COPYRIGHT 1900

by

WILLIAM CLEAVER WILKINSON.

( Printed in the United States of America )

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PREFACE.

The preparation of the present volume proposed to the author a task more difficult far than that undertaken in the case of either of the literatures, the Greek or the Latin, treated in the four preceding volumes of the present series. Those volumes dealt with literatures limited and finished; this volume deals with a literature indefinitely vast in extent, and still in vital process of growth. The selection of material to be used was, in the case of the earlier volumes, virtually made for the author beforehand, in a manner greatly to ease his sense of responsibility for the exercise of individual judgment and taste. Long prescription, joined to the winnowing effect of wear and waste through time and chance, had left little doubt what works of what writers, Greek and Roman, best deserved now to be shown to the general reader. Besides this, the prevalent custom of the schools of classical learning could then wisely be taken as a clew of guidance to be implicitly followed, whatever might be the path through which it should lead. There is here no similar avoidance of responsibility possible; for the schools have not established a custom, and French literature is a living body, from which no important members have ever yet been rent by the ravages of time.

The plan of this volume, together with the compass proposed for it, created the necessity of establishing from the outset certain limits to be very strictly observed. There could be no introductory general matter, beyond a rapid and summary review of that literature, as a whole, which is the subject of the book. The list of authors selected for representation must not include the names of any still living. A third thing resolved upon was to make the number of representative 6 names small rather than large, choice rather than inclusive. The principle at this point adopted was to choose those authors only whose merit, or whose fame, or whose influence, might be supposed unquestionably such that their names and their works would certainly be found surviving, though the language in which they wrote should, like its parent Latin, have perished from the tongues of men. The proportion of space severally allotted to the different authors was to be measured partly according to their relative importance, and partly according to their estimated relative capacity of interesting in translation the average intelligent reader of to-day.

In one word, the single inspiring aim of the author has here been to furnish enlightened readers, versed only in the English language, the means of acquiring, through the medium of their vernacular, some proportioned, trustworthy, and effective knowledge and appreciation, in its chief classics, of the great literature which has been written in French. This object has been sought, not through narrative and description, making books and authors the subject, but through the literature itself, in specimen extracts illuminated by the necessary explanation and criticism.

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CONTENTS.

9

FRENCH CLASSICS IN ENGLISH

I.

FRENCH LITERATURE.

Of French literature, taken as a whole, it may boldly be said that it is, not the wisest, not the weightiest, not certainly the purest and loftiest, but by odds the most brilliant and the most interesting, literature in the world. Strong at many points, at some points triumphantly strong, it is conspicuously weak at only one point,—the important point of poetry. In eloquence, in philosophy, even in theology; in history, in fiction, in criticism, in epistolary writing, in what may be called the pamphlet; in another species of composition, characteristically, peculiarly, almost uniquely, French—the Thought and the Maxim; by eminence in comedy, and in all those related modes of written expression for which there is scarcely any name but a French name—the jeu d’esprit , the bon mot , persiflage , the phrase ; in social and political speculation; last, but not least, in scientific exposition elegant enough in form and in style to rise to the rank of literature proper—the French language has abundant achievement to show, that puts it, upon the whole, hardly second in wealth of letters to any other language whatever, either ancient or modern.

What constitutes the charm—partly a perilous charm—of French literature is before all else its incomparable clearness, its precision, its neatness, its point; then, added to this, its lightness of touch, its sureness of aim; its vivacity, sparkle, life; its inexhaustible gayety; its impulsion toward wit—impulsion so strong as often to land it in mockery; the 10 sense of release that it breathes and inspires; its freedom from prick to the conscience; its exquisite study and choice of effect; its deference paid to decorum—decorum, we mean, in taste, as distinguished from morals; its infinite patience and labor of art, achieving the perfection of grace and of ease—in one word, its style.

We speak, of course, broadly and in the gross. There are plenty of French authors to whom some of the traits just named could by no means be attributed, and there is certainly not a single French author to whom one could truthfully attribute them all. Voltaire insisted that what was not clear was not French—so much, to the conception of this typical Frenchman, was clearness the genius of the national speech. Still, Montaigne, for example, was sometimes obscure; and even the tragedist Corneille wrote here and there what his commentator, Voltaire, declared to be hardly intelligible. So, too, Rabelais, coarsest of humorists, offending decorum in various ways, offended it most of all exactly in that article of taste, as distinguished from morals, which, with first-rate French authors in general, is so capital a point of regard. On the other hand, Pascal—not to mention the moralists by profession, such as Nicole, and the preachers Bourdaloue and Massillon—Pascal, quivering himself, like a soul unclad, with sense of responsibility to God, constantly probes you, reading him, to the inmost quick of your conscience. Rousseau, notably in the “Confessions,” and in the “Reveries” supplementary to the “Confessions;” Chateaubriand, echoing Rousseau; and that wayward woman of genius, George Sand, disciple she to both—were so far from being always light-heartedly gay, that not seldom they spread over their page a somber atmosphere almost of gloom—gloom flushed pensively, as with a clouded “setting sun’s pathetic light.” In short, when you speak of particular authors, and naturally still more when you speak of particular works, there are many discriminations to be made. Such exceptions, however, being duly allowed, the literary product of the French mind, considered in the aggregate, will not be misconceived 11 if regarded as possessing the general characteristics in style that we have now sought briefly to indicate.

French literature, we have hinted, is comparatively poor in poetry. This is due in part, no doubt, to the genius of the people; but it is also due in part to the structure of the language. The language, which is derived chiefly from Latin, is thence in such a way derived as to have lost the regularity and stateliness of its ancient original, without having compensated itself with any richness and sweetness of sound peculiarly its own; like, for instance, that canorous vowel quality of its sister derivative, the Italian. The French language, in short, is far from being an ideal language for the poet.

In spite, however, of this fact, disputed by nobody, it is true of French literature, as it is true of almost any national literature, that it took its rise in verse instead of in prose. Anciently there were two languages subsisting together in France which came to be distinguished from each other in name by the word of affirmation— oc or oïl , yes—severally peculiar to them, and thus to be known respectively as langue d’oc and langue d’oïl . The future belonged to the latter of the two forms of speech—the one spoken in the northern part of the country. This, the langue d’oïl , became at length the French language. But the langue d’oc , a soft and musical tongue, survived long enough to become the vehicle of lyric strains, mostly on subjects of love and gallantry, still familiar in mention, and famous as the songs of the troubadours. The flourishing time of the troubadours was in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Provençal is an alternative name of the language.

Side by side with the southern troubadours , or a little later than they, the trouvères of the north sang, with more manly ambition, of national themes, and, like Virgil, of arms and of heroes. Some productions of the trouvères may fairly be allowed an elevation of aim and of treatment entitling them to be called epic in character. Chansons de geste (songs of exploit), or romans , is the native name by which those 12 primitive French poems are known. They exist in three principal cycles, or groups, of productions—one cycle composed of those pertaining to Charlemagne; one, of those pertaining to British Arthur, and a third, of those pertaining to ancient Greece and Rome, notably to Alexander the Great. The cycle revolving around the majestic legend of Charlemagne for its center was Teutonic, rather than Celtic, in spirit as well as in theme. It tended to the religious in tone. The Arthurian cycle was properly Celtic. It dealt more with adventures of love. The Alexandrian cycle, so named from one principal theme celebrated—namely, the deeds of Alexander the Great—mixed fantastically the traditions of ancient Greece and Rome with the then prevailing ideas of chivalry, and with the figments of fairy lore. (The metrical form employed in these poems gave its name to the Alexandrine line later so predominant in French poetry.) The volume of this quasi-epical verse, existing in its three groups, or cycles, is immense. So is that of the satire and the allegory in meter that followed. From this latter store of stock and example, Chaucer drew to supply his muse with material. The fabliaux , so called—fables, that is, or stories—were still another form of French literature in verse. It is only now, within the current decade of years, that a really ample collection of fabliaux —hitherto, with the exception of a few printed volumes of specimens, extant exclusively in manuscript—has been put into course of publication. Rutebeuf, a trouvère of the reign of St. Louis (Louis IX., thirteenth century), is perhaps as conspicuous a personal name as any that thus far emerges out of the sea of practically anonymous early French authorship. A frankly sordid and mercenary singer, Rutebeuf always tending to mockery, was not seldom licentious—in both these respects anticipating, as probably also to some extent by example conforming, the subsequent literary spirit of his nation. The fabliaux generally mingled with their narrative interest that spice of raillery and satire constantly so dear to the French literary appetite. Thibaud was, in a double sense, a royal singer of 13 songs; for he reigned over Navarre, as well as chanted sweetly in verse his love and longing, so the disputed legend asserts, for Queen Blanche of Castile. Thibaud bears the historic title of The Song-maker. He has been styled the Béranger of the thirteenth century. To Thibaud is said to be due the introduction of the feminine rhyme into French poetry—a metrical variation of capital importance. The songs of Abélard, in the century preceding Thibaud, won a wide popularity.

Prose, meantime, had been making noteworthy approaches to form. Villehardouin must be named as first in time among French writers of history. His work is entitled, “Conquest of Constantinople.” It gives an account of the fourth crusade. Joinville, a generation later, continues the succession of chronicles with his admiring story of the life of St. Louis, whose personal friend he was. But Froissart of the fourteenth century, and Comines of the fifteenth, are greater names. Froissart, by his simplicity and his narrative art, was the Herodotus, as Philip de Comines, for his political sagacity, has been styled the Tacitus, of French historical literature. Up to the time of Froissart, the literature which we have been treating as French was different enough in form from the French of to-day to require what might be called translation in order to become generally intelligible to the living generation of Frenchmen. The text of Froissart is pretty archaic, but it definitely bears the aspect of French.

With the name of Comines, who wrote of Louis XI. (compare Walter Scott’s “Quentin Durward”), we reach the fifteenth century, and are close upon the great revival of learning which accompanied the religious reformation under Luther and his peers. Now come Rabelais, boldly declared by Coleridge one of the great creative minds of literature; and Montaigne, with those essays of his, still living, and, indeed, certain always to live. John Calvin, meantime, writes his “Institutes of the Christian Religion” in French as well as in Latin, showing, once and for all, that in the right hands 14 his vernacular tongue was as capable of gravity as many a writer before him had superfluously shown that it was capable of levity. Amyot, the translator of Plutarch, is a French writer of power, without whom the far greater Montaigne could hardly have been. The influence of Amyot on French literary history is wider in reach and longer in duration than we thus indicate; but Montaigne’s indebtedness to him is alone enough to prove that a mere translator had in this man made a very important contribution to the forming prose literature of France.

“The Pleiades,” so called, were a group of seven writers, who, about the middle of the sixteenth century, banded themselves together in France, with the express aim of supplying influential example to improve the French language for literary purposes. Their peculiar appellation, “The Pleiades,” was copied from that of a somewhat similar group of Greek writers that existed in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus. Of course, the implied allusion in it is to the constellation of the Pleiades. The individual name by which the “Pleiades” of the sixteenth century may best be remembered is that of Ronsard, the poet, associated with the romantic and pathetic memory of Mary Queen of Scots. Never, perhaps, in the history of letters was the fame of a poet in the poet’s own life-time more universal and more splendid than was the fame of Ronsard. A high court of literary judicature formally decreed to Ronsard the title of The French Poet by eminence. This occurred in the youth of the poet. The wine of success so brilliant turned the young fellow’s head. He soon began to play lord paramount of Parnassus, with every air of one born to the purple. The kings of the earth vied with each other to do him honor. Ronsard affected scholarship, and the foremost scholars of his time were proud to place him with Homer and with Virgil on the roll of the poets. Ronsard’s peculiarity in style was the free use of words and constructions not properly French. Boileau indicated whence he enriched his vocabulary and his syntax, by satirically saying that Ronsard 15 spoke Greek and Latin in French. At his death, Ronsard was almost literally buried under praises. Sainte-Beuve strikingly says that he seemed to go forward into posterity as into a temple.

Sharp posthumous reprisals awaited the extravagant fame of Ronsard. Malherbe, coming in the next generation, legislator of Parnassus, laughed the literary pretensions of Ronsard to scorn. This stern critic of form, such is the story, marked up his copy of Ronsard with notes of censure so many, that a friend of his, seeing the annotated volume, observed, “What here is not marked will be understood to have been approved by you.” Whereupon Malherbe, taking his pen, with one indiscriminate stroke drew it abruptly through the whole volume. “There I Ronsardized,” the contemptuous critic would exclaim, when in reading his own verses to an acquaintance—for Malherbe was a poet himself—he happened to encounter a word that struck him as harsh or improper. Malherbe, in short, sought to chasten and check the luxuriant overgrowth to which the example and method of the Pleiades were tending to push the language of poetry in French. The resultant effect of the two contrary tendencies—that of literary wantonness on the one hand, and that of literary prudery on the other—was at the same time to enrich and to purify French poetical diction. Balzac (the elder), close to Malherbe in time, performed a service for French prose similar to that which the latter performed for French verse. These two critical and literary powers brought in the reign of what is called classicism in France. French classicism had its long culmination under Louis XIV.

But it was under Louis XIII., or rather under that monarch’s great minister, Cardinal Richelieu, that the rich and splendid Augustan age of French literature was truly prepared. Two organized forces, one of them private and social, the other official and public, worked together, though sometimes perhaps not in harmony, to produce the magnificent literary result that illustrated the time of Louis XIV. Of these two organized forces the Hôtel de Rambouillet was 16 one, and the French Academy was the other. The Hôtel de Rambouillet has become the adopted name of a literary society, presided over by the fine inspiring genius of the beautiful and accomplished Italian wife of the Marquis de Rambouillet, a lady who generously conceived the idea of rallying the feminine wit and virtue of the kingdom to exert a potent influence for regenerating the manners and morals, and indeed the literature, of France. At the high court of blended rank and fashion and beauty and polish and virtue and wit, thus established in the exquisitely builded and decorated saloons of the Rambouillet mansion, the selectest literary genius and fame of France were proud and glad to assemble for the discussion and criticism of literature. Here came Balzac and Voiture; here Corneille read aloud his masterpieces before they were represented on the stage; here Descartes philosophized; here the large and splendid genius of Bossuet first unfolded itself to the world; here Madame de Sévigné brought her bright, incisive wit, trebly commended by stainless reputation, unwithering beauty, and charming address, in the woman who wielded it. The noblest blood of France added the decoration and inspiration of their presence. It is not easy to overrate the diffusive beneficent influence that hence went forth to change the fashion of literature, and to change the fashion of society, for the better. The Hôtel de Rambouillet proper lasted two generations only; but it had a virtual succession, which, though sometimes interrupted, was scarcely extinct until the brilliant and beautiful Madame Récamier ceased, about the middle of the present century, to hold her famous salons in Paris. The continuous fame and influence of the French Academy, founded by Richelieu, everybody knows. No other European language has been elaborately and sedulously formed and cultivated like the French.

But great authors are better improvers of a language than any societies, however influential. Corneille, Descartes, Pascal, did more for French style than either the Hôtel de Rambouillet or the Academy—more than both these two 17 great literary societies together. In verse, Racine, following Corneille, advanced in some important respects upon the example and lead of that great original master; but in prose, when Pascal published his “Provincial Letters,” French style reached at once a point of perfection beyond which it never since has gone. Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Fénelon, Massillon, Molière, La Fontaine, Boileau, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère—what a constellation of names are these to glorify the age of Louis XIV.! And Louis XIV. himself, royal embodiment of a literary good sense carried to the pitch of something very like real genius in judgment and taste—what a sun was he (with that talent of his for kingship, probably never surpassed), to balance and to sway, from his unshaken station, the august intellectual system of which he alone constituted the despotic center to attract and repel! Seventy-two years long was this sole individual reign. Louis XIV. still sat on the throne of France when the seventeenth century became the eighteenth.

The eighteenth century was an age of universal reaction in France. Religion, or rather ecclesiasticism—for, in the France of those times, religion was the Church, and the Church was the Roman Catholic hierarchy—had been the dominant fashion under Louis XIV. Infidelity was a broad literary mark, written all over the face of the eighteenth century. It was the hour and power of the Encyclopædists and the Philosophers—of Voltaire, of Diderot, of D’Alembert, of Rousseau. Montesquieu, though contemporary, belongs apart from these writers. More really original, more truly philosophical, he was far less revolutionary, far less destructive, than they. Still, his influence was, on the whole, exerted in the direction, if not of infidelity, at least of religious indifferentism. The French Revolution was laid in train by the great popular writers whom we have now named, and by their fellows. It needed only the spark, which the proper occasion would be sure soon to strike out, and the awful earthshaking explosion would follow. After the Revolution, during the First Empire, so called—the usurpation, that is, of 18 Napoleon Bonaparte—literature was well-nigh extinguished in France. The names, however, then surpassingly brilliant, of Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael, belong to this period.

Three centuries have now elapsed since the date of “The Pleiades.” Throughout this long period, French literature has been chiefly under the sway of that spirit of classicism in style which the reaction against Ronsardism, led first by Malherbe and afterward by Boileau, had established as the national standard in literary taste and aspiration. But Rousseau’s genius acted as a powerful solvent of the classic tradition. Chateaubriand’s influence was felt on the same side, continuing Rousseau’s. George Sand, too, and Lamartine, were forces that strengthened this component. Finally, the great personality of Victor Hugo proved potent enough definitively to break the spell that had been so long and so heavily laid on the literary development of France. The bloodless warfare was fierce between the revolutionary Romanticists and the conservative Classicists in literary style, but the victory seemed at last to remain with the advocates of the new romantic revival. It looked, on the face of the matter, like a signal triumph of originality over prescription, of genius over criticism, of power over rule. We still live in the midst of the dying echoes of this resonant strife. Perhaps it is too early, as yet, to determine on which side, by the merit of the cause, the advantage truly belongs. But, by the merit of the respective champions, the result was, for a time at least, triumphantly decided in favor of the Romanticists, against the Classicists. The weighty authority, however, of Sainte-Beuve, at first thrown into the scale that was destined to sink, was thence withdrawn, and at last, if not resolutely cast upon the opposite side of the balance, was left wavering in a kind of equipoise between the one and the other.

But our preliminary sketch already reaches the limit within which our choice of authors for representation is necessarily confined.

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With first a few remarks, naturally suggested, that may be useful, on the general subject thus rather touched merely than handled, the present writer gives way to let now the representative authors themselves, selected for the purpose, supply to the reader a just and lively idea of French literature.

The first thing, perhaps, to strike the thoughtful mind in a comprehensive view of the subject is not so much the length—though this is remarkable—as the long continuity of French literary history. From its beginning down to the actual moment, French literature has suffered no serious break in the course of its development. There have been periods of greater and periods of less prosperity and fruit; but wastes of marked suspension and barrenness there have been none.

The second thing noticeable is, that French literature has, to a singular degree, lived an independent life of its own. It has found copious springs of health and growth within its own bosom.

But then a third thing to be also observed is that, on the other hand, the touch of foreign influence, felt and acknowledged by this most proudly and self-sufficiently national of literatures, has proved to it, at various epochs, a sovereign force of revival and elastic expansion. Thus, the great renascence in the sixteenth century of ancient Greek and Latin letters was new life to French literature. So, again, Spanish literature, brought into contact with French through Corneille and Molière, with others, gave to the national mind of France a new literary launch. But the most recent and perhaps the most remarkable example of foreign influence quickening French literature to make it freshly fruitful is supplied in the great romanticizing movement under the lead of Victor Hugo. English literature—especially Shakespeare—was largely the pregnant cause of this attempted emancipation of the French literary mind from the bondage of classicism.

A fourth very salient trait in French literary history consists in the self-conscious, elaborate, persistent efforts put forth from time to time by individuals, and by organizations, 20 both public and private, in France, to improve the language and to elevate the literature of the nation. We know of nothing altogether comparable to this anywhere else in the literature of the world.

A fifth striking thing about French literature is, that it has, to a degree as we believe beyond parallel, exercised a real and vital influence on the character and the fortune of the nation. The social, the political, the moral, the religious, history of France is from age to age a faithful reflex of the changing phases of its literature. Of course, a reciprocal influence has been constantly reflected back and forth from the nation upon its literature, as well as from its literature upon the nation. But where else in the world has it ever been so extraordinarily, we may say so appallingly, true as in France, that the nation was such because such was its literature?

French literature, it will at once be seen, is a study possessing, beyond the literary, a social, a political, and even a religious, interest.

Readers desiring to push their conversance with the literary history of France further into the catalogue of its less important names than the present volume will enable them to do will consult with profit either the Primer, or the Short History, of French Literature, by Mr. George Saintsbury. Mr. Saintsbury is a well-informed writer, who diffuses himself perhaps too widely to do his best possible work. But he has made French literature a specialty, and he is in general a trustworthy authority on the subject.

Another writer on the subject is Mr. H. Van Laun. Him, although a predecessor of his own in the field, Mr. Saintsbury severely ignores, by claiming that he is himself the first to write in English a history of French literature based on original and independent reading of the authors. We are bound to say that Mr. Van Laun’s work is of very poor quality. It offers, indeed, to the reader one advantage not afforded by either of Mr. Saintsbury’s works—the advantage, namely, of illustrative extracts from the authors treated 21 extracts, however, not unfrequently marred by wretched translation.

A noteworthy book of the year 1889 is “A History of French Literature” by Charles Woodward Hutson, Professor of Modern Languages in the University of Mississippi. This is an intelligent, well-studied, well-written, carefully conscientious, comprehensive account of French letters from the beginning down to the present day. It has, as a concluding chapter, a notice of the “French Writers of Louisiana.” An admirable series of books, translated from the French, on the great French writers, has recently been brought out in Chicago. These two last mentions, by the way, strikingly suggest how wide, territorially, the bounds of the republic of letters are becoming in our country.

The cyclopædias are, some of them, both in articles on particular authors and in their sketches of French literary history as a whole, good sources of general information on the subject. Readers who command the means of comparing several different cyclopædias, or several successive editions of some one cyclopædia, as, for example, the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” will find enlightening and stimulating the not always harmonious views presented on the same topics. Hallam’s “History of Literature in Europe” is an additional authority by no means to be overlooked. And, finally, it is to be remembered that any good general history of France will almost certainly contain notices of the more important literary events co-ordinately with those of political, social, economic, or scientific moment.

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II.

FROISSART.

1337-1410.

French literature, for the purposes of the present volume, may be said to commence with Froissart. Froissart is a kind of mediæval Herodotus. His time is, indeed, almost this side the Middle Ages; but by character and by sympathy he belongs rather to the mediæval than to the modern world. He is delightfully like Herodotus in the style and the spirit of his narrative. Like Herodotus, he became a traveler in order to become an historian. Like Herodotus, he was cosmopolite enough not to be narrowly patriotic. Frenchman though he was, he took as much pleasure in recounting English victories as he did in recounting French. His countrymen have even accused him of unpatriotic partiality for the English. His Chronicles have been, perhaps, more popular in their English form than in their original French. Two prominent English translations have been made, of which the later, that by Thomas Johnes, is now most read. Sir Walter Scott thought the earlier excelled in charm of style.

Jehan or Jean Froissart was a native of Valenciennes. His father meant to make a priest of him, but the boy had tastes of his own. Before he was well out of his teens he began writing history. This was under the patronage of a great noble. Froissart was all his life a natural courtier. He throve on the patronage of the great. It was probably not a fawning spirit in him that made him this kind of man; it was rather an innate love of splendor and high exploit. He admired chivalry, then in its last days, and he painted it with the passion of an idealizer. His father had been an heraldic painter, so it was perhaps an hereditary strain in the 23 son that naturally attached him to rank and royalty. The people—that is, the promiscuous mass of mankind—hardly exist to Froissart. His pages, spacious as they are, have scarcely room for more than kings and nobles, and knights and squires. He is a picturesque and romantic historian, in whose chronicles the glories of the world of chivalry—a world, as we have said, already dying, and so soon to disappear—are fixed forever on an ample canvas, in moving form and shifting color, to delight the backward-looking imagination of mankind.

Froissart, besides being chronicler, was something of a poet. It would still be possible to confront one who should call this in question with thirty thousand surviving verses from the chronicler’s pen. Quantity, indeed, rather than quality, is the strong point of Froissart as poet.

He had no sooner finished the first part of his Chronicles, a compilation from the work of an earlier hand, than he posted to England for the purpose of formally presenting his work to the queen, a princess of Hainault. She rewarded him handsomely. Woman enough, too, she was, woman under the queen, duly to despatch him back again to his native land, where the young fellow’s heart, she saw, was lost to a noble lady, whom, from his inferior station, he could woo only as moth might woo the moon. He subsequently returned to Great Britain, and rode about on horseback gathering materials of history. He visited Italy under excellent auspices, and, together with Chaucer and with Petrarch, witnessed a magnificent marriage ceremonial in Milan. Froissart continued to travel far and wide, always a favorite with princes, but always intent on achieving his projected work. He finally died at Chimay, where he had spent his closing years in rounding out to their completeness his “Chronicles of England, France, and the Adjoining Countries.”

Froissart is the most leisurely of historians, or, rather, he is a writer who presupposes the largest allowance of leisure at the command of his readers. He does not seek proportion and perspective. He simply tells us all he has been able to 24 find out respecting each transaction in its turn as it successively comes up in the progress of his narrative. If he goes wrong to-day, he will perhaps correct himself to-morrow, or day after to-morrow—this not by changing the first record where it stands, to make it right, but by inserting a note of his mistake at the point, whatever it may be, which he shall chance to have reached in the work of composition when the new and better light breaks in on his eyes. The student is thus never quite certain but that what he is at one moment reading in his author may be an error of which at some subsequent moment he will be faithfully advised. A little discomposing, this, but such is Froissart; and it is the philosophical way to take your author as he is, and make the best of him.

Of such an historian, an historian so diffuse, and so little selective, it would obviously be difficult to give any suitably brief specimen that should seem to present a considerable historic action in full. We go to Froissart’s account of the celebrated battle of Poitiers (France). This was fought in 1356, between Edward the Black Prince on the English side, and King John on the side of the French. King John, as a result of the battle, fell into the hands of the enemy.

The king of the French was, of course, a great prize to be secured by the victorious English. There was eager individual rivalry as to what particular warrior should be adjudged his true captor. Froissart thus describes the strife and the issue:

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We continue our citation from Froissart with the brief chapter in which the admiring chronicler tells the gallant story of the Black Prince’s behavior as host toward his royal captive, King John of France (it was the evening after the battle):

A splendid and a gracious figure the Black Prince makes in the pages of Froissart. It was great good fortune for the posthumous fame of chivalry that the institution should have come by an artist so gifted and so loyal as this Frenchman, to deliver its features in portrait to after-times, before the living original vanished forever from the view of history. How much the fiction of Sir Walter Scott owes to Froissart, and to Philip de Comines after Froissart, those only can understand 27 who have read both the old chronicles and the modern romances.

It was one of the congenial labors of Sidney Lanier—pure flame of genius that late burned itself out so swiftly among us!—to edit a reduction or abridgment of Froissart’s Chronicles dedicated especially to the use of the young. “The Boy’s Froissart,” he called it. This book is enriched with a wise and genial appreciation of Froissart’s quality by his American editor.

Whoever reads Froissart needs to remember that the old chronicler is too much enamored of chivalry, and is too easily dazzled by splendor of rank, to be a rigidly just censor of faults committed by knights and nobles and kings. Froissart, in truth, seems to have been nearly destitute of the sentiment of humanity. War to him was chiefly a game and a spectacle.

Our presentation of Froissart must close with a single passage additional, a picturesque one, in which the chronicler describes the style of living witnessed by him at the court—we may so not unfitly apply a royal word—of the Count de Foix. The reader must understand, while he reads what we here show, that Froissart himself, in close connection, relates at full, in the language of an informant of his, how this magnificent Count de Foix had previously killed, with a knife at his throat, his own and his only son. “I was truly sorry,” so, at the conclusion of the story, Froissart, with characteristic direction of his sympathy, says, “for the count his father, whom I found a magnificent, generous, and courteous lord, and also for the country that was discontented for want of an heir.” Here is the promised passage; it occurs in the ninth chapter of the third volume:

The foregoing is one of the most celebrated passages of description in Froissart. At the same time that it discloses the form and spirit of those vanished days, which will never come again to the world, it discloses likewise the character of the man, who must indeed have loved it all well, to have been able so well to describe it.

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We take now a somewhat long forward step, in going, as we do, at once from Froissart to Rabelais. Comines, an historian intervening, we must reluctantly pass, with thus barely mentioning his name.

III.

RABELAIS.

1495-1553.

Rabelais is one of the most famous of writers. But he is, at the same time, of famous writers perhaps quite incomparably the coarsest.

The real quality of such a writer it is evidently out of the question to exhibit at all adequately here. But equally out of the question it is to omit Rabelais altogether from an account of French literature.

Of the life of François Rabelais, the man, these few facts will be sufficient to know. In early youth he joined the monastic order of Franciscans. That order hated letters; but Rabelais loved them. He, in fact, conceived a voracious ambition of knowledge. He became immensely learned. This fact, with what it implies of long labor patiently achieved, is enough to show that Rabelais was not without seriousness of character. But he was much more a merry-andrew than a pattern monk. He made interest enough with influential friends to get himself transferred from the Franciscans to the Benedictines, an order more favorable to studious pursuits. But neither among the Benedictines was this roistering spirit at ease. He left them irregularly, but managed to escape punishment for his irregularity. At last, after various vicissitudes of occupation, he settled down as curate of Meudon, where (the place, however, is doubtful, as also the date) in 1553 he died. He was past fifty years of age before he finished the work which has made him famous.

This work is “The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel,” a 30 grotesque and nondescript production, founded, probably, on some prior romance or traditionary tale of giants. The narrative of Rabelais is a tissue of adventures shocking every idea of verisimilitude, and serving only as a vehicle for the strange humor of the writer. The work is replete with evidences of Rabelais’s learning. It would be useless to attempt giving any abstract or analysis of a book which is simply a wild chaos of material jumbled together with little regard to logic, order, or method of whatever sort. We shall better represent its character by giving a few specimen extracts.

Rabelais begins his romance characteristically. According as you understand him here, you judge the spirit of the whole work. Either he now gives you a clew by which, amid the mazes of apparent sheer frivolity on his part, you may follow till you win your way to some veiled serious meaning that he had all the time, but never dared frankly avow; or else he is playfully misleading you on a false scent, which, however long held to, will bring you out nowhere—in short, is quizzing you. Let the reader judge for himself. Here is the opening passage—the “Author’s Prologue,” it is called in the English translation executed by Sir Thomas Urquhart and Motteaux; a version, by the way, which, with whatever faults of too much freedom, is the work of minds and consciences singularly sympathetic with the genius of the original; the English student is perhaps hardly at all at disadvantage, in comparison with the French, for the full appreciation of Rabelais:

Up to this point the candid reader has probably been conscious of a growing persuasion that this author must be at bottom a serious if also a humorous man—a man, therefore, excusably intent not to be misunderstood as a mere buffoon. But now let the candid reader proceed with the following, and confess, upon his honor, if he is not scandalized and perplexed. What shall be said of a writer who thus plays with his reader?

Does this writer quiz his reader, or, in good faith, give him a needed hint? Who shall decide?

We have let our first extract thus run on to some length, both for the reason that the passage is as representative as any we could properly offer of the quality of Rabelais, and also for the reason that the key of interpretation is here placed in the hand of the reader, for unlocking the enigma of this remarkable book. The extraordinary horse-play of pleasantry, which makes Rabelais unreadable for the general public of to-day, begins so promptly, affecting the very prologue, that we could not present even that piece of writing entire in our extract. We are informed that the circulation in England of the works of Rabelais, in translation, has been interfered with by the English government, on the ground of their indecency. We are bound to admit that, if any writings whatever were to be suppressed on that ground, the writings of Rabelais are certainly entitled to be of the number. It is safe to say that never, no, not even in the boundless license of the comedy of Aristophanes, was more flagrant indecency, and indecency proportionately more redundant in volume, perpetrated in literature, than was done by Rabelais. Indecency, however, it is, rather than strict lasciviousness. Rabelais sinned against manners more than he sinned against 33 morals. But his obscenity is an ocean, without bottom or shore. Literally, he sticks at nothing that is coarse. Nay, this is absurdly short of expressing the fact. The genius of Rabelais teems with invention of coarseness, beyond what any one could conceive as possible, who had not taken his measure of possibility from Rabelais himself. And his diction was as opulent as his invention.

Such is the character of Rabelais the author. What, then, was it, if not fondness for paradox, that could prompt Coleridge to say, “I could write a treatise in praise of the moral elevation of Rabelais’s works, which would make the church stare and the conventicle groan, and yet would be truth, and nothing but the truth?” If any thing besides fondness for paradox inspired Coleridge in saying this, it must, one would guess, have been belief on his part in an allegorical sense hidden deep underneath the monstrous mass of the Rabelaisian buffoonery. A more judicious sentence is that of Hallam, the historian of the literature of Europe: “He [Rabelais] is never serious in a single page, and seems to have had little other aim, in his first two volumes, than to pour out the exuberance of his animal gayety.”

The supply of animal gayety in this man was something portentous. One cannot, however, but feel that he forces it sometimes, as sometimes did Dickens those exhaustless animal spirits of his. A very common trick of the Rabelaisian humor is to multiply specifications, or alternative expressions, one after another, almost without end. From the second book of his romance—an afterthought, probably, of continuation to his unexpectedly successful first book—we take the last paragraph of the prologue, which shows this. The veracious historian makes obtestation of the strict truth of his narrative, and imprecates all sorts of evil upon such as do not believe it absolutely. We cleanse our extract a little:

So much for Rabelais’s prologues. Our readers must now see something of what, under pains and penalties denounced so dire, they are bound to believe. We condense and defecate for this purpose the thirty-eighth chapter of the first book, which is staggeringly entitled, “How Gargantua did eat up Six Pilgrims in a Sallad:”

Rabelais closes his story with jocose irreverent application of Scripture—a manner of his which gives some color to the tradition of a biblical pun made by him on his death-bed.

The closest English analogue to Rabelais is undoubtedly Dean Swift. We probably never should have had “Gulliver’s Travels” from Swift if we had not first had Gargantua and Pantagruel from Rabelais. Swift, however, contrasts Rabelais as well as resembles him. Whereas Rabelais is simply monstrous in invention, Swift in invention submits himself loyally to law. Give Swift his world of Lilliput and Brobdingnag respectively, and all, after that, is quite natural and probable. The reduction or the exaggeration is made upon a mathematically calculated scale. For such verisimilitude Rabelais cares not a straw. His various inventions are recklessly independent one of another. A characteristic of Swift thus is scrupulous conformity to whimsical law. Rabelais is remarkable for whimsical disregard of even his own whimseys. Voltaire put the matter with his usual felicity—Swift is Rabelais in his senses.

One of the most celebrated—justly celebrated—of Rabelais’s imaginations is that of the Abbey of Thélème [Thelema]. This constitutes a kind of Rabelaisian Utopia. It was proper of the released monk to give his Utopian dream 36 the form of an abbey, but of an abbey in which the opposite should obtain of all that he had so heartily hated in his own monastic experience. A humorously impossible place and state was the Abbey of Thélème—a kind of sportive Brook Farm set far away in a world unrealized. How those Thelemites enjoyed life, to be sure! It was like endless plum pudding—for every body to eat, and nobody to prepare:

The foregoing is one of the most purely sweet imaginative passages in Rabelais’s works. The representation, as a whole, sheathes, of course, a keen satire on the religious houses. Real religion Rabelais nowhere attacks.

The same colossal Gargantua who had that eating adventure with the six pilgrims is made, in Rabelais’s second book, 37 to write his youthful son Pantagruel—also a giant, but destined to be, when mature, a model of all princely virtues—a letter on education, in which the most pious paternal exhortation occurs. The whole letter reads like some learned Puritan divine’s composition. Here are a few specimen sentences:—

“Friar John” is a mighty man of valor, who figures equivocally in the story of Gargantua and Pantagruel. The Abbey of Thélème is given him in reward of his services. Some have identified this fighting monk with Martin Luther. The representation is, on the whole, so conducted as to leave the reader’s sympathies at least half enlisted in favor of the fellow, rough and roistering as he is.

Panurge is the hero of the romance of Pantagruel,—almost more than Pantagruel himself. It would be unpardonable to dismiss Rabelais without first making our readers know Panurge by, at least, a few traits of his character and conduct. Panurge was a shifty but unscrupulous adventurer, whom Pantagruel, pious prince as he was, coming upon him by chance, took and kept under his patronage. Panurge was an arch-imp of mischief—-mischief indulged in the form of obscene and malicious practical jokes. Rabelais describes his accomplishments in a long strain of discourse, from which we purge our selection to follow—thereby transforming Panurge into a comparatively proper and virtuous person:

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Coleridge, in his metaphysical way, keen at the moment on the scent of illustrations for the philosophy of Kant, said, “Pantagruel is the Reason; Panurge the Understanding.” Rabelais himself, in the fourth book of his romance, written in the last years of his life, defines the spirit of the work. This fourth book, the English translator says, is “justly thought his masterpiece.” The same authority adds with enthusiasm, “Being wrote with more spirit, salt, and flame than the first part.” Here, then, is Rabelais’s own expression, sincere or jocular, as you choose to take it, for what constitutes the essence of his writing. We quote from the “Prologue:”

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It is impossible to exaggerate the mad, rollicking humor, sticking at nothing, either in thought or in expression, with which especially this last book of Rabelais’s work is written. But we have no more space for quotation.

Coleridge’s theory of interpretation for Rabelais’s writings is hinted in his “Table Talk,” as follows: “After any particularly deep thrust ... Rabelais, as if to break the blow and to appear unconscious of what he has done, writes a chapter or two of pure buffoonery.”

The truth seems to us to be, that Rabelais’s supreme taste, like his supreme power, lay in the line of humorous satire. He hated monkery, and he satirized the system as openly as he dared—this, however, not so much in the love of truth and freedom as in pure fondness for exercising his wit. That he was more than willing to make his ribald drollery the fool’s mask from behind which he might aim safely his shafts of ridicule at what he despised and hated is, indeed, probable. But in this is supplied to him no sufficient excuse for his obscene and blasphemous pleasantry. Nor yet are the manners of the age an excuse sufficient. Erasmus belonged to the same age, and he disliked the monks not less. But what a contrast, in point of decency, between Rabelais and Erasmus.

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IV.

MONTAIGNE.

1533-1592.

Montaigne is signally the author of one book. His “Essays” are the whole of him. He wrote letters, to be sure, and he wrote journals of travel undertaken in quest of health and pleasure. But these are chiefly void of interest. Montaigne the Essayist alone is emphatically the Montaigne that survives. “Montaigne the Essayist”—that has become, as it were, a personal name in literary history.

The “Essays” are one hundred and seven in number, distributed in three books. They are very unequal in length: and they are on the most various topics—topics often the most whimsical in character. We give a few of his titles, taking them as found in Cotton’s translation:

Montaigne’s titles cannot be trusted to indicate the nature of the essays to which they belong. The author’s pen will not be bound. It runs on at its own pleasure. Things the most unexpected are incessantly turning up in Montaigne—things, probably, that were as unexpected to the writer when he was writing as they will be to the reader when he is reading. The writing, on whatever topic, in whatever vein, always revolves around the writer for its pivot. Montaigne, from no matter what apparent diversion, may constantly be depended upon to bring up in due time at himself. The tether is long and elastic, but it is tenacious, and it is 41 securely tied to Montaigne. This, as we shall presently let the author himself make plain, is no accident of which Montaigne was unconscious. It is the express idea on which the “Essays” were written. Montaigne, in his “Essays,” is a pure and perfect egotist, naked and not ashamed. Egotism is Montaigne’s note, his differentia , in the world of literature. Other literary men have been egotists—since. But Montaigne may be called the first, and he is the greatest; by no means the most monstrous, but the greatest.

Montaigne was a Gascon, and Gasconisms adulterate the purity of his French. But his style—a little archaic now, and never finished to the nail—had virtues of its own which have exercised a wholesome influence on classic French prose. It is simple, direct, manly, genuine. It is fresh and racy of the writer. It is flexible to every turn, it is sensitive to every rise or fall, of the thought. It is a steadfast rebuke to rant and fustian. It quietly laughs to scorn the folly of that style which writhes in an agony of expression, with neither thought nor feeling present to be expressed. Montaigne’s “Essays” have been a great and a beneficent formative force in the development of prose style in French.

For substance, Montaigne is rich in practical wisdom, his own by original reflection or by discreet purveyal. He had read much, he had observed much, he had experienced much. The result of all, digested in brooding thought, he put into his “Essays.” These grew as he grew. He got himself transferred whole into them. Out of them, in turn, the world has been busy ever since dissolving Montaigne.

Montaigne’s “Essays” are, as we have said, himself. Such is his own way of putting the fact. To one admiring his essays to him, he frankly replied, “You will like me if you like my essays, for they are myself.” The originality, the creative character and force of the “Essays” lies in this autobiographical quality in them. Their fascination, too, consists in the revelation they contain. This was, first, self-revelation on the part of the writer; but no less it becomes, in each case, self-revelation in the experience of the reader. For, as face 42 answereth to face in the glass, so doth the heart of man to man— from race to race and from generation to generation. If Montaigne, in his “Essays,” held the mirror up to himself, he, in the same act, held up the mirror to you and to me. The image that we, reading, call Montaigne, is really ourselves. We never tire of gazing on it. We are all of us Narcissuses. This is why Montaigne is an immortal and a universal writer.

Here is Montaigne’s preface to his “Essays”—“The Author to the Reader,” it is entitled:

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, our author, as the foregoing date will have suggested, derived his most familiar name from the place at which he was born and at which he lived. Readers are not to take too literally Montaigne’s notice of his dispensing with “borrowed beauties.” He was, in fact, a famous borrower. He himself warns his readers to be careful how they criticise him; they may be flouting unawares Seneca, Plutarch, or some other, equally redoubtable, of the reverend ancients. Montaigne is perhaps as signal an example as any in literature of the man of genius exercising his prescriptive 43 right to help himself to his own wherever he may happen to find it. But Montaigne has in turn been freely borrowed from. Bacon borrowed from him, Shakespeare borrowed from him, Dryden, Pope, Hume, Burke, Byron—these, with many more, in England; and, in France, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Voltaire, Rousseau—directly or indirectly, almost every writer since his day. No modern writer, perhaps, has gone in solution into subsequent literature more widely than Montaigne. But no writer remains more solidly and insolubly entire.

We go at once to chapter twenty-five of the first book of the “Essays,” entitled, in the English translation, “On the Education of Children.” The translation we use henceforth throughout is the classic one of Charles Cotton, in a text of it edited by Mr. William Carew Hazlitt. The “preface,” already given, Cotton omitted to translate. We have allowed Mr. Hazlitt to supply the deficiency. Montaigne addresses his educational views to a countess. Several others of his essays are similarly inscribed to women. Mr. Emerson’s excuse of Montaigne for his coarseness—that he wrote for a generation in which women were not expected to be readers—is thus seen to be curiously impertinent to the actual case that existed. Of a far worse fault in Montaigne than his coarseness—we mean his outright immorality—Mr. Emerson makes no mention, and for it, therefore, provides no excuse. We shall ourselves, in due time, deal more openly with our readers on this point.

It was for a “boy of quality” that Montaigne aimed to adapt his suggestions on the subject of education. In this happy country of ours all boys are boys of quality; and we shall go nowhere amiss in selecting from the present essay:

It is difficult to find a stopping-place in discourse so wise and so sweet. We come upon sentences like Plato for height and for beauty. An example: “The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness; her state is like that of things in the regions above the moon, always clear and serene.” But the genius of Montaigne does not often soar, though even one little flight like that shows that it has wings. Montaigne’s garnishes of quotation from foreign tongues are often a cold-blooded device of afterthought with him. His first edition was without them in many places where subsequently they appear. Readers familiar with Emerson will be reminded of him in perusing Montaigne. Emerson himself said, “It seemed to me [in reading the ‘Essays’ of Montaigne], as if I myself had written the book in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my thoughts and experience.” The rich old English of Cotton’s translation had evidently a strong influence on Emerson, to mold his own style of expression. Emerson’s trick of writing “’tis,” was apparently caught from Cotton. The following sentence, from the present essay of Montaigne, might very well have served Mr. Emerson for his own rule of writing: “Let it go before, or come after, a good sentence, or a thing well said, is always in season; if it neither suit well with what went before, nor has much coherence with what follows after, it is good in itself.” Montaigne, at any rate, wrote his “Essays” on that easy principle. The logic of them is the logic of mere chance association in thought. But, with Montaigne—whatever is true of Emerson—the association at least is not occult; and it is such as pleases the reader not less than it pleased the writer. So this Gascon gentleman of the olden time never tires us, and never loses us out of his hand. We go with him cheerfully where he so blithely leads.

Montaigne tells us how he was himself trained under his 46 father. The elder Montaigne, too, had his ideas on education—the subject which his son, in this essay, so instructively treats. The essayist leads up to his autobiographical episode by an allusion to the value of the classical languages, and to the question of method in studying them. He says:

We are now to see how, helped by his wealth, the father was able to gratify a pleasant whimsey of his own in the nurture of his boy. Highly æsthetic was the matin réveille that broke the slumbers of this hopeful young heir of Montaigne:

In short, as in the case of Mr. Tulliver, the world was “too many” for Eyquem père ; and, in the education of his son, the stout Gascon, having started out well as dissenter, fell into dull conformity at last.

We ought to give some idea of the odd instances, classic and other, with which Montaigne plentifully bestrews his pages. He is writing of the “Force of Imagination.” He says:

We italicize the last foregoing words, to make readers see that Montaigne is not to be read for the truth of his instances. He uses what comes to hand. He takes no trouble to verify. “The discourses are my own,” he says; but even this, as we have hinted, must not be pressed too hard in interpretation. Whether a given reflection of Montaigne’s is strictly his own, in the sense of not having been first another’s, who gave it to him, is not to be determined except upon very wide reading, very well remembered, in all the books that Montaigne could have got under his eye. That was full fairly his own, he thought, which he had made his own by intelligent appropriation. And this, perhaps, expresses in general the sound law of property in the realm of mind. At any rate, Montaigne will wear no yoke of fast obligation. He will write as pleases him. Above all things else, he likes his freedom.

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Here is one of those sagacious historical scepticisms, in which Montaigne was so fond of poising his mind between opposite views. It occurs in his essay entitled, “Of the Uncertainty of our Judgments:”

The sententiousness of Montaigne may be illustrated by transferring here a page of brief excerpts from the “Essays,” collected by Mr. Bayle St. John in his biography of the author. The apothegmatic or proverbial quality in Montaigne had a very important sequel of fruitful influence on subsequent French writers, as chapters to follow in this volume will abundantly show. In reading the sentences sub-joined, you will have the sensation of coming suddenly upon a treasure-trove of coined proverbial wisdom:

We append a saying of Montaigne’s not found in Mr. St. John’s collection:

Montaigne was too intensely an egotist, in his character as man no less than in his character as writer, to have many personal relations that exhibit him in aspects engaging to our love. But one friendship of his is memorable—is even historic. The name of La Boëtie is forever associated with the name of Montaigne. La Boëtie is remarkable for being, as we suppose, absolutely the first voice raised in France against the idea of monarchy. His little treatise Contr’ Un (literally, “Against One”), or “Voluntary Servitude,” is by many esteemed among the most important literary productions of modern times. Others, again, Mr. George Saintsbury, for example, 50 consider it an absurdly overrated book. For our own part, we are inclined to give it conspicuous place in the history of free thought in France. La Boëtie died young; and his Contr’ Un was published posthumously—first by the Protestants, after the terrible day of St. Bartholomew. Our readers may judge for themselves whether a pamphlet in which such passages as the following could occur must not have had an historic effect upon the inflammable sentiment of the French people. We take Mr. Bayle St. John’s translation, bracketing a hint or two of correction suggested by comparison of the original French. The treatise of La Boëtie is sometimes now printed with Montaigne’s “Essays,” in French editions of our author’s works; La Boëtie says:

Montaigne seems really to have loved this friend of his, whom he reckoned the greatest man in France. His account of La Boëtie’s death, Mr. St. John boldly, and not presumptuously, parallels with the “Phædon” of Plato. Noble writing, it certainly is, though its stateliness is a shade too self-conscious, perhaps.

We have thus far presented Montaigne in words of his own such as may fairly be supposed likely to prepossess the reader in his favor. We could multiply our extracts indefinitely in a like unexceptionable vein of writing. But to do so, and to stop with these, would misrepresent Montaigne. Montaigne is very far from being an innocent writer. His moral tone generally is low, and often it is execrable. He is coarse, but coarseness is not the worst of him. Indeed, he is cleanliness itself compared with Rabelais. But Rabelais is morality itself compared with Montaigne. Montaigne is corrupt and corrupting. This feature of his 51 writings we are necessarily forbidden to illustrate. In an essay written in his old age—which we will not even name, its general tenor is so evil—Montaigne holds the following language:

Harmlessly, even engagingly, pensive seems the foregoing strain of sentiment. Who could suppose it a prelude to detailed reminiscence on the author’s part of sensual pleasures—the basest—enjoyed in the past? The venerable voluptuary keeps himself in countenance for his lascivious vein by writing as follows:

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We must leave it—as, however, Montaigne himself is far enough from leaving it—to the imagination of readers to conjecture what “pleasures” they are, of which this worn-out debauchee (nearing death, and thanking God that he nears it “without fear”) speaks in the following sentimental strain:

Mr. Emerson, in his “Representative Men,” makes Montaigne stand for The Skeptic. Skeptic, Montaigne was. He questioned, he considered, he doubted. He stood poised in equilibrium, in indifference, between contrary opinions. He saw reasons on this side, but he saw reasons also on that, and he did not clear his mind. “ Que sçai-je? ” was his motto (“What know I?”), a question as of hopeless ignorance—nay, as of ignorance also void of desire to know. His life was one long interrogation, a balancing of opposites, to the end.

Such, speculatively, was Montaigne. Such, too, speculatively, was Pascal. The difference, however, was greater than the likeness, between these two minds. Pascal, doubting, gave the world of spiritual things the benefit of his doubt. Montaigne, on the other hand, gave the benefit of his doubt to the world of sense. He was a sensualist, he was a glutton, he was a lecher. He, for his portion, chose the good things of this life. His body he used, to get him pleasures of the body. In pleasures of the body he sunk and drowned his conscience, if he ever had a conscience. But his intelligence survived. He became, at last—if he was not such from the first—almost pure sense, without soul.

Yet we have no doubt Montaigne was an agreeable gentleman. We think we should have got on well with him as a neighbor of ours. He was a tolerably decent father, provided the child were grown old enough to be company for him. His own lawful children, while infants, had to go out 53 of the house for their nursing; so it not unnaturally happened that all but one died in their infancy. Five of such is the number that you can count in his own journalistic entries of family births and deaths. But, in his “Essays,” speaking as “moral philosopher,” he says, carelessly, that he had lost “two or three” “without repining.” This, perhaps, is affectation. But what affectation!

Montaigne was well-to-do; and he ranked as a gentleman, if not as a great nobleman. He lived in a castle, bequeathed to him, and by him bequeathed—a castle still standing, and full of personal association with its most famous owner. He occupied a room in the tower, fitted up as a library. Over the door of this room may still, we believe, be read Montaigne’s motto, “ Que sçai-je? ” Votaries of Montaigne perform their pious pilgrimages to this shrine of their idolatry, year after year, century after century.

For, remember, it is now three centuries since Montaigne wrote. He was before Bacon and Shakespeare. He was contemporary with Charles IX., and with Henry of Navarre. But date has little to do with such a writer as Montaigne. His quality is sempiternal. He overlies the ages, as the long hulk of a great steamship overlies the waves of the sea, stretching from summit to summit. Not that, in the form of his literary work, he was altogether independent of time and of circumstance. Not that he was uninfluenced by his historic place, in the essential spirit of his work. But, more than often happens, Montaigne may fairly be judged out of himself alone. His message he might, indeed, have delivered differently; but it would have been substantially the same message, had he been differently placed, in the world, and in history. We need hardly, therefore, add any thing about Montaigne’s outward life. His true life is in his book.

Montaigne the Essayist is the consummate, the ideal, expression, practically incapable of improvement, of the spirit and wisdom of the world. This characterization, we think, fairly and sufficiently sums up the good and the bad of Montaigne. We might seem to describe no very mischievous thing. 54 But to have the spirit and wisdom of this world expressed, to have it expressed as in a last authoritative form, a form to commend it, to flatter it, to justify it, to make it seem sufficient, to erect it into a kind of gospel—that means much. It means hardly less than to provide the world with a new Bible—a Bible of the world’s own, a Bible that shall approve itself as better than the Bible of the Old and New Testaments. Montaigne’s “Essays” constitute, in effect, such a book. The man of the world may—and, to say truth, does—in this volume, find all his needed texts. Here is viaticum —daily manna—for him, to last the year round, and to last year after year; an inexhaustible breviary for the church of this world! It is of the gravest historical significance that Rabelais and Montaigne, but especially that Montaigne, should, to such an extent, for now three full centuries, have been furnishing the daily intellectual food of Frenchmen.

Pascal, in an interview with M. de Saci (carefully reported by the latter), in which the conversation was on the subject of Montaigne and Epictetus contrasted—these two authors Pascal acknowledged to be the ones most constantly in his hand—said gently of Montaigne, “Montaigne is absolutely pernicious to those who have any inclination toward irreligion, or toward vicious indulgences.” We, for our part, are disposed, speaking more broadly than Pascal, to say that, to a somewhat numerous class of naturally dominant minds, Montaigne’s “Essays” in spite of all that there is good in them—nay, greatly because of so much good in them—are, by their subtly insidious persuasion to evil, upon the whole quite the most powerfully pernicious book known to us in literature either ancient or modern.

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V.

LA ROCHEFOUCAULD : 1613-1680; La Bruyère : 1646(?)-1696; Vauvenargues : 1715-1747.

In La Rouchefoucauld we meet another eminent example of the author of one book. “Letters,” “Memoirs,” and “Maxims,” indeed name productions in three kinds, productions all of them notable, and all still extant, from La Rochefoucauld’s pen. But the “Maxims” are so much more famous than either the “Letters” or the “Memoirs” that their author may be said to be known only by those. If it were not for the “Maxims,” the “Letters” and “Memoirs” would probably now be forgotten. We here may dismiss these from our minds and concentrate our attention exclusively upon the “Maxims.” Voltaire said, “The ‘Memoirs’ of the Duc de La Rochefoucauld are read, but we know his ‘Maxims’ by heart.”

La Rochefoucauld’s “Maxims” are detached sentences of reflection and wisdom on human character and conduct. They are about seven hundred in number, but they are all comprised in a very small volume; for they generally are each only two or three lines in length, and almost never does a single maxim occupy more than the half of a moderate-sized page. The “Maxims,” detached, as we have described them, have no very marked logical sequence in the order in which they stand. They all, however, have a profound mutual relation. An unvarying monotone of sentiment, in fact, runs through them. They are so many different expressions, answering to so many different observations taken at different angles, of one and the same persisting estimate of human nature. Self-love is the mainspring and motive of every thing we do, or say, or feel, or think—that is the total result of the “Maxims” of La Rochefoucauld.

The writer’s qualifications for treating his theme were unsurpassed. 56 He had himself the right character, moral and intellectual; his scheme of conduct in life corresponded; he wrote in the right language—French; and he was rightly situated in time, in place, and in circumstance. He needed but to look closely within him and without him—which he was gifted with eyes to do—and then report what he saw, in the language to which he was born. This he did, and his “Maxims” are the fruit. His method was largely the skeptical method of Montaigne. His result, too, was much the same result as his master’s. But the pupil surpassed the master in the quality of his work. There is a fineness, an exquisiteness, in the literary form of La Rochefoucauld, which Montaigne might indeed have disdained to seek, but which he could never, even with seeking, have attained. Each maxim of La Rochefoucauld is a “gem of purest ray serene,” wrought to the last degree of perfection in form with infinite artistic pains. Purity, precision, clearness, density, point, are perfectly reconciled in La Rochefoucauld’s style with ease, grace and brilliancy of expression. The influence of such literary finish, well bestowed on thought worthy to receive it, has been incalculably potent in raising the standard of French production in prose. It was Voltaire’s testimony, “One of the works which has most contributed to form the national taste, and give it a spirit of accuracy and precision, was the little collection of ‘Maxims’ by François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld.”

There is a high-bred air about La Rochefoucauld the writer, which well accords with the rank and character of the man La Rochefoucauld. He was of one of the noblest families in France. His instincts were all aristocratic. His manners and his morals were those of his class. Brave, spirited, a touch of chivalry in him, honorable and amiable as the world reckons of its own, La Rochefoucauld ran a career consistent throughout with his own master-principle—self-love. He had a wife whose conjugal fidelity her husband seems to have thought a sufficient supply in that virtue for both himself and her. He behaved himself accordingly. His illicit relations with other women were notorious. But they 57 unhappily did not make La Rochefoucauld in that respect at all peculiar among the distinguished men of his time. His brilliant female friends collaborated with him in working out his “Maxims.” These were the labor of years. They were published in successive editions, during the lifetime of the author; and some final maxims were added from his manuscripts after his death.

Using for the purpose a very recent translation, that of A. S. Bolton (which, in one or two places, we venture to conform more exactly to the sense of the original), we give almost at hazard a few specimens of these celebrated apothegms. We adopt the numbering given in the best Paris edition of the “Maxims”:

How much just such detraction from all mere natural human greatness is contained in the following penetrative maxim:

What effectively quiet satire in these few words:

This man had seen the end of all perfection in the apparently great of this world. He could not bear that such should flaunt a false plume before their fellows:

Of course, had it lain in the author’s chosen line to do so, he might, with as much apparent truth, have pointed out, 58 that to lock up uneasiness in the heart requires steadfastness no less—nay, more—than not to feel uneasiness.

The inflation of “philosophy” vaunting itself is thus softly eased of its painful distention:

When Jesus once rebuked the fellow-disciples of James and John for blaming those brethren as self-seekers, he acted on the same profound principle with that disclosed in the following maxim:

How impossible it is for that Proteus, self-love, to elude the presence of mind, the inexorable eye, the fast hand, of this incredulous Frenchman:

What a subtly unsoldering distrust the following maxim introduces into the sentiment of mutual friendship:

How striking, from its artful suppression of strikingness, is the first following, and what a wide, easy sweep of well-bred satire it contains:

The plain-spoken proverb, “A man that is his own lawyer has a fool for his client,” finds a more polished expression in the following:

How pitilessly this inquisitor pursues his prey, the human soul, into all its useless hiding-places:

The following maxim, longer and less felicitously phrased than is usual with La Rochefoucauld, recalls that bitter definition of the bore—“One who insists on talking about himself all the time that you are wishing to talk about yourself”:

If we are indignant at the maxims following, it is probably rather because they are partly true than because they are wholly false:

With the following, contrast Ruskin’s noble paradox, that the soldier’s business, rightly conceived, is self-sacrifice; his ideal purpose being, not to kill, but to be killed:

Here is, perhaps, the most current of all La Rochefoucauld’s maxims:

Of the foregoing maxim it may justly be said, that its truth and point depend upon the assumption, implicit, that there is such a thing as virtue—an assumption which the whole tenor of the “Maxims” in general contradicts.

How incisive the following:

The first following maxim satirizes both princes and courtiers. It might be entitled, “How to insult a prince, and not suffer for your temerity”:

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Here, at length, is a maxim that does not depress—that animates you:

The following is much less exhilarating:

This, also:

Here is a celebrated maxim, vainly “suppressed” by the author, after first publication:

Before La Rochefoucauld, Montaigne had said, “Even in the midst of compassion we feel within us an unaccountable bitter-sweet titillation of ill-natured pleasure in seeing another suffer;” and Burke, after both, wrote (in his “Sublime and Beautiful”) with a heavier hand, “I am convinced that we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others.”

La Rochefoucauld is not fairly cynical, more than is Montaigne. But as a man he wins upon you less. His maxims are like hard and sharp crystals, precipitated from the worldly wisdom blandly solute and dilute in Montaigne.

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The wise of this world reject the dogma of human depravity, as taught in the Bible. They willingly accept it—nay, accept it complacently, hugging themselves for their own penetration—as taught in the “Maxims” of La Rochefoucauld.

Jean de La Bruyère is personally almost as little known as if he were an ancient of the Greek or Roman world surviving, like Juvenal, only in his literary production. Bossuet got him employed to teach history to a great duke, who became his patron, and settled a life-long annuity upon him. He published his one book, the “Characters,” in 1687, was made member of the French Academy in 1693, and died in 1696. That, in short, is La Bruyère’s biography.

His book is universally considered one of the most finished products of the human mind. It is not a great work—it lacks the unity and the majesty of design necessary for that. It consists simply of detached thoughts and observations on a variety of subjects. It shows the author to have been a man of deep and wise reflection, but especially a consummate master of style. The book is one to read in, rather than to read. It is full of food to thought. The very beginning exhibits a self-consciousness on the writer’s part very different from that spontaneous simplicity in which truly great books originate. La Bruyère begins:

La Bruyère has something to say, and that to length unusual for him, of pulpit eloquence. We select a few specimen sentences:

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:

Here is a happy instance of La Bruyère’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:

Highly satiric in his quiet way, La Bruyère 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:

How painstakingly, how self-consciously, La Bruyère did his literary work is evidenced by the following:

We feel that the quality of La Bruyère 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 Bruyère with a single additional extract—his celebrated parallel between Corneille and Racine:

Less than half a century after La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère 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 65 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:

Here is a good saying:

There is worldly wisdom also here:

Virgil’s “They are able, because they seem to themselves to be able,” is recalled by this:

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So much for Vauvenargues.

And so much for what—considering that, logically, though not quite chronologically, Vauvenargues belongs with them—we may call the seventeenth-century group of French pensée -writers. A nineteenth-century group of the same literary class will form the subject of a chapter in due course to follow.

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 Château-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 debauchee 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 67 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 be 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 Sablière. 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. Molière, 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 thought by asking, “Do you think St. Augustine had as much wit as Rabelais?” 68 “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 Sablière, 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, Fénelon 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, 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 69 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 Æsop and Phædrus. 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, after a single further exception, introduced, we confess, partly because it could be given in a graceful version by Bryant, we shall use Elizur Wright’s translation—a meritorious one, still master of the field which, about fifty years ago, it entered as pioneer. Mr. Wright here expands La Fontaine’s thirty-two verses to it forty-four. The additions are not ill-done, 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:

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Here is that fable of La Fontaine’s graced by the hand of Bryant upon it as translator. It is entitled “Love and Folly:”

In the fable of the “Rat Retired from the World,” La Fontaine rallies the monks. With French finesse he hits his mark 72 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 needful!”

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:

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 Shakespeare 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.

MOLIÈRE.

1623-1673.

Molière 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? Molière’s works survive, and his greatness may be measured.

We have stinted our praise. Molière is not only the foremost name in a certain department of literature; he is one 76 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 Molière.

Molière’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 Molière is rated one of the few greatest producers of literature. Molière’s comedy constitutes to Molière 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 a race, but human attributes, those of all times, and of all races, are the things with which, in his higher comedies, Molière 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 Molière the substance of his dramatic creations. Now and again, if you read Molière 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 Molière.

This character in Molière the writer accords with the character of the man Molière. It might not have seemed natural to say of Molière, as was said of Dante, “There goes the man that has been in hell.” But Molière 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 77 least, feel Molière 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 Æschylus), one is a Roman (Lucretius), one an Italian (Dante), one an Englishman (Shakespeare)—seven. The eighth could hardly fail to be a Frenchman, and that Frenchman is Molière. Mr. Swinburne might perhaps make the list nine, but he would certainly include Victor Hugo himself.

Curiously enough, Molière 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 Théâtre, it was, twenty years after, recognized by the national title of Théâtre Français. Molière’s real name was Jean Baptiste Poquelin.

Young Poquelin’s bent, early encouraged by seeing plays and ballets, was strongly toward the stage. The drama, under the quickening patronage of Louis XIII.’s lordly minister, Cardinal Richelieu, was a great public interest of those times in Paris. Molière’s evil star, too, it was perhaps in part that brought him back to Paris, from Orleans. He admired a certain actress in the capital. She became the companion—probably not innocent companion—of his wandering life as actor. A sister of this actress—a sister young enough to be daughter, instead of sister—Molière finally married. She led her jealous husband a wretched conjugal life. A peculiarly dark tradition of shame, connected with Molière’s marriage, has lately been to a good degree dispelled. But it is not possible to redeem this great man’s fame to chastity and honor. He paid heavily, in like misery of his own, for whatever pangs of jealousy he inflicted. There was sometimes true tragedy for himself hidden within the comedy that he acted for others. (Molière, to the very end of his life, acted in the comedies that he wrote.) When some play of his represented the torments 78 of jealousy in the heart of a husband, it was probably not so much acting, as it was real life, that the spectators saw proceeding on the stage between Molière and his wife, confronted with each other in performing the piece.

Despite his faults, Molière was cast in a noble, generous mold, of character as well as of genius. Expostulated with for persisting to appear on the stage when his health was such that he put his life at stake in so doing, he replied that the men and women of his company depended for their bread on the play’s going through, and appear he would. He actually died an hour or so after playing the part of the Imaginary Invalid in his comedy of that name. That piece was the last work of his pen.

Molière produced in all some thirty dramatic pieces, from among which we select a few of the most celebrated for brief description and illustration.

The “Bourgeois Gentilhomme” (“Shopkeeper turned Gentleman”) partakes of the nature of the farce quite as much as it does of the comedy. But it is farce such as only a man of genius could produce. In it Molière ridicules the airs and affectations of a rich man vulgarly ambitious to figure in a social rank too exalted for his birth, his breeding, or his merit. Jourdain is the name under which Molière satirizes such a character. We give a fragment from one of the scenes. M. Jourdain is in process of fitting himself for that higher position in society to which he aspires. He will equip himself with the necessary knowledge. To this end he employs a professor of philosophy to come and give him lessons at his house:

The “Bourgeois Gentilhomme” is a very amusing comedy throughout.

From “Les Femmes Savantes” (“The Learned Women”)—“The Blue-Stockings,” we might perhaps freely render the title—we present one scene to indicate the nature of the 81 comedy. There had grown to be a fashion in Paris, among certain women high in social rank, of pretending to the distinction of skill in literary criticism, and of proficiency in science. It was the Hôtel de Rambouillet reduced to absurdity. That fashionable affectation Molière made the subject of his comedy, “The Learned Women.”

In the following extracts, Molière satirizes, under the name of Trissotin, a contemporary writer, one Cotin. The poem which Trissotin reads, for the learned women to criticise and admire, is an actual production of this gentleman. Imagine the domestic coterie assembled, and Trissotin, the poet, their guest. He is present, prepared to regale them with what he calls his sonnet. We need to explain that the original poem is thus inscribed: “To Mademoiselle de Longueville, now Duchess of Namur, on her Quartan Fever.” The conceit of the sonneteer is that the fever is an enemy luxuriously lodged in the lovely person of its victim, and there insidiously plotting against her life:

But our readers, we think, will consent to spare the epigram. They will relish, however, a fragment taken from a subsequent part of the same protracted scene. The conversation has made the transition from literary criticism to philosophy, in Moliére’s time a fashionable study, rendered such by the contemporary genius and fame of Descartes. Armande resents the limitations imposed upon her sex:

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“Les Précieuses Ridicules” is an earlier and lighter treatment of the same theme. The object of ridicule in both these pieces was a lapsed and degenerate form of what originally was a thing worthy of respect, and even of praise. At the Hôtel de Rambouillet, conversation was cultivated as a fine art. There was, no doubt, something overstrained in the 85 standards which the ladies of that circle enforced. Their mutual communication was all conducted in a peculiar style of language, the natural deterioration of which was into a kind of euphuism, such as English readers will remember to have seen exemplified in Walter Scott’s Sir Piercie Shafton. These ladies called each other, with demonstrative fondness, “Ma précieuse.” Hence at last the term précieuse as a designation of ridicule. Madame de Sévigné was a précieuse . But she, with many of her peers, was too rich in sarcastic common sense to be a précieuse ridicule . Molière himself, thrifty master of policy that he was, took pains to explain that he did not satirize the real thing, but only the affectation.

“Tartuffe, or the Impostor,” is perhaps the most celebrated of all Molière’s plays. Scarcely comedy, scarcely tragedy, it partakes of both characters. Like tragedy, serious in purpose, it has a happy ending like comedy. Pity and terror are absent; or, if not quite absent, these sentiments are present raised only to a pitch distinctly below the tragic. Indignation is the chief passion excited, or detestation, perhaps, rather than indignation. This feeling is provided at last with its full satisfaction in the condign punishment visited on the impostor.

The original “Tartuffe,” like the most of Molière’s comedies, is written in rhymed verse. We could not, with any effort, make the English-reading student of Molière sufficiently feel how much is lost when the form is lost which the creations of this great genius took, in their native French, under his own master hand. A satisfactory metrical rendering is out of the question. The sense, at least, if not the incommunicable spirit, of the original, is very well given in Mr. C. H. Wall’s version, which we use.

The story of “Tartuffe” is briefly this: Tartuffe, the hero, is a pure villain. He mixes no adulteration of good in his composition. He is hypocrisy itself, the strictly genuine article. Tartuffe has completely imposed upon one Orgon, a man of wealth and standing. Orgon, with his wife, and with his mother, in fact, believes in him absolutely. These people 86 have received the canting rascal into their house, and are about to bestow upon him their daughter in marriage. The following scene from act first shows the skill with which Molière could exhibit, in a few strokes of bold exaggeration, the infatuation of Orgon’s regard for Tartuffe. Orgon has been absent from home. He returns, and meets Cléante, his brother, whom, in his eagerness, he begs to excuse his not answering a question just addressed to him:

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Tartuffe repays the trust and love of his benefactor by making improper advances to that benefactor’s wife. Orgon’s son, who does not share his father’s confidence in Tartuffe, happens to be an unseen witness of the man’s infamous conduct. He exposes the hypocrite to Orgon, with the result of being himself expelled from the house for his pains; while Tartuffe, in recompense for the injury done to his feelings, is presented with a gift-deed of Orgon’s estate. But now Orgon’s wife contrives to let her husband see and hear for himself the vileness of Tartuffe. This done, Orgon confronts the villain, and, with just indignation, orders him out of his house. Tartuffe reminds Orgon that the shoe is on the other foot; that he is himself now owner there, and that it is Orgon, instead of Tartuffe, who must go. Orgon has an interview with his mother, who is exasperatingly sure still that Tartuffe is a maligned good man:

The short remainder of the scene has for its important idea the suggestion that, under the existing circumstances, some sort of peace ought to be patched up between Orgon and Tartuffe. Meantime one Loyal is observed coming, whereupon the fourth scene of act fifth opens:

The scene gives in conclusion some spirited byplay of asides and interruptions from indignant members of the family. Then follows scene fifth, one exchange of conversation from which will sufficiently indicate the progress of the plot:

The next scene introduces Valère, the noble lover of that daughter whom the infatuated father was bent on sacrificing to Tartuffe. Valère comes to announce that Tartuffe, the villain, has accused Orgon to the king. Orgon must fly. Valère offers him his own carriage and money—will, in fact, himself keep him company till he reaches a place of safety. As Orgon, taking hasty leave of his family, turns to go, he is encountered by—the following scene will show whom:

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Tartuffe thus disposed of, the play promptly ends with a vanishing glimpse afforded us of a happy marriage in prospect for Valère with the daughter.

“The Tartuffian Age” is the title of a late Italian book admirably translated into English by an American, Mr. W. A. Nettleton. That such should be the Italian author’s chosen title for his work incidentally shows how cosmopolitan is our French dramatist’s fame. The book is a kindly-caustic satire on the times in which we live, found by the satirist to be abundant in the quality of Tartuffe, that leaven of the Pharisees which is hypocrisy.

Molière is said to have had a personal aim in drawing the character of Tartuffe. This, at least, was like Dante. There is not much sweet laughter in such a comedy. But there is a power that is dreadful.

Each succeeding generation of Frenchmen supplies its bright and ingenious wits who produce comedy. But as there is no second Shakespeare, so there is but one Molière.

VIII.

PASCAL.

1623-1662.

Pascal’s fame is distinctly the fame of a man of genius. He achieved notable things. But it is what he might have done, still more than what he did, that fixes his estimation in the world of mind. Blaise Pascal is one of the chief intellectual glories of France.

Pascal, the boy, had a strong natural bent toward mathematics. The story is that his father, in order to turn his 92 son’s whole force on the study of languages, put out of the lad’s reach all books treating his favorite subject. Thus shut up to his own resources the masterful little fellow, about his eighth year, drawing charcoal diagrams on the floor, made perceptible progress in working out geometry for himself. At sixteen he produced a treatise on conic sections that excited the wonder and incredulity of Descartes. Later he experimented in barometry, and pursued investigations in mechanics. Later still he made what seemed to be approaches toward Newton’s binomial theorem.

Vivid religious convictions meantime deeply affected Pascal’s mind. His health, never robust, began to give way. His physicians prescribed mental diversion, and forced him into society. That medicine, taken at first with reluctance, proved dangerously delightful to Pascal’s vivacious and susceptible spirit. His pious sister Jacqueline warned her brother that he was going too far. But he was still more effectively warned by an accident, in which he almost miraculously escaped from death. Withdrawing from the world, he adopted a course of ascetic practices, in which he continued till he died—in his thirty-ninth year. He wore about his waist an iron girdle armed with sharp points; and this he would press smartly with his elbow when he detected himself at fault in his spirit.

Notwithstanding what Pascal did or attempted worthy of fame, in science, it was his fortune to become chiefly renowned by literary achievement. His, in fact, would now be a half-forgotten name if he had not written the “Provincial Letters” and the “Thoughts.”

The “Provincial Letters” is an abbreviated title. The title in full originally was, “Letters written by Louis de Montalte to a Provincial, one of his friends, and to the Reverend Fathers, the Jesuits, on the subject of the morality and the policy of those Fathers.”

Of the “Provincial Letters,” several English translations have been made. No one of these that we have been able to find seems entirely satisfactory. There is an elusive 93 quality to Pascal’s style, and in losing this you seem to lose something of Pascal’s thought. For with Pascal the thought and the style penetrate each other inextricably and almost indistinguishably. You cannot print a smile, an inflection of the voice, a glance of the eye, a French shrug of the shoulders. And such modulations of the thought seem everywhere to lurk in the turns and phrases of Pascal’s inimitable French. To translate them is impossible.

Pascal is beyond question the greatest modern master of that indescribably delicate art in expression, which, from its illustrious ancient exemplar, has received the name of the Socratic irony. With this fine weapon, in great part, it was, wielded like a magician’s invisible wand, that Pascal did his memorable execution on the Jesuitical system of morals and casuistry, in the “Provincial Letters.” In great part, we say; for the flaming moral earnestness of the man could not abide only to play with his adversaries to the end of the famous dispute. His lighter cimeter blade he flung aside before he had done, and, toward the last, brandished a sword that had weight as well as edge and temper. The skill that could halve a feather in the air with the sword of Saladin was proved to be also strength that could cleave a suit of mail with the brand of Richard the Lion-hearted.

It is generally acknowledged that the French language has never in any hands been a more obedient instrument of intellectual power than it was in the hands of Pascal. He is rated the earliest writer to produce what may be called the final French prose. “The creator of French style,” Villemain boldly calls him. Pascal’s style remains to this day almost perfectly free from adhesions of archaism in diction and in construction. Pascal showed, as it were at once, what the French language was capable of doing in response to the demands of a master. It was the joint achievement of genius, of taste, and of skill, working together in an exquisite balance and harmony.

But let us be entirely frank. The “Provincial Letters” of Pascal are now, to the general reader, not so interesting as 94 from their fame one would seem entitled to expect. You cannot read them intelligently without considerable previous study. You need to have learned, imperfectly, with labor, a thousand things that every contemporary reader of Pascal perfectly knew as if by simply breathing—the necessary knowledge being then, so to speak, abroad in the air. Even thus you cannot possibly derive that vivid delight from perusing in bulk the “Provincial Letters” now, which the successive numbers of the series, appearing at brief irregular intervals, communicated to the eagerly expecting French public, at a time when the topics discussed were topics of a present and pressing practical interest. Still, with whatever disadvantage unavoidably attending, we must give our readers a taste of the quality of Pascal’s “Provincial Letters.”

We select a passage at the commencement of the “Seventh Letter.” We use the translation of Mr. Thomas M’Crie. This succeeds very well in conveying the sense, though it necessarily fails to convey either the vivacity or the eloquence, of the incomparable original. The first occasion of the “Provincial Letters” was a championship proposed to Pascal to be taken up by him on behalf of his beleaguered and endangered friend Arnauld, the Port-Royalist. (Port Royal was a Roman Catholic abbey situated some eight miles to the south-west of Versailles, and therefore not very remote from Paris.) Arnauld was “for substance of doctrine” really a Calvinist, though he quite sincerely disclaimed being such; and it was for his defense of Calvinism (under its ancient form of Augustinianism) that he was threatened, through Jesuit enmity, with condemnation for heretical opinion. The problem was to enlist the sentiment of general society in his favor. The friends in council at Port Royal said to Pascal, “You must do this.” Pascal said, “I will try.” In a few days the first letter of a series destined to such fame was submitted for judgment to Port Royal, and approved. It was printed—anonymously. The success was instantaneous and brilliant. A second letter followed, and a third. Soon, from strict personal defense of Arnauld, the 95 writer went on to take up a line of offense and aggression. He carried the war into Africa. He attacked the Jesuits as teachers of immoral doctrine.

The plan of these later letters was to have a Paris gentleman write to a friend of his in the country (the “provincial”), detailing interviews held by him with a Jesuit priest of the city. The supposed Parisian gentleman in his interviews with the supposed Jesuit father affects the air of a very simple-hearted seeker after truth. He represents himself as, by his innocent-seeming docility, leading his Jesuit teacher on to make the most astonishingly frank exposures of the secrets of the casuistical system held and taught by his order.

The “Seventh Letter” tells the story of how Jesuit confessors were instructed to manage their penitents in a matter made immortally famous by the wit and genius of Pascal, the matter of “directing the intention.” There is nothing in the “Provincial Letters” better suited than this at the same time to interest the general reader, and to display the quality of these renowned productions. (We do not scruple to change our chosen translation a little at points where it seems to us susceptible of some easy improvement.) Remember it is an imaginary Parisian gentleman who now writes to a friend of his in the country. Our extract introduces first the Jesuit father speaking:

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The humorous irony of Pascal, in the “Provincial Letters,” plays like the diffusive sheen of an aurora borealis over the whole surface of the composition. It does not often deliver itself startlingly in sudden discharges as of lightning. You need to school your sense somewhat, not to miss a fine effect now and then. Consider the broadness and coarseness in pleasantry, that, before Pascal, had been common, almost universal, in controversy, and you will better understand what a creative touch it was of genius, of feeling, and of taste, that brought into literature the far more than Attic, the ineffable Christian, purity of that wit and humor in the “Provincial Letters” which will make these writings live as long as men anywhere continue to read the productions of past ages. Erasmus, perhaps, came the nearest of all modern predecessors to anticipating the purified pleasantry of Pascal.

It will be interesting and instructive to see Pascal’s own statement of his reasons for adopting the bantering style which he did in the “Provincial Letters,” as well as of the sense of responsibility to be faithful and fair, under which he wrote. Pascal says:

Of the wit of the “Provincial Letters,” their wit and their controversial effectiveness, the specimens given will have afforded readers some approximate idea. We must deny 100 ourselves the gratification of presenting a brief passage, which we had selected and translated for the purpose, to exemplify from the same source Pascal’s serious eloquence. It was Voltaire who said of these productions: “Molière’s best comedies do not excel them in wit, nor the compositions of Bossuet in sublimity.” Something of Bossuet’s sublimity, or of a sublimity perhaps finer than Bossuet’s, our readers will discover in citations to follow from the “Thoughts.”

Pascal’s “Thoughts,” the printed book, has a remarkable history. It was a posthumous publication. The author died, leaving behind him a considerable number of detached fragments of composition, first jottings of thought on a subject that had long occupied his mind. These precious manuscripts were almost undecipherable. The writer had used for his purpose any chance scrap of paper—old wrapping, for example, or margin of letter—that, at the critical moment of happy conception, was nearest his hand. Sentences, words even, were often left unfinished. There was no coherence, no sequence, no arrangement. It was, however, among his friends perfectly well understood that Pascal for years had meditated a work on religion designed to demonstrate the truth of Christianity. For this he had been thinking arduously. Fortunately he had even, in a memorable conversation, sketched his project at some length to his Port Royal friends. With so much, scarcely more, in the way of clew, to guide their editorial work, these friends prepared and issued a volume of Pascal’s “Thoughts.” With the most loyal intentions, the Port-Royalists unwisely edited too much. They pieced out incompletenesses, they provided clauses or sentences of connection, they toned down expressions deemed too bold, they improved Pascal’s style! After having suffered such things from his friends, the posthumous Pascal, later, fell into the hands of an enemy. The infidel Condorcet published an edition of the “Thoughts.” Whereas the Port-Royalists had suppressed to placate the Jesuits, Condorcet suppressed to please the “philosophers.” Between those on the one side and these on the other, Pascal’s 101 “Thoughts” had experienced what might well have killed any production of the human mind that could die. It was not till near the middle of the present century that Cousin called the attention of the world to the fact that we had not yet, but that we still might have, a true edition of Pascal’s “Thoughts.” M. Faugère took the hint, and, consulting the original manuscripts, preserved in the national library at Paris, produced, with infinite editorial labor, almost two hundred years after the thinker’s death, the first satisfactory edition of Pascal’s “Thoughts.” Since Faugère, M. Havet has also published an edition of Pascal’s works entire, by him now first adequately annotated and explained. The arrangement of the “Thoughts” varies in order, according to the varying judgment of editors. We use, for our extracts, a current translation, which we modify at our discretion by comparison of the original text as given in M. Havet’s elaborate work.

Our first extract is a passage in which the writer supposes a skeptic of the more shallow, trifling sort, to speak. This skeptic represents his own state of mind in the following strain as of soliloquy:

The central thought on which the projected apologetic of Pascal was to revolve as on a pivot is, the contrasted greatness and wretchedness of man—with Divine Revelation, in its doctrine of a fall on man’s part from original nobleness, supplying the needed link, and the only link conceivable, of explanation, to unite the one with the other, the human greatness with the human wretchedness. This contrast of dignity and disgrace should constantly be in the mind of the reader of the “Thoughts” of Pascal. It will often be found to throw a very necessary light upon the meaning of the separate fragments that make up the series.

We now present a brief fragment asserting, with vivid metaphor, at the same time the fragility of man’s frame and the majesty of man’s nature. This is a very famous “Thought”:

One is reminded of the memorable saying of a celebrated philosopher: “In the universe there is nothing great but man; in man there is nothing great but mind.”

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What a sudden, almost ludicrous, reduction in scale, the greatness of Cæsar, as conqueror, is made to suffer when looked at in the way in which Pascal asks you to look at it in the following “Thought”! (Remember that Cæsar, when he began fighting for universal empire, was fifty-one years of age:)

That is as if you should reverse the tube of your telescope, with the result of seeing the object observed made smaller instead of larger.

The following sentence might be a “Maxim” of La Rochefoucauld. Pascal was, no doubt, a debtor to him as well as to Montaigne:

Here is one of the most current of Pascal’s sayings:

The following “Thought” condenses the substance of the book proposed into three short sentences:

The prevalent seeming severity and intellectual coldness of Pascal’s “Thoughts” yield to a touch from the heart, and become pathetic, in such utterances as the following, supposed to be addressed by the Saviour to the penitent seeking to be saved:

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It is austerity again, but not unjust austerity, that speaks as follows:

But we must take our leave of Pascal. His was a suffering as well as an aspiring spirit. He suffered because he aspired. But, at least, he did not suffer long. He aspired himself quickly away. Toward the last he wrought at a problem in his first favorite study, that of mathematics, and left behind him, as a memorial of his later life, a remarkable result of investigation on the curve called the cycloid. During his final illness he pierced himself through with many sorrows—unnecessary sorrows, sorrows, too, that bore a double edge, hurting not only him, but also his kindred—in practicing, from mistaken religious motives, a hard repression upon his natural instinct to love, and to welcome love. He thought that God should be all, the creature nothing. The thought was half true, but it was half false. God should, indeed, be all. But, in God, the creature also should be something.

In French history—we may say, in the history of the world—if there are few brighter, there also are few purer, fames than the fame of Pascal.

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IX.

MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ.

1626-1696.

Of Madame de Sévigné, if it were permitted here to make a pun and a paradox, one might justly and descriptively say that she was not a woman of letters, but only a woman of—letters. For Madame de Sévigné’s addiction to literature was not at all that of an author by profession. She simply wrote admirable private letters in great profusion, and became famous thereby.

Madame de Sévigné’s fame is partly her merit, but it is also partly her good fortune. She was rightly placed to be what she was. This will appear from a sketch of her life, and still more from specimens to be exhibited of her own epistolary writing.

Marie de Rabutin-Chantal was her maiden name. She was born a baroness. She was married, young, a marchioness. First early left an orphan, she was afterward early left a widow—not too early, however, to have become the mother of two children, a son and a daughter. The daughter grew to be the life-long idol of the widowed mother’s heart. The letters she wrote to this daughter, married and living remote from her, compose the greater part of that voluminous epistolary production by which Madame de Sévigné became, without her ever aiming at such a result, or probably ever thinking of it, one of the classics of the French language.

Madame de Sévigné was wealthy as orphan heiress, and she should have been wealthy as widow. But her husband was profligate, and he wasted her substance. She turned out to be a thoroughly capable woman of affairs who managed her property well. During her long and stainless widowhood—her husband fell in a shameful duel when she was but twenty-five 106 years old, and she lived to be seventy—she divided her time between her estate, “The Rocks,” in Brittany, and her residence in Paris. This period was all embraced within the protracted reign of Louis XIV., perhaps upon the whole the most memorable age in the history of France.

Beautiful, and, if not brilliantly beautiful, at least, brilliantly witty, Madame de Sévigné was virtuous—in that chief sense of feminine virtue—amid an almost universal empire of profligacy around her. Her social advantages were unsurpassed, and her social success was equal to her advantages. She had the woman courtier’s supreme triumph in being once led out to dance by the king—her own junior by a dozen years—no vulgar king, remember, but the “great” Louis XIV. Her cynical cousin, himself a writer of power, who had been repulsed in dishonorable proffers of love by the young marchioness during the lifetime of her husband—we mean Count Bussy—says, in a scurrilous work of his, that Madame de Sévigné remarked, on returning to her seat after her dancing-bout with the king, that Louis possessed great qualities, and would certainly obscure the luster of all his predecessors. “I could not help laughing in her face,” the ungallant cousin declared, “seeing what had produced this panegyric.” Probably, indeed, the young woman was pleased. But, whatever may have been her faults or her follies, nothing can rob Madame de Sévigné of the glory that is hers, in having been strong enough in womanly and motherly honor to preserve, against many dazzling temptations, amid general bad example, and even under malignant aspersions, a chaste and spotless name. When it is added that, besides access to the royal court itself, this gifted woman enjoyed the familiar acquaintance of La Rochefoucauld—with other high-bred wits, less famous, not a few—enough will have been said to show that her position was such as to give her talent its best possible chance. The French history of the times of Louis XIV. is hinted in glimpses the most vivid and the most suggestive, throughout the whole series of the letters.

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We owe it to our readers (and to Madame de Sévigné no less) first of all to let them see a specimen of the affectionate adulation that this French woman of rank and of fashion, literally in almost every letter of hers, effuses on her daughter—a daughter who, by the way, seems very languidly to have responded to such demonstrations:

Conceive the foregoing multiplied by the whole number of the separate letters composing the correspondence, and you will have no exaggerated idea of the display that Madame de Sévigné makes of her regard for her daughter. This regard was a passion, morbid, no doubt, by excess, and, even at that, extravagantly demonstrated; but it was fundamentally sincere. Madame de Sévigné idealized her absent daughter, and literally “loved but only her.” We need not 108 wholly admire such maternal affection. But we should not criticise it too severely.

We choose next a marvelously vivid “instantaneous view” in words, of a court afternoon and evening at Versailles. This letter, too is addressed to the daughter—Madame de Grignan, by her married name. It bears date, “Paris, Wednesday, 29th July.” The year is 1676, and the writer is just fifty:

There is your picture. Picture, pure and simple, it is—comment none, least of all, moralizing comment. The wish is sighed by “everybody,” that such pleasant things may “last.” Well, they did last the writer’s time. But meanwhile the French revolution was a-preparing. A hundred years later it will come, with its terrible reprisals.

We have gone away from the usual translations to find the foregoing extract in an article published forty years ago and more, in the “Edinburgh Review.” Again we draw from the same source—this time, the description of a visit paid by a company of grand folks, of whom the writer of the letter was one, to an iron-foundery:

Once more:

Yet again. The gay writer has been sobered, perhaps hurt, by a friend’s frankly writing to her, “You are old.” To her daughter:

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She dates a letter, and recalls that the day was the anniversary of an event in her life:

Here is a passage with power in it. The great war minister of Louis has died. Madame de Sévigné was now sixty-five years old. The letter is to her cousin Coulanges:

A glimpse of Bourdaloue:

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:

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 Sévigné allows herself to go in sympathy. Her heart never bleeds very freely—for anybody except her daughter. Madame de Sévigné’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 113 sincerity as unquestionable as the levity is, on the point of personal religion:

Madame de Sévigné involuntarily becomes a maxim-maker:

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 æsthetic stomach of her 114 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 Sévigné. 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:

M. de la Rochefoucauld appears often by name in the letters. Here he appears anonymously by his effect:

Not a very sapid bit of gnomic wisdom, certainly. We must immediately make up to our readers, on Madame de Sévigné’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:

Madame de Sévigné makes a confession which will comfort readers who may have experienced the same difficulty as that of which she speaks:

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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 somberly as follows:

A memorable sarcasm saved for us by Madame de Sévigné, at the very close of one of her letters:

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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:

If such things were done by the aristocracy—and the spiritual aristocracy at that!—in the green tree, what might not be expected from them 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 Sévigné 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 Sévigné 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 117 devotion of her talent, an English analogue to Madame de Sévigné. 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, 118 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 Æschylus; 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 Æschylus 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 Bruyère’s celebrated comparison of the two Frenchmen—made, of course, before Voltaire—yoked them, Corneille with Sophocles, Racine with Euripides. Mr. John Morley, however, in his elaborate monograph on Voltaire, remarks: “He [Voltaire] is usually considered to hold the same place relatively to Corneille and Racine that Euripides held relatively to Æschylus and Sophocles.”

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. His fondness for Lucan, Corneille always retained. This taste on his part, and the rhymed Alexandrines in which he wrote tragedy, may together help account for the hyperheroic 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 mold of 119 verse, that nobody could possibly be simple and natural in that. Molière’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 Molière; but, like Molière, he heard and he heeded an inward voice summoning him away from the bar to the stage. Corneille did not, however, like Molière, 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 of 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; 120 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 Hôtel 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 Hôtel Rambouillet, and that awful court decided against the play. Corneille, like Michael 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 Hôtel de Rambouillet.

The objection raised by the Hôtel 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 121 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 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 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.

But Severus on his part emulates the nobleness of the woman whom he vainly loves. Learning the true state of the case, he rises to the height of his opportunity for magnanimous behavior, and bids the married pair be happy in a long life together.

A change in the situation occurs, a change due to the changed mood of the father, Felix. Felix learns that Severus is high in imperial favor, and he wishes now that Severus, instead of Polyeuctes, were his son-in-law. A decree of the emperor makes it possible that this preferable 122 alternative may yet be realized. For the emperor has decreed that Christians must be persecuted to the death, and Polyeuctes has been baptized a Christian—though of this Felix will not hear till later.

A solemn sacrifice to the gods is to be celebrated in honor of imperial victories lately won. Felix sends to summon Polyeuctes, his son-in-law. To Felix’s horror, Polyeuctes, with his friend Nearchus, coming to the temple, proceeds in a frenzy of enthusiasm to break and dishonor the images of the gods, proclaiming himself a Christian. In obedience to the imperial decree, Nearchus is hurried to execution, in the sight of his friend, while Polyeuctes is thrown into prison to repent and recant.

“Now is my chance,” muses Felix. “I dare not disobey the emperor to spare Polyeuctes. Besides, with Polyeuctes once out of the way, Severus and Paulina may be husband and wife.”

Polyeuctes in prison hears that his Paulina is coming to see him. With a kind of altruistic nobleness which seems contagious in this play, Polyeuctes resolves that Severus shall come too, and he will resign his wife, soon to be a widow, to the care of his own rival, her Roman lover. First, Polyeuctes and Paulina are alone together—Polyeuctes having, before she arrived, fortified his soul for the conflict with her tears, by singing in his solitude a song of high resolve and of anticipative triumph over his temptation.

The scene between Paulina, exerting all her power to detach Polyeuctes from what she believes to be his folly, and Polyeuctes, on the other hand, rapt to the pitch of martyrdom, exerting all his power to resist his wife, and even to convert her—this scene, we say, is full of noble height and pathos, as pathos and height were possible in the verse which Corneille had to write. Neither struggler in this tragic strife moves the other. Paulina is withdrawing when Severus enters. She addresses her lover severely, but Polyeuctes intervenes to defend him. In a short scene, Polyeuctes, by a sort of last will and testament, bequeaths his wife to his rival, and retires with his guard. Now, Severus and Paulina are alone 123 together. If there was a trace of the false heroic in Polyeuctes’s resignation of his wife to Severus, the effect of that is finely counteracted by the scene which immediately follows between Paulina and Severus. Severus begins doubtfully, staggering, as it were, to firm posture, while he speaks to Paulina. He expresses amazement at the conduct of Polyeuctes. Christians certainly deport themselves strangely, he says. He at length finds himself using the following lover-like language:

But here Paulina interrupts, and Severus is not permitted to finish his protestation. Her reply is esteemed, and justly esteemed, one of the noblest things in French tragedy—a French critic would be likely to say, the very noblest in tragedy. She says:

Voltaire, as editor and commentator of Corneille, is freezingly cold. It is difficult not to feel that at heart he was unfriendly to the great tragedist’s fame. His notes often are remorselessly grammatical. “This is not French”; “This is not the right word”; “According to the construction, this should mean so and so—according to the sense it must mean so and so”; “This is hardly intelligible”; “It is a pity that such or such a fault should mar these fine verses”; “An expression for comedy rather than tragedy”—are the kind of remarks with which Voltaire chills the enthusiasm of the reader. It is useless, however, to deny that the criticisms thus made are, many of them, just. Corneille does not belong to the class of the “faultily faultless” writers.

Severus proves equal to Paulina’s noble hopes of him. With a great effort of self-sacrifice, he resolves to intercede for Polyeuctes. This is shown in an interview between Severus and his faithful attendant Fabian. Fabian warns him that he appeals for Polyeuctes at his own peril. Severus loftily replies (and here follows one of the most lauded passages in the play:)

Such is the high heroic style in which pagan Severus resolves and speaks. And thus the fourth act ends.

Felix makes a sad contrast with the high-heartedness which the other characters, most of them, display. He is base enough to suspect that Severus is base enough to be false and treacherous in his act of intercession for Polyeuctes. He imagines he detects a plot against himself to undermine him with the emperor. Voltaire criticises Corneille for giving this sordid character to Felix. He thinks the tragedist might better have let Felix be actuated by zeal for the pagan gods. The mean selfishness that animates the governor, Voltaire regards as below the right tragic pitch. It is the poet himself, no doubt, with that high Roman fashion of his, who, unconsciously to the critic, taught him to make the criticism.

Felix summons Polyeuctes to an interview, and adjures to be a prudent man. Felix at length says, “Adore the 126 gods or die.” “I am a Christian,” simply replies the martyr. “Impious! Adore them, I bid you, or renounce life.” (Here again Voltaire offers one of his refrigerant criticisms: “ Renounce life does not advance upon the meaning of die ; when one repeats the thought, the expression should be strengthened.”) Paulina meantime has entered to expostulate with Polyeuctes and with her father. Polyeuctes bids her, “Live with Severus.” He says he has revolved the subject, and he is convinced that another love is the sole remedy for her woe. He proceeds in the calmest manner to point out the advantages of the course recommended. Voltaire remarks—justly we are bound to say—that these maxims are here somewhat revolting; the martyr should have had other things to say. On Felix’s final word, “Soldiers, execute the order that I have given,” Paulina exclaims, “Whither are you taking him?” “To death,” says Felix. “To glory,” says Polyeuctes. “Admirable dialogue, and always applauded,” is Voltaire’s note on this.

The tragedy does not end with the martyrdom of Polyeuctes. Paulina becomes a Christian, but remains pagan enough to call her father “barbarous,” in acrimoniously bidding him finish his work by putting his daughter also to death. Severus reproaches Felix for his cruelty, and threatens him with his own enmity. Felix undergoes instantaneous conversion—a miracle of grace which, under the circumstances provided by Corneille, we may excuse Voltaire for laughing at. Paulina is delighted; and Severus asks, “Who would not be touched by a spectacle so tender?”

The tragedy thus comes near ending happily enough to be called a comedy.

Such as the foregoing exhibits him is the father of French tragedy, Corneille, where at his best; where at his worst, he is something so different that you would hardly admit him to be the same man. For never was genius more unequal in different manifestations of itself, than Corneille in his different works. Molière is reported to have said that Corneille had a familiar, or a fairy, that came to him at times, and enabled 127 him to write sublimely; but that, when the poet was left to himself, he could write as poorly as another man.

Corneille produced some thirty-three dramatic pieces in all, but of these not more than six or seven retain their place on the French stage.

Corneille and Bossuet together constitute a kind of rank by themselves among the Dii Majores of the French literary Olympus.

XI.

RACINE.

1639-1699.

Jean Racine was Pierre Corneille reduced to rule. The younger was to the elder somewhat as Sophocles or Euripides was to Æschylus, as Virgil was to Lucretius, as Pope was to Dryden. Nature was more in Corneille, art was more in Racine. Corneille was a pathfinder in literature. He led the way even for Molière still more for Racine. But Racine was as much before Corneille in perfection of art as Corneille was before Racine in audacity of genius. Racine, accordingly, is much more even and uniform than Corneille. Smoothness, polish, ease, grace, sweetness—these, and monotony in these, are the mark of Racine. But if there is, in the latter poet, less to admire, there is also less to forgive. His taste and his judgment were surer than the taste and the judgment of Corneille. He enjoyed, moreover, an inestimable advantage in the life-long friendship of the great critic of his time, Boileau. Boileau was a literary conscience to Racine. He kept Racine constantly spurred to his best endeavors in art. Racine was congratulating himself to his friends on the ease with which he produced his verse. “Let me teach you to produce easy verse with difficulty,” was the critic’s admirable reply. Racine was a docile pupil. He became as painstaking an artist in verse as Boileau would have him.

It will always be a matter of individual taste, and of 128 changing fashion in criticism, to decide which of the two is, on the whole, to be preferred to the other. Racine eclipsed Corneille in vogue during the lifetime of the latter. Corneille’s old age was, perhaps, seriously saddened by the consciousness, which he could not but have, of being retired from the place of ascendency once accorded to him over all. His case repeated the fortune of Æschylus in relation to Sophocles. The eighteenth century, taught by Voltaire, established the precedence of Racine. But the nineteenth century has restored the crown to the brow of Corneille. To such mutations is subject the fame of an author.

Jean Racine was early left an orphan. His grandparents put him, after preparatory training at another establishment, to school at Port Royal, where during three years he had the best opportunities of education that the kingdom afforded. His friends wanted to make a clergyman of him; but the preferences of the boy prevailed, and he addicted himself to literature. The Greek tragedists became familiar to him in his youth, and their example in literary art exercised a sovereign influence over Racine’s development as author. It pained the good Port-Royalists to see their late gifted pupil, now out of their hands, inclined to write plays. Nicole printed a remonstrance against the theater, in which Racine discovered something that he took to slant anonymously at himself. He wrote a spirited reply, of which no notice was taken by the Port-Royalists. Somebody, however, on their behalf, rejoined to Racine, whereupon the young author wrote a second letter to the Port-Royalists, which he showed to his friend Boileau. “This may do credit to your head, but it will do none to your heart,” was that faithful mentor’s comment, in returning the document. Racine suppressed his second letter, and did his best to recall the first. But he went on in his course of writing for the stage.

Racine’s second tragedy, the “Alexander the Great,” the youthful author took to the great Corneille, to get his judgment on it. Corneille was thirty-three years the senior of Racine, and he was at this time the undisputed master of 129 French tragedy. “You have undoubted talent for poetry—for tragedy, not; try your hand in some other poetical line,” was Corneille’s sentence on the unrecognized young rival, who was so soon to supplant him in popular favor.

It was a pretty, girlish fancy of the brilliant Princess Henriette (that same daughter of English Charles I., Bossuet’s funeral oration on whom, presently to be spoken of, is so celebrated) to engage the two great tragedists, Corneille and Racine, both at once, in labor, without their mutual knowledge, upon the same subject—a subject which she herself, drawing it from the history of Tacitus, conceived to be eminently fit for tragical treatment. Corneille produced his “Berenice” and Racine his “Titus and Berenice.” The princess died before the two plays which she had inspired were produced; but, when they were produced, Racine’s work won the palm. The rivalry created a bitterness between the two authors, of which, naturally, the defeated one tasted the more deeply. An ill-considered pleasantry, too, of Racine’s, in making out of one of Corneille’s tragic lines in his “Cid,” a comic line for “The Suitors,” hurt the old man’s pride. That pride suffered a worse hurt still. The chief Parisian theater, completely occupied with the works of his victorious rival, rejected tragedies offered by Corneille.

Still, Racine did not have things all his own way. Some good critics considered the rage for this younger dramatist a mere passing whim of fashion. These—Madame de Sévigné was of them—stood by their “old admiration,” and were true to Corneille.

A memorable mortification and chagrin for our poet was now prepared by his enemies—he seems never to have lacked enemies—with lavish and elaborate malice. Racine had produced a play from Euripides, the “Phædra,” on which he had unstintingly bestowed his best genius and his best art. It was contrived that another poet, one Pradon, should, at the self-same moment, have a play represented on the self-same subject. At a cost of many thousands of dollars, the best seats at Racine’s theater were all bought by his enemies, and left 130 solidly vacant. The best seats at Pradon’s theater were all bought by the same interested parties, and duly occupied with industrious and zealous applauders. This occurred at six successive representations. The result was the immediate apparent triumph of Pradon over the humiliated Racine. Boileau in vain bade his friend be of good cheer, and await the assured reversal of the verdict. Racine was deeply wounded.

This discomposing experience of the poet’s, joined with conscientious misgivings on his part as to the propriety of his course in writing for the stage, led him now, at the early age of thirty-eight, to renounce tragedy altogether. His son Louis, from whose life of Racine we have chiefly drawn our material for the present sketch, conceives this change in his father as a profound and genuine religious conversion. Writers whose spirit inclines them not to relish a condemnation such as seems thus to be reflected on the theater take a less charitable view of the change. They account for it as a reaction of mortified pride. Some of them go so far as groundlessly to impute sheer hypocrisy to Racine.

A long interval of silence, on Racine’s part, had elapsed, when Madame de Maintenon, the wife of Louis XIV., asked the unemployed poet to prepare a sacred play for the use of the high-born girls educated under her care at St. Cyr. Racine consented, and produced his “Esther.” This achieved a prodigious success; for the court took it up, and an exercise written for a girls’ school became the admiration of a kingdom. A second similar play followed, the “Athaliah”—the last, and, by general agreement, the most perfect work of its author. We thus reach that tragedy of Racine’s which both its fame and its character dictate to us as the one by eminence to be used here in exhibition of the quality of this Virgil among tragedists.

Our readers may, if they please, refresh their recollection of the history on which the drama is founded by perusing Second Kings, chapter eleven, and Second Chronicles, chapters twenty-two and twenty-three. Athaliah, whose name 131 gives its title to the tragedy, was daughter to the wicked king, Ahab. She reigns as queen at Jerusalem over the kingdom of Judah. To secure her usurped position, she had sought to kill all the descendants of King David, even her own grandchildren. She had succeeded, but not quite. Young Joash escaped, to be secretly reared in the temple by the high-priest. The final disclosure of this hidden prince, and his coronation as king in place of usurping Athalia, destined to be fearfully overthrown, and put to death in his name, afford the action of the play. Action, however, there is almost none in classic French tragedy. The tragic drama is, with the French, as it was with the Greeks, after whom it was framed, merely a succession of scenes in which speeches are made by the actors. Lofty declamation is always the character of the play. In the “Athalia,” as in the “Esther,” Racine introduced the feature of the chorus, a restoration which had all the effect of an innovation. The chorus in “Athalia” consisted of Hebrew virgins, who at intervals marking the transitions between the acts, chanted the spirit of the piece in its successive stages of progress toward the final catastrophe. The “Athalia” is almost proof against technical criticism. It is acknowledged to be, after its kind, a nearly ideal product of art.

First, in specimen of the choral feature of the drama, we content ourselves with giving a single chorus from the “Athalia.” This we turn into rhyme, clinging pretty closely all the way to the form of the original. Attentive readers may, in one place of our rendering, observe an instance of identical rhyme. This, in a piece of verse originally written in English, would, of course, be a fault. In translation from French, it may pass for a merit; since, to judge from the practice of the national poets, the French ear seems to be even better pleased with such strict identities of sound, at the close of corresponding lines, than it is with those definite, mere resemblances to which, in English versification, rhymes are rigidly limited.

Suspense between hope and dread, dread preponderating, 132 is the state of feeling represented in the present chorus. Salomith is the leading singer:

The catastrophe is reached in the coronation of little Joash as king, and in the destruction of usurping and wicked Athaliah. Little Joash, by the way, with his rather precocious wisdom of reply, derived to himself for the moment a certain factitious interest, from the resemblance, meant by the poet to be divined by spectators, between him and the little Duke of Burgundy, Louis XIV.’s grandson, then of about the same age with the Hebrew boy, and of high reputation for mental vivacity.

The scene in which the high-priest, Jehoiada, for the first time discloses to his foster-son, Joash, the latter’s royal descent from David, and his true heirship to the throne of Judah, will serve sufficiently to exhibit what maturity of modest and pious wisdom the dramatist attributes to this Hebrew boy of nine or ten years. Nine or ten years of age Racine makes Joash, instead of seven, as Scripture interpreted without violence would make him. The lad has had his sage curiosity excited by seeing preparations in progress for some important ceremonial. That ceremonial is his own coronation, but he does not guess the secret. Nay, he has just touchingly asked his foster-mother, observed by him to be in tears:

The discreet foster-mother refers the lad to her husband, Jehoiada, now approaching. Joash rushes into the arms of the high-priest, exclaiming, “My father!” “Well, my son?” the high-priest replies. “What preparations, then, 134 are these?” asks Joash. The high-priest bids him prepare himself to listen and learn, the time being now come for him to pay his debt to God:

Fénelon had already been two years preceptor to the Duke of Burgundy when this tragedy was written. It is impossible not to feel that Racine must have had that prince in mind when he put into the mouth of young Joash sentiments so likely to have been instilled into the heart of his royal pupil, the great king’s grandson, by such a preceptor as Fénelon. How could the selfish old monarch of France contrive to avoid recognizing his own portrait suggested by contrast in that description of the good king from the lips of little Joash? Racine was here treading on treacherous ground. He will presently find his footing quite give way under him, to let him down into the “horrible pit” of disgrace with his king. This not, however, in the present play.

The tragedist has generously bestowed upon wicked Queen Athaliah a certain loftiness of spirit which, in its display in the final catastrophe, almost redeems her to admiration, if not to sympathy. There is nothing in the play more nearly sublime in declamation than the final speech in which Athaliah greets her own doom, and blasphemously forecasts, for young King Joash, a future of apostasy from God. With this admirable piece of rhetoric, resembling a burst of blasphemy from Satan in “Paradise Lost,” so far as French poetry may be allowed to resemble English, we conclude our representation of Racine. Athaliah has now just heard the announcement of things that assure her of the overthrow of her usurpation. She expresses herself in a speech, the first words 135 of which were, no doubt, designed by the poet to recall the celebrated traditional exclamation of Julian the Apostate, uttered at a moment of irretrievable disaster to his impious hopes—“O Galilean, thou hast conquered!” as follows:

With words thus rendered into such English verse as we could command for the purpose, Athaliah disappears from the stage. Her execution follows immediately. This is not exhibited, but is announced with brief, solemn comment from Jehoiada. And so the tragedy ends.

The interest of the piece, to the modern reader, is by no means equal to its fame. One reproaches one’s self, but one yawns in conscientiously perusing it. Still, one feels the work of the author to be irreproachably, nay, consummately, good. But fashions in taste change; and we cannot hold 136 ourselves responsible for admiring, or, at any rate, for enjoying, according to the judgment of other races and of former generations. It is—so, with grave concurrence, we say—It is a great classic, worthy of the praise that it receives. We are glad that we have read it; and, let us be candid, equally glad that we have not to read it again.

As has already been intimated, Racine, after “Athaliah,” wrote tragedy no more. He ceased to interest himself in the fortune of his plays. His son “Louis,” in his Life of his father, testifies that he never heard his father speak in the family of the dramas that he had written. His theatrical triumphs seemed to afford him no pleasure. He repented of them rather than gloried in them.

While one need not doubt that this regret of Racine’s for the devotion of his powers to the production of tragedy was a sincere regret of his conscience, one may properly wish that the regret had been more heroic. The fact is, Racine was somewhat feminine in character as well as in genius. He could not beat up with stout heart undismayed against an adverse wind. And the wind blew adverse at length to Racine, from the principal quarter, the court of Versailles. From being a chief favorite with his sovereign, Racine fell into the position of an exile from the royal presence. The immediate occasion was one honorable rather than otherwise to the poet.

In conversation with Madame de Maintenon, Racine had expressed views on the state of France, and on the duties of a king to his subjects, which so impressed her mind that she desired him to reduce his observations to writing and confide them to her, she promising to keep them profoundly secret from Louis. But Louis surprised her with the manuscript in her hand. Taking it from her, he read in it, and demanded to know the author. Madame de Maintenon could not finally refuse to tell. “Does M. Racine, because he is a great poet, think that he knows every thing?” the despot angrily asked. Louis never spoke to Racine again. The distressed and infatuated poet still made some paltry request 137 of the king—to experience the humiliation that he invoked. His request was not granted. Racine wilted, like a tender plant, under the sultry frown of his monarch. He could not rally. He soon after died, literally killed by the mere displeasure of one man. Such was the measureless power wielded by Louis XIV.; such was the want of virile stuff in Racine. A spirit partly kindred to the tragedist, Archbishop Fénelon, will presently be shown to have had at about the same time a partly similar experience.

XII.

BOSSUET : 1627-1704; BOURDALOUE : 1632-1704; MASSILLON : 1663-1742; SAURIN : 1677-1730.

We group four names in one title, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Massillon, Saurin, to represent the pulpit orators of France. There are other great names—as Fléchier and Claude—but the names we choose are the greatest.

Bossuet’s individual distinction is, that he was a great man as well as a great orator; Bourdaloue’s, that he was priest-and-preacher simply; Massillon’s, that his sermons, regarded quite independently of their subject, their matter, their occasion, regarded merely as masterpieces of style, became at once, and permanently became, a part of French literature; Saurin’s, that he was the pulpit theologian of Protestantism.

The greatness of Bossuet is an article in the French national creed. No Frenchman disputes it; no Frenchman, indeed, but proclaims it. Protestant agrees with Catholic, infidel with Christian, at least in this. Bossuet, twinned here with Corneille, is to the Frenchman, as Milton is to the Englishman, his synonym for sublimity. Eloquence, somehow, seems a thing too near the common human level to answer fully the need that Frenchmen feel in speaking of Bossuet. Bossuet is not eloquent, he is sublime. That in French it is in equal part oratory, while in English it is poetry almost alone, that supplies in literature its satisfaction to the sentiment 138 of the sublime, very well represents the difference in genius between the two races. The French idea of poetry is eloquence; and it is eloquence carried to its height, whether in verse or in prose, that constitutes for the Frenchman sublimity. The difference is a difference of blood. English blood is Teutonic in base, and the imagination of the Teuton is poetic. French blood, in base, is Celtic; and the imagination of the Celt is oratoric.

Jacques Bénigne Bossuet was of good bourgeois , or middle-class, stock. He passed a well-ordered and virtuous youth, as if in prophetic consistency with what was to be his subsequent career. He was brought forward while a young man in the Hôtel de Rambouillet, where, on a certain occasion, he preached a kind of show sermon, under the auspices of his admiring patron. In due time he attracted wide public attention, not merely as an eloquent orator, but as a profound student and as a powerful controversialist. His character and influence became in their maturity such that La Bruyère aptly called him a “Father of the Church.” “The Corneille of the pulpit,” was Henri Martin’s characterization and praise. A third phrase, “the eagle of Meaux,” has passed into almost an alternative name for Bossuet. He soared like an eagle in his eloquence, and he was bishop of Meaux.

Bossuet and Louis XIV. were exactly suited to each other, in the mutual relation of subject and sovereign. Bossuet preached sincerely—as every body knows Louis sincerely practiced—the doctrine of the divine right of kings to rule absolutely. But the proud prelate compromised neither his own dignity nor the dignity of the Church in the presence of the absolute monarch.

Bossuet threw himself with great zeal, and to prodigious effect, into the controversy against Protestantism. His “History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches,” in two good volumes, was one of the mightiest pamphlets ever written. As tutor to the Dauphin (the king’s eldest son), he produced, with other works, his celebrated “Discourse on Universal History.”

139

In proceeding now to give, from the four great preachers named in our title, a few specimen passages of the most famous pulpit oratory in the world, we need to prepare our readers against a natural disappointment. That which they are about to see has nothing in it of what will at first strike them as brilliant. The pulpit eloquence of the Augustan age of France was distinctly “classic,” and not at all “romantic,” in style. Its character is not ornate, but severe. There is little rhetorical figure in it, little of that “illustration” which our own different national taste is accustomed to demand from the pulpit. There is plenty of white light, “dry light” and white, for the reason; but there is almost no bright color for the fancy, and, it must be added, not a great deal of melting warmth for the heart.

The funeral orations of Bossuet are generally esteemed the masterpieces of this orator’s eloquence. He had great occasions, and he was great to match them. Still, readers might easily be disappointed in perusing a funeral oration of Bossuet’s. The discourse will generally be found to deal in commonplaces of description, of reflection, and of sentiment. Those commonplaces, however, are often made very impressive by the lofty, the magisterial, the imperial manner of the preacher in treating them. We exhibit a specimen, a single specimen only, and a brief one, in the majestic exordium to the funeral oration on the Princess Henrietta of England.

This princess was daughter to that unfortunate Stuart, King Charles I. of England. Her mother’s death—her mother was of the French house of Bourbon—had occurred but a short time before, and Bossuet had on that occasion pronounced the eulogy. The daughter, scarcely returned to France from a secret mission of state to England, the success of which made her an object of distinguished regard at Versailles, suddenly fell ill and died. Bossuet was summoned to preach at her funeral. (We have not been able to find an English translation of Bossuet, and we accordingly make the present transfer from French ourselves. We do the same, for the same reason, in the case of Massillon. In the case of 140 Bourdaloue, we succeeded in obtaining a printed translation which we could modify to suit our purpose.) Bossuet:

It will be felt how removed is the foregoing from any thing like an effort, on the preacher’s part, to startle his audience with the far-fetched and unexpected. It must, however, be admitted that Bossuet was not always—as, of our Webster, it has well been said that he always was—superior to the temptation to exaggerate an occasion by pomps of rhetoric. Bossuet was a great man, but he was not quite great enough to be wholly free from pride of self-consciousness in matching himself as an orator against “the most illustrious assembly in the world.”

The ordinary sermons of Bossuet are less read, and they 142 perhaps less deserve to be read, than those of Bourdaloue and Massillon.

Bourdaloue was a voice. He was the voice of one crying, not in the wilderness, but amid the homes and haunts of men, and, by eminence, in the court of the most powerful and most splendid of earthly monarchs. He was a Jesuit; one of the most devoted and most accomplished of an order filled with devoted and accomplished men. It belonged to his Jesuit character and Jesuit training that Bourdaloue should hold the place that he did, as ever-successful courtier at Versailles, all the while that, as preacher, he was using the “holy freedom of the pulpit” to launch those blank fulminations of his at sin in high places, at sin even in the highest, and all the briefer while that, as confessor to Madame de Maintenon, he was influencing the policy of Louis XIV.

No scandal of any sort attaches to the reputation of Louis Bourdaloue. He was a man of spotless fame—unless it be a spot on his fame that he could please the most selfish of sinful monarchs well enough to be that monarch’s chosen preacher during a longer time than any other pulpit orator whatever was tolerated at Versailles. He is described by all who knew him as a man of gracious spirit. If he did not reprobate and denounce the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, that was rather of the age than of Bourdaloue.

Sainte-Beuve, in a remarkably sympathetic appreciation of Bourdaloue—free, contrary to the critic’s wont, from hostile insinuation even—regards it as part of the merit of this preacher that there is, and that there can be, no biography of him. His public life is summed up in simply saying that he was a preacher. During thirty-four laborious and fruitful years he preached the doctrines of the Church; and this is the sole account to be given of him, except, indeed, that in the confessional he was, all that time, learning those secrets of the human heart which he used to such effect in composing his sermons. He had very suave and winning ways as confessor, though he enjoined great strictness as preacher. 143 This led a witty woman of his time to say of him: “Father Bourdaloue charges high in the pulpit, but he sells cheap in the confessional.” How much laxity he allowed as confessor, it is, of course, impossible to say. But his sermons remain to show that, though indeed he was severe and high in requirement as preacher, he did not fail to soften asperity by insisting on the goodness, while he insisted on the awfulness, of God. Still, it cannot be denied that somehow the elaborate compliments which, as an established convention of his pulpit, he not infrequently delivered to Louis XIV., tended powerfully to make it appear that his stern denunciation of sin, which at first blush might seem directly leveled at the king, had in reality no application at all, or but the very gentlest application, to the particular case of his Most Christian Majesty.

We begin our citations from Bourdaloue with an extract from a sermon of his on “A Perverted Conscience.” The whole discourse is one well worth the study of any reader. It is a piece of searching psychological analysis, and pungent application to conscience. Bourdaloue, in his sermons, has always the air of a man seriously intent on producing practical results. There are no false motions. Every swaying of the preacher’s weapon is a blow, and every blow is a hit. There is hardly another example in homiletic literature of such compactness, such solidity, such logical consecutiveness, such cogency, such freedom from surplusage. Tare and tret are excluded. Every thing counts. You meet with two or three adjectives, and you at first naturally assume, that, after the usual manner of homilists, Bourdaloue has thrown these in without rigorously definite purpose, simply to heighten a general effect. Not at all. There follows a development of the preacher’s thought, constituting virtually a distinct justification of each adjective employed. You soon learn that there is no random, no waste, in this man’s words. But here is the promised extract from the sermon on “A Perverted Conscience.” In it Bourdaloue depresses his gun, and discharges it point-blank at the audience 144 before him. You can almost imagine you see the ranks of “the great” laid low. Alas! one fears that, instead of biting the dust, those courtiers, with the king in the midst of them to set the example, only cried bravo in their hearts at the skill of the gunner:

What could surpass the adaptedness of such preaching as that to the need of the moment for which it was prepared? And how did the libertine French monarch contrive to escape the force of truth like the following, with which the preacher immediately proceeds?

Bourdaloue, as Jesuit, could not but feel the power of Pascal, in his “Provincial Letters,” constantly undermining the authority of his order. His preaching, as Sainte-Beuve well says, may be considered to have been, in the preacher’s intention, one prolonged confutation of Pascal’s immortal indictment. We borrow of Sainte-Beuve a short extract from Bourdaloue’s sermon on slander, which may serve as an instance to show with what adroitness the Jesuit retorted anonymously upon the Jansenist:

In conclusion, we give a passage or two of Bourdaloue’s sermon on “An Eternity of Woe.” Stanch orthodoxy the reader will find here. President Edwards’s discourse, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” is not more unflinching. But what a relief of contrasted sweetness does Bourdaloue interpose in the first part of the ensuing extract, to set off the grim and grisly horror of that which is to follow! We draw, for this case, from a translation, issued in Dublin under Roman Catholic auspices, of select sermons by Bourdaloue. 146 The translator, throughout his volume, has been highly loyal in spirit toward the great French preacher; but this has not prevented much enfeebling by him of the style of his original, to which we here do what we can to restore the tone:

It is not imagination, it is pure reason and intelligence, that now in Bourdaloue goes about the business of impressing the thought of the dreadfulness of an eternity of woe. The effect produced is not that of the lightning-flash suddenly revealing the jaws agape of an unfathomable abyss directly before you. It is rather that of steady, intolerable pressure gradually applied to crush, to annihilate, the soul:

That was a touching tribute from the elder to the younger—tribute touching, whether wrung, perforce, from a proudly humble, or freely offered by a simply magnanimous heart—when, like John the Baptist speaking of Jesus, Bourdaloue, growing old, said of Massillon, enjoying his swiftly crescent renown: “He must increase, and I must decrease.” It was a true presentiment of the comparative fortune of fame that impended for these two men. It was not, however, in the same path, but in a different, that Massillon outran Bourdaloue. In his own sphere, that of unimpassioned appeal to reason and to conscience, Bourdaloue is still without 148 a rival. No one else, certainly, ever earned, so well as he, the double title which his epigrammatic countrymen were once fond of bestowing upon him—“The king of preachers, and the preacher of kings.”

Jean Baptiste Massillon became priest by his own internal sense of vocation to the office, against the preference of his family that he should become, like his father, a notary. He seems to have been by nature sincerely modest in spirit. He had to be forced into the publicity of a preaching career at Paris. His ecclesiastical superior peremptorily required at his hands the sacrifice of his wish to be obscure. He at once filled Paris with his fame. The inevitable consequence followed. He was summoned to preach before the king at Versailles. Here he received, as probably he deserved, that celebrated compliment in epigram from Louis XIV.: “In hearing some preachers, I feel pleased with them; in hearing you, I feel displeased with myself.”

It must not, however, be supposed that Massillon preached like a prophet Nathan saying to King David, “Thou art the man”; or like a John the Baptist saying to King Herod, “It is not lawful for thee to have her ”; or like a John Knox denouncing Queen Mary. Massillon, if he was stern, was suavely stern. He complimented the king. The sword with which he wounded was wreathed with flowers. It is difficult not to feel that some unspoken understanding subsisted between the preacher and the king, which permitted the king to separate the preacher from the man, when Massillon used that great plainness of speech to his sovereign. The king did not, however, often invite this master of eloquence to make the royal conscience displacent with itself. Bourdaloue was ostensibly as outspoken as Massillon; but somehow that Jesuit preacher contented the king to be his hearer during as many as ten annual seasons, against the one or two only that Massillon preached at court before Louis.

The work of Massillon generally judged, though according to Sainte-Beuve not wisely judged, to be his choicest, is contained 149 in that volume of his which goes by the name of “Le Petit Carême”—literally, “The Little Lent”—a collection of sermons preached during a Lent before the king’s great-grandson and successor, youthful Louis XV. These sermons especially have given to their author a fame that is his by a title perhaps absolutely unique in literature. We know no other instance of a writer, limited in his production strictly to sermons, who holds his place in the first rank of authorship simply by virtue of supreme mastership in literary style.

Still, from the text of his printed discourses—admirable, exquisite, ideal compositions in point of form as these are—it will be found impossible to conceive adequately the living eloquence of Massillon. There are interesting traditions of the effects produced by particular passages of particular sermons of his. When Louis XIV. died, Massillon preached his funeral sermon. He began with that celebrated single sentence of exordium which, it is said, brought his whole audience, by instantaneous, simultaneous impulse, in a body to their feet. The modern reader will experience some difficulty in comprehending at once why that perfectly commonplace-seeming expression of the preacher should have produced an effect so powerful. The element of the opportune, the apposite, the fit, is always great part of the secret of eloquence. Nothing more absolutely appropriate can be conceived than was the sentiment, the exclamation, with which Massillon opened that funeral sermon. The image and symbol of earthly greatness, in the person of Louis XIV., had been shattered under the touch of iconoclast death. “God only is great!” said the preacher; and all was said. Those four short words had uttered completely, and with a simplicity incapable of being surpassed, the thought that usurped every breast. It is not the surprise of some striking new thought that is the most eloquent thing. The most eloquent thing is the surprise of that one word, suddenly spoken, which completely expresses some thought, present already and uppermost, but silent till now, awaiting 150 expression, in a multitude of minds. This most eloquent thing it was which, from Massillon’s lips that day, moved his susceptible audience to rise, like one man, and bow in mute act of submission to the truth of his words. The inventive and curious reader may exercise his ingenuity at leisure. He will strive in vain to conceive any other exordium than Massillon’s that would have matched the occasion presented.

There is an admirable anecdote of the pulpit, which—though since often otherwise applied—had, perhaps, its first application to Massillon. Some one congratulating the orator, as he came down from his pulpit, on the eloquence of the sermon just preached, that wise self-knower fenced by replying, “Ah, the devil has already apprised me of that!” The recluse celibate preacher was one day asked whence he derived that marvelous knowledge which he displayed of the passions, the weaknesses, the follies, the sins, of human nature. “From my own heart,” was his reply. Source sufficient, perhaps; but from the confessional, too, one may confidently add.

There is probably no better brief, quotable passage to represent Massillon at his imaginative highest in eloquence, than that most celebrated one of all, occurring toward the close of his memorable sermon on the “Fewness of the Elect.” The effect attending the delivery of this passage, on both of the two recorded occasions on which the sermon was preached, is reported to have been remarkable. The manner of the orator—downcast, as with the inward oppression of the same solemnity that he, in speaking, cast like a spell on the audience—indefinitely heightened the magical power of the awful conception excited. Not Bourdaloue himself, with that preternatural skill of his to probe the conscience of man to its innermost secret, could have exceeded the heart-searching rigor with which, in the earlier part of the discourse, Massillon had put to the rack the quivering consciences of his hearers. The terrors of the Lord, the shadows of the world to come, were thus already on all hearts. So much as this, Bourdaloue, too, with his incomparable 151 dialectic, could have accomplished. But there immediately follows a culmination in power, such as was distinctly beyond the height of Bourdaloue. Genius must be super-added to talent if you would have the supreme, either in poetry or in eloquence. There was an extreme point in Massillon’s discourses at which mere reason, having done, and done terribly, its utmost, was fain to confess that it could not go a single step farther. At that extreme point, suddenly, inexhaustible imagination took up the part of exhausted reason. Reason had made men afraid; imagination now appalled them. Massillon said:

What is there wanting in such eloquence as the foregoing? Wherein lies its deficiency of power to penetrate and subdue? Voltaire avowed that he found the sermons of Massillon to be among “the most agreeable books we have in our language. I love,” he went on, “to have them read to me at table.” There are things in Massillon that Voltaire should not have delighted to read, or to hear read—things that should have made him wince and revolt, if they did not make him yield and be converted. Was there fault in the preacher? Did he preach with professional, rather than with personal, zeal? Did his hearers feel themselves secretly acquitted by the man, at the self-same moment at which they were openly condemned by the preacher? It is impossible to say. But Massillon’s virtue was not lofty and regal; however it may have been free from just reproach. He was somewhat too capable of compliance. He was made bishop of Clermont, and his promotion cost him the anguish of having to help 153 consecrate a scandalously unfit candidate as archbishop of Cambray. Massillon’s, however, is a fair, if not an absolutely spotless, fame. Hierarch as he was, and orthodox Catholic, this most elegant of eloquent orators had a liberal strain in his blood which allied him politically with the “philosophers” of the time succeeding. He, with Fénelon, and perhaps with Racine, makes seem less abrupt the transition in France from the age of absolutism to the age of revolt and final revolution. There is distinct advance in Massillon, and advance more than is accounted for by his somewhat later time, toward the easier modern spirit in Church and in State, from the high, unbending austerity of that antique pontiff and minister, Bossuet.

In dealing with Saurin we are irresistibly reminded of the train of historic misfortunes that age after age have visited France. It bears eloquent, if tragic testimony to the enduring noble qualities of the French people, that they have survived so splendidly so much national suicide. What other great nation is there that has continued great and spilled so often her own best blood? The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, with its sequel of frightful hemorrhage in the loss to France of her Huguenots, the guillotine of the Revolution, the decimations of Napoleon, the madness of the Franco-German war, the Commune!

To such reflections we are forced; for Jacques Saurin preached his great sermons in French as a compulsory exile from France. He had a year or two’s experience as French preacher in London; but from his twenty-eighth year till he died at fifty-two he was pastor of the French church at The Hague in Holland.

Saurin’s living renown was great; and his renown has never been less, though it has been less resounding, since he died. This is as it could not but be; for the reputation of Saurin as preacher rested from the first on solid foundations that were not to be shaken. If he had been a loyal Roman Catholic, he would have been twinned with Bossuet, whom 154 he somewhat resembles, in the acclamations of general fame. It is far more in name than in merit that Bossuet surpasses him. Bossuet’s quasi-pontifical relation to the Gallican Church indeed engaged him in various activities which seemed to display a talent in him correspondingly more various than that of Saurin, who remained almost exclusively a preacher. But the difference is probably a difference of fortune rather than a difference of original gift. The intellect that expresses itself in Saurin’s sermons is certainly a spacious intellect. Saurin is in mere intellect as distinctly “great” as is Bossuet. In imagination, however, that attribute of genius as distinguished from talent, to Bossuet we suppose must be accorded superiority over Saurin.

Clearness, French clearness; order, French order; solidity of matter; sobriety of thought; soundness of doctrine; breadth of comprehension; sagacity and instructedness of interpretation; solemnity of inculcation; progress and cumulation of effect; strength and elevation, rather than grace and winningness, of style; address to the understanding, rather than appeal to the emotions; certitude of logic, rather than play of imagination; a theological, more than a practical, tendency of interest—such are the distinguishing characteristics of Saurin as preacher.

Sermons are literary products in which change from fashion to fashion of thought and of form makes itself felt more than in almost any other kind of literature. The sermons of one age are generally doomed to be obsolete in the age next following. But to this general rule Saurin’s sermons come near constituting an exception. They might, many of them, perhaps most of them, still be preached. This, certain pulpit plagiarists of a generation or two ago, are said to have learned.

The following extract will give our readers an idea how Saurin, toward the close of a discourse—having now done, for the occasion, with dispassionate argument—would follow up and press his hearer with deliberately vehement, unescapable oratoric harangue and appeal. His text is: “Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world.” Analyzing this, 155 he states thus his second head of discourse: “Motives to virtue are superior to motives to vice.”

To illustrate the point-blank directness, the almost excessive fidelity, amounting to something very like truculence, with which Saurin would train his guns and fire his broadsides into the faces and eyes of his hearers, let the following, our final citation, serve; we quote from the conclusion to a powerful sermon on infidelity:

157

One thing in just qualification of the praise due to Saurin for his pulpit eloquence requires to be added. When he attempts the figure of apostrophe, as he frequently does, personifying inanimate objects and addressing them in the way of oratoric appeal, he is very apt to produce a frigid effect, the absolute opposite of genuine eloquence. Nothing but imagination white-hot with passion justifies, in the use of the orator, the expedient of such apostrophe as this which Saurin affects. With Saurin, both the necessary imagination and the necessary passion seem somehow to fail; and he possessed neither the perfect judgment nor the perfect taste, nor yet the fine feeling, that might have chastised the audacities to which his ambition incited him. His rhetorically bold things he did in a certain cold-blooded way; so that, with him, what should have been the climax of oratoric effectiveness, or else not been at all, produces sometimes instead a reaction and recoil of disappointment. We thus indicate a shortcoming in Saurin which deposes this great preacher, one is compelled to admit, despite his remarkable merits, from the first into the second rank of orators.

Both the Roman Catholic and the Protestant lines of French pulpit eloquence are continued down to our own day. Lacordaire, Père Félix, Père Hyacinthe, of the Catholics, Frédéric Monod, Adolph Monod, Coquerel, of the Protestants, are names worthy to be here set down; and it may be added that Eugène Bersier, deceased in 1889, challenges on the whole not unequal comparison with the men treated in this chapter for pulpit power. He may be described as a kind of nineteenth-century Bossuet, tempered to Massillon, among French Protestant preachers.

But there is no Louis XIV. now to cast over any great preachers, even of the Roman Catholics, the illusive, factitious, reflected glory of the person and court, the sentence and seal, of the “most illustrious sovereign of the world.”

The seventeenth-century sacred eloquence of France, the sacred eloquence, that is to say, of the “great” French age, will always remain a unique tradition in the history of the pulpit.

158

XIII.

FÉNELON.

1651-1715.

If Bossuet is to Frenchmen a synonym for sublimity, no less to them is Fénelon a synonym for saintliness. From the French point of view, one might say, “the sublime Bossuet,” “the saintly Fénelon,” somewhat as one says, “the learned Selden,” “the judicious Hooker.” It is as much a French delight to idealize Fénelon an archangel Raphael, affable and mild, as it is to glorify Bossuet a Michael in majesty and power.

But saintliness of character was in Fénelon commended to the world by equal charm of person and of genius. The words of Milton describing Eve might be applied, with no change but that of gender, to Fénelon, both the exterior and the interior man:

The consent is general among those who saw Fénelon, and have left behind them their testimony, that alike in person, in character, and in genius, he was such as we thus describe him.

Twice, in his youth, he was smitten to the heart with a feeling of vocation to be a missionary. Both times he was thwarted by the intervention of friends. The second time, he wrote disclosing his half-romantic aspiration in a glowing letter of confidence and friendship to Bossuet, his senior by many years, but not yet become famous. Young Fénelon’s friend Bossuet was destined later to prove a bitter antagonist, almost a personal foe.

Until he was forty-two years old, François Fénelon lived 159 in comparative retirement, nourishing his genius with study, with contemplation, with choice society. He experimented in writing verse. Not succeeding to his mind, he turned to prose composition, and, leading the way, in a new species of literature, for Rousseau, for Chateaubriand, for Lamartine, and for many others, to follow, went on writing what, in ceasing to be verse, did not cease to be poetry.

The great world will presently involve Fénelon in the currents of history. Louis XIV., grown old, and become as selfishly greedy now of personal salvation as all his life he had been selfishly greedy of personal glory, seeks that object of his soul by serving the Church in the wholesale conversion of Protestants. He revokes the Edict of Nantes, which had secured religious toleration for the realm, and proceeds to dragoon the Huguenots into conformity with the Roman Catholic Church. The reaction in public sentiment against such rigors grew a cry that had to be silenced. Fénelon was selected to visit the heretic provinces, and win them to willing submission. He stipulated that every form of coercion should cease, and went to conquer all with love. His success was remarkable. But not even Fénelon quite escaped the infection of violent zeal for the Church. It seems not to be given to any man to rise wholly superior to the spirit of the world in which he lives.

The luster of Fénelon’s name, luminous from the triumphs of his mission among the Protestants, was sufficient to justify the choice of this man, a man both by nature and by culture so ideally formed for the office as was he, to be tutor to the heir prospective of the French monarchy. The Duke of Burgundy, grandson to Louis XIV., was accordingly put under the charge of Fénelon to be trained for future kingship. Never, probably, in the history of mankind, has there occurred a case in which the victory of a teacher could be more illustrious than actually was the victory of Fénelon as teacher to this scion of the house of Bourbon. We shall be giving our readers a relishable taste of St. Simon, the celebrated memoir-writer of the age of Louis XIV., if out of 160 the portrait in words, drawn by him from life, of Fénelon’s princely pupil, we transfer here a few strong lines to our pages. St. Simon says:

St. Simon attributes to Fénelon “every virtue under heaven”; but his way was to give to God rather than to man the praise of the remarkable change which, during Fénelon’s charge of the Duke of Burgundy, came over the character of the prince.

The grandfather survived the grandson; and it was never put to the stern proof of historical experiment whether Fénelon had indeed turned out one Bourbon entirely different from all the other members, earlier or later, of that royal line.

Before, however, the Duke of Burgundy was thus snatched away from the perilous prospect of a throne, his beloved teacher was parted from him, not indeed by death, but by 161 what, to the archbishop’s susceptible and suffering spirit, was worse than death, by “disgrace.” The disgrace was such as has ever since engaged for its subject the interest, the sympathy, and the admiration of mankind. Fénelon lost the royal favor. That was all—for the present; but that was much. He was banished from court, and he ceased to be preceptor to the Duke of Burgundy. The king, in signal severity, used his own hand to strike Fénelon’s name from the list of the household of his grandson and heir. The archbishop—for Fénelon had previously been made archbishop of Cambray—returned into his diocese as into an exile. But his cup of humiliation was by no means full. Bossuet will stain his own glory by following his exiled former pupil and friend, with hostile pontifical rage, to crush him in his retreat.

The occasion was a woman, a woman with the charm of genius and of exalted character, a Christian, a saint, but a mystic—it was Madame Guyon. Madame Guyon taught that it was possible to love God for himself alone, purely and disinterestedly. Fénelon received the doctrine, and Madame Guyon was patronized by Madame de Maintenon. Bossuet scented heresy. He was too much a “natural man” to understand Madame Guyon. The king was like the prelate, his minister, in spirit, and in consequent incapacity. It was resolved that Fénelon must condemn Madame Guyon. But Fénelon would not. He was very gentle, very conciliatory, but in fine he would not. Controversy ensued, haughty, magisterial, domineering, on the part of Bossuet; on the part of Fénelon, meek, docile, suasive. The world wondered, and watched the duel. Fénelon finally did what king James’s translators misleadingly make Job wish that his adversary had done—he wrote a book, “The Maxims of the Saints.” In this book, he sought to show that the accepted and even canonized teachers of the Church had taught the doctrine for which, in his own case and in the case of Madame Guyon, condemnation was now invoked. Bossuet was pope at Paris: and he, in full presence, denounced to the monarch 162 the heresy of Fénelon. At this moment of crisis for Fénelon, it happened that news was brought him of the burning of his mansion at Cambray with all his books and manuscripts. It will always be remembered that Fénelon only said: “It is better so than if it had been the cottage of a poor laboring-man.”

Madame de Maintenon, till now his friend, with perfect frigid facility separated herself from the side of the accused. The controversy was carried to Rome, where at length Fénelon’s book was condemned—condemned mildly, but condemned. The pope is said to have made the remark that Fénelon erred by loving God too much, and Fénelon’s antagonists by loving their fellow-man too little. Fénelon bowed to the authority of the Church, and meekly in his own cathedral confessed his error. It was a logical thing for him, as loyal Catholic, to do; and he did it with a beautiful grace of humility. The Protestant spirit, however, rebels on his behalf, and finds it difficult even to admire the manner in which was done by him a thing that seems so unfit to have been done by him at all. Bossuet did not long survive his inglorious triumph over so much sanctity of personal character, over so much difficult and beautiful height of doctrinal and practical instruction to virtue. Fénelon seems to have been reported as preaching a funeral sermon on the dead prelate. “I have wept and prayed,” he wrote to a friend, “for this old instructor of my youth; but it is not true that I celebrated his obsequies in my cathedral, and preached his funeral sermon. Such affectation, you know, is foreign to my nature.” The iron must have gone deep, to wring from that gentle bosom even so much cry as this of wounded feeling.

It is hard to tell what might now have befallen Fénelon, in the way of good fortune—he might even have been recalled to court, and re-installed in his office of tutor to the prince—had not a sinister incident, not to have been looked for, at an inopportune moment occurred. The “Telemachus” appeared in print, and kindled a sudden flame of popular feeling, which instantly spread in universal conflagration over the face of 163 Europe. This composition of Fénelon’s the author had written to convey, under a form of quasi-poetical fiction, lessons of wisdom in government to the mind of his royal pupil. The existence of the manuscript book would seem to have been intended to be a secret from the king—indeed, from almost every one, except the pupil himself for whose use it was made. But a copyist proved false to his trust, and furnished a copy of “Telemachus” to a printer in Holland, who lost no time in publishing a book so likely to sell. But the sale of the book surpassed all expectation. Holland not only, but Belgium, Germany, France, and England multiplied copies as fast as they could; still Europe could not get copies as fast as she wanted them.

The secret of such popularity did not lie simply in the literary merits of “Telemachus.” It lay more in a certain interpretation that the book was supposed to bear. “Telemachus” was understood to be a covert criticism of Louis XIV., and of the principle of absolute monarchy embodied in him. This imputed intention of the book could not fail to become known at Versailles. The result, of course, was fatal, and finally fatal, to the prospects, whatever these may have been, of Fénelon’s restoration to favor at court. The archbishop thenceforward was left to do in comparative obscurity the duties of his episcopal office in his diocese of Cambray. He devoted himself, with exemplary and touching fidelity, to the interests of his flock, loving them and loved by them, until he died. It was an entirely worthy and adequate employment of his powers. The only abatement needful from the praise to be bestowed upon his behavior in this pastoral relation is that he suffered himself sometimes to think of his position as one of “disgrace.” His reputation meantime for holy character and conduct was European. His palace at Cambray, hospitably open ever to the resort of suffering need, indeed almost his whole diocese, lying on the frontier of France, was by mutual consent of contending armies, treated in war as a kind of mutual inviolable ground, invested with privilege of sanctuary. It was an instructive 164 example of the serene and beautiful ascendency sometimes divinely accorded to illustrious personal goodness.

There had been a moment, even subsequently to the affair of the “Telemachus” publication, when it looked as if, after long delay, a complete worldly triumph for Fénelon was assured, and was near. The father of the Duke of Burgundy died, and nothing then seemed to stand between Fénelon’s late pupil and the throne, nothing but the precarious life of an aged monarch, visibly approaching the end. The Duke of Burgundy, through all changes, had remained unchangingly fast in his affectionate loyalty to Fénelon. Sternly forbidden, by the jealous and watchful king, his grandfather, to communicate with his old teacher, he yet had found means to send to Fénelon, from time to time, reassuring signals of his trust and love. Fénelon was now, in all eyes, the predestined prime minister of a new reign about to commence. Through devoted friends of his own, near to the person of the prince at court, Fénelon sent minutes of advice to his pupil, which outlined a whole beneficent policy of liberal monarchical rule. A new day seemed dawning for France. The horrible reaction of the Regency and of Louis XV. might, perhaps, have been averted, and, with that spared to France, the revolution itself might have been accomplished without the Revolution. But it was not to be. The Duke of Burgundy first buried his wife, and then, within a few days, followed her himself to the grave. He died sincerely rejoicing that God had taken him away from the dread responsibility of reigning.

“All my ties are broken,” mourned Fénelon; “there is no longer any thing to bind me to the earth.” In truth, the teacher survived his pupil but two or three years. When he died, his sovereign, gloomy with well-grounded apprehension for the future of his realm, said, with tardy revival of recognition for the virtue that had perished in Fénelon: “Here was a man who could have served us well under the disasters by which my kingdom is about to be assailed.”

Fénelon’s literary productions are various; but they all 165 have the common character of being works written for the sake of life, rather than for the sake of literature. They were inspired each by a practical purpose, and adapted each to a particular occasion. His treatise on the “Education of Girls” was written for the use of a mother who desired instruction on the topic from Fénelon. His argument on the “Being of a God” was prepared as a duty of his preceptorship to the prince. But the one book of Fénelon, which was an historical event when it appeared, and which stands an indestructible classic in literature, is the “Telemachus.” It remains for us briefly to give some idea of this book.

The first thing to be said is, that those are mistaken who suppose themselves to have obtained a true idea of “Telemachus” from having partly read it at school, as an exercise in French. The essence of the work lies beyond those few opening pages to which the exploration of school-boys and school-girls is generally limited. This masterpiece of Fénelon is much more than a charming piece of romantic and sentimental poetry in prose. It is a kind of epic, indeed, like the “Odyssey,” only written in rhythmical prose instead of rhythmical verse; but, unlike the “Odyssey,” it is an idyllic epic written with an ulterior purpose of moral and political didactics. It was designed as a manual of instruction—instruction made delightful to a prince—to inculcate the duties incumbent on a sovereign.

Telemachus, our readers will remember, was the son of Ulysses. Fénelon’s story relates the adventures encountered by Telemachus in search for his father, so long delayed on his return from Troy to Ithaca. Telemachus is imagined by Fénelon to be attended by Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, masked from his recognition, as well as from the recognition of others, under the form of an old man. Minerva, of course, constantly imparts the wisest counsel to young Telemachus, who has his weaknesses, as had the young Duke of Burgundy, but who is essentially well-disposed, as Fénelon hoped his royal pupil would finally turn out to be. Nothing can exceed the urbanity and grace with which the delicate 166 business is conducted by Fénelon, of teaching a bad prince, with a very bad example set him by his grandfather, to be a good king. The style in which the story is told, and in which the advice is insinuated, is exquisite, is beyond praise. The “soft delicious” stream of sound runs on, as from a fountain, and like “linked sweetness long drawn out.” Never had prose a flow of melody more luscious. It is perpetual ravishment to the ear. The invention, too, of incident is fruitful, while the landscape and coloring are magical for beauty. We give a few extracts, to be read with that application in mind to Louis XIV., and to the state of France, which, when the book was first printed, gave it such an exciting interest in the eyes of Europe. Telemachus, after the manner of Æneas to Queen Dido, is relating to the goddess Calypso, into whose island he has come, the adventures that have previously befallen him. He says that he, with Mentor (Minerva in disguise), found himself in Crete. Mentor had been there before, and was ready to tell Telemachus all about the country. Telemachus was naturally interested to learn respecting the Cretan monarchy. Mentor, he says, informed him as follows:

Pretty sound doctrine, the foregoing, on the subject of the duties devolving on a king. The “paternal” idea, to be sure, of government is in it; but there is the idea, too, of limited or constitutional monarchy. The spirit of just and liberal political thought had, it seems, not been wholly extinguished, even at the court, by that oppression of mind—an oppression seldom, if ever, in human history exceeded—which was enforced under the unmitigated absolutism of Louis XIV. The literature that, with Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, the Encyclopædists, prepared the Revolution, had already begun virtually to be written when Fénelon wrote his “Telemachus.” It is easy to see why the fame of Fénelon should by exception have been dear even to the hottest infidel haters of that ecclesiastical hierarchy to which the archbishop of Cambray himself belonged. This lover of liberty, this gentle rebuker of kings, was of the freethinkers, at least in the sympathy of political thought. Nay, the Revolution itself is foreshown in a remarkable glimpse of conjectural prophecy which occurs in the “Telemachus.” Idomeneus is a headstrong king, whom Mentor is made by the author to reprove and instruct for the Duke of Burgundy’s benefit. To Idomeneus—a character taken, and not unplausibly taken, to have been suggested to Fénelon by the example of Louis XIV.—to this imaginary counterpart of the reigning monarch of France, Mentor holds the following language. How could the sequel of Bourbon despotism in France—a sequel suspended now for a time, but two or three generations later to be dreadfully visited on the heirs of Louis XIV.—have been more fully foreshadowed? The “Telemachus”:

So much is perhaps enough to indicate the political drift of the “Telemachus.” That drift is, indeed, observable everywhere throughout the book.

We conclude our exhibition of this fine classic, by letting Fénelon appear more purely now in his character as dreamer and poet. Young Prince Telemachus has, Ulysses-like, and Æneas-like, his descent into Hades. This incident affords Fénelon opportunity to exercise his best powers of awful and of lovely imagining and describing. Christian ideas are, in this episode of the “Telemachus,” superinduced upon pagan, after a manner hard, perhaps, to reconcile with the verisimilitude required by art, but at least productive of very noble and very beautiful results. First, one glimpse of Tartarus as conceived by Fénelon. It is the spectacle of kings who on earth abused their power that Telemachus is beholding:

If the “perpetual feast of nectar’d sweets” that the “Telemachus” affords is felt at times to be almost cloying, it is not, as our readers have now seen, for want of occasional contrasts of a bitterness sufficiently mordant and drastic. But the didactic purpose is never lost sight of by the author. Here is an aspect of the Elysium found by Telemachus. How could any thing be more delectably conceived and described? The translator, Dr. Hawkesworth, is animated to an English style that befits the sweetness of his original. The “Telemachus:”

The leaden good sense of Louis XIV. pronounced Fénelon the “most chimerical” man in France. The founder of the kingdom of heaven would have been a dreamer, to this most worldly-minded of “Most Christian” monarchs. Bossuet, who, about to die, read something of Fénelon’s “Telemachus,” said it was a book hardly serious enough for a clergyman to write. A more serious book, whether its purpose be regarded, or its undoubted actual influence in molding the character of a prospective ruler of France, was not written by any clergyman of Fénelon’s or Bossuet’s time.

Fénelon was an eloquent preacher as well as an elegant writer. His influence exerted in both the two functions, that of the writer and that of the preacher, was powerfully felt in 171 favor of the freedom of nature in style as against the conventionality of culture and art. He insensibly helped on that reform from a too rigid classicism, which in our day we have seen pushed to its extreme in the exaggerations of romanticism. Few wiser words have ever been spoken on the subject of oratory than are to be found in his “Dialogues on Eloquence.”

Disappearing space warns us that we must perforce let pass from presence the gracious spirit of Fénelon. But we should wrong this most engaging of prelates, and we should wrong our readers, not still to represent a side of his character and of his literary work, a very important side, that thus far has been only hinted at in incidental allusion. We mean that distinctively religious side which belongs alike to the man and to the writer.

Fénelon, as priest, was something more than professional preacher, pastor, theologian. He was a devout soul, the subject of a transcendent Christian experience, even verging on mysticism. In his capacity of spiritual director, he wrote what are called “spiritual letters,” many of which survive, included in his published works. These have a very peculiarly ripe, sweet, chaste, St. John-like quality of tone, and they are written in a pure, simple, transparent style, that reads as if the thought found its own form of expression without the smallest trouble on the part of the writer. The style, in fact, is absolute perfection; you cannot tell the mere literal truth about it and not thus seem to be exaggerating its merit. Even in translation some charm of such ultimate felicity in it cannot fail to be felt.

Almost any “spiritual” letter that we happen first to strike will be as good as any other, to illustrate the rare culture of heart, the deep spiritual wisdom, the perfect urbanity in manner, reconciled with the perfect frankness in fact, and the circumfluent grace of literary style, with which this heavenly-minded man conducted, through correspondence, his cure of individual souls. We pluck out a few specimen sentences from two different letters, and present them detached, without setting of context:

172

What now follows, ending our extracts from Fénelon’s writings, we give, not only for its own value, but for the light it throws on the charming humility of the author:

It is impossible not to associate with Fénelon, in the thought of this spiritual life of his, explored and purified so deep, that remarkable woman, Madame Guyon, to whom in certain religious relations the great and gentle archbishop ostensibly, and perhaps really, submitted himself, as one who learns to one who teaches. Her exaltation—how far real, and how far illusory only, let us leave it for the All-knower to judge—made Madame Guyon easily equal to the seemingly audacious part of spiritual guide to a man who was at once one of the most illustrious writers, one of the most highly placed Church dignitaries, and one of the saintliest Christians in Europe. It is undoubtedly true that the sage can learn more from the fool than the fool can from the sage; and therefore if it could be proved to have been indeed the fact that, of the two, Fénelon was the greater gainer from the relation existing between himself and Madame Guyon, that 173 might well be only because he was already a wiser person than she.

We have no room here to show Madame Guyon by any of her extant letters addressed to Fénelon; but we may take the present occasion to introduce at least a few stanzas from one of those sweet little Christian poems of hers which a spirit not far alien from Fénelon’s own, we mean William Cowper, has put for us into fairly happy English expression. Madame Guyon spent ten years in prison—for teaching that souls should love God unselfishly, for his own sake only!—and it is in prison that this meekly triumphing song of hers must be imagined as sung by the author. It bears the title, “The Soul that Loves God Finds Him Everywhere.”

French literature, unfortunately, is on the whole such in character as to need all that it can show to be cast into the scale of moral elevation and purity. Fénelon alone—he was not alone, as the instance of Madame Guyon has just freshly been reminding us—but Fénelon alone were enough, in quality supported by quantity, not indeed to overcome, but to go far toward overcoming, the perverse inclination of the balance.

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XIV.

LE SAGE.

1668-1747.

Le Sage was a fruitful father of literary product, but it is as the author of “Gil Blas” that he is entitled to his place in these pages. “The Adventures of Gil Blas” justly enjoys the distinction of being among the few works of fiction that are read everywhere, and everywhere acknowledged to be masterpieces in literature. Lapse of time and change of fashion seem not to tend at all toward making “Gil Blas” obsolete. With every generation of men it takes as it were a fresh lease of inexhaustible immortality.

Of course, there must be something elemental in the quality and merit of a book, especially a book of fiction, concerning which this can truly be said. A novel “Gil Blas” is generally called. The name is hardly descriptive. Le Sage’s masterpiece is rather a book of human nature and of human life. It constitutes already, embraced within the compass of a single work, that which it was the ambition of the novelist Balzac to achieve in an Alexandrian library of fiction; “Gil Blas” is the whole “comedy” of man. The breadth of it is enormous. There is hardly any thing lacking to it that is human—unless it be some truly noble human character, some truly noble human action.

We spoke of it not amiss, when we used Balzac’s half-cynical word and called it the comedy of man. Le Sage involuntarily reveals his own limitation in the fact that he has converted into comedy the whole mingled drama of man’s earthly condition. Within his proper individual bounds, this man’s dimensions are so large that he has been not unfitly styled Shakespearean. But Shakespeare exceeds Le Sage in measure by a whole hemisphere. Shakespeare knows how to be serious, to be tragic; as Le Sage does not. Matter 175 of tragedy indeed abounds in “Gil Blas,” but it is all treated lightly, in the manner of comedy. You are allured, in reading, to laugh, when, if you return at all upon yourself, you are conscious you ought rather to weep. Le Sage is the antithesis of Rousseau, of Chateaubriand, of Lamartine, of George Sand—writers who know as little of laughter as Le Sage does of tears.

But it should at once, and strongly, be said that Le Sage is no cynic. It is not a sneering, but a smiling, mask that he wears. The smile is of a worldly-wisdom not ill-pleased with itself, and therefore not ill-pleased with the world which it rallies. It is a genial smile. But for all that, if you are yourself at bottom a serious man, you are disturbed at last. You are vexed to find yourself incessantly brought to smile at what you know ought to move your shame, your indignation, or your grief. The moral temper which Le Sage exhibits and which he engenders is not the “enthusiasm of humanity.” It is less the temper to help your fellow-men than the temper to profit the most that you can by their weaknesses, by their follies, and even by their crimes. Le Sage’s hero, “Gil Blas,” goes through a series of “adventures,” in which nearly every human sin is committed by him and by his fellows, either unblushingly, or, if with any show of compunction at all, then with such show of compunction as is almost worse than perfect indifference would be. The book is not in intention immoral, but only unmoral. It may well be questioned whether in effect it be not the more immoral for this very character in it. The abounding gay animal spirits of the narrative go frisking along as if let loose in a lucky world where moral distinctions were things that did not exist; the real world indeed, only with the deepest reality of all left out!

Verisimilitude seems hardly sought. The situations often waver on the edge of the ludicrously farcical. The tenor of the production stops barely short of sheer extravaganza. There is no unity, progressiveness, culmination of plot. The whole book is a mere concatenation, scarcely concatenation, 176 succession, say rather, of “adventures,” any one of which is nearly as good a starting-point for the reader as any other would be.

The scene of the story and the local color are all Spanish. Le Sage’s previous experience of travel in Spain, as well as his long occupation in translating from the Spanish into French, probably influenced him to this choice of medium for his masterpiece; which, by the way, it cost the author intervals of time covering twenty-two years to bring to its completion. The fact of its Spanish character gave color to the charge, deemed now to have been exploded, that “Gil Blas” was plagiarized by Le Sage from a Spanish original. It may be added that laying the scene and action of his story in Spain left Le Sage the more free to satirize, as he undoubtedly does, certain persons and certain manners belonging to his own country, France.

Of Alain René Le Sage, the man, there need little be said. He was a successful writer of comedies for the stage. Of these the most were ephemeral productions. Two, however, and one especially, the “Turcaret,” have the honor of ranking, in French literature, next to the very highest in their kind, the comedies of Molière. Never rich, Le Sage was always independent in spirit. The story is told of him that, arriving once unavoidably late at a noble mansion where he had made an appointment to read one of his own productions, he was reproached by the distinguished hostess for making the company lose an hour in waiting; whereupon he replied: “I give the company a chance to recover their lost hour,” and refusing to be placated bowed himself out.

Smollet, the celebrated English novelist—and historian so-called—has translated “Gil Blas.” We make use of his translation in presenting our extracts from this novel to our readers. There are two passages, both deservedly famous, which will admirably exemplify Le Sage at his best; one of these is the immortal episode concerning the illustrious physician, Doctor Sangrado, and the other is the instructive relation 177 of Gil Blas’s experience in discharging the office of what one might call literary valet and critic to an archbishop.

First we introduce Doctor Sangrado.

Gil Blas is at this time in the Spanish town of Valladolid serving an ecclesiastic in the capacity of lackey. His master, falling sick, sends for a physician. Gil Blas—the novel is autobiographic in form—shall tell his own story:

Blood-letting, as an expedient of the healing art, has happily gone out of fashion; but Dr. Sangrado’s other master secret, the therapeutic drinking of hot water, has been rehabilitated in our days. We sincerely hope that none of our hot-water-drinking readers will let Le Sage laugh them out of countenance in holding to their habit—if it really does them good!

Gil Blas is promoted to be servant, and then professional assistant, to the famous Dr. Sangrado. Gil Blas and the 178 doctor’s maid were warned by their master against eating much, but, now, however, Gil Blas shall himself again resume the part of narrator:

Gil Blas , discouraged, was about to leave Dr. Sangrado’s service, when that distinguished physician said to him—we take up the text of the story once more:

This resolution Gil Blas carried out, and, returning home drunk in consequence, gave Dr. Sangrado an artfully heightened account of a scuffle he had had with a rival physician of 179 his master named Cuchillo. Let Gil Blas pursue the narrative:

In passing from the humor of Le Sage’s Dr. Sangrado, we cannot refrain from exhorting the reader not to miss that refinement about water made hot without actually boiling. The present writer seems to himself to have encountered the same delicacy of hot-water-drinking in his own personal observation of those who now practice this method of health or of cure.

A later fortune of Gil Blas, in his long career of extremely various “adventures,” shaken from change to change as in a kaleidoscope, was to fall into the service of an archbishop, by whom he was soon advanced to a post of confidential favor. Gil Blas became in fact the archbishop’s “guide, philosopher, and friend,” in the very important matter 180 of that high dignitary’s literary and historical reputation. This happened through Gil Blas’s felicity in copying out with judicious calligraphy—a calligraphy such as seemed to their author to commend those productions in some fit proportion to their worth—the venerable archbishop’s homilies. Gil Blas thus relates the immediate, and then the more remote, result of his submitting to the archbishop his maiden essay in copy-hand reproduction of that prelate’s pulpit rhetoric:

Gil Blas was destined soon to be put to the extreme proof of his fidelity. Himself must tell how:

It would be hard, we think, to overmatch anywhere in literature the shrewd but genial satire, the quiet, effective comedy, of the foregoing. How deep it gently goes, probing and searching into the secret springs of our common human nature! The cool, the frontless calculation of self-interest on Gil Blas’s part throughout the whole course of his conduct of the relation between himself and the archbishop is perfectly characteristic of the impudent easy-heartedness everywhere displayed of this conscienceless adventurer. It illustrates the consummate art of the author that the whole is so managed that, while you do not sympathize with his hero, you still are by no means forced to feel unplesantly offended at him. This is a great feat of lullaby to the conscience of the reader; for the character of the work is such that if, in perusing it, you should throughout keep vigilantly obeying the wholesome safeguard injunction of the apostle, “Abhor that which is evil,” you would be so busy doing the duty of abhorring as seriously to interfere with your enjoyment of the comedy. To get the pleasure or the profit, and at the same time leave the taint, that is the problem often in studying the masterpieces of literature. As generally, so in the case of “Gil Blas,” it is a problem perhaps best to be solved by being still more intent on leaving the taint than on getting the pleasure or the profit.

On the whole, the reading of “Gil Blas” entire is a task or a diversion that may safely in most cases be postponed to the leisure of late life. The whole is such, or is not so good, as the part that has here been shown. It is an instance in which the building is very fairly represented 184 by a single specimen brick. Multiply what you have seen by the necessary factor, and you have the total product with little or no loss.

It ought to be added that “Gil Blas,” as in local color and in what might be styled medium not French at all, is also in general character the least French of French productions. It seems almost as if expressly written to be part of what Goethe taught his disciples to look for, namely, a “world-literature.” “Gil Blas,” though French in form, is in essence French only because it is human. And for the same reason it is of every other nation as well. It possesses, therefore, as French literature a unique and, so to speak, paradoxical importance in not being French literature; it is, in fact, perhaps quite the only French book that is less national than universal.

XV.

MONTESQUIEU : 1689-1755; DE TOCQUEVILLE : 1805-1859.

To Montesquieu belongs the glory of being the founder, or inventor, of the philosophy of history. Bossuet might dispute this palm with him; but Bossuet, in his “Discourse on Universal History,” only exemplified the principle which it was left to Montesquieu afterward more consciously to develop.

Three books, still living, are associated with the name of Montesquieu—“The Persian Letters,” “The Greatness and the Decline of the Romans,” and “The Spirit of Laws.” “The Persian Letters” are a series of epistles purporting to be written by a Persian sojourning in Paris and observing the manners and morals of the people around him. The idea is ingenious; though the ingenuity, we suppose, was not original with Montesquieu. Such letters afford the writer of them an admirable advantage for telling satire on contemporary follies. This production of Montesquieu became the suggestive example to Goldsmith for his “Citizen of the 185 World; or, Letters of a Chinese Philosopher.” We shall have here no room for illustrative citations from Montesquieu’s “Persian Letters.”

The second work, that on the “Greatness and the Decline of the Romans,” is less a history than a series of essays on the history of Rome. It is brilliant, striking, suggestive. It aims to be philosophical rather than historical. It deals in bold generalizations. The spirit of it is, perhaps, too constantly and too profoundly hostile to the Romans. Something of the ancient Gallic enmity—as if a derivation from that last and noblest of the Gauls, Vercingetorix—seems to animate the Frenchman in discussing the character and the career of the great conquering nation of antiquity. The critical element is the element chiefly wanting to make Montesquieu’s work equal to the demands of modern historical scholarship. Montesquieu was, however, a full worthy forerunner of the philosophical historians of to-day. We give a single extract in illustration—an extract condensed from the chapter in which the author analyzes and expounds the foreign policy of the Romans. The generalizations are bold and brilliant,—too bold, probably, for strict critical truth. (We use, for our extract, the recent translation by Mr. Jehu Baker, who enriches his volume with original notes of no little interest and value.) Montesquieu:

The “Spirit of Laws” is probably to be considered the masterpiece of Montesquieu. It is our duty, however, to say that this work is quite differently estimated by different authorities. By some, it is praised in terms of the highest admiration, as a great achievement in wide and wise political or juridical philosophy. By others, it is dismissed very lightly, as the ambitious, or, rather, pretentious, effort of a superficial man, a showy mere sciolist.

The philosophical aim and ambition of the author at once appear in the inquiry which he institutes for the three several animating principles of the several forms of government respectively distinguished by him; namely, democracy (or republicanism), monarchy, and despotism. What these three principles are will be seen from the following statement: “As virtue is necessary in a republic, and in a monarchy honor , so fear is necessary in a despotic government.” The 188 meaning is that in republics virtue possessed by the citizens is the spring of national prosperity; that under a monarchy the desire of preferment at the hands of the sovereign is what quickens men to perform services to the State; that despotism thrives by fear inspired in the breasts of those subject to its sway.

To illustrate the freely discursive character of the work, we give the whole of chapter sixteen—there are chapters still shorter—in Book VII.:

The relation of the foregoing chapter to the subject indicated in the title of the book is sufficiently obscure and remote for a work like this, purporting to be philosophical. What relation exists seems to be found in the fact that the custom described tends to produce that popular virtue by which republics flourish. But the information, at all events, is curious and interesting.

The following paragraphs, taken from the second chapter of Book XIV., contain in germ a large part of the philosophy underlying M. Taine’s essays on the history of literature:

In the following extract, from chapter five, Book XXIV., the climatic theory is again applied, this time to the matter of religion, in a style that makes one think of Buckle’s “History of Civilization”:

Climate is a “great matter” with Montesquieu. In treating of the subject of a State changing its religion, he says:

For the Christian religion, Montesquieu professes profound respect—rather as a pagan political philosopher might do, than as one intimately acquainted with it by a personal experience 190 of his own. His spirit, however, is humane and liberal. It is the spirit of Montaigne, it is the spirit of Voltaire, speaking in the idiom of this different man, and of this different man as influenced by his different circumstances. Montesquieu had had practical proof of the importance to himself of not offending the dominant hierarchy.

On the whole, concerning Montesquieu it may justly be said, that of all political philosophers, he, if not the profoundest, is at least one of the most interesting; if not the most accurate and critical, at least one of the most brilliant and suggestive.

As to Montesquieu the man, it is perhaps sufficient to say that he seems to have been a very good type of the French gentleman of quality. An interesting story told by Sainte-Beuve reveals, if true, a side at once attractive and repellent of his personal character. Montesquieu at Marseilles employed a young boatman, whose manner and speech indicated more cultivation than was to have been looked for in one plying his vocation. The philosopher learned his history. The youth’s father was at the time a captive in one of the Barbary States, and this son of his was now working to earn money for his ransom. The stranger listened apparently unmoved, and went his way. Some months later, home came the father, released he knew not how, to his surprised and overjoyed family. The son guessed the secret, and, meeting Montesquieu a year or so after in Marseilles, threw himself in grateful tears at his feet, begged the generous benefactor to reveal his name and to come and see the family he had blessed. Montesquieu, calmly expressing himself ignorant of the whole business, actually shook the young fellow off, and turned away without betraying the least emotion. It was not till after the cold-blooded philanthropist’s death that the fact came out.

A tranquil, happy temperament was Montesquieu’s. He would seem to have come as near as any one ever did to being the natural master of his part in life. But the world was too much for him; as it is for all—at last. Witness the 191 contrast of these two different sets of expressions from his pen. In earlier manhood he says:

In late life, the brave, cheerful tone had declined to this:

Then it took a further fall to this:

Finally it touches nadir:

When Montesquieu died, only Diderot, among Parisian men of letters, followed him to his tomb.

Belonging to an entirely different world, literary, social, political, from that in which Montesquieu flourished—more than one full century, and that a French century, had intervened—was a man kindred in genius with him, to whom, for the double reason that his intellectual rank deserves it, and that the subject of his principal work is one to command especially the interest of Americans, we feel compelled to devote serious, though it must be hastening, attention. We refer to Alexis de Tocqueville , the author of that famous book, “Democracy in America.” We can most conveniently discharge our duty by letting their likeness in intellectual character and achievement bridge for us the chasm of time between the two men, and thus considering the later in conjunction here with the earlier author.

“Democracy in America” is a most remarkable book to 192 have been, as in fact it was, the production of a young man of thirty. It was the fruit of a tour in the United States undertaken by the writer ostensibly to visit in an official capacity the prisons of the new nation that France had helped create, in a kind of counterpoise to England, on this side of the Atlantic. The inquisitive young French inspector inspected much more than the prison system of the lusty infant republic. He observed and studied American institutions and manners at large, in order to lay a base line for the boldest speculative triangulation into the probable political future of the world.

Tocqueville held the belief that democracy, as a system of government, was destined to prevail universally. He wrote his observations and reflections, and he made his guesses, primarily for the instruction of France. So confident was his conviction on the subject of democratic destiny for his own country at least, that, while as yet the apparently profound peace was undisturbed of the monarchical reaction under Louis Philippe, he predicted an impending revolution; predicted in fact the revolution which actually occurred in 1848. France, after that date, both during the prophet’s life, and subsequently to his death, experienced her vibrations from, one form of government to another; but no one can now deny that thus far the resultant tendency is in favor of Tocqueville’s bold speculative forecast of the political future of his nation. The same thing is true, we think, more broadly, of the world in general; and of this Brazil apparently furnishes a striking late instance in confirmation.

“Democracy in America” is a classic in literature. Its credit is highest with those best qualified to form a judgment. But its fame is universal. It associates its author in rank of genius with the foremost political philosophers of the world—with Machiavelli, with Montesquieu, with Burke. Every American aiming at a political career, every American journalist having to discuss political subjects should be familiar with this book. Mr. Bryce’s more recent work on the United States, which has sprung so suddenly into such 193 commanding fame, by no means supersedes, though it does most usefully supplement, the monumental treatise of Tocqueville—a name generally miscalled “De Tocqueville.”

Of Alexis de Tocqueville’s life it need only be said that, sprung of a noble French family, he ran a respectable, though neither a brilliant, nor a very influential, career in the politics of his country; until, discontented with the second empire, that of the usurper, Louis Napoleon, he retired, about 1851, from public service and devoted himself to labor with the pen. His second chief work was “The Ancient Régime,” published in 1856, three years before his death.

We cannot probably make a better brief selection, at once more characteristic and more interesting, from Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” than by presenting in large part the chapter entitled: “Causes which render democratic armies weaker than other armies at the outset of a campaign, and more formidable in a protracted warfare.”

A striking illustrative light was destined to be thrown by momentous subsequent history in our own land on the sagacity and justness of the speculations hazarded here by the author on his particular topic.

It would not be far wrong to consider that Americans, by the great civil war, furnished, in a single historical case, the double example required for complete illustration of Tocqueville’s point: an example of the democratic, together with an example of the aristocratic, community engaging in war after a long peace. Readers may make each his own comparison of the Frenchman’s philosophical speculations with the actual facts that emerged in the course of our national strife:

The words italicized by us above illustrate the intrepid firmness of our author in staking the fortune of an opinion of his upon the risk of confutation by future fact. He affirms, it will be seen, absolutely, and does not seek to save himself by a clause.

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“Democracy in America” must be credited with a very important teaching influence on the political thought of mankind. This influence is more than the impulse of stimulating speculation. It is a practical force fruitful of solid political result. The present writer remembers hearing Tocqueville taught to eager audiences of French students in the Collège de France, at Paris, by M. Laboulaye, a popular professor in that national institution. This was while in France the second empire remained as yet apparently firm on its base, and while in this country the great duel between section and section remained as yet apparently doubtful. The applause with which the lecturer’s praise of free institutions was greeted signified much. It signified that the leaven of Tocqueville’s ideas was working in those youthful hearts. (M. Laboulaye’s lectures, which possessed original merit of their own, were finally published in a volume.) Present republican France owes, in no despicable degree, its existence to the fact that Tocqueville had visited, and reported, and interpreted the United States to his countrymen. Perhaps, also, it is true that the American Union is standing to-day partly because the popular sentiment created by Tocqueville in France favorable to American democracy was too strong, too vivid, and too universal, for the emperor safely to disregard it, in imperial acts, long threatened, hostile to the integrity of the republic. If Tocqueville’s guess is right, if democratic institutions are indeed ultimately to prevail throughout the world, certainly it cannot be denied that the prophet himself will have done his part toward fulfilling his prophecy.

We feel that we shall have done scant justice to the high and serious spirit who forms the subject of these concluding pages of the present chapter, if we do not go from the one work itself, by example out of which we have shown him, to expressions of his in his correspondence that may let us a little deeper into the personal secret of the man himself. Tocqueville, although, as we have intimated, a believer in the democratic destiny of the world, was not such in virtue of being a democrat by preference himself. On the contrary, 197 his own aristocratic blood favoring it perhaps, his individual choice would apparently have gone, not for, but against, democracy. This seems to be indicated in what follows, written to a friend concerning the purpose of his work, “Democracy in America”:

The “Commune” in France, “Nihilism” in Russia, “Socialism” in Germany, “Nationalism” in the United States, are all of them, each in its own different way, remarkable historical commentaries on the prophetic political forecast contained in the foregoing letter.

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Here is ripe practical wisdom occurring in a letter written by Tocqueville about two years before his death:

His experience as practical politician made him write thus:

There was so much wholesome reaction in Tocqueville’s moral nature that, notwithstanding the disparaging views, on his part, thus revealed of human worth, he never became cynical. He could even write as follows to a friend of his who, he thought, went too far in decrying mankind:

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On the whole, Alexis de Tocqueville’s own practice in life showed that he wrote not only with sincerity, but with earnestness, when he wrote those words. It was not of such Frenchmen as was Tocqueville that the author of that heavy sentence on France could have been thinking—that the French character was made up without conscience. We, for our part, cannot but maintain that Tocqueville is as much more solid as he may be less brilliant than his predecessor and fellow, Montesquieu. They were both too theoretical; that is, too exclusively French as distinguished, for instance, from English, in political philosophy. They began to be deductive, when to be inductive yet longer would have been their wiser part. In a word—like Guizot, too, the author of the “History of Civilization,” and the minister of Citizen-King Louis Philippe—both Montesquieu and Tocqueville failed of escaping what the French would call the defect of their quality.

XV.

VOLTAIRE.

1694-1778.

By the volume and the variety, joined to the unfailing brilliancy, of his production; by his prodigious effectiveness; and by his universal fame, Voltaire is undoubtedly entitled to rank first, with no fellow, among the eighteenth-century literary men, not merely of France, but of the world. He was not a great man, he produced no great single work, but he must nevertheless be pronounced a great writer. There is hardly any species of composition to which, in the long course of his activity, he did not turn his talent. It cannot be said that he succeeded splendidly in all; but in some he succeeded splendidly, and he failed abjectly in none. There is not a great thought, and there is not a flat expression, in the whole bulk of his multitudinous and multifarious 200 works. Read him wherever you will, in the ninety-seven volumes (equivalent, probably in the aggregate, to two hundred volumes like the present) which, in one leading edition, collect his productions, you may often find him superficial, you may often find him untrustworthy, you will certainly often find him flippant, but not less certainly you will never find him obscure, and you will never find him dull. The clearness, the vivacity of this man’s mind were something almost preternatural. So, too, were his readiness, his versatility, his audacity. He had no distrust of himself, no awe of his fellow-men, no reverence for God, to deter him from any attempt with his pen, however presuming. If a state ode were required, it should be ready to order at twelve to-morrow; if an epic poem—to be classed with the “Iliad” and the “Æneid “—the “Henriade” was promptly forthcoming, to answer the demand. He did not shrink from flouting a national idol, by freely finding fault with Corneille; and he lightly undertook the task of extinguishing a venerable form of Christianity, simply with pricks, innumerably repeated, of his tormenting pen.

A very large part of the volume of Voltaire’s production consists of letters, written by him to correspondents perhaps more numerous, and more various in rank, from kings on the throne down to scribblers in the garret, than ever, in any other case, exchanged such communications with a literary man. Another considerable proportion of his work in literature took the form of pamphlets, either anonymously or pseudonymously published, in which this master-spirit of intellectual disturbance and ferment found it convenient, or advantageous, or safe, to promulge and propagate his ideas. A shower of such publications was incessantly escaping from Voltaire’s pen. More formal and regular, more confessedly ambitious, literary essays of his, were poems in every kind—heroic, mock-heroic, lyric, elegiac, comic, tragic, satiric—historical and biographical monographs, and tales or novels of a peculiar class.

Voltaire’s poetry does not count for very much now. 201 Still, its first success was so great that it will always remain an important topic in literary history. Besides this, it really is, in some of its kinds, remarkable work. Voltaire’s epic verse is almost an exception, needful to be made, from our assertion that this author is nowhere dull. “The Henriade” comes dangerously near that mark. It is a tasteless reproduction of Lucan’s faults, with little reproduction of Lucan’s virtues. Voltaire’s comedies are bright and witty, but they are not laughter-provoking; and they do not possess the elemental and creative character of Shakespeare’s or Molière’s work. His tragedies are better; but they do not avoid that cast of mechanical which seems necessarily to belong to poetry produced by talent, however consummate, unaccompanied with genius. Voltaire’s histories are luminous and readable narratives, but they cannot claim the merit either of critical accuracy or of philosophic breadth and insight. His letters would have to be read in considerable volume in order to furnish a full satisfactory idea of the author. His tales, finally, afford the most available, and, on the whole, likewise the best means of arriving shortly and easily at a knowledge of Voltaire.

But, before coming to these, we owe it to our readers, and perhaps to ourselves, to justify with example what, a little way back, we said of Voltaire as epic poet.

Voltaire was profoundly influenced by his personal observations of what England was, alike in her literary, her political, and her theological aspects. Voltairism may, in fact, be pronounced a transplantation from English soil. It was English deism “mixed with cunning sparks of”—French wit. A very short passage from the “Henriade” will suffice the double purpose of showing what in quality of style that poem of Voltaire’s is, and of suggesting its author’s sense of debt to the England which, for its freedom and its free-thinking, he so much admired. The reader will not fail to note the skill with which Voltaire manages in praising another country to give a very broad hint to his own. The old-fashioned formal heroic couplet, with rhyme, in which the following 202 passage appears translated, is not inapposite to the artificial cast and style of the original. Various passions, such as “Fear,” are not only personified in the “Henriade,” but made to play the part of veritable characters in the action of the poem. Supernatural interferences occur. History is boldly fabricated or falsified at the pleasure of the poet. Of this audacious freedom the passage from which we take our extract presents an instance. Voltaire sends his hero on a mythical mission to England to solicit help from Queen Elizabeth. He here meets every reader’s familiar old friend, “a venerable hermit,” who instructs him in English history and manners. Voltaire wrote prefaces and notes to vindicate his epic practices. He went to Virgil for precedents. Lucan he censured for not making free enough with his history. “Eliza” is, of course, Queen Elizabeth, and “Bourbon,” is the hero of the epic, Henry IV. of France, from whose name, it need not be said, comes the title, “Henriade.” We quote from the first canto of the poem:

A poem flaunting on its front invidious praise like the foregoing of a foreign government so different from the government of France, could not be very acceptable to the ruling classes of his time in the author’s own country. But in England, during the poet’s two years’ stay in that island, a revised edition of the “Henriade” was issued under auspices the most august and imposing. Queen Caroline headed the list of subscribers, and such was the brilliancy of the patronage extended to the poem that Voltaire, as is with probability said, netted forty thousand dollars from his English edition—a sum of money equivalent to, say, one hundred thousand dollars, present value. This early success laid the foundation of a fortune for Voltaire, which the skill, the prudence, the servility, the greed, and the unscrupulousness of the owner subsequently built into proportions that were nothing less than princely. Voltaire’s annual income at his death was about a hundred thousand dollars. It seems incredible that a man so rich, and, in some ways, it must be acknowledged, so generous, should have been at the same time so mean, so sordid, so literally perjured in sordidness, as Voltaire is demonstrated, and admitted even by his farthest-going admirers, for instance, Mr. John Morley, to have been.

Among Voltaire’s tales doubtless the one most eligible for use, to serve our present purpose, is his “Candide.” This is a nondescript piece of fiction, the design of which is, by means of a narrative of travel and adventure, constructed without much regard to the probability of particular incidents, to set forth, in the characteristic mocking vein of Voltaire, the vanity and misery of mankind. The author’s invention is often whimsical enough; but it is constantly so ready, so reckless, and so abundant, that the reader never tires as he is hurried ceaselessly forward from change to 204 change of scene and circumstance. The play of wit is incessant. The style is limpidity itself. Your sympathies are never painfully engaged, even in recitals of experience that ought to be the most heart-rending. There is never a touch of noble moral sentiment to relieve the monotony of mockery that lightly laughs at you and tantalizes you, page after page, from the beginning to the end of the book. The banter is not good-natured; though, on the other hand, it cannot justly be pronounced ill-natured; and it is, in final effect upon the reader’s mind, bewildering and depressing in the extreme. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity; such is the comfortless doctrine of the book. The apples are the apples of Sodom, everywhere in the world. There is no virtue anywhere, no good, no happiness. Life is a cheat, the love of life is a cruelty, and beyond life there is nothing. At least, there is no glimpse given of any compensating future reserved for men, a future to redress the balance of good and ill experienced here and now. Faith and hope, those two eyes of the soul, are smilingly quenched in their sockets, and you are left blind, in a whirling world of darkness, with a whirling world of darkness before you.

Such is “Candide.” We select a single passage for specimen. The passage we select is more nearly free than almost any other passage as long, in this extraordinary romance, would probably be found, from impure implications. It is, besides, more nearly serious in apparent motive than is the general tenor of the production. Here, however, as elsewhere, the writer keeps carefully down his mocking mask. At least, you are left tantalizingly uncertain all the time how much the grin you face is the grin of the man, and how much the grin of a visor that he wears.

Candide, the hero, is a young fellow of ingenuous character brought successively under the lead of several different persons wise in the ways of the world, who act toward him, each in his turn, the part of “guide, philosopher, and friend.” Candide, with such a mentor bearing the name Martin, has now arrived at Venice. Candide speaks:

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The single citation preceding sufficiently exemplifies, at their best, though at their worst not, the style and the spirit of Voltaire’s “Candide;” as his “Candide” sufficiently exemplifies the style and the spirit of the most characteristic of Voltaire’s writings in general. “Pococurantism” is a 209 word, now not uncommon in English, contributed by Voltaire to the vocabulary of literature. To readers of the foregoing extract, the sense of the term will not need to be explained. We respectfully suggest to our dictionary-makers, that the fact stated of its origin in the “Candide” of Voltaire would be interesting and instructive to many. Voltaire coined the name, to suit the character of his Venetian gentleman, from two Italian words which mean together “little-caring.” Signor Pococuranté is the immortal type of men that have worn out their capacity of fresh sensation and enjoyment.

Mr. John Morley’s elaborate monograph on Voltaire claims the attention of readers desirous of exhaustive acquaintance with its subject. This author writes in sympathy with Voltaire, so far as Voltaire was an enemy of the Christian religion; but in antipathy to him, so far as Voltaire fell short of being an atheist. A similar sympathy, limited by a similar antipathy, is observable in the same author’s still more extended monograph on Rousseau. The sympathy works without the antipathy to limit it, in Mr. Morley’s two volumes on “Diderot and the Encyclopædists”—for Diderot and his closest fellows were good thorough-going atheists.

Even in Voltaire and Rousseau, but particularly in Voltaire, Mr. Morley, though his sympathy with these writers is, as we have said, not complete, finds far more to praise than to blame. To this eager apostle of atheism, Voltaire was at least on the right road, although he did, unfortunately, stop short of the goal. His influence was potent against Christianity, and potent it certainly was not against atheism. Voltaire might freely be lauded as on the whole a mighty and a beneficent liberalizer of thought.

And we, we who are neither atheists nor deists—let us not deny to Voltaire his just meed of praise. There were streaks of gold in the base alloy of that character of his. He burned with magnanimous heat against the hideous doctrine and practice of ecclesiastical persecution. Carlyle says of Voltaire, 210 that he “spent his best efforts, and as many still think, successfully, in assaulting the Christian religion.” This, true though it be, is liable to be falsely understood. It was not against the Christian religion, as the Christian religion really is, but rather against the Christian religion as the Roman hierarchy misrepresented it, that Voltaire ostensibly directed his efforts. “You are right,” wrote he to his henchman D’Alembert, in 1762, “in assuming that I speak of superstition only; for as to the Christian religion, I respect it and love it, as you do.” This distinction of Voltaire’s, with whatever degree of simple sincerity on his part made, ought to be remembered in his favor, when his memorable motto, “ Écrasez l’Infâme ,” is interpreted and applied. He did not mean Jesus Christ by l’Infâme ; he did not mean the Christian religion by it; he did not even mean the Christian Church by it; he meant the oppressive despotism and the crass obscurantism of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. At least, this is what he would have said that he meant, what in fact he substantially did say that he meant, when incessantly reiterating, in its various forms, his watchword, “ Écrasez l’Infâme ,” “ Écrasons l’Infâme ”—“Crush the wretch!” “Let us crush the wretch!” His blows were aimed, perhaps, at “superstition;” but they really fell, in the full half of their effect, on Christianity itself. Whether Voltaire regretted this, whether he would in his heart have had it otherwise, may well, in spite of any protestation from him of love for Christianity, be doubted. Still, it is never, in judgment of Voltaire, to be forgotten that the organized Christianity which he confronted was in large part a system justly hateful to the true and wise lover, whether of God or of man. That system he did well in fighting. Carnal indeed were the weapons with which he fought it; and his victory over it was a carnal victory, bringing, on the whole, but slender net advantage, if any such advantage at all, to the cause of final truth and light. The French Revolution, with its excesses and its horrors, was perhaps the proper, the legitimate, the necessary, fruit of resistance such as was Voltaire’s, in 211 fundamental spirit, to the evils in Church and in State against which he conducted so gallantly his life-long campaign.

But though we thus bring in doubt the work of Voltaire, both as to the purity of its motive and as to the value of its fruit, we should wrong our sense of justice to ourselves if we permitted our readers to suppose us blind to the generous things that this arch-infidel did on behalf of the suffering and the oppressed. Voltaire more than once wielded that pen of his, the most dreaded weapon in Europe, like a knight sworn to take on himself the championship of the forlornest of causes. There is the historic case of Jean Calas at Toulouse, Protestant, an old man of near seventy, broken on the wheel, as suspected, without evidence, and against accumulated impossibilities, of murdering his own son, a young man of about thirty, by hanging him. Voltaire took up the case and pleaded it to the common sense, and to the human feeling, of France, with immense effectiveness. It is, in truth, Voltaire’s advocacy of righteousness, in this instance of incredible wrong, that has made the instance itself immortal. His part in the case of Calas, though the most signal, is not the only example of Voltaire’s literary knighthood. He hated oppression, and he loved liberty, for himself and for all men, with a passion as deep and as constant as any passion of which nature had made Voltaire capable. If the liberty that he loved was fundamentally liberty as against God no less than as against men, and if the oppression that he hated was fundamentally the oppression of being put under obligation to obey Christ as lord of life and of thought, this was something of which, probably, Voltaire never had a clear consciousness.

We have now indicated what was most admirable in Voltaire’s personal character. On the whole, he was far from being an admirable man. He was vain, he was shallow, he was frivolous, he was deceitful, he was voluptuous, he fawned on the great, he abased himself before them, he licked the dust on which they stood. “ Trajan, est-il content? ” (“Is Trajan satisfied?”)—this, asked, in nauseous adulation, and nauseous 212 self-abasement, by Voltaire of Louis XV., so little like Trajan in character—is monumental. The occasion was the production of a piece of Voltaire’s written at the instance of Louis XV.’s mistress, the infamous Madame de Pompadour. The king, for answer, simply gorgonized the poet with a stony Bourbon stare.

But, taken altogether, Voltaire’s life was a great success. He got on in the world, was rich, was fortunate, was famous, was gay, if he was not happy. He had his friendship with the great Frederick of Prussia, who filled for his false French flatterer a return cup of sweetness, cunningly mixed with exceeding bitterness. His death was an appropriate coup de théâtre , a felicity of finish to such a life quite beyond the reach of art. He came back to Paris, whence he had been an exile, welcomed with a triumph transcending the triumph of a conqueror. They made a great feast for him, a feast of flattery, in the theater. The old man was drunk with delight. The delight was too much for him. It literally killed him. It was as if a favorite actress should be quite smothered to death on the stage under flowers thrown in excessive profusion at her feet.

Let Carlyle’s sentence be our epigraph on Voltaire:

“No great Man.... Found always at the top, less by power in swimming than by lightness in floating.”

XVII

ROUSSEAU : 1712-1778; St. Pierre : 1737-1814.

There are two Rousseaus in French literature. At least there was a first, until the second effaced him, and became the only.

We speak, of course, in comparison, and hyperbolically. J. B. Rousseau is still named as a lyric poet of the time of Louis XIV. But when Rousseau, without initials, is spoken of, it is always Jean Jacques Rousseau that is meant.

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Jean Jacques Rousseau is perhaps the most squalid, as it certainly is one of the most splendid, among French literary names. The squalor belongs chiefly to the man, but the splendor is wholly the writer’s. There is hardly another example in the world’s literature of a union so striking of these opposites.

Rousseau’s life he has himself told, in the best, the worst, and the most imperishable of his books, the “Confessions.” This book is one to which the adjective charming attaches, in a peculiarly literal sense of the word. The spell, however, is repellent as well as attractive. But the attraction of the style asserts and pronounces itself only the more, in triumph over the much there is in the matter to disgust and revolt. It is quite the most offensive, and it is well-nigh the most fascinating, book that we know.

The “Confessions” begin as follows:

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Notwithstanding our autobiographer’s disavowal of debt to example for the idea of his “Confessions,” it seems clear that Montaigne here was at least inspiration, if not pattern, to Rousseau. But Rousseau resolved to do what Montaigne had done, more ingenuously and more courageously than Montaigne had done it. This writer will make himself his subject, and then treat his subject with greater frankness than any man before him ever used about himself, or than any man after him would ever use. He undoubtedly succeeded in his attempt. His frankness, in fact, is so forward and eager that it is probably even inventive of things disgraceful to himself. Montaigne makes great pretense of telling his own faults, but you observe that he generally chooses rather amiable faults of his own to tell. Rousseau’s morbid vulgarity leads him to disclose traits in himself of character or of behavior, that, despite whatever contrary wishes on your part, compel your contempt of the man. And it is for the man who confesses, almost more than for the man who is guilty, that you feel the contempt.

The “Confessions” proceed:

“A feeling heart!” That expression tells the literary secret of Rousseau. It is hardly too much to say that Rousseau was the first French writer to write with his heart; 215 but heart’s blood was the ink in which almost every word of Rousseau’s was written. This was the spring of his marvelous power. Rousseau:

The elder Rousseau was right respecting himself. And such a father would almost necessarily have such a child. Jean Jacques Rousseau is to be judged tenderly for his faults. What birth and what breeding were his! The “Confessions” go on:

Some hint now of other books read by the boy:

On such food of reading and of reverie, young Rousseau’s imagination and sentiment battened, while his reason and his practical sense starved and died within him. Unconsciously 216 thus in part were formed the dreamer of the “Émile” and of “The Social Contract.” Another glimpse of the home life—if home life such experience can be called—of this half-orphan, homeless Genevan boy:

It is pathetic—Rousseau’s attempted contrast following, between the paternal neglect of his older brother and the paternal indulgence of himself:

Poor lad! “Never knew what it was to have a whim!” It well might be, however—his boy’s life all one whim uncrossed, unchecked; no contrast of saving restraint, to make him know that he was living by whim alone!

Young Jean Jacques was at length apprenticed to an engraver. He describes the contrast of his new situation and the effect of the contrast upon his own character and career:

Thus ends the first book of the “Confessions.”

The picture Rousseau is “about to draw” has in it a certain Madame de Warens for a principal figure. This lady, a Roman Catholic convert from Protestantism, had forsaken a husband, not loved, and was living on a bounty from King Victor Amadeus of Sardinia. For Annecy, the home of Madame de Warens, our young Jean Jacques, sent thither by a Roman Catholic curate, sets out on foot. The distance was but one day’s walk; which one day’s walk, however, the humor of the wanderer stretched into a saunter of three days. The man of fifty-four, become the biographer of his own youth, finds no lothness of self-respect to prevent his 218 detailing the absurd adventures with which he diverted himself on the way. For example:

Rousseau describes the emotions he experienced in his first meeting with Madame de Warens:

This abnormally susceptible youth had remarkable experiences, all within his own soul, during his sojourn, of a few days only, on the present occasion, under Madame de Warens’s hospitable roof. These experiences, the autobiographer, old enough to call himself “old dotard,” has, nevertheless, not grown wise enough to be ashamed to be very detailed and psychological in recounting. It was a case of precocious love at first sight. One could afford to laugh at it as ridiculous, but that it had a sequel full of sin and of sorrow. Jean Jacques was now forwarded to Turin, to become inmate of a sort of charity school for the instruction of catechumens. The very day after he started on foot, his father, with a friend of his, reached Annecy on horseback, in pursuit of the truant boy. They might easily have overtaken him, but they let him go his way. Rousseau explains the case on behalf of his father as follows:

Rousseau’s filial regard for his father was peculiar. It did not lead him to hide, it only led him to account for, his father’s sordidness. The son generalized and inferred a moral maxim for the conduct of life from this behavior of the father’s—a maxim, which, as he thought, had done him great good. He says:

The fruitful maxim thus deduced by Rousseau, he thinks he tried faithfully to put in practice. With apparent perfect assurance concerning himself, he says:

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Jean Jacques at Turin made speed to convert himself, by the abjurations required, into a pretty good Catholic. He was hereon free to seek his fortune in the Sardinian capital. This he did by getting successively various situations in service. In one of these he stole, so he tells us, a piece of ribbon, which was soon found in his possession. He said a maid-servant, naming her, gave it to him. The two were confronted with each other. In spite of the poor girl’s solemn appeal, Jean Jacques persisted in his lie against her. Both servants were discharged. The autobiographer protests that he has suffered much remorse for this lie of his to the harm of the innocent maid. He expresses confident hope that his suffering sorrow, already experienced on his behalf, will stand him in stead of punishment that might be his due in a future state. Remorse is a note in Rousseau that distinguishes him from Montaigne. Montaigne reviews his own life to live over his sins, not to repent of them.

The end of several vicissitudes is, that young Rousseau gets back to Madame de Warens. She welcomes him kindly. He says:

With Madame de Warens, Rousseau’s relations, as is intimated above, became licentious. This continued until, after an interval of years (nine years, with breaks), in a fit of jealousy 221 he forsook her. Rousseau’s whole life was a series of self-indulgences, groveling, sometimes, beyond what is conceivable to any one not learning of it all in detail from the man’s own pen. The reader is fain at last to seek the only relief possible from the sickening story, by flying to the conclusion that Jean Jacques Rousseau, with all his genius, was wanting in that mental sanity which is a condition of complete moral responsibility.

We shall, of course, not follow the “Confessions” through their disgusting recitals of sin and shame. We should do wrong, however, to the literary, and even to the moral, character of the work, were we not to point out that there are frequent oases of sweetness and beauty set in the wastes of incredible foulness which overspread so widely the pages of Rousseau’s “Confessions.” Here, for example, is an idyll of vagabondage that might almost make one willing to play tramp one’s self, if one by so doing might have such an experience:

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This happy-go-lucky, vagabond, grown-up child, this sentimentalist of genius, had now and then different experiences—experiences to which the reflection of the man grown old attributes important influence on the formation of his most controlling beliefs:

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A hideously false world, that world of French society was, in Rousseau’s time. The falseness was full ripe to be laid bare by some one; and Rousseau’s experience of life, as well as his temperament and his genius, fitted him to do the work of exposure that he did. What one emphatically calls character was sadly wanting in Rousseau—how sadly, witness such an acted piece of mad folly as the following:

Readers have now had an opportunity to judge for themselves, by specimen, of the style, both of the writer and of the man Jean Jacques Rousseau. The writer’s style they must have felt even through the medium of imperfect anonymous translation, to be a charming one. If they have felt the style of the man to be contrasted, as squalor is contrasted with splendor, that they must not suppose to be a contrast of which Jean Jacques himself, the confessor, was in the least displacently conscious. Far from it. In the latter part of his “Confessions,” a part that deals with the author as one already now acknowledged a power in the world of letters, though with all his chief works still to write, Rousseau speaks thus of himself (he was considering at the time the ways and means available to him of obtaining a livelihood):

Is not that finely said? And one need not doubt that it was said with perfect sincerity. For our own part, paradoxical though it be to declare it, we are wholly willing to insist that Rousseau did think on a lofty plane. The trouble with him was, not that he thus thought with his heart, rather than with his head—which, however, he did—but that he thought with his heart alone, and not at all with his conscience and his will. In a word, his thought was sentiment rather than thought. He was a sentimentalist instead of a thinker. One illustration of the divorce that he decreed for himself, or rather—for we have used too positive a form of 225 expression—that he allowed to subsist, between sentiment and conduct, will suffice. It was presently to be his fortune, as author of a tract on education (the “Emile”), to change the habit of a nation in the matter of the nurture for babes. French mothers of the higher social class in Rousseau’s time almost universally gave up their infants to be nursed at alien bosoms. Rousseau so eloquently denounced the unnaturalness of this, that from his time it became the fashion for French mothers to suckle their children themselves. Meantime, the preacher himself of this beautiful humanity, living in unwedded union with a woman (not Madame de Warens, but a woman of the laboring class, found after Madame de Warens was abandoned), sent his illegitimate children, against the mother’s remonstrance, one after another, to the number of five, to be brought up unknown at the hospital for foundlings! He tells the story himself in his “Confessions.” This course on his own part he subsequently laments with many tears and many self-upbraidings. But these, alas, he intermingles with self-justifications, nearly as many—so that at last it is hard to say whether the balance of his judgment inclines for or against himself in the matter. A paradox of inconsistencies and self-contradictions, this man—a problem in human character, of which the supposition of partial insanity in him, long working subtly in the blood, seems the only solution. The occupation finally adopted by Rousseau for obtaining subsistence was the copying of music. It extorts from one a measure of involuntary respect for Rousseau, to see patiently toiling at this slavish work, to earn its owner bread, the same pen which had lately set all Europe in ferment with the “Emile” and “The Social Contract.”

From Rousseau’s “Confessions,” we have not room to purvey further. It is a melancholy book—written under monomaniac suspicion on the part of the author that he was the object of a wide-spread conspiracy against his reputation, his peace of mind, and even his life. The poor, shattered, self-consumed sensualist and sentimentalist paid dear in the 226 agonies of his closing years for the indulgences of an unregulated life. The tender-hearted, really affectionate, and loyal friend came at length to live in a world of his own imagination, full of treachery to himself. David Hume, the Scotchman, tried to befriend him; but the monomaniac was incapable of being befriended. Nothing could be more pitiful than were the decline and the extinction that occurred of so much brilliant genius, and so much lovable character. It is even doubtful whether Rousseau did not at last take his own life. The voice of accusation is silenced in the presence of an earthly retribution so dreadful. One may not indeed approve, but one may at least be free to pity, more than he blames, in judging Rousseau.

Accompanying, and in some sort complementing the “Confessions,” are often published several detached pieces called “Reveries,” or “Walks.” These are very peculiar compositions, and very characteristic of the author. They are dreamy meditations or reveries, sad, even somber, in spirit, but “beautiful exceedingly,” in form of expression. Such works as the “René” of Chateaubriand, works but too abundant since in French literature, must all trace their pedigree to Rousseau’s “Walks.”

This author’s books in general are now little read. They worked their work and ceased. But there are in some of them passages that continue to live. Of these, perhaps quite the most famous is the “Savoyard Curate’s Confession of Faith,” a document of some length, incorporated into the “Émile.” This, taken as a whole, is the most seductively eloquent argument against Christianity that perhaps ever was written. It contains, however, concessions to the sublime elevation of Scripture and to the unique virtue and majesty of Jesus, which are often quoted, and which will bear quoting here. The Savoyard Curate is represented speaking to a young friend as follows:—

So far in eloquent ascription of incomparable excellence to the Bible and to the Founder of Christianity. But then immediately Rousseau’s Curate proceeds:—

The compliment to Christianity almost convinces you—until suddenly you are apprised that the author of the compliment was not convinced himself!

Jean Jacques Rousseau, in the preface to his “Confessions,” appealed from the judgment of men to the judgment of God. This judgment it was his habit, to the end of his days, thanks to the effect of his early Genevan education, always to think of as certainly impending. Let us adjourn our final sentence upon him until we hear that Omniscient award.

In pendant to what we have said and have shown of Rousseau, some notice may here properly be given of another celebrated writer, or writer perhaps we should say of a celebrated book, who stands to Rousseau in the relation of sequel and echo. We mean St. Pierre , the author of “Paul and Virginia.”

This is a very famous little classic. It is a kind of prose idyll, a pastoral of lowly and simple life, a life lived by the subjects of it in the spirit of return to the conditions of nature, such as Jean Jacques Rousseau idealized the conditions of nature to be. The author’s own personal experience furnished him the hint, the ground, and the material, of his bucolic romance. It had happened to St. Pierre, in the course of a somewhat fruitless and vagabond life, to be sent in an official capacity to Mauritius, or the Isle of France. In this remote island, as in a kind of Utopia, the scene of the story of “Paul and Virginia” is laid.

St. Pierre was already thirty-one years old when he took 229 his distant voyage; he stayed three years in Mauritius, and then he waited sixteen years, becoming therefore, fifty years old, before he made use of what he had experienced in publishing his romance of “Paul and Virginia.” He had meantime seen a great deal of Rousseau during the latter’s declining years, and from him had learned that art of writing by virtue of which he was destined to constitute the second of succession in a literary line to be continued after him in Chateaubriand and Lamartine, in Madame de Stael and George Sand.

It is the historical importance thus attaching to St. Pierre’s name, even more perhaps than it is the merit and the fame of his books, or of his book—for of his books other than “Paul and Virginia,” we need not trouble our readers with even the titles—that warrants us in listing him, as we do, among the select “immortals” of French literature. St. Pierre’s distinguishing note was the supposed return to nature and to natural unsophisticated sentiment accomplished in his writings.

But the return, with him, was by no means completely satisfactory. There was always something unreal in St. Pierre’s passion for nature; and the feeling with which he wrote seems, to us of to-day, to have been neither very deep nor very sincere. Still, all was accepted and was highly effective in its time; Europe was flooded with tears in reading “Paul and Virginia,” much as afterward it was flooded with tears in reading an equally notable, but far less wholesome book, that prose masterpiece of the youthful Goethe, “The Sorrows of Werther.” The “Corinne” of Madame de Stael afterward, later the “Jocelyn” of Lamartine, later again the passionate earlier novels of George Sand, served to their respective fresh generations of readers a somewhat similar office, that of stimulating and of expressing the vague longing and aspiration of youth.

The plot of “Paul and Virginia” is simplicity itself. Two young French widows—widows we may euphemistically call the women both, though the mother of Paul had never been married—meet, strangers to each other, in Mauritius, 230 and their children, Paul and Virginia respectively, grow up from babyhood together, as if brother and sister, in a state of nature such as never was anywhere in the world outside of a romance, until at last, Virginia undertaking a vain voyage to France to bring round a rich alienated aunt of her mother’s, perishes by shipwreck on her return; in prompt sequel of which calamity, all the remaining personages of the tale, down to the very dog, naturally and sentimentally, one after another, die. The story is represented as told to a traveler in the Isle of France by a sympathetic old man who had been an eye-witness of all.

Two extracts, one from the beginning, and one from the end, of the romance, will sufficiently indicate its quality.

Paul and Virginia being now about twelve years of age, Virginia goes, accompanied by Paul, to restore to the master a runaway female slave to whom he had been cruel, and to intercede with him on the sufferer’s behalf. She has accomplished her purpose, and the two have set out to return. They lose their way. This is the state of the case at the point at which our first extract begins, as follows:

Of course all turned out happily. A rescue party had come in search of the estray, and they were soon brought with rejoicing home.

Such as the foregoing passage will have served to show is the charm of unfallen simplicity and innocence represented by St. Pierre to have been cast, forming as if an Eden in the wilderness, about these happy children of nature on whom society had had no chance to exercise its baneful power. True, they suffered, though in Eden. True, others sinned, as well as suffered, about them, for there was slavery and there was cruelty; but that was in the wilderness outside; in Eden they did not sin. It was all Rousseauism in experiment and reduced to absurdity. By Rousseauism we indicate the doctrinal dream of that dreamer; by no means the actual waking practice of the man that dreamed.

It may seem a strange marring of the idea of a sufficiency in nature, let nature but be unhindered by society, to renew the world in the purity of paradise, that the end of the idyll of Paul and Virginia should have come about through an effort on the part of Virginia’s mother, made quite in the spirit of the present artificial order of things, to secure a bequest from an aunt of hers in France, whom the niece had offended by marrying as she did; but so it was. Virginia undertakes the necessary voyage, and, as we have already said, perishes by shipwreck on the coast of Mauritius in returning. The heart-rending agony of the final catastrophe we have no space to exhibit. The author seems to hint that Virginia might have been saved, could she have brought 233 herself to assent to the desire of an entreating honest stalwart seaman that she should disembarrass her person of her clothes. It is almost the step taken from the sublime to the ridiculous for the author to make his heroine perish thus as a martyr to her own invincible modesty.

The bereaved mother has visions of her departed daughter’s accomplished felicity in the world unseen. These she describes to the neighbor, who, a venerable old man, tells the traveler the tale. Now for the final extract from the text of the book:

If we have treated somewhat lightly this romance of sentimentalism and of naturalism it is because of the taint of ungenuineness—that is, of unreality more or less conscious on the author’s part—that we seem to ourselves to discover in its pages. But the masterpiece of Bernardin de St. Pierre is after all a serious literary fact. For instance, if “Paul and Virginia” had never been written it is doubtful if we should ever have had that series of romantico-realistic little pieces of fiction from the pen of George Sand, out of one of which we shall presently exemplify this woman of genius to our readers. A production in literature is to be judged not only by its own inherent quality, but also, perhaps not less by its entail of influence.

“Paul and Virginia,” in becoming a school-book for the learning of French, may be said to have bought increase of celebrity at the price of some diminution in fame. In our own opinion, however, which, after all that we have said, hardly needs to be thus expressly stated, the book still remains quite as famous as its intrinsic merits entitle it to be. Its chief security of renown in the future lies, and will continue more and more to lie, in the striking fact of its renown in the past.

We formally part with Rousseau and with his first literary foster-child. But we shall trace their features still, again 235 and again, persisting in authors to follow who could not escape a tell-tale impress, open to all to see, stamped from that singularly fecund, and singularly potent, literary paternity.

XVIII.

THE ENCYCLOPÆDISTS.

A cenotaph is a monument erected to the memory of one dead, but not marking the spot in which his remains rest. The present chapter is a cenotaph to the French Encyclopædists. It is in the nature of a memorial of their literary work, but it will be found to contain no specimen extracts from their writings.

Everybody has heard of the Encyclopædists of France. Who are they? They are a group of men who, during the eighteenth century, associated themselves together for the production of a great work to be the repository of all human knowledge,—in one word, of an encyclopædia. The project was a laudable one; and the motive to it was laudable—in part. For there was mixture of motive in the case. In part, the motive was simple desire to advance the cause of human enlightenment; in part, however, the motive was desire to undermine Christianity. This latter end the encyclopædist collaborators may have thought to be an indispensable means subsidiary to the former end. They probably did think so—with such imperfect sincerity as is possible to those who set themselves, consciously or unconsciously, against God. The fact is, that the Encyclopædists came at length to be nearly as much occupied in extinguishing Christianity as in promoting public enlightenment. They went about this their task of destroying in a way as effective as has ever been devised for accomplishing a similar work. They gave a vicious turn of insinuation against Christianity to as many articles as possible. In the most unexpected places, throughout the entire work, pitfalls were laid of anti-Christian 236 implication, awaiting the unwary feet of the explorer of its pages. You were nowhere sure of your ground. The world has never before seen, it has never seen since, an example of propagandism altogether so adroit and so alert. It is not too much to say further that history can supply few instances of propagandism so successful. The Encyclopædists might almost be said to have given the human mind a fresh start and a new orbit. The fresh start is, perhaps, spent; the new orbit has at length, to a great extent, returned upon the old; but it holds true, nevertheless, that the Encyclopædists of France were for a time, and that not a short time, a prodigious force of impulsion and direction to the Occidental mind. It ought to be added that the aim of the Encyclopædists was political also, not less than religious. In truth, religion and politics, Church and State, in their day, and in France, were much the same thing. The “Encyclopædia” was as revolutionary in politics as it was atheistic in religion.

The leader in this movement of insurrectionary thought was Denis Diderot . Diderot (1713-1784) was born to be an encyclopædist, and a captain of encyclopædists. Force inexhaustible, and inexhaustible willingness to give out force; unappeasable curiosity to know; irresistible impulse to impart knowledge; versatile capacity to do every thing, carried to the verge, if not carried beyond the verge, of incapacity to do anything thoroughly well; quenchless zeal and quenchless hope; levity enough of temper to keep its subject free from those depressions of spirit and those cares of conscience which weigh and wear on the overearnest man; abundant physical health—gifts such as these made up the manifold equipment of Diderot for rowing and steering the gigantic enterprise of the “Encyclopædia” triumphantly to the port of final completion, through many and many a zone of stormy adverse wind and sea, traversed on the way. Diderot produced no signal independent and original work of his own; probably he could not have produced such a work. On the other hand, it is simply just to say that hardly anybody 237 but Diderot could have achieved the “Encyclopædia.” That, indeed, may be considered an achievement not more to the glory than to the shame of its author; but whatever its true moral character, in whatever proportion shameful or glorious, it is inalienably and peculiarly Diderot’s achievement—at least in this sense, that without Diderot the “Encyclopædia” would never have been achieved.

We have already, in discussing Voltaire, adverted sufficiently to Mr. John Morley’s volumes in honor of Diderot and his compeers. Diderot is therein ably presented in the best possible light to the reader; and we are bound to say that, despite Mr. Morley’s friendly endeavors, Diderot therein appears very ill. He married a young woman whose simple and touching self-sacrifice on her husband’s behalf he presently requited by giving himself away, body and soul, to a rival. In his writings he is so easily insincere that not unfrequently it is a problem, even for his biographer, to decide when he is expressing his sentiments truly and when not, insomuch that, once and again, Mr. Morley himself is obliged to say, “This is probably hypocritical on Diderot’s part,” or something to that effect. As for filthy communication out of his mouth and from his pen—not, of course, habitual, but occasional—the subject will not bear more than this mention. These be thy gods, O Atheism! one, in reading Mr. Morley on Diderot, is tempted again and again to exclaim. To offset such lowness of character in the man it must in justice be added that Diderot was, notwithstanding, of a generous, uncalculating turn of mind, not grudging, especially in intellectual relations, to give of his best to others, expecting nothing again. Diderot, too, as well as Voltaire, had his royal or imperial friends, in the notorious Empress Catherine of Russia, and in King Stanislaus of Poland. He visited Catherine once in her capital, and was there munificently entertained by her. She was regally pleased to humor this gentleman of France, permitting him to bring down his fist in gesture violently on the redoubtable royal knee, according to a pleasant way Diderot had of emphasizing a point in familiar 238 conversation. His truest claim to praise for intellectual superiority is, perhaps, that he was a prolific begetter of wit in other men.

D’Alembert (Jean le Rond, 1717-1783) was an eminent mathematician. He wrote especially, though not at first exclusively, on mathematical subjects for the “Encyclopædia.” He was, indeed, at the outset, published as mathematical editor of the work. His European reputation in science made his name a tower of strength to the “Encyclopædia,”—even after he ceased to be an editorial coadjutor in the enterprise. For there came a time when D’Alembert abdicated responsibility as editor and left the undertaking to fall heavily on the single shoulder, Atlantean shoulder it proved to be, of Diderot. The celebrated “Preliminary Discourse,” prefixed to the “Encyclopædia,” proceeded from the hand of D’Alembert. This has always been esteemed a masterpiece of comprehensive grasp and lucid exposition. A less creditable contribution of D’Alembert’s to the “Encyclopædia” was his article on “Geneva,” in the course of which, at the instance of Voltaire, who wanted a chance to have his plays represented in that city, he went out of his way to recommend to the Genevans that they establish for themselves a theater. This brought out Rousseau in an eloquent harangue against the theater as exerting influence to debauch public morals. D’Alembert, in the contest, did not carry off the honors of the day. D’Alembert’s “Éloges,” so called, a series of characterizations and appreciations written by the author in his old age, of members of the French Academy, enjoy deserved reputation for sagacious intellectual estimate, and for clear, though not supremely elegant, style of composition.

Diderot and D’Alembert are the only men whose names appear on the title-page of the “Encyclopædia;” but Voltaire, Rousseau, Turgot, Helvétius, Duclos, Condillac, Buffon, Grimm, Holbach, with many besides whom we must not stay even to mention, contributed to the work.

The influence of the “Encyclopædia,” great during its day, is by no means yet exhausted. But it is an influence indirectly 239 exerted, for the “Encyclopædia” itself has long been an obsolete work.

There is a legal maxim that the laws are silent when a state of war exists. Certainly, amid the madness of a revolution such as, during the closing years of the eighteenth century, the influence of Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopædists, with Beaumarchais, reacting against the accumulated political and ecclesiastical oppressions of ages, precipitated upon France, it might safely be assumed that letters would be silent. But the nation meantime was portentously preparing material for a literature which many wondering centuries to follow would occupy themselves with writing.

XIX.

MADAME DE STAEL.

1766-1817.

In Madame de Stael we encounter a truly redoubtable figure in literature.

But Madame de Stael in her day seemed more than a writer, more even than a writer of what the Germans would call world-importance; she was, or she seemed, a prodigious living personal force. For her tongue was not less formidable than her pen. In truth, the fame of Madame de Stael is due to the twofold power which, during her life-time, she exercised, and exercised in very uncertain proportions, first perhaps as a talker and second as a writer. She is generally allowed, and that upon the most incontestable authority, to have been one of the most brilliant and most effective talkers in the history of the human race.

This power in Madame de Stael of personal impression you are not free to ascribe to any charm that she owned of physical beauty; for Madame de Stael was not a beautiful woman. By her friend, Madame Récamier, that charm was exercised to the full, and that charm Madame de Stael, 240 did not despise. So far from it, she is said once (thus at least the present writer seems to remember, but he has been unable to verify his impression) passionately to have exclaimed that she would give all her genius for one evening of Madame Récamier’s beauty. This was not the vanity on her part of wish to be admired. It was the pathos of longing to be loved. “Never, never,” she cried out in anguish, “I shall never be loved as I love.” She was true woman after all; and it would be inexpiable wrong against her not to say this also, and say it with emphasis, however sharply we may be just in pronouncing the masculine strength of her character. The contrast was so obvious between Madame de Stael and Madame Récamier in point of mere personal charm that, in a moment evil for him, a gentleman once seated between them permitted himself the awkwardness of saying, in ill-advised intention of compliment to both, but with most unhappy chief effect to the contrary, alike on this side and on that, “How fortunate! I sit between Wit and Beauty.” “Yes, and without possessing either the one or the other,” retorted Wit, amply avenging herself for being reminded that she was not also Beauty. Madame de Stael had certainly justified one half of the gentleman’s compliment; and Madame Récamier, with her serene ineffable charm, did not need to speak in order to justify the other.

It was, then, by the pure dry light of her intellect and her wit that Madame de Stael dazzled so in conversation—dazzled so, and so attracted. Wherever she was, there was the center. She made a salon anywhere, by simply being there. And Madame de Stael’s salon was felt by the ruler of Europe to be a formidable political power implacably hostile to himself. “Somehow,” said Napoleon, “I observe that, whatever is talked about at Madame de Stael’s, those who go there come away thinking less favorably of me.” It seems to have been in part because she said nothing, and would say nothing, of Napoleon in her “Germany,” that he finally suppressed that book. “You will speak ill of me when you get back to your academy,” said to Plato the tyrant 241 of Syracuse. “In the academy we shall not have time to speak of you at all,” was the philosopher’s reply.

Madame de Stael was singularly fortunate in heredity on both sides of her parentage. Her father was an eminent banker and minister of finance, who enjoyed the noblest and clearest renown as a man both of talent and of character. Her mother was that beautiful and gifted daughter of a Swiss pastor whom the historian Gibbon once thought he loved, but whom he dutifully gave up at the will of his father. “I sighed as a lover and obeyed as a son,” Gibbon says in his “Autobiography.” This was after years had passed with him—“years that bring the philosophic mind!” The obese but famous English historian, still a bachelor, was a frequent guest at the house of M. Necker, where he had the opportunity gallantly to admire the brilliant daughter of the woman who might have been his wife.

We have said enough to show that, with the exception of personal beauty, Madame de Stael enjoyed every external advantage that could help to give her a shining career. Her wealth was something more than a mere accessory advantage; she needed it to sustain her in the waste of money made necessary by her wanderings through Europe to escape the tyrannous hand of Napoleon. Her exile was agony to her, for she loved France, and she loved Paris with inextinguishable affection. It is impossible to deny to the obstinacy that refused to burn even a pinch of incense to the god of her nation’s idolatry, for the sake of permission to return to every thing that she loved—it is impossible, we say, to deny to this obstinacy in Madame de Stael the title of a true and heroic virtue.

How costly-brave was the attitude that Madame de Stael steadfastly kept toward Napoleon, during the fifteen years of his unparalleled sway, may be guessed from the account that she gives of the unnerving, the prostrating effect upon her of the presence, the character, and the genius of that extraordinary man. In her “Reflections on the French Revolution” she has the following passage, almost equally striking whether taken as a description or as a confession:

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It was not a light thing, and Madame de Stael did not feel it a light thing, to hold out as she did, never once dipping her colors, against the will and the power of the man whom she thus describes.

This passionate woman of genius, twice linked by marriage in a union marked by violent and opposite disparities of age—for the second husband was as much younger as the 243 first was older than she—sought satisfaction for her hungry desire of love in “relations,” if not ambiguous, at least apparently ambiguous, with men other than her husbands. One of these men was Benjamin Constant, whose conversational powers, exercised in partnership, never in rivalship, with Madame de Stael, helped make the society in which they shone as twin stars together, the admiration, the envy, the despair, of cultivated Europe. Benjamin Constant, as Madame de Stael’s companion of travel in Germany, was no doubt part, though August Wilhelm Schlegel was part still greater, of the vitalizing intellectual influence that helped her produce her work on that country. Schlegel, by the way, had previously accompanied Madame de Stael in that Italian tour and sojourn of hers, the fruit of which was the novel, or the book of travels, or both in one, entitled “Corinne.” This book was the first of her books to give its author a European fame. Besides being studied as a text-book in the schools, “Corinne” is still read as a production important in literary history.

The “De l’Allemagne” (literally “Concerning Germany”) is generally esteemed the masterpiece of its author. From this we draw our illustrations by specimen of the literary quality of Madame de Stael. The “Germany” may be said to have first introduced that country to France, almost to Europe in general. Its scope is comprehensive. It describes Germany in a great variety of aspects; but it is on the literature of Germany that it expends its strength.

Madame de Stael’s “Preface” to her “Germany,” written in England, where, after its arbitrary suppression in France, the volume was finally published, is an interesting bit of reading. Witness one or two extracts:

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What a glimpse is there incidentally afforded of the intolerable despotism of Napoleon!

Madame de Stael thinks silently of her lovely and beloved friend Madame Récamier, who had suffered from Napoleon by her relation with the exiled woman of letters, when still in her preface she writes:

We advance into the body of the work.

The German Lessing had himself found in his literary countrymen the same fault that Madame de Stael, near the beginning of her book, points out as follows:

Bismarck and Moltke in politics and in war, Herman Grimm, for example, in literature, with his appalling claim for Goethe’s “Faust,” as the “greatest work of the greatest poet of all nations and times,” have lately “changed all that.” The fault of Germany now is not over-modesty.

The boundless freedom, nay, audacity, of speculative thought indulged by the Germans is stimulantly contrasted with their strangely contented subserviency (which then was) in more material matters. The sentence we italicize below was canceled by Napoleon’s censors, before their master took the shorter method of canceling the book:

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The following passage concerning Voltaire and a particular production of his pen is one of the most trenchantly critical expressions that the reader would find in the whole course of the “Germany.” The German name of Leibnitz occurring in it will suggest the association of contrast by which such a criticism of a Frenchman found its way into a book treating of things German. Leibnitz had propounded a metaphysical theory of universal optimism, which—like all philosophic hypotheses, even those apparently least practical, let them once become widely entertained—was having its influence on national thought and national character. With Voltaire’s “Candide” the readers of this volume will already have acquired sufficient acquaintance to make Madame de Stael’s remarks upon it here presented additionally interesting:

When Madame de Stael comes in due course to speak of the masterpiece of Goethe, his “Faust,” she prepares her French readers to be shocked with a first disappointment. She says:

We close our series of extracts by giving what this most brilliant among the French women that have been at the same time great talkers and great writers found to say of that high art of conversation in which her countrymen surpass the world and in which she surpassed her countrymen:

There is something in the foregoing strain of ascription from Madame de Stael to the social virtues of the French which recalls that remarkable character given by Pericles, in his noble funeral oration reported by Thucydides, to the national spirit and habit of the Athenians in contrast with those of their Spartan neighbors and enemies.

If of Madame de Stael the woman we shall in any respect have failed to give a just idea, it will be by not having adequately represented the generosity of her character. Her desire and her ability to shine should not be permitted, in any one’s conception of her, to obscure her fondness and her fitness for loving and for being loved. Those who knew her intimately bear touching testimony to this quality of womanliness in the personal character of Madame de Stael. She was fundamentally an amiable, as she was conspicuously a strenuous, spirit, and no mutations in fashion or in taste will ever reduce her to less than a great tradition in literature.

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XX.

CHATEAUBRIAND.

1768-1848.

Chateaubriand —his is a faded fame. He was a false brilliant from the first, but he glittered during his time like a veritable Mountain of Light. Men hardly found out till he died that instead of being precious stone he was nothing but paste.

Our figure misrepresents the fact. Chateaubriand was not thus spurious through and through. He had streaks of genuine in him. His true symbol perhaps would be a common rubble-stone flawed splendidly with diamond.

The reaction of disparagement, which is now the critical vogue as to Chateaubriand’s personal and literary value, meets occasional stout challenge from redoubtable voices. Mr. Matthew Arnold, for instance, protests against it, triumphantly citing out of the author for whom he stands up what certainly would read like the utterance of a mind both large and noble, could one rid one’s self of the feeling that Chateaubriand in writing it had his own case chiefly in view, as follows:

The author of the foregoing, assuredly, excites with his pathos quite as much admiration as sorrow.

Chateaubriand forms an essential link in the chain of literary history for France. He constitutes almost the sole representative of French literature for the period of the First Empire, so-called—that is, the time of the supreme ascendency of Napoleon Bonaparte. Madame de Stael alone 249 needs to be named as his rival and peer. Chateaubriand, in his day—and his day was a long one, for he outlived the empire, the restoration, and the reign of Louis Philippe—was well-nigh an equal power with Napoleon himself. In his own opinion, he was fully such; for his self-complacency was unbounded.

Never in the history of letters did it twice happen to an author to be better served by opportunity than in two cases was Chateaubriand. The Encyclopædists, with Voltaire and Rousseau, had had their hour, and a reaction had set in, when Chateaubriand’s “Genius of Christianity” appeared. It was the exact moment for such a book. It seemed to create the reactionary movement with which it coincided, and it rendered its author not merely famous, but powerful. Napoleon saw his account in making use of a writer who had the secret of such popularity. Besides, the Napoleonic sagacity was equal to perceiving that return to religious belief was needful for France. Napoleon made overtures to Chateaubriand, which Chateaubriand accepted. The author took office at the gift of the dictator.

But Chateaubriand was himself too supremely an egotist to be securely attached to another egotist’s interest by any flattery that could be bestowed upon him. When, at the word of Napoleon, the Duke d’Enghien was murdered, Chateaubriand—let him have the credit of his high spirit—resigned his office and separated himself from the tyrant who had conferred it. Chateaubriand’s first happy synchronism with the course of events was his publishing the “Genius of Christianity” when he did. His second was his publishing the pamphlet “Bonaparte and the Bourbons” at the very moment when that restoration impended which raised Louis XVIII. to the throne of France. The new monarch acknowledged that Chateaubriand’s book had been worth an army to his cause.

Chateaubriand prolonged his literary career to a great age, enjoying almost to the end an undisputed supremacy among the authors of France. There has seldom been a more 250 uncloudedly, more dazzlingly, brilliant contemporary success achieved by any writer of any age or any nation. The renown continues, but the splendor of the renown has passed away. Why? Our answer is, Chateaubriand’s writing is vitiated by a vein of unreality, of falseness, running through it. This character in his writing but reflected, we fear, a character in the writer. There is ground for suspecting that Chateaubriand was at heart lacking in genuineness. It was inseparable defect in the man that gave that hollow ring to the words. It is but a just reprisal upon Chateaubriand that his literary fame should suffer by the fault detected in his personal character. A man’s words are seldom in the long run more weighty than the man.

Chateaubriand was a kind of continuer and modifier of a celebrated French writer that preceded him. He was a better-bred, a much purified, an aristocratic Rousseau. He may be pronounced second greatest in the succession of the literary sentimentalists of France.

René François Augustus, Viscount de Chateaubriand, to give him now his full name and title, lived a life replete with adventure and vicissitude. At twenty-three years of age he fled from the horrors of the French Revolution to travel in America and to find a north-west passage to the Polar Sea. He called, with a letter of introduction, on President Washington, to whose prudent dissuasion of the young man from his project of arctic exploration, founded on the difficulty of the task, Chateaubriand had the French readiness, together with the necessary egotism, to make the complimentary reply: “But, sir, my task is not so difficult as yours was, that of creating a state.” In his posthumous biography, the “ Memoirs d’Outre Tombe ” [Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb], Chateaubriand, alluding to this interview of his with Washington, said, sententiously and loftily, “There is a virtue in the look of a great man.”

Our adventurer never found that north-west passage which he came to seek, but he took impressions of a strange new world, impressions that he afterward turned to various literary 251 account. His “René” was one fruit of these experiences of his. The “René” is a romantic and sentimental tale, the main interest of which, where it possessed interest, lay in the seductive style of the composition, the idealizing descriptions occurring in it of American landscape, and the tone of melancholy reflection that pervaded it. The “noble red man” is made in it to talk like a Socrates come again, or like a French Christian philosopher born “the heir of all the ages.” Such absurd inconsistency with the truth of things well illustrates that taint of lurking falseness which to such a degree vitiates all Chateaubriand’s work.

The French Revolution had made great strides while Chateaubriand was discovering the north-west passage by musing and dreaming in the woods and by the streams of the New World. Learning that many members of his social class, the aristocracy of France, had fled from their homes and were rallying in other lands to make a stand against their enemies, Chateaubriand resolved to join them. He was nigh to shipwreck on his way. In a siege, after his arrival, he was saved from death by the chance of his having the manuscript of his “Atala” in the right spot on his person to intercept a ball from the enemy. But he was severely wounded nevertheless, and, worse still, was attacked with the small-pox. Thus disabled, he started on foot to make a journey of hundreds of miles. He, of course, suffered many hardships, and one night gave up to die in a ditch in which he lay down to rest. He was picked up and carried to Namur. Here, as he crawled on hands and knees through the streets, he was befriended by some women who saw his condition. After many adventures, he found himself in London, where he lived squalidly on what he could earn by hack-work with his pen.

His family meantime were suffering in France. Some of them had actually been guillotined, and some were imprisoned, among them his wife, his sister, and his mother. The mother died praying for her son’s conversion from infidel error. The sister wrote to her brother the pathetic story, 252 but she too had died before her letter reached that brother’s hand. “These two voices,” Chateaubriand says, “coming up from the grave, ... struck me with peculiar force.... I wept and believed.” The “Genius of Christianity” was written in the spirit of this sentimental conversion of the author.

We pass over, with mere mention of some principal titles, his other books, not previously named, as his “Itinerary,” a volume of travels; his “Moses,” his “Martyrs,” his “Essay on English Literature,” his “Translation of the Paradise Lost,” to make the brief extracts for which we have room from the “Genius of Christianity.”

This work is designed as a manual of Christian evidence, an argument for the truth of the Christian religion. It is written, of course, from a Roman Catholic point of view, but it may be described as liberal and literary, rather than strict and ecclesiastical. It is far from being closely reasoned. There is, in fact, a great deal of digression and discussion in it. The aim of the author was evidently more to make a readable book suited to the times than to produce an apologetic work that would stand four-square against all hostile attack. The author’s question with himself as he wrote seemed to have been, not, Is this valid, and necessary to the demonstration? but, Will this be interesting? The consequence is that the “Genius of Christianity” is now worthy of note rather as a book that has had a history than as a book that possesses permanent value. It contains, however, writing that will satisfactorily exhibit the style of Chateaubriand—a clear, pure, brilliant, harmonious poetic prose.

Chateaubriand raises and answers the question why the ancients failed in feeling for the beauties and sublimities of nature, thus:

The foregoing, paradoxical perhaps, is certainly a sharp turning of the tables upon modern paganizers who mourn the dead Greek and Roman divinities of grove and stream.

Here is a passage in description of nature that every reader must acknowledge to be charming. It is throughout thoroughly characteristic of the author. The closing sentence is certainly French rather than Hebrew in spirit—Chateaubriand rather than David:

How Roman Catholic, rather than catholic, in tone, is the “Genius of Christianity,” the following deliciously written sentiment about the Virgin Mary will sufficiently show:

Finally, to illustrate the amusing real lack of logic, masking in logical form, of which Chateaubriand was capable, 255 we give the syllogistic-looking conclusion that sums up the book:

Chateaubriand was long a venerated figure, central in the pure and brilliant salon of Madame Récamier, that later Marchioness Rambouillet at Paris. His easy airs of patriarchal condescension toward the younger generation of authors who drew around him there naturally engaged them to prolong the long days of his triumphs. But his triumphs may be said to have come to an end when Sainte-Beuve was ready to pronounce, as he did, that this defender of Christianity was a skeptic at heart, this preacher and praiser of purity was a libertine in life. We will not say that we accept this destructive view of Chateaubriand’s character. But we are bound to confess that we wish there were more internal evidence contained in his writings to throw doubt on the justice of a sentence so severe.

De Maistre (Joseph Marie, 1753-1821), is another author who, like Chateaubriand, a little earlier than he, took up a polemic for Christianity as represented in Roman Catholicism. A truly high and nobly earnest spirit was De Maistre, as such contrasting with Chateaubriand, a far deeper and far more philosophical thinker than his brilliant compeer, but wanting in that grace and seductiveness of style which gave to Chateaubriand his life-long wide supremacy in the empire of French letters. It would be not incongruous, if there were room for it in our volume, to prolong this chapter with some brief notice and exemplification of De Maistre’s literary work. We must content ourselves with this respectful bare mention of his name.

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The proportionately small space in these pages that, in here ending our notice of him, we allot to Chateaubriand, fails indeed to represent by symbol to the eye the proportionate space that he occupies in the literature of his country. But it has afforded us fairly adequate opportunity to exhibit in description and specimen the characteristic quality of his literary production.

XXI.

BÉRANGER.

1780-1857.

Béranger was a song-writer, the whole of him. He was a song-writer and nothing else. It is his own word, “My songs, they are myself.”

Béranger was not the rose-crowned lyrist of love and wine; he was not Anacreon. Béranger was not the hymner of heroes and kings, a maker of odes; he was not Pindar. Béranger was not the poet of the world, the gay world and the wise; he was not Horace. Béranger was not by chance the lowly melodist, who might by chance as well have been a lofty bard; he was not Robert Burns. Béranger was the song-singer of the people; he himself elected to be such, and he was by the people elected to be such; he said himself, “My muse is the people.” In one word, Béranger was—Béranger. There was none like him before, there has been none like him since; Béranger is alone. We do not thus praise him, we simply describe him.

But it is possible to describe him better. We do so by borrowing from Victor Hugo through Sainte-Beuve.

Sainte-Beuve, not in his essay on Béranger (which, in appreciating, somewhat depreciates the poet), but among the interesting things that, under the title “Chateaubriana,” he prints at the close of his monograph in two volumes on Chateaubriand, has the following personal recollection of his own, which, given here, will serve a threefold purpose; that 257 of hinting incidentally the relation of four celebrated French authors to one another, that of illustrating the ready fecundity and plasticity of Victor Hugo’s genius, and that of setting forth in concrete example Béranger’s master method in his songs, which master method is essentially Béranger, the song-writer, himself. Sainte-Beuve says—of course we translate:

There is Béranger, his whole secret, summed up in small by a masterhand. What Béranger, then, did was to choose wisely, with long heed, some single, simple, obvious sentiment, appealing to every body’s experience, shut that sentiment up into a short, neat, striking, rememberable form of words suited to be sung, make of that form of words a refrain to recur at intervals, and finally on that refrain build up, one after another to the end, the stanzas of his song. He worked slowly and painfully. His genius was never very prolific. The time of his chief fruitfulness was short, covering only fifteen years, the fifteen years between Waterloo (1815) and the elevation of Louis Philippe to the 258 throne of France (1830). During this time his largest product hardly exceeded a dozen songs a year.

Béranger’s first discipline to his art may be considered to have been a certain favorite diversion of his childhood, the carving of cherry-stones. This exercise of skill he practiced sedulously with delight when a boy, and in it learned the long, minute patience of art. The man’s songs were cut gems laboriously finished, like the boy’s carvings in cherry-stones.

Béranger became immensely popular. He remained so to the end. When he died, and it was after prolonged silence on his part—if one can call silence a period marked, indeed, by non-production, but filled with the singing, from land’s end to land’s end, of his songs in every mouth—when he died the empire buried him and the nation attended his funeral. He had been born poor, and he was reared in poverty. Rich he would not be, when a man. He took infinite pains to be of the people, and he succeeded. The people were loving and honoring themselves in loving and honoring Béranger. Sainte-Beuve, with that critical incredulity of his, thought that Béranger carried his demonstrative cultivation of the “people” to the point of something like affectation. Perhaps; but the affectation, if it was such, had a sound basis in it of real instinctive popular sympathy. Still, Béranger’s emphasized identification of himself with the people was not all a matter of instinct with him. It was in part a matter of deliberately adopted policy. He said:

Béranger was quite willing to make any moral descent that might seem to him necessary in order to reach his audience. He may have been instinctively, but he was also deliberately, low and lewd in some of his songs.

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Even the best of Béranger’s songs lack any thing like lift and aspiration. They are conceived in a comparatively low tone. The noblest leaven in them is love of France and of liberty. Béranger hated the Bourbons; they persecuted him, but that only helped him sing them off the throne of France. Béranger’s songs did more than any other one individual influence, perhaps they did more than all other individual influences combined, first to overturn the restored Bourbon dynasty after Waterloo, and, second, to bring about the elevation of Louis Napoleon to power.

For Béranger was a passionate admirer of the great Napoleon. True, he deprecated the exhaustions visited on France by the wars of glory which Napoleon waged. But that famous piece of his, “The King of Yvetot,” in which this deprecation found voice, was a protest so lightly conceived and at bottom so genial, that the jealousy of Napoleon himself could afford to laugh at it. The pieces in which, on the contrary, he celebrated the praises of the emperor were written with an emotion contagiously vivid. Let us now have before us “The King of Yvetot,” with an appropriate contrast to it afterward supplied in one of these encomiastic pieces.

“Yvetot” is the name of an ancient French town, situated in a seignory the lord of which once enjoyed the nominal rank of king. The effect of Béranger’s title to his song is of course humorous. The song-writer’s purpose was to draw, in the king whom he describes, a whimsical contrast to the restless Napoleon. Thackeray furnishes us with a happily sympathetic rendering of Béranger’s “King of Yvetot,” as follows; for brevity’s sake we omit one stanza:

In his autobiography, an interesting book, Béranger says that hardly any other writer equally with himself could have dispensed with the help of the printer. His songs traveled of themselves from mouth to mouth without the intervention 261 of printed copies. In fact, Béranger was already famous before his works went into print. It was this oral currency of his songs that made them such engines of power. That brilliant Bohemian wit among Frenchmen, Chamfort, defined, it is said, before Béranger’s time, the government of France to be absolute monarchy tempered by songs. This celebrated saying does not overstate the degree, though it may misstate the kind, of influence that Béranger exercised with his lyre. He was, by conviction and in sympathy, a determined and ardent republican, and yet, in fact, he founded, or played the chief part in founding, the imperial usurpation of Louis Napoleon. This he did by getting the glories of the great emperor sung by Frenchmen throughout France, until the very name of Napoleon became an irresistible spell to conjure by. We now give the most celebrated of these Bonaparte songs. Mr. William Young, an American, has a volume of translations from Béranger. Of this particular song, Mr. Young’s version is so felicitous that we unhesitatingly choose it for our readers. The title of the song is, “The Recollections of the People.” It was, we believe, founded on an incident of Béranger’s own observation; we shorten again by a stanza:

There was not in Béranger’s genius much innate and irrepressible buoyancy toward poetry, as we English-speakers conceive poetry. But he practiced a severely self-tasking art of verse, which at last yielded a product sufficiently consummate in form to command the admiration of qualified critics. He became unquestionably first among the song-writers of France; he even elevated song-writing, popular song-writing, to the rank of acknowledged literature. His fashion, and, with his fashion, his currency, are rapidly becoming things of the past; but the real merit of his achievement, and, more than that, the fact of his extraordinary influence make his name securely immortal in the literary history, and in the literature, of France.

XXII.

LAMARTINE.

1791-1869.

Lamartine, the man, was an image incongruously molded of gold and of clay. Take him at his best, and what is there better? Take him at his worst, and you would not wish worse.

The same contrast holds, but not in the same degree, in Lamartine the author. He is at once one of the most admirable, and one of the least admirable, of writers.

There are few figures in history worthier to command the homage of generous hearts than the figure of Lamartine in 1848, calming and quelling the mob of Paris by the simple ascendant of genius and of bravery. There are few figures in history more abject than the figure of Lamartine, toward 264 the close of his life, in the garb of a beggar holding out his hat to mankind for the pence and half-pence of wonder, of sympathy, and of sympathetic shame.

Perhaps we instinctively fall into some contagious conformity to Lamartine’s own exaggerating rhetoric in expressing ourselves as we do.

The chief facts of the life of Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine are briefly these. Well-born, having for mother a woman of more than Cornelian, of Christian, virtue, who herself mainly educated her son, he traveled, loved, lost, wept “melodious tears”—mixed much in Parisian society, until, at thirty, he published under the title “Meditations,” a volume of verse which made him instantly, brilliantly, triumphantly, famous. Every thing desirable was easy to him now. He married an Englishwoman of wealth, he wrote and published more poetry, amusing himself meantime with various diplomatic service, was made member of the French Academy, and in 1832 went traveling in the East, like an Eastern prince for lavish splendor of equipage and outlay. His book, “Memories of the Orient,” published three years after, was the fruit of what he saw and felt and dreamed during this luxurious experience of travel. Dreamed, we say, for Lamartine drew freely on his imagination to expand and embellish his memories of the East. Other volumes of verse, his “Jocelyn,” his “Fall of an Angel,” and his “Recollections” followed speedily.

The Revolution of 1830 had seated Louis Philippe on the throne. Lamartine under him had been elected to the legislature of France and had been making reputation as an orator. The poet and orator would now be historian. Lamartine wrote his celebrated “History of the Girondists,” which, after first appearing in numbers, was issued in volume in 1847. This book had in it the fermenting principle of a fresh revolution. In 1848 that revolution came, and Louis Philippe fled from Paris and from France, in precipitate abdication of his throne.

Now was the moment of glory and of opportunity for 265 Lamartine. During the three months following, he may be said to have ruled France. Eloquence and bravery together never won triumphs more resplendent than were Lamartine’s during this swift interval of his dizzy elevation to power. He was in title simply minister for foreign affairs, in a provisional government which he had had himself the decision and the intrepidity among the first to propose. But his personal popularity, his serene courage, his magical eloquence, gave him much the authority of dictator. It cannot be asserted that Lamartine, in this crisis, proved himself a statesman able to cope with the stern exactions of the hour. The candidate for such distinction success only can crown, and Lamartine did not succeed. He fell, as suddenly and as swiftly as he had risen. Yesterday omnipotent, he was absolutely impotent to-day.

But nothing can deprive Lamartine of the pacific glory his due from several extraordinary feats of eloquence achieved by him, at imminent risk to himself, on behalf of mankind. A mob of forty thousand Parisian fanatics roared into the street before the Hôtel de Ville to compel the Provisional Government sitting there to adopt the red flag as the ensign of the republic. This meant nothing less than a new reign of terror for France. Lamartine, single-handed, met the wild beast to its teeth, and with one stroke of the sword that went forth from his mouth laid it tamed at his feet. “The red flag you bring us,” cried the orator to the mob, he shining the while resplendent in a personal beauty touched with the gleam of genius and glorified with the consecration of courage—like a descended Apollo, the rattling quiver borne on his shoulder—“The red flag you bring us,” said he, “has only gone round the Champ de Mars, trailed in the blood of the people—in 1791 and in 1793; while the tricolor has gone round the world, with the name, the glory, and the liberty of our country.” This eloquent condensation of history, untremblingly shot, at close quarters, full in the face of those wild-eyed insurgents, felled them, as if it had been a ball from a cannon. But ranks from behind 266 still pressed forward with menacing cries. “Down with Lamartine!” “Down with the time-server!” “Off with his head! His head! His head! Lamartine’s head!”

The brandished weapons were in Lamartine’s very face. But that gentle blood never blenched. “My head, citizens? You want my head? Indeed, but I wish you had it, every one of you. If Lamartine’s head were now on each pair of shoulders among you, you would be wiser than you are, and the revolution would go on more prosperously.” The mob was in Lamartine’s hand again, taken captive with a jest.

It is generally granted that Lamartine saved the nation from a new reign of terror. But eloquence is not statesmanship; and Lamartine, weighed in the balance, was found wanting. He served at last only to hand over the state to Louis Napoleon, first president, and then emperor.

Under Napoleon, Lamartine, now and henceforward simply a private citizen, found his affairs embarrassed. He had been a prodigal spender of money. He toiled at letters to mend his broken fortunes. But his sun was past its meridian, and it settled hopelessly in cloud toward its west. He wrote a pseudo-biography of himself and published it as a serial in one of the Paris daily newspapers. He almost literally with his own hands performed the profaneness execrated by the poet, and “tare his heart before the crowd”—or would have done so, if his production, the “Confidences,” so called, had really been what it purported to be, the actual story of his life. It was in fact as much imagination as revelation. But the once overwhelmingly popular author now cheapened himself before the public in almost every practicable way. He brought his own personal dignity to market in his works—and did this over and over again. The public bought their former idol at his own cheapened price, and he still remained poor. In 1850 a public subscription was opened for his relief. As a last humiliation, the proud patrician submitted to accept a pension from the empire of Louis Napoleon. This he enjoyed but two years, for in two years after he died. A further space of two years, and the empire itself 267 that granted Lamartine his pension had met its Sedan and ceased to be.

Fresh from admiring the radiant pages of Lamartine’s rhetoric in prose, from admiring the iridescent play in color, the deliquescent melody in sound, of his verse, we feel it painful to admit to ourselves that so much indisputably fine effect goes for little or nothing, now that the fashion of that world of taste and feeling for which this writer wrote has passed returnlessly away. But so it is. Lamartine, like Chateaubriand, and for substantially the same reason, namely, lack of fundamental genuineness, has already reached that last pathetic phase, well-nigh worse than total eclipse, of literary fame, the condition of an author important in the history of literature, rather than in literature.

Poet, orator, historian, statesman, this munificently gifted nature was most profoundly, most controllingly, poet. But he was French poet, which is to say that his poetry is removed, if not quite from access to the English mind, at least from access to the English mind through translation. He, however, enjoyed at first high English reputation as poet, and the publication of “Jocelyn,” his masterpiece in verse, may be said to have been even a European event in literary history.

The story of “Jocelyn” is avouched by the author to be almost a series of actual occurrences. This assertion, to those familiar with Lamartine’s style in asserting, will not be quite so conclusive as on its face it appears. At any rate, if “Jocelyn” be truth, Lamartine has made truth read like fiction, and fiction of a highly improbable sort. The story, true or fictitious—and which it is, as nobody now knows, so nobody now cares—we need not detain our readers to report.

The poet staggered his public by printing on the title-page to his “Jocelyn” the words, “An Episode,” as much as to say that a certain “Epic of Humanity,” which he might finally (but which, as a matter of fact, he never did) produce, would be large enough to make shrink into the dimensions of a mere episode this poem of ten thousand lines more or less!

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Now for an extract or two. In the “Edinburgh Review,” of a date not far from fifty years past now, we find our translation. A day of festival, followed by a long evening of out-door dancing to music, has just closed. The breaking-up is described, with the sequel of young Jocelyn’s pensive and yearning emotions:

There is an indefinable French difference, but, that apart, the foregoing is somewhat like Goldsmith in his “Deserted Village.” Or is it the resemblance of meter that produces the impression?

“Jocelyn,” though certainly intended by the author to be pure, wavers at points on the edge of the exceptionably ambiguous. The following spring song, however, put by the poet into the mouth of his Laurence, is an inspiration as innocent as it is sweet:

Passing now from Lamartine’s poetry, expressly such, we go to his prose, which, however, is scarcely, if at all, less poetical. Poetry, or at least, the presence in power, and in great proportionate excess of power, of imagination, lording it over every thing else, over memory, judgment, taste, good sense, veracity—characterizes all that proceeded from Lamartine’s pen. His history is valueless, almost valueless, as history. His travels are utterly untrustworthy as records of fact. Lamartine cannot tell the simple truth. Persons, things, events, suffer a sea-change, always to something rich and strange seen by him looming in the luminous haze of atmosphere with which his imagination perpetually invests them. His men are ennobled, like Ulysses transfigured by Pallas-Athene. His women are beautiful as houris fresh from paradise. The aspects of ocean and shore and wood and stream and mountain and sky, are all, to Lamartine, washed with a light that never was on sea or land or in heaven overhead, the consecration and the poet’s dream. This quality in Lamartine’s style does not prevent his being very fine. He is very fine; but you feel, Oh, if this all were also true!

On the whole, large, splendid, scenic, admirable in instinct for choosing his point of view, as Lamartine is in his histories, brilliant even, and fecund in suggestion, we turn from the ostensibly historical in our author to the ostensibly autobiographical, in order to find our prose specimens of his quality in the “Confidences.” Lamartine never perhaps did any thing finer, any thing more characteristic, than in telling his story of “Graziella” in that work. This story is an “episode” where it appears; or rather—for it is hardly so much as let into the continuous warp and woof of the “Confidences”—it is a separable device of ornament embroidered upon the surface of the fabric. It is probably, indeed, to 271 some extent autobiographic; but the imagination had as much part in it as the memory. For instance, the actual girl that is transfigured into the “Graziella” of the story was not a coral-grinder, as she is represented by Lamartine, but an operative in a tobacco factory. The real beauty of the tale is, by a kind of just retribution on the author, inseparably bound up with unconscious revelation on his part of heartless vanity and egotism in his own character. You admire, but while you admire you wonder, you reprobate, you contemn. A man such as this, you instinctively feel, was not worthy to live immortally as an author. You are reconciled to let Lamartine pass.

“Graziella” is a story of love and death, on one side, of desertion and expiation—expiation through sentimental tears—on the other. One would gladly trust, if one could, that the reality veiled under the fiction was as free in fact from outward guilt as it is idealized to have been by the writer’s fancy. But neither this supposition, nor any other charitable supposition whatever, can redeem “Graziella” from the condemnation of being steeped in egregious vanity, egotism, and false sentiment, from the heart of the author.

We strike into the midst of the narrative, toward the end. There has been described the growth of relation between the author and the heroine of the idyll, a fisherman’s daughter. And now this heroine, Graziella, is desired in marriage by a worthy young countryman of hers. Such a suitor—for she loves, though secretly, the author (this by the way is a thing almost of course with Lamartine)—the girl cannot bring herself to accept. In despair she flees to make herself a nun. She is found by the autobiographer alone in a deserted house. He ministers to her in her exhausted state—and this to the following result:

The man thus wooed by the maid assures her of his reciprocal affection. But the author explains to his readers:

The autobiographer is summoned away by his mother, and he goes, lacerating Graziella’s heart, but swearing a thousand oaths of fealty to his beloved. Alas! the “treacherous air of absence” undid all—with him, though not with her. He blames himself in retrospect—gently—and pities himself lamentably, as follows:

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A farewell letter from Graziella dying:

The autobiographer “complied with the order contained in her dying behest.” He says: “From that day forward, a shadow of her death spread itself over my features and over my youth.” He apostrophizes the remembered Graziella as follows:

The pensive poet even makes poetry on the subject, twenty years afterward, poetry which, in his customary triplets of expression, he calls “the balm of a wound, the dew of a heart, the perfume of a sepulchral flower.” He wrote it, he says, “with streaming eyes.” He prints his stanzas—for Lamartine is eminently of those who, as it has been said, weep in print and wipe their eyes with the public—and with a sigh, says:

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We ought not to disturb, with any further words of our own, the impression of himself which Lamartine has now made on the reader. He has given us here his own true image. He is the weeping poet. It is fit—let him dissolve, let him exhale, from view in tears.

Lachrymose Lamartine, farewell!

XXIII.

THE GROUP OF 1830.

VICTOR HUGO : 1802-1885; SAINTE-BEUVE : 1804-1869; BALZAC : 1799-1850; GEORGE SAND : 1804-1876; DE MUSSET : 1810-1857.

As a convenient method of inclusion and condensation for a number of authors who must by no means be omitted, but for whom there is left little room in these pages, we adopt the plan of making a cluster of important names to be treated in a single chapter. The political and the literary history of France join a sort of synchronism with one another at a certain point of time, which makes this arrangement not only feasible but natural.

The accession of Louis Philippe to the throne of France and the first representation of Victor Hugo’s “Hernani” in Paris both occurred in the year 1830. The Bourbon or absolutist tradition in French politics and the classic tradition in French letters were thus at one and the same moment decisively interrupted. For, as in the commencing reign of Louis Philippe, the “Citizen King” of France, the French people became for the first time, under monarchical rule, a recognized estate in the realm, so, with the triumph of Victor Hugo’s “Hernani” on the stage, the hour may be said to have struck of culmination in splendor and in influence for the romantic movement in French literature. The dominance of the ideas indicated in the expression “the Romantic Movement” was then suddenly for the moment so overwhelming 275 and so wide that it amounted almost to a usurpation of letters in France. We might indeed have written “The French Romanticists” as a fairly good alternative title to the present chapter.

1. Victor Hugo.

The men of 1830—we thus use a designation which has come to be established in French literary history—began each man his career in letters as a fighting romanticist. Victor Hugo was the acknowledged Achilles of the fight. Whoever wavered backward, Victor Hugo clamped his feet for his lifetime on the bridge of war, where his plume nodded defiance, seeming still to say for its wearer standing with a cliff of adamant at his back,

Around Victor Hugo, as the towering central figure among them all, were mustered, though some of them not to remain in this comradeship with him, Sainte-Beuve, Balzac, George Sand, De Musset. There were others than these, but these shall for us here constitute the group of 1830.

We shall be in yet better accord with Victor Hugo’s estimate of himself, if we take for his symbol a being mightier even than a demigod like Achilles. Let us do so and call him a Titan. But the past tense half seems an anachronism in speaking of Victor Hugo. The earth still trembles to his retiring footsteps and to the portentous reaction of his wrestle in war with the gods. This is his glory—he fought against Olympus, and, if he did not overthrow, at least he was not overthrown. Olympus in our parable was classicism in power; Victor Hugo was the genius of insurgent romanticism.

We thus repeat yet again terms which it would be difficult precisely to define. Classicism and romanticism are two forces in literature, seemingly opposed to each other, which, however, need to be compounded and reconciled in a single resultant, in order to the true highest effect from either. For 276 neither classicism nor romanticism alone concludes the ultimate theory of literature.

Classicism criticises; romanticism creates. Classicism enjoins self-control; romanticism encourages self-indulgence. Classicism is mold; romanticism is matter. Classicism is art; romanticism is nature. Classicism is law; romanticism is life. Romanticism is undoubtedly first and indispensable; but so, not less, classicism is indispensable, though second. Neither, in short, can get along without the other. But Victor Hugo represents romanticism.

Victor Hugo’s personality seems to have been a literary force almost as much as was his genius. As his quantity was immense, so his quality was vivific. Such a man was certain to be not only the master of a school but the center of a worship. Mr. Swinburne’s late volume on Victor Hugo may be cited in extreme example of the deific ascription rendered by many at the shrine of this idolatry. Mr. Matthew Arnold, on the other hand, lost no opportunity to flout with indignity the claims of Victor Hugo to his supreme literary godship.

This great French writer has so recently died that, for the purposes of this book, he might almost be considered still living. At any rate, he has of late been so much talked about in current periodicals; he is, in some of his books, so freshly familiar to all, and, if we must say it, he offers a subject so perplexing to treat at this moment judicially, that we shall in some measure avoid responsibility by presenting him here with the utmost brevity—brevity, however, to be taken rather as a homage, than as a slight, to the unmanageable greatness by imminency of his merit and his fame.

Victor-Marie Hugo wrote verse very early, beginning as a classicist. In later youth he was royalist and religious in spirit. At twenty he acquired the title of “the sublime boy.” How he acquired this title seems a matter of doubt. It is generally supposed to have been given by Chateaubriand, in his quality of patriarch of French letters. But this origin of the sobriquet the present writer has seen seriously suggested to be, along with the sobriquet itself, the pure invention of 277 Victor Hugo’s own imaginative egotism; which fruitful source of autobiography is said also to have yielded the poet’s noble pedigree—the process of production employed on his part being, in the latter case, the extremely simple one of adopting for ancestry the ancient line of a family, bearing the same name indeed with himself, but otherwise utterly unrelated to his own humble house. The really extraordinary independence of fact with which Victor Hugo undoubtedly made his assertions respecting himself renders any testimony that he bears on this point interesting as imagination rather than instructive as history. For three or four years now he was an irrepressible producer and publisher of verse. At twenty-five he put out his “Cromwell,” a drama, with a belligerent preface in favor of romanticism. After this each play of his was a battle for that literary cause. His “Hernani” (1830) was at last more than a battle—it was a victory.

The royalist in due time became republican. When Louis Napoleon was president, Victor Hugo opposed him. When Louis Napoleon made himself emperor, Victor Hugo denounced him. Banished for this from France, the poet betook himself to Belgium. Repelled from Belgium, he found refuge in England. Here, or, more exactly, in the island of Jersey first, and longer, afterward, in the island of Guernsey, he remained till the second empire fell. He then returned to Paris, and shared the melancholy fortunes of that beleaguered capital during the Prussian siege and during the anarchy of the Commune. Here, finally, he died, and, by his own will and testament, in a quite other than the original meaning of that pregnant Scripture phrase, “was buried”—for his funeral was to be attended with peculiar obsequies. He signified his wish to be treated in burial exactly as one of those paupers of whose cause he had been in his works the life-long champion.

During his long exile, which, notwithstanding his passionate love of Paris, he refused to shorten by any understanding arrived at with the emperor, he kept persecuting that usurper with printed diatribes, both in prose and in verse, which for 278 mordant bitterness have probably never been surpassed in the literature of invective. One of these diatribes was a book entitled “The History of a Crime.” To this he prefixed a kind of imprimatur of his own, which may be quoted here as well exemplifying the high oracular style of expression characterized by short sentences and short paragraphs—these often of a single sentence only—that he habitually affected:

Victor Hugo’s egotism was so vast that it was insane if it was not sublime. To exemplify adequately this statement by extracts would ask pages of room. The four lines about to follow, from one of his longer poems, present a modest and moderate example. The poet has been supposing the impossible case that the Supreme Being should take different views, in a certain matter, from his, the poet’s, own—that he should outrage his, the poet’s, sense of moral propriety. Here is how, in that case, Victor Hugo would, he declares, deal with offending Deity (we translate literally the original Alexandrines, line for line, without attempting to reproduce either meter or rhyme):

To Victor Hugo himself, the foregoing was not blasphemy; it was simply sublimity of a sort suitable to the character of the poet. There was, it is said, fully developed mental unsoundness in his father’s family and in his own. Victor Hugo’s own genius had, we suspect, some trace of a real, though noble, insanity in it.

In 1862, appeared “Les Miserables,” which must be accounted, if not the greatest, at least the most popular work of its author. This book was issued simultaneously in eight different cities and in nine different languages—a circumstance probably not paralleled in the history of literature. The fame 279 of “Les Miserables” does not fade, and it hardly will fade. It is a book of truly prodigious elemental power. That, however, Victor Hugo’s genius in producing it worked with some disturbing consciousness of a theory of literary art to be exemplified and defended, the following curious note, inserted in the midst of the text, at a point of interest in the story, may serve to show:

“Les Miserables” is justly open to many strictures, both on literary grounds and on ethical; but it must be pronounced, notwithstanding, a great, and, on the whole, a noble work.

Victor Hugo made this approach to the illimitable in power, that he was well-nigh equally able to do great things and to do small. To exhibit by specimen his achievement in verse we shall offer here a few of his small things, in the impossibility of representing his great. The small things that we offer may acquire a value extrinsic to themselves if thought of as the gentle play of a giant who could with the same ease have astonished you by exhibitions of strength.

Victor Hugo went a second time, having once failed, to intercede with King Louis Philippe on behalf of a political offender condemned to death. It was late at night, and the monarch could not be seen. The intercessor would not be baffled, and, bethinking himself to appeal by the tenderness of birth and of death to the king, wrote four lines of verse which he left on the table. The allusions in them are to a lovely daughter of the royal house just lost and to a little son just born. We give the French text, and follow it with a close English translation:

The poet’s plea availed.

Another little gem of Victor Hugo’s is the following quatrain, which, though it may have had at first some particular occasion, is capable of the most general application. Again we give the French, for the French here almost translates itself:

This may be thus rendered, almost word for word:

One more little gem from Victor Hugo’s treasury of such we are happily able to present in a version whose authorship will commend it; Mr. Andrew Lang translates “The Grave and the Rose.” The poet here affirms, as he is very fond of doing, that capital article in his creed, the immortality of the soul:

The majesty with which this great Frenchman would sometimes, in prose, condescend to be an acrobat walking the tight-rope of grandiloquence stretched over a bottomless abyss of the ridiculous, is well shown in his monograph on Shakespeare. This is accessible in a scholarlike English translation (A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago, publishers) by Melville B. Anderson. The following sentences will indicate what it is. No one familiar with Victor Hugo can doubt that the great presence of HIMSELF , the writer, was really the chief thing in his musing eye, when, in the latter part of this extract, he was ostensibly describing and vindicating romanticist Shakespeare:

“He shudders at his own depth”—hardly could we resist the temptation to bracket in “[Victor Hugo]” after the pronoun “he.” Every reader should do this mentally for himself; he otherwise will miss that important part of the true sense, which here is written between the lines. There never was genius with more inseparable, unescapable, tyrannizing consciousness of itself. You feel the personality even more than you feel the genius in reading Victor Hugo.

A considerable part of Victor Hugo’s prose production, mostly fiction, has been translated into English. Messrs. T. 282 Y. Crowell & Co. publish six portly volumes in a uniform edition. From “Les Miserables” in this series we make extracts which will briefly represent Victor Hugo’s prose at its very best, alike in style, in thought, and in spirit. In the first, the writer gives utterance to reflections inspired by the final event of the battle of Waterloo:

In the second, Victor Hugo contrasts the two leaders, the conqueror and the conquered, of that momentous day:

It remains only to exemplify, as best in small space we can, Victor Hugo’s portentous, his terrific, power in working up a tragic situation, and displaying it as in a calcium-light of intense imaginative description or narration. We shall then feel that this Titanic figure in French literature is at least by suggestive partial glimpses fairly before our readers. From “Les Miserables,” we take the following passage, introduced by the original author as a first step only in the climax by which he represents the supreme agony of his hero in a great crisis of his life:

Victor Hugo’s hero was involved thus in a quicksand—but the quicksand in his case was underground, and dark as Erebus; it was a quicksand composed of the unspeakable foulness and fetor of a cess-pool—he was wading up to his very chin in the noisome Styx of the great Paris sewer. All this to rescue, upborne in his arms above his head, a man unconscious, perhaps already dead from wounds received, and a man whom he, the rescuer, hated. There is Victor Hugo for you, Victor Hugo in his glory. For the glory of Victor Hugo as novelist is in climaxes of agony, lashed together and reared like an endless ladder reaching to heaven. This his strength is his weakness. All is said that need be said in hostile criticism of Victor Hugo’s writings, when it is said that he is always to the last degree egotistic and to the last degree theatric. Effect is every thing, truth nothing, with him.

That Victor Hugo willed to be buried exactly like a pauper did not prevent the occurrence of certain very important contrasts between his obsequies and the rites of an ordinary pauper funeral; perhaps, indeed, such a will on his part contributed to create the difference which at all events existed. The funeral attendance was said to be the most numerous ever seen in France. A million spectators were present. Three large wagons headed the procession filled with floral gifts. A beautiful diadem of Irish lilies was contributed by Tennyson, inscribed “To the World’s Greatest Poet.”

The French apotheosis of a national idol would not be 285 complete without tribute from the theater. Accordingly, the Theâtre Français produced a drama by M. Rénan entitled “ Mort ,” in which the shades of Corneille, Racine, Boileau, Voltaire, and Diderot hold a dialogue about human progress in the century to follow them, and, Corneille asking, “What poet will sing in that era, as sweet and tender as Racine, as logical as Boileau, as clear in style as Voltaire,” the genius of the age lyrically answers, “Hugo,” at the same time placing a crown on Hugo’s bust.

Victor Hugo the man, especially as he mellowed with old age, was a sunny, sweet, benignant nature. He was a hearty, one might almost say a partisan, believer in God—atheism was so offensive to him. Unfortunately, however, Victor Hugo’s theism was not such as to enforce departure, in his own personal practice, from that deplorable tradition of his country which has rendered so many distinguished French authors, from the earliest to the latest, offenders against the laws of marriage and of chastity.

2. Sainte-Beuve.

Sainte-Beuve is an instance of the half-malicious sportiveness of nature or of fortune. What he chiefly desired was the fame of a poet. What he chiefly got was the fame of a critic. But Sainte-Beuve’s fame as a critic was far more in fact, if far less to his mind, than any fame that he could have achieved as a poet. In poetry, he never could have risen higher than to be a poet of the second or of the third rank. He is admitted to be a critic of the first rank. Nay, in the opinion of many, Sainte-Beuve constitutes a rank by himself, having no peers.

Sainte-Beuve’s range of subjects was very wide. He exercised himself to be equally open and fair toward all schools of taste and of opinion alike. At the outset, he was of the coterie of the romanticists. But he soon broke with these, either personally repelled by antipathies, or else unconsciously attracted by a secret sympathy of his own, too strong for his contrary will to resist, toward the classical standards 286 respesented in the seventeenth-century writers. He never seems to feel himself more entirely in his element than when he is appreciating the literature of the French golden age.

As to religion, Sainte-Beuve, having had his phase of pietism even, ended by becoming a blank unbeliever. But his own antipathetic personal attitude of intellect and of heart toward Christianity he would not in the least allow to disturb the urbanity and serenity of his tolerance for the most orthodox Christian writers. Such, at any rate, was his standard and ideal.

But at this point, as at all points, the complaisance of Sainte-Beuve’s writing is a manner with him, rather than a spirit. It does not penetrate deeply. He loves his “insinuations.” That is his own word. He is willing to write a whole essay in criticism for the sake of the “insinuations” which his deceitful blandness will sheathe. Or, rather, he would sooner give up the whole essay than forego a phrase, or perhaps a single word, containing his insinuation. It was partly his critical conscience, no doubt, instinctively nice about shades of opinion and of expression; but then a something very like malice was mingled with his critical conscience. With all that must be conceded to the value of Sainte-Beuve’s critical work, readers are conscious, in concluding the perusal of almost any one of his essays, that the result to them is a sapor remaining on their literary palate, rather than substance of nutriment entered into their mental digestion. Their food has been refined into a flavor.

For our illustration of Sainte-Beuve, we go to a paper of his on Bossuet. But we need to prepare our readers. Sainte-Beuve is a writer for the few, instead of for the many. To profit from him requires some effort of attention. One must study a little, as well as simply read. Sainte-Beuve does not deal in heavy strokes. His lines are most of them fine, many of them hair-lines vanishing almost into invisibility. He escapes you like Proteus. Very different is he, by this elusive quality of his, from his countryman, M. Taine, whose bold crayon sketches are at once appreciable to all.

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In the choice indicated of specimen, we draw from a series of short criticisms which the author called Causeries du Lundi ; “Monday-Chats,” Mr. William Matthews, who has a volume of select translations from them, not unhappily renders the title. These were originally published as Monday articles in the columns of two Paris journals, the Constitutionel and the Moniteur . Mr. Matthews’s volume is introduced by a most readable biographical sketch and literary appreciation of Sainte-Beuve himself from the pen of the translator. M. Sainte-Beuve, we ought to say, in addition to his very considerable body of criticism, ranging, as we have intimated, over a wide field of literature, wrote an extended historical monograph on Port Royal, which is constantly referred to by writers as an authority on its subject.

The critic characterizes his subject broadly by his most commanding traits:

Sainte-Beuve is so much a critic that he cannot help criticising by the way, or even sometimes perhaps a little out of the way. But it will be quite to our purpose if we admit here what Sainte-Beuve incidentally says of Lamartine:

Sainte-Beuve speaks of the relation of the Hotel de Rambouillet to the future great man:

In the following passage, Sainte-Beuve appreciates, not without insinuated criticism, the younger eloquence of Bossuet the preacher. Conceive this atheist critic, for such in effect Sainte-Beuve was, entering into the spirit of the orthodox Christian, exclusively for the purpose of justly judging and enjoying a strain of pulpit eloquence! But that is Sainte-Beuve:

Sainte-Beuve cannot let Lamartine alone. In the clause following, italicized by us, our readers are to recognize an irony on the part of the critic:

Having quoted, with significant italics disposed here and there, a highly realistic imaginary picture of the youthful Bossuet from the hand of Lamartine, Sainte-Beuve says:

You feel, with regard to the foregoing criticism, that it is as just as it is penetrative. Lamartine fairly provoked it.

Here is a trait of Bossuet’s that pertained remarkably also to Daniel Webster:

The Abbé Maury is a critic belonging to the classical school of French literature. His best-known work is a treatise on pulpit eloquence. La Harpe is another critic of the same class with Maury, who has a considerable work, historical and critical, devoted to French literature in general. To these two writers Sainte-Beuve makes instructive allusion in the following passage:

Victor Cousin is one among the somewhat numerous writers who, within the bounds of this same paper on Bossuet, fall under the touch of Sainte-Beauve’s critical lance, that weapon borne ever in rest and ready for any encounter:

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It is Sainte-Beuve’s specialty—in aim, whether in achievement or not—to be without the tendency thus charged upon M. Cousin, to violate proportion in his criticism. The insinuating delicacy of his adverse, or at least disparaging, critical judgment toward a distinguished contemporary author is well exemplified in the following passage, in which the critic, by his instinct as critic, is irresistibly drawn to make a return to Cousin. The wise reader familiar with Mr. Matthew Arnold will see how exactly the latter caught from his French master the trick of method here displayed:

Lamartine does not escape still another light thrust from this dangerous delicate lance, aimed yet again, with exquisite accuracy, through an unquestionable joint in the victim’s harness:

The “bright consummate flower” of Bossuet’s eloquence is to be found in his Funeral Discourses. Of one of these, Sainte-Beuve, with a sudden sympathetic swell of kindred 293 eloquence in description, speaks, in a passage with quotation from which we close our exemplifications of this famous critic:

It has been to us some satisfaction that the wrong of distortion by reduction in scale done to the majestic figure of Bossuet in our own treatment of him, and unavoidable there, could thus in a measure be redressed by return to the subject in effective quotation from Sainte-Beuve. Looking back on the extracts preceding, we feel that enough is expressed, or suggested, in them, to justify us in saying, There is Bossuet.

But at any rate we have great confidence in saying, There is Sainte-Beuve.

3. Balzac.

Honoré de Balzac is one of the heroes of literature. He set himself labors of Hercules in literary production, and he toiled at his tasks of will with a tireless tenacity little less than sublime. The moral spectacle of such courageous industry in Balzac, the present writer admires, not the less, but the more, that the intellectual achievement resulting seems to him not commensurately great. Balzac’s long “toil and endeavor” was not leavened and lightened and turned into play by that “reflex of unimpeded energy” in him which a lofty philosopher has defined happiness to be. He did his work hardly—with profuse sweat of his brow. His mind did not answer to that definition of genius which makes it a faculty of lighting its own fires. His fires Balzac lighted with late hours, artificial illumination, strong stimulant drinks. He burned himself out early in life—comparatively early, that is to say; he died at fifty-one.

The moral triumph of Balzac we have but half suggested. Not only did he lack the spontaneous joy of genius at work; 294 he lacked also, for many and many a doubtful year, the encouragement of recognition and success. Book after book of his failed, and still he toiled on. The world was fairly conquered at last. The reverse of Tulliver’s experience happened with Balzac. One man, in his case, proved “too many” for the world.

For his own part, he freely confesses, the present writer not only admires; he wonders. Balzac’s novels do not please him, either as products of genius or as works of art. They please him solely as monuments of victorious labor. They have to his mind exactly the quality that was to have been expected from the history of their production. They smell of oil, they smack of sweat. They are full of stimulated, rather than stimulating, thought. So much as one passage in which imagination played its magnificent play in easy and easily perfect creation, one passage in which the words flowed of themselves, and did not come each pumped with a several stroke of author’s will, he cannot remember ever to have found in Balzac. He wonders, therefore, and helplessly wonders, that Balzac should be esteemed, as he is, and that by some good judges, one of the greatest writers in the world.

What Balzac undertook was to write the whole “human tale of this wide world”—that is, to represent in fiction all the manifold phases and aspects of human life and character. He calls the entire series of his novels “The Human Comedy.” This title, we have seen it stated, was not original with Balzac, but was adopted by him at the suggestion of a friend who hit upon it as a kind of balance and contrast to Dante’s expression, “Divine Comedy.” It is not quite a cynic conception of human character and human destiny that Balzac intended thus to express. Still, on the other hand, his view of human nature and human life cannot be said to be genial. The disagreeable preponderates in his fiction—the disagreeable one must call it, rather than the tragic. For true tragedy there is not height enough. In reading Balzac, you breathe for the most part an atmosphere of the not merely common, but—vulgar. Of course, the novelist himself would 295 have said, Very well, such is man, and such is life. This one need not deny, but one can say, It was at least not desirable that readers should be obliged to feel the novelist to be himself vulgar, along with his characters. There is such a thing as refined dealing with people not refined.

Realism was Balzac’s aim, and realism was the rock on which Balzac suffered double shipwreck. In seeking to be realistic, he became vulgar; and in seeking to be realistic, he became unreal. For there is an air of unreality diffused everywhere over the pages, meant to be realistic or nothing, of this voluminous writer. Balzac evolved the personages of his fiction out of his own consciousness. They are none of them human beings, such as you meet in the real world. They are simulacra , images, bodiless projections, of the author’s own mind. They move over his canvas like the specters thrown by the magic-lantern on its screen.

Balzac and Dickens are sometimes paralleled. There certainly is in a number of particulars a superficial resemblance between them. Both undertake to be realists. Both concern themselves chiefly with people of the average sort—sort, perhaps, even tending toward the vulgar. Both exaggerate to a degree that makes them at times almost caricaturists. Both deal abundantly in minute detail of description. But the contrast too between them is great. Balzac is far less spontaneous than Dickens. You feel that Dickens improvises. You never feel this about Balzac. You can hear Balzac drive his Pegasus with shout and with lash. Dickens’s Pegasus often flies with his bit between his teeth. Dickens was an observer of men and of things—of books, a student never; there is perhaps scarcely another instance in nineteenth-century literature of an author who owed so little as did Dickens to study of books. From books, on the other hand, Balzac purveyed a large share of his material. Dickens writes as if unconscious that a race of men like the critics existed. Balzac writes in view of the critics. These in fact seem to be his audience quite as much as do the general public. Balzac, beginning that novel of his from which we are presently to 296 draw our sole brief extract to exhibit his manner, enters, according to a fashion of his, upon an elaborate unnecessary description of the house in which the scene of his action is laid. But he prefaces thus:

Such a sentence as that—prefatory, but in the body of the text, and not in a formal preface—would have been impossible to Dickens. In Balzac, it is the most natural thing in the world. And it discloses the secret of the character everywhere stamped on his production. He wrote as a professional writer. He conformed to a law that he himself imposed upon his genius, instead of leaving his genius free to be a law to itself. A real realist, a realist, that is to say, such by nature, and not merely by profession, a realist like De Foe, for example, could never have committed the offense against art of disturbing thus that very illusion of reality which he sought to produce, by exhibiting and defending the method adopted by him to produce it. There could not be a case imposing more obligation on the artist to conceal his art. But Balzac, instead, forces upon his reader the thought of art by calling its very name.

Balzac paints with a big brush and puts on plenty of color. No one need fear in reading him that he will miss delicate shades. There are none such to miss. Balzac does not suggest. He speaks right out. Nay, he insists. You shall by no means fail of understanding him.

But, over against everything that can thus justly be said in diminution of his worth, there remain the unalterable facts, of Balzac’s great reputation, just now looming larger than ever, of his voluminous literary achievement, of his population of imaginary personages projected into the world of thought, by actual count more, we believe, than two thousand poll. 297 There is published a portly biographical dictionary exclusively devoted to the characters of Balzac’s fiction.

Paralyzed to choose, even to think of choosing, out of the enormous volume of this writer’s laborious production, a single page for exemplifying his quality, we pitch desperately upon the conclusion of that story of his called by the accomplished American translator of it, Miss Katharine Prescott Wormeley, “The Alkahest,” “The Search for the Absolute” is the author’s own title. This work, belonging in the endless series of volumes dedicated to the display of the “comedy of human life” in all its phases, is a novel which undertakes to illustrate the effect on character and destiny of an exclusive supreme absorption in scientific pursuits. The hero has at length reached the catastrophe of his career. He is an old man who has wrecked fortune after fortune in chemical quest of a scientific chimera, The Absolute. A monomaniac before, he is paralytic now, and the last night of his life is slowly passing. Balzac:

The reader there has Balzac at his highest and best.

Those desirous of acquainting themselves with some integral work of this author’s will choose wisely if they choose any one of these four: “Père Goriot,” “César Birotteau,” “Modeste Mignon,” “The Alkahest” (“The Search for the Absolute”). Mr. Saintsbury, a competent hand, edits a series of translations from Balzac, including the novels just named, together with everything else worth possessing from his industrious pen.

4. George Sand.

In virile quality, Madame de Stael seemed rediviva , or should we keep the more familiar masculine gender, and say redivivus ? in George Sand. “It only happened that she was a woman,” said some one, of the latter personage; and indeed the chance that made her such seemed half on the point of being reversed by the choice of the subject herself. For, besides that she has her fame permanently under a pseudonym naturally betokening a man as its owner, it is a fact that she did, at one time, in order to greater freedom of the world, wear man’s clothes and otherwise play the man among her Parisian fellows. This episode in her experience doubtless helped give her that great advantage over other women, which her genius enabled her to use to effect so surpassing, in describing the male human being such as he himself recognizes himself to be.

The episode, however, was short, and George Sand is thought by her admirers—and her admirers include some very grave and self-respecting persons, the late Mr. Matthew Arnold being one example—never to have parted with a certain paradoxical womanly reserve and delicacy which ought logically to have been quite lost out of her nature through 299 the coarse and soiled contacts to which she herself willingly, and even willfully, subjected it.

But, poor George Sand! Let us never, in judging her, forget how ill-bestead a childhood was hers, and how unhappy a marriage was provided for her warm and passionate youth. Her life began in protest, and protest was the early strength of her genius and her endeavor. She protested against things as they were, and, according to her light—a light sadly confused with misguiding cross-lights from many quarters besides her own eager self-will—fought, and pleaded, and wept, aspiring, hoping, believing, for an ideal world in which love should be law; or rather an ideal world in which law should have ceased, and love should be all. From one of the last of her innumerable books, perhaps from the very last, Mr. Matthew Arnold translates this expression, which he repeats as summing up the motive of her work—“the sentiment of the ideal life, which is none other than man’s normal life as we shall one day know it.”

The word “love” does not occur in this expression, but that word and that thought make the luminous legend over everything hers by the light of which everything hers is to be read and interpreted.

Of course, George Sand’s “love” is not the sentiment which the apostle Paul sings in that prose canticle of his found in the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians. But neither is it the purely animal passion that base souls might understand it. The peculiar affection natural between the sexes it indeed includes, but it includes much more. It includes all domestic, all social affections. In short, it is love in the largest sense. The largest sense, but not the highest. For it is love, the indulgence, the appetite; not love, the duty, the principle. George Sand’s gospel is that you may love and indulge yourself; Paul’s gospel is that you must love and deny yourself. Paul says love is the fulfilling of the law; George Sand virtually says love is the annulling of the law.

Because in many passionate and powerful novels, read 300 everywhere in Europe and not only in France, read also in America, George Sand has preached this gospel of love as the virtual solvent of existing society, Mr. Justin Macarthy pronounces the opinion that she is on the whole incomparably the greatest force in literature of her generation. He probably would attribute to her as a chief motor the portentous movements in human society which we of to-day feel, like tides of the sea, bearing us on, no one knows whither. It is no doubt true that George Sand has contributed what mechanicians call a “moment,” not sufficiently considered, to make up the urgency that is pushing us all in the direction toward uncalculated social solutions and social reconstructions. This constitutes her a notable social force working by literature; a force, however, that has already chiefly spent itself, or that persists, so far as it does persist, translated indistinguishably into other forms.

For George Sand is no longer read as she formerly was, her fashion having already to a great extent passed away. It is a common testimony that, as she wrote like one improvising, so her writing is to be read once and not returned to. Her “Consuelo,” in its time such a rage, and still often spoken of as her masterpiece, is now even a little hard to get through. You yawn, you feel like skipping, you do skip, and you finally shut up the book wondering why such bright writing should make such dull reading.

There occurred a sharp, decisive change, a change, however, not consistently maintained, in George Sand’s quality of production. From producing novels of social ferment, she turned to producing the quietest, most quieting, idyllic little stories in the world. There is a long list of such. “La Petite Fadette,” “François le Champi,” “Les Maîtres Sonneurs,” are among the best of them. From this last, consummately well translated by our countrywoman, Miss Katharine Prescott Wormeley, who has Messrs. Roberts Brothers for her publishers, we shall offer a very short extract in specimen. But first a short passage from one of her earlier books, in order that our readers may get a sense of the 301 change that she underwent, or rather—for no doubt the change was voluntary and calculated on her part—the change that she chose to make, in her manner. It is simply her two contrasted manners that we aim to illustrate—not at all, in either case, the matter or doctrine set forth. To illustrate this last we should have no room, had we the inclination.

From “Lélia,” we translate a passage descriptive of Alpine scenery, or rather of the effect on the mind of Alpine scenery. After lighting upon this passage for our choice we found that Mr. Saintsbury too, in his “Specimens of French Literature,” had made the same selection, at double length, for his sole exemplification of George Sand. We are thus confirmed in trusting that we shall show our author, if far too briefly, still at her best:

With our utmost effort to convey, through close fidelity, the feeling of George Sand’s style, the delicious music of it, its sweet opulence of diction, its warmth of color, its easy spontaneity, its lubricity, its flow, we must ask our readers 302 to imagine all twice as charming as they could possibly find it in any translation. As to the substance of what is said in the foregoing sentences? Other travelers may have been more fortunate, but the present writer is obliged to admit that he never saw “great flocks,” or any flocks at all, of eagles “incessantly hovering around the summits” of the Alps. Indeed, the eagle is generally supposed to be a solitary bird, not inclined to fly in flocks. Also, he has never happened to meet with “stags” in the Alps, much less to hear them moan passionately or otherwise. “The vultures screaming,” etc.? In short, he would be quite unable to verify in its details George Sand’s beautiful description, which he thinks must have been written from the heart of the writer, much more than from either her eye or her ear.

Successive generations of readers are not apt to be satisfied with merely subjective truth in what is offered them to read. There must be fact of some sort to correspond with statement, in order permanently to secure the future for an author. But feeling, rather than fact, at least in her earlier work, is the substance to which George Sand’s magical style gave such exquisite form.

Now for a specimen passage done in her later manner.

This we take from “Les Maîtres Sonneurs,” or “The Bagpipers,” as Miss Wormeley renders the title. Brulette is a charming peasant girl, who, brought up in the same house with José, has known him only as a shy, recluse, silent, sullen, even downright stupid boy, if not indeed almost a “natural.” He has cultivated music secretly, and he now makes trial of his art for the first time before Brulette. She turns away, and he is in despair, till he sees that she turned away to hide her fast-coming tears. He then demands to know what she thought of while he was playing. Brulette replies, and José in his turn expresses his mind:

Little speeches like the foregoing make up what, throughout the whole story of “The Bagpipers” does duty for dialogue between the characters. Charming, but in no proper sense of the word natural or verisimilar.

George Sand and Balzac are often set in antithesis to each other as respectively idealistic and realistic writers. Different enough, indeed, they are, but the difference is that of temperament, of genius, and not that of method. Balzac is all conscience (his sort of conscience), will, work; George Sand is all freedom, improvisation, play—around her everywhere a nameless exquisite charm.

5. Musset.

Alfred de Musset makes a melancholy figure in literary history. Few men ever had a more brilliant morning than 304 he; few men ever had an evening more somber. And Musset’s evening fell at mid-day. Heine, with that bitterness which was his, could say of the still youthful poet, “A young man with a very fine future—behind him!”

What this writer accomplished, he accomplished by the pure felicity of genius—genius, flushed and quickened with the warm blood of youth. He did nothing in the way of self-tasking, but all in the way of self-indulging. He obeyed whim, and not will. When the whim failed, he failed. Will indeed he seemed not to have, but only willfulness. He died at forty-seven, but he had already ceased living at forty.

It is generally agreed that in what makes genius for the poet, namely, capacity of poetic feeling, propensity to poetic rhythm, command of poetic phrase, and power to see with the imagination, Musset belongs among the foremost singers of France. What he lacked was moral equipment to match. We mean not moral goodness, though this, too, he missed, but moral strength. He might have soared like the eagle, for he had eagle’s pinions; but he had not the eagle’s heart, and after a few daring upward flights he fluttered ignobly downward, and thereafter, except at intervals too rare, kept the ground. Some charge this lamentable failure on Musset’s part to the ill influence over him of George Sand, with whom in the fresh splendor of his young fame he entered into an unhappy “relation”—a “relation” sought by the woman in the case, who of the two was the older. She, as some think, sucked Musset’s heart out of him like a vampire. But what a confession to make on the man’s behalf of flaccid moral fiber in him! Such a man, one would say, was certain to fall in due time prey to some one; in default of other hunter, then prey to himself. It is one of the things least consistent with a favorable view of George Sand’s fundamental character that, two years after Musset’s death, and some twenty years after the time of her “relation” with him, she should publish, thinly veiled under the form of fiction, a story of that relation, in which she herself 305 appeared vindicated, and the unhappy dead was held up to the laughter and contempt of Europe. Paul de Musset, Alfred’s brother, replied in a book which claimed to set the facts in their true light before the world. Wretched wrangle! A little more of dull conformity on her part to things as she found them, and a little less of passionate protest against them in literature and in life, would have helped George Sand shun scandals that happily limit her influence as they deservedly darken her fame. There is too much reason to fear that this woman, in whom genius was certainly greater than was conscience, made, after the manner of Goethe, a deliberate study of Musset in quest of material to be worked up in literary product.

Musset was greatest as poet, but he wrote admirable prose in novels and in comedies. He singularly combined capacity of hard and brilliant wit in prose dialogue with capacity of the softest, most dewy sentiment in musical verse. Some of his comedies are established classics of the French stage.

We confine ourselves here to brief exhibition by specimen of what Musset accomplished in that species of literary work in which he was greatest, namely, poetry. A quaternion of pieces called “The Nights” will supply us perhaps with our best single extract, at once practicable and characteristic. These pieces are entitled respectively “Night of May,” “Night of August,” “Night of October,” “Night of December.” They are couched in the form of dialogue between the poet and his muse. Of course they are highly charged with autobiographic quality. The poet poses in them very pensively before the public. The Byronic melancholy, without the Byronic passion, pervades them. Our extract we take, condensing it, from the “Night of December.” In it, the poet’s muse talks to the poet in what might easily pass for an almost pious vein. We could make extracts in which the piety would be far, very far, less edifying, would in fact take on the characteristic dissolute French type of moral sentiment. His muse’s talk to the poet is somewhat such as might be imagined to be a confidential 306 consolatory strain of condescension from the goddess-mother Venus to her son, the Virgilian “pious” Æneas. We make our translation closely line for line, almost word for word. The rhyme we sacrifice for the sake of what we trust may seem to wise judges a fairly good approximation, otherwise impossible in a literal rendering, to the spirit and rhythm of the original:

Imagine the foregoing in its own original music, and invested with that hovering, wavering atmosphere of pathos which Musset knew so well how to throw over his verse, and you will partly understand what the charm is of this French poet to his countrymen.

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Musset exhibits something of the wit that he was, in the following bit of rhymed epigram, which, breaking up two stanzas for the purpose, we take from his poem entitled “Namouna.” The rhymes were necessary here to convey the effect of smartness belonging to the original, and we accordingly preserve them:

This self-vindicating epigram of Musset’s may be pronounced clever rather than satisfactory.

Musset—the juxtaposition and contrast of the two men irresistibly provokes the reflection—was as much less than Balzac by inferiority of will as he was greater by superiority of genius.

Already, such is the pace of progress in these last days of the nineteenth century, the “men of 1830” are beginning to seem a generation long gone by. The future will see whether their successors of the present time enjoy a more protracted supremacy.

XXIV.

JOUBERT : 1754-1824; Madame Swetchine : 1782-1859; Amiel : 1821-1881.

We come now to that nineteenth-century group, foreshadowed on an earlier page, of French pensée -writers.

The longer lapse of time in Joubert’s case, constantly confirming his claim to be a true classic, justifies us in placing, as we do, his name not only first but principal in the title to the present chapter.

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Joseph Joubert presents the singular case of a man of letters living to a good old age, whose published literary work, and, therefore, whose literary fame, are wholly posthumous. He left behind him more than two hundred blank books filled with notes of thoughts which were to constitute after he died his title to enduring remembrance.

Everything important surviving from his pen exists in the form of what the French call pensées . The sense of this word one of Joubert’s own pensées very well expresses:

Another of his pensées confesses, perhaps we should say rather, professes, what the ambition was that this most patient of writers indulged with reference to the literary form of his work:

Joubert was a natural unchangeable classicist in taste and spirit. The Periclean age of Greece, the Augustan age of Rome, the “great age” of France, that of Louis XIV., supplied Joubert with most of the books that fed his mind. He remained distinctively Christian in creed, though not nicely orthodox according to any accepted standard. Like so many of his literary compatriots, Joubert owed a great debt, for intellectual quickening, shaping, and refining, to brilliant and beautiful women.

We show a few, too few, specimens that may indicate this gifted Frenchman’s rare and precious quality:

A comparison, the latter foregoing, however faulty by defect we may justly esteem it, loyally designed, of course, by the author to render profound homage to the Bible.

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In pondering such golden sentences, one is constantly incited to make maxims one’s self; which, indeed, is a part of the value of this kind of literature.

The foregoing happy English rendering of the French maxim we borrow from Mr. Henry Attwell, who has published a selection of Joubert’s pensées translated, the translation being accompanied with the original text.

Buffon’s is a good working definition, to say the least—for genius of any sort.

This may be compared to the law in musical composition requiring that a piece end in the key in which it began.

“Artistic,” instead of “literary,” Joubert might have widened his “thought” by saying.

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A few individual literary judgments now, and we shall have shown from Joubert all that our room will admit:

The quality of both writers is such that we seem simply to be making the transition from masculine to feminine in going, as now we do, from Joubert to Madame Swetchine.

Madame Swetchine lives, and deserves to live, in French literature—for, though Russian, she wrote in French—by the incomparable exquisiteness of her personal, expressing itself in her literary, quality. Purest of pure was she, as in what she wrote, so in what she was. Through sympathetic contemporary description she makes an impression as of one of Fra Angelico’s female saints released for a life from the fixed canonization of the canvas.

Madame Swetchine’s life was chiefly spent in Paris, where 312 the French language, already long before, in St. Petersburg, grown easy and tripping on her tongue, became to her a second, perhaps more familiar, vernacular. She was a high-born, high-bred, refined, and elegant woman of the world—woman in the world we should rather say, for, in the truest sense, of it she never was—who held brilliant, choicely-frequented salons , but who, without ostentation and without affectation, would go from her oratory, which indeed seems to have been a private “chapel,” in the full ecclesiastic sense of that word, to her drawing-room; who had even, as Sainte-Beuve indulgently, but with something of his inseparable irony, intimates, the effect of vibrating from the one to the other in the course of the same evening. Madame Swetchine was married young very unequally to a man twenty-five years her senior; but she set the edifying example of half a century’s wifely devotion to that husband whom, at the wish of her father, well beloved, she had dutifully accepted in place of a noble young suitor, the choice of her own affections.

Two volumes—both of “Thoughts,” though one of them bears the title “Airelles”—shut up within themselves the fragrance that was Madame Swetchine. We cull a few specimens:

Madame Swetchine was a woman of wealth and of leisure so-called; but it may be doubted whether any poor woman in Paris worked harder. She carried with her when she went hence what, through all her conscientious activity, outward and inward, she had in her own being become; and she found besides that ample further reward, unknown, which she had thus grown capable of receiving.

Henri Fréderic Amiel , who lived an almost silent life of sixty years—not quite silent, for he piped a volume or two of ineffectual verse—became a bruit of marvel and of praise soon after his death, through the publication from his “Journal Intime” [“Private Journal”] of a select number of his “Thoughts” found recorded there. How permanent a glow may prove to be the brightness of fame for Amiel thus suddenly outbursting, time only will decide. Already two very opposite opinions find expression concerning his merit—one applausive to the point almost of veneration, the other very freely irreverent.

Both these two contradictory opinions admit of being apparently justified from the text of his “Journal.” Take the following for an example on one side:

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The foregoing sentence is unintelligible enough to make, probably, the impression of pretty pure jargon on most minds. But in truth the amount of such writing in Amiel’s “Journal” is proportionally very small.

Another line of entries in the “Journal” tending to reflect disparagement upon the writer consists of reiterated confessions on Amiel’s part of morbid weakness of will, with habits of helpless morbid introspection, which, disappointing the hopes of his friends, practically shut him up his whole life long in a well-nigh total sterility of genius. On this count of the indictment against Amiel it is quite impossible to defend him. He was inexcusably non-productive. His “Journal” itself shows that its author should have done more than that.

This book, admirably translated into English by Mrs. Humphrey Ward, exhibits Amiel in the character of a man who always thought and felt and spoke and wrote on the side of what was pure and good and noble. He was a profoundly religious soul. As the years went on with him, and he became more and more the passive prey of his own eternally active thought, there appear to be registered some decline from the simplicity, and some corruption from the wholesomeness, of his earlier religious experience. In fact, he at last seems to let go historical Christianity altogether, still clinging, however, pathetically to God, as Father, all the time that he regards God’s fatherly providence over the world as only a subjective beautiful illusion of faith existing in his own imaginative mind!

Amiel judges the present age and the current tendency of things:

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He writes to himself a sort of “spiritual letter” that might almost have been Fénelon’s (the date is 1852, he was therefore now thirty-one years old):

The first following “thought” is a deep intuition:

From entries fourteen years apart in date, we bring together, abridging them, two expressions of Amiel about Victor Hugo:

Amiel had a just perception of the immense healing virtue lodged in happiness:

A vent of frank French distaste for the German type of book. Amiel had been reading the great nineteenth-century philosopher Lotze:

The following shows a good heart as well as a wise head:

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He first passes judgment on Goethe, and then afterward checks himself:

Under date 1874, Amiel asks a question and answers it. He had before said, “My creed has melted away”:

A melancholy fall from his earlier state! A whole sky between such conscious false motions toward self-deceiving and the victory which overcomes the world, even our faith. Amiel had now definitely lost his health.

Toward the end, occurs this striking and illuminating word about one of the worst of human passions:

Doubting Amiel still thinks that Christ is better than Buddha:

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Amiel was a naturally noble spirit, not equal to making for himself the career that he needed. But the right career, made for him, would have left to history and to literature a very different man from the writer of Amiel’s “Journal.”

The very latest conspicuous French candidate for renown as a writer of pensées is Joseph Roux , a rural Roman Catholic priest, and a man still living. Out of a volume of his “Thoughts” lately translated and published in America under the title of “Meditations of a Parish Priest,” we show the following specimen of literary criticism peculiarly pertinent to the subject of the present chapter:

Pensée -writing has gained such headway in France, there is so much literary history behind it there, and it is in itself so fascinating a form of literary activity, that, in that country at least, the fashion will probably never pass away.

XXV.

EPILOGUE.

How much author’s anguish of self-tasking and of self-denial, in exploration, study, selection, rejection, condensation, retrenchment, to say nothing of the anxiety to be clear in expression, to be true, to be proportionate, to be just, finally, too, to be entertaining as well as instructive—this little book has cost the producer of it, no one is likely ever to guess that has not tried a similar task with similar application of conscience himself.

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For instance, to name Ronsard, the brilliant, the once sovereign Ronsard—lately, after so long occultation of his orb, come, through the romanticists of to-day, or shall we write “of yesterday”? almost to brightness again—to name this poet, without at least giving in specimen the following celebrated sonnet from his hand, which, for the sake of making our present point the clearer, we may now show in a neat version by Mr. Andrew Lang (but why should Mr. Lang, in his fourth line, change Ronsard’s “fair” to “young”?):

—then, for another instance, to pass over Boileau and not bring forward from him even so much as the following characteristic epigram, wherein this wit and satirist pays his sarcastic respects to that same poet Cotin whom (pp. 81 ff.) we showed Molière mocking under the name of “Trissotin” (here we must do our own translating):

to achieve, we say, these abstinences, and abstinences such as these, was a problem hard indeed to solve.

The result of all is before the reader; and, good or bad, 320 it is, we are bound to confess, the very best that, within the given limits, we could do. Such students of our subject as we may fortunately have succeeded in making hungry for still more knowledge than we ourselves supply, we can conscientiously send, for further partial satisfaction of their desire, to that series of books, already once named by us, which has lately been published at Chicago, under the title, “The Great French Writers.” Messrs. A. C. McClurg & Co. have done a true service to the cause of letters in general, and in particular to the cause of what may be called international letters, in reproducing this series of books. They are good books, they are well translated, and they appear in handsome form. Madame de Sévigné, Montesquieu, Bernardin de St. Pierre, and three names that, together with all of their several kinds, economists, philosophers, historians, we here have been obliged to omit, Turgot, Victor Cousin, Thiers, are in the list of authors treated in the volumes thus far issued.

An interesting doubt may, in retrospect of all, be submitted, without author’s solution supplied, to entertain the speculation of the wisely considerate reader. Let the earlier still living French literature, that part of the whole body, we mean, ending, say, with the date of Montesquieu, which, in a rough approximate way, may be described as dominated by the spirit of classicism—let this be compared with the later French literature, that section in which the leaven of romanticism has strongly worked, and do you find existing an important fundamental difference in intimate quality between the one and the other? Is the later literature of a certain softer fiber, a more yielding consistence, than characterizes the earlier? Does the earlier present a harder, more quartz-like structure, a substance better fitted to resist yet for ages to come the slow but tireless tooth of time?

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INDEX.

The merest approximation only can be attempted in hinting here the pronunciation of French names. In general, the French distribute the accent pretty evenly among all the syllables of their words. We mark an accent on the final syllable chiefly in order to correct a natural English tendency to slight that syllable in pronunciation. In a few cases we let a well-established English pronunciation stand. N notes a peculiar nasal sound, ü, a peculiar vowel sound, having no equivalent in English.