the presence of the mysteries. He who listens sits in judgment on
him who preaches, to condemn or to applaud, and is no more
converted by the discourse which he praises than by that which he
pronounces against. The orator pleases some, displeases others, and
has an understanding with all in one thing,--that as he does not
seek to render them better, so they do not think of becoming
better.
The almost cynical acerbity of the preceding is ostensibly relieved of
an obvious application to certain illustrious contemporary examples
among preachers by the following open allusion to Bossuet and
Bourdaloue:--
The Bishop of Meaux [Bossuet] and Father Bourdaloue make me think
of Demosthenes and Cicero. Both of them, masters of pulpit
eloquence, have had the fortune of great models; the one has made
bad critics, the other, bad imitators.
Here is a happy instance of La Bruyere's successful pains in redeeming a
commonplace sentiment by means of a striking form of expression; the
writer is disapproving the use of oaths in support of one's testimony:--
An honest man who says, Yes, or No, deserves to be believed; his
character swears for him.
Highly satiric in his quiet way, La Bruyere knew how to be. Witness the
following thrust at a contemporary author, not named by the satirist,
but, no doubt, recognized by the public of the time:--
He maintains that the ancients, however unequal and negligent they
may be, have fine traits; he points these out; and they are so fine
that they make his criticism readable.
How painstakingly, how self-consciously, La Bruyere did his literary
work, is evidenced by the following:--
A good author, and one who writes with care, often has the
experience of finding that the expression which he was a long time
in search of without reaching it, and which at length he has found,
is that which was the most simple, the most natural, and that
which, as it would seem, should have presented itself at first, and
without effort.
We feel that the quality of La Bruyere is such as to fit him for the
admiration and enjoyment of but a comparatively small class of readers.
He was somewhat over-exquisite. His art at times became
artifice--infinite labor of style to make commonplace thought seem
valuable by dint of perfect expression. We dismiss La Bruyere with a
single additional extract,--his celebrated parallel between Corneille
and Racine:--
Corneille subjects us to his characters and to his ideas; Racine
accommodates himself to ours. The one paints men as they ought to
be; the other paints them as they are. There is more in the former
of what one admires, and of what one ought even to imitate; there
is more in the latter of what one observes in others, or of what
one experiences in one's self. The one inspires, astonishes,
masters, instructs; the other pleases, moves, touches, penetrates.
Whatever there is most beautiful, most noble, most imperial, in the
reason is made use of by the former; by the latter, whatever is
most seductive and most delicate in passion. You find in the
former, maxims, rules, and precepts; in the latter, taste and
sentiment. You are more absorbed in the plays of Corneille; you are
more shaken and more softened in those of Racine. Corneille is more
moral; Racine, more natural. The one appears to make Sophocles his
model; the other owes more to Euripides.
* * *
Less than half a century after La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere had shown
the way, Vauvenargues followed in a similar style of authorship,
promising almost to rival the fame of his two predecessors. This writer,
during his brief life (he died at thirty-two), produced one not
inconsiderable literary work more integral and regular in form,
entitled, "Introduction to the Knowledge of the Human Mind"; but it is
his disconnected thoughts and observations chiefly that continue to
preserve his name.
Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues, though nobly born, was poor.
His health was frail. He did not receive a good education in his youth.
Indeed, he was still in his youth when he went to the wars. His culture
always remained narrow. He did not know Greek and Latin, when to know
Greek and Latin was, as it were, the whole of scholarship. To crown his
accidental disqualifications for literary work, he fell a victim to the
small-pox, which left him wrecked in body. This occurred almost
immediately after he abandoned a military career which had been fruitful
to him of hardship, but not of promotion. In spite of all that was thus
against him, Vauvenargues, in those years, few and evil, that were his,
thought finely and justly enough to earn for himself a lasting place in
the literary history of his nation. He was in the eighteenth century of
France, without being of it. You have to separate him in thought from
the infidels and the "philosophers" of his time. He belongs in spirit to
an earlier age. His moral and intellectual kindred was with such as
Pascal, far more than with such as Voltaire. Vauvenargues is, however, a
writer for the few, instead of for the many. His fame is high, but it is
not wide. Historically, he forms a stepping-stone of transition to a
somewhat similar nineteenth-century name, that of Joubert. A very few
sentences of his will suffice to indicate to our readers the quality of
Vauvenargues. Self-evidently, the following antithesis drawn by him
between Corneille and Racine is subtly and ingeniously thought, as well
as very happily expressed--this, whatever may be considered to be its
aptness in point of literary appreciation:--
Corneille's heroes often say great things without inspiring them;
Racine's inspire them without saying them.
Here is a good saying:--
It is a great sign of mediocrity always to be moderate in praising.
There is worldly wisdom also here:--
He who knows how to turn his prodigalities to good account,
practises a large and noble economy.
Virgil's "They are able, because they seem to themselves to be able," is
recalled by this:--
The consciousness of our strength makes our strength greater.
So much for Vauvenargues.
VI.
LA FONTAINE.
1621-1695.
La Fontaine enjoys a unique fame. He has absolutely "no fellow in the
firmament" of literature. He is the only fabulist, of any age or any
nation, that, on the score simply of his fables, is admitted to be poet
as well as fabulist. There is perhaps no other literary name whatever
among the French, by long proof more secure, than is La Fontaine's, of
universal and of immortal renown. Such a fame is, of course, not the
most resplendent in the world; but to have been the first, and to remain
thus far the only, writer of fables enjoying recognition as true
poetry,--this surely is an achievement entitling La Fontaine to
monumental mention in any sketch, however summary, of French literature.
Jean de La Fontaine was humbly born, at Chateau-Thierry in Champagne.
His early education was sadly neglected. At twenty years of age he was
still phenomenally ignorant. About this time, being now better situated,
he developed a taste for the classics and for poetry. With La Fontaine
the man, it is the sadly familiar French story of debauched manners in
life and in literary production. We cannot acquit him, but we are to
condemn him only in common with the most of his age and of his nation.
As the world goes, La Fontaine was a "good fellow," never lacking
friends. These were held fast in loyalty to the poet, not so much by any
sterling worth of character felt in him, as by an exhaustless,
easy-going good-nature, that, despite his social insipidity, made La
Fontaine the most acceptable of every-day companions. It would be easy
to repeat many stories illustrative of this personal quality in La
Fontaine, while to tell a single story illustrative of any lofty trait
in his character would he perhaps impossible. Still, La Fontaine seemed
not ungrateful for the benefits he received from others; and gratitude,
no commonplace virtue, let us accordingly reckon to the credit of a man
in general so slenderly equipped with positive claims to admiring
personal regard. The mirror of _bonhomie_ (easy-hearted
good-fellowship), he always was. Indeed, that significant, almost
untranslatable, French word might have been coined to fit La Fontaine's
case. On his amiable side--a full hemisphere or more of the man--it sums
him up completely. Twenty years long, this mirror of _bonhomie_ was
domiciliated, like a pet animal, under the hospitable roof of the
celebrated Madame de la Sabliere. There was truth as well as humor
implied in what she said one day: "I have sent away all my domestics; I
have kept only my dog, my cat, and La Fontaine."
But La Fontaine had that in him which kept the friendship of serious
men. Moliere, a grave, even melancholy spirit, however gay in his
comedies; Boileau and Racine, decorous both of them, at least in
manners,--constituted, together with La Fontaine, a kind of private
"Academy," existing on a diminutive scale, which was not without its
important influence on French letters. La Fontaine seems to have been a
sort of Goldsmith in this club of wits, the butt of many pleasantries
from his colleagues, called out by his habit of absent-mindedness. St.
Augustine was one night the subject of an elaborate eulogy, which La
Fontaine lost the benefit of, through a reverie of his own indulged
meantime on a quite different character. Catching, however, at the name,
La Fontaine, as he came to himself for a moment, betrayed the secret of
his absent thoughts by asking, "Do you think St. Augustine had as much
wit as Rabelais?"--"Take care, Monsieur La Fontaine: you have put one of
your stockings on wrong side out,"--he had actually done so,--was the
only answer vouchsafed to his question. The speaker in this case was a
doctor of the Sorbonne (brother to Boileau), present as guest. The story
is told of La Fontaine, that egged on to groundless jealousy of his
wife,--a wife whom he never really loved, and whom he soon would finally
abandon,--he challenged a military friend of his to combat with swords.
The friend was amazed, and, amazed, reluctantly fought with La Fontaine,
whom he easily put at his mercy. "Now, what is this for?" he demanded.
"The public says you visit my house for my wife's sake, not for mine,"
said La Fontaine. "Then I never will come again." "Far from it,"
responds La Fontaine, seizing his friend's hand. "I have satisfied the
public. Now you must come to my house every day, or I will fight you
again." The two went back in company, and breakfasted together in mutual
good humor.
A trait or two more, and there will have been enough of the man La
Fontaine. It is said that when, on the death of Madame de la Sabliere,
La Fontaine was homeless, he was met on the street by a friend, who
exclaimed, "I was looking for you; come to my house, and live with me!"
"I was on the way there," La Fontaine characteristically replied. At
seventy, La Fontaine went through a process of "conversion," so called,
in which he professed repentance of his sins. On the genuineness of this
inward experience of La Fontaine, it is not for a fellow-creature of
his, especially at this distance of time, to pronounce. When he died,
at seventy-three, Fenelon could say of him (in Latin), "La Fontaine is
no more! He is no more; and with him have gone the playful jokes, the
merry laugh, the artless graces, and the sweet Muses!"
La Fontaine's earliest works were _Contes_, so styled; that is, stories,
tales, or romances. These are in character such that the subsequent
happy change in manners, if not in morals, has made them
unreadable,--for their indecency. We need concern ourselves only with
the Fables, for it is on these that La Fontaine's fame securely rests.
The basis of story in them was not generally original with La Fontaine.
He took whatever fittest came to his hand. With much modesty, he
attributed all to AEsop and Phaedrus. But invention of his own is not
altogether wanting to his books of fables. Still, it is chiefly the
consummate artful artlessness of the form that constitutes the
individual merit of La Fontaine's productions. With something, too, of
the air of real poetry, he has undoubtedly invested his verse.
We give, first, the brief fable which is said to have been the prime
favorite of the author himself. It is the fable of "The Oak and the
Reed." Of this fable, French critics have not scrupled to speak in terms
of almost the very highest praise. Chamfort says, "Let one consider,
that, within the limit of thirty lines, La Fontaine, doing nothing but
yield himself to the current of his story, has taken on every tone,
that of poetry the most graceful, that of poetry the most lofty, and one
will not hesitate to affirm, that, at the epoch at which this fable
appeared, there was nothing comparable to it in the French language."
There are, to speak precisely, thirty-two lines in the fable. In this
one case, let us try representing La Fontaine's compression by our
English form. For the rest of our specimens, we shall use Elizur
Wright's translation,--a meritorious one, still master of the field
which, near fifty years ago, it entered as pioneer. Mr. Wright here
expands La Fontaine's thirty-two verses to forty-four. The additions are
not ungraceful, but they encumber somewhat the Attic neatness and
simplicity of the original. We ought to say, that La Fontaine boldly
broke with the tradition which had been making Alexandrines--lines of
six feet--obligatory in French verse. He rhymes irregularly, at choice,
and makes his verses long or short, as pleases him. The closing verse of
the present piece is, in accordance with the intended majesty of the
representation, an Alexandrine.
The Oak one day said to the Reed,
"Justly might you dame Nature blame:
A wren's weight would bow down your frame;
The lightest wind that chance may make
Dimple the surface of the lake
Your head bends low indeed,
The while, like Caucasus, my front
To meet the branding sun is wont,
Nay, more, to take the tempest's brunt.
A blast you feel, I feel a breeze.
Had you been born beneath my roof,
Wide-spread, of leafage weather-proof,
Less had you known your life to tease;
I should have sheltered you from storm.
But oftenest you rear your form
On the moist limits of the realm of wind.
Nature, methinks, against you sore has sinned."
"Your pity," answers him the Heed,
"Bespeaks you kind; but spare your pain;
I more than you may winds disdain.
I bend, and break not. You, indeed,
Against their dreadful strokes till now
Have stood, nor tamed your back to bow:
But wait we for the end."
Scarce had he spoke,
When fiercely from the far horizon broke
The wildest of the children, fullest fraught
With terror, that till then the North had brought.
The tree holds good; the reed it bends.
The wind redoubled might expends,
And so well works that from his bed
Him it uproots who nigh to heaven his head
Held, and whose feet reached to the kingdom of the dead.
In the fable of the "Rat retired from the World," La Fontaine rallies
the monks. "With French _finesse_, he hits his mark by expressly
avoiding it. "What think you I mean by my disobliging rat? A monk? No,
but a Mahometan devotee; I take it for granted that a monk is always
ready with his help to the needy!"
The sage Levantines have a tale
About a rat that weary grew
Of all the cares which life assail,
And to a Holland cheese withdrew.
His solitude was there profound,
Extending through his world so round.
Our hermit lived on that within;
And soon his industry had been
With claws and teeth so good,
That in his novel heritage,
He had in store for wants of age,
Both house and livelihood.
What more could any rat desire?
He grew fat, fair, and round.
God's blessings thus redound
To those who in his vows retire.
One day this personage devout,
Whose kindness none might doubt,
Was asked, by certain delegates
That came from Rat United States,
For some small aid, for they
To foreign parts were on their way,
For succor in the great cat-war:
Ratopolis beleaguered sore,
Their whole republic drained and poor,
No morsel in their scrips they bore.
Slight boon they craved, of succor sure
In days at utmost three or four.
"My friends," the hermit said,
"To worldly things I'm dead.
How can a poor recluse
To such a mission be of use?
What can he do but pray
That God will aid it on its way?
And so, my friends, it is my prayer
That God will have you in his care."
His well-fed saintship said no more,
But in their faces shut the door.
What think you, reader, is the service,
For which I use this niggard rat?
To paint a monk? No, but a dervise.
A monk, I think, however fat,
Must be more bountiful than that.
The fable entitled "Death and the Dying" is much admired for its union
of pathos with wit. "The Two Doves" is another of La Fontaine's more
tender inspirations. "The Mogul's Dream" is a somewhat ambitious flight
of the fabulist's muse. On the whole, however, the masterpiece among the
fables of La Fontaine is that of "The Animals Sick of the Plague." Such
at least is the opinion of critics in general. The idea of this fable is
not original with La Fontaine. The homilists of the middle ages used a
similar fiction to enforce on priests the duty of impartiality in
administering the sacrament, so called, of confession. We give this
famous fable as our closing specimen of La Fontaine:--
The sorest ill that Heaven hath
Sent oil this lower world in wrath,--
The plague (to call it by its name),
One single day of which
Would Pluto's ferryman enrich,
Waged war on beasts, both wild and tame.
They died not all, but all were sick:
No hunting now, by force or trick,
To save what might so soon expire.
No food excited their desire:
Nor wolf nor fox now watched to slay
The innocent and tender prey.
The turtles fled,
So love and therefore joy were dead.
The lion council held, and said,
"My friends, I do believe
This awful scourge for which we grieve,
Is for our sins a punishment
Most righteously by Heaven sent.
Let us our guiltiest beast resign,
A sacrifice to wrath divine.
Perhaps this offering, truly small,
May gain the life and health of all.
By history we find it noted
That lives have been just so devoted.
Then let us all turn eyes within,
And ferret out the hidden sin.
Himself, let no one spare nor flatter,
But make clean conscience in the matter.
For me, my appetite has played the glutton
Too much and often upon mutton.
What harm had e'er my victims done?
I answer, truly, None.
Perhaps, sometimes, by hunger pressed,
I've eat the shepherd with the rest.
I yield myself if need there be;
And yet I think, in equity,
Each should confess his sins with me;
For laws of right and justice cry,
The guiltiest alone should die."
"Sire," said the fox, "your majesty
Is humbler than a king should be,
And over-squeamish in the case.
What! eating stupid sheep a crime?
No, never, sire, at any time.
It rather was an act of grace,
A mark of honor to their race.
And as to shepherds, one may swear,
The fate your majesty describes,
Is recompense less full than fair
For such usurpers o'er our tribes."
Thus Renard glibly spoke,
And loud applause from listeners broke.
Of neither tiger, boar, nor bear,
Did any keen inquirer dare
To ask for crimes of high degree;
The fighters, biters, scratchers, all
From every mortal sin were free;
The very dogs, both great and small,
Were saints, as far as dogs could be.
The ass, confessing in his turn,
Thus spoke in tones of deep concern:
"I happened through a mead to pass;
The monks, its owners, were at mass:
Keen hunger, leisure, tender grass,
And, add to these the devil, too,
All tempted me the deed to do.
I browsed the bigness of my tongue:
Since truth must out, I own it wrong."
On this, a hue and cry arose,
As if the beasts were all his foes.
A wolf, haranguing lawyer-wise,
Denounced the ass for sacrifice,--
The bald-pate, scabby, ragged lout,
By whom the plague had come, no doubt.
His fault was judged a hanging crime.
What! eat another's grass? Oh, shame!
The noose of rope, and death sublime,
For that offence were all too tame!
And soon poor Grizzle felt the same.
Thus human courts acquit the strong,
And doom the weak, as therefore wrong.
It is suitable to add, in conclusion, that La Fontaine is a crucial
author for disclosing the irreconcilable difference that exists, at
bottom, between the Englishman's and the Frenchman's idea of poetry. No
English-speaker, heir of Shakspeare and Milton, will ever be able to
satisfy a Frenchman with admiration such as he can conscientiously
profess for the poetry of La Fontaine.
VII.
MOLIERE.
1623-1673.
MOLIERE is confessedly the greatest writer of comedy in the world. Greek
Menander might have disputed the palm; but Menander's works have
perished, and his greatness must be guessed. Who knows but we guess him
too great? Moliere's works survive, and his greatness may be measured.
We have stinted our praise. Moliere is not only; the foremost name in a
certain department of literature; he is one of the foremost names in
literature. The names are few on which critics are willing to bestow
this distinction. But critics generally agree in bestowing this
distinction on Moliere.
Moliere's comedy is by no means mere farce. Farces he wrote,
undoubtedly; and some element of farce, perhaps, entered to qualify
nearly every comedy that flowed from his pen. But it is not for his
farce that Moliere is rated one of the few greatest producers of
literature. Moliere's comedy constitutes to Moliere the patent that it
does of high degree in genius, not because it provokes laughter, but
because, amid laughter provoked, it not seldom reveals, as if with
flashes of lightning,--lightning playful, indeed, but lightning that
might have been deadly,--the "secrets of the nethermost abyss" of human
nature. Not human manners merely, those of a time, or of a race, but
human attributes, those of all times, and of all races, are the things
with which, in his higher comedies, Moliere deals. Some transient whim
of fashion may in these supply to him the mould of form that he uses,
but it is human nature itself that supplies to Moliere the substance of
his dramatic creations. Now and again, if you read Moliere wisely and
deeply, you find your laughter at comedy fairly frozen in your throat,
by a gelid horror seizing you, to feel that these follies or these
crimes displayed belong to that human nature, one and the same
everywhere and always, of which also you yourself partake. Comedy,
Dante, too, called his poem, which included the "Inferno." And a
Dantesque quality, not of method, but of power, is to be felt in
Moliere.
This character in Moliere the writer, accords with the character of the
man Moliere. It might not have seemed natural to say of Moliere, as was
said of Dante, "There goes the man that has been in hell." But Moliere
was melancholy enough in temper and in mien to have well inspired an
exclamation such as, 'There goes the man that has seen the human heart.'
A poet as well as a dramatist, his own fellow-countrymen, at least, feel
Moliere to be. In Victor Hugo's list of the eight greatest poets of all
time, two are Hebrews (Job and Isaiah), two Greeks (Homer and AEschylus),
one is a Roman (Lucretius), one an Italian (Dante), one an Englishman
(Shakspeare),--seven. The eighth could hardly fail to be a Frenchman,
and that Frenchman is Moliere. Mr. Swinburne might perhaps make the list
nine, but he would certainly include Victor Hugo himself.
Curiously enough, Moliere is not this great writer's real name. It is a
stage name. It was assumed by the bearer when he was about twenty-four
years of age, on occasion of his becoming one in a strolling band of
players,--in 1646 or thereabout. This band, originally composed of
amateurs, developed into a professional dramatic company, which passed
through various transformations, until, from being at first
grandiloquently self-styled, L'Illustre Theatre, it was, twenty years
after, recognized by the national title of Theatre Francais. Moliere's
real name was Jean Baptiste Poquelin.