blended with so much friendship. 'Twas a truth, I own, which I
ought to have borne in mind; and yet I must confess it astonished
me, for I do not yet perceive in myself any such decay.
Nevertheless, I cannot help making many reflections and
calculations, and I find the conditions of life hard enough. It
seems to me that I have been dragged, against my will, to the fatal
period when old age must be endured; I see it; I have come to it;
and I would fain, if I could help it, not go any farther; not
advance a step more in the road of infirmities, of pains, of losses
of memory, of _disfigurements_ ready to do me outrage; and I hear a
voice which says, "You must go on in spite of yourself; or, if you
will not go on, you must die;" and this is another extremity from
which nature revolts. Such is the lot, however, of all who advance
beyond middle life. What is their resource? To think of the will of
God and of universal law, and so restore reason to its place, and
be patient. Be you, then, patient accordingly, my dear child, and
let not your affection soften into such tears as reason must
condemn.
She dates a letter, and recalls that the day was the anniversary of an
event in her life:--
PARIS, Friday, Feb. 5, 1672.
This day thousand years I was married.
Here is a passage with power in it. The great war minister of Louis has
died. Madame de Sevigne was now sixty-five years old. The letter is to
her cousin Coulanges:--
I am so astonished at the news of the sudden death of M. de
Louvois, that I am at a loss how to speak of it. Dead, however, he
is, this great minister, this potent being, who occupied so great
a place; whose me (_le moi_), as M. Nicole says, had so wide a
dominion; who was the centre of so many orbs. What affairs had he
not to manage! what designs, what projects, what secrets! what
interests to unravel, what wars to undertake, what intrigues, what
noble games at chess to play and to direct! Ah! my God, grant me a
little time; I want to give check to the Duke of Savoy--checkmate
to the Prince of Orange. No, no, you shall not have a moment, not a
single moment. Are events like these to be talked of? Not they. We
must reflect upon them in our closets.
A glimpse of Bourdaloue:--
Ah, that Bourdaloue! his sermon on the Passion was, they say, the
most perfect thing of the kind that can be imagined; it was the
same he preached last year, but revised and altered with the
assistance of some of his friends, that it might be wholly
inimitable. How can one love God, if one never hears him properly
spoken of? You must really possess a greater portion of grace than
others.
A distinguished caterer or steward, a gentleman described as possessing
talent enough to have governed a province, commits suicide on a
professional point of honor:--
PARIS, Sunday, April 26, 1671.
I have just learned from Moreuil, of what passed at Chantilly with
regard to poor Vatel. I wrote to you last Friday that he had
stabbed himself--these are the particulars of the affair: The king
arrived there on Thursday night; the walk, and the collation, which
was served in a place set apart for the purpose, and strewed with
jonquils, were just as they should be. Supper was served; but there
was no roast meat at one or two of the tables, on account of
Vatel's having been obliged to provide several dinners more than
were expected. This affected his spirits; and he was heard to say
several times, "I have lost my honor! I cannot bear this disgrace!"
"My head is quite bewildered," said he to Gourville. "I have not
had a wink of sleep these twelve nights; I wish you would assist me
in giving orders." Gourville did all he could to comfort and assist
him, but the failure of the roast meat (which, however, did not
happen at the king's table, but at some of the other twenty-five)
was always uppermost with him. Gourville mentioned it to the prince
[Conde, the great Conde, the king's host], who went directly to
Vatel's apartment, and said to him, "Every thing is extremely well
conducted, Vatel; nothing could be more admirable than his
Majesty's supper." "Your highness's goodness," replied he,
"overwhelms me; I am sensible that there was a deficiency of roast
meat at two tables." "Not at all," said the prince; "do not perplex
yourself, and all will go well." Midnight came; the fireworks did
not succeed; they were covered with a thick cloud; they cost
sixteen thousand francs. At four o'clock in the morning Vatel went
round and found everybody asleep; he met one of the
under-purveyors, who was just come in with only two loads of fish.
"What!" said he, "is this all?" "Yes, sir," said the man, not
knowing that Vatel had despatched other people to all the seaports
around. Vatel waited for some time; the other purveyors did not
arrive; his head grew distracted; he thought there was no more fish
to be had. He flew to Gourville: "Sir," said he, "I cannot outlive
this disgrace." Gourville laughed at him. Vatel, however, went to
his apartment, and setting the hilt of his sword against the door,
after two ineffectual attempts, succeeded, in the third, in forcing
his sword through his heart. At that instant the couriers arrived
with the fish; Vatel was inquired after to distribute it. They ran
to his apartment, knocked at the door, but received no answer; upon
which they broke it open, and found him weltering in his blood. A
messenger was immediately despatched to acquaint the prince with
what had happened, who was like a man in despair. The Duke wept,
_for his Burgundy journey depended upon Vatel_.
The italics here are our own. We felt that we must use them.
Is it not all pathetic? But how exquisitely characteristic of the nation
and of the times! "Poor Vatel," is the extent to which Madame de Sevigne
allows herself to go in sympathy. Her heart never bleeds very
freely--for anybody except her daughter. Madame de Sevigne's heart,
indeed, we grieve to fear, was somewhat hard.
In another letter, after a long strain as worldly as any one could wish
to see, this lively woman thus touches, with a sincerity as
unquestionable as the levity is, on the point of personal religion:--
But, my dear child, the greatest inclination I have at present is
to be a little religious. I plague La Mousse about it every day. I
belong neither to God nor to the devil. I am quite weary of such a
situation; though, between you and me, I look upon it as the most
natural one in the world. I am not the devil's, because I fear God,
and have at the bottom a principle of religion; then, on the other
hand, I am not properly God's, because his law appears hard and
irksome to me, and I cannot bring myself to acts of self-denial; so
that altogether I am one of those called lukewarm Christians, the
great number of which does not in the least surprise me, for I
perfectly understand their sentiments, and the reasons that
influence them. However, we are told that this is a state highly
displeasing to God; if so, we must get out of it. Alas! this is the
difficulty. Was ever any thing so mad as I am, to be thus eternally
pestering you with my rhapsodies?
Madame de Sevigne involuntarily becomes a maxim-maker:--
The other day I made a maxim off-hand, without once thinking of it;
and I liked it so well that I fancied I had taken it out of M. de
la Rochefoucauld's. Pray tell me whether it is so or not, for in
that case my memory is more to be praised than my judgment. I said,
with all the ease in the world, that "ingratitude begets reproach,
as acknowledgment begets new favors." Pray, where did this come
from? Have I read it? Did I dream it? Is it my own idea? Nothing
can be truer than the thing itself, nor than that I am totally
ignorant how I came by it. I found it properly arranged in my
brain, and at the end of my tongue.
The partial mother lets her daughter know whom the maxim was meant for.
She says, "It is intended for your brother." This young fellow had, we
suspect, been first earning his mother's "reproaches" for spendthrift
habits, and then getting more money from her by "acknowledgment."
She hears that son of hers read "some chapters out of Rabelais," "which
were enough," she declares, "to make us die with laughing." "I cannot
affect," she says, "a prudery which is not natural to me." No, indeed, a
prude this woman was not. She had the strong aesthetic stomach of her
time. It is queer to have Rabelais rubbing cheek and jowl with Nicole
("We are going to begin a moral treatise of Nicole's"), a severe
Port-Royalist, in one and the same letter. But this is French; above
all, it is Madame de Sevigne. By the way, she and her friends, first and
last, "die" a thousand jolly deaths "with laughing."
A contemporary allusion to "Tartuffe," with more French manners
implied:--
The other day La Biglesse played Tartuffe to the life. Being at
table, she happened to tell a fib about some trifle or other, which
I noticed, and told her of it; she cast her eyes to the ground, and
with a very demure air, "Yes, indeed, madam," said she, "I am the
greatest liar in the world; I am very much obliged to you for
telling me of it. "We all burst out a-laughing, for it was exactly
the tone of Tartuffe,--"Yes, brother, I am a wretch, a vessel of
iniquity."
M. de La Rochefoucauld appears often by name in the letters. Here he
appears anonymously by his effect:--
"Warm affections are never tranquil"; a _maxim_.
Not a very sapid bit of gnomic wisdom, certainly. We must immediately
make up to our readers, on Madame de Sevigne's behalf, for the
insipidity of the foregoing "maxim" of hers, by giving here two or three
far more sententious excerpts from the letters, excerpts collected by
another:--
There may be so great a weight of obligation that there is no way
of being delivered from it but by ingratitude.
Long sicknesses wear out grief, and long hopes wear out joy.
Shadow is never long taken for substance; you must be, if you would
appear to be. The world is not unjust long.
Madame de Sevigne makes a confession, which will comfort readers who may
have experienced the same difficulty as that of which she speaks:--
I send you M. de Rochefoucauld's "Maxims," revised and corrected,
with additions; it is a present to you from himself. Some of them I
can make shift to guess the meaning of; but there are others that,
to my shame be it spoken, I cannot understand at all. God knows how
it will be with you.
What was it changed this woman's mood to serious? She could not have
been hearing Massillon's celebrated sermon on the "fewness of the
elect," for Massillon was yet only a boy of nine years; she may have
been reading Pascal's "Thoughts,"--Pascal had been dead ten years, and
the "Thoughts" had been published; or she may have been listening to one
of those sifting, heart-searching discourses of Bourdaloue,--the date of
her letter is March 16, 1672, and during the Lent of that year
Bourdaloue preached at Versailles,--when she wrote sombrely as
follows:--
You ask me if I am as fond of life as ever. I must own to you that
I experience mortifications, and severe ones too; but I am still
unhappy at the thoughts of death; I consider it so great a
misfortune to see the termination of all my pursuits, that I should
desire nothing better, if it were practicable, than to begin life
again. I find myself engaged in a scene of confusion and trouble; I
was embarked in life without my own consent, and know I must leave
it again; this distracts me, for how shall I leave it? In what
manner? By what door? At what time? In what disposition? Am I to
suffer a thousand pains and torments that will make me die in a
state of despair? Shall I lose my senses? Am I to die by some
sudden accident? How shall I stand with God? What shall I have to
offer to him? Will fear and necessity make my peace with him? Shall
I have no other sentiment but that of fear? What have I to hope? Am
I worthy of heaven? Or have I deserved the torments of hell?
Dreadful alternative! Alarming uncertainty! Can there be greater
madness than to place our eternal salvation in uncertainty? Yet
what is more natural, or can be more easily accounted for, than the
foolish manner in which I have spent my life? I am frequently
buried in thoughts of this nature, and then death appears so
dreadful to me that I hate life more for leading me to it, than I
do for all the thorns that are strewed in its way. You will ask me,
then, if I would wish to live forever? Far from it; but, if I had
been consulted, I would very gladly have died in my nurse's arms;
it would have spared me many vexations, and would have insured
heaven to me at a very easy rate; but let us talk of something
else.
A memorable sarcasm saved for us by Madame de Sevigne, at the very close
of one of her letters:--
Guillenagues said yesterday that Pelisson abused the privilege men
have of being ugly.
Readers familiar with Dickens's "Tale of Two Cities," will recognize in
the following narrative a state of society not unlike that described by
the novelist as immediately preceding the French Revolution:--
The Archbishop of Rheims, as he returned yesterday from St.
Germain, met with a curious adventure. He drove at his usual rate,
like a whirlwind. If he thinks himself a great man, his servants
think him still greater. They passed through Nanterre, when they
met a man on horseback, and in an insolent tone bid him clear the
way. The poor man used his utmost endeavors to avoid the danger
that threatened him, but his horse proved unmanageable. To make
short of it, the coach-and-six turned them both topsy-turvy; but at
the same time the coach, too, was completely overturned. In an
instant the horse and the man, instead of amusing themselves with
having their limbs broken, rose almost miraculously; the man
remounted, and galloped away, and is galloping still, for aught I
know; while the servants, the archbishop's coachman, and the
archbishop himself at the head of them, cried out, "Stop that
villain, stop him! thrash him soundly!" The rage of the archbishop
was so great, that afterward, in relating the adventure, he said,
if he could have caught the rascal, he would have broke all his
bones, and cut off both his ears.
If such things were done by the aristocracy--and the spiritual
aristocracy at that!--in the green tree, what might not be expected in
the dry? The writer makes no comment--draws no moral. "Adieu, my dear,
delightful child. I cannot express my eagerness to see you," are her
next words. She rattles along, three short sentences more, and finishes
her letter.
We should still not have done with these letters, were we to go on a
hundred pages, or two hundred, farther. Readers have already seen truly
what Madame de Sevigne is. They have only not seen fully all that she
is. And that they would not see short of reading her letters entire.
Horace Walpole aspired to do in English for his own time something like
what Madame de Sevigne had done in French for hers. In a measure he
succeeded. The difference is, that he was imitative and affected, where
she was original and genuine.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu must, of course, also be named, as, by her
sex, her social position, her talent, and the devotion of her talent, an
English analogue to Madame de Sevigne. But these comparisons, and all
comparison, leave the French woman without a true parallel, alone in her
rank, the most famous letter-writer in the world.
X.
CORNEILLE.
1606-1684.
The two great names in French tragedy are Corneille and Racine. French
tragedy is a very different affair from either modern tragedy in English
or ancient tragedy in Greek. It comes nearer being Roman epic, such as
Lucan wrote Roman epic, dramatized.
Drama is everywhere and always, and this from the nature of things, a
highly conventional literary form. But the convention under which
French tragedy should be judged differs, on the one hand, from that
which existed for Greek tragedy, and, on the other hand, from that
existing for the English. The atmosphere of real life present in English
tragedy is absent in French. The quasi-supernatural religious awe that
reigned over Greek tragedy, French tragedy does not affect. You miss
also in French tragedy the severe simplicity, the self-restraint, the
statuesque repose, belonging to the Greek model. Loftiness, grandeur, a
loftiness somewhat strained, a grandeur tending to be tumid, an heroic
tone sustained at sacrifice of ease and nature--such is the element in
which French tragedy lives and flourishes. You must grant your French
tragedists this their conventional privilege, or you will not enjoy
them. You must grant them this, or you cannot understand them. Resolve
that you will like grandiloquence, requiring only that the
grandiloquence be good, and on this condition we can promise that you
will be pleased with Corneille and Racine. In fact, our readers, we are
sure, will find the grandiloquence of these two tragedy-writers so very
good that a little will suffice them.
Voltaire in his time impressed himself strongly enough on his countrymen
to get accepted by his own generation as an equal third in tragedy with
Corneille and Racine. There was then a French triumvirate of tragedists
to be paralleled with the triumvirate of the Greeks. Corneille was
AEschylus; Racine was Sophocles; and, of course, Euripides had his
counterpart in Voltaire. Voltaire has since descended from the tragic
throne, and that neat symmetry of trine comparison is spoiled. There is,
however, some trace of justice in making Corneille as related to Racine
resemble AEschylus as related to Sophocles. Corneille was first, more
rugged, loftier; Racine was second, more polished, more severe in taste.
Racine had, too, in contrast with Corneille, more of the Euripidean
sweetness. In fact, La Bruyere's celebrated comparison of the two
Frenchmen--made, of course, before Voltaire--yoked them, Corneille with
Sophocles, Racine with Euripides.
It was perhaps not without its influence on the style of Corneille, that
a youthful labor of his in authorship was to translate, wholly or
partially, the "Pharsalia" of Lucan. Corneille always retained his
fondness for Lucan. This taste on his part, and the rhymed Alexandrines
in which he wrote tragedy, may together help account for the
hyper-heroic style which is Corneille's great fault. A lady criticised
his tragedy, "The Death of Pompey," by saying: "Very fine, but too many
heroes in it." Corneille's tragedies generally have, if not too many
heroes, at least too much hero, in them. Concerning the historian
Gibbon's habitual pomp of expression, it was once wittily said that
nobody could possibly tell the truth in such a style as that. It would
be equally near the mark if we should say of Corneille's chosen mould
of verse, that nobody could possibly be simple and natural in that.
Moliere's comedy, however, would almost confute us.
Pierre Corneille was born in Rouen. He studied law, and he was admitted
to practice as an advocate, like Moliere; but, like Moliere, he heard
and he heeded an inward voice summoning him away from the bar to the
stage. Corneille did not, however, like Moliere, tread the boards as an
actor. He had a lively sense of personal dignity. He was eminently the
"lofty, grave tragedian," in his own esteem. "But I am Pierre Corneille
notwithstanding," he self-respectingly said once, when friends were
regretting to him some deficiency of grace in his personal carriage. One
can imagine him taking off his hat to himself with unaffected deference.
But this serious genius began dramatic composition with writing comedy.
He made several experiments in this kind with no commanding success; but
at thirty he wrote the tragedy of "The Cid," and instantly became
famous. His subsequent plays were chiefly on classical subjects. The
subject of "The Cid" was drawn from Spanish literature. This was
emphatically what has been called an "epoch-making" production.
Richelieu's "Academy," at the instigation, indeed almost under the
dictation, of Richelieu, who was jealous of Corneille, tried to write it
down. They succeeded about as Balaam succeeded in prophesying against
Israel. "The Cid" triumphed over them, and over the great minister. It
established not only Corneille's fame, but his authority. The man of
genius taken alone, proved stronger than the men of taste taken
together.
For all this, however, our readers would hardly relish "The Cid." Let us
go at once to that tragedy of Corneille's which, by the general consent
of French critics, is the best work of its author, the "Polyeuctes." The
following is the rhetorical climax of praise in which Gaillard, one of
the most enlightened of Corneille's eulogists, arranges the different
masterpieces of his author: "'The Cid' raised Corneille above his
rivals; the 'Horace' and the 'Cinna' above his models; the 'Polyeuctes'
above himself." This tragedy will, we doubt not, prove to our readers
the most interesting of all the tragedies of Corneille.
"The great Corneille"--to apply the traditionary designation which,
besides attributing to our tragedian his conceded general eminence in
character and genius, serves also to distinguish him by merit from his
younger brother, who wrote very good tragedy--was an illustrious figure
at the Hotel de Rambouillet, that focus of the best literary criticism
in France. Corneille reading a play of his to the _coterie_ of wits
assembled there under the presidency of ladies whose eyes, as in a kind
of tournament of letters, rained influence on authors, and judged the
prize of genius, is the subject of a striking picture by a French
painter. Corneille read "Polyeuctes" at the Hotel de Rambouillet, and
that awful court decided against the play. Corneille, like Michel
Angelo, had to a good degree the courage of his own productions; but, in
the face of adverse decision so august on his work, he needed
encouragement, which happily he did not fail to receive, before he would
allow his "Polyeuctes" to be represented. The theatre crowned it with
the laurels of victory. It thus fell to Corneille to triumph
successively, single-handed, over two great adversary courts of critical
appreciation,--the Academy of Richelieu and the not less formidable
Hotel de Rambouillet.
The objection raised by the Hotel de Rambouillet against the
"Polyeuctes" was that it made the stage encroach on the prerogative of
the pulpit, and preach instead of simply amusing. And, indeed, never,
perhaps, since the Greek tragedy, was the theatre made so much to serve
the solemn purposes of religion. (We except the miracle and passion
plays and the mysteries of the middle ages, as not belonging within the
just bounds of a comparison like that now made.) Corneille's final
influence was to elevate and purify the French theatre. In his early
works, however, he made surprising concessions to the lewd taste in the
drama that he found prevailing when he began to write. With whatever
amount of genuine religious scruple affecting his conscience,--on that
point we need not judge the poet,--Corneille used, before putting them
on the stage, to take his plays to the "Church,"--that is, to the
priestly hierarchy who constituted the "Church,"--that they might be
authoritatively judged as to their possible influence on the cause of
Christian truth.
In the "Polyeuctes," the motive is religion. Polyeuctes is an historic
or traditional saint of the Roman-Catholic church. His conversion from
paganism is the theme of the play. Polyeuctes has a friend Nearchus who
is already a Christian convert, and who labors earnestly to make
Polyeuctes a proselyte to the faith. Polyeuctes has previously married a
noble Roman lady, daughter of Felix, governor of Armenia, in which
province the action of the story occurs. (The persecuting Emperor Decius
is on the throne of the Roman world.) Paulina is the daughter's name.
Paulina married Polyeuctes against her own choice, for she loved Roman
Severus better. Her father had put his will upon her, and Paulina had
filially obeyed in marrying Polyeuctes. Such are the relations of the
different persons of the drama. It will be seen that there is ample room
for the play of elevated and tragic passions. Paulina, in fact, is the
lofty, the impossible, ideal of wifely and daughterly truth and
devotion. Pagan though she is, she is pathetically constant, both to the
husband that was forced upon her, and to the father that did the
forcing; while still she loves, and cannot but love, the man whom, in
spite of her love for him, she, with an act like prolonged suicide,
stoically separates from her torn and bleeding heart.