How glory, first reserved for the kings and warriors sung by the
poets, has come finally to be attributed to the poets themselves, even
more than to the heroes of their poems, is an historic fact whose
exact origin would be of little interest. It would be more curious
to discover as a result of what change in the manners and customs,
or through what enhancement of egoism and of vanity, the complicated
idea of justice came to attach itself to the idea of the perennity of
the name and of the work. At what epoch of Greek civilization, did an
Athenian dramatist, whose play had been flouted by the public, have the
boldness to appeal to posterity? Are any ancient texts known wherein
such recriminations may be read? Sensibility has increased to such
an extent that there exists to-day no scorned poetaster who does not
dream of the justice of future generations. The _exigi monumentum_ of
Horace and Malherbe has become democratized; but how can we believe
that the vanity of authors has ever had a beginning? The fact must be
admitted, however, in order to keep within the logic of the successive
developments of human character.
Literary glory was at first merely the sentiment of the future duration
of the present reputation--a legitimate sentiment which accords fairly
well with the facts; for absolute revivals are almost as rare as solid
rehabilitations. To-day it is a scientific probability. Æschylus
believed that the relation existing in his own lifetime between the
_Suppliants_ and public opinion would continue the same throughout
the ages. Æschylus was right; but not if he cherished the same dream
with regard to the _Danaides_ and the _Egyptians_. Yet Pratinas saw
himself, in the future, one of the rivals of Æschylus, and Pratinas
is to-day but a word, scarcely a name. The idea of glory, even in its
oldest and most legitimate form, would seem, therefore, to contain the
idea of justice, at least by preterition, since its non-realization
at once suggests to us the idea of injustice. But men of so ancient
a civilization should not be made to reason in terms of our modern
sensibility. Pratinas would, perhaps, have submitted to destiny. He
would, perhaps, have called a fact, pure and simple, what we are
pleased to name injustice.
The idea of justice, since it is subject, to the variations of
sensibility, is of the most instable sort. Most of the facts that we
class to-day in the category of injustice, were left by the Greeks in
the category of destiny. For others, which we ditch under the name of
misfortune, or of fatality, they strove to find a cure. In principle,
when a people restricts the category "destiny" in favour of the
category "injustice," the truth has begun to confess its decadence. The
extreme state of sensibility to injustice is symbolized by the gag of
Zaina, who breathed only through a veil, in order to destroy no life--a
state of intellectual degradation towards which European humanity, with
its mystic vegetarians, precursors of sentimental socialists, is also
progressing to-day. Have we not already our "lower brothers," and are
we not agreed to praise the machines that spare animals the exercise of
their muscles? To weep over the slave who turns the wheel, or the poet
who sings in the desert, is a sign of depravity; for the fact is that
the slave who turns the wheel loves life more than he suffers from his
labour, while the poet who croaks like a frog in his hole finds singing
an agreeable physiological exercise.
The physical laws promulgated or established by scientists are
confessions of ignorance. When they cannot explain a mechanism, they
declare that its movements are due to a law. Bodies fall by virtue
of the law of gravitation. This has precisely the same value, in
the serious order, as the comic _virtus dormitiva_. Categories are
confessions of impotence. To throw a fact into the abyss of destiny, or
into the drawer of injustice, is to renounce the exercise of the most
natural analytical faculties. The _Lusiads_ was saved because Camoens
was a good swimmer, and Newton's treatise on light and colours was
lost because his little dog, Diamond, overturned a candle. Presented
thus, these two events belong henceforth neither in the category
Providence nor in the category Fatality. They are simple facts--facts
like thousands of others that have occurred without men finding in them
a pretext for enthusiasm or for anger. That Æschylus has survived and
Pratinas is dead are accidents like those which happen in war. There
are some more scandalous, but none should be judged in accordance with
the puerile notion of a distributive justice. If justice is wounded
because Florus keeps afloat in the shipwreck where Varius and Calvus
perish, it is justice which is wrong. It was out of place there.
However, just as it has attached itself to the idea of paradise, so
the idea of justice has become the parasite of the idea of glory. For
the immortality for which Tahiti gambled heads or tails, has, with the
best will in the world, been substituted providential immortality; but,
so far as glory, at any rate, is concerned, we know that Providence,
even if it does not determine the name of the elect by lot, is governed
by motives that it would, perhaps, not dare to acknowledge. However
unjust man may be, by nature and by taste, he is less unjust than the
God he has created. Thus, as Ausonius has pertinently remarked, chaste
men engender obscene literatures. So, also, the work of the veritable
genius is always inferior to the brain which bore it. Civilization has
put a little method into glory, provisionally.
Even in the spiritual order, men have almost always been at variance
with the decisions of their gods. Most of the saints in the past were
created by the people in spite of the priests. In the course of the
centuries the catalogue of the saints and the catalogue of the great
men have drawn so far apart that they will soon not have a single
name in common. Almost all the really venerable men of this last
century--almost all those whose clay contained veins or traces of
gold--were outcasts. We live in the age of Prometheus. When Providence
alone ruled the earth, during the interregnum of humanity, she caused
such hecatombs that intelligence nearly perished. In the year 950, the
son of a serf of Aurillac, young Gerbert, summed up almost the whole
European tradition. He was, all by himself, civilization. What a moment
in history! Men, by an admirable instinct, made him their master. He
was Pope Sylvester II. When he died, there began to be built, on that
column which had sustained the world, the legend destined to find
its culmination in Goethe's _Faust_. Such is Glory, that Gerbert is
unknown. But he is not unknown like Pythagoras. It has been possible
to write his life, his writings have been preserved. If Gerbert is not
one of our great men to-day, he will perhaps be to-morrow. He has kept
intact all the possibilities of his resurrection. The reason is that,
leaving aside the paradoxical idea of Providence, we have since Gerbert
scarcely changed our civilization.
When the Christians came into power, they preserved, outside those few
spared by chance, only the books necessary for school instruction.
There has survived of Antiquity precisely what would have survived
of the seventeenth century, if the professors of the old University,
together with the Jesuits and the Minims, had possessed the power of
life and death over books. Adding La Fontaine to Boileau's catalogue,
they would have burned the rest. The Christians burned much, in
spite of their professions of love; and what they did not burn they
expurgated. It is to them that we owe the almost burlesque image of a
chaste Virgil. The authentic incompletion of the _Æneid_ afforded a
good pretext for cuts and erasures. The booksellers charged with the
task were, moreover, unintelligent and lazy. But the great cause of the
disappearance of almost all pagan literature was more general. A day
came when it was deemed of no interest. From the first centuries its
circle had already begun to dwindle. Could a Saint Cecilia find any
pleasure in Gallus? This delicious, heroic Roman woman (who was found
last century lying in the dust, in her bloody robes) changed her heart
with her religion. Women ceased to read Gallus, and Gallus has almost
completely perished.
In his interesting book on this subject,[4] M. Stapfer has not taken
into account changes in civilization. He has thought only of chance to
explain the loss of so many ancient books. Chance is a mask, and it is
precisely the duty of the historian to lift this mask, or to tear it.
Between the sixth century and our own day, there has been one further
partial modification in civilization--in the fifteenth century. About
that time, the old literature began to lose its hold upon the public.
The novels, the miracles, the tales seemed suddenly to have aged. They
were no longer copied or recited. They were seldom printed, a single
manuscript having preserved for us _Aucassin et Nicolette_, which is
something like the _Daphnis and Chloe_ of the Middle Ages. Accidents
frighten the poet--and even the critic, who is colder, whose logic
is more rigorous--the moment the suggestion is made of separating
the purely historical idea of literary survival from the sentimental
idea of justice. Till now--and I allude once more to the conservative
rôle of modern civilization--the printing-press has protected writers
against destruction; but the serious rôle of printing affects as yet
only four centuries. This distant invention will appear some day as
if contemporary at once with Rabelais and with Victor Hugo. When a
time equal to that which separates us from the birth of Æschylus--two
thousand three hundred and seventy-five years, let us say--shall have
elapsed between us and a given moment of the future, what influence
will printing have had on the preservation of books? Perhaps none.
Everything not worth the trouble of reprinting--that is to say
everything, with the exception of a few fortunate fragments--will have
disappeared, and the more rapidly that the material substance of books
has become more precarious. Even the discovery of a durable paper would
not give absolute assurance of survival, because of the temptation to
employ this excessively strong paper for a thousand other purposes.
Thus the value of the parchment has often led to the sacrifice of a
manuscript, just as gold articles go necessarily to the smelting-pot
once the style has changed. The best material for the preservation of
books would be something unchanging, but fragile, slightly brittle, so
that it would be good for nothing outside its binding. Would not such a
discovery be a curse?
For the work of the last four centuries, and for what, about 1450,
remained undamaged of the earlier work, as well as for what has since
been found in the dustbins, printing has proved a memorable blessing.
We are not obliged to accept the opinions of the past. The books are
there, and whether they be common or rare, we can find and read them.
We are the startled and clement judges of the glory and of the obloquy
that Boileau distributed to his contemporaries. Martial dishonoured
poets who were perhaps a Saint Amant or a Scudéry; but we have beneath
our eyes the documents composing the _dossier_ of the _Satires_, and no
professor friendly to good morals and eternal principles can make us
share his commonplace hatreds. A witty writer has remarked that Boileau
treated the writers whom he disliked almost the way we treat convicted
assassins or seducers of little girls; but, thanks to the unforeseen
permanence of books, this ancient abuse matters no more for the judges
to-day than a lawyer's vituperation. I have Sanlecque within hand's
reach, even Cotin, even Coras. If they are poor writers, I shall say so
only as a result of my own personal impression.
A catalogue of lost books has been compiled.[5] Their number reaches
five or six hundred, and to attain even this figure, the author was
obliged to count some works which have merely strayed, as well as
several editions of works reprinted more than once. Were there, among
these lost books, any pages really worth crying over? It is hardly
likely, judging from the epitaphs of these tombs. The following were
doubtless neither other _Maximes_, nor other _Phèdres_, nor even
other _Alarics_: _Herménégilde_, tragedy, by Gaspard Olivier (1601);
the _Poétiques Trophées_, by Jean Figon de Montélimard (1556), or
the _Courtisan Amoureux_ (1582) or the _Friant Dessert des Femmes
mondaines_ (1643). But who knows? However, the _Coupe-Cul des Moines_,
or the _Seringue spirituelle_, inspires but feeble regrets, and it
is the same with the _Estranges et espouvantables Amours d'un diable
déguisé en gentil-homme et d'une demoiselle de Bretagne_. A more
palpable loss is that of several _Almanachs_ prepared by Rabelais, but
even this does not matter so very much. The fact that feverish fingers
wore out the first editions of _Astrée_, of the _Aventures du baron de
Fœneste_, of the _Odes_ of Ronsard prematurely,[6] proves nothing but
the immediate success of these works which do not cease to be in the
hands of all connoisseurs for more than half a century, and the same
might be said of the original editions of the first novels of Alexandre
Dumas, which cannot be classed, for the most part, among lost books.
But the fact that we can still read the inscriptions in a cemetery
proves, at least, that those buried beneath them had a name and a
fame, however transitory. The real lost books are those whose very
titles to-day could be suspected by nobody. This anonymous dust would
not, doubtless, fill a very large ossuary; but a necropolis could be
constructed from lost manuscripts.
It is not probable that, of the French literature of the Middle Ages,
much more than the hundredth part has survived the changing fashion.
Almost all the dramatic works have disappeared. The number of authors
must have been immense at a time when the writer was his own publisher,
the poet his own reciter, the dramatist his own actor. In a certain
sense printing proved an obstacle to letters. It operated a selection
and cast contempt upon books that had failed to find a publisher. This
situation still exists, though mitigated by the low cost of mechanical
typography. The invention with which we are now threatened--a
home-printing-press--would triple or quadruple the number of new books,
and we should have mediaeval conditions once more. Everyone with a
smattering of culture--and some others, as is the case to-day--would
venture the little work which the writer confides to his friends before
offering it to the public. Every progress ends by defeating its own
purpose. Reaching its maximum development, it tends to re-establish the
primitive state which it had superseded.
The change in civilization, from antiquity to the Middle Ages, was
intellectual and sentimental rather than material. The same trades
continued under the same primitive conditions. The bookshop in the time
of Rutebeuf was the same that sold the _Odes_ of Horace, when they
were fresh and full of life. In both periods, which were similarly
periods of expansion, literature was similarly abundant. There remains
almost nothing of it to-day. All Latin poetry, from Ennius to Sidonius
Apollinaris, is contained in two folio volumes,[7] but almost the
whole second volume is devoted to the Christian poets. The Greeks
have been less badly treated. Antony made a gift to Cleopatra of
the library at Pergamos, which contained two hundred thousand Greek
works, each in a single copy. Greek literature, in Didot's edition,
is contained in sixty-one volumes. If we add an occasional treatise
of Aristotle, Herondas, Bacchylides, the number of pages will not be
greatly increased. Literature fared the same as an army which has been
decimated. The dead are buried and the survivors become heroes. We may
judge of the relative, but not of the absolute value of what is left.
Here we encounter Pratinas once more. He teaches us that glory is a
fact.