the end of this Part Croesus comes personally into the story, being the
head of a formidable combination to supplant the King of Pontus, detain
Mandane, and, if possible (as the well-known oracle, in the usual
ambiguity (_v. inf._), encourages him to hope), conquer the Medo-Persian
empire and make it his own. But the _Histoire_ mania--now further
excited by consistence in working the personages so obtained in
generally--is in great evidence, and "Lygdamis and Cleonice" supply a
large proportion of the early and all the middle of the eighth volume,
the second of the Fourth Part. There is, however, much more business
than usual at the end to make up for any slackness at the beginning. In
a side-action with the Lydians both Cyrus and the King of Assyria are
captured by force of numbers, though the former is at once released by
the Princess Palmis, as well as Artames, son of Cyrus's Phrygian ally,
whom Croesus chooses to consider as a rebel, and intends to put to
death. Here, however, the captive Queen and Princess, Panthea and
Araminta, come into good play, and exercise strong and successful
influence through the husband of the one and the brother of the other.
But at the end of book, volume, and part we leave Cyrus once more in the
dismals. For though he has actually seen Mandane he cannot get at her,
and he has heard three apparently most unfavourable oracles; the
Babylonian one, which was quoted above, and which he, like everybody
else, takes as a promise of success to Philidaspes; the ambiguous
Delphic forecast of "the fall of _an_ Empire" to Croesus; and that of
his own death at the hands of a hostile queen, the only one which,
historically, was to be fulfilled in its apparent sense, while the
others were not. He cares, indeed, not much about the two last, but
infinitely about the first.
At the opening of the Fifth Part (ninth volume) there is a short but
curious "Address to the Reader," announcing the fulfilment of the first
half of the promised production, and bidding him not be downhearted, for
the first of the second half (the Sixth Part or eleventh volume of the
whole) is actually at Press. It may be noticed that there is a swagger
about these _avis_ and such like things, which probably _is_
attributable to Georges, and not to Madeleine.[174]
The inevitable _Histoire_ comes earlier than usual in this division, and
is of unusual importance; for it deals with two persons of great
distinction, and already introduced in the story, Queen Panthea and her
husband Abradates. It is also one of the longer batch, running to some
four hundred pages; and a notable part in it and in the future main
story is played by one Doralise--a pretty name, which Dryden, making it
prettier still by substituting a _c_ for the _s_, borrowed for his most
original and (with that earlier Florimel of _The Maiden Queen_, who is
said to have been studied directly off Nell Gwyn) perhaps his most
attractive heroine, the Doralice of _Marriage a la Mode_. Another
important character, the villain of the sub-plot, is one Mexaris.[175]
At the end of the first instalment we leave Cyrus preparing elaborate
machines of war to crush the Lydians.
Early in Book II. we hear of a mysterious warrior on the enemy side whom
nobody knows, who calls himself Telephanes, and whom Cyrus is very
anxious to meet in battle, but for the time cannot. He is also
frustrated in his challenge of the King of Pontus to fight for
Mandane--a challenge of which Croesus will not hear. At last Telephanes
turns out to be no less a person than Mazare, Prince of Sacia, whom we
know already as one of the ever-multiplying lovers and abductors of the
heroine; while, after a good deal of confused fighting, another inset
_Histoire_ of him closes the tenth volume (V. ii.). It is, however, only
two hundred pages long--a mere parenthesis compared to others, and it
leads up to his giving Cyrus a letter from Mandane--an act of generosity
which Philidaspes, otherwise King of Assyria, frankly confesses that he,
as another Rival, could never have done. After yet another _Histoire_
(now a "four-some") of Belesis, Hermogenes, Cleodare, and Leonice,
Abradates changes sides, carrying us on to an "intricate impeach" of
old and new characters, especially Araminta and Spithridates, and to the
death in battle of the generous King of Susiana himself, and the grief
of Panthea. There is, at the close of this volume, a rather interesting
_Privilege du Roi_, signed by Conrart ("_le silencieux Conrart_"),
sealed with "the great seal of yellow wax in a simple tail" (one ribbon
or piece of ferret only?), and bestowing its rights "nonobstant Clameur
de Haro, Charte Normande, et autres lettres contraires."
The first volume of the Sixth Part (the eleventh of the whole and the
first of what, as so many words of the kind are required, we may call
the Second Division) has plenty of business--showing that the author or
her adviser was also a business-like person--to commence the new
venture. Cyrus, after being victorious in the field and just about to
besiege Sardis in form, receives a "bolt from the blue" in the shape of
a letter "From the unhappy Mandane to the faithless"--himself! She has
learnt, she tells him, that his feelings towards her are changed,
requests that she may no longer serve as a pretext for his ambition,
and--rather straining the prerogatives assumed even by her nearest
ancestresses in literature, the Polisardas and Miraguardas of the
_Amadis_ group, but scarcely dreamt of by the heroines of ancient Greek
Romance--desires that he will send back to her father Cyaxares all the
troops that he is, as she implies, commanding on false pretences.
Now one half expects that Cyrus, in a transport of
Amadisian-Euphuist-heroism, will comply with this very modest request.
In fact it is open to any one to contend that, according to the
strictest rules of the game, he ought to have done so and gone mad, or
at least marooned himself in some desert island, in consequence. The
sophistication, however, of the stage appears here. After a very natural
sort of "Well, I never!" translated into proper heroic language, he sets
to work to identify the person whom Mandane suspects to be her
rival--for she has carefully abstained from naming anybody. And he
asks--with an ingenious touch of self-confession which does the author
great credit, if it was consciously laid on--whether it can be Panthea
or Araminta, with both of whom he has, in fact, been, if not exactly
flirting, carrying on (as the time itself would have said) a "commerce
of respectful and obliging admiration." He has a long talk with his
confidant Feraulas (whose beloved and really lovable Martesie is,
unluckily, not at hand to illuminate the mystery), and then he writes as
"The Unfortunate Cyrus to the Unjust Mandane," tells her pretty roundly,
though, of course, still respectfully, that if she knew how things
really were "she would think herself the cruellest and most unjust
person in the world." [I should have added, "just as she is, in fact,
the most beautiful."] She is, he says, his first and last passion, and
he has never been more than polite to any one else. But she will kindly
excuse his not complying with her request to send back his army until he
has vanquished all his Rivals--where, no doubt, in the original, the
capital was bigger and more menacing than ever, and was written with an
appropriate gnashing of teeth.
The traditional balance of luck and love, however, holds; and the armies
of Croesus and the King of Pontus begin to melt away; so that, after a
short but curious pastoral episode, they have to shut themselves up in
the capital. The dead body of Abradates is now found, and his widow
Panthea stabs herself upon it. This removes one of Mandane's possible
causes of jealousy, but Araminta remains; and, as a matter of fact, it
_is_ this Princess on whom her suspicion has been cast, arising partly,
though helped by makebates, from the often utilised personal resemblance
between her actual lover, Prince Spithridates, and Cyrus. The
treacherous King of Pontus has, in fact, shown her a letter from
Araminta (his sister, be it remembered) which seems to encourage the
idea.
All this, however, and more fills but a hundred pages or so, and then we
are as usual whelmed in a _Histoire de Timarete et de Parthenie_, which
takes up four times the space, and finishes the First Book. The Second
opens smartly enough with the actual siege of Sardis; but we cannot get
rid of Araminta (it is sad to have to wish that she was not "our own
Araminta" quite so often) and Spithridates. Conversations between the
still prejudiced Mandane and the Lydian Princess Palmis--a sensible and
agreeable girl--are better; but from them we are hurled into a _Histoire
de Sesostre_ (the Egyptian prince, son of Amasis, who is now an ally of
Cyrus) _et de Timarete_, which not only fills the whole of the rest of
the volume, but swells over into the next, being much occupied with the
villainies of a certain Heracleon, who is at the time a wounded prisoner
in Cyrus's Camp. The siege is kept up briskly, but Cyrus's courteous
release of certain captives adds fuel to Mandane's wrath as having been
procured by Araminta. He will do anything for Araminta! The releases
themselves give rise to fresh "alarums and excursions," among which we
again meet a pretty name (Candiope), borrowed by Dryden. Doralise is
also much to the fore; and we have a regular _Histoire_, though a
shorter one than usual, of _Arpalice and Thrasimede_, which will, as
some say, "bulk largely" later. The length of this part is, indeed,
enormous, the double volume running to over fourteen hundred pages,
instead of the usual ten or twelve. But its close is spirited and
sufficiently interim-catastrophic. Cyrus discovers in the _enceinte_ of
Sardis the usual weak point--an apparently impregnable scarped rock,
which has been weakly fortified and garrisoned--takes it by escalade in
person with his best paladins, and after it the city.
But of course he cannot expect to have it all his own way when not quite
twelve-twentieths of the book are gone, and he finds that Mandane is
gone likewise; the King of Pontus, who has practically usurped the
authority of Croesus, having once more carried her off--perhaps not so
entirely unwilling as before. Cyrus pursues, and while he is absent the
King of Assyria (Philidaspes) shows himself even more of a "Philip
Devil" than usual by putting the captive Lydian prince on a pyre,
threatening to burn him if he will not reveal the place of the
Princess's flight, and actually having the torch applied. Of course
Cyrus turns up at the nick of time, has the fire put out, rates the King
of Assyria soundly for his violence, and apologises handsomely to
Croesus. The notion of an apology for nearly roasting a man may appear
to have its ludicrous side, but the way in which the historic pyre and
the mention of Solon are brought in without discrediting the hero is
certainly ingenious. The Mandane-hunt is renewed, but fruitlessly.
At the beginning of Part VII. there are--according to the habit noticed,
and in rather extra measure as regards "us" if not "them"--some
interesting things. The first is an example--perhaps the best in the
book--of the elaborate description (called in Greek rhetorical technique
_ecphrasis_) which is so common in the Greek Romances. The subject is an
extraordinarily beautiful statue of a woman which Cyrus sees in
Croesus's gallery, and which will have sequels later. It, or part of it,
may be given:
[Sidenote: The statue in the gallery at Sardis.]
But, among all these figures of gold, there was to be seen
one of marble, so wonderful, that it obliged Cyrus to stay
longer in admiring it than in contemplating any of the
others, though it was not of such precious material. It is
true that it was executed with such art, and represented
such a beautiful person, as to prevent any strangeness in
its charming a Prince whose eyes were so delicate and so
capable of judging all beautiful objects. This statue was of
life-size, placed upon a pedestal of gold, on the four sides
of which were bas-reliefs of an admirable beauty. On each
were seen captives, chained in all sorts of fashions, but
chained only by little Loves, unsurpassably executed. As for
the figure itself, it represented a girl about eighteen
years old, but one of surprising and perfect beauty. Every
feature of the face was marvellously fine;[176] her figure
was at once so noble and so graceful that nothing more
elegant[177] could be seen; and her dress was at once so
handsome and so unusual, that it had something of each of
the usual garbs of Tyrian ladies, of nymphs, and of
goddesses; but more particularly that of the Wingless
Victory, as represented by the Athenians, with a simple
laurel crown on her head. This statue was so well set on its
base, and had such lively action, that it seemed actually
animated; the face, the throat, the arms, and the hands were
of white marble, as were the legs and feet, which were
partly visible between the laces of the buskins she wore,
and which were to be seen because, with her left hand, she
lifted her gown a little, as if to walk more easily. With
her right she held back a veil, fastened behind her head
under the crown of laurel, as though to prevent its being
carried away by the breeze, which seemed to agitate it. The
whole of the drapery of the figure was made of
divers-coloured marbles and jaspers; and, in particular, the
gown of this fair Phoenician, falling in a thousand graceful
folds, which still did not hide the exact proportion of her
body, was of jasper, of a colour so deep that it almost
rivalled Tyrian purple itself. A scarf, which passed
negligently round her neck, and was fastened on the
shoulder, was of a kind of marble, streaked with blue and
white, which was very agreeable to the eye. The veil was of
the same substance; but sculptured so artfully that it
seemed as soft as mere gauze. The laurel crown was of green
jasper, and the buskins, as well as the sash she wore, were,
again of different hues. This sash brought together all the
folds of the gown over the hips; below, they fell again more
carelessly, and still showed the beauty of her figure. But
what was most worthy of admiration in the whole piece was
the spirit which animated it, and almost persuaded the
spectators that she was just about to walk and talk. There
was even a touch of art in her face, and a certain
haughtiness in her attitude which made her seem to scorn the
captives chained beneath her feet: while the sculptor had so
perfectly realised the indefinable freshness, tenderness,
and _embonpoint_ of beautiful girls, that one almost knew
her age.
Then come two more startling events. A wicked Prince Phraortes bolts
with the unwilling Araminta, and the King of Assyria (_alias_
Philidaspes) slips away in search of Mandane on his own account--two
things inconvenient to Cyrus in some ways, but balancing themselves in
others. For if it is unpleasant to have a very violent and rather
unscrupulous Rival hunting the beloved on the one hand, that beloved's
jealousy, if not cured, is at least not likely to be increased by the
disappearance of its object. This last, however, hits Spithridates, who
is, as it has been and will be seen, the _souffre-douleur_ of the book,
much harder. And the double situation illustrates once more the
extraordinary care taken in systematising--and as one might almost say
_syllabising_--the book. It is almost impossible that there should not
somewhere exist an actual syllabus of the whole, though, my habit being
rather to read books themselves than books about them, I am not aware of
one as a fact.[178]
Another characteristic is also well illustrated in this context, and a
further translated extract will show the curious, if not very recondite,
love-casuistry which plays so large a part. But these French writers of
the seventeenth century[179] did not know one-tenth of the matter that
was known by their or others' mediaeval ancestors, by their English and
perhaps Spanish contemporaries, or by writers in the nineteenth century.
They were not "perfect in love-lore"; their _Liber Amoris_ was, after
all, little more than a fashion-book in divers senses of "fashion." But
let them speak for themselves:
[Sidenote: The judgment of Cyrus in a court of love.]
[_Menecrate and Thrasimede are going to fight, and have,
according to the unqualified legal theory[180] and very
occasional actual practice of seventeenth-century France, if
not of the Medes and Persians, been arrested, though in
honourable fashion. The "dependence" is a certain Arpalice,
who loves Thrasimede and is loved by him. But she is ordered
by her father's will to marry Menecrate, who is now quite
willing to marry her, though she hates him, and though he
has previously been in love with Androclee, to whom he has
promised that he will not marry the other. A sort of
informal_ Cour d'Amour _is held on the subject, the
President being Cyrus himself, and the judges Princesses
Timarete and Palmis, Princes Sesostris and Myrsilus, with
"Toute la compagnie" as assessors and assessoresses. After
much discussion, it is decided to disregard the dead
father's injunction and the living inconstant's wishes, and
to unite Thrasimede and Arpalice. But the chief points of
interest lie in the following remarks:_]
"As it seems to me," said Cyrus, "what we ought most to
consider in this matter is the endeavour to make the fewest
possible persons unhappy, and to prevent a combat between
two gentlemen of such gallantry, that to whichever side
victory inclines, we should have cause to regret the
vanquished. For although Menecrate is inconstant and a
little capricious, he has, for all that, both wits and a
heart. We must, then, if you please," added he, turning to
the two princesses, "consider that if Arpalice were forced
to carry out her father's testament and marry Menecrate,
everybody would be unhappy, and he would have to fight two
duels,[181] one against Thrasimede and one against
Philistion (_Androclee's brother_), the one fighting for his
mistress, the other for his sister." "No doubt," said
Lycaste, "several people will be unhappy, but, methinks, not
all; for at any rate Menecrate will possess _his_ mistress."
"'Tis true," said Cyrus, "that he will possess Arpalice's
beauty; but I am sure that as he would not possess her
heart, he could not call himself satisfied; and his greatest
happiness in this situation would be having prevented the
happiness of his Rival. As for the rest of it, after the
first days of his marriage, he would be in despair at having
wedded a person who hated him, and whom he, perhaps, would
have ceased to love; for, considering Menecrate's humour, I
am the most deceived of all men if the possession of what he
loves is not the very thing to kill all love in his heart.
As for Arpalice, it is easy to see that, marrying Menecrate,
whom she hates, and _not_ marrying Thrasimede, whom she
loves, she would be very unhappy indeed; nor could
Androclee, on her side, be particularly satisfied to see a
man like Menecrate, whom she loves passionately, the husband
of another. Philistion could hardly be any more pleased to
see Menecrate, after promising to marry his sister, actually
marrying another. As for Thrasimede, it is again easy to
perceive that, being as much in love with Arpalice as he is,
and knowing that she loves him, he would have good reason
for thinking himself one of the unhappiest lovers in the
world if his Rival possessed his mistress. Therefore, from
what I have said, you will see that by giving Arpalice to
Menecrate, everybody concerned is made miserable; for even
Parmenides [_not the philosopher, but a friend of Menecrate,
whose sister, however, has rejected him_], though he may
make a show of being still attached to the interests of
Menecrate, will be, unless I mistake, well enough pleased
that his sister should not marry the brother of a person
whom he never wishes to see again, and by whom he has been
ill-treated. Then, if we look at the matter from the other
side and propose to give Arpalice to Thrasimede, it remains
an unalterable fact that these two people will be happy;
that Philistion will be satisfied; that justice will be done
to Androclee; that nothing disobliging will be done to
Parmenides, and that Menecrate will be made by force more
happy than he wishes to be; for we shall give him a wife by
whom he is loved, and take from him one by whom he is hated.
Moreover, things being so, even if he refuses to subject his
whim to his reason, he can wish to come to blows with
Thrasimede alone, and would have nothing to ask of
Philistion; besides which, his sentiments will change as
soon as Thrasimede is Arpalice's husband. One often fights
with a Rival, thinking to profit by his defeat, when he has
not married the beloved object; but one does not so readily
fight the husband of one's mistress, as being her
lover.[182]"
Much about the "Good Rival" (as we may call him) Mazare follows, and
there is an illuminative sentence about our favourite Doralise's _humeur
enjouee et critique_, which, as the rest of her part does, gives us a
"light" as to the origin of those sadly vulgarised lively heroines of
Richardson's whom Lady Mary very justly wanted to "slipper." Doralise
and Martesie are ladies, which the others, unfortunately, are not. And
then we pay for our _ecphrasis_ by an immense _Histoire_ of the Tyrian
Elise, its original.
At the beginning of VII. ii. Cyrus is in the doldrums. Many of his
heroes have got their heroines--the personages of bygone
_histoires_--and are honeymooning and (to borrow again from Mr. Kipling)
"dancing on the deck." He is not. Moreover, the army, like all
seventeenth-century armies after victory and in comfortable quarters, is
getting rather out of hand; and he learns that the King of Pontus has
carried Mandane off to Cumae--not the famous Italian Cumae, home of the
Sibyl whom Sir Edward Burne-Jones has fixed for us, and of many
classical memories, but a place somewhere near Miletus, defended by
unpleasant marshes on land, and open to the sea itself, the element on
which Cyrus is weakest, and by which the endlessly carried off Mandane
may readily be carried off again. He sends about for help to Phoenicia
and elsewhere; but when, after a smart action by land against the town,
a squadron does appear off the port, he is for a time quite uncertain
whether it is friend or foe. Fortunately Cleobuline, Queen of Corinth, a
young widow of surpassing beauty and the noblest sentiments, who has
sworn never to marry again, has conceived a Platonic-romantic admiration
for him, and has sent her fleet to his aid. She deserves, of course, and
still more of course has, a _Histoire de Cleobuline_. Also the
inestimable Martesie writes to say that Mandane has been dispossessed of
her suspicions, and that the King of Pontus is, in the race for her
favour, nowhere. The city falls, and the lovers meet. But if anybody
thinks for a moment that they are to be happy ever afterwards,
Arithmetic, Logic, and Literary History will combine to prove to him
that he is very much mistaken. In order to make these two lovers happy
at all, not only time and space, but six extremely solid volumes would
have to be annihilated.
The close of VII. ii. and the whole of VIII. i. are occupied with
imbroglios of the most characteristic kind. There is a certain Anaxaris,
who has been instrumental in preventing Mandane from being, according to
her almost invariable custom, carried off from Cumae also. To whom,
though he is one of the numerous "unknowns" of the book, Cyrus rashly
confides not only the captainship of the Princess's guards, but various
and too many other things, especially when "Philip Devil" turns up once
more, and, seeing the lovers in apparent harmony, claims the fulfilment
of Cyrus's rash promise to fight him before marrying. This gets wind in
a way, and watch is kept on Cyrus by his friends; but he, thinking of
the parlous state of his mistress if both her principal lovers were
killed--for Prince Mazare is, so to speak, out of the running, while the
King of Pontus is still lying _perdu_ somewhere--entrusts the secret to
Anaxaris, and begs him to take care of her. Now Anaxaris--as is so
usual--is not Anaxaris at all, but Aryante, Prince of the Massagetae and
actually brother of the redoubtable Queen Thomyris; and he also has
fallen a victim to Mandane's fascinations, which appear to be
irresistible, though they are, mercifully perhaps, rather taken for
granted than made evident to the reader. One would certainly rather have
one Doralise or Martesie than twenty Mandanes. However, again in the now
expected manner, the fight does not immediately come off. For "Philip
Devil," in his usual headlong violence, has provoked another duel with
the Assyrian Prince Intaphernes,[183] and has been badly worsted and
wounded by his foe, who is unhurt. This puts everything off, and for a
long time the main story drops again (except as far as the struggles of
Anaxaris between honour and love are depicted), first to a great deal of
miscellaneous talk about the quarrel of King and Prince, and then to a
regular _Histoire_ of the King, Intaphernes, Atergatis, Princess
Istrine, and the Princess of Bithynia, Spithridates's sister and
daughter of a very robustious and rather usurping King Arsamones, who is
a deadly enemy of Cyrus. The dead Queen Nitocris, and the passion for
her of a certain Gadates, Intaphernes's father, and also sometimes, if
not always, called a "Prince," come in here. The story again introduces
the luckless Spithridates himself, who is first, owing to his likeness
to Cyrus, persecuted by Thomyris, and then imprisoned by his father
Arsamones because he will not give up Araminta and marry Istrine, whom
Nitocris had wanted to marry her own son Philidaspes--a good instance of
the extraordinary complications and contrarieties in which the book
indulges, and of which, if Dickens had been a more "literary" person, he
might have thought when he made the unfortunate Augustus Moddle observe
that "everybody appears to be somebody else's." Finally, the volume ends
with an account of the leisurely progress of Mandane and Cyrus to
Ecbatana and Cyaxares, while the King of Assyria recovers as best he
can. But at certain "tombs" on the route evidence is found that the King
of Pontus has been recently in the land of the living, and is by no
means disposed to give up Mandane.
The second volume of this part is one of the most eventless of all, and
is mainly occupied by a huge _Histoire_ of Puranius, Prince of Phocaea,
his love Cleonisbe, and others, oddly topped by a passage of the main
story, describing Cyrus's emancipation of the captive Jews. He is for a
time separated from the Princess.
The first pages of IX. i. are lively, though they are partly a _recit_.
Prince Intaphernes tells Cyrus all about Anaxaris (Aryante), and how by
representing Cyrus as dead and the King of Assyria in full pursuit of
her, he has succeeded in carrying off Mandane; how also he has had the
cunning, by availing himself of the passion of another high officer,
Andramite, for Doralise, to induce him to join, in order that the maid
of honour may accompany her mistress. Accordingly Cyrus, the King of
Assyria himself, and others start off in fresh pursuit; but the King has
at first the apparent luck. He overtakes the fugitives, and a sharp
fight follows. But the guards whom Cyrus has placed over the Princess,
and who, in the belief of his death, have followed the ravishers, are
too much for Philidaspes, and he is fatally wounded; fulfilling the
oracle, as we anticipated long ago, by dying in Mandane's arms, and
honoured with a sigh from her as for her intended rescuer.
She herself, therefore, is in no better plight, for Aryante and
Andramite continue the flight, with her and her ladies, to a port on the
Euxine, destroying, that they may not be followed, all the shipping save
one craft they select, and making for the northern shore. Here after a
time Aryante surrenders Mandane to his sister Thomyris, as he cannot
well help doing, though he knows her violent temper and her tigress-like
passion for Cyrus, and though, also, he is on rather less than brotherly
terms with her, and has a party among the Massagetae who would gladly
see him king. Meanwhile the King of Pontus and Phraortes, Araminta's
carrier-off, fight and kill each other, and Araminta is given up--a loss
for Mandane, for they have been companions in quasi-captivity, and there
is no longer any subject of jealousy between them.
Having thus created a sort of "deadlock" situation such as she loves,
and in the interval, while Cyrus is gathering forces to attack Thomyris,
the author, as is her fashion likewise, surrenders herself to the joys
of digression. We have a great deal of retrospective history of Aryante,
and at last the famous Scythian philosopher, Anacharsis, is introduced,
bringing with him the rest of the Seven Ancient Sages--with whom we
could dispense, but are not allowed to do so. There is a Banquet of them
all at the end of the first volume of the Part; and they overflow into
the second, telling stories about Pisistratus and others, and discussing
"love in the _aib_-stract," as frigidly as might be expected, on such
points as, "Can you love the same person _twice_?"[184] But the last
half of this IX. ii. is fortunately business again. There is much hard
fighting with Thomyris, who on one occasion wishes to come to actual
sword-play with Cyrus, and of whom we have the liveliest _ecphrasis_, or
set description, in the whole romance.
[Sidenote: Thomyris on the warpath.]
As for Thomyris, she was so beautiful that day that there
was no one in the world save Mandane, who could have
disputed a heart with her[185] without the risk of losing.
This Princess was mounted on a fine black horse, trapped
with gold; her dress was of cloth of gold, with green panels
shot with a little carnation, and was of the shape of that
of Pallas when she is represented as armed. The skirt was
caught up on the hip with diamond clasps, and showed buskins
of lions' muzzles made to correspond with the rest. Her
head-dress was adorned with jewels, and a great number of
feathers--carnation, white and green--hung over her
beautiful fair tresses, while these, fluttering at the
wind's will, mixed themselves with the plumes as she turned
her head, and with their careless curls gave a marvellous
lustre to her beauty. Besides, as her sleeves were turned
up, and caught on the shoulder, while she held the bridle of
her horse with one hand and her sword with the other, she
showed the loveliest arms in the world. Anger had flushed
her complexion, so that she was more beautiful than usual;
and the joy of once more seeing Cyrus, and seeing him also
in an action respectful towards her,[186] effaced the marks
of her immediately preceding fury so completely that he
could see nothing but what was amiable and charming.
Thomyris, however, is as treacherous and cruel as she is beautiful; and
part of her reason for seeming milder is that more of her troops may
turn up and seize him.
On another occasion, owing to false generalship and disorderly advance
on the part of the King of Hyrcania, Cyrus is in no small danger, but he
"makes good," though at a disastrous expense, and with still greater
dangers to meet. Thomyris's youthful son (for young and beautiful widow
as she is, she has been an early married wife and a mother),
Spargapises, just of military age, is captured in battle, suffers from
his captors' ignorance what has been called "the indelible insult of
bonds," and though almost instantly released as soon as he is known,
stabs himself as disgraced. His body is sent to his mother with all
sorts of honours, apologies, and regrets, but she, partly out of natural
feeling, partly from her excited state, and partly because her mind is
poisoned by false insinuations, sends, after transports of maternal and
other rage, a message to Cyrus to the effect that if he does not put
himself unreservedly in her hands, she will send him back Mandane dead,
in the coffin of Spargapises. And so the last double-volume but one ends
with a suitable "fourth act" curtain, as we may perhaps call it.
The last of all, X. i. and ii., exhibits, in a remarkable degree, the
general defects and the particular merits and promise of this curious
and (it cannot be too often repeated) epoch-making book. In the latter
respect more especially it shows the "laborious orient ivory sphere in
sphere" fashion in which the endless and, it may sometimes seem, aimless
episodes, and digressions, and insets are worked into the general theme.
The defects will hardly startle, though they may still annoy, any one
who has worked through the whole. But if another wickedly contented
himself with a sketch of the story up to this point, and thought to make
up by reading this Part of two volumes carefully, he would probably feel
these defects very strongly indeed. We--we corrupt moderns--do expect a
quickening up for the run-in. The usual beginning may seem to the
non-experts to promise this, or at least to give hopes of it; for though
there is a vast deal of talking--with Anacharsis as a go-between and
Gelonide (a good confidante), endeavouring to soften Thomyris, one can
but expect it--the situation itself is at once difficult and exciting.
The position of Aryante in particular is really novel-dramatic. As he is
in love with Mandane, he of course does not want his sister to murder
her. But inasmuch as he fears Cyrus's rivalry, he does not want him to
be near Mandane for two obvious reasons: first, the actual proximity,
and, secondly, the danger of Thomyris's temper getting the better (or
worse) of her when both the lovers are in her power. So he sends private
messengers to the Persian Prince, begging him _not_ to surrender. Cyrus,
however, still thinks of exchanging himself for Mandane. At this point
the neophyte's rage may be excited by being asked to plunge into the
regular four-hundred page _Histoire_ of a certain Arpasie, who has two
lovers--a Persian nobleman Hidaspe, and a supposed Assyrian champion
Meliante, who has come with reinforcements for Thomyris. And no doubt
the proportion _is_ outrageous. But "wait and see," a phrase, it may be
observed, which was not, as some seem to think, invented by Mr. Asquith.
At last the business does begin again, and a tremendous battle takes
place for the possession of certain forests which lie between the two
armies, and are at first held by the Scythians. Cyrus, however, avails
himself of the services of an engineer who has a secret of combustibles,
sets the forests ablaze, and forces his way through one or two open
defiles, with little loss to himself and very heavy loss to the enemy,
whose main body, however, is still unbroken. This affords a fine subject
for one of the curious frontispieces known to all readers of seventeenth
century books. A further wait for reinforcements takes place, and the
author basely avails herself of it for a no doubt to herself very
congenial (they actually called her in "precious" circles by the name of
the great poetess) and enormous _Histoire_ of no less a person than
Sappho, which fills the last 250 pages of the first (nineteenth) volume
and about as much of the second (twentieth) or last. It has very little
connection with the text, save that Sappho and Phaon (for the
self-precipitation at Leucas is treated as a fable) retire to the
country of the Sauromatae, to live there a happy, united, but unwed and
purely Platonic (in the silly sense) existence. The foolish side of the
_precieuse_ system comes out here, and the treatment confirms one's
suspicion that the author's classical knowledge was not very deep.
It does come to an end at last, however, and at last also we do get our
"run-in," such as it is. The chief excuse for its existence is that it
brings in a certain Mereonte, who, like his quasi-assonant Meliante, is
to be useful later, and that the tame conclusion is excused by a Sapphic
theory--certainly not to be found in her too fragmentary works--that
"possession ruins love," a doctrine remembered and better put by Dryden
in a speech of that very agreeable Doralice, whose name, though not
originally connected with this part of it, he also, as has been noted,
borrowed from the _Grand Cyrus_.
The actual finale begins (so to speak) antithetically with the last
misfortune of the unlucky Spithridates. His ill-starred likeness to
Cyrus, assisted by a suit of armour which Cyrus has given to him, make
the enemy certain that he is Cyrus himself, and he is furiously
assaulted in an off-action, surrounded, and killed. His head is taken
to Thomyris, who, herself deceived, executes upon it the famous
"blood-bath" of history or legend.[187] Unfortunately it is not only in
the Scythian army that the error spreads. Cyrus's troops are terrified
and give way, so that he is overpowered by numbers and captured.
Fortunately he falls into the hands, not of Thomyris's own people or of
her savage allies, the Geloni (it is a Gelonian captain who has acted as
executioner in Spithridates's case), but of the supposed Assyrian leader
Meliante, who is an independent person, admires Cyrus, and, further
persuaded by his friend Mereonte (_v. sup._), resolves to let him
escape. The difficulties, however, are great, and the really safest,
though apparently the most dangerous way, seems to lie through the
"Royal Tents" (the nomad capital of Thomyris) themselves. Meanwhile,
Aryante is making interest against his sister; some of Cyrus's special
friends, disguised as Massagetae, are trying to discover and rescue him,
and the Sauromatae are ready to desert the Scythian Queen. One of her
transports of rage brings on the catastrophe. She orders the Gelonian
bravo to poniard Mandane, and he actually stabs by mistake her
maid-of-honour Hesionide--the least interesting one, luckily. Cyrus
himself, after escaping notice for a time, is identified, attacked, and
nearly slain, when the whole finishes in a general chaos of rebellion,
arrival of friends, flight of Thomyris, and a hairbreadth escape of
Cyrus himself, which unluckily partakes more of the possible-improbable
than of the impossible-probable. The murders being done, the marriages
would appear to have nothing to delay them; but an evil habit, the
origin of which is hard to trace, and which is not quite extinct, still
puts them off. Meliante has got to be rewarded with the hand of Arpasie,
which is accomplished after he has been discovered, in a manner not
entirely romantic, to be the son of the King of Hyrcania, and both his
marriage and that of Cyrus are interfered with by a supposed Law of the
Medes and of certain minor Asiatic peoples, that a Prince or Princess
may not marry a foreigner. Fresh discoveries get rid of this in
Meliante's case, while in that of Cyrus a convenient Oracle declares
that he who has conquered every kingdom in Asia cannot be considered a
foreigner in any. So at last the long chart is finished, Doralise
retaining her character as lightener of this rather solid entertainment
by declaring that she cannot say she loves her suitor, Prince Myrsilus,
because every phrase that occurs to her is either too strong or too
weak. So we bless her, and stop the water channels--or, as the Limousin
student might have more excellently said, "claud the rives."
* * * * *
[Sidenote: General remarks on the book and its class.]
If the reader, having tolerated this long analysis (it is perhaps most
probable that he will _not_ have done so), asks what game one pretends
to have shown for so much expenditure or candle, it is, no doubt, not
easy to answer him without a fresh, though a lesser, trial of his
patience. You cannot "ticket" the _Grand Cyrus_, or any of its fellows,
or the whole class, with any complimentary short description, such as a
certain school of ancient criticism loved, and corresponding to our
modern advertisement labels--"grateful and comforting," "necessary in
every travelling bag," and the like. They are, indeed, as I have
endeavoured to indicate indirectly as well as directly, by no means so
destitute of interest of the ordinary kind as it has generally been the
fashion to think them. From the charge of inordinate length it is, of
course, impossible to clear the whole class, and _Artamene_ more
particularly.[188] Length "no more than reason" is in some judgments a
positive advantage in a novel; but this _is_ more than reason. I believe
(the _moi_, I trust, is not utterly _haissable_ when it is necessary)
that I myself am a rather unusually rapid, without being a careless or
unfaithful, reader; and that I have by nature a very little of that
faculty with which some much greater persons have been credited, of
being able to see at a glance whether anything on a page needs more
than that glance or not, a faculty not likely to have been rendered
abortive (though also not, I hope, rendered morbid) by infinite practice
in reviewing. I do not say that, even now, I have read every word of
this _Artamene_ as I should read every word of a sonnet of Shakespeare
or a lyric of Shelley, even as I should read every word of a page of
Thackeray. I have even skimmed many pages. But I have never found, even
in a time of "retired leisure," that I could get through more than
three, or at the very utmost four, of the twenty volumes or half-volumes
without a day or two of rest or other work between. On the other hand,
the book is not significantly piquant in detail to enable me to read
attentively fifty or a hundred pages and then lay it down.[189] You do,
in a lazy sort of way, want to know what happened--a tribute, no doubt,
to Mlle. Madeleine--and so you have to go on ploughing the furrow. But
several weeks' collar-work[190] is a great deal to spend on a single
book of what is supposed to be pastime; and the pastime becomes
occasionally one of doubtful pleasure now and then. In fact, it is, as
has been said, best to read in shifts. Secondly, there may, no doubt, be
charged a certain unreality about the whole: and a good many other
criticisms may be, as some indeed have been already, made without
injustice.
The fact is that not only was the time not yet, but something which was
very specially of the time stood in the way of the other thing coming,
despite the strong _nisus_ in its favour excited by various influences
spoken of at the beginning of this chapter. This was the
devotion--French at almost all times, and specially French at this--to
the type. There are some "desperate willins" (as Sam Weller called the
greengrocer at the swarry) who fail to see much more than types in
Racine, though there is something more in Corneille, and a very great
deal more in Moliere. In the romances which charmed at home the
audiences and spectators of these three great men's work abroad, there
is nothing, or next to nothing, else at all. The spirit of the _Epistle
to the Pisos_, which acted on the Tragedians in verse, which acted on
Boileau in criticism and poetry, was heavier on the novelist than on any
of them. Take sufficient generosity, magnanimity, adoration, bravery,
courtesy, and so forth, associate the mixture with handsome flesh and
royal blood, clothe the body thus formed with brilliant scarfs and
shining armour, put it on the best horse that was ever foaled, or kneel
it at the feet of the most beautiful princess that ever existed, and you
have Cyrus. For the princess herself take beauty, dignity, modesty,
graciousness, etc., _quant. suff._, clothe _them_ in garments again
magnificent, and submit the total to extreme inconveniences, some
dangers, and an immense amount of involuntary travelling, but nothing
"irreparable," and you have Mandane. For the rest, with the rare and
slight exceptions mentioned, they flit like shadows ticketed with more
or less beautiful names. Even Philidaspes, the most prominent male
character after the hero by far, is, whether he be "in cog" as that
personage or "out of cog" as Prince and King of Assyria, merely a
petulant hero--a sort of cheap Achilles, with no idiosyncrasy at all. It
is the fault, and in a way the very great fault, of all the kind: and
there is nothing more to do with it but to admit it and look for
something to set against it.
How great a thing the inception (to use a favourite word of the present
day, though it be no favourite of the writer's) of the "psychological"
treatment of Love[191] was may, of course, be variously estimated. The
good conceit of itself in which that day so innocently and amusingly
indulges will have it, indeed, that the twentieth century has invented
this among other varieties of the great and venerable art of extracting
nourishment from eggs. "We have," somebody wrote not long ago--the exact
words may not be given, but the sense is guaranteed--"perceived that
Love is not merely a sentiment, an appetite, or a passion, but a great
means of intellectual development." Of course Solomon did not know this,
nor Sappho, nor Catullus, nor the fashioners of those "sentiments" of
the Middle Ages which brought about the half-fabulous Courts of Love
itself, nor Chaucer, nor Spenser, nor Shakespeare, nor Donne. It was
reserved for--but one never names contemporaries except _honoris causa_.
It is--an "of course" of another kind--undeniable that the fashion of
love-philosophy which supplies so large a part of the "yarn" of
Madeleine de Scudery's endless rope or web is not _our_ fashion. But it
is, in a way, a new variety of yarn as compared with anything used
before in prose, even in the Greek romances[192] and the _Amadis_ group
(nay, even in the _Astree_ itself). Among other things, it connects
itself more with the actual society, manners, fashions of its day than
had ever been the case before, and this is the only interesting side of
the "key" part of it. This was the way that they did to some extent talk
and act then, though, to be sure, they also talked and acted very
differently. It is all very well to say that the Hotel de Rambouillet is
a sort of literary-historical fiction, and the _Precieuses Ridicules_ a
delightful farce. The fiction was not wholly a fiction, and the farce
was very much more than a farce--would have been, indeed, not a farce at
all if it had not satirised a fact.
It is, however, in relation to the general history and development of
the novel, and therefore in equally important relation to the present
_History_, that the importance of the _Grand Cyrus_, or rather of the
class of which it was by far the most popular and noteworthy member, is
most remarkable. Indeed this importance can hardly be exaggerated, and
is much more likely to be--indeed has nearly always been--undervalued.
Even the jejune and partial analysis which has been given must have
shown how many of the elements of the modern novel are here--sometimes,
as it were, "in solution," sometimes actually crystallised. For any one
who demands plot there is one--of such gigantic dimensions, indeed, that
it is not easy to grasp it, but seen to be singularly well articulated
and put together when it is once grasped. Huge as it is, it is not in
the least formless, and, as has been several times pointed out, hardly
the most (as it may at first appear) wanton and unpardonable episode,
digression, or inset lacks its due connection with and "orientation"
towards the end. The contrast of this with the more or less formless
chronicle-fashion, the "overthwart and endlong" conduct, of almost all
the romances from the Carlovingian and Arthurian[193] to the _Amadis_
type, is of the most unmistakable kind.
Again, though character, as has been admitted, in any real live sense,
is terribly wanting still; though description is a little general and
wants more "streaks in the tulip"; and though conversation is formal and
stilted, there is evident, perhaps even in the first, certainly in the
second and third cases, an effort to treat them at any rate
systematically, in accordance with some principles of art, and perhaps
even not without some eye to the actual habits, manners, demands of the
time--things which again were quite new in prose fiction, and, in fact,
could hardly be said to be anywhere present in literature outside of
drama.
To set against these not so very small merits in the present, and very
considerable seeds of promise for the future, there are, of course,
serious faults or defects--defaults which need, however, less
insistence, because they are much more generally known, much more
obvious, and have been already admitted. The charge of excessive length
need hardly be dealt with at all. It has already been said that the most
interesting point about it is the opportunity of discovering how it was,
in part, a regular, and, in fact, almost the furthest possible,
development of a characteristic which had been more or less observable
throughout the progress of romance. But it may be added that the law of
supply and demand helped; for people evidently were not in the least
bored by bulk, and that the fancy for having a book "on hand" has only
lately, if it has actually, died out.[194] Now such a "book on hand" as
the _Grand Cyrus_ exists, as far as my knowledge goes, in no Western
literature, unless you count collections of letters, which is not fair,
or such memoirs as Saint-Simon's, which do not appeal to quite the same
class of readers.
A far more serious default or defect--not exactly blameworthy, _because_
the time was not yet, but certainly to be taken account of--is the
almost utter want of character just referred to. From Cyrus and Mandane
downwards the people have qualities; but qualities, though they are
necessary to character, do not constitute it. Very faint approaches may
be discerned, by very benevolent criticism, in such a personage as
Martesie with her shrewdness, her maid-of-honour familiarity with the
ways and manners of courtly human beings, and that very pardonable,
indeed agreeable, tendency, which has been noticed or imagined, to flirt
in respectful fashion with Cyrus, while carrying on more regular
business with Feraulas. But it is little more than a suggestion, and it
has been frankly admitted that it is perhaps not even that, but an
imagination merely. And the same observation may apply to her "second
string," Doralise. No others of the women have any character at all, and
we have already spoken of the men.
Now these things, in a book very widely read and immensely admired,
could not, and did not, fail to have their effect. Nobody--we shall see
this more in detail in the next chapter--can fail to perceive that the
_Princesse de Cleves_ itself is, from one point of view, only a
_histoire_ of the _Grand Cyrus_, taken out of its preposterous _matrix_
of other matter, polished, charged with a great addition of internal
fire of character and passion, and left to take its chance alone and
unencumbered. Nobody, on the other hand, who knows Richardson and
Mademoiselle de Scudery can doubt the influence of the French book--a
century old as it was--on the "father of the English novel." Now any
influence exerted on these two was, beyond controversy, an influence
exerted on the whole future course of the kind, and it is as exercising
such an influence that we have given to the _Great Cyrus_ so great a
space.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The other Scudery romances--_Ibrahim_.]
After the exhaustive account given of _Artamene_, it is probably not
necessary to apologise for dealing with the rest of Mlle. de Scudery's
novel work, and with that of her comrades in the Heroic romance, at no
very great length. _Ibrahim ou L'Illustre Bassa_ has sometimes been
complimented as showing more endeavour, if not exactly at "local
colour," at technical accuracy, than the rest. It is true that the
French were, at this time, rather amusingly proud of being the only
Western nation treated on something like equal terms by the Sublime
Porte, and that the Scuderys (possibly Georges, whose work the
Dedication to Mlle. de Rohan, daughter of the famous soldier, pretty
certainly is) may have taken some pains to acquire knowledge. "Sandjak"
(or "Sanjiac"), not for a district but for its governor, is a little
unlucky perhaps; but "Aderbion" is much nearer "Azerbaijan" than one
generally expects in such cases from French writers of the seventeenth
or even of other centuries. The Oriental character of the story,
however, is but partial. The Illustrious Pasha himself, though First
Vizir and "victorious" general of Soliman the Second, is not a Turk at
all, but a "Justinian" or Giustiniani of Genoa, whose beloved Isabelle
is a Princess of Monaco, and who at the end, after necessary
dangers,[195] retires with her to that Principality, with a punctilious
explanation from the author about the Grimaldis. The scene is partly
there and at Genoa--the best Genoese families, including the Dorias,
appearing--partly at Constantinople: and the business at the latter
place is largely concerned with the intrigues, jealousies, and cruelties
of Roxelane, who is drawn much more (one regrets to say) as history
paints her than as the agreeable creature of Marmontel's subsequent
fancy. The book is a mere cockboat beside the mighty argosy of the
_Cyrus_, running only to four volumes and some two thousand pages. But
though smaller, it is much "stodgier." The _Histoires_ break out at once
with the story of a certain Alibech--much more proper for the young
person than that connected with the same name by Boccaccio,--and those
who have acquired some knowledge of Mlle. Madeleine's ways will know
what it means when, adopting the improper but defensible practice of
"looking at the end," they find that not merely "Justinian" and
Isabelle, but a Horace and a Hypolite, a Doria and a Sophronie, an
Alphonse and a Leonide are all married on the same day, while a "French
Marquis" and an Emilie vow inviolable but celibate constancy to each
other; they will know, that is to say, that in the course of the book
all these will have been duly "historiated." To encourage them, a single
hint that Leonide sometimes plays a little of the parts of Martesie and
Doralise in the _Cyrus_ may be thrown in.
There is, however, one sentence in the second volume of _Ibrahim_ which
is worth quotation and brief comment, because it is a text for the whole
management and system of these novels, and accounts for much in their
successors almost to the present day. Emilie is telling the _Histoire_
of Isabelle, and excuses herself for not beginning at the beginning:
"Puisque je sais que vous n'ignorez pas l'amour du Prince de Masseran,
les violences et les artifices de Julie, la trahison de Feliciane, le
genereux ressentiment de Doria [this is another Doria], la mort de cet
amant infortune, et ensuite celle de Julie." In other words, all these
things have been the subject of previous histories or of the main text.
And so it is always. Diderot admired, or at least excused, that
procedure of Richardson's which involved the telling of the conversation
of an average dinner-party in something like a small volume. But the
"Heroic" method would have made it necessary to tell the previous
experiences of the lady you took down to dinner, and the man that you
talked to afterwards, while, if extended from aristocratic to democratic
ideas, it would have justified a few remarks on the cabmen who brought
both, and the butcher and fishmonger who supplied the feast. The
inconvenience of this earlier practice made itself felt, and by degrees
it dropped off; but it was succeeded by a somewhat similar habit of
giving the subsequent history of personages introduced--a thing which,
though Scott satirised it in Mrs. Martha Buskbody's insistence on
information about the later history of Guse Gibbie,[196] by no means
ceased with his time. Both were, in fact, part of the general refusal to
accept the conditions of ordinary life. If "tout _passe_" is an
exaggeration, it is an exaggeration of the truth: and in fiction, as in
fact, the minor shapes must dissolve as well as arise without too much
fuss being made about them.[197]
[Sidenote: _Almahide._]
_Almahide_ is, I think, more readable than _Ibrahim_; but the _English_
reader must disabuse himself of the idea (if he entertains it) that he
will find much of the original of _The Conquest of Granada_. The book
does, indeed, open like the play, with the faction-fights of
Abencerrages and Zegrys, and it ends with Boabdelin's jealousy of his
wife Almahide, while a few of the other names in both are identical. But
_Almahide_ contains nothing, or hardly anything, of the character of
Almanzor, and Dryden has not attempted to touch a hundredth part of the
copious matter of the French novel, the early history of Almahide, the
usual immense digressions and side-_histoires_, the descriptions (which,
as in _Ibrahim_, play, I think, a larger relative part than in the
_Cyrus_), and what not.
[Sidenote: _Clelie._]
[Sidenote: Perhaps the liveliest of the set.]
Copious as these are, however, in both books, they do not fill them out
to anything like the length of the _Cyrus_ itself, or of its rival in
size, and perhaps superior in attraction, the _Clelie_. I do not plead
guilty to inconsistency or change of opinion in this "perhaps" when it
is compared with the very much larger space given to the earlier novel.
_Le Grand Cyrus_ has been estated too firmly, as the type and
representative of the whole class, to be dislodged, and there is, as we
shall see presently, a good deal of repetition from it in _Clelie_
itself. But this latter is the more amusing book of the two; it is,
though equally or nearly as big, less labyrinthine; there is somewhat
livelier movement in it, and at the same time this is contrasted with a
set or series of interludes of love-casuistry, which are better, I
think, than anything of the kind in the _Cyrus_.[198] The most famous
feature of these is, of course, the well-known but constantly misnamed
"Carte de Tendre" ("Map of the Country of Tenderness"--not of
"Tenderness in the _aib_stract," as _du_ Tendre would be). The
discussion of what constitutes Tenderness comes quite early; there is
later a notable discourse on the respective attractions of Love and of
Glory or Ambition; a sort of Code and Anti-code of lovers[199] occurs as
"The Love-Morality of Tiramus," with a set of (not always) contrary
criticism thereof; and a debate of an almost mediaeval kind as to the
respective merits of merry and melancholy mistresses. Moreover, there is
a rather remarkable "Vision of Poets"--past, present, and to come--which
should be taken in connection with the appearance, as an actual
personage, of Anacreon. All this, taken in conjunction with the
"business" of the story, helps to give it the superior liveliness with
which it has, rightly or wrongly, been credited here.
[Sidenote: Rough outline of it.]
Of that business itself a complete account cannot, for reasons given
more than once, be attempted; though anybody who wants such a thing,
without going to the book itself, may find it in the places also above
mentioned. There is no such trick played upon the educated but not
wideawake person as (_v. inf._) in La Calprenede's chief books. Clelie
is the real Clelia, if the modern historical student will pass "real"
without sniffing, or even if he will not. Her lover, "Aronce," although
he probably may be a little disguised from the English reader by his
spelling, is so palpably the again real "Aruns," son of Porsena, that
one rather wonders how his identity can have been so long concealed in
French (where the pronunciations would be practically the same) from the
readers of the story. The book begins with a proceeding not quite so
like that of the _Cyrus_ as some to be mentioned later, but still pretty
close to the elder overture. "The illustrious Aronce and the adorable
Clelia" are actually going to be married, when there is a fearful storm,
an earthquake, and a disappearance of the heroine. She has, of course,
been carried off; one might say, without flippancy, of any heroine of
Madeleine de Scudery's not only that she was, as in a famous and already
quoted saying, "very liable to be carried off," but that it was not in
nature that she should not be carried off as early and as often as
possible. And her abductor is no less a person than Horatius--our own
Horatius Cocles--the one who kept the bridge in some of the best known
of English verses, not he who provoked, from the sister whom he
murdered, the greatest speech in all French tragedy before, and perhaps
not merely before, Victor Hugo. Horatius is the Philidaspes of _Clelie_,
but, as he was bound to be, an infinitely better fellow and of a better
fate. Of course the end knits straight on to the beginning. Clelie and
Aronce are united without an earthquake, and Porsena, with obliging
gallantry, resigns the crown of Clusium (from which he has himself long
been kept out by a "Mezentius," who will hardly work in with Virgil's),
not to Aronce, but to Clelie herself. The enormous interval between (the
book is practically as long as the _Cyrus_) is occupied by the same, or
(_v. sup._) nearly the same tissue of delays, digressions, and other
maze-like devices for setting you off on a new quest when you seem to be
quite close to the goal. A large part of the scene is in Carthage,
where, reversing the process in regard to Mezentius, Asdrubals and
Amilcars make their appearance in a very "mixedly" historical fashion. A
Prince of Numidia (who had heard of Numidia in Tarquin's days?) fights a
lively water-combat with Horatius actually as he is carrying Clelie off,
over the Lake of Thrasymene. All the stock legends of the Porsena siege
and others are duly brought in: and the atrocious Sextus, not contented
with his sin against Lucrece, tries to carry off Clelie likewise, but is
fortunately or wisely prevented. Otherwise the invariable propriety
which from the time of the small love-novels (_v. sup._ pp. 157-162) had
distinguished these abductions might possibly have been broken through.
These outlines might be expanded (and the process would not be very
painful to me) into an abstract quite as long as that of Cyrus; but "It
Cannot Be."
One objection, foreshadowed, and perhaps a little more, already, must be
allowed against _Clelie_. That tendency to resort to repetition of
situations and movements--which has shown itself so often, and which
practically distinguishes the very great novelists from those not so
great by its absence or presence--is obvious here, though the huge size
of the book may conceal it from mere dippers, unless they be experts.
The similarity of the openings is, comparatively speaking, a usual
thing. It should not happen, and does not in really great writers; but
it is tempting, and is to some extent excused by the brocard about _le
premier pas_. It is so nice to put yourself in front of your
beginning--to have made sure of it! But this charity will hardly extend
to such a thing as the repetition of Cyrus's foolish promise to fight
Philidaspes before he marries Mandane in the case of Aronce, Horatius,
and Clelie. The way in which Aronce is kept an "unknown" for some time,
and that in which his actual relationship to Porsena is treated, have
also too much of the _replica_; and though a lively skirmish with a
pirate which occurs is not quite so absurd as that ready-made series of
encores which was described above (pp. 181-2), there is something a
little like it in the way in which the hero and his men alternately
reduce the enemy to extremity, and run over the deck to rescue friends
who are in the pirates' power from being butchered or flung overboard.
"Sapho's" invention, though by no means sterile, was evidently somewhat
indiscriminate, and she would seem to have thought it rather a pity that
a good thing should be used only once.
Nevertheless the compliment given above may be repeated. If I were sent
to twelve months' imprisonment of a mild description, and allowed to
choose a library, I should include in it, from the heroic or semi-heroic
division, _Clelie_, La Calprenede's two chief books, Gomberville's
_Polexandre_, and Gombauld's _Endimion_ (this partly for the pictures),
with, as a matter of course, the _Astree_, and a choice of one other. By
reading slowly and "savouring" the process, I should imagine that, with
one's memories of other things, they might be able to last for a year.
And it would be one of the best kind of fallows for the brain. In
anticipation, let us see something of these others now.
[Sidenote: La Calprenede: his comparative cheerfulness.]
It has seemed, as was said, desirable to follow the common opinion of
literary history in giving Madeleine de Scudery the place of honour, and
the largest as well as the foremost share in our account of this
curious stage in the history of the novel. But if, to alter slightly a
famous quotation, I might "give a short hint to an impartial _reader_,"
I should very strongly advise him to begin his studies (or at least his
enjoyment) thereof, not with "Sapho," but with Gauthier de Costes,
Seigneur de la Calprenede, himself according to Tallemant almost the
proverbial "Gascon _et demi_"; a tragic dramatist, as well as a romantic
writer; a favourite of Mme. de Sevigne, who seldom went wrong in her
preferences, except when she preferred her very disagreeable daughter to
her very agreeable son; and more than any one else the inventor, or at
least perfecter, of the hectoring heroic style which we associate with
Dryden's plays. Indeed the Artaban of _Cleopatre_ is much more the
original of Almanzor and Drawcansir than anything in Madeleine, though
_Almahide_ was actually the source of Dryden's story, or heroine.
Besides this, though La Calprenede has rather less of the
intricate-impeach character than his she-rival, there is much more
bustle and "go" in him; he has, though his books are proper enough, much
less fear of dealing with "the kissing and that sort of thing," as it
was once discreetly put; and he is sometimes positively exciting in his
imbroglios, as when the beautiful Amazon princess Menalippe fights a
real duel on horseback with Prince, afterwards King, Alcamenes of
Scythia, under the impression that he has killed a certain Alcimedon,
who was her lover; discovers, after no small time and considerable
damage, that he is Alcimedon himself; and, like a sensible and agreeable
girl, embraces him heartily in the sight of men and angels.
[Sidenote: _Cleopatre_--the Cypassis and Arminius episode.]
This is among the numerous _divertissements_ of _Cleopatre_ (not the
earliest, but perhaps the chief of its author's novels[200]), the
heroine of which is not
The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands
herself, but her daughter by Antony, who historically married Juba of
Mauretania, and is here courted by him under the name of Coriolanus,
while he is in disgrace with Augustus. La Calprenede (all these
romancers are merciful men and women to the historically unlucky, and
cruel only, or for the most part, to fictitious characters) saves her
half-brother Caesarion from his actual death, and, after the due
thousands of pages, unites him happily to Queen Candace of AEthiopia.
There is the same odd muddle (which made a not unintelligent Jesuit
label this class of books "historia _mixta_") with many other persons.
Perhaps the most curious of all episodes of this kind is the use made of
Ovid's "fusca Cypassis." If Mrs. Grundy could be supposed ever to have
read the _Amores_, the mere sight of the name of that dusky handmaid--to
whom Ovid behaved, by his own confession, in such an exceedingly shabby
as well as improper fashion--would make her shudder, if not shriek. But
La Calprenede's Cypassis, though actually a maid of honour to Julia, as
her original was a handmaid to Corinna, is of unblemished morality,
flirted with certainly by Ovid, but really a German princess, Ismenia,
in disguise, and beloved by, betrothed to, and in the end united with no
less a compatriot than Arminius. This union gives also an illustration
of the ingenious fashion in which these writers reconcile and yet omit.
La Calprenede, as we have seen, does not give Arminius's wife her usual
name of Thusnelda, but, to obviate a complaint from readers who have
heard of Varus, he invents a protest on "Herman sla lerman" part against
that general, who has trepanned him into captivity and gladiatorship,
and makes him warn Augustus that he will be true to the Romans _unless_
Varus is sent into his country.[201]
[Sidenote: The book generally.]
This episode is, in many ways, so curious and characteristic, that it
seemed worth while to dwell on it for a little; but the account itself
must have shown how impossible it is to repeat the process of general
abstract. There are, I think, in the book (which took twelve years to
publish and fills as many volumes in French, while the English
translation is an immense folio of nearly a thousand pages in double
column, also entitled _Hymen's Praeludia_[202]) fewer separate
_Histoires_, though there are a good many, than in the _Cyrus_, but the
intertwined love-plots are almost more complicated. For instance, the
Herod-and-Mariamne tragedy is brought in with a strictly "proper" lover,
Tiridates, whom Salome uses to provoke Herod's patience, and who has, at
the very opening of the book, proved himself both a natural philosopher
of no mean order by seeing a fire at sea, and "judging with much
likelihood that it comes from a ship," and a brave fellow by rescuing
from the billows no less a person than the above-mentioned Queen
Candace. From her, however, he exacts immediate, and, as some moderns
might think, excessive, payment by making her listen to his own
_Histoire_.
Not the least attractive part of _Cleopatre_ to some people will be that
very "Phebus," or amatory conceit, which made the next ages scorn it.
When one of the numerous "unknowns" of both sexes (in this case a girl)
is discovered (rather prettily) lying on a river bank and playing with
the surface of the water, "the earth which sustained this fair body
seemed to produce new grass to receive her more agreeably"--a phrase
which would have shocked good Bishop Vida many years before, as much as
it would have provoked the greater scorn of Mr. Addison about as many
after. There are many "ecphrases" or set descriptions of this kind, and
they show a good deal of stock convention. For instance, the wind is
always "most discreetly, most discreetly" ready, as indeed it was in
Mlle. de Scudery's own chaste stories, to blow up sleeves or skirts a
little, and achieve the distraction of the beholders by what it reveals.
But on the whole, as was hinted above, Gauthier de Costes de La
Calprenede is the most natural creature of the heroic band.
[Sidenote: _Cassandre._]
His earlier _Cassandre_ is not much inferior to _Cleopatre_, and has a
little more eccentricity about it. The author begins his Second Part by
making the ghost of Cassandra herself (who is not the Trojan Cassandra
at all) address a certain Calista, whom she mildly accuses of "dragging
her from her grave two thousand years after date," adding, as a boast of
his own in a Preface, that the very name "Cassandre" has never occurred
in the _First_ Part--a huge cantle of the work. The fact is that it is
an _alias_ for Statira, the daughter of Darius and wife of Alexander,
and is kept by her during the whole of her later married life with her
lover Oroondates, King of Scythia, who has vainly wooed her in early
days before her union with the great Emathian conqueror. Here, again,
the mere student of "unmixed" history may start up and say, "Why! this
Statira, who was also called Barsine [an independent personage here] was
murdered by Roxana after Alexander's death!" But, as was also said,
these romancers exercise the privilege of mercy freely; and though La
Calprenede's Roxana is naughty enough for anything (she makes, of
course, the most shameless love to Oroondates), she is not allowed to
kill her rival, who is made happy, after another series of endless
adventures of her own, her lover's, and other people's. The book opens
with a lively interest to students of the English novel; for the famous
two cavaliers of G. P. R. James appear, though they are not actually
riding at the moment, but have been, and, after resting, see two others
in mortal combat. Throughout there is any amount of good fighting, as,
for the matter of that, there is in _Cleopatre_ also; and there is less
duplication of detail here than in some other respects, for La
Calprenede is rather apt to repeat his characters and situations. For
instance, the fight between Lysimachus and Thalestris (La Calprenede is
fond of Amazons), though _not_ in the details, is of course in the idea
a replica of that between Alcamenes and Menalippe in _Cleopatre_; and
names recur freely. Moreover, in the less famous story, the whole
situation of hero and heroine is exactly duplicated in respect of the
above-mentioned Lysimachus and Parisatis, Cassandra's younger sister,
who is made to marry Hephaestion at first, and only awarded, in the same
fashion as her elder sister, at last to her true lover.
By the way, the already-mentioned "harmonising" is in few places more
oddly shown than by the remark that Plutarch's error in representing
Statira as killed was due to the fact that he did not recognise her
under her later name of Cassandra--a piece of Gascon half-naivete,
half-jest which Mlle. de Scudery's Norman shrewdness[203] would hardly
have allowed. There is also much more of the supernatural in these books
than in hers, and the characters are much less prim. Roxana, who, of
course, is meant to be naughty, actually sends a bracelet of her hair to
Oroondates! which, however, that faithful lover of another instantly
returns.
[Sidenote: _Faramond._]
La Calprenede's third novel, _Faramond_, is unfinished as his work, and
the continuation seems to have more than one claimant to its authorship.
If the "eminent hand" was one Vaumoriere, who independently accomplished
a minor "heroic" in _Le Grand Scipion_, he was not likely to infuse much
fire into the ashes of his predecessor. As it stands in La Calprenede's
own part, _Faramond_ is a much duller book than _Cassandre_ or
_Cleopatre_. It must, of course, be remembered that, though patriotism
has again and again prompted the French to attack these misty
Merovingian times (the _Astree_ itself deals with them in the liberal
fashion in which it deals with everything), the result has rarely, if
ever, been a success. Indeed I can hardly think of any one--except our
own "Twin Brethren" in _Thierry and Theodoret_--who has made anything
good out of French history before Charlemagne.[204] The reader,
therefore, unless he be a very thorough and conscientious student, had
better let _Faramond_ alone; but its elder sisters are much pleasanter
company. Indeed the impolite thought will occur that it is much more
like the Scudery novels, part of which it succeeded, and may possibly
have been the result--not by any means the only one in literature--of an
unlucky attempt to beat a rival by copying him or her.
[Sidenote: Gomberville--_La Caritee_.]
If any one, seeking acquaintance with the works of Marin le Roy,
Seigneur de Gomberville, begins at the beginning with his earliest work,
and one of the earliest of the whole class, _La Caritee_ (not
"Carit_ie_," as in some reference books), he may not be greatly
appetised by the addition to the title, "contenant, sous des temps, des
personnes, et des noms supposes, plusieurs rares et veritables histoires
de notre temps." For this is a proclamation, as Urfe had _not_
proclaimed it,[205] of the wearisome "key" system, which, though
undoubtedly it has had its partisans at all times, is loathsome as well
as wearisome to true lovers of true literature. To such persons every
lovable heroine of romance is, more or less, suggestive of more or fewer
women of history, other romance, or experience; every hero, more or
less, though to a smaller extent, recognisable or realisable in the same
way; and every event, one in which such readers have been, might have
been, or would have liked to be engaged themselves; but they do not care
the scrape of a match whether the author originally intended her for the
Princess of Kennaquhair or for Polly Jones, him and it for corresponding
realities. Nor is the sequel particularly ravishing, though it is
dedicated to "all fair and virtuous shepherdesses, all generous and
perfect shepherds." Perhaps it is because one is not a generous and
perfect shepherd that one finds the "Great Pan is Dead" story less
impressive in Gomberville's prose than in Milton's verse at no distant
period; is not much refreshed by getting to Rome about the death of
Germanicus, and hearing a great deal about his life; or later still by
Egyptian _bergeries_--things in which somehow one does not see a
concatenation accordingly; and is not consoled by having the Phoenix
business done--oh! so differently from the fashion of Shakespeare or
even of Darley. And when it finishes with a solemn function for the rise
of the Nile, the least exclusively modern of readers may prefer Moore or
Gautier.
[Sidenote: _Polexandre._]
But if any one, deeming not unjustly that he had drunk enough of
_Caritee_, were to conclude that he would drink no more of any of the
waters of Gomberville, he would make a mistake. _Cytheree_[1] I cannot
yet myself judge of, except at second-hand; but the first part of
_Polexandre_, if not also the continuation, _Le Jeune Alcidiane_,[206]
may be very well spoken of. It, that is to say the first part of it, was
translated into English by no less a person than William Browne, just at
the close of his life; and, perhaps for this reason, the British Museum
does not contain the French original; but those who cannot attain to
this lose the less, because the substance of the book is the principal
thing. This makes it one of the liveliest of the whole group, and one
does not feel it an idle vaunt when at the end the author observes
cheerfully of his at last united hero and heroine, "Since we have so
long enjoyed _them_, let us have so much justice as to think it fitting
now that _they_ should likewise enjoy each other." Yet the unresting and
unerring spirit of criticism may observe that even here the verbosity
which is the fault of the whole division makes its appearance. For why
not suppress most of the words after "them," and merely add, "let them
now enjoy each other"?
The book is, in fact, rather like a modernised "number" of the _Amadis_
series,[207], and the author has had the will and the audacity to
exchange the stale old Greeks and Romans--not the real Greeks, who can
never be stale, or the real Romans, who can stand a good deal of
staling, but the conventional classics--as well as the impossible
shadows of the Dark Ages, for Lepanto and the Western Main, Turks and
Spaniards and Mexicans, and a Prince of Scotland. Here also we find in
the hero something more like Almanzor than Artamene, if not than
Artaban: and of the whole one may say vulgarly that "the pot boils."
Now, with the usual Heroic it too often fails to attain even a gentle
simmer.
[Sidenote: Camus--_Palombe_, etc.]
Jean Camus [de Pontcarre?],[208] Bishop of Belley and of Arras--friend
of St. Francis of Sales and of Honore d'Urfe; author of many "Christian"
romances to counteract the bad effects of the others, of a famous
_Esprit de Saint Francois de S._, and of a very great number of
miscellaneous works,--seems to have been a rather remarkable person,
and, with less power and more eccentricity, a sort of Fenelon of the
first half of the century. His best known novel, _Palombe_, stands
practically alone in its group as having had the honour of a modern
reprint in the middle of the nineteenth century.[209] The title-giver is
a female, not a male, human dove, and of course a married one. Camus was
a divine of views which one does not call "liberal," because the word
has been almost more sullied by ignoble use in this connection than in
any other--but unconventional and independent; and he provoked great
wrath among his brethren by reflecting on the abuses of the conventual
system. _Palombe_ appears to be not uninteresting, but after all it is
but one of those parasitic exercises which have rarely been great except
in the hands of very great genius. Historically, perhaps, the much less
famous _Evenemens Singuliers_ (2 vols., 1628) are more important, though
they cannot be said to be very amusing. For (to the surprise, perhaps,
of a reader who comes to the book without knowing anything about it) it
is composed of pure Marmontel-and-Miss-Edgeworth Moral Tales about
_L'Ami Desloyal_, _La Prudente Mere_, _L'Amour et la Mort_,
_L'Imprecation Maternelle_, and the like. Of course, as one would expect
from the time, and the profession of the author, the meal of the
morality is a little above the malt of the tale; but the very titles are
"germinal."
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Hedelin d'Aubignac--_Macarise._]
Francois Hedelin, Abbe d'Aubignac, is one of those unfortunate but
rarely quite guiltless persons who live in literary history much more by
the fact of their having attacked or lectured greater men than
themselves, and by witticisms directed against them, than by their own
actual work, which is sometimes not wholly contemptible. He concerns us
here only as the author of a philosophical-heroic romance, rather
agreeably entitled _Macarise ou La Reine des Iles Fortunees_, where the
bland naivete of the pedantry would almost disarm the present members of
that Critical Regiment, of which the Abbe, in his turn, was not so much
a chaplain as a most combatant officer. The very title goes on to
neutralise its attractiveness by explaining--with that benignant
condescension which is natural to at least some of its author's
class--that it "contains the Moral Philosophy of the Stoics under the
veil of several agreeable adventures in the form of a Romance"; and that
we may not forget this, various side-notes refer to passages in an
_Abrege_ of that philosophy. The net is thus quite frankly set in the
sight of the bird, and if he chooses to walk into it, he has only
himself to blame. The opening is a fine example of that plunge into the
middle of things which Hedelin had learnt from his classical masters to
think proper: "Les cruels persecuteurs d'Arianax l'ayant reduit a la
necessite de se precipiter[210] dans les eaux de la Sennatele avec son
frere Dinazel...." The fact that the presupposed gentle reader knows
nothing of the persons or the places mentioned is supposed to arouse in
him an inextinguishable desire to find out. That he should be at once
gratified is, of course, unthinkable. In fact his attention will soon
be diverted from Arianax and Dinazel and the banks of the Sennatele
altogether by the very tragical adventures of a certain Clearte. He,
with a company of friends, visits the country of a tyrant, who is
accustomed to welcome strangers and heap them with benefits, till a time
comes (the allegory is something obvious) when he demands it all back,
with their lives, through a cruel minister (again something "speakingly"
named) "Thanate." The head of this company, Clearte, on receiving the
sentence, talks Stoicism for many pages, and when he is exhausted,
somebody else takes up the running in such a fascinating manner that it
"seemed as if he had only to go on talking to make the victims
immortal!" But the atrocious Thanate cuts, at the same moment, the
thread of the discourse and the throat of Clearte--who is, however,
transported to the dominions of Macarise,--and _histoires_ and
"ecphrases" and interspersions of verse follow as usual. But the Abbe is
nowise infirm of purpose; and the book ends with the strangest mixture
of love-letters and not very short discourses on the various schools of
philosophy, together with a Glossary or Onomasticon interpreting the
proper names which have been used after the following fashion:
"Alcarinte. _La Crainte_, du mot francais par anagramme sans aucun
changement," though how you can have an anagram without a change is not
explained.
[Sidenote: Gombauld--_Endimion._]
Perhaps one may class, if, indeed, classification is necessary, with the
religious romances of Camus and the philosophical romance of Hedelin
d'Aubignac, the earlier allegorical ones of the poet Gombauld,
_Endimion_ and _Amaranthe_. The latter I have not yet seen. _Endimion_
is rather interesting; there was an early English translation of it; and
I have always been of those who believe that Keats, somehow or other,
was more directly acquainted with seventeenth-century literature than
has generally been allowed.[211] The wanderings of the hero are as
different as possible in detail; but the fact that there _are_
wanderings at all is remarkable, and there are other coincidences with
Keats and differences from any classical form, which it might be out of
place to dwell on here. Endymion is waked from his Latmian sleep by the
infernal clatter of the dwellers at the base of the mountain, who use
all the loudest instruments they possess to dispel an eclipse of the
moon: and is discovered by his friend Pyzandre, to whom he tells the
vicissitudes of his love and sleep. The early revealings of herself by
Diana are told with considerable grace, and the whole, which is not too
long, is readable. But there are many of the _naivetes_ and
awkwardnesses of expression which attracted to the writers of this time
the scorn of Boileau and others down to La Harpe. The Dedication to the
Queen may perhaps be excused for asserting, in its first words, that as
Endymion was put to sleep by the Moon, so he has been reawakened by the
Sun,[212] _i.e._ her Majesty. But a Nemesis of this Phebus follows. For,
later, it is laid down that "La Lune doit _toujours_ sa lumiere au
Soleil." From which it will follow that Diana owed her splendour to Anne
of Austria, or was it Marie de Medicis?[213] It was fortunate for
Gombauld that he did not live under the older dispensation. Artemis was
not a forgiving goddess like Aphrodite.
Again, when Diana has disappeared after one of her graciousnesses, her
lover makes the following reflection--that the gods apparently can
depart _sans etre en peine de porter necessairement les pieds l'un
devant l'autre_--an observation proper enough in burlesque, for the idea
of a divine goose-step or marking time, instead of the _incessus_, is
ludicrous enough. But there is not the slightest sign of humour anywhere
in the book. Yet, again, this is a thing one would rather not have said,
"Diane cessant de m'etre favorable, Ismene[214] _me pouvait tenir lieu
de Deesse_." Now it is sadly true that the human race does occasionally
entertain, and act upon, reflections of this kind: and persons like Mr.
Thomas Moore and Gombauld's own younger contemporary, Sir John Suckling,
have put the idea into light and lively verse. But you do not expect it
in a serious romance.
Nevertheless it may be repeated that _Endimion_ is one of the most
readable of the two classes of books--the smaller sentimental and the
longer heroic--between which it stands in scope and character. The
author's practice in the "other harmony" makes the obligatory
verse-insertions rather less clumsy than usual; and it may be permitted
to add that the illustrations of the original edition, which are
unusually numerous and elaborate, are also rather unusually effective.
"Peggy's face" is too often as "wretched" as Thackeray confessed his own
attempts were; but the compositions are not, as such, despicable--even
in the case of the immortal and immortalising kiss-scene itself. The
"delicious event," to quote the same author in another passage, is not
actually coming off--but it is very near. But it was perhaps a pity that
either Gombauld or Keats ever _waked_ Endymion.
[Sidenote: Mme. de Villedieu.]
The most recent book[215] but one about Mme. de Villedieu contains (and,
oddly enough, confesses itself to contain) very little about her novels,
which the plain man might have thought the only reason for writing about
her at all. It tells (partly after Tallemant) the little that is known
about her (adding a great deal more about other people, things, and
places, and a vast amount of conjecture), and not only takes the very
dubious "letters" published by herself for gospel, but attributes to
her, on the slightest evidence, if any, the anonymous _Memoires sur la
Vie de Henriette Sylvie de Moliere_, and, what is more, accepts them as
autobiographic; quotes a good deal of her very valueless verse and that
of others, and relates the whole in a most marvellous style, the
smallest and most modest effervescences of which are things like this:
"La religion arrose son ame d'une eau parfumee, et les fleurs noirs du
repentir eclosent" or "Soixante ans pesaient sur son crane ennuage d'une
perruque."[216] A good bibliography of the actual work, and not a little
useful information about books and MS. relating to the period, may
reconcile one class of readers to it, and a great deal of scandal
another; but as far as the subject of this history goes no one will be
much wiser when he closes the volume than he was when he opened it.
The novelist-heroine's actual name was Marie Catherine Hortense des
Jardins, and she never was really Mme. de Villedieu at all, though there
was a real M. de Villedieu whom she loved, went through a marriage
ceremony and lived with, left, according to some, or was left by,
according to others. But he was already married, and this marriage was
never dissolved. Very late in life she seems actually to have married a
Marquis de Chaste, who died soon. But most of the time was spent in
rather scandalous adventures, wherein Fouquet's friend Gourville, the
minister Lyonne, and others figure. In fact she seems to have been a
counterpart as well as a contemporary of our own Afra, though she never
came near Mrs. Behn in poetry or perhaps in fiction. Her first novel,
_Alcidamie_, not to be confounded with the earlier _Alcidiane_, was a
scarcely concealed utilising of the famous scandal about Tancrede de
Rohan (Mlle. des Jardins' mother had been a dependant on the Rohan
family, and she herself was much befriended by that formidable and
sombre-fated enchantress, Mme. de Montbazon). In fact, common as is the
real or imputed "key"-interest in these romances from the _Astree_
onwards, none seems to have borrowed more from at least gossip than
this. Her later performances, _Les Annales Galantes de la Grece_ (said
to be very rare), _Carmente_, _Les Amours des Grands Hommes_, _Les
Desordres de l'Amour_, and some smaller pieces, all rely more or less
on this or that kind of scandal. Collections appeared three or four
times in the earlier eighteenth century.
[Sidenote: _Le Grand Alcandre Frustre._]
Since M. Magne wrote (and it is fair to say that the main purpose of his
book was frankly avowed by its appearance as a member of a series
entitled _Femmes Galantes_), a somewhat more sober account, definitely
devoted in part to the novels, has appeared.[217] But even this is not
exhaustive from our point of view. The collected editions (of which that
of 1702, in 10 vols., said to be the best, is the one I have used) must
be consulted if one really wishes to attain a fair knowledge of what
"this questionable Hortense" (as Mr. Carlyle would probably have called
her) really did in literature; and no one, even of these, appears to
contain the whole of her ascribed compositions. What used sometimes to
be quoted as her principal work, _Le Grand Alcandre Frustre_ (the last
word being often omitted), is, in fact, a very small book, containing a
bit of scandal about the Grand Monarque, of the same kind as those which
myriad anonyms of the time printed in Holland, and of which any one who
wants them may find specimens enough in the _Bibliotheque Elzevirienne_
edition of Bussy-Rabutin. Its chief--if not its only--attraction is an
exceedingly quaint frontispiece--a cavalier and lady standing with
joined hands under a chandelier, the torches of which are held by a ring
of seven Cupids, so that the lower one hangs downwards, and the
disengaged hand of the cavalier, which is raised, seems to be grabbing
at him.
[Sidenote: The collected love-stories.]
Most of the rest, putting aside the doubtful _Henriette de Moliere_
already referred to, are collections of love-stories, which their
titles, rather than their contents, would seem to have represented to
the ordinary commentator as loose. There is really very little
impropriety, except of the mildest kind, in any of them,[218] and they
chiefly consist of the kind of quasi-historic anecdote (only better
told) which is not uncommon in English, as, for instance, in Croxall's
_Novelist_. They are rather well written, but for the most part consist
of very "public" material, scarcely made "private" by any striking
merit, and distinguished by curious liberties with history, if not with
morals.
[Sidenote: Their historic liberties.]
[Sidenote: _Carmente_, etc.]
For instance, in one of her _Amours Galantes_ the
Elfrida-Ethelwold-Edgar story is told, not only with "_Edward I._ of
England" for the deceived and revengeful king, but with a further and
more startling intrusion of Eleanor of Guyenne! That of Inez de Castro
is treated in a still more audacious manner. Also (with what previous
example I know not, but Hortense was exceedingly apt to have previous
examples) the names of the heretic to whom Dante was not merciful and of
his beloved Margaret--names to which Charles Kingsley made the atonement
of two of the most charming of his neglected poems--appear as "Dulcin"
and "Marguerite," King and Queen of Lombardy, but guilty of more
offensive lubricity than the sternest inquisitor ever charged on the
historical Dolcino and his sect. For this King and Queen set up, in cold
blood, two courts of divorce, in one of which each is judge, with the
direct purpose of providing themselves with a supply of temporary wives
and husbands. Some have maintained that no less a thing than the
_Princesse de Cleves_ itself was suggested by something of Mme. de
Villedieu's; but this seems to me merely the usual plagiarism-hunter's
blunder of forgetting that the treatment, not the subject, is the _crux_
of originality. Of her longer books, _Alcidamie_, the first, has been
spoken of. The _Amours des Grandes Hommes_ and _Cleonice ou le Roman
Galant_ belong to the "keyed" Heroics; while the _Journal Amoureux_,
which runs to nearly five hundred pages, has Diane de Poitiers for its
chief heroine. Lastly, _Carmente_ (or, as it was reprinted, _Carmante_)
is a sort of mixed pastoral, with Theocritus himself introduced, after a
fashion noted more than once before.
[Sidenote: Her value on the whole.]
Her most praised things, recently, have been the story of the loves of
Henri IV. and Mme. de Sauve (lightly touched on, perhaps "after" her in
both senses, by Dumas) in the _Amours Galantes_, and a doubtful story
(also attributed to the obscure M. de Preschac of the _Cabinet des
Fees_[219]) entitled _L'Illustre Parisienne_, over which folk have
quarrelled as to whether it is to be labelled "realist" or not. One
regrets, however, to have to say that--except for fresh, if not very
strong, evidence of that "questing" character which we find all over the
subjects of these two chapters--the interest of Mme. de Villedieu's work
can hardly be called great. By a long chapter of accidents, the present
writer, who had meant to read her some five-and-thirty years ago, never
read her actually till the other day--with all good will, with no
extravagant expectation beforehand, but with some disappointment at the
result. She is not a bookmaker of the worst kind; she evidently had wits
and literary velleities; and she does illustrate the blind _nisus_ of
the time as already indicated. But beyond the bookmaking class she
never, I think, gets. Her mere writing is by no means contemptible, and
we may end by pointing out two little points of interest in _Carmente_.
One is the appearance of the name "Ardelie," which our own Lady
Winchelsea took and anglicised as her coterie title. It may occur
elsewhere, but I do not recollect it. The other is yet a fresh
anticipation of that bold figure of speech which has been cited before
from Dickens--one of the characters appearing "in a very clean
shepherd's dress _and a profound melancholy_." Mme. de Villedieu (it is
about the only place she has held hitherto, if she has held any, in
ordinary Histories of French Literature) has usually been regarded as
closing the Heroic school. We may therefore most properly turn from her
directly to the last and most cheerful division of the subjects of this
chapter--the Fairy Tale.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The fairy tale.]