Classic French Course in English Part 6

Christian eloquence has become a spectacle. That gospel sadness, which is its soul, is no longer to be observed in it; its place is supplied by advantages of facial expression, by inflexions of the voice, by regularity of gesticulation, by choice of words, and by long categories. The sacred word is no longer listened to seriously; it is a kind of amus.e.m.e.nt, one among many; it is a game in which there is rivalry, and in which there are those who lay wagers.

Profane eloquence has been transferred, so to speak, from the bar,... where it is no longer employed, to the pulpit, where it ought not to be found.

Matches of eloquence are made at the very foot of the altar, and in the presence of the mysteries. He who listens sits in judgment on him who preaches, to condemn or to applaud, and is no more converted by the discourse which he praises than by that which he p.r.o.nounces against. The orator pleases some, displeases others, and has an understanding with all in one thing,--that as he does not seek to render them better, so they do not think of becoming better.

The almost cynical acerbity of the preceding is ostensibly relieved of an obvious application to certain ill.u.s.trious contemporary examples among preachers by the following open allusion to Bossuet and Bourdaloue:--

The Bishop of Meaux [Bossuet] and Father Bourdaloue make me think of Demosthenes and Cicero. Both of them, masters of pulpit eloquence, have had the fortune of great models; the one has made bad critics, the other, bad imitators.

Here is a happy instance of La Bruyere's successful pains in redeeming a commonplace sentiment by means of a striking form of expression; the writer is disapproving the use of oaths in support of one's testimony:--

An honest man who says, Yes, or No, deserves to be believed; his character swears for him.

Highly satiric in his quiet way, La Bruyere knew how to be. Witness the following thrust at a contemporary author, not named by the satirist, but, no doubt, recognized by the public of the time:--

He maintains that the ancients, however unequal and negligent they may be, have fine traits; he points these out; and they are so fine that they make his criticism readable.

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

A good author, and one who writes with care, often has the experience of finding that the expression which he was a long time in search of without reaching it, and which at length he has found, is that which was the most simple, the most natural, and that which, as it would seem, should have presented itself at first, and without effort.

We feel that the quality of La Bruyere is such as to fit him for the admiration and enjoyment of but a comparatively small cla.s.s of readers.

He was somewhat over-exquisite. His art at times became artifice--infinite labor of style to make commonplace thought seem valuable by dint of perfect expression. We dismiss La Bruyere with a single additional extract,--his celebrated parallel between Corneille and Racine:--

Corneille subjects us to his characters and to his ideas; Racine accommodates himself to ours. The one paints men as they ought to be; the other paints them as they are. There is more in the former of what one admires, and of what one ought even to imitate; there is more in the latter of what one observes in others, or of what one experiences in one's self. The one inspires, astonishes, masters, instructs; the other pleases, moves, touches, penetrates.

Whatever there is most beautiful, most n.o.ble, most imperial, in the reason is made use of by the former; by the latter, whatever is most seductive and most delicate in pa.s.sion. You find in the former, maxims, rules, and precepts; in the latter, taste and sentiment. You are more absorbed in the plays of Corneille; you are more shaken and more softened in those of Racine. Corneille is more moral; Racine, more natural. The one appears to make Sophocles his model; the other owes more to Euripides.

Less than half a century after La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere had shown the way, Vauvenargues followed in a similar style of authorship, promising almost to rival the fame of his two predecessors. This writer, during his brief life (he died at thirty-two), produced one not inconsiderable literary work more integral and regular in form, ent.i.tled, "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 n.o.bly born, was poor.

His health was frail. He did not receive a good education in his youth.

Indeed, he was still in his youth when he went to the wars. His culture always remained narrow. He did not know Greek and Latin, when to know Greek and Latin was, as it were, the whole of scholarship. To crown his accidental disqualifications for literary work, he fell a victim to the small-pox, which left him wrecked in body. This occurred almost immediately after he abandoned a military career which had been fruitful to him of hardship, but not of promotion. In spite of all that was thus against him, Vauvenargues, in those years, few and evil, that were his, thought finely and justly enough to earn for himself a lasting place in the literary history of his nation. He was in the eighteenth century of France, without being of it. You have to separate him in thought from the infidels and the "philosophers" of his time. He belongs in spirit to an earlier age. His moral and intellectual kindred was with such as Pascal, far more than with such as Voltaire. Vauvenargues is, however, a writer for the few, instead of for the many. His fame is high, but it is not wide. Historically, he forms a stepping-stone of transition to a somewhat similar nineteenth-century name, that of Joubert. A very few sentences of his will suffice to indicate to our readers the quality of Vauvenargues. Self-evidently, the following ant.i.thesis drawn by him between Corneille and Racine is subtly and ingeniously thought, as well as very happily expressed--this, whatever may be considered to be its aptness in point of literary appreciation:--

Corneille's heroes often say great things without inspiring them; Racine's inspire them without saying them.

Here is a good saying:--

It is a great sign of mediocrity always to be moderate in praising.

There is worldly wisdom also here:--

He who knows how to turn his prodigalities to good account, practises a large and n.o.ble economy.

Virgil's "They are able, because they seem to themselves to be able," is recalled by this:--

The consciousness of our strength makes our strength greater.

So much for Vauvenargues.

VI.

LA FONTAINE.

1621-1695.

La Fontaine enjoys a unique fame. He has absolutely "no fellow in the firmament" of literature. He is the only fabulist, of any age or any nation, that, on the score simply of his fables, is admitted to be poet as well as fabulist. There is perhaps no other literary name whatever among the French, by long proof more secure, than is La Fontaine's, of universal and of immortal renown. Such a fame is, of course, not the most resplendent in the world; but to have been the first, and to remain thus far the only, writer of fables enjoying recognition as true poetry,--this surely is an achievement ent.i.tling La Fontaine to monumental mention in any sketch, however summary, of French literature.

Jean de La Fontaine was humbly born, at Chateau-Thierry in Champagne.

His early education was sadly neglected. At twenty years of age he was still phenomenally ignorant. About this time, being now better situated, he developed a taste for the cla.s.sics and for poetry. With La Fontaine the man, it is the sadly familiar French story of debauched manners in life and in literary production. We cannot acquit him, but we are to condemn him only in common with the most of his age and of his nation.

As the world goes, La Fontaine was a "good fellow," never lacking friends. These were held fast in loyalty to the poet, not so much by any sterling worth of character felt in him, as by an exhaustless, easy-going good-nature, that, despite his social insipidity, made La Fontaine the most acceptable of every-day companions. It would be easy to repeat many stories ill.u.s.trative of this personal quality in La Fontaine, while to tell a single story ill.u.s.trative of any lofty trait in his character would he perhaps impossible. Still, La Fontaine seemed not ungrateful for the benefits he received from others; and grat.i.tude, no commonplace virtue, let us accordingly reckon to the credit of a man in general so slenderly equipped with positive claims to admiring personal regard. The mirror of _bonhomie_ (easy-hearted good-fellowship), he always was. Indeed, that significant, almost untranslatable, French word might have been coined to fit La Fontaine's case. On his amiable side--a full hemisphere or more of the man--it sums him up completely. Twenty years long, this mirror of _bonhomie_ was domiciliated, like a pet animal, under the hospitable roof of the celebrated Madame de la Sabliere. There was truth as well as humor implied in what she said one day: "I have sent away all my domestics; I have kept only my dog, my cat, and La Fontaine."

But La Fontaine had that in him which kept the friendship of serious men. Moliere, a grave, even melancholy spirit, however gay in his comedies; Boileau and Racine, decorous both of them, at least in manners,--const.i.tuted, 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 b.u.t.t of many pleasantries from his colleagues, called out by his habit of absent-mindedness. St.

Augustine was one night the subject of an elaborate eulogy, which La Fontaine lost the benefit of, through a reverie of his own indulged meantime on a quite different character. Catching, however, at the name, La Fontaine, as he came to himself for a moment, betrayed the secret of his absent thoughts by asking, "Do you think St. Augustine had as much wit as Rabelais?"--"Take care, Monsieur La Fontaine: you have put one of your stockings on wrong side out,"--he had actually done so,--was the only answer vouchsafed to his question. The speaker in this case was a doctor of the Sorbonne (brother to Boileau), present as guest. The story is told of La Fontaine, that egged on to groundless jealousy of his wife,--a wife whom he never really loved, and whom he soon would finally abandon,--he challenged a military friend of his to combat with swords.

The friend was amazed, and, amazed, reluctantly fought with La Fontaine, whom he easily put at his mercy. "Now, what is this for?" he demanded.

"The public says you visit my house for my wife's sake, not for mine,"

said La Fontaine. "Then I never will come again." "Far from it,"

responds La Fontaine, seizing his friend's hand. "I have satisfied the public. Now you must come to my house every day, or I will fight you again." The two went back in company, and breakfasted together in mutual good humor.

A trait or two more, and there will have been enough of the man La Fontaine. It is said that when, on the death of Madame de la Sabliere, La Fontaine was homeless, he was met on the street by a friend, who exclaimed, "I was looking for you; come to my house, and live with me!"

"I was on the way there," La Fontaine characteristically replied. At seventy, La Fontaine went through a process of "conversion," so called, in which he professed repentance of his sins. On the genuineness of this inward experience of La Fontaine, it is not for a fellow-creature of his, especially at this distance of time, to p.r.o.nounce. When he died, at seventy-three, Fenelon could say of him (in Latin), "La Fontaine is no more! He is no more; and with him have gone the playful jokes, the merry laugh, the artless graces, and the sweet Muses!"

La Fontaine's earliest works were _Contes_, so styled; that is, stories, tales, or romances. These are in character such that the subsequent happy change in manners, if not in morals, has made them unreadable,--for their indecency. We need concern ourselves only with the Fables, for it is on these that La Fontaine's fame securely rests.

The basis of story in them was not generally original with La Fontaine.

He took whatever fittest came to his hand. With much modesty, he attributed all to aesop and Phaedrus. But invention of his own is not altogether wanting to his books of fables. Still, it is chiefly the consummate artful artlessness of the form that const.i.tutes the individual merit of La Fontaine's productions. With something, too, of the air of real poetry, he has undoubtedly invested his verse.

We give, first, the brief fable which is said to have been the prime favorite of the author himself. It is the fable of "The Oak and the Reed." Of this fable, French critics have not scrupled to speak in terms of almost the very highest praise. Chamfort says, "Let one consider, that, within the limit of thirty lines, La Fontaine, doing nothing but yield himself to the current of his story, has taken on every tone, that of poetry the most graceful, that of poetry the most lofty, and one will not hesitate to affirm, that, at the epoch at which this fable appeared, there was nothing comparable to it in the French language."

There are, to speak precisely, thirty-two lines in the fable. In this one case, let us try representing La Fontaine's compression by our English form. For the rest of our specimens, we shall use Elizur Wright's translation,--a meritorious one, still master of the field which, near fifty years ago, it entered as pioneer. Mr. Wright here expands La Fontaine's thirty-two verses to forty-four. The additions are not ungraceful, but they enc.u.mber somewhat the Attic neatness and simplicity of the original. We ought to say, that La Fontaine boldly broke with the tradition which had been making Alexandrines--lines of six feet--obligatory in French verse. He rhymes irregularly, at choice, and makes his verses long or short, as pleases him. The closing verse of the present piece is, in accordance with the intended majesty of the representation, an Alexandrine.

The Oak one day said to the Reed, "Justly might you dame Nature blame: A wren's weight would bow down your frame; The lightest wind that chance may make Dimple the surface of the lake Your head bends low indeed, The while, like Caucasus, my front To meet the branding sun is wont, Nay, more, to take the tempest's brunt.

A blast you feel, I feel a breeze.

Had you been born beneath my roof, Wide-spread, of leaf.a.ge weather-proof, Less had you known your life to tease; I should have sheltered you from storm.

But oftenest you rear your form On the moist limits of the realm of wind.

Nature, methinks, against you sore has sinned."

"Your pity," answers him the Heed, "Bespeaks you kind; but spare your pain; I more than you may winds disdain.

I bend, and break not. You, indeed, Against their dreadful strokes till now Have stood, nor tamed your back to bow: But wait we for the end."

Scarce had he spoke, When fiercely from the far horizon broke The wildest of the children, fullest fraught With terror, that till then the North had brought.

The tree holds good; the reed it bends.

The wind redoubled might expends, And so well works that from his bed Him it uproots who nigh to heaven his head Held, and whose feet reached to the kingdom of the dead.

In the fable of the "Rat retired from the World," La Fontaine rallies the monks. "With French _finesse_, he hits his mark by expressly avoiding it. "What think you I mean by my disobliging rat? A monk? No, but a Mahometan devotee; I take it for granted that a monk is always ready with his help to the needy!"

The sage Levantines have a tale About a rat that weary grew Of all the cares which life a.s.sail, And to a Holland cheese withdrew.