra. But this mass of character

could never have been presented to us without a corresponding variety of

incident; and, indeed, the tragedy is packed with an endless succession

of incidents--battles, intrigues, marriages, divorces, treacheries,

reconciliations, deaths. The complicated action stretches over a long

period of time and over a huge tract of space. The scene constantly

shifts from Alexandria to Rome, from Athens to Messina, from Pompey's

galley to the plains of Actium. Some commentators have been puzzled by

the multitude of these changes, and when, for a scene of a few moments,

Shakespeare shows us a Roman army marching through Syria, they have been

able to see in it nothing more than a wanton violation of the rule of

the unity of place; they have not understood that it is precisely by

such touches as these that Shakespeare has succeeded in bringing before

our minds a sense of universal agitation and the enormous dissolution of

empires.

Turning to _Bérénice_, we find a curious contrast. The whole tragedy

takes place in a small antechamber; the action lasts hardly longer than

its actual performance--about two hours and a half; and the characters

are three in number. As for the plot, it is contained in the following

six words of Suetonius: 'Titus reginam Berenicem dimissit invitus

invitam.' It seems extraordinary that with such materials Racine should

have ventured to set out to write a tragedy: it is more extraordinary

still that he succeeded. The interest of the play never ceases for a

moment; the simple situation is exposed, developed, and closed with all

the refinements of art; nothing is omitted that is essential, nothing

that is unessential is introduced. Racine has studiously avoided

anything approaching violent action or contrast or complexity; he has

relied entirely for his effect upon his treatment of a few intimate

human feelings interacting among themselves. The strain and press of the

outer world--that outer world which plays so great a part in

Shakespeare's masterpiece--is almost banished from his drama--almost,

but not quite. With wonderful art Racine manages to suggest that, behind

the quiet personal crisis in the retired little room, the strain and the

pressure of outside things do exist. For this is the force that

separates the lovers--the cruel claims of government and the state.

When, at the critical moment, Titus is at last obliged to make the fatal

choice, one word, as he hesitates, seems to dominate and convince his

soul: it is the word 'Rome'. Into this single syllable Racine has

distilled his own poignant version of the long-resounding elaborations

of _Antony and Cleopatra_.

It would, no doubt, be absurd to claim for Racine's tragedy a place as

high as Shakespeare's. But this fact should not blind us to the

extraordinary merits which it does possess. In one respect, indeed, it

might be urged that the English play is surpassed by the French one--and

that is, as a _play. Bérénice_ is still acted with success; but _Antony

and Cleopatra_--? It is impossible to do justice to such a work on the

stage; it must be mutilated, rearranged, decocted, and in the end, at

the best, it will hardly do more than produce an impression of confused

splendour on an audience. It is the old difficulty of getting a quart

into a pint bottle. But _Bérénice is_ a pint--neither more nor less, and

fits its bottle to a nicety. To witness a performance of it is a rare

and exquisite pleasure; the impression is one of flawless beauty; one

comes away profoundly moved, and with a new vision of the capacities of

art.

Singleness of purpose is the dominating characteristic of the French

classical drama, and of Racine's in particular; and this singleness

shows itself not only in the action and its accessories, but in the

whole tone of the piece. Unity of tone is, in fact, a more important

element in a play than any other unity. To obtain it Racine and his

school avoided both the extreme contrasts and the displays of physical

action which the Elizabethans delighted in. The mixture of comedy and

tragedy was abhorrent to Racine, not because it was bad in itself, but

because it must have shattered the unity of his tone; and for the same

reason he preferred not to produce before the audience the most exciting

and disturbing circumstances of his plots, but to present them

indirectly, by means of description. Now it is clear that the great

danger lying before a dramatist who employs these methods is the danger

of dullness. Unity of tone is an excellent thing, but if the tone is a

tedious one, it is better to avoid it. Unfortunately Racine's successors

in Classical Tragedy did not realize this truth. They did not understand

the difficult art of keeping interest alive without variety of mood, and

consequently their works are now almost unreadable. The truth is that

they were deluded by the apparent ease with which Racine accomplished

this difficult task. Having inherited his manner, they were content;

they forgot that there was something else which they had not

inherited--his genius.

Closely connected with this difficulty there was another over which

Racine triumphed no less completely, and which proved equally fatal to

his successors. Hitherto we have been discussing the purely dramatic

aspect of classical tragedy; we must not forget that this drama was also

literary. The problem that Racine had to solve was complicated by the

fact that he was working, not only with a restricted dramatic system,

but with a restricted language. His vocabulary was an incredibly small

one--the smallest, beyond a doubt, that ever a great poet had to deal

with. But that was not all: the machinery of his verse was hampered by

a thousand traditional restraints; artificial rules of every kind hedged

round his inspiration; if he were to soar at all, he must soar in

shackles. Yet, even here, Racine succeeded: he _did_ soar--though it is

difficult at first for the English reader to believe it. And here

precisely similar considerations apply, as in the case of Racine's

dramatic method. In both instances the English reader is looking for

variety, surprise, elaboration; and when he is given, instead,

simplicity, clarity, ease, he is apt to see nothing but insipidity and

flatness. Racine's poetry differs as much from Shakespeare's as some

calm-flowing river of the plain from a turbulent mountain torrent. To

the dwellers in the mountain the smooth river may seem at first

unimpressive. But still waters run deep; and the proverb applies with

peculiar truth to the poetry of Racine. Those ordinary words, that

simple construction--what can there be there to deserve our admiration?

On the surface, very little no doubt; but if we plunge below the surface

we shall find a great profundity and a singular strength. Racine is in

reality a writer of extreme force--but it is a force of absolute

directness that he wields. He uses the commonest words, and phrases

which are almost colloquial; but every word, every phrase, goes straight

to its mark, and the impression produced is ineffaceable. In English

literature there is very little of such writing. When an English poet

wishes to be forceful he almost invariably flies to the gigantic, the

unexpected, and the out-of-the-way; he searches for strange metaphors

and extraordinary constructions; he surprises us with curious mysteries

and imaginations we have never dreamed of before. Now and then, however,

even in English literature, instances arise of the opposite--the

Racinesque--method. In these lines of Wordsworth, for example--

The silence that is in the starry sky,

The sleep that is among the lonely hills--

there is no violent appeal, nothing surprising, nothing odd--only a

direct and inevitable beauty; and such is the kind of effect which

Racine is constantly producing. If he wishes to suggest the emptiness,

the darkness, and the ominous hush of a night by the seashore, he does

so not by strange similes or the accumulation of complicated details,

but in a few ordinary, almost insignificant words--

Mais tout dort, et l'armée, et les vents, et Neptune.

If he wishes to bring before the mind the terrors of nightmare, a single

phrase can conjure them up--

C'était pendant l'horreur d'une profonde nuit.

By the same simple methods his art can describe the wonderful and

perfect beauty of innocence--

Le jour n'est pas plus pur que le fond de mon coeur;

and the furies of insensate passion--

C'est Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée.

But the flavour of poetry vanishes in quotation--and particularly

Racine's, which depends to an unusual extent on its dramatic

surroundings, and on the atmosphere that it creates. He who wishes to

appreciate it to the full must steep himself in it deep and long. He

will be rewarded. In spite of a formal and unfamiliar style, in spite of

a limited vocabulary, a conventional versification, an unvaried and

uncoloured form of expression--in spite of all these things (one is

almost inclined, under the spell of Racine's enchantment, to say

_because_ of them)--he will find a new beauty and a new splendour--a

subtle and abiding grace.

But Racine's extraordinary powers as a writer become still more obvious

when we consider that besides being a great poet he is also a great

psychologist. The combination is extremely rare in literature, and in

Racine's case it is especially remarkable owing to the smallness of the

linguistic resources at his disposal and the rigid nature of the

conventions in which he worked. That he should have succeeded in

infusing into his tiny commonplace vocabulary, arranged in rhymed

couplets according to the strictest and most artificial rules, not only

the beauty of true poetry, but the varied subtleties of character and

passion, is one of those miracles of art which defy analysis. Through

the flowing regularity of his Alexandrines his personages stand out

distinct and palpable, in all the vigour of life. The presentment, it is

true, is not a detailed one; the accidents of character are not shown

us--only its essentials; the human spirit comes before us shorn of its

particulars, naked and intense. Nor is it--as might, perhaps, have been

expected--in the portrayal of intellectual characters that Racine

particularly excels; it is in the portrayal of passionate ones. His

supreme mastery is over the human heart--the subtleties, the

profundities, the agonies, the triumphs, of love. His gallery of lovers

is a long one, and the greatest portraits in it are of women. There is

the jealous, terrific Hermione; the delicate, melancholy Junie; the

noble, exquisite, and fascinating Bérénice; there is Roxane with her

voluptuous ruthlessness, and Monime with her purity and her courage; and

there is the dark, incomparable splendour of Phèdre.

Perhaps the play in which Racine's wonderful discrimination in the

drawing of passionate character may be seen in its most striking light

is _Andromaque_. Here there are four characters--two men and two

women--all under the dominion of intense feeling, and each absolutely

distinct. Andromaque, the still youthful widow of Hector, cares for only

two things in the world with passionate devotion--her young son

Astyanax, and the memory of her husband. Both are the captives of

Pyrrhus, the conqueror of Troy, a straightforward, chivalrous, but

somewhat barbarous prince, who, though he is affianced to Hermione, is

desperately in love with Andromaque. Hermione is a splendid tigress

consumed by her desire for Pyrrhus; and Oreste is a melancholy, almost

morbid man, whose passion for Hermione is the dominating principle of

his life. These are the ingredients of the tragedy, ready to explode

like gunpowder with the slightest spark. The spark is lighted when

Pyrrhus declares to Andromaque that if she will not marry him he will

execute her son. Andromaque consents, but decides secretly to kill

herself immediately after the marriage, and thus ensure both the safety

of Astyanax and the honour of Hector's wife. Hermione, in a fury of

jealousy, declares that she will fly with Oreste, on one condition--that

he kills Pyrrhus. Oreste, putting aside all considerations of honour and

friendship, consents; he kills Pyrrhus, and then returns to his mistress

to claim his reward. There follows one of the most violent scenes that

Racine ever wrote--in which Hermione, in an agony of remorse and horror,

turns upon her wretched lover and denounces his crime. Forgetful of her

own instigation, she demands who it was that suggested to him the

horrible deed--'_Qui te l'a dit?_' she shrieks: one of those astounding

phrases which, once heard, can never be forgotten. She rushes out to

commit suicide, and the play ends with Oreste mad upon the stage.

The appearance of this exciting and vital drama, written when Racine was

twenty-eight years old, brought him immediate fame. During the next ten

years (1667-77) he produced a series of masterpieces, of which perhaps

the most interesting are _Britannicus_, where the youthful Nero, just

plunging into crime, is delineated with supreme mastery; _Bajazet_,

whose subject is a contemporary tragedy of the seraglio at

Constantinople; and a witty comedy, _Les Plaideurs_, based on

Aristophanes. Racine's character was a complex one; he was at once a

brilliant and caustic man of the world, a profound scholar, a sensitive

and emotional poet. He was extremely combative, quarrelling both with

the veteran Corneille and with the friend who had first helped him

towards success--Molière; and he gave vent to his antipathies in some

very vigorous and cutting prose prefaces as well as in some verse

epigrams which are among the most venomous in the language. Besides

this, he was an assiduous courtier, and he also found the time, among

these various avocations, for carrying on at least two passionate

love-affairs. At the age of thirty-eight, after two years' labour, he

completed the work in which his genius shows itself in its consummate

form--the great tragedy of _Phèdre_. The play contains one of the most

finished and beautiful, and at the same time one of the most

overwhelming studies of passion in the literature of the world. The

tremendous rôle of Phèdre--which, as the final touchstone of great

acting, holds the same place on the French stage as that of Hamlet on

the English--dominates the piece, rising in intensity as act follows

act, and 'horror on horror's head accumulates'. Here, too, Racine has

poured out all the wealth of his poetic powers. He has performed the

last miracle, and infused into the ordered ease of the Alexandrine a

strange sense of brooding mystery and indefinable terror and the awful

approaches of fate. The splendour of the verse reaches its height in the

fourth act, when the ruined queen, at the culmination of her passion,

her remorse, and her despair, sees in a vision Hell opening to receive

her, and the appalling shade of her father Minos dispensing his

unutterable doom. The creator of this magnificent passage, in which the

imaginative grandeur of the loftiest poetry and the supreme force of

dramatic emotion are mingled in a perfect whole, has a right to walk

beside Sophocles in the high places of eternity.

Owing to the intrigues of a lady of fashion, _Phèdre_, when it first

appeared, was a complete failure. An extraordinary change then took

place in Racine's mind. A revulsion of feeling, the precise causes of

which are to this day a mystery, led him suddenly to renounce the world,

to retire into the solitude of religious meditation, and to abandon the

art which he had practised with such success. He was not yet forty, his

genius was apparently still developing, but his great career was at an

end. Towards the close of his life he produced two more plays--_Esther_,

a short idyllic piece of great beauty, and _Athalie_, a tragedy which,

so far from showing that his powers had declined during his long

retreat, has been pronounced by some critics to be the finest of his

works. He wrote no more for the stage, and he died eight years later, at

the age of sixty. It is difficult to imagine the loss sustained by

literature during those twenty years of silence. They might have given

us a dozen tragedies, approaching, or even surpassing, the merit of

_Phèdre_. And Racine must have known this. One is tempted to see in his

mysterious mortification an instance of that strain of disillusionment

which runs like a dark thread through the brilliant texture of the

literature of the _Grand Siècle_. Racine had known to the full the uses

of this world, and he had found them flat, stale, and unprofitable; he

had found that even the triumphs of his art were all compact of

worldliness; and he had turned away, in an agony of renunciation, to

lose himself in the vision of the Saints.

The influence and the character of that remarkable age appear nowhere

more clearly than in the case of its other great poet--LA FONTAINE. In

the Middle Ages, La Fontaine would have been a mendicant friar, or a

sainted hermit, or a monk, surreptitiously illuminating the margins of

his manuscripts with the images of birds and beasts. In the nineteenth

century, one can imagine him drifting among Paris cafés, pouring out his

soul in a random lyric or two, and dying before his time. The age of

Louis XIV took this dreamer, this idler, this feckless, fugitive,

spiritual creature, kept him alive by means of patrons in high society,

and eventually turned him--not simply into a poet, for he was a poet by

nature, but into one of the most subtle, deliberate, patient, and

exquisite craftsmen who have ever written in verse. The process was a

long one; La Fontaine was in his fifties when he wrote the greater

number of his _Fables_--where his genius found its true expression for

the first time. But the process was also complete. Among all the

wonderful and beautiful examples of masterly craftsmanship in the

poetry of France, the _Fables_ of La Fontaine stand out as _the_ models

of what perfect art should be.

The main conception of the fables was based upon the combination of two

ideas--that of the stiff dry moral apologue of Æsop, and that of the

short story. By far the most important of these two elements was the

latter. With the old fabulists the moral was the excuse for the fable;

with La Fontaine it was the other way round. His moral, added in a

conventional tag, or even, sometimes, omitted altogether, was simply of

use as the point of departure for the telling of a charming little tale.

Besides this, the traditional employment of animals as the personages in

a fable served La Fontaine's turn in another way. It gave him the

opportunity of creating a new and delightful atmosphere, in which his

wit, his fancy, his humour, and his observation could play at their

ease. His animals--whatever injudicious enthusiasts may have said--are

not real animals; we are no wiser as to the true nature of cats and

mice, foxes and lions, after we have read the _Fables_ than before. Nor,

on the other hand, are they the mere pegs for human attributes which

they were in the hands of Æsop. La Fontaine's creatures partake both of

the nature of real animals and of human beings, and it is precisely in

this dual character of theirs that their fascination lies. In their

outward appearance they are deliciously true to life. With the fewest of

rapid strokes, La Fontaine can raise up an unmistakable vision of any

beast or bird, fish or reptile, that he has a mind to--

Un jour sur ses long pieds allait je ne sais où

Le héron au long bec emmanché d'un long cou.

Could there be a better description? And his fables are crowded with

these life-like little vignettes. But the moment one goes below the

surface one finds the frailties, the follies, the virtues and the vices

of humanity. And yet it is not quite that. The creatures of La

Fontaine's fantasy are not simply animals with the minds of human

beings: they are something more complicated and amusing; they are

animals with the minds which human beings would certainly have, if one

could suppose them transformed into animals. When the young and foolish

rat sees a cat for the first time and observes to his mother--

Je le crois fort sympathisant

Avec messieurs les rats: car il a des oreilles

En figure aux nôtres pareilles;

this excellent reason is obviously not a rat's reason; nor is it a human

being's reason; the fun lies in its being just the reason which, no

doubt, a silly young creature of the human species would give in the

circumstances if, somehow or other, he were metamorphosed into a rat.

It is this world of shifting lights, of queer, elusive, delightful

absurdities, that La Fontaine has made the scene of the greater number

of his stories. The stories themselves are for the most part exceedingly

slight; what gives them immortality is the way they are told. Under the

guise of an ingenuous, old-world manner, La Fontaine makes use of an

immense range of technical powers. He was an absolute master of the

resources of metre; and his rhythms, far looser and more varied than

those of his contemporaries, are marvellously expressive, while yet they

never depart from a secret and controlling sense of form. His vocabulary

is very rich--stocked chiefly with old-fashioned words, racy,

colloquial, smacking of the soil, and put together with the light

elliptical constructions of the common people. Nicknames he is

particularly fond of: the cat is Raminagrobis, or Grippeminaud, or

Rodilard, or Maître Mitis; the mice are 'la gent trotte-menu'; the

stomach is Messer Gaster; Jupiter is Jupin; La Fontaine himself is

Gros-Jean. The charming tales, one feels, might almost have been told by

some old country crony by the fire, while the wind was whistling in the

chimney and the winter night drew on. The smile, the gesture, the

singular _naïveté_--one can watch it all. But only for a moment. One

must be childish indeed (and, by an odd irony, this exquisitively

sophisticated author falls into the hands of most of his readers when

they are children) to believe, for more than a moment, that the

ingenuousness of the _Fables_ was anything but assumed. In fact, to do

so would be to miss the real taste of the work. There is a kind of art,

as every one knows, that conceals itself; but there is another--and this

is less often recognized--that displays itself, that _just_ shows,

charmingly but unmistakably, how beautifully contrived it is. And La

Fontaine's art is of the latter sort. He is like one of those

accomplished cooks in whose dishes, though the actual secret of their

making remains a mystery, one can trace the ingredients which have gone

to the concoction of the delicious whole. As one swallows the rare

morsel, one can just perceive how, behind the scenes, the oil, the

vinegar, the olive, the sprinkling of salt, the drop of lemon were

successively added, and, at the critical moment, the simmering delicacy

served up, done to a turn.

It is indeed by an infinity of small touches that La Fontaine produces

his effects. And his effects are very various. With equal ease,

apparently, he can be playful, tender, serious, preposterous, eloquent,

meditative, and absurd. But one quality is always present in his work;

whatever tune he may be playing, there is never a note too much. Alike

in his shortest six-lined anecdote and his most elaborate pieces, in

which detail follows detail and complex scenes are developed, there is

no trace of the superfluous; every word has its purpose in the general

scheme. This quality appears most clearly, perhaps, in the adroit

swiftness of his conclusions. When once the careful preliminary

foundation of the story has been laid, the crisis comes quick and

pointed--often in a single line. Thus we are given a minute description

of the friendship of the cat and the sparrow; all sorts of details are

insisted on; we are told how, when the sparrow teased the cat--

En sage et discrète personne,

Maître chat excusait ces jeux.

Then the second sparrow is introduced and his quarrel with the first.

The cat fires up--

Le moineau du voisin viendra manger le nôtre?

Non, de par tous les chats!--Entrant lors au combat,

Il croque l'étranger. Vraiment, dit maître chat,

Les moineaux ont un gout exquis et délicat!

And now in one line the story ends--

Cette réflexion fit aussi croquer l'autre.

One more instance of La Fontaine's inimitable conciseness may be given.

When Bertrand (the monkey) has eaten the chestnuts which Raton (the cat)

has pulled out of the fire, the friends are interrupted; the fable ends

thus--

Une servante vint; adieu, mes gens! Raton

N'était pas content, ce dit-on.

How admirable are the brevity and the lightness of that 'adieu, mes

gens'! In three words the instantaneous vanishing of the animals is

indicated with masterly precision. One can almost see their tails

whisking round the corner.

Modern admirers of La Fontaine have tended to throw a veil of sentiment

over his figure, picturing him as the consoling beatific child of

nature, driven by an unsympathetic generation to a wistful companionship

with the dumb world of brutes. But nothing could be farther from the

truth than this conception. La Fontaine was as unsentimental as Molière

himself. This does not imply that he was unfeeling: feelings he

had--delicate and poignant ones; but they never dominated him to the

exclusion of good sense. His philosophy--if we may call so airy a thing

by such a name--was the philosophy of some gentle whimsical follower of

Epicurus. He loved nature, but unromantically, as he loved a glass of

wine and an ode of Horace, and the rest of the good things of life. As

for the bad things--they were there; he saw them--saw the cruelty of the

wolf, and the tyranny of the lion, and the rapacity of man--saw that--

Jupin pour chaque état mit deux tables au monde;

L'adroit, le vigilant, et le fort sont assis

A la première; et les petits

Mangent leur reste à la seconde.

Yet, while he saw them, he could smile. It was better to smile--if only

with regret; better, above all, to pass lightly, swiftly, gaily over the

depths as well as the surface of existence; for life is short--almost as

short as one of his own fables--

Qui de nous des clartés de la voûte azurée

Doit jouir le dernier? Est-il aucun moment

Qui vous puisse assurer d'un second seulement?

The age was great in prose as well as in poetry. The periods of

BOSSUET, ordered, lucid, magnificent, reflect its literary ideals as

clearly as the couplets of Racine. Unfortunately, however, in the case

of Bossuet, the splendour and perfection of the form is very nearly all

that a modern reader can appreciate: the substance is for the most part

uninteresting and out-of-date. The truth is that Bossuet was too

completely a man of his own epoch to speak with any great significance

to after generations. His melodious voice enters our ears, but not our

hearts. The honest, high-minded, laborious bishop, with his dignity and

his enthusiasm, his eloquence and his knowledge of the world, represents

for us the best and most serious elements in the Court of Louis. The

average good man of those days must have thought on most subjects as

Bossuet thought--though less finely and intensely; and Bossuet never

spoke a sentence from his pulpit which went beyond the mental vision of

the most ordinary of his congregation. He saw all round his age, but he

did not see beyond it. Thus, in spite of his intelligence, his view of

the world was limited. The order of things under Louis XIV was the one

order: outside that, all was confusion, heresy, and the work of Satan.

If he had written more often on the great unchanging fundamentals of

life, more of his work would have been enduring. But it happened that,

while by birth he was an artist, by profession he was a theologian; and

even the style of Bossuet can hardly save from oblivion the theological

controversies of two hundred years ago. The same failing mars his

treatment of history. His _Histoire Universelle_ was conceived on broad

and sweeping lines, and contains some perspicacious thinking; but the

dominating notion of the book is a theological one--the illustration,

by means of the events of history, of the divine governance of the

world; and the fact that this conception of history has now become

extinct has reduced the work to the level of a finely written curiosity.

Purely as a master of prose Bossuet stands in the first rank. His style

is broad, massive, and luminous; and the great bulk of his writing is

remarkable more for its measured strength than for its ornament. Yet at

times the warm spirit of the artist, glowing through the well-ordered

phrases, diffuses an extraordinary splendour. When, in his _Méditations

sur l'Evangile_ or his _Elévations sur les Mystères_, Bossuet unrolls

the narratives of the Bible or meditates upon the mysteries of his

religion, his language takes on the colours of poetry and soars on the

steady wings of an exalted imagination. In his famous _Oraisons

Funèbres_ the magnificent amplitude of his art finds its full

expression. Death, and Life, and the majesty of God, and the

transitoriness of human glory--upon such themes he speaks with an

organ-voice which reminds an English reader of the greatest of his

English contemporaries, Milton. The pompous, rolling, resounding

sentences follow one another in a long solemnity, borne forward by a

vast movement of eloquence which underlies, controls, and animates them

all.

O nuit désastreuse! O nuit effroyable, où retentit tout-à-coup

comme un éclat de tonnerre, cette étonnante nouvelle: Madame se

meurt, Madame est morte!...

--The splendid words flow out like a stream of lava, molten and glowing,

and then fix themselves for ever in adamantine beauty.

We have already seen that one of the chief characteristics of French

classicism was compactness. The tragedies of Racine are as closely knit

as some lithe naked runner without an ounce of redundant flesh; the

_Fables_ of La Fontaine are airy miracles of compression. In prose the

same tendency is manifest, but to an even more marked degree. La

Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère, writing the one at the beginning, the

other towards the close, of the classical period, both practised the art

of extreme brevity with astonishing success. The DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

was the first French writer to understand completely the wonderful

capacities for epigrammatic statement which his language possessed; and

in the dexterous precision of pointed phrase no succeeding author has

ever surpassed him. His little book of _Maxims_ consists of about five

hundred detached sentences, polished like jewels, and, like jewels,

sparkling with an inner brilliance on which it seems impossible that one

can gaze too long. The book was the work of years, and it contains in

its small compass the observations of a lifetime. Though the reflections

are not formally connected, a common spirit runs through them all.

'Vanity of vanities! All is vanity!' such is the perpetual burden of La

Rochefoucauld's doctrine: but it is vanity, not in the generalized sense

of the Preacher, but in the ordinary personal sense of empty egotism and

petty self-love which, in the eyes of this bitter moralist, is the

ultimate essence of the human spirit and the secret spring of the world.

The case is overstated, no doubt; but the strength of La Rochefoucauld's

position can only be appreciated when one has felt for oneself the keen

arrows of his wit. As one turns over his pages, the sentences strike

into one with a deadly force of personal application; sometimes one

almost blushes; one realizes that these things are cruel, that they are

humiliating, and that they are true. 'Nous avons tous assez de force

pour supporter les maux d'autrui.'--'Quelque bien qu'on nous dise de

nous, on ne nous apprend rien de nouveau.'--'On croit quelquefois haïr

la flatterie, mais on ne hait que le manière de flatter.'--'Le refus de

la louange est un désir d'être loué deux fois.'--'Les passions les plus

violentes nous laissent quelquefois du relâche, mais la vanité nous

agite toujours.' No more powerful dissolvent for the self-complacency of

humanity was ever composed.

Unlike the majority of the writers of his age, La Rochefoucauld was an

aristocrat; and this fact gives a peculiar tone to his work. In spite of

the great labour which he spent upon perfecting it, he has managed, in

some subtle way, to preserve all through it an air of slight disdain.

'Yes, these sentences are all perfect,' he seems to be saying; 'but

then, what else would you have? Unless one writes perfect sentences, why

should one trouble to write?' In his opinion, 'le vrai honnête homme est

celui qui ne se pique de rien'; and it is clear that he followed his own

dictum. His attitude was eminently detached. Though what he says reveals

so intensely personal a vision, he himself somehow remains impersonal.

Beneath the flawless surface of his workmanship, the clever Duke eludes

us. We can only see, as we peer into the recesses, an infinite ingenuity

and a very bitter love of truth.

A richer art and a broader outlook upon life meet us in the pages of LA

BRUYÈRE. The instrument is still the same--the witty and searching

epigram--but it is no longer being played upon a single string. La

Bruyère's style is extremely supple; he throws his apothegms into an

infinite variety of moulds, employing a wide and coloured vocabulary,

and a complete mastery of the art of rhetorical effect. Among these

short reflections he has scattered a great number of somewhat lengthier

portraits or character-studies, some altogether imaginary, others

founded wholly or in part on well-known persons of the day. It is here

that the great qualities of his style show themselves most clearly.

Psychologically, these studies are perhaps less valuable than has

sometimes been supposed: they are caricatures rather than

portraits--records of the idiosyncrasies of humanity rather than of

humanity itself. What cannot be doubted for a moment is the supreme art

with which they have been composed. The virtuosity of the language--so

solid and yet so brilliant, so varied and yet so pure--reminds one of

the hard subtlety of a Greek gem. The rhythm is absolutely perfect, and,

with its suspensions, its elaborations, its gradual crescendos, its

unerring conclusions, seems to carry the sheer beauty of expressiveness

to the farthest conceivable point. Take, as one instance out of a

multitude, this description of the crank who devotes his existence to

the production of tulips--

Vous le voyez planté et qui a pris racine au milieu de ses tulipes

et devant la _Solitaire_: il ouvre de grands yeux, il frotte ses

mains, il se baisse, il la voit de plus près, il ne l'a jamais vue

si belle, il a le coeur épanoui de joie: il la quitte pour

l'_Orientale_; de là, il va à la _Veuve_; il passe au _Drap d'or_,

de celle-ci à _l'Agathe_, d'où il revient enfin à la _Solitaire_,

où il se fixe, où il se lasse, où il s'assied, où il oublie de

dîner: aussi est-elle nuancée, bordée, huilée a pièces emportées;

elle a un beau vase ou un beau calice; il la contemple, il

l'admire; Dieu et la nature sont en tout cela ce qu'il n'admire

point! il ne va pas plus loin que l'oignon de sa tulipe, qu'il ne

livrerait pas pour mille écus, et qu'il donnera pour rien quand les

tulipes seront néligées et que les oeillets auront prévalu. Cet

homme raisonnable qui a une âme, qui a un culte et une religion,

revient chez soi fatigué affamé, mais fort content de sa journée:

il a vu des tulipes.

_Les Caractères_ is the title of La Bruyère's book; but its

sub-title--'Les Moeurs de ce Siècle'--gives a juster notion of its

contents. The whole of society, as it appeared to the subtle and

penetrating gaze of La Bruyère, flows through its pages. In them,

Versailles rises before us, less in its outward form than in its

spiritual content--its secret, essential self. And the judgement which

La Bruyère passes on this vision is one of withering scorn. His

criticism is more convincing than La Rochefoucauld's because it is based

upon a wider and a deeper foundation. The vanity which _he_ saw around

him was indeed the vanity of the Preacher--the emptiness, the

insignificance, the unprofitableness, of worldly things. There was

nothing too small to escape his terrible attention, and nothing too

large. His arraignment passes from the use of rouge to the use of

torture, from the hypocrisies of false devotion to the silly absurdities

of eccentrics, from the inhumanity of princes to the little habits of

fools. The passage in which he describes the celebration of Mass in the

Chapel of Versailles, where all the courtiers were to be seen turning

their faces to the king's throne and their backs to the altar of God,

shows a spirit different indeed from that of Bossuet--a spirit not far

removed from the undermining criticism of the eighteenth century itself.

Yet La Bruyère was not a social reformer nor a political theorist: he

was simply a moralist and an observer. He saw in a flash the condition

of the French peasants--

Certains animaux farouches, des mâles et des femelles, répandus par

la campagne, noirs, livides, et tout brulés du soleil, attachés à

la terre qu'ils fouillent et qu'ils remuent avec une opiniâtreté

invincible; ils out comme une voix articulée, et, quand ils se

lèvent sur leurs pieds, ils montrent une face humaine: et en effet

ils sont des hommes--

saw the dreadful fact, noted it with all the intensity of his genius,

and then passed on. He was not concerned with finding remedies for the

evils of a particular society, but with exposing the underlying evils of

all societies. He would have written as truthful and as melancholy a

book if he had lived to-day.

La Bruyère, in the darkness of his pessimism, sometimes suggests Swift,

especially in his sarcastically serious treatment of detail; but he was

without the virulent bitterness of the great Dean. In fact his

indictment owes much of its impressiveness to the sobriety with which it

is presented. There is no rage, no strain, no over-emphasis; one feels

as one reads that this is an impartial judge. And, more than that, one

feels that the judge is not only a judge, but also a human being. It is

the human quality in La Bruyère's mind which gives his book its rare

flavour, so that one seems to hear, in these printed words, across the

lapse of centuries, the voice of a friend. At times he forgets his gloom

and his misanthropy, and speaks with a strange depth of feeling on

friendship or on love. 'Un beau visage,' he murmurs, 'est le plus beau

de tous les spectacles, et l'harmonie la plus douce est le son de voix

de celle que l'on aime.' And then--'Être avec les gens qu'on aime, cela

suffit; rever, leur parler, ne leur parler point, penser à eux, penser à

des choses plus indifférentes, mais auprès d'eux tout est égal.' How

tender and moving the accent, yet how restrained? And was ever more

profundity of intimacy distilled into a few simple words than here--'Il

y a du plaisir à rencontrer les yeux de celui à qui l'on vient de

donner'? But then once more the old melancholy seizes him. Even love

itself must end.--'On guérit comme on se console; on n'a pas dans le

coeur de quoi toujours pleurer et toujours aimer.' He is overwhelmed by

the disappointments of life.--'Les choses les plus souhaitées n'arrivent

point; ou, si elles arrivent, ce n'est ni dans le temps ni dans les

circonstances où elles auraient fait un extrême plaisir.' And life

itself, what is it? how does it pass?--'Il n'y a pour l'homme que trois

événements: naître, vivre, et mourir; il ne se sent pas naître, il

souffre à mourir, et il oublie de vivre.'

The pages of La Bruyère--so brilliant and animated on the surface, so

sombre in their fundamental sense--contain the final summary--we might

almost say the epitaph--of the great age of Louis XIV. Within a few

years of the publication of his book in its complete form (1694), the

epoch, which had begun in such a blaze of splendour a generation

earlier, entered upon its ultimate phase of disaster and humiliation.

The political ambitions of the overweening king were completely

shattered; the genius of Marlborough annihilated the armies of France;

and when peace came at last it came in ruin. The country was not only

exhausted to the farthest possible point, its recuperation had been made

well-nigh impossible by the fatal Revocation of the Edict of Nantes,

which, in circumstances of the utmost cruelty, had driven into exile the

most industrious and independent portion of the population. Poverty,

discontent, tyranny, fanaticism--such was the legacy that Louis left to

his country. Yet that was not quite all. Though, during the last years

of the reign, French literature achieved little of lasting value, the

triumphs of the earlier period threw a new and glorious lustre over the

reputation of France. The French tongue became the language of culture

throughout Europe. In every department of literature, French models and

French taste were regarded as the supreme authorities. Strange as it

would have seemed to him, it was not as the conqueror of Holland nor as

the defender of the Church, but as the patron of Racine and the

protector of Molière that the superb and brilliant Louis gained his

highest fame, his true immortality.