French Classics Part 15

The partial mother lets her daughter know whom the maxim was meant for.

She says, "It is intended for your brother." This young fellow had, we suspect, been first earning his mother's "reproaches" for spendthrift habits, and then getting more money from her by "acknowledgment."

She hears that son of hers read "some chapters out of Rabelais," "which were enough," she declares, "to make us die with laughing." "I cannot affect," she says, "a prudery which is not natural to me." No, indeed, a prude this woman was not. She had the strong aesthetic stomach of her time. It is queer to have Rabelais rubbing cheek and jowl with Nicole ("We are going to begin a moral treatise of Nicole's"), a severe Port-Royalist, in one and the same letter. But this is French; above all, it is Madame de Sevigne. By the way, she and her friends, first and last, "die" a thousand jolly deaths "with laughing."

A contemporary allusion to "Tartuffe," with more French manners implied:

The other day La Biglesse played Tartuffe to the life. Being at table, she happened to tell a fib about some trifle or other, which I noticed, and told her of it; she cast her eyes to the ground, and with a very demure air, "Yes, indeed, madam," said she, "I am the greatest liar in the world; I am very much obliged to you for telling me of it." We all burst out a-laughing, for it was exactly the tone of Tartuffe--"Yes, brother, I am a wretch, a vessel of iniquity."

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

"Warm affections are never tranquil;" _a maxim_.

Not a very sapid bit of gnomic wisdom, certainly. We must immediately make up to our readers, on Madame de Sevigne's behalf, for the insipidity of the foregoing "maxim" of hers, by giving here two or three far more sententious excerpts from the letters, excerpts collected by another:

There may be so great a weight of obligation that there is no way of being delivered from it but by ingrat.i.tude.

Long sicknesses wear out grief, and long hopes wear out joy.

Shadow is never long taken for substance; you must be, if you would appear to be. The world is not unjust long.

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

I send you M. de Rochefoucauld's "Maxims," revised and corrected, with additions; it is a present to you from himself. Some of them I can make shift to guess the meaning of; but there are others, that, to my shame be it spoken, I cannot understand at all. G.o.d knows how it will be with you.

What was it changed this woman's mood to serious? She could not have been hearing Ma.s.sillon's celebrated sermon on the "Fewness of the Elect," for Ma.s.sillon 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:

You ask me if I am as fond of life as ever. I must own to you that I experience mortifications, and severe ones too; but I am still unhappy at the thoughts of death; I consider it so great a misfortune to see the termination of all my pursuits, that I should desire nothing better, if it were practicable, than to begin life again. I find myself engaged in a scene of confusion and trouble; I was embarked in life without my own consent, and know I must leave it again; this distracts me, for how shall I leave it? In what manner? By what door?

At what time? In what disposition? Am I to suffer a thousand pains and torments that will make me die in a state of despair? Shall I lose my senses? Am I to die by some sudden accident? How shall I stand with G.o.d? What shall I have to offer to him? Will fear and necessity make my peace with him? Shall I have no other sentiment but that of fear?

What have I to hope? Am I worthy of heaven? Or have I deserved the torments of h.e.l.l? Dreadful alternative! Alarming uncertainty! Can there be greater madness than to place our eternal salvation in uncertainty? Yet what is more natural, or can be more easily accounted for, than the foolish manner in which I have spent my life? I am frequently buried in thoughts of this nature, and then death appears so dreadful to me that I hate life more for leading me to it, than I do for all the thorns that are strewed in its way. You will ask me, then, if I would wish to live forever? Far from it; but if I had been consulted, I would very gladly have died in my nurse's arms; it would have spared me many vexations, and would have insured heaven to me at a very easy rate; but let us talk of something else.

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

Guilleragues said yesterday that Pelisson abused the privilege men have of being ugly.

Readers familiar with d.i.c.kens's "Tale of Two Cities" will recognize in the following narrative a state of society not unlike that described by the novelist as immediately preceding the French Revolution:

The Archbishop of Rheims, as he returned yesterday from St. Germain, met with a curious adventure. He drove at his usual rate, like a whirlwind. If he thinks himself a great man, his servants think him still greater. They pa.s.sed through Nanterre, when they met a man on horseback, and in an insolent tone bid him clear the way. The poor man used his utmost endeavors to avoid the danger that threatened him, but his horse proved unmanageable. To make short of it, the coach-and-six turned them both topsy-turvy; but at the same time the coach, too, was completely overturned. In an instant the horse and the man, instead of amusing themselves with having their limbs broken, rose almost miraculously; the man remounted, and galloped away, and is galloping still, for aught I know; while the servants, the archbishop's coachman, and the archbishop himself at the head of them, cried out, "Stop that villain! stop him! thrash him soundly!" The rage of the archbishop was so great, that afterward, in relating the adventure, he said if he could have caught the rascal he would have broke all his bones, and cut off both his ears.

If such things were done by the aristocracy--and the spiritual aristocracy at that!--in the green tree, what might not be expected 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 Sevigne is. They have only not seen fully all that she is. And that they would not see short of reading her letters entire.

Horace Walpole aspired to do in English for his own time something like what Madame de Sevigne had done in French for hers. In a measure he succeeded. The difference is, that he was imitative and affected, where she was original and genuine.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu must, of course, also be named, as, by her s.e.x, her social position, her talent, and the devotion of her talent, an English a.n.a.logue to Madame de Sevigne. But these comparisons, and all comparison, leave the French woman without a true parallel, alone in her rank, the most famous letter-writer in the world.

X.

CORNEILLE.

1606-1684.

The two great names in French tragedy are Corneille and Racine. French tragedy is a very different affair from either modern tragedy in English or ancient tragedy in Greek. It comes nearer being Roman epic, such as Lucan wrote Roman epic, dramatized.

Drama is everywhere and always, and this from the nature of things, a highly conventional literary form. But the convention under which French tragedy should be judged, differs, on the one hand, from that which existed for Greek tragedy, and, on the other hand, from that existing for the English. The atmosphere of real life present in English tragedy is absent in French. The quasi-supernatural religious awe that reigned over Greek tragedy, French tragedy does not affect. You miss also in French tragedy the severe simplicity, the self-restraint, the statuesque repose, belonging to the Greek model. Loftiness, grandeur, a loftiness somewhat strained, a grandeur tending to be tumid, an heroic tone sustained at sacrifice of ease and nature--such is the element in which French tragedy lives and flourishes. You must grant your French tragedists this their conventional privilege, or you will not enjoy them. You must grant them this, or you cannot understand them. Resolve that you will like grandiloquence, requiring only that the grandiloquence be good, and on this condition we can promise that you will be pleased with Corneille and Racine. In fact, our readers, we are sure, will find the grandiloquence of these two tragedy-writers so very good that a little will suffice them.

Voltaire in his time impressed himself strongly enough on his countrymen to get accepted by his own generation as an equal third in tragedy with Corneille and Racine. There was then a French triumvirate of tragedists to be paralleled with the triumvirate of the Greeks. Corneille was aeschylus; Racine was Sophocles; and, of course, Euripides had his counterpart in Voltaire. Voltaire has since descended from the tragic throne, and that neat symmetry of trine comparison is spoiled. There is, however, some trace of justice in making Corneille as related to Racine resemble aeschylus as related to Sophocles. Corneille was first, more rugged, loftier; Racine was second, more polished, more severe in taste.

Racine had, too, in contrast with Corneille, more of the Euripidean sweetness. In fact, La Bruyere's celebrated comparison of the two Frenchmen--made, of course, before Voltaire--yoked them, Corneille with Sophocles, Racine with Euripides. 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 aeschylus 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 n.o.body 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 verse, that n.o.body could possibly be simple and natural in that. Moliere's comedy, however, would almost confute us.

Pierre Corneille was born in Rouen. He studied law, and he was admitted to practice as an advocate, like Moliere; but, like Moliere, he heard and he heeded an inward voice summoning him away from the bar to the stage. Corneille did not, however, like Moliere, tread the boards as an actor. He had a lively sense of personal dignity. He was eminently the "lofty, grave tragedian," in his own esteem. "But I am Pierre Corneille notwithstanding," he self-respectingly said once, when friends were regretting to him some deficiency of grace in his personal carriage. One can imagine him taking off his hat to himself with unaffected deference.

But this serious genius began dramatic composition with writing comedy.

He made several experiments 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 cla.s.sical subjects. The subject of "The Cid" was drawn from Spanish literature. This was emphatically what has been called an "epoch-making" production.

Richelieu's "Academy," at the instigation, indeed almost under the dictation, of Richelieu, who was jealous of Corneille, tried to write it down. They succeeded about as Balaam succeeded in prophesying against Israel. "The Cid" triumphed over them, and over the great minister. It established not only Corneille's fame, but his authority. The man of genius taken alone proved stronger than the men of taste taken together.

For all this, however, our readers would hardly relish "The Cid." Let us go at once to that tragedy of Corneille's which, by the general consent of French critics, is the best work of its author, the "Polyeuctes." The following is the rhetorical climax of praise in which Gaillard, one of the most enlightened of Corneille's eulogists, arranges the different masterpieces of his author: "'The Cid' raised Corneille above his rivals; the 'Horace' and the 'Cinna' above his models; the 'Polyeuctes'

above himself." This tragedy will, we doubt not, prove to our readers the most interesting of all the tragedies of Corneille.

"The great Corneille"--to apply the traditionary designation which, besides attributing to our tragedian his conceded general eminence in character and genius, serves also to distinguish him by merit from his younger brother, who wrote very good tragedy--was an ill.u.s.trious figure at the Hotel de Rambouillet, that focus of the best literary criticism in France. Corneille reading a play of his to the _coterie_ of wits a.s.sembled there under the presidency of ladies whose eyes, as in a kind of tournament of letters, rained influence on authors, and judged the prize of genius, is the subject of a striking picture by a French painter. Corneille read "Polyeuctes" at the Hotel 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 Hotel de Rambouillet.

The objection raised by the Hotel de Rambouillet against the "Polyeuctes" was that it made the stage encroach on the prerogative of the pulpit, and preach instead of simply amusing. And, indeed, never, perhaps, since the Greek tragedy, was the theatre made so much to serve the solemn purposes of religion. (We except the miracle and pa.s.sion plays and the mysteries of the Middle Ages, as not belonging within the just bounds of a comparison like that now made.) Corneille's final influence was to elevate and purify the French theatre. In his early works, however, he made surprising concessions to the lewd taste in the drama that he found prevailing when he began to write. With whatever amount of genuine religious scruple affecting his conscience--on that point we need not judge the poet--Corneille used, before putting them on the stage, to take his plays to the "Church"--that is, to the priestly hierarchy who const.i.tuted 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sions. 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 n.o.bleness 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 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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds, 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 n.o.bleness 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 antic.i.p.ative 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 n.o.ble 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 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:

As for me, had my destiny become a little earlier propitious and honored my devotion by marriage with you, I should have adored only the splendor of your eyes; of them I should have made my kings; of them I should have made my G.o.ds; sooner would I have been reduced to dust, sooner would I have been reduced to ashes, than--

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

Let us break off there; I fear listening too long; I fear lest this warmth which feels your first fires, force on some sequel unworthy of us both. [Voltaire, who edited Corneille with a feeling of freedom toward a national idol comparable to the st.u.r.dy independence that animated Johnson in annotating Shakespeare, says of "This warmth which feels your first fires and which forces on a sequel:" "That is badly written, agreed; but the sentiment gets the better of the expression, and what follows is of a beauty of which there had been no example.